Abstract
TE V D M U N D S P E N S E R'S The Faerie Queene was so widely admired and imitated from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries that its treatment of chastity, rape, and marriage remains embedded in the way many of us conceptualize gender relations today (Spenser [1590] 1981). Like its most prominent literary descendants, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Paradise Lost, The Faerie Queene interacted with its time so significantly that it helped to fashion our own. The Faerie Queene's treatment of heterosexual union is at times the most violent of the texts I have encountered. As I assess this violence, I will argue that it results from the conflict between Spenser's insistence on chastity defined as male possession of the female body and the counterheterosexual chastity of Spenser's audience and patron, Queen Elizabeth I.1
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