9
  
More Lost Years and Second Marriage, 1592–5

THERE is little trace of what Spenser did in the next three years, a situation not helped by the loss of the Irish State Papers in 1922. We know from the reference in the dedicatory Letter to Ralegh in Colin Clout that he was back in Ireland over the Christmas season. He might have been absent again from his estates in August–September 1592, possibly back in England, but there is no record of him returning to London. A document in the Irish State Papers, ‘A particular of the number of English tenants inhabiting under each several undertaker’, endorsed by the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Robert Gardiner, and the Solicitor-General, Sir Roger Wilbraham, omits Spenser’s name from the list of undertakers who have secured tenants on their estates—these include Sir William Herbert (thirty-five tenants); Sir Edward Denny (four tenants); Henry Billingsley (sixty-six tenants), adding up to a total of 245 tenants. The others are sternly reprimanded because they have not ‘performed the plot of the habitation so well’, especially in terms of ‘any English building … each one excused his default, alleging that they have time of respite to perform Her Majesty’s plot till anno 1594’. The failing undertakers are reminded that ‘each undertaker of 12,000 acres is by his letters patents bound to erect 92 families, English, upon his seigniory before Michaelmas 1594; and so after that proportion rateably for other inferior seigniories’. However, ‘few or none will accomplish that convenant’.¹

The document, produced at the behest of powerful, central figures in the Irish civil service, shows that the authorities were starting to become worried about the status of the Plantation quite early in its history, placing the blame squarely on the undertakers. Perhaps they were also realizing that the task of making Ireland English would prove more difficult than they had first imagined. Clearly many undertakers did not have the time or the funds to erect English buildings and were finding it impossible to transplant English families to Ireland, undoubtedly through their lack of enthusiasm for a venture that was always likely to prove insecure and dangerous. They also faced the complex task of establishing their rights to the land and, consequently, their ability to evict existing Irish tenants and landowners. It suggests that Spenser’s time in England had seriously reduced his ability to transform his Irish estates, and he may not have fully transformed the Norman castle into an inhabitable house by this point. It is possible that he had assumed that he would be able to return to England permanently in 1589, or had at least thought about this prospect, perhaps imagining that now that he had acquired an estate in one of the queen’s kingdoms, he could exchange it for another elsewhere. This might have been his long-term plan all along and his other recorded long visit (1596–7) probably had the same aim, albeit in rather more desperate circumstances. If so, this would further indicate that he probably took his children, Sylvanus and Katherine, with him, and that Machabyas died before or during that prolonged visit.

The sections at the end of Colin Clout refer to his second marriage, although they probably survive from an earlier version of the poem before the marriage actually took place. Spenser must have met Elizabeth Boyle in England, or, more likely, at some point soon after his return to Ireland in 1590, perhaps staying the publication of that poem because of her, in addition to his complicated relationship with Ralegh—although it is more likely that he met her in the second half of 1592 or early 1593.² Without these last lines the poem seems like a hostile lament about his unlucky fate, a complaint in the manner of the volume he published in 1591; with them, even though he laments that Rosalind neglects his suit, a repetition of Colin’s futile endeavours in the Calender, there is something to hope for and while prospects ostensibly look bleak in the poem, readers of the Amoretti and Epithalamion, published a year earlier, would have known that Spenser had remarried. But in 1589–91, especially if his first wife died in or just before this period, Spenser could have been eager to leave Ireland and been hunting for an English patron to support him, first seizing on Ralegh, and then searching for another when the prospect of Ralegh’s help evaporated. The absence of such a figure may also have fuelled the aggressive style and tone of the Complaints.

Nevertheless, the same series of records compiled for Gardiner and Wilbraham note that Spenser was required to pay an annual rent of £17. 7s. 6½d. for the Kilcolman estate, and that he paid £5. 15s. 10d. to the crown in Easter 1592.³ Another note records that his total landholdings were of 4,000 acres (the Kilcolman estate was 3,028 acres) and that the annual rent he paid to the crown was £22.⁴ The extra 972 acres, assuming this figure is accurate and not just based on an assumption, indicate that Spenser held other lands that are unrecorded (assuming the document is not referring to the prebend at Effin and the lands that he may still have held elsewhere, such as those at New Ross).⁵ If Spenser had been attempting to leave Ireland in the late 1580s or early 1590s, he was evidently holding on to his lands (although he may have been unable to sell them).

Having produced such an impressive volume of published work in 1590–1, Spenser did not publish anything else until 1595. This hiatus indicates, as might be expected given the miscellaneous nature of the work that appeared in the wake of The Faerie Queene, that virtually everything Spenser had written that could be found and that he wanted to see in print appeared in those two years. He surely spent most of the next three years on his estate writing, working on the second edition of The Faerie Queene, Astrophel, and other shorter poems. Some of this body of material may have been written or planned earlier—Sidney had died in 1586 and sections of The Faerie Queene, Book IV, and possibly Book V, probably have earlier origins—but, if so, each was revised.⁶ It is likely that he put Colin Clout to one side in 1591 and completed that later when an opportunity arose.

Spenser would also have spent significant amounts of time and energy fighting his legal battles with Lord Roche, although he would have relied on trusted servants to complete the documents and make the relevant appearances before judges. It was probably also in this period that the Kilcolman estate was transformed, given the strident tone of Gardiner and Wilbraham’s document and what we know took place from the archaeological records.⁷ Again, it is hard to judge how involved Spenser would have been in such developments: like many bookish Elizabethans, he was interested in buildings and architectural projects, as his poetry demonstrates, and he undoubtedly made some plans for the transformation of Kilcolman Castle.⁸ But he probably left the actual building work to be supervised by his chief servant, perhaps William Hiernane. Spenser also appears to have further withdrawn as much as possible from more public duties, most likely in order to concentrate on his writing and his estate, which suggests that he now had enough income from his lands and—perhaps—his writing to support himself and his family. At some point in 1593 Spenser passed his office of deputy clerk of the Munster Council on to Nicholas Curtis, according to Lord Roche in his petition to Adam Loftus, in his role as Lord Chancellor.⁹ In a letter to Robert Cecil written soon after Spenser’s death, Curtis reveals that he had obtained the office through Spenser and Bryskett, providing further evidence that such positions were distributed as the holder saw fit and so remained within a small circle.¹⁰ In another document submitted to the Irish Court of Chancery, Roche suggests that Spenser passed on the office to fight his legal disputes more effectively.¹¹ The truth is probably more complicated and less conspiratorial, as Spenser would have held on to the office if he had wanted direct access to and influence with the Council (although Curtis could well have served as his informant):

whereas, one Edmund Spenser, gentleman, hath lately exhibited suit against your suppliant for three plowe lands, parcel of Shanballymore (east of Doneraile), your suppliant’s inheritance, before the Vice-President and Councill of Munster, which land hath bene heretofore decreed for your suppliant against the said Spenser and others under whom he conveied; and, nevertheless, for that the said Spenser, being clark of the council in the said province, and did assyne his office unto one Nicholas Carteys, among other agreements, with covenant that during his life he should be free in the said office for his causes, by ocacon of which immunity he doeth multiply suits against your suppliant, in the said province, upon pretended title of others.¹²

Again, Roche represents—accurately—the English settlers as a closed group eager to help each other against the Irish. Roche’s petition also cites Joan Ny Callaghan, who had the ‘supportation and maintenance of Edmond Spenser, gentleman’, demonstrating that Spenser had Irish tenants on his land, hardly a surprise, given what took place elsewhere on the Plantation.¹³ In a letter to Robert Cecil in February 1599, Curtis confirmed that he had taken over Spenser’s post and had served ‘in that poor and troublesome place of clerk of the Council of Munster’, which he had received ‘upon the trust of Lodowick Bryskett and Edmund Spenser (men not unknown to your Honour)’. He also describes Spenser as ‘lately deceased, the mean and witness of our mutual trust and confidence’.¹⁴

Curtis’s testimony indicates that, while Spenser may have railed against the English court and the ways in which offices were distributed in England, he was prepared to use his influence in similar—albeit more limited—ways in Ireland. Curtis’s expression of support for Spenser to Robert Cecil might be read as somewhat ironic given Spenser’s fractious relationship with Cecil’s father, but is probably an indication of how rapidly disputes could be forgotten within a culture that tried to ensure that reconciliation between opposing parties could take place if at all possible.¹⁵ Clearly officials and settlers were eager to assume lucrative offices if and when they became available, as Spenser’s own career in Ireland demonstrates.

Although he probably spent much of his time writing, it is unlikely that Spenser was totally reclusive during this period and he must have visited other settlers, just as they would have visited him. The colonists probably made visits lasting a few days, given the complicated and difficult terrain in south-west Ireland, and the obvious dangers of travel. Given his interest in the culture of letters, Spenser would also have continued long correspondences with various friends, such as Harvey and Ponsonby, perhaps Mulcaster, or even Edward Kirk. He was probably also connected to other groups, resulting from his protracted visit to London in 1589–90, presumably a mixture of other poets such as Nicholas Breton and Michael Drayton, publishers, officials, administrators, and military men.

At a time in which dedicatory and commendatory verses, ‘an innovation of the Renaissance humanists’, were increasing exponentially, Spenser only wrote three, a sign of his relative isolation, perhaps the result of his obscurity and aloofness or of his pre-eminence.¹⁶ These three sonnets all prefaced the books of writers, principally translators, with close connections who may have formed their own distinct group, a circle on the fringes of the Sidney circle who later gravitated towards Essex. In 1595, Sir William Jones published his translation of Giovanni Battista Nenna’s treatise on nobility, Nennio, dedicated to Essex and prefaced by dedicatory sonnets from a formidable team of advocates: Samuel Daniel, George Chapman, Angell Day, and Spenser. Spenser advises the reader that ‘Who so wil seeke by right deserts t’attaine | vnto the type of true Nobility’ should give thanks ‘To Nenna first, that this worke created, | And next to Jones, that truly it translated’.¹⁷ Jones (1566–1640), from Caernarvonshire, finished his studies in Lincoln’s Inn in the same year, having translated Justus Lipsius’ Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Ciuil Doctrine a year earlier.¹⁸ He later became an important judge.¹⁹ Spenser would have read Jones’s translation, given the neo-Stoic Lipsius’ important role in articulating conceptions of temperance and self-control, and probably possessed a copy, given that Jones’s translation was published by Ponsonby.²⁰ Jones may have been related to Zachary Jones, the translator of The Historie of George Castriot, surnamed Scanderbeg (1596), another work published by Ponsonby, for which Spenser wrote a second dedicatory sonnet, stating that Scanderbeg’s achievements in defeating the Turks would be remembered when the vain monuments of princes had crumbled (linking this work to the Complaints, especially The Ruines of Time).²¹ Spenser was a contemporary of Zachary’s at Cambridge, who dedicated his translation from the French to George Carey, second Baron Hunsdon, the husband of Elizabeth Spencer, to whom Spenser had dedicated Muiopotmos and addressed a sonnet accompanying the first edition of The Faerie Queene. Spenser’s links to Zachary are therefore significant and it is likely that they knew each other reasonably well.²² Spencer’s poem concludes that Scanderbeg was ‘The scourge of Turkes, and plague of infidels’, providing a neat link to Spenser’s representation of Saracens in The Faerie Queene, and the connections he makes between them and the Catholic forces besieging Protestant England and Ireland.²³

The final dedicatory sonnet was written to preface Lewis Lewkenor’s translation of Gaspar Contarini’s The Commonwealth and Gouernment of Venice (1599), published by John Windet, a printer closely linked to Spenser’s circle of printers and booksellers. Maurice Kyffin and John Astley, future master of the revels, also wrote dedicatory sonnets suggesting that they may all have been clients of the countess of Warwick.²⁴ This sonnet is the most significant of Spenser’s three poems. He praises Venice as the ‘flower of the last worlds delight’, replacing the vain beauties of the two great cities of the ancient world, Babylon and Rome.²⁵ While the other empires have fallen, recalling the descriptions in A Theatre for Worldlings and the Complaints, Venice ‘farre exceedes in policie of right’, a comparison that enables Spenser to indulge in a witty hyperbole that praises Lewkenor: ‘Yet not so fayre her buildinges to behold | As Lewkenors stile that hath her beautie told.’²⁶ Lewkenor (1560–1627), a relative of the Sidneys, was a Catholic who had left England in 1580 having studied at the Middle Temple, fearing persecution because of his faith.²⁷ He fought in the Spanish army and returned to England in 1590 after safe passage was guaranteed by Sir Robert Sidney, writing about his experiences in A Discourse of the Usage of the English Fugitives by the Spaniard (1595), a work designed to cover his tracks by professing his loyalty to the crown. Ponsonby ‘acquired but never used the copyright’ on the expanded version of this work.²⁸ Lewkenor put his linguistic skills to good use and produced a version of Olivier de La Marche’s Chevalier Déliberé from the Spanish translation, Hernando de Acuña’s El Caballero Determinando, entitled The Resolved Gentleman (1594). This work, like the translation of Contarini, was dedicated to Anne, countess of Warwick, a dedicatee of the Fowre Hymns, providing further evidence that Lewkenor and Spenser had a series of connections in common. Lewkenor praised Spenser in an obvious addition to his translation, commenting that the queen’s rare virtue will

Drawe vp (as the heate of the Sunne doth vapours from the earth) the excellent wittes of her time to so high a pitch, that the following ages among millions of other noble workes penned in her praise, shall as much admire the writer, but farre more the subiect of the fairie Queene, as euer former ages did Homer and his Achilles, or Virgill, and his Aeneas, such worth, rare, and excellent matter, shall her matchless and incomparable virtue yeelde them to enoble their pennes, & to immortalize their fames.²⁹

Spenser’s compliment to Lewkenor reverses his trope, providing further evidence that the two men were on friendly terms. While Lewkenor places the object of Spenser’s work, the queen, above the poem, Spenser places Lewkenor’s translation above its object, Venice. There is no real evidence to link the two Joneses and Lewkenor, but they were connected to the Sidneys as well as Ponsonby, and had patrons in common with Spenser. It is worth noting that, yet again, Spenser was connected to people with differing religious views, one of whom was a well-known Catholic.

A final figure whom we know to have existed in Spenser’s orbit in the 1590s is Maurice Kyffin (c.1555–98), who was ‘on close and friendly terms with a wide circle of scholars and littérateurs, who numbered among them such celebrated figures as John Dee, William Camden, Edmund Spenser, Sir John Harington, William Morgan, Dr David Powell’.³⁰ Kyffin, another translator, was a Welsh author and soldier who translated John Jewel’s Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae into Welsh in 1595, and whose career reveals a number of parallels with that of Spenser. He also translated guides to help students learn Latin, as well as one of Terence’s plays, Andria, into English prose. This play was dedicated to Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, whose sons he had tutored in the early 1580s, and to whom Spenser had addressed a dedicatory sonnet in The Faerie Queene.³¹ His poem in praise of Elizabeth, The Blessednes of Brytaine (1588), was published by John Wolfe and dedicated to Essex, and he contributed another dedicatory poem himself to Lewkenor’s Resolved Gentleman.³² Furthermore, Kyffin was praised by Harvey in Pierces Supererogation (1593) as one of a number of writers in whose work ‘many things are commendable, diuers things notable, some things excellent’, and he later served as comptroller of the musters (1596–8) in Ireland, where he died and was buried in Christ Church Cathedral.³³

Spenser’s connections to such figures, whether they formed a distinct group or not, indicate that he had significant links with English writers in the early 1590s. All four writers produced important translations, suggesting that Spenser was especially eager to associate with intellectuals tuned in to contemporary developments in European culture. His three dedicatory poems promote a variety of translations from Italian, French, and Spanish. Moreover, Kyffin, along with John Eliot, whose work was published by Wolfe and who was a staunch supporter of Harvey during his quarrel with Nashe, was especially keen to write about the practice and theory of translation in order to encourage Englishmen to make works available for themselves and their fellow countrymen, a means of strengthening and opening out English intellectual culture, in line with Spenser’s stated aims and practice in his poetry.³⁴ Two of the writers, William Jones and Kyffin, were Welsh, the latter especially important for his translations into Welsh.³⁵ As has often been suggested, Spenser was interested in Welsh history and culture and may have used correspondents, friends, and acquaintances to help him with Welsh literature and history, and perhaps even Welsh language texts.³⁶

We cannot be sure what role, if any, Spenser played in the Nashe–Harvey quarrel, which lasted from 1590 to 1596, when Nashe published Have With You to Saffron-Walden. This dispute dominated a major strand of the literary scene in London, and was cited as a key reason for the prohibition of satire in the Bishops’ Ban, 4 June 1599.³⁷ Nashe, who valued Spenser’s work and praises him elsewhere, was notably sarcastic about the dedicatory and commendatory sonnets to The Faerie Queene in Pierce Penilesse (1592), probably because of Spenser’s public association with Harvey.³⁸ Although Spenser must have corresponded with Harvey during this period, at no point did Spenser intervene in the quarrel, possibly because he was too remote from the fray. Moreover, he did not return to England until 1596, by which time the exchange of pamphlets had effectively ended.³⁹ Other explanations might be that he had started to distance himself from Harvey, whether through design or circumstance; that Spenser was not prepared to help Harvey, through fear of the consequences or because he was too preoccupied with his own issues; or, most likely, that he or Harvey agreed that he would stay out of the quarrel, because of the damage it might do his literary reputation, an explanation supported by Harvey’s public criticism of the satirical nature of Mother Hubberds Tale.

Overall, we do not know enough about the quarrel to state how much was motivated by personal animus, intellectual issues, or even the desire for self-promotion and the promotion of the value of literature as a serious medium for debate in the wake of the Marprelate quarrel of 1588–9.⁴⁰ Therefore it remains difficult to judge why Spenser stayed aloof from a quarrel in which his mentor was involved. The combined effect of these interrelated disputes was clear enough. What emerged from both the Marprelate Tracts, the anti-Martinist campaign, and the subsequent Nashe–Harvey quarrel were not principles and positions but a scurrilous style of writing which all parties adopted, and a concomitant understanding that they had forged ‘new ways of presenting … ideas to a public increasingly recognized as an entity that could be addressed in print’.⁴¹ As Spenser spent his entire literary career addressing a public through the medium of print, and attempting to create new ways of exploring the possibilities that it produced, it was perhaps wise to remain apart from the fray. More likely, Harvey, whose position throughout was that scurrilous exchange was not the proper way for intellectuals to conduct their business, wanted his protégé to remain uncontaminated by what he felt he had to do to defend his honour and that of his brothers.⁴²

It is equally unlikely that we will ever discover when Spenser met his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle, unless new evidence appears. But, as he married her on 11 June 1594, and he records the courtship in terms of a calendar year in the Amoretti, it is most likely that he met her in 1592–3, and she agreed to marry him at Easter 1593, as the sonnet sequence suggests.⁴³ The couple could have met through the offices of her relation, Richard Boyle, given the role he played in her life after Spenser’s death, and because Spenser’s daughter, Katherine, married William Wiseman, who was well known to the earl’s family.⁴⁴ The fact that Elizabeth married three widowers in rapid succession would further support this conjecture and suggests that Boyle may have planned her life—and the lives of others within the family circle—perhaps rather more than she would have liked, as her surviving letters to him suggest. Boyle, who was closely acquainted with Geoffrey Fenton and who also knew Bryskett, would have known—or known of—Spenser, and would have realized that, as a widower with a family and an estate to run, he was probably eager to get married, as well as being a decent catch.⁴⁵

Far more is known about Elizabeth than Machabyas, and a stone image of her survives (Plate 29). In 1636 Elizabeth’s third husband, Robert Tynte, erected a monument with a stone effigy of himself and his two wives, one kneeling at his feet, the other at his head, in Kilcredan church, just over ten miles from Youghal, on the estates that Richard Boyle, earl of Cork, purchased from Walter Ralegh in 1602. Tynte established the church in 1636.⁴⁶ Elizabeth died in 1622, so we cannot know how accurate the image of her is, but, as she had four children with Tynte, it is probable that she is the ‘more staid and matronly’ lady at Tynte’s head.⁴⁷ Unfortunately the church was closed in 1917 and was vandalized, and the heads of Tynte’s wives were knocked off, so that the once impressive monument is now a shadow of its original state, and has decayed beyond the possibility of proper restoration. One of the heads of the wives is visible in a photograph from 1927, although it has subsequently been lost.⁴⁸ This somewhat unclear and problematic image and Elizabeth’s decapitated trunk are, unfortunately, the closest we have to physical likenesses of Spenser’s immediate family.⁴⁹

Elizabeth was the daughter of Steven and Joan Boyle from Bradden, Northamptonshire (Plate 30), a small village about six miles from the Dryden house at Canons Ashby, and so near to the large estates of the Spencers of Wormleighton and Althorp. Numerous branches of the Spencer family exist throughout the area, and there is an attractive plaque erected in 1606 to commemorate the lessees of the local manor, Thomas and Dorothy Spencer and their family in the church of St Mary, Everdon, about eight miles north of Bradden (Plate 31). If Spenser’s family were from Northamptonshire, as seems likely, the couple could have met through mutual connections, and might have known each other before their courtship began in earnest, given the importance of kinship and evidence that ‘members of the propertied classes took care during this period to maintain a fairly broad knowledge of their kindred, going well beyond those with whom they were on close terms’.⁵⁰ In fact Elizabeth was related to the Spencers of Althorp by marriage, through her mother, Joan, née Cope, whose grandfather had married Jane Spencer, granddaughter of John Spencer of Hodnell, Warwickshire, also the ancestor of Sir John Spencer, to whose daughters Spenser dedicated a number of poems. These three sisters were fourth cousins of his wife, a relationship that would have had some significance within Northamptonshire circles.⁵¹ Elizabeth was also a distant relative of Richard Boyle, perhaps his cousin: she is not mentioned in his memoir of 1632, but he certainly showed a keen interest in her welfare.⁵² Geoffrey Fenton, a rather more successful career civil servant than Spenser who had come to Ireland at the same time, became Boyle’s father-in-law in 1603, when his daughter, Catherine, became the second wife of the earl.⁵³ English settlers intermarried, as would be expected, especially second time around, but we cannot be sure whether Edmund and Elizabeth met in England or Ireland, although the Amoretti, which records a number of places and events in their courtship, makes no mention of a journey which would be expected if the couple had first met in England.⁵⁴ The most likely explanation is that Elizabeth moved to Ireland because of her relation’s conspicuous success in acquiring wealth and lands. Two of Boyle’s sisters settled in the Youghal area, and Elizabeth moved to Ireland with her brother, Alexander, indicting that emigration to Ireland was often a family affair.⁵⁵ It is further possible that Sir George Boyle, knighted in 1624, who practised iron smelting on the earl’s estate, was yet another relative who made the journey over from England.⁵⁶ Records show that Elizabeth later rented a house owned by the earl in Kilcoran, west Youghal, near the strand.⁵⁷ If she occupied this or a nearby house before her marriage to Spenser, then the opening line of Amoretti 75, ‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’, and another line in the Epithalamion, when the poet states that he will sing ‘of the sea that neighbours to her neare’ (line 39), can be read autobiographically (Plate 32).⁵⁸ Moreover, as Ralph Houlbrook has pointed out, ‘Ties with relatives by marriage and maternal kinsfolk were often stronger than those with paternal kindred’, providing further evidence that after his second marriage Spenser started to make use of his new connections within the wider Boyle family circle.⁵⁹ After all, some of his own family seem to have followed him over, notably his sister, Sarah, who married John Travers, another sign that members of the Spenser and Boyle families had moved over from Northamptonshire to Munster en masse.⁶⁰

Boyle signed the agreement to buy Ralegh’s estates for the knockdown price of £1,500 on 7 December 1602, by which time Ralegh had long lost interest in his Irish lands.⁶¹ Boyle’s family evidently had a significant presence in that area before then, suggesting that there may have been connections between the Boyles and the Raleghs, providing us with yet another context through which Edmund and Elizabeth could have met. Youghal, a well-established and relatively affluent town which had received its charter of incorporation in 1209 and had acquired walls by 1275, was nearly as important a port as Cork in the 1590s, as figures for customs receipts, wool exports, and livestock and cattle-hide exports demonstrate.⁶² William Camden, although admitting that it was ‘no great towne’, nevertheless provided a positive description of an anglicized settlement that was recognized as important in England: ‘the fruitfulnesse withal of the Country adjoining, draweth merchants unto it, so as it is well frequented and inhabited, yea and hath a Major for the head magistrate’.⁶³ Cork’s rise to prominence took place in the wake of the lapse of the Navigation Acts in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as the development of Atlantic trade transformed the region and placed the city centre stage, its population increasing from about 3,000 in 1600 to about 5,000 by the late 1620s.⁶⁴ Youghal’s importance in this period owed much to the presence of the Boyles, in particular, Richard Boyle’s ability to secure land for his followers, and his patronage of local merchants. It also benefited from an ‘open policy towards prospective New English freemen (in contrast to the situation in Cork)’, which helped to create its character as a loyal, Protestant city, and its strategic importance on the Blackwater made it a natural outlet for trade from the interior, especially from the Mallow area where Spenser lived (Plate 33).⁶⁵ The town had been a target of Desmond forces in November 1579, when it was sacked, and again in January 1583.⁶⁶ There was significant interaction with English towns, notably Bristol, where a number of Irish apprentices went to learn their trades.⁶⁷ Spenser would have had more reasons to be in Youghal than any other local town so it was where he was most likely to encounter a wife in Ireland.

Elizabeth was clearly a lot younger than Edmund, probably in her early to mid-twenties, perhaps even younger, given the number of children she had with Robert Tynte, after they married in 1612.⁶⁸ A date of 1576 has been conjectured as her birthday.⁶⁹ She was not without some assets, as her father had settled about £250 on each of his children when he died in 1582, and may have had access to some of Richard Boyle’s vast wealth.⁷⁰ Her parents were clearly people of some means, as Steven Boyle’s will mentions four children, which would have involved them inheriting the not inconsiderable sum of £1,000 in total, to be paid when they reached maturity (21) or got married, whichever came first (if any died, as it appears one did, the money was to be divided between the surviving siblings). As Steven died when his children were still minors, and probably fairly young, the sum would have been based on projected income from his estates, suggesting that he was comfortably off by the standards of the time, rather than especially wealthy.⁷¹

Elizabeth was also well provided for after Spenser’s death, with the earl leasing her a house in Kilcoran, at a nominal rent of 2s. 6d. per annum, perhaps one she was already occupying, when her second husband, Roger Seckerstone, died, probably in April 1606.⁷² She then married Captain Robert Tynte (b. 1571), a member of the minor gentry from Wraxall, Somerset, also the original home of the Gorges family with whom Spenser was closely linked, suggesting that there may have been a further series of connections between the parties. Tynte later followed Spenser as sheriff of Cork (1625–6). The marriage ceremony took place at Richard Boyle’s house in March 1612, as he records in a letter: ‘Cap^tn Robert Tynte was married in my study in yoghall by my cozen Richard Boyle, dean of Waterforde, to my kinswoman M^rs Elizabeth Boyle, als. Seckerstone, widow; and I gaue her unto him in marriadge, and I beseech god to bless them w^th good agreement and many virtuous children.’⁷³ Tynte was a friend or client of Boyle’s, as was Seckerstone, and Boyle’s relation was employed to carry out the ceremony.⁷⁴ One of seven commissioners of the town, he became very wealthy, as his financial dealings indicate, and was able to afford a grand monument to display his status when he died. The wording on the tomb indicates that it was erected in his lifetime, as was normal practice.⁷⁵ Tynte acquired the impressive tower house still standing in Youghal, known as Tynte’s Castle (Plate 34), probably used as the trading base which secured the economic development of the family.⁷⁶

Elizabeth wrote a number of letters expressing her gratitude to the earl for supporting her, showing that she was literate, a relatively unusual achievement for a woman of her status in the 1590s.⁷⁷ One dated 22 December 1615 states her ‘thankfullness for your ever wonted kindness towards me’, and, in the postscript, records a conversation Elizabeth had with Catherine Boyle in which she ‘spake to your Lady conser[n]ing some bisnes which if you can do me the faviour I would put what monyes I can of my Childrine … conser[n]ing some estates to setell upon them’.⁷⁸ The letter makes clear how much Elizabeth had come to rely on the earl for welfare and well-being, along with that of her children. In another letter dated 19 November 1616 Elizabeth asks that Boyle keep her son—probably her son with Seckerstone, Richard, as her children with Tynte would have been too young, and Peregrine would have been grown up by now—‘for his better edicacion’ and she asks Boyle to ‘show [his] louinge favour & countenance towards him & his childes accions to excuses in regarde of his youeth & want of exsperiance’.⁷⁹ Boyle took a great interest in Richard, who was his godson.⁸⁰ We do not know what the boy did, but the letter again shows Elizabeth’s dependence on her benefactor and the Boyles working as an extended family in Ireland in a manner that was probably only unusual in terms of the wealth and power that they possessed.⁸¹

Elizabeth’s mother, Joan, was widowed in 1582, and remarried Captain Ferdinando Freckleton the following year. He was probably the captain who came to Ireland in 1596, possibly earlier, and, as he served in Ireland until 1611, when the last record of him appeared in the State Papers, he probably brought his family over with him, assuming they were still alive at that point. Captain Freckleton was knighted in Dublin Castle in 1603 along with Richard Boyle by the Lord Deputy, Lord Mountjoy, to mark the coronation of James I, providing yet more circumstantial evidence that the larger Boyle family group stayed together and looked after each other. It is therefore likely that the Freckletons settled in the Youghal area.⁸²

The Spensers undoubtedly behaved in a similar way. Edmund’s sister, Sarah, moved to Ireland at some point in the 1580s, and married John Travers, from a family who had moved to Ireland at some point in the middle of the sixteenth century, registrar of the diocese of Cork, Cloyne, and Ross, in 1587 or 1588.⁸³ Furthermore, Peregrine Spenser married Dorothy Tynte, Robert’s daughter in 1623, a year after his mother’s death, and Spenser’s daughter, Katherine, also married someone close to the earl, again showing how intricately interwoven the lives of settler families invariably were.⁸⁴ Indeed, the evidence suggests that Elizabeth was ‘carefully controlled’ by the earl, and he may even have arranged many of these marriages, which might explain why she married Roger Seckerstone so soon after Spenser’s death.⁸⁵

Elizabeth’s continuing relationship with the earl probably suggests that during their marriage the Spensers had important contact with the Boyles and their circle after 1594. Spenser was by no means badly off, and neither was Robert Tynte, who was later ennobled, and Boyle was prepared to help out his family. Boyle’s rapacious and self-interested pursuit of gain was the logical culmination of the colonial mentality that had made Spenser’s principal patrons, Grey, the Norrises, and Wallop, so successful and popular among the New English they employed and supported. Boyle made sure that he had access to information about land titles and claims, through contacts such as Fenton; acquired rights to estates; and then took possession of as much land and property as he could. He carefully looked after those who mattered to him, his family, and a close circle of friends and retainers, exactly what Anglo-Irish lords such as Lord Roche of Fermoy alleged was normal practice among those whom the crown had entrusted to administer the law impartially. It is little wonder that there were competing communities in Ireland, different groups of Old and New English appealing to the authorities that they had the exclusive right to land and property and the force of law to protect them and trying to ensure that they had the largest share of what property and wealth was available.⁸⁶ Boyle was also conspicuously successful in marrying his children into the most important families in England, including the Clifford and Howards, and that of the rising star at the Stuart court, George de Villiers, duke of Buckingham; and in Ireland, the Barrys, earls of Barrymore, and Fitzgeralds, earls of Kildare.⁸⁷

Boyle’s behaviour was always likely to make enemies, and he earned the enmity of Adam Loftus, whom Spenser also appears to have detested, as well as the Lord Deputy, Oliver St John (1559–1630), who was viceroy from 1615 to 1622.⁸⁸ More significantly, the need to secure land led to disputes within the extended family itself, and Elizabeth and her new husband, Roger Seckerstone, were challenged by Sylvanus, who had probably just come of age, in 1602–3, for the rights to Kilcolman.⁸⁹ If Boyle controlled the family, Edmund and Elizabeth’s married life may not have been without its tensions, and, as is all too often the case, stepchild and stepmother may have had different understandings of what was rightfully theirs. The Boyle family were certainly involved in a number of complicated financial and legal disputes—although this was not unusual in this period and anyone who acquired land expected to have to fight for rights of possession in the courts.⁹⁰

The Amoretti appeared along with the Epithalamion in 1595, part of the second—and last—flurry of published work that Spenser produced (1594–6). As with the Complaints, the volume shows Ponsonby advertising his role in helping to make Spenser’s work public. His dedicatory letter to Sir Robert Needham, who was knighted on 1 September 1594, just before he returned to England on 25 September, suggests that the sequence was finished at some point during the summer, after the Spensers’ marriage on St Barnabas’ Day, 11 June.⁹¹ Sir Robert Needham of Shavington, Cheshire was yet another figure with a connection to the Spencer family, as his mother-in-law was Mary Spencer, another daughter of Sir John Spencer of Althorp.⁹² Ponsonby’s letter also shows his confidence in his own literary taste and judgement. Thanking Needham for bringing the manuscript over for him to publish, Ponsonby waxes lyrical in ways that make him sound far more like a contemporary literary critic than a publisher, demonstrating a significant change from the more technical and cautious letter that accompanied the Complaints:

I do more confidently presume to publish it in his absence, vnder your name to whom (in my poore opinion) the patronage thereof, doth in some respectes properly apertaine. For, besides your iudgment and delighte in learned poesie: This gentle Muse for her former perfection long wished for in Englande, nowe at the length crossing the Seas in your happy companye, (though to your selfe vnknowne) seemeth to make choyse of you, as meetest to giue her deserued countenaunce, after her retourne⁹³

Ponsonby addresses Needham, a knight, and tells him how important his role has been in helping to produce a major literary work, which in itself suggests that normal assumptions of literary relations have been reversed. Needham is clearly—and publicly—cast as the willing, ignorant messenger who has worked to serve the writer and his publisher by bringing the manuscript over from Ireland, a sign that, in the Spenser circle at least, publishers and writers assumed equal relations and valued the outside world only in so far as it served their needs.

Sir Robert Needham may not have loomed large as a major figure in Spenser’s life, but the volume does provide us with other clues of whom Spenser knew. Two dedicatory sonnets by ‘G. W. Senior’ and ‘G. W. I.’, the ‘I’ undoubtedly standing for ‘Junior’, were probably written by Geoffrey Whitney (1548?–1600/1), best known for his collection, A Choice of Emblems, published by Christopher Plantin at Leiden in 1586, and his father.⁹⁴ The identification is not certain, however.⁹⁵ Whitney Junior did have a number of significant links to Spenser, and, through his connections with Leicester, moved among Dutch artists and intellectuals in the Low Countries, providing us with some evidence that Spenser had maintained links he had established earlier in London when he was young, perhaps by correspondence.⁹⁶ He was also probably the brother of Isabella Whitney (fl. 1566–73), the first significant English female poet from outside the ranks of the aristocracy, and author of two miscellanies, who may, therefore, have been another writer of Spenser’s acquaintance.⁹⁷ Isabella’s work is notable for its unusually forceful style of female complaint, a ‘unique representation of a woman’s reaction against the tyranny of the masculine lyric tradition’, as the speaker laments her fate at the hands of an inconstant male, which probably had an effect on Spenser’s development of this particular genre of poetry and his adoption of female voices.⁹⁸ Her brother dedicated two of his poems to Alexander Nowell and Sir John Norris, important figures at different stages of Spenser’s life.⁹⁹ Spenser had a particular interest in emblems and the relationship between word and image in printed texts, and he may well have had a copy of Whitney’s book in Ireland.¹⁰⁰ Neither dedicatory poem is especially remarkable, but the opening quatrain of the first, ‘Darke is the day, when Phoebus face is shrowded, | and weaker sights may wander soone astray: | but when they see his glorious raies vnclowded, | with steddy steps they keepe the perfect way’, certainly suggests that it was written by someone well versed in emblem books.¹⁰¹

The sonnet sequence itself is best known as a celebration of Spenser’s marriage, a new departure in the recently established genre, which, following Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, first published in 1591, had charted adulterous love or unrequited passion.¹⁰² Yet again, Spenser’s intervention was designed to transform the state of English culture: using a number of mainly French and Italian models and examples, he invented a new style of English sonnet, now known as the Spenserian sonnet, based on a ‘very demanding rhyme scheme, at least as difficult as the Petrarchan scheme (ABAB ABAB CDE CDE)’.¹⁰³ The Anacreontic poems that join the two major works are also an innovation in both style and substance.¹⁰⁴ In the Amoretti Spenser tells the story of his courtship of Elizabeth, the sequence culminating in another new form of English poem, the marriage-hymn, the Epithalamion, as no one before had combined ‘the roles of bridegroom and poet-speaker’.¹⁰⁵ Although there were well-known classical precedents in the works of Claudian and Statius, Spenser’s poem had yet another innovative stanza pattern, ‘derived from the Provençal and Italian canzone, which Spenser introduced to England’.¹⁰⁶ Furthermore, as Kenneth J. Larsen has demonstrated, ‘The eighty-nine sonnets of the Amoretti, as numbered in the 1595 octavo edition, were written to correspond with consecutive dates, beginning on Wednesday 23 January 1594 and running, with one interval, through to Friday 17 May 1594: they correspond with the daily and sequential order of scriptural readings that are prescribed for those dates by the liturgical calendar of the Church of England.’¹⁰⁷ Spenser narrates the course of his courtship and marriage of Elizabeth in terms of the prescribed Bible readings used by the established church, a token of his allegiance to that church, as well as a manifestation of the establishment of English culture in Ireland. In 1594 Spenser’s life had reached a high point of stability and renewed purpose through his second marriage, something he celebrates in this volume, and in the revised Colin Clout, published in the same year after a significant hiatus, perhaps also brought over by Needham. Ironically enough, it was to prove a brief and false dawn, his hopes for the future dashed by the outbreak of the Nine Years War, leading eventually to the destruction of the Munster Plantation, and Spenser’s flight and death.

The volume shows that the Munster planters believed that they had established a civilized order in Ireland that could rival and even supersede the tired culture of the court. Spenser appropriates the language of the courtly lyric—in the main that of Sidney’s sequence—in order to praise his bride-to-be, translating the tropes of courtiers to a conspicuously provincial, commercial scene:

Ye tradefull Merchants that with weary toyle,
do seeke most pretious things to make your gain:
and both the Indias of their treasures spoile,
what needeth you to seeke so farre in vaine?
For loe my loue doth in her selfe containe
all this worlds riches that may farre be found;
if Saphyres, loe her eies be Saphyres plaine,
if Rubies, loe hir lips be Rubies found;
If Pearles, hir teeth be pearles both pure and round;
if Yuorie, her forhead yuory weene;
if Gold, her locks are finest gold on ground;
if siluer, her faire hands are siluer sheene,
But that which fairest is, but few behold,
her mind adornd with vertues manifold.¹⁰⁸

Elizabeth is as beautiful as any courtly lady, and Spenser’s sonnet may well have Astrophil’s ornate description of Stella’s face in mind, transposing the elaborate ironies of that poem to a new, middle-class setting and a different series of literary coordinates.¹⁰⁹ Sidney’s poem reads:

Queen Virtue’s court, which some call Stella’s face,
Prepar’d by Nature’s choicest furniture,
Hath his front built of alabaster pure;
Gold in the covering of that stately place.
The door by which sometimes comes forth her Grace
Red porphyr is, which lock of pearl makes sure,
Whose porches rich (which name of cheeks endure)
Marble mix’d red and white do interlace.
The windows now through which this heav’nly guest
Looks o’er the world, and can find nothing such,
Which dare claim from those lights the name of best,
Of touch they are that without touch doth touch,
Which Cupid’s self from Beauty’s mine did draw:
Of touch they are, and poor I am their straw. (Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 9)

Sidney’s poem asserts that his lady has all these marvellous possessions as part of her substance; in pointed contrast, Spenser claims that his is better than these things, establishing a distance between her (middle-class) virtues and the riches that the merchants bring back from far-flung lands, most of which, presumably, end up at court and in the possession of courtiers. Furthermore, Spenser’s love is witnessed by merchants, not courtiers, and her commodified body serves to revitalize them, the real substance of society, not those at court who imagine that their actions run the country.¹¹⁰ The opening quatrain, especially if read alongside the proem to Book II of The Faerie Queene, claims that foreign exploration is probably a waste of time, as more profit will be gained, financially and spiritually, by staying at home and securing England’s possessions within the British Isles, a development that would involve the strengthening and proliferation of provincial society, not the spectacular voyages of explorers and empire builders which invariably disappointed investors.¹¹¹ In marrying Elizabeth, Spenser is achieving this aim, making him a better citizen than many of his more exalted counterparts. The sonnet may take another swipe at Ralegh, and is the sort of writing that would have done nothing to help the courtier regain his position at court or secure support for his transatlantic ventures, suggesting that Spenser felt betrayed by his erstwhile champion in some way, perhaps for abandoning Ireland.¹¹² The description is repeated in the tenth stanza of the Epithalamion, when the poet-narrator asks, ‘Tell me ye merchants daughters did ye see | So fayre a creature in your towne before?’ (lines 168–9), followed by a similar depiction of Elizabeth in terms of a blazon invariably applied to court beauties.¹¹³ Spenser reminds his readers that his bride has a radiance that puts them to shame, marking the couple out as both part of the community and yet also separate from it. When read alongside Colin Clout the marriage poems express a recommitment to making a life in Ireland and an understanding that the Spensers were choosing to adopt an Anglo-Irish identity in doing so.

Spenser also repeats earlier works that place a high value on the religious significance of marriage as the holy state in which Christians were exhorted to live. Throughout the sequence the poet adopts the erotic language of the Song of Songs, most conspicuously in the ‘garden sonnet’ (64):

Coming to kisse her lyps, (such grace I found)
Me seemd I smelt a gardin of sweet flowres:
that dainty odours from them threw around
for damzels fit to decke their louers bowres.
Her lips did smell lyke vnto Gillyflowers,
her ruddy cheekes, lyke vnto Roses red:
her snowy browes lyke budded Bellamoures
her louely eyes lyke Pincks but newly spred,
Her goodly bosome lyke a Strawberry bed,
her neck lyke to a bounch of Cullambynes:
her brest lyke lillyes, ere theyr leaues be shed,
her nipples lyke yong blossomd Iessemynes,
Such fragrant flowres doe giue most odorous smell,
but her sweet odour did them all excell.¹¹⁴

Spenser celebrates his forthcoming union with his bride in terms of the description of the beauties of Nature employed to describe the marriage between the church and God in the Canticles. Although the church insisted that this book be read allegorically, there was a long tradition of it being read in more obviously literal, erotic terms.¹¹⁵ In the Amoretti Spenser represents his marriage as a sacred event, the impending first act of sexual intercourse as a holy rite of passage into the joys of Christian matrimony, the proper way of living and establishing the social order after the Reformation.

However, a dissonant note is struck in the concluding stanzas of the Epithalamion, just as the much anticipated act is about to take place. In bed the newly-weds look out of the window and spot an unsettled figure unable to find her own place of rest:

Who is the same, which at my window peepes?
Or whose is that faire face, that shines so bright,
Is it not Cinthia, she that neuer sleepes,
But walkes about high heauen al the night?
O fayrest goddesse, do thou not enuy
My loue with me to spy:
For thou likewise didst loue, though now vnthought,
And for a fleece of woll, which priuily,
The Latmian shephard once vnto thee brought,
His pleasures with thee wrought,
Therefore to vs be fauorable now;
And sith of wemens labours thou hast charge,
And generation goodly dost enlarge,
Encline they will t’effect our wishfull vow,
And the chast wombe informe with timely seed,
That may our comfort breed:
Till which we cease our hopefull hap to sing,
Ne let the woods vs answere, nor our Eccho ring. (lines 372–89)

It is not usually remarked when listing Spenser’s poetic innovations that he appears to have been the first poet who imagined the queen looking into his bedroom on his wedding night.¹¹⁶ The image relies on a conventional understanding of the monarch as Cynthia, the imperial moon, continually watching over her subjects in order to protect them from any ills.¹¹⁷ But here she is the one looking through the window, staring in jealousy at her subjects, reversing the normal hierarchical relations. The poem also, as in Donne’s lyric, ‘The Sunne Rising’, asserts that the lovers’ bed is the centre of the world at the time of their holy union.¹¹⁸ This can be read as a particularly offensive stanza, especially given Spenser’s track record, designed to provoke the queen, should she or anyone close to her read it—a strident revision of the genre, deliberately striking a discordant note and asserting, once again, that the poet was the really important figure.¹¹⁹

The key word is ‘envy’, given Elizabeth’s virginity, and the reminder that she once loved: The Shepheardes Calender had made a number of references to the projected Alençon match, so the ‘Latmian shephard’ may be François, duc d’Alençon, or, even, Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester.¹²⁰ The queen is cast as a voyeur, peeping through the curtains, jealous of the joy of the lovers, an image that repeats the closing lines of the first edition of The Faerie Queene with Britomart gazing enviously at the joy of the hermaphrodite created by the lovers Amoret and Scudamore.¹²¹ There, we know that Britomart will have her time when she marries Artegall, leading to a dynasty of mighty kings.¹²² Here we are told that Cynthia/Elizabeth has had hers, and needs to bless the lovers and stop her envy. Spenser would appear to be commenting on her inability to rule effectively in Ireland, a theme he was developing in the second edition of The Faerie Queene, on which he would have been working at this time, and her failure as a ruler of men and women who have sexual desires, as Ralegh had discovered to his cost three years earlier.

It is possible, of course, that Spenser has this scandal in mind, as he celebrates his own marriage in a conspicuously bourgeois manner, as he was soon to publish an allegory of Ralegh’s fate.¹²³ The stanza is also a memento mori, a cruel reminder that Elizabeth had failed to marry and produce an heir, when her duty, as Spenser clearly saw it, was to ensure the protection of her subjects. Instead they have to depend on her failing corpse-like body, wandering at night like a ghost, a parody of the true role that Cynthia should play.¹²⁴ Spenser has linked his own life and situation with that of the monarch, skilfully—and confrontationally—drawing together two of the main concerns articulated throughout his writing career. His personal life is seen at odds with, and as more ordered than, the larger political state of affairs. The newly-weds appeal to Juno, the goddess of marriage, to bless their bridal bed, and to enable it to remain:

Without blemish or staine,
And the secret pleasures of theyr loues delight
With secret ayde doest succour and supply,
Till they bring forth the fruitfull progeny,
Send vs the timely fruit of this same night. (lines 400–4)

The Epithalamion, a poem written as a numerological artefact in order to represent the 365 days of the year, as a counterpoint to the 52 weeks represented in the Amoretti, has often been read as if it were a work that expressed the divine order of the universe.¹²⁵ In fact, the harmony of both of the poems’ structures is distinctly at odds with the anxiety and, in places, hostility represented in the content, which is full of sly and skilful reversals of expected norms. Spenser hopes for a bright future for the couple with children and stability in their home, but has to acknowledge that this does not depend on themselves alone, counterpointing his domestic bliss with that of a threatening world outside his domestic sphere.¹²⁶

Amoretti and Epithalamion also provide the reader with more mundane details designed to anchor the works in the realities of the poet’s life. Again, Spenser’s model was probably Sidney in Astrophil and Stella, who, using the rhetorical technique of occupatio, referred to his keen knowledge of political events while ostensibly denying any interest, and quibbled on the name ‘Rich’, the name of Penelope Devereux/Stella’s husband.¹²⁷ Sidney’s death had been swiftly followed by his posthumous canonization and, as his works were printed, the conditions of writing were transformed, because secular lyric poetry in print became far more socially acceptable and popular.¹²⁸ Such lessons were not lost on Spenser, and Sidney’s influence is especially apparent in the poetry he published immediately after the first edition of The Faerie Queene.

As already noted, in Amoretti 33 Spenser addresses his friend Lodowick Bryskett, who published poems alongside Spenser in Astrophel later that year. He explains that he has neglected his duties to the queen in failing to finish The Faerie Queene, because he has been so tormented in his pursuit of his proud mistress that he will be unable to continue work until ‘she vouchsafe to grawnt me rest, | or lend you me another liuing brest’ (lines 13–14).¹²⁹ When read in conjunction with sonnet 74, expressing his devotion to the three Elizabeths in his life—mother, queen, and wife—the sonnet again demonstrates that Spenser’s primary devotion was to his wife ahead of his sovereign. In representing Elizabeth Boyle as a cruel, tyrannical mistress until she submits to his suit, Spenser is adapting conventional poetic imagery in an unfamiliar manner—although he may well be consciously adapting Dante’s representation of Beatrice in La Vita Nuova—emphasizing the need he has for a partner in order to be able to live his life and work properly.¹³⁰ The Amoretti can be read as a critique of the ‘pagan self-sufficiency’ of Stoicism and a statement of the benefits of married life, casting the poet’s wife in a more active role than that imagined for many unobtainable ladies in the poetry of Spenser’s contemporaries.¹³¹ The eventual union of the disdainful beloved and the desperate suitor, achieved at the turn of the year, 25 March, in sonnet 62, may or may not correspond exactly to a development in their romance. The last lines, ‘So likewise loue cheare you your heauy spright, | and change old yeares annoy to new delight’, are surely conventional and employ the traditional poetic theme that spring brought the awakening of new love, but they may chart the course of Spenser’s suit from the ‘long storms and tempests sad assay’ to sight of the ‘happy shore’, as the next sonnet states.¹³²

It is more likely, however, that in his most famous sonnet, ‘One day I wrote her name vpon the strand’, Spenser is recalling an event that he wants the reader to note, as Elizabeth did probably live near Youghal strand, a significant feature of the town, suggesting that he spent some time in the area, probably through connections to the Boyle family. If she did not live in the house in Kilcoran already mentioned, Elizabeth might have lived with her brother-in-law, Sir Richard Smith, in a house on the estuary where the River Blackwater flows into the sea, which suggests that the topographical exhortation in Epithalamion is another carefully placed detail: ‘Bring with you al the Nymphes that you can heare | both of the riuers and the forests greene: | And of the sea that neighbours to her neare, | Al with gay girlands goodly wel beseene’ (lines 37–40).¹³³ The marriage must have taken place in Youghal, or nearby, not in Christ Church, Cork, as is often assumed.¹³⁴ If so, the ceremony would have been conducted in St Mary’s church, damaged in the Desmond Rebellion, but undoubtedly restored by 1594, where there is a large monument to Sir Richard Boyle and his family, of a similar style to the one in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin (Plates 33, 35).¹³⁵ The warden at Youghal was Nathaniel Baxter (fl. 1569–1611), a vociferous Calvinist minister whose long poem, Sir Philip Sydneys Ouránia, that is Endimions Song and Tragedie (1606), shows that he knew the Sidney family well and had taught Sir Philip Greek. The work is, unsurprisingly, heavily influenced by Spenser, whom he would have known in this period. Baxter would have attended the wedding ceremony.¹³⁶ Ralegh’s house at Myrtle Grove was next to the church, although no evidence survives that he ever lived there.¹³⁷

It would have made little sense to have travelled into Cork, which would have been an expensive and time-consuming journey. Moreover, it is not clear that either bride or groom had any significant reason to be in Cork. The marriage was far more likely to have been held in the bride’s parish—or, less likely, the groom’s parish or house, which would have meant either on the Kilcolman estate or in nearby Buttevant. Custom would have suggested the bride’s parish, as had been the case with Spenser’s first marriage.¹³⁸ Epithalamion’s plea that the couple be not disturbed by terrors of the night—goblins, witches, nightmares, owls, ravens, and so on—concludes with ‘Ne let th’unpleasant Quyre of Frogs still croking | Make vs to wish theyr choking’ (lines 349–50). The reference has a distinguished and obvious classical precedent in the Georgics, where Virgil describes the dangers and irritations that the farmer needs to be prepared to confront, culminating in the croaking of frogs:

                   No, rain need never take us

Unawares: for high-flying cranes will have flown to valley bottoms
To escape the rain as it rises, or else a calf has looked up
At the sky and snuffed the wind with nostrils apprehensive,
Or the tittering swallow has flitted around and around the lake,
And frogs in the mud have croaked away at their old complaint.¹³⁹

In recalling this line in a marriage hymn Spenser situates bride and groom in a country setting, ready to run their estates together, suggesting that he now identifies himself and his future with his country estate at Kilcolman.

Given the ways in which Elizabeth is represented in the Amoretti as a beautiful, cruel tyrant, we might wonder whether she read Spenser’s work. Most likely, she was party to his literary games and representation of their lives in fictionalized form, as it appears Machabyas was over a decade earlier, a privileged woman reader entering a male world of reading and writing together, shared books and manuscripts, and the deft use of print.¹⁴⁰ A copy of The Faerie Queene exists, now in private hands, which, if it is authentic (a big ‘if’), was the volume that Spenser must have given to Elizabeth. At the end, beside the Letter to Ralegh, is an earlier version of the first sonnet of the Amoretti:

A sa mistresse

           Happy ye leaves when as those lilly Hands
That houlds my life in hir deaddoing might
Shall handle yo^u and hold in Loves swete bandes
Like captives trembling at y^e victors sight.

           Happy ye liues when as w^th stary light
Those lamping eies shall deigne on yo^u to looke
And reade the sorowes of my dieng spright
Written w^th tears in harts close bleedinge book.

           Happy ye rymes bathed in y^e sacred brook
Of Helicon whence shee derived is
When as you shall beholde y^t angels looke
My soules longe lacked foode my heavens blisse.

Leaves, lines & rymes seeke her to please alone
Whome if yo^u please I care for others none/.¹⁴¹

The printed version of the sonnet has been lightly but carefully revised. In line 2 ‘That’ has become ‘which’; in line 3 ‘swete’ has become ‘soft’; line 5 has been changed to ‘And happy lines, on which with starry light’; in line 6, ‘shall’ has become ‘will’ and ‘on yo^u’ has become ‘sometimes’; in line 9 ‘Happy ye rymes’ has been changed to ‘And happy rymes’ to parallel the structure of line 5; line 11 has become ‘When ye behold that Angels blessed looke’; and in line 14, ‘yo^u’ has become ‘ye’. The possible revisions are plausible, although as there are no Spenser holographs, we know very little about his writing practices, and the revised poem could well be a fake.¹⁴²

But even if the inscription is fraudulent, the point may not be seriously affected. In both versions of the sonnet Spenser casts Elizabeth as the most important reader of his poetry, making it clear that the references to her bewitching eyes throughout the sequence signal not just her beauty but her ability to read the ‘Leaues, lines and rymes’ that he has written for her. Spenser claims that he is only happy when writing for her, anchoring his poetry in his private, domestic sphere, with the knowledge that in print the representation of that personal world takes on a different meaning as an alternative to the courtly mode that has dominated English poetry and that he has now appropriated and subverted.¹⁴³ The point becomes all the more obvious when read alongside the references to the merchant families as the community in which the couple exist. In inscribing the first edition of his magnum opus for Elizabeth to read and to become his reader, Spenser includes Elizabeth within his circle of readers, inscribing the book to mark their new life together. It is likely, then, that the sonnet to Bryskett describing his failure to complete the second part of The Faerie Queene because of his quest for Elizabeth’s hand, was a shared joke between a married couple rather than simply an address to a male friend about the malign effects of his love life on his work.¹⁴⁴ After all, Spenser had represented his married life in this way before.

And an old flame was indeed revitalized in the same year. Rosalind appears again as Colin’s love in Colin Clout. As in the Calender she is represented as a cruel mistress who has rejected poor Colin’s advances by the shepherds Hobbinol and Lucid: ‘Indeed (said Lucid) I have often heard | Faire Rosalind of divers fowly blamed: | For being to that swaine [Colin] too cruel hard, | That her bright glorie else hath much defamed’ (lines 907–10). Exactly like Elizabeth Boyle in the Amoretti. Nevertheless, Colin vigorously defends her in the closing speech of the poem:

Ah shepheards (then said Colin) ye ne weet
How great a guilt upon your heads ye draw:
To make so bold a doome with words unmeet,
Of thing celestiall which ye never saw.
For she is not like as the other crew
Of shepheards daughters which emongst you bee,
But of divine regard and heavenly hew,
Excelling all that ever ye did see.
Not then to her that scorned thing so base,
But to my selfe the blame that lookt so hie:
So hie her thoughts as she her selfe have place,
And loath each lowly thing with loftie eie.
Yet so much grace let her vouchsafe to grant
To simple swaine, sith her I may not love:
Yet that I may her honour paravant,
And praise her worth, though far my wit above.
Such grace shall be some guerdon for the griefe,
And long affliction which I have endured:
Such grace sometimes shall give me some reliefe,
And ease of paine which cannot be recured.
And ye my fellow shepheards which do see
And heare the languours of my too long dying,
Unto the world for ever witnesse bee,
That hers I die, nought to the world denying,
This simple trophe of her great conquest. (lines 927–51)

Even though he has not yet won her love, Rosalind gives Colin a reason for making Ireland his home, providing him with the ‘grace’ that renders the pains of living in Ireland bearable. The key lines in this speech are surely ‘Unto the world for ever witnesse bee, | That hers I die, nought to the world denying’. Colin hints strongly that he desires a permanent union with Rosalind, which can only mean marriage, especially when written by a poet so obsessed with the institution. These lines appear to allude to those in the marriage ceremony that require the couple to live together ‘forsaking all other’, and to promise ‘to love and to cherish, tyll death us depart’.¹⁴⁵ Therefore, Rosalind must now be Spenser’s new wife, Elizabeth.¹⁴⁶ Even though we cannot be sure when these lines were written and whether they survive from a 1591 version of the poem, or a time closer to 1594, the poem points towards a new marriage in Ireland as a means of establishing the poet’s sense of place and making him accept the hostile country as his real home, the debate over Spenser’s ‘home’ and identity being a—if not the—key theme of Colin Clout. The ending, which looks forward to a marriage as a reason for making and staying in a home, also provides a neat link to the Amoretti and Epithalamion, and suggests that we should read these three poems as a group centred around Spenser’s second marriage. Spenser seems to have revised Colin Clout in order to confirm his identity as an Englishman in Ireland. The poem cannot simply be read as an anti-court poem—although it is that. Spenser makes it clear that he is staying in Ireland because he has met and married Elizabeth, a second Rosalind who will transform his life as the first did. In dating and describing the poem as written ‘From my house of Kilcolman, the 27. of December. 1591’ Spenser connects it not just to Ralegh and their journey to London (1589–90), but also to its importance in his own life, as his estate and the home of his wife, linking the two as key events in his story. Both point him in the same direction, away from the court and towards Ireland with its community of shepherds and merchants, where he plans to remain rooted.¹⁴⁷

Rosalind’s new identity as Elizabeth is also confirmed in the second edition of The Faerie Queene, yet another example of Spenser cross-referencing his works with each other and with his life, his fictional creations reappearing throughout his career in different guises. As has often been noted, a fourth Grace, who ‘seem’d all the rest in beauty to excell’, appears on Mount Acidale before Colin Clout, a fictionalized version of the poet (VI.x.14, line 4). This Grace, Elizabeth, represents his new wife, who, despite her relatively humble origins, surpasses the queen and is the chief inspiration of Colin, the shepherd poet (VI.x.25–8).¹⁴⁸ Furthermore, Elizabeth is ‘Crownd with a rosie girlond, that right well | Did her beseeme’ (14, lines 5–6). ‘Rosie girlond’ is a reference to Rosalind, with the clear implication that Elizabeth is her new manifestation.¹⁴⁹

Bound in the same volume as Colin Clout was Astrophel: A Pastoral Elegy upon the death of the most noble and Valorous Knight, Sir Philip Sidney, and dedicated to Sidney’s widow, Frances Walsingham.¹⁵⁰ She had secretly married Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, in the late 1580s, the union becoming public in 1590 when her advanced pregnancy could no longer be kept hidden.¹⁵¹ This is probably the most mysterious volume which contains Spenser’s work. There is no dedication prefacing the poems, not even a deliberately misleading one, providing us with clues as to its provenance, so we have no sense of who made the decision to publish the miscellaneous volume; what input the publisher, Ponsonby, had; whether Spenser—or someone else—collected poems by the other poets included in the volume; or whether the writers compiled the volume themselves. Perhaps Ponsonby was attempting to further exploit Spenser’s fame, but, if so, the volume seems oddly placed as a hidden second part to Colin Clout.

In his dedicatory letter to Philip’s sister, Mary, prefacing The Ruines of Time, Spenser states that he had started to write some poetry in memory of Sidney, which had not yet reached fruition. He acknowledged that when he was in England ‘some frends of mine … knowing with howe straight bandes of duetie I was tied to him … haue sought to reuiue them [i.e., the poems] by upraiding me: for that I haue not shewed anie thankefull remembrance towards him’ or his family.¹⁵² Nevertheless, this does not explain why the volume did not appear for another four years, especially as the belated nature of the tribute had already been acknowledged. Complaints was published five years after Sidney’s death, meaning that Spenser waited for almost a decade before commemorating the event, and, as the letter prefacing the Ruines acknowledges, the Sidneys do not seem to have been pleased by the long hiatus, which was perhaps inspired by a serious rivalry between the two poets.¹⁵³ Spenser’s whole career is notable for gaps and delays as well as frenetic bouts of publication and there are probably a host of reasons why works did not appear smoothly and easily, not least because he offended so many important people throughout his life. But the explanation for the wait here may be the simple one that he only published the elegy when it was ready. After all, we know that he began his literary career at the relatively late age of 25, perhaps slightly older; revised a large number of early works, abandoning others; and worked on his magnum opus for at least twenty years. Spenser was not a poet who liked to publish work when others wanted it. He only produced his work when he was satisfied with what he had written.¹⁵⁴

Astrophel contains other poems besides Spenser’s: two elegies, ‘The Mourning Muse of Thestylis’ and ‘A Pastorall Aeglogue Vpon the Death of Sir Philip Sidney Knight’, which are attributed to ‘L. B.’, generally assumed to be Lodowick Bryskett, and which show him to be a more than competent poet; one by Mathew Roydon; an epitaph by Walter Ralegh; the volume concluding with another epitaph by Fulke Greville or Edward Dyer.¹⁵⁵ The whole volume was, according to Patrick Cheney, ‘historic … the first book in English literature to feature the national poet as the center of a national community of fellow poets and civic leaders’, further evidence of Spenser’s role within an intellectual culture and his relationship to other writers.¹⁵⁶ These last three poems had already appeared in sequence as the first three poems in the collection of poetry and prose, The Phoenix Nest (1593), compiled by Richard Stapleton, a gentleman of the Inner Temple.¹⁵⁷ That volume was in part a collection of poems dedicated to the memory of Philip Sidney, in part a robust defence of the legacy of Leicester and his circle against the attacks launched by Nashe in particular, in Pierce Penilesse.¹⁵⁸

The compilation of The Phoenix Nest sets in train a number of issues as we do not know who authorized the selection of poems, which includes work by Oxford, Dyer, Greene, and Peele, as well as writers with connections to Spenser: Breton, Lodge, and Ralegh.¹⁵⁹ The same problem applies to the Astrophel volume: unless we assume that Ponsonby imposed the selection on one of his greatest literary assets, then either Spenser must have agreed to the choice of poems, or made them himself. This then leads to the question of authorship. The poems that appeared in both The Phoenix Nest and Astrophel were clearly written by poets other than Spenser. However, evidence indicates that some of the other poems in Astrophel may have been jointly authored, notably Bryskett’s ‘Pastorall Aeglogue’, which may have been partially written by Spenser, suggesting that the poem was written specially for the volume, perhaps making the whole enterprise a joint project.¹⁶⁰

The poem is a dialogue between Colin (Spenser) and Lycon (Bryskett), which looks back to the debate eclogues in the Calender, especially ‘November’, in lamenting the death of the dominant literary force of the 1580s.¹⁶¹ The two names stand as anagrams of each other, probably meaning to signal how closely the two men worked together, something that Bryskett, who probably knew Sidney much better than Spenser, having accompanied him on his grand tour, highlights in his Discourse of Civil Life.¹⁶² Certainly Colin’s voice sounds ‘distinctly Spenserian’ and, if it is not by Spenser, then it was ventriloquized by someone who was able to imitate the Calender and Colin Clout (which he must have seen in manuscript) perfectly.¹⁶³ Colin’s opening speech begins:

Ah Lycon, Lycon, what need skill, to teach
A grieued mynd power forth his plaints? How long
Hath the pore Turtle gon to school (weenest thou)
To learne to mourne her lost make? No, no, each
Creature by nature can tell how to waile.
Seest not these flockes, how sad they wander now?
Seemeth their leaders bell their bleating tunes
In dolefull sound. Like him, not one doth faile
With hanging head to shew a heauie cheare,
What bird (I pray thee) hast thou seen, that prunes
Himselfe of late? Did any cheerfull note
Come to thine eares, or gladsome sight appeare
Vnto thine eies, since that same fatall howre?¹⁶⁴

The confident representation of dialogue, the use of brackets to insert parentheses, the concentration on Anglo-Saxon diction, the employment of carefully chosen repetition and parallels, and the skill in producing a consistent iambic pentameter with frequent enjambement, all point to Spenser’s authorship of Colin’s lines. It was only after his death that other poets, such as William Browne in Britannia’s Pastorals (1613), consistently started to adopt Spenser’s persona as Colin (although Harvey had addressed Spenser as Colin in his commendatory verse to The Faerie Queene, ‘To the learned Shepheard’). In his lifetime Spenser forged Colin’s voice as his own, which suggests that Spenser probably wrote these lines, and that we should read the poetic dialogue with Bryskett as a real one, perhaps composed together by the friends.

However, the most contentious and problematic issue in the volume has been the relationship between Astrophel itself and the poem that follows it, the ‘Doleful Lay of Clorinda’. In the final stanza of Astrophel the speaker announces that the poet’s sister, Clorinda, will deliver a ‘dolefull laye’ (line 214) to the assembled mourners. The monologue appears as a separate poem in this volume, divided by a printer’s flower. Later in Matthew Lownes’s edition of 1611 the two poems were merged and critics have been divided about the authorship of the ‘Doleful Lay’.¹⁶⁵ Is Spenser ventriloquizing Mary Sidney; did they collaborate on the poem; or did she write it for inclusion in the volume?¹⁶⁶ As much recent feminist criticism has argued, it is almost impossible to extract authentic female voices from complex literary texts, which, directly or indirectly, involve collaboration, and we should modify our understanding of ‘authorship’ to include the person who shaped the work into its published form.¹⁶⁷

Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that Spenser or Ponsonby would have buried the poem so discreetly if they had secured a work by such a powerful figure, or that, given the differences of rank and status between the two, they would have cooperated on such a poem. There are few examples of such a collaborative practice—the ‘Pastorall Aeglogue’ being a potentially rare case, albeit a dialogue. Even Harvey and Spenser appear to have written alongside and in relationship to each other rather than composed passages together. More importantly, there was a long literary tradition of male writers imitating female voices, a significant example being Erasmus’ Praise of Folly first printed in 1511, which, of course, Spenser would have known, as he would have encountered Erasmus at school, and of which he undoubtedly owned a copy, especially as it was discussed by Sidney in his Apology.¹⁶⁸ George Gascoigne, who was highly regarded by Harvey and Spenser, who dedicated a work to Lord Grey de Wilton and who worked on an entertainment to celebrate Elizabeth’s progress to Kenilworth in the summer of 1575 with Richard Mulcaster, experimented with female voices and represented himself as a female supplicant, as well as a hermaphrodite, in The Steele Glasse.¹⁶⁹ A devotee of Ariosto, Gascoigne was an ambitious writer with a substantial output of diverse forms who had an impact on the poetic practice of many subsequent writers, including Spenser, and may well have had an influence here.¹⁷⁰ And, Nicholas Breton, a poet Spenser knew who attracted the countess’s patronage, later assumed her persona in his poetry, notably ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Love’, published in 1592, and ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Passion’, probably written around the same time and perhaps inspired by Spenser’s example.¹⁷¹ The publication of the latter as The Passions of the Spirit (1599), addressed to another patron, Mary Houghton, the wife of a sheriff of London, appears, not surprisingly, to have gravely offended the countess, a sign of the high risk that such prosopopoeia ran, and an indication of how close to the wind Spenser was sailing in his poem.¹⁷² One of Spenser’s characteristic poetic strategies was to insert dramatic monologues into his works, a practice he followed throughout his literary career, and, in terms of rhetorical practice, as well as style and diction, the poem reads as if it were the work of one author.¹⁷³ Moreover, as Pamela Coren has argued, Spenser is not trying to pass his work off as that of the countess; rather, ‘The Lay does what it should for Astrophel, completes the fiction with a “womanish” burst of feeling and orthodox otherworldly direction’.¹⁷⁴

The suspicion that the Astrophel volume was designed by Spenser and Bryskett is further strengthened by a reference in Bryskett’s other poem, ‘The Mourning Muse of Thestylis’, to the voice of Mary Sidney. Bryskett refers to ‘His [Philip Sidney’s] noble sisters plaints, her sighes and teares emong, | Would sure haue made thee milde, and inly rue her paine’.¹⁷⁵ Such lines could only have been written if the author had had access to the ‘Doleful Lay’ in manuscript.¹⁷⁶ It is somewhat less likely that ‘Pembroke and Bryskett worked with Spenser to prepare Astrophel as a commemorative volume that would include a selection of works written by his friends’, although by no means impossible, given the countess’s role in seeing her brother’s work into print.¹⁷⁷ Moreover, as her translations of the Psalms indicate, she was a close and careful reader of Spenser’s Ruines poems, adopting his vocabulary and imagery to supplement biblical language in order to represent the pathos of mutability.¹⁷⁸

A more significant issue that has not been addressed is Spenser’s appropriation of an aristocratic female voice, a device traceable back to the Heroides, a major component of the classical tradition within which Spenser worked.¹⁷⁹ This is a sign of his confidence as a poet, as he ‘places himself as leading the mourning’ for Sidney, ‘contain[ing] and control[ing] the figure of the countess of Pembroke with her superior claims to the position of chief mourner, by placing her in a relationship of dependency’ within a text he controls.¹⁸⁰ Furthermore, given the countess’s undoubtedly hostile reaction to Thomas Newman’s appropriation of Astrophil and Stella, and her probable intervention to have the pirated volume impounded by Burghley in 1591 before being reissued with corrections, Spenser was, yet again, showing that he published as he pleased, and was prepared to take risks that few other poets would take.¹⁸¹

Astrophel appears, then, as a complex and integrated poem, with a number of European and classical sources, including Ronsard and Ovid.¹⁸² Perhaps its most significant debt is to Moschus’ Lament for Bion, enabling Spenser to emphasize his own role as the funeral poet speaking for a grieving nation.¹⁸³ While the join between the poem that we know to be Spenser’s and the female complaint of the ‘Doleful Lay’ is not seamless, that poem is written in the same style as those produced by the melancholy female narrators in The Ruines of Time and The Ruines of Rome, making it hard to tell their voices apart:

O vaine worlds glorie, and vnstedfast state
Of all that liues, on face of sinfull earth,
Which from their first vntill their vtmost date
Tast no one hower of happines or merth,
But like as at the ingate of their berth,
They crying creep out of their mothers woomb,
So wailing backe go to their wofull tomb. (The Ruines of Time, lines 43–9)

Ay me, to whom shall I my case complaine,
That may comparison my impatient griefe,
Or where shall I vnfold my inward paine,
That my enriuen heart may find relief?
Shall I vnto the heauenly powers it show?
Or vnto earthly men that dwell below? (‘Doleful Lay of Clorind, lines 1–6)

It would have been almost impossible for readers to tell the style and tone of these works apart, which is presumably the point. Each female narrator begins with an apostrophe, which, in Quintilian’s terms, is ‘the diversion of our words to address some person other than the judge’, i.e., an utterance with no particular addressee.¹⁸⁴ More specifically, each speaker employs the figure of ecphonesis (exclamation), an expression of ‘extreme emotion’.¹⁸⁵ Both lament the vanity of earth’s glory and urge the hearer to place their trust in heaven in an elegiac style that Spenser had adopted from the start of his literary career and had produced at length in the Complaints volume. The rhyme scheme of each poem is almost identical (The Ruines of Time has an extra fifth line), as is the diction (again, conspicuously Anglo-Saxon) and the predominantly end-stopped lines.

Yet again, the Astrophel volume is a work that risks offending the good and the great through its appropriation of their voices, and through deliberately revisiting the Complaints, a work still subject to censorship that Spenser also alludes to in the dedicatory letters to the Fowre Hymnes a year later. This tactic is in line with Spenser’s conspicuous public self-representation as a middle-class poet, eager to show off his skills in opposition to the courtly centre, especially when read alongside its companion poem, Colin Clout.¹⁸⁶ Perhaps the fear of offending yet more courtiers explains why this volume, clearly designed to help foster the burgeoning legend of Sidney as the lost great aristocratic poet, was published in such an unusual, disguised manner.¹⁸⁷ As Danielle Clarke has pointed out, Spenser cunningly appropriates both the voice and the legend of the Sidneys, in having Clorinda’s poem echo his own, ‘thus overseeing the transition from Sidney to Spenser as the poet occupying the preeminent position’ in England.¹⁸⁸ This changing of the guard was also acutely imagined, as it had to be, in terms of class.

The volume appears to have had a serious impact, significantly transforming the representation of Sidney from a soldier to a poet, which suggests that it did reach a wide audience, showing how eager readers were to consume Spenser’s work in the mid-1590s and how carefully they read it.¹⁸⁹ Ponsonby might have held the volume back at the press, if he feared the consequences of publishing the work, and it is plausible that the Astrophel volume was completed soon after the Phoenix Nest, ready for publication in 1594. We will probably never know why Astrophel was published as an appendage to Colin Clout, but, especially given Spenser’s complicated publication record and his fraught relationship with authority, the decision to bind the volumes together cannot have been taken lightly or be entirely devoid of significance.

Spenser’s elegy is not uncritical of Sidney, who, in his warrior mode, is cast as a combination of the reckless Adonis and the terrifying Talus, the Iron Man of the second edition of The Faerie Queene, administering the violent side of the law.¹⁹⁰ Spenser describes Astrophel as a foolhardy and bloodthirsty soldier, who courts death and is appropriately rewarded:

It fortuned as he, that perlous game
In forreine soyle pursued far away:
Into a forest wide, and waste he came
Where store he heard to be of saluage pray.
So wide a forest and so waste as this,
Nor famous Ardeyn, nor fowle Arlo is.
There his welwouen toyles and subtil traines,
He laid the brutish nation to enwrap:
So well he wrought with practise and with paines,
That he of them great troups did soone entrap.
Full happie man (misweening much) was hee,
So rich a spoile within his power to see.
Eftsoones all heedlesse of his dearest hale,
Full greedily into the heard he thrust:
To slaughter them, and work their finall bale,
Least that his tolye should of their troups be brust.
Wide wounds emongst them many a one he made,
Now with his sharp borespeare, now with his blade.
His care was all how he them all might kill,
That none might scape (so partiall vnto none)
Ill mynd so much to mynd anothers ill,
As to become vnmyndfull of his owne.
But pardon that vnto the cruell skies,
That from himselfe to them withdrew his eies.
So as he rag’d emongst that beastly rout,
A cruell beast of most accursed brood:
Vpon him turnd (despeyre makes cowards stout)
And with fell tooth accustomed to blood,
Launched his thigh with so mischieuous might,
That it both bone and muscles ryued quight. (lines 91–120)

The implicit comparison is to the legend of Adonis, gored to death by a boar; undoubtedly with Shakespeare’s recently published poem (1593) in mind.¹⁹¹ Sidney/Astrophel deserves his fate even more than Adonis did. Adonis was merely naive in his pursuit of the boar; Sidney is actively cruel in his desire to kill the enemy. He is happy in his role as an errant knight, failing to realize that he is neither performing at a tilt for his uncle, the earl of Leicester, whose estates bordered the forest, nor in an unavoidably dangerous situation, like Spenser, who lived near to ‘fowle Arlo’ and so had to defend himself from attack, as descriptions of the shepherds’ life in Ireland in Colin Clout made clear. In that poem, Colin celebrates the stable life of rural England by means of a comparison with the dangers experienced in rural Ireland:

No wayling there nor wretchednesse is heard,
No bloodie issues nor no leprosies,
No griesly famine, nor no raging sweard,
No nightly bo[r]drags, nor no hue and cries;
The shepheards there abroad may safely lie,
On hills and downes, withouten dread or daunger:
No rauenous wolues the good mans hope destroy,
Nor outlawes fell affray the forest raunger. (lines 312–19)

Colin is talking about an area such as Arlo, the glen about twenty miles north-east of his estate, which, as ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ demonstrates, Spenser recognized as one of the most dangerous areas in Ireland, a place that the English crown could not afford to ignore if it wished to govern Ireland effectively. The reference in Astrophel contrasts violence that has to be carried out, such as that at Smerwick Harbour, with the juvenile bloodlust of Sidney. It is no accident that he chances upon a forest that is ‘waste’, the description combining a romance motif with a technical legal term to demonstrate the extent of Sidney’s misplaced valour.¹⁹² Spenser shows that Sidney has cut himself off from any divine direction, the words used forcefully demonstrating his lack of care and knowledge of what he was doing: ‘misweening’, ‘heedlesse’, ‘unmindfull’. More disturbing still is Sidney’s eagerness to kill: he is represented as unable to control his martial vigour, greedy in his desire to slaughter as many of the enemy as he can, making himself as savage and as brutish as the enemy he hunts, a familiar motif in Spenser’s writing, especially in the second half of The Faerie Queene.¹⁹³

These lines should be read with a number of considerations in mind. Sidney’s death on 17 October 1586 from the injuries sustained at Zutphen took place just before the recall of the commander of the forces, Leicester, in November. Towards the end of his life Leicester was extremely unpopular and was blamed for the failure of the war and the death of Sidney.¹⁹⁴ In pointing out that the dead Sidney had not been fighting in the Forest of Arden, Spenser was rather archly reminding readers that Sidney had perished in a disastrous campaign, led by his uncle, which had failed to achieve any of its goals, continuing his criticisms of the earl. The hostile comments further indicate that Spenser, for all his opposition to aggressive international Catholicism, was not necessarily an uncritical supporter of the war in the Netherlands, and that he was painfully aware of the costs of war, one reason why he was so eager to defend Lord Grey from the charge that he was a ‘blodye man’ in A View. In contrast to Grey, Sidney and, by implication, Leicester are represented as very bloody men. It is perhaps worth recalling that Spenser was certainly familiar with a large number of Dutch immigrants in London, many of whom, like van der Noot, had undoubtedly returned to their native land. A large proportion of them would have been eager to stay clear of the religious crusade that Leicester was eager to launch; some would have been members of the Family of Love; and others, like Jan van der Noot, would have reconverted to Catholicism out of either conviction or expediency. Spenser did support Elizabeth’s right to intervene in the Low Countries as proper resistance to international tyranny in the Belge episode in The Faerie Queene, Book V, cantos x–xi.¹⁹⁵ But, as these lines in Astrophel demonstrate, he was clearly less than enthusiastic about Leicester’s role.

Spenser was concerned to show that Sidney’s real achievement was not as a soldier, or an aristocratic patron, but as a widely read poet.¹⁹⁶ In the poem we witness Astrophel/Sidney abandoning poetry for military glory (lines 67–72); Spenser returns Sidney to his true vocation, so recovering what he did best for a non-courtly audience.¹⁹⁷ In doing so he claims his legacy for the shepherds, ‘all which loued him full deare’ (line 200), figures who represent other poets, as well as ordinary readers away from the court. He quite deliberately makes Sidney seem like himself in Colin Clout, one of the ‘shepheardes nation’.¹⁹⁸ And, following Sidney’s conceit in Astrophil and Stella, Spenser stellifies the poet as his (Sidney’s) fictional alter ego:

The Gods which all things see, this same beheld,
And pittying this paire of louers trew:
Transformed them there lying on the field,
Into one flowre that is both red and blew.
It first growes red, and then to blew doth fade,
Like Astrophel, which thereinto was made.
And in the midst thereof a star appeares,
As fairly formd as any star in skyes:
Resembling Stella in her freshest yeares,
Forth darting beames of beautie from her eyes,
And all the day it standeth full of deow,
Which is the teares, that from her eyes did flow. (lines 181–92)

If Stella is Penelope Devereux, then Spenser has deliberately obscured the complicated personal histories of Philip and Penelope so that they can be reunited after death. In joining them as a posthumous couple—even though Penelope Devereux did not die until 1607 and was famous in the 1590s for her scandalous affair with Charles Blount, Baron Mountjoy—Spenser is placing the literary relationship ahead of what happened in real life.¹⁹⁹ If Stella is Sidney’s widow, Frances, then Spenser has used the name Stella in the same way that he used Rosalind in representing his own love life in poetry.²⁰⁰ Either way, the end result is the same: Spenser is, in effect, rewriting Sidney’s sonnet sequence as if it were his own story of happy, provincial marriage. The shepherd-poets, at least, have inspirational figures to follow. Meanwhile Clorinda is left to mourn her loss, in the familiar style of female complaint, a genre developed in this period by Spenser and Spenserian poets, most notably Daniel and later Drayton, which in effect proves Spenser’s point that the aristocracy need to learn from the work of their social inferiors.²⁰¹ Having discounted any comfort from the heavens or men, she turns to the natural world:

Woods, hills and riuers, now are desolate,
Sith he is gone the which them all did grace:
And all the fields do waile their widow state,
Sith death their fairest flowre did late deface.
The fairest flowre in field that euer grew,
Was Astrophel; that was, we all may rew.
What cruell hand of cursed foe vnknowne,
Hath cropt the stalke which bore so faire a flowre?
Vntimely cropt, before it well were growne,
And cleane defaced in vntimely howre.
Great losse to all that euer [did] him see,
Great losse to all, but greatest losse to mee. (lines 25–36)

Spenser has employed another of his favourite poetic devices, prosopopoeia, making Clorinda one in a line of female personae in Spenser’s poetry, her words recalling the speeches of Verlame and Rome in the Complaints. Clorinda/Mary Sidney is desolate in her grief, experiencing Nature as a bleak reflection of her state of mind and seeing her own loss as the greatest of all. The universe provides her with no sense of purpose. The shepherd-poets, in contrast, remember Sidney as a fellow poet, who looks down on them from the heavens and so helps them produce their work. Spenser, who had first praised Sidney back in the 1570s, now ‘can repudiate his precursor at the same time that he invents him’, and, in doing so, glorify/stellify his own literary career.²⁰²