ABSTRACT
Peacham chiefly admired Spenser as the creator of emblematic personifications. In Graphice (1612), he refers the gentleman who would draw Fear to the figure ‘described by our excellent Spencer’ and tells whoever would draw Dissimulation to remember Spenser’s figure ‘looking through a lattice’ (FQ III xii 12; at 15, Dissemblance’s companion, Suspect, peeps through a lattice). Anyone depicting August should draw a young man, wearing ‘at his belt (as our Spencer describeth him) a sickle,’ though it is Spenser’s July who carries the sickle (VII vii 36). (References by both Peachams are cited from Sp All pp 34, 129, 132-3, 144, 157, 167, 203.) One emblem in Minerva Britanna is based on a line in The Faerie Queene (Sehrt 1968:491), and possibly two others (Freeman 1948:81-2). Its commendatory poem signed ‘E.S.’ is so close to versions of a passage in Theatre, Bellay, and Time (8-12) that one early editor supposed it was by Spenser himself (Waldron 1792:9-12).
