The young master of arts probably did not seek a fellowship. Had be failed, his friend Harvey was not the man to have kept silence. More poet than scholar, Spenser doubtless, like other needy Elizabethan poets, looked to • place and patron and became first, it would seem, tutor or secretary in the family of a lady of rank in the °North partes' of England; and was then, upwards of a year later, called by Harvey to Kent "for his more preferment." This "Gentlewoman of no mean house" in the
partes" is the "Rosalinde' of the
Calendar' ; and the poet's pretense of blighted passion implies probably no more than regulation "loving" gratitude to lady patron. He was, as she put it, "her Seignor Pegaso." Twelve years later, in
The editor of the
From these "North panes' Spenser was called to become "the Southerne shepheardes boye' in Kent. Through the "shepheard," ac ceptedly Sir Philip Sidney, he may presently have been made secretary to Sir Henry Sidney, Lord-Deputy in Ireland. At least, in the 'Vette of the Present State of Ireland' (Globe ed., p. 636), Irenwus, Spenser's general mouthpiece, professes to have witnessed the execution of "Merrogh 0-Brein," 1 July 1577.
Two years later, 5 Oct. 1579, Spenser appears in the service of Sir Henry's brother-in-law, Leicester, and writing to Harvey from Leices ter House. This letter and another, with Harvey's answers, were published, presumably by Harvey, a year later. They reveal 1579-80
as the poet's annus mirabilis. Brimful of pub lishing projects, eager for literary reforms, re ceived at Court, had "in some use of familiarity' by such high society as Sidney and Dyer and by pretty women (to sober Harvey's alarm),— before the year-end he had achieved its pro gram of a new poetic school, written ts mani festo and outlined his own chief works to come. Among other projects, he informs his some what sceptical friend of a great Continental trip on Leicester's business. Then suddenly, as it seems, all this stops. He arrives in Dublin, 12 Aug. 1580, secretary to the new Lord Deputy, Lord Grey de Wilton.
Meanwhile, but one of his several finished poems had been printed; and this under a pseudonym and ostensibly on a friend's re sponsibility. The 'Shepheards Calendar,' fin ished before 10 April 1579—date of the editor's epistle to Harvey,— but not "entered" until December 5, appeared soon afterward, em bedded in a literary apparatus full of mystifica tions. Secrecy, however open, was in the code. More importantly, the "theo logical" eclogues expressed opinions close to treasonable and preferred unpleasant personal charges. The editor, °E. K.," played his part well, being at times clairvoyant of the author's secret meanings, at other times obtuse as °Ig naro" himself. He was doubtless Edward Kirke, once with Spenser at Pembroke College; but much of the "glosse" must have been in spired, ij not dictated, by Spenser himself, who, if perhaps "furre estraunged" in April, was cer tainly in London in October 1579.
The Calendar'— perhaps so called from a popular almanac, the (Kalender of Shepherdes— contains, as its sub-title indicates, °twelve aeglogues proportionable to the twelve monethes." It was dedicated to Sir Philip Sid ney. The "aeglogues" are of the Renaissance courtly type, in no proper sense poems of coun try life. The nature described is °Arcadian"; the description decorative; the real appeal per sonal and polemical. Tribute to a past patron, °Rosalinde,"— to a present patron, Leicester, in the dirge for his kinswoman, "Dido,"— to a hoped-for patron, the Queen, in the "laye of Ehsa"; partisan support of Leicester's Puri tanism against Burghley's °Anglicanism"; proc lamation of his own Platonist poetics— such are the live interests; the rest, as E. K. says, is °recreative," little neo-classic idyls in porcelain. Such "pastoralism" is a poetry, not of nature, but of art,— goldsmith's art for nicety and °curious felicity" of detail. The 'Calendar' is the first English poem which rivals the poetic virtuosity of Renaissance Italy and France.