Richard A. McCabe

“O pierlesse Poesye, where is then thy place?”: Locating Patronage in Spenser

“O pierlesse Poesye, where is then thy place?”: As Piers’s despairing question indicates, Spenser’s concern with patronage stretches beyond the customary “topoi” of his paratexts to inform the topography of the verse through which he seeks it. As he proceeds from genre to genre, the geographical dislocation of his speakers figures the cultural displacement of his craft. In terms of the authorial careers he lived and fabricated—the distinct yet inextricably related careers of Edmund Spenser and Colin Clout—“place” is of crucial thematic significance to “authority,” whether it be Leicester House, Kilcolman Castle, Essex House, Mount Acidale, or the “courts” of Cynthia and Mercilla (and it is arguable whether the former three are any less fictive than the latter). Beginning with an analysis of the “place” of poetry in the pastoral landscape of The Shepheardes Calender, this article examines its various inflections through the genera that followed. Relegated to the allegedly “salvage” terrain of the Gaelic bards, Spenser creates landscapes that both attest to, and simultaneously resist, his fear of cultural assimilation. But the wish to live in fairyland, expressed in the proem to the sixth book of The Faerie Queene, concedes poetry’s inability to fashion a patronal culture worthy of heroic verse, and necessitates the adoption of an Ovidian poetics paradoxically centered on the displaced self and the “designer” wilderness it inhabits.

Patronage, gentility, and “base degree”: Edmund Spenser and Lord Burghley

ABSTRACT This essay examines the social asymmetry of Early Modern patronage by focussing on Edmund Spenser’s complex relationship with Lord Burghley. Both were anxious to validate their social credentials, the one as novus homo, and other as novus poeta. Burghley sought to offset criticism of his rise by consolidating a reputation for public service with claims of illustrious ancestry, and scores of dedicators obliged. Spenser was anxious to claim the status of gentleman through talent despite his obscure origins. In appending a dedicatory sonnet to Burghley in the 1590 Faerie Queene he endorses his public image in the hope of reciprocal acknowledgement. Apparently disappointed, he responds in Complaints (1591) by presenting Burghley as a mercenary parvenu, while for the first time claiming kinship to the “ancient” house of the Spencers of Althorp, thereby reversing the social hierarchy but problematizing his own criteria for gentility.

Spenser, Plato, and the Poetics of State

Focusing on Spenser’s response to Plato’s controversial expulsion of the poets from his Republic, this essay analyzes the many contradictions arising from the poet’s simultaneous call for political censorship of the Irish Bards and vigorous defense of his own work against the apparent opposition of Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s chief officer of state. The disquieting similarity between the accusations allegedly leveled against Spenser by Burghley, and those that Spenser in turn levels against the Bards, is used to illustrate the complexity of the debate on artistic liberty and political control that Plato initiated in the Republic. The essay argues that all of the publications and compositions of 1596—the second installment of The Faerie Queene, the Fowre Hymnes, Prothalamion, and the manuscript of A View of the Present State of Ireland—engage in a concerted act of authorial self-assessment and self-exculpation designed to reclaim the “laureate” status that Spenser was seen by some to have forfeited through the calling in of his Complaints in 1591. In particular, the Fowre Hymnes and Prothalamion (being designed as examples of the two genres of poetry allowed by Plato) are interpreted as mounting a defense not merely of the moral and political value of Spenser’s own verse but of the poetic art generally.