A Textual Study of The Faerie Queene (Books I-VII)

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The purpose of the present research is to reexamine the texts of all the seven books of The Faerie Queene, taking recent bibliographical data on the work into consideration and basing our editorial principle on W.W.Greg's rationale of copy-text. In order to achieve this purpose, we have chosen as base texts the first edition of 1590 for Books I-III,the first edition of 1596 for Books IV-VI and the first folio edition for Book VII (Two Cantos of Mutabilitie), and compiled them into machine-readable text files. We corrected and emended errors in these early texts, collating them with subsequent old editions and occasionally consulting modern editions such as the Oxford Edition by J.C.Smith and the Variorum Edition by Edwin Greenlaw, C.G.Osgood and F.M.Padelford. In editing the texts, we made detailed textual notes to show every departure from the base (copy) texts, including spelling and punctuation. We also carried out investigations into press variants. We have collated twelve differen … More t copies of the 1590 quarto (Books I-III), fourteen copies of the 1596 quarto (Books IV-VI) and seven copies of the 1609 folio (Book VII only) and made a list of press variants, some of which are new findings.An analysis of the 'Faults Escaped in the Print' or the list of errata appended to the 1590 Quarto revealed who might have made it and how far Spenser might have been involved in proofreading. For details see "A Note on the Errata on the 1590 Quarto of The Faerie Queene, " Treatises and Studies by the Faculty of Kinjo Gakuin University, 169.38, pp.105-130. The paper also discusses to what extent Richard Field's compositors observed the rule about 'metrical spelling'. In another article written in Japanese and contributed to a forthcoming book of Spenserian studies (which is to be published in June, 1997) by the members of Spenser society of Japan, we examined the compositors' treatment of rhyme spellings and concluded that they did not regard irregular visual rhymes as particularly faulty and that they felt no need for correcting. Less