The Implications of Form for The Shepheardes Calender

Abstract

The Shepheardes Calender is the most avowedly eclectic masterpiece in English. Spenser acknowledges several borrowings in the names of the speakers and in the emblems, as well as in the lines of the poem themselves; and E. K. points to many more. The only really new ingredient is the form, a framework which links the separate eclogues into a connected series. Everything else is conscious imitation of a convention, or at least of a precedent. Therefore the implications of the form become salient in any attempt to assess the distinctive genius of the work.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.