A Review on the Spenser Newsletters.
83・30 Edmund Spenser 'Epithalamion'．
With an Introduction and Notes by Motohiro Kisaichi．
Kyoto：Yamaguchi Shoten，1982. iv＋116 pp．
This carefully edited and beautifully printed litt1e volume bears witness to the continuing Japanese interest in Spenser. Professor Motohiro Kisaichi, of Konan Women's University in Kobe，studied
Epithalamion under the guidance of Alastair Fowler, who provides a brief preface.
A very full introduction includes full discussion of the poem's numerical and "topomorphic" aspects（to borrow RØstvig's useful term）；the notes contain information about mythological and biographical allusions（in the manner of Enid Welsford's 1967 edition）with extensive commentary on the vocabulary and syntax. Although this edition was designed for Japanese readers, it would probably be equally useful for American undergraduates，for whom Sp's language and feeling for ritual may be no less foreign．
【D．C．】
A Letter by Professor Hamilton
2 June 1988
Professor Motohiro Kisaichi
English Department
Konan Women's University
Morikitacho，Higashinada
Kobe．
Dear Professor Kisaichi，
Now that I have returned from my lecture tour and caught up with my lectures and correspondence, I have had the pleasure of reading through your most helpful edition of Spenser's Epithalamion. Students in Japan should be well served by your annotations, and so will my students in Canada, for I shall make the edition available to them when we study the poem. I endorse Alastair Fowler's comment that modern readers need a meticulous examination of individual lines. There are only a few lines on which you don't comment. I can't recall seeing before the charts you include−but I leave all structural matters to my good friend, Kent Hieatt．
For your introduction, I believe you may be interested in the article in The Spenser Encyclopedia on the poem by Germaine Warkentin. When I return,
I hope I remember to send you a copy. And if I should forget. I trust that you will remind me. There is also a Yale University Press edition of Spenser's minor poems that would interest you for its commentary on the Epithalamion. That should appear this autumn．
l want to thank you also for being such an excellent host to Mary and myself. Our visit with you to the Silver Temple（whose name escapes me），Heian Shrine and lunch at that superb restaurant made a most memorable day．
Sincerely，
A．C．Hamilton
*Professor A・C・Hamilton is the editor of Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene.
Longman Annotated English Poets (1977).
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