Edmund 1552-1599 Spenser

It was at this juncture apparently that Spenser drew his pen. He had begun a fabliau of an ape and a fox, satirising the Parson Trullibers and other humbugs of the day. Now, catching at Elizabeth's trick of animal nick-names, he brought his ape and fox to a court of beasts. The ape becomes Alencon-Simier, the fox is Burghley, who was believed to favour the marriage. Their misrule when they have stolen the lion's skin foreshadows the fate of England under a French king-consort. But Spenser misjudged the situation. Leicester had concluded that the wind stood fair for France, and trimmed his sails accordingly. Spenser was snubbed, and the satire, which was circulating in manuscript as Mother Hubberds Tale, was called in, but not before it had come to Burghley's ears. The tale of Spenser's discomfiture is told in Virgils Gnat, killed by the man whose life it had saved. Such is the most plausible explanation of this obscure episode. At all events, abandoning all his projects of publication, Spenser ac cepted a secretaryship to Lord Grey of Wilton, the newly appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland.

In Ireland.

Grey landed in Dublin in Aug. 158o and set himself at once to the task of suppressing Desmond's rebellion. He was a stern Puritan, to whom the pope was Anti-christ and the Papist rebels were traitors at once to God and their queen. Spenser soon had proof of his quality. A band of Spanish and Italian filibusters had landed in Kerry to support the Munster rebels and occupied a fort near Smerwick. Grey marched against them, forced them to surrender unconditionally, held the officers to ransom, and put the men to the sword. Then he ravaged Munster, leaving famine to complete the work. On campaigns Spenser saw "such wretchednesse as that any stonye harte would have rued the same." With Grey's recall in 1582 Spenser lost his secretaryship; but in the previous year he had acquired a clerkship for the faculties (i.e., licences and dispensa tions) in the Dublin chancery; and he had begun to obtain leases of forfeited houses and lands at modest rents which he did not always pay. At one of these houses, New Abbey in Co. Kildare, he seems to have resided occasionally in 1583 and 1584. But his headquarters were still in Dublin. We get a pleasant glimpse of him there in Ludovick Bryskett's Discourse of Civil Life. Bryskett tells us how a distinguished company, including the primate of Armagh, and soldiers like Norreys and St. Leger, met at his cottage near Dublin. Spenser suggested that their host should read them his translation of Giraldi da Cinthio's Discourse of Civill Life; which Bryskett accordingly did. The reading lasted for three days, being interspersed with discussions. On the third day Spenser interposed again, urging (to our astonishment) Aristotelian objections to the immortality of the soul. But Bryskett is simply putting into his mouth the arguments given by Giraldi to Torquato. It is doubtful, indeed, if this famous discussion ever took place at all, for Bryskett imitates Giraldi not only in the substance of his dialogue but in its setting. But if it never actually occurred it must be such as might have occurred.

In 1585 the centre of Spenser's interests began to shift to Munster. In that year he is found acting as deputy to Ludovick Bryskett in the clerkship of the council of Munster. In 1586

he held the prebend of Effin in Co. Limerick; and in that same year, under the Government's scheme for the plantation of Mun ster, he obtained a perpetual lease of Kilcolman Castle in Co. Cork with 3,028 acres of land. His resignation of his clerkship for the faculties in 1588 probably means that he then began to live at Kilcolman, where tradition says that his sister Sarah kept house for him. Here in 1589 he received a momentous visit from Raleigh. He had been engaged on the Faerie Queene intermit tently for nearly ten years, receiving a fresh stimulus from Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, which reached him probably about the time of Lord Grey's recall. By 1589 three books were com pleted. Raleigh at once perceived their superlative merits and carried Spenser off to England to lay his poem at the queen's feet. It was licensed on Dec. 1, 1589 and published in 1590 with a dedication to the queen. Its reception can only be described as reverential. The great English epic so long awaited had appeared.

Spenser remained in England for more than a year, enjoying his fame, making friends with brother-poets, entertained at coun try houses, and acknowledged by his kinswomen of Althorpe, Lady Carey, Lady Strange, and Lady Compton and Mountegle.

But Burghley had not forgiven him ; the substantial preferment for which he hoped was whittled down to a pension of iso a year, and in 1591 he returned to Ireland a disappointed man. Before leaving, he arranged for the publication of some of his minor poems, which appeared in 1591 as Complaints.

Complaints.

Of the Complaints, the Visions of Petrarch and Visions of Bellay are refurbishings of his schoolboy translations.

The Ruines of Rome, a rendering of du Bellay's Antiquitez de Rome, is clearly a juvenile production also. In the same kind, but much superior, is the original Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, in which, from Harvey's remarks, we may fairly recognize a f rag ment of the Dreams of 1580. The Teares of the Muses, men tioned in A Midsummer Night's Dream, V. i. 52, where Theseus dismisses it as "some satire, keen and critical," is an unconvinc ing complaint of the neglect of poetry, more excusable in 158o than in 159o. The Ruines of Time laments various members of the Dudley family, including Sidney and Leicester, who had died in the previous decade: its present form belongs to 159o, but it probably incorporates some material collected for the Latin Stemmata Dudleiana; and the "Pageants" at the end may be another fragment of the Dreams. Mother Hubberds Tale was strengthened by the addition of a brilliant and bitter denuncia tion of the wretchedness of the suitor's state; and Spenser bated no jot of his satire on Burghley. Virgils Gnat, a free rendering of the Culex, has already been described. The one entirely new poem in the volume is Muiopotmos, which clearly belongs to 159o. Its theme recalls Sonnet 71, and may have been suggested simply by the sight of Lady Carey at her drawn-work. In spite of the grim ending the tone is so light-hearted that it seems per verse to read an inner meaning into this "airy trifle," with Burghley as the spider. Yet no reader would have suspected an inner meaning in Virgils Gnat but for the dedication to Leicester.