Abstract
Spenser singles out Lord Burghley as a disapproving misreader of his poetry in 1596, lashing out in turn against the senior minister of state in terms so strong and unflattering that it is difficult to attribute the poet’s motives to irony or indirection. Part I of this study reconsiders what Burghley actually misread and why. Thus far, it has argued that Spenser frames the Lord Treasurer as an interpreter in bad faith of the Book 3 conclusion to The Faerie Queene. If the 1596 Faerie Queene contains internal evidence of Burghley’s role in the cancellation of the poem’s celebration of married chastity, it is the 1590 edition of the poem that provides further contextual evidence of Burghley’s motives as Spenser’s antagonist. As we have seen, Spenser’s advertisement of the Earl of Oxford as a topical referent in 1590 holds pivotal ramifications for Burghley’s negative reception to The Faerie Queene, particularly its representation of chastity. To the scandalizing of the Cecil family, Oxford besmirched the chaste reputation of his own wife, Burghley’s daughter Anne, the consequences of which continued to be felt by the family into the 1590s. In outlining the injuries to Anne Cecil’s reputation and that of her family in the previous chapter, we have established the context in which any complimentary appeal to Oxford would have been viewed by Burghley and Robert Cecil.
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Notes
Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser, THREE PROPER, and wittie, familiar Letters: lately passed betweene two Universitie men: touching the Earthquake in Aprill last, and our English refourmed Versifying (1580), 36.
On Thomas Nashe’s charge that Harvey wrote ‘Speculum Tuscanismi’ about Oxford, see Adversary 225–8. It should be noted, however, that while the target of ‘Speculum Tuscanismi’ is anonymous, Harvey actually praised Oxford in 1578 during a series of orations composed for the queen’s visit to Audley End. See Gabriel Harvey, Gratulationum Valdinensium Libri Quatuor (1578).
Edmund Spenser, The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt, eds. (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 625, italics omitted.
For Harvey’s denial of Oxford as a target of ‘Speculum Tuscanismi’, see Gabriel Harvey, Foure Letters (1592), 21. For Nashe’s rebuttal, see Thomas
Nashe, Strange Newes, of the Intercepting of Certain Letters (1592), G4. On Lyly’s possible involvement in the controversy, see Adversary 227.
Paul E. McLane, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender: A Study in Elizabethan Allegory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961), 61–76. On the doubtful nature of this theory, see Steven W. May, ‘Oxford, Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of’, in Spenser Encyclopedia 524.
Bernard M. Ward, The seventeenth Earl of Oxford, 1550–1604, from contemporary documents (London: J. Murray, 1928), 206–7. For the theory that Oxford betrayed his friends in order to secure his own protection see Adversary 251.
Joseph Black, ‘“Pan is Hee”: Commending The Faerie Queene’, Spenser Studies 15 (2001): 121–34.
merely suggests Thomas Watson as the likely author, while D. Allen Carroll, ‘Thomas Watson and the 1588 MS Commendation of The Faerie Queene: Reading the Rebuses’, Spenser Studies 16 (2002): 105–23 reads the designs of the manuscript in ways that identify Watson’s authorship more specifically.
Thomas Watson, The Hekatompathia [in Greek] or Passionate Centurie of Love (1582), A3–A3v.
Girolomo Cardomo, Cardanus Comforte, Thomas Bedingfield, trans. (1573).
For a discussion of the dedicatory sonnets under the topos of the corpus mysticum, see David Lee Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 49–62.
Seventeenth Earl of Oxford and Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, 43–4; 85–8 and Steven W. May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and Their Contexts (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 124.
being part in all I have, devoted yours’. William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, David Bevington, ed. (New York: Pearson/Longman, 2003), 1674.
For discussions of Spenser’s attitude toward his aristocratic dedicatees, see Miller 52 and Wayne Erickson, ‘The Poet’s Power and the Rhetoric of Humility in Spenser’s Dedicatory Sonnets’, SLI: Studies in the Literary Imagination 38:2(2005): 91–118, 107.
On the order of the sonnets and their relation to heraldic rules of precedence, see Carol Stillman, ‘Politics, Precedence, and the Order of the Dedicatory Sonnets in The Faerie Queene’, Spenser Studies 5 (1985): 143–8. By contrast, Jean Brink in ‘Precedence and Patronage: The Ordering of Spenser’s Dedicatory Sonnets’, SLI: Studies in the Literary Imagination 38:2 (2005): 51–72.
argues that ‘social convention influenced but did not determine either the selection of dedication or the ordering of dedications’ in either incarnation of Spenser’s dedicatory sonnets (65). Studies that examine the role of patronage in the dedicatory sonnets include Miller, Joseph Lowenstein, ‘Spenser’s Retrography: Two Episodes in Post-Petrarchan Bibliography’, in Spenser’s Life 99–130, Judith Owens, Enabling Engagements: Edmund Spenser and the Poetics of Patronage (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), Wayne Erickson, ed. The 1590 Faerie Queene: Paratexts and Publishing, in SLI: Studies in the Literary Imagination 38:2 (2005).
For a less pessimistic argument for the cancellation of the poem’s backmatter, see Ty Buckman, ‘Forcing the Poet into Prose: “Gealous Opinions and Misconstructions” and Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 38 (2005): 17–34, 29.
For information on extant copies of The Faerie Queene, see Anonymous, ‘MS Notes to Spenser’s “Faerie Queene”‘, Notes and Queries (1957): 509–15 and Alastair Fowler, ‘Oxford and London Marginalia to “The Faerie Queene”‘, Notes and Queries (1961): 416–19. Fowler reports on the scant details in most surviving copies of Spenser’s epic, 417.
Graham Hough, The First Commentary on ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Privately published, 1964), 2–8.
Joshua McClennen, On the Meaning and Function of Allegory in the English Renaissance (Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1969), 21.
Jonson himself annotated Spenser’s 1617 folio with significant, and sometimes topical, commentary. See James A. Riddell and Stanley Stewart, Jonson’s Spenser: Evidence and Historical Criticism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1995).
On the possible roles of Ralegh in Book 6 of The Faerie Queene, see James P. Bednarz, ‘Ralegh in Spenser’s Historical Allegory’, Spenser Studies 4 (1984): 49–70.
For an overview of the lives of the Vere daughters, Elizabeth, Susan, and Bridget, see Helen Payne, ‘The Cecil Women at Court’, in Pauline Croft, ed., Patronage, Culture and Power: The Early Cecils, 1558–1612 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 265–81, 269.
G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 31–2.
On the georgic implications of this passage, see Andrew Wallace, ‘“Noursled up in life and manners wilde”: Spenser’s Georgic Educations’, Spenser Studies 19 (2004): 65–92, esp. 66–72.
On Burghley’s published poetry, see Jan van Dorsten, ‘Literary Patrons in Elizabethan England’, in Patronage in the Renaissance, Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 196.
On the Copy of a Letter … to Don Bernadino Mendoza, see B. W. Beckingsale, Burghley: Tudor Statesman, 1520–1598 (London: Macmillan, 1967), 225–6.
John Soowthern, Pandora Reproduced from the Original Edition 1584, George B. Parks, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), C3v–C4v.
For an edited text of the poems, along with an argument in favor of Anne Cecil’s authorship, see Ellen Moody, ‘Six Elegiac Poems, Possibly by Anne Cecil de Vere, Countess of Oxford’, English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989): 152–70.
Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘Upstaging the Queen: the Earl of Essex, Francis Bacon and the Accession Day Celebrations of 1595’, in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 41–66, esp. 44–5.
Philippe Desportes, Cartels et Masquarades, Épitaphes, Alfred Michiels, ed. (Geneva and Paris, 1958), 90. See Smith, ‘The Sonnets of the Countess of Oxford and Elizabeth I: Translations from Desportes’, 448.
For a pointed and polemical discussion of the Countess of Pembroke’s authorship of ‘The Doleful Lay of Chlorinda’, see Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 84–101.
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© 2011 Bruce Danner
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Danner, B. (2011). The Faerie Queene Dedicatory Sonnets and the Poetics of Misreading. In: Edmund Spenser’s War on Lord Burghley. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230336674_3
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