
Edmund Spenser In
1594 he married Elizabeth Boyle and to celebrate their marriage wrote his famous Epithalamion.
In 1598 his castle at Kilcolman was burnt down during an uprising and he
was forced to flee
Cork with his wife and three children. He subsequently returned to London and died,
in poverty, in lodgings in King Street, Westminster.
It
is reported that his funeral was attended by Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher and
Shakespeare. Apparently they all wrote elegies for Spenser which they threw
into the grave along with their pens. In 1938 the nearest grave to his
memorial was opened in the hope of finding the pens and elegies, but
unfortunately all that was discovered was a collapsed lead coffin
surrounded by dry soil. It was not until 10 years after his death that the first folio edition of
The Faerie Queene was published. He is also remembered for The
Shepeardes Calender. Spenser was one of the forefathers of English
poetry and his work was a major influence upon Keats, Milton
and Yeats.
(See also allegory,
epithalamion, and
Spenserian
stanza.)
|