ery Queen is the reflection of it, tempered and sobered by the poets purpose, to make it represent his conception of all that makes a man great and true in his resistance to the vices and evils of the world.
The Faery Queen purports to be a story, and the outline of the story, which was to bind it together, is given in the poets explanatory letter to Sir Walter Ralegh, now prefixed to the poem. He imagines the Faery Queen, by whom he shadows forth Elizabeth, holding a great festival, on occasion of which twelve of her knights, each the example and champion of some particular virtue, undertake separate enterprises at her appointment and in her honour; while Prince Arthur, in whom is represented the comprehensive Aristotelic virtue of magnificence, or greatness of soul, is to fall in with them one by one in his quest of his fated bride the Faery Queen, helping and saving them by the superior power of his virtue and his knightly skill. The adventures of the twelve knights were to furnish the Legends of the twelve books of the first portion of his design, the ethical portion. He thought it inartificial for a poet to begin from the occasion and starting-point of these various adventures: A Poet, he said, thrusteth himself into the middest, even when it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the things forepast, and divining of things to come, maketh a pleasant analysis of all. So he starts in the middle of one of the adventures, reserving his poetical account of the origin of them all, till he should have brought all his Knights back again to the Faery Queens Court in the last book. The arrangement was an awkward one, and the Twelfth Book was never reached. Though we know the framework of the story, we do not know it from the poem itself. And as he went on with his work, the main story is soon lost in the separate ones, and the poem becomes a succession of adventures, stories, pictures, and allegories, with little attempt to keep them together.
In the First Book, the story and the allegory,the dangers, the combats, the defeats, the final victory of the Red Cross Knight of Holiness, the champion of the Virgin Una with her milk-white lamb,and that which all this shadowed, the struggle of true religion and godliness with its foes, its vicissitudes, and its triumph, both in the visible scene of the worlds history, and in the heart of man, are both carried on clearly and consecutively. The Second Book, which takes the Knight of Temperance through his contest with violence, with the falsehood of extremes, with the madness of uncontrolled temper, with the temptations of Mammon, of riches and ambition, to the closing achievement, the conquest over all that Pleasure could present to allure and fascinate him, is straightforward and distinct in its construction. But after this the poets hold over his story relaxes. The legend of Chastity in the next book presents the same idea as that of the second, but exhibited in the persons of the lady knight Britomart, and the virgin huntress Belphbe, both of them in various aspects imaging the sacred saint of the poets worship. In the three later books, the legend of Justice is marked by its strong and definite representations of some great historical events of Spensers age, the administration of Lord Grey of Wilton in Ireland, the blows dealt at the Spanish power in the Channel and in the Netherlands, the fate of Mary Queen of Scots. The legends of Friendship and Courtesy certainly exhibit examples of friendship and courtesy. But when we think of what friendship is, we wonder that Spenser has so little to say about it, and that his imagination found nothing more to work upon than the companionship in love or war, sometimes loyal, sometimes false, of men-at-arms: and so many other interests and incidents come in besides, that it seems rather arbitrary to assign the legends specially to these virtues. And then, with the exception of the fragment on Mutability, which is part of a projected legend of Constancy, the poem stops, and with it all our knowledge of the way in which it was to be carri