Hadfield, Andrew. Edmund Spenser: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. xxi + 624 pp. ISBN: 978-0199591022. $45 cloth.

The long-standing absence of an up-to-date biography has done a disservice to Edmund Spenser. As Andrew Hadfield explains,

This lacuna has effectively removed Spenser from most discussions of life writing and political intrigue and patronage, so that he is invariably seen as a remote and unattractive figure, the poet’s poet, or the brutal spokesperson for a savage colonial order in Ireland. (12)

The subject of Hadfield’s outstanding new life of Spenser is self-possessed, but never remote. At crucial moments like the massacre at Smerwick in 1580 or Tyrone’s Rebellion in 1598, Hadfield’s readers may well feel as though they are standing alongside the flesh-and-blood Edmund Spenser, watching events unfold through his troubled eyes. Hadfield’s protagonist also qualifies as an attractive figure, a man who epitomized his mentor Gabriel Harvey’s “ideal of the intellectual in public service” (343), dearly loved his wife, remained faithful to his poetic vocation, stood by his fellow settlers in Ireland through hard times, and “meant to be his own man” (128). Nevertheless, Hadfield is quite candid about the less attractive sides of Spenser’s character: he offers numerous examples of the poet’s “possible sharp practice” in his business dealings (192) and “calculated rudeness” towards his benefactors (235); he presents Lord Roche’s prior claim to Spenser’s Irish estate as “entirely plausible” (204); and he shows that “Spenser must have known that what he described in A View [of the Present State of Ireland] was a serious distortion of the truth” (216).

For Hadfield, the biographer of Spenser has two main tasks to discharge:

The first step is to piece together the surviving bits of information, and to sweep away any false leads, and so uncover the bare bones of Spenser’s life. The second is to work out how the life relates to the work and what each tells us about the other. (12)

Step One commits him to the model of a documentary life. Having canvassed all the pertinent sources—Hadfield doesn’t distract us with false leads—he considers them as they arise during the course of Spenser’s life, sets each bit of information in its context, and arranges the pieces into coherent sequences. The rewards are enormous.

With respect to “the bare bones of Spenser’s life” Hadfield’s book contains, among other things, a chronological itinerary of all the poet’s comings and goings, comprising everything worth knowing about his places of residence, neighbors, travels and travelling companions in England and Ireland; and a full account of his relationships to all of his known mentors, patrons, publishers, and other backers, ranging from grandees like Leicester and Ralegh, to serious players like Jan van der Noot and Bishop John Young, to obscure figures like Nicholas Curtis, the deputy clerk of the Munster Council, who supported Spenser in a letter to Sir Robert Cecil in February 1599. He provides a detailed record of Spenser’s various property transactions in Ireland, including his endless legal battles with Lord Roche; and a complete employment history that tracks Spenser as he acquired, deputized, and discarded the multitude of posts and sinecures that constituted the poet’s lifelong day job after graduating from Cambridge in 1586. Hadfield does not simply make all these facts available; he also presents them in a way that makes the most abstruse technicalities of Spenser’s life records readily intelligible to lay readers. To take just one example, inquiring minds will surely rejoice at the one-page excursion into Irish ecclesiastical history that explains why Spenser “undoubtedly did what he felt he had to do” (192) when he purchased the prebend of Effin for three pounds.

Prior to the appearance of Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) and of the Familiar Letters (1580) that passed between himself and Harvey, Spenser’s life, as Hadfield portrays it, largely consisted of being called into well-stocked patronage networks. His lineage placed him (or so he claimed) on the periphery of a prominent family, the Spencers of Althorp. His famous schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster’s “wide network of connections” put his precocious pupil in contact with “the generation of Protestants who had been exiled under Mary in Geneva and who were directly influenced by Calvin” (33). The young Spenser “obviously did meet” the Dean of St. Paul’s cathedral Alexander Nowell (34), the Biblical translator Miles Coverdale, and the martyrologist John Foxe. Mulcaster in turn “existed as part of a wider circle of international intellectuals”—including the Dutch scholar and statesman Janus Dousa, the man of letters Sir Philip Sidney, the diplomat Daniel Rogers (“among the best connected men in Elizabethan London” [38]), and the Dutch poet Jan van der Noot—many of whom “would prove especially important for Spenser in his early career” (37).

Cambridge University drew Spenser into the orbit of still another group of influential figures. The bulk of this chapter describes the careers of Gabriel Harvey, who “shaped Spenser’s educational experience at Cambridge and afterwards” (63); of Harvey’s mentor and patron Sir Thomas Smith, later Secretary to the second Earl of Essex; and of John Young, the Master of Pembroke College during the seven years the poet resided there. During the “lost years” between his graduation from Cambridge in 1576 and The Shepherd’s Calendar (1579), Spenser’s patronage networks began to produce results in the real world of getting a job. He found employment with Young, the newly consecrated Bishop of Rochester, in 1578, when he became the Bishop’s principal secretary. A year later he joined the household of Sir Thomas Smith’s patron, the Earl of Leicester. Spenser had done the state some service, would do a great deal more in the future, and was now ready to embark on his second career.

Step Two (“how the life relates to the work”) brings Hadfield to the literary biographer’s dark Wood of Error. A major lacuna in documentary lives of early modern writers is the absence of the diaries, intimate letters, first-person utterances, and personal ephemera that afford access to the authorial psyches of their modern counterparts. The easiest way through this empty space is to extrapolate the life from the works; but this gambit always runs the risk of circular logic and unwarranted inference (e.g., “[i]t was often assumed that because he wrote about the queen he must have been a devoted royalist and enjoyed a special relationship with the monarch” [5])—the scandalous essence of Foucault’s “author-function.” Nevertheless, Hadfield reckons that the risk is worth taking, “if we consider how much Spenser represents himself in his writings and how often he urges the reader to read the work in terms of a life behind or beyond the printed page” (12). Apart from his virtuoso translations of Petrarch and Du Bellay in van der Noot’s A Theatre (1567), Spenser wrote no printed pages until his mid-twenties. Hence, Hadfield’s first three chapters must run their course before the reader discovers “how the life relates to the work” in Chapter Four, “Annus Mirabilis.”

Spenser presented his first book of poetry, The Shepheardes Calendar, in the format of a humanist textbook, complete with a critical apparatus in which “the life of the poet is used as a game to promote the poetry, just as the poetry then serves to promote the poet in his life beyond the text” (123). Spenser raised the stakes in this game by “attempting to sever himself from the world of patronage politics and in doing so . . . asserting his independence as a poet” (131). The April eclogue “appears to praise [Queen] Elizabeth, but is actually highly critical of her and fraught with anxiety” (132). The July eclogue “might seem like a tactful representation of [Archbishop] Grindal’s unfortunate fate, but the story is really intensely critical of the queen” (138). The November eclogue “casts Elizabeth as Dido . . . and so further makes the point that England is in serious trouble” (134). The March eclogue “directly insults” Spenser’s patron Leicester with a scornful reference to the earl’s second wife Lettice Knolles (130). The second of Spenser’s published Letters to Harvey further “indicates a pronounced contempt for the authority of the mighty”: “There is a calculated rudeness—or simply tactlessness—in Spenser deciding that he cannot dedicate his poem [the Calendar] to Leicester because it is written in honour of ‘a priuate Personage vnknowne’, so that someone the poet knows personally proves more important to him than a great lord” (128).

For the remainder of Hadfield’s Life, Spenser repeatedly signals that he “meant to be his own man” by disrespecting his patrons and social betters, even, or especially, at moments when he would have been expected to praise them. If Spenser’s formal brilliance and intellectual reach attested to his native talent and stellar education, calculated rudeness was the signature of his distinctive poetic voice. Consider the following examples: in his reading of Spenser’s “‘To the Right Worshipfull, my singular good frend, M. Gabriell Haruey’ there is ‘an undisguised aggression in lines such as those describing Harvey ‘as one careless of suspition / Ne fawnest for the fauour great,’that read as a bitter reflection on his own life in 1586” (190-91). Spenser’s sonnet praising the Earl of Ormond “is craftily evasive, leaving the reader to decide whether Ormond is part of the problem or the solution, helping to establish order amid chaos, or hoarding the land’s goods for himself” (253). The author’s Letter to Ralegh at the end of The Faerie Queene (1590) “probably caused some measure of offence, not least to its addressee” (235). The Faerie Queene itself, although dedicated to the virgin queen, “forcefully remind[s] Elizabeth that she had failed to take her opportunity to marry, and had left her subjects facing an uncertain future” (255). In creating the figure of Faunus, in the Mutabilitie Cantos

Spenser would appear to be saying that he is the one who has seen the queen naked and exposed her as a fraud, unable and unwilling to protect her true subjects from the ravages of time and mutability, a problem exposed most cruelly and dangerously in Ireland. (377)

Last but not least, consider Spenser’s priceless image of the queen peering into his bedroom on his wedding night (“Who is the same, which at my window peepes,” Prothalamion, ll. 372 ff.), in a stanza that can be read as “particularly offensive … designed to provoke the queen” (306).

Hadfield does a masterly job of showing that Spenser gave his patrons cause for offense. Did any of them actually take offense? When Spenser became Secretary to Arthur Grey, Lord Deputy of Ireland, in 1580 Leicester “probably recommended” him for the post (154). When Queen Elizabeth awarded Spenser a life pension of fifty pounds a year after the publication of The Faerie Queene, “[i]t is likely that Ralegh worked hard on Spenser’s behalf, and that his efforts secured the funds from Elizabeth, who was notoriously parsimonious, and only awarded one other pension to a writer” (236). Contemporaries regarded Spenser’s masterpiece as “his booke in the prayse of the Quene” (267) and reckoned that posterity shall “much admire the writer, but farre more the subiect, of the faerie Queene” (294). Even after his biting satire of Lord Burghley in Mother Hubberd’s Tale had “caused a major international scandal in the English- speaking world” (265), “Spenser was held in great esteem in official circles, notwithstanding his past transgressions” (382). When the Queen’s Privy Council nominated him for the post of Sherriff of Cork in 1598, they wrote that he was “so well known unto your Lordships, for his good and commendable parts . . . as wee need not use many words in his behalf” (380).

The fact that Spenser “offended so many important people throughout his life” (313), and got away with it, may indicate “how rapidly disputes could be forgotten within a culture that tried to ensure that reconciliation between opposing parties could take place if at all possible” (292). (For a more pessimistic view of conflict-resolution in Elizabethan aristocratic culture, see Lawrence Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy [1965], pp. 223-234). On the other hand, contemporary readers may have misrecognized Spenser’s provocative speech acts because they just wanted a “booke in the prayse of the Quene” and her court. Such readers were ill equipped to grasp the verbal nuances of a laudatory poet who “was attempting to sever himself from the world of patronage politics.” The protagonist of Hadfield’s biography has a subjective depth that few of Spenser’s contemporaries would have fathomed.

After placing the first half of Spenser’s life in its institutional setting, and establishing the poet’s literary persona, Hadfield tells the fascinating story of a high minded humanist and civil servant who cast his lot with the post-Reformation influx of English settlers in Ireland. Spenser emigrated at a time when “[t]he crown urgently needed to find loyal subjects to occupy the estates of those they had dispossessed and there were rich pickings available for anyone bold enough to risk being a settler” (184). Upon his arrival in 1580, Spenser “behave[ed] as most English settlers in Ireland behaved throughout the early modern period, acquiring land and property cheaply in order to make a quick profit” (184-85). Throughout this process, he subscribed to the ideological construct of a reformed Ireland “populated with English settlers who will be enabled to transform the island to an ordered and prosperous state” and a bulwark against an “aggressive international Catholicism led by Spain and the papacy” (331). At the same time, “Spenser’s desire for an estate underpinned his literary aspirations, the pastoral retreat providing the material base for the epic poetry, though his quest also compromised his lofty ideals, a conflict he clearly understood” (204).

For the first fifteen years, Spenser’s plan met with qualified success. He acquired Kilcolman Castle, where “[t]he Spensers must have had at least a dozen servants to run the household” (325), together with 3,028 acres of Irish land in 1589. His second marriage allied him to the phenomenally wealthy Boyle family of Anglo-Irish gentry. He wrote his epic masterpiece along with many fine shorter poems. He learned Gaelic, steeped himself in Irish folklore and antiquities and even played “the part of a rival Irish bard” (223) in Colin Clout’s Come Home Again (dated 1591; publ. 1596). Nevertheless, Spenser found it hard to secure a place for himself and his family in Ireland. During the 1580’s he led an “itinerant existence serving the powerful in Ireland, constantly on the move, with little time to write and no home” (190). He depended for his safety on the military men whose outlook he adopted as his own. He “spent significant amounts of time and energy fighting his legal battles with Lord Roche” (291), who “had much better access to the queen and her advisers than he did” (204-05). He proved unable to attract a sufficient number of English settlers to farm his Irish lands. Finally, he lived with the knowledge that the native Irish, who still regarded the land as their rightful possession, could rise up and shatter his fortunes at any time.

The outbreak of Tyrone’s Rebellion in 1594 signaled the collapse of Spenser’s prospects in Ireland. Two years later, shortly before insurgents overran the Munster Plantation, his widely circulated A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland made “the argument for spectacular violence” (404) and the extensive use of famine in the subjugation of Ireland. Spenser’s “terrified allegory of ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ in which he imagines the struggle for universal supremacy happening only a few miles from his house” on Arlo Hill also dates from these troubled times (404). The rebels attacked and burned Kilcolman castle soon after October 14, 1598. On December 9 its owner left Cork for London, where he died three weeks later. Spenser, who evidently “was working on a history of ancient Ireland and Irish antiquities” during his final years (340), had come to believe that his adopted country should be “levelled, flattened, and civilized” (341).

Every reader will come away from Hadfield’s Life with an enhanced appreciation of Spenser’s work and of the sheer perseverance with which he went about it. Hadfield’s keen sense of how Spenser interweaves criticism and compliment in his greatest poetry should lay the ghost of Karl Marx’s “arse-kissing poet” (402) for the foreseeable future. The author of The Shepheardes Calendar, Amoretti, and The Faerie Queene surely achieved what Yeats called “Perfection of the Work.” “Perfection of the Life” proved much more elusive in Spenser’s case. Like many gifted storytellers, Hadfield uses irony as a master trope. Spenser’s commendable wish to “be his own man” led him to another country where he literally bought into a settler mentality that compromised his integrity. The lofty goal of a “reformed” Ireland rested on a shaky foundation of political influence and expropriated land. Under duress, Spenser advocated an interim program of harsh measures that would underwrite several centuries of brutal oppression. Instead of trying to resolve these contradictions, Hadfield wisely locates his readers in the midst of them, inviting us to grapple with Spenser’s predicament for ourselves.

David Riggs, Stanford University