The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [86]
Moreover, the idea of poets as legislators and politicians—a concept that, by the time of Shelley’s Defense of Poetry, had become rhetorical in the abased sense of that term—was, for the Elizabethans, a practical reality. Shelley would claim that poets were the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” but in ancient Greece and throughout the Renaissance, poets were, in fact, fully acknowledged as political players. “Poet” was not a full-time occupation to the exclusion of other pursuits. Philip Sidney was a diplomat, Walter Raleigh a courtier and explorer, George Herbert a priest.*
John Donne was trained as a diplomat and anticipated a career in government until his marriage produced a breach between Donne and his political patrons. Edmund Spenser pursued a political career in Ireland (his prose pamphlet A View of the Present State of Ireland recommended aggressive conquest of the Irish native population and the instigation of English language and customs); his prose epic The Faerie Queene, one of the masterworks of the English literary canon, was written in hopes of obtaining a place at court—hopes that did not come to fruition for political reasons. As one of Spenser’s early-twentieth-century editors wrote, “Poetry was a noble pastime, even a vocation, but for a gentleman it was not a profession. All it could do for him would be to bring his talents to the notice of those who were in the position to better his fortunes.”25
The argument of The Faerie Queene, setting forth its poetic program, was addressed to Spenser’s friend Walter Raleigh. Spenser explained that “the generall end” of the book was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.” So this, too, was a use of poetry. The choice of a fictional narrative for what Spenser called his “continued Allegory, or darke conceit,” was connected—or so he alleged—to the idea of fashioning the moral character of his gentle or noble readers:
To some I know this Methode will seeme displeasaunt, which had rather hauve good discipline deliuered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large, as they use, then thus cloudily enwrapped in Allegoricall deuises. But such, me seeme, should be satisfied with the vse of these dayes, seeing all things accounted by their showes, and nothing esteemed of, that is not delightfull and pleasing to commune sense.26
Excuse or not—since allegory’s “dark conceit” was also, equally usefully, a way of disguising controversial views under the device of fiction—this explanation for why one of the most brilliantly imagined poems in the English language takes the form of poetry and fiction rather than precepts and sermons is a good example of the use of use. In Spenser’s letter to Raleigh, “the vse of these dayes” is customary practice, what people are used to, what they like or prefer—in this case, “showes.” A few years later, Ben Jonson would excoriate mere “showes” as the stage design and props provided by his collaborator, Inigo Jones, as contrasted with the greater complexity of poetry: “O showes! Showes! Mighty Showes! / The Eloquence of Masques! / What need of prose/Or Verse, or Sense, t’express Immortal you?”27 But “showes” for Spenser still seemed to include literary exhibitions or fictions.
So the uses of rhetoric, eloquence, “poetical ornament,” figures of speech, and fictional examples were, for the poets, scholars, and politicians of the English Renaissance, a way of (1) fashioning gentlemen, (2) inculcating moral virtues as painlessly and pleasurably as possible, (3) concealing or disguising unpopular opinions under the guise of fiction or allegory, and (4) seeking—and sometimes obtaining—political, social, and financial advancement. Literature had uses: it did things, it gained