August is unique in the Calender for its formal complexity—in structure, rhyme scheme, tone, and thus in function and significance. It becomes not merely the ‘ultimate comic distillation of Virgilian pastoral in The Shepheardes Calender’ (Bernard 1989: 68) but more precisely the book’s register for the genre of pastoral itself, unfolding the poet’s skilled authority before the nation.

The eclogue consists of four main parts: 1) in lines 1-52, Perigot and Willye engage in a dialogue over Perigot’s debilitating love for a ‘bouncing Bellibone’ (61) and select Cuddie as their judge for a singing contest; 2) in lines 53-124, the two shepherds engage in the singing contest, with Perigot voicing his suffering and Willye offering a response; 3) in lines 125-50, Cuddie then awards the prize to both shepherds and offers to ‘rehearse’ (194) Colin Clout’s song of unrequited love for Rosalind; and 4) in lines 151-95, Cuddie records Colin’s song, followed by Perigot’s ‘admir[ing]’ response (191) and Cuddie’s call for the shepherds to go ‘home’ (194).

Each of the four parts has its own rhyme scheme. The opening dialogue redeploys the six-line stanza of Januarye (ababcc), with its iambic pentameter line, although it orchestrates the layout of the rhyme scheme quite differently and with considerable complexity: in lines 1-24, Willye speaks the quatrain and Perigot the couplet; in lines 25-42, Willye speaks the six-line stanza twice and Perigot once; and then in lines 43-52 the shepherds alternate two-line units, until Cuddie concludes by voicing the stanza’s last two lines. The roundelay sung during the singing contest—arguably pastoral’s defining event—relies on a tetrameter line and consists of thirty quatrains rhyming abab, with Perigot singing the ‘a’ lines’ and Willye the ‘b’. The follow-up conversation awarding the prizes and leading up to Colin’s song redistributes the six-line stanza, with Cuddie singing all the quatrains but one and with the other two shepherds singing the couplets. Colin’s song, the showpiece of August, is an English sestina, using an unrhymed, iambic pentameter line spread across six stanzas, concluded with a three-line envoy. The form of the sestina traces to Arnaut Daniel, Dante, Petrarch, Sannazaro, and the French Pléiade, with Spenser and Sidney (in ‘Ye goteheard Gods’) vying for the title of English inventor, although Spenser’s sestina is the first to appear in print (cf. Shapiro 1980). The placement of a six-stanza poem with six lines in each stanza is appropriate to an eclogue about the sixth month of the year, according to the old calendar, which begins in March (Brooks-Davies 1995: 128). Yet it was Petrarch in the Rime Sparse who had featured the number six in his sestinas as a ‘particularly clear example of a cyclical form expressing the embeddedness of human experience in time’: the ‘recurrence of the six rhyme-words expresses the soul’s obsession with its inability to transcend time’ (Durling 1976: 17).

Nonetheless, as E.K. points out in his Argument, the key subtexts for August are the singing contests in Theocritus and Virgil, Idylls 5 and 6 and Eclogues 3 and 7. While the singing contest, known as ‘amoeboean song’, was ‘destined to become a hallmark of the bucolic poetry of Theocritus and his imitators’ (Halperin 1983: 178), it forms an unusually precise model for the imitative methodology of pastoral poetry. For the fiction of two singers competing with each other in rivalry for a prize models the way that pastoral poets produce their art in rivalry with preceding poets, the way Theocritus does with the epics of Homer (Halperin 1983: 170-89, 223-30, 237-43, 250-3). E.K. encapsulates this model—scripting a precise mimesis identifying imitation with representation—when he calls the singing contest ‘a delectable controversie, made in imitation of that in Theocritus: whereto also Virgile fashioned his third and seventh Æglogue’ (Arg 1-3).

The Theocritean link of pastoral with epic appears in displaced form in the singing contest, which notably replaces war with art, and often resolves the competition peacefully. The generic paradigm appears on one of the traditional prizes of the contest, the drinking cup, which constitutes a miniature ekphrasis (one that, for Theocritus, originates in the famed decorated shield of Achilles in the Iliad, Book 18): the self-conscious artifact of the cup represents not merely pastoral as an art form (cf. Halperin 1983: 185-7) but the agonistic epic dynamic of pastoral. Thus the ‘mazer’ that Willye offers contains two scenes, each representing a version of the epic dynamic of Spenser’s pastoral. The first depicts an ivy vine taming the ‘fiers warre’ of ‘Beres and Tygres’ (28)—‘fiers warre’ to appear in Spenser’s programmatic phrase for epic in the opening stanza of The Faerie Queene: ‘Fierce warres and faithfull loves shall moralize my song’ (I.pr.1.9). The second scene depicts a ‘shepherd swayne’ stepping in to ‘save’ a ‘Lambe in the Wolves jawes’, an act of pastoral bravery evocative of the epic heroes of Scripture, David and Christ. When Spenser says that his cup is fit for ‘any harvest Queene’ (36), he gestures to the public utility of his pastoral for Elizabeth (see 25-36n).

Spenser’s insertion of the sestina into an eclogue with a singing contest is original in the pastoral tradition, and demonstrates his competitive overgoing of the very tradition he imitates, modeled in the way that the sestina triumphs over the roundelay of Willye and Perigot. Yet it is not clear how the two songs finally relate. Do they ‘occur in the same eclogue because they work out two extremes of the pastoral assumption that love suffering is appeased or stabilized by song’ (Alpers 1985: 92)? Or do they form evidence of Spenser’s critique of such a paradise principle: ‘erotic obsession’ may be ‘the means to poetic expression’, but ‘[m]isogyny is the dark side of recreative narcissism’ (Berger 1988: 393). However construed, the eclogue does create a counterpoint on the Petrarchan theme of unrequited love as it affects the poet’s art: between the ‘light-hearted . . . mock-tragic’ tone of the roundelay, characterized by Perigot’s naïve lovelorn-ness and Willye’s splendid cynicism, and the ‘serious . . . tragedy’ of the sestina (Cullen 1970: 106-7). Whereas Perigot can be spurred into song by Willye, Colin has abandoned his art, and thus his song can only be rehearsed (see Hoffman 1977: 84). The ‘grief becomes something of a performance art’ (McCabe 1999: 549), but that art reveals something unexpected: embedded in time amid the isolated world of the forest, Colin suddenly sympathizes with Rosalind, whose ‘voyces silver sound’ (181) inspires his verse, which, unlike in Januarye or June, now recognizes the ‘misdeede, that bred her woe’ (186).

Unlike the woodcut for June, the woodcut for August is relatively straightforward, though impressively detailed. In the center are the three shepherds involved in the singing contest, with leafy foliage in the background, while in the foreground are the prizes of a ‘spotted Lambe’ (37) and a maplewood cup or ‘mazer ywrought’ (26). To the left is Venus holding the ‘golden Apple’ that E.K. identifies in his gloss on Willye’s reference to the Judgment of Paris (137-8). Since Paris had awarded the fruit to the love goddess rather than to Juno or Athena, causing the Trojan War, the reference lets a tragic tenor intrude into the narrative. Likely, Spenser alludes to the marriage between Queen Elizabeth and the French duc d’Alençon, since August is the month of Virgo (as the woodcut displays) and thus of the Virgin Queen: the depiction of the danger of desire in the woodcut, as well as in the dialogue, roundelay, and sestina, warns Elizabeth against marriage in favor of virginity (Brooks-Davies 1995: 128-9). Yet one detail is especially striking. In the upper-left corner, a male figure walks toward a building; presumably, the figure is Colin Clout, returning to the ‘house’ from which Rosalind ‘did part’ (161).

The detail suggests that August is important partly because it includes the second of three inset-songs sung by Colin, joining the Aprill lay of Queen Elisa and the November elegy on Queen Dido; thereby, it makes apparent a central question raised by the Calender: how does the ‘authour’ of the ‘book’ deploy his own self-image within the eclogue-fiction? If Colin in August is a ‘failed Orpheus’ (Brown 1972-3: 15), Spenser’s own virtuoso performance of an Orphic sestina suggests that his poetry functions as a ‘transformative . . . art’ (McCabe 1999: 550), one that builds a bridge between the individual’s faith in nature from earlier eclogues (e.g., Januarye) and a transcendent vision of the divine in November (P. Cheney 1993: 98-100). Colin’s sympathy with Rosalind forms that bridge, represented metaphorically in his identification with Philomela, who has been raped by her brother-in-law, Tereus, but who produces piercing song out of pain: ‘Hence with the Nightingale will I take part, / That blessed byrd, that spends her time of sleepe / In songs and plaintive pleas’ (183-5; see notes to 180-6). Remarkably, Colin feels sympathy for Rosalind despite the fact that—or perhaps because—his love for her remains unrequited: it is a stunning breakthrough in Petrarchan poetry, although it has a precedent in Petrarch’s discovery, voiced imaginatively after Laura dies, when she assumes status as an angel in heaven: pur per nostro ben dura ti fui (RS 341.13: ‘“still for our good was I cruel to you”’).

Finally, the sophisticated artistry of August illustrates Spenser’s competitive worthiness to address the nation of Queen Elizabeth on the relation between eros and art.