Abstract
Edmund Spenser’S presence in Ireland as a high-level political official from around 1588 until shortly before his death in 1599, combined with his use of epic and the genre’s investiture as propaganda in nation-making, has made him interesting to postcolonial theorists who wish to supply a longer historical perspective to Britain’s colonial relations and imperial aspirations. Since Stephen Greenblatt’s seminal study, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, scholarly investigation of English nationhood in the early modern period has focused especially on the vexed place of Ireland—and more recently—Scotland, Wales, and the Americas, in Tudor politics and ideology; and Spenser’s work has particularly drawn close scrutiny in this regard.1 In his essay on The Tempest in Post-colonial Shakespeares, Jerry Brotton notes how the scholarly focus of the last twenty years on “New World” contexts for the play reiterates a colonial impulse to elide the Eastern Other, and I would argue that the same case could be made for The Faerie Queene. “In dismissing the significance of the Mediterranean geography of [The Tempest], colonial criticism . . . leaves the play curiously one-dimensional, implying that the eastern frontier of the play’s geography is politically inert, thus suggesting that significant contemporary English expansion was confined to a western horizon encompassing the Atlantic and the Americas.
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Notes
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)
Andrew Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)
Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and ldentity (London: Macmillan, 1997)
Walter S. H. Lim, The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to Milton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998).
Jerry Brotton, “’This Tunis, sir, was Carthage’: Contesting colonialism in The Tempest,” in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), 31
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
Michael Murrin notes that in locating fairyland, Spenser “faithfully follows his sources, the Charlemagne romances,” and in imitating the Italian epics that derive from them, he “found faery in the Near and Middle East.” See Michael Murrin, The Allegorical Tradition: Essays in Its Rise and Decline (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), 137
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1995)
Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 14–16
See Jonathan Bengston, “Saint George and the Formation of English Nationalism,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 317–18
Hugh MacLachlan, “St. George,” The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 329
Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend (Legenda aurea) (Westminster: William Caxton, 1483)
See Stace, St. George, 11-13 and 43-50; Stace also mentions as sources circulating in the period Richard Johnson’s The most famous history of the seaven champions of Christendome (London: J. Danter, for Cuthbert Burbie, 1596)
Peter Heylyn’s The historie of that most famous saint and souldier… St. George of Cap-padocia (London: Thomas Harper, for Henry Seyle, 1633)
Alexander Barclay, The Lyfe of the glorious Martyr Saynt George (London: Richard Pynson, ca. 1530).
Ibid. 18, 14; Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, vol. 3, The Perspective of the World (London: Collins, 1984)
Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaare: From the Silk Road to Michaelangelo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
For the concept of hybridity as the negotiation of identity within imperialist discourses, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994)
Ania Loomba, “’Local-manufacture made-in-India Othello fellows’: Issues of race, hybridity and location in post-colonial Shakespeares,” in PostColonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), 143–63.
Virginia Mason Vaughan, “Global Discourse: Venetians and Turks,” in Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 24.
18. Vaughan, 24. See The Ottoman of Lazaro Soranzo, trans. Abraham Hartwell (London: Iohn Windet, 1603)
Abraham Ortelius, His Epitome of the Theatre of the Worlde (London: Adam Islip, 1603).
James G. Harper, “Turks as Trojans; Trojans as Turks: Visual Imagery of the Trojan War and the Politics of Cultural Identity in Fifteenth-century Europe,” in Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 167–68
Thomas Newton, “The Epistle Dedicatorie,” A Notable Historie of the Saracens (London: William How, for Abraham Veale, 1575)
Filiz Turhan, The Other Empire: British Romantic Writings about the Ottoman Empire (London: Routledge, 2003), 11
Berna Moran, Turklerle Ilgili Ingilizce Yayinlar Bibliografyasi. From the Fifteenth-Seventeenth Century (Istanbul: Istanbul Matbassi, 1964).
William Lithgow, The Totall Discourse, of the Rare Aduentures, and painefull Per-egrinations of long nineteene Yeares Trauayles, from Scotland, to the most Famous Kingdomes in Europe, Asia, and Affrica (London: Nicholas Okes, 1632), 162
Richard Knolles’s The Generall Historie of the Turkes, from the first beginning of that nation to the rising of the Othoman Familie: with the notable expeditions of the Christian Princes against them (London: Adam Islip, 1603)
Paolo Giovio’s Shorte Treatise upon the Turkes Chronicles, trans. Peter Ashton (London: Edward Whitchurch, 1546); see Turhan, 11–14.
22. Daniel J. Vitkus, “Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 146
Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
23. Perhaps most famously illustrating the Spanish presence in Ireland were the papal troops at Smerwick: an expedition of Italian and Spanish forces landed at Smerwick Harbor in County Kerry, sent to support the Munster rebels and massacred by Lord Grey in September 1580; see Ciaran Brady, British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
Edmund Spenser, The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., vol. 11, The Life of Edmund Spenser, Alexander C. Judson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1945), 20–23.
Edmund Spenser, A Theatre for Worldlings, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 472
See Vaughan, 15-16; and David C. McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990)
William Thomas, Historie of Italie (London: Thomas Bertelet, 1549).
Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 19–21.
Nabil Matar, “Queen Elizabeth through Moroccan Eyes,” Journal of Early Mod-ern History 12, no. 1 (2008): 55–76
Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Trafiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, vol. 2 (London: George Bishop et al., 1589).
Matar, 19. See also Vitkus, “Trafficking with the Turk: English Travelers in the Ottoman Empire during the Early Seventeenth Century,” in Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period, ed. Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Singh (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 35–52.
For a reading of Eastern elements in the episode, and especially Acrasia and Pha-edria as orientalized and sexually exoticized, see Marion D. Hollings, “Fountains and Strange Women: Eastern Contexts for Acrasia and Her Community,” in Consuming Narratives: Gender and Monstrous Appetite in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), 144–156
Harper, 160. The ubiquitous turban to denote the “Turk” is found in countless sixteenth-century tracts on the customs and apparel of peoples recorded in early modern ethnographies; see, for instance, François Desprez, Recueil de la diuersite des habits, qui sont de present en usage, tant es pays d’Europe, Asie, Affrique & Isles sauuages, le tout fait après le naturel (Paris: Richard Breton, 1564)
Nicholas Nicholay, The nauigations, peregrinations and voyages, made into Turkie by Nicholas Nicholay Daulphinois, Lord of Arfeuile, Chamberlaine and Geographer ordinaire to the King of Fraunce, etc., trans. T. Washington the younger (London: Thomas Dawson, 1585).
42. Robert A. Bryan, “Apostasy and the Fourth Bead-Man in the Faerie Queene,” English Language Notes 5, no. 2. (December 1967): 87–91
See Jerome Friedman, “Jewish Conversion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws and Reformation: A Revisionist View of Racial and Religious Antisemitism,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 18, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 3–30.
Commissioned around 1560, Philip’s Impresa recalls the imperial images on com-memorative medallions such as that of the Duke of Berry, issued in 1402 and depicting the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius in a horse-drawn chariot; see Brotton and Jardine, 11-32. Devised by Philip II “some time before 1566,” the Impresa appears in the 1566 and subsequent editions of Girolamo Ruscelli’s Le Imprese Illustri con espositioni, et discorsi (Venice: Francesco Rampazetto, 1566)
René Graziani, “Philip II’s Impresa and Spenser’s Souldan,” in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964): 322–24
Walter S. H. Lim, “Figuring Justice: Imperial Ideology and the Discourse of Colonialism in Book V of The Faerie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland,” Renaissance and Reformation 19, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 45–67.
For an analysis of the “discourse about human diversity” developing in the Renais-sance (x-xi), see Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
See Norman Daniel, The Arabs and Medieval Europe (London: Longman, 1975)
Scarfe Beckett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
See Svetlana Loutchitskaja, “L’image des musulmans dans chroniques des crois-ades,” Le Moyen Age: Revue d’Histoire et de Philologie 3-4 (1999): 717–35.
See William Wistar Comfort, “The Saracens in Italian Epic Poetry,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 59 (1944): 882–910
See Malcolm Bull, “Pagan Names in The Faerie Queene, I,” Notes and Queries (December 1997): 471-72; and Mark Heberle, “Raymond A. Moody (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), 81–87.
Tome Pires, The Suma Oriental of Tome Pires, an account of the East… written in 1512–1515, ed. and trans. A. Cortesao (London: Hakluyt Society, 1944).
Sir John Smythe, Certain discourses… concerning the forms and effects of diuers weapons and other verie important matters militarie…, etc. (London: Thomas Orwin, for Richard Jones, 1590).
See Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley [based on the Ware edition of 1633] (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 50
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Dismantling Irena: The Sexualiz-ing of Ireland in Early Modern England,” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker et al. (London: Routledge, 1992), 159.
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Hollings, M. (2009). Romancing the Turk. In: Johanyak, D., Lim, W.S.H. (eds) The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106222_3
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