52445
The Gabriel Millet Collection
Millet No.: 1.V777.12
Unidentified
1612
Personification of County, Britannia
Engraved frontispiece for the 1612 publication of Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion (First Edition). Drayton’s frontispiece contains a representation of an allegorical personification of Great Britain, a goddess-like woman dressed in a map. The four figures who surround her, as male suitors, represent powers who have sought to control her. They are, according to the accompanying poem, to be identified as follows: (top left) the founder/discoverer Brutus, (descendant of the Trojan Aeneas, who founded Rome: top right); Julius Caesar, (bottom left); Hengist the possibly mythical fifth-century Saxon or Jutish king of Kent; and (bottom right) an unnamed Norman prince, probably William the Conquerer.
Brink, J. R., Michael Drayton revisited (1990)
Helgerson, R., Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (1992)
McEachern, C., The Poetics of English Nationhood 1590-1612 (1996)