The argument to the “October” eclogue in The Shepheardes Calender describes poetry as “having bene … alwayes of singular accounpt and honor,” a phrase that combines social and economic value.¹ “Account,” as both a noun and verb, first entered English in its enumerative sense, a sense emphasized by Spenser’s antiquated French orthography—“accounpt.”² As the credit economy grew, “account” also began to denote a financial statement that recorded balances, amounts due, receipts, and a calculation of change over time. This type of document allowed one to work with or trust a creditor, attesting to a person’s financial stability. This is partially what enabled this term to migrate into a more generalized sense, the sense that Hadfield and Prescott point to by glossing the word as “esteem” in their edition of the Calender.³ Furthermore, Spenser was writing at a time when the “account” had accrued a secondary, narrative meaning.⁴ This is not coincidental since, as Adam Smyth has argued, early modern life-writing was a genre that overlapped with, and emerged from, financial accounts.⁵ I would like to suggest that, while these other versions of accounting are certainly at play in the eclogue, the financial sense of this term is important to understanding the ways in which “October” is deeply concerned with not just the outcomes, but also the process of determining economic value. In other words, to call the Calender an “account book,” as I do in my title, is not a throwaway pun but a claim for the ways in which the literary and economic share commitments to exploring and determining value.

What “October” presents, I argue, is a reckoning. By this, I refer to the particular arithmetic process of “reciprocal accounting that depended on multiple parties to determine value.”⁶ This was an everyday occurrence in early modern England, in part because of the increased numeracy of early modern persons, but also because the lack of sufficient coin to pay for goods and services required alternative means of conducting transactions.⁷ Reckoning necessitated conversation and sometimes negotiation between two parties just like Piers and Cuddie enact in their dialogue as they attempt to pinpoint the proper “reward,” “gayne,” “good,” and “price” of poetry. ⁸ As Tom Johnson notes, “people who sat down to a reckoning had to decide which of their relations were ‘reckonable’ in the first place,” which could create new, idiosyncratic economic relations between those persons.⁹ In other words, the two parties had to come to a shared understanding, not just about line items but the very value system they were using to determine worth, cost, and price. Thus, reckoning “helped people to translate between the diverse modes of exchange that coexisted in premodern economies.”¹⁰ As Piers and Cuddie weigh and compare the proper rewards for poetry, they weigh readerly pleasure, pedagogical efficacy, and material reward against one another, reckoning not just the value of poetry, but two distinct value systems: one whose currency is reputation (patronage) and the other whose currency is money (capitalism). While Piers and Cuddie utilize distinct economic frameworks to determine the value of poetry, presenting these two opposing viewpoints, I argue that the eclogue as a whole suggests some ways in which these two economic structures need not be in opposition but might work with one another. Thus, the reckoning within The Shepheardes Calender can help us make sense of the changing, complicated economic landscape in Spenser’s own world as he simultaneously tried to take advantage of patronage and live in an increasingly capitalist society.

On the one hand, we have Piers, whose approach to the poetic economy approximates an idealized version of patronage, where reputation and readerly pleasure are the ultimate reward. Piers posits a variety of outcomes, from praise—which he insists is “better than the price”— to glory— “eke much greater than the gayne”—to honor.¹¹ All of these are immaterial, abstract, and explicitly not financial, as his comparative phrasing insists. Poetry, for Piers, holds value for a writer’s reputation rather than for the writer themselves. This is a version of the philosophy that E.K offers in the gloss, that poetry has “the power to make men immortal for theyr good dedes, or shameful for their naughty lyfe.”¹² While Piers and E.K. differ slightly in that Piers’s “praise,” “glory,” and “honor” might accrue for the poet as well as those within the poem, they both locate their reward in the reaction of the reader.¹³ Indeed, Piers takes this a step further by highlighting the pedagogical potential of poetry, that it might

[...] restrain

the lust of lawlesse youth with good advice:

or pricke them forth with pleasaunce of thy vaine. (21-3)¹⁴

Poetry, then, for both Piers and E.K., are valued in terms of their effect on others, and any compensation for the poet is an intrapersonal one. He imagines that “our Cuddies name to Heaven” might “sownde,” attesting to the high value of Cuddie’s poetic prowess by describing a divine audience. ¹⁵ Piers, then, endorses an exaggerated version of the Elizabethan patronage economy, wherein more elite and more well-connected readers both confirm the value of a poetic project and create its value through their readerly support.

For Cuddie, on the other hand, the appropriate “gayne” is explicitly financial; he seeks to commodify his poetry in order to sustain his life. Cuddie begins with his dissatisfaction, complaining that poetic composition has been all work with no reward: “I haue pypéd erst so long with payne … yet little good hath got, and much lesse gayne.”¹⁶ Cuddie dismisses Piers’s stance that praise alone is a worthwhile reward for his efforts since praise cannot “feede him once the fuller by a graine.”¹⁷ In this way, he is a distinctly utilitarian poet, one who is interested in rewards that can do something for him. He anticipates an argument that positions readerly pleasure as a suitable reward for writing poetry, and doubles down on the uselessness of such a result:

the dapper ditties, that I wont deuise,

To feede youthes fancie, and the flocking fry,

Delighten much: what I the bett for thy?

They han the pleasure, I a sclender prise.

I beate the bush, the byrds to them doe flye:

What good thereof to Cuddie can arise? (13-18)¹⁸

When he asks, “what good thereof to Cuddie,” he makes clear both that these other results are not “good,” at least not for him. It is not that Cuddie cannot imagine the system that Piers proposes, but rather that he rejects it. Such a system is of no value to Cuddie’s because it does not impact him in any tangible, material, or physical way. It is only “youthes fancie” that is fed, whereas Cuddie remains hungry. Indeed, it is precisely the immaterial and impermanent nature of Piers’s idealized rewards that seems to irk Cuddie: “sike prayse is smoke that sheddeth in the skye, / Sike words bene wynd, and wasten soon in vayne.”¹⁹ Wind and smoke are not substantial; cannot feed, clothe, or shelter the poet; cannot meet any of his needs. For that, he would need money.

While this exchange seems at first to set up an opposition between societal influence and monetary wealth, the process of reckoning enables such disparate currencies as readerly pleasure, pedagogical efficacy, and material reward to be assessed against one another. And, crucially, this process of assessment enabled these two sets of values to function with one another by negotiating exchanges between the various forms of currency. Reckoning enables the functional commutation of not just items of different value, but differing forms of value altogether. Perhaps, then, the process of reckoning can help us make sense of the ways in which Spenser and his contemporaries had to navigate, and reconcile, the differing demands of literary patronage and the literary marketplace at the end of the sixteenth century. While we might think of patronage and capitalism as distinct economies with inequivalent means of assigning value, the reckoning within “October” bears witness to a more flexible view of co-existent economies. At the end of the day, after all, the Elizabethan patronage system did not so easily separate material and financial benefits from reputation and status. This is what Marx misunderstood when he famously dismissed Spenser as “Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet.”²⁰ While Cuddie’s imagined rewards (that which would “feede him”) ensure the continuation of the poetry by sustaining the poet himself, Piers’ fruits (“praise,” “glory,” and “honor”), would attract more and better patrons, thus eventually leading to Cuddie’s desires. ²¹ In other words, the compensation that Piers seeks would support Cuddie’s practical desires if it leads to among the right readers. The logic of reckoning demonstrates that these rewards need not be commensurate to be exchangeable.

This reconciliation of two value systems in “October,” though, is not so much a static conclusion as a fluid, active process of value determination. This reckoning of various economic frameworks was a continuous condition of living at a time of economic change, and a mode of negotiation that must recur with each new transaction or relationship. We see this yet again at the end of the poem, which echoes Piers’s opening invitation of “let us cast.” ²² To cast might refer to a forceful throw—to cast a die, to cast a fishing line—but casting was also a method of calculation that utilized a “counting board” to accumulate material markers. Like reckoning, casting was a social process, involving a team-coordinated effort to keep track of amounts, counters, errors, and to make a final tally.²³ While the poem’s earlier mention of casting is fairly ambiguous, this second use of the term firmly locates it within the poem’s fiscal concerns:

Whoever casts to compasse weightye prise,
And thinks to throwe out thondring words of threate:
Let power in lavish cups and thriftie bitts of meat,
for Bacchus fruite is frend to Pheobus wise.
And when with Wine the braine begins to sweate,
Then nombers flowe as fast a spring doth ryse (103-108)²⁴

The language here yet again connects the narrative and economic, suggesting that to write is also to accumulate value. While the “numbers” in the final line here might refer to the lines or meter or poetic musical composition, it also evokes the counting board, which determines “weightye prise” through casting. Cuddie and Piers are then both included in the “whoever” that casts to figure out the value of poetry, a figuration that they enact over the course of the poem itself.

Casting, much like reckoning and accounting, was not just a form of calculation but a kind of meaning-making. At such a time of economic flux, to take account meant more than accruing and deducting numbers but engaging in a larger, more abstract process, of articulating the economic value of things that were not easily quantifiable or comparable. This is what Piers and Cuddie do in the poem as they attempt to affix value to poetry itself. Their negotiation, then, shows us how the early modern world and the ways it made sense of forms of labor that did not readily fall within the prescribed economic structures. It also shows us something about poetry, about the ways in which narrative accounts, like their economic counterpart, enabled complex networks, items, and actions to be considered with and against one another. Both forms of accounting—reckoning and storytelling—do not just calculate value but are valuable processes in their own right. And, at the end of the day, The Shepheardes Calender allows us to reckon with all of this for ourselves.