EDMUND SPENSER: LIFE C - Tapa dura

Hadfield's breadth of reading and his coverage of relevant details are impressive. ... will undoubtedly become the authoritative biography of Spenser (Elizabeth Heale, Modern Language Review)

readers will find much to enjoy in this story of a path-breaking, independent-minded writer, whose network of associates included most f the important literary and political figures in the last quarter of the 16th century. (Neil Rhodes, Around the Globe)

this is going to be the standard biography of Spenser for a very long time ... If I encounter a better historical biography this year, I'll be surprised. (Jonathan Wright, The Tablet)

This tremendous book represents nothing less than tha most comprehensive account of Edmund Spencer's life that we have ever had. (Christianity and Literature)

Hadfield's Spenser is revelatory and performed with authentic scholarship and drive. (Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University)

Andrew Hadfield has created ... an invaluable biography, which will be a resource for Spenserian scholars and enthusiasts for generations to come. (Helen Hackett, Times Literary Supplement)

This is, in all senses, a substantial book, packed with scholarly detail. (Charles Nicholl, The Guardian)

Andrew Hadfield's monumental undertaking sets new standards in life writing. Not merely a significant contribution to Spenser studies, it changes the way we think about Renaissance literature, Elizabethan history, biographical criticism and issues of authorship. (Times Higher Education)

A phenomenal work of scholarship and insight. (Nicola Shulman, The Spectator)

Andrew Hadfield's life of Spenser is the first biography of the Prince of Poets, as his epitaph had it, in 60 years, and I cannot imagine anyone doing a better job for another 60 ... He brings to the biography a nuanced critical intelligence, and above all, a capacity to remind the reader how surprising Spenser was. (Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman)

Edmund Spenser's innovative poetic works have a central place in the canon of English literature. Yet he is remembered as a morally flawed, self-interested sycophant; complicit in England's ruthless colonisation of Ireland; in Karl Marx's words, 'Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet'― a man on the make who aspired to be at court and who was prepared to exploit the Irish to get what he wanted.

In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the poet for 60 years, Andrew Hadfield finds a more complex and subtle Spenser. How did a man who seemed destined to become a priest or a don become embroiled in politics? If he was intent on social climbing, why was he so astonishingly rude to the good and the great - Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester, Sir Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I and James VI? Why was he more at home with 'the middling sort' ― writers, publishers and printers, bureaucrats, soldiers, academics, secretaries, and clergymen ― than with the mighty and the powerful? How did the appalling slaughter he witnessed in Ireland impact on his imaginative powers? How did his marriage and family life shape his work?

Spenser's brilliant writing has always challenged our preconceptions. So too, Hadfield shows, does the contradictory relationship between his between life and his art.