Solon His Follie, or, A Politique Discourse Touching the Reformation of Common-weales Conquered, Declined or Corrupted.

Richard Beacon. Ed. Clare Carroll and Vincent Carey. (Renaissance English Text Society, 7th ser., vol. 18.) Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1996. xlviii + 166 pp. $26. ISBN 0-86698-194-2.

The colonial experience of the English in early modern Ireland has recently captured considerable scholarly attention, and its importance in the history of the Atlantic world has been widely acknowledged. The continual failure of the English to extend their rule over the Irish in the late sixteenth century spawned a lively pamphlet literature. Many of these tracts, while revealing the cultural stereotypes and prejudices of the English, were simple "position papers," but some of them also exhibit broader intellectual curiosity. Among these by far the best known is Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland. Recently, however, we have received valuable editions of two other comparable treatises - William Herbert's Croftus in 1992 and now Richard Beacon's Solon His Follie, or, A Politique Discourse Touching the Reformation of Common-weales Conquered, Declined or Corrupted, carefully edited and annotated by Clare Carroll and Vincent Carey almost exactly four hundred years after its first publication in 1594.

Solon His Follie is an allegory set in sixth-century B.C. Athens, where Epimenides, Pisistratus and Solon discuss the policy of Athens (i.e., England) towards its colony Salamina (i.e., Ireland). The theme of the work is "the sound & universal reformation of this your Realme of Ireland," as Beacon put it in dedicating the work to Queen Elizabeth I. While this reformation sometimes refers to the completion of the English conquest of Ireland, Beacon also intended to explain how the Irish commonwealth could be reformed in earnest. He did not share with Spenser the extreme demonization of the Irish, but instead insisted on persuasion and the implementation of English law in Ireland.

The edition contains much of value. The text is meticulously edited; the editors have traced down Beacon's numerous references to classical and Renaissance sources and have written a substantial introduction, which firmly places Beacon's work both in its contemporary political context and in its intellectual context of Renaissance political theory.

Vincent Carey, who writes on Beacon's Irish experience, demonstrates his involvement in the disputes among the New English in Ireland and mentions how Beacon, being removed from his official post in Munster, intended the treatise as a way out of his political exile. But while Carey carefully places Beacon in the contemporary political context, he unfortunately does not point out, as he has done in his subsequent work on Beacon, that Solon His Follie was intended as a veiled assault on Lord Burghley's protege Sir William Fitzwilliam, and could thus be seen as a minor part of the power struggle between Burghley and the earl of Essex.

In her part of the introduction, Clare Carroll treats Beacon's sources and his intellectual setting. She discusses Beacon's sources and his dialogue form, notes the Ramist resonances of the treatise and its millenarian allegory. Slightly disquieting, however, is Carroll's suggestion that Beacon was privy to Thomas Starkey's unpublished Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (xxxiv-xxxv, xlii, n. 61). Moreover, although she points out Beacon's wide usage of Machiavelli's Discorsi, she unduly downplays the centrality of Machiavellian republicanism in Solon His Follie, claiming that it is "at times more an attempt to impress the reader with the author's erudition than to express policy" (xxxviii). Of course, Beacon also uses Jean Bodin, but his whole reform program is nevertheless thoroughly based on Machiavellian republicanism. Ireland was to be organized as a mixed state. To avoid tyranny, the kingly element should not only be constantly rotated, but also carefully watched by a powerful council. Beacon also believed that a chief aim of the government was to preserve the liberty of the people and, to achieve this, the people must be given the opportunity to check the few - in other words, they must be granted the guardianship of their own liberty.

Such reservations aside, the editors and the publisher are to be commended for this scholarly and finely produced edition, which makes this important treatise readily available for students and scholars alike.

MARKKU PELTONEN University of Helsinki