Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (1596): Re-Appraised

The Royal Irish Academy

On Monday, 7 October, Nicholas Canny MRIA delivered this lecture as part of the Dublin Festival of History in the Royal Irish Academy. Spenser’s View has, for centuries, been treated variously as a trove of prejudiced antiquarian lore useful for disparaging Irish people at moments of crisis, and as a store house of evidence that the English government engaged upon an Irish genocide in Elizabethan times. This lecture by Nicolas Canny, MRIA, offers a radical re-appraisal of the manuscript copy that Spenser left to posterity in 1596, and asks what motivated Spenser to take time from poetic composition to write this prose dialogue, what circumstances influenced his composition of different passages, and what sources and methods he used to underpin the ideas advanced by his interlocutors?