French Faeries and Alliterative Plays in Lucy Peacock’s Adaptation of Edmund Spenser’s Poem The Faerie Queene

Abstract

This paper concerns Lucy Peacock’s transcreative approach towards the adaptation of Edmund Spenser’s heroic poem The Faerie Queene for children. Her book entitled The Adventures of the Six Princesses of Babylon (1785) belongs to very few successful attempts to rewrite the Spenser’s epic and make it fully available for young readers. The included analysis pertains to the highly creative strategies adopted by Peacock to tackle the linguistically obsolete and dense text written in the Elizabethan age and turn it into children’s literature. The particular attention was paid to the alliterative plays that reflect some textual peculiarities present in Spenser’s poem and are a form of refined competition with the author of the original text. Besides, the setting and protagonists of the book are analysed as they deliberately deviate from the characteristics of Spenser’s universe being wisely borrowed from the French fairy tales by Madame d’Aulnoy and filtrated through a personal and ideological filter of the translator.