You're quite right, Penny, I should have been more precise. It was in
the second device at Woodstock, during the banqueting, that Elizabeth
was addressed by the Fairy Queen, a separate character:
"Her Maiesty thus in the middest of this mirth might espy the Queen of
the Fayry drawen with 6. children in a waggon of state: the Boies
brauely attired, & her selfe very costly apparelled, whose present shew
might wel argue her immortality, and presenting herself to the Queenes
Maiesty, she spake as followeth ..." &c. [J.W. Cunliffe, "The Queenes
Majesties Entertainment at Woodstocke", PMLA 26 (1911), 92-141 at p. 98]
The fact that the Fairy Queen directly addresses Elizabeth does indeed
suggest they are separate figures, so I should have made that
distinction. Mea culpa. Perhaps the most one can say is that Gascoigne
was associated with the earliest figure of the Fairy Queen performed
before Elizabeth, and for Spenser scholars there is much of interest in
the entertainment.
However, the Fairy Queen doesn't appear in the Hemetes manuscript.
Instead, Gascoigne invokes a different iconography for the Queen, when
his petrarchan persona casts Elizabeth as his "Lawra":
"Yf god wolde deigne to make, a Petrarkes heyre of me
the coomlyest Queene that ever was, my Lawra needes must be"
Gillian
On 28/09/2010 09:49, Penny M wrote:
> But Gillian, in the description of the same events by Anon in The Queenes
> Majesties entertainment at Woodstocke (pub. 1585), it is not so clear that
> Elizabeth is the Fairy Queen. There the FQ arrives and gives the real Queen
> a gift and some verses of sesta rima poetry which she declaims to the real
> Queen. So they are two individuals, not one. True, in Gascoigne's Hemetes,
> the lowly suitor refers his love suit to the FQ who is* the Queen. So yes,
> Gascoigne may have been the first to treat Elizabeth as the FQ, but not
> everyone in the Dudley circle was playing the same game, it seems.
>
> Penny
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> On Behalf Of Gillian Austen
> Sent: 27 September 2010 21:27
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: patron-client relation in Spenser/Gascoigne
>
> I hadn't seen this connection before, but agree completely: Spenser must
> have seen the Noble Arte and picked up on that imagery in Gascoigne's
> woodcuts. There are just so many threads linking Gascoigne and Spenser.
>
> Regarding Hemetes, as I understand it, the first time Elizabeth was
> represented as the Fairy Queen was there at Woodstock. If that's the
> case, it makes Gascoigne the first person to address Elizabeth as the
> Fairy Queen, in the device of Hemetes, the blind hermit who led the
> Queen into the bower while telling her the story of Loricus and Contarenus.
>
> Hemetes was performed by Gascoigne but probably written by Sir Henry
> Lee, as Frances Yates proposed. But opinions do vary: Henry Woudhuysen
> (in Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts) and now
> Gabriel Heaton in a new book (Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments
> from George Gascoigne to Ben Jonson) suggest it may have been one Robert
> Garrett, Reader in Rhetoric at St John's College, Oxford, who wrote it
> on Lee's behalf. Nonetheless, the Hemetes device associates Gascoigne
> very closely with the origins of that part of Elizabeth's iconography,
> and right at the beginning of Lee's development of the Accession Day
> Tilts.
> Gillian
>
> On 27/09/2010 00:20, James C. Nohrnberg wrote:
>> 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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