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...and misconstructions," to "the daunger of enuy, and suspition of present time," to his poem as seeming "tedious and confused," as well as the defensive tone of the Letter more generally, suggest something more than conventional posturing. The Variorum editors offer the assurance that "Such epistolary prefaces, defending the poetical type to which a work belonged, or explaining its allegorical character, were traditional," but none of the examples they cite present anything to compare to Spenser's anxieties in the Letter (1: 312). (1)
If we do not accept Spenser's claim that he writes at Ralegh's request merely to provide "better light in reading" his poem, we might see the Letter as akin to the Commendatory Verses and Dedicatory Sonnets in heralding the poem's dignity. The obvious analogy for this would be the apparatus published with The Shepheardes Calender. However, the introductory epistle and argument by E. K., no less than his glosses, are notable for their discursiveness and misdirection; they run several times longer than the Letter but tell us comparatively little about the Calender and almost nothing that a reader could not gather from the poem itself. (2) The example of The Shepheardes Calender suggests that, in the absence of the threat of hostile reception, the poem remains the poet's statement of its meaning.
We can also read the Letter in the context of its genre--the genre that Spenser invokes in the Letter itself--and conclude that Spenser intends to "proclaim his poem a classic" in Daniel Javitch's formulation, to make it look like its classical and Italian epic precursors, a text worthy of scholarly controversy. Spenser's likely model would be the "Allegoria" Tasso published with his Gerusalemme Liberata. (3) Unlike the Letter, however, Tasso's preface actually prefaces his poem, and it does not disparage the Liberata or acknowledge the possibility of its having detractors; and rather than address himself to a particular patron as Spenser does in the Letter, Tasso lectures his readers in general on the theory of allegory and its application to his poem. In one respect not generally noted, the "Allegoria" may present a useful parallel to the Letter. Tasso's explanation of his allegorical approach and his reductive reading of his own poem were crafted with the Holy Office of the Inquisition in mind, and his "Allegoria," for all its elegance and learning, seems intended--much more pointedly than Spenser's Letter--to answer the demand that he show the authorities his papers.
We must return to the Letter itself, then, for an explanation of its purposes. In its opening lines, Spenser states his intention of "auoyding gealous opinions and misconstructions" by discovering to his reader the poem's "general intention and meaning." Until very recently, Spenser's anxious concerns have been regarded as mere convention, further cringing by his pastoral persona to be passed over silently on the way to the Letter's discussion of The Faerie Queene. Among the few critics who have paused to consider Spenser's stated purpose for writing his Letter are A. Leigh deNeef, who relates the Letter's concern with misreading to Sidney's observation in the Defence that "the grand claims for poetry are always tempered by a recognition that some readers are either too dull or too hardened in vice to be properly affected by it" ("Raleigh" 583), and Wayne Erickson, who argues that Spenser here has in mind Lord Burghley and all those people who will "become the Blatant Beast in Book 6 of The Faerie Queene" ("Spenser and his Friends" 18).
More than twenty-five years ago, Louis Montrose placed at the beginning of an article on Spenser's modes of courtship in The Shepheardes Calender the following observation on the first of Ralegh's commendatory verses published with the 1590 Faerie Queene:
Ralegh envisions Spenser as overgoing not Virgil or Chaucer but Petrarch--not the epic poet of the Africa but the visionary love poet of the Canzoniere and Trionfi. The Faerie Queene supplants Laura as the supreme image of the poet-lover's power to sublimate desire. Ralegh does not envision The Faerie Queene as an exemplary heroic poem but as the verbal courtship of an exalted female whose patronage can satisfy the poet's material ambitions and whose Idea is a spur to his moral and poetic aspirations. In other words, Ralegh is suggesting that The Faerie Queene and his own Cynthia poems are parallel in strategy and purpose. ("Perfecte Paterne" 34)
Montrose did not pursue the point further, but other Spenserians have, and the essay that follows is another footnote of sorts to this passage. (4) By tracing Spenser's anxiety about the reception of his poem from the proem to Book 3 through the Commendatory Verses and the Dedicatory Sonnets and finally into the Letter itself, I hope to demonstrate that the misreading Spenser seeks to forestall in the Letter to Ralegh originates with Ralegh himself, and that the Letter, far from being a disinterested statement of Spenser's literary theory, constitutes a reluctant attempt by the poet to distinguish his project, generically and thematically, from Ralegh's own poems to the queen.
I
Wayne Erickson argues persuasively that passages from Book 3 and the ancillary texts of the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene constitute a "dialogue" between Spenser and Ralegh. (5) If Erickson is right, and I think he is, then how we interpret this dialogue depends to an unusual degree on the context in which we place it. Erickson finds the relationship between the two to be essentially collaborative, marked by shared irony, inside jokes, and other "serious fun" ("Spenser Reads" 176). (6) This reflects, in my view, a proleptic reading of the 1590 edition of the poem, one indebted to the playful tone and pastoral leveling of Colin Clouts Come Home Again, probably written in 1591 but not published until 1595. The Spenser of the mid and late 1590s is confident enough to tease Ralegh in his dedication to Colin Clouts Come Home Again, to place himself among and declare himself arbiter of Elizabeth's train of court poets, to single out the "rugged forhead" in the proem to Book 4 and to declare peremptorily "To such therefore I do not sing at all" (1, 4). (7)
If we try to reconstruct the perspective of Spenser in the late 1570s and 1580s, a different context and a more cautious poet emerge. Here we find the young Cambridge graduate writing to his friend Gabriel Harvey from London in 1579 of the cautionary example of Stephen Gosson, who dedicated his book to Sir Philip Sidney, and faced scorn for the gesture: "Suche follie is it not to regarde aforehande the inclination and qualitie of him to whome wee dedicate oure Bookes" (Var. 9: 6). Spenser wrote this letter the same year and from the same city in which the unfortunate John Stubbs--a writer who might have wisely elected for more "dark conceit" and less "sermoning at large"--lost his right hand for presuming to publish unsolicited royal marriage advice. (8) After leaving England, the Spenser of the 1580s found success in Ireland, but it was a fragile, hard won success: a confiscated estate of uncertain title and a post in a military administration that looked more like an occupation force than the provisional government of a new colony. Spenser's pastoral alter ego Colin Clout looks back and volunteers that he needed an invitation to London and an entree at court to spur him to print...
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