The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser
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; ;;:' '. ;-;'v ;: CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 1\ FROM Woodford Patterson * Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924012959866 THE POETICAL WORKS OF EDMUND SPENSER -fK. IN THREE VOLUMES VOLUME I HENRY FROWDE, M.A. PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK TORONTO AND MELBOURNE SPENSER'S MINOR POEMS EDITED BY ERNEST DE SELINCOURT OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS MCMX T CM;...', i-U VH\\n Kill V f.: 1 It ANY '-I OXFORD ~ PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS BY HORACE HART, M.A. PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY A- "37 1 ..ijvjiiHCKV';- Y'rreHH.yJMU Y4lAJUiU —' INTRODUCTION. THE aim of this volume is to present a trustworthy text of the Minor Poems of Spenser, based upon a collation of the editions published in the poet's lifetime with the Folio of 1 1611. As in Mr. J. C. Smith's edition of The Faerie Queene, to which this book is the companion volume, certain typographical peculiarities of the Quartos—long s, &, 6, superscribed m and n (e.g. fro, whe) are not reproduced, and the frequent practice in the Epistle and Glosses of The Shepheardes Calender of beginning a sentence with a small letter has been ignored ; but with these exceptions every deviation from the text of the first editions has been recorded in the footnotes. The variations to be found in other Quartos, and in the Folio, are not so fully recorded ; but every verbal change is noted, and any of those changes in spelling or punctuation which seem really significant, or bear upon the relation of the different Quartos and the Folio to one another. To have presented a full variorum edition would, it is believed, be of far less value to the student ; for the accumulation of an immense mass oforthographical variants, such as 'delights and ' delightes ', ' everye ' ' everie ' and * every ', ' forget- ' ' fulnes and forgetfulnesse ', would have hidden from the reader's eye, not only many that are of real interest, but 5 Copies of this Folio, the first collected edition of Spenser's poems, are variously made up with copies of the F. Q. dated 1609, 1611, 1612, 1613. The other poems are all dated 161 1 except Colin Clout &c, which bears no date, and Mother Hubberds Tale, which is dated either 1 612 or 1613. The F. Q., Shep. CaL, and Mother Hub. Tale are separately paged, the other poems are not paged. vi INTRODUCTION. also those other changes which serve to illustrate, in even more important respects, the mutual relations of the texts. The general character of those trivial orthographical changes which I have omitted may be inferred from those that are is duly recorded ; and their tendency, as would be expected, towards modernization. The Shepheardes Calender. It seems likely that Spenser wrote The Shepheardes Calender shordy before its publication. But when E. K. speaks of it in his letter to Harvey as * the maydenhead of this our commen frends Poetrie ' he does not intend to imply that it was his first composition, for a few lines earlier he has referred to 'divers other excellent works of his, which slepe in silence, as his Dreames, his Legendes, his Court of Cupide and sondry, ; others ' rather is he viewing it as the poet's first serious appeal to the general public. Of The Shepheardes Calender five editions, in quarto, appeared in the poet's lifetime, in 1579 (Q 1), in 158 1 (Q 2), in 1589 (Q3), in 1591 (Q 4), in 1597 (Q 5). They were all published anonymously, the authorship being first publicly acknowledged in the 1 6 1 1 Folio of Spenser's collected poems. An exhaustive collation of these editions proves conclusively, that though some of the corrections may have been made at Spenser's instigation, he cannot be regarded as in any way responsible for the general form of the text after Q 1. Each Quarto was printed from its predecessor, and F from Q 5. Each edition corrects a few errors, reproduces initiates many, and others ; and these in their turn were either incorporated in the later editions, or wrongly emended by conjecture when the correct reading might have been restored by a reference to Q 1 . That there was no thorough- going and systematic revision of the text in these editions can be proved by their sins both of omission and of com- — — INTRODUCTION. vu mission. Thus the beautiful stanza omitted from June by is not in 11. Q 5 found F ; 316-7 of p. 2,8, dropped in Q 4, are ' absent from Q 5 and F ; and on p. 59 the words in Fraunce ', dropped in Q 3, do not appear in subsequent editions. The gradual deterioration of the text through the blind reliance of each edition upon its immediate pre- decessor is proved by the textual variants to be found at the foot of almost every page of this edition. The point may here be illustrated by the recurrence from Q 2 to Q 5 of the absurd form 'kithousiasmos' for evdovariaapos, only corrected in F, and by the failure of Q 2 to understand the Northern * ' form glitterand ' for glittering ', which, therefore, it prints c glitter and '—a fault that persists into F through all the intervening Quartos. An instructive example of a more elaborate kind is to be found in Februarie 229, where Qq 1-3 read : Now gan he repent his pryde to late : For naked left and disconsolate, &c. Q 4 misprints ' For ' as ' Yor ', and Q 5, seeing that the passage as it stands is nonsense, does not examine an earlier text, but is content with its own conjecture : Now gan he repent his pryde to late, Yore naked left and disconsolate. —which, indeed, makes a kind of sense, but a very different one from that which the poet obviously intended. And F follows Q 5. Similarly, I think, the orthographical authenticity of Q 1 may be upheld against that of later editions. Even in the nineteenth century, when a somewhat rigid orthodoxy has prevailed in the matter of spelling, several poets (Landor, for example, Keats, even Wordsworth,) have preferred at times to follow their own peculiar taste ; and Spenser, as is shown by 'The Faerie Queene (particularly by viii INTRODUCTION. the rime words, which are the safest test), took full advantage of the latitude in orthography which obtained in the six- teenth century. Now the spelling of Q I is definitely archaic, dialectical, experimental, of a piece with the general character of the poem ; and in every succeeding edition, especially in Qq 3, 5, and F, it tends to become more normal. The very fact that many of these wellnigh in- numerable changes are so trivial goes far towards proving that Spenser had no hand in any of them. He would never have given himself the trouble to alter 'happye'into 'happy', ' ' faynt ' into faint ', and so on, ad infinitum, when once they had been set up in type, even if he had himself a preference for one or other of the forms. It is unreasonable to suppose that Spenser altered some of the orthography himself, and not all ; and anyhow we should hardly be justified in selecting some alterations as genuine and rejecting others. Changes such as 'threttie' to 'thirty', 'hem' and 'her' to 'them' and 'their', 'lepped' to 'leaped', 'solein' to 'sullen', 'whott' to 'hot', 'bloosmes' to 'blossoms', are not only unlike Spenser prima facie, but they seem the more so when we find that often the change comes either gradually or through another form which shows that the earlier one was not understood by the corrector. Thus 'hem' tends to become 'him' before it becomes 'them', 'solein' only becomes 'sullen' through 'soleine' and 'sullein', 'floweretts' becomes 'florets' through 'flowrets', 'bloosmes' becomes 'blossoms' through 'blosomes', and 'Gate' becomes 'Goat', though the Northern form is the subject of a special gloss, which is retained after 'Gate' has been removed from the text. If all this is viewed in the light of the fact that in other re- spects succeeding editions show a general deterioration in accuracy, it is difficult to accept as genuine any orthographical emendations of Qq 2-5 or F. To what extent the spelling of Q 1, in all its details, is Spenser's it is impossible to INTRODUCTION. ix determine without an autograph MS. of the poem. I feel myself, that were such a MS. extant, it would contain rather more than less orthographical peculiarities than are preserved in Q i ; for, misprints apart, the tendency of a compositor is always towards normalization rather than idiosyncrasy. But we may, I think, be certain that if we have not Spenser's own spelling in Q i we have it nowhere, and there is strong evidence in favour of the view that in all important respects the spelling of Q i, the only edition printed from MS., is really authentic. Our view of the part played by Spenser in overseeing the production of Q i is in some measure affected by our opinion as to the identity of E. K. For if we suppose E. K. to be a pleasant creation of Spenser's by whose mouth he could blow his own trumpet, his own share in the publication is necessarily greater than if we take the more natural view that Edward Kirke, or some other friend of the poet's, wrote the Episde, Argument and Gloss, and, as would be natural to assume in that case, was generally responsible for seeing the poem through the press.