Edmund Spenser
(1552–1599)

Edmund Spenser was the greatest nondramatic poet of the English Renaissance. One of the first English writers to make a professional career of poetry, Spenser was a bold innovator in his use of meter, language, and verse forms. His superb craftsmanship has earned him the nickname "a poet's poet."

Spenser was born into a working-class London family in 1552. He won a scholarship to attend the Merchant Taylors' School, where he received a thorough grounding in the classics. Spenser then studied at Cambridge University, where he began to form ambitious plans for a career as a professional poet.

After earning his B.A. degree, he served as secretary to the Bishop of Rochester and then to the Earl of Leicester, whose nephew was Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney's broad range of interests and accomplishments won him a reputation during his lifetime as the quintessential Renaissance man: soldier, poet, lover, and patron of the arts. Spenser dedicated his first important work, The Shepheardes Calender, to Sidney.

In the poems comprising The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser used 13 different meters. Technical boldness characterized much of his other poetry: For example, he developed a distinctive scheme of interlocking rhymes for his sonnets, and he invented a special nine-line stanza for his epic, The Faerie Queene. More than two centuries later, during the Romantic period, the poets Keats, Shelley, and Byron all used the "Spenserian stanza" in major works. Spenser also deliberately mingled archaic diction with sixteenth-century language in his poetry to give his verse a distinctive, antique flavor.

In 1580, Spenser was appointed secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton and moved with his employer to Ireland. By 1582, the poet was at work on his masterpiece, The Faerie Queene. This was to be a national epic honoring Queen Elizabeth and the English nation. Spenser originally planned 12 books but lived to complete only the first six. The poem is an allegorical romance, in which a series of knights strive to attain the virtues of holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice, and courtesy.

Spenser spent the rest of his life in Ireland. Little is known of his first marriage; in 1592, however, he met Elizabeth Boyle, and he married her two years later. It is usually assumed that Spenser composed his sonnet sequence, entitled Amoretti, and his graceful wedding hymn, Epithalamion, to commemorate his courtship of Elizabeth and their marriage.

During the late 1590s, Ireland witnessed rebellion and civil war. Spenser's castle was destroyed, and he was forced to return to England, where he died in poverty in early 1599.

The word renaissance, which means rebirth, designates the remarkable achievements in philosophy, science, and the arts that occurred across Europe during the period 1350–1600. Beginning in Italy, the rediscovery of the languages, literature, and culture of ancient Greece and Rome sparked a great change in many people's worldview, which began to focus on human potential rather than on the insignificance of humanity in the eternal scheme.

In England, the humanizing influence of classical Greek and Roman literature was most evident in the work of scholar-statesmen such as Thomas More (1478–1535), the German-born painter Hans Holbein (1497–1543), and the schoolmaster Roger Ascham (1515–1568), who served as tutor to the young Elizabeth. Sir Thomas Wyatt and his contemporary, the Earl of Surrey, courtier poets during the last decade of Henry VIII's reign, introduced the sonnet into English poetry. In 1567, Arthur Golding translated into English the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid, a storehouse of mythological tales that profoundly influenced Elizabethan writers, including Shakespeare. 12 years later, in 1579, Thomas North translated Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, which Shakespeare used as a source for several of his history plays.

In the second half of the sixteenth century, manuals of rhetoric and dictionaries began to appear, testifying to a new awareness of the power of language. Before the Renaissance came to an end, a rich variety of literary forms had taken hold in England, including plays, brief lyrics, satires, epics, travel narratives, sermons, and religious meditations.

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