ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses Edmund Spenser's representation of Duessa. Spenser aroused James I's wrath through his portrait of the trial of Duessa in The Faerie Queene, V, ix, a transparent allegory of the trial and execution of Mary Queen of Scots on 8 February 1587. In his published advice to Prince Henry, Basilikon Doron, James VI was quite happy to argue that the work of John Knox and his old tutor, George Buchanan, should be suppressed. The main reason, presumably, was that their writings threatened his path to the succession. Perhaps Spenser was a careless writer who recycled his work in a more haphazard manner than we have often assumed and James, not realizing that Spenser had no official sanction, overreacted most unfortunately. Spenser's relationship to the Arbella Stuart claimants to the throne was clearly a key feature of his mature work published in the 1590s, as Richard A. McCabe has conclusively demonstrated.
