Maye is the first of three ecclesiastical eclogues, followed by Julye and September; but it has affinities with the ‘moral’ dialogue-and-fable structure of Februarye, the family narrative of March, and the holiday-dance atmosphere of Aprill. These four topics—politics, courtly ethics, family life, artistic holiday—open up the resonance of Maye considerably.

Without question, the eclogue focuses on church politics, as indicated by E.K. in his Argument and his glosses but also by the dialogue between two middle-age shepherds, Piers and Palinode, who use key ecclesiastical language to evoke contemporary religious debates. Their dialogue divides into three parts. In lines 1-173, the shepherds advance cases for radically different pastoral ‘perspectives’ on ‘the role of the priest in the world’ (Cullen 1970: 41): Palinode, for the care-free pleasure of May Day festivals as acceptable acts of conduct; Piers, for austere pastoral discipline prohibiting such conduct. Then, in lines 174-305 Piers tells an Aesopian fable about the Fox and the Kid, featuring the Kid’s vulnerability to the wiles of the Fox, despite the care of the Kid’s mother. Finally, in lines 306-17 the two shepherds amicably discuss the social utility of the fable and go home for the night.

The shepherds’ dialogue replays debates familiar from such Henrician, Edwardian, and Marian polemicists as William Turner and John Bale, and in particular the Elizabethan Anthony Gilby’s Pleasant Dialogue (composed 1566, published late 1570s), between a zealous Protestant and a worldly chaplain (Norbrook 2002: 57; see Hume 1984: 20-5; J.N. King 1990: 37). In the background, as well, lies A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings, which presents Jan van der Noot’s commentary on the history of the slow collapse of the Church, drawing heavily on Bale’s Image of Both Churches. The work of situating the present in a history of the Church, a history carefully articulated to bring it in accord—or into various accords—with the prophetic idioms of the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation is not only Bale’s project but also the historical vision of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments. Piers’ fable adapts Aesop’s story of the Wolf and Kid, turning the Wolf of Catholic evil into a deceptive Fox, in accord with Protestant polemic against Church of England clergy (Brennan 1986). Moreover, in the background is Psalm 23, ‘The Lord is my shepherd,’ and John 10:14, Christ as the Good Shepherd, but also the tradition of ecclesiastical satire emerging in the eclogues of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Mantuan. Combining continental, biblical, classical, and historical materials, Maye thus offers a rich meditation on the role of the Elizabethan pastor in matters of church government, focusing primarily on the behavior of the episcopate, the acceptability of their wearing vestments, and the threat of the Jesuit Mission infiltrating England (undercover priests meeting secretly with the Catholic faithful). The dialogue format ensures that Spenser’s own perspective remains concealed. Milton famously indicted Palinode as ‘that false Shepheard’ who figures ‘our Prelates, whose life is a recantation of their pastorall vow’ (Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence against Smectymnuus, in Prose Works 1953: 1.722), but Palinode does appear as a sympathetic, even affable figure (Cain in Oram 1989: 86; Chamberlain 2005: 49).

Maye also has a social dynamic that focuses on the importance of ‘care’, a word that appears five times (48, 77, 96, 180, and 215), more than in any other eclogue. Not merely pastors but parents and the sovereign herself are pressed to engage in a social duty committed to self-sacrifice, modeled on the teachings of ‘Algrind’ (a figure for Edmund Grindal, Archbishop of Canterbury [see 75n; cf. Lane 1993: 101,109]). The concept of care is tied to work, and indicates Spenser’s interest in signaling a shift from a classical ideal of pastoral otium (leisure) to a medieval ideal of agrarian labor: in short, from Virgil’s Eclogues to Langland’s Piers Plowman (Little 2013: 143-56).

When Piers criticizes shepherds that ‘caren little’ for their ‘flocke’ (39-49), he uses a pastoral metaphor that Spenser first applies to himself in his role as poet (To His Booke 9-10). Hence, Maye includes details that extend the dialogue to the role of art and poetry in the world (Montrose 1983: 451-2; Alpers 1985: 94)—in particular, to the difficulty that those who lack art (and by extension, poetry) have when trying to care for their flock (Berger 1988: 304; see Chamberlain 2005: 45; L.S. Johnson 1990: 77-9; Herman 1992: 19-20). Such artistic details emerge first in the Argument, when E.K. says that Piers and Palinode ‘represent . . . two formes of pastours or Ministers’, with Piers pausing to ‘tell . . . a tale’ to Palinode (2-7; emphasis added). Palinode’s depiction of May Day ‘mask[ing]’, with its ‘merimake’ (2, 15) of ‘shepheardes . . . singing’, ‘play[ing]’, ‘pyp[ing]’, and ‘daunc[ing]’ to ‘fetchen home May with their musicall’ (20-8), formally versifies poetic art. At one point, Spenser’s willingness to implicate himself as a poet appears especially daring, for the deceptive Fox has a ‘hinder heele . . . wrapt in a clout’ (243). The word ‘clout’ nominally means bandage, but it inescapably evokes Colin Clout, as supported by Spenser’s pun in November. There, Queen Elisa gives her shepherds ‘clouted Creame. / O heavie herse, / Als Colin cloute she would not once disdayne’ (99-101; see note, and March 50n). The artistic details are so pervasive that we may well see the eclogue as ‘an allegory about allegory, or about the imperative for allegorical reading’ (Halpern 1991: 210 on the fable; see 182, 208-11). Intriguingly, Spenser presents the instrumentality of poetic narrative itself when, at the end, Palinode ask Piers, ‘let me thy tale borrowe’ (308), the word ‘borrowe’ evoking the process of imitation, of putting art to work in society. In Maye, that work is the mark of valuable ‘pastours’: clergy, politicians, heads of family, authors.

Remarkably, the woodcut features an artistic reading, exiling the debating shepherds to the upper-left corner, breaking the fable into three parts scattered around the block, and bringing Palinode’s May Day festival front and center: eight figures dance around a wagon carrying a man and a woman (‘the Lord of Misrule and his lady’ [Luborksy 1981: 35]), pulled by two winged horses, evoking Pegasus, symbol of poetic inspiration and artistic fame (Cain in Oram 1989: 86), perhaps with the symbolic power of Plato’s winged horses of reason and desire in the Phaedrus (cf. Borris 2017: 83-121; see Dec 63-4n).

The verse of Maye consists of a varying meter of a tetrameter line in couplets, divided between Piers’ ‘rugged tetrameters’ that evoke ‘the moral ethos of [work in] The Plowman’s Tale’ and Palinode’s ‘infectious music’ evoking May Day sport (McCabe 1999: 534), as well as contrasting two models of time, one largely artistic, the other finally religious: Palinode’s classical ‘carpe diem attitude’ and Piers’ Christian attitude toward history leading to the ‘account’ (51, 54) of the Last Judgment (Snyder 1998: 34).

Easily the longest of the eclogues at 321 lines, Maye assumes a central position in The Shepheardes Calender—indeed in the Spenser canon—for representing a compelling interplay of church, state, and family in the realm of English poetry.