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satirist, we can imagine that, with the 1596 installment of The Faerie Queene, Spenser found a balance between the caution of The Shepheardes Calender and the rashness of Complaints, a balance that Aristotle might describe as true courage. He intervenes into court politics with his allegorical defense of Walter Raleigh against the displeasure of the Queen at his secret marriage. He offers multiple opinions on European political and religious struggles with his allegorizations of the situations in France and the Netherlands. Most famously, he supports the justice of
desire. Thus the popularity of the Triumphs in sixteenth-century England provided a crucial element in the creation of the Elizabethan icon. It offered a vocabulary and a cluster of associations through which Elizabeth could be presented to her own subjects and to other European political figures as the Virgin Queen, but in a context resonant of military victory and masculine
… It hath a kinde of beast called Cama, or Anta, as bigge as an English beefe, and in greate plenty.68 Such Golden Age geographies were made available in the Discouerie and would continue to figure in English colonial publications for generations because Elizabeth and her successors were unwilling to bankroll in a sustained manner any initiatives regarding the founding of an Atlantic empire.69 Moreover, butchery and slaughter were recurring features of the Elizabethan participation in European politics, whether it was in Ireland, in the Low Countries, or in the