Spenser's life and career

Abstract

'Who knowes not Colin Clout ?' asks The Faerie Queene (1596), nodding to the renown of its own author and his poetic alter ego. As posed here, near the conclusion of what was to be the final book of Spenser's epic and the greatest poetic achievement of the sixteenth century, this is surely meant as a rhetorical question. But rhetorical in what way exactly? Does the remark bespeak the bravado of ambition realised, of a career successfully accomplished? Or is it a presage of fame, pointing towards a horizon of celebrity and its rewards: that is, an aspiration not quite yet, but perhaps now at last about to be attained? Or does the rhetorical cast of the query - embedded in the poem's narrative as a parenthetical aside: 'Poor Colin Clout (who knowes not Colin Clout ?)' (VI, X, 16)1 - mask a more fraught gesture of selfpromotion, one borne of the concern that there may indeed still be those who know not Colin Clout, or, in any event, have yet to prize 'Poor Colin' according to his real worth? What does it mean, we should further inquire, that Spenser does not proffer this question from a secure position within or even near Elizabeth's court, the putative epicentre of the courtly values and virtues his nationalistic epic celebrates, and, as a cynosure of elite cultural activity, the seemingly natural home for a poet who presents himself as the nation's laureate? Instead, Spenser's query issues from the outposts of the kingdom, from the 'wilds' of Ireland, where he spent most of the last twenty years of his life pursuing, in tandem with his poetic career, another career as a colonial official and a planter.