Spenser’s Phaedran Calender

Focusing on Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, this chapter newly shows that one of the texts most marginal in previous readings, Plato’s Phaedrus, is one of the Calender’s foundational references. There Plato defines and coordinates love, beauty, the soul, its prospects, and the modes of revelatory furor, including the lover’s and the poet’s. Whereas the Calender’s Platonic affinities have typically seemed too vague to merit investigation, attention to the poem’s flight motif, to the precedents for its pictures in early modern iconography and emblem books, and especially to the quasi-emblematic interplay of the Maye eclogue’s poem and its illustration featuring two winged coach-horses shows that those Phaedran doctrines energized Spenser’s notions of poetry’s inspirations, power, and national significance. These findings profoundly change understanding of the Calender, Spenser’s literary development, and his intellectual biography.