ABSTRACT
Renaissance criticism, following a tradition going back at least as far as Plato, accorded a special status to the poetry of praise. Puttenham, in his defence of the dignity of poetry, claims that, second only to poetry written in praise of the immortal gods, is that which honours "the worthy gests of noble Princes". Already in the "October" eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender they find him alluding to the passage in the third book of the Georgics where Virgil speaks of the heroic poem he intends to write in honour of Augustus. For Boccaccio there was no more need to explain the difference between allegory and typology than there was for Spenser, writing some 300 years later. In praising his sovereign, Spenser, like Virgil, used typology to suggest that her reign had been anticipated or foreshadowed by events in the ancient past. This mixing of allegory and typology is one of the characteristic features of the poem.
