Gloriana; or The Unfulfill'd Queen (1978)

Avon 1978, Art: Elizabeth Malczynski

Aspects of Fantasy

Near the conclusion of the 1977 Jerry Cornelius novel The Condition of Muzak (in the chapter "The Mirror; or, Harlequin Everywhere"), the tone briefly departs from the increasingly post-modern techno-urban atmosphere typifying most Cornelius stories and diverts into a more fable-like writing style with a somewhat "vintage" Dickensian tone. In a way, this was a hint of what was to come the following year in Moorcock's next novel, Gloriana; or, The Unfulfill’d Queen. 

Published in 1978, Gloriana was dedicated to Moorcock's friend, the groundbreaking fantasy literature writer Mervyn Peake (author of the "Gormenghast" trilogy 1946-1959), and subsequently won the World Fantasy Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Although Moorcock is probably most well-known for his heroic fantasy (Elric, etc.) and his sociopolitical techno-satires (featuring Jerry Cornelius), Gloriana is essentially historical fiction written as if it came from the mind of a writer living in the post-Elizabethan age of the late 17th century. However, Moorcock himself avoids the terms "Elizabethan Fantasia" and historical fiction, probably because the language is obviously not Elizabethan and because the premise does not try to portray itself as being a part of real historical events. Instead, Gloriana straddles the worlds of both fantasy and literary fiction.

Fontana Collins 1978, Art: Gustave Moreau (detail)

Nonetheless, the novel generally never puts itself forth as anything but a "realistic" novel. In other words, presented from the supposed viewpoint of a scribe in the late 1600s, many things which would now be considered "fantastic" are accepted as possible fact. The only other major Moorcock work in this style (up to this time) would probably be his early novel The Golden Barge, whose main character Jephraim Tallow (or possibly an incarnation of him) also returns in Gloriana (in fact, Moorcock has characterized the then-unpublished The Golden Barge as a direct precursor to Gloriana). 

L'Atalante (French) 1990, Art: Monsù Desiderio

Aside from citing thematic and stylistic connections to Peake and The Golden Barge, Moorcock has also described the novel as a "bow to Jacobean melodrama", with language hewing closer to a late Carolingian flavor than an Elizabethan one. Jacobean drama was a form of theater developed after Shakespeare's time (during the reign of Queen Elizabeth's successor, King James), and is generally considered to be a flimsier, less refined form of drama compared to the heights attained in the Elizabethan age by the "Immortal Bard". Jacobean drama was also written with royal patrons in mind (as opposed to the "common people"), and in Gloriana the drama mostly revolves around the competitive intrigues of the Royal Court. However, despite similarities to historical England in the Elizabethan age, the fictional Albion is actually a kind of retro-future Utopian vision:

"Albion, with her Platonic temples and barmy alchemists like John Dee, is not an “alternate England” in any generic sense but a fabulous construct, a version of what the best of a nation might look like if written from a seventeenth-century perspective. I was not trying to imitate the language and thought of the Elizabethan age but was drawing on the attitudes and styles of late-Carolingian England. In this, the likes of Defoe and Marvell were great influences. My parodies of Spenser (especially the Mutability Cantos) and court poetry of the sixteenth century were done from that perspective, when practical, commercial interests had come to dominate the thinking of incipient imperialists."

MM: "Haunted Palaces and Poisoned Chalices" 2004 Warner Aspect (Hachette) Edition Afterword

ACT (Russian) 2016, Art: Darya Kuznetsova

Although Gloriana may employ a pastiche form of Spenserian, pre-1600s court poetry (in Wheldrake's Court Masque verses) and a late 1600s satirical tone in line with that of Daniel Dafoe and Andrew Marvell's (in the narrative portions), nonetheless many of the characters are analogues to historical figures from the earlier 16th century court of Queen Elizabeth I - but also some with critical differences. For example, where the "Virgin Queen" Elizabeth I was cold, inviolate and pragmatic (and nurtured an ultimately lethal rivalry with Mary, Queen of Scots), here Gloriana is achingly sexual, and reveals a decidedly romantic imagination (and is best friends with the impulsive northern envoy Countess Una of Scaith). Other characters are also apparently creations partially-inspired by real historical characters, but usually imbued with personality traits inspired from Moorcock's own circle of friends and enemies (for more on this aspect, Mark Scroggins' book Michael Moorcock: Fiction, Fantasy and the World’s Pain (2015) goes into much more detail).

Allison & Busby 1978, Art: Jill Riches

The Hollow Lands

In the world of Gloriana, Albion is the dominant global power in Europe and the Americas. After having replaced her despotic, insane father King Hern on the throne 13 years ago, Queen Gloriana and her "Privy Court" maintain policies which have brought forth a "Golden Age" of peace and prosperity, radiating from their island empire (Great Britain, essentially). One of Gloriana's most important advisors is the Lord Chancellor Montfallcon, a survivor from the "bad old days" of King Hern's rule, who frequently uses decidedly shady elements abroad in order to accomplish some of his Realpolitik diplomatic aims (all without the Queen's knowledge, of course). Balancing out Montfallcon's zeal for practicality and political influence is Gloriana's Court Philosopher Doctor John Dee (named after a real historical figure), who delivers fanciful reports on visitors "from other worlds" (of the multiverse). Speaking in "Eternal Champion" terms, one could say that Mintfallcon is a "Lord of Order", while Dee acts as a "Lord of Chaos" (with Gloriana being the hapless Champion).

Centripress SF 1981, Art: Dicky Groenendijk-Grimme

Although the public spaces of Gloriana's palace are occupied by objects and personages of great beauty, behind the walls there exists another society, made up of exiles, criminals, and other lost souls. Essentially a "rabble", they spy vicariously on the doings of the royal court but do nothing else to draw attention. Another more actively-nefarious element in the novel is the wily Captain Quire, Lord Montfallcon's best henchman, who ruthlessly (and cheerfully) executes the bloody deeds underlying the Lord Chancellor's velveted-iron fist statesmanship abroad. Feted as a local folk hero by the lower caste citizens of the city, Quire thinks of himself as an "artist" whose criminal skills demonstrate his high degree of expertise. 

Additionally, the Queen herself has an unseemly flaw, in that in all her years she has never experienced an orgasm, and this she vainly pursues in nightly escapades in which she explores all manner of sexual activities, both typical and "deviant". This, the "Unfulfill'd Queen's" one failing, is an open secret amongst the members of the court and the populace, although never spoken of aloud (on an allegorical level this of course reinforces the idea of there being hidden cracks lying within the Empire's carefully-constructed image of immaculate perfection).

SFBC 2005, Art: Bruce Jensen

While the first part of the book establishes the cast of characters and the three main settings (the palace proper, the secret world behind the walls, and the lower city), small events occur which eventually lead to a secret bargain in which Quire betrays his arrogant royal patron Montfallcon and complies with the wishes of a foreign agent to bring both Gloriana and Albion down to their knees. Acting behind the scenes throughout much of the middle part of the book, Quire leverages the dark forces bubbling behind the palace walls to place himself in a position so that he eventually gains control of the entire Realm. On the way, behind increasingly decadent and frivolous festivals and parties, Quire and Montfallcon wage a "secret war" against each other which ultimately lays bare all of the secret desires and hidden intrigues binding together the many colorful members of the royal court. However, in the end, as spectres from the past return to haunt the souls of the present, Gloriana and Quire manage to reach a kind of mutual understanding, acknowledging their dependence on one another.

Questar 1986, Art: Robert Gould

A Fabled Beginning

Gloriana's first chapter takes place just after Albion's New Year's Eve festivities (concluding Gloriana's 12th year of reign), and acts somewhat as an "overture" to the rest of the book. As it swoops around the city following certain main members of the cast in a kind of literary "tracking shot", it also functions to introduce the three major settings used in the drama (the palace, the palace underworld, and the lower city). First focusing on the titular Queen (as she attempts to assuage her sexual frustration), it moves through the echoing passageways of the palace to pause on her political advisor Montfallcon (who weighs the preservation of Albion against Gloriana's personal needs and wants). This then leads to a comic scene featuring the sneak-thief Jephraim Tallow (a denizen from behind the walls), then the inebriated court poet Ernest Wheldrake (responsible for the original verse uttered during royal ceremonies), and then the Queen's Champion, Sir Tancred (a model of out-of-fashion chivalry who attempts to woo Gloriana's Lady in Waiting, the affable Mary Perrott). 

The narration stays with Wheldrake as he wanders down to the lower city, where New Years Eve festivities have not yet entirely sputtered out. The poet eventually lands at the raucous Seahorse Tavern where the antagonist of the tale, Captain Quire is introduced. In this scene the fuse for the drama to come is lit, as Quire takes mock-offense to an Arabian merchant's espionage proposition, and almost insouciantly forces a less-than-honorable duel. Finally, the narrative eye drifts to the wharf where Albion's naval "edge of the sword", Admiral Tom Ffynne, returns from his travels enforcing Albion's global dominance. It's worth noting that this first chapter is written entirely in the "present tense", a stylistic tone which imparts a sense of mythic fable (a technique also briefly employed in the Condition of Muzak chapter "The Mirror; or, Harlequin Everywhere", as mentioned earlier).

Unused Avon cover sketch, Art: Howard Chaykin 1978

Seasons of Discontent

After this opening medley of interlinked vignettes, the book begins exploring each of the characters in sequences strung throughout the better part of the remaining year, featuring secret meetings, unspoken inner dialogues, and "random" disruptions to the Court's formerly-untarnished surface. Acting as structural tent-poles, several major royal events occur throughout the novel (a Masque on Twelfth Night, May Day celebrations, Accession Day jousts, a Hunt, a bacchanalian Autumn Masque, etc.). These Royal Appointments try to preserve a sense of order and routine at the court, in order to divert attention from the melodrama (and growing rot) roiling underneath.

"It's essentially a classical form: the Four Seasons. It's a bit like a dance, in four movements. Each movement is in tune with its season: winter, spring, summer, autumn. There's a festival for each season, a set piece, each with a poem: the banquet on the ice, the May festival, the tournament, and the Bacchanalia."

            MM: Death Is No Obstacle, 1992  

With the quote above in mind, the novel's thirty-five chapters could theoretically be grouped into four sections, seasons and theatrical "set pieces":

1. Ch. 1-15: Winter: On the Twelfth Night of the Yuletide, the Court Masque portrays the Norse Ragnarok.
   
2. Ch. 16-22: Spring: On May Day, Wheldrake reads a spring-themed chapter from his chivalric poem "Atargatis; or, the Celestial Virgin".
   
3. Ch. 23-30: Summer: After the Accession Day tilt, a Court Masque (featuring Gloriana as the Witch Queen Urganda) draws from the Fairie Queene poem.
   
4. Ch. 31-35: Autumn: During the Bacchanal, a mechanical "Harlequinade" is presented to the Queen.

Additionally, although some of the seemingly-untethered scenes in between the royal affairs may not at first seem to have any great importance or relevance to the greater picture, eventually the puzzle pieces begin to fall into place, as Quire pulls tight the many-stranded web of lethal design which he has been surreptitiously weaving all along. 

Court Myth-ology

Warner Aspect 2004, Art: Nicholas Hilliard

In his previous books, Moorcock's characters frequently inhabited the fringes of society, or at least spent their time in the "outlands" of political power. Elric and the other incarnations of the Eternal Champion are heroes without a country (or multiversal plane), and Oswald Bastable and Jherek Carnelian are literally adventurers adrift in time. And, besides his nature as a time-traveller, Jerry Cornelius is usually cast in the role of a destroyer of worlds rather than a contributing member of order. Gloriana, in contrast, explores the highest levels of society and empire and makes its titular protagonist the most powerful person in the world - hardly a "sailor on the seas of fate" like the ones featured in the previously-mentioned series (not to mention the Michael Kane books, Behold the Man, Breakfast In the Ruins, etc.).

By placing the ruling court of Albion as the nominal "heroes" of the saga, the novel is able to deconstruct and de-mythologize this higher strata of society, and yet still maintain the reader's sympathies for these "tragic" characters. Aside from giving Moorcock a chance to explore various layers of exotic Elizabethan pageantry (sometimes with an ironic air), it's also refreshing to be following a drama taking place "at court", where realistic geopolitics directly affect the main characters' personal lives. While Elric and Hawkmoon might have been Emperors and Dukes in their stories, the reader rarely saw them on their thrones. Also, while both Gloriana and the earlier science fantasies both qualify as "romances", this novel literally eschews foreign battlefields for imperial bedrooms (and seraglios).

Japan Edition, Art: Tomomi Kobayashi 2010

Despite its stylistic departure from the more pulpy early works, readers familiar with Moorcock's bibliography can still find many "winks" to some facets of his multiverse. The names of Elric's Chaos Lords are sometimes uttered in curses, and Jephraim Tallow's cat appears to be a relative to Jhary-a-Conel's familiar, Whiskers. The poetry of Ernest Wheldrake plays a part in the Dancers At the End of Time books, and the poet himself resurfaces in the 1991 Elric novel The Revenge of the Rose.

Of course, the most obvious connection to the multiverse is the presence of Una, Countess of Scaith. While the name Scaith may recall Ynys Scaith (from Corum's The Sword and the Stallion), the Countess here has the same irrepressible joie de vivre as that of the famed Temporal League Aviatrix Mrs. Una Persson, and can is sometimes caught in private reveries reliving scenes from other worlds (one imagines).

Gollancz 2013, Art: Harry Clarke
"A woman in an elaborate gown,
possibly Queen Mab" (detail)

The Jewel In the Skull

Moorcock has described Gloriana as an "ironic fable". Like The Golden Barge, its narrative contains an allegorical element. The public-facing facade of impenetrable chivalry characterizing the palace halls is comparable to the outer surface of the mind (or its "media self-projection"), while the secret world behind the walls (and its pathetic denizens) represents the inner surface of the mind and its underlying primal identity (or subconscious). This is in part an homage to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy (Titus Groan in particular), whose layered, catacombed setting Moorcock has described as being comparable to the structure of a giant head, complete with a structurally-defining skull and a soft inner psyche (see Wizardry and Wild Romance, 1987). Additionally, it's likely that some elements of Gloriana may also have been inspired by Horace Walpole's 1764 proto-Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, which Moorcock has also cited as an early inspiration.

Last but not least, Moorcock has also cited Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590s) as a reference point from which to approach Gloriana. As an "anti-imperialist" thinker, Moorcock uses Gloriana to argue against the political implications underlying Spenser's epic poem (which posits the Queen and her chivalric Court as examples of unassailable Christian virtue and high morality). Moorcock first establishes Albion as a utopian ideal of European (Anglo-Saxon) civilization, and then exposes the entire construct as being built on all-too-human frailties and fears. In this way, he also asks "if the means ever justified the end, or whether a glamorous construct ultimately destroyed that which it sought to defend, however successful it at first seemed." However, Moorcock also states that the book is not meant to be some kind of revelatory expose of the underlying, frequently self-serving machinations of modern government. More equitably, "it does deal to some degree with self-deception while it accepts the need for a balance between high morality and low realism."  ("Haunted Palaces").

Flamingo 1986, Art: A.H. Tanoux

In some sense, although Gloriana, or The Unfulfill'd Queen pokes and prods at an idealism-based "Golden Age" sustained through underhanded foreign policy, on most practical levels Gloriana's preceding 12 years of rule seem to have been actually quite wonderful, and the resolution to the story seems to come back around to a way of government not particularly different from that seen in the opening premise. 

On the other hand, the novel was written during a period of self-deception on the part of the author ("The book is a description of a lie that I was living at the time, maintaining power in my life, in an unwholesome relationship, unhealthy for all concerned, which only appeared to be stable.", Death Is No Obstacle), so I suppose it is up to the reader to determine which reading resonates more strongly.

Delta Vision (Hungarian) 2006, Art: Kira Santa

Ending Revision

A few years after its publication, Gloriana came under attack for its ending, in which a rape leads to seeming redemption for both parties. Although probably originally intended to simply topple the seemingly inviolate edifice (or "Imperial Office") of the Queen (Moorcock uses the word "demystify"), the sequence left many readers thematically confused, distracted by Gloriana's apparent role as a melodrama victim. 

After conversations with sf writer Colin Greenland (see Death Is No Obstacle) and writer Andrea Dworkin (amongst other feminists), the author took into consideration the immediate, negative implications of such a plot turn, and in 1993 rewrote the scene (now included as an Appendix entry in most modern editions of the book). In the new ending (spoiler alert!), the Queen experiences a cathartic moment of self-worth which succeeds in both giving her the sexual release she has been pining for and derailing the sexual crime. In this way, Quire the antagonist is "tamed" after Gloriana finally sees through the false mythology pinned on her through her royal station.

Mondadori Italian editions 1981, 1993

More Commentary

More historical background connected to Gloriana can be found in Michael Moorcock: Fiction, Fantasy and the World’s Pain (Mark Scroggins, 2015). Additional commentary can be found in The Law of Chaos: The Multiverse of Michael Moorcock (Jeff Gardiner, 2015) and Death Is No Obstacle (Michael Moorcock & Colin Greenland, 1992). A pretty good article/review can be found on the Tor site as well: https://www.tor.com/2017/09/12/gloriana-michael-moorcocks-would-be-farewell-to-fantasy/. "The Idle Woman" (a curator at the British Museum) has a nice review here: https://theidlewoman.net/2019/02/01/gloriana-michael-moorcock/.

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Previous Chapter: The Condition of Muzak (1977)

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