THE POETICAL WORKS OF EDMUND SPENSER IN THREE VOLUMES VOLUME II SPENSER’S FAERIE QUEENE EDITED BY J. C. SMITH VOLUME I: BOOKS I-III OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS _Oxford University Press, Amen House, London E.C.4_ GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI LAHORE DACCA CAPE TOWN SALISBURY NAIROBI IBADAN ACCRA KUALA LUMPUR HONG KONG FIRST PUBLISHED 1909 REPRINTED LITHOGRAPHICALLY IN GREAT BRITAIN AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD FROM SHEETS OF THE FIRST IMPRESSION 1961, 1964 INTRODUCTION. I. In these volumes I seek to present a true text of the _Faerie Queene_, founded upon a fresh collation of the Quartos of 1590 and 1596 and the Folio of 1609. I shall call these editions by their dates for short. The fragmentary Seventh Book appeared first in 1609: for the rest the text is based on 1596. Some typographical peculiarities--long s, &, ô, and superscribed m and n (e.g. frõ, whẽ)--have not been reproduced, but noted only where they first occur. With these exceptions, the readings of 1596 if not adopted in the text are recorded in the notes; so that text and notes together amount, in effect, to a complete reprint of 1596. No such completeness has been attempted in recording variants from 1590 and 1609. But all verbal differences are recorded, and all differences of punctuation that imply a different view of the meaning. Mere changes of spelling that answer to no change of pronunciation are, as a rule, ignored; but I have recorded such differences of spelling as seemed likely to interest students of Elizabethan phonology, grammar, and usage. The evidence of these variants must be used with caution in view of Spenser’s deliberate archaism. Yet I believe that they have some value. I give one instance in each kind:-- 1. A fluid _e_-sound is indicated by the variants ‘seeldome’ 1590, ‘seldome’ 1596, ‘sildom’ 1609, at I. iv. 23, l. 5. 2. Syllabic _-es_ in possessives and plurals, which still lingered in the early fifteen-nineties, has grown quite strange to the editor of 1609. To this point I shall return. 3. The conjunctions ‘since’ and ‘sith’ are used indifferently in 1590 and 1596, choice of one or other form being determined by euphony alone. But 1609 makes a deliberate, though not quite consistent, attempt to appropriate ‘since’ to the temporal, ‘sith’ to the causal sense. The attempt unfortunately did not avail to save the more primitive form.