This student edition is based on the first published text and offers an authoritative introduction, discussing the View's reception, relating it to Spenser's corpus as a whole, and summarising recent scholarship.

Andrew Hadfield is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and the author of Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (1994). He and Willy Maley co-edited Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534-1660 (1993), with Brendan Bradshaw.

Willy Maley is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Apart from his collaborative volume with Maley and Bradshaw, he is also the author of Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (1997) and A Spenser Chronology (1994).