Search results
Spottiswoode, 1962), 112. MUP_Armitage_Ralegh.indd 293 07/10/2013 14:09 294 Gary Waller ment that he experiences when excluded from the royal presence. The poem evokes the collective fantasy that the Elizabethan court is immune to change – an harmonious, static world, the secular equivalent of the eternal world presided over by the Queen of Heaven – while realising that it is in fact ruled by change and unpredictability. Ralegh may assert that Elizabeth reigns over change (as Spenser so eloquently does in The Faerie Queene) but he knows she is all too mortal. Unlike the
into a power struggle over university governance. 13 The University was technically governed by six men, the Vice-Chancellor and the caput senatus . At the beginning of Elizabeth's reign the relatively liberal statutes of Edward's reign were reinstituted. 14 The caput , elected at each congregation, consisted of five members: three doctors from the traditional faculties of law, physic, and divinity and
served as a pattern of certainty, in this regard now gives voice to contemporary religious doubts and despair. The play's consideration of eschatological matters in David's final speech (discussed below) as well as its blurring of cosmologies provide specific examples of this wider preoccupation with the consequences of Reformation theology. As the century progressed, the branch of Protestantism which became most influential in England, particularly by Elizabeth's reign, was Calvinism, the doctrine developed by the Genevan reformer Jean Calvin and best known for the
insofar as the voice of the people is heard. Moments before the two sides are to join battle, Stilt cries out, ‘we'll have a prince of our own choosing: Prince Jerome!’ (III.ii.76). The suggestion of elective monarchy on the English stage in the closing moments of Queen Elizabeth's reign could potentially be incendiary, if not downright treasonous. The closest parallel available in Hamlet is of course Laertes’ arrival in Act IV, Scene v: They cry, ‘Choose we! Laertes shall be king
document has survived which shows that Spenser preceded Grey to Ireland. Early in the Calendar of Fiants for Elizabeth's reign under 1580, we find a reference to a lease to New Abbey in County Kildare near Dublin, which was granted to Spenser under commission: Lease under commission 15 July to Ed. Spenser, gent.; of the site of the house of Friars called the New Abbey, co. Kildare, with
continued to view prodigies and other unusual natural phenomena in a providential context, see Notebooks of Whitelocke Bulstrode, vol. IV: fos 51-8, 77-85 (Folger Library): and the report of Bulstrode's charge to the Grand Jury of Middlesex in Annals of King George, vol. 4 (London, 1718): 396-7. A more straightforward view of the aurora as a positive phenomenon may have been taken by a pamphlet advertised in the Evening Post, no. 1035 (March 22-24, 1716): The Meteor a Good Omen, Prov'd by a parallel Instance in the 2d Year of Queen Elizabeth's Reign; Whereunto is Premis
Antichrist was widely accepted doctrine in the Church of England during Elizabeth's reign. By 1581, John Field concluded that to prove it was 'needless considering how it is a beaten argument in every book' (Hill 1971: 18). Condemnations of Catholicism used bastardy, the accursed share, to blacken their pictures of the Romish faith. The pamphlet entitled A True and Plaine Genealogy or Pedigree ofAntichrist(1634) traced the Roman Church's bastard descent from the devil: He by a stranger without Matrimony Did then beget the Churches Patrimony. Then Mammon of Iniquity his
These requirements could prove challenging to Reformed cathedral clergy. In 1570, for instance, certain Norwich prebendaries allegedly vandalised the organs and ‘committed other outrages in the choir’, while Dean Whittingham supposedly failed to celebrate communion after 1563 to avoid wearing a cope. 25 Reformed churchmen certainly criticised the state of cathedrals early in Elizabeth's reign. Writing to Peter Martyr in 1559 after serving as royal visitor to the western counties
composition of theatre goers, many of whom were young, insecure and hoping for improved fortunes, and so would have experienced the social issues of the city or the country. Issues of class were not confined to drama but were the stuff of poetry too, especially work written by writers outside the metropolis who appeared to resent what they thought was the excessive influence of the court. One of these, I suspect, was the dominant poet of the 1590s, Edmund Spenser, writing from the most significant English colony established in Elizabeth's reign, the
’ Britomart at least for the moment in a confident sense of providential design ‘though all the world do shake’. Yet III.iii.25.c also verbalises the tension between these ambiguous ‘termes’, underlining the difficulty of guaranteeing the firmness of such a historical design authoritatively. The climax of the prophecy in stanzas 49–50 is similarly anxious, as it hurries from the Virgilian anticipation of the ‘sacred Peace’ of Elizabeth's reign to the abrupt close of Merlin's speech, ‘But yet the end is not’. 32 Merlin's prophecy is only a partial discovery of the future