Spenser's Late Pastorals

Abstract

Spenser, as everyone interested in him knows, began his career as writer of pastoral. But he also returned to pastoral at the end of his career, and we have not made this fact sufficiently intelligible. This essay begins by interpreting the pastoral cantos of Book VI as pastorals, and then draws out the implications of this analysis for The Faerie Queene as epic narration and for Spenser's poetry in the 1590s. In particular, I will argue that unlike The Shepheardes Calender, which was conceived as prologue to heroic poetry, Spenser's late pastorals are alternatives to it. Treating the pastoral cantos as pastoral means paying attention to the old shepherd Melibee and the poet-shepherd Colin Clout. By giving each of these figures his own domain, by involving the hero in significant encounter with each, and by making these two encounters central to separate cantos of the poem, Spenser indicates that they have equivalent claims on the reader's attention. Critical commentary, however, has not followed the poem's lead. On the one hand, Colin Clout has been viewed as authoritative presence in the poem. Kathleen Williams called him picture of the poet at his task of seeing meaningful order, ultimate concord, and making it actual and influential in harmonious sound.' This is the note sounded again and again by Spenser's interpreters-by Harry Berger, for example, for whom Colin on Acidale exemplifies the poet's secret discipline, or by Northrop Frye, for whom he is the Prospero of Spenser's epic.2 Melibee, on the other hand, is treated as always simple and sometimes even contemptible case. Berger fluttered the dovecotes many years ago by saying that his praise of the simple life is simply an excuse for laziness.3 Other critics, less openly disparaging, still view Melibee as utterly different from Colin Clout. Humphrey Tonkin says that he inhabits dream world, whereas Mount Acidale presents world of perfect order, visible only to the poet and the seer.4 Even if Acidale too proves to be in some sense a dream world, the shepherd-poet at its center remains privileged presence. I think we cannot understand these cantos without first recognizing that the poem establishes balance between Melibee and Colin