THERE is a dispute among Spenserian critics about the way in
which his historical allegory is to be interpreted. One group holds
that the historical allegory in the Faerie Queene forms a continuous
narrative, at least in Books One and Five, the figures corresponding
throughout to the historical personages involved in that narration. The
other group believes that the poet intends no more than occasional
historical illustration, and that the personages, though corresponding
from time to time with various historical originals, are introduced
more as exercising certain virtues held as characteristic, than as actors
on the factual scene.

The first school of thought is relatively modern, for though as early
as 1693, Dryden had said in his Essay on Satire, that all Spenser's
knights were represented in the court of Queen Elizabeth, it does not
appear that he followed any tradition, or had any direct evidence
beyond the ambiguously expressed dedicatory sonnets. It is not until
the eighteenth century that Warton, in his Observations on the Faerie
Queene, 1754, remarked that there existed an historical allegory of
Elizabethan intrigue in it. But he does not attempt to reconstruct this.
Four years later, in the notes to his edition of Spenser, Upton ventures
on a number of historical identifications, many of which have held
their ground until the present time. It is he, for example, who identi-
fies the Red Cross Knight with Henry VIII. This opened a field for
speculation which attracted various nineteenth-century critics, and
they have been followed by many more in the twentieth century,
especially in America. In Notes and Queries Ser. 3 and 4, in 1863,
Howard, in an Essay on the Historical Allusions in Spenser, identifies
Arthur with Essex (who was hardly so considerable a figure by 1590),
the Red Cross Knight with Sidney, Archimago with Burleigh, and
his son-in-law, the Earl of Oxford, with the three Pagan knights
Sansfoy, Sansloy, and Sansjoy. But Scott, in his review of Tod's edition,
had, with characteristic breadth of vision, envisaged a larger stage. For
him Book One narrated the history of the Primitive Church: the
fight with Error stands for the Arian controversy. Sansfoy stands for
paganism, but with the reign of Constantine, worldly pride prevails in
the palace of Lucifera, and a period of relaxation follows in which the
church submits to the Pope and the Red Cross Knight is imprisoned
by Orgoglio, until the Protestant Church is liberated from Mary

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