The Virgin Queen Elizabeth Tudor; the politician, spymaster, and Lord High Treasurer of England William Cecil, Lord Burghley; the soldier/courtier/adventurer Sir Walter Ralegh; the military commander and Lord Deputy of Ireland Baron Grey de Wilton; the dashing royal “favorites” Leicester and Essex: these were the figures writ large in the life and poetry of Edmund Spenser. Spenser was himself a colonial agent in Ireland, an unstinting apologist for the suppression, often violent, of its people and its culture, and yet we still regard him as one of the most subtle moral thinkers of his age. He was the (uncrowned) poet laureate of a nation that had just defeated the great Spanish Armada: in his own era, his literary reputation, if not his popularity, far exceeded that of William Shakespeare. And The Faerie Queene was his crowning achievement: an exuberant, outlandish, contradictory amalgam of epic, allegory, and chivalric romance, the most extended meditation ever written on the tangled politics, religion, and sexuality of sixteenth-century England. We will read this marvelous poetic narrative, canto by canto, throughout the term, sampling the rich selection of critical approaches the poem has inspired.

Course Requirements:

Students will contribute regularly to an online discussion site, will present individual and collaborative in-class reports, will draft in stages and complete a final research paper.

Intended Audience:

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Class Format:

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