Chapter II: Book VI: the poet lives once more in Arcadia. But positive indications

of date are very rare. Book V Canto xi must be later than July 25, 1593, when Henri IV heard that mass which was the price of Paris: the singular dislocation of the Argument to Canto xii--half of which refers to the incidents of Canto xi--suggests that this _Burbon_ episode was an afterthought; that it was inserted after Book V had been disposed into Cantos; and that Spenser meant it to form part of Canto xii. On the ordinary interpretation of the _Amoretti_,[9] all these books were finished before, but not long before, his wedding on June 11, 1594 (_v. Sonnet_ 80); and on any interpretation they must have been finished by 1595, when Sir Robert Needham brought the manuscript of the _Amoretti_ to London. Yet Spenser may have added and retouched up to the date of publication. For, in spite of _Sonnet_ 80, I have fancied that when he wrote certain descriptions in Books V and VI Spenser was not only a husband but a father. See especially V. v. 53 (simile of the nurse and infant); V. vi. 14 (the child crying in the night); VI. iv. 18, 23, 24 (_Calepine’s_ treatment of the foundling, which should be compared with _Guyon’s_ behaviour in a similar situation, II. ii. 1); also VI. iv. 37, particularly line 8. Now Spenser’s eldest child was born in 1595. This may be fanciful. What is certain is that towards the close of 1595 Spenser followed Needham to London with the manuscript of the second part of _F. Q._ It was licensed to Ponsonbye on Jan. 20, 1596, and published by autumn of that year. James VI took offence at the treatment of _Duessa_, and had to be appeased by the English Ambassador, whose letter detailing the incident is dated Nov. 12, 1596. The new edition was in two volumes, the first being a reprint, with alterations, of 1590.

Late in 1596, or early in 1597, Spenser returned to Ireland. In 1598 Tyrone’s rebellion broke out. In October the rebels attacked and burned Kilcolman Castle. Spenser fled to Cork, whence in December he made his way to London; and there, on Jan. 16, 1599, he died. Ten years after his death a folio edition of _F. Q._ was published by Mathew Lownes, which added to the six books already published two Cantos of _Mutabilitie_, ‘which, both for Forme and Matter, appeare to be parcell of some following Booke of the _Faerie Queene_, vnder the Legend of _Constancie_.’ These two cantos, with two stanzas of a third, are all that remain of the third part of _F. Q._ Whether Spenser wrote more is unknown. But the fact that the two cantos are numbered vi and vii makes it fairly certain that he had at least sketched the whole Seventh Book. I cannot accept the view that these two cantos are an independent poem, in the sense that they were not designed to form part of _F. Q._ The lines (VII. vi. 37)--

‘And, were it not ill fitting for this file,
To sing of hilles and woods, mongst warres and Knights’--

show clearly that they were so designed. That they may have been written independently, in the sense in which the _Wedding of Thames and Medway_ was written independently, I am not concerned to deny. The view that these cantos are spurious is unworthy of serious discussion. If they are spurious, there must have been living in 1609 an unknown poet who could write the Spenserian style and stanza as well as Spenser at his best. For there is nothing of its kind in _F. Q._ superior to the pageant[10] of the months and seasons; and no one who really knows Spenser can doubt that the two stanzas which alone remain of the ‘vnperfite’ eighth canto came from his heart.

IV.

The chief critical problem that confronts an editor of _F. Q._ concerns the text of Books I-III. Should the text of these books be based on 1590 or on 1596? I have chosen the latter. And I have done so, in the main, for a quite general reason. 1596 was produced under Spenser’s eye and by his authority. That authority must be held to cover both volumes, not the second only. Behind this we cannot go. The case is quite different with the later quartos of the _Shepheards Calender_, which were produced in Spenser’s absence.

This general position is confirmed by a minute comparison of 1590 and 1596. To take the more massive changes first: in 1 596 Spenser completely remodelled the conclusion of Book III. Instead of bringing _Scudamour_ and _Amoret_ together, as in 1590, he left them still parted, hoping thus to prolong the interest of their story into Book IV, and so to form a link between the two volumes, which he desired to be read as one continuous poem. For this he sacrificed five glorious stanzas, one of them the most rapturous that he ever wrote. The three stanzas which he substituted are far inferior, as he must have known; but they served his purpose. He also added a new stanza at I. xi. 3. He rewrote single lines, in the interests of sound or sense; he altered single words or phrases; and he made--what is even more significant--several minute changes of order designed to improve the rhythm. Let me add that most of these changes are more happily inspired than the second-thoughts of poets have sometimes been.

I hasten to make two admissions. The first volume of 1596 was not reset afresh from Spenser’s manuscript. It was printed from a copy of 1590. In the nature of the case, while it escapes some of the blunders of its original, it reproduces others, and perpetrates some new. Nor did Spenser do more than glance at the proof. The 1596 volumes, as we have seen, were printed rapidly; the poet was busy,[11] and such time as he had for proof-reading was given to the new books. I infer that the alterations which he made in 1590 were made not on the proof, but on the copy. In no other way can we account for that combination of author’s corrections with printer’s errors which marks the first volume of 1596. And this conclusion is strengthened by another consideration. It is one of the worst faults of 1596 that it so often ignores _F. E._ But the significance of the fault has been overlooked. Making corrections on the copy, Spenser did not trouble himself about errors that he had already noted in _F. E._; had he made his corrections on the proof, they could not have escaped him.

I believe this to be a true account of the relations of these two texts. But when all is said there remain many places where we cannot pronounce on mere inspection whether an alteration is the author’s or the printer’s, but must be guided by a calculation of probabilities, inclining (e. g.) to the author where there is clear evidence of his hand in the neighbourhood of the vexed passage, to the printer where the _ductus litterarum_ in both readings is suspiciously alike. The most important of these places are discussed in the Critical Appendix to Vol. III.

Has 1609 any independent authority? In the main a reprint of 1596, it is certainly a respectable piece of work, in punctuation especially far more logical and consistent than either of the quartos: the editor seldom fails to show exactly how he understands his text. Our respect for 1609 would be enhanced if we could believe that the editor was Gabriel Harvey, as Todd at one time fancied. But that notion is untenable, and Todd himself abandoned it. We may go further: the editor of 1609 did not belong to the generation of Harvey and Spenser. For this conclusion I will adduce only one piece of evidence, but it is decisive. In the last decade of the sixteenth century syllabic _-es_ in possessives and plurals still lingered even in verse not deliberately archaic. But it was strange to the editor of 1609. Sometimes he remarks it, and signalizes his discovery by printing it _-ez_, as ‘woundez’, ‘beastez’, ‘clothez’. Sometimes he fails to remark it, and fills up the syllable by conjecture: thus ‘_Nightes_ children’ becomes ‘_Nights_ drad children’ (I. v. 23); ‘th’Earthes gloomy shade’ becomes ‘the Earthes gloomy shade’ (III. x. 46). He seems, moreover, to have made little or no use of 1590. When, as sometimes happens, a word has been dropped in 1596, he emends by conjecture: thus at I. ii. 29:--

‘For the coole shade him thither hastly got’ 1590;

‘For the coole shade thither hastly got’ 1596;

‘For the coole shadow thither hast’ly got’ 1609.

Cf. also III. ix. 13, l. 9, III. xi. 26, l. 7, &c. The few instances in which 1590 and 1609 agree as against 1596 may fairly be set down to coincidence.

Yet I am disposed to assign some independent authority to 1609.[12] The grounds for this view are slight, and may be stated in full:--

(1) At I. x. 20, l. 5, 1609 adds the missing line, ‘Dry-shod to passe, she parts the flouds in tway.’

(2) At II. viii. 48, l. 8, it corrects ‘Sir _Guyon_’ to ‘Prince _Arthur_’.

(3) At III. iii. 50, l. 9, it completes the imperfect Alexandrine by adding ‘as earst’.

(4) At III. vi. 45, l. 4, it adds a broken line, ‘And dearest loue,’ to an eight-line stanza.

(5) At IV. xii. 13, ll. 1, 2, 1596 reads:--

‘Thus whilst his stony heart with tender ruth
Was toucht, and mighty courage mollifide’;

1609 reads:--

‘Thus whilst his stony heart was toucht with tender ruth,
And mighty courage something mollifide.’

(6) At V. Proem 11, l. 2, it reads ‘stead’ for the non-rhyming ‘place’.

Of these changes, (2) and (3) are not beyond the capacity of an ordinary editor; yet it is worth noting that 1609 does not correct other confusions of names almost as obvious as (2). Even the missing line (1), Spenserian as it sounds, might conceivably be editorial. But to add a _broken_ line, like (4), seems to me a touch beyond an editor. And (5) is most easily explained by supposing that Spenser altered the text, meaning to omit ‘tender’, but left that word standing. (6) is an instance of a phenomenon that has already been discussed. The significant point is that this is the only instance of that phenomenon which is corrected in 1609. An editor who corrected one of these mistakes might be expected to correct others; but the author who perpetrated these non-rhymes would more easily overlook them.

The addition of the _Mutabilitie_ cantos in 1609 must be allowed to create a prejudice in favour of the view for which I argue. The editor who recovered so much of Spenser’s manuscript may have recovered more: parcels of _F. Q._, as we have seen, were handed about in London in Spenser’s absence. Or--and the form of the variants at IV. xii. 13 makes this the more probable hypothesis--the editor of 1609 may have had a copy of 1596 with some corrections by the author. Finally, it is not impossible that these corrections were actually embodied in exemplars of 1596 which no longer survive. Elizabethan writers were in the habit of correcting sheets as they passed through the press: in _F. Q._ itself I have noted more than a score of places in which the readings of the copies used for this edition differ from those of other copies in the Bodleian or the British Museum, or of copies used by previous editors; and the notes of Church, Upton, and Todd show that they had seen copies which differ in minute points from any now available. As the sheets were probably bound indiscriminately, it is possible that no two exemplars exactly correspond. The charges of careless collation freely bandied among Spenser’s editors are sometimes due to this cause.

* * * * *

It remains for me to acknowledge with gratitude the unwearied help that I have received in preparing this edition, first, from my wife, who read 1609 with me twice; next, from my friend Dr. Soutar, of University College, Dundee, who revised the difficult proofs of Books I-III; last, from an unknown coadjutor, Mr. Ostler of the Clarendon Press, to whose skill and vigilance above all I owe whatever measure of accuracy has been secured. An edition like this has little claim to any higher virtue; yet perfect accuracy, even, is too much to hope for in the reproduction, by ordinary typography, of the original spelling and punctuation of a poem which runs to more than 35,000 lines. In the Critical Appendix I have called attention to one or two places in which I have noted what now seem to me to be errors, or on which I have changed my mind since the sheets were printed.

I have also to thank Sir James Murray, Dr. Bradley, and Dr. Craigie for information on points of lexicography; and Mr. Charles Cannan for the protracted loan of his copy of the first folio.

J. C. SMITH.

ST. ANDREWS,
_September, 1909_.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] But this was corrected as the sheet passed through the press. See note _ad loc._ in the Critical Appendix.

[2] The peculiarity consists not in the occasional occurrence of a rhymeless line--a thing that can easily be paralleled from Shelley or any poet of equal fluency--but in the fact that the right word is in every case so obvious that we cannot but believe it to have been in Spenser’s mind.

[3] This argument loses some of its weight from the likelihood that Spenser had been in Ireland before 1580. In his _View of the Present State of Ireland_, Irenæus, who is Spenser’s mouthpiece, speaks of himself as an eyewitness of the execution of Murrogh O’Brien, which took place at Limerick in July, 1577. The statement, of course, is not conclusive, as it would be if made in Spenser’s own person. Yet Spenser’s account of this hideous incident has the stamp of personal observation, and, taken with the evidence of Phillips’s _Theatrum Poetarum Anglicorum_, points to the conclusion that in 1577 Spenser had been sent to Ireland by Leicester with letters to Sir Henry Sidney. His visit, however, must have been brief, and may well have left no trace in his poetry.

Upton believed that the _Ruddymane_ episode in II. ii referred to the O’Neills, whose badge was a bloody hand (_v._ the _View of the Present State of Ireland_). If there be anything in this, it makes against the view that a book and a half had been written by August, 1580; for Spenser is not likely to have known the O’Neill ‘badge’ till he settled in Ireland.

[4] The passage in Tasso (_G. L._ ix. 25) is itself an imitation of Virgil, _Aen._ vii. 785. Yet the ‘greedie pawes’ and ‘golden wings’ of Spenser’s picture seem due to Tasso’s ‘Sù le zampe s’inalza, e l’ali spande.’

Both these arguments, then, are indecisive; and in the absence of decisive proof I find it hard to believe that Harvey, who though a pedant was no fool, can have seen anything like the whole of Book I without recognizing its superlative merits.

[5] Fraunce’s book was licensed on June 11.

[6] From these _Pageaunts_ E. K. quotes a line:

‘An hundred Graces on her eyelidde sate,’

which appears, slightly altered, in _F. Q._ II. iii. 25.

[7] The ‘fennes of Allan’ (II. ix. 16) would be near New Abbey in Co. Kildare, where Spenser seems to have occasionally resided in the years 1582-4.

[8] In the whole of Books I-III there is only one feminine ending, viz. in II. ix. 47. In Books IV-VI such endings abound.

[9] ‘On the ordinary interpretation,’ I say; for an attempt has recently been made (_Mod. Lang. Rev._ 1908) to prove that the lady of the _Amoretti_ and the ‘countrey lasse’ of _F. Q._ VI was not Elizabeth Boyle, but Lady Elizabeth Carey.

[10] The occurrence of feminine endings makes it very unlikely that this was among the _Pageaunts_ mentioned by E. K. The greater part of the _Mutabilitie_ cantos was certainly written in Ireland, probably in 1597-8.

[11] The scene of the dialogue on the _Present State of Ireland_ is laid in England; so that, unless this is a mere literary device, the tract must have been written, or at least begun, during this visit in 1596.

[12] No such authority, I think, belongs to the ‘Second Folio’, though it sometimes corrects printer’s errors. In the Critical Appendix I have cited some of its characteristic variants in support of this view.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.

Of the copies collated for this edition, three are in the Bodleian, viz.:--

(1) Malone 615, Books I-III, 1590.
(2) Malone 616, Books IV-VI, 1596.
(3) 4^o Art. Seld. S. 22, Books I-VI, 1596 (collated for Books I-III).
For 1609 I have used (4) a copy belonging to Mr. Charles Cannan.

The following copies, though not collated _verbatim_, have been examined for variants:--

(5) Malone 7, 1609 }
(6) M. 4. 5 Art. { Books I-III, 1611 }
{ Books IV-VII, 1612 } in the Bodleian.
(7) Douce S. 817 { Books I-III, 1609 }
{ Books IV-VII, 1613 }

(8) G. 11535, 6 { Books I-III, 1590 }
{ Books IV-VI, 1596 }
(9) C. 12. h. 17, 18 { Books I-III, 1590 }
{ Books IV-VI, 1596 }
(10) 686 g. 21, 22, 1596 }
(11) G. 11537, 1596 } in the British Museum.
(12) C. 57. f. 6, 1609 }
(13) 78 g. 13 { Books I-III, 1609 }
{ Books IV-VII, 1613 }
(14) 79 h. 23 { Books I-III, 1611 }
{ Books IV-VII, 1613 }

The bibliographical note on Spenser in the _Dictionary of National Biography_ appears to ignore 4^o Art. Seld. S. 22.

The 1590, 1596, 1609 editions of _F. Q._ have been described already. In 1611 Lownes (the publisher of the 1609 _F. Q._) set about a complete edition of Spenser’s poems. But having on hand unsold copies of 1609, he incorporated parts of these under the new title-page.[13] This has happened to (6), the first part of which is identical with 1609, except for the title-page and dedication. The genuine 1611 edition of _F. Q._ I-III is represented by the first part of (14). The second part of (6), bearing date 1612, has been reset: it is identical with the second parts of (7), (13), (14), which bear date 1613. No 1611 edition of _F. Q._ IV-VII is known to me. But in the footnotes I have followed the custom of citing this ‘Second Folio’ as 1611, except where readings not found by me in editions prior to 1612-13 have been attributed to 1609 by previous editors, misled perhaps by the omission from the British Museum catalogue of the second title to (13). In the Critical Appendix on Books IV-VII I cite this Second Folio (for these Books) as 16(11)-12-13.

* * * * *

Subsequent editions of Spenser’s works:--The folios of 1617, 1679 (the latter said to have been overseen by Dryden); ed. J. Hughes, 1715; H. J. Todd, 1805; F. J. Child, 1855; J. P. Collier, 1862; R. Morris, 1869; A. B. Grosart, 1882-4.

Separate editions of _Faerie Queene_:--ed. J. Upton, 1758; R. Church, 1758-9; Kate M. Warren, 1897-1900.

Commentaries:--_Remarks on Spenser’s Poems_, by J. Jortin, 1734.
_Observations on the Faerie Queene_, by T. Warton,
1754.

[For the matter of this note I am largely indebted to Mr. Ostler and Mr. Percy Simpson.]

FOOTNOTES:

[13] From a MS. note of Malone’s I learn that Ponsonbye had played the same trick in 1596; and even of the 1617 folio Church avers that some copies are made up with sheets of the old 1611.

CONTENTS.

THE FAERIE QVEENE.

PAGE

DEDICATION TO QVEEN ELIZABETH 2