This Great Stage of Fools: The Journey of Illusion and Deception in Say No to Plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare's King Lear Perhaps more than any other period in British history, the English Renaissance embodied themes of deception and deceit. Political conspiracies were rampant at court, and loyalty was something constantly in question (“Sixteenth” 494). This tone is inescapably present throughout English Renaissance literature, such as Edward Spenser's The Faerie Queene and William Shakespeare's King Lear. However, while Spenser focuses on the finally triumphant journey of a totally good and holy-minded individual through such a deceptive and therefore sinful world, Shakespeare focuses on individuals so trapped by delusions that they cannot separate and therefore die in such a state. Spenser's epic poem is, first and foremost, religious in nature. Book I follows the Knight of the Red Cross, identified as a knight who will eventually become Saint George, patron saint of England. From the beginning, therefore, the reader is aware that the protagonist is not only a saintly individual, but that he will ultimately succeed in his quest. In his quest, the Knight of the Red Cross encounters trials and embodiments of sins such as the Dragon of Error, the old Archimagus (hypocrisy), Pride, Despair, and Lady Duessa (duplicity). These are allegorical figures that Spenser assumes apply to all "Christian souls", but especially to British Anglican citizens. Perhaps the most interesting figure of these is Duessa, whom Redcross Knight trusts implicitly throughout much of the poem. In many cases in The Faerie Queene, Redcross Knight is on some level aware of the possibility of being deceived. This occurs at the beginning, when Archimago presents a false image of a lustful woman Una and again when he is at the House of Pride. In both situations, a sense of unease "throws his brains" and prevents the Knight of the Red Cross from being completely deceived (Spenser 1.1.492). However, Duessa overcomes these entrapments by playing on Redcross Knight's understanding of love. She initially introduces herself as Fidessa, which stands for fidelity or faithfulness. Playing on this misunderstanding of love, Duessa manipulates Redcross Knight into "following her unfulfilled desires" (1.8.450). Redcross Knight never seems to question Duessa and continually takes her declarations of love at face value. Indeed, it is only when Arthur and Una strip Duessa of her disguise and the Knight of the Red Cross sees her as "[a] loathsome, wrinkled hag" that her manipulation comes almost to an end (1.8.413). By having Duessa's lust/love deception based on love be the most successful in the entire poem, Spenser seems to imply that the deception based on love is the most harmful. This theme is also the backbone of Shakespeare's King Lear. However, while Spenser's tale is certainly allegorical and will surely end in triumph, Shakespeare "explores the extremes of the mind's anguish... [and] never forgets that his characters have bodies [with] needs, longings and terrible vulnerabilities ” (“Lear” 1141). The audience of Shakespeare's play never forgets for a moment that these characters are mortal and, unlike the Red Cross Knight, have the potential to fail on many levels. Furthermore, unlike the Red Cross Knight, the deception involving love is not a romantic love, but a familial one. a. In the first scene of the play, the elderly King Lear orders his daughters to say which ofthey love him the most, promising to give the largest share of his kingdom to the daughter who will "prove" her love in her speech. Goneril and Regan flatter their father beyond truth, insisting that they love him "no less than life" and "profess themselves enemies to all other joys" beyond that of their father's love (1.1.57-73). Lear is completely taken in by the flattery of his daughters and rewards them with large shares of his kingdom. However, because of this blindness to the difference between flattery and true love, Lear does not recognize the much more real devotion that Cordelia expresses for him. In this way, it is not only Goneril and Regan who deceive Lear, but also Lear himself. Cordelia is the only daughter to speak without any sense of deception and to truly express unconditional love for her father, but Lear cannot see this because he is trapped in a false understanding of love. Unlike Spenser's naive but essentially good protagonist who becomes trapped by the lies of external forces, Lear is trapped by his own illusory view of reality. Lear becomes his own undoing when his deluded vision begins to collapse and he realizes that his seemingly "good" daughters actually despise him. As he finds himself thrown into a raging storm, Lear alternately falls into a state of rambling madness and finds moments of moral clarity in which he sees the world as it truly is: full of "poor naked wretches" (3.4.29) and horrible injustices . However, Shakespeare's work is not entirely devoid of characters such as the Knight of the Red Cross, who are more manipulated than self-deceived. Edmund's distortion of his father Gloucester parallels a more Spenserian approach in which professions of love are used solely to manipulate what might be seen as an essentially good but naive man. Also like Redcross Knight, Gloucester falls into despair and needs the support of his true beloved, in this case his son Edgar, to pull him out again. However, Shakespeare complicates this situation with Gloucester's tragic blindness and the sorry state of his life before his death. In this way, Shakespeare highlights Lear's statement to the despairing Gloucester: "When we are all born, we weep that we are come / To this great stage of fools" (4.6.176-7). Unlike The Faerie Queene, where good triumphs over Satan and the deadly sins, Shakespeare's vision in King Lear is in no way about poetic justice. Humans delude and deceive themselves and others using expectations of love and examples of “what we should say” (5.3.323), and even in moments of reality we are confronted with injustice and cruelty. The image of the universe as inherently cruel and unjust is reiterated at the end of the show. When Lear enters the last scene carrying the dead Cordelia with him, he sobs and initially refuses to acknowledge anyone directly except his daughter's corpse. As he slowly explains Cordelia's death, he wavers in and out of coherence, until he finally fixates on searching for every last trace of life in her. A possible and even probable reading of the ambiguous phrase: "Look at her, look at her lips, / Look there, look there!" (5.3.310-11) is that in his final moments Lear once again falls into self-deception and "dies under the illusion of seeing a breath on his daughter's lips" ("Lear" 1141). Through close reading, it is clear that both The Faerie Queene and King Lear explore how easy it is to misinterpret reality and become trapped in an illusion. However, in the end, the clearest difference between The Faerie Queene and King Lear is that the hope of triumphing over difficulties such as deception and cruelty is still available in The Faerie Queene. In contrast, no one in King Lear is, 2006.