Some Review Help with Spenser’s Fairie Queene
and
A Scheme for Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus
If you have some trouble with
sorting out all the characters and incidents as you first read Spenser’s Fairie
Queene, don’t despair. The text
is dense, and it is a text to be experienced rather than solved. There is sometimes a feeling of characters or
incidents appearing “out of the blue,” a stylistic feature not uncommon in
romance, the genre of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Wife
of Bath’s Tale and an important element in the FQ.
The final will include
identifications from the FQ, but these will be passages dealt with in
lecture. You will need some familiarity with the major themes in the text in
order to give a strong answer on the identifications. You are also responsible
for the literary terms discussed in relation to the text; epic, romance, in
medias res, etc. For the final, you will need to have an understanding of
the major themes and ideas in the text to use in essay questions. These “major themes” will be discussed in the
FQ lectures and then listed in review in lecture. It might be most useful to try to make
connections between Spenser’s work and other texts, especially SGGK and Paradise
Lost, although connections to various texts (think of all those
supernatural woman, for example) abound.
If possible, reread as much of the text as you can. I know from experience that this is the only
way for FQ to really sink in.
So, to help you deal with the
plot complexities, here’s a summary of what we will read with some hopefully
helpful hints thrown in. I’ve tried to
stay focused on the level of the plot, although I occasionally get carried away
and gesture beyond this.
BOOK ONE:
Canto One: After the proem showing (among other things) the
speaker/poet’s move from pastoral to epic and his dedication to Queen Elizabeth
(the Goddesse), and the four line stanza that tells us that this book is about
“true Holiness,” we begin “in medias res” with a “gentle
knight...pricking on the plain.” We get
a description of the knight and his lady, who are only named later. (Spenser always holds off on these
names). We have learned in the “Letter
to
A sudden storm forces the
pair to seek shelter in a dense “wandering” wood. They can’t see the forest for the trees and
get lost, losing their horizon--the plain on which they had traveled. Then they encounter the Den of Error. Although Una and that Dwarf warn him against
it, the Red Cross Knight dashes into the den, determined to fight. Error is a dreadful monster, half woman/ half
snake. She has a brood of a thousand
little baby errors that she suckles. She
at first wraps herself around RCK, but then Una calls to him “shew what ye be”
and he defeats her by cutting off her head.
She vomits up stinky masses of books, papers, and “gobbets” of
flesh. Then the little errors eagerly
drink up all her blood until they swell and burst. Una congratulates RCK and they leave. Those books and papers really clue us into
the fact that Errors seems to suggest religious (Catholic) error. Be sure to get a sense also for how Spenser
evokes disgust here and look at RCK’s behavior: is he the perfect knight?
After conquering Error, RCK
and Una soon encounter an old hermit with lots of very Catholic habits who puts
them up for the night. This hermit turns
out to the Archimago, (Latin. archi+ magus, the first or chief
magician or arch-enchanter) and while they sleep he summons dreams from
Morpheus, god of sleep (related to the word for Morphine) and then magically
transforms a sprite at this bidding into the shape of Una. He then has this false Una try to seduce
RCK. This doesn’t work and the sprites
report back that they have failed.
Canto Two: So then Archimago shows RCK this fake Spright-Una
copulating with another Knight. RCK is
enraged and he takes off, deserting Una.
Then, Una awakes, and she takes off after them as fast as her slow mount
can go. Note: the Spright who looks like
Una is not Duessa, although the references to magic, her baited hook and the
general duplicity of the situation all are connected to the type of evil that
Duessa represents.
You might also want to
consider the different natures of evil Spenser attempts to describe. What differences do you see between
Archimago’s hypocrisy and Error’s threat?
How does this later compare the experience with Acrasia in Book II (see
summary below).
After separating Una and RCK,
Archimago then transforms himself into the likeness of RCK. [All you need to
know about this is that it is another form of doubling; we don’t see the plot
repercussions in our readings.]
Then, the real RCK encounters
a lady dressed up all in red, whose description evokes (with purpose) the Whore
of Babylon. She is with a Saracen
Knight, Sansfoy (without faith). They
fight, as knights do (check out the epic simile here). RCK defeats him. The lady tells RCK that the Saracen had her
captive and thanks him, throwing herself on his mercy. She introduces herself as “Fidessa,”
explaining that she is searching through the world to find the corpse of her
betrothed to give it proper burial. RCK
offers her protection and they go on their way.
They are resting under a tree and RCK plucks a small branch to make
“Fidessa” a crown for her head. To his
surprise the tree cries out and bleeds.
Fradubio’s story: [a kind of
story within a story in the text] It turns out that the tree is actually a man,
Fradubio (Ital. Fra (in, among)+dubbio (doubt) one who wavers in
faith or Brother Doubt, from fra, frate) . He and his lady, Fraelissa (It. Frale)
are now trees. He tells how this came to
pass: He was traveling with Fraelissa
and then he saw another beautiful lady with her knight. This lady is Duessa (Ital. Due+Latin esse)
and she is evil, but Fradubio does not know this. The two knights fight. Fradubbio wins the new lady. Then it seems he is a situation to decide
which is fairer. They seem equally
beautiful, but then Duessa calls up a fog that shrouds Fraelissa’s beauty and
then the real witch, Duessa, declares Fraelissa a witch. Fradubbio believes Duessa–he doubts his own
lady, and then it seems that they leave here there and Duessa transforms her
into a tree (it is unclear exactly when).
Fradubbio takes Duessa as his
new lady and he is happy for a long time, but one day he happens to see her
bathing at Prime (as all witches must do).
He sees her secret misshapen “nether half” and that she is really old
and ugly. She senses that he has seen
her and turns him into a tree.
Now, it turns out that this
evil Duessa, the witch who turns people into trees, is actually RCK’s
Fidessa. She hears all this, but
pretends simply to be afraid and incensed by the tree’s story. The tree can’t see her and so she is still
safe and RCK “too simple and too true” (although not, it seems, all that true
to Una) goes on with her, thinking her to be a perfectly nice lady....
And, this is where we leave
off. You don’t need to worry about the
plot further, but just know that after many, many trials and tribulations and a
good dose of despair on the part of poor RCK, Una and RCK are reunited and
betrothed.
Dr. Faustus
The play is divided up into
13 scenes, but I think (following critic G.K. Hunter) that we can also think of
it as a five act drama, as we do with Shakespeare’s plays.
Act I: The Decision
Act II: The Contract
Act III: The Challenge to
Religion and Power
Act IV: The Disintegration of
Power
Act V: The Reckoning
I break down the scenes in
Acts as following:
Act I: prologue and scenes
1-4
Act II: scenes 5-6
Act III: chorus 2 and scenes
7 and 8
Act IV: chorus 3 and scenes
9-11
Act V: chorus 4 and scenes
12-13
Another way to describe the
Acts is:
Act I: Introduction
Act II: Presents Central
Conflict
Acts III and IV: Moving Back
and
Act V: Catastrophe