Spenser's Faerie Queene (Folio Society Limited Edition)

SPENSER, Edmund (ed. Thomas J. Wise; illus. Walter Crane). Spenser's Faerie Queene: A Poem in Six Books, with the Fragment Mutabilitie. London: The Folio Society, 2011. 3 vols.

Large Quarto. All three volumes bound in full white Nigerian goatskin, blocked in gold to covers and spines with a design based on Walter Crane's original edition. Top edge gilt. White ribbon markers. Printed on watermarked laid paper. 1,712 pp. total across three volumes. 88 large illustrations and 135 illustrative head- and tail-pieces by Walter Crane throughout. Housed on a sliding tray within a wooden slipcase covered in Toile Vendôme silk. Accompanying pamphlet by Alan Stewart. Facsimile limited edition, reproduced from the 1897 George Allen edition. Limited to 1,000 numbered copies, this being number 69.

Edmund Spenser (c.1552–1599) set out, in The Faerie Queene, to write an English equivalent to Virgil's Aeneid — an epic that would connect Tudor England to a heroic mythological past, in Spenser's case the age of King Arthur, in the way that Virgil had connected Rome to the fall of Troy. Where Virgil glorified the Caesars, Spenser glorified Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, casting her throughout the poem's elaborate allegorical structure in multiple guises — a warrior maiden, a virtuous paragon, the embodiment of Protestant England itself. He read portions of the poem to the Queen in 1589 and was rewarded with an annual pension of £50. The first three books were published in 1590, the next three in 1596; Spenser died in 1599 with only six of his planned twelve books completed, leaving the fragmentary "Cantos of Mutabilitie" as the poem's unfinished close.

The result is the longest poem in the English language and, in the estimation of critics from the seventeenth century onward, among its greatest: a chivalric romance populated by knights each embodying a particular virtue — Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, Courtesy — who undertake quests that are simultaneously adventure narrative, moral allegory, and political commentary on the England of Spenser's own moment. James Montgomery called it "the noblest allegorical poem in our language — indeed the noblest allegorical poem in the world."

Walter Crane (1845–1915) was already an established illustrator, painter, and wood engraver — a friend and collaborator of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, and one of the central figures of the Arts and Crafts movement in book design — when he undertook what became his most ambitious project: the illustration and decoration of Spenser's epic for George Allen's 1897 edition. He produced eighty-eight large illustrations and one hundred and thirty-five head- and tail-pieces, overseeing every aspect of the volumes' production, and the result is consistently ranked among the finest achievements of Arts and Crafts book illustration — a body of work in which Crane's decorative line, his sense of pattern, and his deep engagement with medieval and Renaissance visual sources combine to produce images fully worthy of Spenser's poem.

This Folio Society facsimile, limited to 1,000 numbered copies, reproduces the complete 1897 edition with a fidelity that extends to the binding itself: full Nigerian goatskin blocked in gold with a design derived from Crane's own decorative scheme, presented in a wooden slipcase covered in Toile Vendôme silk whose colour shifts subtly with the angle of light — a detail collectors have long remarked upon as one of the most distinctive touches in the entire Folio Society limited edition programme.

Near fine. Some foxing to edges of volumes, confined to the text block edges and page extremities - not effecting any of the contents. Otherwise fine throughout; clean and bright. A magnificent set.

Please note: This is a very large and extremely heavy three-volume set. Additional postage costs may apply. Please contact us for a shipping quote before purchase.

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Catalogue Number: HH000661