Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–1599) was an Elizabethan English poet and the author of The Faerie Queene, an allegorical epic honoring Queen Elizabeth I. Born in London and educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, he made his name with The Shepheardes Calender (1579). In 1580 he went to Ireland as secretary to the Lord Deputy and spent most of his remaining life there. Encouraged by Sir Walter Raleigh, he brought the first three books of The Faerie Queene to London, where they were published in 1590 and earned him a royal pension; three more followed in 1596. Each book follows a knight who embodies a virtue, such as Holiness, Temperance, Justice and Courtesy. He also wrote the sonnet sequence Amoretti and the marriage hymn Epithalamion (1595). Remembered as “the poets' poet” and the creator of the Spenserian stanza, he was buried in Westminster Abbey near Geoffrey Chaucer.
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Christian Imagination in English Literature
Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Milton's Paradise Lost and Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress gave English literature enduring visions of virtue, temptation and salvation. Centuries later, C.S. Lewis wrote scholarly studies of Spenser and Milton and modeled The Pilgrim's Regress on Bunyan. His friend J.R.R. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, helped lead Lewis back to Christian faith, and both men expressed their beliefs through imaginative fiction in Middle-earth and Narnia.
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The Tudor Age
Thomas More served Henry VIII as Lord Chancellor but refused, for reasons of conscience, to accept the king as head of the English church. Henry's daughter Elizabeth I presided over a flourishing of English culture and seafaring: Sir Francis Drake sailed around the world, Edmund Spenser dedicated The Faerie Queene to her, and William Shakespeare's first plays reached the London stage.
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