In their frequent conjectures on revision in The Shepheardes
Calender scholars have not fully exploited the well-known disorder
of E. K.'s glosses for evidence. The disarrangement of the five hundred or
so notes, identical in the five quartos printed before Spenser's death, was
retained "in all preceding editions except perhaps Herford's" until tidily
"corrected, and . . . made more convenient" in the Variorum Edition of
The Minor Poems (I, 231). On good grounds one may urge
that, in scholarly editions, at least, the old order continue to be
printed.
Of the two dozen irregularities (including two glossed words not in
the texts of the eclogues) more than half are simple reversals of glosses to
words occurring in the same or adjacent lines of poetry, or rearrangements
of short glosses printed together in a single line in the first quarto.[1] They are often accountable as
attempts by
the printer to balance his page and save space, or simply as instances of a
genial lack of fastidiousness on his part or that of E. K. In any case, since
the glosses occur near their proper places (it should be
remembered that neither the lines in the eclogues nor the glosses were
numbered), these "errors" of order would have caused early readers no
trouble. If they may be discounted, there remain only five or six
discrepancies of arrangement that are not readily, even conjecturally,
explainable: "Sere" (Jan. 37) is glossed between "Stoure"
(51)
and "His clownish
gyfts" (57); "Coronall" (
Feb. 178) and "Flouret" (182)
between
"O my liege" (150) and "The Primrose" (166); "For thy"
(
Mar.
37) between "Ascaunce" (21) and "Lethe" (23); and "Euer among"
(
Dec. 112) and "Thus is my" (97) in that order between
"Scathe" (100) and "The fragraunt flowres" (109). For lack of a better
course, we must call these printer's errors. Still other peculiarities,
however, offer possible evidence of revision in the poems.
One such instance, though not concerning errors of order, is well
known. C. H. Herford, T. P. Harrison, and R. B. Botting, of those cited
in the Variorum Minor Poems (I, 339, 349, 614), have
inferred
from the absence of glosses to the August sestina and the
stanzas framing it that the sestina was a late addition, "an after-thought."
The passage represents 57 lines untouched by E. K.; the next longest
unglossed span (in January) is 26 lines long, and other sizable
gaps are considerably shorter. There is a good chance that Spenser added
Cuddie's "doole" (and mention of it in the Argument) after the glosses were
written, possibly because he felt that the singing match was not good
enough to carry the eclogue by itself.
Where disorder appears, however, E. K.'s notes have been treated
cavalierly. The glosses to the words not occurring in the text have not been
sufficiently commented on. For "Bett," which appears in the
July glosses between "Melling" (208) and "Bynempte" (214),
the Variorum editors supply in the "Critical Notes on the Text" (I, 718):
"[July] 230. Herford. E. K.'s Gloss makes it almost certain
that
Spenser wrote 'bett,' though 'better' is the reading of all the editions. And
that the change to 'better' was not due to Spenser himself is clear. For it
produces an anapaestic verse, of which there is no other example in the
Eclogue; and Spenser did not avoid the form 'bett' (cf. Oct.
15)." But Herford is partly wrong about the metrics. The first three feet of
"This had a brother, (his name I knewe)" (July 161) are
rhythmically identical with "but shall be better in time" (230); and one can
just as easily read "but shall be bett'r in time" as "They bene yclad
in purpl' and pall" (173) or "Now sick'r I see, thou doest but clatter" (207).
That is, while Herford may be right in thinking Spenser wrote "bett" in line
230, his hasty reasoning must be rejected.
For "Soote," glossed in September between "Lorne"
(57)
and "Vncouthe" (60), the Variorum editors twice observe (I, 365, 719) that
the word is "not in the text," and in summarizing an article by R. B.
Botting they refer to it (I, 614) as an indication of Spenser's "hurry." But
some further, more specific comment is called for, and they could have
expanded with Botting's own words (PMLA, L [1935], 434):
"It would appear [from this gloss] that in at least one instance Spenser
removed a passage after the explanatory notes were composed." It may be
noted that both July and September are among
the
moral eclogues, "which for the most part be mixed with some Satyrical
bitternesse," and that late revision in the form of deleting overbold
statements, especially after the persecution of
John Stubbe and his and Spenser's printer Hugh Singleton in October 1579,
would not be surprising.
The final evidence to be gleaned from the arrangement of E. K.'s
notes lies in the patterned disorder of the glosses to the April
"laye of fayre Elisa." The glosses to lines 92, 99, 73, 82, 86
(in that order) are printed between the glosses to lines 136 and 145. The
pattern—lines 92 and 99 occur in one stanza not connected in thought
with the preceding or succeeding stanzas, and lines 73, 82, 86 occur in two
stanzas that are connected with each other but not with those on either
side—may suggest that these stanzas were originally grouped in the
order
in which E. K. treats them, just before the last stanza of the song. The
phrase "decked as thou art" (145), linking the last stanza with the preceding
one in the text as we now have it, could easily have been substituted for
another phrase ending in "art" if Spenser did make the change.
Any instance of disorder or other irregularity in the glosses must be
conjecturally explained as E. K.'s error, as the printer's error (in handling
either the glosses or the text of the poems), or as evidence of revision by
Spenser. Of the "errors" just discussed, the disorder of "Bett" is probably
attributable to the printer, who may well have put its gloss on the same line
with two other short ones ("Bynempte," 214, "Gree," 215) to avoid printing
the tiny explanation by itself after the two-line gloss to "Algrin" (219: see
below). If the disorder may thus be explained, it seems reasonable to accept
the editors' correction of "better" to "bett" in line 230 of the eclogue. The
instance of "Soote," however, is not easily explained as error by either E.
K. or the printer, nor is the patterned disorder of the glosses to
April. If we could accept E. K.'s date of 10 April 1579 for
the
completion of the glosses, and the Stationers' Register entry of 5 December
1579 as a date
for the completion of printing, then we could urge on slightly better
grounds than one finds in the Variorum that Spenser revised his work
between those dates, possibly when he was in London in October, "minded
for a while to haue intermitted the vttering of my writings" (Variorum
Prose Works, p. 5).
While I would be the first to urge that these considerations are only
further speculation, I think they offer reason for saying that the Variorum
editors should have retained the original order of E. K.'s glosses, or at least
recorded the "errors" in the "Variant Readings" or the "Critical Notes on
the Text" (they scrupulously note [I, 698] that the gloss to "Ouerhaile,"
Jan. 75, is wrongly printed after the heading "Embleme"). As
it is, in correcting the order of the glosses they have introduced new
disorder, wrongly assigning the gloss to "There" (July 65) to
line 63 of the eclogue and rearranging it to appear before "The Shepheard"
(64) —and they have shown poor judgment in two other corrections
of
order. In January they reverse the glosses to "Rosalinde" and
"I loue" (61): the "Rosalinde" gloss explains an entire stanza (61-66) rather
than the specific mention of her name in line 60, and it need not have been
moved. In assigning "Algrin" to July
213 they make a similar mistake: the gloss clearly refers to
"Algrins ill" (219), the "myshap" described by Spenser in
lines
217-228.
