This book provides an authoritative guide to debate on Elizabethan England's poet laureate. It covers key topics and provides histories for all of the primary texts. Some of today's most prominent Spenser scholars offer accounts of debates on the poet, from the Renaissance to the present day. Essential for those producing new research on Spenser.

'Spenser has become ever more appealing as a prospect for study, with present day students more likely to be familiar with at least some parts of The Faerie Queene than they are with Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, which was arguably more celebrated in its immediate period. This makes Bart van Es' excellent collection timely and pertinent to a whole range of Spenser students. Designed in part to allow both an authorative overview of Spenser's critical reception from the sixteenth century until the present and to indicate areas of potential research for those new to the writer, this collection is equally valuable to 'professional' Spenserians by reminding us just how contested Spenser studies are.' - Thomas Healy, The Review of English Studies