Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton.

Willy Maley. Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton.

New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2003. xvii + 185 pp. + 10 b/w pls. index. $62. ISBN: 0-333-64077-2.

This book consists of seven previously published essays that relate certain texts to nascent English imperial aspirations, especially regarding Ireland. The essays, deserving of collective publication, reflect considered application of current postcolonial theory, but read clearly, intelligibly, even quickly.

The jewel in the crown of these chapters must be "Forms of Discrimination in Spenser's A View of the State of Ireland (1596; 1633): From Dialogue to Silence." Part close reading, part historical study, this essay might almost serve as a terminus a quo for future work on its subject. A View has loomed over Spenser studies during the last fifteen years in unprecedented ways, at least since the great awakening of Spenser criticism that began in the late 1950s. More often than not, cultural and new-historical opinion has found Spenser writing a blueprint for an Irish Holocaust; a direct line supposedly runs from the Black and Tans back to the tailor's son turned big landowner and colonial enforcer. For naive Spenser devotees like me, Maley has good news and bad news. On the one hand, he denies that A View is a founding document of racism; nevertheless, he contends, Spenser really aims at something perhaps more destructive of the Irish: effacing their ethnic identity. It is "by ignoring the Irish as such," ironically in identifying them with the English--the "Old English" who had resided in Ireland for centuries--"that Spenser is able to achieve the desired goal--the elimination of the native" (72). Debunking current myths of origin, Spenser (through Irenius, who in the convention of humanist dialogue both is and is not the author), argues that no nation can prove to have a single ethnic background. In Ireland many apparently Irish traits, like the wearing of the mantle, derive from English, Old English, ways.

The real problem, Spenser insinuates, lies not in race but in behavior, in the feudal ways of the Old English and their native Irish adherents ("gullible rather than guilty," 85), with both groups "refusing to make way for a new generation of reforming native English" (84). Maley writes: "If demonising is one colonialist approach to the Other, then dematerialising is another. Invisible natives are manifestly easier to handle than negative stereotypes" (85). I wonder if this reading of A View never surfaced in the past because ethnic identity was a subject distasteful to the liberal scholarly community and militated particularly against the American myth of the melting pot. I confess that dematerializing, as long as it is done in a melting pot, still seems preferable to demonizing, but then I live in Kansas.

The book's first three chapters, which cover Shakespeare, seek "to show the extent to which the work of England's national bard is bound up with the disputed borders of Britishness," (113) beginning with the histories and their wishful thinking about British unification--particularly redolent in Henry V. When Maley advocates establishing a British milieu for the plays, along lines projected in the recent work of Paul Brown, Francis Barker, Alan Sinfield, and others, I am confused. Is "British" not a melting-pot sort of idea that dematerializes constituents like "Irish"? The new British Shakespeare Association appears committed to repatriating "the banished bard of Britain" (29). Following a chapter on "postcolonial Cymbeline," Maley explores the politics of Holinshed's Irish history, derived from postcolonials like Gerald of Wales and Richard Stanyhurst, who perpetuate an image of Irish savagery. Elsewhere, Maley demonstrates the originality of Bacon's Certain Considerations in bringing together the subjects of Union and the Ulster Plantation. Perkin Warbeck is shown to deconstruct the Tudor myth while critiquing a generation of Stuart rule. Milton's 1649 Observations displays an anglocentricism dedicated foremost to keeping Ireland and Scotland subservient.

This absorbing book lacks source page numbers on the notes pages, vexing the reader no end; at least one note number has vanished entirely (n. 23, missing on 44). Damnable English orthography surely caused Maley's confusion of "prophecy" and "prophesy" (21, 39, 41). John Kerrigan's foreword on "Where is Willy Maley coming from" will thrill cultists of personality, but it also helpfully situates "the new British history."

RICHARD F. HARDIN

University of Kansas