Edmund Spenser

This is the first collection of Spenser's shorter poems to offer modernised spelling and punctuation, thus placing the poet alongside his contemporaries - amongst them Sidney, Shakespeare, and Donne - as a writer who can now be read and understood by modern readers without the obstacles of archaic spelling and punctuation artificially obscuring his meaning. Spenser's celebrated manifesto poem, The Shepherds' Calendar (1579), together with its original prefatory material and the contemporary glosses by E.K., appears here for the first time in a modernised form, but with the conscious archaisms and dialectal forms retained so that it can now, for the first time since it was published, be read as the linguistic palimpsest Spenser intended it to be. Each poem is prefaced by a headnote explaining occasion, genre, sources, theme, and current critical debate, which, together with the detailed footnotes, allows the reader to place each work in its critical and historical context. Aimed at undergraduate as well as postgraduate readers, this groundbreaking edition will make the richness and variety of Spenser's shorter poems truly accessible to the modern reader.

This new edition addresses the shifts in scholarly and critical interests in Spenser studies since 1993 as well as access provided by new technology. Notes reflect the information that Spenser's best readers would have at their fingertips without spoiling the pleasure of reading Spenser for the first time. Mother Hubberds Tale from the 1591 Complaints is newly included. The Ruines of Rome, Spenser's translation of Joachim Du Bellay's Antiquitez, is also added to give readers the chance to see Spenser at work as a translator and to give the English perspective on Rome. Sixteen critical essays have been added to supplement fourteen earlier commentaries. Among the perspectives new to the Fourth Edition are those of C. S Lewis, Martha Craig, Gordon Teskey, Jeff Dolven, David Wilson-Okamura, and Jennifer Summit. In keeping with the last edition, critical pieces on the House of Busyrane, Spenser's pastoral, Muiopotmos, and Amoretti are grouped together to facilitate classroom discussion. New selections from Jane Grogan, Andrew D. Hadfield, Colin Burrow, Lynn Staley, Lauren Silberman, and A. E. B. Coldiron join the readings on House of Busyrane, and "Amoretti" grows with selections by A. Leigh DeNeef and Helena Mennie Shire." -- Publisher website.