PENGUIN ENGLISH POETS

GENERAL EDITOR: CHRISTOPHER RICKS

EDMUND SPENSER: THE SHORTER POEMS

EDMUND SPENSER was born in London, probably in 1552, and was educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School, from which he proceeded to Pembroke College, Cambridge. There he met Gabriel Harvey, scholar and University Orator, who exerted a considerable influence on his first important poem, The Shepheardes Calender (1579) and with whom he collaborated on a volume of familiar letters (1580). He graduated BA in 1573 and proceeded MA in 1576. By 1578 he was employed as secretary to John Young, Bishop of Rochester, formerly Master of Pembroke College. He may have also served briefly in the household of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, where it is commonly assumed that he met the Earl’s nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, to whom The Shepheardes Calender is dedicated. In 1580 he went to Ireland as Secretary to Lord Grey de Wilton, Lord Deputy of Ireland, and stayed there for much of the remainder of his life, eventually becoming an undertaker in the Plantation of Munster. While at Kilcolman, his estate in County Cork, he met or reacquainted himself with his neighbour, Sir Walter Ralegh, with whom he travelled to London in 1589 to present the first three books of The Faerie Queene (1590) to its dedicatee, Queen Elizabeth, who rewarded him with an annual pension of fifty pounds. 1591 saw the publication of Complaints and Daphnaïda, the former exciting political controversy owing to the criticism of Lord Burghley contained in Mother Hubberds Tale. Spenser’s marriage to Elizabeth Boyle was celebrated in his Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595), and his pastoral eclogue, Colin Clovts Come Home Againe, appeared in the same year. In 1596 he brought out the second three books of The Faerie Queene as well as his Fowre Hymnes and Prothalamion. In 1598 his estate was burned during the Tyrone rebellion, and he fled to Cork and thence to London, where he died in 1599. He was buried in Westminster Abbey and posthumously celebrated as the ‘Prince of Poets’. In 1609 a folio edition of The Faerie Queene appeared, including the previously unpublished ‘Mutabilitie Cantos’, followed, in 1611, by a folio edition of the complete poetical works. A View of the Present State of Ireland, written in 1596, was published by Sir James Ware in 1633.

RICHARD A. McCABE is a Fellow of Merton College and Reader in English at Oxford University. He was formerly Drapers’ Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. His publications include, Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation (1982), The Pillars of Eternity: Time and Providence in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (1989), Incest, Drama and Nature’s Law (1993) and Presenting Poetry: Composition, Publication, Reception (1995), co-edited with Howard Erskine-Hill.

EDMUND SPENSER

The Shorter Poems

Edited by RICHARD A. McCABE

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Published in Penguin Books 1999

9

Editorial material copyright © Richard A. McCabe, 1999

All rights reserved

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193951-3

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHRONOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

FROM A THEATRE FOR WORLDLINGS

Epigrams

Sonets

THE SHEPHEARDES CALENDER

Januarye

Februarie

March

Aprill

Maye

June

Julye

August

September

October

Nouember

December

FROM LETTERS (1580)

COMPLAINTS

The Ruines of Time

The Teares of the Muses

Virgils Gnat

Prosopopoia. Or Mother Hubberds Tale

Ruines of Rome: by Bellay

Mviopotmos

Visions of the Worlds Vanitie

The Visions of Bellay

The Visions of Petrarch

DAPHNAÏDA

COLIN CLOVTS COME HOME AGAINE

Colin Clovts Come Home Againe

Astrophel

Dolefull Lay of Clorinda

AMORETTI AND EPITHALAMION

Amoretti

Anacreontics

Epithalamion

FOWRE HYMNES

An Hymne in Honovr of Love

An Hymne in Honovr of Beavtie

An Hymne of Heavenly Love

An Hymne of Heavenly Beavtie

PROTHALAMION

COMMENDATORY SONNETS

ATTRIBUTED VERSES

NOTES

Abbreviations

GLOSSARY OF COMMON TERMS

TEXTUAL APPARATUS

FURTHER READING

ILLUSTRATIONS

All of the illustrations are by courtesy of the Bodleian Library with the exception of those from Daphnaïda and Amoretti and Epithalamion which are reproduced by permission of the British Library. Details of the editions used are supplied in the Textual Apparatus.

A THEATRE FOR WORLDLINGS, title-page

Epigram 1

Epigram 2

Epigram 3

Epigram 4

Epigram 5

Epigram 6

Sonet 2

Sonet 3

Sonet 4

Sonet 5

Sonet 6

Sonet 7

Sonet 8

Sonet 9

Sonet 10

Sonet 11

Sonet 12

Sonet 13

Sonet 14

Sonet 15

THE SHEPHEARDES CALENDER, title-page

Januarye

Februarie

March

Aprill

Maye

June

Julye

August

September

October

Nouember

December

LETTERS (1580), title-page

COMPLAINTS, title-page

The Teares of the Muses, title-page

Prosopopoia. Or Mother Hubberds Tale, title-page

Mviopotmos, title-page

DAPHNAÏDA, title-page

COLIN CLOVTS COME HOME AGAINE, title-page

Astrophel, title-page

AMORETTI AND EPITHALAMION, title-page

Epithalamion, title-page

FOWRE HYMNES, title-page

PROTHALAMION, title-page

CHRONOLOGY

INTRODUCTION: ‘OPPOSD REFLEXION’

Spenser is most commonly celebrated as the author of The Faerie Queene yet had he written nothing other than the works collected in the present volume he would still rank amongst the foremost of English poets. His shorter poems are arguably as essential to the comprehension of his epic verse as are the Eclogues and Georgics to Virgil’s Aeneid but, like their Virgilian counterparts, their primary importance lies in their intrinsic literary merit. They are no mere adjuncts to the epic project but integral components of a wider canon which acknowledges and explores both the strengths and limitations of the heroic outlook. Read in conjunction with, rather than in subordination to, The Faerie Queene they reveal the intellectual range and aesthetic diversity of a singularly complex and frequently dichotomous world view. To an even greater extent than the epic poetry they demonstrate Spenser’s generic and stylistic versatility, his remarkable linguistic virtuosity and mastery of complex metrical forms. Here he adopted the conflicting, if oddly complementary, personae of satirist and eulogist, elegist and lover, polemicist and prophet and, in the process, radically transformed the classical and medieval genres he employed. The impact upon succeeding generations of poets from Shakespeare to Yeats was tremendous. Originality, bred by tradition, fostered the renewal of tradition. Long before the term ‘Spenserian’ passed into common critical usage the concept was well understood and the practice widely imitated.

The publication of The Shepheardes Calender in 1579 marked a crucial turning point in English literary history. The ‘new Poete’ introduced to, and concealed from, the reading public, by the mysterious ‘E. K.’ – a literary agent too ideal to be other than fictitious – issued a manifesto for a new poetics premised upon an aggressive confidence in the English language, ‘which truely of it self is both ful enough for prose and stately enough for verse’. By appropriating to his yet anonymous cause the illustrious names of Virgil and Chaucer, he nominated himself as their successor, arrogantly proclaiming his talent even as he pretended to disclaim ‘vaunted titles’ and ‘glorious showes’. For the contemporary reader the shock of the new entailed a startling accommodation with the old. The Calender’s archaic diction articulated its claims to kinship with Chaucer by lending ‘great grace, and as one would say, auctoritie to the verse’. On behalf of the nation the new poet ‘hath laboured to restore, as to theyr rightfull heritage such good and naturall English words, as haue ben long time out of vse and almost cleare disherited’. The matter was politically charged: at a time when ‘fayre Elisa’, the Queen whose unsullied virginity had come to symbolize the country’s territorial and spiritual integrity, was preparing to wed the ‘alien’, Catholic and French-speaking Duc d’Alençon, the preface assailed those ‘whose first shame is, that they are not ashamed, in their own mother tonge straungers to be counted and alienes’. ‘Why a Gods name’, Spenser asked the following year, ‘may not we… haue the kingdome of our owne Language?’ (cf. Prose, 16). From the outset linguistic and political sovereignty go hand in hand, and the political import of the Calender is most potently conveyed through the assurance of its wordplay. To write good English verse was to assert true English identity, to oppose the linguistic miscegenation of those who ‘made our English tongue, a gallimaufray or hodgepodge of al other speches’. The play on ‘gall’ in ‘gallimaufray’ is a shrewd hit for as The Faerie Queene reminds us ‘old Gall… now is cleeped France’ (4. 11. 16). Apropos the French match we learn that, ‘Of Hony and of Gaule in loue there is store: / The Honye is much, but the Gaule is more’ (March, 122–3). Never had mere orthography been so politically loaded; Elizabeth’s ‘Gaule’ was England’s ‘gall’ and the ‘natural speach’ of all true Englishmen, ‘which together with their Nources milk they sucked’, proclaimed its antipathy to the proposed misalliance.

The Shepheardes Calender serves not merely as a precursor to The Faerie Queene but as a pre-emptive strike in defence of the beleaguered ‘faery’ mythology, which would later inform it. For this reason Spenserian pastoral is confrontational rather than escapist and more inclined to chart the landscape of wish-frustration than that of wish-fulfilment. As the ‘envoy’ indicates, the poetry is acutely responsive to the ‘ieopardee’ of the moment and draws nervous energy from the sense of peril. Just a few months previously John Stubbs had lost his right hand for penning the notorious anti-Alençon tract, The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf Whereinto England is like to be Swallowed (1579). His printer was Hugh Singleton, the printer of the Calender, and Spenser took a considerable risk in echoing Stubbs’s condemnation of those who ‘gape for greedie governaunce / And match them selfe with mighty potentates’ (Februarie, 121–2). The overt target is the pride of worldly prelates but the play on ‘match’, in such close conjunction with the Stubbsian ‘gape’, is unmistakable. Even in the Aprill eclogue, at the height of apparently seamless panegyric, the choice of Virgilian emblems pulls the ragged threads of discontent: ‘O quam te memorem virgo? / O dea certe’. In the first book of the Aeneid Venus appears to her son disguised as a nymph of Diana. Both he, and the epic’s subsequent Christian interpreters, are puzzled by her identity: does she represent chastity, or licence disguised as chastity? Is she really a virgin (virgo) or a goddess (dea) ? Should the first emblem be translated as ‘what shall I call you, maiden?’ or ‘shall I call you maiden?’: the ‘vision’ is strongest at the point at which it threatens, like Virgil’s Venus, to evaporate into thin air. The ‘pastoral of power’ feeds upon the anxieties of impotence.

In the aptly entitled collection of Complaints published in 1591 vision and satire coalesce. That the volume should have appeared shortly after the first instalment of The Faerie Queene should occasion little surprise since it illustrates the adverse circumstances in which Spenser’s more idealized aspirations struggle for survival. The label of ‘court’ poet so often attached to him is grossly misleading for, as Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595) powerfully demonstrates, he was more of an outsider than a laureate. Consigned to the ‘waste’ landscape of Elizabethan Ireland with its ‘griesly famine’ and ‘outlawes fell’ (314–19), he wrote from the margins not the centre. While Virgil is frequently invoked as the model for his career, the despondent ghost of Ovid, driven into exile by Virgil’s imperial patron, echoes in the subtextual background. Colin’s voyage from Ireland to England is ironically replete with echoes of Ovid’s Tristia thereby enforcing the ambiguity of the poem’s title. Like Ovid, Spenser seldom played safe. The Shepheardes Calender risked prosecution, Mother Hubberds Tale was called in, the first instalment of The Faerie Queene gave offence to Lord Burghley, and the second was banned in Scotland by James VI. Spenser’s famous assertions of epic weariness, so publicly canvassed in the Amoretti (sonnets 33 and 80), gesture towards the most poignant Ovidian expression of despair: ‘think not all my work is trivial; oft have I set grand sails upon my bark. Six books of Fasti and as many more have I written… This work did I recently compose Caesar, under thy name, dedicated to thee, but my fate has broken it off’ (Tristia, 2. 547–52). Whereas Ovid suggests that all twelve books have at least been drafted, Spenser indefinitely defers the great project in honour of his ‘dear dred’ – an oxymoron which perfectly conveys the ambivalence of his attitude towards one of the primary sources of his inspiration.

In Colin Clouts Come Home Againe as in The Shepheardes Calender amorous complaint encodes political discontent. Both works, like most of the Spenserian canon, are relentlessly dialectical and self-reflexive. In the Calender even Colin’s monologues give vent to the frustrated dialogues of a divided self, reflecting the persona’s own divided genesis in the garrulous, aggressive Colyn Cloute of John Skelton’s court satires and the pensive, elegiac Colin of Clément Marot’s plaintive pastorals. Writing his Observations on the Faerie Queene in 1754 Thomas Warton perceptively devoted a whole chapter to the unusual subject of ‘Spenser’s Imitations of Himself’ in the belief that it would help to illustrate ‘how variously he expresses the same thought’. But, as Warton himself demonstrates, the ‘thought’ is never quite the ‘same’. The Spenserian imagination is obsessively dialogical, constantly interrogating, revising and redacting its material in a diversity of contexts, genres and styles. And yet, the very strategies which appear to offer an escape from solipsism often serve to compound it. E.K.’s identification of Spenser with Colin Clout, ‘vnder which name this Poete secretly shadoweth himself’, is richly disingenuous, designed to make the unwary forget that Spenser created, and speaks through, all of the Calender’s other personae, that he engineered all of their conflicts and disagreements, that he shunned dialectical closure in his pastoral verse as thoroughly as he avoided narrative closure in his epic – or, for that matter, emotional closure in his love poetry. The Amoretti, for example, is distinguished from other sonnet sequences by the repetition of sonnet 35 as sonnet 83 – an astonishingly bold act of self-quotation which also serves as a trenchant act of self-revision. That it should be this sonnet and no other that is repeated is crucial: its subject is Narcissus and the repetition enacts the obsession. Self-quotation articulates, and effectively ironizes, self-love. The lady’s eyes which ideally serve as a window to her soul may become no more than ‘the myrrour’ of the speaker’s ‘mazed hart’ (sonnet 7). They may function as an avenue to emotional communion or an encouragement to solipsism. The delicate negotiation between two discrete selves, with which love is properly concerned, risks the imprisonment of both parties in their own self-images:

The delicious paradox of ‘semblant trew’ encapsulates the psychological problem about which the Amoretti is constructed: the relation of image and self-image to reality, and the relevance, if any, of Plato’s ‘fayre Idea’ of love to the selfish, and self-consuming, hunger of appetite. The lover’s eyes are ‘hungry eyes’ and desire for another, bred in the ‘inner part’, consumes the self:

At the heart of Spenserian self-assertion is self-qualification: ‘my selfe, my inward selfe I meane’. The startling imagery of a male ‘wombe’ threatens to confound the sexual distinction upon which the speaker’s desire is premised. The ‘art of eyes’ which he is called upon to master is also the art of conflicting egos (sonnet 21). Spenser is acutely aware of the tendency for love poetry to degenerate into the poetry of self-love, just as elegiac verse finds us ‘mourning in others, our owne miseries’ (Dolefull Lay of Clorinda, 96). Hence the inevitable ambiguity of a line such as ‘helpe me mine owne loues prayses to resound’ even in a poem intended to celebrate the mutuality of marriage (Epithalamion, 14). In his comment upon the ‘Emblem’ to the September eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender, E. K. applies Narcissus’ motto ‘Inopem me copia fecit’ (plenty has made me poor) to ‘the author’ – ‘and to suche like effecte, as fyrste Narcissus spake it’. In The Faerie Queene Spenser speaks of reflecting Elizabeth Tudor ‘In mirrours more then one’ so that she may see ‘her selfe’ (3 Proem 5), but this is merely an extension of his preoccupation with anatomizing the whole notion of the ‘selfe’, with reflecting upon the chaotic emotional and intellectual fragmentation subsumed into the first person singular. The hope must be that, as An Hymne in Honovr of Beautie asserts, ‘two mirrours by opposd reflexion, / Doe both expresse the faces first impression’ (181–2), but the very concept of ‘opposd reflexion’ betrays the multiple contradictions involved in the complex phenomenon of self-consciousness, in the desperate anxiety to objectify the subjective and ‘see’ the elusive ‘inward selfe’. As a means to this end narrative personae proliferate in the shorter poems, and images of mirrors and echoes abound. Their close association is highly revealing. In classical mythology Echo was the maiden who died for unrequited love of a morbidly self-reflexive Narcissus: ‘So I vnto my selfe alone will sing, / The woods shall to me answer and my Eccho ring’ (Epithalamion, 17–18).

It has become common to speak of Spenserian ‘self-fashioning’ but his tendency to undermine his self-image by habits of ‘opposd reflexion’, or to multiply conflicting self-images ‘in mirrours more then one’, has been relatively neglected. Far more is involved in such manoeuvres than a courtly game of hide-and-seek. Even such a practical matter as the pursuit of a patron, one of the dominant concerns of the shorter poems, entails scrutiny of the speaker’s fantastical alter egos which are constructed and deconstructed in ‘expectation vayne / Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away, / Like empty shaddowes’ (Prothalamion, 7–9). As Virgilian confidence struggles with Ovidian despair, the public poet often retreats, or represents himself as retreating, into the private man: ‘I play to please my selfe, all be it ill’ (June, 72). But this is a sentiment intended for publication and is ‘spoken’ not by Spenser but by Colin Clout. Though persistently auto-referential, the Spenserian ‘I’ is never truly autobiographical. Autobiography is the condition it never quite attains, auto-fabrication the condition it never quite escapes.

In works such as The Shepheardes Calender and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe images of circularity abound, pitting ideals of fulfilment against experiences of entrapment. And it is not only the speaker who is entrapped but also the objects of his attention. Mother Hubberds Tale was called in upon its publication in 1591 even though it is likely that large parts of it had been written some dozen years earlier. But this is the Elizabethan equivalent of Animal Farm and Spenser’s analysis of the contemporary malaise proceeds beyond specific personalities to the very power structures of the Elizabethan regime. The sovereign lioness rejoices to see her favourite ‘beast’ romping about ‘enchaste with chaine and circulet of golde… buxome to his bands’, yet she is offended by the ‘late chayne’ which has been laid about his neck. She would have him both ‘wilde’ and ‘tame’ simultaneously, wholly bound to her yet somehow also ‘free’ (624–30). Depending on the dating of the passage, the allusion may refer either to the Earl of Leicester’s clandestine marriage to Lettice Knollys (1578) or to the Earl of Essex’s clandestine marriage to Frances Walsingham (1590). On the deepest level, however, it matters little which we choose. Because of her unmarried state Elizabeth (whose personal motto was ‘semper eadem’, always the same) was fated to recurrent disappointments of this nature, and the political dynamics of the Elizabethan court, vulnerable as they were to the emotional vicissitudes of fruitless courtship, were correspondingly unstable. What the poem exposes is not an isolated incident but an endemic condition, a vicious circle of sexual jealousy and political disarray.

Given the force of such preoccupations, it is hardly surprising that the shorter poems so often gesture towards spiritual transcendence as a means of escape from the world’s prevailing ‘vanitie’. The Fowre Hymnes (1596) conclude with what might well be interpreted as a programme for the redemption of Narcissus:

The object may have changed but the ‘hunger’ survives. But has the object actually changed? Or, as the persistence of mirror imagery suggests, is the object still the subject? Is the love of God any less self-referential than the love of woman? The structure of the Fowre Hymnes is rigorously dialectical and the relationship between ‘earthly’ and ‘heauenly’ love cannot be explained solely, or even principally, in terms of ascent or renunciation. The process, as Spenser tells us, is not one of recantation but of ‘retractation’, a complex operation of revision or redaction. The two ‘earthly’ hymns are not suppressed but republished, like Amoretti’s repeated sonnet, in a new context. The structure of the volume expands to embrace, rather than to deny, its internal contradictions. Evident throughout the ‘heavenly’ pair is the struggle to sublimate earthly desire, a hallowing of Eros which inevitably entails a sexualizing of Agape. Even the God of the heavenly hymns, constructed in the image of the earthly speaker’s ‘hungry’ desire, is a divine Narcissist who created man:

God sees himself in creation and creation strives to glimpse his image by gazing upon reflections of itself. ‘Rest’ may be the word upon which the hymns close, but the poetry thrives upon the disquietude of complex metaphysical thought.

However fervent his aspirations towards perfection and stability, Spenser’s imagination was complicit with the depredations of time, with emotional dislocation, with exile, and ultimately with the ‘vanitie’ he castigates. His music draws strength from the breaking of Colin’s pipe, from the fall of Rome, the fate of butterflies and from the very corruption of Eliza’s court. Even in the Epithalamion, a rare poem of consummated desire, the speaker’s Orphic power is deliberately offset by darker resonances and echoes. The abrupt ending may even suggest that personal fulfilment entails poetic loss. E. K. divides the eclogues of The Shepheardes Calender into three distinct groups, the ‘plaintiue’, the ‘recreatiue’ and the ‘moral’, but the work itself challenges such distinctions. Plaintive ‘undersongs’ resound in recreative verse, moral issues intrude into matters of love, and a disturbingly ‘doolful pleasaunce’ is derived even from elegy. All of the ‘mirrours’ are carefully angled to enhance the most provocative effects of ‘opposd reflexion’. The biographer’s loss is the reader’s gain.

The present edition contains all of Spenser’s shorter poetry including the important Latin verse which appeared in the Spenser-Harvey correspondence of 1580. A full translation from the Latin is supplied in the commentary. The various works are arranged in the chronological order of publication thereby affording the reader a clear overview of Spenser’s public career. As the headnotes point out, however, exact dates of composition are notoriously hard to determine and it is essential to bear this in mind when considering the issue of Spenser’s artistic development. The volume of Complaints published in 1591, for example, contains revisions of material that first appeared as early as 1569. The commentary is designed to alert the reader to problems such as these while at the same time facilitating immediate comprehension of difficult passages or terms. Because Spenser is such an aggressively inter-textual writer, freely adapting, and occasionally subverting, classical, biblical and contemporary materials, I have endeavoured to supply concise references to all of the most important sources and analogues. Comparison between such passages and the Spenserian texts will generally be found to throw considerable light upon the character of Spenser’s poetic craft and intellectual outlook. The headnotes are designed to examine some of the more general problems of interpretation arising from particular works, or collections of works, and to suggest various avenues of critical approach.

As will be evident to those familiar with the history of Spenserian annotation, the commentary to the present edition is heavily reliant upon a wide range of scholarly authorities. So immensely rich is the editorial tradition that my contribution necessarily falls far short of my indebtedness, but this is very much in the nature of an exercise which seeks to consolidate past gains by a process of compilation, selection and synthesis. To edit Spenser is also to edit his editors. I acknowledge my obligations with gratitude; my errors are doubtless original. For the glossing of common nouns my single greatest debt is to the OED, valuably supplemented by C. G. Osgood, A Concordance to Spenser (1915). For classical allusions my principal sources are Natalis Comes, Mythologiae (1567), H. G. Lotspeich, Classical Mythology in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (1942), N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard (eds.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary (1970) and Pierre Grimal, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology (1986). For plants and herbs I have drawn upon John Gerard, The Herbal or General Historie of Plantes (1597) and Nicholas Culpeper, The Complete Herbal (1653). For political, historical and miscellaneous allusions (particularly in Complaints) my work is greatly indebted, as are all recent editions of Spenser, to the editors of The Works of Edmund Spenser. A Variorum Edition (1932–58). Classical sources have generally been cited from the relevant Loeb editions, and Shakespeare’s works from the Arden editions. The Bible has been consulted in both the Genevan and King James’s versions.

Severe restrictions of space generally preclude the recording of specific attributions in the course of the commentary, but I have drawn with profit upon all of the following sources (listed in chronological order): John Jortin, Remarks on Spenser’s Poems (1734); Thomas Warton, Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser (1754); the collected editions of Spenser’s Works by H. J. Todd (1805); F. J. Child (1864) and A. B. Grosart (1882–4); C. H. Herford (ed.), The Shepheards Calendar (1895); L. Winstanley (ed.), The Fowre Hymnes (1907); F. I. Carpenter, A Reference Guide to Edmund Spenser (1923); W. L. Renwick (ed.), Complaints (1928), Daphnaïda and Other Poems (1929) and The Shepheardes Calender (1930); H. S. V. Jones, A Spenser Handbook (1930); F. R. Johnson, A Critical Bibliography of the Works of Edmund Spenser Printed before 1700 (1933); E. Welsford, Spenser: ‘Fowre Hymnes’, ‘Epithalamion’: A Study of Edmund Spenser’s Doctrine of Love (1967); C. G. Smith, Spenser’s Proverb Lore (1970); A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Faerie Queene (1977); T. P. Roche, Jr (ed.), The Faerie Queene (Penguin English Poets, 1978); W. A. Oram, E. Bjorvand, R. Bond, T. H. Cain, A. Dunlop and R. Schell (eds.), The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (1989); A. C. Hamilton et al. (eds.), The Spenser Encyclopedia (1990); H. Maclean and A. L. Prescott (eds.), Edmund Spenser’s Poetry (3rd edn, 1993); D. Brooks-Davies (ed.), Edmund Spenser: Selected Shorter Poems (1995). I am also immensely grateful to the following scholars for their generous assistance with particular problems of interpretation: Mr Thomas Braun, Dr Susie Clark, Mr Sam Eidinow, Dr Steve Gunn, Dr Nicholas Richardson and Mr Colin Wilcockson.

Epigrams.

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Sonets.

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