"The thing/which never was": Republicanism and the ruines of time

This essay discusses Spenser's engagement with republican political thought in The Ruines of Time, parts of Book V of The Faerie Queene, and in Spenser's dedicatory sonnet to Lewkener's translation of Contarini's De magistratibus et republica Venetorum (The Commonwealth and Government of Venice). This essay proposes that in The Ruines of Time Spenser invents a republican principal of poetry, one that intensifies his readers' responsibility for political thought, and it then goes on to explore this readerly responsibility in the poem and in the engagement of The Faerie Queene, Book V, with the emergent Dutch republic. While Spenser's poetry stages the limits of its own political thought, through abstraction and negation, it also provokes and solicits readers who can overcome these limitations.