AGE OF CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH

 # Hello, Readers The task of Thinking activity Age of Chaucer to Elizabeth was assigned by Barad sir.

Write in brief about Chaucer or Edmund Spencer or Ben Jonson on francis bacon

 or on any one of their work.

EDMUND SPENSER: THE POET OF THE POETS

EDMUND SPENSER

 ''For whatsoever from one place doth fall,

Is with the tide unto an other brought:

For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.''

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

# His life:

 Edmund Spenser was born in 1552 London, United Kingdom. He came of a poor family, so he had to work as a waiter by a rich family to finance his study. His father was John Spenser. 

# Spenser's Education:

He was educated in London.At the merchant Taylors’ school and on Pembroke college, was he educated. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1573. Because of an epidemic, Spenser left Cambridge in 1574, but he received the Master of Arts degree in 1576.

He graduated in the year 1576 from Pembroke college as a master. 2 years after he was graduated he went working as secretary by the bisschop from Leicester.Little is certainly known about Spenser. He was related to a noble Midlands family of Spencer, whose fortunes had been made through sheep raising. His own immediate family was not wealthy. He was entered as a “poor boy” in the Merchant Taylors’ grammar school, where he would have studied mainly Latin, with some Hebrew, Greek, and music.

In 1569, when Spenser was about 16 years old, his English versions of poems by the 16th-century French poet Joachim du Bellay and his translation of a French version of a poem by the Italian poet Petrarch appeared at the beginning of an anti-Catholic prose tract, A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings; they were no doubt commissioned by its chief author, the wealthy Flemish expatriate Jan Baptista van der Noot. (Some of these poems Spenser later revised for his Complaints volume.)

From May 1569 Spenser was a student in Pembroke Hall (now Pembroke College) of the University of Cambridge, where, along with perhaps a quarter of the students, he was classed as a sizar—a student who, out of financial necessity, performed various menial or semi-menial duties. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1573. Because of an epidemic, Spenser left Cambridge in 1574, but he received the Master of Arts degree in 1576.

His best-known friend at Cambridge was the slightly older Gabriel Harvey, a fellow of Pembroke, who was learned, witty, and enthusiastic for ancient and modern literature but also pedantic, devious, and ambitious. There is no reason to believe that Spenser shared the most distasteful of these qualities, but, in the atmosphere of social mobility and among the new aristocracy of Tudor England, it is not surprising that he hoped for preferment to higher position.

Spenser’s period at the University of Cambridge was undoubtedly important for the acquisition of his wide knowledge not only of the Latin and some of the Greek classics but also of the Italian, French, and English literature of his own and earlier times. His knowledge of the traditional forms and themes of lyrical and narrative poetry provided foundations for him to build his own highly original compositions. Without the Roman epic poet Virgil’s Aeneid, the 15th-century Italian Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, and, later, Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), Spenser could not have written his heroic, or epic, poem The Faerie Queene. Without Virgil’s Bucolics and the later tradition of pastoral poetry in Italy and France, Spenser could not have written The Shepheardes Calender. And without the Latin, Italian, and French examples of the highly traditional marriage ode and the sonnet and canzone forms of Petrarch and succeeding sonneteers, Spenser could not have written his greatest lyric, Epithalamion, and its accompanying sonnets, Amoretti. The patterns of meaning in Spenser’s poetry are frequently woven out of the traditional interpretations—developed through classical times and his own—of pagan myth, divinities, and philosophies and out of an equally strong experience of the faith and doctrines of Christianity; these patterns he further enriched by the use of medieval and contemporary story, legend, and folklore.

Spenser’s religious training was a most important part of his education. He could not have avoided some involvement in the bitter struggles that took place in his university over the path the new Church of England was to tread between Roman Catholicism and extreme Puritanism, and his own poetry repeatedly engages with the opposition between Protestantism and Catholicism and the need to protect the national and moral purity of the Elizabethan church. Contrary to a former view, there is little reason to believe that he inclined toward the Puritanical side.

In the mean while he had made friends like Gabriel Harvey. Who had arranged he a job for him at the counties house staff. And he published his first poet ‘’The Shepheardes Calender’’’ Spenser was admired by William Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Byron and Alfred Lord Tennyson, among others. The language of his poetry is purposely archaic, reminiscent of earlier works such as The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer, whom Spenser greatly admired.

# Marriage and children:

Spenser married his first wife, Machabyas Childe, in 1579, around the same time he published The Shepheardes Calender. Together, they had two children, Sylvanus and Katherine.By 1594, Edmund Spenser’s first wife had died, and in that year he married a much younger Elizabeth Boyle, a relative of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork. He addressed to her the sonnet sequence Amoretti, and the marriage itself was celebrated in Epithalamion. Together, they had a son named Peregrine.

A year later he was resigned to secretary of  Arthur Lord Grey de Wilton. Who was settled in London. He has also served the army for a while. But after that he gets the castle of kolcolman  in cork and he lived their for 18 years(With some exceptions left). He has write probably the great and the famous poet ‘’The Faerie Queene’’ and 6 years after that he published a supplement for ‘’The Faerie Queene’’.

# The Faerie Queen

The Faerie Queene (1590) is an epic poem by Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–1599), which follows the adventures of a number of medieval knights. This poem is notable for its form: at over 36,000 lines and over 4,000 stanzas. it is one of the longest poem in the English language. It's a remarkable poem just because Edmund Spenser had made this poem especially for the queen for who this poet was written a new rhyme scheme called ‘’Spenserian stanza’’.  The rhyme scheme goes like this ABABBCBCC .

Another thing that lights up is the length of poem their is said that this is the longest poem in the English Language. The character have mostly some band with real life fame persons.

The 'Queene' in the title alludes to Queen Elizabeth the first.

In the poem you will follows several knights in an fight against evil and virtues. The poem is based on the legend of Arthur. The poem became so heroic that Spenser was granted by the Queen a pension of 50 pounds a year. This poem is an allegorical romance, symbolizing the moral and spiritual journey of an individual through innumerable temptations of sins towards the ultimate attainment of glory and truth.

# The allegory: There are the usual characters, poorly developed, of the Arthurian and classical romance, such as Arthur, merlin, Saracens, fauns, and satyrs. There are the allegoried moral and religious virtues, with their counterparts in the vices:Una (Truth), Guyon (Temperance), Duessa (Deceit), Orgoglio (Pride).

The poem is unfinished: Spenser’s original plan was for 12 books, but we have just seven, the last being incomplete. The first three books were published in 1590 and the second three in 1596.

'' What though the sea with waves continuall

Doe eate the earth, it is no more at all ;

Ne is the earth the lesse, or loseth ought :

For whatsoever from one place doth fall

Is with the tyde unto another brought :

For there is nothing lost, that may be found if sought.''

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

 In total he published 6 books

 First publication:

Book I: “The red cross knight” Holiness   

Book II: ”The Good Sir Guyon”Temperance

Book III: The Legend of Britomart Chasity             

Second publication:

Book IV: The Squire of Low Degree Friendship   

Book V: The Adventures of Sir Artegall Justice 

Book VI: Knight of Courtesy Courtesy

 The first of the poems that have descended to us is The Shepheards Calendar (1579). The title, adopted from a popular compilation of the day, suggests the contents: a series of twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year. Each eclogue, as is common with the species, is in dialogue form, in which the stock pastoral characters, such as Cuddie, Colin Clout, and Perigot, take part. Skilful literary exercises on classical pastoral models, the pieces show great metrical dexterity. Their style is deliberately archaic, in keeping with the rustic characters, and Spenser adopting the dialect and alliteration of the Midlands and North.

''One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washed it away:

Again I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.''

# List of works:

•The Shepheardes Calender was published in 1579 and was Spenser’s first major work.

•The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596, 1609)

•Complaints Containing sundrie small Poemes of the Worlds Vanitie (1591)

•The Ruines of Time

•The Teares of the Muses

•Virgil's Gnat

•Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberds Tale It is a bitter “Satire in the form of a fable”. The poem tells the story of a fox and an ape”

•Ruines of Rome: by Bellay

•Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterflie (1591) tells the tale of a butterfly, Clarion, grimly slain by a spider, Aragnoll. Published among his Complaints, it is a notoriously enigmatic poem that has bred diverse allegorical and anti-allegorical interpretations.

•Visions of the worlds vanitie

•The Visions of Bellay

•The Visions of Petrarch

•Daphnaida. An Elegy upon the death of the noble and vertuous Douglas Howard, Daughter and heire of Henry Lord Howard, Viscount Byndon, and wife of Arthure Gorges Esquier (1594)

•Colin Clouts Come home againe (1595)

•Astrophel. A Pastoral Elegie upon the death of the most Noble and valorous Knight, Sir Philip Sidney (1595).

•Amoretti (1595)which contains eighty-eight sonnets commemorating his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle.

•Four Hymns (1596)

•Prothalamion was written by the English poet Edmund Spenser in 1596 in celebration of the engagements of Elizabeth and Katherine Somerset, the daughters of the Earl of Somerset. The poem was innovative and unusual for its time. In fact, Spenser coined the word "prothalamion" specifically for it, modeling the title on the word.

                                     

•Epithalamion it is spousal song and after though to be a filling conclusion of his sonnet sequence. It celebrates the poet wedding with ‘Elizabeth Byele’ which was celebrated in a small Irish town on 11th June 1554. In 1594 Spenser married and celebrated the event in his “Epithalamion,” a wedding song, considered the most beautiful example of this genre in English literature. It was printed in 1595 in the same volume as a group of love sonnets, the Amoretti.

• A View of the Present State of Ireland in 1596, however, it wasn’t published until the mid-seventeenth century. 

•Babel, Empress of the East – a dedicatory poem prefaced to Lewes Lewkenor’s The Commonwealth of Venice, 1599.

The Edmund Spenser known as The Prince of Poets Spenser was known to his contemporaries as 'the prince of poets', as great in English as Virgil in Latin. He left behind him masterful essays in every genre of poetry, from pastoral and elegy to epithalamion and epic.

''And turned have the tenor of my string,

The heavenly prayses of true love to sing"

-Edmund Spenser

# Death of Spenser:

Spenser once more arrived in London, but he was now in dire distress and prostrated by the hardships which he had suffered. There on January 16, 1599, at a tavern in King Street, Westminster, the great poet died brokenhearted and in poverty. Drummond of Hawthornden states that Ben Jonson told him that Spenser “died for lack of bread in King Street, and refused 20 pieces sent to him by my Lord of Essex, and said He was sorrie he had no time to spend them.” The story is probably a bit of exaggerated gossip. He was buried close to the tomb of Chaucer in the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, his fellow-poets bearing the pall, and the Earl of Essex defraying the expenses of the funeral. Referring to the death of Spenser’s great contemporary.

''Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nigh

To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumont, lie

A little nearer Spenser, to make room

For Shakespeare in your threefold, fourfold tomb.''

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