About

Encouraged by the republishing of Edmund Spenser's 'The Faerie Queene' in 1609, a folio which also included a selection of shorter poetry and, for the first time, 'The Cantos of Mutabilitie', I will read his work alongside William Shakespeare's four, late, Jacobean romances. When studied together, Shakespeare's plays highlight Spenser's own interest in theatricality and spectatorship. By analysing the strange theatrical spectacles, unusual figures, and fluctuating environments in these texts, I will show how, across both writers' work, it can be difficult for a reader-spectator to know what they are looking at - what obscure life they are being made to confront. My project will suggest that Shakespeare and Spenser use these complex, unsettling moments of theatricality and theatrical life to educate their readers and audiences in the art of spectatorship.

I will track episodes in the narratives which require 'figuring out', analysing how Spenser and Shakespeare move away from discrete human figures to present their reader-spectators with epistemologically challenging spectacles, bodies, and landscapes. I will structure this research through three case-study chapters, tackling Pageants, The Non-Human, and Environments.

By tracking the dehumanisation of spectatorship in Spenser and Shakespeare's later work, I will show how these writers speak to post-humanist and ecocritical scholarship. This research project will therefore advance appreciation for Spenser's relevance to current critical trends, whilst also expanding on the relationship between Spenser and Shakespeare. My work will be suggestive to the influence Spenser may have had on Shakespeare's use of theatricality in these late plays, but I will primarily show how both writers are interested in the philosophical possibilities complex 'figuring out' can introduce as part of an education in the art of spectatorship. This will also highlight how theatricality and spectatorship can be studied as a meta-theatrical concern not just of drama, but of poetry, too.