Appendix: Urania-Astraea and ‘Divine Elisa’ in The Teares of the Muses (ll. 527–88)

Summary

Spenser possibly intended Urania's flight in The Teares of the Muses (ll. 527–32) to foreshadow Polyhymnia's panegyric of Elizabeth (ll. 571–88). As Yates argues, Astraea became a symbol for the Queen, especially in her Virgilian incarnation as the inaugurator of a new golden age. The Elizabethan settlement is imaged in the idea of Astraea's descent back into the world in the person of Elizabeth. So Peele's Descensus Astraeae (1591) presents ‘this gentle nymph Astraea faire’ as a goddess inimical to ‘cruel warres’, but now miraculously ‘Shadowing the person of a peerlesse Queene’. The Elizabeth-Astraea formula became a powerful myth at the service of the Elizabethan state. But it is one which (Yates notwithstanding) Spenser seems reticent of using explicitly. Though Astraea is Artegall's tutor in Justice in The Faerie Queene V.I, in his depiction of Mercilla – the allegorical symbol of Elizabeth as a just monarch – Spenser makes no unequivocal allusion to the Astraea material.

Even though Polyhymnia's praise of Elizabeth gives an opportunity to present her as both the redescended Astraea and true patron of poetry, I believe that Spenser does not take it. If he had incorporated an unequivocal image of Elizabeth as Astraea/Urania in Polyhymnia's complaint, this figure could dispense both ideal justice and artistic patronage befitting ‘this golden age’ she presides over, and eradicate the mortal sin which Urania believes has precipitated the crisis. Polyhymnia's panegyric (ll. 571–82) does at first seem to recall Urania's vocabulary.