ABSTRACT
It may seem unnecessary today to affirm the value of Spenser’s poetry, at a time when so many exchanges of information, evaluation, and appreciation are taking place in what seems, by and large, a strong and even inflationary market; but it may be useful to consider the degree to which Spenser’s original decision to go public, to go into print with his enterprise, was taken with full awareness of both its risks and its necessity. The Shepheardes Calender concludes with a riddling motto: Merce non mercede. Whether this is to be rendered as the Yale editors have suggested, “Judge by the goods, not the price,” or perhaps taken as contrasting the market value of a book with its patronage value as a privately circulated manuscript in the old way, the “grace and favour” of a courtly dedication, the words seem to locate the volume explicitly as merchandise, and as constituting a risky venture, at that.1 I would suggest that the Calender's strategies of presentation, as domestic almanac and as an eclogue book with full apparatus in imitation of the classics, place it within an Augustan tradition whereby poetic survival is couched in economic terms (as currency), in calendrical terms (as recurrency), and in terms, too, of the characteristically Spenserian signature of a poetry attuned to the natural currents of river or waterfall. At the same time, I shall propose more sketchily that when the 1579 prospectus of the Calender is recalled explicitly in The Faerie Queene, Spenser can expect the reader to recognize simultaneously the monumental achievement of his project and its commitment to the workings of mutability.
