Ireland

Ireland
Chaucer
Spenser
St. Patrick

 

Ephesians 4:29
“Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.”

 

 "Dan Chaucer, well of English undefiled"~~~Spenser

 

 

 

"This ... focuses on Spenser's creative response to both the legacy of Chaucer and also to the tradition of native medieval romance. What characterizes Spenser's response to both Chaucer and medieval native romance above all is a sense of strategy. A number of Spenser's texts provoke the reader into moments of recognition, where s/he must negotiate the significance of the work's signalled relationship with earlier native literature. More than just borrowing, Spenser's response to Chaucer and native medieval romance involves complex manipulations of the authority and meaning of the earlier literature, impacting on the authority of his own works. What is perhaps most interesting is how Spenser's handling of both Chaucer's legacy and the tradition of native medieval romance achieves synthesis, since the two traditions represented an intrinsic opposition."~~~Richard A. McCabe
Those lucky few are treated to an appropriately complex, shifting Spenser. McCabe’s introduction highlights a guiding principle which underpins almost every essay:
Without his literary skills, Spenser would be indistinguishable from the scores of secretaries, civil servants, and colonists who sought personal advantage on the fringes of empire (p. 4).
This sentence identifies one of the major preoccupations of Spenser studies in the past thirty years: his involvement in the government of Ireland as a colonial administrator and his intense, problematic thinking about Irish affairs in The Faerie Queene and Vewe of the Present State of Ireland.
Yet McCabe balances the self-interested secretary with the imaginative writer; he notes that the section on poetic craft is the major justification for the Handbook’s existence (p. 4). One of the strengths of the volume is that questions of
 craft are not restricted to this section."

Chess: "Ireland" "Chaucer" "Spenser" "St. Patrick"