Spenser's Secret Career [Paperback]

An impressive exploration of the poet Edmund Spenser's second career as a political secretary.Spenser's Secret Career is an interesting study of the interplay of secrets and secrecy in Spenser's poetic texts and his careerist negotiations, as well as in conceptions of gender, power and subjecthood in Renaissance culture.Spenser's Secret Career is an interesting study of the interplay of secrets and secrecy in Spenser's poetic texts and his careerist negotiations, as well as in conceptions of gender, power and subjecthood in Renaissance culture.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.List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Introduction; 1. Professional secrets; 2. The secretary's study: the secret designs of The Shepheardes Calender; 3. 'In sundrie hands': the 1590 Faerie Queene and Spenser's Complaints; 4. Secret sights, private parts: the 1596 Faerie Queene; Notes; List of works cited; Index. This book is to be valued especially for pointing the way to a more nuanced engagement with...Spencer's poems. Modern Philology ...one of the more exciting of recent books on Spenser; and, remarkably, for such a stylish study, it is a model of argumentative and stylistic lucidity. P. Cullen, Choice Spenser's Secret Career is an excellent test case for the value of 'narrow' literary biography--that is, a work that accounts for a writer's career in terms of a single theme or preoccupation....Rambuss is a good close readerl£