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My original "novice" assessment -- that Spenser's writing is less excellent when he is more actively seeking favor with the Queen -- appears indeed to be an oversimplification. The consensus among critics seems to be that nearly every detail of the Faerie Queene may be a political commentary of some type. If this is true, then there is no separation of the work into sections that are primarily allegoric political commentary (the parts I felt are inferior) and sections that represent pure, unfettered artistic vision. The latter does not exist. Is Spenser, then, like Dante? Surely it is a huge risk to weave political details that for the most part are irrelevant for future readers into a work the author hopes will be read centuries later. Dante, working from a safe distance, named names. Spenser, being paid by the Queen, writes in code. Joyce too wrote in code / "no language", and used his prodigious talent to write something almost no one will ever look at in future centuries -- which to me means he failed. I had previously considered Spencer to be of the same class. And before people here kindly educated me, I considered Spenser's and Joyce's failures to be of the same kind: caused by a non-artistic ambition (Spenser to win a place in the Queen's court in London, Joyce to out-write Shakespeare and be recognized as the Master Artist of the English language) that shadowed and in ways disfigured their art. Now I begin to wonder what Spenser's objective was. Or if he himself even had a firmly-formed artistic objective. The Faerie Queene is hardly about a "faerie queene" artistically. The books don't always focus on the individual virtues we're told each book will address. It's like he just wrote whatever came into his mind each day. Here Spenser reminds me of Joyce again: there is a broad conceptual plan for the work, but the words are spewed out in fits and spurts, such that the actual text isn't always tightly bonded to the work's overall concept. Totally unlike Dante, where each canto is rigidly fixed into place within a highly defined conceptual structure for the entire work, just as the stars are fixed in place in the heavenly sphere... Enough from a Spenser novice...