Introduction: Writing the Life

EDMUND SPENSER’s life will probably always be shrouded in a certain mystery. We cannot be sure about his ancestry and immediate family. As is usual for writers of the sixteenth century, no personal letters survive, and there are no significant literary manuscripts in Spenser’s hand, only legal documents and secretarial works.¹ We know very little about Spenser’s relationships with most of his patrons, friends, or the social superiors to whom he was connected. It was assumed for a long time that Spenser must have been an intimate associate of Sir Philip Sidney because they were both poets who had Irish connections, and that Sidney must have eased his entry into court society, but many have questioned how well they could have known each other, given their obvious difference in class and status.² We do not really know how close Spenser and Sir Walter Ralegh, with whom he is invariably depicted, really were in the 1580s and 1590s, especially if we bear in mind that their relationship survives principally in the form of literary works (Plate 1).³ We do not know whether he was a close friend and confidant of Lord Grey, the Irish patron with whom Spenser has most frequently been associated, nor what his relationship was with Gabriel Harvey after he left for Ireland in 1580. In fact we do not know why Spenser left for Ireland in that year.⁴ There are many people referred to in his poetry or related to his life, who may or may not really exist, most notably Rosalind and E. K. in The Shepheardes Calender and the careless servant who supposedly lost the later books of The Faerie Queene in Wales.⁵ We do not know how Spenser died.⁶ There is nothing of Spenser’s opinions, comments, or even many details of his life outside his writings.

The most obvious reason for the lack of information we have about Spenser is that in the sixteenth century lives of even quite prominent people only really mattered when they told a useful, moral story that could be applied with profit to the reader’s own case. Reading was often pragmatic and goal-oriented, a skill that Spenser’s tutor and friend, Gabriel Harvey, practised, publicized, and made a cornerstone of his career.⁷ Lives were made to fit obviously useful patterns, and it should not surprise us that so many seem to conform to familiar narratives, such as the parable of the prodigal son, a particular favourite in Elizabethan England.⁸ The most spectacular example was that of Robert Greene (1558–92), who expired, according to his principal detractor, Gabriel Harvey, and his friend and ally, Thomas Nashe, after a ‘fatall banquet’ which involved ‘a surfeit of pickle herringe and rennish wine’.⁹ Greene’s eventful life and death were represented in various works which have proved hard to attribute to any author with certainty.¹⁰ However, they all construct his life in terms of a particular narrative structure, that of the repentant prodigal, who is able to save his soul after an agonizing deathbed confession enables him to atone for his previous sins. We cannot, of course, be sure that either Harvey or Nashe is actually telling the truth about Greene’s death: significantly enough, no one knows who was at the fatal banquet, apart from the unknown Will Monox (who may be invented) and, perhaps, the publisher Cuthbert Burby.¹¹ Harvey is eager to expose the disgusting behaviour of an enemy who has been vigorously defended by his allies and so tells the story with considerable glee; Nashe exploits the detail as a means of showing that even if it were true (Nashe comments in parenthesis, ‘(if thou wilt needs haue it so)’), Greene was still a better man and writer than Harvey could ever hope to be.¹²

Most lives written in sixteenth-century Europe had a didactic religious purpose. As Irena Backus has pointed out in her study of life writing in Reformation Europe, whatever authors might claim, ‘the early Lives of Luther, Calvin, Beza and the Swiss reformers were sui-generic’, detail is included to tell a particular story, hagiographic or hostile.¹³ Philip Melanchthon’s biography of Luther is a case in point: ‘Melanchthon … announces what his biography is not: a biography in the sense of a chronological account of an individual’s life. It is an account of Luther as instrument of divine providence, which also praises a selection of his extraordinary human qualities.’¹⁴

We now have a very different perception of biography, one that assumes that there can be a separation between the recorded details of the subject’s life and his or her achievements. The two exist separately: after we have gathered together the life from the surviving life records (family records, legal documents, personal effects and objects, wills, and, above all, letters), we can then read the works and the life in terms of each other, so that the life helps to explain the works.¹⁵ Ideally, an author writes details of his or her own life, an autobiography, that can be read with or against the grain.¹⁶ Such assumptions lie behind the great recent literary biographies of men and women of letters from the eighteenth century onwards, such as Walter Jackson Bate’s life of Samuel Johnson; Michael Meyer’s Henrik Ibsen; Leon Edel’s Henry James; Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf; or Michael Holroyd’s Bernard Shaw.¹⁷ But things are more complicated when we try to reconstruct the lives of men and women in the early modern period, especially those born outside the aristocracy, who were not employed by the church, who did not live in a notably saintly or evil manner, and who were not engaged in politics or diplomacy, e.g., writers of the middling sort such as Spenser. It is notable that while a number of life records do survive that have enabled scholars to reconstruct the life of Sir Philip Sidney in considerable detail, virtually nothing relates to his literary activities. Sidney is represented in contemporary accounts as a Protestant saint and as a politician, notably in the life written by his friend, Fulke Greville (1554–1628), which makes no mention of his literary achievements, even though Greville edited the Arcadia after Sidney’s death.¹⁸ Sidney’s literary works only became read in terms of his life a long time after his death.¹⁹

It is worth reminding ourselves that although English biography did exist in an earlier form than has often been recognized, biographers were not ‘interested in minute and even apparently trivial information about remarkable persons’ until the second half of the seventeenth century.²⁰ As is widely recognized, it is no accident that ‘Milton is the first English author for whom we have so much in the way of biography’.²¹ The first biographer who appears to have taken a proper interest in the apparently inconsequential details of lives is John Aubrey (1626–97), whose Brief Lives remained in manuscript until 1813. Only after such a development could a biographer really hope to assemble the sort of material that we think of as essential to the construction of a life. Paradoxically, the serious work of biography, one of the key genres of writing that we depend on today, could only begin with a desire to document superfluous, ephemeral details, a sign that lives were being read in rather less serious ways than when they were perceived in moral and theological terms. The history of biography and the history of gossip are intertwined.²²

The problem that needs to be addressed is how we deal with this apparently fundamental division. Biographers invariably want to look back beyond the middle of the seventeenth century and find life records and narratives of lives that resemble those found later. But, such evidence does not often exist. This lacuna helps to explain why so many strange conspiracy theories have developed about the life of Shakespeare in particular, as, frustrated at the lack of surviving material, biographers with little experience of late sixteenth-century England imagine that a gap in the biographical record signals an aberration that needs to be explained, and so are able to conclude that Christopher Marlowe did not really die in Deptford but was resurrected as Shakespeare, or that William Shakespeare of Stratford was a front for another writer, Sir Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, earl of Oxford, and, as has recently been suggested, Sir Henry Neville.²³ Indeed, it should not really surprise anyone interested in questions of early modern biography that a lengthy case has been made that Bacon wrote all of Spenser’s works—as well as those of Shakespeare.²⁴

But even a superficial trawl through the new Dictionary of National Biography will reveal how little we know about so many important figures, making the gaps in the biographical records of Shakespeare and Spenser seem typical rather than unusual and therefore in need of explanation. Thomas Nashe (bap. 1567, d. c.1601) was among the most significant literary figures of the 1590s, having forced the authorities to close the theatres and then censor the press within the space of two years, surely a unique achievement.²⁵ Yet, no one saw fit to record the date, let alone the cause, of his death.²⁶ Gabriel Harvey (1552/3–1631), his bitter opponent, and a writer who did leave behind a large number of clues about his whereabouts and opinions, nevertheless disappeared into relative obscurity in Saffron Walden for the last thirty years of his life.²⁷ The same might be said of John Lyly (1554–1606), a major court poet and dramatist. His ODNB biographer, G. K. Hunter, notes that ‘The only expression of Lyly’s literary talent in the last sixteen years of his life appears in the begging letters he wrote to Elizabeth and to the Cecils.’ The case is no different if we turn to Thomas Lodge (1558–1625), another prominent literary figure, whose work had a major impact on the course of Elizabethan literature. His ODNB biographer, Alexandra Halasz, is also clear about the frustrating gaps in our knowledge: ‘Although Lodge was occasionally recognized by his contemporaries, his name occurs less frequently than might be expected from the range of his work and the length of his life,’ adding further, ‘Some of the mentions, moreover, are not easily understandable in relation to what is taken to be Lodge’s œuvre.’ Almost nothing is known about the life of Abraham Fraunce (1559?–1592/3?), a key figure within the Sidney circle, who was among the first to appreciate the importance of Spenser’s work. Even when a life can be chronicled rather more fully, such as that of Ben Jonson (1572–1637), there are frustrating gaps in the narrative.²⁸

If we turn to dramatists who largely relied on the stage for their income, the picture is, if anything, even worse. It is especially hard to determine the canon of Thomas Middleton (bap. 1580, d. 1627).²⁹ Only recently has the important play The Family of Love (pub. 1608) been removed from the list of his known works, and, despite the recent interest in his life and work, many gaps remain in our knowledge of both.³⁰ The life records of John Webster (c.1578/80–1638?) are even more obscure.³¹ Unless there is a reason to record lives because the narrative will tell the reader as much as a seriously learned book, or details are preserved through the records of state or other official mechanisms, evidence invariably does not survive. What are left are scraps, fragments, and clues in parish registers, court records, and probate offices.³²

It is hardly surprising, given the state of the evidence, that often a great deal is made of one or two facts, which, read in particular ways, determine how a whole personality—and more—might be seen in relationship to their work. Again, the case of Shakespeare indicates how problematic such interpretations often are. As there are virtually no literary remains left behind by Shakespeare outside his published works, and most of the surviving records deal with property and legal disputes, a revisionist impulse has attempted to correct the familiar picture of Shakespeare as a wild and untutored genius by representing him as a hard-headed provincial citizen with an eye for personal gain.³³ Moreover, a whole scholarly sub-industry hinges on what we might understand by the gift of the second-best bed to Anne Hathaway, whether the gesture signals the contempt of a husband trapped in a loveless marriage, or a sign of intimate affection because the second-best bed was the one the couple slept in.³⁴ The life and the works are then read as a symbiotic whole, with Shakespeare’s plays and poems compensating for what he did not get at home; revealing his contempt for women; or, expressing a fulfilled and happy love as he saw it.³⁵

The same problems of interpretation shadow Spenser’s life and the ways in which it has been narrated. It was often assumed that because he wrote about the queen he must have been a devoted royalist and enjoyed a special relationship with the monarch. In Thomas Fuller’s Worthies of England, published posthumously in 1662, the following story has pride of place in the brief entry:

There passeth a story commonly told and believed that Spenser, presenting his poems to Queen Elizabeth, she, highly affected therewith, commanded the Lord Cecil, her treasurer, to give him an hundred pounds; and when the treasurer (a good steward of the queen’s money) alleged that sum was too much, ‘Then give him,’ quoth the queen, ‘what is reason,’ to which the lord consented, but was so busied, belike, about matters of higher concernment, that Spenser received no reward; whereupon he presented this petition in a small piece of paper to the queen in her progress:

I was promis’d on a time,
To have reason for my rhyme;
From that time unto this season,
I receiv’d nor rhyme nor reason.

Hereupon the queen gave strict order (not without some check to her treasurer) for the present payment of the hundred pounds she first intended unto him.³⁶

The story has long been treated with some scepticism, and is undoubtedly based on confusion with Thomas Churchyard’s complaint about his belated royal reward.³⁷ However, Spenser’s biographer, A. C. Judson, argued that even if it ‘sounds on the whole, rather like the work of a court wit’, the story ‘may indeed have a core of truth’.³⁸ The anecdote can only have a ‘core of truth’ if it is assumed that Spenser was a poet admired by the queen but treated with disdain by her other courtiers, in this case, William Cecil, Lord Burghley. The recently discovered ‘Tresham letter’ corroborates the widespread assumption that Spenser’s portrayal of the ‘fox’ in Mother Hubberds Tale did indeed offend Lord Burghley, led to The Complaints being ‘called in’ after their publication, and placed the author in serious trouble.³⁹ However, it is unlikely that the queen took a personal interest in the poem and the anecdote seems to owe much to Fuller’s own temperate support for the royalist cause and faith in the insight and efficacy of the monarch rather than his or her advisers.⁴⁰ The idea that monarchs enjoyed the cheeky wit of court poets is also perhaps partly proverbial wisdom, partly based on Spenser’s own self-representation in his poetry.⁴¹ On the other hand, it is documented that Elizabeth enjoyed jest books, and had courtiers read episodes from A Hundred Merry Tales (1526) to her on her deathbed.⁴²

Fuller’s anecdote, repeated in numerous subsequent lives of the poet throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, indicates how certain key details are seen to encapsulate a life in miniature.⁴³ The whole narrative, which is barely five hundred words long, is the first life of Spenser in the seventeenth century and so set the tone for much of what followed.⁴⁴ For Fuller, Spenser was a scholar who loved poetry, had a court career, then went to Ireland, where he fared badly (and did not really want to be), was burned out by the rebels, before ‘dying for grief’ in London, where he was buried in Westminster Abbey at the expense of Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex. In essence, this is the story that has been told ever since.

John Aubrey’s brief life, as we might expect given his role as a ‘hint-keeper’, recording details for others to develop, is a mass of tempting but unconnected scraps, many of which only assume an importance in the story of Spenser’s life later when they were published (1813).⁴⁵ Aubrey is the first to provide any details of Spenser’s appearance, commenting that ‘Mr Beeston sayes, he was a little man, wore shorte haire, little band and little cuffs.’⁴⁶ The description is not especially vivid or helpful and probably reached Aubrey at one remove, the Mr Beeston being William (1610/11?–82), son of the impresario and actor manager Christopher (1579/80?–1638), who could have seen Spenser in London but died when Aubrey was 13.⁴⁷ Nevertheless, the details may have some importance, as they suggest that Spenser was a man of modest attire, and habitually wore the clothes of the middle classes, as well as keeping his hair short, not a flamboyant courtier, as he is represented in the Kinnoull portrait, reproduced on the cover of this book. The ‘little band’ would have been of the same style as that worn by Ben Jonson in the portrait by Abraham van Blyenberch, painted in 1617, or by Shakespeare in the Flower portrait.⁴⁸ The story is a sign of Aubrey’s desire to preserve apparently irrelevant detail, realizing that it might take on much greater significance later, or, simply be of interest to readers. In revealing his sources he also shows how much work he did in recording details and trying to preserve living memories of the dead. Aubrey reproduced details which originated in correspondence or conversations, again showing the close relationship between biography and gossip, and the accidental nature of the genre, details preserved because of who the author happened to know or encounter.

Aubrey’s next paragraph provides a series of details that cannot simply be taken at face value, but which provide important clues about how Spenser was perceived in the later seventeenth century, as well as pointing us towards important facts:

Mr Edmund Spencer was of Pembroke-hall in Cambridge; he mist the Fellowship there, which Bishop Andrewes gott. He was an acquaintance and frequenter of Sir Erasmus Dryden: His Mistris Rosalind was a kinswoman of Sir Erasmus Ladys. The chamber there at Sir Erasmus’ is still called Mr Spencers chamber. Lately, at college takeing-downe the Wainscot of his chamber, they found an abundance of Cards, with stanzas of the Faerie Queene written on them.⁴⁹

The story of the competition for the fellowship at Pembroke with Lancelot Andrewes is wrong. Andrewes (1555–1626), like Spenser, was a pupil at Merchant Taylors’ School, and then Pembroke College, Cambridge, matriculating two years after Spenser in 1571, so they must have been acquainted, especially as both were star pupils of the educational reformer Richard Mulcaster (1531/2–1611).⁵⁰ However, it was not with Spenser that Andrewes competed and won, but his exact contemporary Thomas Dove (1555–1630), who had been with him at Merchant Taylors’ School, and then gone up to Cambridge at the same time. Each future divine was funded from the same bequest by Thomas Watts (1523/4–77), a notable benefactor of the school, whose funds had also helped Spenser’s educational progress.⁵¹ Aubrey is not far away from the truth, which suggests that the detail probably comes from a faulty memory by his source.

What the story illustrates is that from the middle of the seventeenth century, if not earlier, Spenser was seen, undoubtedly based in part on his self-representation in his writings, as a disaffected and disappointed man who was perpetually overlooked by the authorities. Certainly, the story of the failed fellowship was repeated in many of the lives written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, until disproved by the historian and biographer Thomas Birch (1705–66) in his life of the poet for the 1751 edition of Spenser’s works, the first that contained a properly critical and sceptical biography.⁵² The confusion is understandable, but it also suggests that evidence was read in terms of the perception of the life, as much as it determined how that life was reconstructed.

The detail about Rosalind’s connection to the Dryden family is, if anything, even more tantalizing. Aubrey or his source would again appear to have transposed details. In the course of his exhaustive research into Spenser’s family, W. H. Welply discovered that Spenser’s second wife, Elizabeth Boyle, was a niece by marriage of John Dryden, great-grandfather of the poet John Dryden (1631–1700), and, therefore, a first cousin of Sir Erasmus Dryden (1553–1632), the eldest son of John.⁵³ If we assume that Aubrey has confused the literary figure, Rosalind, with Spenser’s real wife, then the connection of Spenser with an exact contemporary is strengthened rather than weakened, as is his connection with Northamptonshire, the county of both the Spensers and Drydens.⁵⁴ Therefore, the existence of the Spenser chamber at the Dryden family home of Canons Ashby (Plate 2) need not be dismissed out of hand.⁵⁵ Dryden’s particular interest in Spenser is not necessarily explained by this family connection, and he does not refer to any link between them, but it might have played a part.⁵⁶

Aubrey produces two other significant details, both of which would appear to have some basis in reality:

Mr Samuel Woodford (the Poet who paraphras’d the Psalmes) lives in Hampshire neer Alton, and he told me that Mr Spenser lived sometime in these parts, in this delicate sweet ayre: where he enjoyed his Muse: and writt good part of his Verses …

Sir John Denham told me, that Abp Ussher, Lord Primate of Armagh, was acquainted with him; by this token: when Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert cam forth, Sir John askt the Lord Primate if he had seen it. Said the Primate, Out upon him, with his vaunting Preface, he speakes against my old friend Edmund Spenser.⁵⁷

Samuel Woodford (1636–1700) was another of Aubrey’s witnesses who could have had no first-hand knowledge of Spenser. The tradition that Spenser spent some time in Alton has persisted into modern times, and there is a plaque on a house in the town’s main street (1 Amery Street, see Plate 3) which bears the legend, ‘Here lived Edmund Spenser Poet—1590’.⁵⁸ However, it is unlikely that Spenser stayed in this particular house, which would have been a small and uncomfortable dwelling next to a marketplace in the 1590s. Aubrey’s story was revived in late Victorian times and the detail, ‘neer Alton’, transformed to ‘in Alton’ and then to the address in question. The owner placed the plaque on the house when he purchased the property in c.1900 on the authority of Revd John Vaughan, whose lecture, ‘Some Local Celebrities of Alton’, had a considerable impact in the town after it was delivered in January 1890. It certainly helped to save the house form the threat of demolition in the mid-1930s.⁵⁹

Nevertheless, it is possible that Spenser did visit Hampshire, as Aubrey suggests, even if he did not stay in Alton. The estates of Sir Henry Wallop (c.1531–99) are nearby at Farleigh Wallop, and it is likely that Woodford was referring to this impressive manor house when recalling his knowledge of Spenser’s visit.⁶⁰ Spenser was certainly closely acquainted with Wallop, who worked, somewhat reluctantly, as under-treasurer in Ireland in the 1580s, arriving in 1579, a year before Spenser.⁶¹ Spenser might well have visited Wallop at some point during his long visit back to England (1589–90). If so, then Woodford, who lived near Alton, being rector of Shalden and of Hartley-Malduit from 1673 until his death, could well have been repeating local knowledge to Aubrey.⁶²

The final detail may be the most important of all. The first printed edition of Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland was published by Sir James Ware in 1633, possibly based on an extant manuscript which had been in the possession of James Ussher, now in Trinity College Dublin, perhaps another, now lost or destroyed in the publication process, that Ussher had.⁶³ If Aubrey is right that Ussher knew Spenser and had an especially high regard for him, then we have some evidence that the published work might have had some form of authorial approval. Moreover, Ussher’s decision to tone down certain aspects of the work because ‘if hee had lived to see these times, and the good effects which the last 30 yeares peace have produced in this land, both for obedience to the lawes, as also in traffique, husbandry, civility, & learning, he would have omitted those passages which may seeme to lay either any particular aspersion upon some families, or generall upon the Nation’, could seem to be a more informed judgement that many of Spenser’s critics have imagined.⁶⁴ Ussher (1581–1656) would only have been 17 when Spenser died, but it is possible that they met in Dublin where Ussher grew up. Ussher’s father, Arland, worked in the same office as Spenser, although it is just as likely that Ussher refers to Spenser as a ‘friend’ because he admired him.⁶⁵ Certainly, the reported conversation has an air of authenticity. William Davenant (1606–68) was a figure who was extremely knowledgeable and voluble about the affairs of the many writers that he knew, and he was highly critical of Spenser’s poetic methods and diction in his preface to his own epic poem, Gondibert (1651).⁶⁶ Sir John Denham (1614/15–1669), poet and courtier, was the son of Sir John Denham (1559–1639), attorney general for Ireland, and so perhaps had some obvious connection to Ussher’s circle, and was eager to defend an esteemed writer they all respected.⁶⁷

The principal work of any biographer of Spenser will be to sort out what are the known pieces of information from false leads, which then have to be placed in context. It was perhaps Alexander Grosart, notorious for his flights of fancy, whom W. H. Welply had foremost in mind in 1941 when he asserted that ‘An authentic life of Edmund Spenser has yet to be written, a life, that is, which will purge away the dross heaped up around the career of this great poet by Todd, Grosart, Church, Hales, De Selincourt and others’.⁶⁸ Reconstructing the life of Spenser has proved almost as much a process of clearing away key misconceptions and false emphases as of establishing new facts. The major work in the first half of the twentieth century was carried out by Welply himself, as well as Douglas Hamer and Alexander Judson. Indeed, important parts of Welply’s research into Spenser’s family in Ireland, and, to a lesser extent, his ancestors, cannot be checked because the documents were destroyed in the fire that consumed the Irish Public Record Office in Dublin on 30 June 1922 during the Irish Civil War, hours before the surrender of the Anti-Treaty IRA.⁶⁹ Even so, certain key facts and pieces of information have emerged in the last ninety years which have changed our understanding of Spenser’s life: details of his marriages; documents that he wrote and others that enable us to chart his movements in Ireland; details of land purchases; some annotations in books; and details of his descendants.⁷⁰

However, writing a biography is as much about establishing the contexts in which that life was lived as it is about startling archival discoveries.⁷¹ Contextualizing a life involves placing any figure within the respective social, political, and cultural contexts that they inhabited, in order to determine which choices they made, what influenced them in particular, what factors determined what they did, and to understand the significance of their actions.⁷² The process will inevitably be circular because, in order to achieve this, one has to be able to reconstruct the contexts from the scraps of information that one has, and these then explain the information on which they depend.⁷³ The point is not that the process of writing history becomes impossible, as has sometimes been assumed.⁷⁴ Rather, context always remains a contingent entity constructed by the historian/biographer and never something that can exhaust or definitively end enquiry, an issue that the work of Frank Ankersmit and Marshall Sahlins explores.⁷⁵ We can never be entirely satisfied with, or rely on, contexts, which will never have a cast-iron authority, but we cannot ignore them if we wish to write about the past.

The same might be said of the most vexed of biographical concepts, speculation. Many professional academics would like to expunge such a concept from serious inquiry. Alan Downie, in his analysis of the lives of Christopher Marlowe, has argued that

The temptation to try to extrapolate Marlowe’s artistic intentions not only from the text of his plays and poems, but from the little that is known about his dramatic career, continues to lead those who write about his life down blind alleys. This tendency to make use of what I like to describe as the ‘must-have’ theory of biography, according to which Marlowe must have thought this or must have known that, is widespread. [Downie’s emphases]⁷⁶

And, of course, unfettered speculation invariably leads to bizarre and unsustainable conclusions, especially when produced by authors not familiar with the subject, who do not understand the limitations of the surviving records. But, again, there is no absolute means of policing the boundaries between the concrete and the flimsy, especially when we are dealing with biography. Some biographies are more rigorous than others, but rigour and speculation should not be seen as polar opposites. If we refuse to speculate, to join the dots up between fragmentary pieces of information when there is a plausible context that can be used, we risk the naivety of scepticism. In doing so we distort and warp the historical record, dismissing plausible interpretations through an over-reliance on the need to verify what evidence we have: the concept of a speculation-free biography that simply relies on the facts is almost as much a fantasy as the far-fetched and distorted work that collapses fact and fiction. There is no solution to this conundrum and a biographer will inevitably be caught between the Scylla of speculation and the Charybdis of the limited archive.⁷⁷

The point is neatly illustrated in Natalie Zemon Davis’s speculative biography of Leo Africanus/Al-Hassan al-Wazzan, the author of the first history of Africa written in Europe, who was captured by Christian pirates and became a scholar in the papal palace before returning to obscurity in Morocco. There are numerous gaps in the historical record, which, if we want to read the life at all, have to be filled by speculation. In contrast to scholars approaching more mainstream lives that have been the subject of fanciful readings, Davis defends the use of the past conditional: ‘Throughout I have had to make us of the conditional—“would have,” “may have,” “was likely to have”—and the speculative “perhaps”, “maybe.” These are my invitations to the reader to follow a plausible life story from materials of the time.’⁷⁸ While Downie thinks that the life of Marlowe requires less speculation and more evidence, Davis shows that the life of al-Wazzan can only be constructed from a series of traces and contexts. Different biographies require different approaches and methods. The central issue is how we reconstruct our picture of the early modern world. For Downie, we simply do not need yet another speculative biography that delves into the murky world of Elizabethan spying and tries to work out the circumstances of Marlowe’s death: the genre has become too well established, its paradigms accepted, and it is not producing anything new or insightful for readers.⁷⁹ However, for Davis, the refusal to write a biography that requires speculation is more problematic than indulging in such apparently unscholarly practices, as it would deprive us of the knowledge of the life of a key figure who played a vital role in the central area of the early modern world, the Mediterranean, the subject of one of the most important studies of the period in the last century.⁸⁰ Reconstructing the early modern world, as we see it now, with the Mediterranean dividing Europe and the Ottoman Empire and North Africa, demands that the neglect of al-Wazzan cannot continue.⁸¹

The same logic, I would suggest, needs to be applied to the biography of Spenser. About as much is known of his life as is known of Shakespeare’s, perhaps even a little more. Yet, what has inspired boldness in Shakespeare biographers has led to timidity in would-be biographers of Spenser.⁸² Spenser’s life is important in similar ways to al-Wazzan’s. He was the most significant literary figure of all the many English colonists, settlers, officials, and soldiers in Ireland in the sixteenth century, in itself a distinguished cast list, which includes John Bale, Richard Beacon, Lodowick Bryskett, Sir John Davies, John Derricke, Geoffrey Fenton, Barnabe Googe, Meredith Hanmer, Sir John Harington, Fynes Moryson, and Barnabe Rich.⁸³ Ireland inspired his work in significant ways more than any other Elizabethan writer, yet he remained aware of his English identity, a legacy he was constantly rethinking and re-evaluating.⁸⁴ Spenser was both a major colonial thinker and bureaucrat and the most important Elizabethan non-dramatic poet. He bequeathed a complex, diverse, and, above all, dominant legacy of subsequent notions of literature and national/ethnic identity in the British Isles for the whole of the seventeenth century and beyond.⁸⁵ The context, as we have constructed it, and as we understand it, demands a biography of Spenser.⁸⁶

The fact that no recent biography of Spenser exists means that our understanding of the early modern period is distorted, as other writers who have had their lives written, have dominated our perception of English Renaissance Culture.

There have been numerous recent biographies of Shakespeare, Ralegh, Marlowe, Milton, Jonson, Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, Mary and Philip Sidney; as well as political figures such as Sir Francis Walsingham; intellectuals such as Richard Hakluyt; political power players and patrons, such as Bess of Hardwick (Elizabeth Talbot); as well as a deluge of studies of various monarchs.⁸⁷ In contrast, there has been none of Spenser since A. C. Judson’s pioneering work in 1945.⁸⁸ This lacuna has effectively removed Spenser from most discussions of life writing and political intrigue and patronage, so that he is invariably seen as a remote and unattractive figure, the poet’s poet, or the brutal spokesperson for a savage colonial order in Ireland.⁸⁹ He is certainly regarded as less familiar and knowable than his contemporaries, even when their life records are as sketchy as his. The irony is that Spenser writes more extensively than most about his life in his work, encouraging readers to think about his work in terms of his life.⁹⁰ We are presented with a fundamental dilemma: either take what appears in the literary works as evidence of the poet’s life or abandon any quest for that life and declare that it is unwritable. This might be a coherent position to adopt, but it appears somewhat less tenable if we consider how much Spenser represents himself in his writings and how often he urges the reader to read the work in terms of a life behind or beyond the printed page. There is a cat-and-mouse game established between author and reader about how much can be assumed and reconstructed from the text.⁹¹

How, then, can such a life be recovered? The first step is to piece together the surviving bits of information, and to sweep away any false leads, and so uncover the bare bones of Spenser’s life.⁹² The second is to work out how the life relates to the work and what each tells us about the other. This symbiotic process involves making decisions not only about the relationship between the individual writer and his work, but also how sixteenth-century lives were perceived. Research on infant mortality rates has led to vigorous debates between historians about attitudes to the sanctity of life and whether parents, prepared for the deaths of numerous offspring, had a more robust and less sentimental attitude towards their children than we do now.⁹³ In short, such research forces us to wonder whether life was perceived in a different way in early modern England. It has generally been assumed that Spenser’s death at the age of 45–7 must have been caused by his traumatic departure from Ireland, but we should bear in mind that life expectancy at birth was about 35, that Spenser’s lifespan was not unusually short, especially compared to those of people living in large cities such as London, and that many of his contemporaries, notably Fraunce, Greene, Marlowe, Nashe, and Sidney, for one reason or another, died much younger.⁹⁴ Privacy was much harder to obtain than we take for granted now, households rarely organized to give even quite wealthy people much time alone, hence the importance for a wealthy few of the one private room in the house, the closet.⁹⁵ People often slept in the same bed to keep warm or because there was little available space in a crowded household, an arrangement that Spenser and Harvey exploit in their published letters.⁹⁶ Household space undoubtedly had an impact on how people conceived their identities and so lived their lives. The same might be said of family groupings, much more extended than many experience now in Britain, and kinship ties, an important consideration when we cannot discover as much as we would like to, as is the case with Spenser.⁹⁷ Walter J. Ong suggested long ago that the commencement of teaching in Latin functioned as a puberty rite, bonding groups of boys together as they entered the phase of early manhood.⁹⁸ It is important, therefore, to think about the impact of education on a writer such as Spenser and how his early training might have made him think differently from us, in terms of his chosen career and the life for which it prepared him.⁹⁹ The list can, of course, be extended almost indefinitely, as we need to think about attitudes to sex, marriage, death, patterns of work, old age, and so on, and whether these should force us to see the lives that we reconstruct as radically different from how people experience life now.

Seen in practical terms, the task of reconstructing a life can never be satisfactorily completed, in itself a minor problem, although the lack of dialogue between practising biographers and theorists of historical change has undoubtedly limited our understanding of this fundamental issue.¹⁰⁰ Spenser lived at a point in European history which some have seen as a pivotal moment, one which witnessed the birth of modernity and modern consciousness, as men and women developed a sense of their interiority and an understanding of themselves as private individuals. The description of the period 1500–1700 (or 1800) as ‘early modernity’ implicitly endorses this teleological narrative.¹⁰¹ Reflecting on a famous, pioneering study of impersonation, The Return of Martin Guerre, whereby the imposter Arnaud du Tilh (‘Pansette’) assumed the identity of the supposedly dead Martin Guerre, occupying his house and his wife’s bed until a property dispute with Martin’s uncle led to his exposure and execution, Stephen Greenblatt has argued that we witness a world that is not yet quite modern: ‘For what most matters in the literary texts, as in the documents that record the case of Martin Guerre, are communally secured property rights to a name and a place in an increasingly mobile social world, and these rights seem more an historical condition that enables the development of psychoanalysis than a psychic condition that psychoanalysis itself can adequately explain.’¹⁰² The argument is subtle and nuanced, but this case of impersonation and fraud in south-west France, which took place in the early years of Spenser’s life, can be read in another way. As Greenblatt argues, the case is about property rights and identities, but do we need to add a grand, overarching narrative to place the story in a larger context? Natalie Zemon Davis’s narrative can, pace Greenblatt, be read in straightforward terms as her interim conclusions frequently demonstrate. Martin Guerre probably left the village and abandoned his wife because of tension with his father, fears of his sexuality, and a dislike of women; Pansette probably impersonated Martin because he coveted Martin’s larger inheritance, having learned about his life when two men confused him with Martin; Martin’s wife, Bertrande de Rols, who was undoubtedly not fooled by Arnaud, probably found life with him preferable to life with Martin, a man who clearly generated antagonism and conflict; and the equal split of the villagers during the trial might be explained by their genuine confusion, religious divisions, or opportunist allegiances.¹⁰³ The largest mystery is probably why Martin decided to return after an absence of twelve years. Davis speculates that Martin probably found out what was going on and decided that he needed to act: ‘Who am I, Martin Guerre might have asked himself, if another man has lived out the life I left behind and is in the process of being declared the heir of my father, Sanxi, the husband of my wife, and the father of my son? The original Martin Guerre may have come back to repossess his identity, his persona, before it was too late.’¹⁰⁴

The story is indeed unusual, but what it reveals is perhaps not, and probably has little to do with mankind on the verge of discovering a new sense of identity. The motives that the actors involved reveal are familiar enough to any historian of everyday life throughout the late Middle Ages, the sixteenth century, and beyond: sex, jealousy, village rivalry, and, above all, the desire for property in a society that held virtually all wealth in the form of land and buildings.¹⁰⁵ There is no need for any particularly bizarre explanation to help us understand why Arnaud pretended to be Martin, why Bertrand accepted his duplicity, or why it ended so tragically. Indeed, the fact that a second film based on the events, undoubtedly inspired by the critical and commercial success of the first, could be transposed to the American Civil War, probably tells us less about the historical licence of film-makers, than about the ease with which the story of Martin Guerre can be transported in time and place.¹⁰⁶

The life records and stories of English men and women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries do not, of course, suggest that people living four to five hundred years ago thought and acted just like us all the time.¹⁰⁷ Nevertheless, The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne (c.1528–96), the most extensive life-writing narrative from the late sixteenth century, reveals him to have been an anxious man on the make; eager to record his sexual adventures; a callous exploiter of women; and desperately unsure of his own social status.¹⁰⁸ The same might be said of the greatest diarist of the next century, Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), especially as regards his relationship with women. It is also worth noting that the more substantial records left by prominent women, inspired by the chaos of the Civil War, Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676), Lucy Hutchinson (1620–81), Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle (1623?–73), Anne, Lady Halkett (1623–99), Ann, Lady Fanshaw (1625–80), reveal a clear understanding that society was held together by property and marriage.¹⁰⁹ Spenser, a poet of marriage whose life was defined by a quest for property, frequently acknowledged, as often as not actually highlighted, the forces that he felt determined and shaped his life in his work. Spenser’s life and work cannot be conflated, and his poetry has a significance that travels well beyond his individual circumstances. However, we also need to acknowledge that they cannot be irrevocably prised apart and that the poet’s representation of himself in his work forms part of its significance, which is why his life matters, as well as his poetry.