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Introduction to Spenser’s Art of Royal Encomium

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Spenser’s Heavenly Elizabeth

Part of the book series: Queenship and Power ((QAP))

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Abstract

This study explores Spenser’s representations of Elizabeth I in Gloriana, the title character of The Faerie Queene, and five other figures: Una, Belphoebe, Britomart, Mercilla, and Cynthia. Compared with darker representations of the queen crafted by Spenser’s principal literary model, Sir Philip Sidney, these figures are frequently so idealized as to suggest that Spenser was a flatterer. Bringing to bear a wide range of historical resources, the book explores the complexity of these figures, arguing that they are grounded in Christian Humanist views of human nature and divine providence now largely forgotten. Detailing problems with earlier interpretations, this chapter explores the poet’s way of creating ethical allegory out of messy contemporary history by taking biblical history as his model. It also introduces the chapters that follow.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    On the extent of Sidney’s influence on him, see Donald Stump, “Edmund Spenser,” in The Dictionary Literary Biography, vol. 167: Sixteenth-Century British Nondramatic Writers, edited by David A. Richardson (Detroit, MI: Bruccoli Clark Layman, Gale Research, 1996), 228–63.

  2. 2.

    See Donald Stump, “Mapping the Revisions to Arcadia : Geo-political Decision-Making in Sidney and Virgil,” Sidney Journal 30, no. 2 (2012): 1–31, especially 29–31.

  3. 3.

    In Latin, Philisides means “star lover,” as does Astrophil .

  4. 4.

    See, for example, Edwin Greenlaw, “The Captivity Episode in Sidney’s Arcadia ,” in The Manly Anniversary Studies in Language and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 54–63; Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 177–79, 263–64; and Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), especially 127–206.

  5. 5.

    Dennis Kay, “‘She Was a Queen, and Therefore Beautiful’: Sidney, His Mother, and Queen Elizabeth,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 43 (February 1992): 18–39; Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, 211. Worden sees Helen as an idealized version of Elizabeth, but he overlooks her abandonment of royal responsibility in not assisting Basilius and in succoring the rebel Amphialus during the Arcadian civil war. See 133, 136, 243–44.

  6. 6.

    The Faerie Queene, edited by A.C. Hamilton, 2nd ed., text edited by Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki (London: Longman, 2001). All subsequent references are to this edition.

  7. 7.

    Letter , in Hamilton, Faerie Queene, 714.

  8. 8.

    The only tangible evidence of the queen’s reaction is her unusually generous grant to the poet of fifty pounds per year for life. See Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 231–40.

  9. 9.

    Hamilton, Faerie Queene, 727–35.

  10. 10.

    Greenlaw, Variorum, vol. 7: The Minor Poems, Part I, edited by Charles Grosvenor Osgood, Henry Gibbons Lotspeich, and Dorothy E. Mason (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1943), 5.

  11. 11.

    See Hugh MacLachlan, “Arthur , Legend of,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, edited by A.C. Hamilton, Donald Cheney, W.F. Blissett, David A. Richardson, and William W. Barker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 259–89.

  12. 12.

    Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, edited by Geoffrey Shepherd (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1973), 105–7. There is reason to doubt that Sidney actually saw history as a teacher inferior to poetry. His advice to his brother Robert and his friend Edward Denny prescribes extensive reading in histories and none at all in works of poetry. See Stump, “Mapping,” 3–6.

  13. 13.

    Sidney, Apology , 109.

  14. 14.

    Since Spenser wrote the Letter to Ralegh before Sidney’s Apology appeared in 1595, he may not have known the argument. It may, however, have come out in discussions of literary theory with Sidney at Leicester House in 1578–1579. See Hadfield, Life, 106–8.

  15. 15.

    Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 175–76.

  16. 16.

    See J.E. Whitney, “The Continued Allegory in the First Book of the Faerie Queene,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 19 (1888): 40–69 (Variorum, 1: 455–58); Lilian Winstanley, The Faerie Queene, Book I (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1915) (Variorum, 1: 460–65); and Frederick Padelford, The Political and Ecclesiastical Allegory of the First Book of the “Faerie Queene” (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1911) (Variorum, 1: 466–73). See also Frank Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne (New York, 1971); Michael O’Connell, Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); Thomas H. Cain, Praise in “The Faerie Queene” (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1978); and Robin Headlam Wells, Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” and the Cult of Elizabeth (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1983).

  17. 17.

    John D. Staines, “The Historicist Tradition in Spenser Studies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 733–56.

  18. 18.

    Greenlaw, Studies in Spenser’s Historical Allegory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1932), 96.

  19. 19.

    Greenlaw, Variorum, 5: 211.

  20. 20.

    Introduction to Book I, in The Faerie Queene, 1st ed., edited by A.C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977), 24.

  21. 21.

    The Structure of Allegory in “The Faerie Queene” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 9.

  22. 22.

    Michael O’Connell suggests that “The moral allegory is necessarily prior; the reader must see into himself before he is prepared to see into history” (68). I suspect that the reverse is true, at least in the initial “fashioning” of virtue.

  23. 23.

    Against critics who deny the applicability of the topical allegory to other times and cultures, O’Connell rightly argues that Spenser “avoids limiting … sacred myth to fulfillment here and now; other godly princes and other history, past or future, may equally partake” (43). See also Kermode, 12–32, 36–59.

  24. 24.

    John Dixon, The First Commentary on “The Faerie Queene,” edited by Graham Hough (Privately printed, 1964), annotations on I.i.3, vii.1, x.60, xi.motto, xii.motto and 10. On Scott, see Staines, 733–56, especially 736.

  25. 25.

    “Discourse on the Original and Progress of Satire,” in Essays of John Dryden, edited by W.P. Ker, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), 2.28.

  26. 26.

    Upton, ed., The Faerie Queene, 2 vols. (London, 1758), Preface xxxl and I.xiii.50n., II.iii.4n., quoted in Variorum, 1: 264, 2: 206.

  27. 27.

    Scott, review of The Works of Spenser, edited by H.J. Todd (1805), Edinburgh Review 7 (1806), 203–17.

  28. 28.

    See the appendices on the “Historical Allegory” in individual volumes of the Variorum.

  29. 29.

    Staines provides a useful overview of New Critical, New Historicist, and political criticism (744–51).

  30. 30.

    On the open-endedness of the invitation, see Staines, 736–37. As Thomas P. Roche, Jr., has observed, “When the structural patterns of the narrative coincide with the structural patterns of any other events of nature or supernature, we as readers are entitled to view the conformity or analogy as an allegorical meaning.” See The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 10.

  31. 31.

    Oxford English Dictionary Online, “pageant,” definitions 1a and 3, accessed June 14, 2019.

  32. 32.

    McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 12–14.

  33. 33.

    Thomas Cain’s notion of allegorical “plasticity” (103) identifies characters with individual persons, but changeably. Amoret , for example, is sometimes the queen, sometimes Sir Walter Ralegh’s wife.

  34. 34.

    Hadfield, Life, 63, 106–8, 313–22.

  35. 35.

    See 67–68, 114–18, 128–30, 275–77, 279–80.

  36. 36.

    See 153–89, 172–73, 208–11, 231–43, 248–50, 186–89.

  37. 37.

    See Greenlaw, Historical Allegory, 200; and Ray Heffner, “Spenser’s Allegory in Book I of the Faerie Queene,” Studies in Philology 27, no. 2 (April 1930): 142–61.

  38. 38.

    On the legal and political dangers that authors such as Spenser faced under the Elizabethan machinery of censorship and the Privy Council’s oversight of defamatory speech, see Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 24–58.

  39. 39.

    Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in “The Faerie Queene” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 89–129 and passim.

  40. 40.

    Kermode, O’Connell, Wells, and others have pointed to Foxe’s influence on Book I, but have not explored it in the detail it deserves.

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    Donald Stump

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Stump, D. (2019). Introduction to Spenser’s Art of Royal Encomium. In: Spenser’s Heavenly Elizabeth. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27115-2_1

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