Spenser's Machiavelli: Reading and political thought in 'The Faerie Queene'

This project seeks to revise current critical understanding of the intersections between sixteenth-century English poetry and political thought by offering a new account of Elizabethan reception of Niccolo Machiavelli's political writings. Although Machiavelli's major texts were widely read at the universities and by members of the court bureaucracy, the standard scholarly assumption remains that medieval theories of mystical kingship and divinely-ordained hierarchy prevented the development of an English civic consciousness necessary for serious engagement with Machiavelli's thought until the 1640's and the outbreak of civil war. However, Machiavelli's political thought was influential among literary figures associated with the colonial administration in Ireland and the militant Protestant factions at court, including Philip Sidney, Walter Ralegh, Gabriel Harvey, and Edmund Spenser. These authors shared Machiavelli's concerns to facilitate imperial conquest and political reformation, and for them Machiavelli's gendered political vocabulary offered possibilities for negotiating a political culture dominated by anxieties over what anti-Marian polemicist John Knox called the "monstrous regiment of women." Over the course of six chapters, I argue that Spenser's understanding of rhetoric, political time, and sovereignty was influenced by his reading of Machiavelli's rhetorical politics and theory of constituting power. Though The Faerie Queene's engagement with Machiavelli is inconsistent and changes over the course of its composition, the thrust of Spenser's political analysis in both the 1590 and 1596 editions of the poem lies neither in his attempts to influence monarchical policy nor in his possible affinities with alternative modes of political thought such as classical republicanism, but rather in his response to Machiavelli's theorization of a purely democratic political force that resists all attempts at consolidation or constitution. The Faerie Queene's and A View of the Present State of Ireland 's engagements with a Machiavellian dynamic of constituting power emerge most forcefully in each text's rhetorical handling of readership. In these texts, readership emerges as a flexible political category, enabling multiple responses to sovereignty and generating a nascent, collective form of political subjectivity.