The complicated category of the imperfectible human navigating the mutable world is the pivotal object of speculation in Spenserian ethics, examining how Spenser sets out to discover the moral possibilities of his agents’ boundedness in temporality, worldly change, and transformation. Here we see accounts of the mutable body itself as site of procreant expansion, and thus as a microcosm and animating engine of empire building. Linking Spenser’s romance narrative structures to the formal patterns of colonialist expansion mapped out in Sir Thomas Smith’s 1572 pamphlet written in promotion of the Ulster plantation, Chapter 2 argues that Spenser renders a wholesale reorientation of received Aristotelian ways of thinking about meaning-making aims and of the orienting purpose of a human life away from self-perfecting character-making and towards the articulation of collective, and expansive, political agendas.

Chapter 7 concentrates on an indirect strategy of resistance that is the product of ruse, of ‘cunning intelligence’, or metis in Greek. The dynamic of frontal riposte gives way to the dynamic of deviation (the choice of Kent and Edgar in King Lear). This chapter examines how deviation paradoxically means staying here, in the homeland, instead of going away, elsewhere, and how this entails dissembling: changing one’s physical appearance, one’s behaviour and one’s voice, creating an unexpected persona to produce an effect of trompe l’oeil, temporarily renouncing one’s identity to assume the semblance of otherness, so that one’s former self can go unnoticed, as if imperceptible. In King Lear, Kent turns to service, and Edgar to Bedlam begging. Their becoming imperceptible paradoxically entails showing up in the most risky places, right before one’s banisher’s nose, for instance, or publicly undressing to exhibit a nearly naked body that can be scrutinised like a map. It is as if imposing one’s ostentatious persona were the best way to hide one’s genuine identity, and this is why this chapter also focuses on the dialectics of ostentation and dissimulation.

Spenser centers his moral project around the virtue ‘magnificence’, positing the expansive and transformative project of empire building as the privileged form of moral agency in a mutable world. Chapter 3 first traces a brief history of the ways in which Elizabethan vernacular and popular moral discourses align magnificence with specifically secular and political imperatives, while privileging the temporal and mutable body as the origin and end of magnificent activity. Such a shift constitutes a basic rift with received Aristotelian accounts of human excellence’s self-transcending orientation, a rift modeled in the narratives of Redcrosse and Arthur. Both of their quests are organized by a recognition that the ultimate scope and teleological orientation of virtue is fundamentally concerned with establishing a politically viable mode of embodied life in historical time, one whose ultimate goal and material instantiation is the imperial commonwealth.

Having explored dramaturgical correspondences among plays attributed solely to Kyd, Chapter 1 provides an overview of methods used by attribution scholars to distinguish dramatists’ styles, such as analyses of an author’s verse habits, phraseology, linguistic habits, and vocabulary. The chapter then provides evidence for the stylistic homogeneity of the six plays that have been attributed solely to Kyd, engaging with the work of Philip Timberlake, Ants Oras, and Marina Tarlinskaja on Kyd’s verse habits; Charles Crawford, H. D. Sykes, Paul V. Rubow, and Brian Vickers on Kyd’s habitual turns of phrase; MacDonald P. Jackson on Kyd’s distinct stage direction formulae; Thomas Merriam on Kyd’s linguistic markers; and Albert Yang on Kyd’s vocabulary. The chapter demonstrates that these six plays are stylistically of a whole and reveal Kyd’s distinctive authorial fingerprints.

This chapter presents Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theories (from A Thousand Plateaus) and explores several oppositions, such as ‘smooth space’ versus ‘striated space’, ‘game of Go’ versus ‘chess’, which are related to the main opposition, ‘war machine’ versus ‘State apparatus’, before turning to Coriolanus and King Richard II to see how relevant they can be to analyse Coriolanus’ and Bolingbroke’s respective illegal returns. This chapter focuses on the strength of the ‘war machine’: unpredictability and dazzling speed. Such dazzling speed favours an uncommon striking power, which cannot be found on traditional battlefields where enemy armies face one another, one advancing, the other withdrawing, and vice versa, until the issue is decided. The ‘war machine’ is like a weapon of mass destruction for Coriolanus, whereas, for Bolingbroke, it is a deterrent weapon that will ultimately lead to the king’s deposition and his own coronation. Yet the starting point is the same in both plays: so as to maximise its efficiency, the ‘war machine’ must be set in motion at the right time, so as to take advantage of the weakness of the ‘State apparatus’.

This book analyses King Richard II, Coriolanus and King Lear, three Shakespearean plays that particularly deal with abusive forms of banishment. In these plays, the abuses of power are triggered by fearless speeches that question the legitimacy of power and are misinterpreted as breaches of allegiance; in these plays, both the bold speech of the fearless speaker and the performative sentence of the banisher trigger the relentless dynamic of what Deleuze and Guattari termed ‘deterritorialisation’. This book approaches the central question of the abusive denial of territory from various angles: linguistic, legal and ethical, physical and psychological. It also explores various strategies of resistance: illegal return, which takes the form of a frontal counterattack employing a ‘war machine’; ruse and the experience of internal(ised) exile; and mental escape, which nonetheless may lead to madness, exhaustion or heartbreak.

Chapter 6 is concerned with possible alternatives to the ‘war machine’. The first alternative it focuses on is to serve another ‘State apparatus’ or ‘structure, for example, to become God’s soldier, which is Mowbray’s choice in King Richard II. Mowbray reterritorialises himself within a politico-religious structure whose ideals transcend any Christian territory’s specific nationalism. The second alternative is to engage in single combat with ‘nomadic’ advantages, that is, following the codes of chivalry but in a Deleuzian ‘smooth’ space, which is Edgar’s decision in King Lear. Single combat is to Edgar what the ‘war machine’ is to Coriolanus: the opportunity to recover his lost name or to forge himself a new one. The third alternative makes a detour via the island of The Tempest with Prospero’s option: Deleuzian ‘magic capture’. Magic may offer a different alternative to the ‘war machine’ – unless it happens to be a ‘war machine’ in disguise.

An overview of Spenser’s basic ethical assumptions is revealed through a reading of what remains the most pointed and vigorous claim for Spenser’s status as an innovator in moral theory: John Milton’s account of Spenser’s ethical poetics in Areopagitica. The image of Spenserian virtue advanced by Milton renders a broad-strokes outline both of Spenser’s moral thought and its particular divergences from key norms and assumptions of the classical and humanist virtue-ethics traditions, depicting Spenser as, above all, a theorist of the problem of virtue in a metaphysically fallen world. We see here an ethics centered in an agent that is necessarily imperfectible, thereby complicating virtue ethics’ foundational centering figure of the perfectible human character and instead making political action and association the normative point of reference for moral agency, life, and being. By construing the human not as a normative center, but as itself an object of speculation, and making social interaction and obligation the normative frame of reference for ethical action, Milton reveals how Spenser offers both a key departure from ancient ethical frameworks and, in turn, a crucial anticipation of modern moral philosophy.

This chapter calls for a reassessment of Kyd’s legacy as a major dramatist of the period. It summarises the narrative of the monograph, in which Kyd wrote a number of surviving plays in a variety of genres, which influenced Shakespeare’s dramatic language, his versification style, his dramatic devices, his characterisation, and his plots. It also provides excellent reasons for believing that Shakespeare acted in some of Kyd’s plays, that he later revised Kyd’s work, and that the dramatists even collaborated directly. The chapter compares Kyd’s influence on Shakespeare to the relationship between the latter dramatist and Christopher Marlowe. It does not seek to undermine the pervasive influence that Marlowe had on Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. The impact that Kyd’s room-mate had on Shakespeare has been universally acknowledged by early modern scholars. It is time for Kyd’s impact on Shakespeare to be properly acknowledged. Shakespeare would continue to engage with and learn from Kyd through processes of revision, adaptation, and collaboration, and readers may therefore regard Kyd as an even more important dramatic predecessor than has hitherto been acknowledged.

This chapter examines the internal evidence for Kyd’s hand in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part One. On 3 March 1592, Philip Henslowe recorded a performance of ‘Harey the vj’ by the Lord Strange’s Men. Henry VI Part One dramatises events leading up to the Wars of the Roses, as depicted in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part Two and Henry VI Part Three. Scholarly opinion has diverged over whether the play was written first in the Henry VI trilogy, or as a prequel. This chapter contends that the second and third Henry VI plays were written solely by Shakespeare for Pembroke’s Men as a two-part play, and that ‘Harey the vj’ was designed by Lord Strange’s Men to capitalise on their success. Most modern scholars assign the play’s opening act to Thomas Nashe and approximately three scenes to Shakespeare, but no consensus exists with respect to the play’s third author. Nevertheless, Kyd’s name has often been linked to the authorship of Henry VI Part One. Having surveyed scholarship linking the play to Kyd, the chapter assesses a variety of evidence in order to establish that Shakespeare’s chronicle history play was indeed written by Kyd and Nashe for the Lord Strange’s Men, and that Shakespeare subsequently added three scenes for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. This chapter also investigates the attribution of The Spanish Tragedy 1602 additions to Shakespeare in order to show the ways in which Shakespeare appears to have revised his dramatic predecessor’s work.

The way banishment and abuse of power are articulated participates, both upstream and downstream, in a dialectics of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, a dynamic whose driving force remains a form of transgression. The banished person is forced to follow a trajectory entailing various types of crossing, whether domestic or political, physical or mental, and any crossing implies risk-taking and uncertainty as regards the future. Downstream, because abusive banishment generates either a dynamic of riposte, that is, a ‘boomerang’ effect, or a dynamic of deviation, in which ruse proves useful, or a dialectics of endurance and exhaustion. Upstream, because political mismanagement or individual abuse triggers questioning and challenging by fearless speakers. Their ‘irruptive truth-telling’ (Foucault) is felt by the banisher as a parrhesiastic deterritorialisation and this is why he answers with geographic exclusion, which is perceived as abusive banishment by the parrhesiast. The dialectics of territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation highlights the danger not only of abuses of power as such, but also, due to the spiral they initiate, of their repercussions, of their retributive effects. It ultimately invites us to consider and reflect upon the challenge that exercising power represents.