Customer Reviews:
Please with Purchase.......2007-05-31
I am delighted, this is just like the one I read in college!
More about the journey than the destination..........2007-03-24
I will be the first to admit that this is not a book for those that give up easily. At over a thousand pages of Elizabethan poetry, it took me almost two years to get through, and I am not a particularly slow reader. However, I don't want to completely scare away potential readers because it has also been one of the most rewarding books I have ever read. The story is always interesting and imaginative (and in such a long work that's saying something), most of the heroes and heroines are very sympathetic, and the imagery of poetry itself is breathtakingly beautiful. Though it was definitely a commitment to read, I have no regrets in taking the time to do so, and only hope that others will give it a try. Bravo, Edmund Spenser!
Penguin is best edition short of Hamilton's.......2006-07-06
This is a review of The Faerie Queene, Penguin Classics edition, edited by Thomas Roche (ISBN 0140422072).
The Faerie Queene itself will not be to everyone's taste. It is probably easier than Milton, definitely harder than Malory, and parts of it are very accessible and parts of it are not very accessible at all. However, the language, which most will perceive as the primary barrier to Spenser's work, is not that difficult to get used to. Take Book I, Canto V, stanza 5, for example:
At last forth comes that far renowmed Queene,
With royall pomp and Princely maiestie;
She is ybrought vnto a paled greene,
And placed vnder stately canapee,
The warlike feates of both those knights to see.
On th'other side in all mens open vew
Duessa placed is, and on a tree
Sans-foy his shield is hangd with bloudy hew:
Both those the lawrell girlonds to the victor dew.
In line one, "renowmed" just means "renowned," and should be pronounced with three syllables: "re-nowm-ed," not "renowm'd." There is a difference.
In line two, the knowledge that Spenser typically uses "i" for "j" and "u" for v" is all readers need to read "majesty" for "maiestie." A passing acquaintance with Chaucer would help with line three, which features the Middle English prefix "y-" on "ybrought."
Line four: pronounce "placed" "plas-ed," not "plazd"; and just remember "v" means "u" for "vnder."
Line five presents no problems.
In line six, some readers might wonder why "the other" is contracted to "th'other." Here, a basic knowledge of English prosody is necessary. If Spenser had said "On the other side in all men's open view," he would have used eleven syllables, when his meter of choice, iambic pentameter, demands ten syllables. So he makes a contraction to stay within those ten syllables.
In line eight, Spenser writes "hangd" for the same reason: to stay within the ten syllables of iambic pentameter. If he had said "hanged," the sixteenth-century reader would have counted the syllables thus: "Sans-foy-his-shield-is-hang-ed-with-bloody-hue," which is eleven. Bear in mind that words such as "shield" are one syllable (sheeld), words such as "beauteous" are two syllables (beautyus), and words such as "disobedience" are three syllables (dis-o-bed-yence) for the purposes of scanning verse.
So much for Spenser's language. The content of the Faerie Queene might prove the greater barrier to the twenty-first century reader. If you don't like chivalry, knights, damsels in distress, hermits, and magicians, then you probably won't like the FQ. But if you are indeed blessed with a taste for "romance" in the old sense, then you should like Spenser. You might surprise yourself; a friend who doesn't read much old literature, and almost no poetry, read a few stanzas of the Faerie Queene and said she liked it. Granted, I don't know if she would have liked every bit of the entire thing. But in such a long poem, some parts will get boring. I loved Books I and II, didn't enjoy Book III as much, and then loved Books IV, V, and VI. Book V, with Artegall and his "Iron Man" who represents Justice, is quite good. And the Mutabilitie Cantos at the very end, as C.S. Lewis said, just might be "the finest thing in the whole work." But beware: the storyline is very, very complex. I found myself scanning previous cantos to recapture the plot line, which I'd lost track of. Be prepared to lose track of what's going on, unless you have an excellent memory or are used to old literature and complex plots.
Now for this particular edition. It's a very fat book (over 1,000 pages), and I wish it had been in two volumes (Penguin adopted that expedient in the Penguin Classics edition of Malory's Le Morte Darthur). Roche's text differs somewhat from A.C. Hamilton's standard edition of the Faerie Queene, but it's more than adequate for the non-scholarly reader. I found his notes extensive and very helpful. Spelling is barely modernized; Roche just changes the archaic long "s" to the modern one, leaving "v" for "u" (vnder) and "i" for "j" (maiestie) intact. Roche seems to be the best edition out there short of Hamilton, which costs about $55, and definitely the best for a first-timer. One recommendation: read Malory's Le Morte Darthur before the Faerie Queene. For one thing, if you don't like Malory, you probably won't like Spenser; and so reading Malory first could save you some time reading the FQ. If you do like Malory, then you probably will like Spenser; and reading Malory first accustoms you to knights and jousts and wizards and the typical machinery of Spenser. Also, knowing some Malory helps you catch some of Spenser's allusions to the Arthurian legend.
I give five stars to the Faerie Queene itself because I happen to love it; not everyone will share my opinion. I give five stars to Roche's edition because it's the best out there short of Hamilton, which not everybody needs.
A Poeme of Romaunce rich and Chevalrie.......2005-06-14
If you ignore the symbolism and focus on the surface elements, "The Faerie Queene," a bulky mythological epic rendered in ornate baroque verse, almost seems like a sixteenth-century prototype of the campy swords-and-sorcery pulp of the past century. Thumbing through the pages invokes that particular aura of an ancient struggle against evil in a world of horrible monsters, brave warriors, clashing swords and spraying gore, shape-shifting wizards, fair ladies, and towering castles overlooking dreary fantasy landscapes. However, there must be more to it than just eye candy for Edmund Spenser to have been worthy of burial in Westminster Abbey; "The Faerie Queene," like Virgil's Aeneid before it or Wagner's Ring cycle after, is a nationalistic and moralistic doctrine layered with religious and historical allusions that transcend its veneer of fabulous imagery.
As explained in a letter to his peer Sir Walter Raleigh, Spenser's plan was to write twelve "books," each containing twelve cantos and portraying a virtue from Aristotle's Ethics in the guise of a knight on a quest, the totality intended as a tribute to Queen Elizabeth, who in the epic is implied to be the Faerie Queene. Only six of the twelve books were completed: holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice, and courtesy. The actions of the knights in their respective books are supposed to exemplify the specified virtues as proper behavior in the service of the Queene; conversely, vices such as envy, lust, and furor are represented as obstructors or monsters to be defeated by the knights. Stripped of its considerably gaudy window dressing, "The Faerie Queene" is a simple series of object lessons.
The content is a strange, but not totally incongruous, amalgamation of legends from Greek and Egyptian mythology, the Crusades, Arthurian lore, Italian Renaissance poetry, and Spenser's own invention. As though they had emerged from a set of medieval "narrative" tapestries, the stories are dazzlingly intricate in plot and detail: The hero of the first book, the "Redcrosse Knight," must rescue the parents of the princess Una (the Protestant Church) from a dragon (the Roman Catholic Church), aided by Arthur, here but a prince. The third book begins the story of Britomart, a lady who disguises herself as a knight in order to find Artegall, the knight of Justice in the fifth book, with whom she is enamored when she sees his image in a magic mirror. There are some interesting cross-references, such as the tale of King Lear and his three daughters mentioned in a history of England in the second book.
Although English spelling was not conventionalized until dictionaries began to be compiled two centuries later, the poem's peculiar appearance is not representative of the typical writing of the late sixteenth century. The language, archaic even for Spenser's time, is designed to emulate Chaucer, then the standard English poet, in an attempt to conjure a medieval mood, a romanticized past. The misspellings are even intentionally inconsistent; for instance, "giant" is variably spelled Gyant or Geant or Gyaunt but never Giant. The idea, I think, is to signal to the reader that the poem should evoke the days when poems were more often spoken aloud than read, so what the words sound like is more important than what they look like; another clue to this is that Spenser is actually quite meticulous about the words he chooses to misspell.
Glorification of a national heritage is a tall order, so who can blame the poet for his excesses? "The Faerie Queene," a project distinguished by its sheer ambitiousness, is an intense reading experience that overwhelms its own flaws and difficulties.
Sword and Sorcery!.......2004-06-27
This is the first epic poem written in English. It is a work of English imagination coloured with some classicism. To me, it matches closely with Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings in theme and in tone. Of course, it is written in 16th Century English, so you will have to be smart enough to handle the differences in spelling and grammar you will encounter. I love it because it blends the whole Medieval and Dark Age English narrative heritage with the 'new learning' of the classicizing Renaissance and thereby brings together all the fundamental cultural streams flowing into the sea of the modern English-world's character. This is a poem of identity for the English-speaking world. I would also add that the sound of the poem is highly musical. Edmund Spencer, in my opinion, is the greatest English poet.
This is REAL sword and sorcery - at its best!
Customer Reviews:
A marvelous amalgamation.......2007-07-06
Spenser's marvelous amalgamation of chivalric quest-romance, Ovidian mythology, phantasmagoric allegory, and classical-cum-Renaissance epic comes the closest yet to a definitive edition in this reissue of A. C. Hamilton's Second Edition of the poem. ("Second Edition" still according to the splendid and majestic cover, "Revised Second Edition" according to the title page, "Third Edition" according to the acknowledgements.) It is hard to see how the textual editors can justify the rejection of several revisions which were obviously made in the 1596 edition by Spenser himself, but Hamilton always gives the later reading in his footnotes, so this is a minor complaint. Still needed is a complete edition of the poem in modern spelling--despite what you may read elsewhere, Spenser's spelling is, at least 99% of the time, no more archaic or eccentric than that of Shakespeare or other authors of the time when read in facsimile or original spelling.
Book Description
First in a series of Spenser's great work in five volumes. Each includes its own Introduction, annotation, notes on the text, bibliography, glossary, and index of characters; Spenser's "Letter to Raleigh" and a short Life of Edmund Spenser appear in every volume.
Framed in Spenser's distinctive, opulent stanza and in some of the trappings of epic, Book One of Spenser's The Faerie Queene consists of a chivalric romance that has been made to a typical recipe—"fierce warres and faithfull loves"—but that has been Christianized in both overt and subtle ways. The physical and moral wanderings of the Redcrosse Knight dramatize his effort to find the proper proportion of human to divine contributions to salvation—a key issue between Protestants and Catholics. Fantastic elements like alien humans, humanoids, and monsters and their respective dwelling places are vividly described.
Book Description
/* LC275, 0-582-09951-X, Hamilton, A.C., Spenser: The Faerie Queene, Second Edition */ The first edition book of this book has become essential to the study of one of the seminal masterpieces of English literature. The Faerie Queen has influenced, inspired and challenged generations of writers, readers and scholars since its completion in 1596. And, due to its epic length, it is also one of the hardest to comprehend. In this fully revised second edition, the poem has been freshly annotated throughout, as has the additional material which includes a chronology, a letter to Raleigh, commendatory verses, and dedicatory sonnets. A list of characters and their appearances has been compiled by Shohachi Fakuda and the text has been newly edited by Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki. Those wishing to read and/or better understand the Faerie Queene.
Customer Reviews:
Vast Improvement over the first edition.......2004-04-23
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.
But not exactly fun.......2003-09-12
I would have to disagree with the reviewer that called Spenser's epic "fun" to read... it is a lot of work, not only because of the length but because of the archaisms involved in Spenserian diction. On the other hand the work is definitely fruitful, one finds passages of indelible beauty and insight. For scholarly criticism I would recommend the Oxford edition ("Poetical Works") with an introduction by E. de Selincourt: he often points out just the stanza or two that helps place the entire poem into a new perspective. Make no mistake about it, the Spenserian stanza (ababbcbcc) is a difficult read, whether one is talking Byron's "Childe Harold" or Novak's "Requiem": in all cases (I would say) a significant amount of effort is required, simply to follow the train of the author's thought, which, because of the difficult nature of the stanza perhaps, is not necessarily clearly linear... but in the long run, MAKE NO MISTAKE the effort is clearly worth it, and Spenser, if not exactly conforming to one's expectations, will not exactly disappoint them either. A worthwhile read, even in bits and pieces, if you cannot adhere to the storyline as a whole.
Poetry sinks under the weight of scholarship.......2003-03-28
There's no question that this is a lot of book for the money, and it's an essential volume for the serious student. The introductory matter is a disappointment, though; instead of guiding us into this massive work with a view to our gaining pleasure from it, Hamilton gives us a dense and barely readable collection of quotations from other critics and cross-references to scholarly papers. Many of the footnotes in the text suffer from the same kind of high-priestly scholarship, mixed with a tendency to ferret out sexual symbolism wherever it can be found. There is plenty of information in the notes to clear up the inevitable confusion modern readers must experience, but at times one wishes a giant could wield a club without being followed by a tribe of commentators chattering about phalluses and biblical parallels.
In short, this volume contains all that is good and all that is bad about "literary criticism". It is illuminating for those who want to dig deeper into the meaning of the poem, but it takes a lot of fun out of the reading. After all, The Faerie Queene wasn't written to keep academics busy; it was an entertainment, to be read aloud in groups, and to inspire wonder and laughter.
My advice to those who are new to Spenser is to read the poem quickly, without worrying too much about full comprehension, and referring to the notes only occasionally. You may be surprised at how quickly the antiquated language (much of it idiosyncratic even in Spenser's day) becomes familiar to you. First learn to love the flow of words, the characters, the action, and the humor; later you can come back for deeper study.
A Marvelous Poem Brilliantly Edited by Professor Hamilton.......2003-01-06
This second edition of "The Faerie Queene," with A.C. Hamilton as the editor, again sets the standard for critical editions of Edmund Spenser's classic poem. This volume replaces Hamilton's first edition of the poem as the standard academic text. Anyone who is serious about studying the poem should purchase this particular edition. In addition to featuring a much clearer typeface than that of the first edition, the second edition contains critical commentary about the poem that is as current as one could expect (i.e., through the `90s). The footnotes are conveniently and unobtrusively placed at the bottom of the text, so one can easily ignore them, if they prefer. However, the labyrinth of cross-references are highly informative, provocative, and illustrate the poem's incredible richness. I find myself so engaged in the contemporary criticism of the poem that I'm constantly going to the library to read the articles to which the notes refer.
If you already have the first edition that was edited by Hamilton (or if you were lukewarm about reading Spenser in the first place), you may not need this updated edition, unless you would like to read the updated essays and commentary. However, if you love "The Faerie Queene," this particular volume will provide you with many hours (and possibly years) of enjoyment. It is well known that the poem is one of the greatest ever to be penned in the English language. In the second edition, Hamilton helps us all understand why this poem speaks so powerfully to us over four hundred years later. This is truly a marvelous poem and a great academic text.
A beautiful literary piece in a masterful edition.......2001-11-29
Fortunately, in reviewing this book I am not faced with the usual difficulty of separating the quality of the work itself from the quality of its presentation; both are exquisite.
Edmund Spenser's _The Faerie Qveene_ is rightly considered one of the timeless masterpieces of English literature. Collectively, it is an embodiment of and a response to both medieval and Renaissance themes and devices. The medieval romantic and Arthurian genres are blended with Petrarchan techniques and Neoplatonic philosophy. Nevertheless, Spenser maintains a distinct style all his own; the nine-line stanza is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful conventions in poetic verse. Oh yeah, and it's a darn good story too.
This edition of the "booke" far outshines any other I've encountered. The text itself is annotated with copious footnotes which explain unclear passages, point out allusions to classical, medieval and contemporary events, and provide criticism. All of the peripheral material associated with _The Faerie Qveene_ is also provided, including the dedication to Raleigh and introductory sonnets. Other value-adding perks include a comprehensive bibliography, a chart showing minor changes made between the poem's three publications, and a character guide.
Though this thick volume may seem daunting, it is in fact quite enjoyable. The notes are fairly unintrusive, so the casual reader can skim or read through the poem at his or her own pace, with the option to delve deeper if he or she desires.
I strongly advise anyone with an interest in Renaissance literature, Shakespeare, poetry, or English literature as a whole, to purchase this book, and to dish out the bit of extra money for this particular edition.
Customer Reviews:
Selections from The Faerie Queene review.......2007-05-12
I thought the reader did an excellent job. I had listened to the Canterbury Tales and I liked this even better. I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in poetry. I think it is a must read or listen as the case may be.
Not an Unabridged Edition.......2006-05-10
This three CD set (ISBN: 962634377X, Naxos 2006) is not unabridged. It appears, in fact to be a re-issue of the 1998 Naxos three CD set (ISBN: 9626341599). It is, however very well done, beautifully read by John Moffat.
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Source and Meaning in Spenser's Allegory: A Study of The Faerie Queene
John Erskine Hankins
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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ASIN: 0198120133 |
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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene (Studies in Renaissance Literature)
Paul Suttie
Manufacturer: D.S.Brewer
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ASIN: 1843840871 |
Book Description
Recent Spenser criticism has thrown much new light, and much doubt, on the nature of The Faerie Queene's involvement in contemporary political and religious controversies. Material to these developments has been wide recognition of the unreliability of the poem's narrating voice and its often parodic relation to generic conventions. Nonetheless, some longstanding misconceptions about allegory still limit understanding of Spenser's approach to topical issues. This book re-examines The Faerie Queene's allegorical method, showing what is gained by recognising that the poem's main locus of allegorical self-interpretation, as in the medieval Quest of the Holy Grail, is within rather than extrinsic to the story world. Like the knights of the Quest, Spenser's heroes are poised between rival codes of moral interpretation, in a way that illuminates the relative value of those codes as guides to action. But unlike its predecessor, Spenser's poem addresses an era violently divided as to which constitutes the true code of right and wrong. Amongst the oppositions it grapples with are the ideological conflict in England and Ireland between emergent monarchic absolutism and residual feudalism, the doctrinal division between the Elizabethan and Roman churches, and the Machiavellian challenge to received ideas about political and religious legitimacy.Dr PAUL SUTTIE is a Senior Member of Robinson College, Cambridge.
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Spenser's Faerie Queen and the Reading of Women
Caroline McManus
Manufacturer: University of Delaware Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0874137683 |
Book Description
Published to commemorate the six-book 1596 edition, this first modernized text presents selections from modern England's first epic poem. A massive Arthurian romance that asserts national identity through the vivid myths of Christianity, The Fairy Queen simultaneously celebrates and critiques the Elizabethan Golden Age and the Queen who conjured it.
Customer Reviews:
A great disappointment, don't buy it.......2001-11-28
I bought this book as a study guide to a course in Renaissance literature, and Spenser in particular. I have now found that it is incomplete! Canto II of Book II only has 11 verses out of 46! Moreover, Cantos 4, 5 and 6 of Book II are completely missing! It does say 'Selection' in the subtitle, I now realize, although it was not made clear in the original description. The volume is doing me little to no good for its intended purpose. I consider it a waste of time and a deception to leave out huge parts of a work you are purporting to present under its original title. I feel cheated. Why wasn't the title "Bits and Pieces of The Faerie Queen"??
Most coherent and easy-to-read version of Faerie Queene.......1998-12-09
As a freshman student who is enrolled in English Literature, I needed all the help I could get,especially with English that is not modern. The Renaissance Version of the Faerie Queene is quite hard to read, and must be read over and over again before you can comprehend all the underlying themes and symbols. This edition, stated in modern English, makes the work so much more enjoyable and easy to understand. Not much is lost through this translation, and it has helped me greatly----especially for exams!
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