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HERBERT F. TUCKER, JR Spenser's Eighteenth-Century Readers and the Question of Unity in The Faerie Queene The editors of two recent anthologies of Spenser criticism throw out complementary challenges to modern readers of The Faerie Queene. 'What is now at issue,' writes R.M. Cummings, 'is the consistency of Spenser's poetry, the connexion between its meaning and its structure." If we take 'structure' as signifying, in its broadest sense, all of the formal resources which a poet of Spenser's gifts may exploit, we bring Cummings 's assertion into harmony with that of Paul J. Alpers: for readers today 'the central problem' is: 'How does one read The Faerie Queene?,2 To what extent these questions reveal modern critical preoccupations preoccupations with which this paper is in sympathy - becomes evident when we turn to Spenser's critics in the eighteenth century. For those lovers of system and propriety on the one hand, and on the other of the 'transporting' sublime which transcends system, the meaning of Spenser's 'Gothick' poem often seems not to be an open or a rewarding question. Instead of confronting the relationship between what Ben Jonson calls Spenser's 'matter' and Spenser's manner, between what his great poem means and how it means, eighteenth-century readers tend either to submit the poem to systematic neoclassical standards of diction and stanza, of decorum and structure, or to abandon system in favour of an exhilarated appreciation of the poem's unruly but picturesque 'beauties.' The first tendency recalls the uncompromising strictures of Thomas Rymer, William Temple, and others in the preceding century; the second anticipates, and arguably makes way for, the sensualism of William Hazlitt (1818) and the escapism of James Russell Lowell (1875) in the century to come.3 The most enterpriSing mid-century readers, Thomas Warton and John Upton, are perhaps typical of their age in intermittently embodying both tendencies, though with strikingly divergent results. As a work of criticism Warton's Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser (1754; revised 1762) collects and displays traditional opinions like those outlined below. The commentary in Upton's 1758 edition of the poem, for all its inconsistencies, represents a more genuinely original and substantial contribution to Spensercriticism; as a champion of Spenser's artistry, Upton finally encourages a reading which we may call 'modern' in the sense indicated by Cummings and Alpers. UTQ, Vollime XLVI, Number 4. Summer 1977 The Faerie Queene IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 323 The formal elements of The Faerie Queene with which all readers have first to contend are Spenser's diction and his stanza. As we shall also see in considering questions of genre and structure, a gradual loosening of the neoclassical grip characterizes Spenser criticism throughout the eighteenth century: readers approaching Spenser's uncouth diction evince an increasing willingness to take the poem, quite literally, on its own terms. Almost everyone professes to toe the strong line that stretches from Ben Jonson's 'writ no language' to the censures of Samuel Johnson on the diction and the stanza both· Yet most eighteenth-century critics also agree in tempering their condemnations with praise, joining Matthew Prior (1706) in applauding 'that Curiosa Felicitas' in the choice of diction 'which every Writer aims at and so very few have reach'd. ' S Thus Samuel Wesley (1700) can call Spenser's verse 'smooth and neat: apparently despite his 'Stanza cramp'd, his Rhimes less chast.'" And John Hughes (1715) can complain about the abruptness of the stanza and its fragmentation of the poem's narrative without ceasing to find it both 'harmonious' and 'elegant." In a textual remark from Hughes's edition a new note is sounded: Hughes returns to 'the old Spelling: 'not only to shew the true State of our Language, as Spenser wrote it, but to keep the exact Sense: so that Spenser may 'be his own Interpreter.'· Like so many of Hughes's notes, this one is implicitly taken up by Thomas Warton when he objects to 'translation' of Chaucer as vitiating sense, and when he observes that Spenser's 'sense and sound are equally flowing and uninterrupted.'9 But these suggestions that the local conventions of the...

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