Edmund Spenser

About this book

This book, the first comprehensive introduction to Spenser's work since 1963, places his epic, The Faerie Queene, in the context of his shorter works and gives those works extended treatment. Aside from his epic, Spenser wrote in nearly every nondramatic genre available to Elizabethan poets - eclogue book, complaint, satire, mythological narrative, pastoral elegy, sonnet sequence, marriage poem, mythological hymn. While showing himself capable from the first, in The Shepheardes Calender, of dazzling generic experimentation, that experimentation continued and deepened during his life, especially in the two genres of pastoral and complaint. This study discusses the generic traditions he inherits and suggests how his poetry extends and criticizes those traditions. The book also treats Spenser's imaginative revision of his experience in his later poetry, in which he stages himself in various roles and creates an ongoing fictional biography. In doing so it traces Spenser's ambivalence toward the court of Elizabeth I - a court he hoped to rise in as a young man, needed to depend on as an English landowner in Ireland, and continued throughout his life to distrust. Author William Oram argues that this ambivalence derives partly from his view of his poetic vocation. As a prophetic poet he saw himself as the court's moral center; yet he remarks angrily, and repeatedly, that the court views him as no more than another entertainer whose function is "to please.". Edmund Spenser prefaces the discussion of Spenser's works with a biographical chapter and follows it with a brief account of Spenser's influence. Oram argues that "Spenser changed significantly in method and emphasis over the twenty-odd years of his poetic career." Accordingly he treats Spenser's works in the order that they were published and divides The Faerie Queene into its two halves, setting each in the context of related shorter poems. This prodigious monograph will serve as a resource for understanding all of Spenser's poetic works, providing readers with points of departure as well as firm grounding for continuing interpretation.