Abstract
This chapter argues that Spenser’s Belphoebe typifies the youthful woman Elizabeth and Britomart the ruler as she grew to full maturity. Seeing the strife in Books II-V as a covert outworking of the conflict between Catholic and Protestant Englishmen in Book I, the chapter explores the queen’s struggles with Mary Stuart and her backers from 1560 to 1587, Elizabeth’s fraught courtship of the Duke of Anjou, and her erotic relationships with Leicester, Ralegh, Hatton, and Essex. Along with veiled criticism of the queen as a virgin Venus, resembling both chaste Florimell and her false Petrarchan twin, the allegory reproves her failure to adequately resolve growing tensions between England’s traditional agricultural economy and its rapidly expanding trading interests, a symbolized in the rivers Thames and Medway.
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Notes
- 1.
See Anthea Hume, “Duessa”; Douglas Brooks-Davies, “Archimago”; and René Graziani, “The Faerie Queene, Book II,” 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; London: Routledge, 1990), 53–54, 229–30, 263–70.
- 2.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, edited by A.C. Hamilton; text edited by Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 2001). I follow this edition throughout.
- 3.
Compare II.i.8–10 with I.i.38–ii.9.
- 4.
On this and the sustained process by which the government reformed the English clergy and converted the Catholic majority of 1558 to a small minority by 1603, see Carole Levin, The Reign of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 25–30.
- 5.
John E. Hankins, “Acrasia,” in Hamilton, The Spenser Encyclopedia, 6.
- 6.
- 7.
On the religious significance of the incident at the nymph’s well connecting it with Mortdant ’s fatal mingling of “Bacchus with the Nymph” and Duessa ’s lethal cup (I.viii.14), see Hamilton, Faerie Queene, II.i.55 note.
- 8.
On Orgoglio , see above Chapter 4, Sect. 4. On Mammon, see Thomas H. Cain, Praise in “The Faerie Queene” (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 93–98; David T. Read, “Hunger of Gold: Guyon, Mammon’s Cave, and the New World Treasure.” English Literary Renaissance 20 (Spring 1990): 209–32.
- 9.
See Peter Marshall, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 460.
- 10.
See Levin, Reign, 25–37; Patrick Collinson, “Windows in a Woman’s Soul: Questions About the Religion of Queen Elizabeth,” in Elizbethan Essays, by Patrick Collinson (London: Hambledon Press, 2003), 87–118.
- 11.
Levin, 41–43.
- 12.
Only after serious assassination and invasion plots in the mid-1580s and the attack of the Spanish Armada did the queen support legislation to bring the most extreme legal sanctions to bear on Catholic dissenters. See Jessie Childs, God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 22–40, 45–47, 96–97, 123–32, 192–210.
- 13.
Winstanley, “Introduction,” in The Faerie Queene, Book II, 2nd ed., lxxii–lxxix, summarized in Edmund Greenlaw, ed., The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, vol. 2, Appendix II, 403–4. See also Edmund Greenlaw, Studies in Spenser’s Historical Allegory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1932), 205. Greenlaw confirms the association, which Winstanley had based on John Knox’s, History of the Reformation (pub. 1586–1587), in which Mary is compared with a mermaid, luring men to her by her beauty and singing to them flattering songs.
- 14.
On Mary’s secret marriage to Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, a nobleman in the English royal line; her subsequent dalliance with her court musician, David Riccio, which led Darnley to murder him; Darnley’s own assassination by Mary’s favorite James Hepburn, Lord Bothwell; and Mary’s hasty marriage to Bothwell, see John Guy, The True Life of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 178–322.
- 15.
The need for royal temperance in quelling religious strife is suggested as early as the moment when Arthur enters Orgoglio ’s palace. Tempted to wreak havoc on the porter, Ignaro, a figure of mere ignorance, the prince first “calmd his wrath with goodly temperance,” then set out instead to free prisoners and restore order (I.viii.34).
- 16.
For an analysis of the queen’s own statements on the matter and the circumstances of each failed negotiation, see Susan Doran, “Why Did Elizabeth Not Marry,” in Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, edited by Julia M. Walker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 30–59.
- 17.
For the case that Elizabeth was only ever serious about marriage with Robert Dudley and the Duke of Anjou, see Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 39–65.
- 18.
Raphael Holinshed’s 1587 account of the episode was available to Spenser. See Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6 vols. (London: J. Johnston, 1808), 4.188–201.
- 19.
III.i.26, 30, 34–35.
- 20.
On the courtly view of falling in love, which proceeds from Gardante (gazing) to Parlante (conversing), Iocante (courtly play), Basciante (kissing), Bacchante (intoxication), and Noctante (spending the night), see Hamilton, Faerie Queene, i.45 and notes.
- 21.
Levin, Reign, 41, 44, 52–53.
- 22.
See Leonie Frieda, Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France (New York: Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, 2003), 244, 313–15.
- 23.
See her godson’s report of the measures she took, reprinted in Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch, eds. Elizabeth I and Her Age: Authoritative Texts and Criticism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 632–33. See also Anne Somerset, Elizabeth I (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1991), 142, 345–49; and Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 72–83.
- 24.
See John Guy, Elizabeth: The Later Years (New York: Pengruin, 2016), 44–45.
- 25.
Somerset, 132–35.
- 26.
III.iii.28, V.vii.42–44.
- 27.
III.iii.50. On the moment as a warning of a looming succession crisis, see Howard Dobin, Merlin’s Disciples: Prophecy, Poetry, and Power in Renaissance England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 6; John Watkins, “‘And Yet the End Was Not’: Apocalyptic Deferral and Spenser’s Literary Afterlife,” in Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age, edited by Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000), 156–73.
- 28.
See Hamilton, Faerie Queene, notes on III.iii.42–44, 50.
- 29.
On the extent of his borrowings, see Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 111–48.
- 30.
Virgil, The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 2008), 6.874–984.
- 31.
Michael O’Connell quotes the Elizabethan historian William Camden on Elizabeth’s mystical marriage to her people and cites a popular love ballad of 1564, “A Song Between the Queen’s Majesty and England,” reprinted in Stump and Felch, 132–35. See O’Connell, Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 60–63. See also Robin Headlam Wells, Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” and the Cult of Elizabeth (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983), 86–90.
- 32.
Somerset, 72.
- 33.
See “Answer to the Commons’ Petition That She Marry (January 28, 1563),” in Stump and Felch, 125–28.
- 34.
See III.i.15–19, where Arthur chases after the beautiful Florimell , becoming lost and losing sight of his quest for Gloriana , while Britomart “would not so lightly follow beauties chace.”
- 35.
There, Spenser writes of Elizabeth that “For considering she beareth two persons, the one of a most royall Queene or Empresse, the other of a most vertuous and beautifull Lady, this latter part in some places I doe expresse in Belphoebe ” (Hamilton, Faerie Queene, 716; see also III.proem.5). The theory is discussed in Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957).
- 36.
For samples of her activities on such outings, see the entertainments at Kenilworth and at Elvetham, in Stump and Felch, 195–226, 417–33. See also Zilah Dovey, An Elizabethan Progress: The Queen’s Journey into East Anglia, 1578 (Phoenix Mill, England: Sutton, 1996), 1–6.
- 37.
John Dixon, The First Commentary on “The Faerie Queene”, edited by Graham Hough (privately printed, 1964); David Quint, “Bragging Rights: Honor and Courtesy in Shakespeare and Spenser,” in Creative Imagination: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, edited by David Quint, Margaret W. Ferguson, G.W. Pigman III, and Wayne A. Rebhorn. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992, 391–430.
- 38.
Somerset, 308.
- 39.
On Anjou’s reputed illness, see Sir Philip Sidney, “A Discourse to the Queene’s Majesty Touching Her Marriage with Monsieur (1579)”; and John Stubbs, The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf (1579), in Stump and Felch, 280, 287.
- 40.
See Mack Holt, The Duke of Anjou and the Politique Struggle During the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 166–208.
- 41.
Spenser was among the first to popularize the figure of the ever-virgin queen, which took Elizabeth out of the international marriage market. For others, including George Puttenham, Fulke Greville, and William Shakespeare, see Stump and Felch, 616–23.
- 42.
“To His Booke,” in Variorum, vol. 7, 1. On the anti-Ajou rhetoric of the Calender, see Paul E. McLane, Spenser’s “Shepheardes Calender”: A Study in Elizabethan Allegory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961), 3–10, 27–76.
- 43.
See William A. Ringler, Jr., ed. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 518.
- 44.
On the complex politics of the entertainment, see Catherine Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 71–72; and Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989), 102–4. On the similarity of Arthur ’s quest for Gloriana to the amorous attempt of the “foster children,” see Robert J. Mueller, “‘Infinite Desire’: Spenser’s Arthur and the Representation of Courtly Ambition,” ELH: English Literary History 58 (1991): 747–71.
- 45.
See Norman Council, “O Dea Certe: The Allegory of The Fortress of Perfect Beauty,” Huntington Library Quarterly 39 (August 1976): 329–42. Council argues that both the English court and the French emissaries expected the entertainment to oppose the match. I would add, however, that Sidney maintained his usual deniability by attributing the assault on the fortress to Englishmen.
- 46.
On his inner division, see Ronald A. Horton, “Satyrane,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, 628.
- 47.
Thomas Cain goes so far as to treat Florimell as a type of Elizabeth (Praise, 106–7), an identification that goes back at least to Buck (Greenlaw et al., Variorum, 3.379–80). To read the character in that way, however, is to give her a royal significance that she cannot sustain and to miss compelling reasons for Spenser to avoid such a direct identification.
- 48.
See Donald Stump, “Elizabeth and Her Favorites: Britomart, Florimell, and Oram’s Concept of Fragmented Historical Persons,” Spenser Studies 34 (2020): forthcoming.
- 49.
See below, Sect. 6.
- 50.
Compare the descriptions of Florimell (III.1.15–16, v.5, 8; V.iii.18–19, 23) and her false twin (III.viii.6–9) with those of Gloriana (I.proem.4, II.proem.5), Belphoebe (II.iii.22–25), and Britomart (III.ix.20–25).
- 51.
On the Queen’s sponsorship of politically inflected tournaments, see Richard C. McCoy, Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989). On Spenser’s echoes of the Accession Day Tilts , see Editors, “Tournaments,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, 695–96, and the selections and commentary in Stump and Felch, 321–33, 456–76.
- 52.
Cain treats her as a type comparable to Una or Belphoebe (107), but few commentators go that far.
- 53.
See, for example, instances by Sir Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, Henry Constable, and John Lyly reprinted in Stump and Felch, 567–77.
- 54.
Philippa Berry argues for the predominance of the Courtly in Elizbethan literature from the mid-1570s through the 1580s and a shift toward the Petrarchan and neo-Platonic in the 1590s. See Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989), 73–110. She sees Spenser as drawn to the latter but increasingly concerned about the loss of masculine privilege, which he saw as essential if her chief courtiers were to serve as powerful intermediaries to enact Elizabeth’s will in the “fallen world of history” (153–65).
- 55.
Though rumors of affairs were numerous in her own day, and are in ours, no convincing evidence has been adduced to confirm them. Committed to protecting her honor, her royal prerogative, and her mastery over England and her favorites, Elizabeth could not afford to risk becoming a bedmate and the mother of an illegitimate child.
- 56.
Sir Francis Bacon remarks on “her wonderful art in keeping servants in satisfaction, and yet in appetite”; she “allows of amorous admiration but prohibits desire .” See “Discourse in Praise of the Queen” and “In Felicem Memoriam Elizabethae,” cited in McCoy, 61.
- 57.
Hatton was rare in being a long-time intimate with whom Elizabeth almost never quarreled. He never married. On his love, as expressed in letters to the queen, see Susan Doran, Elizabeth I and Her Circle (Oxford: University Press, 2015), 148; and Wallace T. MacCaffrey, “Hatton, Sir Christopher (c.1540–1591),” in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (published online, version: 26 May 2016). The letters appear in Nicholas Harris Nicolas, Memoirs of the Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton (London, 1847). None of her replies survives.
- 58.
See Stump, “Elizabeth and Her Favorites.”
- 59.
See I.vi.16, 30–34.
- 60.
See Germaine Warkentin, “Amoretti, Epithalamion,” and Elizabeth Bieman, “Fowre Hymnes,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, 30–38, 315–17.
- 61.
The queen’s delight in playing the Petrarchan lady appears in her poem “When I Was Fair and Young,” where she confesses “then favor gracéd me;/ Of many was I sought, their mistress for to be,/ But I did scorn them all and answered them therefore,/ ‘Go, go, go, seek some otherwhere; importune me no more’” (Stump and Felch, 316–17).
- 62.
III.viii.11–19; IV.iv.6–14 and v.8–27.
- 63.
See the expressions of grief and loss in the poems “I Grieve and Dare Not Show My Discontent,” “When I was Fair and Young,” and “Now Leave Me and Let me Rest,” and in the letter “Queen Elizabeth to Catherine de Medici, Queen Mother of France, on Monsieur’s Death, ca. July 1584,” reprinted in Stump and Felch, 309, 316–17, 273–74. Elizabeth’s seriousness in seeking to marry Anjou appears in her consultation of astrological signs to confirm the suitability of the match. See Benjamin Woolley, The Queen’s Conjurer: The Science and Magic of Dr. John Dee, Adviser to Queen Elizabeth I (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2001), esp. 77–79, 144–45.
- 64.
Anjou may also be represented in the witch’s idiot son, with Anjou’s mother, Catherine de Medici, playing the part of the witch. See Philo M. Buck, Jr., “On the Political Allegory in The Faerie Queene,” Nebraska University Studies 11 (1911): 159–92, cited in the Variorum, 3.379–80. Catherine played a prominent role in seeking and pursuing the French marriage.
- 65.
In their private correspondence, relations were already showing strain as early the winter of 1579–1580 and by the fall of 1583 had turned to ice. See the selection of the queen’s letters in Stump and Felch, 267–73.
- 66.
- 67.
See O’Connell, 122. For a long line of scholarly discussions of allusions to Ralegh in the story of Timias and Belphoebe , see Hamilton, Faerie Queene, notes on III.v.32 and IV.vii.36 and viii.6, 11. In discussing Belphoebe, O’Connell seems to me to attempt to square the circle between idealization and critique (99–124).
- 68.
See Susan Doran, “Elizabeth and Her Favorites: The Case of Sir Walter Ralegh,” in Elizabeth I and the ‘Sovereign’ Arts: Essays in Literature, History, and Culture, edited by Donald Stump, Linda Shenk, and Carole Levin (Tempt, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011), 157–74, esp. 170–73; Somerset, 498–99.
- 69.
See William Lacey, Sir Walter Ralegh (New York: Atheneum, 1979), 146–49, 313–21, 350–77.
- 70.
Since the Timias material was published in 1596, Spenser must have kept up with Ralegh after they parted in 1590, knowing that there had been no reconciliation with the queen, though Bess’s brother Arthur had tried to arrange one. The poet can hardly have known so much and been ignorant of Bess’s character.
- 71.
In III.xi.19–26, the poet describes her and lists her qualms about consummating her marriage. On the attack of Lust, figured as a representation of the male genitalia, and on her subsequent imprisonment in the monster’s den, her escape, wounding, rescue, and her first embrace by Timias , see IV.vii.2–23, 35–36 and the notes in Hamilton edition.
- 72.
Timias , too, seems to think himself wronged by Belphoebe , rather than the other way around, since when they finally meet in his hovel, he reproaches her for her “high displeasure, through misdeeming bred,” IV.viii.17.
- 73.
Doran, “Ralegh,” 170; and Lacey, 176, 179.
- 74.
Walter Oakshott, “Carew Ralegh’s Copy of Spenser,” The Library, 5th ser. 26 (1971): 1–21. Annotations also appear by the passage describing Belphoebe ’s discovery of Timias with the wounded Amoret (IV.vii.36–38).
- 75.
See Jean R. Brink, “The Masque of the Nine Muses: Sir John Davies’s Unpublished ‘Epithalamion’ and the ‘Belphoebe Ruby’ Episode of The Faerie Queene,” Review of English Studies 23 (1972): 445–47.
- 76.
Oram, “Elizabethan Fact and Spenserian Fiction.” Spenser Studies 4 (1984): 33–48. As Oram writes in an abstract, “In order to analyze these problems, [Spenser] often fragments the historical persons into several distinct fictional characters, each fictional figure embodying an aspect of its original.” I would add that he sometimes, as here, weaves allusions to several originals into a single character. See also Oram, “What Did Spenser Really Think of Sir Walter Ralegh When He Published the First Installment of The Faerie Queene?” Spenser Studies 15 (2001): 165–74.
- 77.
- 78.
III.i.1, II.iii.22, 25–26, 29.
- 79.
On the erotic tensions in the descriptions, see the notes in Hamilton’s edition and Louis Adrian Montrose, “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” in Literaty Theory/Renaissance Texts, edited by Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1986), 303–40, esp. 327.
- 80.
It is a mistake to pity Timias . He who had earlier been so indignant at the forester’s attack on the vulnerable Florimell now takes advantage of the wounded Amoret, kissing her in her weakened state and touching her “wound.” Acting, of course, out his own repressed sexuality, he tells himself that he is only rescuing her. When, however, Belphobe discovers him embracing the lady and reproaches him, he is overcome with shame.
- 81.
On Leicester’s betrayal, see Somerset, 316–19. Ralegh’s conduct was similarly inexcusible. When Ralegh took up with Bess Throckmorton in the early 1590s, the Earl of Essex had long supplanted him in the queen’s affections, and he might have married openly had he sought the queen’s approval. Instead, he pretended loyalty to Elizabeth while having a secret affair.
- 82.
Maurice Valency, In Praise of Love: An Introduction to the Love-Poetry of the Renaissance (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 142–94.
- 83.
On the justice of Elizabeth’s rage when her lovers married secretly and on her eventual reception of all but Essex back into her service, see Somerset, 318–19, 483, 511; and Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I (London: Edward Arnold, 1993), 362.
- 84.
See, for example, Lauren Silberman, Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of “The Faerie Queene” (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 102–6.
- 85.
Rhonda Lemke Sanford sees the story as a call to the queen to establish England as a sea power . See Maps and Memory in Early Modern England: A Sense of Place (New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2002), 27–52.
- 86.
- 87.
On the names and their nations of origin, see Hemilton, Faerie Queene, V.iii.5 note. Though “Bellisont” has a Latin root, the name may be French and, if so, fits better the array of other names suggesting modern nationalities.
- 88.
See MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I, 208–10.
- 89.
See Garrett Mattingly, The Armada (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 197–98, 270–75.
- 90.
This topical interpretation complements others that stress the marriage as a figure for seasonal change and a sense of locale characteristic of classical nature catalogs. See O’Connell, 89–98.
- 91.
For the full text of the entertainments, see Stump and Felch, 417–33.
- 92.
That Spenser knew of the entertainments seems likely. The most important and literarily accomplished of the 1590s, they were comparable to those at Kenilworth in the 1570s. Two illustrated editions were rushed into print. See Stump and Felch, 415–17.
- 93.
The British Broadcasting Corporation television drama Downton Abbey explores the same national divide between old rural interests and new urban ones focused on finance, technology, manufacturing, and trade.
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Stump, D. (2019). The Maturation of the Queen. In: Spenser’s Heavenly Elizabeth. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27115-2_5
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