Spenser, Edmund (1552 or 1553–1599)

SPENSER, EDMUND (1552 or 1553–1599)

SPENSER, EDMUND (1552 or 1553–1599), English poet and author. Born in London, perhaps at East Smithfield, Spenser was educated at the newly founded Merchant Taylors' School and at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. His family may have been related to the Spencers of Althorp. As both politically engaged author and dutiful state servant, he first came to public notice in 1569. In that year, he translated verses by Petrarch (1304–1374) and Joachim Du Bellay (c. 1522–1560) for A Theatre for Worldlings, an English version of a work by the Dutch Calvinist Jan van der Noot (c. 1540–c. 1595)—a key text for the reforming tradition of militant Protestantism to which Spenser belonged—and was paid on 16 October for bearing letters from Tours in France for Sir Henry Norris, English ambassador there, to Queen Elizabeth—the beginning of a long secretarial career.

At Cambridge he began a long-lasting friendship with fellow scholar Gabriel Harvey. He received his B.A. in 1573 and his M.A. in 1576. After a few years in which little is known of his activities or whereabouts, Spenser exploded onto the literary scene in 1579 with The Shepheardes Calender, a pastoral poem in the form of a collection of "eclogues," or conversations among shepherds. Much more than a publication, it was a literary event. The Shepheardes Calender founded the myth of Gloriana, contributing to the cult of Elizabeth at the very moment when Spenser, frustrated in his efforts to secure preference at court, was seeking his fortune abroad. Despite its panegyric to the queen in the April Eclogue, it contains a covert critique of church and state. Like his later work, it contests the very authority to which it apparently commends itself.

Published anonymously, but carefully timed to coincide with correspondence with Harvey containing clues to its authorship, The Shepheardes Calender came complete with the kind of editorial apparatus associated with classical texts by canonical authors, yet was illustrated with woodcuts, and contained dialogue written in the language of ordinary country folk. This mix of playfulness and purposefulness, with its inventive and often subversive borrowing from high and low culture, is characteristically Spenserian. The Shepheardes Calender was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, earning Spenser a mention in Sidney's Apology for Poetry (1595).

In 1580 Spenser became secretary to the new lord deputy of Ireland, Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton. Ireland remained Spenser's home until his death. Having presented himself as the most promising poet of his generation with The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser failed to publish for a decade, busy both with the writing of his epic poem, The Faerie Queene, and with his role as secretary. From 1588, he occupied an estate of three thousand acres at Kilcolman, County Cork, one of many parcels of land seized from the late earl of Desmond as part of a government plan to settle lands in Munster with English tenants. This earned him the title of gentleman and provided a base from which to pursue his literary projects. He associated with Sir Walter Raleigh (1554–1618), who was a neighbor.

In September 1598 Spenser was appointed sheriff of Cork. Weeks later, Kilcolman was razed as part of a popular uprising. Spenser fled to Cork City, and from there to London, carrying a letter from the provincial president, Sir Thomas Norris, to the Privy Council, outlining the plight of the settlers. This last commission came thirty years after the performance of a similar duty for Norris's father. Spenser died in London on 13 January 1599.

THE FAERIE QUEEN

The first three books of The Faerie Queene appeared in 1590. A heady brew of Italianate romance, classical epic, and indigenous idioms inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, John Lydgate, and John Skelton, its verbal density and formal difficulty marked a radical break with English poetic form, impacting later developments in poetry. Its sheer ambition coupled with an intimate attachment to landscape inspired poets from John Milton, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope, to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Seamus Heaney. Its greatest innovation was the Spenserian stanza, a nine-line fusion of French "rhyme royal" and Italian "ottava rima," eight pentameters ending on an alexandrine, with a rhyme scheme of ababbcbcc. The second part of The Faerie Queene, books 4–6, appeared in 1596. Critics detect a darkening of purpose in the later books, as the allegory becomes more historical and political, especially in book 5, "The Legend of Justice." The "darke conceit" of The Faerie Queene shadows—and shares in—the dark doings of the English in Ireland, from martial law to massacres. Cowardice was not part of Spenser's makeup. Those who condemn his role in the government's violent suppression of resistance to colonization in Ireland respect a writer who had the courage of his convictions.

Spenser's work retained its critical edge right to the end, whether published in his own lifetime or in posthumous parting shots, from the anticourtly sentiments of The Shepheardes Calender and Colin Clout's Come Home Againe (1595) to the sharp criticisms of government that litter the prose dialogue A View of the State of Ireland (1596; published 1633), and, in The Faerie Queene itself, from the provocative account of the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), in canto 9 of book 5—which so enraged her son, James VI (ruled 1567–1625), that he asked for the poem to be destroyed and the poet punished—to the sniping from the margins in the "Mutabilitie Cantoes" that form a fragment of book 7 (unpublished until 1609).

Spenser lacked the means—perhaps even the muse—to write in England the national epic he was able to forge freely in Ireland. Born and buried in England, his career and corpus were made in Ireland. Spenser's colonial status both empowered and impaled him. His Irish experiences continue to engage and enrage critics in equal measure. For some, Spenser's astonishingly varied and vibrant literary output remains unbound by any context, historical or political. For others, the poetry, like the prose, is tainted by the world of violence from which it sprang. But where Ireland was once associated with the burden of history in Spenser studies, it has recently opened up his work to new readerships and new readings. Given his location between two cultures, as an imperial servant who became increasingly attached to his adopted country, it is no surprise that Spenser has received attention from postcolonial critics. His fusion of forms has attracted others who see him as an early postmodernist. One thing is clear: studying Spenser is, like his writing itself, an endless work.

See also Elizabeth I (England) ; English Literature and Language ; Ireland ; Patronage ; Sidney, Philip .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Spenser, Edmund. The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser. Edited by J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt. London, 1912. Reprinted 1985.

——. A View of the State of Ireland (1633): From the First Printed Edition. Edited by Andrew Hatfield and Willy Maley. Oxford, 1997.

——. The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition. Edited by E. A. Greenlaw, et al. 11 vols. Baltimore, 1932–1949.

Secondary Sources

Burrow, Colin. Edmund Spenser. Plymouth, U.K., 1996.

Hadfield, Andrew. Spenser's Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Savage Soyl. Oxford, 1997.

Hamilton, A. C., ed. The Spenser Encyclopedia. Toronto, 1990.

Maley, Willy. A Spenser Chronology. New York, 1994.

Shire, Helena. A Preface to Spenser. London, 1978.

Willy Maley