But this is a sentiment intended for publication and is ‘spoken’ not by Spenser but by Colin Clout. Though persistently auto-referential, the Spenserian ‘I’ is never truly autobiographical. Autobiography is the condition it never quite attains, auto-fabrication the condition it never quite escapes.

In works such as The Shepheardes Calender and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe images of circularity abound, pitting ideals of fulfilment against experiences of entrapment. And it is not only the speaker who is entrapped but also the objects of his attention. Mother Hubberds Tale was called in upon its publication in 1591 even though it is likely that large parts of it had been written some dozen years earlier. But this is the Elizabethan equivalent of Animal Farm and Spenser’s analysis of the contemporary malaise proceeds beyond specific personalities to the very power structures of the Elizabethan regime. The sovereign lioness rejoices to see her favourite ‘beast’ romping about ‘enchaste with chaine and circulet of golde… buxome to his bands’, yet she is offended by the ‘late chayne’ which has been laid about his neck. She would have him both ‘wilde’ and ‘tame’ simultaneously, wholly bound to her yet somehow also ‘free’ (624–30). Depending on the dating of the passage, the allusion may refer either to the Earl of Leicester’s clandestine marriage to Lettice Knollys (1578) or to the Earl of Essex’s clandestine marriage to Frances Walsingham (1590). On the deepest level, however, it matters little which we choose. Because of her unmarried state Elizabeth (whose personal motto was ‘semper eadem’, always the same) was fated to recurrent disappointments of this nature, and the political dynamics of the Elizabethan court, vulnerable as they were to the emotional vicissitudes of fruitless courtship, were correspondingly unstable. What the poem exposes is not an isolated incident but an endemic condition, a vicious circle of sexual jealousy and political disarray.

Given the force of such preoccupations, it is hardly surprising that the shorter poems so often gesture towards spiritual transcendence as a means of escape from the world’s prevailing ‘vanitie’. The Fowre Hymnes (1596) conclude with what might well be interpreted as a programme for the redemption of Narcissus:

Ah then my hungry soule, which long hast fed

On idle fancies of thy foolish thought,

And with false beauties flattring bait misled,

Hast after vaine deceiptfull shadowes sought,

Which all are fled, and now haue left thee nought,

But late repentance through thy follies prief;

Ah ceasse to gaze on matter of thy grief.

(An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie, 288–94)

The object may have changed but the ‘hunger’ survives. But has the object actually changed? Or, as the persistence of mirror imagery suggests, is the object still the subject? Is the love of God any less self-referential than the love of woman? The structure of the Fowre Hymnes is rigorously dialectical and the relationship between ‘earthly’ and ‘heauenly’ love cannot be explained solely, or even principally, in terms of ascent or renunciation. The process, as Spenser tells us, is not one of recantation but of ‘retractation’, a complex operation of revision or redaction. The two ‘earthly’ hymns are not suppressed but republished, like Amoretti’s repeated sonnet, in a new context. The structure of the volume expands to embrace, rather than to deny, its internal contradictions. Evident throughout the ‘heavenly’ pair is the struggle to sublimate earthly desire, a hallowing of Eros which inevitably entails a sexualizing of Agape. Even the God of the heavenly hymns, constructed in the image of the earthly speaker’s ‘hungry’ desire, is a divine Narcissist who created man:

In whom he might his mightie selfe behould:

For loue doth loue the thing belou’d to see,

That like it selfe in louely shape may bee.

(An Hymne of Heavenly Love, 117–19)

God sees himself in creation and creation strives to glimpse his image by gazing upon reflections of itself. ‘Rest’ may be the word upon which the hymns close, but the poetry thrives upon the disquietude of complex metaphysical thought.

However fervent his aspirations towards perfection and stability, Spenser’s imagination was complicit with the depredations of time, with emotional dislocation, with exile, and ultimately with the ‘vanitie’ he castigates. His music draws strength from the breaking of Colin’s pipe, from the fall of Rome, the fate of butterflies and from the very corruption of Eliza’s court. Even in the Epithalamion, a rare poem of consummated desire, the speaker’s Orphic power is deliberately offset by darker resonances and echoes. The abrupt ending may even suggest that personal fulfilment entails poetic loss. E. K. divides the eclogues of The Shepheardes Calender into three distinct groups, the ‘plaintiue’, the ‘recreatiue’ and the ‘moral’, but the work itself challenges such distinctions. Plaintive ‘undersongs’ resound in recreative verse, moral issues intrude into matters of love, and a disturbingly ‘doolful pleasaunce’ is derived even from elegy. All of the ‘mirrours’ are carefully angled to enhance the most provocative effects of ‘opposd reflexion’. The biographer’s loss is the reader’s gain.

The present edition contains all of Spenser’s shorter poetry including the important Latin verse which appeared in the Spenser-Harvey correspondence of 1580. A full translation from the Latin is supplied in the commentary.