Yes, but now what do I read?

Things learned while reading The Faerie Qveene:

• Spenser is a master poet, with marvelous invention and extraordinary control of not just sound but the rhetoric of both poetry and narrative. However, he sucks limp carrots as a talespinner.


• The temptations of a knight of chastity are more entertaining than a knight of justice's.


• Allegories of the politics of the 1580's are to snooze for.


• A lady knight is cool (even when the wacky gender confusion hijinks surrounding her are partially her own fault) while Amazons are abominations against God and the natural order. He's just saying.


• An invincible fighting android is a useful servant.


• Questing knights are very distractable.


• Spenser took roughly 16,000 lines to get comfortable with his stanza.


• Faux-Malory doesn't work any better when you're Elizabethan than when you're a Victorian, even though you're closer to the source.


• Authorial self-insertion is just as annoying when you're Elizabethan as when you write fanfic. Only Chaucer and Dante get away with this. Got that? Good.


• Stories are more interesting when you let them sprawl organically, instead of forcing them into the episodic schema you initially conceived.


• When the golden sword once wielded by Jove against the Giants (or possibly Titans — Spenser isn't clear on the difference) is broken, you do not mention this off-handedly, in one line, buried in the middle of a stanza. Nor do you forget to give its bearer a replacement.


• Don't drop the book on your foot. I'm just saying.

---L.