Spenser's Secret Career

An impressive exploration of the poet Edmund Spenser's second career as a political secretary.

Richard Rambuss (Author)

9780521416634, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 February 1993

184 pages, 4 b/w illus.
23.6 x 16 x 1.8 cm, 0.414 kg

"...an elegant and painstaking reading...one of the most well-constructed readings of its kind..." Nigel Smith, Times Literary Supplement

Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–99) conducted two careers at once: a celebrated national poet, he also pursued a lifelong career as secretary to various political and ecclesiastical figures. Richard Rambuss's book explores the ways in which this latter career, usually allotted only a cursory mention in accounts of Spenser's professional and social ambitions, informed his poetic career. The study takes issue with prevailing historicist accounts which see Spenser's careerism as shaped entirely by service to the court and as focused on a single-minded pursuit of laureateship along a Virgilian career route from pastoral to epic. It presents an alternative picture, and argues that for Spenser the manipulation of secrets provided a strategy for self-promotion and a means of measuring his distance from royal and aristocratic power. Spenser's Secret Career throws light on Spenser and on ideas of gender, power and subjecthood in the Renaissance.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction
1. Professional secrets
2. The secretary's study: the secret designs of The Shepheardes Calender
3. 'In sundrie hands': the 1590 Faerie Queene and Spenser's Complaints
4. Secret sights, private parts: the 1596 Faerie Queene
Notes
List of works cited
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]