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Spenser Goes to College

IN THE sixteenth century various funds from foundations and charities were available for bright young scholars to help their school and university education.¹ Spenser was the recipient of a number of bequests at the Merchant Taylors’ School, all from the fund of the wealthy and well-connected London lawyer Robert Nowell, who left significant sums of money to the school when he died on 6 February 1569. The bequests were carried out by Robert’s brother, Alexander, dean of St Paul’s.

In total, there are records of thirty-one scholars from London schools receiving a gown and a shilling each at Nowell’s behest. Along with 254 poor men, the boys were paid to take part in the funeral procession, six of the scholars coming from the Merchant Taylors’ School: Edmund Spenser, Richard Bitese, George Hunte, Thomas Curley, Henry Ive, and Gregory Downhall, along with pupils at St Paul’s, Westminster, and St Anthony’s, normal practice at funerals of the good and the great.² The fact that Spenser heads this list suggests that he may well have been the senior boy in the school.³ On 28 April 1569 Spenser was again recorded in Nowell’s account books: ‘To Edmond Spensore of the m’chante tayler scholl, at his gowinge to penbrocke hall in chambridge—10s.’⁴

Such evidence has been used to argue that Spenser must have been an impoverished scholar in need of assistance, and to support the assumption that his father was the journeyman tailor John Spenser.⁵ However, neither conclusion necessarily follows. Spenser is unlikely to have come from a rich family, and was, like most students, undoubtedly able to spend what money came his way without difficulty. Even so, he received only one small payment while at school, which does not suggest that his family was especially impoverished. The largest payment he received from Robert Nowell’s fund was when he matriculated at Cambridge, which was a substantial sum. Undergraduates incurred a number of costs throughout their academic career, and the money from the Nowell bequest was evidently designed to offset these. In addition to accommodation, subsistence, books, and other living costs and expenses, a graduating Bachelor of Arts would be expected to pay over 15s. to receive his degree.⁶ At Cambridge Spenser then received further payments of 6s. (along with Richard Laugher, another student at Pembroke) on 7 November 1570; of 2s. 6d. on 24 April 1571, making a total of 19s. 6d., along with the gown. These payments added up to a significant amount of money, certainly helpful for a young student, when the average wages of a skilled worker was about 11d. to 12d. per day, and an official university position, such as bedell, who was employed to enforce university discipline, paid just under £3 per annum.⁷ Therefore, we cannot safely conclude that Spenser was in particular need or that he must have come from a poverty-stricken background. Similar sums are recorded as having been distributed to scholars, as well as the poor, throughout the record book, along with gifts of cloth.

Cambridge was, as it is today, much smaller than the only other university city in England, Oxford. William Camden, very much an Oxford man, pays it a rather backhanded compliment in Britannia (1586, 1610). Having praised the town’s ‘faire streetes orderly raunged’, and the colleges as ‘sacred mansions of the Muses’, Camden comments:

Neither is there wanting any thing here, that a man may require in a most flourishing Vniversitie, were it not that the ayre is somewhat unhealthfull arising as it doth out of a fenny ground hard by. And yet peradventure, they that first founded an University in that place, allowed of Platoes iudgement. For he being of a verie excellent & strong constitution of bodie chose out the Academia, an unhollsome place of Attica, for to studie in, that so the superfluous ranknesse of bodie which might overlaie the minde, might bee kept under by the distemperature of the place.⁸

The Fens were notoriously unhealthy and it is perhaps little wonder that Cambridge suffered particularly from outbreaks of the plague, especially as it was also acknowledged that the city provided perfect breeding grounds for disease because the streets where the poor lived were so close together.⁹ Spenser was absent a number of times from the college between 1571 and 1574, and received aegrotat payments (a certificate of illness excusing the student’s absence). In total, he was absent for eleven and a half weeks in 1570; seven weeks in 1571; and six weeks in 1573, a considerable amount of time to be away from the university. Each time college records show that he received an allowance of 10d. per week.¹⁰ Such payments were usually granted for sick leave, although commentators have assumed that there were probably other explanations.¹¹ It is quite likely that there is a hidden story to these payments, and there is evidence to suggest that ‘aegrotat allowances during Lent were an established custom’, enjoyed by fellows and students alike, enabling them to pursue their studies or more lucrative employment elsewhere.¹² In addition, it is also an odd coincidence that the Watts Greek Scholars, who started to attend university in 1571, and of whom there were four at Pembroke, were also apparently ill a great deal, and were paid at the same rate, 10d. per week.¹³ Moreover, the payments were all made while John Young, later to be bishop of Rochester (and Spenser’s employer), was master of the college.¹⁴ But, given the city’s contemporary reputation for the ill health of its inhabitants, it is also possible that Spenser either suffered from debilitating bouts of disease or stayed away through an understandable fear of infection.

Cambridge during Spenser’s time there was an exciting but troubled place, characterized by almost constant religious disputes. University life was dominated by the prolonged effects of the Elizabethan Vestarian controversy, as the archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker (1504–75), struggled to impose uniformity on preachers who were required to wear the cope and surplice.¹⁵ Many saw this as a denial of Reformation principles and refused to conform, led by Thomas Cartwright (1535–1603), sometime fellow of Trinity who was appointed Lady Margaret chair of divinity in 1570. Cartwright, who effectively became leader of the Elizabethan Presbyterians in the 1570s, opposed the hierarchical structure of the established church and argued that archbishops and bishops should be replaced by bishops and deacons who would possess spiritual rather than institutional authority.¹⁶ He favoured a return to the principles of the primitive church and argued that the Elizabethan church should be stripped of its subsequent trappings and additions, claiming that very little of what was accepted practice—vestments, the altar, images, Latin Prayer Book—were adiaphora, or ‘things indifferent’, as his opponents alleged. While they asserted that these conventions had no effect on the proper nature of religious devotion, Cartwright and his followers argued that were diabolical practices introduced by the corruption of the Pope.¹⁷ When Cartwright was deprived of his chair for preaching against established religion, as outlawed by no. 45 of the 1570 university statutes, 164 protesters opposed the enforcement of the statutes, equating the defence of Cartwright with an opposition to changes in university structure and forms of authority.¹⁸ The Vestarian dispute soon led to protests about the forms of church service.¹⁹ There were also objections to the use of Latin prayers (1568–9), and a host of disputes about the election of fellows who were deemed unsympathetic to the large groundswell of sympathy for ‘Puritanism’.²⁰ In the face of such onslaught, Parker, backed by Lord Burghley, held firm, imposed the statutes, and issued a warrant for Cartwright’s arrest, causing him to flee to Germany.²¹

In such a feverish climate Catholics and suspected Catholics were afforded the most hostile treatment. Dr John Caius (1510–73), master of the College that after 1557 bore his name, had his room ransacked on the orders of Edwin Sandys (1519?–88), bishop of London, whose instructions were then passed on to the vice-chancellor, Dr Andrew Byng (d. 1599). Byng wrote to Burghley on 14 December 1572, explaining what had happened:

I am further to geve your honor advertisement of a greate oversight of D. Caius, who hath so long kept superstitious monuments in his college, that the evil fame thereof caused my lord of London to write very earnestly to me to see them abolished. I could hardly have been persuaded that suche thinges had been by him reservid. But causing his owne company to make serche in that college I received an inventary of muche popishe trumpery, as vestments, albes, tunicles, stoles, manicles, corporas clothes, with the pix and sindon, and canopie, besides holy water stoppes, with sprinkles, pax, sensars, superltaries, tables of idolles, masse bookes, portuises, and grailles, with other such stuffe as might have furnished divers massers at one instant. It was thought good by the whole consent of the heades of houses, to burne the bookes and such other things as served most for idolatrous abuses, and to cause the rest to be defaced; which was accomplished yesterday with the willing hartes, as appeared, of the whole company of that house.²²

Caius retired to his London house and died soon afterwards (29 July 1573).²³ The fact that this raid took place soon after news of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (23 August) reached England, when as many as 50,000 Huguenots may have been killed in France, probably explains its ferocity.²⁴ A year before the Massacre, on 30 August 1571, Elizabeth had completed a progress to Audley End, near Saffron Walden, accompanied by the French ambassador, Paul de Foix, sent to try and secure a match between Elizabeth and Henri, duc d’Anjou, the brother of the king of France, Charles IX. Sir Thomas Smith played a key part in the events, which culminated in a dinner at Trinity College, accompanied by a series of public disputations.²⁵ Such pleasant formal events must have seemed ancient history two years later. The representation of ecclesiastical practices, differences, and disputes in The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser’s first major work, developed out of an understanding of the links between the local and the continent-wide impact of religious conflict, and the sudden twist and turns of political life. Spenser’s religious beliefs were undoubtedly complicated and, probably, somewhat unorthodox and syncretic, made up of a variety of traditions and strains of belief (although this was hardly unusual).²⁶ Nevertheless, just as the diverse range of native and Continental forms of religion that he was exposed to at school left their mark on his work and thought, so did the equally complex mixture of factionalism, innovative theological and ecclesiological practice, and reaction to major European events, which he witnessed while a student, help to determine the course of his intellectual career.

Spenser would have been 15 when he began university, a relatively young age to start, but not exceptional. Many other precocious scholars started at the same age, including Sir Philip Sidney, born the same year as Spenser, who matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, also in the same year.²⁷ Pembroke Hall was an obvious choice for Spenser, as it had well-established links to the Merchant Taylors’ School and to the circle of intellectuals attached to it. Edmund Grindal had been a student, then fellow, at the College in the 1530s, before taking over as president in 1549, later becoming absentee master in 1559 for three years.²⁸ The College had a particular reputation for its commitment to the reformed faith, and many of its students and fellows were associated with the radical ideas that developed during the reign of Edward VI.²⁹ The first Marian martyr, John Rogers, father of Daniel Rogers, had graduated from Pembroke in 1526, and Nicholas Ridley (c.1502–55), one of the most prominent churchmen of his generation, whose heroic death is a key event in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, was student, fellow, and then its master between 1540 and 1553.³⁰

Pembroke was not one of Cambridge’s wealthiest colleges, and, with fewer than a hundred members, was among the smaller ones (Plate 4).³¹ Caius, in his history of the university written four years later, stated that Pembroke College had 87 members: the master, 24 fellows, 6 minor fellows, 7 inferior ministers (i.e., servants), 36 pensioners (paying students), and 13 sizars, out of a university total of 1,813 students, fellows, ministers, and masters.³² It was made up of a pleasantly situated series of buildings, most of which dated from the fourteenth century when it had been founded, off Trumpington Street in the heart of Cambridge. The college acquired further lands and buildings in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but it would have appeared as a pre-Reformation college to any new student coming to study during Elizabeth’s reign, a striking reminder of England’s medieval past. It also had its own orchard, and was designed, like all Cambridge colleges, to exist as a self-sufficient educational institution within the town.³³ Pembroke’s social composition appears to have been largely from the middle ranks of society, many of the students supported by newly established scholarships, such as the Watts scholarship, established by Thomas Watts (1523/4–77), archdeacon of Middlesex, which provided funds for seven Greek scholarships at Pembroke. Two of the first recipients were Spenser’s contemporaries at Merchant Taylors’, Lancelot Andrews and Thomas Dove.³⁴ Indeed, it was a natural home for a schoolboy from the Merchant Taylors’ School, having a similar social and intellectual composition, as well as housing a number of Spenser’s former schoolmates.

Spenser entered Pembroke as a sizar in 1569, studying at Cambridge for the next seven years, until he graduated as an MA on 26 June 1576.³⁵ The term derives from ‘size’, an allowance of board and lodgings that was granted in return for duties that were otherwise performed by college servants (waiting at tables, running errands, working in the college kitchens), and is only used for students at Cambridge or Trinity College Dublin (founded 1592). Sizars were allowed to eat what was left over after the college fellows had dined, making them, like Oswald in King Lear, eaters of ‘broken meats’.³⁶ Sizars were assigned to a fellow, shared the same room, and slept beneath the high bed of the fellow in a truckle or trundle bed, often with other students.³⁷ There would have been a series of tiny studies attached to the main communal bedroom, with desks and a few bookshelves. The atmosphere would undoubtedly have been rather claustrophobic, especially if the fellow and the students did not get along well, although there was also the opportunity for lifelong friendship between young men—fellows were invariably only just older than their students—of similar interests.

Compared to other students, sizars were needy, relatively poor scholars eager to find ways of supplementing their funds, a reality that may well explain many of Spenser’s absences from college, as it would be surprising if he had not attempted to find employment when opportunities arose, despite the funds he received from various sources.³⁸ Thomas Middleton, in his clever response to Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell (1592), provides a short description of the humiliatingly servile life of a sizar, designed to characterize what Middleton imagined was Nashe’s experience at St John’s College in the 1580s, a decade after Spenser:

Pierce Penilesse, exceeding poor scholar, that hath made clean shoes in both universities, and been a pitiful batteler all thy lifetime, full often heard with this lamentable cry at the butt’ry hatch: ‘Ho, Lancelot! A cue of bread and a cue of beer,’ never passing beyond the confines of a farthing nor once munching commons, but only upon gaudy-days [holidays].³⁹

The description exaggerates and distorts the reality of a sizar’s life but it does contain more than a grain of truth. Universities, as Hugh Kearney has demonstrated, were ‘instruments for social mobility’, and, even if there were still rigid divisions between the gentlemen and the rest, the two universities were transforming the social fabric of key elements of the nation as more students from moderate social backgrounds graduated.⁴⁰ The register which classifies the 13,569 students who attended the University of Oxford between 1567 and 1622 lists 6,635 as ‘sons of plebeians’, or just under half, and 3,615 as ‘sons of gentlemen’, just over a quarter.⁴¹ There were numerous and clear signs of differing social status inscribed in the structures and practices of the universities, partly in order to offset what was perceived at the time as a serious social change.

The major relationship that Spenser established at Cambridge, at least as it was made available to a wider reading public through published works, was with Gabriel Harvey. It is quite possible that Spenser served as Harvey’s sizar after Harvey was elected to a fellowship at Pembroke on 3 November 1570. Harvey had achieved this position through the offices of his patron, Sir Thomas Smith, having failed to achieve a fellowship at Christ’s, where he graduated.⁴² Not only did Harvey and Smith have previous connections—almost inevitably, through Daniel Rogers—but in their published letters (1580) Spenser asks Harvey what he thinks of a new Anacreontic epigram with the insouciant comment, which seems designed for a third party, ‘Seeme they comparable to those two, which I translated you ex tempore in bed, the last time we lay together in Westminster?’⁴³ The lines seem to hint at a sexual relationship between the two men, even as it is denied, but they also suggest that their nocturnal intimacy had a long history.⁴⁴ The fact that Spenser provides this particular detail might suggest that he is placing himself in the role of supplicant—albeit cheekily—a reminder that, although the two men were almost exactly the same age (Harvey was probably born in 1552/3), Spenser had been, and perhaps still was, the apprentice.

Spenser would have studied the arts curriculum at Cambridge, designed to prepare an educated elite for service in government, national and local, the rapidly expanding civil service, as well as the church. The medieval arts degree had been planned to lead star students towards the study of theology, once they had completed their Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, a path still followed by many who entered the church. However, universities throughout Europe were changing to meet the demands of a new social order that opened up a wider series of roles for graduates.⁴⁵ The complete course in the arts—which included what we now define as sciences—started with the trivium, the study of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; proceeded to the quadrivium, which covered arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music; and was completed by study of the three philosophies, moral, natural, and metaphysics.⁴⁶ There was also some study of mathematics, which, given its role within the arts curriculum, might explain where Spenser’s much discussed interest in numerology originated, as well as geography, another subject that Spenser clearly valued.⁴⁷ By the later sixteenth century this basic structure was still in place—much less rigidly at Cambridge than at Oxford—but with important variations. Elizabeth produced a series of statutes for the university in 1570, which set out what should be taught by university lecturers, the forms of examinations, as well as the government and organization of the university. The university lecturer in rhetoric was required to teach Cicero, Quintilian, and Hermogenes; the lecturer in Greek, Homer, Demosthenes, Isocrates, and Euripides; and the lecturer in philosophy, Aristotle, Pliny, and Plato, every author to be taught in the original language. All examinations were oral disputations, and students were expected to argue with their teachers at least twice a year, as well as declaim in class a set number of times, the results decided by faculty present.⁴⁸ At Cambridge, the statutes of 1570 stipulated that candidates for the BA had to dispute twice in public, and twice in college during their four years of study; MA candidates had to respond to a teacher three times, dispute twice in hall, and deliver one oration.⁴⁹ The student would act as respondent and the examiner as opponent, debating a series of formal questions on the set texts. The student would be tested on his ability to argue logically as he either accepted or denied the propositions. The aim was to ‘ensure that he neither contradicts himself, nor by implication denies the proposition that he is meant to be upholding, nor lets himself be reduced to confusion’. If the student maintained his position for a specified period of time, he passed.⁵⁰ Disputation was the key feature of the early modern university curriculum, and explains why so many writers—Spenser, Bacon, Milton—were able to write as they did.⁵¹ Students were required to attend all lectures, morning and evening prayers, and there were punitive fines for non-attendance, and for other transgressions such as wearing prohibited dress (sleeves and ruffs of the wrong material or with excessively ornate cuts and styles), and leaving college without permission.⁵² Life was as hard and regimented at university as it had been at school, students often working from four or five o’clock in the morning until ten at night, the day a mixture of lectures, private study, and devotions.⁵³

The Cambridge degree demanded that the student concentrate on rhetoric, dialectic, and philosophy in the four years for the BA, with the statutes requiring the study of rhetoric in the first year, logic in the second and third, and philosophy in the final year. The MA required the study of philosophy, optics, astronomy, and Greek.⁵⁴ Under the inspiration of Quintilian and Erasmus, great emphasis was placed on the student’s ability to argue a case, and undergraduates had to participate in a number of public debates, making university a natural progression from grammar or public school, especially for a student who had been taught by a teacher like Richard Mulcaster, who trained his charges in precisely this way.⁵⁵ There was also a new emphasis on the study of modern languages alongside Latin and Greek, as the universities realized that they had to train graduates to suit the needs of society outside college.⁵⁶ By the time Spenser completed his studies he would have read and attended lectures on Aristotle, Plato, Pliny (philosophy); Strabo, Ptolemy, Pomponius Mela (mathematics); Cicero, Quintilian (dialectic/rhetoric); Virgil, Horace (grammar); Euclid (geometry); Boethius (music); and many other classical authorities.⁵⁷ He would not have had access to the university library until he became an MA student—although it was in a notoriously poor state in the early 1570s. The Pembroke College library, however, was well stocked with classical and theological works.⁵⁸

English and Continental books were often absent from institutional libraries, which concentrated largely on works in Latin and Greek.⁵⁹ Extracurricular reading was often encouraged, notably by tutors such as Harvey, who pursued his own course of reading and recommended numerous modern authors to his students.⁶⁰ Harvey noted in his Letter-Book that students were especially keen on recent works of controversial political history:

You can not stepp into a scholars studye but (ten to on) you shall litely finde open other Bodin de Republica or Le Royes Exposition upon Aristotles Politiques or sum other like Frenche or Italian Politique Discourses.

And I warrant you sum good fellowes amongst us begin nowe to be prettily well acquayntid with a certayne parlous booke called, as I remember me, Il Principe di Niccolo Macchiavelli, and I can peradventure name you an odd crewe or tooe that ar as cuninge in his Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Livio, in his Historia Fiorentina, and in his Dialogues della Arte della Guerra tooe.⁶¹

Harvey had, undoubtedly, encouraged students to read these books himself, as they reflect his taste in modern political theory, and he certainly owned copies of Bodin, Guicciardini, and Machiavelli, which he probably lent to students.⁶² Student wills also reveal that these were the sort of books they owned, along with Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, Camden’s Britannia, and Buchanan’s History of Scotland.⁶³ Given Spenser’s relationship to Harvey it is hard to believe that Spenser was not one of the students about whom he was writing, and that Spenser did not also read these works along with his tutor, as they all had a significant influence on his later writings. It is surely no accident that A View of the Present State of Ireland refers to Aristotle and Machiavelli’s Discourses, and is informed by the reading of Bodin and Guicciardini.⁶⁴ That Spenser would have been a voracious reader given his education at the Merchant Taylors’ School and Cambridge is hardly surprising, but he would also have been exposed to Harvey’s particular theories of careful, targeted reading, which may well have helped form his particularly scrupulous habits.⁶⁵ He would have begun learning to read Italian while he was at Cambridge, if he had not already acquired a working knowledge before.⁶⁶ Harvey’s library contained a number of language manuals many of which he annotated, and it is likely that Spenser was able to use these throughout his long association with Harvey.⁶⁷ Spenser clearly knew French before he left school, and may well have used his knowledge of that language to help him learn Italian, translating texts as a means of acquiring the language. Often students were advised to learn through the use of an intermediary language, and John Florio suggested that a new language could be absorbed in three months, a claim that frustrated Harvey.⁶⁸

Perhaps the most significant change to student experience in the early modern university was in the teaching of rhetoric and logic. Students were still taught complicated scholastic logic, as they had been throughout the Middle Ages, and heavy emphasis was placed on Aristotle’s ‘rigorous demonstrative logic’.⁶⁹ Certainly, the scholastic nature of much of the curriculum, especially the sciences (metaphysics, physics, and mathematics), was evident well into the seventeenth century.⁷⁰ Nevertheless, traditional methods and approaches were challenged, circumvented, and modified by some tutors, led by Harvey, and later by his brother, Richard, another fellow at Pembroke, who turned to the work of the controversial modern logician Peter Ramus (1515–72).⁷¹ Ramus’ logical method owed much to ‘the topical logic of Agricola’, which, in effect, ‘abandoned a tool capable of dealing with scientific problems for a humanist dialectic of little use beyond merely literary pursuits’.⁷² Furthermore, Ramus had perished in the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day, and so was associated with Protestantism, an important factor in a college of a reformed character such as Pembroke.⁷³ Ramus’ Logic was translated in 1574, just before Spenser took his MA, and a collection of other works followed in the years immediately afterwards, including Ramus’ works on grammar (1585), geometry (1590), and arithmetic (1592).⁷⁴ By the early 1570s Ramus’ works were already well known and owned by a wide circle of readers, his status rising even higher after he was made a Protestant martyr.⁷⁵ He was to have a significant influence on virtually every aspect of English culture in the next half-century, from science to law, from history to the science of memory, and, above all, in enabling Calvinist divines to develop a system of logic that explained how they saw God’s plans for the world and the choices that he presented to mankind.⁷⁶

The impact of Ramist reforms on the teaching of logic and rhetoric has probably been exaggerated, and it is clear that many humanists throughout Europe thought that Ramus’ methods were not sophisticated enough to deal with complex epistemological matters. Nevertheless, Ramus did have a major influence on a general trend towards teaching rhetoric, alongside logic and a concentration on the art of persuasion, as central to the study of the humanities.⁷⁷ Ramus is sometimes caricatured as if he ‘reduced rhetoric to style and delivery’, whereas in fact he insisted that ‘rhetoric and dialect be studied together’.⁷⁸ What Ramus achieved was to simplify logic so that it was based on a method of practical reasoning that could deal with any situation and could be transported easily enough from one situation to another. Rhetoric and logic were no longer seen as divergent fields, but ways of thinking and arguing that complemented each other—two similar methods of argument that could be combined and deployed as the user saw fit. M. Roll’s translation of Ramus’ Logic, which argues for the need to have such works in the vernacular and is printed in black-letter (English) type, opens with a characteristically lucid statement outlining divisions for the reader to follow:

Dialecticke otherwise called Logicke, is an arte which teachethe to dispute well.

It is diuidyd into two partes: Inuention, and iudgement or disposition.

Inuention is the first parte of Dialecticke, which teachethe to inuente arguments.

An argumente is that which is naturally bente to proue or disproue any thing, suche as be single reasons separately and by them selues considered.

An argumnte is eyther artificial, or without arte.

Artificiall is that, which of it self declare and is eyther first, or hathe the beginning from the first.

The first is that which hathe the beginning of it self: is eyther simple or compared.

The Symple is that, which symplie and absolutelie is considered: and is eyther agreeable or disagreeable.

Agreeable is that, wich agreethe with the thing that it prouethe: and is agreeable absolutely, or after a certaine fashion.

Absolutely, as the cause and the effecte.⁷⁹

Ramist logic involved carefully dividing up different definitions and opposites, often leading to the construction of charts that show how any one concept can be split into two, two into four, and so on, with the hope that the reader will be able to see the apparently complex but actually straightforward relationship between a host of ideas and forms.⁸⁰ Alexander Richardson’s The Logician’s School-Master (1629), a posthumously published work based on his lectures and circulating among Cambridge students in the 1590s, gives a clear sense of the separation of logic and rhetoric derived from Ramus’ distinctions, which was now widespread at the university:

[B]ecause things that are reported, are not so easily receuied, as those which are seene by our eye of Logicke … it was requisite that there should … be … a fine sugaring of them with Rhetoricke, for the most easie receuing of them …

Now because speech is an inartificiall argument, and so not easily receuied, therefore Rhetoricke serues to deliuer the matter more soberly and grauely; and Poetry yet makes it more fine, where all things must be done by measure and sweet sounds.⁸¹

Rhetoric serves to make the conclusions of logic palatable as well as accessible to a wider audience, in the same way that poetry serves philosophy in Sidney’s Apology, an obvious influence on Richardson’s text.⁸² Such arguments post-date Spenser’s time at Cambridge, but they do indicate what was starting to happen when he was there, inaugurated in large part by Harvey.

Ramist logic as an actual method was probably less revolutionary than either its proponents or its detractors claimed, certainly for the majority of non-specialist students taught at Cambridge, where it took root more sturdily than at Oxford.⁸³ Often the forms of argument described and recommended were the same as those of the scholastic logic they were supposedly replacing, although stripped of the sophisticated levels of content and forms of proof.⁸⁴ The basic building block of logical analysis was still the syllogism, derived from Aristotle’s statement, ‘discourse in which, certain things being posited, something else necessarily follows’, but which by the Middle Ages had become more obviously formulaic, involving three categorical propositions, with the third (the conclusion) following from the first two (the premises).⁸⁵ The basic form of syllogistic logic was represented as ‘All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal.’ Although Ramists attacked such logical forms as tautologies, and a simple exercise in exploiting the definitions of words, they, nevertheless, invariably relied on syllogistic reasoning.⁸⁶ Dudley Fenner’s explicitly Ramist The Artes of Logike and Rhethorike, for example, an attempt to outline a usable manual for Protestants, establishes a series of Ramist charts to outline the options available for logical investigation. He classifies the syllogism with a series of relevant examples:

The Affirmatiue generall:

All the iustified shalbe saued:

Al the iustified shal raigne with Christ: Therefore

Some that raigne with Christ, shalbe saued.

The Negative with the Proposition generall:

No hypocritical caller upon God shalbe saued.

All hypocritical callers vpon God, say, Lorde, Lorde. Therefore

Some that say, Lord, Lord, shal not be saued.

Affirmatiue speciall:

Some who fel in the wilderness heard the word.

Al who fell in the wilderness, tempted God. Therefore

Some that heard the word, tempted God. Heb. 6. 3.⁸⁷

The Calvinist nature of Fenner’s examples, demonstrating to readers that outward signs of God’s grace will not necessarily place them among the elect, is clear enough, as he forges a link between forward thinking in method and doctrine.⁸⁸

The example of Fenner’s influential text illustrates the importance of the Ramist revolution, especially in Cambridge (Fenner had studied at Peterhouse and was a protégé of Thomas Cartwright).⁸⁹ Ramism was most significant in the ways in which it transformed what mattered in education, the relationship between logic and rhetoric and the teaching curriculum, and its universalizing nature and style were strongly connected to puritanism—a significant reason why it flourished in Cambridge rather more than Oxford.⁹⁰ Logic now became a series of topics, which could be employed by the student in order to make a case. Logic itself might have been denuded of its significance in scholastic terms, but arguments could now be made in all sorts of ways using a variety of examples instead of being restricted to formalized academic debate. The syllogism was no longer seen in absolute terms, but as a tool for debating, an aid to dialectic designed to persuade an audience.⁹¹ Accordingly, intellectual debate was highlighted as a major component of the strategies that could be employed by the orator to persuade an audience, in line with humanist preoccupations.⁹² Arguments were not merely supplemented by a host of examples from other areas of the curriculum, most frequently literary, placing emphasis on the formal nature of the dispute; rather, the proper use of material became the raison d’être of debate, the art of persuasion assuming greater importance than the formal properties of logic itself. Ramus’ Logike justifies its existence through the use of examples from Virgil, not through using them merely as supplements to the main argument. Ramism also had a significantly ‘anti-hierarchical’ thrust, which added to its appeal in the stratified world of the early modern university.⁹³

Late sixteenth-century Cambridge became a university with ‘an aggressively liberal approach to the curriculum’, with teaching based on the wide reading of students in all areas of the arts held together by a textbooks of dialectic, most frequently by Rudolf Agricola as well as Ramus.⁹⁴ Such a system naturally precipitated the advance of charismatic star teachers, the most ambitious and significant of which in the early 1570s was Harvey, who rose rapidly from his fellowship at Pembroke, becoming university lecturer in Greek in October 1573 and university praelector of rhetoric in April 1574.⁹⁵ Harvey deliberately established himself as the leading exponent of Ramism in a time of Ramist revolution.⁹⁶ In Ciceronianus (1576), Harvey’s Easter-term oration of 1575, printed by Henry Bynneman, publisher of A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings and, in the future, the Harvey–Spenser Letters, Harvey wittily but rather pompously argues his case in the form of an overarching syllogism: Ramus was a Ciceronian; Harvey is the true follower of Ramus; therefore, Harvey is the true heir of Cicero.⁹⁷ Rhetor, the text of the opening two orations that Harvey delivered as praelector (1574), also published by Bynemann (1577), represents the speaker as the modern manifestation of the great orator of the Roman Republic, persuading the audience that eloquence in argument is what matters most.⁹⁸ Harvey’s influence on Spenser was principally through his command of rhetoric.⁹⁹

Either Spenser gravitated towards Harvey because of his reputation, which developed rapidly after 1570, or they were introduced through mutual acquaintances and networks. A number of connections might have facilitated their academic relationship and friendship. Harvey was linked to Daniel Rogers and Sir Philip Sidney; he knew members of the circle around Lord Burghley, as Spenser did, through his tutor at Christ’s College, William Lewin, a client of Burghley’s, and tutor to his daughter, Lady Anne Cecil; and he cultivated Dutch connections, in particular Jan van der Does. Spenser, through Mulcaster, was also linked to the same circles.¹⁰⁰ It is also possible that Harvey, who had a keen eye for what was happening at the university, was able to put Spenser in touch with some of the other star students at Cambridge at the time: Abraham Fraunce, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Nashe, perhaps through a shared interest in Lucian, the subject of a book-wager between Harvey and Spenser.¹⁰¹ Whatever the background to their encounter, it is clear that Harvey shaped Spenser’s educational experience at Cambridge and afterwards, and that his work would have developed in a different way—perhaps been rather less logical and less assured—if they had not met.

Harvey looked backwards and forwards in his hopes for a glittering academic career that would take him beyond the confines of the university and enable him to make his mark in the world of politics and at court. Harvey was heavily indebted to Sir Thomas Smith when he first met Spenser. Smith guided Harvey’s career in the later 1560s, and Harvey looked up to him as an intellectual mentor, a role Harvey wanted to play for Spenser.¹⁰² Harvey corresponded extensively with Smith in the early 1570s, and he is cited in the Harvey–Spenser Letters as an authority on orthography and prosody.¹⁰³ Smith dedicated his Latin work on the pronunciation of Greek, De Recta et Emendata Linguae Graecae Pronuntiatione (1568), to Harvey.¹⁰⁴ Harvey records in a letter to John Young, then master of Pembroke, that he visited Smith at his house, Hill Hall, Theydon Mount, Essex, a further twenty-five miles away (a day’s travel).¹⁰⁵ Smith also had a large town house in Saffron Walden, almost next door to one of the properties owned by the Harvey family.¹⁰⁶

Smith was an immensely influential figure in England from the 1550s until his death in 1577. He had emerged as one of the key thinkers about the nature of English government under the radical Protestant regime of Edward VI (1547–53), like his younger contemporaries William Cecil (1520–98) and Sir Henry Sidney (1529–86).¹⁰⁷ The careers of all three were intertwined throughout Edward’s regime and the first half of Elizabeth’s reign.¹⁰⁸ Smith served as secretary of state during the dominant years of his patron, Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset (c.1500–52), and worked closely with Thomas Cranmer, who had—mainly indirectly—a number of connections to Spenser.¹⁰⁹ After Somerset’s execution Smith disappeared into the political wilderness until rehabilitated by Elizabeth, for whom he served as ambassador to France in the 1560s, and then as secretary of state (1572–7). During his time as ambassador in France Smith wrote one of the key works of Elizabethan political theory, De Republica Anglorum, not published until 1581, four years after his death.¹¹⁰ The work classifies the various forms of government, institutions, political offices, and the people who constitute the state of England, explaining how the various hierarchies in England work, the network of strands of government, and defines England as a monarchy ruled by the king or queen in parliament, which is ‘The most high and absolute power of the realm of Englande’.¹¹¹ Spenser read this work in manuscript, undoubtedly at Harvey’s bidding, and a commitment to the ideal of the sovereign only able to rule with the consent of parliament is certainly evident in his later writings, indicating that Smith’s ideas stayed with him throughout his life.¹¹² The gloss to the word ‘couth’ in The Shepheardes Calender links Smith and Harvey and informs the reader that the latter lent the writer the former’s book:

couthe) commeth of the verbe Conne, that is, to know or to haue skill. As well interpreteth the same worthy Sir Tho. Smith in his book of gouernment: whereof I haue a perfect copie in writing, lent me by his kinsman, and my verye singular good freend, M. Gabriel Haruey: as also of some other of his most graue and excellent writings.¹¹³

Of course, the notes to the Calender are attributed to ‘E. K.’, but given Spenser’s very public relationship with Harvey, this certainly suggests that Spenser wrote many, if not all, of them, probably with the help of others.¹¹⁴ The note is a deliberate advertisement of the intimate intellectual circle established around Smith, echoes of whose work have also been discovered in Spenser’s View.¹¹⁵

Since Smith was one of the leading humanists of his generation, Harvey looked to emulate his career and establish himself as Smith’s intellectual heir. Harvey was responsible for a series of Latin elegies composed after Smith’s funeral (August 1577), which were published by Bynemann in January 1578, Smithus; vel Lachrymae Musarum. These works later influenced both the style and form of Spenser’s Teares of the Muses: just as Harvey proclaimed that it was up to him as the author to seize the intellectual agenda in order to shape the future, so did Spenser, even more presumptuously and cheekily, in assuming the mantle of the deceased earl of Leicester.¹¹⁶ Smith acquired a manor house, Hill Hall, through his second wife, Philippa Wilford, after their marriage in 1554, and he started to transform it into a major intellectual centre which represented humanist ideals (Plate 5). He assembled a carefully catalogued library, one of the largest in Elizabethan England, with works on civil law, theology, mathematics, history, philosophy, medicine, literature, including not only classical texts but many contemporary works of topical interest, such as Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier and Machiavelli’s works.¹¹⁷ Like many of his wealthy neighbours, Smith was a keen student of architecture, and he redesigned Hill Hall as a classical palace, complete with impressive façades and allegorical frescos, in imitation of the French chateaux he had visited and the Italian houses he had read about.¹¹⁸ Most significant of all, Smith may have used Hill Hall as an alternative university, encouraging scholars to meet and discuss important issues and problems in order to advise politicians, the logical culmination of his attempts to marry intellectual and practical endeavour, in line with the Aristotelian humanist ideal of combining the active and contemplative lives.¹¹⁹

One particular debate took place in late 1570 or early 1571, as Harvey recorded in his copy of Livy, using a reading of the historian of the Roman Republic to think about Elizabethan military strategy:

Thomas Smith junior and Sir Humphrey Gilbert [debated] for Marcellus, Thomas Smith senior and Doctor Walter Haddon for Fabius Maximus, before an audience at Hill Hall consisting at that very time of myself, John Wood, and several others of gentle birth. At length the son and Sir Humphrey yielded to the distinguished Secretary: perhaps Marcellus yielded to Fabius. Both of them worthy men, and judicious. Marcellus the more powerful; Fabius the more cunning. Neither was the latter unprepared [weak], nor the former imprudent: each as indispensable as the other in his place. There are times when I would rather be Marcellus, times when Fabius.¹²⁰

As Harvey’s account demonstrates, the debate was designed to decide whether the ruthlessness of Marcellus or the more cautious strategy of Fabius was better suited for the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, Harvey indicating that he, and presumably many others, felt that the conclusion was finely balanced.¹²¹ The debate, in front of an audience of ‘several others of gentle birth’, sounds very much like the sort of formal public exercises that students had to undergo in order to complete their degrees, further suggesting that Harvey and Smith saw events at Hill Hall playing a crucial role in bridging the gap between the university and public life. Spenser, of course, may have been present at this debate, given what we know of his close relationship with Harvey at this time, and he may have been working for Harvey in his role as a sizar. But even if he was not present, it is likely that such debates had an impact on his political awareness and interest in Ireland, especially given that Gilbert (1537–83) was the half-brother of Sir Walter Ralegh, a figure with whom Spenser was keen to be associated twenty years later.¹²²

Gilbert had already made a name for himself as a ruthless exponent of martial law when military governor of Munster in late 1569, suppressing the Fitzgerald uprising and forcing the chief Irish lords who submitted to him to approach him through a lane of severed heads on poles, according to Thomas Churchyard (1523?–1604), a loyal soldier under Gilbert in the 1560s and 1570s.¹²³ Gilbert was also a keen advocate of the sort of educational reforms favoured by Smith, and wrote a short tract at about this time, The Erection of an Achademy in London for Educacion of her Maiestes Wardes, and others the youth of nobility and gentlemen, with another tract arguing the case for academies that bridged the gap between tertiary education and public life, especially in military matters.¹²⁴

The immediate purpose of the debate at Hill Hall was to prepare Sir Thomas Smith’s illegitimate son, also called Thomas, for his military expedition to Ireland to colonize the Ards Peninsula, the first stage of Smith’s attempt to use the help of intellectuals to transform Ireland from the most rebellious and lawless of the queen’s dominions to an ordered and settled society.¹²⁵ Smith published a pamphlet, A letter sent by I.B. Gentleman vnto his very frende Maystet [sic] R.C. Esquire vvherin is conteined a large discourse of the peopling & inhabiting the cuntrie called the Ardes, and other adiacent in the north of Ireland, and taken in hand by Sir Thomas Smith one of the Queenes Maiesties priuie Counsel, and Thomas Smith Esquire, his sonne (1572), clearly written in the wake of the Hill Hall debates. The pamphlet also published by Bynemann, provides yet another link between Harvey, Spenser, and Smith; written as a dialogue, it probably had some influence on A View.¹²⁶ It has the same practical but seriously informed approach to colonization, giving details of how much land each settler will need, what they should grow, how they need to protect themselves, and how they can rely on the native Irish churls to work for them, which will, in fact, lead to a problem: ‘but I feare the sweetnesse which the owners shall find in the Irish Churle, giuing excessiuely, wil hinder the Countrie muche in the peopling of it with the Englishe Nation, making men negligent to prouide Englishe famours’.¹²⁷ Sadly and unsurprisingly, this optimistic assessment proved unfounded and the expedition ended in disaster, with the death of Smith Jr, his boiled carcass fed to the dogs by his Irish killers, according to Churchyard.¹²⁸

Even before this debate Spenser had probably already entered this exciting but dangerous world between the academy and political/military action, the ideal of so many Elizabethan figures.¹²⁹ A bill dated 18 October 1569 confirms ‘Edmonde Spencer’ as the bearer of letters from the English ambassador in France, Sir Henry Norris (c.1525–1601), currently stationed in Tours, to the queen: ‘Payde upon a bill signed by M^r Secretarye dated at Wyndsor xviij. Octobris 1569 to Edmonde Spencer that broughte lres to the Quenes Ma^tis from Sir Henrye Norrys knighte he Ma^tis Embassador in Fraunce beinge then at Towars in the sayde Realme, for his charges the some of vj^li.xiij^s.iiij^d. [i.e., £6. 13s. 4d.] over and besydes ix^li. [i.e., £9] prested to hym by Sir Henrye Norrys.’¹³⁰ These are substantial amounts, in total over £15, well beyond the sums that any scholarship could have provided a student. Could this Edmund Spenser have been the poet? It is certainly plausible, even likely that he was, even though he would have been very young, 15 or 16 at the time. Other students had leave of absence from university to undertake important tasks, most notably Christopher Marlowe; others, such as Ralegh, took leave from school to serve with the Huguenots in France in the same month (October 1569) before matriculating at university.¹³¹ More relevant still is the connection with the Norris family, whose interests seem to have been bound up with Spenser’s from his schooldays. Spenser had been singled out as an especially good French translator, which would suggest that he had the right skills for the task of delivering letters in France itself, and he was later to serve the sons of Henry Norris as the transcriber and bearer of letters in Ireland.¹³² Furthermore, Henry Norris, who was in regular contact with the queen, Leicester, and Burghley, employed Daniel Rogers at this time as a secretary, tutor to his children, and a spy to deal with Catholic conspiracies, providing a further, perhaps key, link to Spenser.¹³³ The circumstantial evidence that this Edmund Spenser was the poet is therefore strong. It would be a strange coincidence if the Norrises and Rogers were connected to two letter-bearing Edmund Spensers.

During Spenser’s time at Pembroke John Young replaced John Whitgift (1530/1–1604) as the master of the college. Whitgift, later archbishop of Canterbury, enjoyed only a brief tenure as master, serving from April to June 1567, leaving to become master of the much wealthier college, Trinity.¹³⁴ Young had the support of Grindal, and was closely linked to Thomas Watts, archdeacon of Middlesex and one of the chief benefactors of Pembroke, who had strong links to both Grindal and the Merchant Taylors’ School, which he had inspected when Spenser was there as a pupil.¹³⁵ Young was appointed as master on 12 July 1567, nearly two years before Spenser matriculated, and remained in the post until he was consecrated as bishop of Rochester on 1 April 1578.¹³⁶ He served as vice-chancellor of the university from 1568 to 1569.¹³⁷

Young employed Spenser as his secretary when he became bishop of Rochester or almost immediately afterwards.¹³⁸ He may not have known Spenser especially well when he was an undergraduate, but Young clearly did know Harvey.¹³⁹ Spenser probably achieved his position through Harvey’s offices, although Young also knew the divines connected to the Merchant Taylors’ School: Grindal, Watts, and Nowell, who could have been a further source of information. Young accepted a variety of benefices in London, Cambridgeshire, and East Anglia throughout his career, undoubtedly in part to support him in his important roles, and he was frequently absent from Cambridge. This was not unusual at the time and seems to have produced no adverse comment. It is possible, of course, that Spenser’s absences from Pembroke were looked upon sympathetically by Young, or may even have been connected to the master’s own absences, given that Spenser worked for him later, but there is no evidence to support either conjecture. Spenser must surely have been grateful for the opportunity to work for Young, but, as his comments on Young in The Shepheardes Calender indicate, he may have had an ambivalent sense of Young as a bishop.¹⁴⁰

Ill feeling and disputes between students and fellows were commonplace then as they are now. Harvey’s Letter-Book opens with a series of letters relating to his problems in being granted his MA at Pembroke. He had already been denied a fellowship at Christ’s, and had obtained one at Pembroke only after the intervention of Smith, so clearly he did not get on easily with all of his peer group. A long letter to Young of some eight thousand words, dated 21 March 1573, sought the support of the absent master against the other fellows, who were blocking the award of the degree.¹⁴¹ Harvey’s principal antagonists were Richard Osborn and Thomas Neville (c.1548–1615), younger brother of Alexander Neville, and a future master of Magdalene and Trinity colleges and vice-chancellor of the university in 1588.¹⁴²

Harvey explains that there are three main charges levelled against him. First, that he was not ‘familiar like a fellow, and that I did disdain everi mans cumpani’, to which Harvey replied, rather defensively, that he ‘was aferd les over mutch familiariti had mard al’. Nevertheless, he then asserted that, in fact, he really was a social animal: ‘this I am suer, I never auoided cumpani: I have bene merri in cumpani: I have bene ful hardly drawn out of cumpani’.¹⁴³ The second accusation is that he has a low opinion of others and ‘culd hardly find in mi hart to commend of ani man; and that I have misliked those which bi commun consent and agreement of al have bene veri wel thout of for there lerning’. Harvey repeats his recollection of their subsequent exchange:

I thout it mi duti to speak wel of those that deserved wel; and that he miht sundry times have harde me commend mani a on, but that it pleasd him now to wrangle with me. Whereuppon he tould me roundly, that that was mi fault indeed, and that I was evermore in mi extremities, ether in commending to mutch without reason, or dispraising to mutch without cause. To the whitch I gave him no other anser but this, that he ouht to give me and others as gud leave to use our iudgments in that behalf as I and others had givn him. Stil he harped upon that string, that I culd not afford ani gud wurd. And I made him aunser, that this were great arrogance and extreme folli.¹⁴⁴

Neville’s final accusation is that Harvey made ‘smal and liht account of mi fellouship’. Harvey replied that he was stung by the accusation, that he had accepted the position to make money, retorting that he ‘culd have made better shift without’ one.¹⁴⁵

The argument is a fascinating one and tells us a great deal about life in an Elizabethan university, as well as the protagonists. It is likely that Neville, as Virginia Stern surmises, while an upstanding pillar of Cambridge in later life, was ‘less than exemplary in his youth’.¹⁴⁶ For Harvey, perhaps, the charges run deeper, and the accusation that he was a selfish, vain, and self-regarding man who was incapable of working with others is the basis of Thomas Nashe’s attack on him two decades later.¹⁴⁷ But Harvey was clearly capable of making friends when he chose to, as his relationships with figures as diverse as Smith, Spenser, and John Wolfe indicate.¹⁴⁸ Harvey also appears to have been on good terms with such serious scholars as Dr John Still (c.1544–1608), master of Trinity College, who had been Harvey’s tutor at Christ’s College and who replaced Thomas Cartwright as Lady Margaret professor of divinity in 1572, and Thomas Preston (1537–98), playwright, civil lawyer, and later master of Trinity Hall.¹⁴⁹ In their published Letters Spenser asks Harvey to keep the poems contained in his first letter ‘close to your selfe, or your verie entire friendes, Maister Preston, Masiter Still’, which indicates either that the four discussed poetry together, perhaps with others as well, or that Spenser knew that Harvey was especially close to these two learned men. Harvey also mentions Still in the fourth letter in the series, arguing that a truly learned man able to assess the significance of the recent earthquake should be ‘an excellent Philosopher, a reasonable good Historian, a learned Diuine, a wise discrete man, and generally, such a one as our Doctor Still, and Doctor Byng are in Cambridge’.¹⁵⁰ There was certainly a group of senior Cambridge academics who took Harvey seriously, discussed matters with him, and listened to his advice, unless we assume, rather implausibly, that Harvey and Spenser fabricated or misunderstood the relationship.

The root of Harvey’s quarrel with Neville may really lie in terms of what each antagonist considered the proper commitment to the university and college life. Neville accuses Harvey of not valuing his position at Pembroke; of not treating other fellows with proper respect; and of trying to use his fellowship to make himself rich, an accusation that Nashe made later when he represented the Harvey brothers as talentless and pedantic men-on-the-make.¹⁵¹ Despite Harvey’s outraged protestations of innocence, there was obviously much substance in the charges, enabling us to reconstruct how Harvey conceived of himself and how he operated at Cambridge.

Nashe, delving back into the history of Harvey’s conduct at Cambridge in Have With Yov to Saffron-Walden (1596), makes a similar accusation:

so Trinitie Hall hath borne with him more than that, he being (as one that was Fellow of the same House of his standing informed mee) neuer able to pay his Commons [college bills], but from time to time borne out in almes amongst the rest of the Fellowes: how euer he tells some of his friends he hath an out-brothership, or beadsmans stipend of ten shillings a yeare there still coming to him, and a Library worth 200. pound.¹⁵²

We do not know the identity of Nashe’s anonymous informant, but the passage indicates that Harvey’s selfish behaviour was still resented a decade later (Harvey qualified as Doctor of Laws at Trinity Hall in 1586 and probably left for London soon after this date, even though he remained a fellow of the college until 1592).¹⁵³ Nashe’s story has Harvey acquiring books for his library and tactlessly boasting of its value, while neglecting to work for the common good of his fellow scholars.

Nashe’s anecdote, when read alongside Harvey’s representation of Neville’s accusations, further suggests that Harvey placed more value in himself than his institution. The emphasis on his personal library also indicates that he was known for possessing a valuable and influential collection of books, a fact that he was keen to advertise as part of his status as a scholar and intellectual, confirming his particular value to others as an expert reader.¹⁵⁴ Harvey’s negative reputation in Cambridge helps to confirm a suspicion that he was really more committed to the circle around Sir Thomas Smith than to his college. Smith’s public relationship with John Cheke, in which the two sought to represent the interests of Cambridge to the court, appears to have been one that Harvey hoped to emulate in his relationship with Spenser, notably through the audacious act of publishing their correspondence in 1580.¹⁵⁵ By then Harvey had already positioned himself as the intellectual heir of Smith, asking Smith’s advice about the value of civil law and then studying for a Doctor of Laws around the time of Smith’s death, perhaps a symbolic act of intellectual patrilineage.¹⁵⁶

Harvey clearly had plans for Spenser and we can see his influence in Spenser’s early works. Harvey’s involvement in The Shepheardes Calender and the publication of the Letters in 1580 indicates that their relationship was extremely close until Spenser went to Ireland in the November of that year. Therefore, Spenser must have been party to Harvey’s educational methods, ideals, and goals. In the published letter dated 7 April 1580, the longest of the three sent by Harvey, which contains the discourse of the earthquake, Harvey concludes with some news from Cambridge. This section provides further evidence of Harvey’s intellectual interests and approach to his work and life, as well as his familiar relationship with Spenser and student life at Cambridge.

Harvey starts by outlining the reading habits of undergraduates, who, he claims, do not read Cicero and Demosthenes as much as they used to, concentrating instead on the historians Livy and Sallust but neglecting Lucian, and treating the Greek philosophers with indifference and contempt: ‘Aristotle muche named, but little read: Xenophon and Plato, reckned amongst Discoursers, and conceited Superficiall fellowes.’¹⁵⁷ These reading patterns do suggest serious activity, and the list of Italian authors in the following paragraph—Machiavelli, Castiglione, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Guazzo, and Aretino—indicates that Harvey’s desire to spread the study of modern languages is working well.¹⁵⁸ But, Harvey asks Spenser, ‘The French and Italian when so highlie regarded of Schollers? The Latine and Greeke, when so lightlie?’¹⁵⁹ The implication is that, while many good things are happening at Cambridge, the fundamental problem is the neglect of the central humanist project of Cheke and Smith, who had sought to reform Greek orthography so that the language and its literature could be taught more effectively and widely.¹⁶⁰ Spenser is, of course, included within Harvey’s circle of familiars, one who will understand how standards have slipped, which confirms that Spenser must have acquired a significant knowledge of Greek from Mulcaster.

Harvey caricatures the efforts of current undergraduates:

Much verball and sophisticall iangling: little subtile and effectuall disputing: noble and royall Eloquence, the best and persuasiblest Eloquence: no such Orators againe, as redhedded Angelles: An exceeding greate difference, betweene the countenances, and portes of those, that are braue and gallaunt, and of those, that are basely, or meanly apparelled: between the learned, and vnlearned, Tully, and Tom Tooly, in effect none at all.¹⁶¹

In effect, Harvey is lamenting the failure of the university to listen to him and to organize teaching according to his ideas. Instead, students have the appearance of learning without the substance, the tricks of the trade without the knowledge that those tools were supposed to provide. Students look like they are arguing but they are not because they dismiss real debate as that of ‘conceited Superficiall fellowes’. The attacks on Xenophon and Plato read suspiciously like those on Harvey by Thomas Neville, indicating that in Harvey’s mind he has become the heir of true Greek scholarship, the intellectual son of Sir Thomas Smith, a sly reference surely designed for Spenser to enjoy. The students, meanwhile, have declined under the foolish charge of the Cambridge authorities, becoming ‘redhedded Angelles’ rather than skilled orators. The reference is to the story of St Augustine of Canterbury, the missionary sent to convert the Anglo-Saxons by Pope Gregory, who, on being told that the golden-haired English boys in the Roman marketplace were Angles, quipped that they should be called Angels not Angles.¹⁶² Harvey uses the story to indicate that Cambridge has turned the clock back and transformed its once brilliant students, like Spenser, into ignorant English boys who cannot see the real value of reading Plato and Xenophon in Greek. One can distinguish undergraduates by the clothes they wear: the wealthy are able to flaunt their riches while the relatively impoverished are ‘meanly apparelled’. But it is impossible to distinguish them in terms of their learning: a budding young Cicero (Tully) cannot be distinguished from a yokel (Tom Tooly). Harvey addresses Spenser in terms that draw him into obvious agreement with the letter-writer, signalling to other readers that they share a series of jokes, and can easily read each other’s references: both understand that things are not what they used to be and, in communicating at such an advanced level, are helping to restore proper humanist values. There is a familiar humour between the teacher and his former student, based on subtle references and deft puns, some obvious to any reader, others more difficult to discern, that define them as part of a university culture of wits, a corollary to their shared investment in the humanist educational project.

Harvey complains that the students now neglect Lucian, the most humorous and witty of Latin authors. As Harvey would have known, Lucian was the favourite author of Erasmus and Thomas More, a writer who lay behind their culture of banter and shared jokes and without whom the style and substance of Utopia and In Praise of Folly would have been impossible to achieve.¹⁶³ In Harvey’s eyes, his exchange of witty and familiar letters with Spenser carries on the proper traditions of Cambridge learning, combining the skill and elegance of jests with serious intellectual substance, exactly what a humanist education demanded, making them the true heirs of Erasmus and More, as well as Cheke and Smith.¹⁶⁴ Harvey’s copy of A Merye Jeste of a man called Howleglas (c.1528) contains a substantial annotation that provides further evidence of the importance of Lucian in Spenser and Harvey’s culture of humanist wit (Figure 2):

This Howeletglasse, with Skoggin, Skelton, and L[a]zarill, given by me at London of M^r Spensar XX. Decembris 1[5]78, on condition [I] should bestowe the reading of them over, before the first of January [imme]diately ensuing: otherwise to forfeit unto him my Lucian in fower volumes. Whereupon I was the rather induced to trifle away so many howers, as were idely overpassed in running thorowgh the [foresaid] foolish Bookes: wherein methowgh[t] not all fower together seemed comparable for s[u]tle & crafty feates with Jon Miller whose witty shiftes, & practices ar reported amongst Skeltons Tales.¹⁶⁵

It is possible that Spenser acquired these works as a schoolboy, as they were all printed by Thomas Colwel, who had a printshop near the Merchants Taylors’ School.¹⁶⁶ The annotation shows how much Harvey valued Lucian, which is presumably why Spenser conceived the joke of forcing his teacher to read three books of more obviously popular culture and one recently translated and voguish novel, knowing it would stretch Harvey’s literary horizons. Harvey’s tone betrays an irritation at being taken away from more serious reading matter, perhaps with a hint of self-irony, indicating that Spenser already had the ability and the desire to goad his master, and probably resented Harvey’s assumption of superiority and need to mould his charge in his own image. Harvey’s comment appears to suggest that Spenser was eager to test the boundaries and limits of Harvey’s Cambridge culture and to show him that humour did not begin and end with the classics. After all, More and Erasmus enjoyed jest books like Howleglas and A Hundred Merry Tales, proving that popular culture was everyone’s culture, especially when it came to humour, a lesson that Harvey appears to have resisted—at least, in part.¹⁶⁷ We get a glimpse of Spenser exploiting his status as Harvey’s student, treating his mentor with a certain degree of gentle mockery in opening his eyes to a new world of bawdy and scurrilous jest books. Harvey records that he enjoyed the jests of Skelton best, perhaps because of their more conspicuously literary qualities, and because they were less hard-edged and grotesque in style, certainly in comparison to the scatological nature of Howleglas’s jests and the picaresque Spanish novel, Lazarillo de Tormes, as well as the hard-edged cruelty of Scoggin’s jests.¹⁶⁸ Skelton’s jests have particular significance because of Spenser’s adoption of the persona of Colin Clout, appropriated from Spenser’s poetry. Moreover, the rights to Lazarillo were bought by Bynemann in 1573—although it was not published until 1586 (by Abel Jeffries) and Spenser clearly read the work, probably with Harvey, and used phrases from it in Mother Hubberds Tale, providing some evidence that an early version of this work did exist.¹⁶⁹

Figure 2. Gabriel Harvey’s annotations in his copy of Howleglas. Reproduced with kind permission of the Bodleian Library.

The copy contains a number of underlinings and a few notes, mainly on the table of contents at the end of the volume, indicating that, whatever he thought about the book, Harvey read it carefully. Next to the chapter headings, ‘How Howleglas would fly from a house top’ and ‘How Howleglas wore a piece of cloth’, Harvey has written ‘Scoggins patterns’, showing that he was able to make connections between the different jest books, so he had evidently taken Spenser’s wager seriously.¹⁷⁰ One annotation is especially significant. Above the chapter title ‘How Howleglas feared his host was a dead woulfe’ Harvey has written ‘great braggadocchio’.¹⁷¹ The OED provides the definition of the word as ‘An empty, idle boaster; a swaggerer’, and gives the first citation as Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller (1594). Nashe was adopting the term from the first edition of The Faerie Queene, as the character, Braggadocchio, first appears near the start of Book II, and plays a minor but significant role in the next three Books.¹⁷² Harvey’s use of the term in 1578 provides further evidence that he read early drafts of the poem while Spenser was first writing it, and that he must have had a major influence on the poetic direction that Spenser took in this period. Harvey’s main contribution, as we might expect and as the note implies, was undoubtedly in persuading Spenser to take a keen interest in Italian literature and culture, adding another layer to Mulcaster’s French and Dutch influences.

Harvey’s picture of Cambridge life also includes an attack on Andrew Perne (1519?–89), master of Peterhouse:

And wil you needes haue my Testimoniall of youre olde Controllers new behauior? A busy and dizy heade, a brazen forhead: a leaden braine: a wodden wit: a copper face: a stony breast: a factious and eluish hearte: a founder of nouelties: a confounder of his owne, and his friends good gifts: a morning bookworme, an afternoone maltworm: a right Iuggler, as ful of his sleights, wyles, fetches, casts of Legerdmaine, toyes to mocke Apes withal, odd shiftes, and knauish practises, as his skin can holde. He often telleth me, he looueth me as himselfe, but out lyar out, thou lyest abhominably in they throate.¹⁷³

By the early years of Elizabeth’s reign Perne was notorious as a turncoat, changing his religion to ingratiate himself with each new regime and each new change in religious policy. But Perne was also a powerful diplomatic figure, who ‘served his university very well through a period of sustained danger to its very existence’. The qualities that Harvey lampooned were also those of a diplomat prepared to put the survival of the institution above the integrity of the individual.¹⁷⁴ Perne had his defenders, and Nashe attacked Harvey’s words in Have With You to Saffron-Walden, referring to Harvey’s ‘impudent brazen-fac’d defamation of Doctor Perne’, the echo of the word ‘brazen’ proving that Harvey’s verbal assault was indeed understood to have been aimed at Perne.¹⁷⁵ Harvey had a sustained and unpleasant series of public quarrels with Perne, culminating in an unseemly dispute at Sir Thomas Smith’s funeral about Harvey’s acquisition of some manuscripts that had been in Smith’s possession. Perne then successfully opposed Harvey’s appointment as university orator in 1580, after Harvey had written to Burghley requesting the post. Perne persuaded the incumbent, Richard Bridgewater, to continue.

It is easy to see why Harvey and Perne disliked each other so much: Perne saw his task as preserving the intellectual health and success of Cambridge; Harvey felt the university’s success was limited and was eager to transform it in his own image. Perne appears to have seen Harvey as Nashe saw him later, a brash and arrogant upstart. Harvey, as his comments indicate, saw Perne as a conservative time-server, dangerously unimaginative and ossified by the university’s traditions. Yet again we have evidence of the clash of cultures, demonstrating that Harvey was clearly at odds with his fellows.

The rhetorical question that opens the description is intriguing. Harvey refers to Perne as Spenser’s ‘olde Controller’, which enables him to suggest that he is, in fact, defending Spenser in providing him with a spirited attack on the character and behaviour of an old enemy. However, the evidence that we have suggests that it was Harvey who was Perne’s real bête noire. Either Harvey is being especially tactless in transferring the opprobrium from himself to Spenser, or Spenser also fell foul of Perne at some point when he was a student.¹⁷⁶ The most likely explanation is a combination of the two, that Perne took against both men because they were flouting what he saw as the proper spirit of the university in establishing an alternative educational network. Harvey was clearly criticized for his comments on Cambridge, and later felt the need to apologize to ‘that flourishing Vniversitie, my deere Mother’ in Fowre Letters and certaine Sonnets (1592).¹⁷⁷ This is the first real evidence we have of Spenser antagonizing one of his superiors, a pattern that was to define his life and career.

Harvey was also attacked by other scholars.¹⁷⁸ He was satirized at the same time in a Latin play performed at Trinity College in 1581. Edward Forsett (1553/4–1629/30), a contemporary of both Harvey and Spenser, represents his central character in Pedantius as a ludicrous schoolmaster who speaks in an orotund Ciceronian style and argues using the most absurd chop logic.¹⁷⁹ He is also a vain dandy, ambitious and arrogant, with a self-professed Italian appearance: ‘I shall comport myself so picturesquely that everyone shall say he perceives the very mirror of Tuscanism in this my Italian counternance.’¹⁸⁰ Harvey had been described by Elizabeth as having ‘the face, the look of an Italian’, when he was introduced to her on her progress to Audley End on 26 July 1578, suggesting that Forsett knew what was going on and that Harvey’s reputation for self-regard and vanity was widespread.¹⁸¹ Certainly Nashe made the connection, referring to Pedantius as a satire of Harvey in both Fovre Letters Confuted (1592) and Have With You to Saffron-Walden:

What will you giue mee when I bring him vppon the Stage in one of the principallest Colledges in Cambridge? Lay anie wager with me, and I will; or, if you laye no wager at all, Ile fetch him aloft in Pedantius, that exquisite Comedie in Trinitie Colledge; where, vnder the chiefe part, from which it tooke his name, as namely the concise and firking finicaldo fine School-master, hee was full drawn & delineated from the solar of the foote to the crowne of his head. The iust manner of his phrase in his Orations and Disputations they stufft his mouth with, & no Buffianisme throughout his whole bookes but they bolstred out his part with.¹⁸²

The character Pedantius habitually argues in a careless, analogical manner, allowing connections that occur within his meandering train of thought to become what he thinks of as logical arguments, deluding himself in the process, but actually fooling no one. Pedantius is contrasted to his fellow academic, the scholastic and equally ludicrous Dromodotus, each representing equal and opposite forms of facile reasoning and the abuse of language. Pedantius starts to explain to Dromodotus why he is different from self-interested academics who wish to pursue careers at court:

As for myself, I don’t care a fig for those snooty judges of whom you speak. I don’t care a groat’s worth, I scorn ’em, I despise ’em. Is it not the case that your academics now dress up and play at being courtiers, though there are not to be compared to me in point of genius or authority? And furthermore, ‘when in Rome do as the Romans do,’ where one’s life is measured by one’s dress, diction, manner of eating and drinking, and so forth. And the Court is a kind of Rome, and I a courtier, a sort of Roman. (III.v, lines 1–7)

Pedantius argues in such a loose manner, entirely without rigour, that he is able to end up at the opposite point where he started, initially denying that he has any interest in a public career but concluding that he would make a better courtier than his rivals. The spurious connection is provided through the link made in Pedantius’ confused mind between the court and Rome, and his citation of the proverb, ‘When in Rome do as the Romans do’, which justifies his elevation to the court because he values himself more highly than his rivals. This speech, like so many others, satirizes Ramist logic and its use of appropriate places or topics to make a case via a series of analogies so that dialectic becomes a tool of a predetermined argument rather than a real one.¹⁸³ It also exposes Harvey as a hypocrite and shows how well known his aspirations were throughout Cambridge.

Pedantius has two pupils, Ludio and Bletus. Ludio is clearly the superior student, and the first to appear in the play, later in the same scene:

Lud: Here I am, most learned receptor.

Ped: Ah, see! Ludio, you sweetly eloquent lad, although I am in truth your most learned and most learning-dispensing preceptor, now, now I say, after I have been raised to higher and loftier station of dignity, you must henceforth address me in this wise: ‘most honourable master, most worthy Maecenas’, and ‘if it please your highness’. These are the amplicative formulae of the rhetoricians. Procede.

Lud: Most honourable master, my worthy Maecenas, I shall always satisfy my every duty, or rather my pious obligation, towards you, in which I can never do enough to satisfy myself.

Ped: What a most Ciceronian young man! (One must employ a vocabulary of super-Latin superlatives, to keep the child happy). Now do you grasp the importance of garthering some more than familiar phrases from Cicero’s letters to his familiars? (lines 53–66)

It is more than likely that Ludio is a satire of Spenser, who would have been associated with Harvey in 1581 after the publication of the Letters, which looked back to their Cambridge days together.¹⁸⁴ Forsett casts Spenser as a precocious, sycophantic student, ever eager to please his ridiculous master. Harvey is, yet again, shown to be unable to understand the advice he so desperately wants to hand out in order to further his own designs and status. Not only does he have a poor grasp of what Cicero actually says and simply uses his name as a means of recommending endless amplification—the common critique of Ciceronianism—but he fails to understand the allusions he makes.¹⁸⁵ Harvey demands that his recent success entitles him to the title of Maecenas, but he does not know that Gaius Cilnius Maecenas (70–8 BCE) was a wealthy nobleman in Augustan Rome, chiefly remembered for his patronage of major poets, and his close friendship with Horace. If Pedantius was really the great classical scholar he claimed to be, he would have known this, simply from reading Horace’s Satires and Tacitus’ Annals, hardly obscure volumes in Elizabethan England.¹⁸⁶ Failing to read satire makes one all the more likely to fall victim to it. Pedantius, like Harvey it is implied, wishes to be celebrated for his patronage of a talented young poet, but has forgotten—or simply failed to understand—the limitations of his own role and his dependency on the ability of his younger charge.

Casting Spenser as an enthusiastic schoolboy further suggests that the aspiring poet is equally naive and does not realize the extent of his talent. For now, his speech has become infected with the sub-Ciceronian verbiage that he has learned from his incompetent master. In the next scene Pedantius continues his suit for Lydia with Ludio faithfully supporting his master in ways that only diminish his chance of success, presumably a sardonic assessment of the malign effect that Spenser and Harvey’s relationship had on each other. When Pedantius is rebuffed, Ludio comments: ‘Honourable Maecenas, it would seem this woman is slanderous and chatterous. Since this does not suit your nobility, do you wish me to heap her with insults culled out of Cicero and Terence?’ (III.vi, lines 25–7). He contributes a number of rather inept insults, which are really attacks on Lydia’s inability to see Pedantius’ true worth, culminating in ‘If you were aware what manner of children he could beget, you would never refuse him. From Day One his son will be a pure Cicero, a pure Terence; in the first hour of his birth he will cry for his book’ (lines 111–13). Lydia shows herself to be a better satirist than Pedantius and his supporters, a master of the appropriate insult when she eventually retorts, ‘Was your mother accustomed to eat paper, that you would suck books out of her tits?’ (lines 117–18). For all their learning, Pedantius and Ludio are unable to wield language as they would wish, and as Pedantius boasts he can.

Pedantius shows how Spenser and Harvey were seen by their critics in Cambridge, partly motivated, no doubt, by the insults delivered to the university in the recently published Letters and Harvey’s attempts to establish alternative means of educating the serious youth of England under his auspices. Harvey is seen warping and distorting Spenser’s intellectual gifts, and, simultaneously, dependent on his talents for all his assumption of mastery, a criticism repeated several years later by Nashe, who alleged that Harvey would never leave his ‘olde trickes of drawing M. Spenser into euerie pybald thing’ he did—exactly what Pedantius does when he allows his pupil to accompany him when out courting.¹⁸⁷ The play undoubtedly had a significant influence on a generation of students who attended the production, many of whom would have played an important role in English civic and cultural life, and it certainly helped to cement the reputation of Harvey as a myopic, pompous pedant, unable to perceive the heart of any matter. The Parnassus Plays, performed at Cambridge a generation later (1598–1602/3), written in the wake of the Nashe–Harvey quarrel, satirize Ramism, and appear to contain a number of sharp references to Harvey, who may be allegorically represented by the figure Luxurio. Interestingly enough, however, they display an intimate knowledge of Spenser’s works, imitating phrases and refrains, and heap scorn on characters foolish enough to criticize him. Spenser is now seen as a touchstone of literary merit, suggesting that by the time of his death he was no longer identified as Harvey’s stooge.¹⁸⁸

Of course, this negative assessment of their relationship ignores what Harvey probably did help Spenser achieve. Harvey clearly stimulated and expanded Spenser’s interest in rhetoric, literature, and languages. In 1592 a translation of Axiochus, a pseudo-Platonic dialogue, was published by Cuthbert Burby, about to play an important role in English literary history as the publisher of many of Robert Greene’s works. Axiochus was his first book.¹⁸⁹ Attached to the dialogue in a separate printing was ‘a sweet speech or Oration, spoken at the Tryumphe at White-hall before her Maiesties, by the Page to the right noble Earle of Oxenforde’. Why the two works were produced together is a mystery, especially given Spenser and Harvey’s sniping at Oxford in the Letters, although it is possible that the speech was included ‘at a late stage as a supplement to bulk out a short pamphlet’.¹⁹⁰ It is most likely that Burby, who had links with Oxford and his literary clients, notably Robert Greene, acquired the first part of this broken-backed volume from Spenser’s major publisher, William Ponsonby (1546?–1604).¹⁹¹ The translation was attributed to ‘Edw. Spenser’ and dedicated to Benedict Barnham (1558/9–98), a wealthy member of the Drapers’ Company and alderman from Eastcheap, past the Tower of London where Spenser probably grew up.¹⁹² Spenser’s authorship has been vigorously disputed and a case has been made for Anthony Munday (1560–1633), who was at school with Barnham, both being members of the Drapers’ Company. The mistake with the name does not serve as real evidence, as Spenser’s full name had not yet been produced in print, and was often cited as ‘Edward’ elsewhere.¹⁹³ The author of the dedicatory letter to Barnham does refer to their ‘younger yeeres’ when they ‘were Schollers together’, but he was probably not the translator.¹⁹⁴ Moreover, there are echoes of Axiochus in Spenser’s description of Acrasia’s Bower which would seem to affirm his authorship beyond any reasonable doubt.¹⁹⁵ It is possible that the volume was a work of literary piracy, given Burby’s eagerness to flout the control of the Stationers’ Company, along with John Wolfe, Gabriel Harvey’s friend and ally in the publishing trade.¹⁹⁶ Or, it might have been passed on to Burby by Ponsonby, as Ponsonby often had good relations with other publishers, but this is unlikely, given Ponsonby’s investment in Spenser. Burby later published Richard Johnson’s Seven Champions of Christendom, a prose epic which told the legend of St George (among others), clearly designed to exploit Spenser’s popularity for a new, more middlebrow, audience, which suggests an interest in and knowledge of the commercial possibilities of Spenser’s work, and even, perhaps, some knowledge of the writer himself.¹⁹⁷ The work was partly printed by John Charlewood (d. 1593), and partly by John Danter (fl. 1589–99), both associated with Ponsonby, but also well known as literary pirates (Charlewood, who was singled out by the Stationers’ Company as a persistent offender against literary privileges, along with John Wolfe, printed the first unauthorized edition of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella for Thomas Newman in 1591).¹⁹⁸ Spenser had become famous—and notorious—in the wake of the publication of the first edition of The Faerie Queene and the Complaints, and the publication of Axiochus was probably a scheme to make use of his fame, the bookseller having acquired what was either believed to be, or, possibly, could have been passed off as, his work. The ‘speech spoken at the Tryumph before the Queen’, printed by Charlewoood, also included in the volume, is almost certainly transcribed, remembered, or written by Munday, an Oxford client.¹⁹⁹

Axiochus was translated into French by Philippe du Plessis Mornay, and then appeared as the first treatise in Six Excellent Treatises of Life and Death collected (and published in French) by Philip Mornay, sieur du Plessis; and now (first) translated into English, published by Matthew Lownes in 1607, a publisher with a keen interest in the works of Sidney and Spenser, who had entered A View into the Stationers’ Register in 1598 and later published the first folio edition of The Faerie Queene.²⁰⁰ Lownes was also responsible for the reprint of a separate edition of Mornay’s A Discourse of Life and Death: written in French by Phil. Mornay. Done in English by the Countesse of Pembroke in 1606, first published by Ponsonby in 1592, suggesting that Axiochus was closely connected to the Sidney circle, and had associations with both of Spenser’s printers.²⁰¹ Even if Axiochus was not translated by Spenser it was certainly perceived as a work that he could have produced, an indication that he was regarded as a writer who had emerged from an intellectual culture at school and university that valued Greek as well as Latin.²⁰²

Assuming that Axiochus was translated by Spenser rather than Munday, the dialogue reads like a relatively early work, and would date from Spenser’s schooldays or from his period at Cambridge, perhaps produced as an educational exercise.²⁰³ Either way, it seems appropriate to link the text to Spenser’s education and to suggest that the translation either led him to Harvey, one of the tutors at Cambridge most eager to disseminate Greek literature—especially, of course, in his role as lecturer in Greek—or was produced as a result of Harvey’s tuition.²⁰⁴

Axiochus is not a remarkable work and shows the wise Socrates leading the confused and terrified protagonist towards an acceptance that death, far from being an end, leads the individual to a higher form of existence. It stands as a commonplace example of Christian Stoicism, popular because of the attempt to link such classical figures as Seneca and Socrates to Christian doctrines and values, as well as an intellectual and cultural counterpart to the Fowre Hymnes.²⁰⁵ Towards the end of the dialogue Socrates explains to Axiochus how lucky he is to be dying:

Wherefor nowe O Axiochus, thou art not in the way to death, but to immortality, neither shalt thou (as thou didst seeme right now to feare) bee bereft of all good, but shall hereby enioy true and perfect good: Neither shalt thou perceiue such durty pleasures as are these, beeing mingled with the puddle of this sinfull body, but most pure and perfect delight being deuiod of all contagious trouble. For beeing loosed and deliuered out of the darksome dungeons of this body, thou shalt passe to that place where is no lacke nor complaint, but all things full of rest, and deuoid of euill.

Moreouer there is calme and quiet liuing without all knowledge of vnrest, peaceable and still occupied in beholding the course & frame of Nature, and studying Philosophy, not to please the idle ignorant and common sort, but with vpright and vndeceiuable truth.²⁰⁶

Socrates shows Axiochus that true philosophy will lead to an understanding of both natural and supernatural worlds, equipping the thinker with true wisdom and so ready to accept death as a release from the pains of life. The dialogue leads the reader towards this Christian Platonic ideal, in which Nature is a bad copy of divine forms, alluding to the famous shadows in the cave in the Republic and the awareness that the truth can only be perceived after death.²⁰⁷ Axiochus is suitably grateful to Socrates for drawing him closer to enlightenment, and he states that he is no longer dreading his demise, but actually looking forward to it:

O Socrates with this gladsome speech thous hast now brought mee into a cleane contrary minde, for so farre am I nowe from dread of death, that I am euen set on fire and burne with desire thereof. And that I may stay my selfe in the steppes of them which are counted workemasters of speech, I will say thus much more excellently, Now I begin to behold those high matters, and doo ouerlooke that aeternall and heauenly course of things, hauing now raysed vp my selfe out of my weaknes, and being as it were renued and refreshed of my former malady.²⁰⁸

Such Neoplatonism sounds more like Ficino, or even the Eroici Furori of Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), who was well known to the Sidneys and their circle, than Plato, indicating that the Axiochus was a later work, perhaps a neo-Pythagorean work of the first century BCE.²⁰⁹ Moreover, Charlewood was also the London printer of Bruno’s works in English and Italian, possibly suggesting a further link between the circle of authors and printers.²¹⁰ A true Socratic work would have consisted of a much more rigorous dialogue which would not have led to such a straightforwardly consoling conclusion, one that no reader is likely to challenge.²¹¹

Axiochus’ burning desire to confront death and to understand the mysteries of life, and his belief that there is a hidden reality that lies behind the surface of the natural world, resembles nothing so much in Spenser’s work as the first two of the Fowre Hymns. The translation of Axiochus should probably be dated to a similar period in Spenser’s literary career, the product of either a precocious schoolboy or a talented and intellectually curious undergraduate. How seriously Spenser took the mixture of Neoplatonic philosophy and commonplace wisdom of Axiochus is hard to tell. Certainly it is difficult to imagine that he had anything to do with its publication, undoubtedly some years after it was written, suggesting that the publishers found an old copy and saw an opportunity that they could exploit, now that Spenser was an established literary name.²¹²

Spenser graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in 1573. To graduate, a candidate had to have spent twelve terms at the university (usually a period of four years), and to have passed the college examinations in responsiones and oppositiones and the university’s examinations, in the form of a series of philosophical disputations.²¹³ At this point the praelector (at Cambridge, a college fellow who formally presents students to the university at matriculation and graduation) submits a supplicat, asking for the degree to be conferred before the vice-chancellor and university senate. The process took place before Ash Wednesday (in 1573, this was 4 February, the earliest possible date), and the degree was then conferred during the six and a half weeks of Lent, before Palm Sunday. Spenser graduated eleventh out of the supplicats for the BA, third among those from Pembroke, a position that may have some reflection on his academic achievements.²¹⁴ Nine more terms of study later (usually three years) the Bachelor of Arts could answer questions from Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, complete other suitable exercises, and submit to become a Master of Arts, generally in early July. Spenser applied in July 1576, numbered sixty-seven in the list of seventy supplicats, and graduated as an MA.²¹⁵ His position in the list has led to some scepticism as to whether the list orders were based simply on merit, and certainly the list in the Grace book makes it clear that the Pembroke graduates were examined late in the examination period (26 June), which would explain why they came near the end of the list.²¹⁶ It is possible that Spenser left Cambridge in January 1574 and was already employed for much of the period he was registered, as there is evidence that the formal requirements for residency for an MA were not strictly applied at this time. Moreover, it is possible that Spenser did not return to Cambridge after 1573 when an aegrotat shows that he was absent for the last six weeks of the academic year owing to a severe outbreak of plague during which the university was ‘practically disbanded’. The vice-chancellor, Andrew Perne, wrote to Burghley expressing his concern about the effects of the university on the poor people in the town, as the disease spread most quickly in areas of narrow streets, a noticeable feature of even the more affluent areas of the town. Fellows and students were advised to stay away from Cambridge, or to stay inside and shut their doors.²¹⁷ It is also possible that Spenser applied for but was not elected to a fellowship at Pembroke or another college, perhaps because of his association with Harvey, but there is no evidence for this.²¹⁸ Spenser may have left the university a long time before he graduated for the second time and was already employed elsewhere.