Spenser's World of Glass

"The great poem of Edmund Spenser was to have been 'disposed into XII. bookes fashioning XII. morall vertues,' but only six books were completed. In this volume Miss Williams examines The Faerie Queene as, essentially, a unified whole despite its unfinished state. The poem is seen as depending for its unity less upon narrative line or schematic moral allegory than upon the establishment of a pattern of meaning which is expanded through the six books but is coherent and self-consistent at the close of each. It is a matter of expansion and enrichment rather than of completion; the pattern of meaning is capable of further development, but it exists at each stage of the poem. Each book focuses our gaze from a different point of view: Red Crosse's story regards human life under the aspect of holiness: Artegall's, under the aspect of justice. In progressively defining the virtues for which they are names, the legends progressively shape our experience of living; the pattern grows as we look at the material from different angles. Romance, with its wanderings and its twin themes of love and war; formal allegory with its affirmation of order; myth, legend, literary tradition, pagan and Christianised philosophy-- all work together in a variety of ways to construct the small world of the poem, which mirrors our won. Miss Williams maintains that part of the reason why The Faerie Queene, for all its romance and fantasy, is so close to our experience of living lies in its cumulative, patterned structure which allows meaning to develop as naturally and inevitably in reading as it does in life." -Publisher.