After this we are on firmer ground. We know that in 1578 Spen ser was secretary to John Young, bishop of Rochester, who had been master of Pembroke hall while Spenser was a student. The bishop of Rochester (Episcopus Roffensis) is the Roffyn of the Shepheardes Calender: the fable of Roffyn's dog and the wolf may glance at the old Roman Catholic bishop, Thomas Wat son, who was committed to Young's custody in Feb. 1579. Much of the Shepheardes Calender was apparently written at Rochester, where also Spenser first conceived the idea of the wedding of Thames and Medway. If Spenser at this time thought of enter ing the Church, he changed his mind on a nearer view of its condi tion, for by Easter 1579 he was in Westminster, sharing rooms with Harvey and holding "long conference" with him. There was a third party to their discussions, one "E.K.," to be identified prob ably with Edward Kirke, once a fellow-sizar of Spenser's at Pem broke. The notion that E.K. is a mask for Spenser himself has been disproved by Dr. Herf ord. It is not unlikely, indeed, that the "Mistress Kerke" in Westminster, who took charge of letters for Spenser in October of this year, was E.K.'s mother, and that all three were living in her house. Among other things they dis cussed Spenser's debut as an author. He had several pieces ready or nearly ready—Dreams, Legends, Court of Cupid, Pag eants, The English Poet (in prose), and the Shepheardes Calender. It was decided to bring out the last, and to bring it out in classical style with introduction, notes and glossary by E.K., even as Muretus edited the first book of Ronsard's Amours. E.K. wrote the introduction forthwith—it is dated from London, April io, 1579—and got to work on the notes.
Harvey's Letter-book gives us an amusing picture of Spenser that summer. He is reading some law, evidently with an eye to diplomatic or administrative work; he has blossomed into a cour tier and a gallant, bearded and moustachioed, Italianate, Frenchi fied. At what date, and in what sense, he entered Leicester's service we do not know precisely. At all events on Oct. 5 he writes from Leicester house to tell Harvey that he expects to go abroad in a week, "most what" at Leicester's charges—the "most what" shows that he was not entirely dependent on Leicester's bounty—and that "gentle Mr. Sidney" has proposed that they two should correspond. The tour apparently never took place, for his next letter of ten days later says no word about it, but is all con cerned with quantitative verse and with doubts about the publica tion of his Slumbers. He has been to Court and expects to go again ; Sidney and Dyer have him "in some use of familiarity." The Shepheardes Calender was licensed on Dec. 5, and published anonymously; the dedication to Sidney is by "Immerito." The Shepheardes Calender.—The Calender consists of 12 pastoral eclogues in the artificial style of Virgil, Mantuan, Sanaz zaro and Marot, which admits real persons and current events in a pastoral guise. From all these precursors Spenser borrowed ostentatiously, above all from Marot, whom E. K. nevertheless belittles, perhaps because the Pleiade had eclipsed him. Deriva tive and conventional as it is, the Calender made an epoch in English literary history, not so much by naturalising pastoralism as by showing (under cover of the pastoral convention) what English could do in many kinds and metres. The couplets of the
satires and fables are intentionally rude, and the rhymeless sestina is mere virtuosity; but the elegiac stanzas of the com plaints recaptured the metrical secret of Chaucer, and the lyric staves of the paean and the dirge extended the range of English song. In all these measures he made free use of alliteration, dear to English ears, though abused by his contemporaries and frowned on by the classicists. For his reform of poetic diction Spenser had before him the example and precepts of the Pleiade. Like them, he sought to embellish the beggarly vocabulary of contemporary verse, partly by foreign loan-words, but mainly by drawing on native sources, 'by archaisms, pseudo-archaisms and dialect words. He was in search of a vocabulary fit for the heroical poem that he already contemplated. But the new poet had to care not only for words but for the order of his words and the structure and juncture of his sentences. Here Spenser scored his greatest suc cess, eschewing obscurity and looseness, and giving his syntax a movement, too copious perhaps, but admirably fluent, in lucid, easy yet well-knit sentences. Syntactically, Spenser is one of the simplest of poets.
The Shepheardes Calender may not have fulfilled all Spenser's hopes, but it went into a second edition in 1581. Sidney praised it judiciously, or judicially, but durst not approve its rustic diction. However, Spenser had many other arrows in his quiver. In April 158o he is full of projects for the immediate publica tion of his Dying Pelican and Dreams; his Latin Stemmata Dudleiana will need "more advisement" before it can be "sent abroade," but the quantitative Epithalamion Thamesis shall be "shortly set forth." Under the influence of Sidney, Dyer and Drant, he had come for the moment to take quantitative verse more seriously. But he is more eager to proceed with the Faerie Queene, of which he sent Harvey specimens. Harvey thought little of them, preferring the (lost) Nine Comedies in the manner of Ariosto. Moreover, the poet is in love again, this time with better hopes. Harvey's compliments to Mea Domina Immerito, Mea Bellissima Collin Clouta, taken with an obscure passage in Daphnaida (I 1. 64-66), which reads like consolation tendered by one widower to another, have led some scholars to believe that Spenser married this "second Rosalind." But there is no other evidence for the marriage, nor is the lady ever heard of again. These letters of April 158o give no hint of any friction with Leicester. But now Spenser seems to have made a false step. The queen had dallied for years with the project of marrying the duke of Alencon. In Jan. 1579 his agent Simier came to Eng land and Alencon himself paid a flying visit in August to press his suit in person. He was ugly, dwarfish and half her age, but the queen smiled on him, called him her "grenouille" and Simier her "petit singe." The Puritans took alarm. Sidney remonstrated in such plain terms that the queen forbade him the Court. He retired to Wilton to write his Arcadia, and Spenser probably never saw him again. This was in Jan. 1580.