Nine Lives (of the Poets): Donne!

Our book today - the final instalment in this latest, surprisingly popular "Nine Lives" segment - is John Carey's elegant, humorous, and joyously insightful 1981 book John Donne: Life, Mind and Art. Donne can be about as difficult and abstruse a poet as ever put quill-pen to paper, and one unfortunate result of this has been that most of the books written about him have been at least equally difficult and ever so much less rewardingly abstruse. Born in 1572 to a prosperous London merchant family, Donne was a full-blooded courtier and man of action before he was a Doctor of Divinity, and although he himself came to draw a too-neat distinction between those two halves of his life - begging friends of "Dr. Donne" to forget they ever knew "Jack Donne" - they blended exuberantly in his work, as Carey is quick to point out in his study. He's also quick to locate faith - whether the Catholic faith into which he was born or the Protestant faith to which he converted - at the heart of Donne's story:

The disadvantage of being a Catholic in Elizabethan England are difficult to generalize about. On the one hand, as the careers of Donne's father and stepfather suggest, it was possible, if you were sufficiently circumspect or well-connected, to prosper. On the other hand, you might end up having your intestines torn out.

... and also at the heart of his psychology, by describing the mental aftershocks of growing up on such a knife-edge:

Donne's fastidious withdrawal from the great mass of English people is reflected, too, in the style of his poems. Superior, difficult, designed for circulation among a few kindred spirits, they make no concessions to the barbarous clods and half-wits he had the ill luck to be living among.

But the deepest pleasure of Carey's book comes in the way he continually grapples with this most problematic and rewarding of English poets (who's the subject of one of the single most intellectually thrilling essays Open Letters has ever published, which you can read here). Page after page is filled with happy discoveries:

He handles holy things so as to cauterize himself. Elaborate blasphemies are also incorporated into the love poems, as if it were not merely Catholicism but Christianity that Donne had to cure himself of. When he proclaims that his love can be expressed only by negatives, or compares the naked woman in 'Going to Bed' with 'soules unbodied', he is ingeniously perverting what St. Thomas in the Summa Theologica had written about God's nature and the joys of the blessed.

Carey is also excellent in his poem-by-poem defense of the man's genius. Take for example his comments about 'A Hymne to Christ at the Authors last going into Germany' a poem Donne wrote about accompanying Lord Doncaster on an official embassy from James I to the German princes. After noting that some scholars have criticized Donne's veracity (he was travelling in splendor and relative ease, not roughing it in an open boat), Carey is appropriately tart: "... we have only to read the poem," he tells us, "to see that Donne's self-dramatizing urge has produced something so fraught with power that it would be absurd to demand, in its stead, a more realistic estimate of the risks involved." What's going on here is far deeper:

Donne does not so much falsify as master reality, taking one or two fragments as his stage set, and discarding the rest. All the actual circumstances of the embassy are obliterated. The rich coachloads, and the ambassador to whose suite Donne was a relatively minor appendage, vanish without a trace. We are left with Donne looming tragic and solitary above a vessel which seems on the point of disappearing as well. ... The struggle between the ambitious careerist and the lofty scorner of the world's rewards is, in this poem, quite naked.

As in so much of Donne's verse, no matter how clear the ultimate victory in such a struggle might be, there's a pausing, darker note of ambiguity pulling at the strings of its pattern:

In what torne ship soever I embarke,

That ship shall be my embleme of thy Arke;

What sea soever swallow me, that flood

Shall be to mee an embleme of thy blood;

Though thou with clouds of anger do disguise

Thy face; yet through that maske I know those eyes,

Which, though they turn away sometimes,

They never will despise.

Seale then this bill of my Divorce to All

On whom those fainter beames of love did fall;

Marry those loves, which in youth scattered bee

On Fame, Wit, Hopes (false mistresses) to thee.

Churches are best for Prayer, that have least light:

To see God only, I goe out of sight:

And to scape stormy dayes, I chuse

An everlasting light.

Many straightforward biographies of Donne have been written (some more effective than others, as I've had occasion to learn over and over again), but to my mind, the best kind of such work will be something like what Carey does here, an aesthetic study that grounds itself in life-details, rather than a life-study that occasionally indulges in aesthetic digressions. Carey's approach works best in the end because that's the kind of life John Donne chose for himself in the end. It's certainly the only kind of life of himself he'd have been interested in reading - and it'll interest you too, without fail, so find a copy (mine, as you can see, is already spoken for).

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Jonson!

Our book today is Marchette Chute's warm and winning 1960 biography Ben Jonson of Westminster (which she dedicates, the dear thing, to the New York Public Library). Chute did similar books on Chaucer and Shakespeare, but her Jonson book is my favorite - and I'd be willing to bet it was her favorite too. Sometimes you can just tell from the spirited tenor of the writing that an author is enjoying herself especially well.

Certainly Jonson's life lends itself to that kind of enjoyment. Here is a man in full: he's not a ghost like Shakespeare, nor is he merely a few fugitive mentions in his own verses like Pindar. We cannot suspect him of being a suave court fop like Sidney, and he certainly couldn't possibly have been the thwarted sad-sack we wonder if Spenser was. Instead, he's everything rolled together that they separately were not: family man, branded felon, industrious man-of-work, fierce entrepreneur, and indomitable survivor.

Chute is alive to all these different sides of her subject, and one of the many charms of her book is how that very liveliness of her narrative spills over to include virtually every larger-than-life character she encounters - and almost all of them draw into some kind of parallel with Jonson, whom she clearly likes more than the rest of them put together:

Among Jonson's many acquaintances in London was Sir Walter Raleigh. It was almost inevitable that the two men should know each other, since Raleigh was not only a scholar and an omnivorous reader but was currently engaged on a book of so monumental a nature that he welcomed the assistance of every man of letters who knew anything about the subject.

Raleigh, like Jonson, was incapable of admitting defeat. He was not in his fifties and had been a prisoner in the Tower since 1603 on a charge of conspiracy. But he refused to admit that his mind could be in prison, and it would seem quite reasonable to him to embark on a history of the world, beginning with the Creation and continuing down through the ages.

Her admiration isn't blind, however: she's perfectly willing to relate Jonson's bad moods, enormous errors in judgement, and even the rare occasional critical slip-up:

Donne was one of the few writers for whom Jonson had a profound admiration. He regretted the obscurity of Donne's style, which he feared would make him unreadable in future generations, and he deplored his experimentation with rhythm. But he considered him "the first poet in the world in some things" and in spite of Jonson's independence as a writer he paid Donne the complement of sending him hi own work for criticism.

And what of that most famous of Jonson's contemporaries, that demm'd elusive Bard of Avon? Chute, obviously a first-rank Shakespeare fan, finds a way to like them both almost equally:

Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson could not accept things as they were and settle down to write for ordinary people. His theoretical temperament demanded an audience consisting of select and dedicated spirits, and of course he never found them. Instead, he did most of his work for a stupid, self-indulgent and greedy Court, and searched earnestly for the great men he felt must be in it somewhere.

The Ben Jonson who emerges from these pages is a big, three-dimensional person, a warm, living man of infinite contradictions and the unfailing willingness to confront those contradictions in his own verses, which ring with more plains-spoken truth than almost any other poetry I know of, partly because the author has no qualms about his own mutability:

Let me be what I am, as Vergil cold,

As Horace fat, or as Anacreon old ....

Who shall forbid me then in rime to be

As light and active as the youngest he?

In these benighted days, Marchette Chute's trio of popular biographies may well be out of print, but even so, I urge you to find and read them all - especially since all three subjects have now had the Stevereads seal of approval!

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Shakespeare!

Our book today is Katherine Duncan-Jones' roistering, clear-eyed Ungentle Shakespeare from 2001, which does the seeming impossible: takes the vast world of Shakespeare scholarship and pseudo-biography and distils it into a terse and crackling-good book that actually leaves even the least-Bardophile reader wanting more.

To put it mildly, we've come a long way from our complaints about the lack of biographies for Edmund Spenser. Shakespeare's case is the exact opposite: far, far too much gets written about him every fifteen minutes, all over the world. Thousands of critical studies of his works, thousands of anthologies of his plays and poems, thousands of biographies - thousands of biographies! When Spenser can't get even a couple, and when Harington, Chapman, and even Ben Jonson have to go scrounging. Hell, more biographies have been written about Edward deVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, than have been written about Christopher Marlowe - solely on the basis of some theory that de Vere might have been Shakespeare (such theories also exist about Marlowe, of course, and virtually every other person who was alive in the 16th century). The glut is enormous - and it shows no sign of ending.

That glut is made all the more ironic because we know so little about Shakespeare's life. Oh, it's been fashionable for at least 70 years to say we know lots about his life, more than we know about any other Elizabethan playwright except Jonson - I've read that many times in many contexts, and it always baffles me. Even if we didn't have the overwhelming curiosity about every detail of Shakespeare's life that's naturally generated by our love of his works, we'd still find all the huge gaps in our knowledge frustrating; but we do have that love, so we do have that curiosity, which makes the little we know all the more frustrating.

It forces his biographers to serial feats of supposition, and in this Duncan-Jones can't be any different. Her guesses and theories are lively and fascinating - for instance, she wonders if Shakespeare might not have been acquainted with Sir Fulke Greville of Beauchamps Court, the father of the best friend of the famous poet Sidney:

The first steps of Shakespeare's route towards 'a fellowship in a cry of players' may have been taken during his training in declamatory and acting skills at Stratford Grammar School. He would have had opportunities to display those skills to large audiences in Whitsuntide plays in Stratford in the early 1580s. As a result of such seasonal performances, he perhaps came to the notice of Sir Fulke Greville of Beauchamps Court, and for a couple of years served him in some capacity, probably as a player, possibly also as a clerk or secretary. Greville was very closely allied to the Dudleys, and his large retinue would be a natural source of recruitment for his powerful friend Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. As a member of Leicester's Men for some time between 1584 and 1586, Shakespeare would have quickly showed his versatility both in writing and performing.

But you can hear all the 'would have's and 'might have's even in so short a passage, and they're everywhere in Ungentle Shakespeare, as they must be in any life of the Bard. Take a passage like this:

A possible order of events is as follows: Southampton gave Shakespeare a good reward for Lucrece - probably between 5 and 10 pounds - in April or May 1594. Not only was Shakespeare more handsomely rewarded for Lucrece than for Venus, the poem also reflected closer relations between the poet and the stylish young nobleman - perhaps ... including sexual relations. It may have been in 1594-5, and for Southampton, a reluctant bridegroom who eventually had to pay a large fine for refusing to marry Burghley's grand-daughter Elizabeth Vere, that early versions of sonnets 1-17 were written, of which Burghley would thoroughly approve.

There's hardly a pair of lines in that whole stretch that aren't educated guesses. We don't know what Shakespeare was paid for the two poems he dedicated to Southampton, or even that he was paid at all. We don't know if they ever even met, much less rogered each other on the Earl's damask cushions. We don't know the dates involved with any certainty, nor do we know if Lord Burghley ever knew the sonnets existed, much less read them with approval (or even commissioned them as some kind of procreative encouragement for Southampton). Duncan-Jones is forced to speculate on all of it, and despite how good she is at speculation, we should remind ourselves that most Shakespeare scholars would give back every dime they've ever made off publishing speculation if they could just have a couple of pages from a Pepys-style journal Shakespeare might have kept, or two or three paragraphs of reminiscences from people who knew him.

Or maybe even some funeral notices, which you'd expect to see if the most famous and popular playwright of the era died in the fullness of his age. The fact that no such notices exist has certainly fired the 'alternate' theories of every Shakespeare-didn't-do-it theorist of the so-called Authorship Question (since one glaring possibility why Shakespeare received no death-notices is because none of his colleagues thought he'd done anything to deserve them, being only a semi-literate malt-hoarder from Stratford-on-Avon), Again, there's only so much Duncan-Jones can do with such a gap, and in the end she resorts to a dodge so old even Jonson was a little ashamed to use it:

The unhappy circumstances of Shakespeare's death may have been widely known among his London friends. We know nothing of what ceremonies attache to his funeral in Stratford on 25 April. They perhaps accorded wth instructions given orally or in writing to John Hall, or else may have conformed to Hall's own austerely Protestant inclinations. There is no reason to think that patrons or fellow poets assembled to attach their tributes to his hearse. It is striking that there was no immediate rush of elegies or epitaphs from his friends, colleagues or admirers. Even what may be the earliest poetical tribute, a sonnet by William Basse, seems to have been written some time later, to judge by its retrospective subtitle 'he died in April 1616.' It may have taken several years for recollections and rumours of the unpleasant details of Shakespeare's end to fade, to be replaced by a return to what, after all, was the best of him: his writings.

So the central irony of the continuing boom in Shakespeare lives is undimmed: we get more and more books, as numberless as sands on the strand, about a man who is - and almost certainly always will be - little more than a ghost, while all his colleagues in the great enterprise of Elizabethan literature peep about to find themselves dishonorable graves. Still, if you only want to read one Shakespeare biography, my recommendation would be this one. It's lively as hell, and he would have liked that - maybe.

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Marlowe!

Our book today is John Bakeless' wonderful 1937 classic, Christopher Marlowe: The Man in His Time which stands in my mind as the best biography ever written of this much-biographied young man.

Oddly much-biographied. Marlowe cut a huge swath through the London literary scene of his day, true, but by the standards of the Elizabethan writing-market, he produced very little work, and he died before he was thirty. The oblivion of footnotes seems the more likely fate for such a figure than the bright measure of fame posthumous fame he's enjoyed instead, and the discrepancy can only be chalked up to spicey rumor and innuendo. Marlowe was born in Canterbury in 1564 and got his B.A. from Corpus Christi, Cambridge, despite being often enough missing from college that he needed a written excuse from Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council to graduate - and that waiver has led to four centuries of speculation as to what he did to earn it: 'begging and pleading with any family connection who'd listen' has never been romantic enough, so Marlowe has been given a Batman-style second career as an espionage agent in the employ of the implacable Thomas Walsingham.

From 1587 to 1593, his plays - Tamburlaine 1 & 2, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, Doctor Faustus, and Dido - were produced and rapturously attended and idolized (a fact reflected in the pamphlets of the day and funnily sent up in the movie "Shakespeare in Love"). They gave to English letters and the English stage something almost thoroughly new, a "mighty line" that buried its own subtleties in a tidal wave of primary-color images and devastatingly powerful verse. Even now, in all of Western literature, there's no experience quite like reading Marlowe for any stretch of pages - the room starts to spin, and all things begin to seem possible.

Marlowe's posthumous reputation has benefited immeasurably from two things that have nothing to do with his work: the first is the portrait found at Corpus Christi College in 1953 and forever afterward taken to be the image of Marlowe as a handsome, proud, wastrel college student - it looks just exactly as we want Marlowe the literary rebel to look - and the second is the manner of his death, not only young but violent: stabbed in the forehead in May of 1593 by Ingram Frizer, one of the three men with whom he'd spent the day at an inn in Deptford. As Charles Nicoll demonstrates in his brilliant book The Reckoning, all three of the men in that room with Marlowe had connections with Thomas Walsingham and his equally enigmatic brother Francis, and inferences have been rife ever since that Marlowe's death was state-sanctioned, or even state-ordered. The fact that we'll almost certainly never know the truth of the matter only adds to the spice.

One of the many charms of this book is that Bakeless, despite being a Harvard-educated egghead, is also an unapologetically opinionated crank who has a fiercely-researched and often openly-irritated take on every aspect of his young subject's life and world. Spice doesn't deter him (although his book is something of a product of its time, in that Marlowe's fondness for tobacco gets a lot more attention than his fondness for teenage boys), nor does controversy, nor does the prospect of seeming like a crackpot. As a result, his irritated asides are often more entertaining than the subjects that inspired them, as with this little digression on the shoddy printing standards of today:

Our modern abomination of cheap wood-pulp paper was unknown in those happy days, and consequently the fugitive pamphlets in which Marlowe's plays and poems appeared, cheap as they were, had to be printed on good rag paper, which has endured the centuries unharmed. If cheaper paper had existed the early printers would undoubtedly have used it for little books like these, which were not in their day regarded as especially valuable. Practically all of Elizabethan literature would have crumbled into a fine yellow powder not later than the middle of the seventeenth century, the only exceptions being stray lyrics preserved in the manuscript commonplace books and the fortunate poets who, like Shakespeare, appeared in expensive printed folios. Without the good rag paper that went to make these queer old books, most of the great Elizabethan writers and all the lesser ones would have remained mere names. On such mechanical accidents do reputations in literature depend.

But Bakeless does have a big soft spot, and it's right where it should be: he's very partial to his chosen subject. He sees Marlowe's work - the whole spectrum of it - with a clarity that's often muddled or missing from later biographers, and he's perfectly willing to address the flaws of that work, but always in the context of the general genius of the man:

Of the gentleness of Shakespeare's humour - that humour which, seeing folly and being diverted with it, yet keeps a certain tenderness and tolerance for the fool - Marlowe had none whatever. Humour for Marlowe did not represent a saving sense of proportion. Humour could never enable this fiery spirit to laugh at the evils and injustices surrounding it. That is why those evils and injustices so galled and fretted this impassionate soul, drove it to wild, perilous freedom and forbidden speculation, to a philosophy of revolt against the state, against morals, against God himself.

Despite the brevity and murkiness of his life, Marlowe's going to keep generating books, and some very good ones have appeared since Bakeless (Park Honan's in particular stands out in my mind). The statistics-crawling exercise known as "Shakespearean studies" has yielded a few more likely instances where the Bard was paying sly tribute to the greatest of his contemporaries, and of course sociological studies proceed apace. And it's worth remembering that despite the brilliance of Bakeless' treatment of Marlowe's plays, we'd still be studying this young man even if those plays didn't survive, on the basis of his strengths as a poet alone, strengths that, after all, earned him his place in this series (Nine Lives of the Dramatists being reserved for another date, naturally). So it's fitting we close with one of those poems, a bit from one of his taut, dancing translations of Ovid:

Rude man, 'tis vain thy damsel to commend

To keeper's trust: their wits should them defend.

Who, without fear, is chaste, is chaste in sooth:

Who, because means want, doeth not, she doth.

Though thou her body guard, her mind is stained:

Nor, lest she will, can any be restrained.

Nor canst by watching keep her mind from sin;

All being shut out, th' adulterer is within.

Who may offend, sins least; power to do ill

The fainting seeds of naughtiness doth kill.

Forbear to kindle vice by prohibition,

Sooner shall kindness gain thy will's fruition.

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Sidney!

Our book today was written quite some time ago: it's Fulke Greville's biographical sketch of his friend Philip Sidney. As every English major in the Western world once knew, Sidney died while fighting Spanish forces in the Netherlands in 1586 ("thy need is yet greater than mine" he reportedly told a fellow wounded man, handing him his water canteen) at the age of 32. Fulke Greville, his devoted friend since childhood ("Fulke Greville is a good boy" the boy Sidney scrawled in one of his friend's schoolroom copy-books), probably wrote his The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney around 1611 or 1612. On 1 September 1628, Greville - Lord Brooke by then, and fairly wealthy from a lifetime spent at court - was stabbed in the back by his servant, Ralph Haywood (who then killed himself), allegedly because Haywood was irritated that Greville hadn't mentioned him in his will. In 1652, Greville's Life of Sidney was finally printed.

Unlike the case of poor Spenser, the ensuing centuries have seen many, many excellent biographies of Sidney - they could hardly resist such a tempting subject, now could they? Sidney was everything a young courtier should be - well-educated, widely-travelled, well-spoken, much-respected, only picturesquely reckless, personally brave, artistically gifted, and physically beautiful. His father, Henry Sidney, had been much the same - plain-spoken, handsome in his youth, non-ostentatiously honest and as sharp as a well-wrought weathervane. Henry Sidney did much that deserves censure while pursuing the Tudor oppression of Ireland, but it was also he who held the shivering, pain-wracked Edward VI in his arms in the last hour of his life and, his rough lips touching the boy's brow, whispered "Rest now, dearest one; fine to rest now" - greater comfort than which no servant has ever given a king. Henry's son Philip never got a chance to grow into the hale middle-aged statesman and writer he would have become - but he dazzled all the same, dazzled like the sun for the time he had.

Greville was as dazzled as the rest, and his portrait of Sidney - an intensely, almost joyfully strange little book, as passionate and distractible as its author - unapologetically displays that fact:

Indeed he was a true model of Worth; a man fit for Conquest, Plantation, Reformation, or what Action soever is greatest, and hardest among men: Withall, such a lover of Mankind, and Goodness, and that whosoever had any real parts, in him found comfort, participation, and protection to the uttermost of his power ...

Perhaps some readers will take these tones of outright worship, link them with that business of old Lord Brooke being stabbed to death in a fit of pique by a manservant, perhaps mix in the many happy, laughing, sweaty days when Greville would join Sidney and the other lusty courtiers of Elizabeth's court in elaborate jousts and contests and pantomimes, and derive a picture, a reality, that has familiar names and taxonomies here in the 21st century. In the Elizabethan Age, open and strenuous protestations of friendship between men was the highest fashion, so such a picture might be too presumptuous - or too easy. Safer just to say Greville was completely devoted to his handsome friend - and that he received in return the passionate reciprocation Sidney (the son, just like the father) gave to everybody he found worthy. Certainly Greville could never really believe in a world where Sidney was so abruptly taken away - like most of Sidney's friends, he more or less refused to live in that world. "For my own part," he writes, "I observed, honoured, and loved him so much; as with what caution soever I have passed through my days hitherto among the living, yet in him I challenge a kind of freedom even among the dead."

At one point while his brief biography is thumping along, Greville pauses for the most unaffectedly touching line in his whole book. He's relating some anecdote from long ago when he stops and admits, "Besides, I do ingenuously confess, that it delights me to keep company with him, even after death."

Although he himself assesses Sidney's work with a severity of judgement we might not expect of an acolyte (to be fair, Sidney himself set the example in this, referring but casually to the ultimate worth of any of his own works), Greville has nothing but offhand scorn for those uncomprehending readers - "our four-eyed Criticks" - who might come along later. And come along they did, in their legions! They annotated his works, wrote his many biographies - and annotated Greville's biography. Our particular version of that biography today is the 1906 edition by Nowell Smith, whose work is superb - and whose assessment of the four-eyed Critick who came before him, Dr. Grossart, thunders with Edwardian excess:

Lovers of literature, who happen to have scholarly instincts and training, can never speak of enthusiastic antiquaries like Dr. Grossart without compunction. On the one hand they admire the generous expenditure of time and money which Dr. Grossart gave to his many 'labours of love.' On the other hand they can only look aghast at on the mass of inaccurate statements and worthless judgements which swell the undigested bulk of his editions. The gratitude which they are anxious to feel as they enter into the fruits of his labour is thwarted by the double labour which they have to expend in correcting his mistakes and verifying the rest of his statements.

As mentioned, many, many worthy biographies have appeared since this one. In recent years, the scholarly volume by Alan Stewart and the lively one by Katherine Duncan-Jones stand out as equally good and pleasantly different from each other, for instance. But there's something about Greville's haphazard devotion and lovable garrulity that take the palm for charm even in their fallibility. There's devotion here, as might be expected of a man who ordered that his grave's inscription read: "Fulke Greville, servant to Queen Elizabeth, conceller to King James, friend to Sir Philip Sidney."

No real doubt which of those he considered the greatest honor.

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Spenser!

Our book today is most likely called Edmund Spenser: A Life, and, as the hilarious critic-speak malapropism goes, it fills a much-needed void. It's a fully-researched, lustrously energetic, beautifully crafted (deckle edge, dozens of spot illustrations, flourished margins), and unapologetically literate full-dress biography of Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599), the great Elizabethan poet.

There's ample material for such a biography. Spenser was born in London and educated first at the Merchant Taylor's School (where the grants of money he received instilled in him both an appreciation for simple kindness and an appreciation of the material dimensions of humanism that he'd carry with him - in one problematic way or another - for the rest of his life) and at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he made the acquaintance not only of several of his future employers but also of Gabriel Harvey, the scholar and litterateur who first fanned Spenser's own literary gifts to life. Harvey was a bit prone to pomposity and had only mediocre literary talents himself (neither of these things was forgivable by a scalding wit like Nashe, but they don't in themselves condemn a man, after all - he was an oddity even by the standards of his very odd time, and he richly deserves a rattling good biography of his own), but the field of literature is forever in his debt, for giving us Spenser. The two collaborated on a series of public letters about the state of English poetry, and Harvey is the guiding animus in Spenser's first major work, The Shepheardes Calendar, which was published in 1579 to an acclaim - a kind of acclaim - no previous work in English had ever received. Instantly it was seen that an epoch had begun.(To be fair, Spenser considerably helped that perception along by 'annotating' his own poem-sequence under the pseudonym E. K.) It had been two centuries since Chaucer, and in that time England had come into her own as a country and an identity and had begun to yearn, Augustan Rome-style, for its own literature, for the sense that its own literature was possible.

The Shepheardes Calendar is dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. In all likelihood, Spenser had met the younger poet-courtier the year before while serving briefly in the household of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, who was Sidney's uncle. In 1580, Spenser went to Ireland as Secretary to Lord Grey De Wilton, who'd been appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland, and it was in Ireland that Spenser was to spend most of his time and make most of his fortune, eventually becoming master of Kilcolman, an estate in County Cork. It was in Ireland that he would meet and marry the lovely Elizabeth Boyle (and it's Elizabeth Boyle he would celebrate in his gorgeous Amoretti and Epithalamion), and it was from Ireland that he would always look with longing toward the court of Elizabeth I in London.

It was to flatter (and guardedly, fashionably chastise) this court that Spenser crafted the first three books of his masterpiece, The Faerie Queene, an extended allegory and a heartfelt act of homage to Spenser's beloved Chaucer. Our big, beautiful biography would owe a good part of its length to the fact that it would have to grapple with The Faerie Queene, a work that's longer than War and Peace (and Spenser, like Chaucer with his own masterpiece, planned for it to be four times as long) and more easily misunderstood than the Bible. It's safe to say The Faerie Queene is the single greatest work of English literature absolutely nobody reads anymore, and our biographer would not only have to explain why that is but also correct it - no mean feat.

Spenser travelled to London in 1589 (in the company of his County Cork neighbor, Sir Walter Ralegh) to present those first three books of The Faerie Queene to their exemplar, Queen Elizabeth I, and although she was appreciative (measuredly so - she never had the temperament for extended allegories - ironically enough, considering the fact that she fashioned her entire life into one) and pledged Spenser a fairly decent pension, her chief councillor, Lord Burghley, disliked the poet and successfully scuppered his future at court. Spenser returned to Ireland, married, and kept writing. By 1596 he had a gigantic amount of new work done, including the next three books of The Faerie Queene and a bit of literary payback for Burghley in Mother Hubberds Tale. There was a great deal of verse besides this, and copious letters, and a pile of Irish documents (indeed, a vast amount of good work on Spenser awaits our biographer in Ireland alone) - our poet was a busy man, a contented man who was nevertheless convinced he was not as happy as he would have been living a different life, a glorious courtier's life like the one being enacted by his friend Sidney. Our biography will necessarily deal with the ugly sin of ambition.

In 1598 it all came crashing down. Tyrone's rebellion reached Spenser's castle, ransacked and burned it, and Spenser fled, eventually all the way to London, to the tender mercies of the court that had spurned him. Our present biography will perforce have much to say on the subject of the English occupation of Ireland and Spenser's place in that story. The poet's A View of the Present State of Ireland is by any reckoning a vile and provoking document (it was published posthumously), and our biographer will need to take account of it - the more arresting and original the account, the better.

Spenser died in London in 1599 - 'for lack of bread,' as Ben Jonson famously lied.  He was buried in Westminster Abbey (hard by Chaucer, fittingly enough), and his fellow poets tossed verses and pens into the grave before it was closed.

They hailed Spenser as "the Prince of Poets" (our biographer at the last minute will very wisely choose not to make that the title of the biography), and that praise only grew stronger in the following decades and centuries. Dryden ranked his pastorals among the finest of their kind ever written, and Pope echoed and amplified that verdict. In 1875 the great, much-missed James Russell Lowell wrote a typically learned and magisterial essay on Spenser, according him that highest of all Boston Brahmin compliments, being capable:

We can trace in Spenser's poems the gradual growth of his taste through experiment and failure to that assured self-confidence which indicates that he had at length found out the true bent of his genius , - that happiest of discoveries (and not so easy as it might seem) which puts a man in undisturbed possession of his own individuality.

"Before his time," Lowell writes, "the boundary between poetry and prose had not been clearly defined. His great merit lies not only in the ideal treatment with which he glorified common things and gilded them with a ray of enthusiasm, but far more in the ideal point of view which he first revealed to his countrymen." "His natural tendency," Lowell continues, "is to shun whatever is sharp and abrupt. He loves to prolong emotion, and lingers in his honeyed sensations like a bee in the translucent cup of a lily."

Our biographer would also be well advised to study the 1909 essay on Spenser by J. W. Mackail, who sets a stern warning early in the piece:

The fatal tendency of classicism is to see life through books, and to take it at second hand. Its natural instinct is to copy, and in doing so, to copy the inferior classics, who are more copiable, and then to go on copying itself.

Mackail strikes a generally elegiac tone throughout his essay:

Thus Spenser, like so many other great poets, represents the late splendour of a descending and fast disappearing tradition. The realm in which he was so great an innovator, so wide an explorer and conqueror, was even before his death passing into other hands.

But even so, Mackail is heartfelt in his praise, as discusses the Epithalamion: "For sustained beauty of execution, for melodiousness in which the most melodious of English poets excels even his own standard, for richness of ornament that stops just short of excess, and does not either blur the outline or clog the movement, it easily takes the first place, not only among Spenser's own lyrics, but among all English odes."

Edmund Spenser: A Life will draw on a vast array of sources, including many previously either unknown or underexamined; it will make such spirited and sharp-minded use of the vast corpus of Elizabethan literature that readers will feel as though they're sitting in the very taverns and ale houses, listening to a mighty new age shape its literary responses to itself. But the book won't owe its enormous general popularity and critical praise to its research, nor to its extensive bibliography, no - this book will be bought and read and talked about and treasured and revered and reprinted because it will have that perfect combination of acumen and dramatic assurance that so few biographies managed to achieve. It will go on the same shelf as Caro's The Power Broker or Bate's Samuel Johnson or Milford's Zelda or Bainton's Here I Stand - a great biography of its subject, yes, but also a great book in its own right.

Edmund Spenser: A Life hasn't been written yet. I've been waiting patiently for a very long time, and I'll continue waiting. Anybody out there who's game for giving it a try has my enthusiastic encouragement.