Though from different perspectives formalist and new historicist criticism converge in viewing Elizabethan culture, including The Shepheardes Calender, as fundamentally aristocratic. The former view, concerned with essential human nature, has excluded social considerations altogether, while the latter has constricted poetry's context to patronage at court. Neither gives an adequate account of this work's thoroughgoing identification with the non-elite in Elizabethan society, either how that identification is accomplished or what its significance is.;Incorporating the indicia of popular culture such as fables, proverbs, woodcuts, and the calendar format itself, and drawing on the vernacular literary tradition (in which Skelton's "Colin Clout" and Piers Plowman figure prominently) the Calender valorizes the voice and culture of the subordinate classes in the highly stratified Elizabethan social order. This perspective, one "furre estraunged" from orthodox representations, is integral to the work's critique of institutions central to that society: the Crown, hierarchy, patronage itself, and economic distribution. Utilizing a debate format the text's "moral" eclogues interrogate the practices of these institutions and the claims made on their behalf, especially the alignment of religious and cultural authority with social and political power.;Discussion of such issues in Spenser's society was dangerous because the Crown insisted on its prerogative to govern public speech, dictating both who could speak and what subjects could be addressed. The Calendar challenged this prerogative, but Spenser did so by utilizing strategies to protect himself from official retaliation. Important among these was including within the text itself examples--the participants in the debates themselves and E.K.'s commentary--showing how its controversial material might be defused, thus allowing for a more orthodox interpretation.;By engaging these issues the Calender raised the question of poetry's social role. Much, though by no means all, of Elizabethan criticism conceived of poetry as part of court culture, and much modern scholarship reads the Calender as a monovocal treatise on aesthetics consistent with, if not reinforcing, this alignment. But the Calender's poetic discussion is also a debate which, together with its own practice, interrogates the social status and function this conception assigns to poetry, and articulates the outline of an alternative practice.
展开▼
