In this paper, we propose a general and powerful theory of the plasmonic enhancement of the many-body phenomena resulting in a closed expression for the surface plasmon-dressed Coulomb interaction. We illustrate this theory by computing the dressed interaction explicitly for an important example of metal–dielectric nanoshells which exhibits a rich resonant behavior in magnitude and phase. This interaction is used to describe the nanoplasmonic-enhanced Förster resonant energy transfer (FRET) between nanocrystal quantum dots near a nanoshell.