The poem serving as a prologue to The Shepheardes Calender, To His Booke, appears on the verso of the title page in the early quartos. The two pages have a close relationship, because they both refer to Philip Sidney: the title page dedicates the book to Sidney, while the prologue refers to him as ‘the president / Of noblesse and of chevalree’ (3-4). From the outset, Spenser features the relationship between author and patron, poetry and patronage, creating a specific professional frame for the reception of his book. Yet nowhere does Spenser reveal his own name, instead calling the author ‘Immerito’ (‘The Unworthy One’) at the foot of the prologue. In the fiction of the prologue, however, Immerito makes a sustained address to his ‘booke’, which introduces a second relationship, between author and work. Together, the two fictions present the author telling his book to go to Sidney for protection.

The book needs protection for three reasons. First, as an orphan ‘whose parent is unkent’ (unknown) (2)—Spenser is making his first formal appearance in print and wishes to remain anonymous—the book requires someone in a position of power to provide ‘succoure’ for it (6). Second, since the book boldly appears in print while being so vulnerable, it needs defense against the ‘Envie’ that will ‘barke’ at it (5). And third, because the book is ‘base begot with blame’, and thus ‘takest shame’ for its low-class status (14-15), it needs a higher-ranking member of society to license its authority. Immerito relies on the modesty topos, calling his enterprise ‘hardyhedde’, or arrogant presumption, but the word also draws attention to Spenser’s bold ambition: someone who had been a ‘sizar’ or poor scholar at Cambridge University now publishes a book dedicated to a ‘noble’ man of letters.

Beneath the mask of modesty is not just Spenser’s social mobility but the very grounds for it: an eighteen-line debut poem in tetrameter tercets—a rare if not original verse form in itself—which relies on such unusual and sophisticated devices for the time as recurrent enjambment, neologism, lucid and polysyllabic diction, and learned allusion to biblical, classical, and native medieval works, all of which command authority. For instance, Immerito asks Sidney for protection ‘Under the shadow of his wing’ (7), a phrase borrowed from Ps 36.7, identifying the English patron with the Israelite David, the shepherd-king who protects his flock with faithful song. Yet the prologue opens with a clear imitation of a native author, Chaucer, who had placed an address to his work toward the end of Troilus and Criseyde: ‘Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye’ (5.1786). Immerito repeats the words of England’s greatest poet of the past and aims to overgo him. Chaucer’s address had a healthy afterlife in English poetry, including Lydgate’s Troy Book and Skelton’s Garland or Chaplet of Laurel (see note below). Yet none of these three native precursors formally wrote in pastoral, so scholars have also found Spenser imitating Virgil: ‘A shepheards swaine say did thee sing / All as his straying flocke he fedde’ (9-10). Here, Spenser scripts a deft accommodation of a classical to a biblical trope for the Christian poet’s saving pastoral art. For those who look to Virgil as a model, pastoral anticipates epic. Hence, Immerito gestures to the Virgilian progression of literary forms when identifying Sidney as ‘the president / Of noblesse and of chevalree’: not just the patron but the exemplar of heroic culture and art. Immerito’s concluding lines also gesture to future poems: ‘Come tell me, what was sayd of mee: / And I will send more after thee’ (17-8). Finally, Immerito’s interest in his own reputation emerges in line 13 when he raises the prospect that Sidney might wish to ‘aske’ the author his ‘name’, providing a glimpse into one of Spenser’s singular preoccupations: fame. Here, also, Spenser bids for an ongoing personal relationship with his patron, mediated by the book they share.

For its metrical and formal innovations, its generic representations, its social, political, and religious topics, and finally its fiction of authorship, patronage, social reception, and renown, To His Booke opens the page of Spenser’s Calender to a remarkable index of literary ambition and achievement.