Edmund Spenser

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To Sound Her Praises: Introduction

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SOURCE: "To Sound Her Praises: Introduction," in Spenser's Faerie Queene and the Cult of Elizabeth, Barnes & Noble Books, 1983, pp. 1-28.

[In the following excerpt from a study of The Faerie Queene in relation to the cult of Elizabeth, Wells analyzes Spenser's use of allegory to honor Queen Elizabeth.]

1. The Poetry of Praise

Spenser had completed six books of The Faerie Queene when he published the Amoretti in 1595. The apologetic tone of sonnet no. 33 suggests that he probably knew that his original plans for a poem consisting of twelve books devoted to the 'priuate morali vertues', to be followed by another twelve devoted to the 'polliticke vertues',2 would never be realized. But more important than what this sonnet tells us of Spenser's state of mind is what it says concerning the purpose of his epic. As a poetic tribute to Elizabeth, The Faerie Queene was intended to 'enlarge her prayses'.

Renaissance criticism, following a tradition going back at least as far as Plato, accorded a special status to the poetry of praise.3 Puttenham, in his defence of the dignity of poetry, claims that, second only to poetry written in praise of the immortal gods, is that which honours 'the worthy gests of noble Princes.'4 However humble his own position might be, the poet could lay claim to a unique office, since he alone was able to offer the glory of immortality through verse. As Spenser himself remarks in a sonnet addressed to the Earl of Northumberland:

The sacred Muses haue made alwaies clame
To be the Nourses of nobility,
And Registres of euerlasting fame.5

In the Renaissance it was believed that the highest poetic kind was the epic, and most critics were agreed that the function of epic was essentially epideictic, that is, to display the virtues of some great man as a pattern for emulation.6 The poem which was universally held to be the supreme example of its genre was the Aeneid. Donatus, writing in the fourth century, claimed that 'If anyone wants to measure Virgil's genius, his morality, the nature of his speech, his knowledge, character, and skill in rhetoric, he must first learn whom he undertakes to praise in his poem.'7 This view of the Aeneid is repeated in Fulgentius's De Contentia Virgiliana (e. sixth century), a work which has been described as 'the most characteristic monument we possess of Vergil's celebrity during the times of Christian barbarism'.8 Although Fulgentius's commentary turns the Aeneid into something akin to a medieval allegory of Everyman in which epic combats are seen as psychomachia, the underlying conception of the poem as 'panegyrical biography'9 is one which formed the basis of most Renaissance interpretations of Virgil. As late as 1715 it was argued that

the whole Aeneis of Virgil may be said to be an allegory, if we consider Aeneas as representing Augustus Caesar and his conducting the remains of his countrymen from the ruins of Troy to a new settlement in Italy as emblematical of Augustus' modelling a new government out of the ruins of the aristocracy and establishing the Romans, after the confusion of the civil war, in a peaceable and flourishing condition."10

Such a view of the Aeneid is also substantially Spenser's. Indeed it has been claimed that 'Of all sixteenth-century epics, none better illustrates the continuity of the Fulgentius tradition than Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. '11 That Spenser himself wished The Faerie Queene to be identified with this tradition is apparent from the way he deliberately modelled his own poetic career on Virgil's example. Already in the 'October' eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender we find him alluding to the passage in the third book of the Georgics (10-30) where Virgil speaks of the heroic poem he intends to write in honour of Augustus. To Piers's suggestion that he turn from lesser matters and honour 'fayre Elisa' by singing 'of bloody Mars, of wars, of giusts', Cuddie replies that he has indeed heard of how 'Romish Tityrus'

If Spenser's choice of the pastoral mode for his apprentice work is clearly based on Virgil's example, it is well known also that he closely identified the epic poem he was anticipating in these lines with the Aeneid12

To describe The Faerie Queene as a poem of praise belonging to a long tradition of epideictic poetry is not, of course, to say anything new. Many critics have asserted what Spenser himself tells us in his letter to Ralegh, namely that The Faerie Queene was designed as a glorification of Elizabeth and the British nation.13 However, although Cain is right in saying that 'Spenser's great poem exists to praise Elizabeth',14 this does not mean that it is merely an elaborate vehicle for flattery. The purpose of epideictic poetry is essentially moral. The special nature of the responsibilities assumed by the panegyrist is perhaps best explained by Erasmus writing in 1504:

Those who believe panegyrics are nothing but flattery seem to be unaware of the purpose and aim of the extremely far-sighted men who invented this kind of composition, which consists in presenting princes with a pattern of goodness, in such a way as to reform bad rulers, improve the good, educate the boorish, reprove the erring, arouse the indolent, and cause even the hopelessly vicious to feel some inward stirrings of shame.15

In proclaiming the moral function of praise Erasmus is rehearsing a commonplace of classical and Renaissance poetics;16 he is also anticipating the treatise which he presented to his own patron twelve years later on the occasion of his appointment as counsellor to Charles V (then Archduke of Burgundy). As a speculum principis, The Education of a Christian Prince belongs to an ancient tradition of hortatory treatises on the subject of kingship.17 Although Erasmus characterizes his book as a work of praise,18 his object is an ethical one. Underlying his portrait of the Christian ruler are two principles which are also fundamental to the conception of The Faerie Queene as a mirror for Elizabeth: first, that the prince, as God's deputy on earth, is to be seen as performing a function in the hierarchy of the state analogous to that performed by God in the universal order of things (pp. 158-9), and second, that upon the moral character of the prince depends the well-being of the state (p. 157). By defining the characteristics of the ideal prince and comparing these with an image of the corrupt ruler, Erasmus is in effect creating a pattern of Christian conduct to which all men should aspire. Informing the whole book is the humanist belief in the moral value of learning. As Spenser says in The Teares of the Muses,

By knowledge wee do learne our selues to knowe,
And what to man, and what to God wee owe.

From hence wee mount aloft vnto the skie,
And looke into the Christall firmament …
(503-6)

The Faerie Queene does not offer the reader a scheme of practical education; nevertheless, as a moral poem which undertakes to instruct the reader in the nature of virtue, it testifies to the belief—central to Erasmus's thought, and indeed to the humanist movement as a whole—that knowledge brings us nearer to God. As one recent critic has said, the various books of the poem trace 'a sequence displaying the dignity of man, a progression of learning for the reader'.19

In so far as he is presenting his reader with an image of princely magnificence in the figure of Arthur, Spenser may be seen to be writing within a clearly defined tradition of treatises on kingship. But when he announces his intention of fashioning 'a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline',20 it is the courtesy book rather than the prince's mirror with which his poem may best be compared.21 Many scholars have written on Spenser's debt to the courtesy tradition and to Castiglione in particular.22 Whereas the speculum concerns itself with the virtues of the ideal prince and offers advice on the art of government, the courtesy book is less specialized in its subject matter and deals with the education and accomplishments of noblemen and courtiers. In their most elementary form Renaissance courtesy books were little more than manuals of self-improvement. However, the more serious writers of the period are unanimous in their insistence that the courtier's accomplishments are worth nothing if they are not devoted to the cause of realizing what Sir Thomas Elyot terms the 'iuste publike weale'.23 Castiglione's claim that the courtier must employ his accomplishments as a means of gaining the goodwill and favour of his prince and that he should use the influence he wins in this way to supply the prince with virtuous counsel,24 is a favourite maxim among Renaissance humanists.

The close similarities between the speculum principis and the courtesy book are illustrated in the work of Castiglione's most celebrated English imitator.25 Addressed to Henry VIII, The Boke Named the Governour is both a manual on the art of government which offers its dedicatee a portrait of the ideal ruler, and at the same time a handbook of education for the sons of English gentlemen. Of the vast number of pedagogic treaties which appeared in the sixteenth century, Elyot's book is arguably the most important so far as Spenser is concerned. Indeed it has been claimed that The Governour and The Faerie Queene 'have almost identical aims'.26 Although this is an exaggeration, it is true that Spenser, like Elyot, does combine elements of the speculum principis with certain features of the courtesy book. That Spenser saw these two functions of his poem as aspects of a single meaning is clear from his statement in the letter to Ralegh of his intentions regarding the character of Prince Arthur. As Virgil had combined features of Homer's Agamemnon and his Ulysses in the single figure of Aeneas, says Spenser, so Arthur is to be seen as a composite figure representing 'a good gouernour and a vertuous man'.27

Spenser's general intention may be summed up, then, as being to praise Elizabeth by presenting her with a portrait of the ideal ruler—a portrait which she would recognize as her own, but which would at the same time serve as a pattern of conduct for her courtiers. Summarized in this way The Faerie Queene sounds not unlike a versification of The Governour. What this account does not recognize is the political dimension of Spenser's poem. In addition to its pedagogic aspect, The Faerie Queene is a national epic whose purpose is to celebrate Queen Elizabeth as the predestined ruler of an elect nation. In this respect it has more in common with the Aeneid than with The Governour. In celebrating a national ideal Spenser, like Virgil, employs one of the favourite topoi of the epideictic poet and constructs a genealogy—part mythical and part historical—in which he traces his prince's ancestry to its supposedly divine origins. Since it is sometimes claimed that the Elizabethans were quite uncritical in their appetite for literature dealing with the mythical history of their country …., it is important to consider the status of Spenser's genealogical material, particularly with regard to his use of typology as a means of proclaiming the predestinate nature of Elizabeth's rule.

2. Allegory and Typology

In one of the commendatory verses annexed to The Faerie Queene (chosen, no doubt, for the aptness of its sentiments rather than its poetic merit) explicit comparison is made between Spenser and Virgil:

Graue Muses march in triumph and with prayses,
Our Goddesse here hath giuen you leaue to land:
And biddes this rare dispenser of your graces
Bow downe his brow vnto her sacred hand.
Desertes findes dew in that most princely doome,
In whose sweete brest are all the Muses bredde:
So did that great Augustus erst in Roome
With leaues of fame adorne his Poets hedde.
Faire be the guerdon of your Faery Queene,
Euen of the fairest that the world hath seene.28

Although Spenser never won the royal patronage which the author of these verses anticipates, his poem has much in common with Virgil's. Indeed the similarities between the Aeneid and The Faerie Queene would have appeared far more striking to the Renaissance reader than they do to us. The modern student, familiar with the idea that The Faerie Queene has a number of different levels of meaning, might possibly be surprised to be told that the Aeneid had a similar fourfold significance. But in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance it was commonly accepted that, in addition to its literal significance, Virgil's narrative embodied certain moral and political meanings. Boccaccio, for example, tells us that 'concealed within the veil' ('sub velamento latet poetico') of the story of Aeneas's abandonment of Dido are three ulterior purposes: first, to offer a universal moral truth concerning the need to subdue the destructive passions; second, to glorify Augustus by praising Aeneas's steadfast devotion to his political destiny; and third to celebrate the martial successes of the Roman people in terms of the events which prefigured these triumphs.29

Boccaccio's interpretation of Virgil is clearly based on the analogy of contemporary scriptural exegesis. But although he speaks of the poet's fourfold purpose, his method cannot properly be compared with that of a true allegorist like Aquinas. For, of the three levels of meaning which Boccaccio finds in addition to the literal significance of Virgil's narrative, it is only the first which is, strictly speaking, allegorical (in this case, tropological); the latter two are typological. The distinction is important. Where moral allegory is usually timeless and characteristically involves the use of signs—more or less arbitrary in themselves—to point to moral or spiritual truths which have a universal applicability, typology reveals a pattern in the course of history by establishing connections between events or persons which have a historical reality.30 For Boccaccio there was no more need to explain the difference between allegory and typology than there was for Spenser, writing some 300 years later. However, such a way of reading literature belongs essentially to a pre-modern culture; and the twentieth-century critic must spell out distinctions which would have been self-evident to Boccaccio's and Spenser's readers.

The literary use of typology is familiar enough to students of medieval drama.31 However, unlike the medieval writer, who is dramatizing events which—so far as he is concerned—have a historical reality, Spenser creates an imaginary world. In establishing parallels between the fictional characters who inhabit this world and the real historical person whom they prefigure, Spenser is attributing a providential significance to contemporary events in much the same way that the New Testament writer sees in the past a series of figures prognosticating Christ. But the analogy is not a true one. Where the New Testament writer concerns himself only with historical realities, Spenser creates characters which are, for the most part, purely fictional. This mingling of the fictional and the real presents critical problems of a very different nature from those associated with the miracle play. Because these problems have received scant critical attention and because, as a consequence, there is some confusion about what we mean when we speak of typology in The Faerie Queene,32 it is necessary to rehearse a subject whose general principles are by now well established.33

As an exegetical method typology originates in St Paul and other New Testament writers who interpreted certain events and persons in the Old Testament as …. prefigurations of Christ; as a method of composition, however, typology antedates the Christian era. Medieval and Renaissance commentators on the Aeneid were fully aware, as we have seen, of the way Virgil links events widely separated in time in order to show that they form steps in an historical progression culminating in the reign of Augustus.34 If the patterns of recurrence and prefiguration we find in the Aeneid bear similarities to those in the Bible, this is because they are the product of a similar view of history. Typology is essentially the product of a theory of history which sees events not simply as sequence, but as significant elements of a divine plan. Such a providential view of history is not, of course, unique to Christendom.

In praising his sovereign, Spenser, like Virgil, used typology to suggest that her reign had been anticipated or foreshadowed by events in the ancient past. Whether Virgil intended the allegorical meanings his medieval commentators found in the Aeneid we shall probably never know; with Spenser we are on surer ground. We know that, in addition to its historical aspect, The Faerie Queene is a 'continued Allegory, or darke conceit' designed to illustrate a humanist ideal of moral conduct. This mixing of allegory and typology is one of the characteristic features of the poem. On the one hand there are purely allegorical characters such as Furor, or Malbecco, who clearly have no typological significance; on the other hand there are characters like Belphoebe, whose significance is primarily typological and who tell us very little about the nature of the virtue which they supposedly represent. Between these two extremes are those characters such as Mercilla or Britomart who are both 'historical' types foreshadowing their antitype, Queen Elizabeth, and also allegorical symbols of the virtues which form the subjects of the books in which they appear.

We must be clear, however, exactly what is implied by describing a character like Britomart as a type of Queen Elizabeth. The Faerie Queene is a poem which makes extensive use of prophecy and historical parallelism. But these do not in themselves necessarily involve typology. For example, in the final stanza of the proem to Book V Spenser invokes his muse:

The terms in which Spenser addresses his 'Souerayne Goddesse' make it impossible to say whether he is speaking to Astraea or Queen Elizabeth. In fact, of course, he is doing both. Behind the familiar Elizabethan identification of the Queen with the goddess of justice lies the prophetic annunciation of Virgil's fourth Eclogue: 'iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna'. It was to these famous words that chroniclers like Richard Nicols were alluding when they hailed Elizabeth's reign as a return to the golden age:

No sooner did this Empires royall crowne
Begirt the temples of her princelie hed;
But that love-borne Astraea straight came downe
From highest heauen againe, to which in dread
Of earths unpietie before shee fled:
Well did shee know, Elizaes happie reigne
Would then renew the golden age againe.35

But if Spenser, like so many of his contemporaries, is suggesting that Elizabeth represents the fulfilment of Virgilian prophecy, that she is indeed Astraea rediviva, this does not mean that the relationship is typological. For an antitype is not a reincarnation of the type by which it has been anticipated, but a fulfilment of its hidden meaning. In a truly typological relationship type and antitype always retain their separate identities. It would be improper, therefore, to describe as typological that form of prophetic recurrence which is in fact a recapitulation, though, as we shall see, prophecy does not exclude typology.

It may help to clarify the unique relationship between type and antitype if we consider another form of reiterative relationship in The Faerie Queene which is, nevertheless, not typological. When Paridell abducts Malbecco's wife Hellenore (III, x, 1 ff.) in a crude reenactment of the tale he had been telling Britomart the previous evening (III, ix, 33-7), we scarcely need to be told by the narrator that his lover is 'a second Hellene' (13), or that the firing of Malbecco's castle recalls the sack of Troy (12). But although Paridell and Hellenore are clearly linked both by name and temperament with their notorious forbears, they are not their antitypes. In no sense can they be said to reveal the true significance of the past. Paridell the seducer and Hellenore the faithless wife are human stereotypes who tell us no more about their originals than Paris and Helen tell us about them. The relationship is simply analogical. By investing this allegory of concupiscence, infidelity and jealousy with historical echoes, Spenser is doing no more than reminding his reader that human nature is the same in all ages, and that what was capable of bringing about chaos in the past is still capable of doing so now.

Paridell, Hellenore and Malbecco are personifications of the moral evils against which Britomart is pledged to fight; as the champion of fidelity she is the allegorical antithesis of everything they represent. But when Spenser describes this 'Magnificke Virgin' (V, vii, 21) in terms which evoke her illustrious descendant, Queen Elizabeth, he is writing not as an allegorist, but as a typologist. For it is only in the distant future when another 'royall virgin'—celebrated, like Britomart, for her chastity—shall come to rule a divided world, that the true meaning of Britomart's 'perillous emprize' will be revealed (III, iii, 48-9). Although her reign has been prophesied by Merlin, Elizabeth is not a reincarnation of Britomart, but a fulfilment of the divine historical plan foreshadowed in the deeds of her heroic ancestress.

It would be wrong to suggest that The Faerie Queene cannot be understood without making these distinctions. Nevertheless, they are ones which Spenser's contemporaries regarded as significant,36 and some awareness of them may sharpen our understanding of the kind of poem The Faerie Queene is. If Spenser treats characters like Britomart, now as types of Elizabeth, now as allegorical symbols, we may reasonably assume that this is not because he was as confused as a good many of his twentieth-century readers are about the difference between typology and allegory, but because such a technique was to some extent dictated by his 'whole intention' in writing The Faerie Queene. As an epideictic poet he is attempting both to define an abstract ideal of 'vertuous and gentle discipline' as a pattern for emulation, and also to praise Queen Elizabeth as predestined ruler of a chosen people. To accomplish this latter purpose Spenser made use of two quite separate typological traditions: a classical tradition and a Christian tradition. The body of classical legend which forms part of the mythical background of The Faerie Queene is well known and need not detain us long; the Christian material, though familiar to Spenserians in principle, is deployed in a more extensive and systematic fashion than is generally recognized. In the remaining sections of this introduction I shall try to show how Spenser combines this heterogeneous material to reveal the providential nature of Elizabeth's reign.

3. The Myth of Troy

Although she is referred to only through the medium of prophecy, and then not by her own name, Queen Elizabeth nevertheless dominates The Faerie Queene in much the same way that Augustus's presence can be felt throughout the Aeneid, in spite of the fact that he never actually appears in the poem. As protagonists in absentia Augustus and Elizabeth have much in common: each is portrayed as the instrument of a providential purpose, a peace-bringer descended from the gods, who is at the same time a dispenser of ruthless justice. To enforce the parallel Spenser begins The Faerie Queene with a direct allusion to the Aeneid?37 But undue emphasis should not be given to this initial echoing of Virgil, for in the poem as a whole there is little explicit verbal parallelism. Although certain incidents, such as Duessa's journey to the underworld in Book I, canto v, for example, are loosely based on passages in the Aeneid, these parallels are not always of thematic significance, and in form the poem owes more to Ariosto and Tasso than it does to Virgil.

Spenser does, however, link his poem with the Aeneid in a more radical way. Just as Virgil, by connecting Roman history with its legendary past, had shown Augustus to be the instrument of a providential plan, so Spenser employs ancient myth to glorify Queen Elizabeth. It is, moreover, the same myth which Virgil had used to claim divine ancestry for Augustus, that Spenser uses in The Faerie Queene. In Book III, canto iii, Britomart visits the cave of Merlin where it is revealed that from her

The passage is a direct imitation of the third canto of the Orlando Furioso where Bradamante similarly learns of her Trojan ancestry and is told by Merlin of the glorious deeds of her descendants. Spenser, like Ariosto, is deliberately inviting comparison between his poem and the Aeneid. Later, in Book III, canto ix, we discover that Britomart, herself an ancestor of Elizabeth, is 'lineally extract' from Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas and founder of Troynovaunt, or London. Elizabeth is thus shown to be, like Augustus, a direct descendant of the gods through Aeneas, and her reign to be the fulfilment of a divine plan.

As it is told in The Faerie Queene the Troy story is a complex one, for instead of presenting its events in chronological order, Spenser divides his narrative into four main parts. The first part of the story dealing with the flight of Aeneas from Troy and the founding by Ascanius of a new Troy in Alba Longa, is told by Paridell to Britomart in Malbecco's castle (III, ix, 40-3). When Britomart mentions the building of a third Troy by descendants of Aeneas, Paridell recalls the details, which he had until then forgotten, of Brutus's accidental parricide, his years of self-imposed exile and his eventual conquest of Albion. For the second part of the story, dealing with Brutus's descendants, we have to turn back to Book II, canto x, where Prince Arthur reads a chronicle of British kings from Brutus to his own father Uther Pendragon. The continuation of this chronicle, beginning with Arthur's grandson and tracing the descent as far as Cadwallader, last of the British kings, is related in the form of a prophecy by Merlin in Book III, canto iii. With the coming of the Saxons and the death of Cadwallader the succession of British kings is finally broken. But Merlin prophesies that in due time the British line will be restored, that the country will be united, and that a royal virgin will reign in glorious peace. This final part of the story, dealing with the Tudor dynasty, is then retold in Book III, canto x, in the form of a history of Faeryland.

Spenser's reason for presenting the story in such a disjointed form was principally chronological: since the action of The Faerie Queene is presumed to have taken place before Arthur's accession, all later events would necessarily have to take the form of prophecy. Such, however, was the popularity in Elizabethan England of the Trojan myth that Spenser could afford to distort his narrative without risk of losing his readers.38 This popularity is not difficult to account for. By tracing his nation's ancestry to ancient Troy, the chronicler was able to show that his people were not barbarians, but had been marked out by providence for a special purpose. Since national pride is a commodity of no great rarity, it is not surprising to find that in medieval Western Europe the Trojan myth was 'everybody's game';39 as early as the seventh century, Frankish legend had spoken of a Trojan national ancestry, while closer to Spenser's own time we find Ariosto employing the same myth in his glorification of the House of Este.

In England the Trojan myth owed its currency to Geoffrey of Monmouth. Drawing on fragmentary literary sources and orally transmitted material, Geoffrey created in his Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1135) a masterpiece of imaginative literature which dominated antiquarian thought for centuries to come: 'within fifteen years of its publication not to have read it was a matter of reproach; it became a respected text-book of the Middle Ages; it was incorporated in chronicle after chronicle; it was turned into poetry; it swept away opposition with the ruthless force of a great epic …. '40 Geoffrey's chronicle of ancient British kings from Brutus to Cadwallader became the most important single source not only for medieval chronicles, but also for apologists of the Tudor right to accession. Of especial significance was Geoffrey's portrayal of Brutus as a man marked out by divine prophecy as the founder of a universal empire. When Brutus petitions the gods to reveal his destiny he is told to seek an island beyond France where giants once lived but which is now uninhabited. There he would find a land fit for his descendants, where another Troy would be built and kings would be born to whom the whole world would bow.41

The idea of the British nation as one destined for worldwide sovereignty reappears in popular Tudor literature. Among the stories added by John Higgins to the Mirror for Magistrates, for example, is the Tale of Albanact (one of Brutus's three sons), in which, following Geoffrey, the poet relates how Diana appeared to Brutus in a dream prophesying that he would establish a new kingdom in an island beyond France where he would build 'an other stately Troye':

Here of thy progenye and stocke, shall mighty kinges descende:
And vnto them as subiecte, all the worlde shall bowe and bende.42

Such a myth had its obvious political uses. It was revived by Henry VII on his accession as a way of justifying his claim to the throne. Hall records how, claiming to be able to trace his ancestry back to Cadwallader, Henry encouraged the idea that he represented a fulfilment of the ancient prophecy that a British king would return to rule the land.43 The myth was revived for similar reasons during Elizabeth's reign and became a familiar feature of the patriotic minor literature which flourished in the 1580s and 1590s.44 Chronicles from Geoffrey onwards had kept the Trojan myth alive, and it now found expression in pageants, narrative poems and plays celebrating the glory of England's Queen and tracing her ancestry back to Brutus.

When we speak of the popularity of the Trojan myth in Elizabethan England we must be clear that no historiographer worthy of the title ever accorded it the status of historical fact.45 It was antiquarians such as Leland and Churchyard and poets such as Baldwin, Peele, Warner, Nicols and of course Spenser himself who popularised the myth. In doing so they were continuing a medieval chronicle tradition in which moral utility was the writer's chief concern. Unlike the historiographer, the poet was considered to be free to adapt his historical material to suit his moral purpose. One of the most memorable passages in Sidney's Defence of Poetry deals with precisely this distinction. Where the historiographer is bound to record only 'what men have done' the poet,

Disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit.46

The poet imitates not an imperfect sensible world, but an ideal world. It is by 'feigning notable images' of virtue or vice that he is able to 'lead and draw us to as high a perfection, as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of'. It would be naive, Sidney tells us, to suppose that there ever existed so perfect a prince as Xenophon's Cyrus or so excellent a man as Virgil's Aeneas. Yet by taking the idealized heroes of mythology and literature as models of our own conduct we encourage the growth of the virtues they embody.47

When Spenser incorporated the Trojan myth in The Faerie Queene he did not wish to suggest that the British were in a literal sense descended from Troy; indeed elsewhere he speaks with scorn of those 'vaine Englishmen' who claimed that Brutus 'first conquered and inhabited this Land, it being …. impossible to proove, that there was ever any such Brutus of England ….'48 The relationship is typological: in showing that the events of Elizabeth's reign have been foreshadowed by events in the ancient world Spenser is suggesting that they are to be seen as part of a divine historical plan. Though the Troy story is dealt with only in Books II and III of The Faerie Queene, it forms an essential part of the mythico-historical background of the whole poem. Rightly to understand the historic significance that Spenser attributed to Elizabeth we must see her, like Virgil's Augustus, as a descendant of the gods, born to bring peace to a divided world.

4. Marian Iconography

Virgil's praise of Augustus in terms of the legendary ancestor by whom he is shown to have been prefigured provided a typological model for Renaissance epideictic poets. The fact that Virgil was a pagan writer did not matter. A long tradition of interpreting the enigmatic fourth Eclogue as unconscious Christian prophecy49 offered justification for regarding the empire foretold by Anchises (Aeneid, VI, 756 ff.) as preparatory for the coming of Christ, while, conversely, the birth of Christ was spoken of as heralding the return of the golden age.50 In this way Virgilian myth was assimilated to a Christian view of world history. Thus when Spenser gives his reader the sequel to the Troy story in Books II and III of The Faerie Queene and traces, in the form of prophecy, its future events as far as Elizabeth's England he is in effect extending the Christian providential view of history back into the ancient world and forward into the present. What the Trojan myth could not suggest, however, was Elizabeth's specifically Protestant destiny. To convey the idea that the British were in a particular religious sense a 'chosen and peculier people'51 Spenser drew on a popular tradition of biblical typology.

In tracing Britomart's descent from 'auncient Troian blood' (III, iii, 22), Spenser links his heroine with a familiar body of classical legend. But when he describes her genealogical tree as a

it is to a Christian typological tradition that he is alluding. The prophetic blossoming tree whose branches stretch to heaven's height (III, iii, 22) echoes the familiar image of the Virga lesse in Isaiah, XI. Owing, perhaps, to the verbal similarity of virga (rod) and virgo (virgin), the Tree of Jesse came to be identified in the Middle Ages as a type of the Virgin Mary.52 Indeed so habitual in medieval and Renaissance iconography was this interpretation of Isaiah, that to employ such a familiar image in a sixteenth-century poem was to guarantee the evocation of Marian associations. Since Britomart is herself a type of Queen Elizabeth this means that Spenser is establishing a typological connection between Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary.

It may at first seem strange to find an Elizabethan poet drawing parallels between his prince and the Catholic Queen of Heaven, more particularly since the Reformed Church of which she was Supreme Governor had been zealous to abolish what it saw as the idolatrous, Romish and hence unpatriotic veneration and invocation of the saints, especially that of the Virgin Mary. However, Spenser was not alone in making this comparison. Secularized versions of the Tree of Jesse are not uncommon in Elizabethan patriotic literature. In The Misfortunes of Arthur the ghost of Gorlois addresses the queen as

Virgilian and Christian traditions are here combined to express the idea of Elizabeth's role as predestined inaugurator of a new golden age of 'Religion, ease and health'.

The most explicit identification of Elizabeth with the Virgin of the Tree of Jesse is the illustration on the title page of Stow's Annals where the traditional iconography of the Virga Iesse has been adapted to a Tudor genealogy with Queen Elizabeth as the royal flower 'enraced', like the Blessed Virgin, in 'stocke of earthly flesh' (FQ. Ill, v, 52).54

That identification of the Queen with the Virgin Mary was a central feature of the cult of Elizabeth is well known.55 What is not widely understood is the way in which Spenser systematically exploits this typology in his characterization of most of the important regal female figures in The Faerie Queene. A review of the more important aspects of the cult of the Virgin Mary and the ascription to Elizabeth of Marian attributes will serve to show how perfectly suited this material was to Spenser's purpose.

From the time of the early Church Fathers Mary was revered in her own person as Mother of God,56 and in symbol as the Church in its true faith.57 By the end of the Middle Ages the cult of her person had grown to enormous proportions, emphasizing her quasi-divine powers and privileges as predestined Queen of heaven and hell,58 co-redeeming vanquisher of death and the devil,59 mystical bride of Christ,60 miraculous protectress, and merciful intercessor for all mankind, both in this world and at the Day of Judgement.61 Her feast days were highly popular, not least the day of her Nativity and the day of her Assumption into heaven. It was from these special powers, privileges and devotions that the Virgin Mary was firmly divested by the Church reformers in their zeal to return to the orthodoxy of the primitive Church.

The abolition of such deep-rooted beliefs could hardly be accomplished without leaving an emotional and intellectual gap in the life of Christendom. As Wilson has remarked, 'Human devotion changes more slowly than its objects shift. From 1558 to 1603 the virgin queen of England was the object of a love not dissimilar in quality from that which for centuries had warmed English hearts that looked to the virgin Queen of Heaven for all grace.'62 However, it is important to realize that the adaptation of Marian imagery to the praise of Elizabeth was rare until the mid-1570s,63 and that when it did become current its purpose was more than sentimental or merely metaphoric. Rather it is to be seen as a later extension of the very earliest attempts to identify Elizabeth as a predestined champion of the Protestant cause; as such it had a precise historical and apocalyptic function.

As soon as Elizabeth acceded to the throne she was greeted as a godly prince providentially appointed to deliver a chosen people from Antichrist. 'Let us daily call to God with lifted up hearts and hands for her preservation and long life', wrote John Aylmer in 1559 in reply to Knox's Monstrous Regiment of Women, 'that she may many years carry the sword of our defence, and therewith cut off the head of that Hydra, the Antichrist of Rome, in such sort that it may never grow again in this realm of England.'64 With the publication of Jewel's Apology of the Church of England in 1562 and of the English version of Foxe's Acts and Monuments in the following year, the predestinate nature of the role the new queen was to play—already firmly implanted in the popular mind through civic pageantry65—received the confirmation of a seemingly overwhelming weight of historical evidence. As Haller has shown, the great achievement of the Acts and Monuments was to demonstrate that 'by all the signs to be found in scripture and history the will of God was about to be fulfilled in England by a prince perfect in her obedience to her vocation ….'66

What was not apparent in the early years of Elizabeth's reign was the apocalyptic significance of her virginity. Quite apart from the consideration that to be ruled by a woman ran counter to natural law, there was much pressure on her to marry for the sake of ensuring the succession.67 But the longer Elizabeth reigned, miraculously impregnable to Catholic plots and presumptive husbands, the greater was the tendency for Protestant Elizabethans to see the adulation of their Virgin Queen as a precise and proper substitute for the cult of the Virgin Mary. 'Vivat ELIZA! for an Ave MARI!' sings Dowland,68 while Dekker (born c. 1570) declares that his own generation 'never shouted any other Aue than her name ….'69 As her reign wore on the pious hopes expressed in the allegorical pageantry of the accession-day festivities were naturally transformed into confident tributes to Elizabeth's godly statesmanship. By the 1580s it was a common belief that 'the whole course of hir Maiesties life is myraculous'.70 November 17 was fervently kept as a day of patriotic rejoicing, 'in the forme of an Holy-day',71 to celebrate the date of 'saint' Elizabeth's accession to the throne. Another day of celebration which gave particular offence to English Catholics was Elizabeth's birthday, for September 7 was also the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Thomas Holland, in a sermon for 17 November 1599, adverts to the complaint that Protestants contemptuously ignored the Virgin's nativity and 'insteede thereof, most solemnly doe celebrate the birth-day of Q. Elizabeth', even to the extent that in St Paul's Cathedral

That Antiphone or Himne that was accustomably in the end of the service song by the Quier in the honor of the blessed Virgin, is now converted (as it is reported by common fame) to the laude and honor of Queene Elizabeth, thereby to sounde her praises.72

The transference to Elizabeth of certain deep-rooted devotional habits no doubt filled an important emotional gap in the lives of her subjects. But it would be misleading to suggest that the reasons for this phenomenon were purely intuitive: the celebration, in the later years of her reign, of Elizabeth as a post-figuration of the Virgin Mary is an important but neglected ramification of the nationalistic propaganda whose essential features had been definitively established in the Acts and Monuments. From the first year of her reign, some time before Marian comparisons had begun to be made, Elizabeth was likened to the biblical Deborah who saved God's chosen race from the idolatrous heathen.73 But later in her reign, in the mid-1570s, other Old Testament analogies became popular. From that time onwards Elizabeth is frequently likened to Judith and Esther,74 both of whom were formerly types of the Virgin Mary in her conquest of the Devil;75 she is compared with the Queen of Sheba76 (another type of Mary), whose homage to Solomon symbolized the faith and worship of the true Church;77 she is seen as a daughter of King David, a virgin begotten of the Lord and espoused to God's only son to rule over Sion;78 her people are a second Israel,79 her country a second Canaan, the promised land flowing with milk and honey.80

The motive behind these comparisons is not sentimental but political. In drawing parallels between his Queen and certain Old Testament figures who are themselves types of the Virgin Mary, the panegyrist is implying that Elizabeth's royal virginity signifies the fulfilment of God's special will for his chosen people. Though the promise contained in these Old Testament figures was fulfilled in the Blessed Virgin, her life does not represent a consummation of the historical process of which it forms a part. For the antitype itself contains the promise of a future event and looks forward to the end of time and the establishment of God's kingdom on earth.81 As a post-figuration of the Virgin Mary, Elizabeth performs a crucial role in this millenial plan. For if Mary is, above all, a type of the Church, then Elizabeth's triumph over popery could be seen as the defeat of Antichrist prophesied in the Apocalypse, and the institution over which she presided as indubitably the one true Church.82

It is not surprising, therefore, that the coincidence of Elizabeth's own nativity with Mary's should have been regarded as more than a happy accident of fate. To the Protestant Elizabethan it seemed to be a divine omen, whose full import—that the entire reign of the Virgin Queen and her Anglican Church had been authorized, miraculously sustained and sanctified by divine providence—was indisputably confirmed by the date of Elizabeth's death, 24 March 1603. The fact that 'This Maiden Queen Elizabeth came into this world the Eve of the Nativity of the blessed Virgin Mary; and died on the Eve of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary'83 was a clear sign of predestination. Dekker wrote:

Shee came in with the falle of the leafe, and went away in the Spring: her life (which was dedicated to Virginitie), both beginning & closing vp a miraculous Mayden circle: for she was borne vpon a Lady Eue, and died vpon a Lady Eue.84

When Elizabeth was addressed as queen of heaven and hell,85 vanquisher of death and the devil,86 mystical bride of Christ,87 miraculous protectress and merciful intercessor,88 few educated Elizabethans would have failed to recognize the apocalyptic significance of such appellations: it was as if she had, by providential design, attained a symbolic kinship with the Virgin Mary, and so, without any impropriety, could be venerated by Protestant patriots in the terms and images reserved for the honour of the Queen of Heaven.

Nowhere is the belief that the resemblances between Elizabeth and Mary were the coherent revelations of a divine purpose clearer than in the English and Latin verses composed in commemoration of Elizabeth's death. Here we find not only quasi-Marian litanies of her titles and epithets, but also the most direct and explicit comparisons between the two women. 'Do you wish to know the reason why it was on the Eve of Lady Day that the holy Eliza ascended into heaven?' asked the anonymous author of one Latin elegy. His answer was simple:

being on the point of death she chose that day for herself because in their lives these two were as one. Mary was a Virgin, she, Elizabeth, was also; Mary was blessed; Beta was blessed among the race of women. Mary's heir was a prince, Elizabeth was the heir of a prince. Mary bore God in her womb, but Elizabeth bore God in her heart. Although in all other respects they are like twins, it is in this latter respect alone that they are not of equal rank.89

For an Elizabethan poet undertaking to vindicate his prince's claim to be the restorer of the one true Church the tradition of veneration which culminates in these memorial verses provided a vehicle of praise which was uniquely suited to his purpose. If Elizabeth's sex created serious problems for an epideictic poet writing in the heroic mode, at the same time it made available to him a form of praise which no poet had been able to use before. The reason why Spenser's use of these techniques has, on the whole, gone unnoticed is probably the fact that he often combines Marian and classical imagery in describing the same character. Belphoebe in Book II and Cynthia in the 'Mutabilitie' fragment are the most notable examples of this fusion of the Christian with the pagan. However, it is important that we distinguish between the purely metaphoric significance of the latter—the stock in trade of the epideictic poet—and the typological significance of the former. When Spenser compares Elizabeth with a classical goddess like Cynthia he is writing figuratively: he wishes to persuade us that Elizabeth possesses those virtues of which Cynthia is a personification. But when he uses Marian imagery to describe the same character he is implying that the relationship between Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary is not just an imaginary one, but a kinship of character and of providential function between two historical figures. The resemblances between them—too complete to be explained as mere coincidence—appeared to confirm the fact that Elizabeth was no ordinary ruler, but indeed a 'Prince of peace from heauen blest' (FQ, IV, proem, 4).

Marian typology thus complements the Trojan myth; together they form the background of a poem which can, in the fullest sense of the term, be described as a work of Christian humanism. Allusion to these two bodies of mythico-historical matter is by no means continuous throughout The Faerie Queene: as Virgil allows his reader occasionally to catch, as it were, a glimpse of Augustus, without his ever appearing in the Aeneid in person, so Spenser reminds his reader, at certain dramatic moments in the narrative, that the events which he is witnessing have a significance beyond their literal, or indeed their allegorical meaning—a significance which can only be perceived in its entirety within the context of a Christian humanist view of world history.

In addressing his poem to Queen Elizabeth and telling her that she may trace her own 'great auncestry' in its 'antique Image' (II, proem, 4), Spenser set himself a twofold task—a task which is perhaps best summed up by Erasmus when he claims that the purpose of the epideictic writer is to present his prince with an image of virtue, both as a pattern for emulation and as a warning against the dereliction of his sacred responsibility. The virtues which form the subjects of the six completed books of The Faerie Queene are to be understood, then, not simply as facets of a Renaissance ideal of human conduct, but as attributes of Queen Elizabeth….

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

BJRL
Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
ELH
Journal of English Literary History
ES
English Studies
JMRS
Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies
JWCI
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
MLR
Modern Language Review
PMLA
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

Notes

1 All quotations from Spenser are from The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, edited by J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt, one vol. edn (Oxford, 1924).

2 Letter to Ralegh, Smith and de Selincourt, p. 407.

3 The best modern account of the theory of praise in Renaissance literature is O. B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Westport, Conn., 1962). See also Theodore Burgess, Epideictic Literature (Chicago, 1902); A. Leigh De Neef, 'Epideictic Rhetoric and the Renaissance Lyric', JMRS, 3 (1973), 203-31; Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Donne's 'Anniversaries' and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton, 1973), pp. 15-41; James D. Garrison, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1975), pp. 1-82; Thomas H. Cain, Praise in 'The Faerie Queene' (Lincoln, Nebr., 1978), pp. 1-10; John W. O'Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450-1521 (Durham, N.C., 1979), pp. 36-76; Richard S. Peterson, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (New Haven, Conn, and London, 1981), pp. 1-43.

4 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, edited by Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1936), p. 24.

5 Smith and de Selincourt, p. 411.

6 Epideictic poetry…. means literally poetry of display. On the analogy of epideictic oratory it normally signifies poetry of praise. (Epideictic oratory is one of the three classical divisions of rhetoric; see Aristotle, Rhetoric, I, iii, 3; [Cicero?] Rhetorica ad Herennium, I, ii, 2; Cicero, De Inventione, I, v, 7; De Oratore, I, xxxi, 141; Quintilian, Institutio Oratore, III, iv; Menander Rhetor, I, i, 1-14.)

7Donati interpretationes Virgilianae, quoted by Hardison, p. 33 (Hardison's translation). Servius (c. fourth-fifth century) likewise claimed that Virgil's intention was 'to imitate Homer and to praise Augustus in terms of his ancestors' (Introduction to P. Vergilii Carmina Commentarii, quoted by D. L. Drew, The Allegory of the 'Aeneid' (Oxford, 1927), p. 98 (my translation)). On Servius as an interpreter of Virgil, see also Michael O'Connell, Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1977), pp. 25-31. As O'Connell writes: 'Servius held a position of unique authority and honor in sixteenth-century editions of Vergil. Indeed his commentary was practically inescapable by Renaissance readers of Vergil ….' (pp. 25-6).

8 Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, translated by E. F. M. Benecke (London, 1895), p. 108.

9 Hardison, p. 78.

10 John Hughes, 'An Essay on Allegorical Poetry' (1715) rpt. in Edmund Spenser: A Critical Anthology, edited by Paul J. Alpers (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 82. Cf. Dryden: 'Virgil …. designed to form a perfect prince, and would insinuate that Augustus, whom he calls Aeneas in his poem, was truly such ….', 'Dedication of the Aeneis', Essays of John Dryden, edited by W. P. Ker, 2 vols (New York, 1961), II, 179.

11 Hardison, p. 80.

12 Many scholars have written on Spenser's debt to Virgil. See in particular Merritt Y. Hughes, Virgil and Spenser (New York, 1929); Wm. Stanford Webb, 'Vergil in Spenser's Epic Theory', ELH, 4 (1937), 62-84; Josephine Waters Bennett, The Evolution of 'The Faerie Queene' (New York, 1942), pp. 6 ff.; William Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser (New York and London, 1963), pp. 117 ff.; O'Connell, pp. 23-30.

13 'In that Faery Queene I meane glory in my generall intention, but in my particular I conceiue the most excellent and glorious person of our soueraine the Queene, and her kingdome in Faery land' (Letter to Ralegh, Smith and de Selincourt, p. 407). See Edwin Greenlaw, Studies in Spenser's Historical Allegory, Johns Hopkins Monographs in Literary History, II (Baltimore, 1932); Frances Yates, 'Queen Elizabeth as Astraea', JWCI, 10 (1947), 27-82; Hardison, pp. 80-4; Frank Kermode, 'The Faerie Queene, I and V', BJRL, 47 (1964), rpt. in Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (London, 1971), p. 40; Cain, Praise in 'The Faerie Queene', passim.

14Praise in 'The Faerie Queene', p. 1.

15 Letter to Jean Desmarez, The Correspondence of Erasmus, translated by R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson, 2 vols. (Toronto, 1975), II, 81.

16 See Hardison, pp. 27-42.

17 For discussions of the speculum principis tradition see John E. Mason, Gentlefolk in the Making: Studies in the History of English Courtesy Literature and Related Topics from 1531-1774 (Philadelphia, 1935), pp. 10-11; Lester K. Born, introduction to a translated edition of Erasmus's Education of a Christian Prince, Columbia University Records of Civilisation, XXVII (New York, 1936), pp. 44-130.

18 Dedicatory Epistle to The Education of a Christian Prince, edited by Born, pp. 135-6.

19 Helena Shire, A Preface to Spenser (London, 1978), p. 84.

20 Letter to Ralegh, Smith and de Selincourt, p. 407.

21 The standard works on the Renaissance courtesy book are Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, XIV (Urbana, I11., 1929) and Mason, Gentlefolk in the Making.

22 See in particular Mohinimohan Bhattacherje, Studies in Spenser (Calcutta, 1929) extract rpt. in The Works of Edmund Spenser, Variorum edition, edited by Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, Frederick Morgan Padelford and Ray Heffner, 10 vols (Baltimore, 1932-49), Books VI and VII, 328-33; H. S. V. Jones, A Spenser Handbook (New York, 1930), pp. 287-92; A. C. Judson, 'Spenser's Theory of Courtesy', PMLA, 47 (1932), 122-36; Fritz Caspari, Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England (Chicago, 1954), pp. 176-80.

23 'Proheme' to The Boke Named the Governor (1531), edited by Foster Watson, Everyman edition (London, 1907), p. xxxi. For further discussion of this point see Robin Headlam Wells, 'Spenser and the Courtesy Tradition: Form and Meaning in the Sixth Book of The Faerie Queene', ES, 58 (1977), 226-8.

24The Book of the Courtier, translated by Sir Thomas Hoby, Everyman edition (1928; rpt. London, 1966), pp. 260-1.

25 On Elyot's debt to Castiglione and the differences as well as similarities between The Courtier and The Governour see John M. Major, Sir Thomas Elyot and Renaissance Humanism (Lincoln, Nebr., 1964), pp. 61-76.

26 Caspari, p. 183.

27 Smith and de Selincourt, p. 407.

28 Smith and de Selincourt, p. 409.

29Genealogie Deorum Gentilium Libri, edited by Vincenzo Romano, Opere, 7 vols (Bari, 1928-51), VII, 721-3. On Boccaccio's influence in Renaissance England see Charles G. Osgood (ed.), Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio's 'Genealogie Deorum Gentilium' (1930; rpt. Indianapolis, 1956), p. xliv.

30 It was the arbitrary nature of much medieval interpretation of the Bible which led to the condemnation of this form of hermeneutics by Reformation exegetes. For the Protestant seeking the one true sense of Scripture, allegorists of the school of Philo were held in deep suspicion because they dealt with arcana. The typologist, on the other hand, sought only to reveal an aspect of the literal meaning of sacred texts. (See Lewalski, pp. 150-6. See also Philip Rollinson, Classical Theories of Allegory and Christian Culture (Pittsburg and Brighton, 1981), pp. 29-86.)

31 See V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (London, 1966), pp. 63 ff.

32 In one of the fullest of the rare discussions of typology in The Faerie Queene Angus Fletcher consistently and wrongly equates typology not only with prophecy, but with parody and literary parallelism of the most general kind (The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (Chicago, 1971), pp. 57-132). To say that 'Insofar as Book II seems grossly analogous to Book I it has always been read in a typological way ….' (p. 84) or that the names of the rivers attending the marriage of the Thames and the Medway in Book IV 'Come from the matrix of Ovidian typology' (p. 96) does more to obscure the meaning of typology than to clarify it.

33 The most scholarly modern discussion of typology is still Erich Auerbach's 'Figura' in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York, 1959), pp. 11-76. See also Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946; rpt. New York, 1953), pp. 13-14; 42-3; 64-6; Austin Farrer, 'Typology', The Expository Times, 67 (1956), 228-31; K. J. Woollcombe, 'The Biblical Origins and Patristic Development of Typology' in Essays on Typology, edited by G. W. H. Lampe and K. J. Woollcombe (London, 1957), pp. 39-75; Jean Danielou S. J., From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers, translated by Dom Wulstan Hibberd (London, 1960), pp. 1-7 and passim; Thomas M. Davis, 'The Tradition of Puritan Typology', Early American Literature, 5 (1970), 1-50, rpt. in Typology and Early American Literature, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch (Amherst, Mass., 1972), pp. 11-45; John MacQueen, Allegory (London, 1970), pp. 18-23; Karlfried Froehlich, '"Always to keep to the Literal Sense in Holy Scripture Means to kill One's Soul": The State of Biblical Hermeneutics at the Beginning of the Fifteenth Century' in Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present, edited by Earl Miner (Princeton, 1977), pp. 20-48; Mason I. Lowance, Jr., The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists (Cambridge, Mass, and London, 1980), pp. 13-27.

In recent years there have appeared some outstanding studies of typology in literature. See in particular A. C. Charity, Events and their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante (Cambridge, 1966); Stephen Manning, 'Scriptural Exegesis and the Literary Critic', Early American Literature, 5 (1970), 51-73 rpt. in Bercovitch, pp. 47-66; Lewalski, Donne's 'Anniversaries ', pp. 149-58; Robert Hollander, 'Typology and Secular Literature: Some Medieval Problems and Examples' in Miner, pp. 3-19; Steven N. Zwicker, 'Politics and Panegyric: The Figural Mode from Marvell to Pope' in Miner, pp. 115-46.

34 The first modern critic to draw attention to this aspect of the Aeneid is Drew, The Allegory of the 'Aeneid', p. 4. See also Hollander, 'Typology and Secular Literature', p. 6.

35 Richard Nicols, Englands Eliza: or The Victoriovs and Trivmphant Reigne of that Virgin Empresse of Sacred Memorie, ELIZABETH …. printed in A Mirovr for Magistrates, edited by John Higgins (London, 1610), p. 784.

36 See Lewalski, pp. 150-8.

37 Spenser's edition, like all Renaissance editions of the Aeneid, began, as Nelson reminds us (p. 117), not with the words 'Arma virumque cano ….' but:

Ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus avena
Carmen, et egressus silvis, vicina coegi
Ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono
Gratum opus agricolis: at nunc horrentia Martis
Arma virumque cano …

38 For discussions of the Trojan myth from a literary point of view see A. E. Parsons, "The Trojan Legend in England', MLR, 24 (1929), 253-64, 394-408 and Greenlaw, Studies in Spenser's Historical Allegory, pp. 1-58. T. D. Kenrick (British Antiquity (London, 1950), passim), and F. J. Levy (Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, 1967), pp. 65-6) consider the myth from the points of view of the Tudor antiquarian and historian respectively.

39 Kenrick, p. 3.

40 Kenrick, p. 7.

41

Brute sub occasu solistrans gallica regna.
Insula in occeano est habitata gigantibus olim.
Nunc deserta quidem gentibus apta tuis.
Illa tibi fietque tuis locus aptus aeuum.
Hec erit & natis attera troia tuis.
Hie de prole tua reges nascentur & ipsis.
Totius terrae subditus orbis erit.

(The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, edited by Acton Griscom (London, 1929), p. 239.)

42Parts Added to The Mirror for Magistrates, edited by Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge, 1946), p. 55.

43The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke, Beeyng, Long in Continual Discension for the Crowne of this Noble Realme, with all the Actes Done in Bothe the Tymes of the Princes …. (1548; rpt. London, 1809), p. 423.

44 The myth was also revived on James I's accession. See Charles Bowie Millican, Spenser and The Table Round, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, VIII (Cambridge, Mass., 1932), pp. 127-41 and Glynne Wickham, Shakespeare's Dramatic Heritage (London, 1969), pp. 250-8.

45 See Appendix, 'Polydore Vergil and English Historiography'.

46A Defence of Poetry, Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford, 1973), p. 78.

47 Sidney, p. 79.

48A View of the Present State of Ireland, Variorum Spenser, The Prose Works (1949), edited by Rudolf Gottfried, p. 82.

49 See Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, pp. 99-101; Yates, 'Queen Elizabeth as Astraea', pp. 32-3; Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London, 1976), pp. 264-5.

50 Lydgate, for example, writes, 'Sythe [Christ] is borne with so fayre a face, / The golden worlde makying to retourne, / The worlde of pece, the kyngdome of Satourne ….' (Life of Our Lady, edited by Joseph A. Lauritis, Ralph A. Klinefelter and Vernon F. Gallagher, Duquesne Studies in Philosophy, II (Pittsburg, 1961), p. 533).

51 John Lyly, Euphues' Glass for Europe, The Complete Works of John Lyly, edited by R. Warwick Bond, 3 vols (Oxford, 1902), II, 205.

52 See Arthur Watson, The Early Iconography of the Tree of Jesse (Oxford, 1934). In medieval Marian literature the Virgin Mary is sometimes compared, as empress, with the most illustrious pagan rulers of the ancient world and her royal lineage with theirs. See, for example, The Myroure of oure Ladye, edited by John Henry Blunt, Early English Text Society (London, 1873), pp. 216, 258-9; John Lydgate, Life of Our Lady, pp. 252-3. In constructing a mythical genealogy for Queen Elizabeth, Spenser conflates the pagan with the Christian.

53 Quoted by Elkin Calhoun Wilson, England's Eliza, Harvard Studies in English, XX (1939; rpt. London, 1966), p. 103. Elizabeth is similarly described as a 'matchlesse flower' springing from 'the Royall Garden of a King' in Bacon's prophecy from Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (see Wilson, pp. 103-4).

54 The same illustration is used in the 1580 edition of the Annals, entitled The Chronicles of England.

55 See Yates, 'Queen Elizabeth as Astraea', pp. 74-5; John Buxton, Elizabethan Taste (London, 1963), p. 50; Jean Wilson, Entertainments for Elizabeth I (Woodbridge, 1980), pp. 21-2.

56 See the New Catholic Encyclopaedia (Washington, D.C., 1967) under 'Mother of God'.

57 See Warner, pp. 104-5.

58 See Émile Mâle, Religious Art in France: XIII Century, translated by Dora Nussey (London, 1913), p. 235.

59 See Mirella Levi D'Ancona, The Iconography of the Immaculate Conception in the Middles Ages and Early Renaissance, Monographs on Archaeology and Fine Arts sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America and the College Art Association of America, VII (New York, 1957), pp. 20-8, 32-3 and Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1968), pp. 121-3.

60 See Warner, pp. 121-33, 247. The imagery is drawn from the Canticles and the Apocalypse, XXI, 2.

61 See D'Ancona, pp. 34-5; Mâle, pp. 23-66; Woolf, pp. 123-4.

62 Wilson, England's Eliza, p. 215. Much of the illustrative material contained in the following paragraphs is taken from Wilson's invaluable compilation of Elizabethan panegyric. Although Wilson discusses the Elizabethan habit of comparing the Queen with the Virgin Mary in a chapter somewhat obliquely entitled 'Diana', many Marian analogies are to be found in other chapters, often in a form whose significance was apparently not recognised by him.

63 See Wilson, passim.

64An Harborowe for faithfull and true subjectes (1559), quoted by William Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London, 1963), p. 88.

65 At the royal entry of 1558 Elizabeth was represented as Deborah, judge and restorer of Israel, 'sent / From Heaven, a long comfort to us thy subjectes all'. See The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, edited by John Nichols, 3 vols (1788-1805; rpt. London, 1823), I, 56.

66 Haller, p. 225.

67 See J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth (London, 1934), Chs. V, XV.

68The Second Book of Airs (1600) (quoted by Wilson, p. 206).

69 Thomas Dekker, The Wonderful! Year e (1603) (quoted by Wilson, p. 393).

70 Henri Estienne, The Stage of Popish toyes (1581) (quoted by Wilson, p. 225). Cf. also Thomas Bentley, The monument of matrones, 'The first Chapter of the HEAST', reproduced by Wilson in a plate facing p. 220: God has 'miraculouslie deliuered [Elizabeth] out of so manie & so great dangers ….' In her ageless virginity, too, she is 'Heauens miracle' (Histriomastix (c. 1589), quoted by Wilson, p. 109). For the Virgin Mary's agelessness see Warner, p. 95.

71 Thomas Holland, A sermon preached at Pauls in London (1599) (quoted by Wilson, p. 223, n. 100).

72 Quoted by Wilson, pp. 221-2.

73 See above, note 65.

74 Cf. Thomas Deloney, The ouerthrow of proud Holofornes, and the triumph of vertuous Queene Iudith (1588): 'How often hath our Iudith sau'd, / and kept vs from decay: / Gainst Holofernes, Deuill and Pope ….' (quoted by Wilson, p. 44). For other examples of Elizabeth as Judith see Wilson, pp. 36, 81, 185, 372, 380. As with Judith, analogies between Elizabeth and Esther, who preserved her people against the plots of Haman, were especially popular after the defeat of the Armada. For examples see Wilson, pp. 81, 101 n. 27, 185, 376, 380.

75 See Woolf, p. 285.

76 Thomas Holland's sermon for 17 November 1599 compares Elizabeth ('Regia Virgo') with the Queen of Sheba (see Wilson, p. 223, n. 100).

77 See Mâle, p. 157.

78 In Thomas Bentley's The Monument of matrones God addresses Elizabeth in the following words: 'Elizabeth, thou Virgin mine, the KINGS Daughter, and fairest among women; most full of beautie and maiestie: attend a litle to my Heast, and marke what I shall say. Thou art my Daughter in deede, this daie haue I begotten thee, and espoused thee to thy king CHRIST, my Sonne; crowned thee with my gifts, and appointed thee QVEENE, to reigne vpon my holie mount Zion' (reproduced by Wilson in a plate facing p. 220).

79 In The monument of matrones God declares to Elizabeth: '[I have] annointed thee with holie oile, to be the Queene, the Mother, and the Nursse of my people in Israel ….' (Wilson, plate facing p. 220). Lyly speaks of England as 'a new Israel' in Euphues' Glass for Europe, p. 205.

80 See the poems extracted by Wilson, pp. 376, 387.

81 Isabel Rivers is misleading when she writes: 'the antitype once and for all fulfils the type and the meaning hidden in it' (Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry (London, 1979), p. 149). As Auerbach argues, both type and antitype 'have something provisional and incomplete about them; they point to one another and both point to something in the future, something still to come, which will be the actual, real, and definitive event' ('Figura', p. 58).

82 Interpretations of the Apocalypse as an allegorical prophecy of the struggle between the English Protestants and their persecutors were common in the sixteenth century….

83 Memorial inscription in Westminster Abbey cited by Buxton, p. 51. Buxton notes that the 'Lady Chapels which their grandfathers had built on to the east end of English churches were now replaced by …. secular shrines for their devotion to the Queen' (p. 50).

84The Wonderfull Yeare (quoted by Wilson, pp. 220-1).

85 In Dekker's Old Fortunatus (1599) it is claimed of Eliza that 'heau'n and hell her power obey' (quoted by Wilson, p. 116).

86 In Idea the Shepheards Garland (1593) Drayton depicts Elizabeth as the Marian composite of the Second Eve, trampling the serpent of Eden under her heel (Genesis, III, 15), and the woman of the Apocalypse threatened by the beast or dragon with seven heads (Revelation, XII, 3-4) when he writes 'And thy large empyre stretch her armes from east unto the west, / And thou under thy feet mayst tread, that foule seven-headed beast' (quoted by Wilson, p. 146). The seven-headed beast is to be interpreted in regular Protestant fashion as the papacy. See, for example Bale's Image of Both Churches. In his paraphrase of Revelation, XII, 3 Bale writes, 'this is the very papacy here in Europe, which is the general antichrist of all the whole world almost' (Select Works of John Bale, edited by Henry Christmas, Parker Society Reprints (Cambridge, 1849), p. 407). On the traditional conflation of Genesis, III, 15 with Revelation, XII, 3-4 see Warner, pp. 244-6.

87 See above, note 78.

88 In a ballad of 1584 celebrating her triumph over Catholic plots, Elizabeth, the 'pearle of princes' and 'renowned virgin queen' is represented as a protector of her loyal followers from the rod of God's vengeance for sin (see Wilson, pp. 32-4). On the Virgin Mary as protecting intercessor see Louis Réau, Iconographie De L 'Art Chrétien, 6 vols. (Paris, 1955-9), III (1957), 116-17.

89

Scire cupis causam pridie cur, sacra, diei
Virginis, ad superas scandit Elisa domus?
Disce brevi: moritura diem sibi legerat istum,
Caetera quod paribus, par sit vtrisq; dies.
Virgo Maria fuit, fuit ilia: beata Maria,
Inter foemineum Beta beata genus.
Haeres huic princeps fuit, altera principis haeres,
Haec vtero gessit, corde sed illa Deum.
Caetera cum similes, cum caetera poeme gemellae,
Hoc vno parilem non habuere statum …

(Lines from an anthology of Latin funeral verses published by Oxford University in 1603 (quoted by Wilson, p. 382).)

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