My subject is self-interpretation in The Faerie Queene, both in the sense in which the poem, qua allegory, interprets itself to readers, and in the sense in which its principal characters are represented as continually engaged in interpreting their own deeds. Those senses may seem quite distinct; but amongst my main contentions is that they are inextricably involved in one another, by virtue of the type of allegory Spenser chose to write – one in which the main locus of allegorical interpretation is within rather than extrinsic to the story world, such that the characters' self-interpretative activity does not merely echo but largely constitutes the way in which the book interprets itself to readers. In writing that type of allegory, Spenser had numerous precedents, both Scriptural and literary; perhaps the most broadly analogous to The Faerie Queene, I will suggest, is the anonymous thirteenth-century prose Quest of the Holy Grail. That is not to say that the two works function allegorically in quite the same way (Spenser's allegory is much the more complex), but the Quest does exemplify in an especially clear and relevant way a type of allegory whose role in The Faerie Queene has historically been underestimated, indeed whose existence therein has often been ignored or actively denied.

A related concern is the authority of self-interpretation in The Faerie Queene: to what extent should we take either the poem or its characters as authoritative guides to the story's moral significance?