This thesis is a study of the popularity of Edmund Spenser as revealed by allusion and criticism between the years 1600 to 1850. An appendix has been added showing .the extent of Spenser study and scholarship in leading North American universities today. I have shown that Spenser was highly regarded by the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers; was attacked by the neo-classicists; was praised without qualification by the romantics and with qualification by the later romantics; and was severely attacked by the early Victorians. Spenser's popularity, I believe, has declined not among writers but among readers, reaching its lowest point at the time of the romantics, and not regaining strength since. The appendix contains the results of a questionnaire, sent to leading universities, concerning Spenser study and scholarship. In these institutions Spenser receives only a small fraction of the attention that is paid to Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. In my opinion, the results reveal the fact that mainly because of student apathy towards him, universities are not fostering a study of Spenser. On the whole, I think I have shown that the works of Edmund Spenser have become the property of writers and of a small group of interested scholars. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

published_or_final_version / Chinese Historical Studies / Master / Master of Arts

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History in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene Book V and his View of the Present State of Ireland reflects the basic assumptions and characteristics of Elizabethan territorial history, a form observed in the geographic basis of chorography, in the metaphoric expression of the British past, and in the contemporary English enthusiasm for state, county, and city histories. William Lambarde's A Perambulation of Kent, the earliest English model for Spenser's territorial history, employs the antiquary's tentative empirical methodology in a study of sources newly freed of myth, legend, and unreliable antiquity. Accepting the developmental historical perspective of the territorial historians, Spenser in his View discusses the susceptibility of certain positive laws to the ravages of time and circumstance and argues for a reformation of those laws and their administration in Ireland. Similarly, justice in book V is a virtue of reformation that requires a "physician" who diagnoses, cures, and prescribes a diet of new, well-ordered laws for the patient-state, the primary danger to "recural" existing in laws abrogated or perverted since their inception. While accepting the workings of divine and natural law in history, Spenser focuses on the justiciar's secular role in terms of political more than providential causation, legal more than moral justice, and practical more than theoretical law. As England's first justiciar Artegall presents a righteous response to original tyranny in a prelegal society and acquits himself on the charges of "unmanly guile" and "reproachful cruelty" by representing human justice based on laws responsive to season. In the historical domains of Book V Arthur's presence exemplifies providence in human justice, Artegall's actions man's secular control over responsive lawmaking and territorial rebellion, and Radigund's tale the imposition of natural law on justice. The legal and topical content of Book V's poetic journeys suggest the territorial historian's "perambulation" in which Spenser's heroes learn the history of each canto's territory before a reforming justice can operate. As feigned antique history merges with topical event, the Legend of Justice becomes an innovative, optimistic, and uniquely Elizabethan glimpse of new territory.

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