Introduction

This book ends at a point where it might well begin. 'Before 1715', writes William Mueller, 'we have little more than a series of incidental remarks on Spenser ... John Hughes, in the critical essays of the 1715 edition, was the first writer to consider the sum of Spenser's work, and not merely fragments ofit.'l No one could argue with that. Individually the passages printed in this book are unlikely to yield any but an incidental interest. Collectively, they are, I hope, in a variety of ways interesting and useful. In particular, they may draw attention to emphases in Spenserian criticism, from which the modern reader has generally been drawn away. There is almost nothing even in the best of the following pages (excepting the pieces by Hughes), which a modern critic would spontaneously have thought of saying. That is, the seventeenth-century and the twentieth-century impressions of Spenser's work are very different. There is, moreover, very little on the following pages which a modern critic would even think worthwhile saying. The only real argument against the notion that most of the passages printed here are critically useless is to point to the unlikelihood of so many clever and learned men having written nonsense. It will not do to pretend that they were blinkered, that they could never see beyond their own immediate concerns, or beyond Cicero or beyond Bossu. While the modern reader and critic is so isolated from the perceptions (and the ordering of those perceptions) of those closest to Spenser in time and presumably in sympathies, his ground is not the safest. On the other hand, the fragmentary character of most of what is printed here is not something which can be properly apologized for at all. It is merely unfortunate. It can however be said that there is no English poet of the period on whom more extended comment would be available. In Italy or even in France it would have been different. But in England the criticism of vernacular poetry was simply not such an industry then as it was on the Continent. That does not make its errors (when it is certain that they are errors) more those offolly than of carelessness; and it is not in the main an underdeveloped discipline in

any but a quantitative sense. In the circumstances it is remarkable that Spenser so early attracted as much critical attention as he did - a good deal more than, say, Shakespeare.