Spenser wrote A View of the Present State of Ireland (1598) for the purpose of offering and justifying a rigid policy of English colonial control over Ireland. Yet despite A View's support of English colonialism, there is evidence that it may have been suppressed by the Elizabethan government: it did not appear in print until 1633, nearly forty years after Spenser first submitted it to the Stationer’s Register. Even after 1633, Sir James Ware, who published the text, remarked that “we may wish that in some passages it had bin tempered with more moderation” (Hadfield and Maley xxiv). Ware’s uneasiness about the vehemence of A View—his sense that it exceeded the boundaries of "moderation" necessary even in the most polemical of political tracts—illuminates the larger issues of boundary negotiation that permeate Spenser's text. Spenser advocates a strict course of containment, relocation, and military governance in Ireland. Nevertheless, he cannot quite contain his own rhetorical efforts within the boundaries he advocates, and A View—both in form and content—builds to argumentative crescendos that overreach themselves, rendering it difficult at times to distinguish the savageness of the Irish from the savageness of the measures designed to suppress them.[1] When Irenius, Spenser's persona in the text, catalogues the "evills" (45) of Irish law, custom, and religion, which he offers as proof of the need for drastic measures of conquest and subjugation of the Irish populace, we see Spenser struggling not only with pragmatic questions of how best to justify, craft, and execute English colonial policies, but also with the difficulty of imposing on his own language a framework of discipline and control.

This paper examines the spatial and visual qualities of Spenser's colonial language in A View, qualities that lend themselves well to the concept of dimensionality—a term I will use to signify the conceptual space that Spenser’s text assumes at different points in the narrative. One important rhetorical mode in A View can be described as two-dimensional: a distanced critical perspective from which English plans for the future of Ireland and the Irish appear systematic and clear, and which is exemplified in Spenser’s references to the all-seeing “ey of England.” When Irenius recommends total martial control and offers policies that he claims will facilitate English suppression of the Irish, he acts as a spokesman for this two-dimensional perspective. He lists figures for the placement of English garrisons, sets out harsh but lucid plans for the Irish territory, and promulgates a vision of spatial and moral order. Ireland, in these passages, is figured as a territory that can be mapped, divided, and controlled, and its inhabitants as peoples who can be subdued, transplanted neatly into settlements, and brought from disorder to a state more amenable to Irenius’ colonial aims. However, another important mode of Spenser’s rhetoric can be described as multi-dimensional. The concept of multi-dimensionality helps us to understand two distinct phenomena in A View: first, it refers to the native “chaos” of the Irish that threatens to spill past the boundaries within which Irenius hopes to contain it and thus infect the English project with its "contagion" (63). As Irenius prepares to launch into his discourse on Irish laws, customs, and religion, Eudoxus remarks, "the evills which youe desire to be recounted are verye manye and allmoste Countable with those which weare hidden in the baskett of Pandora" (45). The metaphor of Pandora suggests an anxiety over the English ability to contain the Irish on a properly two-dimensional plane. However, it also helps to introduce the second multi-dimensional phenomenon I will discuss: Spenser’s sense that he has opened a discursive box over whose contents he lacks total control. The very zeal of Irenius' Irish disquisition results in strained logical connections and a rhetorical pitch that often verges on desperation, and implicitly exposes the limitations of the order for which he calls. Spenser’s narrative ultimately casts doubt on the efficacy the two-dimensional approach to colonial policy it offers, for this approach depends upon a notion of order that Spenser cannot sustain—even in his own tract. The Irish retain a realm of action over which the “ey of England” cannot maintain full surveillance.

The issue of surveillance as form of power in A View is perhaps best illustrated by the practice of cartography. Several critics have observed that the moment when Eudoxus pulls out a map to follow along with Irenius’ plans for Ireland's reconstruction is a crucial one in the narrative. As Irenius describes his plans for the placement of English military forces in the Irish colony, Eudoxus interjects:

I see now all your men bestowed but in what places woulde youe sett theire Garrison that they might rise out moste Convenientlie to service? and thoughe perhaps I ame ignorant of the places yeat I will take the mapp of Ireland before me and make myne eyes in the meane while my Scollemasters to guide my vnderstandinge to iudge of your plott. (152)

As Bruce Avery has argued, the map functions as a "tool of empire" (Avery 265) which allows Eudoxus to seize both spatial and conceptual control over the territory that he and Irenius have been discussing. When Eudoxus uses the map to “make [his] eyes in the meane,” he assumes that the two-dimensional plot will facilitate understanding and proper judgment. David Baker, however, points out that the boundaries drawn by English maps of Ireland in the Elizabethan period were frequently constructed piecemeal or through guesswork: "Outside the zones of English control, officially established boundaries were often conjectural and muddled. As a result... Ireland was a colony in which, from the perspective of English officials, spatial coordinates were intractably ambiguous" (Baker 78). Irenius and Eudoxus initiate a stabilizing gesture, a movement toward the two-dimensional, by using the map to delineate specific areas of control. However, the fact that such maps plotted out territories whose boundaries were often in dispute, unknown, or in flux, suggests that the mapping impulse is propelled in part by a profound sense of discomfort with Ireland’s spatial ambiguity: how were colonial representatives to exercise their power if they did not know precisely where they were supposed to exercise it? English cartographic enterprises in Ireland attested to a sense of disorientation that was keenest in areas where the power of the crown was least established.

As Irenius repeatedly expresses, the Irish, with their ambulatory habits, resist the two-dimensional plotting that would render them more easily containable within mapped boundaries. Irenius’ frustration suggests that as long as Irish rebels retained the ability to move outside defined zones of English power, the limitations of colonial control would remain a source of anxiety for those who were exerting it. This uneasiness crops up again and again in Spenser's text. Irenius denounces Irish "night stealthes" and recommends the "Cuttinge downe and openinge of all places thoroughe wodes so that a wide waye of the space" (224) might be forged. To counter the Irish desire to "revoulte or breake out" (227) he counsels the establishment of towns under the watchful eye of a governor; such towns, he claims, will keep the Irish people "well and strongelye entrenched or otherwise fenced in" (225). Irenius’ plans are most consistent when he offers strategies of containment that will facilitate the subjection of the Irish population, bringing them "from desire of warrs and tumultes to the love of peace and Civillitye" by the execution of "straighte lawes and ordinaunces" (218). Again, Irenius exhibits the linear, two-dimensional impulse associated with attempts to subdue the Irish and maintain colonial rule.

This impulse is complicated, however, by the very rhetorical strategies Irenius employs in order to establish the need for such rule. In a particularly revealing passage, Irenius identifies the suppression of uncontrolled Irish movement as an integral component of effective colonization. To Eudoxus’ confusion, he denounces "bolloying," a practice that he claims the Irish derived from the Scythians and Scottish, in which nomadic farmers moved with herds of cattle from pasture to pasture in order to provide grazed lands with a replenishing period. When Eudoxus asks what possible objection Irenius can have to bolloying, Irenius responds by linking nomadic customs with the ability to hide from and therefore stymie authorities:

... if theare be any outlawes or loose people (as they are never without some) which live vppon stealthes and spoile, they are evermore succored and finde reliefe onelye in those Bollies being vppon the waste places, wheareas els they shoulde be driven shortelye to sterve or to Come downe to the townes to steale reliefe wheare by one meanes or other they | they woulde sone be Caughte... Moreover the people that live thus in these Bollies growe theareby the more Barbarous and live more licentiouslye then they Could in townes vsinge what meanes they liste and practisinge what mischiefs and villanies they will either againste the gouernement theare generallye by theire Combinacions or againste private men whom they maligne by stealinge their goodes or murderinge themselves; for theare they thinke themselues haulfe exemted from lawe and obedience and havinge once tasted fredome doe like a steare that hathe bene longe out of his yoke grudge and repine ever after to Come vnder rule againe. (98)

Irenius contrasts the "loose" Irish with insular "private men," and the "stealthes and spoile" of unfamiliar territory with the "lawe and obedience" of the towns. The nomadic communities act as a locus of dangerous "Combinacions," encouraging rebellious cooperation from a space that lies beyond the boundaries of colonial control. Furthermore, the language of this passage is telling in its use of metaphors of space: those who practice bolloying add relief to the two-dimensional colonial map by living "vppon the waste places," a position from which it is difficult to bring them back "vnder rule."

As Irenius’ discussion of bolloying segues into a long excursion on the Irish practice of wearing mantles (another supposedly Scythian inheritance), his concern with maintaining conceptual control over the native population acquires a acutely visual quality; the Irish must not only be physically contained, they also must be visually monitored. When Eudoxus asks Irenius why he considers mantles an offensive form of dress, Irenius responds that the mantle is:

a fitt howsse for an outlawe a mete bedd for a Rebell and an Apte cloake for a thefe, ffirste the Outlawe beinge for his manye Crymes and villanies banished from the Townes and howses of honeste men and wanderinge in waste places far from daunger of lawe maketh his mantle his howsse and vnder it Couerethe him self from the wrathe of heaven from the offence of the earthe and from the sighte of men. (100)

Irenius conflates the types of spatial issues exemplified by his mistrust of Irish nomadic behavior with a mistrust of that which is hidden from the visual scope more generally. He accomplishes this by figuring the mantle as a type of "howsse" that permits individuals to frustrate attempts at their colonization by utilizing a self-contained, portable tool of concealment and disguise. Significantly, Irenius identifies the various "eyes," or perspectives from which mantle-wearers hide, as the "wrathe of heaven," the "offence of the earth," and then the "sighte of men." This gazing trio covers the three basic perspectival positions that the colonizers would hope, in their quest for absolute power, to achieve: the first is oriented downward, the second is oriented upward, and the third surveys its immediate surroundings. Irenius’ attempt to totalize the colonial perspective by putatively embracing all perspectives acts as a gesture toward expansion of the "ey of England" that would allow for the subjugation of the Irish. Those who wear mantles frustrate this colonial scheme.

Spenser's language, however, is arguably at its most out of control as he describes the various unsavory uses to which mantles might be put. In a passage that stretches on for more than a page, Irenius claims that mantles contribute to the lawlessness of Irish males by protecting rebels from gnats in the woods, by acting as makeshift shields in physical scuffles, by hiding thieves and their pillage, by enabling disguise, and by concealing weapons. Irish women can likewise employ mantles to facilitate their acts of prostitution, hide pregnancy, and serve as swaddling clothes for bastard children (101-2). These claims for the mantle's counter-colonial efficacy are both grossly exaggerated and curiously graphic. Significantly, their very copiousness exposes the all-seeing colonial eye as pitifully short on powers of sight. If a mere item of clothing can provide myriad opportunities for the avoidance of colonial surveillance, that surveillance cannot possibly be as powerful as Irenius would hope to assert. In these passages, the language of the text focuses more on possibilities for subversion of the “English ey” than on building strategies that will amplify its scope of vision.

As I have mentioned, Irenius claims that the Irish practices of bolloying and mantle-wearing are relics of their Scythian heritage. Irenius goes to great lengths to establish the Scythian origins of the Irish practices he decries; moreover, he claims that the barbarisms he mentions are only a few of those he might have cited in order to bolster his argument:

manie suche Customes I Coulde recounte vnto youe as of theire olde manner of marryinge of buryinge of davncinge of singinge of feastinge of Cursinge thorughe Christians, haue wyped out the most parte of them, by resemblaunce wheareof it mighte plainelye appeare to youe that the nacions are the same but that by the reckoninge of these fewe which I haue tolde vnto youe I finde my speache drawen out to a greater lengthe then I purposed Thus muche onelye for this time I hope shall suffise youe to thinke that the Irishe are auncientlye reduced from the Scythyans. (109)

Irenius claims to regard his catalogue of behavioral descriptions—conjectural, far-fetched, and improvisational as they often have been—as convincing evidence of a direct cultural lineage that "reduces" the Irish from the Scythians, downplays the vitality of Irish customs, and thus maps Irish heritage onto a two-dimensional plane. Nevertheless, this language of reduction, of colonial compression, is couched within an increasingly expanding rhetoric. As Irenius informs Eudoxus in a telling use of the passive voice, his speech has been "drawen out to a greater lengthe" than he had intended. Furthermore, even before he begins to outline his genealogy of barbarism, Irenius tells Eudoxus that the ancient Irish bards "deliuer no certaine truethe of anie thinge neither is theare anye houlde to be taken of anye Antiquitye which is receaued by tradicion since all men be lyars and many lye when they will" (87). Although Irenius makes these claims in the context of commentary on what he considers to be the "forged histories" (89) with which the Irish identify themselves, his statement calls into question the status of letters more generally. If "all men be lyars" and traditions offer "no certaine truethe of anie thinge," then his claims are cast in an even more spurious light than his lengthy arguments had merited on their own.

The two-dimensional colonial rhetoric that Irenius espouses is thus an essentially flattening impulse. In order to write the Irish as a people in need of conquest, Irenius frames the multi-dimensionality of Irish experience as chaotic and then attempts to squelch that chaos by locating the Irish and Ireland on a more containable plane of discourse. The violence that this process breeds is illustrated by the image of the sword:

ffor by the sworde which I named I doe not meane The Cuttinge of all that nacion with the sworde, which farr be it from me that ever I shoulde thinke soe desperatlye or wish so vncharitablie; but by that sworde I meante the Royall power of the Prince which oughte to stretche it selfe forthe in her Chiefe strength to the redressinge and Cuttinge of all those evills which I before blamed, and not of the people which are evill: for evill people by good ordinaunces and government maye be made good but the evill that is of it selfe evill will never become good. (148)

Irenius claims that he hopes to act as a colonial surgeon who selectively slices the evil from the body of his patient. Nevertheless, the two-dimensional plane onto which he has mapped the Irish renders this type of surgery impossible, for the subjugated colonial body lacks the multi-dimensionality that would render the physician's cuts only partially dismembering. The alternative is an infinite "reduction" of the Irish populace, an erasure of the threat posed by Irish difference, that will assist the seizure of the conceptual, spatial, and visual control for which Spenser aims. However, as Irenius’ dialogue in A View progresses, Spenser's text exhibits rhetorical strains that hamper his ability to check his argument: the surgeon, in attempting to use a sword as a scalpel, hacks at his own hands, and his vision of colonial order is subverted by its multi-dimensional irregularities.