1. Jan van der Noot, A theatre wherein be represented as wel the miseries & calamities that follow the voluptuous worldlings (London, 1569).
2. The English edition is a translation of the French edition published the year before by John Day. Day also printed the first edition of the work in Dutch, Het theatre oft Toon-neel … (London, 1568).
3. References to Spenser’s translations will be given in the text and taken from The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). The Theatre has attracted considerable attention from scholars interested in tracing the contours of Spenser’s poetic development. Josephine Walters Bennett was among the first to argue that the apocalyptic form of the Theatre gave Spenser the structure for Book I of The Faerie Queene (The Evolution of the “Faerie Queene.” [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942]).
4. Carl J. Rasmussen identified a Calvinist poetics in van der Noot’s commentary (“‘Quietnesse of Minde’: A Theatre for Worldlings as a Protestant Poetics,”, Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 1 [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980], 3–27).
5. On Spenser’s relation to the prophetic tradition of vision poetry, see Thomas Hyde, “Vision, Poetry, and Authority in Spenser,” English Literary Renaissance 13.2 (1983): 127–45.