:Shepheards Devises: Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender and the Institutions of Elizabethan Society

Abstract

In this study of Edmund Spenser's 1579 poem The Shepheardes Calender, Robert Lane attempts to uncover hidden dimensions of Spenser's earliest important work by placing it in the historical context of Queen Elizabeth's reign and showing how thoroughly it engages the fundamental sociopolitical issues that confronted English society of the time. Rejecting earlier formalist and new historicist readings that viewed Elizabethan culture as fundamentally aristocratic, Lane reveals this poem's thoroughgoing identification with the non-elite of Spenser's society. By including such popular forms as fables, proverbs and woodcuts, and by drawing on the vernacular literary tradition of Piers Plowman and Skelton's Collyn Clout, Lane argues, the Calender demonstrates the value of the voice and culture of subordinate classes in the highly stratified Elizabethan social order. Adopting the perspective of those who were politically and culturally disenfranchised proves integral to the poem's critique of the key Elizabethan institutions: the Crown and Church, the social hierarchy, the practice of patronage, and the economic system. As Lane notes, discussion of such issues in Spenser's society was dangerous because the Crown claimed a prerogative to govern public speech. Lane describes how Spenser, while challenging this prerogative, used strategies that protected him from official retaliation. Important among these was Spenser's inclusion of voices within the text that seem to present an orthodox position but are in fact critically scrutinised. Lane goes on to show that by taking up controversial social and political issues, the Calender also raises the question of poetry's social role. Whereas most modern scholarship reads the poem as a monovocal treatise on aesthetics that is firmly aligned with the Court, Lane demonstrates that contained within the Calender's poetic discussion is a debate that actually interrogates the social status and function of courtly poetry and begins to outline an alternative conception consonant with its own practice.