Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene (1590-96), and all-purpose with the well of English undefiled, spent the years 1580-99 in Ireland, chiefly on his estate of Kilcolman Castle, former seat of the former seat of the Desmonds, until burnt out by the súgan Earl of Desmond in the first years of Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone's 'Rebellion' which ended at the Battle of Kinsale. The poet died destitute shortly afterwards in London. His connection with Ireland has been a matter of some interest to generations of Anglo-Irish literary historians-the topographical counterparts of the Tipperary Galtees and the waterways of Co. Cork in his great poem being the chief focus of patriotic interest for many years. The prose work, A Viewe of the present state of Ireland, probably written in 1596, was registered by Matthew Lowndes on 14 April 1598 but not printed until Sir James Ware issued it in Dublin, bound with similar colonial tracts by Edmund Campion, Meredith Hanmer, and Lord Marlborough under the somewhat mysterious imprint of the Dublin Society of Stationers in 1633. Ware modified Spenser's strong language about the Irish in some places, and in recent years it has been the business of Irish scholars and creative writers to anatomise the ethnically-intolerant version of western-tending, Brito-centric imperialism and renaissance centralism that it represents. Ware's book in crisply printed and well-made folios is an Irish bibliophilic prize, few copies being in private possession. 20 manuscript copies of the original have survived, though none in Ireland. [Now read on-Ed.]
The Irish University Review, 26, 1 (Autumn/Winter 1996), takes the form of a Special Issue devoted to 'Spenser in Ireland 1560-1996', with Anne Fogarty acting as guest editor, and contributions from Bernhard Klein ('The Lie of the Land: English Surveyors, Irish Rebels and The Faerie Queene'), John Breen ('The Faerie Queene, Book I and the Theme of Protestant Exile'), Eilean Ní Chuilleanain ('Reading Spenser as an Irish Writer'), Nicholas Canny ('Reviewing A View of the Present State of Ireland'), Sheila T. Cavanagh ('Spenser's View of the Irish and The Faerie Queene', Clare Carroll ('Spenser and the Irish Language'), Andrew Hadfield ('Another Look at Serena and Irena'); Willy Maley ('Ireland in The Faerie Queene'), and Patricia Coughlan ('The Local Context of Mutabilitie's Plea'). It would be impertinent to summarise the arguments in these essays, but certainly Spenser's relationship with Ireland can never again appear as simple as it does in Alspach and such commentaries. Spenser's mobilisation of the discourses of politics and aesthetics in the colonial context are scrutinised by each of these essayists in a manner that feels definitive. In adding an adroitly annotated bibliography of writings on 'Spenser and Ireland', 1986-96, Willy Maley has mapped out the intellectual terrain with remarkable economy and some wry humour.
The Review also contains an Annual IASIL Bibliography, compiled by Kellie Donovan Wixson (Chair) and other members of the Bibliographical Sub-Committee, with a prefixed letter indicating that the rules of listing are currently under review by an ad-hoc sub-committee charged with drawing up future guidelines under the chairmanship of Christopher Murray (IUR Ed.). IASIL Members are invited to contribute views matters relating to the format, scope, &c., of the Bibliography at the earliest date possible.
Books reviewed include Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, Otto Rauchbauer's Edith Oenone Somerville Archive in Drishane [... &c.], and The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, all approved in different ways. Dr. Murray is surely right to bracket the assumption made by Mary Junker in Beckett: The Irish Dimension that the writer was interested in the Irish language, and with it the tenuous inference that 'Godot' was a pun on 'go deo' (forever). Indeed, it might be said-as Beckett remarked of the Irish people vis-a-vis Great Art in a letter to McGreevy-he never 'gave a fart in his corduroys' about it one way or the other, although we now learn that he was a 'Brits Out' man in his final years.
The IUR 'Spenser Issue' was launched at a reception in the Nora Greene Room on UCD's Belfield Campus, 28 Nov. 1997, when the main speaker was Professor Robert Welch, former IASIL Chairman, editor of the Oxford Companion, and novelist whose widely-noticed The Kilcolman Notebook (1995) is described by Maley as an 'imagining of Spenser's relationship with Elizabeth and Raleigh, bawdy and irreverent'. [Hold on there! You're talking about my Head of Department!-Ed.]