John Aubrey's brief life described him unhelpfully as "a little man", with "short hair", while Karl Marx's notoriously blunt assessment of Spenser as "Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet" defined the opinion of generations of glum students, faced with reading his vast, archaic masterpiece, The Faerie Queene. Those who finish it usually conclude that Spenser was an intemperate Protestant versifier, glorifying an ageing monarch while making a fortune on his ill-gotten estates in Munster, from where he launched a reprehensible defence of Elizabeth's bloody and...
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