Setting
Moorcock reimagines the realm of Queen Elizabeth I and her Early Modern England as that of Queen Gloriana I of Albion, ruler of an empire stretching from "Hindustan" and "Cathay" to the "great continent of Virginia (and Kansas)." The era is a century after the time of Elizabeth I: "I wrote the book as if it was being written in the late 17th century, closer to Defoe than Shakespeare, drawing on language and understanding from that far forward, as it were," says Moorcock. Yuletide and Twelfth Night are celebrated within a pagan spirituality and pantheon that includes Mithras, Thor, and Zeus. Albion's capital is "Troynovante" (New Troy), which is an allusion to sixteenth century mythologies about the alleged initial settlement of England by descendants of the sacked classical kingdom of Troy.
Albion's world is one of many parallel worlds of which Gloriana's people are just learning. Her Councillor of Philosophy, Doctor John Dee, tells her, "There are other Glorianas, other Dees, other Lord Chancellors, no doubt," from other spheres, perhaps separated by layers of ether. Gloriana's Thane of Hermiston has traveled to some of them, and Albion has been visited from other spheres by such as Cagliostro and Adolphus Hiddler, an Austrian who claimed to have conquered his own world.
The novel's atmosphere owes something to English writer Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, published in the 1940s and 1950s, and Moorcock dedicated Gloriana to the memory of Peake, one of his literary heroes. Similar to the castle-city of Gormenghast, Gloriana's palace is riddled with abandoned chambers, apartments, hallways, passages, balconies, stairways, and caverns—"the walls"—within which live an underground community of runaways, escapees, and vagrants.
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