Glosses to Spenser's "Shepheardes Calender" 571
collection of recherche antiques; but the knowledge that a glossator must have had to follow in his recondite footsteps, must indeed have been enormous. If the critics are right, as they probably are, in associating E. K. with Edward Kirke, but 'shortly out of college in 1579, and in supposing that the glosses were composed in the space of a few months, then E. K.'s ability to gloss so many words correctly, seems indeed sur- prising. Not only this, but also he knows with some accuracy whether a term is from Lydgate or Chaucer or Gower; and in one case, he actually traces two lines of the text quite correctly to a Chaucerian original. 53 A knowledge of the loan-words from French, Italian and Latin, E. K. might easily have had without Spenser's help; but the knowledge of dialect, especially of words that (at least in the nineteenth century) were localized in small districts, is again a significant matter; and even more significant are the words that Spenser shifted in form or mean- ing, or coined outright! That E. K., unaided, either knew or guessed correctly in the vast majority of these cases, surely passes belief. Of the ten possible examples of mis-glossing, all but two or three are quite uncertain; and the rest seem to be careless blunders, attributable quite as probably to Spenser as to E. K. In short, the evidence of the lexicography points to a very large share of Spenserian authorship of the glosses. E. K. may have added remarks of his own without Spenser's oversight; but, I think, undoubtedly, Spenser inspired, if not actually wrote, most of the entries. The problem of dialect has already been answered by infer- ence. Unquestionably, there are a considerable number of words drawn from this source, most of them characteristically Northern. The paucity of East Anglian elements and the inaccuracy of their use suggests that Spenser was not writing anywhere in the vicinity of Cambridge; and the lack of Kentish expressions makes the Kentish localization of the eclogues a little incongruous to the student of linguistics. Spenser, 63 Lines 39-40 of the February Eclogue are taken, as the gloss suggests, from Chaucer. They appear in The House of Fame, lines 1225-6. Sometimes, how- ever, the gloss misdirects the reader as to source: October, line 100, for example is not from Mantuan. See Mustard's edition of Mantuan, Baltimore, 1911, p. 50. But it is much easier to imagine Spenser's making the slips than E. K.'s
knowing the sources.
