'More ado in Ireland . . .'
THE TUDOR COURT: Fintan O'Toole
An anxious England saw dark forces at play on its neighbouring island
Queen Elizabeth 1: her court and advisers surmised that the Irish derived from barbarians. From a painting by Isaac Oliver, courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland.
In 1588, a year after the young Hugh O'Neill visited her court, Queen Elizabeth was entertained by a play written by a group of students that included the great thinker Francis Bacon. Called The Misfortunes of Arthur, it was set ostensibly in the distant past, but was full of topical allusions. Chief among them was that source of perpetual anxiety for the Elizabethan court: Ireland. The play drew on the legend of King Arthur's struggle with his ultimate nemesis, his treacherous nephew Mordred. In a dumb show, Mordred is followed by "a man bareheaded, with long black shagged hair down to his shoulders, apparelled with an Irish jacket and shirt, having an Irish dagger by his side . . . the Irishman signified Revenge and Fury."
Even before the Nine Years War presented the Tudor court with its most profound political crisis, the image of the wild, vengeful Irish haunted the dreams of the English elite. Many of the great writers and thinkers of the greatest era of English literature had profound connections to the conquest and plantation of Ireland. Philip Sidney's father served three terms as lord deputy of Ireland and he himself wrote a Discourse on Irish Affairs. Walter Raleigh helped to suppress the Desmond rebellion in Munster in the 1580s and acquired huge estates around Youghal and Lismore. One of the greatest of English poets, Edmund Spenser, spent most of the 1580s and 1590s in Ireland, first as an official, then as a planter at Kilcolman Castle in Co Cork, and wrote much of his most important work there. English writers of the era imagined that the Irish, however geographically close to themselves, could not be possibly be civilised Europeans. They tended to see Ireland physically as an alien terrain of mists and bogs. In Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour, a spirit is said to "run over a bog like your wild Irish". In Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, a woman's body is imagined as the world, and the question "In what part of her body stands Ireland?" is answered "Marry, sir, in her buttocks. I found it out by the bogs."
They also surmised that the inhabitants of such an uncivilised place could not really be enlightened people like themselves and imagined that they must really derive from the prototypical barbarians, the nomadic Scythians of the Eurasian steppes. Edmund Spenser concluded that the Irish were made up of many races but that "the chiefest . . . I suppose to be Scythians". Fynes Moryson reported that "the Gangaui, a Scithean people comming into Spaine, and from thence into Ireland, inhabited the county of Kerry".
Moryson also found in Kilkenny that "some Irish (who will be beleeved as men of credit) report of Men in these parts yeerely turned into Wolves".
This Ireland of Scythians and werewolves was the Other against which an emerging, increasingly self-confident England defined itself. The conquest of Ireland was, for the Elizabethans, intertwined with the colonisation of America. Many of those who fought in Ireland in the 1580s (Raleigh, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Richard Grenville) had helped to launch the first English colony in Virginia, Roanoke.
Equally, many of those who were founding the second such venture at Jamestown as the Earls were leaving Ireland, had been involved in the Nine Years War. When they encountered Indians in Virginia, they tended to see them as being like the Irish. Captain John Smith, who had fought in Ireland, compared the deerskin robes of the Indians to "Irish mantels". Thomas Harriot compared the Indians' spear-fishing to "the manner as Irish men cast darts".
WHEN THEY SAILED away from Donegal in 1607, the Earls left behind not just a broken and defeated Gaelic order, but a profound mark of their own on what would come to be seen as the golden age of English literature. Their rebellion influenced English culture in the 1590s and early 1600s as profoundly as Vietnam influenced American culture in the 1960s and 1970s. As Christopher Highley has put it, "Ireland assumed a crucial symbolic place in the formation of emergent English notions of nationhood, empire and cultural self-understanding."
During the reign of Elizabeth's successor, James I, the Keeper of Records at Whitehall, Sir Thomas Wilson, claimed to have discovered in the files "more ado with Ireland than all the world beside". In this light, it is striking that direct references to the Irish revolt are relatively rare in the work of contemporary playwrights. But this may simply be a result of censorship. In the official text of Henry VI, part 2, for example, there is anachronistic news from Ireland "that rebels there are up/And put the Englishmen unto the sword . . ." In an unofficial text, which may be closer to what was actually played on stage, the message to the Queen is more explicit and alarming:
"Madame I bring you news from Ireland,
"The wild Onele [ O'Neill] my lords, is up in Arms With troupes of Irish kernes that uncontrold Doth plant themselves within the English pale And burns and spoils the country as they goe."
These lines are strikingly similar to a passage in Christopher Marlowe's Edward II:
"The wild O'Neill, with swarms of Irish kernes, Lives uncontroll'd within the English pale." The recurrence of the image in plays written before O'Neill had definitively joined the rebellion suggests the degree to which the revolt was the incarnation of a fear that was already haunting the self-proclaimed golden age.
That anxiety was both literal and psychological. The very real possibility of defeat by Irish rebels in alliance with Spain posed a genuine political threat. But in the cultural sphere, the Irish question also threatened to undermine the English self-image of civic enlightenment. In A View of the State of Ireland (written around 1596) Spenser set out a programme for "reducing that savage nation to better government and civility". He outlined the supposed cultural inferiority of the Irish stemming from their pastoral economy and manifesting itself in heresy, incest, laziness, filthiness, violence and lechery.
Yet Spenser also embodied the irony of the Elizabethan mission to bring the Irish "from their delight of licentious barbarism unto the love of goodness and civility". The struggle for goodness and civility would have to be waged with methods that look suspiciously like barbarism. For those foolish enough to refuse the joys of civility, he wrote, "there is no compassion to be had". He recommended the method he had seen used in the suppression of revolt in Munster in the 1580s - the laying waste of the land to create a famine:
"Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them. They looked anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves, they did eat of the dead carrions . . ."
The contradiction between the urging of such horrors and the great cultural attainments of the era may be one of the forces that lies behind the darkly questioning imagination of William Shakespeare. In Henry V, the chorus imagines "the General of our gracious Empress" (probably the Earl of Essex), "from Ireland coming,/ Bringing rebellion broached upon his sword".
In the same play, the Irish soldier Mackmorrice asks the famous question "What ish my nation? Ish a/ Villain, and a bastard, and a knave, and a rascal?" It can be read as a rhetorical question, describing Ireland as the English saw it. But it could also be heard as a question about England itself, hinting at the dark anxieties about power, violence and victory that Shakespeare placed at the heart of England's triumph.
