Spenser

Spenser, EDMUND, was born in 1552 in London. Of his fctmily little is known, except that it claimed relationship with the Spencers of Althorp. He was educated at the Merchant Taylors' School, and in 1569 he made his first appearance as a poet with some translations from Du Bellay and Petrarch, which were published in Vander Noodt's Theatre for Worldlings. In the same year he was admitted as a sizar to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. He took the degree of B.A. in 1572, and M.A. in 1576. Of his career at college we hear nothing, except that his health was delicate, and that he became a close friend of one of the fellows of Pembroke, Gabriel Harvey, the "Hobbinol" of his pastoral poems, who attempted to bring him into a movement for the introctuction of unrhymed classical metres into English verse. On leaving Cambridge Spenser lived for a while in the north of England, perhaps in Lancashire, where he probably had relations. About this time he fell in love, seriously and unhappily, with a young lady, whose name is only known in his anagram, Rosalind. On his return to the south he was introduced by Harvey to Sir Philip Sidney, who, in turn, presented him to the Queen, and ever afterwards exercised a strong influence over him, leading him, perhaps, into affectations of language and metre, but showing him a living example of his ideal knight and courtier. In 1579 Spenser first proved his power by the publication of The Shepherd's Calendar, a pastoral poem, or set of "AEglogues" (eclogues) following the classical models. The book was not printed in the author's name, but introduced as the work of a "New Poete" in a preface by his college friend Edward Kirke. In 1580, as secretary to the Lord-Deputy, he accompanied Lord Grey of Wilton to Ireland, a country which was thenceforward to be his home, and which, with its scenes of revolt and violence, must have been full of suggestions for the poet of the Faerie Queene, a specimen of which had already been submitted to Harvey, who greatly preferred the Nine Comedies, which Spenser had also sent to him, and which, with his Stemmata Dudleiana and other poems, are now lost. In Lord Grey Spenser had a chief whom he thoroughly admired, and whom he introduced into the Faerie Queene as Arthegal, the personification of justice. His own policy, based, like Lord Grey's, on ruthless military repression, was developed in his View of the Present State of Ireland, which, though not published in his lifetime, was entered at Stationers' Hall in 1598. His promotion under Government was neitller great nor rapid. In 1583 he was made Clerk of Decrees and Recognisances in the Irish Court of Chancery, and received a lease of the lands and abbey of Enniscorthy. In 1586 he was appointed clerk to the Council of Munster, and, perhaps int he same year, had assigned to himn the castle of Kilcolman in the county of Cork. At the end of 1589 he went with Sir Walter Raleigh, now his neighbor in Ireland, to London, carrying with him the first three books of the Faerie Queene, which were published early in 1590. he remained in London for twelve months, and received a pension of £50 a year from the Queen. In 1591 his publisher brought out a volume of his collected pieces, Complaints, and in the next year he wrote Colin Clout's Come Home Again, and Daphnaida. He married, in 1594, a lady whose Christian name, Elizabeth, alone has come down to us, and in the next year he published his Amoretti and Epithalamion in her honour. In 1596 he brought out three more books of the Faerie Queene, Four Hymns, Prothalamion and Astrophel. In 1598 he was appointed Sheriff of Cork, but in the same year his house was burnt down during Tyrone's rebellion. He crossed to England, ruined, and died at Westminster on the 16th of January, 1599. He was buried in the Abbey near Chaucer, whose English he had imitated, and as whose first gtreat successor, alike in melody and creative power, he is admitted to rank.