ABSTRACT
Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-65) left Gloucester Hall, Oxford, without a degree. He is the most exact and probably the best of Spenser's early critics, and his reputation as a Spenserian is undiminished by any later enterprise. Ben Jonson, in his Epigram to my Muse, the Lady Digby, on her Husband . . . hopes that Sir Kenelm will look on his verses '(next to Spenser's noble booke)/And praise them too.' The finest tribute to Digby's criticism comes, however, in Thomas May's lines on the Observations (B.M. MS. Add. 25303, fol. 187). The Discourse is addressed to May and must I think predate the Observations, dated 1628 and addressed to Sir Edward Stradling. The most elaborate commentary on the Observations is provided by Alastair Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time (1964), pp. 266 ff. Digby's copy of the 1617 Folio is now in Wellesley College Library. Unfortunately, it contains no marginalia, but on the blank opposite the title-page Digby has transcribed Alabaster's obituary epigram.
