Character Clues

Character Analysis

Names

Since The Faerie Queene is an allegory, naming provides an absolutely essential window onto the characters of the poem, perhaps more than any other book you'll come across, ever. In Spenser, names often don't just evoke a negative or positive quality (i.e. Malfoy from Harry Potter, means "bad faith") but literally describe the entire identity of that character (i.e. Despair is, you know, Despair).

So in some ways, you can think of the naming in Spenser as a kind of character cheat-sheet, although you're going to need to brush up on your Latin, Greek, French, and Italian since Spenser liberally derives his names from a variety of linguistic traditions.

But there is a catch. Not all the names in The Faerie Queene work equally straightforwardly. So, yet, Ignaro is an embodiment of ignorance, but what's Britomart? Her name means "war-like British person," but that clearly on accounts for a small part of her overall qualities. In fact, it's typical for the major protagonists of The Faerie Queene to amount to a lot more than just the literal meaning of their name while more minor characters do tend to more directly correspond to the quality they are named after. So the moral is, definitely investigate the names you come across, but don't always stop there.

Physical Appearances

If you're puzzled by a character's name, there's a good chance that their physical appearance will provide the next best clue about who this character is. Good characters tend to be attractive and well-dressed while bad characters are often ugly, old, and have physical deformities. Not the nicest system, we have to admit, but there it is.

Duessa, for example, appears beautiful as a way to convince characters that she's good but when her true identity as a malicious witch is actually exposed, she's revealed to be hideous and monstrous in appearance.

More specifically, characters' physical attributes will often align with or even communicate something further about the characteristic they embody. So Mammon, a character who represents greed, is dirty and dressed in shabby looking clothes even though he is surrounded by wealth. This communicates the lesson that those who are greedy often want money just for its own sake and don't even spend on it on necessities like proper clothing—greed does not make you more comfortable.

Sometimes, however, the clues imparted by a character's physical appearance are hard for us as readers to understand, and that's often because they relate to a conventional or traditional way of depicting a particular concept in art or literature that Spenser's readers would have been more familiar with us. Don't despair (remember, Despair is one of Spenser's top villains) but do refer to your footnotes and our section on Characters.

Actions

There are no such things as neutral actions in The Faerie Queene, so pretty much every single thing that a character does or that happens to them is filled with meaning—not just about life in general, but about who they are and what they stand for.

When Redcrosse and Una get lost and wander into the cave of Error, it's not just telling us that "Hey, everyone gets lost in dark and confusing forests" but that Redcrosse is wandering morally by being overly concerned with his reputation as a knight. It's kind of impossible to read too much into anything that happens in this book.

It can be confusing because we're not used to thinking of external events as reflections of internal psychological events (we're often told that such thinking is problematic!), but since The Faerie Queene is set in an allegorical universe, you just have to accept some of the weirder effects. And once get the over the whole inside/outside thing, it can be actually pretty interesting to assess various episodes in the poem as speaking to the characters' choices, mistakes, or abilities.