SOURCE: “Some Spenserians,” in English Pastoral Poetry, Twayne Publishers, 1983, pp. 48-58.

In the following excerpt, Sambrook surveys the eclogues of courtly writers such as Michael Drayton, Richard Barnfield, George Wither, and William Browne, who took Edmund Spenser as their model, and contends that the work of these later poets lacks the symbolic richness and formal complexity of that of their master.

Allegory became a less potent lure as Elizabethan and Jacobean poets moved further away from Italian models. A late Jacobean critic, Michael Drayton, in the address to the reader of his Pastorals (1619), admits allegory as a possibility rather than a necessity: “the most High, and most Noble Matters of the World may bee shaddowed in them, and for certaine sometimes are.” However, Drayton agrees with his predecessors that among English pastoral poets Spenser stands first: “Master Edmund Spenser had done enough for the immortality of his Name...