In this chapter I demonstrate how both Spenser and Shakespeare show the difficulty of establishing noble identity by pointing toward their own authorial roles as fiction-makers, spurring readers and audiences to recognize how their own responses to the text render it meaningful. Taking as my focus two recognition scenes when an apparently rustic young woman (Pastorella in The Faerie Queene, Perdita in The Winter’s Tale) is recognized to be of noble birth, I examine how both authors insist on the obvious fictionality of their work. Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s texts reject the hidden art of sprezzatura and instead make use of metapoetry and metatheater, directly drawing attention to and commenting on the fictional nature of the stories they create. Even as recognition scenes emphasize the fictional nature of the text through their use of highly conventional archetypes that are acknowledged as such, they also denaturalize gentle identity by prompting readers and audiences to connect texts’ literary performances and aristocratic role-playing in the wider society. The metapoetic and metatheatrical moments in The Faerie Queene and The Winter’s Tale encourage both explicit reflection on the authors’ self-conscious artistry and a critical examination of social fictions.

This book ends by exploring how the conclusions of The Book of the Courtier, the 1590 and 1596 Faerie Queene, and The Tempest offer opportunities to both approach and challenge readers and audiences. These are moments, I argue, when readers and audiences are called on to recognize the special power that their own investment—their pleasure, their judgment—in poems and plays has to render these works meaningful, and to decide how they will position themselves with relation to the text. While much of the book focuses on parallels between Spenser and Shakespeare, here I suggest a divergence as Spenserian rupture contrasts with Shakespearean collaboration. At the same time, as both authors offer choices about how to relate to their works, they show their fundamental recognition of readers’ and audiences’ agency.

This chapter explores the relationships between Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Book 6 of The Faerie Queene, and the dialogue Nennio, or a Treatise on Nobility. In Nennio, the characters’ debate about whether nobility of blood or nobility of mind is superior concludes with a relatively straightforward victory for nobility of mind. But Spenser’s poem requires more complicated reactions of its readers, as the knight of Courtesy’s competitions in generosity with the lowly shepherds he encounters have differing outcomes. I demonstrate that, in contrast both to Nennio and to his own commendatory sonnet, Spenser’s concern throughout his treatment of courtesy in The Faerie Queene is not to direct his readers toward a particular view of nobility, but to train their judgments in understanding the complexity of courtesy in action. Interpreting the characters’ competitions in courtesy and the audience’s judgment in The Merchant of Venice, I show that Bassanio’s “impromptu” speech in praise of the lead casket is an example of sprezzatura that has significant implications for the play’s treatment of the conflict between courteous and mercantile systems of exchange. While with one voice the play suggests the obvious superiority of the Christian aristocrats, it also offers readers the tools to question the nature of inherited nobility and to critique the pernicious view that gentility runs in the blood.

The late 1960s was a period of uncertainty for the Liberal Party, which struggled with the question of how to position itself within the British political system. Overshadowing this question, however, was the Party’s declining electoral performance. But the period also witnessed the emergence of a radical Liberal youth movement, which advocated left-wing positions such as American withdrawal from Vietnam and British disengagement from NATO. The 1970 General Election saw the Liberals marginalised, prompting a major reappraisal of the Party’s strategy and purpose. Impetus came from the Young Liberal movement, which advanced a ‘community politics’ approach, stressing grass-roots social and political change. This had a decisive influence on the Party’s strategic and ideological development, and substantial gains were made in the local elections of 1973 and the 1974 General Election, though the first-past-the-post system meant that the Party’s 19.3 per cent national share equated to only 14 parliamentary seats.

The book’s introduction emphasizes the interconnections between poetry and performance in Renaissance English literature. Pointing out how Spenser makes use of theatrical metaphors and Shakespeare makes use of print metaphors, it next considers the overlap between Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poetry and Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors. It argues that both works share the assumption that poetry and theater have the ability to mold the characters of readers and spectators through their reactions to texts and plays. It further argues that Renaissance reading and playgoing practices empowered interpreters of both poems and plays to develop their own assessments of texts even as these texts were designed to work changes upon them. The judgment of readers and audiences defined books and plays, then, and also defined readers and audiences themselves. The introduction concludes with an overview of the book’s remaining chapters.