ABSTRACT
This chapter explains why Spenser may have thought he was unworthy both of praise and blame in writing as he did by placing The Shepherd's Calendar in the context of one of the great debates fostered by academic humanism in the later sixteenth century: the relative merits of ancient and vernacular prosody. It argues that Spenser, though he was deeply committed to the vernacular tradition, and had a proper understanding of his own achievements in this kind of verse, was nonetheless worried that his poetry would be dismissed as 'barbarous' by humanist critics. Spenser's distinction between the shepherd and the clown is crucial to his later development as a pastoral poet. Here Turberville presents his eclogues as if they themselves were shepherds, intruding their rude and rustical presences on 'Maister Hugh Bamfield Esquier'. Shepherds are 'clowns', that is, 'country-folk'; but Spenser suggests that shepherds are not as rude as other people who live in the country.
