SOURCE: "Fables of Power: The Sixteenth Century," in Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History, pp. 45-80. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Patterson refutes the contention that fables were meant exclusively as moral or educational tools, arguing instead that the English fables of the Middles Ages and Renaissance were intended as political commentary.]

O wretch that thy fortunes should moralize
Esops fables, and make tales, prophesies.
Thou 'art the swimming dog whom shadows cosened,
And div'st, neare drowning, for what's vanished.
—John Donne: Satire 5

The history of the fable in the sixteenth century is, from one perspective, continuous with that of the late middle ages. John Lydgate's The Horse, the Goose, and the Sheep, which included comments on the fable's function as a medium of communication, "under covert," of social protest by the poor and their advocates, was printed by Caxton in 1477, and by Wynkyn de Worde in 1499 and again in 1500. Lydgate's The Churl and the Bird was, likewise, printed by Caxton in 1478 and by De Worde in 1520. The latter poem, claiming to be a translation from a French "pamphlet" and indeed an expansion of a clerical fable by Petrus Alfonsi,¹ becomes in Lydgate's treatment an extended meditation on the fable tradition in the world of political power structures, especially in its relation to freedom of expression.

For The Churl and the Bird, whose center is a Chauntecleer-like tale of how a captured bird out-witted her captor, is, quite unlike the Nun's Priest's Tale, a moving account of the problems of poets who are forced to operate under any kind of social constraint, from clientage to more extreme forms of repression. (Lydgate himself wrote to order for Henry V, Henry VI, and Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and The Churl and the Bird ends by recommending itself "unto my maister.") Having trapped the bird, the churl (peasant) "cast for to make, / Withyn his hous a praty litel cage, / And with hir song to rejoissh his corage." But here is the bird's response:

I am now take & stond undir daungeer,
Holde streite, & I may not flee;
Adieu my song & al my notis cleer
Now that I have lost my liberte,
Now am I thral, and sometyme I was fre,
And trust weel now I stonde in distresse,
I can-nat syng, nor make no gladnesse.

And thouh my cage forged were of gold,
And the pynaclis of beral & cristall,
I remembre a proverbe seid of old,
"Who lesith his fredam, in soth, he leseth all;
For I have lever upon a braunche small,
Meryly to syng among the woodis grene,
Than in a cage of silver briht and shene.
Song and prisoun have noon accordaunce,
Trowistow I wole syngen in prisoun?

Ryngyng of ffeteris makith no mery soun,
Or how shold he be glad or jocounde
Ageyn his wil that lith in cheynes bounde?²

In addition, Lydgate opened his fable with several metacritical stanzas that implicitly relate this central issue to the "liknessis & ffigures" with which, from time immemorial, fables have been constructed. Beginning with Jotham's fable, in Judges 9, of how the trees of the forest went about to choose themselves a king, Lydgate proceeded to the secular tradition in which monarchy involves consideration of parliamentary government:

And semblably poetes laureaite,
Bi dirk parables ful convenyent,
Feyne that briddis & bestis of estat—
As roial eglis & leones—bi assent
Sent out writtis to hold a parlement,
And maade decrees breffly for to sey,
Some to have lordship, & som to obey.
(2:469)

These poems today exist on the fringes of "literature," as supposedly minor productions of a poet whose reputation has faded into insignificance beside Chaucer. Yet their history of publication in the fifteenth century and early sixteenth century implies that their message was noticed and valued, that it carried an application to early Tudor England. It seems inarguable to me that Lydgate established an English tradition of political fabling as a form of resistance to unjust power relations, which ran continuously alongside (or beneath) the more conventional and conservative notion that the content of fables was merely ethical, and that they could, therefore, serve as benign texts in the elementary education of children. Lydgate's reminder in The Churl and the Bird that "Poetes write wondirful liknessis, / And under covert kept hem silf ful cloos" (2:469), was, as we shall see, a cardinal principle of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fabulists.

Yet the established critical position has beeri that the fable does not or should not do what Lydgate believed it had always done. Rather, we have been told, it should eschew topicality (or political allegory) and speak to the most general (and hence socially neutral) moral concerns. As Lessing remarked in his Abhcndlungen iiber die Fabel, published in 1759, "the fable only becomes an allegory when to the invented individual case which it contains [the animal plot] a similar and real one [of human, historical circumstance] is added; and the word allegory must be regarded as not at all connected with the strict definition of the fable, which in its essence ought to convey a general moral precept."³ This eighteenth-century opinion remains as an uninspected premise in modern criticism of the fable, reinforced by other prejudices—against allegory as a mode of figuration and against historical circumstances as a subject of representation or an object of interpretation—inherited respectively from Romanticism and New Criticism. Denton Fox's desire to ignore the evident topicality of Henryson's fables⁴ is related to Derek Pearsall's critique of Lydgate's. For Pearsall, Lydgate's fables are only of interest insofar as they can be compared, unfavorably, to Henryson's, as in their common interest in The Wolf and the Lamb. Henryson is praised for his development of narrative as distinct from its moralization and for "realism, the sense of a significance attaching to life in its literary imitation." Lydgate's handling of the fable is described as "bookish, moralistic, typically medieval," and although the further charge of "quietism" is leveled, you would never elsewhere guess from Pearsall's description that Lydgate's fables were driven by politicalactuality, were everywhere concerned with what Lydgate calls "tyranny," especially in the legal system.

More telling still is the comparison, again unfavorable, with Chaucer. Chaucer is praised for "his gradual sloughing-off of the externally imposed moralisation" endemic to fable tradition:

The Nun's Priest's Tale explodes the fable in a cascade of literary fireworks, so that the mock-serious injunction at the end, "Taketh the moralite, goode men," can evoke the bewildered response, "Which one?" The moral is mortified into absurdity and irrelevance, and our attention directed back to the body of the tale.… In the Manciple's Tale Chaucer provides as the moral a string of unctuous platitudes which reflect back not upon the tale but upon the narrator, and upon the whole concept of the fable as a vehicle of moral wisdom. These very platitudes, parodied by Chaucer, are presented by Lydgate with a perfectly straight face.⁵

If one starts, however, with a bias in favor of political consciousness, it greatly enhances one's capacity to recognize its presence. And in fact Chaucer's fables clearly contain their own brand of politics. The Nun's Priest's Tale of Chauntecleer's escape from the fox may avoid explicit social commentary (which in Pearsall's vocabulary is not distinguished from moral platitude), but it gratuitously expresses contempt for "Jakke Straw and his meynee" (1. 3394), Chaucer's only reference to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. The early Parliament of Fowls completely suppresses from the idea of a "parliament" any political implications; it is merely the forum for aristocratic dynastic-marital disputes; and the Manciple's Tale anticipates Lydgate's use of the caged bird motif, in language that Lydgate evidently remembered:

Taak any bryd, and put it in a cage,
And do al thyn entente and thy corage
To fostre it tendrely with mete and drynke
Of alle deyntees that thou kanst bithynke,
And keep it al so clenly as thou may,
Although his cage of gold be never so gay,
Yet hath this brid, by twenty thousand foold,
Levere in a forest, that is rude and coold,
Goon ete wormes and swich wrecchednesse.
For evere this brid wol doon his bisynesse
To escape out of his cage, yif he may.
His libertee this brid desireth ay.
(L1. 163-74)

Yet having admitted the problem of constrained speech, Chaucer's tale decides against the bird and against freedom of expression. The manciple's fable of the crow, once white but transformed to black by Apollo for betraying the adultery of its mistress, concludes with a moral precisely the opposite of Lydgate's theory of the fable. In fifty lines Chaucer's manciple repeats over and over the injunction to silence:

My sone, be war, and be noon auctour newe
Of tidynges, wheither they been false or trewe.
Whereso thou come, amonges hye or lowe,
Kepe wel thy tonge, and thenk upon the crowe.
(L1. 359-62)⁶

It might be possible to argue that the manciple is mocked for Polonius-like sententiousness; but there is nothing in the Manciple's Tale to suggest that its message is to be held suspect. It appears that Chaucer did what he could to neutralize the fable's potential for protest or resistance and that Lydgate did what he could to reverse the process.

Early Tudor writers had reason continually to assess these rival models. In the 1520s John Skelton developed the model of the bird in the cage with unsurpassed brilliance, but not without a certain equivocation between the extremes of outspokenness and silence. Speke, Parott is a tour de force of vituperation directed against Cardinal Wolsey, in which the conceit of a truly talkative bird who is nevertheless a court pet and learns by rote permitted Skelton to encode some of his most violent accusations in a seemingly random medley of foreign tongues:

For trowthe in parabyll ye wantonlye pronounce
Langagys divers; yet undyr that dothe reste
Maters more precious than the ryche jacounce.
(L1. 363-66)⁷

Yet, as Arthur Kinney has shown, the complexity of Skelton's biblical sources renders the fabulist plot almost invisible in a far more learned project. His Parrot, in fact, "pretendith to be a bybyll clarke" (1. 119).⁸

At about the same time Wynkyn de Worde had printed, as well as Lydgate's The Churl and the Bird, an anonymous Parliament of Birds, which may also have been intended as anti-Wolsey persuasion. In sharp distinction to Chaucer's poem with a similar title, this Parliament makes no bones about the institution's political function:

This is the parlyament of byrdes,
For hye and lowe and them amyddes,
To ordayne a meane: how it is best
To keepe among them peace and rest,
For muche noyse is on every side
Agaynst the hauke so full of pride.
Therfore they shall in bylles bryng
Theyr complaint to the egle, theyr kyng;
And by the kynge in parlyament
Shall be sette in lawful judgement.⁹

In fact, the poem divides into two complaints, one against the hawk, represented as a gray-headed chief minister of the realm, and the crow, an upstart who has received, with the eagle's initial encouragement, borrowed feathers from each of the birds to permit him to come to attend the parliament in proper array. Eventually this arrangement causes more outrage than the crow's initial absence, and is consequently reversed:

Then was plucked fro the crowe anone
All his feders by one and by one,
And lefte in blacke instede of reed.
(P.66)

It is possible that this episode refers, by way of allusion to the red of the cardinal's robe, to Wolsey's fall in 1529, which was also the year of the Reformation Parliament; but a more interesting form of political commentary is represented by the hawk, whose role in the poem is less to defend himself than the system as it stands, and especially to articulate the position of Chaucer's Manciple's Tale, against freedom of speech:

The hauke answered the prating pye:
"Where is many wordes the trouth goeth by;
And better it were to seace of language sone,
Than speake and repent whan thou hast done."

Than sayd the sterlynge: "Verament,
Who sayth soth shal be shent;
No man maye now speke of trouthe
But his heed be broke, and that is routhe."

The hawke swore by his heed of graye:
"All sothes be not for to saye:
It is better some be left by reason,
Than trouthe to be spoken out of season."

Than spake the popyngeiay of paradyse:
"Who saythe lytell, he is wyse,
For lytell money is sone spende,
And few wordes are sone amende."

The hawke bade: "For drede of payne
Speke not to moche of thy soverayne,
For who that wyll forge tales newe
Whan he weneth leest his tale may rewe."
(P.60)

Echoes of this debate would be heard in the The Mirror for Magistrates in the years following Elizabeth's accession,¹⁰ in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, and Sidney's Arcadia, and, from the perspective of the hawk, in Lyly's Euphues his England. But by the end of the century this thematic continuity would have seemed less obvious, perhaps, than a newly ratiocinative and applied approach to the fable. John Donne took it for granted that a fabulist mode of reference was a necessary part of the thinking man's intellectual machinery. The fifth of his satires, quoted as this chapter's epigraph, concluded with an appeal to the typical late Elizabethan, trapped in a world of entrepreneurial greed and humbug, and seeing himself in Aesop's Dog and the Shadow. One of the most famous of his verse letters, The Calme, begins with a metaphor that equally depends on familiarity with the Aesopian fable, in this instance the famous Frogs Desiring a King. "The fable is inverted," wrote Donne of his voyage to the Azores in 1597, "and farre more / A blocke afflicts, now, then a storke before." The first poem printed in the 1633 edition of Donne's poems was Metempsychosis, an amalgam of the ancient animal fable with its related concept of metamorphosis, the whole underwritten by Pythagorean notions of the transmigration of souls, but the purpose political satire.¹¹ And in one of his epigrams Donne identified himself as "Esops selfe," the man of wisdom who recommends himself for sale in the slave market by admitting he knows nothing, whereas his fellow slaves profess omicompetence.¹² The metaphor derives from one of the earliest episodes in the Life of Aesop, and speaks to that text's continual contrast between conventional values and alien insights, wisdom from below.

I take this congeries of allusions to indicate that the second half of the sixteenth century in England was the time (and place) where the Aesopian fable entered early modern culture decisively. In Donne's practice the details of fable plots were not merely an educational residue, a reminder that boys in the grammar schools would probably read Aesop as their first classical author. In Donne's glancing allusions the fable was evidently a reflex of the political imagination; and in other hands (Sidney and Spenser) it had already become the medium in which opposing political theories were debated with considerable precision and even, perhaps, constructed. It is also evident that throughout the early modern period writers who reused the Aesopian materials frequently consulted their English predecessors, and conducted their debates with their support or against their opposition; which is not to say that the literary system operated solely by the mechanism of internal reflexes. On the contrary, it appears that the relation between old forms and their new application to events in the real world was taken so seriously that later fabulists consulted earlier ones as carefully as if they were historians or political philosophers.

In the last decades of the sixteenth century there were created in England the conditions that promote Aesopian writing in the looser modern sense; that is to say, a flexible and constantly renewablesystem of metaphorical substitutions for actual events, persons, or political concepts that can, but need not, be recognized as such. Among those conditions were a great increase in formal education (including, of course, access to the ancient fabulists); a large group of dissatisfied intellectuals, like Donne himself; and, perhaps most importantly, a determination by the authorities (the queen and her privy council) to exert political control over all the public media of expression at a time when the spread of print technology made such control more difficult, and therefore more obvious in its legal manifestations and public justifications.

The result was a steadily increasing tendency to recuperate not only the fable as a genre, but the genre's own political history, as implied in the Life of Aesop and by Phaedrus. Thus certain ancient fables, The Dog and the Wolf, which Phaedrus had identified as a liberty-text, or The Frogs Desiring a King, which Phaedrus attributed to Aesop on the occasion of a coup by Pisistratus in Athens, inevitably carried with them their original historico-political context, which allowed them to become both exemplars of how to construct a topical fable and permanent tropes in the public discourse of early modern Europe. Others, particularly those that featured the lion, quickly became metaphors for the strengths and limitations of monarchical government in emergent nation states. And still others, like the famous fable of The Belly and the Members attributed to Menenius Agrippa and reported both by Livy and Plutarch became, as in Shakespeare's Coriolanus, an extremely complex text in which event the tiniest verbal variations could become the bearers of an individual political posture.

Also, a great deal of formal innovation took place within the fable as a genre. It could be massively expanded into a longer narrative, as, for example, by Edmund Spenser in Mother Hubberds Tale, one of the chief models for John Dryden's Hind and the Panther a century later. Expansion could also be dramatic rather than narrative. In the first decade of James's reign Ben Jonson refashioned the many fables that featured a quick-thinking fox into the plot of Volpone, producing an astringent but morally ambiguous analysis of Jacobean legacy hunters, parasites and catamites, professional politicians, and ultimately the entire legal system.¹³ No one did more, in the mid-seventeenth century, to expand the fable's possibilities as local political commentary than John Ogilby, in whose hands Aesopian originals became at once definitively lyrical (as distinct from merely being versified) and definitive markers of both civil war and Restoration thinking; yet Ogilby too looked back to Spenser for technical innovation, while enlisting the fable as far as was possible to the support, rather than the critique, of the monarchy then in defeat or exile.

It is one of the fable's habits (and this book's objectives) to oscillate between "literary" exempla and others not normally thought of as literature. If a by-product of this chapter is a clearer sense of what that distinction means and whether it can be maintained, so much the better; but the chief objective is to show the habit itself, the deep penetration of the fable into the culture. I begin with a striking example that itself straddles the divide. In July 1586 there was discovered a Roman Catholic plot against Elizabeth by young aristocrats led by Anthony Babington; the leaders were all executed in September in a public spectacle, complete with the full horrors of disembowelment; and early in 1587 there was rushed into print a new edition of "Holinshed's" Chronicles. Though Raphael Holinshed himself was dead, a committee of antiquaries including John Stow continued the history of England through Elizabeth's reign and literally up to the moment. Its conclusion was devoted to an account of the Babington plotters, their discovery and trial, and the public satisfaction at the rigors of the punishment. The chronicle described how, in the Tower, the conspirators "occupied their wits in dolorous devises … savouring more of prophane poetrie than christianitie, of fansie than religion"; and Babington, in an appeal for clemency on the basis of his rank, managed to distribute certain poems, which were promptly illegally printed: "the copies are common (yet never authorised for the print)."

The chronicler continued:

Furthermore, … to procure the speedier commiseration (in his fansie) he falleth into a familiar tale of a certaine man, that having a great flocke of sheepe, mooved either with a sheepish unruliness, or for his better commoditie, threatened everie daie by one and one to dispatch them all: which he dailie performed according to his promise, untill such time as the terror of his accustomed butcherie strake the whole flocke into such a fear, as whensoever he came and held up his knife, advising at that instant but the slaughter of one, the whole number of them would quake, fearing each one his particular chance. Which tale he applieth to himself, being one of the brutish herde (as he confesseth) that for their disordinat behaviour the law justlie condemneth, and threatneth to dispatch one after another.¹⁴

This extraordinary insert, marked out for readerly interest, indeed, literary attention, by the marginal gloss "A fable or tale which Babington applieth to his present case of wretchednesse," demonstrates with a fearful economy all but one of my opening postulates about how the fable functions in the world. Clearly, it speaks to unequal power relations, and to the need for those without power in those relations to encode their commentary upon them, not to preclude understanding, but in order to claim for their protest the sanction of an ancient form; and equally clearly, Babington hoped that wit or literary ingenuity (which the chronicler degraded as "fansie") would emancipate him, save him from the Tower and the scaffold.

The chronicler assumed this to be "a familiar tale." In fact, it was a remarkable adaptation of the Aesopian fable of The Sheep and the Butcher which appeared in Steinhöwel's edition (and hence also in Caxton's) with a woodcut showing the butcher cutting the throat of one sheep while the rest of the flock look on.… The moral of the original fable was that personal safety depends on group solidarity. In Caxton's translation the fable reads as follows:

Whenne a lygnage or kyndred is indyfferent or in dyvysyon not lyghtly they shalle doo ony thynge to theyr salute as reherceth to us this fable Of a bocher whiche entryd within a stable full of whethers. And after as the whethers sawe hym none of them sayd one word. And the bocher toke the fyrst that he fonde. Thenne the whethers spake al to gyder and sayd lete hym doo what he wylle. And thus the bocher tooke hem all one after another sauf one onely. And as he wold have taken the last the poure whether sayd to hym Justly I am worthy to be take by cause I have not holpen my felawes. For he that wylle not helpe ne comforte other ought not to demaunde or aske helpe ne comforte. For vertue which is uny[t]ed is better than vertue separate.¹⁵

Caxton's translation had been telling in its own time, in its substitution of "lygnage or kyndred" for the Latin "Parentes vel amici," thus appealing to precisely that standard of loyalty based on lineage in an honor culture that was already being eroded, as much by the internecine Wars of the Roses as by the long international development of centralized monarchies.¹⁶ And in 1484 this fable would have had a specific, horrific charge, published as it was the year after Richard III took over the throne, an event accomplished by the summary executions of Earl Rivers and Lord Hastings, not to mention the probable murder of the young king Edward V and his brother.

But whereas Caxton was content to let the fable do its work in 1484 with only minimal adjustment to the circumstances, Babington, through the voice of the chronicler, had apparently rewritten the fable so as to add to its "familiar" message an unmistakable indictment of the psychology of repression. Caxton's sympathy for the "poure whether" and the brutal implications of "bocher" are retained, which already ran counter to the sheep's confession that he suffered justly for his earlier passivity, for nonintervention in the deaths of his colleagues; but he nowhere anticipated the brilliance of Babington's conception whereby the shepherd terrifies his flock into submission by a daily, ritual execution of one of their number. This was a genuine insight into the Elizabethan theory of public executions as, literally, exemplary ritual; a theory to which, of course, the 1587 Chronicles subscribed or claimed to subscribe.¹⁷

Yet however much the law-and-order mentality of the narrator attempts to control the fable's power by editorial comment, the story transmits its own message. A "sheepish unrulinesse" (which is only hypothetical, and may actually be an excuse for the shepherd's "better commoditie") scarcely justifies such "accustomed butcherie" as indeed, common sense asserts, must surely work against the economy of sheep farming; while the metaphor itself has disturbing implications for the idyllic versions of pastoral, with the queen as shepherdess, which were already fashionable in Elizabethan courtly poetry and drama.

Today's reader can therefore speculate on the complexities of a cultural process that produces such a document; not least because, as we now know, this fable fell victim to censorship. The new "Holinshed" was called in by the Privy Council almost as soon as it appeared in January 1587, and large sections of it dealing with the most up-to-the moment events, especially the Babington Plot, were deleted and replaced with a briefer and more neutral account.¹⁸ In this unusually careful revision, largely carried out by Abraham Fleming, a second, different fable significantly survived.

A few pages later, the chronicler had paused to moralize on the Babington plot and its consequences, and, marking the spot with another marginal gloss ("A prettie apolog allusorie to the present case of malcontents") proceeded to rewrite for the occasion the ancient Aesopian fable of The Frogs Desiring a King:

God make prince and people of one mind, and plant in all subjects a reverend regard of obedience and contentment of present estate, supported with justice and religion: least longing after novelties, it fare with them as with the frogs, who living at libertie in lakes and ponds, would needs (as misliking their present intercommunitie of life) with one consent sue to Jupiter for a king, and so did. Whereat he woondering, granted their desires, and cast them an huge trunk of a tree, which besides that it made a great noise in the water as it fell, to their terrifieng; so it was cumbersome by taking up their accustomed passage: insomuch that discontented therewithall, they assaulted Jupiter with a fresh petition, complaining that (besides diverse mislikes otherwise) the king whom he gave was but a senselesse stocke, and unworthie of obedience: wherefore it would please him to appoint them another indued with life. Whereupon Jupiter sent the herne among them, who entring into the water, devoured up the frogs one after another: insomuch that the residue, seeing their new king so ravenouslie gobling up their fellowes, lamentablie weeping besought Jupiter to deliver them from the throte of that dragon and tyrant. But he (of purpose unchangeable) made them a flat answer, that (will they nill they) the herne should rule over them.

(4:922)

"Whereby we are taught," the chronicler concluded, "to be content when we are well and to make much of good queene Elizabeth, by whom we enjoie life and libertie" (2:1576). Again, the applied topical moral asserts that passive obedience to the queen is the best policy. In the uncensored text these two fables would have reverberated with each other in a most uncomfortable fashion, since the second replicates the narrative premise—sequential execution of the powerless—of The Sheep and the Butcher. In the censored version, where The Frogs Desiring a King appears in splendid literary isolation, it is more easily controlled by the concluding official platitudes.

Yet, as we shall see, both the original and the subsequent political history of this fable admitted that its own structure was too complicated for certain application. On the one hand it appears to argue for a divinely sanctioned monarchy and the required obedience of subjects, no matter how harsh the rule; on the other it implies a contractual relationship, whereby the frogs freely brought monarchy upon themselves; and although the gods may argue that they now have no more choice in the matter, once the contractual basis of sovereignty has raised its logical head it is hard to lay it down. In fact, the chronicler has made matters worse than they were in simpler versions of the fable by emphasizing the earlier, republican state of the frogs, "living at libertie in lakes and ponds" or "intercommunitie" (a word here recorded for the first time in English), and moving to petition "with one consent," an important political term implying a general will. All of this jars unnecessarily with the "libertie" that is finally said to derive from Elizabeth's rule; and even more puzzling, if one puts any pressure on the metaphor, is whether she was to be identified with King Log or King Herne.

The 1587 Chronicles, then, establish the terms of reference for this chapter, which will broadly survey political fabling in England during Elizabeth's reign and a little beyond. One of the first major contributions was made in Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, published in 1579 in the context of court factionalism—the competition for influence between Burghley, on one side, and the circle of Leicester, Walsingham, and Sir Philip Sidney on the other, who were associated with a more militant Protestantism than Elizabeth herself was prepared to countenance. In 1579 those tensions were exacerbated by the queen's proposed marriage to the French duke of Alencon, a member of the same family that the English held responsible for the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of the Huguenots. Dedicated to Sidney, and written (though anonymously) by Leicester's secretary, the Calender was unlikely to be neutral on these issues; though discreet it certainly had to be, given Elizabeth's extreme antipathy to any public discussion of the match. Spenser was certainly aware of the fate of a too-out-spoken critic of the queen's plans, John Stubbs, whose authorship of a pamphlet attacking the marriage had been grounds for his trial for seditious libel in October of that same year. In a notorious case of political censorship, Stubbs's pamphlet, The Goping Gulf, was burned, and its author, printer, and publisher were sentenced to lose their right hands. Mysteriously, the printer, Hugh Singleton, appears to have been reprieved; only to reappear as the printer of The Shepheardes Calender.

Although the dominant genre of the Calender is, obviously, theeclogue-book on the model of Virgil's, Spenser, through E. K., apparently intended a close and interesting relationship between pastoral and Aesopian discourse. There is a frontal emphasis on fables and fabulist thought, beginning with E. K.'s "Epistle" to the reader, where we are warned that those who do not cherish the vernacular are "like to the Mole in Aesopes fable, that being blynd her selfe, would in no wise be perswaded, that any beast could see," and also "Like to the dogge in the maunger, that him selfe can eate no hay, and yet barketh at the hungry bullock, that so faine would feede."¹⁹ The "February" eclogue contains a fable of The Oake and the Briar, which, as E. K. remarks, "he telleth as learned of Chaucer, but it is cleane in another kind, and rather like to Aesopes fables" (p. 426); and the "May" eclogue, in case the reader had failed to notice its relation to The Wolf and the Kid, is also carefully glossed as "much like to that in Aesops fables, but the Catastrophe and end is farre different" (p. 440). For good measure, E. K. inserts into the notes to "February" the remark that old men who have lost their fear of God are "lyke unto the Ape, of which is sayd in Aesops fables, that oftentimes meeting the Lyon, he was at first sore aghast and dismayed," but later lost both fear and respect (p. 427). I take this fabulist insistence to be one of Spenser's strategies for making the Calender speak to "the meaner sorte" as well as to a courtly audience, balancing his lyric praise of Elizabeth with a strong strain of popular protest. And indeed, in the "September" eclogue he anticipated Donne's reference to The Dog and the Shadow, placing it, with a self-ironizing bitterness resembling Donne's, in the mouth of a spokesman for anticlerical and social reform. "To leave the good, that I had in honde, / In hope of better, that was uncouth:" says Diggon Davy, "So lost the Dogge the fleshe in his mouth" (p. 453).

But the full-fledged fables he produced are, to put it mildly, extremely difficult to read, or at least to "apply" in the manner to which an Elizabethan schoolboy was likely to have been accustomed. In "Feb-ruary," Spenser probably started with Aesop's fable of The Bush and the Aubyer, where a woodcutter is induced by one tree to cut down its rival. In this tale of "The Oak and the Briar," however, we follow the fate of an ancient oak who is finally cut down by a "husbandman" at the urging of an upstart briar, who will ultimately suffer from the loss of shelter that the great oak had provided. Spenser's fable has therefore absorbed the tradition represented by The Hospitable Oake in Edward's reign, whereby great patrons or political protectors were envisaged as powerful yet vulnerable shade trees.²⁰ But while one of "February's" referents was plausibly Leicester's fall from influence over Elizabeth, its length and complexity of detail invoke a larger scenario. The Oak is represented in terms that would better apply to a venerable religious institution:

The Axes edge did oft turne againe,
As halfe unwilling to cutte the graine:
Seemed, the sencelesse yron dyd fear,
Or to wrong holy eld did forbeare.
For it had bene an auncient tree,
Sacred with many a mysteree,
And often crost with priestes crewe,
And often halowed with holy water dewe.
But sike fancies weren foolerie,
And broughten this Oake to this miserye.
(L1. 203-11)

Such ambivalence—half awe and half critique—is consistent with Spenser's view of the pre-Reformation church; and when the Briar finds himself without shelter, he suffers from the same weather that oppresses the poet in "January" and "December" ("The biting frost nipt his stalke dead / … And heaped snowe burdned him so sore / that nowe upright he can stand no more"). The reader's allegiances are, therefore, subtly shifted from one side to the other as the fable proceeds, although even the notion of a "side" seems too precise for the experience; and the result is no simple recognition of hero and villain, still less the assignment of blame to a single error (rivalry, ambition, inexperience, superstition) but a tragic fable of mixed allegiances and the misunderstanding of roles and values.

In "May," Spenser produced a version of the ancient fable of The Wolf and the Kid, and by substituting a fox for the adversary achieved a greater emphasis on cunning. This was appropriate to the fable's most evident goal, which was anti-Catholic satire. In one of his glosses, Spenser's mysterious commentator E. K. identifies the trinkets in the fox's basket as "the reliques and ragges of popishe superstition": and he directly asserts that the "morall of the whole tale" is "to warne the protestaunt beware, howe he geveth credit to the unfaythfyll Catholique," and cites as an example the massacre of the Huguenots, "practised of Late yeares in Fraunce by Charles the nynth." In so doing, Spenser through E. K. was also identifying the topical value of Protestant alertness at the time of the Calender's publication, since at this very moment Elizabeth was considering a marriage with Charles IX's brother.

But, as with "February," today's alert reader (and probably many of Spenser's original audience) might well experience a credibility gap between this explicit moral and the complex text they face. Neither court factionalism nor Protestant fervor seem sufficiently to motivate Spenser's innovations in this fable's plot and texture. Its power resides in the remarkable development of the domestic setting and—unusual in early modern poetry—of the mother-child dyad:

Thilke same Kidde (as I can well devise)
Was too very foolish and unwise,
For on a tyme in Sommer season,
The Gate her dame, that had good reason,
Yode forth abroade unto the greene wood,
To brouze, or play, or what shee thought good.
But for she had a motherly care
Of her young sonne, and wit to beware,
Shee set her youngling before her knee,
That was both fresh and lovely to see,
And full of favour, as kidde mought be:
His Vellet head began to shoote out,
And his wrethed homes gan newly sprout:
The blossomes of lust to bud did beginne,
And spring forth ranckly under his chinne.
My sonne (quoth she) (and with that gan weepe:
For carefull thoughts in her heart did creepe)
God blesse thee poore Orphane, as he mought me,
And send thee joy of thy jollitee.
Thy father (that word she spake with payne):
For a sigh had nigh rent her heart in twayne)
Thy father, had he lived this day.
To see the braunche of his body displaie,
How would he have joyed at this sweete sight?
But ah False Fortune such joy did him spight,
And cutte of hys dayes with untimely woe,
Betraying him into the traines of hys foe.
Now I a waylfull widdowe behight,
Of my old age have this one delight,
To see thee succeede in thy fathers steade.
(L1. 173-203)

This news, that the father of the family has already fallen prey to the Fox, creates a genuine dramatic irony, and also connects with that other classic tale of fatal heredity—The Wolf and the Lamb—at least as Caxton told it.

Yet here Spenser evidently recognized, and exploited to the full, that ambiguity resident in Aesopian tra-dition with respect to the relationship between speech and power, wit and innocence, one's sense of justice and one's sympathy for the oppressed. All the widow's warnings against opening the door to strangers are rendered useless by the histrionic skills of the Fox, who comes to the door disguised as a "poore pedler." It is not his trinkets that gain him entrance, but hig apparent physical distress:

A Biggen (handkerchief) he had got about his braine,
For in his headpeace he felt a sore payne.
His hinder heele was wrapt in a clout,
For with great cold he had gotte the gout,
There at the dore he cast me downe hys pack,
And layd him downe, and grones, Alack, Alack.
Ah deare Lord, and sweete Sainte Charitee,
That some good body woulde once pitie mee.
(L1. 242-48)

He employs, in effect, the very pathos that the fable's opening claimed in its address to the reader; and when the Kid takes pity upon him, and opens the door to his own undoing, he is only showing the sympathy that the fable assumes and encourages in its audience. A false victim claims a true one; and the reader is therefore required to rethink the role of suffering as a claim to authenticity—certainly a more serious approach to Protestant polemic than the usual focus on trinkets, and possibly an insight of more than ecclesiastical pertinence.

We are looking here at a remarkable achievement, though one remarkably underacknowledged. In his first independent publication, Spenser had apparently established an original position on the Aesopian fable, one that was both unimaginable from what had preceded him and unprecedented in terms of the freedoms he took with his models. Nor did Spenser's reputation as a fabulist rest only on the Calender. More important as precedent, at least for John Dryden, was Prosopopeia. Or Mother Hubberds Tale, which appeared under similar protocols ("Base is the style, and matter meane withal") that had indicated the Calender's populist thematics. This story of how the Fox and Ape conspire to take over the kingdom of beasts while the true ruler, the Lion, "sleeping lay in secret shade, / His Crowne and Scepter lying him beside, / And having doft for heate his dreadfull hide" (11. 951-53) was loosely based on two Aesopian originals, The Lion and the Mouse (already developed by Henryson in terms of Scottish politics) and The Ass in the Lion's Skin. Together they produced and emblem of royal negligence, which permits knaves to take over the government.

Unlike the majority of Aesop's fables, this one ends well, with the Lion recalled to duty by Mercury, and the Fox and the Ape (who has been wearing the Lion's skin) captured and punished. But there is an earlier phase of the narrative which does not offer the same optimism. The Fox and the Ape have been begging, the Ape got up like a wounded veteran of the wars. They encounter a "simple husbandman" who offers the Ape the job of shepherd on his farm, with the Fox as his sheepdog. Not surprisingly, the rogues ravage the flock, eating the lambs as fast as they are born; and when the time comes that they should "render up a reckning of their travels / Unto their master" they simply flee the area. "So was the husbandman left," concludes Spenser of this episode, "to his losse" (1. 341). The effect is of two parallel fables of governance by false deputy, the first a tragedy whose tone matches those of the fables within The Shepheardes Calender, the second a satirical comedy; and also, of two contrasting models of the lawful monarch, the good but naive husbandman, and the supreme but slothful beast of prey.²¹ It was not an encouraging pair of alternatives, nor, for all the summary justice of its conclusion, a respectful representation of the Elizabethan state.²²

But precisely because it is so expanded, at the level of detail Mother Hubberds Tale resists any single explanation. There areelements of the Fox's behavior when in power that would certainly have suggested the fiscally-prudent Burghley (whom Elizabeth herself called her Fox)²³ especially the charge (which we now know to have been unjust) that under "the cloke of thrift, and husbandry, / For to encrease the common treasures store" he had made himself wealthy, and the concomitant complaint that during his ministry the power of the great noble families had diminished:

For he no count made of Nobilitie,
Nor the wilde beasts whom armes did glorifie,
The Realmes chiefe strength and girlond of the crowne,
All these through fained crimes he thrust adowne,
Or made them dwell in darknes of disgrace:
(L1. 1183-87)

But in the earlier phase of the fable, when the tricksters first embark on their partnership, the Fox advises practices that belonged to the bottom strata of society, and justifies them by appealing to precisely that concept of liberty that Aesopian tradition, especially when governed by the Life of Aesop, could itself be seen to stand for. "Thus therefore I advise," says the Fox to the Ape:

That not to anie certaine trade or place,
Nor anie man we should our selves applie:
For why should he that is at libertie
Make himselfe bond? sith then we are free borne,
Let us all servile base subjection scorne:

Just as the appeal to pathos was transferred from the Kid to his destroyer, so here the appeal to liberty is transferred to this rapacious entrepreneur, and heard as a rationalization for further rapacity. Further, and even more skittishly, Spenser develops this specious claim in the language of sixteenth-century egalitarianism, of protest from below:

And as we bee sonnes of the world so wide,
Let us our fathers heritage divide,
And chalenge to our selves our portions dew
Of all the patrimonie, which a few
Now hold in hugger mugger in their hand,
And all the rest doo rob of good and land.
For now a few have all and all have nought,
Yet all be brethren ylike dearly bought:
There is no right in this partition,
Ne was it so by institution
Ordained first, ne by the law of Nature,
But that she gave like blessing to each creture
As well of wordly livelode as of life,
That there might be no difference nor strife,
Ne ought cald mine or thine.
(L1. 129-49)

As all of Spenser's readers would have realized, this was the language by which the Puritan protest of the 1580s and 1590s was linked, at least in official propaganda, with radical social protest from the Peasants' Revolt onward. In Richard Bancroft's Survey of the Pretended Holy Discipline, published in 1593 as anti-Puritan propaganda, the dissenters are compared to the insurrectionists of 1381:

We live in a worlde (you know) that crieth out: the first institution, the first institution: everything must be brought to the first institution. The wordes be good, if they be well applied. But something was amisse in the Priestes application of his text, being such a like saying amongest a multitude of rebelles, viz: When Adam digged and Eve spanne, who was then the Gentleman.²⁴

It is impossible to determine whether the Fox's appeal to the "institution / Ordained first" was intended really to discredit this tradition of protest and so to distance Spenser from his own earlier populism, or whether it merely warns that the ancient Edenic tropes of equality were capable of being abused by racketeers. Mother Hubberds Tale as a whole was scarcely a prudent document. Containing hints of previous censorship, it was finally published in 1591; and unsold copies of the Complaints, the volume in which it appeared, were apparently called in by the authorities.²⁵

Spenser's fables, then, are marked by contradictions: an insistence on the Aesopian base, but considerable independence from the model; a theoretical grasp of the Aesopian ideology, but as great an interest in how those beliefs may mislead; a strong indication (through what L'Estrange referred to as "Hints and Glances") that topical meaning is present, but an equally strong resistance to having that meaning easily decoded. The story that Spenser's fabulist practice tells has itself the structure of a fable: If you find yourself in the position of the Lamb or the Kid, you had better learn how to write, at least, like a Fox.

Working in precisely the same political context—the French marriage crisis and the struggles of the Leicester-Walsingham axis to retain any influence over Elizabeth's policy—Sir Philip Sidney also turned to Aesopian tradition, but with very different effect. His position was both more exposed and more protected than Spenser's, not only because he was Leicester's nephew, but also because he had taken it upon himself to write the queen a personal letter strongly advising against the marriage. It is generally assumed that Sidney's retreat to his country estate during 1580-81, there to write most of his pastoral romance, the Arcadia, was a form of political prudence, if not of actual protest; and into the center of his romance Sidney inserted a long and extremely complex neo-Aesopian fable.

The fable is presented as a song within a song within the pastoral romantic narrative frame. Its singer is Philisides, manifestly Philip Sidney's own persona, and its source, he reports, is another non-fictional person, Hubert Languet, Sidney's Huguenot friend and mentor. Some of his readers, therefore, would have expected the fable to bear some relation to the political theories of the Huguenots, who argued for a monarchy limited by a contractual relation to those (the people) who bestow on any individual the sovereign power; and also for the right of reformers or "subaltern magistrates" to depose a monarch if he breaks his contract and becomes tyrannical. Sidney's fable was, indeed, loosely based both on The Frogs Desiring a King and its biblical analogue, Jotham's fable of the trees; but it explores in a more complex way than either, at the level of political philosophy as regenerated by Machiavelli, the origins, sanctions, and disadvantages of monarchy as an institution.

Here, because we are dealing with political argument, we shall need to quote most of this long poem. Before the existence of Man, the poem claims ("Such manner time there was"), the animals all lived "freely" together:

The beasts had sure some beastly policy;
For nothing can endure where order nis.
For once the lion by the lamb did lie;
The fearful hind the leopard did kiss;
Hurtless was tiger's paw and serpent's hiss.
 This think I well: the beasts with courage clad
 Like senators a harmless empire had.
At'which, whether the others did repine
(For envy harb'reth most in feeblest hearts),
Or that they all to changing did incline
(As e'en in beasts their dams leave changing parts),
The multitude to Jove a suit imparts,
 With neighing, bleating, braying, and barking,
 Roaring, and howling, for to have a king.

Jove wisely said (for wisdom wisely says):
"O beasts, take heed what you of me desire.
Rulers will think all things made them to please,
And soon forget the swink due to their hire.
But since you will, part of my heav'nly fire
 I will you lend; the rest yourselves must give,
 That it both seen and felt with you may live."

Full glad they were, and took the naked sprite,
Which straight the earth yclothed in his clay.
The lion, heart; the ounce gave active might;
The horse, good shape; the sparrow, lust to play;
Nightingale, voice, enticing songs to say.
 Elephant gave a perfect memory;
 And parrot, ready tongue, that to apply.

The fox gave craft; the dog gave flattery;
Ass, patience; the mole, a working thought;
Eagle, high look; wolf, secret cruelty;
Monkey, sweet breath; the cow, her fair eyes brought;
The ermine, whitest skin spotted with naught;
 The sheep, mild-seeming face; climbing, the bear;
 The stag did give the harm-eschewing fear.

The hare her sleights; the cat his melancholy;
Ant, industry; and cony, skill to build;
Cranes, order; storks, appearing holy;
Chameleon, ease to change; duck, ease to yield;
Crocodile, tears which might be falsely spilled.
 Ape great thing gave, though he did mowing stand:
 The instrument of instruments, the hand.
Each beast likewise his present brings;
And (but they drad their prince they oft should want)
They all consented were to give him wings.
And ay more awe towards him for to plant,

To their own work this privilege they grant:
That from thenceforth to all eternity
No beast should freely speak, but only he.

Thus man was made; thus man their lord became;
Who at the first, wanting or hiding pride,
He did to beasts' best use his cunning frame,
With water drink, herbs meat, and naked hide,
And fellow-like let his dominion slide,
 Not in his sayings saying "I," but "we";
 As if he meant his lordship common be.

But when his seat so rooted he had found
That they now skilled not how from him to wend,
Then gan in guiltless earth full many a wound,
Iron to seek, which gainst itself should bend
To tear the bowels that good corn should send.
 But yet the common dam none did bemoan,
 Because (though hurt) they never heard her moan.

Then gan he factions in the beasts to breed;
Where helping weaker sort, the nobler beasts
(As tigers, leopards, bears and lion's seed)
Disdained with this, in deserts sought their rests;
Where famine ravin taught their hungry chests,
 That craftily he forced them to do ill;
 Which being done, he afterwards would kill

For murder done, which never erst was seen,
By those great beasts. As for the weakers' good,
He chose themselves his guarders for to been
Gainst those of might of whom in fear they stood,
As horse and dog; not great, but gentle blood.
 Blithe were the commons, cattle of the field,
 Tho when they saw their foen of greatness killed.

But they, or spent or made of slender might,
Then quickly did the meaner cattle find,
The great beams gone, the house on shoulders light;
For by and by the horse fair bits did bind;
The dog was in a collar taught his kind.
 As for the gentle birds, like case might rue
 When falcon they, and goshawk, saw in mew.

Worst fell to smaller birds, and meanest herd,
Who now his own, full like his own he used.
Yet first but wool, or feathers, off he teared;
And when they were well used to be abused,
For hungry throat their flesh with teeth he bruised;
  At length for glutton taste he did them kill;
  At last for sport their silly lives did spill.

But yet, O man, rage not beyond thy need;
Deeme it no gloire to swell in tyranny.
Thou art of blood; joy not to make things bleed.
Thou fearest death; think they are loath to die.
A plaint of guiltless hurt doth pierce the sky.
  And you, poor beasts, in patience bide your hell,
  Or know your strengths, and then you shall do well.²⁶

Like the 1587 chronicler's version of The Frogs Desiring a King, Sidney's fable tells how all the creatures had once enjoyed a well-balanced "policy," which combined aspects of the biblical peaceable kingdom with those of the Roman republic ("Like senators a harmless empire [they] had") until it occurred to them to ask Jove for a king. Jove first warns them, as Jotham did the Israelites, that monarchy will only lead to tyranny, and then accedes to their request, on the condition that if he provides the life principle, the creatures will all contribute their own characteristics to the new creation. The result is Man, a mixture of good and sinister qualities, which in combination give him absolute power. A part of the fable's effectiveness derives, I submit, from its subtle contest between conventions, the traditional attributes of the different species being reallocated so as to cross the normal boundaries between strong and weak, the benign and the untrustworthy. Traditionally monarchical symbols, the lion and the eagle (and, in the special case of Elizabeth, the ermine, symbol of purity) are combined with animals more often associated with courtiers (parrot, wolf, fox, and dog) or with the common people (industrious ant, perpetually victimized sheep). The ape provided the "Instrument of Instruments," the hand; and for the ultimate gift the creatures, who have previously all enjoyed "perfect speech," agree on a great sacrifice: "That from thenceforth to all eternity / No beast should freely speak, but only he."

It is hardly a surprise, then, when Jove's prediction is fulfilled and Man becomes a tyrant, driving away (like the Fox in Spenser's fable) the great wild beasts, forcing them, in desperation, to become predators and so susceptible to punishment; and turning those who are weaker into either his servants or his prey. This section of the poem is clearly represented as an allegory of class relations, and of the extent to which class warfare can be conceived as neither necessary nor perennial, but rather produced by stress emanating from the top of the political system. It is also clearly specific to the Elizabethan system. The distinction between those of "great" lineage who have been exiled and criminalized, and those of "gentle blood" who are employed to serve the state and to police their superiors is directly pertinent to Elizabeth's reliance on Burghley, and prophetic of her later struggle with the second earl of Essex. Indeed, Sidney's use of the term "factions" as the consequence of monarchical manipulation is a sardonic comment on what has been claimed as Elizabeth's greatest contribution to the pragmatics of rule, her ability to manage rival interest groups. This poem suggests that she actually fostered faction in order to maintain her own supremacy.

Instead, then, of the crude antithesis between the passivity of King Log and the cruelty of King Stork, Sidney provided a subtle analysis of current and competing theories of monarchy, in which divinely sanctioned power (Jove's "heavenly fire") is incorporated into an anatomy of the role such as Machiavelli might have produced, had he chosen to extend his analogy of how the prince is composed of both the lion and the fox.

Sidney resolutely extended the original fable's capacity to suggest how the theory of monarchy's acceptance is dependent on two conflicting premises, divine origin and that particular version of contract theory that supposes a people, initially capable of self-government, consenting to transfer the common sovereignty to a single figure.²⁷ While his attitude toward the "multitude" acting as such contains a measure of aristocratic disdain,²⁸ his theory of commonwealth is carried not only by the utopian "beastly policy" and "harhless empire," but also by the triple appearance of "common." So long as the monarch is uncertain of his power he "fellow-like" adopts a corporate rhetoric, "Not in his sayings saying 'I,' but 'we'; / As if he meant his lordship common be" (a sardonic gloss on the so-called "royal we"). When he turns to violence, however, his first step is to violate "the common dam," the maternal earth that he shares with the animals, who in fact preceded his late arrival on or from it; and one of his primary strategies is to persuade the "commons, cattle of the field" that it is in their interest that the great wild beasts (whom he has forced into a posture of hostility to the commons) be destroyed. Behind this satire lies an intuitive and perhaps nostalgically feudal notion in which diversity of rank would not be incompatible with peaceful cooperation, and in which the weak would be protectedrather than preyed on by the strong.

When the fable ends, Sidney remarks that its shepherd audience was bemused by "the strangeness of the tale … scanning what he should mean by it" (p. 259). Subsequent criticism has experienced the same difficulties;²⁹ but one obvious key to its interpretation was the textual reference back, at the close, to The Frogs Desiring a King. When recording that fable, Phaedrus had explained its original historical context—a coup d'etat by Pisistratus in the mid-sixth century B.C., by which Athenian democracy, already under internal strain, was temporarily ended. At the end of his version of the fable, Phaedrus had also explained that as Jove told the frogs to endure the misery of the crane, so Aesop instructed the Athenians to accept their present misfortune, lest worse befall:

…"Vos quoque, o cives," ait
"hoc sustinete, maius ne veniat, malum."

Here, clearly, is the source of Sidney's final moral also: but with a certainr difference. His fable ends with a double message, addressed to a double audience:

But yet, O man, rage not beyond thy need;
Deem it no gloire to swell in tyranny.

And you, poor beasts, in patience bide your hell,
Or know your strengths, and then you shall do well.

The traditional advice to the frogs to observe a stoical patience is now qualified: first by the warning directed to the monarch; second, by that adjectival "poor," as in Caxton's version of The Sheep and the Butcher, a candid direction of sympathy; and especially by that barely explicit threat of an alternative ("Or know your strengths") to passive obedience.

Here, then, is another kind of metafable—an overview of the system by which human failings are emblematically recognized in the animal kingdom and then, at a second level of translation, perceived to be somehow intensified, mimetically actualized, in the sphere of political action. Given the unsettled state of political theory in Europe at the end of the sixteenth century, given Sidney's own uneasy situation as one of Elizabeth's courtiers, it would have been surprising to find anywhere, let alone in a courtly poem, an unequivocal definition of an acceptable polity; but, nevertheless, the choices are distinguished with remarkable clarity, and the political issues unmistakable. Compared to Spenser's fables, Sidney's is direct. The difference is partly required by his subject, which is not the temporary shifts in the factional balance at Elizabeth's court, but political theory in the abstract; but while Spenser's response to political censorship was to create a smokescreen, Sidney's was to render articulate even the conditionsof the fable's telling. His choice of genre for this central poem in the Old Arcadia is surely to be found in his insistence on the last and greatest gift that the creatures gave their king—the renunciation of their freedom of speech. Unnecessary to the fable's plot, this gesture explains why the fable itself became a necessary ingredient of Elizabethan discourse. It is deeply connected to the theory of language built into the ancient Life of the Father of the fable, which contains three premises: the first, that the fabulist mysteriously recovers the Adamic prerogative of differentiating (naming) the creatures; the second, that he thereby recalls a still more innocent age when beasts themselves could speak;³⁰ and the third, that by making them speak again as metaphors for a brutal society he emancipates his own speech, which would otherwise remain forbidden and unfree.

That actual censorship was on Sidney's mind as the Old Arcadia took shape seems indisputable; for another poem prior to Philisides' fable seems to address it directly (as well as recalling the late medieval bird poems, especially the anonymous Parliament of Birds that De Worde had printed in the 1520s, and that Kitson had reprinted in 1565).³¹ In a debate as to how shepherds (poets) can educate their society, Geron ("old man") warns a younger colleague against imprudent critique of the powerful:

Fie, man; fie, man; what words hath thy tongue lent?

We oft are angrier with the feeble fly
For business where it pertains him not
Than with the pois'nous toads that quiet lie.
I pray thee what hath e'er the parrot got,
And yet they say he talks in great men's bow'rs?

Let swan's example siker serve for thee,
Who once all birds in sweetly singing passed,
But now to silence turned his minstrelsy.
For he would sing, but others were defaced:
The peacock's pride, the pie's pilled flattery,
Cormorant's glut, kite's spoil, kingfisher's waste,
The falcon's fierceness, sparrow's lechery,
The cuckoo's shame, the goose's good intent,
E'en turtle touched he with hypocrisy.
And worse of other more; till by assent
Of all the birds, but namely those were grieved,
Of fowls there called was a parliament.
There was the swan of dignity deprived,
And statute made he never should have voice,
Since when, I think, he hath in silence lived.³²

In January 1581, while Sidney was probably at work on his romance, the House of Lords introduced an "Act against seditious words and rumours" (23 Eliz. Cap. II), sometimes referred to as the "statute of silence." The measure was clearly in response to the French marriage negotiations and Elizabeth's insistence that they not be discussed in press or pulpit; and between this real parliament and Arcadia's fabulous one there is a more than coincidental resemblance.

Sidney, then, looked to the Aesopian fable as a medium of comment on the concept of monarchy, Spenser as a medium of criticism of its practice. Given that shift in political relations which, all over early modern Europe, centralized power in single figures controlling larger geographical units than before, both were predictable responses to what some have called the age of absolutism. Although in England monarchy was never so absolute—not subject to constitutional limitation—as was claimed at the time and has been subsequently argued by both its supporters and opponents, there were obviously phases in the reigns of all the Tudors, with the exception of Edward VI, when the relationship between sovereign and subject seemed unduly weighted in favor of the former. The period of the French marriage negotiations (1579-81) was one such juncture, the time of the Babington plot in 1586 was evidently another. And the fable's usefulness as an increasingly complex medium of political analysis (and hence of political resistance) is demonstrated in part (though the argument must here remain entirely circular) by its appearance and reappearance at moments of crisis, or at least of visible strain on the ligaments of the social body.

But sometimes, and also at moments of strain, we can witness the turn to fable for what seems a contrary purpose—by writers convinced that contemporary power relations were the best they could be. In the same year that Spenser produced The Shepheardes Calender, John Lyly, notorious for his efforts to ingratiate himself with Elizabeth, produced the second instalment of his mannered novella whose protagonist Euphues gave his name to a certain kind of stylistic excess. Licensed for the press in July 1579. Euphues and His England offered its readers an intensely nationalistic reading experience, whereby Euphues, as a visitor to England from Greece, is treated, mostly through conversation, to an idealized survey of English life and customs. And whereas in the first installment Lyly had peppered his text with what Sidney was later to call "unnatural natural history," similes derived from the plant and animal kingdom, in Euphues and His England this habit revealed its affinity with a certain kind of fabulist practice.

Euphues and His England in fact offers its readers three extended tales of the birds, the beasts, and the bees; and although only the central one is (almost) identified as a fable, all three are generically related and share the same political philosophy. And while Euphues himself introduces the first, the second and third are produced by good old Fidus of Canterbury, whose name, location, and vocation (gardener and husbandman) ostentatiously proclaim hisfunction as a reliable narrator, the same claim that Sidney made for "old Languet" and his "old true tales." The fabulist mode is established when Fidus, offering Euphues hospitality, begins apologizing for his house; to which Euphues replies with a version of the parliament of fowls:

When all the birds were appointed to meet, to talk of the Eagle, there was great contention at whose nest they should assemble, every one willing to have it at his owne home, one preferring the nobility of his birth, another the statelinesse of his building: … at last the swallow said they should come to his nest, beeing commonly of filth, which all the Birds disdaining, said: Why, thy house is nothing else but dirt. And therefore (answered the Swallow) would I have talke there of the Eagle: for being the basest, the name of an Eagle will make it the bravest.³³

Partially hidden in this deferential statement is a reference to yet another parliament of birds ("all the birds were appointed to meet, to talk of the Eagle"); but "talk of the Eagle" in a parliamentary context is the last thing that Lyly intends to recommend. For Fidus embarks on the second, much longer and more complex fable by remarking that "as Kings pastimes are no playes for every one, so their secrets, their counsels, their dealings, are not to be either scanned or enquired of any way, unlesse of those that are in the like place, or serve the like person." The tale he proceeds to tell is of uncertain status. "I cannot tell," he says, "whether it bee a Canterburie tale, or a Fable in Aesope, but prettie it is, and true":

The Foxe and the wolfe going both a filching for food, thought it best to see whether the Lion were asleepe or awake, lest beeing too bold, they should speed to badde. The Foxe entring into the Kings denne (a King I call the Lion) brought word to the Wolfe that hee was asleepe, and went himselfe to his owne kennell: the Wolfe desirous to search in the Lions denne, that hee might espie some fault, or steale some pray, entred boldly, whom the Lion caught in his pawes, and asked what he would? The sillie wolfe (an unapt terme for a Wolfe, yet fit, being in a Lions hands) anwered, that understanding by the Foxe, hee was a sleepe, he thought he might be at liberty to survay his lodging: unto whom the princely Lyon, with great disdaine, though little despight (for that there can be no envy in a King) said thus: Doest thou thinke that a Lion thy prince and governour can sleepe, though hee winke, or darest thou enquire whether hee winke or wake? … you shall both well know, and to your griefes feele, that neither the wiliness of the Foxe, nor the wildnesse of the Woolfe, ought either to see or aske, whether the Lion either sleepe or wake, bee at home or abroad, dead or alive. For this is sufficient for you to know, that there is a Lion; not, where he is, or what he doth.

(Pp. 43-44)

Lyly's fable was evidently a clever variant on the Aesopian The Lion and the Mouse, where the moral was the lion's high-minded generosity in freeing the mouse who has dared to play on his body while he sleeps; that royal magnanimity receives its reward when the mouse later frees him from the hunter's net. But it is also clear that Lyly was alert to the satirical potential of the notorious laziness of lions between hunting periods—precisely that characteristic that Spenser turned to political critique in Mother Hubberds Tale. Rather than denying its zoological credit, he bypassed the question of moral respon-sibility and translated the problem into one of political theory. All of the monarch's doings are transferred by Lyly (in a move that James I would later insist on for himself) to the territory of arcana imperii, the mysterious realm of government which is beyond criticism because it is beyond secular limitation. As old Faithful moralizes his text for Euphues, it is the subject's only duty to "understand there is a king, but what he doth, is for the gods to examine, whose ordinance he is; not for men, whose overseer he is."

And then, using as a transition a condensed version of the fable of the Body (which had so vast a tradition of political use that it will require a chapter of its own), Fidus moves on to a fully structural account of the English form of government as he understands it, by way of analogy with the commonwealth of bees drawn, or so his says, from his own experience as apiarist. The classical source here was of course not Aesop, but rather Virgil, who had devoted the fourth book of his Georgics to beekeeping, and in an extended account of the internal regulation of the hive had provided a metaphorical compliment to Augustus, which entered the Renaissance as a paradigm of effective monarchical or imperial government.³⁴

"Then how vain is it," Fidus continues, "… that the foot should neglect his office, to correct the face; or that subjects should seeke more to know what their Princes doe, then what they are? wherein they shew themselves as bad as beasts, and much worse then my Bees.… "H e then proceeds to claim that the bees choose their king and direct all their endeavors to his protection:

whom if they finde to fall, they establish again in his Throne, with no less dutie than devotion, garding him continually, as it were for fear he should miscarry, for love he should not: whom they tender with such faith and favour, that whithersoever he flieth they follow him, … If their Prince die, they know not how to live, they languish, weepe, sigh, neither intending their worke, nor keeping their old society. And that which is moost marvellous, and almost incredible: if there be any that hath disobeied his commandments, either of purpose or unwittingly, hee killeth himselfe with his own sting, as executioner of his owne stubbornnesse. The King himselfe hath his sting which hee useth rather for honour then punishment.

(Pp. 44-45)

However implausible this may be as an empirical account of apian behavior, its message is unmistakable. Lyly seeks to produce in his readers the same internalization of loyalty, of subjection to the monarch, as that which is found (he claims) in the best of the insect communities. And if this honor community is entomologically implausible, what are we supposed to think of what follows? For here the bee-king himself supervises the means of production, and thereby provides an alternative answer to the charge of monarchical indolence:

The King himselfe not idle, goeth up and downe intreating, threatning, commanding, using the counsell of a sequell, but not losing the dignitie of a prince, preferring those that labor [to] greater authoritie, & punishing those that loiter with due severity. Al which things being much admirable, yet this is most, that they are so profitable, bring unto man both honey & waxe, each so wholesome, that we all desire it, both so necessarie that we cannot misse them.

(P. 46)

In these last lines the language of natural community is particularly potent, blending as it does the novella's middle-class readership into that alluring "we all," bringing together into one "wholesome" construct authority, profit, rewards, punishments, honey, wax, needs, desires, and their gratification.

Seldom does one find so instructive an example of how, it is now often claimed, literature serves hegemony. Yet we can be reasonably sure that Lyly produced this powerful rhetorical magic as a defensive strategy, defensive against the troublesome spirits of 1579, like Spenser and Stubbs, who had taken it upon themselves to question royal policy (or perhaps, in the context of the French marriage proposal, royal desires and needs). And it is possible to detect the point at which Lyly felt defensive, to discern a slight crack in the idealizing armature where political critique might be recognized. It occurs at the point where the concept of choosing a king (the premise of Aesop's fable of the frogs) has to be given some rational, instrumental extension.

Notes

¹ For the different versions of the story, originating in the Latin Disciplina clerica of Petrus Alfonsi, see J. O. Halliwell, ed., Lydgate's Minor Poems, in Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature, 2 vols. (London: Percy Society, 1940), 2:179.

² John Lydgate, The Minor Poems, ed. H. N. MacCracken, 2 vols. (London: EETS, 1934), 2:472. It appears that Sir Thomas Wyatt remembered these lines when imprisoned by Henry VIII in 1541, subsequent to Thomas Cromwell's fall from power and influence. Wyatt wrote to his friend Sir Francis Brian: "Syghes ar my foode, drynke are my teares; / Clynkinge of fetters such musycke wolde crave"; and in another related poem, he ironically contrasted his incarcerated self to that of his own hunting birds: "Luckes, my faire falcon, and your fellowes all, / How well plesaunt yt were your libertiee!" See Sir Thomas Wyatt, Collected Poems, ed. Kenneth Muir (London, 1949), pp. 159, 160.

³ Gotthold Lessing, Abhandlungen uiber die Fabel, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1 (Berlin and Weimar, 1981), pp. 359-60. The fable in question here was The Horse, the Hunter, and the Hart (Romulus, 4:9), in which the horse "allowed itself to be bridled by the man … in order to revenge himself on the deer." As Lessing complained, this fable became allegorical by its occasion, as related by Stesichorus, "at a time when the Himerenses had made Phalaris the commander of their forces, and were about to furnish him with a body guard" (Aristotle, Rhetoric, 2:20). "All is here allegorical," Lessing complained, "but only because … the bridle [is not made applicable] to every first encroachment upon liberty, but simply to the unrestricted commandership of Phalaris."

⁴ See chapter 1, pp. 33-34.

⁵ Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London, 1970), pp. 197, 196, 194-95. These views are largely repeated by Lois Eben, John Lydgate (Boston, 1985), pp. 105-11.

⁶ Geoffrey Chaucer, Works, ed. F. N. Robinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 225-27.

⁷ Quotation from John Skelton: The Complete English Poems (London, 1983). For an argument that Skelton wrote Speke, Parott as a bid for renewed royal favor, and that he badly miscalculated Wolsey's capacity to survive, see Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 88-100.

⁸ Arthur Kinney, John Skelton: Priest as Poet (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987), pp. 15-30.

⁹ Malcolm Andrew, ed., Two Early Renaissance Bird Poems: The Harmony of Birds, The Parliament of Birds (London and Toronto, 1984), p. 59.

¹⁰ See "Howe Collingbourne was cruelly executed for making a foolishe rime," in Richard III's reign, specifically for not remembering to "Touche covertly in termes," but for writing a poem in which "The Cat, the Rat, and Lovel our Dog, / Do rule al England, under a Hog," whereof, Collingbourne complains, "the meanyng was so playne and true, / That every foole perceyved it." The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (New York, 1960), pp. 347, 349.

¹¹ For an account of the poem as an extended satire on the ministry of Burghley's son, Robert Cecil, from Donne's perspective as a supporter of Ralegh and ambivalent toward Essex, both of whom could be seen as Cecil's victims, see M. van Wyk Smith, "John Donne's Metempsychosis," Review of English Studies n.s. 24 (1973): 17-25, 141-52.

¹² For the texts, in order cited, see John Donne, Poetical Works, ed. H. J. Grierson, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1912), 1:171, 178, 78. The epigram was directed against the newssheet, Mercurius Bello-Gallicus, which Donne regarded as a source of misinformation.

¹³ For Jonson's return to the beast epic of Reynard the Fox (one branch of which was also translated by Caxton in 1481), see R. B. Parker, "Volpone and Reynard the Fox," Review of English Studies n.s. 1 (1950): 242-44. Parker provides an invaluable summary of the evolution and dispersal of the Reynard legends, and shows how Jonson's play shares the confusion of tone endemic to medieval tales "which all commentators see as a tug-of-war between an anarchic identification with the fox and a satiric condemnation of the evils and institutions he represents" (p. 35).

¹⁴ Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland 6 vols. (London, 1808; repr. New York, 1965), 4:912.

¹⁵ Lenaghan, ed., Caxton's Aesop, p. 126.

¹⁶ On this transition, and the collapse of aristocratic dissidence into passive obedience to the monarchy, see K. B. McFarlane, "The Wars of the Roses," in England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays, intro. G. L. Harriss (London, 1981), pp. 87-119, 260; and Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986).

¹⁷ Compare Holinshed, Chronicles, 4:916, on the meaning of the crowds at the execution: "although the assemblie were woonderfull great, and the traitors all goodlie personages, clothed in silkes, &c: and everie waie furnished to moove pitie … yet … there appeared no sadnesse or alteration among the people, at the mangling and quartering of their bodies."

¹⁸ See Elizabeth Story Donno, "Some Aspects of Shakespeare's Holinshed," Huntington Library Quarterly 50 (1987): 229-47.

¹⁹ Edmund Spenser, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (London, 1912), p. 417.

²⁰ See Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology (Berkeley, Calif., 1987), pp. 49-57.

²¹ While Spenser usually refers to the Lion as male, there is one line (629) in which her female sex slips through the convention.

²² In fact, these two fables are only the frame for an extended critique on Elizabethan society, including more than 100 lines of anticlerical satire, and an even longer diatribe on how knaves succeed at court and the miseries of clientage. "What hell it is," wrote Spenser, "in suing long to bide … To have thy Princes grace, yet want her Peeres" (11. 895, 900).

²³ For this long-standing interpretation, as well as a theory that the Tale was composed in two parts, one in 1579-80, the other in 1591, see Edwin Greenlaw, Studies in Spenser's Historical Allegory (Baltimore, 1932), pp. 112-24.

²⁴ Richard Bancroft, A Survey of the Pretended Holy Discipline (London, 1593), pp. 8-9.

²⁵ See H. S. V. Jones, A Spenser Handbook (New York, 1930), pp. 74-75, who lists references to the "calling-in" by Gabriel Harvey (1592), Thomas Nashe (1593), John Weever (1599), and Thomas Middleton (1604). Jones adds that the Tale was omitted from the Folio of 1611, presumably to avoid offending Burghley's son, Sir Robert Cecil, but that it reappeared in editions following Cecil's death in 1611.

²⁶ For the text see Jean Robertson, ed., The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (Oxford, 1973), pp. 254-59.

²⁷ For a clear account of this theory and its chief exponents, see J. P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-1640 (London and New York, 1986), pp. 64-85.

²⁸ There is disagreement as to Sidney's attitude toward the "commons," and especially toward popular protest, as articulated in the Arcadia. Compare Stephen Greenblatt, "Murdering Peasants," Representations 1 (1983): 1-29; and Richard M. Berrong, "Changing Depictions of Popular Revolt in Sixteenth-Century England: The Case of Sidney's Two Arcadias," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 19 (1989): 15-33.

²⁹ This fable has occasioned much scholarly dispute as to its meaning. For a recent summary of previous arguments (as well as a proposal, with which I disagree, that the fable rejects the antimonarchism of Hubert Languet), see Martin N. Raitiere, Sir Philip Sidney and Renaissance Political Theory (Pittsburgh, 1984), pp. 57-101.

³⁰ This concept Aesop himself articulates in his first fable as delivered to the Samians: in the words of the Life, the fabulist reconstructs what it was like "In elder Times when Beasts had speech."

³¹ See Andrew, ed., Two Early Renaissance Bird Poems, p. 26.

³² Sidney, Old Arcadia, pp. 78-79.

³³ John Lyly, Euphues and His England (London, 1609), p. 39. There were previous editions in 1579, 1580, 1582, 1586, 1597, 1606, and several more in the reigns of both James I and Charles I. Whether one understands such a publication history as proof of a works' popularity or of its political usefulness, it is worth noting that Euphues and His England continued to be republished long after the fashion for Euphuism had become a subject for mockery.

³⁴ Sincy Lyly shared with antiquity the belief that bees were ruled by a king, not a queen, he missed an opportunity to "apply" his natural history to Elizabeth in a gender-specific way. This opportunity was first used in the 1630s in relation to Henrietta Maria. But in Lyly's case the resulting masculinization merely matches his strategy in the fable of the lion, the wolf, and the fox (as was also the case in Mother Hubberds Tale). There seems to have been no attempt in Elizabethan fables to adapt their protagonists' sex to the special circumstances of a female monarch.