THE TEXT OF THE POEM
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o manuscript of _The Faerie Queene_ is known; we depend for ourtext upon printed copies of the work. The first of these appeared in 1590. It is a quarto edition,published by William Ponsonby, and contains Books I-III. TheRegisters of the Stationers' Company for 1589 include thefollowing entry: _Primo Die Decembris.--Master Ponsonbye. Entered for hisCopye a book intituled the fayre Queene, dyposed into xii.bookes &c. Aucthorysed vnder thandes of the Archb. ofCanterbury & bothe the Wardens, vjd._ The date of Spenser's letter to Raleigh is 23 January 1589 (1590New Style); the book itself appeared some time after 25 March.The text was indifferently proof-read, and a list of corrigenda(Faults Escaped in the Print) accompanies it. Moreover, there isvariation between individual copies of the edition. Early copiescontain only ten dedicatory sonnets, while later ones contain thefull set of seventeen: for Spenser had made the signal blunder ofomitting Lord Burleigh from the illustrious company ofdedicatees. To confuse matters further, a few copies contain amixture of pages from the original and revised versions. The quarto edition of 1596 was also published by Ponsonby, andcontains Books I-VI, variously bound into one or two volumes.Books I-III were completely reset, apparently not from the MS.but from a copy of 1590 heavily annotated by the author. Some,but not all, of the corrections listed in the Faults Escaped wereincorporated in 1596. The end of Book III was changed,continuing rather than ending the story of Scudamour and Amoret.Spenser also added a new stanza at the beginning of Book I, Cantoxi, rewrote some single lines, and made sundry adjustments toothers. This process continued even as pages passed through thepress, so that there is variation from copy to copy, made morecomplex by the mixing of sheets from different printings duringbinding. No single copy of 1596 can therefore be said to bedefinitive. 1596 does, however, have the advantage of Spenser'spersonal supervision, and for this reason it is chosen as thecore of modern composite texts. The third edition of _The Faerie Queene_ was published by MathewLownes in 1609, ten years after Spenser's death. It is a folioedition, and contains not only Books I-VI but also two cantos"which, both for Forme and Matter, appeare to be parcell of somefollowing Booke of the Faerie Queene, vnder the Legend ofConstancie". This fragment comprises what are now called the"Mutability Cantos". The edition of 1609 is fundamentally a reprint of 1596. There isreason to suspect that its editor was guided, at least in part,by some authorial source which has now been lost: an annotatedcopy of 1596, perhaps; or material found among the assortedpapers of the Mutability Cantos. 1609 is a conscientious edition which often achieves a higherdegree of consistency and intelligibility than 1596 itself,although it is plain that a more modern hand than Spenser's isresponsible for many of its emendations: the punctuation, forexample, though often more logical, is blander than that of theeditions produced in Spenser's lifetime. Furthermore, the editorof 1609 virtually ignores 1590, even though knowledge of thattext is often essential for filling in the gaps left by errors in1596. The editions of 1611 onwards throw little light on problemsraised by the three former editions. A modern editor, then, must go to three different sources inorder to assemble a text which tries to do justice to Spenser'soriginal intention. The copy-text for this edition is the facsimile published in 1976by Scolar Press (see Bibliography).
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