By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The sovereign beauty which I do admire, / Witness the world how worthy to be praised’: so begins the third sonnet in Edmund Spenser’s 1595 sonnet sequence Amoretti, written to celebrate his own marriage to his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle. As love poems to one’s newlywed bride go, it must have made the young Elizabeth blush with pride; the sonnet flatters her beauty using the courtly language of the sonnet sequence.