Spenser’s Afterlives from Shakespeare to Milton: The Faerie Queene as Intertextual Environment examines Spenser’s longest poem from the fresh perspectives of reader-response criticism, ecocriticism, animal studies, and actor-network theory. Jennifer Vaught reveals how Spenser’s early readers from 1590-1660 were highly attentive to ecological features of The Faerie Queene such as animals, plants, landscapes, and the elements of earth, air, fire, and water. She illustrates that Spenser’s early readers not only interpreted Mother Hubberds Tale in The Complaints as beast satire but The Faerie Queene as satirical as well. This study explores how Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, and Milton among many others appropriated Spenser’s long and shorter poems for creating comedy, parody, and satire. Their appropriations, which were widely influential on communities of readers, writers, and intertextual networks from 1590–1660, left an abiding impression of Spenser as a biting satirist. Spenser’s Afterlife from Shakespeare to Milton: The Faerie Queene as Intertextual Environment is the first study to combine the reception history of The Faerie Queene with ecocriticism, animal studies, and posthumanist tenets of vital materialism and the power of things. This poem functions as a powerful, nonhuman agent that transforms how readers respond to their environments. The Faerie Queene and its afterlives move readers to perceive flaws in political, social, and religious figureheads and institutions to envision better ones.
