Samuel Sheppard’s Faerie King and the Fragmentation of Royalist Epic

This essay offers a reading of Samuel Sheppard’s little-known heroic poem, The Faerie King, as part of the virtual subgenre of unfinished Royalist epic. Begun in 1648 while the author was imprisoned for publishing Royalist propaganda, The Faerie King narrates the fortunes of the invented kingdom of Ruina in an obscure, fragmented allegory of the Civil War. Sheppard brings together conflicting elements of elevated poetic style and vulgar newsbook rhetoric in a volatile generic mix that registers the impact of actual war on the processes of literary creation and forms of authorship available in the Interregnum.