ABSTRACT
For a general account, see ‘The Faerie Queene, commendatory verses and dedicatory sonnets’ in the SEnc. It is not known why these poems do not precede the FQ where they could more directly lure prospective buyers. Perhaps because the present prefatory matter – the title page backed by the dedication to the Queen signed ‘Ed. Spenser’ who on the second leaf of signature A introduces himself as ‘Lo I the man …’ – could not be more startlingly effective. Perhaps the printer, who usually set up prefatory matter last, lacked copy of the CV and DS and proceeded with the title page and dedication. What might have served the reader as a threshold, a liminal space to introduce the reader to the poem, becomes instead an epilogue, remaining apart from it as a commentary on its publication as a literary and social event; see Erickson 1997. F.R. Johnson 1933:17 suggests that possibly four presses and probably two were used, and ‘that it seems highly probable that in 1590 the second largest printing-house in London was devoting at least half its resources [two presses] to the rapid printing of Spenser's Faerie Queene’. As a consequence, matter usually printed first, if it were not available, was tacked on at the end. Nor is it known why the DS exist in several states in the copies examined by Johnson 15–16: some have ten sonnets ending with ‘Finis’; some add seven new sonnets to eight of these and in a new order; and some include all ten of the first state, making a total of seventeen. The simplest but most unlikely explanation is that Spenser forgot to include Burghley, and in adding a sonnet to him decided to add six more. Nor is it known why all were omitted – together with the LR and all but three of the CV – in the 1596 edition. The simplest and most likely explanation is that six years after the appearance of the first three books, the poem no longer needed an appendix: ‘Who knows not the FQ?’ Or that the DS were omitted because the dedication to the Queen had proven sufficient; and that CV 1–3 were included only to fill in the otherwise blank eighth leaf of the signature Oo, as Johnson 19 suggests. (For a thorough investigation of the different states of the DS, see Brink's article forthcoming in RES.) Finally, it is not known when they were written except for DS 12: since Walsingham died on 2 Apr. 1590, presumably the sonnet to him was written before that date.
