Yes, but now what do I read?
13 July 2004 08:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
larryhammerThings 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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 13 July 2004 09:23 am (UTC)It might be interesting to find out first hand. If it's my servant, of course.
no subject
Date: 13 July 2004 09:32 am (UTC)---L.
no subject
Date: 13 July 2004 10:12 am (UTC)Okay, I'll ask (having only been as close to Faerie Qveen as having a roommate study it in university), what is the difference between the two?
no subject
Date: 13 July 2004 11:05 am (UTC)Though he stacks the deck by making the Amazons not only usurpers (women ruling being against the natural order of things, unless of course you are a queen by inheritance; he was walking a thin line with this one, given Elizabeth Tudor), but enslavers of defeated men who dress their sexual thralls in women's clothing (which is the repeat THE most shameful thing that could EVER happen to a man; never mind that the lady knight cross-dresses the other way). Contrariwise, the lady knight is the champion of chastity (even while flirting with ladies as part of pretending to be a man) and so an official heroine, and she eventually marries the knight of justice. And, incidentally, rescues her fiance from the Amazons.
---L.
no subject
Date: 13 July 2004 12:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 13 July 2004 01:31 pm (UTC)Well done!
(I am not, looking at your notes, moved to add it to my Immediate TBR pile...)
no subject
Date: 13 July 2004 03:08 pm (UTC)But no, it's not something you need to boost up the queue. Ariosto, on the other hand, you especially need to read: Reynolds translation, two volumes from Penguin Classics. Get it and chortle your heart out.
---L.
no subject
Date: 13 July 2004 03:18 pm (UTC)---L.
no subject
Date: 13 July 2004 03:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 13 July 2004 05:16 pm (UTC)---L.
no subject
Date: 13 July 2004 09:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 14 July 2004 08:03 am (UTC)---L.
no subject
Date: 14 July 2004 11:37 am (UTC)Yes, please! My roommate the English major (now a professor at a college in Texas) focused more on Byron and I didn't get the interesting bits of FQ.
no subject
Date: 14 July 2004 12:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 15 July 2004 02:07 pm (UTC)---L.
no subject
Date: 15 July 2004 02:24 pm (UTC)