Recommendations
Books Like The Faerie Queene
Best books to read after The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
Readers who love The Faerie Queene are drawn to its combination of the longest poem in English, the extraordinary allegorical richness of its six books, the Spenserian stanza that Keats and Byron and Shelley all used, and the sustained Elizabethan vision of virtue, temptation, and the female knight Britomart. They want works that deal with allegory, the Elizabethan world, Renaissance epic, and the long tradition of poets for whom Spenser is the essential predecessor.
- 1Buy
Paradise Lost
by John Milton
The English poem most directly descended from The Faerie Queene — Milton read Spenser as a boy and the allegory of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost draws directly on Spenser's allegorical method; the Faerie Queene is the most important English predecessor for Paradise Lost.
- 2Buy
Orlando Furioso
by Ludovico Ariosto
The Italian Renaissance epic that was Spenser's primary model — Ariosto's romance epic gave Spenser the female warrior Britomart (modelled on Bradamante), the interweaving of multiple plot-lines, and the ironic relationship between narrative and romance convention; the essential predecessor to The Faerie Queene.
- 3Buy
The Pilgrim's Progress
by John Bunyan
The allegorical journey narrative that inherits Spenser's tradition in Protestant prose — Bunyan's Christian travels through allegorical landscapes (Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, Giant Despair's castle) is the most direct Puritan descendant of Spenser's allegorical method.
- 4Buy
The Eve of St Agnes
by John Keats
Keats's medieval dream-romance written in the Spenserian stanza — the stanza Keats uses for his most sensuous poem is the stanza Spenser invented; reading Keats's mastery of the form illuminates what Spenser's stanza can do.
- 5Buy
His Dark Materials
by Philip Pullman
The contemporary fantasy that is the most sustained allegory in English literature since Spenser — Pullman's three-volume examination of the Authority, free will, and human consciousness works allegorically at the same scale as The Faerie Queene, and both works use the journey through multiple worlds as their organizing structure.
- 6Buy
The Lord of the Rings
by J.R.R. Tolkien
The modern fantasy epic in the allegorical tradition Spenser represents — Tolkien's Middle-earth inherits Spenser's vision of a moral landscape where geography and character embody virtue and vice; the Shire, Mordor, and the journey between them work allegorically in ways that descend from the Spenserian tradition.
- 7Buy
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
by George Gordon Byron
Byron's Romantic narrative poem in the Spenserian stanza — using Spenser's stanza for his restless hero's meditation on post-Napoleonic Europe, Byron shows how the form that Spenser developed for sustained allegorical epic could be redirected toward Romantic introspection.
- 8Buy
Amoretti and Epithalamion
by Edmund Spenser
Spenser's sonnet sequence and marriage ode — the Amoretti sonnets chart Spenser's courtship of his wife Elizabeth Boyle and make the best companion reading to The Faerie Queene's treatment of Amoret and Scudamour; reading Spenser's lyric alongside his epic reveals the same concerns in different forms.
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