¹ For Sidney see The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), p. 3, and n. 15 below; for Lodge see Rosalynde and Prosopopeia, in The Complete Works, ed. E. W. Gosse, 4 vols. (1883; rpt. New York: Russell, 1963), i, 7, and m, 13; for Harington see Orlando furioso, ed. Robert McNulty (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), pp. 14–15, and Nugae Antiquae, ed. Henry Harington and Thomas Park, 2 vols. (London, 1804), i, 333.

² I disagree here with Muriel Bradbrook's assumption that Spenser's initial aim was a political rather than a literary career. Unlike Gascoigne or Harvey, the other figures she discusses, Spenser does not suggest that poetry is a way of displaying talents that would be used to better advantage in some other activity if the poet could only secure suitable employment. See “No Room at the Top: Spenser's Pursuit of Fame,” in Elizabethan Poetry, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 2 (New York: St. Martin's, 1960), pp. 91–109.

³ The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967), p. 22. Ascham's later exhortation to “the goodly wits of England” to “give themselves to poetry” is found in the very limited and limiting, but extraordinarily influential, context of his attack on rhyme and his plea for quantitative meter “to make perfect ... this point of learning in our English tongue” (p. 151). As I suggest below, to Spenser and to many of his contemporaries, this narrow door seemed for a time the only one that led to anything like a fuller poetic career. Needless to say, it opened instead on quarters more cramped than those they already occupied.

⁴ For a fuller discussion of this pattern and its place in the lives and works of Spenser's contemporaries, see my Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976). Other of my obiter dicta in the discussion of Spenser's English backgrounds, including my reading of Sidney, my characterization of the nature and influence of a humanistic education, and my understanding of the attitudes of such figures as Burghley, Ascham, Gascoigne, Lyly, Lodge, Greene, and Harington, are also worked out in greater detail in The Elizabethan Prodigals.

⁵ Philisides is most fully presented in Sidney's Old Arcadia, though he appears in the New Arcadia as well; Andruchio is a character in The Straunge and Wonderfull Adventures of Don Simonides (1584).

⁶ Thomas Watson, Hekatompathia or Passionate Centurie of Love, ed. S. K. Heninger, Jr. (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1964), p. 5.

⁷ The modern attitude toward Sidney was largely established by Kenneth Myrick in Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman (1935; rpt. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965). The comparable view of Spenser has been the work of many scholars and critics—first among them, C. S. Lewis, whose Allegory of Love (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936) is a spirited application of medieval and Renaissance ideas to a genuine critical appreciation of Spenser's poem. A typical, and in many ways admirable, product of this tradition is Mark Rose's Heroic Love: Studies in Sidney and Spenser (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), which, as its title suggests, finds love and heroic action triumphantly reconciled in both Sidney and Spenser. An appreciation of the more problematic relation of action to contemplation in Elizabethan literature was initiated by G. K. Hunter in John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (London: Routledge, 1962). My thinking about these matters is indebted both to Hunter's book and to Richard Neuse's article, “Book vi as Conclusion to The Faerie Queene,” ELH, 35 (1968), 329–53, where Hunter's views were first applied to Spenser.

⁸ For Lyly see The Complete Works, ed. R. Warwick Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1902), i, 65; for Harington see Nugae Antiquae, i, 333; for Fletcher see The English Works of Giles Fletcher, the Elder, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1964), pp. 74–77; for Rich see my “Lyly, Greene, Sidney, and Barnaby Rich's Brusanus,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 36 (1972/73), 105–18. Greene's repentance began in 1590 with his Vision, his Never Too Late, and his Mourning Garment and ended only with his death and the posthumous Repentance of 1592.

⁹ Harry Berger, quoted by Angus Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 23, n. 14. See also Fletcher's discussion, pp. 14–23.

¹⁰ An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (1965; rpt. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1973), p. 100.

¹¹ See Russell Fraser, The War against Poetry (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970).

¹² See John Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics,” Diacritics, 5 (1976), 34–40.

¹³ Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925–52), viii, 638.

¹⁴ Robert Durling, The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965).

¹⁵ Fulke Greville, Life of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Nowell Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), pp. 16–17. See also Thomas Moffet, Nobilis, or A View of the Life and Death of a Sidney, trans, and ed. Virgil B. Heltzel and Hoyt H. Hudson (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940), p. 74.

¹⁶ Apology, p. 125. The contradiction between this statement, which I take more seriously than do most other critics, and Sidney's praise of Heliodorus' “sugared invention of that picture of love in Theagenes and Chariclea” as “an absolute heroical poem” (p. 103) provides one more example of the difficulty English poets experienced in placing foreign-inspired poetic monuments in an English moral landscape. What Heliodorus had done, Sidney could do only at the risk of moral rebuke.

¹⁷ Quotations are from The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, 11 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1932–57). I have regularized the letters u, v, i, and j and printed proper names in roman type. Otherwise spelling follows that of the Variorum.

¹⁸ Sola quia interea nullum paris Anglia vatem? / Versifices multi, nemo poeta tibi est.“ C. Downhale in Watson's Hekatompathia, p. 12.

¹⁹ John W. Moore, Jr., “Colin Breaks His Pipe: A Reading of the ‘January’ Eclogue,” English Literary Renaissance, 5 (1975), 3–24, reviews previous criticism of this aspect of the Shepheardes Calender and suggests that the January eclogue and, more particularly, Colin's breaking of his pipe, with which it ends, “introduces us to the issue which gives unity to the Calender”—the nature of Colin's poetic vocation and the question of his fitness for it. I agree and would suggest further that the series as a whole fails either to resolve the issue or to answer the question.

²⁰ Hamilton, 'The Argument of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender“ ELH, 23 (1956), 175. See also Durr, ”Spenser's Calendar of Christian Time,“ ELH, 24 (1957), 294–95: ”The Shepheardes Calender is the young Spenser's declaration to the world that he knows to what heights he is called, to what purpose he has been graced, and that he is ready to undertake the task ... Colin is not Spenser; at most he is what Spenser or any other gifted poet, or pastor, might become. Colin is ruined, but Spenser is not.“

²¹ A Discourse of English Poésie (1586); rpt. in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1904), i, 231.

²² I agree with Paul Alpers that “it is simply absurd to say, as recent critics do, that the poet who speaks [these] lines has abandoned his calling.” But I think that Alpers goes too far in writing them off as “the traditional diffidence of the literary shepherd.” There is too much genuine uncertainty, particularly when these lines are read in the context of the June eclogue and of the Shepheardes Calender as a whole, to dismiss as a merely conventional stance the problematic aspect of Spenser's presentation of himself as poet. See “The Eclogue Tradition and the Nature of Pastoral,” College English, 34 (1972/73), 365.

²³ Josephine Waters Bennett, The Evolution of The Faerie Queene (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1942), and W. J. B. Owen, “The Structure of the Faerie Queene,” PMLA, 68 (1953), 1079–100.

²⁴ Spenser's Latin epistle is translated in the Variorum, x, 256–58.

²⁵ Variorum, x, 473. The passage as a whole shows not only Harvey's feeling that poetry should be abandoned for more serious pursuits but also his sense that Spenser might not agree. It is translated in F. I. Carpenter, A Reference Guide to Edmund Spenser (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1923), p. 58, as follows: “Do, I beg you, except with me (and I am bound by a solemn oath and vow to give up the cup of love and at the very first opportunity to drain the cup of law)—do, I repeat, bid farewell to nonsense and trifling songs of this kind (which, nevertheless, I believe, will seem to you one of the things that cannot be done).”

²⁶ In discussing Petrarch's own title for the Rime, Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, Nicola Zingarelli remarks, “Le cose volgari o in volgare sono poésie in lingua italiana; ma volgare implica anche un senso inerente alia passione giovanile ed erronea, come dicesse ‘poésie amorose.‘ ... In volgare si fanno soltanto poesie di amore.” Le Rime de Francesco Petrarca (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1964), p. 27.

²⁷ Compare the political dreams of revived imperium, frustrated for Petrarch in the misadventure of Cola di Rienzo and hardly more successful in the later pretensions of Charles v, Henri iii, Henri iv, or Elizabeth. See Francis A. Yates, Astrea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1975).

²⁸ Prothalamion, ll. 8–9. See also Ruines of Time, ll. 435–48; Teares of the Muses, ll. 79–90; and Mother Hubberds Tale, ll. 892–918.

²⁹ Spenser had, of course, given Burghley more direct cause for offense in Mother Hubberds Tale. But for the poet to have alluded to that political source of disfavor would have been to cast himself as a satirist—a role that he studiously avoided except in a few passages of Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, and even there, as Thomas R. Edwards has remarked, “satire is an inadequate vehicle for the whole of Colin's experience” (Imagination and Power: A Study of Poetry on Public Themes [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971], p. 58). Spenser keeps Colin out of the satiric eclogues of the Shepheardes Calender and goes to quite elaborate lengths to dissociate himself as poet from Mother Hubberds Tale. In this he differs markedly from poets of the next generation—Hall, Marston, and Jonson—who seize on satire as the best way of escaping the role of lover-poet.

³⁰ Hymne of Heavenly Love, ll. 8–12. See also Hymne of Heavenly Beautie, ll. 288–94.

³¹ The following inscription, based on Ovid's Tristia (i.ix.5), occurs in a manuscript of Gower owned in the sixteenth century by the Countess of Warwick:

Rosemond Tuve has argued for Spenser's authorship of the inscription and has related it to the retraction of his hymns of Love and Beauty. See “‘Spenserus,‘” in Essays in English Literature ... Presented to A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed. Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1964), pp. 3–25; rpt. in Essays by Rosemond Tuve, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 139–63.

³² Compare the passages in the first books of the Faerie Queene, where Spenser suggests that fatigue is the greatest burden, ease after toil the greatest temptation (e.g., i.ix.40; i.vii.5; ii.xii.32; iii.i.58). Most often, as in Spenser's own weariness with the Faerie Queene, sensual pleasure combines with rest to oppose heroic activity.

³³ It is curious that, though love does oppose public duty in the Amoretti, it does not oppose religion. See Sonnets 9, 22, 53, 55, and 61. Only in Sonnet 72 is there anything approaching a conflict between the two, and even here it is extraordinarily muted. In this, too, Spenser is very unlike his contemporaries.

³⁴ On the differing relations of Books v and vi to history, see Michael O'Connell, Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser's Faerie Queene (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1977), Chs. v and vi.

³⁵ “The Truancy of Calidore,” in That Soveraine Light: Essays in Honor of Edmund Spenser, ed. William R. Mueller and Don Cameron Allen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1952), p. 68.

³⁶ On the Isis Church passage, see Frank Kermode, Renaissance Essays (1971; rpt. London: Collins, 1973), pp. 49–59.

³⁷ The split “between mythic success and palpable disappointment” in Books v and vi is suggestively explored by Judith H. Anderson in The Growth of a Personal Voice: Piers Plowman and The Faerie Queene (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), which I saw only after completing this essay. Anderson's perceptive remark that “personality becomes a more explicit, self-conscious concern in these Books” and that “unity of experience and wholeness of being also become more problematical” (p. 154) might with certain modifications be extended to cover the beginning and the end of Spenser's career generally. When he is least sure of himself, Spenser is most intent on himself.

³⁸ See, for example, the readings of Graham Hough, A Preface to The Faerie Queene (1962; rpt. New York: Norton, 1963), pp. 201–12; Kathleen Williams, Spenser's World of Glass (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), pp. 189–223; and Maurice Evans, Spenser's Anatomy of Heroism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 209–28.

³⁹ Harry Berger, Jr., “The Prospect of Imagination: Spenser and the Limits of Poetry,” Studies in English Literature, 1 (1961), 93, offers a succinct summary of the problems posed by the scene on Mt. Acidale: “It is a digression from a digression. It is unrelated to the main quest, has no effect on it, does not noticeably alter the hero after he leaves Colin.” For the opposing argument—i.e., that Calidore does undergo an education in true courtesy on Mt. Acidale—see Humphrey Tonkin, Spenser's Courteous Pastoral (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), pp. 111–55.

⁴⁰ “But now I come into my course againe, / To his atchievement of the Blatant beast.” Note that Calidore's “atcbievement” is Spenser's “course.” The “I” here is clearly Spenser the epic poet and not Colin the pastoral poet, who has been left behind on Mt. Acidale and whose “course” has nothing to do with heroic “atchievement.”

⁴¹ Spenser's Allegory: The Anatomy of Imagination (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 366–70. The examples of retirement mentioned in my next few paragraphs were first suggested by MacCaffrey.

⁴² Donald Cheney has suggested the connection between the poet and the Redcross knight in Spenser's Image of Nature: Wild Man and Shepherd in The Faerie Queene (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 18–22.

⁴³ Berger points out that “the most frequently repeated motif [in Book vi] is ... that of a character surprised in a moment of diversion” (“Prospect,” p. 103).

⁴⁴ Daniel's and Drayton's remarks are reprinted in Spenser: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. M. Cummings (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), pp. 75, 79. The importance of fiction to Spenser's poetic accomplishment is discussed by A. C. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), pp. 15–29. See also William Nelson, Fact or Fiction: The Dilemma of the Renaissance Storyteller (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973).