Impersonating Authority: Animals and the Anglo-Irish Social Order in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui and Edmund Spenser’s Mother Hubberds Tale

Abstract

In his political satire Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberds Tale (1591), a poem quoted at some length in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui (1809), Edmund Spenser has a Fox and an Ape impersonate shepherds, clergy, courtiers, and ultimately a monarch in order to earn a free and easy living in early modern England. This parody of Renaissance self-fashioning targets Elizabethan courtly power-brokers such as William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who is regularly identified as the Fox in this tale.2 Moreover, as Thomas Herron has argued, the poem should be read in the Irish colonial context of Spenser’s career, an interpretation that aligns the Fox with Adam Loftus, Archbishop of Dublin, as much as with Burghley.3 As a beast-fable, Mother Hubberds Tale delves into matters of representation, especially of court life, on animal terms, in the well-known continental tradition of Renard the Fox.4 Mother Hubberds Tale calls into question the distinction between human and nonhuman animals, particularly in terms of how social beings adapt to cultural structures. Spenser, for example, directs his audience’s attention to the fact that the two deceivers learn how to pass themselves off as clergy from a corrupt Anglican priest, and they themselves are given a benefice under the episcopacy.5