Edmund Spenser
A Life
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Edmund Spenser's innovative poetic works have a central place in the canon of English literature. Yet he is remembered as a morally flawed, self-interested sycophant; complicit in England's ruthless colonisation of Ireland; in Karl Marx's words, 'Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet'-- a man on the make who aspired to be at court and who was prepared to exploit the Irish to get what he wanted.
In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the poet for 60 years, Andrew Hadfield finds a more complex and subtle Spenser. How did a man who seemed destined to become a priest or a don become embroiled in politics? If he was intent on social climbing, why was he so astonishingly rude to the good and the great - Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester, Sir Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I and James VI? Why was he more at home with 'the middling sort' -- writers, publishers and printers, bureaucrats, soldiers, academics, secretaries, and clergymen -- than with the mighty and the powerful? How did the appalling slaughter he witnessed in Ireland impact on his imaginative powers? How did his marriage and family life shape his work?
Spenser's brilliant writing has always challenged our preconceptions. So too, Hadfield shows, does the contradictory relationship between his between life and his art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The last biography of Edmund Spenser (1554 1599), author of The Faerie \tQueene, was issued in 1945. It is probable that no one will have to write another after this one from Hadfield (Shakespeare and Republicanism), a professor of English at the University of Sussex, who includes a whopping 2,500 endnotes in addition to 60-plus pages of bibliography as part of his record. Considering the skimpiness of documentary evidence, such levels of scholarship are impressive. The most visual of Elizabethan poets, Spenser is a highly stylized innovator whose ornate versification and influence have been left largely behind by modernist and postmodernist sensibilities. Hadfield, who previously has published on Spenser's crucial years in Ireland, makes a case for the centrality of Spenser's work while setting the record straight on his colonialist ambitions. Meticulous and slow to publish in an era in which life expectancy was only 35 years, and 10 years Shakespeare's senior, Spenser bent the course of English literature by establishing pentameter versification. Although marred slightly by a sprinkling of odd repetitions, even the most serious readers will learn more than they might imagine about a colorful, seminal era. Illus.
