Aprill is the second of six Colin Clout eclogues (with Jan, June, Aug, Nov, and Dec), and features a narrative about the role of the shepherd-poet in his rural community. Whereas Januarye has presented Colin’s private, amorous courtship of Rosalind, Aprill presents his professional, political courtship of Queen Elisa, identified in the Argument as a representation of Queen Elizabeth (Montrose 1979: 39). The relationship between poet and monarch comes front and center, emphasizing their reciprocity in the making of each other: poetry shapes monarchy; and monarchy shapes poetry (Montrose 1986).

Spenser represents this relationship through a complex three-part structure. In lines 1-36, two shepherds who have appeared previously, Thenot and Hobbinol, engage in a dialogue about Colin: whereas Hobbinol weeps that his friend has turned away from him to Rosalind and now has abandoned his art, Thenot cheerfully asks to hear one of Colin’s songs. In lines 37-153, Hobbinol then ‘recorde[s]’ (Arg and line 30) Colin’s ‘laye / Of fayre Elisa, Queene of shepheardes all’ (33-4). Finally, in lines 154-61 Thenot and Hobbinol agree that Colin has been foolish to sacrifice his art to unrequited love.

To offset the inset-lay from the dialogue, Spenser modulates prosody intricately. The dialogue proceeds through a four-line stanza (or quatrain) of often rough-sounding alliterative verse (the opening line reads, ‘what garres thee greete?’) in a generally iambic pentameter line, rhyming abab. In contrast, Colin’s lay proceeds through an elaborately devised thirteen-stanza unit with each stanza having nine lines, rhyming ababccddc, alternating long and short lines: the first, third, fifth, and sixth are generally in iambic pentameter; the second, fourth, seventh, and eighth, generally in iambic dimeter; and the ninth, generally in iambic tetrameter. It is a remarkable premonition of the nine-line stanza of The Faerie Queene (known as ‘the Spenserian stanza’), and is original to English literature. The effect of the eclogue’s full metrical design is to draw attention to the superiority of the poet—both Colin and Spenser—in the presence of his peers (and sovereign).

Clearly, then, the showpiece of the eclogue is Colin’s lay of Elisa. The lay had a substantial contemporary reception, discussed, e.g., by Abraham Fraunce in his 1588 The Lawiers Logike (sig. Jiiir-Jiiijv) and anthologized in the 1600 England’s Helicon (sig. Cb). In the 1586 Discourse of English Poetrie, William Webbe discusses the lay and curiously turns it into Sapphics (sig. Jiir-Jiiijr), while in his Lay to Beta, on Elizabeth (Shepheards Garland, Eclogue 3), Michael Drayton offers a clear imitation. Milton, too, was attracted to Aprill, as revealed by both Lycidas and Arcades (Var 7: 280). Indeed, Colin’s lay qualifies as ‘one of the chief beauties of The Shepheards Calender, and of Elizabethan verse at large’ (Herford, Var 7: 275). Further, the ‘blazon of Elisa in the “April” eclogue has become one of the most famous of all the poetic images of the Virgin Queen. But retrospect has made it hard to remember that the cult of Elizabeth as maiden goddess was still a relatively new phenomenon’ (Norbrook 2002: 74). In particular, Colin’s lay joins his August sestina on Rosalind and his elegy on Dido in November in ‘stand[ing] out as staking an English claim in the poetry of the European Renaissance’ (Alpers 1996: 182).

Colin’s lay is the first version of what will recur famously throughout the Spenser canon: a detailed masculine representation of the female body (cf. Micros 1993), indebted to European traditions of the blazon, which here traces to the Song of Solomon and to Petrarch’s Rime Sparse (e.g., 90, 157, and 200). Yet Spenser’s specific precedents for celebrating a monarch come from classical pastoral, Scripture, and continental pastoral: the praise of a ruler in Theocritus, Idylls 17, the ‘Encomium to Ptolemy’; the celebration of the princely Roman babe as the herald of the return of the Golden Age in Virgil, Eclogues 4 (the so-called ‘Messianic eclogue’, because Christians interpreted the babe as Jesus); the lovely description of the beloved’s female body in the Song of Solomon; and the lament for the death of a beloved sovereign in Marot’s Complainct de Madame Loyse. In the background as well may be Richard Mulcaster’s The passage of our most drad Soueraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth, through the citie of London (1558 = 1559), which ‘describes Elizabeth’s passage past a succession of elaborate symbolic pageants’ that emphasize ‘the mutuality of the love displayed by Elizabeth and her people’: ‘Mulcaster’s pamphlet has much in common with Virgil’s fourth eclogue, joyously heralding a reign which promises to bring peace and prosperity to the nation’ (Pugh 2016: 117, 122; see 116-24). As the scriptural precursor text hints, Colin’s lay, while formally a praise poem, is indebted to the tradition of the wedding hymn or ode, known as the epithalamium. Yet the eclogue’s double structure of dialogue-and-song suggests a compound depiction of the poet in relation with the monarch. On the one hand, Aprill tells a triumphal story about Colin’s use of his art to praise his sovereign, depicting an idealized poet-monarch relation, which presumably becomes useful to Spenser in advertising his address to the queen and important to the leadership he offers to other poets. On the other hand, Aprill tells a disastrous story about the poet’s unrequited love for Rosalind as impeding this very model, thereby tempering the idealization through lament.

Is Aprill, then, a praise poem (Cain 1978: 14-24), or a poem of ‘resistance’ relying on ‘the “doubleness”’ of ‘camouflage’ (Norbrook 2002: 78-80)? For that matter, is the subject of the eclogue Elizabeth as ‘queen of England and head of the English church’, with ‘the panegyric ode . . . the closest The Shepheardes Calender comes to expressing a complete and idyllic unity of nation and church’ (Halpern 1991: 205); or does Aprill present the political leader as ‘a personification of pastoral poetry’, with Spenser emphasizing ‘Elizabeth’s status as an ideal image created by the poet’ (Montrose 1979: 40-1)?

Although the eclogue is rich enough to sustain affirmative answers to all of these questions, the woodcut emphasizes the latter interpretation. It presents the queen standing in the center, surrounded by ten dancing ladies holding musical instruments, suggesting the classical Muses, while Colin stands off to the left, facing the dance and playing his pipe, his smaller scale suggesting that he conjures up the vision with his art. Above Colin, in the background, are Thenot and Hobbinol, with their sheep in front of them and the house to which they return at the end behind them (160). Yet even further in the background, toward the middle and on a hill, stands an imperial city, reminding viewers that ‘“Aprill” serves to predict the heroic poem that was already being composed’ (Oram 1989: 69). At the top, and centered, is the zodiacal sign of Taurus, the Bull, a reference to the myth of Jupiter disguising himself as a bull to carry off the beautiful girl Europa, which Ovid uses to tell how ‘“majesty and love” do not go well together’, a warning to Elizabeth about the dangers of marrying the French Duc d’Alençon (McCabe 1999: 530, quoting Met 2.846-7; see Brooks-Davies 1995: 64).

For its complex artistic design, its bifurcated representation of a relationship at the heart of sixteenth-century literature, and its importance within a long reception history, Aprill commands attention as a set piece of the Calender and of English poetry.