Tuesday, July 24, 2012

News at Eleven: In a complaint lodged against [Edmund] Spenser

it is claimed that "by menacing Lord Roche's tenants, seizing their cattle, and beating Lord Roche's servants and bailiffs, he has wasted six ploughlands of his lordship's lands", and whether or not this is true, we get a macho frontiersman sort of image not usually associated with the "Fairy Singer". Hadfield also shows how Spenser's immersion in the Irish countryside, with its "wilde fruit and salvage soyle", seeps generously into the imagined landscape of his poetry, transmuting the realities of this Elizabethan Wild West into the airy fantasies of an Elizabethan Narnia.

from The Guardian: Edmund Spenser: A Life by Andrew Hadfield--review

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