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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANIMALS AND LITERATURE

Edmund Spenser and

Animal Life
Edited by
Rachel Stenner
Abigail Shinn
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

Series Editors
Susan McHugh
Department of English
University of New England
Auburn, ME, USA

Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK

John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing
an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of
human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences
that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology
and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-­
disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the sepa-
ration of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and political
stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we locate and
understand the agency of animals in human cultures?
This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of
the ‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often
thought of as the key marker of humanity's difference from other species;
animals may have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of com-
munication of a wholly other order. The primary motivation is to muddy
this assumption and to animalise the canons of English Literature by
rethinking representations of animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas
animals are conventionally read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor
(and as signs of specifically human concerns), this series significantly
extends the new insights of interdisciplinary animal studies by tracing the
engagement of such figuration with the material lives of animals. It exam-
ines textual cultures as variously embodying a debt to or an intimacy with
animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic engagements of
literary arts have always done more than simply illustrate natural history.
We publish studies of the representation of animals in literary texts from
the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to the discipline’s key
thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. The series focuses on lit-
erary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related discussion of
the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and film to
fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera)
with which English studies now engages.

Series Board:
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College)
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde)
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC)
Philip Armstrong (Canterbury)
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette)
Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)
 Rachel Stenner • Abigail Shinn
Editors

Edmund Spenser and

Animal Life
Editors
Rachel Stenner Abigail Shinn
University of Sussex Goldsmiths, University of London
Brighton, UK London, UK

ISSN 2634-6338     ISSN 2634-6346 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
ISBN 978-3-031-42640-7    ISBN 978-3-031-42641-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42641-4

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
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 Acknowledgements

This volume was inspired by conversations with Bob McKay at the

University of Sheffield, which led to a conference at the University of
Sussex. We would like to thank Bob for providing the initial impetus, and
leap of faith. Also, we would like to thank the participants and attendees
at the conference. Special thanks are due to Jonny Thurston-Torres for
their contribution. Sussex’s School of Media, Arts, and Humanities
Research Committee and Centre for Early Modern and Medieval Studies
provided invaluable support. We would also like to thank the contributors
who diligently and with utmost collegiality read each other’s work (and
our own). This volume is all the better for the collectivity of the endeavour.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction:
 Edmund Spenser and Animal Studies  1
Rachel Stenner and Abigail Shinn

Part I Animals and Cultural Practices  19

2 Did
 Edmund Dream of Shorthaired Sheep? 21
Andrew Hadfield

3 Spenser,
 Marine Life, and the Metaphysics of Extinction:
Overfishing and the True Monsters of the Deep 45
Todd Andrew Borlik

Part II Animals, Slavery, and Race  69

4 The
 Politics of Hunting: An Aristotelian Reading of
Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti 67 71
Kat Addis

vii
viii Contents

5 Errour’s
 Repercussions: Dragons, Race, and Animality in
The Faerie Queene 93
Rachel Stenner

Part III Animals in Complaints 115

6 Spenser’s
 ‘Apish Crue’: Aping in Prosopopoia or Mother
Hubberds Tale117
Abigail Shinn

7 Scorned
 Little Creatures?: Insects and Genre in
Complaints (1591)139
Richard Danson Brown

8 Spenser’s Parenthetical Butterflies159

Chris Barrett

Part IV Readers and Poetics in The Faerie Queene 181

9 ‘Good
 to Think [With]’: Spenser’s Animals Against
Materiality183
Namratha Rao

10 A
 Fruitful-Headed Beast?: Rhyme in The Faerie Queene203
Bethany Dubow

11 Coursers
 and Courses in The Faerie Queene237
Conor Wilcox-Mahon

12 Spenser’s Wings259
Raphael Lyne

13 Coda279
Pia F. Cuneo

Index287
 Notes on Contributors

Kat Addis recently completed her PhD at New York University, in which
she studied slavery and race in sixteenth-century European epic poems by
Spenser, Tasso, and Juan Latino. Her work is published or forthcoming
from The Spenser Review, Spenser Studies, and English Literary Renaissance,
and she is writing a monograph on the epic genre, slavery, and the concept
of necessity.
Chris Barrett is Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State
University. The author of Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics
of Cartographic Anxiety (2018), Barrett’s research interests centre on
early modern literature, poetry and poetics, and ecocritical approaches to
literature. She is currently completing a monograph on the ecopoetics of
the obvious.
Todd Andrew Borlik is Reader in Renaissance Literature at the
University of Huddersfield. He is the author of Shakespeare Beyond the
Green World: Drama and Ecopolitics in Jacobean Britain, Literature and
Nature in the English Renaissance: An Ecocritical Anthology, Ecocriticism
and Early Modern English Literature, and over a dozen articles in aca-
demic journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, and
English Literary Renaissance. He is currently preparing a new edition of As
You Like It and editing a collection on The Winter’s Tale.

ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Richard Danson Brown is the author of three acclaimed studies of

Spenser: The New Poet: Tradition and Novelty in Spenser’s ‘Complaints’
(1999); A Concordance to the Rhymes of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (2013, with
Julian Lethbridge); and The Art of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (2019), as well as
many essays. He has been book reviews editor of The Spenser Review
(2013–19), and is currently Professor of English Literature at The Open
University.
Pia F. Cuneo is Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of
Arizona. Her research and multiple publications explore the intersections
between art history and hippology in early modern Germany. She also
edited and contributed to Animals and Early Modern Identity (2014;
2017). Her current book project attends to the dynamic exchange between
professional, gender, and religious identities in the equine imagery of the
German artist Hans Baldung (d.1545).
Bethany Dubow is a postdoctoral research fellow in English at the
University of Cambridge. She is currently writing her first book, Sixteenth-
Century Poetics, Mathematics and ‘The Faerie Queene’, which develops the
findings of her PhD. Beth is interested in the theory and practice of early
modern poetics in relation to the period’s mathematics and natural phi-
losophy. Her work is published or forthcoming in journals including
Spenser Studies, The Spenser Review, Exemplaria, and Renaissance Drama.
Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and
Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of a number of books,
most recently, Lying in Early Modern English Culture (2017) and
Literature and Class from the Peasants’ Revolt to the French
Revolution (2021).
Raphael Lyne is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of
Cambridge, and Fellow of Murray Edwards College. He is the writer of
four books, most recently Memory and Intertextuality in Renaissance
Literature (2016), and, with Cathy Shrank, the editor of The Complete
Poems of Shakespeare (2017).
Namratha Rao is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University
of York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Essays in Criticism,
The Spenser Review, Spenser Studies, The Review of English Studies, and
English Literary Renaissance. She is the co-editor of a special issue of
Spenser Studies, Companionable Thinking: Spenser with …, and is writing
her first book, Poetics of the Material: Spenser and Milton.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi

Abigail Shinn is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature and Culture at

Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Conversion
Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales of Turning (Palgrave, 2018)
and co-editor with Andrew Hadfield and Matthew Dimmock of the
Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England (2014).
She is currently working on a new monograph project: Spenser’s Popular
Voices: Culture and Play.
Rachel Stenner is Senior Lecturer in Literature, 1350–1660 at the
University of Sussex. Her research is about Tudor literature and print cul-
ture, with a particular focus on Edmund Spenser and William Baldwin.
Her monograph, The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English
Literature came out in 2018 (repr. 2021), as did the collection she co-
edited with Tamsin Badcoe and Gareth Griffith, Rereading Chaucer and
Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete. Rachel is currently co-editing the
Collected Literary Works of William Baldwin and she co-­directs People of
Print, a book series which profiles understudied figures in the print trades
across four centuries.
Conor Wilcox-Mahon recently completed his PhD at Corpus Christi
College Cambridge on rest and pause in The Faerie Queene. He is inter-
ested in caesura and periodicity, early modern and classical poetics, the
social history of time, and hermeneutic and narratological theory. He is
currently Teaching Fellow in English at Durham University.
 List of Abbreviations

ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

OED Oxford English Dictionary
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900
SENC Spenser Encyclopedia
SSt Spenser Studies

xiii
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Woodcut accompanying Epigram 5; attributed to Lucas de

Heere. In public domain 4
Fig. 2.1 Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London, 1579),
January eclogue, woodcut. In public domain 32
Fig. 2.2 Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London, 1579),
February eclogue, woodcut. In public domain 33
Fig. 2.3 Romney Marsh sheep. Public domain 34
Fig. 3.1 The Stack, Ireland’s Eye. Photo Courtesy of Stephanie Jud 57
Fig. 3.2 Olaus Magnus, Carta marina (detail; 1539). Courtesy of
James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota 60
Fig. 3.3 John Speed, Map of Leinster, Theatre of Empire (1611).
From Wikimedia Commons 63
Fig. 13.1 Hans Baldung, Horses in a Forest, woodcut, 8 15/16 × 13
3/16 in. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers
Fund, 1922. Public Domain 280

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Edmund Spenser and Animal

Studies

Rachel Stenner and Abigail Shinn

Animal life is a marked feature of Spenser’s poetry from his earliest pub-
lication onwards. The collection that readers know as A Theatre for
Worldlings (1569), with its epigrams translated from Petrarch via Marot
and its sonnets by Du Bellay and Jan Van der Noot, has prominent animal
motifs or images in over half of its 22 poems.1 Erupting from the pages

1
The epigrams are from Petrarch’s Rime Sparse (c.1327–1368), as translated from Italian
into French by Clément Marot. The first eleven sonnets are from Joachim du Bellay’s Songe
(1558); the remaining four were probably composed by Van der Noot (Spenser 1999, 508).
See MacFaul (2010) for detail on the translation and a discussion which positions the poems
within Van der Noot’s book as a whole. Cf. Hadfield (2012), 38–47.

R. Stenner (*)
University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
A. Shinn
Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2024
R. Stenner, A. Shinn (eds.), Edmund Spenser and Animal Life,
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42641-4_1
2 R. STENNER AND A. SHINN

alongside statuesque lions and horses (Sonnets 3 and 4), are the terrifying
beast of Revelation (Sonnets 12–14), dogs pursuing their quarry (Epigram
1), a hind, phoenix, and eagle meeting grisly ends (Epigrams 1 and 5,
Sonnet 6), and a serpent stinging a lady (Epigram 6). There are more
beneficent scenes too, as birds chant in the shade of a laurel tree (Epigram
3), and a wolf nurses her offspring (Sonnet 7). Albeit a translation this
text contains, as Tom MacFaul notes, ‘almost all of Spenser’s later preoc-
cupations in embryo’ (2010, 149). But a preoccupation with animal sig-
nification is not regularly listed among Spenser’s major concerns. In
contrast, the chapters in Edmund Spenser and Animal Life collectively
demonstrate that the poet’s writings are closely engaged with animals: he
leverages various early modern discursive contexts for them; he explores
how they signify; he folds them into moral and educative analyses; he
thinks through the ways in which animal form and literary form intersect;
he considers poetic possibilities for the expression of animal characters;
and, critically, his works make space for thinking about the animal as a
being unto itself.
In the sixth sonnet of the radically Protestant Theatre, for example, ‘the
birde that dares beholde the Sunne’ flies higher and higher, eventually
reaching ‘the temple of the Gods’ only to be dashed ‘tombling through
the aire in lompe of fire’ (1999, 13, ll.1, 8, 10). The accompanying wood-
cut depicts the bird as an eagle, but the poem also attributes to ‘her’
(1999, 13, l.3) the properties of a phoenix when she arises ‘as a worme’
out ‘of hir ashes’ (1999, 13, l.14). She functions typologically to invoke
both Christ and Icarus, in fabular mode to warn over-reaching humanity
against hubris, and was read allegorically in the period as both the papacy’s
rise from the ashes of empire (Spenser 1999, 511) and Elizabeth I herself
(MacFaul 2010, 150).2 The lines also construct a poetics of ambivalent
vatic inspiration: the ‘feeble flight’ of the singing poet elevates them to
cloud-piercing heights before their aspiration comes to nought, with
‘bodie turned all to dust’ (1999, 13, ll.2, 12). Yet, they revive in humble
form as the owl is born from the debris. Spenser’s poetry is replete with
moments such as this, where animals occupy multi-layered signifying roles.
Spenser’s investment in the animal as symbol or motif gave rise to
Joseph Loewenstein’s oft-quoted remark that ‘Spenser [...] seems to have

2
The phoenix was an Elizabethan and Jacobean image of royal succession and successful
lineal continuity; for a discussion of this mythical bird’s significance in the period see
Kantarowicz (1997, 385–400).
 1 INTRODUCTION: EDMUND SPENSER AND ANIMAL STUDIES 3

virtually no affective engagement with fauna’ (Loewenstein 2007, 244), a

remark to which Andrew Hadfield responds in this collection’s opening
chapter. As Chris Barrett also reports, Spenser has been accused of pre-
senting animals as ‘lacking individual subjectivity, [...] always vehicles for
the invocation of traits or abstractions’ (Barrett 2013, 148). This is the
critique—which is central to Animal Studies as a field—that figurative lan-
guage and literary form de-realise the animal, subordinating them in a
species hierarchy that humans dominate. It is worth pausing, however,
over the phoenix motif in A Theatre for Worldlings as a whole because it
offers a greater sense of subjectivity to the bird than Sonnet 6 alone appears
to convey—and thus a deeper understanding of what Spenser is up to with
animals.
In Epigram 5, the speaker relays a scene to which the Phoenix is central
(see Fig. 1.1). When the speaker regards the bird ‘in the wood alone’, its
‘purple wings and crest of golden hew’ astonish him, so that he takes the
impression ‘that of some heauenly wight’ he ‘had the vew’ (1999, 5,
ll.1–4). The solitude, beauty, and divine aspect of the bird heroise him
(the Phoenix is gendered male by the poem), foregrounding him in the
eyes of the speaker and the reader as the sonnet’s protagonist. The poem
compounds this sense when the speaker brings the Phoenix into an
encounter with ‘the broken tree / And [...] the spring that late deuoured
was’ (1999, 5, ll.5–6); these are the settings of the previous two epigrams.
Epigram 3 describes a laurel tree being struck by lightning and torn up by
the root, and Epigram 4 describes a spring, implicitly the Hippocrene
Spring, being devoured by ‘the gaping earth’ (1999, 5, l.10). The Phoenix
is now present in these locations as if a wanderer in a broken (romance?)
landscape. Moreover, he has an affective response to the site, smiting him-
self ‘with his beake, as in disdaine’ and then dying ‘in great dispite’ (1999,
6, ll.10–11).
On one level, Spenser’s rendering of the Phoenix’s emotion is an
anthropocentric interpretation that draws on the sorrow the speaker him-
self expresses in response to the events of Epigrams 3 and 4. The scene is
an emblematic visualisation of the doleful complaint and grieving heart
that the epigrams’ closing lines evoke; Epigram 4’s speaker, for example,
laments that what he has witnessed ‘agreues’ his ‘heart euen to this houre’
(1999, 7, l.12). It is thus possible to read the Phoenix not as a subject in
its own right but merely as an avian avatar of the human poetic subject.
On another level, readers might find that the closing line of Epigram 5,
‘for pitie and loue my heart yet burnes in paine’ (1999, 5, l.12), directs
4 R. STENNER AND A. SHINN

Fig. 1.1 Woodcut accompanying Epigram 5; attributed to Lucas de Heere. In

public domain

their attention generously towards both the Phoenix and the damaged
environment it occupies and experiences. Readers are being invited to
empathise, like the speaker does, with the pain of the Phoenix protagonist.
Informed by current ecocritical concerns, readers might further be lured
to read Spenser’s emblems of poetic catastrophe—the uprooted laurel and
the disappearing spring—as a narrative of environmental degradation. In
 1 INTRODUCTION: EDMUND SPENSER AND ANIMAL STUDIES 5

this reading, the Phoenix performs a silent, self-wounding lament. The

fact that in medieval and early modern mythography there was only ever
one phoenix alive tempts the reader further still to read into the scene a
parable of extinction; however, its powers of rebirth work against this
(Todd Borlik discusses early modern thought on extinction in Chap. 3).
Spenser’s bird does, surely, substantiate Barrett’s observation that ‘the
very imagining of ecologies in early modern literature seems tied up in
bird/song’ (Barrett 2022, 585), but it is the inverse of the fluttering crea-
tures that, she notes, sing the cosmos into being in early modern poetry.
Barrett’s coinage, ‘bird/song’, expresses the way that literary avian ‘mar-
vels exist midway between their feathered form and their poetic represen-
tation’ (2022, 592). As with Spenser’s Phoenix, when literary texts depict
birds and other animals, they do not always compel readers to choose
between the animal as an abstraction or an affectively—and materially—
realised subject. Creatures are often critters too.3

Animals, Spenser, and Literary Form

A theorised relation between animals and literary form is at least as old as
Aristotle’s explanation of plot perfection in his discussion of tragedy: ‘just
the same way as living creatures and organisms compounded of many
parts must be of a reasonable size, so that they can be easily taken in by the
eye, so too plots must be of a reasonable length, so that they may be easily
held in the memory’ (1965, 42). Aristotle’s animal analogy, uncannily
proleptic of Descartes’ beast machine with its pieces and parts, presents
tragic plots as animal bodies: made of many functioning components, they
must fit a particular size to be comprehensible by people. The remark with
which Aristotle leads into this analogy is also significant: ‘beauty is bound
up with size and order. A minutely small creature [...] would not be beau-
tiful, for it would take almost no time to see it and our perception of it
would be blurred; nor would [an] extremely large one, for it could not be
taken in all at once’ (1965, 42). In this foundational work of literary criti-
cism, humans’ ability to perceive the animal is linked to aesthetic taste.
And it seems paradigmatic that of the thousands of students who have

3
... to use two terms paired in tension by Dominic O’Key and Donna Haraway. For the
history of ‘creature’ see O’Key (2022, 22–37). ‘Critter’ is Haraway’s alternative to convey
the idea of living organisms as opposed to the aesthetically-mediated, Biblically-freighted
‘creature’. See Haraway (2016, passim).
6 R. STENNER AND A. SHINN

learned about the dramatic unities, very few will have paused to consider—
or been directed to by their instructors—the animal simile which under-
girds Aristotle’s theory, let alone the amorphous animal body within
the simile.
Precisely because of its extensive engagement of forms associated with
the elision of the animal, combined with the sheer expansiveness of his
imaginative worlds, Spenser’s oeuvre is, in fact, especially useful for think-
ing through literary animals. Edmund Spenser and Animal Life represents
the first sustained critical attempt to situate the poet in early modern
Animal Studies. Central to this field in scholarship of later periods are the
ways that figuration shapes readers’ engagement with animals, and this is
a discussion to which several chapters in this book contribute an early
modern perspective (see Kat Addis, Abigail Shinn, Richard Danson Brown,
Chris Barrett, Namratha Rao, Bethany Dubow, Conor Wilcox-Mahon).
Spenser’s aptitude for techniques ‘censured for their complicity in human
exceptionalism’ (Boehrer 2015, 338), such as personification, proso-
popoeia, allegory, and animal metaphor, makes his writings a superb early
modern site for this discussion. The erasure of the actual animal via form
has acquired new ethical urgency in recent decades, as expressed by
Dominic O’Key when he asks, ‘how does fiction express and thereby for-
malize modernity’s planetary impacts on human and animal life?’ (2022,
2). O’Key highlights that literature’s formal procedures can contribute to
a mindset which instrumentalises animals, the broader environment, and
other humans. Giorgio Agamben articulated the same problem when he
conceptualised literature as an anthropological machine, a ‘device for pro-
ducing the recognition of the human’ (2004, 26). Metaphor and allegory
might function within such a device, instrumentalising the animal as a
‘tool in the construction of the human as subject’, rendering them ‘pas-
sive, silent, hollow’, and coercing them into reproducing ‘notions of
human uniqueness, significance, and complexity’ (Lönngren 2021, 40).
Responses to the problem of extractive form frequently aim at a sharper
understanding of the work that form itself does. Emerging from discus-
sions of the eighteenth century, Mario Ortiz-Robles and Heather
Keenleyside both contend that, rather than wringing out their actuality, it
is tropes and figurative language that enable readers to comprehend
 1 INTRODUCTION: EDMUND SPENSER AND ANIMAL STUDIES 7

animals (Ortiz-Robles 2016, 18; Keenleyside 2016, 2).4 That comprehen-

sion might be limited, but the characteristics of poetic language as both
excessive to rationality and conducive to empathy, as both generic and
defamiliarising—the Phoenix’s ‘purple wings and crest of golden hew’
(Spenser 1999, 5, l.2)—help to create it.
For Spenser’s readers, the particular qualities of allegory hold special
significance, and here The Faerie Queene, raucous with animal figures,
metaphors, and allusions, is central. Spenser’s romance epic prompts much
thought in the chapters that follow, with Borlik considering its sea crea-
tures, Rachel Stenner its dragons, Raphael Lyne the wings of its flying
creatures, Rao addressing the transformations of Gryll and Malbecco; and
Dubow and Wilcox-Mahon analysing its animal analogies for form (as
‘coursers’ and ‘Hydran’ respectively). These chapters collectively point to
Joseph Campana’s description of allegory as

a system by which a series of capacities—agency, speech, will, vitality, affect,

and cognition—are distributed to a range of creatures, objects, and land-
scapes including but not limited to the human. [...] a system for the incite-
ment and distribution of life, one in which the entanglement of literary
form, life form, and form of life is especially apparent. (2015, 280)5

One component of allegory particularly attentive to the ‘entanglement

of literary form, life form, and form of life’ is termed ‘allegraphy’ by
Barrett. Flipping the early modern understanding of allegory as double-­
speaking, ‘when we speak one thing and mean another’ as George
Puttenham described it in 1589 (2004, 159), allegraphy is other-writing.
Authors leave allegraphical signs within their allegories. Reading for alleg-
raphy means noticing a text’s ‘agentic and unsignifying beings’ who resist
‘allegorical assimilation’ (Barrett 2016, 1) and refuse to be instrumental-
ised. This is a strategy invested not in doubleness but in singleness, con-
veying the dull ‘unabstractable’ (Barrett 2016, 3) self-identity of the thing

4
As Keenleyside (2016), alongside Tobias Menely (2015), makes clear, the Enlightenment
and eighteenth century created particular conditions for animal life and its comprehension by
people. This is not solely owing to the major hinge of Descartes’ articulation of the beast-
machine thesis in his Discourse on Method (1637). It is also because the concept of sensibility
changed how people could think about animal communication, while the emergence of
animal rights discourse increased people’s consciousness of their duties to animals (Menely
2015). For a discussion of Descartes turned towards the sixteenth century see Bach (2018).
5
This description resonates with Oerlemans’ argument that complexity and doubleness
characterise allegorical representations of animals (2018, 28; see 27–51 for extended discus-
sion of medieval and early modern animal allegory).
8 R. STENNER AND A. SHINN

itself. Allegraphy cultivates an ethical and ecological hermeneutic that is

‘key to recuperating allegory’s potential’ now, as a mode ‘of making sense’
(Barrett 2016, 3) of, and creating sense in, a catastrophically unstable
world. O’Key might find in allegraphy an example of what he calls ‘crea-
turely forms’, those that ‘compel new ways of relating to other creatures’
and are typical of ‘texts which stage human–animal relations in ways that
seek to pause the anthropological machine’s decisionist logic’ (2022, 22).
Allegraphy is a space within allegory that recomposes the mode’s limits
(O’Key 2022, 29) by noticing the actants that allegory can accommodate
but that it refrains from sifting for an inner meaning.
Though allegraphy is a formal method, it has affinities with the influen-
tial, and intensely readerly, ‘surface reading’ model proposed by Stephen
Best and Sharon Marcus (2009).6 Ann-Sofie Lönngren pursues surface
reading when she determines to be guided by ‘the animal’s traces, scents,
presences and noises’ rather than ‘metaphysical notions about human
exceptionalism’ (2017, 241). Elsewhere Lönngren considers animal
metonymy, the figure characterised by ‘similarity, presence, and closeness’
(Lönngren 2021, 41), as opposed to metaphor, which is invested, like
allegory, in difference (and in a similar vein Addis’ chapter in this volume
picks up the simile/metaphor shift). These strategies resist, in different
ways, a depth model which presents animals as the shallow or transparent
symbol and humans as the deep signified.
Yet such dualities of surface/depth, animal/human, material/intellect,
body/soul undergird the socio-politico regimes of power that construct
what Judith Butler terms the ‘differential norm’ of the human: ‘a value
and a morphology that may be allocated and retracted, aggrandized, per-
sonified, degraded and disavowed, elevated and affirmed’ (2016, 64).
Registering, instead, that the animal characteristically defies dichotomies is
a powerful critical move in a conceptual arena thrumming with binary
thinking. As Spenser’s Phoenix indicates, readers do not have to choose
between one or the other. The literary animal can be double, abstraction
and actant, creature and critter. As Lönngren writes, the animal has a
‘character of simultaneousness: it is both a material organism with its own
agency and phenomenology, separate from the human and her experi-
ences, and part of a human epistemological system’ (2021, 43). While the
textual habits of early modern readers trained them to think analogically
and in fabular ways, they also operated within theological and political

6
Barrett herself notes this, but distinguishes between surface reading’s focus on reading
strategies, and her own focus on the text’s internal strategies (Barrett 2016, 20).
 1 INTRODUCTION: EDMUND SPENSER AND ANIMAL STUDIES 9

discourses that saw ‘animals as political subjects in themselves and not just
didactic fables for humans’ (Shannon 2013, 68). It is also important that
although the Enlightenment’s flattening of the animal via Descartes’ beast
machine thesis was undeniably consequential (and Keenleyside (2016, 9)
observes that much animal studies scholarship seeks to recover the ani-
mal’s invisibility post-Descartes), Spenser’s works are prior to that
moment. They are in dialogue with the extended tradition of literary,
philosophical, and natural historical writing that precedes Descartes. The
complexity of the early modern understanding of animal life is one reason
that the period has become particularly significant for Animal Studies.

Spenser in Early Modern Animal Studies

The wider field has been in the ascendant for some time, producing work
across disciplines and periods including the early modern. Vital research
has highlighted the significance of animals in early modern thought and
cultural production. Foundational contributions by Erica Fudge construe
the ways that humans ‘define themselves as human in the face of the ani-
mal’ (Fudge 2002, 1), and the role of humanist approaches to language
and reason within those definitions. Her more recent work uses wills to
trace people’s quotidian, affective relationships with their livestock (Fudge
2018). The scholarship so far has generated an increasingly textured his-
toricised understanding of the entanglements of humans and animals,
philosophically, materially, and psychically. Thus Karen Raber (2013)
explores the complexities of overlapping embodiment, and Pia Cuneo’s
2014 collection focuses on identity in the period across geographies,
genres, and cultures.7 Perhaps unsurprisingly, Shakespeare is central, with
the recent Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals (Raber and
Dugan 2021) consolidating the field and building on crucial work by
Bruce Boehrer on animal character (2010), and Laurie Shannon on ani-
mals’ subjective investment and existence ‘within the reach of politics’
(2013, 3).8 Further interventions focus on particular groups of animals.
Andreas Höfele (2011), for example, considers the overlap of bear gar-
dens, public executions, and theatres, positing that the animal is central to

7
See also Fudge et al. (1999).
8
See also Boehrer (2002) on animal metaphor.
10 R. STENNER AND A. SHINN

Shakespeare’s wielding of violence as spectacle.9 Analysing a different class

of being, Rebecca Ann Bach (2018) foregrounds the importance of bird
sociality and voices for human culture.
Only recently have scholars interested in animals turned their attention
to Spenser, despite the extensive range of fauna present in his poetic
worlds. There are notable exceptions, however. The first phase of work,
starting in the 1960s, was largely taxonomic, deploying modes of interpre-
tation informed by fables and bestiaries. Madeleine Pelner Cosman’s anal-
ysis of The Faerie Queene counts two hundred and thirty images ‘drawn
from animal life’ (1963, 85), taxonomising animals according to ‘fami-
lies’, formal classification, ‘genus and species’, ‘characteristics’, and ‘images
of animals and man’ (1963, 105–7). Arthur Marotti, contextualising
Cosman’s identification of a ‘numerical preponderance’ (1965, 85) of ani-
mal analogy, focuses on the lion, the tiger, and the flight of Florimell to
demonstrate how Spenser leverages the rich symbolic relationship of ani-
mals with scripture, the classics, and mythology (Marotti 1965). Elizabeth
Porges Watson also emphasises Spenser’s range of animal symbolism,
equating it with chivalric bestiary (Watson 1997).
Critical interest then lulled until the publication in 2007 of a cluster of
articles in Spenser Studies, featuring Elizabeth D. Harvey and Elizabeth
Jane Bellamy alongside the influential piece by Loewenstein cited above.
All of these contribute to an early phase of Animal Studies which demon-
strated the ambivalence of the species ‘divide’—not only culture’s need to
assert and police it, but the porosity of the divide itself. Loewenstein’s
disavowal of Spenser’s affective relationship with fauna informs his explo-
ration of the poet’s assertion of kinship between ‘certain animals and cer-
tain humans’ (2007, 243), a kinship that Spenser analyses through
philosophical scepticism. Bellamy argues that The Faerie Queene reveals a
fear that human access to animality, and specifically insect-being, is ‘less
mediated than we may think’ (2007, 229). Harvey, in turn, puts Spenser
into conversation with John Donne’s Metempsychosis (1601), arguing that
Donne can help clarify the ‘ethical dimensions’ of Spenser’s animals
(2007, 257).
The field’s next sustained engagement was the 2015 Spenser Studies
special issue, Spenser and ‘the Human’, edited by Ayesha Ramachandran
and Melissa E. Sanchez, which reads Spenser through the framework of

9
See also Box Office Bears, a project about animal baiting in the playing culture of
London’s Bankside.
 1 INTRODUCTION: EDMUND SPENSER AND ANIMAL STUDIES 11

the posthuman. Seeing the animal as emblematic of human ontological

instability, Ramachandran and Sanchez write that ‘Animal Studies offers
one of the most persuasive challenges to the conceptual privileging of the
human as a category’ (2015, xiii). They dedicate three articles to the sub-
ject. Joseph Campana’s piece, ‘Spenser’s Inhumanity’, considers why
Spenser’s interest in the animal has been generally overlooked, positing
that the poet’s focus on forms of ‘inhumanity’, including that of allegori-
cal reading and writing, reveals the violence of human vitality (2015).
Sean Henry explores goats in The Faerie Queene through a detailed analy-
sis of Calepine in Book IV, arguing that goat imagery collapses species
boundaries (2015), while Bradley Tuggle (2015) sees in Mother Hubberds
Tale a similar drive to elide distinctions between life-forms. Rachel Stenner
continues this conversation in a 2021 chapter in The Palgrave Handbook of
Animals and Literature, via a discussion of The Faerie Queene, Book VI
and The Shepheardes Calender. Engaging Lindgren Johnson’s idea of fugi-
tive humanism (Johnson 2018), Stenner finds a ‘fugitive alterity’ (2021,
168) at play, in which a fleeting mode of being is shared by human and
non-human alike.
Animal-related Spenser scholarship is methodologically and theoreti-
cally eclectic, dialoguing not only with posthumanism, but with ecocriti-
cism and studies of monstrosity (some would see Animal Studies as a
subsidiary of the former). Alongside Barrett’s formulation of allegraphy
discussed above, she explores elsewhere Spenser’s use of contemporary
natural historical accounts of whale stranding (2013), focalised through
the dragon’s corpse in The Faerie Queene, Book I. Watson analyses how
animals shape monstrosity in the same poem, arguing that Spenser’s
employment of hybrid creatures renders description ‘literally and figura-
tively chaotic’ (2000, 169). Maik Goth, in his comprehensive terratology
(2015), also highlights the centrality of the poem’s human-animal com-
posites, framing his ideas via the scholarship of Fudge (2002) and Joyce
Salisbury (1994). It is to this incipient but already diverse critical conver-
sation that Spenser and Animal Life contributes.

Chapter Summaries
The chapters in this volume offer provocations for rethinking how Spenser
engaged with animal life, a phenomenon—whether insect or whale, mon-
strous hybrid or ubiquitous sheep—that is present throughout his career
and that animates his fertile literary worlds. Our contributors pay
12 R. STENNER AND A. SHINN

sustained attention to the intersection of the animal and poetic form, pro-
viding innovative readings of Spenser’s poetics as animal-like or indebted
to animal movements and behaviours such as the pace of a horse, the
wings of a butterfly, or the contortions of a performing ape. Several chap-
ters locate Spenser’s writings within the discourses of his day, be they agri-
cultural, maritime, or natural historical. Others demonstrate that animals
provide Spenser with a multi-layered means of signification, a way of
thinking about the natural world but also about the human on gradations
between visibility and shadow. Several contributors respond to the increas-
ing recognition that Animal Studies needs to make space for other cri-
tiques around race, gender, and including (though not treated explicitly
here) sexuality and ableism.
The two chapters in part 1, ‘Animals and Cultural Practices’, investigate
the real animals and habitats whose exploitation informs Spenser’s depic-
tion of animal life. Hadfield, in ‘Did Edmund Dream of Shorthaired
Sheep?’, considers Spenser’s representation of sheep and sheep farming,
responding to Loewenstein by asking whether the poet’s work demon-
strates a sympathetic understanding of animals. Hadfield argues that
despite the importance of sheep farming for his own life, Spenser reveals
little about his thoughts on the animal, being more interested in literary
shepherds than literary sheep. Borlik, in ‘Spenser, Marine Life, and the
Metaphysics of Extinction: Overfishing and the True Monsters of the
Deep’, investigates Spenser’s representations of the sea and marine life in
the context of mounting anxiety about the decline of Britain’s fisheries.
Borlik details how The Faerie Queene contrasts Lucretian views of the
ocean as the site par excellence of ecological instability with a Neoplatonic
vision of the ‘fruitful’ (p. 48) ocean as a nursery of proliferating, and copi-
ous, biodiversity.
In part 2, ‘Animals, Slavery, and Race’, Kat Addis and Rachel Stenner
read Spenser’s positioning of the animal in political hierarchies and theo-
ries of racial difference. Addis’ chapter, ‘“Beholde her Selfe in Mee”: The
Politics of Hunting in Spenser’s Amoretti, Sonnet 67’, analyses the sonnet
alongside the suture between hunting and war in Aristotle’s Politics. Addis
looks to the sonnet’s alignment of hunting with literary figuration, argu-
ing that the incorporation of the animal into the human formulates a
political conception of ‘grace’ (p. 73), whilst the dynamic of hunter and
hunted resembles the relationship of master to slave. Stenner’s chapter,
‘Errour’s Repercussions: Dragons, Race, and Animality in The Faerie
Queene’, focuses on two of Book I’s monsters, the dragonlike Errour and
 1 INTRODUCTION: EDMUND SPENSER AND ANIMAL STUDIES 13

the dragon that Redcrosse must defeat to save Una’s Eden. She finds that
Spenser conceptualises the human through an intersection of animality
and race working in tandem. Redcrosse’s quest to destroy the dragon
reflects how British homogeneity relies on the defeat of a composite ani-
mal and racial alterity.
In ‘Animals in Complaints’, the volume’s third section, Shinn, Brown,
and Barrett interrogate Spenser’s 1591 poetry collection. Shinn’s chapter,
‘Spenser’s “apish crue”: Aping in Prosopopoeia, or Mother Hubberds Tale’,
looks for a performing simian behind Spenser’s characterisation of his dis-
sembling Ape who usurps the Lion’s throne. Shinn analyses the contor-
tion of the Ape’s body and how its performativity relates to the pain of the
animal in the baiting arena, reading the animal as a critique of the abuse of
prosopopoeia and the risks that personation entails. Brown, in ‘Scorned
Little Creatures? Insects and Genre in Complaints (1591)’, explores the
miniature bestiaries of Visions of the Worlds Vanitie. Finding the insect to
be an important component in Spenser’s shift from epic to complaint,
Brown ponders whether poems in Complaints may be ‘negligible by
design’ (p. 140). The final essay on Complaints is Barrett’s ‘Spenser’s
Parenthetical Butterflies’. Reading Muiopotmos, or, The Fate of the
Butterflie, Barrett focuses on Spenser’s conceptualisation of this flamboy-
ant insect, and his engagement of early modern natural history. She posits
a lepidopteran practice of reading parenthetically which locates a fragile
hospitality, at once essential and unnecessary, in the winged parentheses
which flit through the poem.
The last section, ‘Readers and Poetics in The Faerie Queene’, ranges
through the animal poetics of Spenser’s epic. In “‘Good to Think [With]”:
Spenser’s Animals Against Materiality’, Rao argues that it is possible to
read Spenser’s poems as both in touch with and resistant to the creatures
they invoke or name. Centring Gryll, Malbecco, and the trembling deer
from Amoretti 67, Rao critiques the tendency to distrust figuration, seeing
in the animal a source of speculative interpretative possibilities. Dubow’s
chapter, ‘A Fruitful-Headed Beast? Rhyme in The Faerie Queene’ explores
the poem’s Hydran proliferation of regenerating rhymes. Dubow identi-
fies a ‘snaky generativity’ (p. 204), thematically reflected in the serpentine
Errour, which promotes a tendency for rhyme to proliferate beyond the
bounds of the formal architecture of Spenser’s verse. An appendix to
Dubow’s chapter presents for the first time new data backing her analysis
of run-on rhymes. Wilcox-Mahon, in ‘Coursers and Courses in The Faerie
Queene’, links the poem’s horses to its pacing, analogising a horse’s agility
14 R. STENNER AND A. SHINN

in motion with the narrative course of Spenser’s epic. Lyne, in ‘Spenser’s

Wings’, thinks carefully about how wings in The Faerie Queene can be at
once light and heavy, their flight informing the reader’s conceptualisation
of Christian experience. When heavy, and even sharp, these wings corre-
spond to the weightiness of sin.
Finally, in the ‘Coda’, Cuneo shifts our disciplinary focus as she reflects
on and concludes the work of the volume. She brings the insights of Art
History to a discussion of German artist Hans Baldung’s (c.1485–1545)
woodcuts, Horses in a Forest. Like Spenser’s poetic animals, the stallions in
these images provoke the viewer to perceive new possibilities in a ‘frac-
tious defiance of narrative and classification’ (p. 280). Cuneo closes by
considering the ethical call of the animal and the potential of Animal
Studies to ‘encourage a new radical interdisciplinarity’ (p. 284).
To return momentarily to Spenser’s Theatre for Worldlings, the Phoenix
with which we opened this introduction is only one of many animals in
that text deserving critical attention. The first epigram features a hind, ‘so
faire as mought the greatest God delite’ (1999, 2, l.5), being pursued and
vanquished by two ‘egre Dogs’ (1999, 2, l.6). As the speaker observes, the
hind is rapidly chased, ‘pinchte’, and finally ‘opprest’ (1999, 3, ll.5–11)
into untimely death. It is, however, neither the conventional marring of
the hind’s ‘noble beautie’ (1999, 3, l.13) nor the deadliness of the dogs’
force that stands out in this poem. Rather, it is the epigram’s striking
image of construal and affect: animal interaction is witnessed and inter-
preted from a vantage point in which human subjectivity is marked. But
how sufficient is the human response? In the face of the scene’s whirlingly
concise bite, the speaker’s passivity—sitting at the ‘window all alone’
(1999, 3, 1.1)—jars curiously. He reflects that ‘so many strange things
hapned me to see, / As much it grieueth me to thinke theron’ (1999, 3,
ll.2–3); death’s triumph, he states, ‘oft makes me waile so harde a destinie’
(1999, 3, l.14). Despite the strangeness and suddenness of the hind’s
appearance, the speaker’s reaction is familiar, almost habitual, even in its
emotiveness. We hope that this collection, provoking its own new con-
struals and perspectives, brings the rewarding differences of Spenser’s ani-
mal entities closer into view. As for affect, our chase is not the urge to
vanquish, but an acknowledgement of the power of defamiliarisation and
the spirit of empathetic curiosity.
 1 INTRODUCTION: EDMUND SPENSER AND ANIMAL STUDIES 15

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Another random document with
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century ago and exercise at least a limited discretion in casting their
votes. In a State like Nebraska, for instance, it looks as though it
would be possible that the electoral ticket on the anti-Republican
side would be composed of four Bryan and Watson men and four
Bryan and Sewall men. Now in the event of Bryan having more votes
than McKinley—that is, in the event of the country showing strong
Bedlamite tendencies next November—it might be that a split
between Sewall and Watson would give a plurality to Hobart, and in
such event it is hardly conceivable that some of the electors would
not exercise their discretion by changing their votes. If they did not,
we might then again see a return to the early and profoundly
interesting practice of our fathers and witness a President chosen by
one party and a Vice-President by the other.
I wish it to be distinctly understood, however, that these are merely
interesting speculations as to what might occur in a hopelessly
improbable contingency. I am a good American, with a profound
belief in my countrymen, and I have no idea that they will deliberately
lower themselves to a level beneath that of a South American
Republic, by voting for the farrago of sinister nonsense which the
Populistic-Democratic politicians at Chicago chose to set up as
embodying the principles of their party, and for the amiable and
windy demagogue who stands upon that platform. Many entirely
honest and intelligent men have been misled by the silver talk, and
have for the moment joined the ranks of the ignorant, the vicious and
the wrong-headed. These men of character and capacity are blinded
by their own misfortunes, or their own needs, or else they have
never fairly looked into the matter for themselves, being, like most
men, whether in “gold” or “silver” communities, content to follow the
opinion of those they are accustomed to trust. After full and fair
inquiry these men, I am sure, whether they live in Maine, in
Tennessee, or in Oregon, will come out on the side of honest money.
The shiftless and vicious and the honest but hopelessly ignorant and
puzzle-headed voters cannot be reached; but the average farmer,
the average business man, the average workman—in short, the
average American—will always stand up for honesty and decency
when he can once satisfy himself as to the side on which they are to
be found.
 FOOTNOTES:
[17] Review of Reviews, September, 1896.
 X
HOW NOT TO HELP OUR POORER BROTHER[18]

After the publication of my article in the September Review of

Reviews on the vice-presidential candidates, I received the following
very manly, and very courteous, letter from the Honorable Thomas
Watson, then the candidate with Mr. Bryan on the Populist ticket for
Vice-President. I publish it with his permission:
Hon. Theodore Roosevelt:
It pains me to be misunderstood by those whose good
opinion I respect, and upon reading your trenchant article in
the September number of the Review of Reviews the impulse
was strong to write to you.
When you take your stand for honester government and for
juster laws in New York, as you have so courageously done,
your motives must be the same as mine—for you do not need
the money your office gives you. I can understand,
instinctively, what you feel—what your motives are. You
merely obey a law of your nature which puts you into mortal
combat with what you think is wrong. You fight because your
own sense of self-respect and self-loyalty compels you to
fight. Is not this so?
If in Georgia and throughout the South we have conditions
as intolerable as those that surround you in New York, can
you not realize why I make war upon them?
 Tammany itself has grown great because mistaken leaders
of the southern Democracy catered to its Kellys and Crokers
and feared to defy them.
The first “roast” I ever got from the Democratic press of this
State followed a speech I had made denouncing Tammany,
and denouncing the craven leaders who obeyed Tammany.
It is astonishing how one honest man may honestly
misjudge another.
My creed does not lead me to dislike the men who run a
bank, a factory, a railroad or a foundry. I do not hate a man for
owning a bond, and having a bank account, or having cash
loaned at interest.
Upon the other hand, I think each should make all the profit
in business he fairly can; but I do believe that the banks
should not exercise the sovereign power of issuing money,
and I do believe that all special privileges granted, and all
exemption from taxation, work infinite harm. I do believe that
the wealth of the Republic is practically free from federal
taxation, and that the burdens of government fall upon the
shoulders of those least able to bear them.
If you could spend an evening with me among my books
and amid my family, I feel quite sure you would not again
class me with those who make war upon the “decencies and
elegancies of civilized life.” And if you could attend one of my
great political meetings in Georgia, and see the good men
and good women who believe in Populism, you would not
continue to class them with those who vote for candidates
upon the “no undershirt” platform.
In other words, if you understood me and mine your
judgment of us would be different.
The “cracker” of the South is simply the man who did not
buy slaves to do his work. He did it all himself—like a man.
Some of our best generals in war, and magistrates in peace,
have come from the “cracker” class. As a matter of fact,
 however, my own people, from my father back to
Revolutionary times, were slave owners and land owners. In
the first meeting held in Georgia to express sympathy with the
Boston patriots my great-great-grandfather bore a prominent
part, and in the first State legislature ever convened in
Georgia one of my ancestors was the representative of his
county.
My grandfather was wealthy, and so was my father. My
boyhood was spent in the idleness of a rich man’s son. It was
not till I was in my teens that misfortune overtook us, sent us
homeless into the world, and deprived me of the thorough
collegiate training my father intended for me.
At sixteen years of age I thus had to commence life
moneyless, and the weary years I spent among the poor, the
kindness I received in their homes, and the acquaintance I
made with the hardship of their lives, gave me that profound
sympathy for them which I yet retain—though I am no longer
poor myself.
Pardon the liberty I take in intruding this letter upon you. I
have followed your work in New York with admiring sympathy,
and have frequently written of it in my paper. While hundreds
of miles separate us, and our tasks and methods have been
widely different, I must still believe that we have much in
common, and that the ruling force which actuates us both is to
challenge wrong and to fight the battles of good government.
Very respectfully yours,
(Signed) Thos. E. Watson.
Thompson, Ga., August, 30, 1896.
I intended to draw a very sharp line between Mr. Watson and
many of those associated with him in the same movement; and
certain of the sentences which he quotes as if they were meant to
apply to him were, on the contrary, meant to apply generally to the
agitators who proclaimed both him and Mr. Bryan as their
champions, and especially to many of the men who were running on
the Populist tickets in different States. To Mr. Watson’s own sincerity
and courage I thought I had paid full tribute, and if I failed in any way
I wish to make good that failure. I was in Washington when Mr.
Watson was in Congress, and I know how highly he was esteemed
personally by his colleagues, even by those differing very widely
from him in matters of principle. The staunchest friends of order and
decent government fully and cordially recognized Mr. Watson’s
honesty and good faith—men, for instance, like Senator Lodge of
Massachusetts, and Representative Bellamy Storer of Ohio.
Moreover, I sympathize as little as Mr. Watson with denunciation of
the “cracker,” and I may mention that one of my forefathers was the
first Revolutionary Governor of Georgia at the time that Mr. Watson’s
ancestor sat in the first Revolutionary legislature of the State. Mr.
Watson himself embodies not a few of the very attributes the lack of
which we feel so keenly in many of our public men. He is brave, he is
earnest, he is honest, he is disinterested. For many of the wrongs
which he wishes to remedy, I, too, believe that a remedy can be
found, and for this purpose I would gladly strike hands with him. All
this makes it a matter of the keenest regret that he should advocate
certain remedies that we deem even worse than the wrongs
complained of, and should strive in darkling ways to correct other
wrongs, or rather inequalities and sufferings, which exist, not
because of the shortcomings of society, but because of the existence
of human nature itself.
There are plenty of ugly things about wealth and its possessors in
the present age, and I suppose there have been in all ages. There
are many rich people who so utterly lack patriotism, or show such
sordid and selfish traits of character, or lead such mean and vacuous
lives, that all right-minded men must look upon them with angry
contempt; but, on the whole, the thrifty are apt to be better citizens
than the thriftless; and the worst capitalist cannot harm laboring men
as they are harmed by demagogues. As the people of a State grow
more and more intelligent the State itself may be able to play a larger
and larger part in the life of the community, while at the same time
individual effort may be given freer and less restricted movement
along certain lines; but it is utterly unsafe to give the State more than
the minimum of power just so long as it contains masses of men who
can be moved by the pleas and denunciations of the average
Socialist leader of to-day. There may be better schemes of taxation
than those at present employed; it may be wise to devise inheritance
taxes, and to impose regulations on the kinds of business which can
be carried on only under the especial protection of the State; and
where there is a real abuse by wealth it needs to be, and in this
country generally has been, promptly done away with; but the first
lesson to teach the poor man is that, as a whole, the wealth in the
community is distinctly beneficial to him; that he is better off in the
long run because other men are well off; and that the surest way to
destroy what measure of prosperity he may have is to paralyze
industry and the well-being of those men who have achieved
success.
I am not an empiricist; I would no more deny that sometimes
human affairs can be much bettered by legislation than I would affirm
that they can always be so bettered. I would no more make a fetish
of unrestricted individualism than I would admit the power of the
State offhand and radically to reconstruct society. It may become
necessary to interfere even more than we have done with the right of
private contract, and to shackle cunning as we have shackled force.
All I insist upon is that we must be sure of our ground before trying to
get any legislation at all, and that we must not expect too much from
this legislation, nor refuse to better ourselves a little because we
cannot accomplish everything at a jump. Above all, it is criminal to
excite anger and discontent without proposing a remedy, or only
proposing a false remedy. The worst foe of the poor man is the labor
leader, whether philanthropist or politician, who tries to teach him
that he is a victim of conspiracy and injustice, when in reality he is
merely working out his fate with blood and sweat as the immense
majority of men who are worthy of the name always have done and
always will have to do.
The difference between what can and what cannot be done by law
is well exemplified by our experience with the negro problem, an
experience of which Mr. Watson must have ample practical
knowledge. The negroes were formerly held in slavery. This was a
wrong which legislation could remedy, and which could not be
remedied except by legislation. Accordingly they were set free by
law. This having been done, many of their friends believed that in
some way, by additional legislation, we could at once put them on an
intellectual, social, and business equality with the whites. The effort
has failed completely. In large sections of the country the negroes
are not treated as they should be treated, and politically in particular
the frauds upon them have been so gross and shameful as to
awaken not merely indignation but bitter wrath; yet the best friends of
the negro admit that his hope lies, not in legislation, but in the
constant working of those often unseen forces of the national life
which are greater than all legislation.
It is but rarely that great advances in general social well-being can
be made by the adoption of some far-reaching scheme, legislative or
otherwise; normally they come only by gradual growth, and by
incessant effort to do first one thing, then another, and then another.
Quack remedies of the universal cure-all type are generally as
noxious to the body politic as to the body corporal.
Often the head-in-the-air social reformers, because people of sane
and wholesome minds will not favor their wild schemes, themselves
decline to favor schemes for practical reform. For the last two years
there has been an honest effort in New York to give the city good
government, and to work intelligently for better social conditions,
especially in the poorest quarters. We have cleaned the streets; we
have broken the power of the ward boss and the saloon-keeper to
work injustice; we have destroyed the most hideous of the tenement
houses in which poor people are huddled like swine in a sty; we
have made parks and play-grounds for the children in the crowded
quarters; in every possible way we have striven to make life easier
and healthier, and to give man and woman a chance to do their best
work; while at the same time we have warred steadily against the
pauper-producing, maudlin philanthropy of the free soup-kitchen and
tramp lodging-house kind. In all this we have had practically no help
from either the parlor socialists or the scarcely more noxious beer-
room socialists who are always howling about the selfishness of the
rich and their unwillingness to do anything for those who are less
well off.
 There are certain labor unions, certain bodies of organized labor—
notably those admirable organizations which include the railway
conductors, the locomotive engineers and the firemen—which to my
mind embody almost the best hope that there is for healthy national
growth in the future; but bitter experience has taught men who work
for reform in New York that the average labor leader, the average
demagogue who shouts for a depreciated currency, or for the
overthrow of the rich, will not do anything to help those who honestly
strive to make better our civic conditions. There are immense
numbers of workingmen to whom we can appeal with perfect
confidence; but too often we find that a large proportion of the men
who style themselves leaders of organized labor are influenced only
by sullen short-sighted hatred of what they do not understand, and
are deaf to all appeals, whether to their national or to their civic
patriotism.
What I most grudge in all this is the fact that sincere and zealous
men of high character and honest purpose, men like Mr. Watson,
men and women such as those he describes as attending his
Populist meetings, or such as are to be found in all strata of our
society, from the employer to the hardest-worked day laborer, go
astray in their methods, and are thereby prevented from doing the
full work for good they ought to. When a man goes on the wrong
road himself he can do very little to guide others aright, even though
these others are also on the wrong road. There are many wrongs to
be righted; there are many measures of relief to be pushed; and it is
a pity that when we are fighting what is bad and championing what is
good, the men who ought to be our most effective allies should
deprive themselves of usefulness by the wrong-headedness of their
position. Rich men and poor men both do wrong on occasions, and
whenever a specific instance of this can be pointed out all citizens
alike should join in punishing the wrong-doer. Honesty and right-
mindedness should be the tests; not wealth or poverty.
In our municipal administration here in New York we have acted
with an equal hand toward wrong-doers of high and low degree. The
Board of Health condemns the tenement-house property of the rich
landowner, whether this landowner be priest or layman, banker or
railroad president, lawyer or manager of a real estate business; and
it pays no heed to the intercession of any politician, whether this
politician be Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Gentile. At the same time
the Police Department promptly suppresses, not only the criminal,
but the rioter. In other words, we do strict justice. We feel we are
defrauded of help to which we are entitled when men who ought to
assist in any work to better the condition of the people decline to aid
us because their brains are turned by dreams only worthy of a
European revolutionist.
Many workingmen look with distrust upon laws which really would
help them; laws for the intelligent restriction of immigration, for
instance. I have no sympathy with mere dislike of immigrants; there
are classes and even nationalities of them which stand at least on an
equality with the citizens of native birth, as the last election showed.
But in the interest of our workingmen we must in the end keep out
laborers who are ignorant, vicious, and with low standards of life and
comfort, just as we have shut out the Chinese.
Often labor leaders and the like denounce the present conditions
of society, and especially of our political life, for shortcomings which
they themselves have been instrumental in causing. In our cities the
misgovernment is due, not to the misdeeds of the rich, but to the low
standard of honesty and morality among citizens generally; and
nothing helps the corrupt politician more than substituting either
wealth or poverty for honesty as the standard by which to try a
candidate. A few months ago a socialistic reformer in New York was
denouncing the corruption caused by rich men because a certain
judge was suspected of giving information in advance as to a
decision in a case involving the interests of a great corporation. Now
this judge had been elected some years previously, mainly because
he was supposed to be a representative of the “poor man”; and the
socialistic reformer himself, a year ago, was opposing the election of
Mr. Beaman as judge because he was one of the firm of Evarts &
Choate, who were friends of various millionaires and were counsel
for various corporations. But if Mr. Beaman had been elected judge
no human being, rich or poor, would have dared so much as hint at
his doing anything improper.
 Something can be done by good laws; more can be done by
honest administration of the laws; but most of all can be done by
frowning resolutely upon the preachers of vague discontent; and by
upholding the true doctrine of self-reliance, self-help, and self-
mastery. This doctrine sets forth many things. Among them is the
fact that though a man can occasionally be helped when he
stumbles, yet that it is useless to try to carry him when he will not or
cannot walk; and worse than useless to try to bring down the work
and reward of the thrifty and intelligent to the level of the capacity of
the weak, the shiftless, and the idle. It further shows that the maudlin
philanthropist and the maudlin sentimentalist are almost as noxious
as the demagogue, and that it is even more necessary to temper
mercy with justice than justice with mercy.
The worst lesson that can be taught a man is to rely upon others
and to whine over his sufferings. If an American is to amount to
anything he must rely upon himself, and not upon the State; he must
take pride in his own work, instead of sitting idle to envy the luck of
others; he must face life with resolute courage, win victory if he can,
and accept defeat if he must, without seeking to place on his fellow-
men a responsibility which is not theirs.
Let me say in conclusion, that I do not write in the least from the
standpoint of those whose association is purely with what are called
the wealthy classes. The men with whom I have worked and
associated most closely during the last couple of years here in New
York, with whom I have shared what is at least an earnest desire to
better social and civic conditions (neither blinking what is evil nor
being misled by the apostles of a false remedy), and with whose
opinions as to what is right and practical my own in the main agree,
are not capitalists, save as all men who by toil earn, and with
prudence save, money are capitalists. They include reporters on the
daily papers, editors of magazines, as well as of newspapers,
principals in the public schools, young lawyers, young architects,
young doctors, young men of business, who are struggling to rise in
their profession by dint of faithful work, but who give some of their
time to doing what they can for the city, and a number of priests and
clergymen; but as it happens the list does not include any man of
great wealth, or any of those men whose names are in the public
mind identified with great business corporations. Most of them have
at one time or another in their lives faced poverty and know what it
is; none of them are more than well-to-do. They include Catholics
and Protestants, Jews, and men who would be regarded as
heterodox by professors of most recognized creeds; some of them
were born on this side, others are of foreign birth; but they are all
Americans, heart and soul, who fight out for themselves the battles
of their own lives, meeting sometimes defeat and sometimes victory.
They neither forget that man does owe a duty to his fellows, and
should strive to do what he can to increase the well-being of the
community; nor yet do they forget that in the long run the only way to
help people is to make them help themselves. They are prepared to
try any properly guarded legislative remedy for ills which they believe
can be remedied; but they perceive clearly that it is both foolish and
wicked to teach the average man who is not well off that some wrong
or injustice has been done him, and that he should hope for redress
elsewhere than in his own industry, honesty, and intelligence.

FOOTNOTES:
[18] Review of Reviews, January, 1897.
 XI
THE MONROE DOCTRINE[19]

The Monroe Doctrine should not be considered from any purely

academic standpoint, but as a broad, general principle of living
policy. It is to be justified not by precedent merely, but by the needs
of the nation and the true interests of Western civilization. It, of
course, adds strength to our position at this moment to show that the
action of the national authorities is warranted by the actions of their
predecessors on like occasions in time past, and that the line of
policy we are now pursuing is that which has been pursued by all our
statesmen of note since the republic grew sufficiently powerful to
make what it said of weight in foreign affairs. But even if in time past
we had been as blind to the national honor and welfare as are the
men who at the present day champion the anti-American side of the
Venezuelan question, it would now be necessary for statesmen who
were both far-sighted and patriotic to enunciate the principles for
which the Monroe Doctrine stands. In other words, if the Monroe
Doctrine did not already exist it would be necessary forthwith to
create it.
Let us first of all clear the question at issue by brushing away one
or two false objections. Lord Salisbury at first put in emphatic words
his refusal in any way to recognize the Monroe Doctrine as part of
the law of nations or as binding upon Great Britain. Most British
statesmen and publicists followed his lead; but recently a goodly
number have shown an inclination to acquiesce in the views of Lord
Salisbury’s colleague, Mr. Chamberlain, who announces, with bland
indifference to the expressed opinion of his nominal chief, that
England does recognize the existence of the Monroe Doctrine and
never thought of ignoring it. Lord Salisbury himself has recently
shown symptoms of changing ground and taking this position; while
Mr. Balfour has gone still farther in the right direction, and the Liberal
leaders farther yet. It is not very important to us how far Lord
Salisbury and Mr. Chamberlain may diverge in their views, although,
of course, in the interests of the English-speaking peoples and of
peace between England and the United States, we trust that Mr.
Chamberlain’s position will be sustained by Great Britain. But the
attitude of our own people is important, and it would be amusing,
were it not unpleasant, to see that many Americans, whose
Americanism is of the timid and flabby type, have been inclined
eagerly to agree with Lord Salisbury. A very able member of the New
York bar remarked the other day that he had not yet met the lawyer
who agreed with Secretary Olney as to the legal interpretation of the
Monroe Doctrine. This remark was chiefly interesting as showing the
lawyer’s own limitations. It would not have been made if he had met
the Justices of the Supreme Court, for instance; but even on the
unfounded supposition that his remark was well grounded, it would
have had little more significance than if he had said that he had not
yet met a dentist who agreed with Mr. Olney. The Monroe Doctrine is
not a question of law at all. It is a question of policy. It is a question
to be considered not only by statesmen, but by all good citizens.
Lawyers, as lawyers, have absolutely nothing whatever to say about
it. To argue that it cannot be recognized as a principle of international
law, is a mere waste of breath. Nobody cares whether it is or is not
so recognized, any more than any one cares whether the
Declaration of Independence and Washington’s farewell address are
so recognized.
The Monroe Doctrine may be briefly defined as forbidding
European encroachment on American soil. It is not desirable to
define it so rigidly as to prevent our taking into account the varying
degrees of national interest in varying cases. The United States has
not the slightest wish to establish a universal protectorate over other
American States, or to become responsible for their misdeeds. If one
of them becomes involved in an ordinary quarrel with a European
power, such quarrel must be settled between them by any one of the
usual methods. But no European State is to be allowed to
aggrandize itself on American soil at the expense of any American
State. Furthermore, no transfer of an American colony from one
European State to another is to be permitted, if, in the judgment of
the United States, such transfer would be hostile to its own interests.
John Quincy Adams, who, during the presidency of Monroe, first
clearly enunciated the doctrine which bears his chief’s name,
asserted it as against both Spain and Russia. In the clearest and
most emphatic terms he stated that the United States could not
acquiesce in the acquisition of new territory within the limits of any
independent American State, whether in the Northern or Southern
Hemisphere, by any European power. He took this position against
Russia when Russia threatened to take possession of what is now
Oregon. He took this position as against Spain when, backed by
other powers of Continental Europe, she threatened to reconquer
certain of the Spanish-American States.
This is precisely and exactly the position the United States has
now taken in reference to England and Venezuela. It is idle to
contend that there is any serious difference in the application of the
doctrine to the two sets of questions. An American may, of course,
announce his opposition to the Monroe Doctrine, although by so
doing he forfeits all title to far-seeing and patriotic devotion to the
interests of his country. But he cannot argue that the Monroe
Doctrine does not apply to the present case, unless he argues that
the Monroe Doctrine has no existence whatsoever. In fact, such
arguments are, on their face, so absurd that they need no refutation,
and can be relegated where they belong—to the realm of the hair-
splitting schoolmen. They have no concern either for practical
politicians or for historians with true historic insight.
We have asserted the principles which underlie the Monroe
Doctrine, not only against Russia and Spain, but also against
France, on at least two different occasions. The last and most
important was when the French conquered Mexico and made it into
an Empire. It is not necessary to recall to any one the action of our
Government in the matter as soon as the Civil War came to an end.
Suffice it to say that, under threat of our interposition, the French
promptly abandoned Maximilian, and the latter’s Empire fell. Long
before this, however, and a score of years before the Doctrine was
christened by the name Monroe even the timid statesmen of the
Jeffersonian era embodied its principle in their protest against the
acquisition of Louisiana, by France, from Spain. Spain at that time
held all of what is now the Great West. France wished to acquire it.
Our statesmen at once announced that they would regard as hostile
to America the transfer of the territory in question from a weak to a
strong European power. Under the American pressure the matter
was finally settled by the sale of the territory in question to the United
States. The principle which our statesmen then announced was in
kind precisely the same as that upon which we should now act if
Germany sought to acquire Cuba from Spain, or St. Thomas from
the Danes. In either of these events it is hardly conceivable that the
United States would hesitate to interfere, if necessary, by force of
arms; and in so doing the national authorities would undoubtedly be
supported by the immense majority of the American people, and,
indeed, by all save the men of abnormal timidity or abnormal political
short-sightedness.
Historically, therefore, the position of our representatives in the
Venezuelan question is completely justified. It cannot be attacked on
academic grounds. The propriety of their position is even more easily
defensible.
Primarily, our action is based on national self-interest. In other
words, it is patriotic. A certain limited number of persons are fond of
decrying patriotism as a selfish virtue, and strive with all their feeble
might to inculcate in its place a kind of milk-and-water
cosmopolitanism. These good people are never men of robust
character or of imposing personality, and the plea itself is not worth
considering. Some reformers may urge that in the ages’ distant
future patriotism, like the habit of monogamous marriage, will
become a needless and obsolete virtue; but just at present the man
who loves other countries as much as he does his own is quite as
noxious a member of society as the man who loves other women as
much as he loves his wife. Love of country is an elemental virtue,
like love of home, or like honesty or courage. No country will
accomplish very much for the world at large unless it elevates itself.
The useful member of a community is the man who first and
foremost attends to his own rights and his own duties, and who
therefore becomes better fitted to do his share in the common duties
of all. The useful member of the brotherhood of nations is that nation
which is most thoroughly saturated with the national idea, and which
realizes most fully its rights as a nation and its duties to its own
citizens. This is in no way incompatible with a scrupulous regard for
the rights of other nations, or a desire to remedy the wrongs of
suffering peoples.
The United States ought not to permit any great military powers,
which have no foothold on this continent, to establish such foothold;
nor should they permit any aggrandizement of those who already
have possessions on the continent. We do not wish to bring
ourselves to a position where we shall have to emulate the European
system of enormous armies. Every true patriot, every man of
statesman-like habit, should look forward to the day when not a
single European power will hold a foot of American soil. At present it
is not necessary to take the position that no European power shall
hold American territory; but it certainly will become necessary, if the
timid and selfish “peace at any price” men have their way, and if the
United States fails to check at the outset European aggrandizement
on this continent.
Primarily, therefore, it is to the interest of the citizens of the United
States to prevent the further colonial growth of European powers in
the Western Hemisphere. But this is also to the interest of all the
people of the Western Hemisphere. At best, the inhabitants of a
colony are in a cramped and unnatural state. At the worst, the
establishment of a colony prevents any healthy popular growth.
Some time in the dim future it may be that all the English-speaking
peoples will be able to unite in some kind of confederacy. However
desirable this would be, it is, under existing conditions, only a dream.
At present the only hope for a colony that wishes to attain full moral
and mental growth, is to become an independent State, or part of an
independent State. No English colony now stands on a footing of
genuine equality with the parent State. As long as the Canadian
remains a colonist, he remains in a position which is distinctly inferior
to that of his cousins, both in England and in the United States. The
Englishman at bottom looks down on the Canadian, as he does on
any one who admits his inferiority, and quite properly, too. The
American, on the other hand, with equal propriety, regards the
Canadian with the good-natured condescension always felt by the
freeman for the man who is not free. A funny instance of the English
attitude toward Canada was shown after Lord Dunraven’s inglorious
fiasco last September, when the Canadian yachtsman, Rose,
challenged for the America cup. The English journals repudiated him
on the express ground that a Canadian was not an Englishman and
not entitled to the privileges of an Englishman. In their comments,
many of them showed a dislike for Americans which almost rose to
hatred. The feeling they displayed for the Canadians was not one of
dislike. It was one of contempt.
Under the best of circumstances, therefore, a colony is in a false
position. But if the colony is in a region where the colonizing race
has to do its work by means of other inferior races the condition is
much worse. From the standpoint of the race little or nothing has
been gained by the English conquest and colonization of Jamaica.
Jamaica has merely been turned into a negro island, with a future,
seemingly, much like that of San Domingo. British Guiana, however
well administered, is nothing but a colony where a few hundred or
few thousand white men hold the superior positions, while the bulk of
the population is composed of Indians, Negroes, and Asiatics.
Looked at through the vista of the centuries, such a colony contains
less promise of true growth than does a State like Venezuela or
Ecuador. The history of most of the South American republics has
been both mean and bloody; but there is at least a chance that they
may develop, after infinite tribulations and suffering, into a civilization
quite as high and stable as that of such a European power as
Portugal. But there is no such chance for any tropical American
colony owned by a Northern European race. It is distinctly in the
interest of civilization that the present States in the two Americas
should develop along their own lines, and however desirable it is that
many of them should receive European immigration, it is highly
undesirable that any of them should be under European control.
So much for the general principles, and the justification, historically
and morally, of the Monroe Doctrine. Now take the specific case at
issue. Great Britain has a boundary dispute with Venezuela. She
claims as her own a territory which Venezuela asserts to be hers, a
territory which in point of size very nearly equals the Kingdom of
Italy. Our government, of course, cannot, if it wishes to remain true to
the traditions of the Monroe Doctrine submit to the acquisition by
England of such an enormous tract of territory, and it must therefore
find out whether the English claims are or are not well founded. It
would, of course, be preposterous to lay down the rule that no
European power should seize American territory which was not its
own, and yet to permit the power itself to decide the question of the
ownership of such territory. Great Britain refused to settle the
question either by amicable agreement with Venezuela or by
arbitration. All that remained for the United States, was to do what it
actually did; that is, to try to find out the facts for itself, by its own
commission. If the facts show England to be in the right, well and
good. If they show England to be in the wrong, we most certainly
ought not to permit her to profit, at Venezuela’s expense, by her own
wrong-doing.
We are doing exactly what England would very properly do in a
like case. Recently, when the German Emperor started to interfere in
the Transvaal, England promptly declared her own “Monroe
Doctrine” for South Africa. We do not propose to see English
filibusters try at the expense of Venezuela the same policy which
recently came to such an ignominious end in the Transvaal, in a
piece of weak, would-be buccaneering, which, it is perhaps not unfair
to say was fittingly commemorated in the verse of the new poet-
laureate.
It would be difficult to overestimate the good done in this country
by the vigorous course already taken by the national executive and
legislature in this matter. The lesson taught Lord Salisbury is one
which will not soon be forgotten by English statesmen. His position is
false, and is recognized as false by the best English statesmen and
publicists. If he does not consent to arrange the matter with
Venezuela, it will have to be arranged in some way by arbitration. In
either case, the United States gains its point. The only possible
danger of war comes from the action of the selfish and timid men on
this side of the water, who clamorously strive to misrepresent
American, and to mislead English, public opinion. If they succeed in
persuading Lord Salisbury that the American people will back down if
he presses them, they will do the greatest damage possible to both
countries, for they will render war, at some time in the future, almost
inevitable.
Such a war we would deplore; but it must be distinctly understood
that we would deplore it very much more for England’s sake than for
our own; for whatever might be the initial fortunes of the struggle, or
the temporary damage and loss to the United States, the mere fact
that Canada would inevitably be rent from England in the end would
make the outcome an English disaster.
We do not in any way seek to become the sponsor of the South
American States. England has the same right to protect her own
subjects, or even in exceptional cases to interfere to stop outrages in
South America, that we have to interfere in Armenia—and it is to be
regretted that our representatives do not see their way clear to
interfere for Armenia. But England should not acquire territory at the
expense of Venezuela any more than we should acquire it at the
expense of Turkey.
The mention of Armenia brings up a peculiarly hypocritical plea
which has been advanced against us in this controversy. It has been
solemnly alleged that our action in Venezuela has hampered
England in the East and has prevented her interfering on behalf of
Armenia. We do not wish to indulge in recriminations, but when such
a plea is advanced, the truth, however unpleasant, must be told. The
great crime of this century against civilization has been the upholding
of the Turk by certain Christian powers. To England’s attitude in the
Crimean War, and after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, the present
Armenian horror is primarily due. Moreover, for six months before the
Venezuelan question arose England had looked on motionless while