Edmund Spenser’s Poetry (Norton Critical Fourth Edition) ed. by Anne Lake Prescott and Andrew D. Hadfield (review)

In their preface to the fourth Norton Critical edition of Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, editors Andrew D. Hadfield and Anne Lake Prescott comment on the growth of the Internet’s role in literary scholarship, mentioning “Early English Books Online” (EEBO), online databases such as JSTOR, and other examples of the “huge shift in what modern research entails” (x). Interestingly, the editors make no mention of Google, Wikipedia, or other popular sites of online research—the types of websites that today’s undergraduate student researcher uses most regularly. Spenser is to be found here, too: his complete works are freely available online via Renascence Editions; free audiobooks of the Amoretti are available on iTunes and YouTube. Although Spenser does not enjoy the same Internet presence as, say, Shakespeare, with time, the Spenserian e-books, audio-files, and YouTube videos will no doubt continue to accrete. All of this seems worth mentioning because while some teachers introducing their students to Spenser might wonder which print edition to assign, others may wonder if asking students to spend money on a print edition is even necessary. Free, online access to “the classics” is a real consideration for many teachers, and for good reason. Yet, as always, the appeal of any Norton Critical edition is that it has been carefully curated and edited by scholars who know the field, and in this respect the fourth edition of Edmund Spenser’s Poetry disappoints neither the teacher nor the researcher. Spenser can be quite difficult or alien to first-time readers, and the Norton provides top notch para-textual supports: glosses, editors’ notes, criticism, and bibliography.

Of the primary texts, the Amoretti, Epithalamion, Prothalamion, and Muiopotmos are still included. Excerpts from The Shepheardes Calender remain unchanged since the last edition, as do the excerpts of The Faerie Queene—the Norton Critical still contains all of Book I, Book III, the Mutability Cantos, and “A Letter of the Authors;” much of Books II and VI and a few stanzas of Books IV and V are also included. Colin Clouts Come Home Againe is left out this time, but Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberds Tale and The Ruines of Rome: by Bellay have been swapped in. A satirical beast fable attacking Lord Burleigh and a translation of Du Bellay, respectively, these last two texts present Spenser taking political risks and interpretive liberties, showing himself to be an author engaged in political and literary contexts both at home and abroad. Editors Hadfield and Prescott have revised and pruned the footnotes for all the primary texts, “excising commentary that might spoil the experience of reading Spenser” (x). Hadfield and Prescott make an strong case for this practice, arguing that the experience of reading The Faerie Queene ought to sometimes mirror the puzzlement and engaged seeking of Spenser’s characters. Crucially, though, the annotations still provide the kind of contextual information that boosts our early modern reading literacy without predetermining our interpretations—precisely the kind of support that readers of free online e-texts won’t easily find.

Regarding the selection of criticism, the essay groupings “Readings of the House of Busyrane” (selections from Thomas P. Roche, Jr., A. Kent Hieatt, and Susanne Lindgren Wofford) and “Muiopotmos: A Mini-Casebook” (selections from D. C. Allen, Ronald B. Bond, Robert A. Brinkley, and Andrew D. Weiner) are carried over from the third edition. The group of essays on the Amoretti still includes Anne Lake Prescott’s piece on Amoretti 67, along with two newly-included readings by A. Leigh De Neef and Helena Mennie Shire. William Camden and Samuel Taylor Coleridge still represent the “Early Critical Views,” and the fine essays by Richard Helgerson, A. Bartlett Giamatti, Northrop Frye, and Judith H. Anderson are again included.

Sixteen of the thirty critical readings are new additions if not new scholar-ship—the excerpt from C. S. Lewis on Spenser’s “Platonized Protestantism” is something...