Edmund Spenser: his political career and writings

[fatema_diu]

His personal life influenced his career a lot. In ‘Mother Hubbard’s Tale” he laments the situation of England’s court which he witnessed while visiting the court with Leicester for the very first time. His job in Kilcolman helped him to write his first prose work regarding the control of rebellious people. Here at this point I find him unmatchable to his literary career. A man who can write Shepherd’s Calendar, a melancholy for Rosalind cannot write on violent controlling of people. But as they job demanded him he had to write on it. Moreover, writing to praise the queen: can it be seen as a tool to get rid of the job at Kilcolman? But as we know from history that it is somebody else, probably Raleigh, that took him before the queen to search out for him the honor he is supposed to get for his writing. The main point is that he was not that happy at the estate at the earlier stage (of 16 years) in his life but later when he grew interested in an Irish girl, only then he got back his interest working there. Out of his love for that Irish girl, he wrote: ‘Amoretti’ and few Hymns (Epithalamion).
To summarize, all the major changes in his life influenced his literature. But the literary freedom is bound to be restricted only in the case of Kilcolman (View of The state of Ireland) where he had to be somebody else other than his own self.

[Afroza Akhter Tina]

The Shepherd's Calendar

This work, consisting of 12 pastoral eclogues, uses the pastoral conventions as vehicles of allegorical and satirical allusions to contemporary political and religious problems, as well as to the poet's own life and loves. Spenser in this work shows the influence of such classical and foreign models as Virgil, Jacopo Sannazaro, and Clément Marot, but he also acknowledges a considerable debt to Geoffrey Chaucer and to other English sources. The work is especially important for its naturalization in English of a variety of poetic forms—dirges, complaints, paeans—and for its attempt to enrich the English poetic vocabulary through foreign borrowings and through the use of archaic and dialect words.

Allusions and letters from this period of Spenser's life show that he was busy with a variety of literary projects. Spenser was already at work on The Faerie Queene and on a number of the poems eventually collected in his Complaints. Meanwhile, he was also studying law and hoping for a place in diplomacy or civil service. His efforts were rewarded in 1580, when, through the influence of the Earl of Leicester, he was named secretary to Lord Grey, the new lord deputy of Ireland. That same year Spenser accompanied Grey to Dublin.

Ireland was to remain Spenser's home for the rest of his life. Grey was recalled in 1582, but Spenser remained, holding a variety of government posts and participating at first in the cultivated life of Dublin Anglo-Irish society. Increasingly, however, the poet's financial interests and administrative duties took him to Munster (southern Ireland). In 1586 he leased Kilcolman Castle in County Cork, and he lived there after 1588.


Afroza Akhter Tina
Senior Lecturer
Department of English, DIU