SOURCE: "In liuing colours and right hew: The Queen of Spenser's Central Books," in Critical Essays on Edmund Spenser, edited by Mihoko Suzuki, Prentice Hall International, 1982, pp. 168-82.

In the following essay, Anderson analyzes the significance of the complex and often critical portrait of Queen Elizabeth in books III and IV of The Faerie Queene.

Even in the 1590 Faerie Queene, Spenser's reverence for Queen Elizabeth is accompanied by a cautionary awareness of the temptations and dangers of queenly power and by a complementary awareness of the cost—the denial or exclusion of human possibilitiesCan ennobling Idea exacts of its bearer. The one is evident in the House of Pride and Cave of Mammon, and the other in the treatment of Belphoebe. The attainments of Una, the "goodly maiden Queene," are threatened demonically by their perversion in Lucifera, the "mayden Queene" of Pride, and parodied again in Book II...