50.2 (Spring-Summer 2020)

The current issue of The Spenser Review reminds us all in the Spenser community of our debt to tradition. We have to pay our last respects to Tom Roche, who sadly died this May. Tom, as you all know, wrote one of the critical works that has shaped modern Spenser criticism, The Kindly Flame (1964), as well as co-founding and steering the course of Spenser Studies from 1980 onwards. Read more…

When the editors of The Spenser Review suggested a feature on Harry Berger, Jr.’s new book Resisting Allegory, I thought that, having had my say in the book’s introduction, I would ask a few friends and colleagues to share their thoughts. The results vary in length, tone, and point of view; I hope that this variety, which is deliberate, will help us relax the usual boundary between writing for publication and conversing through social media. A few contributions stand as written and submitted; others are woven together from email exchanges and previously published essays. Readers of what follows are invited to join the conversation, extending it into a thread on the Sidney-Spenser listserv. Read more…

What happens in the Amoretti is the serious play of an ongoing courtship between an Edmund Spenser in his early forties and an Elizabeth Boyle in her late teens. It’s a surprisingly intimate sequence, concerned, as few others are, with the relationship between wooer and wooed. Like much of Spenser’s work it’s what one might call potentially comic in form, moving toward marriage, while avoiding secure resolution. In this paper I assume that the course of the sequence describes a version of an actual courtship, in part because Spenser identifies himself with the speaker when he mentions by name his mother, his queen, his friend Lodowick Bryskett and of course his bride, as well as The Faerie Queene. Read more…

In what is arguably the most important contribution to Spenser studies since Andrew Hadfield’s landmark biography, Jean Brink has rendered a superb service to the field, filling in blanks in the poet’s life and opening up fresh lines of inquiry for future scholars. Brink’s account of the 1560s and 1570s is exemplary in its scholarly scrupulousness. A sustained analysis of Spenser’s schooldays and undergraduate experiences, a meticulous reading of The Shepheardes Calender and a firm putting of Gabriel Harvey in his proper, if less witty and familiar place are just some of the highlights of this splendid monograph. It is a work that is sure to be of lasting impact. Read more…

When I opened my e-mail on May 3rd, the first one to appear was Bo Smith’s ‘On His Way’, telling us that Tom had gone. It had not been unexpected, but he had held on for a long time, with Bo’s tireless and unstinting help. Now, as Bo said he’d told Tom in the last few days, ‘You can go and ask Spenser and Sidney all those questions you’ve been wanting to ask them’. Read more…