Research Paper - UCLA Library

Elizabeth in The Faerie Queene as an effort to give the queen a public and royal proxy in his
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poem. Spenser’s Gloriana represents a unified public and private identity that is impersonal in a
way because as the fairy queen never leaves the realm of allegory to become a real character in
her own right. While other proxies for Elizabeth in the epic, such as Britomart and Belphoebe,
are actively involved in the plot, Gloriana remains far away at court, removed from the
immediate happenings of the narrative. However, the fairy queen’s presence is still felt
throughout The Faerie Queene. As A.C. Hamilton puts it, Spenser’s Gloriana is “part of the
tradition of protagonists whose influence on the action of their poetic world is manifest through a
kind of negative capability: by their absence or uninvolvement, or through the indirect influence
of a god or supernatural force” (Hamilton 333).
This characterization of Gloriana is particularly useful for our understanding of
Middleton’s usage of the same nickname in The Revenger’s Tragedy. Middleton’s Gloriana
exhibits a similar “negative capability” as the dead fiancé of Vindice, the protagonist. Although
she is unable to act or speak for herself, her presence in the play as well as Vindice’s purposeful
usage of her corpse to get revenge on her murderer make the dead Gloriana an important driving
force throughout the work. Given the enormous popularity of The Faerie Queene during the
1590s, Middleton would most certainly have been familiar with both the power context and
subtext of the nickname.
In naming Vindice’s dead lover Gloriana, I argue that Middleton not only invokes the
death of the real Queen of England just three years prior, but also subverts the mystical,
legendary image of Elizabeth I. While scholars commonly assume the murdered Gloriana in The
Revenger’s Tragedy to represent the consequences of the corrupt and licentious court of the
newly crowned James I, the timing of being the new king’s ascension and the production of the