Poet of the middling sort

‘If you cn rd ths msg, you cn bcm a sec & gt a gd jb’. So ran the advertisement for the Brook Street Bureau employment agency. It was the ubiquitous ornament of tube trains, buses and escalators in the 1970s, now seen no more and forgotten, at least by me, until Andrew Hadfield’s biography of Edmund Spenser whistled it back from the void. Here is Spenser’s career in a nutshell, according to the emphases of Hadfield’s study, a phenomenal work of scholarship and insight, if not itself a nutshell at almost 600 closely- printed pages.

Hadfield is at pains to show Spenser, the pre-eminent poet of the 16th century, as a writer ‘of the middling sort’, most unlike his patron Sir Philip Sidney, the courtier and adventurer-poet who now sits next to him in the anthologies. Spenser emerged from the clerical world. His friends and mentors were not courtiers but professionals: printers, university fellows, civil servants, secretaries, translators, soldiers and the like. His first promoter was his headmaster at Merchant Taylors’ school, his next Gabriel Harvey, a charismatic Cambridge don with humanist leanings and elevated connections.

With Harvey’s help, he put forth The Shepheardes Calendar, an astonishingly accomplished piece of work which, Hadfield points out, amounted to a comprehensive advertisement for Spenser’s writing skills. In these series of pastoral ‘Aeclogues’ with topical edge, he showed a perfect command of everything that the medium of print required, including manipulation of typefaces and woodcuts. He twined modern with ancient diction, displayed colossal erudition, championed the English language and put on a bravura display of what is now called paratextuality: the mischief you can make with footnotes, prefaces, titles, emblems and the like. There are also intertextual jokes, false authorial personae, allegories, annotations and deliberately misleading editorial interventions designed to make the reader’s head spin.