Hello -- certainly Spenser, as with Malbecco, is good at giving "expert" or in-depth portrayals of personality traits; I imagine he'd be a perceptive psychiatrist, although thoughts of the therapist treating Joseph Fiennes at the beginning of *Shakespeare in Love* also come to mind.
Judith Anderson writes very eloquently on how Shakespeare takes various love-lust types from Spenser's works (the many facets of Venus, in fact) and combines them into a fuller character, such as Cleopatra or Venus (in V+A: think of all her various moods and behaviors), one that we can believe in. There's something technical in the concept: Spenser designs the parts; Shakespeare builds the car.
Spenser also very much into technical details of architecture. Sometimes I like to think of FQ as one of those E-shaped houses in the English countryside, on a massive scale and half-finished. Having experienced and escaped its labyrinth, we have to climb a nearby mountain and look down on it to appreciate its larger contours and approximate the details of its missing wings. [Thinking neo-platonically, we might compare FQ in its repeating three parts to buildings such as the triangle-shaped Longford Castle, where Sp's patroness Helena Snakenborg lived]. --Tom
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From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of David Miller [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2014 3:37 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Technical vocabulary in Spenser
This is such an interesting conversation, I suspect Paul Alpers would like to join in.
Commenting on the description of Malbecco at 3.10.59,
Ne ever is he wont on ought to feed,But todes and frogs, his pasture poysonous,Which in his cold complexion doe breedA filthy blood, or humour rancorous,Matter of doubt and dread suspitious,That doth with curelesse care consume the hart,Corrupts the stomacke with gall vitious,Croscuts the liver with internall smart, And doth transfixe the soule with deathes eternall dart.
Alpers points out that what reads like a physiological account of the symptoms of jealousy is in fact made-up, because although we think Spenser must be following a standard physiology, in fact none exists. "For all its scientific appearance, the stanza makes sense only as poetic discourse." The commentary is quite brilliant--it's on pp. 222-6 of The Allegory of The Faerie Queene.
Can't always trust what Spenser is up to, either, although Alpers would never say that!
David
On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 3:20 PM, Loewenstein, Joseph <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
On May 22, 2014, at 2:13 PM, Katherine Eggert <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
I think that FQ generally pulls out technical vocabulary when the poem doesn’t quite trust what someone is up to. I don’t think Spenser’s a big fan of domain knowledge. Are gentlemen supposed to know anything deeply, or are they supposed to know a little bit about everything? The latter takes more sprezzatura, to be sure. And it takes faking it, which lots of characters in FQ are extremely good at, from a novice knight wearing battle-battered armor on through to the end of the poem.
This feels quite right to me and, then, not. For the poem usually doesn’t quite trust what someone is up to, no? The exceptions are, well, exceptional.
--
David Lee Miller
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