"The death of the 'new Poete': Virgilian ruin and Ciceronian recollection in Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender". *.

Critics working in the field of English Renaissance literature often discover in Edmund Spenser's (ca. 1552-99) pastoral poetry the birth of a sacred cow: a "new" Virgil for a renewed era. Spenser, after all, seemingly embodied an entire nation's cultural aspirations and thus became a spokesman for some dearly-held truths about what the very word "renaissance" means: the desire to disinter the past, the endeavor to reconstruct its ruins anew--that is, to imitate Virgil. But particularly with The Shepheardes Calender, a work first published in 1579 and self-consciously intended to launch his soon-to-be illustrious career as the "new Poete," Spenser articulates ambivalent attitudes about and, indeed, dramatically alters the terms of his literary inheritance. (1)

For many reasons, Spenser's Calender marked a strange debut on the English literary stage. This calendric collection of bucolics with its illustrative, rough woodcuts adapted a popular medieval form that made it appear neither very old nor very new, as did the Calender's accompanying critical apparatus, a series of glosses by Spenser's first and anonymous critic, "E.K.," whose commentary attempted to cover the Calender with the patina of antiquity it otherwise lacked. Despite evidence of Spenser's catholic tastes, E.K.'s epic assertions of the Calenders classical ambitions and Spenser's eminent status as a "new" Virgil continue to dominate our understanding of this work; consequently, Spenser's modern critics often echo E.K.'s forceful claims for Spenser's fame. Yet, as this essay argues, E.K.'s struggle to construct Spenser's authority in Virgilian terms--and his failure to accomplish this effort--enacts the Calender's central drama: a dialogue between E.K. and Spenser about how to remember the ruins of the past. Far from reconstructing an ideal of permanence that best represents Virgilian ambitions, The Shepheardes Calender reimagines the architecture of immortality in ruin itself.

At stake here is our desire to see Spenser as a new Virgil. Spenser's critics, including E.K., frequently attempt to accommodate the ways in which the Calender explicitly challenges cultural assumptions about the role of Virgilian imitation, often assuming that Virgil's example represented the best (and sometimes only) available path to literary immortality and laureate renown. Yet what makes the Calender remarkable, beyond the subjective realm of literary merit, lies in what it reveals about its particular cultural moment: not only a real reluctance to follow in Virgil's path but also a profound questioning of what expectations such imitation entailed--an heroic vision of authorship--coupled with an endeavor to find alternative models for emulation.

As the Calender makes clear, Virgil stood less for a single author than a whole host of literary and imperial values exerting a set of pressures to which Spenser responds in complex ways. Even as Virgil finds a central place in the Calender, Spenser's reluctance to perform a Virgilian role in English culture takes center stage. This essay examines how E.K.'s bold assertions as literary critic, and Spenser's subtle opposition to them, establish a crucial tension in the Calender between two competing patterns of imitation, two divergent models of authorial and cultural formation: Virgil's and Cicero's. The Calender locates its pivotal conflict in E.K.'s longing to cast Spenser and his authorial persona Colin in Virgil's mold, in his desire for Spenser-cum-Colin to follow the "perfecte paterne of a Poete" embodied in Virgil's ideal (170). Such a pattern emerges as the generic movement from pastoral to epic poetry and, moreover, as a pattern of cultural ruin and repair. For E.K. and the shepherds, only one true Virgil exists--the Virgil of epic poetry. Rather than seeing a Virgil of variegated works, or recognizing the varied Virgils of eclogue, georgic, and epic, they focus on the idea of the Virgilian rata, the career trajectory whose most important point they locate as its end: the cultural and literary immortality promised in his Aeneid as the translation of Troy's ruins for Rome's "empire without end." (2)

E.K. introduces the Calender by strenuously arguing that Spenser's poem effects just such a translatio, repairing ruinous old words into an immortal literary monument, erecting a "house of fame" for himself and England. (3) Certainly, how E.K. and the shepherds remember Virgil speaks, above all, to Virgil's complex cultural reception in the Renaissance, and it is precisely his legacy that The Shepheardes Calender holds up for examination. We need to notice that Spenser's engagement with Virgil's legacy is considerably more nuanced than that of his speakers; by constructing the Calender as a pastoral place for debate and dialogue about epic authority, Spenser draws attention to the multiple Virgils available for literary imitation. Yet Spenser's critique goes beyond challenging the predominance of The Aeneid in Virgil's reception history and instead explores the problems of pursuing permanence as either a literary or cultural ideal. Against E.K.'s aspirations for Spenser to reproduce a "perfecte paterne of a Poete"--a romantic ideal of what it means to be England's "new" Virgil--Spenser presents an alternate "paterne" of building upon Rome's ruins in Cicero's "paterne of a perfect Oratour" (15). Through E.K.'s introductory discussion of Cicero's De oratore, Spenser offers the architectural mnemonic as a decidedly un-Virgilian method for remembering the ruins of the past. (4) Emphasizing the impossibility of reproducing Virgilian claims to immortality, Spenser locates in Cicero's art of memory another pattern, one describing the continual re-edification of memorial ruin. While critics often think of the art of memory as either a humanist technique or an hermetic art, Spenser evokes the architectural mnemonic as a metaphor for such cultural transmission. (5) Thus even as the shepherds and E.K. look for a new Virgil to repair England's ostensible cultural ruin, Spenser looks to Ciceronian dialogue for England's cultural formation, for building new memorial edifices from ruin. Beginning with the shepherds' debate about Virgil, this essay traces E.K. and Spenser's dialogue about the architecture of immortality.

1. "O PIERLESSE POESYE, WHERE IS THEN THY PLACE?"

The desire to locate a "new" Virgil for English culture, and the anxiety that no such author exists to fill Virgil's place, finds expression not only in E.K.'s introduction, but throughout The Shepheardes Calender. E.K. introduces the "argument" to the October eclogue as indirectly concerning the problem of Virgilian imitation, writing that "In Cuddie is set out the perfecte paterne of a Poete, which finding no maintenance of his state and studies, complayneth of the contempte of Poetrie" (170). As becomes apparent in October, the importance of this phrase lies in the ideal of authorship it represents--a Virgilian ideal--for the inability of the shepherds (Cuddle and Piers, as well as Colin) to meet the requirements of such poetic perfection is placed in comparison with Virgil's example; by contrast to Virgil, they write in the wrong genres, sing of the wrong muses, and live at the wrong time--a time when, as Cuddle claims, the lack of patronage makes the appearance of a new Virgil for England seem impossible. Cuddie and Piers rehearse cliches of authorship, debating whether poetry is "a divine gift and heavenly instinct," or is "to bee gotten by laboure and learning," or is "adorned with both" inspiration and erudition (170). Disputing whether women or wine best inspires song, the shepherds can agree on poetry's woeful decline since its golden age in antiquity; the current "comtempte of Poetrie" (170) that has produced only the conspicuous absence of a "Romish Tityrus" for England (173). Piers puns upon his name in order to lament poetry's homeless state:

   O pierlesse Poesye, where is then thy place?
   If nor in Princes palace thou doe sitt:
   (And yet is Princes pallace the most fitt)
   Ne brest of baser birth doth thee embrace.
   Then make thee winges of thine aspyring wit,
   And, whence thou camst, flye backe to heaven apace.
   (79-84)

Far from an isolated concern, Piers's complaint that England's orphaned and impoverished poetry seemingly finds a "place" in neither palace nor pub articulates the CalendeVs broad concern with the problem, and the process, of situating poetry's place in English culture.

E.K.'s catchy alliterative phrase, "the perfecte paterne of a Poete," encapsulates Cuddle and Piers's expectations about poetry and its place in culture, defining their mutual construction of authorship through Virgil's authority--an ideal whose influence extends well beyond the October eclogue. Both Cuddle and Piers optimistically imagine that the right poet could build such a place for poetry, housing it, effectively repairing what these shepherds perceive as England's state of cultural ruin. Virgil's example proves crucial here because it provides Cuddle and Piers with all their hopes and fears about poetry: with their passionate conviction that poetry should rightly inhabit the monumental architecture of culture, the "Princes pallace," and with their accompanying belief that the peerless poet occupies the position of heroic architect, one capable of constructing a monumental literary edifice. Both remember Colin as someone with the potential to play or perform Virgil's part in culture, "for Colinfittes such famous flight to scanne" in the same way that poetry's "place" is in "Princes pallace the most fitt" (88, 81). Yet Piers and Cuddle further concur that Colin, because distracted by love (or by the wrong kind of love), fails to fulfill this vital authorial role. Mired in hopeless Petrarchan romance and the love lyrics it provokes, Colin rejects the pressure to move on to epic poetry and thus, according to Cuddle and Piers, damns his chances at any real fame. Without following Virgil's career path from pastoral to epic, Colin holds little hope of imitating what to them constitutes poetic perfection.

But a more important issue remains at stake, submerged within this authorial paradigm: how the shepherds imagine Virgil's "paterne" of imperial and cultural transmission, translatio imperil and translatio studii. Piers explains the cultural significance of epic poetry when exclaiming, "There may thy Muse display her fluttrying wing, / And stretch her selfe at large from East to West" (43-44). The movement from East to West exemplified by Virgil's epic, which charts the imaginary path for the translation of empire and learning, suggests to Cuddle and Piers the path by which an imperial poet builds both a culture and a place for fame within this culture. Precisely their inability to reconstruct Virgil's career in this pastoral world fills Cuddie and Piers with a powerful sense of fin-de-siecle cultural decay.

However, with October's woodcut Spenser subtly challenges his characters' views about authorship and culture, ironically suggesting less that poetry holds no place in English culture than that Cuddle and Piers may be looking in the wrong place for it (see Fig. 1). Seemingly pointing in two directions at once, October's emblem offers two very different ways of seeing Cuddle and Piers's dilemma. In this illustration, Piers probably gestures to the foreground where Cuddle strides, pantomiming the "perfecte paterne of a Poete"--laurel crown aloft, poetic scroll in hand--likely in imitation of the "Romish Tityrus" (173). But Piers simultaneously motions toward a figure in the background, likely Colin, approaching what looks like the very monumental architecture, the very place for poetry, that they bemoan England utterly lacks. Observe that while Cuddle plays at poet laureate he stands practically alone (with Piers forming his only audience), whereas Colin strides not only toward an apparent "house of fame" but also toward a busily discoursing crowd, whose very presence seemingly refutes Piers's assertion that no one--neither "Princes" nor "brest of baser birth"--cares about poetry (80-82). Silently rebutting Cuddle and Piers's dire pronouncements, Spenser pictorially draws our attention to a "place" for poetry. We see, that is, an edifice that may in fact point toward a vision of collective authorship in The Shepheardes Calender at odds with the shepherds' desire for a new Virgil.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

This significant image creates a tacit debate between Spenser and his shepherds, implying that dialogue rather than individual poets builds a place or edifice for poetry in culture. If Piers and Cuddle are unable to recognize their part in constructing Colin's fame, the very fact of their dialogue indicates that "poesye" cannot be not entirely "pierlesse," for these two shepherds form at least a small community of friends concerned with poetry's ostensible decline into oblivion. Through dialogue and, moreover, through the very idea of dialogue, Spenser mediates Cuddle and Piers' polarized perspectives on the past and the present: on the one hand, their shared fantasy of reconstructing Virgil's career in Colin-cum-Spenser, and on the other, their anxiety that any attempt to rebuild antiquity in Virgil's image is futile. The October woodcut illustrates a double perspective evident throughout The Shepheardes Calender- balancing romantic dolor against pragmatic acculturation--by which Spenser negotiates his characters' views, both their impossibly idealistic conception of authorial construction and their equally pessimistic notion of England's own lack of cultural edification.

In a sense, then, the Calender offers itself as a kind of literary case study for how we too respond to Virgil's legacy. Critics often share a belief that Renaissance writers sought to reconstruct the ruins of the past as a Virgilian ideal, the "perfecte paterne" of antiquity rebuilt, or reformed, in poetry. (6) And while alive to the psychological complexity involved in imitation, much influential scholarship emphasizes the anxiety that Virgil's influence evoked at the expense of fully recognizing how authors creatively made new "places" for themselves amidst the imposing ruins of antiquity. In The Light in Troy, Thomas Greene has argued that "humanist culture had its mainspring [in] the paired intuitions of rupture and continuity," a response to ruin which Greene describes as a "double gesture": "one first stoops, digs, gropes downward into the disorder of the past and then one rises and constructs upward by imitation" (193, 235, 233). Yet "Renaissance culture is full of the failures resulting from the double phases of imitation," Greene suggests, "failures that in a sense justify the fear it inspired": "In the calm of this humility, the resignation of this sorrow, humanism found the strength to comprehend its tragedy and its solitude" (235,241). (7) Although this seems a persuasive model of cultural imitation, if we decide that "personal adaptations" of the "double gesture" are mere "distortions of the pattern" that Renaissance authors followed, then we potentially overlook precisely how such variations in literary and cultural patterns ask for, even demand, our closer attention (236). Greene imagines, as do many critics, that seeing ruins necessarily produced a longing to reconstruct them and, with this, to rebuild the past--that ruins "inspired a will to form" because "to see the fragments was already instinctively to see how they had been or might be made whole" (233). Understood in this way, the ambivalence that ruin and its association with imitation produced--where optimistic ambition and pessimistic despair collided with paralyzing uncertainty--finds its source in Virgil; as critics have traditionally argued, imitative success or failure depended largely upon the ability to adapt Virgilian forms, the very skill for which Spenser wins plaudits.

In some respects, attempting to make Spenser into a "new" Virgil by aligning their careers marks the history of Spenser criticism. (8) Lawrence Manley, for example, praises Spenser's poetry by writing that his "pastoral role initiates a process of translatio by which Spenser, in assuming the Virgilian mantle, prepares for the rebirth of Orpheus in himself and of the city for his time" (1982,208). Such praise implies a double pattern that critics often perceive in Spenser's poetry: the career path that moves generically from pastoral to epic, coupled with the cultural progress of translatio from civic ruin to imperial repair. Still, assertions of Spenser's Virgilianism often require more than a little bit of finessing. The process of aligning these two authors usually resolves either into the suggestion that Spenser Christianizes, and thus completes, the Virgilian paradigm, or that Virgil's poetry encompasses so many paradoxical positions (imperial and anti-imperial, epic and anti-epic) that Spenser could hardly have avoided imitating Virgil. As Patrick Cheney has argued, "Spenser's most significant contribution to Western poetics lies in Christianizing the Virgilian idea of a literary career," and that "Spenser's genius lies in constructing a comprehensive career idea that synthesizes the Renaissance version of the Virgilian progression, pastoral and epic, with non-Virgilian genres compatible with Christianity and the Reformation" (1993, 10). (9) Or as Annabel Patterson writes, "The two voices of Elizabethan pastoral--the one idyllic, myth-making, or myth-supporting, the other ambiguous and skeptical--would seem to continue the essential argument that Vergil had with himself and posed for his contemporaries," adding that "really strong writers and thinkers would continue, as both Spenser and Sidney did, to build both voices into their work" (171). (10) The tremendous flexibility of these interpretations speaks to our own desire to cast Spenser within a Virgilian mold, to cast out notions that Spenser's authorial ambitions may lie elsewhere--even for critics who pursue Spenser's evident deviations from Virgilian paradigms. Yet at what point does Spenser stray so far from Virgil's pattern as to make his own? (11) To be sure, the Calender clearly imitates Virgil by writing pastoral eclogues, but this forms only the first step into the poem, and so to imagine that in this act of imitation Spenser thereby signs on for the whole Virgilian agenda seems a mistaken conclusion. Yet if we see Virgilian imitation in the Renaissance in a state of flux, as John Watkins suggests, we can observe that "Spenser repeatedly dramatizes his struggle to construct a Virgilian identity at a time when the nature of Virgilian writing was subject to extensive debate" (2). (12) With Virgil's promise for Rome's endless empire long fallen to ruin, with Trojan constructions of history in a state of disrepair, surely authors sought to remake Virgil's "paterne" for political, religious, and artistic reasons.

Rather than reconstructing Virgil's ideal of permanently repairing the ruins of the past in poetic or imperial monuments, the Calender suggests that poetry's "place" lies in ruins. As "places" for memory, ruins function in the Calender as mnemonic spaces for dialogue and recollection, as locations for building new memorial edifices. Such dialogic remembrance hardly represents Spenser's sole innovation, of course, since the pastoral tradition always concerns recovering the past's memorial ruins in dialogue. The crucial difference between Virgil's and Spenser's eclogues--the space between them that demands our attention--lies in how they imagine the "end" of recollection. Virgil's Eclogues clearly point to epic (altering a form that Theocritus presented as anti-epic), by auguring his future prophecy of Rome's "empire without end." Foretelling an epic that promises to repair Rome's ruin wrought by decades of war, Virgil suggests that he leaves his shepherd community behind to perform this heroic feat of authorship. (13) By contrast, Spenser's Calender suggests a refusal to leave pastoral dialogue, thereby intimating a very different "end" for recollection and for Spenser's own epic ambitions. Spenser endows communal cultural recollection with the power to build immortality, a power that Virgil ultimately arrogates to himself; the Calender thus represents not Spenser's first step along Virgil's path, but an edifice that he refuses to abandon even as he embarks upon The Faerie Queene.

Cuddie and Piers' obsession with epic alone reveals how the Calender takes Virgil less as a guide than as a subject. Rather, Spenser uses his Virgilian setting as a location for a sharp reevaluation of Virgil's cultural authority. The initial imitation of Virgil thereby establishes a context for Spenser's criticisms and, further, a set of tools with which to make them. Reading Virgil backwards, in effect, Spenser presents Virgil's earlier themes in order to revise his later ones. If we read Cuddle and Piers' desire (like E.K.'s) to locate a "new" Virgil and thus a new "place" for poetry in English culture simply as Spenser's own, we potentially miss the Calender's vital debate about authorship. The Calender's fixation with Virgil's "paterne," in other words, self-consciously examines the anxiety that Virgil's paternal presence evokes for the shepherds and E.K. Nostalgically, the Calender's inhabitants imagine building immortality in exclusively Virgilian terms, and while the apparent irretrievability of the past frustrates them, Spenser answers their ambivalence in a surprising way: by offering two visions of Rome's ruin.

2. REBUILDING VIRGIL'S "PERFECTE PATERNE OF A POETE"

E.K.'s critical introduction to The Shepheardes Calender--which this essay takes as part of the fiction of the Calender--at once introduces Spenser as the "new Poete" and attempts to place this new wine in an old bottle. (14) That is, E.K. portrays Spenser not simply as a soon-to-be-famous new poet but more portentously as England's new and improved Virgil. Investing Spenser with an heroic model of authorship, the same authorial pattern that Cuddie and Piers chart for Colin in October, E.K. devotes the better part of his introduction to the sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit argument that Spenser has followed Virgil's "perfecte paterne of a Poete" in composing his inaugural work of poetry. But where Spenser's authorial persona, Colin, falls short of expectation, E.K. implies that Spenser himself succeeds brilliantly.

As if answering Piers and Cuddie's call to locate a "place" for poetry in English culture, E.K. first describes Spenser's burgeoning fame as that which "so very well taketh place in this our new Poete" by way of analogy with that "olde famous Poete Chaucer," himself once an unknown, "uncouth unkiste" author before deemed comparable "to the worthines of the Roman Tityrus Virgile" (13). With sleight of hand, E.K. endows Spenser with a Virgilian heritage through the conflation of Chancer's and Virgil's anthorial identities, assuring Spenser (if not now, then in the fullness of time) of his "place" as England's once and future preeminent poet. (15) Yet E.K. hopes to impress upon readers a still more significant contention: rather than merely filling a vacant seat of authorship, Spenser built a "place" for English poetry with his Shepheardes Calender. Like Cuddle and Piers, E.K. describes literary authority in "monumental" terms, intimating that it requires the very kind of edifice that Virgil's epic fashioned for Rome's empire.

The juxtaposition between E.K.'s opening and closing commentaries make such architectural ambitions (and Spenser's response to them) very apparent. Indeed, perhaps the best introduction to E.K.'s place in the Calender is his departure from it. E.K.'s triumphant final commentary in The Shepheardes Calender ironically provides a gloss for a missing emblem--a blank space at the end of December's eclogue that stands in lieu of Colin's last words--and thereby creates an intriguing paradox: an assertion of Spenser's poetic immortality in the absence of his or, indeed, any poetry. Of the nonexistent emblem, E.K. approvingly explains:

   The meaning whereof is that all thinges perish and come to thyr last
   end, but workes of learned wits and monuments of Poetry abide for
   ever. And therefore Horace of his Odes a work though ful indede of
   great wit and learning, yet of no so great weight and importaunce
   boldly sayth.

   Exegi monimentum aere perennius,
   Quod nec imber neq aquilo vorax etc.  (16)

   Therefore let not be envied, that this Poete in his Epilogue sayth
   he hath made a Calendar, that shall endure as long as time etc.
   folowing the ensample of Horace and Ovid in the like. (212)

The breezy tone and facile manner with which E.K. offers Spenser a classical pedigree--a genealogy of poetic immortality--marks this allusive gesture to Spenser's fame as somehow obvious, normative, inevitable. Directing readers to interpret December's vacant emblem (whatever it said prior to its mysterious disappearance) as an entirely conventional declaration of authorship, E.K. contends that Spenser merely echoes a literary commonplace for the Calender's classical conclusion, 'folowing the ensample of Horace and Ovid' in staking his final claim to fame. Yet E.K.'s apologetic attempt to avert "envie" about such authorial boasts ultimately appears less an offer of literary context than a transparent pretext for him to brag as well.

While this passage concludes E.K.'s critical annotations, it also affords us a glimpse at E.K.'s foundational critical assumptions. With this comparative reading, E.K. conceals differences behind "etc.s," portraying Spenser's ostensible declaration that "he hath made a Calender, that shall endure as long as time" as a mere reconstruction of Horace's claim to having "built a monument more lasting than bronze" (212). This interpretation, the "meaning" E.K. sees in the Horatian formulation, constitutes a clear inverse relation between material ruin and memorial survival: "All thinges perish and come to theyr last end, but workes of learned wits and monuments of Poetry abide for ever," which to E.K. means that literary edifices memorialize best presumably because they never fall to ruin (212). E.K. clearly intends to build up Spenser's Calender--and Spenser's fame--as an immortal monument, but his interpretive elisions and omissions confer upon the Calender a status that the work itself then complicates. The absence of Colin's emblem, in other words, offers a further commentary on E.K.'s commentary. Since the promise of permanence forms the premise of poetic immortality, the missing words paradoxically undercut the Calender's claim to endurance, intimating that the Calender has fallen into the very state of ruin that E.K. claims it transcends. (17) Although E.K. remains blissfully unaware that his depiction of the Calender's immortality is profoundly contradicted by its textual context (or lack thereof), this breach nevertheless provides an important perspective on E.K himself; we see him interpretively fill in the "blank," constructing Spenser's literary renown according to his recollections of poetic precedents and, further, according to his own desire to locate a "place" for Spenser within a literary pantheon.

The tension apparent here, between judging the Calender as an immortal monument while conceding its ruinous appearance, forms the crux of E.K.'s strange defense of Spenser's poetry. E.K.'s contradictory introduction to The Shepheardes Calender at once asserts that Spenser built his literary monument by imitating Virgil's authorial pattern, both generically by starting with pastoral and symbolically by repairing the ruins of the past into an eternal edifice, and attempts to reconcile this claim with the pervasive presence of ruin in the Calender. As the introduction to the Calender makes clear, E.K.'s vast ambitions for Spenser as the "new" Virgil encompass reconstructing what E.K. perceives as the linguistic and literary rotting of England's cultural fabric. Announcing that the Calender marks only the poetic beginning of Spenser's Virgilian career path, E.K. affirms that Spenser plans to pursue his flight to fame by retracing the Virgilian rota; in this, he argues, Spenser "follow[s] the example of the best and most auncient Poetes, which devised this kind of wryting, being both so base for the matter, and homely for the manner, at the first to trye theyr habilities" (18). Spenser's "homely" origin in pastoral is merely the start of something epic, for as E.K. explains, "As young birdes, that be newly crept out of the nest, by little first to prove thyr tender wyngs, before they make a greater flyght ... So flew Virgil, as not yet well feeling his winges" (18). While directing this accomplishment more to the future than the present, E.K. still implies that Spenser has already achieved his Virgilian ambitions with the Calender. In other words, E.K. suggests that Spenser Calender's is a poetic monument to Virgil's path, exemplifying the movement from linguistic ruin to literary and cultural repair.

However, much of E.K.'s preoccupation with the architecture of immortality involves his anxiety that the Calender, far from meeting this restorative ideal, remains in ruins. This apparent conflict, between wanting to introduce Spenser as the "new" Virgil and sensing that Spenser performs his role incorrectly, is played out in E.K.'s linguistic analysis of the Calender. Behind E.K.'s eagerness to inaugurate Spenser's fame lurks an apprehension about the "new Poete's" use of obsolete language. If Spenser's Chaucerian language seems decidedly unclassical, E.K. nevertheless attempts to portray it as such; indeed, E.K.'s own language about ruin mingles his concern for England's cultural state with his nervous perception of Spenser's seemingly ruinous, archaic language. These clear reservations about Spenser's liberal use of old words significantly shape E.K.'s introduction--even though E.K. presents these doubts as those of Spenser's audience. Anticipating readers' anxieties about Spenser's antiquated language thus forms the critical role that E.K. fashions for himself.

To defend Spenser's unorthodox language, E.K. boldly asserts that Spenser's "old" words reconstructed England's long-decaying language, which he describes as a ruined edifice:

   our Mother tongue, which truely of its self is both ful enough for
   prose and stately enough for verse, hath long time ben counted most
   bare and barrein of both. which default when as some endevoured to
   salve and recure, they patched up the holes with peces and rags of
   other languages, borrowing here of the french, there of the
   Italian, every where of the Latine, not weighing how il, those
   tonges accorde ... with ours. (16)

Previous authors "patched up the holes" of the English language with "peces and rags of other languages," which unexpectedly resulted not in a restored cultural edifice but one, as E.K. puts it, with a "disorderly and ruinous" appearance (15). Complaining that earlier authors had "made our English tongue, a gallimaufray or hodgepodge of al other speches," E.K. only heightens this linguistic Tower of Babel with his choice of words (16). (18) To previous authors' failures E.K. pins a lack of faith; not believing English "ful enough for prose and stately enough for verse" produced their translative dereliction and, in turn, the cultural degeneration that E.K. so deplores (16).

Yet Spenser, E.K. tells us, represents a literary architect par excellence, "for what in most English wryters useth to be loose, and as it were ungyrt, in this Authour is well grounded, finely framed, and strongly trussed up together" (17). Such architectural skill stands Spenser in sharp contrast to "the rakehellye route of our ragged rymers" who, E.K. hyperbolically rails, "without learning boste, without judgement jangle, without reason rage and fome ... [who] seeme to be so pained and travelled in theyr remembrance, as it were a woman in childebirth" (17). Lavishly commending Spenser for laboring "to restore, as to thyr rightfull heritage such good and naturall English words, as have ben long time out of use and almost cleare disherited," E.K. then strongly compels none to "rashly blame" Spenser for his "choyse of old and unwonted words" (16). At the same time, E.K. acknowledges that Spenser's archaisms may strike a jarring note for readers, explaining that Spenser's "words: the which of many thinges which in him be straunge, I know will seeme the straungest, the words them selves being so auncient ... so grave for the straungenesse" (14). In "graunt[ing the words] be something hard, and of most men unused, yet both English and also used of most excellent Authors and Poetes," E.K. endeavors here to portray Spenser as a linguistic archaeologist and architect; Spenser heroically recovered words, making these "hard" and "unused" words viable again through linguistic restoration (14).

E.K. piles on the architectural analogies, making his polemic metaphorically plain to see: unlike authors who in "theyr remembrance" produced only crumbling hovels, Spenser recollected the ruins of the past as the Calenders lasting monument (17). Yet while insisting that Spenser's poetry repairs the damage of less-skilled literary architects, E.K. argues his case in a peculiar and counterintuitive fashion. To discredit England's native literary tradition, the one that Spenser ostensibly restored to classical form, E.K. summons tired cliches for the recovery of antiquity--disinterment, reconstruction, even rebirth--while producing a diatribe against foreign words that ironically might apply equally to Spenser since, as E.K. knows all too well, Spenser's own "old" words require some translating. This dismissal of past English authors therefore seems directed less at translation per se than at an idea--really an ideal--of cultural translatio.

Parsing E.K.'s architectural metaphors reveals a paradoxical argument wherein lies E.K.'s own doubts about Spenser's status as a "new" Virgil and E.K.'s evident attempts to fit him into a Virgilian mold anyway. Filling in the symbolic empty spaces of the English language with foreign words once produced a dilapidated linguistic edifice, E.K. argues, while Spenser's use of seemingly-decayed native words helped render the English language a complete and sturdy structure. In other words, E.K. indirectly and uncomfortably admits that Spenser's "old words" still look like relics. But if E.K. worries that the Calender appears more like a ruinous edifice than an immortal monument, he nevertheless attempts to justify the value of Spenser's words as ruins and in a manner as "straunge" as the words themselves: by praising Spenser's "dewe observing of Decorum" in "handeling his matter, and framing his words" (13-14). For E.K., Spenser's distinction from England's earlier and ostensibly inauspicious lot of authors hinges, in short, on how his "remembrance" shapes his memorial edifice, marking less his superior natural ability than his superior imitation of cultural authority.

3. REMEMBERING CICERO'S "PATERNE OF A PERFECT ORATOUR"

E.K. looks to rhetorical decorum in order to explain why Spenser's Calender, presumably already an immortal monument, has been fashioned from linguistic ruins that remain visible in its structure. As E.K. argues, decorum describes how Spenser's "remembrance" of "old words" constructs the Calender as a classical unity (all appearances to the contrary) because of how Spenser "handl[ed] his matter" and "framed his words" (14). If counting a poet worthy of immortality for his deft use of"decorum" seems like damning with faint praise, decorum still comprises the crux of E.K.'s defense of the Calender's "auncient" language; rhetorical decorum generates and frames E.K.'s efforts to persuade readers that Spenser seamlessly adapted "old," undesirable words for his "new" literary edifice--that Spenser followed Virgil's example of translating ruin into repair. Yet E.K. endeavors to explain how Spenser's Calender demonstrates this coherence with enormous and apparent difficulty. Indeed, we see a contradictory portrait of the Calender as E.K. attempts to rationalize its appearance as a matter of just memory.

To explain the usefulness and beauty of Spenser's "hard" dialect, E.K. invokes rhetorical authorities on such matters. Cogitating aloud, E.K. muses, "sure I think, and think I think not amisse, that [these words] bring great grace and, one would say, auctoritie to the verse," even if "amongst many other faultes it specially be objected of Valla against Livie ... that with over much studie they affect antiquitie" (14). Lest critics consider Spenser a mere antiquarian, a mere collector of linguistic curiosities, E.K. asserts, "I am of the opinion, and eke the best learned are of the lyke, that those auncient solemn wordes are a great ornament" (14-15). But E.K.'s discourse of decorum quickly bleeds from considerations of stylistic appropriateness into trickier questions of imitation. "Whenas this our Poet hath bene much traveiled and throughly redd," E.K. explains, "how could it be," (as that worthy Oratour sayde) but that walking in the sonne ... and having the sound of thos auncient Poetes still ringing in his eares, he mought ... in singing hit out some of theyr tunes" (14). For his vexed defense of Spenser's Calender, E.K. thus seeks authority in Cicero.

With his odd assortment of arguments defending Spenser's decorous language--ranging from dignified emulation, to natural and nearly unconscious simulation, to imitation in its least radical, perversely prudish sense of apt decoration or "ornament"--E.K. mostly suggests his own confusion and unintentional appropriation. Struggling with how to champion Spenser's choices, E.K. returns to "that worthy Oratour," Cicero, and particularly his dialogue De oratore, to describe the Calender's decorum:

   For if my memory fayle not, Tullie in that booke, wherein he
   endevoureth to set forth the paterne of a perfect Oratour, sayth
   that ofttimes an auncient worde maketh the style seeme grave, and as
   it were reverend ... yet nether everywhere must old words be stuffed
   in, nor the commen Dialecte and maner of speaking so corrupted
   therby, that as in old buildings it seine disorderly and ruinous.
   But all as in most exquisite pictures they use to blaze and
   portraict not onely the daintie lineaments of beautye, but also
   rounde about it to shadow the rude thickets and craggy clifts, that
   by the basenesse of such parts, more excellency may accrew to the
   principall; for oftimes we fynde ourselves, I knowe not how,
   singularly delighted with the shewe of such naturall rudenesse, and
   take great pleasure in that disorderly order. Even so doe those
   rough and harsh termes enlumine and make more clearly to appeare the
   brightesse of brave and glorious words. (15)

In his very selective memory of De oratore, E.K. draws another portrait (reminiscent of his picture of the English language's edifice) of how "old words" paradoxically render a structure whole. To E.K., Ciceronian decorum means that Spenser's visibly archaic language somehow frames the Calender and thereby demonstrates its unity: so "those rough and harsh termes enlumine ... the brightness of brave and glorious words." Yet E.K. remembers Cicero's "paterne of a perfect Oratour" only partially at best. Indeed, this faulty recollection ultimately casts E.K., rather than Spenser, as the sunburnt accidental tourist stumbling through the landscape of antiquity, "much travelled and throughly redd," hearing "the sound of those auncient [authors] still ringing in his eares" while he unconsciously "hit[s] out some of theyr tunes" (14). (19) In other words, precisely what Ciceronian decorum means manifests as a debate between E.K and Spenser.

Significantly, E.K. conflates two of classical Rome's greatest authorities--Virgil and Cicero--in order to suggest that Spenser pursued Virgil's "perfecte paterne of a Poet" through Cicero's "paterne of a perfect Oratour." Yet E.K. casts about wildly to link these two patterns somehow, to merge them in his overarching argument that the Calende's immortal monument has repaired the ruins of England's past poets. Pointing first to the pleasurable pathos of ruin, E.K. confesses "I know not how" we "fynde ourselves ... singularly delighted with the shew of such natural rudeness" (15). Perhaps, E.K. reasons through an analogy between poetry and painting, we see ruinous "old words" as naturally sublime because of how they frame a work--"rounde about it to shadow the rude thickets and craggy clifts" (15). On a different tack, E.K. wonders if "old words" fulfill the aesthetic of discordia concors, writing that we "take great pleasure in that disorderly order," that "so oftentimes a dischorde in Musick maketh a comely concordaunce" (15). (20) Yet E.K.'s attempt to recall Cicero's De oratore from his own disordered memory gestures to a memory tradition that E.K. seemingly only half remembers: the art of memory.

What E.K. seems to forget in his memorial reconstruction of Cicero proves crucial, for it frames the debate between E.K. and Spenser about how to remember the past: while E.K. finds in Cicero classical proof of the Calender's Virgilian permanence, Spenser locates in De oratore an alternative pattern for authorial and cultural formation. If unintentionally, E.K.'s awkward reference to Ciceronian decorum contradicts his own Virgilian ideal by offering another vision of Rome's edification and repair with the architectural mnemonic. That is, E.K.'s references to Cicero's De oratore introduce an intertext that ultimately undermines his own argument, for his Ciceronian allusions serve to remind readers about two very different, even opposed, patterns of cultural and authorial edification. Against E.K.'s visions of Virgilian poetic immortality, Spenser suggests, through Cicero, that poetry's "place" lies in ruins--ruins that provide the place for ongoing recollection, for building memorial edifices anew through dialogue.

De oratore offers another vision of Rome's edification, distinct if not opposed to the idealized eternal Rome that the shepherds find in Virgil's Aeneid. Like the Calender, Cicero's De oratore concerns itself both with creating a literary monument to the fame of its interlocutors and with building a "place" for cultural memory, endeavors that Cicero figuratively connects through techniques of locational memory. But Cicero less appropriates the rules of the ars memorativa than recasts the art's apocryphal origin as a frame tale--a fictional narrative--for how his own dialogue reconstructs the cultural and literary ruins of Rome's republic into a textual "edifice." Put another way, Cicero imagines building immortality as an art of memory, an art in which ruins function as spaces for recollection, as places for remembering the past anew.

Ironically, though, when the interlocutor Antonius introduces the topic of artificial memory at the end of book 2, he presents it as a trivial aspect of rhetoric. Describing the art's apocryphal origin--the tale of the poet Simonides who discovered the importance of place to memory when memorially reconstructing a ruined banquet hall--he paints this tale as a mere fiction:

   The apartment in which [Simonides' patron] was feasting fell down,
   and he himself, and his company, were overwhelmed and buried in the
   ruins; and when their friends were desirous to inter their remains,
   but could not possibly distinguish one from another, so much crushed
   were the bodies, Simonides is said, from his recollection of the
   place in which each had sat, to have given satisfactory directions
   for their interment. (186)

"Simonides, or whoever else invented the art," Antonius says, developed the basic rules of artificial memory. Without deigning to elaborate upon "so well-known and common a subject," Antonius quickly summarizes the art's techniques (188). (21) First "some place" for memorable images "must be imagined, as bodily shape can not be conceived without a place for it," Antonius explains, describing how an orator would imagine an edifice to "walk" through and vivid images to "look" at with the mind's eye in order to recollect the order and substance, more often than the exact words, of a speech (188). "The memory of things is the proper business of the orator," he asserts, citing a conventional division between memory for "words" and "things," calling "books" and "buildings" distinctly different "places" for storing memory (188).

Far from treating artificial memory as trivial, Cicero interrupts the dialogue in order to make exquisitely clear the architectural mnemonic's importance to De oratore's structure. Indeed, Cicero erases this metaphoric divide in his introduction to book 3, conflating writing with edification to describe De oratore's own memorial edifice. Calling this work "a memorial to posterity"--a lamentation for the interlocutors' sad fates and Rome's ruinous decline--Cicero suggests why he adopts the tale of Simonides as a powerful narrative frame for De oratore itself (196):

   life does not appear to me to have been taken away from Crassus by
   the immortal gods as a privation, but death to have been bestowed on
   him as a blessing. He did not live to behold Italy blazing with war,
   or the senate overwhelmed with popular odium, or the leading men of
   the state accused of the most heinous crimes ... for if any fortune
   had rescued [him] from so barbarous a death, the same fortune would
   have compelled [him] to be a spectator of the ruins of [the]
   country. (194-95)

Cicero casts himself in the role of Simonides by remembering their dialogue, De oratore, amidst the ruins of the Republic. "Let us deliver as a memorial ... to the remaining and almost last discourse of Lucius Crassus," Cicero asserts, "for I, who was not present at this dialogue, and to whom Caius Cotta communicated only the topics and heads of dissertation, have endeavored to shadow forth in the conversation of the speakers those peculiar styles of oratory, in which I knew that each of them was conspicuous" (196). Unlike Crassus, Cicero remains as "a spectator to the ruins of [the] country," to Rome's demise, and thus he sees his task as one of remembrance: to recollect this "remaining ... last discourse" for posterity (195-96). Suggesting a connection between recollecting ruin and literary immortality, Cicero reconstructs these fragments of dialogue in order to erect a memorial, an edifice-cum-book, to the fame of the now destroyed interlocutors.

De oratore functions, in other words, like an art of memory. In transforming the art of memory from a set of individual techniques into a story about collective memory, Cicero makes the ruins of Rome the "place" for textual recollection. Ideally, then, De oratore creates a literary edifice that reconstructs Rome's ruined house of memory, a permanent monument to preserve the interlocutors' memories. "I thought it due from me to men of such genius," Cicero further explains, "while we still retain a lively remembrance of them, to render their fame, if I could, imperishable" (85). Complicating the apparent directness of this task is that Cicero himself has no remembrance of this dialogue--nor does he attempt to conceal this fact. "I, who was not present at this dialogue," Cicero explains, "have endeavored" to shadow forth," rather than thoroughly reconstruct, their conversation (196). That Cicero recalls De oratore from "topics" rather than from personal experience reminds us of artificial memory's close alliance with rhetorical invention. Yet this fact also serves to emphasize that Cicero, even as he secures the interlocutors' memories, still fails to recover their discourse entirely. This recollective paradox speaks powerfully to the desire at the heart of the tale of Simonides: the impossible yearning to disinter the dead from the ruins of the past. Even if he wanted to revivify the dead, Cicero instead suggests that he gathers the remains of their dialogue for posterity's continuation of this discourse.

The fantasy of total recollection, Cicero intimates, is just that. The complete reconstruction, the total repair of a ruined edifice, here represents neither a possible nor desirable end. (22) Cicero's admission of partial memory, rather than evidencing despair about De oratore's ability to preserve memory, marks his expansive sense of how recollection entails change, how it acts as a vehicle for both rhetorical decorum and cultural accommodation. In his following description of artificial memory's rules, Cicero evokes the analogy between poetry and painting to clarify how the art of memory might be understood as a collective art of decorum:

   This faculty of artificial memory practice will afford ... [from]
   the derivation of similar words converted and altered in cases, or
   transferred from particulars to generals, the idea of an entire
   sentence from the symbol of a single word, after the manner and
   method of any skillful painter who distinguishes spaces by the
   variety of what he depicts. (188) (23)

Cicero presents De oratore not as an immortal monument, a fixed and permanent edifice that might evoke the Horatian tag, exegi monumentum, though his analogy anticipates the crucial context for Horace's phrase ut pictura poesis: that of decorum. In the Ars poetica, decorum is the context for Horace's comparison of poetry and painting: decorum describes, in visual terms, how to accommodate with light and dark the distance between near and far, and, presumably as well, between past and present. In other words, decorum intimately connects to how an audience views a work. (24)

Cicero suggests that De oratore's dialogue lays such visual decorum as the foundation for its edifice, for its memorial reconstruction of Rome's ruin. Cicero's art of memory illustrates decorum as both visual and verbal. But he less endows writing with the capacity to communicate like images (and vice versa) than suggests the vital importance of how this work is seen. This dialogue both remembers the dead and allows them to continue speaking, a conversation that necessarily changes to suit the perspectives of new audiences as they join in this conversation--even as late arrivals to the banquet--about cultural change and transmission.

By beginning book 3 of De oratore with his adaptation of the art of memory, Cicero indirectly asks us to consider its bearing on this book's stated topic: language and style. Book 2 closes with Crassus' complaint that "Antonius ... left me nothing but words, and took the substance for himself," but he takes up the topic of language and lends it new significance (191). As Crassus all but admits, so-called "pure Latin" is an impossible ideal. While speaking correctly is a basic expectation, Crassus argues that no one correct style exists that an orator must imitate. Rather, there are a wide variety of styles to choose from, and so what makes for great speakers constitutes ineffable decorum: skill in employing styles appropriately and elegantly (Crassus must use multiple words to describe this golden mean), fitting words to the occasion and matching matter with expression.25 Such decorum describes De oratore's architecture, for Cicero suggests this literary edifice will remain incomplete--in ruins, so to speak--and continue to change for new times and new places in renewed dialogue. In performing Simonides' role, Cicero teaches how to remember the ruins of the past for posterity, future readers who, ideally, will continue making Simonides' discovery anew.

In a sense, Cicero uses the art of memory to negotiate the interlocutors' points of view from the vistas of hindsight and memory. By committing their dialogue to writing, Cicero reveals that which lies beyond their field of vision, outside the garden where they debate the ideal education of the orator: Rome's ruin and with it their own. But the continued life of De oratore makes the more important statement about the nature of continuity and adaptation. Just as no one "perfect" style exists, no one "perfect paterne of an Oratour" exists either; and rather than recovering an ideal of rhetoric, De oratore recalls a dialogue or debate about differing ideals of rhetoric. (26) Dialogue, in fact, as a form of memorial accommodation, may represent De oratore's only true ideal of decorum. "Here the recollection of an old tradition must be revived in my mind," Cicero explains, "adapted ... [so that] you may understand what opinions the most famous and eloquent men entertained respective the whole art of oratory" (7). Nor does Cicero presume to have the last word on the matter. Rather, by transforming the ars memorativa from a technique for individual memory into a story of collective memory, Cicero illustrates how the ruins of the past are continually refashioned through recollection. De oratare's portrait of the architecture of immortality as a process of cultural transmission therefore depends upon dialogue--dialogue that describes "decorum" in the radical sense of cultural change: as a means of accommodating the ruins of the past for new literary and cultural edifices not once and forever but in perpetuity.

4. THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR

E.K.'s defense of Spenser as a new Virgil and of the Calender as an immortal monument turns on the issue of "remembrance": on how Spenser repaired the linguistic ruins of the past by fashioning his literary edifice with skillful Ciceronian "decorum." As we have seen, how E.K. configures Cicero's authority causes us to question Spenser's own--or at least E.K.'s version of it--because De oratore effectively topples, rather than bolsters, E.K.'s architectural assertions of the Calenders monumental immortality. E.K.'s attempt to render The Shepheardes Calender an instant "classic" paradoxically reveals his vexed relationship with classical (and modern) authority. Ultimately, readers can see (or hear) that E.K. and Spenser disagree about what defines decorum and, further, about who creates immortality.

E.K. most wants readers to see The Shepheardes Calender as an immortal monument, an immutable house for Spenser's fame. Indeed, how readers "behold" the Calender and thus perceive Spenser's authority forms E.K.'s greatest concern (15). Yet E.K.'s justification of Spenser's masterful repair of ruinous "old words" leans heavily on a limited, even distorted, interpretation of Ciceronian decorum. (27) Justifying the Calenders appearance in the passage quoted above, E.K. alludes not only to Ciceronian decorum but to Horatian utpicturapoesis: "as in most exquisite pictures they use to blaze and portraict not only the daintie lineaments of beautye, but also rounde about it to shadow the rude thickets and craggy cliffs, that by the basenesse of such parts, more excellency may accrew to the principall ... so doe those rough and harsh terms enlumine and make more clearly to appeare the brightnesse of brave and glorious words" (15). E.K. implies, in seemingly Ciceronian fashion, less that words and images both create "speaking pictures" but rather that decorum needs to be understood in visual as well as verbal terms. And like Horace, E.K. suggests that poetry is like painting because the degree of detail that a composition requires (whether written, oral, or pictorial) depends upon the metaphoric distance--spatial as well as temporal--of the audience "viewing" a work.

But even if E.K.'s reference to Cicero is understood as a semi-conscious evocation of the art of memory, a crucial question remains: precisely who, and what, creates this decorum? E.K. asks Spenser's audience to see the Calender's ruins as a place for individual, not collective, memory, while intimating that his memory--and not Spenser's--constructs the Calender's unity. Ironically, E.K. appears to call upon Cicero's authority less to defend Spenser's "decorum" than to justify his own: that is, the complex and contradictory ways that E.K. sees his own apparently external place in the Calender's structure. With the analogy of poetry and painting, we might suggest that E.K. pictorially represents his own critical decorum, insinuating that his glosses gather Spenser's "old words" into a coherent monument, mediating the distance between near and far, old and new, past and present, completing the Calender and demonstrating that fashioning a literary edifice depends upon such authoritative remembrance. In this way, Cicero's "paterne of a perfect Oratour" would serve a very particular end in E.K.'s introduction: Cicero permits E.K. to portray his commentaries on Spenser's "auncient" language as the ruins that flame the Calender, which in a sense conflates--even creates a dependent relation between--E.K.'s and Spenser's authority, since E.K. suggests that his glosses demonstrate (even effect) The Shepheardes Calender's decorous result. In short, E.K. credits himself with the greater knowledge; after all, E.K. alone comprehends how Cicero's "paterne of a perfect Oratour" truly allows Spenser to fulfill Virgil's "perfecte paterne of a poete."

In so doing, E.K. misses the point of Ciceronian "decorum"--dialogue--almost entirely, for he sees decorum as the duty of the author / architect who builds his immortal monument once, if not for all. Yet how E.K. portrays the Calenders architecture paradoxically allows readers to see the "place" of ruin in it differently from E.K., to hear in his remembrance of De oratore a dialogue between E.K. and Spenser about opposing "paternes" of authorial edification. Just as more than one "paterne of a perfect Oratour" exists, so Spenser implies the fallacy of just one "perfecte paterne of a Poet." Indeed, E.K. and Spenser part company (like Cuddle and Colin in October's holographic emblem) on the crucial issue of what constitutes immortality. Against E.K.'s defense of his poetry, Spenser suggests that the Calender bears out another interpretation of Cicero, and another understanding of the architecture of immortality: not as a permanent edifice that repairs ruin, but as a collection of ruins that provide the space for recollection, for building new literary and cultural edifices.

At the heart of their debate resides the question of exactly who builds literary immortality: the author or the audience? By misremembering De oratore, E.K. fails to see how readers' cultural accommodation underpins Ciceronian stylistic "decorum"; thus his effort to classicize Spenser's catholic literary style, to portray it as static rather than changing, aspires to a kind of "pure English"--a fiction, indeed. E.K. imagines a literary monument as an individual authorial construction, a private mnemonic that to be remembered requires another authority--ideally one like E.K., who claims to have been "made privie to [Spenser's] counsell and secret meaning" (19). E.K. thus performs his role in the Calender as Spenser's "translator." By "glosing and commenting" on Spenser's poetry, E.K. hopes that England "might be equal to the learned of other nations," but he rarely succeeds in effecting this kind of cultural translatio--one desired end of the Virgilian rota--because his glosses rarely hit the mark. While promising to reveal what Spenser "him selfe [is] labouring to conceale," E.K.'s relationship to Spenser's "auctoritie" is clearly more complex than that of simple confidence and revelation (19). With many of E.K.'s seemingly erudite glosses, Spenser often hints that E.K. knows far less than he professes.

A nice example of E.K.'s obfuscating observations is in his historicist commentary on the phrase "Frendly faeries," which he glosses as "when all Italy was distraict into the Factions of the Guelfes and Gibelins, being two famous houses in Florence," who evolved into "Elfes and Goblins" (115). Despite his obsession with Spenser's eventual move to epic, and despite his claims to special knowledge and insider status, E.K. fails to observe what even the casual reader might easily recognize: an amusing announcement of The Faerie Queen's incipient birth.

If he noticed it, E.K. might be comforted by De oratore's portrait of cultural ruination, the nearly infinite regress of Rome's ruin that provides a larger historical perspective than Virgil's promise of "empire without end": if Venice is always sinking, Rome is eternally falling. (28) Still, E.K. misses precisely this pattern of memorial and cultural construction--the continual cycles of ruin and recollection--both in his manifestly silly gloss to "Frendly faeries" and throughout the Calender. E.K.'s introduction and commentary therefore affect Spenser's authority in ironic and unintentional ways, placing it effectively outside the text and into hands other than E.K.'s own. While Spenser tacitly concurs that E.K.'s glosses flame the Calender like so many ruins, he also suggests that such ruin serves another end as the "place" for dialogue and continual recollection, by which the Calender's edifice is adapted for new times and places--"decorum" that continues to build Spenser's monument anew. Spenser repeatedly underscores the important place of ruin in his Calender as part of the larger "paterne of the perfect Oratour," suggesting that ruin and recollection constitute the very art of memory by which readers construct and reconstruct his Calender. By virtue of E.K.'s interpretive fallacies, Spenser engages readers in an ongoing dialogue about E.K.'s hermeneutical decorum and, in turn, about the decorum of the Calender.

Decorum, then, describes not permanence, but rather coming to feel at home by learning how to fashion one through discourse and memory, through recollection. (29) E.K.'s glosses indeed create a "place" for dialogue with Spenser's readers about his authority, readers who through their remembrance act as the continuing architects of Spenser's fame and England's culture. If E.K.'s interpretation of December's missing emblem reveals the useful ways he misreads the Calender, Spenser's epilogue replies with another picture of the architecture of immortality:

   Loe I have made a Calender for every yeare,
   That steele in strength, and time in durance shall outweare:
   And if I marked well the starres revolution,
   It shall continewe till the worlds dissolution.
   To teach the ruder shepheard how to feede his sheepe,
   ... Go lyttle Calender, thou hast a free passeporte.
   (1-7)

The epilogue exposes E.K. and Spenser's dialogue, laying bare their contrasting notions of fashioning literary immortality. While E.K.'s analysis of this passage reiterates Horace's claim to permanence--that the Calender "shall endure as long as time etc. folowing the ensample of Horace" (2 12)--reading further into the passage clarifies that Spenser's depiction of poetic immortality embraces change rather than defying it. "It shall continewe till the worlds dissolution" does not mean that Spenser's Calender stands as a monument to outwear time; rather, Spenser clearly locates the Calenders "strength," "durance," and ability "to continewe" within reach of time's scythe and with the CalendeFs ability "to teach." The epilogue emphasizes that poetry's continuance depends upon its translation--upon being relinquished by its author.

Taken as a whole, the epilogue suggests that fame exists as a process of cultural transmission; it explains how Spenser's work survives, in what form and fashion it persists, and thus elucidates a version of immortality that implicates Spenser's audience in his and the Calender's memorial life. By depicting poetic immortality as movement rather than monument, the epilogue insinuates that E.K.'s final gloss constructs Spenser's authority only in partial terms. Yet the epilogue forms less a corrective than a continuation of E.K. and Spenser's architectural debate about the immortality of literary monuments: E.K. claims that they exist in opposition to ruin, while Spenser suggests that they survive in the strange immortality of ruin and recollection. (30)

This essay began by noting an incongruity of the October eclogue: that it creates a locus for poetry even while lamenting its inability to discover such a "place." E.K.'s refusal to recognize this pattern of building immortality seems equally clear in his glosses to October; while October seems to affirm poetry's place in the Virgilian ideal of authorship--or the absence thereof, as Cuddle and Piers's lamentations confirm--it instead demonstrates conflicting "Paternes" of authorship: a Ciceronian dialogue between Spenser and E.K. (and Cuddle and Piers) about how to build a "place" for poetry in culture. Indeed, Cuddle and Piers's debate about poetic fame helps to construct a memorial edifice from the very ruins they despairingly recollect, an edifice that serves at once as a "house of fame" for Colin and as a new "place" for poetry in culture. (31) Their discussion about Colin's personal and romantic dilemma, their fear that he cannot perform Virgil's role because he has chosen the wrong muse, becomes itself an opportunity for Colin's integration into cultural memory. Colin's assertion in January that his desire is not to become famous but to express his self--"Art made a myrrhour to behold my plight," he assures Hobbinol--is not mere modesty (20). In June when Hobbinol again tells Colin that he is looking in for love in all the wrong places, and encourages him to forget Rosalind and lyric in favor of Eliza and epic, Colin at once rejects this advice and articulates his own ambitions about poetry. These authorial ambitions are finally not those of the "Romish Tityrus" but of the other "Tityrus," Chaucer: (32)

   The God ofshepheardes Tityrus is dead,
   Who taught me homely, as I can, to make ...
   Nowe dead he is, and lyeth wrapt in lead ...
   And all hys passing skil with him is fledde,
   The fame whereof doth dayly greater growe,
   But if on me some little drops would flowe,
   Of that the spring was in his learned hedde,
   I soone would learne these woods, to wayle my woe,
   And teache the trees, their trickling teares to shedde.
   (81-96)

Colin's fame "doth dayly greater growe," though the other characters in the Calender do not see their part in creating this fame. Nevertheless, precisely at the moments when shepherds lament Colin's ruin they also recollect the fragments of his poetry, adapting them for a new literary and cultural edifice and moving him inadvertently toward his house of fame.

Colin begins and ends the Calender in a state of personal ruin, and to this extent his progress as a lover is circular. In January, Rosalind has broken his heart and in turn his poetic inspiration; she "laughs [at] the songes Colin Clout doth make" leading him to break "his oaten pype" (66, 72). In December Colin laments that his "spring is spent, [his] sommer burnt up quite," and intones, "Gather ye together my little flocke" (128, 145). But his "flocke" have already been doing this throughout the Calender, gathering his scattered rhymes in their memory. We see that Colin's path as a poet follows a different trajectory; his refusal to play a Virgilian role, his apparent passivity and self-destructiveness in the face of his own ruin, implies that he moves toward Elizabeth and epic poetry not of his own volition but rather through his gradual integration into cultural memory. (33) And lest we conclude that Spenser willingly assumes the Virgilian part that Colin rejects, the debates about Virgil's legacy throughout the Calender suggest otherwise. The Faerie Queene, Spenser clarifies through his shepherds' continuing dialogues, will not conform to Virgil's "perfecte paterne of a Poete" but rather will follow a new architectural pattern to fashion a new "place" for poetry from the ruins of the past. The Calender thereby "continewes ... to teach," as the epilogue intimates, how remembering ruin continues to build immortality. Recollecting the "ruins" of Colin's poetry, a process that occurs in October and throughout the Calender, moves him closer to his house of fame, because the very act of recollection builds a place for poetry in culture. And Spenser repeatedly points The Shepheardes Calender in the direction of home, toward the poetic edifice that he will remember from Colin's ruins, moving from Colin's lyrical obsessions with Roma and Amor to worthier loves, Elizabeth and England, and the house that epic will continue to build for them--even after the death of the author.

* I would like to thank Anne Lake Prescott, Edward Tayler, and Patrick Cheney for their enormous help with this essay. Many thanks also to Leonard Barkan and Jean Howard