As the brief biographies of Spenser by Fuller and Aubrey outlined in the Introduction indicate, some facts were available about Spenser’s life based on the testimony of his contemporaries even as late as the Restoration. However, Aubrey’s gleanings remained hidden from view until the pattern of Spenser’s life had already been established, at which point they were reintroduced into a familiar story rather than having the impact they might have done had they appeared at a more formative time. The first analyses of Spenser’s life were a few brief comments in Robert Johnson’s Historia Rerum Britannicarum (1655), slightly expanded and refined in Edward Phillips’s compilation of the lives of poets ancient and modern, Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum (London, 1675).1 Phillips (1630–c.1695) was Milton’s nephew, providing another link between the two pre-eminent early modern English poets.2 Phillips refers to Spenser as ‘the first of our English Poets that brought Heroic Poesie to any perfection’ (p. 34), judging The Faerie Queene to be only just inferior to the epics of Greece and Rome and the modern romances of Italy. He acknowledges, however, that it was the Calender that first ‘brought him to Esteem’. The life is structured around the conflict of art and bureaucracy that was to become familiar. Sidney brought Spenser to Elizabeth’s attention and then secured him a job with his brother, Henry [sic] in Ireland. When his employment ceased he came back to England but lived in poverty. Eventually he appealed to the queen, who, impressed by Spenser’s skill, was about to award him £500 when Lord Burghley, still smarting from Spenser’s hostile comments in Mother Hubberds Tale, exclaimed ‘What all this for a Song?’ and the sum was promptly reduced to £100. Spenser lapsed into melancholy and died. Sketchy as it is, the two and a half pages are quite substantial for a modern poet (Sidney only merits half a page), suggesting Spenser’s significance for Phillips as the English poet who defined modern writing. Furthermore, he defends Spenser from the charge of flattery, arguing that at times praise of the monarch is necessary and, besides, Elizabeth was a great queen (p. 36).
The first serious life of the poet, one that has therefore probably had a greater influence than critics eager to correct falsehoods have recognized, was the anonymous ‘A Summary of the Life of Mr Edmond Spenser’ that prefaced the 1679 folio of Spenser’s works, an account of the life that was twice as long as any earlier version.3 This life, which makes use of Ware’s comments on Spenser, claims that Spenser was born in London in 1510 (based on the dates on his monument), and was ‘by his Parents liberally educated’.4 Spenser then went to Cambridge; was defeated in the fellowship competition by Lancelot Andrewes; travelled to the north of England, where he fell in love; returned to London, and decided to introduce himself to Sir Philip Sidney, ‘then in full glory at Court’. Spenser’s plan works rather well:
To that purpose [Spenser] took an occasion to go one morning to Leicester-House, furnish’d only with a modest confidence, and the Ninth Canto of the First Book of his Fairy Queene: He waited not long, e’re he found the lucky reason for an address of the Paper to his hand; who having read the Twenty-eighth Stanza of Despair, (with some signs in his Countenance of being much affected, and surpris’d with what he had read) turns suddenly to his Servant, and commands him to give the Party that presented the Verses to him Fifty Pounds; the Steward stood speechless, and unready, till his Master having past over another Stanza, bad him give him an Hundred Pound; the Servant something stagger’d at the humour his Master was in, mutter’d to this purpose, That by the semblance of the Man that brought the Paper, Five Pounds would be a proper Reward; but Mr Sidney having read the following Stanza, commands him to give Two Hundred Pounds, and that very speedily, least advancing his Reward, proportionately to the heighth of his Pleasure in reading, he should hold himself oblig’d to give him more than he had.5
After this encounter, Sidney becomes both patron and friend of Spenser, showing that great art breaks down social barriers, even if those involved in any transaction are obliged to respect them. It also helped to make Spenser’s description of Despair one of the key descriptions for later readers, especially the Romantic poets.6
The length of this description, which amounts to nearly a quarter of the whole biography, emphasizes the importance of the relationship between Spenser and Sidney for late seventeenth-century readers. The story is also told independently in Aubrey’s life of Sidney, without the specification of the passage read, or the incremental increase in the amount of the reward (Aubrey simply states that Sidney ordered Spenser to be given ‘so many pound in gold’).7 Although apocryphal, this repetition may suggest that the tale has a basis in fact, perhaps like the tale of Burghley’s hostility to the poet.8 Ever after Spenser and Sidney have been linked as the two major non-dramatic Elizabethan poets, The Faerie Queene and the Arcadia read as parallel projects, even though Sidney only mentions Spenser once in his extant writings, in the Apology for Poetry, and does not even mention his name.9
The story of Burghley’s hostility and parsimony is then repeated from Fuller, with
the comment that the ‘great Councellour … studied more the Queen’s Profit than her Diversion’. The biographer also asserts
that the lines in The Teares of the Muses (they are actually from The Ruines of Time), which he cites as
O Grief of Griefs! O Gall of all good Hearts!
To set that Vertue should despoiled be
Of such, as first were rais’d for Vertue’s parts,
And now broad-spreading, like an aged Tree,
Let none shoot up that nigh them planted be!
O let not those of whom the Muse is scorn’d,
Alive, nor Dead, be of the Muse adorn’d! (lines 449–55)
are a direct reference to Lord Burghley, and urges the reader to consult Mother Hubberds Tale to gauge the full extent of Spenser’s hostility to Elizabeth’s chief secretary.10 The last paragraph runs through a series of points that define Spenser’s life and work. He was esteemed and rewarded by many of the nobility, whom he then praised in his poetry, but unsuccessful in love, as the episode with Rosalind demonstrates, when he lost out to the unscrupulous Menalcus. Spenser did well in Ireland and was handsomely rewarded by the queen for his services, but lost all in the rebellion, as well as the second half of The Faerie Queene, which disappeared through the ‘abuse of his Servant, whom he had sent before him into England’, a story taken from Ware. Spenser, learning that his friend and patron Sidney had died soon before, yielded ‘to the impressions of a Fortune obstinately adverse to him, he died, without the help of any other Disease save a broken Heart’. He was then buried in Westminster Abbey next to Chaucer at the expense of the earl of Essex.
This first thumbnail sketch of a biography is worth citing at some length because it establishes the narrative that subsequent biographers have largely followed.11 Spenser’s life is punctuated by paradoxes: he is a man of humble birth who rises to greatness through his talent, but while he is successful in his chosen career, he is unlucky in love; the queen and her courtiers love him, but the chief minister blocks his path to advancement; his mind is set on the court, but he has to make his way in Ireland; he has a great capacity for friendship, but is continually undone by bad luck and treachery.12 Spenser’s life may not have a moral as direct as those of saints and reformers, but it certainly tells a tale of the inverse relationship between poetry and worldly success.
The pattern is largely followed in Jacob Tonson the elder’s important edition of Spenser’s Works, the first to contain illustrations, published in 1715.13 The life in Tonson’s edition, written by the editor, John Hughes (1678?–1720), expands that of 1679 to some twenty-two large pages, without producing a great deal more evidence.14 Hughes duly notes that ‘The Accounts of his Birth and Family are but obscure and imperfect’, one reason why they are assumed to have been humble, which then leads to the judgement that, although related and connected to the wealthy, ‘his Fortune and Interest seem at his first setting to have been inconsiderable’.15 Hughes repeats the details, established in 1679: that Spenser lost out to Andrewes for a fellowship and was forced to leave Cambridge; that in the north he was ditched by the cruel Rosalind, but produced some good poetry; that he returned south, persuaded by Gabriel Harvey, and was helped to preferment by Sidney who became his ‘judicious friend and generous patron’ (p. iv) after he had read the Despair episode; and that at court he became the unofficial laureate, until Burghley thwarted his progress (the pension story is repeated) (pp. vi, x–xi). Hughes adds that Spenser would have been saved from Burghley’s designs had Sidney not been abroad (p. viii). Hughes was astute enough to read some of Spenser’s published work and so worked out that the Letters to Harvey published in 1580 indicate that Spenser was planning to go abroad at this point, but the evidence does not tell us whether he ever went (p. xi). In Ireland Spenser prospered, principally because he was good at his job as A View indicates (again, Hughes makes judgements based on the published work) and had sound ideas about government (p. xii). The grant of Kilcolman led to a friendship with his neighbour, Sir Walter Ralegh, as shown in Colin Clouts come home againe, resulting in the restoration of his favour with the queen after their joint visit (p. xiv). He finished The Faerie Queene, half of which was lost by the careless servant. Eventually Spenser, plundered in the Desmond Rebellion (Hughes conflates this with the Nine Years War), returned to England, where heartbroken on learning of the death of Sidney, he died in the same year as his nemesis, Burghley, and was buried next to Chaucer in Westminster Abbey (p. xv).
The similarities to the 1679 life are striking. For all his careful reading, Hughes follows the pattern set by his predecessor, showing Spenser’s broken fortune in life, and establishing the pointed irony that he and Burghley expired in the same year.16 Hughes shows the value of reading Spenser’s published work carefully for clues about his life, and the need to weigh up what is stated with considerable scepticism. Spenser tells us a great deal about his life in his work, but it is not information that can be taken at face value and there are always traps for the unwary.
Spenser’s great-great-grandson, Edmund, planned to produce an edition of his works in 1744–5, which never appeared owing to a failure to interest enough subscribers and to the advent of the Jacobite Uprising. He claimed that he was planning to write a definitive life but his surviving letters do not indicate that he had any new information and his main motive appears to have been financial.17 The next substantial life, written by Thomas Birch (1705–66) as a preface to his 1751 edition of the poem, follows the now established narrative (although Birch thinks that Spenser was of noble descent), with more details added.18 Birch corrects the error derived from Fuller that Spenser competed with Andrewes for a fellowship at Pembroke, and rightly names Thomas Dove as Andrewes’s unsuccessful rival.19 Spenser had left for the North before where he was treated badly by Rosalind (Birch follows Hughes), but returned south and was attached to a nobleman in Kent or Surrey (p. iv). Birch is sceptical of the Despair story (p. viii), but this is because he argues that Sidney played a significant role in the earlier development of Spenser’s literary career, persuading him to turn from pastoral to heroic verse (pp. viii–ix). Birch notes that Sidney commends Spenser in the Apology, as does William Webbe in his Discourse of English Poetry (1586) (p. vi).20 He also assumes, from reading Spenser’s ‘earthquake letter’, that Spenser did go abroad in 1579, which is undoubtedly an error, but an understandable one, which, again, shows how keen Birch was to read the works and establish the facts (pp. ix–x). Birch provides comment on the allegorical figures represented in The Shepheardes Calender, identifying Algrind as Grindal and Morrell as Aylmer (p. vii), and follows Hughes in commenting on the lost works in the Harvey–Spenser Letters (from which he quotes substantially) (pp. x–xii). He expresses doubts about Fuller’s stories of Burghley’s animosity and Spenser’s role as court laureate (pp. xii–iii), but he accepts that the evidence of The Teares of the Muses and The Ruines of Time show that Spenser felt neglected by the great and the good, while, in Mother Hubberds Tale he imitated Chaucer in satirizing the court (pp. xiv–xv). In citing Spenser’s dedicatory sonnet to Burghley, prefaced to The Faerie Queene in 1590, Birch shows that he has an astute understanding of the complexities of patronage networks and the dangers of assuming that relationships can be read straightforwardly, and that they stayed constant throughout people’s lives. Birch suggests that Burghley probably disliked Spenser because of his proximity to Leicester and Essex, not for any particular fault of his own (p. xvi).
Birch also did some research on Spenser’s Irish career. He was aware of Spenser’s sense of debt to Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton, expressed in the sonnet prefacing the first edition of The Faerie Queene, but also saw that his career was linked to other powerful officials in Ireland, Adam Loftus, archbishop of Dublin, and Sir Henry Wallop, an insight that has not always been followed by subsequent biographers eager to stress the relationship between Spenser and Grey. Birch was also able to state correctly that Spenser had acquired his Irish estate at Kilcolman when it was acquired by the crown after the Desmond Rebellion, and was able to provide a description of the estate (p. xviii).
Following Hughes again, Birch confirms that Spenser found a new love who was much more amenable than Rosalind, and that he visited London with Ralegh, adding that Ralegh was in Ireland because of his feud with Essex (Birch again shows a nuanced understanding of court politics and the volatile nature of patronage networks) (pp. xviii–xix). Birch states that Spenser met the queen and then developed his own usage of Cynthia after Ralegh’s poem ‘The Ocean to Cynthia’, referred to in Colin Clouts come home againe, also astutely decoding many of the names in that poem (Astrophel is Sidney; Urania is Mary Sidney; and, Mansilia is the Marchioness of Northampton).21 Spenser then published a second edition of The Faerie Queene, failing to correct some errors from the first edition, even though many were noted. Birch follows Elijah Fenton in arguing that the extant version of the poem is all there was, Spenser not having been robust enough to complete it.22 Birch also endorses Fenton’s notion that the story was copied from Suetonius Tranquillus, author of the life of Terence, who repeated the rumour that Terence’s death had resulted from the understandable grief he felt when he lost a bag containing 108 plays adapted from Menander in a shipwreck (pp. xxiii–iv).23 Spenser biographers have not always been so careful at spotting the uncanny resemblances between literary anecdotes, or in recognizing that early modern lives often appropriated or imitated stories found in other life stories, or were modelled on other lives.24
Birch concludes that Spenser must have been in England in 1596 where he wrote Fowre Hymnes and oversaw the publication of the second edition of The Faerie Queene, again showing his ability to make connections and use the published material to support his judgements (p. xxv). His reading of A View is also more informed and astute than any that had gone before, linking the work’s logic and conclusions to Sir John Davies’s A Discoverie of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued (1612). Birch argues that Sir James Ware used Archbishop Ussher’s copy of A View for his printed edition, repeating Ware’s judgement that Spenser would have mollified his opinions had he lived in more tranquil times (pp. xxv–vi). Birch also demonstrates a robust sense of humour and refusal to be intimidated by his subject in arguing that
in the History and Antiquities of the Country he is often miserably mistaken, and seems rather to have indulg’d the Fancy and License of a Poet, than the Judgment and Fidelity required for an Historian; besides his Want of Moderation. If this Character be a true one, we have the less Reason to regret his not finishing another Treaties, which he promised at the Conclusion of his View, expressly upon the Antiquities of Ireland. (pp. xxvi–xxxii)
Here, Birch may not have been fully alive to the wit and etymological play of Spenser’s work, but his understanding of the dangers and, implicitly at least, the power politics of taking such liberties with the truth show an astuteness that needs to be imitated.25 Birch notes that we cannot be sure how long Spenser stayed in England, but he was back in Ireland by 1598 (pp. xxxviii–xxxix). He estimates that Spenser was 45 or 46 when he died, and confesses that, despite extensive searches in the London Prerogative Office, he could find no will (p. xxxix).
Birch’s biography is a clear advance on its predecessors. He reads the works carefully for any clues; has laboured extensively in all the relevant areas (Elizabethan London, the poet’s family, life in Ireland); is resolutely sceptical about the reliability of anecdotes; always provides his sources; admits when he does not know the answer so that future researchers know where to look; and makes the best of the sources that he has available. None of the lives produced for the next 150 years—those of Henry John Todd (1805), J. C. (1840), George L. Craik (1845), F. J. Child (1855), J. Payne Collier (1862), J. W. Hales (1869), R. W. Church (1879), and, especially Alexander Grosart (1882)—improve significantly on Birch’s account of Spenser’s life.26
Of these lives, only that by Grosart warrants analysis, principally because of the errors and unfounded suppositions that it introduced, misleading notions that are often repeated in recent works, although there are also some important new discoveries too.27 Grosart did all Spenser scholars a great service in uncovering the Townley Manuscript, which laid out the money spent by Robert Nowell, and provided crucial evidence of the resources provided for Spenser at school and university. But, as even his admirers admitted, he often allowed his enthusiasm for research get the better of him and spoil his hard work. His friend, Ernst Dowden, remarked of Grosart’s life of Spenser, ‘I have Grosart’s wild wilderness of a Life, which of course contains some valuable things’, which, as Arthur Sherbo noted, was clearly ‘damning with faint praise’.28
Grosart’s main aim was to prove that Spenser originated from Lancashire: to be precise, the Burnley area. The link had not originated with Grosart, and had been proposed on a number of previous occasions in the nineteenth century, in the lives by Craik and Child, as well as articles in the Gentleman’s Magazine.29 But, Grosart pushed the evidence as hard as he could in order to demonstrate that Spenser’s family had lived in Lancashire for generations.30 Grosart, to his own satisfaction, proved that Spenser was a member of the Pendle Forest Spensers, and that returning home to see his parents after leaving university he fell in love with Rose Dineley of Downham, ‘at the foot of the Pendle, in the north-west, about three miles from Clitheroe’, only for her to leave him for a local yeoman called Charles Aspinal (allegorically represented as ‘Menalcas’ in The Shepheardes Calender, an anagram in which a ‘C’ makes up ‘C Asmeral’, i.e., Aspinall).31 Exhibiting none of Birch’s caution over a century earlier, Grosart asserted that when Spenser writes in his first published letter to Harvey from Leicester House, 5 October 1579, ‘Et pede Clibosas fesso calcabimus Alpes’ (‘We shall press our worn feet up the jagged defiles of the Alps’), there can be ‘no question’ that he is referring to the Pendle Hills and his recent visit to Rosalind (Works, ed. Grosart, vol. i, p. lvi).32 And, if this does not quite prove the case on its own, he adds that the publisher of the Calender was Hugh Singleton, a Lancashire man, and, given the prominence of briars in the poem, Spenser must be referring to Burnley where they proliferate (Works, ed. Grosart, vol. i, pp. lvi–ii, lx).
Elsewhere, Grosart is over-confident in his judgements and makes irritating mistakes. He claims that Spenser must have had a penchant for ‘fair women’; that Lord Grey was gentle but stern in Ireland; that the two hymns that Spenser refers to as works written in the ‘greener times of my youth’, which he has been persuaded to publish, reluctantly, in 1596, were the love songs spurned by Rosalind; that Diggon Davie in the Calender is Jan van der Noot; that Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester was Philip Sidney’s brother-in-law (in fact, he was his uncle); that Lord Burghley was crooked and ugly (Grosart is confusing him with his son, Robert) (Works, ed. Grosart, i. 124, 136–7, 81, 25–7, 85, 77). The point is not simply that Grosart misleads the reader: rather, the issue is also related to his frustration at the lack of evidence available and his desire to establish a proper Victorian biography of his subject and so place Spenser alongside the dominant figures of his age: Elizabeth, Drake, Mary Queen of Scots, Shakespeare, Ralegh, Sidney, all of whom were the subjects of substantial biographies in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their personalities, however shaky the evidence that enabled writers to reconstruct them for their readers, dominated an understanding of the English Renaissance after studies of the period had been revivified in the wake of Jacob Burkhardt.33 In many ways Grosart’s instincts have been proved correct. A. C. Judson’s 1945 biography was a tremendous achievement, especially in his analysis of Spenser’s life in Ireland, even though it probably did not receive adequate praise in contemporary reviews.34 One reviewer concluded, rather harshly, ‘this life of Spenser, in spite of its goodwill, its research, its patient industry, because it illuminates neither the poet nor his works, fails to extend our understanding’.35 But, perhaps owing to questions of space and the fact that it was commissioned as part of the Variorum edition, it did not comment adequately on the works, omitting the reason why a reader might care about the life in the first place.36 Moreover, it fits within the familiar paradigm of Spenser as an ambitious would-be courtier, eager for patronage, whose goal in life was to shower praise on the queen.37