Spenser, Plato, and the Poetics of State

Abstract

Focusing on Spenser’s response to Plato’s controversial expulsion of the poets from his Republic, this essay analyzes the many contradictions arising from the poet’s simultaneous call for political censorship of the Irish Bards and vigorous defense of his own work against the apparent opposition of Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s chief officer of state. The disquieting similarity between the accusations allegedly leveled against Spenser by Burghley, and those that Spenser in turn levels against the Bards, is used to illustrate the complexity of the debate on artistic liberty and political control that Plato initiated in the Republic. The essay argues that all of the publications and compositions of 1596—the second installment of The Faerie Queene, the Fowre Hymnes, Prothalamion, and the manuscript of A View of the Present State of Ireland—engage in a concerted act of authorial self-assessment and self-exculpation designed to reclaim the “laureate” status that Spenser was seen by some to have forfeited through the calling in of his Complaints in 1591. In particular, the Fowre Hymnes and Prothalamion (being designed as examples of the two genres of poetry allowed by Plato) are interpreted as mounting a defense not merely of the moral and political value of Spenser’s own verse but of the poetic art generally.