The scholar or student who wishes to elucidate Spenser's relations with the vernacular poetry of his time finds a curious unevenness in the received views. Spenser's career began with his participation in A Theatre for Worldlings (1569), an English version of the visionary anthology Het theatre oft Toon-neel by the Dutch poet Jan van der Noot. His debut as 'our new Poete' came in The Shepheardes Calender (1579), where two late medieval or early Renaissance figures, the English poet John Skelton and the French poet Clément Marot, are prominent influences, fused in the figure of Colin Clout. The Complaints, a loose collection of nine pieces 'containing sundrie small Poemes of the Worlds Vanitie' formerly 'disperst abroad in sundrie hands', are closely modelled on the work of Joachim Du Bellay, while Spenser's sonnet sequence, the Amoretti, depends on that of Philippe Desportes. For the epic purposes of The Faerie Queene Spenser is assumed to participate in a continuum that reaches back first to Lodovico Ariosto and then to Matteo Maria Boiardo, with the Portuguese Luis de Camães as a latter-day precursor. Each phase of his career, then, has its own track of established influences, but these are seldom argued to extend past their immediate sphere – Spenser's Camões, for instance, is always an epic, and never a lyric, poet. Nor are the implications of such a staggered set of models followed to obvious conclusions. Why, we might ask, is an Englishman who can read Italian, French and Portuguese with a poet's penetration not assumed to read Spanish as well? While the immediate result of this uneven pattern of what is called influence is a certain lack of flexibility in literary history's presentation of his career, the more serious consequence is that a Spenser so remorselessly divided can scarcely be thought of as a European poet. And so, as it happens, Spenser is not. Instead he comes to us constructed as perhaps the most English of early modern poets.