Spenser’s Faerie Queene in Republican and Royalist Networks: Marvell, Sir Thomas Fairfax, and Milton

Abstract

As culminating voices in an intertextual network of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline writers from 1590-1660, Marvell, Sir Thomas Fairfax, and Milton appropriate Spenser’s ideologically malleable Faerie Queene for biting satirical purposes—conservative, moderate, or radical. In Upon Appleton House Marvell alludes to Spenser for indirect satire of his royalist patron Sir Thomas Fairfax. Fairfax borrows Spenser’s Braggadocchio to mock the Parliamentarian Sir Oliver Cromwell in his 1660 “Coronation” poem for Charles II. In Areopagitica, Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes anti-royalist Milton appropriates Guyon’s walk through the Cave of Mammon to advocate for freedom of the press and Spenser’s Braggadocchio, the giant aristocrat Orgoglio, and the populist Giant with the Scales to satirize tyranny, intemperate crowds, and aristocrats on fine horses.