Spenser’s Audiences

Abstract

William Oram’s study of the dedicatory sonnets appended to the Faerie Queene gave scholars insight into the audiences Spenser sought. In our subsequent work to understand those audiences, one major problem remains: we still lack full bibliographic studies of the more than twenty surviving manuscripts of Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland, analyses that would establish dates, scribes, provenance, and contexts for each manuscript. A critical bibliography of the View’s manuscripts would tell us much about Spenser’s audiences both after his lifetime and perhaps during his final years as well.