Structure and Language
The Faerie Queene was written in Spenserian stanza, which was created specifically for The Faerie Queene. In this style, there are nine iambic lines – the first eight of them five footed and the ninth a hexameter – which form “interlocking quatrains and a final couplet” (McCabe 203). The rhyme pattern is ABABBCBCC. Each book of The Faerie Queene contains a proem and twelve cantos. Each cantos has forty eight stanzas. This means that each book as a whole has over 18,000 lines (McCabe 203). Over 2000 stanzas were written for the 1590 Faerie Queene (McCabe 203).
Read more about this topic: The Faerie Queene
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