Edmund Spenser's War on Lord Burghley

BRUCE DANNER has taught at St. Lawrence University and Skidmore College, USA. His articles have appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Studies in English Literature, Spenser Studies, and Mississippi Quarterly.

'While Danner gives convincing accounts of individual poems, the revisionary power of his book lies in its making Edmund Spenser's Complaints central to the understanding of his life. By contextualizing the volume especially Mother Hubberds Tale , The Ruines of Time , and Virgils Gnat in 1591, he illuminates Spenser's estrangement from Elizabeth's court and suggests the dimensions of his boldness in attacking Lord Burghley, the most powerful man in Elizabethan England. In his introduction Danner performs the coup de grace on Greenlaw's moribund thesis about Spenser's supposed disgrace in 1579, and substitutes his own bold hypothesis about the causes of Burghley's enmity. As it develops its thesis, the book gives unusually careful attention to contemporary understandings of the Complaints and to the poet's self-presentation in its poems. It marks an important shift in Spenserian biography.' - William Oram, Smith College, USA

• Acknowledgements Abbreviations List of Illustrations Introduction PART I: THE 1590 FAERIE QUEENE AND THE ORIGINS OF 'A MIGHTY PERES DISPLEASURE' Lord Burghley and the Oxford Marriage The Faerie Queene Dedicatory Sonnets and the Poetics of Misreading PART II: THE COMPLAINTS AND 'THE MAN OF WHOM THE MUSE IS SCORNED' The Ruines of Time and the Rhetoric of Contestation Retrospective Fiction-making and the 'secrete' of the 1591 Virgils Gnat Mother Hubberds Tale and the Ambivalent Withdrawal from Power PART III: AFTER THE COMPLAINTS The Legacy of the Complaints and the Question of Slander Afterword Notes Index