Re-Viewing Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland: a symposium

Jean R. Brink, Huntington Library
What We Don't Know about the View and Who Its Audience Wasn't

A View of the Present State of Ireland, a work universally regarded as anti-Irish, is the text most frequently cited in discussions of Spenser’s attitude toward Ireland. The View, however, is rhetorical and aims at persuading the English government to use military force to protect the interests of English planters; for this reason, it cannot be taken as a complete statement of Spenser’s own “view of Ireland.” Had he ventured to identify a few ways in which Ireland rivaled, or even surpassed, England as a place to live, his rhetorical objectives in the View would have been compromised.

Elizabethan Englishmen almost invariably contrast the savagery of Ireland with the civility of their homeland, and in the View, Spenser accedes to and even embellishes the typical sixteenth-century English view of Ireland as a “salvage nacion.”  There is a brief, but notable, exception to his vilification of Ireland as a nation. In the Mutabilitie Cantos (pub. 1609), he celebrates Ireland’s illustrious Medieval past, and this celebration even suggests that he regarded Ireland as a land with a richer history than England: “Whylome, when IRELAND flourished in fame/ Of wealths and goodnesse, far aboue the rest / Of all that beare the British Islands name” (Faerie Queene, VII.xi.38). Although unpublished during his life, this celebration of Ireland’s “goodnesse” appears in what was probably the last poetry Spenser ever wrote.

It is perhaps easier to say who the audience of the View was not than to identify who Spenser hoped to influence. Only one of the more than twenty extant manuscripts of the View has a dedication, and that sole dedication, significantly addressed to King James of England, had to have been written after Spenser’s death in 1599. That Spenser himself did not include a dedication with the View suggests either that he suspected his appeal for military force would be ignored or that he was not finished.  The provenance of the Folger manuscript, long believed to have been written for Essex and his circle, has recently been questioned.

The dedication to King James in the Castle Howard manuscript should also interest us because it demonstrates that people felt free to appropriate the View. There is watermark evidence, for example, that two important manuscripts, the Huntington Library copy-text for the Spenser Variorum edited by Rudolf Gottfried and the Cambridge manuscript which W. R. Renwick used to correct his modernized edition, were copied on paper that cannot have been produced before the early seventeenth century— more than a decade after Spenser’s death. Since we have neither a critical bibliography of manuscripts, nor a stemma of extant manuscripts, our views of the View remain open to question. 

William Palmer, Marshall University
Historians Interpret A View of the Present State of Ireland: The Canny/Brady Debate and the Problem of Context

It is a truth, almost universally acknowledged among intellectual historians, that understanding texts requires that they and their authors be situated in context. But this of course is not as easy as it sounds. Authors write in multiple contexts, and debates among intellectual historians often center upon which context or contexts are most important to understanding a particular author’s work. The problem of context emerges conspicuously in the efforts of scholars to understand that most notorious text to emerge from the Tudor conquest of Ireland, Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland. In this work Spenser contended that all previous attempts to secure Ireland for English rule had failed. And he proposed instead a savage and continuous program of ethnic and cultural cleansing, involving military conquest, deliberate starvation of the indigenous population, and destruction of all family and kinship ties as the only means by which English rule such could be achieved.

What accounts for such a heartless and apocalyptic vision? While numerous other English observers and officials had advocated harsh practices for dealing with Ireland, prior to A View, Spenser was not one of them, and none of the others proposed policies as extreme as his. What, then, explains the appearance of such a cruel and morally bereft vision in A View, made even more frightening by the fact that Spenser claimed his plan was actually virtuous? The context from which A View emerged was central to the famous debate between Nicholas Canny and Ciaran Brady, both of whom advanced arguments for the proper context in which A View should be understood. This paper will review that debate, evaluate some of the suggestions for context made by Canny and Brady, and offer some new suggestions.

Karen Nelson, University of Maryland
Rents, Garrisons, Planted Plowlands: Stasis Theory and A View

A View of the Present State of Ireland presents twenty-first century interpreters with numerous challenges, many of which stem from its polemical nature and its charged descriptions of the Irish people and Irish governance. In this paper, I use sorting bins from rhetorical analysis —stasis theory— to dissect the trajectories of the arguments that Spenser offers. The stases allow me to step back from the specifics and survey the overall progression of A View. A schematic conceptual outline emerges that reveals how Spenser deploys facts, definitions, and issues, to justify particular policies; these strategies are intertwined.

Spenser suggests extreme social reforms. He advocates English crown expenditures on soldiers, garrisons, extensive land-redistribution, and the enforcement of rent collections, all of which require investment of resources at the expense of the Irish resident population and its existing institutions.  He makes his case for financial outlays urgent by defining Ireland's people as "wild" and "savage." Too, he articulates Irish social structures as outside of the common law and therefore requiring reform and order. All of these descriptions serve to bolster the policies he wants the English government to support and sustain.

James Ware, who compiles and prints A View in 1633 as part of a volume of Irish cultural resources, attempts to mitigate Spenser's arguments, to erase and contain the critique while retaining Spenser’s suggestions for social change. The volume overall begins its work of defending Irish culture by documenting its long-standing Irish heritage with two extensive testimonials, histories by Edmund Campion and Meredith Hanmer (STC 1014). Further, Ware frames and assesses Spenser's writings on Ireland in his preface to A View. While he notes their deep learning and recognizes the achievement associated with Spenser's documentation of languages, customs, and early history of Ireland, Ware also wishes for more moderation in their critiques. In the end, he praises Spenser's proposals for change: "Touching the generall scope intended by the author for the reformation of abuses and ill customes, that although very many have taken paines in the same subject . . .yet none came so neere to the best grounds for reformation, a few passages excepted, as Spenser hath done in this." [Sig. ¶v-¶2] Ware finds Spenser's suggestions for improving Irish society pragmatic and reasonable, even as he rejects Spenser's categorizations of the people and the place. Even he is persuaded by Spenser’s map for reform.

Stasis theory helps reveal the ways in which Spenser taps into English fears in order to motivate English people to spend money and send soldiers to secure Ireland. He promises rents and natural resources in return. He diminishes the humanity of residents, which therefore reduces perceived human costs associated with the violence needed to take the land and reallocate it. Spenser's methods resonate with writings of his period.

Nicholas Popper, College of William and Mary
Spenser's View and the Production of Political Knowledge in Elizabethan England

This talk places Spenser’s View in the context of the practices and forms underlying other Elizabethan policy papers.  In particular, it examines Spenser’s mobilization of the principles of the artes apodemicae – or guides for travel observation – that aspiring Elizabethan statesmen and administrators used to structure their observations of foreign locales, hoping to garner approval and advancement from prospective patrons.  Though these manuals were ostensibly produced to facilitate profitable experience from travel, readers too often directed the categories for attention articulated in their pages towards lands and polities to which they never physically traveled.  Well-known Elizabethan works of counsel by figures such as Richard Hakluyt and John Dee were shaped according to such dictates, and as I will show, Spenser similarly produced the View by his written sources far less than to his own experience.  As a whole, investigating the practices underlying the View helps situate Spenser within a broader culture of counsel, and these works gesture towards a transformation in Elizabethan statecraft in which the collection and adaptation of written sources increasingly constituted the primary horizon of evidence for political practice.  I conclude by suggesting that this distancing of experience from policy -- in favor of a limited coterie of textual sources -- was central to entrenching the imperial perspective with which Whitehall increasingly viewed Ireland.

Jean E. Feerick, John Carroll University
“To make . . . one kynred and blood of all people”: Spenser and the Colonial Milieu of Ireland

My paper examines the nature of early modern theories of race by examining how the poet Edmund Spenser understood the inter-animation of cultural and natural forces in the constitution of human identity. Where modern racial theories tend to posit a rigid notion of human biology, such that people are born into a racial designation at birth which cannot be altered by culture, early modern conceptions of the human body linked it to other natural forms, imagining all bodies as requiring the intervention of culture to be properly ordered. This implied that all people, regardless of birth or cultural background, could be shaped into a “good” kind or race. I argue that Spenser employs this radically different account of identity in the “Mutability Cantos” which concludes his epic poem, The Faerie Queene, as well as in his political tract on Ireland.

Spenser’s engagement with the necessary imbrication of nature and culture pervades his entire corpus, but I focus in this paper on these two texts because they foreground the distinctively early modern way of seeing nature as alterable and as requiring ongoing acts of cultivation to maintain its ordered course. Julia Lupton has compellingly positioned these texts in relation to one another, understanding the "Mutability Cantos" as “a mythopoetic analogue of the View’s narrative of waste” that gives an “account of Irish desolation” (102). I build upon this reading by suggesting that the "Mutability Cantos" portrays, in the oppositional figures of Nature and Mutability, an allegorical representation of the outcomes available to all peoples and all living forms, and shows Ireland as the testing ground for these claims, since the trial that Mutability demands is staged atop Arlo-hill, Spenser’s name for the peak of the Galtee mountains in Ireland. Mutability therefore resonates with and obliquely encodes the history of the Old English. In the View, Spenser tracks a similar set of dynamics in the context of discussing what has allowed the mere Irish and Old English, two populations with presumably quite distinct origins, to be indistinguishable, exposing the pitfall of mutability as that into which the Old English settlers have willfully heaved themselves. Both texts express a view of human nature as provisional, suggesting that a population’s most basic identity —what we think of as its race— is made and shaped through the application of culture, rather than something that is conferred with any degree of finality at the moment of birth.

Katarzyna Lecky, Bucknell University
The Virtues of Irish Milk: A Reconsideration of the Wetnurse in A View

My talk places A View of the State of Ireland (1596) into conversation with an early modern nursing manual to show how Spenser's tract draws from contemporary medicine to explore the proper relation of England to Ireland. John Jones' The Arte and Science of Preseruing Bodie and Soule (London, 1579) details the power of Irish nursemaids in language almost identical to Ireneus' description, which scholarship has previously assumed to be original to Spenser. Moreover, Jones's emphasis on Queen Elizabeth I as "mother" to both her English and Irish subjects mingles divine, royal, and common spheres of existence under the sign of an early modern version of universal health care, in which the monarch ensures the welfare of her children by nourishing them all equally with love, regardless of their particular version of Christian faith or political affiliation.

I concentrate on how the View at once appropriates and resists Jones' arguments about the benefits of Irish wetnurses to the English "weale publique" (Jones A6r). In the process, I broaden the lens by comparing Irenius' plan to subjugate Ireland with the overarching arguments of Arte and Science (published the same year that Spenser moved to Ireland, and the year prior to the birth of Spenser's son). A View's simultaneous debt to and struggle against Jones' text reveals the vexed ontological landscape of England's responsibility toward its colonized neighbors, in which the microcosm of the blended Anglo-Irish family acts as the proving ground for the conjoined Elizabethan kingdom.

Thomas Herron, East Carolina University
Comma Chameleon: Centralized Authority in Spenser’s Later Poetry and the View

Why is the View structured as it is? A humanist dialogue, it notes problems and suggests solutions. There may be more to it than that, however. The View has traditionally been read —indeed it reads itself— as composed of three parts (with the first part itself in three parts): first, a disquisition on the corruptive laws, customs and religion of the Irish; second, an analysis of how best to fortify and garrison the country; third, a short analysis of how to administer the country, including reform of the country’s religious administration and call for a more powerful chief governor. Taking three as its focus, this paper explores the work’s potential Platonic patterning; connections with the overall structure of The Faerie Queene, a heavily neo-platonic poem published in parts of three, will be surmised. The paper will then focus on the use of the structural center as a place where Spenser places his ideal type of ruler in both the View and poems such as Book I of The Faerie Queene (1590) and “Colin Clouts Come Home Againe” (1595). Ambiguities and unresolved editorial differences between MSS beg the question, “which governor(s) is Spenser complimenting? Essex? Ormond? Someone else?” Despite and because of this confusion, the View has more of an intellectual affinity with Spenser’s poetry and its idealized forms of government than appears on the surface.

Maggie Vinter, Case Western Reserve University
Peace in Spenser's View

This paper situates A View of the Present State of Ireland in the context of sixteenth century humanist discussions of pacifism in order to theorize the text’s engagement with peace. To date, critics have (understandably) been inclined to stress the militarist and colonialist qualities of A View, and to dismiss Spenser’s notion of a peaceful Ireland as repressive, articulated in bad faith, and undermined by internal contradictions. I have no desire to deny or soften the View’s endorsement of anti-Irish violence. Nevertheless, I do think that it is important to take the text’s vision of peace seriously – both because of what it reveals about Spenser’s position within contemporary political and philosophical debates, and because of how it manifests within the text on a formal level. A View responds to two contemporary understandings of peace, each founded on a different notion of time. The first sees war and peace as mutually constitutive states that necessarily alternate to compensate for one another’s inadequacies. The second takes universal peace as a teleological goal. I argue that many of the View’s formal peculiarities are consequences of attempts to negotiate between these two models, and the incompatible notions of recurrent and progressive time that they imply.

Benjamin Moran, The Ohio State University
Genius of the Soyle

As Eudoxus announces at the outset of Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland, the stakes of Irish reformation are abundantly clear: ready access to that “so goodly and commodious…soyl.” By restraining the Irish populace, stamping out its ancient practices of the cattle herding, and squelching justifications for Irish self-governance, England stood (finally) to cement its hold over its island neighbor. Eudoxus’ compatriot Irenius will go on to elaborate at length how England can achieve that end, but his initial remarks betray skepticism over the endeavor. “It is a fatall destiny of that land,” he explains, to resist any such reformation, “whether it proceed from the very genius of the soyle” or some other supernatural cause. The pair’s opening words thus frame a peculiar conundrum: the substance motivating English colonial desires may itself be an impediment to their realization. Regardless of critics’ reminders that the View requires serious consideration of both Irenius’ and Eudoxus’ perspectives, our instinct is, nevertheless, to side with the latter’s scoffing at the idea of agential soil as little more than superstition. My essay resists this impulse, opting to take seriously the speculation that there’s something in the Irish soil that lies beyond human control. Strangely, Spenser’s dialogue does not fully adopt the ideal of a wholly passive nature, ready for the hands of the English planters. What emerges over the course of the View is an elaboration of the problem inherent in its opening exchange. Even as the dialogue relies on a vision of an inert soil to supply its metaphorical discourse (“you wished the Irish to be sowed and sprinckled with English”), it acknowledges that the “sweetness of the soyle” is too great a temptation for England to abandon, regardless of the its legacy of colonial failure or the threats posed by native rebellion. Dead and yet compelling and lively, Spenser’s soil, I argue, embodies the contradictions of early modern ecological thought, torn between the divergent influences of ancient animism, burgeoning mechanisms, and the imperatives of resource exploitation.

Denna Iammarino, Case Western Reserve University
Spenser's View of the Present State of England

While much of the conversation about Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland focuses on Spenser's harsh, arguably hateful, depiction of the Irish, this piece will consider Spenser's criticism of the English in the same piece. This paper will engage with the questions: How do depictions of the English relate to those of the Irish? What are their significance? Moreover, how do these moments of representation and critique fit into Spenser's larger poetic projects, especially considering his earlier work, The Shepheardes Calendar, and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe? 

Brendan Kane, University of Connecticut
Re-viewing Early Modern Letters and Policy: Spenser, Ware and the Politics of Historiography
 
This paper considers the historiographical fortunes of the works of Spenser and of the first publisher of A View, Sir James Ware. Spenser’s work has served as a touchstone for modern analyses of how the English thought of the Irish and approached governance of the island. Arguably, the scholarly attention paid to Spenser’s views, and A View, comes less from their effect on early modern policy than from their concordance with meta-narratives of English-Irish relations built on later centuries’ experience of Ireland’s (ostensible) direct rule from London. This paper draws attention to Ware’s wider corpus in an effort to consider a broad range of early modern English approaches to the Irish and, thus, to review our (implicit?) understandings of the relationship between letters and the making of policy in early seventeenth-century Ireland.

Peter McQuillan, University of Notre Dame
“A destructive plattforme laid for the utter subversion of this kingdome”: Gaelic and Gaelicized Irish responses to Spenser’s View in the 1630s

This paper will discuss the first recorded response to Spenser’s View from the object of that text’s venom and vitriol: Gaelic and Gaelicized Ireland. In the 1630s, three texts appear in quick succession. Spenser’s View is published in 1633 as part of Sir James Ware’s Ancient Irish Histories, its composition in the 1590s notwithstanding. Seathrún Céitinn’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (1634-5), his foundational blueprint for an emerging Irish Catholic nation follows in 1634-5, although it remains in manuscript form until the twentieth century. Within a year, his fellow Tipperary man Michael Kearney pens a complete translation of Foras Feasa into English. As luck would have it, Kearney’s translation, never published, survives in a single manuscript copy of the 1660s, preserved today in the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. Céitinn’s narrative ends with the arrival of the Anglo-Normans of the twelfth century; the most interesting aspect of Kearney’s translation, however, is his own original address to the reader with which he prefaces it. What Kearney does effectively in his preface is to contextualize Céitinn’s narrative for the Ireland of the 1630s. Along with bringing the historical narrative up to date, he launches a robust attack on Spenser, point for point; while Céitinn addresses Spenser, as well as Hanmer and Campion of Ancient Irish Histories fame, in his own polemical introduction to Foras Feasa, his engagement is nowhere near as detailed or as trenchant as Kearney’s. I will discuss all three texts (Spenser, Céitinn and Kearney) in the cultural and linguistic context of Ireland in the 1630s.

Banner Illustration: detail from Richard Bartlett, Plan of Monaghan Fort, Ulster, c. 1602

Special thanks for website design to Joyce Joines Newman and Laurie Godwin, East Carolina University