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
Famous quotes containing the words structure and/or language:
“In the extent and proper structure of the Union, therefore, we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“The reader uses his eyes as well as or instead of his ears and is in every way encouraged to take a more abstract view of the language he sees. The written or printed sentence lends itself to structural analysis as the spoken does not because the reader’s eye can play back and forth over the words, giving him time to divide the sentence into visually appreciated parts and to reflect on the grammatical function.”
—J. David Bolter (b. 1951)