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DANIEL T. LOCHMAN, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

manner of Boccaccio’s Decameron or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, are
techniques that disrupt the impression of a forward flow of time:
Spenser’s work is replete with such — to name just a few types: the
proems to all six books; the narrator’s intrusive moralizing and obser-
vations; multiple, interlaced narratives; pauses for back-stories; pro-
lepses; digressions, sometimes nested one within another; dialogue;
detailed descriptions of se ings, characters, or actions; ekphrases; and
diverting play with polysemous language, allegorical significances,
and symbols. Furthermore, Spenser complicates the overarching
frame of chivalric quests with myriad subgenres, including tragedy
(as in an episode with suicide of the young mother Amavia after a
witch’s murder of her beloved Mordant); satire (as in the humiliations
of aptly named Braggadocchio and the hapless Squire of Dames, who
was doomed to find as many virtuous women as he has seduced);
metamorphic allegory (as in Malbecco’s transformation to the allegor-
ical Gelosy); dynastic betrothals or marriages, such as that of the rivers
Thames and Medway or Marinell and Florimell; embedded com-
plaints, masques, pageants, riparian and pastoral interludes, and, as
we will consider below, allusive adaptations of native English, classi-
1
cal, and contemporary continental sources and influences. With so

1
Spenser’s omnivorous absorption of structural influences contributes to the
perception of The Faerie Queene as an “endlesse worke.” Massive scholarly ef-
forts have been devoted to influences on this structure — a few exemplary
ones include Andrew King, The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance: The
Ma er of Just Memory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) and “’Well Grounded,
Finely Framed, and Strongly Trussed up Together’: The ‘Medieval’ Structure
of The Faerie Queene,” Edmund Spenser: New and Renewed Directions, ed. J. B.
Lethridge (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006), 119-52;
and Syrith Pugh, Spenser and Ovid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). On the influ-
ence of the Greek romance and its structural principles see David Konstan,
Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994) and Victor Skretkowicz, European Erotic Ro-
mance: Philhellene Protestantism, Renaissance Translation, and English Literary
Politics (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2010). For helpful
overviews in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), see essays by Colin Burrow
(“Spenser’s Genres,” 403-19), Carol Kaske (“Spenser and the Bible,” 485-502),

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