Spenser: The Faerie Queene, 2nd Edition

This is meant as a reply to certain comments/complaints that the Kindle version of this book has botched the setup of notes. The notes are set at the end of each canto and there is no hyper-link between the notes and the text, per the complaints. I researched here and glad I did. I then checked out a sample of the same book--published by Routledge--at Google Play Books. The Google eBook has the footnotes at the bottom of the page, just like the paperback. Cost is $31.16. Compared with the Kindle price today: $29.99, it's only $1.17 more, and no tax here in Cali. It is a better version, judging from the complaints about the Kindle version.Was going to post this as a reply to those complaints, but the reply feature has since been removed by/from Amazon.Hope the info is helpful to some.

The Faerie Queen itself: This took about 45 hours to finish, it's a mammoth of a book and it is really difficult to follow. Half the time I felt my mind wandering and no comprehending what I'm reading. It is beautifully written however and it being such a classic, I admit that a lot of it is above me. That having been said, I can't but help to give it 5 stars and a marathon that is recommended that you all undertake. Just try and find a good system for reading it to maximize your comprehension and appreciation. I used Shmoop.com for a nice basic stanza-by-stanza summary, along with two kindles open on my monitor, one being endnotes and one being what I was actually reading.This version itself (The KINDLE version, not the hardcover): 2.85 stars. Why? First of all, in the end notes, they're constantly hitting you with "see smith, 1964 mythology etc page xii", you get hundreds and hundreds of those embedded in the middle of paragraphs sometimes which makes it really sloppy looking. It would have been much more clean if they had just put in subscript numbers because that isn't pertinent information, no human being has time to go and find those hundreds of books to flip to whatever page they're talking about. Secondly, there aren't any little numbers in the actual text itself so that you can conveniently push them to quickly read what these guys have to say about it. You have to click twice to go all the way to the glossary, or have another source of this book open somewhere, which is what I did. Either way, it could have been made much easier. Finally, the price, I paid $15 for a 1 month subscription and it's almost $50 for the book in it's entirety.So overall, 5 stars for the book itself as being a brutal-to-finish marathon classic that I can't really bring myself to criticize and this version a 2.85 for the reasons listed above. If you choose to read The Faerie Queen for the first time....God help you

The Kindle edition doesn't even have a good table of contents. It doesn't have links to the individual cantos in the books, only a link to the start of each book.And, it has the annotations at the end of each canto. There should be an internal link on each verse to the corresponding annotations, but there isn't. So you'd have to keep paging back and forth between the text and the annotations, if you have just this one version of the Faerie Queene. Or read the poem on two different devices, one open at the text, the other at the annotations.Also, there should be indications in the text, showing which words have annotations. You can't know if something is explained in the annotations without going to look at them.The annotations are incomplete anyway. For example, what the heck is a "bounch of heares"??? Some kind of helmet ornament, but Hamilton doesn't explain. I didn't find out until later in the poem, when Spenser writes "heare" for hair. So "bounch of heares" = "bunch of hairs".So I have been reading it with 3 editions open: this one, the Hackett version - all 6 books of which can be found online free in PDF format! - and a  version annotated by D L Purves , also available on Kindle.Hamilton's version of Book 1 has the most detailed annotations, but many of them are academic in nature, just speculation, and interfere with enjoying the poem as poetry. For example, Duessa is crowned at one point, and Hamilton comments "Duessa's crowning, which lasts until her defeat ... sixty stanzas later, may allude to the six-year reign of the Catholic Mary Tudor".It gets obnoxious and overbearing. Sometimes his interpretations make accusations against Spenser which aren't warranted by the actual text. For example, Spenser has the Redcrosse Knight say "the man, who ever would deceive/ A gentle lady, or her wrong through might/ Death were too little pain for such a foul despite." Hamilton thinks this "indicates that rape of a lower-class woman would be condoned". And in Book 2, Spenser writes "honour virtue's meed/ Doth bear the fairest flower in honorable seed." Hamilton thinks he means that "honour, which is the reward of valour, flourishes best among the nobility", but it sounds more like a beautiful message that outside honor means more when it corresponds to inside honor.Also, Hamilton can't resist making witty comments here and there which insert modern culture into the text. For example, Gluttony in the poem "spued up his gorge, that all did him deteast". Hamilton comments "he has bulimia nervosa". These kinds of comments distance the reader from the mythic atmosphere Spenser is trying to build.And, Gluttony doesn't have bulimia nervosa anyway! He just eats a lot and throws up so he can eat more. The Hackett PDF version has footnotes, which is useful and makes it easy to read, although Carol Kaske in Book 1 also leaves many puzzling words unexplained. I much preferred the Hackett version of Book 2 to the Hamilton version, because the annotations (by Erik Gray) are pretty complete, but also much more modest than Hamilton's.The  Purves version  has somewhat modernized spelling, which is helpful. And, it has annotations you can click on.The different versions complement each other, so with the help of all three, it's pretty well explained.As for the poem itself - it's very lively! There's a Proem with 4 stanzas; then 5 stanzas describing the Redcrosse Knight, Una and a dwarf who's acting as a porter for Una.Then it starts to rain a lot. They take shelter in a dense wood, and we're off on a rollicking, rapid, incredible epic adventure. It's compressed like poetry, but extended like prose.It's set in "Faerie", but there's almost nothing corresponding to our usual ideas of fairies or Fairyland. No beautiful, quirky little people with wings and wands, so far. It's a place of magic and a spiritual place, with characters from Arthurian romance, Greek and Roman mythology and the Bible, all knit into a unified whole by Spenser's distinctive language and rhyme pattern.It isn't just an adventure story; it's a story about what happens to the souls of the characters, told via allegory, and in sometimes wonderful poetry.It was written in a time of deadly Protestant/Catholic conflict, and Spenser is thoroughly on the Protestant side. So there's a lot of anti-Catholic messaging, which might be offensive to some.I was led to read the Faerie Queene by JK Rowling's book  Troubled Blood , which includes a quote from it at the start of each chapter, as an argument. Thank you, JKR, for the introduction!

I did not think much of the first edition of this in the Longman series and didn't get it. This second edition is a vast improvement. Although I do not agree with the all the editors' textual choices the evidence is always given there on the page. The annotations are excellent though the keen Spenserian will need the Spenser encyclopedia as well. The book is large format, sewn in signatures and opens flat. However, it is only available in paperback. I had my copy bound to match other hardbacks in this series, so getting the best of both worlds. If you prefer a plain text, with a few endnotes, then the Penguin or the Yale hardback version of it, is very good.

A well designed kindle edition making reading the annotations very easy. Indeed it's probably the best designed Kindle edition of poetry that I have read. Hamilton is an almost perfect editor neither skimping on his annotations nor over-burdening the text with their excessive use. Having taken to the age of 64 to read the Faerie Queen I found it unexpectedly readable. I can thoroughly recommend both the poem and the edition.

Extremely well laid out with all explanatory notes on the same page as the text referred to. The notes are copious, clear and very useful to anyone studying the Faerie Queen for examinations or for pleasure. The book is heavy, even as a paperback, so you'll need to read it a desk, but it's much easier to use than any e-book version, or even the old Penguin Classics version.

My older edition (same cover; same editors) is stitched and I have read it about 6 times now and it is still fine and still together.This newer version, however, is so obviously inferior. Already falling apart. Sad that publishers are penny pinching on such a large book.

Very annoyed to find that half of the stanzas are missing from Canto Xii Book 2.