The Faerie Queene

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

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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).