'This valuable compendium of synoptic essays includes well-measured contributions from leading figures in the field: Richard Rambuss, Richard McCabe, Willy Maley and Hadfield himself … they offer carefully calibrated accounts of the complexity of late Elizabethan Anglo-irish affairs and timely reminders of the need to read literary texts in their own terms. The Companion as a whole gives an excellent sense of Spenser's strange position simultaneously at the very centre and the extreme margin of his culture, with one foot in the court and the other on distant Irish soil.' The Times Literary Supplement