Abstract
How the English perceived the Irish in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has proved to be a matter of considerable debate among historians of the period. Assumptions that Ireland was regarded as a stepping stone on the way to the Americas and that the Irish were represented in terms of native American Indians, made by historians such as David Beers Quinn and Nicholas Canny, have been challenged in a variety of ways.1 Brendan Bradshaw has argued that the Irish were regarded in terms of a philosophical debate between an Erasmian humanism which posited that they could eventually be assimilated into an English polity and a pessimistic Calvinist-inspired Protestantism which argued that the defective will of the Irish meant that they had to be brought to obedience and order through the use of harsh coercion. Those in favour of assimilation tended to be the Catholic ‘Old’ English, descendants of the Norman settlers in Ireland, who were moving gradually towards an understanding of Ireland as a separate nation; those in favour of coercion were often the ‘New’ English, recent settlers who wanted to displace the ‘Old’ English as the governing colonial class.2
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David Beers Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1966);
Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: a Pattern Established, 1565–76 (Hassocks: Harvester, 1976);
K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny and P. E. H. Hair, eds, The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480–1650 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978).
Canny has provided a more nuanced reading of the evidence in his recent work: see ‘The Origins of Empire; an Introduction’, in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 1: The Origins of Empire, British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 1–33;
Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Sword, Word and Strategy in the Reformation in Ireland’, The Historical Journal, 21 (1978), pp. 475–502;
Brendan Bradshaw, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies trans. Nigel Griffith, introduction by Anthony Pagden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), pp. xxviii–xxx;
Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: the American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982);
Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), pp. 30–7.
Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470–1603 (Harlow: Longman, 1985);
Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: the Making of the British State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995);
Hiram Morgan, ‘Mid-Atlantic Blues’, The Irish Review 11 (Winter 1991/92), pp. 50–5;
Michael McCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986);
Joseph Th. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1986);
Ciaran Brady, The Chief Governors: the Rise and Fall of Reform Government in Tudor Ireland, 1536–1588 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
J. O. Bartley, Teague, Shenk in and Sawney, Being an Historical Study of the Earliest Irish, Welsh and Scottish Characters in English Plays (Cork: Cork University Press, 1954).
See Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds, Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
On the ‘British question’, see Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds, The British Problem, c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1996);
Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, eds, British Consciousness and Identity: the Making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
A succinct overview of rebellions is provided in Anthony Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions (Harlow: Longman, 1968).
Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process, 2 vols, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982);
Raymond Williams, ‘Civilisation’, Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976), pp. 57–60;
Bernard W. Sheehan, Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). See also Andrew Hadfield, ‘The English Conception of Ireland, c.1540-c. 1600, with Special Reference to the Works of Edmund Spenser’, unpublished D.Phil. Thesis, University of Ulster at Coleraine, ch. 4.
Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland trans. J. J. O’Meara (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), pp. 101–2, 106.
See also Expugnatio Hibernica (The Conquest of Ireland) ed. F. X. Martin and A. B. Scott (Dublin: The Royal Irish Academy, 1978);
John Gillingham, ‘The English Invasion of Ireland’, in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley, eds, Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 24–42.
See, for example, Sir George Peckham, ‘A true report of the late discoveries… of the Newfound Lands’ (1583), in Andrew Hadfield, ed., Amazons, Savages and Machiavels: Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 256–65.
Conveniently collected in Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish; J. P. Myers, ed., Elizabethan Ireland: a Selection of Writing by Elizabethan Writers on Ireland (Hamden, CI: Archon, 1983).
Geoffrey Keating, History of Ireland ed. D. Comyn and Rev. P. S. Dineen, 4 vols (London: Early Irish Text Society, 1902–13), vol. 1, p. 153.
Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 20.
For analysis and discussion, see Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race (London: Routledge, 1995).
See also Michel Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’, in Robert J. C. Young, ed., Untying the Text: a Post-Structuralist Reader (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 48–78.
Sir John Dowdall to Lord Burghley, 9 March 1596, Calendar of State Papers, Ireland of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1592, October-1596, June, p. 486.
See Hulme, Colonial Encounters, chs 1 and 2; D. B. Quinn, ‘New Geographical Horizons: Literature’, in Fredi Chiapelli, ed., First Images ofAmerica: the Impact of the New World on the Old (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 635–58.
See also Bernard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave now Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 178–87;
Andrew Murphy, But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Britain (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999), passim.
Reprinted in C. Litton Falkiner, Illustrations of Irish History and Topography, Mainly of the Seventeenth Century (London: Longman, 1904), pp. 345–62.
Barnaby Rich, A New Description of Ireland, wherein is described the disposition of the Irish whereunto they are inclined (London, 1610), p. 18.
Barnaby Rich, A True and Kinde Excuse written in defence of that booke, intituled A Newe Description of Irelande (London, 1612), pp. 8–9.
Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell through the Twelve Dominions of Germany, Bohmerland, Sweitzerland, Netherland, Denmarke, Poland, Italy, Turkey, France, England, Scotland&Ireland (1617), 4 vols (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1907–8), vol. 3, pp. 281–3.
See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1983); Hulme, Colonial Encounters ch. 1;
Bernard Sheehan, Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), ch. 2.
For details, see Charles Hughes, ‘Introduction’, Shakespeare’s Europe, Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary, Being a Survey of the Condition of Europe at the End of the Sixteenth-Century (London: Sherratt and Hughes, 1903), pp. xxxvi-xliv.
See Edward W. Said, ‘On Repetition’, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber, 1984), pp. 111–25;
Paul De Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1983), pp. 187–228.
See Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’, in Derek Attridge, ed., Acts of Literature (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 221–52;
Deborah L. Madsen, Rereading Allegory: a Narrative Approach to Genre (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), ch. 1.
See J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Critic as Host’, in Harold Bloom et al., eds, Deconstruction and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1979), pp. 217–53.
Sir William Herbert, Croftus Sive De Hibernia Liber, ed. and trans. Arthur Keaveney and John A. Madden (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1992), p. 83.
For some further examples see Andrew Hadfield and John McVeagh, eds, Strangers to That Land: British Perceptions of Ireland from the Reformation to the Famine (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994), ch. 3, ‘The Nature of the Irish’.
Sir Thomas Elyot, The boke named the governour (1531) (Menston: The Scolar Press, 1970), p. 40.
See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: the Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 97–8. See also ‘Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century’, in Chiapelli, ed., First Images of America pp. 561–80, for comments on the two poles of linguistic use in colonial texts.
See MacCarthy-Morrogh, Munster Plantation, especially ch. 2; T. W. Moody, The Londonderry Plantation, 1609–1641: the City of London and the Plantation of Ulster (Belfast: William Mullen, 1939);
Philip S. Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster: British Settlement in an Irish Landscape, 1600–1670 (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1994, rpt of 1984);
Raymond Gillespie, Colonial Ulster: the Settlement of East Ulster, 1600–1641 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1985).
D. B. Quinn, ‘“A Discourse of Ireland” (Circa 1599): a Sidelight on English Colonial Policy’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 47, sec. C (1941–42), pp. 151–66, pp. 164–6.
See Andrew Hadfield, ‘Briton and Scythian: Tudor Representations of Irish Origins’, Irish Historical Studies 112 (1993), pp. 390–408, pp. 405–6.
See Karl Bottigheimer, ‘Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Westward Enterprise, 1536–1660’, in Andrews, Canny and Hair, eds, The Westward Enterprise pp. 45–64; Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: the Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), chs 2–4;
Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie, eds, Natives and Newcomers: the Making of Irish Colonial Society, 1534–1641 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986), ‘Introduction’;
Nicholas Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World, 1560–1800 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
John Davies, Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was never Entirely Subdued (1612) (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1969), pp. 116–17.
As tends to be the assumption in Steven Ellis, ‘Henry VIII, Rebellion and the Rule of Law’, Historical Journal, 24 (1981), pp. 513–31;
Alistair Fowler, ‘Spenser and War’, in J. R. Mulryne and M. Shewring, eds, War, Literature and the Arts in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), pp. 147–64.
See Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1935), ch. 14;
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England (The University of Chicago Press, 1992), ch. 4;
David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 3.
For analysis of the use of the law in an Irish context, see Hans Pawlisch, Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland: a Study in Legal Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
John Derricke, The Image of Irelande (London, 1581).
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© 2004 Andrew Hadfield
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Hadfield, A. (2004). Crossing the Borders: Ireland and the Irish between England and America. In: Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502703_2
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