SOURCE: Quitslund, Jon A. “Questionable Evidence in the Letters of 1580 between Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser.” In Spenser's Life and the Subject of Biography, edited by Judith H. Anderson, Donald Cheney, and David A. Richardson, pp. 81-98. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Quitslund examines the five letters between Spenser and Harvey that were published in 1580 and questions the trustworthiness of these documents as evidence about Spenser's personal life.]

Scholars interested in the private life of Spenser, in the public career that was the context for his pursuit of fame, and in the friendships and other dealings with people that help us to understand who Spenser was and what he thought at various points in his life, have few documents to work with. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that much has been made of the information contained in the exchange of letters between the poet and his friend Gabriel Harvey that was published in 1580, not long after the appearance of The Shepheardes Calender.¹ Like the apparatus enclosing Spenser's poems in the Calender, this pamphlet gathering five heterogeneous Letters contains several references to unpublished poems and the interests of a literary coterie, to current events and affairs of state, and to well-placed people in public life. The Letters testify to the credentials of the “new Poete” and his movement toward the “somewhat greater things” implicitly promised in The Shepheardes Calender, and they also show us, in the self-revelatory terms proper to the discourse of intimate friendship, glimpses of Spenser at an important juncture in his life: the end of the beginning of his double career as a poet and a public servant.

As soon as we recognize, however, that the Letters are public rather than private documents, we have placed their evidentiary value in doubt. The efforts to fashion a poetic persona that had motivated the Calender's elaborate program are also evident in the Letters. Why should we expect these texts to provide trustworthy information about the private person Edmund Spenser, whose life and literary endeavors are only hypothetically related to the textual figures of Immerito and Colin Clout? We tend to think of the pen and its creations as dependent on moves made by a mind and hand enjoying an independent and individual life, but is the shape of that life ascertainable, either as a cause or an effect of writing, as it is represented in this text? In the move from autographic script to a printed text offered for sale, what authenticity is lost, and what other purchase on identity may be gained?

Perhaps the most important fact about Spenser, especially at this liminal stage of his life, is that his biography took shape in the public domain, through deliberate moves in which courtiership and service were combined with publishing in pursuit of an author's status. What he exhibited of his private life should be seen in this light—not in the glare associated with publicity in modern experience but in a twilight that renders authors hard to distinguish from the texts declaring their interests, and texts inseparable from the contexts of writerly conventions and public institutions. Another consideration to be stressed at the outset is that all efforts to separate Spenser's identity or character from Harvey's involve a mistaken view of the Letters, the intentions inscribed within them, and the cultural matrix they document for us. So my intention in this essay is not primarily to isolate facts about the Edmund Spenser who wrote certain letters in 1579 and 1580 but to articulate what can be found in and inferred from the Letters concerning their writers—chiefly but not entirely the young man who signs himself “Immerito.”

The relationship of writer to writing may be compared to the black-and-white portions of the classic figure/ground problem, which can be read two ways: the two components and the images they create are interdependent yet sharply distinguished from one another. The same analogy can be taken further: Spenser and Harvey are similarly interdependent as close friends, correspondents, competitors for favor, collaborators with a jest to execute. To the extent that these Proper, and wittie, familiar Letters advanced Spenser's interests as a courtier and an author, he would wish to take credit for the writerly persona exhibited in them; but in his rhetorical culture, that would not mean accepting a literal reading as either proper or witty. When Immerito, “mox in Gallias navigaturi” (“about to set sail for France and Italy”), addresses a valedictory poem to G. H. (see Variorum Prose Works, 8 and 256; ed. 1912, 637), the itinerary he imagines describes ambitions—those of a poet and a would-be secretary to the earl of Leicester—rather than actual travel plans. Where expressions of friendship and love are concerned (and they concern Immerito much more than his friend), having seen how important love, courtship, and marriage are in Spenser's poetry, one is inclined to winnow the language of these familiar letters for what they can tell us of Spenser's private life. But anyone who regards the hyperbole, allusions, postures, and badinage of Immerito's intimacies as husks hiding kernels of true feeling or the facts of life will be disappointed; only the written words remain.

The text itself puts a distance between the men who wrote these letters and their textual personae. On the title page, the Letters are described as “lately passed betwene two Universitie men,” and within them the names and personal identities of the writers are treated as meaningful only to those readers who already know by acquaintance who “Master G. H.” and “Immerito” are. Jonathan Goldberg, extending the arguments of David Lee Miller and others, has shown how important anonymity was to the author of the Calender (1986, 38-67), as a basis for textual identities tenuously related to flesh-and-blood existence. As we shall see, in the Letters Spenser takes some pains to declare Harvey's interests and put his own name in Harvey's mouth; who the “two Universitie men” are eventually gains the status of an open secret. The Shepheardes Calender had already presented “the Author selfe” and Harvey as “very speciall and most familiar” friends;² here they are even more involved in each other's projects, each declaring ideals and ambitions in relation to the other. As we shall see, Spenser anticipates a breach in the correspondence, if not in the friendship itself, consequent upon his marriage and the career that took him to Ireland not long after the letters were published. Read together, these letters “lately passed betwene” Spenser and Harvey represent neither man individually but offer representations of enigmatic intentions shared and split between them, stretching from a somewhat pretentious but promising present into an imagined future, tenuously related to public life and publishing.

Calling into question the modern tendency to regard private experience as constitutive of individual identity, we ought to recognize that, in the Renaissance at least, to the extent that it was articulated at all privacy was largely a function of publicity. In Elizabethan England, only an interest in one's place in the public eye was apt to motivate someone in Spenser's or Harvey's position to lay claim to a private life, containing—in addition to domestic arrangements, which were treated as insignificant—secrets about which the public might be curious.³ And even if we could reconstruct a full and circumstantial account of either man's privacy, it would be misleading to locate there the origin of either his authorial or his courtly ambitions. It would be more useful if we could reconstruct the dynamics of their relationship, difficult as that must be in our different world: we are just beginning to see how important “homosociality” was in the Renaissance, especially in the constitution of both intimacy and public culture in and around the universities and Inns of Court, aristocratic households, and the royal court.⁴

Our attention as biographers should be given first to the institutional and discursive matrix in which Spenser found himself. Individuality in the Renaissance was not an originary principle but a process and a product of communal culture and specific institutions, involving both willing and unwitting responses—sometimes typical, sometimes idiosyncratic—to meaning and value constituted outside the self. In The Shepheardes Calender and the Letters, everything is dialogical and intertextual, and to isolate an individual (to settle the identity of E. K., for example) would be to take a fish out of water.

With regard to privacy and secrecy, which were cultivated intensively and variously in the later years of the sixteenth century, it is no accident that those years, in which literature and other arts took a pronounced inward turn, also witnessed a flowering of courtly intrigue, intelligence, and secret diplomacy, proliferating in ways that still confound historians' attempts to account for events and opinions in and around Elizabeth's court (Archer 1993). What, then, do we know? We know less than earlier generations thought they did, largely because the inferences and conjectures that were meaningful in a more positivistic climate make less sense today. We trust received opinions less than the positivists did, and we are also suspicious of the “factual” evidence that has come down to us, perhaps because we doubt the integrity of those who left it behind them.

Reasons for uncertainty may be sought not only in our historical distance and the fragmentary nature of documentary evidence from the sixteenth century but in the designs and habits governing Elizabethan uses of language. It now appears that, when some public purpose was to be served, words were often used to insinuate, manipulate, or deceive, and not so much to fashion a self as to mask fundamental uncertainties about the speaker's or writer's place in a world full of change and variable opinions. Much is made in the Letters of the secrets and private lives that may in time be better understood, but the secrets withheld, the private lives we are invited to imagine beyond the nested fictions and indirections of Spenser's pretentious apprentice work, amount to an indeterminate potential, haunting the blank page where writing starts and the hallways where some patron may open the door to a brilliant career.

This essay explores the extent to which the Letters published in 1580 differ from anything we might find in manuscript form in Spenser's hand (or even in Harvey's, for whom margins, flyleaves, and odd sheets of paper were apt to serve as hallway mirrors for a man always preparing to do something other than writing). The Letters are valuable to a biographer interested in Spenser's frame of mind in the months immediately preceding his removal from London to Ireland as secretary to Arthur, Lord Grey.⁵ They also offer some perspective, I believe, on the Edmounde Spenser whose marriage to Machabyas Chylde was recorded at St. Margaret's, Westminster, on 27 October 1579 (Judson 1945, 63; Mohl 1990, 670). They document the interest both Spenser and Harvey took in the earl of Leicester, Philip Sidney, and several of Sidney's associates. I have my doubts, however, about the factual value of references in the letters to several unpublished works, which are often listed by biographers and bibliographers as “lost.”⁶

We should recognize in the design of these Letters an element of artifice and a sort of fiction uncontrolled by the idealizing rationale of Sidney's Defence of Poesie, with its somewhat forced distinction between “making” and “lying.”⁷ Both Spenser and Harvey anticipate in this text the “unredeemed rhetoric,” the “antiworld … associated with worldliness, political manipulation, and sophisticated savoir-faire,” which Jonathan Crewe has described in his study of Thomas Nashe's writings a decade later (1982, 22). Far from being “golden” in the sense developed by Sidney and celebrated by C. S. Lewis, the terms of this text are more like promises to pay that the writer has not yet signed. The incidental contents and the sequencing of these Letters establish a plot of the kind described by Lorna Hutson in her study of the reading habits assumed in Elizabethan prose fiction (1993): the “imaginative ground plot” in such a text may not be a narrative but some other mode of explanation, such as the display of a proper courtier's fitness for advancement. But if we cannot separate the biographical truth in this text from artful pretense, its unreliability is not without evidentiary value in an account of Spenser and Harvey as writers, eager to exhibit their mastery of writing as a technē and their understanding of printing as a powerful technology.⁸

For example, the “Welwiller of the two Authours,” who serves readers and the authors as a go-between, tells his “Curteous Buyer” in a prefatory letter that he was fortunate to obtain his copies “at the fourthe or fifte hande.” This friend (plausibly identified by Thomas Nashe as Harvey incognito)⁹ has heard tell of many other letters by Harvey which he “would very gladly see in Writing, but more gladly in Printe” (Prose Works, 447-48; ed. 1912, 610). This bid for attention in the marketplace serves as a reminder that Spenser gained his status as a laureate author by means of printing, apparently with little recourse to the courtly traffic in manuscripts.¹⁰ In general, Spenser's printed texts are fully authorized, free from the stigma attached to a book that is only tenuously related to the author's initiative. His contributions to the Letters, however, retain until the end the guise of anonymity that had distinguished Immerito in The Shepheardes Calender; their authority is thus derived from the earlier and more consequential book.

The anomalous character of the Letters¹¹ has lent credence to the assumption that Spenser was caught unawares in Harvey's awkward attempt to establish himself as not only an impressively learned man but a wit. Some modern readers have followed Thomas Nashe in doubting that Spenser himself wrote the letters attributed to Immerito, but this does Harvey an injustice and lets Spenser off too easily. Nashe's more agile and less scrupulous wit has cast a long shadow across Harvey's reputation and his friendship with Spenser, even though some scholarship on the Nashe/Harvey quarrel offers considerable sympathy to Harvey (Hibbard 1962, 187-97, 223-25; Crewe 1982, 3-4; Grafton and Jardine 1986, 184-96). The account of Immerito's role in Strange Newes (1592) is suggestive but untrustworthy: “Signior Immerito (so called, because he was and is his friend undeservedly) was counterfeitly brought in to play a part in that his Enterlude of Epistles that was hist at, thinking his very name (as the name of Ned Allen on the common stage) was able to make an ill matter good” (quoted in Prose Works, 484). The asymmetrical dichotomies Nashe employs to divide the (good) Spenser from the (ill) Harvey can be recognized as sophistry, plausible in 1592 but at odds with their reputations in 1580. Construing the “Enterlude of Epistles” as a more or less symmetrical partnership associates Spenser with a man much better established than Immerito was at that time. The praise and the blame earned by Immerito's part in this overingenious literary experiment should be attached to Spenser: the roleplaying in this text is consistent with his career-long fondness for “masking” his identity, and the anticipations of themes in his later poetry are too subtle to have been contrived by Harvey. In support of this argument for Spenser's involvement, which will be substantiated in what follows, we have the evidence of a copy of the Letters containing numerous corrections and alterations in Harvey's hand to his part of the correspondence.¹²

Every text creates a role, if not a repertoire, for its readers, to be assumed or resisted in accordance with their interests. Naive readers of the Letters will count themselves among those fortunate to gather intelligence from correspondence never meant for their eyes; the wiser sort will imagine that only the naive are being taken in. Harvey is especially prone to this crude manipulation of the audience that he pretends to exclude. His longest letter carries a “POSTSCRIPTE. This Letter may only be shewed to the two odde Gentlemen you wot of. Marry I would have those two to see it, as sone as you may conveniently” (Prose Works, 462; ed. 1912, 622b); the next letter carries a similar proviso (Prose Works, 477; ed. 1912, 632b). Appearing in a manuscript, these confidences would mean one thing; in such a text as this they are more devious and destabilizing. Conspicuous moves made to set up a “Curteous Buyer” are bound to provoke a resistant or suspicious reading, either the hostile response that Nashe offers or a more generous respect for the authors' fine inventions.

If the letters only occasionally reward a reading as documents with no strings attached, they may still be useful in a biographical inquiry as registers of the terms in which Harvey and Spenser sought to fashion themselves in print. And we are not, I think, merely settling for what is available in dwelling on the textual Spenser: we are attending to the remaining traces of his subjecthood, and also to the dialogical discourse that constituted, for Elizabethans, the sine qua non of a subjective life.¹³ It seems likely that from the start the Letters were composed with publication in mind, in order to catch the eyes not only of readers interested in the vernacular literature that was emerging during the 1570s, but also of those in positions of authority who recognized the utility of university-trained eloquence and the value of men who could already claim to be well connected.

Before we take a closer look at some passages in the Letters, it will be useful to situate the text in its generic category. Considered singly and in collections, letters constituted a recognized literary genre, cultivated in antiquity and conspicuously revived by both Italian and northern humanists (Trimpi 1962, 60-75; Guillen 1986; Clements and Levant 1976). Whether limited to manuscript circulation or published in printed form, the genre was adapted to many uses, personal, polemical, epideictic, didactic, and satiric. Some manuals on letter writing were restrictive in their advice on decorum in form and style, but Erasmus and others encouraged variety through their examples and precepts (Henderson 1983, 1990). Anyone well trained in rhetoric was prepared and often obliged to work within epistolary conventions, and was also free to play with what could be a cornucopian discourse. (For the common reader or “Curteous Buyer” sought by Spenser and Harvey, letter writing was the art form they were most likely to practice, and the Letters offered models for admiration and imitation.) Scholarly opinion allowed for some of the same freedoms within the middle style in verse epistles as in prose, and in his Latin verse letter Spenser was following abundant Neo-Latin precedents, harking back to the Epistles of Horace (Trimpi 1962, 76-91). Against this background our pamphlet is not anomalous, though it remains odd. Large and small collections of letters by humanists are numerous in the sixteenth century, but I can find no exact precedents for the publication of a small collection of private letters, recently written, by two virtually unknown men.

What no single tradition explains, a number of kindred instances may render intelligible. Several uses of the letter form bear comparison to what Spenser and Harvey were up to, and with writers so bookish and style-conscious, it is reasonable to suppose an awareness of various precedents, and of the risks they were taking in their own mingling of effects. The Letters are as heterogeneous in style and contents as any postmodern text, including political and literary gossip, satiric sorties against pedantry and superstition, a serious appeal to skeptical principles in natural philosophy, crude anti-feminism, various drab verses and specimens in English quantitative meter, and (from Spenser) a Neo-Latin poem of 114 lines anticipating some of the themes in his Faerie Queene and later poetry. Humanists' letter collections offered a form that might be made to accommodate such material.

The most important and immediate English precedents will be found in George Gascoigne's two miscellanies: The Adventures of Master F. J. in its epistolary form in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573), and Certayne Notes of Instruction (a letter to “Master Edouardo Donati”) in The Posies (1575). There are many signs of Gascoigne's importance to Harvey in the Letter-Book and elsewhere (Stern 1979, 31 n., 33, 215-16), and similarities between The Shepheardes Calender and A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres have been noted by Alpers (1988, 164-65, 170-71). Another significant generic context is indicated by the curious text often cited as “the Laneham Letter,” a description by Robert Laneham or Langham, ostensibly for the benefit of a kinsman in London, of festivities sponsored by the earl of Leicester to honor queen Elizabeth when her progress came to Kenilworth in 1575. Roger Kuin, this text's most recent and careful editor, regards the letter as an authentic piece of personal correspondence, an instance of the kind of “‘personal newsletter’ … common in Sidney's circle” (Langham ed. 1983, 15). But publication of such letters was not common; political motives on the part of Leicester or his supporters must have figured in the publication of Langham's Letter. Still another precedent, showing how letters might be used to stimulate curiosity and influence opinion, is offered by the Epistles of Obscure Men, a learned hoax at the expense of pedants and stupid defenders of the status quo, in support of Johann Reuchlin and the new learning that contributed to the Reformation in Germany. Harvey's copy of this internationally popular book survives, signed and dated 1572 (Stern 1979, 238).

In the Letters, as in the Calender but less elaborately and seriously, political concerns are hinted at; in keeping with the principle of decorum and the precedents just cited, a political agenda is presented in personal terms. Spenser writes as a member of Leicester's household and alludes to his master's enigmatic stance toward the queen's negotiations with the duke of Alençon and Anjou, paying passing attention to inner-circle gossip and public concern. Little is said; one purpose of letters is to establish the existence of secrets without giving them away (Rambuss 1993, 19, 54). At the beginning of his first letter, just before mentioning the earthquake, he observes, “Little newes is here stirred: but that olde greate matter still depending. His Honoure never better” (Prose Works, 15; ed. 1912, 611a). Here, and in the publicity given to Sidney's agenda for the reform of poetry, the writers associate themselves with men who recognized that the press could be used to influence opinions within a status-conscious and suggestible reading public. Since Sidney had given offense to Elizabeth by offering unwelcome advice on the French marriage and quarreling with the earl of Oxford (Duncan-Jones 1991, 160-67), it may have suited his interests to have it advertised that he was in London, not at Wilton, concentrating on harmless versifying rather than politics.

It will be worthwhile to consider the order of items in the Letters, a literary production that seems casual and even disorderly but still possesses a significant form. In the Letters as published in 1580, most of the separate items bear dates, but they appear out of chronological order, and this should alert us to the presence of details and patterns in the textual domain that are independent of events in the writers' lives. Except for the prefatory letter ascribed to “a Welwiller,” which is dated “This XIX. of June. 1580” (Prose Works, 448; ed. 1912, 610), close in time to the Stationers' Register entry on 30 June, all of the dates may be unreliable. From both writers' passing references, changes of subject, and rushed responses to various surprises and mishaps one gets the sense, appropriate to letters as a genre, that time is of the essence, but temporality as a textual effect does not correspond to real time in these writers' lives.

This can be illustrated in two ways, from the first part (Three … familiar Letters), which is dominated by Harvey's response to a sensational earthquake, and then from Spenser's most substantial contribution to the correspondence, in the separately titled Two Other, very commendable Letters, of the same mens writing. On 6 April 1580, an earthquake was felt in London and elsewhere in southern England. Interpreters were quick to moralize upon the event, seeing the hand of an admonitory God in it, and the earthquake's significance remained a subject for pamphlets and ballads for at least the next three months. Harvey's letter on the subject, ostensibly a response to Immerito's inquiry, bears the date “Aprilis septimo, Vesperi” (Prose Works, 462; ed. 1912, 622b), but his two-part display of satiric storytelling and up-to-date learning in natural philosophy could hardly have been planned and completed so soon after the event. In fact, Harvey was less concerned with the earthquake itself (although he gives an elaborate account of the circumstances in which he says he felt it) than with unsophisticated responses to it in the popular press, some appearing only a short time before his “Pleasant and pitthy familiar discourse, of the Earthquake in Aprill last” went to press.¹⁴ He labors to create the effects of reportage and off-the-cuff analysis, but the context in which Harvey's opinions are meaningful is a textual circus of interpretation, not the pressure of events in the writer's personal life: these are treated as the “imaginative groundplot” for his colorful rhetoric.

Harvey pretends to have been carried away by his disagreement with “these miserable balde odious three halfepenny fellowes, alas, a company of silly beetleheaded Asses” (Prose Works, 459; ed. 1912, 620a); in his learned opinion, natural causes suffice to explain earthquakes, and he doesn't see “howe a man on Earth, should be of so great authoritie, and so familiar acquaintance with God in Heaven, (unlesse haply for the nonce he hath lately intertained some few choice singular ones of his privie Counsell) as to be able … to reveale hys incomprehensible mysteries” (Prose Works, 455; ed. 1912, 617b). Harvey was eager, of course, to be of service to any and all members of the queen's Privy Council (Jardine and Grafton 1990); his evidence of fitness for such responsibilities includes a swaggering attack on men who have been insufficiently deferential, presuming to rise above the modest limits of their knowledge.¹⁵

Immerito/Spenser's role is more modest than Harvey's. In the first part of the correspondence, Three … familiar Letters, it is limited to initiating discussion of the earthquake and touting the literary interests that both men claim to have in common with Philip Sidney and his fellows. Spenser's short letter serves to introduce two long ones from Harvey, the first mostly concerned with the earthquake and a second “with sundry proper examples, and some Precepts of our Englishe reformed Versifying” (Prose Works, 463-77; ed. 1912, 623-32). Both men seek to be known—if it can be called knowledge—by writings referred to in passing, as yet seen by only a few. Among these are the Dreames being prepared as a sequel to The Shepheardes Calender and some part of the work in progress that both men cite as The Faerie Queene (Prose Works, 17, 471; ed. 1912, 612b, 628b). Both men also appear interested in showing that their experiments in quantitative versification corroborate Sidney's. In this, as in other things, Immerito is content to give Harvey the leading role, and he ends his “Postscripte” with a Latin maxim defining the terms of their friendly rivalry, to the effect that “Nevertheless I shall follow only you, yet never overtake you” (Prose Works, 18; ed. 1912, 612b).

Spenser's persona emerges more clearly in the second part of the collection, Two Other, very commendable Letters, of the same mens writing: both touching the foresaid Artificiall Versifying, and certain other Particulars; although dated earlier, these letters are presented by the title page (for a facsimile, see Prose Works, 3; ed. 1912, 633) as having been “More lately delivered unto the Printer.” The first of them (Prose Works, 5-12; ed. 1912, 635-38) is Spenser's most substantive contribution, and it offers a counterpoise to Harvey's predominance in the first part. Immerito repeats the maxim about following yet never overtaking his mentor, but now it is coupled with a taunt: “beware, leaste in time I overtake you” (Prose Works, 7; ed. 1912, 636b).

Spenser's letter is in two parts, both bearing dates that place them earlier in time than anything in the Three … familiar Letters; they also predate the poet's marriage to Machabyas Chylde (27 October) and the entry of The Shepheardes Calender on the Stationers' Register (5 December). The first part of the letter carries references to its writing on 15 October, with a continuation the next morning in response to something from Harvey (Prose Works, 7; ed. 1912, 636a). The letter ends with pages given a still earlier date, “Leycester House. This.5. of October. 1579” (Prose Works, 12; ed. 1912, 638b), and a suspect explanation that the Latin verse-letter included with this “last Farewell” had been “through one mans negligence quite forgotten” (Prose Works, 8; ed. 1912, 636a).

These pages ostensibly torn from time and rescued from neglect create perspectives on Spenser's life, not documentary evidence of it. While it is reasonable to suppose that Spenser resided in Leicester House in October of 1579 and that he was in correspondence with Harvey at that time, when they were both involved in preparing for publication of The Shepheardes Calender, it would be prudent to regard “5 October 1579” and other dates as only accidents of the epistolary genre, offering nothing like the connections to the writer's life and creative processes that are implied by “July 13, 1798” in the full title of Wordsworth's “Lines … above Tintern Abbey.” The unreliability of such signs in Spenser's text, beyond their arbitrary meaning within generic conventions, should warn us not to look for clear correspondences between the writer's life and the significant structures, both diachronic and synchronic, in his writings, but to look instead for attempts to transform the personal and transcend a life line defined by time, mixing together topical and allegorical discourses somewhat as the Calender does, and as Spenser also does in Amoretti and Epithalamion much later.

The belatedness of the Two Other … Letters is intelligible thematically, independent of the accidents of chronology, in the light of their valedictory content. In several respects Spenser's last letter and Harvey's reply echo the farewell to the flesh emphasis of the Calender, while offering variations on the classicizing sophistication associated with Sidney and his circle. Spenser's “Iambicum Trimetrum” is a lover's complaint and a pathetic bid for recognition, ending “And if I dye, who will saye: this was, Immerito?” (Prose Works, 7-8; ed. 1912, 636). Harvey in turn, responding to Spenser's praise of him as a Cato for their time, begins by urging his friend “to abandon all other fooleries, and honour Vertue, the onely immortall and surviving Accident amongst so manye mortall, and ever-perishing Substaunces” (Prose Works, 442; ed. 1912, 639a); he ends with a cento of Latin verses and English translations, reducible to the last line of Harvey's own version, “Vertue alone eternall is, and shee the Laurell weares” (Prose Works, 447; ed. 1912, 643). An alert contemporary reader might have caught, in the overtones carried by these vales, aves to preferment: for an Elizabethan, contemptus mundi was paradoxically a fit preparative for an ambitious life at court or in someone's service abroad.

Spenser's valedictory epistle “Ad Ornatissimum virum … G. H.” refers expectantly to a Continental journey on behalf of the earl of Leicester (Prose Works, 12, and ed. 1912, 638b; cf. Judson 1945, 60, and Rambuss 1993, 17-19). The project came to nothing so far as we know, except that in less than a year the author was in Ireland serving Arthur, Lord Grey. Perhaps this was no less than he had hoped for. It seems that his European itinerary (fantastically represented in poetic locutions, beginning with a trip “in Gallias” and extending as far as Rome and even Greece) was never more than an elaborate way of saying, to Leicester and others, “Have pen—will travel.” The literal sense of this “last Farewell” is undercut by the chronologically later letters appearing earlier in the collection, as well as by Harvey's response: he wagers “al the Books and writings in my study … that you shall not, I saye, bee gone over Sea” (Prose Works, 444; ed. 1912, 641a). However, in its position as an appendix, “Ad Ornatissimum virum” invites an allegorical reading of its Reise-angst, as pertaining to the end of a phase in the poet's career and portending an uncertain future for his high hopes. It contains some extraordinary foretastes of The Faerie Queene: with the wisdom of hindsight, helped by Harvey's references to what he has seen of “that Elvish Queene” (Prose Works, 471; ed. 1912, 629b), we can approach the threshold of the epic poet's workshop.¹⁶ Equally important to Spenser's inner life at the moment, his poem alludes to Love as a cause of uncertainty and stretches to the breaking point the elaborate code of friendship that had defined his intimacy with Harvey. Returning to this part of the collection later, I will undertake to interpret the confusion and doubling of roles that Spenser was involved in with Harvey, and the uncertainties attending his breaking away and embarking on a career that would take him considerably farther from his mentor than Leicester House was from Cambridge University.

The Letters are of interest primarily for what they tell us about the two writers' friendship and Harvey's importance in Spenser's formation as a poet and a public servant. The next phase of his career involved absence from England, an interval of ten years before the first part of The Faerie Queene appeared in print, and either the disappearance or the transumption of other projects that had figured—more or less figuratively—in the new poet's earlier promise. It appears that in these years Spenser's friendship with Harvey endured a breach rather than an expansion. In his Latin valedictory letter, Spenser anticipates and in some sense enacts a break: the map across which the poet moves may be imaginary, but at the level of emotions Spenser already appears far from Harvey. The larger world of the would-be heroic poet will not contain Hobbinol; there will be angels in The Faerie Queene, but no Gabriel. Yet in 1580 Harvey was still crucially important to Spenser's sense of himself as a poet, and the nuances of this friendship call for a full and accurate understanding. Of all the relationships enabling and informing Spenser's imagination, this is almost the only one documented, and it provides points of reference for other aspects of the poet's developing personal life.

The scene of writing for Spenser in 1580 can be understood in terms of two moments, one recalled as real in the recent past, the other set in a hypothetical future. A comparison of two passages will help us to understand some of what Spenser was going through in the transition from rustic pastoral verse to the next phase of his career, which coincided with marriage and a move from obscure duties in Leicester's household to a larger place in Ireland.

Introducing the subject of “Englishe Hexameters” in the first of the Three … familiar Letters, and asking “why a Gods name may not we, as else the Greekes, have the kingdome of oure owne Language,” Spenser offers four lines as an example of his own experimentation in “your artificial straightnesse of Verse.” He asks, “Seeme they comparable to those two, which I translated you ex tempore in bed, the last time we lay togither in Westminster?” (Prose Works, 16; ed. 1912, 611b). Over against this moment of intimacy remembered we should place the scene, near the end of the Letters and in the last lines of Spenser's valedictory verses, where the poet imagines himself alone and far from England, “in the shadow of Mount Oebalius,” involved in mourning “the reticence of sacred Helicon” while his “good Harvey, … both angel and Gabriel,” is back in England (ed. 1912, 638b).¹⁷ Here the contrasting exotic and domestic scenes are both used as backdrops for mutual longing, with Spenser in solitude and Harvey “surrounded by a crowd of friends.” The poem ends with a startling bit of ventriloquism; he imagines that his friend will “miss the one absent, Immerito,” and will say, “‘If only my Edmund were here.’” In an imagined absence, the poet names himself not only Immerito but—in the voice of another—Edmundus. Nowhere else in his poetry does Spenser present himself unclothed in this way:¹⁸ passages in the Amoretti are emotionally more direct, but the fortyish poet entering his second marriage leaves his Christian name in his publisher's hands and doesn't identify himself outside of literary conventions.

In the first instance, the poet's letter recalls the improvised translation of a lyrical fragment in his friend's presence, prompting Goldberg's observation that “Spenser slept with Harvey, and it is no secret” (1992, 79). In the second scene, imagined in the future rather than recalled, we have a grand gesture revealing the poet's true identity, invoked in his absence. (Both passages involve absence, of course, as the occasion for writing and its substitution of a text for the writer's speaking presence.) Harvey's interest is fundamental to both scenes, and they both involve erotic overtones.¹⁹

Spenser's most personal revelations of hopes and fears attending a public career as a serious poet are expressed in these two moments. In the first, concerned with an attempt to domesticate classical quantitative meters, and to show himself worthy of a close association with Sidney and his friends, Spenser expresses a desire for authority in “the kingdome of oure owne Language,” involving mastery of poetic technique that “will easily and fairely, yeelde it selfe to our Moother tongue” (Prose Works, 16; ed. 1912, 611). The quantitative experiments of Spenser, Harvey, and Sidney have been the subject of extensive and expert scholarship (Prescott 1978, 93-95; Weiner 1982; Attridge 1990; Helgerson 1992, 25-40), to which I can add little. In some respects, this effort on Spenser's part is consistent with what he had undertaken in The Shepheardes Calender: E. K. in his letter to Harvey observed that “the new Poete” “hath laboured to restore, as to theyr rightfull heritage such good and naturall English words, as have ben long time out of use and almost cleare disherited,” in order to renew in “our Mother tonge” its capacity to produce both prose and verse (ed. 1912, 417). In the language of Immerito and E. K., mastery of form and diction is a masculine effort, a systematic regimen without which the English language would lack legitimate issue.

Harvey's response to Immerito's theory and practice of “artificial” versification is worth noting: he refers not to “our Moother tongue” but to “the [queenes] Englishe” (Prose Works, 474; ed. 1912, 630a, with Harvey's emendation from McKitterick 1981, 352-53); “we are licenced and authorized by the ordinarie use, and custome, and proprietie, and Idiome, and, as it were, Majestie of our speach.” Where Spenser wishes to rule, Harvey would happily serve; in his view, Prosody is “the vulgare, and naturall Mother” who rules in the customs observed in speech, not by precepts derived from Greek or Latin rules (Prose Works, 475-76; ed. 1912, 631). In his emphasis on custom rather than rules Harvey was the odd man out within the Areopagus (Attridge 1990, 576), and he opposed Spenser's potentially absolutist overreaching with principles rooted in “a Gothic, common-law tradition” (Helgerson 1992, 27-28).

The scene imagined at the end of Spenser's contributions to the Letters presents the poet in a different relation to Harvey. “I beseeche you by all your Curtesies, and Graces, let me be answered, ere I goe: which will be, (I hope, I feare, I thinke) the next weeke, if I can be dispatched of my Lorde. I goe thither, as sent by him, and maintained most what of him: and there am to employ my time, my body, my minde, to his Honours service” (Prose Works, 12; ed. 1912, 638b). What sounds in these sentences like a diplomatic mission is also projected in “Ad Ornatissimum virum” as an open-ended journey into the realms of romance and classical antiquity. Exercises in “artificiall Verses” had been one proof of learned aspiration. The Latin language provides a medium for instruction ostensibly addressed to Harvey, employing the Horatian epistolary mode Harvey had used in poems addressed to Sidney in his Gratulationes Valdinenses (1578). Spenser no less than Harvey must have hoped to reach Sidney with proof of his promise as a doctus poeta. The formal strictures of Latin verse enable him to voice, before a limited audience, a desire for independence and broader horizons than the English kingdom and its language had so far offered; they also provide a vehicle for personal feelings of vulnerability and ambivalence that had been expressed more crudely in the Calender.

By various means in the course of his valedictory verse-letter, Spenser puts an exaggerated distance between himself and Harvey, giving us reason to believe that their intimacy has been jeopardized, yet Harvey's interest continues to provide a motive for writing and a confirmation of Immerito's identity, which is a function, equally, of Gabriel's love for Edmund and the poet's distance from home. Spenser's image of himself in solitude and voluntary exile enacts independence as an internalization of interdependence.

As Jonathan Goldberg remarks in his account of Spenser's friendship with Harvey, both the Calender and the Letters represent the two men in many mirrors, and “[w]ithin this mirror relation, Harvey/Hobbinol functions as an alter ego” (1992, 76-77). This is nowhere more true or more complicated than in Spenser's verse-letter. Some of the positions he takes are appropriated from Harvey, as when he argues that “whoever studies how to please great men / Studies how to play the fool, for the awkward man attracts favor” (ed. 1912, 637b): a large part of the poem, devoted to advice on getting ahead in the world, is based on one of Horace's Epistles (1.17), which Harvey himself had imitated in his “Castilio, sive Aulicus,” a poem addressed to Philip Sidney in Gratulationum Valdinensium Libri Quatuor (1578a, K4v-L1v).²⁰ Throughout these letters, of course, while Spenser is consistently sage and serious, Harvey has played the fool in several voices, noting at one point that “David, Ulysses, and Solon, fayned themselves fooles and madmen” (Prose Works, 461; ed. 1912, 621b). But Spenser too is playful, in a fashion consistent with his masquerade as Immerito. The Latin verse letter is tinged with irony, especially in its more lavish praises of “G. H.” and a corresponding self-deprecation. At the outset, he complains that while everything is set for his departure, Love has rendered him “foolish” (ineptus), and he needs help: “Untie these knots, and you will be my stalwart Apollo” (Hos nodos exsolue, et eris mihi magnus Apollo). His praise is not unqualified, however; the Magnificentia attributed to his friend in an elaborate tribute (ed. 1912, 637) resembles Arthur's self-assurance before his dream of Gloriana, and the limited capacity for virtuous action that Stoic counsels underwrite in the Legend of Temperance. In spite of the complaint with which it begins, much of the poem is devoted to justifying love, reconciling virtue to pleasure. In this, if Harvey serves as an alter ego, he occupies a lofty and self-satisfied position from which the poet distances himself.

The poem's knots, like those imposed by Cupid in the opening lines, invite interpretation in the light of Spenser's marriage. According to Goldberg, “The love of women does not interrupt” the love between Colin and Hobbinol (1992, 78). It is true that Spenser had (earlier in the text, later chronologically) asked for signs of goodwill toward his Corculum and Harvey responded—in Latin, more for the husband's than his sweetheart's benefit—with a copious show of love, concluding, “O mea Domina Immerito, mea bellissima Collina Clouta, multo plus plurimum salve, atque vale” (Prose Works, 17, 476; ed. 1912, 612b, 632a). It is easier to construe Harvey's compliments in the context of his pervasive antifeminist rhetoric than it is to appreciate the predicament described at length in Immerito's valedictory verse letter. Love is a problem for him—or perhaps it is two problems. Although the woman Spenser married in the months between his two exchanges of letters has been cloaked in pseudonyms, she is as real in the implied social world around Immerito as Sidney, Dyer, and Daniel Rogers. The triangular desire represented in the Calender continues, but Rosalind, or another like her, has been won, and presumably the poet's marriage accounts for his move from Leicester House to the lodgings in Westminster mentioned in his letter after the earthquake. Harvey's response to all that is said about love and marriage in “Ad Ornatissimum virum” is to chide his friend as a “magne muliercularum amator”; he is resolved to “rid you quite of this yonkerly, and [woomanish] humor” (Prose Works, 444; ed. 1912, 640b-641a, emended from McKitterick 1981, 353). Harvey's advice is worthy of Musidorus when he discovers Pyrocles in love; and if Sidney read the Letters with any care, as a bachelor entering the awkward age of young manhood he must have appreciated the issues left unresolved in these exchanges.

In “Ad Ornatissimum virum,” Ulysses figures prominently as a hero motivated by love for his wife, and in his fantasy of Continental travel, the poet sees himself engaged in “endless wandering” (inexhaustis … erroribus), a companion of Ulysses; he also imagines accompanying the “grieving goddess” (Deam … aegram) Ceres, in a quest suggestive of Orlando's search for Angelica.²¹ So the inescapable quests and idealized feminine figures that appear in so many heroic poems of the Renaissance are already taking shape in Spenser's imagination, uneasily linked with the morality of rational self-control. But these are not the only images of desire that are concentrated together in the last lines of the poem. Immerito's impulse to travel arises from a fear of shame, such as may inhibit a bridegroom; the terms in which he describes a stay-at-home life are suggestive. “For one feels ashamed at heart, at home in shameful obscurity [Namque sinu pudet in patrio, tenebrisque pudendis], / An unhappy youth not without talents, / To be wasting the green years in unworthy duties.” The poet has not yet had opportunities in the public world worthy of his talents, so he has not yet earned the pleasures of privacy. If marriage is the setting for a mature man's happiness, as earlier passages in the poem imply, some fear or guilt may still attend its bliss.

But intimacy between men also presents dangers: in his last lines the poet comes to rest in what I have already discussed as his imaginary scene of writing, finding his muse mourning “in the shadow of Mount Oebalius” (sub Oebalii … cacumine montis). Seen in relation to Edmund's separation from Gabriel, who had been praised as “my stalwart Apollo,” what can this mean? This out-of-the-way mountain in Sparta has only one literary association, as far as I know: Ovid tells of Apollo's love for Hyacinthus (Oebalides), whom he killed accidentally when the wind caught a discus they were tossing (Metamorphoses 10.162-219). The connections between art and life, the author's words and the man's emotions, are no more than dotted lines where Spenser is concerned, but I would suggest that this poem encodes, like so much of Elizabethan literature,²² the emotional difficulties attending intimacy and desire between men at the point where they come into conflict with marriage, which was both the foundation of patriarchal culture and the matrix for individual identity as the early modern cultural order had begun to define it.

Notes

1. There is no satisfactory text for the Letters of Spenser and Harvey. The Variorum Prose Works (ed. Rudolf Gottfried, 1949) offers a reliable and well-annotated text of the various items but presents them out of sequence, relegating much of the collection to an appendix. The one-volume Oxford Poetical Works (ed. 1912) includes the Letters entire and in order, and for many purposes this text is preferable to that in the Prose Works.

2. I quote from the glosses on Colin's friendship with Hobbinol, at “September” 176 and “Januarye” 59. These and related passages in the Calender and Letters pertaining to Spenser's friendship with Harvey are discussed by Goldberg 1992, 63-81, in terms that provide a frame of reference for other scholars (Smith 1991, Rambuss 1993) and the basis for several points in my argument.

3. Rambuss 1993 studies Spenser's career(s) as a poet and a secretary with reference to the discourse of secrecy in which someone holding or seeking a secretary's office was supposed to be proficient. In this connection, Jardine and Grafton 1990 on Gabriel Harvey's methods as a reader and his services to members of the Leicester/Sidney circle is quite relevant.

4. In a few years generalists in Renaissance studies have gone from knowing less than nothing on this subject to an embarrassment of riches, both in the archives of information now available to us and in strategies for its interpretation. For my purposes, the most useful socioliterary study is Smith 1991; Goldberg 1992 is by design more “exorbitant,” but as already noted it offers more detailed and original attention to Spenser and Harvey. Rambuss 1993, 40-48, explores the homoerotic aspect of secretaryship, and see the comments on secrecy in Smith 1991, 114-15, 234-36. Readers of either Smith or Goldberg will be led to relevant earlier work of Michel Foucault, Alan Bray, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

5. It is generally accepted that Spenser left London with Arthur, Lord Grey, in July of 1580 (see Judson 1945, 71-72), but he may have gone to Ireland earlier. In one of the best recent discussions of Spenser's involvement with the English colonial enterprise in Ireland, Lisa Jardine treats this posting with Lord Grey as a “return.” The months in which the Calender and Letters were published become, then, an interval with an indeterminate significance: perhaps they were a hiatus in his public career rather than steps upward to laureate status (Jardine 1990, 70 n. 8; cf. Judson 1945, 46, and Rambuss 1993, 25-28).

6. In this I concur with the skepticism voiced by Heninger 1987, 241-42, 245; cf. Oruch 1990, 738, and Rambuss 1993, 53-56. Heninger 1989, 5-6, is more inclined to wishful thinking about “the ‘lost works’” and other mysterious business.

7. Kinney 1983 notes how, in the absence of clear distinctions between truth and falsity, training in rhetoric emphasized plausible eristic arguments, which play an important part in the prose fiction that was contemporary with the Familiar Letters. Both Lyly and Gascoigne, using epistolary conventions for fiction and discourse on literary matters, offer precedents close in time to the unusual project undertaken by our two University men.

8. Goldberg 1990, a study of the conventions governing handwriting in the Renaissance, is relevant here, as is Miller 1990, a review essay pertaining specifically to Spenser's writing. See also Crane 1993: the subject-forming strategies of gathering and framing found in sixteenth-century commonplace books are also apparent in the Letters.

9. Prose Works, 484-85, quoting from Nashe's Strange Newes (1592): “for an Author to renounce his Christendome to write in his owne commendation, to refuse the name which his Godfathers and Godmothers gave him in his baptisme, and call himselfe a welwiller to both the writers, when hee is the onely writer himselfe; with what face doe you thinke hee can aunswere it at the day of judgement?”

10. Except for his View of the Present State of Ireland, which appears to have been “published” in manuscript form for a select audience, next to none of Spenser's writing survives in manuscript copies. The other notable exception is the sonnet eventually printed as Amoretti 8, which appears in several manuscript miscellanies with other courtiers' poems composed circa 1580. Spenser's poem is intertextually related to Greville's Caelica 3 and Sidney's Astrophel and Stella 42, serving as evidence of the “familiarity” with Sidney and his circle which Spenser claims in the course of these letters to Harvey (Cummings 1964; Quitslund 1973, 238-39).

11. This is not, however, the only instance of Spenser's playing with his readers' awareness that printed texts are derived from manuscript copies that may get out of the author's hands: in the epistle prefacing the Fowre Hymnes, he refers to earlier poems that he had been unable to “call in,” because “many copies thereof were formerly scattered abroad.” No manuscript copies of the first two Hymnes have been found, and this cryptic passage probably refers to passages in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, which is the kind of poem that may have circulated in manuscript before it was revised and printed in 1595 (years after the occasion that prompted its writing and the dedication to Ralegh).

12. McKitterick 1981, 350-53, provides a full account of Harvey's annotations in a copy found in the Peterborough Cathedral Library; I have incorporated these corrections where appropriate in subsequent quotations. McKitterick comments, “Most, but not quite all, of the corrections and alterations are to Harvey's part of the correspondence, and thus present him actually at work at his own texts” (351). In fact, only the first of the changes he records pertains to Spenser's part, and that amends a comment attributed to Harvey: introducing the subject of “your late Englishe Hexameters,” Immerito says that he too has been writing “in that kinde,” finding it, “as I have heard you often defende in worde, neither so harde, nor so harshe, [but] that it will easily and fairely, yeelde it selfe to our Moother tongue” (Prose Works, 16; ed. 1912, 611).

13. “Self-fashioning is always, though not exclusively, in language” (Greenblatt 1980, 9; cf. Greenblatt 1990). Bellamy 1992, 19-22, adds some pertinent nuances, commenting on “a subjecthood that is specifically literary,” inscribed within a narrative of events.

14. For Harvey's letter, see Prose Works, 449-62; ed. 1912, 613-22. On the earthquake and responses to it in print, see Prose Works, 263, 477-79: immediately after the event five items were entered in the Stationers' Register, with a dozen or more ballads and pamphlets appearing in the next three months.

15. At the end of his discourse on the earthquake, Harvey's brief account of the state of learning at Cambridge builds its satire similarly on tropes of collapsing distinctions; for example, “David, Ulysses, and Solon, fayned themselves fooles and madmen: our fooles and madmen faine themselves Davids, Ulysses, and Solons” (Prose Works, 461; ed. 1912, 621b).

16. A full discussion of “Ad Ornatissimum virum” is beyond the scope of this essay, but a few comments will appear in the next section. Here I would note that, with regard to love and marriage, in his Latin poem Spenser can be observed in transition from a view limited by pastoral conventions to the larger ideals appropriate to a quest romance. In addition, foretastes of Book II—allusions to Horace and Cicero, for example—are especially interesting, since it has not been assumed that the Legend of Temperance contains much material from the earliest stages in Spenser's evolving plans for The Faerie Queene.

17. Here and subsequently, translations of passages from “Ad Ornatissimum virum … G. H.” are my own, and I refer to the Latin text in the Oxford Poetical Works. The Variorum Prose Works provides a text with notes and a translation by Rudolf Gottfried (8-11, 255-61). A new text and an annotated translation of the Latin poem, alone or in concert with the Letters, is to be desired.

18. My reading differs from Goldberg's: “Immerito's veil is almost dropped” (1992, 73; emphasis added). Having made much of the author's absence from The Shepheardes Calender (1986, 38-67) and the presence of Harvey in Hobbinol (1992, 72-78), Goldberg seems loath to allow Edmundus a footing in reality similar to Gabriel's.

19. For reasons having more to do with our culture than that of Spenser's time, readers will differ in their interpretations of Spenser's sleeping with Harvey: for some, sexual intimacy is definitely not implied, while for others the question of its significance deserves both a shrug and a smirk. I regard the issue as undecidable, and not unrelated to the appearance of various aporias in this and other Spenserian texts.

20. See the Variorum commentary (Prose Works, 259); on Horace's poem, Kilpatrick 1986, 43-48; on Harvey's poem, Barnett 1945, and cf. Stern 1979, 43-44. It is not irrelevant that Castiglione's Courtier was one of the books Harvey was studying in 1580; see Ruutz-Rees 1910, 634-35.

21. Spenser's allusion to Ceres' search for Proserpina recalls the account in Ovid, Metamorphoses 5.341-486, but my colleague Patrick Cook aptly suggests that Ariosto (Orlando Furioso 12.1-4) is uppermost in Spenser's mind here.

22. Bruce R. Smith (1991, 31-77) provides an account of this literature and the forces at work in society that rendered sexuality problematic, yet central to the definition of social roles: women regarded as objects of sexual desire threatened masculinity and the solidarity of all-male institutions, yet the interests of a patriarchal culture required most men to found families, and affectionate bonds within marriage might be threatened by a husband's continuing emotional involvement with an old friend.

Works Cited

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