Skeltonic anxiety and rumination in The Shepheardes Calender.(Critical essay)

The Shepheardes Calender is a work profoundly anxious about the meaning of its poet. Often when a critic points out anxiety in a poem, we learn more about the critic's own anxieties than the poem's. Rather than deny that pitfall, I want to embrace it and suggest that Edmund Spenser, instead of simply feeling anxiety, thematizes anxiety over the meaning of "poet." The locus of the poem's rumination is centered upon Colin Clout in his several roles--shepherd, author, allegorical archpoet, and author figure. He is both poet and poetic subject, and the anxiety of the disjunction proves matter for the poem. The poem is permeated with a sense of both wonder and repulsion at the idea that it is being authored; in addition Colin Clout's language expresses much the same emotions at the prospect that he is an author. Several compelling lines of argument have been advanced to trace the nature of Colin's fractured self, locating the fault lines at Spenser's shifting relationship to Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil), the tensions between different strands of pastoral, and seasonal age versus youth debates. In this study I want to offer another reading of Colin's anxious identity by associating him with his godfather in poetry, the equally anxious self-created poet John Skelton.

Spenser's Colin Clout derives from John Skelton's poetic stand-in Collyn Cloute who speaks Skelton's poem of the same name. Aside from Spenser's nod to Skelton as a father of English verse, Spenser's appropriation of the name suggests that we may want to look at precisely what it was about Collyn Cloute with which Spenser felt an affinity. Nicholas Canny notes that the Skeltonic connection "enabled [Spenser] to trace his social criticism backwards through Skelton to Chaucer and Langland." That is, Skelton was primarily important as a marker of a relatively recent ancestor linking Spenser to more canonical but distant authors. (1) I want to resist passing over Skelton as a transitional figure in this study and to focus squarely on Skelton.

I. E. K.'S PREFACE: BRINGING "AUCTORITIE TO THE VERSE"

The writer of the "Epistle" to The Shepherdes Calender, E. K., constructs his prologue with a paradox, and in part, it is because of that paradox that the poem has a nervous, defensive tone. (2) E. K. claims antique authority and canonical value for this poem (he invokes Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Virgil) while simultaneously apologizing for the archaic quality of the poem, the "olde and obsolete wordes" (line 43). (3) E. K. attempts to solve this problem by sleight of hand, insisting that any perceived inconsistency is misperception on the part of the reader of The Shepheardes Calender and has nothing to do with the poet. Interestingly, this tactic on the part of E. K. creates a foreword purportedly about the poet, but which is hesitant to even mention the poet: "And firste of the wordes to speake, I graunt they be something hard, and of most men unused, yet both English, and also used of most excellent Authors and most famous Poetes. In whom whenas this our Poet hath bene much traveiled and throughly redd, how could it be, (as that worthy Oratour sayde) but that walking in the sonne although for other cause he walked, yet needes he mought be sunburnt; and having the sound of those auncient Poetes still ringing in his eares, he mought needes in singing hit out some of theyr tunes" (lines 29-38). The poet at hand is almost completely removed from these metaphors. Rather, the poet as creator is removed and instead is reduced to a vapid reflection of the sunshine and an echo of the "auncient Poetes." E. K.'s use of "hit out some of theyr tunes" both suggests the poet's mindless repetition of the ancients as well as the poet's random encounter with the "tunes." In this reading a "tune" already exists, and the composer/poet happens upon it; this is a very external version of the creative process and one that eliminates the artist's subjectivity. E. K. uses this metaphor to suggest that the reader is misdirected if he blames the poet for any problems with the language. E. K. then turns to a defense of how "Livie" and "Saluste" "affect antiquitie" in which defense he offers Marcus Tullius Cicero as an authority (lines 47-9, 56). E. K.'s argument has turned from explaining the poet's motives to a purely theoretical discussion about canonical writers. At length E. K. offers this example: "So ofentimes a dischorde in Musick maketh a comely concordaunce: so great delight tooke the worthy Poete Alceus to behold a blemish in the joint of a wel shaped body. But if any will rashly blame such his purpose in choyse of old and unwonted words, him may I more justly blame and condemne" (lines 74-80, my emphasis). The "his" in the emphasized "his purpose" must refer to the poet of The Shepheardes Calender, yet there is no antecedent for such a reference. The syntax suggests that "his" refers to Alceus, and the ambiguity about the purported subject of this preface illustrates how watered-down and tangential the poet has become here. There is more than silence about the creative process embodied in the poet: E. K. has an undercurrent of venom for the poetic, creative process. E. K. is willing to discuss the poet when he distinguishes him from the alliterative school of English poetry, and his tone is unusually bitter: "I scorne and spue out the rakehellye route of our ragged rymers (for so themselves use to hunt the letter) which without learning boste, without judgement jangle, without reason rage and fome, as if some instinct of Poeticall spirite had newly ravished them above the meanenesse of commen capacitie" (lines 127-32). This outburst is shocking and lays bare what upsets E. K. That dangerous poetical "spirite" in a man is the opposite of the cultured, stable, classically knowledgeable poet. The former suggests a near-demonic, sexually open ("ravished"), creative frenzy; the latter suggests a mouthpiece for the canon. Or, as E. K. puts it, "For what in most English wryters useth to be loose, and as it were ungyrt, in this Authour is well grounded, finely framed, and strongly trussed up together" (lines 124-7). So Spenser's talent here is in confinement: far from being "ungyrt," his poetic voice is "strongly trussed up," containable, and, importantly, noncreative. E. K.'s "hunt the letter" is the opposite of his earlier "hit out some of theyr tunes": the process of hands-on, down-and-dirty poetic crafting is debased compared with drifting in the wake of the ancients.

E. K.'s tirade against the ravishment of "Poeticall spirite" is opposed to his rather prosaic characterization of Colin Clout: "under whose person the Authour selfe is shadowed, how furre he is from such vaunted titles and glorious showes, both him selfe sheweth, where he sayth. Of Muses Hobbin. I conne no skill. And, Enough is me to paint out my unrest, etc. And also appeareth by the basenesse of the name, wherein, it semeth, he chose rather to unfold great matter of argument covertly, then professing it, not suffice thereto accordingly" (lines 141-9).

Colin's name, according to E. K., indicates his less-than quality in which he is not only the shadow to the author but also the shadow to his poem. That is, the purpose of the author figure is to be unworthy and, in fact, unfit for his poem to allow the poetry to shine forth on its own. The poetry unfolds "covertly" not by means of the debased author figure. While E. K. recognizes this as a pastoral pose, his insistence that there is something inappropriate or insufficient about the man who shadows forth the poet points to the tension in the poem itself over the relationship between the poet and his poem.

Compare E. K.'s gloss on the name "Colin Clout" with the name of the author of the poem, "Immerito." Donald Cheney notes the double significance of "Immerito": "in the primary sense (taking the word as an Italian adjective or substantive) ... one who has not yet won or earned a name for himself. Alternatively, if the word is taken as Latin, its meaning is shaded toward a context of unfair or undeserved treatment." Both names imply absence of authorial merit and the imminence of authorial merit. (4)

Patrick Cheney identifies "clout" with "clot of earth" and thus "a figure of georgic." (5) Roland Greene notes that "the name suggests not only bluntness and rude force, not only rusticity or removal from the center of things, but the possibility of a rough blow's turning into a deft strike, and of the margin's becoming the center or target." (6) As E. K.'s introductory remarks hint, pondering the nature of poetic marginality is of supreme importance to The Shepheardes Calender; this is a concern common to both Skelton and Spenser as well as to the pastoral genre itself. Yet what Skelton and Spenser share most of all is anxiety about their poetry and a sense that their poetic problems cannot be resolved within one body. These poets both seek to create poet figures--rustic and ennobled, inside the text and outside the text--in order to establish a place to locate their own problematic selves within their poetry. I suggest this is the primary connection between Skelton's and Spenser's poetry and perhaps the reason why Spenser saw a kinship with the figure of Collyn Cloute. (7)

II. "MY NAME IS COLLYN CLOUTE": SKELTON AND SPENSER

This is a passage often quoted in comparing Spenser's Clout to Skelton's Cloute:

 
  And yf ye stande in doute 
  Who brought this ryme aboute, 
  My name is Collyn Cloute. 
 
  For though my ryme be ragged, 
  Tattered and jagged, 
 
  Yf ye take well therwith 
  It hath in it some pyth. (8) 

Like E. K.'s preface, these lines serve the purpose of shifting responsibility from author to reader. It is the reader's job to find the "pyth," and even the "yf" in the first line makes it sound for a moment as though the poet's name being Collyn Cloute were contingent upon the reader's "doute." Spenser problematizes Colin Clout's name from the first lines of "Januarye"; as John D. Bernard notes, "Colin has changed from 'January' to 'December,' but only in becoming the more…