nf0058: is on allegory not just allegory in The Faerie Queene but allegory and 
symbolism in general and one of the things i'm trying to get you to see is that 
allegory in The Faerie Queene isn't just a sort of special thing that only 
creatures from the planet Zog and specialists in Reformation theology know 
about we don't just descend from on high and say oh by the way this bit means 
this thing and that bit means that thing and this thing over there means the 
other thing and you know this specific bit in the Bible or this specific 
historical event is what's being alluded to here i mean these are definitely 
things that you need to know if you don't know about them then we need to point 
your noses in these directions so that you can find out but er when we tell you 
all these useful pieces of background information what we like to feel we're 
doing is clearing away a barrier of ignorance that lay between you and the text 
or perhaps not actual ignorance of events but 
unawareness that those particular events that you did know about like for 
example the changing religion of England between Roman Catholicism and 
Protestantism and back again and then back the other way in the sixteenth 
century would be relevant to this passage or something like er the Spanish 
Armada of fifteen-eighty-eight Spain's unsuccessful attempt to invade these 
shores and reclaim all the lost souls for Catholicism the idea is to say oh by 
the way do you see how this fits here do you see how Spenser is thinking about 
that bit there so as i say what we're trying to do is remove a barrier of 
ignorance or unawareness that the things you did know were actually helpful at 
this point what we do not wish to do by all this saying oh yes well of course 
Duessa both means the whore of Babylon look at her in Revelation and she means 
Mary Queen of Scots the rival Catholic claimant to the throne whom Elizabeth 
had very er reluctantly had had to have 
beheaded al-, and you know it also means the Roman Catholic Church in general 
as opposed to the Protestant religion and you then think oh great got that 
that's Duessa hurray finish we don't want you to then feel that we have 
actually erected another wall another barrier between you and the text so that 
first there was a barrier between you and the text considering consisting of 
ignorance and then we stick up another barrier consisting of knowledge and then 
you think oh God yes i couldn't have worked that out for myself i'm not clever 
enough or i don't know enough or i'm frankly not that interested in Renaissance 
politics and history and then say oh right this is what i want to know this is 
what the lecturers have told me so this is the stuff i need to know this is the 
answer to the text and this is what i have to give the lecturers back in my 
essays and in my exams that way some very very dismal work lies and perhaps far 
more to the point some very very 
dismal reading experiences what we're trying to do is clear the way for you 
plough the road so that you can then roll up your sleeves and get back into 
that text and get things out of that text for yourself it's to help you with 
your reading so i'm going to start off by just going through a few basic 
reading techniques and critical terms that will crop up and that may come in 
useful and just to remind you that The Faerie Queene is doing something that 
lots and lots of poems and plays and novels and films and advertisements and 
political slogans and football shirts do it's just doing it rather more often 
and rather more vehemently so just to get you feeling that Spenser was an 
author like any other author and The Faerie Queene is a work like any other 
work i want to go through some literal terms that could be useful when you're 
reading this or anything else and this will gradually lead us into allegory and 
symbolism and special things that happen there well to start 
with most literature deals with literal description simply saying what 
something is like er and saying that it's like it in very literal terms you 
know she had long blond hair er the house was made of grey granite literal 
description then we start getting figurative language now figurative language 
is also known as imagery or figures of speech figures of speech right figures 
of speech now this is where you say things that are striking but are not 
literally true and a lot of people make a mistake of talking about imagery 
whenever they find anything that's particularly vivid or interesting and it 
really doesn't work that way so i'll just rub this off now and we'll start with 
some examples of very simple examples of figures of speech now if something is 
said to resemble something that it doesn't really resemble very closely that is 
simile like as if as it were so have i seen two swans or something like that 
and that's simile and 
the standard one i always quote here is er Robert Burns' famous line my love is 
like a red red rose very few people would really be attracted to a girl if she 
was covered with thorns green leaves and petals but we all know that what he's 
alluding to is her sweetness her softness and maybe you know the loveliness of 
her blush but she isn't really very like a rose it's a simile er then we get 
metaphor and most other figures of speech are branches of metaphor one way or 
the other and metaphor is when you say something is or does something that it 
isn't real in real life for example er if you say my heart is on fire that's a 
metaphor i hope love laughs at locksmiths er that's a metaphor because of 
course there isn't really such a thing as love who is a person that can laugh 
so that's a personification of love so that comes in under the heading of 
metaphor my cat is a demon i don't know why i put dow-, that 
down as a metaphor you only got to look at me to see that that's true but never 
mind er my son is a pickle well let's hope that's just a metaphor and somebody 
hasn't been after him right and there are many branches including 
personification which i've already mentioned love laughs at locksmiths the idea 
that if you really love somebody you can always get at her however hard her 
husband is trying to keep you out of the house and you know that's the sort of 
thing that metaphor does er now something we have here to think about is two 
other words and you will often find this being thrown at you by critics so we 
might as well get it right vehicle and tenor and i could imagine a lot of times 
when if you're talking about allegory in Spenser or anybody else it's useful to 
know these words vehicle is the thing you are given it's the image and the 
tenor is what it is talking about so if i say my cat is a demon 
the idea of the cat being a demon is the vehicle and the meaning the tenor is 
the idea that my cat has a very bad temper right so much for these words and 
thus in er Spenser you could say for example that [sniff] you know Duessa 
riding along in her bright red dress on her seven-headed beast is the vehicle 
and that Roman Catholicism or evil or doubleness or whatever else you want to 
say she represents at the time is the tenor that's what's really going on 
right now here are some other words coming up type and antitype now you have to 
remember that we're studying works written by people who believed that God 
himself used allegory the idea is that in the Old Testament that's the first 
part of the Bible the part that the Jews believe right in the Old Testament 
everything important that happens is not only literally true in itself but so 
arranged that it is a type by which they meant a foretelling an indication a 
symbol of something that was going to happen in the New Testament that's what 
starts with the Gospels Matthew Mark Luke and John and it tells the story of 
Jesus and of his apostles after him in the Acts of the Apostles and the various 
Epistles of Paul and other saints and it is this together with the Old 
Testament that Christians believe and one example i can give you of type and 
antitype it's just one thing but it shows you the way er this sort of biblical 
critical mind worked and you can also find it very useful when you're reading 
Milton is that when in the Old Testament it describes how Moses and his 
followers spent forty years in the desert after they came out of Egypt looking 
for the promised land right which was of course Israel and Judea the antitype 
to this the thing that this was a symbol of was the forty days that Jesus spent 
in the wilderness being tempted by the Devil before he took on his mission to 
save humanity so there is a type and an antitype and these are words that 
you'll often find thrown at you in critical books er another word er that you 
might find which i find enormous fun is if i can get it on yep here it comes 
euhemerism E-U- H- E-M-E-R-I-S-M euhemerism and you will sometimes find a 
critic toss he'll say oh yes this is a euhemeristic reading and this is called 
after the Greek critic Euhemerus er a man for whom i have enormous respect who 
looked at the pagan myths and legends of the gods and heroes around him 
and i don't think he was the first one to do this but he was the one to get i-, 
get it named after him what he did was he thought of this interpretive system 
which he felt was desperately needed in order to explain a curious anomaly 
about myths of the gods and heroes and the curious anomaly was this that we are 
supposed to venerate the heroes and worship the gods which might suggest a 
certain amount of respect and yet their behaviour is very often deeply deeply 
immoral when judged by human standards and in fact er there have been a lot of 
people throughout history including Pythagoras and Plato who made perhaps what 
anthropologists would consider the terrible mistake of believing that a god 
necessarily has to be respectable by human terms the fact is many of the 
ancient myths that you should be coming across in your classical reading show 
that no such thing is the case and that perhaps ultimately an attempt by er a 
Greek worshipper of the Olympian gods to condemn Aphrodite goddess of love 
because she's an adulteress or Ares god of war because he's a bully is totally 
irrelevant and deeply impertinent not to say blasphemous if Aphrodite alias 
Venus sleeps around then she's doing what she does best this is what is in her 
nature to do and if a god and personification of war er isn't a violent 
aggressive bully then he's obviously sleeping on the job but this idea that 
gods personify the essence of universal phenomena is one way of looking at 
religion and the idea that God should not only demand high moral standards from 
his or her worshippers but also be a moral being himself or herself that is a 
very different idea and what we see with Judaism Christianity Islam and with a 
lot of high-minded pagan Greeks and Romans themselves is the clash of these two 
different ideas and so Euhemerus like others before and after him came up with 
the idea that the real truth was not so much about morality as about power that 
the originals of the pagan gods had not been gods but they had been human 
beings and on the whole 
very badly behaved human beings who had behaved in very violent ways and that 
people had then er told legends about them or been forced by their power to 
worship them as if they were gods and that was how the story started Aphrodite 
for example had begun her career as a highly successful prostitute somehow it 
all makes a hideous amount of sense and so very often you'll find er stories 
and interpretations where people will go around to say well there must 
originally have been a human being who behaved in a particular way and then the 
stories got enlarged and distorted and that's how ideas about how Jupiter 
turned himself into a bull and raped Europa started something like that thus 
for example er Actaeon a very popular figure in Renaissance poetry er a young 
man who went out hunting one day accidentally saw the goddess Diana bathing and 
was thereupon turned into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds can turn 
into a little moral story about a young man who was so 
fond of hunting that he spent more on it than he could afford and his hounds to 
use a common metaphor ate him out of house and home er something else that 
you'll come across and this is very useful indeed do keep your eye open for 
this in Spenser is pathetic fallacy a fallacy of course means something that 
isn't true and pathetic means to do with feelings and pathetic fallacy is the 
convention whereby the weather the landscape the whole environment around you 
matches your mood now er in an allegory where er everything can be seen as 
symbolic pathetic fallacy can be very important indeed so watch for weather er 
note that in Spenser the weather is always there er in connection with er moral 
developments with some sort of er er turn or twist in the plot if he needs his 
characters to get lost in a wood it will rain otherwise it won't you know 
there's there's no sense of giving us the sort of naturalistic randomness of 
English weather that 
you might get or expect to get in realistic plays poems or novels but there 
again how random is the weather in most English plays poems or novels anyway 
how random is the landscape i mean those of you who have read Thomas Hardy will 
know the way that he will construct landscapes that er illustrate and reflect 
the mood of his characters thus in Tess of the d'Urbervilles when our heroine 
is having a happy love affair she does it in a lush green landscape full of 
cows and flowers when she has been cast aside and is miserable she goes to a 
place with the wonderfully symbolic name of Flintcomb-Ash you know everything 
is just debris hard sterile and er she has a very miserable hard job even that 
most ruthlessly realistic of writers Jane Austen will flirt with pathetic 
fallacy er notice the way that in Emma the weather always seems to subtly not 
only affect but reflect the mood of the characters and as i said all these 
things have to be thought of and 
these are things that occur all over the place it isn't just something that 
Spenser does finally what are we going to do about symbolism symbolism is a is 
a word i think that many people find fraught with perils and again it's a word 
that will often crop up in discussions of Renaissance poetry not just in 
Spenser let me see can i get can i get them all on probably not let's try again 
s-, now the point about symbolism is it's when something represents a part of a 
larger whole and probably er the best recognized symbol in our culture would be 
the cross which is both the cross upon which Christ was crucified and which 
also er represents Christianity right so something is symbolic when it has its 
own value but it also has other values that go beyond and something that i want 
to impress on you very strongly is that all the things i've talked about so far 
from the most literal description to the most fanciful metaphor simile or 
personification can be symbolic 
anything can be sym-, a symbol if it sort of goes beyond its own self if it 
links up with another meaning right in fact originally er the symbol comes from 
the Greek word which meant a tally where er if you if you owed somebody money 
and er was sending it to them and you wanted to make sure it went to the right 
person you sent the money along with half a stick and the person who was going 
to receive it had the other half of the stick and when the person arriving with 
the money handed it over to the other guy he would first test his stick to make 
sure that the that the broken bits of his stick fitted the broken bits of the 
other guy's stick and that was when the symbol came together so it is something 
which fits in makes a meaning with something else and it can be anything you 
like really i mean in drama it can even be a bit of scenery or a prop you know 
it doesn't have to be words right 
now then now i can give you just a few examples from The Faerie Queene of some 
of the things that i've been looking at and i would like to do that er so that 
i can just remind you it isn't just a question of looking up your lecture notes 
but that it's a a question of fine detail too because all the lecture notes do 
is give you the course outline of you know what tells what story but we want 
you also to be able to read in the detail for yourselves because if The Faerie 
Queene were no more than what the useful lecture summaries make it it would 
neither have been worth writing nor reading it would not be on this syllabus so 
remember go for the details now er if i look at the first book of The Faerie 
Queene i'm looking at canto two it really doesn't matter what i'm reading it 
really doesn't matter just listen to me i don't want paper rustling er here's a 
just an example of er literal description as we've seen already er you know of 
Duessa a goodly lady clad in scarlot red purfled with gold and pearle of rich 
assay and oh tiny simile but not really just like a Persian mitre on her hed 
she wore with crownes and owches garnished the which her lauish louers to her 
gaue so the fact that we're told on the literal level this lady had lavish 
lovers so we know she's no better than she should be right now when Redcrosse 
decides to fight her escort there's a simile Redcrosse and the escort are 
described in terms of animals as when two rams stird with ambitious pride fight 
for the rule of the rich fleeced flocke their horned fronts so fierce on either 
side do meete that with the terrour of the shocke astonied both stand 
sencelesse as a blocke forgetfull of the hanging victory so in other words 
they're both rushing at it eyes shut heads down and you're meant to think not 
just oh yes aren't they like rams er but also aren't they being stupid you 
know literally bashing their heads together over this utterly worthless woman 
er now in in the third book canto eleven there's a nice little simile here of 
the tapestry which we find er decorating the the chamber of Busyrane for round 
about the wals yclothed were with goodly arras and remember goodly here just 
means beautiful it doesn't imply any sort of moral worth goodly arras of great 
maiesty wouen with gold and silke so close and nere that the rich metall lurked 
priuily as feigning to be hid from enuious eye interesting personification of 
the metal there the gold is trying to lurk to hide away even the tapestry is 
sneaky yet here and there and euerywhere vnwares it shewd it selfe and shone 
vnwillingly like a discolourd snake whose hidden snares through the greene gras 
his long bright burnisht backe declares and notice there how suddenly the metal 
has turned into the snake it's like a snake it's coming alive it's treacherous 
it's going to get 
you oh and notice too how brilliantly there Spenser has used the alexandrine 
you know the long final line of the stanza through the greene gras his long 
bright burnisht backe declares so a nice usage there of imagery and of sound to 
get the effect and that's about creating atmosphere not just a one to one 
correspondence of something and this is what we want you to do look at 
atmosphere look for subtleties er and very often there might be an implied 
moral judgement too now the original ending of the third book of The Faerie 
Queene er it's where Scudamour and Amoret come together lightly he clipt her 
twixt his armes twaine and streightly did embrace her body bright her body late 
the prison of sad paine now the sweet lodge of loue and deare delight but she 
faire lady ouercommen quight of huge affection did in pleasure melt and in 
sweete rauishment pourd out her spright and there might be a suggestion here 
that it might be all right because they 
are actually married but is perhaps their love a s-, slightly excessive or is 
it just warning that love itself is a very powerful thing it can actually 
dissolve two human beings and turn them into one they go on to be compared to 
the hermaphrodite which could as i've showed you l-, last time i talked to you 
be a sign of the danger giving yourself up to excessive passion so it's 
reminding you how very powerful sexual attraction is and here again there's a 
suggestion of judgement atmosphere in the description of how Florimell er runs 
away Florimell is frightened she's always running away er she's running towards 
the man she loves Marinell and away from every other man she sees er in the 
fear that he's going to attack her and mostly the poor thing is right so here 
she goes on one of her runs like as an hynd forth singled from the heard that 
hath escaped from a rauenous beast yet flyes away of her owne feet affeard and 
euery leafe that shaketh with the least murmure of 
winde her terror hath encreast so fled faire Florimell from her vaine feare 
long after she from perill was releast so she's being compar-, cared to a 
panicking animal and then we're told hey it was vain there was nothing to run 
away from you should stop but no again er like the knights when they're 
fighting the girl when she's running away is like an animal she's out of 
control each shade she saw and each noyse she did heare did seeme to be the 
same which she escapt whyleare all the same euening she in flying spent and all 
that night her course continewed nor did she let dull sleepe once to relent nor 
wearinesse to slacke her hast but fled euer alike as if her former dred were 
hard behind were hard behind her readie to arrest and her white palfrey hauing 
conquered the maistring raines out of her weary wrest perforce her carried 
where euer he thought best so her palfrey her riding horse has er has er got 
away out of her control conquered the maistring reins 
out of her weary wrest her wrist she cannot control her horse and again this is 
typical that Spenser will often show er the accoutrements of a character the 
horse the armour the garments are telling you something about them and here er 
you know this horse which is er bolting is very much a picture of Florimell and 
in fact you could actually argue here er that perhaps you know er the vehicle 
er you know the girl er riding an out of control horse and the tenor which is 
to tell us about the girl's mindless terror we might in fact see that they were 
very slightly er in tension here in opposition in friction because if you're 
looking at that scene completely realistically it's the girl who's frightened 
of being raped not the horse and you might feel that after hours and hours and 
hours of galloping if the horse was actually able to gain control of the 
situation it would probably want to slow down not keep on galloping but there 
you are the horse here is being 
used to express Florimell's out of control passions but just to remind you here 
that er this sort of simile this sort of comparing one thing with another 
background with mood goes on all the time i've got a nice little poem written 
in the twentieth century by Robert Frost called Birches er where he uses a very 
powerful simile to describe how wandering er in a wood can be like living your 
life generally and where you are meant to stop and think and say oh yes this 
bit fits with this bit oh yeah and that bit fits with that bit er he doesn't 
kind of er dot all the Is or cross all the Ts for you it's when i'm weary of 
consideration and life is too much like a pathless wood where your face burns 
and tickles with the cobwebs broken across it and one eye is weeping from a 
twig's having lashed across it open i'd like to get away from Earth awhile and 
then come back to it and begin over and he doesn't actually tell you in detail 
what it is that makes his life so hostile 
sometimes but i think we can all think of ourselves have there been occasions 
when you feel your face has burned and tickled with a cobweb broken across it a 
cobweb in itself isn't a very strong barrier it's nothing but it can burn and 
tickle you it's the kind of little detail of your life that embarrasses you 
makes you blush oh God i wish i hadn't done that it isn't important but ooh it 
irritates ooh it irks and of course one eye is weeping from a twig's having 
lashed across it open well what vulnerability happened here what injustice what 
mistake did you make by leaving yourself open and he gives you the feeling in 
terms of walking through a wood but you can relate it to your own or imaginary 
life experiences 
and again a few i'm going to give you a few examples now of er stories where 
you can find allegory working in do-, popular culture we are expected to be 
able to understand this and of course allegory itself is best understood as a 
continued metaphor er where one story is told and it has its own meaning but it 
also has another meaning or other meanings on top and er going to going to 
explore a few documents shall we say which have er which have allegorical 
significance er right to start with then the climax the c-, i know let's turn 
this off the climax of book one of the The Faerie Queene is a fight 
nf0058: and here we have the young knight the young knight is going out to 
battle evil he's going to face his most feared enemy and he's going to take his 
light sabre though he's been told to leave it 
behind typical behaviour the knights are always getting too gung-ho in Spenser 
too oh did Spenser neglect to ne-, mention that the name of er Redcrosse's 
dwarf was R-two-D-two well well okay we've got into the dark cavern not unlike 
the Wood of Errour i think and he's about to encounter his worst nightmare he 
thinks it's the dragon but it's not the dragon interesting that the foe is so 
often seen as reptilian remember the serpent in Paradise here we are Darth 
Vader embodiment of evil or so we think he was told to leave it at home he 
thinks he's won oh-oh he's killed himself should have listened 
nf0058: right now i think we see here a lot of things happening which are very 
very like er Redcrosse's first encounter with Errour in the wood you know where 
er Una the goddess y-, you know the representation of truth says don't start 
don't tangle don't go in for it you know er but you know 
the young knight is so gung-ho he wants to show off he wants to show how 
absolutely y-, you know bloody marvellous he is and so he goes in and finds 
this monster and attacks this monster and of course it is his own mistake one 
of the reasons he gets so tangled up with Errour in canto one in the first 
place is that he doesn't have the wisdom to know that when the very embodiment 
of truth says leave it you should just leave it he's he's looking for extra 
adventures he isn't realizing that when God has sent you out on a mission you 
go for it and you don't stop and try anything fancy and of course er it is his 
own errors that he gets tangled up with now er one of the things that Yoda said 
which i think is very helpful to you always cling on to the sayings of Master 
Yoda er when i-, you know when Luke Skywalker wants to take his light sabre y-, 
Yoda says only take what you have with you and really it should be only take 
what you have in you because this is one of the golden 
rules of allegory a lot of people moan that a lot of the characters and figures 
and personifications that you come across in an allegory are just flat two-
dimensional figures don't say one-dimensional a one-dimensional figure would 
just be a spot it's the thing you should be accusing them of is being two-
dimensional you know that they're they just er symbolize well like shall we say 
Sansfoy Sansloy and Sansjoy that they symbolize faithlessness lawlessness and 
joylessness and then they complain and they say well all these characters are 
so flat and boring you know that Redcrosse has a fight with one of these guys 
and wins and another guy and loses et cetera et cetera but the point is what 
you have to remember is that in an allegorical story everybody the h-, the hero 
meets is what he has inside him so it's a way of creating a complex 
psychological figure er so perhaps it's better to think of allegory not just as 
just a no a vague 
succession of er flat characters 
nf0058: watch the reactions of the Princess 
nf0058: that's another thing of course that Redcrosse has to learn originally 
we're told that er he was like Luke a farm boy after all saint he wa-, he does 
become Saint George and er you know George actually means in its root meaning a 
farmer that's why Virgil's Georgics are poems about farming and according to 
the background story Spenser gives to this all er you know for the whole story 
er the Redcrosse knight turned up at the court of the Faerie Queene Gloriana 
looking all sort of rough and untrained and demanded as a boon the next quest 
that should turn up and the next quest was Una the beautiful princess in the 
black veil and the white dress who needed her parents rescuing from the scaly 
dragon and therefore Redcrosse is assigned to the job and this is quite an old 
story and in most versions of this story the princess is none too pleased when 
they actually send an 
inexperienced er volunteer on this extremely dangerous and difficult quest but 
also in most versions of the story she she cheers up and marries him in the end 
but the important thing to remember is that Spenser's princess Una truth wisdom 
the true faith the Protestant chu-, Church chastity the right girl is all these 
things and should therefore be listened to when she gives a bit of advice now 
then let us see what else we have here we have now we're going to have another 
little er another relative complex engagement now between vehicle and tenor 
again i'm trying to drive home the idea that what the hero fights against will 
often tell you as much about the hero's character what he has to learn as the 
people who are actually on his side and here again we've got a very er complex 
little situation where the hero is having to fight evil in himself and he 
manages to solve all the problems by working out that he is in fact a character 
in allegorical story something which would often be of enormous help to the 
guys in The Faerie Queene if they knew and that therefore the way to defeat the 
embodiment of all evil is not to rush around trying to cut it into pieces with 
his light sabre but to give in and say no i'm a good guy i'm going to follow 
the path of moral sacrifice and i'm not going to do anything nasty at all 
er a slight little crunch time then between vehicle and tenor because if that 
was a pure allegory then at that point the powers of er evil should just wither 
away of their own accord but because it isn't it's a bit mixed up he's then got 
to get his father to come in and start fighting his physical battle for him er 
and er you know i-, i-, it might be in-, you know and t-, you might find it 
interesting to consider er where Spenser too might sometimes have little sort 
of vehicle-tenor clashes let's see what happens 
nf0058: oh sorry we-, er sorry wrong tape er get this right in a minute there 
will now be a short intermission er [click] ooh very sorry okay right here we 
are Armageddon the ultimate battle between good and evil and slight confusion 
as to whether it should be fought in physical or moral terms 
nf0058: you see the temptation here for Luke our young knight is to engage in 
physical battle just as so 
often the knights in The Faerie Queene are actually being tempted to dally with 
temptation and so often the correct solution will be to say well actually i 
don't want to fight today you know i'm just going to do what i'm supposed to do 
i'm not going to volunteer i'm not going to show off 
nf0058: and at this point 
nf0058: i don't want to grow up to be like daddy [sniff] [laugh] he gets it 
right finally 
nf0058: so notice there the real trap was losing his temper and i think so 
often you'll find in er The Faerie Queene too that er Spenser takes a very dim 
view of those knights who feel that a problem can be solved just by swagging 
swaggering around being macho about it er and as i said since the whole thing 
you know in book one climaxes in a fight with a fire-breathing dragon er i 
thought again we might think about ways in which a fire-breathing dragon can 
represent can symbolize all sorts of evils but ultimately human evil you know 
if Adam and Eve hadn't fallen there wouldn't have been a 
dragon and er so many dragons or other ghastlinesses are products of human 
naughtiness 
nf0058: good guy protected by the American constitution 
nf0058: well there we are huge environmental havoc being wreaked there by a 
terrible monster but of course what people there are fighting is their own evil 
er because er the film of Godzilla every film of Godzilla makes it very clear 
that the monster has been created by human aggression human greed er human evil 
because of course it was created by mutations in the genes of its ancestors by 
which were the result of nuclear fallout so again man is facing his own evil 
and again the rule is always what you find in the cave is what you take with 
you there would have been no aggressive destructive Godzilla if there had been 
no aggressive destructive atom bombs other things to note er when you're you 
know searching through allegory is things that don't fit i've already suggested 
that there was 
a slightly you know poor fit there er between the physical and the moral 
battles er at er the end of Return of the Jedi er and sometimes you might find 
something that doesn't quite seem to make sense on one level or perhaps you 
know er raises questions that don't seem to get answered on that level that 
might need to be er answered on another also er you might sometimes find er 
some surprising changes between the value of a symbol or an object as it passes 
from literal to allegorical meaning and a good example of that i think is the 
cross itself and another one is pilgrimage because wearing of crosses was seen 
especially by the Puritans the really Low Church Protestants as an idolatrous 
practice an abuse and it was associated with Roman Catholicism or High Church 
of England practice you have to remember at the time you couldn't just say 
Protestantism or Church of England because people were desperately moving the 
goalposts round and trying to decide 
who was on the pitch and who wasn't or even which end people were playing you 
know this was the time people were trying to make the rules and er and so 
crosses are a problem because within the story er George's shield that bloody 
cross is clearly er a symbol of pure Christianity but there might have been one 
or two of Spenser's readers who wouldn't have felt too delighted at seeing 
somebody wearing er a cross quite so flashily in real life and in fact er some 
people even you know tr-, tried to say it w-, you know w-, w-, was trying to 
say you know that it was wrong to actually make the sign of the cross and again 
that is not so-, that is something that many many Low Church people abhor as a 
practice to this day they see it as idolatrous and another thing is pilgrimage 
because going on pilgrimages actually going to places like Compostella where 
Saint James preached the gospel or to Jerusalem itself was seen by Roman 
Catholics and some High Anglicans as a virtuous 
thing to do in itself the feeling you went there the-, these places were holy 
and okay you didn't actually go there to worship the place or or to worship 
anything at the place but the feeling was that it would inspire you with holy 
thoughts but er again the Protestant and especially the Puritan take on this 
was that this was bad foolish and wasteful and yet we find Redcrosse himself 
goes on a pilgrimage and he goes to the Mount of Olives no less Olivet in 
Jerusalem which was where Jesus er sweated blood in his agony at the thought of 
the forthcoming trials he would have to bear if he consented to er the state of 
events that would ultimately lead to his cruxifiction this was where he stayed 
up all night in the garden and prayed to God saying let not this cup come to me 
take this from me i cannot stand it but then in the end said but if it has to 
happen thy will not mine be done and it is to that place that place of utter 
sacrifice that Redcrosse is brought but i think 
the point you have to bear in mind there is that he isn't taken to the real 
Olivet that he is actually standing on the Mount of Contemplation so that what 
Spenser is saying is that this pilgrimage is all right because it's only 
spiritual it's all in the mind so it's as if pilgrimage itself could be seen as 
a type of which contemplation Christian consent to the will of God is the 
antitype so again it's all about what happens inside you and the complexities 
are there the details are there the fine shades of character drawing are there 
but you must remember to look for them not just in the individual figures that 
are named Saint George or Una or Britomart or the rest but look at the way they 
interact with everybody else and that is how the two-dimensional cardboard 
figures are slotted together to form structures of great beauty and complexity 
but do remember that this is something that you have to do for yourselves thank 
you