Dubbed ‘the English Virgil’ in his own lifetime, Spenser has been compared to the Augustan laureate ever since. He invited the comparison, expecting a readership intimately familiar with Virgil’s works to notice and interpret his rich web of allusion and imitation, but also his significant departures and transformations.This volume considers Spenser’s pastoral poetry, the genre which announces the inception of a Virgilian career in
The Shepheardes Calender, and to which he returns in
Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, throwing the ‘Virgilian career’ into reverse. His sustained dialogue with Virgil’s
Eclogues bewrays at once a profound debt to Virgil and a deep-seated unease with his values and priorities, not least his subordination of pastoral to epic.Drawing on the commentary tradition and engaging with current critical debates, this study of Spenser’s interpretation, imitation and revision of Virgil casts new light on both poets-and on the genre of pastoral itself.
Table of Content
Introduction
1. Intertextuality and allegory in Virgil’s Eclogues
2. Virgilian negotiations in The Shepheardes Calender
3. Virgilian structure in The Shepheardes Calender
4. Reshaping the Virgilian cursus: pastoral vocation in ‘Astrophel’
5. Reimagining the pastoral muse in ‘Colin Clouts Come Home Againe’
Index
About the author
Syrithe Pugh is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen
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