1. Peter Beal (ed.), Index of English Literary Manuscripts, i/2. Douglas to Wyatt (London: Mansell, 1980), pp. 523–31. John Donne is a notable exception as many personal letters do survive.
2. Donald Cheney, ‘Spenser’s Fortieth Birthday and Related Fictions’, Sp. St. 4 (1984), 3–31; S. K. Heninger, ‘Spenser and Sidney at Leicester House’, Sp. St. 8 (1990), 239–49.
3. H. E. Marshall, English Literature for Boys and Girls (London: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1910), opposite p. 252. On Spenser and Ralegh see Robert Lacey, Sir Walter Raleigh (London: Sphere, 1975), pp. 155–9; Judson, Life, pp. 135–42; Andrew Zurcher, ‘Getting It Back to Front in 1590: Spenser’s Dedications, Nashe’s Insinuations, and Raleigh’s Equivocations’, SLI 38/2 (2005), 173–98.
4. The literature on this issue is substantial. The most influential article has been Edwin Greenlaw, ‘Spenser and the Earl of Leicester’, PMLA 26 (1910), 535–61. Another series of speculations is provided in Muriel Bradbrook, ‘No Room at the Top: Spenser’s Pursuit of Fame’, in John Russell Brown and Bernhard Harris (eds.), Elizabethan Poetry (London: Arnold, 1980), pp. 90–109.
5. On Rosalind, see Richard Mallette, ‘Rosalind’, in Hamilton (ed.), Sp. Enc., p. 622; Paul E. McLane, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender: A Study in Elizabethan Allegory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961), ch. 3, ‘Elizabeth as Rosalind’; Andrew Hadfield, ‘The Fair Rosalind: What’s in a Literary Name: Disguise and the Absent Beloved in Spenser and Shakespeare’, TLS, 12 Dec. 2008, pp. 13–14. On the servant, see Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 5.
6. Ray Heffner, ‘Did Spenser Die in Poverty?’, MLN 48 (1933), 221–6; Josephine Waters Bennett, ‘Did Spenser Starve?’, MLN 52 (1937), 400–1.
7. William Sherman and Lisa Jardine, ‘Pragmatic Readers: Knowledge Transactions and Scholarly Services in Late Elizabethan England’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds.), Religion, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 102–24; Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘ “Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, P&P 129 (1990), 30–78; Eugene R. Kintgen, Reading in Tudor England (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996).
8. Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976).
9. Gabriel Harvey, Fovre Letters and certaine Sonnets, especially touching Robert Greene and other parties by him abused (1592), ed. G. B. Harrison (1922; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), p. 13; Nashe, Works, i. 287–8.
10. Henry Chettle and Thomas Greene (attrib.), Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592), ed. D. Allen Carroll (Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1994); Robert Greene, Greenes vision vvritten at the instant of his death. Conteyning a penitent passion for the folly of his pen (1592); Robert Greene, The repentance of Robert Greene Maister of Artes. Wherein by himselfe is laid open his loose life, with the manner of his death (London, 1592). For discussion, see ODNB entry; Kirk Melnikoff and Edward Gieskes (eds.), Writing Robert Greene: Essays on England’s First Notorious Professional Writer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
11. Charles Nicholl, A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe (London: Routledge, 1984), pp. 123–4.
12. Nashe, Works, i. 288. For analysis, see Andrew Hadfield, ‘ “Not without Mustard”: Self-Publicity and Polemic in Early Modern Literary London’, in Healy and Healy (eds.), Renaissance Transformations, pp. 64–78. On Greene’s life, see also Brenda E. Richardson, ‘Studies in Related Aspects of the Life and Thought of Robert Greene, with particular reference to the material of his prose pamphlets’, unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1976, ch. 1.
13. Irena Backus, Life Writing in Reformation Europe: Lives of Reformers by Friends, Disciples and Foes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. xxxiii.
14. Ibid. 4.
15. For discussion see John Bachelor (ed.), The Art of Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
16. For astute reflections, see Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).
17. Walter Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977); Michael Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography (London: Hart-Davies, 1967–71); Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James, 5 vols. (London: Hart-Davies, 1953–72); Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Knopf, 1997); Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, 4 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988–92).
18. Fulke Greville, ‘A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney’, in The Prose Work of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. John Gouws (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 3–135. For recent lives, see Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, Courtier Poet (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991); Alan Stewart, Philip Sidney: A Double Life (London: Pimlico, 2001).
19. On the creation of the myth of Sidney, see Jan Van Dorsten, Dominic Baker-Smith, and Arthur F. Kinney (eds.), Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend (Leiden: Brill, 1986); Gavin Alexander, Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).
20. Alan Pritchard, English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Survey (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), pp. 7, 181.
21. Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘John Milton: The Later Life (1641–1674)’, in Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 26–47, at p. 26.
22. Roger Wilkes, Scandal! A Scurrilous History of Gossip, 1700–2000 (London: Atlantic Books, 2002); T. H. White, The Age of Scandal: An Excursion through a Minor Period (London: Cape, 1950); Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 98–9, 220–2, passim. Michael Mascuch makes the analogous point that the use of private notebooks appears to have been a new phenomenon after 1600: Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), p. 72.
23. The literature on this subject is depressingly voluminous: on Shakespeare as Marlowe, see A. D. Wraight, In Search of Christopher Marlowe: A Pictorial Biography (1965; Chichester: Hart, 1993); on Shakespeare as Sir Henry Neville, see Brenda James and William D. Rubinstein, The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare (Harlow: Longman, 2005). For overviews of the anti-Stratfordian claims, see Scott McCrea, The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005); James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (London: Faber, 2010).
24. Edward George Harman, Edmund Spenser and the Impersonations of Francis Bacon (London: Constable, 1915).
25. For discussion, see Hadfield, ‘ “Not without Mustard”’, pp. 66–8.
26. Nicholl, Cup of News, pp. 269–70.
28. Ian Donaldson, Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
29. MacDonald P. Jackson, ‘Early Modern Authorship: Canons and Chronologies’, in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (eds.), Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), pp. 80–97.
30. Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). On The Family of Love, see Gary Taylor, Paul Mulholland, and MacD. P. Jackson, ‘Thomas Middleton, Lording Barry, and The Family of Love’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 93 (1999), 213–42.
31. See the ODNB entry by David Gunby.
32. It is a great loss that Mark Eccles never completed his projected biographical dictionary of Elizabethan authors: see ‘A Biographical Dictionary of Elizabethan Authors’, HLQ 5 (1942), 281–302.
33. Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life (London: Thomson, 2001); Charles Nicholl, Shakespeare the Lodger: His Life on Silver Street (London: Penguin, 2007).
34. Most recently, see Germaine Greer, Shakespeare’s Wife (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), ch. 19. For different interpretations, see Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare, pp. 272–5; Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005), pp. 485–6.
35. David Bevington, Shakespeare and Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 34–9.
36. Thomas Fuller, The Worthies of England, ed. John Freeman (London: Unwin, 1952), pp. 365–6.
37. Richard A. McCabe, ‘Rhyme and Reason: Poetics, Patronage, and Secrecy in Elizabethan and Jacobean Ireland’, in Literary Milieux: Essays in Text and Context Presented to Howard Erskine-Hill (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 30–51, at pp. 37–8. See p. 236.
38. Alexander C. Judson, ‘The Seventeenth-Century Lives of Edmund Spenser’, HLQ 10 (1946), 35–48. See also G. L. Craik, Spenser and His Poetry (London: Charles Knight & Co., 1845), p. 39.
39. Richard Peterson, ‘Laurel Crown and Ape’s Tail: New Light on Spenser’s Career from Sir Thomas Tresham’, Sp. St. 12 (1989), 1–36.
40. See the ODNB article by W. B. Patterson.
41. Andrew Hadfield, ‘Secrets and Lies: The Life of Edmund Spenser’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker (eds.), Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 55–73.
42. Linda Woodbridge, ‘Jest Books, the Literature of Roguery, and the Vagrant Poor in Renaissance England’, ELR 33 (2003), 201–10, at 206.
43. See e.g. The Works of Edmond Spenser … Whereunto is added, an account of his life; with other new additions (London, 1679); The Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser, 6 vols., ed. John Hughes (London, 1715), vol. i, p. vi; A View of the State of Ireland as it was in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Written by way of a Dialogue between Eudoxus and Ireneus: To which is prefix’d the Author’s Life, and an Index added to the Work (Dublin, 1763), pp. x–xi; Poetical Works, ed. Frances J. Child, 5 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1855), vol. i, p. xxix.
44. It is worth noting that even when extensive biographies of 17th-century figures do survive, as is the case with John Milton, they need to be treated with considerable caution: see Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 2.
45. Kate Bennett, ‘John Aubrey, Hint-Keeper: Life-Writing and the Encouragement of Natural Philosophy in the pre-Newtonian Seventeenth Century’, Seventeenth-Century 22 (2007), 358–80.
46. Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (1949; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 340.
47. See Judson, Life, p. 208 n. 19. On the Beestons see the ODNB lives by Andrew Gurr.
48. Tarnya Cooper, Searching for Shakespeare (London: National Gallery, 2006), pp. 180–1.
49. Aubrey’s Brief Lives, p. 340.
50. On Andrewes, see ODNB entry by Peter McCullough; Lancelot Andrewes, Selected Sermons & Lectures, ed. Peter McCullough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. xv.
51. H. B. Wilson, The History of Merchant Taylors’ School (London, 1814), pp. 557–62. See also the ODNB entries on Dove by Kenneth Fincham, and Watts by Brett Ussher.
52. See Works (1679); View (1763), pp. ii–iii. The Faerie Queene. By Edmund Spenser. With an exact collation of the two original editions … To which are now added, a new Life of the Author [by Thomas Birch] and also a glossary. Adorn’d with thirty-two copper plates, 3 vols. (London, 1751), vol. i, pp. iii–iv; Judson, ‘Seventeenth-Century Lives’, pp. 40–1. Birch’s text and some of his notes are preserved as BL Add. MS 4235. On the illustrations, which were by William Kent, and their significance in developing the concept of the Gothic, see Andrew Hadfield, ‘William Kent’s Illustrations of The Faerie Queene (1751)’, Sp. St. 14 (2000), 1–81.
53. W. H. Welply, ‘Edmund Spenser: Being an Account of Some Recent Researches into His Life and Lineage, with Some Notice of His Family and Descendants’, N&Q 162 (1932), 128–32, 146–50, 165–9, 182–7, 202–6, 220–4, 239–42, 256–60, at 166. See also Ray Heffner, ‘Edmund Spenser’s Family’, HLQ 2 (1938), 79–84.
54. Variorum, vi. 220. On the Drydens in Northamptonshire, see James Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 4–8. I owe this reference to Paul Hammond.
55. Oliver Garnett, Canons Ashby (Swindon: National Trust, 2001), pp. 20–1.
56. On Dryden’s interest in Spenser, see David Hill Radcliffe, Edmund Spenser: A Reception History (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996), pp. 27–9, passim.
57. Aubrey’s Brief Lives, p. 340.
58. The house featured in The Observer weekend magazine, 26 July 2008, as one of three homes for sale ‘with literary links’ (p. 99).
59. Jane Hurst, ‘Did Edmund Spenser Live Here?’, Alton Papers 12 (2008), 3–12. I am extremely grateful to Ms Hurst for sending me her article.
60. Wallop’s family estates were clearly substantial as the queen was prepared to visit Wallop in 1591: see Victoria County History: Hampshire, iii. 364.
61. Judson, Life, p. 151 n. 21, passim; Chronology, p. 54, passim. On Wallop, see the ODNB entry by Ronald H. Fritze.
62. Leicester Bradner, ‘Spenser’s Connections with Hampshire’, MLN 60 (1945), 180–4. See pp. 238–9.
63. ‘Dialogue between Eudoxus and Irenius on the history of Ireland, 1596’, TCD MS 589. For a list of manuscripts of a View, see Variorum, x. 506–16.
64. View 1997, p. 6. On Ware’s editing of A View, see Andrew Hadfield, ‘Historical Writing, 1550–1660’, in Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield (eds.), The Oxford History of the Irish Book, iii. The Irish Book in English, 1550–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 250–63, at pp. 255–60; Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 273–6; Bart Van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 78–85. For more traditional views of how and why Ware altered a View, see Ciaran Brady, ‘Spenser’s Irish Crisis: Humanism and Experience in the 1590s’, P&P 111 (1986), 17–49, at 25; David J. Baker, Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 120–3.
65. For details of Ussher’s life and thought, see R. Buick Knox, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967); Jack Cunningham, James Ussher and John Bramhall: The Theology and Politics of Two Irish Ecclesiastics of the Seventeenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). On Spenser and Arland Ussher, see pp. 192–3.
66. Spenser Allusions, pp. 226–7. Davenant claimed to be Shakespeare’s illegitimate son: see S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 224–7.
67. See the ODNB entries by W. H. Kelliher and Wilfrid Prest.
68. W. H. Welply, ‘Some Spenser Problems’, N&Q 180 (1941), 56–9, 74–6, 92–5, 104, 151, 224, 248, 436–9, 454–9, at 56.
69. Calton Younger, Ireland’s Civil War (London: Muller, 1968), pp. 321–6. Welply notes at the end of one of his early articles, ‘Final note—Most, if not all, of the documents cited as being in the Public Record Office, Dublin, no longer exist, having been burned in the recent destruction of the Four Courts’ (‘The Family and Descendants of Edmund Spenser’, JCHAS, 2nd ser. 28 (1922), 22–34, 49–61, at 59).
70. See e.g. F. I. Carpenter, ‘The Marriages of Edmund Spenser’, MP 22 (1924), 97–8; Mark Eccles, ‘Spenser’s First Marriage’, TLS, 31 Dec. 1931, p. 1053; Douglas Hamer, ‘Spenser’s Marriage’, RES 27 (1931), 271–90; Raymond Jenkins, ‘Spenser and the Clerkship in Munster’, PMLA 47 (1932), 109–21; Raymond Jenkins, ‘Newes out of Munster, a Document in Spenser’s Hand’, SP 32 (1935), 125–30; A. C. Judson, ‘Two Spenser Leases’, MLQ 5 (1944), 143–7; Lee Piepho, ‘The Shepheardes Calender and Neo-Latin Pastoral: A Book Newly Discovered to Have Been Owned by Spenser’, Sp. St. 16 (2002), 17–86; Lee Piepho, ‘Edmund Spenser and Neo-Latin Literature: An Autograph Manuscript on Petrus Lotichius and His Poetry’, SP 100 (2003), 123–34; Heffner, ‘Spenser’s Family’.
71. See the discussion in Robert D. Hume, Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles of Archaeo-Historicism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
72. See Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), i. Regarding Method, in particular, chs. 5–7.
73. Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 278–93.
74. See e.g. Beverley Southgate, Postmodernism in History: Fear or Freedom (London: Routledge, 2003), pt. 2; Alun Munslow, ‘Biography and History: Criticism, Theory, Practice’, in Alexander Lyon Macfie (ed.), The Philosophy of History: Talks Given at the Institute of Historical Research, London, 2000–2006 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 226–36.
75. Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 251–7, 275–80, passim; Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
76. See J. A. Downie, ‘Marlowe, May 1593, and the “Must-Have” Theory of Biography’, RES 58 (2007), 245–67, at 245. I am grateful to Ros Barber for bringing this article to my attention. See also Lukas Erne, ‘Biography, Mythography and Criticism: The Life and Work of Christopher Marlowe’, MP 103 (2005), 28–50.
77. For reflections on this problem, see Judith P. Zinsser, ‘A Prologue for La Dame d’Esprit: The Biography of the Marquise Du Châtelet’, in Alun Munslow and Robert A. Rosenstein (eds.), Experiments in Rethinking History (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 195–208; Ray Monk, ‘Getting Inside Heisenberg’s Head’, in Macfie (ed.), Philosophy of History, pp. 237–52; Mark Roseman, ‘Surviving Memory: Truth and Inaccuracy in Holocaust Testimony’, in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (eds.), The Oral History Reader (London: Routledge, 2nd edn., 2006), pp. 230–43.
78. Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: In Search of Leo Africanus, a Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (London: Faber, 2006), p. 13.
79. Downie has in mind such works as Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (London: Cape, 1992), and David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (London: Faber, 2004), ch. 15.
80. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (London: Collins, 1972).
81. On the Ottoman Empire and its presence in Europe, especially Britain, see Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For one series of approaches to the complexities of the Mediterranean world, see Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield (eds.), Religions of the Book: Co-existence and Conflict, 1400–1660 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008).
82. Recent overviews of Spenser’s life includes: Ruth Mohl, ‘Spenser, Edmund’, in Sp. Enc., pp. 668–71; Richard Rambuss, ‘Spenser’s Life and Career’, in Andrew Hadfield (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spenser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 13–36; Andrew Hadfield, ‘Spenser, Edmund’, ODNB entry; Patrick Cheney, ‘Life’, in Bart Van Es (ed.), A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 18–41.
83. See Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley, ‘Introduction: Irish Representations and English Alternatives’, in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley (eds.), Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 1–23, at pp. 10–11.
84. The literature on this subject is now voluminous: for recent comment, see Thomas Herron, Spenser’s Irish Work: Poetry, Plantation and Colonial Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
85. On Spenser’s literary heritage, see Wells (ed.), Spenser Allusions; Radcliffe, Spenser: A Reception History. On his impact on 17th-century identities, see Nicholas P. Canny, ‘Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity’, YES 13 (1983), 1–19; Nicholas P. Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), ch. 1, ‘Spenser Sets the Agenda’; John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics, 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 3, 39, 45, passim.
86. For recent overviews, see Patrick Cheney, ‘Life’; Rambuss, ‘Spenser’s Life and Career’.
87. See e.g. Park Honan, Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Campbell and Corns, Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); John Stubbs, Donne: The Reformed Soul (London: Viking, 2006); Susanne Woods, Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Alan Haynes, Walsingham: Elizabethan Spymaster & Statesman (Stroud: Sutton, 2004); Peter C. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promises: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Mary S. Lovell, Bess of Hardwick: First Lady of Chatsworth (London: Abacus, 2006).
88. Judson’s work was not always greeted enthusiastically by reviewers, principally because they felt that the life had not been defined clearly enough: W. L. Renwick felt that the portrait of an ‘ambitious thruster’ was inaccurate and this was not helped because Spenser ‘is surrounded with very flat and faint shadows of his friends and associates’ (RES 25 (1949), 261–2); B. E. C. Davis admitted that ‘It is truly astonishing that no full-length life of Spenser should have appeared since the publication of Grosart’s edition in 1884’, but felt that, even so, ‘There is still room for a full-length life of Spenser, historical and critical’ (MLR 42 (1947), 494–5); the eminent historian Conyers Read was far more dismissive and asserted that Judson ‘has given us neither a clear picture of Spenser nor a clear picture of the Elizabethan court circles nor anything approaching a clear picture of Munster’ (American Historical Review 51 (1946), 538–9).
89. For comment, see Richard Rambuss, ‘Spenser’s Lives, Spenser’s Careers’, in Judith H. Anderson, Donald Cheney and David A. Richardson (eds.), Spenser’s Life and the Subject of Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), pp. 1–17, at p. 16; Gary Waller, Edmund Spenser: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1994), p. 25.
90. But see Patrick Cheney, ‘Biographical Representations: Marlowe’s Life of the Author’, in Takashi Kozuka and J. R. Mulryne (eds.), Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: New Directions in Biography (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 183–204, which makes a vigorous case that Marlowe’s characters are often versions of the author.
91. This last section revises Hadfield, ‘Secrets and Lies’, p. 60.
92. A useful list of problems, some of which have not yet been solved, is given in Frederick Ives Carpenter, ‘Desiderata in the Study of Spenser’, SP 19 (1922), 238–43.
93. The most comprehensive recent overview is David Cressy, Birth, Marriage & Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
94. Fernand Braudel, Civilization & Capitalism, 15th–18th. Century, trans. Siân Reynolds, 3 vols. (London: Collins, 1981), i. 90; Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 194–200.
95. Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), ch. 5.
96. Hadfield, ‘“Secrets and Lies”’, p. 61. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 121–2. For a discussion of the Harvey–Spenser letters in the light of such issues, see Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 63–101.
97. The literature on this subject is vast. For seminal discussions, see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977); Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), chs. 3–4. For a succinct overview, see Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485–1603 (London: Penguin, 2000), ch. 3.
98. Walter J. Ong, ‘Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite’, SP 56 (1959), 103–24.
99. See David Cressy, Education in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Arnold, 1975); Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England (London: Routledge, 1975); Helen M. Jewell, Education in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998); T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine an Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944); Juan Luis Vives, Tudor School-Boy Life: The Dialogues of Juan Luis Vives (1908; London: Frank Cass, 1970).
100. On the first issue, see Hume, Reconstructing Contexts, pp. 41, 47; on the second, see Andrew Hadfield (ed.), Were Early Modern Lives Different? (special issue), Textual Practice 23/2 (Apr. 2009).
101. See Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984); Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985). For a critical evaluation of such arguments, see David Aers, ‘A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the “History of the Subject”’, in David Aers (ed.), Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing (Hemel Hempstead, 1992), pp. 177–202; John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004).
102. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture’, in Patricia Parker and David Quint (eds.), Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 210–24.
103. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 21, 41, 44, 56.
104. Ibid. 83–4.
105. F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Home, Work and Land (Chelmsford: Essex County Council, 1976); Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (rev. edn., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Helen Castor, Blood and Roses: The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century (London: Faber, 2005); Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998).
106. Le Retour de Martin Guerre, dir. Martin Vigne (1982); Sommersby, dir. Jon Amiel (1993).
107. For a brief overview, see Debora Shuger, ‘Life-Writing in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Patrick Coleman, Jayne Lewis, and Jill Kowalik (eds.), Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 63–78.
108. The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne, ed. James M. Osborn (London: Oxford University Press, 1962); Andrew Mousley, ‘Renaissance Selves and Life Writing: The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 26 (1990), 222–30; Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly, Early Modern English Lives, Autobiography and Self-Representation, 1500–1600 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 15–21.
109. The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. D. J. H. Clifford (Stroud: Sutton, 2003); Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson: With a Fragment of Autobiography of Mrs Hutchinson, ed. N. H. Keeble (London: Dent, 1995); Margaret Cavendish, The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, ed. C. H. Firth (2nd edn., London: Routledge, 1906); The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, ed. John Loftis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
1. Spenser, Shorter Poems, p. 424.
2. Amoretti, ed. Larsen, pp. 207–8.
3. Harvey had complained of Spenser’s ignorance of astronomy in his copy of Dionysius Periegetes, Surveye if the World (1572): ‘Pudet ipsum Spenserum, esti Sphaerae, astrolabiique non plane ignarum; suae in astronomicis Canonibus, tabulis, instrumentisque imperitiae’ (‘It is a shame that Spenser himself, while not entirely unaware of the Sphere [either a globe, or spherical map of the heavens] and the astrolabe, was unaware of his ignorance of astronomical principles, tables and instruments’) (Harvey, Marginalia, p. 162) (I am extremely grateful to Norman Vance for help with this translation). Either Spenser had improved his knowledge by 1590 or Harvey was joking (Amoretti, ed. Larsen, p. 189); Stephen A. Barney, ‘Reference Works, Spenser’s’, Sp. Enc., pp. 590–3, at p. 592.
4. Amoretti, ed. Larsen, p. 189.
5. Welply, ‘Edmund Spenser’, pp. 165–6; Chronology, pp. 61–2; Jean R. Brink, ‘Revising Spenser’s Birth Date to 1554’, N&Q 56 (2009), 523–7.
6. Amoretti, ed. Larsen, pp. 3–4. Pope Gregory XIII issued a papal bull on 24 Apr. 1582, decreeing that Catholic countries would adopt the Gregorian calendar which corrected the errors of the Julian calendar by omitting 10 days, and altering the rules for leap years. England, like most Protestant countries, preserved the Julian calendar so that Europe was now divided by time as well as religion. Spenser’s mentor, Gabriel Harvey, was especially interested in calendars and almanacs, as his brothers, John and Richard, each wrote astrological discourses, works that Thomas Nashe ridiculed in their controversy. For comment on the astute awareness of time and dating in the late 16th century, and precedents for Spenser’s keen interest, see Steve Sohmer, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe Theatre, 1599 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 17–24, passim; Anne Lake Prescott, ‘The Thirsty Deer and the Lord of Life: Some Contexts for Amoretti 67–70’, Sp. St. 6 (1985), 33–76. On the Harvey brothers, see Bernard Capp, Astrology & The Popular Press: English Almanacs, 1500–1800 (London: Faber, 1979), p. 46, passim; Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: A Study of His Life, Marginalia, and Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 70–2, 91–2, passim; Nashe, Works, i. 167, iii. 72.
7. Amoretti, ed. Larsen, p. 190.
8. The New Year started on 25 March until England switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1752.
9. On Spenser’s interest in numbers, see especially A. Kent Hieatt, Short Time’s Endless Monument: The Symbolism of the Numbers in Edmund Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960); Alexander Dunlop, ‘Calendar Symbolism in the “Amoretti”’, N&Q 214 (1969), 24–6. More generally, see Tom W. N. Parker, Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney Circle: Loving in Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
10. For a claim that Spenser was born in 1550, see Percy W. Long, ‘Spenser’s Birth Date’, MLN 31 (1916), 178–80.
11. Chronology, p. 68.
12. John Stow locates the source in ‘a village called Winchcombe in Oxford (A Survey of London, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 2 vols. (1908; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), i. 11; William Harrison admits that the source has been disputed but feels able to solve the mystery: ‘this famous streame hath his head or beginning out of the side of an hill, standing on the plaines of Cotswold, about one mile from Tetburie’ (‘An Historicall description of the Iland of Britaine’, in Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, 3 vols. (London, 1587), i. 45). See alsoWilliam Camden, Britain, or A chorographicall description of the most flourishing kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the ilands adioyning, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1610), p. 241.
13. See W. H. Herendeen, ‘Rivers’, Sp. Enc., pp. 606–9; Alistair Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time (London: Routledge, 1964), ch. 11; P. W. Joyce, ‘Spenser’s Irish Rivers’, in The Wonders of Ireland and Other Papers on Irish Subjects (Dublin: Longman, 1911), pp. 72–114.
14. See F. C. Spenser, ‘Locality of the Family of Edmund Spenser’, Gentleman’s Magazine, NS 18 (1842), 138–43, at 138; William Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire, illustrated from records, leiger-books, manuscripts, charters, evidences, tombes, and armes: Illustrated (London: 1656), pp. 404–5, passim. On Althorp, see J. Alfred Gotch, The Old Halls & Manor-Houses of Northamptonshire (London: Batsford, 1936), pp. 68–71; John M. Steane, The Northamptonshire Landscape: Northamptonshire and the Soke of Peterborough (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974), p. 187. On Wormleighton, see Geoffrey Tyack, Warwickshire Country Houses (Chichester: Phillimore, 1994), pp. 273–4; Mary Dormer Harris, Unknown Warwickshire (London: John Lane, 1924), pp. 82–8.
15. Jeremy Wheeler, Where Sheep Safely Graze: 1000 Years of Worship, 1000 Years of History: A Short History and Description of The Village of Wormleighton and the Church of St. Peter (Wormleighton: Wormleighton PCC, 2011), p. 43.
16. Spenser, Shorter Poems, p. 234.
17. Ibid. 190.
18. See the ODNB entries on Alice Spenser (Louis A. Knalfa), Ferdinando Stanley (David Kathman), and Anne Clifford (Richard T. Spence); Campbell and Corns, Milton, p. 69; Cedric C. Brown, John Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 13–26, 41–56. On Egerton, see pp. 336–8, 349.
19. Spenser, Shorter Poems, p. 290.
20. Studies of female patronage in early modern England are now legion: see Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, pp. 365–79; Jacqueline Pearson, ‘Women Writers and Women Readers: The Case of Aemilia Lanier’, in Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen, and Suzanne Trill (eds.), Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996), pp. 45–54, at pp. 49–50. On Spenser’s pursuit of female patronage elsewhere, see Ernest A. Strathmann, ‘Lady Carey and Spenser’, ELH 2 (1935), 33–57; Jon A. Quitslund, ‘Spenser and the Patronesses of the Fowre Hymnes: “Ornaments of All True Love and Beautie”’, in Margaret Hannay (ed.), Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1985), pp. 184–202.
21. ‘Edmund Spenser’s Family: Two Notes and a Query’, N&Q 44 (1997), 49–51, at 50.
22. Alan G. R. Smith, Servant of the Cecils: The Life of Sir Michael Hickes (London: Cape, 1977), p. 156.
23. See p. 267.
24. See e.g. the researches of Margaret Russell, countess of Cumberland (1560–1616), dedicatee of Fowre Hymnes (1596) and mother of Anne Clifford (1590–1676), who commissioned Spenser’s funeral monument in 1620: Richard T. Spence, Lady Anne Clifford: Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and Montgomery (1590–1676) (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), pp. 164–8, passim.
25. J. Horace Round, Studies in Peerage and Family History (London: Constable, 1901), p. 281; Mary E. Finch, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, 1540–1640 (Oxford: Northamptonshire Record Society, 1956), ch. 3.
26. On the continued rise of the Spencers in the early 17th century, see Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 25–30.
27. Round, Studies in Peerage, pp. 289–90, 293; J. Horace Round, Peerage and Pedigree: Studies in Peerage Law and Family History (1910; London: Woburn, 1971), p. 188; Georgina Battiscombe, The Spencers of Althorp (London: Constable, 1984), p. 11.
28. Carpenter, Reference Guide, pp. 77–8; Carpenter, ‘Marriages of Edmund Spenser’; Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 129; Douglas Hamer, ‘Edmund Spenser: Some Further Notes’, N&Q 162 (1932), 380–4, at 380; Mark Eccles, ‘Elizabethan Edmund Spensers’, MLQ 5 (1944), 413–27; Round, Studies in Peerage, p. 323.
29. The theory was most vociferously proposed by Grosart (see Appendix 1, p. 424), but was effectively demolished by W. H. Welply and Douglas Hamer: see e.g. Hamer, ‘Spenser: Further Notes’, pp. 380–1.
30. W. H. Welply, ‘Edmund Spenser: Some New Discoveries and the Correction of Some Old Errors’, N&Q 146 (1924), 445–7, at 446; 147 (1924), 35. For more details of the will, the legal dispute it generated, and its implications, see pp. 343–9.
31. Pauline Henley, Spenser in Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1928), pp. 78–9. On the Spencers of Althorp, see Judson, Life, ch. 1. On marriages and family connections, see Stone, Crisis, ch. 11; Greer, Shakespeare’s Wife, 67–8, passim.
32. Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 447; James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 4. On Canons Ashby, see Gotch, Old Halls & Manor-Houses of Northamptonshire, pp. 84–6.
33. Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 185.
34. Judson, Life, pp. 8–9.
35. Retha M. Warnicke, William Lambarde: Elizabethan Antiquary, 1536–1601 (Chichester: Phillimore, 1973), p. 1.
36. A. S. W. Clifton, ‘Edmund Spenser, His Connection with Northants’, N&Q 154 (1928), 195.
37. Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 130; Brink, ‘Spenser’s Family’, pp. 49–50.
38. Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 130, is dismissive. Maley, Chronology, p. 4, speculates that this John Spenser may have been Edmund’s brother, as there was a John Spenser who served as constable of Limerick in 1579. Maley also speculates that a James Spenser who worked in Ireland in the 1570s and 1580s may have been a relative, even a brother (Chronology, pp. 10, 38), but the name was common in the period and there is no useful evidence that makes either John or James a likely relative of the poet.
39. The marriage is well known: see Craik, Spenser and His Poetry, p. 250; H. J. S., ‘Spenser and Travers’, N&Q, 3rd ser. 4 (1863), 373; Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 130; W. H. Welply, ‘Edmund Spenser’s Brother-in-law, John Travers’, N&Q, 179 (1940), 70–8, 92–7, 112–15.
40. Welply, ‘Spenser’s Brother-in-law, John Travers’, p. 76. On Sylvanus Spenser, see pp. 408–9.
41. Welply, ‘Spenser’s Brother-in-law, John Travers’, p. 93.
42. Ibid. 92.
43. John J. Fitzgerald, ‘Documents Found at Castlewhite, Co. Cork’, JRSAI, 6th ser. 20 (1930), 79–83, at 79.
44. Welply, ‘Spenser’s Brother-in-law, John Travers’, p. 113.
45. Judson, Life, pp. 130–1; Henley, Spenser in Ireland, pp. 72–3; Welply, ‘Spenser’s Brother-in-law, John Travers’, p. 95.
46. George Vertue, Notebooks, ed. K. Esdaile, earl of Ilchester and H. M. Hake, 6 vols., Walpole Society 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 30 (1930–55), at 26. 99. On the portrait, see Appendix 2, pp. 413–14.
47. Vertue, Notebooks, 30. 193; 20. 79; Judson, ‘Eighteenth-Century Lives’, pp. 166–7. On Oldys and Winstanley, see the ODNB lives by Paul Baines and William E. Burns.
48. Henry A. Harber, A Dictionary of London (London: Jenkins, 1918), pp. 213–14.
49. Stow, Survey, i. 120–1.
50. Ian Grainger and Christopher Phillpotts, The Royal Navy Victualling Yard, East Smithfield, London (London: Museum of London, 2010), pp. 2, 9.
51. Ibid. 33.
52. Stow, Survey, i. 124; Ian Grainger, Duncan Hawkins, Lynne Coral, and Richard Mikulski, The Black Death Cemetery, East Smithfield, London (London: Museum of London, 2008), p. 10.
53. Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 18.
54. Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, p. 108; Lien Bich Luu, Immigrants and the Industries of London, 1500–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), ch. 4.
55. Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, p. 21.
56. A useful, but rather fanciful, account of Spenser’s journey to school is provided in Donald Bruce, ‘Edmund Spenser: The Boyhood of a Poet’, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2242/is_n1537_v264/ai_15295932/pg_7/?tag=content;col1 (accessed 19 Feb. 2012). See also Walter Thornbury, Old and New London: A Narration of Its People, and Its Places, 2 vols. (London: Cassell 1879), ii. 28–41.
57. Fuller, Worthies, p. 367.
58. On grammar schools see Charlton, Education in Renaissance England, ch. 4; Jewell, Education in Early Modern England, pp. 80–3, 99–102. Invaluable details of the specific charters and practices of each grammar school are provided in Nicholas Carlisle, A Concise Description of the Endowed Grammar Schools in England and Wales, 2 vols. (London, 1818).
59. Carlisle, Endowed Grammar Schools, i. 49; F. W. M. Draper, Four Centuries of Merchant Taylors’ School, 1561–1961 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 1.
60. ‘Ordinance Book, 1561–1667’, London Metropolitan Archives, Merchants Taylors’ School Records, MS 34270, p. 82.
61. Carlisle, Endowed Grammar Schools, i. 49; Stow, Survey, i. 237. The School statutes exist in the ‘Ordinance Book’, Merchants Taylors’ School Records.
62. E. P. Hart (ed.), Merchant Taylors’ School Register, 2 vols. (London: Merchant Taylors’ Company, 1936); Rebekah Owens, ‘The Career of Thomas Kyd Relating to His Attendance at Merchant Taylors’ School’, N&Q 254 (2009), 35–6; Mildred Campbell, The English Yeoman under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts (1942; London: Merlin, 1960), p. 271.
63. ‘Ordinance Book’, Merchant Taylors’ School Records.
64. On citizenship and London identity, see Philip Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 10–15, passim; Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 153–94; Tracey Hill, Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1585–1639 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), ch. 1.
65. On literature in the London merchant culture, see Ceri Sullivan, ‘London’s Early Modern Creative Industrialists’, SP 103 (2006), 313–28. The article points out how many members of the Merchant Taylors’ Company were involved in literary projects.
66. Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch 4. See pp. 303–5, 357–60.
67. On Spenser as a court poet see Stegner, ‘Spenser’s Biographers’, Sp. Handbook, pp. 125–45, at p. 128.
68. Stow, Survey, i. 129–32; The Map of Early Modern London, http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/render_page.php?id=TOWE3 (accessed 17 Mar. 2009).
69. Bruce, ‘Spenser: Boyhood’.
70. Steve Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 61–86; Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); John Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England (Harlow: Longman, 1971), passim; A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), passim. On the population of England, see E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (1989; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 575.
72. Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons: Change, Crime and Control in the Capital City, 1550–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 1–3.
73. On the influx of Dutch settlers and refugees into England in the 16th century, and their economic and cultural impact, see W. J. B. Pienaar, English Influences in Dutch Literature and Justus Van Edden as Intermediary: An Aspect of Eighteenth-Century Achievement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), pp. 8–12.
74. Luu, Immigrants, p. 4; Stephen Porter, Shakespeare’s London: Everyday Life in London, 1580–1616 (Stroud: Amberley, 2009), ch. 2.
75. Alan R. H. Baker, ‘Changes in the Later Middle Ages’, in Darby (ed.), New Historical Geography of England, pp. 186–247, at p. 244.
76. Bruce, ‘Spenser: Boyhood’.
77. Nicholas Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London, i. The Cities of London & Westminster (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. 33.
78. Cressy, Education in Tudor and Stuart England, pp. 71–2.
79. See William Kempe, The Education of Children in learning declared by the dignitie, vtilitie, and method thereof. Meete to be knowne, and practised aswell of parents as schoolmaisters (London, 1588), sig. F2v. I owe this reference to Sean B. Palmer. On ‘petty schools’, see Jewell, Education in Early Modern England, pp. 27–8; Singman, Daily Life in Elizabethan England, p. 42. Richard Mulcaster was a noted enthusiast for pre-school education and worries about the problem of the age at which children should start school in his educational treatises: Richard De Molen, Richard Mulcaster (c.1531–1611) and Educational Reform in the Renaissance (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1991), pp. 54–5; Richard Mulcaster, Positions, wherein those primitive circumstances be examined, which are necessarie for the training vp of children (London, 1581), ed. Robert Herbert Quick (London: Longman, 1881), pp. 17–24, 222, 256.
80. Jewell, Education in Early Modern England, pp. 94–5.
81. Stephen K. Galbraith, ‘Edmund Spenser and the History of the Book, 1569–1679’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 2006, p. 11. Galbraith’s account of Spenser’s education in terms of his exposure to typeface is excellent and I am grateful to Dr Galbraith for sharing his work with me in advance of publication and for many illuminating conversations.
82. Carlisle, Endowed Grammar Schools, i. 55; see also Wilson, History of the Merchant Taylors’ School, pp. 11–21.
83. Carlisle, Endowed Grammar Schools, i. 75, 418, 425. On Colet, see the ODNB entry by J. B. Trapp; comments from Douglas Gray, Later Medieval English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 85. On the importance of grammar schools in 16th-century England, see J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1990), p. 4.
84. Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380–1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 7, 80.
85. Carlisle, Endowed Grammar Schools, i. 101, 408, 425, 627. On Nowell, see the ODNB entry by Stanford Lehmberg; Draper, Four Centuries of Merchant Taylors’ School, pp. 6, 13–14, passim; Mark Eccles, ‘Brief Lives: Tudor and Stuart Authors’, SP 79/4, Texts and Studies (Autumn 1982), 1–135, at 100–1.
86. Carlisle, Endowed Grammar Schools, i. 75.
87. Ibid. On candles, see Singman, Daily Life in Elizabethan England, p. 80.
88. Vives, Tudor School-Boy Life; Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), ch. 1; Ronald Knowles, Shakespeare’s Arguments with History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), ch. 1.
89. Stow, Survey, i. 74. On Stow’s dedication to Spenser, see Barrett L. Beer, Tudor England Observed: The World of John Stow (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), p. 17.
90. Mulcaster, Positions, p. 185.
91. The best short outline is Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ch. 1. See also Cressy, Education in Tudor and Stuart England, especially part 5, and the compendious Baldwin, Shakspere’s Small Latine. On Spenser’s use of what he would have learned at school in his poetry, see David Herbert Rix, Rhetoric in Spenser’s Poetry (State College, PA: Pennsylvania State College, 1940).
92. William Lily, A short introduction of grammar generallie to be vsed. Compiled and set forth, for the bringing vp of all those that intend to attaine the knovvledge of the Latine tongue (London, 1557) (although there were numerous reprints throughout the 16th century); Carol V. Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 9–11; Galbraith, ‘Spenser and the History of the Book’, p. 13.
93. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, pp. 13–14; Cressy, Education in Tudor and Stuart England, pp. 83–4. See also Andrew Wallace, Virgil’s Schoolboys: The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 40.
94. Peter Mack, ‘Spenser and Rhetoric’, Sp. Handbook, pp. 420–36, at pp. 425–6; Lesley B. Cormack, ‘Maps as Educational Tools in the Renaissance’, in David Woodward. (ed.), The History of Cartography, iii. Cartography in the European Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pt. 1 pp. 622–36, at pp. 622–3.
95. Galbraith, ‘Spenser and the History of the Book’, p. 16; R. T. D. Sayle, ‘Annals of the Merchant Taylors’ School Library’, The Library, 4th ser. 15 (1935), 457–80, at 459. On Spenser’s use of such works throughout his career, see De Wilt T. Starnes and Ernest William Talbert, Classical Myth and Legend in Renaissance Dictionaries: A Study of Renaissance Dictionaries in Relation to the Classical Learning of Contemporary English Writers (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1955), ch. 4. A catalogue of 1773 reveals many of the same books: London Metropolitan Archives, Merchants Taylors’ School Records, MS 34334.
96. Cressy, Education in Tudor and Stuart England, pp. 24–5; Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. ii, ch. 12; Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 288.
97. Riggs, World of Christopher Marlowe, ch. 3.
98. For discussion of Spenser as a secretary, see Richard Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
99. Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 11–14.
100. Hill, Pageantry and Power, pp. 36–7.
101. John Wesley, ‘Mulcaster’s Boys: Spenser, Andrewes, Kyd’, unpublished dPhil thesis, University of St Andrews, 2008, p. 82; Mulcaster, Positions, p. 124.
102. Mulcaster, Positions, pp. 276–7. Other educationalists also argued for the importance of corporal punishment: see Kempe, Education of children, sig. H2r; Ong, ‘Latin Language Study’, pp. 111–13. The most famous case of enthusiastic caning was that of Nicholas Udall (1504–56), headmaster of Eton: see the ODNB entry by Matthew Steggle.
103. Fuller, Worthies, p. 600.
104. Mulcaster, Positions, 35.
105. Rebecca W. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 25–6.
106. Barker, ‘Mulcaster’, ODNB.
107. Victor Morgan, with Christopher Brooke, A History of the University of Cambridge, ii. 1546–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 6–7.
108. Thomas M. Greene, ‘Antique world’, Sp. Enc., pp. 42–6.
109. I am especially grateful to Neil Rhodes for discussing Spenser’s relationship to Greek with me.
110. Sir James Whitelock (1570–1632), later to be a prominent judge, writes of his gratitude to Mulcaster for teaching him Latin, Greek, and Hebrew at the school: James Oliphant (ed.), The Educational Writings of Richard Mulcaster (1532–1611) (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1903), p. xv; G. Lloyd Jones, The Discovery of Hebrew in Tudor England: A Third Language (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 225–6, 230–2.
111. Wallace, Virgil’s Schoolboys, pp. 18–34, 50–7.
112. De Molen, Mulcaster, p. 37. On Andrewes’s acknowledgement of his debt to Mulcaster, see the ODNB entry by Peter E. McCullough, p. 1.
113. Richard Mulcaster, The Passage of our Most Drad Soueraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth through the citie of London to westminster the daye before her coronacion Anno 1558 (London, 1558); Gabriel Heaton, Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments: From George Gascoigne to Ben Jonson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 92.
114. Alexander B. Grosart (ed.), The Townley MSS: The Spending of the Money of Robert Nowell of Reade Hall, Lancashire: Brother of Dean Alexander Nowell, 1568–1580 (Manchester: privately printed, 1877), pp. 28–9. On the spelling of Downhall’s name, see A. F. Pollard and Marjorie Blatcher, ‘Hayward Townshend’s Journals’, HR 12 (1934), 1–31, at 21. I am especially grateful to Henry Woudhuysen, who has given me access to an unpublished paper of his on Robert Willis and Gregory Downhall.
115. Alumni Oxoniensis: The Members of Oxford University, 1500–1714, ed. Joseph Foster, 2 vols. (Oxford: Parker and Co., 1891) i. 420.
116. Leslie Hotson, Shakespeare’s Sonnets Dated and Other Essays (London: Hart-Davies, 1949), p. 208.
117. Downhall’s relationship with one of his students, Richard Willis, is recorded in Willis’s Mount Tabor or Private Exercises of a Penitent Sinner (London, 1639), pp. 97–105.
118. A. E. B. Coldiron, ‘Watson’s Hekatompathia and Renaissance Lyric Translation’, Translation and Literature 5 (1996), 3–25.
119. T. E. Hartley (ed.), Proceedings in the Parliament of Elizabeth I, iii. 1593–1601 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1995), pp. 376–7.
120. Willis, Mount Tabor, p. 98.
121. R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 97. On Egerton and Puckering see p. 349.
122. ODNB entry on ‘Sir John Bennett (1552/3–1627)’ by Sheila Doyle; House of Commons, ii. 45–6.
123. Paul E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 184, 278, 364; House of Commons, ii. 45.
124. Draper, Four Centuries of Merchant Taylors’ School, ch. 1; De Molen, Mulcaster, p. 146; ODNB entry on Alexander Nowell; Robert Nowell, ed. Grosart. On the influence of Nowell’s catechism, see William P. Haugaard, Elizabeth and the English Reformation: The Struggle for a Stable Settlement of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 277–90; Norman Jones, The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 172. Nowell was also well known for having spoken too bluntly to the queen about the corrosive power of images and been publicly rebuked by her at court, an incident which took place in 1565 while Spenser was still at school: Peter E. McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 47. Robert Nowell may have had a connection to the Dudley family and it has been suggested that he might have introduced Spenser to them: C. M. Webster, ‘Robert Nowell’, N&Q 167 (1934), 116. A cousin, Laurence Nowell (1530–c.1570), produced the map of Britain and Ireland that Lord Burghley always carried with him; see ODNB entry by Reitha M. Warnicke; George Tolias, ‘Maps in Renaissance Libraries and Collections’, in Woodward (ed.), History of Cartography, iii/1. 637–60, at p. 643. The map is BL Add. 62540.
125. Alexander Nowell, A Catechism or First Instruction and Learning of Christian Religion, trans. Thomas Norton (1570; London: Parker Society, 1868); Michael Graves, Thomas Norton: The Parliament Man (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 55, 322–4, 326–7, passim; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 610–12; Thomas S. Freeman, ‘“The Reformation of the Church in this Parliament”: Thomas Norton, John Foxe and the Parliament of 1571’, Parliamentary History 16 (1997), 131–47.
126. J. S., Certaine worthye manuscript poems of great antiquitie reserued long in the studie of a Northfolke gentleman. And now first published by I.S. 1 The statly tragedy of Guistard and Sismond. 2 The northren mothers blessing. 3 The way to thrifte (London, 1597); Williams, Index of Dedications, pp. 174–5. For comment, see Andrew Hadfield, ‘Spenser and John Stow’, N&Q 56 (2009), 538–40. On Wolfe, see the ODNB entry by Andrew Pettegree; Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, pp. 93–4; McCullough, Cranmer, pp. 66, 524–5, 609–10. On William Smith, see Chloris, or The Complaint of the Passionate Despised Shepheard (London, 1596); ODNB entry by Jean R. Brink; Spenser Allusions, pp. 52–3; McCabe, ‘Rhyme and Reason’, p. 47.
127. Nowell was not necessarily an ideal channel for advancement in this period, as he was out of favour with Lord Burghley: see C. M. Webster, ‘A Note on Alexander Nowell’, N&Q 168 (1934), 58–9.
128. C. Bowie Millican, ‘The Northern Dialect of The Shepheardes Calender’, ELH 6 (1939), 211–13. Millican points out that the teachers were characterized as speaking with a northern pronunciation, which might have had an impact on Spenser’s own language.
129. Philip Edgcumbe Hughes, ‘Preaching, Homilies, and Prophesyings in Sixteenth Century England’, The Churchman 89 (1975), 7–32, at 16–17.
130. Patrick Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (London: Cape, 1979), pp. 125–52, 221–2, passim; Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I’, in Collinson, Elizabethans (London: Hambledon, 2003), pp. 31–57, at p. 44; James P. Bednarz, ‘Grindal, Edmund’, in S. Enc., pp. 342–3.
131. Wilson, History of the Merchant Taylors’ School, pp. 25–30; ODNB entry by David Daniell.
132. A. C. Judson, A Biographical Sketch of John Young, Bishop of Rochester, with emphasis on his relations with Edmund Spenser (Bloomington: Indiana University Studies, 1934); Percy W. Long, ‘Spenser and the Bishop of Rochester’, PMLA 31 (1916), 713–35; Variorum, x. 7, 16; ODNB entry by R. W. McConchie.
133. Byrom, ‘Singleton’.
134. Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie vvhich entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English tung (London, 1582), sig. Aiv–Aiir.
135. Homer, Iliad, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), book 19, lines 90–158. Agamemnon explains his actions against Achilles in terms of the malign influence of Ate. On Ate, see Michael Grant and John Hazel, Who’s Who in Classical Mythology (1973; London: Dent, 1993), p. 54.
136. Variorum, x. 147–8. For Mulcaster’s probable influence on The Faerie Queene, see Hester Lees-Jeffries, England’s Helicon: Fountains in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 182–3.
137. See e.g. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993; London: Vintage, 1994), p. 268; Eamon Grennan, ‘Language and Politics: A Note on Some Metaphors in Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland’, Sp. St. 3 (1982), 99–110; Andrew Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 60–5.
138. Joan Heiges Blythe, ‘Ate’, Sp. Enc., p. 76.
139. The process may well have been reciprocal: see Smith, ‘Spenser’s Scholarly Script’, at p. 93. On the impact of humanist educational methods on poetry in the 16th century, especially Spenser, see Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 3–4.
140. Chronology, p. 2; Bruce, ‘Spenser: Boyhood’; Charles Bowie Millican, ‘Mulcaster and Spenser’, ELH 6 (1939), 214–16; Welply, ‘Some Spenser Problems’, p. 57. For other Elizabethans named Sylvanus, see B. H. Newdigate, ‘Some Spenser Problems: Sylvanus Spenser’, N&Q 180 (1941), 120.
141. The name Sylvanus was distinctive enough for it to be used in a dialogue presented to the earl of Essex in 1599, deliberately marking the work out as one that paid homage to the recently deceased poet: ‘The Dialogue of Perergynne and Silvvynnus, by H. C., SP 63/203, 119, transcribed by Hiram Morgan, http://www.ucc.ie/celt/contents/online/E590001-001/nav.html.
142. ODNB entry on Mulcaster by William Barker.
143. The Shepheardes Calender, Dec., lines 37–48; Spenser, Shorter Poems, pp. 150–1. On Spenser as Colin Clout, see John D. Bernard, Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
144. As Harvey signs his commendatory verse to The Faerie Queene as ‘Hobbinol’, as well as several letters, the identification cannot be in doubt: Virginia F. Stern, ‘Harvey, Gabriel’, in Sp. Enc., pp. 347–8; McLane, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, pp. 237–61, ‘Gabriel Harvey as Hobbinol’.
145. For paradigmatic examples of an older method, which led to the reaction against such studies after the Second World War, see Edwin Greenlaw, ‘Spenser and the Earl of Leicester’; Edwin Greenlaw, ‘Spenser and British Imperialism’, MP 60 (1911–12), 347–70. For analysis, see Radcliffe, Spenser: Reception History, ch. 4.
146. See Andrew Hadfield, ‘Spenser’s Rosalind’, MLR 104 (2009), 935–46.
147. G. C. Moore Smith, ‘Spenser and Mulcaster’, MLR 8 (1913), 368; McLane, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, p. 348. On the pronunciation, which strengthens the case, see Roland M. Smith, ‘Spenser’s Scholarly Script and “Right Writing”’, in D. C. Allen (ed.), Studies in Honor of T. W. Baldwin (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958), pp. 66–111, at p. 67. Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Michael Hattaway (1969; London: Black, 1995), I.i, lines 96–7. For a more sceptical analysis, which suggess that the identification is more complex than has generally been assumed, see John Wesley, ‘Spenser’s “Wrenock” and Anglo-Welsh Latimer’, N&Q 56 (2009), 527–30. I am grateful to Dr Wesley for sending me this note in advance of publication.
148. De Molen, Mulcaster, p. 23. Financial issues appear to have followed Mulcaster around: see the ODNB entry.
149. Jan Van Dorsten, Poets, Patrons, and Professors: Sir Philip Sidney, Daniel Rogers and the Leiden Humanists (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1962), pp. 79, 92, 167; ODNB entries on ‘Alexander Neville’, by Elizabeth Leedham-Green, ‘Andrew Melville’ by James Kirk. See also Abrahami Ortelii, Epistulae, ed. J. H. Hessels, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae Archivum, 1887), i. 178–9, 20–1, 249–52, passim. I owe this last reference to Nick Popper.
150. The main study of the individual Marian exiles remains Christina Garrett, The Marian Exiles, 1553–1559 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938). Coverdale, Alexander Nowell, his brother, Laurence (d. 1576), were all exiles.
151. Richard L. De Molen, ‘Richard Mulcaster: An Elizabethan Savant,’ Sh. Stud. 8 (1975), 29–82, at 60.
152. On Rogers’s antiquarian labours, which were of great significance for Spenser, see Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 29–37.
153. Nicholl, A Cup of News, pp. 130–1; Harvey, Fovre Letters, pp. 10–11; Stern, Harvey, pp. 94–5. It is also worth noting that Gabriel Harvey’s mentor, Sir Thomas Smith, and Mulcaster appear to have known each other, suggesting a further possible link between Spenser and Harvey: see pp. 109–10.
154. ODNB entries on ‘John Rogers’ by David Daniell, ‘Daniel Rogers’ by Mark Loudon, and ‘Laurence Nowell’ by Retha M. Warnicke; Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, pp. 173–5; De Molen, Mulcaster, p. 146; Stern, Harvey, pp. 31, 39. On Daniel Rogers see James E. Phillips, ‘Daniel Rogers: A Neo-Latin Link Between the Pléiade and Sidney’s “Areopagus”’, in Neo-Latin Poetry of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library, 1965), pp. 5–28, at p. 8; Roger Howell, Sir Philip Sidney: The Shepherd Knight (London: Hutchinson, 1968), pp. 158–62; Van Dorsten, Poets, Patrons, and Professors, pp. 39, 42; Jan Van Dorsten, The Radical Arts: First Decade of an Elizabethan Renaissance (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1970), p. 75; John S. Nolan, Sir John Norreys and the Elizabethan Military World (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), p. 16; F. J. Levy, ‘Daniel Rogers as Antiquary’, Bibliotèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 27 (1965), 444–62, at 446; H. R. Wilton Hall (ed.), Records of the Old Archdeaconry of St. Albans: A Calender of Papers, AD 1575 to AD 1637 (St Albans: St Alban’s and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society, 1908), pp. 45, 47. I owe this reference to Natalie Mears. On Buchanan, Rogers, and Spenser, see Paul E. McLane, ‘James VI in the “Shepheardes Calender”’, HLQ 16 (1953), 273–85; and p. 229.
155. De Molen, Mulcaster, p. 120; Van Dorsten, Poets, Patrons, and Professors, p. 28; Anne Lake Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 91–5.
156. W. L. Renwick, ‘Mulcaster and Du Bellay’, MLR 17 (1922), 282–7; Joachim Du Bellay, The Regrets, with The Antiquities of Rome, Three Latin Elegies, and The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), introd., p. 35. See also Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language (3rd edn.; London: Routledge, 1978), p. 203.
157. Alfred W. Satterthwaite, Spenser, Ronsard, and Du Bellay: A Renaissance Comparison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 30–1. Mulcaster was a pioneer, as was Spenser: see W. D. Elcock, ‘English Indifference to Du Bellay’s “Regrets”’, MLR 46 (1951), 175–84.
158. Leonard Foster, ‘The Translator of the “Theatre for Worldlings”’, ES 48 (1967), 27–34, at 33.
159. As Joshua Scodel points out, ‘Of the great sonneteers, only Spenser has close renditions of foreign sonnets’: ‘Non-Dramatic Verse: Lyric’, in Gordon Braden, Robert Cummings, and Stuart Gillespie (eds.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, ii. 1550–1660, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 201–47, at p. 239.
160. Jan van der Noot, A Theatre wherein be represented as wel the miseries & calamities that follow the voluptuous worldlings as also the greate ioyes and plesures which the faithfull do enioy. An argument both profitable and delectable, to all that sincerely loue the word of God. Deuised by S. Iohn van-der Noodt. Seene and allowed according to the order appointed (London, 1569), sig. D7r.
161. For comment, see Werner Waterschoot, ‘On Ordering the “Poetische Werken” of Jan van der Noot’, Quaerendo 1 (1971), 242–63, at 242–5; Van Dorsten, Radical Arts, passim; Bas Jongenelen and Ben Parsons, ‘The Sonnets of Het Bosken by Jan Van Der Noot’, Sp. St. 23 (2008), 235–55, at 235–6.
162. The Olympic Epics of Jan Van Der Noot: A facsimile edition of ‘Das Buch Extasis’, ‘Eeen Cort Begryp Der XIL Bocken Olympiados’ and ‘Abrege Des Douze Livres Olympiades’, ed. C. A. Zaalberg (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1956).
163. Jongenlen and Parsons, ‘Sonnets of Het Bosken’, p. 236; Laura Hunt Yungblut, Strangers Settled Here amongst Us: Politics, Perceptions and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 18.
164. Jan Van Der Noot, The Gouerance and Preseruation of them that Feare the Plage (London, 1569); Ben Parsons and Bas Jongnelen, ‘Jan Van Der Noot: A Mistaken Attribution in the Short-Title Catalogue?’, N&Q 250 (Dec. 2006), 427.
165. Judson refers to his ‘ardent Calvinism’ (Judson, Life, p. 20). A more nuanced discussion is provided in John N. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 233–4, passim.
166. Van Dorsten, Radical Arts, pp. 29–30; Waterschoot, ‘ordering the “Poeticsche Werken”’, p. 243; Karen L. Bowen and Dirk Imhof, Christopher Plantain and Engraved Book Illustrations in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 32, 286. Plantain’s relationship to the Family may have been simply based on business concerns: Paul Valkema Blouw, ‘Was Plantin a Member of the Family of Love? Notes on His Dealings with Hendrik Niclaes’, Quaerendo 23 (1993), 3–23. Ortelius’ religious beliefs undoubtedly had an impact on his published work: see Pauline Moffitt Watts, ‘The European Religious Worldview and Its Influence on Mapping’, in Woodward (ed.), History of Cartography, iii/1. 382–400, at pp. 392–3.
167. A history of the family is provided in Alastair Hamilton, The Family of Love (Cambridge: Clark, 1981). For their impact in England, see Christopher W. Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Jean Dietz Moss, ‘The Family of Love and English Critics’, SCJ 6 (1975), 35–52; Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
168. Van Dorsten, Radical Arts, pp. 30–2; Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, pp. 90, 170.
169. Michael Srigley, ‘The Influence of Continental Familism in England after 1570’, in Gunnar Sorelius and Michael Srigley (eds.), Cultural Exchange between European Nations during the Renaissance (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 1994), pp. 97–110; David Wootton, ‘Reginald Scot/Abraham Fleming/The Family of Love’, in Stuart Clark (ed.), Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 119–38.
170. Jean Dietz Moss, ‘Variations on a Theme: The Family of Love in Renaissance England’, RQ 31 (1978), 186–95, at 186. Tracts which explain how the Family functioned include Tobias, Mirabilia Opera Dei Certaine Wonderfull Works of God which hapned to H.N. even from his youth: and how the God of heaven hath united himself with him, and raised up his gracious word in him, and how he hath chosen and sent him to be a minister of his gracious word (London, 1650); Hendrik Niclaes, An Apology for the Service of Love, and the people that own it, commonly called, the family of love. Being a plain, but groundly discourse, about the right and true Christian religion (London, 1656).
171. Van Dorsten, Radical Arts, p. 75. On the earl of Northampton, see the ODNB entry by Pauline Croft. On Surrey’s influence on Spenser, see William A. Ringler, Jr, ‘Tudor Poetry’, Sp. Enc., pp. 702–4, at p. 703; W. A. Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 135–6.
172. Werner Waterschoot, ‘Jan Van Der Noot’s Het Bosken Re-Examined’, Quarendo 22 (1992), 28–45, at 39.
173. Waterschoot, ‘Ordering the “Poeticsche Werken”’, pp. 243, 245.
174. Waterschoot, ‘Het Bosken Re-Examined’, pp. 29–30.
175. Ibid. 41.
176. W. J. B. Pienaar, ‘Edmund Spenser and Jonker Jan Van Der Noot’, ES 8 (1926), 33–44, 67–76, at 67–8. see also Poems of Sir Arthur Gorges, introd., pp. xiii–xix.
177. Freidland, ‘Illustrations in The Theatre for Worldlings’, p. 111.
178. On Bynemann, see ODNB entry by Maureen Bell; H. R. Plomer, ‘Henry Bynemann, Printer, 1566–83’, The Library, NS 9 (1908), 225–44; Printers, pp. 59–60.
179. Eric St John Brooks, Sir Christopher Hatton: Queen Elizabeth’s Favourite (London: Cape, 1946), pp. 135–7, 140–2, 316–23.
180. On the complex nature of late Elizabethan patronage, see Simon Adams, Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabethan Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), especially chs. 1, 3; John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chs. 1–4.
181. Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London: Longman, 1994), p. 109; Stewart Mottram, ‘Spenser’s Dutch Uncles: The Family of Love and the four translations of A Theatre for Worldlings’, in José Maria Pérez Fernández and Edward Wilson-Lee (eds.), Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe (forthcoming). I am extremely grateful to Dr Mottram for allowing me to see this article in advance of publication.
182. Richard A. McCabe, ‘Edmund Spenser, Poet of Exile’, PBA 80 (1993), 73–103.
183. Pienaar, ‘Spenser and van der Noot’, p. 71.
184. On Day, see Elizabeth Evenden, Patents, Pictures and Patronage: John Day and the Tudor Book Trade (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); ODNB entry by Andrew Pettegree; Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, passim; J. F. Mozley, John Foxe and His Book (New York: Macmillan, 1940). Day was the key publisher of Dutch texts and published one of the most significant tracts on the Dutch revolt, A Defence and True Declaration of the Things Lately done in the Low Country (1571): see van Gelderen (ed.), The Dutch Revolt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 1–77. He also had a number of connections to Spenser, including having been patronized by Cecil and imprisoned with John Rogers.
185. See Satterthwaite, Spenser, Ronsard, and Du Bellay, app. 1. Satterthwaite is sceptical that Spenser translated van der Noot’s sonnets. See also Jan Van Dorsten, ‘A Theatre for Worldlings’, Sp. Enc., p. 685; Pienaar, ‘Spenser and van der Noot’, p. 38; Stein, Studies in Spenser’s Complaints, pt. 4.
186. Forster, ‘Translator of the Theatre’, pp. 28–30.
187. Ibid. 33.
188. Johnson, Critical Bibliography, pp. 1–2. On the fonts see Steven K. Galbraith, ‘“English” Black-Letter Type and Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender’, Sp. St. 23 (2008), 13–40; Lotte Hellinga, ‘Printing’, in Hellinga and Trapp (eds.), Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iii. 65–108, at pp. 75–6; Nicholas Barker, ‘Old English Letter Foundries’, in Barnard, McKenzie, and Bell (eds.), Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. 602–19, at pp. 604–5.
189. Louis S. Friedland, ‘The Illustrations in The Theatre for Worldlings’, HLQ 19 (1956), 107–20. Friedland corrects the commonly repeated error that the illustrations were the work of Marcus Gheeraerts the elder (c.1520/1–c.1586).
190. On De Heere, see Van Dorsten, ‘Theatre’; ODNB entry by Susan Bracken; van Dorsten, Radical Arts, pp. 53–61, passim; Michael Bath, ‘Verse Form and Pictorial Space in van der Noot’s Theatre for Worldlings’, in Höltgen et al. (eds.), Word and Visual Imagination, pp. 73–105, at p. 78; Margaret Aston, The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 167–8; Evenden, John Day, pp. 97–100.
191. Bath, ‘Verse Form and Pictorial Space’. Marot’s poetry had an impact on the work of Barnaby Googe (1540–94), whose work had a significant impact on Spenser: see Judith M. Kennedy, ‘Googe, Barnabe’, Sp. Enc., pp. 336–7; Barnabe Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets, ed. Judith M. Kennedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), introd., pp. 19–20.
192. John B. Bender, Spenser and Literary Pictorialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 153; S. K. Heninger, Jr, ‘The Typographical Layout of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender’, in Höltgen et al. (eds.), Word and Visual Imagination, pp. 33–71; Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry, pp. 63–70.
193. Bender, Spenser and Literary Pictorialism, pp. 4–22; W. B. C. Watkins, Shakespeare and Spenser (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), ch. 7; Rosamund Tuve, ‘Spenser and Some Pictorial Conventions: with Particular Reference to Illuminated Manuscripts (1940)’, in Essays by Rosamund Tuve: Spenser, Herbert, Milton, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 112–38.
194. A case strongly argued in Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), ch. 1.
195. The genre became popular as the 16th century drew to a close. It is worth noting that Spenser’s fellow pupil at Merchant Taylors’, Thomas Lodge, was the co-author of a bleak vision of London’s sins, with Robert Greene, A Looking Glass for London and England (1594), ed. W. W. Greg (London: Malone Society, 1932). For comment, see Darryl Grantley, London in Early Modern English Drama: Representing the Built Environment (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 52–6.
196. Tom McFaul, ‘A Theatre For Worldlings (1569),’ Sp. Handbook, pp. 149–59, at pp. 153–4.
197. Du Bellay, Un Songe ou Vision in The Regrets, trans. Helgerson, p. 281.
198. On the French and English adaptations of Petrarch, see Stephen Minta, Petrarch and Petrarchanism: The English and French Traditions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), pp. 143–79. On the more general issue of translations of the sonnet into English, see John Fuller, The Sonnet (London: Methuen, 1972), chs. 1–2.
199. Bath, ‘Verse Form and Pictorial Space’, p. 79.
200. Early modern interest in Egypt is not always emphasized as strongly as it should be: for an exception to the general rule, see Philip Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 5.
201. For a recent discussion of Spenser’s interest in ruins, see Thomas Russell James Muir, ‘Ruins and Oblivion in the Sixteenth Century’, unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Sussex, 2005, ch. 5.
202. Richard A. McCabe, The Pillars of Eternity: Time and Providence in The Faerie Queene (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989), ch. 6.
203. This moral could have been taken from a number of sources, perhaps the most obvious of which is Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), bk. 6.
204. On the development of Dutch resistance theory against Spanish invasion, see Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt, 1555–1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Ch. 4 describes the development of ideas of resistance during the period of van der Noot’s exile. See also Wyger R. E. Velema, ‘“That a Republic is Better than a Monarchy”: Anti-monarchism in Early Modern Dutch Political Thought’, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), i. 9–25.
205. Van der Noot, Theatre, sigs. F5r–v, G4r–v, passim.
206. On Spenser and republicanism, see Andrew Hadfield, ‘Was Spenser a Republican?’, English 47 (1998), 169–82; David Scott Wilson-Okamura, ‘Republicanism, Nostalgia and the Crowd’, Sp. St. 17 (2003), 253–73; Andrew Hadfield, ‘Was Spenser a Republican After All? A Response to David Scott Okamura-Wilson’, Sp. St. 17 (2003), 275–90; Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘Spenser and the Elizabethan Political Imaginary’, ELH 69 (2002), 907–46.
207. Since A. Kent Hiett’s pioneering Short Time’s Endless Monument, the literature on Spenser’s interest in numerology has become extensive: see the overview in Alexander Dunlop, ‘Number symbolism, modern studies of’, Sp. Enc., pp. 512–13.
208. Prescott, French Poets, p. 47. On Augustine’s influence on Spenser’s conception of numerology, see also Harold L. Weatherby, Mirrors of Celestial Grace: Patristic Theology in Spenser’s Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 88–90.
209. John Wesley, ‘Acting and Actio in the Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes’, RS 23 (2009), 678–93; Lukas Erne, Beyond The Spanish Tragedy: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).
210. Pactol, ‘The Libyan river whose sand was turned to gold by the touch of King Midas’ (Du Bellay, Un Songe ou Vision in The Regrets, trans. Helgerson, p. 291).
211. Michael Holohan, ‘Iamque opus exegi: Ovid’s Changes and Spenser’s Brief Epic of Mutability’, ELR 6 (1976), 244–70.
212. The most comprehensive survey of English iconoclasm is Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts: Laws Against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); on Spenser, see Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), ch. 3. On the eye and delusive imagination, see Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); on Spenser, see Abigail Shinn, ‘Spenser and Popular Culture’, unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Sussex, 2009, ch. 3.
213. Nevertheless, they are important as the culmination of the sequence: see Carl J. Rasmussen, ‘“Quietnesse of Minde”: A Theatre for Worldlings as a Protestant Poetics’, Sp. St. 1 (1980), 3–27, at 14.
214. Florence Sandler, ‘The Faerie Queene: An Elizabethan Apocalypse’, in C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (eds.), The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 148–74; King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, passim; Richard Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), passim; Andrew Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
215. Prescott, French Poets, p. 46.
216. See e.g. Anthea Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
217. Spenser, Shorter Poems, p. 452. On Lady Margaret and Lady Anne, see pp. 352–6.
218. See Andrew Hadfield, ‘Spenser’s Reference to Censorship’, N&Q 56/4 (Dec. 2009), 532–3.
219. Peterson, ‘Laurel Crown and Ape’s Tail’. See also Cyndia Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 223; D. M. Loades, ‘The Theory and Practice of Censorship in Sixteenth-Century England’, TRHS, 5th ser. 24 (1974), 141–57.
220. Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career, introd.
221. See pp. 182, 244. The best conjectural study of what Spenser may have revised is Josephine Waters Bennett, The Evolution of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942). See also W. J. B. Owen, ‘The Structure of The Faerie Queene’, PMLA 68 (1953), 1079–1100.
222. See Elizabeth Bieman, ‘Fowre Hymnes’, Sp. Enc., pp. 315–17. For discussion, see Ayesha Ramachandran, ‘Edmund Spenser, Lucrecian Neoplatonist: Cosmology in the Fowre Hymnes’, in Kenneth Borris, Jon Quitsland, and Carol Kaske (eds.), Spenser and Platonism (special issue), Sp. S 24 (2009), 373–411.
223. Not everyone has taken this declaration at face value. Robert Ellrodt, in what is still the longest single analysis of the intellectual provenance of the poems, confesses: ‘I incline to disbelieve Spenser when he says that the first two Hymnes were written in his youth’ (NeoPlatonism in the Poetry of Spenser (Geneva: Droz, 1960), p. 59).
224. Corinne Saunders (ed.), Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 96–7, 129.
225. Clare R. Kinney, ‘Marginal Presence: Lyric Resonance, Epic Absence: Troilus and Criseyde and/in The Shepheardes Calender’, Sp. St. 18 (2004), 25–39; John A. Burrow, ‘Chaucer, Geoffrey’, Sp. Enc., pp. 144–8.
226. Although it should be noted that C. S. Lewis asserted that ‘nothing could show more clearly how imperceptively [Spenser] read the Chaucer whom he so revered’ (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 369); Burrow, ‘Chaucer’, p. 145.
227. On the influence of Castiglione see Catherine Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), passim; Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 2; on the influence of Ficino, see Brian P. Copenhaver, ‘Astrology and Magic’, in Schmitt and Skinner (eds.), Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 264–300, at pp. 274–85.
228. See Margaret Healy, Shakespeare, Alchemy and the Creative Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), chs. 1, 5. On the challenge to Platonic ideas, see Michael J. B. Allen, ‘Renaissance Neoplatonism’, in Norton (ed.), Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, iii. The Renaissance, pp. 435–41.
229. Healy, Shakespeare, Alchemy, p. 55; Jessica Woolf, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 4.
230. On Neoplatonism see Paul O. Kristellar, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York: Harper, 1961), ch. 3; Brian Vickers, ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’, in Charles B. Schmitt et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 715–45, at pp. 738–40. See pp. 351–2.
231. See pp. 352–6.
232. ‘An Hymn in Honour of Love’, lines 113–19, Spenser, Shorter Poems, p. 456.
233. ‘An Hymne in Honour of Beautie’, lines 141–2, Spenser, Shorter Poems, p. 467.
234. It is also worth noting that A Theatre also had significant Neoplatonic elements: see Rasmussen, ‘“Quietnesse of Minde”’, p. 8.
235. Hamilton, Family of Love, p. 73.
236. Ibid. 6–7.
237. Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1972), pp. 106, 259–60; Frances A. Yates, Astrea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1975), pp. 191–4;
238. David Wootton, ‘John Donne’s Religion of Love’, in John Brooke and Ian Maclean (eds.), Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 31–58.
239. Wootton, ‘Reginald Scott’, p. 131; Hamilton, Family of Love, pp. 114–15.
240. Wootton, ‘Reginald Scott’, pp. 124, 132.
241. Pico Della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man in Paul Oskar Kristellar (ed.), The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 213–54; Jon A. Quitslund, Spenser’s Supreme Fiction: Platonic Natural Philosophy and The Faerie Queene (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 84–7, passim.