² Spenser had begun the process of reviving Chaucer in his 1579 pastoral, The Shepheardes Calender, where the opening and closing poems, ‘To His Booke’ and the Envoy, both imitate Troilus and Criseyde, while three eclogues (Februarie, June, December) include Chaucer in the fiction of the poem. The glossator of this volume, ‘E.K.’ (no doubt Spenser himself in collusion with Gabriel Harvey), calls Chaucer ‘the olde famous Poete’ (Dedicatory Epistle 7–8) and Spenser the ‘new Poete’ (6).

³ That poetic immortality is at stake in Spenser’s revival of Chaucer’s spirit is clear in such words as ‘survive’, but see also the preceding stanzas for Chaucer as ‘that renowmed Poet’ of national epic who has ‘compiled | … warlike numbers and Heroic sound, … | On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled’ (4.2.32). Recurrently, Spenser places Chaucer within the context of fame, as in the very first reference: ‘Uncouthe unkiste, Sayde the olde famous Poet Chaucer’ (Dedicatory Epistle 7–8). E.K.’s quoted Chaucerian phrase comes from Troilus and Criseyde 1.809, and his subsequent discussion reveals how the state of being unknown and unkissed signals the oblivious alternative to ‘the tromp of fame’ (Dedicatory Epistle 23).