Elizabeth A. F. Watson

Published in 1967 as part of the Literature in Perspective series. As Elizabeth Watson says "Spenser is not an easy poet nor did he ever claim to be one". Yet Watson provides an excellent introduction that will allow the reader to get to grips with Spenser's work.

Spenser was a poet of the Elizabethan age; his epic poem The Faerie Queene was published between 1591-96. The modern reader picking up Spenser for the first time will need to have some Knowledge of his life and times to gain more than just a superficial understanding of the words on the page. Elizabeth Watson claims that when she was eleven and recovering from an illness and bored, she picked up a copy of The Faerie Queene and read it literally, enjoying the marvellous narrative and the terrifying descriptions. Yes maybe, but I can't imagine too many children today reaching for their parents copy of The Faerie Queene.

The action of time over the intervening 500 plus years since Spenser's death have rendered his concerns over philosophy, politics, society and religion clouded in obscurity for the 21st century reader. We need to know the events that shaped his thoughts previous to and during his lifetime. Watson does an excellent job here, sketching in the major issues of the time and she takes this a stage further by gaging Spenser's reactions to those events and the ideas that were triggered. There are sections on Puritanism, Catholicism, classical and medieval philosophy. Spenser's position in the literary world and his place in the pantheon of Medieval/Renaissance writers is also discussed.

In the third chapter of her book Watson examines Spenser's poetry. pointing out the literary conventions of the time and how Spenser used these and how he developed them further, creating for himself an individual voice. His use of allegory is demystified and made intelligible and his influence on poets that followed him is given some thought. Watson describes the beauty of his imagery, the musicality of his verse and his innovative techniques with enthusiasm and skill.

Spenser's major poems are then discussed on an individual basis. Watson says that it is beyond the scope of this book to give a detailed commentary on The Faerie Queene, however she provides enough information and exposition to allow this reader to tackle the poem with some confidence. I will certainly have Watson's handy book by my side when reading the poems. Watson provides plenty of examples from the text and uses these wisely to make her points. Spenser's sixteenth century English is not too difficult to read and one soon gets used to it, but it is the thoughts of the poet behind those words that need some explanation and Watson does an excellent job in providing this, in the 170 pages at her disposal.

This book is now out of print and I do not know if there were any reprints after the initial 1967 edition. If there were not then there should have been, because this is an excellent introduction to Edmund Spenser… (meer)