The Empirical Eye: Edmund Spenser's "A View of the Present State of Ireland"

Abstract

Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland has engendered considerable debate concerning its historical, political and aesthetic contexts.1 For example, in a recent edition of History Ireland (Autumn, 1994), Ciaran Brady reviewed Representing Ireland: literature and the origins of conflict 1534-1660, and he pejoratively commented that the contributors focus upon Spenser's View to the exclusion of other texts.2 Brady claims that the contributors, with the exception of the historian Brendan Bradshaw, demonstrate various degrees of methodological limitation and historical ignorance. In part, Brady appears to be irri? tated by the re-orientation in literary studies from the aesthetic analy? sis of canonical texts to the ideological analysis of discursive practices. A consequence of this re-orientation in literary studies is that Spenser's View is situated firmly within the new historicist field of inquiry. Historians and literary critics have previously read Spenser's View in relation to other Elizabethan texts, including The Faerie Queene. However, these readings have often been premised upon an inaccu? rate or a reductive examination of the View's historical contexts. For example, many critics interpret the View and the Faerie Queene as if the fictional voices are transparent mediators for Spenser's voice.3 The paradoxical oscillation between authorial self-promotion and absence is discounted by critics who overlook Spenser's privileged position within Elizabethan culture: Spenser is geographically marginal and symbolically central to the English metropolitan centre. The dialogue between Spenser's Irenius and Eudoxus is designed to complicate the authorial responsibility for what is spoken. It is naive and methodo? logically flawed to treat the opinions expressed by Irenius and Eudoxus as simply belonging to Spenser. New historicist literary critics treat textual voices as registering heteroglossia, locate texts within a historically contextualised sym? bolic order and examine texts as agents in constructing a culture's sense of reality. Louis Montrose has defined the new historicist enter? prise as 'promoting a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history'.41 digress into a cursory account of new historicism to provide a context for understanding the place that the View has assumed in contemporary literary studies: Spenser's View is 44