Andrew Hadfield estimates that Spenser had 200-300 volumes in his working library (by comparison, an inventory of Munster planter Sir William Herbert’s seignory at Castleisland, Co. Kerry mentions “of sundry sortes great and little one hundred“ books). These would have been in various languages and of all kinds and genres, ranging from religious to legal tracts to popular and refined works of literature.

The space for the conjectured study in our recreation is relatively small, so vertically stacked bookshelves (a design known in the late-sixteenth century) are used instead of shelves angled outwards from the wall (as one might find in a periodicals reading-room today, for example). The latter type were better for displaying the covers of books but the former could hold more. Contrary to modern-day practice, the majority of the books are arranged with their spines facing the wall. The reason for this is that many books were bound haphazardly by the owners, and titles of books were often written in ink on the page-ends of books, as opposed to being stamped onto the leather or vellum of the spines.

There was a book trade in early modern Ireland, but how far it reached into the countryside is uncertain. Spenser travelled enough, including to London, and spent enough time in major Irish towns, such as Dublin, and earned enough money, to have amassed a good collection of books for a person of his social status. Many of these books would presumably have been burnt when the castle went up in flames in 1598. Losses may have included unpublished parts of The Faerie Queene.

On the top shelf of one of the bookshelves are two objects with threatening significance. One, a skull, is the standard medieval momento mori or reminder of our final end. The other is a Spanish helmet (see Tower House Study: Helmet), the sort of trophy that Spenser could have bought or have picked up as a souvenir after one or another expedition by Spain landed on Irish shores (disastrously so).

Spenser was a poet acutely conscious of worldly ruin and of his own mortality, while simultaneously hopeful that a decisive English Protestant victory over Spain (and other foreign Catholic forces) might finally be achieved. Spenser anticipates such a battle in The Faerie Queene, between “that great faery Queene and Paynim king,” which he promises to one day write about (FQ I.xi.7). Spenser’s epic has a godly, anti-Spanish, anti-papal, pro-English militaristic purpose. Ironically, that battle came to Kilcolman too soon, and his book was never finished.

The metal chest here is of the kind with elaborate locking mechanisms.

The chest is a Spanish model; Spenser could have purchased or salvaged similar models from the flotsam and jetsam washed up on Irish shores in the sixteenth century, including after ships from the Great Armada crashed there in 1588 (see also Great Hall: helmet, Spanish). In 1587, in a brief period of piracy (or opportunism, depending on the legal interpretation), Spenser captained a seized Spanish ship, loaded with wine, and sailed it from the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry to Cork harbor.

Literary Connections

Spenser's employer Arthur, Lord Grey wrote to Queen Elizabeth during the Desmond rebellion that the Spanish besieged at Smerwick had a ”coffer” in which they stored all their ”treasure.” It was duly seized and its contents of silver (“plate“) coins distributed among his men.

The Munster Plantation offered Spenser himself significant opportunity in land, treasure and status. He, like his fellow New Englishmen, or like Guyon, the hero of Temperance who resists the snares of Mammon (in Book II of The Faerie Queene), had to be on guard against its corrupting influences. He also had to guard against thieves.

The treasure inside the chest might remind us of Spenser’s bride, described in Amoretti 15 as containing “all this worlds riches that may farre be found.” Her lips are like “Rubies,” her eyes like “Saphyres,” and so forth, but most fair of all is “her mind adornd with vertues manifold.” In the following wedding poem, “Epithalamion,” we hear that “all her body” is “like a pallace fayre,/ Ascending vppe with many a stately stayre,/ To honors seat and chastities sweet bowre” (178-80). Elizabeth Boyle was herself a prize to be won.

A chest lost at sea is fought over by two sons of “Milesio,” Amidas and Bracidas, in Book V of The Faerie Queene (the “Book of Justice”). Artegall, the hero of Justice, finds Amidas and Bracidas fighting over a

… Coffer strong,
Fast bound on euery side with iron bands,
But seeming to haue suffred mickle wrong,
Either by being wreckt vppon the sands,
Or being carried farre from forraine lands. (FQ V.iv.5.1-5)

The ensuing story involves a complicated legal matter, involving a dispute over land lost and found (land washed from one brother to the other by action of the sea), wives lost and found (the wife of one brother eloped with the other; the other wife floated back the other way), as well as treasure lost and found (the chest floated, accompanied by wife, from the one brother to the other). Artegall, acting as judge, resolves the dispute through the principle of salvage (or, put crudely, finders-keepers): to whom the land, treasure and wife goes, thanks to the action of the sea, so belongs the ownership of each:

For what the mighty Sea hath once possest,
And plucked quite from all possessors hand,
Whether by rage of waues, that neuer rest,
Or else by wracke, that wretches hath distrest,
He [i.e., the Sea] may dispose by his imperiall might,
As thing at randon left, to whom he list. (FQ V.iv.19.2-7)

The episode has clear Irish significance in that Milesio was the legendary king of Spain who colonized prehistoric Ireland, according to Irish legend. His descendants were the Irish themselves. In Spenser’s poem, however, it is possible that one brother stands allegorically for Ireland and the other for England, Scotland and/or Wales. In either case, the resolution offered here indicates that Spenser fantasized about such a judgment being applied to his Irish situation. Artegall’s decision echoes the judgment of Dame Nature in The Faerie Queene Book VII (“The Mutabilitie Cantos”), which occurs on Arlo Hill, near Kilcolman: in that episode, Jove is allowed to keep the power that he took by force and is “confirm’d in his imperiall see,” or throne (FQ VII.vii.59.7). Spenser, by “imperiall might,” design and fortune, ended up with land, wife and treasure at Kilcolman, until the seas of fate took them all away again.

Links:

Spenser raised at least three children at Kilcolman: from his second marriage (in 1594, to Elizabeth Boyle), a son, Peregrine; from his first marriage (in 1579, to Machabeus Chylde), a daughter, Katherine, and a son, Sylvanus. Sylvanus and his descendants would end up inheriting Kilcolman. A crib was a hopeful sign that a landed gentleman’s name and property would be passed on to his heirs. (See also Bedroom: Toy Knight)

Child mortality was a constant in the early modern period. Spenser’s contemporary, the writer Ben Jonson, reported that Spenser lost another child, a baby, in the destruction of the castle in 1598. How trustworthy this statement is is unclear. Jonson also said that Spenser died penniless, which is unlikely, and Jonson regularly focused on the death of children in his creative work. He may therefore have been embellishing an already dramatic story about the poet’s narrow escape during the uprising.

A story, told by the antiquarian James Ware in his preface to Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland (1633), relates that a different sort of child, i.e., the unpublished remainder of The Faerie Queene, was lost in transit following the desertion of his castle.

Literary Connections

Children are an occasional feature of Spenser’s poetry. Some, like the infant Ruddymane in The Faerie Queene, appear in highly traumatic circumstances: Ruddymane is found playing in the blood of his dying mother, Amavia, who has stabbed herself (FQ II.i.39ff). Ruddymane, whose name means “red hand,” has been read by one of Spenser’s early commentators, John Upton, as alluding to the heraldic Red Hand of Ulster, and hence to the threat of violence and rebellion in the north (from whence soldiers came to sack Kilcolman, for example). Amavia, likewise, could evoke the Irish queen of the fairies (cf. Shakespeare’s “Queen Mab” in Romeo and Juliet). Ruddymane’s deceased father, Mordant, might glance at the English soldier, Captain Mordant, who according to state papers was reprimanded for bad behavior in Ireland in the mid-1580s. With the Ruddymane episode, is Spenser somehow allegorizing the bloody mess that Ireland was in?

Other children, like the “thousand thousand naked babes” in the ever-fertile Garden of Adonis (FQ III.vi.32.3) or the cupids (or amoretti) in his courtship poems, Amoretti and Epithalamion, stand for erotic creativity and new life in Spenser’s work. For example, in “Epithalamion,” the “sons of Venus,” i.e., cupids, amoretti or “winged loves,” symbolize Spenser’s sonnets themselves, titled Amoretti. These cupids fly and “play” around his bedroom at Kilcolman on his wedding night, which the speaker hopes will stay silently peaceful and free from threat while the couple makes love:

But let stil Silence trew night watches keepe,
That sacred peace may in assurance rayne,
And tymely sleep, when it is tyme to sleepe,
May poure his limbs forth on your pleasant playne,
The whiles an hundred little winged loues,
Like diuers feathered doues,
Shall fly and flutter round about your bed,
And in the secret darke, that none reproues,
Their prety stealthes shal worke, and snares shal spread
To filch away sweet snatches of delight,
Conceald through couert night.
Ye sonnes of Venus, play your sports at will,
For greedy pleasure, carelesse of your toyes,
Thinks more vpon her paradise of ioyes,
Then what ye do, albe it good or ill.
All night therefore attend your merry play,
For it will soone be day:
Now none doth hinder you, that say or sing,
Ne will the woods now answer, nor your Eccho ring. (“Epithalamion” 353-71)

Eric Klingelhofer argues that this room, the Parlor between the Great Hall and Tower House, was built during Spenser’s time, so such a stone as the one pictured here may have been included in the building’s original construction as testament to the arrival and permanent presence of the newly married couple. Every time Spenser or Elizabeth Boyle would cross the threshold from the more private Parlor to the more public Great Hall, they could keep their mutual faith in mind.

Literary Connections

What’s in a name? Spenser was subject to three Elizabeths: his mother, his second wife, and the queen. In his sonnet sequence, Amoretti (1595), he writes two adjacent sonnets (numbers 74-75) that celebrate the name of Elizabeth. In the first, he describes his wife’s “Most happy letters fram’d by skilfull trade” (74.1), and he advertises the coincidence between her name and that of the other two Elizabeths by comparing them to the famous three graces of classical mythology: “Ye three Elizabeths for euer liue,/ that three such graces did vnto me giue” (74.13-14). These graces inspire him to write gracefully about graceful things (see also the vision of four graces given to Spenser’s alter-ego, the character Colin Clout, on Mount Acidale in FQ VI.x).

The second sonnet, #75, is one of Spenser’s best-known poems. It describes how he wrote his love’s “name vpon the strand,/ but came the waues and washed it away” (75.1-2). In order to defeat the ravages of time, he decides to “eternize” her name in his verse instead:

my verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
and in the heuens wryte your glorious name.
Where whenas death shall all the world subdew, our loue shall liue, and later life renew. (75.11-14)

Spenser’s verse places her name above his head, “in the heavens,” where their love will “renew” itself at the end of time.

Many estates in Ireland had deer parks dating back to the later middle ages (from the Anglo-Norman invasion in the 1170s-80s on forward). Spenser did not have a deer park (that we know of) but his New English neighbors at Mallow Castle, Co. Cork, the Norris family, reputedly did. Legend has it that Queen Elizabeth I donated the first deer to populate the grounds at Mallow.

Spenser and/or his servants would also have had ample opportunity to hunt deer in the wild. The famously dense wood of Aherlow (“Arlo”) grew nearby to the north. They would have hunted red deer, a native Irish species.

In the castle recreation here, the deerskins are appropriately placed in an important domestic space, on a rocking chair and on the floor in front of the hearth. Deerskins are also placed in the Tower House Parlor.

Literary Connections

We read about a deer hunt in Spenser’s neighborhood in the fragment of Book VII of The Faerie Queene, the “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie,” first published posthumously in 1609. In it, Spenser describes how the character Faunus, a wood-god, is punished by the virginal goddess of the moon and of the hunt, Cynthia (an allegorized Queen Elizabeth I), for spying on her while she takes a bath in the wood of Aherlow. The story loosely imitates that of Diana and Acteon in Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: when Faunus is found out, he is punished by being draped with a deer skin and chased by Diana’s hounds:

But him (according as they had decreed)
With a Deeres-skin they couered, and then chast
With all their hounds that after him did speed;
But he more speedy, from them fled more fast
Then any Deere: so sore him dread aghast.
They after follow’d all with shrill out-cry,
Shouting as they the heauens would haue brast:
That all the woods and dales where he did flie,
Did ring againe, and loud reeccho to the skie. (FQ VII.vi.52)

The sound of Irish woods “echoing” a cry also features prominently in Spenser’s wedding poem, Epithalamion (1595). Whereas in “The Mutabilitie Cantos,” the shrieking or “shrill” cry of the enraged wood nymphs is deeply threatening to the male voyeur, in Epithalamion the ringing woods add a melodious, calming note to festivities that celebrate the marriage “ring”: an allusion to wedding bells and (obliquely) to the wedding band. The poem celebrates orphic harmonies in nature rather than orgiastic destruction. In this case, the woodsy nymphs invoked by Spenser guard the poet and his bride from harm at Kilcolman, as they prepare themselves for the ceremonies later that day. Spenser calls on the nymphs who are

… lightfoot mayds which keepe the deere,
That on the hoary mountayne vse to towre,
And the wylde wolues which seeke them to deuoure,
With your steele darts doo chace from comming neer,
Be also present heere,
To helpe to decke her and to help to sing,
That all the woods may answer and your eccho ring. (Epithalamion 67-73)

In this case his dear bride will be adorned by those who normally “keepe the deer” with “steele darts” or spears; one imagines that these darts are not are neglected entirely but are rather left (figuratively) at the church door for re-use once the ceremonies are done.

Spenser compares his wife-to-be Elizabeth Boyle to a deer in Amoretti, the sonnet sequence written to court her and published with Epithalamion. In sonnet 67, he has finally achieved his love (his “deare”):

Lyke as a huntsman after weary chace,
Seeing the game from him escapt away,
sits downe to rest him in some shady place,
with panting hounds beguiled of their pray:
So after long pursuit and vaine assay,
when I all weary had the chace forsooke,
the gentle deare returnd the selfe-same way,
thinking to quench her thirst at the next brooke.
There she beholding me with mylder looke,
sought not to fly, but fearelesse still did bide:
till I in hand her yet halfe trembling tooke,
and with her owne goodwill hir fyrmely tyde.
Strange thing me seemd to see a beast so wyld, so goodly wonne with her owne will beguyld.

The bride here becomes a Christ-figure as well. Spenser pursues a spiritual as well as a physical ideal. It is not a violent hunt that wins his bride but her own self-sacrifice and active desire to be won by the “beguiling” poet.

Many estates in Ireland had deer parks dating back to the later middle ages (from the Anglo-Norman invasion in the 1170s-80s on forward). Spenser did not have a deer park (that we know of) but his New English neighbors at Mallow Castle, Co. Cork, the Norris family, did. Legend has it that Queen Elizabeth I donated the first deer to populate the grounds at Mallow.

Spenser and/or his servants would also have had ample opportunity to hunt deer in the wild. The famously dense wood of Aherlow (“Arlo”) grew nearby to the north. They would have hunted red deer, a native Irish species.

In the castle recreation here, the deerskins are appropriately placed in an important domestic space, on a rocking chair and on the floor in front of the hearth. Deerskins are also placed in the Tower House Bedroom.

Literary Connections

We read about a deer hunt in Spenser’s neighborhood in the fragment of Book VII of The Faerie Queene, the “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie,” first published posthumously in 1609. In it, Spenser describes how the character Faunus, a wood-god, is punished by the virginal goddess of the moon and of the hunt, Cynthia (an allegorized Queen Elizabeth I), for spying on her while she takes a bath in the wood of Aherlow. The story loosely imitates that of Diana and Acteon in Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: when Faunus is found out, he is punished by being draped with a deer skin and chased by Diana’s hounds:

But him (according as they had decreed)
With a Deeres-skin they couered, and then chast
With all their hounds that after him did speed;
But he more speedy, from them fled more fast
Then any Deere: so sore him dread aghast.
They after follow’d all with shrill out-cry,
Shouting as they the heauens would haue brast:
That all the woods and dales where he did flie, Did ring againe, and loud reeccho to the skie. (FQ VII.vi.52)

The sound of Irish woods “echoing” a cry also features prominently in Spenser’s wedding poem, “Epithalamion” (1595). Whereas in “The Mutabilitie Cantos,” however, the shrieking or “shrill” cry of the enraged wood nymphs is deeply threatening to the male voyeur, in “Epithalamion” the ringing woods add a melodious, calming note to festivities that celebrate the marriage “ring”: an allusion to wedding bells and (obliquely) to the wedding band. The poem celebrates orphic harmonies in nature rather than orgiastic destruction. In this case, the woodsy nymphs invoked by Spenser guard the poet and his bride from harm at Kilcolman, as they prepare themselves for the ceremonies later that day. Spenser calls on the nymphs who are

… lightfoot mayds which keepe the deere,
That on the hoary mountayne vse to towre,
And the wylde wolues which seeke them to deuoure,
With your steele darts doo chace from comming neer,
Be also present heere,
To helpe to decke her and to help to sing,
That all the woods may answer and your eccho ring. (Epithalamion 67-73)

In this case his dear bride will be adorned by those who normally “keepe the deere” with “steele darts” or spears; one imagines that these darts are not are neglected entirely but are rather left (figuratively) at the church door for re-use once the ceremonies are done (Tower House Storage Room: darts).

Spenser compares his wife-to-be Elizabeth Boyle to a deer in Amoretti, the sonnet sequence written to court her and published with Epithalamion. In sonnet #67, he has finally achieved his love (his “deare”):

Lyke as a huntsman after weary chace,
Seeing the game from him escapt away,
sits downe to rest him in some shady place,
with panting hounds beguiled of their pray:
So after long pursuit and vaine assay,
when I all weary had the chace forsooke,
the gentle deare returnd the selfe-same way,
thinking to quench her thirst at the next brooke.
There she beholding me with mylder looke, sought not to fly, but fearelesse still did bide:
till I in hand her yet halfe trembling tooke,
and with her owne goodwill hir fyrmely tyde.
Strange thing me seemd to see a beast so wyld,
so goodly wonne with her owne will beguyld.

The bride here becomes a Christ-figure as well. Spenser pursues a spiritual as well as a physical ideal. It is not a violent hunt that wins his bride but her own self-sacrifice and active desire to be won by the “beguiling” poet.

Almost all surviving examples of Spenser’s handwriting are in the form of letters copied while secretary to Grey or writing on behalf of other administrators, such as John Norris, President of Munster, one of his planter neighbors nearby to the south (at Mallow Castle, County Cork). Few letters survive from Spenser’s time in Munster, however.

Spenser wrote and received both administrative and personal letters; some of the latter, exchanged with the scholar Gabriel Harvey while Spenser lived in England in the 1570s, were published in 1579. They focus on newsworthy events in England and abroad as well as current debates about poetic aesthetics.

In the study in the Tower House portion of this castle recreation is another desk. That room functions as Spenser’s private “office” for other, more creative writing.

Both desks are modeled loosely on that of St Jerome in Albrecht Dürer’s famous print (1514).

Literary Connections

Irenius in A View of the Present State of Ireland describes the Irish as always asking for news, which is carried across the country by “common carriers,” men who are akin to rogues and “loose fellows” (View 76). These supposed low-life criminals are “partakers not only of many stealths by setting forth other men’s goods to be stolen,” but they are “also privy to many traitorous practices” (76). Eudoxus answers that the Irishman’s desire for news “argueth sure in them a greate desire of innovation” (76). Eudoxus’ comment, following so closely upon Irenius’ warning, hints at his fear of dangerous political innovation, including treason, which can spread so swiftly along with the news in Ireland. Spenser is concerned about the unchecked spread of information across the country in troubled times.

The news also helped those in need. In the “Mutabilitie Cantos” portion of The Faerie Queene, people of “the lower World” are confused when the light of Cynthia, or the moon, is momentarily extinguished by the attempted overthrow of her power: her throne in the heavens has been shaken by the rebellious titaness, Mutability. “Fearing least Chaos broken had his chaine,/ And brought againe on them eternall night,” the messenger-God Mercury takes action and speeds to the “faire Palace” of the king of the Gods, Jove, to tell him what has happened. Mercury, “The Heauens Herald” then acts as go-between for Jove and Mutability (FQ VII.vi.14 -19).

Spenser himself is compared to Mercury in a commendatory sonnet written by Sir Walter Raleigh in praise of The Faerie Queene. In this poem, published alongside the epic in the 1590 edition, Raleigh compares Spenser to a “celestiall thiefe” of the glory of previous poets (Raleigh, “A Vision vpon this conceipt of the Faery Queene” 14). The “thiefe” is Mercury, who is also the god of thieves; in Greek myth, Mercury steals the cattle of Apollo. Mercury’s dual role as thief and messenger may help explain the connection in Irenius’s mind (above) between thieving activity in the countryside and running news. Indeed, Spenser was himself accused in a letter (October 12, 1589) to Queen Elizabeth by his antagonistic neighbor, Lord Roche, of stealing his neighbor’s cattle and beating Roche’s men.

Spenser would have retaliated to Lord Roche's abuses in his own letters. As Andrew Zurcher and Christopher Burlinson suggest in their edition of letters associated with Spenser (pp. lxii-lxiv), the poet would have had an anxious relationship with letter-writing, given the bloody politics that inspired some of them. A fear of victimization-by-correspondence can be found in the epistolary vocabulary found in the Despaire episode in Book I of The Faerie Queene. When Red Crosse Knight contemplates suicide with a knife in his hand, ...his hand did quake, And tremble like a leafe of Aspin greene, And troubled bloud through his pale face was seene To come, and goe with tydings from the hart, As it a running messenger had beene. (FQ I.ix.51) In a second commendatory sonnet to The Faerie Queene, Raleigh declares that “Of me no lines are lou’d, nor letters are of price,/ Of all which speak our English tongue, but those of thy deuice” (Raleigh, “Another of the same” 13-4). The immediate reference here is to “lines” and “letters” of verse, i.e., to the poems written by Spenser that Raleigh admires. The “deuice” has to do with Spenser’s powers of invention while writing them (his devising of them). A secondary meaning occurs, however, in that a device, or personal emblem, was used to mark wax seals on letters as a further method of identifying them (no such “device” of Spenser’s exists today, although he would have been entitled to one, according to his rank as a landed “gentleman” at Kilcolman). Raleigh may therefore be hinting at the method by which he received poetry from Spenser, i.e., in letters of Spenser’s devising and with Spenser’s device on them. Simultaneously, such letters in the “English tongue” coming out of Ireland, especially, would attest to their shared nationality.

Links:

Both desks are modeled loosely on that of St Jerome in Albrecht Dürer’s famous print (1514). Spenser would certainly have found inspiration in the early church fathers when writing his own divinely inspired work.

Many writers, such as Michel de Montaigne, Friederich Holderlein and William Butler Yeats, were attracted to towers to work in. Perhaps the physical location on high inspired lofty thoughts, just as it removed one from distractions down below. In the castle recreation here, Spenser’s study is adjacent to his bedroom and above the chapel, both powerful places for the heart and mind.

Almost all surviving examples of Spenser’s handwriting are in the form of letters written while he was secretary to Lord Deputy of Ireland Arthur, Lord Grey or when writing on behalf of other administrators, such as John Norris, President of Munster and his planter neighbor nearby to the south (at Mallow Castle, County Cork). A few rare examples of Spenser’s annotations to poems [from the Shakespeare Folger Library] do exist, however.

On the desk lies Spenser’s magnum opus, The Faerie Queene, open to the title page of the second (1596) edition. As the page declares, it was published in London and “printed for” William Ponsonbie. It shows the emblem (or device) of the printer, Richard Field: the anchora spei or “anchor of hope” that descends from the heavens. Writing epic poetry was both inspired and weighty business, and it took hope for Spenser to make the perilous land-and-sea-journey to London, so as to oversee publication of his work (see the description of such a voyage in Spenser’s poem Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, 1595). It took more hope to return again and to keep writing at Kilcolman, as the political storm-clouds gathered in the north. The name of Spenser’s estate, “Hap-hazard,” indicated its precarious nature.

Literary Connections

In Book II of The Faerie Queene is found the House of Temperance, a castle based allegorically on the human body, wherein the kitchen is the stomach, private rooms are the heart, and so on. The castle’s turret, a “blessed bowre” (FQ II.ix.47.5) functions as the head. It has many rooms, three of which function as the principle parts of the mind and/or higher soul. “Three honorable sages” (47.8) live there, i.e., foresight, judgment and memory. The first of these sages, named “Phantastes,” has “a sharpe foresight, and a working wit/ That never idle was, ne once would rest a whit” and he imagines all sorts of

... idle thoughtes and fantasies,
Deuices, dreames, opinions vnsound,
Shewes, visions, sooth-sayes, and prophesies;
And all that fained is, as leasings, tales, and lies. (FQ II.ix.51.6-9)

The other two men represent the sager and more serious aspects of the mind. The second, judgment (who is unnamed in the poem), has walls

... painted faire with memorable gestes,
Of famous Wisards, and with picturals
Of Magistrates, of courts, of tribunals,
Of commen wealthes, of states, of pollicy,
Of lawes, of iudgementes, and of decretals;
All artes, all science, all Philosophy,
And all that in the world was ay thought wittily. (53.3-9)

The third of these men, “Eumnestes,” represents memory, and

His chamber all was hangd about with rolls,
And old records from auncient times deriud,
Some made in books, some in long parchment scrolls,
That were all worm-eaten, and full of canker holes. (57.6-9)

Combined, the men could represent a well-rounded (and somewhat satirical) portrait of Spenser at Kilcolman: a man of intense poetic imagination and fancy who philosophized, administered and adjudicated on his estate, while also writing antiquarian histories or chronicles (inserted into The Faerie Queene) based on his prodigious reading and memory.

Links:

http://talus.artsci.wustl.edu/

[accessed 11/30/12] [texts and digital editing of Spenser’s work, including facsimiles. Directed by Joseph Loewenstein and hosted at Washington University in St. Louis]

Spenser also likely had an orchard somewhere on his estate. It is possible that he had a pleasure garden as well, such as that pictured here. This garden has symmetrically designed, interlaced or “knotted” hedges according to Elizabethan patterns. The small, vine-laden arbor (or bower) for sitting and admiring the view of the garden, with its central sundial, is modeled on that at Kenilworth in England (the lavish estate of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, Spenser’s sometime patron). Some details are taken from the garden-arbor structures in the weird dream-allegory Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) of Francesco Colonna.

As was conventional, the garden is situated so that its patterns can also be appreciated from above, by those standing on the bawn wall or looking out of the north-facing windows of the tower house, or from its ramparts.

Literary Connections

Spenser in his literary works is clearly enamored of gardens, which were places of great beauty and status in Elizabethan England, as they are in The Faerie Queene. They are places of art and contemplation, for thinking in and on. The deeply philosophical and mythological “Garden of Adonis” is the centerpiece of Book III of The Faerie Queene, the Book of Chastity. [“Chastity” for Spenser did not indicate virginity only, but rather the virtues of fertility under proper, loving (including wedded) circumstances.] A decadent and licentious garden with fountains in it, the Bower of Bliss, appears at the conclusion of Book II and is destroyed by Guyon, the hero of Temperance.

Both the Garden of Adonis and the Bower of Bliss (as well as others) have been read by critics as having Ireland-related allegorical significance: in the former, we see an emphasis on seeding, the life-cycle and creative fertility, which may reflect Spenser’s own ideals as a “genius” creating art on his newly won plantation. In the latter, we see the sad consequences of trading heroic action for sensual, enervating ease: of living for the moment and enjoying your surroundings (including love poetry) far too much. Doughty knights must remain virtuous, armed and vigilant.

In Spenser’s Amoretti #89, the final sonnet in the sequence, the poet imagines himself as a dove (a “Culuer“) missing its mate. She is beautiful and he longs for sight of her. Her “sweet aspect“ inspires both God and man to be with her: “Whose sweet aspect both God and man can moue,/ In her vnspotted pleasauns to delight.“ A “pleasauns“ in this case signifies both the pleasure area of a garden and “pleasantness“ more generally. Should the poet not have the sight and use of his love’s figurative pleasure garden, he complains, “Dark is my day, whyles her fayre light I mis,/ And dead my life that wants such liuely blis.“ (Amoretti 89.11-14).

In Amoretti 64, dubbed the “garden sonnet” by critics, Spenser in a blazon, or poetic catalog on his mistress’ fair parts (a trope familiar also from the Song of Solomon in the Bible), compares his new bride, Elizabeth Boyle, to a garden:

Comming to kisse her lyps, (such grace I found)
Me seemd I smelt a gardin of sweet flowres:
that dainty odours from them threw around
for damzels fit to decke their louers bowres.
Her lips did smell lyke vnto Gillyflowers,
her ruddy cheeks lyke vnto Roses red:
her snowy browes lyke budded Bellamoures,
her louely eyes lyke Pincks but newly spred,
Her goodly bosome lyke a Strawberry bed,
her neck like to a bounch of Cullambynes:
her brest lyke lillyes, ere theyr leaues be shed,
her nipples lyke yong blossomd Iessemynes:
Such fragrant flowers doe giue most odorous smell,
but her sweet odour did them all excell.

The sonnet immediately precedes #65, wherein Spenser compares his bride to a “gentle birde… within her cage” that “singes and feeds her fill,” once she has entered into her engagement “bands” with him. The “cage” brings his house or tower to mind. Birds are also attracted to gardens, and some gardens, like Kenilworth, had aviaries in them. The same “bondage” has captured the poet and tied him to her. They are a pair of love-birds.

Spenser closes Sonnet 65 with a rhyming couplet, wherein a reference to a “brasen towre” is rhymed with “sacred bowre”:

There fayth doth fearlesse dwell in brasen towre,
and spotlesse pleasure builds her sacred bowre. (Amoretti 65.13-14)

Spenser envisions both tower and bower side by side: a “bower” could refer to an inner apartment in a mansion, including bedrooms and boudoirs (see Oxford English Dictionary q.v. “bower”), or to a place in a garden, such as an “arbor” or “place closed in or overarched with branches of trees, shrubs, or other plants” (Oxford English Dictionary q.v. “bower”; see also the reference to the “bowre” in 64.4, above, and to the “Bower of Bliss,” the pleasure garden in The Faerie Queene II.xii). Tower and bower here function as a mutual unit, like man and wife: the sonnet couplet brings the couple to mind. Similarly, Sonnet 64 (the garden sonnet) appears adjacent to Sonnet 65 (the tower sonnet): another coupling. Figuratively, the poet would himself correspond with the strong, masculine and sheltering hard tower (“brasen” connotes both bold and brassy), which is full of “fayth” that is “fearlesse.” His bride, correspondingly, would be the chaste or “spotlesse” and “sacred” “bowre” of “pleasure” that he anticipates enjoying on his wedding night. In that garden-room he and she will grow children.

Alternatively, it could be that Spenser sees his bride as the tower as well as the bower. In “Epithalamion”, the wedding poem that follows Amoretti, the poet returns to the use of the blazon to describe his bride. He compares her features to jewels, fruit [“Her cheekes lyke apples which the sun hath rudded,/ Her lips lyke cherryes charming men to byte” (“Epithalamion” 173-4)] and flowers, and her “snowie necke” is

...lyke to a marble towre,
And all her body like a pallace fayre,
Ascending vppe with many a stately stayre,
To honors seat and chastities sweet bowre. (Epithalamion 177-80)

The poet follows Song of Solomon 7.4 in comparing her neck to a tower. The “bower” here in turn is clearly a room at the top of the tower. As in Sonnet 64, it could easily be perfumed with garden flowers, since it is the “sweet” “seat” of her “honor” and “chastity.” It is her mind, but also, in the poet’s mind, quite possibly a bedroom (see Tower House Bedroom). In Spenser’s poetry, towers and garden bowers, like bride and groom —all sites of fertility and creativity— accompany and blend into one another.