ABSTRACT
Spenser takes O llyphant, the nam e of A rgante's twin brother, from the giant in Chaucer's Sir Thopas, a tale on which Spenser drew frequently and specifically in Book I for Prince Arthur's dream of his beloved elf queen, the Queene of Faerie.3 In the Letter to Ralegh, Spenser wrote that his own sovereign Queen, Elizabeth, bears two persons, "the one of a most royall Queene . . . the other of a most vertuous and beautifull Lady." "This latter part," he added, "in some places I doe express in Belphoebe," who bodies forth chastity. The former part-"the person of . . . the Queene, and her kingdome in Faery land"— he expresses in the Faerie Queene herself, the idealized figure whom Arthur loves and for whom he searches the length of Spenser's poem.4 Through both connections, on the one hand, as a parody of Belphoebe's birth, and, on the other, in the shared Chaucerian origin of Ollyphant's name and Arthur's vision of the Faerie Queene, the genealogy of Argante thus touches distantly the person of Queen Elizabeth.
