This substantially revised second edition of The Faerie Queene. A Reader's Guide offers a rewritten introduction as well as amendments to the main text in order to take account of new scholarship and changing emphases in recent critical writing on the poem. There is also an updated guide to further reading.

Like the first edition, this book is designed for those reading The Faerie Queene for the first time. In my experience the poem presents such readers with a number of initial difficulties, owing partly to the remoteness of the sixteenth century and its ideas from our own and partly to the allegorical mode of the poem and its multiple plots. On first reading we enter a quite unfamiliar world in which the significance of characters and episodes and the logic of their sequence is far from obvious. But the poem demands and copiously rewards re-reading and close attention to its details. With more knowledge and greater familiarity much that at first seems inexplicable or insignificant finds its place and takes on meaning.

This guide in no way wishes to pre-empt the reader's own exploration and gradual discovery of the poem. Its aim is twofold: first, to provide in a convenient form information which is otherwise difficult of access, hidden in scholarly articles or sixteenth-century texts, and which I consider basic to the understanding of the poem; and secondly, to suggest the bare bones of a reading of the poem which concentrates on its coherence – the connections between episodes, their sequence, the significance of repeated patterns and details – while trying to acknowledge the poem's complexity and its often deliberate ambivalence.