The Faerie Queene Read online

  THE FAERIE QUEEN

  PENGUIN ENGLISH POETS

  GENERAL EDITOR: CHRISTOPHER RICKS

  EDMUND SPENSER 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.

  THOMAS 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.

  EDMUND SPENSER

  THE FAERIE QUEENE

  EDITED BY THOMAS P. ROCHE, JR

  WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF

  C. PATRICK O’DONNELL, JR

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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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

  CONTENTS

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  TABLE OF DATES

  FURTHER READING

  A LETTER OF THE AUTHORS

  COMMENDATORY VERSES

  DEDICATORY SONNETS

  THE FAERIE QUEENS

  BOOK I

  BOOK II

  BOOK III

  BOOK IV

  BOOK V

  BOOK VI

  TWO CANTOS OF MUTABILITIE

  TEXTUAL APPENDIX

  NOTES

  COMMON WORDS

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  THE 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.

  TABLE OF DATES

  1474 Birth of Ariosto

  1485 Accession of Henry VII, first ruler of the Tudor dynasty; Caxton’s edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur

  1492 Columbus’s discovery of the New World

  1509 Accession of Henry VIII

  1517 Luther’s Wittenberg Theses

  1520 Birth of William Cecil, later Lord Burleigh and principal adviser to Elizabeth I

  1532 Birth of Robert Dudley, later Earl of Leicester and Elizabeth’s favourite

  Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (complete; partial editions in 1516 and 1521)

  1533 Death of Ariosto

  1534 Act of Supremacy, severing all ties between England and the Church of Rome

  1536 Calvin’s Institutio

  1544 Birth of Tasso

  1547 Death of Henry VIII; accession of Edward VI

  1552 Birth of Ralegh (?)

  Birth of Spenser in London (?)

  1553 Death of Edward VI; accession of Mary I

  1554 Marriage of Mary to Philip of Spain

  Birth of Sidney

  1556 Accession of Philip II of Spain

  1558 Death of Mary; accession of Elizabeth I

  1561?-1569 Spenser attends Merchant Taylors’ School, London

  1567 Revolt of the Low Countries

  1569 Van der Noodt’s Theatre of Voluptuous Worldlings sonnets translated by Spenser

  Spenser’s matriculation as a sizar at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge

  1572 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France

  1576 Spenser proceeds MA

  1578 Spenser secretary to John Young, Bishop of Rochester

  1579 Shepheardes Calender (later editions 1581, 1586, 1591, 1597)

  1580 Spenser’s residence in Ireland begins; secretary to Lord Grey de Wilton, Lord Deputy of Ireland

  Publication of Spenser-Harvey Letters

  Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberate under the title of Il Goffredo

  1585 Expedition to the Low Countries under Leicester

  1586 Trial of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots

  Death of Sidney

  1587 Execution of Mary Stuart

  1588 Defeat of the Armada

  Death of Leicester

  1589 Accession of Henri de Navarre as Henri IV of France

  Beginning of Spenser’s quarrel and litigation with Lord Roche (lasts until 1595)

  October: Spenser with Ralegh to England; in London in November

  1590 Faerie Queene, I-III

  1591 Complaints and Daphnaida

  1593 Henri IV is converted to Roman Catholicism

  1594 June 11: Spenser’s marriage to Elizabeth Boyle

  1595 Death of Tasso

  Colin Clouts Come Home Again

  Amoretti and Epithalamion

  1596 Faerie Queene, second printing of I-III, first printing of IV-VI

  Daphnaida, second edition (with Fowre Hymnes)

  Fowre Hymnes

  Prothalamion

  1598 Edict of Nantes

  Death of Philip II

  Death of Burleigh

  October: Tyrone’s rebellion breaks out in Munster; the ‘spoiling’ of Kilcolman; Spenser flees to Cork; loss of an infant

  1599 January 13: Death of Spenser in London

  Spenser’s burial in Westminster Abbey

  1609 Folio of Faerie Queene; first appearance of ‘Mutabilitie Cantos’

  1611 First folio of Spenser’s Works

  1620 Erection of a monument to Spenser in Westminster Abbey by Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset

  1679 Second folio of the Works

  FURTHER READING

  Paul J. Alpers, The Poetry of The Faerie Queene, Princeton, 1967.

  Paul J. Alpers, ed., Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, Oxford, 1967.

  Paul J. Alpers, ed., Edmund Spenser: a Critical Anthology, Harmondsworth, 1969.

  Jane Aptekar, Icons of Justice: Iconography and Thematic Imagery in Book V of The Faerie Queene, Columbia, 1969.

  Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, jr, New York, 1958.

  John B. Bender, Spenser and Literary Pictorialism, Princeton, 1972.

  Josephine Waters Bennett, The Evolution of The Faerie Queene, Chicago, 1942.

  Harry Berger, jr, The Allegorical Temper: Vision and Reality in Book II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, New Haven, 1957.

  Harry Berger, jr, ed., Spenser: a Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1968.

  Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green, New York, 1962.

  Donald Cheney, Spenser’s Image of Nature: Wild Man and Shepherd in The Faerie Queene, New Haven, 1966.

  Patrick Cullen, Infernal Triad: The World, the Flesh and the Devil in Spenser and Milton, Princeton, 1974.

  R. M. Cummings, ed., Spenser: the Critical Heritage, London, 1971.

  T. K. Dunseath, Spenser’s Allegory of Justice in Book Five of The Faerie Queene, Princeton, 1968.

  Robert M. Durling, The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic, Cambridge, Mass., 1965.

  John R. Elliott, jr, ed., The Prince of Poets: Essays on Edmund Spenser, New York, 1968.

  Robert Ellrodt, Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser, Geneva, 1960.

  Maurice Evans, Spenser’s Anatomy of Heroism: a Commentary on The Faerie Queene, Cambridge, 1970.

  Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, Ithaca, 1964.

  Angus Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: an Essay on Spenser, Chicago, 1971.

  Alastair Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time, London, 1964.

  Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry, Cambridge, 1970.

  Alascair Fowler, ed., Silent Poetry: Essays in numerological analysis, London, 1970.

  Rosemary Freeman, The Faerie Queene: A Companion for Readers, Berkeley, 1970.

  A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic, Princeton, 1966.

  A. Bartlett Giamatti, Play of Double Senses: Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1975.

  E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, London, 1972.

  Thomas M. Greene, The Descent from Heaven: a Study in Epic Continuity, New Haven, 1963.

  A. C. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene, Oxford, 1961.

  A. C. Hamilton, ed., Essential Articles for the Study of Edmund Spenser, Hamden, Connecticut, 1972.

  John Erskine Hankins, Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Allegory: A Study of The Faerie Queene, Oxford, 1971.

  S. K. Heninger, jr, Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics, San Marino, Cal., 1974.

  A. Kent Hieatt, Chaucer Spenser Milton: Mythopoeic Continuities and Transformations, Montreal, 1975.

  Graham Hough, A Preface to The Faerie Queene, London, 1962.

  Judith M. Kennedy and James A. Reither, eds., A Theatre for Spenserians: Papers of the International Spenser Colloquium, Fredericton, New Brunswick, October 1969
, Toronto, 1973.

  C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, London, 1936.

  C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: an Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Cambridge, 1964.

  C. S. Lewis, Spenser’s Images of Life, ed. Alastair Fowler, Cambridge, 1967.

  Isabel G. Maccaffrey, Spenser’s Allegory: the Anatomy of Imagination, Princeton, 1976.

  Waldo F. McNeir and Foster Provost, Edmund Spenser: an Annotated Bibliography, 1937-1972, Pittsburgh, 1976.

  Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory, Chicago, 1967.

  J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I, Harmondsworth, 1960.

  William Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser: a Study, Columbia, 1963.

  William Nelson, ed., Form and Convention in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser: Selected Papers from the English Institute, Columbia, 1961.

  James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene, Princeton, 1976.

  Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, New York, 1962.

  James Emerson Phillips, Images of a Queen: Mary Stuart in Sixteenth-Century Literature, Berkeley, 1964.

  D. W. Robertson, jr, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives, Princeton, 1962.

  Thomas P. Roche, jr, The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Princeton, 1964.

  Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in The Faerie Queene, Memphis, 1977.

  Charles G. Smith, Spenser’s Proverb Lore, Cambridge, Mass., 1970.

  Herbert W. Sugden, The Grammar of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Linguistic Society of America, 1936.