The Faerie Queene Themes

If there's one thing that unites this otherwise massive, unwieldy poem it's love. Whether good or bad, female or male, knight or monster… chances are that love, romance, or sexual desire plays an...

Spenser's The Faerie Queene was written at a time when religious affiliation was seriously important. England had recently broken from the Catholic Church and formed its own Protestant Church. So r...

The Faerie Queene is basically House of Cards, plus monsters. Well, sort of. Although we spend most of our time in the poem following the deeds of knights and ladies without political responsibilit...

Spenser famously wrote that his intention with The Faerie Queene was "to fashion a gentleman." (Hamilton, 714). An important part of a gentleman's educational process (according to Spenser) is deve...

Even though the The Faerie Queene doesn't offer us a narrative of one single character's development in the way most coming-of-age stories do (like in Harry Potter), every main knight we meet is de...

Justice is the explicit theme of Book V of the The Faerie Queene, but it's a topic that is significant throughout the poem. Judgment in particular is constantly used (and abused!) when characters f...

Appearances are tricky in The Faerie Queene. There are a bunch of artificial objects (and even artificial people, like the False Florimell) floating around. This shows us that becoming overly attac...

We can think of loyalty as the glue that keeps this unwieldy and sometimes disjointed poem together. Loyalty is what brings all of our protagonist knights together (eventually) and what allows them...