Edmund Spenser's War on Lord Burghley - (Early Modern Literature in History) by B Danner (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Edmund Spenser's censored attacks on Lord Burghley (Elizabeth I's powerful first minister) serve as the basis for a reassessment of the poet's mid-career, challenging the dates of canonical texts, the social and personal contexts for scandalous topical allegories, and the new historicist portrait of Spenser's 'worship' of power and state ideology.

Review Quotes

'While Danner gives convincing accounts of individual poems, the revisionary power of his book lies in its making Edmund Spenser's Complaints central to the understanding of his life. By contextualizing the volume especially Mother Hubberds Tale, The Ruines of Time, and Virgils Gnat in 1591, he illuminates Spenser's estrangement from Elizabeth's court and suggests the dimensions of his boldness in attacking Lord Burghley, the most powerful man in Elizabethan England. In his introduction Danner performs the coup de grace on Greenlaw's moribund thesis about Spenser's supposed disgrace in 1579, and substitutes his own bold hypothesis about the causes of Burghley's enmity. As it develops its thesis, the book gives unusually careful attention to contemporary understandings of the Complaints and to the poet's self-presentation in its poems. It marks an important shift in Spenserian biography.' - William Oram, Smith College, USA

About the Author

BRUCE DANNER has taught at St. Lawrence University and Skidmore College, USA. His articles have appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Studies in English Literature, Spenser Studies, and Mississippi Quarterly.