Painted Words Put into the Press: The Forms and Functions of Ambition in Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender

Abstract

David Hill Radcliffe begins his study of Edmund Spenser’s literary legacy by highlighting the importance of old and new technologies to Spenser’s career: Spenser made two important decisions that set his poetry apart from earlier verse: he chose to imitate vernacular as well as classical writers, and he elected to market his works in printed books rather than circulate them in the more prestigious form of manuscript. By taking English Chaucer as his master, he paid deference to a national past; by circulating his poems in durable print, he set the precedent for a future literature that would be public and national, not merely courtly or academic. Spenser’s historical importance results from this confluence of the old technology of poetic imitation and the new technology of printing books.1 Robert Lane agrees with Radcliffe’s assertion that Spenser was a pioneer where print technology was concerned: “Spenser’s work appeared at a time when the circulation of writing was undergoing decisive change, poised between the patronage relationship, which was, to borrow Raymond Williams’s terms, ‘residual’ in the sense that its former dominance was on the wane, and the ‘emergent’ commercial printing industry, which was not yet an adequate base of support for writers.”2KeywordsPrint TechnologyCautionary TaleEnglish VersePrint PublicationProfessional AmbitionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.