International Spenser Society

Working primarily with paper collage and stop-motion videography, Claire’s apt description of her work as brightly colored, yet “with a feeling of melancholy, uncertainty, doom just under the surface” struck me at once as having unique potential for bringing the Muiopotmos to (fleeting) life.10 After all, among the challenges of a Moviepotmos! would be the visual adaptation of Spenser’s sardonic mode: pleasure moving inexorably towards the pain that pleasure prefigures, as well as flickering intimations of disaster infiltrating even the most edenic spaces, yet all of it still whimsical, fun (because this is a bug poem, not Paradise Lost). Most of these intimations, of course, are hidden in the stinging tails of mock-epic similes, as in the comparison of Clarion’s “breastplate” to the doomed Achilles’s glorious but unavailing shield, or in the echoes of Ovid’s Proserpina and Actaeon haunting the inset aetiology of the butterfly’s colorful wings, while others reveal themselves fleetingly in tonal grace-notes like Clarion’s “curious busie eye” or the “franke lustinesse” of his aeronautical style (57–63, 113–44, 171, 148).

Dan Moss’s rousing pitch for Spenser’s mini-mock epic Muiopotmos comes complete with a trailer for his film version, in collaboration with Claire Krüeger and Spencer (no relation) Kenney: Moviepotmos! www.spenserreview.org/article/id/1...

Bruno is interested in how we move through pleasure gardens, which often had a set itinerary that produced a narrative of some kind. But pleasure gardens were also used as the staging grounds for landscape entertainments, a different proto-filmic form that Bruno does not directly consider. The entertainments staged for Elizabeth’s progresses, and particularly the highly elaborate one staged at Kenilworth in 1575, constructed fully-realized fictional worlds that were activated by the movement of Elizabeth through them, and which were intended, in turn, to move her through both the moving spectacles she encountered and through the pleasure of her own motion. The landscape entertainments layered immersive fictional worlds onto real ones, and part of their power derived from the sensation of a real body occupying or moving simultaneously through real and imaginary spaces. The entertainments operate according to a proto-cinematic logic rather than a theatrical one because of the way they engage the spectator’s body, and the real or imagined experience of the narrativized (and allegorized) space they are moving through. As I argue at length elsewhere, Kenilworth provided both Sidney and Spenser with a potent example of the power of movement through a golden world

Jim Ellis tracks “fairy drama” and “spectacular tableaux” through Elizabethan landscape entertainments, The Faerie Queene, and the early “cinema of attraction”: www.spenserreview.org/article/id/1...

My aim, however, is not so much to propose an adaptation as it is to test what anime might reveal about the structures of allegorical thinking—namely, the “flattening” of allegorical planes into a dense, proliferating symbolic field. With its unique combination of stylistic economy and symbolic intensity, anime can illuminate how Spenser’s allegory moves between the emblematic and the narrative, between the ideal and the grotesque. Anime may enable us, in the end, to look at allegory again, in all its horror and glory.

Yulia Ryzhik also qualifies “cinematic” in the issue title, finding the fantasy, violence, and self-conscious flatness of The Faerie Queene reflected not in film but in serialized anime: www.spenserreview.org/article/id/2...

Joe Moshenska argues that The Faerie Queene—long, episodic, full of characters that are "bundles of trope and convention that somehow coalesce into individualities greater than the sum of their parts"—is more like a TV series: www.spenserreview.org/article/id/2...

Gordon Teskey finds echoes of Spenser's style in Fellini's films: www.spenserreview.org/article/id/2...

Kat Addis compares Artegall to Buster Keaton: www.spenserreview.org/article/id/2...

Jeff Dolven introduces the issue with a storyboard of the first stanza of FQ: www.spenserreview.org/article/id/2...

New at The Spenser Review: CINEMATIC SPENSER!

An issue-length argument that "Spenser is the most cinematic of our early modern poets" (sorry, Shakespeare). They say Hollywood is dying; could a Faerie Queene franchise save the film industry? Watch this space...

www.spenserreview.org

Thanks to those who attended our Inclusive Pedagogy Initiative event on Teaching Race and Place with Spenser! And thanks to our wonderful speakers: Zainab Cheema, Eli Cumings, Claire Eager, and Justin Shaw.

For those unable to make it, the recording should be available soon at spensersociety.org.

We had a great time at Spenser@Random last week talking about this stanza from Book 6 about a confusing 2-on-1 fight. It starts with an awkward insult ("foule womanwronger"!) and ends with a rather courteous simile ("like to that heauenly sparke..."):

Spenser@Random in just a few minutes!

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Our next Spenser@Random is this Thursday! 12pm EST/5pm GMT

Join us for bibliomantic adventures as we spin the digital wheel of destiny and are led by the cyberfates to a randomly selected stanza from The Faerie Queene.

No registration needed; click to join: cam.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?...

Today!

Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise cloud communications.

Our next Spenser@Random is TOMORROW! 12pm EDT/5pm BST.

We'll be Colin Clout-chasing as we read a random stanza from The Shepheardes Calender. Everyone is welcome, including livestock.

Join here: cam.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?...

CFP: ISS-Sponsored Panels at RSA 2026

We're accepting abstracts for:

🤣 Funny Spenser (roundtable)
🚚 Spenserian Translation (panel)
🎭 Spenserian Genres (panel)

Deadline has been *extended* to July 31. Links to CFPs below!

Renaissance Society of America 365 Fifth AvenueRoom 5405New York, NY 10016 • USA

SPENSERIAN GENRES: How did Spenser understand genre? How do his works conform to but also complicate or even obviate traditional generic distinctions? www.rsa.org/forms/FormRe...

Renaissance Society of America 365 Fifth AvenueRoom 5405New York, NY 10016 • USA

SPENSERIAN TRANSLATION: How do words, ideas, characters, objects, and styles get translated, transferred, or transposed in Spenser? www.rsa.org/forms/FormRe...

Renaissance Society of America 365 Fifth AvenueRoom 5405New York, NY 10016 • USA

FUNNY SPENSER: What can an appreciation of Spenser’s comic sensibility help us see in the more sage and serious aspects of his work? www.rsa.org/forms/FormRe...

CFP: ISS-Sponsored Panels at RSA 2026

We're accepting abstracts for:

🤣 Funny Spenser (roundtable)
🚚 Spenserian Translation (panel)
🎭 Spenserian Genres (panel)

Deadline has been *extended* to July 31. Links to CFPs below!

We sadly need to cancel today’s Spenser@Random. Apologies to all who have registered, and we hope to reconvene randomly soon!

Spenser@Random returns tomorrow! Thursday, June 26, at 12pm EDT/5pm BST. Join us as we spin the digital wheel of destiny and are led by the cyberfates to a randomly selected section from The Shepheardes Calendar!

Register here: cam.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?...

Registration link for THE OCCASION OF THE MACLEAN now live!

stanford.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

🚨🚨🚨 ATTENTION: starting soon! 🚨🚨🚨

SPENSER IN AN AGE OF DISTRACTION, our Inclusive Pedagogy Initiative event, is tomorrow! Register here: binghamton.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Happy St. George’s Day!

Seize the occasion and catch up on episodes of OCCASION OF THE SEASON here: occasionoftheseason.substack.com/podcast

SAVE THE DATE! 
ISS AGM / Maclean Event
Wednesday 21 May, 9am PST/12pm EST/5pm BST

Join us to celebrate a year of The Shepheardes Calender Podcast, hosted by Kat Addis.

Featuring producers & poets from behind the scenes, as well as a few friends of the pod.

Registration link coming soon!

Join us on April 24 for a lively discussion of how teaching Spenser can solve the crisis of attention in the classroom! Or at least distract us from other crises. Register here: binghamton.zoom.us/meeting/regi...