Project MUSE - But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us: Ireland Colonialism and Renaissance Literature by Andrew Murphy (review) (2024)

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Reviews: Leirmheasanna opment of Ireland. Fallon warns against such amnesia, as"dismissive ignorance of the past is confused with liberation from it:' An Age ofInnocence marks the changing ofthe cultural pendulum, as a generation ofwriters fought for a new balance between the "living actuality ofthe past" and the realities ofa modern Ireland. Without this period of transition, the poetry revival of the 1960s and 1970s would not have been possible. ~ TIMOTHY P. KEANE But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us: Ireland Colonialism and Renaissance Literature, by Andrew Murphy, pp. 224. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. $34. Andrew Murphy focuses on the imaginative involvement of select English writers who, between the Norman and the Jacobean conquests of Ireland, draw sharp distinctions between themselves as Englishmen, and the Irish as Irishmen . Murphy attempts to show how Ireland was thought to be different, alien, and Other and how such writers as Spenser, Shakespeare, and Jonson responded to this. He argues convincingly that, unlike the New World, the proximity of Ireland and the Irish caused them to share many cultural and religious characteristics with the English. It was precisely this proximity, argues Murphy , that gave rise to a certain anxiety among some English writers and exacerbated the struggle of these writers to disassociate themselves from the Irish at a moment when English identity was being formed during the Tudor and Stuart monarchies. Murphy traces the literary foundation of Irish Otherness to Geraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century. Cambrensis wrote disparagingly of the "barbarian" Irish. This Norman depiction is treated as what would later be the prototypical English attempt at dissociation. Cambrensis faced the problem of disassociating that which was not only proximate in the geographic sense, but also deeply interwoven into the fabric of European, as well as English , consciousness. As Cambrensis admits, Irish pilgrimages to the Continent helped to establish many religious communities there. Subsequently, when the Normans ventured into Ireland they were met by a people that was alien and yet well versed in a similar religious culture. In order to dissociate himself , Cambrensis attacked the Irish brand of this common Christian heritage by associating the works and legends of Irish saints with the pagan East. For instance, he denigrated Irish religious paranormal experience as heathen and belittled it as the product of superstition, vice, or charlatanism. In so doing, Murphy argues, Cambrensis succeeded in creating in the English imagination 153 Reviews: Leirmheasanna an Irish devotional tradition that was a clownish assortment of heretical practices that were Christian in name only, ignorant and merely a parody of civilization. The late Elizabethan period holds particular interest to Murphy, as it was during Tyrone's Rebellion in the 159o's that the Irish began to forge a national consciousness. He notes that,"... O'Neill, in 1599, appeared on the Irish scene as the first Irish leader since the eleventh century to attempt to forge an island wide coalition, with some ambitions toward uniting the country as a whole and creating from it a single national unit." Murphy supports his observations of early modern Ireland by examining the writings of Spenser and Shakespeare. In A View ofthe Present State ofIreland (1596), Spenser attacked not only the Irish and their increasingly sophisticated responses to England, but also the Old English as well, accusing them of falling from their English identity by taking on "barbarian" Gaelic mannerisms. Murphy argues that "the broad fidelity of the majority of the Old English to the unreformed church provided New English writers such as Spenser with ammunition in their struggle for control in Ireland, as it signaled another way in which the Old English could be conflated with the native Irish as a single grouping in need ofthe kind ofrigorous reform that only the New English could provide:' Building on Norman religious distinctions, Spenser's cultural view of the Irish prepared for such later writers as Shakespeare and his complex look at the Irish question in Henry V. In much the same way that Spenser was concerned with establishing the identity ofthe English in terms of people, culture, and religion , Shakespeare was concerned with establishing the identity of the realm itself. Murphy points to Henry Vas a self-conscious attempt to...

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