SOURCE: Walker, Julia M. “Spenser's Elizabeth Portrait and the Fiction of Dynastic Epic.” Modern Philology 90, no. 2 (November 1992): 172-99.

In the following essay, Walker discusses Spenser's exposition of Queen Elizabeth I and her royal lineage through the epic narrative of The Faerie Queene.

Suggesting that the royal houses of Renaissance Europe were “consciously … intensifying the mystique of monarchy” because rulers were “assuming more and more of a messianic role in an age which had witnessed the breakdown of the universal church and the shattering of the old cosmology,” Roy Strong argues for the consequent importance of images of the monarch.¹ Recent work on the “Siena/Sieve” portrait and the “Rainbow” portrait has established in impressive detail just how true this intensification had become for court artists in the last years of Elizabeth's reign.² Strong's assertion, I will argue, also holds true for the work of Edmund Spenser as he...