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SPENSER, EDMUND (c. 1552-1599), English poet, author of the Faery Queen, was born in London about the year 1552. The received date of his birth rests on a passage in sonnet lx. of the Amoretti. He speaks there of having lived forty-one years; the Amoretti was published in 1595, and described on the title-page as " written not long since "; this would make the year of his birth 1552 or 1553. We know from the Prothalamion that London was his birthplace. This at least seems the most natural interpretation of the words
" Merry London, my most kindly nurse,
That to me gave this life's first native source."
In the same poem he speaks of himself as taking his name from " an house of ancient fame." Several of his pieces are addressed to the daughters of Sir John Spencer, head of the Althorp family; and in Colin Clout's Come Home Again he describes three of the ladies as
" The honour of the noble family
Of which I meanest boast myself to be."
Mr R. B. Knowles, however, is of the opinion (see the Spending of the Money of Robert Nowell, privately printed, 1877) that the poet's kinsmen must be sought among the humbler Spencers of north-east Lancashire. Robert Nowell, a London citizen, left a sum of money to be distributed in various charities, and in the account-books of his executors among the names of other beneficiaries has been discovered that of " Edmund Spensore, scholar of the Merchant Taylor School, at his going to Pembroke Hall in Cambridge." The date of this benefaction is the 28th of April 1569. As the poet is known to have been a sizar of Pembroke, the identification is beyond dispute. Till this discovery it was not known where Spenser received his school education. The speculations as to the poet's parentage, started by the Nowell MS., are naturally more uncertain. Mr Knowles found three Spensers in the books of the Merchant Taylors, and concluded that the poorest of them, John Spenser, a " free journeyman " in the "art or mystery of clothmaking," might have been the poet's father, but he afterwards abandoned this theory. Dr Grosart, however, adhered to it, and it is now pretty generally accepted. The connexion of Spenser with Lancashire is also supported by the Nowell MS.—several Spensers of that county appear among the " poor kinsfolk " who profited by Nowell's bounty. The name of the poet's mother was Elisabeth, and he notes as a happy coincidence that it was borne by the three women of most consequence to him—wife, queen and mother (Amoretti, lxxiv.).
It is natural that a poet so steeped in poetry as Spenser should show his faculty at a very early age; and there is strong reason to believe that verses from his pen were published just as he left school at the age of sixteen or seventeen. Certain pieces, translations from Du Bellay and Petrarch, afterwards included in a volume of poems by Spenser published in 1591, are found in a miscellany, Theatre for Worldings, issued by a Flemish Protestant refugee, John van der Noodt, on the 25th of May 1569. The translations from Du Bellay appear in blank verse in the miscellany, and are rhymed in sonnet form in the later publication, but the diction is substantially the same; the translations from Petrarch are republished with slight variations. Poets were so careless of their rights in those days and publishers took such liberties that we cannot draw for certain the conclusion that would be inevitable if the facts were of more

modern date; but the probabilities are that these passages in Van der Noodt's Theatre, although the editor makes no acknowledgment, were contributed by the schoolboy Spenser.' As the exercises of a schoolboy writing before our poetic diction was enriched by the great Elizabethans, they are remarkable for a sustained command of expression which many schoolboys might exhibit in translation now, but which was a rarer and more significant accomplishment when Surrey and Sackville were the highest models in post-Chaucerian English.
Little is known of Spenser's Cambridge career, except that he was a sizar of Pembroke Hall, took his bachelor's degree in 1572, his master's in 1576, and left Cambridge without having obtained a fellowship. Dr Grosart's inquiries have elicited the fact that his health was not good—college allowances while he was in residence being often paid " Spenser aegrotanti." One of the fellows of Pembroke strongly influenced his destiny. This was Gabriel Harvey, a prominent figure in the university life of the time, an enthusiastic educationist, vigorous, versatile, not a little vain of his own culture and literary powers, which had gained him a certain standing in London society. The revival and advancement of English literature was a passion of the time, and Harvey was fully possessed by it. His fancy for reforming English verse by discarding rhyme and substituting unrhymed classical metres, and the tone of his controversy with Thomas Nash, have caused him to be regarded as merely an obstreperous and pragmatic pedant; but it is clear that Spenser, who had sense enough not to be led astray by his eccentricities, received active and generous help from him and probably not a little literary stimulus. Harvey's letters to Spenser' throw a very kindly light on his character. During his residence at the university the poet acquired a knowledge of Greek, and at a later period offered to impart that language to a friend in Ireland (see Ludowick Bryskett, Discourse of Civil Life, London, 16o6—written twenty years previously). Spenser's affinity with Plato is' most marked, and he probably read him in the original.
Three years after leaving Cambridge, in 1579, Spenser issued his first volume of poetry, the Shepherd's Calendar. Where and how he spent the interval have formed subjects for elaborate speculation. That most of it was spent in the study of his art we may take for granted. That he lived for a time in the " north parts " of England; that there or elsewhere he fell in love with a lady whom he celebrates under the anagram of " Rosalind," and who was most likely Rose, a daughter of a yeoman named Dyneley, near Clitheroe; that his friend Harvey urged him to return south, and introduced him to Sir Philip Sidney; that Sidney took to him, discussed poetry with him, introduced him at court, 'put him in the way of preferment—are ascertained facts in his personal history. Dr Grosart conjectures with considerable plausibility that he was in Ireland in 1577. The words " for long time far estranged " in E.K.'s preface to the Shepherd's Calendar point that way. Spenser undoubtedly entered the service of the earl of Leicester either in 1578 or a year earlier (Carew Papers).
The interest of the Shepherd's Calendar is mainly personal to Spenser. Its twelve poems continue to be read chiefly because they were the first published essays of the author of the Faery Queen, the poems in which he tried and disciplined his powers. They mark no stage in the history of pastoral poetry. The title, borrowed from a French almanack of the year 1496, which was translated into English in 1go3.and frequently reprinted, is at-tractive but hardly tallies with the subject. It may have been an afterthought. Spenser had too strong a genius not to make his own individuality felt in any form that he attempted, and his buoyant dexterity in handling various schemes of verse must always afford delight to the connoisseur in such things. But a reader not already interested in Spenser, or not already familiar with the artificial eclogue, would find little to attract him in the Shepherd's Calendar. The poems need a special education; given this, they
' The first versions of the Visions of Petrarch and Du Bella}, are reproduced by Dr Grosart in his Complete Works of Spenser, vol. iv. (London, 1882). The translations of Petrarch are imitated from Marot. Koeppel (Englische Studien, vol. xv.), questions whether they are by Spenser (see also J. B. Fletcher, Modern Language Notes, vol. xxii.).
2 Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey (Camden Society).;EDM<UND
are felt to be full of charm and power, a fresh and vivid spring to the splendid summer of the Faery Queen. The diction is a studiously atchaic artificial compound, partly Chaucerian, partly North Anglian, partly factitious; and the pastoral scenery is such as may be found in any country where there are sheep, hills, trees, shrubs, toadstools and running streams. That Spenser, having been, in the north of England, should have introduced here and there a touch of north country colour is natural enough; but it is not sufficient to give a character to the poems as pastoral poems. As such they follow continuously and do not violently break away from Latin, Italian and French predecessors, and Professor George Saintsbury is undoubtedly right in indicating Marot as the most immediate model. At the same time one can quite understand on historical grounds why the Shepherd's Calendar was hailed with enthusiasm as the advent of a " new poet." Not only was it a complete work in a form then new to English literature, but the execution showed the hand of,a master. There had been nothing so finished, so sustained, so masterful in grasp, so brilliant in metre and phrase, since Chaucer. It was felt at once that the poet for whom the age had been waiting had come. The little coterie of friends whose admiration the young poet had won in private were evidently concerned lest the wider public should be bewildered and repelled by the unfamiliar pastoral form and rustic diction. To put the public at the right point of view the poems were published' with a commentary by" E.K."—supposed to be one Edward Kirke, who was an undergraduate with Spenser at Pembroke,. This so-called glosse " explained the archaic words, revealed the poet's intentions, and boasted that, as in the case of Virgil, the pastoral poetry of the " new poet " was but " a proving of the wings for higher and wider flights." The " new poet's" name was with-held; and the identification of the various " shepherds"—of Cuddie and 12offy and Diggon Davie, and the beauteous golden-haired " widow's daughter of the glen "—was fortunately reserved to yield delight to the ingenious curiosity of a later age.' On the subject of Spenser's obligations the glosse " is very misleading. An eclogue drawn almost entirely from Virgil is represented as jointly inspired by Virgil and Theocritus and chiefly by the latter. Marot is belittled and his claim to be a poet called in question. As regards the twelfth eclogue suggested by and in' part translated from his poetry, his influence is ignored. The stanzas Professor Hales cites as autobiographical are actually taken from Marot's eclogue, Au Rai sous les noms de Pan et Robin. Dr Grosart falls into the same error.
The Shepherd's Calendar was published at Gabriel Harvey's instance, and was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. It was one out of many poetical schemes on which the young poet was busy in the flush of conscious power and high hopes excited by the admiration of the literary authorities whose approval was then most to 'lie coveted. His ; letters to Harvey and Harvey's letters to him furnish hints fora very engaging fancy picture of Spenser at this stage of his life—looking at the world through rose-coloured, spectacles, high in favour with Sidney and Leicester, dating his letters from Leicester House, gaily and energetically discussing the technicalities of his. art, with some provision from his powerful friends—certain, but the form of it delightfully uncertain—going to court in the train of Leicester, growing pointed beard and mustachios of fashionable shape, and frightening his ever-vigilant friend and mentor Harvey by the light courtier-like tone of his references to wol41en. The studious pastoral poet from north parts " had blossomed with surprising rapidity in the image of the gay fortune-seeking adventurers who crowded the court of the virgin queen in those stirring times. Some of the poems which he mentions to Harvey as then completed or on the anvil—his Dreams, his Nine Comedies, his Dying Pelican and his Stemmata dudleiana (singing the praises of the noble family. which was befriending him)—have not been preserved, at least in any form that can be certainly identified. Among the lost works. was his English Poet—a contribution to literary criticism., He had sent Harvey a portion of the Faery Queen, which he was eager to continue; but Harvey did not think much of it—a judgment for which Harvey is often ridiculed as a dull pedant, as if we knew for certain that what was submitted to him was identical with what was published ten years later.;
Spenser was appointed secretary to the lord-deputy of Ireland
in 158o, and was one of the band of adventurers who, with mixed
motives of love of excitement, patriotism, piety and hopes of
forfeited estates, accompanied Lord Arthur Grey of Wilton to
Ireland to aid in the suppression of Desmond's rebellion.
Regret is sometimes expressed that the author of the ' Faery
Queen, who ought to have been dreamy, meditative, gentle and
refined, should have been found in such company, arid should
have taken part in the violent and bloody scenes of Lord Grey's
two years' attempt at " pacification." But such things must
be judged with reference to the circumstances and the spirit
of the time, and it must be remembered that England was then
See Dr Grosart's Complete Works of Spenser, vol. i.
engaged in a fierce struggle for existence against the Catholic powers of the Continent. Of Lord Grey's character his secretary was an enthusiastic admirer, exhibiting him in the Faery Queen as Arthegal, the personification of justice; and we know exactly what were his own views of Irish policy, and how strongly he deplored that Lord Grey was not permitted to carry them out. Spenser's View of the State of Ireland drawn up after fourteen years' experience, but first printed in 1633 by Sir James Ware, who complains of Spenser's harshness and inadequate know-ledge (History of Ireland, appendix), is not the work of a gentle dreamer, but of an energetic and shrewd public official.
The View is not a descriptive work; there,is nothing in the style to indicate that it was written by a poet; it is an elaborate state paper, the exposition in the form of a dialogue of a minutely considered plan for the pacification of Ireland. written out of zeal for the public service for the eyes of the government of the day. A very thoroughgoing plan it is. After passing in review the history and character of the Irish, their laws, customs, religion, habits of life, armour, dress, social institutions and finding ' evil usages " in every department, he propounds his plan of reformation." Reformation can be effected only by the sword, by the strong hand. The interlocutor in the dialogue holds up his hands in horror. Does he propose extermination? By no means; but he would give the Irish a choice between submission and extermination. The government had vacillated too long, and, fearing the cost of a thorough operation, had spent twice as much without in any way mending matters. Let them send into Ireland io,000 font and woo horse, disperse them in garrisons—a complete scheme of localities is submitted—give the Irish twenty days to come in; if they did not come in then, give no quarter afterwards, but hunt them down like wild beasts in the winter time when the covert is thin; " if they be well followed one winter, ye shall have little work to do with them the next summer "; famine would complete the work of the sword; and in eighteen months' time peace would be restored and the ground cleared for plantation by English colonists. There must be no flinching in the execution of this plan—" no remorse or drawing back for the sight of any such rueful object as must thereupon follow, nor for compassion of their calamities, seeing that by no other means it is• possible to recover them, and that these are not of will but of very urgent necessity." The government had out of foolish compassion drawn back before when Lord Grey had brought the recalcitrant Irish to the necessary extremity of famine; the gentle poet warns them earnestly against a repetition of the blunder.
Such was Spenser's plan for the pacification of Ireland, pro-pounded not on his own authority, but as having support in " the consultations and actions of very wise governors and counsellors whom he had sometimes heard treat thereof." He knew that it was " bloody and cruel "; but he contended passionately that it was necessary for the maintenance of English power and the Protestant religion. The method was repugnant to the kindly nature of average Englishmen; from the time of Lord Grey no English authority had the heart to go through with it till another remorseless zealot appeared in the person of Cromwell. That Cromwell knew the treatise of " the sage-and serious Spenser," perhaps through Milton, is probable from the fact that the poet's Irish estates were secured to his grandson by the Protector's intervention in 1657. These estates had been granted to Spenser as his share in the redistribution of Munster -3000 acres of land and Kilcolman Castle, an ancient seat of the Desmonds, in the north of the county of Cork. The elaborate and business-like character of the View shows that the poet was no sinecurist, but received his reward for substantial political services. He ceased to be secretary to the lord-deputy when Lord Grey was recalled in 1582; but he continued in the public service, and in 1586 was promoted to the onerous position of clerk to the council of Munster.
Amidst all the distractions of his public life in Ireland Spenser kept up his interest in literature, and among proper subjects for reforn included Irish poetry, of which he could judge only through the medium of translations. He allows it some merit—" sweet wit," " good invention," " some pretty flowers "—but laments that it is " abused to the gracing of wickedness and vice." Meanwhile he seems to have proceeded steadily with the composition of the Faery Queen, translating his varied experience of men and affairs into the picturesque forms of his allegory, and expressing through them his conception of the immutable principles. that ought to regulate human conduct.