On the 16th of January 1599,
a funeral took place at Westminster Abbey in London.
When the coffin was laid to rest, a line of poets,
clutching eulogies they had written,
threw their poems and their pens into the tomb after it.
They had lost a hero.
This was a man who had changed literature for ever.
And he did it with one poem.
But WHAT a poem!
A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine
Y cladd in mightie armes and silver shielde
Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine
The cruell markes of many a bloudy fielde
Yet armes till that time did he never wield
His angry steede did chide his foming bitt
As much disdayning to the curbe to yield
Full jolly knight, he seemd, and faire did sitt
As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.
The poem is called The Faerie Queene.
And its author is Edmund Spenser, a lowly civil servant
who had climbed his way up the greasy pole of Elizabethan society
and, for me, it's one of the most
exciting works of literature ever written.
I'm Dr Janina Ramirez.
I'm a social and cultural historian,
and I've been fascinated by this unfinished masterpiece
ever since I first read it as a teenager.
Why?
Because nothing about this poem is as it seems.
Its language may sound otherworldly,
its cast of Arthurian knights and fairies might smack of fantasy,
but look deeper and you'll find something even more intriguing.
This is a deeply subversive book.
It begins with a sense of optimism and order.
But underneath the ornate poetry
lies a society gripped by political upheaval,
violence and religious turmoil.
And, as this turmoil overtook Spenser's own life,
the poem itself turned into something much darker,
chaotic and emotionally complex.
Nothing like this had been seen before.
And I don't think we've seen anything quite like it since.
There may be other contenders but, for me, this is the book
that catapulted English literature into the modern age.
In the summer of 1580, a young English civil servant
travelled to Ireland to begin a new life across the sea.
On the surface, it was a plum posting -
private secretary to the Lord Deputy of Ireland himself.
But some historians have argued that he was fleeing
from a mess of his own making.
Because the precocious aspiring poet
had written a satire that had landed him in hot water.
The young civil servant was Edmund Spenser.
And the poem was Mother Hubberd's Tale.
But this was no little ditty about fetching a bone for a dog.
It was something much more provocative.
In it, he pokes fun at influential members of the Royal Court,
portraying one as a bumbling ape, and another as a sly fox.
Of course, he never actually names anyone directly.
That would be far too dangerous.
But one courtier in particular gets mocked especially.
The powerful William Cecil, Lord Burghley.
It was a potentially career-ending mistake.
We'll never know just how much this bruising encounter
affected Spenser's decision to leave for Ireland.
But one thing was very clear...
..if he thought a quiet life in the civil service awaited,
he was sorely mistaken.
When Edmund Spenser arrived here in the 16th century,
Ireland was gripped by one of the bloodiest periods in its history.
By 1580, Ireland had undergone centuries of occupation.
First, by the Norman earls
and then by successive Tudor and Elizabethan forces.
Wave after wave of invasion
had already created a confused, conflicted nation.
And now religion had been thrown into the mix.
After the Reformation in England,
the Protestant faith became the official religion of state.
The Elizabethan government was determined to export
this brand of Christianity across the Irish Sea.
In response, pockets of resistance sprang up all across Ireland,
from indigenous Catholics to old Anglo-Norman settlers.
And what had begun as a series of tit-for-tat raids and counter-raids
escalated into something far more vicious and deadly.
Spenser found himself thrust into a chaotic world
of clashing religious loyalties,
ancient traditions and shockingly brutal violence.
And, in the midst of all of this horror,
he sat down and wrote one of the most beautiful poems
in the English language.
Sadly, Spenser's handwritten manuscripts no longer survive
but, buried in the archives of the University Library at Cambridge,
are extremely rare copies of the very first edition of this important poem.
And here it is.
Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene.
This is a really exciting moment for me.
I have been obsessed with this poem
since I first read it as an undergraduate student.
I can't believe I'm in the presence
of such a precious 400-year-old object.
The poem is divided into six books,
each one following a knight who has been sent on a quest by Gloriana,
the Faerie Queene, betrothed to Prince Arthur.
It's a mythic landscape of elves, nymphs and lonely castles.
And even to the Elizabethan reader,
it would have seemed a little quaint and old-fashioned.
Even the language Spenser uses is deliberately outdated and archaic.
Elizabethans wouldn't have talked like this.
But, by writing in this style,
Spenser is drawing on a well-established literary tradition
of romance literature that stretched right back to the 10th century.
And it's what he does with this tradition
that is just so revolutionary.
Spenser took the familiar world of Arthurian chivalry and courtly love
and thoroughly subverted it.
Each character is loaded with meaning.
And at the heart of this epic is a deeply symbolic marriage
between the past and the future.
The Faerie Queen of the poem is, of course,
meant to be Queen Elizabeth I.
And by using her marriage to Prince Arthur
as the framework for the whole poem,
Spenser is lending Elizabeth's politically insecure dynasty
a mythic continuity and credibility through the Arthurian legend.
With this book, Spenser is constructing a narrative
that needs to be decoded before it can be understood.
And, helpfully, he tells us just how to do it.
'Dr Richard Danson Brown is an expert on Spenser's writing,
'and thinks that the key to understanding this epic poem
'lies in a letter that was included at the end of the first edition.'
He wrote it to Sir Walter Raleigh,
and it is a letter which basically explains
the whole intention behind the poem.
Why did he write it to Raleigh? Mm.
Basically, at this stage, in 1590,
Raleigh is a really important courtier.
He's one of Elizabeth's favourites,
and he's something of a Renaissance man.
So, in a sense, by putting this letter in The Faerie Queene,
Spenser is hitching his star to Raleigh's.
Mm, he's backing this very important, influential person.
Right, absolutely.
And what he does here is he gives a kind of explanation
of what's happening in the poem.
So this is just the first three books of the Faerie Queen.
What the letter as a whole tells us
is that his plan is that the final poem will be a full 12 books.
Gosh, right. And he never gets around to the full 12,
but that's the intention? He never gets around to that.
And, in many ways, The Faerie Queene is a massive poem as we have it.
It's six and a bit books.
A 12-book poem would have been truly humongous. Yeah, yeah.
So what the letter is doing
is outlining the plan of the poem as a whole.
And he does this through a series
of really interesting phrases and words.
The one that I'm particularly fond of is he describes it as being
"a continued allegory or a darke conceit".
The Faerie Queene is a puzzle book of symbols and codes,
of hidden meanings and subtexts.
It reflects the world in which it was written,
a world full of metaphor and elaborate representation.
This is a painting of Queen Elizabeth I,
the Faerie Queene herself, Gloriana.
This one's known as the Rainbow Portrait.
And the whole image is composed of a number of symbols.
So you can see, across her cloak, there are eyes and ears painted.
This is because, like God, she can see and hear everything.
And, here on her arm,
there's a beautiful, coiled, embroidered snake,
symbolising her knowledge and wisdom.
Today, we might struggle to decode such an image.
But, to the informed Elizabeth viewer,
its message would have been loud and clear.
Like this painting, The Faerie Queene is a work of art
that needs to be unpicked and unlocked.
And, to do that, the reader needs to come armed
with an astonishing amount of knowledge.
The kind of knowledge that only an educated person at the time
could hope to attain.
Spenser attended university here at Pembroke College in Cambridge.
The fact that he came here at all is pretty remarkable.
Unlike most of his peers, Spenser wasn't born into money.
His father was probably a lowly tradesman,
and records here show that he came as a sizar,
which means that he had to work to fund his studies.
From nowhere, he'd secured for himself
the finest education in the country.
And he certainly didn't waste his time.
Spenser would have read the works of classical writers,
like Virgil and Ovid, but he also became fascinated
by English authors like Chaucer and with French Romantic poetry.
The young Edmund would absorb all these influences
like an intellectual sponge.
And, later, put them to work to create something entirely new.
'It wasn't just the way Spenser fused these influences that was unique.
'It was also his style of writing.
'He wanted to create a style that set him apart from others,
'something that would make him stand out.
'Professor Simon Palfrey has been exploring his signature technique.'
What he does is he kind of constructs his own stanza form.
Now, the...
This stanza form is known as a Spenserian stanza
because it is unprecedented.
His crucial thing is to make a stanza of nine lines. Right.
I mean, if you take pretty much any stanza... Mm.
Here's one from Book III. Mm-hm.
It shows very clearly the kinds of techniques that Spenser users.
You've got the four rhymes there. "Sent", "more", "spent", "store".
Right, A-B-A-B. A-B-A-B.
Now, that seems to be a self-sufficient unit of poetry.
But then you get the crucial...
It's the fifth line in the Spenser stanza which is the crucial one.
Right. Which is the hinge point,
cos you've got four above and four below.
The fifth line is the pivotal line, literally, in the stanza.
Spenser plays with the rhyming pattern of each stanza,
repeating the rhythm of the words back and forth.
It creates a sense of wandering through the text.
For every door that closes, another opens.
So why do you think, then,
that Spenser writes in this very unusual way?
I think he writes in this way
because of his ambition for the work.
The Spenserian stanza, because of its forward and backward rhythms,
because of the fact that it ends in a way that begs further supplements
and is...definitively incomplete,
means that the stanza itself is an embodiment of the idea
of a quest which can never quite be finished.
And the poem is never quite finished.
Each book is, in some fundamental way, unfinished.
You reach an end which is not an end.
It somehow speaks for the sleeplessness
of Spenser's art and imagination.
This intricate style, with its nine lines
and strict rhyming pattern, is fiendishly difficult.
It has inspired and challenged
some of the greatest poets who ever lived,
including the likes of Byron, Keats and Wordsworth,
all of whom would write poems in this style to prove their ability.
The Spenserian stanza became a poetic test of skill.
But while those who came later
wrote maybe one or two poems in this style,
Spenser managed to keep it going for an impressive 35,000 lines.
So what was it all for?
Could it be that this epic poem
is little more than an intellectual exercise
for the amusement of his peers?
Or was it to achieve something else entirely?
In 1590, Edmund Spenser published the first three books
of The Faerie Queene.
It was a full decade since he had left England for Ireland,
and court life must have seemed like a distant memory.
But with this book came the chance for him to turn his fortunes around.
And he knew exactly who to dedicate it to.
Gloriana, the Faerie Queene herself -
Queen Elizabeth I.
It certainly got him noticed.
And, even though he had barely started on his 12-book epic,
he was soon invited to an audience with the Virgin Queen.
An impressive achievement for a commoner
who'd had to serve tables to fund his education.
By all accounts, the encounter went well.
We've no record of exactly what the Queen said about the poem,
but she clearly felt its poet deserved a reward.
Spenser was granted a pension of £50,
a decent amount in a country where the average wage
was little more than £5 a year.
His contemporaries began to refer to him as "a laureate poet".
His triumphant return to the royal circle seemed secured.
Well, not entirely.
In the same year that Spenser was granted his pension,
he also published a collection of poems,
possibly to cash in on his success.
This collection included a little number from Spenser's back catalogue.
Mother Hubberd's Tale.
Ten years earlier, this very same poem
may have been behind his hasty relocation to Ireland.
Edmund Spenser clearly hadn't learned his lesson.
Perhaps we can put it down to Spenser's naivety about court life.
Or perhaps he thought his favour with the Queen made him untouchable.
In reality, he was anything but.
His old enemy, Lord Burghley,
made sure that, once again, copies of the poem were seized and destroyed.
And Spenser found himself, once again, locked out of court.
Frustrated, Spenser returned to Ireland to finish his poem
and, as his fortunes changed, so did the work itself.
What we have got here are two editions of The Faerie Queene
that were published during Spenser's lifetime.
So the first edition is the 1590, here.
And here we've got the 1596 version.
And there's an intriguing difference between them
in the way the third book ends.
The original ending,
the most beautiful, fantastic ending of the third book,
comes where the female knight, Britomart,
has just rescued Amoret, who's been tortured by this enchanter.
And she delivers poor Amoret back to Scudamore. Mm.
And there's this incredible passage
which describes Scudamore and Amoret embracing.
Oh, I'm going to have a read of that. So it's here, isn't it? Yeah.
It's really beautiful stuff, isn't it? It's stunning.
And the next stanza goes on to describe them
as being like the Hermaphrodite,
so it's an image of almost perfect psychological
and erotic fusion between these characters, a real happy ending.
Yeah, a great sense of resolve, where everything's come together.
That's right. And then, when you go forward to 1596,
that happy ending disappears. He's taken it out completely.
So Britomart and Amoret come out of the castle
but Scudamore has already gone off into the distance. Right.
So what we've got here...
We've got books I to III, that seem all lovely and finished
but, when he goes to add the next three books, to bring it up to six...
Yeah. ..he changes this ending, he changes the resolve in it.
Yeah, and this is one of the major questions for Spenserians -
why does he make this change?
What's happened between 1590 and 1596 to make this change necessary?
It wasn't just Spenser's rejection from court
that had changed his outlook.
Ireland had descended even further into a bitter and bloody conflict,
with no clear winner and no end in sight.
As a senior civil servant, Spenser had benefited
by acquiring confiscated properties from rebel landowners.
But, as the war raged on, his position became even more precarious.
One of the most important properties was here,
in the beautiful but isolated countryside outside of Cork.
And it wasn't just important to Spenser.
I think this is one of the most important locations
in the history of English literature,
because it was here that Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene.
Kilcolman Castle.
The castle is little more than a ruin now
but, when Spenser arrived here,
two years before he published the first edition of his poem,
he set about establishing a fortified outpost,
embracing his new role as a colonial landowner.
Dr Andrew King from the University College, Cork,
knows the location very well.
And how do you think Spenser felt
about the Irish people around him?
I think there was a considerable ambivalence.
He does express a great interest in the culture, the countryside,
and yet he does, clearly, present the Irish as a savage people.
That's... To put it frankly, that's how he presents them.
Do you think, when Spenser publishes
the second edition of The Faerie Queene in 1596,
that he's lost faith in the Elizabethan enterprise in Ireland?
Absolutely. I think he's completely disillusioned
in the possibility of not only an Elizabethan project in Ireland
but, I think, more philosophically, or, if you like, more abstractly,
he's disillusioned in any human efforts to achieve stability.
The whole book was posited on, you know,
achieving a kind of stability, documenting...
documenting it, nailing it down.
And the realisation that he can't believe in it.
It's a complete switch in tone, isn't it? It really is. It really is.
And that, to me, is the brilliance of the work.
As I've said before, it's intellectual honesty.
The war that had been raging around Spenser as he wrote
finally began to close in.
Two years after the second edition of The Faerie Queen was published,
rebel forces attacked his castle.
Spenser was forced to flee for his life.
Legend has it he escaped via a secret tunnel somewhere near here,
just a few hundred yards from the castle.
As he emerged,
he must have known that his world had completely collapsed.
As if to compound the tragedy,
it is thought that the original manuscripts of The Faerie Queene
were lost in the flames.
Driven out of court, mired in a failing colonial enterprise
and now homeless,
Spenser was forced to confront the fact that everything he believed in
had fallen far short of the ideal he'd created.
Defeated, he returned to London and died there just a month later,
in January 1599.
But that isn't the end of the story.
Among his papers,
Spenser's friends found a final book of The Faerie Queene, Book VII.
And it contains what is, for me,
one of the most powerful scenes in the whole work.
Only a few stanzas of the final book remain.
They are known as the Cantos of Mutability.
And the story they tell takes place on Galtymore Mountain,
which dominates the skyline
between the counties of Limerick and Tipperary.
The mountain, right in the heart of Ireland,
is christened Arlo Hill, and it's the scene of an epic battle
between the giantess, Mutability, and the God, Jove.
In the poem, Mutability, who represents chaos and change,
clashes with Jove, who represents order.
The two sides fiercely argue over who has supremacy.
When it's over, Mother Nature,
who has been watching the events unfold,
concludes that while change is a powerful force,
it's only part of a broader process.
Ultimately, the only true constant is eternity.
I think this is an incredibly beautiful and powerful book.
For its time, it was revolutionary.
By fusing allegory and symbolism
with the epic legends of Arthurian chivalry,
Spenser was creating something entirely new.
A kind of poetry that would inspire generations of writers
for hundreds of years to come.
In the end, Spenser is saying that only two things really matter -
God and eternity.
They're the words of a man who has been forced to question
everything he believed in, including his own great project.
Perhaps he thought it was a failure.
I think he succeeded in more ways than he will ever know.
If you want to dig deeper into Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene,
or the other books in this series, then go to...
..and follow the links to the Open University.