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Spenser and Ireland: An Annotated Bibliography, 1986-1996
collected by Willy Maley
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ForewordThis bibliography is intended as a supplement to my 'Spenser and Ireland: A Select Bibliography', Spenser Studies 9 (1991), pp. 227-42. It could be argued that the current wave of interest in Spenser and Ireland was inaugurated by two articles which represent the theoretical and historical nature of this criticism. I acknowledge them here although they fall out with the decade of material I am summarising: Stephen J. Greenblatt (1980), 'To Fashion a Gentleman: Spenser and the Destruction of the Bower of Bliss', in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 157-192; Nicholas P. Canny (1983),'Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity', The Yearbook of English Studies: Colonial and Imperial Themes, 13, pp. 1-19. Many of the items cited below owe their existence to these important interventions, which continue to generate debate.
This bibliography first appeared as 'Spenser and Ireland: An Annotated Bibliography, 1986-96',
in Spenser in Ireland: 'The Faerie Queene', 1596-1996, The Irish University
Review 26, 2 (Autumn/Winter, 1996), special issue, ed. Anne Fogarty, pp.
342-53.
BibliographyJudith H. Anderson, (1987), 'The Antiquities of Fairyland and Ireland', Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 86, pp. 199-214. Charts Spenser's uses of antiquity, enshrined in The Faerie Queene, and sharply relevant to his understanding of Ireland's present state.
Bruce Avery, (1990), 'Mapping the Irish Other: Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland', ELH 57, 2, pp. 263-79. Argues that the production of a map by Eudoxus at a crucial moment in the dialogue forces Irenius to be more explicit in his descriptions, and, more importantly, reveals the map as 'a tool of domination'.
David J. Baker, (1986), ''Some Quirk, Some Subtle Evasion': Legal Subversion in Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland', Spenser Studies, 6, pp. 147-163. The View too baldly stated Elizabethan policy in Ireland, hence its suppression.
__________. (1992), '"Who Talks of my Nation?": Colonialist Representation in Shakespeare and Spenser' (unpublished PhD thesis, Johns Hopkins University).
__________. (1993), 'Off the map: charting uncertainty in Renaissance Ireland', in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley, editors, Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534-1660, pp. 76-92. Maintains that Elizabethan maps of Ireland were inadequate, and that 'colonial cartography' itself was necessarily an incomplete project.
Brendan Bradshaw, (1987), 'Edmund Spenser on Justice and Mercy', Historical Studies, 16, pp. 76-89. Argues that the extreme nature of Spenser's proposal for Irish reform 'finds its intellectual source in his protestant world-view'.
__________. (1988), 'Robe and Sword in the Conquest of Ireland', in Law and Government under the Tudors: Essays presented to Sir Geoffrey Elton on his retirement, eds. C. Cross, D. Loades and J. J. Scarisbrick, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 139-162. An exemplary close reading of texts by Richard Beacon and William Herbert contemporaneous with the View, concluding that Spenser is less representative, and more reprehensible, than his counterparts. Ciarán Brady, (1986), 'Spenser's Irish Crisis: Humanism and Experience in the 1590s', Past and Present,111, pp. 17-49. Spenser is unique in his 'pessimistic determinism', and theView is 'a sustained exercise in bad faith'. Both author and text are the product of a particular crisis in Anglo-Irish politics.
__________. (1988), 'Spenser's Irish Crisis: Reply to Canny', Past and Present, 120, pp. 210-215. Reinforces argument of (1986) that Spenser wanted to persuade his contemporaries of the necessity of radical action in Ireland.
__________. (1989), 'The Road to the View: On the Decline of Reform Thought in Tudor Ireland', in Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, editor Patricia Coughlan, Cork: Cork University Press, pp. 25-45. The author's contention is that Spenser's criticisms of the common-law are the key to the radical import of his text, and, by extension, that the reason for its alleged suppression rests upon its claim that English law has failed the colonial enterprise.
__________. (1990), 'A Brief Note of Ireland', in A. C. Hamilton (editor) The Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 111-12. Brady holds that of the set of three documents gathered under this title, documents that are 'the most doubtful of writings attributed to Spenser', only the third, an 800-word urgent plea for reform, is by the poet.
__________. (1990), 'Grey, Arthur, fourteenth Baron of Wilton (1536-93)',in A. C. Hamilton (editor), The Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 341-42. Argues for Grey's pervasive influence upon Spenser 'as the apotheosis of that morally engaged noble warrior who is at the center ofFQV'.
John Breen, (1994), 'A Country So Remote', Irish Review 16, pp. 141-44. A review essay on two very different books treating Spenser and Ireland, a book of sources, Hadfield and McVeagh (1994d), and a provocative novella, Welch (1994), both of which raise questions around the historical and literary representation of Anglo-Irish conflict.
__________. (1994-95), 'Imagining Voices in AView of the Present State of Ireland: A Discussion of Recent Studies Concerning Edmund Spenser's Dialogue', Connotations 4, 1-2, pp. 119-32. Sees Spenser's use of dialogue, like allegory, as a deliberate effort to 'complicate the authorial responsibility for what is spoken', and insists on the place of the View within the Renaissance dialogue and historiography.
__________. (1995), 'The Influence of Edmund Spenser's Viewon Fynes Moryson's Itinerary', Notes and Queries 42, 3, pp. 363-64. Focuses on three features of the View, law, tanistry, and degeneracy, in order to argue it was a source-text for Moryson.
__________. (1995), 'The Empirical Eye: Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland', Irish Review 16 (1994) , pp. 44-52. Declares that 'Spenser is geographically marginal and symbolically central to the English metropolitan centre', and that theView is shaped by colonial and cartographic discourses.
Jean Brink, (1992), 'Constructing the View of the Present State of Ireland', Spenser Studies 11,pp. 203-28. A challenging account of the provenance of Spenser's View, dramatically throwing its authorship into doubt.
__________. (1994), Documenting Edmund Spenser: A new life study', American Notes and Queries n.s. 7 (October), pp. 201-208.Three Chancery Bills, salvaged from the National Archives of Ireland, furnish valuable evidence of Spenser's first marriage, of his inheritance, and of his visit to England in 1595-96.
Donald Bruce, (1992), 'Spenser's Irenius and the nature of Dialogue',N & Q 39 [237], 3, pp. 355-57. CCCHA is 'a largely sympathetic account of Ireland and the Irish'. Spenser was an 'expert in the traditions of classical dialogue'. Asserts that Spenser was too weak to accompany Grey in his campaigns, despite evidence of the various military posts that the poet held, and his nomination as Sheriff of Cork.
__________. (1995), 'Edmund Spenser and the Irish Wars', Contemporary Review 266, pp. 129-38. Speculative, lax on dates and details, and the insistence that the appointment of Spenser as secretary to Grey was 'an abrupt dismissal from the service of the Earl of Leicester' harks back to an earlier critical tradition that saw Ireland as a punishment rather than an opportunity.
Colin Burrow, (1996), Edmund Spenser, Northcote House in Association with the British Council: Plymouth. A good introduction, lucid and accessible, with useful chapters on 'Wild Men and Wild Places', and 'Love and Empire'
Nicholas P. Canny, (1987) 'Identity Formation in Ireland: The Emergence of the Anglo-Irish', in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World,1500-1800, eds. Nicholas Canny and A. Pagden. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, pp. 159-212. Develops the idea that the View is a 'synthesis' of New English perceptions.
__________. (1988), ''Spenser's Irish Crisis': A Comment', Pastand Present, 120, pp. 201-209. Insists that Spenser is a representative of the New English community, and has to be viewed in that light.
__________. (1989), 'Introduction: Spenser and the Reform of Ireland', inSpenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective,editor Patricia Coughlan, Cork: Cork University Press, pp. 9-24. Spenser's experience is essentially a Cork one. Brady and Bradshaw are too 'value-laden' in their criticisms. Spenser is more mainstream humanist - 'humanists were not pacifists' - than has been allowed, and the View more reform-oriented and conciliatory.
__________. (1990), 'Ireland, the historical context', in A. C. Hamilton, editor, The Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 404-407. Places Spenser firmly within sixteenth-century Anglo-Irish reformation discourse, specifically the New English experience, with its peculiar mix of pragmatism and pessimism.
__________. and Andrew Carpenter, editors, (1991), 'The Early Planters: Spenser and his Contemporaries', in Seamus Deane, editor, TheField Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols., Derry: Field Day Publications, pp. 171-234. Introduction (pp.171-74) presents Spenser as both a destroyer and a reformer, in that order. Spenser 'and his Anglo-Irish contemporaries are best seen as apologists for English rule in Ireland'. Extracts from the View (pp. 175-202) with useful annotations.
Clare Carroll, (1990), 'The Construction of Gender and the Cultural and Political Other in The Faerie Queene 5 and A View of the Present State of Ireland: The Critics, the Context, and the Case of Radigund', Criticism, 32, 2, pp. 163-91. An excellent piece that opens by pointing out that critics have yet to respond to Greenblatt's claim thatThe Faerie Queene is all about Ireland, and goes on to suggest that Greenblatt's famous reading of the Bower of Bliss episode plays down the gendering of colonial narrative. Insists that topicality and historicity and central to an understanding of Spenser's epic poem.
Sheila T. Cavanagh, (1986), ''Such Was Irena's Countenance': Ireland in Spenser's Prose and Poetry', Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 28, pp. 24-50. Claims that the View is less extreme and more complex than has been recognised, and points to a subtle awareness of division in Irish culture in the prose and in Book V.
__________. (1993), ''The fatal destiny of that land': Elizabethan views of Ireland', in Bradshaw et al editors, RepresentingIreland, pp. 116-31. Rehearses some Elizabethan perspectives on Ireland and concludes that Spenser is less extreme than some critics would have him appear.
__________. (1994), ''That Savage Land': Ireland in Spenser's Legend of Justice', in David Lee Miller and Alexander Dunlop, editors, Approaches to Teaching Spenser's 'Faerie Queene', New York: Modern Language Association, pp. 143-52. Discusses the problems of teaching Book V, one approach being through post-colonial theory and ideas on race, using Fanon and Said.
Patricia Coughlan, (1989), ''Some Secret Scourge which shall by her come unto England': Ireland and Incivility in Spenser', in Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, editor Patricia Coughlan, Cork: Cork University Press, pp. 46-74.Emphasises classical precedents and the 'fictive mode of existence of theView'. Suggests that text and tradition are as important as context and innovation.
__________. (1990), ''Cheap and common animals': the English anatomy of Ireland in the seventeenth century', in Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (editors), Literature and the English Civil War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 205-23. Credits the View as 'the founding text of modern English discourse about Ireland' and underlines its influence on the propaganda of the mid-seventeenth century. Moreover, argues that it offered a grounding for the Anglo-Irish nationalism expounded later by Petty and Swift.
John T. Day, (1990), 'dialogue, prose', in A. C. Hamilton, editor, The Spenser Encyclopedia, p. 217. Cites Beacon as possible source for the dialogue form of the View, and complains of Spenser's weak characterisation, arguing that the text is a catechistical rather than a classical dialogue, didactic rather than dialectic.
Anne Fogarty, (1989), 'The Colonization of Language: Narrative Strategies in A View of the Present State of Ireland and TheFaerie Queene, Book VI', in Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, editor Patricia Coughlan, Cork: Cork University Press, pp. 75-108. A theoretically-informed and historically grounded essay that highlights the problem of reconciling different aspects of Spenser's career. Fogarty sees the View is a 'bricolage' of discourses holding together a number of conflicting positions, leading in the prose and poetry to impasse and aporia.
__________. (1995), ''This Inconstant Sea-Nimph': History and the Limitations of Knowledge in John Davies' Writings about Ireland', in Timothy P. Foley, Lionel Pilkington, Sean Ryder, and Elizabeth Tilley, editors, Gender and Colonialism (Galway: Galway University Press), pp. 23-34. Argues that Davies' Discovery, no less than the View, to which it is all too rarely compared, is itself a complex and contradictory text.
Alastair Fowler, (1989), 'Spenser and war', in War, Literature and the Arts in Sixteenth-Century Europe, editors J. R. Mulryne and M. Shewing, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 147-64. Opens with a contrast betweenThe Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, then examines war in Spenser's epic as an internal struggle, taking issue with colonial readings of Guyon's destruction of Acrasia's Bower, but pointing out that Timias's skirmish with the foresters in III.v.18-25 is arguably an Irish-influenced episode, and that Talus's 'robotic' disposition suggests that he marks 'the increasingly technological character of law enforcement and war in the modern state'. Concludes that Spenser recognised that war was a means to an end, and that civility was more important than chivalry, hence his fashioning of a gentleman.
Elizabeth Fowler, (1995), 'The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser', Representations 51, pp. 47-76. Spenser presents rather than possesses views. Two passages from The Faerie Queene - the rape of Amoret in Book IV and the debate between Artegall and the Egalitarian Giant in Book V - illustrate this point. The Two Cantos of Mutabilitie further indicate that Spenser stages diverse view of moral philosophy, and the views of law and right in The Faerie Queeneinterface with those in the View.
Shohachi Fukuda, (1990), 'Bregog, Mulla', in A. C. Hamilton, editor,The Spenser Encyclopedia, p. 110. The marriage tale of the two rivers in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, reprised inFQ VII.vi.38-55, shows Spenser's intimate knowledge of his local environment, and provides a comic counterpoint to Raleigh's Oceans Love to Cynthia.
Patricia Fumerton, (1986), 'Exchanging Gifts: The Elizabethan Currency of Children and Poetry', ELH, 53, pp. 241-78. A fascinating treatment, from a sophisticated ethnographic and anthropological standpoint, of fostering in the View and The Faerie Queene.
Paul L. Gaston, (1986), 'Spenser's Order, Spenser's Ireland: Competing Fantasies', in Jan Hokenson and Howard D. Pearce, editors, Formsof the Fantastic, New York: Greenwood, pp. 121-27. Takes literally the poem's claim to fashion a gentleman, seeing The Faerie Queene as illustrating the use of fantasy in tackling complex questions of 'legal equity, of theology, of diplomacy'. Book V, however, sees fantasy fall victim to politics.
Eva Gold, (1993), 'Spenser the Borderer: Boundary, Property, Identity inA View of the Present State of Ireland and Book 6 ofThe Faerie Queene', Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, 14, pp. 98-113. Compares the analysis of problems of identity and geography in the View and The Faerie QueeneBook VI, where Spenser fashions an identity apart from, and in opposition to, the queen and her court.
Andrew Hadfield, (1993a), 'The Course of Justice: Spenser, Ireland and Political Discourse', Studia Neophilologica, 65, pp.187-96. Argues that the View and Book V 'articulate the same message and use the same political discourse', and that Ireland 'overshadows the latter books of TheFaerie Queene and is carefully related to the poem's conclusion'.
__________. (1993b), 'Briton and Scythian: Tudor representations of Irish origins', Irish Historical Studies, 28, 112, pp. 390-408.An elaborate exploration of British origin-myths in the Viewand The Faerie Queene.
__________. (1994a), 'Spenser, Ireland, and Sixteenth-Century Political Theory', The Modern Language Review, 89, 1, pp. 1-18.Concludes a detailed discussion of language and representation with the remark: 'The Faerie Queene is the Irish 'other' of the View'.
__________. (1994b), 'Was Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland Censored? A Review of the Evidence', Notes and Queries, 240, 4, pp. 459-63. A cautionary note that surveys recent arguments around the suppression of the View and leaves an open verdict.
__________. (1994c), ''Who knowes not Colin Clout?': The permanent exile of Edmund Spenser', in Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 170-201. Studies uses of exile in The Shepheardes Calender, Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, and The Faerie Queene, and claims that Spenser's narratives of exile reveal a desire and demand for a national public sphere.
__________. (1994d), editor, with John McVeagh, Strangers to That Land: British Perceptions of Ireland from the Reformation to the Famine. Colin Smythe: Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire. Furnishes the reader with a wide selection of source material, including passages from the View, that help locate Spenser within the broad historical framework of a developing Anglo-Irish discourse.
__________. (1994/95), 'Who is Speaking in Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland? A Response to John Breen', Connotations 4.1-2 (1994/95), pp. 119-32.
__________. (1995), 'The 'sacred hunger of ambitious minds': Spenser's savage religion', in Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier (editors),Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England,1540-1688 Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 27-45. Maintains that with Spenser there can be 'no easy separation of religious views and political position'. Ireland 'permeates all aspects of his work'. All of Book I has an Irish context, with the salvage nation saving the English Reformation, thus: 'Ireland is the place where both the political stability of the British Isles is threatened and the religious certainties outlined in the earlier books of the poem are rendered problematic'.
__________. (1996a), 'The Trials of Jove: Spenser's Irish Allegory and the Mastery of the Irish', Bullán 4 (1996), pp. 1-15.Focuses on The Faerie Queene as an exemplar of the hybrid genre of allegorical epic, examining questions of gender, as Spenser seeks to render Elizabeth more masculine, and his praise of Grey stands as a rebuke, concluding that 'threatening female figures really fashion him and undermine the authorities he holds dear'.
__________. (1996b), 'Another case of Censorship? the riddle of Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland (c.1596)',History Ireland 4, 2, pp. 26-30. A revised version of 1994b, but with a more concise summary of the evidence, an introduction that places the text more generally within the issue of censorship in Ireland , and a stronger critique of Brady 1986. I am grateful to Dr Hadfield for providing me with a copy of this text at the proof stage.
__________. (1996c) ''The naked and the dead': Elizabethan perceptions of Ireland', in Michèle Willems and Jean-Pierre Maquerlot, editors,Travel and Drama in Shakespeare's Time, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 32-54. An essay on anthropological and ethnographic perceptions of Ireland, using the View to interrogate the emerging colonial discourse that divided humanity into interlocking spheres of savagery and civility.
Thomas Healy, (1992), 'Civilisation and Its Discontents: The Case of Edmund Spenser', in New Latitudes: Theory and English Renaissance Literature, Edward Arnold: London, pp. 84-109. Some simple identifications - 'Irenius is Spenser' - but also some interesting observations on teaching theView and its relation to contemporary politics. Sees Spenser's treatise as highly critical of Elizabeth, and concludes that reading Spenser 'raises more questions about relations between literary and historical texts than it resolves'.
Christopher Highley, 'Shakespeare, Spenser, and Elizabethan Ireland', unpublished PhD thesis, Stanford University, 1992). Extensive treatment of gender and colonialism.
Tracey Hill, (1993), 'Humanism and Homicide: Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland', Irish Studies Review, 4, pp. 2-4. Argues - like Brady (1986) - that Spenser's charged advocacy of colonial violence jars with his professed humanism - 'a writer with a humanist outlook cannot ... admit intolerance' - and that discussions of the View tend either to marginalise or modify its opinions.
Elaine Y. L. Ho, 'Author and Reader in Renaissance Texts: Fulke Greville, Sidney, and Prince Henry', Connotations 5, 1 (1995/96), pp.1-22. Takes issue with Breen and Hadfield and opens with an interesting passage on the View in order to illustrate the generic complexity of Renaissance historical texts.
Lisa Jardine, 'Mastering the Uncouth: Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser and the English experience in Ireland', in J. Henry and S. Hutton, editors,New Perspectives in Renaissance Thought: Essays in Honour of Charles B. Schmitt, London: Duckworth, 1990, pp. 68-82. Focuses on Latin marginal annotations in Harvey's Livy that suggest Spenser's tutor, and by implication the poet himself, were steeped in Irish colonial politics from the early 1570s as part of a pragmatic humanist education.
__________. (1993), 'Encountering Ireland: Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser and English colonial ventures', in Bradshaw et al(editors), Representing Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 60-75. Revised version of preceding.
D. Newman Johnson, 'Kilcolman Castle', in A. C. Hamilton, editor, The Spenser Encyclopedia (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 417-22. Informative piece, descriptive and historical, on Spenser's Irish estate, concluding with irony of its present ruinous state.
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass (1992), 'Dismantling Irena: the sexualising of Ireland in early modern England', in Andrew Parker et al. (editors), Nationalisms and Sexualities, London: Routledge, pp. 157-71. Compelling essay on Spenser's gendered colonial discourse which places it within wider articulation of sexual and national identities.
William Keach, (1990), 'Arlo Hill', in A. C. Hamilton, editor, TheSpenser Encyclopedia, p. 60. Usefully traces Spenser's use of this locality in the View and Book VII of The Faerie Queene, concluding that the latter appearance 'may instance Spenser's way of including change, contradiction, and loss within a larger providential order'.
Bernhard Klein, (1995), ''And quickly make that, which was nothing at all': English National Identity and the Mapping of Ireland', in Nationalismus und Subjektivität, Mitteilungen Beiheft2, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Zentrum zur Erforschung der Frühen Neuzeit: Frankfurt am Main, pp. 200-226. Another contribution to the mapping of Spenser's colonial cartography, supplementing Avery (199),and Baker and Lupton (1993).
Walter S. H. Lim, (1995), 'Figuring Justice: Imperial Ideology and the Discourse of Colonialism in Book V of The Faerie Queene andA View of the Present State of Ireland', Renaissance and Reformation 19, 1, pp. 45-67.
Julia Lupton, (1990), 'Home-making in Ireland: Virgil's Eclogue I and BookVI of The Faerie Queene,' SpenserStudies, 8, pp. 119-45. Argues that the pastoral interlude of The Legend of Courtesy shows Spenser making a home away from England and the court, a move that entails a founding violence.
__________. (1993), 'Mapping mutability: or, Spenser's Irish plot', in Bradshaw et al (editors), RepresentingIreland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 93-115. Reads the View and the Mutabilitie Cantos within the Elizabethan genre of the 'Irish plot', and within the Ovidian scheme of metamorphosis, exploring Spenser's dual identities as exile and colonist.
George MacBeth (1992), The Testament of Spencer, Andre Deutsch: London. Novel set in future unified Ireland where a John Spencer is haunted by his near-namesake in a moving meditation on history, colonialism, and identity.
Richard A. McCabe (1989), 'The Fate of Irena: Spenser and Political Violence', in Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, editor Patricia Coughlan, Cork: Cork University Press, pp. 109-125. Good discussion of the relationship between Grey and Artegall, sharply concluding that Spenser encountered in the bards poets espousing his own violent methods.
__________. (1991), 'Edmund Spenser, Poet of Exile', Proceedingsof the British Academy 80, pp. 73-103. An authoritative and insightful treatment of Spenser's life, with valuable comments on his Irish experiences.
George E. McLean, (1986), 'Spenser's Territorial History: Book V ofThe Faerie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland', The University of Arizona, unpublished PhD thesis.
Willy Maley (1993), 'How Milton and some contemporaries read Spenser'sView', in Bradshaw et al editors, Representing Ireland, pp. 191-208. Charts the impact of Ware's edition of the View on seventeenth-century Anglo-Irish politics.
__________. (1994), A Spenser Chronology, London: Macmillan. Lists and summarises Irish state papers in Spenser's hand, and juxtaposes known facts on literary career with available documentation on his life as a colonial administrator.
__________. (1994), 'Rebels and Redshanks: Milton and the British Problem',Irish Studies Review, 6, pp. 7-11. Argues that MiltonsObservations of 1649 can be usefully read alongside Spenser's View, with which Milton was familiar.
__________. (1994), 'Spenser's Irish English: Language and Identity in Early Modern Ireland', Studies in Philology, 91, 4, pp.417-31. Sketches out an Irish cultural context for Spenser's allegedly archaic language and suggests that The Shepheardes Calender may be part of his Irish oeuvre.
__________. (1996a), 'Spenser's View and Stanyhurst'sDescription', Notes and Queries, 241, 2,pp. 140-42. Argues that Richard Stanyhurst's contribution on Ireland to Holinshed's Chronicles provides a useful comparative text to set alongside Spenser's dialogue, especially as this treatise was itself subject to censure at the time of publication, and has been overlooked in recent criticism.
tx7920__________. (1996b) 'Spenser and Scotland: The Limits of Anglo-Irish Identity', Prose Studies 19, 1, pp. 1-18. Argues that critics of the View who focus exclusively on its anti-Irish sentiments often overlook the extent to which Spenser's dialogue is concerned from the outset with a threatening Scottish context, including a claim that the Irish are originally Scots.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (1990), 'Ireland, the cultural context', in A. C. Hamilton, editor, The Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 403-404. Detailed exploration of Spenser's Irish milieu concluding that his use of North Munster in the Mutabilitie Cantos serves 'to offset his cosmic drama with the perfect example of the particular and familiar'.
Michael O'Connell (1990), 'The Faerie Queene, Book V', in A. C. Hamilton, general editor, The Spenser Encyclopedia,London and Toronto: Routledge, pp. 280-83. Incisive summary of critical responses to the most problematic section of Spenser's epic, detailing the Irish historical context, and tracing the book's progress from a rehearsal of English common law to a wider application of English justice abroad.
Diane Parkin-Speer, Diane (1992), 'Allegorical Legal Trials in Spenser'sThe Faerie Queene', Sixteenth Century Journal 23, 3, pp. 494-505. Engages with the View as a source of material on English law and legal trials. Echoes Brady(1989) in belief that Spenser's criticisms of English common law is the radical edge of his project.
Annabel Patterson (1992), 'The Egalitarian Giant: Representations of Justice in History/Literature', Journal of British Studies,31, pp. 97-132. Compelling account of justice and law in the Viewand Book V, using Kafka's The Trial as a way into the discussion.
__________. (1993), 'The Egalitarian Giant: Representations of Justice in History/Literature', in Reading between the lines London: Routledge, pp. 80-116. Version of above.
David Beers Quinn (1990), 'A vewe of the Present State of Ireland', in A. C. Hamilton, editor, The Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 713-15. Important contribution that stresses the fundamental ambiguity of Spenser's attitude to the Gaelic Irish.
Juan Emilio Tazón Salces (1988), 'Some Ideas on Spenser and the Irish Question', Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 16 (April), pp. 105-19. Fairly general, but cites an Irish ballad called 'The Burning of Kilcolman' that offers a sidelight on Spenser's fatal exit.
__________. (1989), 'Politics, Literature, and Colonization: A View of Ireland in the Sixteenth Century', in C. C. Barfoot and Theo D'haen, editors, The Clash of Ireland: Literary Contrasts and Connections, Rodopi Press: Amsterdam and Atlanta, pp. 23-36. Usefully contrasts texts on Spanish colonial projects with the View, claiming that no Spanish precedent exists for the kind of text that Spenser was writing
Simon Shepherd (1989), 'Politics', in Spenser, New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 4-55. Combative and accessible - if somewhat glib - introduction to Spenser's colonial politics from a self-confessed 'vulgar marxist' perspective.
Robert E. Stillman, 'Spenserian Autonomy and the Trial of New Historicism: Book Six of The Faerie Queene', English Literary Renaissance 22 (1992), pp. 299-314. Draws on Barthes' analysis of myth to argue that 'Spenser's experiences in Ireland provided more than day-residue to be reworked in the dreamscape of Book Six's fairyland', and that it forces the poet to produce 'an assimilationist mythology'.
James Vink (1990), 'Spenser's 'Easterland' as the Columban Church of Ancient Ireland', Éire-Ireland 25, 3, pp. 96-106.Contains a fascinating account of British origin-myths in TheFaerie Queene, supplementing Hadfield (1993b), as well as providing further intertextual evidence, in the form of a verbal echo, that Spenser wrote the View. The word 'Scatterlings' in FQ II.x.63.5 resonates with 'scatterlings and out-lawes' on page 12 of the Ware edition.
Elizabeth Porges Watson (1992), 'Introduction', Spenser: Selected Writings, Routledge: London, pp. 1-30. Useful overview from an historical and biographical perspective.
Robert Welch (1994), The Kilcolman Notebook, Brandon Press: Dingle, Co. Kerry. Novel imagining of Spenser's relationship with Elizabeth and Raleigh, bawdy and irreverent.
West, Michael (1988), 'Spenser's Art of War: Chivalric Allegory, Military Technology, and the Elizabethan Mock-Heroic Sensibility', Renaissance Quarterly 41, 4, pp. 654-704. Valuable supplement to Fowler (1989), much more detailed in its treatment of military knowledge, with some very good material on Smerwick and Book V.
Bart Westerweel (1989), 'Astrophel and Ulster: Sidney's Ireland', in C. C. Barfoot and Theo D'haen, editors, The Clash of Ireland: Literary Contrasts and Connections, Rodopi Press: Amsterdam and Atlanta, pp. 5-22. Vigorous discussion of Irish activities of Spenser and the Sidneys. Thomas E. Wright (1990), 'Bryskett, Lodowick', in A. C. Hamilton, editor,The Spenser Encyclopedia, Routledge: London, p. 119.Instructive note on the figure Spenser shadowed and deputised for in Ireland, and in whose Discourse of Civill Life (1606) he made a cameo appearance.
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