¹ Kafka, Franz, The Trial (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 145–46Google Scholar.

² Ibid., p. 147.

³ See Febvre, Lucien, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Gottlieb, Beatrice (Cambridge, Mass., 1982)Google Scholar. As Gottlieb points out, “the book is really about croyance” (p. xxix). “What Febvre wanted to demonstrate was that the mental equipment available in the sixteenth century made it as good as impossible for anyone to be an atheist.” Originally published in 1942, as one of the cornerstones of Annales school historiography, Febvre's work has only very recently itself been subjected to skepticism.

⁴ Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene, in The Poetical Works, ed. de Selincourt, E. (Oxford, 1912)Google Scholar, and View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. Renwick, W. L. (Oxford, 1970)Google Scholar.

⁵ See Canny, Nicholas, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565–76 (London, 1976)Google Scholar, which contains several references to Spenser's View, and more specifically, “Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity,” Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983): 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ SirDavies, John, Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was Never Entirely Subdued, and Brought under Obedience of the Crown of England, until the Beginning of His Majestie's Happy Reign (London, 1612)Google Scholar, A survey of the present Estate of Ireland, Anno 1615, Addressed to His Most Excellent Majesty James the First … by His Most Humble Subject E.S., San Marino, Calif., Huntington Library, EL. 1746Google Scholar.

⁷ Bradshaw, Brendan, “Sword, Word and Strategy in the Reformation in Ireland,” Historical Journal 21, no. 3 (1978): 475–502CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Bradshaw, Brendan, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Robe and Sword in the conquest of Ireland,” in Law and Government under the Tudors: Essays presented to Sir Geoffrey Elton, ed. Cross, Claire, Loades, David, and Scarisbrick, J. J. (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 139–230CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Bradshaw, , “Sword, Word, and Strategy,” p. 491Google Scholar. Since Bryskett was Spenser's friend and superior in the Grey administration, this connection is plausible, even though Bryskett's treatise was not published until 1606 (Bryskett, Lodowick, Discourse of civill life containing the ethike part of morall philosophie (London, 1606)Google Scholar.

⁹ Starkey, Thomas, Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, ed. Burton, Kathleen M. (London, 1948)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Bradshaw, , “Swords, Word, and Strategy,” p. 494Google Scholar. For a study that offers itself as an alternative to either Bradshaw's approach via intellectual history or Canny's “anthropological view of social development,” see Pawlisch, Hans S., Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland: A Study in Legal Imperialism (Cambridge, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pawlisch investigates the collision between common law and Gaelic customs such as gavelkind and tanistry in a way that may clarify some issues in the View, but his focus is on the next stage of English policy in Ireland, on Davies and the Jacobean strategy of using judicial procedures to consolidate the Tudor conquest.

¹¹ Brady, Ciaran, “Spenser's Irish Crisis: Humanism and Experience in the 1590s,” Past and Present, no. 111 (1986), pp. 17–49Google Scholar. See also Brady, Ciaran, “Court, Castle and Country: The Framework of Government in Tudor Ireland,” in Natives and Newcomers: Essays on the Making of Irish Colonial Society, 1534–1641, ed. Gillespie, Brady and Gillespie, Raymond (Bungay, Suffolk, 1986), pp. 22–49Google Scholar. In the most recent stage of this controversy, Canny, and Brady, squared off in Past and Present, no. 120 (1988), pp. 201–15Google Scholar: Canny, , “Spenser's Irish Crisis: Humanism and Experience in the 1590s,” pp. 201–9Google Scholar; Bradshaw, , “Reply,” pp. 210–15Google Scholar.

¹² Brady, , “Spenser's Irish Crisis,” p. 28Google Scholar.

¹³ Ibid., p. 33.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Bradshaw, Brendan, “Edmund Spenser on Justice and Mercy,” in The Writer as Witness: Literature as Historical Evidence, ed. Dunne, Tom, Historical Studies 16 (1985): 76–89Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Brady, , “Spenser's Irish Crisis,” p. 18Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 49.

¹⁸ While his employment by Lord Grey offered financial security and entrepreneurial opportunities, there exists a strong and still not disproved inference that the publication of his Shepheardes Calender in the winter of 1579, with its obvious allusions to the queen's quarrel with Archbishop Grindal and less obvious ones to her unpopular marriage negotiations with Alencon, might well have endangered at least his prospects in England.

¹⁹ Dunseath, T. K., Spenser's Allegory of Justice in Book V of “The Faerie Queene” (Princeton, N.J., 1968), p. 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This book attempts to recuperate the poem by replacing the interest in the historical allegory (“the solving of historical equations”) with a genuinely literary focus on “organic wholeness and thematic unity” (pp. 4, 14).

²⁰ See, as the prime instance, Hough, Graham, A Preface to “The Faerie Queene” (London, 1962), pp. 193–200, esp. p. 193Google Scholar: “Justice is not a popular virtue in our age and a more or less conscious resentment against some of its classical forms is one of the current social derangements. Only a very reduced conception of justice is at all generally accepted nowadays—the egalitarian one; and that is precisely the view that Spenser did not hold.” This critic (writing in the early 1960s) is not, I feel, quite secure in his adoption of group position; his “we” tends to divide into two groups, one that approves of retributive justice and one that does not. For example:

What leaves us disgusted or dissatisfied is that so often Artegall's decisions seem harshly mechanical, lacking in insight and clemency. Yet it is idle to pretend that Spenser's Justice is not confronting a real problem. We have seen so much of the appalling corruptions of power in recent years that for us the whole field of executive authority is enveloped in confusion. There are many who deny the legitimacy of punishment altogether. Politically speaking the very words “police action” stink in the nostrils. Yet we all know that without penal authority the operation of justice is a mockery. How much slaughter and misery in the Congo might have been avoided by an early application of the old crude, outmoded colonial whiff of grapeshot? … We do not deny the facts, but we feel that Spenser ought to have been more embarrassed by them. It is quite clear that he was not embarrassed by them. He is an unhesitating exponent of the necessity for swift and relentless punishment. This is a point of view that is not in itself disreputable; and there is more to be said for it than is commonly said today. [P. 197]

²¹ It might be supposed that recent changes in literary studies would have proved more receptive to the complex message that, I argue, Spenser was transmitting in the later 1590s. Not so. Ironically, when contemporary critics pick up the same disturbing signals that led Brady to call the View incoherent and Hough to call Spenser inept in dealing with the Egalitarian Giant, they seem to work even harder, to provide only more sophisticated reasons, why we should not imagine the disturbance intentional. In an article entitled “‘Some Quirk, Some Subtle Evasion’: Legal Subversion in Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland” (Spenser Studies 6 [1985]: 147–63)Google Scholar, David Baker has argued that Spenser did not get permission to publish the View in 1598 because “he misjudged the effect his text would have on its intended readers—and those readers, for their part, misread (or disregarded) his intent” (p. 150). For Baker, the View was intended to be read as royalist polemic, but it failed because the authorities were suspicious readers, and detected in it “a tacit critique of English legal verities.” Citing Irenius on the need for “stony tables,” Baker remarks: “If these lines are ironic—and I do not think they are intentionally so—it is because the dialogue they are set within can be read as a circuitous demonstration that law in Elizabeth's colony cannot be plain, stead-fast, and unmoveable, that, for the English, Ireland has become a chaos of legal ambiguity, subversive equivocation, and pervasive uncertainty” (p. 152). For Baker, Spenser “did not distrust his ideological language and could not have ‘spoken’ any other, but he could sense, and lead his suspicious readers to sense, that in Ireland another tongue was spoken and another truth given voice” (p. 161). This is the furthest that Baker will go in admitting that Spenser's official readers were right to be suspicious, and his argument may be recognized as another version of Brady's formula for the View, that it expresses “deliberately and inadvertently, an eloquent expression of an acute sense of crisis.” But where does inadvertence end and deliberation begin? Baker's formulation repeats a currently fashionable shibboleth derived ultimately from Marx—that individuals are incapable of penetrating the sealed dome of ideology under which they are born. By the same token, the problems evident in Spenser's treatment of the Giant vs. Artegall were placed by Greenblatt, Stephen (“Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion,” Representations 1 [1983]: 1–29)CrossRefGoogle Scholar in the general context of “peasant rebellions” and disposed of in what has come to be known as the theory of containment. Taking for granted that “the great ruling class nightmare in the Renaissance” was “the marauding horde, the many-headed multitude, the insatiate, giddy, and murderous crowd” (p. 5), Greenblatt tried to come to terms with evidence to the contrary. He acknowledged “the uncanny resemblance between the Giant's iconographic sign and Artegall's” and “the still more uncanny resemblance between the Giant's rhetoric and Spenser's own.” But this perplexity, we are told, “is not an embarrassment but a positive achievement, for Spenser's narrative can function as a kind of training in the rejection of subversive conclusions drawn from licensed moral outrage” (p. 22). Freud's “uncanny” is offered as a vaguely psychological substitute for ambivalence, let alone for a theory of conscious intention. Quoting with satisfaction Spenser's image of the Giant tossed over the cliff by Talus, Greenblatt decided that Talus's violence “exorcises” “the potentially dangerous social consequences—the praxis—that might follow from Spenser's own eloquent social criticism.”

²² This point is made more conventionally by Aptekar, Jane, Ikons of Justice: Iconography and Thematic Imagery in Book V of The Faerie Queene (New York and London, 1969)Google Scholar, which finds “dubious, ironic undertones” in the Legend of Justice carried both by Spenser's emphasis on force and fraud and by the alignment of Artegall with Hercules. “Readers have very often found [Artegall] an objectionable hero and man. The standard defence is that the rigorous justice he exemplifies was accepted as legitimate by Spenser's contemporaries. Iconographical evidence indicates that this is not the case and that if we find Artegall objectionable it is probably for good reason” (pp. 6–7). By iconography, however, Aptekar means not political icons employed by the Elizabethan state but the more academic and esoteric emblem tradition.

²³ For a brief introduction to the relation between “conscience” and “equity,” see Baker, J. H., An Introduction to English Legal History (London, 1979), pp. 83–95Google Scholar.

²⁴ For a summary of the argument in favor of Wenceslaus Hollar as the engraver, see Rogow, Arnold A., Thomas Hobbes: Radical in the Service of Reaction (New York, 1986), pp. 156–59Google Scholar.

²⁵ Cooper, Thomas, An Admonition to the People of England, ed. Arber, E. (London, 1589; reprint, London, 1895), p. 118Google Scholar.

²⁶ See Hill, Christopher, “The Many-headed Monster,” in his Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), pp. 181–204Google Scholar; and Graham Hough, who finds “a tone of somewhat confused indignation” which “suggests a contemporary target” (p. 194); Hough's own suggestion for the target is the Anabaptists at Munster, who “attracted unfavourable attention in England in 1575.” But Spenser himself makes no such connection.

²⁷ Wordsworth, William, “Blest Statesman He,” in Poems, ed. Hayden, John (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1977), p. 819Google Scholar.

²⁸ Craik, G. L., Spenser and His Poetry, 3 vols. (London, 1845, 1871; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1971), 2:194–95Google Scholar.

²⁹ Compare also H. J. Todd's remark on this episode: “This fiction is an admirable picture of the absurdity of those levelling principles, which have lately made such a noise in the world. See The Patriot, a periodical Paper, published in Ireland in the year 1793, and written (it is supposed) by Baron Smith” (cited in Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Greenlaw, Edwinet al. [Baltimore, 1932–1957], bk. 5, p. 177Google Scholar.

³⁰ Craik, 2:194–95.

³¹ Fletcher, Angus, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (Chicago and London, 1971), pp. 242–45Google Scholar.

³² Bradshaw, Brendan, “Edmund Spenser on Justice and Mercy” (n. 15 above), p. 78Google Scholar.

³³ At the end of book 1 Spenser wrote:

Now strike your sailes ye jolly Mariners,

For we be come unto a quiet rode,

Where we must land some of our passengers,

And light this wearie vessell of her lode.

……………And then againe abroad

On the long voyage whereto she is bent:

Well may she speede and fairely finish her intent.

Book 6, canto 12, begins with another version of the same simile:

Like as a ship, that through the Ocean wyde

Directs her course unto one certaine cost,

Is met of many a counter winde and tyde,

With which her winged speed is let and corse,

And she her selfe in stormie surges tost;

Yet making many a borde, and many a bay,

Still winneth way, ne hath her compasse lost:

Right so it fares with me in this long way,

Whose course is often stayd, yet never is astray.

³⁴ W. L. Renwick, ed. (n. 4 above, p. 171), points out that the View identifies itself as having been written in England “with a consistency difficult to preserve if the placing were imaginary” and that, of the seven dated manuscripts, five give 1596 as the date. It was entered in the Stationers' Register on April 14, 1598, but not published until the Dublin edition of 1633 dedicated to Wentworth, then Charles I's deputy general in Ireland. See SirWare, James, ed., The Historie of Ireland collected by three learned authors (Dublin, 1633)Google Scholar, which also contains the tracts of Meredith Hanmer and Edmund Campion. This edition is of great interest in its own right, not only because it contains Campion's Jesuit perspective; not only because it was intended, according to the dedication to Wentworth, to contrast “these our halcyon dayes” with “the former turbulent and tempestuous times”; not only because it contains an edited version of Spenser's tract intended to soften some of its more brutal passages; but also because there exists a copy richly annotated in or about 1670. So, e.g., beside Ware's prefatory statement that “The troubles and miseries of the time when he wrote it, doe partly excuse him” for his severity, the annotator added: “for the rebellion of Oct. 23. 1641 justified Spencers wisedome and deep insight into that barbarous nation.”

³⁵ Brady, , “Spenser's Irish Crisis” (n. 11 above), p. 29Google Scholar.

³⁶ Ibid., p. 37.

³⁷ Ibid., p. 41.

³⁸ Ibid.

³⁹ Although the Oxford English Dictionary defines “folkmote” as meeting only, it is clear that Spenser believes, probably following local lore, that the name was given to these places from their ancient purpose. As a result, the topography of Ireland is marked, if you will, with democratic icons built into the landscape.

⁴⁰ View, p. 78.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 79.

⁴² Ibid., pp. 50–53.

⁴³ Ibid., p. 53. It is perhaps worth noticing that Brady finds this section not only original to Spenser but unsettling: “[Spenser] has some curious, and I suspect not altogether serious, observations to make concerning the pernicious effects of native dress and hair-style, but in the main his description followed upon earlier accounts” (“Spenser's Irish Crisis,” p. 28).

⁴⁴ View, p. 75.

⁴⁵ Ibid., pp. 74–75.

⁴⁶ For some notes toward a theory of ventriloquism—texts that articulate the grievances of repressed groups either in order to refute them or, covertly, to encourage them, see my Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford, 1989), pp. 41–48Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ View, p. 5; italics added. To a modern reader, it is tempting to see a certain irony in his subsequent complaint that Brehon law is “repugning quite both to God's law and man's” in permitting a financial compounding for murder instead of capital punishment.

⁴⁸ “Inconvenience” is a legal term, distinguishing the social or public cost of a given law from a “mischief,” a cost to an individual. It is ubiquitous in the View. I owe this information to Thomas Scanlan.

⁴⁹ View, p. 33.

⁵⁰ I agree with Bradshaw that Plato's Laws is part of Spenser's intellectual building material; I do not agree that to find a source is to find agreement with the source. One may just as likely encounter adaptation or serious critique.

⁵¹ Plato, Laws 7:797e–798b, from The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Hamilton, Edith and Caims, Huntington (New York, 1961), pp. 1369–70Google Scholar.

⁵² Hough, Even Graham (A Preface [n. 20 above], pp. 194–95Google Scholar) notes that Artegall's reply is self-contradictory and that the Giant's complaints “are remarkably like those advanced by the poet himself,” but he concludes: “The fact is that Spenser is uncommonly inept at set dialectic.” “The whole effect,” he remarks in a now archaic but telling allusion, “is rather like that of an unscripted discussion on the Third Programme.”

⁵³ This is a condensed version of the debate that occupies Laws 1:625e–630. Similarly, the reference to Tyrtaeus in the discussion of the Irish bards is probably an ironic allusion to Laws 9:858e, where an analogy is drawn between the “bad precepts” for living that are derived from “Homer, or Tyrtaeus,” and the good rules (which, however, need to be alluringly written) of the legislator.

⁵⁴ View, p. 94.

⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 12.

⁵⁶ Ibid.

⁵⁷ Ibid.

⁵⁸ Like the View, the Note was submitted to the Privy Council, but it requests the queen to take pity on the English colonists rather than the Irish: “our feare is leste your Maiestes wonted mercifull minde should againe be wrought to your wonted milde courses.” See The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. Greenlaw, Edwinet al. (Baltimore, 1932–1957), 9:241–42Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ View, p. 95.

⁶⁰ Contrast, however, Ciaran Brady's interpretation of this passage: The sword “served symbolically to represent the power of the magistrate or indeed the divine order, as a metaphor for rigour, a cutting edge, as an image of sheer power unrestrained by convention, and of course it also denoted an instrument of mortal violence…. It is through such a subtle process of assertion, qualification, abstraction and reaffirmation that Spenser seeks to induce his readers to accept the violence which is about to be proposed, while allowing them to evade the moral consequences of such acceptance” (“Reply,” Past and Present, no. 120 [1988], p. 215Google Scholar).

⁶¹ It was this aspect of the View which Milton in his invoked against the Irish who, “by their endlesse treasons and revolts have deserv'd to hold no Parlament at all, but to be govern'd by Edicts and Garrisons.” See his Articles of Peace made and concluded with the Irish Rebels (1649), in Complete Prose Works, ed. Wolfe, D. M.et al., 8 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1953–1980), 3:303Google Scholar. But it was also this Spenser whom Milton appropriated, in wishing for “a man of iron, such as Talus, by our Poet Spencer, is fain'd to be the page of Justice,” to assist him in his own campaign against the institution of monarchy. In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates Milton found it useful to reinvoke the sword of Justice as an emblem of antityrannical retribution, complaining that the Presbyterians “protest against those that talk of bringing [the king] to the tryal of Justice, which is the Sword of God … in whose hand soever by apparent signes his testified will is to put it” (3:193); “be he King, or Tyrant, or Emperour, the Sword of Justice is above him; in whose hand soever is found sufficient power to avenge the effusion, and so great a deluge of innocent human blood” (3:197).

⁶² Some have argued that Leviathan's frontispiece tactically combined the features of Charles II and Cromwell. See Brown, Keith, “The Artist of the Leviathan Title-Page,” British Library Journal 4, no. 9 (1978): 34Google Scholar; and Rogow (n. 24 above), pp. 159–60. The theory that Cromwell was represented was first introduced in 1842 by Whewell, W. in his Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (London, 1841), p. 21Google Scholar.

⁶³ See King, John N., Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton, N.J., 1989), pp. 263–65Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ Spenser, View, p. 94. Renwick (n. 34 above) “takes it” that Spenser means the earl of Ormond, but the phrase “coasting upon the South Sea” can only refer to Essex, who in 1596, when the View was written, achieved the capture of Cadiz and established himself as a popular military hero. Renwick does acknowledge that the concluding reference to the “such an one … upon whom the eye of all England is fixed and our last hopes now rest” is probably Essex. Most important, he acknowledges that in 1596 another invasion by Spain was daily expected in Ireland, “until it was forestalled by the Cadiz expedition” (p. 182).

⁶⁵ McCoy, Richard, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), pp. 86, 88Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Oram, William A.et al., eds., Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1989), p. 755Google Scholar, points out that the double wedding of Elizabeth and Katherine Somerset took place on November 8, 1596, and that the double betrothal must have been celebrated at Essex House after Essex's return from Spain on August 7 and before the court moved from Greenwich on October 1.

⁶⁷ Plumb, J. H., “The Growth of the Electorate in England from 1600 to 1715,” Past and Present, no. 45 (1969), p. 94Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Carlson, Leland H., Martin Marprelate, Gentleman: Master Job Throkmorton Laid Open in his Colors (San Marino, Calif., 1981), pp. 101, 104, 106–7, 216Google Scholar; and see especially the following summary, p. 238: “Throkmorton was a zealous nonconformist…. During the Admonition Controversy he had befriended Field, the organizing head of the dissident Puritans, and had urged his release from Newgate prison…. With Peter Wentworth he believed in free speech for parliamentarians, even on sensitive subjects such as the succession problem or religious reform. Consequently, he resented the role of the bishops, and despised Archbishop Whitgift, who had enforced articles of subscription, curtailed the liberty of the press by the Star Chamber decree of 1586, imprisoned nonconformists, bullied defendants, exacted ex officio oaths, intimidated adversaries, and displayed unwonted choler. Throkmorton criticized the Court of High Commission, which was dominated by Archbishop Whitgift, Bishop Aylmer, and Bishop Cooper, whose decisions he regarded as miscarriages of justice.”

⁶⁹ See Ibid., p. 238: “He was an admirer of Robert Dudley, the earl of Leicester, and of his older brother, Ambrose Dudley, earl of Warwick.”

⁷⁰ Throkmorton, Job, The just censure and reproofe of Martin Junior ([Wolston, Warwickshire: John Hodgskin & Valentine Symmes, 1589])Google Scholar.

⁷¹ Aylmer is represented in the “July” eclogue as the shepherd Morrell, and we are told that the poem is written in “disprayse of proude and ambitious Pastours. Such as Morrell is here imagined to bee.”

⁷² Throkmorton, The just censure, fol. A4r.

⁷³ Ibid., fol. C3r, v.

⁷⁴ Ibid., fol. C4r.

⁷⁵ [Throkmorton, Job], A Petition directed to her Majestie (Middelburg: Richard Schilders, 1592)Google Scholar.

⁷⁶ Sutcliffe, Matthew, An Answere to a Certaine Libel Supplicatorie, or rather Diffamatory, and also to certaine Calumnious Articles, and Interrogatories, both printed and scattered in secret corners, to the slaunder of the Ecclesiasticall state, and put forth under the name and title of a Petition directed to her Majestie (London, 1592)Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ Ibid., fol. A3r; italics added.

⁷⁸ Ibid., fol. 55.

⁷⁹ Ibid., fol. 47.

⁸⁰ Ibid., fol. 68.

⁸¹ Ibid., fols. 76–77; italics added.

⁸² Ibid., fol. 67.

⁸³ Ibid.,fol. B3r.

⁸⁴ Throkmorton, , A Petition directed to her Majestie, p. 46Google Scholar.

⁸⁵ Ibid., p. 46.

⁸⁶ Sutcliffe, fol. 79.