1. "England's Forgotten Worthies," 446. For Froude, the relation between the voyagers and the literature is causal in a surprisingly direct way. "We wonder at the grandeur, the moral majesty of some of Shakespeare's characters," writes Froude, but in fact "the men whom he draws were such men as he saw and knew" (445)—preeminently, Froude's essay implies, "the Elizabethan navigators," who were not merely heroic but "full for the most part with large kindness, wisdom, gentleness, and beauty"(462).

2. Elizabethan Conquest , 33; for more on the policy, see 32-34, 48-50, 62-63, 105, and 113. The anonymous writer of "Of the Voyage for Guiana" similarly recommends that the English have "the Inga of Manoa [i.e., of El Dorado] by the consent of his Lords and Casiques surrender the ensigns of his Empire to her Majesty to be returned to him again to be holden in chief of the Crown of England" (Raleigh, Discoverie , 146).

3. Throughout this study, I use the terms savage and Indian , rather than Native American or Amerindian, in order to emphasize that I am describing English conceptions of Native Americans, not Native Americans as they were in fact.

4. Pilgrimes 18:497-98; quoted in Smith, Works 1:237 n. 9. In every text I cite, excluding titles and Spenser's poetry, I have modernized spelling (and silently corrected obvious typographical errors). Even in the case of titles and Spenser, I have changed i to j and u to v .

5. Pilgrimes 18:494; quoted in Smith, Works 1:234 n. 2. For another angry reference by Smith to the coronation, see 2:189.

In a broadside publicizing the coronation, the Virginia Company ("Considering . . .," 1609) declares that Powhatan "hath granted Freedom of Trade and Commerce to our English people," "witnessing the same by accepting a Copper Crown presented unto him, in the name of King James , and set upon his head by Captain Newport. " Cf. True Declaration , 11. The specification that the crown was copper would seem to indicate that the company believed the coronation was itself a sophisticatedly trifling action. As later pronouncements from the company show, it came still closer to Smith's position; cf., e.g., the references to the Indians "glutted with our trifles" in Barbour, Jamestown Voyages 2:266 and True Declaration , 40.

6. Hakluyt, "Discourse," 263; for an introduction to the "black legend" of Spanish atrocities in the New World, see Maltby, Black Legend .

7. Writing for the Virginia Company after the massacre, Edward Waterhouse (1622) explicitly recommends the adoption of Spanish colonial methods, which include the use of "Mastiffs to tear" the Indians (Declaration , 24). In his essay "Of Plantations" (1625), also published after the massacre, Bacon too rejects trifling, but only because he believes it is not benign enough: he advises that "if you Plant , where Savages are, do not only entertain them with Trifles, and Gingles; But use them justly, and graciously, with sufficient Guard nevertheless" (Essayes , 108).

8. Strachey, Historie , 26; cf. Smith, Works 3:276.

9. Quoted in Strathmann, "Raleigh," 265; cf. Strachey, Historie , 93.

10. For an exceptional instance of skepticism regarding the standard explanations for the Renaissance, see the first chapter of C. S. Lewis's English Literature in the Sixteenth Century .

11. From the prayer concluding the epistle to the reader in the Geneva Bible (***4v). Unless otherwise noted, I quote the Geneva version throughout.

12. Quoted in Masson, Drummond , 120, cited (though misascribed) in Sheavyn, Literary Profession , 157-58; my emphasis.

13. Parker, Books , 94; for the central role in Tudor colonial advocacy of what Parker calls a "literary-nationalist tradition" (82), see Parker, passim.

14. Sidney and Puttenham are drawing on Horace in De Arte Poetica , 11. 391-401; for other Tudor references to this allegory in a literary-critical context, see Smith, Elizabethan 1:74, 231, 234, and 297.

15. For the literary-theoretical topos of Orphic power turned into a colonialist topos, see, e.g., Parmenius, De Navigatione , 178-92; Raleigh, "Observations," 33-34 (which expands Botero, Cities , 2); Barbour, Jamestown Voyages 1:233; and Lescarbot, Nova Francia , 186. George Chapman (1596) expects to see "a world of Savages fall tame" before Raleigh's adventurers in Guiana "as if each man were an Orpheus " ("De Guiana," 11. 165-66).

16. Fulke Greville (c. 1604-1614) claims that Sidney became interested in another rivalry, between little England and equally little Holland: "they without any native commodities (art and diligence excepted) making themselves masters of wealth in all nations; we, again, . . . exporting our substantial riches to import a superfluous mass of trifles" (Dedication , 84). But the belief that Holland was using littleness rather than being used by it gained currency primarily with the Jacobeans, beginning, e.g., with Greville's "Treatise of Monarchy," 414-16. For a short bibliography of Jacobean works on Holland as a mercantile and possibly colonial power, see Shammas, "English Commercial Development," 167 and 172.

17. Warner also mentions Philip's impresa here; for other invidious references to it, see Lea, Answer , 25 and Keeler, Voyage , 245. Hakluyt is at times less optimistic than Warner about the limitations of Spanish gold: in his "Discourse" he says that Martyr "truly prognosticated" when he declared to the young Charles V that from America "shall instruments be prepared for you whereby all the world shall be under your obeisance" (244-45, quoting Eden, Decades , 64). Hakluyt later quotes Oviedo: "God hath given you these Indies . . . to the intent that your Majesty should be the universal and only monarch of the world" (311-12). The most famous expression of this belief appears in Ariosto (1532), who moves from an account of the discovery of America to an apocalyptic prediction concerning Charles:

God means to grant him all this earthly Isle,
And under this wise Prince his dear anointed,
One shepherd and one flock he hath appointed.
                                                 ( Orlando Furioso  15.22-26;
                                               trans. Harington 15.14-18)

18. For a fine recent discussion of this old chestnut about Elizabeth, see Montrose, "Shaping Fantasies."

19. See Bacon, Works 8:387-88, for the critical debate concerning the relation of the entertainment to Raleigh. The inability of scholars to decide whether the entertainment supports or derides Raleigh reflects my point.

20. Chamberlain, Letters , 1:64-65; for Spenser matched with Virgil in his own lifetime, see, e.g., Wells, Spenser Allusions , 7, 29, 36, 41, 60, and 63.

21. For the possibility of the pun, see Richard Stanyhurst in his "Description of Ireland" (1577) on a community within the English Pale: "But Fingall especially from time to time hath been so addicted to all the points of husbandry, as that they are nicknamed by their neighbors, for their continual drudgery, Collonnes, of the Latin word Coloni, whereunto the clipt English word clown seemeth to be answerable" (4). Cf. Jonson's Tale of a Tub (acted 1633) 1.3.30-47; the editors' note (Jonson 9:280); and a Jamestown figure, George Percy, who spells colony "Colline" ("Trewe Relacyon," 267). Colin Clout is, of course, not even a husbandman: his mere association with coloni-alism will become a feature of the red-cross knight's identity, as I show in chapter 3.

1. Early in the century, two knighted Shakespeareans—Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Henry Lee—made the discovery of America seem fundamental to England's literary renaissance. Later writers such as Robert Ralston Cawley, Howard Mumford Jones, and Frank Kermode continued to examine the New World from a literary perspective (for an extensive survey of literary allusions to America during the English Renaissance, see Cawley, Unpathed Waters , 275-395), but the topic of America's influence on Renaissance literature was never significantly reevaluated, nor did it regain the general critical attention of Renaissance scholars, until the publication in the 1970s of Stephen Greenblatt's book on Raleigh, his first essay on The Tempest , and the articles now composing Renaissance Self-Fashioning . Though far less well disposed to Tudor expansionism than his predecessors, Greenblatt has not made clear whether his analyses of discursive or epistemic continuities between that expansionism and English literature support or subvert the strong view of American influence that Raleigh and Lee helped make commonplace. For the New World work of all these writers, see my bibliography (I am indebted to Sara Norman for the reference to Lee's Great Englishmen ). It is an interesting question why literary critics should for so long have lost interest in examining the New World more thoroughly—no doubt the demise of an overt imperialism and the rise of the New Criticism were major factors—but I will not pursue that question in this book.

Subsequent to Greenblatt, the most notable work on the New World by literary critics has been Todorov's Conquest of America (which basically elaborates Greenblatt's claim about the "improvisational" superiority of the European over the Indian); Mullaney's two articles "Strange Things" (1983) and "Brothers and Others" (1987); and Hulme's Colonial Encounters (1986). None of these writers directly addresses the question of influence.

2. Old World , 8; see Old World , passim, and also Elliott, "Renaissance."

3. The year after Columbus's voyage saw at least twelve European editions of his letter: at Barcelona (one), Rome (three), Antwerp (one), Basel (one), Paris (three), plus three editions of Dati's Italian versification (one at Rome, two at Florence); see Sanz, Bibliotheca , 18- 21.

The Antwerp book is entitled Of the Newe Landes . Eden refers to "a sheet of printed paper, (more worthy so to be called than a book) entitled of the new found lands" that had "chanced of late to come to my hands" (Treatyse , 5); if this tract is something other than the Antwerp volume, it has not survived.

4. Cortés's own extremely popular letters fared no better than Columbus's in England; see Cortés, Letters , lx-lxvii.

5. See, e.g., Quinn and Ryan, England's Sea Empire , 19, and 12-18 for a bibliography of writings on "Commerce and Colonialism."

6. A later translator of the Narrenschiff , Henry Watson, also adds America to the same portion of his Shyppe (1517); and the Scottish poet William Dunbar invokes "the new found Isle" in the similarly sarcastic context of his poem "Of the Waraldis Instabilitie" (before 1513). For quotations, see Quinn, New American World 1:130-31.

Cf. also the fragment of a morality play, Old Christmas or Good Order (1533), in which Riot and Gluttony are banished from England:

7. For Utopia called a "new world," see U, 106/7 and 196/97; twice the prefatory letters also describe Utopia as in the new world (14/15, 42/43).

8. Eden in 1555 seems to consider the term colony unfamiliar enough to require glossing; e.g., "their new colony or habitation" (Decades , 110). As Quinn notes ("Renaissance Influences," 77), Ralph Robinson in his translation of Utopia (1551) eschews the term altogether, preferring instead the simpler "foreign towns" (70).

9. It is well known that, in New Spain in the 1530s, Vasco de Quiroga tried to set up Indian communities patterned after Utopia; see Zavala, "Sir Thomas More."

10. In the dedicatory letter to his tract on the existence of a northwest passage, A Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia (1576), Sir Humphrey Gilbert, for example, begins by differentiating his project from More's: "Sir, you might justly have charged me with an unsettled head if I had at any time taken in hand, to discover Utopia, or any country feigned by imagination: But Cataia is none such" (Quinn, Gilbert , 1:134). The True Declaration (1610) answers those critics who think reports about Virginia "to be but Utopian, and legendary fables" (33)—critics like Jonson, Chapman, and Marston in their Eastward Ho! (1605):

Why, man, all their dripping-pans and their chamber-pots are pure gold; and all the chains with which they chain up their streets are massy gold; all the prisoners they take are fettered in gold; and for rubies and diamonds, they go forth on holidays and gather 'em by the seashore to hang on their children's coats, and stick in their caps, as commonly as our children wear saffron-gilt brooches, and groats with holes in 'em. (3.3.25-32; cf. U, 152/53)

Though Lawrence Keymis (1596) distinguishes the Guiana project from "hope of a new found Utopia" (Second Voyage , 445), he claims that Columbus showed how ventures sounding merely Utopian can nevertheless bear inestimable fruit.

11. See Surtz, "St. Thomas More"; appropriately, More never mentions so specific a reason for his embassy.

12. Cf. Richard Sylvester, "Si Hythlodaeo Credimus," which proposes that the apparent standoff in book 1 between the two main debaters, More and Hythloday, and then between the debate itself and Hythloday's lengthy exposition of Utopian policies in the second book, represents More's attempt to avoid dogmatism. For Sylvester, divisiveness in Utopia is less an expression of ambivalence on More's part than "a plea for both engagement and detachment, both dialogue and monologue, in matters that concern the best state of a commonwealth" (301). Unfortunately, what makes this via media difficult to accept as such is the fact that flexibility represents no compromise between the debaters but rather More's position in the debate right from the start.

13. A marginal note also declares that "Today the Desire for Expansion is the Curse of All Commonwealths" (U, 112/13).

14. For More's financial problems resulting from his embassies to Bruges and Calais, see Marius, Thomas More , 190-91, 198.

15. Erasmus's prefatory letter to Utopia stresses both More's sedentar-iness and its disruption by the embassy recorded in Utopia : "He has never left his native England except twice when serving his king on an embassy in Flanders" (U , 2/3). For evidence that Erasmus exaggerates, see U , 268, and Marius, Thomas More , 51-52.

16. Erasmus tells von Hutten that More wrote the second book of Utopia , the discourse on Utopia, "when at leisure" (Correspondence 7:24), and J. H. Hexter argues that this leisure time could only have been supplied by More's stalled embassy (U , xv-xvii). (Hexter goes on to make even more specific claims about the timetable of Utopia's composition, though on the basis of very tenuous evidence that discounts the possibility of More's rewriting; see xvii-xxiii.)

Not coincidentally, it would seem, the two other early Tudor works that raise the issue of English enterprises in America—Rastell's Four Elements and Robert Thorne's "Declaration of the Indies," both of which I examine—also seem to have been composed outside England. For indications that Rastell wrote his interlude in Ireland, see Reed, Early Tudor Drama , 202-3; Thorne, an English merchant resident in Spain, appears to have transmitted his letter to Henry VIII by way of Sir Edward Lee, England's ambassador to Spain; see Hakluyt, Divers Voyages , 33.

17. Cf. Cabot's son Sebastian, who worked for both England and Spain, sometimes concomitantly, and, as the Spanish ambassador to England in 1550 says, "tried to make his profit out of both sides" (quoted in Quinn, England , 153; see 131-59).

18. Of course, Cabot's disappearance adds a further complication to the idea of rootlessness: as Polydore Vergil says, Cabot "is believed to have found the new lands nowhere but on the very bottom of the ocean" (quoted in Williamson, Cabot Voyages , 225).

19. For an account of Thorne and the English merchant community resident in Spain, see Connell-Smith, Forerunners .

20. Nevertheless, Thorne is one of the few Renaissance writers to allow that a savage disregard for gold and love of "trifles" make sense: both novelty and usefulness, Thorne argues, recommend a knife or nail over precious metal ("Declaration," 34).

21. More's Polylerites seem meant to highlight by contrast this ambiguous apartness of islands: "They are far from the sea, almost ringed round by mountains, and satisfied with the products of their own land, which is in no way infertile. In consequence they rarely pay visits to other countries or receive them" (U , 74/75). Yet not even this landlocked island can escape the rest of the world, for "it pays an annual tribute to the Persian padishah."

22. In fact, Sir Thomas Smith mistakenly associates Utopia with isola-tionism: "Well a man may change the name of things, but the value he cannot [change] in any wise to endure for any space, except we were in such a country as Utopia was imagined to be that had no traffic with any other outward country" (Discourse , 105).

23. The Elizabethans credited John Twyne with this theory (see Ferguson, John Twyne , 30-32), though More's joke would seem to suggest that it had been current earlier than Twyne. Cf. Richard Verstegan (1605), who, while expounding the view that England was once joined to the Continent (Restitution , 95-112), declares in a marginal note, "Sir Thomas More in his Utopia seemeth so to understand of our country of England " (96-97; cited in Kennedy, "Additional References," 22-23).

24. Apparently composed by either Erasmus or Giles; see U, 280-81.

25. Actually, the poem says that Utopia received its name because it was infrequentiam. The Yale editors comment: "The allusion must be to the rare visits of foreigners to the island . . . —so rare that people wondered whether it actually existed anywhere" (U , 279). But the Utopian chronicles mention only one classical visit, a shipwreck, of which no report ever reached the Old World: "Some Romans and Egyptians were cast on shore and remained on the island without ever leaving it" (U , 108/9).

Samuel Daniel (1612) notes that before the Roman conquest of Britain, "as it lay secluded out of the way, so it seemed out of the knowledge of the world" (Works 4:86).

26. This is the project that Camden (1586) says Ortelius suggested and Camden undertook in Britannia ("To the Reader," 4), which begins with a disquisition on Britain as another world. Parker notes that the discovery of America also apparently sparked an increased interest in classical geographies—that is, in geographies that do not mention America (Books , 134-35).

27. In his prefatory letter William Bude imagines Utopia "one of the Fortunate Isles, perhaps close to the Elysian Fields" (U , 12/13), which is again a classical conception of England: see Bennett, "Britain," 117-24.

28. Cf., e.g., Johnson, Nova Britannia , 14; Strachey, Historie , 6; and the Virginia Company's broadside "Declaration." Arthur Ferguson claims that John Twyne in his De Rebus Albionicis (written c. 1530s) "was probably the first English scholar to make this sort of connection" ("John Twyne," 34-35). The earliest instance that I have found of England's former barbarity becoming a colonial incitement is in a letter of Sir Thomas Smith (1572) concerning the colonization of Ireland: "This country of England, once as uncivil as Ireland now is, was by colonies of the Romans brought to understand the laws and orders of th'ancient orders [sic ]" (quoted in Canny, Elizabethan Conquest , 129). For Spenser's version of this appeal, see the third part of my chapter 3.

29. The only reference in Utopia to England as an island occurs here, when that island is being imagined a wasteland.

30. By 1609 William Symonds can make this relation between enclosures and colonization explicit: thanks to enclosures, "the true laboring husbandman . . . can hardly scape the statute of rogues and vagrants" (Virginia , 20), and therefore would be better off in America. Interestingly, the wool trade in these cases does not block consideration of America but rather provokes it.

31. See Roper, Life , 207, and Marius, Thomas More , 210.

32. See Muir, Life and Letters , 44-45. Wyatt is reported to have complained to the Spanish, "Perhaps by not mentioning my master in the treaty the object was to show that he is not a Christian king?" (quoted in Muir, Life and Letters , 63).

33. For Bonner and his accusations, see Muir, Life and Letters , 63-69. Cromwell apparently suppressed this attack on his favorite, but after Cromwell's fall in 1541, Bonner's letter was unearthed and Wyatt was arrested. The ex-ambassador wrote a declaration (178-84) and speech (187-209) in his defense—"arse" is his more colorful version of the "tail" Bonner reported but he seems never to have stood trial.

34. At the time the Marquis of Exeter and Lord Montague were arrested, Wyatt's presumed mistress Elizabeth Darrell was questioned about Wyatt (Muir, Life and Letters , 82-85). In a letter to Cromwell from Spain (28 November 1538), Wyatt remarks: "I have had it told me by some here of reputation that peradventure I was had in suspect both with the king and you, as they said it was told them." He adds rather unconvincingly, "I take it light" (86).

35. "To wish and want and not obtain," 1. 6; cf. "Most wretched heart," 1. 27 and "Patience, though I have not," 1. 6.

36. For instance, Wyatt devotes four lines in the canzone (17-20) to describing the sun's journey—only in these two poems does he use the word westward ; his beloved is "absent wealth" (58); her transcendently golden hair "doth surmount Apollo's pride" (69); her eyes emit "lively streams" (70); Wyatt longs for "the resting place of love" (93); and the final word in each poem expresses Wyatt's desire to "flee."

37. Certainly nothing divided Wyatt from his erotic desires so extravagantly as Henry. Whether or not Wyatt loved Anne Boleyn, he suffered imprisonment and nearly death for the possibility. Besides Henry's many other interests, he seems also to have courted Wyatt's wife, yet a condition of Wyatt's release from his second, near-fatal imprisonment was that he return to the wife he loathed. Henry commanded that if Wyatt should "not lead a conjugal life with her, or should he be found to keep up adulterous relations with one or two other ladies that he has since loved, he is to suffer pain of death and confiscation of property" (Muir, Life and Letters , 13-36, 212, 209). These facts add depth to Joost Daalder's explanation about the "other will" in the poem that Wyatt says fills him with "deep despair" (88): Wyatt, Daalder claims, "probably refers to the King's will that Wyatt was to stay in Spain" (Wyatt, Collected Poems , 90). Yet, as I have noted, Wyatt always represents his actions as unchosen, the will that chooses as relentlessly other. He is ever restless, as Surrey's epitaph maintains, because he cannot have his will.

Mason suggests a simpler reason for the beloved's replacement in the Tagus poem: Wyatt's "loyalty and patriotism" may be merely "a mask for his love for his mistress" (Wyatt , 222). But the question remains: why would Wyatt feel the need for such a mask?

38. Though less radically than Wyatt, Michael Drayton also describes the Thames's crescent shape as an image of erotic fulfillment and yet constraint: according to Drayton, Brute decides to place his city

        where fair  Thames  his course into a Crescent casts
(That, forced by his tides, as still by her he hasts,
He might his surging waves into her bosom send)
Because too far in length, his Town should not extend.
                                                            ( Poly-Olbion  16.325-28)

39. See McCann, English Discovery , 173-75.

40. Cited in Elliot, Old World , 73, from whom I borrow the last translation. What prevents westward-traveling empire from next leaving Spain and heading for America is, Perez de Oliva maintains, the sea.

41. "Item, to remember Sebastian Cabot, he hath here but three hundred ducats a year, and he is desirous if he might not serve the king, at least to see him as his old master. And I think therein. And that I may have answer in this" (Muir, Life and Letters , 81).

42. Cf. the epitaph of Pico della Mirandola (died 1494): "Iohannes jacet hic Mirandula, caetera norunt / Et Tagus, & Ganges, forsan & antipodes " ("Here lies Mirandula, Tagus the rest doth know, / And Ganges , and perhaps th'Antipodes also," trans. Hakewill, Apology , 217)—that is, Pico's fame extends from west to east and possibly south.

The difference between England and a Continental nation as ends of the earth is explained by John Speed (1611): "Virgil surely (of all Poets the most learned) when describing the Shield which Vulcan forged (in Virgil's brain) for Aeneas , he calls the Morini (people about Calais) the outmost men , doth only mean that they were Westward, the furthest Inhabitants upon the Continent, signifying withal that Britain as being an Island, lay out of the world" (Theatre, 1 ). Such a distinction does not prevent competition: Perez de Oliva, for example, asserts that Homer thought Cordoba and its environs, not otherworldly England, "the Elysian fields" (Obras , 132r).

43. For this theory of gold's origins as it crops up in early Tudor travel literature, see McCann, English Discovery , 163-67.

44. Cf. the far more straightforward celebrations of London as "Troy-novant" by William Dunbar (1501) and Robert Fabyan (1516) (quoted in Manley, London , 52-57), not to mention the more straightforward dismissal of the Tagus in Sylvester's paean (1605) to England ("The Colonies," 11. 463-64, in Bartas ).

45. This port is, of course, Lisbon—the capital of Portugal, not Spain. But Wyatt appears to ignore this distinction, first by heading his poem "In Spain," and second by addressing the poem to the river itself, which rises in Spain. Even if Wyatt does imagine the Tagus flowing toward both the Spanish and the Portuguese empires in America, however, my point remains unchanged: he still has to picture an imperial expansiveness from which England is absent.

46. Tatlock does note the prominence of woods in Brutus's story, but ascribes it to the influence of the hunt-loving Norman kings on Geoffrey (Legendary , 358-59).

47. Brutus's counterpoint to Aeneas supports the allegorical speculation that these giants represent distorted, vestigial images of the old "heroes" who lost Troy: Italy, Aeneas's final destination, is also the land of his ancestors (Aeneid , 3.167-68).

48. Leland, Assertio . For Polydore considered a Roman, see Millican, Spenser , 31-32; John Bale (1549) in another context complains that "for so little esteeming our true Antiquities, the proud Italians have always hold us for a barbarous nation" (quoted in Millican, Spenser , 33).

The best appraisal of the controversy remains Kendrick's, in British Antiquity ; see particularly 34-44 and 78-98.

49. Polydore Vergil says of Geoffrey that he "hath extolled them [the British] above the nobleness of Romans and Macedonians, enhancing them with most impudent lying" (English History , 29). Cf. John Twyne (c. 1530-50), who calls Geoffrey "that Homer, or father of lies" (ille Homerus, ac mendaciorum pater ) (De Rebus Albionicis , 13).

50. Cf. Polydore Vergil, English History , 31-32 and Twyne, De Rebus Albionicis , 16.

51. Rastell suggests this interpretation when he refuses to deny or affirm the Brutus story. His interest in Brutus is, he claims, less historical than moral: he wants to preserve the "many notable examples" of good and bad princes, God's wrath, and so forth, that Brutus's story contains (A1v).

52. For relevant documents, see Quinn, New American World 1:161-68.

53. William Bradford shows how little difference a century of contact with the Indians could make to this view of America as empty: "The place they had thoughts on was some of those vast and unpeopled countries of America, which are fruitful and fit for habitation, being devoid of all civil inhabitants, where there are only savage and brutish men which range up and down, little otherwise than the wild beasts of the same" (Plymouth , 25).

54. For primary documents on Hore's voyage, see PN 8:3-7 and Quinn, New American World 1:209-14; for a detailed commentary, see Quinn, England , 182-89; for Rastell's imprisonment, see Rastell, Four Elements , 10.

55. Stephen Gosson (1582) associates this kind of story with romance, and mocks the trifling proof of identity as it appears in plays: "Sometime you shall see nothing but the adventures of an amorous knight, passing from country to country for the love of his lady, encountering many a terrible monster made of brown paper, & at his return, is so wonderfully changed, that he can not be known but by some posy in his tablet, or by a broken ring, or a handkerchief, or a piece of cockle shell" (Playes , 161).

56. Confessio Amantis 7.746-54; cited in Zacher, Curiosity , 142. Cf. Sir John Mandeville, who translates the moon's lack of substance into lightness and therefore speed:

we been in the seventh climate that is of the moon, and the moon is of lightly moving and the moon is planet of way . And for that skill it giveth us will of kind for to move lightly and for to go diverse ways and to seeken strange things and other diversities of the world, for the moon environeth the earth more hastily than any other planet. (Travels , 119-20)

Caxton (1490) cites the moon's special relation to England in order to explain why England is so linguistically divisive: "For we english men / been born under the domination of the moon. which is never steadfast / but ever wavering / waxing one season / and waneth & discreaseth another season / And that common english that is spoken in one shire varieth from another" (Prologues and Epilogues , 108; cited in Zacher, Curiosity , 142).

57. According to the highly influential Sphere of Sacrobosco, for instance, the habitable world is divided into seven climes; beyond the seventh "there may be a number of islands and human habitations, yet whatever there is, since living conditions are bad, is not reckoned a clime" (Thorndike, Sphere , 112/140). A thirteenth-century English commentator, Robert Anglicus, explains: "The last clime ends. . . where the altitude is 50½ degrees, and this is hardly across the English channel, so that almost all England is outside a clime" (ibid., 187/236). For the history of the theory of climes, see 16-18 n. 88.

58. Cf. George Best (1578) on the habitability of the north above the forty-eighth parallel: "How then can such men define upon other Regions very far without that Parallel, where they were inhabited or not, seeing that in so near a place they so grossly mistook the matter" (True Discourse , 39-40). Anglicus antidpates this line of argument when he asserts that the mistake of past authorities about England disqualifies them from ruling on the habitability of the equatorial regions (Thomdike, Sphere , 192/241).

59. Cf. Thorne, who in a postscript warns the English ambassador to Spain that "to move" Thorne's northwest project "amongst wise men it should be had in derision. And, therefore, to none I would have written nor spoken of such things but to your Lordship, to whom boldly ! commit in this all my foolish fantasy as to my self" ("Declaration," 53).

60. Nor, on the other hand, does he mention such quotidian reasons for his return to England as politics, money, fear, the weather, or simple homesickness: see Muir, Life and Letters , 54-55, 87. (Wyatt did indeed abhor the Spanish climate. The heat blocked any literary exercise especially.

In a letter to Cromwell, Wyatt complains: "I have such a pain in my head that it grieveth me to write or read. This town of Toledo is dangerous for the head" [Muir, Life and Letters , 91]. Later chapters will return to the issue of climate in English poetry and imperialism.)

61. It is, again, the company of learned men that enables More the ambassador to forget home (cf. Erasmus, Correspondence 3:235-36). In discussing the reception of Utopia , More concludes that the favorable opinion of Erasmus "will be more than enough for my judgment. We are 'together, you and I, a crowd'; that is my feeling, and I think I could live happily with you in any wilderness [solitudine ]" (Erasmus, Correspondence 4:116-17, Opus Epistolarium 2:372)—that is, in the wilderness of learning exemplified for More by his Nowhere.

But the oppositions aligned with relative clarity here grow too complicated elsewhere for such easy systernization. After all, service, the opposite of travel, is what takes More away from home, not only on embassies but in England. According to More's son-in-law and biographer, William Roper, Henry VIII so enjoyed More's company at supper that More "could not once in a month get leave to go home to his wife and children" (Life , 202) (and, in the end, Henry imprisoned and then beheaded him). But then More can imagine home itself as separating him from his true home in heaven (cf. 242, 253), a belief manifested in "the New Building" More constructs "a good distance from his mansion house" so that he may frequently "sequester himself from worldly company" (211). What these shifting oppositions show is that More under any circumstance figures himself distracted. This predilection appears more starkly in Roper's More as a characteristic figure of speech that associates the realization of More's desires with his own injury or demise: for example, "Now would to our Lord, son Roper, upon condition that three things were well established in Christendom [viz., universal peace, uniformity of religion, and "a good conclusion" to Henry's marriage problems], I were put in a sack and here presently cast into the Thames" (210; cf. 223, 224, 227, 245).

62. Giles follows Erasmus's lead, calling More "a man distracted [distractus ] by a mass of public business and domestic affairs" and yet also "of superhuman and almost divine genius" (U, 22/23); while Desmarais later marvels at More "among the British at the ends of the earth . . .. much distracted [distractus ] by public and domestic affairs" (26/27). Cf. Robert Whittington (1519) on the marvel of More as homebound author: "Ulysses' long voyages brought him the wisdom / More in Utopia managed to tell" (quoted in Sullivan, Supplement , 120).

63. Polemicists fantasize the exile of opponents to Utopia throughout the English Renaissance: for example, Foxe (1570) suggests that malcontents "which neither live here like Angels, nor yet remember themselves to be but men amongest men, are to be sent ad republicam Platonis , or to M. More's Utopia , either there to live with themselves, or else where as none may live to offend them" (quoted in Wooden, "Unnoticed," 91; cf. Sullivan, Supplement , 15 and 102). John Grange (1577) tells his coy mistress that "sith you think your beauty such, as none enjoys the like: / To Plato's City, fairies' land, or to Utopia wenne" (Golden , E1v; cf. Gibson, Bibliography , 403, and Sullivan, Supplement , 98).

64. Erasmus, Correspondence 4:163-64, Opus Epistolarium 2:414. For nugis , cf. U, 152/53.

65. Cf. More's prefatory letter to the second edition of Utopia (1517), in which he jokes with Giles about a critic who has detected "some rather absurd elements" in the book: "Why should he be so minded as if there were nothing absurd elswhere in the world?" (U, 248/49).

66. Cf. Giles, who says in his prefatory letter that, reading More, "I am as affected as if I were sometimes actually living in Utopia itself" (U, 22/23).

67. In his prefatory letter William Bude imagines Utopia a "Hagnopolis," or Holy City, detached from the earth but not in heaven either, "leading a kind of heavenly life which is below the level of heaven but above the rabble of this known world" who engage in "empty" [inanibus ] pursuits (U, 12/13).

68. For a measured assessment of More as politician, see Elton, "Thomas More."

69. The Scourge of Villanie , satire 10, 11. 23, 21.

70. Cf. Richard Rich on his versified Newes From Virginia (1610): "I must confess, that had I not debarred my self of that large scope which to the writing of prose is allowed, I should have much eased my self, and given thee better content" (A3v).

71. Translated by Marlowe. For evidence of Wyatt's familiarity with the Arnores , see Nelson, "Note." John Skelton in Phyllyp Sparowe seems to have Ovid in mind when he hopes for Apollo's grace, "To whom be the laud ascribed / That my pen hath enbibed / With the aureat drops, / As verily my hope is, / Of Thagus, that golden flood, / That passeth all earthly good" (871-76). Poetry is equal rather than superior to the Tagus here because Skelton means his praise of Jane Scrope to be worldly: "And as that flood doth pass / All floods that ever was / With his golden sands, / . . . / Right so she doth exceed / All other of whom we read, / Whose fame by me shall spread / Into Perce and Mede, / From Briton's Albion / To the tower of Babylon" (877-79, 883-88).

72. Tottel's (1557) and Lewis's (1954) remarks are conveniently reproduced in Thomson, Critical Heritage , 32 and 180, respectively; Tottel actually speaks of "the weightiness of the deep-witted Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder's verse." Thomas Warton (1781) refers to the poem's "great simplicity and propriety, together with a strain of poetic allusion" (quoted in Critical Heritage , 45); George Nott (1815) allows that the lines "prove Wyatt's mind to have been well stored with reading. But what constitutes their chief merit is a certain air of truth which shows them to have been the spontaneous effusion of feeling" (quoted in Critical Heritage , 58). Most recently, Mason says that "we are drawn into mysterious depths of feeling by the body of the poem" (Wyatt , 221).

73. In imagining the perfect courtier, one of Castiglione's interlocutors says he finds

one rule that is most general, which . . . taketh place in all things belonging to a man in word or deed, above all other. And that is to eschew as much as a man may, and as a sharp and dangerous rock, too much curiousness, and (to speak a new word) to use in every thing a certain disgracing [sprezzatura ] to cover art withal, and seem whatsoever he doth and saith, to do it without pain, and (as it were) not minding it. (Courtier , 45-46)

For a useful account of sprezzatura in Castiglione, see Rebhorn, Courtly , 33ff.

74. The gainwardness of Wyatt's journey even suggests a parallel between himself and a heavenly body: for the view that the lesser astronomical spheres moved eastwardly, a direction "repugnant" to the westward-moving first heavenly sphere, see Wyatt's very obscure poem "When Dido feasted" and the commentary by Rebholz (Complete Poems , 490-94). Lucan anticipates Wyatt in transforming this heavenly contrariety into pathos, though he attributes that pathos to "the sorrowing Sun. . . driving his steeds harder than ever against the revolution of the sky, and urging his course backwards, though the heavens whirled him on" (7.2-3).

In fact, contrariety yields sublimity even in the preeminently worldly case of the Tagus, whose westward-moving water "turns up" the resisting gold.

75. Here too, however, Sir Henry anticipates his son by making his own loyalty to Henry seem as arbitrary as possible: he answers Richard, "If I had first chosen you for my master, thus faithful would I have been to you."

76. Erasmus, De Contemptu Mundi , 20r, a possible source for Wyatt cited in Mason, Wyatt , 223. Gr. Chaucer's translation of Boethius: "Alle the thinges that the ryver Tagus yeveth yow with his goldene gravayles, or elles alle the thinges that the ryver Herynus [Hermus] yeveth with his rede brynke, or that Indus yeveth that is next the hote party of the world, that medleth the grene stones with the whyte, ne sholde nat cleeren the lookinge of yowre thowht, but hyden rather yowre blynde corages within her dyrknesse" (Boece 3.10.11-19). Silius Italicus also mentions the Tagus in combination with the Pactolus and the Hermus (Punica 1.155).

77. Holinshed, Chronicles 4:330. Stow's Annales (1592) partially reprints this account, and follows it with the report of a similarly trifling display:

Also about the same time Mark Scaliot black Smith born in London, for trial of workmanship, made one hanging lock of iron, steel, and brass, a pipe key filed three square, with a pot upon the shaft, and the bow with two esses, all clean wrought, which weighed but one grain of gold or wheat corn: he made also a chain of gold of 43. links, to the which chain the lock and key being fastened and put about a flea's neck she drew the same, all which lock, key, chain and flea, weighed but one grain and a half. (1164)

Scaliot appears in Holinshed under the year 1579; Stow adds here, "A thing almost incredible, but that my self (amongst many others) have seen it, and therefore must affirm it to be true" (4:406).

78. Miniature , 6. For an analysis of the relation between Elizabethan poetry and "the miniature craze" in Elizabethan England, see Fumerton, "Secret Arts."

79. The classical precedent for Bales's feat does in fact involve Homer. "Keenness of sight," says Pliny, "has achieved instances transcending belief in the highest degree. Cicero records [in a lost work] that a parchment copy of Homer's poem The Iliad was enclosed in a nutshell" (Historia Naturalis 7.21). Certainly Bales was aware of Pliny's story, for he apparently matched it, though with the difference, once again, of tying poor matter to great Christian spirit: his book "within an English Walnut no bigger than a Hen's egg, seen and viewed [?] of many thousands with wonderful admiration," is "the English Bible" (Harleian MS. 530, art. 2, f. 14).

For Bales analogized to poets, see Rowlands, Letting , A3r.

80. For the authenticity of this claim, see Nashe, Works , 4:427-28 and 5:suppl. 64.

81. When Frobisher later returns to the island from which the stone was taken, he can find no other,

so that it may seem a great miracle of God, that being only one rich stone in all the island, the same should be found by one of our countrymen, whereby it should appear, God's divine will and pleasure is, to have our common wealth increased with no less abundance of his hidden treasures and gold mines, than any other nation, and would that the faith of his Gospel and holy name should be published and enlarged through all those comers of the earth, amongst those Idolatrous infidels. (Best, True Discourse , 57)

82. Speaking before the House of Commons in 1601, Robert Cecil thus mistakenly associates Utopia with a disdain for farmers (in Utopia, coloni ): "excepting Sir Thomas More's Utopia , or some such feigned Commonwealth, you shall never find but the Ploughman is chiefly provided for" (D'Ewes, Compleat Journal , 674; cited in Gibson, Bibliography , 411). For the related, and more arguable, notion that More is interested in rationalizing agriculture so as to release the Utopians from "rural bondage," see Gury, "Abolition."

83. Writing about these two prizes, George Best (1578) establishes a kind of proportion between them in more than number: the accounts of their taking occur within a paragraph of each other; both are obtained against enormous odds; and Frobisher takes both for the same reason, because he is "desirous to bring some token thence of his being there" (True Discourse , 50).

84. The analogy derives from Martyr: "For like as razed or unpainted tables, are apt to receive what forms so ever are first drawn thereon by the hand of the painter, even so these naked and simple people, do soon receive the customs of our Religion, and by conversation with our men, shake off their fierce and native barbarousness" (Eden, Decades , 106). Cf. Strachey, Historie , 18.

Both Hakluyt and Stow retell a story from The Great Chronicle of England that eerily exemplifies this conception of the Indian:

This year also [September 1501 to September 1502] were brought unto the king iii men taken In the New found Isle land . . .. These were clothed In beasts' skins and ate Raw flesh and spake such speech that no man could understand them, and In their demeanor like to brute beasts whom the king kept a time after, Of the which upon (ii) years passed (after) I saw ii of them apparelled after English men In westminster palace, which at that time I could not discern from English men till I was learned what men they were, But as for speech I heard none of them utter one word. (Williamson, Cabot Voyages , 220-22)

For the conception of Indians as bestial because linguistically deficient, see Greenblatt, "Learning."

1. In his address to both houses of Elizabeth's first parliament, the Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, demanded (1559), "Could there have happen'd to this Imperial Crown a greater loss in Honor, Strength and Treasure than to lose that piece, I mean Calais? " (D'Ewes, Compleat Jour nal, 13).

2. Quoted in Wernham, Making , 26.

3. Lyly , 34; Hunter is attacking the "Whig" notion that "the 'spaciousness' of Elizabeth's reign is a setting for a new-found freedom of the human spirit" (3).

4. Yates, "Queen Elizabeth," 59.

5. Quoted in Neale, Queen Elizabeth , 294. Cf. "The second voyage of Master Laurence Aldersey" (1586): "They brought us to the house of the Cady, who was made then to understand of the 20 Turks that we had aboard, which were to go to Constantinople , being redeemed out of captivity, by sir Francis Drake , in the west Indias , and brought with him into England , and by order of the Queen's Majesty, sent now into their Country. Whereupon the Cady commanded them to be brought before him, that he might see them: and when he had talked with them, and understood how strangely they were delivered, he marveled much, and admired the Queen's Majesty of England, who being but a woman, is notwithstanding of such power and renown amongst all the princes of Christendom" (Hakluyt, Principall Navigations [1589], 224).

6. For example, Roger Ascham (1570) recalls how "once it pleased" Cicero "to rail upon poor England, objecting both extreme beggary and mere barbarousness unto it, writing thus unto his friend Atticus: 'There is not one scruple of silver in that whole isle, or anyone that knoweth either learning or letter' "(Scholemaster, 150).

7. William Harrison, "Historicall Description" book 1, cap. 1 (Holinshed, Chronicles 1:3); Holinshed, "The Historie of England" book 3, cap. 19 (Chronicles 1:481, first in 1577 ed.); Harrison, "Historicall Description" book 1, cap. 18 (Chronicles 1:183).

8. Camden, Britannia , 4; cf. Speed, Theatre, 1 and Selden's notes to Poly-Olbion (1612) in Drayton, Works 4:15-16. Bennett's "Britain among the Fortunate Isles," which lists these references and notes their source (119), is a useful compendium of the alter mundus topos in Renaissance England; many of my references may be found in her article.

Characteristically for the dialectic I am describing, the "Fortunate Isles" story is not unequivocally in England's favor. Hakewill, for instance, cites it as evidence of "the ignorance of former ages" (Apology , 232-33).

9. The Angle/angle pun may not seem operative in Bede's account, but it was certainly available to Gregory, as the Renaissance knew. In a letter to Eulogius, Archbishop of Alexandria, announcing the mission to England launched by Gregory, Gregory refers to "the tribe of the Angles placed in an angle of the world [gens Anglorum in mundi angulo posita]" (Registrum Epistularum 2:551). The greatest popularizer of the Angle/angle etymology was Higden's Polychronicon : "Anglia hath that name as it were an angle and a comer of the world [Anglia dicitur ab angulo orbis ]" (2:4-5 [1.39]). In his translation of Virgil's Eclogues , Abraham Fleming explicates the pun in relation to the divisos line (Bucoliks , pp. 3-4).

10. Quoted in Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse , 86. For the classical theory of climates that assumed the area of the world in which Britain lay to be uninhabitable, see chapter 1.

11. Cf. the revenging ghost Gorlois's closing prophecy about Elizabethan England in The Misfortunes of Arthur (1588): "Gorlois will never fray the Britons more. / For Britain then becomes an Angels' land, / Both Devils and sprites must yield to Angels' power, / Unto the goddess of the Angels land" (Hughes et al., 195-96; quoted in Wilson, EngIand's Eliza , 103 n. 29). See also Averell, Mervailous Combat , E1v.

12. The English Catholic Nicholas Sanders (1585) asserts that Mary married Philip primarily because he "would be a help to her in bringing the kingdom back again to the faith and obedience of the Church" (De Origine , 222). For the Protestant view that Philip was ultimately responsible for the loss of Calais, see, e.g., Nedham, "Letter," 124-25, Wheeler, Treatise , 40, and Sutcliffe, Answer , 86, 174; the Catholics blamed the loss on "heretical treason" (Parsons, Warn-word , 80v).

13. Sanders, De Origine , 205/288; Supper A3v. For Catholics too, Gregory I seemed a figure prophetically pertinent to modem England; they liked to compare Gregory XIII to his predecessor, and thereby encourage him to believe that "he may be canonized for delivering us from heresy as St. Gregory has been for delivering us from heathendom" (quoted in Meyer, England , 283; cf. Bacon, Works 8:18-19).

14. Nichols, Progresses 2:158. Cf. the mayor of New Windsor to the queen in 1586:

How (in a manner) miraculous a thing it is, that while the whole world (as I might say), even the Kingdoms, and Countries round about us (to us a world), stand at this day garboiled and oppressed with troubles and stirs; we, even we alone, here in this our England (as it were a little Goshen), neither feeling dint of sword, nor hearing sound of drum, nor fearing either slaughter or depilation of the Oppressor, sit us still every man in his own

home, having freedom at the full to praise God in his sanctuary, and safety at the full to follow our affair in the Commonwealth. (2:478)

15. Quoted in Wilson, England's Eliza , 388, from A Chaine of Pearle (1603). Some believed this hyperbole about Elizabeth's virtue to be literally true, as in the rumor reported by Jonson "that she had a Membrana on her which made her uncapable of man" (Jonson 1:142).

Even the Catholic Parsons accepts the relation between England's otherness and Elizabeth's virginity, but argues that both are equally effects of English heresy: "The principal cause of her grace's not marrying is to be presumed to have proceeded of the different Religion of foreign Princes, who desired the same on the one side: and on the other, the inequality of blood in her own subjects, for such advancement" (Temperate , 8).

16. Cf. Greville, who describes the Armada victory as Elizabeth's "virgin triumph over that sanctified and invincible navy" (Dedication , 124).

17. For the tradition that England was originally not an island at all but a peninsula, see FQ 2.10.5 and chapter 1.

18. "To the Q: After His Return Out of Italy" 12-14; Constable never published the poem.

19. Cf. North, Stage , 89-90. For the most influential account of Elizabeth's imprisonment and deliverance, see Foxe, Acts 8:605-24.

20. Cf. Elizabeth in 1601: "Should I ascribe any thing to my Self and my Sexly Weakness, I were not worthy to live then" (D'Ewes, Compleat Journal, 660 ).

21. The mad William Reynolds provides unusual testimony to the power of Hellwis's praise: Reynolds believed that the Privy Council had published works like A Marvell and Venus and Adonis so as to make him fall in love with Elizabeth (Hotson, Shakespeare's Sonnets , 141-47).

22. Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse , 179-80 notes this connection.

23. For the related tradition that celebrates the Virgin's little womb as paradoxically able to contain "that which the whole world cannot hold" (quem totus orbis non capit ), see Hunter, Dramatic Identities , 75-78.

24. Cf. Greene's Spanish Masquerado (1589) on the massive force of the Armada—enough "to threaten ruin to the greatest Monarchy of the whole world"—as "bended against a little Island, a handful in respect of other Kingdoms" (Works 5:255).

25. Quoted in Stone, "Sad Augurs," 473. Anthony Marten (1588) deduces from the Armada's defeat that "if all the world fret and rage never so much against you, the Lord will fight for you. He will give the victory, and ye shall but look on" (quoted in Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse , 177).

26. I say "mere body" because Elizabeth describes her great spirit as materialized in the "Heart" and "Stomach" of her body politic, which was itself supposedly incorporated within her body natural. As I will later show, Spenser opposes this material conflation of the queen's two "persons" (V 1:168). Cf. Montrose, "Elizabethan Subject," 315-16. In a later speech to the House of Lords (1593), Elizabeth again "acknowledge[s]" her "Womanhood and weakness" (and, implicitly, her virginity), though this time as a reason why "my Mind was never to Invade my Neighbors, or to Usurp over any" (D'Ewes, Compleat Journal , 466).

27. The belief that Spain hoped to inflict American cruelties on England surfaced particularly in relation to the Armada: Archdeacon writes that King Philip, "having with Nimrod , like beasts hunted men with Dogs in India , would fain use the like practice here in England" (True Discourse , 8). Cf. Thomas Deloney's "A New Ballet of the strange and most cruel Whips which the Spaniards had prepared to whip and torment English men and women: which were found and taken at the overthrow of certain of the Spanish Ships , in July last past, 1588" (Works , 479-82; and Vaughan, Golden-grove , K1v-2r.)

28. Anthony Pagden notes that "parts of butchered Huguenots had been sold publicly in Paris and Lyon in 1572" (Fall , 84).

29. Cf. Nichols, Progresses 2:158, and Anthony Nixon, Memoriall (1603):

If all the costly Mines of th'Indians,
Which secretly lie hid within the ground:
If all the predous stones which in the sands
Of Lybia  land most plenteously abound:
If all the joys of human heart's content,
Which seated are under the Firmament,

Should be transported to our English coast,
And here enjoyed as our proper own;
Of them we might not half so truly boast,
As of this sacred truth amongst us sown.
                                                                        (Br)

30. Cf. Mother England in John Aylmer's Harborowe (1559), after she lists (as Lea does) England's "plenty of all things" (P4r):

Besides this God hath brought forth in me, the greatest and excellentest treasure that he hath, for your comfort and all the world's. He would that out of my womb should come that servant of his your brother John Wycliff, who begat Hus, who begat Luther, who begat truth. What greater honor could you or I have, than that it pleased Christ as it were in a second birth to be born again of me among you? (Rv)

Lea continued his propaganda campaign the next year with A True and Perfecte Description of a Straunge Monstar (the Holy League again).

31. Jonson in fact refused to celebrate England as a separate world until the accession of James, who at least provisionally combined England and Scotland by renaming his dominions Great Britain. See Part of the Kings Entertainment in Passing to His Coronation (1604), 11. 41-45 and The Masque of Blackness (1605 ), where Jonson declares that "with that great name BRI-TANIA , this blest Isle / Hath won her ancient dignity, and style, / A world, divided from the world " (246-48). Cf. The Masque of Queens , 395, Love Freed , 189-9 and 285, and Pleasure Reconciled , 198-200.

32. Quoted in Yates, "Queen Elizabeth, " 85-86 from Le Cena de la Ceneri , which in another, more straightforward version remains wistful: "If the empire of fortune would correspond to and would match the empire of the most generous mind and spirit, [Elizabeth] would be the sole empress of this terrestrial sphere, and with fuller significance that divine hand of hers would sustain the globe of this universal monarchy" (trans. Jaki, 83).

33. Strype, Annals 3:618, 620; letter noted and affair discussed in Fell-Smith, John Dee , 201-13. Cf. the queen's involvement in two other frauds, by Cornelius de Lannoy (1565-67) (CSP 1:249, 275-77, 289, 292), and Ro-loft Peterson (1593-97) (CSP 3:376-77, 422-23, 435, 558 ; 4:17-18, 31, 105, 119-20, 219, 518-19, 539, 543).

34. In the 1589 edition, 245.

35. Hakluyt (1598) later elaborates Best's immediately subsequent claim that Spain's apparent triumphs in navigation had all along been too materially grounded to betoken any real spirit: "For admit that [Spain's] way [to America] was much longer" than England's,

yet was it never barred with ice, mist, or darkness, but was at all seasons of the year open and Navigable; yea and that for the most part with fortunate and fit gales of wind. Moreover they had no foreign prince to intercept or molest them, but their own Towns, Islands, and main lands to succour them . . .. And had they not continual and yearly trade in some one part or other of Africa, for getting of slaves, for sugar, for Elephants' teeth, grains, silver, gold, and other precious wares, which served as allurements to draw them on by little and little, and as props to stay them from giving over their attempts? (Taylor, Original Writings 2:437)

36. The matching complaint of Thomas Hacket (1568)—"But alas, the greater number of men are given to idleness and sensuality" (Thevet, New Found Worlde , *3r)—was one of the most persistent features of New World propaganda in the English Renaissance. Cf. Captain John Smith's famous attack (1612) on those former settlers who slandered Jacobean Virginia:

because they found not English cities, nor such fair houses, nor at their own wishes any of their accustomed dainties, with feather beds and down pillows, Taverns and alehouses in every breathing place, neither such plenty of gold and silver and dissolute liberty as they expected, [they] had little or no care of any thing, but to pamper their bellies, to fly away with our Pinnaces, or procure their means to return for England. (Works 1:176)

The attack copies almost verbatim Thomas Harriot's account (1588) of the first Virginian colony (Report , in Quinn, Roanoke 1:323), which itself echoes in part Richard Eden's dedication to the first collection of New World voyages printed in England, A Treatyse of the Newe India (1553) (AA4r).

37. Writing on the same voyage, Edward Hayes (c. 1583) seconds the idea that the English will, indeed must, convert the Indians, as evidenced

by the revolution and course of God's word and religion, which from the beginning hath moved from the East, towards, & at last unto the West, where it is like to end, unless the same begin again where it did in the East, which were to expect a like world again. But we are assured of the contrary by the prophecy of Christ, whereby we gather, that after his word preached

throughout the world shall be the end. And as the Gospel when it descended Westward began in the South, and afterward spread into the North of Europe: even so, as the same hath begun in the South countries of America, no less hope may be gathered that it will also spread into the North. (Quinn, Gilbert 2:388)

This Gospel version of the westward march of empire became very popular in Jacobean times: see Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm , 16-20.

38. Raleigh nicely flatters such hopes when he reports a Spanish story that certain Indians "now admitting of Christianity and obedience to the king of Spain" had sent Philip their idol, "a Giant all of Gold," "in token they were become Christians, and held him for their king" (Discoverie , 84). More rigorous antimaterialists may condemn this model of colonial exchange, but they nevertheless accept it as what happens in America. Thomas Bastard (1598), for example, considers gold a trifling reward for spirit:

Indie  new found the Christian faith doth hold,
Rejoicing in our heavenly merchandize.
Which we have chang'd for precious stones & gold
And pearl and feathers, and for Popingyes.
Now are they loving, meek and virtuous,
Contented, sweetly with poor godliness.
Now are we salvage, fierce and barbarous,
Rich with the fuel of all wickedness.
                                                ( Chrestoleros , 85-86)

Cf. Herbert's "The Church Militant," ll. 249-58.

39. James was, of course, even more conspicuous a poet: during Elizabeth's reign, Gabriel Harvey (c. 1598-99) refers to him as "the sovereign of the divine art" (Marginalia , 231).

40. For an extensive treatment of the poverty of poets, see the three Parnassus plays (c. 1598-1602); as their editor J. B. Leishman notes, the first play specifically alludes to Hero and Leander (at 1.63-64 and 76). The complaint about patronage is in particular a pastoral topos derived from Theocritus's Idyll , 17. Eclogue 3 of Thomas Lodge's Fig for Momus (1595), for instance, portrays Lodge as the shepherd "Golde" (Works 3:23), himself a treasure who does not receive the literal gold due him. I will, shortly, treat the most famous instance of this topos, the "October" eclogue in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender .

41. For Lesbos as England, see Hunter, Lyly , 180, who notes that Sapho in Sapho and Phao is a general compliment to Elizabeth, "and Sapho in Ovid appears as the Queen of Lesbos."

42. Though devoted to a satire on greed, Richard Barnfield's mock-panegyric "The Encomion of Lady Pecunia: or The Praise of Money" (1598) nevertheless cannot resist praising Elizabeth, and even true religion, in the terms it otherwise denounces:

The time was once, when fair  Pecunia , here
Did basely go attired all in Leather:

But since her reign, she never did appear
But richly clad; in Gold, or Silver either:
        Nor reason is it, that her Golden reign
        With baser Coin, eclipsed should remain.

And as the Coin, she hath repurified,
From baser substance, to the purest Metals:
Religion so, hath she refined beside,
From Papistry, to Truth.
                                                            (90-91)

43. For Sidney, the fact that the oracle of Delphi should choose to prophesy in verse already constitutes a defense of poetry: "For that same exquisite observing of number and measure in words, and that high flying liberty of conceit proper to the poet, did seem to have some divine force in it" (Apology , 11). The defense is traditional: cf. Horace, Ars Poetica , 400.

The conventional excuses for poets making wisdom look trifling range from fear of reprisal (e.g., Smith, Elizabethan 1:65), consideration for simpleminded readers (66), contempt for simpleminded readers (2:203), and hopes to make wisdom memorable (ibid.).

44. In Agrippa's influential attack on poetry, "trifle" and "fable" are almost synonymous: cf., e.g., De Incertitudine , 33-34. Stephen Gosson cites the poets' addiction to mythology as the best proof of their trifling. Either the mythological divinities are themselves merely trifles mystified— for example, the ancient poets made "gods of them that were brute beasts, in the likeness of men, divine goddesses of common harlots" (Apologie , 127)—or else the gods "delight in toys" (132), like material sacrifices and "light huswifes" (Schoole , 87).

45. Yates, it is true, at first imagines the substitution as "half-unconscious" ("Queen Elizabeth," 78), by which she means that the Elizabethan state in part exploited the connection, but she finally decides that "it would be, perhaps, extravagant to suggest that, in a Christian country, the worship of the state Virgo was deliberately intended to take [the] place" of the cult of the Virgin (79). I do not deny that the cult of Elizabeth may have fostered idolatry or the exploitation of it, only that Mary's replacement by Elizabeth depended primarily on the transference of actual superstition, "unconscious" or otherwise.

46. For another instance of an overtly superstitious pilgrim involved in the defense of England "from the world sequestered all alone" (16), see Weever, Whipping .

47. "Hobynoll" celebrates "that fair Island's fight / Which thou doest veil in Type of Fairy land / Eliza's blessed field, that Albion hight" (V 3:186).

48. The criticism that the Elizians mistake temporal for spiritual good fortune would, no doubt, have seemed to Copley supported by assertions like G. D.'s in his Briefe Discoverie (1588): "Let God's especial favors therefore miraculously showed unto her Majesty , and his exceeding blessings abundantly poured out by him upon her Country, be unto you (as it is indeed) an assured argument, that her Religion is the true Religion acceptable unto God, and conformable to his word" (119).

49. Cf., e.g., Abraham Fleming (1589) calling the Eclogues "even a pearl in a shell, divine wit in a homely style, shepherds and clowns representing great personages, and matters of weight wrapt up in country talk" (Bucoliks , A2v).

50. Barckley, Discourse , *3v. See Yates, "Queen Elizabeth."

51. Cf. Patterson, "Re-opening," 64.

52. As E. K.'s headnote suggests, the other homogeneity from which Colin's heterosexual desire proves alienating is Hobbinol's homoerotic love. See William Webbe's Discourse of English Poetrie (1586) for evidence that readers did indeed notice "the motion of some unsavory love" in the Calender (in Smith, Elizabethan 1:264-65; quoted in Wells, Spenser Allusions , 9).

53. Palgrave (V 7:395), Greg (398) and Renwick (401-402) discuss the marked similarities between the stanzas of "Aprill" and "November."

54. Noted by Malone (V 7:402). Following Malone on this and on his identification of Dido's lover Lobbin as Robin Leicester, Mary Parmenter concludes that Dido is indeed Elizabeth, who, in the words of the Variorum , "is now figuratively dead to Leicester by reason of the threatened French marriage" (404). Paul McLane supports this analysis, noting, for example, that Gabriel Harvey had a year earlier complimented the queen by calling her Elissa, and that the "Aprill" nymphs recur in "November" (Study , 47-60). While the connection with Alçenon makes sense, the decoding by Parmenter and McLane is nevertheless reductive, and collapses the distinction obtaining, as I will try to demonstrate, between Elizabeth and a certain view of her which "Dido" represents.

55. Cf. Montrose: "Colin's elegy for Dido is a displacement of the Rosalind-Elisa problem in which Spenser attempts a radical solution by symbolic means: kill the lady, thus sending her spirit to heaven, where the lover's spirit might hope eventually to join her in a communion free from the accidents and constraints that characterize earthly life—life within the body and the body politic" ("Perfecte," 54). In my account, Spenser ultimately does not endorse such contemptus mundi .

McLane (Study , 27-46) maintains that "Rosalind" too has all along meant Elizabeth, but Spenser's question is, again, what does "Elizabeth" mean? McLane's reductive claim must overlook the differences in character and status between Rosalind on the one hand and Eliza and Dido on the other. It is important to note that Spenser is less nervous about figuring Elizabeth as a private person when that person is also a fairy—Bel-phoebe; see chapter 3.

56. "If we follow out the Ovidian logic of the [Pan and Syrinx] myth, which E. K. retells concisely in his gloss, it becomes obvious that Elisa is also a personification of pastoral poetry: the 'offspring' of the love chase and the nymph's transformation were the reeds from which Pan created his pipe" (Montrose, "Perfecte," 40). As Montrose notes, the presence of this myth behind Eliza makes Colin's song seem an expression not of virginal innocence but of "sublimated eroticism" (50).

57. McLane, Study , 60 notes the pun on Eliza here.

58. Sidney, "The 7. Wonders of England" (written c. 1580); cited in Wilson, England's Eliza , 248.

59. For the view that "the longing for paradise" is "the fundamental object of Spenser's criticism" in The Shepheardes Calender , see Hamilton, "Argument," and Berger, "Mode" and "Orpheus." MacCaffrey covers similar terrain, though she oddly contradicts her developmental account of the Calender by ending with "Aprill," which she believes shows how "the arts of government can unite antagonists and create another Eden" ("Allegory," 106).

"Aprill" 's waterfall topos, perhaps the most widely imitated topos in the Calender , epitomizes for Spenser how the innocent ideal of presence rests on a latent awareness of absence. That is, the waterfall seems to legitimate an ideal of presence not in avoiding but in overmastering absence, presenting change as continuity and motion as stasis. By "November," however, the fall in the waterfall begins to take precedence, when songs of praise are, again, no longer tuned to the waterfall but turned to weeping (79). Spenser's earliest and so potentially most innocent published poems, his translations of Petrarch and Du Bellay, also characterize the waterfall topos as ultimately apocalyptic. In "The Visions of Petrarch," the poet watches as Muses and Nymphs "tune their voyce / To the soft sounding of the waters fall" (48-49); "But while therein I tooke my chiefe delight, / I saw (alas) the gaping earth devoure / The spring, the place, and all cleane out of sight" (51-53). The sight of this and other disasters persuades Petrarch to "loath this base world, and thinke of heavens blis" (96). "The Visions of Bellay," with their "virgin faire" who "to falling rivers thus tun'd her sobs" (127, 130), simply compress the recurrent narrative. For interesting reflections on the waterfall topos in Spenser and its subsequent history, see Hollander, "Footing," 22-28 and "Undersong," 12-19.

60. Among modern readers Michael O'Connell typifies this mistake when he claims that Colin's abandonment of political praise highlights the degree to which that praise had all along been an "idealization," and yet "the actual Elizabeth falls short of the ideal Eliza" only "owing to the fallen human condition" for which Colin's "love melancholy" is simply an apt metaphor. In other words, O'Connell believes that there is nothing wrong with the repudiated ideal as it stands, and he eventually works himself round toward celebrating the inadequate "actual" too: Spenser wants "to show to men within the fallen state the points of connection between their actual ruler and the ideal of which she is merely the human participation" (Mirror , 6-7). Montrose agrees that "Colin's Aprill encomium is an ideal image toward which Elizabeth may aspire," and considers Spenser so confident of Elizabeth's proximity to this ideal that Spenser advances the encomium as indeed "an English and Protestant fulfillment of Vergil's fourth eclogue" ("Perfecte," 43, 40).

61. Bennett notes that "the third quarter of the Revelation is a ringing of changes upon the lay of "Aprill" (Blenerhasset, Revelation , xi).

62. In the poem Elizabeth seems worried by this claim about her immortality:

The life (quoth she) of every living thing
Must perish quite, for death will it deface:
But death to death by due desert to bring
Such death on earth is life everlasting,
I know right well such immortality
you have obtaind, and such remains for me.
                                                                        (Fr)

Yet I would argue that the almost hermetic abstractness of this demurral indicates Blenerhasset's resistance to making Eliza's immortality merely ideal.

63. See Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse , Christianson, Reformers , Firth, Apocalyptic , and Olsen, Foxe , all of whom dispute William Haller's claim in Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs ' that the Elizabethans imagined their nation as a millennial triumph.

64. In the manner of "October," Palinode is extraordinarily explicit about doubting whether Essex as a participant in the expedition deserves praise: "I see no Palm, I see no Laurel bows, / Circle his temples, or adorn his brows, / I hear no triumphs for this late return, / But many a Herdsman more disposed to mourn" (94-97).

65. Sidney's death seems for Peele to epitomize his new doubts about England's potentiality; compare "Eclogue," 61-77, and Polyhymnia , 108-14, 224-26. "Augusta" is, of course, the queen, for whom Peele must invent a new pseudonym in order to avoid the connection with "Elizian fields."

66. Cf. Thomas Goodrick and Edward Kellet, respectively, in the collection of elegies called Sorrowes Joy (1603): "Eliza to Elysian fields is gone" (6); "Eliza was a flower / Worthy alone to deck the Elizian plain" (26). Interestingly, John Weever's elegy for Spenser makes a similar point about "Colin": "Colin's gone home, the glory of his clime" (Epigrammes , 101).

67. Cf. Richard Niccols (1603): "Where's Collin Clout, or Rowland now become, / That wont to lead our Shepheards in a ring?" (Expicedium , B3r). For other allusions to Spenser in elegies for Elizabeth, see Wells, Spenser Allusions , 92-9 .

68. Dedicatory sonnet to Ormond (V 3:193); my emphasis. The opening lines of The Faerie Queene , an imitation of what were once considered the opening lines of the Aeneid , underscore by omission this lack of georgics in Spenser's career. Spenser says he now leaves "oaten reeds" for "trumpets sterne"; Virgil, that he left pastoral for georgics (et egressus silvis vicina coegi / ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono, / gratum opus agricolis ), which he now leaves in turn for epic (at nunc horrentia Martis ).

69. For the opposition to romance among the first generation of humanists—More, Erasmus, Vives—see Adams, "Bold Bawdry"; for the pertinence to Spenser of such opposition, see, e.g., Bennett, Evolution , 74-77. Perhaps the most famous association of chivalric romance with the "standing pool" of "Papistry" appears in Ascham's Scholemaster , 68-69.

70. Cf. John Harvey (1588), who asserts that "Legendaries" like "the tales of Hobgoblin," "king Arthur," and "Orlando furioso," were intended "to busy the minds of the vulgar sort, or to set their heads awork withal, and to avert their conceits from the consideration of serious, and graver matters, by feeding their humors, and delighting their fancies with such fabulous and ludicrous toys" (Discoursive , 68-69; quoted in Thomas, "Hobgoblin," 421).

71. From the third eclogue of Idea The Shepheards Garland (1593) (Works 1:55).

72. Nashe is denouncing what he takes to be the recently manifested atavism of English publishers: "What else I pray you do these bable [i.e., bauble, babble, Babel] bookmongers endeavor, but to repair the ruinous walls of Venus Court, to restore to the world that forgotten Legendary license of lying, to imitate afresh the fantastical dreams of those exiled Abbey-lubbers, from whose idle pens proceeded those worn out impressions of the feigned no where acts, of Arthur of the round table, Arthur of little Britain, sir Tristram, Huon of Burdeaux, the Squire of low degree, the four sons of Amon, with infinite others" (Works 1:11).

73. Even before The Faerie Queene Spenser imagines fairies a cure not only for materialism but for the Calender's contemptus as well. His Prosopopoia. Or Mother Hubberds Tale begins where The Shepheardes Calender leaves off, with the departure of Astraea:

It was the month, in which the righteous Maide,
That for disdaine of sinfull worlds upbraide,
Fled back to heaven, whence she was first conceived,
Into her silver bowre the Sunne receeved;
And the hot Syrian  Dog on him awayting,
After the chafed Lyons cruell bayting,
Corrupted had th'ayre with his noysome breath,
And powr'd on th'earth plague, pestilence, and death.
                                                                                    (1-8)

This heavenly wrath sets Spenser's "weake bodie . . . on fire with griefe" (15), until his raconteur friends come to cheer him:

Some tolde of Ladies, and their Paramoures;
Some of brave Knights, and their renowned Squires;
Some of the Faeries and their strange attires;
And some of Geaunts hard to be beleeved,
That the delight thereof me much releeved.
                                                                        (28-32)

Increasingly ironic, the lines present fairies as simply the next step in absurdity after knights. Yet Spenser seems to appreciate his friends' "nowhere" stories precisely because they are "strange" and "hard to be beleeved," and therefore able to absorb despair about a world apparently alienated from or emptied of God.

74. Whether a consequence of modesty (Chettle) or vanity (Jonson), Elizabeth's reputed distaste for actual mirrors complements Spenser's antimaterialism here; see Jonson, Jonson 1:141-42, 166.

1. For an earlier view that Spenser is consistently imperialist, however, see Greenlaw, "Spenser." Impressed by the fact that the first fairy king is said to have ruled India and America (FQ 2.10.72), Michael Murrin claims that Fairyland simply "is" India and America, and "thus a dream of empire" that "compensates for [England's] political weakness" (Allegorical , 137-40). But Murrin never answers the central question raised by doubting critics, which is how Spenser's depiction of fairyland may be said to enact such imperial "wish fulfillment" (139). More persuasively, Greenblatt in his own discussion of Spenser as "our originating and preeminent poet of empire" relates Guyon's destruction of the Bower of Bliss to the colonization of both America and Ireland (Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 169- 92); but he never explains why, if the Bower is a figure for colonies, Guyon ends up abandoning it.

2. In a passage I will later discuss, Spenser urges the occupation of Guiana (FQ 4.11.22). I do not mean to say that Spenser shows no sign of imperialism before book 4—see, e.g., 2.3.41, 3.3.22-23, and 3.9.44—only that his exhortations to empire are rarely direct.

3. In his Sir Francis Drake (1596), Charles Fitz-Geffrey does insist that Drake is a hero of epic proportions. If Drake had "been born in Agamemnon's age," Fitz-Geffrey maintains, "all poets would have written in his praise / Their Æneads, Iliads , and Odysses" (Poems , 23); and Fitz-Geffrey advises Spenser, among others, to give up singing about any other subject: "Let famous RED CROSS yield to famous DRAKE , / And good Sir GUYON give to him the lance" (22). But the tedious repetitiveness of Fitz-Geffrey's praise betrays the fact that he has no epic action to celebrate. Like his list of England's voyagers, which ends up bemoaning the death of every contemporary hero he names (67-78), Fitz-Geffrey's praise of Drake continually turns to elegy: for example, "Had he surviv'd, Tempe had been our land, / And Thames had stream'd with Tagus ' golden sand" (40).

For similarly troubled Elizabethan claims concerning the potentially epic grandeur of voyagers like Drake, see Warner, Albions England 12:71, Segar, Honor , 58-59, and a very revealing eclogue, possibly by Edward Fairfax, entitled "Ida and Opilio." In the eclogue, Opilio begins praising English voyagers by first describing Drake's successful circumnavigation; he then turns to Frobisher, who, though heroic, failed to find the northwest passage or actual gold; next he alludes to Gilbert, who "lost himself when his light frigate sank"; then he bemoans the voyagers to Russia who were either frozen or lost—at which point the poem breaks off.

The voyagers were not the only potential heroes of Elizabethan epic. Samuel Daniel in The Civill Wars (1599) irritatedly wonders why Spenser bothers with "fained Paladins " when he "may give glory to the true designs / Of Bourchier, Talbot, Nevile, Willoughby " (5.4)—but these are past imperial heroes, and their epics do not get written. William Alabaster began an epic on the life of Elizabeth, his Elisaeis (c. 1590), but it breaks off after Princess Elisa enters the Tower.

4. Elizabethan readers were certainly capable of making such a comparison. During the years Spenser was composing The Faerie Queene, a number of translated histories of the Spanish and Portuguese conquests began appearing for the first time since Eden's lonely Marian edition (1555) of Peter Martyr: for example, Gomara, Pleasant Historie (Spanish ed. 1552; trans. 1578); Zarate, Strange and Delectable History (1555; trans. 1581); Lopes de Castanheda, First Book (1551; trans. 1582); Las Casas, Spanish Colonie (1552; trans. 1583); and Hakluyt's own Latin edition of Martyr, De Orbe Novo (1587). The first known translation in any language of another Camões-like epic, Ercilla's Araucana (1569-90), is itself Elizabethan, The Historie of Araucana , once attributed to Burghley but now to George Carew (1555-1629), a close contemporary of Spenser who, like Spenser, spent many years in Ireland (Historie , vii-viii n. 1). It is interesting to note, however, as Pierce does, that Carew's sketchy prose translation shows Carew unconcerned with the epic pretensions of Ercilla's historical account.

Other heroic poems about voyagers also preceding The Faerie Queene include Gambara's De navigatione Christophori Columbi (1581), Stella's Columbeidos (1585) (published first in London and dedicated by Jacobo Castelvetro to Raleigh), and Lobo Lasso de la Vega's Cortes valeroso (1588). For a general account of the Columbus poems, see Bradner, "Columbus."

5. See FQ 3.proem.5, and the dedicatory sonnets to Lord Grey de Wilton (V 3:194) and Raleigh (196).

6. Noted in Hamilton, ed., Faerie Queene , 31. The storm has other Virgilian parallels: namely, the tempests in Aeneid 1 and 4 that threaten Aeneas's own epic quest by driving him into Dido's arms. But Spenser's reference to Jove and his lover's lap is specifically georgic —tum pater omnipotens fecundis imbribus Aether / coniugis in gremium laetae descendit (Georgics 2.325-26)—and forces these generically more appropriate allusions into the background.

7. Cf. Hobbinol in "September," requesting Diggon in typically pastoral manner to "sitte we downe here under the hill: / Tho may we talke, and tellen our fill, / And make a mocke at the blustring blast" (52-54); and see too the storms, blasts, shade, and heat of "Januarye," 23, "Februarie," 1-2, "June," 2, "Julye," 25-26, "August," 47-48, "October," 116, and "December," 2 and 5. For the cave as a pastoral pleasance, see Virgil's Eclogues (1.75, 5.6, 5.19, 9.41) and the "shepheards den" (96) and "darkesome caves" (117) of Virgils Gnat .

In other writers the tree catalogue itself is often overtly pastoral: Sannazaro's Arcadia opens with such a catalogue, for instance, and another appears in the last eclogue of Sidney's Arcadia book 1. Ovid's oft-cited version of the tree catalogue belongs to an episode in the Metamorphoses with an obvious pertinence to the Error episode generally: through the attractive power of his song, Orpheus manages to convert a plain into a shady grove (10.86ff.). Spenser demonstrates that he associates even this scene with pastoral when he transfers the burden of Orpheus's song, the death of the lovely boy Cyparisse, to the more obviously pastoral woodland setting of canto 6. (The setting in fact recalls "Aprill" specifically: "singing all a shepheards ryme," the woodgods worship Una "as Queene, with olive girlond cround," 13.)

8. For the corresponding theological allegory of Error, see Cullen, Infernal , 25-26; Nohrnberg, Analogy , 135-51; and Klein, "Errour." The term proportion is E. K.'s; he describes the twelve eclogues as "proportioned to the state of the twelve months" (V 7:10; see also 113).

The later Fradubio episode (FQ 1.2.30-44) represents this problem more directly than the Error episode does by replacing the trees that fit human intention with humans (or at least elves) who have been transformed into trees.

9. In noting the mirror relation between Redcross and Error, Paul Alpers, for example, calls the battle "a genuine psychomachia, an expression of conflicting potentialities within a single mind" (Poetry , 337).

10. For a brief history of this conception of Error from the Bible to the Middle Ages, see Zacher, Curiosity , 42-44.

11. For this analysis of a mirror relation thwarted by miniaturization, I am indebted to Steven Knapp's examination of the Narcissus topos in Wordsworth (Personification , 112-16).

12. See Allegorical Temper , 120-60.

13. Cf. the far more straightforwardly heroic simile from The First Part of the Tragicall Raigne of Selimus (acted c. 1590), which borrows Spenser's imagery here: "A matchless knight is warlike Selimus, / And like a shepherd mongst a swarm of gnats, / Dings down the flying Persians with their swords" (Greene, Works 14:287; noted in Wells, Spenser Allusions , 38; see also Greene, Works 14:289).

For other instances in Spenser of elegiac similes that defer a monster's destruction, see FQ 4.7.30 and 5.8.43.

14. For gnats, see A. B. Chambers's article on Donne's "Canonization" ("Fly," 254, 255, 257); and Lucian 1.191. Chambers's helpful survey oddly omits the fly iconography that would seem the most immediately appropriate to Donne's poem: the fact that the fly is considered, as Lucian says, "the creature of a day" (87).

15. Menippus actually compares men to ants (Lucian 2.301). Erasmus would seem to have substituted flies or gnats in order to exploit their associations with ephemerality.

16. For such "noyance" provoking contemptus , see Spenser's "Visions of the worlds vanitie" (esp. stanzas 2 and 10), which incessantly draws the moral, "Let therefore nought that great is, therein glorie, / Sith so small thing his happines may varie" (111-112). For the persistent relation in Spenser's mind of flies or gnats to the deflation of vanity, see also Virgils Gnat; Muiopotmos: or The Fate of the Butterflie ; and, in Two Other, Very Commendable Letters , the Latin poem to Harvey (V 10:10, ll. 174-75).

17. Noted by Hamilton, ed., Faerie Queene , 36.

18. V 7:10. It would be a mistake to dismiss the echo as accidental or merely a second instance of a stock image: in Spenser's eighty-eight uses of the word wings , he applies the adjective tender to it only this once. The similar "tender plumes" occurs in Colin Clout , 422, where Colin praises Samuel Daniel as a fledgling poet along the lines E. K. had earlier spoken of Colin himself. For possible sources, see V 7:239.

19. Renwick (V 7:240) notes that the locus classicus for this theory is Vida: "[A youngster], unskilled in matters [poetic], ought not to venture to compose long Iliads , but should gain experience little by little, making his debut by playing on the shepherds' slender pipes. Soon he will be able to tell in verse of the fearsome fates of a gnat, or of how in boundless battle the murderous mouse dealt death to the croaking troops of marsh-loving frogs, or weave a tale of the stratagems and webs of the subtle spider" (De Arte Poetica 1.459-465).

The interchangeability of flies and persons is dramatically realized in the next episode, when Archimago transforms two sprites "like little Flyes" into the images of Una and a squire (1.38). Later, Redcross in Orgoglio's dungeon, "all his flesh shronk up like withered flowres" (8.41), becomes a gnatlike murmurer (38).

20. Note that "wound" (25), gash, replaces "wound" (18), enveloped, in this open mode. For suggestive remarks on the "radical openness" of Spenserian narrative generally, see Parker, Romance , 54-113.

21. Cf. Eclogues 9.39-43, noted by Rummel in her edition of De Contemptu .

22. Greene's "text," Matthew 3.10, comes closer to Spenser's emphasis on inutility as the outward sign of monastic evil: "And now also is the axe put to the root of the trees: therefore every tree, which bringeth not forth good fruit, is hewn down, and cast into the fire." The comparison of the monasteries to these scriptural trees was a popular one. Cf. the member of Parliament (1536) who argued that, in dissolving the lesser monasteries, Parliament should remember that "these were as thorns, but the great abbots were putrefied old oaks" (quoted in Wright, Three Chapters , 107); or Foxe, who refers to Cromwell's plucking the monasteries up by the roots (Acts 5:368 and 378). For extended jokes on this comparison, see Hall, Union , 825-26, retold in Foxe, Acts 5:179-81; and Harington's translation of Ariosto, Orlando Furioso , pp. 6-7.

The Catholic Nicholas Harpsfield (c. 1553- 58) also relates monasteries to woods, but in a much more favorable light: "What is the decay of woods and the cause of the excessive price of wood," he asks, "but the suppression of the said monasteries, which did carefully nourish, supply, and husband the same?" ("Treatise," 299).

23. Frere and Kennedy, Visitation Articles 2:59-60. For the topos of the relics' nearly overwhelming number and variety, see "Declaration of the Faith," 39, Wright, Three Chapters , 226-27, and the prefatory epistle to the English translation of Erasmus's Peregrinatio (c. 1536-37), which declares that Erasmus "hath set forth to the quick image, before men's eyes, the superstitious worship and false honor given to bones, heads, jaws, arms, stocks, stones, shirts, smocks, coats, caps, hats, shoes, mitres, slippers, saddles, rings, beads, girdles, bowls, bells, books, gloves, ropes, tapers, candles, boots, spurs (my breath was almost past me)" (104-5).

24. Cf. Averell's Mervailous Combat (1588), which refers to "that peddler the Pope, that continually unloadeth his pack to make some sale with us of his Popish trash" (D4r); and warns that papists "will make you believe they are friends, but they are deadly enemies." "Beware the Fox," he concludes, "that shape of lamb retains" (E1r). Calvin makes the fox sound more specifically Erroneous when he deplores those papists who "busied their heads about pelting trifles, and would needs make meritorious deeds of them, and in the meanwhile did cast men's consciences into so strait bonds, as was enough to choke them" (Sermons , 217r).

25. Hume argues that the distinction between wolves and foxes in "September," 154-55, suggests that the wolf represents a straightforward papist and the fox "a secret papist who presents himself as a Church of England pastor" (Spenser , 21-23). Whether overt or covert, however, the fox remains "Roman"; as Tyndale (1530) said of all papist prelates, "They be one kingdom, sworn together one to help another scattered abroad in all realms" (Practice of Prelates , 441).

26. Cf. Higden's Polychronicon : "Of all lands' riches this land hath need to none; / All lands moot [i.e., must] seek help needs of this alone [Insula praedives, quae toto non eget orbe, / Et cuius totus indiget orbis ope ]" (2:20-21 [1.41]).

27. "Historicall Description," 397; see also 371, 395, 396. For more on Armstrong, see Bindoff, "Armstrong"; for the attribution of the Discourse to Smith, see Discourse, xx-xxvi . While Smith considers the chief cause of England's economic troubles to be not England's trifling but its "debasing or rather corrupting of our coin and treasure" (Discourse , 69), he ascribes this problem also to English insularity: "If men might live within themselves altogether without borrowing of any other thing outward, we might devise what coin we would; but since we must have need of other and they of us, we must frame our things not after our own fantasies but to follow the common market of all the world, and we may not set the price of things at our pleasure but follow the price of the universal market of the world" (86).

28. For the conflation of economic and theological issues in England's troubles with Spain, cf. Hakluyt on the need for "Western Planting": "All other english Trades are grown beggarly or dangerous, especially in all the king of Spain his Dominions, where our men are driven to fling their Bibles and prayer Books into the sea, and to forswear and renounce their religion and conscience and consequently their obedience to her Majesty" ("Discourse," 211).

29. Revelation G1v; Araygnement 5.1.139-41. Cf. the entertainment at Elvetham (1591), in which six virgins welcome Elizabeth with this song:

Now birds record new harmony,
And trees do whistle melody:
Now every thing that nature breeds,
Doth dad it self in pleasant weeds,
        O beauteous Queen of second Troy,
        Accept of our unfained joy.
                            (Nichols,  Progresses  3:109)

Greene ends his Masquerado hoping only that God will continue to "shroud us against Spain, the Pope, and all other enemies of the Gospel" (Works , 5:288).

30. As if to resolve the problem of the foreign altogether, Hakluyt's "Discourse" imagines North America becoming a kind of English Old World: "This western voyage will yield unto us all the commodities of Europe, Africa, and Asia" (222).

31. Quinn, Gilbert 1:161. Cf. Peckham, True Reporte , 462; Hakluyt, "Discourse," 235, 270; and two pamphlets by the elder Hakluyt (1585) in Taylor, Original Writings 2:332 and 343.

32. Eight years later, this time in the West Indies, Frobisher is back to his old tricks (Keeler, Voyage , 192). For another extreme version of an extremely commonplace practice—the use of trifles to allure Indians—see James Rosier in 1605, beguiling two natives and hoping to catch a third: "I opened the box, and showed them trifles to exchange, thinking thereby to have banished fear from the other, and drawn him to return: but when we could not, we used little delay, but suddenly laid hands upon them" (Quinn, English , 284). Shakespeare derives the name of Sycorax's god Setebos from a similar story (Eden, Decades , 252).

33. Best marvels at his vision of the savages sneaking behind rocks "as though we had no eyes to see them" (True Discourse , 74). Incidentally, he considers Frobisher's joke better made by having the savage malingerer shot elsewhere than in his face, so that he can go "away a true and no fained cripple" (75).

34. I am indebted to Frederick Goldin's excellent Mirror for these thoughts on Narcissus, though, as my account of Ovid shows, I differ with Goldin about the nature of the Ovidian outcome. Goldin thinks that what happens to Narcissus can best be described as "the mind's discovery that no sensible image can reflect it" (211), but in fact Narcissus's image reflects the mind quite well:

Thou dost pretend some kind of hope of friendship by thy cheer.
For when I stretch mine arms to thee, thou stretchest thine likewise.
And if I smile thou smilest too: And when that from mine eyes
The tears do drop, I well perceive the water stands in thine.
                                                                            ( Metamorphoses  3-575-78)

35. Cf. this famous instance of Catholic "juggling" reported by Geoffrey Chamber: "Upon the defacing of the late Monastery of Boxley, and plucking down of the Images of the same, I found in the Image of the Rood called the Rood of Grace, the which heretofore hath been had in great veneration of people, certain engines and old wire, with old rotten sticks in the back of the same, that did cause the eyes of the same to move and stare in the head thereof like unto a lively thing; and also the nether lip in like wise to move as though it should speak; which, so famed, was not a little strange to me and other that was present" (Ellis, Original Letters 3:168). Cf. "A Declaration of the Faith," 38; and Foxe, who along with other denunciations of the Rood reprints a ballad on the subject, "The Fantasie of Idolatrie" (Acts 5:179, 397, 403-9, 824).

36. The man was in fact embalmed, "preserved to have been sent back again into his own country," presumably to impress the natives with English kindness—the doctor who examined the native declares, for instance, that the man had died from "too liberal" a diet, a situation "brought about by the utmost solicitousness on the part of that great man, the Captain, and by boundless generosity from those with whom he lodged" (Stefannson, Three Voyages , 2:135-37, translation in Cheshire et al., "Frobisher's Eskimos," 24, 40). But even if the corpse would prove to the Eskimos that the English had not eaten it, how happy could the dead body make them? Like the paintings, the embalming derives from the desire at once to educate the Eskimos in their own finitude and mortality and to exhibit the uncanny preservative powers of the English.

37. P. H. Hulton seconds Best's testimony by noting that "there are records of payment to the Netherlandish artist Cornelis Ketel, for various portraits of the man in large and in miniature, in his own costume, in English dress, and naked" ("Drawings," 18). Hulton's article conveniently reproduces the surviving illustrations resulting from the Frobisher voyages.

38. Cf. the elder Hakluyt, who in 1580 advises Pet and Jackman to take "the book of the attire of all nations" (Taylor, Original Writings 1:155) as a gift for the Great Khan.

39. As Captain John Smith (1624) reports, however, savage one-worldliness can as easily lead to battle as to flight: "We demanded why they came in that manner to betray us, that came to them in peace, and to seek their loves; he answered, they heard we were a people come from under the world, to take their world from them. We asked him how many worlds he did know, he replied, he knew no more but that which was under the sky that covered him, which were the Powhatans, with the Monacans, and the Massawomeks, that were higher up in the mountains" (Works 2:175-76).

40. Spenser's most explicit association of one-worldliness with pastoral appears in Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1595), when a fellow Irish shepherd is amazed by Colin's talk of England: "What land is that thou meanst (then Cuddy sayd) / And is there other, then whereon we stand?" (290-91). I will take up the question of Colin's new relation to a plurality of worlds in chapter 5.

41. 200 tons on the second voyage and 1350 on the third (Stefannson, Three Voyages 2:131, 69-70).

42. "Discourse," 316-17; my emphasis. A commentator on the 1592 Hayes plan to colonize the New England area is exceptionally skeptical:

Although at the first & upon the uttermost skirt of a land we find but a naked people, & such as while we stay not to give them law but flatter them with toys, & exchange to their advantage, & so depart, appear well inclined & apt to receive us; yet. . . it may be conceived that they have more with-in-Land towns peopled, & will when they shall see that we attempt upon them . . .. put them selves into resistance. (Quoted in Quinn, New American World 3:173)

43. The Virginia Company was repeatedly forced to make laws requiring that corn be planted along with tobacco: see Kingsbury, Records 3:147, 263, 278-79, 473, 598, 628, and 633; Rolfe, True Relation , 8; and Smith, Works 2:284.

44. For the Virginia Company's derision in 1620 to send their colony some trifles instead of food, see my pp. 76-77. Edmund Morgan notes the Virginia Company's almost inexplicable optimism: "In spite of the experience at Roanoke and in spite of the repeated starving times at Jamestown, the company simply did not envisage the provision of food as a serious problem" (American Slavery , 87). After reviewing and then convincingly rejecting the standard explanations for Virginia's food problem, Morgan reaches a conclusion similar to my own, that the English could not reconcile the fact of their starvation with the theory of their cultural superiority to the Indians (71-90). In his next two chapters, Morgan demonstrates how the tobacco boom in the 1620s gave the settlers, especially those rich enough to secure food anyway, added reason to ignore food production. Finally, Morgan argues that few bothered to make Virginia livable because few planned to stay: in 1626 the governor and council in Virginia complain that Virginia's colonists "for the most heretofore . . . Have only endeavored a present Crop [of tobacco], and their hasty return" (Kingsbury, Records 4:572). The colony's advocates would like to think that various unlucky "distractions & discouragements" were the cause of such recidivism, but, as I have been arguing, the particularly virulent form of homesickness endemic to the English was itself a primary distraction.

45. Even some Englishmen realized, however, that they themselves were the more dangerous Error. After the massacre, an investor in the Virginia Company discovered that, from a total of 700 old colonists and 3,570 new ones sent to the colony in the three previous years, "only 1,240 were alive at the time of the massacre . . .. The Indians had killed 347, but something else had killed 3,000, the great majority of the persons sent" (Morgan, American Slavery , 101). James decided that that "something else" was the Virginia Company, which he soon dissolved.

While these observations on English relations to the Indians stem directly from Stephen Greenblatt's account of the "psychic mobility" that helped Europe conquer America, they somewhat qualify Greenblatt's emphasis on "the Europeans' ability again and again to insinuate themselves into the preexisting political, religious, even psychic structures of the natives and to turn those structures to their advantage" (Renaissance Self-Fashioning , 224, 227). First, although Greenblatt generalizes the Spanish duping of an entire people, the Lucayans, into a European pattern (226-29), the English were lucky to encounter so many Indians, let alone dupe them: Captain John Smith (1612), for instance, says that in the vicinity of Jamestown "6 or 700 [Indians] have been the most hath been seen together" (Works 1:160). Second, as I have tried to show, the English were at first interested less in "insinuating" themselves into the savage world than in standing outside that world and witnessing its collapse; the fate of early English colonial efforts demonstrates that English attachment to the negative ideal of a trifle world severely limited their "psychic mobility."

Steven Mullaney extends Greenblatt's argument in the direction I have also taken it, toward English interest in a savage world staged and consumed by this staging, but, like Greenblatt, Mullaney has exaggerated the degree to which "alien or residual cultures" were "consummately rehearsed and thus consummately foreclosed" ("Strange Things," 62). However, in a more recent essay that opens with Frobisher's picture-viewing Eskimo, "Brothers and Others, or the Art of Alienation," Mullaney seems less confident about the total supremacy of the colonizer. He argues that the "art of alienation" ostensibly practiced on the Eskimo can readily turn against its user.

46. Cf. Thomas, who argues that "by Hobgoblin , [Harvey] meant barbaric and irrational legend" ("Hobgoblin," 419-20).

47. "Spenser Ludens, " 94-95. Cf. Nelson on Saint George: "No Renaissance humanist could have thought the legendary life of St. George a respectable literary model. By the sixteenth century accretions of impossible adventure and the buffoonery of village St. George plays must have rendered the story ridiculous; in fact, it had been denounced as apocryphal as early as the fifth" (Poetry , 150). Nelson's own explanation for Spenser's burlesque turns Spenser into Disney: the poem's reader can be delighted by Fairyland "only if he does not really believe in those awful monsters, witches, and bloody combats," only if he is removed "just so far from the fiction that he is at once seduced by it and amused by his own seduction" ("Spenser Ludens, " 99).

The locus classicus for critical recognition of this problem is Richard Hurd (1762): "The age would no longer bear the naked letter of these amusing stories; and the poet was so sensible of the misfortune, that we find him apologizing for it on a hundred occasions" (Chivalry and Romance , 150). But Hurd thinks the romance elements of the poem are Spenser's true interest, with their allegorization only a "recourse" (154): Spenser "had no better way to take in his distress, than to hide his fairy fancies under the mystic cover of moral allegory" (152). Bennett, incidentally, assumes that Spenser's peculiar use of Arthur reveals Spenser's untidy "conversion to the Arthurian theme" long after he had begun The Faerie Queene (Evolution , 61-79).

48. V 9:82; see Kendrick, British Antiquity , 128-29, and E. K.'s previously cited note to "Aprill."

49. Cf. Frederic Carpenter's claim that the namesake of Spenser's eclogues, The Kalendar of Shepherdes , "prompted him to help counteract the influence of this popular manual 'by a member of the Church of Rome in the interest of his church' (Sommer), by the insertion of Protestant doctrine and polemics in his poem. Also not without influence of the same reverse sort on passages of the F.Q., such as the pictures of the Seven Deadly Sins, the House of Holiness, the allegory of the human body, etc." (quoted in V 7:240-41).

50. Strong is expanding Yates's brief comments in "Elizabethan Chivalry," 108-9.

51. The phrase is, of course, Yates's, in "Elizabethan Chivalry," 108.

52. Duessa laments to Redcross that after Christ's death his body was "I know not how, convaid / And fro me hid" (FQ 1.2.24). According to the Reformers, this sort of error is what makes Catholics worship the pope. As Tyndale has it, "The bishops would have a god upon the earth whom they might see" (Practice , 404); or as a cardinal in George North's Stage of Popish Toyes says, "I will rather worship him that is visible, than he that is invisible" (91). Duessa as Double-being negatively defines a positive not-oneness: golden on the outside (cf. her "ritch weedes," FQ 1.2.21), on the inside rotten ("A loathly, wrinckled hag," 8.46).

53. Isabel Rathborne notes that Gower in the Confessio Amantis assimilates Fairyland to a contemptus view of earth as illusion: upon Constance's death, Gower concludes, "The god hath made of hire an ende, / And fro this worldes faierie / Hath take hire into compaignie" (2.1593; quoted in Spenser's Fairyland , 2). Cf. Oberon the fairy king in Greene's James IV (c. 1590), who says he loves the malcontent Bohan "because thou hatest the world" (Ind. 76-77). For the standard Protestant association of fairies with papist imposture and morbidity, see my previous chapter. Rathborne herself connects Spenser's Fairyland to lands of the dead or of unborn heroes such as Elysium in the Aeneid book 6 and Lucian's True History , or closer to home, Arthur's Avalon; see especially Spenser's Fairyland chapters 2 and 3. Yet in the classical and Arthurian sources, the Otherworld constitutes the setting of only an episode or an unseen terminus, not of the entire poem (cf. Spenser's Fairyland , 153). In an attempt to explain this peculiar difference, Rathborne resorts to that Elysium of the perplexed Spenser critic, the Poem That Would Have Been Written: "Arthur was to exhibit the private virtues in Fairyland before he was king, in the twelve books of the Faerie Queene , and the public virtues in Britain after he was king, in Spenser's projected sequel" (152). At an earlier point in her argument, however, and more in line with her epigraph from Gower, she seems to consider the absorption of the poem by Fairyland a natural consequence, of Spenser's Prospero-like melancholy, his "feeling, which he shared with some of his greatest contemporaries, that the glory of this world, so glittering, so desirable, so praiseworthy, was after all an insubstantial pageant, a mirage whose fragile beauty owed its being to the wand of the enchanter, to the airy dreams of the poets, and was doomed at last to vanish into air, into thin air" (60).

Josephine Bennett disagrees, and argues instead that Spenser's Fairyland recaptures the ancient sense of Britain as the locus of "a higher reality" ("Britain," 140). As evidence for Fairyland considered a Platonic "pattern world," Bennett cites John Grange's Golden Aphroditis (1577), in which a lover says to his disdainful beloved:

And sith you think your beautie such as none enjoys the like:
To Plato's  City, fairies' land, or to Utopia wenne [Bennett has "wonne"].
                                                                                                    (E1v)

Bennett comments: "In other words, 'you belong in an ideal world'" (138). But the next lines of Grange's poem shows how invidious, and therefore traditional, his reference to Fairyland must be:

Yea sith you think your wisdom such, as no man hath the like:
In deserts shrink (as Timon  did) go seek some cave or den,
There to enjoy your gifts alone, imparted not to men.

My own conception of Fairyland most closely resembles Harry Berger's elaboration of Nelson's argument about the peculiarity of Spenser's choosing Saint George for his hero. In his often dazzling essay, "Spenser's Faerie Queene, Book I: Prelude to Interpretation," Berger argues as I do that Fairyland represents a kind of illusion, but he exaggerates Spenser's psychological allegory by reducing Redcross's quest to a narcissistic error: "Thinking himself an Elfin justicer, the hero isolates himself from the common world, ventures into a fairyland largely of his own making and undergoes experiences which expose the narcissism and insufficiency of the romance idiom in its literal character" (45). Yet Redcross was stolen from England as a baby; "all" consider him "a Faeries sonne"; he was chosen for his mission by Gloriana, Una, and ultimately God (FQ 1.9.53); and, as I will shortly note, he remains in Fairyland.

Anthea Hume explains such British sojourns in Fairyland by commonsensically assuming that the Britishness of a character like Arthur represents his historicity, while his fairy travels represent the fabulous legends surrounding him, to which Spenser self-consciously adds (Spenser , 148-51). I would maintain, however, that the fabulous is only one aspect of a more general conception of worldliness in which Spenser wants to place his heroes, and in many ways it is the aspect least pertinent to the gentleman Spenser wants to fashion.

54. This is the adjusted truth about Redcross: a fairy stole him when he was a child; the "base Elfin brood" (FQ 1.10.65) she left in his place may, as Hamilton (ed., Faerie Queene , 142) notes, account for the papist legend; and Georgos is the name given Redcross by the fairy ploughman who adopts him (66). When readers like Cullen describe book x as "a conflict between the new man of the spirit, sanctus , and the old man of the earth, georgos" (Infernal , 23), they overlook the fact that georgos represents a fairy worldliness, not worldliness as such.

55. Neither does Redcross remain in Eden, which, as Parker notes, looks very different from its original description once Redcross reaches it: "At first we are told that it is a kingdom which stretches over all the world, 'from East to Westerne shore' (I.i.5.5) and the defeat of the Dragon would seem to promise a return to its original dominion. But in the final, culminating, canto, it shrinks to a much more limited locus. Like the allegorical persons tied to particular places—Phaedria or Malecasta—it seems to be left behind precisely because it does not participate in the poem's essential movement, its shape-shifting process" (Romance , 76). Though Parker ascribes this "essential movement" to the romance mode of Spenser's poem, I would argue that Spenser decided to fashion his imperialist epic as a romance in the first place because of literary and extra-literary exigencies specific to Elizabethan England.

On "shadow," a term otherwise interchangeable in Spenser with the "shade" shepherds desire, see E. K.'s explanation that Spenser "secretly shadoweth himself" (V 7:18, 10) under the name of Colin, or Spenser's assertion that Gloriana represents Elizabeth, "and yet in some places else, I do otherwise shadow her" (V 1:168). For the rise of millenarianism in the seventeenth century, see Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse , Christianson, Reformers , and Firth, Apocalyptic . None of these historians argues that Elizabethan millenarianism was an impossibility. In the 1590s Thomas Brightman wrote what was to prove a very influential millenarian commentary on Revelation, Apocalypsis Apocalypseos , but the tract remained unpublished till 1609, and even then appeared not in London but in Frankfurt; the first English translation of Brightman's Latin (A Revelation of the Revelation , 1615) was published in Amsterdam. If Spenser shared Brightman's beliefs, he also shared his discretion.

56. Blenerhasset, Revelation , A3v. Though Spenser insists that Fairyland represents either Elizabeth's "realmes" (2.proem.4) or her "kingdom" (V 1:168), he never limits the scope of either term to England's island. Colin Clout figures Elizabeth as "Cynthia the Ladie of the sea " (166; my emphasis). For a brief history of the modern criticism that does insist on a distinction between England and Fairyland, see Hume, Spenser , 145-46.

57. It would be tiresome to document the near unanimity of recent critics on this point, a consensus that in most cases depends on mistakenly equating Colin's vision with poetry per se: for example, "Spenser finds in a moment of vision at the recreative center of the pastoral landscape the realized ideal which is the object of his poetic quest, but he learns too that the pursuit of the chivalric quest must finally diverge from the pursuit of poetry" (Shore, Spenser , 146). Certainly the most extreme proponent of the view that "we have seen the truth in the Acidalian vision" is Kathleen Williams, who believes this glimpse of poetry at its best enables us to "accept without trouble the death of the good Meliboe and his people" (World of Glass , 222). Louis Montrose seems on firmer ground about the later Spenser when he turns to a sonnet where Spenser, now apparently in propria persona, sounds very much like Colin. "In Amoretti , LXXX," claims Montrose, "the earthly paradise of personal love is hemmed in by a public world of toil and obligation" ("Perfecte," 55):

After so long a race as I have run
        Through Faery land, which those six books compile,
        give leave to rest me being halfe fordonne,
        and gather to my selfe new breath awhile.
Then as a steed refreshed after toyle,
        Out of my prison I will breake anew:
        and stoutly will that second worke assoyle,
        with strong endevour and attention dew.
Till then give leave to me in pleasant mew,
        to sport my muse and sing my loves sweet praise:
        the contemplation of whose heavenly hew,
        my spirit to an higher pitch will rayse.
But let her prayses yet be low and meane,
        fit for the handmayd of the Faery Queene.

But the sonnet actually follows earlier passages in Spenser's career quite closely: as in the Error episode, what first looks like a respite becomes a "prison" and "mew" to which Spenser claims he resigns himself only because such resignation will ultimately renew his epic project.

Again Berger comes closest to my own position, although he too collapses the distinction between pastoral and poetry in general. Berger sees Acidale as a return to Spenser's earlier pastoral that enables Spenser to perfect not only pastoral but poetry itself; Colin's vision shows the mind, or poetry—curiously interchangeable terms for Berger—"having triumphed" in its powers, yet only in order to turn outward again with new strength ("Secret," 74). I would argue that Spenser imagines the return to pastoral benefiting larger ambitions by differentiating them from pastoral.

58. Though now detached from mere worldliness, the post-Calender Colin has become addicted instead to illusionary pleasures that in the end still lead him, like the old "Januarie" Colin, to break his pipe in frustration (FQ 6.10.18). For the conventional fairies, see FQ 6.10.7 and 17. In works prior to The Faerie Queene as well, Spenser habitually associates such fairies with pastoral, as for example in the "June" eclogue, where Hobbinol tries to win Colin back to innocent pastoral with the promise that Colin will see "frendly Faeries, met with many Graces, / And lightfote Nymphes" (25-26) dance to the music of the Muses and Pan. But Colin declares himself alienated from such "weary wanton toys" (46-48). Cf. "Maye," 32; Virgils Gnat , 178-79; and, in The Teares of the Muses , the once joyous "Nymphes and lightfoote Faeries" (31) who now depart from the Muses' "groves" (19) lamenting.

59. A friary at Enniscorthy; an Augustinian monastery at New Ross; New Abbey; and Buttevant Abbey; see Judson, Life , 102-4, 195. For the horsemen, see V 9:121.

60. The first quotation, perhaps the most famous piece of Spenser's prose, is Irenius's description of the Irish who found themselves reduced to nothing by the same rebellion from English authority that brought Spenser Irish land (see Judson, Life , 102-4). The passage illustrates Irenius's recommendation that in case of rebellion the natives should be "kept from manurance and their Cattle from Coming abroad," so that "by this hard restraint they would quickly Consume themselves and devour one another" (V 9:158). Cf. John Derricke's happier conception of what it means for the Irish to come out of the woods:

Come each wight which now do haunt the wood,
Submit yourselves unto your sovereign's law
Come forth, I say, receive my counsel good
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
Instead of woods then houses you may use,
Instead of bogs, the cities at your will.
                                            ( Image of Irelande , 90, 212)

The second quotation, from A Brief Note of Ireland (V 9:236), which is presumed Spenser's, concerns the later rebellion that forced Spenser to flee Ireland and meet his end. Rudolf Gottfried also notes the connection between this quotation and the first (V 9:431). If Spenser intends the allusion, he would seem to have in mind something like the point of his Prothalamion (1596), which, as I will argue in chapter 5, suggests that Spenser embraces his real failure as, after book 6, a logical next step in getting his imperialist argument across.

1. For Elizabethan and Jacobean references, see Brooks, Tobacco 1:327, 334, 368, 378, 392, 448, 449, 455, 464, 479, and 2:21, 22, 77; Brooks's citations are by no means exhaustive. Spenser's second term of praise for tobacco, "sovereign" (FQ 3.5.33), appears at Tobacco 1:361, 412, 424, 433, and 2:21, 31, 77, 110. Lyly parodied Belphoebe's herb gathering in his Woman in the Moon (c. 1591-93) (3.1.65-70; see Dickson, Panacea , 177-78).

Brooks's work, an extraordinary sourcebook for the study of tobacco, cites almost all the tobacco references I will examine; see also the Supplement . Dickson's Panacea is a fine one-volume history.

2. Cited in CSP 8:140; the figures actually cover Michaelmas 1603-Michaelmas 1604. Records of smuggled tobacco are, of course, hard to come by.

3. Irish , F4r; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 2:48.

4. The oxymoron is more evident in Spenser's reference to tobacco as "the soveraigne weede" (FQ 3.5.33). Cf. Dekker, Guls , 231; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:464.

5. Cf., e.g., Nashe: "divine Master Spenser , the miracle of wit" (1589) and "heavenly Spenser " (1592) (Works 3:323 and 1:243).

6. Cf. Greenblatt on Guyon's destruction of the Bower of Bliss as in part an allegory of the English colonist's "need for constant vigilance and unrelenting pressure" in resisting a Circean seduction by the land he colonizes (Renaissance Self-Fashioning , 179-88). Again, the Elizabethans generally thought that the murderous greed of the Spanish set the "intemperate" precedent to avoid:

It is about a hundred years since they discovered a new world, under the conduct of Christopher Columbus , who in my judgment would never have undertaken this voyage, if he had thought that the men whom he brought thither, as if they were charmed by the cup of Circe , should straightways be transformed into Lions, Panthers, Tigers, and other savage beasts. (Ashley, Comparison , 23)

For Spenser's surprising turn to American gold at the end of book 4 (FQ 4.11.22), see chapter 5.

7. In her "English Commercial Development and American Colonization 1560-1620," Carol Shammas argues that Elizabethan imperialism was gold centered, while its Jacobean counterpart moved toward commodities-centered schemes. Joan Thirsk's Economic Policy and Projects sees more Elizabethan interest in commodification than Shammas allows. This essay, however, tries to highlight a strand of Elizabethan expansionism at once uneasy about gold and, in its most radical form, indifferent to corn-modification.

8. "Great Chronologie [of England]," MS entry for 1573, quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:298; PN 5:242.

9. James's Counter-blaste asserts that some of the gentry have been "be-stowing three, some four hundred pounds a year upon this precious stink" (C4v).

10. Brooks, Tobacco 1:381. The title character in Chapman's Monsieur D'Olive (acted 1605, publ. 1606) seems to allude to this unusual time lapse when he describes tobacco as "an ancient subject, and yet newly / Call'd into question" (2.2.151-53).

11. Parker, Books , 76, on Monardes (1571), translated by John Frampton as Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Worlde (London, 1577). (For the complicated publishing history of Monardes' work, see Brooks, Tobacco 1:245-46, 263-64.) Parker, whose Books is a valuable starting point for research into Renaissance English travel literature, adds that "two issues in 1577, another in 1580, and still another in 1596 were not in keeping with the tendency of most English travel books of this period to appear in only one edition, even when they were vigorously imperialistic." His explanation of Monardes' exceptional popularity, "its utilitarian value to medical practitioners," sounds plausible enough, but skirts two problems. First, the timing of the various editions matches two small waves of Elizabethan propaganda about America, the earlier stimulated by Frobisher's northern voyages (1576-78), the later by Raleigh's Guianan expedition (1595). Second, the translator Frampton was, as Parker notes, a former victim of the Spanish Inquisition and an ardent imperialist: he translated five other exploration tracts, including that of Marco Polo, in hopes to spur his countrymen into action. Parker maintains that this first translation is "the only one . . . in which the political motive is not evident," which is to say, perhaps, only that Frampton became increasingly explicit about his motives. Parker's bibliography of travel literature (243-65) makes dear that his own definition of politics, like the definitions of so many other researchers into travel literature, does not include plants—no tobacco books, not even James's, appear there. My own explanation of Monardes' popularity, which I hope this chapter will make more convincing, is that his herbal provided the sort of information about America that most interested the Elizabethans.

12. John Melton (1609) alludes to tobacco's high-class origins, and subsequent degradation, when he says that it "was wont to be taken of great gentlemen, & gallants, now made a frequent & familiar Companion of every Tapster and Horse-keeper (Sixe-Folde , 35; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:472; cf. Dekker, Guls , 208).

Even James, in the proclamation of 17 October 1604, that levied a heavy custom on the weed, distinguished between "the better sort," who "have and will use the same with Moderation to preserve their Health," and "a number of riotous and disordered Persons of mean and base Condition, who, contrary to the use which Persons of good Calling and Quality make thereof, do spend most of their time in that idle Vanity. . . and also do consume that Wages which many of them get by their Labor" (quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:406-7). Cf. Doctor Clement in Jonson's Every Man in His Humor (1598, publ. 1601) pretending to hold a similar position and scaring Cob the tobacco hater: "What? A tankard-bearer, a thread-bare rascal, a beggar, a slave that never drunk out of better than pisspot mettle in his life, and he to deprave, and abuse the virtue of an herb, so generally receiv'd in the courts of princes, the chambers of nobles, the bowers of sweet Ladies, the cabins of soldiers —Peto , away with him, by god's passion, I say, go to" (3.3.108-14). Whether or not the playwrights are mocking James in particular, as Brooks assumes (Tobacco 1:424), Chapman's D'Olive too claims to believe that tobacco's "lawful use" should be "limited thus: / That none should dare to take it but a gentleman, / Or he that had some gentlemanly humor, / The murr, the headache, the catarrh, the bone-ache, / Or other branches of the sharp salt rheum / Fitting a gentleman" (Monsieur D'Olive 2.2.290-95)—SO the rheum itself has come to seem a high-class affectation, like spleen.

13. "On the Continent tobacco had been generally accepted as a panacea since 1560, and as such had been woven into daily life there. But in England, about three decades later (after its fairly limited reception as a wonder-working simple) smoking suddenly and triumphantly became a social force, developing into an almost national recreation" (Brooks, Tobacco 1:43).

14. See Brooks, Tobacco 1:47-49, Dickson, Panacea 170-74. It is Raleigh's authority that Philaretes seems to have particularly in mind when in a prefatory poem he anxiously tries to distinguish his special attack on tobacco from his general endorsement of Raleigh's American projects: "Let none deny but Indies soil can yield, / The sov'reign simples, of Apollos field. / Let England Spain and the French Fleur de Lis / Let Irish Kern and the Cold seated Freese / Confess themselves in bounden duty stand / To wholesome simples of Guiana land" (Work , A4v).

15. Stow's Annales (1615) too say that "Sir Walter Raleigh brought first the knowledge of tobacco" (quoted in Suppl . 4:177); while Camden's Annales (1615, trans. 1630) maintain that Raleigh's colonists "were the first that I know of, which brought into England that Indian plant. . .. Certainly from that time, it began to be in great request, and to be sold at an high rate" (quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 2:156).

16. For Raleigh's silence, see Brooks, Tobacco 1:68. Theodor de Bry reprinted Harriot's tract in four languages as the first volume of his America (1590), adding to the original text some engravings from the watercolors of Harriot's fellow colonist John White, along with Harriot's commentary on them (Quinn, Roanoke Voyages 1:390-464).

17. "Renaissance Influences," 82-83. Quinn is following Beer, Origins , 32-77.

18. Cf. William Barclay's "To my Lord the Bishop of Murray," from his Nepenthes, or the Vertues of Tabacco (1614): "A stranger plant shipwracked in our coast, / Is come to help this poor phlegmatic soil" (unpaginated).

See Brooks, Tobacco 1:389 on the identification of Marbecke as the author of the Defence .

19. Cf. the True Declaration (1610), which imagines overpopulation as itself an "inundation" that "doth overflow this little Island" (61).

20. As "good Merchandize" Ralph Lane mentions only "Sassafras, and many other roots & gums" (Quinn, Roanoke Voyages 1:273). For sassafras as the primary New World commodity garnered by Raleigh's man Samuel Mace in 1602, and by Bartholomew Gosnold in a voyage unlicensed by Raleigh the same year, see Quinn, England , 408, 414-16; tobacco is not mentioned in the extant records of either venture.

21. See Strachey, Historie , 122-23, 38; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:525-26; and see 1:86. Hamor says Rolfe "first took the pains to make trial thereof" in 1612 (True Discourse , D4b; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:524).

22. Of course, England must have acquired a good deal of tobacco in a happily indirect way also, via privateering; see Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering . For the interesting history of homegrown tobacco in the English Renaissance, see Thirsk, "New Crops."

23. Cf. Hakluyt, "Discourse," 223-24.

24. The continuation of Harriot's sentence seems to mark a separation from Indian barbarity, as if the superstitious use of tobacco had not been felt as entirely barbarous before: "but all done with strange gestures, stamping, sometime dancing, clapping of hands, holding up of hands, & staring up into the heavens, uttering therewithal and chattering strange words & noises."

25. These last three quotations, from Harriot's captions to John White's drawings, are Hakluyt's translations of Harriot's Latin.

26. For example, "Deer Skins . . . are to be had of the natural inhabitants thousands yearly by way of traffic for trifles" (Harriot, Report , 331). Apparently Harriot came to be regarded as England's resident authority on the subject of Indians misvaluing things. When Newport returned to England in January 1609 with one of Powhatan's sons, "Harriot advised that no expensive gift be made to him but that he would be satisfied with copper decorations only, so that there duly appeared in the [Northumberland house] accounts a payment of three shillings 'for 2 Rings and other pieces of Copper given to the Indian prince.' Similarly, we can identify as probably chosen by Harriot, amongst the goods sent to George Percy in July 1608, 'for blue beads' six shillings and 'for Red copper' nineteen shillings and sixpence, objects Harriot had long ago found the Indians anxious to have" (Quinn, "Thomas Harriot," 50). Cf. Harriot's memoranda for Mace's 1602 voyage, in which we witness the odd spectacle of England's premier scientist carefully directing the production of copper trifles for the Indians (Quinn, England , 410-13).

27. From Greville's advice to England in "A Treatise of Monarchy," 390-95; Grosart's comment on this theory of toy trade anticipates my argument here: "as in barter with the Indians" (Works of Fulke Greville 1:142).

28. The most famous work to celebrate a newly discovered people who contemn gold is of course Utopia , but the topos is a very common one. Cf. Gascoigne's The Stele Glass (1576):

How live the Moors, which spurn at glistring pearl,
And scorn the costs, which we do hold so dear?
How? how but well? and were the precious pearl
Of peerless truth, amongst them published,
(Which we enjoy, and never weigh the worth)
They would not then, the same (like us) despise,
Which (though they lack) they live in better wise
Than we, which hold, the worthless pearl so dear.
                                                                      ( Works  2:153)

29. Shortly before his disastrous second voyage in search of E1 Dorado, Raleigh reportedly boasted "that he knew a Town in those parts, upon which he could make a saving Voyage in Tobacco , though there were no other spoil" (A Declaration of the Demeanour and Cariage of Sir Walter Raleigh [1618], quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:68 n. 8). Cf. Harcourt (1613): "I dare presume to say, and hope to prove, within a few months . . . that only this commodity Tobacco, (so much sought after and desired) will bring as great a benefit and profit to the undertakers, as ever the Spaniards gained by the best and richest Silver mine in all their Indies, considering the charge of both" (Voyage , 105; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:502-3).

30. "In Tabaccam" 1-6, in Epigrammatum libri II (1629) (Works , 238). Trans. Suppl . 4:191.

31. Though Englishmen had smoked tobacco before Lane's men returned home (see, e.g., Brooks, Tobacco 1:240, 298), Charles de L'Ecluse's Latin abridgment of Monardes (1605, trans. 1659) notes that "the English returning from thence [i.e., Virginia] brought the like [Indian] Pipes with them, to drink the smoke of Tobacco; and since that time, the use of drinking Tobacco hath so much prevailed all England over, especially amongst the Courtiers, that they have caused many such like Pipes to be made to drink Tobacco with" (quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:427-18). Quinn explains that "what the colonists apparently introduced was the smoking pipe used in Roanoke Island as a model for English pipe-makers" (Roanoke Voyages 1:345-46 n. 3).

32. C. T., Advice , A3v. This most common of tobacco jibes could appear in the mouths of foreigners—"both Spaniards & all other Nations say tauntingly to us, when they see all our goods landed (to use their own words) Que todo esso sepagtaa con humo ; that all will be paid in smoke" (Bennett, Treatise , unpaginated)—and of kings: a proclamation of Charles I (6 January 1631) prohibited the importation of foreign tobacco so that "our Subjects may not unthriftily vent the solid Commodities of our own Kingdom, and return the proceed thereof in Smoke" (quoted in Beer, Origins , 82).

33. While it has long been recognized that Lucian presents a similar anecdote (1.163), Dickson sensibly observes that this coincidence alone does not prove the story apocryphal; "It is even possible that Ralegh, having read the story in a Greek or Latin edition of Lucian, carefuly arranged the matter of the wager to amuse his royal mistress" (Panacea , 172). As it is, I am less concerned with the anecdote's authenticity than with the testimony it offers about contemporary opinions of Raleigh and tobacco.

34. See Dickson, Panacea , 174. Cf. T. W. on the Gunpowder Plotters: "In the time of their imprisonment, they rather feasted with their sins, than fasted with sorrow for them; were richly appareled, fared deliciously, and took Tobacco out of measure, with a seeming carelessness of their crime" (quoted in Suppl . 3:133).

35. I cite Wands's translation throughout.

36. Cf. the braggadocio Bobadillo in Jonson's Every Man in His Humor : "I have been in the Indies (where this herb grows) where neither my self, nor a dozen Gentlemen more (of my knowledge) have received the taste of any other nutriment, in the world, for the space of one and twenty weeks, but Tobacco only. Therefore it cannot be but 'tis most divine" (3.2.70-75).

37. Taylor, Original Writings 1:367-68; quoted in Seelye, Prophetic , 43, who comments: "So Raleigh's constancy to Elizabeth, his loyalty to his colony, the Queen's barrenness, and Virgina's ill repute are all spun into an ambiguous fabric of allusion, ending by associating the New World with the paradisiac promised land of the Mosaic epic." Seelye also observes that "Hakluyt lifts himself to a level of expression which he seldom attained" (42), though the quality may in fact be Raleigh's: Hakluyt writes to him that "if there be anything else that you would have mentioned in the epistle dedicatory, you shall do well to let me understand of it betimes" (Taylor, Original Writings 1:355).

38. The Latin in the original compensates to some degree for this raciness, as Hakluyt's characterization of Martyr's Latin suggests: "He depicts with a distinguished and skillful pen and with lively colors in a most gifted manner the head, neck, breast, arms, in brief the whole body of that tremendous entity America, and clothes it decently in the Latin dress familiar to scholars" (Taylor, Original Writings 1:363).

39. As I will explain in chapter 5, Raleigh is free to enter America only when he has been barred from Elizabeth's presence.

40. For James, tobacco is the food of the belly fillers in Numbers 11.4-6 who reject manna (Counterblaste , C4r).

41. The wound occurs during a battle reminiscent of Raleigh's well-publicized Irish skirmishes. For the most recent compilation of evidence that Timias represents Raleigh, see Bednarz, "Raleigh," 52-54.

42. For a fine discussion of the relation between Ariosto's Medoro and Angelica on the one hand and Spenser's Timias and Belphoebe on the other, see Alpers, Poetry , 185-94.

43. Raleigh at least understood "Belphoebe" as the queen made approachable. He laments of the angry Elizabeth after his disgrace, "A Queen she was to me, no more Belphoebe, / A Lion then, no more a milk-white Dove" (Ocean to Scinthia , 11. 327-28).

44. On flowers, herbs, and weeds as conventional terms for poetry, see, e.g., Gascoigne's Posies (1575), a book of poems divided into "Flowers to comfort, Herbs to cure, and Weeds to be avoided" (Works 1:17). The locus classicus for the identification of pastoral, poetry, herbs, and erotic frustration is the first book of Ovid's Metamorphoses , in which Apollo, the god of herbal cures, notes the irony of his love for Daphne:

inventtam medicina meum est, opiferque per orbem
dicor, et herbarum subiecta potentia nobis.
ei mihi, quod nullus amor est sanabilis herbis
nec prosunt domino, quae prosunt omnibus, artes!
                                               ( Metamorphoses  1.521-24)

(Of Physick and of surgery I found the Arts for need
The power of every herb and plant doth of my gift proceed.
Now woe is me that ne'er an herb can heal the hurt of love
And that the Arts that others help their Lord doth helpless prove.)
                                                                               (Trans. Golding 1:635-38)

Apollo must learn to exchange his useless skill in herbs for a more satisfactory skill in the reeds Daphne becomes: what heals his desire for Daphne is, in other words, its sublimation into poetry. Spenser, however, rejects the innocent pastoral version of such conversion (e.g., "Aprill," 50-51) as too worldly, but believes that his epic "flowers" can indeed cure lustful fixation.

45. Cf. the shepherds' commentary on the equally lovesick lover of Paris, Oenone: "Farewell fair Nymph, sith he must heal alone that gave the wound. / There grows no herb of such effect upon Dame Nature's ground" (Araygnement of Parts , 601-2).

46. When Peele later comes round to such dissatisfaction with Elizium, he puts himself in Colin's shoes: "Leave foolish lad, it mendeth not with words, / Nor herbs nor time such remedy affords" ("The Honour of the Garter," 69-70).

47. In equating Spenserian virginity as I do with devotion to "a higher ideal" ("Spenser's Accommodation," 423), H. M. English reveals the practical difficulty of this philosophy when he imagines that Elizabeth can readily combine the alternatives of literal virginity and literal marriage, represented by Belphoebe and Amoret respectively.

48. What enables Raleigh to present his return home as even more pathetic and involuntary than Wyatt's, apparently, is that Wyatt's prince and beloved are now one and the same.

49. The Bower is, for instance, said to be

A place pickt out by choice of best alive,
That natures worke by art can imitate:
In which what ever in this worldly state
Is sweet, and pleasing unto living sense,
Or that may dayntiest fantasie aggrate,
Was poured forth with plentifull dispence,
And made there to abound with lavish affluence.
                                               (FQ 2.12.42)

Elsewhere, the Bower's "Art" seems "halfe in scorne / Of niggard Nature" (50), and delivers such delightful sounds "as attonce might not on living ground, / Save in this Paradise, be heard elsewhere" (70).

50. This "writ" is thus distinguished from the writing on the Bower's gate, which in telling "all the famous history / Of Jason and Medea " gives the impression that "ye might have seene" the events described (FQ 2.12.43-46).

Greenblatt pursues something like this argument about Spenser's oxy-moronic allegory when he claims that "The Faerie Queene announces its status as art object at every turn" so as "to spare ideology" the skepticism absorbed by the overtly fictional poem (Renaissance Self-Fashioning , 190- 92). I would argue that Spenser is far more skeptical of certain popular Elizabethan political assumptions than Greenblatt allows; Spenser believes in "wardling] off idolatry" (192) not only of the artwork but of Elizabeth herself. Cf. Montrose, "Elizabethan Subject," passim.

No doubt Spenser's conception of his writing as antithetical to idolatry derives in part from Protestant scripturalism, enforced by visitation articles such as the following (1551-52):

Item , that when any glass windows within any of the churches shall from henceforth be repaired, or new made, that you do not permit to be painted or portrayed therein the image or picture of any saint; but if they will have anything painted, that it be either branches, flowers, or posies taken out of Holy Scripture. (Frere and Kennedy, Visitation Articles 2:289)

Cf. Sidney on poetry's unique power to convey an image such as idolatry used to paint: reading "that heavenly discourse" of the prodigal son (Luke 15.11-32), Sidney exclaims, "me seems I see before my eyes the lost child's disdainful prodigality, turned to envy a swine's dinner" (Apology , 30). But, as I have indicated, Spenser's overtly trifling poetry even shuns what Michael O'Connell has called the Protestant "logolatry" of Scripture ("Idolatrous," 287; cf. esp. 293-94, 298).

51. "It was before 1560, in or about Lisbon, that the gospel of tobacco as panacea was evolved" (Brooks, Tobacco 1:236); see Dickson, Panacea , 57-80. The most influential publicists of tobacco's divinity were Jean Liebault (1570) and Pierre Pena and Matthias de L'Obel (1570-71); see Brooks, To bacco 1:232-42. Frampton's edition of Monardes (1577) includes a translation of Liebault on tobacco's "divine effects" (Joyfull Newes , 93; see Brooks, Tobacco 1:232).

52. His Majesties Gracious Letter (1622) to the Earl of Southampton, treasurer of the Virginia Colony, includes this similar appraisal by the master of the king's silk works, John Bonoeil: "Sure there is some such sorcery in this weed; it was first sown (it seems) by some Indian Enchanter's hand, with spells and Magic verses, or otherwise you could never so much dote on it" (quoted in Suppl . 5:206).

53. The most common way to represent fears about tobacco's ill effect on the English character was to personify tobacco as a witch or whore: e.g., "that Witch Tobacco " (James I [1618], quoted in Dickson, Panacea , 156); "that Indian whore" (William Fennor [1617], quoted in Suppl . 4:182); "a swarty Indian [who] / Hath played the painted English Courtesan " (Philaretes, Work , A4v); "the Indian Devil , our bawd, witch, whore, manqueller" (Scot, PhiIomythie , 41r; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 2:8). This particular stigrnatization of tobacco is due in part to tobacco's associations with fast living—"It is the thing his soul doth most adore," says John Taylor (1614) of the tobacco taker, "To live and love Tobacco, and a whore" (quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:522)—but more generally to worries that tobacco will block the production of legitimate Englishmen. William Vaughan (1612) wanted smokers to memorize this rhyme: "Tobacco, that outlandish weed, / It spends the brain, and spoils the seed: / It dulls the sprite, it dims the sight, / It robs a woman of her right" (quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 2:131). This physiological argument aside, writers often depict wives complaining about the greater affection their husbands feel for tobacco. The most elaborate diatribe occurs in John Deacon's Tobacco Tortured (1616): e.g., "Why dost thou so vainly prefer a vanishing filthy fume before my permanent virtues?" (quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 2:12; for more references see 5:280 under "Smokers, wives of"). Uncannily enough, the first Englishman to begin growing commercially successful tobacco in Virginia was also the first Englishman to marry an Indian: in the same breath Ralph Hamor praises John Rolfe's importation of tobacco seeds and his marriage to Pocahontas, both done "merely for the good and honor of the Plantation" (True Discourse , D4v; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:524). Marlowe assodates tobacco with a third un-English choice: he reportedly declared "that all they that love not Tobacco & Boys were fools" (quoted in Shirley, Harriot , 182).

54. Reprinted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:352-58 and Dickson, Panacea , 198-99; I cite Brooks's edition of the poem, one of thirteen extant MS versions. Heffner, "Essex," 23, notes that William Browne alludes to the poem in the course of his meditation on Essex's career in Britannias Pastorals 1.4.685-760 (Heffner gives 1625 as the date, though book 1 was first published in 1613). What Heffner fails to note, however, is that Browne also alludes to Timias and Belphoebe in the same passage: returning from war, Essex searches for Elizabeth in the hope that "her skill in herbs might help remove" a wound Envy gave him, but she mistakes him for a beast and kills him. To Browne's mind, Spenser's Timias and the narrator of Essex's poem are the same man.

55. Institution , 168r. Cf. Psalms 102.3, Isaiah 51.6, Hosea 13. 3.

56. Cf. Simion Grahame (1609) (quoted in Suppl . 3:145). Thomas Jenner turned this allegorical potential of tobacco smoking into a very popular poem (1626):

The Indian weed withered quite
Green at noon, cut down at night
Shows thy decay, all flesh is hay,
Thus think, then drink Tobacco .

The Pipe that is so lily white
Shows thee to be a mortal wight,
And even such, gone with a touch,
Thus think, then drink Tobacco .

And when the smoke ascends on high,
Think, thou behold'st the vanity
Of worldly stuff gone with a puff:
Thus think, then drink Tobacco .

And when the Pipe grows foul within,
Think on thy soul defil'd with sin,
And then the fire it doth require
Thus think, then drink Tobacco .

The ashes that are left behind,
May serve to put thee still in mind,
That unto dust, return thou must,
Thus think, then drink Tobacco .

Quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 2:128; see ibid. n. 2 for a bibliography of the poem's popularity. As if to emphasize the ambiguity of Jenner's position here—does he approve or disapprove of smoking?—the poem was published "Answered by G. W. [George Wither?] thus, / Thus think, drink no Tobacco. " Incidentally, Wither came full circle on tobacco, and published a similar contemptus "Meditation Whilst He Was Taking a Pipe of Tobacco" (1661) lauding tobacco's educative powers, which he composed during his third incarceration at Newgate; see Brooks, Tobacco 4:421-23.

57. Old Fortunatus (1599), quoted in Suppl . 3:116.; Fortunatus himself sounds like Essex when he refers to "that lean tawny face Tobacconist death, that turns all into smoke" (1.1.336-37).

58. See 2 Peter 3. Buttes's awkward comparisons of the gluttonous eater to an empty oven and desolate house depend on this apocalyptic resonance for their coherence. Both occur in the Psalms as figures for God's judgment upon David's enemies (21.9, 69.25; cf. Matthew 23.38).

59. From Trevisa's translation of Bartholomaeus, De Proprietatibus Re rum (trans. 1398; 1495 ed.), 4.3.evi.b/2; cf. Bateman's 1582 ed., 4.3.fiii.a/1.

60. For a different account of this process of sublimation, see William Vaughan's Spirit of Detraction (1611), whose prefatory epistle has certain "Cavaliers and Gentles" simply aping Monardes' Indian priest: after smoking,

they fain themselves so long ravished as it were in an ecstasy: until after a thorough perambulation of their barren wits . . . they have coined some strange accident worthy the rehearsal among their boon companions. Then as though they started out of an heavenly trance. . . They recount tales of ROBIN-HOOD , of RHODOMONTING rovers, of DONZEL DEL PHOEBO , of a new ANTI-CHRIST born in BABYLON , of lying wonders, blazing out most blasphemous news, how that the DEVIL appeared at such a time with lightning and THUNDRING majesty . . . and if they had not suddenly blessed themselves better, he had carried away with him men, women, houses, and all right into hell. (Quoted in Suppl . 4:158)

61. The standard reference on this subject is Fink, "Milton," supplemented by Stroup, "Climatic"; the theory derives from Aristotle's Politics 7.7. For other English speculations on New World climate, see Kupper-man, "Puzzle."

62. A satiric epigram from Humors Antique Faces (1605) by Samuel Row-lands nicely illustrates, by way of mockery, the idea that tobacco as miraculous fare might alone cure the economic wants Virginia was supposed to supply:

A Poor Slave once with penury afflicted,
Yet to Tobacco mightily addicted
Says, they that take Tobacco keeps their health,
Are worthy fellows in a common wealth.
For if (sayth he) Tobacco were our cheer,
Then other victuals never would be dear.
Fie on excess; it makes men faint and meek,
A penny loaf might serve a man a week.
Were we conforrn'd to the Chamelion's fare,
To live by smoke as they do live by air.

O how our men oppress and spoil their sense,
        in making havoc of the elements.
He can give reason for what he hath spoke.
My Salamander lives by fire and smoke.
Necessity doth cause him to repeat,
Tobacco's praise for want of other meat.
                                       (Quoted in  Suppl  3:131-32)

Cf. the imp in Warner's Continuance of Albions England (1606), who celebrates the "Indian weed, / That fum'd away more wealth than would a many thousands feed" (quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:436).

63. Brathwait, Smoaking Age , 196; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 2:41. A leaf explaining Brathwait's picture (reproduced at Brooks, Tobacco 2:37) appears only in the Arents copy of The Smoaking Age . The use of a smoking blackamoor as a trade sign seems to have been introduced around 1615 (Brooks, Tobacco 2:37). For Brathwait's other references to the sign, see Smoaking Age , 155 and 164; Jonson appears to allude to an actual black boy used as an advertisement in Bartholomew Faire 1.4. 116-18.

64. Hall refers to "certain Indian chiefs of the Torrid Zone, so renowned for smoking that they had blackened their insides. It is clear that this color pleased them, for it did not seem right that the inner part of their bodies should differ in color from the outer" (Mundus , 96; cited in Suppl . 3:129). The joke is recalled by Edmund Gardiner (1610) (Triall , 18r-v; cited in Brooks, Tobacco , 1:480). For accounts of dissections that supposedly showed internal blackening, see Brooks, Tobacco 1:404, 2:11-12 and 89; for brains said to be blackened, see 1:381, 411, 516, and 2:89, 91, 234; on internal blackening in general, see 1:355, 411, 445, 535, and 2:22, 52, 234. The most elaborate version of the conceit that tobacco makes smokers black like Indians, who are themselves black like the devil, is in John Taylor (1614) (Nipping , C4v-D3r; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:519-22).

65. Marbecke's emphasis; cf. 16, 20, and 63-65. Marbecke believes, moreover, that tobacco compensates for any residue it may leave in the body by purging rheum: "It bringeth no more thither, than it carrieth away from thence" (13). James counters that what tobacco smokers take for rheum is really only smoke condensed, "and so are you made free and purged of nothing, but that wherewith you willfully burdened your selves" (Counter-blaste , B4v).

66. Beaumont and his friends subscribe to the Spenserian tobacco tradition with a vengeance: five times in the commendatory verses and poem tobacco is called "divine," five times "sacred," three times "celestial"; five times its effects are "blest"; and then it is also "ethereal," "heavenly," "metaphysical," "immortal"—in short, a "god."

A tradition making Spenser the archetype of the impoverished poet arose almost immediately after his death—e.g., in the third of the Parnassus plays (c. 1601-2): "And yet for all, this unregarding soil / Unlac't the line of his desired life, / Denying maintenance for his dear relief: / Careless ere to prevent his exequy, / Scarce deigning to shut up his dying eye" (Return part 2, 1.2.220-24). See Heffner, "Did Spenser Die in Poverty?" and Judson, Life , 202-3.

67. Martyr paraphrases a treatise on Indian rites by Ramon Pane, a friar who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage. Pane describes the superstitious use of the herb cohoba ; the ceremony is very similar to the tobaccoan one Monardes reports, and in fact by the end of the sixteenth century commentators accepted cohoba as tobacco (Brooks, Tobacco 1:196). Martyr comments to the future Charles V: "Now (most noble Prince) what need you hereafter to marvel of the spirit of Apollo so shaking his Sibyls with extreme fury? You had thought that superstitious antiquity had perished" (Eden, Decades , 102).

68. Cf. Samuel Walsall's praise of tobacco in his commendatory poem to Buttes: "Sovereign Nepenthes, which Tobacco hight, / Tobacco not to Antique Sages known, / Sage wizards that Tobacco knewen not?" (Dyets , Aa3v). An epigram by Sir John Davies (1598?), "apparently the first [poem] in English entirely on the subject" of tobacco (Dickson, Panacea , 201), indirectly suggests the literary boost provided by classical ignorance about America:

Homer  of MoIy  and Nepenthe  sings,
Moly  the Gods' most sovereign Herb divine:
Nepenthe  Heaven's drink, most gladness brings,
Heart's grief expels, and doth the wits refine,
But this our age another world hath found,
From whence an Herb of heavenly power is brought,
Moly  is not so sovereign for a wound,
Nor hath Nepenthe  so great wonders wrought.
                                       (Epigram 36. 1-8, quoted in Dickson,
                                                                                    Panacea , 201)

For Beaumont on tobacco replacing moly, see Poems , 313.

69. Concilium Limense , ed. Jose de Acosta (Madrid, 1591); trans. in Suppl . 2:102. Acosta "appears to have formulated the decrees and defended them against opponents" (ibid.).

70. Cf. W. B.'s commendatory poem: "There didst thou gather on Parnassus cliff, / This precious herb, Tobacco most divine, / Than which ne'er Greece, ne'er Italy did lift / A flower more fragrant to the Muses' shrine: / A purer sacrifice did ne'er adorn / Apollo's altar, than this Indian fire" (Beaumont, Poems , 268-69). Nothing English figures in this account of the poem except Beaumont's head, which W. B. compares to a tobacco pipe.

71. The dearest explanation of this process, and the terms I've used, are Greenblatt's, in his discussion of an Accession Day celebration that seems to combine both classical allusion and Catholic ceremony: "The Roman mythology, deftly keyed to England's Virgin Queen, helps to fictionalize Catholic ritual sufficiently for it to be displaced and absorbed" (Renaissance Self-Fashioning , 230).

72. Cf. The Masque of Flowers , produced by Bacon for Somerset's marriage in 1614, which stages a kind of mock Great Instauration celebration of modem times. The masque begins with a debate about the relative merits of wine, represented by Silenus, and tobacco, represented by an Indian god described by Harriot, "Kiwasa" or "Kawasha." Part of Kawasha's argument is that "nothing but fumigation / Doth chase away ill sprites, / Kawasha and his nation / Found out these holy rites" (Masque, 166). The joke on tobacco is first that Kawasha is himself an ill sprite, and second that no one wants to chase him away, not entirely: the scene of the masque is a walled city, before which sit "on either side a temple, the one dedicated to Silenus and the other to Kawasha" (161). The debate soon gives way to a more explicit account of Britain's superiority to either classical or Indian barbarism, when James transforms some painted flowers— metamorphosed gentlemen, we discover back into men; a song helps explain the allegory:

               Give place, you ancient powers,
               That turned men to flowers,
               For never writer's pen
               Yet told of flowers return'd to Men.

Chorus. But miracles of new event
               Follow the great Sun of our firmament.
                                                              (168)

The apparent euhemerism of the allegory, in which the enlightening sun of James reverses the classical transformation of men into myths or "flowers"—poesies—does not demand that superstition be discarded; rather, the enlightened song is itself sung by twelve "Garden-gods," also referred to as "Priests." The masque wants Britain to retain superstition so that potentially heretical claims for Britain's superiority, indeed for its millennialness, may be maintained, but negatively: Britain is here simply "fit to be" the millennial "fifth monarchy" of Daniel 7.27.

73. I refer to the title of the last chapter of Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning .

74. Keymis, Second Voyage , 464. When Beaumont referred earlier to Elizabeth being "worshipt" in America, he may have been either misremembering this Guianan anecdote or alluding to the much less dramatic submission of the Virginian weroance or chief, Menatonon, who ordered his vassal king Okisko "to yield himself servant, and homager, to the great Weroanza of England." Menatonon seems to have been impressed less by Elizabeth's virtues than by the fact that at the time Lane held his "best beloved son prisoner with me" (Quinn, Roanoke Voyages 1:279, 262).

75. See, e.g., Yates, "Queen Elizabeth," 80-81.

76. Return from Parnassus part 2, 1.4.403; part 1, 1.1.368; Dekker, The Wonderfull Year (quoted in Cawley, Voyagers , 298 n. 152). The Parnassus plays, when optimistic, also transform the scholar's material poverty into his spiritual purity: on his way to Parnassus, Philomusus recalls Marlowe—"Though I foreknow that dolts possess the gold, / Yet my intended pilgrimage I'll hold"—while Studioso adds the moral—"Within Parnassus dwells all sweet content, / Nor care I for those excrements of earth" (Pilgrimage to Parnassus 5.594-97). In the later plays of the trilogy, however, after the scholars return to the quotidian world, this otherworldliness becomes more difficult to maintain, and tobacco soon surfaces as a correlative to ambivalence about poetical "spirit," sometimes like ale inspiring mere vapors (Return part 2, 1.2.160-62), at other times representing a more positive but still jocular alternative to the gold scholars lack: Philomusus, pleased with Luxurio's wit, prays that "long for a reward may your wits be warm'd with the Indian herb" (part 1, 1.1.432-34).

77. Davies, Epigrams 36.9.

78. Noted by Grosart (Beaumont, Poems , 265).

79. Pory to Edwin Sandys, 16 January 1620 (Powell, Pory , microfiche suppl. 81).

80. For tobacco's fortunes in the seventeenth century, see Morgan, American Slavery . Such trifling with the home market also figures in the Virginia Company's schemes for encouraging investments—namely, in lotteries that were advertised as doubly alchemical: on the one hand, they would turn "even but small sums of money" into the cache required to fund Virginia's colonization (Virginia Company broadside: "Whereas"); and on the other, they would repay such "small" investments exorbitantly:

Full many a man that lives full bare,
        and knows no joys of Gold,
For one small Crown may get a share,
        of twice two Thousand told.
                (Virginia Company broadside: 
                       "Londons Lotterie," 20)

For the real financial significance of the lotteries to Virginia, see Craven, Dissolution , 149-50. Due to corruption that, as Edwin Sandys reported, "very much disgraced" the lotteries, the royal license for them was withdrawn in 1621; see Craven, Dissolution , 183-84.

81. On the tobacco deals between the company and the Crown, see, e.g., Andrews, Colonial 1:55-57. Thirsk notes that "in no other country did merchants and planters manage to secure a total prohibition on domestic cultivation for the sake of the colonial trade" ("New Crops," 87).

82. A True and Sincere Declaration , 4; quoted in Beer, Origins , 67.

83. Such imposts eventually helped reduce Charles to smoke: "almost to a man prominent Virginia traders supported the Parliamentarian cause" (Pagan, "Growth," 262; see n. 93).

1. By "agreeable to our natures," Hakluyt means the climatological congeniality of Virginia. Cf. Edward Hayes (1592?), who speaks of the northern portions of Virginia as that part of the New World "which in Situation & temperature is nearest unto, and seem[eth] to be reserved for us" ("Discourse," 158). For more on the significance of climate in early English expansionism, see Kupperman, "Fear."

2. For a chronology of Raleigh's fall, see Rowse, Raleigh , 158-69.

3. Cf. Bednarz, Raleigh , 61.

4. One of Raleigh's poems to Elizabeth Throckmorton or "Serena"— "To His Love When He Had Obtained Her"—represents his now consummatable love as putting an end to "travail":

                             Let's then meet
Often with amorous lips, and greet
Each other till our wanton Kisses
In number pass the days Ulysses
Consum'd in travail. (19-23)

5. See the final stanza of cantos 2, 4-7, and 9-12. Other off-cited manifestations in the book of Spenser's supposed exhaustion are the limited roles of the primary heroes Cambel and Triamond (Telamond, the hero named in the headnote to the book, never even appears); the multiplication of heroes; the confusing throngs of characters throughout the book; inexplicable loose ends, like Belphoebe and Timias simply abandoning the helpless Amoret and Æmylia or Scudamour not informed about Amoret; the new prominence of feminine rhymes; and finally the assignment of the book's bravura canto, its best candidate for what C. S. Lewis calls an allegorical center (Allegory , 336)—the Temple of Venus episode (canto 10)-to a narrator separate from the author who also speaks in a nostalgic past tense.

Paul Alpers notes that the publication of minor poems such as Colin Clout between the time of the first and second editions of The Faerie Queene seems a sign of trouble: "Whereas the poems of the 1580's, collected in Complaints , can be seen as preparatory to The Faerie Queene , these later poems show Spenser going outside his epic to treat subjects and employ modes of expression that formerly would have found a place within it" ("Narration, " 35-36). But I take this implied admission by Spenser of The Faerie Queene's inadequacy to be consistent with Spenser's representations of his epic from the start.

6. See Hamilton, ed., Faerie Queene , 490 for a discussion of this problem.

7. The characterization is Cecil's: "I find him marvelous greedy to do anything to recover the conceit of his brutish offense" (quoted in Rowse, Ralegh , 167); cf. FQ 4.7.45.

Oram, "Elizabethan," 43-45 notes the significance of Æmylia's story in relation to Timias, but he considers it a reflection on Timias's lust for Amoret only (whom he identifies with Elizabeth Throckmorton), and so is hard pressed to make sense of the fact that Æmylia's social status is much higher than her lover's.

8. Judith Anderson anticipates my argument here in a number of respects, though she, like O'Connell, believes the moral of the episode to be the increasing distance between Elizabeth and her possible idealization—"at best a hope or an unrealized promise but no longer, by any stretch of the epic imagination, a present reality" ("Living," 48). My point is that Spenser considers Elizabeth's "present reality" complex: he consistently wants his readers to avoid Raleigh's mistake of imagining Elizabeth's ideal significance, her body politic, as wholly contained or realized within the limits of either her natural body or the English island.

9. This sentiment is not peculiar to book 4 but rather runs throughout the poem: see, e.g., 1.8.40, 2.2.3, 2.6.46, and 5.1.27.

10. I partly agree with Judith Anderson, then, when she claims that in book 4 the poet's voice "no longer indicates but is the alternative" (Growth , 121), but I disagree that "the more insistently visible presence of the poet" (124) in the book manifests "a turning inward which results in an assertion of self made in the face of a more public and intractable world" (115). In my view, the alternative represented by the poet himself remains political, indeed imperialist.

11. Nancy Jo Hoffman epitomizes the sentimental critical orthodoxy on Colin's career when she bemoans the fact that, in Colin , "the old relation between queen and poet, their proximity in the charmed circle of Mount Acidale and in the April eclogue, exists no longer" (Spenser's Pastorals , 120). One wonders what Hoffman can mean by "proximity": the April eclogue, again, presents Colin as already alienated from Eliza; and on Mount Acidale, from which the queen is absent, Colin begs her pardon because he is singing of someone else. In fact, the only assertion in Spenser's poetry that he ever literally saw Elizabeth appears in Colin Clout .

12. Spenser's self-restraint is an implicit answer to the critics of English colonialism in Ireland who, like Spenser's Eudoxius, "think it no good policy to have that Realm reformed or planted with English lest they should grow as undutiful as the Irish and become much more dangerous" (V 9:210). But it goes somewhat against the thrust of Irenius's own answer to this criticism in the View , when Irenius blames English backsliding on

the bad minds of the man, who having been brought up at home under a strait rule of duty and obedience being always restrained by sharp penalties from lewd behavior, so soon as they Come hither where they see laws more slackly tended and the hard Constraint which they were used unto now slacked, they grow more loose and Careless of their duty and as it is the nature of all men to love liberty So they become Libertines and fall to all Licentiousness of the Irish, more boldly daring to disobey the law through presumption of favor and friendship than any Irish dareth. (211)

Irenius insists, then, on tougher laws more rigorously kept; but for Spenser and the gentlemen he would fashion, such external constraints are redundant.

13. Oram understates the case when he says of the poem's title that "it is not immediately clear where 'home' lies" (Shorter Poems , 519), as if the mystery were only a temporary confusion. As many readers have noticed, the problem is matched in the poem by repeatedly contradictory estimations of Ireland: the shepherds' flocks are "devoyd of dangers feare" (1. 54), and Ireland is a "quiet home" (686) for the shepherds also; but then the country is also a "desart" (91), a "waste" (183), and a "bar-rein soyle" (656).

14. For a specific echo between Timias and Colin, see, e.g., FQ 4.7-39 and Colin Clout , 182-83. On the interrelations between book 4 and Raleigh's writing generally, see Goldberg, Endlesse Worke , 50-51 n. 4. Commenting on the fact "that Timias's service to Belphoebe is radically incompatible, now, with service to his master," Donald Cheney concludes: "Perhaps by 1596 Spenser has come to see Elizabeth's court, like Belphoebe's, as a place of sterile dalliance not far removed from Phaedria's or Acrasia's bower" ("Spenser's Fortieth Birthday," 24, 25). I disagree only with Cheney's chronology: Spenser's criticism of Elizabeth's court is as old as The Shepheardes Calender and Mother Hubbard's Tale .

15. The exclusive praise that Colin applies to almost every woman in the Court is quite extraordinary: for example, Theana is "well worthy" of her "honourable place" "next unto" Cynthia herself (Colin Clout , 501-2), but then Mansilia is also "worthie next after Cynthia to tread" (514). Characteristically, Spenser solves the problem by seeming to ignore it: nine times in his list of the ladies at Elizabeth's court he exclaims that the one he now treats is not less praiseworthy than her predecessor (492, 504, 508, 516, 524, 532, 536, 572, and 574).

16. Amoretti 15 is a good instance of the second dilemma. In transferring the praise of Elizabeth to his private beloved, Spenser claims that "my love doth in her selfe containe / All this worlds riches that may farre be found." The "fairest" of those riches is, characteristically, "her mind adorned with vertues manifold," which, like the face and land of The Faerie Queene's second proem, "few behold." But if the beloved alone is supposed to inspire expansiveness as Elizabeth and Fairyland had once done, her reach seems constrained by the original premise of the sonnet: those merchants who "both the Indias of their treasure spoile" do so only because they are ignorant of Spenser's beloved hence they travel "so farre in vaine."

17. The only reference to Indian knowledge of Elizabeth in the Virginian accounts appears in Ralph Lane's narrative (Quinn, Roanoke Voyages 1:279).

18. "The like and a more large discourse I made to the rest of the nations both in my passing to Guiana , and to those of the borders" (Discoverie , 15). Cf. 51, 53, and 70; Keymis, Second Voyage , 444, 456, 464, and 472-73; and "Of the Voyage" (Discoverie , 144).

19. Greenblatt, for instance, describes Raleigh's "uneasiness" here as "the tension between his primitivism and his plans for the exploitation of Guiana" (Ralegh , 112). Montrose repeats this idea, but recognizes the "peculiar resonance" of Raleigh's ambivalence "in the context of an address to Elizabeth" ("Shaping," 76-77).

20. Quinn, Roanoke Voyages 1:84; cf. 122 and 2:575.

21. For Hayes, such indirection in the pursuit of gold is essential to English physiological integrity: trade with "those Countries . . . which possess the fountains of treasure"

shall purchase unto us gold & silver, dwelling under temperate & wholesome climates: Then how much better shall it be for us there to possess gold & Silver in health of body & delight,: than for greedy desire to possess the Mines, to deprive ourselves of all health & delight by dwelling in Countries within the burning zones. where the heat or Air shall be unto our complexions intemperate & contagious. (Quinn, New American World 3:163)

For the attribution of the "Discourse" to Hayes and also possibly to Christopher Carleill, see 156.

22. For Gilbert, this pretence of colonization is what will ultimately make colonization a reality: he imagines that, by means of the treasure and ships seized by those privateers who "set forth under such like color of discovery," "there may be easily such a competent company transported to the W. I. [West Indies] as may be able not only to dispossess the S. [Spaniards] thereof, but also to possess forever your Majesty and Realm therewith" (Quinn, Gilbert 1:170-75). Cf. Quinn, England , 294: "It is clear . . . that the main source of revenue on which a colony could be built was intended to be derived from the plunder of the Spanish merchant fleet and colonies."

23. Cf. Raleigh, Letters , 111; Keymis, Second Voyage , 444, 481, and 486; and "Of the Voyage" (Raleigh, Discoverie , 138-39).

24. In Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1600), Keymis's account and Chapman's poem directly follow Raleigh's account.

Ultimately, of course, Beaumont is as eager for "glorious gold" (Metamorphosis , 1. 317) as Chapman is: tobacco in his account is, I have argued, simply a way to defer and therefore strengthen England's golden hopes.

25. The transparency of gold to spirit is a feature of the New Jerusalem: "and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass" (Revelation 21. 18).

26. Cf. Keymis, Second Voyage , 472-73.

27. Cf. his description of a valley with "as fair ground, and as beautiful fields, as any man hath ever seen, with diverse copses scattered here and there by the river's side, and all as full of deer, as any forest or park in England, and in every lake and river the like abundance of fish and fowl" (Discoverie , 64; see also 42).

28. Keymis in fact dubs the Orenoque after the Shepherd of the Ocean, "Raleana" (Second Voyage , 476), and declares that "my self, and the remain of my few years, I have bequeathed wholly to Raleana" (481)— not to a land, that is, but to a river. He also lists the discoveries he has made as "a free and open entrance into Raleana," along with "choice of forty several great rivers (the lesser I do not reckon)" (480); while he talks of Guiana's gold and other commodities as actually "in the aforesaid rivers" (481; my emphasis). His narrative ends with "A Table of the names of the Rivers, Nations, Towns, and Casiques or Captains that in this second voyage were discovered" (490-95): river names are the most plentiful.

29. For Aeson and Medea, see, e.g., Ovid, Metamorphoses 7.162-293.

30. Keymis too recalls Virginian erotics, but with striking alterations that respond to Raleigh's disgrace in a manner quite the opposite of Chapman's: Guiana may possess "whole shires of fruitful rich grounds, lying now waste for want of people," but these shires are said to "prostitute themselves unto us," and then only like an anonymous "fair and beautiful woman, in the pride and flower of desired years" (Second Voyage , 487; my emphasis).

31. Other servants of Raleigh, like Chapman less directly involved in Raleigh's troubles with Elizabeth, also like Chapman more directly address the issue of plantation than Raleigh does; but their colonial vision is, once again like Chapman, always somehow skewed. Keymis writes, "lucky and prosperous be that right hand, that shall plant and possess a soil"; but the plants that he thinks "may fructify, increase, and grow to good" in Guiana are only England's many unemployed "Gentlemen, soldiers, and younger brothers" (Second Voyage , 489). Elsewhere Keymis envisions a Chapmanian "harvest" of "riches" (480). The anonymous author of "Of the Voyage to Guiana," possibly Harriot, speaks in somewhat more Virginian terms of the Guianans "rendering yearly to her Majesty and her successors a great tribute alloting to her use some rich mines and rivers of gold, pearl, silver, rocks of precious stones &c. with some large fruitful countries for the planting of her Colonies" (Raleigh, Discoverie , 146). Yet, in an earlier sentence similarly constructed, the incidental nature of plantation to the writer's plans is clear: "Hereby the Queen's dominions may be exceedingly enlarged, and this Realm inestimably enriched, with precious stones, gold, silver, pearl, and other commodities which those countries yield" (138).

32. Spain is, interestingly enough, Raleigh's precedent in proving that the gold of America can make a trifling nation great: "for we find that by the abundant treasure of that country [Peru] the Spanish King vexeth all the Princes of Europe, and is become in a few years from a poor king of Castille the greatest monarch of this part of the world, and likely every day to increase" (Discoverie , 18-19). Cf. Keymis, Second Voyage , 446, 483, and 487. Keymis makes clear, however, that Spain has no other potentiality besides American gold: it is "rich without men, confident without reason, proud and adventurous without means sufficient" (485); "without the Indies [it] is but a purse without money, or a painted sheath without a dagger" (486).

33. Cf. Keymis's more explicitly providentialist final sentence: "It hath pleased God of his infinite goodness, in his will and purpose to appoint and reserve this empire for us" (Second Voyage , 501; cf. 487-88).

Berreo tells Raleigh a prophecy found in Peru "that from Inglatierra those Ingas should be again in time to come restored, and delivered from the servitude" of the Spanish (Discoverie , 75). "Of the Voyage to Guiana" adds that, even if a delusion, "at least the prophecy will greatly daunt the Spaniards" (Discoverie , 139-40).

34. The relation between these two disgraces is underscored by the relation between Raleigh's two prefatory epistles. One of them discusses Raleigh's troubles with Elizabeth; the other discusses his troubles with unbelievers:

Because there have been diverse opinions conceived of the gold oar brought from Guiana , and for that an Alderman of London and an officer of her majesty's mint, hath given out that the same is of no price, I have thought good by the addition of these lines to give answer as well to the said malicious slander, as to other objections. (Discoverie , 7)

35. Drake in California (1578) had hung up a plate noting Elizabeth's claim to the country "together with her highness' picture and arms, in a piece of six pence of current English money" (PN 9:325-26). This trifling relation to the New World crumbled for Drake the year of Raleigh's voyage, when, according to Thomas Maynard, Drake during his final voyage confessed "that he was as ignorant of the Indies as my self." Implicitly in Maynard's account, America figures to Drake only as the image of the queen from whom he hopes for reward, the virgin mistress as an aging wet-nurse:

When, good gentleman, (in my conceit) it fared with him as with some care-less-living man who prodigally consumes his time fondly persuading himself that the nurse that fed him in his childhood will likewise nourish him in his old age and finding the dug dried & withered enforced then to behold his folly tormented in mind dieth with a starved body, he had beside his own adventure gaged his own reputation greatly in promising her majesty to do her honorable service and to return her a very profitable adventure and having sufficiently experienced for 7 or 8 years together, how hard it was to regain favor once ill thought of the mistress of his fortune now leaving him to yield to a discontented mind. (Andrews, Last Voyage , 101)

36. As he lay dying during his final voyage, the circumnavigator Thomas Cavendish (1592) also composed a narrative of his venture, unpublished till Purchas. It would be hard to imagine another figure in Elizabeth's later years who could have honored the ideal of material weakness so zealously. Confronted with disaster after disaster, and losing crew, food, and equipment to such an extent that "all the men left in the ship were no more than able to weigh our Anchors" ("Thomas Cavendyshe," 120), Cavendish continues to insist that his ship pursue its course rather than return home. Attempting to exhort a mutinous crew who even he admits had "many reasonable occasions to allege against me" (122), Cavendish like Shakespeare's Henry V argues that "the more we attempted being in so weak a case, the more if we performed would be to our honors" (110). His final demonstration of how failure can produce triumph is the narrative itself, written when he has "grown so weak & faint as I am scarce able to hold the pen in my hands" (120).

37. The difficulty in articulating the paradoxical idea of a laboring gentleman, a difficulty especially marked for a narrative attempting to convince its readers that Guiana possesses such treasure as would free one from labor forever, helps account for the peculiarity of Raleigh's most elaborate prospecting anecdote. At first in that anecdote, gold appears to have been readily available to the English: "Every stone that we stooped to take up, promised either gold or silver by his complexion. Your Lordships shall see of many sorts, and I hope some of them cannot be bettered under the sun." But then Raleigh qualifies the find—"and yet we had no means but with our daggers and fingers to tear them out here and there, the rocks being most hard of that mineral spar aforesaid, and is like a flint, and is altogether as hard or harder, and besides the veins lie a fathom or two deep in the rocks"—until the available "gold" is repudiated altogether: "each of [our companies] brought also several sorts of stones that appeared very fair, but were such as they found loose on the ground, and were for the most part but colored, and had not any gold fixed in them" (55). Of course, this tentativeness reflects Raleigh's worries about his samples—the merely shiny stones kept by some of his more foolish men, Raleigh claims, are the ones that have bred a bad opinion of him in England (55)—but Raleigh's wavering also reflects his desire to represent himself as at once surrounded by gold and yet having to work for it, or as working for it and yet not working too much. The hard rock or "White spar" that covers the "richest" mines is the expedient Raleigh hits upon both to excuse his lack of gold and to distance himself from the labor he must stress his gold requires: "To stay and dig out gold with our nails, had been Opus laboris , but not Ingenii " (43-44; cf. 8).

It is revealing that, though equally lacking in gold samples, Keymis apparently feels no compulsion to represent prospecting as laborious for the English: at one point, for instance, he intends to hire some Indians "for hatchets and knives to return us gold grains," and, though he can find no Indians at home, his guide "showed me in what sort without digging they gather the gold in the sand of a small river, named Macawini" (Second Voyage , 468). Moreover, Keymis twice mentions the fact that the Spanish now have black slaves in Guiana (445, 470), who, he argues, will ultimately benefit England, "since their [the Spanish] preparations of Negroes to work in the mines, their horses, cattle, and other necessaries may (by the favor of God) at our first coming, both store us with quantities of gold ore, and ease us of much trouble, pains, and travail" (445).

38. For other references to the sexual rapacity of the Spanish, see Keymis, Second Voyage , 455, 456, 463, 465, 471, and 472.

39. Indians buy women from the cannibals also; see Discoverie , 387 and 407.

40. The relation between the prominence of savage women in Raleigh's account and Raleigh's difficulties with the queen is implicit elsewhere in the Discoverie , first when Raleigh mentions his propaganda work with "the Canuri, which are governed by a woman (who is inheritrix of that province) who came far off to see our nation, and asked me diverse questions of her Majesty, being much delighted with the discourse of her Majesty's greatness, and wondering at such reports as we truly made of her highness' many virtues" (70); and second when the beleaguered courtier discusses reports of "those warlike women" the Amazons (26-27), who, when Elizabeth embraces Guiana, "shall hereby hear the name of a virgin, which is not only able to defend her own territories and her neighbors, but also to invade and conquer so great Empires and so far removed" (76). For another reference to the Amazons, see "Of the Voyage," in Discoverie , 139.

"Of the Voyage" is, incidentally, the only Elizabethan tract on America that actually raises the prospect of intermarriage: the writer of the tract recommends that the Guianans "give special hostages to be sent into England, which being civiled and converted here, upon their return and receving of others in their rooms they may be matched in marriage with English women" (146). If Raleigh's marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton is the issue Chapman must skirt, then it is no wonder that Chapman's prophecy of Guianan liberation envisions marriages too, but between Englishmen and Englishwomen who represent a compromise between Raleigh's options—private lovers, but separated as queen and courtier are by disparity of wealth:

            all our Youth take  Hymen's  lights in hand,
And fill each roof with honor'd progeny.
There makes Society  Adamantine chains,
And joins their hearts with wealth, whom wealth disjoin'd.
                                                                  ("De Guiana," 173-76)

41. See Barbour, Jamestown Voyages 1:108 n. 1.

42. The title page of the combined Map of Virginia and Proceedings , innovative as far as New World tracts are concerned, lists Smith as the author of the Map and eight other colonists as the authors of the Proceedings . All editors of the Proceedings see Smith as a determining influence throughout, but in fact the pairing on the title page already implies a synecdochal relation between Smith and the others, especially since Smith is described as "sometimes Governor of the Country." It is significant, then, that not till the title page of the Generall Historie (1624) does Smith give himself sole credit—only later in his career does such credit become so important to him. For convenience I will henceforth refer to Smith alone as the author of the Proceedings .

43. An Indian in Martyr anticipates this sarcasm: "If your hunger of gold be so insatiable," says the prince of Comogrus to the Spanish,

that only for the desire you have thereto, you disquiet so many nations, and you yourselves also sustain so many calamities and incommodities, living like banished men out of your own country, I will show you a Region flowing with gold, where you may satisfy your ravening appetites. (Eden, Decades , 117)<

44. Percy himself notes the invidious Spanish parallel: "BALDIVIA A Spanish General being served somewhat Answerable hereunto in CHILE in the WEST INDIES who being Surprised by the Indians enforced him to drink up A certain quantity of melted gold using these words unto him now glut they self with gold BALDIVIA having there sought for gold as SICKLE-MORE did here for food" ("Trewe Relacyon," 265).

45. Cf. a later episode in which the only water Smith and his men can find in an Indian village is "such puddle that never till then, we ever knew the want of good water. We digged and searched many places but ere the end of two days we would have refused two barricoes of gold for one of that puddle water" (Smith, Works I:225).

46. Smith's animus toward the company itself comes clearer in the Generall Historie (1624), when the company is in the process of being dissolved. See in particular Smith's extraordinary letter of complaint, sent back to England near the end of 1608 (Works 2:187-90); cf. Purchas, Pilgrimes 19:3. My next chapter will treat the continuing gold love of the company in more depth.

47. For references in the Map to the Indians' love of trifles, see, e.g., Works 1:160 and 268. Smith reports that the Indians "stuff" the corpses of their kings with "copper beads. . ., hatchets and such trash" (169), and expect "beads, hatchets, copper, and tobacco" (172) as their reward in the afterlife.

According to Smith, idleness is by definition a "trifling," as when one of the colonists lets some Indians escape by "trifling away the night" (261; cf. True Relation , 31, 61, and 97). When Smith trifles away the time, on the other hand, he does it to deceive (249).

48. Later, when Smith sees gold waning as a colonial prospect, he still maintains that many settlers continue to be addicted to "present gain" and thus neglect "many things [that] might more have prevailed for their good" (Works 2:367). Now, however, the colonists hunger not for gold but tobacco, which so degenerates them that the savage comes to seem positively gentlemanly by comparison: at one point, for instance, Smith (1624) describes the Indians "employed in hunting and fowling with our fowling pieces, and our men rooting in the ground about Tobacco like swine" (2:285). For other invidious comments about tobacco, see 2:256, 262, 284, 287, 314, 327, 382, and 3:218, 220, 237, 274. Apparently Smith dislikes tobacco even as a personal habit: one cornmender declares, "I never knew a Warrior yet, but thee, / From wine, Tobacco, debts, dice, oaths, so free" (Smith, Works 1:363). What disgusts him, I would argue, is not so much tobacco's frivolousness as its addictiveness, which too closely proportions trifler to trifle.

49. For other denunciations of riches, see Works 1:344 and 360; for commendatory poems that praise Smith's antimaterialism, see 1:316, 2:49, and 3:146.

50. To Smith's mind, Newport neither understands nor cares for the "necessary business" of plantation because he is a sea captain. His sailors even extort money and goods from the landsmen at an exorbitant rate in exchange for shipboard supplies (Works 1:218); while, as the least attached or most mobile representatives of the colony, they manage to misrepresent at home both the hopes and needs of Virginia:

Those with their great words deluded the world with such strange promises as abused the business much worse than the rest. For the business being builded upon the foundations of their feigned experience, the planters, the money, time, and means have still miscarried: yet they ever returning, and the Planters so far absent, who could contradict their excuses? (1:176)

For other attacks on mariners, see 1:220, 234, 239-40, and also Strachey, "True Reportory," 28, 50-52. It is no wonder that Prospero keeps "the mariners all under hatches stowed" (Tempest 1.2.230) while his own georgic-colonial lessons proceed.

51. Works 1:217. For other references to the Indians "glutted" with trifles, see, e.g., 211 and 239-40. To Smith, the most egregious instance of his enemies' naïveté is Powhatan's coronation (234, 237), discussed in my introduction.

52. Cf. the earlier version of this anecdote in the True Relation (Works 1:71).

53. Some Jacobeans seem to have found the very idea of an Indian language amusing: see, e.g., the gibberish "Barbarian tongue" in Tonkis, Lingua 4.4 (cited in Brooks, Tobacco 2:51); and Taylor, Nipping , D3r (quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:522). A later and more well-known instance of mock-American appears in Massinger's City Madam (1632), when some Englishmen disguise themselves as Indians:

The roughly contemporary Fatal Marriage , which also has a fake Indian, makes Indian language sound like pidgin Latin: "Sib, a re, Crib a re, bunck a me tod, lethe, tu: hoc unge, hungarion siped ley" (51).

For a more explicit instance of a word list considered trifling, see Hall's Mundus (1605), in which his traveler encounters a nation of foolish triflers called the Troverense (John Healey's translation [1609] renames them the Gew-gawiasters): "He that first devised to blow out bubbles of soap and spittle forth of the walnut shell, is of as great renown amongst them, as ever was the first Printer, or Gun-founder amongst us of Europe " (trans. Healey, 87-88). The butt of Hall's humor turns out to be Paracelsian alchemists, who believe, of course, that they can transform nugas to gold. But when Hall provides a word list of their "Supermonical" or esoteric language—"Some of the words I will set down in this place, for the good of such as shall travel those countries hereafter" (88-89)—he manages to mock the trifling of both alchemists and voyagers like Smith.

54. Uncharacteristically, Smith says he provides the Fist only to satisfy the curiosity of those who "desire to know the manner of their language" (Works 1:136; my emphasis). Cf. the far more extensive contemporary word list of William Strachey, "by which, such who shall be Employed thither may know the readier how to confer, and how to truck and Trade with the People" (Historie , 174-207).

55. The inclusion of dialogue in a vocabulary of foreign words was, of course, nothing new. Cf. a sample of the comic interchange between Torquato and Nolano in John Florio's Italian vocabulary Second Frutes (1591) (I quote only the English dialogue):

56. For other references to the availability of Indian women, see 1:168, 174, and the famous "maskerado" before Smith of thirty naked young women that ends with the "Nymphs" "crowding, and pressing, and hanging upon him, most tediously crying, love you not me?" (235-36). If a tradition reported by William Stith (1747) is true, love for Pocahontas could have seemed not only a sexual but a status extravagance: Stith says that King James "was highly offended at Mr. Rolfe, " Pocahontas's future husband, "for marrying a Princess" (History , 142).

57. White beads are favored by aristocratic Indian women (Smith, Works 1:53, 216).

58. B2v-B3r; Mercator later replies,

Indeed de Gentlewomans here buy so much vain toys,
Dat me [we?] strangers laugh a to tink wherein day have their Joys:
Fait Madonna me will search all da strange countries me can tell,
But me will have such tings dat please dese Gentlewomans veil.
                                                                                              (C4r; cf. D4r)

Cf. Francis Meres's proverb in Wits Treasury (1598): "As pigeons are taken with beans, and children enticed with balls; so women are won with toys" (quoted in Schoenbaum, Shakespeare , 189). A now-lost play (c. 1560s) was entitled Far Fetched and Dear Bought Is Good for Ladies (Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 4:400).

For other instances of the "far fetcht" proverb in New World literature, see, e.g., Nicholl, Houre Glasse , A4v, and John Gerard's Herball , which argues that tobacco grown in Europe is better for the English, "notwithstanding it is not so thought nor received of our Tabackians; for according to the English proverb; Far fetcht and dear bought is best for Ladies" (286, quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:346; repeated in Gardiner, Triall , 9r). William Rankins in his Mirrour of Monsters (1587) suggests that the trifling desires of women make England savage. He depicts himself as having traveled to "a country named Terralbon " (1r)—England, obviously—where he met Luxuria, who "hanged at her eyes many costly favors of folly far fet from the Indians of Anglia " (4v)—once again, England.

59. The colonialist comparison of Elizabeth to Isabella is itself Elizabethan, appearing, for example, in Hakluyt's dedication to Raleigh of his translation of Laudonnière (1587):

If Elizabeth Queen of Castile and Arragon, after her husband Ferdinando & she had emptied their coffers and exhausted their treasures in subduing the kingdom of Granada & rooting the Moors, a wicked weed, out of Spain, was nevertheless so zealous of God's honor, that (as Fernandus Columbus the Son of Christopher Columbus recordeth in the history of the deeds of his Father) she laid part of her own Jewels, which she had in great accompt, to gage, to furnish his Father forth upon his first voyage, before any foot of land of all the West Indies was discovered, what may we expect of our most magnificent & gracious prince Elizabeth of England, into whose lap the Lord hath most plentifully thrown his treasures, what may we, I say, hope of her forwardness & bounty in advancing of this your most honorable enterprise being far more certain than that of Columbus, at that time especially, and tending no less to the glory of God than that action of the Spaniards. (Taylor, Original Writings 2:375)

Cf. 456-57. For the appearance of Queen Isabella in the hortatory conclusions of various works by Smith, see Works 1:382, 406, 441, and 2:474; for nostalgia about Elizabeth, see 1:438; 2:63, 91; and 3:159, 301. Cf. Strachey on that "royal spirited Lady Isabella Princess of Castile" (Historie , 10); and Robert Hayman (1628), who during Charles's reign hopes that Queen Mary will prove "a Famous Second Isabell" (Quodlibets , 51).

Columbus himself becomes an increasingly important figure in the idealization of the English colonist. Borrowing from Gomara (Eden, Decades , 341), Sir George Peckham (1582) makes Columbus the archetype of the disgraceful New World adventurer:

By how many ways and means was he derided? Some scorned the piledness of his garments, some took occasion to jest at his simple and silly looks, others asked if this were he, that louts so low, which did take upon him to bring men into a Country that aboundeth with Gold, Pearl, and Precious stones? If he were any such man (said they) he would carry another manner of countenance with him, and look somewhat loftier. Thus some judged him by his garments and some others by his look and countenance, but none entered into the consideration of the inward man. (True Reporte , 448)

This view of Columbus got a good deal of press in 1609: see Johnson, Nova Britannia , 7-8; Gray, Good Speed , Bv; and Linton, Newes , 29-30. For a similar reference to Columbus earlier than Peckham, see Seall, Comendation .

60. The first erotic reference to women as Indian-like triflers appears around the same time as the Map and the True Relation . Welford in Beaumont and Fletcher's Scornful Lady (acted 1623-16) declares that "certainly I am arrived amongst a Nation of new found fools: in a Land where no Navigator has yet planted wit. If I had foreseen it, I would have laded my breeches with bells, knives, copper and glasses to trade with the women for their virginities" (1.1.287-91). Cf. Drayton's "Of His Lady's Not Coming to London" (1627) (Works 3:205) and Carew's "To A.D. Unreasonable Distrustful of Her Own Beauty" (1640) (Poems , 84). Before that time, Alexander in Aurora (1604) likens Aurora to the gold that "sun-parch'd people" "dis-esteem" (song 9.46-54). Constable in "To My Ladie Rich" (MS c. 1592) attempts the same conceit, though in imagining Indians adoring the "treasure" that is Lady Rich, he incompetently implies that Lady Rich is a trifle (Poems , 150). (All these references are cited in Cawley, Voyagers , 350-51.) Whether or not Smith's references to Pocahontas, the first instance of erotic trifling in English travel literature, directly produced Welford's analogy, the relatively late appearance of the analogy seems indicative of English resistance to the idea of erotic mixture with Indians. I will address this issue more fully in chapter 6.

61. Cf. Thomas Fuller's less generous appraisal of Smith (1662) as "having a Prince's mind imprisoned in a poor man's purse" (History , 180).

For Smith, if there is any nation that can still see the value in immateriality, it is the Dutch, who "have neither matter to build ships, nor merchandize to set them forth; yet by their industry they as much increase, as other Nations decay" (Works 1:424; cf. 2:439). At times in Smith's work, Holland even takes England's place as the trifling alternative to golden Spain:

Who doth not know that the poor Hollanders, chiefly by fishing, at a great charge and labor in all weathers in the open Sea, are made a people so hardy, and industrious? and by the venting this poor commodity to the Easterlings for as mean [commodities], which is Wood, Flax, Pitch, Tar, Resin, Cordage, and such like (which they exchange again, to the French, Spaniards, Portugales, and English, etc. for what they want) are made so mighty, strong and rich, as no State but Venice, [which is] of twice their magnitude, is so well furnished with so many fair Cities, goodly Towns, strong Fortresses, and that abundance of shipping and all sorts of merchandize, as well of Gold, Silver, Pearls, Diamonds, Precious stones, Silks, Velvets, and Cloth of gold: as Fish, Pitch, Wood, or such gross commodities? What Voyages and Discoveries, East and West, North and South, yea about the world, make they? What an Army by Sea and Land, have they long maintained in despite of one of the greatest Princes of the world? And never could the Spaniard with all his Mines of gold and Silver, pay his debts, his friends, and army, half so truly, as the Hollanders still have done by this contemptible trade of fish. (1:330-31; cf. 2:409)

For other instances of Smith's enthusiasm about Holland, see 1:159, 333, 377, 396-97; 2:114, 411, 437-38, 466; and 3:291, 298. For the growing interest of Smith's contemporaries in "contemptible" commodities, see Shammas, "English Commercial Development." At one point Smith raises the possibility that he might work for Holland: he writes to Bacon (1618) that the Dutch, among others, "have made me large offers" (Works 1:377).

62. Smith continues, "Yet 30 or 40 of such voluntary Gentlemen would do more in a day than 100 of the rest that must be prest to it by compulsion." Cf. Prince Ferdinand the "patient log-man" in The Tempest 3.1; and Smith, Works 1:347-48.

63. The version of the proverb that Tilley chooses as archetypical— "Help, Hands, for I have no lands" (Proverbs , H116)—is revealing in its quite different emphasis on hands securing one's fortune rather than simply taking that fortune's place.

64. Cf. Works 3:51 and 146-48.

65. Cf. Smith's account of this history in New Englands Trials (1620) (Works 1:398-99).

66. Writing as a work of the hands already receives implicit recognition in T. A.'s otherwise mysterious dedication "To the Hand," but becomes far more prominent a topos in Smith's dedication of the Historie to Frances Howard. "This History," Smith begins, ". . . might and ought to have been clad in better robes than my rude military hand can cut out in Paper Ornaments"; or again, "I confess, my hand, though able to wield a weapon among the Barbarous, yet well may tremble in handling a Pen among so many Judidous" (Works 2:41). In what Smith's editor Philip Barbour calls "the first instance in Smith's writings of a definite statement of his authorship," Smith ends the second book of his history with the subscription, "John Smith writ this with his own hand" (129); the gesture is repeated four more times in Smith's works (2:437, 468, and 3:29, 302).

67. Smith calls himself the father of England's colonies (Works 1:434, 3:223), while he styles King Charles only their godfather (1:309, 3:278).

68. The Generall Historie reprints "a little book" that Smith wrote about Pocahontas, in which he states that "during the time of two or three years, she next under God, was still the instrument to preserve this Colony from death, famine and utter confusion" (Works 2:258-59). The book is itself a version of Columbus before Isabella, since it is addressed to Queen Anne, soliciting her favor in order to make good the embarrassingly low "estate" of Pocahontas's husband John Rolfe. John Chamberlain (1617), sending a copy of the famous portrait of Pocahontas to his correspondent Dudley Carleton, expresses the dismissive view of her that Smith presumably wants to combat: "Here is a fine picture of no fair Lady and yet with her tricking up and high style and titles you might think her and her worshipful husband to be somebody, if you do not know that the poor company of Virginia out of their poverty are fain to allow her four pound a week for her maintenance" (Letters 2:56-57).

For Pocahontas's expanded role in the Generall Historie , see also Smith's Works 2:146-52, 182-3, 198-9, 203-4, 243-46, and 260-62.

69. "You did promise Powhatan what was yours should be his, and he the like to you; you called him father being in his land a stranger, and by the same reason so must I do you: which though I [Smith] would have excused, I durst not allow of that title, because she was a King's daughter; with a well set countenance she said, Were you not afraid to come into my father's Country, and caused fear in him and all his people (but me) and fear you here I should call you father; I tell you then I will, and you shall call me child, and so I will be for ever and ever your Countryman" (Smith, Works 2:261). Hulme rejects the old, and to his mind "romantic," interpretation of this characteristically self-deprecating, self-aggrandizing passage in favor of a more modern type of sentimentality: "Nothing is stranger than that Smith should have reported in direct quotation what so obviously meant nothing to him at all, almost as if he recognized, even if only fleetingly, the extent of his ignorance of this woman and her culture and, as a final gesture, perhaps a sort of homage, recorded her alien words in his text" (Colonial Encounters , 151-52; my emphasis).

70. For the case that the Legend does indeed mock Smith in particular, see Vaughan, "John Smith." Jones's restraint regarding women is not the only manifestation of his chastity. Having landed in America, Jones finds only "a dry and desert soil, nor grain nor grass, / Nor drink, but water had they here, nor bread / For thrice twelve months" (5). To get his food, he does battle with the Indians, two thousand of whom he defeats with his twenty-five men, and kills six native kings in the process; Lloyd comments,

Here some may ask what came of all the wealth,
(For Jones  brought nothing home besides himself)
This conquest gain'd; Sure many precious things
Must needs attend the death of six such Kings.
I answer briefly; His heroic desire
Ascends above earth's excrements as fire:
Nor can descend to Crowns.
                                                                                (6)

An expanded version of the Legend (1648) more fully develops the anachronistic Elizabethan setting—Jones, for instance, meets one famous Elizabethan adventurer after another (cf. Smith, Works 3:301)—and also produces the episode with the Queen of No-land to which the first version merely alludes. She turns out to be "a Maiden Queen" whom neither kings nor princes can move to love, until, of course, she sees Jones. Lloyd is relatively plain about the fact that this "black" queen represents a strange negation of Elizabeth herself: "Jones is resolv'd to see and to be seen / Of this great Princess, that our virgin Queen / Might know when he returns what form, what port / This royal virgin carried in her Court" (58). It seems, then, that Lloyd mocks excessively romantic Elizabethan England too: while on his voyages, Jones had "read to him the ancient stories / Of our old English Worthies, and their glories; / How our S. George did the fell Dragon gore: / The like achievement of Sir Eglemore: / Topas ' hard quest after th'elf-queen to Barwick, " etc. (27). For an account of the sources and the effects of such a critical view, see my epilogue.

71. Fuller, History , 180, first pagination; for the question of Smith's veracity, see Smith, Works 1:lxiii-iv, lxx-lxxi, and the notes passim. On the basis of his own extravagant and materially uncorroborated claims, Raleigh's detractors decided that he had never sailed farther than Cornwall (Discoverie , 4), that his golden empire existed nowhere but in his book. E1 Dorado is, of course, not the only fabulous-sounding feature of Raleigh's Discoverie , which reports sightings of headless men and Amazons, and critics have long assumed that Raleigh thought he could persuade his readers to believe in El Dorado by making the fabulous seem more credible generally. Yet this line of argument fails to explain why, throughout the Discoverie , Raleigh takes pride in lying. He continually boasts that he has successfully deceived not just the Spanish and the Guianans but his own men; in order to keep the crew of his boat rowing, for instance, "we evermore commanded our Pilots to promise an end the next day" (40). No doubt Raleigh hoped that El Dorado truly did exist, and he wanted to persuade his readers, as Spenser wanted to persuade his, "that of the world least part to us is red" (FQ 2.proem.2); but it is difficult to escape the implication that Raleigh was willing to grant the fictionality of E1 Dorado for those readers who needed less material incentives to empire than gold. If this hypothesis is correct, Raleigh can be understood once again to have exaggerated Spenserian logic, by turning the "vele" that "shad-owes" Spenser's otherworld from a trifle to a lie.

72. Cf. the Advertisements , in which Smith bemoans the colonial work of not just writing but circulating books: "I had divulged to my great labor, cost, and loss, more than seven thousand Books and Maps" (Works 3:281). The topos of the travail endured in compiling a book of travels had earlier appeared in Hakluyt, who never traveled to America: see Taylor, Original Writings 2:398, 426, and esp. 433-34.

1. Cf. Frye, ed., The Tempest , 22-23, and Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances , 178. For a bibliography of criticism touching on The Tempest's relation to the New World, see Frey, "The Tempest, " and also Skura, "Discourse."

2. The off-remarked analogy in the play between Aeneas's interrupted imperial voyage and the diverted travels of both Alonso and Gates is similarly obtruded and dismissed during the Court party's debate over "widow Dido" (2.1.71-97). Kermode has said that "nowhere in Shakespeare, not even in his less intensive work, is there anything resembling the apparent irrelevance" (Kermode, ed., The Tempest , 47) of the passage.

3. In his most recent examination of The Tempest , Greenblatt too notes that "the swerve away" from colonial allusions in The Tempest "is as apparent as their presence" (Shakespearean Negotiations , 154), a paradox he ascribes to the fact that, in Shakespeare, "the aesthetic space—or, more accurately, the commercial space of the theatrical joint-stock company—is constituted by the simultaneous appropriation of and swerving from the discourse of power" (159). Yet even if this view of Shakespearean aesthetics is accurate, it is not clear why a simultaneous appropriation of and swerving from a certain "discourse of power" could not help to establish another such discourse (even, I will eventually argue, almost the same discourse). Greenblatt forestalls this option by abstracting colonialism into "the discourse of power" generally.

Other recent critics insist that The Tempest is "fully implicated" in "the colonialist project" of its day (Brown, "This Thing," 64, 48), or that "the discourse of colonialism" is "the articulatory principle of The Tempest's diversity" (Barker and Hulme, "Nymphs," 204); but they too transform Jacobean expansion into a monolithic "discourse" abstract enough to escape the restrictions of practical counterevidence>Other recent critics insist that The Tempest is "fully implicated" in "the colonialist project" of its day (Brown, "This Thing," 64, 48), or that "the discourse of colonialism" is "the articulatory principle of The Tempest's diversity" (Barker and Hulme, "Nymphs," 204); but they too transform Jacobean expansion into a monolithic "discourse" abstract enough to escape the restrictions of practical counterevidence. In response, these historians of discourse might claim that Shakespeare "euphemizes" (Brown) or "represses" (Barker and Hulme) the relation of his play to America—an argument similar to the one I will shortly offer but their own broad treatment of colonialism itself mystifies the "moment of historical crisis" (Brown, "This Thing," 48) they set out to explain.

4. Cf. 5.1.172-73. As I have argued, Spenser continually warns his readers that "wemens faire aspect" has "wondrous powre . . ./ To captive men, and make them all the world reject" (FQ 5.8.2).

5. Carlton to Chamberlain, 15 January 1604 (quoted in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 3:279).

6. Cf., e.g., the Captain of the Gypsies in Jonson's masque The Gipsies Metamorphosed (performed 1621) as he steps back from the heterodoxy of telling James's fortune:

But why do I presume, though true,
To tell a fortune, Sir, to you,
        Who are the maker here of all,
Where none do stand, or sit in view,
But owe their fortunes unto you,
        At least what they good fortune call.
                                                           (334-39)

7. The dress of the "Indian" knights suggests that they are American: "In their hats each of them [had] an Indian bird for a feather with some jewels" (Carleton in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 3:280).

8. Quoted in Strong, Henry , 8. For Henry's cult and its heavily Spenserian cast, see Yates, Majesty , passim; Strong, Cult , 187-91; Strong, Henry , passim; and Helgerson, "Land," 69-71.

9. Dugdale, Time Triumphant , B3v; quoted in Schmidgall, Shakespeare , 252 n. 26.

10. Cf. Schmidgall, Shakespeare , 259, and Gilman: "Prospero's undermined masque becomes a delicately subversive maneuver staged in the enemy camp and hinting at the bedazzled, insulated self-regard of such entertainments" ("All Eyes," 220). The classic treatment of the notion that the Stuarts came increasingly to inhabit a theatrical dreamworld is Orgel's Illusion of Power .

11. For beating as a description of the pulse, see 5.1.103 and 114; for a mind beating, see 1.2.176, 4.1.163, and 5.1.246; for beating in the sense of literal affliction (ad fligere ), see 2.1.115, 2.2.156, 3.2.85, 86, 111, and 4.1.173, 175. For the tide as a figure for mentality, see 5.1.79-82.

12. Nashe maintains that if a state cannot "exhale" its potentially rebellious population in foreign wars, "it is very expedient they have some light toys" like the theater "to busy their heads withal" (Works 1:211). Cf. Heywood, Apology , 31.

Perhaps the most explicit treatment of the theater and its self-consumption as able to cure expansionist distraction appears in Richard Brome's Antipodes (acted 1637). As the play begins, Peregrine has grown "distracted" (1.1.21) by reading Mandeville, and "a fantastic lord" (Dramatis Personae) named Letoy undertakes his cure by staging Peregrine's play-voyage to the antipodes. The moment at which Peregrine fully enters Letoy's illusion—his unscripted attack on and conquest of some "Antipodean" stage props—foreshadows both his ultimate repudiation of such distracting toys and the play's self-repudiating conclusion:

                                           Wonder he did
A while it seem'd, but yet undaunted stood;
When on the sudden, with thrice knightly force,
And thrice, thrice puissant arm he snatcheth down
The sword and shield that I play'd Bevis with,
Rusheth amongst the foresaid properties,
Kills monster after monster, takes the puppets
Prisoners, knocks down the Cyclops, tumbles all
Our jigambobs and trinkets to the wall.
Spying at last the crown and royal robes
I'th' upper wardrobe, next to which by chance
The devil's vizors hung, and their flame-painted
Skin coats, those he remov'd with greater fury,
And (having cut the infernal ugly faces
All into mammocks) with a reverend hand,
He takes the imperial diadem and crowns
Himself King of the Antipodes, and believes
He has justly gain'd the kingdom by his conquest.
                                                                         (3.6.14-31)

Ann Haaker notes that Peregrine's violence recalls the "habit" among London apprentices "of attacking and demolishing" whorehouses and playhouses on Shrove Tuesday (Brome, Antipodes , 69); The Antipodes turns such antitheatricality into the play's self-conquest.

13. Stephano suggests a continuity among these wooden vehicles when he tells Trinculo that he "escap'd upon a butt of sack which the sailors heav'd o'erboard," that he has transferred some of the sack to a bottle "which I made of the bark of a tree," and that to drink from this bottle is to "kiss the book" (2.2.121-30). Part of Prospero's temperate attack on the notion that the body resembles either the rock in which Caliban is stied or the bags back on which Ariel flies consists of turning rooted trees into uprooted logs and then making the freedom of those logs depend on the pains a body takes in moving them.

14. More precisely, Prospero represents the masque as a failed distraction from distraction. The masque begins with the assurance that the gods who helped plot Proserpine's abduction by Dis (89), Venus and Cupid, have fled the scene; but it ends with Prospero having become Distempered and Dis-made (145, 147).

15. The notion that the theater could physically affect its audience is also a common theme in the antitheatrical literature, though the antitheatricalist would say that the effect is to inspire lust. For a recent celebratory version of the view that Shakespeare "more than any of his contemporaries" exploits the power of the theater to arouse its audience physically, see Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations , chap. 3.

16. Sir John Beaumont connects dew to tobacco causally: "from [tobacco's] fumes, ascending to the skies, / Some say the dews and gentle showers arise" (Poems , 318; cf. James I, Counter-blaste , B4r). The relation between dew and smoke as figures of ephemeralness is established in Hosea 13.3: "Therefore they shall be as the morning cloud, & as the morning dew that passeth away, as the chaff that is driven with a whirlwind out of the floor, & as the smoke that goeth out of the chimney."

17. The earliest caution about North American gold that I have found in the practical expansionist literature is Roger Barlow's in "A Brief Summe of Geographie" (MS c. 1540-41):

What commodity is within this land as yet it is not known for it hath not been labored, but it is to be presupposed that there is no riches of gold, spices nor precious stones, for it standeth far aparted from the equinoctial whereas the influence of the sun doth nourish and bring forth gold, spices, stones and pearls. (180)

18. The connection between America and Solomon's navigations seemed plausible enough to be authorized by the Bishops' Bible: "Ophir is thought to be the island in the West coast, of late found by Christopher Columbo, from whence at this day is brought much fine gold" (note to Psalm 45; quoted in Opfell, Translators , 25).

19. The claim is at least as old as Luce; see Luce's edition of The Tempest (1902), 169-70.

20. Cf. Greenblatt, "Learning," 575. Gillies's materialism seems confused in a number of ways, most obviously in the belief that the island as Europeans see it is somehow less physical than the "unimaginable" landscape imagined by Shakespeare, but more generally in the view that a colonial interest in Ovidian topoi of temperance is somehow incompatible with "realism" and "historicity," as if beliefs were an ideally avoidable accident of perception. For Gillies, there is no better sign of the way ideas distort "hard facts" than when contemporaries of the Jamestown settlers interpret their "hard fortune" as a result of "moral failure" ("Shakespeare's Virginian Masque," 702); yet what more fitting explanation does Gillies offer, not only for the settlers' inability to secure food and treat the Indians temperately but also for their very interest in an imperialist venture?

21. According to Strachey, those Bermuda castaways who mutinously want "to settle a foundation of ever inhabiting there" fear that leaving Bermuda and continuing to Virginia will force them "to serve the turns of the Adventurers" for "their whole life" ("True Reportory," 28, 31). For the accuracy of their fears, see Morgan, American Slavery .

22. See, e.g., Eden's address to Philip II and Queen Mary (1555) as, among other things, "Regi ac Reginae . . . Neapolis" and "Ducibus Mediolani" (Decades , 46). Cf. William Warner's reference (1596) to "the free-Italian States, of which the Spaniards part have won: / As Naples, Milan , royal That, and Duchy This" (Albions England 12:75); and Giovanni Botero's assertion (1589; trans. 1606) that "the chiefest parts of Italy ; that is, the Kingdom of Naples , and the Dukedom of Milan , are subject to the King of Spain" (Cities , 79).

23. Hakluyt, "Discourse," 243. Though commonplace in Renaissance England, Hakluyt's sentiments were not universally held: this particular passage is in fact lifted from George Nedham's complaint (c. 2564) about the gold Philip obtained from the Netherlands, which Nedham says are "more profitable" to Philip "than his Indies" ("Letter," 78, 68). Cf. Botero: "The custom of the merchandise of Milan , brings more money to the king of Spain's coffers, than the mines of Zagateca and of Salisco" (Cities , 51). English writers did agree, however, that whatever its source, Spain's gold fueled Spanish expansion.

24. Cf. Marnix, Exhortation , 14-25; Wernham, List 2:416; and Bacon, Works 14:478-79. Both Sutcliffe (Answer , 169-70) and Lightfote (Complaint , G3r-H2r) conjoin descriptions of Spanish crimes in Italy and the Indies. Richard Hakluyt the elder (1585) advises the English to treat the Indians well, so "that we become not hateful unto them, as the Spaniard is in Italy and in the West Indies, and elsewhere, by their manner of usage" (Taylor, Original Writings 2:334). The Spanish governor of Milan (1570) himself associates Spain's Old and New World dominions: he writes to Philip that "these Italians, although they are not Indians, have to be treated as such, so that they will understand that we are in charge of them and not they in charge of us" (quoted in Elliott, Old World , 82). Raleigh's Spanish alter ego in the pursuit of El Dorado, Antonio de Berrio, nicely embodies this connection between Spain's European and American rapacity: Raleigh explains that Berrio "had long served the Spanish king in Milan, Naples , and Low countries and elsewhere" (Raleigh, Discoverie , 15).

In a way, Spain had already invaded England by means of an American weapon first wielded against Naples—"the disease which the french call the evil of Naples ," syphilis. Guicciardini's Historie (trans. 1579) explains "that such a disease was transported out of Spain to Naples , & yet not proper or natural of that nation [Spain], but brought thither from the isles, which in those seasons began to be made familiar to our regions by the navigation of Christopher Colonnus " (128). Cf. Thevet, New Found Worlde , 70v, and Monardes, Joyfull Newes 1:29. For a bibliography of Renaissance Spanish literature on the American origin of syphilis, see Chiappelli, First Images 2:851 and 884; for Shakespeare on the relation between Naples and syphilis, see Troilus and Cressida 2.3.18-19 and Othello 3.1.3-4.

25. "Discourse," 246. Cf. out of many supporting pieces of evidence Sir Roger Williams in a letter to Burleigh, 20 November 1590: "Neither shall we nor our friends give them [the Spanish] the law as we should do, without ransacking his Indies. For his treasure comes unto him, as our salads to us. When we have eat all, we fetch more out of our gardens. So doth he fetch his treasure out of the ground, after spending all that is coined" (quoted in Wernham, List 2:296).

26. This ambivalence figures in Johnson, Nova Britannia , who never denies that gold can be found in Virginia; he only wants to suppress discussion of it. The True Declaration conventionally warns its readers, "Let no man adore his gold as his God, nor his Mammon as his Maker" (67), and reports the cautionary tale of a colonial ship that while trading for food turns piratical instead, led by "dreams of mountains of gold, and happy robberies" (37); yet the conclusion to its list of Virginian commodities coyly describes Virginia's "five main Rivers . . . promising as rich entrails as any Kingdom of the earth, to whom the sun is no nearer a neighbor" (56). Though he begins his sermon on Virginia by exhorting his listeners "to contemn riches" (Good Newes , 1), Alexander Whitaker (1613) similarly goes on to discuss mines in Virginia that provide "argument of much hope"; he adds, tantalizingly, "though I knew all, yet it were not convenient at this time that I should utter all" (38-39). Daniel Price's tangled negations (1609) nicely epitomize the confusion of these writers: "The Country is not unlike to equalize (though not India for gold, which is not unpossible yet), Tyrus for colors, Basan for woods, [etc.]" (Sauls Prohibition , F2r). Even Smith, so vehemently opposed to gold hunting, cannot keep himself from ambiguity on the subject: A True Relation (1608) mentions rocks "interlaced with many veins of glistering spangles" (Works 1:31) and an Indian who brings "a glistering Mineral stone" (95); while the later Map (1612) declares of these rocks that "the crust . . . would easily persuade a man to believe there are other mines than iron and steel" (Works 1:156; cf. 145). Most telling of all, the oldest hand at double-talk about Virginian gold, Richard Hakluyt, could simultaneously recommend and abjure the quest for gold by dividing his ambivalence between two separate and opposed works: on the one hand, the translation of Lescarbot that Hakluyt promoted (Nova Francia , vii); and on the other, a tract published the same year concerning de Soto's Floridan expedition, in which Hakluyt the translator directs the reader to those chapters describing various gold mines "within our limits" (Rye, Discovery , 1-4). The fate of this last work helps explain why the Virginia Company could not afford wholly to quash hopes about Virginian gold: of all the company propaganda published before The Tempest was produced, only Virginia Richly Valued , the one exception to a general restraint about gold talk, saw a second edition.

27. Like tobacco, even the apparently worthless dew of Bermuda can appear to represent imperialist desire: Plutarch (trans. 1579) reports "that the kings of Persia made water to be brought from the rivers of Nilus and Ister (otherwise called Danubie) which they did lock up with their other treasure for a confirmation of the greatness of their Empire, and to show that they were Lords of the world" (Lives 4:342).

28. For further evidence of Miranda's physical attraction to Ferdinand, see, e.g., 1.2.458-60 and 3.1.56-57.

29. For the royal commands, see Simpson, Encomienda , 10-12, 17-18, 39, 42, and 177 n. 3; for notices of concubinage and intermarriage, see Moerner, Race Mixture , 25-27. Moerner believes that the Crown decrees on intermarriage were more experimental and uncertain than Simpson allows: see Race Mixture 36-38.

30. In New England, "the problem [of intermarriage] was raised in a formal way in March 1635 when the Massachusetts General Court entertained and then immediately referred a question concerning the propriety of Indian-white marriages, but it never regained the court's attention" (Axtell, "Scholastic," 155). For opposition to intermarriage in Elizabethan Ireland, see Canny, "Permissive," 24.

Michael Zuckerman also notes the singularity of English resistance to intermarriage ("Identity," 145-47).

31. Encouragement , 28. Cf. the scruples manifested in the comparatively liberal plan of the anonymous writer of "Of the Voyage": the Guianans "shall give special hostages to be sent into England, which being civiled and converted here, upon their return and receiving of others in their rooms they may be matched in marriage with English women" (Raleigh, Discoverie , 146).

32. Kupperman, Settling , 118; see Kupperman for another discussion of most of the writers on intermarriage whom I cite.

There is little reason to accept a report on Virginian intermarriage by the Marquess of Flores to Philip II in 1612, though it does seem revealing of the differences between English and Spanish colonialism:

I have been told by a friend, who tells me the truth, that some of the people who have gone there, think now some of them should marry the women of the savages of that country; and he tells me that there are already 40 or 50 thus married. (Brown, Genesis 2:572)

A century later, the governor of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood, claims that the English distaste for intermarriage has not softened:

And as to beginning a nearer friendship by intermarriage, (as the Custom of the French is,) the inclinations of our people are not the same with those of that Nation, for notwithstanding the long intercourse between the inhabitants of this Country and the Indians, and their living amongst one another for so many Years, I cannot find one Englishman that has an Indian wife, or an Indian married to a white woman. (Quoted in Jacobs, "British-Colonial Attitudes," 92)

33. For Hakluyt's complaints about England's failure to convert the Indians, see his "Discourse of Western Planting" (1584). After noting that the Spanish "more vaunt" of their success in conversions "than of anything else that ever they achieved" there, Hakluyt adds that "I my self have been demanded of them how many Infidels have been by us converted," and a thorough examination of every English venture in America to that time only defeats him: "In very deed I was not able to name any one Infidel by them converted" (216-17). Fifteen years later, he still complains that "our adversaries daily in many of their books full bitterly lay unto the charge of the professors of the Gospel" the neglecting of conversion (Taylor, Original Writings 2:457). Cf. Crashaw, Sermon , K2r-v.

34. Cf. Zuckerman: "As the settlers spurned sexual union with the natives, so they scorned spiritual communion" ("Identity," 147).

Meredith Skura gives the most recent positive account of Prospero's final relation to Caliban. She reads Prospero's claim that Caliban is "mine" figuratively and thinks that Prospero, in acknowledging "the child-like Caliban," "moves for the first time towards accepting the child in himself rather than trying to dominate and erase that child (along with random vulnerable human beings outside himself) in order to establish his adult authority." Though Prospero may be "a long way from recognizing the equality of racial 'others,'" Skura admits, "he comes closer than any of Shakespeare's other 'Prosperos' to acknowledging the otherness within, which helps generate all racism—and he comes closer than anyone else in colonialist discourse" ("Discourse," 66). This implausibly comprehensive pronouncement caps Skura's attack on previous critics of The Tempest for not "specifying Shakespeare's precise literal and temporal relation to colonialist discourse" (57), but it is difficult to see what Skura herself imagines the practical colonialist upshot of Prospero's "acknowledging the otherness within" to be. She seems right to insist that the play "contains the 'colonial' encounter firmly within the framing story of his [i.e., Prospero's] own family history" (66), but then such containment of Caliban within the larger issue of Prospero's troubles as a brother and child looks a good deal like the attempt "to dominate and erase" that Prospero has supposedly transcended. Over the course of the play, Prospero does move from a Spanish-like colonial policy of enslavement to a more benign and English-like attitude toward Caliban—for example, where in act 4 he labels Caliban a "devil" (4.1.188), in act 5 he can reduce the charge to "demi-devil" (5.1.272)—yet at the same time the question, raised in the play's first act, of Caliban's rights to the island gets dropped entirely.

35. See Titus Andronicus; Othello 5.2.347; Fiedler, The Stranger , 201; and Anthony and Cleopatra 1.1.6 and 1.5.28.

36. See, e.g., the "Argument" to Phaer's translation (1573) of the Aeneid (unpaginated).

37. For interesting reflections on the black-white marriage in Shakespeare, see Fiedler, who imagines the intermarriage of Claribel and Tunis as able to "succeed" by its distance "from the world in which Shakespeare had previously demonstrated its inevitable failure" (The Stranger , 203). But Sebastian's report of Claribel's "loathness" makes it hard to believe that Shakespeare views relocation so optimistically.

38. Though the first reference to Pocahontas as nonpareil occurs in Smith's Proceedings , which was not published till 1612, manuscripts of the work or rumors about Pocahontas could easily have circulated earlier; and Smith had been back in England since the end of 1609. Hamor (1615) says Pocahontas's "fame hath even been spread in England by the title of Nonparella of Virginia" (True Discourse , 4). Of course, Pocahontas's marriage occurred after The Tempest was written.

Miranda's likeness to Pocahontas was first noted by Luce (The Tempest , 169-70). Geoffrey Bullough cites the connection and then with no explanation abjures it: "To identify Miranda with Pocahontas is a tempting fancy which must be sternly repressed" (Sources 8:241).

39. Caliban is himself only a first-generation native (1.2.282), and a Mediterranean, not American, one at that. Skura rightly notes that he also "lacks almost all of the defining external traits [of the Indian] in the many reports from the New World no superhuman physique, no nakedness or animal skin (indeed, an English 'gaberdine' instead), no decorative feathers, no arrows, no pipe, no tobacco, no body paint, and—as Shakespeare takes pains to emphasize—no love of trinkets and trash" ("Discourse," 49). Yet, mysteriously, Skura goes on to claim that Shakespeare is "the first writer of fiction to portray New World inhabitants" (58). Even if Caliban were an Indian, and if Skura had said that Shakespeare was the first English fiction writer to depict a New World inhabitant, her claim would remain inaccurate: e.g., the cast of characters in Greene's Orlando Furioso (c. 1588-91) includes the Kings of Cuba and Mexico. But Greene's Americans, like the inhabitants of Cusco in Thomas Lodge's Margarite of America (1596), have names culled from European romance: the King of Cuba is Rodamant; of Mexico, Mandricard. Shakespeare's innovation as an English writer may have been to represent a more savage Indian-like figure—though again, Caliban neither looks nor speaks like the savages in New World travel literature, and he is not American.

40. One character in the play, Roselia, does mention that her island was "inhabited heretofore by warlike women, / That kept men in subjection" (2.2), but these missing Amazons only prove the point that the Europeans have supplanted the natives as natives: Roselia even adds that the Amazonian "example" persuaded the Portuguese women to become Amazons themselves.

For a report of an Indian literally cannibalized by the Jamestown set-tiers during the winter of 1609-10, see McIlwaine, Journals , 29.

41. To my knowledge, no Indian character ever appeared on the popular Jacobean stage. If it was acted, the lost Tragedy of the Plantation of America , registered the year after the massacre of 1622 (see Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage 5:1395-96), must have been an exception that proved the rule: the Indians are subsumed unless they actually murder their European substitutes. Some "Floridans" figure in The Masque of Flow ers (1614), but again, as in the masque of the magician and Chapman's entertainment, they serve as foils to "the great Sun of our firmament," the king.

Caroline plays began to allow Indians on the stage as disguises. See Massinger's City Madam (1632) and the anonymous Fatal Marriage (possibly from the 1620s or 1630s; see xi and Bentley 5:1332-33).

42. Percy, "Trewe Relacyon," 277-78. Smith's Proceedings reports a less mysterious transformation of Englishman to Indian: in order to make a rendezvous with his cohorts, one mutineer at Jamestown disguised himself "Savage like" (Works 1:259). For the threat to Renaissance English colonies posed by colonists going native, see Canny, "Permissive."

1. In a commendatory poem of the same title as Cowley's, Waller also praises Davenant for his American plans. Davenant tells Hobbes in the Preface to Gondibert that he will send him the rest of Gondibert "from America" (Preface , 44). For satire on the praise of Davenant as poet and colonizer, see the poem "Upon the Preface" printed in Certain Verses Written By Severall of the Authors Friends (1653) (reprinted in Gondibert , 273). On the disastrous outcome of Davenant's American venture, see Harbage, Davenant , 110-13.

2. In his dedication of King Arthur (1691) to the Marquis of Halifax, Dryden refers to "that fairy way of writing which depends only upon the force of the imagination" (Works 8:136).

3. For this scorn of "monsters" in favor of "men," see also the prologue to the 1616 version of Every Man in His Humor and the induction to Bartholomew Fair (1616), both of which, however, are different from the Barriers and more characteristic of Jonson in their scorn for the outlandish.

4. According to Chamberlain, in a letter to Carleton on 19 November 1612 (Letters 1:391; quoted in Strong, Henry , 84). For a similar attack on Spenser's fairy nationalism, see also Daniel's rejection (1599) of "fained Paladins " in favor of "the true designs / Of Bourchier, Talbot, Nevile, Willoughby" (Civill Wars 5.4).

5. Cf. Hobbes's own thoughts in the Preface on the relation between poetry and nature (51).

6. See M. H. Abrams's extraordinary The Mirror and the Lamp (e.g., 265-68), upon which much of this epilogue is based.

7. For references to this intellectual world, see Works 1:134/4:23, 1:191/ 4:82, the Descriptio Globi Intellectualis ([written c. 1612, published 1653] Works 3:727-68), and the frontispiece to Sylva Sylvarum (1627)—the work to which New Atlantis was appended which shows the "Mundus Intel-lectualis" framed by the Pillars of Hercules.

8. Rymer in the preface to his translation of René Rapin, Reflections on Aristotle's Treatise of Poesie (1674), 5.

9. Misquoted in Quinn, "First Pilgrims," 345.

10. Quoted in Quinn, "First Pilgrims," 341. Cf. Bullinger (trans. 1577): "For you shall find in these days captious and fantastical men (that is schismatics) worthy surely to be master builders in Utopia or Cyribiria" (quoted in Sullivan and Padberg, Supplement , 15). Anatomizing the character of a "Chameleon"—a creature the Renaissance believed to feed on air Thomas Scot (1616) later declares that he

is in England a Familist, at Amsterdam a Brownist, further on an Anabaptist. He lives by the air, and there builds Castles and Churches; none on the earth will please him: He would be of the triumphant and glorious Church, but not of the terrene militant Church, which is subject to storms, deformities, and many violences and alterations of time: he must find out Sir Thomas More's Utopia , or rather Plato's Community, and be an Elder there. (Philomythie, E5v; cited in Sullivan and Padberg, Supplement , 102)

11. For a good introduction to millenarianism during the English Renaissance, see Capp, "The Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought."

12. Attacking some Parliamentary opponents, Charles (1642) refers to "that new Utopia of Religion and Government into which they endeavor to transform this Kingdom" (Rushworth, Historical , 727, cited in Gibson, Bibliography , 406).

13. Cited in Gibson, Bibliography , 409; cf. Prynne, Vindication , 52 and 57-58·

14. For other references, see Gibson, Bibliography , nos. 842 (p. 409), 843 (410), and 852 (411).

15. The verses are actually untitled. For English opponents of nonconformity who tried, as Richard Harvey (1590) says, to "banish it into the Novus Orbis," see Quinn, "First Pilgrims" (who cites Harvey at 342).

16. In his poem on the Nine Worthies, Morton says it is a "pity" he

                                           cannot call them Knights,
Since they had brawn and brain, and were right able
To be installed of Prince Arthur's table;
Yet all of them were Squires of low degree.
                                                                         ( Canaan , 290)

Interestingly, William Bradford derides Morton and his people in fairy terms also: "They also set up a maypole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies, or furies, rather; and worse practices. As if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of the Roman goddess Flora, or the beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians" (Plymouth , 205-6).

17. Wasserman, Subtler Language , 142; for the contemporary political significance of William the Conqueror and Lodona, see 113-25 and 133-43.

18. For the comparison between Anne and Elizabeth, see Carrera, "Anne and Elizabeth." The most explicit allusion to Elizabeth in Pope's poem, however, combines her virginal insularity with her international authority: at the new Whitehall "Kings shall sue, and suppliant States be seen / Once more to bend before a British QUEEN " (384-85).

19. As the Twickenham editors note, the conclusion of the poem is modeled on the conclusion of Georgics 4, and, just as the last line of Virgil's poem echoes the first line of his Eclogues , so the last line of Windsor Forest echoes the first line of Pope's Pastorals . For the many other minor allusions to words and phrases from the Georgics , and to a lesser degree from the rest of Virgil's poetry, see the editors' notes.

20. The first pastoral, "Spring," begins: "First in these fields I try the Sylvan Strains, / Nor blush to sport on Windsor's blissful Plains."

21. The poem does make minor references to actual cultivation, but they always appear in tandem with references to pastoral: for example, the Thames predicts that "safe on my Shore each unmolested Swain / Shall tend the Flocks, or reap the bearded Grain" (369-70; cf. 37-40 and 87-90). The only homely activity to receive extended treatment in the poem is, however, neither Virgilian pastoral nor Virgilian georgic— namely, hunting (93-158). David Morris thinks these problems resolved by conceiving of Windsor Forest as figuratively georgic: "Although Virgil in the Georgics glorifies agriculture rather than commerce, both he and Pope . . . use commerce and agriculture as symbolic occupations in a profoundly similar way" ("Virgilian Attitudes," 245). Yet it is hard to see how a symbolism lacking interest in both the land and labor, as I will show, can count as georgic. Cf. Addison in his Essay on Virgil's Georgics (1697): "A Georgic therefore is some part of the science of husbandry put into a pleasing dress" (Miscellaneous Works 2:4).

22. Hence at another point "Rich Industry" only "sits smiling on the Plains" (41; my emphasis). For more references to Windsor's forest become England's navy, see 222 and 385-86.

23. For Pope's determined investment in concordia discors throughout the poem, see the masterful treatment in Wasserman, Subtler Language , passim. Spenser's is, of course, not the only way that Elizabethans could relate pastoral to epic. For instance, Drayton's revision of Spenser's "Aprill" eclogue, the third "Eglog" in Idea The Shepheards Garland (1593), has Rowland praising Elizabeth as "Beta" the "shepherd's Goddess" (1. 123), but instead of singing to Colin's waterfall, Rowland addresses the more expansive Thames, and ends his pastoral with a prayer that Beta's "large empire stretch her arms from east unto the west" (119). Here pastoral truly has swallowed epic, as if there were no difference between the two; Pope, however, insists on both ease of relation and difference, so as to avoid the unwarranted complacence of such insular imperialism.

24. See also the Spenserian catalogue of English rivers (Windsor Forest , 340-48). Pope's resistance to dwelling on England's island explains the only passage in the poem that treats at length a landed England beyond Windsor. The Thames exclaims,

Behold! th'ascending Villa's  on my Side
Project long Shadows o'er the Crystal Tide.
Behold! Augusta's  glitt'ring Spires increase,

And Temples rise, the beauteous Works of Peace.
I see, I see where two fair Cities bend
Their ample Bow, a new White-Flail  ascend!
                                                                                (375-80)

These two cities, the only English ones besides Windsor that Pope mentions—"Augusta" or London, and Westminster—leave the Thames for land only so far as to occupy its "banks" (336), and then the only habitations within them that the Thames will describe are those that leave the land by ascending or rising. Elsewhere, discussing Henry VI and Edward IV, Pope does invoke the insular limits of England, yet only to imagine them either exceeded—the two kings were men "whom not th'extended Albion could contain, / From old Belerium to the Northern Main" (315-16)— or else anticipated by the forest: the kings meet in their Windsor "Grave" (316).

25. The Twickenham editors do, however, note the apparent contradiction.

On other occasions too, it is unclear whether Wasserman merely reports or supports Pope's views: for example, "Britain's fleets will bear her thunder and her Union Jack over the seas, not to create foreign conflict, but to assure the concordia discors of the world" (Subtler Language , 167). This liberal imperialism appears as well in an earlier and, at the time, more popular celebration of the treaty than Pope's: Thomas Tickell's On the Prospect of Peace (1712). Praising Britannia, "the Ocean's stately queen," Tickell demands,

Say, where have e'er her union-crosses sail'd,
But much her arms, her justice more prevail'd!
Her labors are, to plead th'Almighty's cause,
Her pride to teach th'untam'd barbarian laws:
Who conquers wins by brutal strength the prize;
But 'tis a godlike work to civilize.
                                                                         (25)

But later Tickell more explicitly adopts the language of "command" that Pope will also employ:

From Albion's cliffs thy wide-extended hand
Shall o'er the main to far Peru command;
So vast a tract whose wide domain shall run,
Its circling skies shall see no setting sun.
                                                                         (31)

26. The Twickenham editors note that "[Joseph] Warton objected to sable , saying, 'they are not negroes.'" Cf. Pope's contemporaneous reference (1714) to "Afrik's Sable Sons" (Rape of the Lock 3.82). Pope does not seem to envision the Indians growing black due to actual intermarriage— he expects them, after all, to "reap their own Fruits" (Windsor Forest , 410). For the recurrent conflation of Indians and blackamoors in Elizabethan literature, see, e.g., Hunter, Dramatic Identities , 41 n. 4; for the same in Restoration pageantry, see Barthelemy, Black Face , 47-48 and 52-55.

27. For more explicit evidence of continuing interest in England as an otherworld, see the vigorous attack by Aylett Sammes (1676) on the notion that England had ever been a peninsular "hanger-on" to the Continent (Britannia , 25-37).

28. For an introduction to the belief that the westward progress of religion would end in an American millennium, see Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm , 17-19. Though some English writers were attracted to the idea, it does not seem to have greatly pleased the authorities. For the reports that licensers were troubled by Herbert's lines, see Hutchinson's commentary in his edition of Herbert (Works , 547); for Wither's imprisonment as a result of the Motto , see the entry for the Motto in Pollard and Red-grave, Short-Title Catalogue 2:472.

29. E.g., Paradise Lost 2.403, 410. For an introduction to seventeenth-century interest in the idea of a plurality of worlds, see McColley, "Seventeenth-Century Doctrine"; for theories about a world in the moon, see Nicolson, World ; and for the intellectual impact of both these notions, see Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being .

30. For Utopia's place in seventeenth-century heterocosmic theory, see, e.g., John Collop's "The Poet" (1656), which declares that when the poet has "o'erview'd" the world, he "can make a new. / A Plato's Commonwealth who can outdo? / A More's Utopia, and Atlantis too" (32-34; cited in Sullivan and Padberg, Supplement , 24).

31. Addison claims that "among the English, Shakespeare has incomparably excelled all others" in that "noble Extravagance of Fancy" by which he comes to create supernatural characters, as "in the Speeches of his Ghosts, Fairies, Witches and the like Imaginary Persons" (Spectator 3:572-73). In a similar vein, Nicholas Rowe (1709) cites The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth , and Hamlet as Shakespeare's most transcendent achievements (see Abrams, Mirror , 382 n. 47); while Joseph Warton in Adventurer no. 93 (1753) later singles out The Tempest as "the most striking instance" of Shakespeare's "boundless imagination" (Adventurer 2:134; quoted in Abrams, Mirror , 275; cf. 382 n. 48): "The poet is a more powerful magician than Prospero : we are transported into fairy-land" (Adventurer 2:138). As for Spenser, Addison admits that other poets such as Ovid, Virgil, and Milton may have produced extraordinary instances of "another sort of Imaginary Beings"—person'ffications—but "we find a whole Creation of the like shadowy Persons in Spenser" (Spectator 3:573).

32. See Abrams, Mirror , for the rising interest in "the psychology of poetic illusion" (270).

33. For the aesthetic, theological, and political ramifications of this ambivalence, see Steven Knapp's Personification and the Sublime .

34. Cowley's note to the passage sharpens the contrast between it and the Davenant poem: Cowley explains that "Poetry treats not only of all things that are, or can be, but makes Creatures of her own, as Centaurs, Satyrs, Fairies , &c."

Earlier in his career, Davenant had himself written a "fantastic" imperialist poem, "Madagascar" (1638), in which he envisions an English fleet, which never sailed for Madagascar, as having already conquered the island. The commendations printed along with the poem anticipate the extreme double perspective of later literary theorists. Suckling mocks and praises at once:

What mighty Princes Poets are! those things
The great ones stick at, and our very Kings
Lay down, they venture on; and with great ease,
Discover, conquer, what, and where they please.
                               (In Davenant,  Shorter Poems , 7)

Davenant may have carried home the laurel, Suckling concludes, "but prithee / In thy next Voyage, bring the Gold too with thee" (ibid.). William Habington is more appreciative of Davenant's immaterial achievement:

                        Kings may
Find proud ambition humbled at the sea,
Which bounds dominion: But the nobler flight
Of Poesy hath a supremer right
To Empire, and extends her large command
Where ere th'invading Sea assaults the land.
                                                                  (Ibid., 9)

But Davenant himself comes closer to Suckling: his poem is a dream vision, and when the dreamer sees Madagascar's gold mines, he exclaims: "I wish'd my Soul had brought my body here, / Not as a Poet, but a Pioneer [i.e., a miner]" ("Madagascar," 425-27. The comparison of this lighter work to Gondibert is illuminating: the more serious imperial ambitions expressed in the ancillary material of Gondibert , which itself seems to have nothing to do with America, show how even in the context of "natural" poetry, the writer who hopes to combine imperialism and poetry must still resort to a Spenserian reticence.