(Un)couth: Chaucer,The Shepheardes Calender, and the Forms of Mediation

Abstract

This essay elucidates The Shepheardes Calender and its relationship to the Chaucerian past. I argue that the Calender constructs its Chaucer by engaging not only with the works in his corpus itself but also with various Medieval and Renaissance texts that mediated his legacy. In doing so, the Calender fashions an English literary tradition rooted both in a single, preeminent figure and in a multitude of interpretations about him. During the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, the interpretations of Chaucer, which I call the “forms of mediation,” are diverse and variable in content. I concentrate here on a small but influential assortment of them: the Tudor editions that printed Chaucer’s works and the poems of Gower and Lydgate that depicted Chaucer’s authorial identity. The Calender incorporates ideas from them into the June eclogue and E. K.’s prefatory epistle. There, they shape the representation of Chaucer and his poetic legacy, and dictate the terms through which Colin and Spenser may succeed to Chaucer’s model. The Calender thus makes poetic succession proceed not according to a path of direct descent but through a circuitous route populated by intermediaries—intermediaries who, as Lydgate and E. K. suggest, themselves share a special characteristic with Chaucer.