This toy knight is dressed for a tournament and is modeled after one made in Nuremburg, c. 1530, and now in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Germany. It shows great care in craftsmanship (with some sharp edges).

Literary Connections

Spenser’s work focuses frequently on marriage and childbirth but not often on childhood. He was no Wordsworth. We should keep in mind, however, that for all its political, ethical and moral significance, The Faerie Queene is a long Arthurian romance about knights, ladies, magicians and monsters. It was written to entertain and not only to instruct. Like its predecessors in the romance tradition, such as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (translated into English in 1591), parts of its action are fabulous, even ridiculous. Like this toy, the poem would have appealed to both children and adults on different levels.

A curious moment occurs in Book I of The Faerie Queene when a child frightens his mother by wanting to play with the talons (“talants”) of a dead dragon:

One mother, whenas her foolehardy chyld
Did come too neare, and with his talants play
Halfe dead through feare, her little babe reuyld,
And to her gossibs gan in counsell say;
How can I tell, but that his talants may
Yet scratch my sonne, or rend his tender hand. (FQ I.xii.11.1-6)

It is as if Spenser, with this word of caution, is breaking a fantastical spell that holds many a reader spellbound, like the child, throughout the dragon fight in the previous canto. The dragon is real, and the beast might still be dangerous. Likewise, Satan, or sin, might easily revive and will not be extinguished from the world until the end of time. Many threats will continue to plague the heroes in the poem.

Many estates in Ireland had deer parks dating back to the later middle ages (from the Anglo-Norman invasion in the 1170s-80s on forward). Spenser did not have a deer park (that we know of) but his New English neighbors at Mallow Castle, Co. Cork, the Norris family, reputedly did. Legend has it that Queen Elizabeth I donated the first deer to populate the grounds at Mallow.

Spenser and/or his servants would also have had ample opportunity to hunt deer in the wild. The famously dense wood of Aherlow (“Arlo”) grew nearby to the north. They would have hunted red deer, a native Irish species.

In the castle recreation here, the deerskins are appropriately placed in an important domestic space, on a rocking chair and on the floor in front of the hearth. Deerskins are also placed in the Tower House Parlor.

Literary Connections

We read about a deer hunt in Spenser’s neighborhood in the fragment of Book VII of The Faerie Queene, the “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie,” first published posthumously in 1609. In it, Spenser describes how the character Faunus, a wood-god, is punished by the virginal goddess of the moon and of the hunt, Cynthia (an allegorized Queen Elizabeth I), for spying on her while she takes a bath in the wood of Aherlow. The story loosely imitates that of Diana and Acteon in Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: when Faunus is found out, he is punished by being draped with a deer skin and chased by Diana’s hounds:

But him (according as they had decreed)
With a Deeres-skin they couered, and then chast
With all their hounds that after him did speed;
But he more speedy, from them fled more fast
Then any Deere: so sore him dread aghast.
They after follow’d all with shrill out-cry,
Shouting as they the heauens would haue brast:
That all the woods and dales where he did flie,
Did ring againe, and loud reeccho to the skie. (FQ VII.vi.52)

The sound of Irish woods “echoing” a cry also features prominently in Spenser’s wedding poem, Epithalamion (1595). Whereas in “The Mutabilitie Cantos,” the shrieking or “shrill” cry of the enraged wood nymphs is deeply threatening to the male voyeur, in Epithalamion the ringing woods add a melodious, calming note to festivities that celebrate the marriage “ring”: an allusion to wedding bells and (obliquely) to the wedding band. The poem celebrates orphic harmonies in nature rather than orgiastic destruction. In this case, the woodsy nymphs invoked by Spenser guard the poet and his bride from harm at Kilcolman, as they prepare themselves for the ceremonies later that day. Spenser calls on the nymphs who are

… lightfoot mayds which keepe the deere,
That on the hoary mountayne vse to towre,
And the wylde wolues which seeke them to deuoure,
With your steele darts doo chace from comming neer,
Be also present heere,
To helpe to decke her and to help to sing,
That all the woods may answer and your eccho ring. (Epithalamion 67-73)

In this case his dear bride will be adorned by those who normally “keepe the deer” with “steele darts” or spears; one imagines that these darts are not are neglected entirely but are rather left (figuratively) at the church door for re-use once the ceremonies are done.

Spenser compares his wife-to-be Elizabeth Boyle to a deer in Amoretti, the sonnet sequence written to court her and published with Epithalamion. In sonnet 67, he has finally achieved his love (his “deare”):

Lyke as a huntsman after weary chace,
Seeing the game from him escapt away,
sits downe to rest him in some shady place,
with panting hounds beguiled of their pray:
So after long pursuit and vaine assay,
when I all weary had the chace forsooke,
the gentle deare returnd the selfe-same way,
thinking to quench her thirst at the next brooke.
There she beholding me with mylder looke,
sought not to fly, but fearelesse still did bide:
till I in hand her yet halfe trembling tooke,
and with her owne goodwill hir fyrmely tyde.
Strange thing me seemd to see a beast so wyld, so goodly wonne with her owne will beguyld.

The bride here becomes a Christ-figure as well. Spenser pursues a spiritual as well as a physical ideal. It is not a violent hunt that wins his bride but her own self-sacrifice and active desire to be won by the “beguiling” poet.

The metal chest here is of the kind with elaborate locking mechanisms.

The chest is a Spanish model; Spenser could have purchased or salvaged similar models from the flotsam and jetsam washed up on Irish shores in the sixteenth century, including after ships from the Great Armada crashed there in 1588 (see also Great Hall: helmet, Spanish). In 1587, in a brief period of piracy (or opportunism, depending on the legal interpretation), Spenser captained a seized Spanish ship, loaded with wine, and sailed it from the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry to Cork harbor.

Literary Connections

Spenser's employer Arthur, Lord Grey wrote to Queen Elizabeth during the Desmond rebellion that the Spanish besieged at Smerwick had a ”coffer” in which they stored all their ”treasure.” It was duly seized and its contents of silver (“plate“) coins distributed among his men.

The Munster Plantation offered Spenser himself significant opportunity in land, treasure and status. He, like his fellow New Englishmen, or like Guyon, the hero of Temperance who resists the snares of Mammon (in Book II of The Faerie Queene), had to be on guard against its corrupting influences. He also had to guard against thieves.

The treasure inside the chest might remind us of Spenser’s bride, described in Amoretti 15 as containing “all this worlds riches that may farre be found.” Her lips are like “Rubies,” her eyes like “Saphyres,” and so forth, but most fair of all is “her mind adornd with vertues manifold.” In the following wedding poem, “Epithalamion,” we hear that “all her body” is “like a pallace fayre,/ Ascending vppe with many a stately stayre,/ To honors seat and chastities sweet bowre” (178-80). Elizabeth Boyle was herself a prize to be won.

A chest lost at sea is fought over by two sons of “Milesio,” Amidas and Bracidas, in Book V of The Faerie Queene (the “Book of Justice”). Artegall, the hero of Justice, finds Amidas and Bracidas fighting over a

… Coffer strong,
Fast bound on euery side with iron bands,
But seeming to haue suffred mickle wrong,
Either by being wreckt vppon the sands,
Or being carried farre from forraine lands. (FQ V.iv.5.1-5)

The ensuing story involves a complicated legal matter, involving a dispute over land lost and found (land washed from one brother to the other by action of the sea), wives lost and found (the wife of one brother eloped with the other; the other wife floated back the other way), as well as treasure lost and found (the chest floated, accompanied by wife, from the one brother to the other). Artegall, acting as judge, resolves the dispute through the principle of salvage (or, put crudely, finders-keepers): to whom the land, treasure and wife goes, thanks to the action of the sea, so belongs the ownership of each:

For what the mighty Sea hath once possest,
And plucked quite from all possessors hand,
Whether by rage of waues, that neuer rest,
Or else by wracke, that wretches hath distrest,
He [i.e., the Sea] may dispose by his imperiall might,
As thing at randon left, to whom he list. (FQ V.iv.19.2-7)

The episode has clear Irish significance in that Milesio was the legendary king of Spain who colonized prehistoric Ireland, according to Irish legend. His descendants were the Irish themselves. In Spenser’s poem, however, it is possible that one brother stands allegorically for Ireland and the other for England, Scotland and/or Wales. In either case, the resolution offered here indicates that Spenser fantasized about such a judgment being applied to his Irish situation. Artegall’s decision echoes the judgment of Dame Nature in The Faerie Queene Book VII (“The Mutabilitie Cantos”), which occurs on Arlo Hill, near Kilcolman: in that episode, Jove is allowed to keep the power that he took by force and is “confirm’d in his imperiall see,” or throne (FQ VII.vii.59.7). Spenser, by “imperiall might,” design and fortune, ended up with land, wife and treasure at Kilcolman, until the seas of fate took them all away again.

Links:

Seen here is a four-poster with embroidered curtains. On it lies a small book (perhaps Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion).

Literary Connections

“To sleep, perchance to dream…” says Hamlet in his famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Spenser’s own dreams must have factored somehow into his deeply visionary poetry.

In his published correspondence (1580) with his Cambridge tutor Gabriel Harvey, Spenser refers to his work, Dreams, which is now lost if not incorporated under a different name in his works. He translates (and re-translates) the fifteen dream-poems or Songe of the French poet, Joachim Du Bellay, and publishes them as his Visions of Bellay along with other Visions in the Complaints volume (1591). These poems are deeply enigmatic with both political and apocalyptic strains in them.

His poetry sometimes focuses on dreams as the spur to the imagination: in The Faerie Queene, evil spirits visit “Morpheus house” (Morpheus is the god of sleep) in search of a “fit false dreame” to torment the hero Red Crosse Knight with (FQ I.i.39 ff.) In the description of the “heauenly towre” that allegorizes the mind in the House of Temperance episode in Book II, we encounter the character Phantastes, who represents the fantastic imagination (see also Tower House Study: Desk). He has “a sharpe foresight, and working wit,/ That neuer idle was, ne once would rest a whit” (FQ II.ix.49.8-9). He imagines all sorts of

...idle thoughtes and fantasies,
Deuices, dreames, opinions vnsound,
Shewes, visions, sooth-sayes, and prophesies;
And all that fained is, as leasings, tales, and lies. (FQ II.ix.51.6-9).

In his wedding poem, “Epithalamion”, the bed is a framing device: the action begins and ends in bed, as his bride is awoken from her “bowre” with the rising of the sun (23) and returns to bed with her new husband that night. At the conclusion of his poem, Spenser invokes the “Genius” of the land (a guardian spirit) to protect the couple and send them children:

And thou glad Genius, in whose gentle hand,
The bridale bowre and geniall bed remaine,
Without blemish or staine,
And the sweet pleasures of theyr loues delight
With secret ayde doest succour and supply,
Till they bring forth the fruitfull progeny,
Send vs the timely fruit of this same night. (398-404)

He also imagines cupids fluttering around his bride’s body as she lies in her (their?) bed:

The whiles an hundred little winged loues,
Like diuers fethered doues,
Shall fly and flutter round about your bed,
And in the secret darke, that none reproues,
Their prety stealthes shal worke, and snares shal spread
To filch away sweet snatches of delight,
Conceald through couert night. (357-63)

The cupids resemble scattered leaves of his own love poetry, including the sonnet sequence he used to woo his wife. The sequence is entitled “Amoretti,” from Italian amoretti, meaning “little loves,” i.e., cupids. Cupids resemble children, who like poems are the fruit of his own invention, or “Genius,” that allow him to grab “sweet snatches of delight” at Kilcolman. Thanks to his genius and “geniall bed,” he will create children, or “fruitfull progeny” with Elizabeth Boyle. Without genius, wife or a bed, no children; without children and a strong house to put them in, no hold on the land, and no place to dream or write his poetry.

Links:

Spenser raised at least three children at Kilcolman: from his second marriage (in 1594, to Elizabeth Boyle), a son, Peregrine; from his first marriage (in 1579, to Machabeus Chylde), a daughter, Katherine, and a son, Sylvanus. Sylvanus and his descendants would end up inheriting Kilcolman. A crib was a hopeful sign that a landed gentleman’s name and property would be passed on to his heirs. (See also Bedroom: Toy Knight)

Child mortality was a constant in the early modern period. Spenser’s contemporary, the writer Ben Jonson, reported that Spenser lost another child, a baby, in the destruction of the castle in 1598. How trustworthy this statement is is unclear. Jonson also said that Spenser died penniless, which is unlikely, and Jonson regularly focused on the death of children in his creative work. He may therefore have been embellishing an already dramatic story about the poet’s narrow escape during the uprising.

A story, told by the antiquarian James Ware in his preface to Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland (1633), relates that a different sort of child, i.e., the unpublished remainder of The Faerie Queene, was lost in transit following the desertion of his castle.

Literary Connections

Children are an occasional feature of Spenser’s poetry. Some, like the infant Ruddymane in The Faerie Queene, appear in highly traumatic circumstances: Ruddymane is found playing in the blood of his dying mother, Amavia, who has stabbed herself (FQ II.i.39ff). Ruddymane, whose name means “red hand,” has been read by one of Spenser’s early commentators, John Upton, as alluding to the heraldic Red Hand of Ulster, and hence to the threat of violence and rebellion in the north (from whence soldiers came to sack Kilcolman, for example). Amavia, likewise, could evoke the Irish queen of the fairies (cf. Shakespeare’s “Queen Mab” in Romeo and Juliet). Ruddymane’s deceased father, Mordant, might glance at the English soldier, Captain Mordant, who according to state papers was reprimanded for bad behavior in Ireland in the mid-1580s. With the Ruddymane episode, is Spenser somehow allegorizing the bloody mess that Ireland was in?

Other children, like the “thousand thousand naked babes” in the ever-fertile Garden of Adonis (FQ III.vi.32.3) or the cupids (or amoretti) in his courtship poems, Amoretti and Epithalamion, stand for erotic creativity and new life in Spenser’s work. For example, in “Epithalamion,” the “sons of Venus,” i.e., cupids, amoretti or “winged loves,” symbolize Spenser’s sonnets themselves, titled Amoretti. These cupids fly and “play” around his bedroom at Kilcolman on his wedding night, which the speaker hopes will stay silently peaceful and free from threat while the couple makes love:

But let stil Silence trew night watches keepe,
That sacred peace may in assurance rayne,
And tymely sleep, when it is tyme to sleepe,
May poure his limbs forth on your pleasant playne,
The whiles an hundred little winged loues,
Like diuers feathered doues,
Shall fly and flutter round about your bed,
And in the secret darke, that none reproues,
Their prety stealthes shal worke, and snares shal spread
To filch away sweet snatches of delight,
Conceald through couert night.
Ye sonnes of Venus, play your sports at will,
For greedy pleasure, carelesse of your toyes,
Thinks more vpon her paradise of ioyes,
Then what ye do, albe it good or ill.
All night therefore attend your merry play,
For it will soone be day:
Now none doth hinder you, that say or sing,
Ne will the woods now answer, nor your Eccho ring. (“Epithalamion” 353-71)

Spenser was a Protestant, but what kind of Protestant is open to debate. To what extent did he sympathize with the rituals and doctrine of the Anglican, or “high” church, which had parallels with the older, Catholic faith? By contrast, how “puritanical,” and therefore mistrustful of vestigial Catholic ceremonies and doctrine, was he? How much did he desire continued radical reform of the church following Lutheran or Calvinist principles?

Furthermore, did he believe in structural as well as doctrinal reform in the church? To what degree for each? How did his opinions evolve? Was he a more hot-headed reformer as a young man, before he came to Ireland? Or was he sympathetic towards tolerant and syncretic religious practices?

As he grew older, how did Ireland’s religious politics influence him? One could argue that his status as a minority English Protestant hardened his militant anti-Catholic and apocalyptic beliefs, a logical reaction to the threats he found surrounding him. He exhibits such beliefs in works he wrote as a young man, for example in his first publication (1569), a translation of the work of Dutch reformer Jan van der Noot.

Spenser’s written works give us conflicting impressions concerning his beliefs and where he stood in relation to the current reform of England and Ireland’s Protestant and Catholic churches. We have therefore taken the controversial step of creating a modest but icon-filled chapel at Kilcolman. An image of the Christ hangs on the crucifix (many Protestants abhorred the idea of presenting an image of their god, preferring instead a plain crucifix), and a late-medieval mural of St Christopher brightens up the wall. It is imagined here as a visible remnant of the previous inhabitants of the same chapel, which Spenser chose not to white-wash. On the makeshift altar (a table and cloth) lies a Bible, chalice and crucifix. A cushion sits below for kneeling in prayer.

Which Bible was Spenser reading? We leave that unspecified although he likely owned a copy of the Book of Common Prayer (1559) for worship purposes.

Literary Connections

Spenser seems to hate — he ridicules, satirizes and demonizes— the institution of the Catholic church, including the papacy, which he equates in The Faerie Queene Book I (for example) with the Whore of Babylon and the Antichrist. In this he follows the Calvinist commentary in the Geneva Bible (1560). He had political worries in this regard: the armies of the Catholic empire Spain regularly interfered in Ireland and the Netherlands, and tried to in England, a drama played out repeatedly in the allegories of Book V of The Faerie Queene and in other places in his poetry, such as the Orgoglio episode in Book I.

Nonetheless, without censure or irony, Spenser includes Catholic imagery and ideas in his House of Holiness episode in Book I.x of The Faerie Queene. Here the Red Crosse Knight undergoes a scourging of the flesh. That hero, the hero of holiness, then becomes St George, a saint from the old liturgy, also the patron saint of England, who undergoes a symbolic crucifixion fighting against the Dragon in canto xi. Saints were redolent of Catholicism, and George becomes an icon or image of Christ himself as we read along. Spenser describes him in words, not images, but Spenser’s words are highly imagistic. The 1590 Faerie Queene included one woodcut, an image of St George defeating the dragon: in other words, a sort of icon (this woodcut can be found hanging on the bookshelf in his study upstairs).

Spenser also appears to be anti-Catholic in his artistic temperament. At the end of Book II, for example, published in the same volume, the hero of temperance, Guyon, violently destroys the highly artistic, if luxurious and decadent, Bower of Bliss. Spenser therefore appears to promote iconoclasm (or image-destruction) at any cost: a radical Protestant idea.

Ireland itself Spenser admires for once being a “holy-Island” that “florished in fame/ Of wealths and goodnesse, far aboue the rest” (The Faerie Queene VII.vi.37.7, 38.1-2), a compliment to its ancient status as an island famed for its saints and scholars, long before the Protestant Reformation occured. Yet in Spenser’s day Ireland had —from his point of view— degenerated to a bad condition, occupied by rebellious papists and no-good, feckless Protestant church appointees (as we hear in A View of the Present State of Ireland).

For Spenser, the best cure for Ireland’s perillous spiritual condition was reformed, state-sponsored religion that would follow a political re-conquest and reformation of the country. Spenser would, presumably, uphold this religion at Kilcolman. In his poem, “Colin Clouts Come Home Againe,“ Spenser’s alter-ego Colin Clout, having visited London (to the east) and returned to Kilcolman (in the west), enthusiastically describes to his fellow shepherds the “lookes“ of “Cynthia,“ i.e., Queen Elizabeth I, whom he saw at court. Her looks and favor inspire religious devotion in him, and he compares her to the sun shining from the “windowes of the east“:

like beames of the morning Sun,
Forth looking through the windowes of the East:
When first the fleecie cattell haue begun
Vpon the perled grasse to make their feast. Her thoughts are like the fume of Franckincence,
Which from a golden Censer forth doth rise:
And throwing forth sweet odours mounts fro thence
In rolling globes vp to the vauted skies. (lines 604-11)

Links: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/gutenberg/ [accessed 10/30/12] [Harry Ransom Center exhibit on Gutenberg and the early printed Bible]

The tapestry here is a generic example of one that displays a pastoral/wooded landscape. Another tapestry, with floral motifs, hangs in the Tower House Parlor.

Literary Connections

Tapestries might tell stories derived from myth, legend and literature. In a well-known episode in Book III, canto xi of The Faerie Queene, the heroine of chastity, Britomart, enters the evil House of Busyrane and travels through a room decorated with many gold- and silk-threaded tapestries depicting amorous scenes:

For round about, the walls yclothed were
With goodly arras of great maiesty,
Wouen with gold and silke so close and nere,
That the rich metall lurked priuily,
As faining to be hidd from enuious eye;
Yet here, and there, and euery where vnwares
It shewd it selfe, and shone vnwillingly;
Like to a discolourd Snake, whose hidden snares
Through the greene gras his long bright burnisht back declares.

And in those Tapets weren fashioned
Many faire pourtraicts, and many a faire feate,
And all of loue, and all of lusty-hed,
As seemed by their semblaunt did entreat;
And eke all Cupids warres they did repeate,
And cruell battailes, which he whilome fought
Gainst all the Gods, to make his empire great;
Besides the huge massacres, which he wrought
On mighty kings and kesars, into thraldome brought.

Therein was writt, how often thondring Ioue
Had felt the point of his hart percing dart,
And leauing heauens kingdome, here did roue
In straunge disguize, to slake his scalding smart;
Now like a Ram, faire Helle to peruart,
Now like a Bull, Europa to withdraw:
Ah, how the fearefull Ladies tender hart
Did liuely seeme to tremble, when she saw
The huge seas vnder her t’obay her seruaunts law. (FQ III.xi.28-30)

Busyrane’s majestic tapestries tell the same kinds of stories as the epic itself. They stress the power of love and desire (or “Cupids warres”) to conquer all.

Links:

One main industry of housewives at the time was to spin yarn out of clumps of wool. We do not know if Boyle would have done this or would have left such work to her servants. Spinning was considered “women’s work” and there was plenty of wool to spin at Kilcolman: pastoral by-products such as wool and leather were economic staples of the Munster plantation.

Another spinning product was linen. Linen was widely worn in Ireland but manufactured there only in limited quantities in the sixteenth century. The industry grew by leaps and bounds in later centuries, however, particularly in the north.

Literary Connections

While spinning by the warmth of the fire, a woman might gossip, share news or tell fantastic “old wives’ tales,“ including literary ones.

Spinning activity appears in Spenser’s poetry. In Book V of The Faerie Queene, the Amazon Radigund defeats Artegall, the hero of Justice. Radigund dresses him in an apron and “womans weeds” (V.v.20.7) and places him into a “long large chamber” (V.v.21.3) with many other male captives to spin linen (not wool) yarn:

There entred in, he round about him saw
Many braue knights, whose names right well he knew,
There bound t’obay that Amazons proud law,
Spinning and carding all in comely rew,
That his bigge hart loth’d so vncomely vew.
But they were forst through penurie and pyne,
To doe those workes, to them appointed dew: F
or nought was giuen them to sup or dyne,
But what their hands could earne by twisting linnen twyne.

Amongst them all she placed him most low,
And in his hand a distaffe to him gaue,
That he thereon should spin both flax and tow;
A sordid office for a mind so braue.
So hard it is to be a womans slaue.… (FQ V.v.22-3)

Artegall is modeled allegorically, in part, on Arthur, Lord Grey, Lord Deputy of Ireland from 1580-82 and Spenser’s patron there during those years. Spenser thought that Grey’s efforts at hard-line reform in Ireland were frustrated by backbiting enemies at court and by the English government’s vacillating and conciliatory policies towards the Irish. The Queen, from Spenser’s point of view, was prone to compromise, change policy and be too merciful towards her enemies. She was also stingy (or financially prudent to a fault). Various court factions were able to take advantage of her fickle behavior in this regard and thereby frustrate Grey’s reforms. At the time, a changeful mind and excessive mercy were seen as womanly weaknesses, shared by the queen. By contrast, Grey, a hard-liner, was not allowed to be “manly” enough for long enough to thoroughly reform the country.

Some critics see this dilemma acted out allegorically in the above passage. Artegall, a.k.a. Lord Grey, and other brave knights have been reduced to effeminate captivity (spinning linen) thanks to the queen’s interference in and obstruction of their efforts at reforms in Ireland. In this case Radigund represents a negative allegorical portrayal of the Queen, who virtually emasculates her would-be warriors.

In Spenser’s prose tract, A View of the Present State of Ireland, Irenius describes the native Irish custom of women directing “all things, both at home and in the fields,” a custom supposedly picked up from their Spanish (Gaulish) ancestry. Irenius states this immediately after noting the Irish custom of wearing shirts and smocks colored with saffron, a habit which also came from Spain: such Spanish shirts are made of linen (View 61).

Links:

There is no evidence that Spenser owned such a portrait. He did, however, paint a complicated picture of Sir Walter Raleigh in his poetry. Raleigh was a fellow planter in Munster and a powerful patron and subject of his work, notably The Faerie Queene. (See Spenser and Raleigh) It is conceivable that Spenser would have owned a likeness of Raleigh and wished to display it in a semi-public space, so as to remind himself and others of his powerful patron.