Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry

Chapter Six: Reading Pastoral in Book 6 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene

six | Reading Pastoral in Book 6 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene In book 6 of his Faerie Queene (1596) Spenser returns to the pastoral mode, but this is a far more self-consciously courtly version that seems to have little or nothing to do with the broader traditions of writing rural labor that helped to shape the Calender. Indeed, the defining feature of this pastoral episode is the life of ease, otium, which appears only inconsistently and sometimes contradictorily in the English eclogues written before Spenser’s pastorals. As Calidore, the knight around whom this episode turns, observes to the old shepherd , Meliboe, “How much (sayd he) more happie is the state, / In which ye father here doe dwell at ease.”1 Spenser’s new emphasis on otium is, of course, directly related to a heightened interest in what scholars call Arcadian or “art” pastoral, whose defining features are not only leisure but also the idyllic landscape and the piping and singing of shepherds. The Arcadian pastoral has long been defined by its contrast to the Mantuanesque pastoral, the “moral” tradition that informs the Calender.2 If the Calender still holds out the possibility that the eclogue tradition and, therefore, the pastoral might at least intermittently depict “ordinary life,” the real shepherds in the English country side , or the reformist tradition associated with “writing rural labor,” 171 the Faerie Queene seems far more interested in the “enamelled world,” to use Raymond Williams’s famous phrase3 —or as Spenser writes, “the happy peace” and “perfect pleasures, which doe grow / Amongst poore hyndes” (6.10.3.4, 5–6). Spenser’s choice of Arcadianism in the Faerie Queene, and thus his implicit rejection of the broader tradition of “writing rural labor,” has, of course, a larger cultural resonance. As a brief glance at later pastoral, such as Shakespeare’s As You Like It or Winter’s Tale, makes clear, the future of pastoral looks more like the Faerie Queene than the Calender.4 If the function (however unwitting) of the early eclogues of Barclay, Googe, and, most importantly, Spenser himself was at least in part to empty the rural laborer of his labor and, therefore, his potentially reformist and anticapitalist associations, then the Faerie Queene demonstrates the success of those attempts. Indeed , its pastoral episode signals the changed role of rural labor with its opening, when the speaker appropriates plowing to figure his own writing: Now turne againe my teme thou iolly swayne, Backe to the furrow which I lately left; I lately left a furrow, one or twayne Vnplough’d, the which my coulter hath not cleft: Yet seem’d the soyle both fayre and frutefull eft, As I it past, that were too great a shame, That so rich frute should be from vs bereft; Besides the great dishonour and defame, Which should befall to Calidores immortall name. (6.9.1.1–9)5 Scholars have long understood this passage as a “georgic moment.”6 While georgic is usually broadly intended, meaning quite simply a reference to rural labor and not to Virgil’s Georgics specifically, its use, perhaps inadvertently, underlines Spenser’s neoclassicism.7 From this perspective, Spenser’s reference to plowing in a book concerned with pastoral grows out of a kind of Virgilianism and is, therefore, hardly surprising: plowing is the same as shepherding, a figure for poetry. But to focus on the similarity of these figures (plowing and shep172 Transforming Work herding) is to ignore Spenser’s own past. After all, Spenser’s previous pastoral, the Calender, bears the traces of medieval and Reformation texts, such as the pseudo-Chaucerian Plowman’s Tale, in which plowmen are most certainly not indebted to the Georgics. Moreover, these medieval and Reformation plowmen exist in a potentially antagonistic relationship to the pastoral quite simply because of their association with rural labor and, therefore, with medieval Christianity and social and religious reform. If we approach the Faerie Queene, then, from the perspective of the Calender, the appearance of plowing in the Faerie Queene has less to do with following Virgil and more with Spenser’s desire to resolve the antagonism between these figures, to make them the same. To do so is, of course, to remove “real” rural labor entirely from the field of representation; it is only a figure that informs the reader’s understanding of poetry. Despite redirecting his pastoral toward the Arcadian tradition and its...