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In tragedies of state, national unity is sought yet never secured. The past is always present as a warning and a mirror of contemporary fears. These plays address political concerns from behind the shields of fictionality and geographical or historical distance, a strategy that was already familiar to political writers who often drew on the examples of republican and imperial Rome but which became increasingly urgent as England had to define itself in response to external and internal challenges. Though the locations of such plays might
At the heart of Edmund Spenser’s moral allegory in The Faerie Queene is a problem that would become central to English intellectual life well into the modern era: understanding colonialism, and the coercive violence on which it depends, as a form of moral activity. Spenser’s ethics reads Spenser as a moral theorist whose ethics are significantly shaped by his experiences as a colonial administrator in Elizabethan Ireland. It illustrates how both his poetry and prose take up key shifts in early modern moral philosophy, while addressing the political project of colonial empire-building. This book is an essential study of Spenser as an ethicist grappling, on the one hand, with the decline and transformation of the classical and humanist virtue ethics tradition in the late sixteenth century, and on the other, with imagining new paradigms of heroic subjectivity for the early modern, imperial nation. It examines the ways Spenser draws on and reworks the Western ethical tradition during a period of tremendous cultural upheaval and political transformation, and illuminates that philosophical tradition’s evolution alongside early modern England’s wider political and economic transformation into a global nation-state built on the foundations of colonial expansion. Emphasizing the conceptual rigor, clarity, and coherence of Spenser’s moral vision, it depicts Spenser as a literary ethicist rigorously committed to discovering a politically and metaphysically viable account of moral life in an era that starkly reveals the ancient virtues’ conceptual and practical limitations.
John Derricke’s Image of Irelande promotes Sir Henry Sidney’s legacy as a model English chief governor of Ireland, glossing over his policy failures and his fractured relationship with the Old English political class. It asserts that, by a combination of military action and diplomacy, Sidney extended Crown control into areas previously dominated by Gaelic lords and engaged tirelessly in state-building and reform of Ireland’s political and administrative systems and structures. Sidney’s achievements in
Go’ versus ‘chess’, that are related to the main opposition, that of ‘war machine’ versus ‘State apparatus’. Deleuze and Guattari’s theories ‘The war machine is the invention of the nomads (insofar as it is exterior to the State apparatus and distinct from the military institution’, 1 as Deleuze and Guattari explain it. It is an armed force that escapes the control of the State (whether monarchy or
from the banisher who did them wrong and partakes of a different structure that has its own strategies. Two alternatives will first be distinguished: on the one hand, the banished individuals who have no choice but to join either a foreign ‘State apparatus’ (as is the case with Cordelia, who returns to England with a French army) or a Christian structure (in King Richard II , Mowbray’s decision to become God’s soldier); on
In the study of Elizabethan literature, little attention has been paid to the parallels between John Derricke’s The Image of Irelande and Edmund Spenser’s Book Five of The Faerie Queene . In each of these works the author praises through a heroic narrative a lord deputy of Ireland who was recalled from office in disgrace. With England’s ongoing efforts to control Ireland, Derricke and Spenser mark their main character’s approach to governance through the representation of the sword of state versus the
unlearned the knowledge of many famous histories, [and] instructed such as ca[n]not reade in the discovery of all our English Chronicles’. 14 While Apology is regularly compared to Sidney’s Defence of Poesy , there are also important differences in their theorisation of imaginative composition. Perhaps responding to Sidney’s example, Heywood adapts the trope of the Four Ages to evoke a ‘golden’ poetic state and establish a classical, even aristocratic, lineage for his creative endeavours: in the dedicatory epistle ‘To the Right Honourable Edward, Earl of Worcester
therefore both about a modern Ireland as a nation-state that remembers Shakespeare and his early modern England (even one with a fraught, emergent colonial practice in Ireland), and offers practical examples of how to read ‘dismemorially’ to excavate the buried secrets (Beiner, 2018: 30) of Shakespeare in modern Irish letters. The Republic of Ireland offers a significant space for this
transformation, rendering a natural law justification for the juridical practices of the Elizabethan colonial state. The cantos tell the story of the Titan, Mutability’s attempt to overthrow Jove as rightful ruler of the physical world and are couched in an allegorical mode that oscillates between densely woven metaphysics and lightly veiled allusions to contemporary politics. The work’s tale of Mutability
on the south side. This appropriation of monastic properties and lands cleared the way for the further expansion of the city’s suburbs. Many of these former monastic properties were conferred on the city itself. 19 Following on from that, in the second half of the sixteenth century, under the influence of the Lord Deputy Henry Sidney, the city benefited from good relations between the civic and state administration. During Sidney’s tenure, a major reconstruction of the castle was carried out to facilitate its role as