‘Consorted in one Harmonee’: The Faerie Queene, 1590, Books One to Three

Abstract

In 1590 the first three books of The Faerie Queene were published. It was not only the culmination of its author’s literary life but arguably, more than any other poem of its age, epitomizes the ambitions, failures and contradictions of the Elizabethan political and religious establishment and its poetry. In 1596 the poem was reissued, with some revisions, including a major change made to the ending the poem had been given in 1590, and with three additional books. The contradictions of both the poem and the age are especially evident in the books added in 1596, which will be the topic of the following chapter; in the 1590 Faerie Queene, despite what in retrospect can also be seen as major intellectual contradictions, there is a buoyancy and confidence about the role of poetry (and Spenser’s own career as a poet) within the Elizabethan court, the English state, and within Spenser’s life itself that the second group of three books blur. Like the Shepheardes Calender, which launched Spenser’s career as a poet, the 1590 Faerie Queene is a product of a confidence that art can, without an loss of integrity, become a ‘work of state’, that a poet may pursue his literary vocation as well as being recognized as central to the well-being of the society.