Spenser describes The Faerie Queene in the Letter to Ralegh as ‘a continued Allegory, or darke conceit’ (p. 737). Allegory can be a demon in the mind of would-be readers of the poem. It is tempting to regard an allegory as a code which presses for a oneto- one correspondence between a fictional event – say, Arthegall's conquest of Grantorto in Book V – and a single referent, such as the defeat of the Spanish Armada. This belief can only make The Faerie Queene frustrating to read: if one thinks there is a simple key to the allegory, and that one does not have it, one can feel locked in. Allegory, however, is not a single mode of writing, but a hybrid of several different modes of signifying. And this hybrid form is usually less concerned with making single relations between particular stories and particular meanings than with extending and exploring complex ideas. Many medieval allegorical poems are what might be called ‘conceptual’ allegories. That is, they take a central concept and explore its ramifications. Chaucer's House of Fame, for example, takes the concept ‘fame’ and explores the range of its meanings – from ‘rumour’ to ‘glory’ to ‘reputation’. It uses a variety of episodes to illustrate each of these ambiguously interpenetrating aspects of the word. A favourite trick of Langland's long allegorical dream poem Piers Plowman is to meditate on an ambiguous term such as ‘meed’ (which can mean ‘reward’ or ‘bribe’) and to generate stories and exempla of its various aspects. At the end of these poems the central terms on which they brood have been not so much defined as de-fined: they have been stretched and extended into something unsettlingly complex. Their meaning can be enacted only through a number of interlocking senses and a variety of alternative narratives. Allegory of this kind changes and enriches the language, and is close kin to fiction, which through complex narrative opens up new spaces for thoughts which lie beyond the limits of individual words.

Allegorical habits of mind can be traced right down into the syntax of The Faerie Queene.