No critic, no poet, no age has yet fully appreciated The Faerie Queene." Thus Herbert E. Cory, in 1917. In the past twenty years, a rush of monographs and articles on the poem has demonstrated the continuing validity of Cory's statement, and has reduced the gap between current and full appreciation.

In these years no movement in the study of Spenser's poem has been more striking than the advance in the study of the allegory. It is the chief purpose of the present essay to review the major treatments in the twentieth century of the theory and techniques of allegory in The Faerie Queene. In pursuing this purpose, we shall begin with a general review of twentieth-century speculations on the theme of the poem, a preliminary dictated by the fact that allegory for Spenser is a poetical mode and technique which he employs to achieve certain ends, ends which are addressed in the thematic speculations. In this way we shall avoid discussing how Spenser's poem is made before we have at least a general view of what his poem is about.

One line of speculation on the theme or themes of The FaerieQueene Queene leads out of the great essay by Edward Dowden, "Spenser, The Poet and Teacher" ( 1884), which identifies the theme of the poem in accordance with Spenser's declared end "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline." For Dowden, Spenser's poem is concerned to foster "a grand self-culture," "the formation of a complete character for the uses of earth, and afterwards, if need be, for the uses of heaven--this was subject sufficient for the twenty-four books designed to form the epic of the age of Elizabeth" (p. 125). In the poem as we have it, Dowden holds, this theme is articulated in three stages (pp. 123 - 24): man's relation to God (Book I), man's relation to himself (Book II), and man's relation to his fellows (Books III-VI). Dowden's exposition of the third stage especially emphasizes the treatment of love in Books III and IV, and this emphasis has been a dominant one in twentieth-century treatments of the theme of the poem as a whole.

We must note incidentally that Dowden's identification of the movement in the poem from personal to social concerns anticipates later conjectures that because Books IV through VI are progressively more concerned with public virtues than with the private virtues which are the declared subject of the first twelve books, Spenser has actually covered in six books what he proposes in the "Letter to Raleigh" to cover in twenty-four. The hypothesis that the poem is essentially complete as we have it, a conjecture moderately popular in the 1960's (see the treatment of Graham Hough below), derives ultimately from Dowden's observation that Books IV-VI concern man's relation with his fellows. The corollary inference is cogent, perhaps inevitable: justice and courtesy, the virtues of V and VI, are public as well as private virtues.

In 1925 we find W. L. Renwick linking the theme of personal love with the public themes of social concord and justice by reference to the further and more comprehensive theme of mutability. In Spenser's concern with "love as the law of life . . . there is some hint of a solution to the problem which recurs through all his work, the problem of change" (p. 169). Renwick proceeds to cite the Mutabilitie Cantos, a passage in V.ii. 40, and especially the Garden of Adonis as testifying to Spenser's belief that change itself is the articulation of the law of God's love: "Here the principle of continuance in change is the Venus of Lucretius, presiding over procreation, and representing 'nothing other than the power of God.' Thus Love is doubly sanctified, matter and spirit are reconciled, and the tragedy of mutability is resolved, not by blind submission or by abstention, but by comprehension" (p. 170).

But the love-theme is only part of the total matter. For Renwick The Faerie Queene has one lesson throughout, the necessity of stability: "Society must be held together by concord or Friendship, the individual must be controlled by Temperance, the state by Justice" (p. 171). This leads back to mutability and the vision of God's plan as working out its perfection through successive changes: every step and change is subject to this universal law. The achievement of stability is man's contribution to the process: "in every particle of existence, in man, in society, in the state, the temporary form is important as a phase of the permanent, and must therefore be brought to its best mode and noblest function" (p. 172). Thus Renwick articulates Dowden's "grand self-culture"' into Spenser's instrument for battling the specter of mutability. This battle is for Renwick the fundamental theme of the poem. Charles G. Osgood in his 1930 lecture "Spenser and the Enchanted Glass" broadens the quest for theme by asserting that Spenser's moral allegory is predicated on the "issue between good and evil, between right and wrong, between life as it is and life as it ought to be" (p. 172). For Osgood this theme of moral struggle is worked out in terms of Spenser's own personal moral problems. The theme is developed in the poem in three sub-issues. The first and most prevalent is "the moral issue between carnal lust and pure affection or chastity" (p. 173). This issue is ubiquitous in the poem because "Spenser was more interested in the experience and spiritual potentialities of romantic love than in anything else" (p. 173). The second is the issue between worldly ambitions and the poets' sense of their unworthiness and his appreciation of higher values. "He longed for conspicuous position, while he knew its real worth in spiritual terms" (p. 175). This fact underlies both Spenser's continual concern in the poem with ambition and fame, and his parallel concern with the maneuvering and duplicity which are commonly employed as a means to conspicuous position and power. The third sub-issue sets "despondency and despair in a fluctuating world over against cheerful security in a sense of Absolute Goodness and Beauty" (p. 177).

Romantic love, ambition, mutability: Osgood's list adds one item, ambition, to the themes already discussed by Dowden and Renwick. The next step comes in Janet Spens notable essay Spenser's "Faerie Queene": An Interpretation (1934). Spens emphasizes the Neoplatonic aspect of the poem, especially in what she views as Spenser's kinship with Plotinus in their understanding of the relationship between the mutable phenomenal world and the ideal. Spens's orientation leads her to transfer the ambition theme, the theme of the quest for fame, from the worldly to the ideal arena. The most conspicuous ambition in the poem is Arthur's "prayse-desire," his quest for glory, personified in Gloriana, the Faerie Queene. But this is a quest for perfection, a "symbol of the soul's pursuit of the supreme good," equivalent to the total thrust and purpose of the poem; and since Arthur's quest is imaged in terms of romantic love, the themes of love and ambition here draw together as two aspects of the same drive toward the vision of perfection. The love-theme which is so dominant in the poem is simply an echo of Arthur's quest, and the primary usage of the word "love" in the poem is as a symbol of spiritual aspiration. Of course love is a broader term than this; it is also "Spenser's symbol for the unifying and dynamic forces in existence" (p. 99).

The unifying force is imaged in the marriage of the Thames and the Medway: "an example of the 'sustaining love' woven through the web of physical and inanimate being." The dynamic forces are imaged in the knights who pursue Florimell"inspired by an aesthetic passion for sensuous beauty" (p. 99); by the natural passion of virtuous figures like Amoret, which once freed of impure overtones is represented as entirely virtuous; and by the friendship of famous pairs like Hercules and Hylas, Jonathan and David, a relationship indistinguishable from that of successful married love.

Spens does not omit the mutability theme. Mutabilitie is a symbol of the shifting phenomenal world of existence; and opposed to legitimate ambition is the tendency to depression, the lethargy or accidie which the uncertainty of this world brings about (pp. 117 - 38). When the poem ends, she concludes, the poet was about to develop a further theme, viz., the reality of the eternal world which lies behind the mutable world of phenomena (p. 138). In Spens's book we observe, if not the actual influence of Osgood, a parallel to Osgood's thematic analysis, but weighted toward Arthur's quest, wherein romantic love images the search for the ideal. . .