Spenser, Edmund

The poet Edmund Spenser (1552/3–1599) was a planter and provincial official in Ireland. Like much else concerning his experience in Ireland, the date of Spenser's first arrival remains uncertain and contentious. The claim that he visited there in the late 1570s has allowed for some speculation about the influence of the island on his work, but it rests on the questionable identification of Spenser with Irenius, the fictional interlocutor in his dialogue A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), who claimed to have been present at an execution at Limerick datable to 1577. No other evidence for Spenser's presence exists before August 1580, when he arrived as the private secretary of Lord Deputy Grey de Wilton. The political influence he exercised in this position is indeterminate, depending upon one's assessment of his role in the composition of the state correspondence, of which he made fair copies. But independent evidence confirms his presence with Grey during the latter's bloody Munster campaigns (1580–1581) and at the massacre of the surrendered garrison at Smerwick, reported on approvingly by Irenius. Grey rewarded Spenser's service with a gift of 162 pounds and a free appointment to the lucrative post of clerk of faculties in the Irish chancery in 1581.

Spenser began early to speculate in Irish lands, acquiring and selling leases of monastic properties in County Wexford, purchasing the Dublin townhouse of the attainted Viscount Baltinglass, and leasing as his residence the substantial property of New Abbey, Co. Kildare. In the later 1580s Spenser began to invest in attainted lands in Munster, acquiring some small leases and a major estate of 3,000 (grossly underestimated) acres at Kilcolman, Co. Cork. He then resigned his chancery post, and on his appointment as clerk of the council in Munster (1588) he took up residence at Kilcolman. Spenser's investment was afflicted by organizational and tenurial troubles from the outset. An increasingly troublesome lawsuit with his Anglo-Irish neighbor David Roche caused him to visit London in 1589 to 1591 in the hope of securing a favorable outcome. But though he was granted a royal pension of fifty pounds per year, he made no progress with his suit, which was determined against him to his considerable cost in 1594. Spenser then resigned from the Munster council, and his writings during this period suggest that he had become severely embittered by his Munster experience.

Still, the depth and duration of his disillusion should not be overstated. His marriage to Elizabeth Boyle, niece of the rising Munster planter Richard Boyle, is an indication of his determination to stay in Ireland and a sign that he was acquiring powerful friends in the region. By 1597 he was again investing in leases, and in 1598 he accepted appointment as sheriff of Cork. Within a month of his taking office, however, the entire plantation was overthrown in a massive rebellion fueled by the successes of the Ulster lords against the English government. Kilcolman was burned and Spenser was forced to take refuge in Cork city. Ben Jonson's claim that Spenser had lost a son in the fire, though possible, lacks corroboration. In December he was despatched to London by Lord President Norris with reports on the state of the rebellion on the understanding that he would return with instructions. But within weeks of his arrival in London he died, on 16 January 1599.

The importance of his Irish experience to Spenser's literary work is certain but difficult to evaluate. The greater part of Books II through VI of The Faerie Queene was composed in Ireland, and references to the country abound throughout the poem. The severe political and social attitudes struck in Book V have frequently been accounted for in relation to events in Ireland. But the complexities of his multilayered poem continue to defy reductionist interpretation. More readily explicable is Spenser's View. The radicalism of his analysis of the Irish problem (that no ordinary English policy could resolve it) and the ruthlessness of his proposed solution (cultural trauma through mass starvation) is undisputed (except by those who maintain that he never wrote it at all). But the internal coherence, representative character, and influence over contemporaries of a text that, though circulating in manuscript, remained unprinted until 1633 continues to stimulate scholarly debate.

Spenser, Edmund

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