Whereas Ovid suggests that all twelve books have at least been drafted, Spenser indefinitely defers the great project in honour of his ‘dear dred’ – an oxymoron which perfectly conveys the ambivalence of his attitude towards one of the primary sources of his inspiration.

In Colin Clouts Come Home Againe as in The Shepheardes Calender amorous complaint encodes political discontent. Both works, like most of the Spenserian canon, are relentlessly dialectical and self-reflexive. In the Calender even Colin’s monologues give vent to the frustrated dialogues of a divided self, reflecting the persona’s own divided genesis in the garrulous, aggressive Colyn Cloute of John Skelton’s court satires and the pensive, elegiac Colin of Clément Marot’s plaintive pastorals. Writing his Observations on the Faerie Queene in 1754 Thomas Warton perceptively devoted a whole chapter to the unusual subject of ‘Spenser’s Imitations of Himself’ in the belief that it would help to illustrate ‘how variously he expresses the same thought’. But, as Warton himself demonstrates, the ‘thought’ is never quite the ‘same’. The Spenserian imagination is obsessively dialogical, constantly interrogating, revising and redacting its material in a diversity of contexts, genres and styles. And yet, the very strategies which appear to offer an escape from solipsism often serve to compound it. E.K.’s identification of Spenser with Colin Clout, ‘vnder which name this Poete secretly shadoweth himself’, is richly disingenuous, designed to make the unwary forget that Spenser created, and speaks through, all of the Calender’s other personae, that he engineered all of their conflicts and disagreements, that he shunned dialectical closure in his pastoral verse as thoroughly as he avoided narrative closure in his epic – or, for that matter, emotional closure in his love poetry. The Amoretti, for example, is distinguished from other sonnet sequences by the repetition of sonnet 35 as sonnet 83 – an astonishingly bold act of self-quotation which also serves as a trenchant act of self-revision. That it should be this sonnet and no other that is repeated is crucial: its subject is Narcissus and the repetition enacts the obsession. Self-quotation articulates, and effectively ironizes, self-love. The lady’s eyes which ideally serve as a window to her soul may become no more than ‘the myrrour’ of the speaker’s ‘mazed hart’ (sonnet 7). They may function as an avenue to emotional communion or an encouragement to solipsism. The delicate negotiation between two discrete selves, with which love is properly concerned, risks the imprisonment of both parties in their own self-images:

Leaue lady in your glasse of christall clene,

Your goodly selfe for euermore to vew:

and in my selfe, my inward selfe I meane,

most liuely lyke behold your semblant trew.

(Amoretti, sonnet 45)

The delicious paradox of ‘semblant trew’ encapsulates the psychological problem about which the Amoretti is constructed: the relation of image and self-image to reality, and the relevance, if any, of Plato’s ‘fayre Idea’ of love to the selfish, and self-consuming, hunger of appetite. The lover’s eyes are ‘hungry eyes’ and desire for another, bred in the ‘inner part’, consumes the self:

Vnquiet thought, whom at the first I bred,

Of th’inward bale of my loue pined hart:

and sithens haue with sighes and sorrowes fed,

till greater then my wombe thou woxen art.

Breake forth at length out of the inner part,

in which thou lurkest lyke to vipers brood:

and seeke some succour both to ease my smart

and also to sustayne thy selfe with food.

(Amoretti, sonnet 2)

At the heart of Spenserian self-assertion is self-qualification: ‘my selfe, my inward selfe I meane’. The startling imagery of a male ‘wombe’ threatens to confound the sexual distinction upon which the speaker’s desire is premised. The ‘art of eyes’ which he is called upon to master is also the art of conflicting egos (sonnet 21). Spenser is acutely aware of the tendency for love poetry to degenerate into the poetry of self-love, just as elegiac verse finds us ‘mourning in others, our owne miseries’ (Dolefull Lay of Clorinda, 96). Hence the inevitable ambiguity of a line such as ‘helpe me mine owne loues prayses to resound’ even in a poem intended to celebrate the mutuality of marriage (Epithalamion, 14). In his comment upon the ‘Emblem’ to the September eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender, E. K. applies Narcissus’ motto ‘Inopem me copia fecit’ (plenty has made me poor) to ‘the author’ – ‘and to suche like effecte, as fyrste Narcissus spake it’. In The Faerie Queene Spenser speaks of reflecting Elizabeth Tudor ‘In mirrours more then one’ so that she may see ‘her selfe’ (3 Proem 5), but this is merely an extension of his preoccupation with anatomizing the whole notion of the ‘selfe’, with reflecting upon the chaotic emotional and intellectual fragmentation subsumed into the first person singular. The hope must be that, as An Hymne in Honovr of Beautie asserts, ‘two mirrours by opposd reflexion, / Doe both expresse the faces first impression’ (181–2), but the very concept of ‘opposd reflexion’ betrays the multiple contradictions involved in the complex phenomenon of self-consciousness, in the desperate anxiety to objectify the subjective and ‘see’ the elusive ‘inward selfe’. As a means to this end narrative personae proliferate in the shorter poems, and images of mirrors and echoes abound. Their close association is highly revealing. In classical mythology Echo was the maiden who died for unrequited love of a morbidly self-reflexive Narcissus: ‘So I vnto my selfe alone will sing, / The woods shall to me answer and my Eccho ring’ (Epithalamion, 17–18).

It has become common to speak of Spenserian ‘self-fashioning’ but his tendency to undermine his self-image by habits of ‘opposd reflexion’, or to multiply conflicting self-images ‘in mirrours more then one’, has been relatively neglected. Far more is involved in such manoeuvres than a courtly game of hide-and-seek. Even such a practical matter as the pursuit of a patron, one of the dominant concerns of the shorter poems, entails scrutiny of the speaker’s fantastical alter egos which are constructed and deconstructed in ‘expectation vayne / Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away, / Like empty shaddowes’ (Prothalamion, 7–9). As Virgilian confidence struggles with Ovidian despair, the public poet often retreats, or represents himself as retreating, into the private man: ‘I play to please my selfe, all be it ill’ (June, 72).