ABSTRACT
In his study on censorship, Richard Dutton states that ‘early modern readers read plays and other texts analogically, often “applying” quite exotic fictions to contemporary persons and events’ (2000, xv). I think Dutton’s analysis of the workings of Elizabethan censorship can help us understand Spenser’s strategies of representation of his relationship to the queen as her encomiastic Protestant poet, strategies which the poet himself described as analogical when he called his epic ‘a continued Allegory, or darke conceit’ (Spenser 2013, 714).
