But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us

Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Literature

Andrew Murphy

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813188775
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire anglaise

At the rise of the Tudor age, England began to form a national identity. With that sense of self came the beginnings of the colonialist notion of the "other"" Ireland, however, proved a most difficult other because it was so closely linked, both culturally and geographically, to England. Ireland's colonial position was especially complex because of the political, religious, and ethnic heritage it shared with England. Andrew Murphy asserts that the Irish were seen not as absolute but as "proximate" others. As a result, English writing about Ireland was a problematic process, since standard colonial stereotypes never quite fit the Irish. But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us examines the English view of the "imperfect" other by looking at Ireland through works by Spenser, Jonson, and Shakespeare. Murphy also considers a broad range of materials from the Renaissance period, including journals, pamphlets, histories, and state papers.

1“White Chimpanzees”

Encountering Ireland

She had an idea that he would have to be a foreigner: not an Englishman, still less an Irishman. A real foreigner.

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

I.

We begin with twentieth-century Dublin and a moment of cultural epiphany. In Roddy Doyle’s novel, The Commitments, Jimmy Rabbitte astonishes his friends Derek Scully and Outspan Foster by declaring that “the Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads.” This information comes as a revelation to Derek and Outspan: “They nearly gasped: it was so true” (1989, 9). In the novel, Jimmy’s observation is turned to comic effect, as, on the strength of his insight, he goes on to proclaim James Brown’s slogan: “Say it loud, I’m black an’ I’m proud”—a phrase humorously inapposite in the context of a racially homogenous working class Dublin. For all the scene’s humor, however, the observation itself and the comic incongruity of the situation indicate a deeper resonance at work in the episode.

To hear some of the historical and cultural echoes at play here, we must go back to the mid-nineteenth century and to the English writer Charles Kingsley, who visited Ireland shortly after the famine and wrote back to his wife in England: “I am daunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don’t believe they are our fault. I believe that there are not only many more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better and more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful: if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours” (Kearney 1985, 7).

For Doyle, the multiply resonant term “nigger” provides a series of meanings, some of which are applicable to the Irish, but others of which are not, and this disjunction serves finally as a source of comedy—the Irish may be “niggers” of a sort, but they are, for the most part at least, not black.¹ For Kingsley, the disjunction serves rather as a source of profound anxiety. A certain kind of racial identity can be imposed on the Irish, but, disturbingly, they fail adequately to equate to the stereotype—“chimpanzees” they may well be but, “except where tanned by exposure,” their skins are as white as the white skins of the English.

Turning back from Kingsley to The Commitments once more, we notice an odd doubleness in Doyle’s phrase: “The Irish are the niggers of Europe.” We might ask ourselves what force the word “of” has in this phrase. The answer, I would argue, is twofold. In the first instance, insofar as the phrase “nigger” can be appropriated as a generic term to describe any group that has been subject to colonial oppression and displacement, then the Irish are “Europe’s niggers”—subjects of the English colonial enterprise. But, in addition to being “Europe’s niggers,” they are also “niggers” of Europe, which is to say, they are “niggers” who happen to be European, who belong to a greater social and cultural world that encompasses both England and Ireland.² This, of course, is precisely the source of Kingsley’s great anxiety: the Irish can be classed as alien, but not wholly so. The term “nigger” is at one and the same time entirely apposite and altogether inapplicable when characterizing the Irish.

It is to this area of doubleness that my study is addressed—to the gap, we might say, that opens up between the apposite and the inapplicable or, more accurately, to the inhering of the inapplicable within the apposite. The territory I wish to explore is precisely that indicated by Kingsley when he registers his own anxiety concerning the failure of the Irish adequately to comply with the cultural and racial stereotype within which he would confine them. What I will wish to argue throughout is that this anxiety is not just an isolated experience of self-doubt encountered on a trip along a particular “hundred miles of horrible” Irish countryside; not just what Alan Sinfield would call a “fault-line” serving to expose a contradiction between the overlapping codes of imperial discourse.³ Rather, I take Kingsley’s letter as being indicative of a defining feature of English colonialist writing on Ireland generally: its encountering of sameness at the heart of presumed difference. Thus, where Michel de Certeau observes in Heterologies that “what is near masks a foreignness” (1986, 67), the thrust of my work here is to suggest that, in an Anglo-Irish context, what is foreign masks (or rather, more often, fails to mask) a nearness.

This aspect of English writing on Ireland has gone largely unattended. For the most part, literary critics analyzing such texts have tended to see them in terms of a clean and stable binary opposition between the colonizer and the colonized. Thus, for example, David Cairns and Shaun Richards open their seminal study, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture, by asserting that “our beginning lies with the reality of the historic relationship of Ireland with England; a relationship of the colonized and the colonizer” (1988, 1).⁴ In a similar vein, Richard Kearney, in commenting on the very passage from Kingsley quoted above, characterizes it as an example of “the colonial calibanisation of the Irish” (7). In saying this, Kearney misses the profound anxiety and ambiguity of the text; he sees it as a moment of coherent and unidirectional colonial definition—calibanization—whereas, in fact, as I have suggested, it actually indicates an instance of the failure of colonial definition to sustain itself.

Kearney’s desire, of course—as his deployment of the term “calibanization” indicates—is to assimilate Ireland’s colonial experience to that of other colonized territories elsewhere.⁵ A similar desire can be seen at play in Terry Eagleton’s contribution to the Field Day volume Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, in which he writes that “it was never of much interest to British imperialism whether the Irish were Irish or Eskimo, white or black, whether they worshiped tree gods or the Trinity. It is not their ethnic peculiarity but their territory and labor power that have entranced the British” (1990, 29). For Eagleton, Ireland’s colonial experience is all of a piece with that of other territories that have been subjected to British imperialism. In this view, Ireland and the Irish are just so much grist to the imperial mill. Ireland might just as well be India or Africa for all that the agents of British imperialism care. But, again, this view of the Irish situation ignores—indeed, allows of no possibility of—the peculiar anxiety that Kingsley registers. Contrary to Eagleton’s claim that “it was never of much interest to British imperialism whether the Irish were . . . white or black,” Kingsley, as we have seen, exhibits a profound awareness of the fact precisely that the Irish are not black, and he finds this deeply troubling.⁶

Eagleton’s determined stance here is characteristic of the general tone of the collection in which his piece appears. Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature is uncompromising in its view of the Irish situation as wholly intelligible within a global colonialist frame. In part, the participants in the volume are driven to this stance by their understandable desire to resist what they perceive as a recent trend within Irish historiography that seeks to qualify radically the notion of colonialism.⁷ As Seamus Deane ironically observes in his introduction to the volume, “ultimately, there may have been no such thing as colonialism. It is, according to many historians, one of the phantoms created by nationalism, which is itself phantasmal enough” (1990, 7). In Deane’s view, the ultimate effect of this revisionism has been to “locali[ze] interpretation, confining it within groups, interests, classes, and periods” (6). In the face of this erosion, Deane feels compelled to state on behalf of Field Day that their analysis of the Irish political situation “derives from the conviction that it is, above all, a colonial crisis” (6).

The work of Field Day and others in insisting on the colonialist nature of the Anglo-Irish relationship and in the forging of links between Ireland’s experience and that of other colonial territories has been necessary, important, and fruitful. But the danger of viewing Anglo-Irish history exclusively within a global colonialist frame is that it may lead to the loss of any adequate sense of the historical particularities of the Irish situation—rather as if the stand against the localized interpretation of some revisionists has prompted the jettisoning of that most famous maxim of one of the very contributors to Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Frederic Jameson): “Always historicize.”

We can see this clearly in the case of Eagleton’s piece cited above, where Ireland becomes just another instance of a monolithic British imperialism in action—an instance no different from all of the others throughout the globe. We find a similar mindset at play in Edward Said’s contribution to the same Field Day volume, when Said writes that “it is true that the connections are closer between England and Ireland, than between England and India, or France and Senegal. But the imperial relationship is there in all cases” (1990, 81 [emphasis added]). In the latter half of this quotation, Said, like Eagleton, unambiguously asserts the global imperial dimension of the Irish situation. But his linking of Ireland here to a greater general realm of imperialism is at the expense of the important insight of his initial assertion, in which he recognizes that, because of the closeness of the connections between Britain and Ireland, the colonial relationship between the two neighboring islands must needs be in some way different from other relationships of a colonial kind. Like Eagleton and Kearney, then, Said fails finally to engage with the particularity of the Irish situation—“the closeness of connections” that persists within the Anglo-Irish colonial relationship; the sameness that Kingsley troublingly discovers at the heart of Anglo-Irish colonial difference.⁸

Kingsley is greatly disturbed, as we have seen, by the fact that the Irish do not fully conform to his anticipated image of colonial difference. On his journey through Ireland, he comes to the shocking realization that Irish Otherness is at best partial. The Irish are curiously hybrid, approximating both to the colonial stereotype and, simultaneously, to the English themselves: “their skins . . . are as white as ours.”⁹ In one sense, Kingsley’s realization is a rather simple one: the Irish are white, not black. But, of course, the strength of Kingsley’s reaction indicates a set of deeper issues at play here. The white skin of the Irish signifies a certain connection of racial kinship between the colonizer and the colonized. We have already noted in relation to the Roddy Doyle phrase one dimension of this relation of kinship, in that the Irish can be seen as being both “Europe’s niggers” and “niggers of Europe,” which is to say that even as they are the subjects of colonial oppression, they are still connected to a common European social and cultural realm, a realm to which England and Ireland jointly belong.

Said similarly notes such a relationship of commonality in registering the fact that “the connections are closer between England and Ireland, than between England and India, or France and Senegal.” Although Said himself does not pursue this insight, preferring instead to assimilate Ireland’s colonial experience to a greater global imperial paradigm, it is, nevertheless, worth asking what exactly might be meant by the closeness of connections that Said recognizes as existing between England and Ireland, and what the implications of that closeness and those connections might be.

England and Ireland are close to each other in a number of different ways and one purpose of this chapter is to provide an account of the constituent elements of this relationship of propinquity. I propose to reformulate Said’s closeness, designating it as the category of “proximity.” I choose this term for its multiple resonances, because it serves both to indicate that which is close—“proximate”—while at the same time retaining a sense of that which is “approximate”—a relationship simultaneously of similarity and of difference.¹⁰ We have already seen the effects of the emergence of a sense of proximity at play in Kingsley’s text on Ireland. The category of proximity is central to virtually all English writing on Ireland, as it returns again and again in such discourse, taking different forms over time as the historical circumstances of the Anglo-Irish relationship change, but always serving to disrupt such discourse, in the way that Kingsley finds his text disrupted by his recognition of the implications of the white skins of the Irish.

My task here and throughout this book is, thus, not to deny the assertion of previous scholars that the colonial paradigm has dominated Anglo-Irish relations and English writing about Ireland. The reality of dispossession and displacement certainly speaks against any such view.¹¹ For this reason, I regard Field Day’s reassertion of the colonialist interpretation of Irish history as being both valid and necessary. However, it is also necessary to move beyond viewing this relationship in strictly binary terms and within a framework that assimilates Ireland’s colonial experience to a general global imperialist experience. To do so is to overlook those aspects of the colonial situation that are unique to the Irish arena, in which English writers find themselves confronted by an Other who is neither fully alien nor yet wholly identical with the self. To do so is also, of course, to conflate the experiences of different peoples in a way that, while useful in producing a working model of imperialist ideology and practice, nevertheless also serves to mask the real differences of individual ethnic histories and experiences. Because, finally, of course, Doyle’s Jimmy Rabbitte is wrong: the Irish are not “niggers,” and it is a disservice to black history and to black suffering to appropriate the term “nigger” as a description of the Irish, however much Ireland may have undergone a similar history of suffering and oppression over the course of its colonial experience.¹² Noting the extension of the colonial model to a variety of different scenes of oppression, Henry Louis Gates has been prompted to ask whether “we still need global, imperial theory—in this case, a grand unified theory of oppression” (1991, 470). The answer, I feel, is yes, in some sense, we do. But any such theory needs to be finely callibrated and must be as alert to difference as it is to commonality. It needs, in other words, to avoid what David Lloyd has noted as the risks of “discovering identity at the expense of significant difference” (1993, 9).¹³

II.

We began with the twentieth century and then stepped back to the nineteenth century. The body of this text will, as I have already noted in my introduction, take us back further still, first to the twelfth century and then on to the period that will be our main focus, the closing decades of the sixteenth century and the opening decades of the seventeenth—the period of the English Renaissance. In the late twelfth century, we find the first major texts written about Ireland by a native of the island of Britain—Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica (c. 1187) and Expugnatio Hibernica (c. 1189). Gerald was related to many of the participants in the Norman-English invasion of Ireland in the twelfth century and in his texts we encounter the foundational documents of the tradition of British writing on Ireland.¹⁴ Moving on to the sixteenth century, it is in the Renaissance period that we find the first great blossoming of texts about Ireland produced by writers from Britain. These texts are spread across a wide variety of types and genres, from official and quasi-official tracts and proposals, to memoirs and journals, to poems and dramatic works. Many English writers of the period spent time in Ireland in one capacity or another and the subject of Ireland seems in some measure to have occupied the minds of just about every early modern literary figure.¹⁵

The likely reason for the burgeoning British interest in Ireland in the Renaissance period lies in the fact that, just as this was a period of enormous change in Britain itself, so too was it an era of evolution and transformation within Anglo-Irish relations. In the century from 1541 to 1641 Ireland witnessed an unprecedented array of English initiatives aimed at consolidating and/or expanding crown control of the island.¹⁶ This included, in the early decades of the seventeenth century, the plantation of the onetime Irish stronghold of Ulster. It is in the plantation of this territory and the consequent Catholic uprising in 1641 that the roots of the current crisis in Northern Ireland are to be found, lending the early modern period a special significance in the general history of Ireland.

The history of early modern Ireland has been the subject of considerable debate in recent years. Indeed, in 1990, T.C. Barnard was moved to observe that “in the last twenty years our knowledge, although not always our underst...