Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Foreign relations in Jacobean England: the Sherley brothers and the ‘voyage of Persia’
- 3 ‘The naked and the dead’: Elizabethan perceptions of Ireland
- 4 The Elizabethans in Italy
- 5 Tragic form and the voyagers
- 6 Nationality and language in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy
- 7 Marlowe's Argonauts
- 8 Pirates and ‘turning Turk’ in Renaissance drama
- 9 The wrong end of the telescope
- 10 ‘Travelling hopefully’: the dramatic form of journeys in English Renaissance drama
- 11 ‘Seeing things’: Amazons and cannibals
- 12 Industrious Ariel and idle Caliban
- 13 The New World in The Tempest
- 14 ‘What's past is prologue’: metatheatrical memory and transculturation in The Tempest
- 15 Lope de Vega and Shakespeare
- Index
3 - ‘The naked and the dead’: Elizabethan perceptions of Ireland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Foreign relations in Jacobean England: the Sherley brothers and the ‘voyage of Persia’
- 3 ‘The naked and the dead’: Elizabethan perceptions of Ireland
- 4 The Elizabethans in Italy
- 5 Tragic form and the voyagers
- 6 Nationality and language in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy
- 7 Marlowe's Argonauts
- 8 Pirates and ‘turning Turk’ in Renaissance drama
- 9 The wrong end of the telescope
- 10 ‘Travelling hopefully’: the dramatic form of journeys in English Renaissance drama
- 11 ‘Seeing things’: Amazons and cannibals
- 12 Industrious Ariel and idle Caliban
- 13 The New World in The Tempest
- 14 ‘What's past is prologue’: metatheatrical memory and transculturation in The Tempest
- 15 Lope de Vega and Shakespeare
- Index
Summary
Just over a third of the way into Edmund Spenser's lengthy prose dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596), the dominant interlocutor, Irenius, substantiates a point about the cultural practices of the indigenous Irish with an anecdote based on his own observation of the people:
[T]he Gaules used to drinke their enemyes blood and to painte themselves therewith So allsoe they write that the owlde Irishe weare wonte And so have I sene some of the Irishe doe but not theire enemyes but friendes blodd as namelye at the execution of A notable Traitour at Limericke Called murrogh Obrien I sawe an olde woman which was his foster mother take up his heade whilste he was quartered and sucked up all the blodd runninge thereout Sayinge that the earthe was not worthie to drinke it and thearwith allso steped her face, and breste and torne heare Cryinge and shrikinge out most terrible.
The incident has frequently been cited to argue that Spenser was in Ireland as early as 1577, when Murrogh O'Brien was executed. Reading the episode in this way is by no means to be dismissed out of hand, but it does risk riding roughshod over the layers of rhetorical and cultural codes which the text places between us as readers and the putative eyewitness.
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- Information
- Travel and Drama in Shakespeare's Time , pp. 32 - 54Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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