"Certaine Signes" of "Faeryland": Spenser's Eden of Thanksgiving on the Defeat of the "Monstrous" "Dragon" of Albion's North

Abstract

"'Certaine Signes' of 'Faeryland': Spenser's Eden of Thanksgiving on the Defeat of the 'Monstrous' 'Dragon' of Albion's North." The work establishes England as the place where the unreformed lands of Eden are found and maps a journey from London to York. The Wandering Wood is explained as the expanse of Windsor Forest; the Houses of Pride and Holiness are discovered as allegories of Theobalds/Burghley House and Wormleighton in Warwickshire. Spenser contrasts the Puritan ideals of the Spencers with the pride of Elizabeth's secretary, Lord Burghley, whose claim to Trojan ancestry-the descendants of Aeneas-determines Spenser's employment of Virgilian devices for the book's underworld. Puritanism connects the image of a "new Hierusalem" with the Leicester movement and the city of Warwick. The arrival of the queen of Scots to the north of England in 1568 across the Solway Firth (into which the river Eden flows), which encouraged Catholic recusancy and rebellion and threatened England's constitution, is explained as Spenser's cause for writing The Faerie Queene. The consequence of Mary's arrival in England-the Rebellion of 1569 led by the Catholic earls in the north-is the pivot upon which the whole of The Faerie Queene 1 tums.