How far did Spenser’s horizon extend? In the republic of letters, was he citizen or sojourner?
One measure is how much he absorbed from foreign authors. In 1579, three years after Spenser completed his M.A., Gabriel Harvey addresses him in a letter, teasingly, as ‘my yunge Italianate Seignior and French Monsieur’.[1] His knowledge of French, which Anne Lake Prescott has detailed, was already evident from The Shepheardes Calender (1579); his knowledge of Italian, mapped by Veselin Kostić, was not obvious until The Faerie Queene.[2] If not minute, both had some range. Compared with these, Spenser’s knowledge of German literature was scant. He owned the works – in Latin – of two German poets from the previous generation, Georg Schuler (1508–1560) and Peter Lotz (1528–1560); and he had an English translation of the satire Till Eulenspiegel.[3] His acquaintance with Iberian literature extended to Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra’s Mirror of Princes and Knights, which he read in Margaret Tyler’s translation and used for the House of Busyrane.[4] His knowledge of Dutch literature was similar: it encompassed one author, Jan van der Noot, and that one through a French translation. What of languages closer to home? There are sprinklings in Spenser of Welsh, Irish, and Scots vocabulary. In 2001 Willy Maley suggested that Spenser ‘possibly had a working knowledge of Welsh, Scots and Irish through his use of Celtic sources’.[5] It depends on what you mean by ‘working knowledge’. According to Patricia Palmer, Spenser’s Gaelic ‘borrowings – and borrowed errors – are drawn from the small stock of Irish words circulating among the colonists’.[6] His knowledge of Welsh seems no better.[7] Spenser’s interest in Scotland can be traced as early as The Shepheardes Calender and is harder to assess. Maley complains that ‘Critics have not acknowledged sufficiently the extent to which Spenser was influenced by Scots like George Buchanan’,[8] whom Spenser cites in A View of the Present State of Ireland and who may be the Goat in his May eclogue.[9] But R.D.S. Jack, who wrote an article on the subject for The Spenser Encyclopedia, thought it safer to speak of Scottish antecedents for Spenser than of Scottish sources.[10] Spenser’s most important debt to Caledonian literature was probably the Scottish rhyme scheme of his sonnets.
When did Spenser’s ears open to foreign voices? Spenser’s most recent biographers, Andrew Hadfield and Jean Brink, agree that he was raised in a polyglot environment. In East Smithfield, where Spenser probably grew up, approximately one in five adult males was foreign-born and there was a ‘large number of Dutch and French settlers’.[11] Spenser’s first teacher, Richard Mulcaster, had contacts in both immigrant communities and adapted an episode from Ariosto into a short play, which he made the student perform (though this happened after Spenser graduated).[12] Early biographers picture Spenser as a charity case, but Brink shows that his scholarships at Merchant Taylors’ School were for merit.[13] Evidently Spenser was an exceptional student, which in those days meant being good (or working hard) at languages. Hebrew was considered a classical language and occupied at least a nominal place in the Merchant Taylors’ curriculum. Modern languages had no place but could be learned from books.[14] And learn them he did: by the time Spenser left Merchant Taylors’, he had acquired enough French to translate Du Bellay and enough Italian to correct a French translation of Petrarch. Cambridge didn’t teach modern languages either, but we know from Harvey that Spenser was reading Ariosto and du Bartas and from The Shepheardes Calender that he knew Marot and Ronsard.
After he moved to Ireland, probably in 1580, Spenser continued reading in both languages: Desportes in French, Tasso in Italian.[15] Ireland’s book trade was pitiful compared with London’s, but foreign books did find their way into Dublin libraries.[16] Too much has been made of Spenser’s supposed exile. As Jean Brink reminds us in her new biography, ‘Ireland offered clear advantages to “new” men without inherited estates’: not only were there fortunes to be made, there was also a surprising degree of religious toleration and, consequently, of intellectual diversity.[17] During the Elizabethan period, Ireland was home or host to ‘many of the leading translators of the age’.[18] Some of these, Thomas Drant and Thomas North, translated the classics (Horace and Plutarch, respectively). Many, though, were translating modern authors from the Continent: Lodowick Bryskett (Cinthio), Barnabe Googe (Heresbach), Barnaby Rich (Bandello), Geoffrey Fenton (Bandello), John Harington (Ariosto).
In 1578, when he was still on course for a career in the Church,[19] Spenser gave Harvey a codex for Christmas, Jerome Turler’s The Traveiler…devided into two Bookes. The first conteyning a notable discourse of the maner and order of traveiling oversea, or into strange and forein Countreys. The second comprehending an excellent description of the most delicious Realme of Naples in Italy (1575). If it is true that people give the kind of gift they wish to receive themselves, Spenser probably wanted to see the world. So far as we know, he never did. In 1579, he corresponded with Harvey about a trip to France, which had to be aborted.[20] It’s possible that he went there earlier, carrying letters for the English ambassador,[21] but to the best of our knowledge Spenser ‘never travelled outside the British Isles’.[22] Except in books, he never tasted the delicious realm of Naples or beheld the ‘fayre … buildings’ of Venice, which he praised in a sonnet for the translator Lewis Lewkenor.
Did Spenser feel like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, dreaming of foreign travel but trapped at home? Only if you don’t count Ireland as a foreign country. In the Renaissance, Hibernia was less foreign than Italy, but also more hostile. Naples had its muggers, then as now, but Ireland had guerillas; and Spenser, as a member of the colonial administration, was one of their targets. Intellectually, Ireland was lively,[23] but physically it was dangerous.[24] It was there Spenser wrote his best poems.
Perhaps he would have written similar things if he had remained in England. But there is a documented connection between moving to a foreign country and creativity. Today the world’s foremost authority on genius and creativity is probably Dean Keith Simonton. In addition to his own research on famous artists and scientists, Simonton has also undertaken a number of meta-studies, collating the work of other researchers. In one of these, ‘Diversifying Experiences in the Development of Genius and their Impact on Creative Cognition’, Simonton and co-author Rodica Ioana Damian conclude that ‘The most common experiences among eminent geniuses are being an immigrant (or having some kind of minority status) and having some degree of familial unpredictability, that is, being less likely to grow up in stable, intact, majority-culture families’.[25] We know little of Spenser’s family, and we don’t usually apply the word ‘immigrant’ to members of a military occupation force. The important thing, however, is not the label but the experience, which (Damian and Simonton theorize) has the effect of forcing the mind into fresh woods and pastures new. In Spenser’s case, the effect would have been offset by his disdain for indigenous Irish culture.[26] As much as we like the epic that Spenser did write, it’s hard not to think what he might have written if he’d been more receptive. But while The Faerie Queene might have failed of some greatness, one thing it never became, brackish.[27] For that we have, in part, immigration to thank.
It would be edifying to stop there. But the questions we started with – how far did Spenser’s horizon extend? in the republic of letters, was he citizen or sojourner? – have only been partially answered. If we focus on the first question – what could Spenser see, with his London and Cambridge education, from his tower at Kilcolman Castle? – the answer is ‘Not everything, but a lot’. The second question, though, is more than a restatement of the first. To be a citizen of the republic of letters, it’s not enough to know certain things: you also have to be known outside of your own country.
‘Who knows not Colin Clout?’ Within Britain and Ireland, that question has meaning: it can register as bragging, self-mockery, or both in turn. But outside, the joke is a riddle. Imagine how Montaigne or Marino would have reacted: ‘Who is this Colin Clout that he thinks I should know him?’ The contrast between Spenser’s national renown and his obscurity on the Continent says as much about the status of England and English as it does about Spenser. But it’s telling about the poet, too. Within England, Spenser was praised during his lifetime as the ‘prince of poets’, a modern Virgil. But without? For early references to Spenser in authors connected with Britain and Ireland, we have the Spenser allusion books.[28] For references in foreign authors, we have to look harder. The earliest I have found so far dates from 1632. It is a brief, even fleeting notice in a Latin work titled Nature’s Constancy; or A treatise [diatribe] in which it is shown, by comparison of latter times with former, that the world has not gone downhill [in pejus ruere], everywhere and at all times, either in whole or in part. The reference to Spenser occurs in a chapter proving that the modern world lacks for nothing in the way of arts and languages: ‘On the contrary we had, in the last century, both Ronsard and Buchanan, who can stand comparison with Homer and Virgil, not to mention Bartas, who wrote surpassingly in French, Torquato Tasso in Italian, Spencer in English, Kochanowski in Polish, and Opitz in German (who is still alive)’.[29] The author, Jan Jonston (1603–1675), was a naturalist from Poland – which could mean that, three decades after his death, Spenser’s reputation had already travelled to eastern Europe. The book, though, was published in Amsterdam, not Krakow. Though born in Poland, Jonston had a Scottish father and attended the University of St. Andrews in Fife. Later he studied botany and earned an M.D. (his second) at Cambridge. That’s probably where he learned Spenser’s name. It says something for Spenser (and for Cambridge) that his alma mater probably bragged about him to a foreigner. It doesn’t establish, though, Spenser’s membership in the republic of letters. By definition, the republic was transnational. To be a citizen, your reputation had to cross national boundaries. Spenser’s did not: not during his lifetime and not for decades after his death (though how many is still unclear).
If Spenser wasn’t a citizen, who was? The obvious comparison is with Philip Sidney, who had European correspondents and his portrait painted by Veronese.[30] But Sidney was a diplomat and MP, with property in Florida the size of Connecticut.[31] His entrée to European salons was due as much to his pedigree and personal charm as to his literary accomplishments. A better comparison is with the poet Jonston ranked with Ronsard, George Buchanan (1506–1582). Like Jonston’s father, Buchanan was a Scot. Unlike Spenser, his reputation was international. The tutor of Montaigne, he could name as friends Theodore Beza, Guillaume Budé, Henri Estienne, Adrian Turnèbe, Julius Caesar Scaliger, and his son Joseph Scaliger. Unlike Sidney, Buchanan was not an aristocrat. He grew up poor, but he had a rich uncle who sent him to the University of Paris, where for two years he practised composing Latin verse. Buchanan has been on Spenserians’ radar for a while because of his history of Scotland, which Spenser cites in A View; because of his role in deposing Mary, Queen of Scots (whom he also tutored, along with her son, the future king); and because he espoused limited, constitutional monarchy. But he was also famous in Europe for his Latin elegies, odes, epitaphs, epigrams, satires, and, above all, psalm paraphrases.[32] Sidney praised Buchanan in the Apologie as one of modern poetry’s ‘piercing wits’: a reference, probably, to his epigrams and satires. Joseph Scaliger said that Buchanan was making Scotland, which had been the frontier of Roman empire, the finish line of Roman style.[33] Henri Estienne called him ‘easily the foremost poet of our time’. Admittedly, Estienne was Buchanan’s publisher. But he was also a scholar in his own right: Estienne’s Greek lexicon (1572) was standard for centuries after his death; and ‘Stephanus numbers’, which refer to the page numbers of his Plato edition (1578), are still in use whenever Plato is cited. Like Scaliger, Estienne and Buchanan were bona fide citizens of the respublica litterarum. Not only did they know things; they were known themselves. Compared with them, Spenser was (at best) a resident alien.
That doesn’t mean Buchanan was the better poet. During their lifetimes he was more famous in Europe, not only than Spenser, but also Shakespeare. Today, Spenser and Shakespeare have readers in China, Korea, and Japan, whereas Buchanan is unknown except to specialists. Sic transit gloria.
David Scott Wilson-Okamura
East Carolina University
[1] Letter-book of Gabriel Harvey, A.D. 1573-1580, ed. Edward John Long Scott (London: Camden, 1884), p. 65.
[2] See Veselin Kostić, Spenser’s Sources in Italian Poetry: A Study in Comparative Literature (Belgrade: Filološki fakultet Beogradskog univerziteta, 1969), and Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Spenser’s French Connection’, in Edmund Spenser in Context, ed. Andrew Escobedo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 264–72, which includes bibliography in n. 1.
[3] Lee Piepho, ‘The Shepheardes Calender and Neo-Latin Pastoral: A Book Newly Discovered to Have Been Owned by Spenser’, Spenser Studies 16 (2002): 77–104; and Piepho, ‘Edmund Spenser and Neo-Latin Literature: An Autograph Manuscript on Petrus Lotichius and His Poetry’, Studies in Philology 100 (2003): 123–34.
[4] Dorothy F. Atkinson, ‘Busirane’s Castle and Artidon’s Cave’, MLQ 1 (1942): 185–92.
[5] Willy Maley, ‘Spenser’s Languages: Writing in the Ruins of English’, in The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 162–79 (p. 169).
[6] Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 79.
[7] ‘There is no reason to suppose that Spenser understood Welsh, in spite of the presence of two Welsh phrases … at II x 24.’ John Buxton, “Wales,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), pp. 725–26, at 725.
[8] Willy Maley, ‘Spenser’s Languages’, p. 168.
[9] Paul E. McLane, ‘James VI in the Shepheardes Calender’, Huntington Library Quarterly 16 (1952): 273–85.
[10] R.D.S. Jack, ‘Scottish antecedents’, in Hamilton (ed.), Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 633–34.
[11] Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 23, 25.
[12] Jean R. Brink, The Early Spenser, 1554–80: “Minde on honour fixed” (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), pp. 43–44.
[13] Brink, Early Spenser, ch. 1.
[14] Jason Lawrence, “Who the devil taught thee so much Italian?” Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), ch. 1.
[15] See David Wilson-Okamura, ‘When Did Spenser Read Tasso?’, Spenser Studies 23 (2008): 277–82.
[16] On the book trade in Elizabethan Ireland, see Raymond Gillespie, Reading Ireland: Print, Reading and Social Change in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), ch. 3; and idem, ‘Print Culture, 1550–1700’, in The Irish Book in English, 1550–1800, ed. Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 17–33(pp. 18–20).
[17] Brink, Early Spenser, p. 200.
[18] Palmer, Language and Conquest, p. 111. See further Willy Maley, ‘Spenser’s Irish Circle’, in Escobedo (ed.), Spenser in Context, pp. 83–89.
[19] See Brink, Early Spenser, chs. 2–4.
[20] Hadfield, Life, p. 101.
[21] Hadfield, Life, p. 66–67.
[22] Hadfield, Life, p. 105.
[23] Hadfield, Life, pp. 197–198.
[24] In addition to Maley and Hadfield, cited above, see Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and two essay collections edited by Thomas Herron and archaeologist Michael Potterton: Ireland in the Renaissance, c. 1540–1660 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007) and Dublin and the Pale in the Renaissance, c. 1540–1660 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2012).
[25] Rodica Ioana Damian and Dean Keith Simonton, ‘Diversifying Experiences in the Development of Genius and their Impact on Creative Cognition’, in The Wiley Handbook of Genius, ed. Dean Keith Simonton (New York: Wiley, 2014), ch. 18 (p. 380).
[26] On Spenser’s indifference and incomprehension, see McCabe, Monstrous Regiment.
[27] On the evolving richness of Spenser’s epic, see Lauren Silberman, Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 2–3 et passim; and my Spenser’s International Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 196–211.
[28] William Wells (ed.), Spenser Allusions in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971–72); and Jackson C. Boswell, Spenser Allusions in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Addenda (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
[29] Joannes Jonstonus, Naturae constantia (Amsterdam, 1632), 5.3.5 (p. 78). Boswell, Allusions, p. 420 quotes from a 1657 translation but misidentifies the source.
[30] On Sidney’s international contacts, see Robert Stillman, Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), and Roger Kuin, ‘Princes and Long Days on Horseback: Philip Sidney and the Holy Roman Empire’, forthcoming in Renaissance Quarterly.
[31] Roger Kuin, ‘Ou-topia or, the Road Not Taken: Florida, Its Narratives, and Sir Philip Sidney’, Sidney Journal 36.2 (2018): 93–101.
[32] On Buchanan’s literary achievement and reputation, see George Buchanan: Poet and Dramatist, ed. Philip Ford and Roger P. H. Green (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2009).
[33] On Scaliger’s epigram and his incongruous friendship with Buchanan, see P. Hume Brown, George Buchanan, Humanist and Reformer: A Biography (Edinburgh, Douglas, 1890), pp. 113–115.
51.1.2
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