Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Sonnet sequences and social distinction
- 2 Post-romantic lyric: class and the critical apparatus of sonnet conventions
- 3 “An Englishe box”: Calvinism and commodities in Anne Lok's A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner
- 4 “Nobler desires” and Sidney's Astrophil and Stella
- 5 “So plenty makes me poore”: Ireland, capitalism, and class in Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion
- 6 “Till my bad angel fire my good one out”: engendering economic expertise in Shakespeare's Sonnets
- 7 “The English straine”: absolutism, class, and Drayton's Ideas, 1594–1619
- Afterword: Engendering class: Drayton, Wroth, Milton, and the genesis of the public sphere
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
5 - “So plenty makes me poore”: Ireland, capitalism, and class in Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Sonnet sequences and social distinction
- 2 Post-romantic lyric: class and the critical apparatus of sonnet conventions
- 3 “An Englishe box”: Calvinism and commodities in Anne Lok's A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner
- 4 “Nobler desires” and Sidney's Astrophil and Stella
- 5 “So plenty makes me poore”: Ireland, capitalism, and class in Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion
- 6 “Till my bad angel fire my good one out”: engendering economic expertise in Shakespeare's Sonnets
- 7 “The English straine”: absolutism, class, and Drayton's Ideas, 1594–1619
- Afterword: Engendering class: Drayton, Wroth, Milton, and the genesis of the public sphere
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
Summary
Spenser in Ireland
Nowhere are Astrophil's “Nobler desires” played out with more ferocity than in the sprawling poetry of Spenser. Spenser himself contributed quite explicitly to the myth of Sidney with the pastoral panegyric Astrophel, and throughout his work Spenser rearticulates Astrophil's desire and tries to create a new kind of nobility. This desire by Spenser becomes activated in two interrelated arenas – his literary activity and his participation in English colonialism in Ireland. In the past decade scholars have persuasively argued that Ireland was far more than a backdrop for the work of the “Poet's poet,” and that his poetry is fundamentally implicated in an English colonial project. They have also shown, however, that Spenser was not merely an apologist for Elizabethan imperialism; his outlook concerning Ireland was as often equivocal as it was resolute. As David Baker argues, “[w]hatever Spenser was at the end of his life, he was no longer (if he ever had been) purely ‘English.’ Spenser, rather, was the product of a life lived on – and ‘between’ – two islands, and the inheritor of the complexly imbricated histories of both.” What, then, might these revisions tell us about the conceptions of social distinction emerging out of such “complexly imbricated” utterances? For if Spenser existed between islands, he also existed between modes of social distinction. I want to address these questions through a reading of Amoretti and Epithalamion in part to build on the long association of the work with Spenser's personal experience in Ireland.
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- Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England , pp. 101 - 122Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005