Spenser, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the Decline of the Preacher’s Plough

This chapter focuses on Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) and View of the Present State of Ireland (c.1598), showing how both use the language of medieval rural complaint to attack greed among the protestant owners of former monastic lands. Beginning with the Calender’s September eclogue, the chapter brings new evidence to bear on previous identifications of the shepherd, Diggon Davie, with the Elizabethan bishop of St David’s, Richard Davies, tracing the influence of Davies’s Funeral Sermon (1577) for Walter Devereux, first earl of Essex, into Diggon’s language in ‘September’. The language of medieval complaint had blamed unscrupulous abbots for enclosing ploughlands, but in his own writing, Richard Davies argues that post-dissolution landowners were having an even more detrimental impact on the religious life of rural Wales, not only refusing to free up former monastic lands for ploughing but also hindering the work of the ‘church-ploughing’ preacher, because refusing to pay preaching ministers a proper wage. The chapter shows how Spenser uses the pseudo-Chaucerian Plowman’s Tale to turn Davies’s local response to the situation in St David’s diocese into a general complaint against unscrupulous farmers of church livings across England and Wales. It concludes by exploring Spenser’s similar attitude in A View towards Adam Loftus and other protestant farmers of church livings in late Elizabethan Ireland, arguing that Spenser here evokes the ruins of churches and monasteries in order to return to his comments in The Shepheardes Calender on the greed of post-dissolution landowners and their neglect of the preacher’s plough.

Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Poetry

Chapters 12 and 13 examine the experience of poetry in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, and assess the claim that the public performance of poetry was common in England at this time. The publication of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender in 1579 shows a concern for the reader of the printed page, while Sidney’s influential Astrophil and Stella, written around the same time, exploits the tones of the speaking voice. Manuscript circulation continued, and several poets avoided print; others, however, including Shakespeare, made use of the new opportunities provided by the printed book. Popular verse was also widely disseminated through printed sheets. The publication of Jonson’s 1616 Workes definitively marks the establishment of the modern print poet. Several anthologies were published, though individuals also kept manuscript miscellanies; in favour, too, were commonplace books, both printed and handwritten. Paratexts and marginalia furnish further evidence for readers’ experience of poetry.