This essay uses Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596) and George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635) to investigate the contingencies that fictions can harbor and the ethical demands of the cocreative reading practices they host. Wither’s Collection includes an innovative “lotterie” game that involves twenty-four poems that do not correspond to any emblem. I trace the uninstantiated possibilities enabled by the inclusion of these “blank chances” in light of early modern poetry’s developing interest in contingency.

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