May I christen the new address with a question about editions?
At the end of his Spenser Encyclopedia article on the FQ, having reviewed
the textual history of the poem, William Proctor Williams states that the
"best modern eds" are "Variorum 1-6, J. C. Smith (1909; rpt. by Hamilton in
ed 1977), or Roche (1978). Note: Smith, Roche, Hamilton are three good
reading editions, but the Variorum presents the fullest textual evidence to
date" (SE 259).
I'm assuming that this last bit does NOT mean that the Variorum editors
were more careful than Smith, or that the Roche text has fallen away from
the editorial purity achieved by the Variorum, but only that the Variorum
editors included a fatter app. crit. than Smith and Roche.
My question is this: are we any closer to a standard edition of Spenser's
works than we were ten years ago, and does anybody care (the way people
care about messy texts like Lear or Hamlet)? (Please note that by standard
edition I mean not a once-and-for-all definitive edition, but merely the
edition that careful scholars cite when they're not trying to make an
editorial point -- the Riverside Chaucer, for instance, or Margoliouth's
Marvell.) It might be argued that the Variorum text IS still the standard
edition, but an informal sampling of recent citation practice doesn't
really bear this out.
Part B (if anyone's still reading): what is the word on McCabe's new
edition of the Shorter Poems? (It's not out in North America until May.)
I'm assuming that -- with the (possible) exception of the SC, which
appeared five times over the course of the poet's lifetime -- there's not
much room for controversy on the text itself; no notoriously corrupt
passages spring to mind anyway.
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David Wilson-Okamura http://geoffreychaucer.org [log in to unmask]
Macalester College Chaucer: An Annotated Guide to Online Resources
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