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a. The obvious (and obviously correct) analogy is Tasso's prose allegory of Jerusalem Delivered. 1. Last week I watched the first "Star Wars" again. That movie came out when I was about seven years old, and I think it still holds up. So well, in fact, that I asked myself all day, "What happened to George Lucas?" The year after the movie came out, my brother and I got the script of "Star Wars" for Christmas. We really pored over that one! I don't know where it is now, but there was a reprint when the new versions came out, and I started thumbing through it. The first page of the script says that the story comes from something called "The Journal of the Whills." Wait, so what's the larger story that "Star Wars" the movie is a fragment of? Now when I was seven, there was no such thing as Google, and I didn't have money to join the Star Wars fan club and read its newsletter, "Bantha Tracks." I knew that there was a Journal of the Whills, but I had no way of finding out what was in it. Three decades pass, the internet goes mainstream, I get tenure. -- You can see where this is going. An hour later, most of the questions that my seven-year-old self worried about are answered: most urgently, what was Luke Skywalker going to do in episodes 7 through 9, after the Empire was defeated? It turns out that Lucas didn't really know either, which is why he scaled back the series from nine episodes (twelve in some interviews!) to six; and then decided, retrospectively, that the six episodes he did film were really "The Tragedy of Darth Vader." If you're curious, read Michael Kaminski's book, "The Secret History of Star Wars" (2007). Or just read the articles on his website, http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com. I know, "Secret History." What does this have to do with Spenser? Only that mythology-writers sometimes do announce big plans and then scale them back. Maybe I'm running through open doors -- again. But is this what happened to Spenser? Unlike Lucas, he doesn't seem to be running out of ideas. In the first "Star Wars," the big threat is a planet-sized battlestation named the "Death Star." In the third "Star Wars," the big threat is...a planet-sized battlestation named the "Death Star," only it's bigger than the first one and not finished yet. To be fair, some of the repetition in Lucas's films is intended to be typological: Anakin does, in Episode I, the same kinds of things that his son, Luke, will do in Episode 4; but at some point there have to be some new ideas, and I don't find any good ones in the later films. I do find new ideas -- and good ones -- in the later books of The Faerie Queene. Also, Spenser is just as good at describing happiness as sorrow. (Dostoevsky can do this too, but it's a rare gift.) So there's no reason he couldn't keep going. More on this below. 2. Another possible analogy, also inspired by recent movie-watching: Tolkien's Silmarillion. It's not long, counting by words, but it covers a long period of time. We know what the sources are, but unlike (say) the Lancelot-Grail cycle, it's the work of one person, same as "Star Wars." Unlike Lucas, though, Tolkien has no problem filling out his outline. His main anxiety, as expressed in the short story "Leaf by Niggle," is that he won't live to give all the episodes their due. And, in fact, he doesn't; even though he lives to be 81, most of the stories aren't ready to be published. But he knows where the story is going, and what its broad turning points will be. What Tolkien can't imagine -- and this brings him back into Lucas's orbit -- is the adventure of realized civilization (as Chesterton might have called it). He didn't know how to write the history of Middle Earth after Aragorn's coronation, any more than Lucas could figure out what to do with Luke Skywalker after he saved his father and destroyed the Death Star (again). Lucas, I've suggested, ran out of ideas. Tolkien, I don't think, had that problem; his mythology is typological, like Lucas's (Silmarils --> rings of power; Beren --> Frodo; Luthien --> Arwen) but the types evolve; the second jewel quest is more profound, morally, than the first. Tolkien's problem, if you want to call it that, is his view of history: namely, as what Elrond calls "the long defeat." We live on a blighted star, on which there are flashes of goodness but no real dawns. Good people can delay the deluge, but not reverse it. Like Lucas, Tolkien can describe the struggle to restore the king (or in Lucas's case, the Republic), but he can't imagine what will happen afterward. When he tries, he gives up after a few pages, because it's so dreary: after Aragorn, people get bored with goodness and begin to experiment with perversions. See Letters, pp. 344, 419. Relevance to Spenser? Tolkien yearns for the sabbath, but he can't picture it. He shows, though, that a long mythology (such as Spenser announces in the Letter to Raleigh) is not automatically a figment of the halflings' pipeweed. Probably, that mythology will be structured typologically, as Tolkien's and Lucas's are; see Kaske, Spenser's Biblical Poetics. Where there is disagreement, I suspect, it will be about the sabbath. I think that a poem like "Epithalamion" shows Spenser _could_ picture it. To this, I can imagine two counterarguments. One, that even "Ep" is shot through, riddled with, or weighed down by, foreboding; I would reply that the poem feels happy anyway. Two, that Spenser wrote about getting married, not being married. He could picture his wedding night, and making babies; but he couldn't -- or at least didn't -- picture them growing up, going to school, &c. I don't have a reply for that one. -- Dr. David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [log in to unmask] English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c East Carolina University Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet