Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (eds.)
(Cambridge University Press, £35)
‘Ireland’, say Hadfield and Maley in one of the many rhetorical flourishes which enliven this collection, ‘was not a fixed, stable entity. It was a complex differentiated, heterogeneous and variegated text (their italics).’ In the wake of this ringing manifesto those anticipating the sustained application of post-structuralist critical techniques á la Barthes and Derrida or even the adoption of the new historicist perspectives á la Greenblatt and Patterson are likely, however, to be disappointed or relieved (according to taste) by the essays that follow. For the approaches they adopt are as varied—and the quality they display is as unstable—as the phenomena they attempt to discuss. In some cases also it seems as if the contributors have taken their editors’ injunction rather too literally; and the complex variegated text taken as representing colonialism in Ireland is all too predictably Edmund Spenser’s View of the present state of Ireland which is the subject of several essays and features prominently in many more.
The analytic attractions of Spenser’s radical, rich and self-inculpating tract are undoubted; but the importance which it assumes in so many discussions is symptomatic of certain preoccupations of the literary history of early modern Ireland as it is currently practiced. The first is a cautious concern to remain within the traces of the familiar printed sources. Spenser has been thoroughly edited, and so in possessing relatively few strictly textual problems allows for the free play of interpretation. But there is a disappointing reluctance of commentators to adventure further into uncharted manuscript materials, even when such exploration promises further support to their case. Thus Julia Reinhard Lupton provides a fine discussion of the role of Irish topography and Irish topynomy in Spenser’s work that is considerably more sophisticated than many previous endeavours in this area. But her sensitive unravelling of the ambiguities in the poet’s perception of place is by no means aided by a crude set of comments on the many reforming ‘plots’ or schemes of the period, in relation to which she seeks to locate Spenser, which she clearly has not studied and dismisses breezily as documenting ‘the rise of a professional class of English colonist-bureaucrats’. Again Lisa Jardine’s close examination of a note in Gabriel Harvey’s copy of Livy is a superb demonstration of how much can be learned about prevailing ideological attitudes in the most unlikely places; but her treatment is also marred by a failure to address the very great differences in motives and objectives which separated such propagandists of colonisation as Rowland White and Humphrey Gilbert. David Baker in his discussion of the fashionable subject of cartography, literature and colonisation writes confidently ‘that we can detect the traces of this topical bewilderment everywhere in the records English officials left’. But he bases this contention on some extracts from one printed source—the selection of Sir Henry Sidney’s letters made by Arthur Collins in the eighteenth century. It is unlikely that this sense of geographical bafflement would be sustained by even a brief review of the routine official reports made by Sidney himself or any of his fellow viceroys to Whitehall or, still less, by the merest acquaintance with the surviving records of the sixteenth-century chancery.
Baker’s essay raises a further characteristic feature of research in this area. That is its submission to the essentially simple master-narrative of colonialism: the story of how the hegemony of one culture over another was established and legitimised. Thus Baker effectively restates the relatively uncontentious case that map-making, surveying and plantation went hand in hand in Ireland, and offers also the comforting conclusion that such expropriative cartography was not ultimately successful, that the plotting of Ireland did not issue in the re-definition of the Irish. But the question which engages the historian is why such a simple relationship should have arisen in the first place? For half a century before the great surge in map-making, English officials had been traversing the country with lightly armed bodyguards reporting with remarkable detail on events in the regions and arbitrating on complex local disputes. And while the drawing up of maps was occasionally suggested as a useful desideratum, it never received priority: for all intents and purposes they already knew the way, whether through the services of local guides, the accompaniment of local lords or the provision of simple route maps prepared for the immediate purpose and destroyed. The appearance of formal surveys and maps toward the end of the century, therefore, signified not merely the acquisition of an aggressive new form of knowledge but the simultaneous loss of an older informal and accumulated body of experience. There is not one simple story to be told here: and perhaps there are more than two.
Such unwillingness to address the more complex questions concerning the cultural context out of which maps and of all the other ideological artefacts of colonialism arose is apparent in other contributions. Sheila Cavanagh provides a useful collection of late Elizabethan views on the Irish, rounding up once more the usual suspects, Spenser, Moryson and Rich. She rightly notes a real tension between such drearily familiar commentaries and the actual practice of several English policies in Ireland. But had she pursued this insight, she might have seen that such writings represented a polemic not simply against the Irish but against conventional English attitudes toward political and cultural reform which were seen by all three to constitute the most serious obstacle to their own agendas. Likewise, John Gillingham in an oddly uncurious essay on Giraldus Cambrensis argues forcefully that the twelfth-century writer continued to exert a dominant influence over the way the Irish were perceived and subordinated by the English four hundred years later. But again, if that is the case, the question is surely what gave rise to this extraordinary intellectual paralysis? And a more considered study of the polemical ways in which Giraldus was exploited, modified and ignored in early-modern Irish writing would reveal that he occupied a rather uncertain place within a much more complex debate on the English presence in Ireland than Gillingham has allowed.
The uncritical assumptions underlying some of the most recent work on the literary side may have stimulated the hard-nosed empiricism espoused by Hiram Morgan in his no-nonsense account of the career of Thomas Lee. Morgan’s research is thorough and his assessments judicious. But his understandable dismissal of Lee’s writings as being without literary merit may have missed the point; for whether he intended his work for wide circulation or not, Lee was pursuing his case within a cultural and ideological atmosphere which exerted a powerful influence over the structure, shape and rhetoric of his arguments. And the very fact that, as Morgan convincingly argues, that atmosphere was a good deal more complicated than many of us have appreciated requires us to pay even more attention to the unquestioned assumptions buried within Lee’s naïve modes of argument and expression.
In any case not all of the essays presented here have evaded interpretative and contextual ambiguities. Andrew Hadfield in a fine examination of Bale’sVocacyon argues that the pressure of religious change altered the character of the cultural debate in many subtle ways, and offers the powerful insight that ‘the identity was not a stable entity, an active and unified consciousness existing prior to the different identities it helped to construct’ but ‘a split screen of itself and its doubling’. Similarly, Willy Maley provides a pioneering account of the ambivalent ways in which Spenser’sView was received and used in the seventeenth century. But Hadfield does not pursue his own insight very far, and his assumption that Bale occupies a centrally representative place in the Reformation argument is questionable; while Maley’s subject is too big to allow for more than a tantalising sketch .
The most sustained effort at the relation of a text to its various contexts is to be found, however, in Brendan Bradshaw’s lucid study of Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn. With characteristic elegance, Bradshaw patiently peels away the rhetorical layers within which Keating’s historical studies are embedded, and demonstrates beyond argument that this was no mere antiquarian fossil, but a densely loaded ideological craft engaged with more complex contemporary political, social and religious issues than any previous comentators have realised. As always there will be some ground to take issue with Bradshaw’s confident exposition, some question as to why it was necessary to pass over the vast bulk of Keating’s work and to concentrate on its smallest part in order to sustain the case, and some question as to whether Keating and Patrick Darcy can really be seen to be speaking the same language of ‘Old English commonwealth patriotism’. But this is doubtless the effect for which he has striven. And in this he is himself representing the spirit of the finest essays in this book, seeking not new truths, but new questions to ask.
Ciaran Brady