nf0059: just to warn you that er er it's a slightly high-tech performance in 
that i intend to show slides and it's taken me most of the morning to get the 
slide projector room open er the chances of that actually appearing at the 
right moment is fairly slim so bear with me if there's some technical hitches 
also the Centre for Applied Language Studies is taping this lecture er simply 
to to to use for language study 
om0060: language study yes 
nf0059: er so er hence slightly more microphones than normal we're looking at 
representations of Elizabeth the First in this lecture er i've already touched 
on this on a number of occasions in relation to The Faerie Queene and other 
lecturers may have touched on it as as well er clearly for The Faerie Queene 
Elizabeth the First is a crucial figure the whole poem er the title of the 
whole poem The Faerie Queene to some extent reflects on Elizabeth the poem is 
dedicated to Elizabeth and she dominates the imagination of most courtly poets 
most poets writing 
for er er a middle class or courtly audience er in the period and what i'm 
going to try and do in this lecture is to some extent explore why that's the 
case er er some of the preoccupations her subjects er felt when they thought 
about Elizabeth er as a Queen some of the problems that she presented to er her 
country er er particularly the imagination of her country rather than the 
actual government of her country which seems to have been carried out er 
perfectly happily during the time that she was in charge er and i'll go on to 
look at er instances of her appearance in The Faerie Queene and one or two 
instances of appearance in other poems so if you've got your er Renaissance 
anthology with you i'll refer to one or two poems there Elizabeth the First 
still dominates the imagination er not only i think of people in this country 
but probably abroad er i didn't get to see the David Starkey television series 
which i understand has just finished and i hope i don't contradict anything 
that 
he er says but the fact that er a series of television programmes could have 
been devoted to Elizabeth in the late twentieth century er as well as a recent 
film some of you might have seen the recent film er er on Elizabeth the First 
er for the cinema er is again an indication of the kind of hold she's had on 
our imagination er we tend to think nowadays er of government to being to a 
great extent dictated to glamorized by spin doctors but as i hope to show 
Elizabeth was no s-, er slouch in this area herself in the sixteenth century er 
the government was fairly sophisticated at spinning Elizabeth and Elizabeth was 
fairly good at it herself so that the consciousness of image of how one 
appeared to the public at large er er is evident throughout Elizabeth's reign 
and er to some extent our own fascination er this fascination with Elizabeth in 
the in the following centuries including the twentieth century is a tribute to 
how successful she and her spin doctors were er when i say spin 
doctors of course they weren't professional P-R people but they knew how to 
manipulate the public pretty effectively and we'll be looking at some of the 
ways in which they did this on the other hand i mean there's so that there's 
Elizabeth and her her ministers who are er thinking very carefully about 
Elizabeth's public image how she appeared not only to her own people and to 
those abroad but there's also a kind of two-way process here in that Elizabeth 
was the source of all patronage she was the source of power in the nation 
anybody who wanted power who wanted patronage through the court had to please 
Elizabeth so there's a two-way process er writers er those in search of er 
advancement at court are going to use a language going to talk about Elizabeth 
in a way that pleases her so that they are also contributing to the myth to the 
glamorization er of Elizabeth they know where their bread is buttered and er 
the language of courtliness is adept at pleasing Elizabeth 
and we'll come back to this er a little bit later on in the lecture first of 
all just some some facts and and and basic aspects of Elizabeth as Queen she 
inherited the throne in fifteen-fifty-eight after er an extraordinarily er up 
and down series of reigns her father Henry the Eighth had died back in fifteen-
forty- seven er leaving the throne to his son who was then under age and who 
died er not long afterwards er Henry the Eighth had as you know begun the 
English Reformation he had broken away from the Roman Catholic Church and the 
papacy although the church under Henry the Eighth tended to be a fairly 
conservative er Roman Catholic-like er institution with Roman Catholic Catholic-
like doctrine and forms of worship er Henry the Eighth's son was er dominated 
er by advisers who were much more er Protestant in their views and the whole 
church moved towards a er what was thought of as a kind of extreme 
Protestantism during the few years of his reign no sooner had the 
church been moved strongly towards Protestant doctrine and worship than er 
Edward died and Mary the First er Henry the Eighth's eldest daughter Mary the 
First came to the throne she was a a staunch Catholic deeply resented er her 
father's break from Rome which had been involved er which had had er been part 
of the divo-, his divorce from Mary's mother Catherine of Aragon and she moved 
the whole church England the church everything back towards a fairly extreme 
form of Catholicism er no sooner had she done this and burned a few er hundred 
er Protestants er than she too died so that through much of the middle years of 
the sixteenth century England had shifted every few years from an extreme form 
of Protestantism to a an extreme form of Catholicism er Elizabeth came to the 
throne in fifteen-fifty-eight er the younger daughter of Henry the Eighth er in 
normal er circumstances not someone who would be expected to inherit the throne 
at all and really an unknown quantity as far as 
many of her subjects were concerned and the question of religion and the 
question of stability the stability of the kingdom as you can imagine was very 
much on people's minds is this woman going to be able to keep the the the the 
the throne stable what's she going to do about religion are we going to be 
shifted again into a whole series of switchback terms of policy not only was 
there an understandable anxiety about stability er and the future but the fact 
that it was another woman on the throne was a cause of deep concern to her 
subjects as i've already explained to you in previous lectures the Elizabethan 
assumption of a God-given natural order and of course for them everything in 
the world was God-given it reflected divine providence and God in their view 
had designed the world with men in charge that's what men were made for and 
women were made to be subservient we've already looked at at quotations er 
where this assumption on er the part of most people men and women 
of course in the period er is expressed er the the the the God-given pattern of 
the world is a patriarchy and my goodness here's another woman in charge er we 
f-, they saw h-, what had happened when her sister had been in charge what on 
earth was this woman going to do and you get some of the sense of appalled er 
er almost inconceivable response to having a woman in charge from the first 
extract on the sheets that you have if you just look at the handouts do you 
want one of these too 
om0060: 
nf0059: [laugh] it's a good bit of Scottish prose so er it's fun to look at 
this is from er a book er sorry my my handout isn't as clear as it should be er 
in fact extract A is from the book that's listed as B i'm sorry this is my 
hastily putting the B in the wrong place when i redid this handout this morning 
er so extract A is from The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous 
Regiment of Women a very famous er book produced in fifteen-fifty-eight by the 
Scottish er reformer John Knox the first thing 
to be said about this extract is it is one of the most unfortunately timed bit 
of writing in the history of print John Knox produced this about three months 
before Elizabeth came to the throne three months before her sister Mary the 
First died John Knox was an ardent Protestant an ardent reformer and the women 
he's attacking are the Catholic women on the throne the throne of France and 
the throne of Scotland Mary Queen of Scots and the throne of England Mary Tudor 
so that John Knox has his sights on Catholic queens who of course confirm all 
his prejudices about women on the throne had he known just three months later 
that Mary was going to die and the Protestant Elizabeth was going to come to 
the throne he would not have published this he spent the next twenty year of 
his life years of his life trying to apologize and undo this as far as 
Elizabeth was concerned but adas-, the damage was done and she would not allow 
him into her kingdom er let alone forgive him for 
ever writing it i want to just pick up a couple of points a couple of moments 
from this er i won't read the whole thing but if you could look at the first 
paragraph where my marking in the margin begins and i'll just read that 
paragraph and the second paragraph who can denie says John Knox but it 
repugneth to nature that the blind shal be appointed to leade and conduct such 
as do see that the weake the sicke and impotent persones shall norishe and kepe 
the hole and strong and finallie that the foolishe madde and phrenetike shal 
gouerne the discrete and giue counsel to such as be sober of mind can such 
things be thought of i-, it's it's nonsense to do such things and such be al 
women compared unto man in bearing of authoritie in other words the women are 
the weak the sick the impotent the foolish the mad and the frenetic and they 
are taking upon themselves to guide and to lead the whole the sound er the 
strong er and the discreet so this is it's repugneth to nature it is against 
all conception that such things can happen but such it is to have women on the 
throne er er on the throne er ruling over men 
then he goes on oh fearefull and terrible are thy iudgementes o Lord whiche 
thus hast abased man for his iniquitie i am assuredlie persuaded that if any of 
those men which illuminated onelie by the light of nature did see and pronounce 
causes sufficient why women oght not to beare rule nor authoritie shuld this 
day liue and see a woman sitting in iudgement or riding frome parliament in the 
middest of men hauing the royall crowne upon her head the sworde and sceptre 
borne before her in signe that the administration of iustice was in her power i 
am sur-, assuredlie persuaded i say that suche a shi-, sight shulde so 
astonishe men th er advisers of the past that they shuld iudge the hole worlde 
to be transformed into Amazones and suche a metamorphosis and change was made 
all of the men of that countrie as poetes do feyn was made of the companyons of 
Vlisses who were turned of course into beasts or at least that albeit the 
owtwarde form 
of men remained yet shuld they iudge that their hartes were changed frome the 
wisdome vnderstanding and courage of men to the foolishe fondnes and cowardise 
of women so here you see prejudice in its pure untainted form er one of the 
things i want you to d-, to just er draw your attention to er here is that for 
Knox to have a queen on the throne and remember he's talking about Catholic 
queens this was printed before Elizabeth came to the throne but nevertheless he 
sees this as as God's pattern in in a sense er i-, he er to be to be er 
consistent he has to apply this to Elizabeth as well er he sees the imposition 
of a queen on the throne as a form of judgement by God and it indicates that if 
women are on the throne men are emasculated men are effeminate it is the 
punishment for effeminate men er er so that this sort of combination this sort 
of er thought process of an emasculating women or or sorry a masculine woman a 
woman in the role of men equals effeminate 
me-, er effeminate men emasculated men is a thought process that we'll find 
over and over again in this period it the two go together and is one reason why 
there is such a fear of powerful women in the period it inevitably implies the 
powerlessness the impotence and the feminization of of women and you can see 
this working very clearly in John Knox's er passage er John Knox's First Blast 
of the Trumpet had to be answered he was an influential Protestant thinker and 
this er treatise got well circulated and he's answered and here i'm sorry i put 
the B in the wrong place and i haven't given you a reference for the second 
passage er at the bottom of your sheets this is a defence of Elizabeth 
published by someone called Bishop Aylmer i'll just write that on the board if 
you can read my writing A-Y-L-M-E-R Bishop Aylmer and this was commissioned or 
er approved certainly by er Elizabeth's government er but what's interesting is 
that er Aylmer who was er 
writing with the approval of the English government even he is not exactly er 
forthright in his defence of women as rulers he says at one point in his text 
and here you have er Elizabethan print it's bra-, black letter print so it's a 
little bit difficult to make out i'll i'll read it carefully for you i'll just 
look at the first bit of it placeth he placeth God he he is God here Alymer 
writes placeth he a woman weake in nature feable in bodie softe in courage 
vnskilfull in practise not terrible to the enemy no shilde to the frynde this 
is a defence of Elizabeth okay no shilde to the frynde wel and he has a bit of 
Latin he's quoting er he's he's paraphrasing what he he feels God's answer is 
God says my strengthe then is moste perfight when you be moste weake if he if 
God ioyne to his strengthe she can not be weake if God put to his hande she can 
not be feable if God be with her who can stande against her 
now this is the office defence of Elizabeth and it's saying right women are 
weak feeble unskilful not terrible to the enemy no shield to the friend true he 
says but that all goes to show how powerful God is if God puts a weak foolish 
woman on the throne then it's a sign of his power it's a sign that England is 
under the special protection of God it's all as it should be so that's the 
defence er you can see er that er Elizabeth was in er a c-, a difficult 
position conceptually as far as her kingdom was concerned by simply being a 
woman in charge the problem of Elizabeth's gender was not merely a matter of 
hierarchy and power it also raised practical problems to do with marriage and 
heirs and of course both of them brought po-, er problems er Mary the First was 
a particularly awful example as far as English people were concerned in that 
she had married the King of Spain and indeed there's er much evidence in fact 
the one big rebellion of her reign er was as much a rebellion 
against Spanish domination as it was against her religion s-, England greatly 
feared Spanish domination domination from a kingdom outside England so one of 
the problems would be that if eng-, if Elizabeth married a suitable er foreign 
suitor the danger was that she that England would come under the domination of 
a foreign nation and of course very possibly a Catholic nation Philip continued 
to be a suitor to Elizabeth after er Mary had died if she didn't marry a 
foreign er prince thus risking foreign domination of England then er she would 
have to marry a subject and that brought all sorts of problems with it as well 
since of course within a marriage the man was in charge the woman swore 
obedience to the husband if she married a c-, er er an Englishman then he would 
inevitably be below her in the hierarchy and this brought all sorts of problems 
as well as of course internal jealousies and divisions if she er did marry 
there were problems if she didn't marry 
there were problems because she couldn't produce an heir and er England looking 
back to a period of instability in the mid-sixteenth century and even more to 
prolonged instability for over a hundred years in the previous century very 
much wanted an heir wanted the succession to be clear Elizabeth might be a 
woman but the hope was she would produce a male heir er in order to ensure the 
succession in the future however if Elizabeth er er were to have children there 
was always the danger of death in childbirth er women often died in childbirth 
er in this period so wherever you looked if she married if she didn't marry 
there were huge er problem problems er for e-, Elizabeth and her er er and and 
her subjects to worry about so Elizabeth is very aware her government is very 
aware that they have a certain amount of groundwork to cover in order to er er 
produce some faith in her er ability to lead the co-, the kingdom effectively 
we've seen how the government approved of Bishop 
Aylmer's reply to er to Knox so that they're trying to fight the theological 
objections to her as a ruler on their own grounds Elizabeth at from the very 
beginning very carefully defines her own position in terms of sympathy to 
Protestantism without going to extremes she tries to occupy middle ground to 
some extent but to reassure her largely Protestant subjects at at the beginning 
of her reign that she is sympathetic that she's not going to go down the road 
of her sister er er she is sympathetic to Protestantism and we can see the 
government don't know what creaking whether it will finally collapse but er let 
us hope not er we see the government being very careful about er pr-, 
projecting a public Protestant image of Elizabeth right from the very beginning 
er when she er rode through the city of London on her coronation procession 
there were a series of very carefully stage-managed public pageants to greet 
her and one of the er these public pageants consisted of er 
Time Old Father Time with his scythe er and his beard bringing Truth out of a 
cave er Elizabeth had the pageant explained to her and she replied very 
publicly and her n-, words were carefully noted down for distribution in a 
broadsheet immediately afterwards tyme quoth Elizabeth and tyme hath brought me 
hether and when Truth appeared holding of course the English Bible the Bible in 
English she took the Bible very carefully made sure everybody saw what she did 
and gave it a big kiss so that here you can see the public projection of 
Elizabeth as this kind of monarch most of her subjects certainly most of her 
London subjects wanted sympathetic to Protestantism and so to speak backed by 
the divine providence of God God had brought her now to produce peace and true 
religion in England Elizabeth throughout her reign proved a very adept er 
controller of her own image er and her own er performances and i just give you 
a couple of brief examples from her speeches which er 
are likely to have been re-, er to have been written mostly by her she was 
obviously she was highly educated and certainly able to produce very effective 
speeches and there's no reason to feel that her speeches were written for her 
in fact we do have some evidence of annotation by her on er on them so there's 
every reason to think that she was largely responsible for her own speeches and 
i just draw your attention this is number C on your sheets to one that she gave 
in Parliament this is an early speech with Elizabeth replying to the constant 
pressure from her Parliament to get her to marry they became increasingly 
concerned about the fact there was no heir er thus calling into question the 
stability of the future you remember at this point in the fifteen-sixties that 
had Elizabeth died and after all her brother and sister died er fairly early on 
er had Elizabeth died the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots would have been the heir 
to the throne so that er ensuring the the 
continuation of a Protestant dynasty was absolutely crucial to people in 
England especially her Parliament and you here see her here very deftly 
answering this in number C though i am determined in this so great and weighty 
a matter to defer mine answer till some other time b-, because i will not in so 
deep a matter wade with so shallow a wit this is in reply to their petition for 
her to marry yet have i thought good to use these few words as well to show you 
that i am neither careless nor unmindful of your safety in this case as i trust 
you likewise do not forget that by me you were delivered whilst you were 
hanging on the bough ready to fall into the mud yet to be drowned in the dung 
neither yet do you forget the promise which you have here made concerning your 
duties and your obedience wherewith i assure you i mean to charge you as 
further to let you understand that i neither mislike of any of your requests 
herein nor the 
great care that you seem to have of the surety and safety of yourselves in this 
matter lastly because i will discharge some restless heads in whose brains the 
needless hammers beat with vain judgement that i should mislike this their 
petition i say that of the matter and sum thereof i like and allow very well 
the petition er just to remind you again was for her to marry as to the 
circumstances if any be i mean upon further advice further to answer and so i 
assure you all 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 syntax 
is difficult for us to follow now it's a sixteenth century syntax and it's a 
speech er but i just want to draw your attention to the very deftness of 
Elizabeth she reminds them that really their safety depends on her that she has 
delivered them from a terrible situation you were hanging on the bough she says 
ready to fall into the mud if i look away that's where you'll fall you depend 
on me she's reminding them of her power she also reminds them of her authority 
she says i will discharge some restless heads in whose brains the needless 
hammers beat with vain judgement she doesn't mince her words she disapproves of 
certain kind of tittle-tattle that's going about but she's so she behaves with 
the authority of a man here reminding them of their position reminding them of 
her authority but also she uses a language of female gender that you may have 
many stepdames she says but you will never have a more natural mother so this 
balancing of threat and assurance of a language o-, er gendered male and a 
language gendered female is very deftly done indeed her most famous example of 
this mis-, er this deployment of a a gendered male language but drawing on her 
female body in this er instance is in D the very famous speech that she is 
reputed to have given er at Tilbury as her troops er gathered together to 
defend er England against the Spanish Armada which was on the seas at this 
point 
and she says er there in the military tamp camp at Milbury Tilbury sorry i am 
come amongst you as you see at this time not for my recreation and disport but 
being resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live or die amongst you 
to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and for my people my honour and my 
blood even in the dust i know i have the body but of a weak and feeble woman 
but i have the heart and stomach of a king and of a kinglan-, king of England 
too and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any of prince of Europe should 
dare invade the borders of my realm to which rather than any dishonour shall 
grow by me i myself will take up arms i myself will be your general judge and 
rewarder are every one of your virtues in this field so again er sort of er 
Shakespeare must have felt i wish i could have written that er as well it's a 
very fine speech playing on her femaleness but claiming that she will take on 
the character of a man and 
indeed in many ways she already has the character of a man to withstand 
invasion from without what with the speech at Tilbury indeed both the speeches 
we've just looked at show how Elizabeth could play on different versions of 
herself representations of Elizabeth could shift between a number of 
possibilities at Tilbury the rhetoric of er male military courage Elizabeth 
playing on herself as the figurehead of an elect Protestant nation confronting 
the Catholic powers of darkness is exploited but she could also play on her 
weak and feeble body of a woman needing protection calling on the gallantry of 
those surrounding her as a woman too she could personify the virtues of England 
she could make of herself a sind of personified figurehead for England Gloriana 
or an embodiment of truth or an embodiment of the true church as in the 
Cheapside pageant she could represent herself as a virgin wedded to her country 
or a natural mother to her country but the s-, at the same time 
she never let her subjects forget that by inheritance she was God's 
providentially appointed monarch to whom everyone owed obedience and now if the 
slides work i just want to have a look at some of these just three images 
hopefully that will be dark enough and it will work ah sorry i think i've got 
to go and just switch it on please excuse me for a moment i suspect the 
machine's switched off 
nf0059: it's always a mistake to use slides i always do something like this 
hopefully it will work no now what am i doing wrong i can hear it working ah 
well i think i'll just let the slides er sit there er and just describe them to 
you er the the three images and some of you will be familiar with the images in 
fact what i have given you on the last bit of your handout is er an a series of 
books which talk about the image making of Elizabeth and the representations of 
Elizabeth and if i could just draw your attention to the last atem item on that 
list Roy Strong Gloriana the Portraits 
of Elizabeth you will find nice illustrations of at least two of the pictures 
in fact all three of the pictures that er i would have shown to you the first 
one is the frontispiece of the official translation of the Bible er the 
Bishop's Bible authorized by Elizabeth's government which has a a woodcut 
frontispiece and the frontispiece represents Elizabeth at the top of the page 
sitting in her throne actually with her hair down as an unmarried virgin 
handing out copies of the Bible to her clergy on either side so here we have a 
visual image of Elizabeth not only in charge but almost in a in a slightly er 
deified position as though she's the representative of God on Earth handing out 
the word of God to the male clergymen on either side so a very clear image of 
this providential Protestant divinely ordained aspect of Elizabeth the second 
portrait is a portrait called the Ermine portrait and i put these on the board 
for you er which is now at Hatfield House which is an 
image of Elizabeth dressed very soberly in black and she sits at a table and 
there are two objects beside her emblematic objects telling us about the nature 
of Elizabeth she's a very she's dressed privately not in coronation robes 
privately but a very regal figure and the two objects at her side are a sword 
in its scabbard and a little ermine little you know one of these little ferret 
creatures a white ferret but it's an ermine it has flecks of black in it er i 
believe ermines actually have a just a black tail but this actually has flecks 
of black and little crown round its er its throat er the two images very much 
point to the two bodies if you like of Elizabeth and i'll come back to this 
idea in a moment Elizabeth's public monarchical self the the the sword in its 
scabbard it's there to be drawn if she needs it er the sword of justice and the 
ermine points to her purity as a woman er the ermine was thought never to allow 
its coat to be dirty it would never allow 
its coat to be soiled therefore it was a er commonly an image of virginity of 
chastity er so we have the two aspects of Elizabeth her female purity and her 
power beside her arm the third portrait and again you might like to look this 
up in er it's a very fine portrait some of you may know it it's in the National 
Portrait Gallery in London is the Ditchley portrait produced in fifteen-ninety-
two and this is a fantastic image of Elizabeth as a huge goddess fa-, figure 
standing on England she actually stands in Oxfordshire she's standing on 
Oxfordshire and she soars hugely above her kingdom with her head in the clouds 
she's a goddess figure her k-, skirt she's dressed in white her skirt 
encompasses more or less the boundaries of England there's a sort of er wan-, 
if you want to be thoroughly misogynous she's got England firmly under her heel 
on the other hand the image is one of protection a skirt encompasses her 
kingdom and she looks towards the west and as she looks 
towards the west the sun comes out in the skies and as she turns her back 
towards Catholic Europe there's thundering and lightning over Europe behind her 
so it's a wonderful political image of the power of Elizabeth of her personal 
role as protectoress of England and she is as much goddess as she is er human 
queen so those are the three images er one can see the this this s-, selling if 
you like the spinning of Elizabeth going on very much in the visual images i 
talked about the two bodies notion of Elizabeth er and i want to use that just 
to go on to think about the way The Faerie Queene Spenser uses Elizabeth er the 
two bodies theory is an old legal theory er going right back to the Middle Ages 
about kings that is that one had a kind of public body a legal body as the 
representative of the kingdom as the king the legal king er or monarch of the k-
, of the kingdom and that this legal body could be occupied by a private body 
individual kings would come and go but the 
institution of kingship went on so you have the public monarchical aspect of 
the king which didn't always entirely fit with the private individual who was 
occupying that role at any one given time this notion of the in this case the 
Queen's two bodies the the body of the monarch and the body of the er of the 
Queen er is deployed in a number of ways in Elizabethan er literature it allows 
them to some extent to escape her female gender her role as monarch could be a 
role that transcended her gender it could be a role as king whereas her female 
private self was er protected if you lake if you like mythologized in her reign 
by this image of virginity this image of being a quasi-deity er a a beautiful 
young er young girl and of course she remained this beautiful young girl in 
rhetoric through most of her life Spenser draws on these two aspects of 
Elizabeth there's monarch and there's private person in that introduction that 
er dedicatory letter to Raleigh that we've looked 
at on a couple of occasions just to remind you Spenser says in the letter to 
Raleigh in that Faerie Queene i mean glory in my generall intention but in my 
particular i conceiue the most excellent and glorious person of our souereign 
the Queene and her kingdome in Faerie land and yet in some places else some 
places else i doe otherwise shadow her for considering she beareth two persons 
that's this two i-, er these two bodies of the the Queen she consid-, for 
considering she beareth two persons the one of a most royall queene or empresse 
the other of a most vertuous and beautifull lady this latter part i doe express 
in Belphoebe so Spenser works two at least two images of the Queen into his 
Faerie Queene the public monarchical Elizabeth Gloriana and the private 
beautiful chaste lady Belphoebe the Faerie Queene Gloriana figures as we've 
seen Elizabeth as monarch of England England is conceived of in The Faerie 
Queene as a kind of 
promised land of Protestantism a land of exceptional blessings a magical 
fairyland indeed ruled over by its fairy Queen and Spenser in the very idea of 
The Faerie Queene manages to get this er sort of extraterrestrial if you like 
this almost goddess-like element er that we can also see in other images of 
Elizabeth he describes her at the very beginning of book one you'll remember as 
a goddesse heauenly bright mirrour of grace and maiestie diuine great lady 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 thoughts too 
humble and too vile so Elizabeth both as a kind of muse here a goddess figure 
but also as the embodiment the the the the very embodiment of her country a 
figure quasi-divine so there's these elements Spenser er these these 
recognizable elements Spenser figures in the figure of of of Gloriana in the 
poem but when you think about the actual 
role of Gloriana i mean here we have obvious flattery of the Queen after all 
she was the patron she was the source of power Spenser was very dependent on 
her approval in everything he did especially in publication of The Faerie 
Queene but when you think about the actual role of Gloriana in the poem you 
begin to see how Spenser even in the very act of praising Elizabeth can 
insinuate certain kinds of criticisms Gloriana never appears she doesn't do 
anything what she does is send out her male knights to fight her battles for 
her she authorizes them she gives them po-, she empowers them to go and conquer 
the world to res-, restore Protestantism to fight the dragons and the evil 
enchanters and so on and so forth it is the men who do the jobs er in The 
Faerie Queene the one exception is book three but Britomart the knight of book 
three is not sent out by Elizabeth she's not an agent of Elizabeth she's an 
ancestress er sorry she's not an agent of Gloriana she's her her 
role is as an ancestress she's not even a queen she's a an ancestress of 
Elizabeth so that Gloriana's role as defined by The Faerie Queene is one of 
empowering her male er er executors if you like those who actually carry out 
the the her policy and had the last book of The Faerie Queene ever been written 
of rewarding them when they come back so her job is to empower and to reward 
Spenser is here possibly suggesting a role for Elizabeth that she didn't always 
fulfil one example of er er er her frustration er er her repeated frustration 
of those who did want to go out and conquer the world in her name to carry the 
Protestant fight to new worlds or back to the old er continental world is her 
relationship with one of her favourites Sir Walter Raleigh who was a patron of 
e-, of Spenser and whose story is worked into the story of The Faerie Queene er 
her relationship with Raleigh could be repeated in her relationship with so 
many of her aristocrats especially in the 
fifteen-eighties and fifteen-nineties Raleigh continually er suggested 
enterprises enterprises which would have taken him to the New World er in order 
to colonize or to er rob the the the new world er like many of her other 
noblemen he continually wanted to be involved in expeditions against Catholic 
powers whether pirating on the high seas or actually armed exibiti-, ex-, 
expeditions to invade er parts of the er Catholic continent and continually 
Elizabeth called him back or would not empower him kept him at home in the 
court and this is characteristic of her dealing with a great many of her 
aristocratic noblemen in the end er she also tended to keep them er hanging as 
far as marriage was concerned she would often not approve of their marrying so 
they too found it difficult to ensure their dynasties to er to to get heirs er 
to carry forward their houses in the end Raleigh fell from power because he had 
to marry secretly in order to er produ-, c-, preserve his dynasty er 
a-, and and continue his house he married secretly Elizabeth found out and 
threw him into prison er and one of the poems that you have in your Renaissance 
Book of er of Verse number twenty-one on page one-o-two a long poem Ocean's 
Love to Cynthia is a poem written by Raleigh er as a sort of slightly 
incoherent it's a difficult poem to read probably deliberately incoherent to 
suggest the incoherence of his grief written by Elizabeth probably when he was 
in prison to complain about how she kept him dangling he had tried to serve her 
all through these years er and she kept him dangling er and just to draw your 
attention to one small er piece of this poem to illustrate lines sixty-one to 
sixty-eight this is page one-o-two of your anthology Raleigh says i kept on 
trying to seeke new worlds for golde for prayse for glory to try desire to try 
love severed farr when i was gonn he says she sent her memory more stronge than 
weare tenthowsand shipps of warr to 
call mee back to leve great honors thought to leve my frinds my fortune my 
attempte to leve the purpose i so longe had sought and hold both cares and 
cumforts in contempt he rather tactfully says it was her memory that she sent 
but more commonly it was a messenger who at times actually called him back when 
he was on the ship halfway down the Channel on a number of occasions he was 
called back ignominiously and not allowed to go on these glorifying expeditions 
to conquer new worlds and defeat the Spanish so that er in a sense we have an 
implied contrast here between Gloriana's enabling role and Elizabeth's frequent 
or er especially by the fifteen-eighties and fifties and nineties this 
perception of her constant frustration er of the ambitions of her aristocratic 
courtiers so perhaps ostensibly while celebrating Elizabeth here Spenser's poem 
may take discreet opportunities to provide her with a mirror of how the ideal 
female monarch ought to behave not 
always coincident with how she does behave there are m-, other moments i think 
where we see discreet moments of criticism of Elizabeth er and particularly of 
Elizabeth's courts and the court culture this culture of adoration of Elizabeth 
that grew up er during the course of her reign we must remember that when 
Elizabeth when Spenser published Faerie Queene in fifteen-ninety Elizabeth was 
fifty years old she was well past childbearing age and she's getting on a bit 
especially in Elizabethan period but nevertheless this language of personal 
adoration of beauty of adoration of a a dazzling mistress continues to er 
dominate the language of the court and Spenser at a number of points er 
registers his disgust his objection with this courtly culture and perhaps one 
of those moments is in book one at a point we've already looked at the 
description of Lucifera's court and i've already pointed out that Lucifera 
described as a maiden queen a queen of pride sitting on her 
throne is surrounded by a court that looks remarkably like the Elizabethan ones 
in which the courtiers have ruffs and curled hair and er carry on a language of 
spitefulness er there's more than a passing resemblance to the contemporary 
royal court there i'm not suggesting that Spenser's explicitly asking the Queen 
to compare herself to Lucifera but those i think with any sharpness would see 
that Spenser is not entirely uncritical admirer of the cult that surrounds 
Elizabeth another instance is at the very beginning of book three where we come 
across the court of Malecasta barred chastity obviously a a a a false figure a 
figure quite different from Elizabeth in some respects but this Malecasta rules 
her court by insisting that everybody worships only her if the knights 
approaching the course the court have a mistress of their own they have to 
fight with her defenders to show that their mistress is better than Malecasta 
if they are defeated then they have 
to worship Malecasta if they win then they're still forced if they want a 
night's lodging to worship Malecasta it's a sort of no win situation and again 
Spenser i think is perhaps suggesting something wrong with the court of his 
Faerie Queene here which so emasculates so deprives men of their noble honour 
and courage in order to pursue this effemini-, infe-, effeminizing worship of 
the Queen er we saw just a glimpse er i think last week when we were looking at 
women's writing of er Elizabeth conducting this kind of courtly language er 
with again it was Sir Walter Raleigh er where Sir Walter Raleigh had written 
her a poem complaining of her treatment to him and she wrote back saying silly 
pug did you think i disapproved of you what a silly little clown you are and 
that demeaning language for one of the foremost er er sort of male courtiers of 
the period must have been deeply humiliating er and one can see perhaps a 
reflection of this this 
private Elizabeth this Elizabeth who was thought of as the kind of Petrarchan 
mistress er of all her courtiers er produced this language this this rhetoric 
indeed poetry of courtly love amongst many courtiers at Elizabeth's er a-, a-, 
a-, in her court and you can see examples in your anthology numbers eighteen 
and nineteen the Earl of Essex writing such a poem number thirty in your 
anthology many courtiers wrote this kind of language of adoration to Elizabeth 
a courtly love language of adoration to Elizabeth she positively encouraged it 
at her court and we see Spenser's perhaps rather sour assessment of the effects 
of this language through the other figure of Elizabeth in The Faerie Queene the 
figure of Belphoebe who appears in book three book two and book three of The 
Faerie Queene Belphoebe is a virgin who knows nothing of love but who inspires 
love in the figure of Timias a squire Timias' name means honour but once he has 
been infected by love of the beautiful 
chaste Belphoebe Timias gives up his honourable calling he gives up his life as 
a squire and becomes completely enmeshed in his worship of Belphoebe Belphoebe 
knows nothing of this she does not recognize it she does not reward his love 
and gradually through the course of the narrative which goes on to book four of 
Faerie Queene Timias degenerates from a figure of honour to a kind of wild man 
in the woods unable to do anything except write sonnets to his mistress er 
which she takes no notice of er i think what Spenser is doing is exploring the 
destructive effect here er it has been suggested that what he's doing is to 
some extent reflecting the story of Sir Walter Raleigh in this story of Timias 
and Belphoebe and it may well be that there are echoes of that historical story 
in the the er the the mythical one the fictional one that Spenser gives but i 
think the more general point is that Spenser is through this figure of 
Belphoebe and her effect on the 
knight honour Timias er exploring the destructive effect of this cult of 
Elizabeth this cult of worship of Elizabeth which has as its corollary a kind 
of emasculating effeminating er effeminizing effect on the male courtiers er 
that surround her so from one point of view this narrative of Belphoebe is 
praising Elizabeth she's an exceptional figure exceptionally beautiful and 
certainly chaste but from another perspective the story can again be seen to 
give shape to a deep-seated masculine anxiety about the effects of a female 
monarch on the men around her simply by the fact of her gender unwittingly 
Belphoebe entraps Timias' honour leading him away from his questing masculine 
vocation to permanent enslavement as her adoring admirer neither Spenser nor 
Raleigh were for a minute taken in of course by the erotic rhetoric used of the 
Queen after all she is fifty at least fifty in fifteen-ninety er and 
enslavement er the the the rhetoric was used er as a coded 
language of courtly plying for favour er courtly patronage it was a a part of a 
courtly game of comp-, compliment of and dependence on royal favours but as 
this deadly serious courtly game of compliment could be and frequently was 
figured as erotic adoration of an ever u-, unattainable beautiful mistress so 
could royal disfavour and rejection be figured as the hopelessness of love for 
a cruel mistress and this is how it often was figured in the poetry it's a 
figurative way of speaking about patronage either way the effect on Elizabeth's 
courtiers and indeed more widely on her male subjects was perceived to be one 
of a cultivated dependence and subjection of the male by the female that could 
easily be seen as ignoble dishonourable and emasculating and here again i think 
we see surfacing that deep-seated fear of female power that we saw right at the 
beginning in the John Knox quotation in a completely unfictionalized way okay 
sorry about the slides i don't know what happened er to those but you'll find 
the pictures as i say in the er Roy Strong book