1. Attempts have been made to suggest that Spenser’s authorship of A View is in doubt, as there is no manuscript that bears his name, only the initials ‘E. S.’: see Jean R. Brink, ‘Constructing the View of the Present State of Ireland’, Sp. St. 11 (1994), 203–28, at 216–23; Cannio, ‘Reconstructing Lord Grey’s Reputation’. However, the volume of evidence that Spenser wrote the dialogue is overwhelming. To cite just part of the case: Spenser’s grandson thought that he wrote it, as he argued to Cromwell (see pp. 410–11); a contemporary, William Scott, also attributed A View to Spenser in his manuscript treatise, The Modell of Poesye (c.1599) (BL Add. MS 81083, fo. 10r, where he cites Spenser as an authority on bards in Ireland (I am extremely grateful to Gavin Alexander for pointing this out to me) ); it was entered into the Stationers’ Register by Matthew Lownes, who also had access to other Spenser manuscripts, as he published ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’; the first print edition by Sir James Ware was almost certainly based on a manuscript he acquired from Archbishop James Ussher, whose father worked with Spenser in Dublin; the ‘Dialogue of Sylvanus and Peregrine’, which might have been written by Spenser’s neighbour in Munster, Hugh Cuffe, would then have to be seen as a case of mistaken identity with its author falsely imagining that Spenser wrote A View; and, perhaps most important of all, A View looks as if it were written by Spenser as it contains a number of characteristic puns (e.g., savage/salvage) also found elsewhere in his work, and its argument resembles that of parts of The Faerie Queene, as well as the documents he brought over from Ireland in Dec. 1598. See Andrew Hadfield, ‘Certainties and Uncertainties: By Way of Response to Jean Brink’, Sp. St. 12 (1995), 197–202.
2. Alan Bliss, ‘The English Language in Early Modern Ireland’, in Moody et al. (eds.), New History of Ireland, ii. 546–60, at p. 557.
3. Anne Laurence, ‘The Cradle to the Grave: English Observations of Irish Social Customs in the Seventeenth Century’, Seventeenth Century 3 (1988), 63–84, at 75–8.
4. Valerie Fildes, Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 73–4; Patricia Crawford, ‘ “The Sucking Child”: Adult Attitudes to Child Care in the First Year of Life in Seventeenth-Century England’, Continuity and Change 1 (1986), 23–51, at 31–2.
5. See Hadfield and McVeagh (eds.), Strangers to that Land, ch. 3.
6. Nicholas Canny argues that the earl of Cork sent his children out to be suckled by Irish wet nurses, which is why they spoke such good Irish: Upstart Earl, pp. 126–7. It is possible that English families were more prepared to do this in the early 17th century.
7. Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, pp. 154–6.
8. Fildes, Wet Nursing, pp. 79–81. This was a European phenomenon: see e.g. John A. Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 239–41.
9. Linda Campbell, ‘Wet-Nurses in Early Modern England: Some Evidence from the Thownshed Archive’, Medical History 33 (1989), 360–70, at 364.
10. Ibid. 365, 369. See also Fiona Newell, ‘Wet Nursing and Child Care in Aldenham, Hertfordshire, 1595–1726: Some Evidence on the Circumstances and Effects of Seventeenth-Century Child Rearing Practices’, in Fildes (ed.), Women as Mothers, pp. 122–38.
11. Ralph Josselin’s wife, Jane, breastfed her children, a factor which influenced her fertility cycle: Macfarlane, Family Life of Ralph Josselin, app. A, pp. 199–204.
12. Alison Sim, The Tudor Housewife (Stroud: Sutton, 1996), p. 26; Robert Cleaver, A Godly Form of Household Gouernment (London, 1598), pp. 231–5. I owe this last reference to Amy Kenny. See also Fildes, Wet Nursing, p. 68; Crawford, ‘ “The Sucking Child” ’, p. 31.
13. Fildes, Wet Nursing, pp. 83–4; Campbell, ‘Wet-Nurses in Early Modern England’, p. 367.
14. Houlbrooke, English Family, p. 134.
15. See pp. 219–20.
16. Hoby, The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady; Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford. See also Greer, Shakespeare’s Wife, chs. 7–10.
17. Descriptions of marriage can be found in Houlbrooke, English Family, ch. 5; Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, pp. 126–48. See also Tusser, Fiue Hundred Points of Good Husbandrie, pp. 65–77, ‘The points of Huswiferie, vnited to the comfort of Husbandrie’, an account that includes general and specific advice, including recipes for cakes.
18. Cleaver, Household Gouernment, pp. 243–6.
19. Houlbrooke, English Family, p. 96.
20. On Spenser and marriage, see Laurence Lerner, ‘Marriage’, Sp. Enc., pp. 454–5; Hadfield, ‘Secrets and Lies’, pp. 72–3. Spenser does discuss the relationship between children, continuity, and fame: see Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight, p. 194; Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 245–6.
21. Carol V. Kaske, ‘Amavia, Mortdant, Ruddymane’, Sp. Enc., pp. 25–7; Carol V. Kaske, ‘“Religious Reuerence Doth Buriall Teene”: Christian and Pagan in The Faerie Queene, II, 1–3’, RES 30 (1979), 129–43; Brooks-Davies, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, pp. 118–33.
22. Houlbrooke, English Family, p. 111.
23. Carol V. Kaske, ‘Bible’, Sp. Enc., pp. 87–90.
24. Chronology, p. 67; Stationers, iii. 34.
25. Bennett, Evolution of ‘The Faerie Queene’, ch. 14.
26. Spenser, Faerie Queene, p. 716; Maurice Hunt, ‘Hellish Work in The Faerie Queene, SEL 41 (2001), 91–108, at 96.
27. For discussion, see Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene: Book Six and Mutabilitie Cantos, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Abraham Stoll (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), introd., pp. vii–x.
28. Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience, ch. 5.
29. Spenser, Faerie Queene, p. 714.
30. See Richard Neuse, ‘Book VI as Conclusion to The Faerie Queene’, ELH 35 (1968), 329–53.
31. Bednarz, ‘Ralegh in Spenser’s Historical Allegory’; Jerry Leath Mills, ‘Raleigh, Walter’, Sp. Enc., pp. 584–5; O’Connell, Mirror and Veil, pp. 110–22.
32. Spenser, Faerie Queene, p. 27.
33. Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire, p. 53.
34. Johnson, Critical Bibliography, p. 19; Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene Disposed into twelue bookes, fashioning XII. morall vertues (London, 1596), pp. 589–90.
35. Johnson, Critical Bibliography, pp. 13–18; Scott-Warren, ‘Unannotating Spenser’; Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene Disposed into twelue books, fashioning XII. morall vertues (London, 1590).
36. Frank B. Evans, ‘The Printing of Spenser’s Faerie Queene in 1596’, SB 18 (1965), 50–69, esp. 65–7.
37. For a summary of the 2nd edition of the poem, see Andrew Hadfield, ‘The Faerie Queene, Books IV–VII’, in Hadfield (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Spenser, pp. 124–42.
38. Danner, Furious Muse, ch. 1. See also Anne K. Tuell, ‘The Original End of Faerie Queene, Book III’, MLN 36 (1921), 309–11.
39. An analytical overview can be found in James Norhnberg, ‘The Faerie Queene, Book IV’, Sp. Enc., pp. 273–80, and a reading of the book in Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). See also David R. Pichaske, ‘The Faerie Queene IV. ii and iii: Spenser and the Genesis of Friendship’, SEL 17 (1977), 81–93.
40. As Frank Covington pointed out, Spenser may have been indebted to a Latin poem by Alexander Neckham for his representation of the Irish rivers. Neckham’s work was known to Camden: see ‘Spenser and Alexander Neckham’, SP 22 (1925), 222–5.
41. On Spenser’s rivers, see Joyce, ‘Spenser’s Irish Rivers’; Judson, Spenser in Southern Ireland; W. H. Grattan Flood, ‘Identification of the Spenserian “Aubrian” River’, JCHAS 22 (1916), 143–4; Smith, ‘Spenser’s “Stony Aubrian” ’.
42. Norhnberg, ‘Faerie Queene, Book IV’, p. 273.
43. Ibid.
44. Patrick Cheney, ‘Spenser’s Completion of The Squire’s Tale: Love, Magic, and Heroic Action in the Legend of Cambell and Triamond’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 15 (1985), 135–55.
45. Harry Berger, Jr, ‘Two Spenserian Retrospects: The Antique Temple of Venus and the Primitive Marriage of Rovers’, in Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 195–214.
46. Silberman, Transforming Desire, pp. 117–24; Susumu Kawanishi, ‘Lust’, Sp. Enc., pp. 442–3.
47. Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience, pp. 138–40.
48. Lewis, Allegory of Love, p. 347.
49. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment, pp. 90–3.
50. McCabe, ‘The Fate of Irena’.
51. For discussion, see Humphrey Tonkin, Spenser’s Courteous Pastoral: Book VI of The Faerie Queene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), ch. 3. For a different reading, which compares Calidore’s stay to that of the Red-Cross Knight in the House of Holiness, see Arnold Williams, Flower on a Lowly Stalk: The Sixth Book of The Faerie Queene (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967), p. 57.
52. Jane Aptekar, Icons of Justice: Iconography and Thematic Imagery in Book V of The Faerie Queene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 80, 114, 155. For the general context, see William Palmer, The Problem of Ireland in Tudor Foreign Policy, 1485–1603 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), chs. 7–8.
53. Although Book VI also provides some important qualifications of the brutal, potentially tyrannical, masculine military world in Book V, reminding readers of the importance of virtues associated with women, such as mercy and pity: see John D. Staines, ‘Pity and the Authority of Feminine Passions in Books V and VI of The Faerie Queene’, Sp. St. 25 (2010), 129–61.
54. See further analysis of these stanzas, p. 171.
55. Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars, pp. 72, 182; Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion, pp. 173–4.
56. Moody et al. (eds.), New History of Ireland, viii. 217–18.
57. Ibid. 218.
58. On the Babington Plot, see John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 334–5; Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, The Trial of Mary Queen of Scots: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 1999), pp. 93–107.
59. CSPS, 1595–7, p. 288.
60. Ibid. 291.
61. On the process of licensing books in England, see Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England, pt. 1. James falsely imagines that texts were all approved by the crown authorities.
62. CSPS, 1589–1603, p. 747.
63. Andrew Hadfield, ‘ “Bruited Abroad”: John White’s and Thomas Harriot’s Colonial Representations of Ancient Britain’, in David Baker and Willy Maley (eds.), British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 159–77, at p. 174.
64. For analysis, see McCabe, ‘Masks of Duessa’; Andrew Hadfield, ‘Spenser and the Stuart Succession’, Literature and History 13/1 (Spring 2004), 9–24.
65. For analysis, see, pp. 194–5.
66. Jeffries, Irish Church, p. 276. Such opposition may have been aimed at James’s Protestantism rather than his Catholic origins.
67. Maley, Salvaging Spenser, ch. 7; Nicholas Canny, ‘Poetry as Politics: A View of the Present State of The Faerie Queene’, in Morgan (ed.), Political Ideology in Ireland, pp. 110–26, at pp. 122–3.
68. Spenser, Shorter Poems, p. 452; Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, pp. 184–5.
69. Rudolf Gottfried, ‘The Date of Spenser’s View’, MLN 52 (1937), 176–80; Ray Heffner, ‘Spenser’s View of Ireland: Some Observations’, MLQ 3 (1942), 507–15; Variorum, x. 503–5.
70. CSPI, 1592–5, p. 421; CSPI, 1596–7, pp. 230, 233, 480.
71. For analysis, see W. C. Martin, ‘The Date and Purpose of Spenser’s View’, PMLA 47 (1932), 137–43; Rudolf B. Gottfreid, ‘Spenser’s View and Essex’, PMLA 52 (1937), 645–51.
72. Robert Lacey, Robert, Earl of Essex: An Elizabethan Icarus (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), pp. 150–64.
73. Variorum, x. 228.
74. Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘Patronage at Court, Faction and the Earl of Essex’, in Guy (ed.), Reign of Elizabeth I, pp. 65–86, at p. 83.
75. Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, ch. 7.
76. Lacey, Ralegh, pp. 249–60.
77. Nicholls and Williams, Ralegh, pp. 121–3.
78. On Essex’s disastrous campaign, see Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland, pp. 297–9; Ellis, Tudor Ireland, pp. 306–7.
79. Variorum, x. 43–4.
80. Andrew Hadfield, ‘The Name “Eudoxus” in Spenser’s View’, N&Q 242 (Dec. 1997), 477–8; Fogarty, ‘Literature in English’, p. 154.
81. Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson B.478. This was the manuscript used in W. L. Renwick’s edition of A View (1934; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).
82. The Records of the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn: The Black Books, 6 vols. (London: Lincoln’s Inn, 1897–2001), ii. 39; Galbraith, ‘Spenser and the History of the Book’, p. 188.
83. Elizabeth Fowler, ‘A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland (1596, 1633)’, Sp. Handbook, pp. 314–32, at p. 325.
84. Louis A. Knalfa, ‘Mr. Secretary Donne: The Years with Sir Thomas Egerton’, in Colclough (ed.), John Donne’s Professional Lives, pp. 37–72, at pp. 44, 51–2.
85. Nicholl, Cup of News, p. 207.
86. BL Add. MS 22022; Variorum, x. 514.
87. TNA PRO SP 63, 202, pt. 4, item 58; CSPI, 1598–9, p. 431.
88. Variorum, x. 506. On Egerton, see ODNB entry by J. H. Baker.
89. TCD MS 589, fos. 68, 69. There are a number of discrepancies between the manuscript and the printed text which indicate that this text may not have been the one Ware used to print A View in 1633, pointing us to another copy, which may or may not be extant: Variorum, x. 516–17; Johnson, Critical Bibliography, pp. 49–53.
90. Lambeth Palace, MS 510.
91. Bruce Avery, ‘Mapping the Irish Other: Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland’, ELH 57 (1990), 263–79; John Breen, ‘The Empirical Eye: Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland’, Irish Review 16 (Autumn/Winter 1994), 44–52; Henry S. Turner, ‘Literature and Mapping in Early Modern England, 1520–1688’, in Woodward (ed.), History of Cartography, iii/1. 412–26, at p. 415; Pauline Moffitt Watts, ‘The European Religious Worldview and Its Influence on Mapping’, in Woodward (ed.), History of Cartography, iii/1. 382–400.
92. Variorum, x. 512.
93. NLI MS 661 (Gurney MS); Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, MS 188.221; Beinecke Library, Yale, Osborn MS fa.12; TNA PRO SP 63, 202, 4, 58. The Beinecke copy is in six hands. It belonged to the herald Sir Henry St George (1581–1644), who had a link to William Camden (see ODNB entry by Thomas Woodcock) (personal communication from Kathryn James).
94. Folger MS V.b.214. A View is copied out from sig. 136r–193r. For comment, see James McManaway, ‘Elizabeth, Essex, and James’, in Herbert Davis and Helen Gardner (eds.), Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies: Presented to Frank Percy Wilson in Honour of His Seventieth Birthday (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 219–30; Pierre Lefranc, ‘Ralegh in 1596 and 1603: Three Unprinted Letters in the Huntington Library’, HLQ 29 (1966), 337–45.
95. For comment, see Heaton, Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments, pp. 86–9.
96. McManaway, ‘Elizabeth, Essex, and James’, p. 221. The Folger text appears to have been copied from the Beinecke text, which, in turn, derives from the Gonville and Caius manuscript.
97. ‘A View of the Present State of Ireland’, Castle Howard archives. A study of the manuscript, and how it passed into the hands of the northern branch of the Howard family, is currently being prepared by the Castle curator, Dr Christopher Ridgway. I am extremely grateful to Dr Ridgway for sharing his findings with me.
98. Vine, In Defiance of Time, pp. 72–3.
99. Bodleian Library, MS Gough Ireland 2, fos. 16r, 17r, 30r.
100. Heffner, ‘Spenser’s View’, pp. 509–11; Joseph Loewenstein, ‘Spenser’s Textual History’, Sp. Handbook, pp. 637–63, at p. 646.
101. BL MS Sloane 1695.
102. BL MS Harley 1932.
103. BL MS Harley 7388.
104. Other copies include the two in Cambridge University Library, Dd.10.60 and Dd.14.28.1, the first in a number of hands following on from each other, suggesting that this was another copy produced in a scriptorium, produced in relay; the second bound together with a number of 17th-century texts, including a treatise by Sir Robert Cotton, a journal of the House of Commons for July 1643, and several parliamentary speeches, suggesting that a reader in the 1640s wanted to read A View alongside events in England, undoubtedly connected to the trial of the earl of Strafford.
105. See e.g. Anon., ‘The Supplication of the blood of the English, most lamentably murdred in Ireland, Cryeng out of the yearth for revenge, c.1598’ [BL Add. MS 34313, fos. 85–121], ed. Willy Maley, Analecta Hibernica, 36 (1994), 3–91, a work that may have been composed in one sitting.
106. Variorum, x. 230–1. On the nature of a dialogue’s conclusion, see Virginia Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 99–113; Jon R. Snyder, Writing the Scene of Speaking: Theories of Dialogue in the Late Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 1–38.
107. See e.g. Smith, ‘Irish Background of Spenser’s View’; Clare Carroll, ‘Spenser and the Irish Language: The Sons of Milesio in A View of the Present State of Ireland, The Faerie Queene, Book V, and the Leabhar Gabhála’, IUR: Spenser in Ireland, 1596–1996, ed. Anne Fogarty (Autumn/Winter 1996), 281–90.
108. Brink, ‘Constructing the View of the Present State of Ireland’, p. 223.
109. Ware (ed.), Historie of Ireland; Hadfield, ‘Historical Writing, 1550–1660’, pp. 255–7. See also Alan Ford, ‘The Irish Historical Renaissance and the Shaping of Protestant History’, in Ford and McCafferty (eds.), Origins of Sectarianism, pp. 127–57.
110. Variorum, x. 155–6.
111. Canny, Making Ireland British, ch. 4. See also Herbert F. Hore, ‘Woods and Fastnesses, and Their Denizens, in Ancient Leinster’, Journal of the Kilkenny and South-East of Ireland Archaeological Society, NS 1 (1856), 229–40, at 232; A. C. Forbes, ‘Some Legendary and Historical References to Irish Woods, and Their Significance’, PRIA, sect. B, 41 (1932–3), 15–36, at 26–7.
112. Anon., ‘ “A Discourse of Ireland” (circa 1599): A Sidelight on English Colonial Policy’, PRIA 47 (1941–2), 151–66, at 166; see also Smyth, Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory, p. 126.
113. Variorum, x. 158.
114. For another version of Spenser’s logic in A View, see Willy Maley, ‘ “This ripping of auncestours”: The Ethnographic Present in Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland’, in Philippa Berry and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton (eds.), Textures of Renaissance Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 117–34.
115. Brady, ‘Spenser’s Irish Crisis’, p. 41; Avery, ‘Mapping the Irish Other’, pp. 263, 277; Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience, ch. 2.
116. Variorum, x. 138; McEachern, ‘Spenser and Religion’, Sp. Handbook, pp. 30–47, at p. 40.
117. Hadfield and McVeagh (eds.), ‘Strangers to that Land’, pp. 44–7.
118. Canny, Making Ireland British, ch. 1.
119. Brian Jackson, ‘The Construction of Argument: Henry Fitzsimon, John Rider and Religious Controversy in Dublin, 1599–1614’, in Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 97–115.
120. Fraunce, Arcadian Rhetorike. Trinity College Dublin, founded in 1592, was notable for the Ramist character of its curriculum: Alan Ford, ‘ “That Bugbear Armenianism”: Archbishop Laud and Trinity College, Dublin’, in Brady and Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland, pp. 135–60, at p. 154.
121. For analysis, see David J. Baker, ‘ “Some Quirk, Some Subtle Evasion”: Legal Subversion in Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland’, Sp. St. 6 (1986), 147–63; Ciaran Brady, ‘The Road to the View: On the Decline of Reform Thought in Tudor Ireland’, in Coughlan (ed.), Spenser and Ireland, pp. 25–45; Fowler, ‘Failure of Moral Philosophy’.
122. See also Fowler, Literary Character, p. 190.
123. Variorum, x. 149. For analysis of Spenser’s military proposals, see Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Robe and Sword in the Conquest of Ireland’, in Clare Cross, David Loades, and J. J. Scarisbrick (eds.), Law and Government under the Tudors: Essays Presented to Sir Geoffrey Elton on His Retirement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 139–62; Brady, ‘Spenser’s Irish Crisis’.
124. Phil Withington, ‘ “For This Is True Or Els I Do Lye”: Thomas Smith, William Bullein, and Mid-Tudor Dialogue’, in Michael Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 455–71; Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness.
125. Spenser, Faerie Queene, pp. 716–17.
126. Much of the following paragraphs rely on work I did with Mr Simon Healy of the History of Parliament Trust. I am extremely grateful to Mr Healy for his cooperation with me and for his expertise about Chancery records in particular.
127. Will of Stephen Boyle, gentleman of Bradden, Northamptonshire, 8 Oct. 1582 (TNA PROB 11/64); Welply, ‘Spenser: Some New Discoveries’, pp. 445–6.
128. On the Lucies, see the ODNB entry on Thomas Lucy (c.1532–1600), by Robert Bearman; on Knightley, see Alumni Oxonienses, ii. 864; Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire, pp. 210, 291, 403.
129. TNA PRO C2 Eliz. S1/40; recorded in Calendars of the Proceedings in Chancery in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, iii (1832), p. 4.
130. TNA PROB 11/64.
131. Alumni Oxonienses, ii. 462.
132. TNA PRO, IPM for Thomas Emelye, 15 Sept. 1608.
133. Joseph Foster, The Register of Admissions to Gray’s Inn, 1521–1889, together with the register of marriages in Gray’s Inn Chapel, 1695–1754 (London: privately printed, 1889), p. 45.
134. Reginald J. Fletcher (ed.), The Pension Book of Gray’s Inn, 2 vols. (London: Chiswick Press, 1901–10), i. 1569–1669, pp. 63, 99.
135. Acts of the Privy Council, 1591–2, p. 299.
136. Acts of the Privy Council, 1590–1, p. 224.
137. Horwitz, Chancery Equity Records, pp. 31–6.
138. BL Add. MS 19837, fo. 70; Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, pp. 149–50.
139. Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, pp. 149–50.
140. CSPI, 1588–92, pp. 554, 568, 578.
141. Pilip Ó Mórdha, ‘Early History of Modern Clones’, Clogher Record 16 (1997), 95–100, at 95; Ranger, ‘Richard Boyle’, p. 277.
142. Variorum, x. 163.
143. For further discussion, see Gillespie and Hadfield, ‘Edmund Spenser in Chancery Disputes’.
144. Huntington Library, Ellesmere MS 7014. Panton, appears to have owned both this copy and Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson B.478, further demonstrating Egerton’s links to that work: Variorum, x. 511–12.
145. For details of the case, see Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, pp. 184–6.
146. Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 81–91.
147. Brink, ‘Documenting Edmund Spenser’; Henley, Spenser in Ireland, pp. 194–5.
148. The Ferdinando Freckleton who was buried in Bermondsey, Surrey, on 2 May 1596, must have been a minor, as the record in the church register indicates: ‘ffernando the sonne of James Freckleton’. He was undoubtedly a relative of Spenser’s father-in-law: Adams, ‘Ferdinando Freckleton’; Anon., The Registers of Saint Mary Magdalene, Bermondsey, 1548–1609 (London, 1894), p. 157. See also Douglas Hamer, ‘Captain Sir Ferdinando Freckleton’, p. 231.
149. TNA PROB 11/109; Hamer, ‘Captain Sir Ferdinando Freckleton’, p. 209; Erne, Beyond The Spanish Tragedy, pp. 127–8. On Puckering see the ODNB entry by N. G. Jones. The will of John Freckleton confirms the relationship, as Puckering’s son, also Sir Thomas, proved the document, and, once his familial and charity obligations were discharged, John left the remainder of his goods to Sir Thomas: TNA PROB 11/143 fos. 130v–131. The will further confirms that the family had means.
150. Hamer, ‘Captain Sir Ferdinando Freckleton’, p. 209.
151. Richard Tarlton, Tarleton’s Tragical Treatises, contaynyng sundrie discourses and pretty conceytes, both in prose and verse (London, 1578), sig. A4v. The volume, which survives in a single copy in the Folger Shakespeare Library, is incomplete, only the prefatory sections surviving. Freckleton’s reference to his ability to keep a secret in the last line suggests that he may have been eager to secure a position as a secretary: Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career, ch. 1.
152. On Tarlton, see the ODNB entry by Peter Thomson. On Tarlton and the Nashe–Harvey quarrel, see Stern, Harvey, pp. 70, 93–4; Nashe, Works, i. 188, 197, 215, passim.
153. Acts of the Privy Council (1596–7), pp. 242, 252.
154. Hamer, ‘Captain Sir Ferdinando Freckleton’, pp. 209–10.
155. See Carew, 1601–3, pp. 93, 397. I owe this reference to John McGurk.
156. Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire, p. 479; Victoria County History: Warwickshire, iii. 82.
157. Hamer, ‘Captain Sir Ferdinando Freckleton’, p. 210.
158. Jospeh Hunter, cited in Strathmann, ‘Freckleton’, p. 543.
159. Heffner, ‘Spenser’s Family’, p. 82; Battiscombe, The Spencers of Althorp, pp. 11–14.
160. ODNB entry.
161. Stubbes, Donne, pp. 89–91.
162. On Greenwich Palace, see Young, Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments, pp. 108–9; Judson, Life, p. 187.
163. Nichols, Progresses, iii. 398–407.
164. Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Burbon’, Sp. Enc., p. 121; Bennett, Evolution of ‘The Faerie Queene’, ch. 15; James Emerson Phillips, ‘Renaissance Concepts of Justice and the Structure of The Faerie Queene’, HLQ 33 (1969–70), 103–20.
165. Sears Jayne, ‘Ficino and the Platonism of the English Renaissance’, CL 4 (1952), 214–38; Jefferson B. Fletcher, ‘Benivieni’s “Ode of Love” and Spenser’s “Fowre Hymnes”’, MP 8 (1911), 545–60. See also Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London: Faber, 1967), pp. 27–35.
166. It is worth noting that Harvey was ‘one of the few Elizabethans who remembered Dante for the Commedia rather than for the conveniently anti-papal De Monarchia’: ‘Some New Marginalia’, p. 403.
167. Philip B. Rollinson, ‘A Generic View of Spenser’s Four Hymns’, SP 68 (1971), 292–304.
168. See esp. Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight, ch. 5. See also Elizabeth Bieman, ‘Fowre Hymnes’, Sp. Enc., pp. 315–17; Josephine Waters Bennett, ‘The Theme of Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes’, SP 28 (1931), 18–57; Frederick Morgan Padleford, ‘Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes: A Resurvey’, SP 29 (1932), 207–32; Jon Quitsland, ‘Thinking About Thinking in the Fowre Hymnes’, in Borris et al (eds.), Spenser and Platonism, pp. 499–517.
169. FQ, Book IV, proem, i; McCabe, ‘Authorial Self-Presentation’, p. 478.
170. Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 74–6.
171. Terry Comito, ‘A Dialectic of Images in Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes’, SP 74 (1977), 301–21, at 301.
172. See p. 47.
173. Edmund Spenser, Fowre Hymnes (London, 1596).
174. Einar Bjorvand, ‘Spenser’s Defence of Poetry: Some Structural Aspects of the Fowre Hymnes’, in Maren-Sofie Røstvig (ed.), Fair Forms: Essays in English Literature from Spenser to Jane Austen (Cambridge: Brewer, 1975), pp. 13–53, at p. 26; Johnson, Critical Bibliography, pp. 31–2.
175. For speculations about the revision of the Hymnes, see Bennett, ‘Theme of Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes’, pp. 49–57, who takes the letter at face value, as I do; for an argument for a late date, see Bjorvand, ‘Spenser’s Defence of Poetry’, at p. 13. On the links between the poems, see Paula Johnson, Form and Transformation in Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 125–31.
176. Evans (ed.), Elizabethan Sonnets, pp. 31–2.
177. Bruno dedicated two works to Sidney and they probably met at an Ash Wednesday supper at Fulke Greville’s house: Duncan-Jones, Sidney, p. 271.
178. John Donne, ‘The Ecstasy’, lines 69–76, in The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 55–6. On ‘The Extasie’, see Wilbur Sanders, John Donne’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 94–106. Elsewhere Donne is much more serious about Neoplatonsim and alchemy: see Healy, Shakespeare, Alchemy, p. 55.
179. Giovanni Dall’Orto, ‘“Socratic Love” as a Disguise for Same-Sex Love in the Italian Renaissance’, in Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma (eds.), The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1989), pp. 33–65. I owe this reference to Elizabeth Pallitto.
180. See Gordon Teskey, ‘A Retrograde Reading of Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes’, in Borris et al. (eds.), Spenser and Platonism, pp. 481–97; Hadfield, ‘Spenser and Religion’.
181. On Russell, see the ODNB entry by John McGurk.
182. On Margaret Russell, see the ODNB entry by Richard T. Spence; Quitsland, ‘Spenser and the Patronesses of the Fowre Hymnes’.
183. See the ODNB entry by Peter Holmes.
184. Martin Holmes, Proud Northern Lady: Lady Anne Clifford, 1590–1676 (Chichester: Phillimore, 1975), p. 130; Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 67–8.
185. Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 8, 12–13.
186. Woods, Lanyer, pp. 42–71; Beilin, Redeeming Eve, p. 192.
187. Holmes, Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 138–9; Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, 66.
188. Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 15, 24, 26, 50, 61.
189. Spenser, Shorter Poems, p. 656.
190. Rosamund Tuve, ‘ “Spenserus” ’, in Essays by Rosamund Tuve, pp. 139–62, at pp. 140–3. On Malby, who was secretary to the earl of Warwick in the early 1560s, see the ODNB entry by Bernadette Cunningham.
191. See the ODNB entry by Simon Adams; Jeremiah Wiffen, Historical Memoirs of the House of Russell, 2 vols. (London, 1833), i. 272, 396; ii. 61.
192. MS Bodley 902, fo. 184r. Anne Russell’s signature is on fo. 80v. For comment, see Tuve, ‘ “Spenserus” ’, p. 139. Ovid, Tristia, 1.9, lines 5–6 (trans. from Ovid, Sorrows of an Exile, trans. A. D. Melville (1995; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 19).
193. See the gloss to July, line 177. On Spenser and Gower, see Tuve, ‘“Spenserus”’, pp. 141–2; R. F. Yeager, ‘Gower, John’, Sp. Enc., pp. 337–8; Nohrnberg, Analogy, pp. 271, 318, 383, 641. Spenser would have seen Gower’s tomb in Southwark Cathedral: Guy Rowston, Southwark Cathedral: The Authorized Guide (Bromley: Robert James, 2006), p. 25; Nicholas Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London except The Cities of London & Westminster (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952), ii. 395–6.
194. M. St Clare Byrne and Gladys Scott Thomson, ‘ “My Lord’s Books”: The Library of Francis, Second Earl of Bedford in 1584’, RES 28 (1931), 385–405.
195. On Francis Russell, see Wiffen, Historical Memoirs, i, ch. 10; Gladys Scott Thomson, Two Centuries of Family History: A Study in Social Development (London: Longman, 1930), ch. 4; ODNB entry by Wallace T. MacCaffrey. On dedications to the earl see Byrne and Thomson, ‘My Lord’s Books’, pp. 390–1.
196. Tuve, ‘ “Spenserus” ’, pp. 143–4.
197. Cited in Beilin, Redeeming Eve, p. 192.
198. Bjorvand, ‘Spenser’s Defence of Poetry’, pp. 27–8. See also Wind, Pagan Mysteries, ch. 3.
199. Dan S. Norton, ‘The Background of Spenser’s Prothalamion’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1940, pp. 37, 73.
200. For details of their history, see Norton, ‘Background of Spenser’s Prothalamion’, pp. 40–93.
201. Ibid. 1.
202. Norton, ‘Background of Spenser’s Prothalamion’, pp. 85–7.
203. Sylvia Freedman, Poor Penelope: Lady Penelope Rich, An Elizabethan Woman (Abbotsbrook: Kensal, 1983), pp. 86–7.
204. Leicester/Essex House was one of the grand houses on the Strand built by Elizabeth’s chief courtiers. The inventory of Leicester’s possessions survives: Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, ‘Essex House, formerly Leicester House and Exeter Inn’, Archaeologica, or Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity 73 (1903), 1–54.
205. Manolo Guerci, ‘Salisbury House in London, 1599–1694: The Strand Palace of Sir Robert Cecil’, Architectural History 52 (2009), 31–78. On the competition between the owners of grand houses, see Manolo Guerci, ‘The Construction of Northumberland House and the Patronage of Its Original Builder, Lord Henry Howard, 1603–14’, AJ 90 (2010), 341–400, at 345–9.
206. Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, p. 286; ODNB entry on ‘Somerset, Edward, fourth earl of Worcester’, by Pauline Croft; Dan S. Norton, ‘Queen Elizabeth’s “Brydale Day” ’, MLQ 5 (1944), 149–54, at 149–50; Norton, ‘Background of Spenser’s Prothalamion’, p. 42.
207. Helena Shire, A Preface to Spenser (London: Longman, 1978), p. 175. On the innovative nature of the poem, see also J. Norton Smith, ‘Spenser’s Prothalamion: A New Genre’, RES 10 (1959), 173–8; Michael West, ‘Prothalamia in Propertius and Spenser’, CL 26 (1974), 346–53.
208. Norton, ‘Background of Spenser’s Prothalamion’, pp. 74–85, 92.
209. Norton, ‘Queen Elizabeth’s “Brydale Day” ’, p. 149.
210. On Essex in the poem, see Judith Owens, ‘Commerce and Cadiz in Spenser’s Prothalamion’, SEL 47 (2007), 79–106, at 90–7.
211. Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘Myth-Making: Politics, Propaganda and the Capture of Cadiz in 1596’, HJ 40 (1997), 621–42, at 623; Owens, ‘Commerce and Cadiz’, p. 92.
212. Spenser, Shorter Poems, p. 733; Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, p. 70.
213. Edmund Spenser, Prothalamion, or A Spousall Verse (London, 1596); Johnson, Critical Bibliography, pp. 32–3.
214. Einar Bjorvand, ‘Prothalamion’, Sp. Enc., pp. 561–2.
215. M. L. Wine, ‘Spenser’s “Sweete Themmes”: Of Time and the River’, SEL 2 (1962), 111–17, at 117; Harry Berger, ‘Spenser’s Prothalamion: An Interpretation’, Essays in Criticism 15 (1965), 363–80, at 364–5.
216. See Owens, ‘Commerce and Cadiz’, p. 90.
217. See Daniel H. Woodward, ‘Some Themes in Spenser’s Prothalamion’, ELH 29 (1962), 34–46, at 35.
218. Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London, p. 209.
219. William Vallans, A Tale of Two Swans, wherein is comprehended the original and increase of the riuer Lee (London, 1590), sig. A2r; Oruch, ‘Spenser, Camden’.
220. On Vallans, see the ODNB entry by Nick de Somogyi.
221. Vallans, Tale of Two Swans, sig. B4r.
1. Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars, p. 192.
2. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, p. 302.
3. Moody et al. (eds.), New History of Ireland, viii. 218.
4. Guy, Tudor Ireland, pp. 350, 365.
5. Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars, p. 206. On the fort, see Klingelhofer, Castles and Colonists, pp. 43–6.
6. Hayes-McCoy, ‘Tudor Conquest and Counter-Reformation’, p. 124.
7. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, p. 303.
8. On the position of the Old English, see Patrick Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience: A Historical Survey (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1985), ch. 3; McGurk, Elizabethan Conquest, chs. 8–9.
9. Welply ‘Edmund Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 169; Ferguson, ‘Memorials of Spenser’, p. 607; Chronology, p. 70; White, Historical and Topographical Notes, iv. 170–5. The Chancery case which provides the evidence for Peregrine’s right to Renny was destroyed in 1922.
10. On the status of professions and the general levels of salaries, which rarely exceeded £20 per anum, see Wilfrid R. Prest (ed.), The Professions in Early Modern England (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1987).
11. Ralph Josselin, writing in the third quarter of the 17th century, provides details which show that in his later years he spent about a fifth of his income on dowries for his daughters. Overall, Josselin spent a quarter of his substantial income on purchasing land; a third on his children; and a quarter on maintaining his household: Macfarlane, Family Life of Ralph Josselin, pp. 42, 54.
12. J. R. O’Flanagan, The Blackwater in Munster (London, 1844), p. 118. White, Historical and Topographical Notes, iii. 172–3, shows that the tree was still standing in the early 20th century, ‘situated in the S. W. of the townland of Renny Lower, on the bank of the River Blackwater, about 10 chains S. of the road leading from Fermoy to Castletownroche’.
13. Gwynn and Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: Ireland, pp. 161–2; Halpin and Newman, Ireland, pp. 508–10; Patent and Close Rolls, ii. 158.
14. Henley, Spenser in Ireland, p. 70; Newman Johnson, ‘Kilcolman Castle’, p. 418; Gwynn and Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: Ireland, pp. 161–2; Fiants (Elizabeth 5911).
15. Henley, Spenser in Ireland, p. 68; Ferguson, ‘Memorials of Spenser’, p. 608; James S. Ferguson, ‘Memorials of Edmund Spenser the Poet, and His Descendants, from the Public Records of Ireland’, JCHAS 14 (1908), 39–43, at 41. Henley appears to have mistranscribed Ferguson’s figure of 395 as 365.
16. Judson, Spenser in Southern Ireland, p. 31; Shohachi Fukuda, ‘Bregog, Mulla’, Sp. Enc., p. 110.
17. On the Barry family’s acquisition of religious property after the dissolution, see Bradshaw, Dissolution, pp. 166–7; Gwynn and Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: Ireland, p. 243.
18. Ferguson, ‘Memorials of Spenser’, p. 608; Henley, Spenser in Ireland, p. 68.
19. Chronology, p. 70; Ferguson, ‘Memorials of Spenser’, p. 606. The original document was destroyed in 1922.
20. Henley, Spenser in Ireland, pp. 67–8; Fiants, i. 35 (Henry VIII, 304). On Katherine Spenser, see Appendix 1.
21. Ferguson, ‘Memorials of Spenser’, JCHAS pp. 14, 41.
22. Chronology, p. 71; Ferguson, ‘Memorials of Spenser’, p. 606.
23. Anthony J. Sheehan, ‘The Overthrow of the Plantation of Munster in October 1598’, Irish Sword 15 (1982), 11–22, at 11; Klingelhofer, Castles and Colonists, p. 26.
24. Brink, ‘Documenting Edmund Spenser’, pp. 206–7.
25. Roger A. Mason, ‘George Buchanan, James VI and the Presbyterians’, in Roger A. Mason (ed.), Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 112–37.
26. Alan Stewart, The Cradle King: A Life of James VI and I (London: Chatto and Windus, 2003), p. 93.
27. Susan Doran, ‘ “Revenge her most foul and unnatural murder”: The Impact of Mary Stuart’s Execution on Anglo-Scottish Relations’, History 85 (2000), 589–612.
28. Chronology, p. 72; Stationers, iii. 34.
29. Avery, ‘Mapping the Irish Other’; John Breen, ‘ “Imaginative Groundplot”: A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland’, Sp. St. 12 (1991; pub. 1998), 151–68; Andrew Hadfield, ‘Censoring Ireland in Elizabethan England’, in Hadfield (ed.), Literature and Censorship, pp. 149–64, at p. 153.
30. Galbraith, ‘Spenser and the History of the Book’, p. 184. The following account is much indebted to Dr Galbraith’s excellent analysis, which substantially corrects earlier accounts, including my own.
31. Spenser Allusions, pp. 48, 50, 56–8; Bartholomew Griffin, Fidessa, More Chaste Then Kinde (1602).
32. See John Izon, ‘Bartholomew Griffin and Sir Thomas Lucy’, TLS, 19 Apr. 1957, p. 245; ODNB entry on ‘Griffin, Bartholomew’, by B. J. Sokol.
33. On the court case, see pp. 343–8.
34. The Records of the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn: The Black Books, 6 vols. (London: Lincoln’s Inn, 1897–2001), ii. 39; Galbraith, ‘Spenser and the History of the Book’, p. 188.
35. See p. 336.
36. Galbraith, ‘Spenser and the History of the Book’, p. 192.
37. Ibid. 201.
38. Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience, pp. 81–2.
39. Peter Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 383–422, at p. 398; Galbraith, ‘Spenser and the History of the Book’, p. 201.
40. On Holinshed, see Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 13. On Derricke, see ODNB entry by Andrew Hadfield. James I, inspecting documents at Whitehall early in his reign, commented, ‘We had more ado with Ireland than all the world besides’, cited in Hadfield and Maley, ‘Introduction: Irish Representations and English Alternatives’, p. 6.
41. Hadfield, ‘Censoring Ireland in Elizabethan England’, pp. 155–8. On Beacon, see Beacon, Solon His Follie, ed. Carey and Carroll, introd., pp. xiii–xxv.
42. On Byrchensa see Hadfield, ‘Allusion to Spenser’s Irish Writings’.
43. Printers, p. 180.
44. For details of the work of the Lownes brothers, see A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, comp. A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, 3 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–91), iii. 109–10.
45. Andrew Zurcher, ‘The Printing of the Cantos of Mutabilitie in 1609’, in Jane Grogan (ed.), Celebrating Mutabilitie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 40–60.
46. See Johnson, Critical Bibliography, pp. 21–3.
47. On paper quality, see Bland, Guide to Early Printed Books, pp. 29–32.
48. Lodovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Sir John Harington, ed. Graham Hough (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962); Sir Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (London, 1593); Samuel Daniel, The Works of Samuel Daniel, newly augmented (London, 1601). I am grateful to David Scott Kastan for advice on this point.
49. Scott-Warren, Harington and the Book as Gift, pp. 34–5.
50. Spenser, Faerie Queene, p. 715.
51. Johnson, Critical Bibliography, pp. 33–48.
52. ODNB entry; Stationers, iii. 274; Zurcher, ‘Printing of the Cantos of Mutabilitie’, p. 41; Colin Burrow, Edmund Spenser (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996), p. 41.
53. ODNB entry on Richard Field by David Kathman; Johnson, Critical Bibliography, pp. 18, 20, 31.
54. George Walton Williams, ‘The Printer of the First Folio of Sidney’s Arcadia’, The Library, 5th ser. 12 (1957), 274–5; Bland, ‘Windet’, p. 324; Huffman, ‘Wolfe’, p. 329.
55. Sheldon P. Zitner, ‘The Faerie Queene, Book VII’, Sp. Enc., pp. 287–9, at p. 289; Shire, Preface to Spenser, p. 187; Julian Lethbridge, ‘Spenser’s Last Days’, in Lethbridge (ed.), Spenser: New and Renewed Directions, pp. 302–36, at pp. 306–8, 312–13. Commentators have generally been sceptical of arguments for an early date, but for such claims, see Evelyn May Albright, ‘Spenser’s Reasons for Rejecting the Cantos of Mutability’, SP 25 (1928), 93–127; Evelyn May Albright, ‘On the Dating of Spenser’s “Mutability” Cantos’, SP 26 (1926), 482–98; J. M. Purcell, ‘The Date of Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos’, PMLA 50 (1935), 914–17. On Spenser and Ovid, see William P. Cumming, ‘The Influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses on Spenser’s “Mutabilitie” Cantos’, SP 28 (1931), 241–56.
56. Russell J. Meyer, ‘ “Fixt in heauens hight”: Spenser, Astronomy, and the Date of the Cantos of Mutabilitie’, Sp. St. 4 (1983), 115–29; Hugh De Lacy, ‘Astrology in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser’, JEGP 33 (1934), 520–43; J. C. Eade, ‘Astronomy, astrology’, Sp. Enc., pp. 72–4.
57. Heffner, ‘Did Spenser Die in Poverty?’, p. 222.
58. Variorum, x. 531; Jack B. Oruch, ‘Works, lost’, Sp. Enc., pp. 737–8.
59. Spenser, Faerie Queene, p. 691.
60. Zurcher, ‘Printing of the Cantos of Mutabilitie’, p. 58; Hadfield, ‘Spenser and Samuel Brandon’; Lethbridge, ‘Spenser’s Last Days’, pp. 328–31.
61. Zurcher, ‘Printing of the Cantos of Mutabilitie’, p. 45.
62. Gordon Teskey, ‘Night Thoughts on Mutability’, in Grogan (ed.), Celebrating Mutabilitie, pp. 24–39, at pp. 30–1. See also Richard A. McCabe, The Pillars of Eternity: Time and Providence in The Faerie Queene (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989), pp. 199–210.
63. Spenser, Faerie Queene, p. 712.
64. Two essays that argues for a late date based on the preponderance of feminine rhymes in the poem, as well as other issues, are Edwin Greenlaw, ‘Spenser’s “Mutabilitie” ’, PMLA 45 (1930), 684–703, at 695–703; Frederick M. Padelford, ‘The Cantos of Mutabilitie: Further Considerations Bearing on the Date’, PMLA 45 (1930), 704–11.
65. On the first two points see pp. 394–9; on Spenser’s poetic disciples, see William B. Hunter, Jr (ed.), The English Spenserians: The Poetry of Giles Fletcher, George Wither, Michael Drayton, Phineas Fletcher and Henry More (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1977); Joan Grundy, The Spenserian Poets: A Study in Elizabethan and Jacobean Poetry (London: Arnold, 1969); O’Callaghan, ‘Shepheardes Nation’.
66. On Arthur in the poem, see Gordon Teskey, ‘Arthur in The Faerie Queene’, Sp. Enc., pp. 69–72; Nohrnberg, Analogy, pp. 35–58; King, The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance, pp. 72–7, 117–25; Sheila T. Cavanagh, Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), ch. 1.
67. Andrew Hadfield, ‘ “The Sacred Hunger of Ambitious Minds”: Spenser’s Savage Religion’, in Donna Hamilton and Richard Strier (eds.), Religion, Literature and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 27–45.
68. Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, pp. 227–8.
69. See e.g. Marcia B. Hall (ed.), Michelangelo’s Last Judgement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), introd., pp. 15–16.
70. See pp. 42–6, 342.
71. Ayesha Ramachandran, ‘Mutabilitie’s Lucretian Metaphysics: Scepticism and Cosmic Process in Spenser’s Cantos’, in Grogan (ed.), Celebrating Mutabilitie, pp. 220–45. Ramachandran associates Mutability with Lucretius, whereas I would argue that nature’s speech also sounds Lucretian in substance. On Lucretius in early modern Europe, see Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp. 376–7.
72. Lucretius, On The Nature of the Universe, trans. Ronald Latham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), pp. 31–5.
73. Lucretius, Nature of the Universe, pp. 121–9.
74. Justus Lipsius, Two bookes of constancie. Written in Latine, by Justus Lipsius. Containing, principallie, A comfortable conference, in common calamities. And will serve for a singular consolation to all that are privately distressed, of afflicted, either in body or mind. Englished by John Stradling (London, 1595); Glyn P. Norton, ‘Introduction’, in Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, iii. The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 1–22, at p. 17.
75. Although the case is often made. For recent restatements, see e.g. Richard J. Berleth, ‘Fraile Woman, Foolish Gerle: Misogyny in Spenser’s “Mutabilitie Cantos” ’, MP 93 (1995), 37–53, at 52–3; E. A. F. Porges Watson, ‘Mutabilitie’s Debateable Land: Spenser’s Ireland and the Frontiers of Faerie’, in Lethbridge (ed.), Spenser: New and Renewed Directions, pp. 286–301, at pp. 300–1; Robert Lanier Reid, ‘Spenser’s Mutability Song: Conclusion or Transition?’, in Grogan (ed.), Celebrating Mutabilitie, pp. 61–84, at p. 79.
76. Sandler, ‘Faerie Queene: An Elizabethan Apocalypse’, pp. 169–71; King, Spenser Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, pp. 146–7.
77. Spenser, Faerie Queene, p. 716.
78. McCabe, ‘Masks of Duessa’; Hadfield, ‘Spenser and the Stuart Succession’. Mary K. Woodworth makes a case that Mutability is Arbella Stuart: ‘The Mutability Cantos and the Succession’, PMLA 59 (1944), 985–1002.
79. On Mutability’s arguments, see Rix, Rhetoric in Spenser’s Poetry, pp. 82–4.
80. Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Titans’, Sp. Enc., p. 691; Aptekar, Icons of Justice, pp. 27–38.
81. Michael O’Connell, ‘Giant with the Scales’, pp. 331–2; Annabel Patterson, ‘The Egalitarian Giant: Representations of Justice in History/Literature’, Journal of British Studies 31 (1992), 97–132.
82. Fowler, ‘Failure of Moral Philosophy’; Bellamy, Tudor Law of Treason, ch. 5.
83. Maurice Evans, Spenser’s Anatomy of Heroism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 202–3.
84. Glenn A. Steinberg, ‘Chaucer’s Mutability in Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos’, SEL 46 (2006), 27–42; Edmund Spenser, The Mutabilitie Cantos, ed. S. P. Zitner (London: Nelson, 1968), introd., pp. 29–30; Fowler, Literary Character, pp. 240–1.
85. On the suspicion of nature and the lack of interest in walking and climbing in the Renaissance, see Hale, Civilization of Europe, p. 42; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (1983; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 258.
86. For discussion of the local setting, see Coughlan, ‘Local Context of Mutabilitie’s Plea’; Lethbridge, ‘Spenser’s Last Days’, pp. 317–21; Judson, Spenser in Southern Ireland.
87. Pugh, Spenser and Ovid, p. 273.
88. On the relationship between Milton and Spenser, see, in particular, Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); David Mikics, The Limits of Moralizing: Pathos and Subjectivity in Spenser and Milton (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1994), ch. 5.
89. Pugh, Spenser and Ovid, ch. 7. On Spenser’s knowledge of the area and its myths, see Joyce, Wonders of Ireland, pp. 72–114.
90. Richard N. Ringler, ‘The Faunus Episode’, MP 43 (1966), 12–19; Holahan, ‘Iamque Opus Exegi’.
91. Variorum, x. 145.
92. Richard D. Jordan, ‘Faunus, fauns’, Sp. Enc., p. 304; Thomas Herron, ‘Native Irish Property and Propriety in the Faunus Episode and Colin Clouts come home again’, in Grogan (ed.), Celebrating Mutabilitie, pp. 136–77, at p. 141.
93. On Faunus and Pan, see Jane Davidson Reid (ed.), The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300–1990s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 802. Patricia Merivale, in her entry ‘Pan’, fails to mention this vital link: Sp. Enc., p. 527.
94. Perhaps following Ovid, who may have represented himself as Actaeon: see Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1997), p. 165.
95. See pp. 266–8.
96. Joyce, ‘Spenser’s Irish Rivers’, pp. 98–105.
97. The episode has been read as a direct allegory of events in Ireland, to my mind, erroneously: see e.g. Shire, Preface to Spenser, p. 187; Herron, Spenser’s Irish Work, pp. 161–2.
98. Joyce, ‘Spenser’s Irish Rivers’, p. 104.
99. Edwards, Ormond Lordship, pp. 15–16, 39, passim.
100. For a reading of Spenser’s thinking about the environment in the Mutability Cantos, see Richard Chamberlain, Radical Spenser: Pastoral, Politics and the New Aestheticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), ch. 6.
101. See e.g. the maps of late 16th-century Munster in the Dartmouth Collection: (National Maritime Museum) P/49, 20, 22, 27, 29.
102. Richard Helgerson, ‘The Land Speaks’, in Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 105–47.
103. Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars, pp. 210–11.
104. Ibid. 213.
105. ‘William Farmer’s Chronicles of Ireland from 1594 to 1613’, ed. C. Litton Falkiner, EHR 22 (1907), 104–30, 527–52, at 108–9; Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars, p. 217; McGurk, Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland, 227.
106. Sheehan, ‘Overthrow of the Plantation of Munster’, p. 12.
107. Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors, vol. iii, ch. 48; McGurk, Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland, pp. 200–1.
108. BL Harley MS 286, fo. 272, transcribed in Chronology, p. 72; Mananaan Mac Lir, ‘Spenser as High Sheriff of Cork County’, JCHAS 7 (1901), 249–50, at 249.
109. MacCarthy-Morrogh, Munster Plantation, p. 268. See also Brady, ‘Captains’ Games’, p. 155. On martial law, see David Edwards, ‘Martial Law and the Tudor Reconquest of Ireland’, History Ireland 5 (Summer 1997), 16–21; Edwards, ‘Spenser’s View and Martial Law’. On sheriffs in England, see Penry Williams, The Tudor Regime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 407–8.
110. Vincent P. Carey, ‘The Irish Face of Machiavelli: Richard Beacon’s Solon His Follie (1594) and Republican Ideology in the Conquest of Ireland’, in Morgan (ed.), Political Ideology in Ireland, pp. 83–109, at p. 88.
111. CSPI, 1598–9, p. 395; Sheehan, ‘Provincial Grievance and National Revolt’, p. 15. See also the criticisms of sheriffs in the anonymous ‘Discourse on the Mere Irish of Ireland’, Exeter College, Oxford, MS 154, ff.55–74 (transcribed by Hiram Morgan, CELT, http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/E600001-004/index.html). I owe this reference to Brendan Kane.
112. Berry, ‘Sheriffs of the County Cork’, pp. 48, 51–2.
113. Ibid. 47.
114. Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 186.
115. CSPI, 1598–9, p. 398.
116. Sheehan, ‘Overthrow of the Plantation of Munster’, p. 16; Sheehan, ‘Political Grievance and National Revolt’, pp. 83–4; ‘Farmer’s Chronicles’, pp. 110–11.
117. Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors, iii. 302–3.
118. James Goold to Sir Robert Cecil, 6 Oct. 1598, CSPI, 1598–9, p. 282.
119. CSPI, 1598–9, p. 291. On Ormond’s resolute military tactics, see Sheehan, ‘Political Grievance and National Revolt’, pp. 92–5.
120. CSPI, 1598–9, p. 292.
121. Sheehan, ‘Political Grievance and National Revolt’, pp. 100–2.
122. Edwards, ‘Spenser’s View and Martial Law’, pp. 154–5.
123. Berry, ‘Sheriffs of the County Cork’, p. 40.
124. MacCarthy-Morrogh, Munster Plantation, p. 269.
125. Sheehan, ‘Overthrow of the Plantation of Munster’, pp. 11–12.
126. CSPI, 1598–9, p. 280.
127. Sheehan, ‘Overthrow of the Plantation of Munster’, pp. 14–15.
128. Chronology, p. 73; Hayes-McCoy, ‘Tudor Conquest and Counter-Reformation’, in Moody et al. (eds.), New History of Ireland, iii. 94–141, at p. 128; Sheehan, ‘Political Grievance and National Revolt’, p. 78.
129. CSPI, 1598–9, p. 281.
130. CSPI, 1588–9, p. 299; Sheehan, ‘Official Reaction’, p. 314.
131. On the Barry lands, which stretched from Fermoy down to the south coast, see the map in Nicholls and Quinn, ‘Ireland in 1534’, in Moody et al. (eds.), New History of Ireland, iii. 1–38, at pp. 2–3.
132. Sheehan, ‘Official Reaction’, pp. 314–15.
133. Canny, Making Ireland British, ch. 8; Brian Mac Curta (ed.), Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1993).
134. CSPI, 1588–9, p. 300.
135. See also the descriptions of atrocities in Anon., ‘The Supplication of the blood of the English’, ed. Maley. It is worth noting that this English family has a wet nurse.
136. CSPI, 1598–9, p. 290.
137. See also the accounts in Annals of the Four Masters, pp. 624–41; Moryson, Itinerary, ii. 218–20.
138. CSPI, 1588–9, p. 300.
139. Roy Harvey Pearce, ‘Primitivistic Ideas in The Faerie Queene’, JEGP 44 (1945), 138–51; Waldo F. McNeir, ‘The Sacrifice of Serena: The Faerie Queene, VI, viii. 31–51’, in Bernhard Fabian and Ulrich Suerbaum (eds.), Festschrift für Edgar Mertner (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1968), pp. 117–56.
140. Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience, ch. 5.
141. Maley, Salvaging Spenser, ch. 3.
142. Chronology, p. 73; CSPI, 1598–9, pp. 291, 293–4.
143. Klingelhofer, ‘Spenser at Kilcolman Castle’, pp. 137–40.
144. Sheehan, ‘Overthrow of the Plantation of Munster’, p. 16.
145. Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, pp. 135–6.
146. Jonson, Poems, ed. Parfitt, p. 465.
147. I am extremely grateful to Charles and Catherine Harold Barry for showing me this map. See also Chronology, p. 73.
148. King, ‘Spenser, Chaucer, and Medieval Romance’, Sp. Handbook, pp. 568, 570. Klingelhofer is sceptical, calling the story ‘fanciful’ and pointing out that the story is modelled on Aeneas’ flight from Troy: Klingelhofer, Castles and Colonists, p. 111.
149. CSPI, 1598–9, p. 399.
150. In a letter to the Privy Council dated 21 Dec. Norris writes ‘Since my last letter of the 9th of this month, and sent by Mr Spenser’ (CSPI, 1598–9, p. 414).
151. SP 63/202, pt. 4/59.
152. See the ODNB entry on Carleton by L. J. Reeve.
153. All Souls College, Oxford, MS 155, fo. 58r–v; BL Harleian 3787, no. 21; Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, p. 37.
154. Heaton, Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments, pp. 197–8. On the Yelvertons, see the ODNB entries on Sir Christopher by David Ibbetson and Sir Henry by S. R. Gardiner, rev. Louis A. Knalfa. On Yelverton’s epilogue for Jocasta, see Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundrie Flowres ed. Pigman, pp. 515–16, passim; Nelson and Elliott (eds.), REED: Inns of Court, ii. 732.
155. Variorum, x. 533.
156. The best discussion is Ciaran Brady, ‘A Brief Note of Ireland’, Sp. Enc., pp. 111–12.
157. Variorum, x. 235.
158. Morgan, ‘Elizabeth and Ireland’, p. 305.
159. Variorum, x. 236.
160. ‘ “A Discourse of Ireland” (circa 1599)’; Hadfield and McVeagh (eds.), Strangers to that Land, pp. 49–50.
161. Supplication, p. 12.
162. Ibid. 8. The work, which is neatly copied out in secretary hand, exists as a small quarto as part of an early 17th-century compilation of tracts on Ireland, alongside Thomas Blenerhasset’s work on the Plantation of Ulster, Captain Thomas Lee’s treatise on Ireland, and others, and looks as if it was assembled for use by an important, busy official working in Ireland, perhaps Sir Arthur Chichester, the long-serving Lord Deputy (1605–16), whose copy of A View also survives in the British Library.
163. Brady, ‘Brief Note’, p. 112.
164. Morgan suggests that Spenser might have written a Supplication: ‘Queen Elizabeth and Ireland’, p. 306. See also Hiram Morgan, ‘Spenser’s Supplication’ (http://ucc-ie.academia.edu/HiramMorgan/Papers/107464/Spensers_Supplication_of_the_Blood_of_the_English).
165. Byrchensha, Discourse Occasioned Upon the Late Defeat, sig. B4v; Hiram Morgan (ed.), The Battle of Kinsale (Bray: Wordwell, 2004), p. 393.
166. Variorum, x. 237–8. For the history of Norris’s feud with Russell, see Nolan, Norreys and the Elizabethan Military World, pp. 224–37.
167. V. B. Hulbert, ‘Spenser’s Relation to Certain Documents on Ireland’, MP 34 (1936–7), 345–53, at 349–50.
168. Brady, ‘Brief Note’, p. 111.
169. Variorum, x. 243.
170. Ibid. 244.
171. Ibid. 244–5.
172. F. V. Emery, ‘England circa 1600’, in Darby (ed.), New Historical Geography, pp. 248–301, at pp. 288–9.
173. Brayshay, ‘Royal Post-Horse Routes’, p. 276.
174. Jonson, Poems, p. 465. A manuscript note in the 2nd edition of The Faerie Queene, discovered by the antiquary John Brand (1744–1806), also states that Spenser died in King Street: Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 186.
175. Stow, Survey, ii. 102, 374.
176. Merritt, Social World of Early Modern Westminster, pp. 149–53.
177. Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 186.
178. Judson, Life, p. 201; Chronology, p. 75.
179. TNA E. 351/543, fo. 40r, cited in Chronology; Chronology, pp. 75–6; Bennett, ‘Did Spencer Starve?’.
180. Judson, Life, p. 200.
181. On the Elizabethan climate, see Singman, Daily Life in Elizabethan England, pp. 81, 94; on disease see Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds, pp. 71–6.
182. Archer, Pursuit of Stability, pp. 9–10; Beier, Masterless Men, pp. 29–32, 36–7.
183. Shapiro, 1599, pp. 70–1.
184. On Shakespeare and Spenser, see the essays in J. B. Lethbridge (ed.), Shakespeare and Spenser: Attractive Opposites (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008); Hadfield, ‘Spenser’s Rosalind’. For a visual representation of their imagined meeting, see Henry Wallis, ‘Shakespeare and Spenser’ (1864) (Spenser files, National Portrait Gallery).
185. Berry and Timings, ‘Spenser’s Pension’, p. 255.
186. Chronology, pp. 76–9; Spenser Allusions, pp. 56–63; Hadfield, ‘Spenser and Samuel Brandon’.
187. Thomas Lodge, A Fig for Momus (London, 1595), sig. B4r–C2r.
188. Spenser Allusions, p. 60.
189. See the ODNB entry by David Kathman.
190. The Workes of Our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed [ed. Thomas Speght] (London, 1598), sig. Ciiir–v; Spenser Allusions, p. 62.
191. See the ODNB entry by David Matthews.
192. Bennett, ‘Did Spenser Starve?’.
193. Berry and Timings, ‘Spenser’s Pension’, pp. 257–8; Brink, ‘Spenser’s Family’, p. 51.
194. Berry and Timings, ‘Spenser’s Pension’, p. 259; Maley, ‘Spenser’s Life’, Sp. Handbook, p. 27.
195. Letters by John Chamberlain, written during the reign of Elizabeth, ed. Sarah Walters (London: Camden Society, 1861), p. 41. On Chamberlain, see the ODNB entry by P. J. Finkelpearl.
196. W. I. Zeitler, ‘The Date of Spenser’s Death’, MLN 43 (1928), 233–4.
197. Heffner, ‘Did Spenser Die in Poverty?’, p. 233.
198. William Camden, The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth, trans. Anon. (London, 1688), p. 565. For comment, see Judson, ‘Seventeenth-Century Lives of Spenser’, pp. 35–7.
199. Richard S. Peterson, ‘Enuies Scourge, and Vertues Honour: A Rare Elegy for Spenser’, Sp. St. 25 (2010), 287–325; The Poems of Charles FitzGeoffrey, 1593–1636, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (Manchester: privately printed, 1881), introd., pp. xix–x, xxiii, 21–2; Carpenter, Reference Guide, p. 237; Cummings, Critical Heritage, pp. 109–11. Fitzgeoffrey, who had family connections in Northamptonshire, later became a clergyman in Cornwall and knew Richard Carew, translator of Tasso: see the ODNB entry by Anne Duffin; Rowse, Tudor Cornwall, pp. 425–6.
200. Breton, Works, ed. Grosart, i. 15–16.
201. Cited in Carpenter, Reference Guide, p. 229. Translation by Paul Shorey. On Alabaster, see ODNB entry by Francis J. Bremer; Eccles, ‘Brief Lives’, pp. 4–5.
202. Weever, Epigrammes, sig. G3r.
203. E. A. J. Honigmann, John Weever: A Biography of a Literary Associate of Shakespeare and Jonson, together with a photographic facsimile of Weever’s Epigrammes (1599) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 22–3, 25–6.
204. For a list of some other possible elegies thrown into the grave, see Judson, Life, p. 206 n. 12.
205. See the list in Carpenter, Reference Guide, pp. 85–7.
206. Anthony Copley, A Fig for Fortune (London, 1596). Copley’s poem, ‘a barely concealed plea for Catholic toleration’, is a reworking of the last four cantos of Book I of The Faerie Queene, suggesting that Elizabeth has been misled by supporters of the Church of England into diluting and distorting the true faith. He was later exiled after the Bye Plot, when he turned evidence against Ralegh, which might suggest a link to Spenser, especially as Arthur Lord Grey de Wilton’s son, Thomas, was also involved: on Copley see the ODNB entry by Michael A. R. Graves; Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, p. 136.
207. Roderick L. Eagle, ‘The Search for Spenser’s Grave’, N&Q 201 (1956), 282–3.
208. Richard Jenkyns, Westminster Abbey (London: Profile, 2004), pp. 79–80.
209. John Dart, Westmonasterium, or The History and Antiquities of the Abbey Church of St. Peter’s Westminster … A survey of the Church and Cloysters, taken in the year 1723, 2 vols. (London, 1742), i. 71.
210. Heffner, ‘Did Spenser Die in Poverty?’, pp. 233–4. On Lane, see the ODNB entry by Verne M. Underwood. Lloyd was a friend of Christopher Carleil, who had been present at the debate at Bryskett’s house in Ireland: Eccles, ‘Brief Lives’, p. 79.
211. On Lloyd, see the ODNB entry by Andrew Hadfield.
212. Three poems are attributed to ‘E. S.’: ‘Being trapped in Loue he complayneth’ (No. 38); ‘Being forsaken of his frend he complaineth’ (50); and ‘Requirying the fauour of his loue: She aunswereth thus’, all of which clearly belong to the mid-century (Edwards died in 1566). The claim that they might have been by Spenser is given short shrift in Richard Edwards (ed.), The Paradise of Dainty Devises, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), introd., p. lxii. The anthology did not meet with universal approval; see Koller, ‘Fraunce and Spenser’, p. 118.
213. John Lane, ‘Triton’s Trumpet’ (1621), BL MS Royal 17.B.XV, fo. 172r–v; Heffner, ‘Did Spenser Die in Poverty?’, p. 233.
214. The laureateship was not officially established until 1668, when Dryden was made Poet Laureate, but pre-eminent poets, notably Chaucer, Skelton, and Spenser, were often afforded the unofficial title: see Broadus, Laureateship, pp. 17, 20–3, 33–7.
215. National Portrait Gallery 776 (Michael Drayton by unknown artist, oil on panel, 1599).
216. William Browne, Britannia’s Pastorals: The Second Book (London, 1616; Menston: Scolar Press, 1969), p. 27, p. 36; Spenser Allusions, p. 146; Judson, Life, pp. 206–7. On Browne (1590/1–1645?), see O’Callaghan, ‘Shepherdes Nation’, pp. 21–2, passim; ODNB entry by Michelle O’Callaghan.
217. Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 80.
218. On Anne Clifford as a patron, see Woudhuysen, Sidney, 327–31.
219. ‘The Notebook and Accounts of Nicholas Stone’, Walpole Society, 7 (1918–19), p. 54.
220. Pevsner, Buildings of England: Essex, p. 43; ODNB entry on Stone by Adam White. See also Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England, pp. 166–7.
221. Peck, Consuming Splendor, p. 280; Stone, ‘Notebook and Accounts’, pp. 170–1.
222. Dart, Westmonasterium, ii. 74; Judson, Life, p. 207.
223. On Dart see the ODNB entry by Gordon Goodwin, rev. Nicholas Doggett.
224. Dart, Westmonasterium, ii. 75.
225. Ibid.; Cummings, Critical Heritage, p. 315; Scott L. Newstock, Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), p. 54.
226. Long, ‘Spenser’s Birth-Date’, p. 179. Dart also notes that the date must be wrong: Westmonasterium, ii. 75.
227. Hughes’s edition did not meet with universal approval: see Loewenstein, ‘Spenser’s Textual History’, Sp. Handbook, pp. 646–7.
228. The Works of Mr Edmund Spenser, ed. John Hughes (London, 1715), vol. i, opposite p. xxii. On the illustrations, see Rachel E. Hile, ‘Louis du Guernier’s Illustrations for the John Hughes Edition of the Works of Mr Edmund Spenser (1715)’, Sp. St. 23 (2008), 181–213, at 196.
229. Pask, Emergence of the English Author, chs. 2, 5; Radcliffe, Spenser: Reception History, pp. 26, 29, 31, 41, passim.
230. ODNB entry on Mason by Jules Smith; Judson, Life, pp. 207–8.
231. Attwater, Pembroke College, p. 102.
1. Richard A. McCabe, ‘Edmund Spenser’, in Claude Rawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Poets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 53–71, at p. 53.
2. Lewis, Allegory of Love, p. 359; Gordon Teskey, ‘Thinking Moments in The Faerie Queene’, Sp. St. 22 (2007), 103–25.
3. Alpers, ‘How to Read The Faerie Queene’.
4. Brendan Kennelly, ‘Delight’, in Cromwell (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1983), p. 110.
5. Sidney, Apology, p. 86.
6. W. B. Yeats, ‘Edmund Spenser’, in Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 356–83.
7. Cited in Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, p. 311.
8. Campbell, English Yeoman, ch. 2.
9. Hiram Morgan, ‘Mid Atlantic Blues’, Irish Review 11 (Winter 1991), 50–5; Nicholas Canny, ‘The Ideology of English Colonisation: From Ireland to America’, William and Mary Quarterly 30 (11973), 575–98; Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire, pp. 48–9, passim.
10. Fowler, ‘Failure of Moral Philosophy’.
11. Gascoigne, ‘Dulce Bellum Inexpertis’, st. 12 (p. 401).
12. McCabe, ‘Fate of Irena’, pp. 120–2.
1. Hugh Cuffe to Sir Robert Cecil, Feb. 1600–1, Calendar of the Manuscripts of … the Marquis of Salisbury … preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, 18 vols. (London: HMC, 1883–1971) xi. 94–7. Henley, Spenser in Ireland, p. 193, erroneously cites Cuffe’s letter as evidence that Elizabeth had ‘returned to Ireland’.
2. MacCarthy-Morrogh, Munster Plantation, pp. 136–9.
3. MacCarthy-Morrogh, ‘English Presence in Early Seventeenth-Century Munster’.
4. Mary Hickson, ‘The Seggerson or Seckerston Family’, Journal of the Historical and Archaeological Association of Ireland, 4th ser. 8 (1887–8), 340–1; Deposition of Therlagh Kelly, undated, MS 823, fo. 170r–v, http://1641.tcd.ie/deposition.php?depID=823170r156.
5. Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 202.
6. Power, ‘Archaeology of the Munster Plantation’, p. 27.
7. Klingelhofer, Castles and Colonists, p. 81.
8. George Bennett, The History of Bandon and the Principal Towns in the West Riding, County Cork (Cork: Guy, 1869), pp. 94–5.
9. On escheats, see Holdsworth, History of English Law, iv. 437, 446.
10. Henley, Spenser in Ireland, p. 204.
11. Will of William Wiseman, 17 Feb. 1635, NAI RC 5, ‘Transcripts of Deeds and Wills recited in Inquisitions (Chancery)’, xviii. 362–74. Wiseman left some money to his nephew, Edmund Spenser.
12. Bennett, History of Bandon, pp. 25–7.
13. Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 182; Henley, Spenser in Ireland, pp. 204.
14. Welply, ‘Spenser: Some New Discoveries’, p. 447; Atkinson, Bibliographical Supplement, p. 30.
15. Hamer, ‘Spenser’s Marriage’, p. 276.
16. Mary Anne Hutchinson, ‘Boyle family’, Sp. Enc., p. 109.
17. Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, p. 182.
18. Caufield, Council Book of Youghal, p. 276; Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 169.
19. Henley, Spenser in Ireland, p. 199.
20. Lismore Papers, 2nd ser., vol. ii, pp. 12–3.
21. The Complete Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. Alexander Grosart, 9 vols. (London: privately printed, 1882–4), i. 556–7; Hamer, ‘Spenser’s Marriage’, p. 224; Henley, Spenser in Ireland, pp. 194–5.
22. Stretton, ‘Women, Property and Law’, p. 49; Wrightson, English Society, pp. 101–2.
23. CSPI, 1603–6, p. 116.
24. On Heriot, see H. S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor: A Study of Peasant Conditions, 1150–1400 (1937; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), pp. 143–50.
25. Hamer, ‘Spenser’s Marriage’, pp. 274–5; Spenser, Works, ed. Grosart, i. 558.
26. Henley, Spenser in Ireland, pp. 200–1; Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 202; Spenser, Works, ed. Grosart, i. 558–9.
27. CSPI, 1611–14, p. 221; Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 202.
28. Klingelhofer, Castles and Colonists, p. 122.
29. Ibid. 109, 117; Dunlop, ‘Unpublished Survey’, pp. 143–4.
30. O’Connell, ‘The Nagles of Ballygriffin’, p. 68; TCD MS 1216 (c.1703), fo. 52. On the provenance of this manuscript, a substantial collection of genealogies of prominent Irish families and its relationship to other manuscripts, see William O’Sullivan, ‘John Mullan’s Manuscripts’, in Vincent Kinane and Anne Walsh (eds.), Essays on the History of Trinity College Library (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), pp. 104–15. Other genealogies of the Nagles exist: see NLI MS GO 87, fo. 87; NLI MS GO 96, fos. 185–7; NLI MS GO 165, fos. 119–21.
31. On Monanimy and the Nagles, see Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, 2 vols. (1837; Baltimore: Clearfield, 2000), ii. 384–5.
32. Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 202.
33. Ibid. 203.
34. Hazel Maynard, entry on Sir Richard Nagle, DIB vi. 849–52. Richard was the son of James, brother of Elinor: O’Sullivan, ‘Nagles of Ballygriffin’, p. 67. Sylvanus’s wife was also the great aunt of Edmund Burke: Thomas B. Gibson, ‘Spenser and Kilcolman’, Dublin University Review 3/1 (Mar. 1887), 82–92, at 91.
35. Henley, Spenser in Ireland, pp. 195–9.
36. MacCarthy-Morrogh, ‘Munster Plantation’, app. II, ‘Biographies of the Undertakers’.
37. Henley, Spenser in Ireland, p. 199.
38. Lismore Papers, 2nd ser., vol. ii, pp. 139–40. See also Ibid., 1st ser., vol. ii, p. 143.
39. Ibid., 2nd ser., vol. ii, p. 60.
40. Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 169.
41. Ibid. 203–4.
42. Ibid. 204.
43. Henley, Spenser in Ireland, pp. 203–4.
44. ‘Edward Deering’s Minutes of Trials Before the Court of Claims in Ireland—Book Marked C from 12 August 1660 to 26 Febr. 1663/4’, Bodleian Library, Carte MS 67, fo. 29v.
45. Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 204.
46. Ibid. 203. The gravestones do not survive, and the overgrown graveyard, the church having been deconsecrated, contains very few gravestones dating before 1750: see Anon., Memorial Inscriptions From St. James’s Graveyard, Dublin (Dublin: National Archives, 1988).
47. Henley, Spenser in Ireland, p. 205; Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 221.
48. 27 Mar. 1657, Letters of Lord Protector and Council, A/28, 26, fo. 118, PRO (Ireland). The document was destroyed in 1922, but is transcribed in Robert Dunlop (ed.), Ireland under the Commonwealth: Being a Selection of Government Documents Relating to the Government of Ireland from 1651 to 1659, 2 vols. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1913), ii. 659. See also Henley, Spenser in Ireland, pp. 206–7.
49. Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 221.
50. Thomas Eliot, Deputy Surveyor-General, ‘Lands Set Out To The Transplanted Irish in the Province of Connaught’ (c.1660), NLI MS 2515 (Ormond Family Papers), p. 151. For comment, see John Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, HJ 53 (2010), 919–37, at 933–4; Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 222.
51. Breandán Mac Giolla Choille (ed.), Books of Survey and Distribution, iii. Co. Galway (Dublin: HMC, 1962), pp. 129–30; Robert A. Simington (ed.), Books of Survey and Distribution, i. Co. Roscommon (Dublin: HMC, 1949), pp. 60–1.
52. See also the analysis in McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment, p. 285.
53. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment, pp. 284–5; Fowler, ‘A View of the Present State of Ireland’, Sp. Handbook, p. 326.
54. Houlbrooke, English Family, p. 111.
55. Deposition of Richard Gettings, 10 May 1642, MS 824, fo. 112r–v, http://1641.tcd.ie/deposition.php?depID=824112r100a.
56. Deposition of John Petters, 19 Aug. 1642, MS 824, fo. 40r–v, http://1641.tcd.ie/deposition.php?depID=824040r044; Deposition of William Merryfield, 19 Aug. 1642, MS 824, fo. 40r–v, http://1641.tcd.ie/deposition.php?depID=825033r027.
57. Willy Maley, ‘How Milton and Some Contemporaries Read Spenser’s View’; Norah Carlin, ‘Extreme of Mainstream? The English Independents and the Cromwellian Reconquest of Ireland, 1649–1651’, in Bradshaw et al. (eds.), Representing Ireland, pp. 191–208, 209–26.
58. Henley, Spenser in Ireland, pp. 207–8; Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 221.
59. Atkinson, Bibliographical Supplement, p. 24.
60. Indenture between Hugolin Spenser and Pierce Power, National Archives of Ireland RC5, vol. 19, pp. 343–53; Andrew Hadfield, ‘A Mortgage Agreement of Hugolin Spenser, Edmund Spenser’s Grandson’, Sp. St. (forthcoming).
61. Deposition of Hugh Hide, 14 Mar. 1653 who stated ‘That there was of English Liuinge neere this deponent Viz Hughline Spencer now Liuinge att Renny’: MS 827, fos. 118r–119v (http://1641.tcd.ie/deposition.php?depID=827118r131).
62. Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 239.
63. J. G. Simms, ‘The War of the Two Kings, 1685–91’, in Moody et al. (eds.), New History of Ireland, iii. 478–508.
64. Henley, Spenser in Ireland, pp. 208–10; Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 223.
65. Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, pp. 166, 240.
66. Henley, Spenser in Ireland, pp. 210–11; Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 239.
67. Herbert Wood, ‘Spenser’s Great-Grandson’, TLS, 14 Feb. 1929, p. 118.
68. Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, pp. 240–1.
69. Ibid. 240.
1. Stephen Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 69–84.
2. Robert Tittler, The Face of the City: Civic Portraiture and Civic Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
3. Cooper, Searching for Shakespeare, pp. 175–91.
4. John Cotgrave, Wits Interpreter, the English Parnassus, or A sure guide to those admirable accomplishments that compleat our English gentry (London, 1655); Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words, or A General English Dictionary (London, 1658). On Cotgrave (1611?–1655?), see the ODNB entry by W. H. Kelliher. It is worth noting that some of the other portraits in the frontispiece to Phillips’s dictionary are based on real portraits, such as Camden, Chaucer, and Bacon; others, notably Sidney, are clearly not.
5. Vertue, Notebooks, xviii. 25, 58. On Vertue’s links to the Kit-Cat Club and Kneller, see Brian Cowman, ‘An Open Elite: The Peculiarities of Connoisseurship in Early Modern England’, Modern Intellectual History 1 (2004), 151–83, at 177.
6. ‘There was no painting in Guise’s collection when it came to Christ Church, Oxford, that was identified to be Spenser. Guise seems to have changed his collection quite a lot over the years and many of the paintings mentioned by Vertue were not in the collection anymore by the time it was bequeathed to Christ Church in 1765. It would also have been an unusual painting for Guise to have (or hold on to) as his interest as a collector were Italian old masters (very little portraiture). Should a portrait of Spenser have been in his collection it would have been not unlikely that he would have sold it to “streamline” his collection’ (personal communication from Jacqueline Thalmann (Curator, Picture Gallery, Christ Church, Oxford).
7. For a list of copies of the Chesterfield portrait, see Freeman O’Donoghue, Catalogue of Engraved British Portraits Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 6 vols. (London: British Museum, 1908–25), iv. 166–7.
8. David Piper, ‘The Chesterfield House Library Portraits’, in René Wellek and Alvaro Ribeiro (eds.), Evidence in Literary Scholarship: Essays in Memory of James Marshall Osborn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 179–95, at p. 187. On Vertue, see ODNB entry by Martin Myrone; Alexander C. Judson, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Lives of Spenser’, HLQ 16 (1953), 161–81, at 164–8. The Director of the National Portrait Gallery, Sir Henry Hake, advised Alexander Judson and Lord Ilchester, who had both asked for his advice, against trusting Vertue as a reliable source (letters 10 Sept. (to Ilchester) and 6 Oct. (to Judson) 1948) (Spenser files, National Portrait Gallery).
9. Attwater, Pembroke College, p. 102. On Benjamin Wilson and William Mason, see the ODNB articles by E. I. Carlyle (rev. John A. Hargreaves) and Jules Smith.
10. Cooper (ed.), Searching for Shakespeare, pp. 70–1
11. Judson, Life of Spenser, pp. 208–9. Parts of this paragraph were written by Tarnya Cooper and I am extremely grateful for her advice on early modern portraiture.
12. ODNB entry by Raymond N. MacKenzie; Ophelia Field, The Kit-Cat Club (London: Harper-Collins, 2009), pp. 12–13.
13. Field, Kit-Cat Club, pp. 262–3.
14. John Somers, Baron Somers by Sir Godfrey Kneller, Bt. (1715–16), National Portrait Gallery 3223.
15. See the ODNB entry on Horace Walpole by Paul Langford; J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: The Making of a Statesman (London: Cresset, 1956), p. 115. Betty Kemp points out that Vertue visited the Walpole family home and commented on its decor, designed by William Kent: Sir Robert Walpole (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), pp. 67–8.
16. The Faerie Queene … with an exact Collation of the two Original Editions … to which are now added a new Life of the Author and also a glossary. Adorn’d with thirty-two copper plates from the original drawings of the late W. Kent, ed. Thomas Birch, 3 vols. (London, 1751), vol. i, p. xviii.
17. H. M., Letter, 4 Feb. 1818, Gentleman’s Magazine 88 (Jan.–June 1818), 224.
18. Hadfield, ‘William Kent’s Illustrations of The Faerie Queene’.
19. Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selbourne, ed. Richard Mabey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977); information at the Gilbert White House, The Wakes, Selbourne.
20. Radcliffe, Spenser: Reception History, ch. 4; Wurtsbaugh, Two Centuries of Spenserian Scholarship, ch. 4.
21. Edmund Spenser, Faery Queene, Book I, ed. G. W. Kitchin (1864; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), introd., p. x. Kitchin (1827–1912) was a friend of Charles Dodgson, another fellow at Christ Church who took a number of pictures of Kitchin’s daughter. The interest in photography probably inspired Kitchin to read a great deal into portraits: see the ODNB entry by M. C. Curthoys.
22. On ruffs and hairstyles, see Jeffrey L. Singman, Daily Life in Elizabethan England (London: Greenwood, 1995), pp. 104–9.
23. Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland; MDCCLXIX (London, 1776), p. 85. The edition in which the details are announced is the fourth, the first having been published in 1772; Piper, ‘Chesterfield House Portraits’, p. 187; Spenser files, National Portrait Gallery. On Thomas Pennant, see the ODNB entry by Charles W. J. Withers. I am grateful to Tarnya Cooper for advice on this paragraph.
24. Samuel Redgrave (ed.), Catalogue of the Special Exhibition of Portrait Miniatures On Loan at The South Kensington Museum, June 1865 (London: Whittingham and Wilkins, 1865), p. 133; Judson, Life, p. 210. Other attributions in the Fitzhardinge collection also look fanciful: item 1476 states, ‘Portrait, called Queen Elizabeth, but most probably that of Anne of Denmark, Queen of James I’.
25. On the history of a portrait surviving in Spenser’s family in Ireland, see Welply, ‘Edmund Spenser: Life and Lineage’, pp. 241–2. There are other spurious relics of Spenser’s life in Ireland ‘discovered’ in the early 18th century, indicating an appetite for material connected to the poet: see e.g. the clearly faked A Canto of The Faerie Queene written by Spenser never before published (1738).
26. Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, p. 241.
27. Varro, ‘Spenser’s Age at His Death’, N&Q, 1st ser. 4 (1851), 74.
28. E. M. B., ‘Spenser’s Monument’, N&Q, 1st ser. 1 (1850), 481–2; E. M. B., ‘Portraits of Spenser’, N&Q, 1st ser. 3 (1851), 301; E. M. B., ‘Spenser’s Portrait’, N&Q, 1st ser. 4 (1851), 101.
29. A. C. Judson, ‘Spenser: Two Portraits’, N&Q 182 (1942), 64.
30. Alexander C. Judson, ‘Another Spenser Portrait’, HLQ 6 (1943), 203–4.
1. Cummings, Critical Heritage, p. 319. Edward Phillips, Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum (London, 1675), pt. II, pp. 34–6; subsequent references in parentheses in the text.
2. See ODNB entry by Gordon Campbell.
3. The author may have been Brooke Bridges: see Judson, ‘Seventeenth-Century Lives’, p. 45.
4. Works (1679), A1r–v. The author’s folio copy of The Faerie Queene, with extensive annotations is in the Folger Shakepeare Library: see Andrew Fleck, ‘Early Modern Marginalia in Spenser’s Faerie Queene at the Folger’, N&Q 55 (2008), 165–70.
5. The story is first told in Phillips’s version, although he has Spenser returning from Ireland to read The Faerie Queene to Sir Philip, having been secretary to Philip’s brother, Sir Henry.
6. Hadfield, ‘Kent’s Illustrations’, pp. 46–7; Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), pp. 302–11.
7. Aubrey’s Brief Lives, p. 337.
8. However, it should also be noted that, while the other stories that Aubrey tells about Spenser have a clear source, this lacks one, which arouses some suspicion. Katherine Duncan-Jones asserts, ‘Aubrey himself had his doubts about this story’ (Duncan-Jones, Sidney, p. 120).
9. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, rev. Robert Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 110. For more sustained and sceptical discussion, see S. K. Heninger, Jr, Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989).
10. The lines probably do refer to Burghley, as revisions to remove personal references to the 1611 folio indicate (Spenser, Shorter Poems, pp. 180, 590, 750).
11. This is true of Sean Lysaght’s recent collection of lyric poems, which imaginatively reconstructs Spenser’s life, Spenser (Westport: Stonechat Editions, 2011). I am extremely grateful to Jane Grogan for sending me a copy.
12. The defining life of an English reformer was Lawrence Humphrey’s life of Bishop John Jewel: see Pritchard, English Biography, pp. 33–5.
13. Hile, ‘Louis du Guernier’s Illustrations’.
14. For analysis of Hughes’s work, see ODNB entry by Thomas N. McGeary; Jewel Wurtsbaugh, Two Centuries of Spenserian Scholarship (1609–1805) (1936; Port Washington: Kennikat, 1970), ch. 2; Radcliffe, Spenser, Reception History, pp. 43–5; Ray Heffner, ‘The Printing of John Hughes’ Edition of Spenser, 1715’, MLN 50 (1935), 151–3; Judson, ‘Eighteenth-Century Lives’, pp. 162–4. On Hughes’s criticism of Spenser, see also Herbert E. Cory, The Critics of Edmund Spenser (1911; New York: Haskell, 1964), pp. 71–4; William R. Mueller, Spenser’s Critics: Changing Currents in Literary Taste (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1959), pp. 18–31.
15. Works, ed. John Hughes, vol. i, p. ii; subsequent references in parentheses in the text.
16. Wurtsbaugh, Two Centuries, p. 49, points out that Hughes was the ‘best critic’ among the 18th-century editors of Spenser, even though his edition is ‘Largely dependent upon the accounts given by Camden and upon the summary of the last folio’ and ‘adds little new information’.
17. National Library of Wales MSS 3580Ci (Puleston 20). In a letter to Francis Price, 10 Oct. 1745, Edmund Spenser remarks, rather sadly, that events in Scotland have been ‘a great damp for people must think of other things than Books’.
18. There is a life in Latin, written by John Ball (d. 1739), as a preface to his edition of a Latin translation of The Shepheardes Calender by Theodore Bathurst, which is sceptical of stories of Burghley’s animus against Spenser, as well as the loss of the last books of The Faerie Queene by the unfortunate servant: The Shepherds Calender, containing twelve aeglogues, proportionable to the twelve months. By Edmund Spencer, Prince of English Poets—Calendarium Pastorale, sive aeglogae duodecim, totidem anni mensibus accommodatae. Anglice olim scriptae ab Edmundo Spensero … nunc autem elegante Latino carmine donatae a Theodoro Bathurst. Eng. & Lat., ed. John Ball (London, 1732). For comment, see Judson, ‘Eighteenth-Century Lives’, pp. 168–70. On Birch see the ODNB entry by David Philip Miller.
19. The Faerie Queene … with an exact Collation of the two Original Editions … to which are now added a new Life of the Author and also a glossary. Adorn’d with thirty-two copper plates from the original drawings of the late W. Kent, ed. Thomas Birch, 3 vols. (London, 1751), vol. i, p. iii; subsequent references in parentheses in the text.
20. Cited in Cummings, Critical Heritage, pp. 56–9.
22. The Works of Edmund Waller, Esq. in verse and prose. Published by Mr Fenton. (Observations on some of Mr Waller’s poems) (London, 1729), pp. xxix–xxx; Judson, ‘Seventeenth-Century Lives’, p. 164; Wurtsbaugh, Two Centuries, p. 55.
23. C. Suetonius Tranquillis, Collections, trans. J. C. Rolfe, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), ii. 461.
24. For analysis of different aspects of this widespread phenomenon, see Aaron Gurevich, The Origins of European Individualism, trans. Katherine Judelson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), ch. 5; Backus, Life Writing, ch. 2; Leslie P. Fairfield, ‘The vocacyon of Johan Bale and Early English Autobiography’, RQ 24 (1971), 327–40.
25. On wordplay in the antiquarian sections of A View, see Anne Fogarty, ‘The Colonization of Language: Narrative Strategies in A View of the Present State of Ireland and The Faerie Queene, Book VI’, in Coughlan (ed.), Spenser and Ireland, pp. 75–108; Baker, ‘“Some Quirk, Some Subtle Evasion”’; Judith H. Anderson, ‘The Antiquities of Fairyland and Ireland’, JEGP 86 (1987), 199–214.
26. The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. H. J. Todd, 8 vols. (London, 1805); The Works of Edmund Spenser, with observations on his life and writings, ed. J. C. (London, 1840); Craik, Spenser and His Poetry; Poetical Works, ed. Child; The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. Payne Collier, 5 vols. (London: Bell and Daldy, 1862); J. W. Hales, ‘Edmund Spenser’, in Complete Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. R. Morris (London: Macmillan, 1869), pp. xi–lv; R. W. Church, Spenser (London: Macmillan, 1879); The Life of Edmund Spenser, in Works, ed. Grosart, i (1882). See also Charles Henry Cooper and Thompson Cooper, Athenae Cantabrigienses, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1858), ii. 258–67.
27. See e.g. Bruce, ‘Spenser: Boyhood’; Donald Bruce, ‘Spenser’s Birth and Birthplace’, N&Q 42 (1995), 283–5.
28. Rather more unkindly, Charles Eliot Norton dismissed Grosart’s edition of Donne’s poetry as marred ‘by blunders proceeding from carelessness and lack of intelligence’. Both quotations are cited in the ODNB entry by Arthur Sherbo.
29. Craik, Spenser and his Poetry, pp. 11–12; Poetical Works, ed. Child, p. ix; F. C. Spenser, ‘Locality of the Family of Edmund Spenser’, Gentleman’s Magazine, NS 18 (1842), 138–43; Anon., ‘Edmund Spenser—The State Papers’, Dublin University Magazine 58 (Aug. 1861), 132–44, at 131. See also F., ‘Spenser’s Lancashire Home’, N&Q, 9th ser. 3 (1899), 481–3; A. J. Hawks, ‘An Edmund Spenser in Lancashire in 1566’, N&Q 196 (1951), 336.
30. See the criticisms in Welply, ‘Spenser: Recent Researches’, pp. 128–30.
31. Works, ed. Grosart, vol. i, pp. xiii; vol. iii, pp. civ–vii; subsequent references in parentheses in the text For another far-fetched reading, see Halpin, ‘On Certain Passages in the Life of Edmund Spenser’.
32. Variorum, x. 11, line 223; trans., p. 257. Interestingly enough, William Camden refers to the mountains of Snowdonia as the British Alps (Britannia, p. 667).
33. J. B. Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). For one typical example, that emerged out of the same intellectual culture as Grosart, see Walter Ralegh, Some Authors: A Collection of Literary Essays, 1896–1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), which contains essays on Boccaccio, Sir Thomas Hoby, Sir John Harington, and John Dryden, among others.
34. See p. 430 n. 88.
35. Lorna Reynolds, ‘Review of Alexander C. Judson, Life of Spenser’, Dublin Magazine (Apr./June 1947), 51–3, at 53.
36. Maley, ‘Spenser’s Life’, Sp. Handbook, p. 28.
37. For an overview, see Stegner, ‘Spenser’s Biographers’.