ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the citation of a single work, the clue to the interpretation both of William Shakespeare’s chronicle plays and of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. The problem of interpretation turns upon the meaning of the word ‘continued’ in Spenser’s letter to Raleigh. That contemporary allusion has a large place in the Faerie Queene there can be no doubt. Moreover, there is equally no doubt of the fondness of the Elizabethans for the dark conceits, the hidden wisdom, the allegorical interpretation of poetry. Not only the Faerie Queene, which is fair game, being purely allegorical, but every work, major and minor, of the Elizabethan period is passing through the same transformation. Even Shakespeare is held by a constantly increasing group of interpreters to have been no mere playwright but a propagandist more cunning than any recently employed by builders of battleships and more subtle than Machiavelli.
