A History of English Literature

Elizabethan period, and one of the chief of all English poets, is Edmund
Spenser. [Footnote: His name should never be spelled with a _c_.] Born
in London in 1552, the son of a clothmaker, Spenser past from the newly
established Merchant Taylors' school to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a
sizar, or poor student, and during the customary seven years of residence
took the degrees of B. A. and, in 1576, of M. A. At Cambridge he
assimilated two of the controlling forces of his life, the moderate
Puritanism of his college and Platonic idealism. Next, after a year or two
with his kinspeople in Lancashire, in the North of England, he came to
London, hoping through literature to win high political place, and attached
himself to the household of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Queen
Elizabeth's worthless favorite. Together with Sidney, who was Leicester's
nephew, he was for a while a member of a little group of students who
called themselves 'The Areopagus' and who, like occasional other
experimenters of the later Renaissance period, attempted to make over
English versification by substituting for rime and accentual meter the
Greek and Latin system based on exact quantity of syllables. Spenser,
however, soon outgrew this folly and in 1579 published the collection of
poems which, as we have already said, is commonly taken as marking the
beginning of the great Elizabethan literary period, namely 'The Shepherd's
Calendar.' This is a series of pastoral pieces (eclogues, Spenser calls
them, by the classical name) twelve in number, artificially assigned one to
each month in the year. The subjects are various--the conventionalized love
of the poet for a certain Rosalind; current religious controversies in
allegory; moral questions; the state of poetry in England; and the praises
of Queen Elizabeth, whose almost incredible vanity exacted the most fulsome
flattery from every writer who hoped to win a name at her court. The
significance of 'The Shepherd's Calendar' lies partly in its genuine
feeling for external Nature, which contrasts strongly with the hollow
conventional phrases of the poetry of the previous decade, and especially
in the vigor, the originality, and, in some of the eclogues, the beauty, of
the language and of the varied verse. It was at once evident that here a
real poet had appeared. An interesting innovation, diversely judged at the
time and since, was Spenser's deliberate employment of rustic and archaic
words, especially of the Northern dialect, which he introduced partly
because of their appropriateness to the imaginary characters, partly for
the sake of freshness of expression. They, like other features of the work,
point forward to 'The Faerie Queene.'
In the uncertainties of court intrigue literary success did not gain for
Spenser the political rewards which he was seeking, and he was obliged to
content himself, the next year, with an appointment, which he viewed as
substantially a sentence of exile, as secretary to Lord Grey, the governor
of Ireland. In Ireland, therefore, the remaining twenty years of Spenser's
short life were for the most part spent, amid distressing scenes of English
oppression and chronic insurrection among the native Irish. After various
activities during several years Spenser secured a permanent home in
Kilcolman, a fortified tower and estate in the southern part of the island,
where the romantic scenery furnished fit environment for a poet's
imagination. And Spenser, able all his life to take refuge in his art from
the crass realities of life, now produced many poems, some of them short,
but among the others the immortal 'Faerie Queene.' The first three books of
this, his crowning achievement, Spenser, under enthusiastic encouragement
from Ralegh, brought to London and published in 1590. The dedication is to
Queen Elizabeth, to whom, indeed, as its heroine, the poem pays perhaps the
most splendid compliment ever offered to any human being in verse. She
responded with an uncertain pension of L50 (equivalent to perhaps $1500 at
the present time), but not with the gift of political preferment which was
still Spenser's hope; and in some bitterness of spirit he retired to