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The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic. John Watkins

logue" — and the relation of a series of practical jokes played by Marcolphus upon the king. This edition represents the tradition faithfully. The introduction is a fine piece of scholarly and historical work discussing the genre, critical approaches, and the cultural and literary history underlying this work and early comic literature in general. Beecher has teased out the tradition's history, generic development, influences on subsequent work, intertextual relationships, and the iconography of the characters. A great deal of expert work has gone into the production of this book. It is one of the Barnabe Riche Society Series, whose principal goal is "to supply much-needed editions of many of the most critically acclaimed works of the period [between 1485 and 1660]." One is left wondering why exactly this text was selected for this series. The scholarship is of fine quality (what one expects of the editor-translator of A Treatise on Lovesickness) and the text undoubtedly deserves attention, but this is simply not an English work, in spite of Beecher's attempt to claim for it such a title (18). One does not call a translation of a novel by Umberto Eco or Isabel Allende "American literature" merely because it appears in the United States in English. This is a translation of a popular European text, but it has not been adapted in any way for an English audience, the way Chaucer changed the tales he borrowed from Boccaccio, for instance. The Dialogue is a Flemish publisher's opinion of what might appeal to English audiences. Beecher himself acknowledges that Leeu was likely in error because, for whatever reason (and there are so many possible reasons), only one copy of this unique printing has survived. With so many unmodernized works of early English prose still unavailable in modern editions, this seems a very anomalous choice. Like many early documents of whatever genre, it attracts the specialist but not the general reader or student, for whom other writers deservedly take precedence.