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Representations 12 (Fall 1985)
This
essay seeks to explain, more precisely than is usual and in terms appropriate
to literary history, the importance to Elizabethan poetry of Edmund Spenser’s The
Shepheardes Calender. Published in 1579, a decade before The Faerie
Queene, this book of pastorals established Spencer as the leading poet of
his generation. Its editor, one “E.K.” (never identified but clearly someone
associated with Spenser), heralded the work as a major literary event and its
author as “our new poet.” It was reprinted four times in Spenser’s lifetime and
evoked imitations and admiring comments almost from the date of its
publication. Spenserians and traditional literary historians still take The
Shepheardes Calender at E.K’s valuation and treat it (not without reason)
as inaugurating the great age of Elizabethan poetry. But it is difficult for
modern readers of the work—who still exist, because most graduate students in
English have to read it—to feel its life and originality, and we have therefore
had difficulty in understanding what all the fuss was about.
. . .
It
was certainly important that Spenser was the first Englishman to emulate
ancient and modern writers of what was a prestigious kind of poetry. Spenser’s
E.K. may be unknowable as Gascoigne’s G.T. and H.W., and he may equally be a
mask of the poet himself. But he appears not in the character of a courtier who
has passed around certain poems and shared certain experiences, but as an
editor who can place the poet in relation to his European predecessors and who
can annotate each of his eclogues. The Shepheardes Calender thus has the
appearance of humanist editions of the Greek and Latin classics and of modern classics
like Petrarch’s Rime and Arisoto’s Orlando Furioso. The volume
accordingly gives no sign of diffidence about appearing in print. Print was the
humanist’s medium, and publication was consistent with E.K.’s hailing the
author as “our new poet,” as opposed to the pejorative epithet of “rhymer.”
What
concerns us, however, is not E.K.’s publicity but the way such claims and
ambitions affect the poems themselves. Writing Virgilian pastorals made a
decisive difference because it meant representing a world of shepherd-singers
and representing yourself, the poet, as one of them. Spenser’s lyric
predecessors characteristically represent themselves as courtiers. This is
manifestly the case with Wyatt and Surrey : whatever the relation of their poems to
actual experience and situations, the speakers of these poems appear in the
character of courtiers. Gascoigne, though socially more marginal than Wyatt and
Surrey , also writes as a courtier. He presents
his poems as written to various ladies or for various friends on various
amatory or social occasions, and the poems characteristically end with a
“device” or “posy.” His greatest poem, “Gascoigne’s Woodmanship,” is addressed
to his patron and represents an actual social occasion as an allegory of his
failure as a courtier. Spenser’s life and career were in a number of ways
different from Gascoigne’s, but he too was a courtier in the sense that he
sought in the court itself or in noble households the patronage that would
establish him as a public servant. What then does it mean for such a
courtier-poet to write pastorals? More than one recent critic has answered this
question by turning to the most important Elizabethan statement of a courtly
aesthetic, The Arte of English Poesie, attributed to George Puttenham
and probably written earlier than 1589, when it was published. Puttenham argues
that pastoral is not a primitive but a sophisticated form of poetry. Poets, he
says, devised eclogues
not of purpose to counterfait or
represent the rusticall manner of loues and communication: but vnder the vaile
of homely persons, and in the rude speeches to insinuate and glaunce at greater
matters, and such as perchance had not bene safe to haue beene disclosed in any
other sort, which may be perceiued by the Eclogues of Virgill, in which
are treated by figure matters of greater importance than the loues of Titirus
and Corydon.
Prompted
by Puttenham’s awareness of the danger of glancing at greater matters, critics
have argued that Spenser’s pastoral personages, far from being a sign of poetic
autonomy, bear witness to the social pressures on poetic utterance.
But
the relevant passages in The Shepheardes Calender are bolder than
Puttenham’s remark leads us to expect. More than one eclogue associates Spenser
with the left wing of English Protestantism, and his boldness extends to
specific allusions. The July eclogue praises a wise old shepherd named Algrind,
who speaks with authority about the character of a true shepherd (i.e.,
minister) and who is said to have suffered a lamentable injury while sitting on
a high hill. “Algrind” simply transposes the syllables of the name of Edmund
Grindal, the archbishop of Canterbury , and a poet who praised his virtues and
lamented his misfortunes was not playing it safe. Two years earlier, the queen had
ordered Grindal to suppress meetings called “prophesyings,” in which a group of
ministers met in public to discuss and interpret biblical texts. These
prophesyings were supported by progressive and radical Protestants and opposed
by conservatives; when Grindal refused to carry out the order to suppress them,
he was placed under virtual house arrest and never regained the queen’s favor.
Yet if praising Grindal and regretting his fate risk royal displeasure, there
are aspects of the poem that remind us of Puttenham’s wariness. The speaker
represents Algrind as a victim and himself as equally helpless, and the simple
moral he draws—“But I am taught by Algrins ill, / to loue the lowe
degree”—suggests a retreat from offending those in power at the very moment the
poet has risked it.
Spenser’s
represented shepherds are neither completely autonomous—free just because they
are literary—nor entirely the creatures of the courtier’s situation. There is a
genuine doubleness about them, a mixture of outspokenness and diffidence, that
E.K. indicates in discussing why one speaks of great matters in pastoral verse.
He says that his author’s rejection of “glorious showes” “appeareth by the
basenesse” of his pastoral pseudonym, Colin Clout, “wherein, it semeth, he
chose rather to vnfold great matter of argument couertly, then professing it,
not suffice thereto accordingly.” By this last phrase he means: if the poet
professed it, i.e., professed to deal with great matters, he might not “suffice
thereto.” Where Puttenham views the pastoral mask as a way of dealing with
social danger, E.K. looks to it for rhetorical adequacy.
We
can restate E.K.’s claim of rhetorical sufficiency by saying that speaking
through shepherds enabled Spenser to speak out in a relatively full and uncompromised
way.
. . .
By
writing a book of eclogues, conceived as the performance of pastoral roles,
Spenser created what I would like to call a “domain of lyric.” In using this
term, I am trying to meet Louis Adrian Montrose’s argument that when critics
speak of Spenser’s work in terms of “aesthetic space,” they ignore what is
specifically historical and cultural about his or any Elizabethan writer’s
poetic project. The way to avoid this charge—which is certainly justified in a
number of cases—is not to oppose the historical and the aesthetic but to
recognize that the claim to relative autonomy, by means of something that looks
like aesthetic “space,” was Spenser’s historical (and therefore, indeed,
problematic) aim in The Shepheardes Calender. I think “domain” takes
cultural and ideological elements into account, because it conceives “aesthetic
space” in terms of rule and authority. One of the age’s most famous lyrics, by
Sir Edward Dyer—a courtier close to Sidney and known to Spenser—begins, “My mind to
me a kingdom is.” Sidney ’s Arcadia , according to the opening sentences of
the romance, is the province of singers because of its governance. Sidney says
the muses chose Arcadia as “their chiefest repairing place”
principally because of the “moderate and well tempered minds of the people,”
which are due to the fact that “the good minds of the former princes had set
down good laws.” Spenser did not feel his own domain of song needed such
precise social specifications, just as neither he nor E.K. offers anything like
Sidney’s explanation that the Arcadian shepherds are good singers because they
“were not such base shepherds as we commonly make account of, but the very
owners of the sheep themselves” and furthermore were infiltrated by gentlemen
poets, whose contributions raised the general level of performance. These are
not surprising remarks for a gentleman of rank, but they are for a pastoral
poet, who, one would think, will find it difficult to take on the roles and
voices of his represented shepherds if even their fictional world is invaded by
these social anxieties.
Spenser
could establish his domain of lyric because his literary assumptions and
practices gave The Shepheardes Calender a certain distance from courtly
and social accountability. A third reason Sidney gives for the excellence of Arcadian
singers is that “the presence of their own duke . . . animated the shepherds
the more exquisitely to seek a worthy accomplishment of his good liking.” This
explanation is consistent with the fact that the major pastorals contemporary
with Arcadia and The Shepheardes Calender—Sidney’s Lady of May,
Peele’s Arraignment of Paris, Lyly’s Gallathea—were masques of
plays written to entertain the queen. Spenser’s main audience, however, was not
the monarch who bestows favor, nor even the court as a whole, but what print
alone could provide—a heterogeneous group of knowledgeable readers. For a
number of reasons, including his social origins and his education, he was
responsive to and felt empowered by another world than the court, the world of
learning represented by his university and European humanism. Nor should we
think, as traditional views of tradition tell us, that humanism in general or
pastoral poetry in particular was enabling in any simple way, as if Spenser were
the passive beneficiary of something already in place. Quite the contrary,
Spenser’s own innovations—notably the device of the calendar, but also his
evident intent to “overgo” his sixteenth-century predecessors—show that he was
conscious of staking out his claim in the world of European letters. By the
modest boldness everywhere evident in The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser
achieved a qualified but nonetheless genuine independence, of which the legal
concept of demesne (= “domain”) is a suggestive representation.
According to F. W. Maitland, the term is applied either to the absolute ownership
of the king, or to the tenure of the person who held land to his own use,
mediately or immediately from the king. . . . In every case the ultimate (free)
holder, the person who stands at the bottom of the scale, who seems most
like an owner of the land, and who has a general right of doing what he
pleases with it, is said to hold the land in demesne.
Whatever
the degree of Spenser’s freedom to poeticize and possess his own space, the
problem of social authority clings to and haunts The Shepheardes Calender.
Its confidence in poetic tradition can be thought to give it a certain distance
from the pressures of an immediate courtly audience, but the humanist tradition
was itself founded on the ideal of the learned man as the counselor of princes.
This ideal and its problematic relation to courtly realities had motivated the
greatest English creation of imaginative space before The Faerie Queene—More’s
Utopia, a literary domain if there ever was one. The Shepheardes Calender
certainly did not undo the work of decades that turned English humanists, as G.
K. Hunter has argued of Lyly, from princely counselors to marginal
entertainers. Lyly was not without his own pretensions to moral authority, but
the brittle brilliance of his writing was inadequate to them. Spenser’s vastly
greater talent was adequate to and enabled by the range of performance required
by a prestigious form of poetry. He was therefore able to achieve, as his
contemporaries immediately recognized, a kind of literary authority.
Like
the metaphor of a poetic domain, “literary authority” is a thoroughly ambiguous
term. The humanist claim is that literary prowess gives one cultural, social,
and political authority. On the other hand, literary authority can be seen as
merely literary, confined to the world of letters. Whatever its scope and
powers, the idea of literary authority is crucial to the epoch of Sidney,
Marlowe, and Shakespeare and, later, of Ben Jonson, Donne (praised by his
elegist Thomas Carew for ruling “the universal monarchy of wit”), and Milton. Spenser’s claim to full cultural authority was to be made
in The Faerie Queene, but in The Shepheardes Calender he had
already achieved—and for the first time in English—a kind of lyric authority.
First of all, the work itself is a complete and substantial book of short poems
that stands on its own terms. This will fail to impress us only if we forget
the problems of motivating lyric that we have seen in Gascoigne, with his
elaborations and evasions, and in Sidney with his romance narration and his
self-conscious staging and justifying of his eclogues. The Shepheardes
Calender appeals for its justification only to what it is, an eclogue book,
and its supporting device, the calendar, is enabling and enhancing. If it
begins with a diffident bid for Sidney ’s protection, in the author’s poem “To
his book,” it concludes with an envoi that repeats Horace’s proud claim: “Loe I
haue made a Calender for euery yeare, / That steele in strength, and time in
durance shall outweare.”
The
literary achievement Spenser claims for his book manifests itself in the lyric
authority of his pastoral self-representation, Colin Clout. In the first half
of The Shepheardes Calender, Colin appears divided against himself: once
the master poet, he is now reduced by love to the complaining monotony of the
January eclogue and the uneven eloquence he displays in “June.” But in
“August,” his sestina, though not sung by him, expresses his love woes in a
form as highly wrought as the youthful celebration of Eliza in “April.” Colin’s
sestina leads to the two final eclogues, in both of which he himself is the
singer and which sum up what E.K. called the “plaintive” aspect of the whole
sequence. “November” expresses an impersonal grief, uses the most elaborate and
lofty stanza in all the eclogues, and is consciously in a main tradition of
European poetry. In “December,” Colin Clout rehearses his life and
love-suffering and uses a native form—the six-line stanza that was common in
mid-Tudor lyric—to express his own particular grief and loss. Both poems
combine strong feeling with moral awareness and formal control. “November”
endows the technical fanciness and impersonal moralizing of Colin’s elegy with
the passionate feeling E.K. admires in his commentary. In “December,” Colin
takes a fuller and more accepting view of his plight—and utters a richer and
more various complaint—than he does in “January,” the opening poem, in which he
is mired in his wretchedness.
Colin
Clout’s emergence as the singer of the two concluding poems—as the master
singer in “November” and as, in a sense, master of himself in “December”—might
lead us to speak, in a general way, of his lyric authority. But I think the
term has a more precise meaning, because these two poems speak to two of the
main cultural pressures on the mid-Tudor lyric, the disparagement of love and
the moral conflict between youth and age. This conflict is the subject of the
February eclogue and underlies the ecclesiastical debate in “May.” But in the
second half of the work, authoritative old shepherds give way to shepherds who
are past youthful innocence, but who do not step into the old shepherd’s role
of fixed moral authority. Diggon Davy in “September,” Cuddie in “October,” and
Colin Clout himself are all speakers whose experience has thwarted them: Diggon
as a seeker of ecclesiastical vocation, Cuddie as an ambitious and
noble-spirited poet, Colin as a pastoral philosopher and singer. For each of
them, Spenser seeks to develop a rhetoric that combines, rather than opposes,
imagination and moral awareness, emotional energy and the felt lessons of
experience. Where Diggon Davy and Cuddie appear in dialogues with other
shepherds, Colin’s two songs are self-sufficient monodies. The pastoral
assumption that song can resolve or at least fully voice distress becomes a
source of poetic authority in these poems. They turn the moral and cultural
oppositions that in other writers compromise lyric into sources of lyric
accomplishment. Like Sidney ’s double sestina, they endow the
expression of loss with what has the feeling of lyric presence. But where this
sense of presence in Sidney ’s poem is a function of the verse form
itself, in the last two eclogues of The Shepheardes Calender it attaches
itself to the first-person speaker. Sidney too had a pastoral pseudonym, but it was
Colin Clout who became a figure, even a name to reckon with, in Elizabethan
culture.
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