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Whether captain, kern or knight, martial identities in Elizabethan England and Ireland are as multiple, class-inflected, and contested as the military contexts through which they are experienced and expressed. This chapter argues that John Derricke’s (mis)representations of Gaelic Irish forces and their English others is critical to our understanding of the work’s political and polemical concerns. The woodcuts, in particular, have long been mined for their accurate depiction of weaponry and dress, but the extent to which the work as a whole seeks to obscure how far the Irish kerne and his English counterpart were indistinguishable comrades in arms has gone unremarked.
One of the most detailed visual accounts of Irish customs and culture, the twelve illustrations in The Image of Ireland (1581) represent an impressive achievement in visual design and textual navigation. Part diagram, part graphic novel, each image features small letters connecting its actions to the narrative poem below. A look at other printed illustrations from the period (particularly those produced by Dutch woodcutters) demonstrates that John Derricke’s work carefully responded to contemporary themes and popular visual protocols. Further, the twelve illustrations offered a unique combination of form, design, and functionality not unlike modern hypertexts. Taking into consideration the early print marketplace in general and the demands from Day’s workroom in particular, this chapter suggests that The Image of Ireland’s illustrations were designed to be printed and circulated separately from Derricke’s poem. Derricke’s illustrations can be understood within the context of increasingly multimodal and dynamic reading practices among middle-class readers and are evidence of Day’s incredibly diverse market of book-buyers.
University of London – Achimota in Ghana, Makerere in Uganda, and the University of the West Indies in Mona Jamaica, and so on. All of these colleges were established in the post-War period, when British colonialism, unable to exist according to the old rules, saw the necessity of creating an African middle class for future partnership. 4
with the ease with which they came to hand, and interpreted that as a good omen for Queen and people. He speaks of these being his first two solutions among five hundred tries. 5 Clearly, anagrams was a game for the leisure class. Another indicator of the popularity of anagrams can be found in The Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden ( 1711 ). A Scots poet and essayist
carefully modulated ambiguity at the heart of Spenser’s claim about his poem’s ‘generall end’ by which the poet, through his poem, seeks not only to fashion a renewed class of virtuous civic agents, but to fashion himself a gentleman through a work he positions as fulfilling a lifetime of civic-minded study and intellectual production. The passage’s attempt to explain the historical and metaphysical whys
debasement is added to his fall in status and loss of class privileges. Worse, he is called a ‘beastly knave’ (2.2.63). As he himself tells Regan, ‘Why, madam, if I were your father’s dog / You should not use me so’ (126–7). He is relegated to the lower order of creation. As regards Edgar, he too hits rock bottom, as he anticipates, knowing that he will take ‘the basest and most poorest shape / That ever
’, power presents itself as being at the service of everybody, but it is the guardian of inequalities and their hierarchies; as being issued from reason or collective will, but it is also begotten by events; as emanating from law, but at the same time it engenders laws that ensure its own defence and have different applications depending on social classes and categories. Nowhere and never is it
’s deployment of this imagery as iconic of both heroic subjectivity and political organization, has long been rooted in the notion that the Tudor and Elizabethan tiltyards reflected the neutering of the aristocratic, warrior class and its subsequent enfolding into the functional mechanisms of the bureaucratic, administrative, and centralized nation-state. For instance, Richard McCoy describes Spenser’s images
cases, those accused were mothers of sole heiresses; 21 while the Lothian case is different in that the charges were against lower-class women, the conflict did concern his daughter’s inheritance rights. The King directly attempted to sort out the dispute: a 1628 letter of Archibald Acheson (secretary of state) hopes that the King’s letter ‘hath produced suche good effects as no harme is to be
humanist thought’), 22 and ‘New Historicism’ and ‘Cultural Materialism’. The latter has close connections with ‘New Historicism’ in ‘its intellectual origins, and its explicit concern with power and its cultural representations’, but has, according to Hebron, ‘a more explicit and self-conscious political engagement, mixing French theoretical language with British polemical traditions of non-conformity and class-struggle’. 23 ‘New