ABSTRACT
False trails and phantom guides abound in the critical pursuit of Spenserian poetics, and not just in The Faerie Queene. The tale of wilfully insufficient metapoetic commentary begins with E.K.’s erratic glosses and Epistle to Gabriel Harvey in The Shepheardes Calender (1579). The complex relations between text and image in this work betray the scrupulous care taken by printer and poet in producing it. Yet the inconsistent scholarship of the glosses and the avuncular posturing of the Epistle severely compromise the authority of E.K.’s paratextual commentary. If many of the interpretative difficulties posed by the paratexts of Spenser’s first major work have their roots in the uncertainty of E.K.’s identity, the Letter to Ralegh proves even less tractable despite being signed by the author himself. The considerable textual and semantic problems with the Letter are by now notorious: that it appears only in the first (1590) edition of The Faerie Queene and not in the 1596 edition (thought by some to have been supervised by Spenser at the printing house); that it appears after the first three books, rather than prefacing them; that its account of the poem diverges in certain key respects from the poem itself.1 The textual difficulties are matched by the challenges internal to the Letter: its inconsistencies, trickeries and bold, sweeping claims. Indeed, problem-solving remains the dominant mode of criticism of the Letter, turning critics into parodies of the knights of The Faerie Queene itself. That those problems and obstacles are designed to find some accommodation in the intellectual culture and literary experiences of its first readers is my first assumption; in this, I travel some distance with Paul Suttie and his recent argument that the poem supplies all of the cues necessary to deciphering its allegory within the world of Faeryland itself.2 But where Suttie uses this approach to marginalise the Letter to Ralegh and the terms it proffers towards understanding the poem, I read the Letter as both illustrative of and continuous with the poem it accompanies, in all its poetic complexity. This chapter therefore situates the Letter in its immediate literary and generic context, and undertakes a fresh reading of its poetic principles, to argue that it remains a crucial guide to the poetics of Spenser’s poem, one with a more organic relation
to the poem than has previously been accepted. I will argue that it operates not just by stating but also by embodying the principles it describes. Exposition meets illustration, exhortation meets demonstration in the Letter, movements that are absolutely characteristic of Spenser’s didactic poetics throughout The Faerie Queene.
