John Derricke's <i>The Image of Irelande: with a Discoverie of Woodkarne</i>

Essays on text and context

Thomas Herron, Denna Iammarino, Maryclaire Moroney, Joshua Samuel Reid

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781526147592
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526147585
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: Literature

John Derricke's Image of Irelande, with a Discoverie of Woodkarne is a key work of English print-making, Irish and English history and cultural misunderstanding. The work attests to the complexity of English and Irish relations, colonisation, military history, imperial propaganda, poetry, art, printing and the forging of identity in the early modern British Isles. The original work comprises of a lengthy poetic narrative and twelve famous woodcuts of the highest quality produced in sixteenth-century England. They also represent some of the only contemporary views of early modern Ireland on record. The sixteen interdisciplinary essays in this collection focus on the text's political and historical meaning, print history, iconographic elements, paratexts, literary and artistic influences, and cultural archaeology. The collection will appeal to scholars of many disciplines.

1

Introduction

Thomas Herron, Denna J. Iammarino, and Maryclaire Moroney

The Image of Irelande: with a Discoverie of Woodkarne (1581), by John Derricke,¹ merits more sustained critical attention than it has received so far. It is a fascinating, multivalent text published in London by John Day and dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, the most prominent figure of a famous English family whose mid-Tudor patriarch, Sir Henry Sidney, was three times governor of Ireland and the protagonist of Derricke’s book. The Image brazenly advertises military atrocity in the name of religious zealotry, although its politics and modes of representation are far from understood. It has more to tell us than we suspect.

This collection, the first dedicated to Derricke’s work, offers new readings of and new sources behind the Image, all to better explicate many facets of a difficult and complex book. The collection delves into historical, art-historical, archaeological and literary scholarship to explore the many meanings of this complex text. Though on the face of it, the Image is blatantly pro-Sidney and anti-Irish propaganda, we suggest that Derricke’s work is in fact culturally and politically daring, a highly sophisticated textual and visual presentation. What is ‘Irish’ about it or its intended audience is subject to dispute. Parts of it are crude and other parts refined, in a seemingly deliberate contrast. Both the subject matter and the manner in which the book represents its subjects, as well as the responses it has garnered from academics, are similarly conflicted.

Although the Image is mainly a poem in varied parts, the work is known, above all, for its woodcuts. They are among the best published in Tudor England² and include some of the only contemporary images of the early modern Irish and the city of Dublin we have today. Nonetheless, the woodcuts have been uncritically received. The third woodcut (of twelve), for example, is frequently reproduced [Plate III]. It shows an Irish feast with a lord, his lady, his dog and his retinue, including a harpist and ‘bard’ (as the caption tells us). As the harp is the national symbol of Ireland (since the time of King Henry VIII), and since friars join the feast, the woodcut pulls strongly on a modern viewer’s Irish-nationalist heartstrings: the plate shows a scene of hospitality, music and feasting outdoors, amid frugal circumstances, all of which resonates with stereotypical notions of the Irish as a Catholic, poetical, musical, boisterous, extremely sociable, down-to-earth people who prefer to live in the countryside.

Looked at more closely, however, vulgar details spoil the quaint façade. Something is clearly awry. The feast is highly primitive, even violent. Intestines spill from the butchered cow. The dog is not friendly. The lord’s dagger (or skeen) is enormous and threatening. The two men warming their backsides by the fire are mooning the company; their lord stares, smiling, at the younger one. There is no space under the table for anybody’s legs. Even the harp is strung in the wrong direction. Is this image intended to be a joke? Is it a comedic, though not unexpected, depiction of these ‘savage[s]’?

Or, taken further, is the image meant to alarm us? Is it a fearful satire of dangerous, devouring rebels preparing an assault on English rule? As Derricke writes in the caption, the friars who counsel the lord are inciting acts of treason against ‘true men’ who abide by the law.³ The native Irish shown here are therefore as savage and depraved as the dog. From this perspective, they are rebels who deserve killing.

Are we to read the text and images in this sequence as ethnography or satire? Funny, alarmist or apocalyptic? Or simply mistaken? Derricke’s book is mired in contradiction both in itself and in our time. Transparent in its colonial aspirations and ideology, it is often confusing and ambiguous in execution. Produced by the premier printer in mid-Elizabethan London, John Day, its fine woodcuts have garnered surprisingly little attention from scholars examining Tudor book illustration.⁴ Although the accompanying poem is substantial, it is rarely read, much less analysed. Until very recently, scholarship on the Sidneys has had little to say about this text.⁵ Despite its value as a precursor to policy tracts such as Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (c.1596), it is seldom explored in relation to those works or to Spenser’s poetry.⁶ This collection, which is edited by three Spenserians and derives partly from an interdisciplinary conference on Derricke held in Cleveland, Ohio in 2016, throws Derricke’s Image into the sharp relief it deserves among literary scholars, historians, art historians and archaeologists.⁷

Derricke’s images have illustrated the pages of social, political and military histories of early modern Ireland for more than a century, but – as noted – the book itself is virtually unstudied. Ironically, for a work promoting itself as a source of discovery and revelation, it remains nearly invisible academically. Historian Hiram Morgan claims that the content of the woodcuts is consistently ‘ignored, sublimated, or misunderstood’,⁸ and reception of the work overall reflects the tenacity of unspoken assumptions about Irish backwardness and British superiority. How else to explain the uncritical use of the scatological third woodcut in Irish schools to teach children about the customs of their forebears? Or the way in which the library of the University of Edinburgh captions its digitized edition, which identifies Rory Og O’More, a Gaelic Irish leader connected to the Earl of Ormond, as ‘a wild kerne’?⁹ The library is ventriloquizing Derricke’s own message. These and a host of similar examples might be explained, or explained away, by the paucity of other visual materials from sixteenth-century Ireland, but we suggest that the reception of Derricke’s work and its relative omission from close scholarly scrutiny is itself part of a colonial legacy. The twin assumptions, that Derricke’s visual representations of the Irish are accurate and do not need to be interrogated, and the complementary assumption that his verbal invectives against the Irish are so polemical that they do not need to be interrogated, have persistently obscured what is most in need of explanation (and, in some cases, is most offensive). To ‘discover’ as well as to defamiliarize the Image of Irelande is at the heart of the project undertaken here.

Historical background

John Derricke, virtually unknown to us apart from this single foray into authorship, produced his work on Ireland during a period of intensified English efforts to bring the island securely under Crown control. Claiming kingship over Ireland in 1541, the Tudors spent the rest of the sixteenth century engaged in administrative reform and periodic military campaigns to extend royal authority well beyond the boundaries of the Pale around Dublin. At the time Derricke’s work was written, political and economic power in Ireland was wielded by three culturally distinct but overlapping groups: Gaelic Irish elites like the O’Neills of Tyrone in the north, who largely maintained their cultural and political autonomy; ‘Old English’ elites like the Earls of Ormond, Desmond and Kildare in the midlands and south, consisting of powerful families established in Ireland since the time of the twelfth-century Norman conquest; and the ‘New English’, including recently arrived governmental appointees from England, whose job it was to assert the Crown’s authority and secure cooperation – by force, if necessary – from the two entrenched communities. The Gaelic Irish and the Old English were predominantly Catholic, while the New English were largely Protestant. Derricke, writing on behalf of one such Crown appointee, the New English Protestant Lord Deputy Sir Henry Sidney (terms in office 1565–71, 1575–78), impugns the motives, integrity and civility of Sidney’s opponents while celebrating Sidney’s effective governance and suppression of armed rebellion.

Two historical Irish figures play significant roles in Derricke’s account, as they did in Henry Sidney’s own representations of his time in Ireland: Rory Og O’More (c.1544–78) and Turlough Luineach O’Neill (c.1530–95).¹⁰ Derricke distorts the image of each to advance his views of Sidney’s political and military achievements during his second term as Lord Deputy. O’More, from Co. Laois, was displaced from his inheritance by the experimental midlands plantation of Laois-Offaly established during the reign of Queen Mary (1553–58). O’More had made a name for himself as a local warlord as well as a swordsman in English service in the early 1570s, but he found himself increasingly at odds with Ireland’s English rulers, none of whom granted the compensation in land to which he felt entitled. Worse still, from Sidney’s point of view, O’More was a kinsman to one of the most powerful of Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers, Thomas Butler, 10th Earl of Ormond (d. 1614), and as such, attracted the particular enmity of Sidney, who was the target of Ormond’s attacks at court.¹¹ In 1577, a number of O’More’s extended family were killed by Sidney’s forces at Mullaghmast, where the O’Mores had been granted safe passage for a parley.¹² In the wake of this violation, O’More re-engaged in a year-long war with the Lord Deputy, a struggle O’More paid for with his life in June 1578.

If O’More’s story illustrates the explosive collision of competing claims to power in the midlands, Turlough Luineach O’Neill exemplifies the dangers to English rule posed by over-mighty powers in the north. Married to the formidable Agnes Campbell, daughter of the 3rd Earl of Argyle, O’Neill promoted himself as the leader best able to exert control in the north, in part, by subordinating the Scots whose interests there went back centuries. He also antagonized English authorities while steadily growing in power. Anticipating acknowledgement of his strategic importance to the Crown, O’Neill submitted to Sidney in 1575. Sidney, in turn, endorsed O’Neill’s request for the English titles Earl of Clanoconnell and Baron of Clogher for O’Neill and his sons.¹³ In the end, however, O’Neill’s inflated sense of his own abilities, coupled with the Privy Council’s ‘continuing suspicion of [O’Neill’s] long-term intention’ led to an indefinite postponement of the patents of nobilitation.¹⁴ The triumphant final woodcut in Derricke’s Image shows a remarkable detente between the two figures, with Sidney (representing the Crown) taking O’Neill’s submission and that of his retinue. The woodcut thus strategically obscures the distrust the Cro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of plates and figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Ideologies
• Part II Archaeologies
• Part III Print and publication
• Part IV Influences
• Part V Interpretations
• Index