The English Renaissance: Spenser to Milton

Edmund Spenser (around 1552–1599) attempted an English answer to the Italian romance epic in The Faerie Queene, publishing Books I–III in 1590 and Books IV–VI in 1596, left unfinished at his death. Composed in the nine-line 'Spenserian stanza' he invented for the purpose, the poem allegorizes Elizabeth I as the Faerie Queene Gloriana and follows a succession of knights, each embodying a virtue — Redcrosse Knight for Holiness, Britomart for Chastity — through adventures that fuse the romance-epic manner of Ariosto and Tasso with an explicitly Protestant, English nationalist moral vision, as Spenser himself explained in his prefatory letter to Sir Walter Raleigh.