Queen ELIZABETH I made him England's poet laureate. But the complete works of Edmund Spenser -- whose epic poem, "The Faerie Queene," so dazzled the monarch -- are hard to find these days.
Now, thanks to Oxford University Press, a coterie of Spenserian scholars and a $150,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an updated collection of the English master's prose and poetry is in the works.
Joseph F. Loewenstein, a Renaissance literature expert at Washington University in St. Louis, is leading a team of graduate and undergraduate students to compile, edit, annotate and digitize Spenser's complete oeuvre, including "The Faerie Queene," which vaulted him into the pantheon of English literature.
"Edmund Spenser is, along with William Shakespeare and John Milton, one of the three most influential writers of the English Renaissance," notes Katherine Eggert, president of the International Spenser Society and a professor at the University of Colorado. " 'The Faerie Queene' was on Shakespeare's mind when he wrote 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and paved the way for 'Paradise Lost.' "
But Spenser goes "largely unread today," in part because of the "difficulty of his language, which -- like James Joyce's later on -- not only bristles with erudition but also engages in brilliant wordplay, employing archaic words and inventing new ones."
Consider this stanza from "The Shepheardes Calender":
To kerke the narre from God more farre,
Has bene an old-sayd sawe;
And he that strives to touche a starre
Oft stombles at a strawe.
Loewenstein first pitched the Spenser project to Oxford in 1999, the 400th anniversary of Spenser's death, along with colleagues Patrick Cheney at Pennsylvania State University and David Lee Miller at the University of South Carolina. Their proposal envisions it as the "standard edition for the century to come." The first of three volumes of the print edition and a substantial portion of the Spenser Archive are expected to be ready by 2010.
Run softly, sweet Thames, until their work is done.
Kristina Lindgren
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Selznick's use of visuals: visionary
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Brian SELZNICK designed his superb children's book "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" using a simple strategy: Illustrations wouldn't be in service to the prose but would share equally in the storytelling. Throughout the book, prose pages give way to image sequences that pick up the narrative. Our reviewer, Sonja Bolle, called the book "cinematic" in its approach to the life of an orphan living in a Paris train station.
