Shepheardes Calendar | ||
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:
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 poem 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:
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:
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:
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":
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 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:
Hausit, at illa manent multa ac praeclara relicta.
As for those many goodly matters left I for others.
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:
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:
Spenser is well aware of the might of the opposition. The beauty of the present moment faces the "great enmity" of
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).
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).
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.
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).
It is in The Shepheardes Calender that Spenser first broaches his great theme:
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.:
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.
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