F.J. and E.K.

George Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F.J. enacts a conceit found in his earlier verse, treating persons as letters come to life. Together with Gascoigne’s proclivity for what critic R. W. Maslen calls “cunningly contrived obscurity,” this conceit catches the author up in his own ironies, as print turns out to be a sorcerer’s apprentice, unleashing consequences he fails to foresee and can never walk back. The fiction of the Adventures seems to prefigure Gascoigne’s own inability to anticipate such consequences. I speculate that Spenser (and Gabriel Harvey) may have understood the special kind of failure on display in the reception of the Adventures and built a reference to Gascoigne’s alphabetical conceits into the self-promotional strategies of The Shepheardes Calender.