Events and Personages

Edmund Spenser lived at a time when the charged relation between the two 'contexts' of this chapter, Britain and Europe, was changing drastically, and, as we will see, his own relation to these shifting contexts was often equivocal. Inserting Spenser into historical contexts can be problematic, and, certainly, no amount of 'context' can finally decide the meaning of Spenser's life or work. In the several books of The Faerie Queene and elsewhere, we find an ongoing mediation on historical contexts that is an index both of Spenser's own uncertain placement within them and his indeterminate effect on them. Sometimes this dialectic can be traced quite clearly: not only can Spenser's work be set 'within' these historical contexts, but these contexts themselves are, to an extent, being defined by him as he writes. In the later years of the sixteenth century, for instance, one of our contexts, that of 'Britain', was not yet assembled as an effective political union. Strictly speaking, 'Great Britain' would not come into existence until 1801. But Spenser invested in the imagining of such a polity throughout his career, and some of our conception of 'Britain' as a splendid fusion of disparate nations we owe to him. 'How brutish is it not to vnderstand', cries Arthur in the second book of The Faerie Queene, looking up from a chronicle titled Briton moniments, 'How much to [Britain] we owe, that all vs gaue, / That gaue vnto vs all, what euer good we haue' (II, x, 69). In other places, however, the dialectic between Spenser and his contexts is less easy to discern.