And henceforth ever wish that like succeed it may (I. i. 27).
And each the other from to rise restraine (II. ii. 64).
Though he uses expertly the variation of throwing together two stresses, he has also left many lines clogged with more than can be uttered without scanting or even stumbling. Thus in the second canto of the first book:
And to him calls “Rise, rise! unhappy swaine” (l. 4).
He could not rest; but did his stout heart eat (l. 6).
Did search, sore grieved in her gentle brest (l. 8).
O too deare love, love bought with death too deare! (l. 31).
In both style and verse the Faerie Queene is the least facile of the chivalric romances.
For the composition of the whole, Spenser’s scheme is not narrative. The most descriptive of all the romancers, he has made his total effect not merely abundant separable ecphrasis but pageantry. For holding the pageantry together he proposes in his preface moral allegory, “fashioning a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.” This end, Caxton’s preface to Malory proclaims, is attained without allegory, by the romances themselves as stories. But now romance, having been first rewritten in Renaissance style, and then recomposed as Vergilian epic, is to be moralized. Further, the allegory is political. Artegall is Lord Grey de Wilton; Duessa and Radegund, Mary Queen of Scots; Archimago, the Pope. The poem is anti-Catholic with the Elizabethan political bias. Its attacks on abuses of the Church, no louder than those of Piers Plowman, are essentially different in that Elizabethan England has broken with the medieval vision of unity. Spenser speaks for the most self-sufficient of the rising nations, and makes its national mission his own. For the divine mission of the poet in Renaissance classical phrase means practically the claim of the poet to support by the court. The new nationalism but intensifies encomium. Spenser was a court poet in the same way as Ariosto, and to an even greater degree. He celebrates not only England, but the Queen and his immediate patrons. He prefixes a letter to Raleigh and seventeen poems to lords and ladies; and he interposes the usual references and allusions. None of the chivalric romances is more devoted to encomium than the Faerie Queene.
To weave all these strands into any large single sequence is probably beyond the capacity of allegory, and certainly beyond Spenser’s achievement. The legendary history of Britain in Book II has little enough to do with the theme of constancy; the long pastoral in Book VI with the theme of courtesy. Even single books, then, do not always hold together. Within a single virtue we have at most a medieval series of exempla. Even if Spenser had lived to subsume all his virtues in Magnificence, the Renaissance virtù, he would have achieved only the summary of a series. The earlier critics of the Faerie Queene were embarrassed by their obligation to consider it as epic. Spenser’s quoting of the Horatian in mediis rebus “A poet thrusteth into the middest” in his preface, and his beginning thus “A gentle knight was pricking on the plaine” are merely superficial. No long poem is farther removed from epic than the Faerie Queene. Dryden, in a digression of his Essay on Satire (1693), said more significantly: “There is no uniformity of design in Spenser.”