Going Rogue: Spenser and the Vagrants

Author(s): Evan Gurney

Source: Studies in Philology , Summer, 2016, Vol. 113, No. 3 (Summer, 2016), pp. 546-576
Published by: University of North Carolina Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/43921898

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 Going Rogue: Spenser and
the Vagrants

by Evan Gurney

Edmund Spenser's poetry is teeming with rogues -false beggars, vagabonds , and other
figures of similar disrepute- but his work is rarely discussed in the context of Tudor
vagrancy law or rogue literature. This article situates Spenser's persistent interest in
rogues throughout his career among contemporary debates over vagrancy, examining
its role and function in his allegorical poetics. Spenser is attracted to these figures, I
argue, precisely on account of the characteristics that earned them the opprobrium of so
many Elizabethans : their associations with idleness and disguise ; as well as their skill-
ful capacity for complicating moments or sites of interpretive difficulty by way of rheto-
ric or simulation. Whereas vagrants frustrated Tudor authorities who desired clear and
stable markers distinguishing the deserving poor from sturdy beggars, the rogue offered
Spenser a compelling figure of hermeneutic instability, an allegorical personage dra-
matizing the perils of reading. In fact, vagrants often appear in Spenser's work in the
context of rhetoric or poetry, which lends his own verse a sense of complicity with these
popular criminals, as if Spenser acknowledges that the poet is a close cousin of (and per-
haps fellow cozener with) the rogue.

ofDURING
DURING of Spenser beast fable: draws
beast fable: Spenser
an early
thethetwo draws
a contemporary
antiheroes aantiheroes
twoofepisode
the contemporary
poem, inthe
Mother
Foxsocial
andof the social
the Hubberd' scene
s scene poem, under theunder the andcover
Tale, Fox the Edmund cover the
Ape, dissatisfied with their professional station and feeling an itch to
travel, prepare to wander abroad. Their ensuing criminal career will in-
volve legal, religious, and political fraud of various types, a journey of
theft and disguise that culminates in the overthrow of the entire state.
But here they are just beginning to ponder the implications of stepping
onto the first rung of the criminal ladder as vagrants, and the Fox won-
ders what specific type of wandering beggar will best serve:

546

© 2016 Studies in Philology, Incorporated

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 Evan Gurney 547
Certes (said he) I meane me to disguize
In some straunge habit after vncouth w
Or like a Pilgrime, or a Lymiter,
Or like a Gipsen, or a Iuggeler,
And so to wander to the worlds ende.1
(83-87)
His short catalogue captures the patchwork spirit of the poem, which
marries Chaucerian satire with dangerously trenchant commentary on
Elizabethan social and political life. The first two professions are con-
sciously archaic in post-Reformation England- pilgrimages and men-
dicant friars had largely gone out, of course, though it was conventional
in Protestant propaganda to associate vagrancy with Roman Catholi-
cism2- but Spenser brings the list up to date with his second pair of
references. Linked by more than alliteration, the terms "Gipsen" (or
counterfeit Egyptian) and "Iuggler" were recent Tudor additions to the
official criminal lexicon. Juggling had long been associated with delin-
quent behavior on account of its use of legerdemain, but it does not
make its way into the statutory books until the Act of 1572, the same
year the term "rogue" gains legal purchase, when "all Juglers Pedlars
Tynkers and Petye Chapmen, [who] shalle wander abroade, and have
not License of two Justices of the Peace" are classified as vagrants.3 Gyp-
sies, who likely arrived in England sometime in the early sixteenth cen-
tury, had become a criminal category several decades earlier, in the
1530s, and the Elizabethan statute of 1563, one of the crueler acts of
legislation on historical record, equates a gypsy identity with criminal
status: merely being a gypsy, or dressing like one, or even associating
with gypsies was considered a felony offense.4 More generally, how-
ever, Spenser uses both terms to stand in here as bywords for a broad
class of Tudor criminals who supposedly preyed on- or, to use another
newly coined word that Spenser deploys in the poem, 'cozened'- an
1 Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William Oram (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1989). References throughout this essay to Spenser's Complaints
and Shepheardes Calender are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically. References
to The Faerie Queene and Spenser's letter to Ralegh are from The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C.
Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki (New York: Longman, 2001); and
references to A View of the Present State of Ireland are from A View of the State of Ireland, ed.
Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997).
2 See Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), esp. 80-108.
3 14 Eliz, c. 5, The Statutes of the Realm (London, 1819), 4:591.
4 Ibid., 448" 49*

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548 Spenser and the Vagrants
ignorant populace by fraud and disguise. It is worth mentioning
the second half of the poem's title, Prosopopoia, means counterfe
personation.
Spenser's gesture toward recent statutory proscriptions against
sies and jugglers is no coincidence but instead a specific instance
larger pattern in which, as Andrew Zürcher has observed, Mother
berds Tale adopts "the language of government and social control.
Fox and Ape are clearly aware of recent developments in vagrancy
for example, knowing better than "wildly to wander in the worlds
Without passport or good warrantye, / For feare least we like r
should be reputed / And for eare marked beasts abroad be br
(185-88). These lines demonstrate a keen familiarity with contemp
legislation: scholars, theatrical players, and other itinerant trade
needed a passport to travel long distances without suspicion, and
gars needed a license to beg locally or they would be apprehende
authorities and marked as vagrants, literally earmarked by being,
1572 statute dictates, "whipped and burnt through the gristle of the r
eare with a hot Yron." Nor are these fears unwarranted. At the p
conclusion, when the Fox and Ape are discovered and apprehended
Fox is "uncased," that is, unclothed and likely flayed or whipped
the Ape's ears are cut off. These are not the standard punishments
out for theft or murder or treason, all of which they have comm
but rather for vagrancy. There is a sense, then, that every subseq
crime is merely an extension of this first decision to circumvent
bethan statutes against vagabonds, when the Fox and Ape forge
gar's licenses and fashion themselves as wounded soldiers late from
wars. Here too the pair demonstrate a savvy appreciation for conte
rary policies related to vagrancy, since wounded veterans, "that n
thought a civile begging sect" (198), were afforded more mobilit
legal sanction to beg for alms, although counterfeit soldiers receiv
creased scrutiny from the Privy Council by the late 1580s.6 In the
capacity as disguised members of the deserving poor, they immed
trick a well-intentioned farmer, the "simple husbandman," and
his charity by killing his entire flock of sheep. A scene of menac
confusion, the episode sets the tone for everything that follows.

5 Zürcher, Spenser's Legal Language : Law and Poetry in Early Modern England
bridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), 76.
6 See Marjorie Mcintosh, Poor Relief in England, 1350-1600 (Cambridge: Cambr
University Press, 2012), 156 -58 and 175-77. See also Burton Milligan, "The Coun
Soldier in Mother Hubberd's Tale," Notes and Queries 176.24 (1939): 421-22.

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 Evan Gurney 549
In a brilliant article that mines the signifi
to passports in Mother Hubberds Tale , Ann
historical context of vagrancy in relation
how their forged passports provide a stru
tween the first two satirical episodes. She
as an alert and often misleading fabulist, m
poetic behavior after the Fox.7 Aside from
of the critical attention that links the Fox a
limited in scope, briefly referencing the co
fore moving on to other concerns, or limite
orthodoxies of an earlier era, which took fo
racy of rogue pamphlets.8 Aside from Pat
tent Kent van den Berg and Richard Danson
scholarship has closely examined the relati
grancy in Mother Hubberds Tale to Spenser's a
In fact, Spenser is rarely if ever mentione
rogue literature and vagrancy law.10 Litera

7 Patterson, "Still Reading Spenser after All These

many ways Patterson's article is the start to this one; s
worth exploring in more detail. Patterson also studies t
Ape in her study of the Aesopian tradition, Fables of P
History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991),
8 As an example of this descriptive tendency, see Th
Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990
and Ape "set out as vagrants to improve their fortune
toward vagrancy among an earlier generation of Sp
claim in "The Counterfeit Soldier in Mother Hubberd's Tale": "There seems no reason to
doubt Spenser's very accurate knowledge of the rogue conditions described by such real-
istic observers as Awdeley and Harman" (422).
9 Van den Berg studies Spenser's ambivalent appropriation of prosopopoia as both a
vehicle for the Fox's "counterfeit reality" as well as a crucial poetic resource in "'The
Counterfeit in Personation': Spenser's Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberds Tale," in The Au-
thor in His Work, ed. Louis Martz and Aubrey Williams (New Haven, CT: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1978), 85-102; Brown, who likens the pair of rogues to Robert Greene's coney-
catchers, develops Patterson's suggestion by considering the Fox and Ape as models for
a kind of amoral poetics, in The New Poet: Novelty and Tradition in Spenser's Complaints
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 169-212. See also Oram, ed., Shorter Poems,
327-33-
10 Consider Brooke Stafford's otherwise fine essay, which links the process of cultural
translation present in the canting dictionaries of Thomas Harman and Thomas Dekker
to the linguistic imperialism encouraged by Spenser in A View: "Englishing the Rogue,
'Translating' the Irish: Fantasies of Incorporation and Early Modern English National
Identity," in Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, ed. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 312-36. Although the essay is notable
for including Spenser in a discussion of contemporary rogue literature, Stafford never
mentions or examines the fact that Spenser himself engages the issue of Irish rogues in the

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550 Spenser and the Vagrants
vagrancy and rogues has largely focused on Elizabethan and
bean prose and drama, for good reason, given the inclusion of th
cal players in the early vagrancy statutes, the histrionic skill ass
with roguery and beggary, and the emergence of rogue pamphl
a popular genre in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth cent
Consequently, however, we have a great deal more to say about
and William Shakespeare or Ben Jonson or Thomas Nashe, let
Robert Greene or Thomas Dekker, than we do about Spenser or
Sidney or, to a lesser extent, John Donne. But as a civil official,
ous and committed humanist, an informed religious and social c
and a shrewd participant in the emerging literary marketplace, Sp
engages most of the professional and intellectual contexts in whi
grancy was passionately disputed or dramatized.
Spenser returns to the figure of the vagrant throughout his ca
and in fascinating ways. In the "May" eclogue of The Shepheard
ender, for example, Piers twice refers to irresponsible shepherd
priests) as "faytours," an archaic epithet likely borrowed from W
Langland that the poem's anonymous commentator E. K. gl
as "vagabond" and a temi specifically associated with vagrant
feigned illness while begging -often the "falling sickness" or ep
(These earned the term "counterfeit cranks" in Thomas Harman
onomy.) Later Spenser recycles the term throughout The Faerie Q
to depict false identities of various kinds, particularly when desc
the arch-hypocrite Archimago. Diggon Davie, in "September," w
about the roguish fraud and disguise of wolves whose "craft is in
countenaunce" (168). In book 5 of The Faerie Queene, Malengin, in
tion to being associated with juggling and legerdemain, is depict
an angler or hooker, a specific type of rogue with a long hook des
in pamphlet literature.11 Spenser's portrayal of the brigands in bo
a "lawless people" (6.10.39) likely refers to the native Irish, but th
havior and government, their organized disorder, would have so
familiar to readers of rogue pamphlets, as would have the sexua
miscuity of the Satyrs in book 3, who treat Hellenore, much like
treat their doxies in Harman, as a "commune good" (3.10.36). In
each of these instances, vagrancy is at once accidental, a vehicle t
other thematic issue of relevance for Spenser, whether he is dram

treatise, when Irenius outlines a proposal that would forcibly remove vagrants fr
Irish countryside.
11 See Milligan, "Spenser's Malengin and the Rogue-Book Hooker/' Philological
terly 19 (1940): 147-48.

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 Evan Gurney 551
ing the apparent perils of Roman Catholicism
he considers characteristic of the native Iri
essential, insofar as rogues and vagrants
bodied texts that are obscure and misinter
in the figure is a continuation of a lifelong
lems of reading and hermeneutics.
This article will situate Spenser's use of th
in Mother Hubberds Tale and throughout hi
rary debates over vagrancy, examining its r
gorical poetics and exploring potential reas
such a persistent interest throughout his c
otherwise, Elizabethan or not, passive recip
agents negotiating the conditions of povert
markers that reveal the habits of mind and behavior attendant to the
cultures in which they wander or reside. In this case, a close study of the
context and manner in which Spenser deploys the figure of the vagrant
reveals a sensitive if ambivalent posture, one that registers several typi-
cal social and literary anxieties related to roguery (and dismisses others)
but remains equally compelled by its fictive potential. This essay argues
that Spenser is attracted to vagrants precisely on account of the charac-
teristics that made them disreputable among so many contemporary
Elizabethans: their associations with idleness and disguise, as well as
their skillful capacity for complicating moments or sites of interpre-
tive difficulty by way of rhetoric or simulation. Moreover, the vagrant,
as a figure in whom bodies and clothes and papers converge in a tex-
tual economy fraught with dubious meanings, offers Spenser a useful
metaphor that can stand in for similar interpretive ruptures in his own
poetic work. Indeed, although he takes care to distinguish his civiliz-
ing project from roguish schemes, even if we need to take his word
for it, Spenser seems to acknowledge that his literary product relies on
what might be called a vagrant poetics, which likewise wanders in the
world's eye, which purposely obscures its designs in "a darke conceit"
(737), which always dramatizes the perils of interpretation and error,
which often begs for a charitable reading, and which is sometimes re-
buffed by "Stoické censours" (4.proem.3).

* * *

If Mother Hubberds Tale was indeed compose

[Spenser's] youth" (334) and later revised for

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552 Spenser and the Vagrants
of his Complaints in 1591, it is hardly surprising to find referen
vagrants and rogues. The poem's likely period of initial composit
the 1570s, witnessed an intense nationwide discussion of potenti
forms to mitigate poverty, and a choir of indignant voices railed a
vagrancy and roguery in particular. Suddenly these otherwise ma
figures were at the center of intellectual conversation. In addition
statutory poor laws of 1572 and 1576, as well as local municipal
cies attempting to categorize and relieve the poor, vagrants appe
in religious polemic, homilies, plays, and chronicles. They emerg
the 1560s as antiheroes in a new genre of popular pamphlet, rogu
erature such as John Awdeley's Fraternity of Vagabonds (ca. 156
Thomas Harman's Caueat or warening, for common cursetors (1566), w
envisioned an organized criminal network of vagrants who spoke
own language or cant. Comic caricatures of vagabonds were foun
jest books, which were especially popular among academic cir
we know, for example, that during this decade Spenser loaned G
Harvey his own copies of Howleglas and Scoggins J estes, as well a
cent translation of the picaresque work by Lazarillo de Tormes.12
sermons exhorted almsgivers to perform works of charity, and t
some clerics reminded their audience to "be mercifull to the poore
ferentlye, without respect of persons . . . Though some do make an
pation of it," others urged givers to beware of vagrants or "bold b
that in Stangate hole take mens horses by the heads," an admon
that would become more pronounced among clergy later in the
tury.13 Religious reformers employed the vagrant as figurative ev
of disorder in the church, comparing nonresident clergy who ow
multiple benefices to vagrants, presumably because they, like ro
and vagabonds, were not attached to a specific parish church. Mor
social critics, and humanists treated the sturdy beggar as sympto
social and political disorder, excoriating the good intentions of m
and women who encourage these "caterpillars in the commonwea
who "doo but licke the sweat from the true laborers browes," as W
Harrison puts it in 1577 (note, for future reference, that Stephen
son recycles this phrase two years later to describe poets in The S

12 Virginia Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia , and Library (Oxford: Clar
Press, 1979), 49.
Henry Bedle, A Sermon Exhorting to Pity the Poor (London, 1573), Ciiiiv. The se
reference to vagrants, a quotation from Thomas Drant's A fruitfull and necessary se
specially concernyng almes geuing ([London, 1572], Aviii), is perhaps all the more rem
able on account of Drant's otherwise strict adherence to indiscriminate almsgiving

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 Evan Gurney 553
of Abuse, linking these two disreputable pr
continued to examine the problem of rogu
emphasis, throughout the rest of the centur
in Mother Hubberds Tale- indeed, its essenti
cal narrative- would have remained curren
of coneycatching pamphlets that shortly fo
fashionable among the literate public in 159
Although there is considerable overlap, tw
in this larger cultural fixation on vagrancy,
ministrative policies related to the poor and
a venerable (if jocular) literary tradition of
wake of the English Reformation's dissoluti
Roman Catholic institutions, Tudor governm
tional levels, replaced traditional forms of
oping alternative systems of discriminate po
clumsy to begin with, and the transition w
population increase and economic stagnatio
but devastating plagues and harvest failu
land, or so it appeared, overwhelming local
suspicions that the able-bodied poor were
godly poor of that which is due unto them
of well disposed people."16 By the early 157
that poor relief required additional reform
statutes in 1572 and 1576 was aimed at red
in fraudulent appropriations of charitable a
debate the actual lived conditions of vagran
but it is clear that the sixteenth-century no
or English rogue- as opposed to, say, the m
ant poor- was equally shaped by literary so
torum (ca. 1509), Alexander Barclay's Ship
on Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff ( 1494), Simo

14 Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges

versity Press, 1968), 183.
15 For two relatively recent and entirely excellent
early modern poor relief and social control, see Mcint
1600 ; and Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politi
c. 1550-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). A
grancy Problem in England, 1560-1640 (London: Meth
and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Long
the historiography of early modern poverty and vagran
16 Harrison, The Description of England, 183.

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554 Spenser and the Vagrants
Beggars (1529), Robert Copland's High Way to the Spital-house (ca.
or Gilbert Walker's Manifest Detection ofDiceplay (1552).17 There is
ously traffic of some kind between the literary and historical phenom
related to vagrancy- from affecting the specific language of legis
to influencing more general attitudes toward vagrancy among the
tural elite- but scholars need to be careful in distinguishing th e
of the vagrant from the actual vagrants we find in churchwarden
counts and county records.18 Both sixteenth-century discourses o
grancy, however, underscore the complicated nature of what migh
be termed the misinterpretable hermeneutics of poverty.
Although English governments had legislated against vagrancy s
at least 1348 in an effort to limit the mobility of the poor, statut
came more comprehensive and were more often enforced in the
sixteenth century, part of a larger effort to promote greater effi
and regularity in the distribution of charitable alms. Much of the
Tudor machinery of material charity instituted widespread catego
tion of the poor, which required a thorough interrogation by loc
thorities to ensure that each recipient of aid actually belonged a
the deserving poor. The vagrant, as the alternative identity imp
on those denied the official status of pauper, thus became inextri
linked to poor relief. Moreover, by virtue of the period's parado
logic of charity, idealized as a marriage of righteous discipline and
ciful aid, authorities insisted "that increased penalties for vagab
were an act of charity, a necessary concomitant to increased poor relie
which the title of the 1572 legislation announces by way of conjun
Acte for the Punishment of Vagabonds and for the Relief of the Poor and
tent }9 Any beggar who was legitimately unable to work was prov
relief, while anyone healthy enough to perform labor- often disre
ing whether work was actually available- was classified as a va
and punished. And the punitive measures intended to discourage
punish vagrancy were severe, a kind of Tudor three-strikes law g

17 See Woodbridge ( Vagrancy ) for what is perhaps the most thorough and convin
literary genealogy of rogue literature.
18 For evidence that rogue literature indeed influenced statutory languag
Kathleen Pories, " The Intersection of Poor Laws and Literature in the Sixteenth C
Fictional and Factual Categories/' in Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Appr
to Early Modern Narrative Prose, ed. Constance Caroline Relihan (Kent, OH: Kent Sta
versity Press, 1996), 17-40.
19 C. S. L. Davies, "Slavery and Protector Somerset: The Vagrancy Act of 1547
nomic History Review, 2nd ser., 19 (1966): 540.

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 Evan Gurney 555
ating from stocks and whipping to brandin
nating in hanging for habitual offenders.
Meanwhile, anyone giving alms or shelter
point worth emphasizing: in the legal econo
Spenser's well-intentioned farmer reaps wha
to criminals. (He is "a good yeoman" but al
suggesting that his fault is a lack of acuity
dicted for their "vaine pitie," as Thomas E
vagrants "to thefte and robry, and some t
quietation of good men."20 There is eviden
ties rarely invoked this specific prong of va
tions of penalizing charity loom large. Finin
as one legislative response to the anxious f
bethans with vagrants who leveraged the pi
beg and steal for a living, burdening giver
tic responsibility. The earlier 1547 vagrancy
"foolish mercy and pity" of people who en
nals, suggesting that donors are complicit in
the penalties for interpretive error were so
tent admission among Elizabethans, one imp
that correctly reading the poor was an inc
temporaries seemed to recognize that the e
fragile dynamic prone to misapplication or
people who mistakenly gave money or shel
ing the problem that way- authorities only
tive burden for donors. For anybody who fe
charity to strangers, the stakes had been raise
ant poor into a site of hermeneutic tension
ent to Spenser and others.
This insistence on establishing an official h
perhaps the most characteristic feature of
ments in poor relief. The impoverished an
and interrogated, provided begging licen
stances dictated, their conditions registered
Collectors of the Poor, who would "without
and distribute the charitable monies receiv
giving "a just account thereof in writing" t

20 Elyot, The Boke named the Governour (London, 1531),

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556 Spenser and the Vagrants
in this idealized depiction of poor relief policy (largely paraphra
from Archbishop Grindal's injunctions of 1571), how much readin
interpretation is required; in fact, much of what we know about this
cess stems from the written records of Collectors or churchwardens.21
On a more conceptual level, as part of their efforts to control the grow-
ing threat of vagrancy, authorities attempted to stabilize the population
by instituting a variety of "semiotic schemes," to borrow William C.
Carroll's term, such as badging or licensing -to positively distinguish
the worthy beggars- and branding, earmarking, or imprisoning of-
fenders, thus marking fraudulent beggars permanently, attempting to
regain "control of the signifying systems"; for beggars who faked an ill-
ness or disability, meanwhile, "the state could make real what had only
been feigned, writing the true text of pain over the counterfeit one."22 In
addition to this gradation of punishments was the standard procedure
of sending each vagrant back to his or her resident parish, where the
individual's identity and circumstances were presumably on record, al-
though local authorities would typically escort offenders only to their
own county's boundaries, whereupon the vagrants would again dis-
appear from official view. In the legal landscape of charitable giving,
vagrants would suddenly appear in obscurity, force a fretful reading of
identity and circumstance, and then disappear once more, with or with-
out additional legal marking to aid future officers.
These policies suggest that the real trouble posed by vagrants was,
perhaps, their inscrutability, to Elizabethans in general and to official-
dom in particular, which undermined the fixed categories on which
these nascent systems of aid (or social control, depending on one's per-
spective) relied. Indeed, the statute of 1598 essentially banned begging
altogether, trying to remedy what was clearly an intractable problem,
although this measure, according to one anonymous commentator,
merely displaced from laypeople to officials an impossible task: "To in-
quire after poore is the next way to procure poore: for . . . many will
dissemble their estates to have releefe, if you doe but examine their
estates."23 As Patricia Fumerton notes, citing a well-known letter from
Somerset magistrate Edward Hext to Lord Burghley, "What is unnerv-
ing ... for contemporaries as well as cultural historians, is the inability
to distinguish between the invisible rogue and the invisible itinerant

21 Mcintosh, Poor Relief in England, 1350-1600, 255-69.

22 Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 44-46.
23 An Ease for Overseers (London, 1601), 29.

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 Evan Gurney 557
poor/'24 In other words, it was difficult t
another, and in trying to stabilize the her
of licenses and passports, which were easil
ated, or by permanently writing a crimina
rogue's body with a brand or scourge, auth
vagrant bodies and vagrant texts merged i
reading. This phenomenon worried contem
them a touchstone for other interpretiv
observed that the Elizabethan language of
identity seems to spring up in this period
gary, marking "a change in the ways of h
were described," and Barry Taylor notes th
(and theatricality more generally) forced c
comfortable realization that "knowledge of
. . . involves a hazardous labour of interpret
reputed capacity for persuasion and disgui
métonymie stand-in for a larger cultural an
language and unreliability of appearance.
If contemporary policies related to vagra
bodies of impoverished persons were misint
read and difficult to keep stationary, many
dict this posture, confidently asserting a
to the population. In this particular discou
ary account of sturdy beggars, I mean- se
emerge that are worth highlighting on ac
Spenser's own depiction of vagrants and ro
nent was the assumption that vagrants we
which was, beyond its own intrinsic viciou
Jesuitical papism (that "rabble of vagrant r
ness, all of which produced a general anxie
was exacerbated during periods of dearth. T
24 Fumerton, "Making Vagrancy (In)visible: The Eco
ern Rogue Pamphlets/' in Dionne and Mentz, eds., Rog
ture, 204.
25 Hug, Impostures in Early Modern England: Representations and Perceptions of Fraudulent
Identities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 17; and Taylor, Vagrant Writing:
Social and Semiotic Disorders in the English Renaissance (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf,
1991), 14. See also Paolo Pugliatti, Beggary and Theatre in Early Modern England (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2003).
26 The description is Sir Walter Mildmay's, quoted in Wallace MacCaffrey, Queen Eliza-
beth and the Making of Policy, 1572-1588 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981),
145-

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558 Spenser and the Vagrants
grancy, apparently, was a powerful capacity to dissemble, a skill in
ous stratagems of fraud involving rhetorical improvisation, hist
art, or legerdemain. Vagrants were also viewed with skepticism
count of their mobility, which transgressed geographical, social, li
tic, and even professional boundaries during a period when author
clearly desired stability. Because of this mobility, perhaps, the itin
poor had conferred on them a kind of alien status (reinforced b
widespread belief that they spoke in cant), as when Thomas Wils
in defending the measures to repress vagrancy in the 1572 Act, c
that "it was no charity to give to such a one as we know not," and
authors of the Second Admonition explicitly give precedence to th
terial needs of religious refugees from the Continent before "the
swine."27 This mindset reached its logical terminus when the 1598
Law initiated the process of legal deportation for crimes of vagr
Likewise, it was assumed that vagrants were sexually licentio
promiscuous generation" as one cleric later puts it, gathering in e
barns and other sites for orgiastic gatherings.28 These accusations
often inflected by bestial metaphors- the "Roguish Travelling pe
which in their Common Whoredome, resemble lawlesse Beastes"2
and in other contexts vagrants were compared to drones, wasps, ra
and, if we read Spenser closely, foxes and apes. Although sixteen
century writers often deployed zoomorphic categories to depict
ous social or professional estates (priests as foxes, lawyers as wol
et cetera), these particular classifications emphasize a lack of rea
order, and restraint. When Spenser's Ape worries about being "b
abroad" as "an ear marked beast," his chosen verb captures both
literal and figurative impacts of vagrant discourse: the cropped
would announce (or brute) to strangers his criminal identity eve
they would signal his subhuman status. Additional ironies emerg
Spenser's poem, since the fable's final punishment serves as a blith
ology explaining why apes look so much like men, a corresponde
that will actually facilitate more future impersonations.30

* * *

27 Wilson is quoted in Slack, Poverty and Policy, 125. See

liament (1572), 52.
28 John Downame, The Plea of the Poore (London, 1616),
29 Michael Sparke, Greevous Grones for the Poore (Londo
3° See van den Berg, "'The Counterfeit in Personation/

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 Evan Gurney 559
Many of these conventional features of rog
erary depictions of vagrancy map surpri
Mother Hubberds Tale. If Aesopian fables p
economy, here Spenser provides an origin
linking the motivation to leave one's residen
that "where change is, good may gotten be
scene without evident moral judgment, and
should be noted, was characterized by const
and Cambridge to his various secretarial po
and finally to County Cork, and he often artic
lar sense of disappointment in "still waytin
(76). He lends the episode further texture b
popular desire among Elizabethans, memor
Cunning Northern Beggar" or plays like Na
Testament , for the supposed freedoms assoc
beggary: "Such will we fashion both our se
world, and so will wander free / Where so
anie" (167-69). The poem is clearly fascinate
and informed about its contemporary legal
final episode of the poem corroborates Wil
A Brief and Plain Declaration , that sturdy beg
great matters against the state."31 By staging
Elizabethan authorities, Spenser's satire acq
since he is obviously more concerned with
als like Lord Burghley or Archbishop Loftus
posed by actual beggars.32
Another typical feature of roguery likew
elite in Spenser's poem, as the Fox and Ape
appetites, dallying "with courtizans, and cos
reach the court, although they demonstrate
tony and wastefulness throughout. And, of
perpetrate fraud everywhere they go, "abu
cloaked guile" (344). They forge passport

31 In Elizabethan Puritanism, ed. Leonard Trineraud

Press, 1971), 284.
32 Burghley is generally accepted as Spenser's target
ample, Bruce Danner, Edmund Spenser's War on Lord B
millan, 2011). But Thomas Herron has mustered co
Spenser might have targeted Loftus in his critique: se
berds Tale (1591) and Adam Loftus, Archbishop of Dub
Studies in Philology 105 (2008): 336-87.

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 560 Spenser and the Vagrants
twice. References to their subtlety, their legerdemain, and their d
abound throughout the poem, leading Harry Berger, Jr. to go so
to classify them as different sides of the same bad coin: "The fox is m
tal cunning, the ape physical cunning [sic]."33 In addition to their
porary careers as false shepherds, priests, and courtiers, the pair
more traditional roles of rogue literature: the Ape is a juggler, a f
teller, a gamester, and a pander; the Fox is a huckster or peddler,
as a counterfeit lawyer, merchant, broker, and farmer. Their cou
feit impersonations give poetic life to one of the great fears emb
within the legal discourse of vagrancy- these wandering stra
could be anybody- and by manipulating his identity the Fox, in pa
lar, takes advantage of the good faith that governs fair exchang
poem's Chaucerian features are clearly evident in this beast fabl
estates satire, as are vestiges of the Reynard cycle and classical epi
Mother Hubberds Tale is a true satura lanx, one that includes rogu
erature and picaresque elements among its overflowing generic pl
Despite its supposed archaic style and language, then, Mother H
berds Tale translates contemporary prose tracts of rogue literatur
well as the legal statutes and other treatises focused on vagrancy,
vivid poetry centered on an issue of critical social moment. And i
ception suggests the work was a literary and political sensation,
ning fame and infamy in equal parts, though the facts are murky
why it was called in from circulation. Sir Thomas Tresham, reco
ing the fallout to an acquaintance, notes that Spenser quickly mor
from poet laurel to poet lorrell, but the barb may be more apt than h
tended, since Cock Lorrell was a mythic prince of rogues, celebra
Awdeley as well as Samuel Rid's Martin Markall, Beadle of Bridewe
it could be argued that Spenser (rather than Greene) inaugurated
ond generation of rogue literature in the 1590s.34 A year after the pu
cation of Spenser's Complaints, Nashe embedded in Pierce Penniles
incisive political fable involving the wiles of a fox, and Lamilia's fa
Greenes Groats-worth of Wit, features a counterfeiting fox to figure
"the falshoode of make-shift flatterers." Later, likely written in 1607
not published until 1627, Richard Niccols's The Begger's Ape recy
great deal of Spenser's theme and plot, and similar forms of sat
beast fable continued to emerge throughout the seventeenth cen
culminating in John Dryden's The Hind and the Panther. Moreover, m

33 Berger, "The Prospect of the Imagination/' SEL 1 (1961): 106.

34 Andrew Hadheld, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford university rress,
267.

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 Evan Gurney 561
of the title pages of Robert Greene's coneyc
that of Harman's The groundworke of conny-c
anthropomorphic rabbits, clearly playing o
wise revealing the influence of Spenser's be
The resemblances are compelling, and if w
criteria, it might be worth asking whether
fies as a work of rogue literature. But it is
crucial differences between Spenser's poetr
like Copland, Walker, Harman, or even Gr
rogue literature famously parades as a journ
nal underground, inserting a variety of lite
vincing social scene, Spenser purposely dis
by foregrounding its fictive elements, lend
deniability, a strategy reinforced by the vo
The implications of Spenser's posture are n
sorship. If Harman, and later Greene and D
practice of roguery more transparent (there
pertise), Spenser intentionally makes the p
an even greater interpretive dilemma. And
to this problem bucks conventional wisdom
tizes a series of encounters that illustrate th
a beggar, Spenser reverses this moral index
his initial response to the Fox's and Ape's r
their early affair with the simple husbandm
meet more powerful and experienced rogu
the Priest to the Mule to a range of delinq
circulate around a negligent or truant roy
offers an inversion of the speaker's progr
demption," who moves from the "great reso
dens, parks, and courts" to find Christ amo
"thee ves and murderers"- here we find rog
cles.36 This strategy likely reveals the influen
though the poem's protagonists are less sym
narrative trajectory follows a similar formu
lent practices of the lower classes up the so
practices of social elite. The same feature o

35 See Lauren Silberman, "Aesopian Prosopopoia : M

in Mother Hubberds Tale," Spenser Studies: A Renaissanc
36 Herbert, "Redemption," in The Works of George Her
Oxford University Press, 1941), 11. 10-11.

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562 Spenser and the Vagrants
dates the picaresque genre, its inherent mobility, also makes it a c
nient vehicle for Spenser's complaint.
Contemporaries were troubled by this vagrant permeability bet
geographical and social boundaries, but surely Mother Hubberds
is most disturbing in its depiction of the moral continuities bet
estates. If Elizabethan officials worried about telling one poor pe
from another, Spenser, in blurring the boundaries of social class,
it difficult to tell a poor rogue from a rich one. In this way the
does not, as many rogue pamphlets do, unsettle but ultimately su
a social and political order that is threatened by rogues- it simp
settles. And the social order, Spenser shows, is already populated
vagrants of all kinds. Though he ultimately dismisses the subver
potential of rogue literature, Stephen Greenblatt deals at length
the opportunity for vagrants to be "revealed either as less fortuna
well-protected imitators of their betters, or, alternatively, as prim
rebels against the hypocrisy of a cruel society."37 In the case of M
Hubberds Tale , Spenser seems to work both of these potential revelati
into the satirical framework of his story: the Fox and Ape begin b
cusing a few high-born individuals of holding "all the patrimoni
in hugger mugger in their hand" (138-39), appropriating the rhe
of egalitarian complaint (and anticipating the Giant of book 5), bu
case is clearly altered once they ascend to power: "As for the ras
commons least he cared; / For not so common was his bountie sh
(1193-94). That the Fox and Ape indict the very estates they even
impersonate only strengthens Spenser's critique. All is rogue: we
met the vagrants, and they are us.

* * *

If there is a kind of social reflexivity in Spenser'

if rogues and priests and courtiers are all of a
in the potential kinship between false beggar
Although the Fox and Ape design "to liue wit
ness serves as an ambivalent marker of rog
vocation throughout Mother Hubberds Tale ,
nexus of meanings. The tale itself, which is off
ing an illness, is called "fit for that idle stoun

37 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: U

1988), 5iā

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 Evan Gurney 563
in his dedicatory epistle Spenser casually no
paradox) that the poem was one among s
youth. More importantly, the Fox and Ape
ters in the work to deploy prosopopoia- Sp
his own method of "simplicitie and meann
prefatory epistle -and each instance of cou
at the creative but deceptive role of authorship
tions his desire "to disguise / in some stra
does Mercury (that great god of "cunning
makes his epic descent to rectify the rogu
gates in strange disguise" (1271). Mercury i
this case, as Kenneth John Atchity and van
serving in addition "the disquieting function
tative artist."38 Even Spenser's ideal courtie
a description of Sidney, seems to participa
guise and verbal invention, though his rog
cial modifiers: "Supplanted by fine falshood
which he gathereth, what is fit / T'enrich t
full wit" (788-90, emphasis mine). A similar
the Muses, , when Thalia laments the loss of
vnhurtfull Sport" (197). There seems to be
flexivity, then, between the lawful and unl
and the vagrant.
Poets, by virtue of their feigning, had oft
kind of ambivalent tension, accused of fals
their fictive power suspected by some and
insisted on "the impossibility of any man's
out first being a good man"- its own self-p
ironic utterance- but it is far less certain
given his depiction of such effective but d
As Trevor McNeely has pointed out, the per
torical power is inextricably linked to mor
deeper fear among writers in the period th
fact amoral.39 Renaissance attitudes toward
ambivalent, often acknowledging the mode

38 Atchity, "Spenser's Mother HubbercTs Tale: Thre

Quarterly 52 (1973): 161-72; and van den Berg, "'The Co
the quotation, however, is from Oram, ed., Shorter Poem
39 McNeely, Proteus Unmasked: Sixteenth-Century Rhe
(Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont Publishing, 2004).

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564 Spenser and the Vagrants
"speaking other/' Consider George Puttenham's description of all
in The Arte of English Poesy ; which depicts the figure (as he call
a kind of captain rogue or "chief Ringleader" among other frau
rhetorical devices, "which for his duplicitie we call the figure of
Semblant or Dissimulation," calling to mind the character of
Semblant" in Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose.40 Poets and rogu
seems, share in common a predilection for simulating a verbal or
cal exterior in order to disguise their intentions. Vagrants even
to work their way into manuals of poetics, as in Henry Peacham
scription of metaphor in The Garden of Eloquence: "He that hath
caterpiller eating and devouring the tender buds and blossomes o
and plants, and after this shall see an idle person living by the spo
other mens labours, is put in mind to call him a caterpillar."41
In response to antagonism and suspicion, poets and rhetoricians
structed a variety of defenses, from Sidney's blithe claim that
"nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth" to Dante's emph
on the moral utility of poetry, "a truth cloaked under a beautifu
Most often, however, writers would invoke the same authority
John Harington, who, in the preface to his 1591 translation of Ar
Orlando Furioso , defends his enterprise by claiming, "And first for
I might if I list excuse it by the rule of Poetica licentia"42 The no
poetic license was derived from classical dicta, articulated by Ho
Cicero, Quintilian, and others, assigning to poets a special license
ploy fictive matter in speech and writing. Rather than serving as
bulwark for poetic fiat, however, notions of license were involve
tenuous negotiation of conflicting meanings: "the too much lice
poetasters," as Jonson would have it; autonomous freedom gran
the poetic imagination; or, most pertinent to this particular essay, a k
of external control doled out by authorities to writers.43 The aut
of a poetic license in this latter instance is figurative, of course

40 Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne Rebhorn
NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 271.
41 Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1593), 3.
42 Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (or The Defence of Poesy), ed. R. W. Maslen (Man
Manchester University Press, 2004), 103; see Convivio 2.1 in Dante: A Life in Wor
R. Hollander (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 98; and Harington
Orlando Furioso (London, 1591), iiii.
43 Jacqueline Miller, Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Ren
Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), esp. 9-33. See Jonson's prefatory
in Volpone, Or the Fox, ed. Brian Parker (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
64.

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 Evan Gurney 565
vulnerable to social and political pressures
Collingbourne in a Mirror for Magistrates), bu
tual imprints of government control, many of
Hubberds Tale : the license Spenser's printe
from the Stationers' Company to publish S
it should be noted, was subsequently rev
Hubberds Tale); the medical practitioner's li
healer like Mother Hubberd, the poetic gu
and, of course, the forged paperwork the F
when he brazenly "askt what license, or w
of these licenses, textual or otherwise, we
bilize a problematic exchange- between wr
ence, almsgiver and beggar, medical practit
was vulnerable to abuse and distrust. The link between licenses for
poetry and poverty is not as arbitrary as it might seem. Printers them-
selves were often implicated in the discourse of roguery: when George
Gascoigne's printer, Richard Smith, Englished Robert Henryson's Mo-
rali Fabillis of Esope in 1577, he included among the prefatory material a
poem entitled "The bookes passport," which defended the publication
of fables against potential slander and misinterpretation.45 Spenser, in
this fabulistic and picaresque mode, finds at least one potential answer
to the question in "October" posed by Piers: "O pierlesse Poesye, where
is then thy place?" (79). On the road, it seems, as Spenser takes his verse
begging for a good reading by using fine falsehoods.
This is not to say that Spenser was actively fashioning himself as a
vagrant poet, but it does seem clear that he often considered the spheres
of writing and begging in tandem. In Lucifera's House of Pride, for ex-
ample, when Envie is depicted as the enemy of good works, Spenser
takes care to link almsgiving with poetry, the two activities perhaps
most vulnerable to malicious interpretation. And if Spenser read Lang-
land's Piers Plowman in a fashion similar to Kate Crassons, he would
have discovered a helpful allegorical model that likewise found itself

44 Kate Giglio, "Female Orality and the Healing Arts in Spenser's Mother Hubberds
Tale," in Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts, ed. Mary Ellen Lamb and
Karen Bamford (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 13-24.
45 Henryson, trans. Smith, The fabulous tales of Esope the Phrygian (London, 1577). See
also Michael Long, "Rogues, Counterfeiters, and Forgers: Surreptitious Printing in the
Popular Literature of Renaissance England," in Shell Games: Studies in Scams, Frauds, and
Deceits (1300-1650), ed. Mark Crane, Richard Raiswell, and Margaret Reeves (Toronto:
CRRS Publications, 2004), 239-67.

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566 Spenser and the Vagrants
participating in the very fictions it deplores. Although Crassons f
on the C-text, whereas Spenser would have known Langland thro
one of Robert Crowley's editions of the B-text, her argument rem
pertinent: Langland develops a sophisticated and complex poet
dramatize the material and spiritual conditions associated with po
deploying allegory to obscure the transparency assumed in conte
rary discourses of poverty (i.e., as a stable signifier of virtue or v
essentially playing a deceptive role similar to the faytours or fals
gars he excoriates.46 Spenser achieves a similar effect in his own
gorical poetics, dramatizing the complex traffic between spiritu
material conditions and complicating confessional scruples. Consi
the figure of Kirkrapine in The Faerie Queene, who robs "poore
boxes of their due reliefe, / Which given was to them for good in
(1.3.17), a passage that has been read convincingly by scholars as a
tack on monasticism, Presbyterianism, or the Church of England
lishment.47 Spenser's allegory ensures that the specific target of
piece of topical religious satire remains obscure, no matter how lo
seems that reference to a Scottish kirk. What is without doubt, o
other hand, is the dignity Spenser accords to the poor (who are
or entitled to relief), the worthiness of good intentions among t
anonymous charitable givers, however they are inflected by theol
distinctions, and how vulnerable alms are to misappropriation. K
rapine himself is clearly a disreputable figure, a rogue who creeps
cunning sleights in at the window" (1.3.17) to steal alms and vestm
but it is the intention governing his deceptive conduct that merits bla
His guile is neither foul nor fair. Spenser, meanwhile, uses his own
gorical cunning to slip past crude religious dichotomies into a m
subtle and wide-reaching evaluation of ecclesial governance.
More generally fable and allegory provide a poet with oppor
ties to negotiate the complicated dynamics of a diverse and unre
readership, "the daunger of envy, and suspition of present time"
as Spenser puts it to Ralegh. This letter, as John Pendergast has sh
might best be read as a kind of prologue, or accessus, that is mean
as a formula that will unlock the poem's allegorical content than
"public [declaration] of literary intention," a reminder that allego

46 Crassons, The Claims of Poverty (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
2010), esp. 21-88.
47 See Kathryn Walls, "Spenser's Kirkrapine and John Foxe's Attack on Rome,"
and Queries 31 (1984): 173-75; and Mary Robert Falls, "Spenser's Kirkrapine and th
bethans," Studies in Philology 50 (1953): 457-75.

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 Evan Gurney 567
a rhetorical strategy rather than a static sy
the reader to look for the hidden meaning
own disguise, calling attention to the need f
just as any beggar in Elizabethan England w
quired close scrutiny from potential almsgiv
Spenser's descriptions of vagrants often app
or rhetoric. The stereotypes of Elizabethan
recognizable figure for Spenser's allegorica
an avatar of idleness or sexual promiscuity
ventional types in favor of using vagrants to
guise and simulation. Whether or not they
lem-and for Spenser vagrants seem to be
they were for, say, the cleric John Northbr
one- the rogue provided an apt figure for a
trate the volatility of any interpretive encoun
by the issue of poetic and rhetorical agency.
This strategy is evident in "May," a so-calle
religious and moral amendment. Piers strug
locutor Palinode of the need for reform, so
involves a vagrant fox who destroys a naïv
a profession notoriously difficult to distin
gifted rhetorician to boot, exploiting his ver
convince the kid of his distress. But so too is
fabulistic rhetoric to convince his audience o
of England, just as Spenser is performing sim
readers. It is difficult to tell, in this poem,
from the shepherd from the vagrant. The po
beggar, a Protean vagrant familiar with di
transform the reader by way of "honest dis
gests and Sidney commends.50 The only dif
an interior condition that is difficult to inte
ries over the inherent disguises of poetry, it
seems to solve his dilemma by anchoring it
good intentions, "to fashion a gentleman o
and gentle discipline" (737). It is a reminder

48 Pendergast, Religion , Allegory, and Literacy in E

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 136.
49 See Northbrooke, Spiritus est vicarius Christi in terr
ing, vaine playes or enterludes (London, 1577).
50 Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, 93, referring to Plutar

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568 Spenser and the Vagrants
which places the reader in a position of trial, is on trial as well, re
on the same disposition among interpreters- mercy or charity-
gets the kid in trouble with the disguised fox.
This reliance on charitable hermeneutics, which fuels Spenser's
prehension of malicious interpreters like Sclaunder or the Blatant
prompts a similar concern with indifferent or unfeeling readers,
Burghley most prominently among them. In the proem to book 4,
Spenser ventriloquizes Burghley's criticism of "looser rimes" in
Faerie Queene and poetry in general, he includes a parodie echo o
own stated project in his letter to Ralegh:
By which fraile youth is oft to follie led,
Through false allurement of that pleasing baite,
That better were in vertues discipled,
Then with vaine poemes weeds to haue their fancies fed.
(4.proem.i)
This is not merely an ironic deflation of Burghley; Spenser (like Sidney
before him) expresses authentic concern for the dissembling capacities
of fictive speech, acknowledging the "fault of few that haue abusd the
same" (4.proem.2). But he suggests that such dangers give poetry its
power, that there is no better method of instilling moral discipline pre-
cisely because of the pleasing allurements of poetry. Spenser refuses,
moreover, to dismiss the authority of passionate language, taking care
to champion the precedence of love as a guarantor of virtue. Indeed, the
poet's apology for romantic verse culminates in a defense of love itself,
protecting the scope and sanction of the wayward but powerful virtue as
well as all its lexical and notional cousins- pity, charity, mercy, friend-
ship-and bringing to mind Calvin's rejection of Stoic rationality in his
commentary on De dementia.51 Burghley, Spenser suggests, begins and
ends with false premises. Not only is he wrong to prefer virtue before
love, "For it of honor and all vertue is / The roote," but he is unquali-
fied to appraise its value anyway: "Such ones ill iudge of loue, that can-
not loue" (4.proem.2-3). Put another way, Burghley is a bad reader, a
"Stoické censour," participating in the same tradition as Thomas Elyot's
scorn for the "vaine pitie" practiced by almsgivers, whose merciful pos-
tures provided inducement to rogues like Harman's Ruffler who could
ask for "charitie, rufully and lamentably, that it would make a flyntey
hart to relent, and pitye his miserable estate."52 The limited hermeneutic

51 Jean Calvin, Calvin's Commentary on Seneca's De dementia, ed. Ford Lewis Battles and
André Hugo (Leiden: Brill, 1969), 251.
52 Harman, A caueat for commen cursetors (London, 1567), Biir.

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 Evan Gurney 569
of Stoic reason proves less vulnerable to th
and vagrants, Spenser claims, but it remain
celebrating authentic virtue.
If Spenser acknowledges that poets serv
reliable moral custodians, he develops and
fully near the conclusion of book 5, in the fig
twinned identity underscores the inherent
well as its relationship to the apparently c
justice and mercy. Situated at the threshold
sumably an erstwhile apologist turned crit
tongue nailed to a post, his vagrant speech
erally immobilized by authorities in simila
discipline of vagrant bodies. Malfonťs g
bodies not only the dual capacities of poetic
but also its rival destinies, a poet laurel tur
bon that once had written bin, / Was raced ou
(5.9.26). The scene captures in its descripti
power- its capacity for slander and abusiv
nerability to the troubling politics of interp
guilt is taken for granted by most scholars
troublingly opaque, "the purport of his sin
few could rightly read" (5.9.26), suggesting
timized by a false or even malicious readin
poets from bad, in other words, might be
pretation as it is intention. Certainly Malf
mind Burghley's earlier indictment of Spe
As Peter Herman has observed of this episo
clear boundaries between the virtuous and
"the porosity of the border separating use fro
forms of poetry, and Spenser from the Ma
ambiguity is reinforced by the hermetic quali
remains resistant to the transparent langu
tempts to erase Bonfont's history and for
is difficult to interpret and difficult to co
compromised position to undermine the
"plainely to be red" (5.9.26) it appears.
Interestingly, just before Artegal and Art
"Poet bad," they encounter a rogue named M

53 Herman, Squitter-wits and Muse-haters: Sidney, Spe

poetic Sentiment (Detroit: Wayne State University Press

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570 Spenser and the Vagrants
ing this figure Spenser borrows a conventional type from rogue l
ture, the angler or hooker, whose method of theft, however unli
clearly struck a contemporary chord, since Greene and Dekker t
care to elaborate on the model provided by Harman. His defining
acteristic is a long staff attached with a complement of hooks, which
thief would use to snatch sundry possessions accessible through
dows and elsewhere. Spenser uses the staff as an emblem of devio
genuity (malum ingenium) and, like Dekker and others, expands o
figure's associations with angling:
And in his hand an huge long staffe he held,
Whose top was arm'd with many an yron hooke,
Fit to catch hold of all that he could weld,
Or in the compasse of his douches tooke
And euer round about he cast his looke.
Als at his backe a great wyde net he bore,
With which he seldome fished at the brooke,
But vsd to fish for fooles on the dry shore,
Of which he in faire weather wont to take great store.
(5-9-11)

Elsewhere Malengin becomes literally protean, transforming himself

into a series of animals to escape the clutches of Artegall, and here his
staff experiences a metamorphosis, from a walking stick to an extra ap-
pendage to an angling rod and gesturing also at the poet's pen. In addi-
tion to roguish angling, moreover, "he in slights and iugling feates did
flow, / And of legierdemayne the mysteries did know" (5.9.13).
By highlighting these associations with vagrancy, I do not mean to
suggest that Spenser intends for Malengin to represent a specific type
of actual rogue, as opposed to Irish rebels or Jesuit missionaries.54 In-
stead Spenser deploys a recognizable social figure to illustrate cunning
writ large: "For he so crafty was to forge and face, / So light of hand, and
nymble of his pace, / So smooth of tongue, and subtile in his tale. / That
could deceiue one looking in his face" (5.9.5). Devious in appearance,
wit, language, and movement, Malengin defies even physiognomy:
there is no window into his soul, no exterior marks that signify a dispo-
sitional condition. Again, Spenser is worried here about the obscurity
of intention. He repeats the word "intent" three times in a short space,
noting how Malengin laughs to shade "his false intent," performs tricks

54 Elizabeth Heale, "Spenser's Malengine, Missionary Priests, and the Means of Jus-
tice/' Review of English Studies 41 (1990): 171-84.

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 Evan Gurney 571
to "turne her eyes from his intent away/' a
herself has "lent her intentiue mind" (5.9.1
read. In this way he is much like Bon/Malfo
the iron flail of Talus and Mercilla's iron nail,
seems to stabilize the identities of Malfont
prefix, but this too is only a brief kind of lin
nature and artificially imposed.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect relate
imity to Mercilla's court. Hovering on th
fraught with allegorical significance, Ma
guile, from Malengin to Malfont to Due
doing something more than merely indictin
and fraudulence. Arthur and Artegall pr
method of luring Malengin into capture, af
punished for accusing Mercilla of guile rat
self. Even Awe, an intermediary figure oste
cal and figurative space between Malengin
in this sequence as a "gyantlike resemblance
malice, and despight, / That vnder shew of
(5.9.22). He is himself an artifact of poetic g
several removes- a resemblance of somethi
ing within its own description a counterfe
"semblance." In dramatizing the pageantry
at Mercilla's court, Spenser takes care to in
law of nations, common law, and even eccle
left to wonder about the legibility of juris
specter of roguery to generate a pervasive a
this case the ironic reflexivity of roguish g
the court, where it seems to congregate, as
It is perhaps no surprise that Spenser claims
to book 6, that courtesy at court is "nought
Spenser's depictions of roguery and po
project under a great deal of interpretive p
conclusion. The rigor of Talus seems merely
lengin in every direction, including Mercill
thorities to "race out" the earlier identity of B
A similar problem emerges in A View of the
though the shoe is on the other foot, when Sp
a policy that might counter the threat of s
fonts among the Irish, and in this case he so

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572 Spenser and the Vagrants
bivalence by eliminating both vagrants and poets altogether. Acco
to Irenius, Spenser's stand-in, vagrants should be systematically
moved from the Irish countryside by martial law, a policy his inte
tor Eudoxus seems to think unnecessary. Undeterred, Irenius pr
organizing a police force to deal with vagabonds: if someone is f
"idelye roguing" the first time, "hee may punish him more light
with stockes, or such like; but if hee bee found againe so loytering
may scourge him with whippes, or rodds, after which if hee bee
taken, let him have the bitternesse of marshall lawe" (152). It is pe
not surprising that Irenius includes "Bardes, Iesters, and such
among this group of "stragglers and runnagates" (151-52), since th
singled out earlier in the treatise for their responsibility in contribut
to the moral deterioration of the Irish landscape and inciting the n
to strive for military glory in rebellion. Some poets are virtuous,
mits, using "the sweete baite of their numbers, to steale into the
spirits a desire of honour and vertue" (75-76), although here too
are references to bait and theft- Irenius is unconcerned with poet
ceit as long as it is linked to honor and virtue. But the Irish poets, on
other hand, find people who are the "most licentious of life, most
and lawlesse in his doings, most dangerous and desperate . . . him
set up and glorifie in their rithmes, him they praise to the peopl
to yong men make an example to foliowe" (75). In both contexts
glers and jesters, rogues and poets, Spenser is worried that fiction
disguise will encourage the wrong kind of moral behavior and con
ute to rebellion. Michael Drayton, a student of Spenser, treats vag
with similarly political valences in The Muses Elyzium when his ny
demand the apprehension of Venus and Cupid, who have been st
up sedition by way of disguise and trickery: both are to be procla
rogues, imprisoned, and punished; Cupid, "this Vagabund" (270),
be sent back to his resident parish Mount Cytheron; and for Ven
"Pasport shall be made" (276) conveying her to Paphos.55 For Spe
the context of Ireland, a so-called "savage" nation, compels him to
the interpretive ambiguity of rhetoric and disguise by eliminatin
conundrum altogether. But he seems to acknowledge the loss tha
sults from these draconian measures, which reduce the positive p
tial for poetry's fictions to steal into Irish hearts and instill virtue.
If Irenius sounds confident that his policies will eradicate vagr
and roguery, it is less clear that Spenser is. In almost every case

55 Drayton, The Works of Michael Drayton, vol. 3, ed. J. William Hebel (Oxford
Blackwell, 1961).

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 Evan Gurney 573
vagrant characters live to commit fraud ano
Hubberds Tale is merely "uncased"- tempor
like Duessa (in book 1) and probably whipp
eclogue succeeds in his crime. The earmark
more mischief. Archimago, the "faitour fal
rupting the betrothal of Redcrosse to Una
Faerie Queene, but he is back out in faerie land
ginning of book 2, now called "a false infam
gal literally cannot hold Malengin; it takes
void of pity, to make an end of his shapesh
vagrants to deal with in Spenser's poetry,
always be enigmatic fables and allegories
that induce error. Spenserian rogues dram
but more importantly the guile in human
vagrant desires and roguish language popu
tive dilemmas of various kinds.

* * *

I want to return briefly to the beginning of th

Ape in Mother Hubberds Tale first dream of "w
There is both a romantic temper and an apocaly
this description of vagrancy, gesturing at a mu
serian progress, one that the poem's frame i
narrator recalls the various tales his friends r
"Some told of Ladies, and their Paramoures; / S
their renowned Squires; / Some of the Faerie
(28-30). Wandering, of course, is an activity
moral interest to Spenser in The Faerie Queene-
error in the strangers they meet, the Redcro
during his wandering quest- and the final can
tization of Revelation, prefigures a different k
Nor are these the only similarities between
Consider, for example, their apparel:
The Ape clad Souldierlike, fit for th'intent,
In a blew jacket with a crosse of red
And manie slits, as if that he had shedd
Much blood throgh many wounds therein
(204-7)
and the other, who "on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore":

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574 Spenser and the Vagrants
Ycladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde,
Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine,
The cruell markes of many' a bloudy fielde;
Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield

Full iolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt,

As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.
(i.i.i)

As Herron notes, the modifier "blew" might describe the color of the
Ape's coat, but it could also reference the grade of wool, so the two
could be wearing precisely the same outfit.56 More importantly, both of
them are playing the part of knight, seeming rather than being, scarcely
linked to their military profession by more than the subordinating
conjunction "as," mere similes rather than soldiers. Both immediately
"wander loosly" after assuming their martial semblance, and one has
just been commissioned by the monarch while the other will eventually
usurp the throne. The Ape seems to be a kind of funhouse mirror image
of Redcrosse, a cousin perhaps of Braggadocchio, "a losell wandring by
the way" (2.3.1).
Even the actual description of wandering is uncannily similar. After
dispatching Error, Redcrosse and Una encounter Archimago:
So forward on his way (with God to frend)
He passed forth, and new aduenture sought;
Long way he trauelled, before he heard of ought.

At length they chaunst to meet vpon the way

An aged Sire, in long blacke weedes yclad,
His feete all bare, his beard all hoarie gray,
And by his belt his booke he hanging had[.]
(1.1.28-29)

The Fox and Ape, meanwhile, seeking adventures as they travel, chance
to meet a simple farmer along the way:
Long they thus trauailed, yet neuer met
Aduenture, which might them a working set:
Yet manie waies they sought, and manie tryed:
Yet for their purposes none fit espyed.
At last they chaunst to meete vpon the way
A simple husbandman in garments gray.
(223-28)

56 Herron, "Edmund Spenser's Mother Hubberds Tale," 383-84.

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 Evan Gurney 575
The language is identical, but the roles are
served that Spenser replicates this formula in
ing each transition into another episode: "W
aduentures fell, / . . . / At length chaunst wit
(359-61); "At last they chaunst to meete vpon t
in goodly rich aray" (581-82).57 These are r
ties, and there is a possibility that Spenser is e
tual parody at his own expense. But I think it
Hubberds Tale (and the entire collection of C
similar preoccupation in The Faerie Queene, on
essay to link with vagrancy -the hazards of
generic contexts are vastly different, Spenser
to complicate the interpretive dynamics of
and recipients of material charity, between
already vexed by issues related to rhetoric a
This discussion of the correspondences bet
and book 1 of The Faerie Queene is prepara
or a question, rather, a kind of postscript f
is one crucial difference between the two works. Whereas the Fox and
Ape rehearse in their roguish progress to the throne one of the greatest
terrors among Elizabethan authorities, infiltrating the center of govern-
ment, Spenser eliminates vagrants almost entirely from the allegorical
domain of the latter cantos in book 1, most notably in the House of Holi-
nesse. When Spenser forcibly removes vagrants from the Irish country-
side in the View , in other words, he is merely staging a strategy he had
already rehearsed in The Faerie Queene. Why? In the one episode when
Spenser provides his most sustained description of almsgiving in The
Faerie Queene, why does he make no mention of vagrants whatsoever?
Why is the figure so conspicuously absent? Nearly every contemporary
discussion of charitable giving references vagrants, often as an acute so-
cial problem and sometimes as an annoyance, but invariably there they
are, hovering around the discourse of poor relief. In startling contrast,
when Spenser describes the Holy Hospital's seven beadmen, who in-
struct the Redcrosse in the practices of corporal mercy, he offers a vision
of indiscriminate giving that does not concern itself with determining
the status of a potential beggar. The narrative seems blithely uncon-
cerned with vagrants: "their gates to all were open euermore" (1.10.36).
For several generations this particular episode has puzzled scholars,

57 Van den Berg, "'The Counterfeit in Personation/" 87-88.

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576 Spenser and the Vagrants
who wonder why Spenser includes so many medieval and Roman
lic features in the House of Holinesse. Perhaps scholars are askin
wrong question. Perhaps, that is, the episode stands out not mere
cause of what is present but also because of what (or who) is miss
is difficult to construct an argument from the absence of evidence; o
other hand, it seems unlikely that Spenser's virtue of holiness is w
unconcerned with vagrancy given the book's repeated references t
giving. I suspect that Spenser recognizes the manner in which va
complicate any interpretive encounter, and he wants to stabilize th
ment in that narrative, and so Spenser provides a bulwark in the
of Holiness to keep a safe distance from its parodie rivals: the den of
the malicious accusations of envy, or the extremes of pride and despa
This article has wandered far from its own place of origin, those
few verses in Mother Hubberds Tale when the Fox considers his various
roguish prospects, but one thing is clear, I hope: while the majority of his
peers believed vagrants to be an urgent and intolerable problem, Spenser
clearly considered them essential to his poetic project. In the figures of
rogues who populated both the legal and literary landscapes of sixteenth-
century England, Spenser found an emblem of rhetorical and poetic
guile that could serve several crucial purposes. By placing these vagrants
throughout his work, Spenser provides a reminder of the interpretive
traffic between bodies and texts, a dynamic fraught by its passionate dis-
course and capacity for error, implicating his own misinterpretable alle-
gory in the process. These figures of cunning and disguise illustrate the
powers and limitations of any kind of fictive project, whether the false-
hood be fair or foul, signaling Spenser's ambivalent attitude toward the
instrumentality of rhetoric. The tricks and ruses of "faytours" throughout
The Faerie Queene and elsewhere repeatedly force us to reassess the role
and power of mercy in judgment, underscoring the dangers inherent to
an interpretive posture of charity, even as Spenser, finding himself in a
vulnerable position similar to that of vagrant beggars, reminds readers
of his own reliance on their charitable interpretation. Finally, by depict-
ing vagrancy and roguery as an interior condition intrinsic to every social
estate, including those in seats of authority, rather than a moral corrup-
tion limited to the lower classes, Spenser adds texture and humanity to his
social satire, his treatment of vagrants revealing a poet as irenic, perhaps,
as he is ironic. Indeed, if vagrants are on the social margins in Elizabethan
England and Ireland, they are nonetheless central to Spenser's poetics.

University of North Carolina , Asheville

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