The Faerie Queene was the first sustained poetic creation after that of Geoffrey Chaucer, and its beauty and power made for it a secure place in English literature as soon as it was given to the world. At present it is generally accorded a high place in the history of English literary art. Combined with Edmund Spenser’s poetic power was his high moral purpose.

Only six books of the twelve planned by Spenser were completed. The fragmentary seventh book was published in 1609, ten years after his death. What he did finish is so great that The Faerie Queene is, sad to say, generally more honored than read. The grand conception and execution of the poem reflect both the life of the poet and his participation in the life and ideals of his age. Spenser was committed to public service in the expansive period of Elizabethan efflorescence. A gentleman poet and friend of the great, Spenser never received the preferment he hoped for, but he remained devoted to Elizabeth, to England, and to late sixteenth century optimism. Even during his lifetime, Spenser was honored as a poet by the court and by other men of letters. Spenser’s allegorical imagination and his masterful control of language have earned him a reputation as “the poet’s poet.”

Like other Elizabethan poets, Spenser produced eclogues and a sonnet sequence, but The Faerie Queene is his great accomplishment. In a famous letter to Sir Walter Ralegh, Spenser explained the ambitious structure and purpose of his poem. It was to be composed of twelve books, each treating one of Aristotle’s moral virtues as represented in the figure of a knight. The whole was to be a consistent moral allegory, and the twelve books taken together would describe the circumscribing Aristotelian virtue of magnanimity, which Spenser called Magnificence.

At some point Spenser apparently decided to modify this plan. By the fourth book the simple representation of one virtue in one hero has broken down, though each book still does define a dominant virtue. More significantly, virtues are included that are not in Aristotle. Spenser is true to Aristotle, however, in consistently viewing virtue as a mean between extremes, as a moderate path between many aberrations of excess and defect.

The poem owes many debts to other antecedents. It is filled with references to and echoes of the Bible and the Greek and Latin classics. It is suffused with the spirit and much of the idealized landscape and atmosphere of medieval romance. However, its greatest debts are to the writers of the Continental Renaissance, particularly Ludovico Ariosto. Ariosto’s loosely plotted Orlando furioso (1516, 1521, 1532; English translation, 1591) was the most influential single model, and Spenser borrows freely, but where Ariosto was ironic or skeptical, Spenser transforms the same material into a serious medium for his high ethical purposes. Moreover, while allegory is a dimension added to Ariosto by his critics, Spenser’s allegorical purpose is unmistakable. In this aim, he is within the Renaissance tradition of writing courtesy books, such as Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (1528; The Book of the Courtier, 1561), guides to conduct for the gentleman who would seek excellence in behavior and demeanor. The Faerie Queene is a courtesy book turned to the highest of purposes—the moral formation of the ideal Christian gentleman.

Book 1, the story of Red Cross Knight, the Knight of Holiness, is the truest to the original structure intention. Red Cross is assigned to Una to relieve her kingdom of a menacing dragon. Through the book Red Cross’s chivalric exploits gradually develop in him the virtue he represents,...