Edmund Spenser's innovative poetic works have a central place in the canon of English literature. Yet he is remembered as a morally flawed, self-interested sycophant; complicit in England's ruthless colonisation of Ireland; in Karl Marx's words, 'Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet'-- a man on the make who aspired to be at court and who was prepared to exploit the Irish to get what he wanted.In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the poet for 60 years, Andrew Hadfield finds a more complex and subtle Spenser. How did a man who seemed destined to become a priest or a don become embroiled in politics? If he was intent on social climbing, why was he so astonishingly rude to the good and the great Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester, Sir Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I and James VI? Why was he more at home with 'the middling sort' -- writers, publishers and printers, bureaucrats, soldiers, academics, secretaries, and clergymen -- than with the mighty and the powerful? How did the appalling slaughter he witnessed in Ireland impact on his imaginative powers? How did his marriage and family life shape his work? Spenser's brilliant writing has always challenged our preconceptions. So too, Hadfield shows, does the contradictory relationship between his between life and his art.

In this volume of essays a group of historians and literary critics debate the representation of early modern Ireland by English Renaissance authors. The contributions deal both with modes of representation - aesthetic, geographic, literary, political, visual - and with the biographies of representative individuals. Thus historical commentary and textual analysis go hand-in-hand with biography and chronology. The essays are interdisciplinary, combining traditional methods of literary and historical enquiry with a range of new theoretical approaches to texts and their authors. There are discussions of the work of major writers including John Bale, Gabriel Harvey, Barnaby Googe, Edmund Spenser, John Milton and Geoffrey Keating in the context of Irish politics from the Reformation to the Restoration.

For many years C. S. Lewis's dismissal of the sixteenth century as a 'drab age' influenced literary scholars. Andrew Hadfield offers a challenging reinterpretation, through study of the work of some of the century's most important writers, including Skelton, Bale, Sidney, Spenser, Baldwin and the Earl of Surrey. He argues that all were involved in the establishment of a vernacular literary tradition as a crucial component of English identity, yet also wished to use the category of 'literature' to create a public space for critical political debate. Conventional assumptions - that pre-modern and modern history are neatly separated by the Renaissance, and that literary history is best studied as an autonomous narrative - are called into question: this book is a study of literary texts, but also a contribution to theories and histories of politics, national identity and culture.

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