Renaissance poets (not just Spenser) were more than aware of allegory, they were practically obsessed by it.
 

The professional mythographer was a Renaissance creation...
 

Although there are restrained exceptions like Giraldi, the force of tradition was too much for most of these compilers, and they found it impossible to avoid the euhemeristic, ethical, or moral readings of the Christian apologists and syncretists and the symbolical and allegorical commentators on all ancient writings. Their readers found in their pages the same fascination with hidden meanings that impelled the scholiasts...  Homer, Virgil, and Ovid.
 

 

 

...the middle of the sixteenth century the ancient mythographers Apollodorus, Hyginus, Antoninus Liberalis, and Cornutus had joined authorities like Proclus, Porphyry, Heraclitus, and Diodorus Siculus in mythographers? libraries. An accomplished scholar like Natale Conti did not hesitate to cite Silenus of Chios, mentioned by Eustathini, and xxxdes, known through Celsus. However, it was Apollodorus and Cornutus, assisted by Cicero?s celebrated conversations On the Nature of the Gods, who furnished the warp for most mythographers? webs. The first author was available in print in 1555 and the second in 1563...
 

The vigorous virtue of Athena, Cornutus writes, is a symbol of the purity of abstract thought; nonetheless, Hermes is the Logos sent to men to make manifest the will of the gods. Hercules is also the personification of reason. His lion skin is a symbol of invincibility...
 

...the etymology of the names of the gods... Macrobius? theories of proper interpretation, uncommonly close to those of Proclus and Julian, are found in that second Bible of medieval men, his Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, where myth as an instrument of the philosopher is defended against the strictures of the Epicurean, Colotes of Lampsacus.
 

Some time in the latter part of the fifth century or the first part of the sixth, the author of the Expositio Virgilianae contentiae gathered seventy-five myths together in Mythologia Tum libri tres. At least a dozen editions of the work were called for between 1500 and 1600, and the seventeenth-century compilers of mythographers? collections, Müncker and Van Staveren, included it in their volumes. ... The medieval renown of Fulgentius was immense. John of Salisbury, Henry of Hereford, Bernard of Sylvester?to name a few?leaned on his interpretations...
 
 

In Isidore of Seville sixth-century Spain furnished the early Middle Ages with a final encyclopedist whose compendium of information rivaled that of Martianus Capella. A short section of the eighth book of the Etymologiat is called the De diis gentium and is filled with more than a hundred euhemeristic, moral, etymological, and physical accounts of ancient idolatry... St. Isidore supplied the next thousand years with an epitomized guide to symbolical and allegorical interpretation.
 

Martianus Capella, Fulgentius, and Isidore had medieval imitators, ...all the efforts of the Middle Ages to find meanings in pagan mythology, similar in nature but probably not so intense as those they found in the Scripture, helped sweep the way for Giovanni Boccaccio, the first of the systematic mythographers.
 

In the sixth circle of the Inferno Dante is frightened by the sight of the Erinyes, and, as Virgil comfortingly takes his hand, the voice of the narrator is heard advising those of  ?sound mind to contemplate the doctrine hidden under the veil of mysterious verse.? The passage in the Divine Comedy closely coincides with the letter to Can Grande? della Scala, where Dante, remembering Servius? remarks on Virgil?s first line, describes his own poetry as ?polysemos,? or of several meanings, the literal and the allegorical or mystical. Petrarch, son of Dante?s fellow exile, loudly defended the theological worth of poetry in his famous apologetic letter to his monastic brother. To support his views?and he quotes St. Isidore?he sends one of his own allegorical bucolics with an explanation of what he intended.  There can be little question that Petrarch read the classics for symbolic meaning; but if there was a doubt, his letter to Aretino on the moral truths of the Aeneid would help dispel it. For Petrarch as for Fulgentius, Aeneas was ?Man on the Way of Life.? The storms endured are those of anger and desire, which can be checked by Aeolus, or reason. As the son of Venus, or pleasure, he is inclined to his mother?s passions; when she meets Aeneas in the midst of the forest, Virgil is thinking of those middle years of life when men pursue pleasure more avidly. The garments of the goddess are girded so that, as pleasure, she may flee quickly; she is clad as a huntress ?who hunts the souls of us miserable ones.? To charm and then smite her victims her hair is unbound and she carries a bow.?
 

About 1350 Petrarch?s great friend Boccaccio was asked... to furnish King Hugo IV with ... compilation originally planned for thirteen books, finally included two additional books in which poetry was described and defended as a kind of theology. ...Myths, according to Boccaccio?s preface, are ?polysemos? in understanding...
 

[historical, moral, allegorical, anagogical] ?These senses, though given different names, can all be called allegorical?. . . which comes from ?allon? which means ?alien or different in Latin and signifies any sense not historical or literal.?
 

Virgil also desired, Boccaccio continues, to praise the Julian gens by showing Aeneas scorning fleshly immodesty and female enticements. Lastly, in Dido?s dying execrations, the Punic Wars and Rome?s triumph are prophetically implied.
 

...most Renaissance mythographers shared Ficino?s belief in the divine mysteries found in these pieces, an opinion supported by his worthy disciples, Pico della Mirandola and Christoforo Landino.
 

In the Heptaplus Pico describes his theory of the three worlds from which all allegorical discipline is derived.
 

Among his contemporaries or recent predecessors, Cartari draws on Alciati, Giraldi, and very heavily on Alexander of Naples or Alexander ab Alexandro, whose Dies Geniales, a suite of scholarly classical articles, appeared first in Rome in 1522. He also refers to Petrarch, to Leo Hebraeus, to Landino?s commentary on the Aeneid, to Alciati? s emblems, and to Giraldi. Among the ancient mythographers, he used Apollodorus, Diodorus, Hyginus, Macrobius, Cornutus, Palaephatus, and Hor Apollo as well as the Christian revilers of myth, Lactantius, Firmicus Maternus, Arnobius, Tertullian, and Augustine. Among medieval experts, he leans most stoutly on Martianus Capella, but he has read Lactantius Placidus, Fulgentius, Eustathius, and Albericus of London. Boccaccio receives special attention. He says of Boccaccio?s Demogorgon, ?But I have never seen any ancient writer who speaks of him.? He mentions Boccaccio?s comparison of the peacock of Juno to the rich... On numerous occasions Cartari stands ready to repeat Boccaccio?s allegorical or symbolic explanations. Pan?s two horns symbolize ?the courses and distances of the planets and their affect on the earth; the Magna Mater?s crown and scepter indicate ?human riches and the power of kings?; the Sirens in meadows of scattered bones signify ?the [mind drawn] by lascivious thoughts?...
 

Cartari relates the happy reception of Saturn by King Janus of Latium and the united rule of the two monarchs, which was of so much benefit to mankind that King Saturn was deified. Saturn?s symbol is a scythe because he taught man the arts of agriculture; but he is also drawn as an open and undisguised truth. Cartari turns to the common myth of Saturn, Rhea, or Ops, and their four children and repeats the old allegory of the four elements devoured by time.
 

As a symbolist and allegorist he steers between the sparingly careful approach of Giraldi and the carefree abandon of Conti. All three mythographers made such impressive advances over Boccaccio and his immediate successors that they dominated the field; no seventeenth century artist could do without their mythologies.
 

The vast success of Giraldi, Conti, and Cartari, especially of the latter two, made the publication of further mythological handbooks hardly worth the effort.
 

...the Jesuit Francois Pomey, whose Pantheum mythicum seu fabulosa deorum historia, cleared for publication by the provincial of Lyons in April, 16X8, was published in the succeeding year. The Pantheum mythicum became the mythological handbook of the following two centuries. The famous classical scholar Samuel Petiscus, engaged by the publisher to correct the sixth edition, advises the ?Friendly Reader? that this book, deriving from Boccaccio, Giraldi, and Conti, was invaluable in the classical instruction of ?studious youths.? Translated into English in 1698 by Andrew Tooke, who was silent about the author of the original, it became known as Tooke?s Pantheon of the Heathen Gods and Illustrious Heroes and was reprinted twenty-three times by 1771. It was published as ?adapted for the use of students of every age and either sex? in America as late as 1859.
 

But the attitude towards the interpretation of classical literature and the Greco-Roman myths was shifting, and this turn in approach has a certain history.
 

Francois Rabelais, who consulted his personal copy of Hor Apollo when he explained the white and blue blazon of Gargantuan is as unfriendly to the allegorizers of Homer as Agrippa is to those of Sacred Writ.
 

Do you believe upon your conscience that Homer, whilst he was couching his Iliads and Odysses, had any thought upon those allegories, which Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticus, Eustathius, Cornutus squeezed out of him, and which Politian filched from them? If you trust it with neither hand nor foot do you come near to my opinion, which judgeth them to be as little dreamed of by Homer as the gospel sacraments were by Ovid in his Metamorphosis though a certain gullible friar and true bacon-picker would have undertaken to prove it if perhaps, he had met with as very fools as himself.?
 

Luther?s view on ?these whores of allegory? is not so stout as his epithet might suggest; in fact, he is inclined to wobble.
 

...beware of allegories; for there is not a more handsome or apt thing to beguile withal than an allegory; nor a more subtle and pestilent thing in the world to persuade a false matter than an allegory. And, contrariwise, there is not a better, vehementer, or mightier thing to make a man quick-witted and print wisdom in him, and make it to abide, where bare words go but in at the one ear and out the other.

 

An occasional Protestant, such as the mystical Henry More, might object to attacks, especially Quaker attacks, on allegory holding it was a common practice of rhetoricians and poets and praising the ease with which moral lessons can be found in story as opposed to the difficulty of an ethical idea.
 

It can be assumed that when the mystical interpretations of the Bible were increasingly held in doubt, similar readings of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and the Greco-Roman mythologies were in the same state.
 

...Francis Bacon, the best English allegorizer of mythology. In The Advancement of Learning he attacks Paracelsus and his followers for seeking in the Bible ?all Natural Philosophy,? an effort that not only scandalizes ?all other philosophy as heathenish and profane? but also debases Scripture. He advises readers not to be overwise but to fear enigmatical or physical interpretations of the Bible which imitate the manner ?of the rabbins or cabalists.?
 

Nevertheless in many the like encounters, I do rather think that the fable was first, and the exposition devised, than that the moral was first, and thereupon the fable framed. For I find it was an ancient vanity in Chrysippus that troubled himself with great contention to fasten the assertions of the Stoics upon the fictions of the ancient poets. But yet that all the fables and fictions of the poets were but pleasure and not figure, I interpose no opinion. Surely of those poets which are now extant, even Homer himself, (notwithstanding he was made a kind of Scripture by the later schools of the Grecians), yet I should without any difficulty pronounce that his fables had no such inwardness in his own meaning; but what they might have upon a more original tradition, is not easy to affirm; for he was not the inventor of many of them.

The De sapientia velerum (1609) appeared midway between The Advancement of Learning (160X) and the Opera of 1623, in which the Latin version of the Advancement became, by the augmentation of the second book into eight, the great De augmentis. In this ultimate version, the myths of Pan, Perseus, and Dionysus were rewritten from the texts of the De sapientia to make Bacon?s theory of hidden mystery more concrete. In spite of the ease with which the material is apparently set forth, the De sapientia absorbed an enormous amount of learning and there are few ancient or recent mythographers unknown to Bacon.
 

Bacon claims that he was fixed in his conclusions by the strange nature of myth and the significance of names, which imply unavoidable meanings. Sometimes the myths contain real history; sometimes matter added for adornment becomes, in due course, important; sometimes there is a confluence of fable resulting in new allegory; and finally, some myths are so absurd that they must have deeper interpretations. He reiterates his old belief that fables came before interpretations, just as hieroglyphics preceded letters; but no matter how the complaints fall, all men must admit that they are the most pleasant means of presenting a lesson.
 

The vogue of the De sapientia velerum was not small, and it is not surprising to find Bacon?s name mentioned with those of Heraclitus, Fulgentius, Lavinius, and Conti as one of the principal interpreters of myth as late as 1684 by Andreas Eschenbach in his Ethica mythologica. By this time very learned, almost scientific, studies of pagan religion and of individual deities clearly were beginning to elbow out mythologies that emphasized deeper meanings. ... were mapping out the positivistic program of classical investigation which would become modern mythological study.
 

There is no question that the allegorical technique which enabled the proper interpreters to find so much Christian, moral, or physical wisdom in classical literature, in Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, in the mythographers or even in the unreadable Egyptian hieroglyphics was very seriously in trouble by the end of the seventeenth century; nonetheless, it had dominated hermeneutics for two hundred years or more.