Februarie is notable for its verse achievement in poetic narrative. In 1586, William Webbe first admired the ‘Sheepeheardes homelyst talke’ (Var 7: 253), and the admiration continued in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, with William Hazlitt calling the inset fable of the Oak and the Briar ‘as splendid a piece of oratory as any found in the records of the eloquence of the British senate’ (Friedland 1954: 224). Yet Hazlitt’s political metaphor from the Roman Republic also speaks to the particular way that Spenser harnesses poetic eloquence here: on behalf of a ‘British’ nation committed to free debate.

Spenser’s oratory divides into three parts: 1) lines 1-101 feature a sometimes rancorous debate between the younger shepherd Cuddie and the older Thenot on the topic of youth and age; 2) lines 102-238 present Thenot telling Cuddie a fable of the Oak and the Briar about the arrogance of youth undercutting the authority of age, only to destroy itself; and 3) lines 239-46 show Cuddie’s biting rejection of the moral utility of Thenot’s fable.

To accomplish such a ‘homely’ narrative, Spenser relies on rugged tetrameter couplets with an often coarse and archaic diction. The lines vary from eight to ten syllables, and the baseline iambic meter frequently modulates through anapests (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one). By writing so many lines having four beats with stresses tending to fall on the heavy alliteration, the poet evokes the medieval tradition of Piers Plowman and the pseudo-Chaucerian Plowman’s Tale, important to the Protestant reform movement. This helps explain the first appearance in the Calender of ‘Tityrus’, the shepherd whom Thenot cites as the inventor of the fable, and whom Cuddie admires, bringing to their rancor an unusual moment of accord. Tityrus, we learn, is Chaucer, and the reference allows Februarie to record Spenser’s own budding genealogy as England’s national poet.

The shepherds’ debate evokes several controversies taking place in mid-Elizabethan culture: about the relative merits of youth and age (Cullen 1970: 34-41); about court patronage, in which warring factions at the Elizabethan court vie for power, the younger generation vying for authority with the older one (Hoffman 1977: 92-7; Montrose 1981; Bond 1981; Patterson 1991: 59-61, 88-9); about Protestant attacks on both older Catholic faith and younger Protestant radicalism (Hume 1984: 43-4; J.N. King 1990: 34); and about opposing Elizabethan poetics (Berger 1988: 425; Halpern 1991: 176-214; Pugh 2005: 30-4), including the two major poetics of the 1570s: Cuddie’s courtly ‘amateur’ art, which features delightful love stories without an ethical end; and Thenot’s older ‘humanist’ art, which insists on moral instruction (P. Cheney 2002). Not just good storytelling, Februarie packs in a wide cultural conversation.

The central precursor text for the eclogue’s showpiece, the fable of the Oak and the Briar, is Aesop’s The Bush and the Aubyer, in which a tree persuades a woodsman to cut down a rival tree, although Spenser superimposes onto this a poem from the reign of Edward VI, The Hospitable Oake, which uses Virgilian allusions to represent powerful patrons as vulnerable shade trees (Patterson 1991: 60-1). Yet in the background is likely Gascoigne’s Princely Pleasures of Kenilworth Castle (1576), in which Queen Complacida (she who pleases everyone) metamorphoses an oak of Constancy and a briar of Contention (Friedland 1954; Watson 1993), in an allegory featuring Queen Elizabeth’s favoring of the earl of Leicester, patron of Gascoigne (and later, Spenser). Perhaps also applicable is the first fable in The Seven Ages of Rome, a medieval romance popular in the sixteenth century (Roberts 1950). These subtexts gesture to the social, political, and religious issues resonating in Februarie.

The woodcut is impressively done, and gestures to these issues as well, with the two debating shepherds standing in the center, their hands nearly touching in accord, balanced by their flocks standing behind them (Thenot, sheep; Cuddie, bullocks). To the right, behind Cuddie, are the emblems of the fable: a husbandman cutting down a tall tree, with a briar standing in its shadow—curiously being eaten by one of the bullocks. To the left, behind Thenot, are buildings that evoke the institutions of church and state.

Both the content of Februarie and its archaic prosody link it with the ecclesiastical eclogues, Maye, Julye, and September, and, together with October, they form what E.K. calls the ‘moral’ eclogues (see note below on Arg ‘morall’). Moreover, Februarie stands out from the eclogue it follows, Januarye, which has featured a smoother poetic surface and a solo artist, Colin Clout. Not merely splendid narrative, Februarie is among the most sophisticated of the eclogues, relying self-consciously on rugged poetic meter to air—rather than simply ‘moralize’ (FQ I.pr.1.9)—social, religious, political, and finally poetic debates. Indeed, Spenser’s ability to contain cultural debate within a verse narrative that manages to balance resonance with restraint demonstrates his emerging authority as a leading voice in ‘the British senate’.