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Aesopian Prosopopoia: Making Faces and Playing Chicken in Mother Hubberds Tale

Mother Hubberds Tale locates the political engagements of the poem within a very complex Aesopian tradition. In reflecting and reflecting on this tradition, the poem registers political resentments and hostility under the cover of Aesopian deniability: generic beast fable figures can seem to conceal specific human targets while making the conclusive identification of those targets impossible. At the same time, the poem’s meta-level examination of its own rhetorical tools is revealed as potentially one more defensive strategy: just as an attack on Burleigh or a critique of Elizabeth can masquerade as a fable about a fox or a lion, so sedition can purport to be discourse about sedition. Just how much Spenser might have been committed to the more radical implications of the Aesopian fictions put in play throughout Mother Hubberds Tale and how much he puts them in play for rhetorical effect is impossible to know for certain since Aesopian political deniability is part of the subject of the poem and cultivating political indeterminacy is an important strategy. At the same time, the way Mother Hubberds Tale adapts and revises its myriad subtexts hints that the political intentions of an individual poet, even if knowable, do not account for all of the political consequences of a particular poem.