Some Disordered Glosses in The Shepheardes Calender

As printed in the early quartos, the twelve sets of glosses to the eclogues of The Shepheardes Calender are marred by many distur-bances of sequence, most of them slight. The disorder of the glosses for “Aprill,” however, is unusually substantial and oddly orderly. This essay takes the order of the “Aprill” glosses seriously; recon-structing the poem in the order of the glosses, one discovers a co-herent poem, one slightly more ideologically aggressive than the more familiar, received version.