Spenser's Irish Work

Poetry, Plantation and Colonial Reformation

Thomas Herron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754656029
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351898669
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Exploring Edmund Spenser's writings within the historical and aesthetic context of colonial agricultural reform in Ireland, his adopted home, this study demonstrates how Irish events and influences operate in far more of Spenser's work than previously suspected. Thomas Herron explores Spenser's relation to contemporary English poets and polemicists in Munster, such as Sir Walter Raleigh, Ralph Birkenshaw and Parr Lane, as well as heretofore neglected Irish material in Elizabethan pageantry in the 1590s, such as the famously elaborate state performances at Elvetham and Rycote. New light is shed here on the Irish significance of both the earlier and later Books of The Fairie Queene. Herron examines in depth Spenser's adaptation of the paradigm of the laboring artist for empire found in Virgil's Georgics, which Herron weaves explicitly with Spenser's experience as an administrator, property owner and planter in Ireland. Taking in history, religion, geography, classics and colonial studies, as well as early modern literature and Irish studies, this book constitutes a valuable addition to Spenser scholarship.

Part I
Finding Spenser's Ireland

Chapter 1
Spenser and the Anxious Critics

The closing decade of Elizabeth’s reign was a time of profound anxiety as far as england’s relationship with Ireland was concerned.

Andrew Murphy, But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us¹

Lo then how greatly their opinions erre, That thinke there is no great delight in warre.

Sir John Harington, “Of the Warres in Ireland”²

As Andrew Hadfield’s alter ego, the fictional character “Andrew,” remarks, “much recent criticism displays a blithe disregard for any Irish dimension” in Spenser’s poetry.³ An example of critical schizophrenia relating to the (non-) importance of Spenser’s Irish background to his poetry, and vice-versa, can be found by comparing two recent collections of essays stemming from the important 1996 International Spenser Society conference, “The Faerie Queene in the World.” One takes an avowedly historical approach towards his work. It situates the “Worldmaking Spenser … [in] a central place in the expansion of Western Culture” (6), virtually anywhere at all but Ireland (judging from the index, about 12 pages out of 248 treat Ireland, and only 7 of those in a sequential manner). Such broad-mindedness does Spenser studies a disservice by pigeon-holing Irish issues into their own sub-field.⁴ Besides, “Western Culture” arguably expanded into him via the Irish scene as much as he expanded Western Culture into it. The other collection includes articles concerned with Ireland at the heart of its line-up.⁵ Ireland is simply too great in Spenser’s life to be casually ignored or flatly argued against by materialist critics especially.

On the other hand, in an all-too-familiar pattern, many literary critics interested in early modern Ireland and Spenser offer similar New Historicist/ materialist arguments that seek to link The Faerie Queene (almost exclusively Books V, VI and the fragment of Book VII, the “Mutabilitie Cantos”) to English-Irish political culture (based particularly on gleanings from the View and policy papers) and then to Stephen Greenblatt- and Homi Babha-inspired post-colonial theory that stresses the ghostly anxieties of the conqueror. Spenser, we might all agree, demonized the Irish and saw in their land a landscape of self-profiting and inspirational pastoral potential, an ideal courteous state (explored in Book VI in particular). Problematically, however, he (and his first patron in Ireland, Arthur, Lord Grey, allegorized sporadically as the hero Artegall) had his more humane instincts and actions bloodied—and the purity of his poetry sullied—by the harsh necessities of justice in that land (allegorized in Books V and VI). The fickle fortunes of mutability, slander and the wavering support of Council and Queen also impaired his quest (problems found in Book VII and in the Blatant Beast episodes of Books V and VI). Spenser’s powerful vision of imperial harmony under English rule (emblematized by the marriage of the rivers, including Irish rivers, in Book IV) and courteous pastoral bliss in Ireland was therefore apt to disappear as swiftly as the Bregog river on his estate is bouldered and driven underground (as described in “Colin Clouts Come Home Againe”), or as the Graces on Mount Acidale frustratingly vanish in Book VI.

Richard A. McCabe, one of the best Spenserian critics writing within (and without) the Irish paradigm, has recently deepened the complexity of the above schema. His long-awaited monograph explores more fully the Irish implications of the earlier, Books I–III of the poem in light of the later ones, as well as “Colin Clouts Come Home Againe.” As critics have traditionally recognized, Book I narrates an aggressive Protestant struggle against a lingering Counter-Reformation Catholic threat, but the extent of its connection to the apocalyptic zeal typical of Lord Grey’s campaign in the early 1580s (when the Faerie Queene was already being written) had not been explored before in quite such depth. McCabe in turn mines contemporary political tracts to provide an Irish relevance for each of the self-professed “Aristotelian” virtues associated with each Book: Book I’s Holiness corresponds to the Protestant crusading ethos in Ireland, Book II’s Temperance with the need for self-restraint on behalf of opportunistic colonists: they must temper their desire for Mammon-like wealth and resist Acrasia-like sensual temptations. Book III, on Chastity (a virtue akin to proper wedded love), is most notable, from an Irish perspective, for its providential history of Tudor genealogy (shared with Book II). Books IV–VI, on the more “public” virtues of Friendship, Justice and Courtesy, respectively, mark an increase in Spenser’s anxiety over accomplishing reform in Ireland, although Spenser’s imperial and colonial attitude becomes more transparent in the allegory.

McCabe explores the defensive counter-discourses of the dying native Irish community and of the struggling Old English who were faced with such predation on the part of the New English. Despite tantalizing glimpses, however, and ample exploitation of Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh’s meticulous historical work, McCabe does not fully address the georgic and plantation resonances in Spenser.⁶ By underplaying this element of Spenser’s artistic motivation, McCabe arguably dismisses both the importance of Spenser’s adoration of Elizabeth as an Augustan sun-goddess illuminating the work as well as the consistently aggressive and hopeful, prophetic quality of Spenser’s art. McCabe instead fixates on negative female figures, such as Duessa and Radigund, whom he reads as allegorical reflections of the fickle queen.⁷ McCabe notes, for example, that while granting letters patent and eventually helping pay for the early (c. 1570s) plantation project in the Ards of Ulster, Elizabeth was angered by the publication of the project’s recruiting pamphlet, which rightly alarmed some of her Irish subjects. The queen thus “actively discouraged the more grandiose ambitions of the would-be conquistadors.”⁸

Yet conquest it was and under her aegis. Elizabeth’s chief minister, Lord Burleigh, was a prime architect of Irish colonial schemes⁹ and with Walsingham planned the Munster Plantation in late 1585, after Crown title to the land was confirmed by Act of Parliament that same year. The Plantation therefore “rel[ied] on state organization and direction” far more than previous colonial efforts in Ireland or the New World, although profit-minded individualists such as Sir Walter Raleigh were consulted for the project.¹⁰

The Queen appointed Lord Deputies who proudly flew the Protestant banner and greatly intensified the conflict. During Grey’s tenure the level of the queen’s “involvement with Irish affairs was exceptional and the queen intervened most frequently not to reverse policy but to demand that the costs of innovation should be met either from private subscription in England or from fresh revenues raised in Ireland.”¹¹ The queen frankly supported some of the most brutal aspects of her Irish policy, including both the Smerwick massacre (1580) by Lord Grey and the massacre on Rathlin Island (1575) by the first earl of Essex of six hundred followers, mostly women and children, of Sorley Boy MacDonnell, a troublesome Scottish-Irishman whose powerbase lay on the Antrim coast. Essex (who had taken over leadership of the colonial scheme in the Ards) wrote proudly to the queen about his Rathlin success during her prolonged entertainment at the famous pageant of Kenilworth, and she responded enthusiastically.¹² Likewise “Elizabeth was delighted with what Grey had done” at Smerwick and “[a]s time passed … her heart continued to be warmed at the thought of his exploit.”¹³

What the queen thought of Spenser’s poetry, we don’t know. We do know that she granted him a state pension soon after he read his poetry to her at court, in October of 1589. Spenser could certainly count on the possibility of enlisting the queen’s support for his militant cause. McCabe also flatly disagrees with Canny that Spenser “set the agenda” for the militant Protestant reformation of Ireland in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century.¹⁴ Yet Ralph Birkenshaw’s and Parr Lane’s poetry supports Canny’s thesis as it pertains to Spenser’s poetic “agenda” in Munster as well as his administrative one. Canny nonetheless surmises that Spenser stops writing poetry and instead writes the more forthright View after the murky allegories of The Faerie Queene fail to register with the right audiences. But we have no proof, beyond chronology (and Canny ignores the “Mutabilitie Cantos,” most likely written late in his career), that Spenser made such a decision.¹⁵ Nor is Spenser the only one who fanned the flames lit at Smerwick for the wider public and with sustained energy in the 1580s and 90s. The private reading of Queen and Council entered the public domain when portions of Grey’s Smerwick correspondence were closely rewritten by A.M. and published in pamphlet form in London in 1581. A.M. (like Grey) starkly denounces the pope as a belligerent “Antichrist” and decries foreign intrigues. Donna B. Hamilton and Vincent P. Carey have argued that the massacre pamphlet, largely neglected by historians and critics, was authored by Anthony Munday and carefully timed to address a growing Counter-Reformation threat that included the arrival, torture and execution of Jesuit missionary Edmund Campion in England. The poison of anti-Catholic fears (some justified) filled the air. Publicity and historiography in the 1580s and 90s (including that by John Hooker and Spenser) helped to create a “pattern of Anti-Catholic, anti-Irish” polemic “nauseatingly repeated throughout the early modern period whenever the establishment felt threatened.”¹⁶

Republicanism and Multiculturalism

Spenser’s political beliefs nonetheless remain vexed: was he both a militant Protestant and a “republican,” as Andrew Hadfield maintains? Both McCabe and David Scott Wilson-Okamura challenge Hadfield as to the extent of any consistently anti-monarchical (proto-) republicanism on Spenser’s part. The Faerie Queene mistrusts unruly crowds and seems too unabashedly idolatrous of the potential power of monarchy, and an empire led by monarchs (and aristocrats) with celestial approval, to allow for a revisionist Spenser citoyen in Ireland particularly … especially where short-term interests were concerned. Spenser needed a Fortinbras far more than a Hamlet; poor defenseless Irena/ Ireland in her emergency state needs the queen’s prerogative as both blessing and justification, as a cover for martial law and to help protect advantageous property settlements, leases and trade agreements on behalf of the settlers.¹⁷

Spenser, like his fellow Munster planter Richard Beacon, used Machiavelli selectively to advocate a harsh punitive central authority in Ireland.¹⁸ Swen Voekel stresses the highly fractured and chaotic nature of an Ireland divided among petty chieftains (or “baron”-like “warlords,” as Katherine Simms labels them) and argues that Spenser’s work participates in a “crucial process of Western state formation” which appealed to (in Spenser’s own words) “‘the superior power of Her Majesty’s pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Ruin or Monument? Cultivating Optimism in Early Modern Ireland
• Part I Finding Spenser's Ireland
• Part II Creating The Faerie Queene: Rethinking Book I From Within a Georgic-Irish Paradigm
• Part III Local Adversity and Apocalyptic Triumph: Books V, VI, and VII of The Faerie Queene
• Bibliography
• Index