The Faerie Queene

There is no single first edition of the whole poem. The 1590 Ponsonby quarto is the true first of Books I–III; the 1596 Ponsonby quarto (The Second Part of the Faerie Queene) is the true first of Books IV–VI, and a complete first-edition set is the two together. Note the trap inside the 1596: it reprints Books I–III, so those books in a 1596 set are a second edition, and their text is revised — Spenser cancelled the 1590 close of Book III (the Amoret and Scudamour hermaphrodite reunion) and substituted the non-ending that carries into Book IV, so the 1590 quarto is the only source for the original ending. The 1609 folio, printed by Humphrey Lownes for Matthew Lownes, is the first folio and the first posthumous/collected edition, and is the first appearance in print of the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie — a genuine first for that text, but for the poem it is a later edition and should be described as first folio / first thus, not as the first edition. No original-language or foreign precedence question arises: the poem is English throughout.