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Thursday, August 07, 2025

Closing the Deal: Edmund Spenser was the Rival Poet.

Standard Citation: Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “Closing the Deal: Edmund Spenser was the Rival Poet.” Virtual Grub Street, enter url here [state date accessed].


In this series:


 

86

Was it the proud full saile of his great verse,

Bound for the prize of (all to[o] precious) you,

That did my ripe thoughts in my braine inhearce,

Making their tombe the wombe wherein they grew?

Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write,

Above a mortall pitch, that struck me dead?

No, neither he, nor his compiers by night

Giving him ayde, my verse astonished.

He nor that affable familiar ghost

Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,

As victors of my silence cannot boast,

I was not sick of any feare from thence.

But when your countinance fild up his line,

Then lackt I matter, that infeebled mine.

As observed in the first part of this series, “I am a worthlesse bote, / He of tall building, and of goodly pride.” of Sonnet 80, and the “proud full sail,” here, in Sonnet 86, refer to stanza vi of the Dedicatory Canto to Queen Elizabeth I in Book VI of The Faerie Queene in which Spenser compares his poem to a ship sailing upon a long, diverse sea voyage:

Like as a ship, that through the Ocean wyde

Directs her course unto one certaine co[a]st,

Is met of many a counter winde and tyde,

With which her winged speed is let and crost,

And she her selfe in stormie surges tost;

Yet, making many a borde and many a bay,

Still winneth way, ne hath her compasse lost:

Right so it fares with me in this long way,

Whose course is often stayd, yet never is astray.

The queen both rules the ocean and is the Ocean in the book. But these are only two of many references in Shakespeare's Rival Poet Sonnets to The Faerie Queene and other of Spenser's poems published during his second visit to London, in 1595-6.

The “spirit” in Sonnet 86, refers to Edmund Spenser's call to the ghost of Sir Philip Sidney, in the poem Ruines of Time (1596), to inspire (breathe into) him:

O noble spirite! live there ever blessed,

*

Thereto doo thou my humble spirite raise,

And into me that sacred breath inspire,

Which thou there breathest perfect and entire.

Sidney was the paragon of poetry and chivalry having died young while acting heroically in battle. He was also Spenser's host at Penshurst for a time. The queen would have recognized Shakespeare's reference.

It was Sir Walter Raleigh who arranged for Spenser's first visit to London, and the Royal Court, in 1590. Having read the first three books of The Faerie Queene, at the time, he abandoned an epic on the queen that he himself was writing and began a campaign at Court for the queen and courtiers to read Spenser's. Raleigh was particularly popular at Court, even while he was technically-speaking imprisoned within The Tower for impregnating one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting, and he was almost certainly the “affable ghost” referred to in the sonnet.

When Raleigh convinced the poet to accompany him to the royal court, at the very end of 1589, it also resulted in Spenser's poem Colin Clouts Come Home Againe describing the social circle at court at a level of detail he could only have gotten so quickly from Raleigh (then a particularly affable intimate of that circle) “gulling” him after their return to their lodgings each night. The gulling presumably continued by letter.

Colin Clout and the first full edition of The Faerie Queene both came out in early 1596. The dedication letter to Clout was dated 1591, and the years of the visit were essentially 1590-1, indicating that a manuscript edition was circulated as early as 1591. Numerous references to events as late as 1594, in the print edition, show that the print text was revised for publication. The first half of The Faerie Queene was published in 1590 but did not include the passage referenced in the Rival Poet Sonnets.

The “Ruine of Time” was published in the volume Complaints: Containing Sundrie Small Poems of the Worlds Vanitie in 1591. It was dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke, in the memory of her brother Philip Sidney, and thanks for her “manie singular favours & great graces”.

Spenser also published his Fowre hymnes in 1596: two each to Love and to Beauty. The dedicatory letter, to the Countesses of Cumberland and Warwick, refers to the hymns having been circulated in manuscript well before they were published. Portions — in particular the praise of Wisdom, the virgin Queen — seems written to flatter Elizabeth:

The soveraine dearling of the Deity,

Clad like a Queene in royall robes, most fit

For so great powre and peerelesse majesty,

*

And on her head a crowne of purest gold

Is set, in signe of highest soveraignty;

And in her hand a scepter she doth hold,


Nevertheless,this queen controls both heaven and earth to a degree that suggests more than her sovereignty over the Anglican church. The reader is left to interpret as he or she will. Few would have missed the reference.

In Shakespeare's Sonnet 85, lines 7-10, we read:

To every Himne that able spirit affords,

In polisht forme of well refined pen.

Hearing you praisd, I say ’tis so, ’tis true,

And to the most of praise adde some-thing more,

Interesting that he speaks of the Rival Poet writing hymns to praise the queen at a time that his rival was also celebrated for writing hymns of remarkable beauty. As if he had conflated all of it — The Faerie Queene and the Fowre Hymns — as hymns to a faerie goddess who ruled over them at a pitch that mere sonnets could not reach.



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