Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Specific Professions - Biography, English Poetry - 16th Century - Literary Criticism, English Fiction & Prose Literature - 16th-17th Century - Literary Criticism, British Poets - Literary Biography

Spenser's Secret Career

Name: Spenser's Secret Career
Author: Richard Rambuss
ISBN: 9780521030939

by Richard Rambuss, Rambuss Richard, Stephen Orgel

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Overview

Edmund Spenser (c.1552-99) conducted two careers at once: a celebrated poet, he also pursued a lifelong career as secretary to various political and ecclesiastical figures. Richard Rambuss's book explores how this latter career, usually allotted only cursory mention in accounts of Spenser's professional ambitions, informed his poetic career. Working from the fact that contemporary bureaucratic treatises defined the management of secrets as the central occupation of secretaryship, this study provides a careerist context for the attention to secrecy throughout Spenser's poetry. It takes issue with prevailing new historicist accounts which see Spenser's careerism as shaped entirely by a single-minded pursuit of laureateship along a Virgilian route from pastoral to epic. Spenser's Secret Career presents an alternative picture, arguing that for Spenser the manipulation of secrets - his own and others' - provided a strategy of self-promotion for both of his careers. In doing so, this study also considers secrecy in relation to Renaissance formations of power, gender, and subjecthood.

Synopsis

Edmund Spenser (c.1552-99) conducted two careers at once: a celebrated poet, he also pursued a lifelong career as secretary to various political and ecclesiastical figures. Richard Rambuss's ground-breaking book explores the ways in which this latter profession informed his poetic career. It argues that for Spenser, the manipulation of secrets provided a strategy for self-promotion and a means of measuring his distance from royal and aristocratic power. The study presents a new picture of Spenser and examines ideas of gender, power, and subjecthood in the Renaissance.