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their unwilling hosts among the Old English with ‘impunity’. 8 As ‘viceregal clients’, some well-connected English officers made use of their often significant autonomy and powers to establish themselves as land-holders in competition with displaced Gaelic-Irish septs. 9 Commissions of martial law were used by officers in this colonial environment as an attractive means of improving their pay and of extending their property, as those who executed the law ‘were entitled to one-third of the possessions of the dead “rebels
backwardness and British superiority. How else to explain the uncritical use of the scatological third woodcut in Irish schools to teach children about the customs of their forebears? Or the way in which the library of the University of Edinburgh captions its digitized edition, which identifies Rory Og O’More, a Gaelic Irish leader connected to the Earl of Ormond, as ‘a wild kerne’? 9 The library is ventriloquizing Derricke’s own message. These and a host of similar examples might be explained, or explained away, by the
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
nobles were planned under Henry, Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, so there was no reluctance in principle to including them as part of the Irish nobility. Despite these ennoblements and St Leger and Cusack’s efforts at inclusion, there was no attempt to treat England and Ireland as equal in a union of crowns, and Derricke’s Image shows the Gaelic Irish as rebellious, uncouth and uncivilised: potential, if not actual, traitors and far from equal subjects. The Gaelic Irish were a ‘reprobate nation’. 17 Tudor state
) Indeed, taken all together, the three Mirror- like Rory Og and O’Neill poems represent a polarised illustration of the only two courses of action available to the Gaelic Irish lords: respectively, persecution and inevitable execution, or humble submission. The opposition between humans and beasts is another significant binary for Derricke and this informs the dominant conceit of the entire Image – that of the essentially bestial nature of the Gaelic Irish kern and the society he inhabits and infects – for