Review
"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 reader and a perceptive analyst of cultural context....we should welcome this book...for the distinctive illumination it provides." Sixteenth-Century Journal
"Rambuss's study enhances the critical repertoire by providing a well-written and often rewarding introduction to its subject. His analysis also provides further evidence that Spenser's command of poetic means of secrecy empowers his texts to depart from political orthodoxies....Rambuss's study clarifies some broader difficulties current in much New Historicism." Kenneth Boris, Dalhousie Review
"...an elegant and painstaking reading...one of the most well-constructed readings of its kind..." Nigel Smith, Times Literary Supplement
Product Description
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–99) conducted two careers at once: a celebrated national poet, he also pursued a lifelong career as secretary to various political and ecclesiastical figures. Richard Rambuss’s book explores the ways in which this latter career, usually allotted only a cursory mention in accounts of Spenser’s professional and social ambitions, informed his poetic career. The study takes issue with prevailing historicist accounts which see Spenser’s careerism as shaped entirely by service to the court and as focused on a single-minded pursuit of laureateship along a Virgilian career route from pastoral to epic. It presents an alternative picture, and 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. Spenser’s Secret Career throws light on Spenser and on ideas of gender, power and subjecthood in the Renaissance.
