Gascoigne seems influential in the
iconography for Q. E. I in Spenser.
There are three pictures in
Gascoigne's venery book featuring the
queen on the outdoor scene of the
hunt, and these suggest Belphoebe,
Spenser's field version of the queen
-- perhaps especially the picture (in
Gascoigne) where the queen is on the
scene for the field-dressing (the term
propagated at the time of the last
Presidential election) of the slain
deer (see also the movie about Q. E.
II [as a deer caught in the
headlights] & Lady Diana Spencer as
played by Helen Mirren--the
unfortunate deer goes back to
Spenser's first sonnet in The Visions
of Petrarch). Gascoigne's putting the
images of her majesty into his text
seems to me connected to the
presentation of the crew of ten court
ladies as Muse-icians in the woodcut
for Spenser's Aprill, where the
central figure is the queen standing
with sceptre and guitar (which could
mean she wrote verse and was the Tenth
Muse [or Grace]). The frontispiece
for Gascoigne's Hemetes, with the
author kneeling before the queen
offering her his presentation copy,
was at least in my mind when I
selected the Schifanioia Palace's Mars
kneeling before Venus for the cover of
AnFQ (which is dedicated to Mrs. N.)
(and where the zodiacal sign on the
middle register in the fresco would be
the same one as overhead in Aprill's
woodcut). Such a picture seems
realized textually (and without any
woodcut), by Spenser, by the
dedication page for the FQ. All of
the three Venery pictures have the
huntsman kneeling and presenting
before the queen (once on a stage or
platform, once on the other side of
the picnic blanket), and the one with
the deer has the huntsman kneeling and
presenting something to the queen that
I suppose could possibly be the deer's
heart. Venus holds the martial
knight's heart in the fresco in
Ferrara.
-- Jim N.
On Sun, 26 Sep 2010 21:59:23 +0100
David Miller <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> I take Peter's point, though there's
>probably a more felicitous way to say
>that.
>
> But I also think that Gascoigne is a
>particularly marked presence for the
>later Elizabethans. Shakespeare's
>Benedick in Much Ado is practically
>quoting FJ at his worst (when he's
>high-fiving himself for having made
>Elinor's husband a cuckold and a
>sentence later is feeling cuckolded
>himself) when he talks about wearing
>his horns in a baldrick. And it does
>seem to me that the flurry of
>initials shared by G. and Spenser is
>more specific than a general
>propensity for fictionalized
>paratexts, though it falls within the
>purview.
>
> Gascoigne must have been a
>compelling if curiously hapless model
>for the later Elizabethans. Much of
>what they accomplished were
>achievements he attempted, and surely
>they were keenly aware of him as a
>prescient, not-quite-apt model for
>their aspirations.
>
> David Lee Miller
> Carolina Distinguished Professor of
>English and Comparative Literature
> Director, Center for Digital
>Humanities at South Carolina
> University of South Carolina
> Columbia, SC 29208
>
> (803) 777-4256
>FAX 777-9064
>
> please note new email address:
> [log in to unmask]
>
> Here lies an honest miller,
> And that is strange.
> --Essex gravestone, c. 1450
>
[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
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