Edmund Spenser 1552-1599

Edmund Spenser was born in London in 1552. Despite the fact that his family was not very rich, he did get a good education. In 1569 he entered Cambridge where he studied at the puritan college of Pembroke Hall. In 1576 he received his M.A. degree. Spenser’s ambition was “to become the great English poet of his age”¹. This is noteworthy because in his days, most poetry was written by people whose interests were not in the first place in poetry, but in their careers in the church or at court (see for example Sidney). Spenser claimed that the poet “had a serious and central role in the state”² and that poetry should not be seen as a hobby. Spenser, together with Philip Sidney and Edward Dyer, formed a group called the “Areopagus”, a group whose goal was to change and improve English poetry with classical elements. In 1579 his work The Shepheardes Calender was published and he dedicated it to Philip Sidney.

In 1580 Spenser went to Ireland to work as the secretary of Lord Grey, the Lord Deputy of Ireland. Spenser lived and worked in Ireland at a time when Ireland was an English colony. Because he held a post in the government, he also participated in “the English struggle against those who resisted their colonial authority”³. This conflict between the English and the Irish is one of the darker chapters in the history of the reign of Elizabeth I. Exploitation, massacres, the burning of crops to starve the inhabitants and fake treason charges to obtain land, were all things the English government was guilty of.

In 1590, Spenser travelled temporarily back to England to publish the first three books of his life’s work The Faerie Queene. Queen Elizabeth I plays an important role in this work and she therefore rewarded Spenser with a nice pension of £50,-. In 1594, he married Elizabeth Boyle, for whom he wrote the marriage poem Epithalamion.

During his time in Ireland, Spenser probably wrote A View on the Present State of Ireland, in which he defended the English regime, which was published anonymously. In A View on the Present State of Ireland, two English men are talking to each other about the situation in Ireland. They try to understand why the English regime still hasn’t managed to subdue the Irish people. The two men make suggestions on how the English regime should handle the Irish so that English rule could be imposed forever.

Although his job in Ireland kept him busy, Spenser kept writing and publishing a lot of literature; the other three books of The Faerie Queene, another pastoral, more poems and his sonnet cycle Amoretti. In 1599 he died and was buried in Westminster Abbey, in a part we now call “The Poet’s Corner”. Spenser had a very large influence on later writers and poets of his age like Shakespeare and Milton. But also on writers that lived centuries later such as Keats, Joyce and Tennyson.