A View of the State of Ireland: From the First Printed Edition (1633).

Edmund Spenser. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley, eds. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. xxvi + 197 pp. $21.95(pbk), $54.95(cl). ISBN: 0-631-20535-7 (pbk), ISBN: 0-631-20534-9 (cl).

1997 witnessed the publication of four books dedicated wholly or in part to the burgeoning field of study of "Spenser and Ireland": Maley's Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity, Hadfield's Spenser's Irish Experience, Christopher Highley's Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland, and David J. Baker's Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain. Critical attention to "Spenser and Ireland" is not new - in the early decades of this century a group of American scholars assembled valuable archival studies of Spenser's Irish experience. Recent efforts, however, enlarge and enrich the scope of interpretation by situating Spenser's career and writings within the broader cultural and political history of English colonial expansion within the British Isles. As Had field notes in his Introduction to Spenser's Irish Experience, Spenser's work "is defined by the Tudors' attempt to expand their boundaries and unify a nebulously conceived ideal of Britain, as well as exploit and subdue other nations and cultures" (12). Nowhere is this more pronounced than in Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland, one reason why this prose dialogue is an important document for Spenserians, Irish and British historians, and anyone interested in questions of (post)coloniality.

A View was entered into the Stationers' Register in 1598. It did not appear in print until 1633, however, when the Dublin antiquarian and historian Sir James Ware included it in his Ancient Irish Chronicles. Why did Hadfield and Maley produce an edition of Ware's text instead of an edition based on one of the many unedited extant manuscripts of A View? As they note, Ware's edition, with its "regularized" spelling and punctuation (xxv), was used by all subsequent readers until the publication of the two major twentieth-century composite editions. Thus, Wares View is an important document precisely because it was the text read by Milton, Wordsworth, and Yeats. And make no mistake, this is very much Ware's edition. Whereas Spenser wrote his Irish tract in the midst of the Nine Years' War, Ware published A View during a time of relative peace in Ireland (note that "Present" is dropped from Ware's title). Not wishing to renew hostilities between the Old and New English and the Gaelic Irish, Ware's preface states "we may wish that in some passages [A View] had bin tempered with more moderation" (6). As the editors point out, "Ware comments in his preface and his marginal annotations [that] he has in places modified the text of A View somewhat." Not only "somewhat," but also significantly. In fact, Ware's cuts to the text effect a remarkable tempering of Spenser's manuscript: e.g., Spenser's "the wretched Realme of Irelande" is changed to "the realme of Ireland." (Fortunately, this edition includes an appendix that houses the passages omitted from Ware's text.) It is surprising, then, to hear the editors claim that Ware's "changes are based on his own scholarly knowledge and designed to express what Spenser really meant to say or to correct his errors" (170). Is Ware's refashioned Spenser truly representative of "what Spenser really meant to say"? The first printed edition of Spenser's View provides no more insights into authorial intention than any other edition. Still, there is no denying the editors' claim that Ware's early modern edition, which is at times an interpretation, "is arguably the most significant text of A View" (xxv).

Since Spenser's prose dialogue is the centerpiece of much recent work on "Spenser and Ireland," a new edition of A View is long overdue. Spenserians have hitherto worked with either the richly annotated 1949 Variorum Vewe or W.L. Renwick's 1934 edition (reprinted by Oxford in 1970 in modernized spelling), and I assume that they will continue to cite these two composite editions. What Hadfield and Maley offer is not necessarily a completely re-edited View but rather an alternative edition. Indeed, their's is handy, useful, and affordable. It contains a map of Ireland, a "Framework of Events" from 1577 to 1641, a concise introduction that admirably introduces "Spenser and Ireland," some footnotes, Ware's annotations, a well-organized "Guide to Further Reading," a seven-page bibliography, and a (certainly too brief) glossary. This edition, to be sure, will be a particularly welcome addition to any undergraduate course or graduate seminar.

If this invaluable new edition of A View makes it possible for scholars and students to possess a copy of Spenser's Irish tract, Hadfield's book will prove an essential critical work on the colonial context in which Spenser fashioned himself a gentleman, as well as an author. Hadfield's central thesis is that "Spenser's status as an English poet in Ireland is not only crucial to an understanding of his work, but also stands as a demonstration that texts are inevitably caught up within the histories of nations and empires, both in terms of their inception and of their reception" (3). While such a statement should not come as a surprise to Spenserians, Hadfield sheds valuable light on the complex ways in which Spenser's texts are "caught up" in history. Informed by postcolonial theory, sustained by close readings, Hadfield's study explores Spenser's struggle to articulate not a homogeneous Englishness but a New English identity, an identity forged in Ireland (Munster) in the later half of the sixteenth century by incoming Protestant settlers who were forced to define themselves against both the Gaelic Irish and Ireland's Catholic Old English - a term coined by Spenser - community (i.e., the collective descendants of the Anglo-Norman invaders who partially conquered Ireland in the twelfth century and who primarily, but not exclusively, inhabited the English-dominated area surrounding Dublin, known then as "the English Pale"). After surveying the ideologically charged context of the 1590s, Hadfield turns to A View and does a stellar job of countering the impoverished view that "Spenser was a penpusher in the service of imperialism" by untangling a "fractured work" that disseminates "an absolutist politics" yet registers dissident traces of nascent republican thought. He also includes an informative discussion of the circumstances surrounding the "censorship" of A View - although his claim that "Spenser's dialogue was the only analytic, exhortationary work on Ireland entered into the Stationers' Resister during Elizabeth's reign" (82) seriously underestimates the affective power of John Hooker's The Conquest of Ireland (included in the second edition of "Holinshed's" Chronicles), which served not only as an impartial record or translation of past events but also to disseminate an ideology of conquest.

The final three chapters of Spenser's Irish Experience impressively trace the presence, or the unsettling presencing, of Ireland in The Faerie Queene and the Mutabilitie Cantos. Generally, much of this material builds on the important work of Louis Montrose, David Lee Miller, David Norbrook, and Maureen Quilligan. However, Hadfield's attention to the poems Irish context revises received narratives of the cultural politics of Spenser's epic romance. Ireland, we are reminded, was not a late entry into The Faerie Queene: "Even when Ireland is not represented as a figure or series of figures within the text," Hadfield astutely argues, "it determines the conditions of representation" (174). Thus, Hadfield is concerned not necessarily with locating Ireland in Spenser's texts; instead, he explores the ways in which Ireland informed and enabled their discursive production. A point that is powerfully maintained throughout this book is that "theological distinctions cannot be made without reference to questions of social being" (132). The appearance of the "salvage nation" of Book 1, for instance, is read in terms of both religious allegory and political and social "reformation," especially with regards to (New) English debates about the need to "reform" the Gaelic Irish and "degenerate," Grill-like Old Englishmen in Ireland who have gone native. This sets up a clever reading of Books 5 and 6 that foregrounds just how tenuous distinctions such as English/Irish, civil/savage become in the second edition of The Faerie Queene. Although an anxious Spenser emerges from Hadfield's reading as a radical Spenser opposed to the indecisive policies of an aging queen, the author refuses to valorize Spenser as a proto-republican. Ireland may have served as base for the oppositional politics of the upwardly mobile New English, but, as this book never fails to remind us, this homosocial colonial community provided the most vocal support for a violent "reformation" of England's Irish kingdom.

CHRISTOPHER IVIC University of Western Ontario