The first comprehensive study of the eighteenth-century response to the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser, from editions to influence.

The four-hundred-year story of readers' struggles with a famously unreadable poem—and what they reveal about the history of reading and the future of literary studies "I am now in the country, and reading in Spencer's fairy-queen. Pray what is the matter with me?" The plaint of an anonymous reader in 1712 sounds with endearing frankness a note of consternation that resonates throughout The Faerie Queene's reception history, from its first known reader, Spenser's friend Gabriel Harvey, who urged him to write anything else instead, to Virginia Woolf, who insisted that if one wants to like the poem, "the first essential is, of course, not to read" it. For more than four centuries critics have sought to counter this strain of readerly resistance, but rather than trying to remedy the frustrations and failures of Spenser's readers, Catherine Nicholson cherishes them as a sensitive barometer of shifts in the culture of reading itself. Indeed, tracking the poem's mixed fortunes in the hands of its bored, baffled, outraged, intoxicated, obsessive, and exhausted readers turns out to be an excellent way of rethinking the past and future prospects of literary study. By examining the responses of readers from Queen Elizabeth and the keepers of Renaissance commonplace books to nineteenth-century undergraduates, Victorian children, and modern scholars, this book offers a compelling new interpretation of the poem and an important new perspective on what it means to read, or not to read, a work of literature.

From the distinguished literary scholar Gordon Teskey comes an essay collection that restores Spenser to his rightful prominence in Renaissance studies, opening up the epic of The Faerie Queene as a grand, improvisatory project on human nature, and arguing—controversially—that it is Spenser, not Milton, who is the more important and relevant poet for the modern world. There is more adventure in The Faerie Queene than in any other major English poem. But the epic of Arthurian knights, ladies, and dragons in Faerie Land, beloved by C. S. Lewis, is often regarded as quaint and obscure, and few critics have analyzed the poem as an experiment in open thinking. In this remarkable collection, the renowned literary scholar Gordon Teskey examines the masterwork with care and imagination, explaining the theory of allegory—now and in Edmund Spenser’s Elizabethan age—and illuminating the poem’s improvisatory moments as it embarks upon fairy tale, myth, and enchantment. Milton, often considered the greatest English poet after Shakespeare, called Spenser his “original.” But Teskey argues that while Milton’s rigid ideology in Paradise Lost has failed the test of time, Spenser’s allegory invites engagement on contemporary terms ranging from power, gender, violence, and virtue ethics, to mobility, the posthuman, and the future of the planet. The Faerie Queene was unfinished when Spenser died in his forties. It is the brilliant work of a poet of youthful energy and philosophical vision who opens up new questions instead of answering old ones. The epic’s grand finale, “The Mutabilitie Cantos,” delivers a vision of human life as dizzyingly turbulent and constantly changing, leaving a future open to everything.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Scholars of Edmund Spenser have focused much more on his accomplishments in epic and pastoral than his work in satire. Scholars of early modern English satire almost never discuss Spenser. However, these critical gaps stem from later developments in the canon rather than any insignificance in Spenser's accomplishments and influence on satiric poetry. This book argues that the indirect form of satire developed by Spenser served during and after Spenser's lifetime as an important model for other poets who wished to convey satirical messages with some degree of safety. The book connects key Spenserian texts in The Shepheardes Calender and the Complaints volume with poems by a range of authors in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including Joseph Hall, Thomas Nashe, Tailboys Dymoke, Thomas Middleton and George Wither, to advance the thesis that Spenser was seen by his contemporaries as highly relevant to satire in Elizabethan England.

Edmund Spenser's poetry remains an indispensable touchstone of English literary history. Yet for modern readers his deliberate use of archaic language and his allegorical mode of writing can become barriers to understanding his poetry. This volume of thirty-seven essays, written by distinguished scholars, offers a rich introduction to the literary, political and religious contexts that shaped Spenser's poetry, including the environment in which he lived, the genres he drew upon, and the influences that helped to fashion his art. The collection reveals the multiple personae that Spenser constructs within his work: to read Spenser is to read a rich archive of literary forms, and this volume provides the contexts in which to do so. A reading list at the end of the volume will prove invaluable to further study.

This book accounts for the previously inadequately explained transformation in the meaning of equity in sixteenth century England, a transformation which, intriguingly, first comes to light in literary texts rather than political or legal treatises. The book address the two principal literary works in which the transformation becomes apparent, Thomas More's Utopia and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, and sketches the history of equity to its roots in the Greek concept of epieikeia, uncovering along the way both previously unexplained distinctions, and a long-obscured esoteric meaning. These rediscoveries, when brought to bear upon the Utopia and Faerie Queene, illuminate critical though relatively neglected textual passages that have long puzzled scholars.