No authoritative likeness of Spenser is known to exist. This portrait and the one next to it, a hypothetical one of Spenser’s second wife, Elizabeth Boyle, are presented as if they formed a pair and were commissioned for their wedding day in 1594.

Further description of the recreated portrait (by Joyce Joines Newman) can be found here.

This portrait and the one next to it, a hypothetical one of Spenser, are presented as if they formed a pair, commissioned for their wedding day in 1594. The two oak leaves on the bare tree represent the couple.

Further description of the recreated portrait (by Joyce Joines Newman) can be found here.

The early modern harp used by the Irish would have been smaller than modern versions used in concerts today. It would have been made of highly decorated wood with wire strings.

A representative example from the period is the famous “Brian Boru” harp now held at Trinity College, Dublin. In the woodcuts to John Derricke’s Image of Irelande (1581), a harp is pictured being played to accompany a singer or reciter of poetry at a native Irish lord’s feast. An audio sample of a wire-stringed harp (featuring Patrick Ball playing a composition by the eighteenth-century composer Carolan), can be found here. Music was clearly played at Kilcolman. A lute-key that may be contemporary with Spenser’s occupation of the castle was found in the excavations of the 1990s (see Ground Floor Parlor: Lute). As a local lord, Spenser could well have had native musicians play music for him on various instruments, including the harp. Spenser’s granddaughter, Catherine, married Ludovicus O’Cahill, son of Daniel Duffe O’Cahill, the harper of Queen Anne of Denmark, wife of King James I of Great Britain.

Literary Connections

In his View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596), Spenser’s spokesman Irenius complains of how unruly young Irishmen are incited to violent, disruptive deeds by heroic poetry in Irish. Their bards praise those whose “music was not the harp nor lays of love, but the cries of people and clashing of armour” (View 75).

In the House of Pride episode in Book I of The Faerie Queene (1590), the sinfully proud queen Lucifera has at her court “many Bardes, that to the trembling chord/ Can tune their timely voices cunningly” (FQ I.v.3.6-7), which may be a reference to the harp.

In his poem “The Ruines of Time,” included in his collection Complaints (1591), Spenser’s speaker in a dream vision sees “th’Harpe of Philisides now dead,” “stroong all with siluer twyne,/ And made of golde and costlie yuorie,” come floating down the “Lee.” The harp is also compared to that of Orpheus, who tamed “Wylde beasts and forrests“ with it (“The Ruines of Time” 603-9; see also Rivers).

In the allegory, “Philisides” is the great Protestant hero Sir Philip Sidney (d. 1586), and the “Lee” may or may not refer to the river of that name in Munster (it could also be the “lea” or bank of the river). We might therefore see this dream-vision as Spenser’s nostalgic fantasy, meant to inspire Sidney-type heroes to once again tame Irish “wylde beasts and forrests” with their poetry and heroic deeds.

Links:

Many estates in Ireland had deer parks dating back to the later middle ages (from the Anglo-Norman invasion in the 1170s-80s on forward). Spenser did not have a deer park (that we know of) but his New English neighbors at Mallow Castle, Co. Cork, the Norris family, did. Legend has it that Queen Elizabeth I donated the first deer to populate the grounds at Mallow.

Spenser and/or his servants would also have had ample opportunity to hunt deer in the wild. The famously dense wood of Aherlow (“Arlo”) grew nearby to the north. They would have hunted red deer, a native Irish species.

In the castle recreation here, the deerskins are appropriately placed in an important domestic space, on a rocking chair and on the floor in front of the hearth. Deerskins are also placed in the Tower House Bedroom.

Literary Connections

We read about a deer hunt in Spenser’s neighborhood in the fragment of Book VII of The Faerie Queene, the “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie,” first published posthumously in 1609. In it, Spenser describes how the character Faunus, a wood-god, is punished by the virginal goddess of the moon and of the hunt, Cynthia (an allegorized Queen Elizabeth I), for spying on her while she takes a bath in the wood of Aherlow. The story loosely imitates that of Diana and Acteon in Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: when Faunus is found out, he is punished by being draped with a deer skin and chased by Diana’s hounds:

But him (according as they had decreed)
With a Deeres-skin they couered, and then chast
With all their hounds that after him did speed;
But he more speedy, from them fled more fast
Then any Deere: so sore him dread aghast.
They after follow’d all with shrill out-cry,
Shouting as they the heauens would haue brast:
That all the woods and dales where he did flie, Did ring againe, and loud reeccho to the skie. (FQ VII.vi.52)

The sound of Irish woods “echoing” a cry also features prominently in Spenser’s wedding poem, “Epithalamion” (1595). Whereas in “The Mutabilitie Cantos,” however, the shrieking or “shrill” cry of the enraged wood nymphs is deeply threatening to the male voyeur, in “Epithalamion” the ringing woods add a melodious, calming note to festivities that celebrate the marriage “ring”: an allusion to wedding bells and (obliquely) to the wedding band. The poem celebrates orphic harmonies in nature rather than orgiastic destruction. In this case, the woodsy nymphs invoked by Spenser guard the poet and his bride from harm at Kilcolman, as they prepare themselves for the ceremonies later that day. Spenser calls on the nymphs who are

… lightfoot mayds which keepe the deere,
That on the hoary mountayne vse to towre,
And the wylde wolues which seeke them to deuoure,
With your steele darts doo chace from comming neer,
Be also present heere,
To helpe to decke her and to help to sing,
That all the woods may answer and your eccho ring. (Epithalamion 67-73)

In this case his dear bride will be adorned by those who normally “keepe the deere” with “steele darts” or spears; one imagines that these darts are not are neglected entirely but are rather left (figuratively) at the church door for re-use once the ceremonies are done (Tower House Storage Room: darts).

Spenser compares his wife-to-be Elizabeth Boyle to a deer in Amoretti, the sonnet sequence written to court her and published with Epithalamion. In sonnet #67, he has finally achieved his love (his “deare”):

Lyke as a huntsman after weary chace,
Seeing the game from him escapt away,
sits downe to rest him in some shady place,
with panting hounds beguiled of their pray:
So after long pursuit and vaine assay,
when I all weary had the chace forsooke,
the gentle deare returnd the selfe-same way,
thinking to quench her thirst at the next brooke.
There she beholding me with mylder looke, sought not to fly, but fearelesse still did bide:
till I in hand her yet halfe trembling tooke,
and with her owne goodwill hir fyrmely tyde.
Strange thing me seemd to see a beast so wyld,
so goodly wonne with her owne will beguyld.

The bride here becomes a Christ-figure as well. Spenser pursues a spiritual as well as a physical ideal. It is not a violent hunt that wins his bride but her own self-sacrifice and active desire to be won by the “beguiling” poet.

Literary Connections

In Book IV of The Faerie Queene (1596), the hero Sir Scudamour encounters a blacksmith named Care. Care is described in a manner reminiscent of other descriptions of savage, unkempt, starving, and criminal characters in Spenser’s poems and prose. Care could therefore be understood in the allegory as potentially Irish (compare with the description of Despair in FQ I.ix.33-36, and with the degenerated Timias who wears a “glib” in FQ IV.viii.12; IV.vii.40-43).

Care resembles

… a wretched wearish elfe,
With hollow eyes and rawbone cheekes forspent,
As if he had in prison long bene pent:
Full blacke and griesly did his face appeare,
Besmeard with smoke that nigh his eye-sight blent;
With rugged beard, and hoarie shagged heare,
The which he neuer wont to combe, or comely sheare. (FQ IV.v.34.3-9)

Care’s smithy, furthermore, is an allegory for the sighing, pensive, care-worn body. Amid the machinery and clanging hammers is a pair of bellows, which function like lungs in the allegory. They blow so loudly that none can hear:

And eke the breathfull bellowes blew amaine,
Like to the Northren winde, that none could heare:
Those Pensifenesse did moue; and Sighes the bellows weare. (FQ IV.v.38.7-9)

“Sighes,” caused by worries, make the lungs work hard, like “bellowes.” Spenser imagines these “bellowes” blowing out cold, “North[er]n” winds. North is the traditional direction of dark and cold, and also (from Kilcolman) the Ballyhoura mountain range and the Glen of Aherlow, which was famous for its rebels and thieves (cf. View 137). To the north of the Munster Plantation lay the region of Thomond, Irish for “north Munster” (Tuath Mumhain) and home of the great O’Brien lordship.

In the View, Irenius describes one of the O’Brien rebels of “Thomond… called Murrogh en ranagh, that is Morris of the ferne or waste wild places,” who allied himself with an “O’Neale” who came from the “Northe revolting,” and together they rebelled with great violence like a wind: “breaking forth like a sudden Tempest [Murrogh] overran all Munster and Connaught, breaking down all the holdes and fortresses of the English… he clean wiped out many great towns” (View 15-6).

Irenius is describing events involving Murrough O’Brien (d. 1383) in the late-fourteenth century (although he mistakenly places them in the fifteenth century), during the so-called “Gaelic resurgence” when Old English settlements lost much of their colonial territory to native Irish lordships. Spenser in 1596 was likewise deeply worried about a new threat, led by Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, sweeping out of the North and joining forces with rebels in Munster, as they were to do in 1598 during the uprising that sacked Kilcolman and the plantation. Hugh O’Neill was thought to be the base-born son of a blacksmith. At Kilcolman, a northern wind blew very cold indeed and may have inspired his portrait of the blacksmith Care.

Literary Connections

In his sonnet sequence Amoretti (1595), which describes his courtship of his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle, Spenser writes two adjacent sonnets admiring the breasts of his beloved. In the second of the two, 77, he imagines himself dining at a table fit for a prince.

Was it a dreame, or did I see it playne,
a goodly table of pure yvory:
all spred with iuncats fit to entertayne
the greatest Prince with pompous roialty?
Mongst which there in a siluer dish did ly
twoo golden apples of vnualewd price:
far passing those which Hercules came by,
or those which Atalanta did entice.
Exceeding sweet, yet voyd of sinfull vice,
That many sought yet none could euer taste,
sweet fruit of pleasure brought from paradice
By loue himselfe and in his garden plaste.
Her brest that table was so richly spredd,
my thoughts the guests, which would thereon haue fedd.

The table is a metaphor for Elizabeth’s “breast,” or bosom. Spenser’s “thoughts” are imagined as “guests” (not as owners or occupants) who admire “two golden apples” that far surpass those found in mythological accounts. The reader is told that these apples are more wholesome than those that lead “to sinfull vice,” but that depends entirely on the attitude and behavior of those who possess them.

In The Faerie Queene, golden apples have a similar ambiguous status, as both ideal objects to be admired and treasured as well as prized goods tainted with a darker, bloodier hue. In Book II, the Book of Temperance (a book that emphasizes the virtue of resisting the wrong kind of easily proffered fruit), they grow in the Garden of Proserpina: “golden apples glistering bright,/ That goodly was their glory to behold” (FQ II.vii.54.1-2). They are not wholesome: amongst these fruit is the golden apple thrown on Mount Ida by the goddess of Discord. Thus began the chain of events that led to the Trojan War:

Here eke that famous golden Apple grew,
The which emongest the gods false Ate threw;
For which th’Idaean Ladies disagreed,
Till partiall Paris dempt it Venus dew,
And had of her, fayre Helen for his meed,
That many noble Greekes and Troians made to bleed. (FQ II.vii.55.4-9)

Because the Trojan warrior Paris chose the golden apple for Venus, the goddess of Love, he was rewarded by her with the love of fair Helen of Troy: a bitter reward in the end, for it caused discord and bloodshed between the Trojans and the Greeks. A lesson may be drawn here, in that many of the fruits offered to Spenser in Ireland, however beautiful, came with strings attached; his rewards there led to further discord and strife (see also the description of the Garden of Ate in The Faerie Queene IV.i.25).

Early modern mantles have been found in modern times preserved in bogs. For example, a plain, semi-coarse example from the sixteenth century is on display in the National Museum of Ireland. The museum also holds a fragment of a different type of mantle, the shaggy woven (or “rya”) kind. A shaggy fringe can be seen at the top of mantles in the sixteenth-century illustrations of John Derricke.

Literary Connections

In Spenser’s prose dialogue and political policy tract, A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596; pub. 1633), Spenser’s alter-ego Irenius discusses with Eudoxus the ancient and barbaric origins of the mantle, before listing its practical and treacherous uses by the Irish.

Irenius They have another custom from the Scythians
that is the wearing of mantles and long
glibs, which is a thick curled bush of hair hanging
down over their eyes, and monstrously disguising
them, which are both very bad and hurtful.

Eudoxus: Do you think that the mantle comes from
the Scythians? I would surely think otherwise:
For by that which I have read it appears that
most nations in the world anciently used the mantle. […]

Iren: I cannot deny but anciently it was common
to most, and yet since disused and laid away.
But in this latter age of the world since the decay
of the Roman empire, it was renewed and
brought in again by those Northern nations
when breaking out of their cold caves and frozen
habitation into the sweet soil of Europe. They
brought with them their usual weeds [i.e., clothes], fit to
shield the cold and that continual frost, to which
they had at home been inured. The which yet
they left not of, by reason that they were in
perpetual wars with the nations where they had
invaded, but still removing from place to place
carried always with them that weed as their
house, their bed, and their garment. Coming
lastly into Ireland, they found there more special
use thereof, by reason of the raw cold climate.
From whom it is now grown into that general use
in which that people now have it. […]

Eudox: Since then the necessity thereof is so commodious
as you allege, that it is [serving] in stead of housing,
bedding, and clothing. What reason have
you then to wish, so necessary a thing [to] cast off?

Iren: Because the commodities do not countervail the
discommodity. For the inconveniences which thereby do
arise, are much more many: for it is a fit house
for an outlaw, a meet bed for a rebel, and apt
cloak for a thief. First, the outlaw being for
his many crimes and villainies banished from
the towns and houses of honest men, and wandering
in waste places far from danger of law, makes
his mantle his house, and under it covers himself
from the wrath of heaven, from the offence of the
earth, and from the sight of men. When it rains
it is his pentice [i.e., “pent-house” or makeshift shelter], when it blows it is his tent,
when it freezes, it is his tabernacle. In summer
he can wear it loose, in winter he can wrap
it close, at all times he can use it, never heavy,
never cumbersome.
Likewise for a rebel it is
as serviceable: for in his war that he
makes (if at least it deserves the name of “war”), when he still flies from his foe and
lurks in the thick woods and straight passages,
waiting for advantages, it is his bed, yea and
almost all his household stuff. For the wood is
his house against all weathers, and his mantle
is his cave to sleep in: therein he wraps
his self round and ensconces him self strongly
against the gnats, which in the country do more annoy
the naked rebels, while they keep the woods,
and do more sharply wound them then all their
enemies swords or spears, which can seldom
come nigh them. Yea and oftentimes their mantle
serves them when they are near driven, being
wrapped about their left arms in stead of
a target [i.e., a small shield], for it is hard to cut through it with
a sword. Besides, it is light to bear, light
to throw away, and being as they then commonly
are naked, it is to them all in all.
Lastly, for a thief it is so handsome, as it may seem it
was first invented for him: for under it he
can cleanly convey any fit pillage that
comes handsomely in his way. And when he
goes abroad in the night on freebooting, it is
his best and surest friend: for lying as they
often do, two or three nights together abroad
to watch for their booty, with that they can
prettily shroud themselves under a bush or
a backside, till they may conveniently do
their errand. And when all is done, he can
in his mantle pass through any town or
company, being close-hooded over his head,
as he uses [to keep] from knowledge of any to whom he
is endangered. Besides all this, he or any man
else that is disposed to mischief or villainy
may under his mantle go privily armed
without suspicion of any, carry his headpiece,
his skene [i.e., long knife] or pistol, if he please to be always
in a readiness. Thus necessary and fitting is a mantle for a bad man.
And surely for a bad housewife [i.e., woman], it is
no less convenient. For some of them that be these wandering
women, called of them Monashut, it is half a wardrobe:
for in summer you shall find her arrayed commonly, but [i.e., “only”] in
her smock and mantle, to bee more ready for the light
services. In winter and in her travel, it is her cloak and
safe-gear, and also a coverlet for her lewd exercise. And
when she has filled her vessel [i.e., become pregnant], under it she can hide both her burden and her blame. Yea and when her
bastard is borne, it [i.e., the mantle] serves in stead of all her
swaddling clothes. And as for all other good women which
love to do but little work, how handsome it is to lie
in and sleep, or to louse themselves in the sunshine, they
that have been but a while in Ireland can well witness.
Sure I am that you will think it very unfit for
good housewives to stir in or to busy herself about her
housewifery in sort as they should.
These be some of the abuses for which I would think it meet to
forbid all mantles.
[A View of the Present State of Ireland, MS Rawlinson B.478 (Bodleian Library, Oxford), 31r-33r.
Some words are modernized.]

Spenser mentions mantles in various places in his poetry. In The Faerie Queene, for example, the treacherous, shape-changing villain Malengin (or “Guyle”) lives in a “hollow cave” (V.ix.10.1), has “hollow” eyes, long “curled” hair and wears a mantle-like cloak on his back (over his torn pants, or “breech”):

Full dreadfull wight he was, as euer went
Vpon the earth, with hollow eyes deepe pent,
And long curld locks, that downe his shoulders shagged,
And on his backe an vncouth vestiment
Made of straunge stuffe, but all to worne and ragged,
And vnderneath his breech was all to torne and iagged. (V.ix.10.4-9)

As such, Malengin resembles a half-starved and dangerous Irish refugee or rebel.

In Book I of The Faerie Queene, Spenser associates the personified figure of Night, an evil hag, with a mantle: “griesly Night, with visage deadly sad… in a foule blacke pitchy mantle clad” (I.v.20.1-3). In a standard metaphor for the time, Night covers the world in darkness with her ”mantle” or cloak. The passage has a political tinge, furthermore, in that she hides crimes, including “traitorous” ones:

Vnder thy mantle black there hidden lye,
Light-shonning thefte, and traiterous intent,
Abhorred bloodshed, and vile felony. (III.iv.58.1-3)

The description of Night’s “bloodshed” and “traitorous intent” gives it/her political resonances that would align it/her with the rebellious and dangerous Irish, as described in the View.

Conversely, Spenser invokes “night so long expected” with its “sable mantle” in his wedding poem, “Epithalamion,” asking that it keep him and his bride safe from the threats surrounding his castle:

Now welcome night, thou night so long expected…
Spread thy broad wing ouer my loue and me,
That no man may vs see,
And in thy sable mantle vs enwrap,
From feare of perrill and foule horror free.
Let no false treason seeke vs to entrap,
Nor any dread disquiet once annoy
The safety of our ioy:
But let the night be calme and quietsome,
Without tempestuous storms or sad afray. (“Epithalamion” 315-27)

The “mantle” here, while representing dangerous “night,” paradoxically protects the married couple from the threats that might disturb their well-being (including supernatural threats that are listed in the following stanza: they include the “evil” Irish spirit, the “Pouke” or pouca). As such, the poet is asking the evil forces of the night to confound themselves by keeping themselves hidden, which in turn allows the couple to stay safely obscure, perhaps hidden under a mantle used for a bedcovering. In this case, Spenser may have in mind another description of the mantle in the View, where it is described as a garment of Venus lined with stars (as is the night). A mantle could be put to good or bad, ugly or positive uses, depending on the intent of the owner.

Timber was a key export from the Munster plantation, and much of this timber was fashioned into barrel staves for use in the international wine trade. Sir Walter Raleigh gained a monopoly on all such exports out of Munster. His own plantation lands along the Blackwater River were some of the most heavily deforested, for this purpose and others. Timber would also have been used for shipbuilding, house-building and glassmaking. Many trees would also have been consumed in the iron mill industry that Raleigh helped to cultivate.

In 1587, in a brief period of piracy (or opportunism, depending on the legal interpretation), Spenser captained a seized Spanish ship, loaded with many “pipes” (pipe-staves) of wine, and sailed it from the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry to Cork harbor.

Literary Connections

Spenser was apparently fond of wine, which would have been stored in barrels. The partying poet describes pouring it out “to all that wull” [i.e., “will”] in his wedding poem, “Epithalamion”:

Now al is done; bring home the bride againe,
Bring home the triumph of our victory…
Make feast therefore now all this liue long day,
This day for euer to me holy is,
Poure out the wine without restraint or stay,
Poure not by cups, but by the belly full,
Poure out to all that wull,
And sprinkle all the postes and wals with wine,
That they may sweat, and drunken be withall. (242-3, 248-54)

The party takes place in Spenser’s “home,” or Kilcolman, perhaps in the great hall of the building adjoining the tower house. The great hall was a public space and could accommodate more visitors than the parlors could. A “belly” here refers to the human stomach but also a pouch-like container for wine. The poet, in his metamorphic mind-set, imagines the house itself, like a person, joining in the revelry: the walls themselves “sweat” and are drunk with wine. All Kilcolman rejoices with the bringing home of the bride.