Printing The Faerie Queene in 1590

Abstract

Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene went into publication for the first time in 1590, it was the largest work of English poetry ever seen through the press by a living author. Spenser apparently had some experience of printing-house proofing, garnered during what appears to have been a carefullyorganized printing, by Hugh Singleton, of the first edition of The Shepheardes Calender in 1579;1 but the pressures of producing The Faerie Queene so far surmounting Spenser's earlier verse as epic, in generic terms, towers over pastoral must have been immense. Although the layout of The Shepheardes Calender had been somewhat complex, including a range of prefatory materials, a woodcut and 'argument' at the head of every eclogue, and a 'glosse or scholion' attached to the back of each eclogue, the sheer personal stakes of the proper presentation of the first instalment of Spenser's epic made this the riskier venture. In 1579, Spenser had been a young man, personal secretary to John Young, Bishop of Rochester, recently graduated with an MA from Cambridge, and with a promising career ahead of him; by 1590, he had been living ten years in Ireland, during which time he had published no further poetry, had retired from the comparative bustle of Dublin to the anonymity of Kilcolman, near Cork, and had apparently lost most of his once-promising patronage connections: Philip Sidney (d. 1586), Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton (back in England from 1582), and the Earl of Leicester (d. 1588). Spenser's return to public notice in 1590, with the advertisement of a new patronage connection to Walter Ralegh, and above all his favorable reception by Queen Elizabeth upon presentation of a manuscript copy of The Faerie Queene (and himself?) at court, gave him a new opportunity to secure his status as 'England's arch-Poet'. It was an opportunity that he could not afford to lose.