Spenser’s Amoretti

This book offers substantial revision of previous critical accounts of Spenser’s sonnet sequence, the Amoretti.

The principal concerns in this study are to demonstrate the witty and playful qualities of Spenser’s poetry, to examine his manipulation of certain literary conventions – the attitude of the lover to his mistress, for example, and the attitude of the writer to his subject – and to place the Amoretti in the context of other Elizabethan sonnet sequences, including those of Sidney and Shakespeare.