Gloriana’s “True Glorious Type”

Despite the centrality of Spenser’s faery queen for his Faerie Queene and its Platonically idealized mode of mimesis, most studies do not define her symbolic scope or address her transcendental implications, though the poem explicitly evokes them. Elizabeth I was typically represented as God’s image and proxy, and Spenser extrapolates Gloriana from her through Platonic idealization of the beloved (I.pr.4). Just as Gloriana never directly appears in the action and Arthur cannot find her despite his continuing searches, so she is definitively beyond representation. Her role reflects divinity’s paradoxical immanence yet transcendence in Platonic and Judeo-Christian traditions: to some extent mediated, rather as Gloriana’s agents somewhat express her nature; yet still beyond apprehension. Spenser’s engagement with these issues of theology and representation approximates Florentine Platonism’s serio-ludic “poetic theology” involving paradox, wordplay, and riddling fables. By creating this deliberately inconclusive fiction, he audaciously rejected the prevailing requirements of literary narrative so as to adumbrate sublimities beyond the ordinary scope of language.