Many years ago I published an essay suggesting ways in which Spenser invited the reader to make interpretive choices and therefore exercise freedom in reading his sometimes complex and richly adorned arguments.¹ Here I want to look at an instance in which Spenser himself appears to speak as freely as he is able and as directly as his situation allows: Colin Clouts Come Home Again. I begin with a brief survey of the social and legal status in the Elizabethan period of what we might call “free speech,” and the particular traditions that ostensibly allowed poets more freedom than most.

In Elizabethan England the only recognized right to speak one’s mind freely rested with Parliament, based on an understanding that leaders needed good and various counsel and aid in the making of laws, especially a monarch in whom was vested vast political, social and religious power.² Yet even in Parliament there were dangers. Elizabeth I objected to Parliament discussing the question of succession, for example, and members such as Paul and Peter Wentworth might find themselves in the Tower for insisting on the free speech supposedly granted them as elected members of the House of Commons.³ Certain organizations, notably guilds and universities, had certain “liberties” that might include their own policing of their members and to that extent might imply more free speech within their confines. However, we know from the experience of Spenser’s mentor Bishop John Young, when he was Vice Chancellor of Cambridge, that those “liberties” might find themselves under attack from the central government (Woods, Milton 21-22). However successfully an organization may defend its “liberties,” they remain special privileges of organizations within the society, not the assurance of individual free speech, a distinction to which I return at the end of this essay.

From ancient times and ancient autocracies, however, poets derived ways to speak against what they saw as social or political abuses. Among the many generic devices developed for just that purpose in Elizabethan times (which included satire and allegory), the pastoral had some advantages. It had a long history, from Theocritus in the third century BCE forward, of posturing as an ignorant countryman’s look at the foibles of urban society. In that guise, the error or follies of simple shepherds could, perhaps, be excused as they commented with awe and surprise at the behavior of their betters. By announcing himself as a serious poet in The Shepheardes Calendar (1579), Spenser follows the Virgilian model of starting first with the “low style,” but he also uses pastoral to introduce, in the character of rustic Colin Clout, his own fictionalized voice.⁴ When he next picks up the pastoral in 1591, and, importantly, revises it for publication in 1595, the situation is more complicated. He has been to court. He has apparently presented the first three books of his serious allegorical epic romance, The Faerie Queene, to its titular dedicatee. He has found himself still connected to his original patron, Sir Walter Ralegh, who by the summer of 1592 is in disgrace,⁵ and he has opinions of the court that are now based on experience. Although by 1595 he has a substantial reputation, an impressive estate in Ireland, and a coterie of dedicatees (mostly women of high standing), he remains a professional poet dependent on patronage. How does Spenser speak freely and publicly about his court experience?

He returns to the pastoral, which allows him the benefit not of disguise exactly, but of figurative language. One of my favorite resources for looking at how poetry was understood to create some level of free speech, or at least permission to be critical of the powerful, is the popular sixteenth-century compendium, Myrrour for Magistrates.⁶ Myrrour stories are mostly straightforward, set sufficiently in the past to give their warnings about improper magisterial behavior a harmless patina of age. In addition, they mostly argue for traditional social order, non-threatening to rulers who saw themselves champions of that order. One of the poems, however, though set in the past, speaks specifically to the role of poets within their own time. In this poem the ghost of “The Poet Collingbourne,” executed for a doggerel attack on Richard III, proclaims a poet’s right to be critical of authority by lamenting the loss, in his case, of an ability to speak freely. The trick is to use figurative language, he says figuratively, which may protect the poet by its tradition (“Hellicon”) and its metaphoric cloak (“in the streames”):

Warne poets therefore not to passe the bankes

Of Hellicon, but kepe them in the streames,

So shall their freedome save them from extreames.

(278-80)

Spenser, ambitious for the praise and compensation gained by a successful public poet, knew how to restrain or reframe his criticisms of those who could aid him, most notably the great monarch who was to become his magnificent Faerie Queene. In his magnum opus, seeking to fashion a “perfect gentleman” through allegorical example, he arguably speaks largely for his culture: a Protestant society ruled by a monarch for whom encomia were the mode of approach. That he was brilliantly successful is confirmed by what amounted to his state funeral and burial at Westminster Abbey in 1599, despite reports of his “poverty” (Hadfield 394).

As a voice for his culture, he focuses his attention on celebrating the virtues and condemning the vices as that culture and especially his Queen presumably saw them. In CCCHA we are offered the voice of that shepherd-poet clearly meant to represent Spenser in his role as poet to the nation, and yet he celebrates someone known to be forbidden from the court (in 1595) and the critique of court culture is damning. The first part of the poem speaks on behalf of Ralegh. The middle of the poem praises certain poets and then ladies of the court. The last part of the poem condemns court behavior in very strong terms. Early and late, however, Spenser creates a platform of security by his unrelenting praise of the Queen herself. The question is whether the praise of Ralegh and the condemnation of court, staying “within the [pastoral] bankes of Hellicon,” sufficiently challenges ideas and even persons to amount to a test of free speech.

CCCHA purports to be Colin’s conversation with his country friends upon his return from his visit to court; in biographical terms, he has returned to pastoral Ireland from urban London after arranging for publication of Books I-III of The Faerie Queene and spending some time at court, likely reading his work to the Queen and getting to know some of her courtiers in situ. Immediately notable is the poem’s dedication: to Sir Walter Ralegh, “from my house at Kilcolman, the 27 of December 1591.”⁷ The date is important, not only to situate the author explicitly following his trip to London, but also to mark a time when Ralegh was himself still in favor with the Queen. Although Ralegh had secretly married Elizabeth Throckmorton (importantly, without the Queen’s permission) in the fall of 1591, the Queen did not discover it until their first child was born in March 1592, at which point she sent them both to the Tower until later that year. By 1595, when Spenser’s poem was published in London, Ralegh had been out of favor for three years; he was not officially restored to the court until 1597 and Lady Ralegh never resumed her place as one of the Queen’s attendants.

Ralegh is unquestionably “the shepheard of the Ocean” (66) and “Cynthia, the Ladie of the sea” (166) unquestionably represents the Queen. The “lamentable lay, / Of great unkindnesse and of usage hard” (164-165) probably describes Ralegh’s experience in the Tower and rejection from court that followed the revelation in March 1592 of his secret marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton. Ralegh had written other “lamentable lays” to the Queen, notably in the latter 1580s when he was being displaced as Elizabeth’s favorite by the Earl of Essex, but the reference here is most likely to Ralegh’s own “Ocean to Cynthia,” the autograph manuscript probably written when he was in the Tower in the summer of 1592.⁸ The complexity of this lengthy, mournful (and angry) work is its own story, but presumably Spenser knew of it when he wrote this part of CCCHA. In any case, the rest of Colin’s story about this “shepheard” comports with Ralegh’s having brought Spenser over from Ireland in 1589 and introduced him to the court and the Queen. The passages are notable for the extent to which the Queen is credited as ruler of the sea as well as the islands they pass and the land where they arrive (232-241, 262-263, 276-289).

Spenser’s first audacity, then, was to print the poem and to keep the dedication to Ralegh during the latter’s period of disgrace. Hadfield sees the dedication to Ralegh as “a notable shift” from the more “generous” tone of the letter appended to The Faerie Queene and its opening is indeed more abrupt (Hadfield 239). But the core content acknowledges the debt he owes Ralegh for bringing him to court and credits Ralegh’s protection from the “malice of evill mounthes, who are always wide open to carpe at and misconstrue my simple meaning.” As payment, the poem provides a barely disguised plea to the Queen on Ralegh’s behalf—an exercise in advocacy that may be seen as a form of free speech, though flowing fully within the “bankes of Helicon.”

After he has praised the “Shepherd of the Ocean” and the magnificent Cynthis, and after he has noted the court culture that invites and promotes poets (most represented by pastoral names, but two, William Alabaster and especially Samuel Daniel, praised more directly [400, 424]), he concludes with praise and sadness for lost “Astrofell,” Sidney of course (“Amongst all these [other poets] was none his Paragone,” 451), and then offers another thanks to the Shepheard of the Ocean:

All these do flourish in their sundry kind,

And do their Cynthia immortal make:

Yet found I lyking in her royall mynd,

Nor for my skill, but for that shepheards sake.

(452-444)

This passage not only reminds Ralegh that Spenser is indeed grateful, but also reminds the Queen that Ralegh was the vehicle for providing her with the epic praise of The Faerie Queene, and reminding her, too, that it is epic praise.

One of the shepherdesses then asks to hear of the court ladies, and Colin obliges. He begins with “Uranie, sister unto Astrofell” (Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke) and moves on to praise other ladies of the court with mostly recognizable noms de pastorale. These are Spenser dedicatees and in many cases identifiable patrons, such as Margaret Russell Clifford, Countess of Cumberland (“Faire Marian, the Muses onely darling,” 305) and the Spencer sisters, Elizabeth, Anne, and Alice (“Phyllis, Charillis, and sweet Amaryllis,” 540).⁹ He has made an effective platform of women patrons on which to perch the somewhat more complicated approach to Queen and court generally.

Not Colin himself, but the shepherdess Aglaura acknowledges this platform of women patrons: “Colin, well worthie were those favours / Bestowed on thee, that so of them does make, / And them requites with thy thankfull labours.” She goes on to elicit the most exalted praise of the greatest patron of all: “But of great Cynthiaes goodness and high grace, / Finish the storie which thou hast begunne” (585-588). This Colin proceeds to do in increasingly heightened language, so that Cuddie accuses him of overreaching his place: “Thou hast forgot / Thy selfe, me seemes, too much, to mount so hie” (616-617). Colin’s response is the conventional one for a simple shepherd inspired by grace to a higher style and, not incidentally, a style that offers the death-defying renown of great poetry: “her great excellence / Lifts me above the measure of my might” (620-621), so that “long while after I am dead and rotten /…my layes of her will not be forgotten” (640, 642).

Once he has established this secure base of ladies whose grace grants and assures his fame, he is ready to answer Thestylis’s obvious question:

Why Colin, since thou foundst such grace

With Cynthia and all her noble crew,

Why didst thou ever leave that happie place

In which such wealth might unto thee accrew?

(652-655)

Here the attack gets serious, though Colin begins by separating out the simple shepherd lifestyle from that of the court as “no sort of life for shepheard fit to lead” (689). Notably, in the attack section of the poem no one is named either directly or as a pastoral character, but the denunciations are brutal:

Where each one seeks with malice and with strife,

To thrust downe other into foule disgrace,

Himselfe to raise: and he doth soonest rise

That best can handle his deceitfull wit.

(690-693)

True “art of schoole” learning is deemed useless at court, and “gentle wit” is “shouldred…out of door,” for “each mans worth is measured by his weed [clothing], / As harts by hornes, or asses by their ears” (702, 707, 709, 711-712). Their “haughtie words” are not “full of highest thoughts: / But are like bladders blowen up with wynd, / That being prickt do vanish into nought’; “Nought else but smoke that fumeth soone away” (716-718, 720).

Hobbinol, Spenser’s figure for his academic friend Gabriel Harvey, accuses Colin of being “too generall,” and reminds him of “Lobbin,” a figure known to represent the late Earl of Leicester, and Cynthia’s own recognized learning and her gifts of “stipends large” to professors (732, 736, 745-746). Colin admits that at court there are “full many persons of right worthie parts,” but he insists ”all the rest do most–what fare amiss, / and spend their time in envy and idleness” (752, 757, 760-161). They corrupt love, a subject simple shepherds know well, and indulge in playing love games: “Ne anyone himself doth ought esteeme, / Unlesse he swim in love up to the eares” (781-782). To contrast this behavior, the last section of the poem is principally a praise of true love. As in the earlier praise of Cynthia, Colin’s language rises toward the high style, which Cuddy again notes (824-826). True love is honored with a “chaste heart,” unlike at court, where “their desire is base, and doth not merit, / The name of love, but of disloyal lust” (891-892). A fictional reminder of Colin’s love for Rosalind in SC concludes the poem’s action, and the pastoral closing frame notes the usual “glooming skies” that warn shepherds to get up and “draw their bleating flocks to rest” (954-955).

What to make of all this, and what does it have to do with free speech? Three points stand out: at its core, this poem is a severe critique of court life. That critique is softly couched by praise of the Queen and of poets and patrons, but the critique itself is unmistakable. One might argue that it is inevitably a critique of the Queen, despite all the glances away, and inevitably of Spenser’s patron, Ralegh, who was a notorious gamesman of the court and famous for his pride and vanity (Beer 43-45, passim). The second point is that this is all bound up in pastoral conventions which are expected to contrast court and country, and in the contrast to remind the urban world of the simple virtues it may be violating. Thirdly, and this may be a more important a point than I have space to make here, the one place in this publication where Spenser speaks, as it were, directly in his own voice is in the dedication to Ralegh in which he implies that a patron can be very demanding and self serving. This suggested burden on the poet is background for all Colin’s praise of his patrons, court women as well as Ralegh and perhaps even the Queen herself, an unstated comment on the price poetry pays for having to satisfy its patrons. Certainly Colin’s last appearance in the Spenser oeuvre, as the poet interrupted by the eager courtier-figure Calidore in FQ VI.x, implies something of the sort. In this scene Colin is inspired by the graces to sing on behalf of his own love, and clumsy Calidore gets in the way, blocking, for a time, his poetic vision. As Colin justifies praising his own love, he also calls for the indulgence of the court:

Great Gloriana, greatest Majestie,

Pardon thy shepheard amongst so many layes,

As he hath sung of thee in all his dayes,

To make one minime of they poore handmaid.¹⁰

I think it’s fair to say that in CCCHA Spenser makes his opinions known despite Colin’s insistence that Cynthia is above and beyond all the ugliness that he so vividly describes. The literary conventions and figurative language do appear to grant a certain freedom that would have been insupportable in a speech to the Privy Council. Yet this is not what I would call “free speech.” Instead, Spenser is exercising his “liberty.” While the terms are often used interchangeably even as early as the sixteenth century, I have elsewhere suggested that they retain some overtones of their origins: “libertas” originally denoting a citizen as opposed to a slave, and “Freiheit” signifying the member of a particular kinship group. To be “free” is to have authority within the group to act as you wish and it would include an individual right to speak up. To have “liberty” is to be a responsible citizen of a legally-defined community and assumes that your rights are in response to the needs of and in service to that community. So “free speech” within the House of Commons is actually the liberty to speak on behalf of the community you represent and in service to the monarch and to the flourishing of the country at large (Woods, Milton 199).

Spenser, through the voice of Colin, is exercising liberty in two senses of the term: the “liberties” granted him as a poet under the protection of patrons, including the monarch, just as guilds and universities have similar “liberties,” and also the “liberty” associated with his rights as a citizen/subject under English law, similar to the right and responsibility to give counsel that members of Parliament enjoy. In that latter capacity he speaks not just for himself, but for the community of which he is a member and offers counsel to that community. As long as it stays within the banks of Helicon, they can choose to hear it or not.