The Faerie Queen | On Shifting Symbolism and Throwbacks to Chaucer

Right, moving away from Doctor Faustus, the next text on which I would like to focus is Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen. The first thing I noted about this piece was how easy it is to recognize. When I was preparing for the GRE in English Literature, it was strongly recommended that I familiarize myself with The Faerie Queen, as this was a staple text within Renaissance literature. This I absolutely could not be bothered to do at the time, since the work is relatively long and because Renaissance literature composes a less significant portion of the exam than modern English and American literature, with which I am easily the least familiar. However, between the Spenserian stanza verse form, created by Spenser for this piece, and the intentionally middle-English-looking spelling within the work, it was among the easiest to identify whenever it came up. Anyhow, now that I have begun to actually read the work, there are two things of which I would like to make mention.

The shifting symbolism in The Faerie Queen is both intriguing and infuriating. Whereas a piece of symbolism is consistent from once place to another in many pieces of literature, something in The Faerie Queen may symbolize one thing in one instance and yet either something completely different or nothing at all in another. The inconsistency of this is somewhat off-putting at first, but it also keeps the reader on their toes. I find myself forced to interpret each stanza both on its own and in context with the rest of the story. Meaning within The Faerie Queen is thus fluid, adding an extra layer of significance to the text and necessitating varying levels of interpretation, a complexity that I have found in few other texts.

Regarding the middle-English-like language of The Faerie Queen, I cannot help but notice that Spenser's work (judging exclusively from the first few cantos of the first book, it is important to note) is quite similar to The Tale of Sir Thopas, which Chaucer-the-pilgrim tells in Chaucer's (the author) The Canterbury Tales. Specifically, the two stories both include a land of fairies and elves and a main character who is a noble and chivalrous yet perhaps also rash and naive, and though The Tale of Sir Thopas is interrupted by the Host in The Canterbury Tales and is thus incomplete, I nevertheless see a connection between the two. Perhaps The Faerie Queen is an embellishment upon or a continuation of The Tale of Sir Thopas, with some changes. Just a thought.

I realize that this is post is brief, but since I am not too far into the text, I find that I have relatively little to say. More next time.

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Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely

Each one demand and answer to his part

Performed in this wide gap of time since first

We were discovered. Hastily lead away.

--from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale