Spenser's Rosalind

When Edmund Spenser used the name 'Rosalind' in The Shepheardes Calender (1579), he deliberately established a literary puzzle, one that was solved the following year with the publication of his correspondence with Gabriel Harvey. The name 'Rosalind', deliberately reused in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), is one with which he played games with his readers, teasing them about details of his life and its relationship to his work. Subsequent writers, notably Thomas Lodge, looked back to Spenser when they used the name. Spenser also influenced Romeo and Juliet, where Shakespeare's use of 'Rosaline' indicates rivalry with poets as well as dramatists