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EDMUND SPENSER

(1552?-1599)

BY J. DOUGLAS BRUCE

DMUND SPENSER was born in London in or shortly before the year 1552. Although the obscurity which hangs about the life and circumstances of the poet's father has never been quite dispelled, it seems at least certain that he belonged to the Lancashire branch of the Spensers; and the family was connected with the "house of auncient fame" of Spencer, which, down to our own day, has continued to bear so honorable a part in the public life of England. The first event in the poet's life of which we have definite knowledge—although even here the precise date is wantingis his admission to the Merchant Taylors' School of his native city. This event is probably to be referred to the very first year of the existence of this famous school-1560; but however this may be, in 1568 we find his name in the list of "poore scholers" who were assisted in obtaining their education by the charities of Dean Nowell,—a list, it may be added, which in the subsequent years of the same century was destined to include still other names hardly less illustrious than Spenser's own. To Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, the poet was transferred in the spring of 1569; and there, amidst studies which apparently were often interrupted by ill-health, he passed the next seven years of his life, receiving in due succession the degrees of bachelor and master; but-owing to some disfavor with the authorities, it would seem-making no application for a fellowship, such as would probably otherwise have been made by a student whose tastes were so scholarly and whose means were so limited.

The years of the poet's life which immediately follow his University career are again involved in obscurity. Shadowy, however, as are both the lady and the circumstances, we know that this period was marked by the love affair with Rosalind,- more famous, perhaps, than is justified by the quality of verse which it called forth. To these years too, most probably, we should refer the beginning of Spenser's fateful connection with Ireland, since in 1577 it appears that he accompanied to that unhappy country the then Lord Deputy, Sir Henry Sidney, father of Sir Philip. Two years later he is again in England, and in the house of the powerful Earl of Leicester, brotherin-law of the Lord Deputy Sidney. From here we find him carrying

on a literary correspondence with his former college-mate, Gabriel Harvey; in which the perverse metrical theories and insufferable pedantry of the latter are almost atoned for by the genuineness of his friendship for the poet, and the stimulus he afforded to his literary activity. For this must indeed have been with Spenser-if we may judge by the list of works which are mentioned in the course of this correspondence, many of them lost-a period of such intense activity as can be paralleled from the lives of but few poets. The range of his literary experiments extended even to the drama,—the branch of literature which of all seems most alien to his genius; and we hear of the Nine Comedies by the side of the work with which he was about to open the great age of Elizabethan literature.

This work, the Shepherd's Calendar,'-appearing towards the close of the year 1579, justified in the minds of contemporaries as well as posterity the title of "The New Poet," which the author tacitly accepted from his friend and commentator, "E. K." To say nothing of the varied command of metrical forms and of the music of verse which the eclogues in this collection revealed, readers of native poetry recognized in the 'Shepherd's Calendar,' for the first time since Chaucer, a work exhibiting the sustained vigor which is an essential of verse that is worthy of the name of literature. A plan had been adopted of no inconsiderable scope,- one which admitted the treatment of a great if somewhat singular variety of subjects and situations; and notwithstanding occasional grotesqueness of diction. or injudicious choice of material,― matters as to which contemporary taste was by no means the same as our own,— or even a curious deficiency in that imaginative glow which the poet was afterwards to exhibit so pre-eminently, this plan had been executed without flagging from beginning to end.

But the year following this great literary success saw Spenser finally drawn into those circumstances which were to determine the sum of his happiness and sorrow during the rest of his too brief career. In the summer of 1580, as secretary to the new Lord Deputy, - Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, the stern Arthegall of the 'Faery Queen,' the poet once more turned his face toward Ireland; in which country, as a servant of the English Crown in various capacities, he was destined to spend the remaining years of his life. Only twice during this period did he revisit his native land before the final year of 1598; when, swept away from Ireland like many another Englishman by the storm of rebellion and devastation, he returned to die in London a broken man, in fortunes if not in spirit. In this savage and untamable Ireland of the closing sixteenth century, the poet who in his works stands furthest aloof of all men from the actual world, was called on to be a witness, and finally an actor, in some of the sternest of the world's work. He was in reality, however,