Spenser’s Heavenly Elizabeth

Providential History in The Faerie Queene

Donald Stump

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030271145
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030271152
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book reveals the queen behind Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. Placing Spenser's epic poem in the context of the tumultuous sixteenth century, Donald Stump offers a groundbreaking reading of the poem as an allegory of Elizabeth I's life. By narrating the loves and wars of an Arthurian realm that mirrors Elizabethan England, Spenser explores the crises that shaped Elizabeth's reign: her break with the pope to create a reformed English Church, her standoff with Mary, Queen of Scots, offensives against Irish rebels and Spanish troops, confrontations with assassins and foreign invaders, and the apocalyptic expectations of the English people in a time of national transformation. Brilliantly reconciling moral and historicist readings, this volume offers a major new interpretation of The Faerie Queene.

Part ISpenser’s Method and Artistry

© The Author(s) 2019

D. StumpSpenser’s Heavenly ElizabethQueenship and Powerhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27115-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction to Spenser’s Art of Royal Encomium

Donald Stump¹

(1)

Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, USA

Donald Stump

End Abstract

This study explores the relation between Edmund Spenser and the ruler he served as a provincial official and a poet for most of his adult life. Though, by his own account, he met her only once, he reflected deeply on her as a woman and a queen, depicting her from many angles in a number of imaginary characters in his great and influential romance epic, The Faerie Queene. The most celebratory of these depictions is Gloriana, a fairy monarch who never actually appears in the poem but who is praised at the opening of most of its books and mentioned occasionally along the way. She is who inspires the knights celebrated in the poem and sends them into the world to defend goodness and justice. Five lesser figures also serve as what Spenser calls “mirrours” of the queen: Una, Belphoebe, Britomart, Mercilla, and Cynthia. The sheer richness of detail and complexity of perspective created by the interplay of so many portraits of Elizabeth is difficult to comprehend, much less sort out. Few modern readers—even those with a professional interest in the poet—know the queen’s background, her life story, her theological, ethical, and political views, and the history of her age and reign in sufficient detail to grasp the implications of Spenser’s wonderfully allusive (and illusive) allegorical depictions.

My own study of Elizabeth’s life has left me with two impressions: that Spenser’s representations are remarkably well informed and astute, and that they are odd. Since their astuteness is the subject of the remainder of the book, let me focus here on their oddity, which is readily suggested by comparison with a contemporary writer who was in many ways the poet’s model.¹ Throughout his literarily brilliant but politically marginal career, Spenser looked to Sir Philip Sidney for inspiration. Like Sidney, he focused his literary interests in the genres of the complaint, the love sonnet, pastoral poetry, and the romance epic. Like Sidney, too, he spent much of his career seeking the patronage of Queen Elizabeth, hoping to gain a position of influence in her government during the years when England was taking its first steps toward its eventual prominence in the affairs of Europe and the world. And like him, he was a militant Protestant, anxious that Elizabeth should consolidate her power against conservative elements opposed to her reformation of the English Church and against the enemies besetting Protestants abroad. Given the close affinities between the two poets, the oddity is that Spenser diverged so widely from Sidney in his representations of the queen.

In his greatest work, the pastoral romance-epic Arcadia , Sidney alludes to Elizabeth in several ways, none of them flattering.² A fictional stand-in for Sidney himself—named appropriately “Philisides” to echo the sound of his name and also to call to mind the poet’s self-image in his sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella³—joins in the pastoral singing matches of the Arcadian shepherds. One of his songs recounts a dream-vision warning of dangers to the state arising from the queen’s negotiations to marry a foreigner. As Blair Worden and others have argued, the song “As I My Little Flock on Ister Bank” offers a stinging response to Elizabeth’s infatuation with a French Prince of the Blood, François Hercules, Duke of Anjou. Although Queen Elizabeth is never touched on directly, the implications of the eclog are clear. By desiring to marry a French, Catholic prince and to conceive a royal heir of divided nationality, she threatens to sacrifice the peace, freedom, and safety of her people.

Nor is Philisides’s vision of the disaster looming in the French marriage a side issue. As scholars have demonstrated, concern about the crisis pervades Arcadia .⁴ In many ways, the political situation in Greece parallels that in England in matters that were of deep concern to Sidney and the forward Protestant faction at court dominated by his uncle, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The peril, in their view, lay in the queen’s reluctance to take decisive steps to defend England from insurrection and invasion. The stages by which the orderly and peaceful state of Arcadia devolves into civil disorder are very like those that Sidney had warned Elizabeth about in a letter to her written in 1579 to dissuade her from the Anjou match. In the New Arcadia , the danger posed by the French marriage appears in the story of Queen Helen of Corinth, widely recognized as a half-concealed figure for Elizabeth.⁵

At first glance, a gulf separates Sidney’s figures of the queen from Spenser’s dazzling and adoring representations. None of Spenser’s “mirrours” of Elizabeth resembles even remotely Sidney’s Basilius, the besotted ruler of Arcadia , or his infatuated Queen Helen. Instead, we have the luminous figure of Gloriana, a divine figure shedding light on the world and inspiring the poet as one of his muses.

                                                O Goddesse heauenly bright,

Mirrour of grace and Maiestie diuine,

Great Ladie of the greatest Isle, whose light

Like Phoebus lampe throughout the world doth shine,

Shed thy faire beames into my feeble eyne,

And raise my thoughtes too humble and too vile,

To thinke of that true glorious type of thine…. (I.proem.4)

⁶

Unlike Sidney’s dark, critical depictions of the queen, Spenser’s are luminous.

That arresting contrast provides the starting point for this study. It turns out to be more difficult to explain than one might suppose. The 1580s and 1590s, when Spenser was composing The Faerie Queene, were hardly sunny. Internationally, England was subjected to a series of assassination plots against Elizabeth supported by her enemies on the continent, two major rebellions in Ireland, the collapse of a key alliance with France, and no less than three attempts to crush her regime with the overwhelming force of the Spanish Armada. War with Spain would drag on until Elizabeth’s death in 1603. Nor was the period a good one for the queen domestically. In the 1590s, England suffered bad harvests, food riots, a rebellion by Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and the disastrous effects on the economy of costly, unremitting war with Spain.

One would think that, as advocates of the forceful expansion of a Protestant sphere of influence to include all the British Isles and nearby areas of Europe, Spenser and Sidney would have seen their queen with similarly gloomy and anxious eyes. In this study, I undertake to explain the grounds for Spenser’s far more celebratory vision of her and the part she played in establishing England’s outsized role in world affairs in the centuries that followed. Though critical of her leadership in many respects, his characterizations of her are grounded in views of human nature and divine providence that differ sharply from those of his more famous and politically engaged mentor and model. I will return to the contrast between Spenser and Sidney at the end of this study.

1 Heavenly Queen: The Problem of Over-Idealization

As is so often the case with Spenser, something as seemingly simple as praise for the queen turns out to be surprisingly complex. The first difficulty is that, to modern ears, his celebrations of Elizabeth ring false because they seem overly idealized. Even judged by his own standards, as laid out in the explanatory Letter to Ralegh printed in the first installment of The Faerie Queene, they do not seem defensible. There, Spenser sets out his primary aim, which was to educate a “gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline,” a goal that he intended to pursue in both its “Ethice” and its “polliticke consideration.”⁷ Given his deeply ingrained Christian Humanism , it is difficult to reconcile that aim with the luminous depictions of Elizabeth in The Faerie Queene. Those of us who are acquainted with the details of her life and her extraordinarily accomplished but all-too-human character are likely to regard his depictions as exquisitely beautiful but misleading, if not outright false.

As I discuss in Chapter 2, the poet’s self-presentation as a teacher of ethical and political probity is difficult to reconcile with such praise, however common it may have been at the Elizabethan court. To Humanists of the poet’s stripe, to delude a monarch about her nature and capabilities was not a minor matter. In virtually all the discussions of praise most widely known to the Elizabethans, flattery was roundly condemned as demeaning to those who practiced it, dangerous to the state, and repugnant to every right-thinking person. To advise monarchs to govern humbly, temperately, and wisely was a councilor’s highest calling. To puff rulers up as if they were gods was to tempt them to trust their own impulses in ways likely to end in disaster. In holding rose-colored “mirrours” up to his queen, Spenser seems to be doing just that, exalting her as if she were a celestial being reflecting the very light of God and dispensing justice as if from the very throne of heaven. For a man like Spenser to flatter the queen in that way ought to have been unthinkable.

But was it? Everything we know about the poet suggests that he was ambitious , and that fact must give us pause. The continual, energetic crafting of a public persona that occupied him throughout his life suggests that his intent was not simply to teach, delight, and move others to virtue but also to win fame and so to influence the queen and her government. He had begun his adult career as a writer with an audacious act of self-promotion, dedicating The Shepheardes Calen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Spenser’s Method and Artistry
• Part II. Spenser’s Elizabeth
• Part III. The Faerie Queene in Context
• Back Matter