Abstract
Edmund Spenser’s longest and most important work, The Faerie Queene (1590,1596), has until recently most often been read as a work fulsomely praising Elizabeth.1 Indeed, Karl Marx was moved to label Spenser, ‘Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet’.2 Commentators have often assumed that Spenser, like his fellow subjects, worshipped the Virgin Queen and wrote his epic romance in celebration of her rule. After all, the knights within the poem are supposedly pursuing a series of quests that will lead to the court of the mysterious virgin queen, Gloriana, a transparent allegorical figure of Elizabeth. Many of the virtuous ladies in the poem, from the woman warrior Britomart, to the chaste/chased damsel, Florimell, from the huntress Belphoebe, to the virginal nun Una, can be read as figures of Elizabeth.3 To the unwary reader, The Faerie Queene appears to be a celebration of Elizabeth’s Protestant rule and its triumph over the forces of Catholicism.
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Notes
Cited in Simon Shepherd, Spenser (Hemel Hempstead, 1989), 3.
See Sheila T. Cavanagh, Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Bloomington, 1994 );
John Watkins, The Specter ofDido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic (New Haven, 1995).
Darryl Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser (Cambridge, 1994), 48–9.
For the most comprehensive analysis of English Reformation iconography, see John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton, 1989 ).
Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge, 1996), 58.
Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Oxford, 1967), 67–83.
Thomas Betteridge, Tudor Histories of the English Reformations, 1530–83 (Aldershot, 1999);
Thomas S. Freeman, ’“The Reformation of the Church in this Parliament”: Thomas Norton, John Foxe and the Parliament of 1571’, Parliamentary History 16 (1997), 131–47.
Willy Maley, A Spenser Chronology (Basingstoke, 1994), 9, 80–1, passim.
Richard S. Peterson, ‘Laurel Crown and Ape’s Tail: New Light on Spenser’s Career from Sir Thomas Tresham’, Spenser Studies Xii [1991] (1998), 1–35.
Peter E. McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge, 1998), 47.
For a fuller account, see Charles Wilson, Queen Elizabeth and the Revolt of the Netherlands (Basingstoke, 1970).
For analysis, see James P. Bednarz, ‘Ralegh in Spenser’s Historical Allegory’, Spenser Studies Iv (1983), 49–70.
On female rule and the general male opposition, see Anne McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585 (Cambridge, 1999).
For further analysis of this episode, see Andrew Hadfield, ed., Edmund Spenser (Harlow, 1996), introduction, 15–6.
For further discussion, see M. Lindsay Kaplan, The Culture of Slander in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), ch. 2.
See Paul E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge, 1999 ), 164–73.
See James Emerson Phillips, Images of a Queen: Mary Stuart in Sixteenth- Century Literature (Berkeley, 1964);
Howard Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (Oxford, 1996), passim.
The best discussion of Spenser’s representation of Mary is Richard A. McCabe, ‘The Masks of Duessa: Spenser, Mary Queen of Scots, and James I’, English Literary Renaissance 17 (1987), 224–42.
Andrew Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Savage Soyl (Oxford, 1997), ch. 2.
Graham Hough, ed., The First Commentary on ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Privately Printed, 1962), 9. See also Michael O’Connell, ’Dixon, John’, Spenser Encyclopedia 220–1.
Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Queen (Basingstoke, 1995), passim.
Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (1998), 20.
See, for example, A. Bartlett Giamatti, Play of Double Senses: Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ (Englewood Cliffs, 1975 ).
David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (1984), 152–3.
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© 2003 Andrew Hadfield
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Hadfield, A. (2003). Duessa’s Trial and Elizabeth’s Error: Judging Elizabeth in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. In: Doran, S., Freeman, T.S. (eds) The Myth of Elizabeth. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21415-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21415-6_3
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