ABSTRACT
As a pastoral work, introducing to the nation a 'new Poete' who will restore its literary fortunes and anticipating a 'greater flyght' in higher genres to follow, The Shepheardes Calender courts the assumption that it 'announce[s] .. . the poet's ambition to follow a Vergilian career,.1 E. K.'s introductory epistle, and later the October eclogue, draw heavily on the notion of the Virgilian rota, the ideal poetic career modelled on Virgil's, beginning with pastoral, the private, lyrical poetry of otium, and progressing through the didactic poetry of the Georgics to dynastic epic celebrating the current regime. But the identification is not straightforward: in October Cuddie ('alias you know who' as Harvey puts it, another veil for 'the authour selfe') rejects the Virgilian paradigm, and E. K. entangles Virgil's name in a web of others, ancient and modern.2 There is throughout, in fact, a persistent pattern at work distancing the Calender from its supposed model in Virgil's Eclogues, and from the political obedience and complacency implicit in the relationship between Virgil and Augustus. Simultaneously another pattern emerges which points to Ovid, poet of love, of indirect political satire against Augustus, and of exile and complaint, as the presiding genius of the Calender. While the politically safe model Virgil is named repeatedly and prominently by E. K., the work's allegiance to the subversive Ovid is not stated openly, but implied by an accumulation of mostly covert allusions. Such obliqueness is apt in this anonymous work, which continually draws attention to its careful shrouding of 'secret meaning,.3 Ultimately the apparent announcement of a Virgilian career seems to be another veil thrown over the provocative self-alignment with Ovid, to distract the censor from its promise of a career of critical distance from state ideology.
