Preface

Jackson C. Boswell’s new collection of Spenser allusions covers an unprecedented gamut of materials, from a portrait of Lady Anne Clifford that displays Spenser’s Works as a mark of identity to the appearance of Spenser in scientific texts, travel writing, broadsides, and almanacs. Building on the collection edited by William Wells, Boswell’s work increases knowledge of the ways in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers and writers assessed Spenser’s reputation, illuminating the ways in which Spenser’s coinages, characters, places, and episodes became part of a cultural vocabulary and appeared in a surprising variety of registers, genres, and contexts.

Responding to contemporary interest in the history of books and reading, Boswell incorporates a group of materials largely absent from Wells’s collection, including library catalogues, auction records, and marginalia. His collection thus offers insight into how early modern readers purchased, handled, and marked up particular copies of Spenser’s works. For scholars researching marginalia in Spenser’s works, Boswell’s list provides an extremely valuable overview of annotated copies. Boswell’s summaries of annotations reveal patterns in reading habits, particularly the strong interest in the moral and political elements of Spenser’s writings (see, for example, entries 402, 404, and 406). Some readers also related Spenser’s works to current events; in an annotated copy of Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland, for example, an anonymous reader notes that “the Rebellion of Oct[ober] 23. 1641 justified Spencers wisdom and deep insight into that barbarous nation” (entry 409). Boswell’s annotations also track Spenser’s works in the background of major historical events, informing us, for example, that Spenser’s Faerie Queene was one of the few books that Charles I had with him in prison in the months leading up to his execution (entry 239).

Boswell broadens our understanding of how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers used Spenser’s characters and situations as metonymies for virtues and vices. Often, writers compare contemporary people to Spenserian figures in order to offer praise or blame. For example, Richard Montagu, in his Immediate Addresse unto God Alone (1624) points to Arthur’s defeat of Grantorto as an example for Charles, whom he describes as “Gods Lieftenant” in defeating injustice (entry 66). Similarly, Thomas Stavely (1674) compares Artegall and Talus’s violent campaign to the contemporary fight against Catholicism, writing that “Our Heroick Laws do no less, when by their commanded Officers, they dissipate superstitious concourses, truss up the Gigantick Jesuite, drag out the monstrous Plotters, and batter down that second Babel of Confusion” (entry 212). Most references to Spenserian characters, however, are derisive rather than commendatory. The most frequently cited characters are Spenser’s figures of pride and ignorance: Braggadochio, Trompart, Orgoglio, and Ignaro. Archimago also appears, notably in Ralph Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe, as a figure of dangerous occult magic (entry 226).

References to Spenser appear in a surprisingly wide range of genres. A 1696 almanac quotes FQ II.ix.52 in a discussion of the astronomical influences of Saturn (entry 367). Antiquaries and writers of history often cite Spenser as an authority, as when Inigo Jones in his work on Stonehenge points to FQ II.x.54 as a source of information about a battle between Romans and Britons fought on the Severn (entry 146). Several writers, including Samuel Clarke, Roger Boyle, and John Speed cite Spenser as a source of geographical information; in his History of Plants, Fruits, Herbs, and Flowers, botanist William Coles quotes Spenser’s catalogue of trees from FQ book 1 (entry 154).

Whereas Wells lists only one reference to Spenser in the works of Shakespeare, Boswell takes a broader view of Spenserian allusion, tracing allusions to Spenser in most of the plays and nearly all of the poems. As J. B. Lethbridge and the other contributors to Shakespeare and Spenser: Attractive Opposites suggest, Shakespeare employs Spenserian tropes, characters, and situations in a parodic way. The allusions Boswell lists are general rather than specific—for example, he argues that the character of Titania is a parody of Gloriana—and they tend to be subtle, oblique, and transformative.

Boswell’s...