‘Returning into England, he was robb’d by the rebels of what little he had; and dying for grief in great want, anno 1598, was honourably buried nigh Chaucer in Westminster, where this distich concludeth his epitaph on his monument
Anglica, te vivo, vixit plausitque poesis;
Nunc moritura timet, te moriente, mori.’
Whilst thou didst live, liv’d English poetry
Which fears now thou art dead, that she shall die.
‘Nor must we forget, that the expence of his funeral and monument was defrayed at the sole charge of Robert, first of that name, earl of Essex.’
The next account is given by Edward Phillips in his Theatrum Po{e”}tarum
Anglicanorum, first published in 1675. This Phillips was, as is well known, Milton’s nephew, and according to Warton, in his edition of Milton’s juvenile poems, ‘there is good reason to suppose that Milton threw many additions and corrections into the Theatrum Po{e”}tarum.’ Phillips’ words therefore have an additional interest for us. ‘Edmund Spenser,’ he writes, ‘the first of our English poets that brought heroic poesy to any perfection, his Fairy Queen being for great invention and poetic heighth, judg’d little inferior, if not equal to the chief of the ancient Greeks and Latins, or modern Italians; but the first poem that brought him into esteem was his Shepherd’s Calendar, which so endeared him to that noble patron of all vertue and learning Sir Philip Sydney, that he made him known to Queen Elizabeth, and by that means got him preferred to be secretary to his brother Sir Henry Sidney, who was sent deputy into Ireland, where he is said to have written his Faerie Queen; but upon the return of Sir Henry, his employment ceasing, he also return’d into England, and having lost his great friend Sir Philip, fell into poverty, yet made his last refuge to the Queen’s bounty, and had 500l. ordered him for his support, which nevertheless was abridged to 100l. by Cecil, who, hearing of it, and owing him a grudge for some reflections in Mother Hubbard’s Tale, cry’d out to the queen, What! all this for a song? This he is said to have taken so much to heart, that he contracted a deep melancholy, which soon after brought his life to a period. So apt is an ingenuous spirit to resent a slighting, even from the greatest persons; thus much I must needs say of the merit of so great a poet from so great a monarch, that as it is incident to the best of poets sometimes to flatter some royal or noble patron, never did any do it more to the height, or with greater art or elegance, if the highest of praises attributed to so heroic a princess can justly be termed flattery.’
When Spenser’s works were reprintedthe first three books of the Faerie Queene for the seventh timein 1679, there was added an account of his life. In 1687, Winstanley, in his Lives of the most famous English Poets, wrote a formal biography.
These are the oldest accounts of Spenser that have been handed down to us. In several of them mythical features and blunders are clearly discernible. Since Winstanley’s time, it may be added, Hughes in 1715, Dr. Birch in 1731, Church in 1758, Upton in that same year, Todd in 1805, Aikin in 1806, Robinson in 1825, Mitford in 1839, Prof. Craik in 1845, Prof. Child in 1855, Mr. Collier in 1862, Dr. Grosart in 1884, have re-told what little there is to tell, with various additions and subtractions.
Our external sources of information are, then, extremely scanty. Fortunately our internal sources are somewhat less meagre. No poet ever more emphatically lived in his poetry than did Spenser. The Muses were, so to speak, his own bosom friends, to whom he opened all his heart. With them he conversed perpetually on the various events of his life; into their ears he poured forth constantly the tale of his joys and his sorrows, of his hopes, his fears, his distresses.
He was not one of those poets who can put off themselves in their works, who can forego their own interests and passions, and live for the time an extraneous life. There is an intense personality about all his writings, as in those of Milton and of Wordsworth. In reading them you can never forget the poet in the poem. They directly and fully reflect the poet’s own nature and his circumstances. They are, as it were, fine spiritual diaries, refined self- portraitures. Horace’s description of his own famous fore-runner, quoted at the head of this memoir, applies excellently to Spenser. On this account the scantiness of our external means of knowing Spenser is perhaps the less to be regretted. Of him it is eminently true that we may know him from his works. His poems are his best biography. In the sketch of his life to be given here his poems shall be our one great authority.
CHAPTER I. 1552-1579. FROM SPENSER’S BIRTH TO THE PUBLICATION OF THE SHEPHEARD’S CALENDAR.
Edmund Spenser was born in London in the year 1552, or possibly 1551. For both these statements we have directly or indirectly his own authority. In his Prothalamion he sings of certain swans whom in a vision he saw floating down the river ‘Themmes,’ that
At length they all to mery London came,
To mery London, my most kyndly nurse,
That to me gave this lifes first native sourse,
Though from another place I take my name,
An house of auncient fame.
A MS. note by Oldys the antiquary in Winstanley’s Lives of the most famous English Poets, states that the precise locality of his birth was East Smithfield. East Smithfield lies just to the east of the Tower, and in the middle of the sixteenth century, when the Tower was still one of the chief centres of London life and importance, was of course a neighbourhood of far different rank and degree from its present social status. The date of his birth is concluded with sufficient certainty from one of his sonnets, viz. sonnet 60; which it is pretty well ascertained was composed in the year 1593. These sonnets are, as well shall see, of the amorous wooing sort; in the one of them just mentioned, the sighing poet declares that it is but a year since he fell in love, but that the year has seemed to him longer
Then al those fourty which my life out-went.
Hence it is gathered that he was most probably born in 1552. The inscription, then, over his tomb in Westminster Abbey errs in assigning his birth to 1553; though the error is less flagrant than that perpetrated by the inscription that preceded the present one, which set down as his natal year 1510.
Of his parents the only fact secured is that his mother’s name was Elizabeth. This appears from sonnet 74, where he apostrophizes those
Most happy letters! fram’d by skilfull trade
With which that happy name was first desynd,
The which three times thrise happy hath me made,
With guifts of body, fortune and of mind.
The first my being to me gave by kind
From mothers womb deriv’d by dew descent.
The second is the Queen, the third ‘my love, my lives last ornament.’ A careful examination by Mr. Collier and others of what parish registers there are extant in such old churches as stand near East Smithfieldthe Great Fire, it will be remembered, broke out some distance west of the Tower, and raged mainly westward has failed to discover any trace of the infant Spenser or his parents. An ‘Edmund Spenser’ who is mentioned in the Books of the Treasurer of the Queen’s Chamber in 1569, as paid for bearing letters from Sir Henry Norris, her Majesty’s ambassador in France, to the Queen, and who with but slight probability has been surmised to be the poet himself, is scarcely more plausibly conjectured by Mr. Collier to be the poet’s father. The utter silence about his parents, with the single exception quoted, in the works of one who, as has been said above, made poetry the confidante of all his joys and sorrows, is remarkable.
Whoever they were, he was well connected on his father’s side at least. ‘The nobility of the Spensers,’ writes Gibbon, ‘has been illustrated and enriched by the trophies of Marlborough; but I exhort them to consider the Faerie Queen as the most precious jewel of their coronet.’ Spenser was connected with the then not ennobled, but highly influential family of the Spencers of Althorpe, Northamptonshire. Theirs was the ‘house of auncient fame,’ or perhaps we should rather say they too belonged to the ‘house of auncient fame’ alluded to in the quotation made a
bove from the Prothalamion. He dedicates various poems to the daughters of Sir John Spencer, who was the head of that family during the poet’s youth and earlier manhood down to 1580, and in other places mentions these ladies with many expressions of regard and references to his affinity. ‘Most faire and vertuous Ladie,’ he writes to the ‘Ladie Compton and Mountegle,’ the fifth daughter, in his dedication to her of his Mother Hubberds Tale, ‘having often sought opportunitie by some good meanes to make knowen to your Ladiship the humble affection and faithfull duetie, which I have alwaies professed and am bound to beare to that house, from whence yee spring, I have at length found occasion to remember the same by making a simple present to you of these my idle labours, &c.’ To another daughter, ‘the right worthy and vertuous ladie the Ladie Carey,’ he dedicates his Muiopotmos; to another, ‘the right honorable the Ladie Strange,’ his Teares of the Muses. In the latter dedication he speaks of ‘your particular bounties, and also some private bands of affinitie, which it hath pleased your Ladiship to acknowledge.’ It was for this lady Strange, who became subsequently the wife of Sir Thomas Egerton, that one who came after SpenserMiltonwrote the Arcades. Of these three kinswomen, under the names of Phyllis, Charillis, and sweet Amaryllis, Spenser speaks once more in his Colin Clouts Come Home Again; he speaks of them as
The honour of the noble familie
Of which I meanest boast myself to be.
For the particular branch of the Spencer or Spenser familyone branch wrote the name with s, another with cto which the poet belonged, it has been well suggested that it was that settled in East Lancashire in the neighbourhood of Pendle Forest. It is known on the authority of his friend Kirke, whom we shall mention again presently, that Spenser retired to the North after leaving Cambridge; traces of a Northern dialect appear in the Shepheardes Calendar; the Christian name Edmund is shown by the parish registers to have been a favourite with one part of the Lancashire branchwith that located near Filley Close, three miles north of Hurstwood, near Burnley.
Spenser then was born in London, probably in East Smithfield, about a year before those hideous Marian fires began to blaze in West Smithfield. He had at least one sister, and probably at least one brother. His memory would begin to be retentive about the time of Queen Elizabeth’s accession. Of his great contemporaries, with most of whom he was to be brought eventually into contact, Raleigh was born at Hayes in Devonshire in the same year with him, Camden in Old Bailey in 1551, Hooker near Exeter in or about 1553, Sidney at Penshurst in 1554, Bacon at York House in the West Strand, 1561, Shakspere at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, Robert Devereux, afterwards second earl of Essex, in 1567.
The next assured fact concerning Spenser is that he was educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School, then just founded. This we learn from an entry in ‘The Spending of the Money of Robert Nowell, Esq.,’ of Reade Hall, Lancashire, brother of Alexander Nowell, Dean of St. Paul’s. In an accompt of sums ‘geven to poor schollers of dyvers gramare scholles’ we find Xs. given, April 28, 1569, to ‘Edmond Spensore Scholler of the Merchante Tayler Scholl;’ and the identification is established by the occasion being described as ‘his gowinge to Penbrocke Hall in Chambridge,’ for we know that the future poet was admitted a Sizar of Pembroke College, then styled Hall, Cambridge, in 1569. Thus we may fairly conclude that Spenser was not only London born but London bred, though he may have from time to time sojourned with relatives and connections in Lancashire before his undergraduateship, as well as after. Thus a conjecture of Mr. Collier’s may confidently be discarded, who in the muster-book of a hundred in Warwickshire has noted the record of one Edmund Spenser as living in 1569 at Kingsbury, and conjectures that this was the poet’s father, and that perhaps the poet spent his youth in the same county with Shakspere. It may be much doubted whether it is a just assumption that every Edmund Spenser that is in any way or anywhere mentioned in the Elizabethan era was either the poet or his father. Nor, should it be allowed that the Spenser of Kingsbury was indeed the poet’s father, could we reasonably indulge in any pretty
picture of a fine friendship between the future authors of Hamlet and of the Faerie Queene. Shakspere was a mere child, not yet passed into the second of his Seven Ages, when Spenser, being then about seventeen years old, went up to the University. However, this matter need not be further considered, as there is no evidence whatever to connect Spenser with Warwickshire.
But in picturing to ourselves Spenser’s youth we must not think of London as it now is, or of East Smithfield as now cut off from the country by innumerable acres of bricks and mortar. The green fields at that time were not far away from Spenser’s birthplace. And thus, not without knowledge and symnpathy, but with appreciative variations, Spenser could re- echo Marot’s ‘Eglogue au Roy sous les noms de Pan et Robin,’ and its descriptions of a boy’s rural wanderings and delights. See his Shepheardes Calendar, December:
Whilome in youth when flowrd my joyfull spring,
Like swallow swift I wandred here and there;
For heate of heedlesse lust me did so sting,
That I oft doubted daunger had no feare:
I went the wastefull woodes and forrest wide
Withouten dread of wolves to bene espide.
I wont to raunge amid the mazie thicket
And gather nuttes to make my Christmas game,
And joyed oft to chace the trembling pricket,
Or hunt the hartlesse hare till she were tame.
What wreaked I of wintrie ages waste?
Tho deemed I my spring would ever last.
How often have I scaled the craggie oke
All to dislodge the raven of her nest?
How have I wearied, with many a stroke,
The stately walnut-tree, the while the rest,
Under the tree fell all for nuttes at strife?
For like to me was libertie and life.
To be sure he is here paraphrasing, and also is writing in the language of pastoral poetry, that is, the language of this passage is metaphorical; but it is equally clear that the writer was intimately and thoroughly acquainted with that life from which the metaphors of his original are drawn. He describes a life he had lived.
It seems probable that he was already an author in some sort when he went up to Cambridge. In the same year in which he became an undergraduate there appeared a work entitled, ‘A Theatre wherein be represented as well the Miseries and Calamities that follow the Voluptuous Worldlings as also the greate Joyes and Pleasures which the Faithful do enjoy. An Argument both Profitable and Delectable to all that sincerely loue the Word of God. Deuised by S. John Vander Noodt.’ Vander Noodt was a native of Brabant who had sought refuge in England, ‘as well for that I would not beholde the abominations of the Romyshe Antechrist as to escape the handes of the bloudthirsty.’ ‘In the meane space,’ he continues, ‘for the avoyding of idlenesse (the very mother and nourice of all vices) I have among other my travayles bene occupied aboute thys little Treatyse, wherein is sette forth the vilenesse and basenesse of worldely things whiche commonly withdrawe us from heavenly and spirituall matters.’ This work opens with six pieces in the form of sonnets styled epigrams, which are in fact identical with the first six of the Visions of Petrarch subsequently published among Spenser’s works, in which publication they are said to have been ‘formerly translated’. After these so-called epigrams come fifteen Sonnets, eleven of which are easily recognisable amongst the Visions of Bellay, published along with the Visions of Petrarch. There is indeed as little difference between the two sets of poems as is compatible with the fact that the old series is written in blank verse, the latter in rhyme. The sonnets which appear for the first time in the Visions are those describing the Wolf, the River, the Vessel, the City. There are four pieces of the older series which are not reproduced in the later. It would seem probable that they too may have been written by Spenser in the days of his youth, though at a later period of his life he cancelled and superseded them. They are therefore reprinted in this volume. (
See pp. 699-701.)
Vander Noodt, it must be said, makes no mention of Spenser in his volume. It would seem that he did not know English, and that he wrote his Declarationa sort of commentary in prose on the Visions in French. At least we are told that this Declaration is translated out of French into English by Theodore Roest. All that is stated of the origin of his Visions is: ‘The learned poete M. Francisce Petrarche, gentleman of Florence, did invent and write in Tuscan the six firste . . . . which because they serve wel to our purpose, I have out of the Brabants speache turned them into the English tongue;’ and ‘The other ten visions next ensuing ar described of one Ioachim du Bellay, gentleman of France, the whiche also, because they serve to our purpose I have translated them out of Dutch into English.’ The fact of the Visions being subsequently ascribed to Spenser would not by itself carry much weight. But, as Prof. Craik pertinently asks, ‘if this English version was not the work of Spenser, where did Ponsonby [the printer who issued that subsequent publication which has been mentioned] procure the corrections which are not mere typographical errata, and the additions and other variations that are found in his edition?’
In a work called Tragical Tales, published in 1587, there is a letter in verse, dated 1569, addressed to ‘Spencer’ by George Turberville, then resident in Russia as secretary to the English ambassador, Sir Thomas Randolph. Anthony {a} Wood says this Spencer was the poet; but it can scarcely have been so. ‘Turberville himself,’ remarks Prof. Craik, ‘is supposed to have been at this time in his twenty-ninth or thirtieth year, which is not the age at which men choose boys of sixteen for their friends. Besides, the verses seem to imply a friendship of some standing, and also in the person addressed the habits and social position of manhood. . . . It has not been commonly noticed that this epistle from Russia is not Turberville’s only poetical address to his friend Spencer. Among his Epitaphs and Sonnets are two other pieces of verse addressed to the same person.’
Complete Works of Edmund Spenser Page 185
