Shepheards Devises: Edmund Spenser's 'Shepheardes Calendar' and the Institutions of Elizabeth Society. - book reviews

Criticism, Spring, 1995 by Tim Montbriand

The first thing to be noted about Robert Lane's study is that it pays only fleeting attention to The Faerie Queene. Although not explicitly stated by Lane, it soon becomes apparent that he is not interested in tracing the movement of the earlier Shepheardes Calender (1579) to the later Faerie Queene (1592) as the Virgilian progression from eclogue to epic. Lane is engaged in a rigorous application of an historicist method that examines the material conditions involved in the production and reception of the Shepheardes Calender. He argues that Spenser's pastoral poem be seen as a radical, oppositionist work that critiques the "regime" of Elizabeth and two hierarchical institutions of Elizabethan society, the Church and Court. He sets his work against analyses of the poem that are concerned with seeing the Shepheardes Calender as inaugurating what has been called the English Renaissance and those which, through an appropriation of biographical material, envision Spenser as the poor scholar at Cambridge, engaged in a lifelong quest to ingratiate himself, through his literary talent, into the patronage circles of an Elizabethan court. He positions his historicist methodology against analyses of the Calender that treat the aesthetic as a transcendent category, even when it is considered as historically contingent, as in the recent work of Paul Alpers ("Pastoral and the Domain of Lyric in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender," Representations 12 [1985]) and Nancy Jo Hoffman (Spenser's Pastorals: "The Shepheardes Calender" and "Colin Clout" [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977]). He also opposes the type of contextualist analysis of the Calender concerned with the author's biography or with a topical approach to the allegory of the poem that attempts to assign one-to-one correspondences between Spenser's shepherds and real historical personages. Referring specifically to Paul McLane (Spenser's "Shepheardes Calender": A Study in Elizabethan Allegory [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961]), Lane cites Louis Montrose in calling this kind of investigation literary "detective work" (8n.).

After dismissing formalist and old-historicist criticisms of Spenser's poem quite early in the book, Lane engages recent new historicist work, particularly Stephen Greenblatt's assertion that subversion is always contained and is, in fact, created by the dominant ideology to legitimate its own entrenched power. However useful the new historicist project has been as a palliative to the shortcomings of formalist and old-historicist criticisms, Lane criticizes it for assuming "a status that elides human initiation, rendering social phenomena as the impersonal operation of social or linguistic entities such as 'power' or 'discursive fields' and society itself, finally, as a monolithic structure in which all differences (especially political resistance) turn out to be only incidental variants of a single imperative" (7). Above all, it is human agency that Lane wants to reclaim for Spenser, and his project thus becomes one of demonstrating that Spenser responds to the circulating discourses of Elizabethan ideology and challenges that ideology by "using the same resources it draws on to reach very different conclusions" (74).

It is, of course, impossible in this space to delineate the very thorough argument Lane elaborates to support these "different conclusions," but a brief example should suffice to give a sense of the way he proceeds. During Elizabeth's reign, there was an elaborate image constructed around the Queen as the "mother" of England. This "mother" image and its association with "motherly care" was appropriated by Spenser and used to criticize Elizabeth's regime in two of the eclogues. In the April eclogue, Lane finds a jarring, discordant note, in what is generally considered to be a panegyric to Elizabeth, in the reference to Niobe: "Niobe's combined role as mother and political ruler has affinities with that other metaphor so familiar to Spenser's readers, of the queen as mother of England and its people as her children" (18). The fact that Phoebus and Cynthia, "Latonaes seede," turn Niobe into stone because of her excessive pride serves to undermine the ostensibly laudatory and celebratory tone of the eclogue. In the May eclogue, the metaphor of motherly care is deflated in the fables of a mother goat who abandons her kid for the pursuit of pleasure, unrealistically expecting admonition to serve in place of education, and the mother ape who inadvertently suffocates her "youngling" in a desire to embrace him too closely. Lane engages in similar procedures to demonstrate, successfully I think, that Spenser criticized the Church and Court as well. The picture of Spenser that emerges is consistently one of political resistance.

As further evidence of the Calender's subversive nature, Lane cites the poem's dedication to Sidney (who incurred, in 1579, the disfavor of the Queen for advising her against her impending marriage to the duc d'-Alencon) and its publication by Hugh Singleton, John Stubbs's printer (Stubbs forfeited his right hand for publicly doing, in his pamphlet, The Gaping Gulf, what Sidney had done in a private letter). Lane also argues that the calendrical form itself - like broadsides and ballads, generally considered a popular medium - and the use of woodcuts to introduce each eclogue for the benefit of the illiterate mark the poem as an oppositionist work directed to a broad audience. Recognizing the populist appeal of the Calender forces us to relinquish the notion that it was written only for courtly aristocrats.