Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene

Spenser and the Making of Literary Criticism

Catherine Nicholson

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780691198989
  9780691176789
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691201597
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The four-hundred-year story of readers' struggles with a famously unreadable poem—and what they reveal about the history of reading and the future of literary studies

"I am now in the country, and reading in Spencer's fairy-queen. Pray what is the matter with me?" The plaint of an anonymous reader in 1712 sounds with endearing frankness a note of consternation that resonates throughout The Faerie Queene's reception history, from its first known reader, Spenser's friend Gabriel Harvey, who urged him to write anything else instead, to Virginia Woolf, who insisted that if one wants to like the poem, "the first essential is, of course, not to read" it. For more than four centuries critics have sought to counter this strain of readerly resistance, but rather than trying to remedy the frustrations and failures of Spenser's readers, Catherine Nicholson cherishes them as a sensitive barometer of shifts in the culture of reading itself.

Indeed, tracking the poem's mixed fortunes in the hands of its bored, baffled, outraged, intoxicated, obsessive, and exhausted readers turns out to be an excellent way of rethinking the past and future prospects of literary study. By examining the responses of readers from Queen Elizabeth and the keepers of Renaissance commonplace books to nineteenth-century undergraduates, Victorian children, and modern scholars, this book offers a compelling new interpretation of the poem and an important new perspective on what it means to read, or not to read, a work of literature.

1

“The Falsest Twoo”

FORGING THE SCHOLARLY READER

WITHIN THE cache of Shakespearean manuscripts, documents, and letters nineteen-year-old William Henry Ireland claimed to have discovered in 1794, in the home of an anonymous country gentleman, was a pair of quarto volumes, printed in 1596 and filled with marginalia. Rebound in handsome green morocco by Ireland’s father, Samuel, a London bookseller and amateur antiquarian, and supplemented with neat italic transcriptions of an almost illegible secretary hand, the volumes were exhibited in Samuel’s shop on Norfolk Street as the crown jewel of the so-called Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare’s Faerie Queene, sixteenth-century England’s most celebrated poem as read by its most celebrated playwright. In reality, of course, William Henry was responsible for every bit of the marginalia, which he crafted with an eye to eighteenth-century readers’ longing for a Shakespeare whose tastes complemented (and complimented) their own. “Upon the margins of this poem, I was most particular in my comments,” he recalls in his memoir of the hoax, published a decade later, “well aware that a writer of such celebrity as Spenser must have attracted the notice of Shakespeare; and I was fully convinced that such notes would be regarded with the strictest scrutiny by every visitant in Norfolk Street.”¹ Indeed, the forged annotations—many helpfully signed “Wm. Shakspere” or initialed “W.S.”—went well beyond establishing that Shakespeare had read The Faerie Queene; they suggested he had revered and even imitated it. Spenser’s poem puts Ireland’s “Shakspere” into ecstasies of admiration: “Innedeede goode Spencerre whenne thourte praysedde tis notte vayne Flatterye butte thatte whyche thou doste trewly merytt”; “the language in thys canto is worthye mye greate masterre Spencerre”; “Thye Genyus O Spencerre is greaterre / Thanne language canne paynte / In trothe thourte morre thanne mortalle”—and so on.² The leaf following the end of book 1 contains an acrostic on Spenser’s name, which Ireland claims in his memoir was hailed as equal to any of Shakespeare’s published verse. Most daring of all is the note scrawled in the margins of canto 2, next to Spenser’s description of the Redcrosse Knight’s horrified response to Fradubio and—in an irony probably lost on Ireland—across from the description of Duessa’s “forged beauty”: a draft of Hamlet’s horrified reaction to his father’s ghost.

Shakespeare’s Faerie Queene was a sensation; according to Ireland, a visitor to the Norfolk Street exhibit offered his father sixty pounds for the pair of volumes, an extravagant sum Samuel rejected as unworthy (Confessions, 196). But Shakespeare’s Faerie Queene also contained the germ of Ireland’s undoing, for it was spelling—his own and Edmund Spenser’s—that gave the game away. The orthography of the Shakespeare Papers attracted suspicion from the start. Irelandisms like innedeede, innevennecyonne, and innetennecyonne “set at defiance the spelling of all periods,” James Boaden complained in a letter to George Steevens:

Look at the authors from whose orthography the poet must have derived his knowledge of language, and from whose pages we can form alone any guess of the orthography of his times, how decide they? Look at Hollinshead and the poets from whose records and tales he has drawn the materials of his dramas, is there in all or one of these or any other writers, a single example of language so idle in its literal form, so clogged, so confounded by unnecessary letters?³

“Shakespeare’s spelling” became a cause célèbre, disputed in the pages of the Gentleman’s Magazine—where an anonymous correspondent argued that “no such mode of spelling prevailed at the latter end of the sixteenth century, nor indeed at any period of our literary history, anterior or posterior”⁴—and played for laughs in the Telegraph, which printed an invitation from “Williamme Shaekspere” to “MISSTEERREE BEENJAAMMINNEE JOOHNNSSONN,” to “dinnee wythee meee onn Fridaye nextte, attt twoo off theee clockee, too eattee sommee muttonne choppes andd somme poottattoooeesse.”⁵

Despite such ridicule, the Shakespeare Papers had their adherents, prominent literary men among them, and it fell to the distinguished Shakespeare scholar and editor Edmund Malone to put an end to the debate—indeed, in February 1796, Gentleman’s Magazine printed a letter from “Anna Hatherrewaye” to “Dearesste Masterre Edmonne,” begging him to do so.⁶ Malone’s response, a five-hundred-page Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments, published in December 1795, was extreme in severity and length. Like everyone else, he began with Ireland’s spelling, which he exposed over the course of seventy pages as unexampled in the writings of any known Elizabethan, including the queen herself. He saved Spenser for the end, comparing an extract from the Shakespeare Papers with the opening stanzas of “THE FAERY QUEENE of Spenser, whose orthography is at least as ancient as that of any of his contemporaries.”⁷ When even The Faerie Queene could not match the “laboured and capricious deformity of spelling” in the letter, Malone pronounced it “an entire forgery”: “the spelling of no time” (68–69, 126).

Malone’s use of The Faerie Queene to strip the pseudoantique varnish from Ireland’s forgeries proved effective, but it entailed an irony of which the scholar himself was only partly aware. Spenser’s spelling revealed the spuriousness of Ireland’s not because it was known to be typical of late sixteenth-century usage, but because it famously wasn’t, being, in Malone’s paradoxical formulation, “at least as ancient as any of his contemporaries.” In other words, if Ireland had only read The Faerie Queene more attentively, he might have discovered in it both a prophetic allegory of truth’s triumph over fraud and a guide to the artful and convincing fabrication of old spelling. But the very faith Malone invests in Spenser’s poem as a limit case of orthographic antiquation rests on a pair of assumptions—that the spelling of The Faerie Queene is notably archaic by sixteenth-century standards and that it is Spenser’s own—with almost no foundation in textual, bibliographic, or historical evidence. Both beliefs were in fact of relatively recent vintage, fetishistic attachments rebranded as articles of scholarly faith and badges of editorial rigor. Malone’s seeming textual conservatism thus betrays his anachronistic relationship to The Faerie Queene no less than Ireland’s flagrant imposture of Shakespeare reading it. Taken together, they deliver an illuminating instance of the entanglement of discipline and desire at the roots of literary scholarship. Moreover, they cast productive doubt on the peculiar fashion in which we continue to read The Faerie Queene today: not simply line by line but letter by letter.

Old Spelling, Modern Usage

The question of how to represent the orthography of The Faerie Queene in modern texts is both settled and unsettled, entrenched as an editorial convention but increasingly shaky as a matter of editorial conviction. Unlike modern editions of Donne’s love lyrics or Shakespeare’s sonnets, which routinely update the orthography of their print or manuscript copy-texts, editions of Spenser’s poem nearly always preserve the late sixteenth-century spellings: it’s The Faerie Queene, not The Fairy Queen. Orthographic purism is not always matched with typographic purism—an ampersand may be replaced with “and,” or long-s with its modern equivalent—but despite such concessions, justifications of the practice tend to be categorical. As the editors of the Penguin Classics Faerie Queene explain, the old spellings “are so integral to the meaning that we are not willing to submit them to the regularities of modern usage.”⁸ The editors of the Norton Critical Edition of The Poetry of Edmund Spenser and the textual editors of the Longman Faerie Queene concur: modern spellings “would diminish the impression [of archaism] Spenser wanted to give” and efface the most important of the poem’s “generally accepted Spenserian characteristics.”⁹ When scholars working on the forthcoming Oxford edition of Spenser’s works proposed normalizing a further handful of typographic conventions, such as the use of “u” for “v” and “i” for “j,” readers for the press objected, feeling that a version of Spenser’s Faerie Queene in which “highest Ioue” appeared as “highest Jove” would be neither Spenser’s nor The Faerie Queene.¹⁰

The reproduction of old spellings communicates a set of seemingly irreproachable editorial commitments: to textual fidelity, to philological precision, to the material and cultural contexts of poetic composition, and, above all, to authorial intent. Ironically, however, the effects of old spelling on Spenser’s modern readers are hard to justify in such terms. As Robert Kellogg and Oliver Steele argue in the introduction to the only available modern-spelling version of The Faerie Queene, a 1965 Odyssey Press edition of books 1 and 2, the antiquated appearance of the poem’s orthography today far exceeds what a contemporary reader would have seen as archaic or strange; moreover, and more seriously, the preservation of all those odd variant spellings in a modern edition confers the impression of poetic intent on what may well be “the inconsistent and idiosyncratic orthography of individual sixteenth-century typesetters.” There is, they conclude, “little of literary value in them.”¹¹ There is, indeed, considerable risk—warnings against which have generally gone unheeded. As Emma Field Pope argued in 1922, the singular treatment of Spenser’s verse by modern editors has contributed to “certain misapprehensions as regards to his language”: “the diction of The Faerie Queene is by no means so antiquated as is often supposed,” she writes, and “many Spenserian words cited as archaisms are not really archaisms since they are also found in the writings of his contemporaries.”¹² Amplifying and extending Pope’s argument six years later, with the assistance of the newly completed Oxford English Dictionary, Bruce McElderry observed that “[t]he loose use of the word archaism has … been particularly misleading in regard to Spenser, for so much has been said of his archaisms that even the informed reader tends constantly to overestimate [them],” classing as “Spenserian” terms that, if they appeared in the work of a contemporary, would simply register as “Elizabethan.”¹³

Neither Pope nor McElderry blamed old spelling in particular for the misperception of archaism by Spenser’s readers—Pope describes Elizabethan orthography as “thin ice, whence retreat is the best course”—but orthographic antiquation played a leading role in establishing Spenser’s reputation for archaism in the eighteenth century. And, as is increasingly clear, it has little relevance to the period in which The Faerie Queene was written. Partly in response to the failure of the campaign to selectively modernize the Oxford Spenser, Anupam Basu, Joseph Loewenstein, and Stephen Pentecost at Washington University developed the EEBO-TCP N-gram browser, which allows users to track clusters of orthographic variants across a digital corpus of some 60,000 English books printed between 1473 and 1700.¹⁴ Using the EEBO-TCP N-gram browser and an array of statistical modeling techniques, Basu and Loewenstein have embarked on a thoroughgoing analysis of what they call “the impression of the linguistic distinctiveness of Spenser’s poetry,” starting with its spellings: “in general,” they found, “Spenser’s corpus is not orthographically distinctive” from the rest of the EEBO-TCP corpus. On the contrary, the spellings in both the 1590 and 1596 editions of The Faerie Queene “conform very closely to those of other texts printed at or around the same time” and “would not have struck early readers” as either old or odd.¹⁵ That finding confirms what Kellogg and Steele suspected: although it aims at preserving the text as Spenser wrote it and early readers read it, the so-called old-spelling Faerie Queene is largely an artifact of the poem’s “modern usage.”

In particular, as the case of Ireland suggests, it is an artifact of its role in securing the distinction between experts and impostors, scholars and charlatans. In part for that reason, even the authority of “big data” may not be sufficient to overcome our attachment to the old-spelling Faerie Queene, which is the version of the poem on which scholarly readers have long staked their identities. Nor is it clear that it should: despite what Kellogg and Steele imply, literary value need not be restricted to what we know to be authorial, or even what we know to be genuinely old. Editorial traditions may be worth preserving even if they are founded on a mistaken basis. And accidents, whether editorial or linguistic, can be extraordinarily difficult to distinguish from intentions, authorial and otherwise. From one perspective, the tradition of reading that has insisted on the significance of each individual letter in The Faerie Queene is an embarrassing shared delusion; from another, it is an ingenious response to the poem’s own surplus of signification, a fantastic and (literally) literal way of localizing the pervasive potential of allegory on the page.

As I argue in what follows, the orthography of The Faerie Queene is well worth our attention, though not necessarily the sort we are accustomed to giving it. Although the “old-spelling” Faerie Qu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: General Ends and First Essentials
• 1. “The Falsest Twoo”: Forging the Scholarly Reader
• 2. Una’s Line: Child Readers and the Afterlife of Fiction
• 3. Mining the Text: Avid Readers in the Legend of Temperance
• 4. Half-Envying: The Interested Reader and the Partial Marriage Plot
• 5. Reading against Time: Crisis in The Faerie Queene
• 6. Blatant Beasts: Encounters with Other Readers
• Coda: Reading to the End
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index