ABSTRACT
A dramatic projection of the implied author, the narrator of The Faerie Queene is an aspect of the poem’s rhetorical structure, a facilitating means to its end of fashioning a noble person (Letter to Raleigh). Although we cannot assume that this narrating presence is dramatically consistent-he vacillates between authorial omniscience and a more limited subjection to the world of appearances-it is helpful to view him as a character who, like the poem’s protagonists, is on a quest. He faces their problems of knowing and doing: he must determine where truth lies and confront the difficulty of bringing it into palpable form, and he must consider the obstacles that make it difficult for this form to affect human action. As a dramatic character, he is defined by how he addresses his audience and by what he says of his aims, his abilities, and the difficulties of writing his ‘historye.’
