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I. SPENSER'S BACK PAGES
As one aspect of the capacious methodological program David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass christened "The New Boredom" (Kastan 18),1 materialist case studies provide benchmarks against which literary scholars have learned to measure their investment in speculation and fantasy. Indeed, it could be argued that one of the chief merits of the work produced by scholars who have insisted on the importance of rigorously engaging with the material conditions of print culture has been to produce a body of studies in which cautionary tales abound. It could be argued, too, that no one must be more aware of the potential embarrassments that haunt speculative projects than the scholar who has chosen to explore the received wisdom concerning the explanatory, dedicatory, and commendatory documents that accompanied Spenser's Faerie Queene into print in 1590.
Bound up in this received wisdom is the vexed question of Spenser's self-fashioning as a creature of the print shop. After several decades during which Spenserians assumed that the poet of The Faerie Queene must have been intimately involved in the printing of his poem,2 Jean Brink has recently insisted that we ought to entertain other possibilities. In her "Materialist History of the Publication of Spenser's Faerie Queene" Brink argues that "From what we know about the Elizabethan printing house, it would be eminently sensible to question Spenser's involvement in the physical presentation of his work" (3). Brink criticizes what she calls "the fictionalization of the printing context" by Spenser's critics (2). Accordingly, her recent work is characterized by a desire to strip the printing context of those seductive fictions.3 The most tenacious of those fictions have clustered around the back pages of the 1590 Faerie Queeneespecially around the Letter to Ralegh and the Dedicatory Sonnets.
Given the complexity of the history laid out by Brink, a brief review of the central problems posed by the different states in which Spenser's Dedicatory Sonnets have survived will not be out of place here.4 Some copies of the 1590 Faerie Queene print ten dedicatory sonnets on signatures Pp6r-Pp8r (pages 601-06).5 The majority of copies, however, print twenty-five sonnets. In these copies the original ten sonnets of the first issue (Pp6r-Pp8r) are accompanied by another set of fifteen sonnets (eight of these...