In the first exchange between Eudoxus
and Irenius, Spenser presents two sets of images that provide
much of the figurative power behind the rhetoric of A View
of the Present State of Ireland. Eudoxus’s in medias
res reference to Irenius’s glowing characterization of the
fertility of Irish soil sets the agenda and the tone for the rest
of the treatise: “...I wonder that no course is taken for
turning thereof (the soil) to good uses, and reducing that salvage
nacion to better government and Civilitye” (43.5-6). Thus,
in its first lines, the text foregrounds the land as not only
the physical and symbolic background of the conflict between the
Irish and English but also as the primary motive, at least in
the view of the “New English” planter Spenser, for
the conquest and colonization of Ireland. The verb “reduce”
also resonates through the text as the method by which the soil
of Ireland must be “turned” before it can be replanted
and a new, civilized nation harvested.
Irenius’s first response to Eudoxus
quickly explains the condition necessitating such a reduction
and replanting: the specter of a disease which ultimately endangers
England’s own body politic. Eudoxus fears that God has “reserved”
Ireland in this “unquiet state still, for some secret skourge,
which shall by her (Ireland) Come unto England...” When,
a few pages later in the dialogue, Eudoxus claims the role of
physicians for himself and Irenius (and, by association, England)
and represents Ireland as a patient infected by people engaged
in evil practices, the narrative establishes the body politic
as the framing metaphor of the text and the structuring logic
of their discussion:"The which method we may learne of the
wise Phisicions which first require that the malady be knowne
thoroughlie and discovered, afterwards doe teache to cure and
redresse the same, and lastelei do prescribe a diet with streighte
rules and orders to be dalie observed for fears of relapse into
the former disease or fallinge into some more dangerous then it"
(45: 58-63).
Accordingly, the dialogue, with many
carefully plotted digressions, winds its way through a discussion
of the disease and its etiology, followed by a proposal for a
cure by reduction, and concluding with a plan to prevent relapse
through an almost totalitarian military and political occupation
and reconstruction. In the context of Spenser’s support
of Lord Grey’s starvation tactics during the Desmond Rebellion
and the dialogues later proposal to starve Irish rebels out of
the woods, the word “diet” in this representation
of the physician’s (England’s) methodology seems either
an almost unspeakably savage prolepsis or unforgivably careless
rhetoric. Unfortunately, in light of Spenser’s rhetorical
gifts, the latter is unlikely.
In the dialogue’s next paragraphs,
Eudoxus worries that Irenius’s arguments imply a criticism
of English laws. Irenius’s response again invokes the physician/body
politic metaphor. As he perceives the law, it operates on the
same principles as medicine. As medicine that cures one illness
can exacerbate another if a doctor does not make a proper diagnosis
of the patient’s illness, so then laws that are “good
still in themselves” can worsen the condition of a body
politic: “..we often see that either thoroughe Ignoraunce
of the disease or unseasonableness of the time or other accidentes
cominge betwene, in stead of good it (a medical treatment) worketh
hurte...So the lawes weare at firste intended for the reformation
of abuses and peacable Continuance of the Subjects, but are sithence
either disannulled or quite prevaricated thoroughe Change and
Allteracion of tymes...” (46: 82-88).
The notion of the body politick and
its deployment in literature was by no means original to Spenser.
It could almost be described as a “commonplace” of
Renaissance rhetoric except that such a description disguises
how provocative and contested a notion it was in the period from
Elizabeth’s reign through the English Civil War and beyond
. Frequently, writers and political theorists would deploy the
body politic metaphor, as Spenser does, to justify extensions
of authority over dissenters or the rebellious. In this figuring
of the body, the Monarch is the head and her or his subjects and
kingdom constitute the body. Dissenters, rebels, and other evil
doers are often then figured as infections or internal diseases
to the body politic of which it must be cured. Arguably the decapitation
of Charles marked the nadir of the nation as body politic (with
monarch at its head) metaphor’s rhetorical hold on the English
imagination, but in Elizabeth’s day, it was, as Spenser’s
own Fairie Queene poetically documents, arguably the ruling metaphor
of monarchical power.
While Spenser’s elaborate calculations
underscore the logistical difficulty of his conquest and occupation
plan for Ireland and the unlikelihood of its acceptance by a cash
strapped monarch, a disjunction between Spenser’s notion
of Ireland’s role in the English body politic and that of
the London ruling court had as much to do with the rejection of
Spenser’s proposal and the brutal measures of Lord Grey
as did this practical unfeasibility. As Andrew Hadfield notes,
the Queen and her court saw the Irish as members of the body politic
of which she was the head (xiv-xvi). The Irish--”natives,”
Old English (the descendants of the Anglo-Norman conquest), and
New English (contemporary transplants like Spenser himself)--were
all considered Elizabeth’s subjects. In this political context,
no plan as draconian as Spenser’s, no plan that would so
reduce and annihilate those subjects, could win the approval of
Elizabeth. Ironically, by calling attention to the body politic,
Spenser’s dialogue seems to underscore the primary argument
against it. On the other hand, perhaps the effort to inject this
language of the body politic as a frame for Irenius’s plan
was a calculated attempt to anticipate and rebut the objections
of the monarch and her court.
While the figure of England as physician
provides a scaffold for understanding Spenser’s representations
of Irish-English relations, his imaging of the land of Ireland
and the people who inhabit it constitutes the core of Irenius’s(who
speaks from Spenser’s perspective) rationale and structure
for the occupation of Ireland. In his introduction to A View,
Andrew Hadfield simplifies this projected relationship between
the Irish people and the Irish soil: “Having separated the
bad people from the good land, the second section (of A View)
provides Irenius’s proposed solution to the situation”
(Hadfield xix). Certainly, Irenius waxes poetic about the Eastern
part of the island, a “most bewtiful and swete Countrie...seemed
throroughe out with manye goodlye rivers replenished with all
sorts of fishe moste aboundantlye sprinckled with many sweete
llandes and goodlye lakes...adorned with goodly woodes fit for
building of houses” (62: 560-563). As so often proves the
case in colonial texts, the description of the land reveals the
mercantile drive of those who describe it. Offering a role call
of exploitable commodities -- fish, woods, fertile soil -- Irenius
figures the land itself as beckoning its colonizers from England:
“...Allsoe full of verye good portes and havens openinge
uppon England and Skotlande as invitinge us to Come unto them
to see what excellente Comodities that Countrye Cane afforde”
(62: 566-69).
In contrast to this welcoming and “invitinge”
land itself, the people of Ireland emerge in Irenius representation
as a “Contagion” on the land, conspiring “in
one to Caste of theire sujeccion to the Crowne of England”
(63: 589-90). Irenius, who later advocates a brutal “reduction”
of both people and land, here links resistance to English authority
with destruction of the land. Relating the Irish and Old English
supported invasion of Earl the Bruce, Irenius traces the roots
of the English contraction into the smaller geographic area called
the “pale”:
...thus was all that goodlye Countrye
utterlye wasted and lefte desolate as yeat it remayneth to this
daie which before had bynne the Chiefe ornament and bewtye of
Irelande for that parte of the Northe somtyme was a populas
and plentifull as anye parte in England And yielded unto the
Kinges of Englande (As yeat appeareth by good recordes) Thirty
Thousand makes of the old money by the yeare besides manye thowsands
of able men to serve them in theire warrs (Greenlaw 62: 553-558).
This bold rhetorical move encapsulates
the circularity of the logic of empire. The Irish, linked geneologically
to the Scots (as well as those hard to place but conveniently
“salvage” Scythians) have made desolate a part of
their own country the invading English had made productive. Even
as it blames the Irish for this “lamentable desolacion,”
the text highlights the export driven orientation of the English
colonization. Like a well tended field, the earliest English plantations
in Ireland had “yielded” money and men for the English
monarch. In this construction of the mercantile colonial economy,
the Irish are left no options. If they acquiesce to the cultivation
of their soil under English control, their harvest and their people
are shipped out to profit the English monarchy. If the Irish choose
instead to disrupt this English plantation, the Irish provide
a rationale for more intensified English intervention.
In a fascinating and provocative reversal
of the native Irish perception of England, Irenius narrates a
contamination of Ireland by the Irish themselves in the fourteenth
century. The geography of this rebellion complicates the good
land/bad people interpretive dichotomy suggested by Andrew Hadfield
and introduced earlier in this essay. While examples of English
productive use of fertile Irish land solicit future British colonialization
and while justifying previous plantation efforts, the text simultaneously
associates the rebellious Irish with mountains, “deserts”
(in this context “desert” refers to land which will
not generate agricultural production), and wild forests. Chased
off of the more productive, open soil by the first Anglo-Norman
Conquerors, the Irish retreat to the mountains, “where they
lived onely upon white meats” (Greenlaw 57: 416).
Although elsewhere the text links the
barbarous practices of the Irish to genealogical associations
with other races, in this line Irenius implies that wild places
generate wild behaviors. This reference to Irish dependence on
meat also reinforces the distinction between English planters
and Irish cattle herders throughout the text. Cultivation of land
and the consequent production of crops materially represent cultural
advancement. Good diet, in short, is a sign of affluence, power,
and culture. The Irish dependence on meat and their consequent
susceptibility to starvation itself, constitute a physical degradation
reflective of the cultural degradation of the conquered not the
economic or military practices of the colonizer. Thus, the English
figure their conquest and colonization as a cultivation of rich
soil contaminated by uncouth savages. The literal sowing of the
land generates the language of political control when the English
planters “speak of plantinge of lawes and plottinge pollicies”
(Greenlaw 55: 368-9) and struggle to “plante anye sounde
ordinaunce or reduce them to a Civil governement” (52: 261-262).
In contrast, the Irish roam the unproductive
parts of the land herding and, according to Irenius, stealing
each others cattle in an informal process described as “bollying.”
Irenius describes this nomadic and tribal animal husbandry as
a “Scithian or Scottish” custom that keeps the Irish
“upon the mountaine and waste wild places and removing still
to freshe lande as they have depastured the former.” “Depastured”
indicates the consumptive quality of this practice as Irenius
perceives it. In his view, what Eudoxus considers a charming bucolic
image evoking the pastoral, encourages barbarism: “Moreover
the people that live thus in these Bollies growe thereby the more
Barbarous and live more licentiouslye then they could in towns
using what means they liste and practisinge what mischiefs and
villanies they will either againste the governement theare...”
(98: 142-145). The bollies function as lawless spaces where rebels
can hide themselves and people who “thinke themselves haulfe
exempted from law and obedience” can steal from and murder
each other. Most importantly, this “taste” of freedom
inculcates the Irish with a spirit of resistance against English
rule. The Irish, “having once tasted freedom doe like a
steare that hathe been long out of its yoke grudge and repine
ever after to Come under rule againe” (98: 1548-1550).
The bestializing simile employed here
unveils a vexing tension within Spenser’s rhetoric. On the
one hand, Irenius needs to present the Irish as capable of reform
in order to placate a London based court and monarch who view
the Irish as subjects of the crown. Toward this end, the text
works to humanize the Irish, at one point proposing reeducation
schemes for Irish children whose reformation may even inspire
their parents to see the evils of their ways (218: 4935-4960 ).
On another level, however, Irenius cannot resist expressing his
disdain for the Irish by figuring them as animals. In the passage
quoted above, “steare” equates the Irish with the
wild cattle they heard and contrasts them with the tamed oxen
under the control of the well ordered English planter. In another
manifestation of this Irish as beast trope, Irenius describes
the Irish as colts tamed by the first Anglo-Norman invaders but
later allowed by weaker English administrators to “shoke
of their bridles and gegane to Colte anew more licentiouslye then
before” (49: 165-170).
A few pages further along in the text,
the colts have transformed into some sort of ravenous pack incensed
by English notions of law, “and the lawes themselves they
(the Irish) doe speciallye rage at and rend in peces as moste
repugnaunte to theire libertye and naturall freedom wich in theire
madnes they affects” (55: 558-60). The rhetorical leap from
the barbarism of “rending” laws--the ultimate guarantor
of civilization against the depredations of savagery--to cannibalism
follows quickly on the heels of this metaphorical wolf pack. Irenius/Spenser
testifies to having seen “an olde woman” who was the
foster mother of an executed Irish “traitor” “take
up his heade whilste he was quartered and sucked up all the blodd
runninge theareout Saying that the earth was not worthie to drink
it...” (112: 1937-40). Because it fetishizes the body and
breaches the Christian mandate to return the body to that whence
it came, cannibalism constitutes the apotheosis of paganism, the
ultimate descent into bestial carnality as both physical and spiritual
depravity.
In the context of this bestialization
of the Irish, the language of “reduction” seems problematic.
If the Irish are so degraded, why is it so necessary to “reduce
them to a Civil Governemnt”? Would not elevation better
describe the colonizer’s impulses toward the Irish “natives”?
It would if Spenser felt the Irish were “noble” savages
along the lines of the noble-by -nature “wildman”
of Book VI of the Fairie Queene. In A View of the Present State
of Ireland, the Irish have no such redeeming, inherent nobility.
More significantly, the practices which perpetuate their barbarism
take place in secret and wild places, quite literally “beyond
the pale”. Thus, Irenius’s applies sustained rhetorical
attention to Irish social practices that permit “stealthes
and spoile” such a boolying, the wearing of blanket-like
“mantles,” and even long hairstyles or “glibs.”
Irenius’s condemnation of these practices constitutes an
effort to expose them and the Irish rebels they cloak to the supervising
and controlling vision of the English planters.
The language with which the mantle
is criticized demonstrates this impulse:” ...the Outlaw
being for his manye Crymes and villanies banished from the Townes
and howses of honeste men and wanderinge in waste places far from
daunger of law maketh his mantle his howsse and under it Coverethe
him self from the wrathe of heaven from the offence of earthe
and from the sighte of men” (100: 1595-1600). Irenius juxtaposes
the civilized town with the “waste places” of the
Irish rebel and the cloaked wanderings of the Irish outlaw with
the “howses of honeste men,” dismissing the mantle
as a perversion of divine, natural, and human law. In the same
paragraph, Irenius expresses anxiety about rebels hiding from
English forces and lurking “in the thicke woods, “
a concern he returns to near the end of his proposal when he calls
for “Cuttingye downe and openinge of all places thoroughe
wodes so that a wide waye of the space of C. yards mighte be laide
open in every of them” (224: 5121-5125). With this proposal,
reduction begins to sound like a literal penetration of the dark
and secret parts of Ireland, a conquest and submission represented
as prerequisite to the construction of bridges and towns and figured
upon both the heretofore hidden and bestialized bodies of the
Irish themselves and the “waste spaces” of their land.
As Irenius images it, the British planters
must compel the Irish to submit themselves stripped of their clothing,
shorn of their locks, and driven starving from their secret and
wild places. In a description of the Munster famine offered up
by Irenius as an exemplum of the effectiveness of the kind of
military policy he proposes, the scope and horror of this New
English vision of Irish reduction emerges as do the Irish themselves,
dressed “only in tag and rag,” from “every corner
of the woods and glinnes (as) they came creeping forth upon their
hands, for their legges could not beare them”. Reduction,
then, is exposing the bestial Irish people for the animals that
they are as they crawl out from their hiding places and submit
to the ordering authority of English planters and law. Still describing
the Munster famine he witnessed, Irenius again evokes the specter
of cannibalism: “they (the surrendering rebels) looked like
anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their
graves; they did eat the dead carrions, happy where they could
finde them, yea, and one another soone after...” (Hadfield
98-103).
At first glance, Irenius’s claim
that that “there perished not many by the sword, but all
by the extremetie of famine, which they themselves had wrought”
seems a shocking rationalization. This is not necessarily an anachronistic
reading of this moment in Spenser’s argument, for the Queen’s
recall of Lord Grey does suggest that the monarchy was uncomfortable
with his brutality. Hewing too closely to the mortification Irenius’s
rhetoric inspires, however, may obstruct a useful recognition
of the consistency of the imagery. Irenius reasons as follows.
The Irish live in a “most rich and plentiful country, full
of corne and cattle, that you would have thought they should have
been able to stand long, yet ere on yeare and a halfe they were
brought to such wretchedness” because they could not order
and harvest the richness of their own land. Consequently, the
good of the Irish as well as the greater English body politic,
depend upon the willingness of the English to use force to expose
the disordered culture and economy of the Irish and subject it
to the good order of English society.
In this logic, the image patterns of
English colonist as planter and physician coalesce, “for
all these evils must first be cut away by a strong hand, before
any good can bee planted, like as the corrupt braunches and unwholesome
boughs are first to bee pruned, and the foule mosse cleansed and
scraped away, before the tree can bring forth any good fuite”
(Hadfield 93). The planter applies a “physicke” to
the body politic of the state by reducing--cutting back the corrupted
branches--of an Irish country and people represented as an infected
organism that can heal only when trimmed back and stripped down.
As shocking and explicitly brutal as
Spenser’s formulation sounds to us, it “reduces”
the avarice couched as paternalism (the wolf in a physician’s
clothing) logic employed to rationalize colonialism well into
the late twentieth century. We would probably better serve our
own cultural and historical moment by suspending our disappointment
with Spenser long enough to listen carefully to the evening news.
Works Cited
Egan, Jim. Authorizing Experience:
Refigurations of the Body Politic in 17th Century New England.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Hale, David George. The Body
Politic. The Hague: Mouton, 1971.
Kantorowics, E. h. The Kings
Two Bodies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Pisan, Christine. The Book of
the Body Politic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994.
Spenser, Edmund. A View of the
Present State of Ireland. The Works of Edmund Spenser.
Ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, Frederick Morgan
Padelford, Ray Heffner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1949.
Spenser, Edmund. A View of the
Present State of Ireland. Ed. Andrew Hadfield, Willy Maley.
London: Blackwell Publishers, 1997.
