Spenser's Redcrosse Knight: Despair and the Elizabethan Malady

The Virgin Knight: Spenser’s Embodiment of Duality in Elizabethan England

Edmund Spenser’s poetry notoriously battles itself, contorting the surface of his poetical works into an ambiguous representation of how he perceived Elizabethan England in terms of theology, sexuality, nobility, and ideology. Written as what he termed “an historicall fiction[sic],” Spenser allowed his imagination to capture and epitomize the perspectives of Elizabethan society, but in a twiste...

Gout: the patrician malady

Aborigines, the repercussions of European contact for levels of native infection and the racial discrimination inherent in the coercive regulations adopted to isolate Aboriginal victims of the disease. More contemporary concerns over the prevalence of HIV/AIDs in the Aboriginal people provides a preamble to a general consideration of the social and governmental responses to the "modern plague" ...

An Elizabethan Enigma

The last thing William Shakespeare wants to be is predictable. Roughly halfway through his published collection of one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, he frets that we may find it dull that he “write[s] . . . all one, ever the same,” producing one fourteen-line poem after another (76.5). He has reason to worry: he rarely allows himself to deviate from a strict iambic pentameter, and holds his v...

The Elizabethan Idea of Empire

This paper argues that the English idea of empire in the reign of Elizabeth I was derivative, belated and incoherent. Its sources were classical and continental rather than indigenous. It arose more than a century after the Scottish monarchy had elaborated its own conception of empire. Moreover, it expressed a sense of backwardness, isolation and anxiety that mirrored the English failure to est...

Elizabethan Dyetary of health