Barnaby Riche’s Appropriation of Ireland and the Mediterranean World, or How Irish is “The Turk”?

Abstract

Barnaby Riche was a prolific early modern writer who, as Eugene Flanagan puts it, is distinctive for having demonstrated “resilience in the shadow of [his] own marginality.”¹ Riche (or Rich) is best known, perhaps, for his Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581), a collection of eight Boccaccian novelle and a major source for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. He is also the author of an additional twenty-five works published between 1574 and 1617. Included among these texts are prose romances, The Straunge and Wonderfull Aduentures of Don Simonides (tome 1, 1581 / tome 2, 1584) and The Aduentures of Brusanus, Prince of Hungaria (1592) which, like most of the chivalric romances of the period, set their title characters ranging over wide expanses of geographic space, and engage in the fictional representation of imagined locations and cultures. Riche also produced texts, such as A Short Survey of Ireland (1609), A New Description of Ireland (1610), and The Irish Hubbub; or, the English Hue and Crie (1619), which grew out of his lengthy military service in Ireland,² and which engage in a less fictional way with the representations of cultural differences than do his romances and novelle. The three texts on Ireland named above are all texts of social criticism in which Riche attacks elements of English and Irish culture directly rather than, as might be expected at least from the Short Survey and New Description, works of ostensibly objective geographical and cultural description.