THE SPENSER ARCHIVE
Prototype
We present the Oxford Edition of the Collected Works of Edmund Spenser in six volumes. The first volumes present prose and poetry that we edit from early printed editions, publications that saw print by 1609; volume 6 contains texts edited from manuscript sources, Spenser's prose dialouge A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland and his secretarial correspondence. There is a rift between those works printed by 1609 and those works that come down to us in manuscrips written out while Spenser was alive: no works printed in Spenser's lifetime survive in manuscripts produced prior to their first printing, while no works that survive in manuscript passed into print until well after Spenser's death. The two media are somewhat insulated from each other within the early publication and circulation of the Spenser corpus, and they are somewhat insulated from each other in this edition.
As we indicate in the General Introduction to this edition, the Oxford Spenser aims to imitate the collective tendency in Spenser's publications: in our rendering of the Spenser-Harvey correspondence, Harvey's letters are represented on comparable footing with Spenser's; we treat the various elegies collected in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe - poems by Lodowick Bryskett, Matthew Roydon, Walter Ralegh, and (most likely) Edward Dyer and (perhaps) Mary Sidney - similarily. We set some limits to this editoral approach, however: Spenser contributed commendatory sonnets to four books first printed in the 1590s and we have not edited and printed the full text of those books, nor have we undertaken to print all of the commentary, which makes up the bulk of Jan van der Noot's Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings (1569) and which overwhelms the poems (which Spenser had translated) on which it reflects. We do offer a selection from the commentary sufficient, we hope, to evoke the polemical effort to which these poems are recruited. But because, like many of Spenser's later imaginings, the full commentary is vividly stretched between iconographic and iconoclastic commitments and so will richly repay the student's and scholar's attention, we offer a complete online edition of the commentary at the Spenser Archive.
When he prepared the first full collection of Spenser's works in 1611, Matthew Lownes pursued a similar inclusiveness: "Together WITH THE OTHER works of England's Arch-Poët," Lownes included all the elegies to Sidney that CCCHA collects; he also included the commendatory poems by various hands that were printed in 1590 when Part 1 of The Faerie Queene first appeared. We follow Lownes' lead in the present edition. But Lownes was less inclusive than we have been. Because he is collecting the works of England's arch-poet, most of the Arch Poët's prose is missing; Lownes prints only prose paratexts to poetic works - a few dedicatory epistles and the Letter to Ralegh explaining the "whole intention of The Faerie Queene. He does not publish Spenser's translation of the psuedo-Platonic dialogue, Axiochus, printed in 1592; nor the Vewe of the Present State of Ireland, composed c.1596, which survives in over 20 manuscripts written between 1596 and its first print publication in 1633; nor the secretarial Letters, unsurprisingly uncollected in Spenser's day, as they were professional documents, composted for others' hands and 'voices'; nor the Brief Note of Ireland, a collection of three items written c.1598 and later attributed to Spenser. Neither dows Lownes reissue Spenser's published correspondance with Harvey, the omission of which was ill- or unadvised, since they include poems by the Arch-Poët - among them a long poem in Latin - along with poems by both Gabriel Harvey and his younger brother John, including John's reworkings of some verses from The Shepherdes Calender. All of these exclusions are easy to explain, for Lownes was simply reprinting corrected versions of the most recently printed volumnes of Spenser's poetry: the 1609 Faerie Queene; the 1597 Shepheardes Calender; CCCHA, Prothalamion, and Fowre Hymnes, all three printed in 1596; the Amoretti and Epithalamion of 1595; and Daphnaïda and (with a notorious absence) Complaints, both printed in 1591. This results in the inclusion of some non-Spenserian prose - or prose not acknowledged as Spenser's: E.K.'s apparatus to the SC and the letter to the reader that William Ponsonby had prefaced to Complaints.
If the omisson of Axiochus, the Vewe, the Brief Note, and the Letters is understandable, and if the omission of the correspondance with Harvey is forgivable, we must still explain Lownes' exclusion of Prosopopoia or Mother Hubberds Tale,originally printed in Complaints of 1591. For reasons that remain contested, MHT was too provocative and unsold copies of Complaints had been confiscated in 1591, and the poem is notably absent from the 1611 Works (Johnson 1933, 47). There are at least a few other verse omissions, four of them commendatory sonnets: the first, a poem in praise of Gabriel Harvey, composed in 1586 and published as the final poem in Foure Letters, and Certaine Sonnets (1592) a volume of compositions by Harvey and his brother John, most of them attacking Robert Greene; the second, a sonnet commending the author, Giovanni Battista Nenna, and the translator, William Jones, of A Treatise of Nobility (1595) the third another commendatory sonnet, for a translation of Jacques de Lavardin's Historie of George Castriot (1596), an Albanian nobleman who led a minor anti-Ottoman rebellion; and a last commendatory sonnet, this one for Lewes Lewkenor's translation of Gasparo Contarini's The Commonwealth and Government published in 1599 after Spenser's death. None of these were satirical or controversial; their exclusion from Lownes' collection of Spenser's poetical "works" was certainly apolitical. Prior to the Restoration, such commendatory verse is seldom re-collected in subsequent verse collections or anthologies, but this may be less a matter of generic convention (as if 'mere commendation' were somehow not regarded as properly poetic 'work') than the effect of sheer inadvertence, for Lownes or his editor may very well not have known of these four fugitive sonnets.1
Two other absences from the 1611 Works may be similarly explained. For his print edition of Spenser's Vewe in 1633, James Ware collected eight pages of Spenser's verse relevant to Ireland: excerpts from Book IV of The Faerie Queene as well as from the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie; three sonnets dedicating The Faerie Queene to Thomas Earle of Ormond and Ossory, Authur Lord Grey of Wilton, and Sir John Norris, Lord President of Munster; and, finally, a distich and a six-line epigram that Spenser ostensibly wrote for Richard Boyle, created the first Earl of Cork in 1620. The poems for Boyle are the only poems that Ware published not witnessed elsewhere and it is unsurprising that Lownes' collection, which comprises only poetic works that had already seen print, should fail to include them. Together with the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, they are, indeed, the only poems not printed during Spenser's lifetime that we regard as likely to have been written by Spenser.
The Oxford Spenser includes several works the attribution of which to Spenser has been contested. Considerations relevant to attribution will be taken up in the Critical Introductions to the Dolefull Lay of Clorinda, Axiochus, the Brief Note of Ireland, the Vewe, the commendatory poems for Harvey, Nenna, Lavardin, and Contarini, and the poems for the Earl of Cork.
The following paragraphs specify our procedures in editing that large portion of 'Spenser's' corpus for which the earliest witnesses are printed texts. The procedures for texts edited from manuscript sources are specified in the front matter to volume VI of the Oxford Spenser.
The Oxford Spenser derives its texts of works that appeared in print during Spenser's lifetime from the first print editions. Our choice of first editions, a choice which respects first print publication as itself an important event in literary culture, is now only minimally controversial, although prior to the twentieth century editors relied on the derivative folio editions of 1609 and 1611 for their copy texts and for much of the twentieth century, editors of The Faerie Queene chose the second, 1596 edition as their copy text not only for Part 2 (Books IV-VI) of the poem, for which it is the earliest edition, but also for Part 1 (Books I-III), for which it is the second, slightly revised edition.
We make a sharp departure from editorial tradition in our choice of copy-text witness. According to the settled norms of modern editorial practice, an editor will choose a particular physical copy of a preferred edition as her copy text and will then note all departures therefrom. The difficulty instituted by such practice derives from the fact that the nature of any given witness is, to a large degree, aleatory. Because corrected and uncorrected sheets of any given forme were indiscriminately stacked and warehoused together, individual copies mix sheets reflecting different printing states (to say nothing of sheets clearly inked and sheets sloppily produced) and few individual copies represented the same admixture of forme-states. Somewhat unconventionally, we correct for this aleatory admixture by adopting as our copy text a selection of formes that we have determined to represent the most fully corrected extant state of each forme from the first edition of any given work. Thus, for outer forme S1 of The Faerie Queene, Part 1 (1590), which comprises signatures S1, S2v, S7, and S8v, we adopt scans of the Washington University copy, which witnesses the third of three states of the forme. Yet because for inner forme S1 (S1v, S2, S7v, and S8) the Washington University copy witnesses the second state of the forme, we adopt scans of a copy housed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which witnesses the forme in its fourth, most fully corrected state, as our copy text.
We document the constitution of this eclectic ideal copy in two ways: we provide a forme-by-forme list of witnesses adopted as copy and we retain scans of each such selection accessible at [Spenser Archive URL] or [OUP URL]. We supplement the scans of our copy text with scans witnessing all known variant states of formes from the first edition, along with scans of at least one witness each from all Spenser editions through 1617. The provision of these scans is also a modest departure from editorial tradition: we treat them as part of the bibliographical apparatus of the edition, and trust that the reader can consult these page-images should she wish to compare our text with its copy, and so observe the effects both of our declared emendations and of the silent adjustments detailed below.
In all save three cases, we have collated at least seven copies of each early edition of Spenser's works printed between 1569, when the Theatre was published, and 1612, when the last constitutent section of the folio Works was first issued. In the case of the 1591 and 1596 editions of Daphnaïda and the 1592 Axiochus fewer than seven copies are known to survive; we have collated all the known extant copies of these works.
As we edit our ideal copy text, we adjust it in several ways. We ignore most variations in font-size and simplify the handling of decorative typography, eliminating box-rules, ornaments, and tapering or otherwise shaped layout at the ends of major sections of works of prose. Our textual notes do not record irregularities in running-titles or signing, nor do they indicate mismatches between catchwords and the body-texts to which they gesture. Where our copy begins sections of documents by pairing a letter in drop-caps followed by a letter in caps, we simply use an initial drop-cap.
Three of our copy-texts deploy a mixture of gothic, roman, and italic fonts. On The Spenser Archive, we preseve a semblance of this typographic heterogeneity, substituting a bolded sans-serif font for gothic fonts, but in the Oxford Spenser we defer to modern typographic norms by reducing the three fonts to two, adapting roman fonts for body-texts and italic (and occasional small-cap roman) for contrast fonts. We regularize spacing and level such distinctions between early modern letter-forms as have disappeared from modern typographic practice: s and long-s are presented identically, as are the various renderings of r in gothic typefaces, oblique double hyphen (⸗), and so forth. Swash types are not reproduced, and VV and vv are changed to W and w respectively. Except in collation notes, stylistic ligatures are changed to correspond to modern typographical convention (so that the single glyph ‘ſt’ is rendered as ‘st’); similarly, the Greek ligature stigma (‘ϛ’) is expanded to ‘στ’. In many cases, early modern English printers allow types with accented letter forms (e.g. ‘í’ or ‘ì’) to mix in with unaccented letters; we frequently find the French digraph ‘ée’ used as a substitute for ‘ee’. We silently emend these, adopting the unaccented forms.2 We preserve æ and œ when present in our copy text, with the provison that these letters are notoriously vulnerable to careless distribution to the typecase and, thence, to careless typesetting. While it is our policy to correct all identifiable instances of foul case, we follow our copy in any instances in which the relevant spelling seems itself to have been variable, as with, for example, cælum/cœlum. Where compositors have set two vowels in sequence with uppercase letters, we take them to be attempting to capture a dipthong and render it as such.
Where space appears in what have now become compound or hyphenated forms, we have preserved the spacing in copy, albeit with two classes of exception. First, we compound all strings in which an isolated 'a' would be compounded in modern printing: 'a while' becomes 'awhile'; 'now a days' becomes 'nowadays'; 'a lone', 'alone'; 'a right', 'aright', etc.3 Second, we compound in a few instances in which failing to do so would irrelevantly confuse the reader. The aforementioned changes are 'silent' adjustments, which is to say that none are recorded in our collation notes.4 In instances in which editorial prudence suggests that we break these rules, as when we adjust the spacing of copy to avoid an unnecessary obstacle to the reader's construction, we provide a textual note on our exceptional procedure. We also note instances in which we would insert word space that, while absent in copy, would be customary in Elizabethan compositorial practice.
We expand without collating those abbrevitations indicated in our copy text by superior tilde or macron. (We expand minimally: thus bē is expanded to ben, not been.) Similarly, we expand ‘ye’, ‘yt’, and ‘yr’, to ‘the’, ‘that’, and ‘their’. We also expand such Latin scribal abbreviations as persist in sixteenth-century type fonts: – i.e., glyphs, based on the letter forms for ‘p’ and ‘q’, that stand for -que, -quae, -quam, per-, pro-, prae- etc. Where '&' plainly stands in for ‘et’ we expand it thus; otherwise we render it as ‘and’. Where a relatively familiar modern British abbreviation now exists, we silently adopt it in lieu of abbreviations that vary widely across the Spenser canon; thus
| &c, and &c. | become | etc. |
| S and S. | become | St or Sir |
| .s. and s. | become | La. |
| La. and La: | become | La. |
It bears observing that 'La.' and La:' might be variously expanded: in the dedication to Time, 'La.' stands in for 'Lady' and 'Ladyship'; in other dedications to poems in Complaints, 'La:' abbreviates 'Lady', 'Ladyship', and 'Ladyship's'. We leave 'M.' and 'Ma.' as originally printed, since the corpus witnesses 'Master', 'Maister', and 'Mayster' and, in Letters 3, the jocular 'Messer', a title Harvey uses teasingly (along with 'Signor' and 'Segnior') in addressing Spenser in his persona as 'Immerito.' We leave these abbreviated honorifics unstandardized.
Numbers are printed variously in our copy; except for minor adjustments in spacing around numbers, we follow our copy in rendering them. We reproduce the use of periods following or framing numerals, Arabic or Roman, and here note that, in many early printed books, the same notation serves for both cardinal and ordinal numbers.
With few exceptions, we preseve the punctuation and capitalization of our copy-text. Modern readers are liable to find early modern punctuation and capitalization irregular, although they may come to apprecaite the rhetorical and rhythmic gestures of earlier pointing and the hints of personification or of other unusal reifications sometimes signaled by capitalization. (Modern readers may also be perplexed by the unreliability of such signaling: in handwritten as well as printed texts, personified abstractions frequently amble through early modern sentences in lower-case apparel.) Despite our disposition to preserve punctuation and capitalization, we silently regularize a very few irregularities of capitalization and punctuation:
We adjust punctuation only where that of copy seems to present an obstacle to the modern reader's construction, although we preserve original punctuation where the editors agree that the obstacles it obtrudes introduce productive ambiguities and uncertainties.
All verse lines set turned-over or turned-under in our copy text are rendered as single continuous verse lines. As a rule, we do not record line breaks in prose nor do we preserve hyphens wehn they appear in our copy immediately prior to a line break; when an editor decides to preserve such hyphens, we record the preservation in a textual note. We also offer a textual note when we introduce a hyphen to link text strings divided only by a line break in our copy. When a word is split by a line or a page break and the two parts of the word are set in different fonts in our copy, we set the entire word in the font that precedes the line or page break.
We note all adjustments to our copy text not mentioned above, even when we incorporate readings taken from the list of errata appended to the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene. Among such collated adjustments, we include corrections of such typographical errors as foul case and turned letter, together with all emendations. We emend quite conservatively. When the reading of copy is difficult, but makes a kind of sense, we preserve it, although we do emend in cases where we believe that the printed copy text entails a misreading of its own copy, either by the compositor or by a copyist who intervenes between author and compositor. In such cases, we collate our emendation and, usually, reflect on the intervention in our commentary. Whenever we preserve a reading in copy for which we judge there to be a compelling alternative, we discuss that alternative in our commentary. We are especially conservative in our handling of Greek, which is poorly transmitted in most of our copy texts. In The Shepheardes Calender, for example, grave and accute accents are often confused and often carelessly located, as is also the case for breathings. Greek spelling errors are also frequent. From this we concluded that those involved in the production of the Calender made little effort to secure the attention of a competent scholar of Greek. We correct the spelling and the location of breathings, collating the corrections; we preserve the choice and placement of accents in our copy texts, an irregularity that can serve as a sign of the general negligence with which the Greek was transmitted - and, perhaps, originally adduced.
In accordance with a durable tradition in the edition of Spenser's works, the Oxford Spenser is more "unedited" than editions of many of Spenser's contemporaries, preserving many features of orthography and punctuation that are customarily regularized or modernized in editions of other early modern texts.5 Many scholars accept a general case for hands-off editing of early modern texts; many scholars of Spenser make a particular case for such a conservative editorial approach based on who the distinctive character of Spenser's attitude to poetic language.6 For those who regard Spenser's distinctiveness as quite limited in character, or for beginners not eager to develop facility in negotiating the full range of irregularites in early modern printed texts, we provide a more boldly regularized version of the corpus at the online Spenser Archive.
The Archive allows readers to select how the text and appartus of the Spenser corpus is displayed: the Archive display can be toggled to represent its text as in the printed Oxford edition, whereas in its default display the text is lightly modernized; the text can also be customized, allowing the reader to make any of a set of granular adjustments to a diplomatic base text. The default (or 'Modern') text modernizes consonantal i as j, and modernizes the use of u and v; Latin texts preserve consonantal i, while u is employed for vocalic u/v and v for consonantal. The Modern text also corrects the foreign-language passages of the corpus, expands abbreviations like 'Ma.' and 'La:', regularizes the spelling of to, too, of, off, be, bee, the, thee, here, heere, hear, and heare for the purposes of disambiguation.
The Modern text somewhat modernizes the puncuation of the corpus: whereas the punctuation of the Oxford text removes obstacles, the punctuation of the Modern text offers assistance to the reader accustomed to modern syntactic pointing. The default text on the Archive does not modernize such word endings as final -e or -ie, since Spenser (and some of the stationers who printed second and subsequent versions of his works) seems to embrace such spellings; neither does the Archive text impose any further regularization on Spenser's spelling. It therefore preserves one of the somewhat unusual features to be found in many of the earliest editions of Spenser's poetry, a tendency to adapt the spelling of individual words, sometimes quite startlingly, in order to secure eye-rhyme.
Our disposition towards "unediting" in both the Oxford and Modern texts preserves other orthographic irregularites of apparent prosodic import. Non-standard spellings like (the preterite verb) 'lovd' (SC, Aprill 10), 'glistring' (FQ I.i.14.4), or 'poisnous' (FQ I.i.15.6) stipulate syllable count, and forms without such syncope often signal unelided or even epenthetic pronuncations: this 'loued' (SC, Aprill 4) calls for a bisyllabic pronunciation and 'fauored' (FQ I.i.15.7) a trisyllabic one. Yet this is by no means a reliable rule: 'turned' in the very regular June eclogue ('And faultlesse fayth, is turned to faithlesse fere', June 110) is almost certainly monosyllabic, as is 'scaled' at Dec 31 ('How often haue I scaled the craggie Oke'). In the bumptious metre of the Maye eclogue, the spelling of the preteries offers no certain guidance to the rhythm of 'Tho sherwed his ware, and opened his pack' (278).
In his letters to Harvey, Spenser shows considerable enthusaism for the prospect of having more of his poems printed with illustrations like those in the Theatre or the Calender. We make some effort to capture the logic and effect of the mise en page of the books from which we take our copy texts, especially in our handling of the illustrations to the Theatre and Amoretti, nor the messy half-glamour of the SC quarto, nor the plainness of the FQ in quarto. Since we edit only the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie from folio copy, we are not much obliged to capture the slight aggrandizement of the folios of 1609 and 1611, an aggrandizement so imperfectly executed in 1609 that the yearning poise of its last stanzas of the TCM are typographically undermined by being squeezed into the final page of its final gathering.
The presentation of both Spenser's first published works, the Theatre and the Calendar, is rendered dialogic by more than illustration: the commentary in the Declaration of the Theatre and the Glosses of the Calender invite the reader to move back and forth through the two texts, as a scholar or devotee would do. Yet it bears observing that the apparatus of the Calender provides only modest assistance to the reader's orientation. In its first edition, Paradise Lost proffers line numbers; the Calender does not. And although typological symmetries and cycloidal logic shape and energize its form, the earliest editions of The Faerie Queene are unhelpful, offering neither line nor stanza numbers; stanza numbers were introduced only in the 1609 folio edition. And most egregiously, although the Amoretti sonnets are numbered, nothing in the presentation of Epithalamion alerts the reader to the numerological substrate that A. Kent Hieatt so brillantly exposed.7 Modern editorial norms, which oblige editors to facilitate easy reference, are at odds with the early printing of most of Spenser's works, which keeps the mathesis of his poetics a secret. We number stanzas and lines, a half-betrayl of numerical secrets.
The norms of the OET series enable us to respect the (usually) moderate esotericism of Spenser's work: we locate our critical commentary at the back of each volume of the Oxford Spenser. We also provide, in the final pages of each volume, a glossary of the terms most frequently used across the Spenser corpus that are likely to be unfamiliar to modern readers; unfamiliar terms that are used less frequently are glossed in the margins.
Following the textual introduction for each work included in the edition, we provide a list of copies collated followed by a table indicating which formes exist in multiple states and which of the collated copies witnesses each state.
We can best illustrate the format and logic for textual notes with examples taken from the notes to The Shepheardes Calender, since the textual situation of the Calender is more complicated than that of all other works in the canon save the Vewe. A textual note at line 6 of the Januarye ecologue illustrates how we handle press variants within the edition from which we take our copy-text:
vnnethes] vnethes1579 state 1, 1581; ~1579 state 2, 1586, 1591, 1597; vnnethes 1611
Our collations uncovered that a single press variant distinguishes two states in outer forme A of the 1597 edition, the edition from which we derive our copy-text. Two copies collated, those at the Pierpont Morgan Library and the Henry Ransom Center, witness a slightly rare spelling, vnethes; the five other copies collated witness a somewhat more common spelling, vnnethes. That 'vnnethes' is more heavily instanced in the copies collated and in the copies of other early Elizabethan text transcribed in EEBO-TCP leads us to regard it as the likely corrected reading, distinguishing the second state of the forme, and to adopt this reading for the text of the Oxford Spenser. The lemma references the adopted reading, vnnethes; after the close-bracket we give the reading of what we take to be the first state of the forme in 1579; the note also records that the second edition, 1581, gives the same reading as that in state 1 of 1579, which strongly suggests that the compositor of 1581 was setting a copy of 1579 containing the first state of outer forme A. The tilde after the semi-colon indicates that the adopted reading is identical in all significant details to the reading in what we take to be the second state of the forme. The note also indicates that all collated copies of 1586, 1591, and 1597 might suggest that 1586, the third edition, was set from a copy of 1579 that contained the second state of forme A, but the evidence of a preponderance of other details in 1586 discredits this hypothesis: as is made clear in the Textual Introduction to SC, each edition seems to have been set from a copy of the previous edition. The best explanation for the match of this particlar reading in 1586 and the state 2 reading in 1579 is simple resistance, by the editor or compositor of 1586, to the reading, vnethes, in 1581.
An important function of these textual notes is to document departures from our copy texts and to indicate when those departures are specifically warranted by another early modern editions. Thus the note at Januarye 2 documents our decision to follow 1591 in rendering the first word of the line:
When] when 1579, 1581, 1591~, 1597; When 1611
But the notes also record variations in the stemma that are suggestive for text-critical or literary historical reasons. For example, at line 116 of the Dedicatory Epistle to SC we offer the following note:
Hobbin.] ~ 1579, 1581; Hobbin, 1586, 1591, 1597; Hobbinoll, 1611
Again the lemma, 'Hobbin.', indicates the reading in the Oxford Spenser; the tilde after the close-bracket indicates that we take the reading verbatim from our copy text (as does 1581). Following the semi-colon, we give the reading of 1586, 1591,, and 1597. We record this because the editor or compositor has made what we take to be an ill-advised correction: setting from a copy of 1581 (which reproduces the 'Hobbin.' of 1579) and supposing the period after 'Hobbin' to be an errant full stop, he has substituted a comma. Yet the period in 1579 seems instead to record an abbrevation of 'Hobbinoll' and, happily, the editor of 1611 resisted his copy-text, a copy of 1597: perhaps he recognized that the line in 1597 is metrically defective, and, consulting June 65, which E.K. is quoting in the Epistle, has corrected the error transmitted in 1586, 1591, and 1597.
Several aspects of both our editorial practice and our conventions in the textual notes may be illustrated in our note at line 80 of the General Argument to SC:
Tisri.] Tiſri 1579; Tiſri. 1581; Tiſri. 1586, 1591, 1611; Tiſri. 1597
Our copy-text at this juncture is missing a full-stop, which deficiency is supplied in the next edition, 1581. Our note indicates that we have addopted the correction in punctuation instancead in 1851, but have prserved the roman font choice of our copy-text (to which 1586 recurs as well). It should be observed that in the notes we record the relevant readings as printed, reproducing long-s, abbreviations, and ligatured forms that we silently and systematically modernise in the body text of the Oxford Spenser: here the lemma for the note registers our typographic modernisation, recording the fact that all of the early editions employ the long-s.