Final Versions

Spenser As Poet-Translator

Edmund Spenser

While the most celebrated work of the enormously important and influential early modern poet Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) is the unfinished epic The Faerie Queene(1590 and 1596), he first made his mark with translations of sonnets and epigrammatic poems by the French poets Joachim Du Bellay and Clément Marot. Spenser wrote the poems when he was in his teens and Henry Bynneman published them in the volume A Theatre For Voluptuous Worldlings (A Theatre) in 1569. These translations are both formally ambitious and innovative and by translating poems by Du Bellay and Marot Spenser affiliated himself with the greatest of then-modern authors.

At the same time the volume in which those translations appear associates Spenser with fiercely partisan, apocalyptic anti-Catholicism. Two lengthy prose pieces, a dedicatory epistle to Elizabeth I and an interpretive essay by Jan Van Der Noot, the "deviser" of the volume, bracket Spenser's translations and instruct the reader to construe the poems collectively as an indictment of the corruption and worldliness of the Roman Catholic Church.

In middle age Spenser revised the translations that appeared in A Theatre and in so doing shed many of the daring formal features of his first versions and removed the translations from their vehement polemical context. Spenser then published the revised translations in the collection Complaints(1591).

Because Spenser's endeavors as a translator span the better part of his life--from the public inauguration of his career as a poet to just a few years before his death--they offer the student and scholar a rare opportunity to observe the evolution of one of the greatest English poets. This site invites the reader to consider Spenser's revision of his first published poetry and the manner in which he reclaimed, rethought, and depolemicized the material of his public debut as poet.

Edited by James A. Williams. Questions or comments may be sent to: jawillia@artsci.wustl.edu