Biography Essay

For all the opportunism, self-promotion, misjudgment, and personal failure that undeniably mark his long career, Sir Walter Ralegh remains the most credible embodiment that Tudor-Stuart England has to offer of the ideal of the Renaissance man. By turns a soldier, privateer, explorer, and projector for colonization, he was as well a courtier, poet, scientist, and historian. Almost all his own poetry was written for selfadvancement at court, yet he promoted unselfishly the fortunes of Edmund Spenser and facilitated the publication of Spenser's epic, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596). Though obviously cultivating a personal stake in his projects for colonization in the two Americas, he fixed those projects firmly in a larger perspective of advancing England's well-being in a world increasingly dominated by Spain; and his colonization plan, unlike the purely economic undertakings of the Spanish, included permanent settlement of families, the development of a nautical academy, and the...