...blazing and defining the national virtue. Spenser declares the "general! end" of The Faerie Queene to be "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline," with "noble person" gender neutral. ("A Letter of the Authors ... to ... Sir Walter Ralegh" [usually...

...literature. In a letter to Ralegh about The Faerie Queene. Edmund Spenser acknowledges that his aim is 'to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline' ('Letter of the Author's'). NOTES Stone, (1964). p. 43; Cressy, p. 17. All further references to this...

...The poet as Medina The "generall end" of The Faerie Queene, Spenser writes in the letter to Ralegh, is to "fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline."1 Given the multiple definitions of aristocratic conduct available to Spenser, however,...

...that will concern me in the next chapter and subsequently. chapter three The Poet as Magus and Viator 'The generall end therefore of all the booke is to...or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.' In this familiar statement and throughout 'A Letter of the Authors,' the poet emphasizes that his subject...

...Ralegh, "the general intention & meaning" of his allegory, "which in the whole course thereof I haue fashioned, without expressing of any particular purposes or by accidents therein occasioned." The author who realized in this letter "how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed," and who sought...

...elements receive fullest expression in the complicated allegory of The Fairie Queene, whose purpose "is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline," according to the letter to Raleigh. Each of the six books portrays the growth of a Christian Knight...

...his study (in a letter to Sir Walter Ralegh, Spenser had defined the purpose of The Fairie Queene as "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline") (l69). Given the complexity and scope of Spenser's work, the critic selects one episode (the destruction...

...that destruction, Spenser thus found an ideal metaphor for the total renunciation of lust necessary "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline." NOTES 1. Faerie Queene quotations come from AC Hamilton's edition (London: Longman, 1977). 2. Waldo...

...and stature. In The Faerie Queene he presumes to school the community of his social superiors in how 'to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline' ('A Letter of the Authors'), but Spenser himself came from modest, non-gentle stock. His Westminster...

..."lewd deeds." What must be especially galling, given that Spenser's avowed aim in The Faerie Queene is to "fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline" (Letter to Ralegh, 737), is the bardic appropriation of "praises which are proper unto virtue itself."...