The present issue of The Spenser Review focusses on Spenser’s connections with European writers, the opportunities for international engagement that Spenser undertook, and that his work, in turn, offers. We begin with Spenser in Ireland (a ‘foreign country’, as David Scott Wilson-Okamura reminds us), and conclude with Spenser in Russia, thanks to Yulia Ryzhik’s fascinating survey of editions, translations and literary criticism of Spenser in Russian. It is an interest that originated with Pushkin, of course, but one which seems to be strengthening, as a recent edition of translations of the Amoretti shows.[1] Along the way we meet old friends (or perhaps ‘frenemies’?) of Spenser’s – Tasso, Petrarch, Du Bartas – but in new forms of influence and connection, each with a much stronger European dimension than has been appreciated.
Wilson-Okamura considers the question of Spenser’s citizenship of the republic of letters, and finds he became, at best, a ‘resident alien’, despite the polyglot environment in which he grew up, and the invigorating intellectual (and other) challenges of the European country to which he moved. Giulio Pertile proposes that Spenser found a kinship in Tasso’s visions of sleep and languor, allowing both to explore ‘the horizontal continuity of life forms’, human, non-human and cosmic. Deirdre Serjeantson puts Spenser’s Petrarchan paratexts front and centre, and by digging deeper into their European contexts, finds Spenser’s negotiations with Petrarch much less radically Protestant than they might first appear. Revisiting what is probably the most important Petrarchan paratext to Spenser’s work – Raleigh’s commendatory sonnet to The Faerie Queene – Serjeantson reveals in this instance a strong imperial subtext to the poem’s Petrarchan conceit, glimpsed through a royal French intertext. Peter Auger redirects our understanding of Spenser’s interest in the revered Du Bartas to his astrological descriptions, and points to some ways in which these, in turn, may have influenced the reading of Du Bartas in England.
Some of our Reviews section also engages Europe, and England’s place in Europe (together with some timely warnings for the United Kingdom in Ruth Canning’s study of the Old English in Ireland, according to reviewer Patricia Palmer). But it also boasts reviews of new studies of emotional dynamics in Spenser, Shakespeare and Sidney; of voices, books and oral culture in early modern Britain; of Spenser’s Elizabeth; and of Shakespeare’s revenge tragedies. In ‘News’, we have a report on the recent International Spenser Society initiative, ‘#Getting Started With Spenser’.
We wish you happy reading, and good health in these trying times.
[1] We are grateful to Andrey Isserov for the original suggestion and for his help in providing some of the key materials.
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