Spenserians all, I am working on an article about the "Faults Escaped in the
Print" for Wayne Erickson. I have looked through the usual sources and can find
little about p. 606 of the 1590 FQ.  Does any one know about other poets (assuming
that Spenser wrote this corrigendum) who add corrections to their published poems
or about the practice of poets correcting text during the printing of their
poems.  I know about Ben Jonson and the 1616 folio.  Of the corrections suggested,
57 are about Book I, 40 about Book II, and 13 about Book III, suggesting a rushed
job on the part of the Author, whether Spenser or not. Can any one suggest
anything?  The Faults are printed on the verso of the page that prints the last
stanzas of Book III.  It is not an insert. Why didn't Wolfe simply correct the
text?  Help.  tpr

David Wilson-Okamura wrote:

> At 12:04 PM 7/17/2002 -0700, Genevieve Guenther
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> >somewhere in the back of my head I can hear Lewis saying about the faerie
> >queene's nocturnal visit to Arthur something to the effect of "either she
> >was real or she was not; either they slept together or they did not."
>
> In a review of Robert Ellrodt's book _Neoplatonism in Spenser's Poetry_,
> Lewis dealt with this question at some length:
>
> "No one doubts that the story is _literaliter_ erotic. The question whether
> the erotic images symbolize some supersensuous experience or not remains to
> be considered on its own merits. (That Gloriana's relation to Elizabeth I
> is wholly in abeyance at this point, seems to me certain; otherwise the
> passage would have endangered Spenser's ears, perhaps his head.)
>         "Now the episode is peculiar in two ways. First, we are not allowed to
> decide whether Arthur's experience was a dream or a reality. At the words
> 'me seemed' (13) it appears to be a dream; the mention of the 'pressed gras
> where she had lyen' (15) sounds as if it were very much more. And secondly,
> we are not given clearly to understand whether, after this night of 'goodly
> glee and lovely blandishment' (14), the fairy rose (or was dreamed to rise)
> with her virginity intact.
>         "This double obscurity about both the reality and the result of the
> _concubitus_ is tolerable on only one condition. Suppose it to be real. You
> can have a story in which two lovers consummate their love, but you must
> not leave us in doubt. You can also have a story in which they lay together
> and abstained. It does not matter whether this or that reader thinks such
> abstinence possible in the real world. It will be poetically possible
> provided this _tour de force_ of chastity is made the main point of the
> story. What is not tolerable--what is in fact ludicrous--is to pass the
> thing over as if it were an unimportant detail. Again, you can have a story
> in which a lover dreams that he has his mistress in his arms. But then the
> bitter awakening, the disappointment, the realization that it was 'only a
> dream', must be the catastrophe of the story. Spenser's actual handling is
> tolerable on one condition only; that we are being shown the sort of
> experience to which the contrast either between mere 'blandishment' and
> full fruition or between dream and waking does not strictly apply. But the
> soul's new-kindled raptures at its first meeting with a transcendental or
> at least incorporeal experience of love, is an experience of that kind.
> First love of fame, of music, of poetry, of a political 'cause', of a
> vocation, of a virtue, of God, have this character. To what stage or degree
> of physical intimacy this spiritual 'embrace' should precisely be compared
> is a senseless qusetion: you must not ask whether the Queen of Faerie kept
> her virginity or not. But to doubt whether it was a dream, whether the
> whole thing, or part of it, and if so what part, was not 'only one's own
> imagination', is absolutely inevitable."
>
> - As rpt. in _Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature_, ed. Walter
> Hooper (Cambridge: CUP, 1966), pp. 158-59.
>
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> David Wilson-Okamura        http://virgil.org          [log in to unmask]
> East Carolina University    Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
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