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Complex Spenser: New Directions in Recent Research

SPENSER STUDIES IS aging well. Never dormant, this distinguished sibling of Chaucer, Sidney, Milton, and Shakespeare studies has recently rejuvenated itself on a world stage while keeping a distinguished profile. We have come to radically reassess what the poet wrote and why: his techniques are more new, his purposes more old than we had thought. Spenser texts are available to more readers than ever before, thanks to new editorial projects and digitization. The many threads of the Spenser tapestry are beginning to make sense when viewed together, despite their contradictions and loose ends. Spenser was the Virgil, or prince of poets, of his time, and his time was golden: the glory period of late Elizabethan literature. He was a genius and prolific. He was and is hugely influential, while also deeply controversial (regarding his role as an Irish colonist in particular). No Spenser, no Shakespeare, Marlowe, or Milton, at least as we know them; indeed, no Yeats or Heaney. His life was a fascinating and deeply complicated one, and his works are profound and yet puzzling. Many basic questions remain unanswered: biographically speaking, where was he in the 1580s, and under what circumstances did he die? Did he co-write works? Why did he write his epic, and to what extent is it a fragment and/or anti-imperial, a deliberate ruin of a work? Scholars have ably responded to the challenge on many fronts, including the interdisciplinary and international, while not neglecting Spenser at home, wherever that may be. This review mainly covers developments in Spenser biography, editions, and monographs, as well as online resources, over a five-year period (2009–13). In addition to remaining au courant with popular trends, recent studies of Spenser have been remarkable for their innovative exploitation of traditional methods of scholarship. These include publication and editing history, biographical-cultural historicization, and formalist studies. All of these fields are fundamental to revising our understanding of the poet’s life and work, including the very manner in which his poetry should be read.