On the opposite side of the spectrum, The Faerie Queene indicates qualities such as cowardice and discourtesy that signify low birth. During his initial encounter with Arthur, Turpine "hides behind his retainers, chooses ambush from behind instead of direct combat, and cowers to his wife, who covers him with her voluminous skirt". These actions demonstrate that Turpine is "morally emasculated by fear" and furthermore, "the usual social roles are reversed as the lady protects the knight from danger. Scholars believe that this characterization serves as "a negative example of knighthood" and strives to teach Elizabethan aristocrats how to "identify a commoner with political ambitions inappropriate to his rank". Poetic structure The Faerie Queene was written in Spenserian stanza, which Spenser created specifically for The Faerie Queene. Spenser varied existing epic stanza forms, the rhyme royal used by Chaucer, with the rhyme pattern ABABBCC, and the ottava rima, which originated in Italy, with the rhyme pattern ABABABCC. Spenser's stanza is the longest of the three, with nine iambic lines – the first eight of them five footed, that is, pentameters, and the ninth six footed, that is, a hexameter, or Alexandrine – which form "interlocking quatrains and a final couplet". The rhyme pattern is ABABBCBCC. Over two thousand stanzas were written for the 1590 Faerie Queene. Many see Spenser's purposeful use of archaic language as an intentional means of aligning himself with Chaucer and placing himself within a trajectory of building English national literary history. Theological structure In Elizabethan England, no subject was more familiar to writers than theology. Elizabethans learned to embrace religious studies in petty school, where they "read from selections from the Book of Common Prayer and memorized Catechisms from the Scriptures". This influence is evident in Spenser's text, as demonstrated in the moral allegory of Book I. Here, allegory is organized in the traditional arrangement of Renaissance theological treatises and confessionals. While reading Book I, audiences first encounter original sin, justification and the nature of sin before analysing the church and the sacraments. Despite this pattern, Book I is not a theological treatise; within the text, "moral and historical allegories intermingle" and the reader encounters elements of romance. However, Spenser's method is not "a rigorous and unyielding allegory," but "a compromise among conflicting elements". In Book I of The Faerie Queene the discussion of the path to salvation begins with original sin and justification, skipping past initial