Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, written in a stanza form he invented and which bears his name, was published in two installments in 1590 and 1596. An eight-book Arthurian epic, whose intertwined quest narratives celebrate the principal moral virtues, it was admired by Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats as an achievement to rank with Paradise Lost, while Yeats published, in 1902, a selection of Spenser’s work with a long, brilliant, perverse introduction. On Spenser’s death in 1599, Westminster Abbey was the obvious place to put him, next to Chaucer’s grave, with a monumental inscription on the wall, hailing him “prince of poets.” He is now, I suspect, the great unread poet of the Elizabethan age. Despite the pioneering advocacy of C. S. Lewis (“To read him is to grow in mental health”) and the existence of excellent modern editions, his deliberately archaic style, his copiousness, his leisurely pace, his allegorical method, his Christian faith, his topical references to the political and ecclesiastical controversies of the day are all deterrents. (Yeats, while admiring his symbolism, found the allegory unreal, concluding that “He had no deep moral or religious life.”) Yet if we really want to understand the literary milieu of the mid-sixteenth century, we cannot ignore him.

Andrew Hadfield, a scholar well-known for his work on Shakespeare and Renaissance political thought, has produced a carefully researched biography. Spenser’s life is patchily documented—we would like to know more about his two wives and his children—but its