Edmund Spenser is apparently serving the fascinating,…
1580 CE
Edmund Spenser is apparently serving the fascinating, highly placed, and unscrupulous Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester by 1580 and to have become a member of the literary circle led by Sir Philip Sidney, Leicester's nephew, to whom the Calender had been dedicated (and who will in 1595 praise it in his important critical work The Defence of Poesie.
Spenser will remain permanently devoted to this brilliant writer and good nobleman, embody him variously in his own poetry, and mourn his early death in an elegy).
Spenser has also started work on The Faerie Queene, and in the previous year he had apparently married one Machabyas Chylde.
Spenser is in this year made secretary to the new lord deputy of Ireland, Arthur Lord Grey, who is a friend of the Sidney family.