Reforming the Fox:Spenser's "Mother Hubberds Tale," the Beast Fables of Barnabe Riche, and Adam Loftus, Archbishop of Dublin Thomas Herron Gluttonie, malice, pride, and covetizeAnd lawlesnes raigning with riotize;Besides the infinite extortions,Done through the Foxes great oppressions,That the complaints thereof could not be tolde. —"Prosopopoia. Or Mother Hubberds Tale," 1309–13.1 Political allegory thrives amid state secrecy and endemic corruption. At least two early modern authors, Edmund Spenser and his fellow radical Protestant reformer in Ireland, Barnabe Riche, wrote risqué allegories in order to promote harsh tactics as a means of cultural change. Unlike Soviet dissidents, to take one modern example, who promoted open-minded and/or democratic principles in the face of totalitarianism, Riche and Spenser took the opposite tack, using their shadowy allegories to promote more militant and authoritarian policies in their adopted country. Riche's richly allegorical Adventures of Brusanus (1592) and Greenes Newes both from Heaven and Hell (1593) lament the abuse of power by local magistrates and condemn the waffling of weak administrators. Spenser's satire "Prosopopoia. Or Mother Hubberds Tale" (1591) demands that London aggressively put an end to the power of moderate albeit highly corrupt governors of the realm, including [End Page 336] those among the queen's own Protestant clerical and civil appointees in Ireland. Spenser's political allegories readily bleed into each other, and English readers who appreciate his satires need not understand their Irish topicality. Nonetheless, "Mother Hubberds Tale" and its host-volume, the aptly titled Complaints (1591), are shaped by Spenser's increased desire for a militant Protestant solution in a highly corrupt Ireland, riven by factional politics and dominated by corrupt administrations. The crafty and hypocritical Fox in the first and fourth parts of the "Tale," it is argued here, primarily satirizes the Archbishop of Dublin and Armagh and Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Adam Loftus, rather than the Lord Treasurer of England, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, as previously understood. This identification of the Fox corresponds with similar contemporary satire of Loftus by Riche. It is in the context of attempted radical reform in and outside of the Dublin Pale in the late 1580s that we should understand the beast fables of both authors. Spenser and Riche demonstrate hostility toward those who, rightly or wrongly, failed to share the reforming spirit of their militant Protestant faction in the worst of times. This is not to say that Spenser held no republican fantasies for the eventual transformation of his adopted land.2 Rather, as in book 5 of The Faerie Queene, short-term necessity demanded that he celebrate the fertile magnificence and strong arm of the prince and her deputies in allegorical guise. The authority he opposed was corrupt and local, its solution authoritarian. Spenser's "Mother Hubberds Tale," when read in the context of contemporary and similarly disguised complaints by Riche, laments the decline of a once-staunch Protestant reformer, Loftus, into spiritual and worldly corruption and suggests that martial, not common law, is among the solutions to Ireland's malady. I Politics Spenser approached his colonial situation as administrator and planter with a starkly alternating pessimism and optimism based on experience, [End Page 337] a conviction that "evil" inhabited the world, and belief, a prophetic hope that it might one day be overthrown. On the optimistic side, Spenser's Faerie Queene makes his position in Ireland resonate with a universal central significance as a land to be labored over, protected, and made fertile by the great sun-goddess Queen Elizabeth I.3 Simultaneously, in what appears as a dynamic tension in his artistic vision, Spenser complains regularly about the world and Ireland in particular, comparing it often to an obscure and lawless wilderness ruled by petty tyrants. He does this in order to meditate on the state of the exiled Christian soul in a hostile or decentered world of confusing signs. Spenser's fascination with lapsed souls and corrupt civilization has as much to do with his fixation on inner states of savagery and Christian salvation as on actual savage conditions in the world, and we can appreciate how the stereotypical colonial images in his poetry, such as those describing the...