Abstract
‘Spencer is ruined’ remarked John Weever in 1599 in an epigram lamenting the poet’s death. The full text was quoted by H. S. V. Jones in 1930 in A Spenser Handbook in the short chapter entitled ‘Complaints’ (74):
Colin’s gone home, the glorie of his clime, The Muses Mirrour, and the Shepheards Saint; Spencer is ruined, of our latter time The fairest mine, Faëries foulest want: Then his Time-ruines did our ruine show, Which by his ruine we untimely know: Spencer therfore thy Ruines were cal’d in, Too soone to sorrow least we should begin.
Jones’s purpose in quoting Weever is indicative of the prevailing critical concerns of the day, concems that were heavily informed by the historicist methodology of Edwin Greenlaw’s Studies in Spenser’s Historical Allegory (1932) and the bibliographical and generic suppositions of Harold Stein’s Studies in Spenser’s Complaints (1934)—the latter being the first, and by 1947 still the only, monograph wholly devoted to the Complaints (Radcliffe 1996, 163–8).
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Further reading
Bernard, J. D. 1989. Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, R. D. 1999. ‘The New Poet’: Novelty and Tradition in Spenser’s Complaints, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Cheney, D. ‘Spenser’s Fortieth Birthday and Related Fictions’, SSt 4 (1984 for 1983), 3–31.
Cheney, P. 1993. Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career, Toronto: University of Toronto P.
Gibbs, D. 1990. Spenser’s ‘Amorett’: A Critical Study, Brookfield: Scolar P.
Hieatt, A. K. 1960. Short Time’s Endless Monument, Port Washington NY: Kennikat.
Hoffman, N. J. 1977. Spenser’s Pastorals: ‘The Shepheardes Calender’ and ‘Colin Clout’, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Johnson, W. C. 1990. Spenser’s ‘Amoretti’: Analogies of Love, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
Kay, D. 1990. Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton, Oxford: Clarendon P.
Loewenstein, J. F. 1986. ‘Echo’s Ring: Orpheus and Spenser’s Career’, ELR 16: 287–302.
MacArthur, J. H. 1989. Critical Contexts of Sidney’s ‘Astrophil and Stella’ and Spenser’s ‘Amoretti’, Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria.
McCabe, R. A. 1993. ‘Edmund Spenser: Poet of Exile’, 1991 Lectures and Memoirs, Proceedings of the British Academy, 80: 73–103.
—. 2002. Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pigman, G. W. 1985. III, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rasmussen, C. J. 1981. ‘“How Weak Be the Passions of Woefulness”: Spenser’s Ruines of Time’, SSt 2: 159–81.
Shore, D. R. 1985. Spenser and the Poetics of Pastoral: A Study of the World of Colin Clout, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Smith, H. 1961. ‘The Use of Conventions in Spenser’s Minor Poems’, in W. Nelson, ed., Form and Convention in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser, New York: Columbia University Press, 122–45
Stein, H. 1934. Studies in Spenser’s ‘Complaints’, New York: Oxford University Press.
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© 2006 Richard A. McCabe
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McCabe, R.A. (2006). Shorter Verse Published 1590–95. In: van Es, B. (eds) A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies. Palgrave Advances. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524569_9
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