Youth Against Age–Chapter 5
Saturday, March 21st, 1981
5
The Backstretched Connexion:
Youth and Age
in The Shepheardes Calender
This chapter proposes an interpretation of The Shepheardes Calender which places the debate of youth and age at the work’s core. Spenser used both the thematic content and the formal structure of this minor bucolic convention as the central shaping principle of his major pastoral work. Such emphasis was particularly appropriate, first because pastoral’s rural settings on the periphery of civilization correspond to the peripheral states of the human life cycle, and second, because pastoral’s projection of dual worlds inspires debate-like comparisons of perception and judgment.
But Spenser did not simply reprocess these essential elements of the pastoral tradition. Rather he modified and enriched his conventional models by disclosing the debate of youth and age through the viewpoint of a narrative persona, a viewpoint which shifts in the course of the poem from identification with youth to identification with age. That is to say, Spenser used the pastoral debate of youth and age as a means by which to externalize the inner conflicts of past and future, of regression and maturation, endemic to adolescence. By patterning his series of eclogues with a phased succession of such debates, Spenser allowed the reader to participate in the reversal of perspective that constitutes the subjective transformation of boy into man. Moving from premises about the psychology of pastoral and about the philosophy of debate laid down previously, this chapter arrives at the conclusion that The Shepheardes Calender–a product of its author’s youth and addressed to youthful readers-has as its deepest unifying subject the life stage of youth itself. (more…)