The Faerie Queene reflects, perhaps, more fully than any other English work, the many-sided literary influences of the Renascence.  It was the blossom of a richly composite culture.  Its immediate models were Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the first forty cantos of which were published in 1515, and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, printed in 1581.  Both of these were, in subject, romances of chivalry, the first based upon the old Charlemagne epos—­Orlando being identical with the hero of the French Chanson de Roland:  the second upon the history of the first crusade, and the recovery of the Holy City from the Saracen.  But in both of them there was a splendor of diction and a wealth of coloring quite unknown to the rude mediaeval romances.  Ariosto and Tasso wrote with the great epics of Homer and Vergil constantly in mind, and all about them was the brilliant light of Italian art, in its early freshness and power.  The Faerie Queene, too, was a tale of knight-errantry.  Its hero was King Arthur, and its pages swarm with the familiar adventures and figures of Gothic romance:  distressed ladies and their champions, combats with dragons and giants, enchanted castles, magic rings, charmed wells, forest hermitages, etc.  But side by side with these appear the fictions of Greek mythology and the personified abstractions of fashionable allegory.  Knights, squires, wizards, hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods, Idleness, Gluttony, and Superstition jostle each other in Spenser’s fairy land.  Descents to the infernal shades, in the manner of Homer and Vergil, alternate with descriptions of the Palace of Pride in the manner of the Romaunt of the Rose.  But Spenser’s imagination was a powerful spirit, and held all these diverse elements in solution.  He removed them to an ideal sphere “apart from place, withholding time,” where they seem all alike equally real, the dateless conceptions of the poet’s dream.

The poem was to have been “a continued allegory or dark conceit,” in twelve books, the hero of each book representing one of the twelve moral virtues.  Only six books and the fragment of a seventh were written.  By way of complimenting his patrons and securing contemporary interest, Spenser undertook to make his allegory a double one, personal and historical, as well as moral or abstract.  Thus Gloriana, the Queen of Faery, stands not only for Glory but for Elizabeth, to whom the poem was dedicated.  Prince Arthur is Leicester, as well as Magnificence.  Duessa is Falsehood, but also Mary Queen of Scots.  Grantorto is Philip II. of Spain.  Sir Artegal is Justice, but likewise he is Arthur Grey de Wilton.  Other characters shadow forth Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney, Henry IV. of France, etc.; and such public events as the revolt of the Spanish Netherlands, the Irish rebellion, the execution of Mary Stuart, and the rising of the northern Catholic houses against Elizabeth are told in parable.  In this way the poem reflects the spiritual struggle of the time, the warfare of young England against popery and Spain.