Introduction to
Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender
Note on this Renascence
Editions text:
This edition was transcribed
by R.S. Bear
at the University of Oregon and is copyright © The
University of Oregon; it is distributed for scholarly and nonprofit
purposes only.
 Edmund
Spenser
Pembroke
College, Cambridge
BOrn in or near
1552 to a family of small means, Edmund Spenser attended the Merchant Taylor's
School under Richard Mulcaster, and went to Cambridge, about 1569-76, as
a sizar of Pembroke Hall, where he befriended Gabriel Harvey. He took his
Bachelor's degree in 1573 and his Master's in 1576. By 1578 he was serving
as secretary to Bishop John Young, in Kent, the landscape of which is frequently
mentioned in The Shepheardes Calender. Entering into employment
by the Earl of Leicester the following year, Spenser became friends with
Philip Sidney, Edward Dyer, and Fulke Greville; they formed a literary
group called by Spenser the "Areopagus," and their talents were enlisted
in supporting the cause of the Leicester faction in matters of religion
and politics (Heninger xii-xiii). The Shepheardes Calender appeared
at the end of the year, in time to serve as, among other things, propaganda
for the Leicester position on the Queen's proposed marriage with the Duc
d'Alencon. The following year he began work on The
Faerie Queene, and entered the employ of Lord Grey of Wilton, Lord
Deputy of Ireland. In 1581 Spenser was appointed Clerk in Chancery for
Faculties, and soon after befriended Sir Walter Ralegh, whose estate was
not far from his own. The year 1589 saw Spenser's return to London, partly
to oversee the publication of the first three books of The
Faerie Queene. Soon thereafter the Daphnaïda
and the Complaints
also appeared. After two years Spenser returned to Ireland, where he courted
and married Elizabeth Boyle, and continued to produce a number of works,
including the Amoretti
and Epithalamion, Colin
Clouts Come Home Againe, Fowre
Hymnes, and Prothalamion.
An edition of The
Faerie Queene, Books I-VI, appeared in 1596. The Stationers Register
carries an entry for A
Vewe of the present state of Irelande in April, 1598, but this
did not appear until 1633. A general uprising of the Irish forced Spenser
to flee to London in 1598, where he brought correspondence from Sir Thomas
Norris to the Privy Council; a few weeks later, January 13th, 1599, he
died in Westminster and was buried in Westminster Abbey. The Cantos
of Mutabilitie first appeared in the edition of The
Faerie Queene of 1609 (MacLean xv-xvi).
The Shepheardes Calender
The Shepheardes Calender, published
anonymously in 1579 by Hugh Singleton, consists of twelve eclogues named
for the twelve months, comprising together a year symbolic, in its turning
of the seasons, of the whole of human life. The work is greatly expanded
by introductory matter and glosses, written by one E.K., and each eclogue
is preceded by a carefully designed woodcut and followed by a motto or
"embleme" summing up the attitude of each speaker. Models for the poem
include Theocritus, Virgil, Mantuan, and Marot, and the style is influenced
by, among others, Chaucer and Skelton. Chaucer, indeed, is the one poet
to whom Spenser acknowledges a direct debt (De Selincourt xvii); he strives
for a language more purely English than the "gallimaufry and hodge podge
of al other speeches" which the literary diction of England had become.
Although Spenser's language and rhythm is or attempts to be that of Chaucer,
his precedent for the pastoral form is that of debut efforts of antiquity:
Virgil, for example, whose Aeneid begins by acknowledging the pastoral
apprenticeship. E.K. notes the tradition:
...and as young birdes,
that be newly crept out of the nest, by little first to proue theyr tender
wyngs, before they make a greater flyght. So flew Theocritus, as you may
percieue he was all ready full fledged. So flew Virgile, as not yet well
feeling his winges So flew Mantuane, as being not full somd. So Petrarque.
So Boccace; So Marot, Sanazarus, and also diuers other excellent both Italian
and French Poetes, whose foting this Author euery where followeth, yet
so as few, but they be well sented can trace him out.
E.K. predicts that Spenser, "our new
Poete...shall be hable to keepe wing with the best," a foreshadowing of
the appearance of The
Faerie Queene.
Five editions of The Shepheardes
Calender appeared in the years 1579- 1597, proving its staying power
despite the topicality of its allegories. In the years since, the work
has provoked considerable critical disagreement, with contrary estimations
of its success, the meaning of its arrangement, the identities of the voices
of the eclogues and of the protagonists of their fables, the extent to
which E.K. himself is but a persona of Spenser, and the extent to
which the poem reaches beyond topical allegory into expression of Spenser's
poetical and patriotic vision.
On the success of the poetry
there can be no doubt. Though its diction demands even more effort from
us than from its contemporary readers, the rewards remain very great. Aprill
offers a marvelously lyrical "laye" in honor of the Queen:
Now ryse vp Elisa, decked
as thou art,
in royall aray:
And now ye daintie Damsells may
depart
echeone her way,
I feare, I haue troubled your troupes
to longe:
Let dame Eliza thanke you for her
song.
And if you come hether,
When Damsines I gether,
I will part them all you among.
Maye
provides, in its fable, finely observed description and characterization:
But the false Foxe came
to the dore anone:
Not as a Foxe, for then he had be
kend,
But all as a poore pedlar he did
wend,
Bearing a trusse of tryfles at hys
backe,
As bells, and babes, and glasses
in hys packe.
A Biggen he had got about his brayne,
For in his headpeace he felt a sore
payne.
His hinder heele was wrapt in a
clout,
For with great cold he had gotte
the gout.
There at the dore he cast me downe
hys pack,
And layd him downe, and groned,
Alack, Alack.
Ah deare Lord, and sweet Saint Charitee,
That some good body woulde once
pitie mee.
October
delves into the "great matter" of poetic inspiration:
Ah fon, for loue does teach
him climbe so hie,
And lyftes him vp out of the loathsome
myre:
Such immortall mirrhor, as he doth
admire,
Would rayse ones mynd aboue the
starry skie.
And cause a captiue corage to aspire,
For lofty loue doth loath a lowly
eye.
Nouember
contains the memorable lyrical elegiac of "some mayden of great bloud,
whom he calleth Dido":
Whence is it, that the flouret
of the field doth fade,
And lyeth buryed long in Winters
bale:
Yet soone as spring his mantle hath
displayd,
It floureth fresh, as it should
neuer fayle?
But thing on earth that is of most
auaile,
As vertues braunch and beauties
budde,
Reliuen not for any good.
O heauie herse,
The braunch once dead, the budde
eke needes must quaile,
O carefull verse.
December
beautifully gathers the threads of the poem's life and ties them in the
circle of a year, as the poet imagines himself in old age regretful of
a misspent life:
Thus is my sommer worne
away and wasted,
Thus is my haruest hastened all
to rathe:
The eare that budded faire, is burnt
& blasted,
And all my hoped gaine is turned
to scathe.
Of all the seede, that in my youth
was sowne,
Was nought but brakes and brambles
to be mowne.
Although its mode is classical pastoral,
the arrangement of The Shepheardes Calender has two sources: one
is the ancient almanac, The Kalender of Sheepehards, to which E.K.
alludes, remarking that Spenser applied "an olde name to a new worke."
The other source is the vogue for Emblem Books in Elizabethan times. Each
of the twelve woodcuts forms part of a whole impression of the year, yet
each easily stands alone with its eclogue as an enclosed work. The cyclical
pattern of the "monethes" -- name, woodcut, argument, eclogue, "embleme,"
gloss -- is enhanced by the repetition of graphic elements: argument in
italics, eclogue in black letter, glosses in roman type. All this local
variation helps to unify the whole, as it is the same throughout. The effect
is to bring the reader simultaneously to an awareness of the present moment
and of the cycle of months and years throughout eternity. In this way,
even the weakest moments of the verse are vested with the grandeur of timelessness.
That the eclogues are allegorical
and topical is asserted by E.K. himself, and some of the voices are by
him deliberately identified: Colin Clout (the name is from Skelton) is
Spenser, Hobbinol represents Gabriel Harvey, and "the worthy whom she (the
Queen) loved best" is the Earl of Leicester. Of the rest there is little
agreement. Rosalind, Colin's great love, has been the object of much exasperated
speculation. In recent years the whole effort to assign names of historical
persons to these personae has come to be regarded as misguided,
but I think that, provided we remember that identifications are always
provisional, they serve two complementary purposes: one, we are forced,
in considering candidates, to observe the work closely and critically,
and to study attentively the history of a complex and fascinating period;
two, we come to realize the rich multiplicity of readings an allegorical
work can support, particularly in a culture steeped in typological readings
of its classics and scriptures.
Paul E. McLane, writing in
1961, sought to identify dozens of Spenser's allegorical figures and topical
allusions. In Januarye,
for example, he sees the famous Rosalind as Elizabeth I herself. Colin
represents not merely Spenser the poet, but the people of England, rejected
by her in her apparently reckless consideration of the French marriage.
In Februarie,
the Oake is Leicester, the Brier the Earl of Oxford, the Husbandman is
Elizabeth I. Maye's
Foxe is Esme Stuart, Duc D'Aubigny, the Kidd is King James of Scotland,
and the Gate (Scottish for goat) is George Buchanan, the young King's tutor.
October's
Cuddie is Edward Dyer, a member of the Areopagus, whose poetry finds acceptation
but no patronage at Court, while Piers, who suggests to Cuddie that he
try composing epics starring the Queen and the Earl of Leicester, is John
Piers, bishop of Salisbury and friend of Leicester. The "mayden of great
bloud" in Nouember,
called Dido, is Elizabeth I, "dead" to her people because of the impending
French marriage; Lobbin the chief mourner is the Earl of Leicester.
McLane's analysis presents
The
Shepheardes Calender as another in the long series of propaganda pieces
originating with the Leicester faction, including works by Sidney, Gascoigne
and Dyer. Like Sidney's May
Lady entertainment, Spenser's cautionary tales may be read as concerned
mainly with the danger of the Queen's proposed marriage to a Catholic Frenchman.
A strong piece of evidence supporting McLane's interpretation is the anonymous
publication of Spenser's book: if the point of the allegory is to warn
against Catholicism generally, it can hardly be dangerous for the author
to be known. Yet it was not generally known that Spenser was the author
for nearly a decade after the book first appeared (Heninger x).
Spenser's printer, the radical
Puritan propagandist Hugh Singleton, had in August or September of 1579
brought out The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf Whereinto England Is Like
To Be Swallowed by Another French Marriage, If the Lord Forbid Not the
Banes, by Letting her Maiestie See the Sin and Punishment Thereof by
John Stubbs. Stubbs, his publisher William Page, and Singleton were all
arrested and sentenced to have their right hands cut off. The sentence
was carried out in November upon Stubbs and Page, but someone at Court
procured a pardon for Singleton, who appears to have been a peripheral
member of the Leicester group as well as a returned Marian exile. Undeterred,
Singleton produced The Shepheardes Calender within a month of his
narrow escape. Not until January of 1580 did Elizabeth write to Alencon
to tell him the marriage was not to be (McLane 18-19).
Yet it is always possible to
overshoot the mark in discovering specific referents in allegory. While
everyone knew that pastorals were intended "under the vaile of homely persons
and in rude speeches to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters" (Puttenham,
Arte
of English Poesy), they also understood that the "glaunce" was done
through layers of accessible meaning that have their own validity. Without
this validity the work could not serve as the protection to its author
that it surely was. "The shepherd's cloak was the acknowledged disguise
of the lover, the poet, the pastor of souls, the critic of contemporary
life" (De Selincourt xv.). Pan might represent, at various places in the
text, a Greek god, Henry VIII, the divine patron of poets, or (as pointed
out several times by E.K.) Christ. The uncertainty, in any given passage,
as to any character's precise identity not only gives some protection to
the author but deepens and enriches the texture of the eclogues, and rewards
repeated readings with the dawning of new possibilities.
The problem of E.K. has been
"resolved" many times. Edward Kirke, who attended Cambridge at the same
time as Spenser, and was also a friend of Gabriel Harvey, was for many
years regarded as the obvious choice (De Selincourt xiv.), but it could
have been no safer to sign one's own initials to the sometimes heavily
polemical glosses than to the eclogues. In recent years the preferred assumption
has been that Spenser himself is E.K. (Sommer 8), and this is supported
by many internal and external evidences. A notable one is given by Sommer
(23): in the gloss on Maye,
E.K. quotes Sardanapalus as rendered by Cicero:
Haec habui quae edi, quaeque
exaturata libido
Hausit, at illa manent multa ac
praeclara relicta.
and translates him into English thus:
All that I eate did I ioye,
and all that I greedily gorged:
As for those many goodly matters
left I for others.
Sommer notes that in a letter
to Harvey dated 10 April 1580, Spenser sends him verses in Latin-style
hexameters, and adds:
Seeme they comparable to
those two which I translated you extempore in bed, the last time we lay
togither in Westminster?
That which I eate did I
joy, and that which I greedily gorged,
As for those many goodly matters
leaft I for others.
Yet this is not proof that Spenser is
E.K.; it is at best evidence that Spenser was on the committee that created
and sustained him. Arguments have been advanced for every member of the
Areopagus, including Sidney, Harvey, and more recently Fulke Greville (McLane
280-95). In the end, we are left with no more of E.K. than the Areopagites
have given us, and they protected his identity for the remainder of their
lives. What we have of him, however, can afford to stand on its own. His
contribution is a highly interesting text that forms an integral part of
The
Shepheardes Calender, amplifying the gist of the eclogues as needed,
fine tuning our sense of the poet's technical attainment, erudition, and
allegorical intent, yet at the same time deliberately adding confusion
where it is needed, in order to distract powerful and potentially vindictive
readers. In his "Argument" to Februarie,
which contains a detailed allegory of court intrigue, E.K. carefully draws
attention to the "literal" sense in which the tale may be taken:
For as in this time of yeare,
so then in our bodies there is a dry & withering cold, which congealeth
the crudled blood, and frieseth the wetherbeaten flesh, with stormes of
Fortune, & hoare frosts of Care. To which purpose the olde man telleth
a tale of the Oake and the Bryer, so lively, and so feelingly, as if the
thing were set forth in some Picture before our eyes, more plainly could
not appeare.
After we have read the eclogue, we might
expect some exegesis of the veiled meaning from E.K., but he sticks, with
tongue in cheek, to his obfuscation:
This tale of the Oake and
the Brere, he telleth as learned of Chaucer, but it is cleane in another
kind, and rather like to Aesopes fables. It is very excellente for pleasaunt
descriptions, being altogether a certaine Icon or Hypotyposis of disdainfull
younkers.
The poetic aims of The Shepheardes
Calender are multiple: Spenser seeks to recover a native voice, and
to warn his nation and his Queen of dangers to England and to the English
Church from within and without. He seeks his own place in the affairs of
his country, and a place among men of letters. Diverse as these aims may
seem, they do not destroy the unity of his work, and even the garrulous
E.K. presents no real threat to it. This is because there is one aim which
Spenser regards as the highest, and he never loses sight of it even when
addressing himself to the most current of current events. This aim will
sustain him through the composition of The
Faerie Queene and will become most evident, perhaps, in the unfinished
Mutabilitie
Cantos. Spenser's great aim is that of all poets: the defeat of death.
This is a battle one cannot win individually, but the possibilities are
greater for a collective effort, and E.K. explains the poet's role in the
collective, or public, arena:
Plato...sayth,
that the first inuention of Poetry was of very vertuous intent. For...some
learned man being more hable then the rest, for speciall gyftes of wytte
and Musicke, would take vpon him to sing fine verses to the people, in
prayse eyther of vertue or of victory or of immortality or such like. At
whose wonderful gyft al men being astonied and as it were rauished, with
delight, thinking (as it was indeede) that he was inspired from aboue,
called him vatem.
This agrees with Sidney, who in The
Defence of Poesie asserts:
Among the Romans a poet
was called vates, which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or prophet
(Duncan-Jones 214).
For Sidney and Spenser, the role of
the poet is to bring divine instruction from the heavenly sphere into our
own fallen realm, and so raise up the minds of men into such semblance
of divinity as may be possible for them, and by that much defeat the Fall.
Thus it is the poet's business to teach, through divine inspiration, virtue
above all, for virtues are public enactments of what in scripture is called
righteousness, the doing of God's work in the world. The Redcrosse Knight
does not defeat the dragon for himself, but for us all. His prowess is
not his own, but God's gift to him and to us for the defeat of fallenness,
a figure for entropy. This giving or sharing of means to defeat entropy,
or death, is called by the theologians grace, and is the cornerstone
of Spenser's poetic vision of knighthood and civility as the means to bring
in a new Golden Age. Spenser is well aware of the might of the opposition.
The beauty of the present moment faces the "great enmity" of
...wicked Time, who with
his scyth addrest,
Does mow the flowring herbes and
goodly things,
And all their glory to the ground
downe flings,
Where they doe wither, and are fowly
mard:
He flyes about, and with his flaggy
wings
Beates downe both leaues and buds
without regard,
Ne euer pittie may relent his malice
hard (FQ III.vi.39).
There can be no successful private
reply to such an assault. Time destroys all moments in the world of mutability.
Divine moments, however, are from beyond Time and safe from his power.
The prophetic moment of Poesy, like that of the inspired prophets of Israel,
accepts divine grace and distributes it to the community with rhetorical
exhortation to carry out the instructions encoded in the divine gift. Spenser
is best known for his effort to pass on these instructions through epic,
in the superhuman efforts of the Faerie Queene's knights to beat back darkness.
It is a stirring image. But I would argue that he is actually more successful
in his vatic vocation when he is in the pastoral mode, for the deliberate
lowliness of his shepherds is accessible to those of us who lack the prowess
of a Britomart or an Artegall. It is his unarmed Colin Clout whose piping
informs the dance of the Graces seen by Sir Calidore in the sixth book
of the Faerie
Queene:
Of a shrill pipe he playing
heard on hight,
And many feete fast thumping th'hollow
ground,
That through the woods their Eccho
did rebound.
He nigher drew, to weete what mote
it be;
There he a troupe of Ladies dancing
found
Full merrily, and making gladful
glee,
And in the midst a Shepheard piping
he did see (FQ VI.x.10).
The vision is explained to Sir Calidore
by the shepherd thus:
These three on men all gracious
gifts bestow,
Which decke the body or adorne the
mynde,
To make them louely or well fauoured
show,
As comely carriage, entertainement
kynde,
Sweet semblaunt, friendly offices
that bynde,
And all the complements of curtesie:
They teach vs, how to each degree
and kynde
We should our selves demeane, to
low, to hie;
To friends, to foes, which skill
men call Ciuility.
Therefore they alwaies smoothly
seeme to smile,
That we likewise should mylde and
gentle be,
And also naked are, that without
guile
Or false dissemblaunce all them
plaine may see,
Simple and true from couert malice
free:
And eeke them selues so in their
daunce they bore,
That two of them still froward seem'd
to bee,
But one still towards shew'd her
selfe afore;
That good should from vs goe, then
come in greater store (FQ VI.x.23-4).
This passage is at the heart of Spenser's
message in his great poem, for it sums up the one rule central to both
the Classical and Christian traditions of accepting, and passing on, divine
grace, and the one means of defeating entropy on the social scale: treat
others as you yourself wish to be treated. This is to be understood in
Spenser's context of rigidly defined degrees of social position:
honor those who are above you and below you in the hierarchy. Kindness
is particularly to be offered to those below, as divine grace to us all
is seen as a mimetic progression of imitatio Christi from the top
of society to its lowest level. Divine inspiration comes through poets,
but not poets alone: the sovereign, chosen by God to be both the head and
the personification of the State, bears the highest responsibility and
indeed must be, for the sake of stability, the most gracious of all.
It is in The Shepheardes
Calender that Spenser first broaches his great theme:
Lo how finely the graces
can it foote
to the Instrument:
They daucen deffly, and singen soote,
in their merriment.
Wants not a fourth grace, to make
the daunce euen?
Let that rowme to my Lady be yeuen:
She shalbe a grace,
To fyll the fourth place,
And reigne with the rest in heauen.
The Graces are graceful. That is, their
actions exemplify the best that form (of which Time is the enemy) has to
offer. They are divine beings, for their abode is heaven; therefore their
gracefulness cannot be flung to the ground, nor beaten with flaggy wings,
nor cruelly scythed. Elisa, the Queen of England, is offered a place among
them, to "reigne with the rest in heauen." Here, beyond the reach of Time,
she may continue to represent the high and public virtue of Civility, as
glossed by E.K.:
The Graces....make three,
to wete, that men first ought to be gracious & bountiful to other freely,
then to receiue benefits at other mens hands curteously, and thirdly to
requite them thankfully: which are three sundry Actions in liberalitye.
And Boccace saith, that they be painted naked...the one hauing her backe
toward vs, and her face fromwarde, as proceeding from vs: the other two
toward vs, noting double thanke to be due to vs for the benefit, we haue
done.
By accepting the place of the fourth
Grace, and thus completing the Dance, Elisa will complete the pantheon
of the highest circle of the Elizabethan cosmos: the sphere of Immutabilitie.
From there, she will be able to defeat the Grim Reaper, reign over England
as a new Eden, and recover for all time the Golden Age that was lost. Hobbinol's
Embleme for that moment of divinization is explicit: "O dea certe."
We are painfully aware, through
hindsight, that the Golden Age of Elizabeth was not sustained, if it ever
existed. All the principals now lie "wrapt in lead." The poet's allegorical
praises were self-serving in that he constructed them to attain his own
political and financial ends, and the monarch he praised was one who bent
all such praise to the maintenance of a repressive, authoritarian regime.
But we must understand that such judgments are no new discovery; with them
Spenser himself would have no quarrel. The civility he commends to us he
believed in as something from beyond our world of decay, indeed the only
immutable gift, and we might do worse than accept its commendation from
his pen.
R.S.
Bear
Works cited:
De Selincourt, E., and J.C. Smith, ed.
The
Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser. London: OUP, 1935.
Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Sir
Philip Sidney. Oxford: OUP, 1989.
Heninger, S.K., Jr., ed. The
Shepheardes Calender. Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints,
1979.
McLane, Paul E. Spenser's
Shepheardes Calender: A Study in Elizabethan Allegory. Notre Dame,
IN: UNDP, 1961.
MacLean, Hugh, ed. Edmund
Spenser's Poetry. New York: Norton, 1968.
Puttenham, George. The Arte
of English Poesie. London, 1589.
Sommer, H. Oskar, ed. The
Shepheardes Calender. London: Nimmo, 1895.
Spenser, Edmund. The Works
of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition. The Minor Poems, Volume One.
Henry Gibbons Lotspeich and Charles Grosvenor Osgood, eds. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins, 1943.
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Calender.
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