Pastoral and the Domain of Lyric in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender

Abstract

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 Spenser 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 workwho 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.' In some ways it is easy to see why The Shepheardes Calender was an event. It was the first set of English pastorals in the European tradition, and in emulating Virgil's Eclogues, it self-consciously inaugurated a poetic career on the model of Virgil's-one that would move from a book of eclogues to a national epic. The very success of this project has encouraged modern scholars to turn away from asking why The Shepheardes Calender made such a difference when it appeared and to treat it mainly as a prototype of The Faerie Queene: most studies since 1950 have emphasized the young poet's epic striving, moral vision, and allegorical technique.2 Recent studies by younger scholars have sought to give a more precisely historical account of The Shepheardes Calender. They have drawn attention to what one might call the problematics of a poetic career in Elizabethan England; to the effects on Spenser of being a courtier and depending on patronage; and in general to the way various social pressures and realities make their presence felt in the poem.3 This kind of historical account has brought out the difficulties and dilemmas of Spenser's literary endeavor in a way that makes his literary achievement all the more impressive. If you assume that in any place or at any time, Renaissance poets could write good pastorals, The Shepheardes Calender may appear to you no better than it did to Dr. Johnson, who mocked its studied barbarity.4 But the poem was not, so to speak, just there to be written. On the