Everything about Edmund Spencer totally explained
Edmund Spenser (c.
1552 –
13 January,
1599) was an important
English poet and
Poet Laureate best known for
The Faerie Queene, an epic poem celebrating, through fantastical allegory, the
Tudor dynasty and
Elizabeth I.
Although he's recognized as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy, Spenser is also a controversial figure due to his zeal for the destruction of
Irish culture and colonization of Ireland.
Life
Edmund Spenser was born in around 1552. As a young boy, he was educated in London at the
Merchant Taylors' School and matriculated as a
sizar at
Pembroke College, Cambridge.
In the 1570s Spenser went to Ireland, probably in the service of the newly appointed lord deputy, Arthur Grey. From 1579 to 1580, he served with the English forces during the
Second Desmond Rebellion. After the defeat of the rebels he was awarded lands in
County Cork that had been confiscated in the
Munster Plantation during the
Elizabethan reconquest of Ireland. Among his acquaintances in the area was
Walter Raleigh, a fellow colonist.
Through his poetry Spenser hoped to secure a place at court, which he visited in Raleigh's company to deliver his most famous work, the
Faerie Queene. However, he boldly antagonized the queen's principal secretary,
Lord Burghley, and all he received in recognition of his work was a pension in 1591. When it was proposed that he receive payment of 100 pounds for his epic poem, Burghley remarked, "What, all this for a song!"
In the early 1590s, Spenser wrote a prose pamphlet titled,
A View of the Present State of Ireland. This piece remained in manuscript form until its publication in print in the mid-
seventeenth century. It is probable that it was kept out of print during the author's lifetime because of its inflammatory content. The pamphlet argued that Ireland would never be totally 'pacified' by the English until its indigenous language and customs had been destroyed, if necessary by violence. Spenser recommended
scorched earth tactics, such as he'd seen used in the
Desmond Rebellions, to create famine.
The paradox proposed by Spenser was that only by methods that overrode the rule of law could the conditions be created for the true establishment of the rule of law. Although it has been highly regarded as a polemical piece of prose and valued as a historical source on
16th century Ireland, the
View is seen today as
genocidal in intent. Spenser did express some praise for the Gaelic poetic tradition, but also used much tendentious and bogus analysis to demonstrate that the Irish were descended from barbarian
Scythian stock.
Spenser was driven from his home by Irish rebels during the
Nine Years War in 1598. His castle at Kilcolman, near
Doneraile in North Cork was burned, and it's thought one of his infant children died in the blaze - though local legend has it that his wife also died. He possessed a second holding to the south, at Rennie, on a rock overlooking the river Blackwater in North Cork. The ruins of it are still visible today. A short distance away grew a tree, locally known as "Spenser's Oak" until it was destroyed in a lightning strike in the 1960s. Local legend has it that he penned some or all of "the Faerie Queene" under this tree. Queen Victoria is said to have visited the tree while staying in nearby Convamore House during her state visit to Ireland before she died. In the following year Spenser traveled to London, where he died in distressed circumstances, aged forty-six. It was arranged for his coffin to be carried by other poets, upon which they threw many pens and pieces of poetry into his grave with many tears.
Spenser was admired by
William Wordsworth,
John Keats,
Lord Byron and
Alfred Lord Tennyson, among others. The language of his poetry is purposely archaic, reminiscent of earlier works such as
The Canterbury Tales of
Geoffrey Chaucer, whom Spenser greatly admired.
Spenser's
Epithalamion is the most admired of its type in the English language. It was written for his wedding to his young bride, Elizabeth Boyle. The poem is comprised 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.
Structure of The Spenserian Stanza and Sonnet
Spenser used a distinctive verse form, called the
Spenserian stanza, in several works, including The Faerie Queene. The stanza's main meter is iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is a b a b b c b c c [c]. The final line is an hexameter line which has 6 feet or stresses. Such a line is known as an
Alexandrine.
The Spenserian Sonnet is based on a fusion of elements of both the Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet. In one sense, it's similar to the Shakespearan sonnet in the sense that it's set up based more on the 3 quatrain and a couplet system set up by Shakespeare; however it's more like the Petrarchan tradition in the fact that the conclusion follows from the argument or issue set up in the earlier quatrains. There is also a great use of the parody of the blazon and the idealization or praise of the mistress, a literary device used by many poets. It is a way to look at a woman through the appraisal of her features in comparison to other things. In this description, the mistress's body is described part by part, for example, much more of a scientific way of seeing one. As William Johnson states in his article "Gender Fashioning and Dynamics of Mutuality in Spenser's Amoretti," the poet-love in the scenes of the Spenser's sonnets in Amoretti, is able to see his lover in an objectified manner by moving her to another, or more clearly, an item. The purpose of Spenser doing this is to bring the woman from the "transcendental ideal" to a woman in everyday life. "Through his use of metonymy and metaphor, by describing the lady not as a whole being but as bodily parts, by alluding to centuries of topoi which remove her in time as well as space, the poet transforms the woman into a text, the living 'other' into an inanimate object" (503). The opposite of this also occurs in The Faerie Queen. The counter-blazon, or the opposition of appraisal, is used to describe Duessa. She isn't objectified, but instead all of her flaws are highlighted.
Works Cited
Rust, Jennifer. "Spenser's The Faerie Queen." Saint Louis University, St. Louis. 10 Oct. 2007.
Johnson, William. "The struggle between good and evil in the first book of "The Faerie Queene". English Studies, Vol. 74, No. 6. (Dec. 1993) p. 507-519.
List of works
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