Week 4 - The Faerie Queene

Edmund Spencer set lofty goals for himself when he set out to write The Faerie Queene. Spencer was looking to create an English epic, steeped in literary history and abounding with nuances attuned to England's own story. Amazingly Spencer accomplished this feat, truly a display of his own prowess. It is a shame that Spencer died with only six books of The Faeire Queene written(he had originally planned on at least double that). The Faerie Queene is a literary masterpiece being required reading for English poets and writers since Spencer's time. However, even though this work is so amazing, I just don't like it.

I'm not sure why The Faerie Queene rubbed me in such the wrong way. Perhaps it was the simplistic nature of the story. "But Wait!" scholars will say. "The Faerie Queene has so many levels, how could you consider it simplistic." True, Spencer's work is meant to be read allegorically, with many readers drawing different interpretations from the same story. Yet the most common allegories beat you over the head. Just look at the names of the characters. The villains are given clearly bad names and the "good" characters are given appropriate names as well. Many of the more interesting allegories are up for debate as to whether the were intended by the author or if the are just brought about by the open ended nature of the work. The actual plot of the story, what we referred to as the 12-year-old, is so simplistic as to be laughable to many readers. The only thing that made the plot harder to follow was Spencer's writing style.

All my complaints have one lingering issue in the background. Spencer's work is an imitation. Spencer is attempting to take great literary traditions of the past and incorporate them into a modern(at his time) work. This means it is a work lacking in real creativity and innovation. So much of of his work is taken from the ancient Greek and Roman tradition's which had more recently already been imitated by the continent during the beginning of it's Renaissance. I know these nods to classical literature have been a long standing tradition and is still found today, but it still bothers me in The Faerie Queene. Spencer's work is one that is written by the book, using traditional tropes and merely slapping on a Protestant covering to make it a new work.

I've been overly harsh, Spencer was a great writer and The Faerie Queene is a classic. However it is a literary exercise and doesn't really harness the power of storytelling as I think it should have.