Original subtitles

Edmund Spencer has been called the poet's poet.

He's on par with his contemporary poet, William Shakespeare, and the greatest

poets of the English language.

So central was Spencer in the canon of English literature that in the 20th

century, his works were studied in every English department.

No one could have imagined a literary education was complete without him. Yet

now in the U.S., Spencer is seldom taught.

Spencer's great work, The Fairy Queen, is the sixth book epic romance and is

really the great wellspring of English visionary literature.

From this book, flows the inspiration for the gardens of John Milton's

paradise, the sensuous crush of consonants and imagery in John Keats's

poetry, the medieval and psychological landscapes of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

and Alfred Lord Tennyson to go further into the Victorian period, and C.S.

Lewis. If we go further into the 20th century, Lewis's favorite poet is very

clearly Spencer.

And the Fairy Queen is a collection of stories about the trials of heroes and

heroines as they seek virtue in a world of deceptive beauty and overwhelming

horrors. To read this book is to descend into an enchanted forest of the

imagination and to discover what it means to flourish as a human being in a

world with overwhelming beauty and terror.

But this is a notoriously difficult book. C.S. Lewis said it's perhaps the

most difficult book in the English language. I mean, it's so worth it.

It does contain about 36,000 lines of poetry.

It's written in a style that was considered old-fashioned in the time of

Shakespeare and the King James Bible.

And that is why I'm publishing this video in hopes of assisting and

inspiring readers to read it.

I'm also hosting a course on the Fairy Queen at the end of October in this

year, and there's more about that in the link below, but this is for the

autodidacts and the social didacts on YouTube who are discovering Shakespeare

and discovering the great poets, but they haven't yet discovered Spencer.

So in this lecture, I'm going to tell you how you can study Spencer's The

Fairy Queen. So I'll cover the contexts.

I'll cover the literary greatness of Spencer's The Fairy Queen, the major

themes. I'll also give you an overview of what's going on in scholarship and

how people have been discussing this book in criticism and in scholarship.

And I'm also going to provide a little survey of each of the books.

We'll see the structure. I'll talk about how to read it and some of the

difficulties there. And all of this is to help you. you, be prepared to find

the beauty and meaning in this great work of literature.

There's no substitution to the actual imaginative encounter.

Now, the first thing we should discuss is allegory.

This is an allegory. You might have heard of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's

Progress. You might have read William Langland's Piers Plowman. These are

allegories.

This is exactly the mode of Spencer's The Fairy Queen. We'll get into this

more deeply in the course lectures on Verst, but suffice it to say here that

Spencer's greatness lies in his use of allegory, which makes complex

spiritual and intellectual journeys visible through the landscapes, through

the metaphors, through the characters and the symbols.

Simply put, an allegory is an extended metaphor in narration.

And it works on so many different levels.

So this is what Spencer says about allegory in his letter to Sir Walter

Raleigh, his friend. This was on the 23rd of January, 1589.

And this will give you a clue as to how to read it.

Sir, knowing how doubtfully all allegories may be construed, and this

book of mine, which I have entitled The Fairy Queen, being a continued allegory,

or a dark conceit, I have thought good to discover unto you the general

intention and the meaning.

So just to pause there, Spencer is telling Raleigh, and effectively us,

what's called the authorial intention, what he wants to do with the book and

what it means.

To continue, the general end, or goal, therefore, of all the book, is to

fashion a gentleman or a noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.

which for that I conceived should be most plausible and pleasing, being

colored with an historical fiction, the which the most part of men delight to

read.

Rather for variety of matter than for profit of the ensemble, I chose the

history of King Arthur as the most fit for the excellency of his person.

Something to note here, Spencer, his goal is to help people, gentlemen, or a

noble person in particular. This was recreation for the noble or the gentry,

the gentleman or the noble person in virtuous, gentle discipline.

So he's trying to instruct.

That means that this book has a didactic or pedagogical purpose. It wants to

teach something, and it wants to form and shape into morals. This is actually

something that much great literature, not all, does seek to accomplish.

And Spencer wants it to be pleasing. He wants it to be delightful.

This is entertainment, but it's actually morally constructive entertainment.

So that's one aspect, but I want to go back to this idea of allegory. It's a

continued allegory, meaning that it just doesn't have allegory in isolated

episodes. It unfolds in a complex manner across

a long narrative.

And this idea of the dark conceit, dark coming from, I mean, the Latin word for

dark is obscure.

So there's something of that informing Spencer's poetry and his intent here.

He doesn't want it to be an explicit conceit or an explicit allegory because

this poem is working on so many different levels, as we're going to see.

It's a political allegory. It's a religious allegory. It's a spiritual and

psychological allegory.

it's also a moral allegory and all of these levels get interchanged in

priority across the different cantos of each book sometimes it's more

narratological sometimes it's more medieval other times it's more

psychological sometimes it's more political and religious but all of those

are shifting across the narration and that's why it's dark because it's not an

explicit one-to-one ratio you can't say that one character always means only x

or why or any any other kind of formula that you could you could reduce this

down to and there are two senses of allegory here as gordon teske explains

in his article allegory under the contained within the spencer

encyclopedia the first use of allegory is that of the rhetorical figure the

first century rhetorician quintilian describes allegory as just an extended

metaphor or conceit So that's the one aspect.

And in this sense, it's a trope.

We know these tropes.

Life is a highway. This is the rhetorical use of a metaphor. The whole

song engages in this conceit or concept.

But a narrative is a longer kind of allegory. It uses that tapas of the

metaphor, but it extends it into narration. This is the second aspect.

of allegory let me just read you a portion of tesky's entry there and this

is on page 16 of the spencer encyclopedia he writes because spencer's

phrase continued allegory or dark conceit recapitulates traditional ideas

of allegory that are in themselves in need of critical analysis it should be

taken not as an not as on objective description of the poem before us but

rather as an indication of how the poet would like us to respond.

Spencer is not telling us how to classify his poem. He is telling us how

to enjoy it. I like what is said here.

He doesn't want us to think in classification of categories, but in

terms of experience.

It doesn't matter so much to know the genre of allegory when you're reading

Spencer's The Fairy Queen as much as it does matter to a degree.

That it should give pleasure. It should be pleasurable.

And an allegory of Spencer's kind cannot be reduced to that one-to-one ratio.

It's not an equation.

We can't strictly say that the Red Cross Knight is a symbol of England, St.

George. Only, he is that, but he's more.

And as we're reading as the readers, you're finding your own correspondence

between your own life and your own psychology and the narration. Your

consciousness is activating the allegory on these different levels.

The character Una, for example, represents the new English Protestant

church, and the shaping ethos, the moral character of her development is, of

course, concomitant with Queen Elizabeth's project of the English

church. So that's a little bit about allegory that will guide you into it.

I'd like to give you some advice before reading this book. To read this book

like a professor is to read like one who is both informed about and in love with

the language arts and the progress of English literature.

Reading Spencer's The Fairy Queen will be challenging, but the reward is

greater in proportion to its difficulty.

In opening the first page of The Fairy Queen, you are stepping out onto a long

road that many of the greatest English poets have traveled before you.

You're reading in the footsteps of John Milton, of John Keats, of Mary Oliver

even. It's a road that leads through valleys of irreverence, woods of

unconventional sexual dynamics and fantasies, meadows of purity and

holiness, battlefields of tests and temptations and trial, and of course the

enchanted bowers of overwhelming beauty, of which there is a lot. Now you have to

prepare your mind for this adventure because it will change your

consciousness.

By the time you finish this book, your imagination will have undergone such an

expansion that your inner life will no longer be the same.

So, prepare yourself.

Charles Lamb, one of the Romantic era essayists, once said that he wondered

why readers don't say grace before reading like they say grace before

meals. He wondered why there wasn't a devotional exercise before reading

Milton or Shakespeare or Spencer to prepare us for the...

experience that we're about to undertake and the necessary frame of mind that

these works demand.

And although Lamb was partly saying this playfully, his suggestion

does say that the heart benefits from a certain summons to the completion of a

sacred act. And when you're reading Shakespeare and Spencer, Milton, any of

the great poets, the reading itself is a sacred act.

So no matter how you decide to prepare your intellect for this journey,

remember always to prepare your heart to meet with humane attention all the

heroes and villains that are about to cross your path.

For the world of Faerie is the world within the human being.

It is human psychology externalized in landscape, character, and narrative

action. Let's begin with some biographical context. I'll introduce you

to Edmund Spencer himself.

He was born in 1552.

He was a major poet during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

Her reign, by the way, was probably the most productive period of English

poetry. Spencer was writing when Shakespeare was performing his plays at

the Globe, when Sir Philip Sidney was publishing his famous works, when

Christopher Marlowe and Bent Johnson were writing poetry and plays.

This was the time to be a poet.

The cool thing about Spencer is that, like Shakespeare, he wasn't one of the

intellectual elites.

educated as a boy at the Merchant Taylor School and was only able to attend

Cambridge University as what was called then a poor scholar.

which was a sort of like a modern-day work-study student who was in some kind

of work-study program.

He performed servants' chores around the college in exchange for his room and

board. It's most often the people who come from the lowest means who end up

making the most of their artistic powers. I mean, Shakespeare is another

example of this, as are many of the romantic poets.

Now, Spencer marked himself as a poet early.

on in his career with the publication of the shepherd's calendar in 1579 this is

an interesting book it's not particularly great i think it tapped

into a lot of the puritan classical fashions that were around cambridge at

the time but it did help push forward the beauty of the vernacular english

And Spencer paid homage to Geoffrey Chaucer's poetry.

He gave a nod to Puritan classicism, which was fashionable around this time

at Cambridge.

And it was very popular for a number of reasons.

Now, after making his success as a poet, he wanted to do something really

ambitious. He wanted one great work for Queen Elizabeth I.

And his idea for the fairy queen was a magnum opus in praise of the queen, who

actually appears in the book as Gloriana.

And she's figured sometimes through Belphiebe and the virtues.

But he also wanted to validate the Tudor dynasty while also championing the

Protestant Christianity that was emerging or being established in England

at the time. And he also wanted to teach classical virtues.

Spencer is a poet of Christian humanism, of the Christian Renaissance humanism.

That's one.

way you really do have to understand him and his work.

Now his life does bring us into the political contexts of his day and the

religious contexts.

This poem is deeply connected with the emergence of the English Protestant

Church. So when Queen Elizabeth I ascended the throne in 1553, it was as

the head of a very, very divided and wounded country.

Remember that the first three books of the Fairy Queen were published in 1590.

And the last three were published in 1596.

Earlier in the century, the Protestant Reformation in England began really in

1534 when Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, which made the King of

England, instead of the Pope, the head of the Church. And this was King Henry

VIII, Elizabeth I's father.

And this initiated a power struggle within the monarchy. When Henry VIII

died, his son, the Protestant King Edward VI, was crowned king.

And under his brief reign, the Protestant movement in England really

progressed. But when he died in 1553, the Catholic Queen Mary I came to the

throne and reinstituted papal authority and really undid everything that the

Protestant reformers in England had done. She tried to undo a lot of that.

Now, when she died in 1558, that was when her half-sister, Elizabeth I,

became queen, as Queen Elizabeth I.

And religious people in England...

you gotta you gotta picture and imagine the trauma of this back and forth

catholic then protestant and catholic again and then we're back protestant

with queen elizabeth and there's a lot of persecution there's so much torture

some people in england when queen elizabeth came to the throne were

avowing

Roman Catholics, while others were Protestants. But many of the population

simply wanted peace.

So there were two extreme parties warring for the soul of England.

There's the Roman Catholic Church, who wanted authority under the Pope, and on

the other extreme, the very extreme Protestants, the Puritans, who wanted a

church bare of decorations, of high liturgy.

They wanted to get rid of statues and basically anything that resembled Roman

Catholicism. And Elizabeth I's goal was to unite these two conflicting impulses

in the extreme. This is what is called the Elizabethan settlement, which

established the English church as the temperate form of Protestantism that was

between these two extremes.

And what you got was the English church, the Elizabethan settlement.

Now, temperance is a very important virtue.

in The Fairy Queen, and we see it in book two. That is the story, the

allegory of temperance.

And there you can actually see, even though this particular book is much less

theological and more classically informed, you can still see how this

project of temperance, of the middle way, of trying to find the way between

the two extremes through this new English church was so important. It was

on Spencer's mind.

So if you go to book two, canto one, you'll find an instance of temperance

here. But temperance, said he, with golden squire betwixt them both, can

measure out a mean.

Neither to melt in pleasures, what desire, nor fry in heartless grief,

in doleful teen.

Thrice happy man who fares them both a tween.

but sith this wretched woman overcome of anguish rather than of crime hath been

reserve her cause to her eternal doom and in the mean vouchsafe her honourable

tomb he's talking about a character in canto one We'll get there in the

lectures. He's not talking about Queen Elizabeth.

This is an encomium on temperance. He's praising temperance as the virtue that

allows a person to measure out a mean to go the middle way between, on one hand,

the extreme.

bareness and asceticism of the Puritans versus the extravagant art and

architecture of the Roman Catholic Church.

You know, there's a middle ground, and the English Church was very interested

in measuring out this mean, to borrow a line from Spencer.

So you will find that this is really relevant to know once you get into the

book. As a devout Protestant, and a believer in the middle way.

Spencer will often allegorize Elizabeth's English church and the Roman

Catholic church.

In book one, the book of holiness, the hero, the Red Cross knight, represents

holiness, or rather the quest for holiness because he finally attains it

at the end, as he searches for the dragon to slay. He is accompanied by

Una, a young beautiful woman who represents the true Protestant church in

England, and...

Opposite to her, you have the villain Duessa, who's the opposite of Una, or

the One.

You have Duessa, the duality of the two, and she represents the duplicity of the

Roman Catholic Church.

So in Una and in the Red Cross Knight, we sometimes see depicted the English

Church.

and in duessa the sorceress we find depicted the roman catholic church at

times and this is how the allegory will sometimes work the real forces within

the political and religious contexts will be allegorized into the narrative

take the flight in canto 1 when red cross knight fights the monster error

It becomes very clear that this error monster is theological error,

particularly the Roman Catholic theological error.

So here's an example here of that allegory, of that aspect of the

allegory. So they come across Error's Den, where inside this monster lays.

They see Error's Den, and he goes inside to battle Error. And from without, Una

and the dwarf are watching Red Cross Knight fight this monster, Error.

and this is how it goes his lady sad to see his sore constraint because the

monster's got him in a chokehold cried out now now sir knight show what ye be

add faith unto your force and be not faint strangle her else she

sure will strangle thee that when he heard in great perplexity His gall did

great for grief and high disdain, and knitting all his force got one hand

free, wherewith he gripped her gorge with so great pain that soon to lose her

wicked bands did her constrain. So he'd broken free from error's constraint.

Therewith she spewed out of her filthy maw.

a flood of poison horrible and black full of great lumps of flesh and

gobbets raw which stunk so vividly that it forced him slack his grasping hold

and from her turn his back her vomit full of books and papers

was with loathly frogs and toads which eyes did lack

This is a pretty disgusting scene.

And you have these great lumps of flesh, gobbets, raw, perhaps alluding to

the doctrine of transubstantiation, but of course alluding as well to the

persecution of the Protestants under Catholicism. It has swallowed up.

all of these things and it's spewing out books and papers i mean if you take a

look at the index of any bibliography that catalogs the tractarian wars and

the many books and papers that were published by catholics against

protestants and protestants against catholics you'll understand exactly

what's being represented here by this this monster error so

Those are little examples of how you'll see this allegory working out once

you're reading the story.

Spencer wrote this poem to win the favor of Queen Elizabeth I, so his narrative

is often invested with promoting her vision of the English Church against the

Roman Catholics on one hand, and on the other hand, against the extreme

Puritans.

Despite Spencer's rather light and often implicit critique of Puritanism, that

critique is definitely there, and I'll mention that, I believe, later on in

this video.

And we'll definitely get into it in the lectures.

But now I want to talk about the greatness of Spencer's The Fairy Queen.

When we talk about literary greatness, we're talking about something, a work of

literature that yields riches to close reading and invites repeated readings.

Those are two of the most basic criteria for literary greatness.

And each great poet has their own aspects of literary greatness. So I'd

like to talk about a few aspects of Spencer's literary greatness. We already

talked about allegory, but let's also mention imagery.

Now, when John Keats read Edmund Spencer for the first time, he wrote to a friend

and he said, I went through it as a young horse would through a spring

meadow ramping.

And he just read it. It's completely absorbed.

And knowing Keats' poetry, I can guess that among the excellencies of Spencer,

what excited Keats the most was probably his imagery.

C.S. Lewis, too, is also said to have read this book in entirely one sitting

and wished that it was longer. But just to give you an example of the imagery

here, just listen to this description of Belphiebe from Book 3, Canto 5. Just two

stanzas. Stanzas 50 and 51.

And the first stanza is about Belphiebe, and the second is a description or an

extended metaphor on her. And I want to focus on the second stanza, but here's

the first one to set it up.

She, gracious lady, yet no pains did spare to do him ease or do him remedy.

Many restoratives of virtue rare and costly cordials she did apply to

mitigate his stubborn malady.

but that sweet cordial which can restore a love-sick heart she did to him envye

to him and to all the unworthy world forlorn she did envye that sulphur and

salve in secret store that dainty rose the daughter of her morn more

dear than life she tendered whose flower the girland of her honour did adorn

Nay suffered she the midday scorching power, Nay the sharp northern wind

thereon to shower, But lapped up her silken leaves most chair.

When so the forward sky began to lower, She soon as calmed.

But soon as calmed was the crystal air, She did it fair to spread, and led to

flourish fair.

This is, especially this, especially this, this, this stanza here, absolutely

gorgeous. The dainty rose, of course, it's the, it's, it's the praise of

Belphiebe's virginity, which was the supreme mark of virtue for Queen

Elizabeth I. And in fact, Spencer did say that in Belphiebe's description

here, he was showing forth Queen Elizabeth I.

But you have this beautiful description, the dainty rose metaphor.

Because the connection between her and the rose is implicit.

But it's also connected to female virginity, as it often is, especially in

this time of Renaissance literature, when that was a major preoccupation.

But notice the assonance and the consonance. The assonance is the

repetition of vowel sounds within a line.

You have, of course, that at the rhyme. We call those rhyme.

rhymes but but assonance are those rhymes within when so the forward sky

began to lower but soon as calmed was the crystal air

calmed air is a form of alliteration alliteration has to do with the

beginning uh the beginning letter but consonance has to do with the repetition

of the sound

crystal and calmed crystal air and of course air does rhyme with fair but you

have the assonance there and fair here as well and the repetition of the the f

sound in fair flourish fair you

have beautiful siblings here with the repetition of the s suffered she the

midday's scorching power

Nay, the sharp northern wind thereon to shower, lapped up her silken leaves,

silken leaves, chair are chairily. Oh, it's just, it's just delicious. You can,

you can totally get why John Keats loved this. And if you go back and read John

Keats, any of his odes, especially the Ode to Autumn, you get a sense of how

much Spencer he was reading at the time and what he learned from Spencer.

And also what we can learn.

What you poets who are watching this, Spencer's the poet's poet for many

reasons. And what he offers and what he models is still relevant to contemporary

poetry. So if you're a poet, think about picking up and reading this book

through. And C.S. Lewis has an excellent study on Spencer's imagery.

He's got a book titled Spencer's Images of Life.

And this was published after his death. It was compiled from his lecture notes

he had on Spencer. And in this book, Lewis recovers the lost significance of

the medieval pageant, and he shows how the imagery in Spencer's world works as

a pageant of sorts that represents the unity of the cosmos.

To the medieval mind, the pageant, of course, represented this unity.

And so what we see in many of the images and processions that we get in The Fairy

Queen is the medieval pageant, the unity of the cosmos universe coming together

in a visual representation.

And Lewis gives one of the best accounts for why Spencer's characters sometimes

feel two-dimensional and flat. You might be disappointed to find that Guillaume,

you know, he's not a very interesting person. The Red Cross Knight, he's kind

of cartoonish and flat.

There's not much psychological depth.

That's because...

The psychology is in the landscape, in the water, in the entire environment of

this world itself.

Everything is allegory. The narrative itself is allegory. And the characters

lack an internal psychology because the inside world is turned out. Because the

entire world of The Fairy Queen is external psychology.

It's an outward allegorical representation of the inner life. I've

said before that I really...

I would have found it very interesting if Sigmund Freud had read as much

Spencer as he had Shakespeare, because to me, the sort of analysis that Freud

was doing would have been more apt in the study of Spencer's The Fairy Queen

than it would have been in Shakespeare.

And we'll get to that when I talk about the sexual dynamics of this book.

The landscapes are psychological, and the landscapes are spiritual.

And what happens in them is all of that internal action externalized.

Now, so we've talked about imagery. Let's talk about the other aspect of

greatness, and that is poetic innovation.

What contributions has Spencer made to the development and progress of

English letters?

That's what we mean when we talk about poetic innovation, and it turns out that

he has contributed so much that this section could be its own lecture. So I'm

just going to stick to the Spencerian stanza.

So let me pull up a stanza here. We've been reading the stanzas, but we haven't

discussed the anatomy of a stanza yet.

And I'd like to do that here because Spencer invented this form.

This block of text you see right here on the screen, it's the stanza, the

Spencerian stanza.

And you might look at it and think, this looks very much like a sonnet.

And you're right, it's related to the sonnet.

Both the sonnet and the Spencerian stanza contain the couplet rhymes.

They both contain the interlocking rhyme scheme.

They are both written in iambic pentameter. That means that every line

contains ten syllables with alternated stress.

A gentle night was breaking on the plain.

Iambic pentameter. And both are brief and can accommodate the occasional

meditation and the unfolding of thought.

The difference is that the sonnet form It's really great for meditation and for

desire and for expressing thought, but it's not so great for narrative action.

Yet, as a master of the sonnet form, Spencer developed the shorter Spenserian

stanza. Sonnet has 14 lines, this one has only 9.

He adapted it for narration instead of just meditation.

So this stanza contains two couplets.

opposed to just the one couplet in the English sonnet.

There's one in the middle and one at the end. So we have field and wield. A

couplet is when two rhymes follow back to back.

Sit and fit, field and wield, those are couplets.

And these allow for the quick turns and a sense of conclusion, which Spencer

heightened by lengthening the ninth line.

to hexameter so you'll find that it actually has 12 syllables this final

line always has a foot more than the previous eight hexameter

pentameter

pentameter

has five stressed syllables ten syllables on the whole hexameter has six

stress similars as one for well let's see as one for nightly jousts and fierce

encounters fit there's the sixths so you have a sense of like finality there at

the end which adds weight to that couplet now his stanza allows for the

development of thought and language like a sonnet and it can accommodate the

quick narrative action of a battle scene It can accommodate descriptive

digressions and dilations.

It can accommodate the intellectual weight of theological passages, such as

the ones we get on Neoplatonic theology in Book 3, Canto 6, in the Garden of

Adonis. It can accommodate dialogue between characters, which range from

battle taunts to encomiums.

The epiphanies that characters experience, spiritual epiphanies,

realizations, such as the one when Artigal unhelms Britomart in Book 4,

Canto 6, and he's just struck by her beauty.

And most of all, it can accommodate, just like the sonnet, erotic desire and

longing. Again, Book 2.

The last canto in the Garden of Bliss, really good example of this kind of

erotic digression and dilation. We see the whole episode of this as well in

Radagund, in that article in book five, which we'll talk about soon. But it just

accommodates so much.

Now, let me slow down and show you the anatomy of a stanza.

A gentle knight was pricking on the plain, he clad in mighty arms and silver

shield. wherein all dents of deep wounds did remain, the cruel marks

of many a bloody field.

You see how he's varying the tempo there? He's exchanging. It's not just

like what Keats called the rocking horse effect, which you can sometimes get in

Alexander Pope's iambic pentameter couplets.

He's varying the stresses.

So you've got nine lines that rhyme, and you have this rhyme scheme of

plane okay so that's our a rhyme shield that's a different rhyme remain oh

that's an a rhyme field okay that's a b rhyme wield that's another b rhyme

and then we have this couplet here you see bit okay that's a new sound

introduced bit yield okay that comes back to the b rhyme sit we're back at c

fit we're back at c and you see how it ends with with a couplet and right there

in the middle is a couplet and sometimes you'll you'll notice when you're reading

the stanzas that the turn or the pivot whether the pivot of action or thought

or of attention usually happens right there with this middle couplet and then

resolves there and final couplet which is sometimes just fine that it just runs

on and on as i said the lines are all iambic pentameter five stressed a gentle

night was pricking on the plane there are the five stressed five stress

syllables there iambic pentameter and then of course the stress syllables here

in the hexameter as one for nightly jousts and fierce encounters fit

perfect iambic hexameter or a line of of alexandrine you'll notice too that there

is a bit of archaic diction here iklad meaning he was um carrying, or wearing.

He was clad with.

And there's this question.

If he is a contemporary of Shakespeare, why is Shakespeare easier to read than

Spencer? Why is Spencer's language so old sounding?

And the answer is, he wanted it to sound old. It's part of the enchantment. He

was trying to give a, what we might call a vibe, to the story.

He wanted you to feel like you were reading something older than something

modern. C.S. Lewis writes about this. He says this is the big paradox of

Spencer's poem.

It is not really medieval.

No medieval romance is quite like it, Lewis wrote.

And he said that what you love about Spencer is that black letter feel, which

feels so much like the Middle Ages.

Lewis said that Spencer became really one of the last medieval poets and one

of the first romantic medievalists. So he really bridges that divide.

A foot in each world.

So there are the two rhyming couplets, one in the middle, one at the end. It's

all a very dynamic form, and it's very difficult to wield unless you're

Spencer. Many poets have tried the Spencerian stanza. Lord Byron tries it

in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. I think he does it pretty well. James Beattie,

excellent.

An example of a Spenserian stanza writer, James Thompson to some extent.

Wordsworth would even try it with his poem on Salisbury Plain. But none of

these poets really quite do it like Spencer. Spencer is the superlative

Spenserian stanza writer. No one's done it any better than him since.

The third aspect of his literary greatness is the moral power.

And I'm mentioning this because I think contemporary readers...

are not apt to value this.

As children of the Romantics, we really aren't interested in being preached to

or being taught in poetry. We want to feel. We don't want to hear much

moralizing. And it's true that a lot of moralizing will kill great poetry.

However, for some reason, it really works. It works in Spencer. And I have

to note that this is something that many poets and readers of Spencer have always

admired in Spencer.

And that's the morality.

I'm speaking of the moral, the part of the human consciousness that regulates

our thought and actions publicly, privately, and this is the aspect of

human consciousness that I think Spencer's The Fairy Queen is really

trying to engage.

There was a writer, Henry Reynolds, in 1632, who said that Spencer's The Fairy

Queen is an exact body of ethical doctrine.

And it's also the same reason why John Milton prized Spencer.

John Milton actually says that Spencer is a better teacher than Thomas Aquinas.

Because virtue is meaningless unless it is tested.

Someone who abstains from all sin and lives alone, never tempted, is not more

righteous than the person who's living among temptations and yet abstains from

those. Oh, by the way, let me put this up. Here is Spencer's On Reading the

Fairy Queen. You can pause that. I just summarized this, but there it is.

I'm going to move on to John Milton's Areopagitica.

Very relevant treatise, by the way, for our times.

But here's what he says about Spencer.

That virtue which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, it knows not

the utmost that vice promises to all her followers, and rejects it, is but a

blank. virtue, not a pure.

Her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness, which was the reason why our

sage and serious poet Spencer, whom I dare to be known to think a

better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the

person of Gion, that's from book two, brings him in with his palmer through

the cave of Mammon,

and the bower of earthly bliss that he might see and know and yet abstain.

That virtue is something that needs to be tested to mean anything is part of

John Milton's point and is really the reason why Spencer really does test

Guillaume as much as he tests the reader.

So this is so funny.

I love book two. I love book two and I love the end of book two when Guillaume

comes to the bower of bliss.

It's so, it's such a fever dream, this book. I cannot communicate how

absolutely wild the fairy queen is.

But there's this moment when Gion comes to the Garden of Bliss, which is like a

paradise of sexual enjoyment.

He and his palmer, they arrive.

And Spencer spins like a few stanzas, more than three stanzas, in fact,

describing how these two beautiful nymphs are wrestling naked in a crystal

fountain, describing in detail her hair and this one's breasts. And our hero,

Gion, who's supposed to be, you know, temperance, he's just standing there

watching until the Palmer comes up and basically says,

Look, your wandering eyes, that's awful. You have a job to do here. Can we move

on? And it's really quite funny to hear him rebuking Guillaume for the wandering

eyes. But through all of that description that Spencer gives us, many

a reader watched and read with erotic interest.

And this is what I think Milton means, that the reader, the poetry itself

presents the temptations.

It does not hide it.

It wants to arouse a sort of erotic desire only to then be chastened by the

Palmer to say, look, this is not what the book's about. It's about something

else. Let's go on with our mission to destroy the power, which is what

Guillaume and the Palmer eventually do.

So the virtues must be tested in order to be strengthened. And this is partly

what John Milton saw was just so beautiful in Spencer's work and why it's

so literarily great.

So you don't want to miss that aspect of it. It can be a little annoying at times

to hear the moralizing.

But what's amazing is you actually don't notice it as much as you would in John

Bunyan. I don't know if you've ever read John Bunyan's poetry. It's pretty bad.

I would call it verse. It's not poetry. It's verse. It's like the versifications

of the Bible, the book of James.

John Bunyan can be preachy. And there's certainly a type of Puritan didactic

poetry that John Bunyan is a part of.

But you don't get nearly as much explicit moralizing in Spencer's The

Fairy Queen like you do in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, for example.

Now, what are the scholars saying about this book? How have the critics and the

scholars who have dedicated their lives to this book, how have they understood

it? And if you're reading like a professor, you'll want to know what the

recent scholars are saying about Spencer.

And there's a lot of historical and formal criticism. And there's a lot of

historicist and formal criticism that came out of the 20th century that's

really helpful.

And I think Harold Bloom has an excellent introduction to Spencer in his

anthology of the best English poems, or the anthology of the best poems in the

English language, I believe it's called.

Great essay.

I think it's the best essay in the book. He considers Spencer as a poet of the

visionary left wing of the Protestant movement.

I think that's such an excellent way to view that. And it places, very

succinctly, Spencer within this whole historic and religious context.

Now, there's also the historical and biographical context and studies that

spend a lot of time giving due attention to the Irish context of

the fairy queen.

how the fairy queen can be read as an example of Tudor statecraft.

It must be said that Spencer was a colonial administrator in Ireland and

actually was brutal, extremely racist, and relentless in his suppression of

the Irish rebellions. He at least participated in that.

And if you read book five, The Legend of Justice, there's a scene where Artigal

and the Iron Man, Talos, slaughter a whole mass of people.

And that scene is often read in context of the English oppression of the Irish,

which Spencer took part in.

So Andrew Hadfield's biography of Spencer is a really great place to start

for all of these kinds of contexts.

A really good biography of a poet is going to bring in the religious, the

biographical, of course the personal and psychological, the religious, the

historical, all of that's going to be there and will give you a good solid

grounding in the book.

Now there's also the history of religion.

Scholarship will often read this work as a work of anti-Catholic polemic.

It is a work of anti-Catholic polemic. And remember that Spencer is trying to

strike a balance between two extremes, so there are ways of reading Spencer as

also countering the Puritan extremists.

For Spencer, the ideal, as I said, as he was a Renaissance Christian humanist, it

was in opposition to the Calvinist extreme puritanical religion of

Protestants, particularly the doctrine of total depravity, which he was having

none of, Spencer's use of classical virtues really helped bolster this

reading.

And if you're really going to believe in total depravity, then Aristotle's virtue

ethics, stoicism, and all the rest just make absolutely no sense. They're

completely worthless under that perspective. And that's what Spencer was

fighting against as well.

And there is a possible way that you can read book one as Calvinistic in some

sense, but the rest of the work does not hold with this theory.

One really good recent book about this is James Simpson's Permanent Revolution.

And this will give you context as to the religious anxieties surrounding English

poetry in the late 1500s and early 1600s. And there are several

moments where Simpson discusses Spencer.

Not sure if I'm totally on board with the idea of the Garden of Bliss being

destroyed as an example of Protestant, you know, iconoclasm. But the topic of

Protestant iconoclasm is so important for this book that it's like, yeah, it's

there. Anyway, it's a good book. You should read it.

There's also the critical theory lens.

And this is helpful in examining the race dynamics in the context of post

-colonial studies.

So race here.

He's understood as a socio-political fiction, really.

So the Elizabethan racism against the Irish, for example, are Spencer's own

racism. Spencer actually published a treatise titled A View of the Present

State of Ireland, which basically calls for the destruction of Irish culture.

And those views do inform the villains of The Fairy Queen, what they look like.

and how they behave.

Now, I know YouTube viewers tend to be really adverse to looking at anything

with critical theory and literature, but if a professor does not mention the

oppression of the Irish while teaching The Very Queen, they're really doing a

disservice to the historical and political contexts in which this work

was made. While Jordan Peterson is going around saying that the Academy is full

of Marxists, it's just simply not the case.

In every evaluation of race, in literature, is not an example of

Marxism. Sometimes you really have to study race to understand James Joyce's

Ulysses, not to mention Toni Morrison's writings, or Spencer's The

Fairy Queen, Jonathan Swift too.

I mean, there's so much literature that has to do with what we call race that

you can't separate that from the work.

Anyway, it's just helpful to know that these contexts are relevant and can

actually enhance your understanding, your scholarly understanding, of the

work. Now, there's also the sexual and psychological perspectives of Spencer.

And to be honest, I just read The Fairy Queen for the first time in about eight

years, and I was struck by how much of a sexual fever dream this book was. And it

might have been because I was reading...

Ulysses at the same time. I just finished that book recently too.

And I was reading books four and five the same time I was reading the Circe

chapter from Ulysses. So, you know, maybe I was thinking about sex a lot

because of that.

But I will have to say that if you're a kid, if you're young, I don't know, are

a parent watching this and you want to give your child the fairy queen, just be

aware that there is a good deal of mature content going on.

in this in this work a book one is pretty much fine although there is like

an illusory sexual encounter but you have these erotic descriptions all

throughout the book of bodily beauty there's a good deal of sexual aggression

a good deal of rape of damsels in dungeons of masochism of dominatrix or

dominatrix how do you say that dominatrix dominatrices

I don't know what the plural of that is. Like, slaves. There's a lot of, like,

cross-dressing by men and women.

And so it's very interesting to, like, view this from a sexual lens, which is

why I would find it very interesting if Freud had read this book.

I mean, for example, you have this scene in book five where Artigal is captured

and enslaved by an Amazonian queen, Radagund, who makes him dress in,

like, women's serving clothes and...

she falls in love with him while he's cross-dressing and performing, like,

domestic duties for her.

And Artigal is, in turn, rescued by his true love, Britomart, who is a woman

warrior in knight's armor.

She's also, in a sense, cross-dressing because nobody knows she's a woman until

she unhelms.

I believe this happens four times in the book. One of them was unintentional,

unhelming. So it makes, it does, it, it, it, The book is fraught.

The book is primed for a very sexual and psychological reading of it.

And if you're interested in this aspect, there's Camille Paglia's book, her 1990

book called Sexual Persona. I just have this excerpt here from this book of

hers, where she writes, the fairy queen is the most extended and extensive

meditation on sex in the history of poetry.

It charts the entire erotic spectrum, a great chain of being rising from matter

to spirit, from the coarser lust to chastity and romantic idealism.

All right, and this is something that C.S. Lewis mentions as well in his

Allegory of Love, I believe, where he says that Spencer was trying to reform

and purify the resurgence, the Renaissance resurgence of the amour

-coutoir, the courtly love tradition.

All of that is to say, to be aware and to enjoy the very rich scholarly

discourse about the psychology and sexual dimensions of this work.

Now, if you want a book that basically does it all, you should try Gordon

Teske's Spencerian moments, where he actually argues that Spencer is the most

important poet, the most relevant poet to us in our contemporary moment, more

so than John Milton. The book... Also considers aspects of the fairy queen in

tandem with philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to the major thinkers of the

Frankfurt School.

This is a book with biographical information, religious and historical

context, a lot of close readings, literary theory, philosophical and

theoretical considerations.

I really like how he brings in the romantic evaluation of his aesthetic

theory.

Spencer's aesthetic theory and how that formed the romantic taste.

And of course, it also has a fantastic analysis of allegory. So if you're

interested in the scholarly discussion, I think Gordon Teske's is a good book to

begin with.

And be sure to check out the bibliography in the index at the back of

the book.

Any of these books I've mentioned so far, if you check the bibliographies,

you'll know where to go to next. If you're not finished, if you haven't

satisfied your scholarly curiosity, there are more books to continue to.

So let me provide you with a brief survey of the books and what they look

like while reading.

In case you aren't planning on taking the course with us on Verst, I really

hope you do. We also have scholarships for extreme cases that you can apply for

if money is an issue.

But if you do want to do this on your own, one of the most helpful things to

remember while reading The Fairy Queen is that each book has what C.S. Lewis

called an allegorical core, which the narratives are either building up

toward, are building up to, or organized around.

I should say, these allegorical cores. So as I'm talking through the books here

in these comments,

I'll mention a few of those allegorical cores so you know where to slow down

your attention and to read really deeply.

Now, before we continue, instead of hearing from a sponsor or watching a mid

-roll ad, which I do not put on my videos, let me tell you about what I'm

doing lately.

and how you can participate in this course. On my teaching platform, Versed

Community, I'm hosting this course on Edmund Spencer's The Fairy Queen.

And like many of my courses, this one is based on the Oxford tutorial model. And

it's going to involve a lecture followed by guided seminar discussions.

What makes this course really special is that I'll be joined by Kate Murphy

Harrell, who has a master's in literature and art from Oxford

University. and is a PhD student at Trinity College Dublin, specializing in

Spencer's The Fairy Queen.

Now, I'm going to host an introductory lecture every week on one book on

Mondays. And we'll have close readings, conversation, guided discussion twice a

day on Mondays to accommodate different time zones.

And then Kate, at the end of the week, is going to deliver a scholarly or

topical lecture every Friday.

We will spend a week on each book.

So six weeks across six books. If you've ever wanted to read this book with an

accompany of like readers and like-hearted readers, this is your

chance. So I do hope you'll join us for this very special event. We are teaching

Spencer's The Fairy Queen, even though much of the Academy no longer does.

If you're watching this after the course has already happened, you can join us

and find the recordings on Verse and even continue the discussion through the

course chat, which is always going.

So each of the six books of the Fairy Queen deal with a virtue.

The first three books were published in 1590, and they deal with private

virtues. Book one is titled The Legend of the Knight of the Red Cross or of

Holiness. So holiness is the virtue here.

This is by far the easiest and most popular and perhaps the most enjoyable

book. It's also the most kid-friendly.

If anyone has read Spencer, it's usually this book at least.

This is also the most theological and romantic.

The theme of holiness, specifically the Red Cross Knight's progress towards

holiness as he begins by traveling with Lady Una, is part of this whole theme

of... holiness.

Lady Una is bringing the Red Cross Knight back to her parents to rescue her

parents from this dragon.

And along the way, they have many misadventures. So the sorcerer Archimago

comes up with false duessa to get in their way. But in the end, with the help

of King Arthur, Lady Una rescues Red Cross Knight, and in return, Red Cross

Knight is restored to holiness, and he rescues her parents.

Now, the allegorical core, what C.S. Lewis called the allegorical core, is

the house of holiness at the end. So you really want to pay attention to that

part, that particular canto. Take this book slowly and go easy on yourself.

Andrew Zerker, in his book, The Fairy Queen, A Reading Guide, makes a really

good point when he says that canto one of the first book teaches you how to

read the rest of the book.

When the red knight when the Red Cross Knight goes into the cave of error, Una

warns, yet wisdom warns, whilst foot is in the gate, to stay the step, ere

forced to retreat.

And Zerker notes that her words of wisdom are for the Red Cross Knight and

for us, as the readers. So go slowly.

Take Una's advice.

This is not a book to just rush into.

It will challenge you.

Ultimately, it will strengthen your patience as a reader and your

comprehension. Book two is titled The Legend of Sir Gion or of Temperance.

Remember, this is the book about temperance. So after book one, the rest

of the fairy queen takes an interest in classical virtue rather than theological

or religious holiness.

And it's Aristotle's virtue ethics that are foregrounded in this chapter.

aristotle held that temperance was the mean between two extremes between excess

and complete abstinence and herein we can see the model and the virtue of the

english church and the elizabethan project on on the whole and and its

attempt to hold a middle way between roman catholicism and extreme puritanism

and while holiness is the key to christian righteousness temperance is

the key to all other classical virtues.

So right here in the beginning, Spencer is setting up the two main concepts.

I would keep in mind that part of what the book is doing is establishing these

highest virtues as the start from which all the other virtues flow, the spring

from which all the other virtues flow.

And in doing so, it emphasizes Spencer's Christian humanism of fusing the

Christian and classical wisdom together.

which is something the Puritans around this time were increasingly hostile to.

The allegorical core of this book is the castle of Alma, or the house of Alma,

which is an allegorical representation of the human body.

The house is the house of the soul.

I say you have a really great allegorical moment happening here. We

have three rooms of the mind.

Spencer calls one fantasies, the other is judgment, the third is memory.

So this gives you a good introduction to Renaissance anthropology.

And by the way, if we have any fans of George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis here,

you're going to be reading this book and thinking, that's where that comes from.

That's where Lewis got that. That's where George MacDonald got that idea.

It's going to be a good introduction to all of that.

And you're going to see where so much of modern fantasy comes from.

Now, book three is titled The Legend of Britomartus or of Chastity.

So the virtue here is chastity.

And what you may find challenging about this chapter is that the narrative

becomes one of interlacement.

Instead of building up to a big dramatic moment, as we've seen in the previous

books, you've got a cobweb of stories, interlacement.

Now, who is the editor of, who's the recent editor of Sir Thomas Mallory's,

the Caxton manuscript?

Eugene Vinhaver. Eugene Vinhaver. In his introduction, he explains the narrative

technique of Sir Thomas Mallory, where you have stories that, instead of

following a rise and fall of dramatic action, a climax, and then a resolution,

you just have different entanglements of stories weaving together.

And it can get a little confusing, especially if you're thinking, okay,

where's the dramatic rise here? Really?

isn't one.

There isn't always one.

The narrative does not always rise and fall to the standard of dramatic action,

so do keep that in mind. Just go with the flow.

You do get the sense sometimes that this is a book that could have gone on

forever. The other thing to note is that chastity in Spencer's day meant

something more than what we would think of now.

It could mean abstinence from sex, yes, or the total rejection of sexual

indulgence, but it more broadly signaled a form of ordered love and

integrity.

Integrity means wholeness because it comes from the Latin word that we get

the same word integer or whole unit from. It's about how we channel

and regulate our love and desire.

That's chastity. And it's associated with this whole idea of wholeness and

devotion to a singular love. Very platonic and neoplatonic in this sense.

Britomart is a lady knight in knightly disguise, and she learns that she is

destined to marry a man named Ser Artagal.

So she's pursuing him, she's looking for him, and she joins up for a time with

King Arthur, with Ser Saturain, and there are several side quests here and

there. Eventually she meets a Ser Scudamore, who is seeking his love,

Amorette. who is captured by a wizard who, and this wizard has her in a

dungeon where he's using physical and psychological torture to coerce Amorette

to fall in love with him.

Britomart rescues Amorette, and when Britomart and Amorette emerge from the

house, she's rescued, they look around, Scudamore has scutted off and is no more

to be found.

And the allegorical core of this book is the Garden of Adonis.

And this is right in the middle of the book. So instead of having it there at

the end, it actually works up to that allegorical core, the narrative action.

Book six, right in the middle.

So much Neoplatonic theology there, which is really beautiful.

So much there that informed George MacDonald's own thinking and William

Wordsworth's. So many of the Romantics got their Neoplatonism from Spencer

because they weren't teaching it at Oxford and Cambridge.

In the 18th century. Not much, anyway. Maybe Plato's laws.

Sometimes. Thomas Gray mentions that sometimes they taught Plato's laws in

Cambridge in the 1800s. In the 1700s. But, you know, they got it from Spencer.

And it's really this core. It's so beautiful.

So fair a place as nature can devise, as Spencer says, this Garden of Adonis.

It's a lovely bit of Neoplatonic fantasy there.

indulge. Read slowly and just relish and enjoy.

So those were the first three books. So while the first three books were

interested in the private virtues of holiness, temperance, chastity, the next

three are really interested in the public virtues and social graces.

So book four is titled The Legend of Campbell and Telemond or of Friendship.

So friendship, very social grace here. This book can be perplexing to readers

because the name the actual name of Campbell is, because the actual name

is not Telamon, but Triamond. And the book actually doesn't have much to do

with friendship.

And as C.S. Lewis mentions in Many Scholars Have, Spencer wasn't quite

finished with his book. It was still in progress. So all of these tensions or

contradictions would have eventually been worked out had he been able to

complete the great project.

So going into this book, knowing that really helps.

Book four.

is also an extenuation of many of the events that happened in book three.

So you can't skip around. You really have to read book three first, then book

four. Britomart and Artigal finally meet each other. They're in disguise.

They joust.

Britomart is unhelmed, and Artigal falls in love with her instantly.

And they can't get married yet because they have work to do. They've got to go

finish their quests, but they will.

And Scudamore...

When she's unhelmed, recognizes Britomart and says, oh, wait, let me go

ask about Amorette. Did you find her? And Britomart says, yes, but I've lost

her. So they've got to go find Amorette, who's meanwhile been abducted again,

this time by a savage man who's described by Spencer as a walking penis.

I mean, if you read the description, that's exactly what this guy is.

He's an allegorical representation of male genitalia. I don't know how else to

say that. It's probably another reason why I can't do mid-rolls on this video

anyways, because I talk so much about sex.

But finally, Amorette is reunited with Scudamore, and then another damsel in

distress, Flormel, must be rescued from Proteus's dungeon.

And I'm telling you all this because you really might be frustrated, as I was

when I first read this book, how chaotic the narration is.

But that's part of the medieval interlacement. That's part of what

Spencer's doing with his style.

And the allegorical core of book four is the Temple of Venus in Canto X, where

Scudamorn tells how he won the hand of Lady Amorette. The legend of Artigal,

or of justice, is book five.

Now, the virtue of justice is all about balance.

Recently, we were studying the iconographic representations of justice

in my course on the major arcana of the tarot.

And you'll see in this picture here, she's depicted holding a scale in one

hand and a sword in another, signifying the determination of justice through

objective measurement to find balance, to balance the pants.

And this book follows her article.

It's all about balance.

You've got the characters of Arthur coming back in, Britomart. But I would

suggest reading everything that happens in the context of this idea of balance,

of the balance pans of justice.

When Artigal is captured and feminized by the Amazon queen, Radagund, and is

rescued by Britomart, who kills Radagund.

You see in that whole episode the restoration of social balance, the

perverted relationship.

between the two, the queen and the slave, is restructured or rebalanced

within the social harmony, the ideal social hierarchy between the sexes at

this time. And Spencer would have understood it as a great rebalancing. So

his understanding of the sexual hierarchy, of course, informs this whole

episode where Mary Queen of Scots is allegorized by the sorceress Duessa in

Canto IX.

You have the giant, Grantorto, who must be slain as well. A lot of scholarly

commentary about him. We'll get into that on the lectures.

But just keep in mind, the image of the balance pans.

Fortunately, I find this book is much more focused than the fourth, so you

might have an easier time with it.

And the allegorical core of this book is Canto VII, the Church of Isis.

I actually love this moment where Britomart finds the church of Isis.

She's kind of like Isis herself in a way.

And she refreshes herself on her quest to rescue Artigal.

And of course she has this dream and then the priestess of Isis tells her

what it means and then she goes on and she's able to rescue Radigan because of

that.

She's able to kill Radigan and rescue Artigal because of that. Now the final

book, book six, is The Legend of Ser Calidor.

And it's the legend of courtesy.

So the virtue is courtesy here. It focuses on this very important social

virtue. It's the idea of manners.

As the Tudors often said, manner maketh man.

Courtesy is the practice of manners. It's the social bond of a society,

especially the higher echelons of society, the court, Queen Elizabeth, the

noble men and women, and the gentry.

Courtesy is not just politeness. We might think of it as politeness today.

But it's more than that, of course. It was a display of social grace through

the arts of conversation, by eating and feasting together, by dancing, by

fighting and debating.

All of these were social functions necessary in keeping the social ecology

of the court well regulated.

And in the story of Sir Calidor's quest to find and slay the blatant beast, we

see figured here several important encounters that exemplify courtesy.

The blatant beast, by the way, is often considered to represent Puritanism.

Tristram, who is Calidor's page, is often the embodiment of courtesy. He's a

very courteous person.

The temptation here is of the pastoral life, the desire to escape from the

toxic social environment of the court, to go with the shepherds and live with

the shepherds.

And so you have, really here, poor Spencer's own complex relationship to

Elizabeth's court, and retreat, and pastoral retreat in peace.

And Spencer is really somewhat of an outcast, who I think seems to have

resented his exile to Ireland, what he felt was his exile.

The allegorical center of this book is Mount Akadali, another locus aminus that

has its root in the Greek a...

which means without care. So it's this place without care. It takes place in

Book 10. So again, make sure that you devote careful slow reading to that

particular canto to really understand that allegorical core.

It's holding it all together.

Now the ending of The Fairy Queen is dark.

The blatant beast is caught.

It's bound, defeated, but it's not slain.

And the blatant beast escapes.

And the second to last stanza reads like this.

now he rangeth through the world again already the blatant beast sounds like

the devil roving about the world seeking whom he may devour he rangeth through

the world again and rageth sore in each degree and state nay any is

that may him now restrain he growin is so great and strong of late

barking and biting all that him do bait

I'll be they worthy blame, or clear of crime.

Nay spareth he most learned wits to rate. Nay spareth he the gentle poet's

rhyme, but rends without regard of person or of time.

There's a little bit of Spencer's own beef with some of the characters at

Queen Elizabeth's court, or in her court, and it's also against the

Puritans. And it's fascinating to think of the blatant beast as Puritanism

because it seems as though Spencer's stanza anticipates the coming of the

English Civil War when Puritans and the Roundheads actually overthrew the

monarchy, beheaded King Charles I, King James I's son,

and established a parliamentary government for about 11 years.

So it ends on a dark note really because Spencer's own story ends on a dark note.

He died in poverty and in a way in exile.

So all of this, I think, will give you some good help here. I have a video on

the recommended books of Spencer, how to read Spencer like a professor, the kinds

of books you'll want for that. Five or six really, really excellent books that

you'll want to get if you love Spencer.

But the first thing to do is to read the poem. I hope you'll join us on Verst.

We're going to have a great time studying.

spencer through this model we combine the university course with the book club

model so there's a lot of discussion both within the classroom in the live

sessions and outside of it in the course chat where you can talk to other people

make friends share ideas so i hope you'll join us there it's a really great

way to experience great literature so i hope to see you there hope this was

helpful and until next time