Spenser’s design in turning his attention to the pastoral form would not seem hard to apprehend.  Less readily may we suppose that any deep philosophical impulse directed his mind towards certain modes of expression, than that in an age of catholic experiment he turned from the penning of impossible iambic trimeters, ‘minding,’ as E. K. directly informs us, ‘to furnish our tongue with this kind, wherein it faulteth.’  He was qualified for the task by a wide knowledge of previous pastoral writers from Theocritus and Bion down to Marot, and deliberately ranged himself in line with the previous poets of the regular pastoral tradition.  Yet we find side by side in his work two distinct and apparently antagonistic though equally conscious tendencies; the one towards authority, leading him to borrow motives freely and even to resort to direct paraphrase; the other towards individuality, nationality, freedom, informing his general scheme and regulating the language of his imaginary swains.  It is this double nature of his pastoral work that justifies us as regarding him, in spite of his alleged orthodoxy, as in reality the first of a series of English writers who combined the traditions of regular pastoral with the wayward graces of native inspiration.  It is true that in Spenser the natural pastoral impulse has lost the spontaneity of the earlier examples, and has passed into the realm of conscious and deliberate art; but it is none the less there, modifying the conventional form.  The individual debts owed by Spenser to earlier writers have been collected with admirable learning and industry by scholars such as Kluge and Reissert[92], but the investigation of his originality presents at once a more interesting and more important field of inquiry.  So, indeed, Spenser himself appears to have thought, for the only direct acknowledgement he makes in the work is to Chaucer, although, as a writer to whom the humours of criticism are ever present has remarked, ’it might almost seem that Spenser borrowed from Chaucer nothing but his sly way of acknowledging indebtedness chiefly where it was not due.’

The chief point of originality in the Calender is the attempt at linking the separate eclogues into a connected series.  We have already seen how with Googe the same characters recur in a sort of shadowy story; but what was in his case vague and almost unintentional becomes with Spenser a central artistic motive of the piece.  The eclogues are arranged with no small skill and care on somewhat of an architectural design, or perhaps we should rather say with somewhat of the symmetry of a geometrical pattern.  This will best be seen in a brief analysis of the several eclogues, ‘proportionable,’ as the title is careful to inform us, ’to the twelve monethes.’