'Take Heed What You Hear': Counsel and Literature in the English Renaissance

The good counselor, an individual who gives advice on both the practical management of affairs and the ethical ideals that should guide conduct, is a potent cultural icon throughout the Renaissance. During the turbulent period in England marked by the sixteenth-century reformations, the end of the Tudor dynasty, the accession of the Stuarts, and the bitter debates over political and religious liberty that culminate in the Civil Wars, would-be counselors find themselves tasked with considerable new work. They also begin to experiment with new textual and artistic methods of achieving their aims. The authors I treat---Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Philip Sidney, and Thomas Elyot---each re-imagine the writing and reading of literature as ways of giving counsel and participating in the government of England. In this period the word government possesses a richness of meaning lost to our ordinary usage; it refers not simply to the institutions that rule countries but to the task of shaping how individuals and communities think and live. Each writer thus takes part in his own way in the broader cultural trend Michel Foucault identifies as the emergence of the arts of government. Yet their literary work extends the idea of governing to new imaginative spaces unaccounted for by Foucault's analysis of the origins of political science. As Pierre Hadot emphasizes in his work on ancient philosophy, projects of self and communal improvement like those Renaissance England's literary counselors facilitate center on the imagination. Literary counsel seeks to harness readers' ability to imagine different possible ways of living to bring about the changes counselor-authors desire. I extend Foucault's and Hadot's insights to show ways in which Spenser's epic, Donne's sermons, Elyot's educational treatises, and Sidney's Defence of Poesy counsel readers by challenging them to imagine new or different ways of thinking and acting as citizens, as Christians, and in any other role life requires them to practice.