In the introduction to the Critical Companion to Spenser Studies, Bart van Es provides an illuminating assessment of the major trends in Spenser studies from the previous twenty years. Among the most fertile trends he identifies, two in particular strike me as highly relevant in the present context, since they help to frame the observations offered in the present chapter and in this book as a whole. First, the recent past has brought to the surface a new form of interest in Spenser's life and career, in terms that have shifted radically from the earlier ‘biographical’ criticism to embrace more fluid and tentative formulations of what we may call the 'self ' and its construction. Resulting from an encounter or a friction between multiple and conflicting discourses and personae, Spenser's identity as inscribed in his writings appears as always shifting, fluctuating and uncertain, in search of a stability that constantly eludes it. Second, recent years have also seen a resurgence of interest in Spenser's relationship to his sources, where the interrogation has moved away from the conveniently stable idea of ‘source-study’ that characterised criticism of the Variorum era, to develop a more complex manner of envisaging the dialogic interaction between Spenser and his literary sources and models. Spenser's sources are no longer mere quarries for narrative matter, but have claimed for themselves a more fully intertextual, participative role in their engagement with the host-text, and collectively provide not an inert ‘background’, but rather a dynamic ‘forcefield’ within which Spenser's own poetry unfolds.