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Edmund Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion : a Critical Edition

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Edmund Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion : a Critical Edition Edmund Spenser's AMORETTI AND EPITHALAMION A CRITICAL EDITION cneOievAL & ReMAissAKice xexTS & STuOies Volume 146 Edmund Spenser's AMORETTI AND EPITHALAMION A CRITICAL EDITION Kenneth J. Larsen (DeOieVAl. & RGMAlSSAMCe TejXTS & STuOies Tempe, AZ 1997 ® Copyright 1997 Arizona Board of Regents for Arizona State University Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Spenser, Edmund, 1552P-1599. [Amoretti] Edmund Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion: a critical edition / Kenneth J. Larsen. p. cm. — (Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies ; v. 146) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-86698-186-1 (alk. paper) 1. Love poetry, English-Criticism, Textual. 2. Sonnets, English-Criticism, Textual. 3. Marriage-Poetry. I. Larsen, Kenneth 1552?-1599. Epithalamion. III. Title. IV. J. II. Spenser, Edmund, Series. PR2360.A5 1997 821'.3-dc21 96-53914 CIP ® This book was produced by MRTS at SUNY Binghamton. This book is made to last. It is set in Goudy, smythe-sewn and printed on acid-free paper to hbrary specifications. Printed in the United States of America Contents Introduction 1 An Edited Text of Amoretti and Epithalamion 67 Commentary 121 Textual Notes 255 Appendix 263 Bibliography 276 Index to the Commentary 285 Amoretti: Index of First Lines 290 My gratitude is due to Professor A. C. Hamilton for early encour- agement and later enthusiasm; to my colleagues in the English Depart- ment, University of Auckland; to the staff of the Folger Shakespeare Library for much courtesy and patience; and finally to the fourth Elizabeth of this sequence, my wife, and to Daniel and Alexander, all of whom bore the brunt. Formal acknowledgement is also made to the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge for their kind permission to reproduce Spenser's Amoretti, 1595: Capell * 18 f.G.3r. Abbreviations EHR = English Historical Review ELK = English Literary Renaissance ELH = English Literary History ES = English Studies JEGP = Journal of English and Germanic Philology /MRS = Journal ofMedieval and Renaissance Studies LCL = Loeb Classical Library, published by William Heinemann, London & Harvard Univ. Press MLN = Modem Language Notes MLQ = Modern Language Quarterly MLR = Modem Language Review MP = Modem Philology N&Q = Notes & Queries PQ = Philological Quarterly RQ = Renaissance Quarterly Ren. & Ref. = Renaissance and Reformation RES - Review of English Studies SEL = Studies in English Literature SPh = Studies in Philology SpS = Spenser Studies TSLL = Texas Studies in Literature and Language YES = Yearbook of English Studies The framed device, inserted by Peter Short, the master printer, before both Amoretti and Epithalamion in the 1595 edition. Introduction The volume containing Edmund Spenser's sonnet sequence and epithalami- on was published in 1595 by William Ponsonby in London under the title, ''Amoretti and Epithalamion. Written not long since by Edmunde Spenser." Of the two larger works in the volume — it comprises a sequence of eighty-nine — sonnets, some short intervening anacreontic verses, and an epithalamium Epithalamion has customarily received the greater acknowledgement, al- though recent work on the sonnet sequence, Amoretti, by Dunlop, Johnson, and Gibbs,' has gone some way towards redressing the balance. The discov- eries presented in the following pages, concerning Amoretti in particular, are exciting both for the insight they provide into Spenser's compositional habits and for the way they present the sonnets in a more intimate light, showing them to be expressive of a range of mood: frequently delicate and tender, often daring, sometimes risque. Spenser's reputation was already secure prior to the publication of the volume. Much of his poetry had already been published, although the second installment of The Faerie Queene did not appear until the following year, and only Prothalamion and the final two hymns of the Fowre Hymnes are of probable later composition. Since this edition will show that the sonnets comprising Amoretti were written for consecutive dates which fell during the first half of 1594, the volume can only be the work of a mature poet, whom an aside in Amoretti, "then al those fourty which my life outwent,"^ suggests was in his early forties. ' Alexander Dunlop, "Introduction to Amoretti and Epithalamion," in William A. Oram et al., eds., The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spemer (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 583-97; William C. Johnson, Spenser's Amoretti: Analogies of Love (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1990); Donna Gibbs, Spenser's Amoretti. A Critical Study (Aldershot, Hants.: Scolar Press, 1990). ^ Am. 60.8. For Spenser's works, apart from Amoretti ar\d Epithalamion, the text throughout is Spenser, Poetical Works, eds. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969). Amoretti, requiring a singular verb, has been used as a title of Introduction In writing a sonnet sequence Spenser was observing a Renaissance convention which had grown popular in England during the prior decade. Thomas Watson's Hecatompathia had appeared in 1582 and had been followed by among others John Southern's Pandora (1584), Samuel Daniel's Delia (1592), Barnabe Barnes's Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593), Thomas Lodge's Phillis (1593), Giles Fletcher the Elder's Ucia (1593), Michael Drayton's Ideas Mirrour (1594), Henry Constable's Diana (1594), and William Percy's Coelia (1594), while the anonymous Zepheria had also appeared in 1594 and Spenser, in Amoretti 8, shows some knowledge of Fulke Greville's Caelica 3, even though Caelica was published later. Petrarch's Rime had established the mode in which poems employ a number of what were to become conventional topoi, all of which in their discrete way explain the poet's difficulties in the face of various facets of love. In Amoretti Spenser often uses the established topoi, for his sequence imitates in its own way the traditions of Petrarchan courtship and its associated Neo-Platonic conceits. His debt to Petrarchist exempla and to the unifying tendencies of continental philosophies is always clear. Yet sugges- tions of his continental predecessors, Tasso, Ariosto, du Bellay, Desportes, Marot, Cazza, and Serafino, would have been more evident in Amoretti to his contemporaries than they are to the modern reader. Spenser seldom imbues a sonnet with a clear Neo-Platonic cast (Amoretti 45 and 88 are possible exceptions) and generally accepts Neo-Platonic doctrines as conceits to be exploited. His essentially syncretic cast of mind shapes these conceits as non-specific rather than explicit imitations. Epithalamion is a poem which gives a ritualized and public effect to the personal on a number of levels, cosmographical, mythological, publicly prayerful and euchological. As arguably the first epithalamium in English it set a precedent; its sources are principally classical, for Spenser imitates the detail of the epithalamia of Statius and Claudian as well as the epithalamial hymns of Catullus. It also shows a familiarity with the epithalamia of Spenser's immediate French predecessors, Marc-Claude Buttet and Remy Belleau. But Spenser, who married Elizabeth Boyle on 11 June 1594,^ moves apart from his predecessors by proposing in Epithalamion that a reso- lution to the sonneteer's conventional preoccupations with love may be found within the bounds of Christian marriage. The poem's recognition that the tension which had occurred in earlier amoretti between the physical and spiritual dimensions of love can be solved in matrimony is an argument for the whole sequence, while amoretti has been used to describe the sonnets as individual units, but always in the plural. ' For the date of Spenser's marriage, sec A. C. Judson, The Life of Edmund Spenser (Baltimore, 1945), 166. Introduction the volume as a whole to be considered an integrated work. It also affords the work a strong Protestant character, because it reflects the doctrine that Spenser's Protestant contemporaries were developing, that the covenant of marriage, itself of the spiritual realm, was sealed and made manifest by physical consummation. It is to this doctrine that the later amoretti and the Epithalamion constantly return. William Ponsonby, the volume's publisher, in his "Epistle Dedicatory" describes the amoretti as "sweete conceited Sonets," an appellation not unlike that ascribed to Shakespeare's sonnets by Meres, "sugred Sonnets." Shakespeare's sonnets have subsequently been seen with all their diversity and riches to have loosed themselves from the description. In this edition, it is hoped, Spenser's will be similarly delivered through the discovery that the eighty-nine sonnets are shaped as an artifact modeled after the liturgy. The detail provided by this edition's annotations confirms not only the im- portance of structure to the Renaissance sonnet sequence in general and the English in particular, but also the multi-faceted — and not exclusively poetic — nature of those structures. The findings also lay the groundwork for further understandings of Spenser's poetry: his wit is revealed in the following pages as one of elegant erudition, which enjoyed those etymological and scriptural puns and pleonasms most becoming of an educated Renaissance mind. I. Sources A. Liturgical The eighty-nine sonnets of the Amoretti, as numbered in the 1595 octavo edition, were written to correspond with consecutive dates, beginning on Wednesday 23 January 1594 and running, with one interval, through to Friday 17 May 1594: they correspond with the daily and sequential order of
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