Edmund Spenser was one of the greatest poets of Elizabethan England, as evidenced by his masterwork, «The Faerie Queene». He is recognised as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy, and one of the greatest poets in the English language.
Background
Edmund Spenser was born into the family of an obscure cloth maker named John Spenser, who belonged to the Merchant Taylors' Company and was married to a woman named Elizabeth, about whom almost nothing is known. Since parish records for the area of London where the poet grew up were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, his birth date is uncertain, though the dates of his schooling and a remark in one of his sonnets ( Amoretti 60) lead to the date traditionally assigned, which is around 1552.
Just which John Spenser was his father is also uncertain, since there were at least three men of that name working in London as weavers at this time. If the poet took his lineage from John Spenser of Hurstwood, then he derived from a well-established family that had lived in Lancashire since the thirteenth century. If he was the son of the John Spenser mentioned in John Stow's Survey of London (1603), then his father was a man of some prominence who in later years bought a house that had once belonged to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and who was knighted in 1594 by Queen Elizabeth upon his election as Lord mayor of London. In any case, from the poem Prothalamion (1596) reveals that Spenser thought of himself as a descendant of "An house of auncient fame," namely the family of the Despencers.
Education
Spenser's parents took what may have been the most important step in advancing their son's fortunes by enrolling him in the Merchant Taylors' school in London. During the early 1560s, when Spenser began his studies there, it was under the able direction of a prominent humanist educator named Richard Mulcaster, who believed in thoroughly grounding his students in the classics and in Protestant Christianity, and who seems to have encouraged such extracurricular activities as musical and dramatic performances.
Mulcaster was also important to Spenser's career for purely pragmatic reasons, since he had good connections with the universities and sent students of modest means such as Spenser on to them with some regularity. The poet later expressed his gratitude to Mulcaster by depicting him as "A good olde shephearde, Wrenock" in the December eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender and by naming his first two children, Sylvanus and Katherine, after those of his master."
The only glimpse that survives of the young poet at school comes from financial records indicating that in 1569, when he was in his last year, he was one of six boys given a shilling and a new gown to attend the funeral of Robert Nowell, a prominent lawyer connected with the school. This connection with Nowell was to prove important to Spenser's later development, for the lawyer's estate helped support his subsequent education."
In 1569, at the usual age of sixteen or seventeen, Spenser left the Merchant Taylors' School for Cambridge, where he enrolled at Pembroke Hall. Even before he arrived, however, he was already composing poetry and attracting the attention of other writers.
Several scraps of reliable information as are known about Spenser during his university days suggest that he served as a sizar (a scholar of limited means who does chores in return for room and board) and that he received his B.A. in 1573 and his M.A. in 1576 with no official marks of distinction as a scholar. He regarded the experience as vital to his development, however, as can be seen in his later reference to the university as "my mother Cambridge" in «The Faerie Queene» (IV.xi.34). Little is known of his friendships at Pembroke. He must have been acquainted with Lancelot Andrewes, two years his junior, who later became a bishop and was well known for his sermons and for his part in translating the King James Version of the Bible. Most important for Spenser's literary career, however, was his close friendship with Gabriel Harvey, a professor of rhetoric who served initially as his mentor and ultimately as his literary promoter.
The revival and advancement of English literature was a passion of the time, and Harvey was fully possessed by it. His fancy for reforming English verse by discarding rhyme and substituting unrhymed classical metres, and the tone of his controversy with Thomas Nash, have caused him to be regarded as merely an obstreperous and pragmatic pedant; but it is clear that Spenser, who had sense enough not to be led astray by his eccentricities, received active and generous help from him and probably not a little literary stimulus. During his residence at the university Spencer acquired a knowledge of Greek, and at a later period offered to impart that language to a friend in Ireland.
Career
After graduating from the university in July 1580 Spenser accepted a post as a private secretary to Arthur Grey, the new Lord Deputy of Ireland. There is some evidence that when he set out for Dublin, he took with him a new wife named Machabyas Chylde, about whom little is known except that she married one "Edmounde Spenser" on 27 October 1579, that she apparently bore him two children named Sylvanus and Katherine, and that she died sometime before 1594. Most of the next twenty years of the poet's life were spent in Ireland, where he served in various governmental posts, from clerk of the Privy Council in Dublin in the early years to Queen's justice and sheriff-designate for county Cork at the end of his life. Until the late 1590s, however, Ireland provided a living, a place to write, and even literary friends.
During his years there, Spenser may have become acquainted with Ralegh , who was his neighbor on the Desmond estates and who, in the summer and fall of 1589, came to see him at Kilcolman and took a personal interest in his poetry. Spenser later revealed the importance of his relationship with Ralegh by preserving a poetic account of it in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe and by writing the "Letter to Ralegh" and a dedicatory sonnet to him in «The Faerie Queene». According to Colin Clout, it was Ralegh who arranged for Spenser to travel to London in 1590 to publish the first three books of his epic “The Faerie Queene.” A second set of three books were published in 1596. Spenser originally indicated that he intended the poem to consist of twelve books, so the version of the poem we have today is incomplete. Despite this, it remains one of the longest poems in the English language. It is an allegorical work, and can be read (as Spenser presumably intended) on several levels of allegory, including as praise of Queen Elizabeth I. In a completely allegorical context, the poem follows several knights in an examination of several virtues.
In Spenser's "A Letter of the Authors," he states that the entire epic poem is "cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devises," and that the aim behind «The Faerie Queene» was to “fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.” Queen Elizabeth, was so pleased by the epic that she granted the poet a pension of fifty pounds a year, which was more than the parsimonious queen granted to any other poet of the period. Spenser expressed his gratitude for Ralegh's patronage by writing a sympathetic allegory of the adventurer's often turbulent and romantically tinged relationship with the queen, which appears in the story of Timias and Belphoebe in Books III, IV, and VI of The Faerie Queene."
Also Spenser published numerous relatively short poems in the last decade of the sixteenth century, almost all of which consider love or sorrow. In 1591 he published «Complaints», a collection of poems that express complaints in mournful or mocking tones.
Four years later, in 1595, Spenser published «Amoretti and Epithalamion». This volume contains eighty-nine sonnets commemorating his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle. In “Amoretti,” Spenser uses subtle humour and parody while praising his beloved, reworking Petrarchism in his treatment of longing for a woman. “Epithalamion,” similar to “Amoretti,” deals in part with the unease in the development of a romantic and sexual relationship. It was written for his wedding to his young bride, Elizabeth Boyle. The poem consists of 365 long lines, corresponding to the days of the year; 68 short lines, representing the sum of the 52 weeks, 12 months, and 4 seasons of the annual cycle; and 24 stanzas, corresponding to the diurnal and sidereal hours. Some have speculated that the attention to disquiet in general reflects Spenser’s personal anxieties at the time, as he was unable to complete his most significant work, The Faerie Queene. In the following year Spenser released "Prothalamion," a wedding song written for the daughters of a duke, allegedly in hopes to gain favor in the court.