Dear Andrew,
I'm happy to disagree with you, too. I apologize for putting you on the
defensive, as I certainly don't believe that you would wish to justify
Spenser's (New) "English policy" in Ireland. As for so "carelessly" quoting
Spenser's complicated tract "to my advantage" (something I think the great
man would have approved of in diplomacy such as ours), in my defense I must
again (more carefully) cite McCabe's *Spenser's Monstrous Regiment* pp.
91-2, wherein McCabe quotes the same passage that I did in the context of
discussing the infamous famine passage a few sophisticated pages earlier.
He reads it as explicitly encouraging tactics which include famine... indeed
McCabe goes a step farther, and reads this later passage as a promotion of
FURTHER famine to outdo the horrific (ca. 30,000 deaths) Munster desolation,
but this time in UIster, where the Desmond domino would now be relocated to
topple the O'Neills and O'Donnells:
"Far from recoiling from the experience of the 1580s Spenser [NB: not
"Irenius"] demands that it be repeated in the 1590s and, to the extent that
Ulster is less fertile than Munster, the results of a Northern famine will
be proportionately worse: 'they would quicklye Consume themselves and devour
one another' (*Prose* [i.e., *View*], 158). The plan is not just to repeat,
but to outdo, the horrors of recent history by suppressing the impediment of
'compassion': 'Therefore by all meanes it muste be forsene and assured that
after once entringe into this Course of reformacion, there be afterwardes no
remorse or drawinge backe, for the sighte of anie suche rufull obiectes as
muste theareuppon followe...' " (McCabe 92)
Truth be told, my careless "this" does indeed refer not to famine
specifically, but rather the "necessary" "spoilation" by English soldiers in
reaction to the same by the Irish (whom you, mysteriously, label as
"itinerant," as if they didn't live on or near or have prior claim to the
land they spoiled and were spoiled on?). Please note, however, that
spoilation (including billetting or "coign and livery") takes food from the
mouths of people and helps to starve them. Our argument on that point, at
least, is academic.
Nor is McCabe howling in the wilderness. The same argument regarding the
general tenor of the famine passage and its barbaric environs as distinctly
unsympathetic, even opportunistic, towards the Irish has been argued by
Hadfield ("The Course of Justice: Spenser, Ireland and Political Discourse"
*Studia Neophilologica* 65 (1993): 190), Maley (*Salvaging Spenser*... 64)
and others, as you well know. Among historians, as opposed to these
historically minded critics, the question is not whether Spenser promoted
brutal policies (including famine) in Ireland but how unique or innovative
he was in doing so (Canny vs. Brady). To therefore claim, as you do, that
Spenser is "not proposing that they be starved," is to row against the tide;
I'd rather surf with it. Insofar as Spenser promoted the use of martial
law in Ireland, as the Young Turk of Cork, historian David Edwards, has
recently argued ["Ideology and experience: Spenser's *View* and martial law
in Ireland." *Political Ideology in Ireland, 1541-1641* Ed. Hiram Morgan.
Four Courts Press, 1999, pp. 127-57], then he condoned the tactical use of
starvation:
"In the *View* Spenser [not "Irenius"] advocated the wholesale slaughter of
the Irish as a regrettable but necessary step in the furtherance of
England's long-term interests in the country, and he maintained that this
could best be accomplished by a process of all-out war, characterized by
state-induced famine and summary executions." (Edwards 127). We might
consider Edwards extreme but he recently organized and promoted his views at
a recent one-day conference, held in April in Collins Barracks, Dublin, to
very little protest from an erudite audience.
Certainly Spenser is no Pol Pot; wholesale genocide is not an option, given
that he did believe in pardons on (New) English terms (by contrast, the more
moderate Archbishop Loftus and Ormond proposed pardoning Desmond himself),
and given that he and Raleigh needed people around to make money for them
once the dust cleared. But the dust needed to be cleared as surely as parts
of the population (so kindly "relocated" to either hell or Connaught, as a
later phrase would have it... cf. again McCabe for a comparison of Grey to
Cromwell, and Maley *Salvaging...* 124 ff on the coincidental purpose of
finally publishing the *View*, in 1633, as incitement for the earl of
Strafford, who arrived in Ireland that year).
Indeed, I would be so cynical as to argue that the famine passage, at least,
is a perverse advertisement for the fertility of the land: fertilized with
corpses, left fallow for the next occupiers (policy papers on Ireland
usually advertised the concommitant fertility of the land). Perhaps to read
it this way is to read it "allegorically," whatever that means in the
context of the *View*; to read it with this slant is not to "disassociate"
the author, or even Irenius, from the horror of the episode, but to invest
them (and the optimistically-opportunistically minded reader) further in it,
to clarify through hidden meanings the direction of Spenser's pragmatic
purpose --whatever failure of moral philosophy may conveniently occur in the
process-- in Ireland by demonstrating how even the most pitiable episode has
an ulterior motive linked to an image of re-fertilizing (with re-conquest)
of the waste soil.
From this perspective, there IS a moral weight attendant upon the pragmatic
and thriving in desolation: the hopeful replanting of the wasted soil with
New English Protestantism (as the desolate Irish refugee, the green-sick
Una, is promised a fertilizing by RCK), which is also a recurrent goal
directing much of the allegory of the Faerie Queene; I think that McCabe is
saying as much in his constant recircling, musically, to the planting motif
in his most recent book (apologies to Prof. McCabe). This re-planting drive
appears here, in the View, as well. M.M. Gray's long-ago comparison of the
wording and image of Despair to the wording and image of these ghostly
crawling carrions in the *View* therefore has a prophetic power in the light
of current criticism; Una rescues RCK from Despair --or, read in one way,
the Munster waste post-Desmond-- by frankly confronting it and instead
proffers herself, and hope, in Despair's place; just as the words of Spenser
(via Irenius, whom I don't find fully ironic) consoles the horrified reader
of the Munster landscape in the *View*, by first demonstrating its (and our)
fallen and pitiable condition, but then signifying ways of controlling and
reinvesting in the landscape and ourselves [intriguingly, the View may have
a bifold rhetorical structure that belies its smaller, sentence-level
ironies: the second half increasingly promotes the idea of order through
militarized construction (note Lord Deputy Perrot's interest in building
forts and bridges by the number 7), as a correction on the chaotic
ethnographic jumble of the first half; in the center of the View, roughly,
is a turning-point(?) built on a discussion of the use of religion; in it
Irenius determines the need to continue with reforming the body instead of
the soul, the sword over the word, as necessity demands for the purpose of
the country's and colonizer's rejuvenation: "for ere a new be brought in,
the old must be removed." Renwick ed. (c. 1970), p. 86; this edition has
170 pages of *View* text); such poise, Irenius!)]. If Irenius must don the
salvage rhetorical garb of Lucian's scythian Toxaris in order to describe
this wasteland, it doesn't mean that his well-structured Pauline breastplate
doesn't glimmer from beneath and prevent a more inward corruption of his
very soul, while peeping from beneath to shine into the eyes of the careful
reader, to help his spirit and profits grow in that dark corner of Ireland.
Secretary Spenser is no Clarion; he spies the secretive webs of Irish policy
and rhetoric about him, and helps to weave them, and knows how to imitate
the spider to crawl in and out of them, all the while trusting that he is
sheltered by his holy hidden exoskeleton from the winds of heaven's wrath.
--TH
>From: Andrew Zurcher <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2003 00:03:26 +0000
>
>Tom,
>
>Yes, I had thought to have heard from you on this point, or some other.
>Aside from the important question of voice and view (now *there's* an
>interesting word), which Terry has already raised--and to her short
>question I would only stress again that Spenser is an author/poet who
>demonstrates throughout his works his consummate grasp of the problems and
>opportunities of pitching voice, and who recognizes that his audience is a
>group trained up in the habits of ironic self-distancing--I would note:
>
>1. You are quoting very reductively from an *extremely* long and
>complicated *set* of passages, which cover many different subjects; and
>the way you have reduced the excerpt here confuses things to your
>advantage. 'This' of line 3 in your quotation, for example, does not refer
>to 'famine' in line 2, as you would lead us to believe, nor does the
>'course of reformation' of the last part refer directly to this process of
>famine. For example, the passage that you quoted so carelessly mixing and
>matching antecedents actually reads, in part (i.e. without ellipses):
>
> yett is it most true and the reason also very
> readie for ye must conceyve that the strength
> of all that Nacion is the kerne Galloglasse Stocaghe
> horsman & horseboye the which havinge bene never
> vsed to haue any thinge of their owne & nowe livinge
> vppon spoyle of others make noe spare of anie thinge
> but havocke and confusion of all they meete with whither
> it be their owne Frendes good or their foes, And if thei
> happen to gett never soe great spoyle at anie tyme
> the same they waste & consume in a tryce as naturally
> delightfull in spoyle thoughe it doe them selues noe
> good & on the other syde whatsoever they leave vnspent
> the soldier when he cometh theare, spoileth & havocketh
> likewise soe that betwene bothe nothinge is verye
> shortlie lefte & yet this is verie necessarie to be don
> for the soone finishinge of the warres & not onlie in this
> wise but also all those subiectes which border vppon those partes
>are
> either to be removed & drawen awaye or likewise to be spoiled
> that the enemie maie finde noe succoure therbie for what the
> soldier spares the rebell will surelie spoyle: /.
>
>Where you write 'this is verie necessarie to be don...', linking 'this' to
>famine, in fact Spenser's 'this' refers not to famine, but to the spoiling
>of the soldier in the clause previous--this use of the demonstrative
>pronoun, taking up the matter of the immediately preceding clause, is
>quite characteristic of Spenser. Irenius is apologizing for the necessity
>of spoiling the householders who happen to be in the path of the itinerant
>rebels who require cutting off. He is not proposing that they be starved.
>He also offers them relocation.
>
>2. It is crucial to recognize that Spenser's limited support for 'seige'
>tactics is restricted to what he identifies as an ultimately
>intransigently recalcitrant element. This is not the population we are
>dealing with here, but a comparatively small group of people that Spenser
>(and many Irish people with him) considered to be outlaws. Spenser goes
>much further than many other contemporary tracts in suggesting that a
>universal pardon be offered first. He also promotes pretty strenuously
>various plans for resettlement and naturalization of the Irish after
>conquest--strategies designed to strip them of their culture and
>ideological commitments, but also to create peace for them, as well as for
>the English. Again, while I am not defending the ideological position, I
>do think it important that Spenser devotes so much time to the propaganda
>campaign both before and after his military solution. This has
>traditionally been read as icing on the cake of his calculated
>colonialism, and I don't want to dispute that, much; but I think there may
>also be value, when looking at the problem from the perspective of someone
>who was in the colonizing party, in considering that many *lives* are
>spared by privileging propaganda (what we now call diplomacy) over ethnic
>cleansing. Why does Spenser take such time over the cultural polemics of
>his treatise? He imagines the Irish surviving, and adopting English law,
>much as the English had adopted Norman law.
>
>3. I am not defending English policy, or even Spenser, much. I
>acknowledged this. I do think that Spenser's approach to the question of
>the pacification of Ireland is more complex than is generally assumed by
>casual readers or by scholars. I do think that there is a kind of optimism
>to his approach to the situation, an optimism that I do not see much of in
>our current engagement with the Middle East. I do think that there are
>deep-running misgivings in A view, misgivings that have something to do
>with dialogue form, but which are also betrayed by apparent
>inconsistencies in the program of the treatise itself. I tend to think
>that the treatise has to be read pretty carefully as a *whole* text, and
>that it has to be considered carefully in relationship to the other kinds
>of advice and the other plans that were circulating at the time.
>
>4. I am perfectly happy to disagree with you.
>
>
>andrew
>
> > "Yet sure in all that [Desmond] war there perished not many by the
>sword,
> > but all by the extremity of famine, which they themselves had wrought...
> > havoc and confusion... yet this is very necessary to be done, for the
>soon
> > finishing of the war... Therefore, by all means it must be foreseen and
> > assured that after once entering into this course of reformation, there
>be
> > afterwards no remorse or drawing back, for the sight of any such rueful
> > object as must thereupon follow nor for compassion of their calamities,
> > seeing that BY NO OTHER MEANS IT IS POSSIBLE TO RECURE THEM and that
>these
> > are not of will, but of very urgent necessity." --Irenius, *View* (ca.
> > Smerwick and famine discussion), emph. added; also McCabe, *Spenser's
> > Monstrous Regiment* 91-3. I think "foreseen...necessity" and blaming
>the
> > victim trumps allegorical disassociation here. --Tom Herron
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