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Tuesday, August 05, 2025

How Shakespeare's Rival Poet Sonnets Prove Edmund Spenser the Rival.


Standard Citation: Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “How Shakespeare's Rival Poet Sonnets Prove Edmund Spenser the Rival.” Virtual Grub Street,  https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2025/08/how-shakespeares-rival-poet-sonnets.html [state date accessed].


In this series:


80

O How I faint when I of you do write,

Knowing a better spirit doth use your name,

And in the praise thereof spends all his might,

To make me toung-tide speaking of your fame.

But since your worth (wide as the Ocean is)

The humble as the proudest saile doth beare,

My sawsie barke (inferior farre to his)

On your broad maine doth wilfully appeare.

Your shallowest helpe will hold me up a floate,

Whilst he upon your soundlesse deepe doth ride,

Or (being wrackt) I am a worthlesse bote,

He of tall building, and of goodly pride.

Then If he thrive and I be cast away,

The worst was this, my love was my decay. 1

Centuries of debate have gone into the question of just who was the Rival Poet in Shakespeare Sonnets 78-86. The first candidate was advanced by the towering 18th century Shakespeare scholar, Edmond Malone. Malone advanced the name of Edmund Spenser.

[commentary on Sonnet 80. Line 9.] Knowing a better spirit doth use your name, ] Spirit is here, as in many other places, used as a monosyllable Curiosity will naturally endeavour to find out who this better spirit was, to whom even Shakspeare acknowledges himself inferior. There was certainly no poet in his own time with whom he needed to have feared a comparison; but these Sonnets being probably written when his name was but little known, and at a time when Spenser was in the zenith of his reputation, I imagine he was the person here alluded to. MALONE.2

Ironically, he was correct, and, straight away, his choice was rejected.

What would sweep aside Malone's candidate without further consideration was a single fact that has misled Shakespeare scholarship since shortly after the 1623 First Folio. If Spenser's Faerie Queene was the ship/poem “of tall building, and of goodly pride”3 that Shakespeare stood before in awe, then the Ocean that the two poets sailed upon — the recipient to whom they wrote their poems — was Queen Elizabeth I.

The odds against a London hustler from Stratford-upon-Avon writing intimate poems to the queen of England were astronomical. So then, the Shakespeare Industry turned the queen into Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, and ever since have debated who should be chosen to fill the role of the Rival Poet for Wriothesley's affections.

In this sonnet, the love-object of the Rival Poets is equated with the Ocean itself. From this metaphor comes the sea and ship imagery. Shakespeare’s tiny sonnets — previously bricks of a monument laid one by one — now are overwhelmed by the vast sweep of The Fairy Queen, so much so that his monument has been revealed to be a mere “sawcie bark” before Spenser’s huge, majestic sailing ship.

Shakespeare adopts the Rival Poet’s self-same imagery: the recipient to whom he writes is the Ocean itself now.

But since your worth (wide, as the ocean is,)

The humble as the proudest sail doth bear,

My saucy bark, inferior far to his,

On your broad main doth wilfully appear.4

These lines are followed by lines 11-12.

I am a worthlesse bote,

He of tall building, and of goodly pride.

The references here are to stanza vi of the Dedicatory Canto to the Book VI of The Faerie Queene in which Spenser compares his poem to the sailing of a ship 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 italics are mine.) Here we find the inspiration for Shakespeare's image of his beloved friend. His rival's poem is an ocean-going vessel on the beloved's ocean.

Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say?

As I pointed out in my Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say? (2015), in the words of Edmund Spenser’s Fairy Queen, her subjects’ virtues originate in her, and return to her again, as rivers receive their water from the Ocean and return it there again.

Great and most glorious virgin Queen alive,

That with her soveraine power, and scepter sheen,

All Fairy lond does peaceable susteen.

In widest Ocean she her throne does rear,

That over all the earth it may be seen;

As morning sun her beams dispredden clear:

And in her face, fair peace and mercy doth appear.5

*

Then pardon me, most dreaded Soveraine,

That from your self I do this vertue bring,

And to your self do it return again:

So from the Ocean all rivers spring,

And tribute back repay as to their King.

Right so from you all goodly vertues well

Into the rest which round about you ring,

Fair Lords and Ladies, which about you dwell,

And do adorn your court, where courtesies excel.6

Perhaps less noticeable but even more evident, the first five lines of the second stanza (quoted here in italics) are also clearly alluded to, with a twist, to try to turn the Rival’s words ironically back upon himself, in the Rival Sonnet 79:

Yet what of thee thy poet doth invent,

He robs thee of, and pays it thee again.7

It is the very meaning of Shakespeare's image. The Rival Poet is Edmund Spenser, whose Fairy Queen Shakespeare recognizes dwarfs his sonnets. The love-object the rivals are competing over is Queen Elizabeth.


1Shake-Spears Sonnets (1609). Sonnet 80. Modernized orthography.

2Malone, Edmond. Supplement to the Edition of Shakspeare's Plays Published in 1778. I.645.

3Shake-Spears Sonnets (1609). Sonnet 80.

4Ibid. Sonnet 80.

5 Spenser, Edmund, The Fairy Queen: with a Glossary Explaining old and obscure words. In Two Volumes. London: Tonson, 1758. Vol. 1, Bk II, Canto II, Stanza XL @ 203.

6 Ibid., Vol. 2, Canto Introduction to Bk. VI, Stanza VII @ 310.

7 Shake-Spears Sonnets (1609). Sonnet 79. l.7-8. Modernized orthography.




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