Spenser's Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference.

Richard McCabe. Spenser's Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference.

Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xiii + 306 pp. + 12 b/w pls. index. illus. bibl. $60. ISBN: 0-19-818734-3.

Richard McCabe starkly defines the contradictions behind England's efforts to subjugate its first colony: "The act of suppression was regarded as an act of 'charity,' an attitude which eventually gave rise to the claim that the Irish were 'beholding to God for being conquered" (19). Godly motives justified brutal means since "the imposition of a 'loving terrour' [was] intended 'not only [to] subdue those people, but convert them'" (227). Edmund Spenser's entanglement in this enterprise is well known. His roles as secretary to Lord Grey, colonial planter, and author of the View of the Present State of Ireland all figure prominently in recent criticism. The View also argues for ruthlessness as a necessity because, "once entringe into this Course of reformacion, theare [must] be afterwards no remorse or drawing backe ... nor for Compassion of theire Callamityes, seing that by no other meanes it is possible to recure them" (92).

Spenser's Monstrous Regiment moves beyond deploring these attitudes from the high ground of post-colonial hindsight. Two distinctive strengths make this book especially original. First, McCabe's knowledge of Irish language and literature provides a richer context, compensating for the "rigidly anglophone" limitations of recent scholarship (2). Second, McCabe challenges prevailing assumptions about art's relationship to ideology. He recognizes art's subversive potential, citing a wonderfully apposite passage from Seamus Heaney's Pleasures of Gaelic Poetry: "poetry of any power is always deeper than its declared meaning" (5). Spenser's "art draws power from ideological contradiction. Spenser's poetics interrogate his politics so profoundly as to discover the heart of darkness at the centre of the colonial enterprise" (4).

McCabe's informed account of Irish poetry makes Spenser's struggle against its attractions more urgent and acute. The bard combined "the roles of poet, chronicler, genealogist, and counselor" (39) to attain a lofty status in Ireland's aristocratic social order. Spenser could easily envy his Irish rivals. Moreover, Irish bards mocked "the low social status of the New English" (40), deriding them as parvenus, and they dismissed English as "a 'barbarous' tongue'" (39), echoing the jeers of their adversaries. They eventually came to grief after their patrons were defeated and exiled, but Spenser too was driven from his land. These struggles were volatile and unpredictable, and McCabe gives a keen sense of their ferocity and Spenser's uncertainties in their midst.

Displacement and inadequate support exacerbated Spenser's poetic uncertainties. He dedicated The Shepheards Calender to Sir Philip Sidney and contemplated epic works celebrating the Earl of Leicester. Yet their heroic aspirations proved as disappointing as their limited patronage, and his elegies for both men are muted and delayed. In Colin Clout's Come Home Again, the poet turns his back on the court of "Cynthia and all her noble crew" (173). Hopes for noblemen like the Earl of Essex persist, but the "savage knight" looms larger in the later books of The Faerie Queene, more luridly marked by their Irish setting. This ominous figure is less an indigenous noble savage than a degenerate "gone native." This great fear of every colonist haunts both Old and New English. McCabe sees Artegall and, behind him, Lord Grey, as versions of the "salvage knight" (97-98), and "regression" overwhelms "reclamation" in book 4 (241). The "discordance" of these final books frustrates "resolution even on a fictional level" (231).

Irresolution is still more emphatic in "The Mutability Cantos," as is disregard for the queen. Cynthia is dethroned by the superior power of Mutability. In Epithalamion, "'Cinthia' is consigned to the role of potentially envious (and certainly barren) voyeur peeping through the bedroom windows" (248). In a cryptic discussion of these final works, McCabe suggests two sources of "secret comfort" (251). One is "poetry itself," but "a 'home' in verse" provides scant protection against war's ravages (251). The other was marriage and "'generation' ... that will counteract the country's 'degeneration' by restocking it with Englishmen" (249). But "degeneration" proved irreversible, even in his own family. His son married a Catholic, and his grandson was driven off his land by Cromwell's forces. Spenser's heir renounced Catholicism and reclaimed ancestral ties but still lost the property. McCabe concludes this fascinating book by showing how another Spenser shared the fate of those he sought to dispossess.

RICHARD C. MCCOY

Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York