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The structuring force of secrecy for The Shepheardes Calender is attested to by E.K., whose identity is itself constructed as one of that text's cardinal undisclosed secrets, in December gloss on Colin Cloute's ffr]agraunt flowres as his sundry and laudable partes of learning, wherein how our Poete is seene, be they witnesse which are to his study.' In one sense, what E.K. supplies here is expected gloss, since flowers are a conventional Renaissance figure for display of eloquence and learning. As Annabel Patterson remarks in her important discussion of this eclogue, E.K. is promoting the Calender and its glosses [as] record of a considerable education. 2 In doing so, however, E. K.'s gloss establishes a principle of intellectual and social exclusiveness (and exclusion) that solicits us to think about than Spenser's humanist credentials. That something more is registered in gloss's punning move from studies to a from Spenser's endeavors as a scholar to his study as a particular place. What kind of space then is Spenser's study, and what does it mean to be privy to it? His study is certainly, again as Patterson claims, the space filled with books, place pastoral as he understood it could be written.3 But E.K.'s tantalizing note suggests that Spenser's study is not only a library, not only a kind of literary echo chamber in which lexicon of pastoral topoi may be invoked and reworked. For Spenser's study is also, E.K. intimates, a priuie place, a place where secrets are being kept.4 Chief among secrets to be read there, I will argue in what follows, is secret of secretariat, open secret of Spenser's careerism, revealed and reveiled here under dissimulative cover of pastoral humility.5 Spenser wrote The Shepheardes Calender while he was employed as secretary to John Young, Bishop of Rochester. The poem shows him looking to continue and advance that career by attaching himself in a similar capacity to some highly-placed employer and patron. In my view, The Shepheardes Calender thus not only marks Spenser's auspicious poetic debut; through its display of his secret study it also serves as an advertisement of Spenser's qualifications for secretaryship.
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