Abstract
Edmund Spenser was a writer whose literary career began in the midst of translation. Spenser, a native of London, who probably grew up in East Smithfield, just beyond the Tower of London, would have been immersed in the polyglot culture of the capital in the middle of the late sixteenth century, and he would have been exposed to a variety of languages as a child, especially French and Dutch, spoken by exiles, refugees, and merchants in the city. Therefore, it is no accident that his first publication was a translation, that of a number of poems by the major French poets Joachim Du Bellay and Clément Marot, included as part of a larger work by a Dutch exile, Jan van der Noot, himself an important figure in the establishment of a Dutch literary tradition. Spenser’s sonnets in A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings (1569) have not often received much critical comment, but they clearly played an important role in his career, as he turned to them again as an established writer, revising the blank verse translations in The Ruines of Rome, one of the collection of Complaints published in 1591. Spenser’s early career and poetic development as a young writer were therefore shaped by contact with the exiled French and Dutch communities in London. It was a legacy that he would retain throughout his life. Although he is primarily known as an Italianate English author, and he clearly was heavily influenced by Ariosto, Tasso, and Boiardo, and, perhaps, Boccaccio and Dante, it is at least arguable that French and French writing were just as important for Spenser, and that his early translation of Du Bellay influenced what came after.
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Notes
C. B. Bourland, ‘Gabriel Harvey and the Modern Languages’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 4 (1940), 85–106.
A. C. Judson, The Life of Edmund Spenser (Baltimore, 1945), 106–7;
A. L. Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation (New Haven, 1978); The ‘Axiochus’ of Plato Translated by Edmund Spenser, ed. F. M. Padelford (Baltimore, 1934), introduction;
G. Hough, A Preface to ‘The Faerie Queene’ (London, 1962), pt 1.
Spenser was certainly interested in German Neo-Latin literature and owned books by relevant authors: L. Piepho, ‘Edmund Spenser and Neo-Latin Literature: An Autograph Manuscript on Petrus Lotichius and his Poetry’, Studies in Philology, 100 (2003), 123–34.
S. Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge, 1989), 61–86;
I. W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991).
On the population of England, see E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (Cambridge, 1989; repr. 2002), 575.
A. Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford, 1986), 21.
More generally see S. Porter, Shakespeare’s London: Everyday Life in London, 1580–1616 (Stroud, 2009), ch. 2.
D. Bruce, ‘Edmund Spenser: The Boyhood of a Poet’, Contemporary Review, 264 (1994), 70–9.
N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London (Volume 1): The Cities of London & Westminster (Harmondsworth, 1957), 33.
R. L. DeMolen, Richard Mulcaster (c. 1531–1611) and Educational Reform in the Renaissance (Nieuwkoop, 1991), 23. Financial issues appear to have followed Mulcaster around: see W. Barker, ‘Mulcaster, Richard (1531/2–1611)’, ODNB.
J. van Dorsten, Poets, Patrons, and Professors: Sir Philip Sidney, Daniel Rogers, and the Leiden Humanists (Leiden, 1962), 79, 92, 167; E. Leedham-Green, ‘Neville, Alexander (1544–1614)’, ODNB; J. Kirk, ‘Melville, Andrew (1545–1622)’, ODNB.
The main study of the individual Marian exiles remains C. Garrett, The Marian Exiles, 1553–1559 (Cambridge, 1938). Miles Coverdale, Alexander Nowell, and his brother Laurence were all exiles.
D. Daniell, ‘Rogers, John (c. 1500–1555)’, ODNB; M. Loudon, ‘Rogers, Daniel (c. 1538–1591)’, ODNB; R. M. Warnicke, ‘Nowell, Laurence (1530—c. 1570)’, ODNB; Pettegree, 173–5; DeMolen, 146; V. F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia and Library (Oxford, 1979), 31, 39.
On Daniel Rogers, see J. E. Phillips, ‘Daniel Rogers: A Neo-Latin Link Between the Pléiade and Sidney’s “Areopagus”’, Neo-Latin Poetry of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Los Angeles, 1965), 5–28 (8);
R. Howell, Sir Philip Sidney: The Shepherd Knight (London, 1968), 158p–62; Van Dorsten, Poets, Patrons, and Professors, 39, 42;
J. van Dorsten, The Radical Arts: First Decade of an Elizabethan Renaissance (Leiden, 1970), 75;
J. S. Nolan, Sir John Norreys and the Elizabethan Military World (Exeter, 1997), 16;
F. J. Levy, ‘Daniel Rogers as Antiquary’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 27 (1965), 444–62 (446); Records of the Old Archdeaconry of St. Albans: A Calendar of Papers, AD 1575 to AD 1637, ed. H. R. Wilton Hall (St Albans, 1908), 45, 47. I owe this last reference to Natalie Mears.
W. L. Renwick, ‘Mulcaster and Du Bellay’, Modern Language Review, 17 (1922), 282–7;
J. Du Bellay, ‘The Regrets’, with ‘The Antiquities of Rome’, Three Latin Elegies, and ‘The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language’: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and tr. R. Helgerson (Philadelphia, 2006), 35.
A. W. Satterthwaite, Spenser, Ronsard, and Du Bellay: A Renaissance Comparison (Princeton, 1960), 30–1.
L. Forster, ‘The Translator of the Theatre for Worldlings’, English Studies, 48 (1967), 27–34 (33).
For comment, see W. Waterschoot, ‘On Ordering the Poetische Werken of Jan van der Noot’, Quaerendo, 22 (1992), 242–63 (242–5);
Van Dorsten, Radical Arts, passim; B. Jongenelen and B. Parsons, ‘The Sonnets of Het Bosken by Jan van der Noot’, Spenser Studies, 23 (2008), 235–55 (235–6).
Jongenelen and Parsons, 236; L. H. Yungblut, Strangers Settled Here Amongst Us: Politics, Perceptions and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (London, 1996), 18.
B. Parsons and B. Jongenelen, ‘Jan van der Noot: A Mistaken Attribution in the Short-Title Catalogue?’, Notes & Queries, n.s. 53 (2006), 427.
Judson refers to his ‘ardent Calvinism’ (20). A more nuanced discussion is provided in J. N. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton, 1990), 233–4 and passim.
Van Dorsten, Radical Arts, 29–30; Waterschoot, 243; K. L. Bowen and D. Imhof, Christopher Plantin and Engraved Book Illustrations in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2008), 32, 286.
A history is provided in A. Hamilton, The Family of Love (Cambridge, 1981). For their impact in England, see C. W. Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge, 1994);
J. D. Moss, ‘The Family of Love and English Critics’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 6 (1975), 35–52;
P. Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford, 2001).
M. Srigley, ‘The Influence of Continental Familism in England after 1570’, Cultural Exchange between European Nations during the Renaissance, ed. G. Sorelius and Srigley (Uppsala, 1994), 97–110;
D. Wootton, ‘Reginald Scot / Abraham Fleming / The Family of Love’, Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture, ed. S. Clark (Basingstoke, 2001), 119–38.
J. D. Moss, ‘Variations on a Theme: The Family of Love in Renaissance England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 31 (1978), 186–95 (186). Tracts which explain how the Family functioned include Mirabilia opera Dei: Certaine wonderfull Works of God which hapned to H. N. even from his youth […] Published by Tobias a Fellow Elder with H. N. in the Houshold of Love (London, 1650); H. Niclaes, An Apology for the Service of Love, and The People that own it, commonly called, The Family of Love (London, 1656).
Van Dorsten, Radical Arts, 75. On Howard, see P. Croft, ‘Howard, Henry, earl of Northampton (1540–1614)’, ODNB. On Surrey’s influence on Spenser, see W. A. Ringler, Jr., ‘Tudor Poetry’, The Spenser Encyclopaedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London, 1990), 702–4 (703);
W. A. Sessions, Henry Howard, The Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford, 1999), 135–6.
W. J. B. Pienaar, ‘Edmund Spenser and Jonker Jan van der Noot’, English Studies, 8 (1926), 33–44, 67–76 (67–8). See also The Poems of Sir Arthur Gorges, ed. H. E. Sandison (Oxford, 1953), xiii—xix.
On Bynneman, see M. Bell, ‘Bynneman, Henry (b. in or before 1542, d. 1583)’, ODNB; H. R. Plomer, ‘Henry Bynneman, Printer, 1566–83’, The Library, n.s. 9 (1908), 225–44; A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of Foreign Printers of English Books, 1557— 1640, ed. R. B. McKerrow and others (London, 1968), 59–60.
E. St J. Brooks, Sir Christopher Hatton: Queen Elizabeth’s Favourite (London, 1946), 135–7, 140–2, 316–23.
On the complex nature of late Elizabethan patronage, see S. Adams, Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabethan Politics (Manchester, 2002), especially chs 1, 3; The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. J. Guy (Cambridge, 1995), chs 1–4.
M. Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London, 1994), 109.
R. A. McCabe, ‘Edmund Spenser, Poet of Exile’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 80 (1993), 73–103.
On Day, see E. Evenden, Patents, Pictures and Patronage: John Day and the Tudor Book Trade (Aldershot, 2008); A. Pettegree, Day, John (1521/2–1584)’, ODNB; Pettegree, passim;
J. F. Mozley, John Faxe and his Book (New York, 1940). Day was the key publisher of Dutch texts and published one of the most significant tracts on the Dutch revolt, A Defence and True Declaration of the Things Lately done in the Low Country (1571): see The Dutch Revolt, ed. M. van Gelderen (Cambridge, 1993), 1–77. He also had a number of connections to Spenser, including having been patronized by Cecil and imprisoned with John Rogers.
F. R. Johnson, A Critical Bibliography of the Works of Edmund Spenser Printed before 1700 (Baltimore, 1933), 1–2.
On the fonts see S. K. Galbraith, ‘“English” Black-Letter Type and Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender’, Spenser Studies, 23 (2008), 13–40;
L. Hellinga, ‘Printing’, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, In: 1400–1557, ed. Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge, 1999), 65–108 (75–6);
N. Barker, ‘Old English Letter Foundries’, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, IV: 1557–1695, ed. J. Barnard, D. F. McKenzie, and M. Bell (Cambridge, 2002), 602–19 (604–5).
Van Dorsten, ‘A Theatre’, Spenser Encyclopaedia, ed. Hamilton; S. Bracken, ‘Heere, Lucas de (1534–1584)’, ODNB; Van Dorsten, Radical Arts, 53–61 and passim; M. Bath, ‘Verse Form and Pictorial Space in Van der Noot’s Theatre for Worldlings’, Word and Visual Imagination: Studies in the Interaction of English Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. K. J. Höltgen, P. M. Daly, and W. Lottes (Erlangen, 1988), 73–105 (78);
M. Aston, The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge, 1993), 167–8; Evenden, 97–100.
See Bath, ‘Verse Form’. Marot’s poetry had an impact on the work of Barnaby Googe (1540–94), whose work had a significant impact on Spenser: see J. M. Kennedy, ‘Googe, Barnabe’, Spenser Encyclopaedia, ed. Hamilton, 336–7; B. Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets, ed. J. M. Kennedy (Toronto, 1989), 19–20.
J. B. Bender, Spenser and Literary Pictorialism (Princeton, 1972), 153; S. K. Heninger, Jr., ‘The Typographical Layout of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender’, Word and Visual Imagination, ed. Höltgen, Daly, and Lottes, 33–71.
A case strongly argued in P. Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto, 1993), ch. 1.
The genre became popular as the sixteenth century drew to a close. It is worth noting that Spenser’s fellow pupil at Merchant Taylors’, Thomas Lodge, was the co-author of a bleak vision of London’s sins with Robert Greene, A Looking Glass for London and England (1594), ed. W. W. Greg (London, 1932).
For comment, see D. Grantley, London in Early Modern English Drama: Representing the Built Environment (Basingstoke, 2008), 52–6.
On the French and English adaptations of Petrarch, see S. Minta, Petrarch and Petrarchism: The English and French Traditions (Manchester, 1980), 143–79.
On the more general issue of translation into English, see M. R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London, 1992), ch. 5.
Early modern interest in Egypt is not always emphasized as strongly as it should be: for an exception, see P. Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford, 2007), ch. 5.
For an interesting recent discussion of Spenser’s interest in ruins, see T. R. J. Muir, ‘Ruins and Oblivion in the Sixteenth Century’ (unpublished D. Phil. thesis, University of Sussex, 2005), ch. 5.
On the development of Dutch resistance theory against Spanish invasion, see M. van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt, 1555–1590 (Cambridge, 1992). Ch. 4 describes the development of ideas of resistance during the period of Van der Noot’s exile.
See also W. R. E. Velema, ‘“That a Republic is Better than a Monarchy”: Anti-Monarchism in Early Modem Dutch Political Thought’, Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. M. van Gelderen and Q. Skinner, 2 vols (Cambridge, 2002), I, 9–25.
On Spenser and republicanism, see A. Hadfield, ‘Was Spenser a Republican?’, English, 47 (1998), 169–82;
D. S. Wilson-Okamura, ‘Republicanism, Nostalgia and the Crowd’, Spenser Studies, 17 (2003), 253–73;
A. Hadfield, ‘Was Spenser a Republican After All? A Response to David Scott Wilson-Okamura’, Spenser Studies, 17 (2003), 275–90;
L. A. Montrose, ‘Spenser and the Elizabethan Political Imaginary’, ELH, 69 (2002), 907–46.
Since A. K. Hieatt’s pioneering Short Time’s Endless Monument: The Symbolism of the Numbers in Edmund Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’ (New York, 1960), the literature on Spenser’s interest in numerology has become extensive: see the overview in A. Dunlop, ‘Number Symbolism, Modern Studies of’, Spenser Encyclopaedia, ed. Hamilton, 512–13.
Prescott, French Poets, 47. On Augustine’s influence on Spenser’s conception of numerology, see also H. L. Weatherby, Mirrors of Celestial Grace: Patristic Theology in Spenser’s Allegory (Toronto, 1994), 88–90.
M. Holohan, ‘Iamque opus exegi: Ovid’s Changes and Spenser’s Brief Epic of Mutability’, English Literaty Renaissance, 6 (1976), 244–70.
The most comprehensive survey of English iconoclasm is M. Aston, England’s Iconoclasts: Laws against Images (Oxford, 1988); on Spenser,
see E. B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago, 1986), ch. 3. On the eye and delusive imagination, see S. Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford, 2007);
on Spenser, see A. Shinn, ‘Spenser and Popular Culture’ (unpublished D. Phil. thesis, University of Sussex, 2009), ch. 3.
F. Sandler, ‘The Faerie Queene: An Elizabethan Apocalypse’, The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, ed. C. A. Patrides and J. Wittreich (Manchester, 1984), 148–74; King, Spenser’s Poetry, passim;
R. Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England (Lincoln, NE, 1997), passim;
A. Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca, NY, 2004).
A. Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet (Cambridge, 1984).
However, it is possible that Spenser did not oversee the publication of the Complaints: see J. R. Brink, ‘Who Fashioned Edmund Spenser? The Textual History of Complaints’, Studies in Philology, 88 (1991), 153–68.
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Hadfield, A. (2011). Edmund Spenser’s Translations of Du Bellay in Jan van der Noot’s A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings. In: Schurink, F. (eds) Tudor Translation. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230361102_8
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