Spenser’s Rosalind

Abstract This chapter shows how Spenser’s first work was gripped by intertwined aesthetic and sexual anxieties, and that, far from displaying confident mastery, it displays technical shortcomings and ongoing difficulties among English poets trying to match the achievements of their Roman exemplars. Specifically, it examines the relationship between Spenser’s book and Virgil’s pastoral poems, and the technical demands of stanza form and sound management in alliteration. The chapter argues that Rosalind’s scathing view of Spenser’s poetry takes its place among several radically experimental and arguably feminist rethinkings of aesthetic and sexual value. The most prominent of these is the figure of Diggon, a shepherd effeminized to the point of gender ambiguity, and whose plight as an economic migrant is linked to racialized abjection. The chapter then places these analyses in the context of Spenser’s later return to pastoral in Colin Clout’s Come Home Againe and book 6 of The Faerie Queene.