The Faerie Queene

THE FAERIE QUEEN

PENGUIN ENGLISH POETS
GENERAL EDITOR: CHRISTOPHER RICKS

E
DMUND
S
PENSER
was born in London, probably in 1552, and was educated at the Merchant Taylor's School from which he proceeded to Pembroke College, Cambridge. There he met Gabriel Harvey, scholar and University Orator, who exerted an influence on his first important poem,
The Shepheardes Calender
(1579). On receiving the MA degree in 1576 he became secretary to John Young, Bishop of Rochester, formerly Master of Pembroke. He may also have served briefly in the household of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, where we assume he met the Earl's nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, to whom he dedicated
The Shepheardes Calender.
In 1580 he went to Ireland as secretary to Lord Grey de Wilton, Lord Deputy of Ireland, and stayed there most of his remaining life. While at Kilcolman, his estate in County Cork, Spenser met or reacquainted himself with his neighbour, Sir Walter Ralegh, who in 1589 brought him to London to present three books of
The Faerie Queen
(1590) to its dedicatee, Queen Elizabeth, who rewarded him with a pension of fifty pounds a year. After his return to Ireland in 1591, his two volumes
Complaints
and
Daphnaida
were published in London.. His marriage to Elizabeth Boyle was celebrated in his sonnet sequence
Amoretti and Epithalamion
(1595), and in the same year his pastoral eclogue,
Colin Clouts Come Home Again
also appeared. In 1596 he brought out the second three books
of The Faerie Queen
as well as his
Fowre Hymnes
and
Prothalamion.
In 1598 his estate was burned during the Tyrone rebellion, and he fled to Cork and thence to London where he died in 1599. He was buried in Westminster Abbey and his fame, denied him in life, has endured. In 1609 a folio edition of
The Faerie Queen
appeared, including for the first time
The Mutabilitie Cantos,
and in 1611 a folio of the complete poetical works. His fame endures to this day as the great precursor of Milton.

T
HOMAS
P.
ROCHE,
Jr, Murray Professor of English at Princeton University, was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1931 and was educated at Yale, Cambridge and Princeton and has taught at Princeton since 1960.
He is the author of
The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of the Faerie Queen
(1964) and
Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences
(1989). He has edited the essays of Rosemond Tuve and is co-editor with Anne Lake Prescott and “William Oram of
Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual.
He has also published on Sidney, Shakespeare, Petrarch, Ariosto and Tasso. He is currently at work on the iconography of the muses from Hesiod to Milton.

EDITED BY THOMAS P. ROCHE, JR

WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF

C. PATRICK O'DONNELL, JR

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The Faerie Queene,
I–III
, first published 1590
The Faerie Queene,
IV–VI
, first published 1596
The Faerie Queene,
VII
, 6–8 first published 1609
This edition first published in Penguin Books 1978
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 1987
31

Editorial matter copyright © Thomas P. Roche, Jr., 1978
All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

9780141920405

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

TABLE OF DATES

FURTHER READING

A LETTER OF THE AUTHORS

COMMENDATORY VERSES

DEDICATORY SONNETS

BOOK I

BOOK II

BOOK III

BOOK IV

BOOK V

BOOK VI

TWO CANTOS OF MUTABILITIE

TEXTUAL APPENDIX

NOTES

COMMON WORDS

T
HE
copy text is that of
The Faerie Queene
(1596) from the Huntington Library copy (56862).
^*
The copy text of the ‘Mutabilitie Cantos' is that of the folio of 1609, in which they first appeared (Ricketts-Osgood copy in Firestone Library of Princeton University). The texts of the Letter to Ralegh, the ‘Commendatory Verses', the ‘Dedicatory Sonnets' and the original ending of
Book Three
(III.
12
.43a–47a) are from the 1590 edition of the poem (Letter and ‘Commendatory Verses' from the Sheldon-Osgood copy; ‘Dedicatory Sonnets' and original ending of Book Three from the William Warren Carman copy in the Robert H. Taylor Collection, both copies in Firestone Library).

In dealing with the text the choices open to us ranged from complete modernization of spelling and punctuation to a simple reprinting of the 1596 text with the additions from 1590 and 1609 specified above. We have chosen to follow these texts as closely as possible in spelling and punctuation. We have retained u,
v
, and i where modern orthography would print
v, u,
and
j
respectively, but we have substituted the modem ifor the old for italic
f, W for VV,
and have expanded all contractions of norm represented by a tilde above the preceding vowel (e.g.
from
for
frõ).
It is our belief that the orthography and punctuation of Spenser's poem are so integral to the meaning that we are not willing to submit them to the regularities of modern usage. We have extended this principle by retaining rhyme words that do not fit the rhyme scheme but make sense (II.2.7.7; 2.42.6; 3.28.7; 8.29.7; 12.54.7; III.6.40.6; 7.34.2; IV.7.32.7; 11.17.6;V. Proem. 11.2; 11.61.7; VI.2.3.3; 12.41.3). In three instances we have emended (II.9.9.1; VI.8.47.3; 10.32.6). We have also retained the eight-line stanzas of 1.10.20 and III.6.45. All these readings are cited in the explanatory notes with suggested readings of other editions.

Nevertheless, in such a long poem, printed in so many editions, we have found it necessary to make some changes in the text. We have made all the corrections directed by the erratum page of the 1590 edition, ‘Faults Escaped'. We have made editorial conjectures in the case of manifest errors (VL3.28.6:
soft footing
for
softing foot)
and narrative errors (IV.4.2.4:
Blandamour
for
Scudamour,
who does not
appear in the canto). We have occasionally chosen readings from die 1590 or 1609 texts when the 1596 reading did not seem suitable. All these changes are noted in the textual appendix that follows on p. 1057.

The composite text we present will necessarily be disappointing in some readings to some readers. These textual notes are intended not as a definitive solution to the problems of Spenser's text but a factual declaration of the sources of our differences from the copy texts. If we had a clearer knowledge of Spenser's manuscripts or of who was re sponsible for the ‘Faults Escaped' or of who edited the 1609 and 1611 editions, we might be in a better position to justify our dependence on one text rather than another. However, in the present situation, in which such decisions cannot be made with any certainty, we have thought it best to make a composite text, giving priority to the 1596 copy text, in full awareness of the fact that reliance on one copy of a text is insufficient proof. Our only justification is that we wanted to make available a complete text of the poem with sufficient annotation to help the modern reader.

No note on the text or any part of this edition would be complete without mentioning some of our debts of gratitude. For supporting grants our gratitude to the Committee on Research of Princeton University; its help made possible the assistance of Douglas Rees in the early stages of the edition and for the past three summers the unrelenting alertness of Steven Westergan, who suffered through the interminable trial of getting things straight, summer after summer after summer, with cheerful fortitude and critical acumen. My wife, Lyn Vamvakis Roche, has counselled often with rigorous insistence; her knowledge of literature and language has kept us from fatuities, grammatical lapses and errors too embarrassing to enumerate. To say more would be a further embarrassment to me and a diminishing of her real and un acknowledged contribution to this edition.