Thanks for the enlightening response, Anne!
To create significant art, one needs a lot of time, leisure for study,
and the bills already paid. Options include being born wealthy, finding
a patron (government or private), or self-patronage. Within
"self-patronage" I include: working 2+ full-time jobs (income-producing
and your art) and having no other life (cf Wallace Stevens, Charles
Ives); postponing the execution of your art until your "retirement" from
income-producing work (rare, Milton perhaps?); or not having a family
and living very cheaply (like Medieval minstrels/troubadors, perhaps
Homer, and many modern not-famous singer/songwriters).
Spenser did "what he had to do" in order to achieve the objective of
being read. One of the most fascinating things to me is how, as the FQ
proceeds, the "true" Spenserian artist seems to start fighting for a
greater voice within the book: he doesn't want to be on an epic quest,
he wants to pipe and sing in the fields!
Suddenly, we have the (to me, his most brilliant work) Epithalamion
which, with other late non-FQ works, completes the career that was
started in the Calendar.
So, by that time, Spenser felt comfortable that the mission of being
read long into the future had been accomplished? Or did the piper simply
roar after having been forcefully stifled for too long?
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Anne Prescott wrote:
> Yes, he glorified Gloriana, but I'm inclined to agree with a lot of
> recent Spenserians that he was also capable of criticizing the queen
> and, goodness knows, some of her counsellors. Didn't she notice? It's
> a sign of her own intelligence, I'm guessing, that she affected not to
> (Cecil was a different matter). As for social climbing, what else was
> one to do if born to the lower middle or middle class? Flattering the
> great was no morally different, was it, than applying for an NEH and
> getting friends to say how terrific you are? In any case, to do what
> he wanted to do probably required getting a fairly good job and
> getting some patronage and pretending to be closer to the Spencers
> than he really was. We, living in a democracy, may find this
> repugnant, but I don't see his alternative. And he had
> company--precedents at the court of Augustus (Horace's father had been
> a freed slave, hadn't he?), to say nothing of parallels on the
> Continent. Spenser's flattery pales when set next to that by Ronsard,
> although to be sure Ronsard was a gentleman by birth, and not by way
> of a BA like Spenser. So sure, he was a social climber. In a class
> society why not? Had Grey's "mute inglorious Milton" done more social
> climbing he might have escaped muteness and written something we'd
> enjoy. The alternative is a more egalitarian society, but even ours .
> . . And, as Kevin says, he got results (so did Horace and Ronsard).
> Anne Prescott.
> On Jul 25, 2008, at 8:24 PM, Kevin Farnham wrote:
>
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