You have THREE possible topics on which to write:

1. Poetry, reception, learning:

   Of all the genres that Antiquity bequeathed to the Renaissance, pastoral poetry is perhaps the most self-conscious: self-conscious in the sense that it pointedly reflects on its own history and transmission as a genre. This paper topic invites you to examine Spenser's engagement with earlier authors in the context of this highly self-reflexive kind of writing.

   Choose one of the Spenserian eclogues that we have NOT read for class. Read carefully and note when Spenser is alluding to other authors and/or texts (Ovid, for example, or Chaucer, or Virgil; there are dozens of possibilities). Consult E.K.'s notes at the end of the eclogue you choose and consider what (if any) explanation he gives for the references that you notice.

   Next, choose ONE allusion from the eclogue that seems particularly resonant, bizarre, opaque or illuminating. Go to the library and learn something about that text. How would you describe Spenser's relationship to it? What does he do with, or do to, the text from which he borrows his material? What about E.K.? If he glosses the allusion that you have chosen, is his gloss accurate or perverse? Does it explain what's going on in the eclogue or make it murkier?

   Your paper should centrally address the question of Spenser's relationship to the author or text that you find him using in The Shepheardes Calender. From the perspective of allusion, what argument does Spenser make, about his authority as a writer, about the value of poetry as a form of knowledge and/or about the status of English as a literary language?

   
   
   

2. With some slight exceptions, Tottel's Miscellany (1557) is printed in blackletter ("gothic"; "ye Olde Englisshe") type. The 1579 Shepheardes Calendar, twenty-two years later, is a much more complex typographic performance. It uses a complicated (but apparently ordered) mixture of blackletter, roman, and italic typefaces. Can you suggest any significance to this mixed typographic format? Can you suggest any significance to the way or ways in which the printers distinguish between the uses to which they put each typeface? Are the book's typographic elements constitutive in any way of Spenser's "meaning" in this book? If so -- IF so! please notice that this question does NOT assume that "Yes" is the only possible answer (you might want to imagine that it's the printers, not Spenser, having typographic fun in this admittedly odd way) -- then how do these elements function?
   
   
   

3. Why might Spenser have wanted his reader to think about Virgil while that reader was also reading, and thinking about, Spenser? Was his reader "reading, and thinking about, Spenser"? Which reader? -- E.K.? Sir Philip Sidney? Gabriel Harvey? Queen Elizabeth? You?

   Does his book, author unnamed, present all of its readers with a level playing field? If it does not, how does it not, and why does it not? Use specific examples from the poem in your response.

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