Such pleasaunce makes the grasshopper so poor,
        And ligge so layd[115] when winter doth her strain. 
        The dapper ditties that I wont devise,
        To feed youth’s fancy, and the flocking fry
        Delghten much—­what I the bet forthy? 
        They han the pleasure, I a slender prize: 
        I beat the bush, the birds to them do fly: 
        What good thereof to Cuddie can arise?
    (Piers)
        Cuddie, the praise is better than the price,
        The glory eke much greater than the gain:...”
                Shepherd’s Calendar, October

In these words, with their sorrowful suggestion of Deor, Spenser reveals his own heart, unconsciously perhaps, as no biographer could possibly do.  His life and work seem to center about three great influences, summed up in three names:  Cambridge, where he grew acquainted with the classics and the Italian poets; London, where he experienced the glamour and the disappointment of court life; and Ireland, which steeped him in the beauty and imagery of old Celtic poetry and first gave him leisure to write his masterpiece.

LIFE.  Of Spenser’s early life and parentage we know little, except that he was born in East Smithfield, near the Tower of London, and was poor.  His education began at the Merchant Tailors’ School in London and was continued in Cambridge, where as a poor sizar and fag for wealthy students he earned a scant living.  Here in the glorious world that only a poor scholar knows how to create for himself he read the classics, made acquaintance with the great Italian poets, and wrote numberless little poems of his own.  Though Chaucer was his beloved master, his ambition was not to rival the Canterbury Tales, but rather to express the dream of English chivalry, much as Ariosto had done for Italy in Orlando Furioso.

After leaving Cambridge (1576) Spenser went to the north of England, on some unknown work or quest.  Here his chief occupation was to fall in love and to record his melancholy over the lost Rosalind in the Shepherd’s Calendar.  Upon his friend Harvey’s advice he came to London, bringing his poems; and here he met Leicester, then at the height of royal favor, and the latter took him to live at Leicester House.  Here he finished the Shepherd’s Calendar, and here he met Sidney and all the queen’s favorites.  The court was full of intrigues, lying and flattery, and Spenser’s opinion of his own uncomfortable position is best expressed in a few lines from “Mother Hubbard’s Tale”: 

Full little knowest thou, that has not tried,
What hell it is, in suing long to bide: 
To lose good days, that might be better spent;
To waste long nights in pensive discontent;
* * * * *
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares;
To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs;
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone.