THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

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political weakness implicit in the rule of a woman who had been declared illegitimate by her father’s Parliament, and
who had been formally excommunicated by the Pope in 1570, was countered by an orchestrated revival of the pomps
and principles of medieval chivalry and by annual Accession Day jousts in celebration of Elizabeth as the queen of
romance and the fount of honour. Even the inevitable process of human ageing was ignored not simply by poets who
professed to see an eternally youthful nymph, but by a royal Council that in 1563 drafted a proclamation forbidding
further portraits of the monarch until an approved pattern of representation had been evolved. That pattern was to
exhibit the splendour of the Virgin Queen in a series of hieratic painted images showing a sumptuous but
depersonalized figure triumphing as a jewel-encrusted imperial artefact.
Elizabeth fashioned herself in her chosen roles as brilliantly and as self-consciously as her faithful courtier Ralegh
acted out his. As an astute, wary, and wily Renaissance politician she readily recognized the intermediary influence of
secular icons. She accepted the flattering addresses of courtly poets and ideologically approved painters as assiduously
as she submitted herself to the equally flattering arts of her maids of honour, her cosmeticians, her wig-makers, and
her dress-designers. She showed herself to her people ostentatiously and theatrically and, when occasion demanded,
she was a master of emphatic assertions of royal dignity, velvet-gloved menaces, golden promises, and fine words.
When, for example, in 1563 uncertainties about the succession to the throne troubled Parliament, she maternally
assured members that ‘though after my death you may have many stepdames, yet shall you never have a more natural
mother than I mean to be unto you all’. The Queen, who liked to dwell on the convenient idea that she was ‘married’
to England, proclaimed to the Commons towards the end of her reign that ‘there will never Queen sit in my seat with
more zeal to my country, care to my subjects, and that will sooner with willingness yield and venture her life for your
good and safety than myself. And though you have had and may have many princes more mighty and wise sitting in
this seat, yet you never had or shall have any that will be more careful and loving’. Perhaps her supreme moment of
calculated theatrical bravura was her appropriately costumed address to her troops at Tilbury in 1588 as the Spanish
Armada threatened the shores of her kingdom. Elizabeth appeared on horseback armed in a steel breastplate and
attended by a page bearing a white-plumed helmet. As she announced in her speech, though she knew she had ‘the
body but of a weak and feeble Woman’, she had ‘the heart and stomach of a King, and of a King of England too, and I
think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any Prince of Europe should dare invade the Borders of my Realm’.
The image of the eloquent and armour-plated Elizabeth of 1588 may well have contributed to the most
conspicuous of many tributes to the Queen in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, that of the figure of the warrior
virgin, Britomart. Although Spenser (c. 1552-99) had modelled Britomart on a parallel figure in Ariosto’s Orlando
Furioso and had adapted her name from that of a
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character in a poem by Virgil, he was also anxious to suggest to his readers that here was a truly British heroine who
had actively assumed the port of Mars. Elizabeth is effectively present in each of the six massive books of The Faerie
Queene. She is the ‘Magnificent Empresse’ to whom the poem is dedicated (or, rather, ‘consecrated’); she is
Gloriana, ‘that greatest Glorious Quene of Faerie lond’, who is the fount of chivalry, the ‘flowre of grace and
chastitie’, and the ultimate focus of each of the knightly quests that Spenser sets out to describe; she is the chaste
Belphoebe who puts Braggadocchio to flight in Book II and who rescues Amoret from Corflambo in Book IV; above
all, her qualities are to be recognized as informing and inspiring the complex expositions of ‘morall vertue’ pursued
as the poem develops towards its intended (but unrealized) climax. In the first three books, published in 1590 (the
thirty-first year of the Queen’s reign), her dual dignity as Head of State and as Supreme Governor of the Church of
England is honoured in allegorical explorations of Holiness, Temperance, and Chastity. The second three books,
published in 1596, treat the virtues of Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy, while the incomplete seventh book
(represented only by the two so-called ‘Mutabilitie Cantos’) would have dealt with Constancy, probably as a reflection
on the Queen’s personal motto, semper eadem.
Spenser’s grand original scheme for a vast poem in twelve books, each of which was to describe the ‘severall
adventures’ undertaken by knights and knightly dames in honour of the twelve days of Gloriana’s annual feast, had
been outlined in a letter of January 1589 addressed to Ralegh and published as a Preface to the poem. Gloriana was to
be identified with ‘the most excellent and glorious person of our sovereine’, and the living Queen’s virtues were also
to be ‘shadowed’ in the thoughts, words, and deeds of the imagined heroes and heroines who sought the faerie court.
Spenser stressed to Ralegh that his poem stood in the epic tradition forged anciently by Homer and Virgil and latterly
in Italy by Ariosto and Tasso. Like Virgil, the martial opening lines of whose Aeneid were echoed in his own first
canto, Spenser was determined to suggest that a modern political settlement was to be seen as legitimized by reference
to the mythical ‘Trojan’ past. His Britomart is descended from ‘noble Britons sprong from Trojans bold' and in canto
x of Book II his Sir Guyon discovers volumes concerned with the ‘Antiquitie of Faerie lond’ and is enthralled by the