Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.

The line is spoken within Edmund Spenser’s epic romance The Faerie Queene (1590–1596), a Protestant-Elizabethan allegory in which knights undergo moral and spiritual trials. It appears as an inscription encountered during a perilous episode: a repeated exhortation to courage that is later complicated by a warning not to be “too bold.” In Spenser’s chivalric world, such mottoes and inscriptions function like moral signposts—testing a knight’s discernment as much as his bravery. The phrase’s memorable repetition helped it circulate later as a standalone maxim about courage, often detached from the poem’s qualifying context.

On its surface, the maxim urges courage: act decisively, do not be paralyzed by fear, and carry bravery into every circumstance. In Spenser’s allegorical framework, however, “boldness” is ethically double-edged. The repetition can read as a necessary antidote to timidity in the face of trials, but it can also hint at the danger of overconfidence—boldness without discernment can lead a knight into traps. The line therefore dramatizes a recurring Spenserian tension: virtue requires fortitude, yet true virtue also requires judgment about when daring becomes rashness. The phrase’s memorable cadence helps it function like a moral proverb, even while the narrative context invites readers to question simple heroics.