Unit 2, like Unit 1, features an unfinished masterpiece, which we're only reading part of. And, like Unit 1, Unit 2 features a writer who's trying to elevate the English language into a major, full-service literary language. And when I talked about what Chaucer was trying to do, more or less, Spencer is trying to do very, very deliberately. The Fairy Queen is...
A genuine bid to create a major national poem for England to set as a center. We are now, we've now accepted you can write literature, serious literature in English. But first you've got to prove you can write really top-end literature.
And this poem is meant to be, number one, he's trying to write the great English poem. Chaucer happens to be the greatest English poet. of his era. Spencer deliberately sets out to make himself the great English poet.
England doesn't have a great poet like that in the early modern period. Spencer has nominated himself for the job. Thank you, Ed. Thank you.
In a way that Milton will later, and that neither Chaucer nor Shakespeare ever seems to really have done in that conscious way. This is going to be The great poem that puts England on the map. It's as good as any...
And he's trying to attempt things that Chaucer never did. First of all, he's trying to write an epic. The Canterbury Tales is a catalog, or aims to be a catalog, of all the various kinds of vernacular literature.
But it doesn't compete directly with the classics. It doesn't tell epic stories like Homer. or Virgil does.
The Fairy Queen is deliberately many things. One of the things it is is the first fairly successful attempt to write an English language epic. What is an epic? An epic is a traditional narrative form of narrative poem.
It is about heroes, about gods and men, supernatural beings and heroes mingling together and it tends to encode code the values of a particular culture. Let's look at Achilles or Odysseus, who really tell us what every Greek should want to be. Let us tell the story of Aeneas, the great founder or pre-founder of Rome, the, not the daddy of father Rome, but like the father of the father of the father of Rome, who is the image of what every good Roman ought to want to be, the role model.
Who is the role model here? Well, depending on who you ask, either Gloriana or Prince Arthur. Who's the most Britomartish of them all?
Gotta be Arthur! This is an epic, and it models various of these. The models, like the Iliad by Homer and the Odyssey, Virgil's great epic, the Aeneid, the Fairy Queen...
will actually do remixes or imitations of particular passages and episodes from those great epic poems of the past. Plagiarism? No.
He's not stealing. Everybody knows those things. They're references. They're homages. And more importantly, they're expected as part of the epic tradition.
So the great Homer, epic poet of Greece, writes his Iliad and his Odyssey, and that's fabulous. People love that. Around the first century, around the turn of the millennium from B.C. to the A.D. or B.C.
to C.E., Christian era, the great Roman poet Virgil, who himself is trying to put Latin on the map as a literary language equal to ancient Greece, writes the Aeneid, which is the great epic of the Romans. He takes moments. from the Iliad and the Odyssey and redoes them.
He deliberately models himself on them. It's a form of, you're supposed to do it. It's part of the epic tradition. Spencer's going to do that too.
He's going to imitate Virgil, imitating Homer. He's going to imitate Homer. When we get to Milton, Milton is going to do Spencer and Virgil and Homer.
This is great. One of the things this does, if you might... You might think that this poem sucks up to the Queen a little much. That's part of the epic tradition, too. If you want to see some primary...
Suckin'up. Boy, Virgil kisses up to the emperor time and again here. That's expected, too.
There's a patron, a powerful patron, and if you're writing the great national poem, you should be interested in your national leader. In the case of the emperor Augustus, or in Spencer's case, Elizabeth I. But this is not just an epic. There's been a whole medieval period, which has a very different narrative genre, the genre of the romance. Not. Not telenovela romance, not Harlequin romance, but chivalric romance or thorough romance.
It's the kind of genre that The Wife of Bathtel comes from. This is like the epic in that there are heroes and sometimes supernatural beings off doing things, but they're not figures of national importance. They tend to be junior members of the elite. Not Arthur himself, but one of his knights.
The whole kingdom doesn't hinge on what happens here. They tell stories of adventure, and here's how romance differs from epic, personal growth. We're not interested in how Aeneas changes and grows.
We're interested in him founding Rome. We're not interested in how Odysseus changes and grows. Maybe a little bit.
We're interested in getting home from the Trojan War. The male protagonist, the knight and the wife of Bath's Tale, well, he changes and grows. These characters, the heroes of romance, go on adventures seeking love and excitement and doing daring deeds, but they also face personal challenges and grow as people.
Spencer's heroes do this as well. Is this an epic? Is it a romance?
It's both. He's trying to do as if doing one or the other weren't hard enough. And his model here, he is constantly referencing the great Italian late romance Ariosto's Orlando Furioso.
Orlando Furioso, which is about one of Charlemagne's nephews going mad for love, but about so many other things. In fact, Britomartomart is in one way a direct imitation or copy or 2.0 of Ariosto's heroine, Bratamante. There's a female warrior named Bratamante. The's got the same kind of invincible lance that Britomartomant has. How is Britomartomart different than Bratamante?
Well, she's Britomartomart, baby. put the Britomart right in there because she is Britomartish. And she is an attempt to do Ariosto's bit and do it better.
That's the goal. You do what the master, in the epic and romance tradition, Spencer's goal and Milton's later is always to do what the master did, but do it better to move the tradition forward. Great. We've got an epic and a romance. Two genres that really.
have different agendas and do different things, and you're going to try to combine them both into one super poem, that seems hard. And it is hard. Also, it's a third kind of poem. It is also an allegory. What is an allegory?
It is a form of symbolic poetry or narrative in which characters stand for, and events stand for, ideas. It's especially a Christian teaching tool. So on one level, there's an allegory. Britomartomart represents chastity, and she's going out in the world to show us the story of how that virtue triumphs over various sins.
People actually, characters in the Fairy Queen in a medieval allegorical way, actually embody virtues and vices. Malbecco is an allegorical personification of jealousy. He's everything.
Jealousy is meant to be in one package. It's complicated because Britomartomart is simultaneously the embodiment of chastity in an oligarchical way, and she's a romance heroine who is on an adventure learning how to be chaste. Your footnotes talk about this a lot. It is, she's a romance character who's changing and growing, who doesn't come already. with the supernat-all the full supernaturalness of chastity.
The is flawed, she is learning, she she means to be the avatar of chastity, but she's got some things to learn before she's done. Um, and on some levels, in some episodes, she does revert no matter what your friend says. The is simply an embodiment of this spiritual virtue and showing how it is superior to other virtues.
So, Spencer's goal is to write tw- 12 books. You see each book is divided into 12 cantos, and each canto into a number of stanzas. There's going to be a whole video on the stanza form itself, the special Spencer stanza form, which he's invented just for this poem and for your delight.
Each book of the Fairy Queen has its own hero, a knight who represents some particular Christian virtue. These are very much Christian virtues, and they're specifically Protestant virtues. Spencer is a militant Protestant. He thinks Catholicism is bad.
He thinks the new Protestant version of Christianity is superior. He's willing. He thinks it's okay to fight for that. So, there are going to be book three seems long to you. Book three is fairly long.
There are only, there are planned 12 books. There are only six. He only lived to finish six.
His plan was then to write a sequel with 12 more books. So we have about a quarter of what Spencer planned. As I said, it's an unfinished masterpiece, but a lot is going on here on the page.
In book three, we meet our hero from book two already in progress with one of our other heroes who tends to show up a lot. The hero of book one is Red Cross. He is the Knight of Holiness. He's a version of... he's on one level a version of St. George, England's patron saint, the Dragonslayer.
And he embodies holiness or learns how to be the Knight of Holiness, of religious virtue. Book two is the story of Gaian. Gaian is the Knight of temperance of moderation, which makes it difficult to make him exciting all the time. When book three opens, we see Gion moving along from having defeated the evil, enchantress, Akrasia.
And he's with another of the heroes, the hero of the twelfth book of this poem, which never got written, is Prince Arthur. Who is the biggest and the baddest of the twelve heroes? Our boy Arthur. Yes, that's Arthur. Not King Arthur, but the not-yet-married, not-yet-crowned, traveling, wandering, heroic knight, Prince Arthur, who tends to show up, who's scheduled to have his own story in Book 12. He is wandering the Earth in search of his beloved, Gloriana, the titular Fairy Queen, who we don't get to see a lot, but that's what this is all about.
And he's meeting her knights, Red Cross and Guyon, are the Fairy Queen, Gloriana, the Fairy Queen's knights. But he shows up in every book to bail out the other heroes. When Red Cross is in a jam, when Gaian really comes to a crisis, Arthur comes by with his squire and his various magical items and just saves the day.
Arthur represents the virtue of magnificence or magnanimity. He is kingly or princely generosity. Generosity as a kind of majestic virtue. And he's here to save the day.
We enter with, we start with Arthur and Gaian traveling along, and they meet knight number three, who immediately knocks Gaian on his butt. This is, you'll see, this is a Protestant epic. It is a nationalist epic.
It is very much about being English or Britomartish. It is set in fairyland. You will see the words knight and fairy a lot.
Most of these, most of our good guys are fairies slash elves. The word is used interchangeably. They are from fairyland.
They serve the fairy queen, Gloriana. They're not little tiny flitter-round fairies. They don't have little wings.
They're full-sized human beings, as in medieval English belief about the fairy folk. And, but a few of them, including Arthur, and including, and very much including, Britomartomart, are not from fairyland. They are from Britomartain. They are from the island that England and Wales are on. They are kind of Welsh.
They are actually pre-English Britomartish people. They're here as part of Spencer's nationalist project. The style is maximally pretty.
This is an aesthetic that can never be pretty enough. We're going to drench everything with rhyme, beautiful description. Everybody's beautiful.
Everybody is beautiful. And or handsome. We see lots of beautiful scenery. We see lots of impressive buildings.
We see lots of fabulous art. Nothing can be pretty enough. Things can never be beautiful.
If it's aesthetically pleasing, make it even more aesthetically pleasing. This is as lush and essential as it could be. Although Spencer believes in a Christianity that's about putting spiritual delight aside, about going past pleasure, the poem itself is full of poetic pleasure, the gorgeousness of the rhyme scheme in the meter. the beauty and the lushness of the descriptions.
It also, as you will notice, moves very slowly. Our heroes aren't in any particular hurry. They're off on a quest, but the quest takes as long as it takes them to change and grow. Most of the Fairy Queen isn't about advancing the plot.
You will see also in this he borrows from Ariosto. By about Canto IV, we start to have a number of intertwining plots as various heroes and villains kind of crisscross each other's path. Actually, it happens even in Canto I as Florimel runs through. And the boys go off and chase her. Timaeus goes off to chase the guy who's chasing Florimel.
And Britomartomart says, boys, and goes off continuing her quest. There's no rush here. There's no hurry. This quest will last as long as it takes the heroes themselves to grow as people enough to be able to complete their quest. It's over.
Yes, they solve their problems with violence. Oh, my God, they solve their problems with violence. But they can't even do that until they've managed to come to a certain place in spiritual and emotional growth. So we're along for the ride.
It's kind of literally a ride. We spend a lot of time looking around at the world around them, looking around at these enchanted kingdoms they're occupying. Go slow. Savor it. It's meant to be enjoyed.
It's like exploring an online fantasy world. Welcome to Fairyland. Stay a while.