The addition of the Mutabilitie cantos in 1609 must be allowed to create a prejudice in favour of the view for which I argue. The editor who recovered so much of Spenser’s manuscript may have recovered more: parcels of F. Q., as we have seen, were handed about in London in Spenser’s absence. Or—and the form of the variants at IV. xii. 13 makes this the more probable hypothesis—the editor of 1609 may have had a copy of 1596 with some corrections by the author. Finally, it is not impossible that these corrections were actually embodied in exemplars of 1596 which no longer survive. Elizabethan writers were in the habit of correcting sheets as they passed through the press: in F. Q. itself I have noted more than a score of places in which the readings of the copies used for this edition differ from those of other copies in the Bodleian or the British Museum, or of copies used by previous editors; and the notes of Church, Upton, and Todd show that they had seen copies which differ in minute points from any now available. As the sheets were probably bound indiscriminately, it is possible that no two exemplars exactly correspond. The charges of careless collation freely bandied among Spenser’s editors are sometimes due to this cause.
It remains for me to acknowledge with gratitude the unwearied help that I have received in preparing this edition, first, from my wife, who read 1609 with me twice; next, from my friend Dr. Soutar, of University College, Dundee, who revised the difficult proofs of Books I-III; last, from an unknown coadjutor, Mr. Ostler of the Clarendon Press, to whose skill and vigilance above all I owe whatever measure of accuracy has been secured. An edition like this has little claim to any higher virtue; yet perfect accuracy, even, is too much to hope for in the reproduction, by ordinary typography, of the original spelling and punctuation of a poem which runs to more than 35,000 lines. In the Critical Appendix I have called attention to one or two places in which I have noted what now seem to me to be errors, or on which I have changed my mind since the sheets were printed.
I have also to thank Sir James Murray, Dr. Bradley, and Dr. Craigie for information on points of lexicography; and Mr. Charles Cannan for the protracted loan of his copy of the first folio.
J. C. Smith.
St. Andrews,
September, 1909.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] But this was corrected as the sheet passed through the press. See note ad loc. in the Critical Appendix.
[2] The peculiarity consists not in the occasional occurrence of a rhymeless line—a thing that can easily be paralleled from Shelley or any poet of equal fluency—but in the fact that the right word is in every case so obvious that we cannot but believe it to have been in Spenser’s mind.
[3] This argument loses some of its weight from the likelihood that Spenser had been in Ireland before 1580. In his View of the Present State of Ireland, Irenæus, who is Spenser’s mouthpiece, speaks of himself as an eyewitness of the execution of Murrogh O’Brien, which took place at Limerick in July, 1577. The statement, of course, is not conclusive, as it would be if made in Spenser’s own person. Yet Spenser’s account of this hideous incident has the stamp of personal observation, and, taken with the evidence of Phillips’s Theatrum Poetarum Anglicorum, points to the conclusion that in 1577 Spenser had been sent to Ireland by Leicester with letters to Sir Henry Sidney. His visit, however, must have been brief, and may well have left no trace in his poetry.