Spenser's Supreme Fiction: Platonic Philosophy and 'The Faerie Queene' by Jon A. Quitsland (review)

1028 Reviews John Roe's concerns are with textual juxtaposition and the interplay of material for audience and reader, rather than with questions of influence and theories of discourse formation and intertextuality. If McCoy's book is limited by doctrinal parochialism, Roe's is weakened (where it is) by a comparative unwillingness to consider not just textual reciprocities and similar strategies of representation, but the material world beyond both. Shakespeare and Machiavelli correspond, or whatever, not in a vacuum, but on a modern terrain where contested ideas ofpower and the political are emerging. There is a meticulous survey of Shakespeare's likely contact with the work of Machi? avelli, but Roe's requirements compromise his logic: 'Shakespeare (an impressionable twenty-year old in 1584, and on the verge of a theatre career) can hardly have failed to have access to Machiavelli' (p. 4). Roe argues that 'Shakespeare and Machiavelli can thus be made to illuminate each other' (p. xiii), but that 'made' and 'illuminate' have much work to do. Phrases like 'brought together for comparison' and 'putting one author in the context of the other' (p. ix) leave lots of questions begging. By the close, Roe tells his reader that he has 'tried to show both the variety' that he believes 'is in Machiavelli and the variousness ofthe Machiavellian' in Shakespeare (p. 207). He undoubtedly succeeds in this objective, and his book ought to prevent the crude gen? eralizations to which this relation has been subjected. But how much stronger itwould have been with less squeamishness about theory and methodology. It is consternating, for instance, in this era of sexual politics, gender studies, and actual political sleaze, to be informed that we 'habitually regard the erotic as inimical to politics' (p. 170). These cavils aside, there are many good things in Shakespeare and Machiavelli. This is an exploration not just of Shakespeare's relation to Machiavelli, but of Ma? chiavelli and Elizabethan (popular) distortions of his ideas. The concentration is on the second tetralogy and the Roman plays and, in the main, the 'rhetorical practice of paradiastole, whereby notions or intention which at firstsight seem bad or unworthy may be described as good or virtuous' (p. xi). Roe, who has a way with geometry, comes close to concluding that Shakespeare, especially when he moves from the confines of English history in the second tetralogy to things Roman, is more Machi? avellian than a Machiavelli who emerges from this study as frequently, so to speak, rather un-Machiavellian. Crucial throughout is a well-made distinction between the 'Machiavel', the kind ofpopular monster dramatized, say, in the shape of Richard III, and the Machiavellian, a character, like Brutus, much closer to what to many readers will seem the surprising scruples of Machiavelli's II principe and Discorsi (Roe's Ita? lian means that his Machiavelli is first-hand). Shakespeare adds 'conscience' to the Machiavellian mixture, but 'gloria' and 'Virtu' in II principe (a work that Roe sees as having a structural similarity with King John) can be seen as its distant relatives. Roe's quietly argued book is more significant than Alterations of State. For much of McCoy's material, the reader would want to turn to historians; the literary-critical yield of his argument is small. Roe on the opening of RichardII, on the other hand, or on Hal's rejection of Falstaff in a Machiavellian context, or on Antony and magnanimity , and the competing Machiavellianism of Cleopatra and Octavius, is not to be missed. University of the West of England Peter Rawlings Spenser's Supreme Fiction: Platonic Philosophy and 'The Faerie Queene'. By Jon A. Quitsland. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2001. xiv + 373pp. $70; ?50. ISBN 0-8020-3505-1. One ignores Spenser's use of Neoplatonism at one's peril. A form of philosophy that once defined and dominated intellectual history in the Renaissance in the wake of MLR, 99.4, 2004 1029 Paul O. Kristellar has disappeared fromview of late. That version of the Renaissance tended to underplay the importance of religion, especially at a popular level, producing a history that could be somewhat elitist, overplaying the importance of the aesthetic: ltalian art, city...

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