John W. Hales

“ There is nothing to justify the theory that the Edmund Spenser of the register was the poet. It is simply incredible that Spenser, one who, as has been said, poured out all his soul in his poems, should have wooed and won some fair lady to his wife, without ever a poetical allusion to his courtship and his triumph. It is not at all likely, as far as one can judge from their titles, that any one of his lost works was devoted to the celebration of any such successful passion. ”

“ No doubt his occupation of the old castle of Desmond had ever been regarded with fierce jealousy. While he had dreamed his dreams and sung his songs in the valley, there had been curses muttered against him from the hills around. At last the day of vengeance came. The outraged natives rushed down upon Kilcolman; the poet and his family barely made their escape; his home was plundered and burned. According to Ben Jonson, in the conversation with Drummond, quoted above, not all his family escaped; one little child, new born, perished in the flames. ”

“ The reigning favourite at this time was the Earl of Essex. In 1596 his successful descent upon Cadiz raised him to the zenith of his fame. With this nobleman Spenser was on terms of intimacy. At his London house in the Strand—a house which had previously been inhabited by Spenser's earlier patron, the Earl of Leicester—it stood where Essex Street now is, and is still represented by the two pillars which stand at the bottom of that street—Spenser no doubt renewed his friendship with Shakspere. ”

“ Then the genius of our literature in the latter part of Queen Elizabeth's reign was emphatically dramatic; in the intense life of these years men longed for reality. Now the Faerie Queene is one long idealizing. These circumstances are to accounted for partly by the character of Spenser's genius, partly by the fact already stated that chronologically Spenser is the earliest of the great spirits of his day. In truth he stands between two worlds: he belongs partly to the new time, partly to the old; he is the last of one age, he is the first of another ”

“ 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.'{6} When Spenser's works were reprinted—the first three books of the Faerie Queene for the seventh time—in 1679, there was added an account of his life. ”

“ Perhaps the absence from his lady love referred to in the concluding sonnets was occasioned by this litigation. Perhaps also the 'false forged lyes'—the malicious reports circulated about him—referred to in Sonnet 85, may have been connected with these appeals against him. It is clear that all his dreams of Faerie did not make him neglectful of his earthly estate. Like Shakspere, like Scott, Spenser did not cease to be a man of the world—we use the phrase in no unkindly sense—because he was a poet. He was no mere visionary, helpless in the ordinary affairs of life. ”

“ The life of Spenser is wrapt in a similar obscurity to that which hides from us his great predecessor Chaucer, and his still greater contemporary Shakspere. As in the case of Chaucer, our principal external authorities are a few meagre entries in certain official documents, and such facts as may be gathered from his works. The birth-year of each poet is determined by inference. The circumstances in which each died are a matter of controversy. What sure information we have of the intervening events of the life of each one is scanty and interrupted. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The work, however, in which he imitates Chaucer's manner is not the Shepheardes Calendar, but his Prosopopoia or Mother Hubberds Tale, which he says, writing in a later year, he had 'long sithens composed in the raw conceipt of my youth.' The form and manner of the Shepheardes Calendar reflected not Chaucer's influence upon the writer, but the influence of a vast event which had changed the face of literature since the out-coming of the Canterbury Tales—of the revival of learning. That event had put fresh models before men, had greatly modified old literary forms, had originated new. ”

“ The second of these collected poems—The Teares of the Muses—dedicated, as we have seen, to one of the poet's fair cousins, the Lady Strange, deplores the general intellectual condition of the time. It is doubtful whether Spenser fully conceived what a brilliant literary age was beginning about the year 1590. Perhaps his long absence in Ireland, the death of Sidney who was the great hope of England Spenser knew, the ecclesiastical controversies raging when he revisited England, may partly account for his despondent tone with reference to literature. ”

“ Edmund Spenser and the worke it selfe, lest I should seeme to offer injury to his worth, by others so much celebrated. Hee was borne in London of an ancient and noble family, and brought up in the Universitie of Cambridge, where (as the fruites of his after labours doe manifest) he mispent not his time. After this he became secretary to Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton, Lord Deputy of Ireland, a valiant and worthy governour, and shortly after, for his services to the Crowne, he had bestowed upon him by Queene Elizabeth, 3,000 acres of land in the countie of Corke. ”

“ Bellum inter capita et membra continuatum.' 'Other matters are much as they were: war kept up between the heads [the dons] and the members [the men] .' Spenser was not elected to a fellowship; he quitted his college, with all its miserable bickerings, after he had taken his master's degree. There can be little doubt, however, that he was most diligent and earnest student during his residence at Cambridge; during that period, for example, he must have gained that knowledge of Plato's works which so distinctly marks his poems, and found in that immortal writer a spirit most truly congenial. ”

“ The poet could only wail and beat his breast. Eclogues I. and VI. are all sighs and tears. Perhaps in the course of time a copy of the Faerie Queene might reach the region where Menalcas and Rosalind were growing old together; and she, with a certain ruth perhaps mixed with her anger, might recognise in Mirabella an image of her fair young disdainful self{4}. The poet's attachment was no transient flame that flashed and was gone. ”

“ This intimacy with Essex, with whatever intellectual advantages it may have been attended, with whatever bright spirits it may have brought Spenser acquainted, probably impeded his prospects of preferment. There can be no doubt that one of the motives that brought him to England was a desire to advance his fortunes. Camden describes him as always poor. His distaste for his residence in Ireland could not but have been aggravated by his recent legal defeat. ”

“ So far as our knowledge goes, it shows some slight positive resemblance between their lives. They were both connected with the highest society of their times; both enjoyed court favour, and enjoyed it in the substantial shape of pensions. They were both men of remarkable learning. They were both natives of London. They both died in the close vicinity of Westminster Abbey, and lie buried near each other in that splendid cemetery. Their geniuses were eminently different: that of Chaucer was the active type, Spenser's of the contemplative ”

“ He dates one of his letters to Harvey, 'Leycester House, this 5 October, 1579.' Perhaps at this time he commenced, or renewed, or continued his acquaintance with his distinguished relatives at Althorpe. During the time he spent now at Penshurst and in London, he mixed probably with the most brilliant intellectual society of his time. Sidney was himself endowed with no mean genius. He, Lord Leicester, Lord Strange, and others, with whom Spenser was certainly, or in all probability, acquainted, were all eminent patrons and protectors of genius. ”

“ The old castle in which he had lived had been one of the residences of the Earls of Desmond. It stood some two miles from Doneraile, on the north side of a lake which was fed by the river Awbeg or Mulla, as the poet christened it. 'Two miles north-west of Doneraile,' writes Charles Smith in his Natural and Civil History of the County and City of Cork, 1774, (i. 340, 341) —'is Kilcoleman, a ruined castle of the Earls of Desmond, but more celebrated for being the residence of the immortal Spenser, when he composed his divine poem The Faerie Queene. ”

“ They spend that nought to learning they may spare;
And the rich fee which Poets wont divide
Now Parasites and Sycophants do share.
Several causes have been suggested to account for this disfavour. The popular tradition was pleased to explain it by making Burghley the ideal dullard who has no soul for poetry—to whom one copy of verses is very much as good as another, and no copy good for anything. It delighted to bring this commonplace gross-minded person into opposition with one of the most spiritual of geniuses. In this myth Spenser represents mind, Burghley matter. ”

“ Bryskett at length assents to Spenser's proposal, and proceeds to read his translation of Giraldi, which is in some sort criticised as he reads, Spenser proposing one or two questions 'arising principally,' as Todd says, 'from the discussion of the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle.' This invaluable picture of a scene in Spenser's Irish life shows manifestly in what high estimation his learning and genius were already held, and how, in spite of Harvey's sinister criticisms, he had resumed his great work. ”

“ Craik suggests, would seem to be an allegorical narrative of some matter recently transpired. It is dated 1590, but nothing is known of any earlier edition than that which appears in the Complaints. Of the other pieces by far the most interesting is Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubbards Tale, not only because it is in it, as has been said, Spenser most carefully, though far from successfully, imitates his great master Chaucer, but for its intrinsic merit— for its easy style, its various incidents, its social pictures. In the dedication he speaks of it as 'These my idle labours ”

“ It must have been some twelve months after those lines were penned, that the writer conceived an ardent attachment for one Elizabeth. The active research of Dr. Grosart has discovered that this lady belonged to the Boyle family—a family already of importance and destined to be famous. The family seat was at Kilcoran, near Youghal, and so we understand Spenser's singing of 'The sea that neighbours to her near.' Thus she lived in the same county with her poet. The whole course of the wooing and the winning is portrayed in the Amoretti or Sonnets and the Epithalamium. ”

“ The next passage that can be called an account of Spenser is found in Fuller's Worthies of England, first published in 1662, and runs as follows:— 'Edmond Spencer, born in this city (London) , was brought up in Pembroke-hall in Cambridge, where he became an excellent scholar; but especially most happy in English Poetry; as his works do declare, in which the many Chaucerisms used (for I will not say affected by him) are thought by the ignorant to be blemishes, known by the learned to be beauties, to his book ”

“ Shakspere was an intimate friend of the Earl of Southampton, who was one of the most attached friends of that Earl of Essex. And a personal acquaintance with Shakspere may have been one of the most memorable events of Spenser's visit to London in 1589. We would gladly think that Thalia in the Teares of the Muses refers in the following passage to Shakspere: the comic stage, she says, is degraded,
And he the man whom Nature selfe had made
To mock herselfe and Truth to imitate,
With kindly counter under Mimick shade,
Our pleasant Willy, ah! is dead of late ”

“ 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 ”

“ It is easy to imagine how intensely Spenser enjoyed his visit to London. It is uncertain to what extent that visit was prolonged. He dates the dedication of his Colin Clouts Come Home Again 'from my house at Kilcolman, the 27 of December, 1591.' On the other hand, the dedication of his Daphnaida is dated 'London this first of Januarie 1591,' that is 1592 according to our new style. Evidently there is some mistake here. Prof. Craik 'suspects' that in the latter instance 'the date January 1591' is used in the modern meaning; he quotes nothing to justify such a suspicion ”

“ He urges the stationing numerous garrisons; he is for the abolishing native customs. Such proposals won a not unfavourable hearing at that time. They have been admired many a time since. It is to this work of Spenser's that Protector Cromwell alludes in a letter to his council in Ireland, in favour of William Spenser, grandson of Edmund Spenser, from whom an estate of lands in the barony of Fermoy, in the county of Cork, descended on him. 'His grandfather,' he writes, 'was that Spenser who, by his writings touching the reduction of the Irish to civility, brought on him the odium of that nation ”

“ 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. ”