1475-6757.00004dec5 Spenser, Race, Ireland

Jean Feerick 85
jean feerick
Spenser, Race, and Ire-land
he objective of colonial discourse, Homi Bhabha summarily main-

T tains, “is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate
types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to
establish systems of administration and instruction.”1 While Bhabha casts
this process as a sort of metanarrative of colonialism, viewing this pattern
of domination as part of the “minimum conditions and specifications” of
colonial discourse generally, the language he uses to frame his assertion—
specifically, the reference to the colonized population as “degenerate
types”—betrays its indebtedness to a specific theory of the body oper-
ating at a precise historical moment. In his formulation “degenerate”
describes the supposedly depraved condition of the colonized in the eyes
of the colonizer, a condition which is seen to contaminate the entire
racial genealogy of the colonized peoples. But what is so fascinating about
Bhabha’s phrasing is that in addition to evoking a consolidated discourse
of colonialism in its late stages, it also recalls terminology used to describe
much earlier colonial encounters. And yet, at this earlier stage, “degener-
ate” has a somewhat different connotation than that which Bhabha sug-
gests. While both usages suggest a “contamination” of or a “falling away”
from an imagined “originary” purity, Bhabha’s description situates that
lapse at the point of “racial origin,” thereby seeing colonial discourse as
I would like to thank Gail Kern Paster and Hiram Morgan for leading stimulating Folger sem-
inars which enabled my thinking on this topic. Special thanks as well to Rebecca Bushnell, Peter
Stallybrass, and Phyllis Rackin for their astute responses and helpful suggestions to early drafts of
this essay. Finally, sincere thanks to John Carey for directing me to some uncut pages of Moryson’s
Itinerary.
1. Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of
Colonialism” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha
Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (New York and Cambridge, Mass., 1990), pp. 71–87,
esp. p. 75.
© 2002 English Literary Renaissance Inc.

85
© 2002 English Literary Renaissance Inc. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road,
Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
ENLR3201C04 85 4/5/02, 11:45 AM

86 English Literary Renaissance
attempting to construct stable divisions between colonized and colonizer,
while early colonial deployments of the term see the contaminating process
as operating in the present on a radically transformable body, one capable
at every moment of “racial” reversibility. Hence, at this earlier moment,
degenerate is most often invoked as a verb, suggesting change in the present
or the recent past, rather than an adjective, which describes by contrast a
completed process of yesteryear. Yet another difference is in the preferred
referent. While Bhabha’s “degenerate” refers to the colonized, in early
usages it described transformations experienced by colonizers themselves.
The residue of the early modern, then, haunts Bhabha’s language, resist-
ing in some ways the narrative he tells of all colonialist discourse and more
generally erupting into that model with its own idiosyncrasies. In fact,
Bhabha’s description implicitly contains a genealogy of race and coloni-
alism, revealing the extent to which “race” has been historically produced
and only gradually consolidated. It might also suggest some venues where
its earliest manifestations have been undertheorized, constrained as we
are to read backward through contemporary understandings of race in
approaching its origins.
The subtle mutations of the term degenerate chart the movement of
racial categories from fluid demarcations to fixed categories. To say, as col-
onizers of the early modern period did, that a group of English planters
has “degenerated”—that is, has effectively become the colonized—is to
work from a conception of racial identity that is malleable and alterable
rather than that which we have inherited today which, as Bhabha sug-
gests, seeks in effect to attach a fixed essence to a group for the purpose
of conquest and domination.2 To assume that “race” has always been
deployed in the colonial context as a fixed designation of identity is both
to ignore the extent to which the production of racial categories was an
uneven, complex, and even contradictory event and to grant it the status
and power of being transhistorical. As Roland Barthes says of myth: “it
abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of
essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond
2. For an analysis of this pattern of degeneration among English settlers in early modern Ireland,
see Nicholas Canny’s “The permissive frontier: social control in English settlements in Ireland and
Virginia, 1550–1650” in The Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America
1480–1650, ed. K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair (Detroit, 1970), pp. 17–44. See also
the recent collection of essays Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and
History from Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, ed. Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee (Durham,
NC, 2001).
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Jean Feerick 87
what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without con-
tradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallow-
ing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity.”3
Sixteenth-century Ireland was the site of England’s earliest colonial
ventures, a time when colonialist ideology was not quite consolidated.4
My inquiry will focus on this context and the racial constructions that
England’s attempt at conquest here produced.5 As Christopher Highley
has recently observed, “Ireland assumed a crucial symbolic place in the
formation of emergent English notions of nationhood, empire, and cul-
tural understanding.” Its role in England’s identity formation requires that
it be included in recent work on race, which seeks to investigate how the
physical body at different historical junctures is made to be the carrier
of cultural, sexual, and religious difference.6 As the effort at conquest in
Ireland in the sixteenth century escalated, an emergent racialism became
operational that drew from the then prevailing discourse of the body
as a humoral entity at the same time as it pressured the boundaries of
that model. While skin color certainly played a role in this emergent
discourse, it was part of a more complex theory of the body that reg-
istered difference through a range of perceived physical mechanisms.7
3. Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972),
pp. 109–59, esp. p. 143.
4. For an argument to the effect that England’s early colonial activities were “experimental and
disjointed,” its visions and advances “fractured” and “random,” see Emily C. Bartels, “Othello and
Africa: Postcolonialism Reconsidered,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997), 45–64. See also Mary
Floyd-Wilson’s dissertation, “ ‘Clime, Complexion, and Degree’: Racialism in Early Modern Eng-
land” (Chapel Hill, 1996), which argues that the racial polarity of white and black was only in the
process of being constructed during the early modern period.
5. See David Beers Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, NY, 1966); Nicholas Canny,
The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established 1565–76 (Sussex, 1976); and Representing
Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660, ed. Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield,
and Willy Maley (Cambridge, Eng., 1993).
6. Christopher Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland (Cambridge, Eng., 1997),
p. 2. While Highley makes it his project to investigate the “prejudices” behind “Anglocentric
assumptions” with regard to the Irish, I wish to take that project further by situating those con-
structions within early modern understandings of the body. I suggest that we cannot begin to under-
stand “assumptions” that defined the Irish as “a race apart,” in the words of Highley, unless we
understand early modern conceptions of physical difference (pp. 1–3).
7. For an analysis of the ways that skin color, economics, and aesthetics imbricate each other,
see Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca,
1995). But see also Roxann Wheeler’s argument that “not pursuing the nuances” of racial ideo-
logies operational in earlier periods enables “our current preoccupation with chromoatism
[to be] reproduced rather than challenged by historical difference” in The Complexion of Race: Cat-
egories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia, 2000), p. 11.
ENLR3201C04 87 4/5/02, 11:45 AM

Far from being an immutable aspect of identity, skin color was perceived
to be the “sign” of an inner, alterable disposition determined by humoral
fluctuations, which in turn could be shaped by external forces.8 Com-
plexion in the early modern period could suggest a variety of referents,
denoting not only a person’s skin coloration—on a scale that registered
red and yellow no less than white and black—but the body’s governing
temperament, the “disposition” of the inner body as well. As Roxann
Wheeler establishes with regard to eighteenth-century Britain in trac-
ing residual ideologies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to
this subsequent period, the prevailing “understanding of complexion, the
body, and identity was far more fluid than ours is today.”9 In fact, in
the evolution of the word complexion, we can read the progress of race’s
logic. An early term for humoral disposition, the word’s referent would
shift from the internal condition of the body to its external comport-
ment, eventually referring primarily to skin color, as in its modern-day
usage.10 Though a shifting and unstable theory of embodiment, how-
ever, humoralism could be and was enlisted in the service of a proto-
racialism which systematically assigned physical difference to entire
8. For a discussion of the exquisitely variable humoral body, see Gail Kern Paster, The Body
Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1993), esp. Intro-
duction. For an account of the role environmental theory plays in early modern racialism, see
her Mary Floyd-Wilson, “Temperature, Temperance, and Racial Difference in Ben Jonson’s
The Masque of Blackness,” English Literary Renaissance 28 (1998), 183–209. For an explication of the
effects on one’s complexion of crossing climatic zones, see also her “Transmigrations: Crossing
Regional and Gender Boundaries in Antony and Cleopatra” in Enacting Gender on the Renaissance
Stage, ed. Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (Urbana, 1999), pp. 73–96. See also Karen
Kupperman’s demonstration of pervasive English fears of hot and cold climates in Settling with the
Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Culture in America, 1580–1640 (Totowa, NJ, 1980), esp.
chaps. 2 and 8. Also see her “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience,”
William and Mary Quarterly 41 (1984), 213–40; and her “Climate and Mastery of the Wilderness in
Seventeenth-Century New England” in Seventeenth-Century New England, Colonial Society of
Masachusetts (Boston, 1984). In a larger part of this project, I build upon Kupperman’s observa-
tions by suggesting that fears of physical alteration associated with transplantation announce the
instability of racial and national identification and suggest the extent to which such identities are
seen at this time as the products of various physical technologies rather than essential properties of
the blood.
9. Wheeler, p. 6.
10. According to the OED, complexion (from com and plectere, meaning “to plait together”)
evolves as follows: “Combination of qualities in a certain proportion, determining a body’s nature
or humor” (sb.; 1a, 1b); one’s “Bodily habit” (2a); one’s “Constitution of mind” or disposition (3);
and, finally, one’s “Natural colour, texture, and appearance of skin . . . showing the temperament
or bodily constitution” (4a). Clearly, the earliest understanding of the color or complexion of one’s
skin was in reference to one’s humoral constitution.
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Jean Feerick 89
populations.11 In the theory of humors, which offered medical explana-
tions for a plethora of maladies, the early modern period also worked
through an early discourse of race.
I emphasize early both temporally and theoretically. Originating as a
discourse that accounted for the variations between individual bodies and
the fluctuations within a given body, it would eventually be deployed as
an explanation of difference between entire groups of people, as in the
inhabitants of nation–states. The broadening of the theory’s application
was facilitated by its intersection with a related theory of physical differ-
ence, climate theory. Since classical times, philosophers had sought to
categorize the inhabitants of the earth on the basis of geography, reading
phenotypical difference as the result of environmental variation.12 Jean
Bodin famously “modernized” this conception in his Method for the Easy
Comprehension of History, arguing that a people’s temperament derived
from their placement within the climatic spheres of the world, whether
north, south, or central. Revising the classical association of the “tem-
perate” (that is, central) zone with the Mediterranean region so as to favor
his native France, Bodin, like many thinkers of the early modern period,
offered this theory as an explanation for the physical and cultural dif-
ferences characterizing different nations.13 Those occupying the hotly
contested temperate zone were thought to hold the ideal disposition, dem-
onstrating the virtue of temperance, a state in which the body’s humors
were believed to be properly balanced. Those positioned to the north
or the south, by contrast, were destined to register the effects of their
distempered climate in their own dispositions. Proximity to the sun, for
instance, produced a body that was burned, “color[ing] men black” by dry-
ing out the body and evacuating its native heat. As Bodin further explains,
11. For a discussion of some of the categories that served a function similar to race today, see
Lynda E. Boose, “ ‘The Getting of a Lawful Race’: Racial discourse in early modern England and
the unrepresentable black woman” in Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed.
Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London and New York, 1994), pp. 35–54.
12. Floyd-Wilson, “Clime, Complexion, and Degree,” provides a thorough overview of this
classical tradition in her chapter “The Subject’s Milieu: Modern Prejudices and Ancient Sources.”
In her dissertation at large, she argues that “climatic-humoral discourse” serves as a “dominating
force in the figuration of early modern identity” and should not be read as “a minor subset of
humoral theory” (p. 26).
13. Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New
York, 1945). While too long to enumerate here, a sampling of early modern thinkers actively
drawing on the tenets of classical climate theory include Juan Huarte, William Harrison, John
Milton, Lemnius Levinus, Thomas Wright, and Thomas Elyot.
ENLR3201C04 89 4/5/02, 11:45 AM

the cold and dry state of the southerner’s body produces an excess of black
bile, which in rising to the skin’s surface yields darker skin coloration
and a generally melancholic disposition.14 By contrast, immersion in a cold
climate was thought to trap the body’s heat within, producing the warrior-
like qualities so often imagined in association with the northern Scythians.15
Geography therefore explained visible differences as derived from the
internal body, as the external manifestation of the blood’s invisible quali-
ties (hot, dry, moist, or cold). In the caloric economy, a change in the
temperature of the environment produced a change in the temperature
of the blood, offering a model for distinguishing the world’s people on
the basis of physiology. That this habit of thought was ubiquitous is
apparent in the dispersal of ditties associating different humoral qualities
with peoples originating from different geographical locations. While
somewhat suspicious of such classifications, Fynes Moryson, an English-
man who travelled extensively on the Continent and would eventually
serve as the Secretary to Lord Mountjoy in Ireland, summed up the
opinions of “olde Writers” as follows: “the French are more quicke and
nimble, and as inhabiters of a middle Region, also more chearefull, since
the Northerne men by grosse humors, and the Southerne men by Mel-
ancholy, are made more slowe.”16 Never one-dimensional or univocal,
however, these deployments of climate theory express varied and often
conflicting agendas, articulating their differences both through the tradi-
tions they adhere to—whether Aristotelian or Hippocratic—and through
14. Bodin, pp. 87–89. Consider Morocco’s reference to his skin as the “shadowed livery of
the burnish’d sun” in The Merchant of Venice (2.1.2) in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore
Evans (Boston, 1974). For elaboration of the effects of black bile on both the southerner’s internal
and external habitus, see Floyd-Wilson, “Temperature,” pp. 206–08; and her “Transmigrations,”
passim. See also Kim Hall, “Sexual Politics and Cultural Identity in The Masque of Blackness” in
The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, ed. Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt
(Iowa, 1991), pp. 3–18; and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Colonization and Miscegenation
in The Merchant of Venice,” Renaissance Drama 23 (1992), 87–111. By contrast, in “ ‘The Getting of
a Lawful Race,’ ” Lynda Boose tellingly discusses various writers of the early modern period who
questioned the classical assumption that black skin was “burned” skin on the basis of contrary
empirical evidence.
15. Bodin, pp. 91–94 and passim.
16. “Of the Opinions of Old Writers,” An Itinerary, 4 vols. (Glasgow, 1907), III, 426–63, esp.
p. 442. In a slightly different vein, one perhaps more accessible to modern sensibilities, Thomas
Wright, in The Passions of the Mind in General (1601), ed. William Webster Newbold (rpt. New
York and London, 1986), esp. p. 119, includes the following two physiognomy-based English
proverbs. Women are categorized as: “Fair and foolish, little and loud, / Long and lazy, black and
proud, / Fat and merry, lean and sad, / Pale and pettish, red and bad.” The proverbs for men claim
that “The red is wise, / The brown trusty, / The pale peevish, / The black lusty.”
ENLR3201C04 90 4/5/02, 11:45 AM

Jean Feerick 91
their precise definitions of its characteristic terms.17 Gail Kern Paster has
suggested the extent to which humors were coded in the early modern
period along a grid of class and gender differences, and I argue that they
were made to carry an array of racial valences as well.
Although climate theory began to be challenged by “empirical” evid-
ence gathered by early modern travellers, it persisted in some form in
the narratives of many early modern voyagers and remained a significant
discourse.18 The theory inscribed in miniature a correspondence between
the external and the internal, between the world and the human body,
the physical and the moral, that persisted from classical antiquity.19 In re-
viving the texture of classical thought, humanism resurrected the classical
tendency to explain phenomena on the basis of their physical properties,20
a tendency it grafted onto the Scholastic tradition of reducing things
to their moral properties. The physical life of the body was intertwined
with the moral life of the soul. Humors, it was argued, transformed the
vital and animal spirits on their way to the soul, literally leaving the
17. On the differences between the Aristotelian and Hippocratic traditions in understand-
ing the body’s response to cold and hot climates, see Floyd-Wilson, “ ‘Clime, Complexion, and
Degree,’ ” pp. 29–32. The two differ most notably, Floyd-Wilson demonstrates, in the way they
explain how the body’s internal qualities are affected by external temperatures. While Floyd-Wilson
suggests that the Aristotelian model gained greater currency than its Hippocratic counterpart in the
early modern period, largely because Pliny’s Natural History draws on the Aristotelian notion of
counteraction, she observes that the two competing models engender “significant contradictions
in Renaissance climate theory” (p. 32).
18. For instance, Fynes Moryson, while expressing much skepticism about the old philo-
sophers’ categorization of peoples according to climes, does confess that “howsoever the situation
of places cannot properly be the cause of any vertue or vice, yet it is probable, that it may cause
diseases or health” (“Of the Opinions of Old Writers,” pp. 426–63, esp. p. 434).
For a comprehensive overview of changing conceptions of nature and the climate throughout
history, see Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought
from Ancient Times to the Ends of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, rpt.
1990). And, for a discussion of the uneven movement of ideology generally, see Raymond Williams’
chapter “Dominant, Residual, and Emergent” in Marxism and Literature (Oxford and New York,
1977).
19. Critics have recently come to explore the materiality of early modern thought, reconsider-
ing older interpretations that have read this materiality as, more often than not, metaphorical. See,
for instance, Peter Stallybrass’ analysis of the literalizing of metaphors concerning the heart in
“Dismemberments and Re-memberments: Rewriting the Decameron, 4.1, in the English Renais-
sance,” Studi Sul Boccaccio 20 (1991–92), 299–324, esp. pp. 318–19. See also Juliana Schiesari, “The
Face of Domestication: Physiognomy, gender politics, and humanism’s others” in Hendricks and
Parker pp. 55–70, esp. p. 57.
20. For the tendency of classical philosophers to physicalize both moral and metaphysical quali-
ties, see Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea,” Tropics of Discourse:
Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London, 1978), pp. 150–82, esp. pp. 157–58.
ENLR3201C04 91 4/5/02, 11:45 AM

imprint of vice or virtue on that soul. As Michael Schoenfeldt describes in
his recent study of physiology and inwardness in the early modern period,
the discourse of humoralism constituted “the purportedly immaterial
subject . . . as a profoundly material substance.”21 Such an understanding
of the interrelation between the body and the soul would lead someone
like Thomas Wright to interpret the Aristotelian statement that “the
affections of the soul are enmattered accounts”22 as meaning that “a soul
drowned in meat, fat, and blood cannot behold the light of God,” since
they cause “such a mist before the eyes of the soul that she cannot possibly
speculate any spiritual matters.”23 In granting “enmattered accounts” such
profound moral agency, this philosophy also implicitly entrusted great
power to those assigned the task of disciplining its excesses, proving a
powerful tool for the colonizing enterprise. To that end, it enabled colon-
ists to cast their project as a mission to “civilize” the “distempered” races
peopling the margins of Western Europe. Controlling the disposition of
human bodies generally answered the assimilative ambitions of empire.
II
In the literature written in the 1580s and 1590s about proper methods for
subduing the Irish, we find the imperial gaze settling again and again on
the “uncivilized” bodies of the Irish. The critical work of the past three
decades has traced the restrictions that Protestant settlers in Ireland—
or New English—attempted to impose on the customs, manners, and
behaviors of both the “Mere Irish” and the “Old English,” as they re-
spectively termed the Gaels and the Hibernicized English living in Ireland
since the Norman invasion of the twelfth century.24 Many have read this
21. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare,
Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), p. 10.
22. Aristotle, “On the Soul,” The Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton,
1984), 1, 641–83, esp. p. 642.
23. Wright, p. 182.
24. For a detailed summary of work recently completed on early modern Ireland, see Hiram
Morgan, “Writing Up Early Modern Ireland,” Historical Journal 31 (1988), 701–11. For analyses
that focus on anthropological and/or cultural differences between the English and Irish, see espe-
cially Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish; Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland; Michael
Neill, “Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shake-
speare’s Histories,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994), 1–32; the collection of essays in Representing
Ireland; and Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Dismantling Irena: The Sexualizing of
Ireland in Early Modern England,” Nationalisms & Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo,
et al., (New York and London, 1992), pp. 157–71.
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Jean Feerick 93
New English literature as an early form of anthropological classification
that located the Irish on a primitive level of development akin to the state
the British supposedly occupied prior to their enforced civilization at
the hands of the Romans.25 These critics have made strides in theoriz-
ing the English-Irish crisis by drawing attention to New English con-
tempt for Irish habits of dress, speech, government, and other cultural
and political practices. I would extend their analyses, however, to argue
that the New English literature about the Irish “problem” also sketches
the outline of a theory of race grounded in a sense of the body as a humoral
entity. From an early propagandistic text such as John Derricke’s Image of
Ireland (1581) to the presumably less partisan political treatises by Richard
Beacon and Edmund Spenser, to the eclectic “travelogue” published by
Fynes Moryson in 1616, years after his service as the secretary to Lord
Mountjoy, New English texts postulate a racialized image of the Irish as
a humorally imbalanced or distempered national group.26 By contrast,
the English are figured as civilized and tempered, serving as models of
restraint for the “incontinent” Irish to emulate.
25. In his article “The Indian as Irishman,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 111 (1975),
267–89, for instance, James Muldoon asserts that “it was the Irish way of life that made them wild,
not any racial or biological cause” (p. 272). While I agree with Muldoon’s argument that the Irish
become the prototype for English constructions of Native Americans, I wish to qualify his reading
of cultural difference as completely separate from biological difference in the early modern period.
As I hope to show, difference in behaviors was often read as indicative of physical difference.
26. John Derricke, Image of Ireland (STC 6734). I have also used an early modern edition of
Richard Beacon, Solon His Follie (STC 1653.2), although a modern edition of this text has recently
been completed by Clare Carroll and Vincent Carey (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies
[Binghamton, NY, 1996] ). Citations for these two texts will refer to early modern foliation. For
Spenser and Moryson, I have used the following modern editions: A View of the Present State of
Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick (Oxford, 1970); and Moryson’s above-cited An Itinerary and his Shake-
speare’s Europe: Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary Being a Survey . . . , ed. Charles
Hughes (London, 1903), except where otherwise noted. References to Spenser’s View will appear
parenthetically in the text with the page numbers of this edition. I have chosen not to use the more
recent edition by Willy Maley and Andrew Hadfield (Oxford, 1997) because they base this edition
on the first printed text of 1633 published by Sir James Ware in an attempt to avoid what the
editors view as the less than adequate solution of producing a composite text from the dozen or so
surviving manuscripts dating from the 1590s. This, they rightly argue, is to provide the modern
reader with a “text which never actually existed for contemporary readers, a work which was
never actually read until assembled by the editor in question” (p. xxv). As Maley and Hadfield
themselves note, however, Ware “obligingly cut out references to major Anglo-Irish magnates
whom Spenser had attacked (notably, the Earl of Ormond), and some of his harsher judgements on
the native Irish, Old and New English inhabitants of Ireland in order to render the text of A View
less offensive and (supposedly) less anachronistic” (p. xxiv). These omissions, in my mind, create
significant alterations to the proto-racial discourse that here concerns me and are in my mind the
product of a later moment in the history of this conflict.
ENLR3201C04 93 4/5/02, 11:45 AM

The context that led to the development of this ideology of race has
been convincingly articulated by Nicholas Canny, who has suggested that
this group of New English planters had a compelling motive to malign
not just the Gaels but the Old English in that these two groups had joined
forces to wage war, both literally and ideologically, against the New Eng-
lish.27 Powerful Irish and Old English lords, such as the Earl of Ormond,
had been successful in lobbying for the Queen’s support by pointing up
the self-interestedness of the New English planters, who had massacred her
Irish “subjects” at Smerwick in 1580. In persuading the Queen, if not to
support their cause then at least to take a more neutral political stance,
the Irish and Old English also elicited a stream of vituperative literature
from the New English. As Clare Carroll has proposed, for Spenser and
his New English peers, the task was “to convince the crown of the need
to exterminate a majority of the Irish, to relocate those remaining, and to
transform all Ireland into the rented property of English settlers.”28 What
emerged within the series of recommendations for reforming the com-
monwealth of Ireland by dismantling its current sociopolitical structure
and replacing it with the elements of a proper English commonwealth
was a conception of racial difference rooted in humoral imbalance.
While the humoral body’s vulnerability to external forces like climate
and diet would seem to resist racialist appropriations,29 such malleability
is the defining hallmark of racialism at this early modern moment. In
the context of Ireland it was all too apparent that races could wax and
wane, that they could “generate”—transmitting an inherited genealogy
to offspring—or they could fall away from that lineage, “degenerating”
under the pressure of forces both cultural and physical. As fluid and mobile
identifications, races of the early modern period enjoyed none of the stasis
some attribute to them today. Although terms such as mobility and fluidity
resonate with the constructionist narratives of poststructuralists, far from
27. Canny, “Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity,” The Yearbook
of English Studies 13 (1983), 1–19.
28. Carroll, “The Construction of Gender and the Cultural and Political Other in The Faerie
Queene 5 and A View of the Present State of Ireland: the Critics, the Context, and the Case of Radigund,”
Criticism 32 (1990), 163–93, esp. pp. 177–78. In fact, in support of her argument, one need only
consider the fact that Sir Walter Ralegh, an executioner at the Smerwick massacres, was awarded
one of the largest estates, totalling 42,000 acres, as was Spenser, who came to occupy a plantation
stretching across 3,028 acres of Munster.
29. Levine Lemnius, for instance, notes in his The Touchstone of Complexions (STC 15458; 1576),
that “it is not possible . . . that any temperature of distemperature can long continue alone and
simple” (sig. T3).
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Jean Feerick 95
“liberating” the Irish to become “proper English subjects,” racial fluidity
produced instead a reactionary discourse guarding against such trans-
formations. The potential for racial “reinscription,” the fluidity of self
and nation that enabled a group like the Old English to become all but
indistinguishable from the Irish, called forth anxious protestations of
difference.30 The recent tendency among critics to celebrate moments of
ambivalence and multivocality as occasions for political intervention at
this early colonialist moment is overly optimistic, requiring the further
step of historicizing how power can operate to repress even through
contradictory or unconsolidated utterances.31 As Anne McClintock argues,
“seeking only the fissures of formal ambivalence (hybridity, ambiguity,
undecidability and so on) cannot . . . explain the rise to dominance of
certain groups or cultures, nor the dereliction and obliteration of others.
To ask how power succeeds or fails—despite its provisionality and despite
its constitution in contradiction and ambiguity—involves investigating
not only the tensions of conceptual form but also the torsions of social
history.”32 The emergent racial discourse of the early modern period
did construct itself upon the central contradiction that alterable bodies
could also be sites of persistent differences. But to assert its logical evasive-
ness is not to concede its ineffectuality or insignificance. Rather, even in
its early stage, this discourse carried real political force. By arguing for the
potential reform of the “unruly” Irish, the New English not only justified
their presence on Irish soil, attracting continual support from home, but
effectively established an image of the Irish as essentially irreformable, as
30. In this respect, my argument intersects with the following observation of Ann Rosalind
Jones and Peter Stallybrass regarding strategies for differentiating the genders at this time: “The
attempt is more to make a difference than to proclaim one that always already exists” (“Fetishisms
and Renaissances” in Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, ed. Carla Mazzio and
Douglas Trevor, [New York, 2000], pp. 20–35, esp. p. 27).
31. In part I see such readings as a necessary response to Raymond Williams’ call for a more
complex theorization of hegemony in Marxism and Literature. Christopher Highley reclaims an
overtly racist text such as John Derricke’s Image of Ireland as “polysemous,” capable of eliciting a
“complex mixture of responses” because it gives the Irish rebel, Rory Og O’More, a voice, if only
one that is self-deprecating (pp. 56–57). See Vincent P. Carey’s “John Derricke’s Image of Irelande,
Sir Henry Sidney, and the massacre at Mullaghmast, 1578” (Irish Historical Studies 31 [1999], 305–
27) for what I consider a necessary counter-reading of Derricke’s text as evincing a racist logic that
helped to feed rather than impede the colonialist machine in Ireland. See also Maryclaire Moroney’s
“Apocalypse, Ethnography, and Empire in John Derricke’s Image of Ireland (1581) and Spenser’s
View of the Present State of Ireland (1596),” English Literary Renaissance 29, 3 (1999), 355–74, which
traces a “racially-inflected theory of reprobation” to Derricke’s text (p. 355).
32. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New
York and London, 1995), p. 15.
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having a predisposition toward barbarity and humoral excess that could
be countered only through constant force. While reversible in theory, the
“Irish condition” could be “cured” only through endless labor on the part
of the English, through the constant application of effort and surveillance.33
Part of the task of constructing a divide between English and Irish
was accomplished by the system of plantation the New English adopted
from Roman colonial practice. Like the knights of Spenser’s Faerie Queene
who wander far from court only to find their civility assaulted from without
by a vast range of barbaric forces,34 the New English in Ireland were con-
tinually confronted with their own possible degeneration as embodied
by the Old English; after centuries of exposure to the Irish land and
people, the Old English had become more Irish than the Irish themselves,
so that no one “would judge [them] to be borne of English parents.”35
The model provided by Roman plantations answered this anxiety. By
developing a system of isolated plantations, the New English hoped
to preserve their civility along with their lives. While Sir Thomas
Smith, one of the early proponents of private plantation, would lure
potential planters to invest in the enterprise by describing the “Churle
of Ireland” as “a very simple and toylesome man” and presumably
an ideal plantation worker,36 Colm Lennon has reconstructed the actual
practice behind such rhetoric and maintains that strict regulations gov-
erned the interaction of Irish and English, and that the Irish were
“ruled out absolutely as residents on the plantation estates.”37 Certainly the
33. Although Highley takes as his primary task the demonstration that “even the most apparently
reactionary and essentialist representations of Ireland and the Irish could create counter-meanings
and even inspire radical insights” (p. 12), he comes close to confessing what I have here suggested, that
the intractability of the crisis and its discursive apparatus bring about for Spenser and others a “hard-
ening [of ] opinion about the incorrigibly violent and uneducable nature of the Irish” (p. 131). For
an analysis of the New English penchant for mapping, surveying, and “viewing” the Irish, see Bruce
Avery, “Mapping the Irish Other: Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland,” ELH 57 (1990),
263–79. See also Mary Hamer, “Putting Ireland on the Map,” Textual Practice 3 (1989), 184–201.
34. Citations of Spenser’s Faerie Queene are to the edition by A. C. Hamilton (London and
New York, 1977) and will be cited parenthetically in the text, with roman and arabic numbers
referring to book, canto, stanza, and line.
35. Moryson, Shakespeare’s Europe, p. 214. See also Clare Carroll’s article for a reading of the
effeminate Artegall as a version of the “degendered” Hiberno-Normans (p. 181).
36. See the “Tract by Sir Thomas Smith on the Colonisation of Ards in County of Down,”
in the Appendix to George Hill, An Historical Account of the MacDonnells of Antrim (Belfast, 1873),
pp. 405–15, esp. p. 410. See also David Beers Quinn’s analysis of Smith’s proposal in “Sir Thomas
Smith (1513–1577) and the Beginnings of English Colonial Theory,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 89 (1945), 543–60.
37. Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest (New York, 1995), p. 231.
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Jean Feerick 97
proliferation of legislation guarding against intermarriage and fostering
between the two groups would suggest a sort of apartheid.38 In the words
of one New English observer, “no lesse Cautions were to be observed
for visiting them and keeping them from mixing with the other, then if
these newe colonyes were to be ledd to inhabitt among the barbarous
Indians.”39 Fearing the potential similarity between English and Irish,
the new settlers sought to locate an absolute difference between the
two groups, a desire they expressed through their insistence on physical
separation. Only through racial quarantine, that is, could they hope to
arrest the “daily decay” that had smitten the Old English and threatened
to encompass them.40
Indeed, “quarantined” seems the only accurate word to describe the
posture of a New English group so obsessed with defining the Irish as
diseased. No doubt critics have tired of the medical and organic images
that litter the New English tracts on the Irish,41 but most have interpreted
those images as mere metaphorical indulgence. In the repeated refer-
ences to the infection, corruption, and contagion that characterize the
Irish, not to mention their customs, manners, and, significantly, con-
ditions (a word that referred to one’s mental disposition or temper),
the New English began to outline a discourse of the Irish as diseased or
infected. A tradition of describing the proliferation of races as resulting
from the degenerate or blighted offspring of Ham had informed Hebrew
and early Christian thought. According to Hayden White, “perceived
differences between men had less significance for Greeks and Romans
than they had for Hebrews and Christians. For the former, differentness
was perceived as physical and cultural; for the latter, as moral and meta-
physical.” White traces to Hebrew thought the association of wildness
with exile from God and the accursed state of begetting a “degraded
breed,” such as the Hebrews and subsequent Christian theologians would
ascribe to Ham and Japheth.42 A similar language appears in a New
38. For an analysis of the 1537 “Act for the English Order, Habit and Language,” see Jones and
Stallybrass in Parker et al., pp. 157–58.
39. Moryson, Shakespeare’s Europe, p. 249.
40. Smith, p. 406.
41. Canny, for one, refers to the “medical metaphors so beloved by the New English” (“Anglo-
Irish Identity,” p. 13).
42. White, pp. 156 and 160–64. I propose, further, that the Christian humanists of early modern
Europe seem to effect a sort of synthesis of both the classical and early-Christian approaches to
difference: they both physicalize and moralize difference.
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English text such as the Supplication of the Blood of the English, which
refers to the Irish as the “Cursed seed of Esau” and as “a perverse froward
and stiffened generation,”43 and in An Image of Ireland, which repeatedly
defines the Irish as a “crooked generation” or a “gracelesse cursed race.”44
While the language here suggests that to “be raced” or to “have a race” is
a desirable inscription in the early modern period, it also refers to the
notion of a racial hierarchy, the idea that some lineages are more “blessed”
than others. Moreover, in the context of Ireland these theological ex-
planations for racial difference exist alongside their secular counterpart, a
discourse which naturalized such hierarchies by interpeting them through
the lens of medicine, by reading difference as disease, as humoral im-
balance. References to the Irish “nature,” Irish “affections,” and Irish
“generation” characterize this discourse, which struggles to define a name-
able physical difference.
Humoralism, the dominant medical discourse of the day, yielded a
necessary vocabulary for constructing differences between races on and
through the body. Levine Lemnius, for instance, provides an anatomy of
humoral dispositions in his Touchstone of Complexions (1576), where he
elaborates the causes and potential cures for various humoral imbalances
familiar to laymen of the day, drawing on a huge body of knowledge that
dated back to the classics. From texts such as Hippocrates’ Airs, Waters,
Places to Loys LeRoy’s seminal explanation of variety in Of the Interchange-
able Course, or Variety of things in the Whole World published in 1594,45
authors had long been categorizing the diverse peoples of the world ac-
cording to their humoral dispositions. Their descriptions of the melan-
cholic disposition as necessary for genius46 or of the choleric temperament
as a hasty body were common constructions which found their way into
dramatic characterization and into political tracts.47 Putting Lemnius’
Touchstone into dialogue with the writings of the New English helps us to
43. See Analecta Hibernica, 36 (1995), pp. 19–20.

44. Derricke, sigs. D3 and E4.
45. Hippocrates, “Airs, Waters, and Places,” The Medical Works of Hippocrates, ed. John Chadwick
and W. N. Mann (Oxford, 1950), pp. 90–111; Loys LeRoy, Of the Interchangeable Covrse, or Variety
of Things in the Whole World (STC 15488; 1594).
46. See, for instance, Floyd-Wilson, “ ‘Clime, Complexion, and Degree,’ ” where she provides
a detailed analysis of this construction in her chapter “An Anatomy of Blackness: ‘to find out the
seat of this atra bilis.’ ”
47. The two remaining humoral dispositions are the phlegmatic disposition, produced by a
combination of cold and moist humors, and the sanguine, produced by a combination of hot and
moist humors.
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Jean Feerick 99
understand the specificity of the discourse they used to define the Irish as
a “diseased” race.
III
The intersection of the discourses of colonialism and humoralism is
most explicitly shown by what appears to be a puzzling decision on the
part of Edmund Spenser to feature temperance as the virtue second only
to holiness necessary for the knights armed with the task of securing Brit-
ain’s imperial destiny. To modern ears, such an emphasis rings strange,
yoking together, as this virtue does, the intangible aspects of virtue with
the material world. As the OED reminds us, temperance is first and fore-
most a physical virtue, a virtue proper to a conception of the body today
rendered obsolete by modern science.48 Temperance depends upon
humors, leeches, purges, systems of bodily management. But Spenser’s
notion of temperance also provides us with the traces of an historical
moment when physical difference hung in the balance between essential-
ism and constructionism, when the language of racialism, while emergent,
was fractured and unstable. For Spenser’s assignment of temperance to an
English knight reminds us that like all “races,” the English had to pro-
duce themselves as a (noble) race. They had to guard against the potential
eruptions of the body which might claim them for a “fallen” or “con-
taminated” race. Like Guyon, Englishmen engaged in colonial struggles
had to learn to regulate their own bodies, lest the degenerative process
count them among its victims.
Guyon’s destiny is to confront every conceivable form of humoral
imbalance in the process of learning proper self-governance. Rather
than seeing Book II of the Faerie Queene as simply an allegory for moral
improvement, I read it as deeply implicated in the enterprise of racialism
itself, as part of the process of organizing the divisions between self and
other which would feed the colonial process. While the book clearly con-
cerns itself with tracing Guyon’s path to temperance, that path is littered
48. According to the OED, temperance is still used to describe “the practice or habit of restrain-
ing oneself in provocation, passion, desire” (citing an excerpt from Spenser’s Faerie Queene I.viii.34;
see definition 1a) and “the avoidance of excess in eating and drinking” (2a). Its obsolete meanings
refer to the body’s state of being balanced, tempered, proportionately mingled, as in having a “tem-
pered condition” or “proportioned . . . constitution” (3b), for which various health-oriented texts
of the early modern period are cited including Elyot’s Castle of Helth and Spenser’s Colin Clout’s
Come Home Againe.
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with emblems of distemperance that he must meet and overcome, ex-
amples of excess that signify a detailed mapping of the external world no
less than a psychomachia. As the references to the newly discovered
“great Regions” of Peru, the Amazon, and Virginia establish early on in
this book (II Pr.), these manifestations of intemperance are themselves
not acontextual or apolitical. Rather, they point directly to native peoples,
particularly to that group of “natives” Spenser lived among for most of
his adult life. Writing his epic while enjoying rapid upward mobility
through his award of a sizeable estate on the Munster Plantation, Spenser
separates his vignettes of intemperance from the colonial context of
Ireland with the thinnest of veils. Ideas that recur throughout his View—
the “moderating,” “tempering,” and “containing” of a people unified by
a “disposition” and “condition” held to be “inordinate,” “stubborn,” and
“untamed”—dominate the second book of his epic as well. Indeed, Ire-
land haunts The Faerie Queene generally. While scholars have tended to
narrow the implications of Ireland to Book V and the Mutability Cantos,
Willy Maley argues that “Spenser’s project is nothing less than the mak-
ing of Irish colonial society. ‘Ireland’ is not only where The Faerie Queene
was written, it is where the forms for its visions of Faeryland were dis-
covered.”49 In the “fertile land” and “waste and voyd” that together de-
scribe Acrasia’s wandering and watery isle, we hear an allegorical echo of
Ireland as described by Spenser. In unblemished form, as Irenius observes,
it is indeed fertile, “sprinkled with very many sweet islands and goodly
lakes like little inland seas” (View, p. 18). But, as Spenser will recall in his
dedicatory sonnet to the Earl of Ormond, it has also been “through long
wars left almost waste, / With brutish barbarisme . . . ouerspredd.”50
Similarly, the infamous pairs who impede Guyon’s quest to dismantle
the Bower of Bliss suggest an Irish context, demonstrating connections
to the Irish of Spenser’s View through their names, warfare, and manner-
isms. Through them Spenser explores the humoral permutations of that
49. Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (London, 1997), p. 98. Maley
argues that “Ireland dominates the poem in the way that the poet would have wished his sovereign
to dominate Ireland”; he concludes that “this dramatically alters the sense of a reading of the poem,
making it more politically critical of English imperialist efforts than has hitherto been appreciated”
(p. 98). Stephen Greenblatt took earlier notice of the connections between Book II and the con-
text of Ireland in “To Fashion a Gentleman: Spenser and the Destruction of the Bower of Bliss” in
Renaissance Self-Fashioning From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London, 1980), pp. 157–92.
50. See Appendix 3 in Hamilton’s edition of the poem (p. 742). For a thorough examination of
Spenser’s description of Ireland as “waste,” see Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Mapping Mutability: or,
Spenser’s Irish plot” in Bradshaw, Hadfield, Maley, pp. 93–115.
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Jean Feerick 101
supposedly obnoxious coupling between the Irish and the Old English.
Linked by their failure to control the body’s internal forces properly,
enslaved to the body’s passions, the explosive figures whom Guyon
encounters—Sir Huddibras and his twin Sans-loy, Phedon and Philemon,
Furor and Maleger, and most suggestively Pyrochles and Cymochles—
are not just ireful men but, Spenser jokes, men of that “land of Ire” which
bordered England to its West.51 Sir John Davies, writing years later, seems
to have caught the allusion, lost ever since in apolitical readings that limit
the allegory’s meanings here to the struggle of the “human condition.”52
In his tract on Ireland, he pays tribute to the observations of earlier New
English writers like Spenser when he notes parenthetically that Ireland
had long been called the “Land of Ire, because the Irascible power was
predominant there, for the space of 400. yeares together.” As Willy Maley
has demonstrated, the tag was already well worn by the time Spenser was
working on The Faerie Queene. It surfaces, for instance, in John Derricke’s
popularized attack on the Irish kern in The Image of Ireland through a refer-
ence to Ireland’s troubles as “her exceadyng Ire.” In his “Description of
Ireland,” Richard Stanyhurst displaces the charge onto the people,
characterizing the “meere Irish” as not just “irefull” but as “sensuall and
ouer loose in liuing,” much like Guyon’s twin antagonists Pyrochles and
Cymochles.53 Through the anatomies of explosive masculine aggression
51. Although my reading here focuses on Spenser’s ireful men, I discuss the unique threat
that Irish women, and more specifically, Irish wet nurses assume in the New English imaginary in
“ ‘Uncouth Mylk’: Irish Wet Nurses and Spenser’s Naturalizing Tropes of Conquest” forthcoming
in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. In that article I suggest that contact with the Irish
nurse’s breastmilk, then assumed to be homologous with blood, conjures fears of the transmissibil-
ity of the Irish temperament and racial reversibility for New English planters.
52. Harry Berger, Jr.’s excellent study of this book in The Allegorical Temper: Vision and Reality
in Book II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (New Haven, Conn., 1957; rpt. Archon Books, 1967), while
ingenious in its reading of the book’s physiological references, nevertheless falls short with regard
to their political applications.
53. John Davies, A Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was never entirely Subdued, nor brought
under Obedience of the Crowne of England, untill the Beginning of his Majesties happie Raigne (1612),
p. 284; and John Derricke, Image of Ireland with a Discoverie of Woodkarne, ed. J. Small (London,
1581; Edinburgh, 1883), p. 64, both cited by Maley, p. 18. Maley here provides still further evidence
for this trope of Ireland as the “land of Ire,” citing the anonymous punning on these words in the
“Dialogue of Sylvanus and Peregrine” (1599) which opens with “In Ireland man? Oh what a Country
of wrath is that, It hath not the addicon of the syllable Ire in vayne” (p. 18). See also Richard
Stanyhurst’s “Description of Ireland” in Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotlande and
Irelande, 6 vols. (New York, 1976), VI, 67. I have consulted Vernon F. Snow’s modern reprint of
Ellis’ 1807–1808 reprint of the 1587 edition of the Chronicles, although this reprint contains altera-
tions to the ordering of the 1587 material. All subsequent citations of the Chronicles are from Snow’s
edition. More general references to Irish cruelty litter English colonial discourse. Consider, for
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that are a constant feature of this book, Spenser analyzes the “complex-
ion,” the humoral disposition, of the foe that had already prompted and
would continue to effect the defeat of his own chivalrous patrons—
Lord Arthur Grey de Wilton, Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Ralegh—in the
imagined quagmire that was Ireland. In the images of diseased, because
humorally imbalanced, bodies that populate Guyon’s mission—fiery,
mutable, and impassioned—Spenser narrows the possible appellations for
that condition known as “Irishness.”
Spenser’s options were not limited. As he makes explicit in the View
when discussing the origins of all races, the tracing of lineages is nothing
less than a construction. Irenius argues, for instance, that the histories
of antiquities “deliver no certain truth of anything, neither is there any
certain hold to be taken of any antiquity which is received by tradition,
since all men be liars and may lie when they will” (p. 40). Such originary
narratives are nothing but mist, the whims and fancies of a shared nation-
alist nostalgia. And yet Spenser proceeds in the View to sort through and
stabilize competing claims for the origins of the Irish, associating them
with the northern Scythians—“the chiefest which have first possessed and
inhabited” Ireland—while acknowledging other, more minor influences
(p. 37). Largely he accomplishes this goal by focussing on how Irish cul-
tural practice resembles Scythian customs in warfare, hunting, burial rites,
and dress, drawing largely from classical sources in reconstructing this
society.54 Through this association he not only blocks Irish attempts to
“[wrest] their ancestry from the Spaniard” (p. 44), and the challenge to
English occupation of Ireland that such a derivation entails, but also posi-
tions the Irish outside the Western tradition that he and others claimed
as England’s legacy, defining them as its antithesis, the “invaders” who
brought down the imperium. In The Faerie Queene he seems eager to
instance, Richard Hooker’s translation of Giraldus Cambrensis which appeared in Holinshed’s Chron-
icles. He notes in the margin, beside Cambrensis’ description of Dermon MacMorogh, that “such is
the reuenging nature of the meere Irishman, that albeit he can or doo laie neuer so manie plagues
and punishments vpon his enimie: yet is he never satisfied, vnlesse he haue also his life, yea and
manie not therewith contented, but will vtter their wicked nature euen vpon the dead carcase”;
see “The Irish Historie” in Holinshed’s Chronicles, VI, 101–32, esp. p. 132.
54. For further analysis of the association of the Irish with the Scythians, see Maley, “The View
from Scotland: Combing the Celtic Fringe” in Salvaging Spenser, pp. 136–62. See also Deborah
Shuger’s article “Irishmen, Aristocrats, and Other White Barbarians,” which details the ways the
Irish suggest continuities with the white barbarians of “ancient northern European tribes” as
described in classical ethnographies (Renaissance Quarterly 2 [1997], 494–525). See also Jones
and Stallybrass in Parker et al., for an early articulation of this link.
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Jean Feerick 103
make the same genealogical connection. But in the context of Book II,
he does so by anatomizing the physical features that align the two groups.
IV
In Book II, where the focus on national temperament is explicitly his
topic, Spenser provides a detailed mapping of the Irish habitus to round
out the picture of Irish culture provided by the View. The figures of
excess that populate the pages of Book II define the Irish through their
enslavement to Northern, which is to say Scythian, humors. Applying the
main tenets of Aristotelian theory,55 Spenser depicts his Irish-like villains
as physically explosive, propelled by a forceful heat such as characterizes
that other infamously unruly Northerner, Hotspur.56 “Distempred through
misrule and passions bace: . . . [grown] a Monster, and incontinent”
(II.ix.1.7), the Irish-like figures Guyon encounters collectively image the
Irish temperament as fiery and mutable, a disposition wavering between
what Lemnius describes as the “great . . . unconstancy” of the sanguine
man’s wet and hot humors and the fiery and “furious rages” characteristic
of the choleric’s drily heated body. For Lemnius, the two dispositions
frequently occur in conjunction, as the wetness of sanguininity is often
burned away by the presence of hot humors, yielding the choleric’s
dry and hot body.57 Both, moreover, had been described in Camden’s
Britannia as characterizing the Irish and explaining their tendency to
“enjoy liberty”; Camden asserts, much like Spenser, that “these Irish people
are both of an hoter and moisture nature than other nations,” a fact he
deduces from their incredible “nimblenesse and flexibility of all parts.”58
Significantly, neither heat nor wetness is seen as obeying boundaries, yet
both are “captives” to the imagined geographical divide separating the
North from an ideally temperate zone identified here with England.
55. See note 17 for an overview of the Aristotelian theory on the climatic influences on the
body’s humors.
56. In 1 Henry IV, Hotspur describes himself, following war, as “dry with rage and extreme
toil” (1.3.31) and is urged by Worcester to moderate his over-heated temper: “Though sometimes
it show greatness, courage, blood—/ And that’s the dearest grace it renders you—/ Yea oftentimes
it doth present harsh rage, / Defect of manners, want of government, /Pride, haughtiness, opinion,
and disdain” (3.1.179–83). Lady Percy, too, chides him for being “altogether govern’d by humors”
(3.1.233).
57. Lemnius, fol. 163.
58. William Camden, Britain, “Hibernia” (London, 1610), sig. 2N1v, first published as his
Britannia in 1590. Although Camden, unlike Spenser, describes Ireland as a Western nation, he
also aligns the Irish with a Scythian, which is to say Northern, ancestry.
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It is probably no coincidence, therefore, that two of Guyon’s arch
enemies, Pyrochles and Cymochles, have names deriving from the Greek
for “fire disturbed” and “wave disturbed.”59 Like Lemnius’ association of
behaviors with bodies, Spenser traces the root of his villains’ behavioral
anomalies to the malfunctioning inner recesses of their bodies and their
excess of distinctly Scythian humors. It is the quality of heat, that marker
of the North, that is most pronounced throughout this book. The many
figures of disordered masculinity which Guyon encounters share this
defect of heat,60 whether it be Furor suffering from an “emboyling in his
haughtie hart” (II.iv.9.6), Phedon attempting to purge with violence
the “cruell fyre” within (II.iv.32.8), or Pyrochles literally inflamed by
the “whot fire” that “burnes in [his] entrails bright” (II.vi.50.4). Figures
like Sir Huddibras and Sans-loy, whom “choler did englut” (II.ii.23.5),
suffer from “grieued mindes” (II.ii.23.5) and “boyling brests” (II.ii.32.2).
Rage, rancor, ire, and pride define their actions. The burned state of these
figures’ inner bodies is registered still further through external mark-
ings on their bodies, as in Furor’s copper “colourd” locks (II.iv.15.8) and
his “tawny beard” (II.iv.15.9), and Pyrochles’ similarly colored “sandy
lockes” (II.v.14.4). Their burnt internal complexions are announced by
these “burnt” external features, quite in accord with Lemnius’ semiology
whereby cholerics tend to be “brownish, abourn, or somewhat ruddy,
some pale or yellowish.”61 In effect, Spenser traces these characters’
moral failings to physiological imbalances which consume and control
them, making them prisoners to their bodies as well as to their “national
disposition.”
59. I owe this observation to Maureen Quilligan. For a further discussion of these humoral
attributes, see Berger, pp. 59–64. As Berger demonstrates, the name Pyrochles derives from the
Greek pyr, meaning fire, and ochelon, meaning to move, disturb; and Cymochles dervives from kyma,
for sea waves. He argues that both figures submit “to the elements, the humors, the accidental
temperament of the physical being. Pyrochles is tyrannized by the fiery, Cymochles by the watery,
humor” (p. 60).
60. Here I am in accord with Schoenfeldt’s observation that heat “although frequently invoked
to explain male superiority . . . could also be the cause of a desire that threatened the kinds of self-
control on which any conception of manhood rested” (p. 51). Its negative implications need not
be confined to the register of desire, however, as heat could also be the source of violent and raging
fits anathema to the properly tempered man, as when Lemnius describes how “if heat increase in
mans body unmeasurably and above a mediocrity, and that through Choler the blood be stirred,
and too much enflamed, it oftentimes turneth into meere desperate rage and fury” (fol. 68).
61. Lemnius, fol. 211. In fact, according to Lemnius, it is the property of heat which produces
bodily hair—the beard being a sign of manliness but a red beard being a sign of blood “too much
enflamed” (fol. 68).
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Jean Feerick 105
The excesses here anatomized are systematically exported to Ireland,
signalling a failing of Irish masculinity, as Spenser seems almost at pains to
suggest. The clues are many, although often overlooked because of a critical
shorthand that confines the implications of Ireland to Book V.62 The Book
is ripe with descriptions that register Irish social and military formations.
Atin’s devotion to Pyrochles, for instance, seems closely patterned after the
relationship between Irish lords and their horseboys or kerns. Announc-
ing his subjection to Pyrochles, he proclaims, “His am I Atin, his in wrong
and right” (II.iv.42.5), a devotion which parallels that which Sir John
Harington would later observe as obtaining between Tyrone and his kern:
“His guard, for the most part, were beardles boys without shirts; who, in
the frost, wade as familiarly through rivers as water-spaniels. With what
charm such a master makes them love him I know not, but if he bid
come, they come; if go, they do go; if he say do this, they do it.”63 Atin,
too, will wade waters on behalf of his master, willingly leaping into the
lake where Pyrochles thinks he is drowning, “his Lord to ayd, / (So Loue
the dread of daunger doth despise)” (II.vi.46.1–2). This sort of feudal
pairing is registered as well in the relationship between Braggadocchio
and Trompart, who “cleeped him his liege, to hold of him in fee”
(II.iii.8.9). In describing the former as a “losell” (II.iii.4.1), Spenser re-
calls a word he uses in the View to describe wandering Irish horsemen
whom he urges be restrained by a provost marshal in the days following
the rebellion (p. 161). Both sets of horseboys are described by Spenser
as “not trayned . . . in cheualree” (II.iii.46.5) and use similar methods
of combat. The two darts that Atin carries, described as “quiuering
steele” (II.iv.46.3) and as a “steelehead dart” (II.vi.40.1), resemble those
Spenser ascribes to the Irish in the View, which are “tipped with steel
heads” and otherwise very “sharp and slender” (p. 57). Moreover, Atin’s
bold approach, “running towards [Guyon] hastily” (II.iv.37.2), bears
an uncanny resemblance to the description of Irish warfare in the View,
which is characterized by a “fierce running upon their enemies” “without
armour on their bodies or heads” (p. 57). Atin’s penchant for wearing his
62. The same humoral-racial logic is used to describe the “tyrants” that populate Book V, who
traditionally have been recognized as shadowing Gaelic and Old English lords. See, for instance,
the description of Pollente and Artegall, who, like Guyon, risk “degenerating” into the Irish con-
dition, at V.ii.13.3–4: “Ne ought the water cooled their whot bloud, / But rather in them kindled
choler new.”
63. Sir John Harington, Nugae Antique: Being a Miscellaneous Collection of Original Papers in Prose
and Verse, 2 vols. (New York, 1966) I, 251.
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knight’s shield “Behind his backe” (II.iv.38.1) might suggestively echo
this practice.
Huddibras and Sans-loy also resonate with the details of early modern
Irish life. Both are linked to an Irish context through names that encode
the Norman-British ancestry of the Old English on the one hand and
echo contemporary Irish/Scottish rebels like Sorleboy on the other.64 Like
the Old English whom Spenser detested for enjoying ancient privileges
like grants of the County Palatines in Ireland, which sanctioned policing
of “borders” at an earlier time and had since devolved into licensing them
to “rob the rest of the counties about it,” Sir Huddibras is described as
“great of name” rather than “good of deedes” (II.ii.17.3) and as warring “in
middle space” (II.ii.20.3) much as the Earl Palatine battled in “borders”
now running directly through “the very lap of all the land” (p. 30).65
64. In the View, Spenser goes to great lengths to argue that the Scottish and Irish people are
one and the same, sharing a common ancestry from the Scythians. For an analysis of Spenser’s
marginalization of the Scots, and the repetition of this tendency in Spenser criticism, see Willy
Maley’s chapter “The View from Scotland: Combing the Celtic Fringe” in Salvaging Spenser,
pp. 136–62.
65. For a reading of Spenser that emphasizes his antipathy for the “warrior arristocracy”
that comprised Irish society, see Shuger. Shuger underscores Spenser’s perception of the “wild
Irish” and the “Anglo-Irish” alike as northern barbarians, linked through their commitment
to “the aristocratic politics of violence” (p. 494). Where she reads Spenser’s View as primarily a
class-based critique, aimed at both Irish and Old English overlords and even English aristocrats,
I have emphasized the proto-racialist nature of his characterizations and have resisted collapsing
important, even if only emergent, constructions of difference between the English and Irish.
Far from conflating Irish and English aristocrats, Spenser will explicitly disavow any genealogical
connection on the part of the English to the Scythians, whom he connects exclusively to the Scots
and the Irish. He distinguishes between Scythian stock and that of the Britons and the Saxons,
for instance, in arguing that the latter settled the eastern shores of Ireland, while the Scyths peopled
the northern shores (p. 46); see Maley’s chapter “The View from Scotland” for a discussion of these
intricate originary narratives (esp. pp. 139–41). Although Shuger admirably outlines the Northern-
European genealogy of Irish “barbarism,” correctly rejecting the notion that this discourse is an
“ad hoc [construct] of a burgeoning imperialist discourse,” she moves too quickly in asserting dis-
tinctions of kind between discussions of Irish barbarity and those regarding “new World or other
non-white peoples” (p. 495). All three of these geographies – Ireland, New World, and Africa –
saw the use of residual theories of difference derived from climate theory to explain physical differ-
ences among peoples, rather than the deployment of “ad hoc” constructions of difference. But even
these residual theories could be deployed in the interests of a burgeoning colonialist enterprise.
On climate-based accounts of Africans, for instance, see Floyd-Wilson, “ ‘Temperature’ ” and
“ ‘Transmigrations,’ ” passim. And see Karen Kupperman’s work for the New World context.
Although the exact tenor of the “barbarism” anatomized may well retain important distinctions
from another “barbarism” (northern violence versus southern lechery, for instance), we should not
underestimate their common derivation from climate theory rather than seeing discourses that
described differences in coloration as essentially different from those describing other physical
differences at this early stage.
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Jean Feerick 107
Moreover, the combat between Huddibras and Sans-loy, which Guyon
seeks to pacify, soon devolves into a “triple warre with triple enmitee”
(II.ii.26.3) among all three knights, much like the war in Ireland splintered
among Irish, Old English, and New English interests. But where the New
English Guyon enjoys the virtue of Medina’s tempered posture, both
the Irish and Old English figures here are called upon to emblematize
distemperment born of heat. Wryly punning like so many contemporary
accounts of Ireland, Spenser traces these defects of body and behavior to
“fell Erinnys” (II.ii.29.2; emphasis added), to that land of (E)ire which
many new English writers saw as inhabited by “infernall” sprights.66
Like Book II’s other hyper-masculinized figures, Pyrochles also suffers
the heat of his body’s condition, as coded not just by the derivation of his
name but also through the various references to his henchman Atin, who
rides a “bloudy red” (II.v.2.8) steed and carries a shield leaving little doubt
as to his ailment; we are told that it displays “A flaming fire in midst of
bloudy field, / And round about the wreath this word was writ, / Burnt I
do burne” (II.iv.38.3–5).67 But to recognize that this condition describes
the Irish land and people we need only consider the derivation of the
name Atin itself. In Anglicizing the Gaelic athainne, meaning “embers,”
or aithinne, meaning “firebrand,” Spenser coyly adapts the Irish language
to describe its people’s intemperate condition.68 Spenser is here speaking
“broken Gaelic,” as made clear by a variant manuscript of the View ex-
cerpted in the Appendix to Renwick’s edition. Arguing that the Britons
settled southern and eastern Ireland, Spenser turns to etymology to stake
his claim: “as fyre is in Welshe Tane: in Iryshe [it is] Tuinnye.”69 Here
66. For the reference to the Irish as “infernall,” see, for instance, Derricke, sig. I4. See also John
Hooker’s section of the Irish Chronicle, which describes Rory Og O’More and his accessories as
“like vnto a sort of furies and diuels new come out of hell” (Holinshed, VI, 395).
67. For the suggestion that Atin, Pyrochles, and Cymochles derive from characters in the
Cuchulain tale in the Irish epic Tain bo Culaigne’, see Clarence Steinberg, “Atin, Pyrochles,
Cymochles: On Irish Emblems in The Faerie Queene,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen,” 72 (1971),
749–61.
68. In footnote 5 to II. iv. 42, A. C. Hamilton attributes this reading of Atin’s name to Steinberg,
p. 750. In demonstrating the connections between Atin, Pyrochles, and Cymochles and the figures
in the Cuchulain tale, Steinberg notes that this association of Irishness and heat might derive from
Cuchulain’s depiction as excessively heated (p. 753). I hope I have suggested further that the em-
phasis on heat accords with historically-based theories of the body and its perceived vulnerability
to climatic influence.
69. Renwick quotes this MS on page 196; for the complete MS, see Public Record Office S. P.
Ir.202, pt. 4.58. It is quite possible that Spenser has Pyrochles, too, speak a bit of “broken Gaelic”
when he curses Fortune at II.v.12.9 with “maugre her spight”; although Hamilton paraphrases
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Spenser makes plain his familiarity with this Gaelic/British word, pre-
sumably giving the same root to Pyrochles’ henchman. But the name
registers a more immediate historical referent for Spenser as well. The
Gaelic epithet a totane, meaning “of the burning” or “the incendiary,”
was in fact used to describe one of the members of the infamous Geraldine
clan. It was a sobriquet for Maurice Fitzjohn Fitzgerald, father of James
Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, the man who took over the Desmond rebellion
when his cousin, Gerald (famed rival to the Queen’s cousin and Spenser’s
dedicatee, the Earl of Ormond), was imprisoned in London in the mid-
1560s. James, reputed to have inherited his father’s fiery temperament,
would later travel to the Continent to seek out allies for his cause in the
pope and Philip II and would be the impetus behind the decision to con-
struct a fort at Smerwick, tying him directly to the horrible massacre of
surrendered troops at the fort for which Spenser’s patron, Lord Arthur
Grey de Wilton, was largely responsible.70
By drawing on this imagery of fieriness throughout his second book,
Spenser anatomizes that land to England’s West which he would have us
believe “fomed ire” (II.v.2.8) much as does Pyrochles’ steed. Looking to
John Hooker’s concluding narrative of the Irish Chronicle in Holinshed,
Spenser would have found the anatomy to match the abuse. In a passage
describing the arch rebel Shane O’Neill, Hooker describes one of his
characteristic excesses: “yet was he neuer satisfied, till he had swallowed
vp maruellous great quantities of Vskebagh or Aqua vite of that countrie:
wherof so vnmeasurablie he would drinke and bouse, that for the quench-
ing of the heat of the bodie, which by that meanes was most extremelie
inflamed and distempered, he was eftsoones conueied (as the common
report was) into a deepe pit, and standing vpright in the same, the earth was
cast round about him vp to the hard chin, and there he did remaine vntill
such time as his bodie was recouered to some temperature.”71 Pyrochles,
too, desperately seeks to evacuate his “secret bowels” (II.vi.49.9) of
their “implacable fire” (II.vi.44.2), jumping into an “idle” lake in search
these lines in his note, he also confesses that “the sense ‘curse on’ is not found elsewhere” (p. 209).
Apparently, in Gaelic, the expression “Mag air” ( the verb “mag” with the preposition “air”) trans-
lates as “to mock” (Gaelic Dictionary, in Two Parts, ed. R. A. Armstrong [London, 1825] ).
70. For the Geraldine nickname, see Cyril Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars (London, 1950), p. 104.
Moryson records a similar sobriquet for one of the O’Donnells who was “called Garne that is a
Cholerick strong (or lusty) Gallant” (Shakespeare’s Europe, p. 195).
71. Holinshed, VI, 369.
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Jean Feerick 109
of relief. But where Shane presumably recovers from his ailment, the
distemperature Pyrochles suffers and those Spenser seems to apply to the
Irish at large have a very different outcome. While the mud-“engrost”
water where Pyrochles takes refuge washes the gore from his outer
body, it fails to alter the burning state of his internal habitus, placing him
beyond the bounds of conventional medical care. Instead his malady
requires the balms and spells of Archimago, who only temporarily stays
the raging fire within. As the compassion-inclined Guyon discovers with
Arthur, “Ne was there salue, ne was there medicine, / That mote recure
their wounds: so inly they did tine” (II.xi.21.8–9). So deep in the body
runs their infectious stain that reform requires the violence of decapita-
tion rather than the healing of a restorative. The balm of grace refused,
Prince Arthur leaves Pyrochles as a “headlesse body bleeding all the place”
(II.viii.52.9).
If Ireland is the repressed subtext for this book on temperance, we
might do well to reconsider what Guyon’s status as the knight of orphans
signifies. Called forth from court to answer the despairing cry of Amavia
and to wage arms against her husband Mordant’s seductress, Guyon is
entrusted by implication with the care of her son, Ruddymane. Orphaned
and alone, Ruddymane also bears the indelible taint of his parent’s crime
on his hands. But how are we to read those crimes? In seeing Mordant’s
submission to Acrasia’s seductions and Amavia’s suicidal devotion to
Mordant as errors of love, critics have allowed only a partial truth. Spenser
suggests a broader referent. In his description of Ruddymane as “budding
braunch rent from the natiue tree” (II.ii.2.6) and of his stain as one not
capable of being “purgd with water” (II.ii.4.2), Spenser casts this familial
vignette on a nationalist level, demanding that we see the nation(s) be-
hind the family. Much like the disdain he describes the Old English as
exemplifying toward Mother England, a “dangerous lethargy” that leads
them “in so short space quite [to] forget their country” and to “bite off
her dug from which they sucked life” (pp. 64–65), Mordant has quite
forgotten the one who loves him and the one who carries his line(age).
As Amavia reports to Guyon, “me he knew not” (II.i.54.5). So, too, the
episode depicting Verdant languishing in the lap of Acrasia, which com-
plements this earlier event, recounts how he too has “ras’st” his “braue
shield, full of old moniments” (II.xii.80.3–4), effacing what is presum-
ably a long and honorable lineage. Mordant and Verdant are linked by
their failure in submitting to Acrasia and in thereby severing them-
selves from honorable genealogies, “erasing” both themselves and their
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offspring.72 In the text’s characteristic punning, that is, they have “raced”
their “races.”73 And yet, although they are transformed through a “hor-
rible enchantment” (II.xii.80.9), the forgotten identities of these knights
are retrieved by Spenser in the encoded names he selects for them. It is
perhaps no coincidence that two of the Old English families he describes
in the View as having “degendered from their ancient dignities” (p. 66)
share the same root as these two lapsing knights. The names Vere and
Mortimer appear prominently in a short list of such formerly honorable
families. As Irenius explains to Eudoxus, the final stage of their trans-
formation to “very Irish” occurs through the Gaelicizing of their English
names by adopting suffixes ending with “an” (p. 66). In choosing Mor-
dant and Verdant as the names for his fallen knights, Spenser does more
than just register meanings derived from classical languages; he also plays
on Old English reinscriptions, which while not historically accurate, none-
theless capture the pattern of “Irishing” which he hopes to arrest through
Guyon’s quest.74
Ruddymane’s healing at the hands of Medina offers the promise of
reversing that transformative trajectory. As the tainted offspring of the
union between Amavia and Mordant, whose own blood has been “in-
fected” by the “secret filth” (II.ii.4.7) of his parents’ blood, Ruddymane’s
stigma recalls the characteristically Irish mark described in Holinshed’s
Chronicles: Stanyhurst notes that “in some corner of the land they vsed a
damnable superstition, leauing the right armes of their infants vnchristened
as they tearme it to the intent it might giue a more vngratious and deadlie
blow.”75 Spenser articulates this connection still more precisely in the
View, when he notes that during battle the O’Neale’s war cry is
“Langergabo, that is the bloody hand, which is O’Neale’s badge” (p. 54).76
72. For a reading of Acrasia’s seductions on a maternal register and the suggestion that her dewy
breasts carry the power to reverse English paternity, see my forthcoming “ ‘Uncouth Mylk.’ ”
73. An alternate spelling of the verb “rase” is “race”; see the OED, under rase (v.1) and race
(v.3). The word points, interestingly, in two directions, suggesting either “to make an incised mark”
(rase; v; 1b) or to “to remove” marks, as in “to erase” (rase; v; 2b) or even to “obliterate” (v; 3). In
that respect, this verb in its early stages traces the potential for marking and unmarking of identity
that I am ascribing to its nominal form (see race, sb.2).
74. The actual “Gaelicization” of the name Mortimer, as recorded by Spenser, is “Macnemarra”
(p. 66).
75. Holinshed, VI, 69.
76. I owe this observation to Richard McCabe, which he makes in “Edmund Spenser, Poet
of Exile,” Proceedings of the British Academy: 1991 Lectures and Memoirs (Oxford, 1993), pp. 73–103,
esp. p. 85.
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Jean Feerick 111
Ruddymane’s mark, a sign which Guyon perceives to be “in lieu of
innocence” (II.ii.4.3), seems to associate him with the Irish, a race pre-
sumably marred by “bloudguiltinesse” (II.ii.4.5), and a people unable to
escape the “fatal destiny of that land” (p. 1). His hands, then, signify not
the “stain” of original sin but rather his racial corruption, a taint that has
accrued to him like just so much inheritance through the father, whose
own degeneration has passed through his behaviors to his blood to en-
snare yet another generation. In describing the degenerate Old English
in the View, Irenius notes that their “Irish habits and customs . . . could
never . . . be clean wiped away, but the contagion thereof hath remained
still amongst their posterities” (p. 66). And yet Ruddymane’s fate would
seem to offer some hope for the generation to come. By entrusting him to
Medina’s tempering hands, Spenser holds out the promise of reforming
his stained genealogy through “gentle noriture” (II.iii.2.5).
Such a transformation, however, is belied not only by its deferment
but also by the indelibility of the stains of the warring figures around
him. Pyrochles, Sans-loy, and Maleger suggest an entrenchment in
villainy which evades tempering applications, and which in the case of
Maleger even exceeds the bounds of death. Like the Scottish rebel
Sorleboy’s reported response to his son’s death—“ ‘It is noe matter, my
sonne hath many heades,’ meaninge that others would rise up in his
place”—so Maleger returns to life again and again, suggesting the ten-
acity of his defiance.77 None of these figures is successfully “grafted” onto
the English race. Rather they are vanquished, and the promise of racial
regeneration is systematically shut down. Yet the racial barrier between
the English and the Irish which Spenser seeks to produce is never fully
secure. His construction of the Irish fails to afford him and his English
knights any rest. The discourse of humoralism, the foundation upon which
he builds, precludes such stasis, allowing the English and Irish races to
haunt each other without end. Hence the text repeats the defeat of this
hyper-masculinized force again and again. In attempting to “justify” Eng-
land’s colonialist aggression in Ireland, Spenser’s anatomy of its inhabit-
ants also threatens to elide the very distinctions between self and other,
English and Irish, that it frantically metes out. Excessive violence—the
very embodiment of the Irish error of “heat” and “distemperature”—is
the only conceivable response, the only “antidote” the English have to
77. For Sorleboy’s response, see Sir James Perrott, The Chronicle of Ireland, 1584–1608, ed. Herbert
Wood (Dublin, 1933), p. 47.
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what is imagined to be an unbounded aggression. The “cure” therefore
becomes indistinguishable from the “problem.” In their violent responses
to Pyrochles and his aggressive counterparts, Guyon and Arthur slide into
that condition the text seeks to reserve for the Irish. So, too, do their
historical analogues. The project of finding a “temperate” governor to
supervise the conquest all but evaded Elizabethan administrators. Grey,
famously rumored to have exceeded his charge in Ireland overseeing such
atrocities as occurred at Smerwick, was even described as having slipped
by his avid defender, Spenser. Trying to explain the history that would
lead to his notorious reputation as a “bloody man,” and proving the claim
he set out to disprove, Spenser asserted that “the Necessity of the present
State of things enforced him to that Violence, and almost changed his
natural Disposition” from what he asserts was otherwise “most gentle,
affable, loving and temperate” (p. 106). Unlike Artegal, whose violent
aspects are projected, literally split off onto Talus, Grey proved unable to
divorce this aspect of rule from his self proper, failing to let the machin-
ery of state do for him what the fragile balance of his physical body could
not withstand. Assertions to the effect that the English in Ireland demon-
strated characteristically “tempered” behavior anxiously punctuate Eng-
lish accounts of the crisis. Hooker would invoke this discursive matrix in
noting of colonist Sir Peter Carew that he was “not known at any times
to have been distempered, not to exceed his bounds, for he abhorred
gluttony and detested drunkenness.” And Sir Henry Sidney, sometime
Lord Deputy of Ireland, would report of the later Lord Deputy, Sir John
Perrot, that he was “the most complete and best humoured man to
deale with that nation.”78 But the repetition of these assertions, like the
repetition of claims for Irish reformability, betrays an unease that works to
undermine them. Writing from the distance of fifty or so years, Sir Robert
Naunton reports that the Irish action engendered a distemperature all
the way up the social ranks, ultimately residing in the state’s very “head.”
In his estimation, the “cure,” rather than the “disease” itself, had devolved
into a “malady and a consumption of [Elizabeth’s] times, for it accom-
panied her to her end, and it was of so profuse and vast expense that it
drew near a distemperature of state and passion in herself.”79
78. The Hooker quotation appears in William Palmer, “Gender, Violence, and Rebellion in
Tudor and Early Stuart Ireland” in Sixteenth Century Journal, 23 (1992), 699–712, esp. p. 709. Sidney’s
remark is cited by Highley, p. 184, n. 60.
79. Quoted in Highley, p. 64.
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Jean Feerick 113
Such reversibility was precisely what Spenser’s book on temperance
sought to prevent. By instructing the English to bridle their own tem-
peraments, Spenser hoped to stabilize the permeable boundary between
the Irish and English. But the English and Irish alike could suffer the pit-
falls of distemperature and become a slave to the body’s humors. Spenser
knows this to be true—the universality of these errors is the very impetus
behind his didactic exercise—but he desperately tries to stack the deck to
favor his native race. Although on occasion tempted to follow in the steps
of his Old English brethren, Guyon is blocked from such slips toward
degeneration by the Palmer’s presence and by eventually internalizing
his prohibitions. But the raging finale of his destruction of the Bower
of Bliss and the martial law that it suggests for all of Ireland makes him in
the end quite indistinguishable from the violent Irish and Old English
overlords he seeks to oppose.80
V
Although the language of temperance and distemperatures, of passion and
its neutralization, might seem to be the harmless residue of an outdated
physiological model, such language is an early manifestation of racialism,
an early attempt to explain “outward deedes” by an inward bent of the
body.81 The strategy seeks to root differences in the unstable fabric of
the early modern body, in the “complexions” that bubbled beneath the
surface of that body and thereby determined the colors and qualities of
whole populations. Other New English writers follow Spenser in attempt-
ing to define the Irish as a distempered race. Early texts, however, hesi-
tate to pronounce such judgments on the population at large, confining
their essentializing logic to specific classes that are directly implicated in
strategies of resistance to the English. Derricke’s Image of Ireland, for
instance, indicates in its dedication that it will attempt to express not the
essence of the Irish, but “the Nature, and qualitie of the . . . wilde Irishe
Wood Karne,” a term derived from the Gaelic word ceithearnach, mean-
ing “foot-soldier.”82 While the actual referent for this word as intended
80. See David Edwards’ “Ideology and experience: Spenser’s View and martial law in Ireland”
(Political Ideology in Ireland, 1541–1641, ed. Hiram Morgan [Dublin, 1999], pp. 127–57), which ar-
gues that Spenser’s View quite successfully insists on the need to reinstate martial law in Ireland in
the wake of the Queen’s decision in 1591 to abandon it in favor of Common Law.
81. Derricke, sig. H2.
82. For a discussion of Gaelic military terms, see Katherine Simms, From Kings to Warlords: The
Changing Political Structures of Gaelic Ireland in the Later Middle Ages (Dover, NH, 1987).
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by Derricke is deliberately left vague, the author is careful to state at the
outset that his scathing critique does not apply indiscriminately to all Irish-
men. Writing to commemorate the victory of Lord Deputy Henry Sidney
over arch-rebel Rory Og O’More, Derricke wishes to show the defeat
of a specific group of rebels rather than the Irish more generally. And
while his mocking appeal to St. Patrick to destroy this “peruerse flocke”
of “monsters” and banish all venomous animals from the land comes
suspiciously close to a call to annihilate all the Irish,83 he narrows the
object of his scorn to the woodkern, leaving unclear whether he intends
the word literally or metonymically for the Irish as a whole.
Richard Beacon, who had served with Spenser as an official on the
provincial Council of Munster, asserts that Ireland, allegorically rep-
resented by Salamina in Solon His Folly, is a commonwealth thoroughly
corrupted because of a “general corruption of manners in the people”
which has “posessed the mindes of the people.”84 Unlike Derricke, who
seems ultimately to place the source of corruption in some divine agent
and even the land itself,85 Beacon secularizes these explanations, deriving
the corruption of Ireland’s political institutions “partly from the contrarietie
of humors, and opinions, lodged in the brests even of the wisest.”86 In
a tract full of medical explanations, Beacon argues for an understanding
of the body politic as having a direct correlation to the humorous bodies
of its inhabitants: “for as the declination of our natural bodies ariseth
chiefely either from occasions, as rest, labour, heate, colde, hunger, thirst,
superfluity, abundance, or from the malice or distemperature of the disease
or sickenes it selfe: so the declination of this polliticke bodie groweth
partely by occasions, and partely from the malice and corruption of the
subject, as from the vnnatural distemperature of that body.”87 Beacon
describes the Irish as being “dulled, mazed, and oppressed . . . as with some
great malady . . . overcome,” which he attributes in part to an excess of
83. Derricke, sig. D4 and dedication.

84. Beacon, sig. Blv.
85. Derricke, for instance, perceives those attempting to redeem the “graceless graftes” of Irish as
fighting a losing battle against God’s will: “Can Phisickes arte restore the lame, / or make the blinde
to see? / When as the Lorde of hostes doeth saie, / this wretche was plagued by me?” (sig. D4).
Moreover, in discussing the “sauage soile” (sig. C4), he bemoans the fact that “such vertue hath
that grounde” that it can undo the civilizing effects of years spent at court, making even reformed Irish
“worse then wildest karne” (sig. D3v). Similarly, Spenser imagines Maleger as a kern-like rebel
who will revive whenever he is thrown down upon the ground by Prince Arthur (II.xi.45.2–6).
86. Beacon, sig. B2.
87. Beacon, sig. K1.
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Jean Feerick 115
wealth and comfort, errors he locates as the result of improper govern-
ing, which has produced in turn a stagnation of bodily humors. Such a
condition, for Beacon, “receveth his present cure with [sic] the lethargie
by motion, dispersing the humor.”88 The role of the fully-tempered Eng-
lish governor, then, is to reinstate the proper functioning of his subjects’
bodies, a goal achieved in large part through the “motion” of labor.
While Beacon ultimately argues for a version of the Irish as reformable
under the leadership and instruction of a Guyon-like governor,89 Spenser
and later Moryson argue that for the most part the Irish are, as David
Edwards has recently put it, “naturally, even genetically, rebellious,”90
requiring reformation by the sword. For these two writers of the mid-and
late-1590s, the intractability of the Irish was a demonstrated fact, as rebel-
lion had followed rebellion in a never-ending quest for the repossession
of lost power and confiscated territory on the part of the Irish and Old
English. Spenser attributes the “perpetual gall in the mind of that people”
either to the soil or some “secret scourge” delivered from on high.91 It is
writ too deep to be cured by a gubernatorial antidote alone, even if
equipped with the “medicines” of cunning and rhetoric envisioned by
Beacon. Similarly, for Moryson, secretary to Lord Mountjoy in the late
1590s, the Irish as a whole suffer from “natural malice” and have minds that
are “instable” and “inconstant,” like “the Common people euery where.”92
As woman, child, and kern alike participate in the qualities that define
their race, the shades of distinction among different classes of Irish society,
earlier upheld by New English writers, fade. Their idleness, slothfulness,
88. Beacon, sigs. E4–E4v and G3v.

89. For an analysis of King James’s subsequent adoption of a similar view with regard to the
“distemperance” of the Highland Scots, see Floyd-Wilson, “Temperature,” pp. 197–99.
90. Edwards, p. 144.
91. The reference to “perpetual gall” does not appear in the printed edition of 1633 which
underwent various emendations but does appear in an earlier manuscript version of the View, as
recorded in Renwick’s edition (p. 9).
92. Moryson, “Description of Ireland” in Illustrations of Irish History and Topography, Mainly
of the Seventeenth Century, ed. C. Litton Falkiner (London, 1904), pp. 214–32, esp. p. 221; and
Shakespeare’s Europe, p. 190. While Moryson’s analogy of the Irish to commoners “euery where”
seems to resist a racialist conception, I would argue that considerations of “blood” or “class” were
not as distinct from “race” in the early modern period as they tend to be today. In fact, the OED
demonstrates just how entangled these two classification are when it describes “race” in its primary
definition through such terms as “breeding” and “generation,” and, in a secondary definition, as
“A group descended from common ancestour” (sb; 1b, 1c, 2a). In fact, early definitions suggest that
the word race is continuous with class. Both represent groups demarcated through various distinc-
tions of blood and physical disposition, among other more obvious differences of property.
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superstition, stealthiness, lawlessness, and forcefulness derive from “turbul-
ent humors”93 that plague the Irish collectively. As a group they are “soe
humorous” as to warrant extreme solutions.94 Perhaps the anonymous
author of Supplication of the Blood of the English conveyed the momentum
gathering in these expressions when he unequivocally asserted: “[The Irish]
are blacke Moores o Queene, wash them as long as you will, you shall
never alter their hue. Yore mercy will not change theire manners; yore
benefitts be they never soe aboundantly powred upon them, will never
wash away the corruption of their nature.”95
V
In its scathing indictment of the Irish “nature,” Supplication layers at least
two racial discourses. The more familiar language of blackness and “hue”
is used to counter the proverbial notion of a pliable, “washable” nature
enabled by humoralism. Unlike Spenser, who seemed set on bending the
laws of humoralism to suit his racialist project, Supplication’s author uses
the presumably more stable semiotics of skin coloration to insist on
races as permanent and essential categories. In effect, the author seeks to
occlude variations in the interests of stabilizing the differences among
populations. But his conflation of the physical bodies of the Irish with
those of “blacke Moores” owes more than a little to the earlier model.
Such a comparison attests to linkages conceivable in the early modern
period. The racializing of the internal Irish body, conceived as having been
burned by an excess of hot humors, partakes of the same logic first used
to racialize the African body. While Africans differed from their Irish coun-
terparts in presumably bearing the “mark” of their humoral complexions
on the outside of their externally burned, melancholic bodies,96 both were
subject to humoral-racial logic, both defined as falling away from the tem-
pered ideal of “noble” and “blessed” races.97

95. Supplication, p. 51.
96. While the African body is constructed as having been “burned” by the sun’s rays, it differs
from the construction of the Irish I have traced since it is thought to yield not an excess of blood or
choler but black bile, whose dry and cold qualities define it as a melancholic body.
97. In fact, Irenius, the figure who articulates commonly held New English views in Spenser’s
View, sets forth a number of connections between the Irish and Africans, noting their shared
custom of using the mantle (pp. 50–51) and their similarly “intemperate . . . wailings of their
dead” (p. 56, emphasis added). These similarities, Irenius suggests, argue for a possible genealogical
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Jean Feerick 117
In the case of the Irish, this racialist construction variously justified
conquest, unrepresentative governing, and slave-like employment on the
grounds of reforming a nation grown humorous. And yet while this proto-
racial discourse has much in common with the type of colonial discourse
which poststructuralist and postcolonialist critics identify in varying tem-
poral and spatial geographies, its difference ought also to be recognized,
not least because homogenizing colonialist discourses erases the histor-
ically variable languages and tools deployed for the purpose of conquest.
Moreover, by emphasizing continuities among disparate colonialist dis-
courses, we tend to erase the past’s estranging features. Humoralism was
a proto-racial discourse which was riddled with contradictions only sub-
sequently effaced by the organization of the world’s human “races” on a
grid of skin coloration. To be sure, the Irish were separated out accord-
ing to a set of perceived physical differences which positioned them as at
once inferior and enslaved. But the excesses encoded in this discourse
could also potentially claim the Englishman’s body, as demonstrated by
the experiences of the Old English. Giraldus Cambrensis was not alone
in attributing the failures of this early wave of English settlers to their
Cymochles-like subjection to the “loose life . . . [,] spending their whole
time in rioting, banketing, whoredome.”98 A relaxation of will or reason
was all the slide of “degeneration” required. So while we might con-
clude with Edward Said that Spenser helped to produce the Irish as a
“barbarian and degenerate race,” or with Bhabha that the colonizer gen-
erally produces his victims as depraved, we must also recall that in this
early modern moment those perceived to be “slipping” were English,
not Irish, and therefore that the “sliding” of one race into another had
not yet ceased to exist.99
u n i v e r s i t y o f p e n n s y l va n i a
connection between these two groups, one which Irenius uses to counter the Irish claim for
Spanish derivation. Although acknowledging this possible connection, however, Spenser seems
more intent on defining the Irish as Scythians.
98. Giraldus Cambrensis, “The Irish Historie,” trans. John Hooker, Chronicles, VI, 226.
99. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1993), p. 5.
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Jean Feerick 85

Spenser, Race, and Ire-land

he objective of colonial discourse, Homi Bhabha summarily main-

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43. See Analecta Hibernica, 36 (1995), pp. 19–20.

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83. Derricke, sig. D4 and dedication.