Half-Envying

This chapter assesses the degree to which Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene not only responds to reading “characterologically” but solicits it, as an offering to and claim upon the reader whose interest Spenser was most anxious to secure. The Faerie Queene is not a tightly plotted prose narrative, and its intended reader was no figment of Spenser's imagination. On the contrary, she was a living ruler on whose favor the poet's livelihood depended and to whom, on at least one occasion, he read parts of his uncompleted poem aloud. These well-known facts are related in nonobvious ways: Queen Elizabeth's engrossment in The Faerie Queene is the poem's motivating and sustaining fiction, as well as the scene of an imagined catastrophe it must labor to forestall. In claiming Elizabeth as inspiration and ideal reader, Spenser's poem participates in a collective fiction of the queen's willing self-subjection to her chastely devoted male subjects, a fiction whose seditious and erotic subtexts were at perpetual risk of contaminating the official narrative.