Edmund Spenser's tombstone (to begin at the end of his life) stands as a warning to would-be biographers:

Erected in 1620 by Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, and daughter of one of the dedicatees of the Fowre Hymnes, the monument gets all but one of its facts wrong. If we are to believe the ‘witnesse’ of Spenser's Amoretti 60, he was 40 in 1594, so was born in about 1554. He died on 13 January 1599, failing to creep over the threshold of the new century. He was, though, probably born in London, since the Prothalamion calls the city ‘my most kyndly Nurse, | That to me gave this Lifes first native sourse’ (ll. 128–9).

The monument is revealing about Spenser, however, in its very sparseness. It was carved by James I's wonderfully named master mason, Nicholas Stone, who was later to produce the extraordinary memorial of John Donne, in which the poet is depicted in his shroud with the face of death upon him. Spenser's monument is, by contrast, undemonstrative, and as chilly as only tombstones can be. Where Donne left a mass of familiar letters, and poems which reach out and command with an intimately abrupt directness, neither Spenser's monument, his life records, nor his verse leave much of the texture of the man behind. Most of the evidence about his life falls into two categories, both of which need to be treated with some care. The first includes his own statements in poems and proems about his career. These tend to be pictures of how Spenser would have wished to be thought of, rather than of how he was. The second group includes official documents – records of leases and appointments and so on – which again need cautious handling. They present the material dimension of Spenser's career, his financial and legal self, to the exclusion of all else. No one looks attractive if one considers only his or her bank statements. Spenser's life is to be found somewhere between those two kinds of source.