Edmund Spenser and E K- a response to Michael Peverett

In a recent blog I made the statement that it is ‘glaringly obvious’ that E K is Edmund Spenser. This view has been challenged by Michael who points to his own ‘feebly indecisive’ remarks. Let me say at the outset how delighted I am that at least one reader of this blog cares about E K’s identity because I’m of the view that it’s really Quite Important. I also need to point out that most debates of this sort are utterly meaningless outside the narrow confines of the academy primarily because we will never know the answer but also because the answer doesn’t really matter. So, given that the identity of E K adds nothing to the quality or enjoyment of ‘The Shepheardes Calendar’, I shouldn’t care one way or the other just as I don’t have a view about the two-handed engine in ‘Lycidas’ and get annoyed by both sides of the debate about what exactly occurred at Todtnauberg.

In this instance it does matter, at least to me, because the epistle preceding the Calendar, in which E K justifies a number of devices, seems to outline a quite distinct manifesto which is carried through in Spenser’s later work and because the use of a self-penned gloss is utterly typical of the Spenser that exists in my head. In retrospect and after careful consideration, ‘glaringly’ may be an adjective too far because we all carry different Edmund Spenser’s about with us.

For those unfamiliar with the ‘Shepheardes Calendar’, it is the earliest surviving poem of any significance that we have and it moves away from the ‘standard’ pastoral sequence by using a range of verse forms across the twelve poems (one for each month). It demonstrates a degree of technical virtuosity and deploys a range of archaisms, a practice which is explained and justified in E K’s epistle.

There are three main factions on the E K debate:

• E K Is Edward Kirke who also attended Pembroke College;
• E K is not Edward Kirke but is not Edmund Spenser either;
• E K is either Edmund Spenser or a combination of Edmund Spenser and Gabriel Harvey.

Michael seems to be opting for the second of these – at this stage it is probably useful to look at the evidence for each case. As will be seen, the hard evidence in support of any of these is very thin.

The evidence for Edward Kirke

According to Andrew Hadfield in the DNB, these are the facts upon which this argument is based;

• he matriculated from Pembroke College in 1571, to years after Spenser- Gabriel Harvey was made a fellow of the college in 1570;
• he was ordained rector at Risby on the institution of Sir Thomas Kyston who was the uncle of the Spenser sister of Althorp who make an appearance in ‘Colin Clouts Come Home Again’ (536-70) – a poem that can be read as an updating of the Calendar;
• one of Kirke’s account books shows that he bought a ‘Shephard’s calender’ in 1582 for two shillings;
• letters between Harvey and Spenser refer to ‘E K’ and to ‘Mystresse Kerke’.

As can be seen, this is making the facts work really quite hard. As an aside, as far as I can tell the only reason the Edward Kirke is in the DNB is due to the fact that he might be ‘E K’ even though Hardfield’s entry gently dismisses this claim.

E K as somebody else

David Shore probably provides the most cogent argument against the ‘E K as Spenser’ faction. Following C S Lewis he points out the differences in view between E K and Spenser with regrad to:

• Marot, as in “and used of the French Poete Marot (if he be worthy of the name of a Poete);
• fairies and elves (although Lewis’ reading of the gloss does seem one-sided);
• Arthurian romance as the product of ‘fine fablers and lowd lyers.

Shore also makes the point that Spenser would not have written such a blatant piece of self-promotion as the epistle and goes on at length to find fault with the intellectual level of the gloss.

E K as Spenser

I’m the first to concede that the hard evidence here is even thinner than that outlined above but the soft evidence is much more compelling. The hard evidence (according to Thomas H Cain in the Yale edition) is that the same translation of Cicero is used in the gloss and in the first of the three letters to Harvery and that the mistake made when glossing ‘furies’ (Persephone instead of Tisiphone) is repeated in “Teares of the Muses”.

In terms of soft evidence, Cain makes the point that this device is more light-hearted than we currently think, that there’s more than a degree of the banteringv in-joke in both the epistle and the text. It is likely that this kind of material would find a ready audience around the Spenser/Harvey circle.

Shore undermines his own argument by pointing out that E K actually glides over the more contentious aspects of the sequence. This only makes sense if the gloss was composed purely as a gloss and not as part of the manifesto containe in the epistle. Viewed in this way, it should be reasonably obvious that both are more interested in justification than explanation.

Finally, what we know of Spenser suggests that he was one of those late Tudor grammar school boys with huge ambition- one of the men on the make who were delighted to gain wealth and status in Ireland that they could never have achieved at home. In short, a bit of a chancer (in the Raleigh mould) who would pen fulsome praise to himself and his abilities and (with a little assistance from Harvey) pass this off as the work of a disinterested third party…

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Poetry’s dead ends

This has been prompted by Andrew Hadfield’s observation that the poetic innovations of John Skelton led to a ‘dead end’ by which I think he means that there are no obvious followers who took up the Skelton way of doing poetry. I think this might be right about Skelton, certainly it’s hard to think of anything since in the manner of ‘Speke Parrot’ and this has led me to consider how many other dead ends there may be.

Hadfield also quotes with approval C S Lewis on Skelton- ‘He has no real predecessors, and no important disciples; he stands out of the streamy historical process, an unmitakable individual, a man we have met’ and this seems quite helpful in dead end identification. The other consideration for me is to identify why I’m attracted to this particular type of failure.

The two poems that spring to mind are Browning’s ‘Sordello’ and David Jones’ ‘The Anathemata’. The DNB has this to say on Sordello: ‘ One of the chief characteristics of the poem that gives it its distinctive voice is parabasis: that is, the presence of digressions in which the author addresses the audience on personal or topical matters. After devoting six books often relating in a roundabout way to Sordello, in the end the narrator suggests that the real subject was not Sordello but rather the poet himself and his efforts to write the poem. Carefully ordered but appearing unstructured, purportedly historical but in fact deeply personal, generically indeterminate and stylistically complex, Sordello is unique in literary history’ and notes that Browning thought that it would make his career whereas it was met with critical condemnation and has remained unfollowed despite attempts by Swinburne and Ezra Pound to revive it. Some lonely souls regard it as our first modernist poem but this is very much a minority view.

‘The Anathemata’ can also be said to have buried Jones’ literary reputation because of what is seen as its relentless difficulty and obscurity which undermined the reputation of the much more accessible ‘In Parenthesis’. It also has had champions but seems to stubbornly resist attempts at rehabilitation. I recognise that Jones’ influence can be seen in the work of John Matthias but I can’t think of any work that matches the ambition and the breadth of this completely brilliant poem.

I’d also like to nominate Michael Drayton’s ‘Poly-Olbion’ but it did receive some recognition at the time of publication and was revered as our national poem by some in the 19th century. I also acknowledge that most of Drayton’s work was a pale imitation of Edmund Spenser but ‘Poly-Olbion’ stands apart in terms of what it tries to do and because it puts Drayton at a further distance from his metaphysical and cavalier peers. Whilst there are a number of poets who were influenced by Drayton, I can’t think of any poems that are in the vein of ‘Poly-Olbion which is a very, very long geographical survey of England and Wales- it is also one of the poems referred to by Jones in his notes to ‘The Anathemata’.

‘Speke Parrot’ is gloriously complicated and makes extensive use of foreign words and phrases. One of its themes are said to be an attack on Cardinal Wolsley’s growing power whilst another is espousing the ‘traditional’ cause in the Grammarians’ War which is now considered to be reasonably obscure but did lay the ground for the English Renaissance at the end of the 16th century. As Jane Griffiths (current expert on all things Skelton) has pointed out, the current version that we now have which was produced in the 19th century is a mixture of the manuscript and print versions of the poem but it is clear that Skelton took more care with this than the rest of his output.

Not only is this poem radically different from any other of the time, it is also very different from the rest of Skelton’s output and I’m increasingly of the view that it is this ‘overshadowing’ by one particular poem that is responsible for these ‘dead ends’.

Warming to this particular theme, the DNB again informs me that it was Browning’s publisher, Edward Moxon, who gently steered back on to a less ‘difficult’ path, thus preventing the kind of overshadowing referred to above. I also need to distinguish here between bad poems and poets that have been rightly overlooked and those accomplished poems which have led to dead ends but nevertheless deserve our attention.

The other point of this post was to try and work out why I’m attracted to this stuff. I think there’s two things that are entwined here:

• a completely sentimental and irrational devotion to the perceived underdog which is embedded in the cultural DNA of the north-east of England which I reluctantly accept as my own even though I haven’t lived therefor thirty years;
• a deeply felt identification with the odd and the incongruous providing that the oddness / eccentricity is sincere and not merely for the sake of standing out from the crowd.

There is also a little bit of elitism going on in that I want to be in the ‘gang’ that recognises the importance of this stuff (Ezra Pound in the case of ‘Sordello’, W H Auden and John Matthias in the case of ‘The Anathemata’ etc.) because I like to think that I’m as preceptive, insightful and generally clever as other gang members. Needless to say, this is something that I need to be very careful with.

By way of coming to some further kind of conclusion, it is worth recognising that the poets concerned took more care with these works than any other and that ‘Speke Parrot’ ‘Poly-Olbion’ and ‘The Anathemata’ were provided with notes. The other commonality is the level of self-consciousness in the work and the presence of the poet who is addressing the audience about (at least in part) the making of the poetry.

Finally, the dead end may also be due to the difficulty in following in these footsteps, as a practitioner I recognise that David Jones provides the best modernist example to follow but it really would take years of practice and learning to reach that kind of breadth and technical prowess. And life might just be too short…

I’m conscious that this is a personal selection, I’d be interested to hear of others, particularly those outside the UK.