Article abstract: Reflecting both Renaissance and Reformation ideals in his Christian

humanism, Spenser incorporated classical, Continental, and native English poetic

traditions to create in his epic The Faerie Queene, the quintessential statement of
Elizabethan national and moral consciousness.

Early Life

Little is known about Edmund Spenser’s life. He was born about 1552, one of the three
children of Elizabeth and John Spenser (a Lancashire gentleman by birth who had
settled in London and become a free journeyman of the Merchant Taylors’ Company).
The family’s income must have been limited, because a wealthy Lancashire family
assisted with Edmund’s education. At the Merchant Taylors’ School from 1561-1569, he
was influenced by the famous humanist educator Richard Mulcaster, who imparted to
Spenser the notion that a man must use his learning in the service of the public good
(usually as a courtier advising his prince). During this period, Spenser demonstrated his
Reformation sympathies by contributing several verse translations to A Theater for
Worldlings (1569), a strongly anti-Catholic work.

Spenser matriculated at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge University, in 1569 as a “sizar,” or

poor scholar; there he continued his study of the Greek and Latin classics and
contemporary French and Italian literature. Spenser was also fascinated by the mystical
elements in Plato and the writings of the Italian Neoplatonists Pietro Bembo and
Marsilio Ficino. Spenser’s Neoplatonism was always blended with staunch
Protestantism, which was strengthened by Cambridge’s Puritan environment. While at
Cambridge, Spenser formed a friendship with Gabriel Harvey, a university don; the two
shared a concern with poetic theory and hoped for a revival of English verse.

After receiving his B.A. in 1573 and his M.A. in 1576, Spenser, in true Renaissance
fashion, became a man of action as well as of letters. He served as secretary to John
Young, Bishop of Rochester, and was later employed by Robert Dudley, the Earl of
Leicester, whose nephew Sir Philip Sidney was well known for his promotion of English
poetry (his famous Defence of Poesie was published posthumously in 1595).
It is to Sidney that Spenser’s first major work, The Shepheardes Calender (1579), is
dedicated. Heralding a new movement in English verse, The Shepheardes
Calender consists of twelve pastoral eclogues, one for each month. The classical
eclogue records shepherds’ songs and conversations about their simple lives. Vergil
had established the form as a preparation for the greater genre of epic, dealing with war
instead of love and with the founding of a great civilization. Spenser thus identified
himself as England’s epic poet, who would sing the praises of the nation and its
sovereign: In the April Eclogue, Colin Clout (Spenser’s shepherd persona) sings the
beauties of the shepherdess Elisa (Elizabeth I).

Moreover, Colin Clout is a shepherd (pastor in Latin) in the spiritual sense; the eclogues
can be read as a satiric critique of contemporary ecclesiastical practices, and the poet-
shepherd, like Moses and Christ, is also a prophet. Spenser thus established himself
within both classical and Christian contexts. He also proclaimed himself truly English by
deliberately using archaic language, which provides a rustic “native English” tone and,
more important, identifies Spenser as the heir of Geoffrey Chaucer. Spenser was
eminently qualified for this role: The Shepheardes Calender displays both his humanist
learning and his technical skill (he experimented with thirteen different meters in the
work). In an age that encouraged self-fashioning, Spenser firmly established himself as
Elizabeth’s “poet laureate.”

Life’s Work

In 1580, Spenser was appointed secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton, the Lord Deputy of
Ireland; with the exception of a few visits to England, Spenser lived the rest of his life in
Ireland, and his love of the Irish countryside is evident in his poetry. In 1588, Spenser
was granted a three-thousand-acre estate, Kilcolman, between Limerick and Cork in
Munster. There, while serving in various official capacities, he practiced his poetic craft.

Most Elizabethan poets engaged in the fashionable practice of sonnet writing, and
Spenser was no exception: His sonnet sequence Amoretti was published in 1595.
Always the innovator who transformed his models, Spenser combined the Italian and
English sonnet forms to create the Spenserian sonnet: three linked quatrains and a
couplet, rhyming ababbcbccdcdee. Spenser also imbued the Petrarchan sonnet with his
own Christian, Neoplatonic sensibility. Sonnet 79, for example, celebrates the “true
beautie” of his mistress, which is not physical but spiritual and proceeds from God, the
source of beauty. It is thus “free from frayle corruption.” The sequence’s structure is
loosely based on the Christian liturgical cycle (reflecting the concern with time’s
movement introduced in The Shepheardes Calender).

Spenser had married Elizabeth Boyle in 1594; by publishing his Epithalamion (a poem

celebrating the wedding day) at the conclusion of the Amoretti in 1595, he reverses the
Petrarchan tradition: His courtship, unlike the never-ending frustrated yearning of
Petrarchan lovers, would be consummated in a fruitful marriage. The Epithalamion is
one of Spenser’s most beautiful and intricate works. Typically eclectic, it combines the
Italian canzone form with numerous allusions to classical mythology and descriptive
details drawn from the Irish countryside. The poem is numerologically significant in that
it contains twenty-four stanzas and 365 long lines, symbolizing not only the wedding day
and night but also the year and ultimately man’s entire life in its movement from birth
through death to heaven. Highly formal and intensely personal, the poem creates an
“endlesse moniment” to love and the power of poetry.

Spenser’s syncretism culminated in his greatest work, The Faerie Queene. The first
three books were published in 1590, with an introductory letter to Sir Walter Ralegh;
books I-VI were published in 1596, and books I-VI, combined with the Cantos of
Mutabilitie, presumably fragments from an unfinished seventh book, were published in
1609. Fortunately, Spenser’s letter to Ralegh provides readers with clues to interpret his
“continued Allegory, or dark conceit.” The work’s purpose, according to Spenser, is “to
fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.” The Faerie
Queene thus functions as a courtesy or conduct book used to train a perfect courtier.
Each of the six books is devoted to the exploits of a knight who represents a particular
virtue: holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice, and courtesy.
In writing this courtesy book, Spenser drew on several literary sources: the classical
epics of Homer and Vergil (the poem began in medias res with the well-known line, “A
Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine. . . .”); the medieval tradition of allegory; the
“matter of Britain,” or Arthurian legend; sixteenth century Italian epic romance (such as
Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, 1532, and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme
Liberata, 1581); and the Bible. The use of allegory was typical of Elizabethan thought,
given the fourfold method of biblical exegesis inherited from the medieval period and the
common habit of allegorizing classical authors such as Homer, Vergil, and Ovid. The
Faerie Queeneoperates on several allegorical levels, though not always simultaneously.
Narrative events can be interpreted literally, historically (the character Sir Calidore, for
example, was modeled on Sir Philip Sidney), morally, or theologically.

The work’s verse form, the Spenserian stanza (eight lines of iambic pentameter
followed by an Alexandrine, rhyming ababbcbcc), is both unique and challenging. The
demanding rhyme scheme gives Spenser an opportunity to show off the poetic
suppleness of vernacular English, as well as establish a stanzaic unity of thought.
Simultaneously active and static, the stanza continues the narrative flow of events (and
Spenser uses inversion to create rhythmical effects that imitate the canter of a horse or
the seductive charm of an enchantress) while also standing as a discrete unit. In this
sense, the stanza operates as a stationary picture or emblem, which the Alexandrine at
its end explains or summarizes. The reader is thus forced to be active and
contemplative, involved and detached, simultaneously.

Read as the great English epic of the Elizabethan age, The Faerie Queene is an
intensely nationalistic poem, celebrating the person of Gloriana, the fairy queen
(Elizabeth I). The poem is not, however, merely an effusive compliment which Spenser
wrote to gain patronage; it was intended to reflect Elizabethan England in its idealized
form, so that in reading or gazing into the textual mirror and imitating the vision, the
sovereign, her courtiers, and ultimately the country would be transformed. Spenser re-
created England’s past, present, and future in an intricate overlapping of plot and life; he
unites the fairy-tale world—replete with knights, ladies, magicians, castles, giants, and
dragons—with the temptations and emotions of everyday experience.
Except for an annual pension of fifty pounds granted in 1591, Spenser was not
rewarded by his queen for singing England’s praises. When Kilcolman was sacked in
1598 by Irish forces rebelling against English domination, Spenser and his wife fled to
London. Spenser died in 1599 in forlorn and diminished, if not penurious, circumstances
and was buried, appropriately, near Geoffrey Chaucer in what is now known as the
poets’ corner of Westminster Abbey. Always fascinated by time’s cyclical ability to move
forward and yet stay the same, Spenser ended his life very much as he began it.

Summary

Edmund Spenser was perhaps the most articulate spoksman for the values and
attitudes of the Elizabethan age. His life reflects the dual Renaissance commitment to
action and thought, and his works reflect the exuberant eclecticism of humanist
learning. Manifesting the period’s eagerness to discover new worlds, Spenser’s
imagination simply created them and, in so doing, forged a national identity and
revitalized English prosody. His technical innovations attested the powers of the English
language in an age which celebrated the vernacular. The Spenserian stanza was used
by Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and George Gordon, Lord Byron. Spenser also
profoundly influenced John Milton, who considered himself a descendant of Spenser as
a Christian humanist poet-prophet to the English nation.

As the father of English pastoral, Spenser united classical and native traditions to
celebrate a past, present, and future golden age. Concerned with the transience of life’s
beauty and the devastating effects of time, Spenser reflected the Elizabethan vogue for
pleasurable, cultivated melancholy yet affirmed the permanence of Christian glory. His
poetry exemplifies Elizabethan literary theory in its endeavor to teach and delight, but at
the same time it possesses an unfading psychological relevance. The Faerie Queene’s
episodic structure and its vast narrative scope, its portrayal of determined questing
interrupted by moments of vision, directly reflect human experience. Though rooted
unmistakably in the Elizabethan age, Spenser’s poetry is, paradoxically, “eterne in
mutabilitie.”