Edmund Spenser

Matthew Woodcock (University of East Anglia)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.03: English Writing and Culture: Renaissance (Elizabethan and Jacobean periods) , 1485-1625.
Vol. editors: William M. Hamlin (Washington State University), J A Roe (University of York), Virginia Mason Vaughan (Clark University), Ema Vyroubalova (Trinity College Dublin)

Dates

Born c. 1552
Died 1599
Activity 1569-1599

Places

Born in England
Active in England; Ireland, Republic of (Eire)

Activities

Primary

Poet

Other

Colonist
Essayist
Letter-writer/ Diarist

Resources

Spenser's Works

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In his dedication to the 1596 edition of

The Faerie Queene

Edmund Spenser addresses Queen Elizabeth, his ultimate implied reader, claiming that in writing his great poem for her as well as about her he might “live with the eternitie of her fame”. Such a statement now seems prescient, given Spenser's modern canonical status as one of the greatest Elizabethan poets. But the idea that Spenser and Elizabeth should forever be associated by the poet's mythopoeic fashioning obscures Spenser's modest origins and the fact that much of his life was one of service.

An imprecise chronological allusion in sonnet 60 of his sequence Amoretti (published 1595) allows us to date Spenser's birth to between 1552 and 1554. In Prothalamion (1596) he refers to London as his “most kyndly Nurse” though

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3262 words

Citation: Woodcock, Matthew. "Edmund Spenser". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 May 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4171, accessed 22 November 2024.]

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