Edmund Spenser’s Poetry

Abstract

The state of Spenser scholarship is in flux.Oxford University Press will shortly release a six-volume edition of the great Elizabethan poet's complete works, a publishing venture that will have significant ramifications throughout Renaissance studies.The last project of this scope involving Spenser, The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, was published between 1932 and 1945.Yet Spenser scholarship has seen a number of shifts in emphasis in recent years.The discipline had just begun to consolidate the lessons from a turn toward examining gender, economics, and power in Spenser's poetry, as well as renewed interest in Spenser's Irish and colonial context, only to face a new spectrum of possibilities opened up by book history, the study of paratext, queer theory, ecocriticism, and a return both to religion and rhetoric.This makes for an exciting time to study Spenser, but the spectre of a new citation edition on the horizon, alongside a changing critical landscape, poses challenges for editing an introduction to the poet's work.Fortunately, the fourth edition of Edmund Spenser's Poetry, edited by Anne Lake Prescott and Andrew Hadfield, builds upon the strengths of the previous Norton Spenser while also reflecting changes in scholarship since the publication of the third edition in 1993.As in its previous incarnation, this Norton Critical Edition includes a generous sampling from The Faerie Queene, including the entirety of book 1.The volume also contains a selection from The Shepheardes Calender, the complete Amoretti and Epithalamion, and the short poem, Prothalamion.Colin Clouts Come Home Againe has been dropped from the volume, but the editors have added other works from the 1591 Complaints, including "Mother Hubberds Tale" and "The Ruines of Rome" while still preserving "Muiopotmos" from the third edition.Aside from providing a greater range of Spenser's poetry, these additions invite questions about particular concerns."The Ruines of Rome" was added "in part because this translation of Joachim Du Bellay's Antiquitez offers readers a chance to see Spenser the translator at work and in part because of a continuing interest in how the English […] thought about Rome and imperium" (xi).Prescott and Hadfield have been in contact with the editors of the forthcoming Oxford, and, more importantly, are accomplished textual scholars

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