Envy, Jealousy, and Emulation: Affective Rivalry in The Shepheardes Calender

Abstract: Reflecting recent scholarly interest in the history of emotion, this article argues that envy, jealousy, and emulation— the so-called “rivalrous emotions”—are a central poetic feature of Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579). Spenser’s exploration of these emotions helps mediate the collection’s complex engagement with forms of hard and soft pastoral, and the affective atmosphere they collectively create forms an unacknowledged thematic unity among the volume’s disparate eclogues.