EDMUND SPENSER
If ever there was a poet reared in a library, it is Edmund Spenser. There’s something a bit monstrous about him. Queen Elizabeth valued, though she could not like, this “little man with little hands and little cuffs.” John Aubrey reports at second hand that he was “a little man, wore short haire, little band and little cuffs.” His allegorical epic The Faerie Queene celebrates Elizabeth; she features, always idealized, elsewhere—everywhere—in his work. He was an eager poet of the established order: monarchy, court, the English church, powers that sustained and rewarded him. His was not a critical but a celebratory commitment. He never got quite enough thanks for his labors: portraits show, beneath his domed brow and emphatic nose, lips a little petulant, and the eyes gaze coldly back. Tetchy. And he could speak with forked tongue: his shepherds unburden themselves, allegorically, of some harsh truths about Spenser’s world.
His books sold steadily until the latter half of the twentieth century. Poets especially warm to him. Keats pays him the tribute of imitation in his apprentice work and draws nourishment from him throughout. He calls him the “elfin poet.” Coleridge said: “In Spenser... we trace a mind constitutionally tender, delicate and... I had almost said effeminate.” He might well have used the term: there are in The Shepheardes Calender and at other points in the poetry moments of sexual and erotic ambiguity. Over a century earlier than Coleridge, Milton (who would not have permitted himself to perceive such irregularities) regarded Spenser as a great poet and a moral teacher: his own work is full of direct debts to Spenser’s poems. Blake, Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy imitated him at the outset of their careers. His formal influence is felt in the early poems of Byron and, preeminently, in James Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence. Well into the twentieth century, poets pay him tribute. Walter Savage Landor sounds a lonely dissenting note a century before. He wrote to Wordsworth, “Thee gentle Spenser fondly led, / But me he mostly sent to bed.” The present age agrees with Landor.
Spenser says he is Chaucer’s heir, a claim it is hard to take seriously unless we consider an archaizing style to be Chaucerian. The differences between Chaucer and Spenser are more striking than any similarities. Chaucer “makes it new”; Spenser deliberately antiquates, not least in reverting to systematic allegory, whereas Chaucer had rumbled, in his middle years, the bankruptcy of that mode. Chaucer’s poetry moves from allegory toward a world of real people rather than personifications. Spenser moves back, deserting the ground Chaucer helped to prepare, in which Marlowe, Shakespeare and other writers of the time took root. Chaucer reached into the literal world, Spenser back into the figurative and ideal. They do share a sensuous imagination. Chaucer makes the world visible and tangible. Spenser at his best exploits the senses to make ideas imaginable.
But when Spenser calls himself Chaucerian, it is more than a gesture. By the latter half of the sixteenth century Chaucer’s music was muted. His language could hardly be heard. Waller judged that he could only boast “sense,” “The glory of his numbers lost.” We are back to the voiced final e, which history silenced. Poets who could not hear saw Chaucer as awkward and faulty, a man whose numbers didn’t add up. Spenser read him somehow, perhaps inspired by Gascoigne’s cogent enthusiasm, and sensed the equal length of lines, perhaps even allowing himself to voice that treacherous e. He wrote a conclusion to Chaucer’s unfinished Squire’s Tale that found its place in The Faerie Queene. Certainly the example of Chaucer was monitory to the classical humanists. If language could change so radically over a century and a half, it needed to be stabilized, given an Augustan fixity, and from the labor to “stabilize” it emerged strict laws, and rules of decorum.
Many a radical poet—Milton, Pope and Eliot spring to mind—have a strategy in the markers they put down in their critical writings. The intention is to be a great poet and to be received as a great poet, and their prose work clears a space for them, showing how and what they read and how they might be read. In Spenser the art is not lacking, the scholarship or dedication; nor is the politicking. Chaucer and Virgil give an equal light. Spenser wanted to be read by the same eyes that read the Eclogues, Georgics and Aenied, Troilus and Criseyde and Canterbury Tales. He wanted the transition from the classic poems to his own to be smooth and clearly understood.
In his age political and social ideas had a peculiarly potent embodiment. Elizabeth would preside over a recovery of classical learning and discipline, the reestablishment of true religion, the growth of power. The virgin queen embodied a new start, she was the just Astraea, the English Augustus, “fair vestal, throned by the West,” bringing back (as Sir John Davies declares in one of his “Hymns” to her) “the golden days, / And all the world amended.” Such optimism survived the first decade of her reign. Semper eadem (Always the Same) was her motto, the Phoenix her symbol, suggesting her red hair and England’s recrudescence. Surrounding her was unprecedented pomp and ceremony, at court or when she went on her spectacular progresses to the castles, palaces and the new “prodigy houses” of her noble subjects (Wollaton, Burghley, Holdenby, Theobalds, etc.), and that pomp spread through the institutions of her rule: church, the law, the universities all developed formality and ceremony. Portraits and tomb effigies from her period display a new magnificence. The fronts of houses become heraldic statements and define the character and status of the master and his family. Poems, too, share in this “refacing.” New decorum, rhetorical propriety, generic correctness are practiced, rule books written. The queen, even as she grows old, is never portrayed as aging, ill, or bald: she always embodies splendor, a vigorous young England.
Born in London around 1552, Spenser was the son of a gentleman, but one who also worked as a journeyman in cloth making. Later in life the poet claimed a not impossible kinship with the noble Spencers of Northampton. Some of his childhood he spent in Burnley, Lancashire, where he may actually have experienced the unrequited love that “Colin” laments in The Shepheardes Calender. He was educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School under the headmastership of Richard Mulcaster, a humanist deeply interested in singing and instrumental music and in the English language. Memorably he declared: “It is our accident which restrains our tongue, and not the tongue itself.” Spenser was already writing verse, translating from the French sonnets of Joachim Du Bellay (1522–60)—“Bellay, first garland of free poesy”—and probably studying the Platonists who were to direct his philsophical imagination.
He went up to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, in 1569. Lancelot Andrewes was his contemporary, but Spenser took up instead with Gabriel Harvey, an opinionated young Fellow senior to him, who advocated the modish humanist and Puritan prejudices of the day, and a man so close to his bookseller (his publisher) that he was sometimes subsidized by him. The Shepheardes Calender Spenser entrusted for printing to Hugh Singleton, who a year before had published a tendentious Puritan tract called The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf that resulted in the author’s, John Stubbs’s, having his right hand chopped off. The printer was still in prison. There is more Puritan sentiment and argument in the poem than we see today. Like the young Milton, young Spenser was bold, cheered on by Harvey, who held him in thrall for some time.
Harvey’s dogmatic revulsion from the medieval made him hostile to Spenser’s eventual plans for The Fairie Queene. He wanted his protégé to write English in classical meters, and they debated the adaptability of Latin and Greek prosodies to English. Spenser obligingly experimented, but Harvey’s arguments were to have more, though not a radical, effect on Sir Philip Sidney.
In The Shepheardes Calender Spenser tried to make pastoral a more serious mode. He mingled the pastoral of Colin Clout (from Skelton) and Piers Plowman (from Langland) with Arcadian and English flora and fauna. Formal “pastoral” diction he laced with rustic terms and archaisms. His first notable poem, it consists of twelve eclogues that exploit thirteen different meters and forms. Colin Clout, Spenser’s bucolic self, speaks the first and last eclogues lamenting frustrated pastoral love. The other ten poems are dialogues with recognizable characters. Hobbinol, for example, is Harvey. One poem celebrates Eliza, the queen. Four are about love, four are religious and moral allegory in pastoral disguise, one is an elegiac lament, and one, “October,” is devoted to a perennial theme: the low regard and reward for the art (and artist) of poetry. The swain called Cuddie exclaims:
They han the pleasure, I a slender price;
I beat the bush, the birds to them do fly:
What good thereof to Cuddie can arise?
His friend Piers consoles him: “Cuddie, the praise is better than the price.” But it never feels that way (and the publisher is usually blamed).
Spenser’s art takes shape here in an archaic diction and vividly representative images and metaphors. Though in a “low style,” the eclogues do not sound spoken. The rusticity is posed, the aphoristic truths rehearsed:
Such neat commonplaces he may have gleaned from his days in Burnley. He has glimpsed the natural world through the veil of literary pastoral, and the verse sometimes sees with amazing clarity: “Keeping your beasts in the budded broom” is a line Keats must have valued, or this:
We will not respond to the poem with the surprise, delight and pride of its first readers. Here they discovered the new poetry in English, unprecedented and fully fledged. E.K. (whoever he was) provided notes which drew attention to every detail of rhetoric exploited with a deliberate intent. E.K. reveals not only what Spenser wants him to say but how a particularly alert Elizabethan might have read, construed, or even deconstructed, the poem, by means of an understanding of its rhetorical elements, so judiciously deployed.
Harvey secured Spenser a place in the Earl of Leicester’s household. He was there when The Shepheardes Calender was published in 1579, a momentous year for our literature because the new poetry is established. It appeared anonymously, but Spenser was generally known to be the author. He met Sir Edward Dyer (author of “My mind to me a kingdom is”) and befriended Sir Philip Sidney, to whom the Calender is dedicated. Indeed the poem exemplifies the rules and qualities that Sidney and his circle had been advocating. Spenser was original and brave. He learned from every source, yet copied hardly at all. From the classics he sought legitimacy, transposing their terms to his setting and situation rather than merely translating them.
Aubrey gives an amusing, if not dependable, account of Spenser paying court to the noblest of the knight poets. He was at work on The Faerie Queene and brought Sir Philip Sidney a copy. Sidney was busy and did not peruse it immediately. Spenser departed tetchily. When Sidney did begin to read, he was impressed and called the poet back, “mightily caressed him, and ordered his servant to give him so many pounds in gold...”
With Sidney, Spenser formed a literary club called the Areopagus, devoted to naturalizing classical meters in English. Was this the first English poetry society, devoted to promoting a movement? It chose an aloof name: the Areopagus is the hill of Mars in Athens, near the Acropolis, where the “Upper Council,” the city’s supreme judiciary, convened.
In 1580 Spenser was appointed secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton, new Lord Deputy of Ireland, and left old friends for Ireland, where he made new ones, including Sir Walter Ralegh. He may have seen action during the Desmond Rebellion (though it is hard to imagine him as a soldier), and in 1586 was awarded as one of the “undertakers” an estate including the ruined castle of Kilcolman in County Cork, with 3,000 acres of land. The first poem he wrote there was prompted by Sir Philip Sidney’s death: his fine elegy “Astrophel” (1586), with its circular rhetoric and repetitions. And there he prepared The Faerie Queene for press. Ralegh encouraged him to return to England and publish the first three books of his epic.
In Ireland he saw some brutal sights, including “the execution of a notable traitor at Limerick, called Morrogh O’Brien. I saw an old woman which was his foster-mother take up his head whilst he was quartered, and sucked up all the blood running thereout, saying that the earth was not worthy to drink it; and therewith also steeped her face and breast and torn hair, crying and shrieking out most terribly.” His matter-of-factness implies, not so much that he was unmoved, as that the scene was one among many extreme scenes.
In 1589 Spenser was in London to entrust the text to the printer. Ralegh, in favor with the queen, presented him at court and she gave him a £50 pension. By the time the first part of the epic appeared in 1590, the Earl of Essex had succeeded the late Earl of Leicester as Spenser’s patron. The poet reluctantly returned to Kilcolman in 1591. He wrote Colin Clouts Come Home Againe and dedicated it to Ralegh (1591, published 1595). In 1594, to lessen his solitude, he married Elizabeth Boyle. His great “Epithalamion” (1595) followed, and the eighty-eight sonnets in the Amoretti may be attributable to the same sacrament. In 1596 he completed the next chunk of The Fairie Queene and it was published in 1597. The following year his castle at Kilcolman was burned in the insurrection. His youngest child perished in the fire and his work-in-progress on The Faerie Queene burned too. It’s possible that Spenser completed, or nearly completed, the last six books of his poem. He returned to London and died destitute in 1599. He was buried at the Earl of Essex’s expense and lies near Chaucer in Westminster Abbey.
Beside the sonnets of Sidney and Shakespeare, Spenser’s Amoretti appear, for all their accomplishment, uninspired. The best is sonnet LXXV, “One day I wrote her name upon the strand.” But his praise of marriage and the courtly sentiment—lacking the ambivalent vigor of The Shepheardes Calender—seldom rises above convention. Courtly sentiment is best expressed in The Faerie Queene itself. One sonnet admits a personal note, referring to the epic and to his exhaustion:
The “Epithalamion” is superior in conception and execution. Following in the tradition of classical marriage odes, it displays in pure form that idealized sensuality which animates parts of The Faerie Queene, and like the epic is meticulous in organization, taking the twenty-four hours of the wedding day. A stanza of introduction is followed by ten stanzas in which the procession gathers and leads the bride in to the ceremony. The two central stanzas tell of the ceremony itself, then a group of ten more stanzas brings home the bride and beds her, and a final stanza rounds out the whole. Within this horological architecture are other symmetries: the words “day” and “night” are repeatedly counterbalanced as part of the device. It might seem to us a cold thing, to structure a love and marriage poem so deliberately; yet part of the passion of an Elizabethan poem is a passion of intelligence; deep feeling elicits the deepest art of which he is capable. Much of the pleasure a poet seeks to impart to a reader is of an intellectual kind. Whether or not we are aware of structural features, we cannot but respond to the declared feeling. Eager for the bridal night, the poet exclaim:
How slowly does sad Time his feathers move!
Haste thee, O fairest planet, to thy home,
Within the western foam.
When in Book Four of his epic he came to adapt Lucretius’s invocation to Venus from De Rerum Natura, it was with this refined passion that his chorus of lovers is made to exclaim:
Great God of men and women, queen of the ayre,
Mother of laughter, and welspring of bliss,
O grant that of my love at last I may not miss!
The “Prothalamion” (1596), written for the marriage of others, is less intense. But its refrain, which echoes strongly in Eliot’s The Waste Land, “Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song,” and the control of rhythm over long sentences in a complex stanza form, make it unforgettable in its virtuosity. Coleridge enjoins us to “mark the swanlike movement of his exquisite Prothalamion. His attention to metre and rhythm is sometimes so extremely minute as to be painful even to my ear, and you know how highly I prize good versification.”
Spenser follows, as Milton was to do, the Virgilian pattern for becoming a Great Poet. First you write your eclogues, then your georgic, then your epic. In his patriotic and moral epic The Faerie Queene he translates qualities of The Shepheardes Calender into a “high style” where they acquire an enhanced allegorical dimension. He retains sensuous directness, for instance in the catalogue of trees in the first canto of Book One, especially:
The first three books of The Faerie Queene are prefaced with an explanatory letter to Ralegh. Of the projected twelve books, the first six and fragments of the seventh, the “Mutability Cantos” from the Legend of Constance, survive. Spenser declares that his purpose is moral: “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and noble discipline.” Milton took Spenser at his word, presenting him as a moral teacher in the Areopagitica. Nineteenth-century admirers lost sight of the moral teaching, disregarded the system of allegory and appreciated the poem’s “beauty.” Coleridge wrote: “The whole of the Faerie Queene is an almost continued instance of beauty.” This is true, but incomplete. It became the general view, and the poem was emancipated from its moral and historical purpose. The morality was archaic, the allegory obscure; the poem survived by virtue of images, techniques and incidents, not its intentions: in short, by virtue of its poetry, not its instrumental aim.
Borrowing from Tasso’s discourses on epic poetry and from Ariosto, in his prefatory letter Spenser distinguishes between the historian’s and the poet’s perspectives: “An historiographer discourseth of affairs orderly as they were done... but a poet thrusteth into the midst, even where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the things forepast, and divining the things to come, maketh a pleasing analysis of all... The beginning therefore of my history, if it were to be told by an historiographer should be by the twelfth book, which is the last; where I devise that the Faery Queene kept her annual feast twelve days; upon which twelve several days, the occasions of the twelve several adventures happened, which, being undertaken by the twelve several knights, are in these twelve books severally handled and discovered.” There follows a description of how the completed poem would have worked. The description does not fit the poem we have, and of course the twelfth, key book was burned.
“A gentle Knight was pricking on the plain,” the poem starts. Book One belongs to the Red Cross Knight, who defends Una from Archimago and Duessa, or, in the allegory, Anglicanism defends truth. Sir Guyon (temperance) destroys the Bower of Bliss in Book Two. Book Three is dominated by Britomart and Belphoebe (chastity); in Book Four Triamond and Cambell exemplify friendship, and we encounter Scudamour and Amoret. Artegall, knight of justice, appears in Book Five, and Spenser devotes much of his allegory to events in recent English history. Sir Calidore, in Book Six, embodies courtesy.
The projected twelve books would have contained twelve cantos each, presenting twelve virtues and twelve exemplary knights. Prince Arthur, who symbolizes magnificence, the perfection of all the virtues, sets out after a vision to seek the Faerie Queene (Elizabeth, variously figured by Belphoebe, Gloriana, Mercilla and others). Arthur is to seek her for twelve days, encountering each day one of her knights and assisting each to triumph. The poem was to end in Arthur’s marriage to Gloriana (Glory). Spenser hoped by the device of Arthur to give the poem unity, without forfeiting the freedom to develop each romantic book as a largely self-contained unit.
So mechanical a conception of form and allegory, arbitrarily conceived, not rising out of an integrating action, accounts for most of the difficulties. In part the allegory derives from legend and convention; in part it is devised to shadow Spenser’s ideas. It works like a code, while traditional allegory functions at best as an accessible common language based on accepted “readings” of accepted figures. Spenser, with a humanist education, returned to the Middle Ages for his form, but he took only part of what he found there, leaving behind necessary substance. And he only partly archaized his language, giving it an antique patina. His allegory is overcharged with moral and conventional elements. Britomart is not only chastity: she stands for aspects of the queen, and for the religious figure of St. Catherine. Artegall recalls Achilles in action and dress, if not temperament. Arthur contains some of Aeneas, Guyon some of Odysseus. These literary dimensions are apposite up to a point, but they complicate figures who lose rather than gain expressive value when they come to act.
Spenser “characterizes” allegorical figures in varying degrees. Some are cardboard, only just two-dimensional, such as “Despair.” More particularized, often with emblematic names—“Sansfoy” and his brothers, for example—are those who act, but in a limited area. Amoret belongs to a more differentiated category, type more than figure; recognizable flesh on stylized bones. Central to the poem are the vital actors representing virtues: developed as characters, their virtues are vulnerable. When such almost-real representations move among static figures of allegory, dramatic interest is low. The moments of tension in the poem are not when a dragon appears or a battle is fought, but the seductions in which human motive and action are recognizable. A special moment is when Paridell woos the miser’s wife with his eyes, speaking not a word.
Spenser’s condensed history of the British kings in Book Two is expository verse of a high order. He moralizes the story of King Leyr (Lear) even as he tells it:
This is psychology on a par with Gower’s, not Chaucer’s; but the verse moves with transparent ease.
For this poem Spenser invented his own “Spenserian Stanza,” comprising eight iambic pentameter lines and a final hexameter, rhyming a-b-a-b-b-c-b-c-c. It is slow-moving, the hexameter giving a finality to each stanza. Compared with the natural expressive flow of Chaucer’s stanzas in Troilus and Crisyede, with its central climax, Spenser’s dignified, ceremonial measure retards the narrative. It works best in description or where the poet expresses motion rather than action. A rich passage occurs in the fourth canto of Book Three, where Cymoënt speeds over the sea to the side of wounded Marinell:
By contrast, action is magnified and slowed down; the procession is impressive rather than exciting.
We miss “human interest” in Spenser’s mature work. And the poetry works by extension rather than concentration, a medieval feature he gets from Gower, Lydgate and Hoccleve. One must take The Faerie Queene in large doses: the impact is cumulative. The best effects are so much a part of the overall verbal context that they do not detach as aphorism or vivid image.
The Spenserian tradition includes Milton, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Hardy and others. But his spell is now broken. He has been called a poets’ poet. In the latter half of this century he has become an academic’s and a theorist’s poet. Numerologists find him especially satisfying (one need only note how often the word “twelve” has appeared above). His work does not merit so reductive a fate. For ease and lucidity of language over long stretches of narrative he has no superior but Chaucer. Ignorance of Spenser is ignorance of a fountainhead of English poetry.
Aubrey records a final piece of fascinating misinformation—or is it? Are the last books of The Faerie Queene one day to be discovered? “Lately, at the college,”—Pembroke Hall—“takeing-downe the Wainscot of his chamber, they found an abundance of Cards, with stanzas of The Faerie Queene written on them.”