Ewe/Who?: Recreating Spenser’s March Eclogue

Abstract

I PROPOSE A RADICAL rereading of critically neglected and trivialized March eclogue of Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender, first factual reading of its references to Elizabethan persons and events. Correctly approached, March readily gives up secrets it has concealed during four long centuries. The force of Spenser's attack as he expresses his views in March, as elucidated in this paper, is such that a reader, however knowledgeable about privilege allowed pastoral as a register for criticism of a poet's political betters, may well be skeptical: how did he dare to say that? He may in fact have gone too far, but determination of that and of its consequences if any are outside scope of this essay.Virgil exercised (or invented) that privilege where, in Eclogue I speaking as Meliboeus and in Eclogue IX as Moeris, he protests Octavian's allocation of land (including Virgil's own property at Mantua) to his soldiers victorious at Philippi. Annabel Patterson demonstrates that pastoral is one of many (in her lapidary phrase) of oblique discourse, similar conventions applying at different times and places to, inter alia, stage, lyric, romance, and private letters meant for unprivate consumption.1 Spenser's contemporary George Puttenham observed that the Poet devised Eglogue ... in rude speeches to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters, such as perchaunce had not bene safe to have beene disclosed in any other sort.2 The literate subject was licensed to vent, but Patterson gives right sense of arrangement: writer must abide by terms of current convention that nobody would be required to make an example of him.3 James I while still fames VI put it clearly: Ze man ... be war of writing any thing of materis of common weill, or uther sich grave sene subjectis (except Metaphorically ...)... they are to grave materis for a Poet to mell in.4 When Spenser published The Shepheardes Calender late in 1579, identities of prominent persons masking as his rustic interlocutors were of necessity evident to cream of contemporary readers. The book was a bravura self-presentation of his technical qualifications as new Poete, but he was also urgently commenting on recent and current social and political events, and needed to be understood. He disguised his meanings but left them open to detection by few . . . wel sented readers able to trace him out.' They would be those who understood tensions working in 1579 royal court, who had some acquaintance with classical and modern continental pastoral poetry and its commentators, and who were curious enough to look into implications of The Shepheardes Calenders archaized vocabulary, its pervasive textual and visual allusiveness, and its anachronistic and intentionally untrustworthy scholarly apparatus. The most immediately striking element would have been simultaneous presentation of verse and gloss in a first edition (and that, of a book by an unknown poet). Late sixteenth-century English readers were accustomed to annotated versions of Virgil, of Petrarch, Sannazaro, and even contemporary Ronsard, but never in a first edition. The Shepheardes Calender was a crafty presumptuous novelty. It would have had punch of Lolita's first appearance as The Annotated Lolita or as a Norton Critical Edition. This was altogether a ludic genre of spurious authenticity never meant to be taken at face value but to be thought upon for pleasure of discovering validities concealed by its falsities. Can we say Early Modern Post-Modernism?''Karen Winstead, speaking (on a 1993 MLA panel) of John Capgrave's mid-fifteenth-century use of hagiography to subvert prevailing narrow official orthodoxy, said, Capgrave hid for safety, but needed to be found. A century later Spenser hid (or pretended to hide) for safety in pastoral, but no recorded later critical eye has found him out in his March: to Spenser's cast of mind an unsatisfying success, like that of a hide-and-goseek player so well hidden that other children have lost interest and gone home to dinner. …