In our own day, yet another Spenser has come to the fore. Recent scholars have been freshly excited by the fact that Spenser spent much of his adult life in Ireland as a colonial administrator, and was associated with some harsh episodes of repression. His unflinchingly severe manual on how Ireland might be reduced into subjection, the posthumously published A View of the Present State of Ireland, suddenly became a key text.  Its bitter remedies were read back into The Faerie Queene, and this had the effect of raising dramatically the stock of the previously neglected Book V, which now emerged as an idealised (from an English perspective) allegory of colonial subjugation.

When the biographical tradition surrounding a writer shows such extreme variety, one reason is normally that the documentary record is meagre. Fewness of authentic life-records translates readily into greater scope for biographical interpretation. This is certainly the case with Spenser — we have no personal letters, no major literary manuscripts in his own hand, and even the documentary trail which his official life in Ireland would have produced was destroyed in the troubles of the early 20th century. But it is also the case with Spenser — and Hadfield brings this out very well — that the relationship between the life and work is teasing and oblique. The man slips easily away from the pages of his poems.

Hadfield's biography assembles everything we know, and perhaps are ever likely to know, about Spenser. It is lavishly footnoted, so those readers who are minded to do so can trace the questions which Hadfield summarises back to their source. There are some nice, vivid touches — for instance, the findings of recent archaeological work on the site of Spenser's Irish residence, Kilcolman, are well exploited. There are also a few slips — it undermines the reader's confidence to be told that the Greek writer Lucian is "one of the most humorous and witty of Latin authors". But the main problem is that Hadfield produces no clear picture of Spenser. He discusses the impediments to the creation of such an image with candour.  But this smacks of trying to pass off the restatement of a problem as its solution. This book is perhaps best regarded as a storehouse or a quarry of materials for the life of Spenser, which will await a future biographer of greater imaginative power.