Zurcher, Andrew.  The Faerie Queene: A Reading Guide.  Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.  ix + 232 pp.  ISBN: 978-0748639571.  $26 paper.

The Faerie Queene is a text that with its layered allegory, its archaic language, and its sheer length can seem daunting to readers encountering it for the first time.  Even the wealth of explanatory footnotes in annotated editions (such as A.C. Hamilton’s Longman edition [2001]) can seem rather too much of a good thing and present an additional obstacle to a reader unfamiliar with the text. Thus Andrew Zurcher’s The Faerie Queene: A Reading Guide is a cleverly devised book that is consistent in its approach, covers a lot of ground and provides an excellent and comprehensive introduction to reading Spenser in general and The Faerie Queene in particular. It should be highly commended for achieving what it sets out to do, that is, to “unlock” some of the more challenging aspects of the poem to new readers while at all times keeping them aware of the “map”of the whole. Above all, the Reading Guide aims to provide its readers with two things: preparation for a first reading of The Faerie Queene and guidance during that reading—“a stay for their first steps,” as the preface puts it (vii).

The Reading Guide is divided into four main sections:  (1) “Mapping and Making,” a brief general introduction to Spenser’s life and works, followed by short summaries of each book of The Faerie Queene (1-15); (2) lightly annotated “Selections from the Poem” (16-161); (3) an essay on “Contexts and Reception” (162-194); and (4) a section on “Teaching the Text” (195-208).  The different sections build on each other and are evidently designed to be referred to in sequence.  A possible exception to this is the subsection containing the book summaries, which do not so much provide a blow-by-blow account of what happens in each individual canto (unlike, for example, the concise canto summaries in Colin Burrow’s Edmund Spenser [1996]), as outline the shape and character of the books and their role within the poem as a whole. Thus that subsection—which is, rather fittingly, titled “A map of The Faerie Queene”—presents an overview that readers can refer to again while reading the poem, as a reminder of where they are. The immediate purpose of the “map,” however, is to locate the extracts that follow it within their proper contexts.

Those extracts are five passages of roughly equal length comprising one or two whole cantos: I.pr-ii (18-49), II.xi-xii (50-74), III.xi-xii (75-105), V.proem-ii (106-132) and VI.x-xi (133-159). They have evidently been chosen with great care. Not only do they cover a number of key episodes spread evenly across The Faerie Queene (Redcrosse’s encounters with Errour, Archimago and Duessa; Guyon’s destruction of the Bower of Bliss; Britomart in the castle of Busirane, with the two endings of book III; the departure of Astraea and Artegall’s quest to save Irena; Calidore’s encounter with Colin Clout), but they  have also been selected to illustrate a range of topics, as well as a range of approaches that can be taken to the poem. As a result of this Zurcher succeeds in presenting a selection that is as representative as any collection of extracts amounting to barely an eighth of the entire text could aspire to be. Although the margins occasionally become a little cluttered when a line contains more than one word that requires a gloss (as in Redcrosse’s encounter with Errour in I.i.19), the presentation of the extracts is otherwise very clean, with relatively few annotations, allowing the reader to focus on the passages themselves. To give an example of how this works in practice: the proem to Book I is among the most heavily annotated passages in the Longman edition. Hamilton’s commentary takes up more than three times as much space as Spenser’s text, mainly through the numerous cross-references it contains (these are of course very useful, though less so for readers tackling the text for the first time, who are not the readership the Longman edition primarily aims for). Zurcher’s commentary, on the other hand, focuses on providing only information that immediately aids a new reader’s understanding of the text through brief explanatory notes. The contrast between the two approaches is perhaps best illustrated by a direct comparison of the annotations to the first line of stanza 2:

Longman edition                                                                                              

1 O holy virgin: perhaps Clio, the muse of history, chiefe in being the ‘eldest’ (Teares 53) of the nine muses, called the ‘greater Muse’ at VII vii 1.1. The name links her with the ‘Goddesse’, Elizabeth (4.1), who is the source of the poet’s inspiration. See III iii 4   and IV xi 10. More likely, Calliope, ‘the firste glorye of the Heroicall verse’ (E.K. On SC Apr. 100), as Roche 1989:181 argues. In Teares 459, Calliope calls herself the muse ‘That lowly thoughts lift up to heavens hight’. The two are linked at VII vi 37.9. S. may invoke either, (and hence does not name the goddess) or he may conflate them as the proper muse of a heroic poem of praise, which is also an ‘antique history’ (II proem 1.2); see I xi 5.6-9n and ‘Muses’ in the SEnc. 

Reading Guide              

2.1 holy Virgin chiefe of nine] Either Clio, muse of history, or Calliope, muse of epic poetry; the ambiguity is probably deliberate.

One of the great merits of the Reading Guide is that it manages to strike a perfect balance between offering too little guidance and offering too much; that is, the “stay” intended to aid new readers during their first steps is in no danger of turning into a crutch.  Thus it refrains from employing reductive strategies to explain a complex text, such as relying heavily on detailed plot summaries, linking specific themes exclusively to individual books or going through the poem book by book and identifying key themes for each.  Instead of trying to explain The Faerie Queene by bits or providing enough ready-made interpretation to enable readers to read that instead of the poem, the Reading Guide aims to make The Faerie Queene accessible as a whole.  Impressively, it achieves that ambitious goal, especially in the discursive essay (disposed into twelve parts) that forms the heart of the Reading Guide. While that essay on “contexts and reception” identifies aspects that can be taken as starting points for analysis (such as the multiple Irish references, for example), makes suggestions for further reading, and introduces readers to a wide range of contextual information to consider so that they „may as in a handfull gripe al the discourse“ (Letter to Raleigh), it does not attempt to sketch out for them an ideal reading of The Faerie Queene that they should subscribe to. Instead, rather like a travel guide-book, it assembles useful information about the poem and its author, and points out some of the available routes but leaves readers free (indeed urges them) to do their own exploring. 

Just as the excerpts from the poem build on the “maps” of the first section, Zurcher’s essay on reading The Faerie Queene is at one level, a continuation of the previous section. As the essay moves between its three main themes—Spenser’s narrative technique and use of sources (“Texts and intertexts,” 162-172), moral instructiveness in The Faerie Queene (“History and prophecy,” 172-181), and the role of allegory (“Allegory and philosophy,”  182-192)—the cantos reproduced earlier in the book as selections (that is, those sections of the poem that a reader who has been reading the Reading Guide in sequence should by then be familiar with) are repeatedly cited as examples, partly as an addendum to annotations and partly to extend the focus towards the entire poem.  Thus, for example, the section called “Texts and Intertexts” contains an amplification of a note on the first stanza of the first proem, which had briefly referred to the Virgilian and Ariostan echoes in the stanza (18), and of another note on the biblical origins of the “loathly frogs and toades” vomited up by Errour in I.i.20 (25) but gradually moves from the identification of individual references towards the question why intertextuality matters in The Faerie Queene.  Another particular strength of the essay lies in the fact that while it is of course addressed to modern readers, there is much useful discussion of earlier readers of The Faerie Queene and their readings.  So, for example, the discussion of Sir Kenelm Digby’s commentary on the stanza describing the proportions of the castle of Alma (188-190) offers a practical illustration of the workings of allegory by showing one reader’s attempt at unravelling it.

The final section of the book concerns something that we may not expect to find in a reading guide that through its very premise of providing an introduction to a difficult English classic is mainly targeted at a student audience: suggestions for “’teaching the text.”  The author is keen to point out that they are not to be taken simply as sample teaching plans for those actually teaching classes on Spenser, but that they represent strategies to “unlock” the text and are thus potentially helpful “to all of us readers who conduct critical conversations within the closed circuit of our own contemplations” (195); that is, they are suitable as tools for self-teaching.  While this is true, and while in an ideal world readers really would put the Reading Guide to that use, it is perhaps something of a stretch of the imagination to envision undergraduates engaged in conducting “closed-circuit” seminars on The Faerie Queene with themselves, in addition to the teaching they are already receiving.  However, this is a very minor niggle about what is otherwise a well thought-out section that successfully builds on the preceding contents and acts as a fitting conclusion to a book whose general end is to fashion a reader in the vertuous and gentle discipline of tracing Spenser’s fine footing (II.proem.4, l. 5).

While the Reading Guide may not necessarily “incite them to a life of repeated and fruitful engagements” with the poem (Preface, p. vii) in every single case, it does succeed in conveying what makes The Faerie Queene such an exciting text to read and to re-read—even if, as the central essay argues, it is a text that tempts readers to embark on a futile quest: it “requires of us an exhaustive capacity for readerly play, ethical and political experimentation and philosophical deliberation. But one of the consequences of this [ … ] is the way in which, having demanded our engagement, [it] slips the hold” (“Contexts and Reception,” 192).

Elisabeth Chaghafi

University of Oxford