Marginal Presence, Lyric Resonance, Epic Absence:Troilus and Criseydeand/inThe Shepheardes Calender

Abstract

The Shepheardes Calender suggests a conscious dialogue with Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in Immerito’s echo of the envoy of the Troilus in his dedicatory poem and Epilogue and in E.K.’s (mis)quotation of Pandarus’s admonition to Troilus (“Uncouthe, unkiste”) as he introduces the New Poet. These marginal allusions invite a larger consideration of Spenser’s relations with the Troilus. Colin Clout, as well as Immerito, is “uncouthe, unkiste,” and the Petrarchan impasse which threatens his artistic career resonates interestingly against lovelorn Troilus’s own rehearsal of the first English translation of a Petrarchan sonnet. The Shepheardes Calender provides an alternative to Colin’s narcissistic lyricism in its anticipation of a “famous flight” to epic; this enacts a telling revision of Troilus’s very different, post-mortem “flight” (which triggers Chaucer’s epilogue). Chaucer’s roman antique teases the proto-Virgilian Spenser with an English epic precursor that never was—and perhaps renders all the more significant his later enfolding and completion of another Chaucerian romance within Book IV of his “poem historicall.” The Faerie Queene’s reinvocation of the English Tityrus revises, furthermore, E.K.’s brokering of Immerito: Spenser now recanonizes an alienated, “uncouthe, unkiste” Chaucer.