The Green and Golden World: Spenser's Rewriting of the Munster Plantation

Book six of Spenser's epic The Faerie Queene is often seen as a welcomed escape not only from book five's focus on the English campaign in Ireland but also from the demands of allegory itself, but the shift into pastoral that accompanies the onset of book six offers the poet a chance to refocus his allegory from matters of conquest to matters of settlement. In creating this pastoral vision, Spenser borrows from his experience as an Irish undertaker to represent his vision of a decidedly New-English Ireland, and the Munster plantation is rewritten as the golden world of pastoral.