Abstract
Early modern England’s general disavowal—via the widely disseminated Black Legend of Spanish cruelty—of any resemblance between itself and Spain has led critics to overlook the many connections between the two nations as imperial actors.1 Recent scholarship on Ireland’s key role in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature and culture has greatly contributed to our understanding of England’s—and later Great Britain’s—colonial project, but has generally overlooked the larger European, and, indeed, transatlantic context.2 Ireland functions as a key site for analyzing England’s tortuous relationship to Spain as both model and rival: while the conquest of Bacon’s “second island of the ocean Atlantic” provided more land for England in the period than any New World expedition, it remained for colonialists a source of great anxiety about Catholic rebellion and Spanish penetration. Representations of ideological and military encounters over Ireland reveal the resemblances hidden beneath England’s insistence on the differences between itself and Spain as colonial powers. An exploration of these problematic resemblances elucidates the discursive apparatus of the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, and, more generally, England’s and ethical integrity? What lessons are learned here that may apply in Ireland?
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Notes
For the problems involved in attempting to distinguish Englishmen from Spaniards in the colonial enterprise, see Louis Montrose’s “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” in New World Encounters , ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 177–217; Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 181–87, and Scanlan, Colonial Writing.
See, for example, Richard Eden’s preface to his translation of Peter Martyr’s Decades of the Newe Worlde (London: William Seres, 1555), where he expresses great admiration for Spanish achievements.
On the ways in which the Laudabiliter was gradually replaced by other justifications after the Reformation, see Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience , 93–95. In his Lords ofAll the World:Ideologies ofEmpire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500—c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), Anthony Pagden points out that Spanish scholars themselves were uneasy about basing Spanish dominium in the New World on the pope’s donation.
See one such episode in Edmund Spenser, A View ofthe State ofIreland , ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 105. Subsequent references in the text are to this edition.
“The Coppie of a Letter sent from M. Rider, Deane of Saint Patricks, concerning the Newes out of Ireland, and of the Spaniards landing and present estate there” (London: Thomas Man, 1601).
Payne, A Briefe Description of Ireland [1589], 51. Cited in Nicholas Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World 1560–1800 (Baltimore MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
Payne’s judgment is largely wishful thinking, as Irish exiles had long urged Philip II to launch an invasion of England from Ireland. See Niall Fallon, The Armada in Ireland (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), 1–16.
See K. Garrad, “The Original Memorial of Francisco Nunez Muley,” Atlante 2.4 (1954): 199–226.
As reported by Ginés Perez de Hita in his second part of the Guerras civiles de Granada , which describes how the Moriscos rebelled against such legislation, ed. Paula BlanchardDemouge (Madrid: Bailly-Bailliere, 1913), 2:3; the translation is mine.
Edward Daunce, “A Brief Discourse of the Spanish State, with a Dialogue annexed intituled Philobasilis” (London: Richard Field, 1590), 14 and passim.
Debora Shuger notes the connection between James’s use of patriarchal imagery and his argument that the king is properly above the law: “a good king, although above the law, rules with ‘fatherly love,’ while a tyrant, equally above the law, rules in his own interest” (Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture [Berkeley: UniversityofCaliforniaPress,1990], 156).
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene , ed. Thomas Roche (London: Penguin, 1978), V.ii.4. Subsequent citations are to this edition, by book, canto, and stanza numbers only.
John Upton, Spenser’s Faerie Queene … With Glossary and Notes , ii, 1758, 625–26; cited in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition; The Faerie Queene, Book V, ed. Ray Heffner (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1936), 226–28.
Roche’s note in the Penguin edition reads: “[Adicia’s] husband, the Souldan, probably signifies Philip II or the Pope, depicted as espousing injustice.” More strikingly, Rosemary Freemar observes: “Not at all remote is the role of the Souldan. He probably represents Philip of Spain who made Ireland his political victim” ( The Faerie Queene: A Companion for Readers [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970], 284). Here the Armada reading has fully incorporated English propaganda and the Black Legend.
In his notes to the episode in the Longman edition of the poem [London and N. Y., 1977], A. C. Hamilton observes that Souldan is “the title of a Mohammedan or Egyptian ruler.” He notes that “Since the term is used only in this episode, it may carry specific political reference,” but fails to elaborate.
Heberle, “Pagans and Saracens in The Faerie Queene ,” in Comparative Literature East and West: Traditions and Trends , ed. Cornelia N. Moore and Raymond A. Moody (Honolulu: College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature, University of Hawaii, 1989), 81–87.
James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 362.
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Fuchs, B. (2004). Learning from Spain: The Case of the Irish Moriscos. In: Rajan, B., Sauer, E. (eds) Imperialisms. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980465_3
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