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Edmund Spenser
Life
Edmund Spenser was born in London around 1552. As a young boy, he was educated in London at the Merchant Taylors' School and matriculated as a sizar at Pembroke College, Cambridge where he studied the classics and read Tasso and Ariosto.
After university, he became acquainted with Sidney, who introduced him to Court life.
In 1580 he was appointed secretary to Lord Grey, the new Lord Deputy of Ireland. Then he served with the English forces during the Second Desmond Rebellion. After the defeat of the native Irish he was awarded lands in County Cork that had been confiscated in the Munster Plantation during the Elizabethan reconquest of Ireland. Among his acquaintances in the area was Walter Raleigh, a fellow colonist.
In Ireland Spenser spent most of the rest of his life, with a few visits to London, where he finally returned and died after the Irish rebels had burnt down his Gasile at Kilcolman.
Works
Among his works, the most famous are:
-The Shepherd's Calendar (1579), a series of twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year, modelled on the ancient pastoral poems and Theocritus;
-Amoretti (1595), a cycle of 88 Petrarchan love sonnets on his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle, his future wife
-Epithalamion (1595) a "marriage song"; '-"'"'
- A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), his only prose work, in which he suggested violent measures to "pacify" the rebel country.
-The Faerie Queene (1596) (unfinished)
Amoretti was a sonnet cycle written by Edmund Spenser in the 16th century. The cycle describes his courtship and eventual marriage to Elizabeth Boyle.
Amoretti was first published in 1595 in London by William Ponsonby. It was printed as part of a volume entitled “Amoretti and Epithalamion. Written not long since by Edmunde Spenser.” The volume included the sequence of 89 sonnets, along with a series of short poems called Anacreontics and an Epithalamion, a public poetic celebration of marriage.“The volume memorializes Spenser’s courtship of Elizabeth Boyle, a young, well-born Anglo Irish woman, and the couple’s wedding on June 11, 1594”.
Amoretti has been largely overlooked and unappreciated by critics, who see it as inferior to other major Renaissance sonnet sequences in the Petrarchan tradition.
The best of the minor poems is Epithalamion, an ode Spenser wrote to celebrate his wedding, the conclusion of a long love story whose ups and downs had been outlined in Amoretti
It consists of 365 long lines, corresponding to the days of the year
The very choice of the title reveals the classical origin of the work: in ancient Greece, in fact, an "epithalamion" was a song sung by boys and girls outside the bridal chamber and poets like Sappho and Anacreon had tried their hands at it. In this poem Spenser was certainly influenced by them as well as by Catullus, by Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls and also by the folklore and the traditions of Ireland, where the wedding took place in 1594. By mingling all these
elements, he gave life to a work which is really a link between the ancient classical past, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
The poem is divided into 23 stanzas telling the story of the wedding day from sunrise to the "so long expected" night
Through his poetry Spenser hoped to secure a place at court, which he visited in Raleigh's company to deliver his most famous work, the Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I that is considered his mastertpiece.
He worked on it for twenty years and left it unfinished when he died. It was originally meant to be in 12 books, but only 6 were published, together with two cantos possible
Spenser himself explained the scheme of the work in a letter to his Sir Walter Raleigh
Each of the twelve books was, therefore, to deal with the adventure of a Knight embodying a particular moral virtue, which, from Book 1 to 6 (books actually published), was in turn Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, Courtesy.
The chief of the Knights, Prince Arthur symbolizing Magnificence in the Aristotelian sense of the perfection of all other virtues, was lo turn up, as a rescuer, at some critical point in each book, thus structurally lying the books together. Being "thè image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve moral virtues", he united in himself all the qualities of all the ideai gentleman,.once more modelled on Castiglione's Cortegiano. In the end he was to marry Gloriana, the Queen of the Fairies, who represented Queen Elizabeth, as well.
Spenser and Ariosto
Ariosto was perhaps the writer who influenced Spenser most. There are certainly some differences.
Orlando Furioso, in fact, is full of gaiety and briskness; it describes human adventures, that is “the daily life of travel, war or gallantry in the Mediterranean world”; its poetry is fluent and natural; fantasy and allegory coexist with realism, its purpose is to amuse.
The Faerie Queene, instead, is more languid and romantic; it is set in an exclusively fantastic and dreamlike world; its purpòse is to reform; its poetry is more artificial and its allegory is too explicitly either religious and moralizing (Knights = virtues) or politicai and flattering (Gloriana = Queen Elizabeth)
Yet without Ariosto, Spenser would never have written The Faerie Queene as he borrowed from him his "ottava rima", which he modified and transformed into what is now known as the Spenserian stanza. In fact, to the 8 lines of iambic pentameters (ten-syllable lines rhyming ab ab ab cc) of the Italian form he added an iambic hexameter, or twelve-syllable Alexandrine. The resulting stanza of 9 lines, rhyming ababbcbcc, which was to become one of the most important measures in English, was certainly the best vehicle for the musicality, the powerful imagination and the skill in picture-making of Spenser, who was often referred to, later, as the poets’poet". |
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