In many ways, The Faerie Queene presents a unique challenge to the English reader. It can be described as epic, romantic or fantasy and covers a wide range of religious and romantic, political and spiritual, Christian and pagan topics. It is also incomplete, leaving the resolution of the separate narrative open to conjecture. Moreover, it is a poem that refuses to reveal itself in a single sitting; demanding more from the reader than usual. MacCaffrey describes the challenge to the reader as follows: Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay “The characters, including the heroes, move primarily in the horizontal plane, but Spenser's readers have their attention drawn to up and down several times. limits of reality which are also the sources of the truth of the poem. This vertical dimension is usually beyond the horizon of the characters, but visible to us as always when a distance is established between the fiction and the reader, it has the effect of making us aware of the fiction; himself and to reflect on the nature and relevance of fictions. "Interpreting the allegory in The Faerie Queene is not simply a task of deciphering a code, but a matter of relating to the Spenserian, Elizabethan and faerie worlds in order to make sense of it and then to bring together the layers and carefully structured meanings of the poem Spenser's contemporaries and his modern audiences will probably know when they approach The Faerie Queene that what they are reading is an allegory Allegory as a literary device evolved from the classical method of. he interpretation of the world through figurative means with gods and myths, combined with the progression (stated somewhat simplistically) from simile to metaphor and allegory Allegory has been used extensively in the Bible; subsequently, the technique was seen as morally intentional and was used throughout the medieval period, from Dante and popular novels like The Romance of the Rose to Chaucer. Therefore, Elizabethans would have been fully aware of the allegorical style of The Faerie Queene, as would modern readers whose copies are invariably preceded by Spenser's famous letter to Sir Walter Raleigh. We should therefore assume that Spenser in no way intended to confuse his readers, but to use allegory as the technique best suited to espouse his ideas and views on contemporary Elizabethan society. Therefore, the reader must complete the task of following the narrative in Fairy Land. while being aware on another level of Spenser's aims of "forming a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline" based on Protestant Christianity and glorifying, in the same vein, the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The role of the Knight of the Red Cross in Book 1 of The Faerie Queene can be examined to highlight the demands placed on the reader in interpreting the allegory. As MacCaffrey explains: “In the epistemological allegory of Book 1, Spenser forces both his reader and his hero to confront the duplicity of appearances.” This “duplicity of appearances” is mainly represented by the roles and differences of Una and Duessa. The reader already knows that the Red Cross is “holiness” from the prefatory quatrain and must keep this in mind to understand the importance of the problems he must overcome. Duessa, Abessa and Archimago are, for Spenser, allegorical representations of the Catholic Church - ones that are specifically intended to deceive Red Cross and the reader, becauseRed Cross is in many ways the Christian, or more precisely the Protestant everyone. His quest for truth and holy glory is one that Spenser considers the duty of every man and it is the forces of Catholicism that stand in his way. But Catholicism is not Spenser's only evil in the poem; Islam, represented by the 3 “Sarazins” brothers, is perceived as being without faith (Sansfoy), without law (Sansloy) and without joy (Sansjoy). There would have been very few problems interpreting these names for Spenser's audience, as any reader of such a poem would most likely have a rudimentary knowledge of the poem's names of Latin origin; however, the modern English reader cannot understand the meaning of the name without secondary elements. Understanding the names in The Faerie Queene is always helpful in the early stages of reading, as they provide a "shortcut" to the allegorical meaning of the characters. Another problem for the modern reader is the blatant and consistent attacks on anything that is not Protestant. , whether Catholics, Muslims or infidels. As a prominent Elizabethan, Spenser wrote with the support of the political and religious power base, and his views would have been either applauded or quietly opposed. However, modern English readers live in a society where multiculturalism is publicly celebrated and religious intolerance officially unacceptable. In Northern Ireland, for example, the study of the allegory of The Fairy Queen would be a highly controversial issue, as celebrating the poem would clearly be an attack on Catholicism in a region of the world where religious differences can cost lives. . endorsing a poem condemning Islam as lawless, faithless and joyless in a British society with an established Muslim community that would be deeply offended. While it is impossible to fault Spenser for his lack of 21st century sensitivity and insight, a new task for the reader is to take Spenser's goals and give them universal meaning. This is dangerous in terms of developing an exclusive interpretation (i.e. attempting to publish a book defining a universal interpretation), but the allegory of The Faerie Queene must be interpreted personally in order for it to mean something something for each individual reader. This may mean accepting Fidessa-Duessa as the personification of falsity but ignoring that she is the whore of Babylon, or perhaps accepting her as the whore of Babylon but rejecting this figure as a representation of the Catholic Church . Likewise, Sansfoy does not need to be Muslim to represent the madness of being lawless. This selective interpretation may break the "completeness" of Spenser's poem, but the process in itself would be an interesting experience. For such personal interpretation to occur, the reader must first fully understand Spenser's intentions. The crux of this task lies in navigating the “vertical axis” mentioned by MacCaffrey. The Red Cross does not symbolize a fixed concept or figure. We have seen that he is the reader's ally in the problems he must overcome, which makes him, in a certain sense, an ordinary man, but he is obviously not just that. Spenser fashioned him to represent holiness, although this definition must be treated with caution because he is not holiness itself, but a man who has holiness. There are characters, like Malbecco (Jealousy) in Book 3 who are concepts in themselves and Una as Truth represents this type of allegorical figure. Whenever she is with Red Cross, he has the “real Christian truth”; when it is absent, it is prey to, 1978.