7
  
Back to England

LATER in the year in which he obtained Kilcolman, Spenser returned to England for an extended visit, one of two that he was to make before his final crossing in 1598. An entry in the Irish Chancery Recognizances for 18 June 1589 states that Edmund Spenser of Cork was to provide security for the delivery of James Shropp to Newgate.¹ The entry further states that Spenser was bound for the sum of £100 to Richard Spence to carry out this and another obligation, the recovery of £30 owed by Richard Brysse to Richard Crowther, deceased.² We know nothing of any of these figures, only one of whom, Brysse, appears elsewhere in the State Papers, or why Shropp was being sent to Newgate, but the entry might suggest that Spenser left Ireland relatively early in the year, unless he simply stood security for the delivery of the prisoner.³ It shows that he remained a trusted servant of the crown, which further suggests that he may have travelled to England on official business on other occasions. For this visit, Spenser passed over his duties as deputy clerk to the Munster Council to Richard Chichester, who had become the constable of Limerick Castle on 16 September 1588, and was, therefore, probably another figure associated with the Norris brothers.⁴ The timing of the journey indicates that Spenser had probably already occupied Kilcolman for some time, had the estate in good running order, and was thus able to hand on responsibilities to a trusted team of settlers under a bailiff. His departure demonstrates that there were others who could undertake his duties for the Munster Council, and that this may have been a regular practice. It is also possible that he may have chosen to leave Ireland at this point because Machabyas had died, perhaps recently.

Spenser’s visit is closely associated with his relationship with Ralegh, and the common image we have of Ralegh and Spenser discussing poetry over their pipes begins with the story that Spenser stayed with Ralegh at Myrtle Grove, next to St Mary’s church, before embarking together for England, the two having spent the best part of the summer together at Kilcolman.⁵ According to Francis Allen, Ralegh retreated to Ireland after he was chased from the court by the queen’s new favourite, the earl of Essex.⁶ However, the only solid evidence of Spenser’s friendship with Ralegh is what Spenser tells us in his dedication to Ralegh prefacing Colin Clouts come home againe, and the Letter, dated 23 January 1589, appended to the first edition of The Faerie Queene. Nowhere in his own published and unpublished writings does Ralegh mention Spenser, outside the dedicatory poems which he contributed to The Faerie Queene.⁷ It is only after Ralegh’s death that we have evidence—albeit problematic—outside Spenser’s writings that Ralegh knew Spenser, through the annotations made by Ralegh’s widow, Elizabeth Throckmorton, in the 1617 folio of Spenser’s Works owned by their son, Carew.⁸ Lady Ralegh’s bizarre claim that she was the object of Colin’s fruitless devotion in Colin Clouts, writing ‘E. Throkemorton his mistris’ in the margin of the copy she gave to their son, Carew, next to lines 464–79, complicates rather than clarifies the evidence of a relationship between Ralegh and Spenser. The poem later reveals that the lady is actually Rosalind, a figure of Spenser’s wife, rather than ‘a fourth Elizabeth in Spenser’s life’.⁹ Lady Ralegh’s marginal note suggests that she knew little of her husband’s interaction with Spenser beyond rumour and hearsay, perhaps because she never went to Ireland. More significantly, the note provides further evidence that Ralegh’s relationship with Spenser was not a friendship of much substance or longevity and Lady Ralegh was trying to show her son that his father and mother were immortalized by a famous poet. Had their marriage not been revealed at the point that it was, things might have been different and Ralegh might have been able to advance his client.¹⁰ Certainly, Lady Ralegh’s comments suggest that 1589–90 was the one time when the two men knew each other.

Spenser and Ralegh clearly had a literary relationship and read each other’s poetry.¹¹ In ‘A Letter of the Authors’ (Letter to Ralegh), Spenser claims that he represented Queen Elizabeth as the Faerie Queene, in places ‘fashioning her name according to your [Ralegh’s] owne excellent conceipt of Cynthia’.¹² This statement suggests that Spenser read Ralegh’s ‘Cynthia’ poems before he wrote his own major poem, although he clearly did not adopt Ralegh’s courtly hyper-Petrarchanism wholesale, and was eager to distinguish his own work from that of Ralegh.¹³ As Jean Brink has pointed out, the Letter should be dated, as it is in the first edition of The Faerie Queene, 23 January 1589, before Spenser set out for England and before he acquired official possession of Kilcolman.¹⁴ The Letter then reads as an appeal for support from Ralegh, as well as a means of advertising Spenser’s connection with a rising star at the court, which in 1589, Ralegh clearly was. Ralegh’s rise had been meteoric in the 1580s, partly driven by the poems that he wrote for the queen—a major reason why he was such an astute choice for Spenser as an advocate in 1589.

Moreover, it looks as if Spenser was in urgent need of support for his work in the late 1580s, as his publishing career had ground to a halt—although he was undoubtedly involved in the second and third editions of The Shepheardes Calender in 1581 and 1586—and it was probably hard to place The Faerie Queene with a publisher.¹⁵ Certainly the rather plain and uninspiring form in which the first edition of the poem appeared suggests that economy was an important consideration. The poem was published by John Wolfe for William Ponsonby in 1590, in a blockish quarto format, with no annotations, a form that does not seem appropriate for such an ambitious, innovative, and challenging work. Perhaps Wolfe was chosen as a matter of expediency rather than for his publishing skills, the deciding factor being the need to have Spenser proofread the work quickly before he returned to Ireland.¹⁶ Certainly, there is a stark contrast between the 1590 Faerie Queene and the elaborate folio of Sir John Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso, published a year later by Richard Field, who was responsible for the significantly more ornate second edition of Spenser’s poem in 1596, by which time Spenser had become a much more celebrated figure.¹⁷ Field’s printing—he also printed the Arcadia (for Ponsonby), and later Shakespeare’s narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece—was far superior to that of John Wolfe.¹⁸

That Spenser and Ralegh encountered each other is clear enough; that they read each other’s work is also evident; that they had mutual connections, common interests, and the opportunity to be closely acquainted, is also beyond doubt.¹⁹ Whether they were ever really friendly is open to question, as the evidence that survives comes from only one of them. And, whatever relationship they had, whether it was friendship, or that of a patron and client, evidently went badly wrong later.²⁰ Were Ralegh and Spenser literary conspirators in the ways in which Harvey and Spenser had been? It is worth thinking about the two friendships together. Spenser had learned about the sly tactical use of the letter from Harvey, and the importance that many in high places gave to letters. The Letter to Ralegh sounds very like Harvey’s letters to Spenser written a decade earlier, a resemblance that cannot be accidental. It should be no surprise that Spenser, more than any other late Elizabethan writer, made clever use of published letters and paratexts after the intellectual training he had received. Spenser’s Letter is designed to give the reader the impression that he was closely connected to the courtier, discussed literature with him, and was treated as an equal as well as a client. Subsequent commentators have followed Spenser’s representation of their relationship. Writing about his method, Spenser apparently provides an insight into the ways in which his mind functioned, a description that bears an uncanny resemblance to the level of intellectual discussion throughout the Harvey–Spenser Letters and Spenser’s own comments on the dedication of the Calender:

By ensample of which excellente Poets [Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, Tasso], I labour to pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a braue knight, perfected in the twelve priuate morall vertues, as Aristotle hath deuised, the which is the purpose of these first twelue bookes: which if I finde to be wel accepted, I may be perhaps encoraged, to frame the other part of polliticke vertues in his person, after that hee came to be king. To some I know this Methode will seeme displeasaunt, which had rather haue good discipline deliuered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large, as they vse, then thus clowdily enrapped in Alegoricall deuises. (Spenser, Faerie Queene, pp. 715–16)

The Letter has an obvious function as an advertisement—again, much like the earlier Letters. As Richard McCabe has argued, the commentary ‘is better understood as an attempt to generate rather than to provide exegesis’.²¹ The Faerie Queene is shown to be an extraordinarily ambitious poem that attempts to combine the values of the best poets of the ancient and modern worlds, so going beyond their achievements and making English poetry the most sophisticated that has ever existed. What the Calender did for the history of pastoral poetry, The Faerie Queene will do for epic, combined with romance to produce a new hybrid form.²² The author, while expressing some doubt as to whether the poem will prove too challenging and experimental for many readers, announces that he has a great deal more to come if readers find his work stimulating. And, like the Calender, Spenser tells the reader that the poem is full of games and surprises—exactly what Elizabethan readers enjoyed—not always meaning what it says.²³ Just as the Letters served in part as a showcase of the work and talents of Harvey and Spenser, so does the Letter to Ralegh, claiming that Spenser had perhaps as many as twenty-four books on moral virtues planned, a claim we should not take seriously as a statement of intent at this stage of his career. Altogether, the Letter shows what Spenser had learned about printing and publishing from the first stage of his writing life, forming a neat bridge between the two stages and providing further evidence that he had thought carefully about how to relaunch his poetry now that he had acquired an estate and obtained his independence. The Letter cannot, therefore, be taken as a direct statement of his aims and plans, or as irrefutable evidence of his intimacy with Ralegh.

Moreover, the Letter was placed after the poem, before the commendatory verses, one of which was by Ralegh, and the dedicatory sonnets, one of which was to Ralegh. The decision to place the Letter at the back was unusual, suggesting that, in Darryl Gless’s words, ‘Even if the Letter does represent an authentic formulation of Spenser’s intentions … it could have influenced few actual readings.’²⁴ The position of these paratextual materials ‘set this edition apart’ among early modern books, suggesting moreover that Spenser was trying to assert his independence as a poet, placing the value of his work over and above that of the patrons and aristocrats to whom he had to dedicate the poem, deliberately challenging and correcting readers’ expectations.²⁵ Placing the prefatory material last looks like yet another example of calculated rudeness by the poet, but also an attempt to show that direct communication between writer and reader was both possible and desirable.²⁶ The Letter was not included in the 1596 edition of The Faerie Queene. Ralegh had fallen from favour, but it had probably done its job and there was no longer a need for the author to correct readers’ errors. Even so, it had probably caused some measure of offence, not least to its addressee.²⁷

Spenser and Ralegh may well have sailed over to England together, but there is no corroborating evidence that they did so beyond Spenser’s own claims. It is most likely that their relationship was one of convenience with an uncertain Spenser eager to attach himself to the rising star at court. Ralegh had come from a relatively humble background, like Sir Thomas Smith, wrote allegorical poetry, and was perhaps the only figure at court who could appreciate what Spenser was trying to do in his work.²⁸ Ralegh, in turn, may well have realized the value of Spenser’s support, especially as he had already started to court Elizabeth Throckmorton and must have realized that trouble would be in store for him with the queen. The alliance of a brilliant poet, whom Ralegh could rediscover and relaunch, would help his cause (and the award of a pension to Spenser indicates that his instincts were indeed sound). Elizabeth jealously policed the private lives of her ladies-in-waiting and showed little tolerance for any who formed independent attachments, most significantly, when another favourite, Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, married Lettice Knollys in 1578, an event to which Spenser had referred rather contemptuously in the Calender.²⁹ In pointed contrast, Spenser defended Ralegh with considerable—albeit ambiguous—vigour in the second edition of The Faerie Queene.³⁰

There is also no real evidence that Spenser attended court and read his poetry aloud to the queen, as has commonly been assumed, although it is possible that he did do this.³¹ The dedication of The Faerie Queene to Elizabeth does not tell us anything, given the vast number of books dedicated to the queen for a variety of motives.³² It is clear, however, that the visit was a success in one important detail, in that Elizabeth awarded Spenser a life pension of £50 a year on 25 February 1591.³³ These were to be paid to him in four equal instalments on Lady Day (25 March); the Nativity of John the Baptist (24 June); Michaelmas (29 September); and Christmas Day. The first instalment was collected by one of Ponsonby’s employees, Edward Blount, the son of a member of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, who was to establish himself as a publisher in 1594, his most celebrated work being the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays. The second was collected by Ponsonby himself, after which Spenser had various people pick up the payments in two half-yearly instalments, including a member of the Dryden family, relatives of Elizabeth Boyle after their marriage in 1594.³⁴

We do not know what the pension was awarded for, but it was a significant sum, over twice the annual salary of most secretaries and government officials. Spenser may have been rewarded for his services to the crown, but this would seem unlikely, unless there is a secret career—spying?—waiting to be discovered. If not, then it is clear that The Faerie Queene did have an important impact when it was published at some point in early 1590, having been entered into the Stationers’ Register by Ponsonby on 1 December 1589, soon after Spenser arrived in London. It is likely that Ralegh worked hard on Spenser’s behalf, and that his efforts secured the funds from Elizabeth, who was notoriously parsimonious and only awarded one other pension to a writer in her reign, the aged Thomas Churchyard, a prolific and loyal writer. Churchyard was granted 18d. per day in January 1593, increased to 20d. in July 1597 (Spenser’s pension was nearly twice Churchyard’s, working out at 2s. ¾d. per day).³⁵ Indeed, the story that has often been attributed to Spenser, complaining about the non-payment of his pension, is, in fact, the work of Churchyard.³⁶ It is also possible that Burghley was the other main influence on Elizabeth, perhaps seeing Spenser as a vital political figure in Munster. Certainly it is notable how seriously A View appears to have been taken by those close to power, and for such a long period of time, suggesting that Spenser already had a reputation as an astute commentator on Irish affairs by those in the know before he wrote the dialogue.

The evidence that Ponsonby had been in charge of collecting Spenser’s pension shows that Spenser had a close working relationship with his publisher and probably spent a great deal of time in his company when he was in London. Ponsonby appears to have worked hard for Spenser, establishing relationships with varied clients. These included John Ramsey, born in 1578, a student at Peterhouse in 1601, later to be a lawyer, minor courtier, and a traveller, as well as the rather more grand Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland, both of whom were eager to buy Spenser’s works.³⁷ Ramsey’s Commonplace Book, written between 1596 and 1633, reveals him to be an avid reader of Spenser, copying out three poems from the Complaints; imitating Spenser’s lyric style in his own poems; and eager to obtain lost poems such as the ‘Court of Cupid’, a work that both he and Ponsonby believed to have existed in the late 1590s.³⁸

This relationship was not unusual. Writers spent a lot of time with their publishers and printers, especially when they came from similar backgrounds. Thomas Nashe, for example, was so closely associated with his publisher, John Danter, that Harvey insulted him as ‘Danters gentleman’, implying that the one was a client of the other.³⁹ Spenser probably also spent time with the printer John Wolfe, who worked closely with Harvey, and encouraged writers to frequent his house and printing shop in Distaff Lane, south-east of St Paul’s churchyard at the heart of the London publishing industry.⁴⁰ Harvey, who never married and lodged with various male friends at different points in his life, wrote his New Letter of Notable Contents (1593), addressed to and printed by Wolfe, while living at Wolfe’s house.⁴¹ Wolfe, who was living at Stationers’ Hall in 1589, creates a neat link between Harvey and Spenser, suggesting that all three met up in London during this period. Wolfe’s keen interest in publishing Italian books—he was responsible for printing various versions of sections of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata—shows that his printing shop would have been an ideal place to check and revise The Faerie Queene ready for publication.⁴²

Ponsonby, who had previously published a number of literary works, including some by Robert Greene, as well as political and religious tracts, had shown a keen interest in publishing Sidney’s Arcadia, a project that had not been strongly supported by the Sidney family. Nevertheless, Ponsonby pressed ahead, secured a licence in 1588 and published The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, printed by John Windet, in 1590.⁴³ The work would have been with Wolfe’s compositors or going through the press when Spenser was in London. Windet was another printer closely associated with Wolfe, who took over many of Wolfe’s commissions when Wolfe gave up printing for bookselling in 1591, including Richard Carew’s very literal-minded translation of Torquato Tasso’s Godfrey of Bulloigne (1594).⁴⁴ Windet published the fourth edition of the Calender in late 1591 (it was entered into the Stationers’ Register in October), using Wolfe’s distinctive emblem.⁴⁵

The evidence demonstrates that there was a close relationship between printers, booksellers, and writers, and points to a network more extensive than is obvious at first glance. Windet was from Exeter, and was related to the Vowell-Hookers, who were connected to the Carews. Sir Peter Carew employed John Hooker (c.1527–1601), the antiquary, who acted as Carew’s legal adviser in Ireland.⁴⁶ The Carews were, in turn, one of the significant west country families who were connected to the Raleghs and the Gilberts.⁴⁷ Richard Carew (1555–1620), was later the author of The Survey of Cornwall, which was dedicated to Ralegh, further suggesting that he, as the first English translator of Tasso, must have been known to Spenser.⁴⁸ He was also the author of a short treatise, ‘The Excellency of the English Tongue’, first published by Camden in Remains, a work that cites Spenser—as well as Sir Thomas Smith—as examples of the proper use of sophisticated English that had absorbed foreign words and styles, and which demonstrates further shared interests with Spenser’s more immediate circle.⁴⁹ It is likely that he was the R. C. who contributed a dedicatory sonnet to Zachary Jones’s translation of Scanderbeg (1596), published by Ponsonby, as it was dedicated to his brother, George Carew (c.1556–1612). Carew’s sonnet appears alongside Spenser’s, providing yet more evidence that they moved in the same circles.⁵⁰ The central link between all these figures may well have been Gabriel Harvey.⁵¹

In securing the work of Spenser along with Sidney, Ponsonby was astute enough to realize what the immediate future of English literature was likely to be, as he now had a monopoly on the work of the two most celebrated poets of the 1590s.⁵² Moreover, it is likely, given Ponsonby’s preface to the Complaints volume, published in 1591, that Spenser either handed over a large part of his publishing duties to Ponsonby, or collaborated closely with his publisher.⁵³ However we read the evidence, Ponsonby and Spenser appear to have become friends—much closer than Spenser and Ralegh could have been—and existed in London within a wider network of other intellectuals.

But it is implausible to imagine Spenser spending most of his time socializing. Given his output in the next two years when, in addition to the first edition of The Faerie Queene, Spenser published the Complaints and Daphnaïda, wrote Colin Clouts come home againe, and would also have been at work on the second edition of The Faerie Queene, he must have spent most of his time writing, as he had done when he lived with Harvey after leaving university.

It is also likely that Spenser visited Hampshire at some point in 1589–90, as Aubrey claimed he did based on the testimony—albeit second-hand—of people who had known Spenser over half a century earlier.⁵⁴ The estates of Sir Henry Wallop at Farleigh Wallop, only about fifty miles from central London, were within easy reach for someone who had travelled extensively in Ireland (the distance is shorter than from Cork to Limerick, which is just over sixty miles).⁵⁵ Wallop, miserable in Ireland and often petitioning Elizabeth’s chief ministers to be allowed to leave the country so that he could sort out his affairs in England, sailed to England in April 1589 and remained in Hampshire until 1595, even though he was still employed as Irish treasurer. His brother, William, was sheriff of Hampshire, and is buried in the nearby village of Wield, and a handsome funeral monument still exists in St James church (Plate 26), which may provide us with some idea of what Sir Henry looked like, as no likeness of him survives. There were complaints about Sir Henry staying on his estates and in 1592 ‘the royal auditor Christopher Peyton … had to travel to Wallop’s Hampshire home to clear his accounts’, indicating that Wallop was extremely reluctant to move from his home and anyone who had to see him had also to seek him out.⁵⁶

Spenser may have been sent to see Wallop on official business, perhaps because of the cordial relations they appear to have enjoyed; may have decided to visit him as a valued mentor; or may have been summoned by Wallop. Certainly, Wallop appears to have looked after Spenser, as they were involved in a significant number of mutually advantageous land deals. Spenser would have been closer to people he had worked with in Ireland, both those on the same level as himself, and his superiors such as Grey, Thomas Norris, and Wallop, than he was to many more obviously literary and cultural figures, especially those at the court, something that is evident in his published work in which he consciously fashions himself as an Englishman in Ireland. Now a large country house which once served as a school, rebuilt after a fire in 1661 and extensively renovated subsequently, Farleigh House would have been a substantial manor house in the late sixteenth century, big enough to house the queen and her courtiers in autumn 1591, when she visited the area on one of her many progresses throughout her kingdom.⁵⁷ Little remains of that building apart from the outline of a moat, a fireplace, and some Elizabethan windows in the north wing (Plate 27). Spenser might only have visited Farleigh House briefly, but it is also possible that he spent a few weeks staying with a significant patron, as he had done at Leicester House, and he may have written or revised sections of the Complaints in this period.⁵⁸

We do not know how long Spenser remained in London, but his primary purpose would have been to see The Faerie Queene into print, as has usually been assumed.⁵⁹ Richard Chichester is recorded as acting as deputy clerk to the Munster Council on 10 July 1591, which suggests that Spenser was still in England at that point.⁶⁰ However, it is possible that he returned to Ireland at various points in this period, perhaps for brief stays. He was perhaps back in Ireland on 30 May 1590, as F. P. Wilson has suggested, to carry on his court battle with Lord Roche of Fermoy, as a bill of imprest (authorization to draw money in advance) is made out to him in person by Wallop.⁶¹ It is also feasible, given Wallop’s reluctance to leave his estates at Farleigh Wallop, that Spenser travelled there instead and that this was the occasion of his visit to Hampshire recovered by Aubrey. Wallop’s account book is a large, neatly produced folio volume, clearly copied out by a scribe at the conclusion of his period of office, so it provides no real clue of his whereabouts while performing his duties. Colin Clouts come home againe was not published until 1595, but was dated in the dedicatory epistle to Ralegh as ‘From my house of Kilcolman the 27. of December. 1591’. This makes it clear that Spenser had returned to Munster at some point before Christmas, probably in the autumn or early winter. The preface also suggests that Spenser meant to publish this work in early 1592, but waited until 1595. Why did he do this? The tone of his Letter to Ralegh provides us with some significant clues:

SIR, that you may see that I am not always ydle as yee thinke, though not greatly well occupied, nor altogether vndutifull, though vnworthie of your higher conceipt for the meanesse of the stile, but agreeing with the truth in circumstance and matter. The which I humbly beseech you to accept in part of payment of the infinite debt in which I acknowledge my selfe bounden vnto you, for your singular fauors and sundrie good turnes shewed to me at my late being in England, and with your good countenance protect against the malice of euill mouthes, which are always wide open to carpe at and misconstrue my simple meaning.⁶²

There is a noticeable shift from the open, generous tone of the Letter appended to The Faerie Queene, in which Spenser negotiated between a friendly and a supplicating style in addressing the court figure. Here, Spenser is far more abrupt, the first line being familiar, even rude, in reminding Ralegh that he has, despite all appearances to the contrary, been hard at work in his interests. The change of style to a more deferential mode serves only to highlight the startling nature of the first sentence. Spenser is telling Ralegh off in public, an address, if anything, even more confrontational than the discussion of the non-dedication to Leicester in the Letters with Harvey.

Furthermore, the letter forces the reader to assume that this is a response to an irate letter castigating the poet for failing to support him properly, making it a public advertisement of their falling out. The poem, which is extraordinarily, aggressively dismissive of the court and courtly values, can hardly have been what Ralegh would have wanted to read and cannot have been much help to him in 1595.⁶³ While the first public letter made use of Ralegh’s support to promote the poem, this second one makes clear to Ralegh that he is now dependent on Spenser’s goodwill and that he cannot command the gentleman of Kilcolman. The letter also provides corroborating evidence that Ralegh had intervened in 1589–90 to gain Spenser preferment and material reward, as well as the familiar Spenserian theme that his work has been misinterpreted, a claim that was at least in part disingenuous, even as it became ever more self-fulfilling. Colin Clout now serves as a means of paying Ralegh back, a complicated return gift that asserts the giver’s power more than warranting the receiver’s gratitude.⁶⁴ Spenser’s preface, a conscious inversion of the Letter to Ralegh placed after the poem, reminds readers that it is the poet who now has the power to represent his patron.⁶⁵

What had caused the unusual delay in publishing a poem that advertised when and where it was first written? We know that the poem was revised between 1591 and 1595 as it refers to the death of Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, husband of Alice Spencer, dedicatee of Teares of the Muses: ‘Amyntas quite is gone and lies full low, | Hauing his Amaryllis left to mone’ (lines 434–5). Both were noted literary patrons.⁶⁶ Furthermore, Spenser refers to Alice as ‘highest in degree’ (line 543), another addition, as she only obtained this status when her husband was made earl of Derby on the death of his father in 1593, and the reference to the husband of her sister, Anne (Charillis), post-dates their marriage on 4 December 1592 (lines 552–5).⁶⁷ Again, these revisions provide us with some clues about this (apparently) personal and autobiographical poem.⁶⁸ What is clear is that the poem, whatever traces it bears of earlier incarnations, was carefully revised to express Spenser’s numerological concerns, the twelve poets and twelve ladies centred around the figure of the poet—yet another sign that Spenser was determined to show that he was the principal figure now, not his patrons or rivals.⁶⁹

Ralegh’s fall was indeed spectacular and Elizabeth’s anger was much greater than even Ralegh had anticipated. In August both husband and wife were sent to the Tower. Ralegh remained in disgrace, banished from the court until 1597.⁷⁰ In another passage in Spenser’s poem that must represent a revision to an original version, one of the shepherds, Thestylis (Bryskett), asks what song the ‘shepherd of the ocean’ (Ralegh) sang. Colin replies that

His song was all a lamentable lay,
Of great vnkindnesse, and of vsage hard,
Of Cynthia the Ladie of the sea,
Which from her presence faultlesse him debard.
And euer and anon with singulfs rife,
He cryed out, to make his vndersong
Ah my loues queene, and goddesse of my life,
Who shall me pittie, when thou doest me wrong? (lines 164–71)

Spenser had clearly read Ralegh’s poetry, as this passage refers to the unpublished ‘The Ocean, to Cynthia’, suggesting that the story told in the poem of Ralegh seeking Spenser out and the two reading poetry together may have a basis in truth.⁷¹ The lines also allude to Ralegh’s well-attested penchant for self-regarding dramatic gestures, such as his staged attempt to escape from his guards in the Tower after he had seen Elizabeth in a barge, seize a rowing boat, shouting that he ‘wolde disguyse hymselfe and gett into a pare of oares to ease his mynde butt with a syght of the Quene, or els, he protest, his harte wolde breake’.⁷² The queen was not amused. Spenser’s lines are perhaps not an entirely fair or serious comment on Ralegh’s poem, which, if it was as Spenser represented, was at odds with the more critical tone of Colin Clout, serving to highlight the superior nature of Spenser’s work and perhaps even hinting that Ralegh sounded rather like the insincere flatterers at court, described later in the poem. A ‘lamentable lay’, after all, could simply be a bad poem, not just a sad one.⁷³

These events suggest that Colin Clout was first imagined as a poem that would be published in the wake of Spenser’s return to Ireland later that year. It was probably conceived in the main as the confrontational and deliberately aggressive work that we now have, attacking the queen’s lack of interest in her subjects in Ireland and complaining of their hard life surrounded by the hostile Irish. Cuddy, having listened to Colin’s stories of Cynthia’s land, asks, ‘What land is that thou meanst … | And is there other, then whereon we stand?’ (lines 290–1). This appears to be a disarmingly naive question that demonstrates his ignorance, before we realize that something is not right if the queen is not known by her subjects, a problem that the metropolitan authorities need to solve. More sustained is the ferocious attack Colin makes on the English court, a place where no self-respecting shepherd would want to live:

For sooth to say, it is no sort of life,
For shepheard fit to lead in that same place,
Where each one seeks with malice and with strife,
To thrust downe other into foule disgrace,
Himselfe to raise: and he doth soonest rise
That best can handle his deceiftull wit,
In subtil shifts, and finest sleights deuise,
Either by slaundring his wel deemed name,
Through leasings lewd, and fained forgerie:
Or else by breeding him some blot of blame,
By creeping close into his secrecie;
To which him needs a hollow hart,
Masked with faire dissembling curtsie,
A filed toung furnisht with tearmes of art,
No art of schoole, but Courtiers schoolery. (lines 688–702)

Perhaps the last line is the most cutting: the court has many arts, sophistication, and skill on display, but all of them are opposed to the ‘art of schoole’, the arts that Spenser had spent his life acquiring. The court is fundamentally at odds with the craft of the intellectual and so no one could ever hope to fulfil Smith and Harvey’s ideal of the active academic participating in public life. The poet, instead of following Virgil’s career path from shepherd to poet, must remain as a shepherd, and so save himself from the pernicious influence of the court in order to be able to write sensibly and to tell the truth. There were, of course, many criticisms of the court and its role in poetry and drama in the period, but few went quite as far as Spenser.⁷⁴ Nor did many re-emphasize the message, as Spenser does in Mother Hubberds Tale and The Faerie Queene, Book VI, echoing words and phrases such as ‘leasings’ and ‘filed tongue’.⁷⁵

This passage may post-date 1591, but it sounds as though Spenser’s comments were a more immediate reaction to the experience of the court, which he may not have visited before 1589—unless he accompanied Leicester at some point in 1579–80, or attended in the 1580s on Irish business—and probably only visited twice again in 1596–7, and just before his death in January 1599. Therefore, it is safe to assume that the first draft of Colin Clout would have contained at least some of this hostile comment, articulating a clear sense of Spenser’s identity as an Englishman in Ireland, a New English settler.⁷⁶ In pointed contrast, Ralegh probably spent little, if any, time on his Irish estates after 1591—he first visited them in 1588—eventually selling them off to Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork in 1602 for £1,500.⁷⁷ He did, however, make a lot of money from them, especially from selling timber for barrels, and developing the iron-mill at Mogeely.⁷⁸

Colin Clout, while apparently praising Ralegh, looks as if it was always a poem that was critical of Ralegh’s life and values as a courtier. Spenser affirmed his identity as an Irish settler and cast Ralegh, whose attention was elsewhere, focused on his marriage, and his colonial and privateering ventures across the Atlantic, as rather more frivolous, dependent on the goddess Cynthia, who neglects her distant subjects. The publication of the poem must surely have been delayed because of Ralegh’s disgrace and the attendant dangers of dedicating a poem to him in 1591–2; through Spenser’s own sense of events, based on the advice of friends in London; and because Ponsonby was too sensible to risk another scandal after the Complaints had been called in.⁷⁹ Spenser’s expression of irritation with Ralegh in 1595 was surely a result of Ralegh’s sense that Spenser had let him down in not defending him vigorously enough, in return for the favour that Ralegh had done him in securing him his pension. In addition, Spenser undoubtedly wanted the reader to read an extract from a correspondence in order to assert his own independence and power as a poet, a device derived from earlier attempts to make the Areopagus sound more substantial than it really was.

However we read the circumstances of the publication of Colin Clout, Spenser reminds the reader that he was associated with someone as powerful as Ralegh—perhaps as a counterweight to Burghley, whom he had offended so badly in 1591. And he does indeed defend Ralegh through the allegory of Timias and Belphoebe in Book IV of The Faerie Queene, published in 1596, albeit in terms that do not wholly endorse Ralegh’s behaviour and which do not provide evidence of their close friendship. Ralegh is represented as a loyal courtier, even though his surrender to passion has provoked the ‘deepe disdaine’ of the queen.⁸⁰ In the poem Timias/Ralegh is reconciled to Belphoebe/Elizabeth, enabling him to live ‘An happie life with grace and good accord’, even though this had not taken place when the poem was published.⁸¹ Moreover, Spenser’s apparent praise of Ralegh’s colonial exploits may not be quite what they seem.⁸² Spenser also reminds the reader who is in charge at this point, that Ralegh now needs him, although he has no more need of Ralegh. Moreover, Spenser is now adamant that he has made Munster his home, for which he has just acquired a new wife.⁸³ Living in the margins, Spenser was now able to place himself at the centre of his world.⁸⁴

And he was, once again, with the publication of The Faerie Queene, the most important poet writing in English. Thomas Watson’s pastoral elegy on the death of Sir Francis Walsingham (March/April 1590), written in imitation of the Calender, in particular the November eclogue on the death of Dido, acknowledges the pre-eminence of Spenser:

sweet Spencer let me leave this taske to thee,
Whose neuer stooping quill can best set forth
such things of state, as passe my Muse, and me.
Thou Spencer art the alderliest swaine,
or haply if that word be all to base,
Thou art Apollo whose sweet hunnie vaine
amongst the Muses hath a chiefest place.⁸⁵

Watson’s homage tells us that for a significant poet like him (Watson), Spenser was seen as the unofficial laureate, probably because he had returned to the capital and had just published or was about to publish a major work.⁸⁶

Thomas Watson (1555/6–92) was a writer best known as a friend of Christopher Marlowe, whom he helped in a brawl in Hog Lane in September 1589, killing William Bradley in self-defence, for which crime he was sent to Newgate until pardoned in February 1590.⁸⁷ Watson wrote primarily in Latin and had a particular interest in music. He dedicated the first English sonnet sequence, Hekatompathia, or Passionate Centurie of Love (1582), to Edward de Vere, seventeenth earl of Oxford.⁸⁸ The work is heavily indebted to Petrarch and other Italian and French poets and was published, appropriately enough, by John Wolfe, who was close to Gabriel Harvey, who cited Watson’s work with approval.⁸⁹ Notably, the sequence contains a number of puns on the word ‘prick’, as written musical notation and penis, a quibble that Spenser could have borrowed for the first line of The Faerie Queene.⁹⁰ Both poets moved in many of the same circles in London; each read the other’s work carefully, and publicly praised the other’s poetry.⁹¹ Accordingly, Watson, who was close enough to Spenser to see the manuscript of The Faerie Queene in 1588, selects Spenser as the poet best suited for recording Walsingham’s life for the queen.⁹² Spenser did transcribe letters to Walsingham from Grey in 1580, when Walsingham was most concerned with Irish affairs through his spy network, but there is no real evidence of any relationship between Elizabeth’s principal secretary and Spenser, apart from their connection to the Sidney family.⁹³ Watson’s plea that Spenser is fittest for the task in hand suggests either that he is using this opportunity to promote Spenser or that he has no real understanding that Spenser’s relationship to the court was always problematic. Watson’s praise pre-dates the publication of Spenser’s praise of great men in the Complaints, further suggesting that some such works probably circulated in manuscript.

The first edition of The Faerie Queene does indeed leave much to be desired, a problem that was corrected in later, more handsome editions; the contrast between first and second editions is especially marked. But, as Jean Brink has argued, the plethora of dedicatory sonnets, commendatory verses, and the Letter to Ralegh at the end of the first edition makes this an unusual book, one that bears little resemblance to comparable works.⁹⁴ Perhaps these sonnets were intended to be given to individuals to accompany a gift of the poem, and were gathered up in the print shop by mistake and added to the text, which suggests that Spenser had less to do with the final stages of the printing of his poem than has often been assumed. Perhaps, after such a long absence from the public sphere, Spenser was eager to remind various influential readers of the significance of his work, which is why so many sonnets and poems were appended to the poem: he was always eager to forge a career as a literary innovator. The repetition of so many poems might also suggest a hurried production, not overseen by the author, as Brink suggests, although, as Marjorie Plant has argued, ‘[t]he close proximity between author and printer-publisher allowed for constant supervision of the press by the author’; indeed, ‘this supervision … was expected’.⁹⁵

Spenser may have been more keen to secure attention for his work than lucrative patronage. The production of both sets of dedicatory sonnets, with the second set of fifteen containing eight of the first ten, mixed in with the seven new ones, only serves to draw attention to who was omitted from the first list. These include Burghley, Walsingham, Mary Sidney, and Sir John Norris, suggesting that nothing binds this group together, as it is unlikely that Spenser would have forgotten to include Norris, then hastily included him, risking offence by showing that he was not one of the first list. The usual explanation that Spenser’s friends, shocked at the exclusion of Burghley, urged him to quickly insert a sonnet to him, seems implausible.⁹⁶ Writing about the sonnets as the conclusion to Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell (1592) Thomas Nashe certainly saw the issue as an embarrassing example of the patronage system whereby authors had to appeal to the fickle favours of the high and mighty. Spenser, according to Nashe, had overreached himself, and Nashe, ostensibly helping the poet to correct yet another oversight, produced his own sonnet to the fictitious neglected peer, Amyntas, parodying the language Spenser had adopted in his sonnets:

Perusing yesternight, with idle eyes,
The Fairy Singers stately turned verse,
And viewing after Chap-mens wonted guise,
What strange contents the title did rehearse;
I straight leapt ouer to the latter end,
Where like the quaint Comaedians of our time,
That when their Play is done do fal to ryme,
I found short lines, to sundry Nobles pend;
Whom he as speciall Mirrours singled fourth,
To be the Patrons of his Poetry:
I read them all, and reuerenc’t their worth,
Yet wondred he left out the memory.
But therefore gest I he supprest thy name,
Because few words might not comprise thy fame.⁹⁷

The sonnet is a generic parody and is not aimed at any particular poem to a patron or, as the first lines indicate, a specific commendatory verse. In referring to the ‘strange conceits’ of the poem Nashe is, however, making a sly and cutting allusion to Spenser’s apparent omission of Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. Stanley, from an ancient Catholic family, had a significant claim to the throne (which may have led to his suspicious death).⁹⁸ The reference to ‘Chap-mens’ possibly alludes to George Chapman (1559/60–1634), the most significant poet patronized by Stanley, although Chapman’s poetic career did not take off until 1594.⁹⁹ In doing so Nashe simultaneously insults Chapman and Spenser as poets who write for hire as producers of chapbooks, cheap works in print designed to sell to an undiscriminating audience, and as writers of occult works of Neoplatonic philosophy (‘strange contents’), known to appeal to Lord Strange, as well as Spenser’s patron, Sir Walter Ralegh.¹⁰⁰ Indeed, Spenser included the character Amyntas, ‘a stock pastoral name descending from Theocritus’, in Colin Clout.¹⁰¹ His representation of Amyntas as a noble patron who could also write with some distinction himself (‘Both did he other, which could pipe, maintain, | And eke could pipe himselfe with passing skill’ (Colin Clout, lines 442–3)), suggests that Spenser felt obliged to respond to Nashe’s taunt, either because he saw the need to protect his reputation and a possible source of income, or because he genuinely desired to defend Stanley and his family.¹⁰²

Nashe appears to have known a great deal about Spenser and had a keen sense of the circles in which Spenser moved as well as the social and economic values they espoused. Clearly the worlds of both writers overlapped, and they would have known each other, even if circumstances placed them on opposite sides in a bitter dispute. Spenser had far more in common with a writer such as Nashe, from a similar background (Nashe’s father was a minor cleric in Suffolk, often short of money), than with an aristocrat such as Lord Strange.¹⁰³ Strange, who had similar interests to Ralegh, and who was Nashe’s patron from the late 1580s or early 1590s, allowed Nashe to live in his house and provided him with sustenance while he wrote Pierce Penilesse.¹⁰⁴ That Nashe dedicated his pornographic poem, The Choise of Valentines, generally known as ‘Nashe’s Dildo’, to Strange in 1592, indicates a considerable degree of intimacy. Strange might have been interested in supporting Spenser; or, more to the point, would have been a potential patron to whom Spenser might have appealed for help. Nashe’s cutting intervention, if taken at face value, appears to be an attempt to close off such links. However, the complicated and fluid nature of early modern patronage relationships could also indicate that this was an elaborate joke, and was actually making the possibility of Strange’s support for Spenser more likely. Not everyone in Strange’s circle got on, and not everything written for Lord Strange took his interests seriously.¹⁰⁵ Nashe was later patronized by the Careys, and he spent Christmas 1593 at Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, ‘and a great while after’.¹⁰⁶ The Careys also supported Spenser (Spenser dedicated Muiopotmos to Lady Carey, the eldest daughter of Sir John Spencer of Althorp, and wrote a dedicatory sonnet for her appended to the first edition of The Faerie Queene), further indicting connections between the two writers.¹⁰⁷ Certainly Nashe’s later references to Spenser express great respect for his ability and achievements, and Spenser’s representation of Lord Strange as Amyntas in Colin Clout indicates a significant degree of gratitude. Just because Harvey and Nashe were at odds does not mean that Spenser and Nashe were also always in conflict, even though Nashe aimed a few barbs at Spenser. Apart from the sonnet addressed to Harvey from Dublin, dated 1586, we have little evidence of Spenser and Harvey’s friendship continuing on anything like their previously intimate terms after 1580, and it is possible that they grew apart or disagreed, although they never made any public statement to this effect. Certainly both were involved in numerous disputes, and it is notable that Spenser kept his distance from the Nashe–Harvey quarrel, in pointed contrast to the mutual loyalty of the Harvey brothers and Nashe’s vociferous defence of his dead friend, Robert Greene.¹⁰⁸

Nashe’s insult is a good one and might even have been enjoyed by his victim, given Spenser’s track record. Nashe notes the unusual placing of the paratexts, and then dismisses Spenser’s work by claiming that he passed over the poem itself in order to reach them, suggesting, of course, that The Faerie Queene was too boring to read.¹⁰⁹ Nashe compounds the barb by pretending to be acting in friendship when his purpose is quite the opposite: ‘Beare with me gentle Poet, though I conceiue not aright of thy purpose, or be too inquisitive into the intent of thy obliuion: for, how euer my coniecture may misse the cushion, yet shal my speech sauour of friendship, though it be not alied to iudgement.’¹¹⁰ Nashe pretends that he would like to be Spenser’s friend but claims that in order to do so he would have to separate his judgement from his amicability. The lines, when read alongside the sonnet, show that Nashe had been reading Spenser carefully, as might be expected from someone who was about to conduct a war in print with Spenser’s most obviously public friend, Harvey, a quarrel that originated in the Harvey–Spenser Letters. Nashe refers to Spenser as a ‘gentle Poet’, a sly dig at his new status as a homeowner of substance, and, in alluding to friendship, refers back to the heavy weight placed on friendship in that epistolary exchange. The reference to ‘Chap-men’ in the sonnet further points out the gap between the pretensions of the dedicatory poems and the poverty of the actual book produced. Nashe’s rudeness towards Spenser is either at odds with the sycophancy he detected in the dedicatory verses, something he ruthlessly exposes by pointing out how Spenser and Harvey had made such capital out of their relationship as equals, or an acknowledgement that Spenser, like Nashe, was another poet capable of spectacular rudeness to the powerful. Furthermore, given his later assaults on Harvey, Nashe may be showing that Spenser could, at his worst, seem very like his mentor.

The commendatory verses and dedicatory sonnets appended to the 1590 Faerie Queene are indeed a very unusual collection of poems, suggesting that the author was uncomfortable and slightly out of place, not quite knowing how to play the game, as Nashe’s comments demonstrate with brutal accuracy. The first two sonnets are by Ralegh, as the initials ‘W. R.’ indicate, an identification confirmed by Lady Ralegh’s comment in her son’s copy of the poem, ‘bothe thes of your fathar’s making’.¹¹¹ Ralegh is the only definitely identified court figure among the poets, which further confirms the suspicion that he was the one link between Spenser and the court. The first poem, ‘Me thought I saw the grave, where Laura lay’, alludes to the claim that the French poet Maurice Scève had discovered Laura’s grave in Avignon in the 1540s.¹¹² Ralegh then claims to see a vision of Elizabeth as the Faerie Queene, ‘At whose approach the soule of Petrarke wept’ (line 7), casting Spenser as a loyal Petrarch to Elizabeth’s elusive but infinitely desirable and irresistible Laura.¹¹³ The second sonnet, ‘The prayse of meaner wits this worke like profit brings’, hints strongly that the poet and his courtly patron are surrounded by enemies, who will try to thwart their efforts. The reference to Philomena in the second line would appear to allude to a factional struggle at court, most likely Ralegh’s conflict with Essex.¹¹⁴ If the queen can read the poem she will see how Spenser has written her virtues as models for all others to copy: ‘If Chastitie want ought, or Temperance her dew, | Behold her Princely mind aright, and write thy Queene anew’ (lines 7–8).

Ralegh’s poem certainly seems written with the dedicatory Letter to him in mind. The sonnet also suggests an attempt to transform Spenser into his client and use him to promote his own courtly ambitions as the queen’s chief champion among so many doubters and hostile forces at court.¹¹⁵ Ralegh’s praise of Spenser’s poem has a clear agenda and it is not obvious that he has actually read much beyond the Letter addressed to him.¹¹⁶ Both Ralegh and Spenser take the idea of ‘fashioning’ seriously, but, for Ralegh, the monarch is the centre of all virtue, the poet reflecting her glory: ‘she shall perceiue, how farre her vertues sore | Aboue the reach of all that lieu, or such as wrote of yore’ (lines 9–10). For Spenser, the poet has considerably more power to represent the monarch and to guide the reader.¹¹⁷ It is hard to square Ralegh’s extravagant praise of the queen and the notion that if he can get back to the centre then all will be well, with Spenser’s subsequent assault on the court and its values in a poem that describes the very circumstances that brought The Faerie Queene into existence as a printed text. Perhaps this was another reason why the confusing morass of paratextual material was moved to the end of the volume.

The only other author that can be identified with any certainly is ‘Hobbynoll’, Gabriel Harvey. Harvey’s poem, ‘And fare befall that Faerie Queene of thine’, indicates a much closer knowledge of Spenser’s life and thought than Ralegh’s two self-serving poems do. Harvey concentrates on the theme of progress, of the poems as a means to advance the poet, not to reflect on the monarch and the court. Having accused Spenser of abandoning his flocks and the ‘louely Rosalinde’ (lines 7–8), Harvey suggests that The Faerie Queene

Enfusing by those Bewties fiers deuyne,
Such high conceites into thy humble wits,
As raised hath poore pastors oaten reede,
From rusticke tunes, to chaunt heroique deedes. (lines 21–4)

Harvey, eager to ensure that readers remember that he and Spenser are still the shepherds in the Calender, reflects on Spenser’s literary progress, but also, in describing the poet as a ‘poore pastor’ with an ‘oaten reede’, reminds the reader that he was once a humble secretary to a bishop when he wrote his first poem, as well as alluding to Spenser’s practice of referring to poets as priests educating their flock in his poetry.¹¹⁸ While Ralegh seems to be using Spenser for his own ends, Harvey shows Spenser what his poetry can do for him. Harvey also reminds the queen of her duties. After noting that the poem sees the victory of the Red-Cross Knight in fairyland, standing for Albion (England), Harvey states that Elizabeth in the guise of the Faerie Queene ‘shieldes her friends, and wares her mightie foes, | Yet still with people, peace, and plenty flowes’ (lines 29–30). The poem concludes with a warning to Spenser to be careful of the court as a dangerously alluring chimera for a poet:

But (iolly Shephearde) though with pleasing style,
Thou feast the humour of the Courtly traine:
Let not conceipt they setled scene beguile,
Ne daunted be through enuy or disdaine.
Subiect thy dome to her Empyring spright,
From whence thy Muse, and al the world takes light. (lines 31–6)

We do not know when this poem was written, but the anxieties expressed coincide exactly with those articulated in the first edition of The Faerie Queene and look forward to the disillusioned mood and anti-court sentiments of Colin Clout. Harvey warns Spenser to be wary of the attractions of the court, which will prove no friend to him and which will impede his ability to write poetry. The queen’s role is to protect her subjects throughout her realm; the poet’s, to ensure that he can write, which, for a poet like Spenser, according to Harvey, almost certainly means working outside the court. Again, the contrast to Ralegh’s straightforward celebration of the queen and courtly values is marked.¹¹⁹ Ralegh claims that the poem can rise above the envy of other courtiers; Harvey tells Spenser to avoid them.

The other four poems, by ‘R. S.’, ‘H. B.’, ‘W. I.’, and ‘Ignoto’, have not been identified with any certainty—although ‘R. S.’ was probably Robert Salter—but it is most likely that they are by other writers rather than courtiers.¹²⁰ They all praise the serious value of the poem, H. B. making the obvious comparison to Virgil, W. I. an equally obvious one to the lliad, suggesting that just as Ulysses brought Achilles (Thetis’ son) from retirement into arms, so ‘Spencer was by Sidneys speeches wonne’.¹²¹ The comparison suggests that The Faerie Queene was seen in a military context by some early readers, a poem that had grown out of an understanding of the need to inspire works of aggressive chivalric literature.¹²² It also indicates that this contributor knew about Spenser and his claim to be connected to Sidney, rather than actually knowing Spenser. The poems urge the queen to reward the poet; Ignoto’s last stanza describing how he will ‘hang a garland at the dore’, is perhaps an allusion to the garland of laurel presented to the laureate and a hint to the queen to present Spenser with a garland to wear.¹²³ The poems are relatively undistinguished, apart from Ralegh’s and Harvey’s, and these four, linked together by their classical themes, may have been assembled by Ponsonby rather than Spenser, as the Sidney comparison indicates.

The dedicatory sonnets pose even more of a puzzle.¹²⁴ There were initially ten on pp. 601–5, addressed to a miscellaneous variety of court patrons: Sir Christopher Hatton; Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex; Edward de Vere, earl of Oxford; Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland; Thomas Butler, tenth earl of Ormond; Charles, Lord Howard of Effingham; Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton; Ralegh; Lady Elizabeth Carey; and the ladies at the court. But then after ‘finis’ and a list of errata, a list of seventeen sonnets was printed, the same ten with seven new ones addressed to Burghley; George Clifford, earl of Cumberland; Sir Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon; Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst; Sir Francis Walsingham; Sir John Norris; and Mary Sidney, countess of Pembroke. There is nothing that seems to connect this group of people, other than that they are all powerful and influential figures at court.¹²⁵ The sonnet addressed ‘To all the gratious and beautifull Ladies in the Court’ would appear to cement this conclusion, one that Nashe also reached. Spenser is likely to have known some of his addressees, including Grey and Norris, for whom he worked; the two with Sheffield connections, Ormond and Howard; probably Burghley; Mary Sidney, with whom he may have collaborated later; Sackville, who worked with Norton and so had a connection, albeit tenuous, to the Merchant Taylors’ School; and, of course, Ralegh.¹²⁶ But being familiar with these courtiers is clearly not the principal issue here, especially if we recall that most works published in the late sixteenth century were dedicated to people of high status whom the author or publisher barely knew.¹²⁷ The problem is that there is no obvious logical order to the dedicatory sonnets, neither to the first list nor to the sonnets then added and mixed amongst the original poems. Important peers are included in the first list, but some obvious names, notably Burghley and Walsingham, are added later; the sonnet to Norris only appears in the second list; and sonnets to Irish nobles appear largely in the first list. It was unusual to have so many dedicatory sonnets to any work, especially after the poem itself, which might suggest that there was a plan that was later changed for some reason, perhaps connected to Ralegh, the only author to contribute two commendatory sonnets. A decision could have been made to move the prefatory material to an appendix and to expand it, perhaps related to Ralegh’s impending fall, but we shall probably never know why the material appears as it does or whether Spenser played any part in what must have been, finally, a publisher’s decision. It could not have been made at the last moment—like the inclusion of the second, expanded group of sonnets—as the page numbers would have to have been set first and the sheets printed and ordered with signatures. But, given the ways in which Spenser played with paratextual material before and after he published the first edition of The Faerie Queene, it is hard to believe that the plethora of appended sonnets did not serve some purpose, if only to remind potential patrons that they were less important than the poet.

To take one example: the sonnet to the court ladies, in its witty, knowing manner, flatters them but also reminds the ladies who is really in charge:

The Chian Peincter, when he was requirde
To pourtraict Venus in her perfect hew,
To make his worke more absolute, desird
Of all the fairest Maides to haue the vew.
Much more me needs to draw the semblant trew,
Of beauties Queene, the worlds sole wonderment,
To sharpe my sence with sundry beauties vew,
And steale from each some part of ornament.
If all the world to seeke I ouerwent,
A fairer crew yet no where could I see,
Then that braue court doth to mine eie present,
That the worlds pride seemes gathered there to bee.
Of each a part I stole by cunning thefte:
Forgiue it me faire Dames, sith lesse ye haue not lefte.

Spenser claims that in attempting to represent Elizabeth he is like the painter commissioned to paint Venus who thought that he ought to see the most beautiful women in the world first to make sure that he understood exactly what he had to produce. It is vital that Spenser follows the same course and observes the ladies of the court who are the fairest women alive. In doing so he steals a small part of each one and apologizes for having to do this. The sonnet fits into the familiar pattern of courtly banter and praise of ladies by poets, inevitably with a fairly clear agenda of the poet wanting something beyond the desire to simply serve without reward, i.e., advancement or sex.¹²⁸ But here, there is a barely disguised dissonance that sets it apart from lyrics written by courtiers who have a real chance of succeeding in the game.¹²⁹ Spenser casts himself as a court painter, perhaps even with a glance at the dreadful fate of the court painter in Sidney’s Arcadia, mutilated and killed during a rebellion, when acting at the behest of the powerful for their benefit.¹³⁰ However, through his skill and ingenuity he is able to turn the tables and represent them as he wishes, taking away a part of them because they now become what he makes them through his representation. Art has the power to transform and go beyond nature, as Sidney argued in his Apology for Poetry.¹³¹ The poet/painter is also cast as a voyeur, sizing up the ladies for his poem/picture, a freedom denied other courtiers, although they may, of course, like Ralegh, marry one of them. At one level the poem is a neat conceit, a compliment that is not quite what it seems to be, elegantly tossed off as a joke, as is appropriate for a dedicatory sonnet; at another, it points to the stratified and mercenary nature of an institution Spenser was to attack with such vehemence elsewhere.

Other poems have similar, deliberately constructed faultlines. The sonnet to Norris makes no mention of the court because Norris had little association with it, having spent his life as a soldier.¹³² Instead, Spenser praises Norris’s ‘warlike prowesse and manly courage, | Tempred with reason and aduizement sage’, qualities that are the very antithesis of those possessed by the ladies.¹³³ He then lists Norris’s achievements, stating that his qualities ‘Hath fild sad Belgicke with victorious spoile, | In Fraunce and Ireland left a famous gage, | And lately shakt the Lusitanian soile’.¹³⁴ This is an accurate description of Norris’s career in the years immediately before 1590, mixing a representation of war as chivalric deeds, like those in the tiltyard with the mention of ‘gage’, and an awareness of the dreadful effects of war in referring to Belgium being now filled with ‘victorious spoile’. The chief trading port of Belgium, Antwerp, had been the victim of a ferocious assault by the Spanish on 4 November 1576, ‘the Sack of Antwerp’. This outrage had quickly become a European horror story and had helped sustain the ‘Black Legend’, which cast the Spanish as the evil villains of world affairs.¹³⁵ The horrific destruction of the city had been extensively described by George Gascoigne in The Spoyle of Antwerpe within a month of its occurrence; Norris served in the Low Countries in the late 1570s.¹³⁶

The sonnet to Ormond might also be read as rather less celebratory than it seems on first reading, also placing the emphasis on the poet’s ability to represent the dedicatee and fashion him as he saw fit. Spenser praises Ormond’s mansion, undoubtedly referring to his house in Carrick-on-Suir not Kilkenny Castle, which Spenser must have visited on a number of occasions on official business, especially when travelling on to Dublin. He refers to it as a rare place where ‘sweete Musses’ can be harboured in an otherwise barbarous land, representing his poem as ‘wilde fruit, which saluage soyl hath bred’, and concluding with the exhortation that ‘as the wasted soyl doth yield, | Receiue dear Lord in worth, the fruit of barren field’.¹³⁷ The ostensible message of the poem celebrates Ormond’s success in spreading civility, the poet bringing him tribute from the otherwise barren land. It is indeed true that Ormond’s stately home is a model of its kind, carefully designed to bring the values of the English country house to Ireland (Plate 28). The house has the earliest and longest long gallery in Ireland, one that matched those at contemporary houses in England.¹³⁸ It has impressive plasterwork throughout, the gallery decorated with emblems and icons of Elizabeth and Edward VI reminding visitors of the owner’s loyalty to the English crown; rooms designed for public use; and was full of pictures, tapestries, and fine furniture.¹³⁹ But the sonnet is also written in the knowledge that the land in Munster was barren in part because of Ormond’s actions: whether through killing large numbers of his fellow Irishmen on behalf of the crown, or as the chief obstacle to New English progress in the region, Spenser does not say.¹⁴⁰ The poem is studied in its ambiguity and works in negative as well as positive terms, listing what the province does not have before it singles Ormond’s fortress as an exception to the rule, an outpost of civilization in an otherwise desolate landscape. Spenser witnessed the destruction in Munster and the poem is craftily evasive, leaving the reader to decide whether Ormond is part of the problem or the solution, helping to establish order amid chaos, or hoarding the land’s goods for himself. When Spenser brings the poem to him, is it a form of praise for what he has done, or a rebuke from a besieged subject abandoned by those who should be protecting him?

The sonnet to Grey is more effusive, expressing the true gratitude of a loyal servant:

Most Noble Lord the pillor of my life,
And Patrone of my Muses pupillage,
Through whose large bountie poured on me rife,
In the first season of my feeble age,
I now doe liue, bound yours by vassalage.¹⁴¹

Spenser makes it clear how much he feels he owes to Grey’s patronage. He is not bringing him a poem out of the wilderness as tribute, but thanking him for supporting his writing when he was younger, further evidence that Spenser was at work on The Faerie Queene all the time he was in Ireland. Grey’s support was material rather than intellectual and Spenser is thanking the former Lord Deputy for setting him on the road to obtaining Kilcolman, as acquiring his estate enabled him to be in London presenting his poem to the court.

If anything, the dedicatory sonnets show that Spenser’s loyalties are easy to read: those who have helped him are fulsomely thanked; those who should help him are reminded of their duties; those who have not helped him are damned with faint, ambiguous praise. These are not the works of a poet eager for court patronage—which is not to say that Spenser might not have thought in these terms when he sailed over from Ireland—but someone with the confidence to tell others how things are and what to do.

The text of the poem itself raises few issues and it remained almost entirely the same for the second edition, indicating that the printing of the first edition was either overseen by Spenser, or that the text Ponsonby received was clear and clean.¹⁴² The Faerie Queene, like the Calender, is a unique poem, a new departure in English poetry that changed its course and nature. Everything about the poem is new: the combination of epic and romance; the mixture of high and popular cultural registers; its old-fashioned and archaic diction; the new stanza form (the Spenserian stanza), a complex Italianate development of the courtly rhyme royal, with a rhyme scheme, ababbcbcdd, consisting of eight pentameters followed by one alexandrine, that Spenser invented; its unfamiliar representation of St George; and the creation of Britomart, an Amazon in armour, as the culmination of the three virtues represented in the poem, Holiness, Temperance, and Chastity. It is at least arguable that The Faerie Queene was instrumental in establishing the pentameter as the dominant mode of English poetry.¹⁴³ The poem clearly challenged and confused many early readers, not least Ben Jonson, who remarked that ‘Spencer, in affecting the Ancients, writ no Language’, an acknowledgement—albeit negative, as Jonson adds, ‘Yet I would have him read for his matter; but as Virgil read Ennius’—of the innovative nature of the poem.¹⁴⁴ Ennius was a rough and unpolished poet who was admired by Virgil, even as he was irritated by his failings. Jonson cleverly turns Spenser’s imitation of Virgil against him, casting himself as the chosen Augustan poet, and suggesting that reading Spenser was ‘like sifting dung’.¹⁴⁵ A case can also be made that the style is a deliberate balance between high and low, creating a middle style between epic and pastoral, suited to a poet like Spenser, who was especially eager to appropriate and develop the georgic.¹⁴⁶ Other readers seem to have taken refuge in historical certainty as a means of making sense of the poem and establishing definite coordinates, their desire for security a sign of its unsettling complexity as much as a guide to how the poem was actually read.¹⁴⁷

Given the torrent of work that Spenser published in the next six years it is clear that the first edition of The Faerie Queene had been chosen to secure his reputation as the most important English poet since Chaucer. While the production values of that book were not of the first order, Ponsonby evidently worked hard to ensure that subsequent works appeared in much more obviously impressive editions, showing that the plan succeeded, and that the significance of the poem was recognized.

We do not know how Spenser composed the poem, but it must have changed a great deal in more than a decade of interrupted composition. Harvey’s description of the poem in 1580 as ‘Hobgoblin runne away with the Garland from Apollo’ suggests that early versions were probably more romantic than epic in tone and style, based on Ariosto in particular.¹⁴⁸ The line suggests that sections of Books II and III were probably written before Book I, and the current shape of the edition took place when the first Book was written. This is an important point indicating that we need to think about how Book I relates to Books II and III, rather than how they fit into the pattern established by Book I, as has usually been the case. If Spenser did revise The Faerie Queene a number of times, he would have needed the copious supplies of paper that his job as a secretary provided.¹⁴⁹

Given Spenser’s ambitions and desire to experiment it is likely that the Spenserian stanza was in place from the start. In appearance and form the poem owed much to Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, which was written in ottava rima (abababcc), as was Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, the two Italian models for the poem, along with Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, written in rhyme royal, a work that enjoyed a far higher reputation in the Renaissance than The Canterbury Tales.¹⁵⁰ Spenser worked from the Italian originals and it is a sign of his erudition and literary success that his poem then influenced Edward Fairfax’s translation of Tasso (1600).¹⁵¹ Combining elements of these poetic models was an extraordinarily ambitious feat, made gargantuan through Spenser’s stated aim of also imitating the epics of Homer and Virgil, going beyond what any English poet had achieved so far—or, indeed, since.¹⁵² Equally important was the Cyropaedia of Xenophon, singled out in the Letter to Ralegh, because it ‘fashioned a gouernment such as might best be’, a counterpart to fashioning a gentleman, and a contrast to Plato who had only ‘formed a Commune welth such as might best be’ (Spenser, Faerie Queene, pp. 715–16). The Cyropaedia, one of the most widely read books in Tudor England, told the life of Cyrus, the warrior king of Persia, whose exemplary restraint and temperance enabled him to conquer and maintain a vast empire.¹⁵³ The work, translated by the Catholic William Barker during Mary’s reign, was reprinted in 1567, and was probably among the books that Spenser had in Ireland, as it had a tangible influence on A View.¹⁵⁴ It is odd, then, that The Faerie Queene has generally been read, even by many of its most able commentators, as if it were a rather straightforward panegyric of Elizabeth, perhaps because of the pension that the queen awarded him.¹⁵⁵ In fact, from the start, the poem advertises its confrontational nature, ensuring that readers have to understand that the poet controls the objects he represents, in pointed contrast to the claims of Ralegh’s commendatory verse.

The Faerie Queene is dedicated to a virgin queen, but the thrust of its narrative is towards marriage and reproduction as the desirable goals of life. In this way, Spenser continues one of the most significant strains of the Calender’s multifaceted nature, forcefully reminding Elizabeth that she had failed to take her opportunity to marry, and had left her subjects facing an uncertain future.¹⁵⁶ The opening line of The Faerie Queene is a stark, even coarse, reminder of sexual desires and needs, something that undermines the pretensions and stance of the queen.¹⁵⁷ The first Book tells the story of the young St George, the Knight of Holiness, who needs to discover his true nature and so defeat the dragon who has imprisoned the parents of his bride-to-be, Una. The knight’s ambiguous and multi-layered identity suggests that we need to see him as a Knight of the Garter, but also a pastoral figure who perhaps loses as well as gains through his transformation.¹⁵⁸ In the opening canto he is able to defeat a monster, ‘Error’, a victory that he complacently imagines marks a stage on his triumphal procession to victory. However, there are enough warning signs for the reader to realize that the knight is sorely mistaken and has little understanding of the nature of his quest. Before he kills Error, the knight holds her in a powerful grip so that

Therewith she spewd out of her filthy maw
A floud of poison horrible and blacke,
Full of great lumpes of flesh and gobbets raw,
Which stunck so vildly, that it forst him slacke
His grasping hold, and from her turne him backe:
Her vomit full of bookes and papers was,
With loathly frogs and toades, which eyes did lacke,
And creeping sought way in the weedy gras:
Her filthy parbreake all the place defiled has. (I.i.20)

The carefully crafted description of Error’s vomit centres around a particular dramatic irony: the monster reproduces books and papers amongst the collection of poisonous sludge, blind frogs and toads, and undigested lumps of flesh. Readers see this, but it soon becomes obvious that the Red-Cross Knight does not, and that he cannot distinguish between the different forms of Error’s vomit. In other words, he cannot read. Even here, Spenser is reminding us that reading is a difficult process, and that texts are full of details that will lead the reader into error so that we have to be constantly on our guard.¹⁵⁹

Within a few stanzas it becomes clear that we are one stage ahead of the knight when he fails to see the rather straightforward problems with the figure he encounters next:

At length they chaunst to meet vpon the way
An aged Sire, in long black weedes yclad,
His feete all bare, his beard all hoarie gray,
And by his belt his booke he hanging had;
Sober he seemed, and very sagely sad,
And to the ground his eyes were lowly bent,
Simple in shew, and voyde of malice bad,
And all the way he prayd, as he went,
And often knockt his brest, as one that did repent. (29)

The description of Archimago is replete with clues that direct the reader’s interpretation.¹⁶⁰ He looks like a monk or hermit, with his black robes, grey beard, and bare feet, which indicates that he belongs to a Catholic order. We do not know what book he carries. The initial assumption is that it is probably the Bible, but we learn a few stanzas later that he has a study full of magic books (36), so this may be one of them. As the stanza progresses our suspicions, along with those of the travellers, are aroused. Archimago seems sober and sad, which implies that he may not be, and the appearance without the reality of sanctity is confirmed in the last two lines. Although he appears modest, he prays ostentatiously and repents in public, recalling the hypocritical publican in Luke 18:13 who ‘would not lift up so much as his eyes to heauen, but smote his brest, saying, O God be mercifull to me a sinner’.¹⁶¹ The stanza shows that the hermit ‘parodies the contemplative life, the alternative to the active heroism’ that the knight intends to demonstrate.¹⁶² The Red-Cross Knight’s grasp of reading is so feeble that he is not able to understand when he witnesses the signs of religion without the substance. He will have little chance with any complex allegory. Readers need to learn from his mistakes.

Of course, Archimago, the Catholic enchanter, is able to separate the Red-Cross Knight from Una with embarrassing ease, and by the start of the second canto the knight has been deluded into thinking that she has given herself to another knight—a devilish chimera that Archimago has conjured up from Hell—and, abandoning her in a fit of rage, the knight subsequently falls prey to the wiles of Duessa. The reader is in danger of falling into a trap like the knight, imagining that he or she is superior to the foolish protagonist. Archimago is a Catholic figure, but the sin that ensnares the Knight of Holiness is not obviously theological; it is lust. He is tormented and tempted by erotic dreams of Una—actually an incubus conjured up by Archimago—the night before he leaves her, an indication that his enemies, like the reader, know him better than he knows himself. But, even so, Spenser is challenging us to think about the more profound problems that he is representing in his narrative.

The story of the Red-Cross Knight’s complicated quest raises a cluster of interrelated issues crucial for any one reader living in the British Isles in 1590. If the knight is a figure of Holiness, why is his downfall related to sex? What does this tell us about Holiness?¹⁶³ And, given that the knight is later revealed as St George, England’s patron saint, how do he and Una represent the nation? Protestant attacks on the history of the pre-Reformation church were often heavily concentrated on the sexual repressiveness and hypocrisy of clerical celibacy, a fact of life that affected an enormous number of people when ‘the medieval church was state’, and, in a variety of guises, employed almost as many people as the secular authorities.¹⁶⁴ Monasteries in particular were attacked as dens of vice, notably in the widely available writings of John Bale, whose work Spenser would have known.¹⁶⁵ The problem was also recognized in more popular cultural literary forms. The jest book, Merie Tales … made by Master Skelton, which Spenser possessed and which informed his understanding of Colin Clout (the persona he adopted from the work of the Henrician poet), contains an especially relevant tale. Irritated by gossip about him, Skelton brandishes his child in front of his congregation while preaching a sermon on humanity after he has learned that they have complained to the bishop that he has been keeping a common-law wife. Skelton preaches on the text, ‘Vos estis, vos estis—that is to say, You be, You be’, and argues that because his child is not deformed then all is well and his flock ought to be more concerned that they are not cuckolded by him: ‘If that you exalt yourself and cannot be contented that I have my wench still, some of you shall wear horns.’¹⁶⁶ Whether intentional or not, it is easy to see how this could be co-opted as a Protestant attack on papal celibacy, as the need to recognize human sexuality is central to the story. Priests, it was thought, could not resist the urge, whatever they had promised in their vows.

After the Reformation there was no longer a separate category of celibate clergy apart from the laity, which meant that marriage became the institution to which most people had to belong.¹⁶⁷ The key Reformation thinkers were quite clear about this and placed great emphasis on Paul’s Letters to the Romans and Corinthians, especially his statement that if one could not abstain, ‘it is better to marry then to burne’ (1 Cor. 7:9).¹⁶⁸ In practical terms, for the few who could not live up to the ideal of celibacy, the most sacred state on earth was holy matrimony, a subject that Spenser represents enthusiastically throughout his poetry. The Red-Cross Knight seems to imagine his quest in traditional romance terms, as the defeat of dragons and rescuing of ladies: what he fails to realize is that he can pass such tests easily enough because the real problem is elsewhere, his relationship to women. The epic quest takes place in a romance, a subtle and complex literary development that places great demands on the reader.¹⁶⁹

The Red-Cross Knight and Una are a spectacularly ill-matched couple. While the knight is out ‘pricking on the plaine’, Una is described as a chaste virgin, hardly an ideal basis for a marriage:

A louely Ladie rode him faire beside,
Vpon a lowly Asse more white then snow,
Yet she much whiter, but the same did hide
Vnder a vele, that wimpled was full low,
And ouer all a blacke stole she did throw,
As one that inly mourned: so was she sad,
And heauie sat vpon her palfrey slow:
Seemed in heart some hidden care she had,
And by her in a line a milke white lambe she lad. (I.ii.4)

Una is associated with white, the colour of purity, being white herself, riding a white ass, and accompanied by a white lamb.¹⁷⁰ She wears a veil, described here as ‘wimpled’. Wimple, as the OED entry indicates, has explicit associations with the church before the Reformation. It was often used by unmarried women to hide their hair and so preserve their modesty, as free-flowing hair was invariably a sign of available virginity.¹⁷¹ But the word was more often associated with lifelong virgins, nuns, and the verb could mean to ‘take the veil’. Most obviously, Spenser would have known Chaucer’s Prioress, who wears a wimple.¹⁷² The image of a modest woman in white riding an ass would seem in itself to suggest a saintly figure from the late medieval church, or, perhaps a pilgrim like Chaucer’s Prioress.

The marriage of this couple is not necessarily doomed to failure, but it is clear that a great deal of work will have to be done before they can come to a mutual understanding. We should not really be surprised when, at the end of the first Book, they are betrothed but immediately separated, indicating that there is a way to go before they can be united.¹⁷³ In terms of his stated aim of ‘fashioning a gentleman’, Spenser shows that a gentleman needs to think about marriage in relation to Holiness in order to provide an answer to the question Aristotle poses of how one should live one’s life.¹⁷⁴ On a related allegorical level Spenser makes a profound point about the progress of the Reformation in England, one in line with his comments about toleration in the Calender, probably influenced by his experiences as a youth in cosmopolitan London as well as the confessional and sectarian conflicts in Cambridge. The knight and Una, standing for England and its church, do not understand each other because they do not yet know who they are, how they should behave, and what the future will provide.¹⁷⁵ Spenser is showing how the Reformation was still a new concept in England, only sixty years old, a tiny part of the church’s overall history of one and a half millennia. Those sixty years had proved complicated enough already, with Henry VIII’s disquieting sequence of volte-faces, Edward’s forward Protestantism followed by Mary’s return to Catholicism, before Elizabeth’s compromise church settlement.¹⁷⁶

There had been waves of persecution that had seen many of Henry’s principal counsellors executed; burnings and exiles under Mary, often carried out because of disagreements over the nature of the sacraments; and, in the wake of the threat of the Armada, a new wave of persecution of Catholics.¹⁷⁷ It was little wonder that ordinary people could not understand how they were supposed to worship, whether what they thought was tolerable or intolerable, orthodox doctrine or heresy, when their rulers could not decide and provide them with a consistent religious policy.¹⁷⁸ In representing the knight as an old-fashioned hero from a romance, and Una as a medieval religious figure, Spenser confronts his readers with the reality of the past as a living entity that has to be acknowledged and absorbed, not simply discarded.¹⁷⁹ The language of the poem is archaic for a reason, forcing readers to realize that the past still lives. The Faerie Queene is intensely hostile to the papacy and to the power of Spain, as the representations of Duessa as the Whore of Babylon, and, in the second edition, the Souldan, demonstrate.¹⁸⁰ But it is much more nuanced about the remnants of traditional religion in England than scholars once thought, in line with Spenser’s earlier work.¹⁸¹ The House of Holiness in which the knight is restored to physical and spiritual health in Book I, canto x, shows him passing through the traditional stages of penance, being ‘exorcised, shriven, and ma[king] a confession of faith’ before baptism in the Well of Life, all elements of traditional worship in England before the Reformation.¹⁸²

The poem shows that there can be no premature hope for religious unity until the significance of the Reformation has been properly absorbed and thought through.¹⁸³ Book I sees the knight called away to serve Gloriana and our attention is turned to Guyon, the Knight of Temperance. Yet again, Spenser is making another confrontational narrative turn, showing the reader that Holiness—which is, after all, a term associated with purity, virginity, and the values of the traditional church—far from being the apex of Christian virtue, is a first stage only, something that has to be defined and fleshed out in the subsequent Books.¹⁸⁴ It is one of Spenser’s sly ironies that he casts the hero of a book that sounds as if it will be about religious purity as a lusty bachelor. In attempting to deny his bodily needs and desires, Guyon only succeeds in provoking them. Temperance might seem to be a lesser virtue than Holiness, but in a world in which marriage is the logical choice for most people, regulating the passions is vital. Spenser’s conception of Temperance conflates the Aristotelian distinction between Continence, the censorship of bodily pleasure, and Temperance, a more positive virtue that deals with the regulation, control, and proper functioning of the body.¹⁸⁵ Spenser carefully catalogues the forms of intemperance and incontinence that assault the individual, a panoply of weaknesses and vices that the Knight of Temperance resists with success. In the end, however, Guyon, the only one of the three protagonists of the first instalment of The Faerie Queene who does not have a marriage partner, is tempted by the sensual beauty on display in Acrasia’s Bower and has no means of dealing with his response other than destroying everything:

But all those pleasant bowres and Pallace braue,
Guyon broke downe, with rigour pittilesse;
Ne ought their goodly workmanship might saue
Them from the tempest of his wrathfulnesse,
But that their blisse he turn’d to balefulnesse:
Their groues he feld, their gardins did deface,
Their arbers spoyle, their Cabinets suppresse,
Their banket houses burne, their buildings race,
And of the fairest late, now made the fowlest place. (II.xii.83)

Guyon cannot control himself in the face of such sexual provocation and he lapses into fury, not the most serious form of intemperance, according to Aristotle, but a vice that renders reason impotent and so undermines a measured approach to life.¹⁸⁶ Moreover, as Anne Fogarty has argued, ‘His act of regenerative violence akin to the military campaigns pursued by successive Elizabethan viceroys is designed to restore order and to obliterate the evil of this savage other world.’¹⁸⁷ Guyon’s first victory was over the ‘symbols of men’s angry passions’, Furor and Occasion and Pyrocles, so that in lapsing into anger himself, the wheel has come full circle and he has become what he was supposed to defeat, demonstrating the limitations of Temperance as a virtue.¹⁸⁸ Temperance is an advance on Holiness, which deludes the subject into thinking that he or she can simply ignore the dictates of the body, but it has to give way to the superior virtue, Chastity.

Book III provides a suitably provocative conclusion to the first edition of The Faerie Queene. We now follow the narrative of a female knight who is revealed as more morally alive and engaged than her two male counterparts. Nevertheless, Spenser uses the figure of Britomart to attack Elizabeth for what she had not done, marry and have children, in showing the female knight on a quest to find her husband, Artegall, the Knight of Justice, and so secure the future of her dynasty.¹⁸⁹ Guyon’s destruction of the Bower can be read as an assault on the values of the Elizabethan court and the queen herself. Elizabeth, known for her love of costume, looks more like figures in Book I, Duessa and especially Lucifera, who lives in the gaudy House of Pride, than the triumphant figure in Book III who, as Merlin shows in his magic mirror, achieves everything that Elizabeth has not.¹⁹⁰ Britomart’s quest pointedly exposes the failings of the real queen, serving as a negative commentary on the second half of her reign and, in doing this, Spenser neatly weaves the stands of the allegory together by the end of the Book. Britomart ensures the success of the Reformation, a feat that the virgin Elizabeth, according to Spenser, has failed to achieve. Britomart manages this through her political triumphs, but also her personal life and, in marrying Artegall, she fulfils the Reformation ideal of marriage, like Spenser himself. Elizabeth, as Gloriana, further hinders the course of the Reformation by prematurely recalling Artegall from the Salvage Island at the end of Book V, intervening in the fictional world to undermine proper government:

But ere he [Artegall] could reforme it thoroughly,
He through occasion called was away,
To Faerie Court, that of necessity
His course of Iustice he was forst to stay,
And Talus to reuoke from the right way,
In which he was that Realme for to redresse. (V.xii.27, lines 1–6)

The allegory is clear, especially as the next line informs us that the chief reason Artegall was recalled was envy of his success, illustrating the shifting cross-currents between the historical and fictional worlds of The Faerie Queene.¹⁹¹ The true married queen who will lead England towards a glorious future has been usurped by an impostor who, like the Red-Cross Knight in the Wood of Error, has followed too many false paths. Had Elizabeth been chaste—rather than simply virginal (temperate)—like Britomart, Spenser argues, the future would probably look bright.

The first instalment of the poem ends with a complicated and disturbing image, later modified to ensure narrative continuity in the second edition, suggesting that this was a crux that was important to Spenser.¹⁹² We witness Britomart staring at Scudamore and Amoret, the lovers she has helped to unite, as they combine to create a hermaphroditic form:

Had ye them seene, ye would haue surely thought,
That they had beene that faire Hermaphrodite,
Which that rich Romane of white marble wrought,
And in his costly Bath causd to bee site:
So seemd those two, as growne together quite,
That Britomart halfe enuying their blesse,
Was much empassiond in her gentle sprite,
And to her selfe oft wisht like happinesse,
In vaine she wisht, that fate n’ould let her yet possesse. (III.xii.46; 1590 edn.)

This is a striking moment designed to stay in the memory, in line with the Horatian theory of poetry as ut picture poesis whereby ‘the poet and the painter both think in visual images which the one expresses in poetry, the other in pictures’.¹⁹³ No source for the description of the statue has ever been identified—assuming there is one—so we cannot know whether what the rich Roman saw from his bath was high art or base pornography. Probably, that is the point. We then follow Britomart’s mixture of jealousy (the description, quite deliberately, has her as ‘half enuying’ their joy), passion (inspired by great art or provoking a desire for intercourse?), and isolation (wishing that she could be part of a similar fusion). Spenser shows the reader the sort of emotions that a queen should have, the excitement not just at her much anticipated future union, but also the prospect of securing her nation’s future. In framing this concluding vision, Spenser brings us back full circle to the issues raised at the start of the Book I, showing that the future lay in thinking carefully and properly about sex.

Perhaps the key word in the stanza is the penultimate ‘yet’. Britomart will have her day, even though it does not happen in the extant poem. She is a young, passionate woman who is on a quest that will lead her eventually to marriage. Seeing Amoret and Scudamore is simply part of the process of growing up, learning the mechanics of love-making as part-inspiration, part-horror.¹⁹⁴ Spenser pointedly reuses this scene in Epithalamion, a sign of just how important this image of the voyeur and the hermaphrodite was for him.¹⁹⁵ In the later poem he describes Cynthia/Elizabeth’s failed love for ‘the Latmian shephard’. But instead of Britomart staring at Amoret and Scudamore with a mixture of guilt and excitement, we have the unedifying scene of Cynthia, the goddess of chastity, and a form of Elizabeth throughout Spenser’s works, peeping through the window at Edmund and his Elizabeth. Read one way this might seem innocent enough: the newly-weds live in Ireland and so require particular protection from their monarch and would surely welcome the knowledge that she will always be around to ensure their safety. Diana/Cynthia was chaste herself, but was the goddess of fertility and so was often asked to bless newly-weds with children. Read another way, Spenser draws attention to what the queen has missed and what she has not done, a somewhat cruel repetition of something that had appeared obvious to him in 1590.¹⁹⁶

Even so, Spenser’s sympathies may be more complicated than this account implies. At the start of The Faerie Queene, Book III, canto vi, the epicentre of the poem, as numerological studies have pointed out, Spenser gives us a description of a painless birth granted to Chrysogenee, the virginal nymph and mother of the twins, Amoret and Belphoebe:

Her berth was of the wombe of Morning dew,
And her conception of the ioyous Prime,
And all her whole creation did her shew
Pure and vnspotted from all loathly crime,
That is ingenerate in fleshly slime.
So was this virgin borne, so was she bred,
So was she trayned vp from time to time,
In all chast vertue, and true bounti-hed
Till to her dew perfection she was ripened. (III.vi.3)¹⁹⁷

The stanza is an affectionate and moving moment in the poem that seems to recognize the pains and perils that women go through when giving birth. Like Milton, who referred to this particular passage in Spenser when he was writing about childbirth, Spenser may have been indifferent to women’s oppression but extremely sensitive to their suffering.¹⁹⁸ The Garden of Adonis serves a key function in Book III, the book of chastity (married sexuality). As the later cantos demonstrate, especially when Amoret is trapped in the Castle of Busiraine, adult sexuality is a dangerous and very painful game, albeit sometimes comically so. The Garden of Adonis is a fantasy within fairyland, a place where, for a brief moment, sexuality is suspended, Nature is fecund and reproduces without problem. It is, as the name implies, unstable and doomed, just as Venus’ boy will be painfully taken from her before he has a chance to reach maturity.

Spenser shows that he was well aware that the real victims of sexual behaviour were often women. The most dangerous years for women were those of sexual maturity and childbirth when a huge percentage of women died. As Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford point out, ‘During every pregnancy, each woman feared her own death.’¹⁹⁹ In one of the few extant sources recording the experience of early modern childbirth, Revd Ralph Josselin records just how much his wife suffered during her pregnancies and how frightened she was as her labour approached.²⁰⁰ Women also had a long time to contemplate the forthcoming ordeal, increasing their anxiety, as most would have witnessed the death of other women through childbirth and seen many have their bodies distorted or deformed through the process.²⁰¹ It is little wonder that the successful deliverance of mother and baby after childbirth was an important religious event, celebrated by the ritual of churching, as women were joyfully welcomed back into the community.²⁰² If women survived these trying times, they had a good chance of living to a ripe age; many did not, as women ran ‘a cumulative risk of dying in childbed of 6 to 7 per cent during their procreative careers’.²⁰³ Spenser would appear to recognize this through his description of the lucky escape of Chrysogenee.

Is the poem telling us what happened to Machabyas Spenser? We can never be sure, of course, but Machabyas was probably dead before this point, as Daphnaïda, published the year after the first edition of The Faerie Queene, suggests.²⁰⁴ As she died before the age of 30 she would have still been fertile and it is possible that the lack of children produced by the Spensers indicates a health problem as well as protracted periods of separation (or that she breastfed their children).²⁰⁵ In normal circumstances couples would have produced about one child a year, but there might have been a number of stillbirths or cases of infant mortality. It seems likely that the tale of Chrysogenee bears some relationship to life and death in the Spenser household, a reminder that, for many, human reproduction came at a cost as well as bringing joy. Perhaps Spenser recognized that the queen’s decision not to have children was reasonable, even if he saw it as a dereliction of her duty as queen.