The Shepheardes Calender introduces Colin Clout, Spenser’s chief persona, immediately, in Januarye, the first of its eclogues. The eclogue especially pairs with the sixth and twelfth eclogues, June and December, where Colin again appears as a speaker; but it aligns as well with the fourth and eighth, Aprill and August, where others rehearse Colin’s songs. This structure gives the Calender a formal symmetry focusing on the poet’s developing career. The central theme of Januarye is the poet’s inability to produce his art under the pressure of unrequited love, narrated in the key event at the end: after his beloved, Rosalind, rejects him, Colin breaks his pipe.

The eclogue divides into three parts. In lines 1-12, a third-person narrator (presumably Immerito, named as the author in To His Booke) describes Colin leading his emaciated flock from their winter pens into the sun, and then identifies the shepherd as an artist-figure: ‘Well couth he tune his pipe, and frame his stile’ (10). Then, in lines 13-71 Colin sings a ten-stanza complaint addressed to various figures in the natural world---the Gods and Pan, the barren ground, the naked trees, his feeble flock---before recalling how his sight of Rosalind debilitated his art, and he asks Pan for pity. Finally, in lines 72-8 the narrator records how Colin breaks his pipe and lies down, until nighttime rouses him to take his sheep home. Ingeniously, Spenser deploys a single six-line stanza in iambic pentameter, rhyming ababcc (a sixain), to record the voices of both narrator and persona, drawing attention to their interconnectedness.

In focusing on the relation between poetry and desire, the eclogue weds the genres of Virgilian pastoral and Petrarchan lyric, dressing Virgil’s classical shepherd in the guise of the continental Renaissance lover (and the Renaissance lover in that of a classical shepherd). The key source-texts for Colin’s complaint are Virgil’s Eclogue 2, which tells of Corydon’s frustrated desire for the shepherd-boy Alexis; and Petrarch’s Rima Sparse 66, which tells of Petrarch’s turn to the natural world to contend with his frustrated desire over Laura (cf. Jan 63-6n). Consequently, the topic of male friendship intersects with that of male-female sexuality: Colin takes the ‘clownish gifts’ (57) given to him by Hobbinol and ‘gives [them] to Rosalind againe’ (60). E.K.’s gloss on Colin’s rejection of Hobbinol in favor of Rosalind, which refers to ‘some savour of disorderly love, which the learned call paederastice’, evokes a longstanding Western conversation about sexuality, despite E.K.’s insistence that this issue is ‘gathered beside his [the author’s] meaning’ (59 [Goldberg 1990]). The dynamic of adolescent male friendship and traumatic heterosexual desire forms the milieu within which Colin produces his youthful art; it is within this dynamic that Rosalind ‘scorne[s]’ his ‘rurall musick’: ‘Shepheards deuise she hateth as the snake’ (64-5).

The shortest of the twelve eclogues at 78 lines, Januarye nonetheless raises important questions at the outset about Spenser’s presentation of his persona. Does Spenser criticize Colin as a ‘failure’, because the shepherd both misgoverns his sheep (Durr 1957: 71) and locates his faith in the world of nature--represented by his invocation of Pan, a pagan nature god--rather than in divine grace (MacCaffrey 1969: 121-2; Moore 1975)? Or does Spenser focus less on Colin’s religious faith and ethical action in society and more on poetry itself, whether Colin’s use of poetic song to form a human art operative in the world (Alpers 1972: 353, 362) or a narcissistic song of misplaced artistic ambition (Berger 1988: 325-46)? By raising such questions, Januarye sets the problem that the rest of the Calender will take on: the role of erotic social courtship (Montrose 1979) in the personal religious faith that underwrites the poet’s public art (P. Cheney 1993: 77-110, 2001: 79). Rosalind’s judgment that Colin’s youthful art is snakelike is especially damning, intimating that Spenser here represents an immature poetry that is dangerous, deceptive, and demonic, particularly with respect to female integrity.

Curiously, E.K.’s glosses provide a different, or complementary, lens---not strictly artistic, erotic, religious, or ethical but political. E.K.’s references to Sir Thomas Smith’s (1513-77) treatise on English government, De Republica Anglorum (written 1562-5; published 1583), to John Skelton’s biting satires against Henry VIII’s chief advisor, Cardinal Wolsey, and to Clément Marot, France’s Protestant poet of exile, speak to the poem’s political agenda. This agenda emerges in such resonant phrasing about Colin’s shepherding as ‘ill government’ (45 and note): in the late 1570s, Spenser joins the Leicester-Sidney circle in its disaffection from Queen Elizabeth and her proposed marriage to the French Catholic Duc d’Alençon (McCabe 1999: 520; Pugh 2016: 86, 98, 110).

The woodcut, the most individualized of the twelve, reverses the trajectory of the poet’s ‘failure’ in the eclogue narrative (cf. Luborksy 1981: 24-9; Patterson 1987: 123-4). Colin stands near the center, a broken bagpipe at his feet (in the shape of a phallus, symbolizing the masculine art of frustrated desire), in the shadow of a tree (symbolizing Virgilian royal patronage from Eclogue 1). Colin’s sheep graze behind him, and behind them stands a house, perhaps the shepherd’s, or perhaps Rosalind’s (see Aug 161, 181). Yet Colin faces away from this pastoral scene, toward a hilltop city, marked as Rome by the pointed towers and the Colosseum, in an evocation (at once clear and clashing) of the Virgilian and even Petrarchan poet who writes pastoral beckoning to epic.

Januarye, then, is important for its complex narrative evoking questions about the power of desire (erotic and ethical, political and religious) to affect the role of the poet in England during the late 1570s (cf. L.S. Johnson 1990: 104-14; Kinney 2010).