Thomas Crofton Croker, Researches in the South of Ireland (1824): This stage of unprincipled warfare was dignified by a crowd of illustrious men, amongst whom Spencer [sic] and Raleigh are conspicuous; the latter commenced his extraordinary and ill-fated career in these scenes of butchery and carnage, and in almost the first action recorded of that young soldier his arms were sullied by the execution of a piece of deliberate cruelty, which called down the censure of his royal mistress on Lord Grey, and will ever remain a stain on the page of British history, notwithstanding Spencers vindication or rather apology for such conduct. (p.6.) [Cont.] Note that Croker spells Spenser var. as Spenser or Spencer in both his table of contents and his text.
James Hardiman, Irish Minstrelsy (1831), Vol. I, Note on “Bridget Fergus”], Notes, pp.319-23: The admirers of this celebrated English Poet may be gratified by a few particulars concerning him and his family, (extracted from original documents,) which may serve to correct some errors of his biographers, or supply information which they do not appear to possess. On 12th of August, 1580, Arthur, Lord Grey, accompanied by Edmund Spenser, his secretary, arrived in [319] Dublin, and on the 7th of September following, was sworn lord deputy of Ireland. On the 22nd of March following, Spenser was appointed clerk of the decrees and recognizances of chancery, and his patent was given free from the seal in respect [that] he is secretary to the Right Honorable the Lord D. In this, department he was succeeded on the 22nd of June, 1588, by Arland Usher, kinsman of the celebrated archbishop of that name, and Spenser was appointed clerk of the council of Munster, an office afterwards filled by Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork. On the plantation of that province, queen Elizabeth, by letters patent, dated 26th of October, 1591, granted him the manor and castle of Kylcolman, with other lands, containing 3,028 acres, in the barony of Fermoy, county Cork, also chief rents forfeited by the late lord of Thetmore, and the late traitor, Sir John of Desmond. (Orig. Fiant, Rolls office, Dublin.) [For full text, see infra.]
Louise Imogen Guiney, Selected Poems of James Clarence Mangan (London: John Lane; NY & Boston Lamson, Wolffe & Co. 1897): If our dear friend, Master Edmund Spenser, had had his way in the south of Ireland, we should hardly have occasion to be thankful for a contemporary poet in the north, and his Roisin Dubh. In A View of the Present State, Spenser puts in the mouth of Irenaeus a plea for the extermination of the bards, already greatly injured by the penal statutes under Elizabeth. I have caused divers of them to be translated unto me that I might understand them, and surely they savored of sweet wit and good invention ... sprinkled with some pretty flowers of their own natural device, which gave good grace and comeliness unto them. ... But they seldom use to choose unto them-selves the doings of good men for the ornaments of their poems; but whomsoever they find to be most licentious of life, most bold and lawless in his doings, most dangerous and desperate in all parts of disobedience and rebellious disposition, him they set up and glorify in their rhymes, him they praise to the people, and to young men, make an example to follow. Had they but sung Gloriana! (Note 1, p.343; referring to My Dark Rosaleen, p.115.) [ top ] W. B. Yeats, (Preface to The Poems of Spenser (1906): Like Sidney, whose charm, it may be, led many into slavery, he persuaded himself that we enjoy Virgil because of the virtues of Aeneas, and so planned out his immense poem that it would be set before the imagination of citizens, in whom there would soon be no great energy, innumerable blameless Aeneases. He had learned to put the State, which desires all the abundance for itself, in the place of the Church, and he found it possible to be moved by expedient emotions, merely because they were expedient, and to think serviceable thoughts with no selfcontempt. He loved his Queen a little because she was the protectress of poets and an image of that old Anglo-French nation that lay a-dying, but a great deal because she was the image of the State which had taken possession of his conscience [ ]. When Spenser wrote of Ireland he wrote as an official, and out of thoughts and emotions that had been organised by the State. He was the first of many Englishmen to see nothing but what he was desired to see. Could he have gone there as a poet merely, he might have found among its poets more wonderful imaginations than even those islands of Phaedria and Acrasia. He would have found among wandering storytellers, not indeed his own power of rich, sustained description, for that belongs to lettered ease, but certainly all the kingdom of Faery, still unfaded, of which his own poetry was often but a troubled image. He would have found men doing by swift strokes of the imagination much that he was doing with painful intellect, with that imaginative reason that soon was to drive out imagination altogether and for a long time. [ ] Spenser, the first poet struck with remorse, the first poet to give his heart to the State, saw nothing but disorder, where the mouths that have spoken all the fables of the poets had not yet become silent. All about him were shepherds and shepherdesses still living the life that made Theocritus and Virgil think of shepherd and poet as the one thing; but though he dreamed of Virgils shepherd he wrote a book to advise, among many like things, the harrying of all that followed flocks upon the hills, and of all the wandering companies that keep the wood. (Yeats, W. B. Yeats, From Edmund Spenser, Selected Criticism, ed. Norman jeffares, Macmillan 1963, pp.111-14; cited in Sean Golden, Post-Traditional English Literature: A Polemic, in The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies [Vol. 3, No. 2 1979], 1982, pp.427-34, p.434.)
Lady Gregory, &;Raftery, in Poets and Dreamers (1903): For Raftery had lived through the &146;98 Rebellion, and the struggle for Catholic Emancipation; and he saw the Tithe War, and the Repeal movement; and it is natural that his poems, like those of the poets before him, should reflect the desire of his people for the mayntenance of their own lewde libertye, that had troubled Spenser in his time. (p.12; available at Gutenberg Project - online; accessed 09/09/2021.)
[ top ] Pauline Henley, MA, Spenser in Ireland (Cork UP 1928; NY: Russell & Russell [Atheneum Publ.] 1969). 231pp. CONTENTS: Introduction; With Grey in Ireland; Spenser as Undertaker; the Poet at Kilcolman; Further Irish Influences and Allusions; The Ruin of the Plantation; Spenser and Political Thought; The Poets Descendants; bibliography, index. Inclu. map of Ireland, and map of Spensers grant. Henley takes her bearings from Yeats, When Spenser wrote of Ireland, it was, as Mr Yeats puts it, out of thoughts and emotions that had been organised for him by the State, for he had begun to love and hate as it bid him. The predominance of the State was the all-prevading idea of the sixteenth century [168] ... Lord Grey exerted the strongest influence on his political opinions, and the policy that he learned from the nobleman he made peculiarly his own, and he advocated it steadily for the remainder of his life. Hence the similarity of the Briefe Note and the View. He either could not, or would not, learn anything from events ... [O]ne regrets the fact that his was the pen to place on record this unworthy exposition of violence ... fire, sword, and famine ... [169] ... Mr. Yeats says, he found it possible to be moved by expedient emotions, merely because they were expedient, and to think serviceable thoughts with no self-contempt. But that is not always true ... [170] Henley refers to Spensers use of the apocryphal tale in Holinshed, of Gurgunt who gave to fugitives of Spayne / Whom he at sea found wandering from their waies, / A seat in Ireland safely to remayne, / Which they should hold of him, as subject to Britayne (Bk.II, c.x, st.41); in the View, he also claims that Arthur had all that Iland in his allegaunce and subjection, fortifying the Elizabethan claim, as well as referring with some awkwardness to the Bull of Adrian IV (View, Globe ed., 1924, p.629). [174-75].... In the proposals that Spenser puts forward for the subjugation of Ireland, the minfluence of Machiavelli on English politics is apparent ... the essential quality for a ruler is strength ... guided not by the principles of natural law but by expediency [79] thus Spenser says there should be no remorse or drawing backe for the sight of such rufull objectes as must thereupon followe, nor for compassion of theyr calamitues, seeing that by no other means it is possible to recure them, and that these are not of will but of very urgent necessite (View, p.654-57). Henley comments, The massacre at Smerwick, the ruin of Munster, the famine, the innumerable butcheries and cruelties are all to be condoned by the one excuse - there was no other way. [181] On the use of famine, thus the Irish custom of dwelling by their septs and several nations would be abolished; forbidden Oes and Macks in their names, they would in shorte time learne quite to forgett this Irish nation. [181] Yet Spenser does not go to the length of advocating such methods as assassination [see FQ, Bk VI canto 7]; however, he does appear to consider the rights of temporising, in keeping with the accusation of broken faith aimed at Gray by the Earl of Ormond after Smerwick, To temporize is not from truth to swerve, / Ne for advantage terme to entertaine / When as necessitie doth it constraine. Artegall replies, Fie on such forgerie ... Knights must be true, and truth is one in all: / Of all things, to dissemble, fouly may befall. (FQ, Bk. V, canto xi. [183]. Spenser no bigot and Catholic tradition made appeal to him, but he feared the political power of the Papacy [185]. Note that Galteemore (Aherlow), is Arlo Hill [and see also Arthur Young, on romantic boundary [q.v.].
[ top ] Constantia Maxwell, The Stranger in Ireland (1954), Edmund Spenser, [Chp. II], Grey recalled, Sept. 1582; one of the noblest of the Elizabethans but not quite right for Ireland; called by Spenser that most just and honourable personage; hero of his Legend of Justice in 5th book of FQ [vide Canto XII, stanza 26, 27]; Spenser present at the massacre at Smerick; expresses no regret, nor does Grey, in descriptive letter to the Queen; such horrible scenes not confined to Ireland; Spenser deeply impressed by horror of Irish wars, picture of desolation, Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts, crying out of their graves; they did eat of the dead carrions, happy were they if they could find them, yea, and one another soon after, insomuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plot of water-cresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue therwithall; that in short space there were none almost left, and a most populaous and plentiful country suddenly made void of man or beast, yet sure in all that war, there perished not many by the sword, but all by the extremity of famine which they themselves had wrought. (View; n.p.; also cited in P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.123) [23] Lodowick Bryskett, his A Discourse of Civil Life, mainly a translation of Giraldo Cintios Dialogues; 3028 acres in Cork, June 1589; neighbour in Cork to Sir Nicholas Walshe, author of Solon his Folly; Spenser describes his meeting with Ralegh in Kilcolman in 1589, Under the foot of Mole, that mountain hoar, / Keeping my sheep amongst the cooly shade / Of the green alders by the Mullas shore; / There a strange shepherd chanced to find me out, / Whether allured with my pipes delight ... He piped, I sung; and, when he sung, I piped;.By change of turns, each making other merrry; / Neither envying other, nor envied,. / So piped we, until both were weary. [&c.] (Colin Clouts come home againe); accompanied Spenser to England as advised [in the poem]; Colin Clouts dated from Kilcolman, 27th Dec 1591; View written at Kilcolman; embodied ideas of Machievelli and Bodin; Conciliation useless in Ireland [30]; more tillage, more schools, more garrisons; professions and trades; his litigation with Lord roche caused him to look beneath the surface of Brehon Laws, but [sic] he was genuinely interested in Irish antiquities and in tribal customs; disapproved of Irish fighting mmen as forming a caste, but extols their horsemanship, hardiness and bravery; put his finger on the cause of hatred, Irish had lost their land and were afraid to lose more; Reformation of manners to come after, it is an ill time to preach among swords; laws out to be fashioned unto the manners and conditions of the people for whom they are meant, not to be imposed on them according to the simple rule of right; Kilcolman probably attacked 15th Oct.; Ben Jonson, quoted in Drummon of Hawthorndens Conversations: a little child, new-born perished in the flames; tradition has it that the infant was Spensers; State Papers Relating to Ireland contains Briefe Note of Ireland; endorsed by Spencer in another hand but the style has been thought too rhetorical for his pen and some of the views are not his; Judson suggests that it was endorsed as a result of having been brought over by him to England, with other official reports, such as the report from Norris, President of Munster, which he carried from Ireland, Dec. 9; d. two week after arriving Westminster; 16th Jan.; Elizabeth Boyle described as kinswoman of Richard Boyle [as in ODNB]; quotes extensively the Utopian view of Ireland: [And] sure it is yet a most beautiful and sweet country as any is under Heaven, seamed throughout with many goodly rivers, replenished with all sorts of fishe, most abundantly sprinkled with many sweet islands and goodly lakes, like little inland seas, that will even carry ships upon their waters, [adorned with goodly woods fit for building houses and ships,] so commodiously, [that if some princes in the world had them, they would hope to be lords of all the seas, and ere long of all the word; also full of good ports and havens opening to England and commodities that country can afford, besides] the soil itself most fertile, fit to yield all kind of fruit that shall be committed thereunto. [And lastly] the heavens most mild and temperate, though somewhat more moist than the part towards the West. [37] Note the resemblence between the verses on the civilised ideal of private life, FQ, Book VI, Canto X, 23 [These three on men all gracious gifts bestow, / Which deck the body or adorn the mind, / To make them lovely or well-favoured shows; / As comely carriage, entertainment kind / Sweet semblance, friendly offices that bind, / And all the complements of courtesy; / they teach us how to each degree and kind / We should ourselves deman, to low, to high, / To friends, to foes; whch skill men call Civility]; and cf. Yeatss terza rima in Prayer for My Daughter, In Memory of Robert Gregory, &c. NOTE, Maxwells bibliography includes, A. C. Judson, Spenser and the Munster Officals, in Studies in Philology, vol. XLIV (1947); also HR Plomer and T. P. Cross, The Life and Correspondence of Lodowick Bryskett (1927); J[ohn] Pope-Hennessy on Sir Walter Raleigh in Ireland (1883).
[ top ] Patricia Coughlan, ed., Spenser in Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, intro. by Nicholas Canny (Cork UP 1989), 125pp.+index. [Preface; notes on text; Canny, Spenser and the Reform of Ireland; Ciaran Brady, The Road to the View, On the Decline of Reform Thought in Tudor Ireland; Coughlan, Some secret scourge which shall by her come to England: Ireland and the Incivility of Spenser; Anne Fogarty, The Colonization of Language: Narrative Strategies in A View of the Present State of Ireland and The Faerie Queene, Book VI; Richard McCabe, The Fate of Irena, Spenser and Political Violence. Note that Fogarty summarises Henleys ultimate dismissal of Spensers thought on the grounds of contemporary patterns, and refers to her view of his mind as caught in frozen polarities and warring personalities; she also cites C. S. Lewis to the tantalising effect that The Faerie Queene is the work of one who is turning into an Irishman [76]; in her reading of Irenaeus she remarks that it is noteworthy that at ... junctures Ireland becomes emblematic of pleasure which is both frustrating and endlessly enticing [87]. McCabe shows how the destructive nature of the necessary violence is sublimated into physic and husbandry [114]; Coughlan examines Spensers account of Irish incivility, and mores that rue does not prevent him advocating barbarism lessons for the Irish Wild Man. In the intro. essay, Canny writes of the Irish critical overreaction, Equally alarming ... will be the use made by Brendan Bradshaw and Ciaran Brady of such value-laden terms as holocaust and final solution to describe what Spenser had in mind for the Irish population ... in the writings of Bradshaw we are being led to believe that the adoption by policy makers of Calvinist theological belief led inevitably ... to the point where, like Hitler, he would embark on genocide and that, in A view [ &c.], he had outlined a programme similar to that delineated in Mein Kampf This argument is in my opinion severely flawed ... because it assumes a moderation and a toleration among Erasmian thinkers that never existed [15]. Editions. used in this collection as J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt, eds, Spenser, Poetical Works (OUP 1912); and prose, W. L. Renwick, ed., A View of the Present State of Ireland (1970).
Willey Maley, Rebels and Redshanks, Milton and the British Problem, in Irish Studies Review, No. 6 (Spring 1994), quotes Spenser on Old English, these doe neede a sharper reformation than the Irish, for they are more stubborne, and disobedient to law and government, then the Irish be. (Ware ed., 1633, p.106). Wares ed. of Spenser was dedicated to Sir Thomas Wentworth, and one of the indictments leading to his execution was his claim that Ireland belonged to England not by law or union but by conquest - a position urged also by John Milton, in Observations upon the Articles of peace (London 1649). Further, [D]oe we not all know, that the Scottes were the first inhabitants of all the north, and that those which are now called the north Irish, are indeed very Scottes, which challenge the ancient inheritance and dominion of the Countrey, to be their owne aunciently. This then were but to leap out of the pan into the fire, For the chiefest caveat and provision in reformation of the north, must be to keep out those Scottes. (ibid. pp.79-80). [ top ] Andrew Hadfield, The Trial of Jove: Spensers Allegory and the Mastery of the Irish, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 2, 2 (Spring / Summer 1996), pp.39-53; applies model used by Kilfeather in Origins of the Irish Female Gothic (Bullán, I, 2, Autumn 1994, pp.35-46), while evoking also the description of Spenser as unwilling native and piggy-in-the-middle in the colonial process by which the English master our own Irishness by mastering the Irish in Robert Welchs Kilcolman Notebook; quotes, the wearinge of mantells and longe glibbes which is as a thicke curle bushe of haire hanginge downe over theire eyes and monstrouslye disguisinge them (View, ed. Gottfried, in Greenlaw ed., Works, Vol. X, pp.99-101); Thus necessarie and fittinge is a mantle for a badd man and surelye for a bad huswife it is no less Conveniente for some of them that be these wanderinge weomen Called of them monashul. It is haalfe a wardrope for in sommer ye shall find her arrayed comonlye but in her smocke and mantle to be more redye for her lighte services. In winter and in travell it is her Cloake and safegarde and alsoe a Coverlett for her Lewed exercisers. And when she hthe filled her vessel under it she may hide bothe her burden and her blame. Yea and when her bastarde is borne it serves in steade of all her swadlinge cloutes, her mantells, her Cradles, with which others are vainlye Combed. (ibid., pp.101-02; Hadfield, p.43); The fact that mantles are garments worn by both sexes would further suggest that such monstrous disguising has a gendered implication. [43] That Irish men and women do not choose to define themselves by dint of their clothing, ipso facto, marks that clothing out as disrupting sexual distinctions. The use to which the mantle was put reinforces the notion that disruptedness is itself a feminine trait, subversive of masculine order In Ireland the hierarchies have been overturned. (pp.43-44); Hadfield finally concentrates on the Mutabilitie Cantos: The decision to place the debate in Ireland serves to reinforce Mutabilities power, as the allegory of the changeable state reflects Mutabilitys own nature and serves to undercut the arguments of both Jove and Nature that their own authority is justifiable apart from the reality of force. (p.50.) [Bibl. as supra; see also under Robert Welch, q.v.]
[ top ] Lorna Hutson, Romances of a Viceroy, in Times Literary Supplement (23 Jan. 1998), review of Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spensers Irish Experience (Clarendon Press 1997) and Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser (Macmillan 1997): [ ] Cites Stephen Greenblatts influential recent model for reading Spensers poetry in an Irish context [which] bears an uncanny resemblance to the older images of the split personality Spenser. If we gloss Spensers Bower of Bliss in The Faerie Queene as the ease with which the New English might be seduced back into the insouciant lifestyle of the wild Irish, then, as Greenblatt says, the violence with which the poet destroys the Bower can be read as testimony to his personal emotional dilemma, his conflicting desires experienced in relation to a colonial homeland. / A virtue common to Willy Maleys and Andrew Hadfields book-length ventures into the vexed topic of Spenser and Ireland is their refusal to have any truck with this non-issue of reconciling a divided Spenser with himself. Sir Thomas Elyots observation [re warres agayne Irrishe men or Scottes, who be of the same rudenes and wilde disposition that [...]. the Britons were in the time of Caesar] about the value of Latin to the goal of English dominion over the Celtic fringe shows that we need assume no conflict between the Erasmian humanism of the 1530s, with its confidence in the civilising power of literature, and the military and colonial projects of the later generation to which Edmund Spenser belonged. What is innovative about both Maleys and Hadfields studies, then, is that they insist on the salvaging / savaging of all Spensers writings, whether literary or not that is, they consistently reread Spensers texts from the perspective of the New English in Ireland. Rather than plunging us into the depths of Spensers psyche, this sharpens and gives nuance to our sense of the alignments and identifications of New and Old English, or Irish and Scots, as the colonialists strategically conceived them. This, in turn, entails an interpretation of Spensers deployment of the literary forms of pastoral and romance not as manifestations of the gentle side of his own personality, but as poetic vehicles for expressing the specific, salvage concerns of a while generation of English colonial administrators in Ireland: concerns such as generational conflict, means of land-acquisition, the justification of English rule, the problematic Irish affinities of western Scotland, royal absenteeism and the legal limits of vice-royalty, and, finally, the executive powers of the law. / while Hadfield sets out to address the scandal of critical silence around Spensers Irish experience, Maley writes rather in response to the scapegoating of Spenser in a recently critical literature which finds Ireland a highly marketable commodity. [Hadfields reading of Faerie Queene shows that it has] affinity with the imperatives of colonialism, and with its need to go beyond the taxonomies of the civilised world. / / Spensers voice becomes audible as that of a poet speaking for a generation of New English in Ireland. For most English-speakers today, however, a deafening silence still surrounds the Irish prose and poetry of the sixteenth and early seventeenth-century, which, as Spenser himself hints, could tell us another story. (Note: Hadfield reviews Mark Thornton Bennett, Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience, Macmillan [1997], also in Times Literary Supplement, 23, Jan. 1998.)
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