SOURCE: Bradner, Leicester. “The Narrative Poet (Faerie Queene, III-V).” In Edmund Spenser and The Faerie Queene, pp. 70-103. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948.

In the following excerpt, Bradner provides an overview of the multiple storylines and the central themes in Books III, IV, and V of The Faerie Queene.

When Gabriel Harvey read the specimen of the Faerie Queene sent him by Spenser in 1580, he could not decide what kind of work it was. In his perplexity he resorted to a characteristically sixteenth-century simile. He said it was “Hobgoblin run away with the garland from Apollo.” It is very unlikely that he saw what is now Book I; in fact, his second comment, that Spenser seemed to be trying to outdo Ariosto, the most amusing of Renaissance poets, points rather clearly to an early version of some part of Book III or Book IV. The implications of the...