Abstract
Focusing on prophecies in the Book of Revelation , this chapter explores the possibility that Spenser thought Elizabeth was fulfilling prophecies of the End Times, acting as St. John’s Woman Clothed with the Sun, mother of the Rider on the White Horse , a figure traditionally associated with Christ’s Second Coming . To identify the Rider with Redcrosse in his defeat of the dragon and with Prince Arthur in his later rescue of Belge is, however, to mistake Spenser for a follower of earlier English Protestant polemicists such as Bale, Foxe, and Bullinger, who saw the unfolding of the End Times as linear and imminent. The apocalyptic passages in The Faerie Queene align better with the recursive and temporally indeterminate views of early Latin Fathers, as synthesized by Augustine.
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Notes
- 1.
A rare, early glimpse of the queen’s views of the apocalypse appears in her first published work, A Godly Medytatyon of the Christen Sowl, which translates Marguerite of Navarre’s religious poem Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (Mirror of the Sinful Soul). Elizabeth’s mentor and editor, John Bale, includes a woodcut of her with a Bible in her hand, kneeling before the risen Christ represented in his resplendent glory as the sun. This, as Patrick Collinson remarks, “was to tap a rich vein of scriptural and especially apocalyptic imagery and metaphor … most significantly and prophetically,… the Woman Clothed with the Sun .” See “Windows in a Woman’s Soul: Questions about the Religion of Queen Elizabeth,” in Elizabethan Essays, by Patrick Collinson (London: Humbledon, 2003), 87–118; reprinted in Elizabeth I and Her Age: Authoritative Texts, Commentary, and Criticism. A Norton Critical Edition, edited by Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), Felch, 696–711, quoted from 703.
- 2.
Reprinted in Stump and Felch, 310.
- 3.
Matt. 24:6–9, 14. For a possible scriptural source for Elizabeth’s view of England as a “receptacle to Thy afflicted Church,” see also 24:37–38, which promises that a vessel will be provided for the redeemed, as in the day of Noah.
- 4.
Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in “The Faerie Queene” (Memphis, TN: Memphis State University Press, 1976), 61–100. On the traditions of interpretation available to Spenser in the sixteenth century, see Katherine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain 1530–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); and Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth Century Apocalypticism, Milleniariianism and the English Reformation from John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman (Appleford: Sutton Courtney Press, 1978).
- 5.
See Kenneth Borris, Spenser’s Poetics of Prophecy in “The Faerie Queene” V (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1990), 21.
- 6.
“Spenser-Harvey Correspondence,” in Elizabethan Critical Essays, edited by G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 1.115.
- 7.
Richard Mallett, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 143–68. Andrew Escobedo qualifies Mallett’s position, seeing in The Faerie Queene English exceptionalism and the expectation of great national achievement before the end of the world, but arguing that Spenser is not otherwise a millenarian. See Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 113–40.
- 8.
Joseph Wittreich, “Apocalypse,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, edited by Hamilton, 46–48; Florence Sandler, “The Faerie Queene: An Elizabethan Apocalypse,” in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, edited by C.A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 160–62.
- 9.
Borris, 9, 33, 45–46, 57–61, and 66; Mallett, 143–68; Escobedo, 113, 119–34.
- 10.
Borris, 10.
- 11.
Donald Stump, “A Slow Return to Eden: Spenser and Women’s Rule,” English Literary Renaissance 29 (1999): 401–21.
- 12.
See John Watkins, “Spenser’s Poetry and the Apocalypse,” in Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 90–101.
- 13.
Here and throughout, I follow the facsimile of the Geneva translation of the Bible, edited by Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).
- 14.
Rev. 9:11, Geneva note.
- 15.
As A.C. Hamilton has pointed out, Errour is the prototype of Duessa , with her woman’s face and upper body and monstrous nether parts (ii.40–41 note). Both are, in turn, representations of the worldly beauty and religious deformity of the late-medieval Catholic Church.
- 16.
Compare Rev. 12:15, FQ I.i.20.
- 17.
16:13n. Spenser goes on to equate the flood with that of the Nile, whose “fattie waues do fertile slime outwell,” breeding “ten thousand kindes of creatures” of His “fruitful seed” (i.21). Though God has a purpose in such floods, Redcrosse sees only filth.
- 18.
See Eph. 6:16 and Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh, in Hamilton, Faerie Queene, 717.
- 19.
Hamilton, Faerie Queene, notes that, at I.iv.2, the same path leads Redcrosse to the Palace of Pride.
- 20.
The Red Dragon represents the same principle of evil as the later Great Dragon of Chapters 19–20, both being identified with “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” (12:9 and 20:2). Both are to be defeated by a mightier power, Christ, who will “rule with a rod of iron” (12:5, 19:15).
- 21.
Compare Rev. 22:1–4 with I.xi.46–48.
- 22.
Compare God’s prophecy that a descendant of Eve will bruise the head of the serpent that deceived her (Gen. 3:15) with the fulfillment of the prophecy (Rev. 12:13–17, 17:11–14, 19:20).
- 23.
On details of the allegory, see Borris, 12–18.
- 24.
Compare Rev. 1:16, 8:12, 19:11–12, 22:16 with V.x.16, 20; xi.16–21, 26–30.
- 25.
A.B. Gough, note in “The Faerie Queene”: Book V, The Legend of Artegall or of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918). On Elizabeth’s decision to send troops, see Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 219–20.
- 26.
Thomas Cain and others view Arthur ’s glorious actions as so unlike Leicester’s blunders as to be a critique. See Praise in “The Faerie Queene” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 147. I do not agree.
- 27.
See David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Reformation, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 120–21. Kenneth Gross suggests that, in its ending, the episode is an “anti-apocalyptic fiction.” See Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 125.
- 28.
Israel, 220–21.
- 29.
Israel, 233–75.
- 30.
This analysis obviates the need to see Spenser as a prophet of Dutch ascendancy (Norbrook, 121). Elizabeth’s compromise had, during his lifetime, already set the Netherlands on their future course.
- 31.
On the complex iconography of Geryon , see Hamilton, Faerie Queene, xi.22–24 notes.
- 32.
The Antichrist does not appear in Revelation , but in the First Epistle of John, it appears as a dangerous “spirit” like Geryon (2:18, 22; 4:3; see also 2 Thes. 2:3–4). On the tradition of combining figures from St. John’s Apocalypse into an image of this mysterious figure, see Roberto Rusconi, “Antichrist and Antichrists,” in Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, edited by McGinn, 287–325.
- 33.
The Dutch wars may not seem comparable with the spiritual battles of the Legend of Holiness. As I discuss in Chapter 3, Sect. 1, however, Spenser allegorizes spiritual warfare in worldly circumstances. St. Paul’s shield of faith and sword of the Spirit have both literal and figurative meanings in Book V, as they do in Book I.
- 34.
Compare V.xi.21, 27–31 with I.xi.26, 28, 38–39, 43.
- 35.
See Margarita C. Stocker, “Astraea,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, 72.
- 36.
See “Elizabeth as Goddess of Justice,” in Stump and Felch, 600–616.
- 37.
See Elizabeth Heale, “Grantorto,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, edited by Hamilton, 339. The name of Irena ’s tormenter means “great wrong.”
- 38.
See Sean Kane, “Fathers, Latin,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, edited by Hamilton, 303–4.
- 39.
Paula Fredriksen, “Tyconius and Augustine on the Apocalypse,” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, edited by Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 20–37, esp. 29–30.
- 40.
E. Ann Matter, “The Apocalypse in Early Medieval Exegesis,” in Apocalypse, edited by Emmerson and McGinn, 38–50.
- 41.
Fredricksen, 20–37; and Augustine, The City of God, edited and translated by R.W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), XX.5 and 9.
- 42.
Augustine, XX.7.
- 43.
Mark 13:32; see also Acts 1:7 and Fredriksen, 29.
- 44.
Stump, “Slow Return,” 401–21.
- 45.
Hamilton, Faerie Queene, II.x.70–76; compare 5–68.
- 46.
Revelation 20. On the Humanist turn away from the Augustinian view toward that of the ancient Hebrew prophets, see Robert E. Lerner, “Millenialism,” in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, vol. 2: Apocalypticism in Western History and Culture, edited by Bernard McGinn (New York: Continuum, 1999), 326–60.
- 47.
See I.x.61, Rev. 20:12–15.
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Stump, D. (2019). Una, Mercilla, and the Elizabethan Apocalypse. In: Spenser’s Heavenly Elizabeth. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27115-2_7
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