For the Sake of the Arguments: Reading the Headnotes to The Faerie Queene

Abstract

Abstract This essay proposes taking a serious poetic and literary-historical interest in the ballad-stanza ‘Arguments’ which precede and summarize every Canto in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Short, simple, and economical, the four-line Arguments seem at first a very different poetical space from the Spenserian stanza—but on closer reading, they demand an investment in the dimensions of printed language and the spaces and syntax of its storytelling which fits persuasively with the wider poetics of The Faerie Queene and with its narrative structures. The first section establishes the Arguments in a context of analogous early modern paratexts—in the Geneva Bible, Thomas Speght’s 1598 collected Chaucer, printed plays, and the Sternhold-Hopkins psalter. The second reads them closely as a ‘didactic technology’ which might, as well as helping us to read The Faerie Queene, help teach us how to.