How doth the little Crocodile improve his shining Tale: Contextualizing the Crocodile of Prosopopoia: Or Mother Hubberds Tale

Abstract

By including a crocodile in the list of animals recruited as mercenaries by the Ape and the Fox in Mother Hubberds Tale, Spenser invokes a complicated discourse concerned with the natural history and symbolism of crocodiles in the early modern period. This essay ranges over The Faerie Queene, the sonnets of Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, the works of Pliny the Elder and his Renaissance followers, an anti-League text, and a painting commemorating the defeat of the Spanish Armada, to seek to set this one crocodile in context and to show how Spenser employs natural history for pointed allegorical ends.

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