Spenser's Reformation Epic: Gloriana and the Unadulterated Arthur

Summary

Many English poets yearned to write an Arthuriad, presumably to surpass Virgil's canonical Aeneid with legends of the English king whose knights took an oath on each Pentecost to be loyal and merciful, to avoid murder and greed, to respect and defend gentlewomen:

the kynge stablisshed all the knyghtes and gaff hem rychesse and londys; and charged them never to do outerage nothir morthir, and allwayes to fle treson, and to gyff mercy unto hym that askith mercy, upon payne of forfeiture [of their] worship and lordship of kynge Arthure for evermore; and allwayes to do ladyes, damesels, and jantilwomen and wydowes [socour:] strengthe hem in hir ryghtes, and never to enforce them upon payne of dethe. Also that no man take no batayles in a wrongfull quarell for no love ne for no worldis goodis. So unto thys were all knyghtis sworne of the Table Rounde both olde and yonge. And every yere so were the[y] sworne at the high feste of Pentecoste.

In “The Myth of Arthur,” the Welsh poet David Jones traces the “native … ‘English’ tradition” idealizing Arthur's rule: “Geoffrey— Wace—Layamon, echoes of Chaucer, Malory of course, Drayton, Camden, Spenser, and almost Milton, who drew back from writing his Arthuriad and chose the theme of the Fall.” Jones writes that Ben Jonson spoke of his “intention to perfect an epic poem entitled Herologia, of the worthies of his country, roused by fame, and was to dedicate it to his country… . For a heroic poem, he said, there was no such grounds as King Arthur's fiction,” and he noted Sidney's intention to transform “all of his Arcadia to the stories of King Arthur.”

Only Spenser came close to fulfilling this dream. In his “Letter to Ralegh” he calls Arthur “the image of a braue knight, perfected in the twelue priuate morall vertues,” his magnificence “the perfection of all the rest, and conteineth in it them all.” Is Spenser's hero morally perfect? Does he match the spiritual Arthurian Torso that so fired the fantasy of Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis? In the first two legends of The Faerie Queene Arthur does overcome two great complementary flaws of human nature: Orgoglio in book 1 is the flesh's assertive pride, shown in apocalyptic context; in book 2 Maleger is the inverse, the flesh's mortal vacuity, shown in a temporal setting.