Abstract
In the spring of 1591, as Spenser’s Complaints had just appeared in print, John Florio was coping with his own state of frustrated ambition. A linguist of considerable ability and identified primarily by this status as a learned man, Florio, like Spenser, seems to have regarded his literary career as only part of a larger context of aristocratic and governmental service. While his erudition had been established in the Italian language manual Florio his Firste Fruites in 1578, his hopes for distinction and placement in Elizabethan society remained unfulfilled. The 1580s saw him in the employment of the French ambassador Mauvissière, where he simultaneously served the queen’s secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, as a spy.1 By 1591 Florio appears adrift, preparing to rejuvenate his career with the publication of the Second Frutes, but with an impatient and jaundiced perspective on literary publication as a path to larger success. Rather than follow a path of introspection and explore the connection between his disappointments and his own actions, the scholar instead takes out his frustration on the popular marketplace, seeking to differentiate his own work from the grasping motives of his contemporaries. In his dedicatory address to Nicholas Saunder of Ewell, Florio opens with a sweeping dismissal of popular literature:
[I]n this stirring time, and pregnant prime of inuention when euerie bramble is fruitefull, when euerie mol-hill hath cast of the winters mourning garment, and when euerie man is busily working to feede his owne fancie; some by deliuering to the presse the occurrences & accidents of the world, newes from the marte, or from the minte, and newes are the credite of a trauailer, and first question of an Englishman. Some like Alchimists distilling quintessences of wit, that melt golde to nothing, & yet would make golde of nothing; that make men in the moon, and catch the moonshine in the water. Some putting on pyed coates lyke calendars, and hammering vpon dialls, taking the eleuation of Pancridge Church (their quotidian walkes) prognosticate of the faire, of foule, and of smelling weather; men weather-wise, that wil by aches foretell of change and alteration of wether. Some more actiue gallants made of a finer molde, by deuising how to win their Mistrises fauours, and how to blaze and blanche their passions, with aeglogues, songs, and sonnets, in pitifull verse or miserable prose, and most for a fashion: is not Loue then a wagg, that makes men so wanton?2
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Notes
Frances Yates, John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), 127–9.
On the role of Camden’s Britannia in the poem’s opening, see YESP 232 and Rosamund Tuve, Essays by Rosamund Tuve: Spenser, Herbert, Milton, Thomas P. Roche, Jr., ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 148–9, n.12. Herendeen’s description of the Britannia hints at the common purpose it possessed with works like Spenser’s The Faerie Queene: ‘Not a history, the Britannia attempts (in the words of Gibson’s translation of Camden’s preface) “to restore Britain to Antiquity, and Antiquity to Britain” — the charge that Camden says was given to him by the “great Restorer of old Geography”, Ortelius himself. It does so by attempting to document the ancient pre-Roman British past using every kind of primary historical evidence imaginable, whether written records, inscriptions, literary remains, material both historical and mythological, or testimony drawn from the physical landscape. In his use of non-literary evidence Camden was a leading figure in his generation … The Britannia, the investigations of the Society of Antiquaries, and the work of others among Camden’s contemporaries helped to transform historical thinking and writing by moving away from a providential view of events toward a more scientific methodology and an interest in material and cultural history.’ Wyman H. Herendeen, ‘Camden, William (1551–1623)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept. 2004;online edn., Jan. 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4431, accessed 26 June 2009].
On the calling-in of the Complaints, see Richard S. Peterson, ‘Laurel Crown and Ape’s Tail: New Light on Spenser’s Career from Sir Thomas Tresham’, Spenser Studies 12 (1991 [1998]): 1–36, 7.
On the awarding of Spenser’s pension, see Herbert Berry, ‘Spenser’s Pension’, Review of English Studies 43 (1960): 254–9, 254.
Cummings incorrectly speculates that Florio’s allusion points to Virgil’s elegiac portrait of Augustus’s nephew Marcellus (from Aeneid 6.875–7) in R. Cummings, ed., Spenser: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 72. In fact the line is a translation of Aeneas’s opening words to Hector in Book 2.
Virgil, Eclogues Georgics Aeneid I–VI, H. Rushton Fairclough and G. P. Goold, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 334. English translation is from Virgil, The Aeneid, David West, trans. (London: Penguin, 1991), 38.
Philip Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Prose and Poetry (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 132.
Leicester’s Commonwealth, D. C. Peck, ed. (Athens, OH: University of Ohio Press, 1985), 8, citing John Harington, A Tract on the Succession to the Crown (A.D. 1602), Clements R. Markham, ed. (London: Roxburghe Club, 1880), 44.
Eleanor Rosenberg, Leicester, Patron of Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 350, n.53.
See Thomas Watson, Meliboeus Thomae Watsoni, siue Ecloga in Obitum F. Walsinghami (1590). See also Spenser Allusions 20–1.
Shorter Poems, 587, citing Stephen Bateman, Batman upon Bartholome, his Booke De Propretatibus Rerum (London, 1582), ‘The fox doth fight with the Brocke [badger] for dens, and defileth the Brockes den with his urine and with his dirte’, 385. See also FQ 1.8.48.3–4: ‘at her rompe she growing had behind/A foxes taile, with dong all fowly dight’.
The memorable phrase ‘sparkes of displeasure’ is from Thomas Nashe, Strange Newes, Of the intercepting certaine Letters, and a Conuoy of Verses, as they were going Pruilie to victual the Low Countries (1592), E1. See also Spenser Allusions 27.
John Weever, ‘In Obitum Ed. Spencer Potae presantiss’. Epigrammes in the oldest cut, and newest fashion (1599), G3, reprinted in Spenser Allusions 69.
Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island, or The Isle of Man: together with Piscatorie Eclogs and other Poetical Miscellanies (Cambridge, 1633), 6, reprinted in Spenser Allusions 190–1. Fletcher feels the lack of monetary support of Spenser most keenly, even though this was the least of Spenser’s stated concerns.
Carl J. Rasmussen, ‘“How Weak Be the Passions of Woefulness”: Spenser’s Ruines of Time’, Spenser Studies 2 (1980): 159. See also James Norhnberg, The Analogy of the Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 237–8;Andrew Fichter, ‘And nought of Rome in Rome perciu’st at all’, Spenser Studies 2 (1981): 183–92;and A. Leigh DeNeef, Spenser and the Motives of Metaphor (Durham, Duke University Press, 1982), 28–40.
Rasmussen, viii. Other critics who recognize the poem’s multiple personae are W. L. Renwick in Edmund Spenser, Complaints, W. L. Renwick, ed. (London: Scholar Press, 1928), 189.
A. Leigh DeNeef, Spenser and the Motives of Metaphor (Durham: Duke University Press, 1982), 30.
William A. Oram, Edmund Spenser (New York: Twayne, 1997), 132–6.
C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954): ‘This is one of the weightiest, the most chastened, and the most sonorous of Spenser’s minor poems … The nine stanzas on Sidney are the best elegiac poetry he ever wrote’ (369).
On the practice of courtier poetry in England, see Steven W. May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991).
For a discussion of the divisions between elite patrons and professional writers, see Robert C. Evans, ‘Frozen Maneuvers: Ben Jonson’s Epigrams to Robert Cecil’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 29 (1987): 115–40.
For a discussion of the alternative spheres of cultural influence during the early reign of James, see David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 173–98.
For an assessment of the censorship of George Gascoigne’s The Posies (1575) according to these principles, see Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 112–18.
For an account which frames Nashe as much more critical of Spenser, see Andrew Zurcher, ‘Getting it Back to Front in 1590: Spenser’s Dedications, Nashe’s Insinuations, and Ralegh’s Equivocations’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 38 (2005): 173–98, 179–84.
Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Diuell (1592), 39–40, quoted in Spenser Allusions 26.
On the parodic quality of Nashe’s comments, see Jean R. Brink, ‘Materialist History of the Publication of Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, Review of English Studies 54 (2003): 1–26, 15–17, esp. 17. By contrast, see Zurcher 187–9, who overstates the implications of Nashe’s sonnet to ‘Amyntas’, presumably, but not conclusively Ferdinando Stanley, Earl of Derby. Such a sonnet represented no honor to a nobleman, but was in fact an overt parody of Spenser’s dedicatory sonnets from The Faerie Queene.
Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 56–96.
For annotations of The Faerie Queene that compare Arthur with Leicester, see Anonymous, ‘MS Notes to Spenser’s “Faerie Queene”‘, Notes and Queries (1957): 509–15.
Alastair Fowler, ‘Oxford and London Marginalia to “The Faerie Queene”‘, Notes and Queries (1961): 416–19.
See, by contrast, Thomas Herron, ‘Reforming the Fox: Spenser’s “Mother Hubberds Tale,” the Beast Fables of Barnabe Riche, and Adam Loftus, Archbishop of Dublin’, Studies in Philology 105 (2008): 336–87, 381–2, who attempts to detach Leicester from this allusion by reference to Leicester’s crest of the bear with a ragged staff. The passage’s immediate context, nevertheless, makes the connection between Leicester and the ‘hole, the which the Badger swept’ perfectly straightforward.
On the Renaissance tradition of allegory and beast fable as tropes of political dissent, see Annabel Patterson, Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
Edmund Spenser, Complaints (1591), C4v.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen: The Shepheards Calendar: Together With The Other Works of England’s Arch-Poët, Edm. Spenser: Collected into One Volume, and carefully corrected (1611), H2.
See Bernard E. C. Davis, ‘The Text of Spenser’s Complaints’, Modern Language Review 20 (1925): 24.
Francis R. Johnson, A Critical Bibliography of the Works of Edmund Spenser Printed Before 1700 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933).
T. Wilson, The State of England, Anno Dom. 1600, ed. F. J. Fisher (London: Camden Society, 1936), 42.
Joel Hurstfield, Freedom, Corruption and Government in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 106.
John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (London: J. Nichols & Son, 1823) 3: 174.
On the emergent nationalist tradition that bound Spenser and Camden, see Wyman H. Herendeen, William Camden: A Life in Context (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2007), 208–20.
Charles G. Osgood, ‘Spenser’s English Rivers’, Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 23 (1920): 65–108, 97–8, summarized in Variorum 8: 286–92.
George Burke Johnston and William Camden, ‘Poems by William Camden: With Notes and Translations from the Latin Author(s)’, Studies in Philology 72 (1975): iii–xii;1–143;64–5.
William Camden, The History of The Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth Late Queen of England: Selected Chapters, Wallace T. MacCaffrey, ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970), xxxviii. For further assessment of Camden’s negative portrait of Leicester, see Wyman
H. Herendeen, ‘Camden, William (1551–1623)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept. 2004;online edn., Jan. 2008 [HYPERLINK “http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4431” http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4431, accessed 24 Sept. 2008].
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© 2011 Bruce Danner
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Danner, B. (2011). The Ruines of Time and the Rhetoric of Contestation. In: Edmund Spenser’s War on Lord Burghley. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230336674_4
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