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-minded story of history’. 34 For Spenser’s Faerie Queene , which falls somewhere between the neat binary of ‘single-minded’ epic and subversive romance, the resulting hybrid forms are heir to the island-logic of both poets and propagandists. And indeed, as Andrews writes, ‘unlike Shakespeare’s Illyria, Gaelic Ireland was no place for feeding one’s knowledge of the town’, where the allusion to the setting of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night recalls the audience’s first glimpse of a safe harbour for the play’s storm-tossed protagonists. 35 As a locus of both conflict and
ascendancy to support his argument for the suppression of Gaelic Irish and reform of degenerated Old English settlers. Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland , ed. William Lindsay Renwick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), esp. pp. 48–68. 65 Eugene M. Waith attributes those lines to
perspectives that draw on different ways of imagining space. 24 Christopher Highley associates the figure of Merlin with ‘Spenser’s claims about the status of the artist and his creations’ but also, owing to his peripheral geopolitical location, with Spenser’s experiences of Gaelic Ireland. 25 For my purposes, Merlin, as might be thought fitting for a legendary figure of enchantment, appears to have feet placed in several overlapping worlds. His located presence connects spatial control with the art of prophecy. Although Britomart travels
8 Omnia vincit amor: Gaelic poetry and English books Mícheál Mac Craith Gaelic Ireland is somewhat under-represented in studies of the Renaissance. While two recent volumes of essays, edited by Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton in 2007 and 2011, for example, clearly disprove the commonly held view that Ireland was untouched by the Renaissance, the editors would be the first to admit weaknesses in coverage.1 Each volume, in fact, contains only four chapters on the Gaelic world. Emmet O’ Byrne’s contribution describing the efforts of the Tudor state to tighten
Yeftis yewyth to Rymoris othyr any Suche losyngeris, for thay Praysith hare yeueris be thay neuer So vicious. Who-so ham any good yewyth brekyth the statutis of kylkeny, and he is acursid by a xi bisschopis, as the same Statutes makyth mencion.5 While Yonge does not directly name native Irish poets, his reference to the Statutes of Kilkenny makes the association clear. The Statutes of Kilkenny sought, among other things, to shore up Anglo-Irish culture against the threat of acculturation and to regulate Anglo-Irish commerce and communication with the Gaelic-Irish
united in opposition to the Gaelic-Irish and Old English communities.8 In keeping with this, the period is also 8 The following are just some of the more prominent examples from amongst the numerous studies which have drawn such a conclusion: Nicholas Canny, The formation of the Old English elite in Ireland (Dublin, 1975); Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Sword, word and strategy in the Reformation in Ireland’, The Historical Journal 21:3 (1978), pp. 475–502; Nicholas Canny, ‘Edmund Spenser and the development of an Anglo-Irish identity’, The Yearbook of English Studies 13
–2000 (Cambridge, 2002), ch. 1. GRIBBEN 9781526113245 PRINT.indd 63 20/04/2017 15:33 64 Andrew Hadfield of hierarchy, and a proclamation of collective privilege’, very similar to the civic pageants in Elizabethan London.43 These processions and public performances often expressed Dublin’s complex sense of itself, caught between Gaelic Ireland and imperial England, uneasily negotiating a sense of identity between the two. They also suggest that Dublin would have seemed more obviously connected to the past than many English cities and it is not clear how vigorously medieval
volume contains Colm Lennon’s essay on Peter White’s school in Kilkenny, alerting the reader to the practicalities of the language learning which makes scholarship and translation possible, and Clare Carroll’s account of Irish clerics in Rome who were in the thick of sophisticated theological arguments but also preserved and furthered Gaelic linguistic scholarship. Lennon’s research on the culture of the English-speaking Pale complements Mícheál Mac Craith’s and Brendan Bradshaw’s on Gaelic Ireland, while Carroll’s points to a well-equipped diaspora.5 2 Crown surveys
therefore forgive his and others’ past 22 The term ‘Mere Irish’ was not, as it is sometimes supposed, a pejorative term. ‘Mere’ in this context means ‘pure-blooded’ or ‘whole’ and was used to distinguish the Gaelic Irish from the English-Irish or Old English. The dismissive connotation of ‘mere’ in the contemporary sense (as in, for example, the phrase ‘a mere child’) did not exist in the early modern period. 23 John Kerrigan, ‘Boyle’s Ireland and the British problem, 1641–1679’, in David J. Baker and Willy Maley (eds), British identities and English Renaissance
Stouthamer-Loeber, ‘Books owned by members of Old English and Gaelic Irish families in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, in Michael Potterton and Thomas Herron (eds), Dublin and the Pale in the Renaissance, c.1540–1640 (Dublin, 2011), pp. 286–8. 36 Raymond Gillespie, ‘The social thought of Richard Bellings’, in Micheál Ó Siochrú (ed.), Kingdoms in crisis: Ireland in the 1640s (Dublin, 2001), pp. 212–28. See also Coolahan’s chapter in this volume. GRIBBEN 9781526113245 PRINT.indd 47 20/04/2017 15:33 48 Raymond Gillespie fitfully.37 The response to older works