Amoretti LIV: Of this worlds Theatre in which we stay

By Edmund Spenser 1552–1599 Edmund Spenser

Of this worlds Theatre in which we stay,

My love lyke the Spectator ydly sits

Beholding me that all the pageants play,

Disguysing diversly my troubled wits.

Sometimes I joy when glad occasion fits,

And mask in myrth lyke to a Comedy:

Soone after when my joy to sorrow flits,

I waile and make my woes a Tragedy.

Yet she beholding me with constant eye,

Delights not in my merth nor rues my smart:

But when I laugh she mocks, and when I cry

She laughes, and hardens evermore her hart.

What then can move her? if not merth nor mone,

She is no woman, but a sencelesse stone.

Biography

To understand Edmund Spenser's place in the extraordinary literary renaissance that took place in England during the last two decades of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, it is helpful to begin with the remarks of the foremost literary critic of the age, Sir Philip Sidney. In The Defence of Poetry, (1595), written in the early 1580s, Sidney looked back on the history of English literature and sees little to admire. He mentions the . . .

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