Politics

Abstract

In 1648, fifty years after Spenser’s death, a section of The Faerie Queene was published separately in a small quarto of eleven printed pages. The work consisted of twenty-five verses from Spenser’s magnum opus, (V.ii.29–54), detailing Artegall’s defeat of the Giant with the Scales, obviously recognised then as now, as one of the key political passages in the work (Patterson 1992; O’Connell 1990b). The extract was given the grand title, The faerie leveller, or, King Charles his leveller descried and deciphered in Queene Elizabeths dayes by her poet laureat Edmond Spenser, in his unparaleld poeme entituled, The faerie qveene, a lively representation of our times. The last phrase is the key to reading the text, an insight developed in the prefatory material which argues that ‘the Prince of English Poets Edmund Spenser’ wrote verses which ‘then propheticall are now become historicall in our dayes’ (3). Spenser’s story of the knight of Justice arguing with the Giant who tries to impose universal equality by weighing everything in his scales, before throwing him off a cliff, is interpreted as a royalist fable. Artegall is King Charles; Talus is ‘The Kings forces’; ‘The Giant Leveller’ is ‘Col. Oliver Cromwell’ (4).