The Faerie Queene Dedicatory Sonnets and the Poetics of Misreading

Abstract

Spenser singles out Lord Burghley as a disapproving misreader of his poetry in 1596, lashing out in turn against the senior minister of state in terms so strong and unflattering that it is difficult to attribute the poet’s motives to irony or indirection. Part I of this study reconsiders what Burghley actually misread and why. Thus far, it has argued that Spenser frames the Lord Treasurer as an interpreter in bad faith of the Book 3 conclusion to The Faerie Queene. If the 1596 Faerie Queene contains internal evidence of Burghley’s role in the cancellation of the poem’s celebration of married chastity, it is the 1590 edition of the poem that provides further contextual evidence of Burghley’s motives as Spenser’s antagonist. As we have seen, Spenser’s advertisement of the Earl of Oxford as a topical referent in 1590 holds pivotal ramifications for Burghley’s negative reception to The Faerie Queene, particularly its representation of chastity. To the scandalizing of the Cecil family, Oxford besmirched the chaste reputation of his own wife, Burghley’s daughter Anne, the consequences of which continued to be felt by the family into the 1590s. In outlining the injuries to Anne Cecil’s reputation and that of her family in the previous chapter, we have established the context in which any complimentary appeal to Oxford would have been viewed by Burghley and Robert Cecil.