Spenser: The Faerie Queene, 2nd Edition

I like the layout of the book with the poem on top and annotations at the bottom. It was very helpful when reading. For a modern reader it made the book easier to read.

The best edition of “The Faerie Queene” you can get at the moment. A.C. Hamilton’s footnotes are wonderful guides through this complex text. I’m almost through the fifth book!

I had to use this book for a Medieval and Renaissance Studies class on Elizabeth I. This book contains extremely detailed footnotes to help beginning Medieval Studies majors sift their way through Spenser's rich prose. Even my professor said he had never seen a better resource for his students!

The annotations have been edited for clarity and are a lot easier to understand than the 1st edition. They also changed the formatting - now the poem is at the top of the page, with annotations at the bottom (vs. previously - 2 columns on each page, one for poem, one for annotations) The binding opens very nicely and easily (important for such a large book)

The Faerie Queen itself: This took about 45 hours to finish, it's a mammoth of a book and it is really difficult to follow. Half the time I felt my mind wandering and no comprehending what I'm reading. It is beautifully written however and it being such a classic, I admit that a lot of it is above me. That having been said, I can't but help to give it 5 stars and a marathon that is recommended that you all undertake. Just try and find a good system for reading it to maximize your comprehension and appreciation. I used Shmoop.com for a nice basic stanza-by-stanza summary, along with two kindles open on my monitor, one being endnotes and one being what I was actually reading. This version itself (The KINDLE version, not the hardcover): 2.85 stars. Why? First of all, in the end notes, they're constantly hitting you with "see smith, 1964 mythology etc page xii", you get hundreds and hundreds of those embedded in the middle of paragraphs sometimes which makes it really sloppy looking. It would have been much more clean if they had just put in subscript numbers because that isn't pertinent information, no human being has time to go and find those hundreds of books to flip to whatever page they're talking about. Secondly, there aren't any little numbers in the actual text itself so that you can conveniently push them to quickly read what these guys have to say about it. You have to click twice to go all the way to the glossary, or have another source of this book open somewhere, which is what I did. Either way, it could have been made much easier. Finally, the price, I paid $15 for a 1 month subscription and it's almost $50 for the book in it's entirety. So overall, 5 stars for the book itself as being a brutal-to-finish marathon classic that I can't really bring myself to criticize and this version a 2.85 for the reasons listed above. If you choose to read The Faerie Queen for the first time....God help you

This is the second edition of the best version of The Faerie Queene available. It is a marked improvement over the first edition. For one thing, you can actually read the type. The first edition looked like it was mimeographed (for those of you who remember what that looked like). The layout is now much better, and the notes (on the same page and with the same size font as the text) and cross references remain indispensable for anyone not born in 1600.

The Kindle edition doesn't even have a good table of contents. It doesn't have links to the individual cantos in the books, only a link to the start of each book. And, it has the annotations at the end of each canto. There should be an internal link on each verse to the corresponding annotations, but there isn't. So you'd have to keep paging back and forth between the text and the annotations, if you have just this one version of the Faerie Queene. Or read the poem on two different devices, one open at the text, the other at the annotations. Also, there should be indications in the text, showing which words have annotations. You can't know if something is explained in the annotations without going to look at them. The annotations are incomplete anyway. For example, what the heck is a "bounch of heares"??? Some kind of helmet ornament, but Hamilton doesn't explain. I didn't find out until later in the poem, when Spenser writes "heare" for hair. So "bounch of heares" = "bunch of hairs". So I have been reading it with 3 editions open: this one, the Hackett version - all 6 books of which can be found online free in PDF format! - and a version annotated by D L Purves , also available on Kindle. Hamilton's version of Book 1 has the most detailed annotations, but many of them are academic in nature, just speculation, and interfere with enjoying the poem as poetry. For example, Duessa is crowned at one point, and Hamilton comments "Duessa's crowning, which lasts until her defeat ... sixty stanzas later, may allude to the six-year reign of the Catholic Mary Tudor". It gets obnoxious and overbearing. Sometimes his interpretations make accusations against Spenser which aren't warranted by the actual text. For example, Spenser has the Redcrosse Knight say "the man, who ever would deceive/ A gentle lady, or her wrong through might/ Death were too little pain for such a foul despite." Hamilton thinks this "indicates that rape of a lower-class woman would be condoned". And in Book 2, Spenser writes "honour virtue's meed/ Doth bear the fairest flower in honorable seed." Hamilton thinks he means that "honour, which is the reward of valour, flourishes best among the nobility", but it sounds more like a beautiful message that outside honor means more when it corresponds to inside honor. Also, Hamilton can't resist making witty comments here and there which insert modern culture into the text. For example, Gluttony in the poem "spued up his gorge, that all did him deteast". Hamilton comments "he has bulimia nervosa". These kinds of comments distance the reader from the mythic atmosphere Spenser is trying to build. And, Gluttony doesn't have bulimia nervosa anyway! He just eats a lot and throws up so he can eat more. The Hackett PDF version has footnotes, which is useful and makes it easy to read, although Carol Kaske in Book 1 also leaves many puzzling words unexplained. I much preferred the Hackett version of Book 2 to the Hamilton version, because the annotations (by Erik Gray) are pretty complete, but also much more modest than Hamilton's. The Purves version has somewhat modernized spelling, which is helpful. And, it has annotations you can click on. The different versions complement each other, so with the help of all three, it's pretty well explained. As for the poem itself - it's very lively! There's a Proem with 4 stanzas; then 5 stanzas describing the Redcrosse Knight, Una and a dwarf who's acting as a porter for Una. Then it starts to rain a lot. They take shelter in a dense wood, and we're off on a rollicking, rapid, incredible epic adventure. It's compressed like poetry, but extended like prose. It's set in "Faerie", but there's almost nothing corresponding to our usual ideas of fairies or Fairyland. No beautiful, quirky little people with wings and wands, so far. It's a place of magic and a spiritual place, with characters from Arthurian romance, Greek and Roman mythology and the Bible, all knit into a unified whole by Spenser's distinctive language and rhyme pattern. It isn't just an adventure story; it's a story about what happens to the souls of the characters, told via allegory, and in sometimes wonderful poetry. It was written in a time of deadly Protestant/Catholic conflict, and Spenser is thoroughly on the Protestant side. So there's a lot of anti-Catholic messaging, which might be offensive to some. I was led to read the Faerie Queene by JK Rowling's book Troubled Blood , which includes a quote from it at the start of each chapter, as an argument. Thank you, JKR, for the introduction!

For those who are in search of a serious, scholarly edition of Spenser's seminal work, this text is a must. The editors have taken painstaking care and attention to running down obscure Classical (Greek, Latin and Italian) sources Spenser uses so liberally throughout his epic poem. Contemporary readers of FQ would have understood the references to Tasso and Dante; later readers need a sure guide to assist them through the thicket of references. Therefore, this volume serves a couple notable purposes for the true Spenserian (and English-language Renaissance) scholar: (1) It provides superlative context upon the historical (or historicist) period in which Spenser worked; and (2) It reinforces an appreciation of the wide learning incumbent of authors of high repute in Elizabethan England.