Born in the early 1550s, Edmund Spenser began his education at the Merchant Taylor’s school in London. He later attended Cambridge on a sizar’s scholarship, which was awarded to poor but deserving students. After leaving Cambridge with his M.A. in 1576, Spenser anonymously published The Shepheardes Calender (1579), a collection of pastoral poems that established him as a new and important voice in English poetry. Next came Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene, the first three books of which were published in 1590. By this time Spenser had pursued various appointments in the English administration of Ireland and had obtained a 3,000-acre estate in Munster. His duties did not appear to slow his literary output, for he continued to publish many books of poetry throughout the mid- 1590s. The most significant of these were Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595), which loosely represented his courtship and marriage to Elizabeth Boyle, and the second edition of The Faerie Queene, which included three new books along with those of the first edition. Not long after this, Spenser’s home in Ireland was destroyed in an Irish rebellion. He returned to England shortly before his death in 1599.
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