Una’s Line

Abstract

This chapter examines the character of Una in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Una was at the epicenter of The Faerie Queene, and the poem's ideal reader was one naturally impervious to any moralizing pretensions: a child, usually but not always a boy, old enough to read independently but not so grown as to have lost a taste for imaginary play or developed a sensitivity to allegory. Today, when nearly all readers of The Faerie Queene encounter the poem in the confines of a classroom or a footnoted scholarly edition, it is hard to appreciate the influence such actual and imagined young readers once had on its critical and popular reception. Far from requiring or fostering the hyperliteracy with which Spenser is now associated, The Faerie Queene was characterized by both admirers and detractors as quintessential children's fare: an almost too effective engine of readerly enchantment and a rich repository of adventures and images. Although this approach to The Faerie Queene ignored or occluded much of what scholarly readers now consider essential, it attended with useful closeness to parts of the poem that now get short shrift: its richly detailed fictive landscape and the characters who populate it, without necessarily having much to do with its meaning.