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Sir Walter Raleigh's literary legacy consists of a highly fragmented oeuvre including many unprinted or pirated poems and works of disputed authorship. No collection of Raleigh's poetry produced under his own direction or that of a contemporary, either in print or in manuscript, exists. This book is a collection of essays by scholars from Great Britain, the United States, Canada and Taiwan that covers a wide range of topics about Raleigh's diversified career and achievements. Some essays shed light on less familiar facets such as Raleigh as a father and as he is represented in paintings, statues, and in movies. Others re-examine him as poet, historian, as a controversial figure in Ireland during Elizabeth's reign, and looks at his complex relationship with and patronage of Edmund Spenser. The theme of Raleigh's poem is a mutability that is political: i.e., the precariousness of the ageing courtier's estate, as revealed by his fall from eminence and the loss of his privileged position in court. The Cynthia holograph engages in complex ways with idealistic pastoral, a genre predicated upon the pursuit of otium (a longing for the ideal and an escape from the actual). The Nymph's reply offers a reminder of the power of time and death to ensure the failure of that attempt. There were patrilineal imperatives that might have shaped Raleigh's views of sovereignty. Raleigh's story is an actor's story, one crafted by its own maker for the world-as-stage.
results, Ralegh performed his affection for the Queen, we do not really have a vocabulary yet for talking about the political and affective dynamics of Ralegh’s fatherhood. Nor have we developed a sustained interest in how patrilineal imperatives might have shaped Ralegh’s views of sovereignty or conditioned his pieties.1 Yet Ralegh’s career provides us with 1 Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), introduced the idea of Ralegh as a player of roles, an assumption that underlies many
acquires potentially transforming power, and it is Molly who prevents the Hamleys from succumbing to ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’ (see above, pp. 42–3). There is considerable irony in the fact that after Mrs Hamley’s and Osborne’s deaths, almost every aspect of the Hamley household lies in the control of a girl who was not judged fit to marry into the family. A more basic irony, however, is that Squire Hamley, the epitome of autocratic will and patriarchal pride, should have one son – Osborne – who weakly evades the patrilineal imperative to ‘marry well’, and another