Chapter I: Introduction: I

In these volumes I seek to present a true text of the _Faerie Queene_, founded upon a fresh collation of the Quartos of 1590 and 1596 and the Folio of 1609. I shall call these editions by their dates for short.

The fragmentary Seventh Book appeared first in 1609: for the rest the text is based on 1596. Some typographical peculiarities--long s, &, ô, and superscribed m and n (e.g. frõ, whẽ)--have not been reproduced, but noted only where they first occur. With these exceptions, the readings of 1596 if not adopted in the text are recorded in the notes; so that text and notes together amount, in effect, to a complete reprint of 1596. No such completeness has been attempted in recording variants from 1590 and 1609. But all verbal differences are recorded, and all differences of punctuation that imply a different view of the meaning. Mere changes of spelling that answer to no change of pronunciation are, as a rule, ignored; but I have recorded such differences of spelling as seemed likely to interest students of Elizabethan phonology, grammar, and usage. The evidence of these variants must be used with caution in view of Spenser’s deliberate archaism. Yet I believe that they have some value. I give one instance in each kind:--

1. A fluid _e_-sound is indicated by the variants ‘seeldome’ 1590, ‘seldome’ 1596, ‘sildom’ 1609, at I. iv. 23, l. 5.

2. Syllabic _-es_ in possessives and plurals, which still lingered in the early fifteen-nineties, has grown quite strange to the editor of 1609. To this point I shall return.

3. The conjunctions ‘since’ and ‘sith’ are used indifferently in 1590 and 1596, choice of one or other form being determined by euphony alone. But 1609 makes a deliberate, though not quite consistent, attempt to appropriate ‘since’ to the temporal, ‘sith’ to the causal sense. The attempt unfortunately did not avail to save the more primitive form.

I have departed from the punctuation of 1596 only where it seemed likely to puzzle or mislead a modern reader. These departures, which are all recorded, are not very numerous. Spenser’s punctuation, though by no means sacrosanct, is less arbitrary than might at first appear; but, as Mr. Gregory Smith says of the punctuation of Addison, it has a rhetorical rather than a logical value. We feel its force best when we read the poem aloud. Two peculiarities are so common that the reader may be warned of them here. One is the absence of punctuation with vocatives: the other is the single comma after qualifying phrases. With this warning I leave these peculiarities, as a rule, unchanged.

In the treatment of capitals and in the distribution of roman and italic type I have followed the same principle of adhering, wherever possible, to the original text.

I have regularized the spelling of proper names wherever the variation seemed to be due to the printer rather than the poet. And this is generally the case with double letters. But for many variations in proper names Spenser was himself responsible. He varied them sometimes for the sake of the metre, as _Serena_, _Serene_; or of the rhyme, as _Florimell_, _Florimele_. In two instances he seems actually to have wavered or changed his mind. _Braggadocchio’s_ name is generally spelt thus in Book II; in Books III and IV it varies; in V. iii it is regularly _Braggadochio_. So we generally find _Arthegall_ in Book III, but _Artegall_ regularly in Book V; 1609, however, returns to _Arthegall_.

II.

Aiming not at a reprint but a true text, I have not hesitated to depart from 1596 wherever I believed it to be in error and the error the printer’s. But it is no part of an editor’s duty to correct, though he may indicate, mistakes made by the author himself. There are many such in the _Faerie Queene_.

(1) There are mistakes of fact, of literary allusion, of quantity in classical names, hardly to be avoided by a poet writing far from libraries.

(2) There are confusions of personages, or of names of personages, within the poem itself. Sir _Guyon_ is confused with the _Redcrosse Knight_ in III. ii. 4, and with Prince _Arthur_ in II. viii. 48 (but not in 1609); _Æmylia_ with _Pœana_ in IV. ix. Arg.; _Calepine_ with _Calidore_ in VI. vi. 17; while over _Serena_ Spenser’s confusion becomes comical--he calls her _Crispina_ in VI. iii. 23,[1] and _Matilda_ in VI. v. Arg.

(3) Some lines are hypermetrical; some are short by a foot; and there are two or three broken lines. One of these last (III. iv. 39, l. 7) is certainly intentional, and all may be so; the supposed example of Virgil may have influenced Spenser in this.

(4) Imperfect rhymes and concords are numerous, especially in Books IV, V, and VI.

(5) There is one form of imperfect rhyme so singular as to deserve a fuller discussion. Its nature will be best seen in an example:--

‘Like two faire marble pillours they were seene,
Which doe the temple of the Gods support, (2)
Whom all the people decke with girlands greene,
And honour in their festiuall resort; (4)
Those same with stately grace, and princely port (5)
She taught to tread, when she her selfe would grace,
But with the wooddie Nymphes when she did play, (7)
Or when the flying Libbard she did chace,
She could them nimbly moue, and after fly apace.’

(II. iii. 28.)

Here ‘play’ in l. 7 is rhymed to ‘support’, ‘resort’, ‘port’: ‘sport’ is the obvious correction. There are, in all, nine instances of this singularity in the _Faerie Queene_. I subjoin them all, citing the rhyme-words only: the number following each word shows the line that it ends:--

1. day (2), dismay (4), way (5), chace (7) (II. ii. 7)
2. make (6), bold (8), told (9) (II. ii. 42)
3. support (2), resort (4), port (5), play (7) (II. iii. 28)
4. leaue (2), cleaue (4), bereaue (5), vpreare (7) (II. viii. 29)
5. spyde (6), law (8), draw (9) (III. vi. 40)
6. enclose (2), plaine (4), Maine (5), complaine (7) (III. vii. 34)
7. times (6), equipage (8), parentage (9) (IV. xi. 17)
8. place (2), aread (4), dread (5), read (7) (V. Proem 11)
9. desyre (2), entyre (4), yre (5), meed (7) (V. xi. 61)

In every case the correction is obvious: ‘chace’ should be ‘pray’ (i.e. prey); ‘make’, ‘hold’; ‘play’, ‘sport’; ‘vpreare’, ‘vpheaue’; ‘spyde’, ‘saw’; ‘enclose’, ‘containe’; ‘times’, ‘age’; ‘place’, ‘stead’ (as in 1609); ‘meed’, ‘hyre’. The phenomenon may now be described in general terms: in these nine places Spenser substitutes for a rhyming word a metrically equivalent synonym which does not rhyme. Our analysis shows further that, the rhyme-scheme of the Spenserian stanza being _ababbcbcc_, this substitution occurs only in the first or last of the _b_-group, or in the first of the _c_-group. It seems as if, borne along on the swell of his metre and the easy flow of his imagination, two words identical in sense and metre but different in sound rose to the poet’s mind almost simultaneously; and the one which he meant to reject slipped nevertheless from his pen, having been (we infer) the first to occur. This explains why this phenomenon always occurs either in the first word of a rhyme-group, where the rhyme is still undetermined; or, if in the last, then only in the last of the _b_-group, where the ear has already been satisfied with as many as three rhymes; and why it never occurs in the _a_-group, where two rhymeless endings would at once have alarmed the ear. I have dwelt on this phenomenon at some length because it is, so far as I know, peculiar to Spenser.[2]

(6) I must glance at another, though a rare, source of error. Our sage and serious Spenser was a thoughtful, even a philosophic writer; but his thought is large, simple, contemplative, not acute and analytic. When he has to deal with a subtle or complex situation he sometimes involves himself inextricably. If any lover of Spenser resent this judgement, let him apply his devotion to explain or emend II. v. 12, ll. 8 and 9; V. vi. 5, ll. 6 and 7; V. vi. 26, ll. 5 and 6: to me these passages appear incorrigible.

III.

The first mention of the _Faerie Queene_ occurs in a letter of Spenser’s to Gabriel Harvey, dated _Quarto Nonas Aprilis_ 1580. ‘I wil in hande forthwith,’ he writes, ‘with my _Faery Queene_, whyche I praye you hartily send me with al expedition: and your frendly Letters, and long expected Judgement wythal.’ ‘I haue nowe sent hir home at the laste,’ writes Harvey in reply. These phrases show that the parcel of the _Faerie Queene_ had been in Harvey’s hands for some considerable time. The poem must therefore have been begun not later than 1579. Now in 1579 Spenser was an inmate of Leicester House, and the constant associate of Sir Philip Sidney. There is therefore no reason to doubt the assertion of W. L. in his commendatory verses that by Sidney the poem was originally inspired.

Harvey’s long-expected judgement, when it came, was far from favourable. But the poet was not discouraged, and doubtless took the manuscript with him when he went to Ireland with Lord Grey in August, 1580. Though he afterwards spoke of the poem as ‘wilde fruit which salvage soyl hath bred’, there is some reason to think that he had actually written as much as a book and a half before he left England. For though allusions to Ireland are not rare in the _Faerie Queene_, the first of them occurs in II. ix. 16.[3] Moreover, the industry of commentators has discovered in Book I only one imitation of Tasso’s _Gierusalemme Liberata_, and that doubtful[4] (I. vii. 31); undoubted imitations begin to appear in II. v, vi, vii, viii, and II. xii blazes with spoils from the Garden of Armida. Now the _Gierusalemme Liberata_ was published in 1581; an imperfect edition had been issued surreptitiously in 1580.

Our next glimpse of the _Faerie Queene_ we owe to Lodovick Bryskett, whose _Discourse of Civill Life_, though not published till 1606, purports to record a conversation held in his cottage near Dublin as early, it would seem, as the spring of 1583. Spenser is one of the interlocutors. He is made to say that he has already undertaken a work ‘which is in _heroical verse_ under the title of a _Faerie Queene_’; which work he has ‘already well entered into’. The company express an ‘extreme longing’ after this _Faerie Queene_, ‘whereof some parcels had been by some of them seene’.

Parcels of the _Faerie Queene_ had been seen, it appears, not only by Spenser’s friends in Dublin, but by his literary contemporaries in London. I. v. 2 is imitated in Peele’s _David and Bethsabe_ (date unknown, but probably before 1590). I. vii. 32 and I. viii. 11 are imitated in Act IV, Sc. 4 and Act IV, Sc. 3 respectively of the second part of Marlowe’s _Tamburlaine_ (published 1590, but acted some years earlier). Finally, Abraham Fraunce in his _Arcadian Rhetorike_ (1588) quotes Spenser ‘in his _Fairie Queene_, 2 booke, cant. 4’. Fraunce’s quotation is the more interesting inasmuch as it shows that by 1588[5] the _F. Q._ had not only been composed, but disposed into its present arrangement of books and cantos so far at least as II. iv. It is worth remarking that all these imitations of and quotations from _F. Q._ before it was published are from that part of the poem which we have seen some reason to think was written before Spenser left England. Allusions in the poem shed no certain light on the progress of its composition.

There is no reason to suppose that Spenser composed the whole of the _F. Q._ in the order in which he gave it to the world. It is more likely that he worked up many incidents and episodes as they occurred to him, and afterwards placed them in the poem. We know that the _Wedding of Thames and Medway_, which now forms IV. xi, is a redaction of an _Epithalamium Thamesis_ which he originally undertook as an experiment in quantitative metre before April, 1580. And it seems probable that the _Legendes_ and _Court of Cupid_ mentioned by E. K. in his preface to the _Shepheards Calender_, as well as the _Pageaunts_[6] mentioned in the Glosse on _June_, were similarly worked over and incorporated in the _F. Q._

Combining these pieces of evidence, we receive the impression that for some time after he came to Ireland Spenser worked but intermittently on the _F. Q._, resuming the regular composition and arrangement of the poem about the time when he ceased to reside in Dublin.[7] By 1588--the date of Fraunce’s quotation--he may have already been settled at Kilcolman. There, at least, Raleigh found him in 1589, and was shown the poem; with the result that in the autumn of that year Spenser accompanied Raleigh to London, and set about the publication of Books I-III. The volume was licensed to William Ponsonbye on Dec. 1, 1589. Spenser’s explanatory letter to Raleigh bears date Jan. 23, 1589 (i. e. 1590 N. S.). In the course of 1590, but not before March 25, the volume was published. The printing shows some signs of haste; there is a long list of errata or ‘Faults Escaped in the Print’. This list, though not itself faultless, is of paramount authority in determining the text of Books I-III; it is cited in the notes as _F. E._

In 1591 Spenser returned to Ireland, a disappointed man. I fear that Burleigh had taken occasion of the Milesian tone of certain episodes in Book III to stir the ashes of an old resentment: the second part of _F. Q._ begins and ends with complaints of misconstruction by that ‘mighty Pere’. But once back at Kilcolman he resumed his task. At first the stream of poetry flows languidly. The fable rambles, dispersing its force in many channels, like a river choked with sand; the verse flags; the play of alliteration is fitful; and Spenser essays a new, but to my ear an unhappy, variation in the form of a feminine ending.[8] But presently he gathers strength again under some new influence, which one would fain associate with his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle. The treatment of _Britomart_ in Book V has strong, dramatic touches beyond anything in the earlier books; and in the lovely pastoral episodes of