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Early Modern Communi(cati)ons
Early Modern Communi(cati)ons:
Studies in Early Modern English Literature
and Culture
Edited by
Kinga Földváry and Erzsébet Stróbl

Early Modern Communi(cati)ons:
Studies in Early Modern English Literature and Culture,
Edited by Kinga Földváry and Erzsébet Stróbl
This book first published 2012
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2012 by Kinga Földváry and Erzsébet Stróbl and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-4186-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4186-3

To the Memory of Professor István Géher
(1940–2012)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix
List of Tables............................................................................................... x
Introduction
KINGA FÖLDVÁRY and ERZSÉBET STRÓBL .................................................. 1
Part I: Social and Religious Issues in Early Modern Texts
The Queen and Death: An Elizabethan Book of Devotion

ERZSÉBET STRÓBL ..................................................................................... 10
On the Shoulders of Giants: Texts and Contexts behind William

Harrison’s Description of England
KINGA FÖLDVÁRY ..................................................................................... 32
Women of No Importance in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

ÁGNES STRICKLAND-PAJTÓK..................................................................... 53
“One Turne in the Inner Court”: The Art of Memory in the Sermons
of John Donne
NOÉMI MÁRIA NAJBAUER ......................................................................... 73
Ten Days in Paradise: The Chronology of Terrestrial Action

in Milton’s Paradise Lost
GÁBOR ITTZÉS ......................................................................................... 100
Part II: Shakespeare on Page and Stage
Hymen’s Truth: “At-one-ment” from Shakespeare to Tyndale,

from Tyndale to Shakespeare
TIBOR FABINY .......................................................................................... 132
viii Table of Contents
William Kemp and Falstaff: Reality and Role in Elizabethan

Popular Culture
KRISZTINA N. STREITMAN ....................................................................... 152
Forgotten and Remembered: the Shakespearean Hobby-Horse

and Circulations of Cultural Memory
NATÁLIA PIKLI ......................................................................................... 177
This Great Ship of Fools: The Ship of Fools and Elizabethan/Jacobean

Drama
ZITA TURI ................................................................................................ 202
“Walking Anatomies:” Violence and Dissection on the Early Modern

English Stage
ATTILA KISS ............................................................................................ 222
“In what vile part of this anatomy doth my name lodge?” Parts of Names
and Names of Parts in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
GÉZA KÁLLAY ......................................................................................... 243
“O Yet Defend Me, Friends!” Claudius’s Struggle for the Favour

of His Audience
BALÁZS SZIGETI....................................................................................... 261
“So Berattle the Common Stages”: Metatheatricality and Polyfunctionality

in two Hungarian Shakespeare Productions
VERONIKA SCHANDL ............................................................................... 283
Appendices .............................................................................................. 303
Bibliography............................................................................................ 311
Contributors............................................................................................. 336
Index........................................................................................................ 339
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. 1. Paradisal equilibrium at sunset..................................................... 104
Fig. 2. The earth’s shadow as an astronomical sundial............................ 108
Fig. 3. Key constellations in Paradise Lost ............................................. 109
Fig. 4. Satan steering his zenith (10.327–29) .......................................... 116
Fig. 5. Portrait of Andreas Vesalius from his De Humani Corporis

Fabrica (1543). (Courtesy of Somogyi Library, Szeged) .................. 227
Fig. 6. The title page of De Humani Corporis Fabrica.

(Courtesy of Somogyi Library, Szeged) ............................................ 228
Fig. 7. Plate from De Humani Corporis Fabrica.

(Courtesy of Somogyi Library, Szeged) ............................................ 239
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1. Epic chronology from the beginning of terrestrial action

to Satan’s journey through darkness .................................................. 112
Table 2. Chronology of epic action from Satan’s re-entry into

Paradise to Adam and Eve’s expulsion.............................................. 127
Table 3. Kapporet in LXX and its versions in the New Testament ......... 138
Table 4. Tyndale’s three translations of hilasmos ................................... 139

INTRODUCTION
EARLY MODERN COMMUNIONS

AND COMMUNICATIONS
KINGA FÖLDVÁRY AND ERZSÉBET STRÓBL
The essays in the current volume have grown out of the fruitful
discussions that characterised both the panels on early modern literature
and culture, and the series of Shakespearean sessions at the 10th biennial
Conference of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English, held on 27–
29 January, 2011 at Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Piliscsaba,
Hungary. The number of papers dedicated to Renaissance and particularly
Shakespearean research at the conference aptly demonstrated the powerful
presence of early modern studies in Hungarian academia, a presence
which has been one of the traditional strengths of English studies in the
country, and the animated discussion among scholars of early modern
studies proved that there is not only a past but also a promising future for
such collaborations. Taking up on the offer of Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, the essays have been developed into research articles, with a
conscious effort to emphasise links among individual contributions, thus
strengthening the cohesion within the volume as a whole.
The title of the volume, by its rather general tone admitting to the
simple fact that there are many types of connections and communications
within a field as diverse as early modern studies, also speaks of each and
every contribution in particular, and the whole volume in general. More
than anything, the volume demonstrates that the connections and common
points of reference within early modern studies bind Elizabethan and
Jacobean cultural studies and Shakespearean investigations together in an
unexpected number of ways, and therefore no researcher should afford to
keep themselves excluded of this discussion by focusing exclusively on a
narrow and limited field.
The variety of meanings associated with both key words hidden or laid
over each other at the heart of the title Early Modern Communi(cati)ons,
lend themselves to a particularly easy introduction of the individual
2 Introduction
contributions. At the same time, the words also reflect on the ties that bind
the various topics and discussions to the collection as a whole.
“Communion” is rooted in the Latin adjective communis, meaning
“common,” and this sense of sharing notions, images, or particular pieces
of creation and tradition is central to the argumentation of most essays in
the collection. Communion is also defined by the OED as “the sharing and
exchanging intimate thoughts and feelings, especially on a mental and
spiritual level,” and it is hard not to feel this intimacy of approach, this
emotional proximity that each and every author displays toward their own
respective topics. Moreover, most pieces also focus on an exchange, a
handing over of traditions, over time and space, from classical and
medieval origins, frequently pointing beyond the early modern period.
Communion is also regularly used with strong religious connotations,
which is equally relevant in our case, since several of the essays deal at
least in part with a sacred or clerical context within which elements of
literary tradition gain an additional meaning of divine import.
The root of “communication,” on the other hand, is none other than the
Latin verb communicare, meaning again “to share,” and as most of the
essays in the collection demonstrate, sharing is an inherent feature of the
early modern period, in between the relatively closed cultural spheres of
the Middle Ages, and the liberated thinking of the enlightenment. Early
modern culture could not choose but share most of the traditions it
inherited from the medieval period, particularly in the more informal
spaces of low and popular culture, even though authors associated with
high culture are often characterised by a conscious turning back to the art
of the Antiquity. At the same time, the period also functioned as a bridge
towards modernity, selecting and transforming elements of both pagan
Antiquity and Christian Middle Ages to preserve and share with later eras.
Set in the above delineated contexts of communions and
communications, the first group of essays deals with early modern culture,
presenting the socio-historical context which is necessary for any in-depth
literary investigation, as exemplified through analyses of outstanding
literary achievements from the period. The section is headed by Erzsébet
Stróbl’s reading of a prayer book compiled for Queen Elizabeth I, where
the significance of the visual layout of an Elizabethan book with the
alternative narrative presented by the border illustrations is underscored.
While the inherent relationship of text and margins is widely
acknowledged in the context of pre-Reformation devotional books, the
essay argues that during the first half of the Elizabethan period this
tradition survived and was fostered by one of the outstanding publishers of
Protestant works, John Day. In her essay Stróbl examines both the
Early Modern Communions and Communications 3
religious and political implications of the parallel messages offered by the

dramatic juxtaposition of the prayers of the English Queen and the
accompanying images of the danse macabre cycle.
The following essay, still dealing with the mid-Tudor era, focuses on a
short chapter from William Harrison’s Description of England, the
chorographical text published as an introduction to Holinshed’s Chronicles.
Kinga Földváry’s reading of Harrison’s treatise on giants shows that such
a pseudo-historical topic, still in circulation in scholarly discussions of the
period, helps the modern reader to get insights into themes as diverse as
the Puritan belief in a providential interpretation of human history, the
variety of Bible translations, and, first and foremost, the particular
working methods of William Harrison himself. She argues that for all the
textual and scholarly failings of the Puritan clergyman, Harrison’s text
displays a personal dedication to the cause of Protestantism that elevates
even the passages otherwise little characterised by individual authorial
creativity.
Similarly to the previous essay, Ágnes Strickland-Pajtók’s piece also
approaches an often neglected aspect of a well-known late Tudor literary
work. She offers an enquiry into another cornerstone of early modern
literature from the Elizabethan era, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,
focusing on a group of characters within the epic whose fate does not often
trouble readers or critics: those female figures whom she calls middle
women, since they belong neither to the impeccable and exemplary
positive heroines, nor to the evil antagonists of the romance, but fall
somewhere in between on a moral scale. The author argues that it is
precisely their fallibility, their occasional weaknesses and proneness to
commit mistakes what makes them human, and what invokes the
sympathy not only of modern readers, but apparently also Spenser’s
narrator, who shows a more lenient treatment towards them than what
fallen women could reasonably expect in the age.
The last two essays in the first part of the volume move beyond the
sixteenth century, and approach two of the major authors of the
seventeenth, John Donne and John Milton. Noémi Najbauer chooses a new
perspective to examine the vast body of the extant sermons of Donne, the
theory of mind, combining the philosophical, theological and literary
approaches of scholarship on Donne. After introducing the basic concept
of ars memoriae, the antique rhetorical technique of the art of memory, the
essay argues for its relevance in the Anglican preaching tradition in
general, and in the construction of the structure and imagery of Donne’s
sermons in particular. Najbauer shows how both Donne’s use of mental
spaces as structural units, and the variety of striking metaphors he
4 Introduction
employed testify to the significance of the art of memory in the homiletic

literature of the early seventeenth century.
No volume on early modern English literature would be complete
without reference to the greatest masterpiece of English epic poetry, and
thus an essay by Gábor Ittzés completes the first part of the volume, re-
examining a key issue of the interpretation of John Milton’s Paradise
Lost: the temporal aspects of the terrestrial action. Through the careful
investigation of Milton’s use of cognitive and poetic-metaphorical
indicators of time, and the meticulous study of the scholarship of the last
three hundred years, the author offers a comprehensive analysis of
Milton’s earthly chronology from Satan’s entry into cosmos until the day
of the expulsion. Ittzés also establishes the general narrative principles of
presenting the passing of time in Milton’s work, and calls attention to the
pitfalls of the overinterpretation of the text.
Set against the backdrop of the above delineated early modern literary
traditions, the second part of the volume focuses on the oeuvre of the most
famous representative of the age, William Shakespeare, with individual
chapters creating a tangible continuum, moving from the cultural and
literary context that informs his work, to the interpretation in present-day
performances and their theoretical background. Tibor Fabiny’s article
explores the influence of the language of the Bible upon the making of
early modern culture. Going back to the time of religious controversies in
the early Tudor period, Fabiny claims that the works of the first Bible
translator, William Tyndale played a key role in the formation of the
English language. Through analysis of the linguistic, theological and
literary connotations of the word “atonement” coined by Tyndale, the
essay presents how the word first used in Biblical-related contexts
ultimately contributed to the artistic principle of “reconciliation” in the
plays of William Shakespeare, and became the key motif in his mature
comedy, As You Like It.
The next two essays deal with the broader context of Shakespearean
theatre, investigating various literary and performative traditions of
sixteenth-century popular culture. Krisztina N. Streitman’s article, after
introducing the most influential critical theories on early modern popular
culture by C. L. Barber, Michael Bakhtin, and Peter Burke, outlines the
major elements of this predominantly oral tradition, and provides an
extensive analysis of its influence on the formation of the character of
Falstaff in the Shakespearean canon. Writing about the arguably most
famous Elizabethan entertainer, William Kemp, the essay sketches out the
parallels between the life and career of Kemp as a star performer of the
morris and jig, and the various character traits assigned to Falstaff by the
bard in the Henry IV plays. Streitman argues that the metaphorical links
between the historical and the fictional figures, both associated with the
carnival and the Lord of Misrule traditions, may also provide support for a
biographical connection between the two.
In close communion with the previous piece, Natália Pikli’s essay also
investigates the popular culture of the age of Shakespeare, albeit from a
slightly different perspective: she underlines its transformation in the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as brought about by the
disappearance of certain medieval festive and religious rituals due to the
Reformation. Looking at one of the most interesting elements, the figure
of the hobby-horse, a physical and metaphorical link to medieval
traditions, Pikli unveils the palimpsest of inherited and translucent cultural
and linguistic layers that inform the dramatic texts of the plays of
Shakespeare and his contemporaries, proving the hobby-horse to be no
less than a treasure trove of cultural connotations.
Another exciting link between past ages and the early modern period is
exemplified by the work of a young scholar, Zita Turi, in her essay on The
Ship of Fools. Turi follows the appearance of the theme from Sebastian
Brant’s fifteenth-century High German text, to its development into a
widely used metaphor in English literature by the end of the sixteenth
century. The author relies on an in-depth reading of critical literature to
show the roots of the metaphor in popular culture, and to argue that by
virtue of the tradition of the emblem book and the impresa behind the first
English translation by Alexander Barclay, the volume may even be
considered as the first emblem book printed in England. She then moves
on to investigate various uses of the theme in the dramatic literature of the
Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, identifying and interpreting references
to The Ship of Fools in the work of Thomas Nashe, Thomas Dekker,
beside the oeuvre of William Shakespeare.
The very same rich dramatic tradition of the age provides the backdrop
to the chapter by Attila Kiss as well, whose writing focuses on the
presence of violence, horror, and transgression in the imagery of early
modern tragedy. With examples from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and
Hamlet, and through the analysis of The Revenger’s Tragedy, Kiss argues
that the enhanced use of the “dissected, tortured, anatomized and mutilated
human body on the Tudor and Stuart stage” signifies an epistemological
change, and marks out the audience’s interest for hitherto unrevealed
dimensions of the human anatomy. To substantiate his claims about the
preoccupation with representations of the human body of an anatomical
precision, he turns not only to dramatic literature, but also alludes to other
artistic and narrative genres of the period where an intensified desire to
6 Introduction
present and test the “inward dimensions of the human body and mind” is
detectable.
Moving on from the heritage of past ages, the following group of
essays also bears witness to the communicative power of the Shakespearean
text, reaching out from the early modern period to our own times,
constantly re-acquiring its relevance via new interpretive and performative
traditions. The chapter by Géza Kállay examines the relationship between
names and personal identity in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and the
related question of the various uses of the word “part” within the play.
Relying on ideas of the theory of names by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand
Russell, Peter Strawson, John Searle and Saul Kripke, the essay analyzes
the power of the name and naming above identity, and attempts to offer
answers to questions such as how far a name may penetrate into the self of
a person, or how it determines personal characteristics, or whether it is a
social frame that can be discarded with ease.
This analytical and systematic reading of Romeo and Juliet is followed
by the close reading of the text of Hamlet by a young scholar, Balázs
Szigeti. His analysis of the soliloquies of Hamlet and Claudius by the
methods of pre-performance criticism sheds light above all on the text’s
theatrical potential. Szigeti claims that the conflict and struggle of the two
characters is manifested in the power of the soliloquies to best express the
two characters’ inner thoughts and to secure the support of the audience.
He enumerates the alternative performance possibilities the text provides
for actors and interpreters, and approaches the play from a directorial
aspect, sensitive to the living connection between Hamlet on the page, that
is, in critical writing, and in live performance on the stage.
The final chapter in the volume, Veronika Schandl’s essay may be
easily read as a conclusion that reinforces many of the themes investigated
by other contributors. She focuses on two Hungarian theatre productions,
an 1986 performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by István
Somogyi, and Sándor Zsótér’s 2009 Hamlet. Her interpretation places both
productions not only in the historical context of the fall of communism and
the subsequent changes in the cultural and theatrical life of the country,
but she also intends to point beyond the generally accepted categories
offered by theatre historian Árpád Kékesi-Kun, and argues for the
significance of metatheatricality and polyfunctionality as the key terms we
may use to describe the postmodern developments in the theatre in the past
two and a half decades.
In the same way as the volume comprises writings on a diverse but still
coherent range of topics, the authorial team is equally representative of
diversity and continuity at the same time. The authors include several
senior scholars working in the Hungarian academic community, representing

all significant research centres in the field from all over the country, but a
number of essays have been contributed by promising young talents as
well. The editors hope that in the same way these essays have developed a
network of communication between locations and generations, individual
scholars and research communities, they will also manage to inspire
further generations of early modern researchers, at times and places far
removed from the birth of these essays.
We wish to dedicate the volume to the memory of the late Professor
István Géher, the father figure of Hungarian Shakespeare scholarship,
whose vision and personality contributed to the formation of the close-knit
scholarly community of early modern English studies in Hungary. We
hope that these essays may communicate to the world at least part of his
heartfelt enthusiasm for the early modern period, and his dedication to
William Shakespeare’s oeuvre in particular, which is the true legacy of his
life and work.
PART I
SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS ISSUES

IN EARLY MODERN TEXTS
THE QUEEN AND DEATH:
AN ELIZABETHAN BOOK OF DEVOTION
ERZSÉBET STRÓBL
In an early Elizabethan prayer book of 15691 one’s eyes meet with the
depiction of a queen being led off by a skeleton. The verse lines
accompanying it warns the reader “Queene also thou doost see: As I am,
so thou shall be,” and the bottom border illustration further increases the
threat by an effigy of a queen inscribed “We that were of highest degree;
Lye dead here now, as ye do see.”2 The prayer framed by this margin is a
Latin language composition speaking in the persona of a queen. It asserts
her unworthiness, gives thanks for God’s protection and asks for his help:
“Extend, O Father, extend, I say, to Thy daughter from thy sublime throne
those things Thou judgest to be necessary for her in such an arduous and
unending office.”3 The Queen’s words and the image of Death appeared in
close proximity on the same page. Could it be a coincidence, or was it an
editorial choice?
The Christian Prayers and Meditations in English, French, Italian,
Spanish, Greek, and Latin was popularly known as Queen Elizabeth I’s
prayer book, and the section where the Dance of Death sequence appeared
contained the foreign language prayers speaking in the Queen’s
personalized voice. Although this arrangement is conspicuous, no attempt
has been made yet to study the reading of the text of the prayers and the
border images together as a complex means of communication. The
following article argues that this prayer book needs to be analysed in the
way early modern books—especially devotional books—were read, that is,
1
Richard Day, Christian Prayers and Meditations in English, French, Italian,
Spanish, Greek, and Latin (London: J. Day, 1569).
2
Ibid., Oo3r.
3
“Porrige pater, porrige inquƗ è sublime solio filiæ tuæ, quæ illi ad tam arduú
necessaria esse iudicas,” ibid., Oo4v. The translation is from the edition of the
prayers in Elizabeth I, Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and
Mary Beth Rose (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000),
159–60.
The Queen and Death: An Elizabethan Book of Devotion 11
we have to take into consideration the implications suggested by the

possible connection between the image of the Queen fashioned in the
prayers and the illustrations depicting the figures of Death. The aim of the
present paper is to look at this visual aspect of the printed page—
illustrations, arrangement, and the medium—in order to enrich the
understanding of the cultural significance of the text and to enfold the
multiple layers of meaning inherent in this unique prayer book.
The Christian Prayers and Meditations (1569) was published by John
Day, a printer of important devotional books composed in a Reformation
spirit. It is a compilation of prayers for private use and relies heavily on
Henry Bull’s Christian Prayers and Holie Meditations4 published a year
earlier. However, it contains additional prayers, among them some English
language prayers scattered in the volume and a bunch of foreign language
prayers printed together at the end of the book that address God in the first
person singular spoken by the persona of the Queen. The book itself stands
out among contemporary devotional writings by using figurative border
illustrations throughout the entire volume. The richness of the illustrations
reflects the influence of the Catholic private prayer books, the Books of
Hours. While the Reformation launched an attack on religious images,
John Day’s book is an example of the contrary process. Instead of purging
his work from pictorial representation an attempt was made to establish a
relevant Protestant visual imagery for private prayers. A degree of official
approval of the project is expressed by the allusions to the Queen’s person.
A portrait of Elizabeth I in prayer opens the volume, and her prayers end
the book. The final position of the Queen’s compositions enhances the role
of the danse macabre theme of the border decoration which also appears at
the end of the work. Could this layout have any religious or political
overtones on the eve of the Catholic Northern Rebellion and in the climate
of severe disputes in Parliament about the Queen’s succession?
The following study renders a cultural reading of the pages of
Christian Prayers and Meditations where the image of the printed page is
“understood as a cultural agent rather then a passive medium”5 and the
significance of the layout of texts and borders are treated as important
ingredients of the compiler’s intentions. The analysis of the visual
experience of the reader, the pre-existing cultural, social and political
formations and the text of the prayers shed light on one of the aspects of
4
Henry Bull, Christian Prayers and Holie Meditations (London: Thomas East,
1568).
5
Evelyn B. Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern
England (Charlottesville; London: University Press of Virginia: 1993), 3.
12 Erzsébet Stróbl
this early modern devotional writing, the message inherent in the dramatic
juxtaposition of the image of the English Queen and the figure of Death.
A Book of Devotion: Re-Forming a Catholic Tradition

The Christian Prayers and Meditations is a collection of devotions for
private use in the tradition of the medieval Books of Hours. The Book of
Hours (in Latin “Horae,” in English “Primer”) was the single most popular
book of the late Middle Ages representing the “innermost thoughts and
most sacred privacies of late medieval people.”6 Modelled on the Latin
books used by the clergy it contained a simplified version of the seven
daily offices, the Gradual Psalms, the Penitential Psalms, the Litany of
Saints, and the Office of the Dead. While the richly illustrated manuscript
versions cost a fortune, with the arrival of printing cheap editions were
available for a broad layer of society including not just the prosperous
aristocracy, but also the gentry, the mercantile classes, shopkeepers and
even domestic servants.7 This laicisation of the clerical forms of prayer
was typical of the heightened seriousness of interior religious life that
penetrated late medieval society. By 1530, there were at least 760 editions
of Books of Hours, among them 114 produced for England.8 These books
appeared also on many portraits9 to accompany a rich sitter and became
icons of an age where private and public beliefs were the subject of the
highest political importance. Books of Hours represented not just a
valuable possession to be bequeathed in legal testaments, but they were in
use for several generations containing notes about their owners as well as
remarks about the births and deaths of family members.
After the Reformation the practice of using primers did not cease in
England in spite of the concern to enforce communal observance rather
than the suspect forms of private prayer.10 As the devotional life of people
6
Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240–1570
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 4.
7
Ibid., 4, 19, 25, 28, 30.
8
Ibid., 36.
9
See the Portrait of a Young Man (National Gallery, London) by Petrus Christus,
the Portrait of Mary Wooton, Lady Guildford, 1527 (St Louis Art Museum,
Missouri) and The More Family, 1527 (Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel) by
Hans Holbein. The portrait of Princess Elizabeth, 1546–47 (The Royal Collection
at Windsor) attributed to William Scrots represents the English princess with a
similar book to the one appearing in the Holbein portraits.
10
There was a primer printed or reprinted nearly every year between 1534 and
1559 by printers such as N. Bourman (1540), John Byddel (1534, 1535, 1536),
is by nature conservative,11 even official primers were produced to cater

for the unchanged demand for this type of devotional literature. In 1534 a
Protestant primer was produced under the patronage of Thomas Cromwell
where the denounced doctrines and practices of the Catholic Church (e.g.,
the rubrics referring to indulgences, or the Office of the Dead) were cut. In
1539 the bishop of Rochester compiled an official primer in Latin and
English, and in 1545 an official royal primer was issued where only the
doctrinally incorrect prayers (for indulgences, or the Office of the Dead)
were left out, but other old prayers used by a broad layer of society
remained untouched. During the early reign of Elizabeth primers also
continued to be printed12 and the Christian Prayers and Meditations fits
into this tradition by its content and layout. Among the old forms of prayer
it contained were the Litany, the Seven Penitential Psalms, the arrangement
of prayers according to the hours of the day, scriptural prayers and
meditations. John Day, its printer and perhaps compiler, who was one of
the champions of the Reformation printing trade, realized the continued
demand to furnish people with such prayers. The layout of the book, with
its sumptuous border illustrations from the life of Christ, the Dance of
Death and the Last Judgement furthermore associated the work with
primers and catered for the unchanged visual appetite of people.
From the earliest times primers contained a rich selection of
illustrations. There were elaborate borders, initials as well as full-page
images. A Book of Hours by the sixteenth century in most cases started
with the calendar that was accompanied by a set of twelve prints
containing the twelve different ages of man, and a depiction of the
Anatomical Man. The opening of each of the hours was also illustrated by
a set of standardized scenes from the life of Christ, as well as powerful
single images, among them a reference to death by the depiction of the
Robert Clay (1555), Arnold Conings (1559), R. Copland (1540), John Day (1557),
T. Gaultier (1550), T. Gibson (1538), Thomas Godfray (1535), Richard Grafton
(1540, 1542, 1545, 1546, 1547, 1549, 1551), Richard Kele (1543, 1548), John
Kyston and Henry Sutton (1557), John Mayler (1539, 1540), John Mychell (1549),
Thomas Petyt (1540, 1542, 1543, 1544, 1545), J. Le Prest (1555, 1556), R.
Redman (1537, 1538), Francis Regnault (1535, 1538), C. Ruremond (1536),
Wilhelm Seres (1560, 1565, 1566, 1568), Robert Valentin (1551, 1554, 1555,
1556), John Wayland (1539, 1555, 1558), Edward Witchurche (1545, 1546, 1548).
11
About the reluctance of the population to conform to regulations demanding the
burning or defacing of images during the early Elizabethan period see Eamon
Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 565–92.
12
It was only by the late 1570s that the form became old-fashioned. Duffy,
Marking the Hours, 171.
Legend of the Three Living and Dead. Another allusion to the topic of
death was the Dance of Death series, which appeared mostly with male
characters, though could contain a separate male and female sequence, as
for instance in the primer printed in Paris in 1502 by Philippe Pigouchet
(STC 15896). Books of Hours for English use were printed not only in
England, but on the Continent as well, where their layout was much more
elaborate than that of their insular counterparts.
After the Reformation—despite the attack of certain images (those
about Mary, Thomas Becket or other saints)—visual representation was
not altogether abandoned. Although numerically being slightly less than in
other parts of Europe, between 1536 and 1603 more than five thousand
images were catalogued in England, and with a moderate estimate of two
hundred copies for each volume, over one million images had been in
circulation throughout the country by the end of the sixteenth century.13
Speaking about early modern images Patrick Collinson pointed out that by
the later reign of Elizabeth I the mode of representation shifted towards the
emblematic, exempting the visual experience from popular culture and
making it “terse, cryptic, and allegorically bookish.”14 Instead of the
“sacramental gaze” of late-medieval piety, images were looked upon with
the “cold gaze” of the reformers that assessed “images in a more didactic
and doctrinal way.”15 No such tendency appeared in the books published
by Day, which set out to establish a popular visual tradition within the
Protestant faith.
John Day was one of the earliest publishers of Reformation polemics.
During the Catholic Marian years, he was presumably the printer of the
radical Protestant tracts published by the clandestine press under the name
of Michael Wood.16 With the reign of Elizabeth his reputation as a printer
of the new faith grew further by becoming the publisher of John Foxe’s
Acts and Monuments. While Day’s Protestant allegiances cannot be
disputed, it is obvious from his works that he was no puritan iconoclast.
Foxe’s volume showcased Protestant faith and devotion not just by its text
but also by its memorable images. In the various editions of Foxe’s
martyrology Day created a visual propaganda of the English Reformation
13
David Jonathan Davis, Picturing the Invisible: Religious Printed Images in
Elizabethan England (PhD diss., University of Exeter, 2009), https://eric.exeter
.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10036/85653/DavisD.pdf?sequence=2, 33.
14
Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society
1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 236.
15
Davis, Picturing the Invisible, 39.
16
Elizabeth Elveden, Patents, Pictures and Patronage: John Day and the Tudor
Book Trade (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 30–34.
and laid the foundations of a Protestant religious imagery. In the first 1563
edition fifty-three illustrations with fifty-seven occurrences appeared,
while in the enlarged 1570 edition 105 illustrations with 149 occurrences
were published.17 Far from rejecting visual representation, Day’s work
demonstrates a deliberate attempt to continue the long pictorial tradition of
Christianity, creating memorable images about the life and struggle of the
church. Day’s other work, attempting a similarly ambitious task, his
Christian Prayers and Meditations also attests to his attempt to produce
visually pleasing, deluxe editions of writings that advocate the new faith in
order to popularize its beliefs not by refusing visuality but by re-forming
it. The volume’s association with the Queen, both through her personalised
voice in some writings and by the royal approval proclaimed in the two
full-page royal arms (depicted at the beginning and the end of the book),
granted him a chance to explore the possibilities the old medium offered
for the new material.
One of the copies of the book, which was specially prepared for the
Queen as a presentation copy with hand-coloured illustrations,18 shows
that the taste of the Queen was not against such editions. In 1578 a very
similar prayer book with the foreword by John Day’s son Richard was
published under the title A Book of Christian Prayers.19 In its content this
book is usually regarded as a separate work rather than a new edition of
the Christian Prayers and Meditations as it drastically rearranged its
material, deleted and added parts, omitted the foreign language prayers of
the Queen, and changed her English language prayers from the first person
to the third. However, in its scheme of illustrations it continued John
Day’s earlier program of using a parallel visual narrative on its borders.
The scope of illustrations was largely extended: in addition to the
representations of the Life of Christ cycle, the male and female sequences
of the Dance of Death and a Last Judgement scene appearing in the 1569
prayer book, it included spectacular new sequences on the Signs of
Judgement, the Works of Mercy, the Five Senses, and a procession of
Virtues accompanied by their corresponding Vices.20 This magnificent
prayer book was far from unpopular and was reprinted in 1581, 1590, and
1608. However, one may wonder why the Queen’s prayers were left out
17
Ibid. 100–101.
18
This copy is in the Lambeth Palace Library. It was hand-coloured presumably by
artists in the workshop of Archbishop Matthew Parker at Lambeth Palace for the
personal use of the queen.
19
Richard Day, A Book of Christian Prayers (London: John Day, 1578).
20
See Samuel C. Chew, “The Iconography of A Book of Christian Prayers (1578)
Illustrated,” in Huntington Library Quarterly 8, no. 3 (May, 1945): 293–305.
from these later versions. But before seeking an answer to this question, it
is worth considering what importance the margins—in which such
illustrations appeared—had in early productions of the printing press and
in the reading process of the early modern public.
Texts and Margins

In modern editions early modern works appear as abstract texts
detached from the actual visual form in which they were presented to their
original audiences. Yet books, especially scriptural ones, were often
accompanied by extensive commentary and illustration in the margins
which formed part of the experience of reading and added further layers of
meaning to their study. For instance, the annotation of scripture was a
common practice in Catholic works from the earliest times. Their
importance over the interpretation of the core text was decisive, and
Reformation theologians, fearing the influence the glosses exerted over the
Word of God, often condemned the use of them. In England, a royal
proclamation of 1538 explicitly banned all marginal annotations in
devotional texts,21 which shows that the margins were estimated as an
important place of communication to the reader. In spite of the prohibition,
the practice continued and even in Protestant editions of devotional works
compilers often added their own comments on the margins.22 Illustration
as a means to extend the appeal of the text also survived in books after the
Reformation and was used extensively both in religious and secular
contexts. For instance, in Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar
(1579) both the images preceding the eclogues of the individual months
and the glosses of E. K. added valuable aspects to the comprehension of
the lines of the Calendar. Such works provide a clue to the reading
methods of the early modern period and justify the comparative analysis of
margin and text as parts of a single concept.
James A. Knapp described the early modern reading process as a
“movement back and forth—between text and image—[. . .] to merge the
effects of a book’s verbal and visual information to produce a totally
complex and hybrid object.”23 He pointed out that illustrations were
“related to the words in a way that drew on prevailing cultural tastes while
simultaneously capitalizing on the power of images to convey a variety of
21
Duffy, Marking the Hours, 150.
22
Tribble, Margins and Marginality, 9–12.
23
James A. Knapp, “A Bastard Art: Woodcut Illustration in the Sixteenth
Century,” in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, ed. Douglas A.
Brooks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 165.
messages” and “images opened the text to multiple and sometimes

contradictory readings (and viewings).”24 D. J. Davis also reached a
similar conclusion when writing on early modern religious images. He
claimed that images appearing on the borders of a page “illustrate the text,
but often they represent a parallel narrative to the text and usually act as
guides for the reader.”25 The Christian Prayers and Meditations contains
both text and images in its margins and invites readers to such a parallel
reading. Though it has been examined many times by those interested in
the iconography of one of the most richly illustrated books of the
Elizabethan period,26 and by those examining the change and purging of
religious practices in the early reign of Queen Elizabeth,27 and also by
those writing about the literary achievements of England’s female
monarch,28 in all approaches, the text and the illustrations were divorced
from each other, appearing as autonomous entities in two different genres
and their complementary relationship and significance were disregarded.
The Christian Prayers and Meditations used two themes to illustrate
its contents. There were seven sequences of the scenes from the Life of
Christ represented in a typological layout, with the image in the middle of
three marginal compartments containing the New Testament scene and the
two Old Testament types shown below and above it. There were also three
sequences of the danse macabre, two with male and one with female
characters, each page containing two episodes. Appropriate verses
accompanied all images, thus it was possible to flip through the pages and
just enjoy the reading and viewing of the margins. Both of these themes
were common in book illustration and though the woodcuts were
presumably designed and cut for this volume (perhaps by foreign
workmen living in the vicinity of John Day’s workshop)29 they presented
24
Ibid., 161, 151–52.
25
26
Chew, “Iconography,” 112–15.
27
Duffy, Marking the Hours, 171–74.
28
Jennifer Clement, “The Queen’s Voice: Elizabeth I’s Christian Prayers and
Meditations,” in Early Modern Literary Studies 13, no. 3 (January, 2008): 1.1–26,
http://purl.oclc.org/emls/13-3/clemquee.htm; Steven W. May, “Queen Elizabeth
Prays for the Living and the Dead,” in Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing, ed.
Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo (London: The British Library: 2007), 201–11.
29
John Foxe, whose Acts and Monuments was printed by John Day too, made a
request to William Cecil, that the number of foreign workmen working for Day
should be allowed to be raised. This fact shows the increased amount of work Day
was facing in the 1560s. Evenden, Patent, Pictures and Patronage, 96–108.
Twenty-one of the Life of Christ designs in the Christian Prayers and Meditations
bear the initials “I C,” while in about half of the Dance of Death images the initial
well-known narratives to their audience, and were more or less free copies
of illustrations from France.30
It was a common practice in early modern print that woodcuts
appeared in more than one book. This recycling of images “created
numerous messages by being re-contextualized”31 and mapped out an
interesting iconographic, religious, cultural and commercial interrelationship
between widely different texts.32 The design of the individual cuts was
often not original, but imitated postures and gestures of figures in a long
line of tradition of religious iconography. However, the arrangement of
text and image was always unique to a volume, mostly not even repeated
in the different editions of the same work. Thus, the recycling of the
woodcuts meant a repetition of images, but not a repetitive pattern of
reading as this depended on the complex layout of the page.
The representation of the scenes of the life of Christ was a common
topic for Books of Hours. In the Christian Prayers and Meditations the
series contained thirty-eight plates appearing in all the seven repetitions of
the cycle, and some additional episodes in certain sequences. Samuel C.
Chew’s iconographical analysis of the border illustrations concentrated on
the chronological misplacements in the sequences and carefully enumerated
the “errors” in the line of events and the instances where these were set
right. He blamed Day’s business where “there was not very alert
supervision of the press-men [. . .] who unintelligently returned to the
original wrong order and had to be corrected again.”33 However, he failed
to realize a possible connection between the structural units of the prayer
book and the corrections, and missed the examples where the
misplacement of a scene could have been deliberate to reflect the meaning
or the structure of the text.
A marked adjustment to the content of the prayer book is the fitting of
the beginning of the fourth sequence of the Life of Christ to the new
material introduced in the book. Up till that point Day’s compilation
contained prayers selected from Bull’s Christian Prayers and Meditations,
but there it continued with an old form of prayer, not included in Bull’s
compilation but part of the Catholic primer tradition, the Seven Penitential
“G” appears. Most scholars agree that the craftsmanship exhibited on the woodcuts
was above the level of the native workmen. Ibid., 96, Chew, “Iconography,” 395.
30
Chew mentions that the design for the Last Judgement scene that concludes the
Dance of Death is practically identical with one used by Pigouchet. Chew,
“Iconography,” 294–95.
31
32
33
Chew, “Iconography,” 296.
Psalms. While the second sequence of the Life of Christ started during a
meditation, and the beginning of the third was also unmarked, this fourth
sequence commenced with new material within the book. To enable a
fresh start of the episodes of the Life of Christ, the editor inserted the first
English language prayer of the Queen at this point, and, as this ran just
beyond the last scene of the sequence used so far, he included additional
cuts (chronologically misplaced) to fill in the space. These new images
(the Miracle of the Pool at Bethesda, Christ and the Canaanite Woman, the
Walking on the Water) celebrated God’s power over sin, sickness and
nature that rhymed with the words of prayer “how [. . .] shall I thy
handmaide, being by kinde a weak woman, have sufficient abilitie to rule
[. . .] unless thou [. . .] doe also in my reigning endue and help thy
heavenly grace, without which, none, even the wisest among the children
of men, can once think a right thought.”34
This section break of the book was also marked by an interrupted
pagination. After P4 it started afresh with A1. Furthermore, in the central
textual unit of the page layout on the top corner of the pages Arabic
numerals (from 41 to 88) appeared, which may point to a possible
borrowing of the typeset of the middle section from an older work. While
the continuity of the layout of border illustrations gives a unified
impression, the transition from one type of prayer to another was definitely
stated by pictorial means in the margins.
Another similar break in the pagination occurs after the second N2,
which continues with Aa1, and which again uses Arabic numerals (from 1
to 48) in the top corners of the central section of the page. The episodes of
Christ’s life are also interrupted here: the line of the sixth sequence being
at the scene of the Transfiguration reverts to the Flight into Egypt. Once
again, new content is introduced here: a Mirror for Princes (“Of the
kingdome of God, and how all kinges ought to seeke his glory,”
“Promises, admonitions and counsels to good kinges with examples of
their good successe,” “Sentences of threatening to evill kinges and
examples of their evill successe”). It is interesting to notice that in these
two sections, marked by a definite break both in the illustration and the
pagination, the confused order of the episodes of the Return from Egypt
and the Baptism of Christ within the sequence of the Life of Christ
(noticed by Chew in his analysis as an “error”) is corrected. While Chew
was right that these corrections reflect a more alert supervision of press-
men, he did not notice that the enhanced interest in these parts resulted
34
Christian Prayers and Meditations, P4r.
from the content of the prayers. The new material introduced in these parts
was emphatic as it addressed the Queen directly or indirectly.
A further example of adjustment of the borders to the content of the
prayers can be seen in the conclusion of the fifth sequence of the Life of
Christ, where the second English language prayer of the Queen is placed.
Here again, to enable a prominent ultimate position, additional images
were used (thus extending the set of the Life of Christ to forty-three cuts,
the most complete within the book). Furthermore, while Chew pointed out
the chronological misplacements of the scenes, these can be explained by
the editor’s intention to match the prayer’s words about relief in sickness
by scenes depicting Jesus’s power to heal the sick in body and soul. The
Queen’s prayer “In Time of Sicknes” appears next to three scenes (used
already next to the first prayer of the Queen) about three miracles of Christ
and new scenes on sin (Woman taken in Adultery), power to work
miracles (Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes) and redemption (Healing of
the Sin of the Palsy).
According to Chew’s study the Life of Christ sequences are followed
by the Dance of Death “with casual abruptness and no relation to the text
of the prayers.”35 However, again the content of the prayer book changed
with the new set of illustrations. This part of the book contained the
foreign language prayers of the Queen. Although the Queen’s first, and
part of the second French language prayer was illustrated by the last
scenes of the last Life of Christ sequence, the great majority of her prayers
appear next to the images of the danse macabre. As there is a
correspondence between image and prayer both in structure and in content
at the most important parts of the compilation, this proximity of the words
of the Queen and the representation of death must not be overlooked or
dismissed.
The Motif of the Dance of Death

The dramatic juxtaposition of the living with the dead was an ancient
motif in western culture. In the Middle Ages the theme received a growing
attention with several literary genres exploiting its associations. From the
thirteenth century representations of the legend of the Three Living and
the Three Dead, in which three young men on a hunt met three dead men,
served as a warning for the right manner of living.36 The medieval vado
35
Chew, The Iconography, 297.
36
“Quod fuimus, estis; quod sumus, vos eritis” (Where we were, you are; what we
are, you will be). About the legend see István Kozáky, “A haláltáncok struktúrái,”
mori poems, where individual representatives of society lamented the

coming of death in a monologue, were also widespread. However, the
drastic experience of the Black Death of 1348 and the recurring outbreaks
of the epidemic throughout Europe caused a heightened awareness of
sudden death and mutability in the fourteenth century. Books on the art of
dying well (ars moriendi) became popular and were published in several
languages in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A further
genre connected to mortality and appearing in both literature and the
visual arts was the Dance of Death, where death figures engaged in dance
or dialogue with members of the social scale. Kings and paupers, queens
and simple maids were equated in the perspective of the new genre, and
the grotesque combination of music and dance with the imminence of
death created an emotionally shocking memento mori. The sequence
usually started with a person of the highest social rank (the pope in the
clerical hierarchy, or the emperor in the secular one) and depicted figures
on the descending social scale, combined with variations on the ages of
men and representatives of various professions. While the danse macabre
appeared in the verse of Jehan le Fèvre in 1376 for the first time, the first
pictorial representation of a Dance of Death was painted on the wall of the
churchyard Cimetière des Innocents in Paris in the year of 1425 during the
period of the English occupation of the city. The murals were
accompanied by French verses that were translated within a few years by
John Lydgate into English. A wealthy citizen of London, John Carpenter
commissioned that Lydgate’s translation should be transformed and
incorporated into a pictorial representation of the Dance of Death in the
churchyard of Old St Paul’s cathedral.37 This series became the model of
many further frescos throughout England, and can be frequently found in
texts which refer to it just as Paul’s dance.38 Lydgate added six additional
episodes to the Paris sequence, among them four female figures. The Paris
[“The Structures of Dances of Death”] in Mauzóleum: A halállal való foglalkozás

[Mausoleum: Preoccupied with Death], ed. Lajos Adamik, István Jelenczki and
Miklós Sükösd (Budapest: ELTE BTK, 1987), 217–37; and Gert Kaiser, Der
Tanzende Tod: Mittelalterliche Totentänze [The Dancing Death: Medieval Death
Dances] (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag GmbH, 1982).
37
Sophy Oosterwiyk, ‘Fro Paris to Inglond’? The Danse Macabre in Text and
Image in Late-Medieval England, (Unpublished PhD diss., Leiden University,
2009), https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/13873, 34–36.
38
It was destroyed together with other monuments of the churchyard in 1549. John
Stow in his famous Survey of London (1598) describes the danse in detail together
with its destruction by the order of the Duke of Somerset. Stow’s Survey of London
(London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1956), 293.
set was probably an all-male series, similar to the one shown by Guyot
Marchant’s publication of 1485, the first printed danse macabre. Marchant
printed a female set only a year later in 1486. English manuscripts used
both versions, some following Marchant, and some mixing female and
male figures.39 From the late fifteenth century the Parisian printers
Antoine Vérard, Simon Vostre, and Thielman Kerver published several
Books of Hours containing a Dance of Death in the margins.40 Yet it was
only in a Book of Hours produced for the English market in 1521 that the
illustrations were accompanied by verse lines (by Lydgate).41
The Christian Prayers and Meditations also contained both text and
image, and incorporated a female series as well. This Dance of Death
illustration is exceptional, as it is the only known representation of a danse
macabre in an English Protestant prayer book (apart from the later version
of the book in 1578). There were only two other Dances of Death printed
in the period by English presses. Both were one-page broadsides,
combining text and image to please a wide audience of a secular interest.
One of them, The Daunce and Song of Death,42 (published in the same
year as the Christian Prayers and Meditations) emphasized the
carnivalesque nature of the genre, with the figure of sickness acting as
minstrel and skeletons leading a dance around an open grave with pairs of
the king and beggar, the old man and the child, and the wise man and the
fool. A similar popular print, arranged as a ballad was published in 1580
beginning with the line “Marke well the effect, purtreyed here in all.”43
The Christian Prayers and Meditations contained nothing of the popular
lore and humour of the theme mirrored in these broadsides. It made no
reference to music, dance or instruments but sounded a serious tone, a
moralizing warning to its readers. The characters depicted in contemporary
costume were taken by surprise and were reluctant to follow the skeletons.
The bottom border illustrations further increased the threatening
atmosphere of the danse macabre. They depicted images copying cadaver
effigy tombs,44 that is, dead bodies in different states of decomposition of
39
Leonard P. Kurtz, The Dance of Death and the Macabre Spirit in European
Literature (New York: Columbia University, 1934), 139–46.
40
Oosterwiyk, ‘Fro Paris to Inglond,’ 105.
41
Hore beate Marie Virginis ad usum in signis ac preclare ecclesie Sarum cum
figuris passionis mysterium representatibus recenter additis Paris (London:Johan
Bignon, 1521).
42
The Daunce and Song of Death (London: J. Awdely, 1569).
43
Marke Well the Effect Purtreyed (London: S. n., c. 1580).
44
On the tradition of the cadaver effigy see Oosterwiyk, ‘Fro Paris to Inglond,’
222–54.
the flesh. The grimness of the representation was increased by the ominous
lines of warning:
As we were, so are ye: / And as we are, so shell ye be. (Kk3v)
Tyme do passe, and tyme it is, / Do use well tyme, least tyme do misse.
(Kk4r)
From earth to earth, so must it be, / From lyfe to death, as thou dooest see.
(Kk4v)
Thus, next to the text of the foreign language prayers written by the
persona of the Queen there was a visual message in the margins to inspire
personal contemplation and meditation about the worthlessness and
finality of worldly might and power. Before looking at the possible
connection between the danse macabre and the words of the Queen, I
would like to address the question of the authorship of these prayers.
Prayers of a Queen: Identity and Image Making

The Christian Prayers and Meditations contains two English, seven
French, four Italian, three Spanish, three Latin, and two Greek prayers
addressing God in the voice of the Queen. Though the book was referred
to popularly as the Queen’s Prayer Book,45 nowhere does it claim that any
of its content was composed by Queen Elizabeth. While there is no factual
proof for the Queen’s authorship, many scholars are inclined to accept it
on the basis of stylistic evidence.46 However, there is a strong argument
for the authenticity of the prayers that critics overlooked so far. The two
English language prayers written in the persona of the Queen and placed at
the end of two important structural units of the book are the rough
translations of their Latin originals appearing under the name of Queen
Elizabeth in 1563 in Precationes privatae.47 These are not new prayers
45
Both the Christian Prayers and Meditations (1569) and A Book of Christian
Prayers (1578) were referred to as the Queen’s Prayer Books.
46
Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, the editors of Elizabeth I’s
Collected Works (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000),
and Jennifer Clement in “The Queen’s Voice” all argue for this interpretation.
47
“A prayer for wisedome to governe the Realm” (P2v–P4v) is edited and
translated in Elizabeth’s Collected Works under the title “Prayer for the Wisdom in
the Administration of the Kingdom,” and “In time of sicknes” (K2v–L2v) appeared
as “Thanksgiving for Recovered Health,” 139–43. In Precationes privatae. Regiae
E. R. (London: T. Purfoot, 1563) they are between A2r–F1r.
then, but have the personalized voice of the Queen and specific references
to her because they are prayers written by the Queen, even though the
question of who the translator was remains unclear.
The use of different languages for prayer also points to the possible
authorship of the Queen. Elizabeth’s knowledge of languages, as part of
her Humanistic education, was well propagated and was part of her public
image of the well educated monarch. There is another prayer book, a
manuscript one, that contains prayers in foreign languages (Latin, Italian,
French and Greek) attributed to Queen Elizabeth and decorated by her
miniature.48 The Christian Prayers and Meditations also bears the visual
signs of authorization: the Queen’s portrait and her coat-of-arms. Jennifer
Clement supported the official nature of the prayer book by analysing the
connection between the use of each language and the content of the prayer.
She claimed that the choice of a particular language reflected a conscious
act of aiming at a specific international audience with the issues presented
within the prayers being tailored for that specifically addressed group of
speakers.49 If we accept her argumentation, then this is further evidence to
support that these writings were either by the Queen or were composed in
her individualized voice.
In the Christian Prayers and Meditations the Queen is subjected to a
public gaze through the prayers given into her mouth. An image of a godly
monarch is drafted in them, one who was specially elected through God’s
grace alone to the English throne. This definition was a cornerstone of the
early years of Elizabethan propaganda, as it justified the Queen’s rule in
the language of Protestant polemics. After the succession of Elizabeth to
the throne of England, next to the sensitive question of the legitimacy of
her mother’s marriage and thus her own right to rule, her gender as a
monarch posed a further problem that was advocated in the Scottish
reformer’s John Knox’s pamphlet The First Blast of the Trumpet Against
the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558). Elizabeth’s unofficial apologist,
John Aylmer answered the attack on female authority by pointing out that
the Queen rules by the special providence of God, selected individually by
48
A Book of Devotions composed by Her Majesty, transl. Adam Fox (London:
Colin Smyth Gerrards Cross and The Cornerstone Library and Studio Rome,
1977). The book contains two miniatures by Nicholas Hilliard that suggest a date
in the late 1570s. The original copy has been lost and the book survives in the form
of a photocopy. Patrick Collinson disputes the authorship of the queen in “Window
in a Woman’s Soul: Questions about the Religion of the Queen,” in Elizabethan
Essays, ed. Patrick Collinson (London and Rio Grande, Ohio: Hambledon Press,
1994), 90–91.
49
Jennifer Clement, “The Queen’s Voice.”
him for the throne.50 The prayers in the Christian Prayers and Meditations
echo this line of thought:
Thou hast of thine own liberalitie, without my deserving and against the
expectation of many, given me a kingdom and made me reign. (P3r)
I do not hold royal rule by my own merit, but receive it from Thee as a
handmaid and servant. (Pp4r)
In acknowledging her feminine weakness and God’s merit in raising

her to rule a country, the Queen was presented to the public in an
appropriately gendered role, which all the same left no place to dispute her
royal position.
A full-page illustration of Queen Elizabeth51 kneeling in her closet at
her devotions also associates the Christian Prayers and Meditations with
the Queen. Yet this representation shifts the emphasis from the Queen
being the author of some texts of the book to her role as reader and user of
the book. So let me now turn to the reading of the prayers composed by or
in the name of or the Queen. How exactly was the Queen to interpret the
lines of these prayers presented to her in this early modern book of
devotion (one copy of which was emphatically decorated for her)? How
was she to interpret the parallel narrative presented by the text and the
margins depicting the Dance of Death? What message can the threatening
figures of death bear in relation to the Queen?
The Politics of the Danse Macabre

From the two English language prayers by the Queen the second is
entitled “In Time of Sicknes” and the text refers to a recent illness of the
Queen and her thanksgiving for recovery. The borders illustrate the
Resurrection of Christ, and its two Old Testament prefigurations (Samson
and Jonas—one escaping from his enemies, the other emerging from the
belly of the fish), all referring to deliverance. Text and margins both draw
50
John Aylmer An harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subiectes, against the late
blown Blast, concerning the Government of Women, wherin be confuted all such
reasons as a stranger of late made in that behalf, with a brief exhortation to
Obedience. Strasborowe: S.n. [i.e. London, printed by John Day], 1559. Ov O2r.
The printer of the apology was the same John Day who published the Christian
Prayers and Meditations.
51
The woodcut is attributed to Levina Teerlinc in Roy Strong, Gloriana: The
Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 57.
the attention of the reader to the tenet that the only cure for sickness and
sin is through the grace of God. In such a context the prayer is a warning
to all mankind, but its individualized voice points to a particular event in
the reign of Elizabeth:
[. . .] though hast stricken me with a grievous sicknes of my body, and very

daungerous unto my life, and also troubled and abashed my minde with
terrours and anguishes of my soule: and withal thou hast by my daunger
sore flighted and amesed thy people of England, whose safetie and
quietnes next after thee, seemeth to stay upon me above all other worldly
creatures, and upon my life and continuance amongst them. (K4v–L1r)
The text refers to Queen Elizabeth’s near fatal attack of small pox in
1562, and is the rough translation of a Latin text published under the name
of the Queen a year later in Precationes privatae (see above). As the
quoted lines show, her illness created dismay among her courtiers who
were faced by an unsettled succession and a possible civil war in case of
the Queen’s death. In the aftermath of the crisis the question of Queen
Elizabeth’s succession and marriage became of acute political importance.
The House of Commons and the House of Lords separately handed in a
petition to urge the Queen to name a successor in 1563; and in 1566 a joint
effort was made by both houses to force an answer from the Queen. But
the Queen reacted by a heated oration in front of the delegations of
Parliament;52 she refused to act, and banned all discussion of her
succession.53 Yet many godly gentlemen, that is, Protestant radicals, who
felt a vested interest in the commonweal of the country and believed to
have a right to counsel the Queen,54 were not satisfied with such a
decision. A tract entitled A Common Cry of Englishmen Made to the Most
Noble Lady, Queen Elizabeth, and the High Court of Parliament (1566)
speaking about the succession turned to the Parliament to take action
instead of the Queen:
52
See her speeches of April 10, 1563; November 5, 1566; January 2, 1567.
Elizabeth I, Collected Works, 79–80, 93–98, 105–8.
53
This ban resulted in the famous incident of Peter Wentworth questioning
whether such an act on behalf of the queen was not “a breech of the liberty of the
free speech of the House.” See “Peter Wentworth’s Question on Parliamentary
Privilege, November 11, 1566,” in Elizabeth I, Collected Works, 100.
54
About the question see A. N. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of
Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 134–60.
And if the Queen [. . .] should seem not to be willing to hear and help [. . .]
then we turn our cry to you our Lords and Commons [. . .] as you do know
what your authority is, so beshow your wisdom and power to put your
country out of such peril.55
The passage shows that among the Protestant elite there was a belief in
the importance of counsel delivered to the Queen as part of the concept
known as the “mixed monarchy.”
The concept of the mixed monarchy was a theory in support of
legitimizing female rule in the sixteenth century. It denoted a special
relationship between crown and parliament, and was described by Sir
Thomas Smith’s book De Republica Anglorum56 circulated in a
manuscript form from the mid-1560s. When defining the commonwealth
Smith considered only freemen and excluded women “whom nature hath
made to keepe home and to nourish their familie and children, and not to
meddle with matters abroade, nor to beare office in a citie or common
wealth no more as children or infants.”57 Yet Smith made an exception in
case the “authoritie is annexed to the bloud and progenie, as the crowne, a
dutchie, or an earldome for the blood is respected, not the age nor the sexe
[. . .] for the right and honour of the blood [. . .] is more to be considered,
than either base age as yet impotent to rule, or the sexe not accustomed
(otherwise) to intermeddle with publick affaires, being by common
intendment understood, that such personages never do lacke the counsel of
such grave and discreete men as be able to supplie all other defaultes”
(emphasis mine).58 In other words the De Republica Anglorum asserted
that “the most high and absolute power of the realm of England, is in the
Parliament”59 and there is no threat in having a female monarch as long as
she is surrounded by the counsel of her Parliament. Counselling the Queen
was regarded thus not only a possibility but as the duty of “grave and
discreete men.”
55
Quoted in McLaren, Political Culture, 149–50.
56
The book was published only posthumously. The date for the first publication is
usually cited as 1583, yet McLaren claims that there was an earlier edition of 1581,
of which no copies survived. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth
I, 201n13. The book was republished in 1583, 1584, 1589 and 1601, showing its
popularity during a period which threatened the principles of mixed rule and
depended in a growing extent on more absolutist modes of government.
57
Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (1583; Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), 64.
58
Smith, De Republica Anglorum, 64.
59
Smith, De Republica Anglorum, 65.
This voice of ‘godly’ counsel is heard when the Christian Prayers and
Meditations includes biblical texts about “how all kinges ought to seeke
his glory,” “counsels to good kinges,” and “threatening to evill kinges,”
which were placed right before the Queen’s foreign language prayers.60
Furthermore, these foreign language prayers ask not just for wisdom and
prudence from God to help the Queen to govern, but reiterate several times
her wish to have good councillors:
Give us also prudent, wise and virtuous councillors, driving far from us
all ambitious, malignant, wily, and hypocritical ones.61
Strength, counsel, doctrine sound to me provide / That well I may Thy
people rule and guide.62
May the mind of Thy handmaid be clear and just, her will sincere, her
judgements fair and pious. Grant me, O Lord, help, counsels, and sufficient
ministers, just and capable, full of piety and of Thy most holy fear.63
Thy Holy Spirit, [. . .] the Spirit of counsel and of fortitude, the Spirit
of knowledge and of Thy fear, by whom I, Thy maidservant, may have a
wise heart that can discern between the good and the bad [. . .] [a]nd in this
manner may justice be administered in this Thy kingdom [. . .]. Since for
this Thou hast constituted magistrates and hast put the weapon of authority
in their hands, vouchsafe it.64
Thou hast granted councillors; grant unto them to use counsel rightly.
Grant them, moreover, a pious, fair, sound mind and truly industrious
diligence, that these may be employed for the people placed under me, and
60
Christian Prayers and Meditations, Aa1–Gg4v.
61
“Donne nous aussi des Conseillers prudens sages & vertueux, chassant loing de
nous, tous ambitieux, malins, cauteleux, & hypocrites.” Christian Prayers and
Meditations, Ii2v. Translation in Elizabeth I, Collected Works, 147.
62
“Force, Conseil, avec saine doctrine, / Pour bien guider, le peuple que domine."
Christian Prayers and Meditations, Ll1v. Translation in Elizabeth I, Collected
Works, 152.
63
“Sia l’intelletto della tua serva chiaro & giusto, la volontà sincera, i giudici equi,
& pÿ. Dammi Signore aiuti, consegli, & ministri abbastanti, retti, & sufficienti,
pieni di pietà, & del tuo santissimo timore.” Christian Prayers and Meditations,
Mm2r–v. Translation in Elizabeth I, Collected Works, 154.
64
“Con ti sancto Espiritu, el qua les [. . .] Espiritu de cõsejo y de Fortaleza,
Espiritu de sciencia y de temor tuyo, para que yo tu sierva tӁga coraçon entendido
que pueda discernir entre lo bueno y lo malo: y desta manera sea en este tu Reyno
administrada iusticia, [. . .] Pues que para esto tu has constituido el Magistrado y le
has puesto el cuchillo en la mano.” Christian Prayers and Meditations, Nn2r–v.
Translation in Elizabeth I, Collected Works, 156.
that they may be willing and able both to make provision under Thy
direction and to give counsel.65
The Queen also acknowledges the mode of governing with the help of
counsel in the sixth French prayer, which was written with the specific
purpose of being used before consulting about the business of the kingdom:
Thou sustainest and preservest under the guidance of Thy providence the
state and government of all kingdoms of the earth, and that to Thee it
belongs to preside in the midst of princes in their councils.66
The placement of the Queen’s prayers next to the scenes of the Dance
of Death in the Christian Prayers and Meditations seems to be a form of
counsel offered to the Queen on behalf of one of the most important
Protestant printers, John Day, his patrons and the anonymous compilers of
this pretentious prayer book of the new faith. While the Queen was
viewing the images and reading the accompanying lines
Queen also thou doost see: As I am, so shalt thou be. (Oo3r)
We that were of highest degree; Lye dead here now, as ye do see. (Oo3r)
We that sate in the highest seate; Are layd here now for wormes meat.
(Oo3v)
Beauty, honour, and riches avayle no whit, For death when he commeth,
spoyleth it. (Oo4r)
she was reminded of her near-fatal illness and the threat her death would
have posed to the country. The succession question being still unsettled,
Protestant godly gentlemen were indirectly offering counsel to the Queen
by reminding her of human mortality through the danse macabre. This
highly sensitive issue was addressed with the means of the intertextuality
of early modern print.
65
“Dedisti consiliarios, da dextrè eorum uti consiliis: illis autem & piam &
æquam, & sanam mentem, industriam vero sedulam, ut quæ mihi subditoque;
populo usui sint, & providere sub tuo præsidio, & consulere velint ac queant.”
Christian Prayers and Meditations, Oo4v. Translation in Elizabeth I, Collected
Works, 160.
66
“Tu soustiens & conserve sous la conduite de ta providence l’estat &
governement de tous les Royaumes de la terre, & que c’est à toy de presider au
milieu des Princes en leur conseil.” Christian Prayers and Meditations, K4r.
Translation in Elizabeth I, Collected Works, 150.
Such freedom to express a voice of counsel was a unique phenomenon

of the 1560s and 1570s. With the growing Spanish threat of the 1580s a
more autocratic governmental form was introduced.67 This change is
demonstrated well by the fate of another illustration that placed the Queen
in close proximity to the figure of Death. In the year the Christian Prayers
and Meditations was published, Henry Denham printed a late fifteenth-
century poem The Travayled Pylgrime (1569)68 with images from a
Spanish book. He added only one extra woodcut, one that depicted the
Queen in triumph. 69 In the background above the Queen’s figure drawn in
a chariot appeared Death enthroned, and while the verses accompanying
the image rang with the praise of the Queen’s unmatchable qualities, the
context into which it was inserted served as a memento mori to
humankind. The lines “Beholde also the ougly corps, that bony figure hee,
/ Is Thanatos [Death] which endes the life of every degree”70 stood right
after the eulogy of the English queen, delivering a threatening warning to
all mankind. The free coupling of the figure of the Queen and death in
both The Travayled Pylgrime and Christian Prayers and Meditations in
the year 1569 is remarkable. Its significance can be further understood if
one looks at how the image of The Travayled Pylgrime was recycled in the
printing industry. Eleven years later, it was reused for another text,
Anthony Munday’s Zelauto: The Fountaine of Fame (1580),71 but the
figure of death was clearly erased. Davis, an expert on religious printed
images, pointed out that the amendment was not because of damage made
to the woodcut, but was in connection with the stricter censorship that was
introduced in the 1580s.72 The text above the picture read “Let all true
English harts, pronounce while they still have breath, God save and
prosper in renown, our Queen Elizabeth,”73 and eliminated all reference to
67
John Guy, “The 1590s: the second reign of Elizabeth I?” in John Guy, ed., The
Reign of Elizabeth: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 1–19.
68
Olivier de La Marche, The Trauayled Pylgrime (London: Henrie Denham,
1569). It was freely translated from the original by Stephen Bateman. About the
work see Marco Nievergelt, “Stephen Bateman, The trauayled Pylgrime (London:
Henry Denham, 1569; STC 1585)” in The EEBO Introduction Series, http://eebo
.chadwyck.com.proxy.library.nd.edu/intros/htxview?template=basic.htx&content=
intro99840252.htm.
69
I am indebted to Davis, Picturing the Invisible, 188–89 for drawing my attention
to this image.
70
La Marche, The Travayled Pylgrime, M3r.
71
Anthony Munday, The Fountaine of Fame (London: J. Charlewood, 1580), E1v.
72
73
Munday, Fountaine of Fame, E1v.
mutability. Any form of allusion to the Queen’s possible death, or

pertaining to her private matters, as for instance public discussion of her
marriage was severely punished by this time. In 1579, the year after the
rearranged version of the Christian Prayers and Meditations was
published, John Stubbs released a pamphlet criticizing Queen Elizabeth’s
proposed marriage to Duke of Anjou.74 The counsel of Stubbs was
unwanted: the pamphlet was prohibited, burnt, and a trial was held at
Westminster which resulted in a punishment of cutting off Stubbs’s right
hand. It is then no wonder that the prayers of the Queen next to margins
depicting a Dance of Death were omitted form the later version of the
prayer book. In contrast to this later edition, in the Christian Prayers and
Meditations one can still witness a freedom of expressing opinion on
questions concerning the Queen, which included also the free access to her
most personal thoughts in prayer. In the new edition of the prayer book the
Queen’s voice was cut out and never again during Elizabeth’s reign was
such a personalized image of her offered to her subjects.
Conclusion
The Christian Prayers and Meditations (1569) received far less notice
up till today than it deserves. While the foreign language prayers it
contains have been mostly attributed to the Queen and examined as her
writing, it has not been noticed that two English language prayers can also
be firmly assigned to her. The placement of these compositions within the
prayer book and their relation to the border illustrations mark them out as
important ingredients of the compilation.
The Christian Prayers and Meditations occupies an emphatic place in
the history of Protestant devotional literature. On the one hand, it
represents a piece of writing that continued and revitalized a long standing
religious tradition of private prayer books, thus underpinning the view of
many historians who regard the Reformation in England not as a drastic
change of religion but as a gradual process of adoption, selection and
incorporation. On the other hand, Day’s compilation of prayers by using
the form of the Book of Hours exploited the visual, intertextual aspect of
the medium to confer a new understanding of royalty as surrounded by
godly councillors.
74
John Stubbes, The discoverie of a gaping gulf whereinto England is like to be
swallowed by an other French marriage, if the Lord forbid not the banes by letting
her maiestie see the sin and punishment thereof (London: H. Singleton, 1579).
ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS:
TEXTS AND CONTEXTS BEHIND WILLIAM
HARRISON’S DESCRIPTION OF ENGLAND
KINGA FÖLDVÁRY
William Harrison’s Description of England (1577, 1587), published as

part of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, has often been described as a dull
and uninteresting compilation, even by its editors.1 It is hard to deny that
most of Harrison’s material came from a variety of sources other than his
own experience, the volume lacking therefore in originality of both
approach and content. At the same time, it is also undeniable that the
volume abounds in exciting details that make it a collection of invaluable
eyewitness accounts of Elizabethan everydays. While it is generally the
personal details and firsthand information that deserve the attention of the
modern reader, I would like to argue here that the copied, compiled, and
thus second-class elements of the text are equally instructive for us today,
even if for different reasons. Among other things, we may learn from the
examination of such passages about the working methods of Harrison, and
by implication we may also discover what the early modern reader and
writer expected and accepted as regards reliability in historical (and
pseudo-historical) sources, together with the intention of chorographic
writing in general, and that of William Harrison in particular.
As a case study, I have chosen to read and interpret Harrison’s chapter
on giants, a topic of obvious significance for him, since he placed it close
to the beginning of his volume in both editions, in 1577 as chapter 4 in
1
Cf. Frederick J. Furnivall’s foreword to his 1877 edition, in which he refers to the
whole of book 1 as “long and dull.” Frederick J. Furnivall, ed., Harrison’s
Description of England in Shakspere’s Youth (London: New Shakspere Society,
1877), iv. Georges Edelen in the preface of his 1968 edition refers to some parts of
the work as “lengthy and readily detachable historical digressions.” Georges
Edelen, preface to The Description of England: The Classic Contemporary
Account of Tudor Social Life, by William Harrison (1968; reprint, Washington DC:
The Folger Shakespeare Library, and New York: Dover, 1994), vii.
Texts and Contexts behind William Harrison’s Description of England 33
book 1, entitled “Whether it be likely that there were euer any Gyaunts
inhabiting in this Isle or not” (1577, 3r), and in the extended 1587 edition
as chapter 5, with the slightly modified title “Whether it be likelie that any
giants were, and whether they inhabited in this Ile or not” (1587, 8).2 The
chapter has no complex argument or narrative structure, it contains hardly
more than a long list of examples from various sources to prove that giants
existed in reality, and they were to be found on the British Isles as well.
Even so, I believe that the text needs revisiting particularly because it has
suffered neglect for a long time, and has mostly remained unknown for
modern readers. Apart from the 1807–8 edition, which is in fact a reprint
of the 1587 text, without any critical introduction or other editorial matter,
no editor considered this chapter important enough to be included in their
publication. The first significant modern edition is the one by Frederick J.
Furnivall, who in the foreword of his 1877 volume picks only a few
paragraphs from each chapter of the first book, which he considers
otherwise too tedious to torture his readers with: “because this Book I is so
dull, I have left it out.”3 The most recent version, edited by Georges
Edelen in 1968,4 again based on the 1587 edition, follows a similar
principle, and leaves out the entire chapter on giants, together with most
others from the first book.5 In this essay therefore I will attempt to find out
how far we can see if we stand on the shoulders of Harrison’s giants, how
much we may understand about the late Tudor period by reading what a
Puritan clergyman has to say about the pseudo-history of his nation. For
the same purpose, it is equally important to compare the texts of the two
editions, since an examination of what Harrison himself recognised as
faulty, and corrected when preparing the extended 1587 edition may prove
instructive as regards the text as a whole.
2
All quotations follow the original spelling, with the exception of the long Ǖ, which
is replaced by the letter s, and the vv, substituted by w throughout the essay.
Parenthetical references to the text identify the edition by date (1577 or 1587) and
page number. In case of unnumbered pages, such as the dedicatory epistle, I use
the signature system accessible on the Holinshed Project website, http://www
.english.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/dox/Contents.pdf.
3
Furnivall, Harrison’s Description of England, iv.
4
William Harrison, The Description of England: The Classic Contemporary
Account of Tudor Social Life, ed. Georges Edelen (1968; reprint, Washington DC:
The Folger Shakespeare Library, and New York: Dover, 1994).
5
It is only through the recently completed online editions of the Holinshed Project
that the average reader has access to the full text, moreover, that of both editions.
34 Kinga Földváry
1. Contexts: Humanism and Puritanism

The gigantic tomes known as Holinshed’s Chronicles, within which
William Harrison’s Description functions as a chorographical introduction,
are today often (if not mostly) mentioned in a Shakespearean context,
since the historical chapters, written by Raphael Holinshed, served as
Shakespeare’s main source for his history plays and several of the
tragedies as well. In fact, modern scholarship has often expressed the view
that the only interest the volumes have for us is due to their Shakespearean
connections. Quite a few editions used this context as their selection
criteria,6 and although recent critical approaches have tried to counter this
view, it has still remained the premise no one can leave out of
consideration.7
The present essay, however, intends to focus our attention on the way
William Harrison, preacher and antiquarian approached his own sources.
The discussion of giants, similarly to other fantastic, legendary or quasi-
mythological creatures, lends itself easily to an investigation into the way
authors handled their source material, what they accepted as authoritative
and in what way they were prone to rely on less than purely scientific
information. The Tudor period is again particularly suitable for such
examinations, since it is well known to have been a period of transition, in
which belief in myth and legend was still living side by side with sceptical
and critical interpretations of the same. However, as Arthur B. Ferguson
remarks,
such was the Renaissance capacity for ambivalence that even the most
perceptive interpreter of what he believed to be a primitive mentality was
also convinced that an arcane wisdom, good for all time, lay beneath the
allegories supposedly contained in the ancient fables.8
6
See Furnivall, ibid.; W. G. Boswell-Stone, Shakspere’s Holinshed: The Chronicle
and the History Plays Compared (London: Chatto & Windus, 1896); Allardyce
Nicoll and Josephine Nicoll, ed., Holinshed's Chronicle as Used in Shakespeare's
Plays (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927).
7
Cf. Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s “Chronicles” (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 3–5; Alison Taufer, Holinshed’s “Chronicles”
(New York: Twayne, 1999), 135–44; Igor Djordjevic, Holinshed’s Nation: Ideals,
Memory, and Practical Policy in the “Chronicles” (Farnham & Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2010), 1; Christopher Ivic, “Reading Tudor Chronicles,” in Teaching
Early Modern English Prose, ed. Susannah Brietz Monta and Margaret W.
Ferguson (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2010), 123–24.
8
Arthur B. Ferguson, Utter Antiquity: Perceptions of Prehistory in Renaissance
England (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 5.
While humanism, which Ferguson describes as “the steering force in

English intellectual life for more than a century,”9 was beginning to
change age-old methods of textual interpretation, “it was preoccupied with
the issues of contemporary England rather than with scholarship for its
own sake.”10 As a result, humanism could not bring an overnight change in
the nation’s attitudes to tradition and legend. At the same time, English
Puritanism, as a branch of Protestantism, adhered to Luther’s sola
scriptura principle, and gave the Bible central position not only in spiritual
matters, but in all other aspects of knowledge and thought as well. As John
Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim summarise its significance:
In rejecting papal authority, Puritans affirmed Luther’s teaching that the

Bible was the Christian’s only infallible authority. Puritan religion was
religion of the Word, and the preaching and reading of the Bible were
central to their faith.11
It is not surprising therefore that a politically inclined, devoted Puritan

thinker would revert to such an unquestioning acceptance of scriptural
traditions that contradicted the advances of textual interpretation achieved
by humanist scholars. William Harrison, whose writing towards the end of
his life was increasingly showing signs of bitterness as a result of the
sinful ways of English society, was exemplary in accepting the authority
of the Bible even in the face of critical opposition. It is all the more
remarkable since as a chronicler or chorographic author, he joined a
tradition in which Tudor authors, among them the Italian humanist
Polydore Vergil, had long rejected much of the legendary prehistory of the
English nation.12 Nonetheless, as his chapter on giants demonstrates,
William Harrison remained faithful to the Scriptures, for all the research
he conducted throughout his long career.
2. Pre-Texts: From the Scriptures to Leland’s Itinerary

Harrison was a child of his age in many ways, and nothing illustrates
this more than the textual complexity, the uneven use of narrative and
9
Ferguson, Utter Antiquity, 10.
10
Ibid.
11
John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to
Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 2.
12
See e.g. Andrew M. Kirk, “Polydore Vergil,” in Major Tudor Authors: A Bio-
Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Alan Hager (Westford, CT and London:
Greenwood Press, 1997), 467.
36 Kinga Földváry
stylistic devices, and the sometimes contradictory statements of purpose

that characterise his text at various points. On the one hand, he was an
astute observer, and the passages in the Description that present his own
personal observations, his opinion on Elizabethan society, whether implied
or stated clearly, often stand out of the text, and their subjectivity is
emphasised by textual and stylistic markers as well. On the other hand,
Harrison also seems to have been aware of the generic tradition his work
aspired to join, and the objectivity required of chroniclers and
chorographers. As a result, the vast amount of chorographic information,
from the flow of rivers to the number and size of towns all over the
country that Harrison gathered from the notes and maps of contemporary
antiquarians, is easily accepted as reliable, although these chapters are
considerably less entertaining to read than the subjective but lively
personal observations.
Harrison’s readiness to accept information from others, however,
makes him an easy target for criticism: he himself admits in the dedication
of the work to his patron, Sir William Brooke that a significant part of the
information in the volume comes from second-hand sources at best, since
he never travelled to the places he describes. Rather, as he gratefully
acknowledges his debt to his contemporaries, he took the information from
John Leland, a sixteenth-century antiquarian, and several other, named and
unnamed sources.13 Nonetheless, this authorial method does not mark out
Harrison as extraordinary in the age, since the requirements of the genre
and of scholarship in general meant that the author with the broadest
reading, particularly in the classics, was considered the most convincing.
It is worth noting, though, that it was precisely the great care Harrison
took to make his geographical descriptions as up-to-date as possible that
led to the fast decline of his work and chorography as a genre as well. He
often simply transcribed the notes taken by John Leland, and the maps
prepared by Christopher Saxton, published in the second half of the 1570s,
into a continuous description. What he could not foresee was that within a
few years, as Georges Edelen remarks, these maps “were to render
obsolete the type of topographical description over which Harrison took
such pains.”14 Were he to stick to his own personal impressions, as he did
in many chapters of book 3, the Description may have held his readers’
fascination for a longer time.
The passages, however, that do not rely on easily traceable, first- or
second-hand geographical information are considerably more interesting,
13
William Harrison, “Epistle to Brooke,” in Holinshed’s Chronicles, 1577, *2v.
14
Georges Edelen, “William Harrison (1535–1593),” Studies in the Renaissance 9
(1962): 268.
and also more troubling from a textual point of view. On the one hand, it is
remarkable in itself that they treat somewhat dubious or downright
incredible topics with the same authorial concern for factual details as the
chapters describing physical characteristics of the landscape. Moreover,
some of these passages not only show the author as naïve from a twenty-
first-century point of view, but they display information that appears to
have come in for criticism as suspiciously unsupported, even at the time of
the original publication of the volume.
It is hard to ignore that William Harrison’s attitude to evidence is often
striking when viewed objectively; at certain points one single author (even
a cleverly forged fifteenth-century collection, the work of Berossus, or
Pseudo-Berossus15) is “proof sufficient” (1577, 97r), at other instances he
quotes multiple events, dates, even names, and still claims that he cannot
find sufficient evidence to make sure that this is true—all of which make it
clear that when it comes to sources, there is a strong hierarchy between
fully authoritative and less reliable items. Not surprisingly for a Puritan
author, the most convincing evidence is derived singularly from the
Scriptures, after which come Christian authors, and last (and least) of all
those pagan writers whose prestige in classical antiquity made them
acceptable for the early modern age, but only after the testimony of the
godly.
The chapter on giants offers a perfect example for the above described
hierarchy of sources, and in what follows, I would like to probe into the
text for a close examination of various details, looking at the sources used
by Harrison, in order to learn more about his authorial intentions and his
working methods, particularly by pointing out inaccuracies in the text.
With this thorough knowledge of the text we may then go on to find the
points of connection to issues of greater significance, and see what
Harrison had to say about the state of his nation and his religion (the two
intricately connected), and what message he wished to send to the readers
of his own times.
Harrison introduces the discussion on giants with a statement of his
intention. His first paragraph is a perfect example of a carefully composed
beginning, which joins the text to the previous topic, the description of
earlier nations who used to dwell in the British Isles, and then goes on to
present a clear statement of his thesis, as follows:
15
See e.g. Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and
Nationhood in the Atlantic World 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), 28, 59.
38 Kinga Földváry
Besides these aforesayde nations, which haue crept as you haue hearde into
our Islande, we reade of sundry Gyaunts that shoulde inhabite here, which
report as it is not altogither incredible, sith the posterities of diuers princes
were called by ye name: so vnto some mens eares it séemeth so straunge a
rehearsall, that for the same onely they suspect the credite of our whole
hystorie and reiect it as a fable, vnwoorthy to be read. For this cause
therefore I haue nowe taken vpon me to make thys briefe discourse
insuing, therby to prooue, that the opiniõ of Gyaunts is not altogether
grounded vpon vayne & fabulous narrations, inuented only to delite the
eares of the hearers with the report of marveilous things. But that there
haue bene such men in déede, as for their hugenesse of person haue
resembled rather* [*Esay. 30. vers. 25.16] highe towers then mortall men,
although their posterities are now consumed, and their monstruous races
vtterly worne out of knowledge. (1577, 3r)
On the one hand, the passage displays a somewhat reluctant admission

that can be considered enlightened and scholarly at the same time: the fact
that there are doubtful elements involved in this topic. The significance of
this statement is that while for Harrison, the sacred tradition and the
unquestionable support of Biblical passages is never brought into doubt,
here he recognises the existence and argumentation of his opponents, and
prepares to defend his view accordingly. The necessity of this approach is
created by the fear that the purpose of the whole narrative (and by
implication, British history as such) may be discredited if minor details are
insufficiently supported.
Nevertheless, the statement of his thesis remains clear: we can have no
doubt about where he stands in the issue, and indeed, he presents us with
his reasons why he cannot choose but accept the notion as fact, rather than
fiction: partly by virtue of present evidence (physical proof in the form of
bones, and the evidence of verbal tradition), partly on account of the
Biblical evidence available. While Harrison stands firm in his conviction,
the disbelief of others is an issue he never takes lightly. Even though we
get no more details here of who suspects what exactly, still, knowing that
for Harrison the history of the nation is the same as providential history,
that of the true church and its constant struggle with the evil church of
Cain, it is easy to see that the question of giants is just another example
where the real issue is the acceptability of providential genealogy, the line
of descent from Creation to the present.17
16
Marginal note in the original.
17
For more details on Harrison’s view concerning the two churches, see G. J. R.
Parry, A Protestant Vision: William Harrison and the Reformation of Elizabethan
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 3–57.
Beside the biblical reference, the passage implies rhetorically as well

that the race of giants is characterised not only by their outstanding
physical properties, but also by their morally degraded nature, as
suggested by the adjective “monstrous.” This interpretation of giants as
not only men of “huge & incredible stature,” but also inhuman, or even
non-human creatures is reinforced by the vocabulary of the chapter, in
which we can find the expressions “pestilӁt race,” “mõsters,” “wicked
tyraunt,” “huge blocks,” and “tyrauntes, doltish, and euyill men” (1577,
3r–4v). Physical strength and bodily stature appear therefore to be the least
significant elements in defining giants, as Harrison underlines by giving
some counterexamples. He mentions at the beginning of his chapter
several men “of Noble race, equall to the Gyauntes in strength, and
manhoode” (1577, 3v), such as Hercules, slayer of Antheus, or the British
prehistoric Corineus, who defeated Gomagot (according to Geoffrey of
Monmouth). Notwithstanding their strength and stature, Harrison draws
our attention to the fact that neither Hercules nor Corineus were called
giants by the authorities who wrote about them, precisely on account of
their nobility, since they did not oppress the people but rather attempted to
free them from the tyrannous giants.
We do not need to go far in the text to find an explanation readily
offered for the moral monstrosity of the race of giants: they were the
descendants of the line of the evil Ham, and therefore regarded as
members of the false church of Cain, enemies of the true church of Christ.
For Harrison, this needs no further elaboration since descent from Ham
equals the worst imaginable evil, and he is ready to make strong
statements on the basis of rather indirect assumptions and etymologies:
Berosus [. . .] writeth that néere vnto Libanus there was a city called Oenon
(which I take to be Henoch, builded somtime by Cham) wherein Gyauntes
dyd inhabit, who trusting to the strength and hugenesse of their bodies, dyd
verye great oppression and mischiefe in the worlde. The Hebrues called
them generally by the name of Enach peraduenture of Henoch the sonne of
Cain, frõ whom that pestilӁt race at the first descӁded. (1577, 3v, italics
mine)
Thus the significance of giants is apparently increased by the recognition

of their role in salvation history, and clearly the best place to look for
traces of their existence is the biblical tradition.
But the paragraph deserves our interest for another, more textual than
rhetorical reason as well, which shows how the best of authorial intentions
may be combined with (and undermined by) imperfect scholarship. The
first passage that Harrison cites from the Bible is the reference to Isaiah in
40 Kinga Földváry
the very first paragraph of the chapter (quoted above). The marginal note
in the Description is spelled as Esay, the form used by the Miles Coverdale
Bible (1535), the Great Bible (1540), the Bishop’s Bible (1568), but not
found in the Geneva Bible, except for a single in-text reference in Mark
7:6. The only reason why this is remarkable is that there is sufficient
evidence to prove that Harrison considered the Geneva version the best
one available, and used it, together with the Geneva catechism.18 The
spelling variant may therefore be a result of some careless copying on the
part of Harrison, but it seems even more plausible that he made the
reference without consulting any version of the Bible at this point. Since
he needed no more than a well-known Biblical name and a general idea to
support his argument, but did not quote directly anything from the Bible, it
appears safe to assume that he relied on memory rather than on a careful
consultation of the Scriptures, particularly when he was forced to complete
his text in haste, as we will see in part 3 of this essay.
At the same time, even in such a casual reference to the Scriptures,
Harrison displays traces of considerable research. Neither the marginal
commentary of the 1560 Geneva Bible, nor the Geneva catechism
interprets the towers that will fall according to Isaiah 30:25 as giants,
which suggests that Harrison’s readings were wider and more scholarly
than his daily pastoral work would have necessitated. While the standard
commentaries by the reformers usually interpreted the towers as either the
Babylonians or the Assyrians,19 the identification of towers with giants
was common enough already in the Targum, the Aramaic translations of
the Bible, known by medieval and early modern Biblical scholars as well,
not to make Harrison’s opinion unique in the age. 20 Unfortunately, there is
no evidence to prove any direct link between a particular contemporary
Biblical commentary and Harrison’s text. Knowing Harrison’s tendency to
rely on authorities, however, it is more likely that the passage quoted
above is based on an earlier reading experience than an extraordinarily
creative, independent interpretation.
Nonetheless, Harrison is always aware of the need to convince the
broadest range of his audience, and therefore he moves on to listing
examples of the giants that conform to the widely accepted definition,
which includes the evil and oppressive nature of these gigantic creatures.
As we have said above, the Bible serves as the main authority, and thus the
18
See Parry, A Protestant Vision, 80, 155.
19
See Joseph Addison Alexander, Commentary on Isaiah (1867; repr. Grand
Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1992), 483.
20
Cf. C. W. H. Pauli, trans., The Chaldee Paraphrase on the Prophet Isaiah
(London: London Society’s House, 1871), 100.
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In the past, the physical difference between the nobility—alii—and
the common or laboring people was far more conspicuous than to-
day, when practically all Hawaiians are well nourished. “No
aristocracy,” says one historian, “was ever more distinctly marked by
nature.” Death was the penalty for the most trifling breach of
etiquette, such as for a commoner to remain on his feet at mention
of the moi’s (king’s) name, or even while the royal food or beverage
was being carried past. This stricture was carried even to the extent
of punishing by death any subject who crossed the shadow of the
sacred presence or that of his halé, house.
Besides the ordinary household officials, such as wielder of the
kahili, custodian of the cuspidor, masseur (the Hawaiians are famous
for their clever massage, or lomi-lomi), as well as chief steward,
treasurer, heralds, and runners, the court of a high chief included
priests, sorcerers, bards and story-tellers, hula dancers, drummers,
and even jesters.
The chiefs were as a rule the only owners of land, appropriating all
that the soil raised, and the fish adjacent to it, to say nothing of the
time and labor of the makaainana (workers) living upon it—a proper
feudal system. The only hold the common people and the petty
chiefs had upon the moi was their freedom to enter, service with
some more popular tyrant; and as wars were frequent, it behooved
monarchs not to act too arbitrarily lest they be caught in a pinch
without soldiery.
To dip into the lore of Hawaii, is to be stirred by the tremendous
romance of it all. Visioning the conditions of those days, one sees
the people slaving and sweating for their warlike masters, and, after
the manner of slaves the world over down the past, worshiping the
pageantry supported by their toil, whether of white invention, or that
of the most superb savagery—priceless feather-mantles, ornaments,
weapons of warfare, or red-painted canoes with red sails cleaving
the blue of ocean.
(1) Iao Valley, Island of Maui. (2) Rainbow Falls, Hawaii.
Before reclining upon the green-carpeted wharf, we haole guests

were weighted with leis of the starry plumeria, awapuhi, in color
deep-cream centered with yellow, in touch like cool, velvety flesh,
clinging caressingly to neck and shoulder. The perfume is not unlike
that of our tuberose, or gardenia, though not quite so heavy. Half-
breathing in the sensuous air, we were conscious of the lapping of
dark waters below, that mirrored the star-lamped zenith.
Our unforced relish of their traditional delicacies had much to do
with the unbending of the natives, both those who sat with us and
those who served. And when we were seen to twirl our fingers deftly
in their beloved poi and absorb it with avidity that was patently
honest, the younger women and girls were captured, ducking behind
one another in giggly flurry at each encounter of smiles and glances.
I wonder if they ever pause to be thankful that they live in the days
of ai noa, free eating, as against those of ai kapu, tabu eating, which
obtained before the time of Kamehameha II.
The foods were of the finest, and, half-lying, like the Romans, we
ate at our length—and almost consumed our length of the endless
variety, this time without implements of civilized cutlery. We pitied
quite unnecessarily, those who boast that they have lived so-and-so
many years in the Islands and have never even tasted poi—together
with most other good things of the land and sea and air.
Recalling the christening feast at Pearl Lochs, we looked vainly for
some sign of desire on the part of the Hawaiians to dance, and
finally asked Mr. Kawewehi about it. The young people appeared
unconquerably shy, but an old man, grizzled and wrinkled, his dim
eyes retrospective of nearly fourscore years, squatted before us,
reenforced with a rattling dried gourd, and displayed the rather
emasculated hula of the Kalakaua reign—an angular performance of
elbows and knees accompanied by a monotonous, weird chant, the
explosive rattling of the gourd accentuating the high lights. This
obliging ancient responded to several encores; and while the
“dance” was different from any we had witnessed, it seemed a
bloodless and decadent example of motion in which was none of the
zest of life that rules the dancing of untrained peoples.
With smiles and imploring looks, and finally, in response to their
tittering protestations of ignorance of the steps, declaring that after
all we believed they did not know the hula, we touched the mettle of
some of the younger maidens. One white-gowned girl of sixteen
disappeared from the line sitting along the stringer-piece of the pier,
and presently, out of the dusk at the land-end, materializing
between the indistinct rows of her people, she undulated to the
barbaric two-step fretting of an old guitar that had strummed
throughout. Directly the social atmosphere underwent a change,
vibrating and warming. Wahines with their sweet consenting faces,
and their men, strong bodies relaxed as they rested among the
ferns, jested musically in speech that has been likened to a gargle of
vowels. Another and younger sprite took form in the shoreward
gloom and joined the first, where the two revolved about each other
like a pair of pale moths in the lantern light. Fluttering before Mrs.
Kawewehi, with motions they invited her to make one of them; but
either she could not for diffidence, or would not, even though her
husband sprang into the charmed space and danced and gestured
temptingly before her blushing, laughing face. A slim old wahine,
coaxed by the two girls, whom all the company seemed eager to
exhibit as their choicest exponent of the olden hula, next stood
before us, and held the company breathless with an amazing and
all-too-short dance. Unsmiling, she seemed unconscious of our
presence—twisting and circling, drawing unseen forms to her
withered heart; level eyes and still mouth expressionless,
dispassionate as a mummy’s. She was anything but comely, and far
from youthful. But she could out-dance the best and command the
speechless attention of all.
Came a pause when the guitar trembled on, though it seemed that
the dancing must be done. Just as, reluctantly, we began to gather
our leis and every day senses, in order not to outlive the sumptuous
welcome, into the wavering light there glided a very young girl,
slender and dark, curl-crowned, dainty and lovely as a dryad, who
stepped and postured listlessly with slow and slower passes of slim
hands in the air, as a butterfly opens and shuts its wings on a flower,
waiting for some touch to send it madly wheeling into space.
And he came—the Dancing Faun; I knew him the moment he
greeted my eyes. Black locks curled tightly to his shapely head, his
nose was blunt and broad, eyes wild and wicked-black with fun, and
lips full and curled back from small, regular teeth. I could swear to a
pointed ear in his curls to either side, and that his foot was cloven. I
could not see these things, but knew they must be. His shirt, for
even a Faun must wear a shirt in twentieth century Hawaii, was a
frank tatter—a tatter and nothing more, over his bister, glistening
chest. The hands, long and supple, betokened the getting of an easy
livelihood from tropic branches.
The listless dryad swayed into quickened life, and the last and most
beautiful spectacle of the night was on. I do not try to describe a
hula. To you it may mean one thing, or many; to me, something
else, or many other things. History tells us that the ancient
professional dancers were devotees of a very naughty goddess,
Laka. One may read vulgarity and sordid immorality into it; another
infuse it with art and with poetry. And it is the love-poetry of the
Polynesian. A poet sings because he must. The Hawaiian dances
because he cannot refrain from dancing. Deprived of his mode of
motion, he fades away, and in the process is likely to become
immoral where before he was but unmoral, as a child may be. The
page of the history of this people is nearly turned. Such as they
were, they have never really changed—the individuality of their
blood, manifested in their features, their very facial expression, is
not strong enough to persist as a race, but unaltered endures in
proportion to its quantity, largely mixed as it now is with other
strains. The pure-bred Hawaiians are become far-apart and few,
dying off every year with none to fill their gracious places. The page
is being torn off faster and faster, and soon must flutter away.
Holualoa, to Huehue, August 30.
The Doctor, as a final benefaction, waiving inconvenience to himself,
sent us the whole journey to Waimea on the Parker Ranch, in his
own carriage, in charge of the Portuguese coachman.
The first night we were fortunate enough to spend at Huehue, home
of the John Maguires, rich Hawaiian ranchers who had extended the
invitation at the Goodhues’ reception. Lacking such hospitality, the
malihini must travel, either by horse or carriage, or the one
automobile stage, a long distance to any sort of hotel. “They don’t
know what they’ve got!” Jack commented on the ignorance of the
American public concerning the glorious possibilities of this country.
“Just watch this land in the future, when they once wake up!”
Mrs. Maguire, one eighth Hawaiian, is an unmitigated joy,
compounded of sweet dignity and a bubbling vivacity that wipes out
all thought of years and the wavy graying hair that only intensifies
the beauty of her dark eyes—a merry, sympathetic companion, one
decides, for all moods and ages. Her husband is a noble example of
the Hawaiian type, like the descendant of a race of rulers, strong
kings, with commanding brow and eye of eagle, firm mouth, square
jaw, and stern aquiline nose, the lofty-featured countenance gentled
by a thatch of thick powder-gray hair and a benevolent expression.
The Kona Sewing Guild was in full blast when we drew up in the
blooming garden of the rambling house, but I fell napping on a hikiè
in the guest-cottage, tired from a strenuous day of packing, typing—
and traveling, even through such ravishing country, in full view of
the ravishing Blue Flush of sea and sky.
“I hate to wake my poor tired Woman,” Jack’s voice wooed me from
sleep an hour later; “but the most wonderful horse is waiting for you
to ride him.”
“But I’ve no clothes,” as I came back to earth.
“Oh, I’ve got some for you,” he grinned, depositing a scarlet calico
muumuu on the hikiè, “and I’m just dying to see you ride in it!—Mrs.
Maguire has one on, and looks all right.”
Properly adjusted, in a man’s saddle this full garment appears like
bloomers, and I can vouch is most comfortable.
Then to me they led one of Pharaoh’s horses—no other could it be,
so full his eye, so proud his neck, the pricking of his ear so fine;
none but a steed of Pharaoh’s wears quite such flare of nostril, nor
looks so loftily across the plain. Ah, he is something to remember,
“Sweet Lei Lehua,” and I can never forget his brave crest, nor the
flick of that small pointed ear, and the red, red nostril, blowing
scented breath of grass and flowers—sweet as the flower whose
name he wears.
Our ride was upon the lava flank of Hualalai and all within the
boundaries of the Maguire possessions, which comprise some 60,000
acres. My steed, like the Welshman on Haleakala showing yonder
above the clouds, evidenced his sober years only in judgment of
head and hoof. We attacked precarious places of sliding stones and
slid down others as steep and uncertain, brushing lehua and great
ferns; into deep, green-grown blowholes of prehistoric convulsions
we peered; and finally, descending a verdant pinnacle where Mrs.
Maguire led for the viewing of broad downward miles of tumultuous
lava to the blue sea, we went gingerly on a grassy trail beset with
snares of slaty lava that tinkled like glass, over natural bridges of the
same brittle-blown substance, then threaded a sparse lehua wood to
the main road.
All the while our hostess, younger hearted than any, was the soul of
the party, a constant incentive to daring climbs or breathless bursts
of speed, just an untired girl in mind and body of her. One could but
join in abandon of enjoyment that comes with swift motion, urging
to greater effort, whirling around curves, going out of the way to
leap obstacles. And which is better, and what constitutes long life: to
sit peacefully with folded hands while the rout goes by a-horseback
with laugh and love and song, walking carefully all one’s days, or to
live in heat of blood and thrill of beauty and every cell of persisting
youth, taking high hazard with sea and sail, mountain and horse,
and every adventurous desire?
Spinning an abrupt curve, our mounts stopped at a gate like shots
against a target, and our gleeful leader spurred at right angles
straight up a four-foot stone wall to the next zigzag of road, we
following willy-nilly in the mad scramble, marveling how we escaped
a spill.
Following the Feast of Horses came the luau—not so-called, for it is
the accustomed dinner of these people who, it seems to me, feed
upon nectar and ambrosia. Fancy the tender fowl, stewed in coconut
cream, and the picked and “lomied” rosy salmon bellies, with rosier
fresh tomatoes, and salmon-pink salt like ground pigeon-blood
rubies, and—but the entirely Hawaiian dinned, served with all the
silver and crystal, napery and formality of a city banquet eludes my
pen.
“Do play, Mate,” Jack said in the twilight, where he lounged on the
lanai after dining; “I haven’t heard a grand piano for a long time, in
this lotus loveland of guitars and ukuleles and their delectable airs.”
And so, high upon a sleeping volcano in the Sandwich Isles I sat me
down to Chopin’s and Beethoven’s stately processionals. For once, in
this land of spent fires, we all forewent and forgot the lilt of hulas
and threnodies of dusky love songs, in the brave, deep music of our
own Caucasian blood.
“I haven’t played those things since I studied in Paris,” Mrs. Maguire
said with reminiscence in her sobered eyes; and a “Thank you” came
through the doorway from a visiting clergyman, while a blithe young
judge of the District called for Mendelssohn’s Funeral March while I
was about it.
But Jack, with cigarette dead between his pointed fingers, lay in a
long chair, his wide eyes star-roving in the purple pit of the night
sky; for music always sets him dreaming, and many’s the time I
have momentarily wondered, at concert and opera, if he heard
aught but the suggestions of the opening measures, so busily did he
make notes upon whatever those suggestions had been to his flying
brain.
Huehue, to Parker Ranch, August 31.

“The sweetest poi is eaten out of the hau calabash,” “He mikomiko
ka ai’na oka poi o loko oka umeke hau,” say the Hawaiians; and our
parting gift from the Maguires was a little calabash of polished, light-
golden wood, out of their cherished hoard.
Then, sped by the warm “Aloha nui oe” we set our faces toward the
expanse of lava that was to be our portion for a day. One’s principal
impression, geographical as well as geological, of the journey, is of
lava, and lava, and more lava—new lava of 1859, old lava, older
lava, oldest lava, and wide waste of inexpressible ruin upon ruin of
lava, lava without end. How present any conception of this resistless,
gigantic fall of molten rock across which, mid-mountain, our road
graded? The general aspect of stilled lava is little different from
photographic portrayal of the living, fluid substance. It cools, and
quickly, in the veriest shapes of its activity, and the traveler who
misses the wonder of a moving mountain-side finds fair
representation in the arrested flood. It needs little imagination to
assist the eye to carry to the brain an illusion of movement in the
long red-brown sweep from mountain top to sea margin. In many
places we could see where hotter, faster streams had cut through
slower, wider swaths; and again, following the line of least
resistance, where some swift, deep torrent had burned its
devastating way down between the rocky banks of a gully.
The pahoehoe lava preserves all its swirls and eddies precisely as
they chilled in the long-ago or shorter-ago; while the a-a rears
snapping, flame-like edges against obstructions, or has piled up of
its own coolness in toothed walls. Incalculable, shimmering leagues
below, purple-brown lava rivers lie like ominous shadows of unseen
menaces upon plains of disintegrate eruptive stuff of our starry
system that has for remote ages ceased to resemble lava.
Ribboning this strange, fire-licked landscape our road lay gray-white
as ashes, at times spanning dreadful chasms where once had blown
giant blisters and bubbles. These, chilling too suddenly, had
collapsed, leaving caverns and bridges of material fragile as crystal,
layer upon layer, which at close range looked to be molten metal,
shining like grains of gold and silver mixed with base alloy.
Often our eyes lifted to the azure summer sea with its tracks like
footprints of the winds, or as if the water had been brushed by great
wings. And with that day, meeting the breezes of Windward Hawaii,
there passed my Blue Flush into the limbo of heavenly memories.
Leaving the later flow, we traversed a land of lava so eternally
ancient that it blossoms with fertile growth. Beautiful color of plant
life springs from this seared dust of millenniums—cactus blossoming
magenta and reddish-gold and snow-white; native hibiscus, flaunting
tawny flames on high, scraggly trees of scant foliage; lehua’s
crimson-threaded paint brushes; blue and white morning-glories and
patches of crimson flowers, flung about like velvet rugs. And here
one comes upon what remains of a sandalwood forest that was
systematically despoiled by generations of traders from the time of
its discovery somewhere around 1790, according to Vancouver. By
1816 the ill-considered deforesting of sandalwood had become an
important industry of the Hawaiians, chief and commoner, with
foreigners.
The wood was originally exported to India, though said to be rather
inferior. Then the Canton market claimed the bulk of the aromatic
timber, where it was used for carved furniture, as well as for incense.
Even the roots were grubbed by the avaricious native woodsmen,
and trade flourished until about 1835, when the government awoke
to the imminent extermination of the valuable tree, and put a ban
upon the cutting of the younger growth. But it is not surprising to
learn that the tireless forethought of Kamehameha had long before
protested against the indiscriminate barter, and particularly the
sacrifice of the new growth.
The livelong day we had traveled upon privately owned ranches, and
at last found ourselves on Parker Ranch, the largest in the Territory,
approximately 300,000 acres, lying between and on the slopes of the
Kohala Mountains to the north, knobby with spent blowholes, and
great Mauna Kea, reaching into the vague fastnesses of the latter.
This grand estate, estimated at $3,000,000, is the property of one
small, slim descendant of the original John Parker who, with a
beautiful Hawaiian maiden to wife, founded the famous line and the
famous ranch, which is a principality in itself. Perhaps no young
Hawaiian beauty, since Kaiulani, has commanded, however modestly,
so conspicuous a place as that occupied by Thelma Parker.
Although we had gone with humane leisure, the horses fagged as
the day wore. Often we walked to rest them and refresh our own
cramped members, treading rich pasture starred with flowers we did
not know, and keeping an eye to bands of Scotch beef-cattle, some
of the 20,000 head with which little Thelma is credited. After the
pampering climate of Kona, coats and carriage robes were none too
warm at the close of day, when we neared the sizable post-office
village of Waimea, headquarters of the enormous ranch.
Never shall be forgotten that approach to Waimea under Kohala’s
jade-green mountains like California’s in showery springtime; nor the
little craters in plain and valley—red mouths blowing kisses to the
sun; nor yet tenderly painted foothills and sunset cloud-rack, and the
sweet, cool wind and lowing herds.
“It seems like something I have dreamed, long ago,” Jack mused;
for, year in and year out, often in sleep he wanders purposefully in a
land of unconscious mind that his waking eyes have never seen.
Parker Ranch, September 2.
Judging from even our sketchy view of the Parker Ranch, it is reason
in itself for a future visit to Hawaii. The glorious country, with its
invaluable assets, is handled with all the precision of a great
corporation. Through the courtesy of Mr. Thurston, we are enjoying
the hospitality of the manager, Mr. Alfred W. Carter, and his wife,
who dwell in the roomy house of Thelma, now abroad. In our short
horseback ride we saw a few of the fine thoroughbred horses which
are raised, one of the imported stallions being a son of Royal Flush
II. Royal Flush II lives and moves and pursues his golden-chestnut
being on the ranch of Rudolph Spreckles, adjoining our own on
Sonoma Mountain.
Louisson Brothers’ Coffee Plantation,

Honokaa District, Hawaii, September 5.
Our next lap was to Honokaa, where we were met by another
carriage. The day’s trip demonstrated a still better realization that
the big island comprises nearly two-thirds of the 6700 square miles
of the eight inhabited islands; as well as the copiously watered
fertility of this windward coast. Leaving Waimea, we continued
across the rolling green plains, whose indefinite borders were lost in
Mauna Kea’s misty foothills. Rain fell soothingly, and often we had
glimpses of fierce-looking, curly-headed Scotch bulls with white
faces, vignetted in breaking Scotch mist into the veriest details of old
steel engravings. Hawaiian cowboys, taking form in the cottony
vaporousness, waved and called to our coachman ere swallowed
again.
One cannot encompass Hawaii without stepping upon the feet of
one lordly mountain or another. If it is not the exalted Mauna Kea, it
is surely the hardly less lofty Mauna Loa, or Hualalai.
At any moment in these Islands one may look off to the sea,
whether calm or blue-flushed; or, as here, deep-blue and white-
whipped, driven like a mighty river by the strong and steady trade
wind. One never grows fully accustomed to the startling height of
the horizon, which seems always above eye-level, cradling one’s
senses in a vast blue bowl.
At last the road dipped seaward to the bluffs where lies red-roofed,
tree-sheltered Honokaa, headquarters of a great sugar plantation.
After luncheon at the little hotel, we set out upon the almost
unbroken climb of several miles to Louissons’ coffee plantation,
where we had been invited by these two indefatigable brothers.
Never have I met but one man who could surpass in perpetual
motion our dear and earnest friend Alexander Hume Ford, and that
man is “Abe” Louisson, who, body and eye and brain, seems
animated by a galvanic battery.
It was a waving, shimmering land of incalculable proportions
through which we ascended, of green so fair that there is no other
green like it—the fabulous sugar-cane so closely standing that it
responds to all moods of the capricious sky, like the pale-green
surfaces of mountain lakes; cane that on the one hand surges out of
sight into the mountain clouds, and on the other floods its fair green
clear to the sudden red verge of cliffs sheering into the blue, high-
breasting Pacific. And every way we turned, there were the sweat-
shining, swart foreigners, Japanese, Portuguese, and what not, in
blue-denim livery of labor, directed by mounted khaki-gaitered lunas
(overseers), white or Hawaiian, or both, under broad sombreros.
We had not been in the high-basemented cottage half an hour, when
the driven enthusiasm of Mr. “Abe” had us out again and among the
magnificent coffee plants; and we learned that a coffee plantation
can be one of the prettiest places under heaven, with its polished
dark-green foliage, head-high and over, crowded with red jewels of
berries, interspersed by an imported shade tree which he calls the
grevillea. This tree serves the dual purpose of shading the plants—
which are kept resolutely trimmed to convenient height—and of
fertilizing with its leaves the damp ground under the thick shrubbery.
Nowhere have we seen such luxuriant growth of coffee, and the café
noir was unequaled save for a magic brew we had once drunk in the
mountains of Jamaica.
We were making very jolly over dessert and the thick, black coffee,
when the house seemed seized in an angry grasp and shaken like a
gigantic rat. I never did like earthquakes, and the April eighteenth
disaster which I saw through in California has not strengthened my
nerve. Jack, with expectant face, remained in his seat; but I, as the
violence augmented, stood up and reached for his hand, vaguely
wondering why every one did not run for the outside. The frame
building seemed yielding as a basket—purposely erected that way. At
the beginning of the tremor, the cook and his kokua had come
quietly into the room and held the lamps; and when the second
shock was heard grinding through the mountain Mr. Abe, wishing us
to have the full benefit of the harmless volcanic diversion, rose
dramatically, black eyes burning and arms waving, and cried:
“Here it comes! Listen to it! It’s coming! Hear it! Feel it!”
It was a milder shock, and was followed by a still lighter one,
accompanied by a distant rumbling and grinding in this last living
island of the group.
Of course, our first thought following upon the immediate
excitement of the shake was of the volcanoes. Would Kilauea, which
had this long time dwindled to a breath of smoke, awake? A
telephone to Hilo brought no report of activity. Our first attempts to
use the wire were ludicrous failures, for every Mongolian and
Portuguese of the thousands on Hawaii was yapping and jabbering
after his manner, and the effect was as of a rising and falling
murmur of incommunicable human woe, broken here and there by a
sharper or more individual note of trouble. A white man’s speech
carried faintly in the unseen Babel.
Louisson’s to Hilo, September 6.
In the perfumed cool of morning we bade farewell to the hospitable
bachelors, and descended once more from the knees of Mauna Kea
to its feet upon the cliffs. The world was a-sparkle from glinting
mountain brow above purple forest and cloud-ring, down the
undulating lap of rustling cane, to the dimpling sea that ruffled its
edges against the bold coast. Trees, heavy with overnight rain,
shook their sun-opals upon us from leaf and branch, and little rills
tinkled across the road. The air was filled with bird-songs, and in our
hearts there was also something singing for gladness.
Thus far, in our junketing, we have relied for the most part upon
saddle horses and railroad trains, or private conveyances of one sort
or another. Long stretches endured in public vehicles have never
tempted. But to-day’s journeying, in the middle seat of three,
luggage strapped on behind the four-in-hand stage, was a unique
experience, and an excellent chance to observe the labor element.
For we traveled in company with members of its various branches—
Hawaiian, Portuguese, Japanese, and many another breed.
The overcrowding was ludicrous. At some stop on the way, a bevy of
Japanese would swarm into the stage without first a “look-see” to
find if it was already full, literally piling themselves upon us. Jack,
determinedly extricating them and holding firmly to his seat, would
say with laughing eyes and smiling-set lips, while he thrust his big
shoulders this way and that: “I like to look at them, but they’d camp
on us if we’d let them!”
The only compromise we made with the overreaching coolie tide was
to take into our seat a sad little Porto Rican cripple, a mere child
with aged and painwrought face, whom the passengers, of
whatsoever nationality, shunned because of the bad repute of his
blood in the Islands; and also a sunny small daughter of Portugal,
glorious-eyed and bashfully friendly. When presented with a big
round dollar, she answered maturely, to his query as to how she
would squander it, a laconic:
“School shoes.”
Shades of striped candy! How did her mother accomplish it? Now,
the shrinking Porto Rican lad hobbled straight into a fruit store at the
next halt, reappeared laden with red-cheeked imported apples, and
with transfigured face of gratitude, held up his treasure for us to
share. Jack, with moist eyes, bit his lip. So much for one Porto Rican
in Hawaii. One would like to know his mother, too.
Isabella Bird Bishop has painted a thrilling word-picture of the
gulches of Windward Hawaii in the Hilo District—giant erosions of
age-old cloud-bursts, their precipitous sides hidden in a savage
wealth of vegetation, heavy with tropic perfume. And this day,
swinging through and beyond the coffee and cane of the Hamakua
District that adjoins the Kona, following the patient grades along the
faces of stupendous ravines, descending to bridges over rapturous
streams that began and ended in waterfalls, we remembered how
she, long before any bridging, at the risk of her precious life, forded
on horseback these same turbulent water courses, swollen by
freshets. For she was possessed of that same joy in existence that I
know so well, and which, unescorted in a period when few women
braved traveling alone, led her to venture ocean and island and
foreign continent, writing as vividly as she lived.
Only fleeting glimpses we had of the coast—sheer green capes
overflung with bursting waterfalls that dropped rainbow fringes to
meet the blue-and-white frills of surf. “Bearded with falls,” to quote
Robert Louis Stevenson, is this bluffwise coast of the Big Island, and
we envied the Snark’s crew who from seaward had viewed the
complete glory, from surf to mountain head.
Laupahoehoe, “leaf of lava,” was the simple poesy of the ancient-
Hawaiian who named a long, low outthrust at the mouth of a wide
ravine. Weather-softened old houses as well as grass huts stray its
dreamy length, under coco palms etched against the horizon; and
the natives seem to have no business but to bask beneath the blue-
and-gold sky. One lovely thumb-sketch we glimpsed, where a river
frolicked past a thatched hut beneath a leaning coco palm, near
which a living bronze stood motionless—a rare picture in modern
Hawaii.
Laupahoehoe, Hakalau, Onomea, each representing a sugar
plantation—we passed them all, and toward the end of day our
absurd four-in-hand of gritty little mules trotted into a fine red
boulevard. Just as we had settled our cramped limbs to enjoy the
unwonted evenness of surface, the driver pulled up in Wainaku, a
section of suburban Hilo, before a seaward-sloping greensward
terrace fanned by a “Travelers’ palm,” under which grazed a golden-
coated mare. Here, upon a word sent ahead by mutual friends in the
adorable way of the land, we were again to know the welcome of
perfect strangers—an unequalled hospitality combined of European
and Polynesian ideals by the white peoples who have made this
country their own.
On the steps of an inviting lanai room stood a blue-eyed lady-
woman, sweet and cool and solicitous, with three lovely children
grouped about her slender, blue-Princess-gowned form—Mrs. William
T. Balding, whose husband is connected with the Hilo Sugar
Company. Its mill purrs all hours at Wainaku by the sea.
Refreshed by a bath, and arrayed in preposterously wrinkled ducks
and holoku out of our suit cases, we dined exquisitely with the
young couple in an exquisite dining room hung with fern baskets,
the table sparkling with its perfect appointment, in contrast with the
natural wildness of tropical growth seen through the wide windows.
Shipmans’ Volcano Home, Hawaii, September

7.
Away back in 1790 or thereabout, an American fur-trader named
Metcalf, commanding the snow Eleanor, visited the Sandwich Islands
on his way to the Orient, his son, eighteen years of age, being
master of a small schooner, Fair American, which had been detained
by the Spaniards at Nootka Sound.
A plot was hatched by some of the chiefs to capture the Eleanor,
which was frustrated by Kamehameha, who himself boarded her and
ordered the treacherous chiefs ashore. Following this, a high alii of
Kona was insulted and thrashed with a rope’s-end by Captain Metcalf
for some trifling offense, and vowed vengeance upon the next vessel
that should come within his reach.
The little snow crossed Hawaii Channel to Honuaula, Maui, where a
chief of Olowalu with his men one night stole a boat and killed the
sailor asleep in it, afterward breaking up the boat for the nails.
Metcalf set sail for Olowalu, where, under mask of trading with the
natives, he turned loose a broadside of cannon into the flock of
peaceful canoes surrounding the Eleanor, strewing the water with
dead and dying.
After this wanton massacre of innocent islanders, Metcalf returned to
Hawaii and lay on and off Kealakekua Bay waiting for the Fair
American, which had by now arrived off Kawaihae, the seaport of
the present Parker Ranch, which we had seen when we passed
through.
Chief Kameeiamoku went out with a fleet of canoes as if to trade,
and when the eighteen-year-old skipper of the schooner was off
guard, threw him outboard and dispatched the crew with the
exception of Isaac Davis, the mate.
Simultaneously, John Young, the original of the Youngs of Hawaii,
found himself detained ashore, and all canoes under tabu by orders
of Kamehameha, in order that Metcalf should not hear of the loss of
his son and the schooner. The Eleanor continued lying off and on,
firing signals, for a couple of days, and finally sailed for China.
John Young and Isaac Davis were eventually raised by Kamehameha
to the rank of chiefs, endowed with valuable tracts of land; and they
in turn lent the great moi their service of brain and hand in council
and war, though carefully guarded for years whenever a foreign keel
hove in sight.
Small cannon, looted from the Fair American as well as from other
vessels which had been “cut out,” were of priceless worth in the
experienced hands of the white men in enabling Kamehameha
eventually to win his war of conquest, especially over the Maui
armies under the sons of Kahekili.
All of which is preamble to the pleasant fact that we are enviable
guests of Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Shipman, of Hilo, at their volcano
residence, Mrs. Shipman being the granddaughter of the gallant
Isaac Davis. Also we find she is half-sister to our friend Mrs. Tommy
White. Such a healthy, breezy household it is; and such a
wholesome, handsome brood of young folk, under the keen though
indulgent eye of this motherly deep-bosomed woman. Her three
fourths British ancestry keeps firm vigilance against undue
demonstration of the ease-loving strain of wayward sunny
Polynesian blood she has brought to their dowry.
The tropic wine in her veins has preserved her from all age and
decay of spirit. During this day and evening I have more than once
failed to resist my desire to lay my tired head upon her breast,
where it has been made amply welcome.
A social and domestic queen is Mrs. Shipman, and right sovranly she
reigns over her quiet, resourceful Scotch spouse, in whose contented
blue eye twinkles pride in her efficient handling of their family.
Although models of discipline and courtesy, their offspring are
brimming with hilarious humor, while ofttimes their mother’s stately,
silken-holokued figure is the maypole of a dancing, prancing romp.
Those holokus are the care of the two elder daughters, who never
tire of planning variations of pattern and richness, with wondrous
garniture of lace and embroidery.
Mrs. Shipman—and again we are in Kakina’s debt—had telephoned
our latest hostess to extend an invitation to this suburban home;
and according to arrangement Jack and I met her on the up-
mountain train from Hilo to the terminal station, whence the
Shipman carriage carried us ten miles farther to this high house in a
garden smothered in tree-ferns.
Today we had our first glimpse of Hilo, the second city of the
Territory, on its matchless site at the feet of Mauna Loa, divided by
two rivers, the Wailuku tearing its way down a deep and tortuous
gorge. Nothing could be more impressive than the pretty town’s
background of steadily rising mountain of sugar cane and forest and
twisted lava-flow. The rivers are spanned by steel bridges, the main
streets broad and clean and shaded by enormous trees, with many
branching lanes over-arched by blossoming foliage and hedged with
vines and shrubbery.
Hilo Harbor was once called after Lord Byron, cousin of the poet,
who nearly a century ago dropped the anchor of his frigate Blonde in
the offing, and surveyed the bay as well as the Volcano Kilauea.
Captain Vancouver, that thoroughgoing benefactor of Polynesia, saw
the possibilities of this port, for he wrote:
“Byron Bay will no doubt become the site of the capital of

the island. The fertility of the district of Hilo, ... the
excellent water, and abundant fish pools which surround it,
the easy access it has to the sandalwood district, and also
to the sulphur, which will doubtless soon become an object
of commerce, and the facilities it affords for refitting
vessels, render it a place of great importance.”
It was the Blonde which brought back in that year of 1825, to his
native land the remains of Kamehameha II, Liholiho, and his queen,
Kamamalu, from England, where they had been made much of at
court. Both fell victims to measles—always one of the deadliest of
diseases to islanders throughout the South Seas.
Poor things! Three years before, this favorite queen of Liholiho,
Kamamalu, on the last day of a long revel, had been the most
gorgeous object ever described by a reverend missionary:
“The car of state in which she joined the processions passing in
different directions consisted of an elegantly modeled whaleboat
fastened firmly to a platform of wicker work thirty feet long by
twelve wide, and borne on the heads of seventy men. The boat was
lined, and the whole platform covered, first with imported
broadcloth, and then with beautiful patterns of tapa or native cloth
of a variety of figures and rich colors. The men supporting the whole
were formed into a solid body so that the outer rows only at the
sides and ends were seen; and all forming these wore the splendid
scarlet and yellow feather cloaks and helmets of which you have
read accounts; and than which, scarce anything can appear more
superb. The only dress of the queen was a scarlet silk pa’u or native
petticoat, and a coronet of feathers. She was seated in the middle of
the boat and screened from the sun by an immense Chinese
umbrella of scarlet damask, richly ornamented with gilding, fringe
and tassels, and supported by a chief standing behind her, in a
scarlet malo or girdle, and feather helmet. On one quarter of the
boat stood Karimoku (Kalaimoku) the Prime Minister, and on the
other Naihe, the national orator, both also in malos of scarlet silk and
helmets of feathers, and each bearing a kahili or feathered staff of
state near thirty feet in height. The upper parts of these kahilis were
of scarlet feathers so ingeniously and beautifully arranged on
artificial branches attached to the staff as to form cylinders fifteen or
eighteen inches in diameter and twelve to fourteen feet long; the
lower parts or handles were covered with alternate rings of tortoise
shell and ivory of the neatest workmanship and highest polish.”
King Liholiho had a very engaging streak of recklessness that more
than once spread consternation amongst his following. As once in
1821, when he left Honolulu in an open boat for a short trip to Ewa.
The boat was crowded with thirty attendants, including two women.
But when off Puuloa, he refused to put in to the lagoon, and kept on
into the very lively water around Barber’s Point. Then, with royal
disregard of the fear and protests of his entourage, without water or
provisions, he set the course for Kauai, ninety miles of strong head
wind and sea.
“Here is your compass!” he cried to the helmsman, flinging up his
right hand, the fingers spread. “Steer by this!—And if you return
with the boat, I shall swim to Kauai, alone!”
Good seamanship and luck vindicated him, and they arrived safely
off Waimea, Kauai, after a night of peril. And to think that the
measles should have had their way with such a prince as that!
From the second station out of Hilo, moored near the main wharf,
we could make out the dear little Snark.
The observation car was filled with well-to-do Hilo residents bound
for the week-end at their volcano lodges, and I could see Jack
planning two more island homes.
To Kilauea, at last, at last—my first volcano, albeit a more or less
disappointing Kilauea these days, without visible fire, the pit,
Halemaumau, only vouchsafing an exhibition of sulphurous smoke
and fumes. But living volcano it is, and much alive or little, does not
greatly matter. Besides, one may always hope for the maximum
since Kilauea is notoriously capricious.
For eighteen miles the track up from Hilo slants almost
imperceptibly, so gradual is the ascent through dense forest, largely
of tree ferns, and, latterly, dead lehua overspread sumptuously with
parasitic ferns and creepers. There seems no beginning nor end to
the monster island. Despite the calm, vast beauty of many of its
phases, one cannot help thinking of it as something sentient and
threatening; of the time when it first heaved its colossal back out of
the primordial slime. And it is still an island in the making.
The carriage, sent up the day before from Hilo, was driven by one
Jimmy, a part-Hawaiian, part-Marquesan grandson of Kakela, a
Hawaiian missionary to the Marquesas group, whose intervention
saved Mr. Whalon, mate of an American vessel, from being roasted
and eaten by the cannibals of Hiva-oa. Jimmy’s grandfather was
rewarded by the personal gift of a gold watch from Abraham Lincoln,
in addition to a sum of money from the American Government. “And
don’t forget, Mate,” Jack reminded me, “your boat is next bound to
the Marquesas!”
It was a hearty crowd that sat at dinner; and imagine our smacking
delight in a boundless stack of ripe sweet corn-on-the-cob mid-
center of the bountiful table! Among all manner of Hawaiian staples
and delicacies, rendered up by sea and shore, we found one new to
us—stewed ferns. Not the fronds, mind, but the stalks and stems
and midribs. Served hot, the slippery, succulent lengths are not
unlike fresh asparagus. The fern is also prepared cold, dressed as a
salad.
The father of his flock rode in late from one of the headquarters of
his own great cattle ranch, PuuOO, on Mauna Kea. These estates, in
the royal manner of the land, often extend from half the colossal
height of one or the other of the mountains, bending across the
great valley to the nether slope of the sister mount, in a strip the
senses can hardly credit, to the sea. This enables a family to enjoy
homes from high altitudes, variously down to the seaside.
The flock as well as its maternal head rose as one to make their
good man comfortable after his long rough miles in the saddle. In a
crisp twilight, the men smoked on the high lanai, and the rest of us
breathed the invigorating mountain air. It was hard to realize the
nearness of this greatest of living volcanoes. Presently Jack and I
became conscious of an ineffably faint yet close sound like “the tiny
horns of Elfland blowing.” Crickets, we thought, although puzzled by
an unwontedly sustained and resonant note in the diminutive
bugling. And we were informed, whether seriously I know not, that
the fairy music proceeded from landshells (Achatinella), which grow
on leaves and bark of trees, some 800 species being known.
Certainly there are more things in earth and heaven—and these
harmonious pixie conches, granting it was they, connoted the loftier
origin. Jack’s eyes and mouth were dubious:
“I ha’e ma doots,” he softly warned; “but I hope it is a landshell
orchestra, because the fancy gives you so much pleasure.”
September 8.
Kilauea, “The Only,” has a just right to this distinguished
interpretation of its name, for it conforms to no preconceived idea of
what a volcano should be. Not by any stretch of imagination is it
conical; and it fails by some nine thousand feet of being, compared
with the thirteen-odd-thousand-foot peak on the side of which it lies,
a mountain summit; its crater is not a bowl of whatsoever oval or
circle; nor has it ever, but once, to human knowledge, belched stone
and ashes—a hundred and fifty years ago when it wiped out the bulk
of a hostile army moving against Kamehameha’s hordes, thus
proving to the all-conquering chief that the Goddess Pélé, who
dwells in the House of Everlasting Fire, Halemaumau, was on his
side.
Different from Mauna Loa’s own skyey crater, which has inundated
Hawaii in nearly every direction, Kilauea, never overflows, but holds
within itself its content of molten rock. It has, however, been known
to break out from underneath. The vertical sides, from 100 to 700
feet high, inclose nearly eight miles of flat, collapsed floor containing
2650 acres, while the active pit, a great well some 1000 feet in
diameter, is sunk in this main level.
In the forenoon we visited the Volcano House on the yawning lip of
the big crater, and sat before a roomy stone fireplace in the older
section, where Isabella Bird and many another wayfarer, including
Mark Twain, once toasted their toes of a nipping night.
From the hotel lanai we looked a couple of miles or so across the
sunken lava pan to Halemaumau, from which a column of slow,
silent, white vapor rose like a genie out of underworld Arabian
Nights, and floated off in the light air currents. No fire, no glow—
only the ghostly, thin smoke. And this inexorable if evanescent
breath of the sleeping mountain has abundant company in myriad
lesser banners from hot fissures over all the surrounding red-brown
basin, while the higher country, variously green or arid, shows many
a pale spiral of steam.
Rheumatic invalids should thrive at the Volcano House, for this
natural steam is diverted through pipes to a bath-house where they
may luxuriate as in a Turkish establishment; and there is nothing to
prevent them from lying all hours near some chosen hot crack in the
brilliant red earth that sulphurous exudation has incrusted with
sparkling yellow and white crystals.
Having arranged with Mr. Demosthenes, Greek proprietor of this
house as well as the pretty Hilo Hotel, for a guide to the pit later on,
Mrs. Shipman directed her coachman farther up Mauna Loa—the
“up” being hardly noticeable—to see thriving as well as dead koa
forest, and also the famous “tree molds.” A prehistoric lava-flow
annihilated the big growth, root and branch, cooling rapidly as it
piled around the trees, leaving these hollow shafts that are faithful
molds of the consumed trunks.
The fading slopes of Mauna Loa, whose far from moribund crater is
second in size only to Kilauea’s, beckoned alluringly to us lovers of
saddle and wilderness. One cannot urge too insistently the delusive
eye-snare of Hawaii’s heights, because an elastic fancy, continuously
on the stretch, is needful to realize the true proportions. Today, only
by measuring the countless distant and more distant forest belts and
other notable features on the incredible mountain side could we gain
any conception of its soaring vastitude.
For a time the road winds through rolling plains of pasture studded
with gray shapes of large, dead trees, and then comes to the
sawmills of the Hawaii Mahogany Company. Here we went on foot
among noble living specimens of the giant koa, which range from
sixty to eighty feet, their diameters a tenth of their height, with
wide-spreading limbs—beautiful trees of laurel-green foliage with
moon-shaped, leaf-like bracts. It was in royal canoes of this acacia,
often seventy feet in length, hollowed whole out of the mighty boles,
that Kamehameha made his conquest of the group, and by means of
which his empire-dreaming mind planned to subdue Tahiti and the
rest of the Society Group. As a by-product, the koa furnishes bark
excellent for tanning purposes.
(1) Alika Lava Flow, 1919. (2) Pit of Halemanman.
Great logs, hugely pathetic in the relentless clutch of machinery,

were being dragged out by steel cable and donkey-engine, and piled
in enormous and increasing heaps. Jack, who is inordinately fond of
fine woods if they are cut unshammingly thick, left an order for
certain generous table-top slabs to be seasoned from logs which we
chose for their magnificent grain and texture.
In addition to their flourishing koa business, these mills are turning
out five hundred ohia lehua railroad ties per day, and filling orders
from the States. But one can easily predict a barren future for the
forests of Hawaii if no restraint, as now, is enforced in the selection
of trees.
In the bright afternoon, horseback, with a Hawaiian guide, we made
descent into Kilauea.
The morning’s cursory view had been no preparation for the
beautiful trail, on which we were obliged to brush aside tree-
branches and ferns and berry bushes in order to see the cracking
desolation of the basin. Abruptly enough, however, we debouched
upon its floor, under the stiff wall we had descended, now hundreds
of feet overhead. Before us lay a crusted field of copperish dull-gold,
where whiffs and plumes of white rose near and far from awesome
fissures—a comfortless waste without promise of security, a
treacherous valley of fear, of lurking hurt, of extermination should a
foot slip.
On a well-worn pathway, blazed in the least dangerous places, we
traversed the strange, hot earth-substance. The horses, warily
sniffing, seemed to know every yard of the way as accurately as the
tiny Hawaiian guide. But I recalled Christian in the Valley of the
Shadow, for at every hand yawned pitfalls large and small and most
fantastic—devilish cracks issuing ceaseless scalding menace, broken
crusts of cooled lava-bubble of metallic dark opalescence; jagged
rents over which we hurried to avoid the hot, gaseous breath of
hissing subterranean furnaces.
Now and then the guide requested us to dismount, and then led,
crawling, into caverns of unearthly writhen forms of pahoehoe lava,
weirdly beautiful interiors—bubbles that had burst redly in the latest
overflow of Halemaumau into the main crater. On through the
uncanny, distorted lavascape cautiously we fared under a cloud-
rifted sky, and finally left the horses in a corral of quarried lava,
thence proceeding afoot to the House of Fire.
Perched on the ultimate, toothed edge, we peered into a baleful gulf
of pestilent vapors rising, forever rising, light and fine, impalpable as
nightmare mists from out a pit of destruction. Only seldom, when
the slight breeze stirred and parted the everlasting, unbottled
vapors, were we granted a fleeting glimpse, many hundreds of feet
below on the bottom of the well, of the plummetless hole that spills
upward its poisonous breath. If the frail-seeming ledge on which we
hung had caved, not one of us could have reached bottom alive—the
deadly fumes would have done for us far short of that.
A long silent space we watched the phenomenon, thought robbed of
definiteness by our abrupt and absolute removal from the blooming,
springing, established world above the encircling palisade of dead
and dying planetary matter. Jack’s comment, if inelegant, was fit,
and without intentional levity:
“A hell of a hole,” he pronounced.
Pélé, Goddess of Volcanoes, with her family, constituted a separate
class of deities, believed to have emigrated from Samoa in ancient
days, and taken up their abode in Moanalua, Oahu. Their next
reputed move was to Kalaupapa, Molokai, thence to Haleakala,
finally coming to rest on the Big Island. In Halemaumau they made
their home, although stirring up the furies in Mauna Loa and Hualalai
on occasion, as in 1801, when unconsidered largess of hogs and
sacrifices was vainly thrown into the fiery flood to appease the huhu
(angry) goddess. Only the sacrifice of a part of Kamehameha’s
sacred hair could stay her wrath, which cooled within a day or two.
Many, doubtless, have there been of great men and women in the
Polynesian race; but the fairest complement to the greatest,
Kamehameha, seems to have been that flower of spiritual bravery,
Kapiolani. A high princess of Hawaii, she performed what is
accounted one of the greatest acts of moral courage ever known—
equal to and even surpassing that of Martin Luther. Woman of
lawless temperament, her imperious mind became interested in the
tenets of Christianity, and swiftly she blossomed into a paragon of
virtue and refinement, excelling all the sisterhood in her intelligent
adoption of European habits of thought and living.
Brooding over the unshakable spell of Pélé upon her people, in
defiance of their dangerous opposition, as well as that of her
husband, Naihe, the national orator, she determined to court the
wrath of the Fire Goddess in one sweeping denunciation and
renunciation. We have it, however, that Naihe later cultivated an
aloha for the missionaries, and was buried where are now only the
ruined foundations of the first mission station, established by Ely and
Ruggles in 1824 and 1828, mauka of Cook Monument.
It was almost within our own time, in 1824, when she set out on
foot from Kaawaloa on Kealakekua Bay, a weary hundred and fifty
miles, to Hilo. Word of the pilgrimage was heralded abroad, so that
when she came to Kilauea, one of the pioneer missionaries, Mr.
Goodrich, was already there to greet her. But first the inspired
princess was halted by the priestess of Pélé, Who entreated her not
to go near the crater, prophesying certain death should she violate
the tabus. Kapiolani met all argument with the Scripture, silencing
the priestess, who confessed that ke akua, the deity, had deserted
her.
Kapiolani proceeded to Halemaumau. There in an improvised hut she
spent the prayerful night; and in the morning, undeserted by her
faithful train of some fourscore persons, descended over half a
thousand feet to the “Black Ledge,” where, in full view and heat of
the grand and awful spectacle of superstitious veneration,
unflinchingly she ate of the votive berries consecrate to the dread
deity. Casting outraging stones into the burning lake, she fearlessly
chanted:
“Jehovah is my God!
He kindled these fires!
I fear thee not, Pélé!
If I perish by the anger of Pélé,
Then Pélé may you fear!
But if I trust in Jehovah, who is my God,
And he preserve me when violating the tabus of Pélé,
Him alone must you fear and serve!”
Vision how this truly glorious soul then knelt, surrounded by the
bowed company of the faithful, in adoration of the Living God, while
their mellow voices, solemn with supreme exaltation, rose in praise.
One cannot help wondering if Mr. Goodrich, fortunate enough to
experience such epochal event, was able, over and above its moral
and religious significance, to sense the tremendous romance of it.
Scarcely less illuminating, was the conversion of that remarkable
woman, Kaahumanu, favorite wife of Kamehameha, to whom I have
already referred as one of the most vital feminine figures in
Polynesian annals. Far superior in intellect to most of the chiefs, she
had been created regent upon the demise of her husband, ruling
with an iron will, haughty and overbearing.
At first disdainful of the missionaries, finally her interest was enlisted
in educational matters, whereupon with characteristic abandon she
threw herself into the learning of the written word as well as the
spoken. An extremist by nature, born again if ever was human soul,
from 1825 to her death in Manoa Valley, Honolulu, in June of 1832,
she held herself dedicate to the task of personally spreading virtue
and industry throughout the Islands. Her last voyage was to pay a
visit to Kapiolani, after which she lived to receive the fourth re-
enforcement of American missionaries, who arrived in the Averick a
month before her passing. The crowning triumph of her dying hours
was to hold in her fingers the first complete copy of the New
Testament in the Hawaiian tongue. Alexander writes:

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Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature

Pestilence in Medieval and Early Modern English

Women and Family Life in Early Modern German Literature

Renaissance and Reformations An Introduction to Early

Fresche Fontanis Studies in the Culture of Medieval and

Anti Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama 1st

The English Bible in the Early Modern World 1st Edition

The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English

Kinga Földváry and Erzsébet Stróbl

This book first published 2012

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2012 by Kinga Földváry and Erzsébet Stróbl and contributors

ISBN (10): 1-4438-4186-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4186-3

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix

Part I: Social and Religious Issues in Early Modern Texts

The Queen and Death: An Elizabethan Book of Devotion

On the Shoulders of Giants: Texts and Contexts behind William

Women of No Importance in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

Ten Days in Paradise: The Chronology of Terrestrial Action

Part II: Shakespeare on Page and Stage

Hymen’s Truth: “At-one-ment” from Shakespeare to Tyndale,

William Kemp and Falstaff: Reality and Role in Elizabethan

Forgotten and Remembered: the Shakespearean Hobby-Horse

This Great Ship of Fools: The Ship of Fools and Elizabethan/Jacobean

“Walking Anatomies:” Violence and Dissection on the Early Modern

“O Yet Defend Me, Friends!” Claudius’s Struggle for the Favour

“So Berattle the Common Stages”: Metatheatricality and Polyfunctionality

Appendices .............................................................................................. 303

Fig. 1. Paradisal equilibrium at sunset..................................................... 104

Fig. 2. The earth’s shadow as an astronomical sundial............................ 108

Fig. 3. Key constellations in Paradise Lost ............................................. 109

Fig. 4. Satan steering his zenith (10.327–29) .......................................... 116

Fig. 5. Portrait of Andreas Vesalius from his De Humani Corporis

Fig. 6. The title page of De Humani Corporis Fabrica.

Fig. 7. Plate from De Humani Corporis Fabrica.

Table 1. Epic chronology from the beginning of terrestrial action

Table 2. Chronology of epic action from Satan’s re-entry into

Table 4. Tyndale’s three translations of hilasmos ................................... 139

EARLY MODERN COMMUNIONS

KINGA FÖLDVÁRY AND ERZSÉBET STRÓBL

religious and political implications of the parallel messages offered by the

employed testify to the significance of the art of memory in the homiletic

senior scholars working in the Hungarian academic community, representing

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS ISSUES

we have to take into consideration the implications suggested by the

A Book of Devotion: Re-Forming a Catholic Tradition

is by nature conservative,11 even official primers were produced to cater

Texts and Margins

messages” and “images opened the text to multiple and sometimes

The Motif of the Dance of Death

mori poems, where individual representatives of society lamented the

[“The Structures of Dances of Death”] in Mauzóleum: A halállal való foglalkozás

As we were, so are ye: / And as we are, so shell ye be. (Kk3v)

Prayers of a Queen: Identity and Image Making