Here ‘play’ in l. 7 is rhymed to ‘support’, ‘resort’, ‘port’: ‘sport’ is the obvious correction. There are, in all, nine instances of this singularity in the Faerie Queene. I subjoin them all, citing the rhyme-words only: the number following each word shows the line that it ends:—

  1. day (2), dismay (4), way (5), chace (7) (II. ii. 7)
  2. make (6), bold (8), told (9) (II. ii. 42)
  3. support (2), resort (4), port (5), play (7) (II. iii. 28)
  4. leaue (2), cleaue (4), bereaue (5), vpreare (7) (II. viii. 29)
  5. spyde (6), law (8), draw (9) (III. vi. 40)
  6. enclose (2), plaine (4), Maine (5), complaine (7) (III. vii. 34)
  7. times (6), equipage (8), parentage (9) (IV. xi. 17)
  8. place (2), aread (4), dread (5), read (7) (V. Proem 11)
  9. desyre (2), entyre (4), yre (5), meed (7) (V. xi. 61)

In every case the correction is obvious: ‘chace’ should be ‘pray’ (i.e. prey); ‘make’, ‘hold’; ‘play’, ‘sport’; ‘vpreare’, ‘vpheaue’; ‘spyde’, ‘saw’; ‘enclose’, ‘containe’; ‘times’, ‘age’; ‘place’, ‘stead’ (as in 1609); ‘meed’, ‘hyre’. The phenomenon may now be described in general terms: in these nine places Spenser substitutes for a rhyming word a metrically equivalent synonym which does not rhyme. Our analysis shows further that, the rhyme-scheme of the Spenserian stanza being ababbcbcc, this substitution occurs only in the first or last of the b-group, or in the first of the c-group. It seems as if, borne along on the swell of his metre and the easy flow of his imagination, two words identical in sense and metre but different in sound rose to the poet’s mind almost simultaneously; and the one which he meant to reject slipped nevertheless from his pen, having been (we infer) the first to occur. This explains why this phenomenon always occurs either in the first word of a rhyme-group, where the rhyme is still undetermined; or, if in the last, then only in the last of the b-group, where the ear has already been satisfied with as many as three rhymes; and why it never occurs in the a-group, where two rhymeless endings would at once have alarmed the ear. I have dwelt on this phenomenon at some length because it is, so far as I know, peculiar to Spenser.[2]

(6) I must glance at another, though a rare, source of error. Our sage and serious Spenser was a thoughtful, even a philosophic writer; but his thought is large, simple, contemplative, not acute and analytic. When he has to deal with a subtle or complex situation he sometimes involves himself inextricably. If any lover of Spenser resent this judgement, let him apply his devotion to explain or emend II. v. 12, ll. 8 and 9; V. vi. 5, ll. 6 and 7; V. vi. 26, ll. 5 and 6: to me these passages appear incorrigible.

III.

The first mention of the Faerie Queene occurs in a letter of Spenser’s to Gabriel Harvey, dated Quarto Nonas Aprilis 1580. ‘I wil in hande forthwith,’ he writes, ‘with my Faery Queene, whyche I praye you hartily send me with al expedition: and your frendly Letters, and long expected Judgement wythal.’ ‘I haue nowe sent hir home at the laste,’ writes Harvey in reply. These phrases show that the parcel of the Faerie Queene had been in Harvey’s hands for some considerable time. The poem must therefore have been begun not later than 1579. Now in 1579 Spenser was an inmate of Leicester House, and the constant associate of Sir Philip Sidney. There is therefore no reason to doubt the assertion of W. L. in his commendatory verses that by Sidney the poem was originally inspired.

Harvey’s long-expected judgement, when it came, was far from favourable. But the poet was not discouraged, and doubtless took the manuscript with him when he went to Ireland with Lord Grey in August, 1580. Though he afterwards spoke of the poem as ‘wilde fruit which salvage soyl hath bred’, there is some reason to think that he had actually written as much as a book and a half before he left England. For though allusions to Ireland are not rare in the Faerie Queene, the first of them occurs in II. ix. 16.[3] Moreover, the industry of commentators has discovered in Book I only one imitation of Tasso’s Gierusalemme Liberata, and that doubtful[4] (I. vii. 31); undoubted imitations begin to appear in II. v, vi, vii, viii, and II. xii blazes with spoils from the Garden of Armida. Now the Gierusalemme Liberata was published in 1581; an imperfect edition had been issued surreptitiously in 1580.

Our next glimpse of the Faerie Queene we owe to Lodovick Bryskett, whose Discourse of Civill Life, though not published till 1606, purports to record a conversation held in his cottage near Dublin as early, it would seem, as the spring of 1583. Spenser is one of the interlocutors. He is made to say that he has already undertaken a work ‘which is in heroical verse under the title of a Faerie Queene’; which work he has ‘already well entered into’. The company express an ‘extreme longing’ after this Faerie Queene, ‘whereof some parcels had been by some of them seene’.

Parcels of the Faerie Queene had been seen, it appears, not only by Spenser’s friends in Dublin, but by his literary contemporaries in London. I. v. 2 is imitated in Peele’s David and Bethsabe (date unknown, but probably before 1590). I. vii. 32 and I. viii. 11 are imitated in Act IV, Sc. 4 and Act IV, Sc. 3 respectively of the second part of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (published 1590, but acted some years earlier). Finally, Abraham Fraunce in his Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) quotes Spenser ‘in his Fairie Queene, 2 booke, cant. 4’. Fraunce’s quotation is the more interesting inasmuch as it shows that by 1588[5] the F. Q. had not only been composed, but disposed into its present arrangement of books and cantos so far at least as II. iv. It is worth remarking that all these imitations of and quotations from F. Q. before it was published are from that part of the poem which we have seen some reason to think was written before Spenser left England. Allusions in the poem shed no certain light on the progress of its composition.

There is no reason to suppose that Spenser composed the whole of the F. Q. in the order in which he gave it to the world. It is more likely that he worked up many incidents and episodes as they occurred to him, and afterwards placed them in the poem. We know that the Wedding of Thames and Medway, which now forms IV. xi, is a redaction of an Epithalamium Thamesis which he originally undertook as an experiment in quantitative metre before April, 1580. And it seems probable that the Legendes and Court of Cupid mentioned by E. K. in his preface to the Shepheards Calender, as well as the Pageaunts[6] mentioned in the Glosse on June, were similarly worked over and incorporated in the F. Q.