While
a student at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, he had translated some of the
_Visions of Petrarch_, and the _Visions of Bellay_, a French poet, but
it was only in 1579 that the publication of his _Shepheard's Calendar_
announced the coming of a great original poet, the first since Chaucer.
The _Shepheard's Calendar_ was a pastoral in twelve eclogues--one for
each month in the year. There had been a revival of pastoral poetry in
Italy and France, but, with one or two insignificant exceptions,
Spenser's were the first bucolics in English. Two of his eclogues were
paraphrases from Clement Marot, a French Protestant poet, whose psalms
were greatly in fashion at the court of Francis I. The pastoral
machinery had been used by Vergil and by his modern imitators, not
merely to portray the loves of Strephon and Chloe, or the idyllic charms
of rustic life; but also as a vehicle of compliment, elegy, satire, and
personal allusion of many kinds. Spenser, accordingly, alluded to his
friends, Sidney and Harvey, as the shepherds Astrophel and Hobbinol;
paid court to Queen Elizabeth as Cynthia; and introduced, in the form of
anagrams, names of the High-Church Bishop of London, Aylmer, and the
Low-Church Archbishop Grindal. The conventional pastoral is a somewhat
delicate exotic in English poetry, and represents a very unreal Arcadia.
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