Edmund 1552-1599 Spenser

Prothalamion; Hymnes; Veue of the Present State of Ireland.—The Prothalamion graced the wedding of two of the Earl of Worcester's daughters, who were married together from Essex house. Though it lacks the glow and sweep of the Epitha lamion, it is, if possible, even more perfect in metre and diction.

The hymns of Heanvenlie Love and Heavenly? Beauty were written in 1596 to propitiate two pious noblewomen and counter act the hymns in Honour of Love and in Honour of Beautie written in his youth. So Spenser avers; but to print the earlier hymns was scarcely the way to ensure their oblivion.

In the Veue of the Present State of Ireland Irenaeus expounds to Eudoxus the causes of the Irish troubles and propounds a cure. Irish laws, customs and religion must all be reformed on the English model. But subjugation must precede reform. Vac illation has been the curse of the Government. Let them now bring over io,000 foot and i,000 horse, plant these in six con venient garrisons, give the rebels 20 days in which to surrender, and then hunt down relentlessly all who stand out. Two winter campaigns will break their spirit. Let a fresh offer of pardon then be made, and rebellion will be at an end. There follows a detailed scheme, supported by statistics, for the administration of the pacified areas, ending with a proposal for the appointment of a lieutenant-general, Essex being clearly indicated. Political antagonism and racial antipathy combined with religious hatred to blind Spenser to the Irish cause.

During this second visit to England Spenser's hopes of prefer ment were centred in the Earl of Essex, but again he sued in vain. He returned to Kilcolman, probably in 1597, and resumed the Faerie Queene. In Sept. 1598 he was recommended for the sheriffdom of Cork. But preferment came too late : in October Tyrone's rebellion had broken out, the Munster Irish rose, Kil colman Castle was burned and Spenser fled with his family to Cork. From Cork he was sent to London with a dispatch which bears date Dec. 9, 1598. Along with it he brought a brief note of his own in which he reiterated the policy of the View. On Jan. 16, 1599 he died. He was buried in Westminster Abbey close to Chaucer; many nobles attended his funeral, and his fellow poets brought elegies which they threw into his grave with the pens that had written them. Spenser's tragic reversal of fortune and sudden death gave rise to a crop of legends. Ben Jonson told

Drummond that one of Spenser's children perished in the flames of Kilcolman Castle and that he himself died "for lack of bread." It is only too likely, after all he had gone through, that Spenser collapsed on reaching London, and was a dying man before his friends could learn of his condition and come to his aid. Two more cantos of the Faerie Queene with two stanzas of a third were published in 1609; if more was written, as is probable, after 1596, it is irrecoverably lost.

The Faerie Queene.

Spenser's place among the great poets depends on the Faerie Queene, a fragment of a great poem which was to have been "disposed," as the title informs us, "into XII. bookes fashioning XII. morall vertues," each virtue embodied in a knight, and the whole designed "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline"—at once a chivalric romance and a handbook of morals and manners; nay more—for Spenser would emulate Virgil as well as Ariosto—a national epic to the glory of England's Elizabeth. Such a threefold cord is not easily twined. Yet the task seemed feasible to Spenser, because to him the eternal war of good and evil, which was his essential theme, was embodied in the struggle of Protestant England against her Catholic foes. Book I. indeed may be read not in consistently either as a mere romance, or as the spiritual experi ence of an elect Christian, or as a history of the English Church in the sixteenth century. But in Book II. the story stands still for nearly two whole cantos; the tale of Hellenore in Book III. is told with a gusto ill calculated to fashion a gentleman in vir tuous discipline; in Book IV. the poet grows so careless of his characters that he lets the long-parted lovers come together with out recognizing one another; the recent history of Book V. has little allegorical or romantic interest; and Book VI. ends in a burst of sheer pastoralism in which the poet forgets his allegory as completely as the hero forgets his quest. Only Spenser's con temporaries could fully appreciate the historical element, and some of it even to them can only have had the interest of a roman a clef; yet it strengthens the texture of the poem, and gives figures like Arthegall and Satyrane some firmness of outline.