Abstract
Numerous allusions to Sirens (seen as being interchangeable with Mermaids) and their enervating effect on the unsuspecting men who crossed their paths occur in many emblematic and literary works of the early modern period.1 Their songs initially lure unwary victims toward an enchanting sound before driving them upon the rocks of destruction. In William Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (ca. 1592), for example, Antipholus of Syracuse, after vowing that Adriana is not his wife, implores Luciana, the “sweet mermaid” with whom he has become infatuated, to “Sing, siren, for thyself, and I will dote.”2 The allusion here suggests an adulterous fantasy that involves switching affection from wife to mistress; at least that is what Luciana believes. Since ancient times, mermaids had been characterized as “fickle,” “slippery,” “dangerous,” and “enchanting.”3 They used their distinctive voices and beguiling musical lyrics to entrap and devour unfortunate mariners. A few years later, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca. 1595), Shakespeare would again include an allusion to a mermaid when he writes of “A mermaid on a dolphin’s back/Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath” that “certain stars shot madly from the spheres/To hear the sea-maid’s music.”
I would like to thank Donald V. Stump and John Watkins for reading versions of this chapter and generously providing advice. I would also like to thank John Watkins for suggesting the connection of the Mermaid and the Hare placard to Acrasia as Mary, Queen of Scots, when I delivered a version of this essay at the South Central Renaissance Conference (March 2010).
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Notes
Petrarch, The Essential Petrarch ed. and trans. Peter Hainsworth (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 2010), 76.
William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, from the Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 3.2, lines 45, 47.
Carol K. Mack and Dinah Mack’s A Field Guide to Demons, Fairies, Fallen Angels, and Other Subversive Spirits (New York: Owl Book, 1998), 11.
Antonia Fraser provides this reference, in Mary Queen of Scots (New York: Delta Book, 1969), 309,
Retha M. Warnicke, “Confronting Adversity, March 1566-May 1567,” in Mary Queen of Scots (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 146.
“Hare” in The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, ed. Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant and trans. John Buchanan-Brown (New York: Penguin Books, 1996),
C. H. Firth, “Ballads and Broadsides,” in Shakespeare’s England: An Account of the Life & Manner of His Age ed. Sidney Lee and C. T. Onions, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916), 2: 511–38.
James Emerson Phillips, Prologue, Images of a Queen: Mary Stuart in Sixteenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 6.
John Macleod, Dynasty: The Stuarts; 1560–1807 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 83.
John Guy, “Mary’s Story.” See esp. 361, in “ My Heart Is My Own”: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (Hammersmith: Harper Perennial, 2004).
Jenny Wormald, “Of Marriages and Murders 1563–7,” 166, in Mary, Queen of Scots: Politics, Passion and a Kingdom Lost (London and New York: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2001), 132–69.
Weir, “Laying Snares for Her Majesty,” especially 362, 366, in Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley (New York: Random House Trade Paperback Edition, 2003).
Robert Riddle Stodart, Scottish Arms: Being a Collection of Armorial Bearings: A.D. 1370–1678, Reproduced in Facsimile from Contemporary Manuscripts with Heraldic and Genealogic Notes (Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1881). Vol. 1. Online Internet Archive. University of Toronto Libraries. Available for online access at http://archive.org/details/scottisharmsbein02stoduoft. Accessed December 2009.
Hugh Clark, An Introduction to Heraldry: With Nearly One Thousand Illustrations rev. by J. R. Planché, Somerset Herald of Arms, 18th ed. (Totawa, NJ: Tabard Press, 1974), 35.
Reverend W. Odom’s Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (London, 1904) (Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, LLC, 2011)
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“Heraldry,” in The Book of Codes: Understanding the World of Hidden Messages; An Illustrated Guide to Signs, Symbols, Ciphers, and Secret Languages ed. Paul Linde (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 228–29.
Walter de Gray Birch, “The Renaissance—Mary Queen of Scots, and Her Successors,” 72, in History of Scottish Seals Elibron Classics Series, vol. 1 (Stirling, 1905) (Charleston, SC: Adamant Media, 2010).
Bruce A. McAndrew, Scotland’s Historic Heraldry (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2006).
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Stephen Budiansky, in Her Majesty’s Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage (New York: Plume Book, 2006),
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Tung’s chapter on “Spenser’s ‘Emblematic’ Imagery: A Study of Emblematics,” in Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, ed. Patrick Cullen and Thomas P. Roche, Jr., vol. 5 (New York: AMS Press, 1985),185–207.
Natale Conti, Mythologiae chapter 24, “On Actaeon,” book VI, 564, in Mythologiae trans. John Mulryan and Steven Brown, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 316 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press, 2006), vol. 2.
Andrew Zurcher, “Selections from the Poem,” 57n, stanzas 27–33, in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene: A Reading Guide, Reading Guides to Long Poems (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
Kerby Neill, “Spenser’s Acrasia and Mary Queen of Scots,” in Publications of the Modern Language Association 60, no.3 (September 1945), 682–88.
Judith Yarnell, “Spenser, the Witch, and the Goddesses.” See esp. 139, in Transformations of Circe: The History of an Enchantress (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
Although Francesco Colonna’s authorship has been disputed, I follow accepted practice by naming him as the author of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream (London, 1592) (Lexington: Theophania Publishing, 2012).
A. Bartlett Giamati, “Inward Sound.” See esp. 95, in Play of Double Senses: Spenser’s Faerie Queene (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1975).
Godwin’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 139.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene ed. A. C. Hamilton, et al., 2nd ed. (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2007),
Alastair Fowler, “The Emblem as Literary Genre,” 23, in Deviceful Settings: The English Renaissance Emblem and its Contexts ed. Michael Bathand Daniel Russell, Selected Papers from the Third International Emblem Conference, Pittsburgh, 1993.
Linda Shenk, Learned Queen: The Image of Elizabeth I in Politics and Poetry (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 33.
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Donald V. Stump’s “The Two Deaths of Mary Stuart: Historical Allegory in Spenser’s Book of Justice,” in Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual ed. Patrick Cullen and Thomas P. Roche, Jr., vol. 9 (New York: AMS Press, 1991), 81–105
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Judith H. Anderson, “Androcentrism and Acrasia: Fantasies in the Bower of Bliss,” in Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 224–38;
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Harry Berger, Jr., “Wring Out the Old: Squeezing the Text, 1951–2001,” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, ed. Patrick Cullen and Thomas P. Roche, Jr., vol. 18 (New York: AMS Press, 2003) 81–121;
Patricia Parker, “Suspended Instruments: Lyric and Power in the Bower of Bliss,” in Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York: Methuen and Company, 1987), 54–66.
Edmund Spenser, “Muiopotmos,” 427, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser ed. William A. Oram, et al. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 406–30,
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A. D. S. Fowler examines the symbolic emblematic images of Temperance in “Emblems of Temperance in The Faerie Queene, Book II,” see esp. 146, Review of English Studies 11, no.42 (May, 1960), 143–49.
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© 2013 Debra Barrett-Graves
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Barrett-Graves, D. (2013). Mermaids, Sirens, and Mary, Queen of Scots: Icons of Wantonness and Pride. In: Barrett-Graves, D. (eds) The Emblematic Queen. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303103_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303103_5
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