Hi Charlie,
To agree with you: it seems to me that, even if someone were to discover
an acrostic in 'October' reading 'I AM E K', we would still have to
consider the question open. (Though please don't let me stop anyone from
looking for acrostics in 'October': a very noble enterprise.) Isn't that
the fun of masking, as time us taught, &c? (Oh, and the identity of E.K.
seems to me as good an explanation as any for understanding why Spenser's
name continues not to appear on The Shepheardes Calender during his
lifetime.)
Anyway, as for why Spenser might have written a bad gloss on elves, or
allowed his friend to write a bad gloss on elves: doesn't that sound like
fun, too? I mean, if you are writing a pseudo-learned commentary on your
own works, obviously you will want some of the glosses and annotations
completely to miss the mark, because that makes the whole project of
self-disclosure and self-interpretation less stable and more productive
(see the glosses on Hobbinol and Rosalind in, say, 'Januarye'; and again
in 'Aprill'); then, to compound the joke, you play most havoc with the
reference that has most to do with your own interests and future career
prospects. Keep in mind, too, that Spenser gives some pretty spectacularly
bad etymologies to Irenius in A view, as well. And I think it's also
probably worth considering, with Matthew Woodcock in his recent book
_Renaissance Elf-Fashioning_, that Spenser deliberately used in FQ what he
and his contemporaries seem to have considered to be a low-comic,
folkloric, and altogether silly convention (fairies) precisely because it
was anti-epic; in that light, this gloss doesn't look so strange, but
rather seems to be playing the same game.
andrew
andrew
Andrew Zurcher
Tutor and Director of Studies in English (Part 1)
Queens' College
Cambridge CB3 9ET
United Kingdom
+44 1223 335 572
hast hast post hast for lyfe
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