Central to Spenser’s ethics is the question of the political and metaphysical insufficiency of the ancient virtues to the task of establishing colonial rule in Ireland. Chapter 6 focuses on Spenser’s engagements with the Florentine political theorist, Machiavelli, claiming that if Spenser’s Irish experience exposes the political limitations of an Aristotelian understanding of virtuous action, then the View’s Machiavelli-inflected account of Arthur, Lord Grey as an icon of virtue notably clarifies the scope, aims, and ambitions of what we might describe as a specifically Spenserian account of virtue. Spenser’s account of Grey’s violent tenure in Ireland, in which he upholds the massacre of Spanish troops at Smerwick as an exemplary action, defines virtue not as fulfillment of normative principles of excellence, but as the ability to respond in politically efficacious ways to various bad choices compelled by fortune and necessity.

Spenser’s ethics are organized among concerns that would become pivotal to the transforming discipline of moral philosophy in early modernity: making the status of humanity itself a central speculative problem of moral inquiry, and centering social obligations as both the normative guide to, and ultimate telos of, virtuous agency. Spenser is thus important to the history of moral philosophy because he also illuminates the ways these questions find a crucial aspect of their historical origin in early modern England’s political emergence as a colonial empire, helping to shape central representational and critical problems of British intellectual culture well into the modern era: the challenge of understanding colonialism, and the coercive violence on which it depends, as a moral activity. Reading Spenser as a moral theorist, and one whose moral theory is significantly shaped by his experiences in Elizabethan Ireland, thus illuminates at a crucial moment of historical inception that philosophical tradition’s pivotal turn as it evolved alongside early modern England’s wider political and economic transformation into a global nation-state built on the foundations of colonial expansion.

Chapter 4’s analysis pivots towards the metaphysical questions such an account of virtue entails. It argues that Spenser’s central image of worldly flourishing, the Gardens of Adonis, describes the metaphysical crux of moral life as Spenser understands it – rendering the good within the material facts of time, death, and decay. The Garden’s iconic exemplar of virtue is Adonis, who represents the instrumentalization of the organic body’s substance by embodying death’s conversion into the infinite potentiality of a form-making life. The image of Adonis in the Garden describes how deathly and temporal bodies become procreant, generative, and expansive forms of life. I argue that such a body stands as the ethical core of this poem and its account of human flourishing. To extend the image beyond the poetic bounds of the Gardens of Adonis and into the critical agendas of the poem writ large, the scene’s images of mortality offer a crucial metaphor for understanding the ways we productively inhabit the mutable world by figuring the point where our poetic, moral, and political lives shape and sustain one another in the task of carving out niches of civilization against the incursions of time and loss.

Chapter 8 studies how one experiences otherness (a displacement of social identity) in one’s own country (inner exile), facing a fall in status and humiliation (eating what is not edible, suffering from infamy and lack of charity) and, at times, facing ‘uncanny’ situations. This chapter shows how the dynamic of deviation is soon transformed into a dynamic of humiliation and degradation, and how one tumbles down the social ladder. Making a detour via a debasing form of otherness while staying in one’s homeland amounts to experiencing not what is elsewhere but what lies at the bottom, to hitting rock bottom at home. The horizontal dynamic of (external) exile gives way to the vertical dynamic of (internal) degradation, also raising the question of whether one can recover from it. Fall in status, humiliating punishment, refusal of hospitality, denial of charity and dietary degradation posing a threat to sanity are generally experienced when the exile finds himself in a hostile foreign territory. Yet the internal exile suffers from the same dynamic of debasement in his homeland, and there may be certain similarities with facing the sudden appearance of the ‘uncanny’.

Chapter 10 focuses on mental spaces that require the resources of the intellect, the creativity of imagination, the emergence of intimate territories, and that depend on the vitality of our inner world. It shows how, having to suffer the hardship of ‘deterritorialisation’, the individual escapes to and finds refuge in their mental sphere: there they have the possibility of creating a mental cartography of their own, a new territory that they can privately and safely inhabit. They become their own compass and map their inner space. Resorting to Emmanuel Housset’s distinction between two types of interiority, a closed one and an open one, which he terms, respectively, ‘insular interiority’ and ‘exile interiority’, this chapter analyses the types of interiority that can be associated with Shakespeare’s Richard II and Lear. In King Richard II and King Lear, mental spaces often betray an ‘insular interiority’ and are ambivalent: endurance turns into a denial of both exteriority and otherness, which leads either to subjective interpretation and radical reconstruction, or to escape into an inner world removed from reality and reason.

Not feeling at home any longer, having the impression that the here is nothing but elsewhere and otherness, losing one’s microcosmic and macrocosmic landmarks and wandering in a Deleuzian ‘smooth space’: such an experience depends on time as it is lived and on temporal perspective (as in King Richard II); it can follow from some disastrous scenario (as in Coriolanus); it can also be closely related to a sort of no man’s land that appears to be a ‘haptic space’, in which one can ‘feel’ but not ‘see’, as opposed to an ‘optic space’ (as in King Lear). What is intuited (home as a foreign elsewhere) in the prophetic mode by Gaunt in King Richard II or with a subjective projection by Coriolanus in the Roman play becomes reality in King Lear. This chapter examines how Gaunt’s critical perception of his homeland as a now debased and unnatural kingdom is echoed by Coriolanus, who comes to see his city, Rome, as deprived of its Romanitas. It shows how, in King Lear, the heath is experienced as a ‘smooth’ space and a ‘haptic’ space in which an aptitude for empathy can be discovered.

Thomas Kyd is traditionally accepted as the author of The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, and Cornelia. HeKyd may also have written a lost Hamlet play that preceded Shakespeare’s version. Among his contemporaries, Kyd enjoyed a far higher reputation than he does today. Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson’s respective epithets, ‘‘industrious’’ and ‘‘sporting’’, suggest that Kyd’s canon was considerably larger than the three plays now acknowledged as his, and that he may have written comedies. This introduction argues that Kyd’s canon should be expanded from three surviving sole-authored plays to six, including King Leir, Arden of Faversham, and Fair Em. Furthermore, the introduction engages with arguments that the play, The First Part of Hieronimo, represents a reconstruction of a lost Kyd play called The Comedy of Don Horatio, and that Shakespeare, rather than Kyd, was responsible for a lost Hamlet play (the so-called Ur-Hamlet) of the late 1580s. The introduction therefore engages with the attribution and textual histories of each of these plays, and explores the dramaturgical similarities amongbetween the six plays that have been attributed solely to Kyd.

Chapter 2 examines the connection between abuse of power and banishment in King Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus. Abuses of power that take the form of banishment can be interpreted as a direct consequence of parrhesia, insofar as parrhesia has been experienced by the interlocutor as speech abuse. Abusive banishment may thus be taken as an ‘effet de retour’ of abusive speech. Naturally, this abuse is not presented as such, as ‘wrong or improper use’, but is openly justified by (mis)interpreting free-spokenness as treason (political misinterpretation) and hubris (moral misinterpretation). A third party is also called for to support or side with the abuser – pagan gods in King Lear, the council in King Richard II and the people in Coriolanus. Yet abuses of power are perceptible in the shift from institutional justice to personal revenge betrayed by the motif of the wilfully deaf ear, by arbitrary decisions, and by the ‘catapulting force’ of affect (here ‘wrath’).

Pervez Rizvi has developed an electronic corpus of 527 plays dated between 1552 and 1657, titled Collocations and N-Grams. Users can download summary spreadsheets for play pairs sharing n-grams (contiguous word sequences). The spreadsheets rank plays in the electronic corpus according to all n-gram matches, as well as unique n-gram matches (i.e. occurring only in two plays in the corpus), and takes account of composite word counts. Rizvi’s results are fully automated and enable scholars to check for every phrasal repetition (including lemmas), as well as all collocations (discontinuous word sequences), shared between texts. Searches of these lemmatised texts – drawn from Mueller’s corpus and the Folger Shakespeare Editions website – allow a wider range of matches to be discovered than by searches using the unlemmatised forms of words. Utilising Rizvi’s corpus, this chapter further explores Shakespeare’s early verbal indebtedness to plays that have been attributed to Kyd. The study utilises quantitative measures to demonstrate the influence of Kyd’s phraseology on plays such as Henry VI Part Three, The Taming of the Shrew, and Richard III beyond reasonable doubt. The chapter proceeds to examine the influence of Kyd’s dramaturgy on Shakespeare’s early plays, including such elements identified by Brian Vickers as vengeful women and foreboding dreams, as well as dramatic structure and staging. The chapter then demonstrates that Shakespeare elaborated on Kyd’s dramatic devices, and that close study of the plays themselves reveals that, in doing so, he recycled aspects of Kyd’s idiom.

Chapter 1 contrasts the duty of allegiance with the affirmation of an individual code of ethics that goes against it. It thus examines, in King Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus, the dialectics of loyalty and disloyalty as subjective notions. Allegiance is presented according to three modes: absolute (obedience is unconditional), contractual (obedience makes sense only if contractual reciprocity is respected) and conflicting (obedience stands in a dialectical relationship with disobedience, a situation which generally breaks down in the face of some personal code of ethics). This chapter focuses on the subordinate figure who refuses to support political excesses (justified by the doctrine of divine right, absolutism or ‘theatrocracy’) and turns into a ‘fearless speaker’, or parrhesiast, that has the courage to speak the truth, thus endangering himself, but also threatening the power of performative speech, as Michel Foucault has shown in his Lectures at the Collège de France.

While Spenser is firmly rooted in the virtue ethics premise that the telos of moral life is action oriented towards the production of flourishing, Chapter 5 offers an account of the often radically un-Aristotelian shape this vision of flourishing assumes in Spenser’s ethics. This chapter considers the disciplinary agendas of Spenser’s ethical imagination as a projection of the Garden of Adonis’s metaphysical concerns into the realm of political agency. Through readings of Neostoic thought in the ‘Mutability Cantos’, of Guyon’s destruction of the Bower of Bliss, and of the image of the colonial market town near the close of Spenser’s prose dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland, it examines the relationship of this central marker of Spenserian political virtue to broader questions of moral subjectivity, of virtuous action, and of the possibility of a flourishing life in the mutable world. Spenser’s program of ‘vertuous and gentle discipline’ describes how structures of normative behavior and personal comportment are ultimately concerned with marshalling the mutable body, its needs, and its desires towards generating a social order within a disordered, and potentially disordering, world.