From the beginning, English pastoral worked as inside-out satire. Spenser’s shepherds, in their songs of love betrayed, of wolves and sheep and foxes, unwittingly offered the witty reader fables of court and church corruption. It is often said that Spenser represented himself in the poem in the figure of the shepherd, Colin Clout, and this is true; yet Colin Clout is a figure remote and comical and small. Spenser had not that sense of compassion or realism that so often suddenly complicates Shakespeare’s portrayal of poor figures; which is to say, Spenser the poet, England’s Virgil, stood outside the work in which he represented himself as the poet, Colin Clout.

Spenser and Raleigh, from H. E. Marshall, English Literature for Boys and Girls (London. T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1910). Reproduced with kind permission of Lebrecht Music & Arts.

There is very often this tension in Spenser’s work between what might be called an inside and outside view. His sonnet sequence and epithalamium derive tension from the difference between their personal tone and a complex organising structure of numerology, astrology, and the church year. His masterpiece, The Faerie Queene (1590–96), is an allegory, a form that carries the sense of a mind multiplying by divisions. More, it is a Puritan allegory in the pleasant and digressive style of an Italian Renaissance romantic epic – a work that combines so many literary influences that his friend Gabriel Harvey described it as ‘Hobgoblin runne away with the Garland from Apollo’.

The Faerie Queene is a work of some four thousand Spenserian stanzas. Though Spenser wrote to Raleigh that he meant to write twelve books, he died with six books complete, along with some stanzas of a seventh. Some critics believe the work to be complete as it stands. The six books, each in twelve cantos, invent the legends of knights who embody holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice, and courtesy. These knights travel in the service of Gloriana, Queen of Fairyland. This epic of wandering gathers itself in wonderful set pieces:the House of Pride, the Bower of Bliss, the Cave of Despair, the Treasury of Mammon, the Processions of the Seasons.

Spenser’s style, like a tapestry of detailed and curious weaving, of massed small emblematic decorative effects, defined the ‘Elizabethan age’. Marx famously described Spenser as ‘Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet’. Although it is true that Spenser’s descriptions of Queen Elizabeth drip with almost desperate praise, it is also true that he was a startlingly tactless sycophant. He mortally offended the most powerful courtier in England, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, representing him as an ape in the beast fable, ‘Mother Hubberds Tale’ (1591). Harvey complained that ‘Mother Hubbard in heat of choler, forgetting the pure sanguine of her sweete Faery Queene, wilfully ouer-shott her malcontented selfe’. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser figured Mary Queen of Scots as the Whore of Babylon. Her son, James VI of Scotland, was England’s future king. Before his accession in 1603, James wrote more than once to Elizabeth demanding that Spenser be ‘duly tried and punished’. Unworldly, you might conclude; yet Spenser’s prose treatise on Ireland makes Machiavelli look naïve.

Spenser’s life also carries this sense of being inside and outside: far from the centre of power, but dreaming of it. He was born in London, and he died there. Yet he spent most of his adult life in Ireland, writing his courtly and ornate allegorical epic in conditions of war. He described The Faerie Queene as ‘wilde fruit, which saluage soil hath bred’. Ben Jonson told William Drummond of Hawthornden ‘That the Irish, having robbed Spenser’s goods and burnt his house and a little child new-born, he and his wife escaped’. Although only in his forties, Spenser died soon afterwards. He was buried next to Chaucer in Westminster Abbey – it was the start of Poets’ Corner.

Spenser went to Ireland as secretary to Lord Grey, and probably witnessed the massacre at Smerwick of the Spanish and Irish prisoners who had unconditionally surrendered. In Lord Grey’s account:

Morning come I presented my companies in battaile before the Forte: the Coronell comes forth with x or xij of his chiefe ientlemen, trayling theyre ensigns roled vp, & presented them vnto mee with theyr liues & the Forte: I sent straight certain gentlemen in to see their weapons and armures layed downe & to gard the munition & victaile there lefte for spoile: Then putt I in to certeyn bandes, who straight fell to execution. There were 600 slayne.

Spenser himself wrote that ‘theare was not other waie but to make that shorte ende of them which was made’. Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) brings the horror of that Irish war to life. Take his account of the Munster Famine:

Out of euerie Corner of the woods and glinnes they Came Crepinge for the vppon theire hands for theire Legs Coulde not beare them, they loked like Anotomies of deathe, they spake like ghostes Cryinge out of theire graues, they did eate the dead Carrions, hapie wheare they Coulde fine them … al by the extremitye of famine which they themselves had wrought …

Although this passage seems written to occasion compassion, Spenser in this work advocates harsher measures to subdue Ireland.

All this means that it is hard to take a simple view of Spenser’s writing. As Coleridge remarked, ‘No man can appreciate Spenser without a reflection on the nature of allegorical writing.’ An interest in the connections between a writer’s life and work drives a great many contemporary biographies. In Spenser’s case, the connections are both rewarding and complicated: they involve questions of how allegory relates to reality. Andrew Hadfield’s biography is strong on historical fact and yet it treats Spenser’s poetry as a cipher. Its literary criticism is characterised by the claim that ‘Spenser knew how to exploit and manipulate the amorphous audience of a printed work’: an assumption that writers write in order to achieve some particular, usually political, gain. It is an assumption that does not serve literary criticism well. It admits no idiosyncrasy, no individual aesthetic. As such it begs the question of why we write literary criticism at all, as distinct from history or biography. At one point, Hadfield writes: ‘What Spenser has achieved in his poetry is a sophisticated understanding that the obvious may be true.’

At times, Hadfield’s writing also appears rushed. ‘Spenser must have met Elizabeth Boyle in England, or, more likely, at some point soon after his return to Ireland in 1590, perhaps staying the publication of that poem because of her, in addition to his complicated relationship with Ralegh – although it is more likely that he met her in the second half of 1592 or early 1593’. Perhaps we will never know when and where Spenser met his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle. If some such single sentences seem to rush through gaps in the history, others rush through arguments that would need to be set out with some care:

In many ways, of course, Spenser could be seen, yet again, as regretting the overthrow of Rome and the dismemberment of Christendom that resulted in, and then from, the Reformation; neither Protestants nor Catholics can be regarded as broadly homogenous groups who had consensual perspectives of the history of religion and, as a recent historian has argued, ‘there was in this period no such thing as a unitary English Catholicism at all’.

Resulted in, and then from? Such twisted sentences often mark where Hadfield tries to bend Spenser to his own purposes. For instance, the argument that Spenser regretted the Reformation is one that Hadfield needed to set out more clearly.

This biography has elsewhere met with unqualified praise, but for me its strength lies in its massing of evidence. Hadfield is an accomplished academic. Professor of English at the University of Sussex, he has written and edited a number of books on Renaissance literature and politics. For five years editor of Renaissance Studies, he is now Editor-in-Chief of ‘British and Irish Literature’, Oxford Bibliographies Online.

In this 640-page book he brings together what scholars and academics have discovered of Spenser’s family background, his school, his patrons, his friends and acquaintances, his sources, his influences, his publishers, the history of his publications and manuscripts, and his life in Ireland. It is, in that respect, an admirable and useful work: the first biography of Spenser since 1945, and the most comprehensive. But it is not a good advertisement for academic writing.