Spenser and Ireland

Richard A. McCabe. 2002. Spenser's Monstrous Regiment. 306 pp. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-818734-3. £45/$70.

1. Richard McCabe, while neatly avoiding the hard question of The Faerie Queene's physical setting and accepting that Faeryland may not be Ireland, argues in Spenser's Monstrous Regiment, that the poem is 'mindset' in that country. He states that the poem 'abounds with Irish topographical references' although cites only a few of the very familiar ones, which are more tropical embellishments than actualities. In these, and elsewhere in this distinguished work, the dominating Irish slant appears too textually selective in The Faerie Queene for a convincing realization of an Irish mindset. Nonetheless, English hegemony Ireland is explicated remarkably. The 'Greeks' – as McCabe terms the self-consciously 'civilizing' English – are exposed in their various modes of construing the Irish as barbaric.

2. Professor McCabe's approach significantly reverses the idealism of the Elizabethan fanfare for the Queen's majesty, by looking closely at the particulars of her colonial mission. The Faerie Queene, McCabe says, questions 'official' iconography and icon making, revealing contradictions between the concept of Gloriana and her queen-of-the-forest prototype, Belphoebe. Embodied in the latter is the notion of a failing monarch; and, more tropically, the tension between this imperfect mortal female body and a supposedly perfect immortal male ruler is negotiated in the Aristotelian division demarcated at Castle Alma.

3. Trimming down the glorious image of Elizabeth is no easy task. As an overwhelmingly powerful iconic figure, steeped and garnished in self-rejuvenating eulogies, she is hard to diminish. But without straining, McCabe is able to show how the Queen's colonial political discourse belied her much vaunted temperance. He explains the difficult realities of singing of 'arms and the woman'. The gender tension which, he says, is figured in the cross dressing of Artegall of Book V – where he is enslaved to Radigund – is also found in Irish politics. And we find that the Queen and her Irish deputies did not enjoy good relations, as is shown in the unhappiness of Lord Grey and the particularly unrewarding office of Sir Henry Sidney, Grey's predecessor.

4. Ironically, the 'absentee' Gloriana model – that lofty, inspirational, quasi-mystical figure – is rather crudely superseded by an intrusive and potentially dangerous woman, forever failing to attain the 'heart and stomach of a king'. This is hardly revelatory but many Spenserians may find it so, at least, that is, if they fail to distil from The Faerie Queene Spenser's understanding of the 'feminine problem', which is overtly manifest in the contradictory matters of 'colonial conquest' and 'female regiment'. It is, however, difficult to imagine how McCabe sees England's first national epic transformed into its first 'colonial romance', though the notion of a Faery King replacing the frustratingly absent Faerie Queene is one way of grasping the shortcomings of a mortal Gloriana. McCabe claims that there is an ambiguity in the character of England's 'dread sovereign', Lucifera being one her malign avatars.

5. The expansionism evident in the 1596 edition of The Faerie Queene is analysed from an Irish perspective. What makes Timias a wild Irishman for example? Civilizing means Christianising, McCabe presses, consolidating this Elizabethan practice in the politics of Protestantising. Here, he begins to address an issue floated earlier – the new 'Greeks' and their stigmatizing of the Irish. So the purposely afflicted 'barbarous' race are conveniently brought to book. The task of the New English – in the spirit of the original conquerors – was to reform a barbarous people through the means of a military-style operation which would precede any cultural or religious reform. The particularly pernicious strategy, which Spenser chose to support, is adumbrated in the very violent Faerie Queene V, though in the face of this, McCabe suggests there are, nevertheless, logical connections between the Poet historical and Spenser's role of secretary to Lord Grey.

6. The debate about Irish sovereignty – by consent, or through claim of conquest treaty – can fall conveniently back on King Arthur, whose 'imperial mission' Elizabeth could be said to have inherited. But the Gaelic chronicles – which Spenser chose to dismiss – deny any Arthurian right of rule. McCabe finds an analogous incompatibility between the goals of empire and Christianity in Jan Van der Noodt's targeting of the papacy's associations with imperial Rome. The Faerie Queene mirrors the desires of Elizabethan expansionism in Book II, but focusing on the way the civil ideal is portrayed through savage antithesis – negative aspects often usurping the positive presences in the poem – tends to overplay the Irish typology. Behavioural typologies expressing various forms of baseness in The Faerie Queene are not confined (nor necessarily even located) in Ireland. And often Spenser, in a more abstract mode, is articulating the age-old universal collisions between the entities and agents of good and evil.

7. Spenser's rival (bard) poets do not necessarily seem to be rivals. The Protestant and 'not quite English' Black Thomas of Ormond who occupies a 'terrain vague' is, McCabe says, curiously praised by Spenser for his civilizing presence. Spenser anglicizes him. The bards, a cohesive but 'politically discordant' group, were pivot-like, balancing Ireland's two powerful nations Gaill and Sean-Ghaill. McCabe explains Elizabeth's interest in Gaelic as political. Her recommending the New Testament's translation into that language – for obvious Reformation purposes – was also strategic, in countering the history of bardic eulogies bent on enlarging 'Mother' Mary's supremacy. McCabe writes about Lord Devlin not as a traitor but as someone whose divided loyalties are expressed in the suspiciously regarded bardic 'bablers' – the otherwise accomplished Gaelic verse writers. The Gaelic poets were subterranean political forces opposing Lord Grey. Ironically, as McCabe exposes, in the mid-fourteenth century, 'many of the Gaelic Irish and Old English had far more in common with each other'. And, anyway, intermarriage meant 'common genealogy', a history seized upon by the bards for political and cultural ends. The New English 'made a point of politicising cultural difference'; the bards did not. And so the nationalizing attitude of the New English was provided with a 'common enemy'.

8. The curious historical context of kingship in Ireland is keenly detailed. We find the Irish crown being pursued by Con Bacach Σ Nιill, and we are told that in 1595, much to the imagined terror of the New English, the leaders of the 'emergent confederacy offered the Irish crown to Philip II'. As 'guardians of the Gaelic language', the bards embraced roles as chroniclers, genealogists and counsellors. The bards, who served an aristocratic social group – 'the Gaelic nobility' – 'mocked the low social status of the New English' and were a group to which Colin did not belong, we find, in Spenser's lamenting of Colin's isolation. McCabe tells us about the established deployment of faery in 'bardic panegyric'.

9. Some clans, and their bards, were implacably opposed to the Dublin administration but others, the O'Tooles for example, 'made terms with the New English'. The rise of political consciousness through the unification of the clans speculatively foregrounded a credible sense of nationalism beyond the Pale, the borders of which are flashpointed as the strategic targets of factional enemies. The power of bardic writing revealed to Spenser its sharp political purpose; but the English, sensing the status of the Gaelic bards, could only turn this downward – 'the courtly "ollamh" ' must be transformed 'into the wild "bard" '. John Derricke's Image of Irelande (1581) provides a fascinating illustration of this; and Spenser's tactics towards the bards are those of 'appropriating' and 'distancing' bardic literature. What Irenius points to is the 'lewd libertie' of the bards, or the threat they posed to the New English. And so to 'conquer is to temper'.

10. The sometimes disturbingly non-heroic portrait of Artegall in The Faerie Queene V can be sharply contrasted with the conventional imaging and analogizing which the bardic poets sought to effect in terms of 'martial' trials, 'chivalry' and dedicated inscriptions to individuals and to families. But Spenser's deliberate translating of bardic prowess into the work of scum and rascals, finds a curiously cutting irony when turned back on the English, whose 'tunge' in poetry was by purists deemed barbarous.

11. Politically, the Queen of Scots was much celebrated in Ireland, if not in Scotland and so was her much praised father, James, who, we are reminded, cared not for the Irish. Following the failed promise of James for Ireland, the flight of the earls in 1607 put paid to the traditional bardic schools, though Gaelic poetry found new, sometimes religious, forms of patronage. An expanded account of the Westminster Hall episode of The Faerie Queene V exemplifies McCabe's excellent model for reading 'Irenius' account of Gaelic poetry as a political palimpsest' – the erased 'ollamh' being disclosed 'beneath the overwritten "bard" '.

12. Unquestionably, The Faerie Queene was 'bred' by 'salvage soyl', but again it is difficult to see how the connection is made with Ireland. Cambrensis' first point of contact – Historia et Topographia Hibernia – finds its more forceful colonial place in Camden's inclusion where, it is suggested, it was a means for the chorographer to reveal a 'contempt' for the Irish 'past and present'. McCabe illustrates how the frontiers of Ireland had opened up significantly by the close of the sixteenth century, though A View of the Present State of Ireland tends to emphasize the wilderness of Ireland and the 'impenetrable fastnesses of the woods', which The Faerie Queene (VI iv 24ff) parallels in a density unrivalled in the poem's other books. Mindset Ireland 'a land of "hidden things" ' is colossally difficult to imagine in the episode featuring the Cave of Mammon. And there exist English explanations for the saluage nation, the Brigants of Book VI, and also the 'wood of error', which McCabe fastens to Lord Grey's campaign in the woods of Glenmalure. Derricke's woodcuts, contained in the Image of Ireland, captivatingly illustrate 'beyond the Pale' a 'legion of eye witnesses to the country's barbarity'. McCabe builds into this culture the episode with Pollente, taking Pauline Henley's line on the Irish context. But Spenser's 'Lee' is not the name of a particular waterway, rather a generic term for 'river'; however, this episode – which is certainly not Irish – can nonetheless tropically support an analogy with the decapitation of Sir John of Desmond. A rather oblique parallel is drawn between Lodowick Bryskett's description of Turlough Luineach O'Neill – 'the very roote, or seedeman of all the rebellion of Ireland' – and the Garden of Ate (IV i 19ff). But Ireland – 'an estate gone to seed' – finds a neat agricultural answer to this metaphor in Cιitinn's brilliant 'winnowing' of the proliferating colonists.

13. The relation between the salvage knight (Artegall) and Lord Grey is presented clearly. Masculine toughness – though tempered by what is written in A View – and hard-line Puritanism are facets of this Herculean deputy, whom McCabe describes coldly. The period of Grey's term of office was clouded by the Alenηon suit and the prospect of Elizabeth becoming the 'weaker vessel' in any marriage had obvious implications for Ireland. Grey's father, William, finds a political place in McCabe's history. And there are parallels between father and son in The Faerie Queene which might have been found – though, unknowingly, McCabe does actually make one such connection. A revisiting of Grey's atrocities finds the deputy at odds with his Queen who was more interested in 'fiscal than religious reform'. Grey's lavish gifts of land as a form of patronage are shown to be relevant to the Munera episode (V ii 25-6). More factually, we are made aware of Grey's lack of success in Ireland and his own reason for it – the Queen's lack of resolve (V xii 27). In the salvage knight we find 'the historical figure' transformed into the fictional hero. Finely traced here is a glimpse into Spenser's process of rewriting Grey: pushing him ever closer to Arthur also bolsters the difference between what history says about Grey and his own 'gentler self image'. Masculine power and feminine temperateness render him the ideal 'Ficinian blend' – a 'Cromwell before his time'. The famine, devastating Munster, culminates in the 'Anatomies of deathe' extract from A View, which forceful accounts of Ireland appropriately tend to quote. The horror Spenser experienced is seasoned with 'military success'.

14. There are fascinating explanations of sexual imaging from bisexuality to Artegall's shameful feminine indignities. An explanation of the behaviour of the salvage knight is found in the words of Irenius, who claims he was corrupted by those he sought to reform. But this is difficult to swallow when considering the role of Talus, which is one of violent activity very early in Book V and long before he reaches the salvage Ilands. McCabe's not inconsiderable understanding of Grey the man, and the office he held, does not fail to note the compromising circumstances in which he operated in Ireland. Grey's defence of Burghley's decision to act without orders in the Queen's best interests to seal the fate of the Queen of Scots, reveals a single-minded tactician.

15. McCabe puts forward a thesis about national identity in the chapter 'St George for Ireland', noting in particular how St George's Day had been appropriated to a 'New English and staunchly Protestant cause'. Certainly, Ireland was a ' "proving ground" for English identity', but, nonetheless, this is no argument for the 'clownishe younge man' pursuing his endeavours in that country. And similarly, the sonnets dedicated to Grey, Ormond and Norris cannot, in themselves, establish any context for Ireland in The Faerie Queene. The notion of devilry as Irish and Godliness as English is said to inform and drive the Protestant-versus-Catholic collisions in the poem's opening book; but this conflict need not represent the respective religious stances of England and Ireland, nor the conflicts between them, for the church wars of England can closely and solely answer this book's allegories. McCabe makes a good case the Jesuit James Archer as Archimago, and the repetitious nuns blindly repeating Pater nosters can take on an Irish context, but neither is exclusively Irish. The struggle for a 'georgic Ireland' – the 'redemption of a once "holy Island" ' (pre -Catholic) – is a brave cause for Redcrosse, but not the cause for which he is fighting, I fancy.

16. The focus of The Legend of Temperance is neither on the New World nor Ireland, I would say, but the concept of the Irish being a 'most intemperate' race is as good a way of suggesting an Irish connection as anyone can locate. Referring to John Upton's work, McCabe develops a curious Irish angle on Guyon's failure to cleanse 'Ruddymane's bloodstained hands'. And the 'Gnats' trope at the House of Alma – the most visited image by the pro-Ireland school of critics – can be found an alternative English explanation in Holinshed. The New World rhetoric in the proem, clearly relating to imperialist England and also to the golden Caves of Mammon, might have inclined McCabe to home in on Ralegh as Warden of the Stannaries and on his established industries in the West Country, as well as, if not rather than, on his mining interests in Munster. McCabe's conflation of Ireland and the New World is thought-provoking, since there are indeed ways of making the topographical images work to this advantage; but we can be undone here with Castle Alma. Certainly, Maleger and his crew appear to be a way of projecting Irish rebel culture. 'Like the kerns of A View' – as many earlier critics have claimed – they seem to fit the image closely, but this castle is an extensively detailed architectural centrepiece, and so must be capable of identification. The semantically confusing 'Marble far from Ireland brought' (II ix 24) does not help in the investigation, but I would claim that this 'Stone more of valew . . .' which did and does exist, can be found at the particular castle Spenser is allegorizing – which is not in Ireland. However, the Antaeus association with Maleger creates a fascinating Irish context. McCabe reminds us that Briton moniments 'record an "English" claim to Ireland,' (II x 41), but excitingly as this reads for us here, associating Eumnestes' chamber with the 'seat of Irish government' creates a bold but rather limiting fusion between the former and the 'archives at Dublin Castle'. The antiquarian parallel, however, is indeed remarkable. The idea of an Odyssean voyage to the Bower is aptly pictured by McCabe, as also are the similarities and dissimilarities observed between Guyon and antecedent voyagers.

17. The 'daungerous Lethargie' into which Verdant comfortably sinks finds parallels in the profiteering of 'Spenser's fellow "undertakers" ' – 'civil knights' can become 'savage beasts' when intermarried with Gaelic families. Here we are reminded how Irenius 'duly warns against "licentious Conversinge with the Irishe or marryinge and fosteringe with them" '. Because both Gaelic Irish and English colonists had proclivities towards degeneracy, the indigenous culture and miscegenative tendencies had to be suppressed. McCabe sees the mirror of degenerate Ireland in the Bower of Bliss, which like the New World once had been an untouched territory 'ripe for the possession of questing knights'. The licentious Irish women are mirrored in Acrasia; she swamps an effeminate Verdant, the unmanly English colonist. The Gaelic women, whom Spenser feared, like Acrasia, 'threatened to undo the colonial enterprise', McCabe says, by interbreeding. The colonial problem of human weakness drives a metamorphosing civility towards the degeneracy of Acrasia and her changelings – the Verdants of this isle. So McCabe thus finds a cultural correlation between the Bower of Bliss and aspects of colonial Ireland.

18. The fashioning and refashioning of myth and history provide a quite stunning insight into Irish origins, as we are shown how there have been recreations of its past. Holinshed reinforces the 'veracity' of Ireland's early history, a warning that is 'soon forgotten' as an Irish myth of origin is effortlessly transformed into an English myth of sovereignty, dutifully recorded in Briton moniments. And in A View, Spenser assumes that 'the Irishe are discended from the Scythyans' – a 'bloodthirsty, cruel, nomadic and idolatrous' race. Boemus's Ominum Gentium Mores, Leges, et Ritus, Spenser's source, was to colour his picture of the whole Irish culture in A View. Mingled with 'Gaulish blood' the Scythians supposedly came out of Spain bringing with them their 'Lettres'. McCabe shows how this history ironically falters somewhat in Spenser's keenness to establish an 'ethnic difference' for the Irish. But the 'Irish are closely akin to the ancient Britons', our poet appears to have forgotten. Another miscalculation, though not entirely Spenser's, concerns the 'romance of Brutus'. This fabricated sheen on what was a barbarous and primitive race, supplied 'two thousand years of missing history'. Britons, Saxons, Danes and Normans become united in Spenser's eagerness to present something of a genealogical precursor to the nation state.

19. And so Arthur and George, as 'foundlings of different races' discover their 'true' identities 'in the service of The Faerie Queene'. For Spenser, the corollary of this is that the Tudors represent a 'miraculous restoration of history, foretold by Geoffrey'. McCabe traces the struggle in The Faerie Queene between the Saxon and British races, although paradoxically, the ethnic assimilation of these two races is a successful process, which has 'far-reaching consequences in terms of Spenser's Irish policy'. In The Faerie Queene and in A View, there are contradictory stances towards Brutus. McCabe sees a 'delight' in a common mythology uniting ourselves with Arthur as fellow readers – Arthur as reader of Briton moniments and ourselves as readers of The Faerie Queene, though we can be reminded that the Brutus legend, both before and after Polydore Vergil, had its defenders proclaiming its gospel truth. And in Spenser, 'allegory transforms historical fictions into parables of political grace'; but Spenser, we are told, is no forger.

20. The 'somehow' of Briton moniments is contrasted with the historical pragmatism of Camden. Tracing the descent of the English language tends to undermine Spenser as historian, his 'myth of linguistic purity' being 'at odds with his myth of ethnic identity'. And, conveniently, Spenser 'sets out to recreate the Briton past in the image of the Tudor present'. Like Brutus, the English monarchs were responsible for civilizing peoples. Once Brutus was as 'warlike as the Irish', but he 'redeems England's ''gentle soyle" from the "salvage race" ' – the giants of the West – and so the Tudor Britons must do the same for Ireland. McCabe's fascinating history of how Wales was incorporated into England unearths a belief in the 'Welsh solution' for the Irish problem. McCabe's assertion that The Faerie Queene is 'about' Ireland, and more than this, his belief that 'Ireland is inescapable within it', is understandable but, without sustainable evidence for this, there is a risk of misrepresenting the poem. However within the current vogue for an Irish slant, McCabe surely is the most appealing writer in Spenser studies.

21. More closely anchored arguments are found in McCabe's discussion of Spenser's minor poems, particularly the politics of Mother Hubberds Tale and Astrophel. The complex psychology of Colin Clouts Come Home Againe is admirably brought into focus. Cynthia's courtiers are described by Spenser with the same pejorative epithets as 'the "wild" Irish' and yet there is 'a lament for the England of courtly patronage'. McCabe asserts that Colin comes home because 'his creator cannot'. So the word 'bodrag' in Colin – serving as just one illustration of a word which also appears in The Faerie Queene – may not merely reflect the poet's Irish background, but confirm Ireland as his very familiar second home. McCabe points to the ironies of such usages, given Spenser's 'morbid fear of infiltration' and relaxing in the 'colonial attitude'. He implies that in Chaucer Spenser did not find a national linguistic purity, and shows also, ironically, how 'Spenser's New English epic had adopted the antiquated diction of the Old English faction he opposed'.

22. That the Irish were of Scythian descent according to Spenser, enabled him to reinforce the 'salvage' inclinations of that race, and also to represent its Gaelic as a 'barbarous tongue'. Outside the Herodotean oikumene there are the barbarous lands, but ironically in Book VI of The Faerie Queene, the salvage man – inhabiting the borders of civilization – inclines to courtesy. The boundaries of the Pale were naturally subject to linguistic fluidity and E.K., voicing similar concerns regarding linguistic importation, objects to inkhorn terms in The Shepheardes Calender. Though linguistic hybridization blurred the 'mother tongue', Spenser's prediction that the abolition of Irish surnames would eradicate Irish nationality completely in a coercive and wholesale lineal cleansing would not be borne out, but in fact would only result in redefinition.

23. Gaelic is the language of the 'outlaw' and there is fine commentary on racial and social engineering and the problems associated with the notion of language banishment in an attempt to unite tongue and heart in English. Irenius and Eudoxus represent the English-speaking state in a 'rehearsed' dialectical argument admitting no inappropriate voice. A rather nice cultural contrast is drawn between this rehearsed dialogue and the salvage man (VI v 30); but, we find, the Gaelic tongue cannot be suppressed. There is a brilliant understanding of the unconscious shifts in language between the 'colonist' and his fellow countryman; so we find that the 'well' of Spenser's English is considerably defiled. McCabe is suggesting that language infiltration has, to both Irenius and Colin, blurred the concept of 'home'.

24. In Book IV, the river pageant places the Shannon of Ireland in 'pole' position. Coupled with the many Irish names of Book IV and the wider Irish allusions, this seems to point towards a very Irish-orientated Book IV. We must acknowledge, however, that the marriage between the Medway and the Thames happens in English seas, to which the Irish rivers have been invited. But again, neatly, the author turns towards colonialist politics in noting the restrictions placed upon them – the Irish rivers must become English and take English names if they want to join the 'wedding celebrations'. Referring to the three Irish rivers – 'the three renowned brethren' – and their relevance to the three sons of Agape, McCabe finds what seems a strong Irish parallel; but in fact these friends are not rivers and do have a firm existence on England's shores. And it is enormously difficult, if not impossible, to see how Irish topography is 'central' to the Legend of Cambell and Triamond. Ironically, from 'Spenser's point of view', there was, McCabe suggests, already too much 'friendship in Ireland'. But there are issues concerning a divided nation and divided court. McCabe splendidly illustrates how the union of lovers in Book IV is contrasted with the intentions of the river marriage – Elizabeth's union with England, which is 'beset with ironies'.

25. The official policy of extermination colours much of Book V, the most brutal of The Faerie Queene's books. While A View seems to find more temperate language to fit a largely similar purpose, McCabe argues that Spenser indulges violence in this book through the operations of Grey (Artegall) 'in the absence of royal favour'. Here we find the moral virtue of Justice being manipulated into a 'necessity of state' in Ireland. Thus many examples in Book V illustrate how events are resolved by violence – the Amidas/Bracidas arbitration being a notable exception. Despite the childhood training of Artegall, we are reminded that – among other deficiencies – he is lacking in any sense of equity, an equity of which Irenius thought Ireland had received too much. If civility is a reason for bringing the Irish to book, we are told that savages are not yet ready for it. They, pagans and savages, are, therefore, unreformable. It is a small puzzle why McCabe writes so little about the book's final canto, for here – the sole occasion in the poem – we are unquestionably on Irish soil.

26. Ironically, the 'single greatest threat to the Plantation of Munster came from the law courts, for the 'legal "quirkes" that Irenius spurns were frequently upheld in court'. The New World colonist, Ralegh, as a henchman to Grey's massacre at Smerwick, didn't always act in the interest of 'civility' in Ireland. And the slaughter – 'loving terrour' – in Ireland is particularly and graphically apparent in the methods of Ralegh's half-brother Humphrey Gilbert. McCabe, asking 'who is Irena?', poses an excellent question: for are we to assume that the rejoicing people at the death of Grantorto are not the 'native Irish' but rather royalist supporters of Elizabeth? Whatever the reasoning for slaughter in Book V and A View, there remains Spenser's deliberate replacing of 'rebelliousness' with 'evil', which McCabe cogently articulates, he himself characterizing the supposed 'evil' as more an expression of self-identity than behaviour which is gratuitously malign.

27. Savage courtesy, oxymoronically, expresses an exemplary ideal in Book VI. Many commentators may have recognized that in this book the violence is not over; in fact the book contains some of the most noxious incidents in the whole poem. Spenser, asserts McCabe, cannot 'displace' Elizabeth without displacing himself. Gloriana is in one sense displaced, but of course Elizabeth, present as the fourth Grace, is therefore an extension of the source of 'civility' provided by the traditional three. The abductors in this book (either two, or one and the same group) unsurprisingly stimulate McCabe's Irish interest, hence his further recourse again to Derricke's Image of Ireland. An interesting interpretation of Colin's lady as a New English colonist arises when seen in relation to the naked Serena. But in Canto x, he says what we all believe should be said, that in Book VI there is an 'incongruous conflation of the civil and the savage'. McCabe finds analogous material in Bryskett's A Discourse of Civill Life, in which is found 'English officials engaged in the process of "civilizing" an uncivil nation', bringing 'courtesy into the wilderness'. Again, it is difficult to imagine The Faerie Queene as a product of the 'New English community', though like Meliboe, Lodowick Bryskett – who has Spenser 'recount his plans for The Faerie Queene' – wished also to 'retire from public life'. The Irish angle concerning Sir Bruin – Sir Bruin's adopted son in fact – re-emerges again in a mode of what McCabe subtly terms 'regressive reclamation' by the Gaelic overlords. But Sir Bruin is thoroughly English.

28. I find McCabe's colonial explanation of the salvage man difficult to assimilate into the tenor of Book VI. The salvage man and the salvage nation are indeed separate entities and Spenser operates two cultures here; but neither is Irish, actually. The same applies to the Brigants, who though relevant to Eudoxus's comments on 'government and Civilitye', are not Irish. The conflation of Irish and New World cannibalism seems a good enough explanation of this behaviour in Book VI, but difficulty is yet again found on Mount Acidale where the central Elizabeth Tudor is metaphorically displaced by the marginal New English community. Removal from the court which is the centre of the political world – symbolized in the truancy of Calidore's weariness of such life – is brilliantly analysed by McCabe whose articulation of the matter of closure again offers exceptionally close and intelligent reasoning.

29. The chapter 'Diana's Spite' traces policy in Ireland following the death of Spenser. Lord Mountjoy's belated 'heroic victory' had 'eluded Elizabeth' and 'legends of the sack of Kilcolman' were already in circulation. There is useful reference to the political purpose and iconic purpose of maps. Burghley's annotations of maps of Ireland revealing 'strategic information' are contrasted with the practices of 'Gaelic clansmen who were killing English surveyors' to 'protect "discovery" of their territories', the targets of 'land-hunger'. And 'Colin Clout had "come home" only to die in neglect'. McCabe offers nothing new on the relationship of the Mutabilitie Cantos to the rest of the poem. The topography of Arlo, says McCabe, is 'highly self referential' as it is claimed to ' "over-looke" the Munster plantation and the adjacent counties'. Since we do find Ireland in the Mutabilitie Cantos, 'setting and theme coalesce'. Here, McCabe blends myth with Irish politics, locating the episode of Faunus and Molanna as an adaptation of a much earlier Gaelic version of the Ovidian theme, in which the second Earl of Desmond was said to have violated the goddess Aine. Spenser, as a critical Faunus, is afforded a 'critical perspective on Elizabeth's government;' and the 'cursed' lands of Diana cause Arlo Hill to 'wither'. They are then rejuventated at 'Nature's approach.'

30. McCabe, as Bart van Es has also recently done, reminds us that the 'Irish were accustomed "to make greate assemblies together upon a Rathe or hill"'. And this assembly has all the makings of a 'riot' and 'disorder'. 'Natures Sergeant', therefore, is not too much of a 'shock amid the vocabulary of classical mythology'. Arlo Hill witnesses a debate, or law case, summoned by an Elizabethan 'sergeant' whose legal parallel is found in the sergeants who summon 'witnesses before the courts'. Mutability is 'damned in her ancestry'. And because she is native to this salvage soil, she cannot be 'allowed to govern it'. So the concept of mutability amid the legal vocabulary and Irish setting is increasingly politicized. Change by politics, or more harshly by the sword, are the stated conflicting methodological tenets for a resolution in Ireland, which McCabe draws upon ingeniously in poetic parallel, telling us that 'readers preparing to undertake the enterprise of Ulster' would, in this unfinished work, so to speak, 'write the next canto themselves'.

31. Professor McCabe's concluding chapter – perhaps the finest hour of his labours – is 'The Response to A View', which collects a range of commentaries from Sir James Ware to Spenser's grandson, William. Ware's discomfort with the text stemmed from Spenser's extremist language, and several examples of his censorship and alterations are cited. References to Old English 'barbarity' are generally 'excised' and so too are grossly anti-Catholic outbursts. Virtually coincidental with Lownes' entry of A View in the Stationers' Register, O'Neill, operating a religious crusade, was active against the government's forces, rendering very remote any prospect of A View's publication. With the potential alienation of the 'oldest established families of the "Englishe Pale" ', this 'arch villain' might have benefited most from publication. Formidable criticism of Spenser's thrusts came from defenders of Gaelic Irish and Gaelicized Old English 'against the unjust imputations of the "new foreigners" ' – Spenser included. One such defender, Seathrϊn Cιitinn, understandably criticized the writing of Irish History or its culture without the basis of 'primary documentation'.

32. Spenser's ignorance of Gaelic genealogy – and the danger of a little knowledge of Gaelic language – resulted in the 'fabrication of false etymologies for family names'. Spenser, the poet, used etymology at will – as in The Faerie Queene – but in A View with the specific aim to 'demonstrate the inherent barbarity of the O'Byrnes'. These examples, and others, reveal weaknesses in the gleanings carried out by the Poet historical. Much later, Milton's response, Upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels, followed an outbreak of hostilities in the early 1640s, 'when Irish intervention in England was a perceived threat'. Milton, who sees the concessions made by Ormond and the 'Popish king' as fomenting the Irish rebellion, pursues Talus-like tactics in dismissing 'inconvenient' legal processes. He seems to 'identify new Presbyterian planters with the wild "Scottes and Redshankes" condemned by Irenius'. And it is the same author who smoothed the way ahead for the 'arrival of a new Lord Grey' – Cromwell, who was prepared to pursue similar hard-line tactics. Following his bloody campaign, the problem of under-paid, under-provisioned soldiers and land ownership loomed large across a strife-torn land.

33. One William Spenser, grandson of the poet, fell victim to land loss. He approached the Lord Protector. In the spirit of Edmund, William distances 'his family from the insurgents', casting 'himself as a former victim of Catholicism' and rejecting 'the baleful influence of an Irish Catholic mother'. Despite this and the excellent Protestant credentials under which Edmund Spenser was granted his lands at Kilcolman, the Spensers were 'never reinstated' but – as McCabe skilfully asserts – 'fated to share in the great diaspora lamented in Gaelic poetry'. In poetic mode, quoting anonymous Gaelic verse, McCabe solemnly captures the loss of Ireland's savage beauty: '…but now the woods are being felled, we must go across the bay, /and Sean O'Dwyer of the Valley, your game is no more'.

34. If some criticism has been levelled here it is because of the tendency of McCabe – often surreptitiously – to slip into his general argument some persuasive, but isolated, individual points about the relevance of Ireland in The Faerie Queene. These very largely – if not entirely – are scattered and unanchored and seem to result more from wishful thinking than to add up to a convincing overall case for an Irish mindset. By this is meant that the culture of Ireland in the hands of McCabe – and several recent critics – to me appears to be transplanted into a poem which is not in any sense grounded in Ireland. Nonetheless, Spenser's Monstrous Regiment stylishly incorporates what is felt to be an Irish mindset in The Faerie Queene. These days I am probably either alone, or among a very small minority in claiming that the poem – apart from Canto xii of Book V and the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie – has nothing whatever to do with that country. So for example, Stephen Greenblatt's assertion that 'Ireland is not only in Book V of The Faerie Queene; it pervades the whole poem' (Greenblatt 1980, 186) is, I believe, made entirely without basis or evidence.

35. But having so charged the author, it is no contradiction to celebrate his work as one of two major and outstanding books published by Oxford University Press in the same year, the other being Bart van Es's Spenser's Forms of History, which I reviewed in Renaissance Forum Winter 2003. Spenser's Monstrous Regiment ranks among the most brilliant contributions made in the last half-century or more. As perhaps with any astute writer on Spenser, there is here a very keen appreciation of the poet's convenient revisionism – a sometimes poetic and sometimes historical imperative – which confirms to a large degree the reputed 'political correctness' of a new church Englishman – the Poet historical.

List of Works Cited

Greenblatt, Stephen. 1980. Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press

van Es, Bart. 2002. Spenser's Forms of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.