Background
Spenser was born in c. 1552 in London, England, the son of a London tailor, but his family seems to have had its origins in Lancashire.
(Edmund Spenser (1559-99) has earned the title "the poet's...)
Edmund Spenser (1559-99) has earned the title "the poet's poet" because of the high poetry of his epic and because so many great poets, including Milton, Dryden, Tennyson, and Keats, cut their poetic teeth on The Faerie Queene. The hero of Book II is Sir Guyon, the knight of Temperance. But do not let that throw you. This is not a poem about teetotalism. As C.S. Lewis puts it, The Faerie Queene "demands of us a child's love of marvels and dread of bogies, a boy's thirst for adventures, a young man's passions for physical beauty." Toby Sumpter's modernization follows Roy Maynard's Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves, and includes similar notes that explain obscure vocabulary and references. Eat this book. Devour it. Read it and then reread it. Make its characters and adventures and lessons and images a part of your mental furniture. Be enchanted. Feed your hunger for fantasy. Exercise your faith. Test your judgment. Form your imagination. Enter Faerie Land.
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( Edmund Spensers Poetry is now available in a revised a...)
Edmund Spensers Poetry is now available in a revised and updated Norton Critical Edition. This revised and enlarged Fourth Edition expands and improves on the strengths of the previous three editions. All selections are based on early and established texts, fully glossed, and carefully annotated. An Editor's Note follows each section. This new edition addresses the shifts in scholarly and critical interests in Spenser studies since 1993 as well as access provided by new technology. Notes reflect the information that Spensers best readers would have at their fingertips without spoiling the pleasure of reading Spenser for the first time. Mother Hubberds Tale from the 1591 Complaints is newly included. The Ruines of Rome, Spensers translation of Joachim Du Bellays Antiquitez, is also added to give readers the chance to see Spenser at work as a translator and to give the English perspective on Rome. Sixteen critical essays have been added to supplement fourteen earlier commentaries. Among the perspectives new to the Fourth Edition are those of C. S Lewis, Martha Craig, Gordon Teskey, Jeff Dolven, David Wilson-Okamura, and Jennifer Summit. In keeping with the last edition, critical pieces on the House of Busyrane, Spenser's pastoral, Muiopotmos, and Amoretti are grouped together to facilitate classroom discussion. New selections from Jane Grogan, Andrew D. Hadfield, Colin Burrow, Lynn Staley, Lauren Silberman, and A. E. B. Coldiron join the readings on House of Busyrane, and Amoretti grows with selections by A. Leigh DeNeef and Helena Mennie Shire. A Chronology of Spenser's life and an extensive Bibliography are also included.
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(Edmund Spenser (1552-99) ranks just below Shakespeare, wi...)
Edmund Spenser (1552-99) ranks just below Shakespeare, with Chaucer and Milton, in the pantheon of great writers. In The Faerie Queene, he spins a sub-created fantasy universe that would be the model for Tolkien and Lewis. This poet, whom Milton considered to be a better teacher than the medieval theologians, wrote an epic tale of adventure, love, noble deeds, and faith. Despite all his acknowledged greatness, almost no one reads Spenser anymore. Roy Maynard takes the first book of The Faerie Queene, exploring the concept of Holiness with the character of the Redcross Knight, and makes Spenser accessible again. He does this not by dumbing it down, but by deftly modernizing the spelling, and including notes in the margins explaining the obscurities in clever asides, and cuing the reader towards the right response.
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(Great Lady of the greatest Isle, whose light Like Phoebu...)
Great Lady of the greatest Isle, whose light Like Phoebus lampe throughout the world doth shine The Faerie Queene was one of the most influential poems in the English language. Dedicating his work to Elizabeth I, Spenser brilliantly united Arthurian romance and Italian renaissance epic to celebrate the glory of the Virgin Queen. Each book of the poem recounts the quest of a knight to achieve a virtue: the Red Crosse Knight of Holinesse, who must slay a dragon and free himself from the witch Duessa; Sir Guyon, Knight of Temperance, who escapes the Cave of Mammon and destroys Acrasias Bowre of Bliss; and the lady-knight Britomarts search for her Sir Artegall, revealed to her in an enchanted mirror. Although composed as a moral and political allegory, The Faerie Queenes magical atmosphere captivated the imaginations of later poets from Milton to the Victorians. This edition includes the letter to Raleigh, in which Spenser declares his intentions for his poem, the commendatory verses by Spensers contemporaries and his dedicatory sonnets to the Elizabethan court, and is supplemented by a table of dates and a glossary For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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(This student edition is based on the first published text...)
This student edition is based on the first published text and offers an authoritative introduction, discussing the View's reception, relating it to Spenser's corpus as a whole, and summarising recent scholarship.
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Spenser was born in c. 1552 in London, England, the son of a London tailor, but his family seems to have had its origins in Lancashire.
He attended the Merchant Taylors School in London and from there proceeded in 1569 to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he took his bachelor's degree in 1573 and his master's in 1576. At Pembroke College he became acquainted with Gabriel Harvey, a brilliant and somewhat conceited scholar, who nevertheless had a very stimulating effect on the young poet.
After completing his studies, Spenser seems to have spent some time in Lancashire, possibly with his relatives. This sojourn in the north increased his familiarity with the northern dialect, which later exerted a considerable influence on the language of The Shepherd's Calendar. Probably at this time Spenser made the acquaintance of Sir Philip Sidney, the poet and courtier.
By 1578 Spenser had written a considerable quantity of poetry, but he had published nothing. Upon the advice of his friends he decided to make his literary debut with The Shepherd's Calendar (1579), which he dedicated to Sidney. Spenser in this work shows the influence of such classical and foreign models as Virgil, Jacopo Sannazaro, and Clément Marot, but he also acknowledges a considerable debt to Geoffrey Chaucer and to other English sources. The work is especially important for its naturalization in English of a variety of poetic forms -
dirges, complaints, paeans - and for its attempt to enrich the English poetic vocabulary through foreign borrowings and through the use of archaic and dialect words. Allusions and letters from this period of Spenser's life show that he was busy with a variety of literary projects. Spenser was already at work on The Faerie Queene and on a number of the poems eventually collected in his Complaints. His efforts were rewarded in 1580, when, through the influence of the Earl of Leicester, he was named secretary to Lord Grey, the newlord deputy of Ireland. That same year Spenser accompanied Grey to Dublin. Ireland was to remain Spenser's home for the rest of his life. In 1586 he leased Kilcolman Castle in County Cork, and he lived there after 1588.
For some years Spenser had been working on The Faerie Queene. By 1589 three books were complete. In November 1589 they arrived in London; and early in the following year the first three books of Spenser's most famous work were published, with an elaborate dedication to Queen Elizabeth I. Spenser's ambition was to write the great English epic. His plan was to compose 12 books, each concerned with one of the 12 moral virtues as classified by Aristotle. Allusions to contemporary political and religious controversies are numerous. Thus the work itself is a fine example of an attempted synthesis between the traditions of Christianity and those of classical antiquity that characterizes all the best productions of the Renaissance. Spenser's style is distinctively his own: he attempted to create a remote, old-fashioned atmosphere through the use of archaic diction, strange neologisms, and forgotten terms of chivalry. For his verse form, Spenser created a new stanza which has since been often imitated in English literature. It consists of nine lines, eight lines of iambic pentameter concluding with an Alexandrine (iambic hexameter), arranged in the rhyme scheme ababbcbcc. The harmonious and orderly movement of this Spenserian stanza fits the slow, ample, and cumulative pace of the whole work. The publication of the first three books of The Faerie Queene met with much acclaim. But in courtly circles he was a decidedly minor figure. In 1591, probably in the spring, Spenser returned to Ireland, famous but disappointed.
Before leaving London, Spenser prepared for publication a collection of minor poems under the title of Complaints. A hint of Spenser's mood at this time might have been expressed in this volume's subtitle: Sundry Small Poems of the World's Vanity. However, most of its contents had been composed years before. The most important of the poems in this volume is "Mother Hubberd's Tale, " a satire that had gained notoriety a decade earlier. The work is important not only because of its political implications but also because of its express and able use of medieval English sources and conventions. Somewhat lighter in tone is "Virgil's Gnat, " a free translation of the Culex, a humorous ancient poem attributed to Virgil. In this work Spenser tells allegorically of his discomfiture resulting from the adverse political reactions to "Mother Hubberd's Tale. " "Muiopotmus; or, The Fate of the Butterfly" was probably an entirely new work written during Spenser's stay in London.
Late in 1591, after returning to Ireland, Spenser wrote the greater part of "Colin Clout's Come Home Again, " an idealized poetic autobiography dedicated to Raleigh. Shortly afterward Spenser compiled a collection of poems dedicated to the memory of Sir Philip Sidney. To this collection he contributed the first elegy, "Astrophel. " This collection was published together with "Colin Clout's Come Home Again" in 1595.
Meanwhile, Spenser was courting Elizabeth Boyle, an Anglo-Irish woman of a well-connected family. They were married on June 11, 1594. His sonnet sequence "Amoretti" and his "Epithalamion" together form an imaginatively enhanced poetic chronicle of his courtship and marriage. Written in frequent imitation of such French and Italian sonneteers as Philippe Desportes and Torquato Tasso, Spenser's sonnets, representing one of the most popular poetic forms of his period, are graceful if not great. However, his "Epithalamion" is generally acknowledged to rank among the greatest love poems in English. In this poem a lover's passion blends with a deeply religious sensibility, calling upon both classical myth and medieval legend to create an intricate pattern of allusions and evocations.
Late in 1595 Spenser returned to London, again staying for more than a year. He published during this visit to the capital three more books of The Faerie Queene; the "Prothalamion, " written to celebrate the double wedding of two daughters of the Earl of Worcester; and the "Four Hymns, " poems that concern his Platonic conceptions of love and beauty. During this stay he seems also to have composed or at least to have revised his View of the Present State of Ireland, a prose tract in which he defended the policies of his earlier patron, Lord Grey, in dealing with rebellious Irish subjects and in which he proposed a program for first subjugating the Irish people and then reforming their government on the model of the English administrative system.
Spenser seems to have returned to Ireland sometime in 1597 and to have resumed his work on The Faerie Queene. He had hardly taken control of that office before, in October of the same year, the Earl of Tyrone's rebellion, a generalized revolt of the Irish people, broke out in Munster. He arrived in the capital at the end of 1598, much weakened by the hardships of the preceding months. Spenser presented his messages to the Queen, together with a personal statement reiterating his position on the Irish question.
(Edmund Spenser (1559-99) has earned the title "the poet's...)
(This student edition is based on the first published text...)
(Great Lady of the greatest Isle, whose light Like Phoebu...)
(Edmund Spenser (1552-99) ranks just below Shakespeare, wi...)
( Edmund Spensers Poetry is now available in a revised a...)