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...argues that political agendas of successive sixteenth-century translations of Virgil's Aeneid, by Gavin Douglas, Henry Howard (earl of Surrey), Thomas Phaer, and Richard Stanyhurst, had differing, predominantly Catholic and counterreformation but also Protestant ideological agendas that reflected the beliefs of the authors or those who patronized the works; the first translations, for example, were published during the Marian reign, which made the westward expansion of Rome highly topical (D. Hamilton). To judge from the Dedicatory Sonnets of The Faerie Queene, and especially their direct allusions to Virgil and his patrons Maecenas and Augustus (Hatton 8; Walsingham), as well as their plentiful praise of epic or martial poetry (Hatton 7; Northumberland 1-4; Cumberland 6; Essex 12; Howard 4-5; Hunsdon 13; Buckhurst 7-8; Norris 4; Ralegh 11), we are invited to read Edmund Spenser's Virgil-influenced epic in a similar light: as both imperial spur and consolation to Protestant warriors who sought to expand Tudor political influence under their own religious banner. (1) I will underscore this reading by pointing to ways in which the innovative Dedicatory Sonnets focus our attention on Irish soil in ways as yet unnoticed by critics. The Sonnets celebrate and chastise Spenser's fellow planters and patrons while promising fertile opportunity to anyone who might be tempted to venture west and north across St. George's Channel. They therefore call for continued military severity in the name of English heroic and imperial ideals and, of course, self-interest, a pro-martial law stance taken most clearly by Spenser's policy tract, A View of the Present State of Ireland (Edwards, "Ideology").
Spenser often emphasizes key concepts through repetition of words in and between poems, as with the word place (Hunsdon 6, 8; Buckhurst 2, 5; Walsingham 5; Ralegh 2). Both Carol Stillman and David Lee Miller argue that Spenser orders the Sonnets so as to "place" his patrons, whose "honor" and "nobility" he idealizes as members of the court. The Sonnets are ordered by importance of family and office, suggesting that Spenser condones and celebrates not only the dedicatees but also the rigid hierarchies of Tudor rule (Stillman 143-48; D. Miller, Two Bodies 49-62). William tram, picking up this thread, argues that Spenser not only gives "place" of merit to his dedicatees, but simultaneously asserts with "exuberant aggressiveness" his own arrival at court as a poet of a great, even transcendent, work of national importance. Newly arrived back in London in the fall of 1589 after ten years living, writing, and administering in Ireland (where his own place shifted steadily to the south-west, from Dublin to Kildare to his house and home in north County Cork), Spenser calls attention to his ability to shape (and even subtly criticize) his patrons through his art. These patrons are so honorable and noble in part because he makes them so (Oram, "Seventeen").
Spenser, as we will see, "places" his virtuous patrons in a geographical context of world and Irish politics, and not only on abstract ladders of courtly hierarchy centered on London alone. The Sonnets and the epic highlight the "place" in his poetry and the world that Spenser has found or wishes to find for both these patrons and himself.
I
Arms and the Empire
The Sonnets are placed with the Commendatory Verses and the Letter to Ralegh at the end of the 1590 edition. The back matter disappears with the 1596 edition. Why it appears at the end of the first three books and only there remains a mystery, although Wayne Erickson (following the work of Mark Bland) argues that Spenser intended its placement there and that the net effect of this move is to gloriously isolate both the title page and the elaborate dedication to the queen at the beginning of the poem, on A1 recto and verso, respectively (Erickson, "Front and Back"). Spenser undoubtedly wished to celebrate the fountainhead of his endeavor, the queen, whose title as "Empresse" of "England, France and Ireland" is loudly announced at the top of the 1590 dedication. This follows a title page whose printer's mark shows the iris, or royal fleur-de-lis, writ large--that is, a declaration of the English monarch's long-held claim to rule France as part of her empire--and the motto ubique florit, a perfect emblem of the organic, plantation impetus behind Spenser's imperial, epic labor. This expansive theme Spenser echoes again at the close of his book, in the back matter.
Letter to Ralegh
As test cases of the imperial and specifically Irish significance of the back matter, we might focus on the Letter to Ralegh and the sonnets to Ralegh and Lord Burghley, men whose presence, real and imaginary, dominates both Spenser's and our view of the back matter. In his prose Letter to Ralegh, Spenser praises "vertuous" authors and fictional heroes as well as those who promoted imperial "gouernement." In the Letter, Spenser praises the "profitable" and "gratious" work of the ancient Greek Xenophon, referring to his Cyropaedia (The Education of Cyrus) for having "fashioned a gouernement such as might best be." Sir Philip Sidney is more explicit in his Defence of Poesy: "For Xenophon, who did imitate so excellently as to give us effigiem iusti imperil, the portraiture of a just empire, under the name of Cyrus, (as Cicero saith of him) made therein an absolute heroical poem" (27). Cyropaedia, "the western pioneer" of "historical romance" (W Miller viii), not only outlines how to educate a prince (the Persian Cyrus) in warring pastimes but illustrates at length strategies of gaining, nurturing, and retaining empires (Ambler 7, 11-12). Spenser would have understood the far-reaching implications of promoting Xenophon...
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Commercial settings of the 1590 Faerie Queene.(Critical essay), September 22, 2005
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