This brief conclusion restates the facts of Spenser’s early life, integrating into this factual outline the points made in this biographical study. In addition, this portrait of Spenser depicts his departure for Ireland as a high point in his life. He concluded the Shepheardes Calender with the bold claim that it was a ‘Calender for euery yeare’ and the fervent hope that his pastoral would outwear ‘steele in strength’ and ‘continewe till the worlds dissolution’. The aspiration in these lines testifies to the idealism that inspired the early Spenser and that prompted him to envision a life in Ireland where he might succeed in fashioning the Renaissance epic.

The only extant play in the dramatic oeuvre of the important Chartist politician, writer, and editor Ernest Jones, St John’s Eve appeared serially in 1848 in the Chartist literary journal the Labourer. A gothic melodrama, the play recounts a Faustian story about the love-struck Rudolf, who traffics with a Mephistophelean stranger in order to peer into the future and discern whether or not the tyrannical elderly father of his beloved will die in the next year. Although less obviously political than much Chartist drama, the play takes up questions of gender equality, a theme to which Jones’s writing frequently returned. The hero’s moral ambiguity coupled with his counter-productive efforts on the heroine’s behalf might be understood as a challenge to the Chartist endorsement of couverture, the idea that a wife’s political life should be subsumed into her husband’s. With its suspect hero, St John’s Eve marks a significant departure from the narrative of feminine vulnerability protected by working-class manhood depicted in an array of radical rhetoric (and working-class theatre) throughout the 1840s and 1850s.

This chapter argues that, after leaving Cambridge, Spenser was employed in London from 1574 to 1578 by John Young, Master of Pembroke College. Previously, it has been assumed that he was employed by Young only after he became Bishop of Rochester in 1578. The only source for the assumption that Spenser was the ‘secretary’ to an Elizabethan bishop is a note written inside the book that Spenser gave Gabriel Harvey for Christmas in 1578. During Spenser’s sojourn in London, he met his future wife, became disillusioned with the Church of England, and decided against taking holy orders. A re-examination of topical satire in the ecclesiastical eclogues shows that Spenser attacked John Aylmer, Bishop of London, for selling timber on church lands to enrich his offspring. This satire in the Shepheardes Calender, later echoed in the Marprelate tracts, indicates that Spenser no longer planned to take holy orders. In an eclogue such as Maye, Spenser has been identified as a Puritan, Church of England Protestant, and even a Catholic. In the ecclesiastical eclogues, he deliberately uses a dialogic structure to conceal his religious persuasion.

This chapter focuses on Gabriel Harvey’s ‘Greenes Memoriall’, a sonnet sequence that forms part of his pamphlet Foure Letters and Certaine Sonnets (1592). Harvey’s pamphlet, a response to Robert Greene’s slandering him and his brothers, is commonly regarded as vengeful, but the sonnets in the volume display a conscious effort on Harvey’s part to conquer his anger. The chapter argues that Harvey intends to show his journey from initial anger towards greater emotional detachment and a balance of temper. His surprising choice to express himself through sonnets (a format he was not very familiar with and perhaps not very good at) may be explained as a strategy within his struggle to regain his temper: the trope of sonnet as a form that exemplifies the ‘sweetness’ of poetry serves to illustrate the idea of restoring a healthy balance of temper, because the sonnet serves to neutralise the ‘bitter gall’ of his anger. Thus Harvey was effectively self-medicating through poetry, and grappling with the constraints of metre and rhyme in an unfamiliar poetic form forced him to detach himself from his anger and to consider more carefully how to express his points than he might have done in prose.

This chapter asks and answers the question of why Ireland was attractive to Englishmen, particularly those, like Spenser, who were intrigued by adventure and had few, if any, prospects in England. The combination of Latin debates on Roman colonization and the lurid report of Captain Thomas Smith, a patron of Gabriel Harvey’s, being boiled and fed to dogs sparked interest in Ireland. For Spenser, his appointment as secretary to Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, was a preferment, an extraordinary opportunity for a twenty-five-year-old poet. In the sixteenth century, Ireland resembled the England of the Wars of the Roses, and it promised medieval glamour as well as remarkable opportunities for social advancement to those, like Spenser, who traded sixteenth-century England for Ireland.

Several Shakespearean sonnets first appeared in Love’s Labour’s Lost, before being published in The Passionate Pilgrim (1598), a collection printed by William Jaggard, raising the issue of their transgeneric circulation. Love’s Labour’s Lost presents sonnet writing as a sterile and artificial activity, but on stage the poems could work as metadramatic tools, and their mock confessional tone as a parody of Shakespeare’s own art. In The Passionate Pilgrim, some of the poems were modified as they were repurposed, which concealed their initial parodic intent. When Heywood later complained that Jaggard had pilfered his work in an epistle at the end of his Apology for Actors, he alluded to Shakespeare. By doing so, he promoted his own work by reminding readers of its presence in The Passionate Pilgrim and by aligning himself with his more famous elder, whose name Jaggard erased from the front page of the next edition of The Passionate Pilgrim. Such an attention-grabbing strategy benefited Shakespeare as well as Heywood and Jaggard himself, who used the puzzlement of potential readers as a marketing device. What has often been dubbed piracy might therefore rather be an extremely cunning commercial strategy.

The Trial of Robert Emmet concerns the arrest and execution of the revolutionary who led the abortive Dublin rising of 1803. Emmet was widely eulogised as a Romantic martyr and commemorated in poetry by Shelley, Southey, George Moore, and, later, W. B. Yeats. Staged three dozen times, The Trial of Robert Emmet participated in Chartist debates about political violence and promulgated support for Irish nationalism and the dissolution of the Act of Union. As no play text is extant (nor was ever published), the volume utilises widely popular prose editions of the trial. The Trial of Robert Emmet is notable as radical theatre for the way it turns from an earlier tradition of trial parodies. Rather than lampooning state ceremonies and the officers who carry them out, Robert Emmet recreates the majesty and terror of a treason trial. Chartist productions helped make Emmet’s address from the dock one of the most famous speeches in Irish political history and inaugurated a long tradition of dramatisations of Emmet’s life by such playwrights as Dion Boucicault and Denis Johnston.

The early Spenser, once he decided not to take holy orders, fully subscribed to the early modern chivalric code as it was practiSed by Sir Henry and Sir Philip Sidney. Little has previously been said about Sir Henry Sidney, but Brink shows that he and Lady Mary were likely to have been in London at Baynard’s Castle or Leicester House while Sir Henry attended Privy Council meetings. Also, it remained a possibility that he would again be sent to Ireland with Philip Sidney as his deputy until February 1600. The literary evidence of contact between Spenser and the Sidneys consists principally of commendatory poems, but in this chapter Brink shows that Lodowick Bryskett, a close friend of Spenser’s in Ireland, was resident in London from 1579 to 1581. Earlier Bryskett accompanied Philip Sidney on his Grand Tour, and, as Sir Henry’s protégé, held the position of Clerk of the Council in Ireland. Bryskett, thus, was a connecting link for Spenser, the Sidneys, and Ireland.

Chartist activist John Watkins’s 1841 play John Frost treats the Newport rising of 1839, in which 9000 armed miners marched on the Welsh market town of Newport. Two dozen Chartists were killed in a confrontation there with soldiers, and three leaders were sentenced to death in the last mass treason trials in British history. Named for the rising’s leader, John Frost dramatises these gripping events in a five-act verse tragedy. For much of the following year the question of how Newport would be remembered dominated editorial writing in the movement’s most important journals, which debated the question of ‘physical force’ and the viability of an insurrectionary strategy for a democratic movement. Watkins’s play was a significant intervention in these debates. Using the affordances of theatre to explore questions of agency, violence, and responsibility in ways written verse could not, John Frost insisted that Newport should be considered an insurrectionary moment and that the blood of Chartist martyrs should be redeemed through further struggle. The editor’s introduction discusses some half-dozen performances of the work, which evidence the contested legacy of Newport and suggests the national scope of Chartist dramatic culture.

Chapter 3 describes the conflict at Cambridge between Thomas Cartwright, Lady Margaret lecturer in divinity, and John Whitgift, future Archbishop of Canterbury. Cartwright, a gifted lecturer, threatened the establishment by supporting the election of bishops on scriptural grounds. As an undergraduate, Spenser witnessed the ‘takeover’ by Whitgift and Andrew Perne, who ‘reformed’ the university statutes, making them more restrictive than they had been under Catholic Mary Tudor, to oust Cartwright. Heads of colleges had to approve degrees before they could be awarded. A spin-off from these conflicts affected Gabriel Harvey’s receipt of the M.A. in 1573. Since Spenser received the B.A. from Pembroke College in 1573, Harvey cannot have served as Spenser’s tutor. His M.A. was not awarded until after Spenser had graduated, and it required the intervention of John Young, Master of Pembroke College, for the degree to be awarded.

Chapter 8 revisits the issue of E.K.’s identity and shows that Harvey was involved in preparing E.K.’s Gloss to the Shepheardes Calender. The Gloss introduces biographical details about Harvey’s life that Spenser by himself could not have supplied. On these grounds, Brink suggests that Harvey supplied the Gloss to Spenser, but that Spenser edited it and so assumed editorial control over the text. This textual analysis is supported by the bibliographical fact that the Gloss supplies annotations for references later cut from the text. Brink thinks that the combination of homosexual references in the text of the Shepheardes Calender and the discussion of pederasty in the Gloss makes Harvey’s participation all the more likely. Brink suggests the possibility that Spenser insisted on his anonymity in the text of the Shepheardes Calender and references to it because he wanted to prevent reprisals against Bishop John Young. After reviewing the joking interchanges in Latin between Harvey and Immerito in Familiar Letters, Brink suggests that it seems likely that, whatever fictional identity Rosalind has in the Shepheardes Calender, his personal romance ended happily with his marriage to Machabyas Chylde.