⁶ Paradoxically, we possess no book-length study of Spenser and Chaucer, but see A. Kent Hieatt, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton: Mythopoeic Continuities and Transformations (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 1975). Krier in Refiguring Chaucer supplies a recent and full bibliography for Chaucer in the Renaissance more broadly, including Spenser. The standard monograph remains Alice Miskimin, The Renaissance Chaucer (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975).

⁷ In ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106, Spenser’s National Epic, and Counter-Petrarchism’, English Literary Renaissance 31 (2001), 331–64, I survey commentary on the Shakespeare—Spenser connection from the sixteenth through the twenty-first centuries.

⁸ This critical principle remains understudied, playing no part in the major books on Shakespeare and Chaucer: Ann Thompson, Shakespeare’s Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1978); and E. Talbot Donaldson, The Swan at the Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985). Still, we may find evidence of the principle’s operation. For instance, James P. Bednarz, ‘Imitations of Spenser in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Renaissance Drama 14 (1983), 79–102, sees Shakespeare using Spenser to mediate Chaucer in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As Bednarz remarks, Bottom’s dream shares a ‘common literary genealogy’ with Arthur’s dream of Gloriana in Book I, canto 9, of The Faerie Queene, and both have their ‘common source’ in Sir Thopas’ dream in The Canterbury Tales (100–1): ‘Shakespeare returns [Chaucer’s] … dream of Sir Thopas to its original low mimetic register, deflating Spenser’s elevation, but their dreams were subjected to similar pressures and inevitably ended in the same perplexity’ (101).