Edmund Spenser was born around 1552 in London,
England. We know very little about his family, but he
received a quality education and graduated with a
Masters from Cambridge in 1576. He began writing
poetry for publication at this time and was
employed as a secretary, first to the
Bishop of Kent and then to nobles in Queen
Elizabeth's
court. His first major work, The Shepheardes
Calender, was published in 1579 and met with critical
success; within a year he was at work on his greatest and
longest work, The Faerie Queene. This poem
occupied him for most of his life, though he published
other poems in the interim.
The first three books of The Faerie Queen
were published in 1590 and then
republished with Books IV through VI in 1596. By
this time,
Spenser was already in his second marriage, which
took place in Ireland, where he often traveled.
Still at work on his voluminous poem, Spenser died
on January 13, 1599, at Westminster.
Spenser only completed half of The Faerie
Queene he planned. In a letter to Sir John
Walter Raleigh,
he explained the purpose and structure of the
poem. It is an allegory, a story whose characters
and events nearly all have a specific
symbolic meaning. The poem's setting is a
mythical "Faerie land," ruled by the Faerie
Queene. Spenser sets forth in the letter that
this "Queene" represents his own monarch, Queen
Elizabeth.
Spenser intended to write 12 books of the
Faerie Queene, all in the classical epic
style; Spenser notes that his structure follows
those of Homer and Virgil. Each Book concerns the
story of a knight, representing a particular
Christian virtue, as he or she would convey at the
court of the Faerie Queene. Because only
half of the poem was ever finished, the unifying
scene at the Queene's court never occurs; instead,
we are left with six books telling an incomplete
story. Of these, the first
and the third books are most often read and
critically acclaimed.
Though it takes place in a mythical land, The
Faerie
Queen was intended to relate to Spenser's
England, most importantly in the area of religion.
Spenser lived in post-Reformation England, which
had recently replaced Roman Catholicism with
Protestantism (specifically, Anglicanism) as the
national religion. There were still many
Catholics living in England, and, thus, religious
protest was a part of Spenser's life. A devout
Protestant and a devotee of the Protestant Queen
Elizabeth, Spenser was particularly offended by
the anti-Elizabethan propaganda that some
Catholics circulated. Like most Protestants near
the time of the Reformation, Spenser saw a
Catholic Church full of corruption, and he
determined that it was not only the wrong
religion but the anti-religion. This sentiment
is an important backdrop for
the battles of The Faerie Queene, which
often represent the "battles" between London and
Rome.
