Edmund Spenser's censored attacks on Lord Burghley (Elizabeth I's powerful first minister) serve as the basis for a reassessment of the poet's mid-career, challenging the dates of canonical texts, the social and personal contexts for scandalous...
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Edmund Spenser's censored attacks on Lord Burghley (Elizabeth I's powerful first minister) serve as the basis for a reassessment of the poet's mid-career, challenging the dates of canonical texts, the social and personal contexts for scandalous topical allegories, and the new historicist portrait of Spenser's 'worship' of power and state ideology. Edmund Spenser's censored attacks on Lord Burghley (Elizabeth I's powerful first minister) serve as the basis for a reassessment of the poet's mid-career, challenging the dates of canonical texts, the social and personal contexts for scandalous topical allegories, and the new historicist portrait of Spenser's 'worship' of power and state ideology
Cover; Contents; List of Illustrations; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction; Spenser's supposed attack on Burghley in 1579: correctingthe record; Cui bono? The elusive motive of Spenser's attack on Burghley; Reading 'the rugged forhead'; The general intention and meaning; Part I: The 1590 Faerie Queene and the Origins of 'a mighty Peres displeasure'; 1 Lord Burghley and the Oxford Marriage; 'If it were not for his fyckle hed. . .'; 'The poor solitary countess'; 'No enemy I have can envy me this match'; 2 The Faerie Queene Dedicatory Sonnets and the Poetics of Misreading
Spenser's connection to Oxford: Thomas WatsonReading the dedicatory sonnets, Version I: Essex-Oxford; Reading the dedicatory sonnets, Version II: Burghley-Oxford; Misreading The Faerie Queene; The silence of Anne Cecil; Part II: The Complaints and 'the man . . . of whom the Muse is scorned'; 3 The Ruines of Time and the Rhetoric of Contestation; 'Dardanias light, and Troyans faithfulst hope'; The Ruines' elusive consistency: contemporary praise and modern criticism; The authenticity of contestation; 'A cunning Time-server'
4 Retrospective Fiction-Making and the 'secrete' of the 1591 Virgils GnatBack to the future: reclaiming 1591; The poetics of backdating; Feigning authenticity; 'The secrete of this riddle rare'; 'The purporte of my evil plight'; And yet the end is gnat; 5 Mother Hubberds Tale and the Ambivalent Withdrawal from Power; The hermit of Theobalds; Regnum Cecilianum; 'The Courtier needes must recompenced bee'; Two Elizabethan anachronisms; Part III: After the Complaints; 6 The Legacy of the Complaints and the Question of Slander; Debating Mother Hubberds Tale: the paradox of slander
Metalepsis and the reversibility of slander in the 1596 Faerie QueeneAfterword; Reassessing Spenser: from Yeats to Greenblatt; Conclusion; Notes; Index;
