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Origins and Childhood

ALTHOUGH Spenser’s origins are not easy to determine, he provides us with three details in his writings that we have no reason to doubt: his mother was called Elizabeth; he was about 40 in 1594; and he came from London. Amoretti 74, a sonnet published in 1594, reads:

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 gaue by kind,
from mothers womb deriu’d by dew descent,
the second is my souereigne Queene most kind,
that honour and large richesse to me lent.
The third my loue, my liues last ornament,
by whom my spirit out of dust was raysed:
to speake her prayse and glory excellent,
of all aliue most worthy to be praysed.
Ye three Elizabeths for euer liue,
that three such graces did vnto me giue.¹

Given that Spenser makes a similar reference in the second edition of The Faerie Queene (1596), describing Elizabeth Boyle, his second wife, as a fourth Grace whose beauty has eclipsed that of Elizabeth Tudor (VI.x.28), we can be confident that the details provided are true. Here, in the sonnet, the Graces refer to ‘the second lesson at morning prayer for Saturday 6 April, Acts 3, in which Peter blesses the three-fold God of glory who has upheld Christ’.² The two carefully constructed frames of reference and the intra-textual relationship between the works of the poet ensure that the alert reader of Spenser’s work detects the verisimilitude, a technique that Spenser employed throughout his career. The poet’s origins, his family, and his ruler are cited to anchor the sonnet in a reality beyond the text.

Another sonnet in the sequence provides us with evidence of his birth and age:

They that in course of heauenly spheares are skild,
To euery planet point his sundry yeare:
in which her circles voyage is fulfild,
as Mars in three score yeares doth run his spheare.
So since the winged God his planet cleare,
began in me to moue, one yeare is spent:
the which doth longer vnto me appeare,
then al those fourty which my life outwent.
Then by that count, which louers books inuent,
the spheare of Cupid fourty yeares containes:
which I haue wasted in long languishment,
that seemd the longer for my greater paines.
But let my loues fayre Planet short her wayes
this yeare ensuing, or else short my dayes. (sonnet 60)

The astronomical knowledge revealed in this sonnet is detailed and precise, which is why we need to take its relationship to Spenser’s life seriously.³ Spenser has chosen the penultimate day of the year to celebrate the year’s passing, principally because, as Kenneth Larsen has pointed out, ‘the final day, was the feast of Palm Sunday in 1594 and required a festive sonnet’, which Spenser duly provides in sonnet 61, ‘The glorious image of the makers beautie’.⁴ The sonnet has been used to date Spenser’s birth, traced to 1554, if we assume that the Amoretti was written or revised in 1594 and accurately records the year of his second marriage, which took place on St Barnabas Day, 11 June 1594.⁵ The correspondence between the dates of that year and the relevant church festivals indicates how carefully the sonnets were written to coincide with dates in the liturgical year and the correct Bible readings assigned for each day, a recognizable feature in a period when the calendar played an especially important role in establishing identities and communities.⁶ The detail that Mars has run his course in ‘three score years’ (i.e., 60), alludes to the return of a planet to its original position in the heavens when its cycle is complete, demonstrating that the rule of Mars is now over and the time dominated by Venus can begin, as sonnet 74 indicates.⁷ Given the precision of the numbers provided in the sonnet, a significant feature of Spenser’s poetry, Spenser is surely referring directly to his birthday as 23 March, the day before the end of the year in the Julian calendar.⁸ If so, he is telling us that he reached the age of 40 or 41 (depending on how we read the lines, ‘the which doth longer vnto me appeare, | then al those fourty which my life outwent’) while courting Elizabeth, the little world of the lovers mirroring the larger world of the heavens in its intricate numerical patterning.⁹ The fact that he mentions his age twice, in lines 8 and 10, making his own life and his period of lovelessness coincide, confirms a reading of this poem as one that marks his actual birth date.¹⁰

Elsewhere, Spenser tells us that he originated from London. At the start of section 8 of the Prothalamion (1596), the betrothal hymn for the two daughters of Edward Somerset, fourth earl of Worcester, Elizabeth and Katherine, an event which took place on 8 November 1596, Spenser writes:

At length they all to mery London came,
To mery London, my most kindly Nurse,
That to me gaue this Lifes first natiue sourse:
Though from another place I take my name,
An house of auncient fame. (lines 127–31)¹¹

The lines unequivocally state that Spenser was born in London. The movement of the bridal procession is in contrast to the stasis of the poet. The use of ‘sourse’ in a poem which is based on a river journey, the origin of which, as a historically literate man like Spenser would have known, was disputed by contemporary historians, clearly places heavy emphasis on that word and locates his origin in the city.¹² Spenser’s work refers time and again to the importance of rivers in early modern life, suggesting that this detail, like those representing time, cannot be accidental.¹³ Here, arguments about the source of the Thames stand as a pointed contrast to the certainty of his own knowledge of his birthplace.

The other important personal detail is more nuanced and provides the reader with more problematic details. The reference to ‘another place’ and ‘An house of ancient fame’ which has provided him with his name, can only really be that of the Spencers of Althorp and Wormleighton, who had risen to prominence relatively recently, through their successful sheep farming.¹⁴ Wormleighton was the Spencers’ chief residence until it was badly fire damaged by Parliamentary forces in 1645, so if Spenser had any contact with the family he would have visited this manor house and not the large seventeenth-century house at Althorp.¹⁵ By the time that he wrote Prothalamion Spenser had already dedicated four poems to daughters of Sir John Spencer of Althorp. Spenser suggests, in the dedicatory letter to Lady Compton and Mountegle prefacing Mother Hubberds Tale, that he may be related to her in some capacity: ‘[I] am bound to beare to that House, from whence yee spring’, a hint that he is dedicating the poem to her from an understanding of their shared ancestry.¹⁶ Lady Compton and Monteagle was Anne Spencer, the fifth of Sir John’s eight daughters. In dedicating The Teares of the Muses, also in Complaints (1591), to Lady Strange, Spenser praises the lady’s virtues and generosity, and refers to some ‘priuate bonds of affinitie, which it hath pleased your Ladiship to acknowledge’.¹⁷ Lady Strange was Alice Spencer (1559–1637), countess of Derby, the youngest daughter of Sir John, who married Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, fifth earl of Derby (1559?–94), in secret in 1579/80. She gained a formidable reputation as a patron of poets and writers, including Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, John Marston, and John Harington. Milton wrote Arcades for her, and A Masque at Ludlow Castle for her stepson and son-in-law, the earl of Bridgewater. She later married, rather unhappily, Sir Thomas Egerton (1540–1617), the Lord Chancellor, who also had connections to Spenser.¹⁸ A third daughter, Elizabeth Spencer (1557–1618), received the dedication for another poem in the same volume of Complaints: Muiopotmos, or The Fate of the Butterflie, which again celebrates their name. Spenser claims that he is honouring her, not ‘For name or kindreds sake by you vouchsafed, beeing also regardable; for that honourable name, which yee haue by your braue deserts purchast to your self, and spred in the mouths of al men: with which I haue also presumed to grace my verses, and under your name to commend to the world this small Poëme’.¹⁹ All three ladies are then praised in verse, in Colin Clouts come home againe (1595, but probably first written in 1591):

Ne lesse praiseworthy are the sisters three,
The honor of the noble familie,
Of which I meanest boast myself to be,
And most that unto them I am so nie. (lines 536–9)

These five references need to be read together and they certainly look like a concerted campaign to gain aristocratic favour from female patrons by claiming kinship, especially as Spenser moves from dedicatory letters to placing the link in actual poems, a progression that looks carefully calculated.²⁰ The question is whether they amount to a convincing case for assuming that Spenser was, in fact, related to the Spencers of Althorp.²¹ Certainly Spenser is keen to advertise his links to the Althorps, and it is hard to imagine that he could have done so if there was no evidence of a connection, although it is worth remembering that Sir John Spencer was fabulously wealthy. When he died in 1610 his fortune was ‘estimated at between £300,000, and £800,000’, making him one of the richest landowners in England.²² However, Spenser only appears to have become seriously interested in advertising his connections to the Spencers after meeting his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle, who was related to them by marriage.²³ The lines, when placed together, do assert that there is a familial link, especially the ‘priuate bonds of affinitie’ that Lady Strange has acknowledged, and, the climax of the campaign, the statement in verse that Spenser is the meanest member of a noble family invites acceptance or contradiction.

The key phrase may well be Spenser’s reference to a ‘house of auncient fame’. Many families which had risen to prominence in the sixteenth century and recently been ennobled were eager to establish their lineages, making them as ancient as possible, in order to assert their aristocratic status and rights to land. Accordingly, people worked hard to trace relatives and connections and so make themselves a crucial part of the history of Britain.²⁴ Few families were more eager to do this than the Spencers, who had spectacularly risen to prominence in the early sixteenth century, making them the only great family who owed their success to farming, not to trade or the wealth of the disestablished monasteries.²⁵ The family, in an attempt to establish their pedigree and to fit in with aristocratic norms, applied for the rights to bear the arms of the ancient Norman family, the De Spencers, in 1504, but research proved that that ancient family had died out and the application was denied.²⁶ Nevertheless, despite the lack of evidence, the family claimed to be descended from the Norman family in 1595, the year before Spenser flattered the family by publicly praising their historical roots.²⁷

Such evidence cannot solve the issue of Spenser’s family, especially as Spenser was a common name in early modern England and there were more than ten Edmund Spensers who lived during Elizabeth’s reign.²⁸ The poet may well have seen a chance to link himself to a wealthy family and taken the opportunity to invent a lineage that served both parties, perhaps with the agreement or encouragement of the Spenser ladies. Or, he may have been exploiting a real connection. Whichever way we read the information that he has placed in the printed record, the suggestion is that Spenser was not a new supplicant to the Spencer ladies, but a poet they certainly knew of, and probably knew personally. It is therefore likely that his immediate family came from the Northamptonshire area, and not Lancashire as used to be claimed.²⁹ Furthermore, Spenser’s second marriage to Elizabeth Boyle provided him with an obvious connection to the county. Elizabeth was from Bradden, Northamptonshire, a village only a few miles from the Althorp estate.³⁰

Edmund, having met Elizabeth in Ireland, might have used his name to claim kinship with the local magnates. Given that most marriages originated from established connections, however, it is more likely that there was a connection between the two that led to their meeting in England or Ireland, suggesting that Spenser had family links to Northamptonshire, and, possibly, of course, the Spencers of Althorp.³¹ One of the defendants in a later dispute involving the will of Elizabeth’s father, Stephen Boyle, John Matthew, made his answer to the charges on 18 January 1597 at Canons Ashby, the home of the Drydens, before Erasmus Dryden and Edward Cope, proving that Spenser must have known the Drydens, as Aubrey suggested (even though he mistook the exact nature of the connection).³² Both Cope and Dryden were first cousins of Spenser’s second wife, Elizabeth Boyle, which further suggests that he had family in this particular area of Northamptonshire and returned here on occasions.³³ Certainly there is more to link Spenser, in terms of family connections, movements, and circumstantial evidence, with the area around the Althorp estate than any other region in England.

Spenser’s father may have been a John Spenser, a ‘free journeyman’, connected to the Merchant Taylors’ Company in 1566, as Spenser attended the school founded by the guild, one of the twelve great livery companies of the city, which was granted its charter in 1408.³⁴ It is likely that John moved to London, like many others, because of the growing importance of trade, which determined the expansion of the capital.³⁵ A John Spenser, a relative of the Spencers of Althorp, sold the manor house of Hodnell, Northants, to Thomas Wilkes, in 1550, perhaps then migrating to London where his son, Edmund, was born, although it is unlikely that these two John Spensers are the same person.³⁶ Furthermore, there is no real evidence to suggest that this was Spenser’s father.³⁷ We know that his mother was called Elizabeth, but no one has managed to trace her, or discover if a John Spenser married an Elizabeth who could have produced Edmund in 1554, along with his siblings.

Evidence about Edmund’s brothers and sisters is equally elusive. Spenser probably had at least one brother but no details survive of any. There was another John Spenser who was admitted to the Merchant Taylors’ School on 3 August 1571, but it is unlikely that he was the poet’s brother.³⁸ However, we do know that he had a sister, Sarah, who also went to Ireland where she married John Travers. Travers, whose pedigree and descendants can be reconstructed with some accuracy, was from a distinguished Anglo-Norman family who had settled in Ireland in the twelfth century soon after the invasion.³⁹ Sarah’s marriage, like those of Edmund’s sons, shows that the family were often eager to establish connections outside New English circles. Travers was related to many of the leading Anglo-Irish families in the English Pale surrounding Dublin: the Fitzgeralds, the Barnwalls, the Eustaces, the Cusacks, and the Nagles (into whose family Edmund’s son, Sylvanus, may have married).⁴⁰ Travers also appears to have been liked by both Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork, and Geoffrey Fenton.⁴¹ The match was certainly an advantageous one for the family, as Travers was related through marriage to a number of figures who played a part in the land deals that Edmund made, notably his purchase of the estates at Renny for his son Peregrine.⁴² Travers also appears, like Spenser, to have been notably successful at acquiring property.⁴³ Moreover, Travers had at least three sons who survived into adulthood.⁴⁴

We do not know much about the relationship between Edmund and his sister, but there is a tradition which states that he gave her two ploughlands, Ardenbane and Knocknagappel, from his estates at Kilcolman to ensure a substantial dowry in 1587/8 and that she lived in Kilcolman, looking after the estate at various points.⁴⁵ It is likely that the two were close in some way, as they both emigrated to Ireland, lived near each other, and appear to have strengthened the position of the family through the matches they made.

Spenser probably grew up on the east side of London. George Vertue, who claimed to have discovered the first portrait of Spenser, was interested in the poet’s life, and recorded in his notebooks: ‘East Smithfield, near the Tower London the birth place of Edmund Spenser the Famous Poet, and our Second Chaucer.—a View of London—printed—by Hollar. 1647.’⁴⁶ Vertue’s knowledge appeared to have been corroborated by the annotation made by William Oldys (1696–1761), who wrote ‘in East Smithfield’ in his copy of William Winstanley’s (d. 1698) Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) next to the date of Spenser’s birth. However, as A. C. Judson discovered: ‘Oldys supplied Vertue with a list of pictures at Wentworth Woodhouse, Yorkshire’, demonstrating a direct link between the two and providing Vertue with an obvious source for his information.⁴⁷

East Smithfield was part of Portsoken ward, a village beyond the Tower of London on the outskirts of the city, surrounded by fields until well into the seventeenth century.⁴⁸ Only a street name now survives of what was once a distinct area, formed when thirteen knights petitioned the Saxon King Edgar (943–75) to grant them the wasteland outside the city’s eastern gate (Aldgate), as is recorded in John Stow’s Survey of London.⁴⁹ The area was given the status of a liberty, independent of the central government of London. It was notable for a number of religious foundations, which were distributed to prominent nobles after the dissolution of the monasteries, as well as the hospital of St Katherine founded by Queen Matilda in 1148. If he did grow up in East Smithfield, Spenser would have witnessed the destruction of the Cistercian Abbey of St Mary, which was largely demolished when the crown acquired the land to build the Royal Navy victualling yard in 1560, the first mass catering factory in London.⁵⁰ Many of the buildings would have been little more than ruins by that time, but actual demolition, especially to replace religious foundations and a church with practical, secular institutions, would have been unusual, a sign of a growing, changing city, as well as the transformation of spiritual life in England.⁵¹ Spenser, so concerned with ruins throughout his work, must have been aware of the significance of the change. The area also contained a number of mass burial sites dating from the Black Death, 1347–51, which were also recorded by Stow and so were probably obvious to inhabitants.⁵² Most importantly, perhaps, aliens were not permitted to unload their cargoes in the city, so St Katherine’s docks were used instead.⁵³ As a result, the area contained a large number of Dutch and French settlers, ‘where foreigners seem to have enjoyed a separate community life to a much greater extent than they did elsewhere around London’.⁵⁴ In East Smithfield foreign adult males stood at over 20 per cent of the settled population.⁵⁵

Whatever our scepticism about the nature of Vertue’s evidence, the family were probably based somewhere in that area or nearby. Spenser must have lived relatively near the site of the Merchant Taylors’ School, for him to be able to walk to school easily.⁵⁶ Lancelot Andrewes, a fellow pupil, was born in nearby Tower Street, according to Thomas Fuller.⁵⁷ We do know that Spenser lived in locations in central London—principally, Westminster—which suggests that he was most obviously at home in the heart of the capital. The significance he invests in the Thames—and other rivers—in the Prothalamion and elsewhere in his writing, suggests that he felt a direct link to the city’s principal river.

Spenser attended the Merchant Taylors’ School before he went to Cambridge in 1569. The school was founded in 1560 when the company decided that it would establish a grammar school, one of many that would transform the educational opportunities of many young Englishmen in the sixteenth century.⁵⁸ It was established in Suffolk Lane, in the parish of St Laurence Pountney, in part of the manor house, the Rose, a building which had belonged to a series of aristocratic families, the street taking its name from the De La Poles, or Suffolks.⁵⁹ There would have been about 250 boys there in the school’s early years.⁶⁰ The school was generously endowed by Richard Hills, ‘a leading member of the court’, who contributed £500, and it opened on 24 September 1561, when its statutes were published and the new headmaster, Richard Mulcaster, began work.⁶¹ The school register shows that Spenser’s fellow students would have largely been from the middle classes, with no offspring from the aristocracy or gentry. The records reveal the sons of bakers, carpenters, chandlers, clothworkers, drapers, fishmongers, goldsmiths, grocers, hosiers, husbandmen, innkeepers, ironmongers, leathersellers, mariners, milliners, plumbers, saddlers, silk-workers, scribes, scriveners (one being Thomas Kyd’s father), skinners, and weavers, as well as a few sons of members of the company who had become citizens, and others described as merchants and schoolmasters.⁶² The school statutes reveal that one of the principal concerns of the founders was to ensure that there was a fair and competitive process to select scholars and to avoid corruption so that elaborate procedures were established to distribute scholarship funds properly.⁶³ The social composition and the ethos of the school increases the likelihood that Spenser was the son of John Spenser, or a man of similar rank and wealth.

Indeed, it is likely that Spenser’s understanding of the forms of civic identity that London merchants fostered had a great significance in fashioning his own sense of himself and his place in the social hierarchy of England, not least because of the money that he was paid for publishing his work.⁶⁴ Even though this made up a relatively small part of his income, it helped him identify with the merchant class who had founded the school he attended.⁶⁵ In the Amoretti Spenser represents his new bride among the ‘tradeful merchants’ at Youghal, deliberately contrasting her status to that of the court; in the Prothalamion he rediscovers a pride in his home city, part of a bid to return and escape the perils of war-torn Ireland; and in both editions of The Faerie Queene he provides us with an epic vision of the Tudor capital, a more stable entity than the monarch who lived and ruled there.⁶⁶ Although he was most frequently thought of as a court poet from the early seventeenth century onwards, Spenser’s literary identity was by no means straightforward; it consisted of a number of different elements, and was rooted in both the city and the country.⁶⁷ But a key element was undoubtedly an identity established at a school in London for the ‘middling sort’.

Assuming that Spenser did grow up in East Smithfield, his route to school would have been straightforward. He would have walked along Posterngate, past the Tower of London, and up Tower Hill, where the scaffold stood ‘for the execution of such Traytors and Transgressors, as are deliuered out of the Tower’, into Tower Street, notable for its churches, monuments to the wealthy citizens and merchants whose goods were unloaded in the docks immediately below the street next to the river, and pubs.⁶⁸ Passing the parish church of St Andrew Hubberd, he would have entered Eastcheap, through the great London markets, and into Candlewick Street, then left into Bush Lane and, finally, left again into Suffolk Street (Figure 1).⁶⁹ Spenser would have walked from the outskirts of the city, looking out over green fields and woodland, into the centre of the fastest growing capital in Europe.

London more than doubled in size during Spenser’s lifetime, having a population of roughly 70,000–80,000 in 1550 and 150,000–200,000 in 1600—the overall population of England increasing at a slower rate in the same period, from about 2.8 to 4 million—causing massive social upheaval and bringing a predictable series of urban problems, in particular crime, poverty, and disorder.⁷⁰ There was, of course, a concomitant increase in the need for goods and services, many of which were supplied by the vast immigrant population, whose restricted opportunities encouraged them to concentrate on well-defined trades: brewing, the silk industry, and the silver trade.⁷¹ London was a city in apparently constant change, as commentators frequently noted, with deaths outnumbering births, its population increased by migration to the capital, as many as one in six of the population spending some of their lives in London.⁷² There was a significant influx of foreigners, especially French and Dutch, into the capital, many of whom settled in the east central areas of London, where the Spensers lived.⁷³ One estimate suggests that between 1550 and 1585 40,000–50,000 foreign refugees from the Wars of Religion, mainly from the Netherlands, came into London.⁷⁴ Perhaps a third of the city’s population was made up of Dutch and Walloons in the 1580s.⁷⁵ As Donald Bruce has pointed out, ‘The churchyard of St. Laurence Poultney, alongside the school, was traditionally the meeting place of immigrant Flemish weavers’, and in ‘the next lane eastwards Huguenots worshipped at the Church of St. Martin Orgar’.⁷⁶ Down towards the river was the Steelyard of the Hanseatic League, ‘the largest establishment of any single group of traders’, made up of merchants from northern Germany and the Baltic, many of whom settled in the surrounding areas.⁷⁷ Spenser grew up in a cosmopolitan urban community in which exiles had an obvious presence, and it is undoubtedly no accident that his first two published works are eager to demonstrate his sophisticated knowledge of Dutch and French literature.

(a)

(b)

Figure 1. ‘Agas’ Map of London (c.1563), showing the south-east area of the city. Reproduced with kind permission of the Guildhall Library, London.

Spenser would have been taught to read by his parents or another literate adult, perhaps the parish priest, as pupils were expected to learn to read before they started their formal education.⁷⁸ Children usually started ‘petty school’ at the age of about 4, sometimes 5, according to William Kempe, before moving on to grammar school about two years later.⁷⁹ Petty schools were usually run by a local educated person, often a cleric, with children in a single room in groups of fewer than ten, where they were taught to read better, sing, and recite verses.⁸⁰ He would undoubtedly have learned from a hornbook, ‘which consisted of a page of text attached to a wooden paddle and covered with a translucent layer of horn’, for the boy to write on and so learn to copy the letters. The first words that Spenser would have written out would have been ‘Our Father which art in Heaven’, before he graduated to ABC primers.⁸¹

The statutes of the Merchant Taylors’ School made it clear that the boys would be worked hard, be expected to pray frequently, and receive extensive religious instruction. They would not have been allowed to waste time, but would have been carefully monitored and looked after well, in line with other institutions recently established in London and throughout the home counties:

27. The Children shall come to the Schoole in the Mornyng at Seaven of the clock both Winter and Somer, and tarry there until Eleaven, and returne againe at One of the clock, and departe at Five: And thrice in the day, kneeling on their knees, they shall say the Prayers appointed with due tract and pawsing, as they be, or shalbe hereafter conteyned ina Table sett up in the Schoole, that is to say, in the Morning, at Noone, and at Evening.

28. In the Schoole at noe tyme of the yere, they shall use tallow candle in noe wise, but wax candles only.

29. Also lett them bring no meate, nor drinck, nor bottles, nor use in the Schoole no Breakfasts, nor drincking in the tyme of learning in no wise. If they need drinck, then lett it be provided in some other place.

30. Nor lett them use noe cock-fighting, tennis-play, nor riding about of vectoring, nor disputing abroade, which is but foolish babbling, and losse of tyme.⁸²

The school’s statutes show that the school day was comparable to that of others established in the same period, such as the nearby St Paul’s School, set up by John Colet in 1509, whose own plan of an ‘austere’ school day has ‘clear echoes of monastic practice’.⁸³ Erasmus had written the instructional manual De Copia, which showed readers how to take ‘a sentence or an idea and make it more impressive’, for Colet to use to instruct the boys in his charge, and this text would also have featured prominently in Mulcaster’s curriculum.⁸⁴ Indeed, it should not surprise us that many sixteenth-century schools resemble each other, as often they were either founded by the same people or copied each other’s statutes. The influence of Alexander Nowell (c.1516/17–1602), dean of St Paul’s, who played a key role in the running of Merchant Taylors’, as did his brothers, is especially prominent in the surviving documents of many schools in London, Middlesex, and Kent.⁸⁵ The long hours that the boys were expected to study, the regular interludes for prayers, the control over their consumption of food and beverages, and the surveillance of their leisure activities are all replicated elsewhere, and it is likely that the founders of Merchant Taylors’ copied the statutes of St Paul’s School.⁸⁶

That school also stated that only expensive wax candles should be used in the classroom, not the cheaper tallow form, presumably because the smell of burning animal fat would have had a deleterious effect on the educational experience of both teachers and boys.⁸⁷ More significantly, each school sought to prevent needless dispute and ‘foolish babling’, evidently because the efforts of the boys were to be channelled into their studies, which did involve disputation and argument, but in a more productive way than they managed in the playground. Dialogue, debate, and the ability to argue eloquently were central ideals of Elizabethan education—and beyond—from the early sixteenth century onwards, as the influential dialogues of the Spanish humanist and educational reformist Juan Luis Vives (1492/3–1540), friend of Catherine of Aragon and tutor to Princess Mary, demonstrate.⁸⁸ The antiquarian John Stow (1524/5–1605), who dedicated a book to Spenser and certainly knew of the poet, if he did not know him personally, recalls how he witnessed grammar school boys, including those at Merchant Taylors’, engaging in competitive public debates in Smithfield:

The arguing of Schoole boyes about the principles of Grammar, hath beene continued euen till our time: fo I my selfe in my youth haue yearely seene on the Eve of S. Bartholomew the Apostle, the schollers of diuers Grammar schooles repayre vunto the Churchyard of S. Bartholomew., the Priorie in Smithfield, where vpon a banke boorded | about vnder a tree, some one Scholler hath stepped vp, and there hath apposed and answered, till he were by some better scholler ouercome and put downe: and then the ouercommer taking the place, did like as the first: and in the end the best apposers and answerers had rewards.⁸⁹

The relationship between private study and public culture was made clear to London schoolboys. As Mulcaster argued in one of his treatises on education, Positions (1581), ‘For how can education be private? It abuseth the name as it abuseth the thing.’⁹⁰

A grammar school education would have been conducted primarily in Latin and would have taught the boys to be able to imitate a variety of forms of writing, literary, historical, rhetorical, and forensic, enabling them to produce imitations of the classics (more Latin than Greek), as well as to construct and conduct dialogues and argument.⁹¹ Once boys had mastered basic fluency in reading and speaking Latin, taught from Lily’s Grammar, they would have gone on to study Greek, Hebrew, and the Bible (although how much remains a matter of dispute).⁹² It was especially important that the boys learned to use the style and argument of writers such as Cicero in particular, whose works were extensively prescribed in all schools, but also Aesop, Caesar, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Sallust, Terence, and Virgil from the ancients, and often Erasmus and Buchanan from the moderns, all in selections, alongside the study of grammar and key religious texts (the New Testament, the Catechism, the Psalter, and Book of Prayer).⁹³ They would also have been taught from manuals of letter-writing and tropes and figures, and would have learned geography from reading Strabo, and possibly looking at some maps.⁹⁴ The school did not have a formal library until c.1661, but there probably was a room put aside for books, as records survive showing that books were bought. An inventory of 1599 suggests that it would have included works by Erasmus, a dictionary, commentaries on Latin works, but mainly guides to mythologies and classical texts, such as Natalis Comes’ Mythologiae, the standard work on classical mythology in Europe, and a book that Spenser knew and used frequently.⁹⁵

The aim of education was to train useful, learned citizens who would serve the commonwealth in a variety of productive ways: as functionaries; members of local government; magistrates (the term has a wider resonance in early modern English, meaning any civil officer charged with upholding the law, and not specifically ‘a civil officer exercising local judicial power’, OED); secretaries; ministers and clerics; Members of Parliament; teachers; record keepers; and so on. The problem was, as ever since, that there were not enough suitable positions to go around, leaving many over-educated young men with no obvious outlet for their talents or mounting frustrations, something that became an idée fixe for social commentators, culminating in Thomas Hobbes’s famous argument that the road to revolution had been started by the over-educated who only half-understood the importance of the classics.⁹⁶ An expert knowledge of the classics could indeed be put to excellent subversive use, as the career of Christopher Marlowe indicates.⁹⁷ Spenser’s career, which saw him achieve a number of prominent secretarial posts in the houses of great men and in the English civil service in Ireland, as well as produce a number of confrontational works that offended great men in authority, illustrates both aspects of the effects of such an educational system.⁹⁸

Richard Mulcaster, the headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School, was an influential educationalist who wrote two important treatises on educational theory, and clearly ran the school in innovative and unusual ways. Although no girls went to the school, Mulcaster was one of the few educational theorists who favoured the education of young women.⁹⁹ Pupils at Merchant Taylors’ ‘read the same books, memorized the same kinds of rules, and wrote the same kinds of speeches’ as those at other schools in the capital. However, Mulcaster placed unusual emphasis on the methods and modes of the delivery of speeches, paying close attention to sound and dramatic gestures. Mulcaster’s expertise was acknowledged, as he wrote speeches for the Lord Mayor to deliver in the Lord Mayor’s Show in 1568, while Spenser was in his charge and old enough to understand the significance of the commission, and he was respected for so long that he wrote speeches in English and Latin for the coronation entries into the city of both Elizabeth and James I.¹⁰⁰

Drama played an important part in the Merchant Taylors’ curriculum, alongside physical activity, in particular, wrestling and dancing, as Mulcaster had an integrated understanding of what a child should study, believing that the body had to be controlled and developed alongside the mind, and that both aspects of teaching had to be carried out by the same master.¹⁰¹ Mulcaster was also known as a severe taskmaster, intolerant of idle pupils and, like many other Tudor schoolteachers, he argued that the rod was a key part of a teacher’s equipment.¹⁰² He was famous enough to feature, along with Spenser, in Thomas Fuller’s Worthies of England, where he is represented as a dedicated, irascible eccentric, a law unto himself and his own rules and regulations:

His method in teaching was this. In a morning he would exactly and plainly construe and parse the lessons to his scholars; which done, he slept his hour (custom made him critical to proportion it) in his desk in the school; but woe be to the scholar that slept the while. Awaking, he heard them accurately; and Atropos might be persuaded to pity, as soon as he to pardon, where he found just fault. The prayers of cockering [indulgent] mothers prevailed with him as much as the requests of indulgent fathers, rather increasing than mitigating his severity on their offending child.¹⁰³

His methods function outside any prescribed rules of education, and his own reflections on teaching emphasize the special bond between teacher and pupils.¹⁰⁴ Despite Mulcaster’s desire to produce general principles for education in Positions, Fuller’s comments are designed to show that he succeeded principally through his own efforts and force of personality, breaking rules and conventions in order to spur on his charges. This gap between the theory and the practice of education was undoubtedly common.¹⁰⁵ The fact that his employers, the Merchant Taylors’ Company, ‘finding his scholare so to profit, intended to fix Mr Mulcaster as his desk to their school, till death should remove him’, is a further testimony to the myth of Mulcaster. Whether he really taught and behaved in this manner, or whether the incredible success of his pupils meant that it was then assumed that he must have taught in a demanding and odd way, is hard to determine. But, as a teacher, he clearly stood out from his peers.

Probably Mulcaster’s most important contribution to Spenser’s education was the emphasis he placed on learning languages, most notably Greek. Mulcaster matriculated at King’s College Cambridge in 1548, the same year that John Cheke (1514–57), the great Greek scholar and the first Regius professor of Greek at the university, assumed the position of provost of the college.¹⁰⁶ Cheke may not have taught Mulcaster, as he was often absent from his academic institution, but his insistence on the need for Greek to play a central role in the university curriculum undoubtedly contributed towards Mulcaster’s facility for classical languages.¹⁰⁷ It is, therefore, perhaps no accident that Spenser gravitated towards Gabriel Harvey, a protégé of Cheke’s principal collaborator, Sir Thomas Smith (1513–77), when he went to Cambridge, nor that he was later described by Lodowick Bryskett as ‘perfect in the Greek tongue’.¹⁰⁸ Indeed, Greek culture and thought were to play a major role in Spenser’s career: he translated the pseudo-Platonic dialogue Axiochus, perhaps while still at school (at least it has been attributed to him, a sign that he was associated with Greek learning and culture); he based much of The Faerie Queene on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Xenophon’s Cyropedia, as he outlines in the Letter to Ralegh; and he later returned to Platonism (or, at least, Neoplatonism) in the Fowre Hymnes. Mulcaster’s influence was undoubtedly the key to Spenser’s discovery of these particular intellectual coordinates.¹⁰⁹ It is also probable that Mulcaster ensured that Spenser had a solid grounding in Hebrew.¹¹⁰

Such an effect on a star pupil is hardly surprising, because Mulcaster, as Richard De Molen has shown, had an extraordinary influence on Elizabethan and Jacobean culture. Schoolboys were often close to their teachers, as they spent so much time together in an era when life expectancy was relatively short, and teachers often had a decisive influence on their charges. Indeed, the relationship was the subject of numerous sly references to pederasty.¹¹¹ Even so, Mulcaster appears to have had more impact than most. His students included Thomas Kyd and Thomas Lodge, as well as Spenser; seven bishops, the most significant of whom was Lancelot Andrewes, whose schooling in the arts ‘of oratorical declamation in the performance of plays and [in] musical theory’ left ‘indelible marks’ on his sermons; a number of prominent academics, including John Spenser (no relation), president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and John Peyrn, Regius professor of Greek at Oxford; scientists, including Thomas Heathe and Thomas Hood; Edwin Sandys, the colonial entrepreneur; Sir James Whitelock, justice of the Common Pleas and King’s Bench; and Samuel Foxe, the diarist.¹¹² Mulcaster was also important enough to be involved in the production and recording of royal entertainments, and he produced a pamphlet detailing the verses and orations recited at Elizabeth’s coronation in 1558, something that could have had an impact on Spenser’s understanding of the panegyric function of public poetry in the April eclogue in the Calender, and much later verse.¹¹³

An especially interesting pupil, whose path seems to have crossed with that of Spenser at a number of points, was Gregory Downhall (c.1555–1614), schoolmaster, secretary, scribe, and MP for various Cornish boroughs. Downhall—his name is spelled in various ways, making absolute identification in a number of cases problematic—was one of the six scholars at the school given cloth as a result of Robert Nowell’s will, alongside Spenser.¹¹⁴ Downhall also studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge, matriculating in 1572 and graduating in 1575, overlapping with Spenser, who had started his studies there three years earlier.¹¹⁵ Downhall must have established a good relationship with his alma mater, as he left the college £100 to establish a scholarship in his will.¹¹⁶ He became a schoolmaster at the Crypt School, Gloucester, probably in 1576, where he was paid, like Spenser as secretary to Grey, the reasonably handsome sum of £20 per annum.¹¹⁷ If he is the ‘C. Downhalus’ (the ‘C’ a mistranscription of ‘G’ by the compositor) who wrote a Latin poem prefaced to Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia, the first sonnet sequence in English, then he moved in the same literary circles as Spenser in the 1570s and 1580s, was interested in the same forms of poetry, and was, like most successful Mulcaster pupils, a trained linguist eager to plead the case for the translation of literature in modern European languages.¹¹⁸

Downhall later became a combative MP through the patronage of Lord Burghley, again suggesting that he had yet more connections in common with Spenser. In the tenth parliament of Elizabeth’s reign (October–December 1601) he spoke with some vehemence against Sir Walter Ralegh on the subject of monopolies.¹¹⁹ In the late 1590s he acted as Sir Thomas Egerton’s secretary, working alongside John Donne.¹²⁰ Downhall had earlier worked for Egerton’s predecessor, Sir John Puckering, who was linked, like Egerton, to the Chancery case that Spenser helped Elizabeth Boyle bring against Ferdinando Freckleton in 1597.¹²¹ He married the daughter of Adriaan Vierendeels of Antwerp, a wealthy widow, who ‘was probably one of the Flemish community gathered around the church of the Austin friars, London’, which suggests that, like Spenser, he was connected to exiles from the Low Countries.¹²² Furthermore, he was related to William Downhall, a lawyer who was secretary to Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, and to the Downhall family in Geddington, north-east of Northampton, and owned property in Heathencote, Northamptonshire, about five miles from Bradden, the home of Elizabeth Boyle’s parents.¹²³ How close Downhall was to Spenser is hard to determine, but the story of his life provides further evidence of the interrelationship of patronage systems, and the closely interlinked lives that those in the orbit of the good and great invariably led.

Mulcaster’s wide network of connections was undoubtedly just as important in considering who Spenser might have known as the pupils he actually taught, and gives us some indication of how close to the centre of the intellectual nation Spenser’s schooling took him. In particular, Mulcaster and the school were associated with the generation of Protestants who had been exiled under Mary in Geneva and who were directly influenced by Calvin. One of the school’s principal patrons was Robert Nowell, whose brother, Alexander, was the author of the distinctly Calvinist catechism that dominated Church of England education in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.¹²⁴ The catechism was translated into English by Thomas Norton (1530/2–84), also the translator of Calvin’s Institutes (1561). Norton acted as solicitor for the Merchant Taylors’ Company, and was the son-in-law of Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556), the archbishop of Canterbury, Marian martyr, and architect of the English Reformation.¹²⁵ Cranmer’s printer, Reyner Wolfe (d. c.1574), a Dutchman who came to England via Strasbourg, left many of his papers to John Stow, who then dedicated a collection of miscellaneous medieval poems, Certaine Worthe Manuscipt Poems of great antiquitie (1597), ‘To the worthiest Poet Maiser Ed. Spenser’, presumably in the wake of the publication of the second edition of The Faerie Queene. This was one of only two works dedicated to Spenser in his lifetime (the other being the sonnet sequence Chloris by William Smith, published in 1596, which pays homage to Spenser throughout).¹²⁶

Alexander Nowell was closely connected to Edmund Grindal (1516/20–83), briefly the archbishop of Canterbury, who was known for his particular interest in Calvin’s theology, and who had corresponded with the great man during the reign of Edward VI.¹²⁷ Grindal was in charge of an inspection of the school on 16 August 1562, when Spenser was probably present.¹²⁸ Spenser vigorously defended Grindal in The Shepheardes Calender after the archbishop had been rusticated by the queen in June 1577 for defending the practice of training ministers through the use of ‘prophesyings’, a distinctly Protestant mode of education of clergy whereby the clergy gathered, often with members of the congregation, to discuss doctrine.¹²⁹ Elizabeth wanted the practice suppressed, even though most of her bishops supported its use.¹³⁰ The school was inspected by another former exile, the aged Miles Coverdale (1488–1569), biblical translator and former bishop of Exeter, also linked to the circle around Grindal.¹³¹ Moreover, Spenser later worked for another Grindal associate, John Young (c.1532–1605), bishop of Rochester, and he refers to Thomas Drant (c.1540–78), Grindal’s chaplain, twice in his correspondence with Gabriel Harvey.¹³² The Calender was published by Hugh Singleton (d. c.1593), who was closely associated with John Foxe (1516–87) and had published some of his work. Foxe had been the room-mate of Alexander Nowell at Oxford.¹³³ Spenser would not have met Cranmer, who died when he was 2, and he may not have met Grindal, but he obviously did meet, however briefly, all the other figures in this list. It is hardly surprising that the progress of the English Reformation is so central to his work, as his schooldays involved such frequent contact with so many influential reformers.

In the opening chapter to his treatise on writing in English, The First Part of the Elementarie (1582), Mulcaster explains why it is necessary to begin the reform of teaching and learning as early as possible, a description that would appear to have wider resonance than its immediate context:

Good things finde hard footing, when theire ar to be reformed after a corruption in vse, bycause of that enormitie which is in possession, and vsurpeth on their place, which hauing strengthened it self by all circumstances, that can moue retaining, and with all difficulties, that can dissuade alteration, fighteth sore for it self, and hard against redresse, thorough the generall assistance of a preiudicate opinion in those mens heds, which might further the redresse … the nature of euills, not naturallie euill, which will neuer be better, but euill by abuse, which right vse will better, is so loth to be amended, and so long ear it harken to the voice of redresse, as at the first attempt to haue som redresse, the partie attempter is more wondered at for the wish, then esteemed of as wise. Homer the great Greeke poet deuiseth a monster, which he nameth Até, and giueth her for surname the Ladie of harm … This Até, saith he, is so swift of wing, so strong of bodie, so stirring to do il, as she flyes far before, & harmeth where she ligteth.¹³⁴

Mulcaster is clearly thinking about more than simply the reform of spelling or the principles of educating children in arguing that delaying reform has drastic consequences and makes the goal of transformation harder, even impossible. If hard work is neglected at the start, then matters may well get out of hand, and resistance to reform steadily accumulate, as corruption sets in and changes the undesirable or limited into something thoroughly evil. The reference to Homer’s Iliad indicates that Mulcaster is keen to get back to the foundation of Western literature and so establish proper models of art: the reference to Ate, daughter of Zeus and ‘personification of blind folly’ who was thrown out of Olympus by her father to dwell in the world of men, shows that his fear is a force of unreason and chaos that cannot be controlled if reform of language and education are neglected.¹³⁵ Ate must be controlled and circumscribed if education—or any reform—is to work.

This striking passage may well have had an impact on Spenser, probably looking back on it at some point during the 1590s. In one of the most frequently cited passages from his prose dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland, Spenser has Eudoxus baulk at Irenius’ radical suggestions for the transformation of Ireland and affirm that surely stability is to be preferred because reform should be carried out by using the existing laws. Irenius explains that things have simply gone too far to trust in the statutes as they stand:

Iren: verye Trewe, Eudox; all chaunge is to be shonned, wheare the affaires stande in suche state as that they may continue in quietnes or be assured at all to abide as they are. But that in the Realme of Irelande we see muche otherwise, ffor everye daie we perceaue the trowbles growinge more vppon vs and one evill growinge on another, in soe muche as theare is no parte now sounde or ascerteined, but all haue theire eares vprighte, waytinge when the watcheworde shall Come That they shoulde all rise generallye into Rebellion, and Caste awaye the Englishe subieccion … And therefore where ye thinke, that good and sounde lawes mighte amende and reforme thinges theare amisse, ye thinke surelie amisse. ffor it is vaine to prescribe lawes where no man carethe for kepinge of them nor fearethe the daunger for breakinge of them. But all the Realme is firste to be reformed and lawes are afterwardes to be made for kepinge and Continewinge in that reformed estate/

Eudox: Howe then doe ye thinke is the reformacion thereof to begonne, yf not by Lawes and Ordinaunces/

Iren: Even by the sworde. for all those evills muste firste be Cutt awaie by a stronge hande before anie good Cane be planted, like as the Corrupte braunches and vnholsome boughes are firste to bee pruned and the foule mosse clensed and scraped awaye before the tree cane bringe forthe anye good fruite.¹³⁶

The force of the law no longer operates in Ireland, so the power of the sword must be introduced and the island reduced to subjection before anything positive can be achieved. The logic of the paragraph has shocked generations of readers, especially in the twentieth century, who have resisted its brutal argument that the Irish have simply gone too far to be saved and so must be exterminated.¹³⁷ But the idea that dangerous times result when evil has become so entrenched that it cannot be removed or reformed would appear to look back to what Spenser learned from Mulcaster. Furthermore, it is worth noting that Ate plays an important role in Book IV of The Faerie Queene, appearing alongside Blandamour, Duessa, and Paridell to represent ‘false friendship in contrast to the tetrad of true friendship: Cambina and Cambell, Canbacee and Triamond’, provoking discord between a number of knights, including Britomart and Scudamore.¹³⁸ It is not possible to prove that such parallels stem directly from Mulcaster, but they do suggest that Spenser inhabited an intellectual world which recognized the effects of his old headmaster’s thought, educational methods, and teaching and that what he was taught had a direct influence on his writing.¹³⁹

The teacher and the pupil had other connections, which indicate how close they must have been. Mulcaster named one of his sons Sylvanus, having the child christened on 12 March 1564 in St Lawrence Poutney, the parish church of Merchant Taylors’ School, just around the corner.¹⁴⁰ Spenser subsequently gave his own firstborn son, probably born in the early 1580s, the same unusual name, a sign of homage to someone he saw as a key figure in his development.¹⁴¹ Spenser’s daughter was named Katherine, also the name of one of Mulcaster’s five other children.¹⁴² The poet pays further homage to his teacher in The Shepheardes Calender, representing Mulcaster allegorically as ‘Wrenock’. In the December eclogue Colin Clout, an identity borrowed from John Skelton to represent Spenser himself, reflects on his upbringing and education:

And for I was in thilke looser yeares,
(Whether the Muse, so wrought me from my birth,
Or I tomuch beleeued my shepherd peres)
Somedele ybent to song and musicks mirth,
A good olde shephearde, Wrenock was his name,
Made me by arte more cunning in the same.
Fro thence I durst in derring doe compare
With shepheardes Swayne, what euer fedde in field:
And if that Hobbinol right iudgement bare,
To Pan his owne selfe pype I neede not yield.
For if the flocking Nympphes did folow Pan,
The wiser Muses after Colin ranne.¹⁴³

The verses tell the story of an education, one in which the young Colin is trained to write well by Wrenock (Mulcaster), his proficiency then being recognized by Hobbinol, Gabriel Harvey, Spenser’s friend and mentor at Cambridge.¹⁴⁴ Spenser is publicly acknowledging his two most important teachers. Reading Spenser’s allegory literally is often a dangerous and fraught exercise which can reduce the poem to dull, often meaningless, source hunting, especially when searching for historical parallels.¹⁴⁵ However, too many critics have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and have failed to see that personal details lodged in the text have a definite relationship to the world outside it.¹⁴⁶ Following the narrative of the poem itself forces us to think of the poem in terms of the poet’s life, even if we are resistant to the ingenious reading which argues that ‘Mast. Wrenoc.’ is an anagram of ‘Mowncaster’. Mulcaster, who was from Carlisle, would have pronounced his name this way, and this is how it was spelled in the text of John Fletcher’s play The Knight of the Burning Pestle (published 1613, first performed 1607/8), when the citizen’s wife asks a boy, ‘were you never none of Master Monkester’s scholars?’ (further testimony of the impact of Mulcaster’s educational ideas).¹⁴⁷

As well as his connections to a distinct section of the leading Edwardian reformers, Mulcaster also had well-known links to important Dutch figures and exiles in Europe and in England. In 1586, just after he had resigned from the Merchant Taylors’ School following a dispute about salary, the distinguished Dutch scholar and statesman Janus Dousa (Johan van der Does) (1545–1604) dedicated a Latin ode to Alexander Nowell, in which he asked, ‘from what imaginable retreat may the delightful Mulcaster be enticed?’¹⁴⁸ Mulcaster existed as part of a wider circle of international intellectuals, centred around an Anglo-Dutch axis, which included many figures who would prove especially important for Spenser in his early career, Mulcaster undoubtedly proving the link between Spenser and this vital international network. Mulcaster was probably also Spenser’s link to Sir Philip Sidney, through his connections with Dousa, and with the key figure in many Anglo-Dutch diplomatic exchanges, Daniel Rogers (c.1538–91).

Dousa appears to have been at, or near, the centre of this circle, which was based in Leiden and had especially close connections to the philosopher and academic Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), a group that was especially important from the 1560s up to the death of Sidney in 1586. Dousa’s Ode on the Queen’s Birthday to Alexander Neville (1544–1614), editor of poems on Sidney’s death and closely connected to Grindal and Drant, refers to ten scholars linked to Sidney (and Rogers), who include Mulcaster; the historian William Camden (1551–1623), another important writer for Spenser; Abraham Ortelius (1527–98), the most celebrated geographer in the world; the Scottish Calvinist and university principal Andrew Melville (1545–1622); and many others.¹⁴⁹ Rogers, who was connected to the same figures, was the son of the Protestant martyr John Rogers (c.1500–55), another figure closely linked to the Marian exiles, and his Flemish mother, Adriana de Weyden (or Pratt), was related to the Antwerp printer Jacob van Meteren, who sponsored Coverdale’s translation of the Bible in 1535.¹⁵⁰ Jacob’s son, Emmanuel van Meteren, a scholar, historian, and merchant, was one of the leaders of the Dutch community in London while Spenser was at school. Mulcaster wrote a poem of friendship to van Meteren included in van Meteren’s ‘Album Amicorum’.¹⁵¹

Rogers, one of the key figures in the development of English antiquarianism, was among the best connected men in Elizabethan London.¹⁵² He was a friend of Philip Sidney, having written the first poem addressed to him, and he was later sought out by Gabriel Harvey through the intervention of Christopher Bird, who lived in Saffron Walden, his letter of introduction reproduced in the first of Harvey’s Fowre Letters (1592).¹⁵³ Rogers also had links with Laurence Nowell (1530–c.1570), a mapmaker and the cousin of Alexander Nowell; with Sir John Norris in Holland, another important figure later in Spenser’s career in Ireland; and was especially close to George Buchanan (1506–82), a vital influence on Spenser’s intellectual development.¹⁵⁴

Like Rogers, Mulcaster was as familiar with French literature as he was with Dutch, an intellectual context that played a major role in Spenser’s development as a poet.¹⁵⁵ The First Part of the Elementarie, Mulcaster’s treatise on spelling reform and its importance to education, is heavily indebted to Joachim Du Bellay’s La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse (1549).¹⁵⁶ Mulcaster made the most of his opportunity as the principal source of Du Bellay’s influence in England.¹⁵⁷ Given these connections, it must have been through Mulcaster’s influence or direction that Spenser received his first poetic commission while still at school, a translation of several sonnets from ‘Un Songe ou Vision’ appended to Du Bellay’s Les Antiquitez de Rome (1558), included as part of Jan van der Noot’s important work, A Theatre wherein be represented as wel the miseries & calamities that follow the voluptuous worldlings as also the greate ioyes and plesures which the faithfull do enioy (1569), a significant combination of Dutch and French literature.¹⁵⁸ Translation was to be a major element of Spenser’s writing throughout his career, and his work was always open to the influence of a wide variety of poetic traditions, which he absorbed and adapted.¹⁵⁹ The lengthy and elaborate text of some 130 folio pages consists of a series of sonnets and epigrams, each accompanied by an appropriate woodcut, followed by a prose ‘declaration’ of the author explaining his visions, ‘taken out of holy scriptures, and dyvers Orators, Poetes, Philiosophers, and true histories’.¹⁶⁰ Spenser’s translations appeared anonymously, and it was only because some of the sonnets were later published in The Visions of Bellay and The Visions of Petrarch, sections in The Complaints (1591), that we can be sure he was one of the translators of this complex and elusive work.

Jan van der Noot (c.1539–c.1596) is one of the most important poets in the history of the Netherlands, whose work had a crucial impact on the progress of Dutch literature.¹⁶¹ His early sonnets determined the development of the lyric form; his later epic, Olympia, had the same effect on longer poetry.¹⁶² Van der Noot was forced to leave Antwerp in 1567, along with many of his fellow Flemings, and accept a life of exile in London, where he lodged at Botolph Ward, between London Bridge and Billingsgate, within easy walk of the Merchant Taylors’ School.¹⁶³ Here, he appears to have become an important figure. A work of medical history, The Governanace and Preservation of Them That Fear the Plague (1569), which was probably written by an earlier exile of the same name, was attributed to him, suggesting that the publisher, William How, wished to ‘capitalize on the later writer’s fame’.¹⁶⁴

Van der Noot is a complex figure. A Theatre is certainly compatible with a Calvinist reading of European history, and it has often been assumed that van der Noot was a Calvinist author, or, at least, a committed Protestant.¹⁶⁵ However, like many major intellectuals in the Low Countries, including Lipsius, Ortelius, and the publisher Christopher Plantain (1520–89), he was associated with the Family of Love, a short-lived but important sect, who flourished in the 1560s, were still influential in the 1590s, but whose impact was on the wane by the early seventeenth century.¹⁶⁶ They were effectively extinct by 1635, their lack of a longer tradition being one reason why so little was known about them until relatively recently.¹⁶⁷

The Family of Love were founded by Hendrik Niclaes (c.1501–c.1580), a visionary who claimed that he had direct access to the word of God. His idea of a religion based on the principles of unity, harmony, and universal brotherhood proved immensely popular during the extensive wars of religion that ravaged Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century, especially in those countries directly affected. Niclaes told his followers that they had to obey whatever authority was in power and never resist, marking them out from Calvinists and Catholics in the Low Countries. The Familists were Nicodemans, permitted by their church to lie about their faith, as they possessed an understanding of spiritual matters that went beyond the constraints of earthly values. As a result they were rarely persecuted, most state authorities having other more bellicose citizens to worry about, although there was considerable conflict between the Dutch Church in London and the Familists in exile.¹⁶⁸ Unsurprisingly, they are also hard to detect, leaving behind few explicit clues of their identity and affiliation, as well as attracting a number of fellow travellers who may have simply flirted with Niclaes’s doctrines, perhaps more interested in the obvious practical advantages of Familist belief.¹⁶⁹ A large number of Niclaes’s tracts were translated into English and published with the distinctive icon of the sect, and they had a significant impact on the development of alchemy in England, and, perhaps, radical ideas before the Civil War.¹⁷⁰

Van der Noot was a client of Henry Howard, earl of Northampton (1540–1614), a leading Catholic nobleman and later secret correspondent of Mary Stuart. Howard was the son of the executed poet Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (1516/17–47), who had a significant influence on Spenser’s development as a poet, especially in his use of blank verse and elegy.¹⁷¹ Van der Noot prefaced his collection of poems, Het Bosken, with an ode to the Protestant William Parr, marquess of Northampton (1513–71), indicating that he was certainly prepared to hedge his religious bets in England.¹⁷² Van der Noot later left England for Antwerp, via Paris, where he reconverted to Catholicism in 1578, having been an exile for eleven years.¹⁷³ In fact, van der Noot was known as a writer who would alter his works to suit his audience, removing anti-Catholic sections when selling to Catholic readers.¹⁷⁴ Moreover, he had changed his mind about religion before his formal conversion when he returned to the Rhineland in 1571, because in the German language edition of the Theatre, ‘the original fierce attack on the Roman Catholic Church in the commentary has been reworked into a tirade against the devil’.¹⁷⁵

Spenser must surely have met van der Noot, given the wealth of the connections they had in common beyond the obvious link through Mulcaster. Furthermore, van der Noot wrote a poem in praise of one of the many prominent members of the Gorges family, Blanca, providing yet another link to Spenser, as Daphnaïda, Spenser’s elegy for Douglas Howard, was written for Arthur Gorges. That poem was dedicated to Northampton’s widow, Helena, who later became the wife of Thomas Gorges, Arthur’s uncle.¹⁷⁶ Het Bosken was published by Henry Bynneman (c.1542–83), an important printer and bookseller who worked with Reyner Wolfe and acquired his devices, ornaments, and initials after Wolfe’s death in 1573.¹⁷⁷ Such evidence provides further links to the circles of writers and publishers around Spenser, as Bynneman was later to publish the Harvey–Spenser letters in 1580, all of which suggests that there may well have been connections that led Spenser from van der Noot to Harvey.¹⁷⁸ Furthermore, Bynneman was a client of Sir Christopher Hatton (c.1540–91), who also supported Spenser’s future patron, Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton (1536–93), and later became an undertaker on the Munster Plantation (although he never visited his estate at Knocknamona, Waterford), demonstrating that, as with the Norris brothers, there is a continuity in Spenser’s friends, supporters, intellectual contacts, and patrons.¹⁷⁹ The evidence also shows that Elizabethan patronage networks were intertwined and overlapping and that a bright young man on the make might well find a wealth of different opportunities opening out for him.¹⁸⁰

What is also clear is that A Theatre, which has been described as an example of the generic form ‘muted apoclypse’, is a work of exile, growing out of the sophisticated, cosmopolitan culture of the Dutch and French immigrants who had recently come to live in the centre of the English capital.¹⁸¹ Spenser began and ended his literary career wrestling with the same phenomenon.¹⁸² W. J. B. Pienaar’s judgement that ‘Spenser’s association with a refugee poet, who, an eye-witness and a victim, had barely escaped the unspeakable tyranny in the Netherlands, must inevitably have made a lasting impression on the youth’s mind’, may be hard to prove, but it is also hard to dispute.¹⁸³

The genesis of van der Noot’s text is complex, given its existence in Dutch, French, and English, the fact that all three versions were published in England, and that it is unclear whether the French or the Dutch version was written first. These two foreign language versions of the Theatre were produced by John Day (1521/2–84), a publisher who had risen to prominence during the reign of Edward VI. Day was closely connected to the Geneva exiles and published many of the works of Calvin. He was immersed in the culture of the Dutch and French exiles in London, and, most importantly, his major achievement was the publication of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments of the Christian Church. Day was responsible for all the editions produced in his lifetime, in 1563, 1570, 1576, and 1583, providing further evidence of the influential circles to which Spenser was connected while still at school.¹⁸⁴

Spenser, probably working with an assistant who knew Italian and Dutch, seems to have translated seven of Petrarch’s sonnets into French by Clément Marot (1496–1544), titled ‘Epigrams’; the eleven sonnets from Du Bellay’s Songe; and the last four sonnets written by van der Noot himself (although these do not appear in the Complaints and so may not have been his work).¹⁸⁵ The long prose commentary on the poems, ‘A Briefe Declaration of the Author upon his visions, taken out of holy scriptures’, which emphasizes the fleeting nature of the world and the need for humankind to put greater trust in God’s grace and judgement, was translated by Theodor Roest, another Dutch exile, but one who, unlike van der Noot, had probably been in London for a considerable time, given his excellent English.¹⁸⁶ It is likely that Mulcaster, because of his close connections to the exiled Dutch community—in particular, the pivotal figure of Emanuel van Meteren—was asked if he could find someone to help translate the sonnets from the French so that a book by a major Dutch writer had a proper impact in England.¹⁸⁷

A Theatre was an expensively produced work, which made careful use of different fonts, roman typeface for the long introductory epistle dedicating the work to the queen, which praised her as an expert linguist (sig. A4^r), and the poems; black-letter (often called ‘Old English’) for the commentary, so combining production techniques that signified a juxtaposition of European and English culture, relevant to a translated work produced in exile.¹⁸⁸ The twenty woodcuts were produced by another Dutch exile in London in the late 1560s, Lucas de Heere of Ghent (1534–84).¹⁸⁹ De Heere was a friend of van der Noot, who was keen to establish a Dutch vernacular tradition. He had worked in France and was a poet as well as an artist, and had extensive experience of working with emblem books and other illustrated printed material. De Heere’s involvement is an indication of the importance of the volume, and of the labour that went into producing the work.¹⁹⁰ The illustrations are a combination of biblical and classical themes, and were perhaps based on an illustrated vellum manuscript of Marot’s Visions de Pétrarque.¹⁹¹ This combination of text and image was pioneering in conception, and the form of A Theatre undoubtedly had an influence on Spenser’s first major poem, The Shepheardes Calender, a work that, like van der Noot’s, was multi-layered in style and conception, and that was eager to highlight its careful combination of different traditions and translations.¹⁹² As has often been pointed out, Spenser’s imagination was notably visual in style.¹⁹³

Spenser’s involvement in such an important project suggests that he was singled out at school as a precocious poetic talent with a great facility for languages, intellectual gifts which would have caught the attention of the headmaster, and which he was eager to parade when he began his career in earnest ten years later. It also probably indicates that he had ambitions to become a poet from a relatively early age, and used other forms of employment to ensure that he achieved his aim, rather than drifting into a vocation.¹⁹⁴ Certainly, he was familiar with a series of key European poets, Petrarch, Du Bellay, and Marot, and undoubtedly many others, while still a teenager. He was also a teenager extraordinarily well connected to a large number of significant European intellectuals and potential patrons, a sign of his precociousness and how hard Mulcaster was prepared to work on his behalf.

Spenser renders Du Bellay’s sonnets in a straightforward and accurate manner, as befits a young apprentice translator, and as is appropriate for a volume designed to express van der Noot’s apocalyptic vision of the fall of imperial cities, a form of reverse translatio imperii, as a message of doom crosses the Alps and the ages on its way to Britain.¹⁹⁵ Du Bellay’s complex Petrarchan rhyme schemes are rendered without rhyme, clearly a deliberate decision that enabled the translator to produce a more accurate version as well as a coherent and plausible poem.¹⁹⁶ The interlaced abba abba ccd eed of Du Bellay’s opening sonnet—

C’estoit alors que le present des Dieux
Plus doulcement s’écoule aux yeux de l’homme,
Faisant noyer dedans l’oubly du somme
Tout le soucy du jour laborieux,

Quand un Demon apparut à mes yeux
Dessus le bord du grand fleuve de Rome,
Qui m’appelant du nom dont je me nomme,
Me commanda regarder vers le cieux:

Puis m’escria, Voy (dit-il) et contemple
Tout ce qui est compris sous ce grand temple,
Voy comme tout n’est rien que vanité.

Lors cognoissant la mondaine inconstance,
Puis que Dieu seul au temps fait resistence,
N’espere rien qu’en la divinité.¹⁹⁷

—is translated by Spenser as:

It was the time when rest the gift of Gods
Sweetely sliding into the eyes of men,
Doth drowne in the forgetfulnesse of slepe,
The carefull trauailes of the painefull day:
Then did a ghost appeare before mine eyes
On that great riuers banke that runnes by Rome,
And calling me then by my proper name,
He bade me vpwarde vnto heuen looke.
He criede to me, and loe (quod he) beholde,
What vnder this great Temple is contained,
Loe all is nought but flying vanite.
So I knowing the worlds vnstedfastnesse,
Sith onely God surmountes the force of tyme,
In God alone do stay my confidence. (sig. B8^r)

Spenser’s rendition is designed to follow the lines of Du Bellay, and is conspicuously more accurate than most of the relatively free translations of European works produced by English poets in the sixteenth century, many of which are adaptations rather than translations.¹⁹⁸ Spenser is able to follow Du Bellay’s syntax and so preserve the structure of the sonnet (he is conspicuously less successful when translating Marot’s twelve-line epigrams, and producing the central volta, a much more difficult feat).¹⁹⁹ The translation divides naturally and easily into two quatrains making up the octave, and two tercets making up the sestet. Like most English translators, Spenser would have found this task extremely difficult if he had tried to match the rhyme scheme of the original, given the paucity of possible rhymes in English, an analytic language, unlike Italian, which is synthetic.

The same can be said of the subsequent sonnets. Sonnet 2, with an accompanying woodcut showing a large Doric temple ‘an hundred cubits hie’, about to be destroyed in an earthquake, describes the insubstantial nature of human achievements when confronted by natural forces controlled by God. The final tercet concludes:

O worldes vainenesse. A sodein earthquake loe,
Shaking the hill euen from the bottome deepe,
Threwe downe this building to the lowest stone.

The third sonnet, accompanied by a woodcut showing an Egyptian obelisk covered in hieroglyphics about to be destroyed by a tempest, concludes with an equally straightforward moral.²⁰⁰ The fourth sonnet represents a Roman triumphal arch with a chariot on top, and places more emphasis on the eyewitness, concluding:

Le me see no more faire thing vnder heauen,
Sith I haue seene so faire a thing as this,
With sodaine falling broken all to dust.

The opening sonnets outline the contrast between the world’s vanity and heavenly glory, emphasizing that we need to trust in God not man’s works, and then show the destruction of the three ancient civilizations that early modern Europeans saw as the cultural and historical foundation of their modern world. The interrelated themes of ruin and destruction were to haunt Spenser’s writing throughout his literary career.²⁰¹ What are probably his last verses, the fragmentary, ‘imperfect’ sections of canto viii that supposedly made up a part of the Legend of Constancy, the subject of the never published Book VII of The Faerie Queene, suggest that there may have been a deliberate return to his origins as a poet.²⁰²

The remaining seven Du Bellay sonnets are variations on the theme of God’s constancy and man’s mutability, although the message becomes more subtle and pointed in places. Sonnet 8—corresponding to sonnet 10 in Du Bellay’s sequence—represents a weeping nymph beside a river who laments the fall of her city from harmony to discord. The sestet reads:

Alas, suffisde it not that ciuile bate
Made me the spoile and bootie of the world,
But this new Hydra mete to be assailde
Euen by an hundred such as Hercules,
With seuen springing heds of monstrous crimes,
So many Neros and Caligulaes
Must still bring forth to rule this croked shore.

This is probably the most important poem in the sequence. Here we move away from the straightforward contrast between God and man. The Nymph, bemoaning her fate beside the Tiber, stands for ancient Republican Rome, and her lament is for the loss of its ancient liberties and the advent of the tyranny of the Julio-Claudians Nero and Caligula. Perhaps we should read the nymph as foolish in trusting in earthly systems of government, and not being aware that even their best forms cannot last for ever.²⁰³ It is equally likely, however, that the poem also has a republican message, transferring Du Bellay’s attack on the Roman Empire and papal supremacy directly to the situation of Dutch exiles such as van der Noot, forced to flee their country, notable for its respect for the liberties of its diverse peoples, in the face of a tyrannical Spanish threat.²⁰⁴ The combined force of religious and political oppression is pointedly condemned, an analysis expanded in van der Noot’s prose commentary.²⁰⁵ The sonnet also looks towards Spenser’s future exploration of republican themes in his writings, an intellectual interest for which his early education undoubtedly prepared him, as well as his personal interest in the issue of exile.²⁰⁶

The sonnet has fifteen lines, the sestet of Du Bellay’s original expanded to seven lines and the tercets run on, achieved through expanding the line ‘Si cet Hydre nouveau digne de cent Hercules’ into two, ‘But this new Hydra mete to be assailed | Euen by an hundred such as Hercules.’ As Anne Lake Prescott has pointed out, this is hardly likely to be an accident, given Spenser’s sustained and sophisticated interest in numerology, and it is a deliberate change from Du Bellay.²⁰⁷ The number fifteen ‘represents spiritual ascent’, following the fifteen steps to the Temple. It is also, as St Augustine, the central church father for Protestants, stated, a combination of the numbers seven, symbolizing Old Testament law, and eight, referring to ‘the New Testament, resurrection, and the New Law’. Together ‘they show the harmony of the two Testaments, and since the waters of the Flood rose fifteen cubits above the mountains “fifteen” also indicates baptism, a mystery beyond the learning of the proud’.²⁰⁸ On the one hand the structure of the poem symbolizes a sense of harmony and unity; but on the other, its subject matter represents a fractured world in turmoil, a contrast that Spenser used extensively throughout his life.

The poem is extraordinarily precocious in its intellectual range and significance, indicating that Spenser was a potentially major poet from his youth, and was recognized as such by many whose opinion mattered; it also provides us with an insight into the intellectual environment in which he grew up. We would expect Mulcaster’s pupils to be lively, intelligent, and learned. What Spenser’s poem suggests is that they were exposed to a vast range of classical and Christian ideas, which they were able to use as building blocks for later careers. Mulcaster’s influence can also be seen in different ways in other major Elizabethan and Jacobean figures, such as Lancelot Andrewes, who used what he had learned about acting and gesture from Mulcaster in his sermons, and Thomas Kyd, who also displayed a sophisticated understanding of rhetoric, theology, and stage conventions in The Spanish Tragedy (c.1589–92).²⁰⁹

One other poem deserves some comment, as it also prefigures themes in Spenser’s later writing. Sonnet 10 (12 in Du Bellay), accompanied by a woodcut of aggressive fauns appearing from the left of the picture destroying the locus amoneus in a grove around a fountain and driving out the nymphs towards the right foreground, is, like sonnet 8, an eyewitness account of the event:

I saw a fresh spring rise out of a rocke,
Clere as Christall against the Sunny beames,
The bottome yellow like the shining land,
That golden Pactol²¹⁰ driues vpon the plaine.
It seemed that arte and nature striued to ioyne

There in one place all pleasures of the eye.
There was to heare a noise alluring slepe
Of many accordes more swete than Mermaids song,
The seates and benches shone as Iuorie,
An hundred Nymphes sate side by side about,
When from nie hilles a naked rout of Faunes
With hideous cry assembled on the place,
Which with their feete vncleane the water fouled,
Threw down the seats, and droue the Nimphs to flight.

It is hard not to read this translated poem as another reflection on tyrannous invasion and the pains of exile. Spenser refers to similar images frequently throughout his work, notably in The Faerie Queene, Books II, III, and VI. Book II concludes with Guyon’s intemperate vandalism of Acrasia’s Bower; Book III contains the brutal image of Hellenore ravished by satyrs while her watching husband, Malbecco, is transformed into an allegorical abstraction of Jealousy; while Book VI is structured around the image of the civilized settlement within the woods overrun by hostile, savage forces. Moreover, the destruction of Ireland is precipitated in ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ when Faunus, imitating Actaeon, insists on seeing Diana naked.²¹¹ The description of the spring proving alluring to ‘all pleasures of the eye’ prefigures Spenser’s exploration of the problem of the seductive delights of the visual imagination—again, encapsulated most obviously in Guyon’s last significant act—and whether images lead us to truth or falsehood, one of the key debates throughout post-Reformation Europe.²¹²

The sequence of poems culminates in van der Noot’s somewhat undistinguished sonnets on his visions of the apocalypse, poems which are far less nuanced than those of Du Bellay immediately preceding them, and have probably helped to obscure his significance for later readers.²¹³ Nevertheless, although they acknowledge their emergence from a Protestant context, the poems in A Theatre are not obviously Calvinist in orientation. The use of visionary poetry suggests a time out of joint and the need for observers to look beneath the surface of things to discover their true significance within the universe. A Theatre, although clearly anti-Catholic, is not really a history of spiritual oppression and salvation as the world approaches its last days in the manner of John Bale (1495–1563) or John Foxe, authors frequently seen as the key influences on Spenser’s understanding of Christian eschatology.²¹⁴ According to Anne Lake Prescott, ‘It was not for an enraged or bigoted partisan that Spenser translated the sonnets by Du Bellay, but for a man of fairly tolerant temperament deeply attached to the most advanced literature of his time’.²¹⁵ Bearing in mind van der Noot’s later conversion to Catholicism—in name, at least—and his association with the Family of Love, this is probably what might be expected. An awareness of this dimension to Spenser’s connections seriously complicates our understanding of him as the Protestant poet he is often assumed to have been.²¹⁶ Spenser was exposed to more varied forms of religious thought than is generally realized—exactly what might have been expected, however, given his origins and schooling.

There is a further piece of evidence which suggests that Spenser’s thought was notably syncretic and synthetic. In Fowre Hymns—published in 1596—Spenser tells us that he has combined some of the last poetry that he wrote with some of the earliest, again suggesting that he looked back to his early works for inspiration towards the end of his life. In the dedicatory epistle to the sisters, Lady Margaret Clifford (née Russell), countess of Cumberland and Anne Russell, two immensely powerful patrons of poets who played an important role in Spenser’s later career, the poet explains the genesis of the four poems:

Hauing in the greener times of my youth, composed these former two Hymnes in the praise of Loue and beautie, and finding that the same too much pleased those of like age and disposition, which being too vehemently carried with that kind of affection, do rather sucke out poison to their strong passion, then hony to their honest delight, I was moued by the one of you two most excellent Ladies, to call in the same. But being unable so to doe, by reason that many copies thereof were formerly scattered abroad, I resolued at least to amend, and by way of retraction to reforme them, making in stead of those two Hymnes of earthly or naturall loue and beautie, two others of heauenly and celestiall.²¹⁷

The dedication has an intimate tone, resembling that of Spenser’s published correspondence with Harvey and dropping hints about his life beyond the page. There is a clear joke in the use of the phrase ‘call in’, the term for a work being seized by the authorities and subjected to post-publication censorship, as this is what had happened to Mother Hubberds Tale five years earlier, as the Tresham letter testifies.²¹⁸ Here, one of the ladies is jokingly equated—in print—with the team of state censors led by the archbishop of Canterbury, who oversaw all material submitted to the Stationers’ Register, the body that regulated printing in London.²¹⁹ Of course, far from being designed to insult the lady in question, the reference expresses a shared joke, one that is at the poet’s expense. The dedicatory letter deliberately hints at much greater knowledge between the three interlocutors, a characteristic strategy of Spenser.²²⁰ The style of the letter is also designed to verify the details contained within it, so we have no reason to doubt the statement that the poems were composed in the ‘greener times’ of Spenser’s youth, or that they had circulated widely. We know that he revised his poetry because he frequently tells us that he does, and other testimonies from Lodowick Bryskett (c.1546–1609/12), Abraham Fraunce, and Gabriel Harvey provide corroborating evidence.²²¹ Hence, it seems most likely that the story we have here is true and that the first two hymns did circulate in manuscript and were then revised to fit into a coherent whole.²²²

When, specifically, were the poems written? The letter suggests that they were very early works, and perhaps dated from his schooldays, as juvenile poetic experiments that have survived as a late work.²²³ In formal terms the hymns are conspicuously less experimental than most of Spenser’s other work published in the 1590s. They are written in rhyme royal (ababbcc), a form introduced into English by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde, but common in sixteenth-century English poetry.²²⁴ Chaucer’s poem had a conspicuous influence on The Shepheardes Calender, whereas Spenser engaged more thoroughly with The Canterbury Tales in The Faerie Queene, especially in Book IV, which further supports an understanding of the first two hymns as early works.²²⁵ Furthermore, we should note that the Hymnes were published together with an imitation of another Chaucerian work, Daphnaïda, which rethinks and rewrites the Book of the Duchess, although not necessarily successfully.²²⁶ In terms of their content, the hymns are unusual in their easy and unchallenging reproduction of Neoplatonic ideas. The hymns represent the body as an imperfect form of the soul, itself an imitation of the true form of the divine. Such ideas were found throughout the works of Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), and a host of related Neoplatonic works.²²⁷ Although Platonic ideas were often challenged by Aristotelian notions of poetic composition at the end of the sixteenth century, there was a major revival of interest in Neoplatonic thought and hermetic philosophy, which had a particular impact on literature.²²⁸ Harvey was especially interested in new developments in scientific and alchemical thinking.²²⁹ Even so, the hymns would appear to be at odds with the much more sophisticated work that Spenser published in the 1590s, as well as witty and sardonic adaptations of Neoplatonic ideas of love in poems such as John Donne’s ‘The Extasie’.²³⁰ Such evidence suggests that the first two hymns should be read as early works as Spenser states, reproduced for a new audience and for a specific purpose.²³¹

‘An Hymne in Honour of Love’ argues that beautiful mortal forms are imitations of heavenly glories and will send the alert observer into a state of rapture:

For sure of all, that in this mortall frame
Contained is, nought more diuine doth seeme,
Or that resembleth more th’immortall flame
Of heauenly light, then Beauties glorious beame.
What wonder then, if with such rage extreme
Fraile men, whose eyes seek heauenly things to see,
At sight thereof so much enrauisht bee?²³²

‘An Hymne in Honour of Beautie’ laments that ‘many a gentle mynd | Dwels in deformed tabernacle’.²³³ However, such discrepancies are ironed out in the spiritual sphere of love:

For Loue is a celestiall harmonie,
Of likely harts composed of stares concent,
Which ioyne together in sweete sympathie,
To worke ech others ioy and true content,
Which they haue harbourd since their first descent
Out of their heauenly bowres, where they did see
And know ech other here belou’d to bee. (lines 197–203)

It is hard to believe that Spenser, an ironic, witty, and confrontational poet, well versed in telling nuances and subtle references, took such work seriously towards the end of his life, and the dedicatory letter can be read as an embarrassed apology for his refigured juvenile efforts. Certainly, there is little else in his mature work that indicates an unqualified enthusiasm for such effusions.

There is, however, a readily identifiable link between the young Spenser and Neoplatonism.²³⁴ The Family of Love were notable for their particular interest in Neoplatonic thought, and they were instrumental in reviving many of its forms in the 1560s and 1570s, ‘stimulated by the spectacle of religious discord’ in the Low Countries.²³⁵ Niclaes was inspired by Thomas à Kempis’s mystical treatise The Imitation of Christ, with its attacks on the fruitless labours of scholastic theology, and desire to escape from the constraints of the world in order to penetrate the mysteries of heaven.²³⁶ As already stated, his writings and ideas had a significant impact on intellectuals and poets throughout the Low Countries, in France, and in England from the 1560s to the 1580s.²³⁷ It is at least arguable that one major English writer had intellectual links to the sect throughout his life.²³⁸ Spenser, via Mulcaster, van der Noot, Rogers, and the Anglo-Dutch writers exiled in London, was well acquainted with the Family of Love in the late 1560s. He undoubtedly knew some members personally as well as van der Noot, and read their writings, even if it is hard to uncover such links directly, given the close secrecy with which Familists guarded their identities, and their belief in the doctrine of Nicodemism, ‘hypocrisy in the cause of self-protection’.²³⁹ Familists held that God’s decree and Nature were indistinguishable, that human nature was perfectable, and that the Holy Ghost and the devil were real and could be located ‘inside the self’.²⁴⁰ These are all ideas that are compatible with Neoplatonism, especially as derived from a work such as Pico Della Mirandolla’s On the Dignity of Man, a work that Spenser undoubtedly read and knew well.²⁴¹ If the first two hymns are early works, written while Spenser was still at school, they indicate just how seriously he was interested in developing a poetic career, and how he was eager to experiment with new ideas. What seems odd and rather anachronistic for a mature poet writing in the mid-1590s was undoubtedly bold and innovative for a young man in the late 1560s, whether or not Spenser really adhered to the beliefs of the Family of Love. Of course, Spenser’s late Neoplatonic poetry may bear no significant relation to any particular belief system, but it undoubtedly provides an insight into the intellectual coordinates of his youth.