Getting It Back to Front in 1590: Spenser's Dedications, Nashe's Insinuations, and Ralegh's Equivocations
2005; Volume: 38; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2165-2678
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Politics, and Exile Studies
ResumoThe most conspicuous feature of the back matter of the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene is that, of course, it is not at the front. (1) Dedications, epistles to patrons, commendatory sonnets, and other ancillary matter in this period typically preface a work, framing and positioning its contents: by interposing this matter between the reader's first, generic impressions of a book (from its binding and title page), and the subsequent experience of reading its particular content, printers and authors sought to realize a range of rhetorical, political, and financial ends. (2) Poets might hope to benefit financially by dedicating the work to a forthcoming patron; or they might hope to shield their book from criticism or rebuttal, to position its contents in relation to a specified faction or individual for their own extra-textual aims, or even to influence a reader's interpretation of the book by the social and political alignments apparent in dedications and commendations. Printers, equally, might try to use dedications to protect their presses from a sometimes capricious post-publication licensing regime; or might hope, by soliciting the right kind of commendations for a book, to increase and accelerate their sales. A page listing faults escaped might satisfy the prospective buyer that the work in hand was printed by a meticulous printer from a legitimate copy--and, given that such lists of errata usually have little to do with the copies to which they are prefixed, it is hard to see what other function they might have served. All of these, whether of the printer or the author, whether rhetorical, political, or financial, or some hybrid of the three, rely on one indispensable condition: the supplementary matter must be prominently visible, must intrude itself upon the reader's eye, and must therefore be at the front of the book. No browsing prospective buyer will flip to the end of six hundred pages of Spenserian stanzas to satisfy himself that the work has been commended by Ignoto; no prospective patron will feel the cords of her purse slacken at the promise of a dedication belatedly tacked onto sig. [Zzz8.sup.v]. The bibliographical details of the publication of The Faerie Queene in 1590 thus present a set of challenging problems, and set this edition apart as a landmark negotiation of the competing interests of authors, printers, publishers, and patrons in early modern print patronage politics. As is well known, the Letter to Ralegh, the Commendatory Verses, and the original ten dedicatory sonnets all appear in a final gathering (signed Pp)--usually considered the last thing to be printed before the volume went to the bookstalls. (3) At some point after Pp was completed--perhaps even when the volume was already on sale--a correction to this final gathering was printed, including seven supplementary dedicatory sonnets on a single-sheet gathering (signed Qq), intended to be inserted in the place of Pp6 and Pp7. (4) Historically-minded scholars have long pondered Spenser's intentions in furnishing his great epic with such a cloyingly elaborate, and unusually disposed, clutch of dedicatory, commendatory, and epistolary materials. (5) Many arguments have been proposed to explain Spenser's positioning of the Dedicatory Sonnets at the back of his volume; some suppose that this was his original intention, part of a concerted design not only to attract patronage, but to exert, and self-consciously acknowledge, his own political agency in recognizing (i.e., individuating) and ordering his patrons. Other interpretations have likened the back matter to an index or catalogue of contents, an interpretational aid that explains the historical allegory of The Faerie Queene in the manner of roman a clef. Still other readers have supposed that Spenser was forced to commit the bulk of his dedicatory material to the back of the volume by the need to privilege his primary dedication to the queen, and radical bibliographers have even argued that the whole question of disposition was determined not by Spenser, but by the experienced and perhaps largely autonomous printer, John Wolfe; or, finally, that it was not determined at all--but that the positioning of the prefatory material was an accident, and an embarrassing one. …
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