Edmund Spenser
c. 1552 – 13 January 1599
Edmund Spenser was an English poet of the Elizabethan era, best known for The Faerie Queene, an unfinished allegorical epic celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Queen Elizabeth I. He spent much of his career as an official in Ireland and invented the nine-line Spenserian stanza. He is buried near Chaucer in what became Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Lived at the same time
Well-documented people whose lives overlapped with Edmund Spenser.
- El Greco (1541–1614) Overlapped 47 years →
- Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) Overlapped 47 years →
- Sofonisba Anguissola (1532–1625) Overlapped 47 years →
- Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616) Overlapped 47 years →
- François Viète (1540–1603) Overlapped 47 years →
- John Napier (1550–1617) Overlapped 47 years →
Life events
Spenser was born in London around 1552 or 1553, probably the son of a journeyman clothmaker.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgSpenser attended Merchant Taylors' School in London under the humanist headmaster Richard Mulcaster during the 1560s.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgSpenser matriculated as a sizar at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, in 1569, taking his BA in 1573 and MA in 1576.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgSpenser's pastoral debut The Shepheardes Calender appeared in 1579, dedicated to Philip Sidney, and established his poetic reputation.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgIn August 1580 Spenser traveled to Ireland as private secretary to the new Lord Deputy, Arthur Grey, beginning a lifelong career in the Irish administration.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgAround 1589 Spenser acquired the estate of Kilcolman in the Munster plantation, where he wrote much of The Faerie Queene.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgThe first installment of The Faerie Queene was published in London in 1590, earning Spenser a royal pension of fifty pounds a year from Elizabeth I.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgSpenser married Elizabeth Boyle on 11 June 1594, celebrating the courtship and wedding in his sonnet sequence Amoretti and the marriage ode Epithalamion.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgIn October 1598 Spenser's estate at Kilcolman was sacked and burned by Irish forces during the Nine Years' War, forcing him to flee to Cork and then London.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgSpenser died in Westminster on 13 January 1599 and was buried near Chaucer in Westminster Abbey.
Source: en.wikipedia.org