These are all excellent points by Andrew and in regard to #1, what 
constitutes an "atrocity" in the period, and in Ireland, one might use the 
Smerwick massacre (whether or not Spenser was there), c. 1580, as a test 
case:  Lord Grey's and Irenius' defense of killing every captive was that 
the Spaniards (mostly Italians) surrendered unconditionally and that, as 
they operated under no formal declaration of war from a recognized nation, 
but were only an expeditionary force sent under the pope's banner (i.e., the 
antichrist), then they were essentially lawless, nationless Al-Qaeda-type 
operatives (today's "enemy combatants") to do with as he wished.  The last 
thing he wanted, also, with the imminent threat of Desmond joining them from 
nearby, was a baggage train of that many prisoners; no convenient Guantanamo 
Bay in the vicinity.  Best get rid of them and spare an officer or two for 
ransom.  Grey also arguably set an example that helped forestall future 
Spanish-Italian invasions until 1601, at Kinsale (not counting the haphazard 
Armada landing in Ulster and Connaught); he was thinking ahead:  "foreseen 
[foreseeing] necessity" in action.

As far as I know (which isn't much), Grey acted according to international 
law, although the victims might protest that the English, and Grey, had no 
true legal jurisdiction over Ireland, since Queen Elizabeth lost that right 
(given to Henry II by Pope Adrian) upon her excommunication with Regnans in 
Excelsis (c. 1570); this was a topic discussed by O'Neill and the Spanish 
emissary during the 9-Years' War, as a component of offering the crown of 
Ireland to Phillip II.

Also, the Irish and Catholic English sources (O'Sullivan Beare and Jesuit 
Nicholas Sander; cf. McCabe 86n.34) declare that Grey gave his word that 
their lives would be spared, hence provoking their surrender, and that he 
betrayed his own word, which is unforgiveable.  (McCabe and Canny etc. are 
all very good about this episode and more precise; McCabe also gives 
sophisticated analysis of the counter-discourse of the Spanish legenda negra 
and how it compares to New English behavior in Ireland.)

Whom do we believe?  Was Grey in any case extreme?  (How many cases of 
massacres of 600+ prisoners are there from the Netherlands?).  Grey also 
broke the legs in many places of the company's English and Irish 
fellow-travellers, including a woman, and let them squirm all night in 
prison before executing them brutally the next day, perhaps as a means of 
extracting information... they must have been near-delusional by the time of 
their deaths [Note, too, the recent deaths of two Afgani prisoners in 
American military custody, by homicide.  Oops.  What's not suprising but 
shameful is how little press this incident has received in the U.S., though 
inflaming the Europeans.]  Was this legal?

Martial law was, nonetheless, used to a greater extent by the New English 
administration in Ireland than in any other country in Europe, including the 
Netherlands (D. Edwards); though suspended c. 1589(?), it was reinstated c. 
1597 (ergo Edwards' argument that the View, c. 1596, was written expressly 
for the purpose of encouraging the re-institution of martial law), just in 
time for Essex #2 (who got his own personal copy of the View... as a 
prompt?).  Martial law not only did away with legal niceties but gave the 
governor ownership of the transgressor's lands.  Massacres abounded:  among 
the more infamous, Rathlin Island in Ulster by the first earl of Essex 
(1575; by his own account, over 600, mostly women and children, killed); 
Mullaghmast in 1577(?) by Henry Sidney (cf. superb recent article by Vincent 
Carey in Irish Historical Studies; on Sidney's violence, cf. also Willy 
Maley's review of Ciaran Brady's edition of Henry Sidney's Irish Memoir, in 
the most recent Sidney Journal); Ardnaree (c. 1585? ambush and slaughter of 
over 1,000? Galloglass mercenaries and their families) by Richard Bingham, 
Governor of Connaught... who, if indeed the model for Talus, demonstrates 
that Spenser's allegorization in FQ did not go too far in disassociating the 
means from the individual agent.  Nasty stuff.  --TH (apologies for length)

ps.  I am no Spenser-basher... I find his poetry reprehensibly violent but 
also exciting and beautiful and sublime, the View less so.  He's good, in an 
ambiguous way, for Irish studies.

pps.  An interesting corollary to this discussion is the Stanley 
Fish-inspired debate (cf. TLS) on whether Samson Agonistes (ergo Milton?) is 
the equivalent of a suicide bomber.


>From: Andrew Zurcher <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: careless relocations
>Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 16:52:02 +0000
>
>Hi again,
>
>
> > I find myself more or less convinced of Spenser's implication in English
> > atrocities in Ireland.
>
>'Atrocity' is a word that is part descriptive, part prescriptive. Would
>Spenser have understood Grey's actions in Ireland to be 'atrocities'?
>Would the Irish? Would the Spanish? A lot of what we sometimes
>anachronistically read as complaints about abuse of human rights turns
>out, for someone at least, to boil down to opportunistic factional
>politics at court (quite similar to today). I don't object to the idea
>that there are basic fundamental rights and wrongs, and believe that
>state-sponsored massacre or planned starvation of civilians qualify as
>'bad'. I could not do these things. And yet 'atrocity' is a term that
>presupposes a context within which these acts might be understood to be
>'atrocities', and I'm not sure that that context obtained. I would like to
>understand more about this. If you mean to say that you find what Spenser
>and his contemporaries did in Ireland to be atrocious, I'm with you there;
>but I do think we need to be careful not to let that language slip into
>judgment *within* the historical frame, when that kind of language, and
>that kind of judgment, might not have been available, useful, relevant,
>etc.
>
> > At the same time, judging from the level of emotion
> > and care given to the posts in this thread, I'm impressed that there is 
>felt
> > to be so much at stake in arriving at a decision on this question.
>
>I would like to register, for my own part, that my own commitment to the
>question of Spenser's argument in A view (does he advocate certain
>policies or not? What are the limits on his advocacy? What were his
>intentions?) is 1. primarily historical rather than literary in interest,
>and 2. in any case quite specifically tied to the issue of what Spenser
>'might have thought about the current situation'. Any emotion that
>blossomed in my account of Spenser's poetics or rhetorical/military
>strategy in A view stems from this root, my quite overwhelmingly emotional
>preoccupation with the current disaster in US/UK foreign policy.
>
> > Biographical Spenser is always fascinating, but are people expecting to
> > adjust their understanding of Spenser's poetry by way of those 
>biographical
> > narratives?  Even FQ Book 5, with all its historical allegory and what
> > Goldberg has called a "straitening" of Spenser's art, is far from a 
>clear
> > and present view of things--perhaps despite Spenser's fiercest 
>intentions.
>
>I'm skeptical of this idea of a 'straitening' of Spenser's art in Book V,
>generally speaking. Tasso argues in the Discorsi that the heroic poet
>ought be careful not to let his allegorical intentions obscure the
>historical narrative or blunt the moral purpose; for him, that was bad
>craft. I think Spenser has a different view about the relative importance
>of history and philosophy in poetry--at least I register a different
>practice, and suspect that it is, in line with what he writes in 'A letter
>of the Authors', not just a practice but a thoughtful understanding. If
>Spenser's historical method is intended to 'fashion' and to 'move' his
>reader to ethical action--here taking ethics in its etymological and
>Aristotelian sense of 'practice' rather than 'armchair moralizing'--then
>the need to *instantiate* his examples right down into plain, worldly,
>mucky soil becomes necessary at some stage in his composition. I do think
>in part that Book V is testing, putting pressure upon this move from the
>study to the battlefield, asking what kinds of compromises might be
>involved, what kind of contamination might be inevitable. For example, the
>displacement of Artegall's agency, for certain bloody and summary acts,
>onto Talus is I think quite important; in no other quest does the knight
>so obviously delegate responsibility for unpalatable actions. Think back
>to Pontius Pilate in the delve of Mammon, who cannot rinse the 'filthy
>feculent' muck of sacrilege (O sacrilege) from his hands. Artegall has
>that kind of contamination fairly well sorted. But is it ethical?
>
> > Can authorial biography provide us with a stable hermeneutics for
> > reading an author's works?  Must our approach to Spenser turn on the
> > question of his biography?  If not, then why are the stakes so high
> > here?
>
>These are very different questions. First of all, what *can* provide us
>with a stable hermeneutics for reading an author's works? Biography is
>perhaps one valid way, insofar as we acknowledge its limitations and do
>not claim more for it than is due. But 'must our approach to Spenser turn
>on the question of his biography?' Is there only one approach to Spenser?
>Of course not. Does that mean we ought not to consider how his biography,
>how the historical events of his experiences both in Ireland and in
>England affected his poetry, how they gave voice and material to his
>speculation and philosophy? Of course not. He is screaming at us, all
>through Book V, that we had better not.
>
>The stakes are high for some, here, I think because they want to totalize
>one or another approach to Spenser. I wish we wouldn't. The stakes also
>seem to be high because we are probably all a bit tired with warplanes
>passing overhead (from Lakenheath in Cambridgeshire, every night at dusk
>for the past two weeks), and the knowledge that bulldozers can crush a
>human skull without, it seems, meaning to.
>
>It seems I have 4¢. Sorry.
>
>andrew


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