© 2003 by Oxford University Press
Materialist History of the Publication of Spenser's Faerie Queene
1 Henry E. Huntington Library, Pasadena
We have fashioned our own interpretative context for Spenser's Faerie Queene, a context that ignores the physical text. The Faerie Queene (1590) was not a printing success: the printer and binder bungled the handling of the dedications. In most surviving copies the original set of dedications was not cancelled, but appeared with a second set of dedications that repeated the first. The result was far more embarrassing to Spenser than if a few statesmen and courtiers had been ignored. Most copies appeared with a dignified dedication to Elizabeth at the front of the volume, but this dedication was undercut by the twenty-five dedicatory sonnets appearing at the conclusion of Book III. The 1596, Faerie Queene has been used as the copy-text for twentieth-century editions, but the dedications to prominent courtiers were omitted from 1596. The dedications were later imported from 1590 to 1596 and silently offered as a preface and context for the poem in influential textbook editions. This materialist history of the printing of Faerie Queene (1590) shows that Spenser was less responsible for the presentation of his poem than has been assumed and invites a reassessment of our critical fashioning of Spenser.