Essay on the Faerie Queen. Edmund Spenser

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Essay on The Faerie Queen. Edmund Spenser Edmund Spenser was born in London, England around the year 1552 and he died in Westminster in January 1599. In 1569 he went to the University of Cambridge as a sizar. At Cambridge Spenser started his poetic career and he became an emblematic English poet. He was a loyal protestant and lived during the reign of Elizabeth the first which was an era of religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. His first work and one of the most significant was Shepheardes Calender published in 1579 and wrote in archaic language. However Spencer was best known and considered “the prince of poets of this time” for The Faerie Queene a volume of poems named Complaints. He dedicated most of his life to this work. Spenser planned to do twelve books of The Faerie Queen but only six were finished, in addition there is another book containing Cantos on Mutability. The first three books were published in 1590 but after six years, in 1596 were republished together with books IV, V and VI. The Faerie Queene is a romantic epic and allegoric poem which is related with the religious and political context of the sixteenth century. The poem was written in the Spenserian Stanza, a form of writing created for the author and characterized by nine lines of iambic pentameter and a final alexandrine .The language is commonly to fall into disuse and archaic which makes the reading difficult to understand for the reader. Spenser develops in the poem a supernatural and romantic atmosphere with magic mirrors, healing fountains, castles, caves, dragons, nymphs, dwarfs, magicians, giants, Saracens and pilgrims. Characters of this work can be good people, for instance Faeries or Elves or by the contrast bad creatures shown by means of monsters and evils. Each book tells the legends of a knight symbolizing a different Christian virtue, on the one hand the
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