Bitter Memories: Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland

Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort.

ernest renan, "what is a nation?" (1882)

Eavan Boland's poem "Becoming the Hand of John Speed" opens with the question "How do you make a nation?" to which the speaker responds, "I have no answer. I was born in a nation/I had no part in making" (48). John Speed was an English historian and mapmaker whose cartographic images and chorographical descriptions of Ireland graced his 1611–12 atlas The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine. Speed "made" Ireland by representing it in the form of a map (figure 1) rendering that island visible to seventeenth-century English men and women in a way that it had never been before. Published in the wake of the Flight of the Earls, Speed's Irish maps can be read as celebratory of Stuart Britain's incorporation of Ireland and, in particular, the plantation of Ulster.

Edmund Spenser, too, played a part in "making" Ireland. He worked in and wrote of Ireland during a time of intense violence; his Irish experience was bracketed by the Desmond rebellion (1579–83) and the Nine Years' War (1594–1603). Just as Spenser's Irish work gives voice to fears that Elizabethan England's grip on its neighboring kingdom/colony was loosening, it revisits and uses the past to instill a sense of English belonging and to incite reclamation in the face of Irish resistance. If Spenser "bequeathed a complex, diverse, and, above all, dominant legacy of subsequent notions of literature and national/ethnic identity in the British Isles for the whole of the seventeenth century and beyond" (Hadfield 12), then he did so in part by drawing upon the constitutive power of memory, especially collective memories etched as grievances.

Spenser arrived in Ireland in 1580 as a secretary to Arthur Grey,

Figure 1.

John Speed, "The Kingdome of Irland," from The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London, 1611–12). The Bodleian Library Map Res 74, between 137–38. Black and white image reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Baron Grey of Wilton, who, as lord deputy, was sent over to confront Old English lords, such as Gerald fitz James Fitzgerald, Earl of Desmond, and James Eustace, third Viscount Baltinglass. As early as 1582 Dublin-based Spenser secured a lease on one of the former estates of Viscount Baltinglass; a few years later, he took possession of the 3,028 acres of Kilcolman Castle in the north of County Cork, a castle formerly held by Desmond. This settlement placed him within the project known as the Munster plantation, to which Spenser as a colonial administrator contributed significantly.¹ His eighteen-year residence in Ireland enabled his social and economic advancement, and by no means did it disable his authorial self-fashioning. Within this volatile and often violent context Spenser wrote, among other texts, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), and Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595).

Another product of Spenser's lengthy residence in Ireland is the document that we now know as A View of the Present State of Ireland, which was completed ca. 1596 at the height of the overthrow of the Munster plantation by Sir Hugh Maguire, Lord of Fermanagh. This lengthy prose tract, almost 70,000 words in dialogue form, is dedicated to redressing what was increasingly seen from both within and without Whitehall, especially by English colonial and military officers in Ireland, as a failing, if not failed, (re)conquest and (re)colonization of Ireland. Its two speakers, Irenius and Eudoxus, are Englishmen: Eudoxus is less familiar with Ireland than Irenius, who shares Spenser's knowledge of Irish history, politics, and society. The View traditionally has been read as a blueprint for the Anglicization of Ireland, and Irenius is often regarded as Spenser's mouthpiece.

Recently, literary historians have come to regard the View as a (if not the...