Navoi innovation university faculty of philology and language teaching

August.
The frame is at first a5b5a5b5c5c5, but by line 10 this is already turning into neo-Medieval 4-accent lines of the kind described in Februarie. It becomes regularly iambic again at 139, introducing the change of mood leading up to Cuddie’s recitation of Colin’s “lay”. The roundelay is a4b4a4b4, with the first two accents of the second line represented by the placed syllables “hey ho”. The lay is a sestina mostly in pentameters, but with two alexandrines, one of them the last line before the coda.
The sestina and its framework (beginning at 139) appear to be a late addition (too late for E.K. to lecture us about Philomela and Tereus), but it was an inspired one: a beautiful sestina - a very rare thing, that - even though it is a doleful plaint (see notes on November), and its inclusion transforms August into a many-sided exploration of how the personal pain of love makes art, whether merry or sad (cf. 144).
This sestina seems to concern a requited – but temporarily absent – love, which is not consistent with what we learn elsewhere of Rosalind. But then you can also argue that there is inconsistency generally, since Rosalind in Januarie rejects Colin’s wooing completely, and thus cannot be guilty of the inconstancy that Colin complains of in Iune.September.
Neo-Medieval couplets, as Februarie and Maye. The three poems are also connected by thematic material that concerns the recent history of church reform and by a structure that issues in some kind of fable, in this case the anecdote about Roffynn, his well-meaning dog Lowder, and the treacherous wolf.
To suppose that Spenser could have gone to the trouble of inventing such a wholly consistent persona, one who shows off his learning at such frequently irrelevant length, is to me unbelievable.
Examples of what I mean are the notes on Flora (March), the olive (Aprill), Sardanapalus (Maye), the ill omen of stumbling as evinced by the Lord Hastings (Maye), the height of Kentish hills (June) the Elfs or Guelfs (June), etc. It’s relatively easy to see why a real E.K. might enjoy the opportunity to produce in Spenser's margins a kind of emblem book or syncretistic compilation of learned gobbets, less easy to see what Spenser himself would gain from doing so. Did Spenser enjoy pedantic dressing-up, like Scott did? Furthermore, Lewis pointed out some of the more obvious places where E.K. expresses sentiments at odds with what we know Spenser thought (e.g. of Marot, Arthurian Legend, fairies, etc).
Or consider the headnote to Nouember:
This Æglogue is made in imitation of Marot his song, which he made upon the death of Loys the frenche Queene. But farre passing his reache, and in myne opinion all other the Eglogues of this booke.
The same Spenser who later imagines his noble Sir Guyon "feeding his thoughts with his own praiseworthy deeds" no doubt had a becoming pride in his own gifts, but I can’t believe he would seriously describe even his best poem as far outstripping Marot’s capacities.
The problem with McCabe’s dismissal of E.K.’s reality is that he fails to take account of the real and delicate context of the publication. Spenser had been a prolific poet for ten years or more. His poems had circulated but he was reluctant to publish. E.K. spurred Spenser on by writing his elaborate commentaries to the Calendar and also to the not-extant Dreames, which were set to be published in 1580 but never appeared. On E.K.’s own admission Spenser had considerable input into the commentary. The glosses of archaic words are probably his, and a mistake like the gloss to Februarie 119 probably arose because Spenser automatically replied to a question about the meaning of wonned by giving the usual sense without realizing that E.K. was asking about a line where he had used the word in a different way. No doubt, too, they conferred about what not to gloss, e.g. Algrind.
But E.K. surely had a personal agenda (i.e. giving free rein to a mass of learning, itself of considerable potential interest to an audience when books were scarce) and it was apparently he rather than Spenser who arranged for the woodcuts (the Dreames had them too). He also planned to publish a Spenserian treatise called the English Poete. It seems that he was the driving force behind these publications, and in some sense they were (or would have been) his books rather than Spenser’s, whose own judgment on the proposed follow-up (“Therin be some things excellently, and many things wittily discoursed of E.K...”) perhaps indicates understandable misgivings and a possible reason why publication of the Dreames in the end came to nothing. But it was presumably the imminence of this second publication that decided the editors of the Letters to maintain E.K.’s (as well as M. Immeritô’s) semi-anonymity.