Patricia Palmer. Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion.

Patricia Palmer. Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xii + 254 pp. bibi. index. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-79318-1.

Joan Fitzpatrick. Irish Demons: English Writings on Ireland, the Irish, and Gender by Spenser and his Contemporaries. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000. ix + 185 pp. bibl. index. $36.50. ISBN: 0-7618-1735-2.

Sir Humphrey Gilbert--Elizabethan explorer, soldier, author, and stepbrother to Sir Walter Ralegh--received commission in 1579 to help quell the

ongoing Desmond rebellion in Munster. His tactics were severe: mercy was offered once and only once; no parleys were tolerated before submission; and any rebel man, woman, or child encountered by his forces was no sooner taken but killed. All this was fairly routine for the Elizabethans in Ireland; what has made Gilbert famous among sixteenth-century Irish historians is a short anecdote rehearsed of him by one of his soldiers, the poet Thomas Churchyard. Arguing that unflinching severity is more efficient, and in the broader view less bloody, than misguided leniency, Churchyard recounts how Gilbert caused the severed heads of slain rebels to "bee laied on the ground, by eche side of the waie leadyng into his owne Tente: so that none could come into his Tente for any cause, but commonly he muste passe through a lane of heddes, whiche he vsed ad terrorem ... and yet did it bryng greate terrour to the people, when thei sawe the heddes of their dedde fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolke, and freendes, lye on the grounde before their faces, as thei came to speake with the saied Collonell." (Thomas Churchyard, A generall rehearsall of warres, f. [Qiii.sup.]) Apologizing for his colonel's cruelty, Churchyard reports that Gilbert "was out of doubte, that the dedde felte no paines by cuttyng of their heddes." But above all, as Churchyard notes, the means were justified by their end: Gilbert's state-sponsored terrorism reduced the province of Munster to "peace" in only six weeks.

This famous story, cited briefly by Patricia Palmer in Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland, stages the central concerns of the two books under review here. All of Gilbert's policies were designed to control Irish voices and, where possible, to silence them altogether. This is illustrated most disturbingly in the way he apologizes for his conduct, cunningly failing to address the charge of cruelty levied against him: with a kind of sick humor, Gilbert construes the charge to refer to his physical treatment of the corpses of the dead rebels, firmly ignoring--and thus silencing--the real charge of psychological cruelty (ad terrorem) inflicted on the captives approaching to "parley." Gilbert and Churchyard here create a setpiece example of the kind of linguistic conquest under scrutiny in Palmer's study of the Elizabethan English encounter with Ireland and the Irish language: an English imperialist adventurer, sometime champion of the English vernacular, brother to the poet Ralegh and captain to Churchyard, deliberately and violently erases Irish and its voice of dissent both from political negotiation, and later from the historical record. And in a final twist, Gilbert completes the defense of his conduct (in Churchyard's version) with an apt anecdote from the life of the cynic Diogenes of Sinope, a detail that Churchyard knows well not to omit: the classical humanist flourish legitimizes the performance.

Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland is an impressive attempt to reconsider such accounts, listening hard through them to the "clamorous silence" of sixteenth-century Irish voices of dissent. Palmer's meticulously (if sometimes excessively) documented study aims "to understand the nature of the encounter between Irish and English under the press of the Elizabethan conquest and to reinsert Irish interlocutors into the discussion in a way that avoids replacing a colonial imbalance with a postcolonial one" (6). With admirable theoretical evenhandedness, she begins by contextualizing the Anglo-Irish confrontation in the broader history of sixteenth-century colonial encounters, recruiting the extensive primary and secondary literature on Spanish conquest in the New World. While identifying many of the major issues at stake in an imperial policy on language and communication, Palmer cannily prepares the reader for her central enabling observation: in contrast to the "discourse of difference" adopted by the Spanish in their approach to, for example, the Inca and their lingua franca, Quechua, the Irish and their language were at once too dissimilar to qualify as "native" and yet not dissimilar enough to render them "exotic"; English governors, soldiers, and planters therefore had to resort to a practice of silencing and suppressing the Irish voice (like Gilbert) lest it should, in turn, supplant them. The core of Palmer's study, in her three central chapters, anatomizes the complicated Elizabethan policy of simultaneous effacement of linguistic difference and occlusion of Irish (chap. 2); registers the points of strain in this policy and the occasional hostile Elizabethan evaluations of Irish (chap. 3); and establishes the relationship of this linguistic encounter to the increasingly imperial political (and linguistic) agenda emanating from London (chap. 4). Following a second brief excursion to the New World in the wake of Ralegh's Virginia and Guiana voyages (chap. 5), Palmer returns in her final chapter to the paradox of the "clamorous silence" brought about by the "linguistic nationalism" of Elizabethan Irish policy, deftly teasing out the ways in which, although Irish succumbed to English as apolitical tongue, the language and its speakers continued to contest their effacement, both in Irish and, increasingly, in "lavish" English.

The chief value of this original study is its compelling insistence on the centrality of the English-Irish linguistic encounter to the Elizabethan development of a literary English, a language for the inchoate nation. The horrific lesson of Gilbert's silencing of Irish, not lost on Churchyard, was likewise well conned by the most famous of the New English poet-planters, Edmund Spenser. The Faerie Queene captures, and indeed is strongly energized by, the linguistic crises and paradoxes of the Anglo-Irish engagement, the violence of its political and military praxis, and the implicit demonization of the Irish "other." Palmer gingerly negotiates her way through the pitched trenches of modern Irish historiography to argue that incipient nationalism guided the English approach to Ireland and Irish, and it is no surprise that she repeatedly recruits Spenser's profoundly nationalistic epic romance to illustrate her claims. It is here, in the frequent points of crossover between Palmer's essentially historical study and Spenser's epic poem, that students of Renaissance literature will find readiest and fruitfullest use for this study. While Palmer's own analyses of Spenser's thought and writings are somewhat variable (for example, her account of a "dark" Spenserian linguistic epiphany a la Richard Waswo, achieved one night in the ruins of Kilcolman Castle while "watching the meanings of his allegory ramify and escape his intentions" [106], is dramatic but all-ways incredible), the link she establishes between the history of the English-Irish linguistic encounter and the great flowering of Elizabethan literature that marks the birth of English imperial expansion is very welcome; I hope that this study will contribute to the emerging recognition of the crucial importance of the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland to ethical and political analyses of the English literature of this period.

Edmund Spenser and The Faerie Queene are likewise the focus of Joan Fitzpatrick's account of the confrontation of the English and Irish in Irish Demons. This study of colonialism and gender in The Faerie Queene takes a brisk walk through the poem from book 1, "Of Holinesse," straight through to the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, locating and construing essentially all possible references to the Irish through targeted topics such as miscegenation, sexual promiscuity, Catholic idolatry, and the nature/nurture topos. Fitzpatrick does not prove herself a sensitive reader of Spenser's polyvalent allegory, which resists the exclusivity of her relentless and reductive historicization, with its lexis of "represents," "stands for," and "depicts." The poem likewise resists her attempts to interpret, for example, all instances of pagan worship as condemnations of Catholicism, or every representation of deviant sexuality (and there are many) as an attack on the "lascivious Irish"--a resistance that, when she does acknowledge it, she quickly goes on to ignore. A typical example of this agenda-driven interpretation is her assessment of the shepherdess Pastotella (FQ 6,9): "In the case of Pastorella, beauty is used as a metaphor for inherent nobility which implies civility, goodness and, most importantly, English Protestant superiority" (113). Whoosh. In these respects, the methodology of her study, and the blunt grossness of its claims, prove unconvincing.

On the other hand, Fitzpatrick's unforgivingly absolute take on Spenser's ideologies--like all extreme positions--yields to the skeptical shopper some enticing wares. The link she develops between the gold and silver limbs of the Lady Munera, pitilessly dispatched by the automaton Talus in FQ 5.2, and the Catholic custom of preserving saints' relics in limb-shaped cases made from precious metals is original and provocative. Similarly, although her reading of what she considers Shakespeare's and Spenser's shared participation in a contemporary propaganda battle over the reputation of Anne Boleyn (mother of "that Protestant whore" Elizabeth) fails to persuade, Spenserians would do well to return to the materials and pitch of her analysis (particularly the idea of Chrysogone as a possible shadow for Boleyn)--though perhaps with more restraint.

Both of these books insist on the fundamental importance of the Elizabethan Anglo-Irish encounter to the early development of English imperialism and, more importantly, to the revitalization of English as a competent literary, even imperial tongue. Both Palmer and Fitzpatrick see in The Faerie Queene, too, the astonishingly dynamic (and seductively beautiful) mix of violence, humanist rhetoric, nationalism, and slippery, almost-hypocritical doubleness characteristic of the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland. As Churchyard's account of Sir Humphrey Gilbert suggests, something catastrophic and horrible took place in Ireland in the sixteenth century, something that the (English) historical and literary record too often allows us to forget, or to soften. These studies forcefully remind us of the heavy price paid by the Irish, and by their language and culture, for some of the treasures of six-teenth- and seventeenth-century English literature; we can only lament, with the Irish proverb, maireann lorg an phinn, ach ni mhaireann an beal a chan: the trace of the pen lives on, but not the mouth that sang.

ANDREW ZURCHER

Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge