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C h a p t e r 4 Pastoral in Exile: Colin Clout and the Poetics of English Alienation No writer labors more conspicuously to claim the mantle of exemplarity than the “new poete” of The Shepheardes Calender, who presents himself to readers as the latest to walk a hallowed and well-trod path to literary glory. As E. K.’s introduction to the 1579 poem reminds us, pastoral is the time-honored birthplace of poetic excellence, the “nest” of literary ambition: “So flew Theocritus , as you may percieue he was all ready full fledged. So flew Virgile, as not yet well feeling his winges. So flew Mantuane, as being not full somd. So Petrarque. So Boccace; So Marot, Sanazarus, and also diuers other excellent both Italian and French Poetes, whose foting this Author euery where followeth , yet so as few, but they be well sented can trace him out.”1 Because the Calender was quickly recognized as a signal achievement not only for the then-anonymous “new poete” Edmund Spenser but also for the hitherto undistinguished canon of English poetry, E. K.’s analysis of its generic orientation has remained persuasive. It has become, as Anne Lake Prescott observes, “a scholarly commonplace” that by “mask[ing] in lowly shepherds’ weeds . . . Spenser was gesturing at a laureate Virgilian career.”2 Pastoral is the “inaugural phase” in what Patrick Cheney dubs “the New Poet’s flight pattern”;3 it serves, in Louis Montrose’s words, as “a vehicle for the highest personal aspirations and public significance a poet can claim” and “demonstrate[s] the capacity of the vernacular to produce a poetry ‘well grounded, finely framed, and strongly trussed up together.’”4 But if pastoral is a logical generic locus for the expression of literary ambition, it is a rather more vexed starting point for an English poet—or for an English poetic renaissance—than E. K. and most subsequent critics acknowledge.5 After all, the most influential poems in the tradition, Virgil’s eclogues, establish their vision of the genre on the assumption that Pastoral in Exile 101 Britain is no place for pastoral. Indeed, as the first English translation of the eclogues makes clear, only a few years before The Shepheardes Calender, England may have been no place for poetry at all. Certainly such a dismal conclusion is not the intended message of Abraham Fleming’s The Bucoliks of Publius Virgil (1575). Rather, Fleming undertook his translation in order to remove the barriers between English readers and what he regarded as an unnecessarily remote poetic tradition. By rendering Virgil’s elegant Latin into “ye vulgar and common phrase of speache,” amplified by an abundance of marginal notes and glosses, Fleming hoped to foster a new sense of “familiaritie and acquaintance with Virgils verse”: to guarantee “readie and speedie passage” across the distances imposed by geographic, historical , and linguistic difference.6 This desire to domesticate Virgilian pastoral takes its most literal form in the compilation of marginal glosses defining all place names and geographical features cited in the poems. Like a map of a foreign country, Fleming writes, his glosses will prevent “the ignorant” from “wander[ing] wyde” by erroneously “applying . . . the name of a mountaine to a man, the name of a fountaine to a towne, the name of a village to a floud, the name of a citie to a riuer” (sig. A3v).7 Thus freed from all “stoppes and impediments ” to understanding, the reader may use Fleming’s translation as a stile or bridge “to passe ouer into the plaine fields of the Poets meaning” (sig. A2v). But if Fleming’s translation, and especially his glossary, is meant to help readers traverse an unfamiliar poetic landscape, it also exposes England’s own place in—or displacement from—that landscape. It is not only that the glosses highlight precisely those aspects of Virgil’s diction—namely the “proper names of gods, goddesses, men, women, hilles, flouddes, cities, townes, and villages &c.” (sig. A1r)—least amenable to vernacular translation, since by definition proper names cannot be rendered “plaine and familiar Englishe” (sig. A1r). More important, the focus on strange place names and geographic features foregrounds the fact that Virgilian pastoral is emphatically—and literally— topical, rooted in the particular place and time of its composition. Critics of the genre rarely identify pastoral with a language of geographic and historical specificity; indeed, its landscape is associated with an allegorical conventionality that would seem to exclude proper names. As one critic asserts...

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