AN epic's source may seem simple—one astonishing singer, preferably blind like Homer and Milton. But in fact, 1) epic is a cultural collective. Whether it is an ancient song, versified to aid a singer's memory, or a capacious modern novel (like that of Tolstoy, Joyce, George Eliot), or a related novel-series (like those of Austen, Mann, James, Proust, Morrison, Atwood), each singer’s word-magic and grand vision draws on that of many others: it is the cumulative saga of an entire culture. 2) Epic is an ultimate story (a “supreme fiction,” says Wallace Stevens). This glorified chronicle of catastrophe uses high language and taut form to enforce one of the two great themes of life: either the horrors of warfare and grappling with cultural monsters, or the hopeful homecoming that grows into a quest for moral perfection. 3) Central to epic is a special hero, who tests cultural values and shapes a national conscience by persisting through many failures, aided by a watchful deity or a thoughtful guide.

One of the most ambitious epics is Spenser's Faerie Queene, but it is just half an epic, the down-going first half. Its magnificent avatars, Queen Gloriana and the future-King Arthur, tease out the dream of a supreme fiction, but in the six completed legends these mythic figures are not yet united, indeed have hardly met. Nor have they yet faced God's throne, which is the end-point of Spenser’s major poems. An equally ambitious national epic is Shakespeare’s Henriad, but with a more populist hero. Prince Hal engages with all social classes as he grows into Henry V. In on-stage trafficking with warriors and idlers, Hal is more present than Gloriana (who acts only in subtypes), and he is more self-consciously aware than Arthur. Hal chides himself for drinking “small beer” with commoners while parrying Falstaff 's deflations, as when he calls Hal “thou whoreson mad compound of majesty” (2H4 2.4.293). Can a prince find ideal kingship beside Falstaff, among smells of sack and urine which Hal openly notes, and even magnifies in flytings with the old rogue? We are charmed by Hal's clever engagement, but his stature as an epic avatar is undercut, necessitating Shakespeare's further testings of sovereignty in a kaleidoscope of history, comedy, tragedy, and romance.