On behalf of the nation the new poet ‘hath laboured to restore, as to theyr rightfull heritage such good and naturall English words, as haue ben long time out of vse and almost cleare disherited’. The matter was politically charged: at a time when ‘fayre Elisa’, the Queen whose unsullied virginity had come to symbolize the country’s territorial and spiritual integrity, was preparing to wed the ‘alien’, Catholic and French-speaking Duc d’Alençon, the preface assailed those ‘whose first shame is, that they are not ashamed, in their own mother tonge straungers to be counted and alienes’. ‘Why a Gods name’, Spenser asked the following year, ‘may not we… haue the kingdome of our owne Language?’ (cf. Prose, 16). From the outset linguistic and political sovereignty go hand in hand, and the political import of the Calender is most potently conveyed through the assurance of its wordplay. To write good English verse was to assert true English identity, to oppose the linguistic miscegenation of those who ‘made our English tongue, a gallimaufray or hodgepodge of al other speches’. The play on ‘gall’ in ‘gallimaufray’ is a shrewd hit for as The Faerie Queene reminds us ‘old Gall… now is cleeped France’ (4. 11. 16). Apropos the French match we learn that, ‘Of Hony and of Gaule in loue there is store: / The Honye is much, but the Gaule is more’ (March, 122–3). Never had mere orthography been so politically loaded; Elizabeth’s ‘Gaule’ was England’s ‘gall’ and the ‘natural speach’ of all true Englishmen, ‘which together with their Nources milk they sucked’, proclaimed its antipathy to the proposed misalliance.

The Shepheardes Calender serves not merely as a precursor to The Faerie Queene but as a pre-emptive strike in defence of the beleaguered ‘faery’ mythology, which would later inform it. For this reason Spenserian pastoral is confrontational rather than escapist and more inclined to chart the landscape of wish-frustration than that of wish-fulfilment. As the ‘envoy’ indicates, the poetry is acutely responsive to the ‘ieopardee’ of the moment and draws nervous energy from the sense of peril. Just a few months previously John Stubbs had lost his right hand for penning the notorious anti-Alençon tract, The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf Whereinto England is like to be Swallowed (1579). His printer was Hugh Singleton, the printer of the Calender, and Spenser took a considerable risk in echoing Stubbs’s condemnation of those who ‘gape for greedie governaunce / And match them selfe with mighty potentates’ (Februarie, 121–2). The overt target is the pride of worldly prelates but the play on ‘match’, in such close conjunction with the Stubbsian ‘gape’, is unmistakable. Even in the Aprill eclogue, at the height of apparently seamless panegyric, the choice of Virgilian emblems pulls the ragged threads of discontent: ‘O quam te memorem virgo? / O dea certe’. In the first book of the Aeneid Venus appears to her son disguised as a nymph of Diana. Both he, and the epic’s subsequent Christian interpreters, are puzzled by her identity: does she represent chastity, or licence disguised as chastity? Is she really a virgin (virgo) or a goddess (dea) ? Should the first emblem be translated as ‘what shall I call you, maiden?’ or ‘shall I call you maiden?’: the ‘vision’ is strongest at the point at which it threatens, like Virgil’s Venus, to evaporate into thin air. The ‘pastoral of power’ feeds upon the anxieties of impotence.

In the aptly entitled collection of Complaints published in 1591 vision and satire coalesce. That the volume should have appeared shortly after the first instalment of The Faerie Queene should occasion little surprise since it illustrates the adverse circumstances in which Spenser’s more idealized aspirations struggle for survival. The label of ‘court’ poet so often attached to him is grossly misleading for, as Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595) powerfully demonstrates, he was more of an outsider than a laureate. Consigned to the ‘waste’ landscape of Elizabethan Ireland with its ‘griesly famine’ and ‘outlawes fell’ (314–19), he wrote from the margins not the centre. While Virgil is frequently invoked as the model for his career, the despondent ghost of Ovid, driven into exile by Virgil’s imperial patron, echoes in the subtextual background. Colin’s voyage from Ireland to England is ironically replete with echoes of Ovid’s Tristia thereby enforcing the ambiguity of the poem’s title. Like Ovid, Spenser seldom played safe. The Shepheardes Calender risked prosecution, Mother Hubberds Tale was called in, the first instalment of The Faerie Queene gave offence to Lord Burghley, and the second was banned in Scotland by James VI. Spenser’s famous assertions of epic weariness, so publicly canvassed in the Amoretti (sonnets 33 and 80), gesture towards the most poignant Ovidian expression of despair: ‘think not all my work is trivial; oft have I set grand sails upon my bark. Six books of Fasti and as many more have I written… This work did I recently compose Caesar, under thy name, dedicated to thee, but my fate has broken it off’ (Tristia, 2. 547–52).