Literary Connections

In Book IV of The Faerie Queene (1596), the hero Sir Scudamour encounters a blacksmith named Care. Care is described in a manner reminiscent of other descriptions of savage, unkempt, starving, criminal characters in Spenser’s poems and prose. Care could therefore be understood in the allegory as potentially Irish (compare with the description of Despair in FQ I.ix.33-36 and with the degenerated Timias who wears a “glib” in FQ IV.viii.12; IV.vii.40-43).

Care resembles

… a wretched wearish elfe,
With hollow eyes and rawbone cheeks forspent,
As if he had in prison long bene pent:
Full blacke and griesly did his face appeare,
Besmeard with smoke that nigh his eye-sight blent;
With rugged beard, and hoarie shagged heare,
The which he neuer wont to combe, or comely sheare. (FQ IV.v.34.3-9)

Care’s smithy, furthermore, is an allegory for the sighing, pensive, care-worn body. Amid the machinery and clanging hammers is a pair of bellows, which function like lungs in the allegory. They blow so loudly that none can hear:

And eke the breathfull bellowes blew amaine,
Like to the Northren winde, that none could heare:
Those Pensifenesse did moue; and Sighes the bellows weare. (FQ IV.v.38.7-9)

“Sighes,” caused by worries, make the lungs work hard, like “bellows.” Spenser imagines these “bellows” blowing out cold, “North[er]n” winds. North is the traditional direction of dark and cold, and also (from Kilcolman) the Ballyhoura mountain range and the Glen of Aherlow, which was famous for its rebels and thieves (cf. View 137). To the north of the Munster Plantation lay the region of Thomond, Irish for “north Munster” (Tuath Mumhain) and home of the great O’Brien lordship.

In A View of the Present State of Ireland, Spenser’s spokesman Irenius describes one of the O’Brien rebels of “Thomond… called Murrogh en ranagh, that is Morris of the ferne or waste wild places,” who allied himself with an “O’Neale” who came from the “North revolting,” and together they rebelled with great violence like a wind: “breaking forth like a sudden tempest [Murrogh] overran all Munster and Connaught, breaking down all the holds and fortresses of the English… he clean wiped out many great Towns” (View 15-16).

Irenius is describing events involving Murrough O’Brien (d. 1383) in the late-fourteenth century (although he mistakenly places them in the fifteenth century), during the so-called “Gaelic resurgence” when Old English settlements lost much of their colonial territory to native Irish lordships. Spenser in 1596 was likewise deeply worried about a new threat, led by Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, sweeping out of the North and joining forces with rebels in Munster, as they were to do in 1598 during the uprising that sacked Kilcolman and the plantation. Hugh O’Neill was thought to be the base-born son of a blacksmith. At Kilcolman, a northern wind blew very cold indeed and may have inspired his portrait of the blacksmith Care.

Eric Klingelhofer argues that this room, the Parlor between the Great Hall and Tower House, was built during Spenser’s time, so such a stone as the one pictured here may have been included in the building’s original construction as testament to the arrival and permanent presence of the newly married couple. Every time Spenser or Elizabeth Boyle would cross the threshold from the more private Parlor to the more public Great Hall, they could keep their mutual faith in mind.

Literary Connections

What’s in a name? Spenser was subject to three Elizabeths: his mother, his second wife, and the queen. In his sonnet sequence, Amoretti (1595), he writes two adjacent sonnets (numbers 74-75) that celebrate the name of Elizabeth. In the first, he describes his wife’s “Most happy letters fram’d by skilfull trade” (74.1), and he advertises the coincidence between her name and that of the other two Elizabeths by comparing them to the famous three graces of classical mythology: “Ye three Elizabeths for euer liue,/ that three such graces did vnto me giue” (74.13-14). These graces inspire him to write gracefully about graceful things (see also the vision of four graces given to Spenser’s alter-ego, the character Colin Clout, on Mount Acidale in FQ VI.x).

The second sonnet, #75, is one of Spenser’s best-known poems. It describes how he wrote his love’s “name vpon the strand,/ but came the waues and washed it away” (75.1-2). In order to defeat the ravages of time, he decides to “eternize” her name in his verse instead:

my verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
and in the heuens wryte your glorious name.
Where whenas death shall all the world subdew, our loue shall liue, and later life renew. (75.11-14)

Spenser’s verse places her name above his head, “in the heavens,” where their love will “renew” itself at the end of time.

Almost all surviving examples of Spenser’s handwriting are in the form of letters copied while secretary to Grey or writing on behalf of other administrators, such as John Norris, President of Munster, one of his planter neighbors nearby to the south (at Mallow Castle, County Cork). Few letters survive from Spenser’s time in Munster, however.

Spenser wrote and received both administrative and personal letters; some of the latter, exchanged with the scholar Gabriel Harvey while Spenser lived in England in the 1570s, were published in 1579. They focus on newsworthy events in England and abroad as well as current debates about poetic aesthetics.

In the study in the Tower House portion of this castle recreation is another desk. That room functions as Spenser’s private “office” for other, more creative writing.

Both desks are modeled loosely on that of St Jerome in Albrecht Dürer’s famous print (1514).

Literary Connections

Irenius in A View of the Present State of Ireland describes the Irish as always asking for news, which is carried across the country by “common carriers,” men who are akin to rogues and “loose fellows” (View 76). These supposed low-life criminals are “partakers not only of many stealths by setting forth other men’s goods to be stolen,” but they are “also privy to many traitorous practices” (76). Eudoxus answers that the Irishman’s desire for news “argueth sure in them a greate desire of innovation” (76). Eudoxus’ comment, following so closely upon Irenius’ warning, hints at his fear of dangerous political innovation, including treason, which can spread so swiftly along with the news in Ireland. Spenser is concerned about the unchecked spread of information across the country in troubled times.

The news also helped those in need. In the “Mutabilitie Cantos” portion of The Faerie Queene, people of “the lower World” are confused when the light of Cynthia, or the moon, is momentarily extinguished by the attempted overthrow of her power: her throne in the heavens has been shaken by the rebellious titaness, Mutability. “Fearing least Chaos broken had his chaine,/ And brought againe on them eternall night,” the messenger-God Mercury takes action and speeds to the “faire Palace” of the king of the Gods, Jove, to tell him what has happened. Mercury, “The Heauens Herald” then acts as go-between for Jove and Mutability (FQ VII.vi.14 -19).

Spenser himself is compared to Mercury in a commendatory sonnet written by Sir Walter Raleigh in praise of The Faerie Queene. In this poem, published alongside the epic in the 1590 edition, Raleigh compares Spenser to a “celestiall thiefe” of the glory of previous poets (Raleigh, “A Vision vpon this conceipt of the Faery Queene” 14). The “thiefe” is Mercury, who is also the god of thieves; in Greek myth, Mercury steals the cattle of Apollo. Mercury’s dual role as thief and messenger may help explain the connection in Irenius’s mind (above) between thieving activity in the countryside and running news. Indeed, Spenser was himself accused in a letter (October 12, 1589) to Queen Elizabeth by his antagonistic neighbor, Lord Roche, of stealing his neighbor’s cattle and beating Roche’s men.

Spenser would have retaliated to Lord Roche's abuses in his own letters. As Andrew Zurcher and Christopher Burlinson suggest in their edition of letters associated with Spenser (pp. lxii-lxiv), the poet would have had an anxious relationship with letter-writing, given the bloody politics that inspired some of them. A fear of victimization-by-correspondence can be found in the epistolary vocabulary found in the Despaire episode in Book I of The Faerie Queene. When Red Crosse Knight contemplates suicide with a knife in his hand, ...his hand did quake, And tremble like a leafe of Aspin greene, And troubled bloud through his pale face was seene To come, and goe with tydings from the hart, As it a running messenger had beene. (FQ I.ix.51) In a second commendatory sonnet to The Faerie Queene, Raleigh declares that “Of me no lines are lou’d, nor letters are of price,/ Of all which speak our English tongue, but those of thy deuice” (Raleigh, “Another of the same” 13-4). The immediate reference here is to “lines” and “letters” of verse, i.e., to the poems written by Spenser that Raleigh admires. The “deuice” has to do with Spenser’s powers of invention while writing them (his devising of them). A secondary meaning occurs, however, in that a device, or personal emblem, was used to mark wax seals on letters as a further method of identifying them (no such “device” of Spenser’s exists today, although he would have been entitled to one, according to his rank as a landed “gentleman” at Kilcolman). Raleigh may therefore be hinting at the method by which he received poetry from Spenser, i.e., in letters of Spenser’s devising and with Spenser’s device on them. Simultaneously, such letters in the “English tongue” coming out of Ireland, especially, would attest to their shared nationality.

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Spenser lived at Kilcolman under constant threat. Full-scale rebellion against him and the New English was always a possibility, as were sporadic raids by thieving, ambitious and/or disgruntled neighbors who would have borne a grudge or simply wanted his property. Some would have resented the creation of the plantation by the (mostly Protestant) New English settlers. Others, like his powerful Old English neighbor Lord Roche, engaged Spenser in regular lawsuits over property, and this led to violence on both sides. Spenser was eventually burned out when the Nine Years’ War, led by Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, began in Ulster and spread south, reaching the plantation in August, 1599. Appropriately, the name of Spenser’s estate was “Hap-Hazard.”

Guns were an early modern innovation in Europe. They are recorded as being in use in Ireland as early as the Battle of Knockdoe in 1504. Even the most mighty and feared Irish lords put gun-loops outside their front doors, as did the 10th earl of Ormond at his Tudor mansion at Carrick-on-Suir. The plantation home of Mallow Castle, occupied by the Norris family of soldiers and administrators, had gun-loops, as did Kanturk Castle, built in the early seventeenth century by the native Irish MacCarthys. Spenser’s fellow planter William Herbert lists cannon and hand-guns among his household inventory at Castleisland, Co. Kerry. Gun-loops are also found at Enniscorthy Castle, Co. Wicklow. Spenser briefly owned property in Enniscorthy in the early 1580s, before he sold it on to Sir Henry Wallop. Spenser’s friend and co-author Lodowick Bryskett lived and wrote in the town of Enniscorthy.

Literary Connections

Spenser makes extensive use of guns in his poetry. It has been argued that the highly destructive flail of Talus, Artegall’s iron-man enforcer in Book V of The Faerie Queene, could allegorize raking gunfire. Elsewhere in the epic, the character Timias (an allegorical stand-in for Sir Walter Raleigh) blasts open the castle of the giant Orgoglio with his “horne,” and Orgoglio’s forceful response is compared to cannon-fire (FQ I.viii.3-9). Book II contains “hideous Ordinaunce” (or cannon) used by villains who besiege a castle, the House of Temperance (II.xi.14.3). These same villains are earlier compared to “a swarme of Gnats at euentide” that rise “Out of the fennes of Allan” (II.ix.16.1-2), i.e., the Bog of Allen in the Irish midlands.

Eric Klingelhofer’s excavations of Kilcolman in the mid-1990s uncovered a tuning peg for a lute or similar stringed instrument. The find was located in a stratification level that could be contemporary with Spenser’s occupation of the site. Although its dating is uncertain, it may have been in use in Spenser’s household there in the 1590s.

Featured here is “Mr. Dowland’s Midnight” by the Elizabethan lutenist John Dowland (played by Christopher Morrongiello; reproduced with permissions).

Literary Connections

A poem attributed to Spenser and published posthumously by James Ware in 1633, “Verses upon the said Earles Lute,” is reported to have been carved upon the lute of Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork. Boyle was a cousin of Spenser’s second wife, Elizabeth Boyle, who lived with Spenser at Kilcolman. Richard Boyle was involved in the English administration in Munster from the 1580s on, and he eventually purchased (in 1602) the Munster holdings of Sir Walter Raleigh, which helped him (Boyle) to become fabulously wealthy and to buy his earldom from the British monarch, James I.

Spenser’s poem reads as follows:

Whilst vitall sapp did make me spring,
And leafe and bough did flourish brave,0.231.2013
I then was dumbe and could not sing,
Ne had the voice which now I have:
But when the axe my life did end,
The Muses nine this voice did send. (“Verses upon the said Earles Lute”)

What does this tell us about Spenser’s life as a poet and a planter? It indicates that the felling of trees is a necessary sacrifice that leads to the making of instruments, such as the lute, which create (or accompany) the “voice” of the “Muses nine.” The nine Muses in classical tradition are the goddesses who inspire learning and the arts, including poetry and history. Spenser refers to the Muses often in his poetry and wrote a set of poems entitled Tears of the Muses, published in his Complaints volume (1591). But the poem does more than praise instruments; it identifies industrial activity on the land as the source of art. Boyle’s lands were famous for their timber, and so Spenser connects tree-cutting, which made things like lutes, with the inspiration of poets who earned their livelihood from the land (and who were, presumably, patronized by wealthy men such as Boyle).

The most famous of mythological poets was Orpheus, whose song in nature calmed the beasts and made the trees bend to hear him. Spenser’s famous refrain to his wedding poem, “Epithalamion,” celebrates how the “woods” around him in Munster “eccho” and “ring” to his song. In such a moment the bridegroom-poet, Spenser, is like Orpheus, who is able to charm the landscape and make it harmonize with, or echo, his song. By analogy, whoever played the earl of Cork’s lute would be in the position of Orpheus, making the woods (including the instrument which is made out of wood) echo and harmonize with poetic song. Orpheus was himself torn apart by savage forces (by orgiastic maenads, or female celebrants of Bacchus) and his head and harp floated down a river. But the ideal concept of the power of his song lives on [see the reference to Orpheus’ harp on a river in Spenser’s Ruines of Time 604-9, published in Complaints (1591), wherein the Orphic harp is that of Sir Philip Sidney. See also Rivers].

Not all music was pleasant to Spenser’s ears. Music could also be a luxurious distraction from more virtuous deeds. For example, in The Faerie Queene, in the vainglorious House of Pride, a place ruled by the queen Lucifera, we witness a royal feast “in commune hall.” Here we find

… many Minstrales maken melody,
To driue away the dull melancholy,
And many Bardes, that to the trembling chord
Can tune their timely voices cunningly,
And many Chroniclers, that can record
Old loues, and warres for Ladies doen by many a Lord. (FQ I.v.3.4-9)

One can imagine Spenser spending many a long day and evening at Kilcolman playing and listening to songs accompanied by lute, and/or listening to Irish “bards” (as Spenser’s spokesman, Irenius, says he has done in the View, pp. 72-5), and/or writing his own chronicle of “Fierce warres and faithfull loues,” as he calls his historical epic, The Faerie Queene (FQ I.Proem.i.9). Such art was only worthwhile, however, if it led to virtuous action, including work on the land.

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Spenser’s New English contemporary on the Munster plantation, Sir William Herbert, lists a ’unicorn horn’ in the inventory of his household goods at Castleisland, Co. Kerry, a residence formerly owned by the earl of Desmond.

Literary Connections

Unicorns are a quintessential fantasy-animal of the middle ages, both then and now, and are often associated with virgins and/or princesses in peaceful garden settings, as in the famous tapestries now in the Cloisters museum in New York. Surprisingly, however, the beast appears in the Bible as a violent animal (Job 39.12-15), beaten only by its enemy, the lion. Spenser uses this idea in an epic simile describing the battle of Guyon, the hero of Temperance, with the wrathful villain Pyrochles, in Book II of The Faerie Queene. Guyon is compared to a treed lion, and Pyrochles to a unicorn that charges the tree and sticks its horn into it, thus trapping itself and so becoming a “feast” for the lion:

Like as a Lyon, whose imperiall powre
A prowd rebellious Vnicorne defyes,
T’auoide the rash assault and wrathfull stowre
Of his fiers foe, him [i.e., the Lion] to a tree applyes,
And when him ronning in full course he spyes,
He slips aside; the whiles that furious beast
His precious horne, sought of his enimyes
Strikes in the stocke, ne thence can be releast,
But to the mighty victor yields a bounteous feast. (FQ II.v.10)

Guyon wins the day, and the moral is that wrathful behavior will undo itself, no matter how great its powers. The passage also has a political dimension in that Guyon is associated with the “Lyon,” a symbol of both the English monarchy and (in this stanza) “imperiall power.” Against it, the unicorn becomes “prowd rebellious.” This description suits any Irish rebel —or any rebel at all— from Spenser’s point of view. As Clarence Steinberg has written, both Pyrochles and his equally angry brother Cymochles have Irish characteristics. They could allegorize Irish rebels in particular; they certainly capture the essence of the “prowd” wrath of Spenser’s enemies.

Spenser mentions the narwhal in The Faerie Queene but calls it a “Monoceros.” It appears in a list of dreadful sea-monsters that were transformed from men into fish-shapes by the evil witch, Acrasia:

Most vgly shapes, and horrible aspects,…
Bright Scolopendraes, arm’d with siluer scales,
Mighty Monoceros, with immeasured tayles. (FQ II.xii.23.1, 8-9)

There is no evidence that Spenser owned such a portrait. If he did own one like it, he may have displayed it in a semi-public place, as a demonstration of his property, taste and political connections. In the early modern period, public display of paintings was unusual, and so the painting hangs here, in the Ground Floor Parlor, rather than in the more public Great Hall.

Picture galleries existed in early modern Ireland, for example at Ormond Castle, Carrick-on-Suir, whose attached Elizabethan mansion was built in the 1560s by Thomas Butler, tenth earl of Ormond and cousin of Queen Elizabeth I. Ormond’s castle at Kilkenny also held paintings in the early modern period. Paintings were typically hung alongside tapestries (such as those in the house of Busyrane and viewed by the heroine Britomart in The Faerie Queene III.xi). For this reason a tapestry also hangs in this room (Ground Floor Parlor: Tapestry). It is questionable whether or not a mid-level functionary and new landowner such as Spenser could afford such luxury items, but it is possible.

A painting of Elizabeth, the “Virgin Queen,” would call attention to Spenser’s complex relationship with his monarch. She was his patron and employer. In 1590, after Spenser visited the court and presented his poetry there, the queen granted him a sizeable pension of 50 pounds per annum. In Ireland, Spenser served as administrator of his estate on behalf of the English crown, and therefore any authority he had ultimately emanated from the queen in London. Enter the parlor and you not only met Spenser’s family, but a likeness of her majesty as well.

Literary Connections

Spenser paints a complicated picture of Queen Elizabeth in his poetry. The queen was a powerful patron and subject of his work. She is allegorized as “Gloriana” or the inspirational Fairy Queen of The Faerie Queene (Great Hall: Mantelpiece on this website), and she is praised elsewhere in fulsome terms in his poetry (in “Colin Clouts Come Home Againe”, for example). In Book I of The Faerie Queene, the main hero of the epic, Prince Arthur, sees Gloriana in a dream vision and is inspired towards virtuous action on her behalf:

Whiles euery sence the humour sweet embayd,
And slombring soft my hart did steale away
Me seemed, by my side a royall Mayd
Her daintie limbes full softly down did lay:
So fayre a creature yet saw neuer sunny day.

Mostly goodly glee and louely blandishment
She to me made, and badd me loue her deare;
For dearely sure her loue was to me bent,
As when iust time expired should appeare.
But whether dreames delude, or true it were,
Was neuer hart so rauisht with delight,
Ne liuing man like wordes did euer heare,
As she to me deliuered all that night;
And at her parting said, She Queene of Faries hight.

...From that day forth I lou’d that face diuyne;
From that day forth I cast in carefull mynd,
To seeke her out with labor, and long tyne,… (FQ I.ix.13-15)

Simultaneously, Spenser’s satiric nature led him to criticize the queen and her court. Elizabeth appears to be satirized for her pride and worldly decadence in the figure of “Lucifera,” who rules over the House of Pride earlier in Book I:

High aboue all a cloth of State was spred,
And a rich throne, as bright as sunny day,
On which there sate most braue embellished
With royall robes and gorgeous array,
A mayden Queene, that shone as Titans ray,
In glistring gold, and perelesse pretious stone;
Yet her bright blazing beautie did assay
To dim the brightnesse of her glorious throne,
As enuying her selfe, that too exceeding shone. (FQ I.iv.8)

This portrait hanging in the ground-floor Parlor captures some of that same ambiguity: it shows the richly adorned Queen Elizabeth in all her splendid majesty but, uncharacteristically for such a portrait in this period, it does not hide her age. The mortal corruption of her flesh and her vanity is evident: wrinkles, veins, jewels and lace all command our attention. Like Oliver Cromwell in a later age, she has been painted “warts and all,” but with a difference.

Links:
http://www.npg.org.uk/research/programmes/making-art-in-tudor-britain/tudor-and-jacobean-painting-production-influences-and-patronage-december-2010/extended-abstracts-and-videos/the-manteo-portrait-of-queen-elizabeth-i.php [Abstract of paper by Sara N. James and Larry E. Tise, “Case Study: A portrait of Elizabeth I at Manteo.” Presented at the conference, Tudor and Jacobean Painting: Production, Influences and Patronage. National Portrait Gallery, London, December 2, 2010.]

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.

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).

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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.

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