Spenser and the Death of the Queen

Abstract

Few Renaissance poems contain more examples of different types of spectacular death than Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. ¹ We witness numerous monsters, dragons, giants and other villains coming to justly sticky ends; Christian and pagan knights falling in battle; as well as some deaths which appear to be more natural, such as the strange deaths of Mortdant and Amavia (2.2).² The poem is also full of near death experiences such as the Red-Cross Knight’s planned suicide when tempted by Despair (1.9), the sufferings of Marinell and Timias (3.4–5), and the rescue of Serena and then Pastorella (6.8; 11). And there are deaths of numerous kings and mythological figures (such as Adonis, represented in a tapestry on the walls of Castle Joyous (3, 1, 34)) in the chronicles and embedded narratives. The rate of deaths and executions increases as the poem becomes more violent in Books 5 and 6, where it is a rare canto that does not contain a killing of some sort, although the first four books are not without their bellicose moments.