Spenser’s Panthea and Lucian’s: Elizabeth, Gloriana, and The Faerie Queene’s Protocols of Encomium

Abstract

Spenser and his friend Gabriel Harvey enjoyed reading Lucian, and at that time this ancient writer’s two dialogues celebrating Panthea were prominent exemplars of encomium for an exalted woman. Although the name Panthea also appears in The Faerie Queene, explicitly linked with Cleopolis and Gloriana, its Lucianic implications there have been hitherto unnoticed. Spenser thereby strategically invites comparison of his epic’s panegyrical enterprise with Lucian’s in those dialogues, as well as with their assessments of appropriate encomiastic expression that avoids mere flattery. Hence The Faerie Queene incorporates means of evaluating its own celebratory project, limits its praise of Elizabeth I, and ensures that its homage to her is definitively provisional. This new perspective on Spenser’s major text clarifies the significance of its fundamental conceit, Elizabeth’s idealization as Gloriana, illuminates the distinction between these two queens, and confirms the advisory and critical functions of Spenserian encomium. So as to ensure that England’s Queen remains open to instructive critique and that his own depiction of faery’s indicates a far higher standard, the poet significantly distances his actual Queen from her “true glorious type” manifested in Gloriana (I.pr.4). [K.B.]