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The Implications of Form for The Shepheardes Calender

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

S. K. Heninger Jr.
S. K. Heninger Jr.*
Affiliation:
Duke University
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Extract

The Shepheardes Calender is the most avowedly eclectic masterpiece in English. Spenser acknowledges several borrowings in the names of the speakers and in the emblems, as well as in the lines of the poem themselves; and E. K. points to many more. The only really new ingredient is the form, a framework which links the separate eclogues into a connected series. Everything else is conscious imitation of a convention, or at least of a precedent. Therefore the implications of the form become salient in any attempt to assess the distinctive genius of the work.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 9 , 1962 , pp. 309 - 321
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1962

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References

1 Only W. W. Greg has made anything of this framework, offering criticism based on its ‘architectural design … [its] geometrical pattern'; see Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (London, 1906), pp. 84 ff. See also A. C. Hamilton, ‘The Argument of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender’, ELH XXIII (1956), 171-182, who suggests that the arrangement of eclogues reveals Spenser's ‘rejection of the pastoral life for the truly dedicated life in the world’ (p. 181).

2 Cf., for example, Beda Venerabilis, Opera (Basle, 1563), 1, 243-265. Wandalbert's Martyrologium most recently appears in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina cxxi, 586-623.

3 In Ultima pars operis (Lyons, 1516), aiii.

4 ‘Spenser and the Zodiake of Life’, JEGP XXXIV (1935), 1-19.

5 The hexaemeral tradition from classical times to the Renaissance has been outlined by Frank E. Robbins, The Hexaemeral Literature: A Study of the Greek and Latin Commentaries on Genesis (Chicago, 1912). See also The Works ofGuillaume de Salluste Sieur Du Bartas, ed. Urban T. Holmes Jr. et al. (Chapel Hill, N. C , 1935-1940), 1, 111-116; and Maury Thibaut de Maisières, Les Poèmes inspirés du début de la Génèse a l'époque de la Renaissance (Louvain, 1931).

6 Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1913), p. 161. The book is Dionysius Periegetes’ Surveye of the World. The title page of this volume bears Harvey's signature and the date 1574, though this seems too early for a reference to du Bartas's Sepmaine.

7 Bartas his Devine Weekes and Workes (London, 1608), p. 388.

8 Works, ed. William Warburton (London, 1751), I, 43.

9 See Rosemond Tuve, Seasons and Months: Studies in a Tradition of Middle English Poetry (Paris, 1933), passim, esp. pp. 122-170. There is a bibliography on this welldocumented subject in Nils Erik Enkvist, The Seasons of the Year: Chapters on a Motif from Beowulf to The Shepherd's Calendar (Helsingfors, 1957), p. 184.

10 The Kalender of Shepherdes, ed. H. Oskar Sommer (London, 1892), hjv.

11 Moralia, tr. Philemon Holland (2d ed., London, 1657), p. 670 [Opinions of Philosophers, n, 1].

12 For complete description of the Pythagorean tetrad and several Renaissance examples of it, see my article, ‘Some Renaissance Versions of die Pythagorean Tetrad', Studies in the Renaissance VIII (1961), 7-33.

13 Cf. Spenser, An Hymne of Love, ll. 78-91.

14 See figure 9 of ‘Renaissance Versions of the Pythagorean Tetrad’ (cf. note 12 above).

15 See figure 12 of ‘Renaissance Versions of the Pythagorean Tetrad’ (cf. note 12 above).

16 Kalender of Shepherdes, ed. Sommer, III, 99-100. Cf. The Compost of Ptholomeus (London, 1532?) [S.T.C. 20480], c2; Godfridus, Boke of knowledge (London, 1530?) [S.T.C. 11931], G4 fF.; and Erra Pater, Pronostycacion for ever (London, 1540?) [S.T.C. 10517], A3V-A7V.

17 Fol. 39v; cf. Charles F. Mullett, ‘Thomas Walkington and His “Optick Glasse” ‘, his XXXVI (1946), 99. The same cut embellishes the title page of Robert Anton's The Philosophers Satyrs (London, 1616); reproduced by Allardyce Nicoll, The Elizabethans (Cambridge, 1957), p. 21.

18 See note 10 above. The woodcut is reproduced as figure 13 of ‘Renaissance Versions of the Pythagorean Tetrad’ (cf. note 12 above).

19 (London, 1598), A2.

20 (London, 1575), fol. 17.

21 Ibid., fol. 190. Levinus Lemnius cites Pythagoras from this passage in the Metamorphoses ﹛Touchstone of Complexions, tr. Thomas Newton, 3d ed., London, 1581, fol. 30v).

22 Tr. Douglas M. Moffat (New York, 1908, Yale Studies in English 36), Prose III, 72-84.

23 See Minor Poems, ed. Henry N. MacCracken (London, 1934, E.E.T.S. 192), pp. 729-734. Cf. Tuve, Seasons and Months, p. 68.

24 Devine Weekes and Workes, p. 42.

25 See figure 15 of'Renaissance Versions of the Pythagorean Tetrad’ (cf. note 12 above).

26 This volume is described in considerable detail by Elbert N. S. Thompson, ‘Between the Shepheards Calender and the Seasons’, PQ I (1922), 23-30.

27 Ernest de Selincourt, ed., The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser (Oxford, 1912), p. xix.

28 Hamilton suggests the associations of pastoral and the Nativity (‘Argument of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender', p. 174).

29 Whetstone of witte (London, 1557), bIv.

30 See the editor's note on ‘Shepheardes’ in Edmund Spenser, Workes, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al. (Baltimore, 1932-1949), Minor Poems, I, 235. The ambiguous spelling ‘shepheardes', rather than ‘shepherds'’ or ‘shepherd's', is essential, I say, to retaining the double reference here to both a universal and an individual.

31 Sir Philip Sidney, Complete Works, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, 1922), II, 141.

32 On the context for this image of the wheel, see the notes for this line in Spenser, Works, ed. Greenlaw, III, 257.