Author: SPENSER, Edmund
Biography:
SPENSER, Edmund (c. 1552-99: ODNB)
The writings of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser were often imitated in the period covered by this bibliography. His name appears here as an author because two anonymous blank verse versions of portions of his The Faerie Queene were published in 1774 and 1783. The same author was responsible for both works but he (or, less likely, she) remains unidentified. Nothing is known for certain about Spenser’s origins but he was probably born in London in 1552 to John and Elizabeth Spenser. He attended Merchant Taylors’ school and matriculated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, as a sizar on 20 May 1569 (BA 1573, MA 1576). It was in the 1570s that he began seriously composing original verse and The Shepheardes Calendar was first published in 1579, the same year that he married Maccabaeus Childe at St. Margaret’s, Westminster. They had two children before her death in about 1593. In 1594 in Ireland he married Elizabeth Boyle; they had one child, a son. The second marriage was the occasion for his sonnet sequence Amoretti and a marriage hymn, Epithalamion (1595). He had moved to Ireland in 1580 as secretary to Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, lord deputy of Ireland. Spenser remained in Ireland, working as a government official, after Lord Grey’s departure in 1582. He purchased the large estate of Kilcolman in county Cork in 1586. Although he returned to England in 1589 when The Faerie Queene was first published (second edition 1596), he continued living and working in Ireland. His View of the Present State of Ireland—a controversial prose work that promotes “plantation” as a means of controlling the indigenous Irish population—was probably written in 1596 but not published until 1633. Spenser was in London when he died in Westminster on 13 Jan. 1599 and he was buried in Westminster Abbey on 16 Jan., in what is now known as Poets’ Corner. (ODNB 9 May 2025; Spenser Encyclopedia Online) SR
Other Names:
- Spenser