... lately Tasso.' (Letter to Sir Walter Raleigh). It is obvious to readers of The Faerie Queene that Spenser took more than simply the character of his hero from these sources (and others), and equally obvious that he developed them further and more intricately than before. The structure and atmosphere of The Faerie Queene is more in keeping with medieval romance than with the epic tradition. As K. W. Gransden points out, 'the romantic "machinery" of his poem - knights errant, ladies in distress, enchanted castles and gardens, dragons, giants, battles - represents the common inheritance of medieval chivalric legend and romance, as taken over in the Renaissance by Spenser's two great Italian predecessors, Ariosto and Tasso. Their poems were really a new kind of epic, partly based on classical models and partly on medieval ones.' (Gransden p. 31) Each book concentrates on the 'quest' of a particular hero and involves the conventions ...

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