A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596; 1633)

Abstract

No overview of the present state of Spenser studies would be complete without dwelling on the most vexed text in his corpus, a text which goes to the heart of Spenser’s life, thought, and politics. A View of the Present State of Ireland provokes violent and varied reactions amongst critics: ignored because it is by Spenser, as a perplexing piece of prose that poses problems for the poetry; or obsessed over because it is by Spenser, as the key to his complex allegory, particularly Book V of The Faerie Queene, or simply as the finest example of English colonial ideology in the period. The ‘present state’ the View describes is one of ongoing anxiety, hence the embarrassment and unease it generates, and hence also the lasting political frisson (Fréchet 1980; Gardiner 2001). If Spenser is our contemporary then his continuing relevance is most dramatically figured in the View, a tale of invasion, conquest, and occupation, of the devastation of war and the rhetoric of reconstruction. What work of Spenser’s could speak more powerfully to our present state than one that opens with a limited handover of sovereignty, offers an eyewitness account of a brutal beheading, lays bare the treatment of prisoners in a remote bay, and gives a chilling illustration of the fate of illegal combatants?