Edmund Spenser - The Shorter Poems

PENGUIN ENGLISH POETS

GENERAL EDITOR : CHRISTOPHER RICKS

EDMUND SPENSER: THE SHORTER POEMS

EDMUND SPENSER was born in London, probably in 1552, and was educated at the Merchant Taylors School, from which he proceeded to Pembroke College, Cambridge. There he met Gabriel Harvey, scholar and University Orator, who exerted a considerable influence on his first important poem, The Shepheardes Calender (1579) and with whom he collaborated on a volume of familiar letters (1580). He graduated BA in 1573 and proceeded MA in 1576. By 1578 he was employed as secretary to John Young, Bishop of Rochester, formerly Master of Pembroke College. He may have also served briefly in the household of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, where it is commonly assumed that he met the Earls nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, to whom The Shepheardes Calender is dedicated. In 1580 he went to Ireland as Secretary to Lord Grey de Wilton, Lord Deputy of Ireland, and stayed there for much of the remainder of his life, eventually becoming an undertaker in the Plantation of Munster. While at Kilcolman, his estate in County Cork, he met or reacquainted himself with his neighbour, Sir Walter Ralegh, with whom he travelled to London in 1589 to present the first three books of The Faerie Queene (1590) to its dedicatee, Queen Elizabeth, who rewarded him with an annual pension of fifty pounds. 1591 saw the publication of Complaints and Daphnada, the former exciting political controversy owing to the criticism of Lord Burghley contained in Mother Hubberds Tale. Spensers marriage to Elizabeth Boyle was celebrated in his Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595), and his pastoral eclogue, Colin Clovts Come Home Againe, appeared in the same year. In 1596 he brought out the second three books of The Faerie Queene as well as his Fowre Hymnes and Prothalamion. In 1598 his estate was burned during the Tyrone rebellion, and he fled to Cork and thence to London, where he died in 1599. He was buried in Westminster Abbey and posthumously celebrated as the Prince of Poets. In 1609 a folio edition of The Faerie Queene appeared, including the previously unpublished Mutabilitie Cantos, followed, in 1611, by a folio edition of the complete poetical works. A View of the Present State of Ireland, written in 1596, was published by Sir James Ware in 1633.

RICHARD A . M c CABE is a Fellow of Merton College and Reader in English at Oxford University. He was formerly Drapers Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. His publications include, Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation (1982), The Pillars of Eternity: Time and Providence in The Faerie Queene (1989), Incest, Drama and Natures Law (1993) and Presenting Poetry: Composition, Publication, Reception (1995), co-edited with Howard Erskine-Hill.

EDMUND SPENSER

Edited by RICHARD A . M c CABE

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Published in Penguin Books 1999

Editorial material copyright Richard A. McCabe, 1999

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The moral right of the editor has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 9781101492093

All of the illustrations are by courtesy of the Bodleian Library with the exception of those from Daphnada and Amoretti and Epithalamion which are reproduced by permission of the British Library. Details of the editions used are supplied in the Textual Apparatus.