The poetry of Edmund Spenser is among the most wide-ranging and allusive ever written. This work offers a detailed literary guide to the life, works, and influence of one of England's greatest poets, and summarizes the scholarship in this area since the publication of the Spenser Variorum 50 years ago. Comprehensive in scope and international in coverage, this work contains over 700 alphabetical entries by 422 contributors from 20 countries. Entries fall into three categories: synoptic essays on individual poems and on the major biographical, historical and social issues, articles providing a full collection of information on a particular topic and its relation to the tradition and articles providing information relevant to the current state of Spenser studies. Throughout the work, Spenser's place in the English literary tradition is fully explored, and in particular his relationship to the minor Elizabethan poets is stressed. The volume also examines Spenser's reputation in other countries, such as France and Japan, and the effects of his influence on writers world-wide.

'This masterly work ought to be The Elizabethan Encyclopedia, and no less.' - Cahiers Elizabethains
Edmund Spenser remains one of Britain's most famous poets. With nearly 700 entries this Encyclopedia provides a comprehensive one-stop reference tool for:
* appreciating Spenser's poetry in the context of his age and our own
* understanding the language, themes and characters of the poems
* easy to find entries arranged by subject.

The Faerie Queene is a scholarly masterpiece that has influenced, inspired, and challenged generations of writers, readers and scholars since its completion in 1596. Hamilton's edition is itself, a masterpiece of scholarship and close reading. It is now the standard edition for all readers of Spenser. The entire work is revised, and the text of The Faerie Queene itself has been freshly edited, the first such edition since the 1930s. This volume also contains additional original material, including a letter to Raleigh, commendatory verses and dedicatory sonnets, chronology of Spenser's life and works and provides a compilation of list of characters and their appearances in The Faerie Queene.

The Faerie Queene is a scholarly masterpiece that has influenced, inspired, and challenged generations of writers, readers and scholars since its completion in 1596. Hamilton's edition is itself, a masterpiece of scholarship and close reading. It is now the standard edition for all readers of Spenser. The entire work is revised, and the text of The Faerie Queene itself has been freshly edited, the first such edition since the 1930s. This volume also contains additional original material, including a letter to Raleigh, commendatory verses and dedicatory sonnets, chronology of Spenser's life and works and provides a compilation of list of characters and their appearances in The Faerie Queene.

A general critical study of Sidney's life and works, first published in 1977: his life in relation to his works and both in relation to his age. In the late 1570s and early 1580s, when the literary scene in England was barren, Sidney emerged as the right man at the right moment to establish a national literature. In his Defence of Poetry he formulated a poetic which showed 'why and how' imaginative literature could be written in Protestant England; and in his poetry and prose, chiefly in Astrophel and Stella and the two versions of The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, he revealed that the English language was, as he claimed, 'indeed capable of any excellent exercising of it'. Through the influence of his personality, his critical insight, and his brilliant achievement in both poetry and prose - which Professor Hamilton in this study establishes through careful analysis - Sidney became the central figure of the English literary Renaissance.

In these essays Northrop Frye addresses a question which preoccupied him throughout his long and distinguished career - the conception of comedy, particularly Shakespearean comedy, and its relation to human experience. In most forms of comedy, and certainly in the New Comedy with which Shakespeare was concerned, the emphasis is on moving towards a climax in which the end incorporates the beginning. Such a climax is a vision of deliverance or expanded energy and freedom. Frye draws on the Aristotelian notion of reversal, or peripeteia, to analyse the three plays commonly known as the 'problem comedies': Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida, showing how they anticipate the romances of Shakespeare's final period.