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Thomas Herron, Denna J. Iammarino and Maryclaire Moroney, eds., John Derricke’s The Image of Irelande: with a Discoverie of Woodkarne: Essays on Text and Context
by Andrew Hadfield

Thomas Herron, Denna J. Iammarino and Maryclaire Moroney, eds. John Derricke’s The Image of Irelande: with a Discoverie of Woodkarne: Essays on Text and Context. Manchester: Manchester University Press (The Manchester Spenser). xii + 292pp.

It is good to have a whole book dedicated to John Derricke. Derricke’s Image of Ireland is the best-known source of images of Elizabethan Ireland, plastered throughout the accessible digital world and recycled by academics and enthusiasts alike. However, as the editors point out in their well-judged introduction, virtually nothing is known of Derricke, the provenance of his book, nor the context in which it was written. The images and accompanying poetry are therefore very hard to read and cannot be taken, as they often are, as straightforward representations of life and conflict in Ireland.

The Image of Ireland was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, and it is a robust propaganda exercise, Derricke lauding the successes of Henry Sidney’s Lord Deputyship, especially his victories over his (now dead) chief antagonist, Rory Oge O’More (c.1537-78), a powerful warlord in the Irish midlands who had turned against his former English masters when he felt he had not been adequately rewarded for his service to the crown. Replete with images of violence, the work is a classic case of blaming the victims. The Irish are represented as lawless, uncontrolled and vengeful, associated with the body and the animal world (as John Soderberg demonstrates in his useful essay); the English as organised and rational, meting out stern punishment to those who need to be brought into line and accept legitimate English Protestant government (a case made by Elizabeth Chaghafi in hers). If the invaders appear excessive in their ‘retaliation’ it is only because the Irish theatre of war demands that savage reprisals are the only measures that work to restore peace. Needless to say, the Image skates over the Massacre at Mullaghmast (1577), when a number of Rory Oge O’More’s extended family was invited to what they thought were peace talks and were summarily dispatched. Vincent Carey has written with great distinction on this event and its hidden significance in English representations of their behaviour in the late 1570s; Maryclaire Moroney here builds on his insights in her essay on Sir Henry Sidney’s attempts to enhance the reputation of the New English in Ireland. The editors comment on the image showing the surrender of the Ulster chieftain, Turlough Luineach O’Neill, to an impressively regal-looking Sir Henry Sidney, shrewdly noting that diplomacy and warfare were a delicately balanced and messy business. The image, while asserting the viceroy’s power and authority, ‘strategically obscures the distrust the Crown had of O’Neill and the reality that neither Sidney nor O’Neill were sufficiently powerful to achieve either their political or military ends’ (p.3).

It is hard to know how widely the Image was read by Derricke’s contemporaries. Only eight copies survive and, of these, only two have woodcuts, one in Edinburgh University Library containing the complete set of twelve, while the other, in the National Library of Scotland, has eight. Was this because these impressive images, probably the finest produced in late sixteenth-century England, were torn out and displayed on walls? That would seem plausible, but no evidence survives, and there is no obvious point of comparison or contextual evidence of this being a widespread practice. Derricke’s work has a number of connections, as a source and analogue, to other English writers on Ireland, and at times I wondered whether rather more analysis might have been provided here. Brian Lockey explores the complicated relationship between Derricke and Spenser’s understanding of the domestic and colonial contexts of Ireland in his essay. There may well be other links, too. Willy Maley noted some time ago that the Image bears certain obvious comparisons to The Shephearde’s Calender, another text that makes use of black letter type, woodcuts and poems to achieve its multi-media effects. Indeed, the relationship between the Calender and the Image, published two years earlier, may well repay more exploration, especially if we can date Spenser’s time in Ireland back to 1577.

It might also be worth thinking about the Image in terms of another Spenser text, his translation of Jan Van Der Noodt’s Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings (1569). That text also combined poetry and images on the page, and it suggests that Spenser was intimately connected to the exiled Dutch community in London early in his writing career and knew Dutch writers and artists. As Stuart Kinsella points out in the longest and best essay in the collection, the Image has too often been read as though it were part of an English tradition of writing and illustration, whereas it should be seen in a European context. The book was produced in the workshop of John Day (c.1522-84), the premier English printer of his time who was commissioned by the crown to produce John Foxe’s monumental Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church, a work that combined text and images and which was placed in every cathedral church in England (Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas Freeman point out that the commission was probably not terribly lucrative as the book took so long to produce and tied up all of Day’s printing presses, which could have been used to generate other income). Day’s workshop, as Kinsella demonstrates, was staffed almost entirely by Dutch exiles, and the genealogy of English martyrs in Foxe’s huge book owes much to continental models. Derricke and Spenser would surely have moved in similar worlds in London as well as Ireland, a point also made in William O’Neil’s essay on justice and equity in the Image and The Faerie Queene, Book 5.

Kinsella worries away at the tiny fragments of evidence providing details of Derricke’s life that survive and wonders whether we cannot find him because we should not be looking for an Englishman but a Dutchman, Jan de Rijke (p.101). He also speculates as to whether one of the three bearded men kneeling before the queen in the famous ‘Capital C’ image in the Acts and Monuments might be Derricke, who played his part in the production of Protestant English history and then transported a similar ideological perspective to Ireland. Like Day, Henry Sidney was keen to employ Dutch Protestants.

Thomas Herron builds on Kinsella’s essay in a fascinating excursion, arguing that Albrecht Dürer’s famous image of the Apocalypse lies behind much of the iconography of the Image’s woodcuts. I am not persuaded by Herron’s larger claim that Derricke modelled his images on those of Dürer, and the very small reproductions of visual material with tiny numbers inserted makes it very hard to judge many of the claims. However, the more general thesis, that the woodcuts in the Image have religious significance in a number of places, seems much more secure. In particular, the Image emerged out of the same intellectual milieu that produced the Acts and Monuments and which denigrated the Irish as wild, savage and irreligious. Herron cites a story in Foxe whereby Thomas Cromwell confronts a man with shaggy, uncombed hair on the London streets and assumes that he is imitating that hairstyle of an Irishman. He also provides a wonderful analysis of a strange figure represented in woodcut 4 of the sequence (these are helpfully reproduced as plates in the centre of the book), depicting a battle between Sir Henry’s forces and those of Rory Oge, arguing that a devil is shown to be fighting alongside the Irish kern, his long forelock deliberately represented as an Irish glib. The image can therefore be linked to the accompanying poem, which describes the kern having ‘writhed glibs like wicked sprites / with visage rough and stern’. It is an excellent point that demonstrates the integrated nature of the Image, providing yet more evidence that Derricke was responsible for the text and woodcuts, and a link to the iconographic world of Elizabethan Protestantism. In his essay, Thomas Cartelli, following Patricia Palmer, provides an equally astute analysis of a severed head in Plate 5 to argue that what we see is part of Margaret Byrne, wife of Rory Oge, the woman depicted at the open air feast in Plate 2.

I also thought persuasive the claim that the open air Irish feast (plate 3), with the friar beside the lord at the long table, contains a seated figure who looks rather like Judas and which links the image to those of the Last Supper, here, showing a once loyal lord (perhaps Rory Oge himself) being led astray by diabolic forces. The images of the Irish lords surrendering to Sir Henry Sidney also surely contain allusions to Christ seated in judgement, but I found these a bit harder to link to specific images, as Herron claims., Their reference is more generally contained in the iconography of royal power. As Andie Silva argues in another excellent essay, ‘Derricke culled from works he admired a range of particularly effective strategies and modified them to produce a visually dynamic and challenging reading experience’ (p.135). The sequence demands to be read alongside the poems, compressing events, spaces, time and location, relying on a ‘practiced reader to decode all the elements in each plate’ (p.139).

Silva argues that the images contain a straightforward message. They depict a cycle of rebellion, defeat and surrender, thereby creating ‘a sense that time has been standing still (these events have, in a sense always been happening) and simultaneously progressing at a dangerous pace (continuing on, unstopped, at least until the English soldiers can intervene)’ (p.141). The repetition will continue until England has gained full control of Ireland and the cycle can be ended. The warning is, as in Spenser’s View, that unless military power is properly supported, the situation may well spiral out of control, so that things will either accelerate until peace is secured, or chaos will engulf the island and beyond. It is clear to see what modes of thinking lie behind the Mutability Cantos and the context out of which it emerged.

The general assumption has been – and often is in the collection too – that the poems are somewhat less impressive than the images. It is hard to argue against this case and it may be that Derricke was primarily an artist or an engraver rather than a writer (and, as Kinsella argues, he could have written clumsily because he was not writing in his native language). A number of the essays do nevertheless analyze the verse. Scott Lucas suggests that the ever-popular Mirror for Magistrates provides the form and style of the verse, especially the lament of Rory Oge’s ghost as he warns readers not to follow his path and rebel against an anointed queen, a lesson he wishes he had heeded in life rather than death. Lucas points out that Derricke ignores the spirit of the original Mirror, which was frequently critical of monarchs and their powerful allies and henchmen. Rather than lamenting their errors and failures, in the Image English kings and governors deny ‘all the manifest failures … detailed in the Mirror’ (p.181). Accordingly, the Image anticipates later versions of the Mirror that celebrate the triumphs of English history rather than commenting critically on the inadequacies and villainies of the past so that these can be avoided in the future. In a short, neat essay Matthew Woodcock does his best to find the range, variety and literary merit in the ‘formal, stylistic and rhetorical aspects’ (p. 231) of the poem, and he succeeds as well as anyone could. There is indeed some variety, despite the technical and metrical shortcomings of the volume, but it is hard to imagine that its dedicatee, the author of Astrophil and Stella, found all that much to admire. Even so, Derricke spoke directly to Sir Philip in his dedicatory epistle ‘poet to poet’, as Denna Iammarino observes in her essay on the paratexts of the work.

In their essays, Bríd McGrath and James Lyttleton discuss the relationship between the Dublin depicted in the Image and the reality of the capital. McGrath shows how Sir Henry’s role is enhanced through the buildings and ceremonies represented, casting him as ‘an embodiment of Tudor majesty’ (p.65) with the ‘implication … that a good governor makes for a good city’ (p.67). Lyttleton surveys Sir Henry’s building projects and shows that, as well as being a ‘relentless self-promoter’ (p.73), he understood ‘the power of architecture and imagery as potent forms of propaganda’ (p.91).

There are also a number of essays on the influence and subsequent history of the Image. The best of these is Willy Maley and Alasdair Thanisch’s analysis of the nineteenth-century editions of the work produced in Scotland. The Image, as they point out, has played a crucial role in the complicated and fractious relationship between England, Scotland and Ireland, not least because the only surviving images in the text are in Scottish libraries. The indefatigable Sir Walter Scott reproduced the Image with eight of the woodcuts in his edition of Lord Somer’s Tracts (1809-15), which paved the way for John Small’s edition of 1883, the first to reproduce all of them. In a densely referenced and carefully argued piece, Maley and Thanisch show how Scott saw in Derricke an accurate recorder of ancient Gaelic life so that he was able to access Scotland’s past as well as Ireland’s. Scott, rather naïvely given the current state of knowledge when he was working, imagined that the Image provided an accurate window into the past. What he saw appealed to both his reactionary and progressive beliefs, so that he could recapture a moment, vitally important in his own fiction, ‘where ennobling but outdated civilizations come into conflict with and are inevitably overcome by the forces of modernity, which appears as necessary but not always thereby morally justifiable’ (p.160).

The editors have taken the decision to allow contributors to produce essays of varying lengths, some being only about ten pages and others more than twice as long. It is a risky strategy that can make a volume look rather miscellaneous but here it pays off well and the essays seem justified and appropriate as they stand. Some are more substantial than others and some more original, and the book is probably rather too long given its subject. Nevertheless, it is full of useful and often excellent analysis, much of it the product of proper hard work and insight, and significantly develops what we know about Derricke, in particular his relationship to print and visual culture. It still seems a strange mystery that so little is known about the man who produced such an influential work. The editors have provided a number of leads that can be developed in the future, and for what they have achieved already – and with print and on-line editions to follow – we should be very grateful.

 

Andrew Hadfield

University of Sussex

           

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51.3.8

Cite as:

Andrew Hadfield, "Thomas Herron, Denna J. Iammarino and Maryclaire Moroney, eds., John Derricke’s The Image of Irelande: with a Discoverie of Woodkarne: Essays on Text and Context," Spenser Review 51.3.8 (Fall 2021). Accessed March 29th, 2024.
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