Spenser's Eighteenth-Century Readers and the Question of Unity in The Faerie Queene

Abstract

The editors of two recent anthologies of Spenser criticism throw out complementary challenges to modern readers of The Faerie Queene. 'What is now at issue,' writes R.M. Cummings, 'is the consistency of Spenser's poetry, the connexion between its meaning and its structure." If we take 'structure' as signifying, in its broadest sense, all of the formal resources which a poet of Spenser's gifts may exploit, we bring Cummings's assertion into harmony with that of Paul J. Alpers: for readers today 'the central problem' is: 'How does one read The Faerie Queene?, To what extent these questions reveal modern critical preoccupations — preoccupations with which this paper is in sympathy — becomes evident when we turn to Spenser's critics in the eighteenth century.

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