Afterword

SPENSER is an elusive writer, even by the standards of the early modern period. If he had the same presence outside the academy as his younger contemporary, William Shakespeare, many would doubt that he was the author of many of the works attributed to him. Indeed, this process has started to happen in some discussions over A View, although momentum does now seem to be waning. But if linking the poet to a life manifested outside his works is not an easy task, it is one that cannot be ignored because Spenser conspicuously refers to his life throughout his work, albeit in invariably oblique terms. In Richard McCabe’s words, ‘He was constantly auto-referential but seldom autobiographical.’¹ As a result Spenser’s subsequent reputation has been complicated and divergent. On the one hand he occupies a central place within the English poetic canon, so that he can be praised as an author who makes us ‘grow in mental health’, or who is especially adept at making the reader think.² On the other hand, Spenser is often remembered as a morally flawed, self-interested sycophant, complicit with a brutal policy of extermination that he articulated with great skill in order to protect what he had gained as a colonist in Ireland.

Spenser makes a couple of fleeting appearances in Brendan Kennelly’s powerful sequence of short poems, Cromwell (1983). In one he is imagined being praised by Cromwell for his talent and for having ‘devoted nights and days | To pleasuring his fellow-countrymen’. The deliberately sexualized nature of the utterance describes an auto-erotic fantasy that has nothing to do with the reality of the island and its people. Kennelly probably has in mind Cromwell’s letter to the Irish Council about William Spenser’s right to inherit Kilcolman, based in part on his grandfather’s poetic prowess, as well as Edmund’s own descriptions of sterile sexuality in the Bower of Bliss, the most celebrated section of The Faerie Queene.³ Cromwell then reflects on the harsh nature of the world, which he thinks is populated by murderous ‘bloody apes’, projecting the violence of the English onto the Irish, the familiar colonial trope of ‘blaming the victims’. He concludes:

Aren’t we lucky, then, to have such a skilled
Poet, one who has truly learned his trade
Of delight, delight, delight?⁴

Again, the poem is aware of contemporary literary developments, as well as of the history of Spenser criticism. The reference to ‘delight’ is a recollection of Sidney’s dictum that poetry should both ‘teach and delight’.⁵ Spenser, according to Cromwell’s escapist understanding of poetry, can only delight his English readers and teaches no one anything. Kennelly is also surely referring to W. B. Yeats’s famous essay on Spenser, which praised the poet’s ability to write symbolist poetry but regretted his penchant for allegory, lamenting that if only he could have engaged with the beauties of Ireland, Anglo-Irish literary history would have been different and better.⁶ Kennelly is therefore acutely aware of the history of Spenser criticism and its relationship to the perceived nature of the poet’s life. Who Spenser was is a question that has been caught up with his subsequent critical reputation so that the two have become inextricably intertwined. Spenser is still, in Marx’s words, ‘Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet’, a man on the make who aspired to be at court and who was prepared to exploit the Irish to get what he wanted and felt he needed.⁷ The fact that he was such an intelligent man and such a skilful poet only makes his craven complicity seem worse.

Re-reading the life records and the literary works qualifies this picture, if anything placing the moral and political problems in even starker relief. Spenser was not a court poet. He clearly attended the court on occasions, probably three times, and may have aspired to a place there at certain points in his life. But he was not really a courtier in any meaningful sense and cannot have been the man with a ruff represented in the Kinnoull portrait and adapted on frequent occasions in the last two hundred years. That picture, along with the Chesterfield portrait, has undoubtedly contributed to the illusion that Spenser looked and dressed like men assumed to have been his close friends and fellow poets, Walter Ralegh and Philip Sidney. Spenser was often an acerbic writer, and was astonishingly rude to the good and the great throughout his life, his list of insulted victims including Elizabeth, James VI, Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester, and Sir Walter Ralegh, as well as (arguably) Bishop Young and Archbishop Loftus, a distinguished collection of names. And, as this list also demonstrates, he had little compunction about biting the hands that fed him. Spenser came from that amorphous category, the ‘middling sort’, and he associated largely with social equals throughout his life: writers, publishers and printers, bureaucrats, soldiers, academics, secretaries, and clergymen, rather than the mighty and the powerful who moved in their own circles. The significance of his social status has often been ignored because of what he wrote and who he was, therefore, assumed to have been. His apparent aspirations to acquire property and rise in status makes him no better nor worse than most of his peers who were also eager to join the gentry and afford themselves the status of a gentleman.⁸

Perhaps thinking in counter-factual terms might help us understand who Spenser really was. His life would have looked very different if he had never had the opportunity of going to Ireland. Life in Ireland eventually made Spenser into a very rich man, one who acquired far more wealth and property than he would have done if he had stayed in England. It may also have distorted his career so that his poetic output involved two, scarcely related, spectacular bursts of productivity. If he had never gone to Ireland it is likely that Spenser would have become a divine, a Cambridge don, a soldier, a hack writer for hire, or, most likely, a functionary of sorts in a substantial household. Perhaps his literary career would have proceeded at a rather steadier pace. Perhaps, the key decision he made, and which changed his life most dramatically, was to get married in 1579, and he placed a heavy emphasis on the significance of marriage, especially his own, ever afterwards. It is also probable, given his origins and what we can understand of his opinions and views from his early works, that he would have seemed more tolerant and open-minded than brutal and bigoted and that the full extent of his poetic experiments would have been even more obvious. Despite all the efforts to prise apart the colonial administrator and the poet, the image of the former, a civic functionary in England’s first overseas imperial possession, has dominated the perception of the latter, casting Spenser as a man who, exiled from court, really wanted to be there, a key element of the seventeenth-century biographies. If we try to understand why a man like Spenser would have gone to Ireland in his mid-twenties, our picture of him changes, even if our sympathies remain the same.

It is also likely that Spenser’s religious beliefs, which have been cast as those of a low church Protestant, eager to purge the British Isles of Catholics, would have looked very different too. Spenser’s early work suggests that he was wary of narrow doctrinal belief, adhered more to the institution of the church itself, had an acute understanding of the pains and tribulations generated by sudden ecclesiastical and theological change, and realized the terrible effects of the Wars of Religion in France and the Low Countries. Furthermore, that notably intolerant work, A View, is significant for its lack of interest in religion. Spenser clearly felt the danger of the international Catholic threat to the independence of the English-dominated British Isles, but that does not mean that he was a blinkered Protestant or that he hated all Catholics. Certainly his sons appear to have had no serious issues establishing homes which encompassed diverse forms of worship, evidence that has probably not been accorded its due importance. They may have married out of expediency and felt the need to protect their lands and to fit into Irish colonial society, but, even so, it is clear that their upbringing did nothing to hinder any such pragmatic aim.

English colonization of Ireland can be seen in at least three interrelated contexts: that of an English desire to dominate the British Isles; that of an expansion westwards towards America; and that of the expansion of the more powerful states within European to colonize their neighbours.⁹ Spenser was part of this process, which shaped his life and work as a colonial civil servant and a writer. But we should not, I think, assume that he was the enthusiast for Irish genocide for which he has often been taken. Spenser may well have been present at the Hill Hall debates about colonial warfare, and, if not, would surely have known about them from Harvey. His descriptions of Ireland in 1594–5, in the Amoretti and Colin Clout, are hardly flushed with unqualified enthusiasm for the land and people, but the argument for spectacular violence only really occurs in works written a year later as the Nine Years War became ever more dangerous for English colonists. Spenser was clearly caught up in processes and events that he could scarcely control and which he assumed that he could influence only in a limited and futile way, hence the terrified allegory of ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ in which he imagines the struggle for universal supremacy happening only a few miles from his house. The irony, of course, is that, while it could not prevent the disastrous events of 1598–9, A View may well have set the agenda for subsequent colonial practices.

Is Spenser’s Irish experience the key? We also need to understand that it is possible that had Spenser not gone to Ireland his poetry would have remained largely recognizable as what we have today, while his life would not have. The relationship between the life and the poetry would have changed, of course, which shows that Spenser’s Irish experience is crucial to an understanding of the man and his work, but is not the only thing that we need to know about him. We also need to consider his origins; his class; his education; his wives and children; his friends and patrons; his reading; and the host of forces that shaped the possibilities, prospects, achievements, and course of his life, some of which he would have understood, much of which he would have been unable to control as he might have wished.

The truth is that Spenser was undoubtedly not an especially savage or violent man, at least, according to the standards of Elizabethan England, and a careful study of his work reveals a profound understanding of the effects of violence.¹⁰ To single out one particular episode already covered in this biography: it is worth remembering that George Gascoigne used Erasmus’ most famous dictum, ‘Dulce Bellum Inexpertis’, as the title of a long poem that he dedicated to Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton, a work that, paradoxically, defends the duty of the true warrior, rather than condemning the futility of war. Gascoigne defines war in familiar terms that condemn the ambition of the tyrannical ruler who cannot be confined by the laws of nations:

And for my parte my fansie for to wright,
I say that warre is even the scourge of God,
Tormenting such as dwell in princelie plight,
Yet not regarde the reaching of his rode,
Whose deedes and duties often times are odde,
Who raunge at randon jesting at the just,
As though they raignde to do even what they lust.¹¹

Grey, the duplicitous author of ‘Grey’s faith’, is cast here as a privileged reader who, like Gascoigne, realizes that war is bloody, futile, and to be avoided if possible. Only a tyrant who has failed to listen to good advice will energetically pursue military conflict. The message is that both Gascoigne and Grey will only wage war if they have to, obeying a monarch, who may or may not have sufficient reasons to fight the enemy.

Like Gascoigne, who had been present at the siege of Antwerp, Spenser witnessed terrible slaughter, which had a significant impact on his imaginative powers, manifested throughout his writing. And also like Gascoigne, he distances his patron from the effects of his actions, representing Grey as Artegall restraining the excessive violence of Talus, rather than being its perpetrator.¹² Spenser’s later writing emerges from its context, his personal experience working to determine the course that his work took, even if it is only formally manifested in an auto-referential mode. It is not only Spenser’s work that makes us think—so does its relationship to his life.