Edmund Spenser's <i>Shepheardes Calender</i> (1579): An analyzed facsimile edition 9781526133465

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

The Manchester Spenser

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The Manchester Spenser is a monograph and text series devoted to historical and textual approaches to Edmund Spenser –​to his life, times, places, works and contemporaries. A growing body of work in Spenser and Renaissance studies, fresh with confidence and curiosity and based on solid historical research, is being written in response to a general sense that our ability to interpret texts is becoming limited without the excavation of further knowledge. So the importance of research in nearby disciplines is quickly being recognised, and interest renewed: history, archaeology, religious or theological history, book history, translation, lexicography, commentary and glossary –​these require treatment for and by students of Spenser. The Manchester Spenser, to feed, foster and build on these refreshed attitudes, aims to publish reference tools, critical, historical, biographical and archaeological monographs on or related to Spenser, from several disciplines, and to publish editions of primary sources and classroom texts of a more wide-​ranging scope. The Manchester Spenser consists of work with stamina, high standards of scholarship and research, adroit handling of evidence, rigour of argument, exposition and documentation. The series will encourage and assist research into, and develop the readership of, one of the richest and most complex writers of the early modern period. General Editors Joshua Reid, Kathryn Walls and Tamsin Badcoe Editorial Board Sukanta Chaudhuri, Helen Cooper, Thomas Herron, J. B. Lethbridge, James Nohrnberg and Brian Vickers Also available Literary and Visual Ralegh Christopher M. Armitage (ed.) Edmund Spenser and the Romance of Space Tamsin Badcoe The Early Spenser, 1554–​80: ‘Minde on Honour Fixed’ Jean Brink The Art of The Faerie Queene Richard Danson Brown A Concordance to the Rhymes of The Faerie Queene Richard Danson Brown and J. B. Lethbridge A Supplement of the Faery Queene: By Ralph Knevet Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher (eds) English Literary Afterlives: Greene, Sidney, Donne and the Evolution of Posthumous Fame Elisabeth Chaghafi

A Companion to Pastoral Poetry of the English Renaissance Sukanta Chaudhuri Pastoral Poetry of the English Renaissance: An Anthology Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.) Spenserian Allegory and Elizabethan Biblical Exegesis: A Context for The Faerie Queene Margaret Christian Comic Spenser: Faith, Folly, and The Faerie Queene Victoria Coldham-​Fussell Monsters and the Poetic Imagination in The Faerie Queene: ‘Most Ugly Shapes and Horrible Aspects’ Maik Goth Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos Jane Grogan (ed.)

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John Derricke’s The Image of Irelande: with a Discoverie of Woodkarne: Essays on Text and Context Thomas Herron, Denna Iammarino and Maryclaire Moroney (eds) Spenserian Satire: A Tradition of Indirection Rachel E. Hile Castles and Colonists: An Archaeology of Elizabethan Ireland Eric Klingelhofer Shakespeare and Spenser: Attractive Opposites J. B. Lethbridge (ed.) Dublin: Renaissance City of Literature Kathleen Miller and Crawford Gribben (eds) A Fig for Fortune by Anthony Copley: A Catholic Response to The Faerie Queene Susannah Brietz Monta Spenser and Virgil: The Pastoral Poems Syrithe Pugh The Burley Manuscript Peter Redford (ed.)

Renaissance Psychologies: Spenser and Shakespeare Robert Lanier Reid Spenser and Donne: Thinking Poets Yulia Ryzhik (ed.) European Erotic Romance: Philhellene Protestantism, Renaissance Translation and English Literary Politics Victor Skretkowicz Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete Rachel Stenner, Tamsin Badcoe and Gareth Griffith (eds) The Early Modern English Sonnet: Ever in Motion Rémi Vuillemin, Laetitia Sansonetti and Enrica Zanin (eds) God’s Only Daughter: Spenser’s Una as the Invisible Church Kathryn Walls William Shakespeare and John Donne: Stages of the Soul in Early Modern English Poetry Angelika Zirker

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) An analyzed facsimile edition Edited by

Kenneth Borris

Manchester University Press

Introduction, critical apparatus etc. © Kenneth Borris 2022 The right of Kenneth Borris to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 3345 8 hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Front cover image: The Apollonian Poet. Maerten de Vos, drawing dated 1579

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To Patrick Grant

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Contents

List of figures Preface and acknowledgments Notes on quotations, translations, and abbreviations

x xiv xvi

Introduction 1 Prologue 2 Hugh Singleton and the Calender’s first publication 3 Designing the 1579 edition 4 Formal affinities, models, sources, and intertexts 5 The Calender and popular almanacs 6 Bibliographical format, paper, typography, and decoration 7 Textual components, their sequence, and the norms of bucolic print 8 The genesis of the illustrations 9 The illustrative mode 10 The pictorial symbology 11 Known copies, surrogates, and the copy reproduced

1 9 23 32 54 66 73 84 92 96 109

Appendices Appendix 1: Spenser’s alleged pictorial naivety Appendix 2: Enlargements of the Calender’s twelve original pictures

A facsimile reprint of Spenser’s 1579 Calender References Index

125 129 143 258 271

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Figures

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Colophon and printer’s device. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 52b (The Morgan Library & Museum, PML 127066. STC 23089) Title page. John Stubbs, The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579) (Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 69569. STC 23400) “April.” The Kalender of Shephardes (London: William Powell for John Walley, 1559), Bvib (By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. STC 22413) “Septembre.” Compost et kalendrier des bergers (Paris: Guy Marchand for Jean Petit, 1499), cvib–​cviia (Courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, University of Toronto, inc 00019) “Mars” and “Avril.” Calendrier historial (Geneva: François Estienne, 1567), *vb (Courtesy of the Rare Books Division, New York Public Library, *KB 1567) “Ecloga sesta,” beginning. Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia, ed. Francesco Sansovino (Venice: Giovanni Varisco, 1578), 46b (© The British Library Board, 12471.aa.33(1)) “Prosa quinta,” beginning. Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia, ed. Francesco Sansovino (Venice: Giovanni Varisco, 1578), 37a (© The British Library Board, 12471.aa.33(1)) “Ecloga prima,” or “Tityrus,” beginning. Virgil, Bucolica, in his Opera (Lyon: Heirs of Simon Vincent, 1535), 1a (© The British Library Board, 687.e.4) “Ecloga tertia,” or “Palaemon,” beginning. Virgil, Bucolica, in his Opera (Venice: Giovanni Maria Bonelli, 1558), 14a (Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Case folio Y 672.V8654)

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Figures

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10 Commentary presentation. Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia, ed. Francesco Sansovino (Venice: Giovanni Varisco, 1578), 48b–​49a (© The British Library Board, 12471.aa.33(1)) 51 11 Watermark, beta-​radiograph. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 51/​50 (The Morgan Library & Museum, PML 127066. STC 23089) 68 12 Watermark, beta-​radiograph. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 21/​24 (The Morgan Library & Museum, PML 127066. STC 23089) 68 13 Watermark, beta-​radiograph. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 20/​17 (The Morgan Library & Museum, PML 127066. STC 23089) 68 14 Title page. Martin Luther, An Exposition upon the Cxxx. Psalme, trans. Thomas Potter (London: Hugh Singleton, 1577) (By permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 8° S 322(3) Art. STC 16979.3) 74 15 “Ecloga septima,” or “Meliboeus,” beginning. Virgil, Bucolica, in his Opera (London: Henry Bynneman, 1570), 24–​5 (Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 24788) 77 16 “Ecloga terza,” or “Palemone,” beginning. Virgil, Bucoliche, in L’Opere di Vergilio, trans. Andrea Lori et al. (Florence: Giunti, 1556), 13b (Courtesy of the Rare Book Division, Special Collections, Princeton University Library, 2945.2556) 78 17 “Ecloga prima,” or “Tityrus,” beginning. Virgil, Bucolica, in his Opera (Venice: Bibliotheca Aldina, 1570), 5a (Courtesy of the Rare Books Division, New York Public Library, *KB 1570) 79 18 “Remember Fortune’s Inconstancy.” János Zsámboky, Emblemata (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1564), 13 (Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, Case miniature W 1025.772) 97 19 The triumph of May’s King and Queen, detail, Maye’s picture. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 16a (Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 23089) 98 20 Elizabeth’s royal arms. Gabriel Harvey, Gratulationem Valdinensium libri quatuor (London: Henry Bynneman, 1578), title page (Courtesy of the Newberry Library. STC 12901) 100

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Figures

21 The English royal arms of 1406–​22, 1461–​1554, 1558–​ 1603. Stained glass window, c.1475, St. James the Great Church, St. Kew, United Kingdom (Stiffleaf Photography, by permission of Charles Slade) 22 Colin piping, detail, Aprill’s picture. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 11a (Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 23089) 23 Pegasus, creator of the Muses’ spring. Medal attributed to Benvenuto Cellini (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) 24 Pegasus, creator of the Muses’ spring, detail of Apollo and the Nine Muses. English woodcarving, c.1580 (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London) 25 Januarye’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 1a (Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 23089) 26 Februarie’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 3a (Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 23089) 27 March’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 8a (Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 23089) 28 Aprill’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 11b (Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 23089) 29 Maye’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 16a (Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 23089) 30 June’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 22b (Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 23089) 31 Julye’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 26a (Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 23089)

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Figures 32 August’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 31a (Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 23089) 33 September’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 35a (Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 23089) 34 October’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 39a (Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 23089) 35 November’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 44a (Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 23089) 36 December’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 48b (Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 23089)

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Preface and acknowledgments

Many years ago, Patrick Grant recommended that I familiarize myself with emblem books and early modern iconography as means of investigating Spenser, and this trail circuitously led here. I thank Patrick for his tutelage and for many later years of friendship. After becoming interested in the symbolism of the Calender’s original woodcuts, I gave a paper on this surprisingly neglected topic in 2015 at the Renaissance Society of America conference in Berlin, and among the intrepid attendees of that early morning session on the Unter den Linden was J. B. Lethbridge, whom I had not met before. He suggested that I edit a new facsimile edition of the Calender for the Manchester Spenser series, for which he was general editor, and since I would not otherwise have imagined undertaking such a project, it began there, at that moment. I then developed my own concept for this endeavor, outlined in Section 1 of the Introduction, and I thank him, his successors Joshua Reid, Kathryn Walls, and Tamsin Badcoe, the editorial board, the anonymous evaluators of my proposal and my subsequent manuscript, Manchester University Press, and my editor Matthew Frost for supporting my program and enabling its present fruition. Writers on Spenser benefit from many illustrious predecessors, some never met or contacted personally, through their publications and otherwise. I particularly thank Patrick, Alastair Fowler, A. C. Hamilton, and James Nohrnberg for early help and encouragement. Although much fine scholarship has been published on Spenser’s Calender, everyone interested in this major early modern text owes an especial debt to the learned original research of Ruth Samson Luborsky. Her explorations of its material precedents and pictorial development clarified much that would otherwise have remained obscure. Although I disagree with her on various important points, I concur on others, and the ubiquity of this present study’s citations of her research gratefully acknowledges its enduring foundational value. Sections 2, 8, and 10 of the Introduction include revised, enlarged, or summarized versions of some relevant paragraphs in my article

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Preface and acknowledgments

xv

“Open Secrets: The Verbal-​Visual Satire of the Anjou Match in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender” (Borris 2020a), and in ­chapter 2 of my monograph Visionary Spenser (Borris 2017). I cite these and some of my other prior publications as references in this present study in order to save space here and thus enhance its scope for addressing the 1579 Calender’s intertextual and bibliographical affinities and materiality within the spatial limits assigned by the publisher. Visiting fellowships at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies facilitated my research, as did an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and its anonymous referees. To investigate the Calender’s characteristics as printed in 1579, I compared hundreds of early modern books of various kinds, mostly in original copies rather than digital surrogates. The rare books collections and librarians of the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Morgan Library and Museum, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the New York Public Library, the British Library, the Newberry Library, Princeton University Library’s Rare Books Division, the Bodleian Library, Harvard University’s Houghton Library, and the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library assisted these endeavors. For not disdaining my clownish gifts and cracknels as Colin Clout did Hobbinol’s, and for sharing many green fields, I thank Luigi Mirando most.

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Notes on quotations, translations, and abbreviations

Quotations When quoting early modern English texts, I normalize usage of “u,” “v,” “i,” and “j” according to early modern orthography, except for archaistic Spenser, and silently expand contractions.

Translations Translations are mine unless attributed otherwise, and deliberately somewhat literal.

Abbreviations BCP  The Book of Common Prayer, 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book, ed. John E. Booty (Charlottesville: Folger Shakespeare Library—​University Press of Virginia, 1976) CHBB  The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, ed. John Barnard et al., 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–​2019) Critical Heritage  Spenser: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. M. Cummings (London: Routledge, 1971) EEBO Early English Books Online ODNB  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Henson, 60 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) OHES  The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) SE  The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990)

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Quotations, translations, and abbreviations

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STC  A Short-​Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–​1640, ed. A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave et al., 2nd, rev. ed., 3 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–​91) Variorum  The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., 11 vols. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1932–​57)

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Introduction Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

1 Prologue As first published in 1579, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender is a most intriguing early modern book: highly innovative both in material form and textual content, politically audacious, and arguably the seminal publication of the Elizabethan literary renaissance. This present volume uniquely focuses on investigating its original materialization in print. Although the medium of any book is integral to its textual message, as D. F. McKenzie and Roger Chartier among others observe, the circumstances and characteristics of the Calender’s first printing are exceptionally significant. It is a “landmark in book design,” as Jason Scott-​Warren remarks, with a “complexity” that renders it “near-​impossible to edit, since these words really are at their best when locked into this bibliographic form” (2011, 153–​4). And most sensationally, the Calender was the first known production of its printer Hugh Singleton after his imprisonment for printing John Stubbs’s Discovery of a Gaping Gulf in August 1579, wherein Stubbs attacked Queen Elizabeth’s prospective marriage to the Roman Catholic François de Valois, the duc d’Anjou and Alençon and the heir apparent to the French throne (hereafter called Anjou). Stubbs, his associate William Page, and Singleton were condemned to have their right hands publicly chopped off: a judgment somehow remitted for the latter but inflicted upon the others on November 3, 1579. Since the Calender involves much anti-​ Anjou satire, Spenser’s and Singleton’s publication of this book shortly thereafter in December 1579 was risky (Sections 2 and 10). However artfully it meddled in this regal affair of state, no one could surely predict how the Crown would react, and sanctions could be unofficial as well as legally mandated. The poet indeed published his Calender under a pseudonym, “Immerito.” Its standard interpretation in Spenser scholarship has been “ ‘the unworthy one,’ ” from the Italian immerito (Kennedy 1990, 652), expressing strategically disarming self-​deprecation. Yet just as this book’s contents courted controversy, so Spenser’s alias also evokes the Latin immerito in the sense “by one who is innocent,” and thus asserts the author’s integrity, his unworthiness of blame or punishment, against potential allegations of wrongdoing.

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

Contrary to the pen-​name’s self-​deprecating sense, this book, Spenser’s first major publication, radically redefined the possibilities of literary form, poetics, authorship, and the illustration of fiction in England. The Calender calendrically and pictorially reconfigured the eclogue series beyond any indications apparent in this genre’s previous English, continental, and ancient exemplars, so that Spenser’s creation is both recognizably correlative to them yet also unique (Sections 4 and 7). Whereas many illustrated books throughout Europe just repeated their pictures in rotation, each one of the Calender’s singularly addresses its particular context. Moreover, the visual composition involving an Calender’s complex interactively verbal-​ extensive programmatic set of original pictures that were each context-​ specific, and hence unrepeated, was unprecedented for a first edition of original poetry printed in England.1 And among such publications there, only Richard Willes’s Poematum liber published in London in 1573 had previously included an elaborate textual apparatus in its first edition. Aside from emblem books, a form that influenced the Calender but from which it differs much (Section 4), this sort of pictorial development seems unprecedented even in continental first editions of original poetry. Moreover, these so rarely provided a commentary that the only precedents known to me are Girolamo Benivieni’s Florentine Canzoni e sonnetti of 1500, and Willes’s. Long into the seventeenth century, the Calender’s first edition of 1579 continued to define much of this text’s reception and cultural impact because the next four editions largely followed the original book’s content, design, and typography, aside from providing grander title pages (1581, 1586, 1591, 1597).2 The first edition has prime textual authority because the successors evince “gradual deterioration of the text through blind reliance of each edition upon its immediate predecessor.”3 Not until the Calender’s sixth edition in 1611 did its mode of presentation substantially change, for its layout was then redesigned to complement that of Spenser’s first and posthumous volume of collected poems. The original woodcuts and commentary were nonetheless retained. The seventh edition, published in 1617 for Spenser’s second folio of collected poems, followed the new model, and the Calender circulated only in these seven editions until after 1650. For English literary history, the first publication of Spenser’s Calender in 1579 has pivotal importance. “If, as most commentators since the end of the sixteenth century have agreed, modern English literature got its first solid foundation in the second half of Elizabeth’s reign,” Richard Helgerson observes, Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney “have the best claim to being its founders” (1992, 26). They were the most talented and productive protagonists of a coterie endeavor that set out in the late 1570s to revivify English letters so as to fulfill the language’s creative potential and challenge the foremost continental literary achievements (Gair 1990, 55; Helgerson

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Introduction

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1983, ch. 2; Sidney 1973b, 110–​21). At least among English texts of the time that were printed, Spenser’s 1579 Calender was the prototype of these developments. It provides an indirect poetic manifesto anticipating his further poetic accomplishments, just as he had already conceived and begun The Faerie Queene around this time (Variorum, 10:17). Not until 1580 did Sidney write most of his so-​called Old Arcadia and his Defence of Poetry (1973a, xvi–​xvii; 1973b, 60–​2), and both circulated only in manuscript until the former was printed, heavily revised, in 1590, and the latter in 1595. The Calender quickly gained an influence unusual for an Elizabethan literary work. Its five editions by 1597 and seven by 1617 were relatively numerous by Jacobethan standards for English vernacular drama, poetry, and fiction (compare Blayney 1997, 387–​9). In many ways a literary coup in 1579, the Calender transformed the apparent prospects of English poets and poetry. At a time when “the institutional identity of English was notably weak” (Helgerson 1992, 24), and when the Calender’s original commentator E. K. could understandably complain “that our Mother tonge, which truly of it self is both ful enough for prose & stately enough for verse, hath long been counted most bare and barrein of both” (¶iib), this book provided a showpiece of an Englishman’s bravura creative performance in English. Not only did it canvass a wide variety of verse forms, some quite difficult, but the Calender’s formal mastery of this genre far excels any previous English attempts and bears comparison with the finest European exemplars, even though many continental poets had already long been publishing eclogues. Barnaby Googe’s Eglogs of 1563, the sole previous original English printed eclogue series since around 1520, had used monotonous poulter’s measure throughout. Yet Spenser’s series also innovatively features both calendrical restructuring (Section 4) and programmatic verbal-​visual development (Section 10). The poetry and pictures engage numerous and varied verbal and imagistic antecedents from the ancients to the late sixteenth century (Sections 4–​10). Provision of a newly conceived, extensive, and programmatic set of pictures for a first edition of original poetry was itself exceptional both in England and continentally, once again, as was equipping such a text with a full-​scale commentary. This latter stratagem enabled the Calender to appear from the outset an instant classic worthy of learned attention. By this means, as well as, paradoxically, by using the authorial pseudo-​ disguise of “Immerito,” Spenser concocted a composite “form that artfully presents its author” as Wendy Wall argues, so as to bring “the question of poetic authority and agency to the fore” at a time when the value of imaginative literary authorship was contested (1993, 235–​6). By allowing identification of Hobbinol as Gabriel Harvey in the Calender’s commentary,

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

which thus indicated Immerito’s personal circumstances (39b), Spenser ensured that his authorial persona was always somewhat unmasked within the book itself. It was devised to launch “our new Poete” who “shall be hable to keepe wing with the best,” as E. K. calls him at the outset (¶iiia). Rejecting discreet dissemination in coterie manuscript, Spenser sought the much-​broadened audience enabled by print, mined Renaissance humanist pastoralism’s rich resources for representing the predicament of the learned writer, and redefined the significance and responsibilities of English poetic endeavor.4 By reassessing various alternatives instanced in diverse shepherd-​ poets, yet claiming to surpass them all in the Epilogue’s final “realization of greatness” overcoming “temporal and mortal hindrances,” the Calender “narrates its own poetic ascendancy up the ranks into the realm of the transcendent,” Wall observes, so that its author emerges “as heroic and singular” (1993, 236, 239). Its eloquent celebration of Elizabeth in Aprill and its daring anti-​Anjou satire, expressed so artfully that Spenser suffered no known sanctions, further assert the poet’s power to forge, critique, and redefine state mythologies, as well as the moral, social, political, and national importance of the poetic vocation (Borris 2020a; Montrose 1986; Wall 1993, 234–​42). Transfiguring the possibilities of English literary authorship, Spenser thus “used the book format to generate the author’s laureate status … as the origin and arbiter of a literary monument that exceeds its place in everyday cultural transactions” (Wall 2000, 77–​9, 86). No wonder that this remarkable text excited admiration. “SPENSER had done enough for the immortalitie of his Name,” Michael Drayton observed in 1619, “had he only given us his Shepheards Kalender, a Master piece if any.” In 1589, before Spenser had printed any other substantial poetry, the university wit Thomas Nashe declared that “should the challenge of deepe conceit, be intruded by any forreiner, to bring our english wits, to the tutchstone of Arte, I would preferre, divine Master Spencer, the miracle of wit to bandie line for line for my life, in the honor of England, against Spaine, France, Italie, and all the world” (Critical Heritage, 60, 81). This present volume conjoins a facsimile of the Calender as first published in 1579 with an Introduction newly reassessing the interpretive implications of its practical and sociocultural circumstances of production, general design, material characteristics, formal affinities, verbal-​visual composition, and their precedents. To provide a convenient basis for advancing knowledge of the Calender as it was first mediated in print, the Introduction surveys previous scholarship that addresses matters most relevant to these concerns, yet freshly reinvestigates them. As well as adducing and endorsing prior views, it critiques them in cases where doing so significantly clarifies the Calender’s characteristics or circumstances. Ruth Samson Luborsky deserves especial credit (Preface and Acknowledgments); the citations of

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Introduction

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other critics and scholars are implicitly also appreciations. Spatial constraints precluded mention of much excellent scholarship addressing aspects of Spenser’s Calender beyond this study’s particular areas of concern. Recent advances in publishing technology enable the resolution of this present volume’s facsimile of the 1579 Calender to surpass considerably that of its four predecessors in print (Spenser 1890, 1967, 1968, 1979), the digitized surrogate provided by Early English Books Online (EEBO), and the previous print editions that seek to reproduce the original woodcuts in conjunction with the verbal text. Attention to the Calender as it was first published shows that both as a text and book it was definitively verbal-​visual (Sections 8–​10), and so this study also uniquely provides full-​ page enlargements of all twelve cuts to denote their interpretive importance, as yet insufficiently appreciated, and facilitate close study of their details (Figures 25–​36). The Calender’s woodcuts from Spenser’s time always appeared integral until 1653, when its first edition after 1617, Theodore Bathurst’s Latin translation, was published unillustrated. By this time the pictorial blocks had presumably been lost and their meanings occluded. Between 1653 and the first facsimile of the 1579 edition issued in 1890, the Calender’s quite numerous editions rarely had pictures, and the original woodcuts disappeared except for its first seven editions published from 1579 to 1617.5 Yet even now the Calender’s reception still unfortunately misses a substantial portion of its content, for most scholarly discussions to date make little allowance for these illustrations, and none of the many previous print editions of even the last hundred years reproduce them with the clarity of the cuts as they were normatively printed from their original blocks in the first seven editions (1579 to 1617). Hence significant details have been inadvertently obscured. Aprill’s and Maye’s particularly complex original woodcuts provide the best means to test reproductions for accuracy, and central portions of Maye’s are illegible smudges in almost all modern editions that include the Calender’s initial set of cuts, including the digital surrogates of its first seven editions provided by EEBO. Yet we would unconsciously tend to assume that recent editions including the woodcuts show them reasonably as they were, even when the present-​day reproductions appear blotchy or unclear, because the woodcuts are stylistically crude as befitted the faux rusticity of humanist pastoralism, and we expect modern technological capacities of pictorial replication to be much more dependable than that of the sixteenth century. This present volume partly seeks to promote recognition that the woodcuts printed from the original blocks show significantly more detail than almost all their apparent reproductions to date since 1617, and that these illustrations should thus be studied only as they were originally printed, or in their as yet few reasonably reliable surrogates.

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

The Calender was indeed an “imagetext” from its initial publication until long into the seventeenth century, and for effective close study of it as such, its original set of twelve pictures must appear as clearly as in well-​ printed exemplars of their early modern xylographic copies, which are crisply detailed. Aside from examining them in the Calender’s first seven editions, the best current options for such study are this present volume and the digitized 1579 copy in the Folger Library’s online LUNA Digital Image Collection, which provides helpful magnification. Since this study endeavors to supplement the fine editorial resources already available for Spenser’s poem elsewhere, it omits their kinds of assistance so as to aid readers in ways they do not. The unique objectives of this project required analysis of the 1579 Calender’s material features and presentation, best provided as a substantial illustrated and indexed Introduction to the facsimile, and inclusion of enlargements for the Calender’s woodcuts. As the space available was not unlimited, so those priorities precluded annotating the text and paratexts otherwise, or providing an explanatory headnote for each eclogue. The 1579 Calender lacks line numbering for the poetry, and annotating a facsimile by modern standards would thus be awkward anyway. Readers seeking those other means of comment, or preliminary introductions summarizing the Calender’s content, style, and general critical reception, have various excellent options already (such as Spenser 1930, 1989, 1995, 1999), which enable a different approach here so as not to repeat them. Some basic terms should be clarified before proceeding further. Throughout this Introduction, the terms “book” and “text” bear their senses now usual in book history. Hence a book or volume is the material printed artifact produced by the publisher typically as a commodity, in Spenser’s time by hand press, and a text is the content of any book or manuscript abstracted from the particular characteristics of its material embodiment (compare Lesser 2004, 10–​11, 16). Since the 1579 Calender significantly juxtaposes its poetry with pictures, its text is both verbal and visual (Section 10). The text of a book may further be distinguished from its “paratexts”: the ancillary materials accompanying the content that chiefly occasioned publication, thus structuring readers’ encounters with the printed text and influencing reception, most obviously by providing framing devices (H. Smith and Wilson 2011, 2–​9). Such features of the Calender include, among others, the title page, the dedication, the commentator E. K.’s apparatus, and the running titles, “flowers” or printer’s ornaments, decorated initials, spatial divisions, and colophon. However, in the Calender’s case the distinction between its text and paratexts is more elastic than usual, and so these terms necessarily somewhat blur when applied to it. Singleton lacked experience in printing literary and illustrated texts, as well as eclogues in particular, so

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that the main features of this book’s design are probably quite Spenserian (Sections 3, 6, 7, 8). Some even suppose that “E. K.” was Spenser himself, and in any case, he would have presumably shepherded E. K.’s textual ruminations somewhat, even just by choosing to remain silent on certain points (Section 3). Although the Calender’s pictures have some paratextual roles, just as they partly serve as structural devices signaling the inception of each new eclogue, they are not just paratexts, and hence rather supplementary, but quite textually integral, for each one constitutes a meaningfully interactive verbal-​visual unit together with its eclogue (Sections 8–​10).6 This Introduction’s terminology departs from current book history by using “forms” not to mean “material forms,” the physical characteristics of a volume, but instead, as particular contexts make clear, either “literary forms” in the sense of genres of written expression (such as the eclogue series), or “verse forms.” Since these sorts of formal considerations determined much of the 1579 Calender’s physical presentation as well as content, this present study extensively addresses “form” in these two senses (Sections 4, 5, 7), and it reserves this term for them to enhance clarity. As András Kiséry and Allison Deuterman observe, the combination of book history with historical formalism provides “the analysis of literary form with material and historical specificity, and the analysis of material form [i.e., bibliographic] with literary traction.” For “while material forms clearly do effect meaning, … literary forms shape the perception and use of the medium.” Bibliographic features such as size, format, typography, and layout “may serve as generic markers” (2016, 41–​2), and the 1579 Calender’s bibliographical format and mise-​en-​page indeed do so (Sections 4–​7). As Spenser’s Calender is in one sense a meditation on the nature and status of literary authorship, probes its potential, and asserts its author’s creative authority, so too even the circumstances of its first publication in 1579 indicate substantial Spenserian oversight of the book’s design and production (Sections 2, 3, 7, 8). Often, study of a text’s materialization in print rather diminishes authorial status instead, by showing how the personnel, norms, and exigencies of the printshop, and hence a “multiplicity of agents and intentions” (Lesser 2004, 12–​17), shaped the resultant book and hence its reception. Furthermore, responsibility for the Calender would at least appear to be so diffused if its first edition had been published or printed by Henry Bynneman, John Day, or someone like them. Both were experienced major publishers and printers of literary and illustrated books. Bynneman had already published and printed Spenser’s translations of poetry in Jan van der Noot’s verbal-​visual Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings in 1569, four books for Spenser’s friend Gabriel Harvey between 1577 and 1578, and three other sets of eclogues (Mantuan 1572; Virgil 1570, 1572).

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

Yet not only did some early modern authors guide mise-​en-​page and orchestrate paratextual content (Section 3), but Singleton had long avoided publishing illustrated books as well as literary fiction, nor had he previously published or printed eclogues as far as we know, nor did he even publish or print any further edition of Spenser’s poetry or prose. In all these respects, the 1579 Calender remained a peculiar anomaly in Singleton’s output (Section 2). Hence its main published characteristics—​not only its most innovative features such as its provision of a commentary as well as a unique pictorial program from the outset, but also the general paradigm for its eclogue layout—​probably evince much more authorial conception and direction than usual, and even relatively incidental features such as the running titles possibly do so too (Sections 3–​8). Even the typesetting for this book would have demanded authorial oversight because of its idiosyncratic diction involving unusual words and spellings as well as Greek, fundamental to the Calender’s poetics and claims upon learning (Sections 3 and 6). Since the 1579 Calender profoundly addresses literary authorship and its importance, as discussed earlier, and its characteristics and circumstances indicate considerable Spenserian involvement in its design and production, it has, beyond its varied interests for Spenser studies, poetics, literary history, pastoralism, and verbal-​visual creativity, much significance too for the historical development of the author-​function, which Chartier has traced back beyond the fifteenth century (1994, ch. 2). Though publication had collaborative aspects involving patrons, stationers, their staff, and readers (Chartier 1994, 28–​9), writers could nonetheless seek to shape their resultant books and reception as Spenser apparently did (Sections 3–​8). And although many now assume that “the identification of an authorial presence” in texts is a “post-​Romantic … ideological product of the impulse to establish intellectual property, and authorial rights in, as well as responsibilities for, particular texts” (H. Smith and Wilson 2011, 8), conceptions of extraordinary and hence quite independent writerly genius distilled within texts, however justified or unjustified such notions may be, have roots going back millennia. For both authors and readers, perceptions of authorial textual presence arose in part from age-​old human desires to survive death in some way, to have an enduring commemoration, and to venerate perceivedly high achievement as well as whatever tangibly remains of it. In Areopagitica, Milton pre-​Romantically declares that “a good Booke is the pretious life-​blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life,” or preserves “as in a viol the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect” (1644, 4). In his view, such a creation epitomizes its writer’s agency and being. While Death “insults ore dull and speachlesse tribes,” Shakespeare declares in Sonnet 107, “Ile live in this poore rime” (1609, G3a). Homer’s and Virgil’s texts, as well as those of

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others, were anciently considered vessels of their abiding poetic genius, and the Renaissance further propagated such notions (Borris 2000, 14–​19). The 1579 Calender is a pivotal English case in point. Asserting his entry into the pantheon of literary demigods at a time when credible English candidates had long been lacking, Spenser declares in his Epilogue, “Loe I haue made a Calender for euery yeare,” thus prospectively surpassing time and mortality through his poetic accomplishment even “till the worlds dissolution” (52a). The commentator E. K. contextually relates this affirmation to Horace’s correlative claim in his Odes (3.30.1–​9), and to Ovid’s declaration, when concluding his Metamorphoses, that his better part transcends the general flux of things through his creation of this lasting poem, or in other words inspirits it, so that he thus secures immortality (52a; Metamorphoses 15.871–​9).

2 Hugh Singleton and the Calender’s first publication Singleton’s relation to the Calender has had little attention since H. J. Byrom in 1933. Though probably not the financer of its first publication and hence its publisher in that fundamental sense, Singleton became not only its printer but its owner, for he licensed it himself and thus owned the rights to publish any further editions, as publishers typically did (Arber 1967, 2:362).7 The title page acknowledges no one for whom he printed it. His involvement with this book was in many ways anomalous, as was the poet’s with him. Singleton’s previous product, John Stubbs’s bilious Gaping Gulf attacking Elizabeth’s prospective espousal of the Roman Catholic Anjou, had notoriously provoked her fury. Printed only a few months later and probably in direct succession (Singleton had printed or published no other presently known books in the interim), the Calender too targets this match: the crucial topic of political debate in England from around 1579 to 1582.8 The manuscript’s otherwise peculiar placement with Singleton befits this agenda, and it was most likely the Earl of Leicester, one of the marriage’s chief adversaries, who subsidized the Calender’s first publication. Singleton’s press thus produced both of the currently known printed works that opposed the Anjou match during this controversy. When the Calender was first published in late 1579, its explicit association with Singleton must have appeared rather sensational on account of the Crown’s controversial arrest and prosecution of Stubbs and his confederates including Singleton himself.9 As Zachary Lesser argues, publication places a text “in a new horizon of expectations for book-​buyers,” generated not

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

only by the book’s material characteristics but also “by their knowledge of and relation to the publisher and his specialty” (2004, 21). For the term “publisher” in this case, we should substitute “the stationer or stationers accredited with the book’s production.” In late 1579 and for some time thereafter, Singleton’s name strongly evoked the controversies over the Gulf and Anjou, which thus suffused the Calender’s debut and in effect signaled its anti-​Anjou content. The economics of the Elizabethan book trade determined much of Singleton’s situation.10 The publisher of a book could also be its printer if he or she owned a press, as Singleton did, or could hire a printer to produce it.11 Publishing books by hand press was an exceptionally capital-​intensive business. Since small print runs were inefficient, an entire edition had to be printed at once. The total costs of publication preceded any possible sales, and profits, if there were any, required selling enough copies to recover those costs, which could take years. Hence the financial risks were “high” (Lesser 2004, 33), and a publisher had to reckon with them before issuing any book. When Singleton published Spenser’s Calender, both it and its author were hitherto unknown, and such ventures appeared commercially risky. The extent of demand was difficult to gage. And a first edition accordant with legal norms incurred significant additional expenses beyond those of production, such as any payments needed to acquire the manuscript, and further fees to obtain official authorization to publish, the Stationers’ Company’s license, and the Company’s optional registration. The publisher thus gained permission to issue the text and ownership of its future rights of publication (Blayney 1997, 396–​405; Raven 2007, 24). Hence subsequent editions of a text were most profitable, even though the type for each was entirely reset, and a publisher preferred acquiring manuscripts with such marketable prospects (Blayney 1997, 412–​13). If sufficient demand materialized, he or she could either publish one or more further editions or, as Singleton did for Spenser’s Calender in 1581 (Arber 1967, 2:380), sell the rights to do so. As writers well knew, publishers specialized in particular kinds of books or subject areas so as to cater most effectively to their established market (Lesser 2004, 37–​51). Deviations from a stationer’s business plan could quickly jeopardize even a large operation, as one of Spenser’s publishers, Henry Bynneman, found in the early 1580s (Barnard and Bell 1991, 19–​21). Even in cases where a book’s publisher also had a retail bookshop, he or she sold copies wholesale to booksellers to accelerate recovery of its costs. The stationer’s imprint on the title page could thus solicit retail clients and tell booksellers where to obtain copies wholesale.12 The title pages of many books were also posted in public places to advertise them, and due

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to Singleton’s recent prosecution for printing Stubbs’s Gulf, the Calender’s would have appeared tantalizing in late 1579 and in 1580. It advertises the location of Singleton’s printing house “in Creede Lane neere vnto Ludgate at the signe of the gylden Tunne,” and that copies “are there to be solde.” A tun was a barrel, and this insignia, used also in his publisher’s device for his title pages and back pages, puns visually on “Singleton” (Figure 1). Among publishers and printers in Elizabethan London, Singleton’s operation ranked toward the bottom in scope, prestige, and financial resources.13 Whereas the major players had three to five presses, Singleton apparently had just one, for he printed relatively little that survives.14 Born around 1516–​17 (Blayney 2013, 662), Singleton also worked as a bookbinder, had persistent debt problems, and was thus sued around 1577.15 Produced from the late 1540s to 1593, his identifiable surviving publications overwhelmingly consist of Reformed catechisms, sermons, anti-​ Catholic polemics, devotional works, and theological treatises by Protestant stalwarts such as John Foxe, John Knox, John Bale, Heinrich Bullinger, Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, and Miles Coverdale.16 His publisher’s device bears the motto “God is my helper” (Figure 1). Yet his licenses in the Stationers’ Register include popular ballads that have not survived (Byrom 1933, 128), and he had a minor interest in producing simple popular almanacs, including one in 1577. By 1583 he ceased printing. Though Byrom claims that Singleton’s connection with Stubbs’s Gulf “ruined” the stationer’s “business as a printer” (1933, 131), the known facts could be interpreted in various other credible ways. He became Printer to the City of London in 1584, a modestly remunerated position allowing him to retain a deputy printer, and in this capacity issued municipal proclamations. Publishers in London increasingly hired printers, and Singleton thus continued publishing other texts, mostly religious as before, until his death around 1593. If, as some speculate, Singleton printed Thomas Lodge’s so-​called Reply to Gosson in 1579, a brief defense of poetry and plays against Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse, this stationer would have undertaken yet another literary venture exceptional for him, as the Calender was, earlier in the same year.17 However, this conjecture is unlikely, and no one yet seems to have checked it by comparing the fonts and their condition in the known copies against Singleton’s publications around 1579. The publishing of this text, Lodge declared in 1584, was forbidden by “the godly and reverent” authorities in London “because it was in defence of plaies and play makers” (A2b). Singleton’s involvement seems improbable on account of the Protestant religiosity of his typical publications (even the Calender includes some such comments dialogically and in E. K.’s commentary), and would be discreditable because this book was printed carelessly.

Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

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Figure 1  Colophon and printer’s device. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 52b.

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Before Singleton licensed, printed, and marketed the Calender in 1579, his standard business procedures, interests, and market had excluded learned humanist literary prose or poetry, as well as even fiction of any sort aside from popular ballads, and this Spenserian venture remained anomalous for him even afterward. Moreover, unlike his contemporaries John Day and Henry Bynneman, Singleton had avoided publishing illustrated books. Before the Calender, as far as we now know, he published only two in the early 1550s. One of these contains only one woodcut, a stock version of the so-​called Zodiac Man correlating the parts of the body with the astrological signs, and the other just two, both printed from blocks cut for another publisher some years before (Luborsky and Ingram 1998, 1:10, 51–​ 2; 2:199). But the Calender features a newly designed illustrative program of twelve original cuts specific to this text alone. Also, although Singleton had some experience with typographically involved page layouts (for example, Touris 1578), the mise-​en-​page of his books had usually been quite simple, and he had not published a book presenting poetry with arguments and commentary. Spenser’s logical choice of publisher for the Calender would thus have been Bynneman. Far more significant to the English book trade than Singleton, he had already published and printed Spenser’s poetry in Jan van der Noot’s illustrated Theatre for Worldlings in 1569, as well as four books for Spenser’s friend Gabriel Harvey between 1577 and 1578, two of which were illustrated, and in 1580 Bynneman also published and printed their Letters. His specializations, unlike Singleton’s, included the publication, printing, and marketing of illustrated books, literary and learned writings, and projects requiring elaborate layouts like the Calender.18 He had already published English translations of both Virgil’s and Mantuan’s eclogues. Spenser never worked with Singleton again, and Harvey never did. Bynneman died in 1583. Since Singleton could not have published the Calender according to the normal considerations that united an author and publisher, how and why did he come to do so? Though wrongly supposing that the opponents of the Anjou match were all Puritan, and that Spenser was too, Byrom rightly linked Singleton’s publication of the Calender to its satire of the prospective royal marriage (1933, 142, 144–​6, 149–​54).19 Many Protestants and most members of the Privy Council, especially Leicester and Sir Francis Walsingham, opposed it because they feared the consequences, mainly on account of Anjou’s Roman Catholicism. They held his family, France’s ruling Valois dynasty, responsible for the massacre of Protestants in Paris on St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. Outcries against the marriage had already begun in March 1579, through sermons, popular ballads, placards and posters, and circulated manuscripts.20 Amid this uproar and Anjou’s first

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

visit to England, Singleton printed the Puritan lawyer Stubbs’s Gulf around August 18. On September 27 a royal proclamation denounced it as a “traitorous device to discredit her majesty,” outlawed possessing it, and required its destruction (Hughes and Larkin 1964–​69, 2:449). Singleton, Stubbs, and his confederate William Page (probably a member of parliament allied with the Earl of Bedford), were arrested, imprisoned, and condemned to forfeit their right hands.21 Whereas Singleton was somehow pardoned and released soon enough to resume his business and license the Calender on December 5, Stubbs and Page publicly suffered that penalty at Westminster on November 3, and Stubbs remained imprisoned well into 1581. Though other protests against the Anjou match circulated somewhat in manuscripts with apparent impunity, including Sidney’s Letter to Queen Elizabeth, the brutal reprisals against the Gulf indicate that censure of the Anjou match in print, a much more readily disseminated, public, and hence potentially provocative medium, seemed relatively dangerous.22 Many would have wished to exploit print’s potential in this way, and yet Stubbs and Spenser are the only writers presently known to have done so. Moreover, among the many printers and publishers in London, only Singleton, as far as we currently know, was willing to print texts opposing the match and actually did so. Despite Sidney’s marketable celebrity, his Letter remained unprinted until 1663. Singleton’s involvement in these endeavors probably arose from his “native lack of caution,” his chronic financial need, and his ardent Protestantism, to which the prospect of a Roman Catholic consort would have been odious (Byrom 1933, 128, 130n1). During Queen Mary’s regime, Singleton had fled to the Continent, where he opposed her by publishing Reformed tracts in English with false imprints to deceive the authorities (Blayney 2013, 661–​2, 811–​12). To hide the Gulf’s origins, he issued it with no imprint. Yet his imprint on the Calender’s title page and colophon is still deceptive in that its clear avowal of responsibility falsely implies that nothing in this book could offend the Crown. Singleton’s press would not have produced both major English publications against the Anjou match by coincidence, nor would he likely have assumed the personal and financial risks of these endeavors without assurances of compensation. In assisting the opposition to Anjou, this stationer may well have been “the more or less conscious instrument of the Leicester-​ Walsingham faction,” Byrom proposes, and thus “enjoyed the protection of someone powerful at court.” He “alone was pardoned” for the Gulf, thus retaining his right hand, and according to a “rumour circulated in Paris,” Walsingham assisted the book’s creation (1933, 142). It seems quite well informed about arguments for and against the match within the Privy Council. After narrowly avoiding the grisly horror inflicted upon his

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associates Stubbs and Page on November 3, Singleton somehow felt confident enough to publish the Calender despite its further critique of the Anjou match. Singleton’s financial predicament further clarifies these circumstances. He had a small, precariously financed business. Trial records for Stubbs’s Gulf state that a thousand copies were printed (Berry 1968, xxvi), and its lack of imprint shows that Singleton anticipated its dangers (Figure 2). Since the Crown confiscated and destroyed as many copies as possible, almost the entire investment in production was lost, possibly impacting his remuneration as printer. Then Singleton’s incarceration would have impaired his livelihood. Nevertheless, he published the Calender directly afterward: an unusually costly venture for its length, because of its complex layout, twelve new illustrations, and unconventional spellings and usage of Greek, both requiring special oversight. Singleton had never published or printed anything like it before, in content, verbal-​visual composition, or textual presentation, nor would he afterward. And in 1579 its market was unpromising. With five editions published in London between 1569 and 1577, Mantuan’s eclogues in Latin were selling well. Three editions of Virgil’s Opera in Latin, including his Eclogues, were published there between 1570 and 1576. But demand for eclogues in English was relatively weak. By 1579, there had only been two editions of Alexander Barclay’s eclogues since 1560 (one included in his English translation of Sebastian Brant’s Stultifera navis), two of George Turberville’s translations of Mantuan’s eclogues (1567, 1572), one of Barnaby Googe’s Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonnettes (1563), and one of Abraham Fleming’s translation of Virgil’s Eclogues (1575). Unlike Mantuan and Virgil, “Immerito” at this point was a nobody. The publication history of Elizabethan plays clarifies the financial risks of publishing the Calender in 1579. According to Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, forty-​eight first editions of “plays from the professional London theatres” were printed between 1576 and 1597, and these had only eleven reprints in total during those years, including “second-​plus” editions (cases where a single play had more than two). Farmer, Lesser, and Peter W. M. Blayney concur that reprints were most profitable for publishers, so that manuscripts with such potential were most desirable.23 Unless subsidized, the publication of a play in London at this time was a gamble resulting from the publisher’s anticipation of future demand. The low proportion of titles warranting reprints would have promoted caution in addressing this particular market. In Blayney’s detailed analysis of the costs of publishing a typical unillustrated first edition of a play in London around this time, the prospects of profit scarcely justified the publisher’s risk of capital unless, as was rather

Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

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Figure 2  Title page. John Stubbs, The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579).

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unlikely, demand turned out to warrant one or more republications. This hypothetical play’s format would have been quarto like the Calender, using nine sheets of paper for each copy in a print run of eight hundred, with thirty-​ nine lines of print per page (including catchwords, excluding headline).24 The stakes in publishing the 1579 Calender were substantially higher. Though paper varied in quality and hence cost, it was a major production expense for a book, and Spenser’s was a longer quarto that consumed at least fourteen sheets of paper per copy rather than nine, even though Singleton used a much higher number of lines of print per page for its apparatus (up to forty-​seven).25 The Calender’s print run may well have been larger than Blayney’s hypothesized play because the Gulf’s was a thousand copies, and the Calender had similar political aims likewise prompting extensive dissemination.26 If its print run were smaller than that of Blayney’s notional play, its expenses for paper would have fallen but its production costs per copy would have risen, thus narrowing the profit margin. The Calender’s first edition also features a wholly new program of twelve woodcuts, which required the design and production of twelve new blocks and expended yet more paper by lengthening the book. Illustrated books cost so much more to publish that when the Stationers’ Company regulated wholesale book prices in 1598, it exempted them. Between around 1550 and 1640, “the average illustrated book” in England “was priced 75 to 100 per cent higher than other books of the same number of sheets” (Johnson 1950, 84, 88–​90).27 Publishers of illustrated editions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales sought avidly to decrease the consequent extra consumption of paper and the expense of designing and incising new woodcuts (Carlson 1997, 25–​67). Even aside from the Calender’s hazards of confiscation due to its anti-​ Anjou agenda, and the added expenses of its verbal-​visual, linguistic, and other presentational complexities, publishing most first editions entailed significant financial risks, and the recovery of costs could take years. Whereas the reception of Blayney’s hypothetical play in performance would have given it and its author public recognition and clarified potential demand, the Calender, Spenser, and “Immerito” were obscure before Singleton printed it. Judging by his prior publications, he had no experience in assessing the market for ambitiously literary poetry, nor any such clientele. “Customers in early modern bookshops chose to spend far more of their money on religious books than they did on playbooks and other ‘literary’ publications” (Blayney 2005, 47), and Singleton had long structured his business accordingly. These aspects of the Gulf’s and the Calender’s production indicate that the financial risks in both ventures were borne by others and that from Singleton’s viewpoint his personal risks probably appeared well compensated.

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

Illegal or otherwise chancy printing could be very lucrative for stationers, just as Bynneman launched two such ventures when his operations became perilously overextended (Barnard and Bell 1991, 21–​2). According to the records of Singleton’s trial with Stubbs and Page, there was a fourth conspirator named Francis Chamberlain, who escaped; Singleton “seditiously imprinted and caused to be imprinted a thousand” copies; and Page was the publisher. Byrom considers the latter point unlikely because Page “was never a publisher; nor was he ever, so far as is known, connected with the book trade” (1933, 141).28 The Gulf remained unlicensed, so that no one ever claimed ownership of its publishing rights. As Singleton’s pardon indicates, these anti-​Anjou activists likely had some high-​level contacts or sponsors. Books could have patrons, sometimes anonymous, who subsidized publication without formally claiming the role and rights of publisher.29 Though Singleton asserted his ownership of the Calender as publisher by licensing it, normally the publisher’s prerogative, some anonymous patronage probably sponsored its publication too, though probably not the same as for the Gulf because the latter book is so different. In 1579, the Calender was much beyond Singleton’s normal publishing interests, practices, market, and expertise, its anti-​Anjou content risked jeopardizing investment as the Gulf had recently shown, its commercial prospects appeared doubtful, and its production costs were relatively high for its length. In England at this time, books for which “specific illustrations” were commissioned, especially when “no established visual program existed” for the text, were “fairly rare,” and “either deluxe editions intended for an elite market, or virtually guaranteed commercial successes” (Knapp 2003, 56). The 1579 Calender was neither, unless it had sponsorship that assured Singleton’s profit. Its probable source of financing, and possibly other logistical assistance such as referral to Singleton, was Leicester and his associates.30 The poet could not likely have underwritten these costs himself. At Cambridge, he had attended Pembroke Hall as a sizar, a student who worked as a servant to pay expenses, and he had just married Machabyas Childe on October 27. As Andrew Hadfield observes, the Calender “has traditionally been … associated with the earl of Leicester, as Spenser appears to have been working for him—​at least, intermittently—​in the mid-​to late 1570s” and “was closely connected to the earl and his circle” at that time. Yet Hadfield nonetheless proposes that the Calender “also likely … owed as much” to Lord Burghley (2012, 126–​7), and Jean R. Brink asserts that Spenser’s patron around this time was not Leicester but Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton. Brink points out that no financial records indicate that Leicester ever employed Spenser (2019, 112, 182–​4, 209–​10). But this lacuna cannot rightly contraindicate his Leicestrian employment because we currently lack all records of the earl’s expenses between May 1561 and April 1584 (S. Adams 1995, 1),

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and he employed many thus undocumented people during this time. Moreover, the poet’s writings repeatedly acknowledge major obligations to Leicester incurred around the late 1570s to 1580, when Spenser even wrote an unpublished and now lost poem on the earl’s lineage, Stemmata Dudleiana (Variorum, 10:18). Like Burghley, Leicester was a major patron for writers (Rosenberg 1955), and the poet clearly praises him in the Calender, but not Burghley or Grey. As Brink acknowledges, Spenser “was at home enough with … Leicester” in the fall of 1579 to sign a letter to Harvey “Leycester House” in October, and its publication in 1580 openly proclaimed this specific connection (2019, 135; Variorum, 10:12).31 In Prothalamion, printed in 1596, the poet fondly reminisces that at Leicester House “oft I gained giftes and goodly grace /​Of that great Lord” (lines 137–​9). These favors could only have occurred there before Spenser left for Ireland around mid-1580. In Ruines of Time, published in 1591 after the earl died in 1588, the poet praises Leicester highly and even describes Colin Clout as “his Colin” who gained “goodness” from “his bounteous minde” (lines 183–​238, my emphasis). Since Colin was Spenser’s distinctive pastoral alter ego, this portrayal of Colin as Leicester’s much-​obligated dependent acknowledges the earl’s former support for the poet and even perhaps specifically for the Calender itself, because Spenser introduced and most extensively presented Colin there. Whereas Burghley was one of the Anjou match’s ardent supporters in 1579 and early 1580 according to the Spanish and French ambassadors, and his eldest son certainly promoted it, the Calender’s satire of this marital project complemented Leicester’s current political agenda.32 Unlike Spenser’s various poetic addresses to Leicester and Grey, the poet’s coolly detached dedicatory sonnet to Burghley in the 1590 Faerie Queene evinces no personal acquaintance. As Leicester was the dedicatee of three emblem books between 1565 and 1586,33 so he apparently savored complex verbal-​ visual texts, and the Calender appeals to such tastes (Section 10). Although the poet dedicated the Calender to Sidney according to the title page, Spenser’s letter to Harvey explicitly written at Leicester House in October 1579 and published in 1580 indicates that he wished to dedicate this book to “his excellent Lordship” instead (Variorum, 10:5, 12). Since Harvey already knew who this personage was, his identity needed no further epistolary definition; but the stated context of “Leycester House” together with the letter’s references to Sidney (Leicester’s nephew and current heir) and to Edward Dyer (a close associate of the earl) point to Leicester. Presumably the poet did not explicitly fulfill that dedicatory wish because it would have been impolitic both for him and for the earl. Not only had Leicester’s outspoken opposition to the Anjou match offended Elizabeth, but Anjou’s envoy Jean de Simier had discredited the earl in July

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1579 by revealing to Elizabeth his semi-​secret marriage to Lettice Devereux (née Knollys). The queen excluded Leicester from court until early in 1580, as well as Walsingham, and apparently subjected the former to house arrest. In late 1579, an explicit dedication of the Calender to Leicester would have heightened the risks of its anti-​Anjou satire and possibly further compromised the earl. Dedication to Sidney could seem more ingenuously literary, on account of his strong interests in poetics, but still signal Leicestrian political alignments. Yet Spenser still appears to have dedicated the Calender to Leicester obliquely, for as William Ringler observes, the dedicatory verse epistle “To His Booke” addresses an unnamed personage called “his honor,” and this form of address was apt for Leicester’s rank, not Sidney’s (1961, 159–​61). Though supposing that this diction merely reflects Spenser’s “original” but abandoned intention, and that the poet forgot to expunge it from his epistle, Ringler insists that “the Elizabethans were punctilious in their use of terms of address … when referring to a nobleman” (1961, 160–​1). Hence Spenser would not likely have been so feckless in managing the published volume’s strategically important dedicatory elements, pace Ringler, and we had better assume that “To His Booke” refers to “his honor” because the poet chose to publish this specific diction. The Calender as published in Spenser’s lifetime thus always evinced dual authorial dedications: explicitly to Sidney on its title page, yet implicitly to his uncle the earl. Though the poet’s associates would have known he was associated with Leicester House at this time, the identity of “his honor” would have been teasingly ambiguous to outsiders, yet some of the eclogues provide clues. Despite the earl’s fall from royal favor in late 1579, October refers to him as “the worthy” most fit for encomiastic “bigger notes,” whom Elisa, the queen’s proxy, “loueth best,” contextually identified by his famous crest of the shackled bear (41a). E. K.’s commentary relates this praise to “the Erle of Leycester” (43a). November hails “greate shephard Lobbin”: a name probably playing on “Leicester” and his nickname “Robin” (46b). Early modern pastoral often used the shepherd trope in such a way to designate noble magnates or kings as “shepherds of the people.” Proceeding between around the spring of 1579 and July 1580, Spenser’s endeavors for Leicester probably included development of the Calender insofar as it publicly attacks the Anjou match, and appear to have established some main conditions for the poet’s later life and prosperity. In his Colin Clouts Come Home Againe published in 1595, Hobbinol remarks to Colin, “Lobbin well thou knewest” (line 736). If an Elizabethan publisher paid a writer for a text to be printed, he or she typically obtained a small monetary fee or around twenty-​five free printed copies for resale, or some combination thereof, and nothing further if any more editions were

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published beyond the first. Spenser may have received some such benefits in this case, and when a book had a dedicatee, the author hoped for more.34 Both Sidney and Leicester likely rewarded Spenser for the Calender on account of its literary excellence and political interventions complementing their concerns. Its verbal-​visual development suited Leicester’s apparent emblematic interests (see n33). Shortly after publishing the Calender, Spenser gained a plum position within Leicester’s ambit of influence. When Lord Grey became Ireland’s new Lord Deputy in July 1580, the poet rewardingly became “the chief of Grey’s secretaries and copyists” (Burlinson and Zurcher 2010, 71), and Leicester, who had secured Grey’s selection, likely arranged Spenser’s too, though Sidney and his father Sir Henry, a former Lord Deputy, may have assisted (Carey and Carroll 1996, 34–​9). Whereas Spenser’s commentators long considered this appointment simply a punitive rustication, secretarial positions with leading nobles appeared highly desirable to educated men of his circumstances at that time. This one afforded extraordinary opportunities because Grey would soon have to dispense great tracts of confiscated rebel lands.35 Although some still suppose that the poet’s work for and contact with Leicester were “minor” (Danner 2011, 125; Heninger 1990b, 244–​5), Spenser must have performed perceivedly significant services to be so rewarded. These likely included the Calender’s trenchant satire of the Anjou match in print, and this scion of impecunious obscurity quickly began acquiring substantial Irish properties, beginning with the manor of Enniscorthy in 1581, and thereby became “very rich.”36 The removal of its author from London and from direct association with Leicester House may also have seemed prudent, for though the intensity of public opposition to the Anjou match had induced the queen to suspend negotiations in early 1580, she renewed them around June. Yet although the poet’s Irish preferment soon after publishing the Calender provided scope to make his fortune, he appears later to have found this relocation too costly. In Virgil’s Gnat his riddling dedication to Leicester reveals that this poem portrays the earl as “causer of my care” (210). Demanding “Where then is now the guerdon of my paine,” the unfortunate titular insect laments being “carried into waste wilderness” (lines 356, 359), and as Richard A. McCabe observes, long-​term residence in Ireland would have been “tantamount to cultural exile” for Spenser (2016, 240–​1).37 The appointment with Grey would have initially appeared to commit the poet only to a short-​term venture there, that not only had lucrative prospects but could well lead to higher advancement within England afterward. But it turned out to be a one-​way ticket, however advantageous monetarily. Although the Gnat’s complaint to Leicester has long seemed puzzling, it would befit the foregoing circumstances if Spenser wished to return to

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

England after Grey’s recall in 1582, then unsuccessfully sought Leicestrian preferment there, found his aspirations blocked, and wrote the poem between around 1582 and 1585 to remind the earl of the poet’s ­capabilities.38 In 1580, Leicester may have promised Spenser more future support than the earl ultimately delivered. And perhaps in Leicester’s view the poet’s sharper satiric admonitions about the Anjou match, as in Maye (Borris 2020a, 33–​ 57, 65), went too far: When the gnat stings the drowsy shepherd to warn him of a dire serpent approaching, he swats the insect (lines 249–​312). Perhaps this fictive incident further pertains to one of the poet’s lost works. By April 1580, for example, his Dreames was “fully finished,” as long as the Calender, “presentlye to bee imprinted,” and had both a commentary and newly devised illustrations (Variorum, 10:17–​18). Yet its publication was mysteriously aborted. It would presumably have needed a backer to be published, for much the same reasons as the Calender did, and its most probable prospective sponsor was Leicester. Hence he was also its most likely suppressor (Appendix 1). Although publishing the Calender entailed significant risks for Spenser and Singleton, it circulated without any known official repercussions. Yet on October 29, 1580, less than a year after publishing the first edition, and almost the anniversary of the brutal punishment of Stubbs and Page that Singleton so narrowly avoided, he sold his rights for the Calender to John Harrison the Younger (Arber 1967, 2:380). Since all Harrison’s editions of it feature the same woodcuts, his purchase somehow included the blocks, so that he acquired this title as an intrinsically illustrated book. Publishers considered such blocks significant assets to be used, loaned, sold, or bequeathed. When a text needed a set of original custom-​made blocks, this requirement helped protect the right to publish it, and inclusion of the set enhanced the resale value of that privilege (compare Hellinga 1999, 101). However the Calender’s first edition and the costs of its illustrations were financed, Singleton gained all rights of future republication as his license shows, and probably the blocks too as an additional recompense for printing it. The Anjou controversy’s resurgence in mid-1580 may well have occasioned the Calender’s second edition (Borris 2020a, 64). Between November 1, 1581 and February 1, 1582, Anjou visited London for the second and last time, and on November 22, during celebrations for Elizabeth’s Accession Day at Whitehall, the queen publicly kissed him and promised that she would marry him (Doran 1996, 176–​90). At some unfortunately unknown point in 1581, Harrison had Thomas East print the Calender’s second edition, and the timing suggests that Harrison did so to capitalize on the match’s renewed topicality and help rally opposition in the political nation, perhaps again with some Leicestrian involvement. Yet by 1583 the match had been abandoned and in 1584 Anjou himself died. The Calender’s satire

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of this projected marriage became mainly retrospective, yet continued to warn that English dynastic liaisons could be recklessly “bought to deare” like Trojan Paris’s as in Julye (28a). Harrison’s purchase of Singleton’s rights to publish this book turned out to be astute, for it required six more editions between 1581 and 1617.39 Comparison with plays of its time clarifies the relative strength of this public demand. Blayney has shown that “of the 96 plays first published in 1583–​ 1602, only 46 … were reprinted inside twenty-​five years.” And among these, only six had five or more editions; the highest total was nine, and the second highest, attained by two plays, was seven (1997, 387–​8). Although Elizabethan and Jacobean bestsellers tended to be religious, and some such titles had many editions, the Calender was among the most reprinted English fictions of the time (Kesson and Smith 2013, 9). In 1586, 1591, and 1597, Harrison published the third to fifth editions. In 1611 Matthew Lownes published the sixth, presumably with Harrison’s remunerated permission, as part of Lownes’s first folio edition of Spenser’s collected poetry printed by Lownes’s brother Humphrey, and redesigned accordingly. For Matthew’s second folio edition of Spenser in 1617, Harrison himself published the Calender’s seventh edition in this new presentational aspect so that it “could be included and sold” by Matthew “as a part of the copies of the collected works” (Johnson 1933, 48).40 Yet only the Calender’s first edition is textually authoritative (Section 1). By contrast with Harrison’s twenty-​seven-​year attachment to this text, Singleton’s quick disposal of his rights indicates how extraneous it was to his normal operations and preferences, so that he probably became involved only on account of exceptional circumstances. Although Singleton ceased printing before 1583, he continued publishing until he died around 1593.

3 Designing the 1579 edition The Calender’s first publication, as Richard Helgerson observes, “was a carefully planned literary event” (1983, 67). Spenser’s semi-​ disguised pastoral roman-​à-​clef published under “Immerito’s” diaphanous veil (September’s gloss reveals the identity of Hobbinol and hence the poet’s personal milieu) initiated a game of authorial peek-​a-​boo. While this stratagem diplomatically avoided avowing the topical satire in propria persona, it also sought to promote speculative inquiry and hence “buzz.” Since Singleton had no experience with publishing or printing learned poetry of literary significance, pastoral eclogues, poetry with a commentary, or books with newly commissioned original pictures or illustrative programs, and had not printed an illustrated book since before 1555 (Section 2), his role

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

in designing the first edition was probably quite subordinate. He would have recommended how best to adapt the poet’s preferences to the constraints of his own resources, such as his stock of fonts, and resolve any technical issues. Yet the decisions to illustrate the Calender with a comprehensive new pictorial program without any repetitions, and to equip the poetry with a commentary, were not only alien to his own established practice and market but almost unprecedented for a first edition of original poetry in England, and even quite anomalous continentally too (Section 1). As the commentary’s designated author E. K. describes Spenser and the poet’s friend Gabriel Harvey as his own “very good and … choise friends” (¶iiib), so it originated in connection with the poet rather than Singleton. Likewise, though the stated date of E. K.’s dedicatory epistle to Harvey, April 10, 1579, might be a feint to enhance deniability for the Calender’s anti-​Anjou satire, it implies that the text and paratexts were largely established before Singleton’s active involvement as printer began (¶iiib). In any case, his financial situation would have discouraged him from doing anything on his own initiative that would significantly increase the costs of production (Section 2). The main contents of the first edition—​including its verbal-​visual conceptualization, incised illustrative blocks, apparatus, and strategic features of its layout—​were probably in effect a package entrusted to Singleton’s care for printing. This section considers general questions of responsibility for the 1579 Calender’s design, while subsequent sections address particular aspects of it. Although Spenser would have consulted somewhat on this project within his own circle—​ certainly including his erudite friend Harvey, Singleton after he became involved, and also perhaps the several artisans who cut the blocks according to the illustrative designs provided—​the poet himself is the best candidate for determining the general characteristics of this book and providing oversight, just as he would have had particular convictions about the purposes, intertextual alignments, implications, and desired reception of his own eclogue series.41 Strategically equipped with a commentary twice hailing him as “our new Poete,” and moreover one who “so soone as his name shall come into the knowledg of men, and his worthines be sounded in the tromp of fame, … shall be … beloued of all, embraced of the most, and wondered at of the best” (¶iia, ¶iiia), the Calender was devised to launch Spenser’s literary career by establishing him as a uniquely accomplished author in his own right. Since the known facts and probabilities indicate that Spenser himself “carefully orchestrated” the 1579 Calender (Wall 1993, 233–​5, 239), such views prevail in most of the recent assessments, as they should.42 Nevertheless, S. K. Heninger claims that “the visual appearance of The Shepheardes Calender as we know it was largely E. K./​Harvey’s doing,”

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and that E. K. was Harvey. He was not only responsible for “arranging to publish the work, including the choice of Hugh Singleton as printer … and the commissioning of the illustrations,” Heninger insists, but also controlled the apparatus and “determined the final form of The Shepheardes Calender when it came from the press.” Furthermore, “in all of this, Spenser obviously acquiesced to Harvey’s co-​option, regardless of any reservations” (1988, 43–​51; similarly 1990b, 245–​7).43 Yet Harvey’s publisher had been Henry Bynneman, a far more significant and reputable stationer than Singleton, with whom Harvey himself had no personal contact reasonably verifiable at present. And Heninger concedes that in the fall of 1579 “Spenser was strategically positioned in London,” whereas Harvey “was stuck in Cambridge” at Trinity Hall (1988, 50). Yet Heninger does not show how and why it was nevertheless Harvey who, despite his physical absence, placed Spenser’s text with Singleton (a rather marginal nonliterary publisher whose interests could not be more different than Harvey’s), and also controlled the development of the book’s content, illustration, mise-​en-​page, and production. To do so in the ways that Heninger imagines, Harvey would have needed to be much in London and in Singleton’s shop. Moreover, in a letter to Spenser sent from Cambridge, dated October 1579, and published in 1580, Harvey rejects his friend’s advice sent from Leicester House that he, like the poet, should seek “preferment” by involving himself with the current undertakings there in London (Variorum, 10:5–​6, 12): “Your hotte yron, is so hotte,” Harvey replies, “that it striketh mee to the hearte, I dare not come neare to strike it” (Variorum, 10:442). Harvey wished to distance himself from Spenser’s endeavors at this time, and this caution likely arose at least somewhat from Leicester’s current disgrace at court and the political hazards of actively opposing the Anjou match as the earl and his adherents did, including Spenser in the Calender and possibly otherwise. Heninger should also explain why Edmund Spenser was so pathetically dependent on Harvey that the poet resigned to him the Calender’s design, illustration, apparatus, and placement with a stationer, as well as the total management of its publication. In 1579, they were about the same age: Spenser now seems to have been born around 1553 or 1554, Harvey in 1551 to 1553.44 As a student, the poet was “truly exceptional” (Brink 2019, 20–​6, 51–​4). In 1569, before he would have met Harvey, Spenser helped create the first English version of Jan van der Noot’s illustrated Theatre for Worldlings, by translating its introductory series of epigrams and sonnets into English (Hadfield 2012, 38–​9, 42). After commencing studies at Cambridge that year, Spenser obtained his BA in 1573 and his MA in 1576. As the Calender’s wide-​ranging intertextualities show, as well as The Faerie

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

Queene’s, he read widely in Latin, French, and Italian besides English, and he knew Greek, as Lodowick Bryskett attested somewhat later (1606, 25).45 He became secretary to the Bishop of Rochester and subsequently became associated with Sidney and Leicester. By meanwhile transforming himself into a brilliantly accomplished poet with his own unique voice and style, Spenser shaped the development of English literature for centuries to come. Though Harvey was an exceptionally learned and voracious polylingual reader, he had no such literary talent, and his ambitious endeavors in poetic and other modes of authorship, courtly advancement, the academy, law, and controversial pamphleteering all foundered or backfired. Despite deserving more credit that he usually gets now, Harvey was so tactless in courtly address and editing himself that his value as a literary advisor is dubious. Though he devised his Gratulationem Valdinensium libri quatuor in 1578 to showcase his learned acuity and gain patronage, some of his own contributions to this anthology of encomia for Elizabeth, Leicester, Burghley, the earl of Oxford, Sidney, and Sir Christopher Hatton are so unwittingly ridiculous that Thomas Nashe publicly skewered them (1966, 3:73–​7).46 It and the Calender as a whole are clearly products of very different sensibilities. Spenser’s eclogues are so far from being apt for Harvey’s appropriation that the latter’s bucolic counterpart, Hobbinol, therein defers to the poet’s, Colin Clout. As Januarye, Aprill, and June recount, Colin has broken away from dismayed Hobbinol to pursue Rosalind and other ventures. And it is Colin who has the outstanding creative talent, as Hobbinol acknowledges (12a, 23b). The fulsome praise of Harvey in the Calender’s apparatus somewhat compensates him for being narratively used to play discarded second fiddle to a moodily lovelorn virtuoso. And Spenser finally surpasses even Colin’s role through his persona of Immerito whose art transcends time within the symbolically consummate form of the Epilogue’s “square poem” (52a; Section 10). Much early modern comment on Spenser’s poetry survives, and no one claimed any significant debts to Harvey: not even Harvey himself in his printed works and relatively private extant manuscripts and marginalia.47 In 1586, William Webbe applauded the “fine poeticall witt, and most exquisite learning” of the Calender’s author, who “deserveth the tytle of the rightest English Poet, that ever I read,” conjectures it “was Master Sp.,” and distinguishes him from Harvey. In 1589, before Thomas Nashe’s pamphlet war with Harvey, Nashe called “diuine Master Spencer the miracle of wit” fit “to bandie line for line for my life, in the honor of England, against Spaine, France, Italie, and all the worlde,” and in 1596, “the Sum’ tot’ of whatsoeuer can be saide of sharpe inuention and schollership” (Critical Heritage, 56–​7, 60, 62). Although Spenser thanks Harvey for the Calender’s subtitle

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in a published letter and thus consulted his friend somewhat (n41), a poet so esteemed by discerning contemporaries was not likely to have been, as Heninger fancies, Harvey’s dummy incapable of exercising significant creative control in publishing his own literary debut in his mid to late twenties. However then did Spenser write The Faerie Queene? He was even far more practically astute than Harvey, for it was the poet who became “very rich” (Hadfield 2012, 403), despite his disadvantaged origins that obliged him to finance his studies at university, unlike Harvey, by working there as a servant (Brink 2019, 51–​2). By around 1593, Harvey’s prospects had so withered that he retreated to his family’s base in Saffron Walden, and though he lived until 1631, he published nothing after the 1590s and lapsed into obscurity. Whereas Heninger further assumes that the 1579 Calender’s commentator was Harvey, the author of the apparatus signs himself “E. K.” Various candidates have been proposed, including Edward Kirke (who began studies at Pembroke Hall in Cambridge in 1571, two years after Spenser did, and whom the poet “must have known”); or Harvey; or the poet alone, or together with Harvey, or with Harvey and Kirke.48 If E. K. were not Spenser himself, this commentator would likely have been in the poet’s Cambridge circle. Spenser had spent most of the previous ten years at Cambridge, and E. K. claims close friendship with both him and Harvey (¶iia, ¶iiib). While discussing poetics in a letter to Harvey dated October 1579 and published in 1580, Spenser mentions “Maister E. K.” as a mutual friend who writes poetry (Variorum, 10:6–​7, 18). Was “E. K.” Harvey? No convincing evidence for this claim has yet been provided.49 During Spenser’s studies at Cambridge, his poetic interests would have connected him with various individuals capable of writing such a basic literary commentary, and so we should not fixate on Harvey. Whereas he was a deeply erudite, cosmopolitan bibliomane who loved to display his wit and polylingual learning rhetorically, as Virginia F. Stern’s investigation of his library has shown (1979), the Calender’s commentary evinces “average non-​professional scholarship of the day” and a “rather … stiff mind” (Renwick in Spenser 1930, 173). Though E. K.’s prose has Latinate affinities like Harvey’s, this characteristic was common among educated writers of the time, and whereas Harvey was stylistically an inveterate show-​off, E. K.’s prose is relatively restrained.50 Nor is E. K.’s harshness on matters of religion and sex Harvey’s tone. The latter’s religious sympathies appear to have been quite syncretic (Harvey 1913, 204, 207–​8). Though commending male friendship in Januarye’s gloss, E. K. condemns sex between males as “execrable and horrible sinnes of forbidden and vnlawfull fleshlinesse,” indeed “abominable errour” for which “defence” is “deuelish” (2b). Yet in a letter to Spenser published in 1580, Harvey banters genially about

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

Ganymede (Variorum, 10:467–​8), and in Gratulationes he hyperbolically simulates hot desire for Sidney (Brink 2019, 104–​5). Was “E. K.” Spenser? Pierre de Ronsard asked his friend Marc-​Antoine de Muret to provide a commentary for the poet’s 1553 Amours (M. Adams 1954, 26), and there is no compelling reason why Spenser would have needed to fake an author for the Calender’s rather than simply asking a real E. K. to write one. Although some nevertheless propose that certain features of the commentary indicate that the poet wrote it, these are inconclusive, whereas many contexts indicate that he did not.51 David R. Shore adduces several (1990, 231), and here we may consider a few others as yet insufficiently taken into account or unnoticed. E. K. declares that he knows much less about the Calender than the poet does, and this warning seems amply justified (¶iiia, 42a–​b, 44a). Previous scholarship appears not to have noticed that the commentary even evinces no knowledge that the poetry is illustrated or will be. Yet insofar as The Shepheardes Calender references the Calendrier des bergers, a text with an extensive pictorial program in all its editions, and hence definitively illustrated, the poet would have long anticipated that his Calender would be verbal-​visual too. Spenser appears to have mandated E. K. to comment on the poetry and withheld notice of its pictorial development. Since this latter aspect of the Calender is important (Sections 8–​10), so is this divergence between the poet and E. K. Moreover, compared to the poet, E. K. generally has “a less flexible mind” (Renwick in Spenser 1930, 172–​3). Whereas Spenser’s treatment of religion in the Calender’s poetry is dialogic, E. K.’s is relatively narrow-​minded, and whereas in Januarye’s gloss E. K. fulminates about sex between males (2b), in Spenser’s certain writings that touch upon such possibilities, his tone is unperturbed.52 Certain clear discrepancies between the poetry and the commentary further indicate they had different authors. E. K.’s comment on Thenot’s and Hobbinol’s “emblems” concluding Aprill reverses their respective statements (14a, 16a), and since the poet devised Aprill’s conclusion, he would not likely make such a mistake about this quite short text. Or perhaps E. K.’s comment here reflects an earlier state of Aprill, and the poet later reversed the eclogue’s emblems. Either way, Spenser and E. K. again appear different. Also, E. K.’s lack of comment on August’s last fifty-​seven lines, which introduce, present, and respond to Colin’s sestina, indicates that the poet probably added or changed this eclogue’s conclusion after E. K. composed the commentary (Stillinger 1961, 204). Yet we should further recognize that if Spenser were E. K., the poet could have readily added glosses there. But no one did. He and E. K. even disagree on fundamental matters of poetics. Whereas the poet endorses alliteration in the Calender by using it quite often, the

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commentator condemns it. Addressing Piers’s line, “For lofty loue doth loath a lowly eye” in October (41b), E. K. considers “this playing with the letter to be rather a fault then a figure,” and indeed “Cacozelon,” a stylistic affectation in bad taste (43b; similarly ¶iib–​iiia). Sidney and various other Elizabethan writers agreed.53 Yet even where Spenser speaks most of all in propria persona in the Calender, in “To His Booke” and in his Epilogue, he uses alliteration (“from the falser’s fraud his folded flocke to keepe”; 52a). If E. K. were actually Spenser, their poetic principles would not so markedly differ. Nor would Spenser likely denigrate his own style. And in E. K.’s rush to adverse judgment here, he misses the contextual point that Piers thus nimbly riffs, so to speak, on his interlocutor Cuddie’s line likewise concluding a previous stanza, “The loftie verse of hem was loued aye,” even by rhyming it with a homophone (41a). This verbal concinnity engineered by Spenser artfully enhances and dramatizes the eclogue’s competitive poetic debate, as the poet would have known.54 Such disparities between E. K. and Spenser indicate they were different people. If the poet were E. K., it would have been much in his interest to draw readers’ attention to this finer point of his poetic craft, for in 1579 he was seeking to promote appreciation of his talents. The Calender indeed accredits its commentary to E. K., who says he is a friend of Spenser and Harvey, and E. K. would thus be the commentary’s primary author, though it could still have some collaborative elements. Before rejecting the apparent facts in this case, scholars should require convincing evidence that they are false, with due respect for Occam’s razor. If questioning the commentary’s attribution had begun in Spenser’s time rather than in the nineteenth century, as it did, it would appear more credible.55 Not even Nashe did so, despite his energetic research undertaken to humiliate Harvey in Have with You to Saffron-​Walden. If Spenser, Harvey, or both had authored the commentary to extoll themselves and faked the attribution, such a juicily scandalous imposture would have very likely leaked. And if there had been such a secret, Harvey appears never to have divulged it, even though he died in 1631, long after Spenser and any compelling reasons to conceal it had expired. The Calender’s seven editions by 1617 show that it was unusually well known for a literary work, and discussions of it from that time do not indicate that the commentary’s ascription to E. K. seemed debatable, even though the personal networks of some readers would have impinged on Spenser’s at Cambridge and elsewhere. Although E. K. was likely an actual person who was neither Harvey nor the poet, and the best currently known candidate is Edward Kirke, Spenser’s mandate for the commentary presumably shaped it somewhat, even just by what he chose to say and not say about the eclogues to the commentator, so that it would have been collaborative in at least this way. Yet the

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

poet apparently gave E. K. a rather free hand. As just explained, E. K.’s comment on Piers’s alliterative line grossly underestimates its contextual dialogic value and yet was allowed to stand. As this passage further confirms, the Calender’s “multiple framings of Spenser’s poetry do not assure a unified reading but operate in tension, as much to provoke as satisfy the reader” (Gordon 2018, 515). Also, “verse and gloss together comprise a complex strategy of indirection which both enables and protects the new poet” (Tribble 1993, 86).56 On account of the Calender’s anti-​Anjou satire, this procedure was politically expedient (Borris 2020a, 59–​60; McCabe 2000, 44–​51). The 1579 edition’s complex array of paratexts deepens and intensifies readers’ engagement with the poetry. The Calender’s commentary is itself multifarious in design, for it addresses many different topics and kinds of readers. Its diverse projects include modeling an etymologically attuned readership for Spenser’s text, aware of the language’s historical development from Anglo-​ Saxon (Crawforth 2011, 294–​316). Yet as Sarah A. Kelen observes, “E. K. presumes a reader sufficiently conversant in the classical tradition to read phrases printed in the Greek alphabet” and also one like a “schoolboy who needs … explication” of rather basic diction and poetics. However, such glossing does not appear “overly generous,” as she suggests (2016, 243–​4), nor ironically parodic, as Brink proposes (2019, 158), if we bear in mind that the Calender’s potential audience included anyone, however knowledgeable or unschooled, who could read English, and that it had unusually wide circulation for an English literary text of the time, judging by its number of reprints (Sections 1 and 2). A commentary that made the poetry somewhat more accessible to many readers while averting underestimations of its actual learning reinforced Spenser’s endeavor to promote poetry’s national importance, his laureate ambitions indicated by Colin’s crowning in November’s picture, and the instructive purposes avowed in the Epilogue. Such considerations probably helped motivate the decision to include glosses. Sir John Harington likewise aimed his apparatus for his translated Orlando furioso at a diverse readership “because all that may reade this booke are not of equall capacities,” so that at some points he seeks “to explane more plainely, then for the learned sort had happily bene requisite” (A1a). As Harington’s statement indicates, no one can effectively assess E. K.’s tone, priorities, and choices in commenting without well-​informed comparison to the norms for glossing sixteenth-​century Latin and especially vernacular poetry, including eclogues such as Mantuan’s and Sannazaro’s. Yet little such research has been done to date.57 E. K., Spenser, and his more educated readers would have been familiar with such commentaries in several languages.

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Through Spenser’s extensive readings of English and continental manuscripts and books accessible in Cambridge’s libraries and in private ones such as his own, including Harvey’s splendidly large and polylingual collection (Stern 1979), the poet would have absorbed much knowledge of the possibilities of printed books, including literary works such as eclogues, as well as paratexts, illustrations, and presentational design, and developed his own particular preferences. Singleton’s range of publications aside from the Calender shows that he lacked Spenser’s humanist cultivation and insight, and hence the poet’s knowledge of the options and conventions of mise-​ en-​page currently appropriate for eclogues and for literary and otherwise learned books in general. Elizabethan authors could direct the design of their books to varying extents, and the most probable candidates for authorial oversight are those with unusually complex or unconventional textual presentations like the 1579 Calender.58 Such Elizabethan books include the Poematum liber of Harvey’s and perhaps Spenser’s acquaintance Richard Willes, which contains concrete poetry and, like Spenser’s book, passages of Greek especially challenging for English printers (1573). John Whitgift’s Defense of the Aunswere to the Admonition uses Greek and designedly differentiates various aspects of the controversy addressed (1574). George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie includes concrete poetry ([1589] 2007). The manuscripts that authors gave their publishers could incorporate detailed instructions. Although few such documents survive because publication rendered them supererogatory, we have two of Sir John Harington’s manuscripts for his translation of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, including most of the copy that the printer Richard Field used for typesetting the first edition in 1591.59 The presentational design of Harington’s book fundamentally follows his own guidelines: its structural divisions, their particular names, their treatment, and the consecutive Arabic numbering of each canto’s stanzas after its Argument all follow his manuscripts (Borris and Donaldson Clark 2011, 1158). He declares in the published book that he “gave direction” for its pictorial development, and at some points his manuscript for the printer prescribes choice of font, usage of ornament, and mise-​en-​page.60 Then as now, conscientious authors had to consider how readers could best encounter their writing in print, within the prevailing practical constraints, and plan accordingly. Even the choice of running title for heading pages “was sometimes the province of authors rather than printers” (Day 2011, 36). Spenser had such controlling architectonic ambitions for his poetry that he counted 679 stanzas to put the Mount of Venus arithmetically “in the middest” of his 1590 Faerie Queene’s Book III (Baybak et al. 1969, 227–​34).

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

And through his selection of the contextually unusual abbreviation “Cant.” for the canto headings and running titles of The Faerie Queene, and his choice of a four-​line stanza of common meter for each canto’s Argument, he appears to have devised the poem’s structural divisions to signal his innovative merger of heroic form with divine poetry and hymnic discourse (Borris and Donaldson Clark 2011, 1148–​93). Andrew Gordon even assigns him a high degree of “typographic consciousness” (2018, 515–​23). Spenser very likely attended the 1579 Calender’s printing and corrected proofs not only because it was his first significant publication, explicitly the public debut of the “new Poete” (¶iia, ¶iiia), but also because its unusual passages of Greek and its unique poetic diction, emphasized in its apparatus (¶iia–​iiia), needed some authorial oversight.61 Later in his literary career, he apparently “attended the print shop very faithfully when he was in London, as is attested by the number of his works printed during his London visits” (W. Williams 1990, 91). Just as this English poet followed Virgil’s prestigious generic progression from eclogues to epic that secured his enduring cultural eminence, so Spenser was deeply concerned with his literary legacy and future reception.62 The continued usage of the Calender’s first edition as the presentational model in all subsequent editions during the poet’s lifetime might further indicate that their publisher knew its features had substantial Spenserian authorization. After Singleton sold the publication rights to John Harrison the Younger in 1580, Harrison largely repeated the 1579 book’s design and content in the second to fifth editions (1581, 1586, 1591, 1597). Though, on the one hand, using the 1579 edition as the exemplar for its successors would have been in some ways a convenient default for Harrison, on the other hand, an astutely revised edition would probably have been more marketable, and his quadruple reiteration of the original design, continuing even after usage of black letter for publishing English poetry had become rather outmoded around 1590 (Section 6), implies that his attachment to the initial paradigm was strongly motivated.

4 Formal affinities, models, sources, and intertexts The 1579 Calender’s general appearance reflects the poet’s innovative mix of various hitherto disparate discursive forms and textual models. It is best called a generic “mixture” rather than “hybrid” because one particular form, the eclogue series, predominates.63 As Ruth Samson Luborsky established in the early 1980s, the Calender derives additional ingredients most obviously

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from the Calendrier des bergers (as I will designate this form collectively, in its various iterations and languages), the emblem book, the “classic” annotated literary work or collection, and georgic, yet also draws on further kinds of calendar (such as those in almanacs, in books of hours or primers, and in Protestant “historical calendars”), illustrated fable books, pilgrimage books, exemplars of English literary accomplishment such as Geoffrey Chaucer, and manuscript traditions, among other resources. Bruce R. Smith rightly adds pastoral romance (1980, 79–​80). Yet naive source study nonetheless persists. Although many promote S. K. Heninger’s claim that the 1579 Calender’s textual presentation replicates a 1571 Venetian edition of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia, no specific source, and certainly not that book, could have modeled the Spenserian volume’s unusually wide-​ranging and combinatively unique formal affiliations, intertextualities, cultural references, pictorial resonances, and correlations of mise-​en-​page. While the Calender, like Spenser’s Faerie Queene, assimilates many cultural resources in a remarkable feat of transformative literary bricolage, the eclogue series remains the former’s main base of operations, as Italianate romantic epic does for the latter. Fundamental to the Calender’s complex generic mixture, the conventions of the eclogue series even determined much of the 1579 edition’s layout. Considered in light of Alastair Fowler’s invaluable distinction between literary “kind” and “mode,” the Calender is an eclogue series by kind, which modally incorporates diverse other literary and nonliterary forms and discourses in varied proportions. A kind in this sense is always “characterized by an external structure” that is a physically evident “linear sequence of parts” distinctively associated with it. This structure has an observable repertoire of more or less optional traits varying somewhat over the kind’s historical development. Further characteristics of kinds, again somewhat historically variable, include norms of “representation aspect” (“such as narrative, dramatic, discursive”), size, scale, subject, values, attitude, character, style, mise-​en-​scène, among others, many of which may be termed “internal” features, such as those that are thematic or attitudinal (Fowler 1982, ch. 4; 60 qtd.). To Fowler’s inventory we should add the kind’s conventional options for material presentation in manuscript and in print (compare Kiséry and Deuterman 2016). A kind often has a corresponding mode that is a much less structured “abstraction from kind” drawn from its resources of internal content. In such cases, the kind’s external structure has been in effect deleted and other elements of its repertoire sampled, thereby producing “a selection or abstraction” of them that may be mixed with another form and thus modulate it accordingly. Modes tend to be adjectival, kinds substantive, and pastoral is a mode mainly derived from eclogues and idylls (Fowler 1982, ch. 7; 55–​6 qtd.).64

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The most prestigious and widely known exemplar of the eclogue series was Virgil’s, and as Annabel Patterson observes, Spenser’s Calender is the book that in English literary history most closely resembles Virgil’s Eclogues. Its presentation as a coherent “eclogue-​book,” its elaborate provision of glosses …, its woodcuts at the head of each of twelve eclogues: all suggest a holistic attempt to replicate in English the cultural phenomenon that Virgil’s text had become, a phenomenon that combined the aesthetics of book production, the politics of self-​representation, and a historically constituted system of textual exegesis. (1987, 106)

Yet to produce a text that could viably seek such a high poetic status in 1579, Spenser not only had to evoke the Virgilian model but also creatively update, renew, and transform it, and did so in many resourceful verbal and visual ways. His Calender partly evokes and reinterprets the genre through references to various other eclogues or related bucolic works by, as E. K. remarks, Theocritus, Mantuan, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Marot, Sannazaro, and Barclay, among others (¶iiia), and to the typical means of presenting texts of this kind in print. The early modern book history of the eclogue indeed has great and as yet largely unappreciated importance for understanding the origins and characteristics of the 1579 Calender’s textual presentation. Though innovatively giving each eclogue a monthly name and one or more conclusive verbal “emblems,” Spenser draws most of the poetry’s external structure from the formal repertoire of the eclogue series, and does so in substantial accord with the current range of options for presenting such a text in print (Section 7). The 1579 Calender recalls series of eclogues more than any other discursive form partly because it looks most like them. It does not look like the Calendrier, annotated emblem books, editions of Virgil’s Georgics, or Elizabethan popular almanacs because it does not reproduce their characteristic external structures. Insofar as these other sorts of publication relate to the Calender, they do so modally. Editions of eclogues, especially Virgil’s, were sometimes illustrated, whether with a unique picture for each eclogue, or a few rotated through the series, or with one picture or a few to provide some visually realized pastoral atmosphere (Mortimer 1986; Pasquier 1992, 31–​3, 218–​37). Further options included prefatory front matter, arguments for eclogues, commentary, and appendices (Section 7). Just as the 1579 Calender is primarily an eclogue series by kind, so it may be called an “illustrated eclogue series” in brief, because it is much more that than anything else, so long as we still acknowledge its mixed character. As the explanatory materials included in many sixteenth-​century editions of eclogues indicate, this literary form presented a paradox of nominal

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bucolic lowliness that is interpretively demanding. Far from being genuinely simple in style and content, the eclogue was a locus of heightened literariness. By using simple shepherds as artful means to address knowledgeably a range of matters far beyond them, with consequently multi-​referential diction whereby words come to work much harder than they ordinarily do, an eclogue posed as what it was not, so as to be much more than it seemed. Like heroic poetry, it was profoundly self-​reflexive, self-​referential, and allusive to precursors, just as Virgil’s Eclogues had extensively engaged Theocritus’s Idylls. Often about poetry as much as anything else, most obviously in frequent singing contests, eclogues strongly tended to explore their own formal and expressive possibilities and those of poetic art. Pastoralists often appeared in their texts in bucolic guises. The eclogue and pastoralism in general put apparent simplicity, rusticity, and authenticity in creative tension with complexity, learned urbanity, and artificiality. Spenser’s eclogue series draws significantly on a further development of Renaissance pastoralism: pastoral romance, which incorporated shepherds and other elements of the bucolic repertoire. Its hero, Bruce R. Smith explains, is typically a “languishing lover” like Sincero in Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (first published in its entirety in 1504), with a problematic amorous past that renders this character “emotionally intense” throughout a protracted narrative role, whereas by comparison the speakers of Virgil’s Eclogues and of its normative Renaissance imitators are not so much “personalities” as “personae.” The Calender’s extended story of lovelorn Colin Clout evinces an “imaginative sympathy” more typical of pastoral romance than of standard eclogues (B. Smith 1980, 69–​70, 91). Like epic in early modernity, pastoralism in general was closely associated with allegory and had accumulated an extensive repertoire of symbolic and hermeneutic traditions documented in commentaries on the eclogues of Virgil, Mantuan, and others.65 By Spenser’s time, its range of expressive options had long assimilated the parabolic and other resources of biblical pastoral. Sixteenth-​century bucolic allegory had certain conventional topics (such as autobiographical reference, ecclesiastical critiques, governance of the passions, poetic achievement, a ruler’s effect on his or her domain), some common foundational tropes (care or abuse of sheep figured attitudes toward some social responsibility), and standard models (Virgilian precedents, Mantuanesque satire, the Parable of the Good Shepherd, among others). “The subject of Pastorals” and their “language,” Michael Drayton explained, “ought to be poor, silly [i.e., simple, lowly], and of the coarsest Woofe in appearance. Nevertheless, the most High, and most Noble Matters of the World may bee shaddowed in them” (1619, 432). According to George Puttenham, “the poet devised the eclogue” to use “the veil of homely persons and … rude speeches to insinuate and glance at greater

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

matters, and such as perchance had not been safe to have been disclosed in any other sort, which may be perceived by the Eclogues of Virgil” ([1589] 2007, 127–​8; similarly Sidney 1973a, 56; 1973b, 94–​5). Spenser’s Calender is replete with such endeavors, incorporates Latin, Greek, French, and Italian besides English, and already provided a commentary in its first edition. As Spenser’s title for his eclogue series indicates, he uniquely combined this traditional literary form with the Calendrier des bergers devised in Paris in the early 1490s: a much-​illustrated, somewhat pastoralized, moralized religious almanac/​miscellany including extensive explication of astrology, its medical applications, and cosmology, as well as a twelve-​month calendar mainly focused on devotional observances.66 Though not invariable, the verbal and visual content of its editions largely conformed to a quite standard paradigm. Between 1491 and 1579, at least thirty-​three French and eleven English editions were published, besides German and Dutch versions, and more thereafter.67 Yet during Spenser’s lifetime, approximately 1553/​ 54 to 1599, there were only around six English printings (see Luborsky and Ingram 1998, 1:673–​81). Whereas the great majority of Elizabethan popular almanacs were ephemeral, designed for only one year, the Calendrier was perpetual, for it applied to every year. Although many would now find it rather crudely didactic, it was “much admired by a well-​to-​do audience” at least in its early French reception (Hindman 1991, 86). Its Elizabethan readership would not have been simply popular or “semiliterate,” pace Luborsky, for various English editions included passages in Latin (Figure 3).68 Although the Calendrier features many illustrations, in most editions its section providing a monthly calendar only furnishes a full-​page picture for the first month, January, depicting a feast at a blazing hearth. Then, as in Figure 3, each month has a suitable set of diminutive illustrations printed on one page together with the calendar of dates. This suite of little pictures includes a depicted activity befitting the month (such as the man holding a flower for April in Figure 3), usually chosen in accord with the traditional Labors of the Month motif ubiquitous in early modern culture, which assigns each month a scene featuring appropriate endeavors (Henisch 1999). The other pictures of the month’s set, presented in an illustrative sidebar on the viewer’s right, mostly depict the principal saints for the month’s saints’ days and its astrological sign (Figures 3 and 4). However, another version of the Calendrier provides each month with a full-​page illustration depicting characteristic activities (Figure 4). Probably because this somewhat more fully illustrated rendition was more costly to publish, it had far fewer editions and no English exemplars are currently known.69 Luborsky proposes that Spenser’s Calender assimilated especially this particular French form of the Calendrier because both likewise provide a substantial illustration displaying representative conditions for each month (1981, 47n24). However, the

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Figure 3  “April.” The Kalender of Shephardes (London: William Powell for John Walley, 1559), Bvib.

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

Figure 4  “Septembre.” Compost et kalendrier des bergers (Paris: Guy Marchand for Jean Petit, 1499), cvib–​cviia.

size and content of the Calender’s illustrations evince no definite or exclusive correlations with this version of the Calendrier or any other, Spenser was much less likely to have encountered this one, and throughout the visual and decorative arts the monthly Labors were a conventional theme anyway. As his Calender engages French poetry extensively, so he may have known the Calendrier in French as well as English. Aside from the shared title, the Calendrier’s correspondences with its Spenserian namesake are so broad and loose and its differences so great that Spenser invokes it mainly as a context from which he signally departs. Jeffrey Todd Knight contrarily declares that “the printed apparatus” of Spenser’s Calender “resembles” the Calendrier “more so than any poetical work in circulation in the 1570s” (2013, 127). By “apparatus” he means textual presentation, and his assertion depends on three claims: (1) the Calender’s “running head, which gives the month of each eclogue,” announces “that an imaginatively resituated and transformed” Calendrier is at its “core”; (2) “Spenser’s monthly eclogues … appear” in the Calendrier’s “black-​letter font”; (3) the Calender’s “programmatic series of crude woodcut illustrations” are “much like” those in the Calendrier (2013, 127–​8, 130).

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Yet since the Calendrier does not have monthly running heads, their usage in the 1579 Calender does not evoke the Calendrier in particular. Although the Calender’s articulate a calendrical structure, Spenser’s text is so generally and loosely calendrical that it intertextually subsumes various kinds of calendars and concepts of months and seasons in relation to human life, not just the Calendrier’s. For example, while providing pictures of the monthly Labors, including a few pastoral scenes, in some editions, the Protestant “historical calendar” aligned the months with biblical events and aspects of the Reformation (Figure 5).70 The Calender’s running heads also enable convenient location of each of its twelve monthly sections. Moreover, its usage of black letter for Spenser’s poetry evinces no particular correlation with English or other versions of the Calendrier because this typeface was the typographical default for all vernacular print publication in England prior to around 1590. In using black letter, the Calender’s first edition is just as much like thousands of other previous English editions as it is like the Calendrier’s. And the Calender’s pictorial program is clearly unlike the Calendrier’s. The latter had numerous illustrations, of which very few include shepherds or sheep. Others, for example, typically depict various torments of hell, many saints, phases of the moon, Jesus enthroned, the Virgin and Child in a mandorla, the Annunciation, an allegorical Ship of Life, the Trees of Vice and Virtue, the Zodiac Man, various astrological depictions, and cosmic schemes.71 Insofar as the Calendrier’s short section providing a monthly calendar pictured the character of each month, it largely followed the Labors of the Month motif ubiquitous anyway in early modern culture. Though the Calender’s pictures draw somewhat on this motif too, they nonetheless differ greatly from those of the Calendrier’s months in any currently known version. Various poetical works circulating in the 1570s resemble the 1579 Calender far more than the Calendrier does, pace Knight: particularly editions of eclogues, which had long optionally included illustrations of specifically pastoral scenes, commentary, or both (Sections 4 and 7). English editions of eclogues had already used black letter for the poetry and provided some pictures.72 For Spenser’s Calender, the heavily didactic Calendrier was no template but rather an allusive reference for some modal assimilation.73 Both these publications include some moralized, religious, and astrological content (as did many other kinds of books and calendars), and provide in different ways a monthly calendar designed to be perpetual (like some other calendars too), as Spenser’s Epilogue claims for his Calender (52a). The Calendrier’s somewhat pastoral contextualization of its contents complements the poet’s emphatic pastoralism, and it always and hence definitively incorporated

Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

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Figure 5  “Mars” and “Avril.” Calendrier historial (Geneva: François Estienne, 1567), *vb.

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extensive illustration. Yet his Calender, replete with allegory and wide-​ ranging learned allusions, and explicitly using five languages, was written at least partly for the admiration of literati and university wits, whereas the Calendrier was a relatively simple book. Devised around ninety years earlier, it verbally and visually expressed a late fifteenth-​century Roman Catholic mode of spirituality passé in much of Elizabethan society, and its woodcuts depicted clothing by that time long outmoded. Harvey mocks astrological charlatans for using it (1913, 163). Insofar as Cambridge-​educated Spenser’s polylingual Calender references the Calendrier, it evokes a quaintness not to be taken literally, which complements the faux rusticity of his eclogues appropriate to late sixteenth-​century humanist pastoralism. In using the same title as the Calendrier’s English version, Spenser applies “an old name to a new worke” as E. K. declares (¶iiia). The poet’s endeavor is new, not the same as its old namesake’s. He reinterprets this borrowed title in a literary way by applying it to a set of “Aeglogues” given a monthly structure, as his Calender’s full title implies: “THE Shepheardes Calender Conteyning twelue Aeglogues proportionable to the twelue monethes” (title page). On account of their moralized and religious content, Spenser’s text and the Calendrier are not only calendrical in the sense of incorporating a sort of calendar but also in that of constituting a guide, directory, or model.74 Spenser’s title further evokes the Calendrier’s distinctive verbal-​visual portrayal of the year as a moralized cycle of life, and its recourse to bucolic rustication as a locus of apt authority. Its advice to readers fictively arises from the lore of shepherds, who were often portrayed in early modern culture as models of the simple life responsive to natural norms. The Calender’s mix of diverse ingredients further involves emblematics. Insofar as the Calendriers des bergers illustrated the months, these images mainly served to evoke the time of year in an attractively decorative way, yet resonated somewhat with symbolic conventions of the time, such as the spiritual implications of garnering harvests before winter (compare Matt. 13:3–​32; John 4:31–​8). But the monthly pictures of Spenser’s Calender have a programmatic symbology whereby each one interacts with its accompanying verbal bucolic, with one or more “emblemes” (in the former sense of motto) following that poem, and also with the Calender’s other pictures, poems, and mottoes (Section 10).75 Such interactive relations between poems and corresponding pictures typify the emblem book. This verbal-​ visual form probably most of all inspired the Calender’s pictorial redevelopment of pastoral poetics, and since its text integrally includes the pictures, it draws modally upon emblematics (Sections 8–​10). In emblem books, each emblem typically had a tripartite format consisting of the picture, a motto, and an epigram; each Spenserian eclogue has a comparably tripartite format,

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

wherein a bucolic poem supplants the epigram and the motto appears at the end. On account of the Calender’s commentary, the annotated emblem book is the most relevant emblematic analogue. In Elizabethan England, emblem books such as Alciato’s were highly fashionable (Daly 2013), Harvey testifies to their fascinations at Cambridge in the 1570s (1884, 79), and emblems had further currency in the decorative arts. Around 1570, for example, Harvey’s father had one of his fireplaces remodeled according to three of Alciato’s emblems (Daly 2013, 160–​1). Another main component of the 1579 Calender’s general design is the perceivedly “classic” poem or collection of poems published with a commentary that in effect asserts the work’s literary eminence. Such an addition was normally created without the poet’s mandate or approval during the process of reception, most often posthumously. But since the Calender’s explicatory apparatus was already integral to the first edition, Spenser probably commissioned it himself (Section 3), and around this time he favored publishing his writings in this way that was atypical for first editions. In a letter sent to Harvey in April 1580 and published shortly thereafter, the poet declares that his Dreames, a “fully finished” work that somehow remained unpublished and was lost, “shoulde come forth alone [i.e., as a book in its own right], being growen by meanes of the Glosse … full as great as my Calendar. Therin be some things excellently, and many things wittily discoursed of E. K.” (Variorum, 10:17–​18).76 Although some scholars consider Ronsard’s Amours of 1553 a precedent, for it included his associate Muret’s commentary, it was not the first edition (Section 3). First editions of original poetry that were printed with a commentary before Spenser’s in 1579 are so rare that I can only adduce Girolamo Benivieni’s deeply Platonic Canzoni e sonnetti of 1500 and Richard Willes’s scholarly Poematum liber of 1573. Spenser might have known the former book on account of his strong interests in Platonism’s poetic applications, evident throughout his literary career (Borris 2017), and may have encountered the latter because Willes attended Cambridge in the late 1570s and Harvey mentions him. The Calender further involves some georgic modulation because its version of pastoral is more “hard” or beset with potential adversities, than “soft” or relatively idyllic.77 After his Eclogues and before his Aeneid, Virgil composed his Georgics focusing on the strenuous travails of farming amid seasonal change, partly as a trope for the hard work of cultivating social order and civilizations despite challenges to them. Hard pastoral impinges somewhat upon georgic endeavor to overcome life’s difficulties. Yet just as Virgil’s Eclogues differs much from his Georgics, these two genres remained clearly distinguished, partly because each had its own particular Virgilian precedents and authority. Whereas ploughing epitomized the georgic ethos of arduous endeavor to produce agricultural and metaphorically

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sociocultural harvests, sixteenth-​century literary pastoralism depicted the herdsman’s way of life as if (whatever the reality) it required care in supervising livestock but relatively little sweat. Spenser’s October acknowledges Virgil’s tripartite progression and the fundamental generic emphases: “his Oaten reede /​… taught his flocks to fede,” then he “labored lands to yield the timely eare,” and finally he sang “of warres” (41a). Although the Calender’s poetry “is undeniably pastoral,” it involves “realistically harsh weather and dialect-​speaking shepherds” who are “­mortal men” that “swincke and sweate” as in November (46b), as well as “georgic seasonal variety” (Fowler 1986, 113). Moreover, while “the woodcuts … show shepherds singing and conversing in the foreground,” some show “in the background husbandmen” who georgically “wield axes and hoes and gather in the harvest, … consonant with Spenser’s moral tone,” which acknowledges the need for “struggle” (Low 1985, 66). Most of the pictured shepherds wear clothing more or less ragged. The hard and hence somewhat georgic aspects of this pastoral reflect the challenges of life and promote vigilant social engagement. According to the Epilogue, the Calender’s teachings include safeguarding sheep, as it were, “from the falsers fraud” (52b). The Calender’s illustrations, title, other verbal components, mise-​en-​page, and typography further evoke additional kinds of calendar (such as those in books of hours or primers, in diverse kinds of almanac, and in the Protestant “historical calendar” instanced in Figure 5), as well as illustrated fable books, pilgrimage books, English classics such as Chaucer, the device (a verbal and optionally verbal-​visual form), the “ploughman tradition” centering on Piers Plowman, psalms, and manuscript traditions.78 As a “physical book,” Luborsky observes, the 1579 Calender is “a unique combination of many books …, directing its readers to the models and traditions of the text,” and appears to be “the first printed book of English poetry whose presentation was planned deliberately to be allusive” in this way. We should “reasonably … suppose that it was Spenser who planned this allusiveness” (1980, 29). Who else among his associates has a better claim to having the requisite knowledge, creative productivity, and demonstrable talent? The quite substantial extant resources of the Calender’s early modern reception emphasize Immerito’s or Spenser’s responsibility and literary genius. On account of the Calender’s marvelously rich transformation of diverse generic, textual, and other cultural references into a work of unique scope and character, no particular text or edition thereof could have provided its singular “model,” nor could even several compositely account for it in toto. Yet naive source-​hunting continues to muddle its present reception, and Heninger is the Calender’s most influential such commentator to date. In his much-​cited view, its 1579 layout, which its later Elizabethan editions largely followed, is an “obvious” and “servile replication” of “an edition of

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia prepared by Francesco Sansovino and printed by Giovanni Varisco at Venice in 1571.” So “unmistakable” are “the similarities between the physical appearance” of these two texts, Heninger insists, that “whoever designed Spenser’s volume intended that to be the case” (1988, 35–​6, 42).79 A full reassessment ensues because this misleading study has been so often cited unreservedly and still lacks any effective critique, and also so that we may consider how scholarly inquiry into the Calender’s textual and material affinities may proceed more aptly.80 He and Luborsky cannot both be right, and so he rejects her excellent previous demonstration of the Calender’s wide-​ranging allusiveness, as well as her well-​informed judgment that in toto, the 1579 Calender’s “physical book does not look like any other single book of its time” (Heninger 1988, 42n19; Luborsky 1980, 29). But the correlations that Heninger perceives between it and this 1571 Arcadia do not establish any necessary relationship because those features have innumerable other counterparts and precedents unknown to him. Also, many important objective differences invalidate his claim of “replication.” These faults typify naive source study. At present, only two copies of Varisco’s 1571 edition are publicly accessible, both in Italy (Brennan 2018, 32n35), and no copy has as yet been digitized. Although Heninger’s study reproduces thirty-​eight pages, these excerpts do not adequately document its structure. However, Varisco printed an almost identical second edition in 1578, also as yet undigitized but publicly available in London and Chicago (Brennan 2018, 32n36). For the purpose of assessing whether Spenser’s Calender follows Varisco’s presentation of the Arcadia established in 1571, either of those editions thus suffices. Both present the same woodcuts and Sannazaro’s and Sansovino’s same verbal texts, with almost identical foliation, layout, and ornamentation throughout.81 Hence this present study illustrates Varisco’s mise-​en-​ page from the 1578 edition. Heninger should not have disregarded it, for it almost exactly reproduces the 1571 edition that he privileges, and likewise preceded publication of Spenser’s Calender.82 According to Heninger, “the illustrations of Spenser’s poem derive directly from those in the earlier book [i.e., Varisco’s 1571 Arcadia] in both subject matter and style. There are the same shepherds dressed in the same way arranged in similar poses. There are the same landscapes: the same sheep, the same trees, the same background buildings, even the same skies” (1988, 36). But the shepherds depicted in Varisco’s 1571 and 1578 Arcadias are relatively refined, idealized, and portrayed amid scenes of considerable artificiality, without evident seasonal change, whereas the Calender’s illustrations present a very dissimilar pastoral world subject to privation, for its shepherds are often ragged, as well as to seasonal and other adversities. In the former text’s pictures, little if any sweat-​inducing physical labor appears

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to occur and trees never lose their leaves, whereas the Calender’s show tree-​chopping in Februarye, agricultural toil in June, Julye, and August, and barren trees in Januarye, November, and December. Moreover, the woodcuts for these Varisco Arcadias are stylistically Italianate and mannerist, featuring human figures mostly with elongated and tapered limbs, gesticulating in graceful poses (Figure 6).83 Yet according to A. Hyatt Major, Curator Emeritus of Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Calender features “English cutting done according to Flemish design evocative of the premannerist style of book illustration that first appeared in Lyons in the 1540s and 1550s and then spread to the Low Countries.”84 Relative to the highly stylized mannerist human figures portrayed in the Italian book, the Calender’s are naturalistically robust. In any case, the resources of sixteenth-​century visual pastoralism were enormous. Hence a credible claim to have traced a particular pictorial “source” or even “model” for a pastoral scene requires some specific evidence of this alleged indebtedness, as well as clear demonstration that the apparent correspondence is difficult to account for otherwise. Yet Heninger just vaguely alleges general similarities of sheep, trees, buildings, and skies that actually had broad currency in bucolic depiction. Moreover, the pictures for Varisco’s 1571 and 1578 Arcadias seek to depict situations in the narrative rather decoratively and were added long after the author’s death. But the Calender’s draw on traditions of calendrical illustration alien to Sannazaro’s text, to Varisco’s 1571 and 1578 editions of it, and to the pictures therein provided.85 And as Sections 9–​10 explain, the Calender’s are not just decorative but deeply symbological in ways always intrinsic to this book as Spenser disseminated it. Even the type of pastoralism differs, for whereas the Italian book’s idealizing illustrations of bucolic life evoke “soft pastoral,” the Calender’s relative pictorial realism evokes “hard pastoral.”86 “Beyond the illustrations,” Heninger continues, “every typographical feature of The Shepheardes Calender has its counterpart in the earlier volume” of 1571 (1988, 36). Thus both of these books have a dedicatory epistle, he observes, and in the Calender, E. K.’s General Argument “corresponds to [Sannazaro’s] ‘Proemio del l’Arcadia,’ ” while in Spenser’s eclogues “the placement of the woodcut, the use of the Latin ‘Aegloga prima,’ the presence and arrangement of the ‘Argument,’ the announcement of the speaker’s name, even the use of ornamental initials carefully follow the format of Sansovino’s Sannazaro” in Varisco’s 1571 edition (1988, 36; my emphasis). But dedicatory epistles and prefatory comments, authorial or not, were far from uncommon in sixteenth-​century books, and in series of eclogues so too were the rest of these allegedly decisive correlations. Moreover, the 1579 Calender could not have meaningfully “followed” the typographical design of Varisco’s Arcadia of 1571 or 1578 because Spenser’s

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

Figure 6  “Ecloga sesta,” beginning. Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia, ed. Francesco Sansovino (Venice: Giovanni Varisco, 1578), 46b.

book is very dissimilar structurally and typographically. Whereas Spenser fundamentally follows Virgil’s well-​known precedent by presenting a substantial set of verse eclogues, Sannazaro’s text prosimetrically combines pastoral romance with eclogues, so that a substantial prose narrative precedes

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and contextualizes each one of its twelve verse eclogues. Whereas Spenser’s typically conclude with one or more mottos stressed in 142 italic, Sannazaro’s have none. In Varisco’s 1571 and 1578 Arcadia, unlike the Calender, the “Argomento” (in roman, not the Calender’s italic) precedes each segment of Sannazaro’s prose, not his subsequent verse eclogue (Figures 6 and 7). Although Heninger’s juxtapositions of selected pages reproduced from Varisco’s 1571 Arcadia may seem to show that each verse eclogue commences together with an “Argomento” of its own (1988, 65–​9), in fact it does not. And in Varisco’s 1571 and 1578 Arcadias, a picture appears before each “Argomento” and also before each verse eclogue (Figures 6 and 7). But unlike both those books, the Calender has only one picture for each Argument and its following bucolic poem, and presents this picture, Argument, and verse eclogue all in direct conjunction: a quite common sixteenth-​century layout for illustrated series of verse eclogues (Figure 8). Whereas Varisco’s 1571 and 1578 Arcadias use roman capitals to title Sannazaro’s verse eclogues in Italian numerically (“ECLOGA TERZA”) and by the names of their characters (“MONTANO, ET URANIO”), the Calender differently uses 142 italic in both upper and lower case to title its eclogues numerically in Latin (“Aegloga prima”) and by their month in English (“Januarye”). It also reduces the characters’ names before each bucolic poem to nontitular indicators of the speakers in just 68 roman. In general, the 1579 Calender’s presentation of each eclogue is much closer to various illustrated editions of Virgil’s Eclogues than to Varisco’s 1571 and 1578 Arcadias.87 In many of those editions of Virgil’s Eclogues, the eclogue’s name and numerical title, the picture, the “Argumentum,” and the preliminary declaration of the speakers’ names all appear together in close conjunction, rather as they do in the Calender (Figures 8 and 9), whereas they do not in those two Arcadias (Figure 6).88 “Perhaps the most telling evidence” that Sansovino’s annotated 1571 Arcadia was the Calender’s “model,” Heninger claims, is “E. K.’s gloss at the end of each eclogue.” E. K. “provides extensive annotation of exactly the same sort” as Sansovino, “and the words being glossed are similarly reprinted, enclosed by a single parenthesis, and then explained” (1988, 36). But innumerable books provided commentary in this way. By 1579 there had even been many other editions of Sannazaro’s Arcadia that did so, such as at least nine with Tommaso Porcacchi’s similarly presented comments.89 The presentation of the commentary in Varisco’s 1571 and 1578 Arcadias clearly differs far too much from that of the 1579 Calender for either of those editions to have guided the latter’s design in this respect. Sansovino’s annotations are repeatedly entitled “ANNOTATIONE” in roman capitals (Figure 10), but E. K.’s “GLOSSE” or “GLOSS,” and in italics instead. In the Calender, this title always appears beneath an ornamental band of

Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

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Figure 7  “Prosa quinta,” beginning. Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia, ed. Francesco Sansovino (Venice: Giovanni Varisco, 1578), 37a.

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Figure 8  “Ecloga prima,” or “Tityrus,” beginning. Virgil, Bucolica, in his Opera (Lyon: Heirs of Simon Vincent, 1535), 1a.

Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

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Figure 9  “Ecloga tertia,” or “Palaemon,” beginning. Virgil, Bucolica, in his Opera (Venice: Giovanni Maria Bonelli, 1558), 14a.

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newgenrtpdf

Figure 10  Commentary presentation. Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia, ed. Francesco Sansovino (Venice: Giovanni Varisco, 1578), 48b–​49a.

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

arabesques that provides a clear sectional divider between the eclogue and its ensuing commentary. Varisco’s 1571 and 1578 Arcadias include no such device aside from the title “ANNOTATIONE.” Moreover, in both, unlike the 1579 Calender, the fictional text and the commentary have marginal Arabic numerals to correlate each annotation with its particular literary context (Figure 10). Each of Sansovino’s lemmata is set flush with its note’s left-​hand margin, a common layout for commentaries in the later sixteenth century. But the 1579 Calender gives E. K.’s lemmata their own consistent left-​hand margin distinct from that of their notes, which appear indented. Much facilitating consultation of the commentary, because each lemma can readily be found, this particular means of presenting E. K.’s commentary seems to have been rather rare, for I have found no precedent wherein the body of each note appears indented relative to its lemma. Though not likely original, this helpful feature of the 1579 Calender’s typography was thus relatively innovative. By using indentation to distinguish each lemma from the ensuing note, though by indenting the lemma rather than the note, the 1567 Arcadia with Porcacchi’s commentary presents his glosses more like E. K.’s than the 1571 edition with Sansovino’s. On account of these many objective differences between the publisher Varisco’s 1571 Arcadia and the 1579 Calender, this Italian edition could not have been the latter book’s “bibliographical model” as Steven K. Galbraith claims (2008, 25), endorsing Heninger. Nor could Varisco’s almost identical edition of 1578. And even if we ignored these differences, none of Heninger’s foregoing claims, nor all of them collectively, would constitute valid evidence that Varisco’s Arcadia in either of these editions was indeed the Calender’s source or model for the design, layout, or configuration of its various components or anything else, because all the features that Heninger mentions were also present in various sixteenth-​century books of eclogues. Their presence in the Calender’s first edition evinces its appropriate commitments to this particular literary form as published then in prestigious illustrated editions with some critical apparatus. Those features do not establish any debt to Varisco’s 1571 or 1578 Arcadia in particular, because the design of these two editions inevitably shared somewhat in such current presentational conventions of the genre. When considering whether one literary text or edition thereof might be a specific source or model for another author’s, we should carefully distinguish any shared factors that could readily arise from coincidentally joint usage of formal and bibliographic conventions, for these cannot establish any definite obligations to the earlier endeavor. Studies privileging a specific source or model should adduce evidence of correlation unlikely to have arisen from anywhere other than the alleged paradigm, and Heninger provides no such evidence. In this case we could not even reasonably argue that a high number of correlations of layout between the 1579 Calender

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and Varisco’s Arcadia of 1571 or 1578 indicates a likely bibliographic relationship between it and either of them, because the Calender evinces many major differences of textual presentation, and the features it shares with them appear in so many other eclogue series of the time. Moreover, unless an ostensible source or model was commonly accessible in a language known by the writer at issue, we should also expect its advocate to show that the author likely knew it. And the rarer the alleged paradigm, the greater its advocate’s burden of proof. Though arguing for the influence of Sannazaro’s Arcadia on the Calender greatly differs from arguing for that of a certain edition thereof, Heninger blurs these two endeavors.90 The bar for demonstration is vertiginously high for his argument because it actually concerns one particular edition of Sannazaro’s Arcadia: Varisco’s in 1571. Heninger even requires us to assume that not just Spenser but also Harvey and Sidney all knew and highly privileged this specific book, though no known evidence such as a surviving library record, personally annotated copy, or explicit reference in their quite voluminous extant writings establishes its physical connection with even one of them.91 The odds were much against any of these three Elizabethan literati encountering either of Varisco’s 1571 or 1578 editions. All three knew Italian, and Sannazaro’s Arcadia was one of Sidney’s and Spenser’s various influences. E. K.’s list of the latter’s bucolic models includes Sannazaro along with Theocritus, Virgil, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Mantuan, Marot, “and also diuers other excellent both Italian and French Poetes” (¶iiia). Yet “almost nothing in The Shepheardes Calender,” Heninger himself observes, “is even vaguely reminiscent” of Sannazaro’s Arcadia in textual content (1988, 37). Now Varisco’s 1571 Italian edition of it, published and primarily sold in Venice, not London, would probably have had a total print run of around 800 to 1,500 copies to disseminate through Venice, Italy, and all Europe. Since Sannazaro’s Arcadia had over sixty sixteenth-​century Italian editions, some both illustrated and annotated, besides others in French and Spanish, the options for encountering and owning it were very numerous indeed.92 To show that either of these two Varisco editions was the Calender’s object of “servile replication” or its “bibliographical model,” Heninger and his followers need compelling evidence of various kinds that they do not provide.93 In the unlikely event that Spenser or anyone connected with the Calender’s production saw either of these two Varisco Arcadias, it gained no evident privilege as any kind of presentational source or model, for the Calender’s 1579 edition differs greatly from them both in many ways. Their relevance to Spenser’s book is thus improbable. They are merely yet further exemplars of the many eclogue series published in the sixteenth century with illustrations, apparatus, or both. Various editions of Virgil’s Eclogues are, once again, presentationally much more like the Calender.

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Luborsky’s methodology far excels Heninger’s. As she immersed herself in diverse sixteenth-​century discursive forms, texts, and pictorial traditions relevant to the Calender, so she well understood how Procrustean endeavors to identify any particular bibliographical or other source for the whole Calender must be. Of course, the Calender has various formal precursors and textual models summarized in this section’s introductory paragraph, as well as verifiable local sources. For example, Clément Marot’s pastoral elegy for Louise de Savoie, the mother of the French king François I, is so much Spenser’s springboard for November that he even translates Marot’s phrases at times (for example, “Ay francke shepheard,” 47a; “O franc Pasteur,” line 261), and features speakers with the same names (Thenot and Colin).94 Such an extensive set of specific correlations cannot be coincidental. While primarily referencing the generic paradigm of the eclogue series, the Calender freshly incorporates various other forms and discourses, and such a text has no single textual source or model, but coordinates and reinterprets a range of precursors intertextually. As in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, such multifarious literary and cultural bricolage is fundamental to his poetics. As E. K. declares, “this Author euery where followeth” the footing of “diuers … Italian and French Poetes, … yet so as few, but they be wel sented can trace him out” (¶iiia), and yet the Calender further synthesizes many formal, textual, sociocultural, and intellectual domains. Though much illuminating the Calender’s broad allusiveness, even Luborsky sometimes misdefines the mix. Whereas she supposes that the annotated emblem book is “the paramount but not exclusive source for the layout” of the Calender’s “eclogue unit” (1980, 51), the annotated and illustrated eclogue series is this text’s primary formal model in this respect and otherwise (Sections 4, 5, and 7). Whereas, for example, “no” known emblem book has “an individual argument as part of the emblematic unit” (Luborsky 1980, 53), many early modern editions of eclogues present each one with an argument as in the Calender (Section 7). As she acknowledges, “there is no need for exclusivity,” for Spenser’s text mixes hitherto disparate forms, discourses, models, and analogues, each of which “feeds into the book as a whole” (1980, 53). Yet scholars should still seek to identify the relative extent of its emphases as well as the scope of its incorporations.

5 The Calender and popular almanacs In another view of the Calender’s formation requiring reassessment here, the Elizabethan popular almanac predominantly shaped Spenser’s endeavor. To date, the main proponents of this approach are Abigail Shinn and Pauline Reid.95 “It is clear when looking at the 1579 edition,” Shinn declares, “that

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Spenser has adopted a style reminiscent of the standard almanac format” and “clearly mimics” it, so that for this reason we should “move away from” the eclogue and literary pastoralism when interpreting this text (2009, 137, 144, 147; likewise 2013, 159–​61). Reid similarly asserts that “Spenser’s Calender evokes several different material and literary genres,” but “most principally, the almanac” (2019, 63; compare 98). If so, the Calender is primarily a popular almanac even in its original design as a book, which also determined the textual presentation of all four of its later Elizabethan editions. Yet although its extensive intertextual references include almanacs of various types, its clearly dominant generic and presentational affiliation is the eclogue series. The Calender’s reception shows that it was much identified and understood as such. Popular texts, books, and discourses have relevance to Spenser’s project that should be investigated, yet without downplaying its prevalent pastoralism and literariness. He sought esteem as a genuine poet in accord with early modern advocacy of the art’s exalted enduring importance, which stressed learning, unique power to benefit society, and profound inspiration. Investigating the Calender’s relation to Elizabethan almanacs requires appropriate basic terms and categories. Despite some variations, all English editions of the Calendrier des bergers have much the same verbal and visual content: moralized, religious, cosmological, astrological, somewhat pastoralized, calendrically perpetual, extensively illustrated, and visually decorative. But the Elizabethan popular almanacs were very diverse, predominantly just annual, hence ephemeral, often illustrated little or not at all, and differed greatly from the Calendrier in appearance, scope, content, and purpose. They were “largely utilitarian” by the standards of the time (Capp 1979, 24), whereas the Calendrier was not. “Most … were read and discarded in a single year,” and they were “synonymous with transience” (Smyth 2013, 127). The Calendrier could not have substituted for them, nor vice versa. Yet Shinn, Reid, and Jeffrey Todd Knight treat the Spenserian Calender’s correlations with the Calendrier as if those also establish the formative importance of almanacs in general, and hence popular English almanacs as well, for the poet’s enterprise.96 Since there were various types of almanac that differed substantially in significant ways, the relevance of one type does not mean that others are equally pertinent. An effective procedure for assessing their relation to Spenser’s Calender should distinguish carefully between the main types and enable appraisal of the degree to which each is relevant. The Short-​Title Catalogue (STC) for this period as well as Ruth Luborsky and Elizabeth Ingram’s Guide to English Illustrated Books 1536–​1603 both treat the Calendrier on one hand and the practical almanacs on the other as wholly different types of publication that constitute two disparate categories: (1) “editions of the ‘Shepherds’ Kalendar,’ ”

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and (2) “almanacs and prognostications.”97 So should any investigator of the Calender’s formal and textual affiliations. The case for the relevance of the second category must be made separately from that for the first. Section 4 addressed the Calendrier’s pertinence, obvious because Spenser appropriated its English title, and now we may reassess the second category, which consists wholly of publications printed in England primarily in English and usually composed there. Since almanacs in England subsumed prognostications (unlike those in France), the term “popular almanac” may epitomize the second category here.98 The epithet “popular” distinguishes it from different kinds of almanacs such as the religious “Almanac” provided in the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer (BCP) ubiquitous in Spenser’s time (BCP, 35–​47). Designed for “a popular audience” as Shinn observes, publications in this second category were sold very widely indeed and often cheaply (2009, 142; compare Watt 1991, 263). Within England during Elizabeth’s reign, there were vastly more editions of this sort, which had quite practical purposes and patterns of usage, than of the pictorially decorative and much less practically oriented Calendrier, which had only around five, and could be somewhat Latinate (Figure 3).99 Hence the popular almanac is also definitively “practical” relative to the Calendrier. Further, “almanac” here is not synonymous with “calendar,” for these were distinct forms. Since popular almanacs typically had other contents besides calendars, and there were diverse kinds of calendars beyond almanacs (such as in books of hours or the Protestant historical calendars exemplified in Figure 5), the inclusion of calendars in popular almanacs cannot in itself warrant privileging them as models for Spenser’s Calender. These terms, so defined, enable needful distinctions. To justify concluding that popular almanacs were the Calender’s central model, Shinn, Reid, or both provide eight main reasons, to be reconsidered here in this order: (1) “The verse in the Calender was printed in the same Gothic black type as most almanacs” (Shinn 2009, 139; similarly Reid 2019, 69, 95; Shinn 2013, 160–​1); (2) its provision of commentary is also correlative (Reid 2019, 69); (3) so is its usage of monthly verses (Shinn 2009, 139); (4) so is its national focus (Shinn 2009, 141–​2); (5) its “inclusion of woodcuts depicting pastoral scenes and scenes of labor … imitates the woodcuts included in many almanacs” (Shinn 2009, 139); (6) its pictured astrological signs and further such verbal references evoke popular almanacs (Reid 2019, 69; Shinn 2009, 143–​7); (7) its monthly development mimics “the almanac maker’s … calendrical reference for the forthcoming agricultural year” (Shinn 2009, 139); (8) it recalls “the standard almanac format” (Shinn 2009, 138–​9; similarly Reid 2019, 69). Since black letter was the default typeface for all English-​language publication prior to around 1590, as Section 4 explained for the Calendrier, the Calender is no more like popular almanacs in this respect than like

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innumerable other kinds of sixteenth-​century English books. Nor does it particularly mimic those almanacs in its provision of commentary. E. K.’s literary and relatively learned discussions in print differ much from the handwritten commentaries to be encountered in such almanacs, which their readers provided.100 And many other kinds of books included commentaries too. In content and presentation, Spenser’s Calender is most like a recent annotated eclogue series (Sections 4, 5, and 7). Nor does the Calender’s usage of monthly verses specifically imitate popular almanacs. Some headed “each month with a short rhyme,” Shinn observes, such as “George Gossenne’s advice for September 1571: ‘Now looke to gathering other fruites, /​as time and season doth require, /​This done, you may possesse the gaine, /​according to your hartes desire’ ” (2009, 139). The Calendrier also included a four-​line verse for each month, though these were Latin in some English editions (Figure 3). Yet Spenser’s endeavor differs greatly from the brief and rudimentary monthly versification that appears in some English popular almanacs, and also from the Calendrier’s. Humanist bucolic faux rusticism should not be mistaken for actual naivety. Even aside from matters of poetic quality, content, style, prosodic variety, literary genre, and scope of reference, each of Spenser’s monthly poems much exceeds four lines. And “the badness of almanac-​verse was proverbial” (Capp 1979, 225).101 Hence we should not suppose, as Shinn does, that the Calender’s “clear positioning … within a national literary framework underscores Spenser’s use of the almanac model” (2009, 141). Unlike the Calender, Elizabethan popular almanacs were quite unliterary and often targeted local concerns, not the realm as a whole.102 In the 1570s, the status and resources of the English language as a vehicle for poetic accomplishment still much lagged behind those of the continental vernaculars, and whereas Spenser, Sidney, and others were specifically striving to amend this literary scandal around that time, as E. K.’s introductory “Epistle” for the Calender bears witness (¶iib–​iiia), popular almanacs were not.103 Nor do the Calender’s woodcuts particularly align it with those publications, for they “contained surprisingly few illustrations, presumably on the grounds of cost” (Capp 1979, 228). Pictures were optional for them and many were unillustrated, as were many eclogue series too. Luborsky and Ingram surveyed the extant English popular almanacs published between 1536 and 1603. Whereas around 300 in total survive (including reprints and translations), 152 of these are to some extent illustrated, and most have few pictures.104 But English versions of the Calendrier, of which there were seven during those years, were always profusely illustrated, so that illustration was a definitive feature for this discursive form, unlike popular almanacs (see Luborsky and Ingram 1998, 1:673–​81). Spenser’s Calender lacks the

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picture most common in those that were illustrated at that time: the Zodiac Man, which correlates the parts of the body with astrological signs.105 And whereas Shinn claims that the “standardised format” of the English popular almanac “often” included “a series of woodcuts depicting appropriate scenes for each of the twelve months” (2009, 138), only around 7 percent of such extant publications did so between 1536 and 1603.106 Although many popular almanacs have been lost, the surviving quantity is reasonably sufficient to indicate the main possibilities of this general category of print as well as the approximate proportion of its editions illustrated in that way. If this category had a standard configuration, pictured monthly scenes were quite peripheral in its repertoire of conventions and options. But they were always included in versions of the Calendrier, usually in a diminutive aspect (Section 4). Moreover, when popular almanacs did include monthly scenes, these conformed to the motif of the Labors of the Months common anyway in the visual and decorative arts and in print throughout early modern Europe, and so the Calender’s mere inclusion of pictured months cannot in itself evince any especial correlation between Spenser’s text and those almanacs.107 If visual details specific to their versions of such scenes were reiterated in the Calender, that would be a different matter; but no one has adduced any such evidence. This motif of the monthly Labors appeared in various kinds of books and illustrated calendars, as well as always in the Calendrier. Between 1536 and 1603 in England, for example, the Labors of the Months appeared in religious calendars within some English Protestant bibles and spiritual guides, and as ornaments elsewhere.108 Since Spenser’s Calender has a religious aspect, such associations of the monthly Labors are not irrelevant. Nor should we suppose that the Calender’s pictorial “inclusion of … pastoral scenes and scenes of labour … imitates the woodcuts included in many almanacs” (Shinn 2009, 139), for between 1536 and 1603 only around 7 percent of them included such scenes, as shown above, and the Calender’s woodcuts differ greatly.109 In accord with the monthly Labors motif, those popular almanacs mainly depicted generally rural and agricultural scenes and work, except January’s feasting and February’s fireside relaxation could occur in urban and courtly situations too.110 Only one of the twelve usual monthly activities was specifically pastoral: sheep-​shearing. Just one of the eight pictorial Labors of the Months series used in some English popular almanacs between 1536 and 1603 included “a shepherd sitting beneath a tree playing the bag-​pipe and watching his flock,” and this particular series was relatively rare, for it appears in only two surviving editions of them.111 Whereas the popular almanacs have an “agricultural impetus” pictorially and otherwise, as Shinn observes (2009, 147), the Calender is not so generally agricultural because it is emphatically pastoral. Farming and herding

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focused on different early modern sociocultural categories of rural life.112 There were two distinct corresponding literary genres, each with its own repertoire of themes, conventions, and stylistic traits: georgic, focusing on farming and its strenuous physical labor; and pastoral, focusing on the quite dissimilar life of herdsmen tending their droves (Fowler 1982, Index, s.v. “georgic” and “pastoral”). Rejecting usage of “ ‘pastoral’ with ungoverned inclusiveness,” Paul Alpers argues that this genre focuses on “the representative anecdote of herdsmen and their lives,” whereas georgic addresses “farmers,” so that “pastoral landscapes are those of which the human centers are herdsmen or their equivalents” (1996, ix, 26–​8). October shows that the poet himself distinguished between these two genres in these ways (41a), and though his Calender assimilates some georgic qualities into its somewhat “hard” version of pastoralism, it remains predominantly pastoral, just as its characters are mostly shepherds (Section 4). All twelve of the Calender’s woodcuts feature one or more shepherds as well as sheep and shepherd’s hooks defining the associated persons as shepherds or herdsmen, not farmers. Only four cuts also include more generally agrarian scenes: Februarye’s tree-​chopping, which illustrates a fable told by a foregrounded shepherd; and June’s, Julye’s, and August’s harvesting, which has figuratively personal and spiritual implications relating to foregrounded shepherds. Never do the Calender’s pictures foreground activities of tilling soil, raising crops, and reaping them. Though the Calendrier included a few woodcuts involving shepherds, its pictorial Labors of the Months involve little pastoralism (see Luborsky and Ingram 1998, 1:673–​81). Whereas the Calender’s pictures specifically stress pastoralism in a way suitable for illustrating eclogues, the Labors of the Months as pictured in English popular almanacs, the Calendrier, and elsewhere do not, and so the Shepheardes Calender strikingly departs from that illustrative motif and from the publications that incorporated it. The Calender’s inclusion of astrology does not specifically evoke English popular almanacs either. Although Reid states that the presence of “woodcuts of astrological symbols” in some illustrated popular almanacs “distinctly parallels Spenser’s Calender” (2019, 69, 73), illustrated calendars of diverse types, including the Calendrier and the Protestant historical calendar, incorporated such symbols visually (Figures 3, 4, and 5), and the Labors of the Months had long been correlated with the zodiacal signs in diverse contexts, discourses, and media.113 Nor, for much the same reasons, do the Calender’s verbal references to astrological phenomena relate it particularly to popular almanacs as Shinn supposes (2009, 144–​7). Astrology and its implications for life, the year, the months, and work were widely addressed beyond popular almanacs. For example, Spenser’s Calender involves much religious content, and “the inclusion of zodiacal notations

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

… was an established custom” even “in ecclesiastical calendars” as well as “those in … primers” (in the sense of prayer books) and in “books of private devotion” (Siegenthaler 1975, 428, 432). Hence the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer for 1559 includes a religious “Almanac for Thirty Years” with a monthly calendar involving astrological information, and the authorized Elizabethan book of private prayers also includes such material.114 As these examples of ubiquitous Elizabethan religious calendars also indicate, the mere inclusion of a calendar in popular almanacs does not justify privileging them as the Calender’s main model. Hence Spenser’s eclogues do not specifically, as Shinn claims, “mimic the almanac maker’s month by month prognostications which were designed to provide the reader with a calendrical reference for the forthcoming agricultural year” (2009, 138–​9). Spenser’s Calender strongly emphasizes pastoralism, as we have seen, not general agriculture. And even its pastoralism is highly symbolic and literary. It could not have guided a shepherd’s actual treatment of flocks in a forthcoming year, supposing he could afford a copy and read, let alone a farmer’s labors. Moreover, almanacs of that type were typically ephemeral, designed for one year only, and local, with predictions ostensibly calibrated for a particular area’s husbandry.115 But Spenser’s Calender is purposefully perpetual, as his Epilogue stresses, and addresses Elizabeth’s whole realm. Since calendars of various types were common in early modern culture, not just characteristic of popular almanacs, the calendrical aspect of Spenser’s eclogues is broadly resonant, as Luborsky understood. Finally, whereas Shinn maintains that “Spenser … adopted a style reminiscent of the standard almanac format” for “the 1579 edition” of his Calender (2009, 139), and Reid follows suit (2019, 69), definitions of the putative “standardised format” of Elizabethan popular almanacs vary widely, and the 1579 edition does not look like Elizabethan popular almanacs. “Almanacs as a genre are diverse” and “display a remarkable variety,” Alison A. Chapman advises, and so “the danger of writing” about them is that “any generalization about these texts immediately runs up against its many exceptions” (2007, 1259, 1260n8, 1269n46). In Shinn’s view, they “commonly incorporated a calendar,” a “zodiacal man (often alongside favorable times for bloodletting and a list of the most appropriate limbs from which to take blood), various moon and tide tables, a prognostication and a weather forecast; these would often be accompanied by … appropriate scenes for each of the twelve months, or more generic scenes of labor” (2009, 138). Spenser’s Calender lacks much of this material, the features it does include had other important contexts, and we have seen that only around 7 percent of surviving English popular almanacs published between 1536 and 1603 included pictures of the monthly Labors, and that these were commonly depicted elsewhere too. Reid’s “standard visual pattern” for

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“English almanacs … that distinctly parallels Spenser’s Calender” comprises “gothic or ‘black letter’ type, occasional printed commentary …, woodcuts of astrological symbols and parts of the human body, and even a thematic focus on memory” (2019, 69). But this definition of the popular almanac is so oversimplified and general, with features common to various other kinds of books too, that it establishes no definite connection to Spenser’s book and omits many characteristics quite typical of such almanacs. In Adam Smyth’s much better definition, the popular almanac provided information about the year to come. These texts were small, generally octavo or duodecimo: their portability was an essential attribute. They included a detailed monthly calendar; descriptions of local fairs, routes between towns, and chronologies of history; astrological, medical, and agricultural notes; a “zodiacal body” anatomizing the influence of the planets on the parts of the body; and “predictions of weather, and strange events.” (2008, 201)

By this standard, Spenser’s 1579 Calender published in quarto clearly differed in bibliographical format, degree of portability, mode of utility, purposes, and content, and did not appear to be a popular almanac. It further lacks many other characteristics of Elizabethan popular almanacs identified by Phebe Jensen, such as rubrication and dual title pages with borders involving inset astronomical or astrological images (2021, chs. 2.1, 2.2). Nevertheless, Reid further claims that the Calender’s “visual arrangement … perhaps most specifically parallels the material form of a mock annotated almanac or ‘blank,’ with the space for annotation already inscribed by E. K.” Besides presenting “the common almanac elements,” the “blank” popular almanac “included blank spaces for readers to include commentary, reminders, tables, and other inscriptions”—​specifically “blank pages” (2019, 98).116 But since the 1579 Calender does not provide blank pages in that way, its visual arrangement lacks the very feature definitive for this type of almanac; and by definition, blank almanacs were not pre-​annotated when published. Though Reid claims that Spenser’s Calender “purposefully imitates the blank-​almanac structure” (2019, 105), her two examples for this form look nothing like Spenser’s book.117 Moreover, far from being “much like E. K.’s glosses” as Reid says (2019, 98), the remarks that users of blank almanacs scribbled on the vacant pages were typically laconic, and Adam Smyth observes that “the central concerns of what might be called a discourse of almanac annotations” were simply those of domestic or rural life: “family birthdays and deaths …; the weather …; travel …; accounting …; and husbandry” (2008, 206). E. K.’s very different commentary is quite typically literary and relatively learned in its concerns, topics, diction, and approach, such as we would find in an annotated collection of eclogues.

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

Nor does the Calender, pace Reid, evince “the material form of a mock annotated almanac” (2019, 98). Such publications parodied the annotation of almanacs by “gullible readers” (Smyth 2008, 206). But E. K. is neither recording the mundane events of his own life like readers who annotated blanks, nor programmatically mocking those who do so. An actual mock almanac makes comments like this one, from Poor Robin (1673): “ ‘Lost my best shirt off the hedge’ ” (Smyth 2008, 206). Besides, the 1579 Calender could not have imitated a mock almanac because this form, as Reid states, “began to appear in the seventeenth century” (2019, 109).118 Nor should we suppose that “technically speaking,” the Calender “is a ‘sort’ or fully typed, fully printed almanac” (Reid 2019, 110). Sorts and blanks were different kinds of popular almanac, and mock almanacs were different yet again, and the Calender should not be equated with any of them because it differs very much from them all.119 Although Shinn maintains that “Spenser’s choice of design for this, his first independent publication, self-​consciously marks itself apart from the classical eclogue and the pastoral mode” (2009, 147), the category of sixteenth-​ century print that the 1579 Calender most resembles is a highly reputed poet’s eclogue series in a prestigious edition (on account of the book’s size, commentary, and illustrations), yet in a characteristically English aspect (on account of the usage of black-​letter textura for the poetry). While the Calender’s full title advertises Spenser’s innovatively calendrical pastoralism, it insists these are “twelue Aeglogues.” Each eclogue then bears a monthly yet pastoralized title, such as “Januarye. Aegloga prima” (1a). In the sixteenth century, eclogues were printed with some flexibility according to the accumulating repertoire of norms and options customary for this literary form, and the incidence of these characteristics varied as some became more or less current while others were added. By affixing a pastoralized calendrical title, giving each eclogue a monthly title, and attaching the so-​called emblems, Spenser’s 1579 Shepheardes Calender departs from some of the norms for presenting an eclogue series, and yet others determine much of the poetry’s presentation so that they implicitly proclaim the book’s fundamental alignment with this form (Section 7). Hence, even aside from the 1579 Calender’s verbal-​visual plethora of shepherds, sheep, sheephooks, and pastoral allusions and conventions (beyond my scope to survey here, and E. K. identifies some anyway), its layout represents it as a work of poetry chiefly to be understood as a collection of eclogues sufficiently rich, deep, learned, and engaging to merit full commentary and illustration. Various eclogue series had already been printed with pastoral illustrations, commentaries, or both (Section 7). E. K.’s apparatus and Spenser’s early reception also clearly represent the Calender as just such a series. E. K.’s Letter to Harvey designates the

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Calender’s poetry a collection of “Aeglogues” authorially intended “to furnish our tongue with this kinde [i.e., literary genre], wherein it faulteth” (¶iiia). Prior to Spenser’s Calender in 1579, series of eclogues in English, whether original or translated, were few and inferior relative to continental accomplishments in this form (compare Hulubei 1939). The Calender’s author, E. K. continues, thus followed “the example of the best and most auncient Poetes, which deuised this kind of wryting,” and a catalogue of foreign authors of eclogues ensues (¶iiia, my emphasis). E. K.’s subsequent “General Argument of the Whole Book” begins by explaining the term “eclogue” (¶iiiia). Then E. K.’s Arguments and glosses repeatedly call the ensuing twelve poems “eclogues.” Although Knight finds that three early modern copies of the Calender were bound with nonliterary texts (2013, 124–​6), this sample is too small and ambiguous to elucidate early modern perceptions of its form: we cannot know the actual causes, accidents, or caprices responsible for the Calender’s inclusion in each assemblage, nor in some cases the original owner’s identity and extent of learning, nor how she or he or subsequent readers of the volume would have formally defined Spenser’s text if asked to do so. But explicit comments by Sidney, William Webbe, George Puttenham, Abraham Fraunce, Michael Drayton, Francis Meres, William Basse, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and John Hughes confirm that reasonably discerning early modern readers understood Spenser’s Calender primarily as an eclogue series.120 When introducing The Faerie Queene, the poet represents his literary development as a Virgilian progress from the “lowly Shephards weeds” and “Oaten reeds” of eclogues to the “trumpets sterne” of epic (I.pr.1).121 As for the Calender’s relation to almanacs in general, the Calendrier des bergers is clearly much more relevant than Elizabethan popular almanacs on account of its correlative title, moralized qualities, somewhat pastoral contextualization, perpetual rather than ephemeral calendar, and standard inclusion of illustrations featuring some pastoralism as well as the Labors of the Months. Yet even the Calendrier’s relation to the Calender is very loose because the poet was primarily writing eclogues shaped by their bucolic kind, its conventions, and its precedents, though he innovatively refreshed it by assimilating other formal, discursive, and imagistic resources. While popular almanacs are not intertextually irrelevant, their pertinence should not be overstated. We could “reread Spenser’s text through the prism of almanac annotations” by early modern readers, as Adam Smyth proposes. Yet his examples of those comments, such as “ ‘June 1st the black cow tooke the Bull,’ ” have little apparent relevance to the Calender (2013, 133; compare Smyth 2008, 205–​6, 217). Although popular almanacs were nearly omnipresent in Elizabethan culture as Smyth observes (2013, 133), their former currency does not

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necessarily guarantee significant influence upon other texts of the time. Various kinds of books were just as influential or more so (such as bibles, psalms, the Book of Common Prayer, Foxe’s Actes and Monuments), or were characteristic of some sectors of society (such as texts known through widespread use in schools), and their degrees and kinds of relevance to a particular author’s project varied according to his or her ideas, beliefs, tastes, extent of education, class, purposes, and choice of discursive form, among other factors. For example, Virgil’s and Mantuan’s eclogues were widely known among Elizabethan males with some significant schooling, because both were common schoolbooks (Piepho 2001, ch. 2; Wallace 2010, ch. 2). Insofar as Spenser’s Calender constitutes serious poetry, and poetry mainly of a particular type, the eclogue series, its assimilations of popular texts were much qualified. In this case, as Knight observes, Spenser “compiled the ‘paterne of a Poete’ out of multiple borrowed text types designed for incongruent audiences” (2013, 132). Yet recent accounts of the Calender’s popular elements tend to overestimate the extent to which they define it, and underestimate its much stronger affinities with learned poetry, eclogues in particular, and literary pastoralism.122 Since the eclogue in sixteenth-​century Europe was a complex literary form with strong humanist affiliations, its educated practitioners primarily addressed cultured literati who understood its consequent potential.123 Hence we should not overemphasize the Calender’s popular aspects, as Knight does, by discounting former distinctions between its assimilated text types and their audiences. “There was no hierarchical distinction in the period between the skills needed to read literature and those needed to read nonliterature,” he claims, “and thus … early book owners would not have experienced the same dissonance in reading The Shepheardes Calender alongside or through an almanac as we do” (2013, 130).124 While leaving theology aside, Sidney ranks poetry so far above all other discursive and epistemological domains—​even philosophy and history—​that for many stated reasons his Defence of Poetry, probably written around 1580, awards the poet “the name above all names of learning” (1973b, 79, see also 74–​94). Moreover, by analyzing poetry’s genres and their distinctive agendas, discussing various poetic devices, and defining poetry as veiled philosophy, he advocates special techniques for reading it (1973b, 78–​9, 91–​2, 97–​9, 103). Spenser himself strove to become known as a poet, and hopefully a great one “hable to keepe wing with the best” as E. K. predicts (¶iiia), not as a writer of simply popular entertainments or ephemeral almanacs for the common people. From various standpoints, not just Sidney’s, worthy poets and their ways of writing appeared very different from these other kinds of writers and their ways. To assess Spenser’s Calender in a historically

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informed manner, we should allow for the former currency and perceived importance of those distinctions. In early modern culture, theories of poetry as a deeply significant means of discourse requiring singular compositional approaches, strategies of reading, and resources of knowledge abounded.125 Whereas poetry’s detractors such as Stephen Gosson found it an especially dangerous sort of writing (1579), its advocates claimed it uniquely benefits individuals and communities, and that each of its genres has a particular cultural importance and hierarchical value within the scope of the art (Puttenham [1589] 2007, 115–​46; Sidney 1973b, 94–​9). For both poetry’s detractors and its advocates, it differed from other kinds of writing and elicited unique responses with distinctive effects (Borris 2017, 2, ch. 1). Poets of the time enveloped their writing with references to Parnassus, the Muses, Pegasus, and Platonizing poetic furor as means of asserting and pursuing the special claims of their art. As poetry was widely considered an extraordinary mode of discourse, so it required its own theories of reception, and these tended to rank readers hierarchically according to their degree of learned perspicacity. Categorizing the Calender’s prospective readers accordingly, E. K. declares that its verse “is round without roughnesse, and learned without hardnes, such indeede as may be perceiued of the leaste, vnderstoode of the moste, but iudged onely of the learned” (¶iib). Though the Calender thus welcomes readers of diverse capacities, those who are “leaste” are relatively deficient, and only “the learned” can apprehend it sufficiently to evaluate it. Whether explicit or implied, such hierarchical categorizations of readers privileging learned insight and depreciating lesser responses typified European poetics around this time. Hence Abraham Fraunce, a protégé of the Sidneys, opposes “the learned unfolder” to “a vulgar conceit” (1592, 3b–​4a), Harington deprecates “weaker capacities” (1591, ¶iiiia–​b), and George Chapman declares that “poesy is the flower of the Sunne, and disdains to open to the eye of a candle” (1611, A3a). Like Milton, Spenser himself often expresses such views, just as, with his Cambridge MA and knowledge of Latin, French, Italian, and Greek, he was far more learned than most Elizabethans.126 In the Calender, Colin Clout invokes the Muses of “Helicon the learned well” and privileges “learned” Tityrus as his creative mentor (12b, 24a). Cuddy laments poetry’s current degradation: whereas debased tastes presume that “Tom Piper makes vs better melodie,” worthy poetry yields “streames of flowing wittes” prized by “the learned troupe” (41b). Deferring to Colin’s greater poetic abilities, Thenot exclaims, “better learne of hem, that learned bee, /​And han be watered at the Muses well” (44b). In a Latin verse epistle published in 1580, Spenser declares that those who merely strive to please men of high

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rank or the public at large “seek the disgraceful esteem of shameful foolishness” (Variorum, 10:10). He writes these themes large in his later Teares of the Muses. Euterpe privileges the “learned layes” of Helicon and deplores the “hellish horror Ignoraunce,” begotten by “Sloth on his owne mother Night,” while Terpsichore disdains piping “to the vulgar sort” and the “liking of the multitude” (lines 259–​76, 319, 326). Thalia condemns those who “with vaine toyes the vulgare entertaine” (line 194). The Calender recontextualizes popular types of discourse within its learned humanist poetic endeavor rather as it incorporates rustic phrases, dialectal expressions, and relatively crude prosodic forms. These are presented as if in quotation marks, with some affectionate irony, within a project that radically differs from them (Borris and Donaldson Clark 2011, 1172, 1176–​81). Apparent rusticity in Renaissance eclogues, a pastoral convention since Theocritus and Virgil, should not be taken at face value, for this form was purposefully faux naïf, committed to veiled learning, allegorism, and complexity, as is Spenser’s polylingual Calender (Section 4). He devised this text to address different kinds of readers differently, yet divulge itself most of all to learned cognoscenti capable of perceiving its manifold references and brilliant new realization of pastoralism’s rich potential.

6 Bibliographical format, paper, typography, and decoration Selection of the quarto “format”127 for the 1579 Calender afforded a happy medium that the next four editions maintained. By the mid-​sixteenth century in English publishing, the quarto and the octavo formats had supplanted folio’s former prevalence. Relative to octavo, quarto’s larger dimensions broadened options for selection of the Calender’s font sizes, and enabled a more substantial, respectfully attractive textual presentation of the poetry, E. K.’s apparatus, and the illustrations. Relative to folio, quarto was smaller, hence provided more intimacy appropriate to poetry, ease of use in diverse situations, and durability for a short text.128 If all other factors in printing were equivalent (such as paper quality), a quarto was more costly to produce than a folio, for “a folio may contain more text per sheet than a quarto,” and paper was a major component of the publisher’s costs (Dane and Gillespie 2010, 25–​45). The Calender only appeared in folio when Matthew Lownes gathered Spenser’s known surviving poetry into the poet’s first collected works published in 1611 and again in 1617. Choice of folio in this case not only enabled an honorifically monumental appearance but produced one conveniently marketable volume, whereas quarto would either

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have been awkwardly fat or required several volumes (Galbraith 2010, 45–​9, 56–​61, 66–​7). Since stocking paper inflated a stationer’s overhead, the 1579 Calender’s was probably bought for its publication, though Singleton may have added remnants from a previous project.129 Judging by the Morgan Library’s trimmed copy, this edition used sheets approximately thirty-​nine by twenty-​ seven centimeters, of “a staple printing grade prevalent in London,” with watermarks of types quite common at the time.130 The quarto format relegates them to the gutter where the stitching of the folded sheets and the binding obscure them. Among the seven currently known extant copies (Section 11), the Morgan’s probably best discloses its watermarks because it is disbound, though it is still stitched. The clearest is a hand or glove with central fleur-​ de-​lis, the fingers surmounted by a star or flower, and an indistinct design, probably initials, at the wrist or cuff (Figure 11).131 The French supplied most of the Elizabethan book trade’s paper, and various paper mills in southwestern France used this sort of mark (Briquet 1968, 2:549, 555–​6, 571). Other watermarks appear barely legible. One seems to be a hand or glove surmounted by a crown, and another an apparently quartered circle or sphere with some protruding shape at the top, perhaps a fleur-​de-​lis, and a different one at the bottom (Figures 12 and 13).132 Diverse watermarks appear in editions of this period mainly because the wholesaling process often mixed paper compatible in size and quality, sourced from different small mills. These three marks sample those of the 1579 Calender’s total print run, and the paper of the extant copies has yet to be fully investigated. The printer’s stock of type largely determined the options for a book’s typographical selections, and in London in the late 1570s, black letter, roman, and italic typefaces were all readily available in a range of sizes, for each of these styles then had standard uses and associations. The 1579 Calender uses all three, and Steven K. Galbraith considers Spenser “a strong candidate” for directing this choice of type and its deployment (2008, 31–​2). The poet’s manuscript for Singleton could have provided such instructions verbally or by using different styles of handwritten script to indicate typographical variations. The 1579 Calender’s particular fonts are 83 textura, the version of black letter long preferred in English printing, for its twelve bucolic poems; 142 italic for the author’s verse epistle “To His Booke,” the running heads, each eclogue’s dual titles (its month and Latin number), and its mottos; 80 italic for each eclogue’s argument, most of the proper names within the bucolic verse, August’s marginal designations of the speakers of its amoebaic singing contest, and the author’s final envoy; and 68 brevier roman mainly for E. K.’s apparatus (his “Epistle to Harvey,” General Argument, and glosses), yet usually also for the names that precede passages of poetry to identify each speaker (Isaac 1936, 29).

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Figures 11, 12, 13  Watermarks, beta-​radiograph. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 51/50 (figure 11), 21/24 (figure 12), 20/17 (figure 13).

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These typographical differentiations impart to the book’s varied verbal components a clear visual order that distinguishes them from each other, defines their respective roles, and ranks them in relative significance. Allocating the sizeable 142 italic font to the author’s initial poem “To His Booke” provides emphasis apt for its partly dedicatory importance while also denoting “Immerito’s” voice speaking here in propria persona rather than through characters.133 Reserving 83 textura for the bucolic poetry (whereas E. K.’s “Epistle,” General Argument, and glosses appear in 68 roman) affirms its unique textual priority within the book, and subordinates the apparatus through differences of both typeface and font size. Further voices are distinguished: the commentator’s, and those of the characters as speakers ventriloquized by the author. For the names stated within each eclogue simply to identify the speaker of an ensuing passage, which thus remain tacitly outside the verse, the typeface is always roman to differentiate them clearly from the actual poetry. In a few eclogues these names are wholly capitalized, but otherwise only their initial letter has a capital. Similarly, through presentation in 80 italic, the arguments for the eclogues gain a unique textual presence relative to directly adjacent material, so that they announce the beginning of each eclogue with a typographically expressed flourish of anticipation. In late sixteenth-​century England, black letter, roman, and italic each had particular cultural associations complementing their roles in the Calender. Usage of this combination, as well as allocation of black letter to the main text, and these others to the verbal paratexts, was quite standard for Singleton and other English stationers at this time.134 Nevertheless, as recontextualized within the Calender, these typefaces and their interplay gained further resonance due to its unique literary character and agenda. In 1579, the choice of black-​letter textura for printing Spenser’s poetry was certainly not archaizing or deliberately old-​fashioned, though we are sometimes told the contrary, because this typeface dominated English-​ language printing in England until around 1590. Although various kinds of black letter were still current among the Dutch and Germans, the French and Italians had long used roman and italic for vernacular print, so that textura in England implied “Englishness” by contrast, and even came to be called “English letter” (Galbraith 2008, 14–​22). At least until the 1590s, the Calender’s usage of textura would have seemed currently and affirmatively English.135 Hence it was especially apt for a book that claims national importance for the accomplished poet in general, for poetry, for its own author, and for itself. According to October’s Argument, Spenser’s lost treatise on poetics was called The English Poete (40a, misnumbered 39). After 1590, as roman became predominant in England, a trend that the 1590 Faerie Queene helped launch (M. Bland 1998, 107–​11), black letter

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began acquiring associations with nostalgic archaism, rusticity, and popular “low” fiction that coincidentally complemented some aspects of the Calender’s pastoralism. This typeface became apt too for the Calender’s religious content, for black letter retained English currency until around 1640 in some specialized applications including vernacular bibles, devotional works and catechisms, and folio editions of the Book of Common Prayer.136 Roman and italic, on the other hand, predominantly suggested cultured humanist learning in sixteenth-​century England, just as their names respectively evoke Latinate antiquity and Italy. Until the 1590s, English printers mainly used roman for languages other than English, chiefly Latin. “Any serious English intellectual of the late sixteenth century had a library that largely consisted of Continental books” (M. Bland 1998, 101), and these had long used roman for major editions of ancient authors and for Italian and French vernacular writings, yet also for English in the Geneva Bible (Pettegree 2010, 124–​6, 324–​6). Both roman and italic had humanistic scholarly origins, Harry Carter explains, and the latter, initially introduced around 1500 by the great Italian scholar-​publisher Aldo Manuzio to foster an impression of handwritten intimacy in small books, “became a symbol of learned humanism” (1969, 75, 117). Yet by around 1550, italic had become secondary to roman, as a decorative option useful for expressing structural and other distinctions between different components of a text (Carter 1969, 125–​6). In 1579 and for some time thereafter, the particular combination of black letter, roman, and italic in the Calender’s first edition would have thus appeared to present new committedly English poetry fully informed by up-​to-​date cosmopolitan humanist learning and print esthetics as adapted in London, and deserving such responses. The Calender’s four subsequent Elizabethan editions (1581, 1586, 1591, 1597) all used these three typefaces in much the same ways. The 1611 and 1617 editions recast the poetry in roman. By then, black letter had lost the associations that made it originally appropriate for Spenser’s verse, purposes, and audience. Among all these editions, the 1579 version uniquely uses a Greek typeface to print Greek, and as Galbraith argues, this exception implies that “someone other than Singleton” supervised the first edition’s design, probably Spenser. “Singleton’s … own print history reveals no use of Greek type” previously; to represent Greek, he had instead substituted Roman letters, as did the printers of the Calender’s next six editions (2008, 31–​2). Actual Greek appears in the first edition almost certainly because someone required Singleton to use it, and he was apparently answerable to a rather demanding overseer—​most likely the author (Section 3)—​who cared deeply even about such details and thus provided quite engaged general oversight. The Calender’s four uses of Greek appear briefly in the General

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Argument, Aprill’s gloss, Maye’s mottos, and October’s Argument. Since Singleton had never before printed any surviving book using this language, he probably had no Greek type, and so he would have had to borrow it for the Calender; or someone, possibly the author, arranged its provision (Galbraith 2008,  31). Moreover, typesetting Greek was difficult without some knowledge of the language or at least prior experience in printing it. The Calender’s next six editions do not attempt to do so. Hence someone intervened to provide guidance: presumably Spenser, who was currently in London, had studied Greek, and was “perfect” in it according to Sidney’s learned friend Lodowick Bryskett (1606, 25).137 The rusticized and archaistic idiosyncrasies of the Calender’s diction and spelling likewise imply authorial oversight of the book’s production (Galbraith 2008, 29–​30). The decoration of the 1579 edition is relatively restrained aside from its twelve pictures. Since they always indicate the commencement of a new eclogue, they function partly as sectional markers within the book. They are predictably woodcuts rather than metal engravings or etchings because these entailed further costs and technical challenges for printers and thus remained rare for English book illustration well beyond 1590.138 Hence in England the Calender’s original means of illustration was not in itself archaic or retrospective. Sections 8–​10 address the origins and significance of the pictorial program. Likewise printed from woodblocks, the arabesques and grotesque ornamenting the 1579 Calender presumably derive from Singleton’s own stock. Fashionable in European publishing since the 1550s, arabesque designs commonly decorated English books of the 1570s and 1580s (M. Bland 1998, 95; Meynell and Morrison 1923, 1–​46). The Calender’s title page focuses on a small such rectangle. As the typical functions of arabesques included marking sectional divisions within a book, so the Calender repeatedly uses them as such dividers, most often to indicate each eclogue’s conclusion and the beginning of its subsequent gloss. Each appears as a band composed of one of three different modular patterns or fleurons. To fill substantial space that would otherwise be blank, an arabesque square concludes March (11a). Appealing to the Renaissance vogue for fanciful grotesqueries as in Roman antiquity, a woman’s head between two cornucopias provides a tailpiece ending June and August (25b, 34b). In the Folger Library’s copy reproduced here, this same head appears above the colophon at the end (52b), whereas the corresponding corrected forme used for the other five known copies replaced that ornament with Singleton’s device (Johnson 1933, 3), which he typically included with his colophon at this time (Figure 1). Large decorative initials appear within the book to help demarcate structure or shifts in voice or special emphasis, but not consistently. Sixteenth-​ century books sometimes evince such variations.139 E. K.’s “Epistle to

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Harvey” and General Argument as well as Januarye’s poem all begin with an elaborate initial. A clearly consistent standard would have required all the following monthly poems either to begin always with an ornamental capital or always without, so that only the first would have that privilege. Instead, most have none, except June’s, September’s, and December’s. The latter’s seems apt for its conclusive importance and for cyclical complementarity with Januarye. Yet the commencements of June’s and September’s poems do not clearly appear to warrant special emphasis. The other eight monthly poems begin more modestly with a capital in italic (Februarye’s) or roman (the remainder). The 1579 Calender also allows ornamented initials within a month’s poem after its first letter, but assigns these only to Aprill and August: once in the former, to begin Colin’s song of Elisa with an emphatic flourish appropriate for its indirect praise of Elizabeth; and twice in the latter, to clarify this eclogue’s complex structure by thus demarcating the start of Perigot and Willye’s singing contest and also that of Colin’s lament sung by Cuddie. Such a distinctive beginning could also have been given to Thenot’s fable within Februarie, Thomalin’s tale within March, Piers’s fable within Maye, and Colin’s pastoral elegy for Dido within November, but was not. Whereas these fables and Thomalin’s tale may aptly lack such honorific treatment due to their relative rustic simplicity, the higher-​styled elegy vatically envisioning Dido’s apotheosis would appear to merit it like Colin’s elaborate song of Elisa in Aprill. However, though also addressing Elizabeth obliquely, November’s elegy confronts her prospective mortality: a very sensitive topic, especially in print. A statute of 1580–​81 made prediction of her death a serious offense.140 If a decorative initial had begun both these inset songs, they would have been more obviously correlative, and both the elegy and Dido’s relation to Elizabeth would have been textually accentuated. Hence the elegy’s lack of this typographical feature seems strategically discreet, and may have been an authorial choice. The positioning of the poetry’s ornamented initials also appears idiosyncratic. “Normally, a decorative initial is set so that the text surrounds it on two or three sides,” Luborsky observes, and it aligns “with the left-​hand margin.” The settings of E. K.’s Letter to Harvey and General Argument observe these conventions. Yet although the decorated initial commencing Januarye’s poem aligns with the previous Argument’s left-​hand margin, “the verse into which it is set does not extend beneath the initial so as to surround it,” yet would normally do so. Moreover, all the subsequent decorative initials in the poetry are unaligned with “any left-​hand margin,” and “all except one are set partially into the text on the right; in ‘December’ the six-​line initial is set completely to the left of the poem, but to the right of the preceding argument.” Singleton’s previous books evince “no precedent” for

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these irregularities, and the subsequent sixteenth-​century editions eliminate them (Luborsky 1980, 53). Since Luborsky assumes “it is much harder to compose an irregular than a regular galley,” and “simpler to insert the initial so that it is aligned with the rest of the matter in the galley,” she argues that the “unconventional setting” of the 1579 Calender’s ornamented initials was “deliberate,” subsidized, and “commissioned,” presumably by the author (1980, 29, 54, 67n52).141 The purposes, she proposes, were to evoke “either the early printed book or the manuscript tradition on which it was modeled” (because they both evinced such irregular positioning of decorative initials), and thus “give the reader a sense of continuity with the way in which the written word was transmitted in the past” through the Calender’s various authorities such as “Vergil, Langland, Lydgate, and Chaucer,” and earlier “calendars, including the book of hours” (1980, 54). The 1579 Calender’s typography for the poetry, we may add, thus manifests quirky interventions of artisanal hand labor befitting the apparent freedom and spontaneity of pastoralism as it was enjoyed in early modernity.

7 Textual components, their sequence, and the norms of bucolic print The material characteristics and arrangement of the 1579 Calender’s title page, introductory parts, and each eclogue, together with its illustration and apparatus, are significant. Despite the recent vogue for discounting the Calender’s important affinities with eclogues (Section 5), the first edition clearly follows or evokes the conventions for printing them, in quite granular detail. It thus implicitly announced to all who had any experience in reading printed eclogues that the Calender is primarily such a text, to be considered accordingly, and contextualizes even the poet’s modifications of this literary form according to the precedents for presenting eclogues. Though Singleton’s title pages in the 1570s often combined black letter, italic, and roman typefaces as the 1579 Calender’s does, this book’s complex allusiveness makes their conjoint scope of associations—​English, humanist, continentally cosmopolitan, and antique—​uniquely resonant (Section 6). Yet its title page is “unusually plain” for England at this time, for whereas a large printer’s device or other substantial ornament as well as or in lieu of a border were normative there, and quite common in Singleton’s practice, the 1579 Calender’s lacks a border and uses only a small arabesque (Luborsky 1980, 30, 32–​3).142 Hence this title page’s restraint may be meaningfully Spenserian, particularly because those of the Calender’s subsequent sixteenth-​century

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editions much more elaborately feature “ornamental or figurative borders” or “a large printer’s device” (Luborsky 1980, 33). Relative to English norms, the first edition’s title page evinces “modesty,” Luborsky observes (1980, 33), as well as, I would add, sobriety. Such qualities befit pastoralism’s pose of humble simplicity, the author’s persona “Immerito,” and his professedly earnest instructive intent, allegorically expressed, “To teach the ruder shepheard how to feede his sheepe, /​And from the falsers fraud his folded flocke to keepe” (52a). Singleton’s title page of the 1570s most like the 1579 Calender’s introduces a sober religious book: Martin Luther’s Exposition upon the Cxxx. Psalme (Figure 14).143 Yet the Calender’s seems yet more

Figure 14  Title page. Martin Luther, An Exposition upon the Cxxx. Psalme, trans. Thomas Potter (London: Hugh Singleton, 1577).

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restrained, balanced, and quietly elegant. The title page Singleton printed for Stubbs’s Gaping Gulf evinces a comparably poised simplicity of design (Figure 2). A book of poetry that had been recently printed in London with a simple title page, without any borders, devices, or ornaments, is Richard Willes’s Poematum liber, published by Richard Tottel in 1573. Luborsky nonetheless proposes French precedents for the 1579 Calender’s title page because “many French title pages seem quite plain” relative to English ones of this time, and she considers “certain editions of Marot and Ronsard” most relevant: Ronsard’s Amours of 1553, and especially Marot’s Oeuvres of 1549 (1980, 33, 38). Neither of their title pages has borders. However, Ronsard’s uses somewhat inconsistently centered roman and italic fonts in several sizes, as well as Greek, with a focal symbolic printer’s device involving a Latin motto. Marot’s features an elaborate symbolic device with Latin motto; the centered lettering solely uses roman capitals in various sizes. However, even this is not much like the Calender’s aside from the lack of borders and the consistently centered lettering. The title page of Mantuan’s four-​volume Antwerp Opera of 1576 has a small focal arabesque square like the Calender’s as well as centered lettering and no border, but uses pretentious roman capitals. If the Calender’s evoked continental publishing practices, it would have helped assert the book’s cosmopolitan comparability to literary accomplishments across the English Channel. Luborsky attributes more French precedence to the order of the subsequent authorial address “To His Booke” and E. K.’s “Epistle to Harvey.” Whereas the dedication normally followed the title page in English books, she argues, “the author’s poem to his book” appears “on the verso of the title page” in certain editions of Marot and Du Bellay (1980, 32–​3, 38). Yet Spenser’s has a double function, she adds, for it also constitutes a dedication “To him that is the president /​Of noblesse and of cheualree,” supplementing the title page’s “To … Philip Sidney.” This second dedication tacitly addresses Leicester (Section 2). Insofar as it is a dedication, Luborsky observes, its position befits the norms of Elizabethan print (1980, 38–​9). Turning to E. K.’s subsequent “Epistle to Harvey,” she shows that it appears “in the position of the conventional explicatory letter to the reader and takes on the tasks of such a letter, praise of the author and his work,” while serving “also as a critical and editorial preface” and as a dedication to Harvey requesting that he undertake “the patronage of the new Poete.” Luborsky found “no precedent” for this epistle’s dedicatory aspect (1980, 40). However, the commentator’s appeal for Harvey’s scholarly sponsorship of the Calender as “both Orator and Poete” with “rare gifts of learning” befits Spenser’s endeavor to establish his book’s literary and learned significance, promotes approval of its linguistic and formal creativity, and

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complements its qualities as a bucolic roman-​à-​clef reflecting on the poet’s own social circle, which includes Harvey as Hobbinol (¶iia, ¶iiib). Before the eclogues themselves, the commentator’s “Generall Argument” quite predictably appears as an overview in effect, since each eclogue has its own Argument. Since “many contemporary Vergils” provided such a headnote, they may have been the Calender’s model in this respect (Luborsky 1980, 41). Yet in the later sixteenth century, this organizational and explanatory feature appeared in many types of books that included commentaries. Each of the twelve subsequent eclogues appears as a composite unit typically composed of eight parts in this sequence: (1) the monthly title, (2) the corresponding woodcut, (3) the ancillary Latin title identifying the poem as an eclogue and its number in the total sequence, (4) the Argument, (5) the brief statement of the eclogue’s speakers, (6) the bucolic poem, (7) its concluding “embleme” or motto, and (8) the commentator’s “glosse.” Most of these components and their order within this total structure accord with, recall, or pointedly modify options quite standard in early modern Europe for presenting the more substantial or prestigious editions of eclogue series in print, and thus implicitly indicate the Calender’s primary affiliation with this literary form. Spenser’s titling of his eclogues invokes and follows such conventions at least as much as it modifies them. Each eclogue in a series often bore dual verbal titles, and so do the Calender’s.144 One of these titles numerically designated the eclogue’s position in the series. Often the other title was the name of the eclogue’s central character or those of its main characters (Figures 8, 9, 15, 16, 17). Yet as in the case of Virgil’s Pharmaceutria, Petrarch’s Querulus, or Mantuan’s Religio, verbal titles other than proper names or numerical designations were already familiar in eclogue series. Though innovatively naming each eclogue for its corresponding month, Spenser’s titling nonetheless accords with the genre’s conventions in that he provides for each eclogue both a title stating its number in the total sequence and another stating its particular appellation. His eclogue titles announce and effect his bold calendrical restructuring of this pastoral form, while also recalling its previous titular norms in counterpoint. Though illustrations were optional for printed eclogues, there were many precedents, especially for Virgil’s (Figures 6, 8, 9).145 The title of Spenser’s series, The Shepheardes Calender, would have led readers to expect pictures by referencing the verbal-​visual Calendrier des bergers, and also to anticipate their pastorally calendrical development. The Calender’s original illustrations require their own discussion in Sections 8–​10. Each eclogue’s numerical title beneath its picture reflects the genre’s convention mentioned above. The Calender less predictably uses Latin for this title even though the poetry is vernacular, and in doing so emphasizes its

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Figure 15  “Ecloga septima,” or “Meliboeus,” beginning. Virgil, Bucolica, in his Opera (London: Henry Bynneman, 1570), 24–​5.

learned literary pedigree and perhaps its Virgilian inheritance, since Virgil’s Latin eclogues were paradigmatic for this form. Barnaby Googe’s eight English eclogues published in 1563 each similarly appear with an italicized and centered Latin numerical title (such as “Egloga prima”), though without another verbal title. The Calender’s titular ascription of the term “Aegloga” to each eclogue asserts the primary generic affiliation of the ensuing poem, notwithstanding its atypical monthly development. The Argument appears after the Latin numerical title of each eclogue and before the brief naming of its speaker or speakers. Luborsky considers this aspect of the Calender “puzzling” because she supposes that “there are surprisingly few models for an argument at the beginning of an individual eclogue.” Whereas “the argument, not necessarily so labeled, is a conventional element in many contemporary fable books” and in “many prose genres … at the beginning of a discrete unit,” she claims, only “a few … English” and “Continental Vergils” and Mantuan’s “eclogues translated by Turberville” situate an argument before an eclogue (1980, 43–​4). But for publishing an extensive series of eclogues equipped with a commentary, provision of an argument before each one, whether in prose or verse, was

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Figure 16  “Ecloga terza,” or “Palemone,” beginning. Virgil, Bucoliche, in L’Opere di Vergilio, trans. Andrea Lori et al. (Florence: Giunti, 1556), 13b.

a well-​established option. In the 1570s, Henry Bynneman’s three editions of Virgil’s Opera presented each of his eclogues with a preliminary prose argument (Figure 15), as did Abraham Fleming’s English version of them published in 1575. John Kingston’s and Thomas Marsh’s five editions of Mantuan’s eclogues between 1569 and 1577 provided verse arguments, as did Bynneman’s two editions of George Turberville’s translation in 1567 and 1572. Numerous continental editions of Virgil’s Eclogues had also furnished arguments (Figures 8, 9, 16, 17), as did Henri Estienne’s printing of Theocritus’s Idylls in 1579. Spenser would have seen many exemplars

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Figure 17  “Ecloga prima,” or “Tityrus,” beginning. Virgil, Bucolica, in his Opera (Venice: Bibliotheca Aldina, 1570), 5a.

by other poets, for the eclogue series was a burgeoning continental locus of creativity (compare Hulubei 1939). Each of Rémy Belleau’s Eclogues sacrées, for example, has its own prose argument (1578). Various editions of Sannazaro’s prosimetric Arcadia include an argument before each main section, though before its prose component rather than the following verse eclogue (Figures 6, 7). For significant longer poems in general, publication with arguments in verse or prose had become quite common. Following the Argument, the summary identification of the eclogue’s speaker or speakers appears, centered and in roman to distinguish it from the following verse, and sometimes wholly capitalized, sometimes not.

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The exception is December, where no name appears in this position and Colin’s should. Though possibly inadvertent, this omission befits his nullified state that he proceeds to lament (he likewise aptly lacks a concluding emblem, since this eclogue concludes with his adieus and hence his departure). Early modern European editions of eclogues often provided such an initial statement of speakers before each eclogue, though the selection of typography and language varied (Figures 8, 9, 15, 16, 17). This declaration became most dispensable when every eclogue in a series had a verbal title consisting of all or most of its speakers’ names (Figure 6). Each of Googe’s eclogues published in 1563 has only a title stating its number in the series, then provides the statement of speakers in much smaller centered italics, so that this announcement does not appear to be another title (such as “Daphnes. Amintas”). It furnishes helpful preliminary information. In George Turberville’s translation of Mantuan’s eclogues published in 1572, each eclogue has a dual title (one stating its number and the other its name), and then, after the rather redundant centered label “The speakers names,” the statement of speakers appears in centered italics. Since each of these eclogues is usually named for its central character, and the eighth is named Religio, the statement of speakers is helpful and generically to be expected. Just as an eclogue was not necessarily named for any of its characters, so the Calender’s are not, and for each a list of its speakers precedes the verse. Each of Virgil’s eclogues in Bynneman’s two editions of this poet’s Opera has a similar set of preliminary features: two titles, one stating its name and the other its number in the series, a prose “Argumentum,” and a statement of speakers (Figure 15). Many other editions of eclogues are presentationally similar in these respects to the Calender’s first. The ensuing layout of each of its verse eclogues is quite standard for early modern published eclogues. The names of speakers stated just before the verse implicitly inform readers that the forthcoming poem is a dialogic interchange between those particular characters, or if only one speaker is named there, as for Januarye, a monologue. Hence the poem’s basic structure is clear from the outset. Thereafter each speaker’s name reappears when he contributes to the dialogue, as was common for this form. Since eclogues were dialogically quasi-​dramatic, they tended to avoid narrative poetry’s usual technique, whereby the speaker of a particular passage is identified within it (as in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, for instance), and instead usually identified the speaker outside the poetry, so that the name may be perceived and yet remain tacit. There were various ways of positioning the names to implement this technique typical for eclogues, and the Calender’s almost invariable procedure for doing so was a frequent option. For example, in a 1560 printing of Ronsard’s “Eclogue à Du Thier,” each speaker’s name appears centered above the passage he speaks, in a font different from the

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poetry’s (12b–​17b; likewise Baïf 1572, 5b–​12b). In the Calender, such a name typically appears centered or clearly indented, and in roman, to distinguish this tacit designation readily from the verse printed in black letter. When the verse incorporates a proper name fully integral to the poetry as read, it usually appears in italic. In November, “Dido” and “Lobbin” in such contexts are sometimes italicized, sometimes not (44b, 46b). For Perigot’s and Willye’s amoebaic singing contest in August, wherein they exchange single lines, the Calender aptly uses a different option for identifying speakers in eclogues, whereby their names appear italicized in the left margin and abbreviated after the first iteration there. In this case, the Calender’s usual method would have disrupted the flow of their roundelay as an integral dialogic poem notionally created ex tempore. Barnaby Googe’s printed eclogues, for example, had identified speakers in the manner of August’s roundelay (1563, Aib). Spenser’s eclogues feature diverse verse forms, stanzaic structures, and commensurate layouts in accord with this genre’s emphasis at the time upon poetic experimentation, versatility, and virtuoso performance. Sidney’s fine eclogues for his Old Arcadia pursue these objectives similarly. The singing contests conventional for eclogues epitomized this tendency of the form, as did Virgil’s self-​reflexive Theocritan engagements in his Eclogues. Since Googe’s and Turberville’s earlier English eclogues relentlessly use poulter’s measure, they were printed with a standardized verse layout impossible for the Calender, where Spenser inventively varies the prosody and verse forms of his eclogues. Here again the poet’s manuscript would have been important for guiding the layout of his eclogues in Singleton’s shop. Spenser’s need to provide such written guidance for at least this reason indicates that the manuscript he gave to Singleton was conceived for purposes of directing presentation, and probably thus addressed a variety of material concerns, like Sir John Harington’s surviving manuscript of his translated Orlando furioso that he gave his printer to guide production (Section 3). Each Spenserian eclogue concludes with one or more verbal “emblems” providing a motto for each main character represented therein, except December, where none follows the heading “Colins Embleme.”146 Though this feature of Spenser’s eclogues seems pastorally unprecedented, many readers would have encountered comparable mottoes in emblem books, where each emblem as such is normally a tripartite interactive sequence of motto, picture, and epigram, in that order. Spenser’s juxtaposition of a picture, pastoral poem, and motto would have recalled emblematic form (Section 4). His inclusion of the mottos further reflects the early modern vogues for sententiae and digests of them, and for the device (Kennedy 1990, 651–​2).

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Since Section 4 addressed much of the presentation of E. K.’s gloss (in relation to Sannazaro’s Arcadia in Varisco’s 1571 edition), we may now consider its discrepancies as printed, and its general position. The commentary evinces some disconnections with Spenser’s printed text that indicate the poetry was likely somewhat revised after E. K. completed his glosses. August’s last fifty-​seven lines have none, as if E. K. commented on an earlier draft that Spenser lengthened later (Section 3). September lacks a word that E. K. annotates—​ “soote”—​ and so Jack Stillinger conjectures that Spenser subsequently removed “overbold statements” in this moral-​satirical eclogue (1961, 204–​5). And in Stillinger’s view the “patterned disorder of the glosses” for Aprill’s song of Elisa, whereby those for “lines 92, 99, 73, 82, 86 (in that order) are printed between the glosses to lines 136 and 145,” suggests “that these stanzas were originally grouped in the order in which E. K. treats them” (1961, 205). By situating E. K.’s commentary after each eclogue’s “emblem” rather than on the same page as the verses it discusses, or beneath or around them, or in marginalia, the 1579 Calender’s design ensures that the poetry appears in space reserved exclusively for it, on pages otherwise blank. This means of presenting Spenser’s verse, enhanced by the exclusive allocation of a particular font to it (83 textura), implies that his writing is very much to be savored and pondered in its own right, as the provision of a commentary further suggests. Otherwise, the mise-​en-​page would have been congested, and the 1579 edition thus uses the means of presenting commentary most appropriate in the later sixteenth century for the publication of an annotated significant poem as an attractive and readable book. Since “marginalia” were “a standard feature in contemporary books” and “many of Singleton’s books are printed with marginalia,” Luborsky concludes that each eclogue’s gloss follows it because Spenser himself chose this option, and that this feature of the 1579 Calender further demonstrates his strategic direction of his book’s general design. Around this time, she points out, he was also devising a similar mode of presentation for his unpublished and lost Dreames, for his published letter of April 1580 shows that “he intended to be deliberate with the placement of the gloss” there too (Luborsky 1980, 44, 50; see Appendix 1). Though Luborsky nonetheless considers the Calender’s positioning of the glosses after each bucolic poem unusual and hence “puzzling,” learned editions of both esteemed poetry and prose often used such a procedure. Expecting marginal glosses in the Calender, she found “only a few models for a subsequent gloss,” for which she supposes the only reasonably close parallels are the “1553 Paris edition of Ronsard” with Muret’s commentary, and annotated emblem books (1980, 44, 50). But there were innumerable other precedents. Besides including some marginal glosses, the first edition

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of Willes’s Poematum liber, published in 1573, provides a commentary gathered at the end. In Denys Lambin’s 1561 edition of Horace, each satire, ode, or epistle has its own following commentary; in various sixteenth-​ century editions of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, so does each canto; in those of Sannazaro’s Arcadia that included the commentaries of Porcacchi or Sansovino, so does each main section (composed of a short prose narrative with a concluding eclogue; Figure 10); and in Gilbert Cousin and János Zsámboky’s four-​volume Lucian of 1563, so do each of Lucian’s prose treatises, dialogues, or lampoons. Spenser wagered Harvey for this edition in 1578 (Borris 2020b, 363–​4). Some such books have a basic repeated organizational unit much like the Calender’s, so that each of the author’s poems, cantos, treatises, or tales has an initial verse or prose argument and finally its own commentary, as in those editions of Ariosto, Sannazaro, and Lucian. By 1579, Spenser would have known Ariosto and his commentators well (Variorum, 10:17, 471–​2). This means of presenting commentary had been developed in the mid-​ sixteenth century to supplant the procedure inherited from medieval manuscript tradition whereby commentary was “commonly arranged around the text in a sort of frame” (Kenney 1974, 63–​4). The mass of comment thereby overwhelmed the literary text (Figure 9), and though such practices persisted, they would have seemed increasingly outmoded (Jones 2004, 101–​3). Books using the Calender’s method of textually situating commentary addressed serious up-​to-​date readers of humanistic tastes or those who wished to cultivate such an image. The 1579 Calender implicitly announces that it is this kind of book, presenting literary art of high achievement for discerning readers—​an instant classic. Somewhat atoning for these claims, pretentious for a writer’s first significant publication, Spenser assumed the persona of Immerito, which suggests humility in one sense (Section 1), and represented his other alter ego Colin similarly in June: “Of Muses Hobbinol, I conne no skill” (23b–​24a). Yet the Calender appears to have justified its puffery, which it expresses also through the other shepherds’ praise of Colin (12a, 23b, 33b–​34a, 41b, 44b–​45a, 47a). “I neuer hearde as yet any that hath reade it” who “hath not with much admiration commended it,” William Webbe remarked in 1586, and indeed its sole characteristic that some found questionable, he says, is its positive portrayal of male same-​sex desire (Critical Heritage, 56–​8). For various reasons including the variety of its verse forms, its unusual poetic diction, its usage of Greek, and its knowledgeable engagements with the norms of bucolic print, the poet’s direction of the first edition’s layout would have been needful. Singleton’s prior publication history was largely irrelevant (Sections 2 and 3).

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8 The genesis of the illustrations The Calender was originally published as a verbal-​visual text, to be understood accordingly, and remained so throughout its first seven editions, from 1579 to 1617. Although no extant evidence certainly shows who decided to illustrate the Calender, nor who designed its pictures, both the instigator and the primary designer were probably Spenser himself, and so analyses of this text should proceed accordingly. Singleton had no such illustrative interests or market and apparently lacked the resources to undertake such ventures on his own initiative (Section 2). To appreciate the Calender’s significance as it circulated in its first seven editions, we must seriously consider its original pictures as well as its poetry. Moreover, if Spenser mandated and directed their program, as he very likely did, they remain as indispensable as his poetry for understanding this text at any time. Since almost all previous so-​ called reproductions of the Calender’s woodcuts obscure much detail clear in the first seven editions, which all used the same blocks produced for the first (Section 1), the pictures should be studied either in a well-​printed early copy or via high-​resolution photographic surrogates as in this present edition. The 1579 Calender’s publication was an exceptional literary event partly on account of the newly designed series of illustrations, each one uniquely apt to its eclogue. In sixteenth-​century England, first editions of poetry were very seldom illustrated at all, let alone with a set of twelve newly designed pictures unrepeated within the book (Luborsky 1981, 16). Aside from John Heywood’s Spider and the Flie (1556) and Jan van der Noot’s Theatre for Worldlings (1569), for which Spenser translated the poetry, English print had not endeavored to combine poetry and pictures programmatically. Yet in Heywood’s Spider, “the illustrative relation is vitiated by the number of [pictorial] repetitions” (Luborsky and Ingram 1998, 1:439), and in the Theatre, many pictures are not original (Bath 1988). Though the Calender’s verbal-​visual development grew in part from Spenser’s experience with the Theatre in his nonage, the latter’s mode of illustration is relatively straightforward. Not until 1586 was an English illustrated emblem book printed—​ Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes—​and it was published abroad, in Leiden. Moreover, Spenser scholarship has as yet not identified a programmatically illustrated first edition of a set of original eclogues published on the Continent before the Calender. In Britain, initial or early editions of Alexander Barclay’s eclogues had been published around 1520 with a few apparently original pictures that were repeated therein, and in 1563, an old block was reused to decorate Barnaby Googe’s first eclogue, though modified to state the names of its speakers.147 But neither of these projects

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provided any extensive original illustrative program. A sequence of eclogues typically acquired illustration if it became a dependable seller with many editions, partly to honor it as a perceived classic, and partly to enhance the new edition’s marketability. Even in these cases, quite often the pictures were either recycled from previous projects of the same publisher or others, using the same blocks; or merely printed from blocks cut according to pictures already published elsewhere. And often only three or four pictures were rotated to illustrate all the eclogues. It currently seems that no previous author had reconceptualized the eclogue as a verbal-​visual form by creating a series of eclogues to be first published with a uniquely complementary set of pictures, one for each. This plan was very likely Spenser’s, not only in fundamental concept but also largely in design. Contemporary precedents indicate that he originated and guided the creation of the Calender’s pictures. For wittily learned verbal-​visual compositions in general, such as imprese or devices, emblems, and emblematic title pages for books, the visual component’s program was typically not the province of its craftsman, but rather that of the impresa’s noble sponsor or his scholarly advisor, the emblematist, or the book’s author (Corbett and Lightbown 1979, 9–​47). The directives could be oral, written, sketched, or combine these options. An artisan then sought to realize the conception visually, and could submit sketches for approval or modification. And in those “rare cases when new woodcuts or engravings had been specially cut for a book”—​as for the 1579 Calender—​“there is evidence that the author could take a direct and controlling interest” (R. Williams 2010, 51). Jan van der Noot’s Theatre for Worldlings, an illustrated apocalyptic collection of poems with prose commentary, is particularly relevant because of Spenser’s involvement with the English edition of 1569 (Hadfield 2012, 38–​47). There, and also in the original edition of 1568 published in Dutch by John Day in London, Van der Noot declares that to sette the vanitie and inconstancie of worldly and tranistorie thyngs, the livelier before your eyes, I haue broughte in here twentie sightes or vysions [i.e., as poems], and caused them to be graven [i.e., as pictures], to the ende al men may see that with their eyes, which I go aboute to expresse by writing, to the delight and lesure of the eye and eares, according vnto the saying of Horace. Omne tulit punctum, qui miscuit vtile dulci. (1569, 12b–​13a; 1568, Dvib–​Dviiiia)148

Van der Noot advocates a verbal-​visual poetics and claims responsibility for commissioning this program of pictures accordingly.149 As Elizabeth Evenden concludes, it is thus “unlikely that Day had any hand in their design whatsoever” (2008, 97). Whereas Day was Elizabethan England’s leading

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publisher of illustrated books, Singleton had long avoided them prior to 1579, and was not in any position to launch the Calender as such on his own initiative (Section 2). Whereas Day’s Dutch and French editions of Van der Noot’s text feature copperplate engravings, Henry Bynneman’s English edition of 1569 has woodcuts following the same authorially approved program. The Elizabethan English writers George Gascoigne, Thomas Palmer, John Blagrave, John Foxe, Conrad Heresbach, John Shute, William Cunningham, Jerome Nadal, and Geoffrey Whitney all designed some illustrations for their texts either verbally or with drawings, and Sir John Harington at least “gave direction” for the pictorial program of his translated Orlando furioso (1591, A1a).150 To design his impresa, a verbal-​visual insignia combining a symbolic picture and motto, the Earl of Rutland commissioned Shakespeare, not any visual artist (Holland 2004, 953). Palmer’s Two Hundred Poosees composed around 1565, a substantial emblem book that remained in manuscript, provides verbal descriptions of pictures for many emblems and drawings for some others. Palmer would at least have been the primary designer for his pictures in the many cases where he verbally described how they should appear (see Palmer 1988). Why could Spenser not have been as capable and enterprising in his book’s pictorial development as Gascoigne, Palmer, Blagrave, Foxe, and the rest just named? In a letter to Harvey published in 1580, the poet keenly appreciates “Pictures” designed for his Dreames (unpublished and lost); this aspect of his publications was important to him at this time (Appendix 1). Since Spenser’s Dreames was never even licensed, these illustrations too were probably initiatives of the poet anticipating a patron’s subsidy and conceived independently from any stationer. No one in the book trade would have likely invested money in developing a set of illustrations for a book he did not proceed to license and publish. And if he made such a blunder, he would have endeavored to recoup his costs by adapting the set to some other project or by selling it to another stationer for that purpose. No one to date has identified any printed images that could have been designed for Spenser’s Dreames. After investigating the Calender’s pictures, first printing, intertextualities, and book design in four studies published between 1980 and 1991, Luborsky concluded, without any effective published challenge to date, that Spenser himself was the “most probable” primary planner of the twelve woodcuts (1990, 655).151 In her essay of 1981, she had argued that they “follow a program, one that could only have been planned by someone who knew the poem well: Spenser, or a person acting for him” (10; compare Luborsky 1980, 29, 50). At least three unidentifiable workmen produced

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the actual blocks, she showed, and so someone’s planning had to coordinate their efforts (1981, 18–​19). Their work is too crude to suggest that any of them had the humanist learning and cultural expertise to devise the program. In her essays of 1990 (655) and 1991 (252), she better followed the logic of her former evidence and argument by concluding that the poet most probably planned the program (rather than him or someone acting for him, as she said before). Otherwise, we would have to clone him to invent an unknown pictorial designer with equivalent knowledge of the Calender, its myriad references, and the relevant symbology, who then mysteriously vanished without any other trace. Whereas historical novelists may revel in such speculations, scholars should be guided by facts and probabilities. The pictures of the Calender’s first edition as well as its layout have features evincing “authorial intention,” Luborsky maintains, and “ ‘mean’—​in the most Spenserian of ways—​the allusive,” and so she concludes that the poet gave “specific instructions” for his book and “paid attention to the matter” (1981, 10, 40–​3; 1980, 29, 50). These pictures manifest a distinctive range of references, interests, and knowledge unique to the Calender, she observes, and only Spenser would have assimilated all this material well: illustrations used for prior pastorals, emblem books, collections of fables, and printed calendars (such as the Calendrier des bergers), as well as the content, generic affiliations, intertextual resources, and characteristic themes and symbolism of the Calender’s twelve verbal bucolics (1980, 42–​3; 1981). Moreover, “only someone who knew the poem intimately could have chosen to create an environment of calendrical images, to quote from previous illustrations, and to illustrate consistently the topic of poetry. It seems most probable that these decisions came originally from the author” (1990, 655). And “the decision to illustrate” this text “was not pro forma,” Luborsky adds, but “must have been taken deliberately,” because the 1579 Calender’s provision of new illustrations for “original, imaginative literature” was highly unusual in England in the later sixteenth century.152 The “choice could not have been Singleton’s; he had not been connected with an illustrated book since 1558” (1980, 41–​2). Prior to licensing the Calender on December 5, 1579, and very likely printing it then, this minor stationer had been imprisoned for printing Stubbs’s Gulf, so that he would have had little scope or resources to conceive and pursue any program of illustrating the Calender in the fall of that year (1990, 654–​5). Finally, the twelve woodcuts were considered “integral” to this text, not adventitious, Luborsky points out, because they were repeated “in the four subsequent quarto editions (and in the folio editions of 1611 and 1617)” (1980, 41–​2). In the 1590s, I would add, when Spenser was “hot property” for publishers and “very rich,” he could have used his literary prestige and wealth to

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authorize a new edition that changed or abolished these pictures, at least during either of his visits to London in 1590 and 1596.153 But he did not, and his 1590 Faerie Queene asserts the Calender’s canonicity (I.pr.1, p. 722). Yet although Luborsky assumes that Spenser initiated and directed the Calender’s pictorial program (1990, 655; 1991, 252), she further supposes that he provided “only partial directions,” so that the woodcutters “relied on their stock in trade for the rest, supervision was inconsistent, and the final products not checked” (1990, 655; similarly 1981, 10, 40–​1). She bases this conclusion on “inconsistency in the quality of cuts …, in the amount of detail …, in the method of composition, and in the relation of illustration to text” (1981, 10). However, these ostensible inconsistencies do not necessarily evince gaps in Spenserian direction. The poetry too evinces analogous disparities, and yet no scholar to date assumes it is significantly uncoordinated. The eclogues too vary much in apparent poetic quality, ranging from Colin’s laureate prosodic exploits to the plain style of Thomalin and Morrell in Julye (Spenser ventriloquizes their plainness for complex purposes). The eclogues further differ in amount of detail and method of composition, partly to provide variety. And the relation of illustration to text may vary just as different eclogues in the series have different subjects and purposes. Any effective pictorial designer would thus illustrate them differently and make different choices about what to include. And humanist pastoralism was to appear rather rustic in effect, so that apparent defects of these pictures were in that sense formally appropriate. Virgil deliberately presents a memory lapse in his third eclogue (3.40–​2). Moreover, the so-​called disjunctions between the illustrations and poetry on which Luborsky bases her claim of inconsistent direction are not necessarily genuine or errors. In November’s picture, she claims, Colin “is bearded” yet “usually clean shaven” elsewhere (1990, 655). But he remains clean-​shaven there too.154 Even if he had grown a beard as she supposes, it could be symbolically appropriate in this elegiac context because it was a Roman token of mourning, and classical precedents underwrote much early modern iconography.155 In December’s picture, Luborsky observes, “Colin’s pipe lies broken on the ground, yet according to the [verbal] text he proposes to hang it ‘upon this tree’ ” (51a; 1990, 655; similarly 1981, 40–​1). Yet both these gestures were complementary conventions of relinquished literary pastoralism (Kelsey and Peterson 1999, 233–​72), and the picture’s broken pipe epitomizes Colin’s dispirited attitude in a visually effective image, while aptly rounding off the cycle by recalling his broken pipe in Januarye’s picture and poem and in June’s picture. In relation to December’s verbal content, a picture of Colin just hanging up his pipe would lack sufficient

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visual impact. No one should expect verisimilar or literal consistency from this intricately polysemous experimental text, which often disregards naturalistic criteria (the pictures show astrological symbols in the daytime sky) and fictional coherence (Piers and Palinode in Maye sometimes seem more like churchmen than shepherds). Four further arguments for Spenser’s seminal role in his book’s pictorial development should be added to Luborsky’s rationales for it. First, before entering Pembroke College at Cambridge University in 1569, he attended the Merchant Taylors’ School throughout much of the 1560s, and the headmaster, Richard Mulcaster, ensured that the program included teaching of skills in the fine arts. His treatises on education both emphasize that instruction in drawing is fundamental to a proper curriculum (1581, 34–​6; 1582, 22, 58). Hence the poet very probably received tutelage at school sufficient for producing visual sketches to guide the cutting of the blocks for his Calender’s illustrations. Learning this skill had various advantages, Mulcaster argued. Some students would even thereby “chuse the pen and pencil to live by,” and drawing had “learned use” in “Astronomie, Geometrie, Chorographie, Topographie, and som other such.” He advocated pedagogical selection of “certain figures … as shall seme most fit to teach a child to draw, … even from their first point, to their last perfection” (1582, 58). Second, since continental and English versions of the Calendrier des bergers were always illustrated and portrayed the months in a verbal-​visual way, the pictorial development of Spenser’s eponymous Shepheardes Calender would have been a fundamental consideration from its very inception as such. Third, this complex pictorially compositional endeavor and its importance for the Calender’s reception must have entailed the poet’s substantial involvement: Aprill’s illustration even depicts Colin Clout, Spenser’s persona, piping to the queen’s, Elisa. Fourth, just as Luborsky observed that the usage of the 1579 Calender’s woodcuts in the six subsequent editions implies that these pictures appeared integrally related to its poetry and had considerable authorial direction, so too, we should add, does their lack of repetition within the Calender itself and their exclusion from other books of the time. Aside from the Calender, Luborsky has shown, “the illustrations in original [Tudor] English literature are repeated”: used more than once within the same book to reduce costs (1987, 83; 1992, 77–​80). Hence they must be relatively generic rather than context-​specific, and produce some apparent disjunctions. But instead of thus cutting costs for the Calender’s first edition, as in many early modern continental illustrated editions of eclogues that rotated a few woodcuts through the series, twelve original cuts were newly created, each one specific to a particular eclogue.

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Also, whereas blocks used to print woodcuts within books were commonly reused for printing books other than the one for which they were first created (Knapp 2003, 54–​6; Luborsky 1987, 74–​85; 1992, 77–​80), the Calender’s were not. For a stationer, such blocks were significant assets valued for their utility in creating marketable products. He or she could reuse them for other projects, or loan them to another stationer who wanted them for that purpose, or reuse blocks indirectly by having new ones cut according to woodcuts in a book printed elsewhere, thus saving the expense of commissioning new designs (compare Hellinga 1999, 101). Yet the blocks for the Calender’s illustrations were never reused except to print editions of it, even though several, such as Januarye’s or October’s, may seem sufficiently general that they could have been repurposed to illustrate other pastorally oriented texts. At that time, apparent disparities between a verbal text and its illustration did not particularly matter: hence the frequency of repeating pictures within a book, and reusing blocks within books other than those for which they had been first created. The 1579 Calender’s lack of pictures repeated within it or later reused elsewhere indicates that its woodcuts were all designedly context-​specific and that this purpose was so perceivedly important as to outweigh the normal economic incentives against implementing and maintaining such a scheme. Only the author would likely have been so invested in this first edition as to envision and require such a pictorial program for it. The dedication of the blocks exclusively to editions of the Calender indicates that its set of twelve pictures appeared to relate so intrinsically to their particular verbal contexts and was thus so closely associated with this book as to preclude transfers to other texts. Such a high degree of perceived complementarity implies the poet’s substantial direction and approval of the pictorial program. Moreover, the reservation of these woodcuts for the Calender alone, rather atypically for illustrated English fiction at the time, further indicates that Singleton and Harrison identified the pictorial program’s design and purposes with this unique book as conceived by its author. Hence this present study assumes that the Calender’s woodcuts largely follow the poet’s own designs most likely provided in sketches and perhaps supplemented with written descriptions.156 The roles of designing a woodcut and cutting its block were quite usually (though not always) performed by two different people.157 The designer could produce a drawing to direct the cutter, or even an appropriately scaled paper template glued to the block to guide incision. Since some of the Calender’s twelve pictures evince differences of style and technique from their counterparts, Luborsky deduces that there were “at least three designers and/​or cutters” and that each block was cut by one of them (1981, 18). By “designer” in this case she actually means

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a visual artist instructed to produce a mostly predefined image, because she also concludes that the total illustrative program had a singular director and that Spenser “is allusive … in the illustrations” (1981, 42–​3; 1990, 655; 1991, 252).158 The artisans each incising blocks for the twelve monthly woodcuts required some general oversight to avoid obvious incoherence, ensure reasonable aptness for each bucolic poem illustrated, and collectively produce a satisfactory visual evocation of the Calender’s unique imaginative world. In a limited sense the woodcutters would have been designers too, and the production process somewhat collaborative, insofar as each had to determine how best to adapt a sketch, verbal description, or both to his own xylographic technique to produce an image of the mandated scale and content for the month at issue. Spenser’s shaping of the Calender’s illustrative program is indeed more “probable” than Luborsky anticipated in her most advanced consideration of this matter in 1990 (655). Unaware of Mulcaster’s curricular emphasis upon drawing, for example, she could not take into account that the poet thus likely had the ability to create quite detailed sketches showing what each month’s woodcut should depict. And if Spenser did not direct the Calender’s pictorial program, who did, and why was this intervention needful? To dispute the probability of his direction would not only require rebutting the arguments summarized in this section but also finding another more credible candidate with the requisite understanding of the Calender, its objectives, its symbolism, and its complex formal and intertextual affinities, who would have been acceptable to the poet as a very full yet wholly unacknowledged collaborator, and who then disappeared and never sought any credit. It would also be needful to explain why the poet himself—​the qualified candidate certainly available during the text’s development—​was unwilling to oversee the unique illustrative program of a book explicitly presented as his artistic debut. The Calender is a very different text with the pictures than without, because they are not merely decorative but highly significant (Section 10). Hence if Spenser were not their primary designer, the Calender would be very much a co-​authored text wherein he allowed his poetry to appear with pictures that radically redefine it, without ever apparently objecting or seeking to reissue his bucolics in an approved version.159 The 1579 Calender would be the debut not of “our new Poete” but rather of a committee over which he had no meaningful control (¶iia, ¶iiia). Yet its quite extensive recorded early reception considers Immerito or Spenser its prime mover. And various features of the book “indicate how keen Spenser was to establish his control over the text” (Hadfield 2012, 131). Insofar as the poet primarily designed the Calender’s pictures, and they have expressive significance, “eclogue” in this case properly denotes a verbal-​visual bucolic, not just a pastoral poem.

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9 The illustrative mode Though concluding that the Calender’s illustrative program is “Spenserian,” Luborsky assumes that it follows a “depictive method” like “cuts in books printed for a wide audience, popular with ‘commen people,’ ” not a more challenging “emblematic mode” with “complex symbolism” (1981, 3, 14–​19, 45–​6n14; 1980, 30, 51, 57). Yet Spenser’s major fictions reconfigure the world so that it appears deeply meaningful, and the Calender’s Epilogue likewise avows that these eclogues instructively survey all time. And if the pictures involved some richly conceived symbology, the Calender would be much more clearly a “total work” in its conception, and Spenser’s direction of their development would become yet more convincing. Indeed, they are not merely depictive. Though their representational methods, complexity, and depth of symbolism vary, and though some appear relatively simple like Januarye’s or Februarye’s, their total program situates us in a symbolically elaborated imaginative universe, just as some pictures, such as Aprill’s and Maye’s, are densely significant. Luborsky distinguishes three main methods of pictorial representation in sixteenth-​century books: depictive (which she also calls “factual” or “naturalistic”), decorative, and emblematic (1981, 45–​6n14). For her, depictive “means that what we read about is shown naturalistically.” Within this technique, she adds, “we can distinguish two modes: the symbolic and the narrative. ‘Symbolic’ means [i.e., in Luborsky’s own idiosyncratic application here] that we do not see an action but a factual equivalent of what the text describes … . ‘Narrative’ means that an action or actions are shown factually.” Since “the depictive illustration is separable from its text,” she maintains, it is in this sense definitively adventitious or inessential (1981, 45–​6n14). In other words, whether its depictive technique uses that so-​ called symbolic approach or the narrative alternative, it adds nothing significant that is not already evident in the text anyway, but may clarify its contents for some readers. To exemplify her so-​called symbolic depictive pictorial mode, which can only use a type of symbolism that is self-​evident, Luborsky adduces a picture of an indolent man slumped against a tree, with downcast tools, which illustrates a verbal account of Sloth (1981, 45–​6n14). On the other hand, in her decorative mode, “the illustration … does not relate directly to the text but merely adds an embellishment” that may or may not be generically “appropriate.” It is “never … a guide to the text” in either the sense of clarifying the text’s meaning or in that of transforming it (1981, 45–​6n14).

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Whereas the depictive and decorative methods as Luborsky defines them are quite straightforward so that “even the ‘commen people’ can understand,” the emblematic mode, she says, features “complex symbolism” interpretively requiring “the reader’s special knowledge and skill,” and was thus relatively “obscure” to those without such expertise (1981, 3, 14). “The subject of the picture (and text) is not factual but ideological; that is why we find a mixture of the naturalistic and improbable co-​existing within one frame,” illustrating “an allegorical idea … by means of symbolic counters.” Such a picture is thus relatively “inextricable from its text” and to some extent interactively transforms it (1981, 45–​6n14). In Luborsky’s definitions of her emblematic and depictive modes, and hence throughout her argument, she uses the term “symbol” in two different ways. This unfortunate terminological overlap does not impair comprehension of her standpoint, so long as we recognize the difference between these two usages. For Luborsky, a pictorially “depictive symbol” is an obvious token or substitute for something already present in the verbal text, and requires no further learning or analysis to be intelligible. As she defines her depictive mode of illustration, it can be “symbolic” only in this way. On the other hand, a pictorially “emblematic symbol” in her view requires some decoding and analysis through deployment of particular knowledge beyond the text at hand and thus evocatively adds to its significance. The emblematic symbol, unlike the depictive symbol, is not readily self-​evident, she assumes, and it can only appear in illustrations in the emblematic mode, never in depictive or decorative pictures, for it is definitively essential for what Luborsky calls “emblematism.” Although Luborsky’s terms and definitions of them are not unproblematic, we may nonetheless use them pragmatically here for the specific purpose of reassessing her argument and her depictive definition of the Calender’s pictorial mode.160 Her assumption that the Calender’s pictures must be just depictive, hence open to the common people, seems based on their naive appearance. “With the exception of the first three,” she says, they are “quite poor” and “mediocre at best,” with “little artistic interest” (1981, 3, 18–​19). However, the poetry is itself faux naïf as befitted early modern humanist pastoralism (Section 4). The bucolic pictures could have been developed to be complementary: visually simple and rustic in appearance, yet with inner complexities to be appreciated by attentive perceivers. Hence we should probe their iconography. If we thus found some learned references and symbolisms not readily self-​evident, the pictures would be rustic only in appearance, not simply depictive, and not what they seem. Insofar as they played such a double game, they would have much artistic interest—​and they do (Section 10).

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Moreover, according to Luborsky’s definition of the depictive pictorial mode, it is characteristically “factual” and “naturalistic,” and yet the Calender’s illustrative program is not. The emblematic mode, she maintains, is “not factual but ideological” and “that is why we find” there “a mixture of the naturalistic and the improbable coexisting within one frame” to illustrate “an allegorical idea … by means of symbolic counters” (1981, 44n4, 45–​6n14). In all the Calender’s original illustrations, astrological symbols appear in the daytime sky. Cupid appears in March’s picture. Winged horses and talking anthropomorphic animals—​including a fox who disguises himself as a sheep, assembles and wears his own backpack, and masquerades as an apparent peddler—​appear in Maye’s. The general world of these illustrations, collectively, is not just naturalistic, factual, or in other words depictive. And although Luborsky insists that the Calender’s pictures are depictive, not emblematic, she argues that emblem books deeply influenced its content and presentation. In her view, “the annotated emblem book” is “the paramount but not exclusive source for the layout” of the Calender’s “eclogue unit,” and this volume may aptly be called “Spenser’s emblem book” (1980, 51, 53, 57; 1981, 3). Though these comments overstate the Calender’s affinities with emblem books, they were an important ingredient (Section 4). In Luborsky’s view, Januarye’s picture recalls Alciato’s emblem of Janus in his Emblemata so as to present “a complex visual announcement of the book” involving complicated emblematic visual allusions and interactions with the poetry (1981, 24–​6, 29 qtd.). Yet she considers the Calender’s pictures simply depictive so that any symbolism in them must be obviously self-​evident. This assumption unfortunately occludes much of the content of the Calender’s pictures and hence much of the book’s. Confronting Maye’s quite detailed illustration, Luborsky presupposes that none of the Calender’s pictures can appeal to knowledge beyond the text as would emblematic pictures, so that “if there is a significance to these details beyond the obvious one of merrymaking in May it is not clear” (1981, 35). Although Maye’s pictorial details always required some knowledgeable interpretation, they now need scholarly inquiry, for they draw on imagistic conventions of Platonic moral philosophy, heraldry, and triumphs known in educated Elizabethan circles but now obscure (Section 10). Moreover, since the Calender’s woodcuts are “emblematic” rather than depictive (provisionally using Luborsky’s terms), they were very much au courant in 1579, not “archaic,” “quaint,” or “old-​fashioned stylistically” as she supposes (1981, 3, 16–​19, 42–​3). As the sixteenth century progressed, Luborsky observes, “emblem books with nondepictive illustrations

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became the new vogue among educated readers,” and in England “we must go back to Barclay’s Egloges, c.1515, to find poetry depictively illustrated” (1981, 16–​19). In the 1570s, Gabriel Harvey declared that emblem books and volumes of imprese had become fashionable at Cambridge (1884, 79), where Spenser had been admitted to Pembroke Hall in 1569. The Calender’s emblematic qualities catered to these tastes, and its tacit dedicatee Leicester likely shared them, because three emblem books were dedicated to him in around 1565, 1585, and 1586 (Section 2). Before 1579, only one emblem book had been composed in England as far as we know: Thomas Palmer’s Two Hundred Poosees, a manuscript that remained unpublished. Or perhaps two, if Van der Noot’s illustrated Theatre, in which Spenser himself participated, may count, though it is “not strictly an emblem book” (Bath 1988, 86). By assimilating and reinterpreting emblematic form, not even following it like Palmer or Geoffrey Whitney, the Calender was extraordinarily innovative. To appreciate the Calender’s complex verbal-​visual mode of representation, we must also look beyond emblematics. Since Luborsky’s three illustrative categories impede doing so, we will now discard them. So-​called emblematic methods of wittily veiled, indirect communication were not simply germane to emblems, which were invented between around 1520 and 1531, but reflect esthetics and ways of thinking and expression broadly current in European culture since at least the later fifteenth century. We may call them collectively “symbological,” because they had programmatic ambitions informed with wide-​ranging learning about the signifiers incorporated, and sought to reconfigure the world to elicit and epitomize its inner significances, so that it became, in effect, richly reinterpreted and reimagined (Borris 2010, 437–​44). These representative techniques had many sources and manifestations, including Platonizing philosophy, Lucianic satire, biblical and mythological hermeneutics, literary theory and fictions, and the visual arts: emblems are just one expression. Some of the diverse verbal, visual, and verbal-​visual creations involving such portentous jeux d’esprit are Ficino’s De amore, Botticelli’s paintings of Greco-​Roman myths, Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Giorgione’s Tempest and Three Philosophers, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Alciato’s Emblemata, Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, and Spenser’s own Faerie Queene. In a letter written to Spenser in 1580, Harvey similarly admires a “singular extraordinarie veine and inuention” apparent in “all the most delicate, and fine conceited Grecians and Italians,” whose “chiefest endeuour … was, to haue nothing vulgare, but in some respecte or other … rare queinte, and odde in euery pointe, and … a degree or two at the leaste, aboue the reache … of a common Schollers capacitie” (Variorum, 10:471).

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10 The pictorial symbology Study of the Calender’s original pictures, and hence of the Calender insofar as they have any interpretive relevance, has long been inadvertently handicapped. With few exceptions, such as Luborsky, Spenser scholarship has in effect so emphasized the poetry in this verbal-​visual text as to marginalize its illustrations. Moreover, Luborsky’s mistaken claim that its woodcuts are just self-​evidently “depictive” has discouraged inquiry into their iconography (Section 9), as has S. K. Heninger’s much-​recommended misconception that the Calender is a “servile replication” of a 1571 Venetian edition of Sannazaro’s Arcadia (Section 4). The “main purpose” of the Calender’s pictures “was not to interrelate visual and verbal imagery as a means of literary experimentation,” Heninger insists, but rather to make “a flamboyant compliment to Philip Sidney” by “directly” imitating “those in the earlier book in both subject matter and style,” which are “the same” except for “only the signs of the zodiac” (1988, 34, 36, 42). The Calender’s pictures could thus have little import beyond supposedly flattering Sidney. And after editions of the Calender began reproducing the original woodcuts in the late nineteenth century, many readers would have presumed that these apparent “facsimiles” are reliable, whereas to various extents they obscure significant details discernible in the originals (Section 1). Since at least several pictures in the Calender evince much symbolic depth and complexity, the Calender’s verbal-​visual development, expressiveness, and content should be fully rethought. Focusing on Aprill, Maye, and December, this section demonstrates Aprill’s and Maye’s pictorially symbolic excursions in politico-​ religious satire and moral philosophy, then addresses Aprill’s visual symbolism of poetics in relation to December’s. Not just “depictive” in Luborsky’s sense (Section 9), the illustrations for these eclogues show that the 1579 Calender interactively combines poetry and pictures so that both jointly express a complex symbolism requiring knowledgeable scrutiny. Although Spenser scholarship has long recognized that Aprill’s picture and poem use laurel to signify honored victory, a significance derived from ancient Roman triumphs, the learned scope of this symbolism has been underestimated (11b, 13a, 15a). The picture also shows Elisa using the specific gestures of the victorious Roman triumphator in such a procession (Figure 28): like him, she bears both a laurel branch in her outstretched right hand, and a scepter denoting rightful authority in her left (Borris 2017, 99–​101, 103–​5).161 János Zsámboky’s emblem “Remember Fortune’s Inconstancy” uses such symbolism too, but less accurately, for its picture omits the scepter (Figure 18).

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Figure 18  “Remember Fortune’s Inconstancy.” János Zsámboky, Emblemata (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1564), 13.

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As Maye’s picture shares this triumphal symbolism with Aprill’s, so they constitute, in effect, a diptych of rival triumphs: Elisa’s in Aprill, the May King’s in Maye (Borris 2017, 99–​101, 103–​5; 2020a, 33–​47). Like her and the Roman triumphator, he holds laurel in his outstretched right hand, while his draped garment reminiscent of a toga further recalls the triumphal context (Figures 18 and 19). Not only the shape of the leaves indicates laurel but also his usage of the triumphator’s definitive gesture. Investigating these or any other pictorial points in the Calender requires a clear original Elizabethan woodcut or high-​resolution reproduction as in this present edition (Section 1). Though the May King has thus supplanted victorious Elisa, he lacks her scepter of rightful authority. These pictorial observations disclose new prospects of politico-​religious satire because Elisa in Aprill corresponds to Elizabeth (head of both the English church and state) in standard readings, and we may now perceive that the subsequent picture displaces her triumph with the May King’s. His consort, likewise dressed in a classicizing draped garment for this triumphal occasion,162 holds a laurel sprig too, but in her left hand, which was conventionally adverse and inferior, and it slumps backward (Figure 19), whereas the traditional Roman triumphator, Elisa, and the May King all uphold theirs victoriously in their right hands.

Figure 19  The triumph of May’s King and Queen, detail, Maye’s picture. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 16a.

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The usage of laureate triumphal symbolism in both of these directly successive pictures indicates that they are a correlative pair to be assessed in mutual conjunction. A fable of tragic carelessness, wherein a treacherous fox abducts a hapless kid left home by his rather negligent mother, visually circumscribes the May King’s triumph. Both his horses bear laurel too, in their mouths (Figure 29); but Maye’s laurel is ironic, depicted in malo contrary to Aprill’s, just as the admonitory beast fable surrounding the May King’s celebration indicates that negligence has triumphed here. Likewise, the carriage’s horses lack a driver and one of them is unbridled, so that the situation is incipiently out of control (Borris 2017, 94–​5, 99–​102). Insofar as these two pictures relate to Elizabeth, Aprill’s largely celebrates her idealized high potential, while Maye’s warns of incipient dangers to the realm inadequately addressed. In the accompanying poem, Piers deplores irresponsible hedonism, laxity, carelessness, and self-​interest, and his fable about the treacherous fox warns parabolically against Roman Catholic and other efforts to subvert Protestantism through proselytization and otherwise. The political satire in Aprill’s and Maye’s juxtaposed pictures especially targets Elizabeth’s prospective match with the Roman Catholic duc d’Anjou, the French king’s brother and current heir apparent, which was highly controversial from 1579 until around 1582.163 On account of his family’s alleged promotion of the Parisian massacre of Protestants on St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, many English Protestants feared that his courtship of Elizabeth masked treacherous plots to advance his religion. Since around 1900, Spenser scholars have investigated the Calender for satire of this match, just as it was printed during the controversy’s intense first phase in 1579, and as Singleton’s first known production after he printed Stubbs’s scandalous Gulf denouncing Anjou (see n8). Although Paul E. McLane correlated the perfidious fox of Maye’s fable partly with Anjou in 1961, Februarye, November, and more recently Aprill have been nonetheless considered the Calender’s main loci of anti-​Anjou satire.164 But reassessment of Maye’s picture relative to Aprill’s shows that this satire climaxes in Maye. Whereas Aprill’s picture and poem present a virgin queen’s triumphal sole rule, Maye’s illustration pointedly displaces her with a mock-​ regal couple, the May King and Queen, wherein he assumes the posture of a triumphator, thus subordinating her. And this picture circumscribes them both with a fable expressing tragic irresponsibility. Considered topically, Maye’s woodcut satirizes Elizabeth’s prospective acquisition of Anjou as a consort, and the consequences for the realm. Maye’s poem indicates that “a royall throne,” a “Queene,” and someone to be “Crowned as king” are at issue (16b). Anjou’s correlation here with the May King and the “lustihede and wanton merriment” of May games complements the allegations of his irresponsible self-​seeking hedonism disseminated by his English opponents (17a; Borris 2020a, 46–​7). And the beast fable’s irresponsible mother goat

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who loses her kid to the trickily disguised fox’s blandishments correlates with Elizabeth insofar as she would yield to Anjou’s amorous overtures that were widely supposed to mask a dire “papist” agenda, and thus deliver her people to its purposes (Borris 2020a, 42–​6). Further symbolic features of these two pictures confirm Maye’s verbal-​ visual satire of the prospective nuptials and their consequences. Aprill’s situates virgin Elisa, Elizabeth’s counterpart, in the central position signifying sovereignty, celebrating her with laureate triumphal symbolism.165 In Maye’s, the mock-​regal couple triumphally displace her there, thus producing a pointed contrast. Moreover, the couple’s depicted carriage bears a pictorially central coat of arms, also correlative to Elizabeth’s centrality in Aprill, and sixteenth-​century English portraits routinely included these to

Figure 20  Elizabeth’s royal arms. Gabriel Harvey, Gratulationem Valdinensium libri quatuor (London: Henry Bynneman, 1578), title page.

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identify the person or persons depicted (Borris 2020a, 47). Hence this one strongly invited heraldic decoding, and it is quartered once, a distinctive feature of the Elizabethan royal arms ubiquitous at that time (Figure 20). Although its particular charges are distanced from the viewer so as to remain discreetly unspecified, their general pattern is nonetheless clear, and it very strongly recalls hers (Borris 2020a, 52–​5). Spenser’s contemporaries would have been used to seeing the royal arms in distanced and hence diminutive aspects whereby only the basic pattern was clear, high on ceilings or walls or in stained-​glass windows in churches, royal palaces, other official buildings or domestic households, or imprinted on many coins (Figure 21). Partly by means of this heraldic symbolism, Maye’s picture indicates that the English monarchy is topically at issue here, and warns against the consequences for the crown and the realm if Elizabeth married Anjou (Borris 2020a, 47–​57). Although oblique reflection on problematic current political and religious issues was one of the fundamental purposes of eclogues in early modernity (Section 4), Spenser’s epilogue for the Calender insists that it is “made … for euery yeare” (52a), and its poetry and pictures polysemously engage

Figure 21  The English royal arms of 1406–​22, 1461–​1554, 1558–​1603. Stained glass window, c.1475, St. James the Great Church, St. Kew, United Kingdom.

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many issues beyond Elizabethan current affairs. Pastoralism was supposed to have broader applications than political and religious topicalities, including matters of love, poetry and its responsibilities, general good governance of the self and state, theology, and the prospects of the soul. The models for such pastoralism included Virgil’s Eclogues as understood in the sixteenth century, and the genre’s adaptations by Petrarch, Boccaccio, Mantuan, Sannazaro, and Marot, among others (Section 4). Maye’s picture, for example, further evokes morally philosophical traditions arising from Plato’s Phaedrus (Borris 2017, ch. 2).166 There, Socrates’s fable of the Phaedran charioteer, an allegory of the soul, focuses on the challenges of properly controlling the chariot’s two winged horses, to show how love’s highest potential may best be sought. One horse is cooperative, easily controlled, the other wildly refractory. They signify the soul’s appetites and passions in their two chief aspects, which were later respectively designated irascible and concupiscible in moral philosophy. These should be directed rationally, Socrates assumes, and though most people cannot adequately control them, they should nonetheless endeavor to do so, he urges, and they may thus partake to varying extents in love’s transcendental rewards. Fundamental to much Renaissance Platonism, this fable was widely current in early modern culture (Borris 2017, 90–​9, 106–​8). Maye’s picture pointedly evokes it by showing two correlative winged horses drawing a carriage, one of which is bridled and thus relatively easy to control, whereas the other is unbridled and hence unmanageable (Figure 29). Such a horse was a standard symbol of uncontrolled appetites and recklessness, often in ways informed by Plato’s fable, as in Andrea Alciato’s widely known Emblemata and also in Zsámboky’s.167 Maye’s illustration incorporates the fundamental symbolic categories of the Phaedran fable, and invites interpretation accordingly. Whereas the Phaedran charioteer had best control both his horses as well as possible, Maye’s carriage is uncontrollable because it has no evident driver and one horse is unbridled. While complementing the encircling beast fable of tragic carelessness, this image of disordered desires critiques perceivedly adverse inner and social conditions. It befits Piers’s literal censure of irresponsible hedonism and self-​interest (16b–​17a), and the correlative allegorized ecclesiastical criticism. It also befits the political satire of the Anjou match. From its opponents’ standpoint, Elizabeth had insufficiently disciplined her own amorous desires in pursuing Anjou so that faults of inner governance threatened to disorder the realm. Though Colin too has “little skill to brydle loue” (12a), the consequences in his case are relatively localized. And the debauchery of Anjou alleged by his English detractors further violates Phaedran standards of love’s apt value, significance and discipline. “To manage well our affections [i.e., passions] and wild horses

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of Plato, are the highest Circenses,” Sir Thomas Browne declared later in Christian Morals, “and the noblest digladiation is in the theatre of ourselves” (2014, 746). The various topics of the Calender’s pictures and poetry also include poetic inspiration. Here we may consider such symbolism in Aprill and then in December, wherein it becomes reconfigured in counterpoint with Aprill. The Calender’s complex structure depends in part upon this significant relationship of these two eclogues, indicated by their joint recourse to a symbolism of aqueous springs (much as juxtaposed laureate triumphs coordinate Aprill and Maye as a satiric diptych). Aprill’s poem includes Colin’s fine “laye of fayre Elisa,” and Hobbinol says that Colin created it “as by a spring he laye, /​And tuned it vnto the waters fall.” Colin thus begins his song praising Elisa: Ye dayntye Nymphs, that in this blessed Brooke    doe bathe your brest, For sake your watry bowres, and hether looke,    at my request: And eke you Virgins, that on Parnasse dwell, Whence floweth Helicon the learned well,    Helpe me to blaze    Her worthy praise, Which in her sexe doth all excel. (12a–​b)

As the Muses’ spring is “the learned well,” so appropriate inspiration draws on learning, and E. K. associates the Muses with “the honor of all excellent studies” and “learning” (14b). The mythographers had linked the Muses and their springs with wisdom, knowledge, and Cadmus’s mythic invention of Greek writing.168 In November, Thenot defers to Colin by stating “better learne of hem, that learned bee, /​And han be watered at the Muses well” (44b). The divinity of the Muses implies that poetry and learning channel transcendental forces, and E. K’s Argument for October likewise insists that poetry is “a diuine gift and heauenly instinct … poured into the witte by a certaine ἐνθυσιασμὸς and celestiall inspiration,” as the Calender’s “author … els where at large discourseth, in his booke called the English Poete” (40a, misnumbered 39a). Comparable to E. K.’s metaphor of flowing liquid here, the poet’s association of literary creativity with aqueous springs appears not only in Aprill but also in June’s praise of “the spring” in Tityrus’s “learned hedde” and in October’s “streames of flowing wittes” (24a, 41b). Also as in E. K.’s comment, insofar as the Muses attend Spenser’s fountain-​head expressing the welling up (so to speak) of creative invention in Aprill (12a–​13a), poetry’s origins are supernatural, just as Piers insists it came from “heauen” in October (41b).169 The early modern material bases of this portrayal of

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artistic power are the inkwell and fluent quill: a feather relating also to the Calender’s pervasive imagery of flight explored by Patrick Cheney (1993, 32–​8, 79–​80, 109–​10). Aprill’s picture represents Colin piping his appended song of Elisa, and he appears at the viewer’s left in the act of creating it, while the portrayal of Elisa with her entourage indicates what he thus envisions and enables others to perceive (Figure 28). In the poetic dialogue here, he is not actually present, and neither he nor Hobbinol perform for her directly. Above Colin, again at our left, is the notionally physical situation of the eclogue, presenting its two shepherds Thenot and Hobbinol; the latter recites Colin’s mainly encomiastic though not uncritical song. While evoking the depicted spectacle of Colin and Elisa, his ditty refers to further scenarios of the mind, the past, and other places as it praises her potential and implicitly exhorts her to fulfill it. This picture’s correlation of Colin with a spring at his right foot seems not to have been previously investigated (Figure 22). Although Colin’s song says at the outset that he pipes by a spring, the picture elaborates

Figure 22  Colin piping, detail, Aprill’s picture. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 11a.

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this situation by assimilating the iconography of Pegasus creating a spring famously sacred to the Muses. This event was often pictured, and the conventions for its depiction inform that of Colin himself here. The resultant image of poesis visually epitomizes many of the claims and issues at stake in the Calender’s treatment of poetry and poetics. For “the learned well” of the Muses flowing from mount “Parnasse” (12b), Spenser chose the name “Helicon.” Chaucer, John Lydgate, Willam Caxton, John Skelton, and various Italian writers had done so too (Lascelles 1959, 181–​3; Variorum, 7:281). Yet the Parnassian fountainhead of the Muses was often called Castalia instead, and Helicon was also another mountain with two of their other sacred springs, Aganippe and Hippocrene. “Helicon” could serve as a metonymy for such a fount or for matters of the Muses more generally, and infused its metonymic senses with Heliconian associations. E. K. glosses Spenser’s “Helicon” accordingly: “both the name of a fountaine at the foot of Parnassus, and also of a mountain.” At the latter, E. K. continues, when “Pegasus the winged horse of Perseus (whereby is meant fame and flying renowme), stroke the grounde with his hoofe, thereout sprang a wel … consecrate to the Muses and Ladies of learning” (14b).170 Thus E. K. relates Spenser’s “Helicon” to the Muses’ Parnassian spring and to their Heliconian spring created by Pegasus. As explained by Fulgentius, Boccaccio, and others, this action of Pegasus usually allegorized the inspirational effects of fame and glory upon writers: just as the Muses attend this spring, so illustrious attainments afford high matter for verbal art and heighten the poetic imagination. Both also associate Pegasus with wisdom, so that “he is said to have caused the fount of the Muses to break forth with his heel, for wisdom bestows the Muses’s fountain.”171 Pegasus’s creation of this fount of the Muses further epitomizes the creative moment whereby something is brought into being that did not exist before. Attaining considerable currency in the early modern visual arts, the stance of Pegasus in creating the fount not only expressed the imaginative stimulus of fame but asserted the creative power of the arts and learning. It was a symbolic nexus for much early modern thought about the value and importance of knowledge and the verbal arts, especially poetry. In showing Colin piping, Aprill’s illustration brilliantly innovates by correlating Colin’s endeavor with Pegasus’s iconic pose as creator of the Muses’ spring (Figure 22). Depictions of Pegasus originating the Muses’ well portray the horse’s rear or front feet in close conjunction with springing water, and Aprill’s picture supplants Pegasus with Colin in such a configuration (Figures 22, 23, 24). This substitution has profound implications for the status of poetry and for that of Spenser’s art, since Colin is Spenser’s creation, as is the song of Elisa. In a letter to Spenser published in 1580, Harvey says Rosalind called Edmund “Segnior Pegaso” (Variorum, 10:466).172 This

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Figure 23  Pegasus, creator of the Muses’ spring. Medal attributed to Benvenuto Cellini.

Figure 24  Pegasus, creator of the Muses’ spring, detail of Apollo and the Nine Muses. English woodcarving, c.1580.

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picture presents an exemplar of the inspired poet interacting with the stimulus of splendid renown—​in this case Elisa, a pastoralized proxy for the monarch Elizabeth—​and correlates this outpouring of poetic creativity with the myth of Pegasus and the Muses’ spring. The Muses themselves were not only tutelary divinities associated with certain springs but also nymphs, and nymphs were associated with water or moisture.173 In this sense Colin’s depicted spring somewhat epitomizes the Muses themselves. The symbolism of Aprill’s picture links Colin and his artful creativity, hence his creator Spenser too, with the Muses, fame, wisdom, and high achievement. Moreover, since in this depiction Colin himself appears correlative to Pegasus as creator of the Muses’ fount, and Spenser too assumes this stance insofar as he is Colin’s maker, it forcefully asserts the poet’s creative agency and social power. Spenserian art appears to transform the cultural landscape and its potential, just as Pegasus produced a momentous fountainhead of the Muses where there had been none, and just as Aprill’s picture shows a landscape of layered kinds and degrees of artistically created reality evoked both visually and verbally. Part of the scene, showing the eclogue’s two speakers in conversation toward the rear, is notionally a physical reality though it is invented; and the other part, shown in the foreground, becomes manifest through Colin’s song, Hobbinol’s recitation of it, and hence Spenser’s creativity. The situation is enlivened by the picture and poem conjointly. As Pegasus often symbolized both wisdom and renown, so the poet himself becomes correlative with both, in that his gifts are means of expressing and augmenting them, and become famous themselves. This picture presents Colin/​Spenser and Elisa/​Elizabeth as equals in their different spheres: the former by channeling poetic power, the latter through regal power. They are jointly presented so that both appear mutually needful and symbiotic. Since “fame with golden wings aloft doth flie, /​Aboue the reach of ruinous decay,” Spenser declares in his Ruines of Time, “Then who so will with vertuous deeds assay /​To mount to heauen, on Pegasus must ride, /​And with sweet Poets verse be glorifide” (lines 421–​7). Through its five editions between 1579 and 1599 during Elizabeth’s reign, a high number for an English work of fiction at that time, the Calender turned out to justify the poet’s lofty claims here for the transformative cultural significance of his art, partly by becoming a central means for defining her public image both verbally and visually. This depiction of Colin in the originary stance of Pegasus producing the fountainhead of the Muses implies that Colin here, and hence his creator Spenser, profoundly manifest the authentic sources of creative energy. As December’s picture pointedly contrasts with Aprill’s, so they are to be interpreted in counterpoint (Figures 28 and 36). Streams of tears sometimes supplant inspirational springs in the Calender, and these substitutions

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

culminate in December’s poem and picture, where Colin again appears adjacent to a spring.174 December’s poem foregrounds this association: “The gentle shepheard satte beside a spring” (48b, line 1). Yet in its picture, his pipe appears broken at his feet and he sets it aside in the poem, so that his visual and verbal juxtaposition with the spring now betokens his creative paralysis.175 Despite this fount’s proximity to him, which indicates his great poetic potential, he and the spring have become disjunct, so that its presence is now ironic, just as he can no longer channel his gifts of song. He has turned away from the welling source, and his swiveled position in December’s picture situates his feet apart from it, contrary to his empowered stance in Aprill correlative to the mythic role of Pegasus.176 In December’s picture, the posture of forceful creative agency that characterizes Colin in Aprill’s picture and expresses poetry’s great value and influence, is pointedly in abeyance. However, though Colin is somewhat Spenser’s persona, he differs much from Colin, as Spenser’s Epilogue shows. Whereas Colin’s role in the Calender ends with the disheartened cessation of his creativity, at least for the present, Spenser’s Epilogue is triumphant:   Loe I haue made a Calender for euery yeare, That steele in strength, and time in durance shall outweare: And if I marked well the starres reuolution,   It shall continewe till the worlds dissolution. (52a)

The Epilogue has twelve lines, a number symbolizing perfection (McCabe in Spenser 1999, 514), and since its number of syllables per line equals its number of lines, it is a “square poem.” As in George Puttenham’s treatise on poetics published in 1589 (2007, 189), this formal equipoise symbolized attainment of virtuous personal equilibrium: the homo quadratus or “square man” who is truly good in Plato’s Protagoras (339a–​b), and whose constant virtue endures fortune’s vicissitudes in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1.10.10–​11). Whereas Colin’s situation in December instances a talented poet’s failure to pursue his artistic vocation and its high social and other obligations, his role in Aprill indicates the poet’s power to arouse a community’s aspirations and shape its perceptions of leadership and even its governance. In this Epilogue, Spenser asserts formally and otherwise that his Calender has attained enduring value and fulfills the poet’s exalted calling. Aprill’s pictorial redevelopment of the iconography of Pegasus creating the Muses’ spring is so wittily apposite for asserting the poet’s cultural significance and so important for the Calender’s poetics that it appears Spenserian, especially because it valorizes the poet and his agency in direct relation to the queen. The verbal-​visual satire of Anjou in Aprill and Maye further evinces such a poetic stance.

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At this point in his literary career, Spenser was committed to pursuing his felt vocation by verbal-​visual means, probably as a deduction from Horace’s doctrine of ut pictura poesis, to which E. K. refers in his Argument for Februarie. Its fable of the oak and briar, E. K. says, is “so liuely …, as if the thing were set forth in some Picture before our eyes” (31b). Yet in the Calender, Spenser supplements verisimilarly evocative notions of poetic pictorialism like E. K.’s with visual imagery that interacts with his verbal text to adumbrate also a conjoint symbology. Hence each of these eclogues functions rather like a complex emblem. Moreover, the verbal-​visual interactiveness of each Spenserian eclogue is not just particular to it but ripples outward throughout the series, as we have seen for Aprill and Maye and for Aprill and December. Whereas educated readers of Spenser’s time were well equipped to interpret and enjoy the Calender accordingly, because of the former currency of emblematics, visually symbolic codes, and their applications throughout early modern culture, our recovery of this important dimension of this text and of Spenser’s experimental artistic genius has only just begun.

11 Known copies, surrogates, and the copy reproduced The 1579 Calender survives in seven presently known copies, all in research libraries, and three, at the British, Bodleian, and Folger libraries, are sufficiently well preserved to be candidates for a facsimile reprint.177 The British Library’s and the Bodleian Library’s copies have already had two each (Spenser 1889, 1967; and 1968, 1979, respectively), but the Folger’s none, and this edition reproduces the latter in a 1:1 scale (call number STC 23089). It mainly differs from other extant copies by misnumbering folio 49 as 94, and repeating the ornament of the lady’s head above the colophon rather than using Singleton’s device (34b, 52b; contrast Figure 1). At present, the 1579 Calender’s only digital surrogates are the Folger’s copy provided with optional magnification in the Folger’s online LUNA Digital Image Collection, and the Huntington Library’s provided by EEBO. The latter surrogate digitizes the low-​resolution photographic reproduction of the Huntington’s copy produced for the microfilm collection Early English Books, and so it is inadequate for serious study, especially of the woodcuts.

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Notes

1 The English edition of Jan van der Noot’s Theatre for Worldlings (1569), for which Spenser translated the poetry from French, juxtaposes poems with correlative illustrations. But it was not the first edition, only three of the poems were original even in the first, and many of the pictures were largely repeated from an earlier text of Marot, not original (Bath 1988). Though Alexander Barclay’s eclogues were published around 1520 with a few apparently original pictures, these were repeated and not programmatic; and though John Heywood’s Spider and the Flie (1556), a long verse fable, has many original cuts, its extensive repetition of them compromises their programmatic potential (Section 8). 2 On the minor differences between the Calender’s first edition and the next four, see Luborsky 1980, 31, 61nn7, 8, 9. 3 De Sélincourt, in Spenser 1910, vii. He allows that “the poet or his friends” might have supplied “some” corrections for the second quarto. Compare Johnson 1933, 3; Williams 1990, 92. 4 On representation of writers in Renaissance humanist pastoral, see Patterson 1987, 60–​133. 5 Only one of the few illustrated editions published between 1653 and 1889 has pictures informed by the original woodcuts, but freely reinterprets them (Spenser 1732). 6 As H. Smith and Wilson observe, “sustained” attempts “to incorporate images into the category of the paratext … risk relegating pictures to a supplementary function” (2011, 13). 7 On the diverse roles of stationers in the Elizabethan book trade, see Melnikoff 2018, 6. 8 On the Calender’s anti-​Anjou agenda, see Adler 1981, 236, 256–​7; Borris 2020a, 25–​75; McCabe 1995, 25, 27; McLane 1961; Norbrook 1984, 87–​8; Parmenter 1936, 213–​16; Pugh 2016, General Index, s.v. “Alençon.” For earlier such studies, see Byrom 1933, 147n. On McLane, see Doran 1996, 252n82. McCabe surveys and refines prior insights into the Calender’s anti-​Anjou satire in Spenser 1999, xii–​xiii, 520, 523, 529–​30, 532, 534, 550, 565–​6, 571. 9 On the unfolding scandal of Stubbs’s Gulf in fall 1579, see Berry 1968, xxvi–​xl. 10 On the early modern English book business, see Gaskell 1972, 12, 160–​2, 175–​83; Lesser 2004, ch. 1; McKenzie 2002, 553–​67; Raven 2007; 2002, 568–​82.

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11 See Blayney 1997, 383–​422; Maguire 1999, 434–​49. On the participation of women, see H. Smith 2003. 12 See Blayney 1997, 390; Lesser 2004, 46–​7; Maguire 1999, 434–​5. 13 Singleton “remained in poverty,” Byrom infers, because he “never appears as a taxpayer in the London Subsidy Rolls—​a fairly sure indication” (1933, 130n1). 14 Byrom 1933, 154. Compare the 1583 census of London printing houses in Arber 1967, 1:248. Singleton had ceased printing by then. Aside from the nine printers in London who had three to five presses each in 1583, the remaining fourteen printers owned only nineteen presses in total, so that most of the smaller operations just had one. 15 On the creditor’s lawsuit, see Byrom 1933, 130; Evenden 2008, 162. 16 On Singleton’s general career as a stationer, see Blayney 2013, 661–​2, 811–​12; Byrom 1933, 122–​34. To survey Singleton’s extant actual and supposititious publications, search EEBO (e.g., using “Singleton” as a keyword, and 1540–​ 1600 as the date range). See also STC, 3:155–​6. 17 “Reply to Gosson” is a pragmatically conventional title for Lodge’s work. Only two copies survive, neither with title page, and so Lodge’s title is unknown. For the conjectural attribution to Singleton’s press, see STC, 2:109 (for STC 16663). 18 For Bynneman’s illustrated books, see Luborsky and Ingram 1998, 2:183. 19 Compare King 1990, 234–​6. 20 See Doran 1996, 160–​1, 164, 167–​8; Worden 1996, 99–​100, 109–​10. 21 On Page, see Barnes 1991, 421–​6. 22 Sidney 1973b, 33–​57. In early modern England, “much circulated in manuscript that could not be printed,” because the official attitude toward manuscripts “and their transmission through personal networks” was “more benign.” M. Bland 2010, 190. 23 Farmer and Lesser 2005a, 6–​7, 12–​13, 24n57. Their dispute with Blayney bears little on my own argument here because their own figures show that between 1576 and 1597, publishing plays was a financial gamble just as Blayney (1997) argues. They claim that he underestimates the subsequent popularity of English playbooks and thus overestimates the financial risks of publishing them. Blayney responds (2005); then Farmer and Lesser answer (2005b). 24 Blayney 1997, 387–​89, 405–​13. On Farmer’s and Lesser’s dispute with Blayney, see n23. 25 On paper costs in early modern publishing, see Dane and Gillespie 2010, 31; Gaskell 1972, 177. For discussion of the 1579 Calender’s paper, see Section 6. 26 Estimating the size of Elizabethan print runs is informed guesswork. Whereas Blayney allows eight hundred for a representative play’s first edition (1997, 384, 405), M. Bland allows five hundred for playbooks and verse (1999, 458). 27 For corrective reassessments of Johnson’s other data (1950), see Barnard and Bell 1991, 11, 13; Blayney 1997, 410. 28 Compare Berry 1968, xxvi. STC conjectures that Page was the Gulf’s publisher (2:371, for STC 23400). 29 In Elizabethan England, “the source of financial backing for any individual book may well be hidden.” Barnard and Bell 1991, 23–​4.

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Notes to pages 18–24

30 Compare Galbraith 2008, 30. On Leicester and Spenser, see Hadfield 2012, 101–​4, 110, 126, 128, 147; Woudhuysen 1990, 432–​3; Variorum, 10:5–​12. 31 “We should take note that, during the tide of ridicule that engulfed Harvey following the publication of Familiar Letters, not one contemporary questioned Spenser’s association with either the Sidneys or Leicester House” (Brink 2019, 114). 32 Though Burghley has long been considered one of the Anjou match’s strongest proponents throughout at least 1579, some revisionist historians recently argue that he opposed the match like Leicester. For a critique of their view, see Borris 2020a, 30, 64–​5, 67n10. 33 Two of these three emblem books for Leicester were manuscript collections (1565, 1585) and the other a published book (1586). See Manning 1990, 155–​200, and his comments in Palmer 1988, ii–​iii. 34 On Elizabethan authorial revenue, see Blayney 1997, 394–​ 6; McCabe 2016, 66–​70. 35 See Brink 1996, 45–​ 64; Carey and Carroll 1996, 31–​ 44; Hadfield 2012, 147–​8, 154–​5. 36 On Spenser’s land dealings, see Hadfield 2012, 182–​6, 197–​202, 403 (qtd.). 37 Compare Spenser’s Colin Clouts, lines 178–​87. 38 Danner surveys prior attempts to explain Leicester’s relation to Virgil’s Gnat (2011, 121–​50). Written “long” before its publication in 1591 according to Spenser’s prefatory note (Gnat, p. 210), this poem is ordinarily said to originate in 1579–​80. Reassigning it to around 1582–​85, as newly proposed here, accords better with recent recognition that Spenser’s move to Ireland in 1580 was at least originally rewarding. His later Gnat would thus press Leicester for further preferment within England. 39 See Johnson 1950, 91, 111. Compare Blayney 1997, 410. 40 The 1617 Calender’s imprint states “printed by Bar. Alsop for John Harrison the elder” (title page). In this case, he is the same Harrison as Harrison the Younger (Johnson 1933, 40). 41 Compare M. Bland 1998, 100–​1; Galbraith 2008, 28–​32. On Spenser consulting Harvey: the poet did so to some extent because one of the poet’s letters to him written between October 5 and 16 in 1579, and published in 1580, mentions one of Spenser’s writings that has a “Title” he “stil liketh … well ynough, and your fine Addition no lesse.” Though not named in the letter, this “worke” is the Calender because it has a title and a subtitle, and the context indicates that the latter is Harvey’s “Addition” (“The Shepheardes Calender Conteyning twelue Aeglogues proportionable to the twelue monethes,” title page). Moreover, the Calender centrally honors an obscure female private personage as the letter also says: Colin’s beloved (Variorum, 10:5). On incising woodcuts: this was a specialized craft distinct from designing them, and often the designer and cutter were different persons. At least three cutters produced the Calender’s pictorial blocks (Luborsky 1981, 18). 42 Such as M. Bland 1998, 100–​1; Galbraith 2008, 29–​32; Kelen 2016, 253n3; Luborsky 1980, 29, 50; 1991, 654–​5; Wall 2000, 77.

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43 Heninger even asserts that the Calender is a “servile replication” of a 1571 edition of Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1988, 42), a claim critiqued here in Section 4. 44 Compare Brink 2019, 10–​ 11, 89; Hadfield 2012, 18–​19; Scott-​Warren 2004, 655. 45 Thomas Lodge considered Spenser the English poet “best read in ancient poetry” (Critical Heritage, 83). 46 Contrast, for example, Spenser’s superbly poised songs of Elisa and Dido with Harvey’s wrong-​footed address to Elizabeth (Harvey 2014, 592–​601, trans. 655–​65). See Brink 2019, 95–​106. 47 Critical Heritage (49–​55) surveys Harvey’s surviving comments on Spenser. 48 Quoting Hadfield 2004, 793. For varied discussions of E. K.’s identity, see Hadfield 2012, 122–​3; Kelen 2016, 252–​3n3, n4; McLane 1961, 280–​95; Shore 1990, 231; Variorum, 7:645–​50. 49 For Brink, E. K.’s knowledgeable comments about Harvey’s activities indicate that E. K. is Harvey (2019, 155–​6). But E. K. says he is Harvey’s “good friend” (2b), and friends communicate. E. K.’s avowed possession of a manuscript originating with Harvey (2b) does not show that he is E. K., pace Brink (2019, 154–​5), because friends quite ordinarily shared texts of mutual interest (and extant documents show that Harvey and Spenser loaned books). Nor does Spenser’s comment on the Calender in a published letter dated October 1579: “The selfe former Title stil liketh me well ynough, and your fine Addition no lesse” (Variorum, 10:5). For Brink, “fine Addition” means the Calender’s introductory epistle by E. K., the commentary, or the whole apparatus (2019, 157). But an “Addition” contextually relating to a “Title” probably means that Harvey suggested the Calender’s subtitle clarifying that it contains twelve eclogues corresponding to the months (see n41). 50 In Brink’s view, the Calender’s “gloss … systematically imitates Harvey’s diction and syntax,” so that “E. K. uses words such as ‘yonkerly,’ a favourite of Harvey’s, and he employs Harvey’s characteristically learned construction of the possessive, for instance ‘… Marot his Aeglogue’ ” (2019, 159). But “yonker” was a common Elizabethan noun that many writers used, and its adjectival form conventionally adds the suffix “-​ly” (e.g., “beastly”). And in the late sixteenth century, “the his-​genitive” was a “popular” construction of “colloquial” origins that by that time “could even occur in formal prose” (Dons 2004, 45–​6). Neither of these characteristics of the Calender’s commentary was stylistically distinctive in Spenser’s time. 51 For studies proposing that E. K. was Spenser, see Pugh 2016, 82n2; Sommer 1890, 20–​5. Advocates of this view often consider the repetition of a two-​line verse translation in both E. K.’s commentary and in one of Spenser’s published letters most compelling (e.g., McCabe 2000, 36). But E. K. says that the Latin verse in question “may thus be turned into English,” and so he never claims that he translated it (22b). “As E. K. was in familiar acquaintance with Spenser, he may well have heard it from Spenser” (Renwick in Spenser 1930, 196). It would thus be an implicit tribute to the poet, whose talent and learning E. K. reveres.

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Notes to pages 28–33

52 Januarye, Aprill, and June address Colin’s and Hobbinol’s relationship, which is homophile at least for the latter. Contexts of The Faerie Queene referencing or implying some sexual relationships between males include I.vi.17; III.vi.24, 45; x.20–​3, xi.34, 37; xii.7–​8; IV.x.27. 53 Sidney 1962, 172 (Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 15); 1973b, 117 (Defence). For further Elizabethan censures of alliteration, see Ringler in Sidney 1962, 466. 54 Sidney uses analogous techniques in his eclogues. In the singing contest between Lalus and Dorus in the Old Arcadia’s First Eclogues, for example, they compete partly by implicitly challenging each other to answer using particular rhymes and prosodic forms (1973a, 58–​64). Sidney’s prosody there is thus a means to express their competitive debate, as in this Spenserian case. 55 A comment in the Bodleian Library’s 1579 Calender appears to assume that E. K. authored the whole text: between the title and the dedication to Sidney on the title page, someone wrote “by E. K.” (reproduced in Spenser 1999, 23). However, this comment is very different from stating “E. K. was Edmund Spenser.” The inscriber’s identity and the inscription’s date are unknown. The comment is so false, as stated, and so inscrutable (it uses only E. K.’s initials, which the book provides anyway) that it mainly shows how wayward some readers could be. Anyone who has marked essays on literary texts knows that some readers can be very careless even in conditions of formal evaluation. For example, this reader could have assumed that E. K. was Immerito, and hence the Calender’s author, simply because E. K. explicitly authored the book’s introductory epistle. 56 Compare Patterson 1987, 126–​7. 57 For comparisons of the Calender’s apparatus to Muret’s commentary in Ronsard 1553, see M. Adams 1954; Tribble 1993, ch. 2. On E. K. and Servius, see McCabe 2000, 41–​51. 58 Compare M. Bland 1998, 96–​7, 100; Chartier 1994, 53–​8; Day 2011; Fleming 2011, 53–​4, 63–​4; Galbraith 2008, 28–​9; Massai 2011; Wilson 2011. 59 See Beal 1980, part II: 128–​9; Cauchi 1983, 137–​68. 60 Harington 1591, A1a. See Cauchi 1983, 138; Gaskell 1978, 11–​14, 24. 61 Galbraith 2008, 29–​32. For Ernest de Sélincourt, it is “obvious … Spenser, or E. K., or both, took some pains over the production” of the Calender’s first edition (in Spenser 1910, x). Simpson (1970) shows that many sixteenth-​century authors corrected proofs. 62 June evokes Aeneas, 23a. October cites Virgil’s generic progression, 41a–​b; and The Faerie Queene commences accordingly (see Hamilton in Spenser 2007, 29n). By 1580, Spenser was already writing his own heroic poem comparable to the Aeneid: The Faerie Queene (Variorum, 10:17, 471–​2). 63 To enable effective description of different types of generic combination, the term “hybrid” should be reserved for cases in which “two or more complete repertoires are present in such proportions that no one of them dominates” (Fowler 1982, 183). 64 In assessing pastoral, Paul Alpers insufficiently allows for the eclogue (1996, 44–​50; contrast Fowler 1982, 109–​10), and misrepresents Fowler’s theory of literary genres. When defining mode, Alpers claims, Fowler overemphasizes

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“ ‘outer form’ at the expense of feelings and attitudes” (1996, 48). But Fowler actually maintains that “mode … evokes a historical kind through samples of its internal repertoire,” which involves, e.g., “ ‘attitude, tone, purpose,’ ” values, and mood. Also, “modes have always an incomplete repertoire, a selection only of the corresponding kind’s features, and one from which overall external structure is absent,” so that a mode constitutes, in effect, an adjectival modifier, providing “tinges of generic color” through the absorption of one or more characteristic motifs, themes, formulas, or qualities (1982, 55–​6, 66–​7, 106–​11; see also his Index, s.v. “mode[s]‌”). 65 See Borris 2000, Index, s.v. “pastoral”; 2010, 448, 450; McCabe 1995, 17, 35; Patterson 1987, chs. 1–​2; Pugh 2016, ch. 1; Scaligero 1561, Book 3, ch. 99; Sebillet 1548, 61b–​62b; Wilson-​Okamura 2010, 56–​8, 62, 64–​73, 253–​72. 66 See Driver 2003, 199–​214; Jensen 2021, 75–​6. 67 On French editions, see Engammare, “Préface” and “Répertoire bibliographique,” in Calendrier des bergers 2008, 9–​49; and Mortimer 1964, 2:156. On English editions, see Luborsky 1980, 43; 1981, 19, 47n24. For English facsimiles, see Kalender of Sheepehards 1979 (c.1585); Kalender of Shepherdes 1892 (1503). G. C. Heseltine’s’ 1930 edition is a pastiche useless for scholarly purposes, hence the full reference is omitted here. Luborsky and Ingram inventory the illustrations of the Calendrier’s English editions from 1536 to 1603 (1998, 1:673–​81). 68 Such as STC 22412, 22415, 22416, 22416.5. 69 This version of the Calendrier des bergers (Version One, as we may call it), wherein each month has one large illustration depicting the time of year and its activities, had at least five French editions (Nos. 8.1499.1, 13.1505.3, 27.1529.1, 30.1541.1 in Calendrier des bergers 2008, 44–​7), and likely a 1510 Nicolas Le Rouge edition (Mortimer 1964, 2:157). The 1499 edition atypically includes a preliminary verse dialogue of shepherdesses and shepherds. Cheaper to publish, Version Two, wherein the months have only diminutive pictures after January, was by far the most common in France and apparently standard for the English editions. 70 On Protestant historical calendars, see Davis 1981, 79–​80; Kolb 1987, 29–​33; Luborsky 1980, 66n37, 56. 71 For an inventory of illustrations in the Calendrier’s English editions between 1536 and 1603, see Luborsky and Ingram 1998, 1:673–​81. 72 Barclay 1518?, 1530?; Googe 1563. See Luborsky 1981, 14–​16. 73 Using “mode” in Fowler’s generically analytic sense defined at the outset of Section 4. 74 Oxford English Dictionary (OED), s.v. “calendar” 3. 75 On “emblem” in the sense “motto,” see Kennedy 1990, 651–​2. 76 A Spenserian comment discussed further in Appendix 1. 77 On Spenser and georgic, see Cheney 1993, 28–​9, 271n27. On hard and soft pastoralism in early modernity, see Boyd 2016, 1–​2. Little discounts georgic’s relevance to the Calender, but disregards the widespread circulation and knowledge of Virgil’s Georgics among sixteenth-​century literati (2013, 9–​10,

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Notes to pages 42–45

144), for whom Virgil had a definitively tripartite generic career as in Spenser’s own October (41a). 78 See Luborsky 1980, 43, 54–​7. As Sections 9–​10 explain, Luborsky errs in claiming that “the emblematic style was not chosen for the Calender’s illustrations” (1980, 42–​3). See also Major 1971, s.v. “Books of hours.” On historical calendars, see n70 above. On devices, see Kennedy 1990, 651–​2. On the ploughman tradition, see Little 2013 (though see n77 above). On the psalmic/ hymnic aspect, see Borris and Donaldson Clark 2011, 1169–73, 1176–80. 79 Although Heninger’s title is “The Typographical Layout of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender,” his argument, which he reasserts elsewhere (1990a, 645; 1990b, 246), involves its illustrations as well as its typography. 80 Endorsements or unreserved citations of Heninger’s claims for the 1571 Arcadia’s prescription of the Calender’s layout include M. Bland 1998, 100–​10; Brennan 2018, 19–​40; Brink 2019, 151n11, 158; Chaghafi 2015, 71; Galbraith 2008, 13–​14, 25–​33; Gordon 2018, 512; Hadfield 2012, 124; Knight 2013, Warren mistakenly 227n19; Rambuss 2001, 23; Stenner 2019, 149. Scott-​ states that Heninger’s “Typographical Layout” identifies “later Italian editions of Sannazaro’s Arcadia … as perhaps the key design influence” for the 1579 4; my emphasis). By likewise disregarding Heninger’s Calender (2011, 153–​ specification of the Arcadia’s 1571 edition, Reid similarly misreports him (2019, 70–​1), as does Brink (2019, 158). For Heninger, only Sannazaro’s Arcadia in the 1571 Varisco edition is the key design influence. Though observing that Heninger’s “comparison is inexact because the [1571] Arcadia edition contains one unit not in the Calender (a prose paragraph after the Argomento) and omits the emblem,” Luborsky accepts his claim that “both the Argument and the gloss are printed as in The Shepheardes Calender” (1990, 654). But plenty of eclogue series had such prose arguments in italics and the gloss is not printed as in the Calender, as I explain hereafter. Though noticing that the Calender’s woodcuts contain features not in those of Varisco’s 1571 Arcadia, Reid concurs with Heninger that the latter “indeed form the visual background” of the Calender’s pictures (2019, 70–​3). However, such backgrounds were common in the visual arts. 81 As comparison of the 1571 Varisco edition’s thirty-​eight pages reproduced in Heninger’s study with the British Library’s copy of the 1578 Varisco edition shows, the former was Varisco’s template for the latter. So much the same are the foliation and layout that page references for the 1571 edition would locate the same material in 1578, and vice versa. Catchwords and the number of lines printed per page may in some cases differ slightly. The main difference is that the 1578 edition uses a different set of decorative initials. But their design and scale are so similar to the previous set’s that the 1571 layout and foliation are preserved. 82 Though aware of Varisco’s reprinting of his 1571 Arcadia in 1578, Heninger focuses wholly on the former edition and allows no relevance to the latter (1988, 35; compare 35nn1–​2). 83 Here I describe the predominant effect (obvious, e.g., in the pictures for Egloga Quarta, Prosa V, Prosa VI, and Prosa VII). Some limbs are foreshortened for

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Notes to pages 45–53

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perspectival effects or mannerist manipulation of design. Italian sixteenth-​ century visual mannerism tends to reshape human bodies rather freely in expressive aspects. One common such approach, as in Jacopo da Pontormo’s and Girolamo Parmigianino’s pictorial practices, was to pursue an apparent elegance of form, gesture, and composition by elongating and tapering parts of the human body and especially its limbs. The pictures for Varisco’s Arcadias of 1571 and 1578 strongly tend to evince this esthetic, whereas the Calender’s shepherds are relatively robust and proportioned much more naturalistically. 84 Mayor as cited by Luborsky 1981, 19, 44, 48n25. 85 Luborsky considers “the calendrical in all its forms, including books of hours and almanacs, … the most pervasive visual element in the cuts to Spenser’s Calender” (1981, 19). Whereas Heninger claims that its pictures are “the same” as those of the publisher Varisco’s 1571 Arcadia except “only the signs of the zodiac have been added in order to confirm the calendrical form of Spenser’s eclogues” (1988, 36), the Calender’s woodcuts actually include much that is seasonally allusive, unlike Varisco’s Arcadias of 1571 and 1578—​beginning with Januarye’s bare trees. The pictures in those Arcadias show none, as if there is no seasonal change. 86 On early modern hard and soft pastoral, see, e.g., Boyd 2016, 1–​2. 87 Compare Patterson 1987, 106. 88 For illustrated editions of Virgil’s Eclogues in Italy and France, see Pasquier’s unfortunately incomplete inventory, 1992, 31–​3, 218–​37. 89 Printings of Sannazaro’s Arcadia with Porcacchi’s commentary before 1579 include editions of 1566, 1567, 1569, 1571, 1572, 1574, 1576, and 1578 (twice that year). 90 Heninger’s summary of the “obvious” debts of the 1579 Calender “to this volume [i.e., the publisher Varisco’s 1571 Arcadia]” alleges correlations that actually apply just as well to numerous other editions of Sannazaro’s text (1988, 36–​7; my emphasis). He claims that Sansovino’s appendix listing the Arcadia’s sententiae and proverbs in that edition constitutes “a handy precedent” for the mottoes concluding Spenser’s eclogues (1988, 37). But many sixteenth-​century editions of the Arcadia included such an appendix, the Spenserian mottoes are very differently deployed, and sayings like them were very fashionable in early modern culture (compare Kennedy 1990, 651–​2). “The envoy at the end” of the Calender, Heninger further claims, “can be matched by the farewell to his pipes, ‘Alla sampogna,’ by which Sannazaro concluded his pastoral exercise” (1988, 37). But many editions of his Arcadia included “Alla sampogna.” Heninger also asserts that “in ‘December,’ when Colin Clout says, ‘Here will I hang my pype upon this tree,’ that action is well depicted by the darkened woodcut that stands before Sannazaro’s envoy” (i.e., before “Alla sampogna”; 1988, 370)—​as if we should suppose that Spenserian line indicates influence by this particular picture in the publisher Varisco’s 1571 Arcadia. But this picture merely illustrates Sannazaro’s own explicit statement in “Alla sampogna” that he leaves his pipe hung up upon a tree (1961, 130.8–​9). Hence any edition of Sannazaro’s Arcadia that included “Alla sampogna”—​and there were many—​ could thus have inspired and informed that remark in the Calender. Moreover,

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Notes to pages 53–57

by 1579 pipe-​hanging had become a widespread pastoral topos (Kelsey and Peterson 1999, 250–​4), and so Colin’s gesture reflects complex early modern intertextualities, not necessarily any specific “source.” 91 Heninger 1988, 34–​51. His fanciful linkage of the publisher Varisco’s 1571 edition to Harvey requires that we first accept Heninger’s incorrect claim that the Calender replicates it, and much else. To connect that 1571 edition to Sidney, Heninger cites Sidney’s remark in his Defence that “ ‘some … have mingled prose and verse, as Sannazaro and Boethius,’ ” and observes that Sansovino’s introduction to Sannazaro’s Arcadia cites Boethius as a precedent for prosimetric works (1988, 41n16). But by 1579, at least five other editions of Sannazaro’s text had included Sansovino’s introduction and hence this comment. In any case, Sidney’s selection of Sannazaro and Boethius as exemplars of prosimetric writing was obvious, hence not likely dependent on Sansovino, because both were well-​known writers at that time. Heninger did not investigate how common it was to pair them in this respect in learned discussions of poetics. 92 On the Italian editions, see Villani 1989, 18–​19. Heninger asserts that the Calender was modeled on the publisher Varisco’s 1571 Arcadia to deliver “a flamboyant compliment” to Sidney (1988, 34). But such an endeavor was extremely improbable because this particular edition would have been either unavailable or very rare in England around 1579, so that either no one or hardly anyone would have known it. Heninger lacks evidence that even Sidney knew it (see n91 above). Compliments are devised to be noticeable, not vanishingly obscure—​especially when “flamboyant.” 93 Quoting Heninger 1988, 42; then Galbraith 2008, 25. 94 Marot, “Eglogue sur le tréspas de ma dame Loyse de Savoye” (1531), in Marot 1990–​93, 1:231. 95 Reid 2019; Shinn 2009, 2013. Studies citing or endorsing Shinn include, e.g., Crawforth 2011, 296, 312n16; Gordon 2018, 513n119; Hile 2017, 44; Jensen 2021, 91n2. 96 Hence Shinn subsumes the Calendrier in English popular almanacs and their alleged importance for Spenser’s Calender, as if they and the Calendrier are all much the same (2009, 139–​42). Similarly Reid 2019, 73–​4; Knight 2013, 130–​1. 97 See STC, 1:15–​30 and 3:261–​2; Luborsky and Ingram 1998, 1:4–​27, 673–​81. 98 On the almanac’s “fusion … with the prognostication in England,” see Capp 1979, 270–​4. 99 Compare STC, 1:15–​30 and 3:261–​2. The many copies of popular almanacs (not including the Calendrier) with readers’ annotations demonstrate their commonly practical applications. See Smyth 2008, 200–​44. 100 On readers’ comments in popular almanacs, see Smyth 2008, 203–​8. 101 Compare Jensen: “a love of doggerel … is essential for the study of calendars and almanacs” (2021, 8). 102 On “spatial pinpointing” in popular almanacs, see Chapman 2007, 1259, 1263. 103 On the endeavor of Spenser and others to revitalize English poetics around 1579, see Gair 1990, 55; Woods 1990, 710–​13.

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104 Luborsky and Ingram 1998, 1:4–​27. Between the same dates, 1536 to 1603, and including reprints and translations (but not versions of the Calendrier, a totally different category in STC), STC lists around three hundred English-​ language almanacs and prognostications (1:15–​30). Although many almanacs do not survive, the extant editions indicate that around half were at least somewhat illustrated, and half not. Compare Capp 1979, 228. 105 For the high incidence of the Zodiac Man in English illustrated popular almanacs, 1563–​1603, see Luborsky and Ingram 1998, 1:4–​27. 106 Surveying English illustrated books between 1536 and 1603, Luborsky and Ingram found 37 featuring the Labors of the Months, of which 22 are popular almanacs also included in the 152 that were to some extent illustrated (1998, 1:4–​27, 2:95–​102). STC lists around 300 popular almanacs in total for those years, of which 22 is about 7 percent (1:15–​30). 107 On the European ubiquity of the monthly Labors motif, see Henisch 1999; Major 1971, s.v. “Books of hours” (Nos. 247–​52). 108 See STC 2106, 2397, 2858 (bibles); STC 12253, 13496 (ornaments). On the age-​old religious associations of the monthly Labors motif, see Oliver 2017, 111–​31. 109 Compare Luborsky 1981, 48n26: “the almanac illustrations turn out to be no closer stylistically to those in the Calender than are those in certain emblem and fable books, and all of these are examples of, or derive from, mid-​century French book illustration.” 110 See Luborsky and Ingram 1998, 2:95–​102. They identify and describe nine different pictorial series of the Labors of the Months used to illustrate English books between 1536 and 1603. All except the ninth appeared in some popular almanacs, which used one of the other eight series. 111 Luborsky and Ingram 1998, 2:100 (Series 7). On which series were used in popular almanacs, see the previous note. 112 Hence, e.g., Henisch carefully distinguishes between generally rural aspects of the monthly Labors, agrarian aspects, and pastoral aspects, devoting a distinct chapter to the latter (1999, ch. 4). Yet Shinn conflates “pastoral” with “agricultural” in order to make Spenser’s Calender seem more like a popular almanac (2009, 139, 147–​9). 113 On the conventional correlation of astrological signs with the monthly Labors, see Henisch 1999, Index, s.v. “Zodiac Signs”; Major 1971, s.v. “Books of Hours” (Nos. 247–​52). 114 BCP, 35–​ 47, discussed 381–​ 2, 389–​ 90. See Chapman 2007, 1271–​8; Siegenthaler 1975, 432–​3. 115 See Chapman 2007, 1259, 1269–​70; Smyth 2013, 127. 116 When Reid says that “by the Shepheardes Calender’s publication, annotated almanacs had begun to appear in early modern English print” (2019, 98; my emphasis), she actually means almanacs printed with blank pages for annotation by their readers. 117 Reid’s two examples of blank popular almanacs (2019, 99–​101): A Blancke and Perpetuall Almanack 1566 (STC 401); T. H. 1571 (STC 454).

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Notes to pages 62–67

118 On the seventeenth-​century origins of mock almanacs, see Smyth 2008, 206. By “early sixteenth-​ century mock almanacs,” Reid actually means early seventeenth-​ century—​ after 1610—​ as her examples show (2019, 245n31). Although Jensen finds “no surviving contributions to the mock almanac genre until 1591” (2021, 89), even that text is a brief mock astrological prognostication in unillustrated prose, not really a mock popular almanac (Foulweather 1591). “Satirizing almanacs” became current in “the Jacobean period” (Jensen 2021, 89–​90). 119 On “sorts” and “blanks” as definitively different types of popular almanac, see Reid 2019, 98; Smyth 2008, 204. 120 See Critical Heritage, 56–​8, 62, 97–​8, 190, 204, 235–​6, 272–​5, 280–​1. 121 Compare Spenser’s October on Virgil as “the Romish Tityrus” who “left his Oaten reede” (i.e., his Eclogues) and “eft did sing of warres” (41a). 122 Such as Knight 2013, 127–​31; Reid 2019, 69, 98–​110; Shinn 2009, 139, 147. 123 See Section 4 on the eclogue. On the complexities of Renaissance humanist pastoralism, see, e.g., Patterson 1987, 133, and ch. 2; Piepho 2002, 77–​86. 124 But premodern and early modern treatments of poetry as a distinct type of discourse and one that requires special mentalities or knowledge were innumerable, whether favorable or not. Those dating from antiquity included discussions by Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Plutarch, pseudo-​Plutarch, Maximus of Tyre, pseudo-​Heraclitus of Pontus, and St. Basil the Great. Early modern editions of literary texts often included editorial apparatus providing such advice (as did the 1579 Calender). And treatises on poetics—​which are partly guides to understanding poetry and imaginative fiction in general—​abounded in early modern Europe (see, e.g., Weinberg 1961). Even England, a relative literary backwater in 1579, had some in print by that time, by Richard Wills or Willes, Henry Dethick, and Thomas Lodge. Sir Thomas Elyot had included such comment in his Boke Named the Governour (1531). Educated Englishmen could also read continental treatises on poetics in other languages, such as Latin, as Sidney did before writing his Defence. 125 See, e.g., Fraunce 1592, 3b–​4a; Harington 1591, ¶iiiia–​via. On early modern Horatian, Aristotelian, and Platonic notions of poetry’s capacities and responsibilities, focusing on the latter as appropriate for Spenser, see Borris 2017, ch. 1. 126 On Milton’s learned elitism, see Hammond 2014, ch. 2. On Spenser’s cosmopolitan learning, see, e.g., Piepho 2002, 77–​86. 127 For books produced by hand press, “format” bibliographically refers to the number of times a printed sheet for a book was folded, and thus how its pages were typeset in formes. “Folio” designates one fold, producing two leaves; “quarto” two folds, for four leaves; “octavo” three folds, for eight; and so forth. Hence “format” in bibliographical usage differs from “layout” (also called “textual presentation” or “mise-​en-​page”). See Suarez 2015, 213–​14. 128 See Dane and Gillespie 2010, 41. 129 On management of paper stock in the hand-​press era, see Gaskell 1972, 142–​3. 130 I thank John Bidwell for this assessment. 131 Compare Briquet 1968, watermarks 10848–​61, 11262.

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132 Watermarks involving crowned hands or gloves were numerous, as in Briquet 1968, e.g., 11324 to 11337, 11392 to 11398, and others. For a comparable circle or sphere, see Briquet 1968, 14064. For advice on the 1579 Calender’s watermarks, I thank Aaron Pratt, who identified these latter two for me, and John Bidwell. 133 On the early modern “association of italic with speech,” see M. Bland 1998, 99–​100. 134 On Singleton’s house style around 1579, see Galbraith 2008, 23–​4. 135 Galbraith 2008, 14–​23. His valuable study unfortunately accepts Heninger’s (1988) mistaken claim, critiqued in Section 4, that a 1571 Venetian edition of Sannazaro’s Arcadia was the Calender’s “bibliographical model” (Galbraith 2008, 13–​14, 25–​33). Although some of Galbraith’s own claims are thus compromised, others and his main argument do not require that assumption. On black letter’s early modern English roles, see M. Bland 1998, 93–​6; Carter 1969. 136 For black letter’s English roles after 1590, see Blayney 1997, 414; Lesser 2006, 99–​126. On this typeface’s importance for English bibles, see Green 2000, 62–​6, 518–​19. 137 Spenser’s Greek studies began early, at the Merchant Taylors’ School. See, e.g., Barker 1990, 468. 138 In his translation of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso published in 1591, Harington states that previous English illustrated books have “figures … cast in wood, and none in metal,” though there had been a few prior exceptions (A1a). On the relative simplicity of printing woodcuts as book illustrations in early modernity versus using engravings and etchings as such, see Griffiths 2016, ch. 11. 139 In Virgil 1556, most but not all arguments for his eclogues have a decorative initial; and in Sannazaro 1574, some eclogues begin this way and others do not. 140 On such Elizabethan controls upon discourse to shield the Crown, see Shuger 2006, 73–​4. 141 As advised by Leon Voet, Luborsky assumes that “there are only two explanations for so odd a printing—​either the work was done by amateurs or it was specifically commissioned, so that the printer did not have to bear the cost of the additional time” (1980, 67n52). Singleton had been printing books for decades, and so Luborsky chose the second alternative. 142 Singleton’s title pages in the 1570s varied. Some had a border or central substantial printer’s ornament. Some, for certain religious books, had a central biblical quotation or summarized the book’s edifying contents. 143 Compare also Singleton’s title page for another religious book, Riger 1579. 144 E.g., Jean-​Antoine Baïf entitles his third eclogue both “Le Voeu” and “Eclogue III” (1572, 5b). 145 See Mortimer 1986; Pasquier 1992, 31–​3, 218–​37. 146 “Emblem” in Spenser’s time could simply mean “motto,” and so his usage of that word does not necessarily refer to verbal-​visual emblems (Section 4). 147 The earliest surviving editions of Barclay’s five eclogues, published between 1518 and 1523, just contain one eclogue, and so they may not have been initially published as a collection.

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Notes to pages 85–93

48 “He who combines pleasure with benefit wins the vote of everyone.” 1 149 Hence van der Noot himself appears to have conceived and developed his text as a verbal-​visual creation. He based part of the pictorial program on a prior manuscript of Marot (Bath 1988, 73–​105). 150 See Corbett and Lightbown 1979, Introduction; Luborsky 1981, 44n8, 46n17, 47n21; 1991, 250. On Foxe, see Aston and Ingram 1997, 66–​142; Cummings 2007, 183–​99. Cunningham emphasizes his own “diligence … given in time of the Printing, to … divisinge sundry new Tables, Pictures, demonstrations” (1559, A6b). Geoffrey Whitney created some original emblems for his Choice of Emblemes (1586), and had presented an illustrated manuscript version to Leicester earlier (Manning 1988, 83–​107). The title page and illustrations of Harington’s translated Orlando largely derive from an illustrated 1584 Venice edition, itself indebted to a 1556 Venice edition. Harington presumably required the title page’s incorporation of the portrait of himself and his spaniel, chose the 1584 edition as the pictorial model (there were various alternatives), and specified usage of metal engraving (which he proudly considers innovative in England; 1591, A1a). 151 Though Heninger rejected Luborsky’s views in 1988, he provided no credible rationale for doing so (34–​5, 42n19). This present study’s assessment of Luborsky’s conceptions of the pictures’ origins supersedes my previous briefer ones in Borris 2017, 87–​9, and 2020a, 37–​9. The former overlooked Luborsky’s shifts toward further affirming Spenser’s direction of the pictures in 1990 and 1991. 152 Before 1600, emblem books printed in England either translated or anthologized continental texts and reused their blocks. Though not wholly derivative, Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes (1586) was not published in England. 153 Quoting McCabe 2016, 64; and on Spenser’s wealth, Hadfield 2012, 403. 154 Luborsky previously asserted that in November’s picture Colin has a moustache (1981, 40). Careful study of a high-​resolution magnification indicates no beard, and Luborsky’s perceived moustache is probably the mouthpiece of Colin’s instrument. 155 After the assassination of Julius Caesar, for example, Octavian long stopped shaving (Dio Cassius, 48.34). 156 On such procedures of early modern writers, see Corbett and Lightbown 1979, 9–​47. 157 See D. Bland 1969, 161–​7; Hind 1935, ch. 2; Landau and Parshall 1974, 9, 21–​3, 30. 158 Luborsky declares it “is clear” that the pictures’ “designers must have been told what traditions to imitate and in what way” (1981, 19). 159 The symbolism of Maye’s picture, for example, strongly modifies the accompanying verse eclogue. See Borris 2017, ch. 2; 2020a, 33–​57. 160 Luborsky’s identification of pictorially complex symbolism with the emblematic mode is somewhat misleading because such representation could be encountered not only also in imprese and other personal devices but throughout the visual arts, and antedated the invention of emblems between around 1520 and 1531. Complex pictorial symbolism should not be tied too closely to emblematic form, for it was a modal phenomenon manifested in diverse

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Notes to pages 93–105

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visual media, and in book illustration beyond emblem books (such as in the Hypnerotomachia, first published long before the first emblem book). To denominate this means of expression, we might better use the term “symbological.” Moreover, not all emblem books were always “emblematically” pictorial in Luborsky’s sense. For example, the pictures for Alciato’s emblems of plants—​the oak, laurel, etc.—​are straightforwardly “depictive” as Luborsky defines this mode, not “emblematic” in her sense. They just depict the plant and contribute nothing essential to understanding the emblem, nor any sense of mystery or complexity. Yet Alciato’s Emblemata is the seminal emblem book that established the foundational characteristics, options, and scope of the form. “Depictive” pictorial representation (in Luborsky’s sense) was always an option therein. On the other hand, some emblem books are much more visually esoteric and consistently so, such as Bocchi 1574. 161 On triumphal symbolism, see Beard 2007, 81–​ 2; Miller 2001, 48. Miller addresses Spenser’s Faerie Queene (92–​106), but not his Calender. On early modern laurel symbolism, see Trapp 1958, 227–​55. 162 Modifying Borris 2020a, which just says the May King’s consort is “ruffed at the neck” (39), as does Luborsky 1981 (35). Yet both this king and his consort wear a garment with concentric lines around their chests, focusing on their necks. Their attire thus differs much from the depiction of ruffs in both Aprill’s and Maye’s pictures. The May King’s and Queen’s garments are in this way depicted quite like the Roman triumphator’s in Figure 18. 163 For full discussion of the Anjou match’s verbal-​visual relation to Aprill and Maye, see Borris 2020a, 33–​57. 164 McLane 1961, 89 (repeated 283, 303, 316). Februarye and November were formerly supposed the Calender’s main means of engaging the Elizabethan Anjou controversy, as Wallace T. MacCaffrey assumes (1981, 264), following McLane’s chs. 4 to 5. Summarizing recent studies of this controversy’s relation to the Calender, Clare R. Kinney observes that Aprill now appears “important,” but does not mention Maye (2010, 172). 165 On the iconographically sovereign center, see Fowler 1970, ch. 2. 166 On the reference of Maye’s picture to both Plato’s Phaedrus and the Anjou match, see Borris 2017, 89–​110; 2020a, 60–​1. 167 Alciato, “Temeritas” (1577, 277–​ 8); Zsámboky, “Voluptatis triumphus” (1564, 172). On the Phaedran implications of these two emblems, see Borris 2017, 94–​101. 168 On the Muses, wisdom, and learning, see Conti 1567, “De Musis,” 7.15. On Cadmus’s creation of the Greek alphabet at the Muses’ spring Hippocrene, see, e.g., Boccaccio 2011–​, “De Cadmo,” 2.63. 169 On poetry’s transcendental associations in early modernity, see Borris 2017, 38–​44. 170 Here E. K. calls the Pegasian fount on Mount Helicon “Castalius,” whereas it was often named Hippocrene (“Horse’s Spring”). But it could also be called Castalia (e.g., Boccaccio 2011–​, 2:547, 549).

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Notes to pages 105–109

171 Quoting Fulgentius 1570, 136. Boccaccio summarizes relevant prior interpretations including Fulgentius’s in several entries relating to Pegasus, such as “De Pegaso” (2011–​, 10.27). See Lascelles 1959, 189. 172 On Pegasus and Spenser, see Cheney 1993, General Index, s.v. “Pegasus.” 173 See Boccaccio, “De Diana prima Iovis secondi filia”; and “De nynphis in generali” (2011–​, 5.2, 7.14); see also Conti, “De Nymphis” (1567, 5.12). 174 “Streames” of “trickling teares” appear in August (33b), and “flouds” of them in November, where the “water Nymphs” bear cypress in mourning (46a–​b). 175 On the pastoral topoi of hanging up and breaking pipes, both gestures of relinquishing art, see Kelsey and Peterson 1999, 233–​72. 176 In December’s picture, a path leads to the cottage on our left and apparently wends by Colin’s little hillock at his feet. The pictorial lines thus circumventing the hillock do not likely indicate a rivulet from the spring at our right because it appears localized behind the hillock, and they most obviously relate to the path leading to the cottage. In any case, whereas Colin’s feet in Aprill are directly next to the spring’s gushing source there, in December they are relatively much removed, and this difference expresses the suspension of his creativity. 177 The other four copies, relatively flawed in various ways, are at the Morgan Museum and Library (Figure 1), Trinity College (Cambridge), the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin, and the Huntington Library.

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Appendix 1 Spenser’s alleged pictorial naivety Although many have long credited this poet with an especially well-​ developed sensitivity to the visual arts expressed throughout his writings, since the 1980s some have supposed that his letter sent to Gabriel Harvey in April 1580 praises the Calender’s pictures in a way indicating much pictorial naivety. However, the context actually addresses the poet’s Dreames, not his Calender, and we cannot assume these comments are naive because the former text has long been lost and so we have never seen its pictures. The poet and Harvey included the letter at issue in their published correspondence printed later in 1580. Spenser’s comment on pictures appears within the letter’s postscript informing Harvey about two current works in progress: I take best my Dreames should come forth alone, being growen by meanes of the Glosse, (running continually in maner of a Paraphrase) full as great as my Calendar. Therin be some things excellently, and many things wittily discoursed of E. K. and the Pictures so singularly set forth, and purtrayed, as if Michael Angelo were there, he could (I think) nor amende the best, nor reprehende the worst. I know you would lyke them passing wel. Of my Stemmata Dudleiana, and especially of the sundry Apostrophes therein, addressed you knowe to whome, muste more aduisement be had, than so lightly to sende them abroade: howbeit, trust me (though I doe neuer very well,) yet in my owne fancie, I neuer dyd better: Veruntamen te sequor solùm: nunquam verò assequar. (Variorum, 10:18)

If, as some assume, the second sentence of Spenser’s postscript specifically addresses the Calender’s illustrations, his discernment of pictorial esthetic quality and technique would be, as they say, “bewilderingly” problematic, ignorant, tasteless, or “ludicrous.”1 They apparently suppose that the adverb “Therin” refers to the directly preceding proper noun, “Calendar.” Yet others apply Spenser’s second sentence to his Dreames, not to his Calender, and they are correct, for the context clearly shows that “Therin” refers to “Dreames.” Such loose grammatical reference was common in early modern English and in Latin, even in much more formal writings than familiar letters sent to close friends, and so we should scrutinize such ambiguities carefully according to context when interpreting them.

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Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

Identifying the purpose of Spenser’s postscript clarifies the context of his remark about pictures, and hence its meaning. This postscript primarily seeks to inform his friend about two particular works that the poet was composing at this time in 1580: first his Dreames, and then his Stemmata Dudleiana. It is not about the Calender. His Dreames is his postscript’s central topic until he turns to discuss his Stemmata, and so his comments on pictures logically refer to his Dreames. The letter’s date, April 1580, further contextualizes that remark and confirms its application to Spenser’s Dreames. The Calender had already been published in late December 1579, and so the postscript presupposes that Harvey already knows it. Spenser just adduces his Calender here as a means of comparison to clarify for Harvey the length of the poet’s Dreames: it is “growen … full as great as my Calendar.” The poet’s usage of this comparison only makes sense if he could take for granted that Harvey was already familiar with the Calender. Harvey was not only the explicit addressee of its dedicatory letter written by E. K. and dated April 10, 1579, wherein E. K. commends the book to Harvey’s care (¶iia–​iiib), but also the topical correlate of the character Hobbinol as E. K.’s commentary explicitly states (39b), as well as apparently the poet’s closest friend at this time. For all these reasons, Harvey would very probably have been one of the published book’s first recipients. Moreover, it is reasonably clear that Spenser had already consulted Harvey on the Calender before its publication, during 1579 (Section 3). Hence, at the point that this postscript was written in April 1580, Harvey would have already known the published book well, and Spenser knew he did. Accordingly, the postscript makes no sense if its second sentence describes the Calender. The latter does involve “many things … discoursed of E. K.” as well as “Pictures.” But it would be inane for Spenser to explain to Harvey, in this sentence, that the Calender—​a book that the poet already knew Harvey knew, and that had already been circulating in print for three months—​ includes comments by E. K. and pictures. These features of the Calender would have been self-​evident even to someone who had just glanced at it for only five or ten minutes in total. Instead, this sentence continues its predecessor’s comment on Spenser’s Dreames, so as to inform Harvey further about the contents of a text that he has not yet seen: this Spenserian work in progress, which is the topic of the postscript at this point. Spenser’s Dreames thus continued the experiments of his Calender by including a commentary by E. K. and illustrations. But despite the poet’s reference to Michelangelo, we cannot appropriately thus condemn Spenser’s pictorial taste, because we have never seen the pictures that were developed for his Dreames. Their existence at this time is very credible because this poet had just published a book with an illustrative program

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and was quite prolific. The allusion to Michelangelo appears to be at least somewhat hyperbolic raillery, animated by enthusiasm for the project, by desire to represent it favorably, and by the brio germane to a familiar letter to a close friend of cosmopolitan learning and tastes. However, we cannot assume that these pictures were like the Calender’s, for those were specifically devised to appear appropriate for the faux rusticity of humanist pastoralism. The Dreames would have played an altogether different literary and verbal-​visual game, which would have appropriately required illustrations quite different in style and technique. Spenser always considered the particular generic requirements of each of his creations carefully.2 The reference to Michelangelo indeed indicates that the illustrations for the Dreames differed much from the Calender’s in concept and style, and instead sought to appeal directly to visual connoisseurship. The latter book’s are instead rather crude in appearance, though sophisticated symbolically (Section 10). Hence the process of pictorial design and production for Spenser’s Dreames would have likely differed from his Calender’s. Whereas the poet probably devised the designs used by the block cutters for the latter (Section 8), his esthetically higher illustrative aspirations for his Dreames would likely have led him to retain skilled artistic assistance for rendering his pictorial concepts into accomplished exemplary drawings. Also, by “Pictures” in this postscript, Spenser probably means the designs for the prospective book’s illustrations, because production of the incised blocks (or perhaps plates for engravings, though those would have been exceptional in London around 1580) would not likely have been undertaken until publication were both assured and imminent, due to the additional expense. As matters turned out, Spenser’s Dreames was never published. Just as his verbal-​visual Calender was a rather expensive and risky venture for a stationer, that would thus have required a sponsor’s subsidy (Section 2), so too would his Dreames. It was probably never printed because its verbal-​visual contents appeared too potentially provocative, so that the prospective backer of the project abandoned and may have suppressed it. This personage was most likely Leicester, for whom the poet’s Stemmata Dudleiana would have been written, and his main patron at this time (Section 2), called “you knowe … whome” in the postscript. Spenser had already experimented with risky content in his Calender, and his immediately subsequent Dreames would have likely followed suit, but in a quite different vein, not pastoral (as the title itself indicates), and hence with illustrations produced to a higher stylistic and technical standard of visual realization.

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Notes 1 Including Barkan 1995, 332; Gent 1981, 2; Grogan 2009, 8n33 (qtd.); Hadfield 2012, 72 (qtd.). 2 Hence the Calender’s poetry intrinsically defines pastoralism’s place in the Virgilian generic hierarchy (41a), and Spenser published it with a commentary defining eclogues and their appropriate decorum (¶iia–​iiiia). His Letter to Raleigh published with The Faerie Queene situates this poem in relation to preceding exemplars of heroic poetry.

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Appendix 2

Enlargements of the Calender’s twelve original pictures

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Figure 25  Januarye’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 1a.

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Figure 26  Februarie’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 3a.

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Figure 27  March’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 8a.

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Figure 28  Aprill’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 11b.

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Figure 29  Maye’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 16a.

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Figure 30  June’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 22b.

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Figure 31  Julye’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 26a.

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Figure 32  August’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 31a.

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Figure 33  September’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 35a.

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Figure 34  October’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 39a.

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Figure 35  November’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 44a.

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Figure 36  December’s picture enlarged. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London: Hugh Singleton for?, 1579), 48b.

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References

For Spenser’s poetry, the default editions are this present facsimile for his Calender, Spenser 2007 for his Faerie Queene, and Spenser 1999 for his other poems. For his prose, Variorum is used and contextually specified. Certain fundamental reference works are cited by their abbreviated title; for these sources, see the list of abbreviations in the front matter of this volume. The Loeb series is the default here for classical references, and so only other cited editions of classical texts appear below. Sources are categorized as either primary or secondary. Only those cited in the Introduction, and not just in the preliminary list of figures or their captions, are included. Some primary sources are mentioned just in passing, with date of publication provided to clarify chronology, and these are not included. Many more, both primary and secondary, were consulted.

Primary sources Alciato, Andrea. 1577. Emblemata: Cum commentariis. Antwerp: Christoph Plantin. Baïf, Jean-​Antoine. 1572. Les Jeux. Paris: Lucas Breyer. Barclay, Alexander. 1518? Fyfte Eglog. London: Wynkyn de Word. STC 1385. Barclay, Alexander. 1530? Egloges. Southwark: P. Treveris. STC 1384. Belleau, Rémy. 1578. Oeuvres poétiques. Paris: Mamert Patisson. Beniveni, Girolamo. 1500. Canzoni e sonetti dell’amore e della bellezza divina, con commento. Florence: Antonio Tubini, Lorenzo Veneziano, Andrea Ghirlandi. Bible. See Geneva Bible. A Blancke and Perpetuall Almanack. 1566. London: Thomas Purfoote. STC 401. Boccaccio, Giovanni. 2011–​. Genealogy of the Pagan Gods (Genealogia deorum gentilium). Ed. and trans. Jon Solomon. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bocchi, Achille. 1574. Symbolicarum quaestionum. Bologna: Societas Typographiae Bononiensis. Browne, Sir Thomas. 2014. Thomas Browne. Ed. Kevin Killeen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bryskett, Lodowick. 1606. Discourse of Civill Life. London: Richard Field for William Aspley. STC 3959. Calendrier des bergers. 2008. Ed. Max Engammare. Paris, 1493; facsim. rpt. Presses Universitaires de France. [See also “Kalender.”] Calendrier historial et lunaire. 1570. Geneva: François Estienne.

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References

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Chapman, George, ed., trans. 1611. The Iliads of Homer. London: Richard Field for Nathaniell Butter. STC 13634. Conti, Natale. 1567. Mythologiae. Venice: Comin da Trino. Cunningham, William. 1559. The Cosmographical Glasse. London: John Day. STC 6119. Drayton, Michael. 1619. Poems. London: W. Stansby for John Smethwicke. STC 7222a. Foulweather, Adam. 1591. A Wonderfull, Strange and Miraculous Astrologicall Prognostication. London: Thomas Scarlet. STC 11210. Fraunce, Abraham. 1592. The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch. London: Thomas Orwyn for Thomas Woodcocke. STC 11341. Fulgentius, Fabius Planciades. 1570. “Mythologiae.” In Fabularum liber, by Hyginus et al., ed. Jakob Moltzer. Basel: Johann Herwagen, 119–​42. The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition. 1969. Intro. Lloyd E. Berry. Geneva, 1560; facsim. rpt. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Googe, Barnaby. 1563. Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonettes. London: Thomas Colwell for Raffe Newbery. STC 12048. Gosson, Stephen. 1579. The Schoole of Abuse. London: Thomas Woodcocke. STC 12097. H., T. [Thomas Hill?]. 1571. An Almanack. London: Henry Denham. STC 454. Harington, Sir John, ed., trans. 1591. Orlando Furioso, by Lodovico Ariosto. London: Richard Field. STC 746. Harvey, Gabriel. 1884. Letter-​Book. Ed. Edward John Long Scott. London: Camden Society, n.s. 33. Harvey, Gabriel. 1913. Marginalia. Ed. G. C. Moore Smith. Stratford: Shakespeare Head. Harvey, Gabriel. 2014. “Gratulationem Valdinensium libri quatuor” [1578]. In John Nichols’s “The Progresses and Public Processions of Elizabeth I”: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources, ed. Elizabeth Goldring et al., trans. Victoria Maul. Oxford: Oxford University Press, vol. 2, 575–​708. Heywood, John. 1556. The Spider and the Flie. London: Thomas Powell. STC 13308. The Kalender of Sheepehards. 1979. Ed. S. K. Heninger, Jr. London, c.1585; facsim. rpt. Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles. [See also “Calendrier des bergers.”] The Kalender of Shepherdes. 1892. Ed. H. Oskar Sommer. 3 vols. in 1. Paris, 1503; facsim. rpt. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892. [See also “Calendriers des bergers.”] Lodge, Thomas. 1579. “Reply to Gosson.” London: ? STC 16663. Lodge, Thomas. 1584. An Alarum Against Usurers. London: T. Este for Sampson Clarke. STC 16653. Luther, Martin. 1577. An Exposition upon the Cxxx. Psalme. Trans. Thomas Potter. London: Hugh Singleton. STC 16979.3. Mantuan. 1572. Eglogs. Trans. George Turberville. London: Henry Bynneman. STC 22991. Mantuan. 1576. Opera. Ed. Laurentius Cuper. 4 vols. Antwerp: Jean Beller. Marot, Clément. 1549. Oeuvres. Lyons: Jean de Tournes. Marot, Clément. 1990–​93. Oeuvres poétiques. Ed. Gérard Defaux. 2 vols. Paris: Classiques Garnier. Milton, John. 1644. Areopagitica. London: ? Wing M2092. Mulcaster, Richard. 1581. Positions. London: Thomas Vautrollier for Thomas Chard. STC 18253. Mulcaster, Richard. 1582. First Part of the Elementarie. London: Thomas Vautrollier. STC 18250.

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Suarez, Michael F., S. J. 2015. “Book History from Descriptive Bibliographies.” In The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Leslie Howsam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 199–​218. Trapp, J. B. 1958. “The Owl’s Ivy and the Poet’s Bays: An Enquiry into Poetic Garlands.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21: 227–​55. Tribble, Evelyn B. 1993. Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Villani, Gianni. 1989. Per l'edizione dell'Arcadia del Sannazaro. Roma: Salerno. Wall, Wendy. 1993. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wall, Wendy. 2000. “Authorship and the Material Conditions of Writing.” In The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500–​1600, ed. Arthur F. Kinney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 64–​89. Wallace, Andrew. 2010. Virgil’s Schoolboys: The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Watt, Tessa. 1991. Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–​1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weinberg, Bernard. 1961. A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance. 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams, Richard L. 2010. “Censorship and Self-​ censorship in Late Sixteenth-​ century English Book Illustration.” In Printed Images in Early Modern Britain, ed. Michael Hunter. Farnham: Ashgate, 43–​63. Williams, William Proctor. 1990. “Bibliography, Critical.” In SE, 91. Wilson, Louise. 2011. “Playful Paratexts: The Front Matter of Anthony Munday’s Iberian Romance Translations.” In Renaissance Paratexts, ed. Helen Smith and Louise Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 121–​32. Wilson-​ Okamura, David Scott. 2010. Virgil in the Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woods, Susanne. 1990. “Versification.” In SE, 710–​13. Worden, Blair. 1996. The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s “Arcadia” and Elizabethan Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Woudhuysen, H. R. 1990. “Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of.” In SE, 432–​3.

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Index

Page numbers in italic refer to illustrations. When “Calender” appears in an entry, it refers to Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender. When “Calendrier” appears in an entry, it refers to the Calendrier des bergers. This present study uses that latter title as an inclusive term to designate all exemplars of this originally French text, whatever their language of publication (33). Other studies give English versions of the Calendrier different titles. For example, Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-​Title Catalogue for this period gives them the collective title Shepherds’ Kalendar (3:261–​2). Aganippe 105 agriculture, farming 42, 45, 56, 58–​9, 60–​1 see also georgics Alciato, Andrea, Emblemata 42, 94, 95, 102, 123n160 Alençon see Anjou and Alençon allegory 35–​6, 39, 41, 64–​6, 74, 92, 93, 94, 95, 102, 105 almanacs 33, 43 blank 61 mock 62 popular 11, 34, 36, 54–​64 woodcuts in 58 see also Book of Common Prayer; Calendrier des bergers; calendars Alpers, Paul 59, 114–​5n64 Anjou and Alençon, François de Valois, duc d’ death 22 prospective marriage to Elizabeth I see “Anjou match” as Roman Catholic 1, 9–​10, 13–​14, 99–​101 visits to England 13–​14, 22

“Anjou match” 1, 9, 19 opposition to 13–​14, 17, 18, 25, 102 satire against 4, 10, 22, 24, 30, 99–​102, 108 Apollo and the Nine Muses 106 arabesque designs 71, 73 Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando furioso 30, 31, 81, 83, 86 Aristotle 120n124 Nicomachean Ethics 108 astrology 36, 39, 41, 55, 59–​61 signs and symbols 13, 36, 39, 56, 58, 59, 61, 89, 94 authorship 2, 3–​4, 7–​9 and print layouts 8, 23–​4, 31–​2 Baïf, Jean Antoine de 81, 121n144 Bale, John 11 Barclay, Alexander 15, 34, 84–​5 Egloges 15, 84–​5, 95, 110n1 Basil the Great, St. 120n124 Basse, William 63 Bathurst, Theodore 5 Bedford, Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of 14 Belleau, Rémy, Eclogues sacrées 79

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272

Index

Benivieni, Girolamo, Canzoni e sonnetti 2, 42 bibles 64 Protestant 58 use of black letter 70 black letter typeface 32, 38, 39, 56–​7, 61, 62, 67, 69–​70, 73 Blagrave, John 86 Blayney, Peter W. M. 15, 17, 23 block cutters 17, 24, 86–​8, 90–​1, 127, 112n41 Boccaccio, Giovanni 34, 53, 102, 105 Bodleian Library, Oxford 109 Boethius 118n91 Book of Common Prayer (BCP) 56, 64, 70 “Almanac for Thirty Years” 60 books of hours 33, 43, 56, 116n78 Botticelli, Sandro 95 Brant, Sebastian, Stultifera navis 15 Brink, Jean R. 18, 19, 30, 113nn49 and 50 British Library 109 Browne, Sir Thomas, Christian Morals 103 Bryskett, Lodowick 26, 71 bucolic poetry 33–​5, 41–​7, 53, 57, 67, 69, 76, 82, 83, 87, 91–​2, 93 see also eclogues and eclogue series; faux rusticity; pastoral romance; pastoralism Bullinger, Heinrich 11 Burghley, William Cecil, 1st Baron 18, 19, 26 Bynneman, Henry 7, 10, 13, 18, 25, 78, 86 Byrom, H. J. 9, 13, 14 Cadmus 103 calendars and almanacs 36, 39, 41, 56, 60 historical (Protestant) 33, 39, 40, 43, 56 illustrations for 37, 38, 40, 58, 59–​60, 87 see also Calendrier des bergers, illustrations religious 60 types of 33, 43

see also almanacs Calendrier des bergers 37, 38 compared with Calender 36–​41, 57–​8, 63 English editions 55–​6, 57 illustrations 28, 36, 37, 38, 39, 57, 58, 59, 63, 76, 89 influence on Calender 28, 33, 34, 36–​41, 57, 59, 63, 89 publication history 36 Spenser’s knowledge of 36, 38, 87 structure, re Calender 34 use of black letter 39 Calendrier historial, “Mars” and “Avril” 40 see also calendars, historical (Protestant) Calvin, Jean 11 Cambridge, University of 29, 31, 42, 65 Pembroke Hall (later College) 18, 27, 89, 95 Trinity Hall 25 Carter, Harry 70 Castalia 105 catechisms 70 Catholic Church 11, 13, 14, 41, 99, 100 Caxton, William 105 Cellini, Benvenuto, medal depicting Pegasus 106 Chamberlain, Francis 18 Chapman, Alison A. 60 Chapman, George 65 Chartier, Roger 1, 8 Chaucer, Geoffrey 33, 43, 73, 105 Canterbury Tales, The 17 Cheney, Patrick 104 Childe, Machabyas 18 “classics,” annotated literary, re Calender 33, 42, 82–​3 Colin Clout (character) as counterpart to Spenser 26, 108 E. K. and 28 illustration of 89, 104–​8 as laureate 30 and Leicester 19, 20 as lover 35, 102, 112n41 Luborsky on 88–​9

372

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Index namesake in Marot elegy 54 poetic skills 26, 65, 83 praise of 26, 83 relationship with Hobbinol 26, 114n52 song praising Elisa (Aprill) 72, 103, 104, 104, 105, 107 Colonna, Francesco, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili 95, 123n160 Compost et kalendrier des bergers, Septembre 38 Cousin, Gilbert, and János Zsámboky, edition of Lucian 83 Coverdale, Miles 11 Cuddie (character) 29, 65, 72 Cunningham, William 86 Cupid 94 Day, John 7, 13, 85–​6 decorative initials 71–​3, 116n81 “decorative mode” 92 “depictive mode” 92–​5, 96 Dethick, Henry 120n124 Devereux (née Knollys), Lettice 20 devotional works 11, 36, 60, 70 Dido (character) 72, 81 Drayton, Michael 4, 35, 63 Dryden, John 63 Du Bellay, Joachim 75 Dyer, Edward 19 E. K. (commentator) apparatus 6, 62, 67 Argument for Februarye 109 Argument for October 103 on the Calender’s title 41 on eclogues 62–​3 on English language, literary potential 3 “Epistle to Harvey” 24, 45, 57, 62–​3, 67, 69, 72, 75, 75–​6, 126 glosses 27–​30, 47–​52, 61, 67, 69, 71, 76, 82–​3 on Harvey 24, 26, 29, 126 identification of 7, 24, 25, 27–​30 list of Spenser’s pastoral models 53

273

on male same-​sex relationships 27–​8 on Muses 103 on poetry 3, 9, 28–​9, 57, 63, 65, 109 and quarto format 66 on references to other poets 34, 41, 53, 54, 63 on religion 11, 27, 28 on Spenser 4, 24, 29, 64 and Spenser’s Dreames 42, 125, 126 Early English Books (microfilm collection) 109 East, Thomas 22 eclogues and eclogue series 2, 3, 7, 15, 32–​6, 62–​3 dedications 45 and emblem books 2, 41–​2, 54, 84–​5 in English 3, 15, 62–​3, 84–​5 and genre theory, 33, 114–​15n64 illustrated editions 34, 44–​5, 47, 57, 59, 76, 84–​5 as literary form 32–​6, 64, 73 see also bucolic poetry; faux rusticity; pastoral romance; pastoralism Elisa (character) 20, 72, 82, 89, 96, 98, 103, 104, 107 Elizabeth I, Queen Accession Day 22 and “Anjou match” 1, 9, 13–​15, 19, 21, 22, 99–​101, 102 Harvey and 26 as head of church and state 98 and Leicester 9, 13, 19–​21 praised in Calender 4, 72, 99 royal arms of 100–​1, 100 satirized in Calender 1, 13–​14, 18, 20, 21, 22–​3, 98–​102 see also Dido (character); Elisa (character) Elyot, Sir Thomas, Boke Named the Governour 120n124 emblem books 2, 33, 41–​2, 54, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 93–​5, 96, 97, 102, 109, 122–​3n160 “emblematic mode” 92–​5, 122–​3n160 “emblematic symbol” 93, 95 emblematism see emblem books

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274

Index

“emblems” as mottoes 81 England royal arms of 101 use of black letter in 69–​70 engravings 71, 85, 86, 121n138, 122n150, 127 Enniscorthy, manor of, Ireland 21 epic 32, 35, 42–​3, 128n2 Estienne, Henri 78 Evenden, Elizabeth 85 Exeter, Thomas Cecil, 1st Earl of 19 fable books 33, 43, 77, 87 fables 99–​100 Platonic 102 Farmer, Alan B., and Zachary Lesser 15 farming see agriculture, farming; georgics faux rusticity 5, 41, 57, 88, 93, 127 Ficino, Marsilio, De amore 95 Field, Richard 31 Fleming, Abraham 15, 78 flight, imagery of 104 see also Pegasus Folger Library 6, 71, 109 LUNA Digital Image Collection 6, 109 folio format 66 “form,” “forms,” bibliographic, literary, and verse 7 “format,” bibliographic 120n127 Fowler, Alastair 33, 43, 59, 114–​15n64 Foxe, John 11, 86 Actes and Monuments 64 France avoidance of black letter 69 order of textual components 75 paper mills 67 title pages 75 François I, King of France 54 Fraunce, Abraham 63, 65 Fulgentius 105 Galbraith, Steven K. 52, 67, 69, 70–​1, 121n135 Gascoigne, George 86

Geneva Bible 70 georgics 33, 42–​3, 59, 115–​16n77 Germany, use of black letter 69 Giorgione Tempest 95 Three Philosophers 95 Good Shepherd, parable of 35 Googe, Barnaby 3, 77, 81, 84 Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonnettes 3, 15, 80 Gordon, Andrew 32 Gossenne, George 57 Gosson, Stephen 65 Schoole of Abuse 11 Greek typeface in Elizabethan books 31 Ronsard’s use of 75 use in Calender 8, 15, 26, 30, 32, 36, 70–​1, 83 Grey de Wilton, William Grey, 13th Baron 18, 19, 21–​2 Hadfield, Andrew 18 Harington, Sir John 30, 31, 65, 81, 86, 121n138, 122n150 Harrison, John, the Younger 22–​3, 32, 89–​90 Harvey, Gabriel 3, 7, 13, 19, 24, 25–​8, 29, 31, 41, 75–​6, 83, 86 book collection 31 and Calendrier 41 correspondence with Spenser 19, 86, 95, 105, 125–​6 E. K. on 24, 26, 29, 126 on emblem books and imprese 95 Familiar Letters 112n31 Gratulationem Valdinensium libri quatuor 26, 27–​8, 100 as Hobbinol 3–​4, 23, 26, 76, 114n52, 126 identification as E. K. 24–​30 publications 7, 13, 25, 26, 27–​8, 100 and Sannazaro’s Arcadia 53 subtitle to Calender 112n41, 113n49

572

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Index and Willes 42 see also E. K., “Epistle to Harvey” Hatton, Sir Christopher 26 Helgerson, Richard 2, 23 Helicon 105 Heninger, S. K. 24–​8, 33, 43–​7, 52–​4, 96 versus Luborsky 32–​3, 44, 54, 116n80, 120n151 heraldry 100–​1 Heresbach, Conrad 86 heroic poetry 32, 35, 42–​3, 128n2 Heywood, John, Spider and the Flie, The 84, 110n1 Hippocrene 105 Hobbinol (character) 3–​4, 20, 23, 26, 28, 76, 104, 107, 126, 114n52 Homer 8–​9 homosexuality, male 27–​8, 83, 114n52 Horace 83, 85, 109, 120n124 Odes 9 horse, symbolism of 102 see also Pegasus Hughes, John 63 humanism 34–​6, 64–​6, 70, 73, 83, 87, 93, 127 Huntington Library 109 hymns 32, 43, 64, 116n78 illustrative mode of Calender 92–​5 “Immerito” (pseudonym of Spenser) 1–​2, 3–​4, 15, 17, 23, 26, 43, 74, 83, 91 imprese 85, 86, 95, 122n160 Ireland 19, 21 italic typeface 67, 69–​70 Italy, avoidance of black letter 69 Jensen, Phebe 61 Julius Caesar 122n155 Kalendar of Shephardes, “April” 37 Kelen, Sarah A. 30 “kind” and “mode,” generic 33, 114–​15n64

275

Kingston, John 78 Kirke, Edward 27, 29 Kiséry, András, and Allison Deuterman 7 Knight, Jeffrey Todd 38, 39, 55, 63, 64 Knox, John 11 Labors of the Month motif 36, 38, 39, 58, 59, 60, 63, 112, 119n106 Lambin, Denys 83 Langland, William 73 Piers Plowman 43 Latin eclogues in 15 mottos 75 passages in Calender 36, 45, 47, 67, 76–​7 passages in Calendrier 57 and sixteenth-​century poetry 30 Spenser’s knowledge of 26, 65–​6 translation of Calender 5 and typography 70 usage in editions of Calendrier 36, 57 laurel, symbolism of 96, 97, 98–​9, 100 Leicester, Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of 9, 13, 14, 18–​22, 26, 75, 95 as dedicatee of Calender 19–​21, 75, 95 Harvey and 26 patron of Spenser 18–​22 probably the 1579 Calender’s publisher 9, 18–​19, 22 and Stemmata Dudleiana 127 see also Lobbin Leicester House, London 19, 20, 21, 25 Lesser, Zachary 9–​10 Lobbin (character) 20, 81 Lodge, Thomas 113n45, 120n124 Reply to Gosson 11 Louise de Savoie 54 Lownes, Humphrey 23 Lownes, Matthew 23, 66

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276

Index

Luborsky, Ruth Samson on Calender allusiveness of 32–​3, 43, 44, 54 “arguments” 77 calendrical aspect of 60, 117n85 decorated initials 72–​3 glosses 82–​3 illustrations for 86–​95, 96 influences on 32–​3, 36, 38, 43, 44, 54 pictorial inconsistencies 88–​9 pictorial mode “depictive,” not emblematic 92–​6 title page 73–​5 “To His Booke” and “Epistle to Harvey” 75 versus Heninger, 32–​3, 44, 54, 116n80, 122n151 on methods of pictorial representation 92–​5, 96, 122–​3n160 Luborsky, Ruth Samson, and Elizabeth Ingram, Guide to English Illustrated Books 55, 57 Lucian 83, 95 Luther, Martin 11 Exposition upon the Cxxx. Psalme 74, 74 Lydgate, John 73, 105 McCabe, Richard A. 21 McKenzie, D. F. 1 McLane, Paul E. 99, 110n8 Major, A. Hyatt 45 Mantuan (Baptista Spagnuoli Mantuanus) 13, 15, 30, 34, 35, 53, 64, 77, 78, 80, 102 Opera 75 Religio 76, 80 manuscript traditions 33, 43, 72–​3 Manuzio, Aldo 70 marginalia 82 Marot, Clément 34, 53, 54, 102 Oeuvres 75 Marsh, Thomas 78 Mary I, Queen 14 Maximus of Tyre 120n124

May King (character) 98–​9, 99 May Queen (character) 99 Merchant Taylors’ School 89 Meres, Francis 63 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 45 Michelangelo Buonarroti 125, 126–​7 Milton, John 65 Areopagitica 8 “mode” and “kind,” generic 33, 114–​15n64 More, Sir Thomas, Utopia 95 Morgan Library 67 Morrell (character) 88 Mulcaster, Richard 89, 91 Muret, Marc-​Antoine 28, 42, 82 Muses (as characters) 66, 103, 105–​7, 108 Nadal, Jerome 86 Nashe, Thomas 4, 26, 29 Have With You to Saffron-​ Walden 29 Netherlands, use of black letter 69 Octavian (later Caesar Augustus) 122n155 octavo format 66 Ovid, Metamorphoses 9 Oxford, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of 26 Page, William 1, 14, 15, 18 Palinode (character) 89 Palmer, Thomas, Two Hundred Poosees 86, 95 paper 67 paratexts 6–​7, 8, 24, 30 Paris (character) 23 Parmigianino, Girolamo 117n83 Parnassus 105 pastoral romance 33, 35, 46–​7 pastoralism in Calendrier 39, 41, 55, 59, 63 literary characteristics of 33–​6, 43 faux naïf quality of 5, 66, 93

772

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Index and genre theory, 33, 114–​15n64 humanist 5, 34, 35–​6, 127 scope of 35–​6, 102 Spenser’s version of 2, 3, 4, 5–​6, 23–​4, 32–​43, 54–​5, 59, 60–​6, 128n2 and typography 72–​3, 74, 76–​81 see also bucolic poetry; eclogues and eclogue series; faux rusticity Patterson, Annabel 34 Pegasus 106 iconography of 105–​7, 108 Perigot (character) 72, 81 Petrarch 34, 53, 102 Querulus 76 pictorial representation, modes of, for Luborsky 92–​5, 96 pictorial symbology 96–​108 Luborsky’s view 92–​5, 96 Piers (character) 29, 30, 72, 89, 99, 102, 103 pilgrimage books 33, 43 Plato 120n124 Phaedrus 102–​3 Protagoras 108 Platonism 42, 94, 95, 102 plays, Elizabethan, publication history 15–​17 “ploughman tradition” 43 Plutarch 120n124 poetry concrete 31 divinity of 9, 65, 103, 123n169 heroic 32, 35, 42–​3, 128n2 Sidney on 3, 64 Spenser’s promotion of 2–​4, 7–​9, 30, 34, 42, 64–​6, 82–​3, 103–​8 status of 64–​6, 105, 108, 120nn124 and 125 theories of 64–​5, 109, 120nn124 and 125 ut pictura poesis 109 Pontormo, Jacopo da 117n83 Poor Robin 62 Pope, Alexander 63 Porcacchi, Tommaso 47, 52, 83, 117n89

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poulter’s measure 81 primers 33, 43, 60 printers 8, 9–​11, 15–​17, 22–​3, 31–​2 see also “publisher”; stationers Privy Council 14 Protestantism 11, 13, 14, 27, 28, 33, 39, 43, 58, 98–​100 psalms 32, 43, 64, 116n78 pseudo-​Heraclitus of Tyre 120n124 pseudo-​Plutarch 120n124 “publisher” 9 see also Leicester; printers; stationers Puttenham, George 35–​6, 63, 108 Arte of English Poesie 31 quarto format 66–​7 Raleigh, Sir Walter 128n2 Reformation 39 see also Protestantism Reid, Pauline 54, 55, 56, 59–​62 Ringler, William 20 Rochester, Bishop of 26 roman typeface 67, 69–​70 romantic epic, Italianate 33 see also epic Ronsard, Pierre de Amours de Cassandre 28, 42, 75, 82 “Eclogue à Du Thier” 80–​1 Rosalind (character) 26, 35, 112n41 Rutland, Francis Manners, 6th Earl of 86 Saffron Walden 27 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre 13, 99 Sannazaro, Jacopo 30, 33, 34, 53, 102 Arcadia 33, 35, 43–​53, 79, 82, 83, 96, 121n135 “Argomento” 47, 48, 79 commentary presentation 47, 51, 52, 92–​3 “Ecloga sesta” 46 “Prosa quinta” 48 Sansovino, Francesco 44, 45, 117n90 annotations 44–​52, 83

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278

Index

satire Horace’s 83 Lucian’s 95 Mantuan’s 35 politico-​religious 96, 98–​101, 102 see also “Anjou match”, satire against; Elizabeth I, satirized in Calender Scott-​Warren, Jason 1 Shakespeare, William, Sonnet 107 ​8 sheep-​shearing 58 shepherds 41, 60 as characters in eclogues 35, 41, 43, 44–​5, 58–​9, 60, 62 Shinn, Abigail 54–​5, 56–​62 Shore, David R. 28 Short-​Title Catalogue (STC) 55 Shute, John 86 Sidney, Sir Henry 21 Sidney, Sir Philip 2–​3, 19–​20, 21, 26, 28, 29, 36, 53, 57, 63, 75, 96, 120n124 dedication to 19–​20, 75 family of 65 Defence of Poetry 3, 64, 118n91, 120n124 Letter to Queen Elizabeth 14 Old Arcadia 3, 81 prosody 114n54 Simier, Jean de 19 Singleton, Hugh and anti-​Anjou satire 1, 9–​10, 13–​14, 18, 20, 22 and Bynneman 13 Calender as anomaly in output of 8 and decorated initials 72–​3 financial problems 15 and first publication of Calender 9–​18, 22–​3 flees to Continent 14 and Harvey 25 inexperienced printing and publishing illustrated works 6–​8, 13, 15, 17–​18, 23–​4, 85–​7 inexperienced printing and publishing literary works 6–​8, 13, 15, 17–​18, 23–​4, 31, 81, 83

and Lodge’s Reply to Gosson 11 purchase of paper 67 sells rights of Calender to Harrison 22, 23, 32 and Spenser’s manuscript 8, 23–​4, 31–​2, 70–​1, 81 and Stubbs’s Gulf 1, 9–​10, 11, 14, 15, 17, 18, 75, 99 and title pages 73–​5 trial and imprisonment 1, 9–​10, 11, 14, 18 and typesetting in Greek 70–​1 Smith, Bruce R. 33, 35 Smyth, Adam 61, 63 Socrates 102 source studies 33, 43–​7, 52–​4 Spenser, Edmund alleged pictorial naivety 125–​7 Colin Clouts Come Home Againe 20 correspondence with Harvey 25, 26–​8, 95, 105, 112n41, 113n49, 125–​6 Dreames (unpublished) 22, 42, 82, 86, 125–​7 English Poete, The 69 Faerie Queene, The 3, 25–​6, 33, 54, 63, 88, 95, 114n62 dedication to Burghley 19 Letter to Raleigh 128n2 speakers 80 structure 31–​2, 33 typography 69 knowledge of Greek 8, 26, 32, 36, 65, 70–​1, 83 Letter to Raleigh 128n2 on poetry 2–​4, 7–​9, 30, 34, 42, 64–​6, 82–​3, 103–​8 as probable pictorial designer of the Calender 84–​91 Prothalamion 19 Ruines of Time, The 19, 107 as scholar 26, 65–​6 Shepheardes Calender, The 23, 72, 82 Januarye 26, 28, 45, 47, 72, 80, 88, 90, 92, 94 Februarye 45, 72, 92, 99 March 71, 72, 94

972

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Index Aprill 4, 5, 26, 28, 71, 72, 82, 89, 92, 96, 98–​100, 103, 109 Maye 4, 22, 71, 72, 88, 92, 94, 96, 98–​103, 109 June 26, 45, 71, 72, 88, 103 Julye 23, 45, 88 August 28, 45, 67, 71, 72, 81, 82 September 23, 72, 82 October 20, 29, 43, 69, 71, 89, 103 November 20, 30, 45, 72, 81, 99 December 45, 72, 80, 81, 88, 96, 107–​8, 109 Arguments 47, 69, 71, 72, 76, 77–​9 Epilogue 26, 28, 29, 30, 43, 92, 101, 108 as “square poem” 108 bibliographic features 6–​7, 23–​4, 31–​2, 61, 66–​85 colophon and printer’s device 12 commentary see E. K. decoration 71–​3 dedication to Leicester 19–​21, 75, 95 dedication to Sidney 19–​21, 75 dedicatory epistle see E.K., “Epistle to Harvey” designing the 1579 edition 23–​32 diction 8, 32, 66, 71 discrepancies in verse and pictures 82 and emblematics see emblem books “emblems” as mottoes 81 first publication 9–​23 identification of speakers 79–​81 illustrations 84–​95, 96–​109 see also woodcuts intertextualities 24–​6, 33, 43 known copies and surrogates 109 Latin passages in 36, 45, 47, 67, 76–​7 Latin translation of 5 prosody 3, 81 satire against “Anjou match” 4, 10, 20, 22, 24, 30, 99–​102, 108

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singing contest 67, 72, 81 source study 33, 43–​7, 52–​4 symbolism 14, 87, 91, 92–​4, 96–​8, 99, 100, 101, 103–​8 textual components 73–​83 title page 73–​5 titles of eclogues in 76–​7 “To His Booke” 29, 67, 69, 75 triumph of May’s King and Queen 96–​101, 97, 98 typography 52, 67–​73, 73–​83 watermarks 67, 68 woodcuts 5, 17, 22, 34, 38, 44, 56, 57–​8, 59, 71, 85, 88, 89–​91, 96 Stemmata Dudleiana 19, 125–​6 as student 25–​6, 27 Teares of the Muses 66 Virgil’s Gnat 21, 112n38 springs, symbolism of 103–​8 stationers 8, 9, 10–​11, 18, 25, 67, 69, 86, 87, 127 Stationers’ Company 10, 17 Stationers’ Register 11 Stern, Virginia F. 27 Stillinger, Jack 82 Stubbs, John 15, 18 Discovery of a Gaping Gulf 1, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17–​18, 75, 87 symbolism heraldic 101 laurel 96–​8, 100 Phaedran 102 springs 103–​8 triumphal 98, 99, 100 see also flight, imagery of; Pegasus Thenot (character) 28, 54, 65, 72, 103, 104 Theocritus 34, 53, 66 Idylls 35, 78 Thomalin (character) 72, 88 Titian, Sacred and Profane Love 95 Tityrus (character) 103 Tottel, Richard 75 triumphs, Roman 96, 97, 98, 103 Turberville, George 15, 77, 78, 80, 81

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typefaces 67–​73 typography 52, 67–​73, 73–​83 Valois dynasty 13 van der Noot, Jan 86 Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings 7, 13, 25, 84, 85, 95, 111n1 Varisco, Giovanni 44, 45, 47, 52 Venice 44, 53 Virgil 8–​9, 32, 53, 73, 76, 128n2 Eclogues 13, 15, 34, 35, 36, 42, 46, 47, 53, 64, 66, 77, 78, 88, 102 “Argumentum” 47 as model for Calender 32, 34, 35, 42–​3, 47, 53, 66, 76–​9 as model for pastoralism 34, 36, 102 preliminary features 80 Georgics 34, 42–​3, 58–​9, 115–​16n77 Opera 15, 78 Bucolica “Ecloga prima; Tityrus” 49, 79 “Ecloga septima; Meliboeus” 77

“Ecloga tertia; Palaemon” 50, 78 Pharmaceutria 76 Wall, Wendy 3–​4 Walsingham, Sir Francis 13, 14, 20 watermarks 67, 68 Webbe, William 26, 63, 83 Whitgift, John, Defense of the Aunswere to the Admonition 31 Whitney, Geoffrey 86, 95 Choice of Emblemes 84, 122n152 Willes, Richard 120n124 Poematum liber 2, 31, 42, 75, 83 Willye (character) 72, 81 woodcuts 5, 17, 22, 34, 38, 44, 56, 57–​8, 59, 71, 85, 88, 89–​91, 96 see also block cutters; engravings Zodiac Man 13, 39, 58, 60 Zsámboky, János Emblemata 96, 102 “Fortune’s Inconstancy” 97 see also Cousin, Gilbert

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