No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The proposal of Dr. P. W. Long to connect Lady Carey with the Amoretti of Spenser, interesting as it is, has perhaps not met with universal acceptance. It seems to rest on too slender a thread of evidence for overthrow of the traditional and more natural explanation of the sonnets as belonging to Spenser's own courtship. Without debating that question, however, so far as Dr. Long's suggestion rests upon a public promise of Spenser to “display” “in ampler wise” his “good will” to Lady Carey, I propose another explanation of how that promise was fulfilled. In addition I shall attempt a somewhat fuller examination than has hitherto been made of Spenser's volume called Complaints.
1 Mod. Lang. Rev., iii, p. 257.
2 To Lady Carew (Carey), one of the dedicatory sonnets to the Faerie Queene (1590).
3 Publications of the Mod. Lang. Ass'n, xxxi, p. 90. Miss Lyons might have strengthened her case for the date by the relation of the Muiopotmos to the dedicatory sonnet to Lady Carey accompanying the Faerie Queene. I trust also that this paper will show added reasons for considering the date 1590 on the Muiopotmos titlepage to be correct.
4 The exact date of Essex's marriage to the widow of Sir Philip Sidney must be inferred from the birth of their first child, Robert, who was christened Jan. 22, 1591. The exposure of the marriage by the pregnancy of the Countess Essex may well have been in the summer of 1590, for we are told that by the middle of October she was publicly waited on as the new countess. By Nov. 24 Essex was again in “very good favor.”—Lives of the Earls of Essex, by W. B. Devereux, i, pp. 210-12.
The secrecy of the marriage is attested by Watson's dedication of the English Eglogue upon the Death of Walsingham to Lady Frances Sidney, although it could scarcely have appeared before she had become the Countess of Essex.
5 That these lines may suggest a further purpose to honor Lady Carey, as Dr. Long thinks (see his article above cited), is no reason for believing the Muiopotmos and the following Visions are not a fulfilment of the promise in the dedicatory sonnet of the Faerie Queene. Besides, as Mr. J. C. Smith points out (Mod. Lang. Rev., v, p. 276), the same promise of “other more worthie labour” was made to Lady Compton and Monteagle,—a promise never fulfilled so far as we know,—and something like it to Lady Strange.
6 Elizabethan Sonnets, i, p. xxxvi. Sir Sidney was no more exact in reference to Spenser's Visions of Bellay on the foregoing page. He there speaks of “fifteen of the Frenchman's sonnets … rendered by Spenser while a schoolboy,” instead of eleven, later increased to fifteen by four new translations when the Visions were revised.
7 Compare also p. 764 of Dodge's Spenser for a similar statement.
8 Spenser's Poetical Works, Introd., p. xxxi. Nor does De Sélin-court recognize the two English sonnets among the Visions of Petrarch, but says of Spenser's revised version: “The latter needed less manipulation [as compared with the blank verse Visions of Bellay], for he had rhymed them in the earlier version.” May I add that it is also strangely inept to introduce the anachronism “sonnets of Shakespearian form” in writing of Spenser's early work.
9 In some particulars the Harvard Library copy, which I have used, differs from any examined by De Sélincourt (Minor Poems of Spenser, Introd.). It usually agrees with the Huth Quarto where that differs from the Bodleian Library copy, which De Sélincourt made the basis of his text. It disagrees with the Huth Quarto and agrees with the Bodleian in reading ‘crime,’ not ‘raine’ (Teares of the Muses, 435). It differs from both in reading ‘Viminal’ (Ruines of Rome, 56), not ‘Vimnial’ with the Bodleian Quarto, or ‘Viminall’ with the Huth Quarto; and in ‘attempted.’ (Muioptomos, 346), not ‘attempted,’ with the Bodleian, or ‘attempted’ with the Huth Quarto. These different readings in different copies of the Quarto of course show that there were different impressions of the whole or parts of the Complaints, and add force to the suggestion that the four booklets may have appeared separately.
10 He used the English form twice, possibly three times, afterwards. The eighth sonnet of the Amoretti is in that from, and the twentieth might be claimed for it, though it is possibly a Spenserian sonnet with imperfect rimes. Spenser's commendatory sonnet Upon the Historie of George Castriot is also of the English form. The envoy at the end of the Ruines of Rome is partly an English sonnet, partly a Spenserian, the scheme being abab cdcd dede ff. Can this be the intermediate experiment which led Spenser from the Surrey type to his own distinctive rime scheme? The chronology of Spenser's poems would seem to justify this conjecture.
I do not here take account of the sonnet Dr. Long thinks he has discovered in Colin Clout, 466-479.
11 With, the sentiment expressed in this second quatrain compare Spenser's autobiographic allusions in Ruines of Time, 446-8, also a clear reference to Burghley's unappreciativeness, and the more specific complaint of himself in Daphnaïda, 33-36, both passages written in this year of waiting.
12 The subject of the Muiopotmos may have been in Spenser's mind even before 1590. One of the first topics of conversation between Spenser and Raleigh in Ireland must have been the Essex rivalry and Raleigh's virtual exclusion from the court circle. Even then it is not likely the poem was composed before Spenser's visit to England.
13 Dedicatory letter to Ruines of Time.
14 It must be remembered that in the opening lines to Astrophel Spenser had given a reason for not printing that poem in honor of Sidney. It was designed, he tells us, “not to please the living but the dead,” and intended only for those “shepheards” who mourned with him the loss of a friend. Nor did he actually print the poem until two of the elegies had been published or entered for publication. Besides, he was now including Sidney in the larger plan of praising all the deceased members of the Dudley house.
15 Before the end of 1590 Spenser felt called upon for another commemorative poem, the third new one of the year. On August 13, 1590, the wife of his friend Arthur Gorges had died, and for her Spenser composed his Daphnaïda. It was dedicated on what most critica believe to have been Jan. 1, 1591, though such a dating in Spenser's time would ordinarily have meant Jan. 1, 1592, nearly a year after he left England. Perhaps the date at the end of the letter of dedication is a mere printer's error for 1590, the figures ‘naught’ and ‘one’ often looking alike in handwriting. Why Ponsonby, who printed the poem separately in 1591, did not gather it into the Complaints volume we do not know. Perhaps he had not found it in time, or some arrangement may have been made for its independent issue.
16 The meaning, not quite clearly expressed, must be “not easy to be obtained from him, partly because he had lost some of them while in England, partly because of his departure over sea.”