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To understand Edmund Spenser's place in the extraordinary literary renaissance that took place in England during the last two decades of Queen Elizabeth I's reign, it is helpful to begin with the remarks of the foremost literary critic of the age, Sir Philip Sidney. In The Defence of Poetry, written in the early 1580s, Sidney looked back on the history of English literature and saw little to admire. He mentions the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and a few sonnets by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey; occasional tragedies such as those printed in the 1560s in-A Mirror for Magistrates; and just one book of contemporary poetry, Spenser's Shepheardes Calender (1579). Although France and Italy and even lesser nations such as Scotland had their notable poets and held them in esteem, England, according to Sidney, had recently brought forth only "bastard poets" and "poet-apes," and, consequently, the art itself had "fallen to be the laughing-stock of children." Though one might quarrel with Sidney over his list of the best native writers, it is certainly true that England could boast of no early poet other than Chaucer comparable in stature to Dante, Petrarch, or Giovanni Boccaccio.
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