...or rather in obedience to the established tyranny of patronage," and the number of these sonnets and their elaborate humility has made them an embarrassment to some critics (Var. 3:307). (2) This disdain has not served us well, for it has left us without a sense of the norms of dedicatory verse comparable, for instance, to our sense of the norms of poems in the Petrarchan tradition and has discouraged careful attention to the sonnets Spenser actually wrote. Until recently, most critics have tended to ignore the Commendatory Verses, with the exception of Ralegh's graceful first sonnet, and to read the brief Letter to Ralegh out of context as a Spenserian poetics, a treatise comparable to (and often explicable in terms of) Sir Philip Sidney's Defence. (3) The new interest in the front and back matter derives partly from the emphases of the New Historicism. Its attention to a wider variety of genres, its concern with the social embeddedness of literature, and especially its analysis of specific reading communities have given new energy to the study of dedicatory and commendatory poems. (4) The past thirty years of work on Renaissance patronage has also enabled us to understand Spenser's position more clearly. The second edition of A. C. Hamilton's Faerie Queene now annotates the Letter to Ralegh, the Commendatory Verses, and the Dedicatory Sonnets.

Yet the first wave of the New Historicism added comparatively little to the account of the 1590 front and back matter. Carol Stillman argued in 1985 that the Dedicatory Sonnets were organized in hierarchical order, and David Miller built on that insight to see them as an emblematic representation of Elizabeth's court. But fuller attention to the shrewd playfulness with which the Sonnets, the Commendatory Verses, and the Letter address their multiple audiences has only developed over the past fifteen years. A number of essays have focused on the exchanges between Spenser and Ralegh in the 1590 volume, (5) and the renewed bibliographical attentiveness on the part of critics like Joseph Loewenstein and Jean Brink ("Materialist") has enabled us to understand more fully the conditions under which it was printed. This increased attention suggests a Spenser who operates flexibly within the constraints of publishing decorum. The Dedicatory Sonnets now look subtler and more independent--and more like a sequence--than they used to. Repeating the formulae of humility, Spenser seems capable of arguing for the merits of his own work or even of criticizing the great men whom he seems to praise. Judith Owens's close look at the Commendatory Verses suggests that Spenser was seen and praised as more than a poet of the Elizabethan court, and Wayne Erickson's 1992 essay on the Letter to Ralegh suggests that it is less Spenser's final word on the nature of his poem than a canny response to criticism he expected to see leveled at it.

I

One advantage of Gerard Genette's Paratexts is that it concerns itself with the functions of a book's front and back matter. The function of a preface is "to ensure that the text is read properly" (197), and all paratexts, from dust jacket to prefaces, notes, and authorial interviews, are meant to "ensure for the text a destiny consistent with the author's purpose" (407). Paratexts are thresholds ("seuils"), mediating between the relatively stable text and the mutable world beyond it: "Being immutable, the text in itself is incapable of adapting to changes of the public over space and time. The paratext--more flexible, more versatile, always transitory because transitive--is, as it were, an instrument of adaptation" (408). Spenser was intensely concerned with making sure that his works were received as they should be: Leigh DeNeef (Spenser), among others, has developed an account of Spenser's attempts to avoid being misread. Throughout his life, Spenser used his paratexts to present his works to particular audiences and to make sure that they would be read correctly.

In addition, Spenser uses the paratexts, especially his dedications, to present himself to his audience, whether that audience is an addressed patron or the more general readership that watches the author's self-introduction. As Spenser's view of himself and his poetry changes, both the function of the paratexts and his self-presentation...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



More articles from Studies in the Literary Imagination
Humble presents: pastoral and gift-giving in the commendatory verses a..., September 22, 2005
Ralegh's gold: placing Spenser's dedicatory Sonnets.(Edmund Spenser)(C..., September 22, 2005
Commercial settings of the 1590 Faerie Queene.(Critical essay), September 22, 2005
Getting it back to front in 1590: Spenser's dedications, Nashe's insin..., September 22, 2005
A note on the errata to the 1590 Quarto of the Faerie Queene., September 22, 2005

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