Edmund Spenser’s early and mid-career

I complicate critical understanding of the career of Edmund Spenser in this chapter. In The Shepheardes Calender (1579) and Three Proper and Wittie Familiar Letters (1580), Spenser uses the techniques of the typographic imaginary to fashion his public image in a way that is markedly similar to George Gascoigne. In The Faerie Queene (1590), however, he presents the monster Errour as a horrific printing press. This depiction resonates through ‘The Teares of the Muses’ (1591). I argue that Spenser explores anxieties circulating in his wider culture about the proliferation of printed material, the fear of error, and cultural decline.