Introduction

Abstract

Edmund Spenser hated William Cecil, Lord Burghley, but if his brazen attacks upon Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer have been long acknowledged, they have never been adequately explained or received the close attention that they deserve. Spenser criticized and insulted Burghley in a series of allusions published in 1591 and 1596, and yet the poet accused the great minister himself of starting the conflict through an unmerited disapproval of his work. The most vicious of Spenser’s attacks, two works from the Complaints anthology of 1591, lampooned Burghley as a malicious, Machiavellian fox who steals the crown of his sovereign to aid the prospects of his ‘cubs’ (MHT 1151), a swipe at the rising figure of his son Robert Cecil. The brilliantly venomous content of these poems provoked an act of state-sponsored censorship, an action long suspected, but now confirmed by recently discovered contemporary evidence.2 The unsold copies of the Complaints volume were confiscated by government authority, and the offending remarks would not be reprinted in Spenser’s folio Works until the death of Robert Cecil in 1612. Perhaps surprisingly, then, Spenser’s war of words against Burghley throughout the 1590s has generated little sustained interest, primarily because no study has yet examined or situated the relevant texts in which Spenser first provoked the Lord Treasurer’s displeasure or those in which he took aim at the minister as the epitome of a corrupt, self-serving English court.