This is a study of the responses of three major Elizabethan writers—Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare—to the classical republican account of political personality. Much recent scholarship has sought to demonstrate the relevance and availability of republican thought in England in the years before 1600. Taking those facts as established, I ask instead how and why authors apparently well positioned to take up republican concepts declined to do so, or took them up only in such a way as to emphasize their problematic character. My proposal is that the most troubling features of the republican ethic appeared when it was considered in the dimension of time. The defining feature of that ethic is the reciprocal, mutually definitive relationship between good action (;;virtue”) and good structure (;;balance”). We become virtuous by acting in the establishment, direction, and defense of a civic structure that, in turn, allows our action to remain virtuous by balancing it against that of our fellow citizens. The three authors who are the focus of this study represent alternative critical positions on republicanism, so defined, from the perspective of its temporal character. Sidney and Spenser each seek, in opposite ways, to loosen the definitional relationship between enduring structures and virtuous action. For Sidney, political life must be oriented to a structure more durable than one standing and falling by mere action; for Spenser political action is vitiated unless it can look beyond its attachment to the endurance of worldly structures. Alone of the three, Shakespeare accepts on its own terms the republican nexus of structure and action; what he finds in it, however, is not a prospect of permanently joining virtue and stability, balance and dynamism, but rather a vision of the tragic finitude entailed by their incommensurability.
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Cities without End: Elizabethan Literature and the Limits of Republicanism
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