The once and future Spenser

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Queen Elizabeth I made him England’s poet laureate. But the complete works of Edmund Spenser, whose epic poem, ‘The Faerie Queene,’ so dazzled the 16th century monarch whose Tudor dynasty it limned, are hard to find these days.

Kessinger Publishing, the Montana-based reprinter of rare, antiquarian books, last January put out a copy of the century-old ‘The Complete Works of Edmund Spenser,’ with apologies for ‘imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues beyond our control.’

Thanks to Oxford University Press, a coterie of Spenserian scholars and a $150,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an updated--and truly complete--collection of the English master’s prose and poetry is now underway.

Joseph F. Loewenstein, an English professor and Renaissance literature expert at Washington University in St. Louis, is leading a team of graduate and undergraduate students in the project to compile, edit, annotate and digitize Spenser’s oeuvre, including ‘The Faerie Queene,’ which vaulted him into the pantheon of English literature alongside Chaucer.

University of Colorado professor Katherine Eggert, president of the International Spenser Society, welcomes the project, saying it could go a long way toward making the poet more accessible to modern readers.

‘Edmund Spenser is, along with William Shakespeare and John Milton, one of the three most influential writers of the English Renaissance,’ according to Eggert. ‘ ‘The Faerie Queene’ was on Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and paved the way for ‘Paradise Lost.’ Spenser’s poetry influenced Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron. Traces of his plots and characters are clearly visible in Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings.’ ‘

But Spenser goes ‘largely unread today,’ Eggert laments, in large part because of the ‘difficulty of his language, which--like James Joyce’s later on--not only bristles with erudition but also engages in brilliant wordplay, employing archaic words and inventing new ones.’

Consider this stanza from Spenser’s ‘The Shepheardes’ Calender’:

To kerke the narre from God more farre,
Has bene an old-sayd sawe;
And he that strives to touche a starre
Oft stombles at a strawe.

Spenser, who helped in the colonization of Ireland, is a controversial figure historically for advocating the destruction of Irish literature and culture in the late 1500s. His inflammatory pamphlet, ‘A View of the Present State of Ireland,’ was kept out of print during his lifetime because he proposed scorched-earth tactics to dominate through famine. His views must have been known, though, because Irish rebels burned down his castle in 1598. He died the following year, reputedly penniless but beloved by fellow poets who bore his coffin and tossed verse, pens and tears into his grave. His tomb in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner is near Chaucer’s.

Loewenstein first pitched the project to Oxford in 1999, the 400th anniversary of Spenser’s death, with colleagues Patrick Cheney at Pennsylvania State University and David Lee Miller at the University of South Carolina. Their proposal envisions it as the ‘standard edition for the century to come,’ not to mention ‘a pioneer for other editions on other writers and works.’ Also working with the team are Elizabeth Fowler at the University of Virginia and Andrew Zucher at Cambridge University. The first of three volumes of the print edition and a substantial portion of the Spenser Archive are expected to be ready by 2010. Run softly, sweet Thames, until their work is done.

Kristina Lindgren

Photo: Washington University in St. Louis