Chapter 3 engages with literary criticism’s argument that English national imagining became increasingly spatialised under Elizabeth Tudor. Critics argue that cartography and chorography introduced a new spatial awareness into English national consciousness. This criticism, which ignores Scotland, misrecognises as merely ‘national’ the imperial connotations of ‘British’ in the sixteenth century. The chapter shows that sixteenth-century chorographic British antiquarianism is shot through with both nostalgia and imperial ambition: ancient place-names and local legends fill the idea of England with the immanent presence of the British past and the promise of a pan-insular, imperial future. John Dee’s claims for English sea sovereignty over the Arctic and the Americas depended on claims to Scotland. Chapter 2 shows how Spenser’s The Faerie Queene conjures the vision of an Anglo-British imperial island in which Scotland becomes inconceivable. Spenser fuses river poetry, chorography and classical poetry with these texts on naval power, maritime law and English sea-sovereignty to shape the love of Florimell and Marinell as an allegory of Chastity as key to English insular empire.

England was probably the first country in Europe to construct a sense of itself as a nation state, but even as it did so the boundaries of native tradition remained uncertain. In the sixteenth century two competing narratives of nationhood are visible, one British and the other Anglo-Saxon (Warner, Spenser, Drayton), and it is the second, more specifically English narrative that comes to supersede the British story (Shakespeare’s histories). Those narratives are complemented in the field of verse form by a further competition between art, represented by classical metres, and nature, represented by native English ‘rhyme’, in which the latter asserts its claims to literary status and value, and history and prosody then converge in the idea of the long line. The achievement of a sense of English national identity in literature is finally constructed as a triumph of nature over art (Daniel).

This chapter argues that Edmund Spenser is at his most deeply political when he invites his readers to immerse themselves in the lush flowerbeds of his poetry. Immersive reading of the lavish and apparently “pointless” descriptions and inventories of flowers in The Shepheardes Calendar, Virgils Gnat, Muiopotmos, and the Garden of Adonis in The Faerie Queene reveal Spenser at his most resistant to submitting the poetic word to the ideological controls associated with the Crown and the court. Spenser plants his flowerbeds in the morally positive terrain of the liberty of speech and poetic license.

Spenser’s poetry offers a glimpse into the aesthetics of skepticism. To understand Spenser’s exploration of perception, interpretation, and subjective experience, the chapter considers skeptical questions posed by medieval philosophy regarding universals, abstraction, mental language, the status of pictures in the mind, and the extent of God’s power. According to Heiko Oberman’s view of the via moderna, these nominalist investigations with their counterfactual approach lead to feelings of contingency and autonomy that in turn produce the subversive political idea that things can be otherwise. In his translations of du Bellay and Marot in his Complaints and in “November,” as well as on Mount Acidale in The Fairy Queen and in The Mutability Cantos, Spenser creates rapturous visions that soon dissolve. These intimations of the sublime have a skeptical quality that suggest a grounding in nominalism. Because Heidegger combats a skeptical metaphysics premised on the rift between subject and object, this chapter uses aspects of his philosophical lexicon to illuminate the stakes of Spenser’s poetic travail with problems of truth, concealment, disclosure, and fullness of being.

‘The Spenser Problem’ considers how writers and critics of the Restoration read, responded to and evaluated the works of Edmund Spenser, especially The Faerie Queene. Spenser, who had died in 1599, was regarded by many in this period as among the most important poets in English literary history, the only Englishman worthy of comparison with canonical European poets such as Homer and Virgil. Yet he was also frequently disparaged by Restoration critics on grounds of his archaic language and his unfashionable style (both his use of allegory and his supposedly unwieldy stanzaic form). ‘The Spenser Problem’ surveys critical responses to Spenser by both well- and little-known writers, the former including such poets as Cowley, Milton, Oldham, Behn and Dryden. It also focuses on Jonathan Edwin’s 1679 edition of Spenser’s Works – the first new collected Spenser since the 1610s – arguing for its importance both within the history of Spenser reception and within larger narratives of English literary history. Crucial in establishing Spenser’s canon and reworking his reputation in the light of Restoration norms and preoccupations, Works (1679) also pioneered the republication of English poetry of ‘the last age’ in a manner later taken up by booksellers such as Jacob Tonson.