Spenser's Audiences, 1589-91

This essay speculates about a crucial period in Spenser's life, the roughly eighteen months from October 1589 through February 1591, during which he first returned to England after nine years in Ireland. In December of 1589 Ponsonby entered The Faerie Queene on the Stationer's Register, and Spenser stayed in England (with a possible short return trip to Ireland on legal business) for another fourteen months. During his stay, sponsored by Sir Walter Ralegh, he gained one or more audiences with the queen and read to her from his poetry. About a year after the publication of The Faerie Queene Ponsonby published a new collection of Spenser's poetry, the Complaints, and shortly after, in the month that Spenser left England, the queen granted him an annual pension of £50. From our distance this period would seem to represent the culmination of Spenser's hopes as a poet. He had fulfilled the Virgilian promise of The Shepheardes Calender by producing an epic, gained the queen's attention, and received what was surely the largest reward she was ever to give for a poem. Yet I will contend that Spenser saw his stay as a failure, largely because of his own exalted sense of his role as a poet.

Twenty years ago Richard Helgerson argued that Spenser developed a new conception of this role.¹ In opposition to the prevailing opinion that associated poetry with misguided youth and illicit pleasure, Spenser saw it as conferring a great-indeed a national-importance on its principal practitioners. Unlike the "amateurs" like Ralegh for whom poetry was primarily a gentlemanly way of showing ability, and the "professionals" like Shakespeare for whom it was a means of gaining bread, Spenser saw himself as a "laureate" poet with the patriotic importance of a Virgil. Laureates resembled amateurs, Helgerson argued, in believing that "they could fulfill themselves and display their gentility only in the active service of the commonwealth." The two groups differ, however, "in how they hoped to accomplish that service, the amateurs as churchmen and statesmen, the laureates as poets."² Helgerson's laureate category has been justifiably influential in enabling us to place Spenser and others in relation to the literary systems in which they worked. But in emphasizing how revolutionary the idea of the poet's laureate status is, Helgerson drew an unrealistic line between the work of poetry and the work of government. Two of his three main examples, Spenser and Milton, spent significant portions of their adult lives in the political service of the commonwealth, and only Jonson contributed to the nation by poetry alone. Although the idea of a life of pure contemplation and poetic production is a nostalgic dream in book 6 of The Faerie Queene, it was never for Spenser a real option. Indeed, it was potentially a misuse of one's gifts. For Spenser, men of "learning" (whom he never clearly distinguishes from poets) have special knowledge of the historical past and of ideal values that makes them fit to advise princes. The epic poet is supremely qualified to serve as a royal counselor.³

This aspiration may seem to us a fantasy, but for all the anti-poetic sentiment that recent scholarship has documented, it was a fantasy encouraged by one tradition in Spenser's culture.⁴ Humanist writers often speak of the importance of learning for courtiership, and in an age when Latin was often the language of diplomacy, the usefulness of humanists as ambassadors was obvious.⁵ The posturings of Spenser's friend Gabriel Harvey give a tragi-comic image of that hope, but it is a hope recorded by Erasmus and others. Thomas More imaged it playfully in his Utopia, in which scholars assume positions of importance in the polity, and then embodied it tragically in himself when he became lord chancellor and eventually lost his life.

Spenser had a vision of his proper "place" in 1589 when he left Ireland with Sir Walter Ralegh and journeyed to the English court: he would become the queen's poet and one of her advisors. At first his dream may...