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There is a likelihood, too, that Spenser, the greatest of Shakespeare’s poetic contemporaries, was first drawn by the poems into the ranks of Shakespeare’s admirers. It is hardly doubtful that Spenser described Shakespeare in ‘Colin Clouts come home againe’ (completed in 1594), under the name of ‘Aetion’—a familiar Greek proper name derived from Αετος, an eagle:

And there, though last not least is Aetion;

A gentler Shepheard may no where be found,

Whose muse, full of high thought’s invention,

Doth, like himselfe, heroically sound.

The last line seems to allude to Shakespeare’s surname. We may assume that the admiration was mutual. At any rate Shakespeare acknowledged acquaintance with Spenser’s work in a plain reference to his ‘Teares of the Muses’ (1591) in ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (v. i. 52–3).

The thrice three Muses, mourning for the death

Of learning, late deceased in beggary,

is stated to be the theme of one of the dramatic entertainments wherewith it is proposed to celebrate Theseus’s marriage. In Spenser’s ‘Teares of the Muses’ each of the Nine laments in turn her declining influence on the literary and dramatic effort of the age. Theseus dismisses the suggestion with the not inappropriate comment:

That is some satire keen and critical,

Not sorting with a nuptial ceremony.

But there is no ground for assuming that Spenser in the same poem referred figuratively to Shakespeare when he made Thalia deplore the recent death of ‘our pleasant Willy.’ [80] The name Willy was frequently used in contemporary literature as a term of familiarity without relation to the baptismal name of the person referred to. Sir Philip Sidney was addressed as ‘Willy’ by some of his elegists. A comic actor, ‘dead of late’ in a literal sense, was clearly intended by Spenser, and there is no reason to dispute the view of an early seventeenth-century commentator that Spenser was paying a tribute to the loss English comedy had lately sustained by the death of the comedian, Richard Tarleton. [81a] Similarly the ‘gentle spirit’ who is described by Spenser in a later stanza as sitting ‘in idle cell’ rather than turn his pen to base uses cannot be reasonably identified with Shakespeare. [81b]