1. As Andrew Murphy writes in his Introduction, there has 'clearly been no shortage of accounts of the intersections of English literature and Irish politics in the Renaissance period' (3). The recent publications by Andrew Hadfield (Spenser's Irish Experience [1997]) and Christopher Highley (Shakespeare, Spenser and the Crisis in Ireland [1997]), reviewed together by Tracey Hill in Renaissance Forum 3.2 (http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v3no2/hill.htm) make this abundantly apparent. Murphy, indeed, was unable to use Highley's book, which is a reflection of the enormous interest and industry which this field continues to generate.

2. So, to ask Murphy's own question, 'What does But the Irish Sea betwixt Us have to offer that has not already been said by other critics?' (3). Unlike Highley, Murphy does not try to extend the number of literary texts which are relevant to the study of early modern Ireland. Where Highley argues that in texts like 1 Henry IV, Shakespeare 'takes advantage of perceived resemblances and connections between the rebellions of Glendower and Tyrone' (Highley 87), Murphy prefers to stick with the small and well-established body of texts which 'substantially engage with the issue of Ireland... Spenser's View and Faerie Queene book 5... Shakespeare's Henry V; and Jonson's Irish Masque at Court' (8). To these texts he adds a chapter on Gerald of Wales's twelfth-century Expugnatio Hibernica and the Topographia Hibernica as the 'foundational documents of an extended tradition of writing on Ireland' (34). While inevitably this means that Murphy reconsiders familiar territory, it does have the methodological virtue of keeping the discussion focused on texts which unequivocally address the situation in Ireland, rather than, as with Highley, seeking to uncover a literary code apparently at work in texts ostensibly about Wales. But this does not mean that Murphy takes a restrictive view of the significance of the English engagement with Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of the book's most plausible claims is that the 'writing' of English identity in the later sixteenth century observed by Richard Helgerson in Forms of Nationhood (1992) is partly contingent on the Elizabethan experience of Ireland. As Murphy observes of Henry V, while the play 'sits comfortably with Helgerson's model of an English quest for national identity... his thesis fails to register the extent to which English self-imagining in such a play is significantly informed by the English experience in Ireland during these years' (113).

3. This sort of claim reflects Murphy's central preoccupation with issues of the 'proximity' between Ireland and England and the Irish and the English. Murphy uses this term as a way of rethinking the relationship between England and Ireland in the early modern period. Drawing on the works of historians like Nicholas Canny, Ciarán Brady and Brendan Bradshaw, he subjects the analogy between the colonisation of the New World and that of Ireland to intensive scrutiny. According to Murphy, the Irish situation is qualitatively different from the New World situation: 'As such closely neighbouring islands, Britain and Ireland... inevitably shared an extended common history stretching back over centuries. By the mid-Tudor period, Ireland... had been incorporated... into a greater British realm. Thus, whereas the Americas constituted... a distant "virgin territory" for the English, Ireland was in no way a "New World."' (20). From this perception, he argues that what most troubles English writers on Ireland is not so much a sense of Irish difference as a sense of alarming similarity: 'In encountering Ireland, the English writer expects to find a sharply defined Otherness but instead finds, adumbrated within the outline of the Other, a certain image of the Self.' (32).

4. While such claims may seem to be boldly revisionistic, the book is by no means a simplistic attack on the colonial model of Irish history. Rather, Murphy is concerned 'to move beyond viewing [the relationship between England and Ireland] in strictly binary terms and within a framework that assimilates Ireland's colonial experience to a general global imperialist model' (16). As such, Murphy moves adroitly between the different disciplinary exigencies of Irish history and postcolonial theory; his thesis is lively and stimulating and he manages to put across a formidable breadth of reading and reflection in an engaging manner.

5. Murphy's theory of 'proximity' gives the readings of the literary texts both coherence and homogeneity. He is particularly interested in moments which reveal instability within English observation of Irishness, and as a corollary of this, an emergent sense of the instability of English self-constructions. Gerald's story of two Irish Christians transformed into wolves but retaining their religious identity and human form below the wolf-skin displays a disturbing proximity between the Irish and the English: the wolves are 'precisely everything that the Topographia works so hard to demonstrate the Irish are not' (52); that is, pious Christians rather than bestial savages. Equally, the Irish captain's question in Henry V 'What ish my Nation?' is interpreted both as 'an interrogation of what constitutes the Irish nation' and as a revelation that 'the construction of an English identity has somehow become contingent on some kind of working through of the Irish question - as if a sense of England cannot be won... without first beginning with some kind of engagement with Ireland' (118, 120).

6. Broadly, then, Murphy's book offers an innovative way of thinking about the relationship between Ireland and England, backed up with cogent readings of canonical literary texts. I find myself slightly less convinced by his account of that notoriously problematic text, book 5 of The Faerie Queene. Murphy's basic tactic here is to suggest that the book allegorises not only the conflict between English settlers and Irish natives, but also Spenser's sense (as articulated in the View) of the degeneracy of the Old English (or Anglo-Norman) colonists during the sixteenth century. Artegall functions variously as an Old English colonist in his conflict with Radigund (who becomes 'a figuring of the Gaelic Irish' [84]), and as New English colonist in his fight with Grantorto. The problem here is not so much the kinds of allegories Murphy imposes on the text, but the fact that his readings seem restricted to the identification of political and historical meanings alone. So in making the acute observation of Artegall's 'active complicity' (89) in both his surrender to Radigund and his loss of his shield in the fight with Grantorto, Murphy fails to consider the potential psychological ramifications of this complicity. It is indeed surprising that a Knight who is usually taken as a quasi-militarist hard-liner should be so complicit in his disgraces, and I found myself wanting the book to extend its discussion of The Faerie Queene to explore the question of how Spenser squares historical and political allegory with his continuous interest, in the poem as a whole, in the narrative representation of interiority. However much critics might want book 5 to be a text which unequivocally displays the corrupting of Spenser's imagination by imperialist discourse, the problem remains that the essential techniques and locations of the poem remain the same as in the earlier, less ostensibly problematic books.

7. Murphy concludes his study by suggesting that 'the notion of proximity' could profitably be extended to the consideration of later periods of Irish history (163). Given the subtlety of his argument and readings, this seems reasonable. I offer one small example. In 1939, Louis MacNeice wrote a poem entitled 'Dublin' which meditates on his own problematic relationship both to Dublin and Irishness in terms which anticipate Murphy's concept of proximity. MacNeice's Irishness is still a problematic issue in cultural history: the son of a Protestant bishop (who paradoxically supported Home Rule), he was born in Belfast but educated in Marlborough and Oxford; in Terence Brown's words MacNeice was 'spiritually hyphenated' between Ireland and England (Brown 1975, 10). His poetry has frequently been interpreted in terms of that hyphenation: not properly Irish, not properly English. 'Dublin' articulates this position tersely and without self-pity: 'This was never my town,/I was not born nor bred/Nor schooled here and she will not/Have me alive or dead' (MacNeice 1966, 163). In the next stanza, however, MacNeice moves from his own predicament to a more lyrical placing of Dublin which all but invokes Murphy's cardinal term: 'the mist on the Wicklow hills/Is close, as close/As the peasantry were to the landlord,/As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish,/As the killer is close one moment/To the man he kills' (164). The displaced context which underlies this poem is, of course, the Second World War and MacNeice's own anguished debates about how he should contribute, if at all, to the war effort; by 1942 he would write the poem 'Neutrality', which bitterly castigates Ireland as 'The neutral island facing the Atlantic' (202). But here Ireland and England are brought into a proximity through the evocation of Dublin which is at once lyrical and unsettled. In the related formulations of the poem's closing stanzas Dublin 'is not an Irish town/And she is not an English' and is the 'Augustan capital/Of a Gaelic nation' (164). In this dazzling poem, the ambivalences of the historical relations between Ireland and England are poised beside a sense of 'the toppling hour' of contemporary history (164). The closeness of the two lands is for MacNeice, as for Gerald, Spenser, Shakespeare and Jonson not something which can be avoided or ignored.

List of Works Cited

Brown, Terence. 1975. Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.

MacNeice, Louis. 1966. Collected Poems. Edited by E.R. Dodds. London: Faber and Faber.

RICHARD DANSON BROWN
THE OPEN UNIVERSITY