"So plenty makes me poore": Ireland, Capitalism, and Class in Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion

I. Spenser in Ireland

How might the perennial issue of Spenser's social standing be altered by recent revisions of his position 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 work 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, "Whatever 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." ¹ What, then, might these revisions tell us about the social standing of one making such "complexly imbricated" utterances? I want to address these questions through readings of the Amoretti and Epithalamion in part to build on the long association of the poems with Spenser's personal experience in Ireland. But I also want to examine the Amoretti and Epithalamion because it offers something like a microcosm of Spenser's literary and political existences—especially his purported transition from the world of court to a private, bourgeois identity. Drawing on the hybrid Spenser produced by the new colonialist readings helps to reimagine the question of Spenser's social standing by reconsidering the ways social distinction, and class itself, are produced in the poems. If Spenser existed between islands, he also existed between modes of social distinction. ² My thesis is that, like Spenser in Ireland, the speaker of Amoretti and Epithalamion tries to create his own social authority by mimicking an idealized conception of nobles, especially nobles in Ireland. Through this desire for and imagination of noble, and especially royal, privilege, however, emerges a new mode of creating social distinction: class.

Like other sonnet sequences of the period, the Amoretti and Epithalamion certainly seeks to reinforce royal authority, as New Historicism has taught us. ³ In a partial revision of his own influential view, however, Louis Montrose suggests that Spenser's position in Ireland also offers an "alternative center" which implicitly challenges the centrality of the English court, for in "generically marginal texts" like Colin Clouts Come Home Againe and Amoretti and Epithalamion "Spenser calls attention to his position on the social and geo-political margins of Elizabethan courtly and aristocratic culture; and the Poet's persona—variously shepherd, lover, and bridegroom—reinvents this margin as an emergent and alternative center." ⁴ Montrose's attention to Spenser's position in Ireland complicates ties between his work and absolutism because the colonial project participates in a re-imagination of the locations of power. This re-imagination presents a historiographical challenge. On the one hand, how can we describe this "alternative center" without implying that it is largely a reflection of the real authority centralized in Elizabeth's court? ⁵ And on the other hand, how can we describe it without invoking what Ellen Meiksins Wood terms "the Bourgeois Paradigm"—that is, without aligning this "alternative" with the interiorized privacy of a teleologically rising middle class confronting its arch historical antagonist, the nobility? ⁶

One way to avoid this Scylla and Charybdis of early modern English historiography—the late feudal polity versus the rise of the middle class—is suggested by the new colonialist readings. Their emphasis on the production of hybrid subjects between discourses points at the participation of these subjects in what Pierre Bourdieu calls "the struggle of classifications": "A symbolic (and political) struggle to impose a vision of the social world, or, better, a way to construct that world, in perception and in reality, and to construct classes in accordance with which this social world can be divided." ⁷ What is at stake in...