Abstract
When Queen Elizabeth arrived at the country palace of Theobalds for her state visit on 10 May 1591, her host, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was not present to greet her. His absence was as conspicuous as it was elaborately planned. The significance of the occasion was only augmented by the presence of the queen’s senior ministers: Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord Chancellor and Keeper of the Great Seal; the Lord Admiral Charles Howard of Effingham; the Lord Chamberlain Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon; Vice-Chamberlain Sir Thomas Heneage; the Lord Steward Henry Stanley, Earl of Derby; and Master of the Horse, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Other distinguished figures of the party included the Earl of Ormonde, Lord Strange, Lord Cobham, Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Henry Grey, Sir Charles Blount, Robert Carey, and John Stanhope. The queen was attended by senior ladies of the court Lady Howard, Lady Stafford, Lady Scroop, Lady Strange, Lady Sheffield, Lady Chandos, Lady Warwick (widow of Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick), and Elizabeth of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury.1 Greeting the queen and her party were Burghley’s two sons Robert and Thomas, and almost certainly their wives, Elizabeth Brooke and Dorothy Neville, respectively, for it seems likely that Robert’s first-born son, William, was also present, probably in his mother’s keeping.2
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Notes
Materializing Space 99. Erroneous conceptions that Robert Cecil performed the role of the hermit stem from the speculation of the notorious John Payne Collier, and are contradicted by the text itself (see John Payne Collier, The History of English Dramatic Poetry, 3 vols. [London: John Murray, 1831], 1: 285–8).
Collier’s error is repeated in Alan Young, Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments (London: Sheridan House, 1987), 174–5.
Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999), 179–80.
On the history of Elizabeth’s visits to Theobalds, see Materializing Space 88–9 and E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 4: 81–8.
For Richard III’s pretended reluctance to assume the throne, see William Shakespeare, Richard III (New York: Signet, 1998), Act 3, scene 7.
On the classical principles of otium and negotium, see John D. Bernard, Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 16–24.
George Peele, ‘Speeches to Queen Elizabeth at Theobald’s’, The Works of George Peele, A. H. Bullen, ed., 2 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1888), 2: 305–6, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as ‘Theobald’s’ by line number. The original document is located in the British Library (British Library, Egerton MS. 2623).
The correction of ‘3 furlonnges’ on line 9 is taken from W. W. Greg, ‘A Collier Mystification’, Review of English Studies 1 (1925): 452–4, 454.
The attributions of the work to George Peele are due to claims made by John Payne Collier, the notorious forger, and therefore cannot be regarded as authentic. The authenticity of the document as a whole has been questioned by Marion Colthorpe, ‘The Theobalds Entertainment for Queen Elizabeth I, with a Transcript of the Gardener’s Speech’, Records of Early English Drama Newsletter 12:1 (1987): 2–9,
but her arguments have been addressed thoroughly by Curtis C. Breight, ‘Entertainments of Elizabeth at Theobalds in the Early 1590s’, Records of Early English Drama Newsletter 12:2 (1987): 2–9. For all of his egregious faults, Collier was also a legitimate scholar. Indeed, he discovered a version of the speeches of the gardener and the molecatcher for the 1591 entertainment that has since been authenticated. On these texts, see Colthorpe 3–4, 7–9. The surviving mock charter created as a response to the hermit’s speech (see note 14) verifies the general drift and many points of detail in the hermit’s speech. Collier scholars Freeman and Freeman agree with Breight that the limit of Collier’s tampering of the manuscript was the spurious attribution to George Peele. See Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 2: 1093–4.
On the charged political context that surrounded Robert Cecil’s appointment to the secretaryship, see Paul E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 319–20 and Materializing Space 119–20.
On Elizabeth’s disapproval of and resistance to court entertainments, see Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 38, 70, 136.
Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship’, Renaissance Drama 8 (1977): 3–35, 19.
Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘Upstaging the Queen: The Earl of Essex, Francis Bacon, and the Accession Day Celebrations of 1595’, in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 41–66.
G. B. Harrison, ed., The Letters of Queen Elizabeth I (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 207–8.
On the complex interplay between the poem’s ‘recreative’ and ‘satirical’ modes, in which animal and human behavior are conflated, see Kent T. van den Berg, ‘The Counterfeit in Personation: Spenser’s Prosopopoia’, in The Author in his Work: Essays on a Problem in Criticism, Louis Martz and Aubrey Williams, eds. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 85–102, esp. 91–3.
Richard Verstegan, A Declaration of the True Causes 1592 (London: Scholar Press, 1977), 68.
On criticism of Burghley’s office, see Harold Stein, Studies in Spenser’s Complaints (New York: Oxford University Press, 1934), 88–91.
T. Wilson, The State of England, Anno Dom. 1600, ed. F. J. Fisher (London: Camden Society, 1936), 42.
Joel Hurstfield, Freedom, Corruption and Government in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 106.
James A. Riddell and Stanley Stewart, Jonson’s Spenser: Evidence and Historical Criticism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1995), 53.
R. M. Cummings, ed., Spenser: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 319.
quoting Robert Johnston, Historia Rerum Britannicarum … ab Anno 1572, ad Annum 1628 (Amerstdam, 1655), 249 (Lib. VIII).
Also reprinted in Frederick Ives Carpenter, A Reference Guide to Edmund Spenser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 61.
For the influence of Theobalds on major contemporary buildings like Holdenby and Audley End, see Malcolm Airs, ‘“Pomp or Glory”: The Influence of Theobalds’, in Patronage, Culture, and Power: The Early Cecils 1558–1612 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 3–19.
Frederick Hard, ‘Spenser and Burghley’, Studies in Philology 28 (1931): 219–34, 234.
On the origins of the ‘prodigy house’ as an academic term, see John Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953; rpt. 1983), 63. See also Materializing Space 2.
For a brief overview of the institution of land tenure as understood in the Tudor period, see Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485–1603 (New York: Penguin, 2000), 28.
‘Diary of the Journey of Philip Julius, Duke of Stettin-Pomerania, Through England in the Year 1602’, ed. G. von Bullow, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, new series 6 (1892): 30.
G. W. Groos, trans. and ed., The Diary of Baron Waldstein: A Traveller in Elizabethan England (London: Thames & Hudson, 1981), 87.
William Benchley Rye, England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First. Comprising Translations of the Journals of the two Dukes of Wirtemberg in 1592 and 1610; both illustrative of Shakespeare … (London: J. R. Smith, 1865), 44.
Philip Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Prose and Poetry, Robert Kimbrough, ed. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 108.
A. G. R. Smith, ed., The ‘Anonymous Life’ of William Cecil, Lord Burghley (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 93–4. On Hickes as the probable author of the ‘Anonymous Life’, see Smith, ed. 5–10.
Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable The Marquess of Salisbury … Preserved at Hatfield House (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1890–1970), 12: 188. See also Materializing Space 74.
Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse, Sir John Harington, trans. (1591), 356.
Charles Grosvenor Osgood, A Concordance to the Poems of Edmund Spenser (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963), 158–9. Not common in the poem are the terms ‘courtesy’ (twice) and ‘courteous’ (never), concepts that Spenser does not readily connect to the court, as seen in Book 6 of The Faerie Queene.
On Spenser’s whereabouts in 1590, see Willy Maley, A Spenser Chronology (Lanham, MD: Barnes and Noble, 1994), 54–5, esp. 54.
John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden: Poems 1685–1692 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 161.
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© 2011 Bruce Danner
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Danner, B. (2011). Mother Hubberds Tale and the Ambivalent Withdrawal from Power. In: Edmund Spenser’s War on Lord Burghley. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230336674_6
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