A short life of the author
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–1599) was born in London and educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He became the pre-eminent non-dramatic poet of the English Renaissance — “the prince of poets in his time,” as his memorial in Westminster Abbey declares — and the author of The Faerie Queene, the most ambitious English poem between Chaucer and Milton.
Life and Career
At Cambridge Spenser formed a friendship with Gabriel Harvey, a scholar and rhetorician, and began the literary experimentation that would produce The Shepheardes Calender (1579), a cycle of twelve pastoral eclogues (one for each month) written in a deliberately archaic English that announced Spenser’s ambition to be the English Virgil — to follow the Virgilian career from pastoral to epic.
He entered the service of the Earl of Leicester and became secretary to Lord Grey de Wilton, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, in 1580. Spenser spent most of the rest of his life in Ireland — at Kilcolman Castle in County Cork — as a colonial administrator and English settler in a land whose culture he admired in poetry and helped suppress in fact. This contradiction haunts his legacy.
The Faerie Queene was his life’s work. The first three books were published in 1590; the second three in 1596. The poem was intended to consist of twelve books (each representing a virtue), but only six were completed plus the fragmentary “Mutabilitie Cantos.” It is a vast allegorical romance — knights, enchantresses, dragons, hermits, false and true churches — that simultaneously celebrates Elizabeth I (as Gloriana), anatomises the virtues of Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy, and creates an enchanted landscape of extraordinary imaginative richness.
Spenser invented the Spenserian stanza — nine lines rhyming ABABBCBCC, with the final line an alexandrine — specifically for The Faerie Queene. The form was later adopted by Thomson, Keats (The Eve of St. Agnes), Byron (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage), and Shelley (Adonais).
In 1598, during Tyrone’s Rebellion, Kilcolman Castle was burned by Irish rebels. Spenser and his family fled to Cork; he was sent to London with dispatches and died there on 13 January 1599, “for lack of bread,” according to Ben Jonson — though this may be apocryphal.
Major Works and Themes
The Faerie Queene operates on multiple levels simultaneously: as romance adventure, moral allegory, political commentary (the religious and political struggles of Elizabethan England), and Neoplatonic vision. Its language — deliberately archaic even by Elizabethan standards — creates a dreamlike atmosphere in which allegory and narrative coexist without collision.
The Shepheardes Calender (1579) is the most important English pastoral poem before Milton’s Lycidas. Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595) — a sonnet sequence and wedding ode for his marriage to Elizabeth Boyle — contains some of the most beautiful love poetry of the period.
The Irish Problem
Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (written c. 1596, published 1633) is one of the most troubling texts of the English Renaissance. In it, Spenser — the poet of courtesy, temperance, and justice — argues for the violent subjugation of the Irish people, including famine as a deliberate instrument of conquest. The document is chilling in its administrative precision: Spenser describes, approvingly, the effects of famine he had witnessed during the Munster wars, and recommends its systematic application.
The contradiction between the allegorical poet of virtue and the colonial administrator who advocated ethnic cleansing is not a contradiction at all, but a revelation of how Elizabethan concepts of civility and virtue depended on the exclusion and subjugation of those deemed barbarous. The Faerie Queene’s Book V — the Legend of Justice — includes the allegorical figure of Artegall, whose brutal suppression of rebellion mirrors Spenser’s own policy recommendations for Ireland. The poem and the policy document illuminate each other: both demonstrate the Elizabethan conviction that order must be imposed, by force if necessary, on what is perceived as chaos.
Modern Spenser criticism takes this seriously. The New Historicist readings of Stephen Greenblatt, Richard Helgerson, and Andrew Hadfield have made the Irish dimension central to any reading of The Faerie Queene, and it is no longer possible to read the poem’s allegory of virtue without acknowledging the violence that underlay it.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Spenser was revered by his contemporaries and by the next generation: Shakespeare, Milton, and Jonson all admired him. Milton called him “a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas.” His influence on English poetry — through the Spenserian stanza, through his example of the poet as national voice, through the musicality and visual richness of his verse — is pervasive. The Romantics — Keats, Byron, Shelley — adopted his stanza and his sensuous, visual style. Today, Spenser is both admired for his poetic achievement and interrogated for its political implications — a combination that makes him one of the most rewarding and demanding of English poets.
Key Works
- The Shepheardes Calender (1579)
- The Faerie Queene (Books I–III, 1590; Books IV–VI, 1596)
- Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595)
- Fowre Hymnes (1596)
- A View of the Present State of Ireland (written c. 1596, published 1633)
Collecting Spenser
Sixteenth-century Spenser first editions are among the great prizes of English book collecting.
The Shepheardes Calender (1579, Hugh Singleton, London) is one of the most important Elizabethan first editions. It was published anonymously; copies are extremely rare and almost entirely institutional. Those that have appeared at auction have brought $50,000–$200,000.
The Faerie Queene (1590, William Ponsonbie, London, first three books) is a landmark of English printing. First editions in folio bring $20,000–$100,000 depending on condition and completeness. The 1596 edition (six books) is somewhat more common.
The first folio collected works (1611, Matthew Lownes) is the more practical target for collectors, typically bringing $5,000–$20,000.
Later important editions include the eighteenth-century scholarly editions by John Hughes (1715) and John Upton (1758), which are collected as milestones in Spenser scholarship.