SOURCE: Benson, Pamela Joseph. “Rule, Virginia: Protestant Theories of Female Regiment in The Faerie Queene.” English Literary Renaissance 15, no. 3 (autumn 1985): 277-92.

In the following essay, Benson discusses Spenser's depiction of female monarchy in Books III and V of The Faerie Queene noting what it reflects about Spenser's own attitude toward Elizabeth I.

Elizabeth I's sex posed a problem for Edmund Spenser in his attempt to praise her in The Faerie Queene. Her unmarried state and chastity offered opportunities for enthusiastic praise of her personal virtue, but her sex itself was an obstacle to his celebration of her public character as a ruler because the natural right of women to rule was not universally accepted in Elizabethan England. Spenser's two major treatments of this controversial issue seem to contradict each other. Book III is dedicated to epic praise of the Queen's ancestry and a pair of encomia of her...