Spenser's Irish Experience is the first sustained critical work to argue that Edmund Spenser's perception and fragmented representation of Ireland shadows the whole narrative of his major work, The Faerie Queene, traditionally regarded as one of the finest achievements of the English Renaissance. The poem has often been read in specifically English contexts but, as Hadfield argues, demands to be read in terms of England's expanding colonial hegemony within the British Isles and the ensuing fear that such national ambition would actually lead to the destruction of England's post-Reformation legacy. Spenser should be seen less as an English writer and more as a new English writer in Ireland, his prose and poetry expressing the hopes and fears of his class. Where A View of the Present State of Ireland attempts to provide a violent political solution to England's Irish problem, The Faerie Queene exposes the apocalyptic fear that there may be no solution at all. The book contains an analysis of Spenser's life on the Munster plantation, readings of the political rhetoric and antiquarian discourse of A View of the Present State of Ireland, and three chapters which argue the case that the apparently Anglocentric allegory of The Faerie Queene reveals a land gradually—but clearly—transformed into its Irish other. Spenser emerges from this study as a writer whose experience in Ireland rendered him implacably opposed to the vacillations of his English monarch.

Exploring Edmund Spenser's writings within the historical and aesthetic context of colonial agricultural reform in Ireland, his adopted home, this study demonstrates how Irish events and influences operate in far more of Spenser's work than previously suspected. Thomas Herron explores Spenser's relation to contemporary English poets and polemicists in Munster, such as Sir Walter Raleigh, Ralph Birkenshaw and Parr Lane, as well as heretofore neglected Irish material in Elizabethan pageantry in the 1590s, such as the famously elaborate state performances at Elvetham and Rycote. New light is shed here on the Irish significance of both the earlier and later Books of The Fairie Queene. Herron examines in depth Spenser's adaptation of the paradigm of the laboring artist for empire found in Virgil's Georgics, which Herron weaves explicitly with Spenser's experience as an administrator, property owner and planter in Ireland. Taking in history, religion, geography, classics and colonial studies, as well as early modern literature and Irish studies, this book constitutes a valuable addition to Spenser scholarship.

This is the first comprehensive study of all the plantations that were attempted in Ireland during the years 1580-1650. It examines the arguments advanced by successive political figures for a plantation policy, and the responses which this policy elicited from different segments of the population in Ireland. The book opens with an analysis of the complete works of Edmund Spenser who was the most articulate ideologue for plantation. The author argues that all subsequent advocates of plantation, ranging from King James VI and I, to Strafford, to Oliver Cromwell, were guided by Spenser's opinions, and that discrepancies between plantation in theory and practice were measured against this yardstick. The book culminates with a close analysis of the 1641 insurrection throughout Ireland, which, it is argued, steeled Cromwell to engage in one last effort to make Ireland British.

This student edition is based on the first published text and offers an authoritative introduction, discussing the View's reception, relating it to Spenser's corpus as a whole, and summarising recent scholarship.

The first study of legal reform and literature in early modern EnglandThis book investigates rhetorical and representational practices that were used to monitor English law at the turn of the seventeenth century. The late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean surge in the policies and enforcement of the reformation of manners has been well-documented. What has gone unnoticed, however, is the degree to which the law itself was the focus of reform for legislators, the judiciary, preachers, and writers alike. While the majority of law and literature studies characterize the law as a force of coercion and subjugation, this book instead treats in greater depth the law's own vulnerability, both to corruption and to correction. In readings of Spenser's Faerie Queene, the Gesta Grayorum, Donne's 'Satyre V', and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale, Strain argues that the terms and techniques of legal reform provided modes of analysis through which legal authorities and literary writers alike imagined and evaluated form and character. Key FeaturesReevaluates canonical writers in light of developments in legal historical research, bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to works Collects an extensive variety of legal, political, and literary sources to reconstruct the discourse on early modern legal reform, providing an introduction to a topic that is currently underrepresented in early modern legal cultural studiesAnalyses the laws own vulnerability to individual agency.

This book provides an authoritative guide to debate on Elizabethan England's poet laureate. It covers key topics and provides histories for all of the primary texts. Some of today's most prominent Spenser scholars offer accounts of debates on the poet, from the Renaissance to the present day. Essential for those producing new research on Spenser.