: <i>The Work of Reform: Literature and Political Ecology from Langland to Spenser</i>

The final two chapters focus on Spenser. Chapter 5 deals with his late pastorals, book 6 of The Faerie Queene and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, which in literary-historical terms feature a surprise return to the Langlandian and Skeltonic mode of his youth. Politically, though, Spenser had learned from the vision of the New World in things like the dramatic interlude of John Rastell and John Heywood called Gentleness and Nobility that “the ideology of work associated with early Tudor reformism could be extended to the justification of colonial occupation in places where the land is fertile but allegedly remains unworked because of a lack of ‘pore mennys handys’” (133). Crucial here is Spenser’s role on the Munster plantation, where he held a colonial position extending the profit-seeking estate management techniques that arose in the wake of the dissolution of the monasteries and combined it with forms of state-sponsored violence. The logic is codified in A View of the Present State of Ireland, the topic of chapter 6, which “articulates a scheme of colonial reform that makes the English plantation the only way to subsist in Elizabethan England” and shows “how colonial primitive accumulation proceeds by using both sovereign force and the biopolitical manipulation of the populations relationship to the environment” (156–57).