Spenser’s ‘Apish Crue’: Aping in Prosopopoia or Mother Hubberds Tale

This reading of Mother Hubberds Tale focuses on the Ape and his debt to the performing apes of the playhouse and baiting arena. The chapter outlines the history of the performing ape and its relationship to mimetic theory before considering the relationship between the speaking and embodied animal in the poem. I then analyse the Ape’s behaviour, emphasising the contortions involved in his two-footedness, dancing and gaming, and his adoption of elaborate costume. I end with a discussion of the role of pain in shaping the poem’s exploration of animal personation and how it references anxieties about censorship. Throughout, I argue that Spenser’s interrogation of the rhetorical figure of personation uses the animal to question modes of performativity in relation to social status, satirising the Elizabethan court but also asking wider questions about the links between prosopopoeia, the production of poetry and violence.