The Seventeenth-Century Lives of Edmund Spenser

Abstract

PUBLICATION of the first three books of Faerie Queene in 1590 .made Spenser famous. Four days after his death John Chamberlain referred to him as principal poet, and Camden a year or so later as easily the leading English poet of our time.' He continued to be admired throughout the seventeenth century. Says Professor Osgood: steadiness of appreciation from his first signal performance, and in absence of strong disapproval at any time, he seems to be distinguished above all other English poets.2 In his Reference Guide to Ednmnd under the heading The Chief Lives of Spenser, the late Professor Carpenter listed thirty-seven lives, nine of which belong to the seventeenth century. Only by courtesy can some of these brief seventeenth-century accounts of Spenser be called lives, and no one of them compares even remotely with the best that the century could offer in biography. But since they constitute what was generally known and said about Spenser during the hundred years after his death, they deserve our close scrutiny. It will be the aim of this paper to reexamine the seventeenth-century lives,3 weigh their worth, and finally consider why a poet who attained eminence long before his death should have been accorded nothing better in the way of biography. It is appropriate that our first notices of Spenser are from the pen of Spenser's great contemporary, the historian and antiquary William Camden. Spenser and Camden admired one another-in Ruines of Time Spenser praises Camden for his just labors in