The Faerie Queene is an English epic poem by Edmund Spenser. Books I–III were first published in 1590, and then republished in 1596 together with books IV–VI.
In 1569, when Spenser was about 16 years old, his English versions of poems by the 16th-century French poet Joachim du Bellay and his translation of a French version of a poem by the Italian poet Petrarch appeared at the beginning of an anti-Catholic prose tract, A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings; they were no doubt commissioned by its chief author, the wealthy Flemish expatriate Jan Baptista van der Noot.
From May 1569 Spenser was a student in Pembroke Hall (now Pembroke College) of the University of Cambridge, where, along with perhaps a quarter of the students, he was classed as a sizar—a student who, out of financial necessity, performed various menial or semi-menial duties. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1573. Because of an epidemic, Spenser left Cambridge in 1574, but he received the Master of Arts degree in 1576.
His best-known friend at Cambridge was the slightly older Gabriel Harvey, a fellow of Pembroke, who was learned, witty, and enthusiastic for ancient and modern literature but also pedantic, devious, and ambitious. There is no reason to believe that Spenser shared the most distasteful of these qualities, but, in the atmosphere of social mobility and among the new aristocracy of Tudor England, it is not surprising that he hoped for preferment to higher position.
