²¹ Theresa M. Krier, Birth Passages: Maternity and Nostalgia, Antiquity to Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2001), 112–13.

²² Krier, Birth Passages, 142–3; her emphasis. Robert R. Edwards, The Dream of Chaucer: Representation and Reflection in the Early Narratives (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1989), sees the Parlement as a commentary on the craft of writing poetry; while David Aers, ’The Parlement of Foules: Authority, the Knower, and the Known’, Chaucer Review 16 (1981), 1–17, argues that Chaucer privileges his own authority as an author over other cultural and literary figures.

²³ Other candidates include Sir John Salisbury and his wife Ursula; Elizabeth and the English people; Elizabeth and Salisbury; Lucy, countess of Bedford, and her husband, the third earl of Bedford; Elizabeth and Giordano Bruno; the martyred Jesuit poets Robert Southwell and Henry Walpole; and the martyred Catholic Ann Line and her husband, Roger. For criticism on these candidates, including Emerson, who first thought the poem an allegory of the poet, see Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), chap. 6, to which the present essay serves as sequel. For two excellent overview essays, see James P. Bednarz, ‘The Passionate Pilgrim and “The Phoenix and Turtle” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 108–24; and Lynn Enterline, ‘“The Phoenix and the Turtle”, Renaissance Elegies, and the Language of Grief’, in Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion, ed. Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), 147–59.