Spenser, Edmund c.1552-1599
English poet

He was born in London, the son of a gentleman tradesman. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. His early writings, partly written at Cambridge, include translations of the Visions of Petrarch and some sonnets of Joachim du Bellay. Shortly after leaving Cambridge (1576) he obtained a place in Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester's household and this led to a friendship with Sir Philip Sidney and the Areopagus, a society of wits. His first original work, The Shepheard's Calender (1579), dedicated to Sidney, heralded the age of Elizabethan poetry and no doubt assisted in his career as a courtier. In 1580 he was appointed secretary to Lord Grey de Wilton, Lord Deputy in Ireland, and was rewarded for his involvement in crushing the Trim rebellion with Kilcolman Castle in Cork. He settled there (1586), hoping to find leisure to write his Faerie Queene and other courtly works; these were written with an eye to the court no less than as a brilliant presentation of the art and thought of the Renaissance. In 1589 he visited London with Sir Walter Raleigh, who had seen the first three books of The Faerie Queene at Kilcolman and now carried him off to lay them at the feet of Queen Elizabeth I. Published in 1590, they were an immediate success, but a previous misdemeanour, the attack in Mother Hubberd's Tale on the proposed match between Elizabeth and the Duc d'Alen�on, was not forgotten and the poet returned to Ireland in 1591 a disappointed man. He later published his wry reflections on his visit in Colin Clout's Come Home Again (1595). Complaints, published in 1591, contains, beside his early work, the brilliantly coloured but enigmatic Muiopotmos, Mother Hubberd's Tale, to which was now added a bitter satire on court favour, The Early Tears of the Muses, which lamented the lack of patronage; and his pastoral elegy for Sir Philip Sidney which is so frigid as to put their friendship in question. In 1594 he married Elizabeth Boyle and celebrated his courtship in the sonnet sequence Amoretti and his wedding in the supreme marriage poem Epithalamion. He revisited London in 1596 with three more books of The Faerie Queene, which were published along with the Four Hymns. In the same year, he wrote Prothalamion, and his prose View of the Present State of Ireland. Kilcolman Castle was burned in the 1598 Irish rising, but the Spensers escaped to Cork and from there to safety in London.

Bibliography: A C Judson, The Life of Spenser (1945)