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A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North ZeebRoad. Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE FAIRY APOTHEOSIS IN RENAISSANCE LITERATURE

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By Jennifer Eva Puin, B.A., M.A.

The Ohio State University

1996

Dissertation Committee: Approved by Phoebe S. Spinrad, Adviser

Patrick B. Mullen Adviser David 0. Frantz Department of English UMI Number: 9639328

UMI Microform 9639328 Copyright 1996, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.

This microfonn edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 ABSTRACT

A popular Disney character always has been Tinkerbell, but fairies once had a central role in the culture of our ancestors far beyond the movie screen. The figure of the fairy has significantly influenced English literature and folk culture. Although writers of every period have demonstrated interest in fairy folk, the years from approximately 1575 to 1625 mark the golden age of the fairy figure in English literature. Without Queen Elizabeth there might not have been a literary fairy vogue: her reign popularized the image of the fairy monarch while her regality and political expertise were the inspiration behind England's greatest fairy works. Owing to the implicit resemblance Elizabeth bore to the fairy queen, this figure of Renaissance folk belief became an image that could serve simultaneously to praise Elizabeth and to advance the writer's own agenda. The sponsors of Elizabeth's progress pageants primarily made use of the fairy tradition they had inherited and utilized the fairy queen figure to negotiate for themselves a more favorable relationship with their sovereign. Spenser, on the other hand, reworks fairy mythology into an image that is at once Protestant, patriotic, and political. Although ii Gloriana is used by the poet to offer indirect criticism of Elizabeth, the Faerie Queene is also an image that encompasses and unites the other exemplary female representations of Elizabeth in the poem. Of all his immediate predecessors, Shakespeare's alteration of the fairy queen most directly challenges Elizabeth's authority as virgin queen and mythic being. King James did not desire to associate himself with the otherworld, but owing to Jonson's diverse use of the fairy world's denizens and belief in the moral purpose of poetry, the fairy folk continued to play a major role in court masques. Under Charles I, however, fairies became the plaything of poets. The dying out of the tradition in which fairies serve as symbols for the glory of the monarch and the court, and the changes the literary fairies undergo in nature and size during the Caroline period, are central factors in the debasement and subsequent decline of the literary fairy vogue. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge here the patience and thoughtfulness of my dissertation advisers, who have overseen my studies in this area for more quarters than they might care to count. Phoebe Spinrad, who chaired my dissertation committee, has been unfailingly attentive to the details of my work. She supported me personally, guided this work intellectually, and has seen me through to the end with always an encouraging word. Pat Mullen enlightened me to the fact that the study of folklore is more intensive and important than some literary scholars may believe. He grounded me when I made over­ generalizations about the fairy as a figure of folklore and stressed the close connection between his specialty and the main currents of literary thought. Equally important, his presence was always a calming influence. David Frantz accepted the responsibility for reviewing my work after it had already been initiated, and for this I am grateful. His detail-oriented practicality and knowledgeable reflections have left their mark on my study, and I have appreciated his personal interest in my progress. Also, I would like to acknowledge the important assistance of Christopher Highley, whose approach to critical theory gave me much to think about as I completed this work. iv Finally, I would like to thank the library staffs at The Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University, and John Carroll University, who retrieved many a dusty book from the back of the stacks. And of course, I could not complete these acknowledgments without a word of thanks to my family, who provided the space where I worked and the inspiration that fueled my effort.

v VITA

1989 Master of Arts English, GPA 4.00 John Carroll University, University Heights, OH

1989 Bachelor of Arts French and English, GPA 4.00 John Carroll University, University Heights, OH

9/89 - 6/95 Teaching Associate/Instructor The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio Courses Taught: - Introduction to Shakespeare - Selected Works of British Literature: Medieval through 1800 - Composition and Literature - Informative Writing - Composition with Computers (Macintosh and IBM) -• First-Year English Composition

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: English

Studies in: Renaissance literature (Phoebe S. Spinrad) Old and Middle English literature (Lisa J. Kiser) American literature to 1900 (Thomas W. Cooley) Folklore (Patrick B. Mullen)

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract...... ii

Acknowledgments ...... iv

V i t a ...... vi

Preface ...... 1

Chapters:

1. Introduction: The Fairy Phenomenon in Renaissance Superstition and Literature .... 4

2. A Quest for Legitimacy: The Fairy Queen in Elizabeth's Progress Pageants . 35

3. The Two "Famous Auncestries" of Queen Elizabeth: Spenser's Mythic Vision of British History in The Faerie Q u e e n e ...... 71

4. Tarnishing Elizabeth's Mythic Aura: Shakespeare's Comic Revision of Fairyland...... 109

5. Festive Diplomacy: Fairies in Stuart Court Masques ...... 143

6. The Decline of the Fairy A p o t h e o s i s ...... 179

Bibliography ...... 216

vii PREFACE

Poltergeists, bigfoot, the abominable snowman, the Loch Ness monster, alien visitors, witches, ghosts and goblins: our popular culture is imbued with images derived from superstition and pagan culture. A popular Disney character always has been Tinkerbell, but fairies once had a central role in the culture of our ancestors far beyond the movie screen. The figure of the fairy has significantly influenced English literature and folk culture. Although writers of every period have demonstrated interest in fairy folk, the years from approximately 1575 to 1625 mark the golden age of the fairy figure in English literature. Spenser's Gloriana and Shakespeare's Titania are the two most famous of these creatures, but lesser manifestations are studied as well in this work. Focusing on why and on how poets and dramatists use fairies during this period, I survey some causes for the popularity of fairy literature in the English Renaissance and offer some explanations for why the literary fairy vogue was altered and to a large extent debased during the Caroline period. Other scholars have developed comprehensive theories explaining the prevalence of the fairy in the Renaissance. For example, in The Erotic World of Faerv (1972), Maureen

1 Duffy believes the fairy is a subconscious expression of the repressed eroticism of the period. In Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1963), C. L. Barber sees the figure as an expression of a pastoral ideal, like Shakespeare's rustics. New historicists see the fairy as providing telling insights into contemporary tensions between poets and politicians. See, for example, Susan Frye's discussion.of the Kenilworth pageant in Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (1993) and Louis Montrose's seminal article on A Midsummer Night's Dream. "'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture" (1988) . This work does not attempt to elaborate any overarching theory of the meaning of the fairy in Renaissance literature. Instead, my goal has been to provide literary scholars who are interested in a particular figure of Renaissance folklore with a critical survey of its use in major as well as minor works. Similarly, I have hoped to offer folklorists a literary perspective on a figure with whom they are already familiar. My approach cannot be characterized as feminist, or as new historicist, or as anything except, perhaps, humanist. It may seem that I have targeted a narrow audience in this work. However, it should be noted that no work since Katharine Briggs's important study in 1959, The Anatomy of Puck, has surveyed the use of fairies in Renaissance literature. Briggs's approach may be characterized primarily as that of the folklorist, whereas mine attempts to be more historical and literary. Also, by discussing in detail the

2 reasons for the rise and decline of the literary fairy apotheosis, my work provides the link that is missing from other studies on fairies in Renaissance literature. Chapter One is an introduction to the main topic and provides the context for the rest of the work. Chapter Two studies the Elizabethan progress pageants, with an emphasis on the political tension revealed in the use of the fairy. Chapter Three gives observations on the brightest star in the firmament of fairy literature, Spenser's Faerie Queene. Chapter Four examines the most persistently popular characters of this type, Shakespeare's sprites in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Chapter Five describes a more minor expression of this potent symbol in the Stuart court masques. Finally, Chapter Six describes the alteration of the fairy vogue and ventures some conclusions.

3 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE FAIRY PHENOMENON IN RENAISSANCE SUPERSTITION AND LITERATURE

While fairy stories were prominent in the literature of Scotland by the early 1500s, the golden age of English fairy literature did not arrive until the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. It is convenient to regard this period in England when the fairies not only made their greatest impression on literature but also were most gloriously manifested in it, as spanning the half-century before the Caroline period, from 1575 to 1625. The beginning date marks the presentation to Queen Elizabeth of Henry Lee's Woodstock pageant, which likely provides the first fully documented appearance of the fairy queen in Elizabethan literature and begins the long line of great fairy works that were to be produced in the succeeding decades. This line is highlighted by Spenser's Faerie Queene. Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the spectacular fairy-filled masques of Ben Jonson. Until the death of King James in 1625, poets and dramatists treated the fairies with some degree of deference and used them for the most part as vehicles to comment on human affairs. My purpose in this introductory chapter is first to provide a cultural context for my study of literary texts. To give

4 some sense of the nature and strength of fairy belief among both the learned and the common folk throughout the Renaissance, I quote mostly from primary sources and examine contemporary accounts of the fairies from books and treatises of historical consequence as well as from the popular journalism of the time. Second, I aim to speculate on a number of issues that might account for the rise of the literary fairy vogue in the late sixteenth century. Although the causes for the fairy fashion are not easy to detect, given the variance of the historical accounts of fairies, it is certain that this fifty year period of the fairies' prominence in literature was related to the totality of circumstances that have shaped England's national character. In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Theseus speaks of the young lovers' nighttime encounter with the fairies and their ensuing confusion in the woods as more strange than true. In the face of the extraordinary, Theseus remains a skeptic: "I never may believe / These antique fables, nor these fairy toys" (5.1.2-3). Although the Renaissance may truly be identified as the age when belief in fairies was dying down among the educated, not many individuals were frankly and entirely skeptical of the material existence of all otherworldly beings. Fairies as well as ghosts, witches, and devils were often regarded as actual physical beings that played a significant role in the daily lives of individuals. Reginald Scot, in the Discouerie of Witchcraft (1584), boldly attempted to show that society's widespread belief in fairies and related spirits was foolish, and he was rewarded for his

5 efforts by being branded as a heretic. The rational and discerning Scot was attacked vehemently by no less a person than King James himself, who flatly refuted Scot's "damnable opinions" in his own treatise, Daemonoloaie (1597), and had all the copies of the Discouerie publicly burnt when he came

to the throne.

The clash between Scot and King James illustrates the conflict of beliefs concerning the otherworld that is characteristic of the entire age. Among other things, scientific curiosity, the witch scare, and the impulse to debunk the magic that was often associated with the Catholic church, aroused interest in the otherworld and incited serious discussions and questionings about fairies and related spirits. Somewhat analogous to current disputes over UFOs or bigfoot, there were both adherents and skeptics of the fairy faith, and some Renaissance pamphlets composed by and for the learned portion of the population were written specifically to prove or to disprove the existence of fairies and spirits. Robert Kirk's late seventeenth-century treatise, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves. Fauns, and Fairies, is crucial among the period's non-fictional literature dealing with the supernatural, since it is the only complete and detailed account of beliefs held concerning the fairy community. Kirk, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, offers a firm defense and thoroughly scientific analysis of the fairy world. In addition to this valuable treatise, there are three principal source-books for the supernatural in the Renaissance, all of which give fairies explicit

6 treatment: Lewes Lavater's Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nvaht. Scot's Discouerie of Witchcraft as well as the appended essay, "A iscourse vpon diuels and spirits," and

King James the First's Daemonoloaie. 9 These writers reflected the beliefs and concerns of learned society, and, with the exception of Robert Kirk, they tended to prove the fairies' nonexistence by classifying them with other beings of folk belief. Given the inter-connectedness of folk traditions in the Renaissance, it is difficult to determine precisely what was believed about the fairies and what was meant when someone spoke of them. The word itself creates problems for scholars because “fairy" was often used synonymously with other names, such as elf and goblin. In examining the semantics of the word fairy, Noel Williams observes that the relation between the supernatural name ("fairy") and its referent has been a loose one in the respect that the form of the word may vary while the referent in some sense remains constant.^ This loose relation between name and referent was especially true throughout the Renaissance, when the boundaries of supernatural realms were not always well defined, and the popular credence in fairies became curiously entangled with belief in devils, witches, and ghosts. In regard to its indeterminate nature, however, fairy belief was no.different from other folk belief, and drawing sharp distinctions between folk traditions, as between literary genres, has proven to be essentially arbitrary if not unprofitable.

7 One prominent recurring theme expressed by educated writers of the age is that fairies are illusions of the devil or the devil himself in masquerade, scheming to deceive innocent and naive victims by blinding them to truth and reality. Thomas Nashe, in "The Terrors of the Night or, A Discourse of Apparitions" (c. 1592), refers to the "Robbin-good-fellowes, Elfes, Fairies, [and] Hobgoblins" as some of the foolish terrors of the nighttime; when not illusions of a melancholic mind, the fairy apparitions are knavery on the part of the devil (347) . The idea that devils disguise themselves as fairies was supported by King James, whose Daemonoloqie (1597) names "the Fayrie" as one of the fourfold classification of devils that haunt the earth. The often base qualities of the folklore fairies account in part for this inter-weaving of fairy belief with devil lore. The fairies were frequently regarded as cruel and treacherous spirits because of their habit of abducting mortals, striking animals and humans with disease, blasting crops, and swiftly avenging any injuries done to them. Passages in Lewes Lavater's Of Ghostes and Soirites Walking bv Nvaht (1572) illustrate well the blurring of fairy and devil lores, but it is the less sinister side of the fairies' nature that is manifested in this work. Lavater's primary purpose in the first part of his treatise is not to distinguish fairies from related spirits, but rather to prove that spirits sometimes appear to people--a fact, he says, that is denied by only the impudent and rash. Among the many allegedly credible witnesses Lavater cites, there are those "graue men of great authoritie" who testify to both past and current citings of companies of dancing elves and fairies (93). When an individual was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the elusive fairies, these unspecified authorities claim, it was likely to be while these creatures were involved in their most characteristic activity, festive and ceremonial dance. Despite these testimonies to the fairies' existence, the author clearly holds the opinion that fairy world beings are simply devils in disguise. At one point Lavater contends that the diminutive spirits who make their houses inside metal mines and dress themselves in miners' clothes are not elves or fairies of the mine, as they were more commonly thought of, but meddling demons that "very seldome hurte the laborers . . . except they prouoke them by laughing and rayling at them" (74). More revealingly, devils are later credited with activities and attributes usually associated with the celebrated Robin Goodfellow, namely leading travelers astray, troubling cattle in the nighttime, and shape-shifting (96). Lavater's mischievous and earthy "devils" are essentially the fairies of folklore, that is to say the fairies as they were conceived of by the folk and pictured in the popular literature. However, in this treatise which attracted the attention of Lavater's learned contemporaries, fairies are made indistinguishable from devils and robbed of their distinctive personalities. In his comprehensive essay on Renaissance superstition, "Elizabethan Demonology," Thomas Spalding conjectures that the merging of the attributes possessed by fairy and devil

9 began at the time of Great Britain's conversion to Christianity, when native deities were identified by Church authorities as devils of the earth. New converts refused to believe the gods of their old religion were as sinister as early Christian Fathers purported, and so their former gods, Spalding argues, "became the progenitors of our fairy mythology rather than the subsequent devil-lore" (24). Although any theory regarding fairy origins can only be speculative, Spalding's conjecture that fairies evolved from pagan deities is particularly valuable in that it explains why the fairies shared some of the same functions or characteristics as the devils and why they were typically regarded as less harmful than their counterparts. In the Renaissance, fairies rather than devils, for example, were blamed for little mishaps in agricultural and domestic matters.^ Stories of harm from fairies outweigh tales of benefit from them, but since people were reluctant to condemn the wide range of fairy folk as malevolent spirits, the uncertainty in regard to the extent of the fairies' wickedness continued throughout the Renaissance. Historically, Catholic clergy were hostile towards fairies and fairylore, but bitter anti-papal feelings during the age fueled an oft-expressed Protestant myth that fairies were the creation of Catholic clergy and indicative of former idolatrous days when devils were ubiquitous. Many Protestant preachers charged the Church of Rome with giving birth to a multitude of apparitions and "splendid miracles," as Lavater says sarcastically, in order to keep people in fear and awe.

10 Not surprisingly, the diverse inhabitants of fairyland are identified consistently by learned Protestant writers as common Catholic idols. The author of the "Discourse vpon Diuels and Spirits" provides a lengthy list of Catholic idols and includes among them the following fairy types: penates, the domestic spirits; virunculi terrei, hobgoblins like Robin Goodfellow that assist maids with household chores; tetrici or subterranei, hideous spirits of the earth; and virunculi, harmless dwarfs "about three handfulles long" who busy themselves by seeming to dig for minerals (521) . Reginald Scot was perhaps more cynical than most when he echoed the sentiments of Chaucer's Wife of Bath by alleging the incubus was simply a fable designed to cloak the lechery of Popish priests, and Robin Goodfellow was some cozening idle friar. This common view that fairies were invented by the wiles of t the Catholic church is not supported by the evidence because not only does fairy belief predate Catholicism, but official clergy regarded belief in fairies as nearly a rival religion and made every attempt to suppress it.^ Nevertheless, the link fettering fairies to Catholicism's evils was indissoluble. In 1572 Lavater wrote that if fairies or elves of the earth had been seen in the past, surely they were evil spirits and appeared exclusively to the Gentiles in order to further engulf them in their blind superstition. In the time of his country's religious infidelity, echoes Nashe, in a less serious tone, devils appeared to individuals and performed their "merry pranks" in the guise of Robin Goodfellow, elves, fairies, and hobgoblins; "Then ground

11 they malt and had hempen shirts for their labours, daunst in rounds in greene meadowes, pincht maids in their sleep that swept not their houses cleane, and led poore Trauellers out of their way notoriously" (347) . The so-called devils of a former time, who ground malt and were left clothing for their service, are none other than those friendly, tutelary spirits of Renaissance folk belief, particularly the Brownie and Robin Goodfellow. In England and Scotland, the naked, hairy creature known as the Brownie would come out at night to sweep the floor, scrub pans, and finish any chores left undone by the servants. Unless offended by the household members, the Brownie was absolutely loyal to the family in whose home he decided to live. Benevolent though prankish, Robin Goodfellow, the best-known hobgoblin of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, also performed Brownie labors at night and is therefore often pictured with a broom and candlestick. Given the outwardly good actions of these honest, amiable fairies, the learned writer found himself faced with a perplexing question: Why would the devil, if indeed he disguised himself as tutelary sprites, act counter to his evil disposition? This enigma is best explained by King James in his Daemono1oaie, and for the king as well as for other Protestant writers, the answer is patently clear. Though not as thoroughly and persuasively as the modern reader would hope, James responds to the question of the devil's disguise in the voice of the polished Epistemon: "Was it not euill inough to deceiue simple ignorantes, in making

12 them to take him for an Angell of light, and so to account of Gods enemie, as of their particular friend" (65). Speaking for all Christians, the king affirms that the material form of any good spirits, including fairies and angels, has ceased to exist since the establishment of God's church on earth, and belief in these harmful visions only furthers the error begun by the Catholic Church that each person was accompanied by two spirits--one good, one bad. Whereas the good spirit or guardian angel was to protect the soul and guide the individual to salvation, an evil spirit continually assayed to entangle the person in all sorts of temptation and sin. Whether spirits performed good or bad actions, it was James's contention that the devil was the source of these actions, and by destroying the devil's illusions, he thought he was carrying out his duty towards his country and God. The earnest endeavor of those like James Stuart to debunk religious supernatural phenomena produced its effect upon a host of other superstitions. When Reginald Scot published his treatise on witchcraft in 1584, he had believed the illusions of Catholicism were discovered, and in a short time the rest of the country's superstitions would be detected and vanish. Although of a very small minority in his opinion, Scot was skeptical not of the existence of spirits but of the possibility of any spirit assuming physical form, even witches and devils.^ Talking of times before his own, Scot says in the Discouerie of Witchcraft. "Certeinlie some one knave in a white sheete hath cousened and abused manie thousands that waie; speciallie when Robin good-fellow kept

13 such a coile in the countrie" (152) . Scot makes the claim that Robin Goodfellow and his kin have disappeared from the land and have ceased to be feared, and he importantly provides a lengthy catalog naming those creatures which had been the sources of terror to his age. Listed among the names in this oft-quoted passage are Robin Goodfellow and the other fairy folk: But in our childhood our mothers maids have so terrified us with an ouglie divell . . . bull beggers, spirits, witches, urchens, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, sylens, kit with the cansticke, tritons, centaurs, dwarfes, giants, imps, calcars, conjurors, nymphes, changlings, Incubus, Robin good-fellowe, the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oke, the hell waine, the fierdrake, the puckle, Tom thombe, hob gobblin, Tom tumbler, boneles, and such other bugs, that we are afraid of our owne shadowes. (152-3)

Those who still see these visions of fairies, changelings, and similar apparitions, Scot says derogatorily, are sick folk, children, women, and cowards--essentially, those who he believes are weak in mind and body. Although many of Scot's claims were not accurate, since fairies were still a part of the popular belief in the country, Scot did help to establish the beginnings of doubt. These doubts made their way into the popular journalism, where Robin Goodfellow and his fairy companions were sometimes spoken of as creatures of childhood belief. In the popular pamphlet Tarltons Newes Out of Puraatorie (1590), for instance, the use of the past tense is evident when discussion centers on those pleasantly disposed hobgoblins such as Robin Goodfellow, who were made famous in every old wives' tale for their merry pranks. In the black-letter

14 pamphlet of 1628, Robin Good-Fellow, his mad prankes and merrv iests. the hostess of the alehouse who is narrating the history of Robin regards the fairies as if they belonged to the distant past: "a great while a goe . . . Thare was wont to walke many harmelesse Spirits called fayries . . . many mad Prankes would they play." Despite claims to the contrary in the popular journalism and historical treatises, one suspects that the death of belief in fairies was exaggerated because of the Protestant impulse to reject fairy belief with the old religion. Although sympathetic to fairy belief, Richard Corbett did not hesitate to associate fairies with the time of Catholicism. In "The Faeryes Farewell" he laments the disappearance since Queen Mary's reign of companies of dancing sprites: Wittness those Rings & Roudelayes Of theirs, which yet remaine Were footed in Queene Maries dayes On many a Grassy Playne; But, since of late Elizabeth, And later lames, came in, They never daunc'd on any heath As when the Time hath bin. (25-32)

Although some liked to believe that fairies declined with the influence of the Roman Catholic Church and Mary's reign, fairy belief still had some generations to linger on, even among the Protestants. Despite the rise of science in the seventeenth century, people clung to folk belief in fairies

n and related spirits.

Although there is a strong note of skepticism in much that was written on the fairies by the more educated members of Renaissance society, belief in fairies was still strong in

15 some learned quarters, especially at the end of the seventeenth century. Robert Kirk, one of the few writers who did not mingle fairies and witches, saw fairy belief as being consistent with Christianity and even confirming belief in angels and devils. In his famous treatise on fairies, The Secret Common-Wea1th. Kirk confidently declares that the fairies are no nonentities or phantasms, creatures, proceeding from ane affrighted apprehensione confused or crazed sense, but Realities, appearing to a stable ma.i in his awaking sense and enduring a -rational tryal of their being. (64)

While there is no consensus among writers on whether or not fairies actually existed in their own time, the historical documents of the period give us a sense of the ambiguous nature of the fairies, which stems from two separate traditions: fairies as evil beings and fairies as benevolent, tutelary spirits. For the most part, writers dwell on the fairies' darker characteristics, and although there is an occasional reference to Brownie labors, these activities are often attributed to devils. Given the infinite variety of the fairy folk, it is understandable that some thinkers would deny that fairies were a distinct race of beings and try to classify them as devils or other supernatural creatures. For the folk, who were considerably more credulous in regard to fairy superstition than the educated, fairies were as real and consequential as any human being. Accounting for the portion of believers among this group is a difficult task and may be comparable to determining how may people today believe in UFOs, astrology, or witchcraft. Evidence for the

16 widespread belief in fairies among the multitude may be found in the numerous contemporary accounts of fraud, similar to that portrayed by Jonson in The Alchemist, in which credulous individuals paid large sums of money in the hopes of meeting

the fairies• or the queen of the fairies. R Many practices and customs were designed to woo a domestic sprite into one's home, to appease an offended sprite, or generally to get on the good side of these creatures. Euphemisms such as "good neighbors" and "good people" were used by country people in order to avoid the ill will of the fairies. The fairies' presence on stage throughout the Renaissance, which was not seen as an improbable occurrence, also bears witness to the strength of the people's belief in fairies. Certainly Falstaff, in the Merrv Wives of Windsor, was not unique in believing that the creatures in Windsor Forest who tormented him with their tapers and pinches were the authentic inhabitants of fairyland. For many the fairies were a deep and even fearful reality. The broadside ballad, which stemmed from folk awareness, is another important source for information pertaining to the folk's conception of the native fairies. Even unlearned and illiterate individuals could learn the art of composing ballads, and through these ballads, Richard Wright states,

"common folk found a means of self-expression" (420) .9

Traditional supernatural ballads such as "King Orfeo," "Thomas Rymer," "Clerk Colvill," and "The Wee Wee Man," not only convey folk knowledge pertaining to the nature and practices of the fairies, but they also furnish guidance for

17 human conduct toward these supernatural beings. Although it is impossible to know when they were composed, it is likely that these ballads, all of which are printed in Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, may have been similar to the ballads performed orally or those in circulation during the Renaissance. The fairies depicted in them are mostly threatening or cruel, and the themes expressed are present also in more literary fairy works of the period. In the Thomas Rymer ballad (Child 37), the fairy queen is portrayed as being amorous of a mortal named True Thomas, whom she fetches to fairyland to be her lover and releases only when it is feared that he would be chosen as the fairies' teind, or tribute, to Hell. Important cultural information about the fairy folk is conveyed in "Thomas Rymer," namely the idea that eating fairy food or having any exchange of speech or physical contact with a fairy would doom the mortal to imprisonment in fairyland. It is Thomas who has put himself in the fairy queen's power: "he had eaten and drunk his fill" of fairy food, then obeyed the fairy queen's bidding to "Lay down your head upon my knee." Unlike the Thomas Rymer ballad, "Clerk Colvill" (CH 42) ends tragically when a scornful sea fairy mistress lays a fatal spell on her mortal lover, who has deserted her by marrying an earthly wife. More than the other ballads, this one speaks of the fairies' malevolence and the mortals' inability to escape from their power. One of the most fanciful fairy ballads is "The Wee Wee Man" (CH 38), which tells of a lady who admires a diminutive fairy and journeys to his "bonny

18 bower" only to have the beautiful sight suddenly vanish from her. This short ballad highlights several features of the fairy folk: the magnificence of fairy ladies and their dwelling, their skill at dance, and their ability to disappear at the blink of an eye. As the historical notices of fairies had done, these ballads highlight the dual nature of these supernatural beings. The fairy folk were at once charming creatures who captured the Renaissance fancy, and malevolent beings who possessed the power to abduct and even to cause the death of mortals. Where the common folk differed from the educated was in the strength of his belief and the inclination to regard the fairy folk as an entity distinct from the host of related sprites. Contrary to what we might expect, belief in fairies is not a necessary correlation to their use or non-use in literary works. Fairy belief was stronger during the first half of the sixteenth century than the later half, but fairies made little impression on the literature. Perhaps, as some critics suggest, fairies were too much a part of popular superstition in the early 1500s to be dealt with by learned scholars and poets, and it was only after people began to question previous convictions concerning the otherworld that the fairies became fashionable. 10 As this brief• examination • of the Renaissance belief in fairies has shown, some individuals rejected fairy belief, some accepted it, and some might have bordered on a state of half-belief in that they believed in the cultural tradition but denied fairies existed in the present time. Often this conflict of opinions is

19 characteristic of well-rooted belief in folklore; that is, legends and folk beliefs are usually disputed in the situations in which they’ are expressed, never simply believed by everyone. In large part, the fairy vogue in literature seems to have been propelled by the period's dynamic mix of belief and disbelief in fairies. Writers may have turned to the familiar elves of the countryside because they half believed in the fairies themselves or simply because they wished to give attention to what was appealing to their readers. The spread of literacy combined with the increase in the number of people buying and reading books is conceivably another chief cause for the prominence of fairies in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature. The introduction of printing into England in the late fifteenth century greatly expanded the reading public and gave rise to a new class of writers who catered to the needs and intellectual interests of first-generation readers. The professionalization of writing was established during the Renaissance, and university-educated writers like Nashe and Greene made their living off writings targeted to the London populace. From among the vast amount of literature which flowed from the printing presses, professional writers recognized that members of the populace, many of whom had recently moved from the countryside and from smaller villages and towns, would be drawn especially to those works which took as their subject matter the familiar folklore of the countryside and the tales they had heard many times over from

20 relatives and neighbors about the native fairies.H Robin

Goodfellow, known mainly in folk tradition as a misleader who derives perpetual entertainment from vexing fools and knaves, is referred to in broadside and pamphlet literature more often than any other inhabitant of the fairy realm. Reginald Scot and his contemporaries give much the same account of him as the 1628 pamphlet, Robin Good-Fellow, his mad orankes and merry ~i ests. which makes Robin the son of Oberon and chronicles his picaresque adventures, each described in its own brief chapter and usually ending with a snatch of a song or Robin's characteristic laugh, "ho, ho, hoh." The treatment of the merry and roguish Robin Goodfellow is unique in Tarltons Newes Out of Puraatorie (1590), where Robin is associated with the spirit and tone of the fiction rather than set up as an individual character. The literary exploitation of fairies may have begun in patriotism no less than in the commercial interests of middle class professional writers. Fairies were part of the living folklore of the English people, and one had only to look at the landscape of the countryside, decked with fairy rings and mounds, to witness the merging of the natural and supernatural worlds. 1 ^ 9 Minor. White Latham importantly notes that the fairies for the most part made their way into literary works "neither from the established categories of demons or devils, nor from the romances of preceding centuries, but from fields and forests of England and from the living traditions and contemporary belief of the English folk" (24). It did not matter whether the fairy folk really

21 inhabited the woods and fields of England; fairyland existed in the hearts and minds of the people. Unlike other folklore beings, the fairies and their world paralleled the world of Renaissance England--the native sprites ate and drank, loved song and dance, had individual occupations and duties, lived in a community headed by aristocratic rulers, and had their share of "Controversies, doubts, disputs, Feuds, and Syding of Parties" (Kirk 62). The fairies' presence in literature brought delight to readers well versed in native fairylore and added a particularly English flavor to those Renaissance genres, such as the pastoral, that were largely derived from foreign or ancient models. As the wave of nationalism heightened in the last decades of the sixteenth century, the native fairies and their queen became popular figures in the entertainments given for Queen Elizabeth and her court. The daunting queen of Faerie was Elizabeth's counterpart in the fairy realm, and only to England's queen was she secondary in power and awe. Authors of the Elizabethan progress pageants and the Jacobean masques appropriated the fairy realm's denizens as much to compliment and reaffirm the ideals of the reigning monarch as to demonstrate their own patriotism which was evident in their use of native folklore. The Renaissance revival of classical literature and the age's familiarity with the mythology of antiquity may have been another impetus to turn a writer's attention to his own folklore. Translators of the classics and literary writers shared the belief that the fairies were the English

22 equivalent of the Roman and Grecian wood gods and spirits. It is not uncommon in the literature of the period, especially in the court masques of Ben Jonson, to find the fairies placed side by side with satyrs and fauns. Nashe's Terrors of the Night identifies the "Robin-good-fellowes, Elfes, Fairies, [and] Hobgoblins" of the present day with creatures that "the fantasticall world of Greece ycleaped Fawnes, Satyres, Dryades, & Hamadryades" (347). Even King James, who resolutely declares that fairies are illusions of the devil or the devil himself, associates "the Phairie" with their counterparts in the classical world, Diana and her wandering court (73-4) . Thomas Churchyard evidently regarded the fairies as being nearly indistinguishable from water nymphs and did not hesitate in his pageant devised for Queen Elizabeth, "The Queen's Entertainment in Suffolk and Norfolk, 1578," to costume his fairy-impersonators with the outfits that were originally intended to adorn the nymphs. The Renaissance notion which connected fairies with creatures of classical mythology was not the only idea to prevail, but it was a recurring one, echoed particularly by learned individuals. Medieval writers as well as the classical poets may have served as the inspiration for the Renaissance writers' focus on the fairies. Even though England's fascination with the fairies peaked during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods, we are reminded by folklorists and other scholars that fairies have a rich history and were not invented by writers of the age. Allusions to the fairies in English

23 literature indicate that these creatures were well known in the Middle Ages and played an important part in the minds of the people. Although it was thought dangerous, partly for fear of the Church's disapproval, to try to win the fairies' favor or to enquire into the nature of these capricious beings, there are several detailed accounts of the fairy world in the Middle Ages. Well before the time of Spenser and Shakespeare, medieval chroniclers, namely Giraldus Cambrensis, Ralph of Coggeshall, and Gervase of Tilbury, provided glimpses of a world of diminutive and mischievous sprites and spoke of such particulars as changelings, fairy wives, fairy mounds, and mermen. In his lengthy thirteenth- century work, Otia Imoerialia. Gervase of Tilbury speaks of the Portunes, very small English fairies about a half an inch tall, who make nightly visits to mortals' homes in order to roast frogs at the hearth (Briggs, Anatomy 193). Giraldus Cambrensis's Itinerary through Wales gives a child's eye­ witness account of miniature fairies and focuses on such things as the fairies' diet of bread sopped in milk and the appearance of their horses and subterranean land. More than even the chronicles, the growing familiarity with medieval romance and the poems of Chaucer likely played a significant role in the rise of the literary fairy vogue. Ever the accurate painter of his day, Chaucer sprinkled the Canterbury Tales with references to the fairies, the most well known being the Wife of Bath's statement at the beginning of her tale that limitors and meddlesome holy friars have expelled all elves and fairies from the land.

24 Judging from the entirety of Chaucer's Tales. we see there is no little irony in his portrayal of medieval clergy, who are said, in the Wife's tale, to have taken the place of incubi and malevolent fairies. As early as Chaucer, the idea was expressed that fairy belief was outdated; according to the Wife, Britain was swarming with fairies "manye hundred yeres ago" in King Arthur's time, but now they have died out (120). Among the educated, it is possible there were doubts concerning the general belief in fairies, as Chaucer suggests; however, we know that these doubts were not held by the majority of the populace since fairy belief was still widespread in the Elizabethan age, two centuries later. Some of the popular fairy superstitions expressed in Chaucer's other tales had carried over into the Renaissance, especially the conception that fairies were associated with deities of classical mythology. The "Merchant's Tale" identifies Pluto and Proserpina, the rulers of classical Hades, as the king and queen of the fairies, who in the tale enter January's garden to hold a scholarly debate over May's infidelity with Damian in the pear tree. The many spells and charms commonly used in the Renaissance for protection against elves and other supernatural creatures were similar to the "nyght-spel" John the carpenter performs in the "Miller's Tale" when he fears Nicholas has become insane from his too diligent studying of astronomy. 1 J Although Chaucer was a court poet and scholar, perhaps even a skeptic of the fairy faith, he demonstrates a pleasure in poetically playing with the fairy superstitions of his age. Chaucer's

25 inclination to write about the "good people" may have influenced Renaissance writers, for he had known what later poets came to realize--fairies would attract the attention of aristocrats as well as commoners. Fairies frequently appear in the poems of Gower, Chaucer's contemporary, buc these creatures are somewhat artificial in that they resemble the fays of medieval romance more than the sprightly and earthy national fairies. The fays are essentially enchantresses who beguile mortal men into becoming their lovers.^ Morgan le Fay, sister to Arthur and one of the most powerful fays of Arthurian romance, is, as Delattre states, basically "the Fairy queen of Arthurian legend" (25). It is in the romances and lays embodying the matter of Britain that fairylore of the Middle Ages finds its greatest expression. Often Renaissance writers used the human-sized, majestic fays of medieval romance as a model from which to draw their accounts of the fairy world, or they chose to mingle characteristics of the fay with those of the folklore fairies and creatures of classical mythology. It is likely that Spenser chose fairyland as the setting for his epic because of the strong supernatural element in Arthurian romance. Spenser's Faerie Oueene is not the first literary work of the Renaissance dealing with fairies, but it helped to popularize the fairies during this period with its glorification of Queen Elizabeth as fairy queen, virgin, and goddess. Elizabeth I was central to both the rise of the fairy vogue and the glorification of the fairies in the literature

26 produced during her reign. The fairy queen became a mythicized self-representation which Elizabeth either created for herself or allowed her subjects to confer on her, and the cult of Elizabeth as the fairy queen replaced the cults of the Virgin Mary and saints which were no longer acceptable. The question of why Queen Elizabeth was compared to the fairy queen, whether directly or indirectly, and of how this image from the otherworld attained such symbolic importance is addressed in the following three chapters, which focus on Elizabeth's transformation into the fairy queen. In general, this supernatural being was a convenient vehicle to praise a female ruler, and the associations the image carried suited the personality and political interests of the queen. By representing Elizabeth as the fairy queen, writers were primarily able to compliment Elizabeth's chastity through the means of an English folklore figure. The native fairies were commonly known to be extreme lovers of chastity and to punish swiftly those engaged in unchaste activities by pinching them black and blue. Shakespeare certainly knew of the fairies' hatred of lust; at the culmination of The Merrv Wives of Windsor. the Queen of the Fairies (really Mistress Quickly in disguise) rebukes Falstaff for his lechery and bids her fairy attendants to inflict him with pinches while they dance around him: Corrupt, Corrupt, and tainted in desire! About him, fairies, sing a scornful rhyme; And, as you trip, still pinch him to your time. (5.5.92-4) The association of the fairy queen with chastity may have developed further through her connection in the Renaissance

27 with Diana or Cynthia, the Roman goddess of chastity and the moon. While Elizabeth's virginity prompted also her comparison to the classical goddess, Diana was simply a majestical figure from the past, unreal and unfeared. The fairy queen, on the other hand, was still widely believed in; she was both awesome and familiar and a sign of Elizabeth's own mysterious powerfulness. Certainly no one reason can adequately account for the sudden burst of fascination with the fairies among readers and poets of the late 1500s and early 1600s. The rise of professional writers who were familiar with folk belief and utilized these traditions to delight the general reader was perhaps one of the major factors contributing to the prominent presence of fairies in the popular journalism. Folklore was allowed also to seep into more literary works and the fairies became fashionable among sophisticated audiences as well. Considering the revival of the classics and foreign influences on Renaissance genres, it seemed undeniably patriotic for poets to reach for something typically English: their own country's fairies, a parallel race of beings whose world resembled that of Renaissance England in uncanny exactitude. While many things may have triggered the rise of the literary fairy vogue, it seems certain that Queen Elizabeth herself, transformed into the mysterious and majestic Gloriana, was central to the vogue's staying power and to the fairy apotheosis.

28 Notes

After the burning of Reginald Scot's Discouerie. a second edition of the treatise did not appear until 1651. In the preface to Daemonoloqie. King James says that his treatise was written to prove that the "assaultes of Sathan are most certainly practized, & that the instrumentes thereof, merits most severly to be punished." The royal author specifically mentions Scot, who he says "is not ashamed in publike print to deny, that ther can be such a thing as Witch-craft: and so mainteines the old error of the Sadducees, in denying of spirits."

2 rp^g "Discourse vpon diuels and spirits" is anonymously authored even though it is appended to the 1665 edition of Reginald Scot's Discouerie of Witchcraft. There are many other contemporary notices of the fairies. Thomas Nashe's "The Terrors of the Night or, A Discourse of Apparitions" and John Aubrey's prose works also make mention of them. The sheer number of historical documents dealing with the difficult theme of supernatural beings is an indication that this topic was a very popular if not a noble one to dispute upon.

^ Noel Williams's article, "The Semantics of the Word Fairy: Making Meaning Out of Thin Air," is printed in The Good People: New Fairvlore Essays (1991), ed. Peter Narvaez.

^ The fairies might be blamed for spilled milk or for any mess that may have been accidentally made in the kitchen or around the house.

Keith Thomas, in Religion and the Decline of Magic, comments on why the Catholic church may have been so hostile towards fairylore: "To ecclesiastics it seemed that people who left out provision for the fairies in the hope of getting rich or gaining good fortune were virtually practicing a rival religion" (610).

^ John Cotta offers the case for moderation in belief. Without denying the actuality of witchcraft, Cotta criticizes those people who ascribe to witchcraft everything which is unknown or strange to them. On the other hand, the writer admits that it is madness to err on the other extreme, as Scot may be said to have done. In chapter 8 of A Short Discoverie of Ignorant Practisers. Cotta says, "To admit also nothing above or beside nature, no witchcraft, no associations with devils at all, is no lesse madnesse of the apposite extreme" (56). 29 n I believe the fairies declined neither with the Reformation nor with the rise of science. Even after scientific research became the dominant approach, people still held on to their belief in the otherworld--in the seventeenth century as well as the late twentieth. Spiritual belief continues today despite proclamations about scientific progress. The research of a folklorist, David Hufford, indicates that "scientific" statements about the decline of spiritual belief are not supported by scientific evidence.

O For an elaboration on the deceptions of Renaissance tricksters, see Louis Wright's Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England, pp. 443-4, and Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp. 613-14.

^ These ballads were not necessarily written; they could be created and sung by the illiterate.

I® This idea is forwarded by Minor White Latham in The Elizabethan Fairies, pp. 14-15, and by Floris Delattre in English Fairy Poetry, pp. 59-60.

H The large portion of England's populace that grew up in rural villages, surrounded by fairylore, was unwilling to forget its fairy neighbors when the mass movement to London and urban areas began. Louis Wright provides population estimates which show that London more than trebled in size from 1563 to 1634. See Wright's Middle-Class Culture, p. 10.

12 The so-called fairy rings were the circles of grass in which the fairies danced at night. In old pastures, these orbs appear as little circles of brighter green. It is now known that they are the result of ground which is rich in nutrients from the growth of a particular mushroom. The hills or mounds of the English countryside were thought to have housed the fairy people. W. Y. Evans-Wentz, in The Fairv-Faith in Celtic Countries, speaks of fairy rings and habitations. See especially pp. 289 and 332.

12 For a sampling of Renaissance spells used against the fairies, see Latham 37-9, 161-2; and Briggs's Anatomy. Appendix IV. Other references to the fairies may be found in Chaucer's "Tale of Sir Thopas," the "Man of Law's Tale," and the "Squire's Tale." Delattre offers a brief overview of the fairy references in Chaucer's Tales. See pp. 53-7.

l^ Lucy Paton states that insistent love is a fundamental part of the fay's nature. For detailed information on the fay, see Paton's Studies in the Fairv Mythology of Arthurian 30 Romance. 1-12; Jean Wilson's Entertainments for Elizabeth,!, 22-3, 25; and Alfred Nutt's Fairv Mythology of Shakespeare, 17-18 .

31 Works Cited

I . Primary Works

Aubrey, John. Three Prose Works: Miscellanies. Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme. Observations. Ed. John Buchanan- Brown. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1972.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer. Ed. John H. Fisher. New York: Holt, 1977.

Corbett, Richard. The Poems of Richard Corbett. Ed. J. A. W. Bennett and H. R. Trevor-Roper. Oxford: Clarendon, 1955 .

Cotta, John. A Short Discoverie of Ignorant Practisers. 1612. New York: Da Capo P, 1972.

The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Ed. Francis James Child. Vol. 1. New York: Dover, 1965.

Giraldus Cambrensis. The Itinerary through Wales and the Description of Wales. London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1908 .

James the First, King of England. Kina James the First Daemonoloaie (1597): Newes from Scotland declaring the Damnable Life and death of Doctor Fian. a notable Sorcerer who was burned at Edenbrouah in Ianuarv last. (1591). Ed. G. B. Harrison. The Bodley Head Quartos IX. London: Lane; New York: Dutton, 1924.

Kirk, Robert. The Secret Common-Wealth and A Short Treatise of Charms and Spels. c. 1691. Ed. Stewart Sanderson. The Folklore Society Mistletoe Ser. Cambridge: Brewer, 1976.

Lavater, Lewes. Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nvaht 1572. Ed. J. Dover Wilson and May Yardley. Oxford: University P, 1929.

Nashe, Thomas. "The Terrors of the Night or, A Discourse of Apparitions." c. 1592. The Works of Thomas Nashe. Ed. Ronald B. McKerrow. Vol. 1. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958. 339-86.

"The Queen's Entertainment in Suffolk and Norfolk, 1578." The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth. Ed. John Nichols. Vol. 2. Burt Franklin: Research and Source Works Ser. 117. New York: Franklin, 1966. 179-213.

32 Robin Good-Fellow, his mad prankes and merry iests. London, 1628. MIC ST 12016-838.

Scot, Reginald. Discouerie of Witchcraft. 1584. The English Experience: Its Record in Early Printed Books Published in Facsimile 299. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1971.

Shakespeare, William. The Merrv Wives of Windsor. The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare. Gen. ed. Sylvan Barnet et al. San Diego: Harcourt, 1972. 969-98.

Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie. 1590. The Cobler of Caunterburie and Tarltons Newes out of Puroatorie. Ed. Geoffrey Creigh and Jane Belfield. Medieval and Renaissance Texts Vol. 3. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1987. 111-206.

II. Secondary Works

Briggs, Kfatharine] M. The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare's Contemporaries and Successors. London: Routledge, 1959.

Delattre, Floris. English Fairv Poetry from the Origins to the Seventeenth Century. London: Frowde; Paris: Didier, 1912 .

Evans-Wentz, W. Y. The Fairv-Faith in Celtic Countries. London: Frowde, 1911.

Hufford, David J. "Beings Without Bodies: An Experience- Centered Theory of Spiritual Belief." FiFe Honor Lecture. June 1994.

Latham, Minor White. The Elizabethan Fairies: The Fairies of Folklore and the Fairies of Shakespeare. 1930. New York: Octagon, 1972.

Narvaez, Peter, ed. The Good People: New Fairvlore Essays. New York: Garland, 1991.

Nutt, Alfred. The Fairv Mythology of Shakespeare. 1900. Folcroft Library Ed. London: Nutt, 197 5.

Paton, Lucy Allen. Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian Romance. 2nd ed. Burt Franklin Bibliographical Ser. 18. New York: Franklin, 1960.

Spalding, Thomas Alfred. "Elizabethan Demonology." London, 1880 .

33 Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. 1971. New York: Scribner's, 1991.

Wilson, Jean. Entertainments for Elizabeth I . Studies in Elizabethan and Renaissance Culture 2. Woodbridge: Brewer- Rowman, 1980.

Wright, Louis B. Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1958.

34 CHAPTER 2 A QUEST FOR LEGITIMACY: THE FAIRY QUEEN IN ELIZABETH'S PROGRESS PAGEANTS

Before Spenser began writing The Faerie Oueene. attempts were made to incorporate the queen of the fairies into the progress pageantry of Elizabeth I. The presence of the native fairies and their queen in the outdoor pageants offered to Queen Elizabeth on her summer tours, or "progresses," through the countryside was particularly appropriate. The fairies were popularly known to inhabit the hills, forests, and lakes of the English countryside and to bestow precious gifts upon their favorites.-*- Convention required that gifts be offered to the monarch upon the occasion of a progress visit, and the shrewd host, careful not to lay himself open to the suspicion of bribery, arranged to have the fairy queen present his pricey tokens of love to Elizabeth. While the fairies' generosity was an asset to the host, it was for much more than this attribute that the fairy queen was appropriated into progress pageantry. The fairy queen shared Elizabeth's love of dancing and her high regard for chastity. Owing to the unspoken but implicit resemblance Elizabeth bore to this native figure, the fairy queen became an image that could be manipulated to serve simultaneously

35 the interests of the queen and her courtiers, the sponsors of these pageants. Elizabeth's progress pageants served not merely as a means for the courtier to convince the queen of his submission and devotion, but as a highly symbolic, highly charged arena in which courtier and queen acted out their respective roles and engaged in an oblique dialogue. In two of the most spectacular pageants presented to Elizabeth on tour--the entertainments at Kenilworth (1575) and Elvetham (1591) and in two pageants noted for their importance in representing Elizabeth's relationship with her courtiers and kingdom-- those at Woodstock (1575) and Ditchley (1592)--the fairy queen is chosen as a medium for this oblique dialogue.^ The focus of this chapter is on the sponsors of these pageants and on their quest to be regarded as legitimate in the eyes of the monarch and the pageants' viewers. My aim is to show how these men utilized the fairy queen figure to negotiate for themselves a more favorable relationship with their sovereign and to communicate indirectly the political and private issues that were pressing on their mind at the time. While this chapter examines primarily the courtiers' uses of the fairy queen in the progress pageants, we cannot lose sight of Elizabeth or the interactive nature of these pageants. The progress pageants consisted not of one but of a string of dramatic episodes that were staged for the queen at intervals during her stay at the country homes of her courtiers. The quest for legitimacy was the queen's as well as the courtiers', and for the most part Elizabeth responded

36 to her subjects' self-assertions through the part she played in resolving the pageants' fictional scenarios. Often the queen was cast as a goddess to be worshiped; it was a role Elizabeth was willing to accept because it allowed her to display superhuman power and to demonstrate the importance of her presence in all her subjects' lives. Elizabeth recognized in these entertainments, which were designed in her honor and paid for by the noblemen whose estates she visited while traveling, an ideal opportunity for advancing her public image.^ While the masque was restricted to a courtly anf3 sophisticated audience, that of the progress pageant cut across all social strata and consisted of the queen's court, members of the great country household, and commoners from nearby villages who came to witness the local event. Not only could Elizabeth be seen by many in her realm, but she could also see what was going on outside her court and make sure her subjects' loyalties lay with the crown and not with their local lord. The famous pageant given for Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth Castle in the summer of 157 5 demonstrates supremely the way the figure of the fairy queen factors into the power play between Elizabeth and her courtiers in the representation of their personal and political relations to each other. This pageant features the fairy queen in the form of the Lady of the Lake, an Arthurian fay.^ The fay's importance centers primarily on her role as distressed damsel in the pageant's principal show, which concerns the delivery of the fay from the subjection of a rapist named Sir Bruse sauns pitie. Two

37 versions describing the rescue of the Lady of the Lake are printed in "The Princely Pleasures at the Courte at Kenelwoorth," George Gascoigne's purportedly "true Copie" of the entertainments performed before Queen Elizabeth during

E* her eighteen day visit at the castle. The first version printed in Gascoigne's text is the version that was performed; it features Elizabeth as the fay's rescuer and demonstrates above all that the queen is beyond the need of male aid or protection. Immediately following this account of the performance is a description of the entertainment as it was originally devised by the pageant's sponsor, Lord Robert Dudley, the earl of Leicester. Although it was never performed, presumedly because it was censored by the queen, the original version of the Lady of the Lake device is significant in that it allows Dudley to assume the roles of suitor and chivalric protector of Elizabeth. As she is in some Arthurian stories, the Lady of the Lake is identified in the fictional scenario of the Kenilworth device with Merlin's fairy mistress, Niniane, who punished her lover for "his inordinate lust" by using the very art he taught her to entomb the magician in a cave (498). The cruel knight, Sir Bruse sauns pitie, attempts to take revenge on the fay for her treatment of "his cosen Merlyne the prophet," but he is thwarted temporarily by the sea-god Neptune, who pities the Lady's distress and builds around her a watery fortress, thus creating the lake at Kenilworth (498) . According to Merlin's prophecy, the Lady of the Lake can be freed neither from her permanent residence in the lake nor

38 from the continual threat of Sir Bruse's forces except if "a worthier maid than she her cause do take in hand" (499) . Robert Dudley and his corps of poets imagined the Lady of the Lake's rescue as a dramatic nighttime military skirmish upon the lake between "a Captaine," the symbolic role Dudley cast himself in, and the forces of the rapist. While the earl reserved for himself the central heroic role of rescuing the fay from Sir Bruse and his hostile forces, he cast Elizabeth in a traditionally passive female role. The queen was imagined at a castle window, where she would have received news from the captain of the battle that was fought on the fay's behalf and petitioned to release the fay according to Merlin's prophecy. With Dudley's interests in mind, Gascoigne insists the Lady of the Lake device would have been a wondrous show if it had been executed according to this plan: "the skirmish by night woulde have bene both very strange and gallant; and thereupon her Majesty might have taken good occasion to have gone in barge upon the water, for the better execution of her delivene"• • (502) .f

Although the author tries to add brilliancy to a lackluster role by suggesting Elizabeth could have made use of a barge to heighten the drama of her delivery, the fay's final release by the queen would have been both superfluous and anti-climactic. Elizabeth's magnificent subordinate, single- handedly and in a dramatic display of heroism, would have already eliminated the immediate threat to the fay's chastity.

39 For several reasons it seems certain that Dudley intended the Arthurian fay to appear as a vulnerable figure of Elizabeth. As a virtuous virgin who is trapped in a prison­ like confinement at Kenilworth Lake, the Lady of the Lake recalls especially the moment in time when the young Elizabeth was imprisoned in the Tower of London and her physical safety most insecure. For her alleged complicity in the rebellion engineered by Sir Thomas Wyatt, Princess Elizabeth was committed to the Tower in 1554 by her sister Mary and afterwards put under house arrest at Woodstock. Wyatt apparently intended to force Queen Mary to renounce her plan to wed the Catholic King Philip of Spain or, if she would not, to depose the monarch and to install Elizabeth on the throne. Elizabeth's projected visit only a month later to Woodstock, the sight of her hated confinement, would have made the resemblance between the Lady of the Lake and the queen all the more evident to the pageant's viewers. A more direct allusion to Elizabeth's captivity appears in a device that was to be presented later to the queen, the masque of Diana and Iris. In the process of arguing for the queen's marriage, Iris says to Elizabeth, Remember all your life, before you were a Queene;

Were you not captive caught? were you not kept in walles? Were you not forst to leade a life like other wretched thralles? (514)

Dudley had no qualms about displaying his magnificence, even if this meant recalling the period in Elizabeth's youth when she faced execution and daily feared for her life.

40 By alluding to the time when his royal mistress was most vulnerable, physically as well as politically, and by representing himself as the mighty captain who gallantly rescues a virtuous lady, the earl of Leicester could imply that Elizabeth was in great need of his services, both as a protector and a husband."^ The original version of the entertainment ultimately challenges Elizabeth's authority by questioning the queen's ability to care for her own safety, let alone the safety of the English nation. Dudley may have used an Arthurian fay as his pageant's chief figure primarily as a means to proclaim himself Elizabeth's equal and to advertise his suitability to be the queen's mate. The Lady of the Lake's presence suggests the preservation at Kenilworth of the Arthurian age's glory and the idea that together Dudley, the self-proclaimed heir to Arthur's castle, and Elizabeth, the putative heir to Arthur's crown, could revive in the present the greatness of England's glorious past. Dudley was justified perhaps in seeing himself as Elizabeth's equal and in feeling himself worthy of a mythic pedigree. In the first years of Elizabeth's reign, he was clearly the queen's favorite, and even though he was then only her Master of the Horse and already married to Amy Robsart, there was widespread belief that Elizabeth would marry Dudley. Fueled by rumors, the Spanish ambassador, Alvaro de la Quadra, reported to King Philip in November 1560 that Elizabeth's Secretary, William Cecil, "had given way to Robert, who they say was married to the Queen in the presence

41 of his brother and two ladies of the chamber" (qtd. in Levin 73). On many occasions Elizabeth displayed her affection for Dudley, but perhaps never so openly as when the queen, suffering from smallpox in October 1562, believed she was dying and insisted that her Privy Council appoint Dudley to be Lord Protector of the Realm in the event of her death. In the summer of 1575, however, approximately sixteen years after the beginning of Dudley's courtship, Elizabeth seemed reluctant to have the issue of her marriage to her subject resurrected in so public a manner. Both the original Lady of the Lake device and the marriage masque in which Iris argues "How necesserie were for worthy Queenes to wed" (514), were prepared but unperformed. Although Gascoigne attributes the cancellation of his masque to inclement weather, critics generally agree that Elizabeth suppressed the device because it forwarded Dudley's suit of marriage. Despite the earl's seemingly earnest plea to Elizabeth during the pageant's final show for either marriage or a release, it seems unlikely that Dudley had any expectation of his present courtship to lead to marriage. Philippa Berry suggests that Dudley's renewed pleas for marriage involved his interest at the time in Lettice Knollys; Dudley could plead that Elizabeth's continual rejection of his suit prompted him to search elsewhere for a wife (87). Regardless of the true state of Elizabeth and Dudley's own relationship, it was in the earl's interests to continue to advertise his position as suitor to the queen. It was Dudley's influence with and close proximity to Elizabeth which had made him one of the

42 most powerful men in England. Until his secret marriage to Lettice Knollys was discovered in 1579, the earl of Leicester's prolonged public courtship continued. As an active viewer and participant of her entertainments, Queen Elizabeth was to some extent successful at Kenilworth in disappointing Dudley's over-reaching ambition and his attempt to portray her as a vulnerable female in need of his protection. Whether Elizabeth was informed before the performance as to how Dudley's Lady of the Lake device was to play out or merely suspected the self-serving intentions of her upstart courtier, she took decisive measures to suppress any display of heroism on the part of her subordinate. In not stating openly that Elizabeth censored the device, Gascoigne fails to acknowledge that Elizabeth was aware of Dudley's maneuvers and was displeased with them. Through censorship, Elizabeth could control the Lady of the Lake device and advance her public image as forceful, independent, and supernatural. By eliminating the part of the captain and casting herself in the central role as rescuer of the Lady of the Lake, Queen Elizabeth comes to represent a valiant knight in the tradition of her ancestor Arthur, who rescues distressed damsels from their persecutors. As Elizabeth crosses Leicester's bridge after returning from an evening hunting excursion, she is stopped by Neptune's messenger. This messenger tells of the Lady of the Lake's predicament and petitions the queen to show herself to Sir Bruse sans pitie, since her presence alone is sufficient to put the enemy to

43 flight and to deliver the fay out of thralldom. Graciously accepting this opportunity to display her power, Elizabeth comes into the sight of the evil knight by advancing further on the bridge, and at once Sir Bruse magically disappears while his bands disperse. The censored version of the Lady of the Lake device is significant because it marks the beginning of the cult of Elizabeth as a supernatural being (Wilson 22). Elizabeth's power is shown to be superior to that of even the best knight in the world, since it is by her mere presence that individuals are liberated. ft

In rescuing the fay, Elizabeth symbolically underscores her ability to protect her subjects and her realm from hostile forces and, by her implied association with the Lady of the Lake, to secure herself from threats against her chastity. Sir Bruse is not only the fay's enemy, "but foe to Ladyes all," and his defeat by "soueraigne maiden's might" signifies Elizabeth's victory against male dominance (500) . While Dudley had no choice but to have his script rewritten to suit Elizabeth, his principal actress, his own interests were still communicated. Gascoigne's "Princely Pleasures" was published eight months after the Kenilworth pageant took place, and what Dudley could not advertise in performance, he advertised in print: his position as the queen's favorite. Presented before Queen Elizabeth less than two months after the Kenilworth pageant, Sir Henry Lee's entertainment at Woodstock appears to have been designed in part to offset Dudley's marital ambitions, since its main themes concern the right relationship of the courtier to his sovereign and the

44 subjection of personal desire to the good of one's country. The anonymously authored account of the pageant, "The Queenes Majesties Entertainment at Woodstocke," E. K. Chambers believes, marks the first fully documented appearance of the fairy queen in Elizabethan literature, and Charles Read Baskervill suggests it may have been the inspiration for

Spenser's portrayal of Elizabeth as the fairy queen.^

Through his varied use of the fairy queen at Woodstock and later at Ditchley, Lee deals with issues decidedly important and pleasing to Elizabeth--issues that were to form the foundation of her cult--and gives expression to his powerful vision of the monarch. While Lee was to reproduce Elizabeth's preferred iconography of virginity in his two pageants and hail his sovereign as goddess, his use of the fairy queen, whether as suitor, double, or opponent of Elizabeth, was most instrumental in shaping the public image the queen wished to project and in proclaiming himself the formulator and guardian of her cult. The phenomenon which has been termed the cult of Elizabeth is believed to have begun after the queen surmounted two major attacks on her authority: the Northern Rebellion of 1569 which sought to place Mary Stuart on the throne, and the 1570 Papal Bull excommunicating Elizabeth and releasing her subjects from obedience to the crown (Wilson 2). It was shortly after this time that Elizabeth's reign was considered established and her subjects began to see her in terms of the image she had built around herself, that of a virgin queen who had "the heart and stomach of a king.Considering1 0

45 that the Woodstock pageant was performed in 1575, when Elizabeth's power was at its height and her subjects began to represent her in ways which reflected this power, Lee was in the best possible position to advertise himself as the architect of the new mythology forming around the queen. Lee's self-advertisement was not to end at Woodstock either; through the queen's annual Accession Day tilts and his final pageant for the queen at Ditchley in 1592, Lee continued to remind viewers of his part in building up around Elizabeth an elaborate mythology. Essential to the cult of the Virgin Queen and to the social reality of the court was Elizabeth's elevation above her courtiers in the social hierarchy, and while the Lady of the Lake was a means whereby Dudley attempted to raise himself to the status of an equal or even a superior of Elizabeth, the fairy queen for Lee becomes one way to acknowledge his own proper subservience to his royal mistress. At Woodstock, the regal "Queen of the Fayry" makes her first appearance at a banquet, where she delivers a short verse speech to Elizabeth and the courtly audience on the topic of her passion for the queen. The fairy queen boldly announces she has "flam'de in fire" since first laying eyes on Elizabeth and desires to declare openly to the English queen "that none to you a better harte doth beare" (99). It might seem odd that Elizabeth's presence kindles in this native being "so hot desire" (99), if we did not regard the fairy queen as she was undoubtedly intended to be seen--as the host's chosen mouthpiece. In a gesture of humility, Lee admits through the

46 voice of the fairy queen that no man in the world is worthy to be Elizabeth's mate. Although Lee symbolically represents himself as a suitor to the queen, he wisely acknowledges, as Dudley does not, the limits Elizabeth placed on the appreciation of herself as woman. Lee gives Elizabeth a semi-divine apotheosis by showing not only her power to spark devotion in her courtiers, but also her supernatural ability to transform an individual physically and morally. Solely by virtue of Elizabeth's presence, the fairy queen is infused with a love so strong that she miraculously undergoes a physical transformation causing her black face to become white: This loue hath caused me transforme my face, and in your hue to come before your eyne, now white, then blacke, your frende the fayery Queene.^

This alteration is an indication also of the queen's magical ability to transform her subjects morally. Black and white were the personal colors of Elizabeth; the one was suggestive of constancy, the other of virginity. Both were attributes of the Tudor queen which find their embodiment, through Elizabeth's inspiration, in this queen of the fairy realm, in Lee himself, and as shown by the Ditchley entertainment, in all Elizabeth's subjects. With the performance of Woodstock's comedy, the pageant's principal show, the fairy queen becomes Eambia, a representation of Queen Elizabeth instead of a figure of the host. On the surface of the dramatized events, Elizabeth participates in the comedy only in a passive way, since she is cast as a superior, transcendent being whose presence

47 brings about the comedy's prophesied events and allows them to take their proper course on England's soil. In spite of her role as a deus ex machina. the queen is represented in many ways, for she bears a resemblance to all the major female figures in both the comedy and the preceding tale which is narrated by a hermit. Elizabeth is at once the hermit's fearsome shape-shifting mistress, the "great and noble" albeit unapproachable lady of the knight Loricus, and Princess Caudina, who must put the good of her country before her personal desires. Amidst Lee's various representations of Elizabeth, the fairy queen Eambia emerges as the most powerful. In that she is immortal, independent, and wise, the fairy queen directly reflects the image Elizabeth wished to project to her people. At a time when Elizabeth's Council advised the queen with urgency to marry before she was past child-bearing age, Lee chose to celebrate his sovereign's autonomy and virginity. In doing so, he also celebrated his own role as the elaborator of Elizabeth's personal mythology. The comedy tells the story of the lovers Caudina and Contarenus, who are separated from each other by Caudina's father, Duke Occanon, and an enchantress hired to carry Contarenus in the air and convey him across the ocean. Before the action of the comedy begins, Princess Caudina had left her country of Cambia in order to search for her lover, and after seven years time in which she "passed perils past beliefe," was reunited with Contarenus in England (94). In the playlet's present time, Duke Occanon is conveniently driven to England's shore in search of his daughter, and the

48 fairy queen, in an effort to reunite father and daughter, intercedes on behalf of Caudina, who wishes to win her father's forgiveness and return to her country with her chosen mate. With the objectivity and thoughtfulness of a wise judge, the fairy queen argues both the princess's case for keeping her chosen lover, and the duke's for urging his daughter to make a match more befitting her degree. Through the aid of the virgin Eambia, the lovers ultimately are made to understand that they must renounce their individual good, their true love for each other, for the sake of their country. Lee praises Elizabeth's virginity through the character of the fairy queen while still regarding Elizabeth as the marriageable Caudina. Though negotiations were underway at the time of the Woodstock performance for Elizabeth's marriage with Francois, due d'Alencon, Caudina's suitor brings most to mind Robert Dudley. Dudley may be compared to Contarenus, who is rejected because he is "of estate but meane" (93), in that he argued for a marriage that was both unpopular and unsuitable, since the queen was not permitted to marry one of her subjects. Drawing support from the fact that the French ambassador accompanied Elizabeth to Woodstock and was known to be hostile to Dudley's marriage designs, J. W. Cunliffe proposes that the comedy was directed specifically against Dudley (131). 1 J It is • more likely, however, that the politically cautious Lee neither designed his comedy with the intention of directly attacking Dudley, his patron, nor of preaching to the queen on the merits of a

49 particular suitor, but aimed simply to present his queen with an entertainment which dealt with themes pleasing to her appetite. The central theme which the fairy queen voices, the priority of duty to one's country over personal desires, serves as a reminder to all Elizabeth's courtiers that their duty as her true and loyal servants must take precedence over self-interests. Since Princess Caudina is shown to be inferior to her advice giver and must be taught where her true loyalty should lie, it is likely Lee intended the correspondence between Elizabeth and the virgin Eambia to be the stronger one. In respect to the views she advocates on marriage and duty, Eambia is nearly indistinguishable from Elizabeth. The fairy queen's persuasive reasoning shows there are some cases in which a princess should not marry, and the specific case of Caudina recalls Mary Tudor's unfortunate mistake of marrying without her country's consent. Unwilling to repeat the error of her sister, Elizabeth spoke of being wedded only to her kingdom. If she should marry, it would be not from inclination but from the country's desire that she wed and bear an heir. In her address to Members of Parliament in 1566, Queen Elizabeth announced her intention of finding an "appropriate" mate: I dyd send theym aunswere by my counseyle I wolde marrye (althowghe of myne own dysposycion I was not enclyned thereunto) .... And I hope to have chylderne, otherwyse I wolde never marrie .... But theye (I thynke) that movythe the same wylbe as redy to myslyke hym with whom I shall marrie as theye are nowe to move yt, and then yt wyll apere they nothynge mente y t . (qtd. in King 41)

50 Such was Elizabeth's dilemma: those who urged her marriage were reluctant to approve her choice of mate. The idea that the fairy queen is a surrogate of Elizabeth is reinforced by the fact that Eambia lives in England, the country ruled by Elizabeth and searched for by the other dramatis personae. Their association is also supported by Eambia's assumed role as peacemaker or mediator of disputes, a role typically reserved for Elizabeth. By attributing the fairy queen's skillful mediation to her virgin state and immunity to "passions blind affects," Lee could suggest that Elizabeth's absolute power and effectiveness as a ruler are founded in her unmarried situation (117). Duke Occanon's praise of the fairy queen as the "power diuine" that brings about reconciliation, "the causer of our ioy the healer of our payne," must be seen as being directed also to Elizabeth, who is ultimately credited with resolving the comedy's tangled dispute arising from the conflict between individual and national interests (123). In the final lines of the play, Roxane, who has witnessed the unpredictable fortune of Princess Caudina, reserves her thanks only for "her which gouernes al the rest" (127), Elizabeth herself. Lee returns to the fairy queen in his final pageant for Queen Elizabeth, which was performed 17 years later at Lee's country estate at Ditchley and serves as a convenient marker of the end of this courtier's career. Two years earlier, in 1590, the 57 year old Lee handed over to George Clifford his title as Queen's Champion, and thereby officially resigned as principal participant in the yearly jousts commemorating

51 Elizabeth's accession to the throne. Lee was both the instigator and driving force behind these ceremonial tournaments in which the gueen received the homage of her knights, and these jousts were the primary means by which Lee elaborated on and shaped the Virgin Queen cult of Elizabeth. The presence of the fairy queen at Ditchley in 1592 serves as a reminder of Lee's earlier pageant given in Elizabeth's honor at Woodstock, where Lee's career was launched and perhaps the first tilt was performed.^ By means of the underlying correspondence between Elizabeth and the fairy queen and between Lee and the character of an old knight, Lee can offer Ditchley's principal entertainment as a symbolic reenactment of the queen's presence in his life. Lee could also use this entertainment as a reminder of the glorious legend he built around Elizabeth, a legend which began at Woodstock and continued in the queen's Accession Day tilts. In the principal show, Elizabeth is cast as a heroine who rescues knights and ladies not from any physical harm, as had been suggested by her rescue of the Lady of the Lake at Kenilworth, but from their own moral failings. The fairy queen never makes an appearance within the device, but it is her enchantment which Elizabeth must dispel in order to release the knights and ladies who are trapped by their inconstancy within the trees of a particular grove. Lee may have borrowed the idea of knights and maidens in tree-form from Spenser's Fradubio/Fraelissa episode of the Faerie Oueene (1.2.30ff), but more likely this device was designed in remembrance of Kenilworth's concluding entertainment for

52 Elizabeth, where the queen is depicted as the nymph Zabeta, a Circe-like creature who “so obstinately and cruelly" transforms her suitors into trees (518). Before entering Ditchley's enchanted grove, the queen is warned by its guardian of the danger that awaits her and is told to “tarry here or if you needes will enter / myne be the warning & yours be the ventur" (277) . ^ Elizabeth responds to this cue as she should by showing herself worthy of the venture and passing on undaunted. When the queen is led to an old knight sleeping in a pavilion at the edge of the grove, it appears that Elizabeth becomes the fairy queen herself, who has received some offense by the knight. The page attending to the knight says he does not know what particular error the knight may have committed, but suer it was the fayrie quenes offending & well I trust it shortly shall have endinge for neuer was ther man that prince displeased who might not by a prince agayne be eased. (281) Seemingly petitioned to forgive a wrong committed against her sovereignty, Elizabeth is asked by the page to awaken his master by deciphering the meaning of the allegorical pictures hanging on the walls of the pavilion: Drawe nere & take a vew of euerie table in them no doubte some secreats are concealed wich if you will (for who denies you able) Cannot but by your wisdom be reuealed, So hapely my Mr may be healed. (281)

As a result of Elizabeth's correct interpretation of the cryptic pictures, the fairy queen's enchantment is broken; the old knight is released from his deadly sleep, and all the

53 victims of inconstancy are freed from their prison within the trees. Not only are the knights and maidens set at liberty, but they are made partakers of Elizabeth's constancy. Even Lady Inconstancy is transformed; she is won over not by reasoned argument but by the silent force of the queen's presence which commands the lady to be as Elizabeth is,

Semper eadem.

After the old knight awakes and recounts his story, frequently alluding to the Woodstock pageant, it becomes evident that this aged knight is a representation of Lee. The allegorical pictures which Elizabeth is asked to interpret first appeared at Woodstock, where they hung from the ceiling of the same banqueting house in which the fairy queen spoke and dined with Elizabeth. The old knight explains that these pictures were conveyed to the pavilion at Ditchley by the fairy queen, and that he, whom the fairy queen "in elder tyme dearlie loved," was strictly charged to watch over them (283). Lack of steadfastness reveals itself as the cause of the knight's fall, since he neglects his duty to the fairy queen by diverting his gaze from the "Piller that was crounde," an emblem of Elizabeth's own constancy, and by becoming "a stranger ladies thrall" (283). The fairy queen's transport of the cryptic pictures to Ditchley may have been designed simply as a nostalgic remembrance of the Woodstock pageant, "whose fame is largely bruted" (282), or, as Frances Yates proposes, a suggestion that Lee was the true keeper of the fairy queen tradition (105). Considering the Ditchley pageant was performed only

54 two years after the publication of Spenser's first installment of The Faerie Oueene. Lee may have wanted to remind his pageant's viewers that not only was he the first to use the fairy queen as a tribute to Elizabeth, but he was to continue to use this figure as part of the romance of the Accession Day tilts. In one tilt speech, the "Message of the Damsel of the Queen of the Fairies," a handmaid of the fairy queen is sent to Elizabeth to present her with a gift and to offer apologies on behalf of an enchanted knight who is unable to tilt before the queen.'1 7 Elizabeth was well aware of Lee's role in shaping her mythology, and even in Lee's retirement, the queen ordered her subject to continue to be present at every joust, "there to see, survey, and as one most careful and skillful to direct" her knights (qtd. in Strong 133). It appears that Lee designed Ditchley's fairy queen episode not only with the intention of elaborating on a theme deeply important to Elizabeth, . constancy or the faithfulness of a subject to his monarch, but also of offering the device as an elaborate apology to Elizabeth that old age forced him to relinquish his post as the Queen's Champion of the tilt. Through the old knight's disregard for the crowned pillar, Lee admits his own negligence in his duty as guardian of Elizabeth's mythology. Because Lee had openly dedicated himself as the queen's own champion, he may have felt an apology was also necessary for transferring his gaze, like the old knight, to a woman other than his royal mistress. Critics generally agree that the old knight's "stranger" lady, who brings about his fall from

55 the fairy queen's grace, is an allusion to Lee's live-in mistress of the 1590s, Anne Vavasour, a woman of youth and beauty but questionable morals. Elizabeth demanded complete loyalty from her subjects: all power and all passion were to revolve around her person, and when divided loyalties were imagined, Elizabeth's wrath and cunning were not unlike that "wrathefull Judge," the fairy queen, who condemns those guilty of inconstancy to an arboreal imprisonment (284) . When Elizabeth discovered, for instance, that the Earl of Oxford was the father of the child Anne Vavasour delivered out of wedlock in 1581, she had both Anne and her accomplice confined in the Tower (Haigh 90). The queen's rage was roused also by the unfortunate marriages of Southampton and Raleigh to maids-in-waiting. Lee acknowledges his "fault" through the words of the old knight, who admits that the "just reuengefull Fayrie Queene . . . giues euerie one his due" (284) . While Elizabeth is rewarded with a jewel for her constancy, Lee's inconstancy leads the fairy queen to seal up his eyes, the instruments of his offense. Perhaps Lee turned instinctively to the fairy queen in his final entertainment for his sovereign mistress, since this supernatural being was a convenient symbol of Elizabeth's mythic stature and a powerful reminder that Lee played a central role in elevating Elizabeth to this stature. Later in the pageant, Lee once again uses the persona of the old knight to comment on the role he chose to play in life and the relationship he had with his queen: Sometymes he consorted with couragious gentelmen, manifesting inward Joyes by open Justes, the yearlie tribute of his dearest Loue. Sometimes he summoned the 56 witnesse of depest conceiptes, Himmes & Songes & Emblemes, dedicating them to the honor of his heauenlye Mistres. . . . Thus spent he the florishe of his gladdest dayes, crauing no rewarde ells, but that he might loue, nor no reputation beside but that he might be known to loue. (291)

Whether jousting before Elizabeth or falling victim to the fairy queen's enchantment, Lee showed that he desired simply to serve his queen and to have his constant service recognized. Although the messages Lee delivered through his pageants were less pointed and more pleasing to Elizabeth than Dudley's, Lee was as committed as his patron to obtaining those intangible rewards that could come from hosting an elaborate reception pageant for the queen-- legitimacy, prestige, honor, vindication of one's social position. Whereas Dudley used a figure from Arthurian romance as a means to voice his political assertions, and Lee adopted a figure from native tradition, Edward Seymour, in the pageant he sponsored at Elvetham in 1591, was unique in juxtaposing Auberon, the fairy king of romance, with Aureola, the fairy queen of traditional folk belief. As recounted by the author of "The HONORABLE Entertainement" at Elvetham, the fairy queen and her maids, while dancing to the "fantastike" music of three cornets, make their entrance into the garden below Elizabeth's gallery window on the morning of the queen's

I Q , departure from Elvetham. Aureola carries with her a garland of flowers shaped like an imperial crown, which she places on a silver staff in the sight of Elizabeth, then sticks the staff into the ground as a monument of Elizabeth's

57 rule. After identifying herself in speech as "the Queene of Fairy land" and explaining how she opened the earth with her staff to allow for her passage to Elizabeth's world, Aureola asks that Elizabeth accept this garland, a gift from "Auberon the Fairy King" (449-50) . Although Auberon never appears in the entertainment, the gift Aureola offers to Queen Elizabeth on his behalf and the implications his name evokes, comments on both Seymour's uncertain relationship with Elizabeth and his personal quest for legitimacy. By devising that this highly symbolic parting gift come not from the fairy queen, as was usually the case in the pageants, but from a male figure represented in the fictive structure by the fairy king, Seymour can subtly remind Elizabeth that he, the earl of Hertford, was the real giver of the gift. Although Seymour's flower crown was not of any monetary value as were the exquisite jewels presented to

Elizabeth during the second day's water entertainments, 1 ^ Q it was a gift rich with significance in light of this courtier's history. The mention of a king figure as well as the visual impact of the crown-shaped garland would have reminded viewers, especially Queen Elizabeth herself, that Seymour was the father of two sons who had a legitimate claim to be Elizabeth's successors to the throne. Early in Elizabeth's reign, Seymour had married the queen's cousin, Catherine Grey, great-granddaughter of Henry VII and then leading claimant to the throne. This marriage, which had taken place without Elizabeth's consent, was seen as a threat to the stability of Elizabeth's regime; it was declared invalid,

58 and Seymour along with Catherine and their infant son were committed to the Tower. It may be that the earl of Hertford positioned the fairy episode at the end of his pageant so as to leave his sovereign with the final thought that his two sons (another son was born in the Tower), although rendered illegitimate by her government, were still persons of royal blood and viable candidates for the throne. The climate of the time lends support to the idea that Auberon's gift-offering was to some extent motivated by Seymour's desire to restore credibility to his family name. England's anxiety about the succession problem was growing in the 1590s, as is indicated by the number of books, plays, and tracts that were published on this issue at the time. 9 n u

Although Seymour might not have intended his pageant's fairy episode as political advice on the succession question, as many entertainments performed before the queen were designed to be, it seems certain Seymour hoped his overall success in entertaining Elizabeth at Elvetham would move the queen to recognize the legitimacy of his sons. Before Elizabeth left Elvetham, the author of "The HONORABLE Entertainment" states, the queen told the earl "that the beginning, processe, and end of this his entertainment was so honorable, as hereafter hee should finde the rewarde thereof in her especiall fauour" (452). Two months after the Elvetham performance, the earl's youngest son, Thomas, renewed a petition asking that he and his brother be recognized as legitimate and that they be granted the right to inherit their father's title and land. 9 1

The Seymour family found, however, that Elizabeth's

59 "especiall fauour" extended no further than the public expression of her gratitude. As always, Elizabeth was not in the humor to render Seymour's sons "royal," and this petition, as well as the one made in the following year, was denied. Although Elizabeth did not respond to his pageant as he had hoped, Seymour's quest for legitimacy was not completely unsuccessful. The figure of Auberon in the pageant could be seen as a symbol of his family's nobility, and whether or not Auberon appeared before the viewers' eyes, the power this image of the fairy king carried was a means whereby Seymour could express his familial magnificence. The fairy king of romance was familiar to contemporary audiences from Lord

O O Berner's translation of Huon of Bordeaux. ^ Because of a curse placed on him at birth, Auberon never grew taller than the height of a four year old child; however, he was compensated for this deficiency by being blessed with extraordinary beauty and might. Throughout Seymour's pageant, which rivals the Kenilworth entertainment in spectacular display, Seymour demonstrates his similarity to the fairy king. As Auberon proves to be more formidable and mighty than his height would indicate, Seymour shows that his influence, wealth, and esteem cannot be denied although his estate is small. In visiting the earl at Elvetham, which was "scituate in a Parke but of two miles in compasse or thereabouts,- and of no great receipt, as beeing none of the Earles chiefe mansion houses" (432), the queen, as Curt Breight suggests, may have intended her suspect courtier to

60 look small and inconsequential (36) . While Seymour's estate did not lend itself to one of the queen's favorite pastimes, hunting, its smallness became an asset in that it allowed the host to demonstrate his ingenuity in transforming tiny Elvetham into a site that could accommodate and be worthy to house Elizabeth and her large retinue. The new rooms and offices that were constructed at short notice by 300 workmen, the crescent-shaped artificial lake that was created to entertain the queen with water sports, the magnificent nighttime banquet by torchlight, and the dramatic fireworks display, were all expressions of Seymour's power and reminders to his sovereign that he, like Auberon, was anything but insignificant. To a greater degree than Robert Dudley, Seymour was careful to pay tribute to Elizabeth's sovereign power while he promoted himself and his lineage. The presentation to the queen of Auberon's crown is a gesture of submission as much as it is one of assertion on the part of the host. The fact that Elizabeth is offered a crown by the king of the fairies implies the queen has command over the supernatural realm and that her power is equal or even superior to that of a male monarch. Elizabeth would have been flattered not only by her subordinate's dramatized acknowledgement of her worthiness to govern, but also by Seymour's choice to have the fairy queen Aureola, a kind of mirror reflection of Elizabeth, present her with Auberon's flower crown. The fairy queen's name referred in the medieval period to the heavenly crown assigned to virgins for their victory over the flesh, so it

61 is appropriate that Aureola would present this recognition of Elizabeth's rule to the virgin queen herself. As in the two pageants hosted by Henry Lee, Elizabeth is shown to be similar to yet distinct from the fairy queen. By Aureola's nightly adoration of Elizabeth, her superior, the Tudor queen is transformed into a goddess or an ideal

9 A . . knight. In speaking of her evening ritual, the fairy queen says, I that abide in places under ground, Aureola, the Queene of Fairy land, . . . euery night in rings of painted flowers Turne round, and carroll out Elisaes name. (449)

Whereas the fairy queen is "belou'd in heauen," Elizabeth is described in terms of being a heaven in herself, for she is the goddess who "Hid'st heauens perfection" in human shape (450). As a dweller of the dark underworld, Aureola further distinguishes herself from Elizabeth and recalls the queen's virginal aspect by hailing her as "Bright shining Phoebe" (450). Even the dancing fairy maids, whose final complimentary song delighted Elizabeth so much "that shee desired to see and hear it twise ouer," proclaim Elizabeth instead of their own sovereign "the fairest Queene / That ever trod upon this greene" (450). Aureola retains too many of her traditional attributes--living underground, dancing in rings at night, possessing the supernatural abilities of blessing and cursing--to be directly linked to Queen Elizabeth, but the association between the two queens trembles just below the surface of the dramatized events. Although Elvetham's fairy episode was probably inspired by

62 Spenser's publication of the first three books of his Faerie Queene a year earlier, it borrows its model of the fairy queen from Elizabeth's earlier progress pageants rather than from Spenser's great epic which celebrates Elizabeth as the fairy queen. Throughout this chapter, I have aimed to demonstrate that Elizabeth's progress pageants can best be understood within the context of the cultural politics of the age and that the fairy queen is central to a political interpretation. The writers and sponsors of the pageants expected this image of the fairy queen to work on several levels, and Elizabeth, perhaps more than anyone else, was aware that the fairy queen figure could threaten as well as affirm her self-image. On the most basic level, the fairy queen serves to enhance the brilliancy of Elizabeth by providing her with an opportunity to liberate characters and to set the way for moral healing and universal harmony. On a deeper level, she serves as a vehicle for the host to advance his personal and political agenda. It is unlikely that Elizabeth's courtiers expected to be remunerated in any material sense by the parsimonious queen for hosting these costly pageants. The reward they seem to have sought was an intangible one: to be regarded as legitimate or as they professed to be, whether this was as the queen's favorite, the true guardian of her cult, or the father of two royal sons. By joining in and sometimes altering the entertainment, Elizabeth demonstrated her capacity to elude masculine manipulation and to assert

63 control over the half-fictional, half-real world of the progress pageant.

64 Notes

The progress pageants serve as a forum for collecting and exhibiting rural and folk customs; in some ways, they are early folk festivals. One account of the Kenilworth pageant, for instance, provides a description of the country sports that were held for the queen during her stay at Kenilworth Castle. Among other events, there was a bear-baiting and a Bride ale that featured an "ill smelling" bride of 35. For an examination of the Renaissance age's curiosity with and collection of customs from other cultures as well as its own, see Steven Mullaney's "Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance."

^ I will examine in this chapter these four pageants because the fairy queen figure which appears in each of them is a central presence and is used most clearly by the host to forward his own ambitions. The fairy queen and other fairy folk appear in at least four other pageants, those at Suffolk and Norfolk, Norwich, Hengrave, and Althrope. It is not my intention to show that the fairy queen is Elizabeth's most frequent representation in the progress pageants but simply that she is one among the many representations of the queen.

^ Queen Elizabeth's shrewdness in using to her political advantage her progress pageantry and processions through the countryside was in complete contrast to her sister Mary, who failed to fully appreciate and to exploit journeys and pageantry for purposes of royal propaganda. In her coronation and marriage pageantry, Mary seems to have been merely a passive spectator of events; she watched and listened to her subjects' tributes and pleas, but did not respond to them. There were no spectacular progresses during Mary's rule as there were during the subsequent reign of Elizabeth, but, as David Loades reminds us, Mary's unsettled reign covered only five summers, with one being taken up by a false pregnancy and another by a raging epidemic (332) . Elizabeth, on the other hand, ruled nearly half a century and had much time to learn how to put ceremony and public appearance to political use.

^ The Lady of the Lake is a fay from Arthurian romance whose title, as Lucy Paton states, indicates her fairy nature, since the Celtic people conceived of the otherworld as residing beneath the sea as well as beyond it (167) . The fairy queen had many appearances, not all of them royal. She could be the Lady of the Lake, Morgan Le Fay, or the other fairy mistresses of medieval romance.

65 ^ There are two published accounts of the Kenilworth pageant, both of which are printed in The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, vol. 1. The two accounts are George Gascoigne's "Princely Pleasures at the Courte of Kenelwoorth" (485-523), and the less reverent text known simply as "Laneham's Letter" (420-484) . Laneham, an attendant in the court, records entertainments that Gascoigne omits, namely the country sports and the queen's responses to some of the entertainments. When Elizabeth arrived at Kenilworth Castle, for instance, she was greeted by the Lady of the Lake, who welcomed Elizabeth to Leicester's territory and relinquished possession of the lake to the queen. According to Laneham, Elizabeth responded to this welcoming so as to remind Dudley that she gave him what he has, that she made him what he is: "It pleazed her Highness too thank this Lady, and too add withall, 'we had thought indeed the Lake had been oours, and doo you call it yourz noow? Well, we will herein common more with yoo hereafter.'" (431) . Gascoigne's text, on the other hand, illustrates best the interests of the host, Robert Dudley, and it is for this reason that I am concerned primarily with Gascoigne's text.

® In describing the two versions of the Lady of the Lake device, Gascoigne is clearly trying to keep the goodwill of both Elizabeth and Dudley. There are a number of reasons why Gascoigne may have allowed Dudley, at least in print, to star in the entertainment for which he was paying. Perhaps this was a bid for patronage, or it may have been that the poet simply shared Dudley's strong Protestant interests, as his passion for an English intervention in the Netherlands.

^ See Susan Frye's chapter, "Engendering Policy at Kenilworth," in Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (1993), for a different interpretation of the Lady of the Lake episode. In analyzing the device in context of the situation in the Netherlands and the opposing views held by Dudley and the queen, Frye speculates that Dudley designed this device as an attempt to sway Elizabeth's foreign policy and to persuade his queen to assign him command of English troops that would aid the Protestant Dutch rebels in their defensive war against Spain.

® The celebration of the queen's power is a major theme of the Kenilworth pageant, and David Bergeron sees it as a theme recurring throughout all of Elizabeth's progress pageants (11)-.

^ Chambers, Henry Lee 88; Baskervill, "The Genesis of Spenser's Queen of Faerie." "The Queenes Majesties Entertainment at Woodstocke" is printed in PMLA 26 (1911) : 92-141. 66 1® In her famous Armada speech delivered before the troops gathered at Tilbury in 1588, Elizabeth is recorded as saying, "I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king" (qtd. in Levin 1).

H The Woodstock banqueting house was set on a mound approximately forty feet high and built around the trunk of an oak; "a diuine sound of vnacquainted instruments" issued from a hidden cave beneath the house (98). While a crescent­ shaped banqueting table was reserved for Elizabeth, a round table accompanied by a red velvet chair, decorated with engravings of trees and wild beasts, was presumedly designed for the fairy queen. After her speech, the fairy queen offers Elizabeth an intricately embroidered gown while six of her young handmaids distribute flowers and poems to the court ladies. Baskervill notes that the mound, cave, round table, gifts, and royal pomp belong to English fairy tradition (53).

12 Page 98. According to Minor White Latham, fairies of the sixteenth century were of different hues--black, gray, green, white, red, and sometimes blue--and colored visors were often worn when impersonating the fairies in masques and other entertainments (83). John Walsh, a man from Dorset, is recorded as saying in 1566 that there were white, green and black fairies; the last type were the worst in his mind and indistinguishable from devils (Thomas 609).

12 The argument that the Woodstock entertainment provides an answer to the messages delivered by Dudley at Kenilworth is supported also by Chambers and Baskervill.

I'l Chambers believes the first tilt was performed at Woodstock, in the mock combat between Loricus (a persona of Lee) and Contarenus, which took place just prior to the hermit's tale. See Henrv Lee 38, 84, 133-34.

15 The Ditchley entertainment is printed in Chambers's Sir Henrv Lee. 276-97. R. W. Bond places Lee's pageant at Quarrendon, another of Lee's country estates, but according to Chambers, the queen did not make a visit to Quarrendon in 1592 (Elizabethan Stage, vol. 4, 107).

-LD1 f\ Semper eadem, " Always one and the same, " was one ofr Elizabeth's favorite mottos. It signified constancy and integrity as well as physical purity.

67 1 7 Reference is • made to this speech in Yates (p.99) and Strong (p.139). For a discussion of how the imagery of Woodstock is bound up with that of the Accession Day tilts, see Yates, 92-102.

18 HONORABLE Entertainement" at Elvetham is printed in The Complete Works of John Lviv. 431-51, but Lyly's authorship of the pageant is a matter of debate.

Both Ernest Brennecke and Lisa Hopkins indicate that Shakespeare may have been an observer of the entertainments at Elvetham. Brennecke draws support from the fact that Oberon's famous speech to Puck in 2.1.148-64 of A Midsummer Night's Dream ("Since once I sat upon a promontory, / And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back . . . ."), is reminiscent of Elvetham's second'day water show (55-6) .

29 Curt Breight, in "Realpolitik and Elizabethan Ceremony" (1992), cites specific evidence of England's growing anxiety: "the early succession play of the 1560s, Gorboduc. was reprinted in 1590; Peter Wentworth, parliamentarian agitator on this issue, was jailed for the first time in August, 1591, but went ahead and published a tract in 1593 which caused permanent imprisonment; and Father Robert Persons published a 1594 book on the succession which irritated the Elizabethan regime" (37).

21 Except in 1583, Thomas submitted a petition every year from 1580 to 1588. Perhaps realizing the utter hopelessness of his case, he did not file one in 1589 or 1590. It is significant that this petition would be renewed shortly after the queen's visit to Elvetham. This information concerning the petitions made by Thomas Seymour is taken from Breight, p.23.

22 a first edition of Huon of Bordeaux appeared in 1534, a second in 1570.

29 Aureola is not only a representation of Elizabeth, but also a representation of folk culture for the courtly audience.

24 Elvetham's fairy episode, says Wilson, may have derived from the medieval romance motif of an ideal knight meeting with the fairy queen (97). The fairy queen was to give her love only to the best, most valorous knight, a fact that adds greater irony to Titania's love of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

68 Works Cited

I . Primary Works

"The Honorable Entertainement gieuen to the Queenes Maiestie in Progresse, at Eluetham in Hampshire, by the right Honorable the Earle of Hertford. 1591." The Complete Works of John Lviv. Ed. R. Warwick Bond. Vol.1. Oxford: Clarendon, 1902. 431-52.

The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth. Ed. John Nichols. Vol. 1. Burt Franklin: Research and Source Works Ser. 117. New York: Franklin, 1966.

"The Queenes Majesties Entertainment at Woodstocke." Ed. J. W. Cunliffe. PMLA 26 (1911): 92-141.

II. Secondary Works

Baskervill, Charles Read. "The Genesis of Spenser's Queen of Faerie." Modern Philology 18 (1920): 49-54.

Bergeron, David M. English Civic Pageantry 1558-1642. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1971.

Berry, Philippa. Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen. London: Routledge, 1989 .

Breight, Curt. "Realpolitik and Elizabethan Ceremony: The Earl of Hertford's Entertainment of Elizabeth at Elvetham, 1591. " Renaissance Quarterly 45 (1992): 20-48.

Brennecke, Ernest. "The Entertainment at Elvetham, 1591." Music in English Renaissance Drama. Lexington, U of Kentucky P, 1968. 32-56.

Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. Vol. 4. Oxford: Clarendon, 1923.

Sir Henrv Lee: An Elizabethan Portrait. Oxford: Clarendon, 1936.

Frye, Susan. Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Haigh, Christopher, ed. The Reign of Elizabeth I . Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985.

69 Hopkins, Lisa. Queen Elizabeth I and Her Court. London: Vision; New York: St. Martin's, 1990.

King, John N. "Queen Elizabeth I: Representations of the Virgin Queen." Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990), 30-74.

Latham, Minor White. The Elizabethan Fairies: The Fairies of Folklore and the Fairies of Shakespeare. 1930. New York: Octagon, 1972.

Levin, Carole. "The Heart and Stomach of a King": Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994.

Loades, David. Marv Tudor: A Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1989.

Mullaney, Steven. "Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance." Representing the English Renaissance. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. 65-92.

Paton, Lucy Allen. Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian Romance. 2nd ed. Burt Franklin Bibliographical Ser. 18. New York: Franklin, 1960.

Strong, Roy C. The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry. 1977. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.

Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. 1971. New York: Scribner's, 1991.

Wilson, Jean. Entertainments for Elizabeth I. Studies in Elizabethan and Renaissance Culture 2. Woodbridge: Brewer- Rowman, 1980.

Yates, Frances A. Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London: Routledge, 197 5.

70 CHAPTER 3 THE TWO "FAMOUS AUNCESTRIES" OF QUEEN ELIZABETH: SPENSER'S MYTHIC VISION OF BRITISH HISTORY IN THE FAERIE OUEENE

With the appearance of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Oueene. the transformation of Queen Elizabeth into the fairy queen is complete. Spenser comes closer than any earlier poet in merging the fairy queen figure with Elizabeth, in spite of the fact that his great epic is an allegory, which by its nature, impedes any attempt to merge signifier and signified. Although Spenser wrote of the Celtic otherworld, his epic was meant for an English audience; by reworking fairy mythology into an image that is at once Protestant, patriotic, and political, the poet brings to the forefront the correspondence between Gloriana's fairyland and Elizabeth's England. Since Spenser's fairyland combines reality and fantasy, the poet can suggest that Elizabeth Tudor is both herself and Gloriana, the Faerie Queene. He does this by giving Elizabeth two "famous auncestries": a historical one that links her with the line of Arthur, and one through which she descends from a line of great fairy emperors. My purpose in this chapter is to show how and to explain why Spenser alters fairy mythology, as well as works within established

71 traditions, in order to confer on Elizabeth these two genealogies. The relationship between Gloriana and Elizabeth in Spenser's historical allegory must first be established, because although it is generally accepted that Spenser's praise of Elizabeth is one of the poem's central political concerns, it is often assumed that Spenser is less successful in conferring on her the persona of the Faerie Queene. It is my argument not only that the fairy queen was the best symbol Spenser could have used to compliment his sovereign, but also that the ideal "reality" of fairyland is used by the poet to rewrite British history in an auspicious light. In giving Elizabeth an ancestry which partakes of the ideal as well as the real, Spenser also sets himself up as a seer or person gifted with second sight; in doing so, he proclaims himself poet-prophet of the Elizabethan age. In the dedicatory letter to Raleigh, the correspondence between Gloriana and Elizabeth is explicitly drawn by Spenser, who says that his "particular" intention is to signify through the Faerie Queene "the most excellent and glorious person of our soueraine the Queene, and her Kingdome in Faeryland."^ Since Gloriana is on one level identified with the Tudor queen, recent critics of Spenser have focused on Gloriana's conspicuous absence in the poem's narrative and questioned the importance of Elizabeth in the poem. Some, like Elizabeth J. Bellamy, have argued that Elizabeth is hardly present in the epic, that Spenser's title is deliberately evasive since it fails to name either Elizabeth or Gloriana as the subject of the poem, and that Spenser has

72 fallen short of realizing at least one of his epic goals, singing his royal mistress's praises through the means of the

Faerie Queene. It becomes clear that the fundamental issue of Elizabeth's importance in The Faerie Oueene is contingent on the reader's understanding of Gloriana's place and function in the poem's narrative. The Faerie Queene and thus Elizabeth herself are too often viewed as figures on the boundaries of the poem's narrative, and in the sense that the reader never catches a glimpse of their "actual" presence, this view is correct; however, the reader must recognize Spenser's manner of developing these characters by superimposing numerous royal images one upon the other. In arguing that Gloriana is an image which encompasses and unites all the other exemplary female representations of Elizabeth in Spenser's poem, and an image which allows the poet to compliment Elizabeth as 'well as to assert his authority as a poet, I am contradicting those critics who view the Faerie Queene as merely a marginally important character who is hardly present in the poem.^

George Puttenham's use of the roundel or circle to illustrate how Elizabeth is simultaneously at the center and perimeter of her realm helps us to understand the ways in which Gloriana's presence may be felt in Spenser's Faerie

Oueene.^ Elizabeth is like the circle's perimeter, Puttenham explains, in that her authority girdles her kingdom and all her subjects. She resembles the circle's center because she sits "in the middes" of her people

73 Where she allowes and bannes and bids In what fashion she list and when, The seruices of all her men. Like the circle's radius, which connects the circle's center to its perimeter, Elizabeth's "rayes" of justice, bounty, and might radiate continuously from her breast to the furthest reaches of her domain. In showing that Elizabeth resides at - the center of her realm and is thus equidistant from every point on its perimeter, Puttenham does not mean to suggest that all of Elizabeth's subjects are on the boundaries of her kingdom. It is more accurate to describe the physical distance between the monarch and her subjects in terms not of a circle but of concentric circles, with Elizabeth at the center and her subjects inhabiting the various circles within the larger circle of the queen's authority. Puttenham likens Elizabeth's people to herds of deer, thereby implying they may roam anywhere within the queen's kingdom but are ultimately "imparked" or fenced in by her authority. As Puttenham's poetic round suggests, Elizabeth's influence and authority can be felt throughout her kingdom whether the queen is near to or distanced from her subjects. Spenser's Faerie Queene also may be likened to the principal parts of the circle, and although she was to be withheld by the poet until Book 12, her presence oftentimes can be felt as st.rongly at the center of Spenser's epic as at its edges.^ Spenser indicates with his account of Gloriana's annual feast in the "Letter to Raleigh" that his titular heroine is to be the unifying thread of the epic's narratives. Published with the 1590 edition of The Faerie

74 Oueene. Spenser's "Letter" describes in part the events of the prospective twelfth book, which was to provide the beginning of the story and the rationale for the individual adventures of the knights. As Puttenham describes Elizabeth at the center of her realm, where she "allowes and bannes and bids" the services of her people, so Spenser provides in the "Letter to Raleigh" an account of Gloriana in the midst of her fairy subjects: she listens to the pleas of her people in distress, decides which knights shall be granted adventures, and maintains the prerogative of determining the type of adventure each knight shall receive. Essentially, Gloriana is a catalyst to much of the action in that she inspires and rewards virtuous action in the epic. The poem's internal reminders that Gloriana, directly or indirectly, is a significant presence in The Faerie Oueene necessarily carry more weight than Spenser's "Letter," which delineates a plan for the epic that was to change over time. In the poem itself, although Gloriana is never actually physically present, the wondrous adventures of Arthur, Britomart, and the fairy knights are foregrounded. Critics like Richard C. McCoy, who speak of the Faerie Queene's "marginal importance" and the dispersal of authority to individual knights, fail to acknowledge in Spenser's epic the circle of Gloriana's authority which environs fairyland and all her fairy subjects. Spenser permits his fairy knights some degree of autonomy, but it is not to the extent that Gloriana is a powerless figurehead or that the poem, as McCoy argues, "foregrounds discord and division" (136). Guyon, for

75 instance, feels the constant pull of his royal mistress's authority; as a reminder of his obedience, loyalty, and service to Gloriana, he bears on his shield a life-like portrait of her. The Red Crosse knight delays his own personal pursuit, his marriage to Una, to fulfill his vow of six-year's service in the Faerie Queene's war with the Paynim king. Artegall also, reminded of his allegiance to Gloriana, separates from his newly betrothed so that he may complete his quest to free Irena's lands from the tyrant Grantorto.^

These examples, as well as Arthur's quest to find Gloriana, reinforce Spenser's declaration at the beginning of his epic that the Faerie Queene, Elizabeth's "true glorious type," is the argument or subject of his poem (1.proem.4). Much in the same manner that Elizabeth is shown to be simultaneously at the center and perimeter of her realm, Spenser shows that Gloriana's presence, particularly in terms of her authority and moral influence, may significantly be felt at both the core and edges of his poem. The fact that Spenser's titular heroine, in all her glory, never actually appears before the reader's gaze in the fairyland presented in the poem, suggests her relation to Queen Elizabeth. Gloriana's elusiveness serves to reinforce the distance the courtier often felt between himself and his sovereign. In serving a female monarch, the Elizabethan courtier was faced with contradictory impulses, as suggested by Guyon's description of his relationship to the Faerie Queene: "[She is] My liefe, my liege, my Soueraigne, my dear" (2.9.4). Guyon recognizes that his fairy queen, like

76 Elizabeth, is a woman to be wooed and won, but her sovereignty distances her and makes her unattainable in any

n physical sense. Spenser himself was only too well aware of

the remoteness of Elizabeth and her court. The Faerie Queene was written while Spenser resided in Ireland, removed from the political and cultural center of his country. Like many courtiers, Spenser found his monarch capricious in dealing out favors; although the poet was presented to the queen in February 1591 and awarded a substantial annual pension for the achievement of his national epic, Spenser remained discouraged throughout his life that he had not received the courtly advancement or proper recognition he felt he merited. Spenser's reasons for keeping Gloriana and Elizabeth herself at a distance in The Faerie Oueene are politically and artistically motivated. The distance the poet creates between himself and his poem's two fairy queens, that of the Arthurian past and of the Tudor present, is largely why Spenser is successful in legitimating his own power as a poet. This distance allows Spenser to praise his sovereign but also to offer criticism through his narrative (never, or very rarely, directly) of Elizabeth. Instead of presenting a single, personalized portrait of Elizabeth, Spenser introduces throughout his poem various "avatars" of his queen, to use Ronald Arthur Horton's apt term, and thereby allows himself the fictional space to explore fully the many selves of Elizabeth as woman and sovereign. A deeper understanding of the Tudor queen is achieved by both poet and reader precisely because Spenser fragments Elizabeth's image

77 into numerous allegorical personas--for instance, Una, Belphoebe, Britomart, Alma, Florimell, and Mercilla. Although Elizabeth was encouraged to see herself in the exemplary female figures presented in the poem, this is not to say that she at all times may be associated with these representations or that they did not suggest some tacit criticism on Spenser's part. Richard McCoy rightly reasons that if Spenser "were to utter the Queen's name and submit to her authority, his own discourse and authority would cease" (126). The poet's authority remains supreme precisely because, by refusing to call forth the presence of Elizabeth, he allows himself the freedom to represent his sovereign in whichever way he chooses and on his own terms. In the later books of the Faerie Oueene. Spenser even shows signs of weariness with his representations of royal power, and in the vision on Mount Acidale in canto 10 of Book 6, the poet's mistress is given precedence over Gloriana/Elizabeth. The note of criticism found in the later books suggests that Spenser's view of Elizabeth may have darkened over the time of writing the poem. Spenser's boldness in examining the interaction of Elizabeth's sexuality and divine-given authority, in literally anatomizing the complex character of his queen, is deflected by his humble assertion that it is impossible for the literary or material artist to reproduce in a single embodiment the perfect beauty and virtue of Elizabeth (3.pr.2). In commenting on his own limitations as a poet, Spenser asks, "How shall fraile pen, with feare disparaged, /

78 Conceiue such soueraine glory, and great bountihed?" (2.10.2). Spenser escapes censure because his vision of Elizabeth is open-ended; Elizabeth may see herself in any image in which she fancies her likeness. Despite Spenser's diplomatic claim that he can successfully provide a life-like portrait of his royal mistress only by fragmenting her image, the reader may ask whether the “essence" of Elizabeth is not somehow lost in the process of the poet's numerous renditions of her excellence. To think that Elizabeth may be dissected by the poet into nothingness would be to misunderstand Gloriana's proper place in the poem, for all those other royal types or reflections of Elizabeth are superimposed one upon the other and combined into the unity of the single image of Gloriana, the majestic and benevolent Faerie Queene. Although Spenser tells “his fairest Cynthia," the partially fictionalized Elizabeth Tudor of the proems, that she may see her image in many mirrors, he specifies the two most important ones: But either Gloriana let her chuse, Or in Belphoebe fashioned to bee: In th'one her rule, in th'other her rare chastitee. (3.p r .5)

These two mirrors suggest the two bodies of Elizabeth-- Gloriana embodies the public person or rule of the queen, Belphoebe her private person. This dichotomy of the queen's two bodies, however, does not hold up, because, as the Belphobe-Timias episode demonstrates, Elizabeth's womanhood and personal relationship with her courtiers is inseparable from her rule.

79 Gloriana images both political and private virtue and was intended to encompass the figure of Belphoebe as well as all the other reflections of the queen. Spenser's Belphoebe is a representation of the classical Diana, virgin goddess of the moon and the hunt, who sometimes went by the name Phoebe and Cynthia. The Faerie Oueene's sixteenth-century readers would have known that Diana was translated by writers of the time into the contemporary figure of the fairy queen. Renaissance poets believed the native fairies were equivalent to the nymphs and fauns of Roman and Greek mythology, and Diana, as virgin chief of the nymphs, was most nearly analogous to the queen of the fairies. Reginald Scot, in his Discouerie of Witchcraft. calls the fairy queen "the lady Sibylla, Minerva, or Diana," and King James I describes in his Daemonoloqie a kind of spirit "which by the Gentiles was called Diana, and her wandring court, and amongst vs was called the Phairie"

(73).® The desire of writers and thinkers of the age to translate classical figures into native ones is a strong indication that Spenser may have absorbed this idea and thought of Belphoebe as a foreshadowing or, more precisely, an emanation of the glory of the Faerie Queene. Gloriana was an image which united all the roles Elizabeth played in Spenser's poem and throughout her long reign as queen of England. By associating Elizabeth with the fairy queen, and by extension England with fairyland, Spenser suggests the entire reign of Elizabeth I may be seen as a fairytime, a magical theatrical fantasy in which Elizabeth played many roles, each of which embodied a particular

80 attribute of the queen.^ There were other fairy queens prior to Spenser's epic who went by the names of Proserpina and Eambia, but it was the title that Spenser gave his queen-- Gloriana, the Faerie Queene--which apotheosized Elizabeth I and seemed to personify best the imaginative permissiveness of her court. As the unifying image that embodies both the public and private selves of Elizabeth, Gloriana is at once the virgin Belphoebe, the warlike Britomart, the faithful Una, the just Mercilla--she is all these women and more. Any one of the poem's lesser female figures would have been sufficient to invest Elizabeth with majesty and authority, but Spenser wanted more for his queen. He wanted to infuse her with the mystery inherently bound up with a supernatural being that was still widely believed in. Queen Elizabeth, as James Nohrnberg insightfully remarks, is at once allegorically revealed and allegorically concealed in Spenser's poem (55). In the respect that the poet gives us palpable representations of her, Elizabeth is allegorically revealed; we know her type through Belphoebe and Mercilla, for instance, and her antitype through malevolent queens such as Lucifera and Acrasia. Ultimately, though, she is allegorically concealed by her association with the elusive and mysterious Gloriana. By portraying his fairy queen as a unifying image but never allowing her to appear in the poem's narrative as a physical entity in and of herself, Spenser can suggest that we may come to know and understand Elizabeth to some extent, but the essence of Elizabeth as woman and

81 sovereign is as mysterious and unknowable as that of the fairy queen. By assimilating Elizabeth with Gloriana, Spenser is also able to tie Elizabeth to the fays of medieval romance, specifically to those chaste fairies who were mistresses of virtuous knights. Like the fay who remains distant from ordinary mortal men and grants her favor only to the most exceptional of knights, Gloriana offers her love to Arthur, the embodiment of magnificence.^ In the romance narrative the fay functions to exalt the excellence of the mortal hero by providing him an opportunity to display his valor or by serving as the reward for his most difficult achievement (Paton 1). Similarly, Gloriana is both the inspiration and reward for virtuous action in the epic; however, she is different from medieval fairy mistresses who win love by enchantment and cause knights to forget everything except the sensual delights offered by the fay. Spenser preserves an analogy between Gloriana and her romance counterparts--all extraordinarily beautiful, ever-youthful, exceedingly powerful--even while he distinguishes between them. The poet recognized his aging monarch could be flattered by her connection with the queen of the fairies who was untouched by time in her immortality. Since Elizabeth was the last in the Tudor line, the idea that she had perpetual youth was affectionately cultivated by poets and painters, and as economic problems increased with the fighting in Ireland and the struggles with Spain, Elizabeth wanted to project an image of absolute power, authority, and terror that would

82 make her enemies tremble and her subjects swell with confidence. Such an image was to be had in the fairy queen. In this first section of my essay I aimed to show the nature of Elizabeth's relation to Spenser's Faerie Queene. Readers who argue the Faerie Queene is nowhere to be seen in the poem and that she is an undeveloped persona of Elizabeth, lose sight not only of Gloriana's role as an image unifying the many royal reflections of the Tudor queen, but also of the assumptions and the power that the image of the fairy queen carried for Spenser's readers. The fairy queen figure, like the image of the Petrarchan lady, reflected directly what Queen Elizabeth demanded and liked: she wanted elevated status, power over her courtiers, praise of her beauty and youthfulness, an aura of mystery. The image was also there for Spenser to shape in the respect that it allowed him to transplant his sovereign into the unknown world of Faerie, essentially, into the world of his own imagination. Spenser's fairyland, however, cannot be seen simply as a fanciful figment of his imagination; it serves a significance beyond itself and is to be taken seriously, because through the poet's make-believe the scroll of British history is unrolled. As beings that have lived through the whole of British history, the lonaaevi or long-livers became for Spenser a convenient symbol of the past. The fairies could create a sense of nostalgia and remind one of a superior past age that brought greater happiness and contentment to the individual. In the moral and political spheres especially, Spenser says, "the antique world"

83 demonstrated its excellence, for it was a time when virtue was not confused with vice, when "Peace vniuersall rayn'd" and "Iustice sate high ador'd" (5.pr.9). Spenser significantly places his fairies in the Golden Age of Arthur, and in this respect he follows established tradition. Chaucer, for instance, in the "Wife of Bath's Tale," expresses the idea that the fairy queen held her court in Arthur's time. In th'olde days of the Kyng Arthour, Of which that Britons speken greet honour, Al was this land fulfild of fairye. The elf-queene with hir joly compaignye Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede. (120) Elizabeth is also tied to the heroic past; by using Gloriana as an allegorical persona of the queen, Spenser suggests that the Elizabethan Age is a rebirth of an ancient purity that had been lost during intervening ages. Elizabeth could be portrayed as reviving the Golden Age, since she had established herself as the moral focus of the nation and champion of the Protestant cause that sought to restore the church to its original purity. As a symbol of the past, the fairies connote both the magnificence of the Arthurian age and the idealism of the new England under Elizabeth. Spenser is as concerned with establishing Elizabeth's Arthurian ancestry as he is with investing her with an ideal, imaginary descent. Arthur was believed to have been a Celtic king who ruled over a vast empire; although this empire was to be destroyed in the time of Cadwallader by the Anglo-Saxon victory, it was prophesied that one day the British empire would be restored by Arthur's line. Elizabeth's claim to have

84 descended from the line of Arthur was in keeping with the propaganda of all the Tudor sovereigns, who used their Welsh ancestry to legitimate their claim to the throne and to

justify their imperial ambitions.-*-^ Queen Elizabeth had the most need for Arthurian legend in the middle and later half of her reign, when she was excommunicated and deposed by the Pope, then faced with the challenge of enforcing English supremacy in Ireland. In The Faerie Oueene Spenser shows that Elizabeth descends from Arthur's line, and therefore she is entitled to Arthur's crown and empire: Thy name 0 soueraine Queene, thy realme and race, From this renowned Prince deriued arre, Who mightily vpheld that royall mace, Which now thou bear'st . . . (2.10.4)

Although Elizabeth's ancestors, Artegall and Britomart, are entirely the product of Spenser's imaginative genius, his account of the battles of Celtic Britain against the pagan Saxons is in keeping with the events recorded in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain and other British chronicle histories. Rather than reserving the future battle with the “barbarian" Anglo-Saxons for Arthur, Spenser alters tradition by leaving this monumental task to Britomart and Artegall, the half-brother of Arthur, and to their offspring. If Spenser is successful in conferring on Elizabeth the persona of the Faerie Queene, which I maintain he is, then Elizabeth is invested with the ideal history of Gloriana's race as well as the glorious history of the English race. Spenser both alters and works within established fairy traditions in order to highlight Elizabeth's two ancestries

85 and their complementary relation to each other. Since the fairies were not predisposed to living an independent existence entirely apart from humans as were ghosts and other spirits, it is not unusual in itself that Gloriana's world

1 D intersects the historical world of Elizabeth's ancestors.

The fairies of popular belief inhabited a separate realm which intersected at times with the real world. The uniqueness of Spenser's treatment of fairyland lies in the fact that fairyland not only intersects but completely merges with the natural world. Spenser regards his fairyland not "as if" it were real, as he would do if he were merely offering a parallel universe, but "as" real. The relation this poet establishes between the historical and fairy worlds is something like that between the body and the soul. In medieval and Renaissance poetry, the body and the soul debate over who is superior; while each denies its dependence on the other, both need each other to survive and to create a whole person. In a similar manner of dependency, Spenser's mythic vision of British history would not be complete without the individual realities offered by the fairy world and the historical world. Diminishing the differences between the historical and fairy realms is the most basic step the poet takes in his efforts to show that Elizabeth has two closely linked histories. By locating fairyland on the surface of the earth and placing his supernatural beings in the Golden Age of Arthur, Spenser creates an imaginary world resembling historical Britain. Because the poet is extraordinarily

86 successful in combining the real and the imaginary, it is easy for the closest of readers to forget that all of the poem's action is set in fairyland, a world of the poet's own making.^ Spenser's fairyland is similar to that of Huon of

Bordeaux in that members of the human race may travel in and out of fairyland, that is, if an individual is fortunate enough to find this supernatural realm in the first place.-*--’

Not only do the boundaries of the Faerie Oueene's natural and supernatural realms disappear, but the inhabitants of both worlds come to resemble each other in physical appearance and moral virtue. Since the fairies' "apparell and speech is like that of the people and countrey under which they live" (Kirk 55), it is not surprising that Redcrosse and Artegall are mistaken for fairies or that Spenser's fairy knights resemble Arthurian knights. The poem's good fairies are humanized because they are denied supernatural abilities; like the historical figures, they must rely on the power of their own inner strength to battle the forces of evil that threaten their sovereign's realm. Supernatural power is most often a sign of Gloriana's enemies, like the witch Duessa, who is associated with the Whore of Babylon and with falsehood in general. Spenser carefully controls his image of the fairies by minimizing their diabolical associations, which were still a part of fairy belief in some places, and removing them from the anger associated with the miracles of the Roman Catholic church. By diverging from the established tradition of locating fairyland underground, in the hills and cavities of the

87 earth, Spenser can hold up Gloriana's realm as a "faire mirrhour" in which Elizabeth may see herself and her own realms reflected (2.pr.4). Whereas fairyland was usually distanced from the poet's present by geographical location, it is separated in The Faerie Oueene by time, since Spenser places his supernatural beings in the natural medieval world. Spenser's immediate predecessors for the most part retained the tradition of an underground fairyland. During the entertainment at Woodstock, the black-faced fairy queen emerged from her subterranean woodland dwelling to greet and praise Elizabeth. In the story of Sir Orfeo, Chaucer's "Merchant's Tale," and other medieval texts, the fairy queen was depicted as Proserpina, queen of dark Hades. The fairy queen's prior association with the classical queen of the dead is one reason why the poets of Elizabeth's progress pageants did not directly associate their monarch with the fairy queen. In Spenser's epic Gloriana's enemy, Lucifera, is associated with the Underworld and identified as the daughter of Proserpina and Pluto, while the Faerie Queene herself is shown to be the glorious queen of the living. In an even more direct way than confounding the boundaries between reality and fantasy, Spenser can show that Elizabeth partakes of two histories by making her ancestor, Artegall, a changeling. It is significant that Artegall, also called Arthegall in the poem to suggest his equivalency to Arthur, partakes of both the fairy and human worlds by virtue of his status as a changeling. The fairies' habit of exchanging their "base Elfin brood" (1.10.65) for beautiful human

88 infants is a major reason why these supernatural beings were regarded by those of Spenser's age as fearful and dangerous beings. However, owing to Spenser's ingenuity and desire to glorify his queen, the changeling concept takes on a new significance in the poem. So that Gloriana is not in any way condemned by the disreputable actions of fairyland's thieves or negatively associated with those fairy queens of preceding centuries who ensnared mortal men by their charms, Spenser specifies that "false Faries" were responsible for stealing the infant Artegall and bringing him to fairyland. Owing to Artegall's changeling status, Spenser can first and foremost compliment Elizabeth on the handsomeness of her ancestry, since only the most beautiful human babies were desired by the fairies. The implication Spenser wants his readers to draw is that Artegall's physical beauty was passed down to his descendants, namely Elizabeth. The changeling idea was also an asset to Spenser in that it allowed him to credit Elizabeth with a supernatural origin. Spenser was likely to be familiar with those legends which tell of how the marriage of a fairy and a mortal gives rise to a noble lineage. Some noble families in Spenser's own day claimed to have a fairy ancestor, and many of society's superstitious were only too eager to credit individuals of superior intelligence and virtue with a supernatural origin. Spenser makes reference to this tradition in the chronicle of British kings that Arthur reads at Alma's castle. In his account of the descendants of Donwallo, the first British king, Spenser mentions the wife of the just Guitheline, named

89 Mertia, who was deemed to have a fairy ancestor because of her superior virtue and special dedication to helping her husband formulate the religious laws of the country (2.10.42) . The noble line from which Elizabeth descends springs from the union of Artegall and Britomart--a marriage that approximately represents the union of the fairy and human worlds. Although Artegall is Cornish and not fairy by race, he is shown to be the foster child of Gloriana, not only because he was raised in fairyland as if it were his native soil, but also because of his loyalty to the Faerie Queene. The Welsh magician Merlin, spokesman for Spenser, prophesies that from the union of Artegall, the honorary fairy, and Britomart, the Welsh maiden, "a famous Progenie / Shall spring, out of the auncient Troian blood" (3.3.22). The excellence of this progeny is to culminate with the reign of Elizabeth Tudor. The fact that Artegall partakes of two worlds and plays a significant role in each, suggests that the fairy and English races have a shared history. The prophesied events of British history, as revealed by Merlin in 3.3.21-50, are fulfilled only through the means of the poem's supernatural realm. The birth of the noble line from which Elizabeth descends is the result of Britomart's journey into fairyland to find her destined mate. It is also in fairyland that Britomart comes to understand the crucial role she is to play in her nation's destiny. Paralleling her ancestress and prototype, Elizabeth journeys through The Faerie Oueene where

90 she acquires knowledge of her royal lineage and is provided a vision of her prominent role in British history. Before falling into an ecstatic trance brought on by envisioning the greatness of England under Elizabeth, Merlin alludes to Elizabeth's confrontation with Spain by predicting the reign of a "royall virgin," who will "Stretch her white rod ouer the Belgicke shore, / And the great Castle smite so sore with all" (3.3.49). While Merlin is a prophet of the past, Spenser proclaims himself poet-prophet of the Elizabethan age by the mere fact that it is he who provides the reader with this vision of fairyland through which the past events of British history are unfolded and those of the future are divined.^

Spenser's design to give Elizabeth an actual and a fanciful ancestry is manifested clearly through not only the half­ fairy nature of Artegall but also the chronicles read by Arthur and Guyon at Alma's castle in 2.10. Recent criticism has shown that the history of Guyon's race recorded in the "Antiquitie of Faerie lond" is an allegorical interpretation of human history from an optimistic perspective. While fairyland is offered as an archetypal or ideal world, its mythical figures and imaginative events allude at times to people and events recorded in British chronicle histories. 1 ft

In presenting the Elfin chronicle, Spenser in part rewrites British history in the sense that he deletes from its pages any unpleasant moments in time. For example, the Elfin chronicle, in its recording of fairy history from Prometheus's creation of Elfe and Fay to the reign of "the

91 fairest Tanaquill," identifies Tanaquill as heir to the crown of Oberon. While Oberon is a clear allusion to Henry VIII, and the noble and learned Tanaquill/Gloriana to Elizabeth, it is not the case that Elizabeth was heir to her father's crown. After Henry's death, the rule of England was bestowed upon Elizabeth's brother, but no allusion is made in the chronicle to the reign of the boy King Edward VI or the troubled rule of Mary Tudor. The fairy nation is ideal simply because of its unity and lack of violence. Paridell underscores the ideal quality of this race when, in unfolding his own history for the guests at Malbecco's castle, he remarks that Gloriana's capital, Cleopolis, is the only city which may be found to surpass Brutus's Troynovant (3.9.51). The history Arthur reads of in Briton moniments is the more accurate recording of events in British history and does not delete from its pages the conflicts which led to the division of the British nation. It is marked by ambition, violence, fratricide, disloyal love, and family betrayal. Spenser does not introduce the history of the Elfin nation merely to remind Elizabeth what her court and rule ought to be like, as writers of the Stuart court masques were to do for James and Charles. He introduces it to examine the relation between the ideal and the actual. While the elfin chronicle records the ideals embodied in a nation, the chronicle of British history serves as an account of human attempts to realize those ideals within history. Despite the chaos he sees in his present time and records in Briton moniments. Spenser upholds the glory of Elizabeth's rule and of Brutus's "sacred

92 progenie" which, the poet claims, held the scepter "With high renowme, and great felicitie" (2.10.36).It is true that

England has not yet achieved the status of fairyland, London is not yet Cleopolis, and the chronicles have not yet come together. Yet through Spenser's prophetic vision, England is shown to partake of the ideal and to have the potential to become the ideal once Arthur is united with Gloriana. Not only is the reader meant to juxtapose the two historical records but also to read them in conjunction, because, as Spenser says at the beginning of the cantos, he aims to recount "the famous auncestries" of his sovereign. The chronicles are presented side by side because each is a part of the same reality, the reality of the poet's mythic vision of British history. Spenser wants his readers to forget neither the ideal history of the fairy nation nor the accepted history of the English nation. At the same time the poet draws us into fairyland, he aims to draw us back to the actual world, partly to keep our gaze directed to Elizabethan England. 9 n

Several figures in the poem complete a circular cycle from Britain, to Gloriana's fairyland, and finally back to Britain: Britomart ventures into fairyland, conveys to Artegall his destiny, and leads him back to Britain; Arthur enters fairyland in search of Gloriana but must leave so that he may inherit the crown from his father, Uther Pendragon; and Redcrosse, brought to fairyland as an infant, must return to the historical world to fulfill his destiny as St. George. Spenser wants his readers also to complete this circular

93 cycle so that our attention will not be focused on the romance of fairyland to the extent that the greatness of England's past, present, and future is forgotten. The battle fought by fairyland and Celtic Britain against the pagan Anglo-Saxons illustrates what the chronicles at Alma's castle only suggest--that Elizabeth's two closely linked histories have the potential to be part of one reality. Gloriana's world comes to the aid of the Britons at a critical moment in time, when the collapse of a great empire is threatened by the invasions of heathen Saxons/1? 1

In depicting the fairy nation as allies of the Britons, Spenser may have drawn from Celtic legends which tell of how the Sidhe folk desired to perform courageous military feats and to control the outcome of human war. The great Irish epic hero, Cuchulainn, is aided in the battlefield by the fairies who guide his spear and infuse him with superhuman strength and courage.^ Although the combined force of

Gloriana's fairy knights and Elizabeth's ancestors is not enough to prevent the Anglo-Saxon victory, the fairy world's involvement in the war waged against the pagan enemy is an indication that unity and peace will once again be restored. Britain's defeat, as seen through the vision of Spenser, is a tragedy with a fortunate result: the eventual restoration of the British empire by the Tudor line. The poem's present resembles the poet's present, since sixteenth century England was also at a decisive moment in history; its religious faith was threatened by Rome and its nation's security by Spanish invasions. Consequently, it

94 seems as if Gloriana's fairy world belongs to two historical periods. The six-year battle Gloriana wages against the pagan king alludes to the six years of Mary Tudor's reign that had to be endured before Elizabeth could restore the Protestant faith in England. With the Armada invasion still fresh in their minds, Spenser's readers would have enjoyed the fanciful notion of supernatural allies coming to their aid in a time of war. Spenser's conception of his fairies is similar to Kirk's notion of the "Co-walker" or "Reflex-man." Kirk speaks of each person being accompanied in life by a twin or companion of a different element who presumably guards the person from the secret attacks of his enemies (52— 3). Gloriana and her fairy knights appear to be this "copy, Echo, or living picture" (Kirk 52) of Elizabeth and her courtiers, and the fairies seem to come to England's assistance when her safety is threatened. At the same time, Spenser also pictures Elizabeth as Gloriana, a fairy queen inside England, who prevents chaos by holding back Rome's encroachment on her supremacy, confronting Spain in shining armor, and fighting all the forces of evil that threaten her nation's safety. Spenser's desire to invest Elizabeth with two "famous auncestries" is in keeping with the purposes of his national epic--to glorify British history and the reigning monarch and to establish himself as the poet-prophet of the Elizabethan age. It seems odd that such a heroic task could be accomplished through the poet's use of fairy mythology, especially when we recall that Spenser's first installment of

95 The Faerie Oueene was published during a period in history when fairies were thought by many to be intimately allied with witches and devils and brought bitter reminders of Roman Catholicism. The moment in time in which Spenser was writing, nevertheless, allowed him in some measure to transform Elizabeth into the fairy queen and England into fairyland. Virginity was central to the fairy queen figure, because in the process of Diana's translation into the fairy queen during the Renaissance, the fairy queen acquired Diana's attributes, most of all her chastity. By the 1580s, when Spenser was writing The Faerie Oueene. the iconography of virginity had been firmly established. More than any other image, the fairy queen gathered strength after Elizabeth's failed attempts at marriage and elaborated itself into a Protestant version of the Virgin Mary cult. The fairy queen was an especially apt symbol for Elizabeth because this female being of the otherworld had power in her own right and ruled her kingdom without the aid of a fairy king. J

Spenser wanted to "overgo" previous epic poets, and he could do this by venturing into virgin territory, into the unknown world of Faerie. In the proem to Book 6, the poet announces he is our guide through fairyland and asks the "sacred imps" or Muses to guide his footing "In these strange waies, where neuer foote did vse, / Me none can find, but who was taught them by the Muse" (2). Because Spenser is permitted this vision of the otherworld, he becomes a seer or person gifted with second sight; for the rest of us, the

96 otherworld is a hidden realm that may be viewed only through the keener vision of the poet-seer.^

Spenser was confident the noble reader would be able to perceive truth amid all the shadowy and improbable adventures of his fairyland. So that his divination of British history would not be looked at with skepticism, the poet offers us reminders throughout The Faerie Oueene that his imaginary world is not "th'aboundance of an idle braine" (2.pr.2); the truths of history reside also in the realm of the imaginary and can be attained when rationalization is suspended. Spenser's fairyland is more palpable than Shakespeare's primarily because Spenser ties his imaginary realm to the world of history. The fairy commonwealth was known to have a great interest in human affairs and a desire to influence human destiny, but whereas Shakespeare's Oberon intervenes in earthly matters by working his magic to ensure harmony and the triumph of love for two young couples, the influence of Spenser's fairies is of national importance. At the end of A Midsummer Nicrht's Dream. Shakespeare playfully offers his audience the option of interpreting all the strange events which unfold in the play as a dream. Puck says, Think but this . . . That you have slumb'red here, While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream. (5.1.410-14) Spenser's imaginary commonwealth, on the other hand, is not simply a magic dream land; it is a world of realities, however romanticized and idealized it may be.

97 While Spenser was not the first to use the fairy folk for royal compliment or royal criticism in the Elizabethan period, his masterwork offers one of the age's most important literary manifestations of the fairies. Katharine Briggs's comment that the medieval fairies, to which Spenser owed a debt, had become "bookish and faded" by Spenser's time, gives one the impression that the Faerie Oueene's author had nothing new to offer his readers with his use of fairy mythology (Anatomy 6). It is not necessarily the case, as Briggs's assumes, that Spenser's use of fairies was outdated, since the history of folk traditions is one of revivals and re-inventions. In reality Spenser transforms fairy mythology as much as Shakespeare was to do in A Midsummer Night's Dream with his portrayal of benign, miniature sprites. Spenser transforms an image that had formerly carried pagan and Catholic overtones, into one that is at once English, Protestant, patriotic, and political. Whereas the medieval age and many people of Spenser's own day were guided and controlled by superstition, Spenser shows that the individual English artist could control both superstition and classical mythology through his use of the fairies and by placing the events of his epic in a Christian context. 9 c In reworking fairy mythology for his own poetic purposes, Spenser celebrates his potency as a poet. He becomes the ultimate creator, combining the real and the imaginary, the natural and the supernatural, the actual and the ideal. The supreme achievement of Spenser's national epic is counterbalanced by the poet's own disappointed hopes of fame,

98 power, and prestige. The man who desired to be England's Virgil and to bear the title of poet laureate found that, to use Isabel Rathborne's words, "the glory of this world, so glittering, so desirable, so praiseworthy, was after all an insubstantial pageant, a mirage whose fragile beauty owed its being to the wand of the enchanter, to the airy dreams of the poets, and was doomed at last to vanish into air, into thin air" (60). Spenser's own quest for Glory(ana) proved to be as futile as Arthur's for the elusive Faerie Queene.

99 Notes

^ Spenser's "Letter to Raleigh" is reprinted in the Longman edition of The Faerie Oueene on pp. 737-38. All citations from Spenser's text in my essay are taken from this edition.

^ In "The Vocative and the Vocational: The Unreadability of Elizabeth in The Faerie Oueene" (1987), Bellamy argues that Gloriana and her fairy realm exist because of Spenser's unsuccessful attempts to call forth the presence of Queen Elizabeth and to speak her proper name. As Bellamy conceives of Spenser's epic, it was doomed to failure ever since its conception as allegory, and as such, the poem could never be in a completed state even if Spenser had written all twelve of the projected books. Contrary to Bellamy, it is my argument in this chapter that the absence of Elizabeth's actual presence in the narrative is indicative of the poem's success rather than its failure.

^ By seriously regarding Gloriana as the unifying force of Spenser's epic, Josephine Waters Bennett and, more recently, Jeffrey P. Fruen have diverged from the generally accepted notion that the fairy queen is only marginally important to the work as a whole. In "'True Glorious Type': The Place of Gloriana in The Faerie Oueene" (1986), Fruen cogently argues that Spenser's withholding of his heroine until Book 12 (had his poem been completed), and elaborate use of foreshadowing is suggestive of biblical typology. As such, "Gloriana should be seen as focal to the poem's disjointed narratives in much the same sense in which Christ was seen as the unifying focus of the Bible" (Fruen 147-48). In Fruen's scheme of events, the fictionalized Elizabeth of the proems would be comparable to Moses rather than Christ, and she would become merely another exemplary female figure who anticipates the greater figure of Gloriana. Every royal type of Elizabeth, as Fruen argues, may be seen to prefigure Gloriana, but in Spenser's historical allegory it is ultimately the Gloriana of the mythological past which anticipates Elizabeth I.

^ Puttenham's explanation of the queen's resemblance to the roundel is found in his chapter titled "Of Proportion in figure" in The Arte of English Poesie (1589) .

^ This is especially evident in the earlier books of Spenser's Faerie Oueene. In Book 6, however, Spenser substitutes his own love for Gloriana.

100 ^ Technically Redcrosse and Artegall are not fairies, but changelings. Spenser makes it clear that these knights were stolen from their human mothers in their infancy and brought to fairyland by "false Faries," not by the poem's good fairies. I include them here with the other fairy knights because, for the majority of their lives, they have believed themselves to be of fairy race and, consequently, bound in loyalty and service to the Faerie Queene. I will discuss the importance of their changeling status in the second half of my essay, where I show how Spenser invests Elizabeth with both a fairy and human ancestry.

^ In his 1991 article, "'Infinite Desire': Spenser's Arthur and the Representation of Courtly Ambition," Robert J. Mueller analyzes the implications of Arthur's desire for Gloriana by equating Arthur's pattern of questing and failing to find Gloriana to the life of the courtier at Elizabeth's court. Mueller says, "Red Crosse and Guyon represent experienced courtiers resigned to an existence of unrewarded effort, in contrast to the perpetually naive and hopeful Arthur" who believes he can be united with the Faerie Queene (763). It has also been suggested, by Mueller and others, that the absence of Gloriana may be a problem with allegory itself: as a representation of earthly glory in the epic (Spenser's "general" intention), Gloriana need not appear because Spenser's knights can win glory through their virtuous deeds and daring adventures rather than simply by union with the Faerie Queene. In one sense, Arthur does not betray Gloriana in 3.12 when he wishes Florimell were his fairy queen, because by rescuing Florimell from the lustful pursuer that would rape her, he has achieved the glory that Spenser's Faerie Queene represents.

® The comparison drawn by Reginald Scot between the fairy queen and Diana is found in Book 13, chapter 16, of the Discouerie of Witchcraft. Perhaps John Steadman explains best the circular link connecting Diana, the fairy queen, and Elizabeth I. Here he is referring specifically to Spenser's Gloriana:

[Gloriana's] position and significance in the poem derive, on the whole, . . . from her assimilation to Elizabeth, along with the assimilation of Elizabeth to Diana, and of Diana as goddess of the chase and sovereign of woodland nymphs to the fairy queen. (In medieval tradition Diana often rides with Oberon or Arthur or with other legendary figures in the nocturnal hunt.) (547)

The fact that Diana's nighttime consort in medieval stories is Oberon and Arthur, who is connected to the fairy folk in

101 Celtic mythology and is described sometimes as a fairy king, also accounts for the translation of Diana into the fairy queen.

^ All the roles Elizabeth played in life, says A. Bartlett Giamatti, "were Gloriana, the single, sole and abiding fountainhead and goal of Unity" (238). For a discussion of the various roles Elizabeth adopted, see Elkin Calhoun Wilson's England's Eliza. Frances Yates's Astraea, and Roy Strong's The Cult of Elizabeth. Roy Strong remarks that the roles Elizabeth adopted tell us about the cult forming around the queen which was created "to buttress public order" and to substitute the cult of Elizabeth for the medieval cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was no longer acceptable (16). Louis Montrose, in "The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text," argues that the images representing the queen were shaped both from above, by Elizabeth, and from below, by her subjects.

In The Meaning of Spenser's Fairyland Isabel Rathborne says that as "Arthur's fairy mistress, Gloriana is related to all the fairy queens of Celtic myth and medieval romance whose love was the crowning glory of 'the best knight in the world'" (211). With complete foreknowledge, the fay or fairy mistress of medieval romance is capable of guarding over her chosen lover from his infancy and claiming him as her own when he reaches maturity.

44 Folklore as a concept constructed by middle class intellectuals offers an anal-ogy to this process through which Spenser recalls a superior past age. The invention of an idealized folk past was part of a nostalgia for a Golden Age.

12 Three good sources dealing with the Tudor use of Arthurian legend are Charles Bowie Millican's Spenser and the Table Round. James Douglas Merriman's The Flower of Kings, and E. M. W. Tillyard's Some Mythical Elements in English Literature.

13 This idea about the fairies' tie to humanity is taken from Katharine Briggs's The Fairies in English Tradition and Literature. p. 95.

14 Michael J. Murrin believes Spenser's Faerie Oueene is the first fantasy work because all the action takes place in an entirely imaginary world. Prior works interspersed marvelous adventures in a primary, knowable world.

102 1 s Britomart needs Merlin's help to find her way into fairyland. As changelings, Artegall and Redcrosse are taken there by fairies. Spenser does not reveal the path Arthur takes to get to fairyland, but it is relevant that although he is in fairyland the whole time, he is not able to find Gloriana and her court. The role of guide is reserved for Merlin, a figure of the poet, and Spenser himself, who directs his noble readers in "these strange waies" through fairyland (6.pr.2). For a good discussion of Merlin as a figure for the poet, see William Blackburn's article, "Spenser's Merlin," in Renaissance and Reformation 4 (1980): 179-98.

1® Isabel Rathborne examines two well-known legends Spenser was likely to be familiar with, the stories of Melusine and of Helyas. Rathborne shows how the fa'iry figures are humanized in these legends and draws a comparison to Spenser's treatment of his fairies.

Spenser's allegory is apocalyptically oriented and fuses human history with biblical prophecy. For an examination of Spenser's emphasis on divining or prophecy in Book 5, see Kenneth Borris's Spenser's Poetics of Prophecy in The Faerie Queene V.

Thomas Roche, for one, forwards this view and provides a discussion of the two chronicles in The Kindly Flame. Many critics have spent time in drawing correspondences between the two versions of history. See, for instance, Rathborne's analysis in her chapter titled “Gods and Heroes" in The Meaning of Spenser's Fairyland.

1® For Spenser's comments on the moral degeneration of humankind, see the following passages in The Faerie Oueene: 1.12.14, 2.7.16-17, 3.1.13, 4.8.29-33, 5.pr.l-9.

2® The danger of Spenser's "romance wanderings," Andrew Fichter argues, "lies in allowing the imagination to become arrested in the past, in Faeryland, as Britomart does in her initial passionate fixation on Artegall and as the narrator of book 3 does in his meditations on Britomart, the Arthurian era and the classical ages" (168).

2-*- Spenser's notion concerning imaginary allies coming to the aid of his nation at a decisive moment in time is reiterated a century later in The Secret Common-Wealth (1691) by Robert Kirk, who writes that Merlin enchanted the fairies, causing them to forge arms for the Britons when they were first threatened by the Saxon force:

103 . . . English authors relate / of Barry Island in Glamorganshyre that laying your ear unto a cleft of the Rock; blowing of Bellows, stricking of hammers, clashing of armour, filing of irons will be heard distinctly, ever since Merlin inchanted those subterranean Wights to a solid manuall forging of arms to Aurelius Ambrosius and his Brittains, till he returned, which Merlin being killed in battell, and not coming to loose the knot these active Vulcans are there ty'd to a perpetuall labour. (62-3)

Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain recounts how Aurelius Ambrosius, brother of Uther Pendragon, defeats his traitorous uncle, Vortigern, then vents his fury on the Saxons whom Vortigern has permitted to settle in Britain (viii.1-8). Geoffrey makes no mention, however, of Merlin's death in battle or of the fairies' ceaseless labor of forging arms for the Britons. Stewart Sanderson, editor and commentator of Kirk's The Secret Common-Wealth. questions the identity of these English authors who supposedly speak of the fairies' military labors beneath the rocks on Barri Island, since such a theory is not to be found in the texts of Gildas, Nennius, Geoffrey, or Malory (63). Giraldus Cambrensis, a twelfth-century Welshman, speaks of Barri Island and of noises "like that of smiths at work," but attributes them simply to the movement of the tides under the rocks (61).

This information about Celtic legend is taken from Evans-Wentz's The Fairv-Faith in Celtic Countries, p. 3 03. Spenser's idealized fairies in part resemble the Sidhe race-- very beautiful, tall, and powerful fairy beings who bear the closest ties to the Tuatha de Danann, the original Irish inhabitants who made themselves invisible when invaders came to the Island. The queen of the Sidhe is said to be so beautiful that it is dangerous for mortals to look at her (Arrowsmith 20), a detail that may have given Spenser the idea to have his fairy queen reveal herself to Arthur in a dream or vision rather than face to face.

^ Minor White Latham tells us that the real ruler of the fairies was simply the fairy queen:

Although the plural number was used to denote the fairy sovereigns, the fairies had but one ruler--a monarch, as old as the race itself, and of the same nationality and being as her subjects, and, like the queen bee, female and nameless except for her royal title. (104)

Like the fairy queen of tradition, Elizabeth is unnamed in Spenser's poem and addressed simply by her various royal

104 titles: "0 Goddesse heauenly bright," ''Mirrour of grace," ''Great Lady of the greatest Isle," "0 dearest dred" (l.pr.4).

9 A Evans-Wentz comments that the "Celtic Otherworld is like that hidden realm of subjectivity lying just beyond the horizon of mortal existence, which we cannot behold when we would, save with the mystic vision of the Irish seer" (334) . While Spenser is like the Irish seer, it was as England's new poet that he intended to establish himself.

OC , , This artistic and creative power of Spenser could also be found in the individual folk performer, who revitalizes dormant and timeworn traditions.

105 Works Cited

I . Primary Works

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer. Ed. John H. Fisher. New York: Holt, 1977.

Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. 1136. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Baltimore: Penguin, 1966.

Giraldus Cambrensis. The Itinerary through Wales and the Description of Wales. London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1908 .

Huon of Bordeaux: Done into English bv Sir John Bourchier. Lord Berners, and now retold bv Robert Steele. London, 1895 .

James the First, King of England. Kina James the First Daemonoloaie (1597): Newes from Scotland declaring the Damnable Life and death of Doctor Fian. a notable Sorcerer who was burned at Edenbrouah in Ianuarv last. (1591) . Ed. G. B. Harrison. The Bodley Head Quartos IX. London: Lane; New York: Dutton, 1924.

Kirk, Robert. The Secret Common-wealth and A Short Treatise of Charms and Spels. c. 1691. Ed. Stewart Sanderson. The Folklore Society Mistletoe Ser. Cambridge: Brewer, 1976.

Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. 1589. Ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1936.

Scot, Reginald. Discouerie of Witchcraft. 1584. The English Experience: Its Record in Early Printed Books Published in Facsimile 299. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1971.

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Ed. Harold F. Brooks. The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare. Bristol: Methuen, 1979.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Oveene. Ed. A. C. Hamilton. London: Longman, 1977.

II. Secondary Works

Arrowsmith, Nancy, and George Moorse. A Field Guide to the Little People. New York: Hill, 1977.

106 Bellamy, Elizabeth J. "The Vocative and the Vocational: The Unreadability of Elizabeth in The Faerie Oueene. ELH 54 (1987): 1-30.

Bennett, Josephine Waters. The Evolution of "The Faerie Oueene." Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1942.

Blackburn, William. "Spenser's Merlin." Renaissance and Reformation 4 (1980): 179-98.

Borris, Kenneth. Spenser's Poetics of Prophecy in The Faerie Queene V. English Literary Studies 52. Victoria, BC: U of Victoria, 1991.

Briggs, K[atharine] M. The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare's Contemporaries and Successors. London: Routledge, 19 59.

The Fairies in English Tradition and Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1967.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y. The Fairv-Faith in Celtic Countries. London: Frowde, 1911.

Fichter, Andrew. Poets Historical: Dynastic Epic in the Renaissance. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982.

Fruen, Jeffrey P. "'True Glorious Type': The Place of Gloriana in The Faerie Oueene." Spenser Studies 7 (1986) : 147-173.

Giamatti, A. Bartlett. "Elizabeth and Spenser." The Spenser Encyclopedia. Ed. A. C. Hamilton. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990. 238-42.

Horton, Ronald Arthur. The Unity of "The Faerie Oueene." Athens: U of Georgia P, 1978.

Latham, Minor White. The Elizabethan Fairies: The Fairies of Folklore and the Fairies of Shakespeare. 1930. New York: Octagon, 1972 .

McCoy, Richard C. The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.

Merrj.man, James Douglas. The Flower of Kings: A Study of the Arthurian Legend in England between 1485 and 1835. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1973.

107 Millican, Charles Bowie. Spenser and the Table Round: A Study in the Contemporaneous Background for Spenser's Use of the Arthurian Legend. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 8. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1932.

Montrose, Louis Adrian. "The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text." Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts. Ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. 303-40.

Mueller, Robert J. "'Infinite Desire': Spenser's Arthur and the Representation of Courtly Ambition." ELH 58 (1991) : 747-71.

Murrin, Michael J. "Fairyland." The Spenser Encyclopedia. Ed. A. C. Hamilton. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990. 296- 98 .

Nohrnberg, James. The Analogy of "The Faerie Oueene." Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976.

Paton, Lucy Allen. Studies in the Fairv Mythology of Arthurian Romances. 2nd ed. Burt Franklin Bibliographical Ser. 18. New York: Franklin, 1960.

Rathborne, Isabel E. The Meaning of Spenser's Fairyland. New York: Columbia UP, 1937.

Roche, Thomas P., Jr. The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser's "Faerie Oueene." Princeton: Princeton UP,- 1964.

Steadman, John M. "Spenser's Icon of the Past: Fiction as History, a Reexamination." Huntington Library Quarterly 55 (1992): 535-58.

Strong, Roy C. The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry. 1977. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.

Tillyard, E. M. W. Some Mythical Elements in English Literature. London: Chatto, 1961.

Wilson, Elkin Calhoun. England's Eliza. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1939.

Yates, Frances A. Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London: Routledge, 1975.

108 CHAPTER 4 TARNISHING ELIZABETH'S MYTHIC AURA: SHAKESPEARE'S COMIC REVISION OF FAIRYLAND

The time period which brought forth A Midsummer Night's Dream was ripe for fairy literature. Not only were the fairies and their queen familiar to the majority of Elizabethans through folk tales, but these native figures were being used in the entertainments of Elizabeth's progresses. Spenser was at the pinnacle of fame after the 1590 publication of his Faerie Oueene. and although Shakespeare followed in the footsteps of his illustrious contemporary by appropriating the fairy queen and merging the natural, supernatural, and political matrices, in A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1594-96) Shakespeare transforms rather than affirms Spenser's mythic vision of fairyland.^ By offering his own version of the English fairies and manipulating the figure of the fairy queen, Shakespeare purposefully challenges the authority and mythic stature of Queen Elizabeth. The playwright takes deliberate steps to alter the fairy queen model offered by previous Elizabethan writers: he juxtaposes the fairy queen with Oberon, invests her with a human-like dimension, and reduces her grandeur in a comic and humiliating way. These alterations suggest that the play's political undercurrent may arise not from

109 Shakespeare's and the national unconscious, as Montrose argues in his New Historicist critique, but from a conscious analytic project on the part of the dramatist to destabilize those exalted myths which had been built up around

Elizabeth. The comic and ironic re-vision of the fairy queen in A Midsummer Night's Dream both reflects the changing relationship of the poet to his monarch and underscores the pettiness and humor of certain aspects of the human condition. Most commentators are agreed that Shakespeare created in A Midsummer Night's Dream the quintessential fairyland of English literature, but the extent to which he departed from traditional fairy folklore has been much debated. Those of Minor White Latham's school maintain that Shakespeare invented the concept of the fairies' diminutive stature and consequently began the fashion for the miniature which continued on through Drayton and Herrick. They emphasize that the fairy attendants of Titania's and Oberon's court, rather than being of human size or dwarflike as the majority of Elizabethan fairies were thought to be, are miniaturized into creatures so tiny that they can creep into acorn cups and would be in danger of being "overflown" by a bumble-bee's honey bag. Others, such as Katharine Briggs, the foremost authority on fairylore, and Harold Brooks, the latest Arden editor of A Midsummer Night's Dream, have refuted this notion of Shakespeare's originality in depicting miniature fairies and have provided ample evidence--from Gervase of Tilbury's Otia Imoerialia (c. 1211) to the folklore of Warwickshire and

110 Wales--to show that there was a tradition of tiny sprites already in place before Shakespeare's time. The second major issue of contention is whether or not the dramatist departed from conventional treatments of fairies by presenting these creatures as benevolent rather than of an

evil nature. This issue is itself complicated by the fact

that some recent critics, focusing on the alleged sinister features of Shakespeare's fairyland, regard the power of the fairies as being unpredictable and potentially malevolent in nature. Polish critic Jan Kott, for instance, stresses the twofold nature of Puck and argues that this character is as much the menacing devil Hobgoblin as he is the merry Robin Goodfellow. If we examine closely the fairies' actions within the context of the play, however, we observe the operation of their benevolence and Shakespeare's attempts to underline their harmlessness. Delighting in those things "That befall prepost'rously" (3.2.121), Puck is more mischievous than sinister, and Oberon's statement that they are "spirits of another sort" (3.2.388) reinforces the antithesis between the inhabitants of the fairy world and the "Damned spirits" of the night (3.2.382) . Given the goodness of Gloriana's knights in The Faerie Oueene. of the fairies who greeted Elizabeth on her progresses, and of folk fairies like the Brownie, who performed domestic chores in the nighttime, it is clear that Shakespeare was not the innovator of the fairies' benevolence. Nevertheless, some critics continue to speculate that A Midsummer Night's Dream marks

111 the first time in fairy folklore that the fairies are purged of any devilish association and wickedness.^

The novelty and magic which many have perceived in A Midsummer Night's Dream lies primarily in neither the diminutive quality of its fairies nor in their propensity for kindness toward human society, but in Shakespeare's ability to take something familiar and redefine it. The apparent newness of tiny fairies, for instance, results from the fact that Shakespeare selected one characteristic of the fairies from the varied tradition of fairy folklore and asserted it against the more conventional treatment of the fairies as human sized beings. Shakespeare's fairyland and the eclectic nature of his fairylore evolved no doubt from the fact that his play, although it may originally have been designed as an entertainment for an aristocratic wedding, was eventually to appear on the public stage. The commercial acting company to which Shakespeare belonged certainly would have wanted the playwright's scripts to please a diverse and representative group of theatergoers. As the supreme consolidator of the fairy tradition, Shakespeare draws from classical, literary, and native spirit lore and juxtaposes in A Midsummer Night's Dream three distinct kinds of fairies: human-sized fairy monarchs, diminutive fairy attendants, and Puck or Robin Goodfellow, who was traditionally regarded as an earthy sprite of the hearth rather than specifically as a fairy. As a creative artist in his own right, Shakespeare adds humor to a tradition that had previously been devoid of comical elements. Shakespeare's motives for introducing Robin

112 Goodfellow into the fairy realm are not obscure: not only did England's national practical joker raise the comic expectations of the Elizabethan audience, but he was likely to be a more familiar figure to a wide cross-section of Londoners than the mostly literary-derived Oberon and

Titania.^

Shakespeare's fairy monarchs have become so familiar to contemporary audiences of A Midsummer Night's Dream that it is easy to forget Oberon's presence in the drama deviates from the norm. Although a portion of Shakespeare's audience knew of the fairy king through folk tales, and the better read were familiar with him through the still popular medieval works as the French romance of Huon of Bordeaux or the chanson de creste of Huon rov de faverce. it was typically the case in Elizabethan literature that the fairy queen was depicted as the sole ruler of the fairy realm. In placing only the fairy queen on the throne of fairyland, writers were following oral fairy tradition. It is also reasonable to suspect, especially given the later prominence of Oberon in Jacobean and Caroline literature, that the poet's crowning of the fairy queen was an acknowledgement of Elizabeth's proper rule. Except in the entertainment at Elvetham (1591), where Elizabeth is juxtaposed with the fairy queen in a dramatic entertainment which also mentions Auberon, the fairy king remains a conspicuously absent figure in the Elizabethan fairy literature which preceded Shakespeare's drama. Since Queen Elizabeth shared with Titania the title of fairy queen,

113 we must question Shakespeare's motives for coupling Oberon with Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Elizabeth's transformation into the fairy queen, possibly beginning in 1575 with the Woodstock entertainment, was a gradual process that reached completion with the 1590 publication of Spenser's Faerie Oueene. C. R. Baskervill speculates that the success of Henry Lee's Woodstock pageant, which introduced the fairy queen as a figure of the English monarch, launched the fairy queen upon a successful career as a prominent player in the pageants and drama of the succeeding decades. The fairy queen was an image connoting many things--female power, virginity, beauty, immortality, other-worldliness, mystery--and poets were eager to appropriate this figure not only to compliment their queen, but also to demonstrate their patriotism which was implicit in the use of native folklore. Spenser's epic work exalting the English nation and immortalizing Elizabeth as Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, came to mark the most glorious and complete stage of Elizabeth's metamorphosis into the fairy queen, for it brought together for the first time all of Elizabeth's multiple aspects under one title. It is likely Elizabeth encouraged the association drawn between herself and this maiden from the otherworld and saw the fairy queen as a vehicle to buttress her authority and, especially as she aged, to sustain her public image as magical and mysterious. When A Midsummer Night's Dream appeared on the public stage in the mid 1590s, Shakespeare's audience, even Elizabeth

114 herself, would have been ready to see in Titania, the fairy queen, an allusion to the English queen. Although Oberon is placed alongside Titania on the dual throne of the fairy kingdom, it initially appears as if the presence of the resplendent Titania will dominate and shape the play. We are first introduced to Titania and her court by one of the fairy queen's attendants, who boasts to Puck of its freedom of movement: Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough briar, Over park, over pale, Thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander everywhere, Swifter than the moon's sphere; And I serve the Fairy Queen, To dew her orbs upon the green. Th6 cowslips tall her pensioners be, In their gold coats spots you see; Those be rubies, fairy favours, In those freckles live their savours. I must go seek some dew-drops here, And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear. (2.1.2-15) The fairy queen's grandeur is heralded by her servant's supernatural swiftness and ability to wander everywhere, unfettered by time and place. It is announced also by her own special concern with beautifying nature, whether it be with dewing rings of grass or placing a "pearl" on every cowslip's petal.^ In accentuating Titania's power and splendor even before she appears on stage and immersing his audience in the enchanting world of her court, Shakespeare simultaneously establishes Titania as a major force in the play and invests Elizabeth with mythic proportions. The fairy court as presented by Titania's nimble attendant draws comparison to Elizabeth's own court. The tall cowslips,

115 flowers personified as the fairy queen's pensioners, are the fairy counterparts of Elizabeth's bodyguards, who were chosen based on their height, birth, and handsome demeanor. The dewdrop or "pearl" which the fairy attendant places "in every cowslip's ear" may be an allusion to the fashion adopted by Elizabeth's favorites of wearing in their ear a pearl, a stone which became suggestive of the queen's virgin purity. Pearls carry particular significance in this context because they are associated with dewdrops, a potent image signifying the infusion of grace. The fairy queen's solicitude for hanging dewdrops upon the cowslips and for dewing fairy rings suggests that Elizabeth serves as a spiritual and revitalizing force in her court as well as throughout nature. It is decidedly a feminine authority which makes itself felt at the start of A Midsummer Night's Dream, since the fairy queen, not Oberon, wields control over fairyland, the natural world, even the realm of the imagination. Most indicative of the matriarchal rule of fairyland is Titania's resolve to keep the little changeling boy, whom she has stolen from an Indian king. Oberon's request to have the human child as his henchman is met with Titania's sharp: "The fairy land buys not the child of me" (2.1.122) . Some readers find Titania haughty in her refusal to give Oberon what he desires, but she behaves as we should expect the fairy queen to, dignified and queenly. She offers a reconciliation, asking that Oberon "patiently dance in our round, / And see our moonlight revels" (2.1.140-1), and leaves only when her royal partner repeats his demand for the boy. It is the

116 fairy king rather than Titania who appears to be unyielding. He refuses to compromise and blames Titania for the dramatic consequences of their dispute. Responding to Titania's anxiety about the alterations occurring in nature, Oberon says to his queen, "Do you amend it then: it lies in you. / Why should Titania cross her Oberon?" (2.1.118-19). The dramatic purpose of the fairy plot is to end this dissension over the changeling, who comes to represent for Titania her sovereignty over Oberon, and for Oberon, his desire to master Titania's will and affection. Titania's domination over the natural world at the beginning of the play is as evident as her command in fairyland. This mastery, already demonstrated by the fairy queen's care for nature's beautification, is indicated in a less direct way by her superhuman ability to exploit all of nature's gifts and to experience its many and disparate beauties. With the power and freedom of an otherworldly being, Titania can fetch "jewels from the deep" (3.1.151), make her bed on "a bank where the wild thyme blows, / Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows" (2.1.249-50), and dance . . . on hill, in dale, forest or mead, By paved fountain, or by rushy brook, Or in the beached margent of the sea, her ringlets to the whistling wind (2.1.83-5). Robert Kirk, a seventeenth-century recorder of fairy belief, likens the fairies to birds and beasts "whose bodies are much used to the change of the free and open air" (60), but Shakespeare's Titania is more than a physical presence in tune with nature. She is so much a part of the sensory world as to be one with

117 the elements, and her discord with Oberon over the changeling means discord throughout the natural world. In her famous weather speech in 2.1, Titania identifies her and Oberon's brawls as the source or origin of nature's present chaos: . . . this same progeny of evil comes From our debate, from our dissension; We are their parents and original. The image of the parent underscores Titania's influence on and rule over nature and may draw upon the Renaissance notion of the correspondence between the microcosm and macrocosm. Since Titania to some extent is also a representation of Elizabeth, this image may also intimate Elizabeth's self­ representation as nurturing mother to her subjects. In the respect that Titania is submissive neither to the point of view or domination of Oberon, her sovereignty extends over the realm of the imagination as well. Oberon's authority is threatened by Titania's nostalgic remembrance of the changeling's mother, who, as though she were one of Diana's nymphs or Elizabeth's own ladies-in-waiting, is described as a votaress of the fairy queen's order. The passage in which Titania speaks of her gossip, then pregnant with the little Indian boy, is filled with airy images, which suggest the free play of the imagination. *7 The fairy queen tells how she and the Indian boy's mother would sit by the seashore in the “spiced Indian air" watching "the sails conceive / And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind," and how her votaress, in imitation, would "sail upon the land" with "pretty and with swimming gait" to fetch Titania trifles (2.1.124-32). Since A Midsummer Night's Dream is concerned

118 primarily with the imagination and its power to give "to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name" (5.1.16-17), it is of thematic significance 'that Shakespeare initially suggests in the figure of the fairy queen the powers of the imaginative faculty. Such a suggestion is another way for Shakespeare to raise Titania in dignity and power and to affirm the mythical aura of his other fairy queen, Elizabeth Tudor. Although tiny and less dignified than Titania, Mercutio's

, , Q Queen Mab is also a controller of the imagination. In her chariot made from an empty hazelnut and drawn by a small, grey-coated gnat, she nightly gallops through the brains of sleepers, delivering to lovers dreams of kisses, to lawyers dreams of fees, to each dreamer the thing he most desires. While Mercutio identifies the diminutive Mab as a creature of Elizabethan superstition by suggesting that she is responsible for tying knots in horses' manes and tangling the hair of slatterns, he shows by the emphatic and mocking tone of his speech that this queen of the fairies is nothing more than a figment of one's imagination. Titania as well as Oberon, on the other hand, cannot be dismissed so easily as a fanciful product of the imagination; they do not merely shape people's dreams but also their waking lives. Owing to the very physical quality of the fairy monarchs' dealing with sleeping people, Titania and Oberon belong, as Marjorie Garber suggests, to an in-between world, one that is neither wholly fictitious nor explainable in natural terms. In response to Theseus's oft-quoted fifth act speech on the

119 lunatic, lover, and poet, Hippolyta asserts that however strange and wondrous the lovers' stories about fairies may be, the consistency of the details "More witnesseth than fancy's images, / And grows to something of great constancy" (5.1.25-6). Unlike Theseus, Hippolyta pleads for the truth of the Athenian youths' "dream." Besides being a more tangible figure than Romeo and Juliet's Queen Mab, Titania possesses a majestic quality throughout the drama, even when she falls victim to Oberon's revengeful fantasy. After all, Titania, like Elizabeth, is enough of a goddess to have a cult and votaresses. Although in every way a fairy queen, Titania is invested with a human-like dimension which at first complements, even heightens, her sovereign power but is later emphasized and exaggerated to such a degree that the implied association between the fairy queen and Elizabeth is complicated and made problematic. Unlike her Elizabethan forbears, Shakespeare's ■Fairy queen may be talked about and analyzed as though she were an actual person. We know, for instance, she is troubled that her quarrel with Oberon has placed hardships on human society and resulted in nature going askew. We know also that her adoption of the changeling is a gesture of love and favor to her former votaress rather than a sign of malevolence. The fairy queen's child-theft is perhaps the only one in the literature of the age that we see solely from the fairy perspective. Although the boy was not an orphan when Titania carried him off to fairyland, no mention is made

120 in the fairy queen's speeches of the father of the changeling, the Indian king. The human perspective on this issue of changelings is most appropriately put forth by Robert Kirk, the Scottish minister reputed to have been transported by the fairies after he became ill and collapsed on a fairy hill at night. Although Kirk's treatise on the life of these subterranean creatures is post-Shakespearean, The Secret Common-Wealth of Elves. Fauns. & Fairies (1691) documents fairy beliefs which were prominent throughout the age. In this treatise, Kirk forwards the notion that the fairies have laws of their own, but by human law "they transgress and committ acts of Injustice" (62). The two most reprehensible activities of the fairies, according to the minister, are the kidnapping of mothers to nurse their fairy babies and the stealing of beautiful human infants.9 The fairies' dealing in changelings was one reason why they were regarded by those of Shakespeare's day as dreaded and malevolent beings. As was the custom, Titania assuredly left in her adoptee's place either a lingering image of the Indian boy or a sickly, ill- natured fairy child, yet it is with Titania rather than with the boy's human relatives that Shakespeare encourages his audience to sympathize. In showing that Tir; ,iia is tied closely to humankind and is responsible to a large extent for its welfare, Shakespeare makes her palpable while emphasizing her magnificence. The human-like quality with which Shakespeare invests the fairy queen proves to be crippling as well as ennobling, for

121 it results in Titania's vulnerability to Oberon's trickery and her subsequent inability to distinguish true love from debasing dotage. The presence of Oberon in the drama counterbalances that of Titania from the moment he vows revenge on his wife for refusing to render to him her page. Because we never fully ascertain Oberon's motives or achieve the degree of insight into his character that we do with Titania, it is questionable whether the fairy queen's actions justify the nastiness of the fairy king's revenge. As Oberon anoints the eyes of the sleeping Titania with a transforming love juice, the fairy king speaks of the nature of his revenge: What thou seest when thou dost wake, Do it for thy true love take; Love and languish for his sake. Be it ounce, or cat, or bear, Pard, or boar with bristled hair, In thy eye that shall appear When thou wak'st, it is thy dear. Wake when some vile thing is near. (2.2.26-33) Oberon's enchantment is designed to make Titania "full of hateful fantasies" (2.1.258). In imagining what Titania may first lay her eyes upon after awakening, Oberon makes a list of animals, naming only those that would make his queen's unnatural affection appear most loathsome. The list ends with a "boar with bristled hair," an animal associated with some of humanity's most unattractive traits, namely stubbornness and promiscuity. The comic climax of the fairy plot is Titania's awakening to the sight of Bottom the weaver, figuratively as well as literally an ass, since he is temporarily "translated" into animal form by the prankster Puck. Since Elizabeth was fond of bestowing animal names on

122 some of the people who were closest to her--Simier was her monkey and the due d'Alencon her frog--the fairy queen's enamorment of an ass, besides prompting considerable mirth among members of Shakespeare's audience, perhaps left a few wondering whether the ass alluded to one of Elizabeth's

courtiers or suitors. 1 n Titania's descent to the level of bestiality, the state of mere physicality and infatuation, is made even more transparent by Shakespeare's initial heightening of her majesty and authority. As the progress pageants had done, Shakespeare's play simultaneously links the fairy queen to and distinguishes her from the historical queen. Before Oberon enchants Titania with the juice of the little western flower, turned purple from white when pierced by Cupid's arrow, he speaks to Puck of "a fair vestal, throned by the west," who remains immune to Cupid's fiery darts (2.1.158). The meddling boy, Cupid, took aim at this vestal, but his arrow was Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon; And the imperial votress passed on, In maiden meditation, fancy-free. (2.1.162-64) This generally acknowledged reference to Elizabeth is a way for Shakespeare to distance his sovereign momentarily from the ethereal Titania, who is now comically and cruelly brought down to earth. Oberon's remembrance of the time when he saw the armed Cupid, particularly his reference to the mermaid sitting on a dolphin's back and to shooting stars, recalls the elaborate imagery of the progress pageants and the entire process by which Elizabeth was mythologized.As she is at Kenilworth, Elizabeth is represented as the

123 imperial "votaress," a term which is also applied to the mother of the Indian boy. In Kenilworth's marriage masque, Elizabeth is Zabeta, Diana's favorite nymph, and the purpose of the masque is to persuade Elizabeth to marry. In Shakespeare's play, as well as in the Kenilworth masque and throughout her life, Elizabeth remained the virgin queen and passed on in "maiden meditation." In the figure of the imperial votaress, Elizabeth is invulnerable to and above the confusion that is intertwined with love. Oberon's vision, keener than even that of Puck since only he is able to see the armed Cupid, contrasts especially with Titania's inability to see clearly. The overpowering love with which she believes herself to be afflicted is in reality a shallow, meaningless affection that is echoed by the confused behavior of the Athenian lovers, who have been blinded as much by their own passion as by the potency of the flower's magic liquor. In focusing on both the virgin purity of the "imperial votress" and the sexual contamination of the fairy queen, Shakespeare at once reaffirms and destabilizes the myth of Elizabeth as the virgin queen. Against each other are set the myth and countermyth, the divinity and humanity of England's queen. However one views this wildly mismatched love affair between Shakespeare's queen of the fairies and an unrefined mortal, the effect of it is still the same: to cast Elizabeth in an ambiguous light. Robert L. Reid, in recently examining how Shakespeare uses the queen of the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream to burlesque the sublime mythmaking

124 of Spenser's epic, sees Bottom as an English Everyman and the fantasy of his affair with Titania as a comic if not crude actualization of Elizabeth's self-representation as the metaphorical mistress to her people. Elaborating in greater detail on this peculiar relationship, Montrose perceives Titania as a mother figure to Bottom as well as a mistress, and her pampering and compliance to gratify Bottom's every desire turns this affair into "a parodic fantasy of infantile narcissism and dependency" (35). All the mother-mistress overtones that are embodied in the myths of the virgin queen are evident in the relationship between Titania and Bottom. In her role as mother, Titania may sternly order Bottom: "Out of this wood do not desire to go: / Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no" (3.1.145-6). As doting mistress heaping favors on her lover, she may entwine herself about Bottom and proclaim, "0 how I love thee! How I dote on thee!" (4.1.44). Elizabeth, like the enchanted Titania, was the mother whom individuals could serve as both child and lover. For countless political reasons, Elizabeth spoke of herself as being both mistress and mother to her people. When her advisors urged her to wed and to bear an heir for the good of her country, Elizabeth, who was content to have her epithet read that "a Queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin," could respond that she was already wedded to her realm (qtd. in Neale 49). When the queen needed the support of her people, she could garner her country's sympathy and allegiance by painting herself as a political

125 mother and all her subjects as her devoted children. In an address to Parliament, the queen uses the parenting image to establish her relationship to her audience: "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" (qtd. in Neale 109). One of Elizabeth's favorite emblems was the pelican, which was believed to pierce its breast to feed its young with its own blood. Although Queen Elizabeth was at once mother, lover, and sovereign to her people, it was near to blasphemy for any of Elizabeth's male subjects to be too familiar or too intimate with his queen, for it was precisely her god-given authority that made her sexually unavailable to them. In showing Titania reduced from her rank as fairy queen by a foolish infatuation, Shakespeare tarnishes Elizabeth's own status as virgin queen. The play's argument for marriage, forwarded especially at the beginning of the play by Theseus, further challenges Elizabeth's authority.^ Strong belief in

Elizabeth's chastity was the foundation upon which her cult had been built, and adoration of Elizabeth as the virgin queen was taken to such heights that it closely resembled a religion. Some of Elizabeth's subjects regarded their queen's virginity as the source of her effectiveness and autonomy as a female ruler. In Henry Lee's Woodstock entertainment, Elizabeth is depicted as the wise fairy queen, whose freedom from "passions blind affects" (117) directly and magically leads to the resolution of all conflicts. 1 1

Although the female sex was generally regarded as the weaker,

126 less rational sex and therefore unsuited to govern, Elizabeth's subjects (if they wished to keep their heads) proclaimed their queen the exception to the rule. Elizabeth did not hesitate to acknowledge her womanness and the inherent weakness of her female body, but she also maintained with fierce tenacity that she had the heart and stomach of a king. Still, as an unmarried and autonomous woman ruler, Elizabeth was an anomaly. The French ambassador made the observation in 1597 that if by chance Elizabeth should die, "it is certain that the English would never again submit to the rule of a woman" (qtd. in Hackett 181). Certainly not everyone was content with being subjected to a woman's rule, and many would have liked the queen to share the burden of governance with a husband. In part through Oberon's forceful presence in the drama, Shakespeare intimates that the ideal political world is characterized by a patriarchal form of government. Since the fairies were unique among the world of spirits in that they functioned as a kingdom or court and were under the direction of an aristocratic ruler, the fairy world aptly functions in A Midsummer Night's Dream as a parallel political reality and a means by which Shakespeare can comment on the proper nature of the English monarchy. Titania's eventual submission to Oberon reunites her with the fairy king and restores order to both the fairy world and the natural world. Once Titania has relinquished the changeling to Oberon and the enchantment is removed from her eyes with "Dian's bud," the fairy king leads his queen in dance, which is suggestive of the

127 reestablishment of order and harmony. This dance parallels that which was performed by Titania and her elves at the start of the play, the dance Oberon refused to participate in unless it was on his own terms. Oberon says, in beckoning the newly submissive Titania, Come my queen, take hands with me, And rock the ground whereon these sleepers be. Now thou and I are new in amity, And will to-morrow midnight, solemnly, Dance in Duke Theseus' house triumphantly, And bless it to all fair prosperity. (84-9) After Oberon has taken control of his queen and his rule has been restored in fairyland, the fairy monarchs can bless the marriage of Theseus and his "warrior love" Hippolyta, a union which parallels that of Oberon and Titania in that it was brought about by the husband's debasement and subsequent transformation of his powerful and head-strong wife. Although Titania's fall is fortunate and necessary in the drama, there is some sadness in watching the fairy queen's once secure world crumble around her as Oberon's revenge plays out. Although Oberon's trickery is the only way to end the dissension between the fairy monarchs, there is a sense of the tragic in the fact that these machinations make the glorious Titania look foolish. Even the water drops which stand "within the pretty flowerets' eyes / Like tears" seem to pity the fairy queen's disgrace (4.1.54-5). Considering the height from which she has fallen and all her noble assertions of independence at the start of the play, it is unsettling when Titania awakes happily and lovingly from her enchantment, harboring no ill will against Oberon. Like

128 Hippolyta, the fairy queen's transformation is complete; she is mastered and made harmless by her more powerful husband. The fairy king comes to preside over not only the world of Faery, but also the natural world and the imaginative realm-- three domains governed by the fairy queen at the play's beginning. Oberon asserts control over nature as he blesses the marriage beds of the three recently married couples and determines that "the blots of Nature's hand / Shall not in their issue stand" (5.1.395-96), an assurance that the children born from the couples' holy union will be healthy and free of any birthmark. Acting in the capacity of a spiritual minister, Oberon directs the fairies in blessing each chamber with "field-dew consecrate." The dewy imagery which appeared early in the play to suggest the puissance of Titania's presence within nature, is utilized now to underscore Oberon's appropriation of the fairy queen's role as the spiritualizing and revitalizing force of nature. The transfer of power of both the supernatural and natural realms from female to male results from Oberon's usurpation of the imaginative faculty. It is his use of imagination which motivates the anointing of Titania's eyes, his design which brings her to sleep with an ass, and his use of fantasy which envelops and controls Titania's wandering and airy spirit. By means of his own fantasy, the performance text of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Shakespeare has, in effect, asserted control over Queen Elizabeth in much the same way as Oberon has presided over his queen. Through his comic and ironic reformulation of the fairy queen, a creative act of the

129 imagination, Shakespeare places Elizabeth in a compromising position and demonstrates the primary role of the poet in the myth-making process. Elizabeth, perhaps more than anyone, was aware she was not always in control of her representations, as when, in the figure of Titania, she is made to fall in love with an ass, and in the figure of Celia, the fairy queen of Tom a Lincolne. she is shown to conceive a bastard. These subversive representations may have been permitted by Elizabeth since they at least mixed the flattering with the uncomplimentary. The mythic ambivalence of Titania, for example, allows the playwright to subtly communicate dissent while providing a surface appearance of panegyric. Titania's actions in regard to the little changeling boy may suggest that the fairy queen is "proud," wayward, and irrational, as "jealous" Oberon would have us believe, or they could be suggestive of the contrary--her autonomy, favor to her female gossip, and responsibility for the welfare of human society. While the fairy queen may be seen as the soul of or the infuser of grace into nature, she can also be viewed as the destructive force which causes dramatic and detrimental alterations in nature. It is by means of this central ambivalence that Shakespeare artfully challenges the ideal, quasi-divine image of Elizabeth, because the English queen, by her implicit association with the fairy queen, shares Titania's paradoxical mixture of power and fragility, of control and vulnerability. The time period in which Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream is a major factor in how he was to shape his

130 two fairy queens: the fictional Titania and the mythologized Elizabeth. Shakespeare's fairy drama is an example of what Helen Hackett has called "the literature of disillusionment," writings produced during the 1590s which are characterized by oblique expressions of fading confidence in Elizabeth and in the myths which buttressed her rule. When Shakespeare's play appeared in the mid 1590s, Elizabeth's humanity was never more evident; she was in her sixties and belief in her purity was showing signs of strain as her physical health deteriorated. Throughout these years and the remaining ones of her life, rumors were widespread of her illness and death. Although these fabricated reports were largely generated by her country's succession anxieties, Elizabeth did little to calm her people's fears and continually delayed to pronounce a successor to the throne. Faced with their queen's own mortality and thrown into a general state of dissatisfaction by war taxation, inflation, and crop failure, Elizabeth's subjects came to accept that their sovereign's magic was declining, that the gulf between her divinity and humanity was widening. The use of the fairy queen throughout Elizabeth's reign reflects the changing relationship of the poet to his monarch. With the progress pageants, Elizabeth was most in control of the fairy world and of her representations since she joined in the entertainments by resolving their fictional scenarios. The creators of these pageants took the mythic quality of their sovereign for granted and used the progress revels to acknowledge her mythic status. Elizabeth was asked

131 to rescue damsels in distress, to settle disputes merely by the power of her presence, to release victims of enchantment, to restore sight to the blind and health to the injured. The hosts of these pageants also sought specific, political ends and acted out their relationship to Elizabeth, but instead of adapting the fairy queen to fit their particular purposes, these courtiers primarily made use of the fairy tradition they had inherited. In Spenser's Faerie Oueene. on the other hand, the poet rather than Elizabeth is the principal controller of the fairy world. Still deferential to the monarch, Spenser writes a national epic and praises Elizabeth through the figure of Gloriana. By creating an alternate world set in fairyland and presenting his readers with multiple personae of Elizabeth, the poet aims to control Elizabeth in the respect that he can master her representations and confine her to the world of his own imagination. The ultimate effect of Spenser's efforts to encompass or limit the authority of Elizabeth, however, is a greater awareness of the queen's omnipresence and omnipotence, for the association of the Faerie Queene with the English queen implies that the essence of Elizabeth is as elusive and mysterious as that of Gloriana. Of all his immediate predecessors, Shakespeare's use of the fairy queen most directly challenges the authority of Elizabeth as virgin queen, goddess, and mythic being. We have only to look to Spenser's Gloriana to grasp the extent to which Shakespeare has reworked the image of the fairy queen to fit his own purposes. While the stately Gloriana

132 offers herself only to Arthur, the representation of magnificence, Titania dotes in extremity upon the most earthy of the Athenian rustics. Gloriana partakes mostly of the divine, Titania of the human. Unlike any of the fairy queens introduced in earlier Elizabethan works, Shakespeare's fairy queen is feminine, vulnerable, sensual. Owing to his initial sublime portrayal of Titania, the playwright can use the fairy queen as a means to comment both positively and negatively on his sovereign. The fairy queen was appropriated by Shakespeare and others principally because it was a dynamic, ambivalent figure which allowed writers to flatter Elizabeth while giving expression to their own politically charged views. Shakespeare's comic revision of the fairy queen not only demonstrates the poet's primacy in the creation of Elizabeth's mythic stature, but also reflects a particular historical moment--a time when Elizabeth's magical aura had begun to fade and her people had begun to question the grandiose myths she had skillfully and deliberately gathered about herself to support her authority. The lasting appeal of A Midsummer Night's Dream lies less in its oblique note of criticism than in its use of fairies to comment on and to highlight the humorous aspects of the human condition. Shakespeare's play is essentially a pastoral drama, peopled by fairies rather than shepherds, since it shares the pastoral's surface elements as well as the pastoral's function of providing a contrast between aristocrats and rustics, art and nature, pastoral life and some more complex type of civilization.-^ Shakespeare's

133 fairy world provides this contrast by setting up a vantage point by which human life may be measured, evaluated, and, ideally, improved upon. Although they act something like lenses whereby the foolishness and foibles of humankind may be truly seen, as Puck clearly sees when he speaks his famous line, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!", the fairies do not lead an exemplary life. With their jealousies and adulteries, the fairy monarchs behave like many humans in that they are often controlled by passion rather than reason. Although the fairies were believed to be of a more pure essence than mortals, they were subject to human fallibilities, as Kirk records in his treatise on the fairy commonwealth: These subterraneans have Controversies, doubts, disputs, Feuds, and syding of parties, there being som ignoranc in all Creatures . . . But for swearing and intemperance they are not observed so subject to those irregularities, as to Envy, Spite, Hypocrisy, lying and dissimulatione. (62)

It is the fairies' mimicry of human passion and folly which brings into greater light the humor and pettiness of daily life as well as the mundane concerns which burden all humankind. The fairy world allows Shakespeare to do things that would be impossible in a more realistic setting. By means of the surface whimsicality of the fairy realm, Shakespeare can separate himself from his work's note of criticism as well as distance himself so as to write about serious, perhaps even painful themes, as the nature of love. The idea that heartache and confusion are involved with love, for instance, becomes farcical once the Athenian lovers enter the woods and

134 become muddled by Puck's mischievous pranks. Fairies serve as an ideal vehicle for the playwright to comment on human nature since they surpass even the shepherd in being unfettered by time and place. In dealing with the fairy world, Shakespeare was dealing with intangibles, not with the palpable physical world as we know it through our own senses. The fairies could be used, therefore, to personify the imagination and human emotion--wonder, terror, or the confusion wound up with love. The differing responses of Theseus and Hippolyta to the power of the imagination represents contrasting reactions to the creative process of the poet. Like Theseus, we may regard the fairies' influence on the young lovers as more symbolic than real and believe the lovers are motivated by blind, passionate love more than by the love juice. The fairies, in this case, may represent the passions. Or, like Hippolyta and perhaps much of Shakespeare's Elizabethan audience, we can see the fairies as actual beings which were close to humans and liable to be encountered by them. The text of A Midsummer Night's Dream seems to encourage belief in the fairies, although the audience's willingness to believe in the imaginative world may surpass its capacity to understand it. Only to those who have taken offense at “this weak and idle theme" does Puck offer the option of relegating the fairies to the world of the imagination or dream. In his final speech, Puck says, If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber'd here While these visions did appear.

135 And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream. (5.1.409-14) Since sleep is used so often in the play to effect enchantment, Puck's plea is in itself a hoax and Shakespeare's way to blur once again the boundaries between reality and illusion. Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, perhaps the greatest fairy drama, stands at a pivotal position in literary history. On the one hand, the play marks the Elizabethan culmination of the fairy apotheosis and recalls earlier works of the period which utilized the fairies and their queen to praise Elizabeth. On the other hand, in that Shakespeare's portrayal of small fairies gave rise to a literary tradition which concerned itself to an inordinate degree with elaborating on the idea of a diminutive fairyland, this play may be seen as the catalyst of the degradation and subsequent diminishing of the fairies in the literature of the seventeenth century. Also because of its use of Oberon, A Midsummer Night's Dream may be seen as straddling two periods or, rather, as leading the way from the fairy queen literature of the Elizabethan period to the Oberon poetry of the Stuart era.

136 Notes

Two useful articles which explore the possibility that Shakespeare's play was written primarily in imitation of or in reaction against Spenser are Robert Reid's "The Fairy Queen: Gloriana or Titania?" (1993) and James Bednarz's "Imitations of Spenser in A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1983) . Reid believes that Shakespeare's parody of the fairy queen image is an example of what Harold Bloom has called "anxiety of influence," and Bednarz argues that A Midsummer Night's Dream may have been among many other things a piece of exorcism, since Shakespeare's parodies of Spenser appear to be calculated attempts "to assert independence and thereby resist the stigma of imitation" (88).

^ In his seminal article on A Midsummer Night's Dream. "'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture" (1988), Louis Montrose deals with "the politics of the unconscious" or the way in which Elizabethan culture shapes the play (33). Echoed within Shakespeare's text, Montrose argues, is "a discourse of anxious misogyny" which resulted from the Virgin Queen myth and the pressures it exerted on Shakespeare and the English male (45). While I agree with Montrose that Shakespeare's text elaborates Elizabeth's mythology at the same time that it generates ironies which tarnish her magical and mythic aura, I believe these ironies may result from authorial intent as much as they may from a collective unconscious.

^ The principal studies on this question of antecedents for the benevolence and size of Shakespeare's fairies are M. W. Latham's The Elizabethan Fairies (1930) and Katharine Briggs's The Anatomy of Puck (1959). See also the following sources for a discussion of the nature of Shakespeare's fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream: David Bevington's "But we are spirits of another sort": The Dark Side of Love and Magic in A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1978), Walter Herbert's Oberon's Mazed World (1977), Jan Kott's Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1974), and David Young's Something of Great Constancy (1966) .

^ Dale Blount, for instance, in his article titled "Modifications in Occult Folklore as a Comic Device in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream." accepts this view that Shakespeare was the first to endow the fairies with "unalloyed goodness" (10). The inclination on the part of some scholars to embrace the notion that Shakespeare invented benevolent and diminutive creatures may fit the pattern of gesunkens Kulturgut ("debased elements of culture"), the 137 concept in folklore scholarship that unliterary people were not capable of creative invention and that an artist such as Shakespeare must have created the idea before it "sunk" to the folk level. If some critics are indeed guilty of an elitist bias, it is ironic in the case of Shakespeare, who was criticized in his own time, namely by the university wits, for his little learning.

-* Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) may have been a source for Shakespeare's representation of Puck, or Robin Goodfellow. Scot identifies him as one of a host of fantastic spirits spoken of by adults to frighten children. The author of "Tarltons Newes Out of Purgatorie," printed in 1590, assures us that Robin Goodfellow and similar sprites were "famozed in everie olde wives Chronicle for their mad merry pranckes." Marcellus in Hamlet. in reporting the belief that during Advent "No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm" (1.1.168), shows that he is familiar with the brand of folklore that would be found in these old wives' tales. While Puck may come from folk imagination, the most prominent source for Oberon is the thirteenth-century French romance, Huon of Bordeaux, which was translated by Lord Berners around 1540. The fairy king's name may also have come from Spenser's elfin genealogy in Book 2 of The Faerie Oueene (1590) or from Greene's play James IV (c. 1591) . Titania's name appears in Ovid's Metamorphoses in reference to both Diana and Circe. Shakespeare's fairy queen is more similar to Diana, her classical counterpart, than to the mischievous night hag of popular superstition, who often went by the name of Mab.

^ The "orbs upon the green" that the fairy mentions are fairy rings, the circles of grass in which the fairies were thought to dance at night. The spots on cowslips, on the other hand, were thought to mark where elves had placed their fingers. In England, the cowslips were also called the key flower or St. Peter's wort because clusters of these flowers were supposed to resemble the bunch of keys carried by St. Peter.

^ Philippa Berry notes that the images of swift movement as well as air in Titania's initial speeches suggest "the rapid motions" of the imagination (145).

® Shakespeare's Queen Mab appears in 1.4 of Romeo and Juliet. It was Mab rather than Titania that caught the popular fancy, as is evidenced by Mab's appearance as queen of the fairies in later works, such as Jonson's Alchemist and "The Satyr," Browne's Brittania's Pastorals. Milton's 138 "L'Allegro," and Herrick's "Fairy Temple" and "Oberon's Palace." Shakespeare throws a different light on the fairy queen when he deals with this figure in The Merrv Wives of Windsor. which differs from both Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Niaht's Dream in that it deals with counterfeit fairies. Nevertheless, the fairy episode is filled with superstitions familiar to Shakespeare's audience--for example, the fairies' habit of pinching and nipping, their dislike of lechery, and the mortal's fear of speaking to these capricious beings.

^ Nursing mothers were perhaps as much in demand as human babies. It was thought that human milk might give fairy babies the chance of a human soul.

I® In 1579 Elizabeth was courted by Jean de Simier as proxy for the due d'Alencon. In The Erotic World of Faerv. Maureen Duffy mentions some of the other nicknames Elizabeth gave her acquaintances: Raleigh was called Water; Hatton, Elizabeth's sheep; Lady Norris, her crow; and Walsingham, her Moor (44).

•*•1 While Ernest Brennecke argues that Oberon's famous speech to Puck in 2.1.48-64 is reminiscent of Elvetham's second day water show and its spectacular fireworks display (the "shooting stars"), Lisa Hopkins, among others, finds a resemblance between this same speech and Kenilworth's water pageant which featured the Lady of the Lake. If Shakespeare was not an observer of one or both of these pageants, then he certainly heard about them or read the printed accounts that were published soon after the performances.

-*-2 In a passage reminiscent of Dudley's exhortations to Elizabeth at Kenilworth on the theme of marriage, Theseus speaks against the rose which "withering on the virgin thorn, / Grows, lives, and dies, in single blessedness" (1.1.77-8) .

■*-3 Spenser is not as sympathetic as Lee, and his depiction of Belphoebe in Book 3 of The Faerie Oueene (1590) is an adulatory challenge of Elizabeth as the virgin queen.

Focusing on the play's surface components, C. L. Barber speaks of A Midsummer Niaht's Dream as a pastoral drama:

His [Shakespeare's] fairies are creatures of pastoral, varied by adapting folk superstitions so as to make a new sort of arcadia. Though they are not shepherds, they lead a life similarly occupied with the pleasure of song and dance and, for king and queen, the vexations and pleasures of love. They have not the pastoral

139 "labours" of tending flocks, but equivalent duties are suggested in the tending of nature's fragile beauties, killing "cankers in the musk-rose buds." They have a freedom like that of shepherds in arcadias, but raised to a higher power: they are free not only of the limitations of place and purse but of space and time. (145)

While Barber speaks of surface similarities between Shakespeare's drama and the pastoral, he does not draw attention to the functional similarity between the two.

140 Works Cited

I. Primary Works

Kirk, Robert. The Secret Common-wealth and A Short Treatise of Charms and Soels. c. 1691. Ed. Steward Sanderson. The Folklore Society Mistletoe Ser. Cambridge: Brewer, 1976.

"The Queenes Majesties Entertainment at Woodstocke." Ed. J. W. Cunliffe. PMLA 2 6 (1911): 92-141.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 19 82.

A Midsummer Niaht's Dream. Ed. Harold F. Brooks. The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare. Bristol: Methuen, 1979.

Romeo and Juliet. Ed. Brian Gibbons. The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1980.

Tarltons Newes out of Puraatorie. 1590. The Cobler of Caunterburie and Tarltons Newes out of Puraatorie. Ed. Geoffrey Creigh and Jane Belfield. Medieval and Renaissance Texts Vol. 3. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1987. 111-206 .

II. Secondary Works

Barber, C. L. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1963.

Baskervill, Charles Read. "The Genesis of Spenser's Queen of Faerie." Modern Philology 18 (1920): 49-54.

Bednarz, James P. "Imitations of Spenser in A Midsummer Might's Dream." Renaissance Drama 14 (1983): 79-102.

Berry, Philippa. Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen. London: Routledge, 1989 .

Bevington, David. "But we are spirits of another sort": The Dark Side of Love and Magic in A Midsummer Niaht's Dream." Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7(1978): 80-92.

141 Blount, Dale M. "Modifications in Occult Folklore as a Comic Device in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream." Fifteenth Century Studies 9 (1984): 1-17.

Brennecke, Ernest. "The Entertainment at Elvetham, 1591." Music in English Renaissance Drama. Lexington, U of Kentucky P, 1968. 32-56.

Briggs, K[atharine] M. The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairv Beliefs among Shakespeare's Contemporaries and Successors. London: Routledge, 1959.

Duffy, Maureen. The Erotic World of Faerv. London: Hodder, 1972 .

Garber, Marjorie B. Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis. New Haven: Yale UP, 1974.

Hackett, Helen. Virgin Mother. Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: St. Martin's, 1995.

Herbert, T. Walter. Oberon's Mazed World: A Judicious Young Elizabethan Contemplates "A Midsummer Night's Dream." With a Mind Shaped bv the Learning of Christendom Modified by the New Naturalist Philosophy and Excited bv the Vision of a Rich. Powerful England. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1977 .

Hopkins, Lisa. Queen Elizabeth I and Her Court. London: Vision; New York: St. Martin's, 1990.

Kott, Jan. "Titania and the Ass's Head." Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Trans. Boleslaw Taborski. New York: Norton, 1974 .

Latham, Minor White. The Elizabethan Fairies: The Fairies of Folklore and the Fairies of Shakespeare. 1930. New York: Octagon, 1972.

Montrose, Louis Adrian. "'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture." Representing the English Renaissance. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. 31-64.

Neale, J[ohn] E[rnest]. Elizabeth I and her Parliaments 1559-1581. New York: Cape, 1952.

Reid, Robert L. "The Fairy Queen: Gloriana o r ’Titania?" The Upstart Crow 13 (1993): 16-33.

Young, David P. Something of Great Constancy: The Art of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." New Haven: Yale UP, 1966.

142 CHAPTER 5 FESTIVE DIPLOMACY: FAIRIES IN STUART COURT MASQUES

The court masque was probably the most spectacular of all the Stuart monarchs' self-advertisements. Its sheer lavishness was meant to impress domestic and foreign spectator alike with the king's magnificence, and the ideas presented in its political undercurrent conformed to the king's concept of rule as God's anointed. Each aspect of the masque was influenced by the ideals and figure of the monarch whose central seat in the banqueting hall represented the perfection of his kingship and provided the best view of the performance. Within the masque's complex political arena, the fairies emerge as players, and for an age where belief in the otherworld was firmly entrenched in society, fairies had particular relevance to current social and political realities. My intention in this chapter is to analyze the ways in which fairies are used in the Stuart court masque, specifically their role in manifesting its political undertones. I emphasize the Jacobean masque since, owing to the genius of Ben Jonson, it makes the greatest and most varied use of the fairy world's denizens and marks the culmination of the genre's achievement. Although fairies are less prominent figures in the masques produced during the

143 Caroline period, I give some attention to these masques in order to illustrate the decline of the fairy apotheosis. The Stuart masque covers the historical period from the accession of James in 1603 to the closing of the theaters in 1642, and its progression reflects the complexity as well as the vacillation of the age's fascination with the fairies. Before examining the role played by fairies in these courtly entertainments, we must consider the way in which the masque form operates. Despite their exorbitant cost, masques were mounted by the Stuart monarchs once or twice a year for a single performance only (unless the king desired to see a show repeated); one was usually given at Epiphany, or Twelfth Night, another at Mardi Gras. Visual art, poetry, music, and dance each had its place in the scheme of the masque, but no matter how much an individual artist may have glorified his contribution to the entertainment, its primary function was always to honor the monarch. Since Stuart court masques were lavishly produced, detailed descriptions of the entertainments were often issued immediately after the performance for those unable to attend and for the further glorification of performers, poets, and producers. Any re­ creation of the masque today would pose difficulties since this genre derived its meaning directly from the presence of the enthroned monarch and from the symbolically masked or disguised "actors," the court aristocrats. While James chose to be merely a spectator of the performances given before him, Charles and his queen, Henrietta Maria, frequently joined with the masked court nobility in dancing out the

144 elaborate fictional scenario which eliminated much of the conflict and passion characterizing the popular drama. The central figure in the Stuart masque, as in the Elizabethan progress pageant, was the monarch, but whereas the core of the progress pageant had been a speech of welcome, that of the masque was the dance. The Stuart court masque was formed primarily by ceremonial dances which corresponded to the three sections of the masque: antimasque, masque proper, and revels. Comic or grotesque dances were proper to the antimasque and were often performed by professional entertainers who could handle the intricate movements with dexterity and eliminate the need for an individual of the court to demean himself by participating in a clumsy, comic dance. In the masque proper, the disguised court nobility, or masquers, performed orderly, graceful dances which suggested the orderliness of the king's rule. During the lively and apparently improvisatory dances of the revels, which were danced by the masquers with partners of the opposite sex chosen from the audience, couples could display their excellence on the dance floor as well as their interest in one another.-*- It was as though the orderly fiction of the masque proper mingled in the revels with the orderly monarchy, and peace and harmony were reaffirmed. In the Jacobean masque especially, decorum was foremost in the minds of the noble dancers; even the masquers could not forget their identity because their disguises were representations of the courtiers themselves. The masquer retains his personality, Stephen Orgel explains, and the

145 "audience affirms his equality with them by consenting to join the dance" in the revels (Jonsonian Masque 117). In the masque, dancing was not only an exercise in decorum and a means by which nobles could demonstrate their collective allegiance to the monarch's rule, but it was also a

reflection of the dancer's inner goodness.^ Renaissance

theory held that dance, like music, was an image of harmony and order, particularly the order of the cosmos, but dance also represented other orders as well: the order of nature, the state, and the individual. In the masque "Pleasure reconciled to Vertue," Ben Jonson suggests that the spectator as well as the masquer can benefit from dance by learning to give proper order and discipline to movement, For Dauncing is an exercise not only shews ye mouers wit, but maketh ye beholder wise, as he hath powre to rise to it.^

Each of the three sections of the masque--antimasque, masque proper, revels--is built upon this principle of grace and order, even the chaotic dances of the antimasque, which, by turning the ideals of order inside-out, reaffirm the perfect harmony of the masque. Ben Jonson's presence gave a moral coloring to the Jacobean masque, which celebrated the values of order and constancy but subtly drew attention to the fact that royalty and nobility alike often fell short of the ideal model described in the fictional scenario. This feature of weaving satiric messages between the lines owes in large part to Jonson's belief that his masques should serve to teach as well as to

146 delight the royal family and the court. The profit of these poetic spectacles, oddly enough, came through praise, as Sir Francis Bacon describes it: "A Forme due in Civilitie to Kings, and Great Persons . . . When by telling Men, what they are, they represent to them, what they should be" (160) . The various inhabitants of the fairy world which make their appearance in Jonson's masques and entertainments prove to be perfectly suited to deliver abundant praise as well as the political and reformist messages Jonson wished to convey. Jonson used the fairies and their world for the most part as a metaphor for something else--the English people in "The Entertainment at Althrope" (1603), the Jacobean court in "Oberon, the Faery Prince" (1611), and the values that are lacking in the court in "Love Restored" (1612). In these dramatic entertainments, fairy characters take on integral roles and enlarge the performance by supporting central themes.^

Jonson's first dramatic endeavor for the Stuarts, "The Entertainment at Althrope," shares with the masque its movement from chaos to order, yet it is in the tradition of the progress pageant, which essentially consists of an elaborate introduction leading to a speech of welcome and the presentation of a gift, usually in the compact form of a jewel. This pastoral entertainment featuring the fairy queen was performed on June 25, 1603, to welcome the new queen and prince to England, and it was commissioned by Sir Robert Spenser, whose home Queen Anne and Prince Henry stayed at for four days while in progress from Edinburgh to London to join

147 King James. At a time when poets were most eager to attract the notice of the Stuart royal family, it is significant that Jonson chose fairies as the subject matter of this welcoming entertainment. The host's desire to present a gift to Anne as well as the expected arrival time of the queen and prince on "Midsummer day at night" (1.80), the traditional time of fairy magic, are major factors in Jonson's choice of a fairy entertainment. With the uneasiness accompanied by the transfer of power from Elizabeth to the Scottish monarch, Jonson desired to demonstrate through his entertainment both the strong patriotism of his nation's people and their willing obedience to the monarch, and so the English fairies of folklore, the original inhabitants of the countryside, come to represent at Althrope those qualities of the English people: bold independence, harmless mischievousness, and instinctive and humble obedience. Also titled "A Satyre," the Althrope entertainment presents Mab as the fairy queen, a bevy of her fairy attendants, and a satyr known as Pug or the "skipping jester" (64), who closely resembles Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Puck, a name interchangeable with Robin Goodfellow in the Renaissance, was traditionally not a fairy but a goblin fond of playing tricks on mortals, especially at night. Jonson's satyr is essentially Puck, since he is characterized by his "wild strayne" (104) and prankish temperament, and, like Shakespeare's trickster, he acknowledges kinship with the fairies. The entertainment's action is reminiscent of the quarrel between Shakespeare's Oberon and Titania in that it

148 centers on the discord between Mab and Pug, who meet in the woods as each comes to pay tribute to the royal company.^ In addressing her queen, Mab's elf suggests that Pug is to blame for the present-'disharmony, which stems from the fairy queen's refusal of a kiss: Mistris, this is onely spight: For you would not yester-night Kisse him in the cock-shout light. (88-90) Although both the satyr and the fairies recognize that Queen Anne and Prince Henry "are of heauenly race" (22), awareness does not prevent them from quarreling in the presence of the Stuarts. Overtones of the Jonsonian antimasque are evident in the satyr's rude disruption of the fairies' welcoming dance and, to a lesser extent, in the impatient disposition of the fairies who hurl threats at Pug before finally punishing him in the traditional fairy manner--pinching him black and blue. Mab and her elves are not "courtly and decorous fairies," as C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson have described them, but rather the traditional mischievous English fairies whose activities involve skimming cream from the dairy, aiding or disrupting the churning of butter, pinching lazy maids, swapping babies, and misleading travelers.^ They are the fairies of folklore accounts whose type is disdainfully looked down upon by the stately fairies in "Oberon" as "the course, and countrey Faery / That doth haunt the harth, or dairy" (418-19). Of the two character types, the fairies are the more refined, yet both they and the satyr represent discordant elements which must be subordinated to the harmony

149 and order embodied in the presence of the royal persons. Only after Pug is pinched into submission and the fairies 1 impatience controlled may homage be properly given to the queen and prince. Pug's flight from the scene and the renewal of the fairies' song and dance signal that order has been reestablished, and in the process of this movement from chaos to order, a political statement is conveyed. Like the fairies, the English people may be spirited and prone to mischievousness, but they are willing to be disciplined and guided by the right order of the House of Stuart. The theme of obedience is expressed by the shift in focus to James's queen, who is hailed by the fairies as "Oriana," a title properly belonging to Elizabeth and connoting her fairy queen persona. Out of compliment to Queen Anne, the fairies' sing "Long live ORIANA

n / To exceed (whom shee succeeds) our late DIANA" (123-24) .

Since Jonson's entertainment borrows from the progress pageant’s structure, it is fitting that Anne is associated with the fairy queen, just as Elizabeth was. In this case, however, the association is with Gloriana, Elizabeth's mythic self-representation, rather than with Queen Mab, who lacks the stately, dignified demeanor of the progress pageants' fairy queens. By having the fairies address Anne as "Oriana," Jonson evokes the patriotic tradition whereby the English people invested their sovereign with mythic proportions and suggests that the English people are ready to transfer their loyalty and obedience to the new queen.

150 Jonson's expertise in using Renaissance fairylore to his advantage is illustrated at the climax of his entertainment, the presentation of a jewel to Queen Anne. After properly- welcoming Anne, Queen Mab, in the name of Sir Robert Spenser (though supposedly without his knowledge), presents a rich jewel to Anne and bids her in the traditional manner, "beware you doe not tell" (151). Like the shepherd in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Jonson alludes to the belief that a fairy's gift is to be kept secret, for the gift must be forfeited once its source is told. By including this well- known fairy belief at the end of Mab's presentation of the jewel, Jonson provides the motive for the satyr to reappear. When Pug does arrive on the scene, he is determined to protest Mab's cruel orders of silence and to openly acknowledge the generosity and humility of the real giver of the gift, Spenser himself. Ingeniously, Jonson accomplishes several tasks through his use of the fairy queen's strict warning of confidence. He gives coherence to the entertainment by manipulating the plot so that Pug must reappear and rekindle the conflict with which the entertainment began. He pays homage to Queen Anne, who is deemed worthy of the fairies' confidence and adoration. And he satisfies Spenser, who commissioned the masque, by having Pug, to spite Mab as well as to give credit to the host's generosity, deliver a lengthy tribute to Spenser's virtues, family, and country lifestyle. Among the many reasons for Jonson's use of the fairy world at Althrope, not least among them is that the young prince

151 was a spectator of the performance. Given the age's fascination with the fairies, it is easy to imagine that nine-year-old Henry was thrilled by the fairies' appearance and already familiar with much of the fairylore, which was adeptly utilized by Jonson and derived from both oral and written sources. Henry was the major factor in Jonson's decision to return to the fairy world eight years later (New Year, 1611) in his masque "Oberon, The Faery Prince," which was staged six months after Henry was made Prince of Wales. Although the prince commissioned the masque, it served as King James's public acceptance of Henry as successor to the throne. Unlike the fairies in the Althrope entertainment, those in "Oberon" are ceremonious and sophisticated creatures supposedly of no substance--"formes, so bright, and aery" (429)--who inhabit the elevated realm of the masque proper. Henry served as leading masquer in his role as Oberon, and various courtiers represented virtuous fairy knights who wait upon the fairy prince in the company of "bright Faies, and Elues" (360). Like his other masques, Jonson designed "Oberon" in the belief that his audience should be morally improved as well as entertained. By creating in "Oberon" heroic roles for Prince Henry and the nobles to fill and an ideal political world characterized by grace and order, Jonson could raise king and court from the petty politics of the moment and remind them of their proper duty to the country. Although Oberon1s name pervades the antimasque, it is unfitting for him or any of his fairy attendants to mingle

152 with the antimasque's undisciplined, comic satyrs. While the satyr and fairies in "The Entertainment at Althrope" acknowledge an intimate thoughcontentious coexistence, only the eldest and wisest satyr in "Oberon," Silenus, may intervene in the fairy realm. Silenus serves as intermediary between the two worlds; by explaining to his creatures the virtues the prince represents, he reconciles the earthy, Bacchanalian world of the satyrs to the elevated world of Oberon, prince of the fairies. Rather than being suppressed, the discordant energy of the antimasque creatures is redirected so that the satyrs are transformed into disciplined, awe-struck followers of the fairy prince. This reordering of energy is so vital because the untamed, lascivious satyrs may not have been unlike the heavy-drinking courtiers (and the king himself) who crowded the banqueting hall of Whitehall Palace. While the satyrs' obedience is essential to the fairy prince's world, Oberon's realm in part remains above their understanding, for the delights which they gleefully anticipate from the rule of Oberon are not the fruits of order and constancy, but the excesses that may be found in James's own court--wine, hunting, sexual promiscuity. The fairy prince serves both as a vehicle through which Henry puts forth the ideal world he would institute upon becoming king--a world where harmony, order, virtue, beauty, and magnificence reign--and a means through which Jonson indirectly satirizes King James's court. Since the sports Jonson satirizes in the antimasque were enjoyed by courtiers

153 and king alike, the unruliness of the satyrs is inseparable from the debauchery of the king's courtiers. The implicit message conveyed through the transformation of the satyrs is that Henry would rid his father's court of its perversity. The undisciplined state is merely a natural progression toward the finer realm of the fairy prince, and it is Oberon, or rather Henry himself, who will bring about this transformation from chaos to order within the country. Jonson emphasizes this natural progression by suggesting in one of his glosses that the English word "fairy" is derived from the name given to the satyrs by the Athenians and Ionians, feras or fereas. Jonson also tries to reconcile the two followers of Oberon by giving the satyrs characteristics of the fairies, not those of the decorous court fairies, but of the traditional English fairy. Silenus calls them his elves and they characterize themselves as "rough, & rude" (278). When threatening to cramp the sleeping sylvan guards or singing a tune containing a magic conjuration ("Buz, quoth the blue Flie, / Hum, quoth the Bee . . ." ), the satyrs closely resemble the fairy folk of contemporaneous accounts. The antimasque of the satyrs prepares us for Prince Henry's coming, and his triumphant entrance, in which he is drawn in a chariot by two white bears and surrounded by his "nation of Faies," ushers in the masque proper with its orderly, graceful dances. As Oberon comes forth on stage, a Sylvane instructs the gleeful, leaping satyrs that this is a night of solemnity, A night of homage to the British court, And ceremony, due to ARTHVRS chaire, From our bright master, OBERON the faire. (322-24) 154 Although a Stuart, James still descended from the Tudor line and claimed descent from Arthur as the Tudor monarchs before him had done. Oberon's desire is to honor Arthur's chair, the hereditary throne of the British monarchs; the tribute is directed to James, but also to the throne to which Henry is heir. The ambiguity in the masque's wording continues in the dance itself as the Sylvane bids the courtly fairies not only to express through their dancing the grace of James and his queen but also to point out to all who behold these rites "the proper hayre / Design'ed so long to ARTHVRS crownes, and chayre" (367-68). Even the hymning fairies who come out of Oberon's palace singing extravagant praise to James seem uncertain whether Oberon/Henry or James is the greater. While "Oberon" honors both royal father and son, the nobility was aware of the growing rivalry between James and Henry. The fact that Oberon enters the banqueting hall from the opposite end i'n which James is seated seems to add to this tension. With the increasing discontent with James's rule, the country's hopes were placed in the prince who could usher in

O a glorious era like that experienced under Queen Elizabeth.

In his role as Oberon, Henry is costumed as a Roman emperor and warrior prince, thereby reviving images of Roman nobility and Elizabeth's Arthur-image put forth by her progress entertainments. Merely the name Oberon, who is king of the fairies, links Henry to the fairy queen cult of Elizabeth embodied most prominently in Spenser's Faerie Oueene. The

155 Oberon of the masque's title, as Graham Parry notes, most likely alludes not to Shakespeare's fairy king, as one might expect, but to the Oberon introduced in Spenser's fairy chronicle, which is designed to show the lineage of Gloriana (74). Oberon's fairy knights, who are "preseru'd / In Faery land" (325-6), seem to be biding their time until Oberon/Henry, Elizabeth's true successor in spirit and lineage, inherits the throne. Jonson's masque revives the fairylore of the Elizabethan age as it puts forth the idea that Elizabeth, the fairy queen, is transferring power to Henry, the fairy prince. In light of King James's Daemonoloaie. his 1597 treatise which sets forth his attempts to suppress demonology, and his views on magic, witchcraft, fairies, and spirits of all sorts, it is curious that James allowed his son to play the role of Oberon and even enjoyed watching fairies on stage. "The Phairie" is discussed in James's treatise under the category of those "kindes of Spirites that troubles men or women" (56), and James authoritatively maintains that fairies are delusions of the devil or the devil himself who is variously disguised. Especially when Catholicism reigned, says James in the voice of the erudite Epistemon, "the deuil illuded the senses of sundry simple creatures, in making them beleeue that they saw and harde such thinges as were nothing so indeed" (74). To reconcile the king's contradictory attitudes towards fairies is difficult, as Warren Wooden states: "regard for the fairy world, now hellish, now charming and whimsical, was obviously more complex, more

156 ambivalent than popular attitudes toward other supernatural beings" (100). The masque genre ideally demonstrates the complexity which characterized the fascination of James and his age with the fairies. Although the fairy world was often linked to the evils of Catholicism, Prince Henry's respectability was in no way lowered by his performance as Oberon, in large part owing to Shakespeare's fairy king, who is mighty and majestic and works his magic to ensure the triumph of harmony throughout the natural and supernatural worlds. Jonson was aware that his primary obligation as an artist of the court was to create roles that matched the dignity of the noble performers. His fairy characters of courtly bearing were fitting disguises for the prince and courtiers: Oberon provided a heroic context for James's heir while the fairy knight validated the nobles' sense of their own importance and their collective allegiance to the House of Stuart. Always the image was crucial, whether it was an appropriate representation of the inner person or not. Jonson's 1612 masque, "Love Restored," was performed a year after "Oberon" and presents the earthy world of a bumbling, shape-shifting Robin Goodfellow rather than the elevated realm of the courtly fairies. "Robin Goodfellow, England's most popular sprite, could deftly supply abundant humor for King James, who preferred his entertainments comical and indecorous. Although Shakespeare makes use of Puck in A Midsummer Nicrht's Dream to raise the comic expectations of his audience, Puck is mostly a Jacobean/Caroline staple, since this character type is well suited to the antimasque.

157 In "Love Restored," Robin Goodfellow has the majority of lines in the antimasque and the important function of revealing Plutus, the god of money, as the impostor of Love. The moral tenor of Jonson found one of its greatest expressions in this masque, where the honest and plain country spirit correctly diagnoses the court's ills and serves as a contrast to the affectation of the wealthy noble spectators. Though the solemn villain, Plutus, is appropriately overthrown by the practical joker of the spirit world, King James is not completely separated from the abuses of wealth Plutus finds in the court. As is often the case in the morality play, the villain of "Love Restored" becomes one of the most dynamic and appealing figures of the performance. The strength of Jonson's antimasque owes largely to the invective of Plutus, the disguised Cupid, who comes out declaring he will have no more masquing because this "merry madnesse of one hower" is the ruin of the country: 'Tis thou [masquing], that art not only the sower of vanities, in these high places, but the call of all other light follies to fall, and feed on them. I will endure thy prodigalitie, nor riots no more; they are the ruine of states. (146-49)

Once unmasked by Robin Goodfellow, Plutus may be seen as a miser who "raignes i' the world, making friendships, contracts, mariages, and almost religion" (175-77). At the time "Love Restored" was performed at court, the Puritans were troublesome for James, and there was a concentration of anti-Puritan rhetoric in other court performances (Marcus 28). Though Puritan attacks on the extravagance of court

158 masques had become serious at this time, so much so that James severely limited the cost of this one, the noble spectators most likely were highly amused by these hackneyed Puritan counsels to embrace more frugal pastimes. Robin Goodfellow represents that which Plutus despises, masquing and revelry. In his eagerness to gain admittance into the masquing hall and to be part of the show, Robin is forced to transform himself into various shapes--an engineer, old woman, musician, feather-maker, wealthy citizen's wife. Robin has the power of shape-shifting, but he is not ethereal enough to enter the palace through a keyhole or cracked window pane and must use a door. Owing to his earthiness, Robin functions as a means for humor (through the transformations he undergoes) and satire (of the noble spectators). It is ironic that despite all his transformations, he is allowed to enter Whitehall Palace by appearing as himself with his broom and candles and claiming that he is part of the show; Plutus, on the other hand, remains disguised and is mistakenly accepted as a performer. Robin is similar to the satyr Pug in Jonson's "Entertainment at Althrope," but in "Love Restored" he is introduced in traditional character and costume: I am the honest plaine countrey spirit, and harmelesse: ROBBIN good-fellow, hee that sweepes the harth, and the house cleane, riddles for the countrey maides, and does all their other drudigerie, while they are at hot- cockles. (55-59)

Only the spirit Robin, a better discoverer than humans, can uncover the impostor, Plutus.

159 At the moment of Plutus's discovery, Robin's personality as a carefree, * roublemaking sprite is suppressed, and his language and tone is elevated. Echoing the famous line of Shakespeare's Puck, Robin chastises the courtly audience for allowing the god of money to reign in the fictional world of the masque as well as the real world of Whitehall Palace: "'Tis you, mortalls, that are fooles; and worthie to be such, that worship him: for if you had wisdome, he had no godhead" (189-191). Robin's clear sight and wisdom are comparable to those of Silenus, the eldest and most wise satyr in "Oberon," who counsels his fellow satyrs to become loyal followers of the fairy prince and leads them to Oberon's glorious palace. In the same manner, Robin sermonizes to the audience on the abuses of wealth, then shows them where Plutus1s captive, Love, may be found. "Love Restored" is not all that different from the morality and mystery plays, which were essentially an acting out of sermons or religious doctrines. The opposition represented in the masque by Robin Goodfellow and Plutus is like the conflict of the personified virtues and vices in the old religious plays.^ The morality play Mankind (c. 1475) serves as an example of how serious theme and comic action can play off each other in late medieval popular theater, as it does in the Stuart court masque. In Mankind, the character of Mercy directly addresses the audience, just as Robin Goodfellow addresses the courtiers in the masquing hall. Mercy respectfully says, 0 ye soverens that sytt and ye brothern that stonde ryght uppe, 160 Pryke not yowr felycytes in thyngys transytorye. (29-30)

Both "Love Restored" and the religious plays show the influence not only of the sermon but also of folk activities. The folk tale, for instance, provided the comic episode of the Second Shepherds' Pageant. When the morality and mystery plays came to an end in Elizabeth's reign, it was not because they had lost their popularity, but because they were suppressed by Protestant zeal and gradually eliminated by the 1559 proclamation prohibiting plays on stage unless they had the state's approval. Jonson's "Love Restored" demonstrates that fairies could become substitutes for the specifically religious morality and mystery plays, and the wooing of a populace who missed their old religious plays may be a factor in the prominent appearance of fairies in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Although the Puritan point of view is mocked, "Love Restored" nevertheless attacks the audience's weakest point-- it preaches about extravagance, which is ironic since the masque genre was meant to display overtly the monarch's wealth. Robin Goodfellow serves as an ideal mouthpiece for Jonson; like Shakespeare's wise fools, Robin can express criticism of authority without fear of punishment because of his reputation as practical joker. The court masques frequently allude to political controversies, and Jonson offered rather daring though indirect advice to the king and court. It is significant that the Masquerado is unable to see through the deceptiveness of Plutus, as some of the

161 courtly spectators seated in Whitehall Palace may have found Cupid, the god of love, indistinguishable from Plutus, the god of money. The implication is that the masque’s aristocratic audience has confused the purpose of the masque, to acclaim the king's majesty, with their relish for extravagant and costly display. Jonson knew only too well the difficulty of putting satire against the court on stage without ending up in jail, as the writer himself did for his part in Isle of Doas and Eastward Ho!.xx1 1 A writer's criticism needed to be indirect enough to get past the censor. To make a satiric point without endangering his head, a writer could simply set his tale in fairyland. Just •as some poets and playwrights translated their criticism into ancient or foreign milieus, so Jonson and others translated it into the fairy milieu. Since the fairies were unlike other supernatural beings in that they lived in a community headed by aristocratic rulers, their world most closely paralleled the world of Renaissance England with its monarchial form of government. Like the earlier masque "Oberon," the fairy world is used in "Love Restored" to compliment as well as to criticize the king and court. Although the masque itself is made possible by Robin Goodfellow, who unmasks Plutus, James is given the honor of ushering in the harmony of the masque proper. The king revives Love, captive of the god of money, by projecting like the sun "bright beams" of light and heat to melt Love's icy fetters (236). Liberality and masquing is safeguarded by the defeat of Plutus, and the conflict between love and money

162- is resolved through the acceptance of both. Jonson justifies the magnificence of the masque performance in his preface to "Hymenaei," where he asserts that riches "rightly becomes" royalty and other great persons (14). The outward splendor was what identified a king, and far from being a vice, extravagance was seen as an expression of magnanimity. However, the moral poet firmly believed that the glory of the masque was to be found in its "more remou'd mysteries" (18— 19), not in the spectacle. In most cases, Jonson was left in the difficult position of having to cater to the court's taste for extravagance while simultaneously persuading the court into changing its taste. The sparseness of "Love Restored" as compared to "Oberon" was due to lack of funds, but also to the fact that Jonson was primarily in charge of the masque.^ At the time, Inigo Jones, architect andstage- designer, was working on a masque to honor the marriage of Princess Elizabeth and could not be involved in the staging of "Love Restored." Through the character of Robin Goodfellow, the humble country spirit who merely wants to participate in the show, Jonson demonstrates that a masque does not have to be expensive in order to show devotion to the monarch. Jonson's masques and entertainments are similar to the Elizabethan progress pageants in that that were designed as more than mere diversion. In both dramatic forms, the panegyric involves a mixture of the writer's submission and defiance to the monarch or the court. While the king is implicated in Jonson's antimasque, his rule and the

163 orderliness of it are reaffirmed in the masque proper. In contrast to Elizabeth's pageants, which dealt almost exclusively with the fairy queen, Jonson's dramatic entertainments of the Jacobean era present a medley of fairy folk: the fairy queen and fairy prince, courtly fays and elves, fairy knights, and Robin Goodfellow. The courtly productions of Jonson, who used his early entertainments to seal his reign as official court poet under James, are characterized by this diverse use of the fairy world's denizens and by a pervasive moral strain. During the Caroline period, the integral role of the fairies within the masque's plot greatly diminished, in part owing to the fact that the fairies were not associated with the royal family or the nobility. In the masque "Oberon, The Faery Prince," Jonson had used Oberon to portray the future monarch of England, but with Henry's premature death in 1612, the correspondence between the monarch and the fairy king no longer existed. Although a few poets may have tried to praise Charles I through the figure of the fairy king, Charles was unable to support the mythic aura which had surrounded his brother. The fairies were increasingly used as an end in themselves rather than as a vehicle to convey some political statement. The growing supremacy in the masque of the visual over the intellectual may also account for the more trivial use of the fairy world during the Caroline period. Ben Jonson's major philosophical dispute with his collaborator, Inigo Jones, over the value and function of poetry within the masque led to the replacement

164 of Jonson in 1631 by the young William Davenant, who appears to have had no qualms about allowing the masque's dialogue and lyrics to be subordinate to Jones's spectacular stage inventions.^ Jonson's fears that the masque would become merely an extravagant offering of spectacle, music, and dance rather than a vehicle to elevate and advise, proved to be legitimate during much of Charles's reign. Robin Goodfellow's message to the noble spectators of "Love Restored" was that lavishness was not necessary for the making of a successful masque, but his words were directed towards an audience concerned more with the masque’s outward magnificence than its moral message. Just how far Jonson's noble purpose for poetry had deteriorated in others is demonstrated by Davenant's use of fairy characters in "Luminalia: The Queen's Festival of

Light" and "The Masque of Twelve Months. Although

Davenant's 1638 masque designed for Queen Henrietta Maria, "Luminalia," presents five fairies and Robin Goodfellow, they are only supernumerary characters, who help to make possible the masque's "variety of scenes, strange apparitions, song, music, and dancing of several kinds" (4-6).15 Furthermore, the fairies are restricted to the entertainment's two antimasques, which are simply miniature comedies and have little relevance to the main masque. In "The Masque of Twelve Months," on the other hand, the lengthy fairy episode is strangely positioned after the dances of the revels, and while the episode is clearly designed to be comic, the comedy

165 is superfluous since the entertainment already contains two antimasques. The major fairy characters are a hooting Madge Howlet and Lady Pigwiggen, also known as Pig, who is described as "th‘ only snoutfaire of the fairies" (137) . Pig says she has been commanded by the fairy queen to wait upon "the great enchantress," Bewty, who is to preside over the celebrations that will be presented in honor of the fairy king. This episode was perhaps an attempt at good-humored satire of the court ladies, who were fit to be members of Bewty's train, but guilty of spending more time than they should in studying the latest fashions. Given the incoherency of the plot, one can only guess at its meaning or hypothesize that the fairies were intended for a greater purpose than mere ornamentation. The Caroline masque is marked not only by its trivial treatment of fairies but also by a change in the types of roles the courtier adopted. Contrary to the aristocratic performers of the Jacobean masque, those of the Caroline court masque ventured to take on speaking and even comedic roles without feeling that their place in the court hierarchy was threatened. Owing to the influence of Henrietta Maria and the duke of Buckingham, who both danced in masques and took speaking parts, the distinction between the kinds of roles adopted by the professional actor and those adopted by the courtier ceased to exist, producing what Richard Burt calls "a crisis of difference" (125).^ Only Charles and his queen consistently took on roles that matched the dignity of their status. In "Luminalia," for example, Henrietta Maria

166 is the glorious Queen of Brightness. Despite the comic nature of many of its antimasque skits, most of these short performances were presented by courtiers or gentlemen of quality rather than professional entertainers. Owing perhaps to the nature of the Caroline antimasques, which eliminated the irreverent humor found so often in Jacobean antimasques, courtiers did not hesitate to take on comedic roles. The initial antimasque of "Luminalia" brings forth such characters as fairies, thieves, watchmen, lackeys, and coiners to perform pantomimic skits and comic dances. On the third entry of antimasquers, the text simply reads, "Five fairies, of which Master Jeffrey Hudson, the Queen's majesty's dwarf, presented Piecrocal, a principal captain under Oberon" (164-66). The text leaves no clues as to the embellishments given to this character during actual performance, but the fact that the queen's dwarf represents an officer of Oberon suggests somewhat that the fairy king has been stripped of his dignity and reduced to a comic figure. The miniature Oberon was familiar through Huon of Bordeaux. but since the court dwarf rather than King Charles was associated with this figure, it is unlikely that the masque's character retained the majesty or power of the fairy king of romance. "Luminalia"'s second antimasque focuses on the allegorical figure of Sleep, the originator of dreams. Sleep calls forth various skits, one of which features Robin Goodfellow and a dairy and kitchen maid. Like the character of Oberon, Robin's power has been reduced; although this nighttime trickster is appropriately brought forward as a

167 creature of the imagination, he is hardly given the dignity or importance of the Robin Goodfellow of Jonson's "Love Restored." John Milton's "Comus," which also makes use of faerie, is spoken of last because it marks a drastic change in the genre. Poetry rather than spectacle reigns in "Comus," properly called "A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634." The purpose of this masque was to glorify not the established nobility or the king, but rather John Egerton, the Earl of Bridgewater, whose installation as Lord President of Wales marked the occasion for the entertainment. Compared to the typical Caroline court masque and even to Jonson's wordy "Love Restored," Milton's masque contains a much higher proportion of dramatic dialogue to spectacle, music, and dance. T. S. Eliot claims that for Milton the masque form was losing its force: "'Comus' is the death of the masque; it is the transition of a form of art--even of a form which existed for but a short generation--into 'literature'" (500). Although "Comus" scholars have debated whether or not this work may properly be called a masque--some have described it as a pastoral drama, others as a dramatic poem--it must be recognized that Milton purposefully chose to call it "A

Maske.Its structure resembles that of the Jonsonian masque, and while the magician Comus becomes the main antimasque figure, the Earl of Bridgewater's three youngest children--Alice (age 15), Viscount Brackley (11), and Master Thomas Egerton (9)--are the equivalent of masquers, who take on ideal roles but remain undisguised. Although Milton

168 converts the masque to his own purposes, classical mythology and native folklore are used as prominently in this entertainment as in the Jonsonian masque. "Comus" is arguably the most complex masque written during the Caroline period, and rather than enter into a discussion of its meaning, I would like briefly to focus on the specific instances in which the fairies appear. Milton mostly speaks of the fairies and their activities as they are described in contemporaneous accounts, and although fairylore permeates the masque, only four specific references to the fairies appear. First, the magician Comus, whose name in Greek means "a revel," compares his night festivity to the nocturnal dancing of "the pert Fairies and the dapper Elves" (118) .

Milton alludes to one of the most characteristic activities of the fairies, their ceremonial night-rounds in the forests and meadows. In the manner of the fairies' circular dances, the antimasquers "knit hands, and beat the ground / In a light fantastic round" (143-44). Contrary to these finer creatures, Katharine Briggs notes, Comus's rout "are grosser, with their hideous and confused noise" (Anatomy 87). The dance of Comus and his riotous rout of animal-headed men and women is more like the clumsy dance of the unruly satyrs in Jonson's "Oberon" than the dance of the delicate fairies who

"trip" (118) upon "the Tawny Sands and Shelves" (117).^^

This single disorderly antimasque dance in the dark woods is balanced against the main masque, which is brought forth by the entrance of Lady Alice, who has become separated from her brothers and lost in these woods. At her approach, the

169 disorderly dancers are forced to discontinue their round suddenly and hide themselves, as the fairies often became invisible at the approach of an outsider. The second reference to the fairies appears in Comus1s description of the Lady's brothers, whose beauty and serenity made them seem as if they were a "faery vision" of "gay creatures" who "play i ’ the plighted clouds" (296-300). This allusion to the extraordinary beauty of the fairies serves not only to honor the Earl of Bridgewater by recognizing the handsomeness of his sons, but also to accentuate the intellectual evil of Comus, who will say exactly what the Lady wishes to hear in order to corrupt her chastity and make her a part of his band of transformed humans. As the two brothers search the woods for their lost sister, the eldest firmly declares his faith in the strength of Alice's chastity, and so brings forth the third fairy reference: "No goblin, or swart faery of the mine, / Hath hurtful power ore true Virginity" (435-36) . Milton alludes now to the dangerous and threatening nature of the fairies. The Lady becomes a prisoner in Comus's stately castle, but we feel that her virginity is never really in danger because, as with Spenser's Britomart, chastity is her hidden strength and "She that has that, is clad in complete steel" (420) . Although virtuous and victorious in refusing to drink from a cup that will transform her into one of Comus's intemperate creatures, the Lady is nevertheless trapped in an enchanted chair that leaves her motionless. If this were a typical masque, the Lady would be freed from her stony enchantment by a

170 spectacular display of disguised courtiers, just as the character, Love, is freed from his icy fetters by the power of James and the noble masquers in "Love Restored." Since it is not, she is released and harmony is reestablished by the magic of the virgin nymph Sabrina. The final allusion to the fairy world appears in a passage describing Sabrina, who is said to visit meadows at night, healing crops and cattle of the "ill luck signes" and infections breathed by mischievous fairies (844) . Despite only four explicit references to the fairies, "Comus" is rich in tacit allusions to the fairy realm. For instance, the feast at Comus's palace, where tables are spread with "all dainties" and "all manner of deliciousness," recalls the fairy banquet. There is also an Attendant Spirit in "Comus" who is assigned by Jove the task of guarding Lady Alice from Comus's evil. It is this spirit who leads the brothers to their sister and invokes the nymph Sabrina. In his swiftness ("Swift as the Sparkle of a glancing Star"), power of invisibility and shape-shifting, and attentiveness to duty, Milton's "guardian angel" bears a strong resemblance to Shakespeare's Ariel. 9 0 As Ariel« is released to the elements at the end of The Tempest. Milton's spirit, after restoring the three virtuous children to their parents, tells how he will return to "the broad fields of the sky" (978) . The presentation of the Earl's offspring is the climax of Milton's masque and is parallel to the typical ceremonial greeting and glorification of the disguised group of courtiers to the king. Whereas the final dances in "Comus"

171 are supplementary to the main action, the courtly dances in Jonson's masques are central to the entertainment. With its unusually large emphasis on dramatic dialogue, Milton's "Comus" substantiates Ben Jonson's claim that the masque as a genre could endure and be appreciated as literature. Jonson asserts in his preface to "Hymenaei' that the soul of the masque resides not in its momentary outward show of magnificence but in its "solide learnings" (16) and "more remou'd mysteries" (18-19), without which "all these solemnities had perish'd like a blaze" (15). It is certain that Jonson's masques have not perished; the political and moral messages they convey are as relevant for contemporary audiences as for Jacobean court aristocrats. Jonson's genius showed how useful the fairy realm's creatures could be for laying bare the abuses of the royal court and encouraging those in power to rise to the ideal images presented in the masque. Although the audience of these courtly spectacles may not have believed in the existence of fairies, these creatures were familiar figures of English folklore and loved for their variety, strangeness, and mystery.

172 Notes

4 The royal audience and nobility demanded from the performance not only music and dance in abundance but also spectacular visual accouterments. In The Elizabethan Stage. E. K. Chambers characterizes the "masque spectacular" of the Stuart reign by its elements of surprise and illusion and its costly glitter--extravagant costumes, intricate stage devices, lights and colors (1: 175). While Queen Elizabeth had been reluctant to offer masques or any extravagant entertainment at her own expense, the Stuart monarchs did not hesitate to use these lavish entertainments to showcase their wealth and prosperity.

2 In Method and Meaning in Jonson's Masques. John Meagher states that the "external grace of the dance is always, in the Renaissance, to be a sign of an internal grace of virtue and excellence" (100). Meagher's examination of the various aspects of the Jonsonian masque is especially good, and his fourth chapter deals specifically with the dance.

^ Lines 269-72. All quotations from Ben Jonson's masques and entertainments are from Ben Jonson (1941), eds. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, vol. 7.

4 Other Jacobean masques contain minor fairy references: Ben Jonson's "Pan's Anniversary" and "The Gipsies Metamorphos'd," and John Marston's "Mountebanks Masque."

^ Jonson's habit of closely associating the fairies of folklore with the creatures of classical mythology was standard practice in the Renaissance among educated writers and translators of the classics and stemmed from the belief that these two types of beings were nearly equivalent.

^ Herford and Simpson comment on the nature of both the satyr and the fairies: Jonson "has enriched the (satyr's] character with some traits of the native Puck, without impairing the naivete of the shaggy wood-god. In this freakish, elemental creature, contrasted with the courtly and decorous fairies, there is already a hint of the Antimasque" (2:261). As Herford and Simpson suggest, the disorder which begins the entertainment anticipates the antimasque. The terms "courtly and decorous," however, more appropriately apply to the stately fairies of Jonson's later masque, "Oberon," than to the fairies of "Althrope."

173 ^ Diana was another of Elizabeth's titles, and "Long liue ORIANA" would have been recognized by some as the refrain from a collection of madigrals titled the Triumph of Oriana. This collection was published in 1601 and written to celebrate the beauty and virginity of Elizabeth, who was then 68 years old. O James's extravagance was a major source of discontent. According to Leonard Tennenhouse, James's expenses more than doubled Elizabeth's during her last years, and the annuities and honors he awarded were five times those of the Tudor queen (118) . The masques themselves cost several thousand pounds, and there were complaints that this extravagance would ruin the country. Jonson's "Love Restored" rather daringly deals with this issue of the masques' extravagance.

^ Although Robin Goodfellow is similar to the figures of virtue, his traditional laugh of ho!ho!ho! appears to be borrowed from the Vice of the mystery play (Briggs, Anatomy 41) .

1® These lines from Mankind are taken from Earlv English Drama: An Anthology, p. 109.

H In 1605, Ben Jonson and George Chapman were imprisoned for co-authoring Eastward Ho!. a comedy which satirized James and his Scottish favorites. Richard Burt, in Licensed bv Authority (1993), lists the works of Jonson that received some form of censorship: Isle of Dogs, Eastward Ho!. Seianus, Epicoene. The Devil Is an Ass. The Magnetic Ladv. the epilogue to Poetaster. and "A Tale of a Tub" (3). At least one of Jonson's masques was censored by James himself, "Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion."

12 "Love Restored" was produced at a cost of 280 pounds, "Oberon" at a cost of 1087 pounds (Marcus 34). Leaving finances aside, Jonson's purpose in "Love Restored" may be as much self-promoting as moral, considering Jonson's rivalry with Jones.

12 Herford and Simpson indicate that Charles's dislike of Jonson's assertiveness may account for the writer's decline in favor: "To a man of his [Charles's) delicate and effeminate temperament, acutely resentful of breaches of etiquette and decorum, and shrinking from excesses of every kind, the full-blooded ultra-masculine self-sufficiency and self-assertiveness of Jonson would hardly have been attractive even in an equal" (1:91). It is enough to say that Jonson's masques simply did not please Charles, who lacked his father's passion for erudition and debate. 174 14 Basque of Twelve Months" has been attributed to George Chapman by some scholars, but his authorship has not been generally accepted. It has even been suggested, by Sidney Race in the 1952 edition of Notes and Queries, that the masque may have been forged by J. Payne Collier, who printed the masque in the Shakespeare Society's Transactions for 1848 but failed to suggest an author or to authenticate the manuscript by providing its history. As far as I know, Race is the only scholar to hold this theory. William Davenant's first masque, "The Temple of Love" (1635), contains a fairy-like creature with wings, named Thelma. Representing the Will, Thelma is described as

a young woman in a robe of changeable silk, girt with several tucks under her breast and beneath her waist, and great leaves of silver about her shoulders hanging down to the midst of her arm; upon her head a garland of great marigolds, and puffs of silver'd lawn between, and at her shoulders were angels'wings. (302-303)

Thelma's part in the masque is minor, yet she and the character Sunesis (representing the Understanding) support the masque's central theme--the merits of Platonic love. Though she is not designated by the class-name of "fairy," Thelma's floral garland and magnificent costume conjure up associations with supernatural beings, namely the majestic Titania of Shakespeare's imagination.

All quotations from "Luminalia" are from Stephen Orgel's and Roy Strong's Inigo Jones (1973). Only Inigo Jones's name is mentioned on the title page of "Luminalia," but the Stationers' Register connects Davenant with the masque.

^ George Villiers, the duke of Buckingham, was a favorite of both James and Charles I. For a discussion of the homosexual nature of James's and Buckingham's relationship, see Jonathan Goldberg's James I. pp. 143-6.

^ See “A Maske at Ludlow:" Essavs on Milton's "Comus." ed. John S. Diekhoff, for various interpretations of "Comus"'s form. Don Cameron Allen is one scholar who maintains that "Comus" is not a masque (62-64). C. L. Barber argues that it is (188-206).

All quotations from "Comus" are from John Milton: The Complete Poems (1980), ed. B. A. Wright.

175 1 9 John Demaray interestingly notes that Comus, who deceives the sight through his illusions, is incapable of seeing clearly. Demaray says that Comus, "thinking he can dance a 'light' round (144) and later 'fairly step aside' (168), beats the ground heavily in wanton, fantastic dance" (133) .

John Major makes a detailed analysis of how "Comus" resembles The Tempest. He examines the similarities between the Attendant Spirit and Ariel as well as between the magician Comus and the characters of Prospero and Caliban.

176 Works Cited

I . Primary Works

Bacon, Francis. The Essaves or Counsels. Civill and Morall. Ed. Michael Kiernan. Oxford: Clarendon, 19 85.

Davenant, William. The Dramatic Works of Sir William D'Avenant. with Prefatory Memoir and Notes. Vol. 1. Edinburgh, 1872. 5 vols. 1872-74.

James the First, King of England. King James the First Daemonoloaie (1597) : Newes from Scotland declaring the Damnable Life and death of Doctor Fian. a notable Sorcerer who was burned at Edenbrough in Ianuarv last. (1591) . Ed. G. B. Harrison. The Bodley Head Quartos IX. London: Lane; New York: Dutton, 1924.

Jonson, Ben. Ben Jonson. Eds. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1925-52.

Mankind. Earlv English Drama: An Anthology. Ed. John C. Coldewey. New York: Garland, 1993. 108-135.

"The Masque of the Twelve Months." Inigo Jones. A Life of the Architect: bv Peter Cunningham, eso. Remarks on some of his sketches for masques and dramas; by J. R. Planche. esg. And Five Court Masoues: edited from the original mss, of Ben Jonson. John Marston. etc. bv J. Pavne Collier, esg. Accompanied bv facsimilies of drawings bv Inigo Jones; and bv a portrait from a painting bv Vandvck. London, 1848. 131-142.

Milton, John. "A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle." John Milton: The Complete Poems. Ed. B. A. Wright. London: Dent, 1980. 47-75.

II. Secondary Works

Briggs, K[atharine] M. The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairv Beliefs among Shakespeare's Contemporaries and Successors. London: Routledge, 1959.

Burt, Richard. Liscensed bv Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.

Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon, 1923. 4 vols.

177 Demaray, John G. Milton and the Masque Tradition: The Early Poems. "Arcades." and "Comus." Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968 .

Diekhoff, John S., ed. "A Maske at Ludlow:" Essays on Milton's "Comus." Cleveland: Case Western Reserve U, 1968.

Eliot, T. S. "Ben Jonson." Ben Jonson's Plavs and Masques: Texts of the Plavs and Masques. Jonson on His Work. Contemporary Readers on Jonson. Criticism. Ed. Robert M. Adams. New York: Norton, 1979. 493-501.

Goldberg, Jonathan. James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson. Shakespeare. Donne, and Their Contemporaries. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989.

Major, John M. "'Comus' and The Tempest." Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959): 177-183.

Marcus, Leah S. The Politics of Mirth: Jonson. Herrick. Milton. Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.

Meagher, John C. Method and Meaning in Jonson's Masques. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1969.

Orgel, Stephen. The Jonsonian Masque. New York: Columbia UP, 1981.

Orgel, Stephen and Roy Strong. Inicro Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court. Including the complete designs for productions at court for the most part in the collection of the Duke of Devonshire together with their texts and historical documentation. Vol. 1. London: Sotheby; Berkeley: U of California P, 1973. 2 vols.

Parry, Graham. The Golden Age restor'd: The Culture of the Stuart Court. 1603-42. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1981.

Race, Sydney. "The Masques of the Twelve Months and the Four Seasons." Notes and Queries 197 (1952): 347-349, 525.

Tennenhouse, Leonard. "Strategies of State and political plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream. Henry IV. Henry V . Henry VIII." Political Shakespeare: Essavs in cultural materialism. Ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. 2nd ed. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994.

Wooden, Warren W. Children's Literature of the English Renaissance. Ed. Jeanie Watson. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1986.

178 CHAPTER 6 THE DECLINE OF THE FAIRY APOTHEOSIS

When Titania declares in A Midsummer Night's Dream. "I am a spirit of no common rate" (3.1.147), she seems to be speaking for all the fairies who are glorified in the literary works of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The period of the fairies' apotheosis was relatively brief-- approximately half a century--and followed by a lesser, intermediate period when the literary fairy vogue had not yet died out but had been altered and to a large extent debased. During this later period, the poets' keen interest in the fairy world continued, but their interest in this supernatural realm as a topic for serious poetry was waning. A small circle of Caroline poets composed of William Browne, Michael Drayton, Robert Herrick, and the little known Simeon Steward, is primarily responsible for altering the literary fairy vogue. In contrast to their Elizabethan and Jacobean predecessors, these poets playfully conceive of fairyland as a miniature cosmos in itself and of the fairies as more charming than formidable. In this concluding chapter, I address the issue of why the fairy vogue underwent this alteration which led to the fairies' reduction in grandeur, to their increasing irrelevancy to the human world, and, consequently, to the death of the fairy fashion around the

179 mid-seventeenth century. While a combination of factors and not one factor alone can adequately account for the decline of the fairy apotheosis, I give most attention to the changes in the imagery appropriated into the Renaissance royal cults. The dying out of the tradition in which fairyland serves primarily as a parallel political reality and the king or queen of the fairies as a representation of the royal person, is a chief reason for the trivial treatment of fairies in the literature produced during the reign of Charles I. The decline of belief in fairies and the accompanying rise of science are two reasons sometimes forwarded for the decay and death of fairy poetry in the seventeenth century, but these speculations should be regarded with some reservation. While it can be said that the Renaissance is the age when, for many educated individuals, belief in fairies began to die out, this shift of belief is more complex than generalizations about decline suggest. As I stated in Chapter I, the Renaissance is characterized by a dynamic mix of belief and disbelief in fairies. When Reginald Scot declared in 1584 that people's fear of fairies, changelings, Robin Goodfellow, and such other "bugs" was largely forgotten, he was echoing what writers since the time of

•1 Chaucer had been saying: fairies were relics of a past age.

Owing to a Protestant bias, however, Renaissance writers often exaggerated the dominance of their skeptical view and did not take into account those people who might have had growing doubts about the existence of fairies but were

180 unwilling to abandon the fairy faith entirely. Fairies were credible and fearful beings for much of the country populace, and these sentiments of belief are sustained in broadside and ballad literature. The seventeenth-century prose writings of Robert Kirk, John Aubrey, and R. Bovet serve as testimony to the credence in fairies among the more educated portion of the population. Like Kirk, Aubrey and Bovet recorded fairy beliefs and accounts with an absence of skepticism and drew some of their material from Scotland, where belief had a firmer hold on society than m England (Briggs, Anatomy 37). 9

Because it is impossible to know how many people followed the fairy faith during the Renaissance and how many abandoned it, the putative decline of belief remains a problematic factor in the decline of the literary fairy phenomenon. The notion that belief in fairies declined with the rise of science, as well as general speculations concerning the effect science had on poetry, should be regarded with equal caution.^ It is undeniable that a scientific Renaissance occurred in the first half of the seventeenth century; the contributions of Galileo, Gilbert, Bacon, Kepler, Harvey, and Descartes have been documented thoroughly. Yet in this age of great scientific discovery, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, spoke of fairies as a natural phenomenon, as natural as the minute worlds she observed through the microscope, and Robert Kirk, a Presbyterian minister, wrote systematically and authoritatively on the nature and state of fairy belief in Scotland and the Islands. In his comprehensive treatise, The Secret Common-wealth of

181 Elves, Fauns, and Fairies (1691), Kirk acknowledges the fairies as rational beings and entertains the notion that their presence will soon become as commonly accepted as other recent discoveries of his age. The fairy commonwealth, muses the minister, is a secret his age must yet discover: Every Age hath som secret left for it's discoverie, and who knows, but this entercourse betwixt the two kinds of Rational Inhabitants of the sam Earth may be not only beleived shortly, but as freely intertain'd, and as well known, as now the Art of Navigation, Printing, Gunning, Riding on Sadies with Stirrops, and the discoveries of Microscopes, which were sometimes as great a wonder, and as hard to be beleiv'd.^

If individuals of Kirk's age were to accept the accounts of distant lands furnished by travelers, the wondrous observations of the heavens made visible by the telescope, and the strange small worlds discovered by aid of the microscope, then perhaps it is not so odd that this educated, rational minister of Balquhidder believed it to be just a short time until his contemporaries were to accept also the presence and influence of the fairy folk in everyday life. At least one of the marvels of the scientific age, the microscope, was more likely to confirm rather than to nullify one's belief in fairies, for it offered proof that creatures exist in proportions smaller than the naked eye could see. Scientists and amateurs alike felt the attraction of micro worlds, and after scientific interest in the microscope had died down, this instrument became a toy of the aristocracy. Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673), was fascinated by both the microscopical world of atoms and the almost equally diminutive world of fairies. "Mad Madge"

182 Newcastle roused the scorn of Samuel Pepys and undoubtedly the envy of less daring women when she paid a visit to the Royal Society in May of 1667 in order to observe a microscopical demonstration.-* This instance was not the only

time in which Margaret Cavendish invaded male territory; she also had the courage to write and publish poetry. In the introduction to her Poems and Fancies (1653), the Duchess comments on the foolishness of those people who claim to believe in witches and spirits but not in fairies, who are the more believable and natural phenomenon: I wonder any should laugh, or think it ridiculous to heare of Fairies, and yet verily beleeve there are spirits: which spirits can have no description, because no dimension: And of Witches, which are said to change themselves into severall formes, and then to returne into their first forme againe ordinarily, which is altogether against nature: yet laugh at the report of Fairies, as impossible; which are onlely small bodies, not subject to our sense, although it be to our reason. For Nature can as well make small bodies, as great, and thin bodies as well as thicke. (qtd. in Briggs, Anatomy 69)

The Duchess's argument that our reason rather than our senses tells us the fairy world exists is based on the premise that fairies are merely "small bodies," and Nature may as easily create little bodies as large ones. More than the telescope or any other invention of the scientific age, the microscope could validate the opinion of those like Cavendish and Kirk that there is always more than meets the eye, and that the unseen and unseeable in this world is as deep a reality as that which is evidenced by the senses. The alterations the literary fairies undergo in the seventeenth century in respect to their size and disposition

183 are more pertinent to the decline of the fairy apotheosis than either the putative decline in belief or the rise of science. The depiction of the fairy world by poets of the Caroline period is distinctive, since these poets used as their model the diminutive fairies of Shakespeare rather than the tall, stately fairies that were more prominent in the work of their immediate predecessors. In the pre-Caroline period, poets and dramatists for the most part followed the strand of fairy mythology that gave the fairies the costume of the country in which they lived and the habit of mimicking human occupations. Kirk succinctly touches on this tradition in his treatise when he says that the fairies' "apparell and speech is like that of the people and countrey under which they live" (55). While fairy women are said "to spin, verie fine, to dye, to tissue and embroyder," their men "travell much abroad" (Kirk 55). So similar are the fairy and human races in Spenser's Faerie Oueene that Redcrosse and Artegall, both historical personages, are erroneously thought to be fairy knights of Gloriana's court. Tiny fairies became the norm in Caroline fairy poetry, and it was rare when poets of the period mingled, or readers confused, the inhabitants of the natural and supernatural realms.^ Although Shakespeare did not invent the fairies' small stature, it is likely that he inspired the tradition of the miniature which took hold in the second and third decades of the seventeenth century. The minuscule world of Faery in all its Lilliputian glory is embodied in Shakespeare's representation of Queen Mab, who . . . comes In shape no bigger than an agate stone On the forefinger of an alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomi. (1.4.54-7) Oberon's and Titania's people are equally diminutive; they make their tiny coats from bats' wings and hide themselves in acorn-cups. When Caroline poets divested the fairies of their physical stature, these poets also robbed them of their reputation for having a great influence for good or evil over the affairs of humans. More than any other attribute of these literary creatures, their Lilliputian stature underscores their incompatibility with and indifference to human society, traits shared by neither the fairies of Shakespeare nor those of contemporaneous accounts. The miniaturization of the fairies owes not only to Shakespeare but also to the influence of the new science, which made evident the wonders of human observation. Long before the discovery of the microscope and early magnifying glasses, as Marjorie Nicolson notes, fairy mythology and poetic fancy had imagined a diminutive world (155). In the thirteenth century, for instance, Gervase of Tilbury wrote of the Portunes, English elves that measured only about one inch high.^ With the discovery of magnifying instruments, interest in things small only intensified. Herrick and his circle of friends appear to have been caught up in the wonder created by the miniature in that they seemed concerned more with examining closely the workings of the fairy world than with using this world for social and political commentary or to give expression to universal truths. These poets took the

185 time to really consider what the fairies might eat and wear or where they might live, and the fairies' diminution provided them with the opportunity to display poetic imagination and wit. The fairy poetry produced during the Caroline period is undoubtedly a product of its time and may owe more to the seventeenth century wonder-cabinet than to O the mythicizing bent of earlier poets. Perhaps reflecting also the abatement of the fear created by the Jacobean era witch trials, Caroline fairy poetry presents fairies that neither appear as credible entities nor bear any close resemblance to the mischievous and potentially wicked fairies a large portion of the country populace still believed in and tried to ward off with charms or to appease with nightly offerings of food and a bowl of cream. The dramatic metamorphosis of the literary fairy in the seventeenth century may readily be perceived by juxtaposing the human size fairy king of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595) with the diminutive fairy ruler of Michael Drayton's "Nimphidia, The Court of Fayrie" (1627). Shakespeare's Oberon is typical of the Elizabethan and Jacobean literary fairy in that he is a figure of dignity and power who intervenes in mortal affairs. In a variety of ways Oberon is involved with the human world: he is amorous of mortal women, desires the Indian boy to be a knight of his train, concerns himself directly with the romance entanglements of four Athenian lovers, orders Puck to remove the ass's head from Bottom, and distributes blessings to the human newlyweds. Like the majority of fairies who inhabit

186 pre-Caroline Renaissance literature, Oberon and his people serve as more than pure fantasy. Shakespeare's fairy play shares with pastoral literature the serious function of providing a contrast, whether implicit or expressed, between pastoral life and some more complex type of civilization.^

Although they are not shepherds, Shakespeare's fairies dwell in the woods and function as standards by which the other characters are evaluated and judged. The regal immortality of Oberon and his queen, for instance, brings to light the earthiness of Bottom and his fellow artisans as well as the classical calm of Theseus and Hippolyta. Drayton's miniature Oberon is more comic than formidable, and, as a whole, "Nimphidia, The Court of Fayrie" differs from A Midsummer Night's Dream primarily in its focus on the fairies' interaction with each other rather than with human beings. Like Shakespeare's Oberon, the fairy king of "Nimphidia" vows to take revenge on his queen for her waning affection. The cause of Queen Mab's lack of interest in her royal mate, however, is unlike Titania's: it is not a changeling boy who comes to monopolize her attention but the devotions of a rival lover, a knight of King Oberon's court named Pigwiggen. In Oberon's frenzy to find the traitorous Pigwiggen and to challenge him to a duel, the fairy king mistakes for Mab's suitor a wasp and nearly squeezes the life out of the hapless creature before it escapes. His face and beard are smeared with beeswax after he runs into a hive, and his clothes are soiled when he is thrown to the ground by an ant, which he had climbed upon for transportation. To end a

187 string of ludicrous accidents, Oberon, mistaking a molehill for a mountain, scrambles to the top only to come tumbling down the other side, where he lands in a lake and is covered in water up to his chin. Far from bringing Mab under his control, as Shakespeare's Oberon does Titania, the king of fairies is duped by his queen and Proserpine, who gives Oberon a mind-erasing drink so that he retains no memory either of Mab's infidelity or the bloody battle he waged with Pigwiggen. At the end of the poem, while Oberon decides to ride back to court for feasting and merriment, Mab and her maids "doe closely smile, / To see the King caught with this wile" (648-9) . Although "Nimphidia" is a mock-romance and not meant to be taken seriously, it is characteristic of Caroline fairy poetry in several respects. First, the fairies are not treated with as great a deference as they are in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature; not only has Drayton's Oberon shrunk in size, but his dignity and power have been reduced. Second, the poem is rich in elaborate, descriptive detail of the fairies' activities within nature. Covering over 60 lines is the scene in which Mab's maid, Nimphidia, casts a spell upon Puck, who has been ordered by Oberon to return Mab, dead or alive. The description of Oberon's rampage takes up over 100 lines, and nearly 50 are devoted to one of the most memorable scenes of the poem, the arming of Pigwiggen. One stanza deals with Pigwiggen's helmet alone: His Helmet was a Betties head, Most horrible and full of dread, That able was to strike one dead, Yet did it well become him: And for a plume, a horses hayre, 188 Which being tossed with the ayre, Had force to strike his Foe with feare, And turne his weapon from him. (505-12)

Last, and most important of all, the poem is typical in that the correspondence between human and fairy, if it exists at all, is far removed. Except as metaphor, fairyland never intersects with the human world in "Nimphidia." Oberon's fantastic miniature palace which "standeth in the Ayre, / By Nigromancie placed there" (33-4), the microscopic gowns and gloves of Mab's ladies, in fact the entire diminutive scale on which the fairy realm is drawn, distance these creatures from reality. Warren Wooden, in Children's Literature of the English Renaissance. raises the issue of whether the fairy world of Caroline poetry abandons its function of contrasting with or commenting on the human world as the fairies are miniaturized and tied closer to the pastoral setting. Wooden states this problem: The pastoralization process tends to emasculate and trivialize the fairies; paradoxically, the more closely they are tied to the countryside the tighter the poets' focus on minute details of the fairies' pastoral equipage and activities and the farther the fairy world is removed from the serious function of the pastoral to offer a criticism of life. (119-20)

This hypothesis about the pastoralizing of the fairy world is a reasonable one. Because of its close tie to nature, fairyland increasingly becomes a self-contained universe something like that created by the lovers in Donne's "The Sun Rising," and its microscopic and often bizarre qualities (who can forget Pigwiggen's daunting beetle-head helmet?) provide distance from real life activities and experience. The

189 dwindling of the fairies' size per se is less pertinent to the trivial treatment of the fairies than the consequent disengagement of their world from reality. To some extent, Caroline poets seem to have desired to describe the miniature within nature merely for the sake of doing so, because small things evoke charm. Their desire for the miniature may have also sprung, as the pastoral does, from nostalgia for a lost world. Through the fairies, the reader of Caroline fairy poetry can in a sense achieve an ideal existence, one where humanity is in harmony with nature.^

A little pamphlet printed in 1635 and composed of several poems which were compiled by a person known only as R. S., A Description Of the Kina and Oueene of Favries. their habit. fare, their abode, pompe. and state, is a fair sample of the kind of fairy poetry written between 1625 and 1650. 1 1 These poems, some of which bear a resemblance to the fairy poems of Herrick's Hesperides. are superficial in nature and content. The first is a fragment of a poem often ascribed to Simeon Steward, a lawyer and friend of Herrick. In "A Description of the King of Fayries Clothes, brought to him on New-Yeares day in the morning, 1626, by his Queenes Chambermaids," the tininess and lightness of the fairy king's clothing is emphasized to the extent that it seems as if he is more akin to the insect than to the human world. The fairy king's shirt is made from a cobweb "more thinn / Than ever Spider since could spin," his breeches from wool "Spun into so fine a yarne / No mortall wight might it discerne," his rich

190 mantle from "Tinsell Gosameare" sprinkled with morning dew, and His Cap was all of Ladies love, So wondrous light, that it did move, If any humming gnat or flie Buzz'd the ayre in passing by. (pp.203-5)

Except for the reference to the fairy king's wreath of "pearls," which was made from the tears of some neglectful maid who was pinched by the fairies, there is no indication that this poem's fairy figure bears any resemblance to the fairies of popular belief. "A Description of the King of Fayries Clothes" is followed by "A Description of his Dyet," which is an incomplete version of Herrick's "Oberon's Feast." This early manuscript poem in which "the Elves" prepare for their king "a feast lesse great than nice" (p.209), demonstrates also the oddity and preciseness of the late Renaissance fairy world. As in the longer version of the poem, the fairy king feasts on the "homes of water'd Butter-f lies, " "Cuckowe spittle," "the red cap worme," "Adders eares," and "the beards of mice" (pp.14- 5). Another version of the fairy feast appears in the last fairy poem of the manuscript, "The Fairies Fegaries," which takes the form of a song that the fairy queen sings to her little elves. The opening lines of "Oberon's Feast" come to mind as the fairy queen speaks of the nighttime feasting of her and her elves: Upon the mushroomes head, Our table cloth we spread A graine o' th' finest wheat Is manchet that we eate: The pearlie drops of dew we drinke In Akorne-cups fill'd to the brinke. (p.214)

191 The full account of the fairy feast in "The Fairies Fegaries" resembles both Herrick's and William Browne's in its use of a mushroom table, the eating of bread, and the insect musicians. Although mention is made of the fairies' habit of pinching and rewarding maids, we get the impression that the fairies live in a miniature world of their own and are concerned little with human affairs. Because the poem is based on description, not narrative, the fairies appear remote. The treatment of fairyland is generally more trivial in the age of Herrick than in that of Spenser and Shakespeare, but Caroline fairy poetry cannot easily be classified as fantasy literature. Especially in the major fairy poems of Robert Herrick, serious themes are subsumed under the poet's elaborate display of ingenious wit. 19 Recent criticism... has focused on Herrick's use of diminutive fairies as a vehicle for satire. Joan Ozark Holmer, for instance, presents the argument that "The Fairie Temple: or, Oberons Chappell" criticizes Puritan attacks on the Anglican Church; Herrick's playful tone, as when he catalogues the fairy saints ("Saint Tit, Saint Nit, Saint Is, Saint Itis") contributes to the readers' enjoyment of poem as well as to the poet's satiric strategy. Even Drayton's "Nimphidia" has a serious core beneath its frivolous exterior. Queen Mab's unrepented, near-adulterous act forces us to see the fairies not as innocent pastoral dwellers but as a metaphor for the court and its corruption. In Caroline fairy poetry, fairyland may still serve as a setting for serious comment on human life,

192 but this particular function is not clearly implicit as it is in the fairy works of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Jonson. The public's changing attitude toward the monarchy is as crucial to the decline of the fairy apotheosis in the seventeenth century as the poets' alteration of the fairies' appearance and reputation. There exists a correspondence between the dwindling of the monarch's credibility and the increasingly trivial treatment of the fairy folk. The Stuart monarchs were neither revered as fairy monarchs, in literature or in life, nor mythologized to the extent that Queen Elizabeth had been while she lived. This focus on the monarchy and the people's attitude towards it gives rise to a number of questions: Why, if Queen Elizabeth was portrayed as the fairy queen, were not the Stuart monarchs depicted as fairy kings? If not the myth of the fairy monarch, what myths did James and Charles gather about themselves? Could King James's zealousness against all that was connected with demonology have delayed the poets' trivial treatment of fairyland until the Caroline period? Because the answers to these questions underscore the changes in the imagery appropriated into the Renaissance royal cults and the degree to which the poet and the people regarded the monarch as legitimate, they are central to the issue of the decline of the literary fairy apotheosis. The strength yet malleability of the Elizabethan royal cult is evidenced by the diversity of personae Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603) assumed throughout her nearly fifty-year rule. Elizabeth's representation as the fairy queen, a figure that

193 is distinguished from the other personae of Elizabeth by its mysteriousness, is apt for many reasons, not least among them being that the Tudor queen herself was somewhat shrouded in mystery. As an unmarried female ruler, Elizabeth was an anomaly to be marveled at and also to be accepted. The Virgin Queen fit well in the robes of a fairy monarch because she was an adept and practiced politician who was able to project to her people a formidable image of herself. Her gallant fight against Spain and the Counter-Reformation, besides giving every patriotic Englishman sufficient cause to rally behind the throne, greatly aided in establishing Elizabeth's public image as a magical, superhuman, and divinely-chosen leader of the English nation. The splendid albeit cumbersome royal progresses through the countryside also etherealized the queen; these annual journeys were designed largely to display Gloriana to her subjects and to encourage their loyalty and devotion. It seems natural that the tradition of praising Elizabeth as the fairy queen would have led to James's glorification as Oberon, especially since there was already in place a tradition by which male monarchs were depicted as fairy kings. In Spenser's Elphin chronicle, Elficleos is a transparent allusion to Henry VII, while the mighty Oberon, father of Tanaqui11/Gloriana, is an analogue to Henry VIII. 1 ^

For personal and political reasons, King James I (r. 1603- 162 5) was unable to support the mythic structure which had surrounded the reigns of Elizabeth and her father. James lacked the ability to project a majestic image of himself,

194 and the prestige of his position was undermined by lapses of decorum, such as the presence at court of Scottish and homosexual favorites and the appearance at times that the court's interests centered less on the people's welfare than

on a combination of wine, hunting, and licentiousness.-*-^ To make matters worse, James concerned himself little with presenting a flattering and personable image of himself to the public. Queen Elizabeth had used royal entries, progresses, and pageants to woo her people and to display the qualities of a heroic monarch, but this tradition of using public ceremony and public entertainments for purposes of royal propaganda was discontinued by James, who disliked crowds and preferred to be a spectator rather than a participant of the entertainments offered to him. Under James's rule, the progress pageant was discarded in favor of the court masque, which was designed to impress not a broad public but an exclusive audience made up of the royal family, the nobility, and occasionally foreign dignitaries. James's tendency toward coarseness and his dislike of role playing were not the only reasons why it became increasingly difficult to invest the English monarch with the stature of a supernatural being. Poets of the period may have been hesitant to create around their ruler a fairy king cult in light of James's savage hatred of witches. In Scotland, James personally had interrogated individuals believed to be witches and consented to have them burned at the stake merely for consorting with fairies, whom he believed to be creatures of the devil.After his accession to the English throne,

195 James I passed severe laws against witchcraft and republished Daemonoloaie. his treatise explicating his beliefs concerning fairies and their cohorts, the witches. This close intermingling of witch lore and fairylore was characteristic more of Scottish than English folk belief, although the Puritans also believed that the fairies had dealings with the witches. James was not transformed into the fairy king, but he was apotheosized by other representations. Unlike Queen Elizabeth, James allowed himself the luxury of creating, financing, and controlling his own cult, and the masquing hall was the arena in which the king projected his idealized self. One recurring device of the masque writer, who was guided directly by the Stuart monarch himself, was to glorify the king as a sun. This image became symbolic in the masque of life, goodness, truth, knowledge, and generally the splendor of the monarch. 1 f \ In Ben Jonson's "Love Restored," not only is the masquing hall illuminated "by the vertue of this Maiestie, who proiecteth so powerfull beames of light and heat" (194-5), but the masque's events are forwarded by these bright beams when they thaw the icy fetters of Love, the villain's captive. Love says he has a light of his own, but it shines now because the light of the king has intervened to rescue him: To those bright beames I owe my life, And I will pay it, in the strife Of dutie backe. (251-3) The release of Love is an affirmation that true love reigns in the hearts of the king and his courtiers. Although the

196 noble masquers, or the "spirits of Court" (254), are glorified in the respect that they are led on by Love "with flam'd intents" (255), the focus of the masque proper is on the power of James's brightness and on the political and social order that is established by means of this power. Shakespeare uses sun imagery in Richard II and Richard III for the opposite purpose: to suggest that the order of the state and of nature have gone awry. Standing to the last for divine right of kingship, King Richard II compares himself to the sun (3.2.36ff), but darkness often threatens to obscure him. When Richard confronts Bolingbroke in 3.3, he appears as a "blushing discontented sun" (62), who "perceives the envious clouds are bent / To dim his glory" (64-5). The clouds and "storms to come" (2.4.22) hint that the king's present glory will be short-lived. The image of the sun is used more ominously in Richard III, where the king is charged by his mother, Queen Margaret, with having turned the sun to shade: Witness my son, now in the shade of death, Whose bright outshining beames thy cloudy wrath Hath in eternal darkness folded up. (1.3.266-8)

While the dark sun illustrates Richard Ill's lack of virtue, the bright sun of the Jacobean masque illustrates James's virtue and the virtues he secures. Jonson's use of this image was in keeping with the noble purpose he gave to the masque: to hold up a mirror to the king so that he could see how well he was carrying out his office. In Jonson's "Oberon," James is exalted as "a greater light" from which the moon borrows to illuminate the masque's

197 events. The light of the moon, Diana, is congruent with the light of the sun, and Jonson's statement about the moon reflecting a superior light could be a riposte at the moon- goddess imagery used about Elizabeth I. Oberon or Prince Henry is also associated with light: his palace is "bright and glorious" (139), he is called the "bright master" (324), and "bright Faies, and Elues" surround his person (360) . James, however, is the more glorious since he reflects the divine Sun and carries with him the magical power to renew the land's vitality and fertility: He makes it euer day, and euer spring, Where he doth shine, and quickens euery thing Like a new nature. (354-6) The religious overtones are evident in this passage, which combines this image of James as a sun with exaltations of his quasi-divinity. James is described as "a god, o're kings" (344), his meditations and "all their issue is a kin to heauen" (343), and to call him by his true title "is to say, Hee's all" (357). Owing in part to his less majestic bearing, James had greater need than Queen Elizabeth to stress his divinity. In a statement to Parliament on March 1610, James speaks of the king as a god: "The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth; for kings are not only God's lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself they are called gods" (qtd. in Coward 91). Largely because of James's stalwart support of the divine right of kings theology and the frequency of the court masques' representation of him as a sun, the

198 Jacobean cult took on more of a religious than a mythic dimension. Although relatively sparse, mythologized compliments are present in court masques. As the Tudor monarchs had done before him, James used Arthurian legend to bolster his right to the throne, a right that was weakened by Henry VIII's will, which excluded from the succession the heirs of Margaret Tudor. The Tudors had claimed direct descent from King Arthur, and some of their family had come from Mona, which was prophesied as the site from which Arthur or his heir would return. The Stuarts had the advantage in the respect that they could claim descent from Arthur through both the Tudor line and the line of Scottish kings. The Stuarts purportedly descended from Fleance, son of Banquo, whose father-in-law was Llewelyn, a Welsh prince and descendant of Arthur (Brinkley 16-17). Whereas Arthur was used as a symbol of chivalric prowess by the Tudor monarchs who wished to justify their imperial ambitions, he became a symbol of British unity during the early Stuart period owing to James's vision of himself as international peacemaker. Although swimming against the tide of popular opinion, James desired to bring peace between France and Spain, between Catholic and Protestant Germany, and, perhaps most unpopular of all, to unite England and Scotland, which was considered by many Englishmen to be a nation of barbarians (Coward 107, 117). The marriage of James's children also reflected the king's commitment to peace: Princess Elizabeth's marriage to

199 the Protestant Elector Palatine was expected to be balanced by the hoped for Spanish-Catholic marriage of Prince Charles. "Oberon" succeeds in simultaneously mythologizing the king and his eldest son, the one by means of Arthurian legend, the other through fairy mythology. An attendant of Oberon, or Prince Henry, says this is A night of homage to the British court, And ceremony, due to ARTHVRS chaire, From our bright master, OBERON the faire. (322-4)

While homage is paid to "ARTHVRS chaire," the seat occupied by King James, who is "the wonder of tongues, of eares, of eyes" (313), Oberon's praises are also sung. Two fays emphasize in song the fairy prince's majesty, wisdom, knowledge, and piety, for "Euery vertue of a king, / And of all in him, we sing" (3 80-1). Since Henry had both the ability and desire to recreate the mythic structure which formerly surrounded England's monarch, it is fitting that he adopted the persona of the fairy prince. In the guise of Oberon, Henry could revive memories of Elizabeth's fairy queen cult and associate himself with the glorious events of the Elizabethan era, such as England's overseas explorations and battles with Spain. Like Queen Elizabeth, Henry came to represent the nation's aspirations. The prince distinguished himself from his father by setting up his own household based on the rules of decorum and good sense and by speaking of a future war with Spain. When Prince Henry died unexpectedly in November 1612 at the age of 18, there was a flood of elegiac display. Much of the written verses praise those virtues of Henry that were

200 depicted in the literature of his lifetime, such virtues as his piety, chastity, temperance, knowledge, and obedience to his parents. One recurring theme is the heroism of the prince, and it is imagined that Henry would have been victorious in many battles had he lived. In one of his 46 elegiac sonnets, George Wither writes, "Mars himselfe enui'd his [Henry's] future glory .... Hell droopt for feare, the turkie Moone look't pale, Spaine trembled" (qtd. in Wilson 137). This heroic representation of Henry is evident also in "Oberon," which was performed a year prior to Henry's death. For his role as fairy prince, Henry was costumed as a Roman emperor and warrior; he wore a breast plate and mantle and majestically rode into the banqueting hall on a chariot. Henry's love for military affairs, martial sports, and navigation pleased the national taste, and perhaps his death was all the more grieved because he embodied those qualities that were lacking in his father. The poet Thomas Campion expressed his nation's grief when he wrote, And like a well tun'd chime his carriage was Full of celestial witchcraft, winning all To admiration and love personal. (qtd. in Wordon 61)

This "celestial witchcraft" was none other than Henry's ability to breed hope and to restore Elizabethan days that seemed in retrospect like a golden age or fairy time. James's son and successor, Charles I (r. 1625-49), was unable to step into the mythic robes of his brother, Henry. Arthurian legend was still used by court poets to mythologize Charles, but few applied the world of Faery to king and court. Since Charles was small, poets could have associated

201 him with the diminutive Oberon without any loss of dignity to the king. Given also Charles's exemplary self-control in both conduct and morality, it would seem natural to compare him to the fairies, who were known to be great lovers of chastity and orderliness. 1 7 The English fairies had a code of behavior that they demanded from the humans they chanced to meet; those individuals whose essential attributes were kindness, courtesy, generosity, and orderly ways were most likely to win the fairies' favor (Briggs, English Tradition 177). The fairies had the most contempt for those who were miserly or promiscuous, but owing to their love of fecundity and festivity, they were also intolerant of prudes. Within his own person, Charles exemplified these seemingly contradictory attitudes of the fairy folk. Control of the passions, as Charles saw it, was the foundation of order within the individual, the royal court, and the nation as a whole. Yet while King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria were preoccupied with platonic love, their marriage was both physical and fecund. Like the fairies, Charles expected members of his own household to share his exact regard for the rules of decorum and order. The neoplatonic cult associated with Henrietta Maria allowed the queen, in theory at least, to surround herself with handsome young courtiers without being accused of impropriety. Much gossip surrounded this cult, however, because of several scandalous incidents, one of which concerned Henry Jermyn, who had gotten with child one of the queen's ladies, Eleanor Villiers. Charles was generally less

202 tolerant than his wife of others' misdoings; in this case, the king ordered his courtier to marry Villiers or to face banishment from the court. 1 ft ° It is probable that Charles's moral character was shaped largely through witnessing the decadence and unrestraint of his father's court. For this reason, we should not suppose his composure was an exact expression of his personality, but, as Kevin Sharpe says, "a gravity self-imposed and donned as an essential garment of majesty" (192). In his memoirs of Charles I's reign, Sir Philip Warwick speaks of the dignified bearing of the king: His deportment was very majestick; for he would not let fall his dignity, no not to the greatest Forraigners that came to visit him and his Court; for tho' he was farr from pride, yet was he carefull of majestie, and would be approacht with respect and reverence. (qtd. in Ollard 28)

Charles appeared to some as a man of principle, who believed his court should be an example of the orderliness and sanctity of his royal office and governance. Although Charles possessed many attributes that would have made his comparison to the fairy king apt, court poets and panegyrists chose to represent their monarch in other ways. Throughout the 1630s, Charles's love for his wife and children were recurring themes of his representations. Van Dyck's paintings of the royal family express a bond of familial warmth and tenderness and evoke the mother-and- father role that Charles and Henrietta Maria acted out within the court and their own family. ^ Through the art of Inigo

Jones and William Davenant, the mutual love of the royal couple is shown to bring forth a reign of harmony and peace,

203 which is often symbolized by the halcyon, a mythical bird that builds its nest upon the ocean and possesses the magical ability to calm the water's waves. Davenant's "Temple of Love" (1634) celebrates the royal cult of platonic love, since its argument is that chastity and purity may triumph over sensuality through the example of love set by Charles and Henrietta Maria. The king and queen could see the representation of their happy union in the figures of Sunesis and Thelema, who signify higher understanding and will. Just prior to the masque's climactic event, the uncovering of the Temple of Chaste Love, these figures symbolically unite: Thus mix'd our love will ever be discreet, And all our thoughts and actions pure, When perfect Will, and strengthened Reason meet, Then Love's created to endure. (p. 3 03)

Celebration of England's peace takes precedence in "Luminalia" (1638), where the Muses decide to take up residence in England after they have been driven by war from other countries. Love and government are clearly intertwined in this masque, since it is by virtue of Charles, who rules through love and welcomes the arts into his country, and of Henrietta Maria, Charles's royal lover, that England is made "a pattern to all nations, as Greece was amongst the ancients" (37-8). One reason why fairy legend did not become part of the symbology of the Caroline royal cult might be because the mythic quality of the monarch was not taken for granted as it had been during the reign of Elizabeth I. It has been persuasively argued, by R. Malcolm Smutts and others, that both Charles I and his father undermined the legitimacy of

204 their governments by underestimating the power of the religious and patriotic traditions established during Elizabeth's reign. The English people's devotion to their sovereign, Smutts suggests, "was conditioned by strong prejudices about how an English monarch ought to behave, largely defined by Elizabeth's golden legend" (16). King James seemed to depart from this tradition in his desire for friendship with Spain and his pacific approach to foreign affairs. These policies might have been beneficial for the country, but they were unpopular among the people, who only recently had feared for the safety of their nation and religion. Also, James was not blessed with Elizabeth's air of dignity; he was a foreign, Scottish king with a taste for bawdy humor and a tendency towards coarse behavior. Charles did not share his father's aversion to war or his disregard for decorum, but his rule was discredited by his Catholic marriage and antagonism to Parliament. Not only did Charles compromise England's indomitable Protestant spirit by marrying Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis XIII of France, but, in his refusal to control his queen's Catholic connections, Charles fueled people's fears that popery would be reintroduced in England. Although many fears were unwarranted, Charles was often opposed by Puritans and members of Parliament because of his failure to communicate effectively or to explain his actions to his people.^0

Poets no longer instinctively turned to the fairy world; the fairies' tie to patriotism, Englishness, and the monarchy had for the most part been dissevered by an atmosphere of

205 distrust for royal policies. There was also less of a need to use fairyland as an indirect means to criticize the actions of the court or to take an unpopular stand on a theological issue, since the government's efforts to censor the press were largely ineffective. There was no institution or system set up for organized censorship in the Caroline period. Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, was responsible for approving performances and issuing licenses, but there were limits to his censor power. Performances dealing with sensitive subjects were often approved by the censor on the condition that certain passages be revised, and although a promise to alter or eliminate the questionable material may have been extracted from a writer or theater manager, Herbert could not follow up on all cases (Sharpe 36). Courtiers, on the other hand, could bypass the censor's authority in two ways: they could bypass it completely, since the plays they wrote needed no license at all, and they could use their influence with the king to persuade Herbert to approve the plays they favored or the ones that were written by their friends. In the 1640s, press censorship collapsed completely with the fall of the crown and the established church. Throughout the Caroline period, poets and playwrights had the unprecedented freedom to see the fairy world for what it was, or for what they fancifully imagined it to be, rather than as a metaphor for something else. The time when both the monarch and the fairies had been regarded with great deference was over. By the end of the Civil War Charles's credibility was destroyed, and he was

206 subservient to the will of the people. The credibility of the fairies was also destroyed; they had become infinitesimal creatures who no longer meddled in human affairs. Fairies were largely banished from literature during the Commonwealth and Protectorate regimes because of the Puritans' hostile attitudes toward anything resembling the fantastic or the superstitious; in their view, fairies were suggestive of both the Catholic and pagan quality of the Anglican Church. Without Queen Elizabeth there might not have been a literary fairy vogue: her reign popularized the image of the fairy monarch while her regality and political expertise were the inspiration behind England's greatest fairy works. Lacking Elizabeth's majestic and authoritative bearing, James was not apotheosized as a fairy monarch, but his firstborn, Henry, adopted this persona in the masque celebrating his newly appointed position as Prince of Wales. Had Henry lived to inherit his father's crown, there might have developed not only a fairy king cult to rival the fairy queen cult of Elizabeth, but a new surge of fairy literature. Although James did not desire to associate himself with the otherworld, the fairy folk continued to play a major role in court entertainments. Perhaps James's rigid views on the injurious nature of the fairies, oddly enough, helped to lengthen the fairies' literary career by delaying the whimsical and trivial treatment of the fairies. It would hardly be appropriate, for court poets at least, to speak of charming, diminutive fairies who were indifferent to

207 humankind, when the Stuart monarch professed in his Daemonoloaie that the king and queen of Faery, as well as their court, were pawns of the devil who mimicked the actions of "naturall men and women" in order to deceive innocent people (74). When Charles came to the throne, fairies became the plaything of poets. Few court poets endeavored to use the fairy monarch as an idealized representation of the king, and essentially it was left up to outsiders of the court to write about the fairy world. Herrick, the master detailer of the fairy world, was the last of the major Renaissance poets to speak of Faerie; with the publication of his Hesoerides in 1648, the literary fairy vogue ran its course. The tiny, often frivolous fairies depicted by Herrick and his small circle of literary friends are the ones that were passed down to us. One manifestation of their influence on our present day is the increasing popularity of faerie gardens, fanciful creations for the wee folk. Equipped with tiny furniture that the fairies might use, these gardens are filled with plants, trees, and flowers that are traditionally associated with the fairies. Fairy festivals are also slowly becoming a familiar sight and attract people of all ages. In giving adults a chance to indulge in what is today often considered child's play, fairy festivals celebrate a return to innocence and serve as a reminder of the fascination the fairies still hold for us.

208 Notes

A list of what Reginald Scot terms "vaine apparitions" is to be found in The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Book 7, chapter 15. Included in the list are various inhabitants of the fairy realm.

n Robert Kirk's research was apparently notorious among country people, and after the minister's death, the legend of his transportation by the fairies was created. Kirk was supposed to have been taken into a fairy hill and to have appeared later to one of his kinsman asking to be rescued from fairyland in the traditional way, with cold iron.

*3 Keith Thomas, for one, supports the idea that the rise of science, as well as the growth of urban living and the spread of a self-help philosophy, is a major factor in the death of fairy poetry in the seventeenth century (665). There are several especially good sources for information on the relationship between science and Renaissance poetry: Marjorie Nicolson's The Breaking of the Circle and Science and Imagination. and Douglas Bush's Science and English Poetrv.

^ This quotation is on page 90 of The Secret Commonwealth. The chief argument of Kirk's treatise is that belief in fairies is contrary neither to reason nor to the Holy Scriptures, and Kirk goes so far as to use fairies as proof of the existence of God and of angels (82-83) . Conversely, Kirk reasons, the miracle of Christ's incarnation as man is evidence enough that anything else in this world may be possible, even something so extraordinary as the existence of sprites. No one can conceive or imagine all the world's wonders, Kirk says, but "Much more that the Son of the Highest Spirit should assume a Bodie like Ours, convinces all the world that no other thing that is possible, neide be much wondered at" (87).

^ According to Nicolson, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that Margaret Cavendish was "a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman" (182).

^ Browne's Britannia's Pastoral (1625) and Drayton's The Muses Elizium (1630) are exceptions to the case; they are true fairy pastorals in that fairyland merges with Arcadia, sprite with shepherd.

209 n The Portunes are spoken of in Gervase of Tilbury's Otia Imoerialia and are possibly the first English elves to be mentioned in writing.

O A wonder-cabinet is a collection of curiosities gathered from around the world. Steven Mullaney speaks of this form of collection peculiar to the late Renaissance in "Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance."

^ In Children's Literature of the English Renaissance. Warren Wooden builds upon C. L. Barber's correlation between pastoral beings and fairies by arguing the similarity of function between pastoral literature and fairy literature. See Shakespeare's Festive Comedy. p. 145, for Barber's comparison of shepherds and fairies, the "natural" inhabitants of the English countryside.

I® This idea is taken from Peter Schwenger's article, "Herrick's Fairy State." Schwenger says,

A return to a state of perfect accord with nature is, admittedly, impossible .... Yet if a fusion of the human with the natural is thus precluded, the fairies represent that fusion as an accomplished fact, by expressing natural forces in anthropomorphic form. A reader of fairy poems may then play at a state of being which is in actuality impossible for him. (36)

Other works comment on the miniature and its link to the pastoral: Barbara Ewell's "The Aesthetics of Fairy Pastoral in Drayton's The Muses Elizium." and Susan Stewart's On Lonaina: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection.

11 This pamphlet is reprinted in Floris Delattre's English Fairv Poetry, pp. 195-220.

1^ Herrick's major fairy poems are the Oberon poems: "The Fairie Temple: or, Oberons Chappell," "Oberons Feast," and "Oberons Palace." Daniel Woodward, searching for some larger meaning than is communicated by Herrick's individual Oberon poems, has argued that these poems encapsulate the mythology of the Hesoerides and are part of one long epithalamion. Schwenger also sees unity in the Oberon poems, and his detailed analysis of “Oberons Feast" and "Oberons Palace" brings out the ways in which these two poems are complementary.

210 1 The Elphm • chronicle, the Antiauitie of Faerie lond, appears in Book 2, canto 10 of Spenser's Faerie Oueene. In this thinly disguised genealogy of the English monarchs, Spenser's allusion to the Tudors arrives in stanza 75.

James is often characterized as crude and undignified and as a king with homosexual tendencies. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the word "fairy" did not become slang for a male homosexual until the end of the nineteenth century. For a discussion of James's homosexuality, see Jonathan Goldberg's James I. pp. 19, 23-4, 142-6. Richard Ollard, in The Image of the Kina, says that James I, "in appearance, manners and habits was grotesquely unfitted to personify the high monarchical doctrines he expounded" (29). Barry Coward notes James's excesses, indecorum, and the deterioration of his physical appearance and habits in the last years of his life, but he believes that the king's appealing characteristics have been consistently overlooked (105-6).

Witches often claimed familiarity with the fairies, perhaps because they imagined that such an acquaintance would be more favorably looked upon than a pact with the devil or because there was a real mingling of the two beliefs.

In commenting on the use of light in the Jacobean masque, John Meagher states, "Jonson's frequent characterization of James as a sun is in part a means of giving a symbolic value to the light in which the masque was performed, and the presence of that light in turn helps to justify that characterization" (119). With the convenience of artificial lighting, we might forget the magnificence of the masquing hall that would have been illuminated solely by the light of candles and torches.

^ The fairies' association with chastity was especially prominent in the Elizabethan period, when the attributes of the classical Diana were transferred to the fairy queen. Katharine Briggs comments on the fairies' high moral standards in Fairies in English Tradition. 177. There is also a tradition in which fairies are depicted as morally lax, and Briggs provides some examples of their illicit behavior. See 108-14, 186-87.

Because of this and other scandalous incidents, Quentin Bone notes, Puritan ladies avoided the queen's court, and Henrietta Maria's own reputation was tarnished.

211 -*-9 Some of Van Dyck's portraits of the royal family are included and discussed in Kevin Sharpe's The Personal Rule of Charles I . 185-88.

20 Coward notes how Charles I's uncommunicative disposition led many people to regard him as autocratic. See The Stuart Age, 136-37.

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