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  • Who Knows not Colin Clout?
  • Harold L. Weatherby (bio)
Edmund Spenser: A Life by Andrew Hadfield (Oxford University Press, 2012. Illustrated. xx + 624 pages. $45)

Andrew Hadfield’s Spenser is a remarkable piece of work. Although we know little more about Spenser’s life than we do about Shakespeare’s, Hadfield offers us over 400 pages of convincing detail, not to mention these appendices: “Spenser’s Descendants,” “Portraits of Spenser,” and “Spenser’s Lives” (biographies). If no doubt an exaggeration, it would be a pardonable one to say Hadfield has read everything ever written not only about Spenser but pertinent to him. By a rough count the bibliography lists 300 primary and 1,600 secondary sources, in addition to manuscripts and other unprinted material. Virtually every statement in the text is documented: there are 2,635 end-notes. It is difficult to imagine a more exhaustive examination of a poet’s life.

How is it possible to have said so much—and so much of substance—about a man of whom we know so little? The answer is threefold: by close attention to what Spenser tells us about himself in his work; by reading previous biographies (“Todd, Grosart, Church, Hales, De Selincourt and others”) with a jaundiced eye, “sorting out what are the known pieces of information from false leads”; and then by placing all this “in context.” It is in the reconstruction of that context—social, educational, political, intellectual, ecclesiastical—that Hadfield excels; his wide reading combined with good judgment give us a convincing picture of the various influences bearing on Spenser.

Here are some instances: we have always known that Spenser attended Merchant Taylors’ School, of which Richard Mulcaster was headmaster. Hadfield examines Mulcaster and his education at King’s College, Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1548—the year the famous Greek scholar John Cheke became provost. “Cheke may not have taught Mulcaster … but his insistence on the need for Greek to play a central role in the university curriculum undoubtedly contributed towards Mulcaster’s facility for classical languages.” In turn “Mulcaster’s most important contribution to Spenser’s education was the emphasis he placed on learning languages, most notably Greek.” That Spenser commanded Greek has been contested—despite testimony by his friend Lodowick Bryskett and the frequency of Greek derivatives in the poetry, especially in names carrying symbolic import (Acrasia, George [“man of earth”], and others). Hadfield lays that matter to rest.

The discussion of Spenser’s friendship with Gabriel Harvey and their correspondence is another instance of the importance of context—namely their “shared investment in the humanist educational project”—an investment made possible, incidentally, by the “significant knowledge of Greek” Spenser “acquired … from Mulcaster.” The Wittie, Familiar Letters (1580), the “banter and shared jokes,” hark back to Erasmus, More, and ultimately to “Lucian, the most humorous and witty of Latin authors,” and more immediately to “the jests of [End Page i] Skelton,” from whom Spenser derived his poetic identity as “Colin Clout.” Placing Spenser in such a context allows Hadfield to argue convincingly that he in fact translated the pseudo-Platonic dialogue Axiochus (1592), an attribution long disputed.

Hadfield also finds Harvey and the “humanist project,” the “banter and shared jokes,” in Spenser’s first major poem, The Shepheardes Calender (1579). The result yields convincing solutions to some of the Calender’s mysteries, among them E. K.’s commentaries. In his gloss on the September eclogue, E. K. “discovers” that Hobbinol represents Harvey, and he proceeds with a list of Harvey’s “rare and very notable writings.” The “comment surely cannot be serious,” says Hadfield: “if he knows this much about Harvey then how could he possibly only have realized at this late stage [three-fourths through the Calender’s year] that Hobbinol was Harvey?” Instead “the purpose is to provide a list of Harvey’s poetic achievements, a rhetorical ploy … [an] elaborate joke.” E. K. may be, as some think, Edward Kirk (a friend), but probably “Harvey and Spenser wrote the notes—with the help of the relatively anonymous Kirk.” “The Calender was a promotional vehicle for Harvey as well as Spenser.” Hadfield also uses context to argue convincingly that Rosalind, Colin’s beloved...

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