"Adverse criticism of the stories in The Faerie Queene is usually based on a false expectation. Both the complaints against "faceless knights" and those against "characters with no insides" come alike from readers who are looking for a novelistic-like interest. But it is quite wrong to approach the poem with this demand; for Spenser never meant to supply it. Occasionally, of course, he makes a very brief approach to the kind of fiction now valued in the novel. [...] We should never concentrate, however, on passages such as these. It is always a great mistake to value a work of one kind for its occasional slight approximations to some other kind which happens to be preferred. If we can't learn to like a work of art for what it is, we had best give it up. There is no point in trying to twist it or force it into a form it was never meant to have. And certainly to read The Faerie Queene as a novel is perverse and unrewarding enough. It is like going to a Mozart opera just for the spoken bits."