“The Falsest Twoo”

This chapter discusses the question of how to represent the orthography of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene in modern texts. Editions of Spenser's poem nearly always preserve the late sixteenth-century spellings: it is The Faerie Queene, not The Fairy Queen. The reproduction of old spellings communicates a set of seemingly irreproachable editorial commitments: to textual fidelity, to philological precision, to the material and cultural contexts of poetic composition, and, above all, to authorial intent. Ironically, however, the effects of old spelling on Spenser's modern readers are hard to justify in such terms. The chapter argues that although the “old-spelling” Faerie Queene encodes much less of Spenser's meaning than most modern editions of the poem imply, it retains more of what the poem has meant to readers, and to the tradition of literary scholarship.