Richard Danson Brown. 1999. 'The New Poet': Novelty and Tradition in Spenser's 'Complaints'. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999. x + 293 pp. ISBN 0-85323-803-0 £32 hb. ISBN 0-85323-813-8 £14.95 pb.

1. Edmund Spenser was fond of introductions. The 'new poet' was portentously thrust into the public gaze in the preface to the 1579 Shepheardes Calender - a text in which each eclogue was accompanied by a preparatory 'argument'. The 1590 Faerie Queene too came with an attached 'Letter of the Authors' explaining and justifying the project, each of its individual books opened with an introductory 'Proem', and each of its cantos was preceded by a verse summary. In the printer's preface to the 1591 Complaints, Spenser was once more heralded as the 'new poet', and for many of the poems in that volume the author himself supplied still further introductions. The poet and his editors evidently felt that the public would benefit from the guiding hand of a knowledgeable insider - a person who, as The Shepheardes Calender's annotator puts it, 'by meanes of some familiar acquaintaunce' was 'made privie to his counsell and secret meaning'.

2. Both Elizabeth Heale and Richard Danson Brown are concerned with the task of introducing a new poet. Heale's book has for some time performed that role for the reader of Spenser's epic. It is (its publishers remind us) 'the only convenient and up-to-date guide to Spenser's poem', and has for over a decade offered a helping hand to the undergraduate who has read (or sometimes neglected to read) The Faerie Queene. The publishers of Brown's work are similarly insistent on its monopoly position - this time as the only up-to-date examination of the Complaints collection. Like Heale, Brown aims to provide an overview of critical perspectives on Spenser's volume. Beyond this, however, he also argues that the Complaints ought themselves to be regarded as an introduction to a 'new poet' - not by means of prose commentary, but as a 'poetics in practice'.

3. The shorter of these texts is tried and tested. Tackling The Faerie Queene's books in numerical order, Heale's Reader's Guide provides an accessible account of this often daunting poem. Heale astutely avoids the kind of book-by-book beauty pageant that sometimes mars such an approach - instead assessing each of Spenser's 'legends' on its own terms. As well as providing the familiar explication of Book I's debts to Revelation, for example, she also offers a fresh and stimulating account of the less obviously purposeful Book IV, especially in relation to Chaucer. Book V, for long a blind-spot of critics otherwise appreciative of Spenser's poem, is also admirably set out as a complex and questioning exploration of the nature of justice. Heale's account is consistently illuminating, succeeding in both of its avowed aims: orientating the reader who is new to the poem and equipping him or her for an ongoing exploration.

4. While there are a number of new sections (including a very good general introduction on 'narration and art'), and while the footnotes and bibliography have been updated, there is little that will surprise the reader who knows the book in its earlier version. Indeed, the back-cover note about the work's distinction as 'the only convenient and up-to-date guide to Spenser's poem' is itself a repetition of the claims to be found on the '87 edition. The assertion that this is a 'substantially revised' work is something of an overstatement. Given the merits of Heale's original survey this is no real threat to its status amongst first-time readers of the poem. Yet, considering the valuable work done by a number of recent critics (Hadfield, McCabe, Helgerson, and Gless to name but a few), it might also be looked upon as a missed opportunity.

5. The absence of new material is felt most strongly in Heale's treatment of the political context of the poem. It would have been good to see this territory - which has proved very fruitful in recent years -made more accessible to the non-specialist. To devote only one sentence of a chapter on 'The Mutabilitie Cantos' to their relevance to the situation in Ireland, for example, must now be seen as inadequate. More fundamentally, the structure of Heale's book itself enforces a rather dated perspective on the poem. A book-by-book approach appears less well-suited to an analysis of stylistic politics than it is to the interpretation of allegory or the enumeration of sources. Work on the relationship between The Faerie Queene and England's monarch is also difficult to present convincingly by means of the current format. This said, Heale's work remains a very valuable overview, commendable for its consistent attention to textual detail. That textual sensitivity, as much as anything else, will sustain its role as a springboard into further explorations of the poem.

6. As a springboard for further study, Brown's 'The New Poet' also has considerable virtues. Simply by producing a book-length study, the author is likely to have stimulated interest in the Complaints. By highlighting Spenser's use of the complaint mode as a means of depicting not just the instability of the external world but also the fractures within poetry itself, he has also isolated an important strand running through the collection.

7. Part One of Brown's study, dealing with Spenser's translations (Virgil's Gnat and the Ruines of Rome), is elegant, informative and full of sound judgement. Brown's attention to detail (both linguistic and ideological) is commendable. His work is excellent in its analysis of what he terms the act of 'creative appropriation'. Brown's focus on the technical qualities of Spenser's verse, showing how and why these details are significant in the poet's rendition of earlier works, is certain to enrich the reader's appreciation of what remain undervalued poems.

8. Part Two is concerned with Spenser's original compositions: The Ruines of Time, The Teares of the Muses, Mother Hubberds Tale, and Muiopotmos. The first of these functions as the fulcrum of Brown's overall argument. Positioning the Ruines as a 'deliberately transitional' text, Brown illustrates the way in which the poem (in both its form and content) enacts a conflict between 'traditional complaint' and a 'new poetry' (110). In contrast to what he has characterised as Du Bellay's confidence in poetry as a preserver of the past (79), he finds in Spenser's own complaint a poetry of instability which responds to 'the complex stimuli of a 'sinfull world'' (132). In The Ruines of Time these two perspectives exert opposing pressures which cause the structure of the poem itself to buckle.

9. In Brown's view it is a Calvinist, profoundly sceptical, world-vision which forces its way into the traditional landscape of the complaint narrative. For him it is the conflict between an old form and Spenser's new thinking which generates an innovative poetics. As an argument about the Ruines of Time itself this reading has considerable merit. Yet as a paradigm for conflict within other works in the collection, and especially as a staging post in a 'speculative reconstruction of the poems' chronology' (32), it also presents a number of problems.

10. The ensuing chapters on The Teares of the Muses, Mother Hubberds Tale, and Muiopotmos are all more vulnerable to attack than those of the first half of this study. The chronological development that Brown charts often seems like wishful thinking. The mere assertion, for example, that (in spite of Spenser's own claims) there are 'strong internal grounds' (175) for tracing the origins of Mother Hubberds Tale to the late 1580s instead of the late 1570s is not, as it stands, convincing.

11. Brown's emphasis on diachronic change also forces him into a series of overly schematic oppositions: between a confident Du Bellay and a sceptical Spenser; between 'humanist' and 'Christian' poetry; and between Sidney's '" golden didactic Art' and a new 'realistic mimesis' (254). Most fundamental is his depiction of the shift between 'Traditional Christianity' (258) and Calvinism. Yet the contention that 'if human life is predicated on a sin which can only be cleansed by an inscrutable divine grace, then traditional didactic and narrative strategies become meaningless' (263), whilst daring, is also insufficiently nuanced.

12. The scholarly caution that characterised Part One of Brown's study is too often set aside in the second part of his work. In particular, Brown's 'premise' that the protagonists of Mother Hubberds Tale (the Fox and Ape) 'are amoral poets' (184) must be treated with scepticism. His suggestion that episodes such as the pair's employment as shepherds support 'their characterization as amoral poets' (192) is not backed up by sufficient textual evidence. Brown's argument that the 'central conclusion' of the poem 'is that poetry itself is amoral' lacks weight as a result.

13. Without doubt, Brown's thesis draws out much that is of significance in these texts. The Fox and the Ape are certainly taletellers; indeed the fable's alternative title (the rhetorical figure 'prosopopoia') explicitly encourages a creative tension between the poet's fictions and those of his roguish protagonists. What's missing is perhaps only a more open acknowledgement of conflicting objectives - not just those of Spenser, but also those of the thinkers to whom the poet was responding.

14. Despite (and indeed because of) his habitual self-explication, Spenser remains an engagingly elusive poet. Heale's Guide is admirable for its insistence on this quality; Brown's 'The New Poet' occasionally forgets it. Both works, however, are welcome new arrivals. They are to be commended above all for treating Spenser's respective volumes in their entirety. In so doing they force us to look again at the range of Spenser's output. In each of The Faerie Queene's books, and in each of the Complaints volume's poems, the poet reintroduces himself to his audience - adding to, but also changing what went before. It is this that makes Spenser forever 'the new poet'.