Spenser was a Protestant, but what kind of Protestant is open to debate. To what extent did he sympathize with the rituals and doctrine of the Anglican, or “high” church, which had parallels with the older, Catholic faith? By contrast, how “puritanical,” and therefore mistrustful of vestigial Catholic ceremonies and doctrine, was he? How much did he desire continued radical reform of the church following Lutheran or Calvinist principles?

Furthermore, did he believe in structural as well as doctrinal reform in the church? To what degree for each? How did his opinions evolve? Was he a more hot-headed reformer as a young man, before he came to Ireland? Or was he sympathetic towards tolerant and syncretic religious practices?

As he grew older, how did Ireland’s religious politics influence him? One could argue that his status as a minority English Protestant hardened his militant anti-Catholic and apocalyptic beliefs, a logical reaction to the threats he found surrounding him. He exhibits such beliefs in works he wrote as a young man, for example in his first publication (1569), a translation of the work of Dutch reformer Jan van der Noot.

Spenser’s written works give us conflicting impressions concerning his beliefs and where he stood in relation to the current reform of England and Ireland’s Protestant and Catholic churches. We have therefore taken the controversial step of creating a modest but icon-filled chapel at Kilcolman. An image of the Christ hangs on the crucifix (many Protestants abhorred the idea of presenting an image of their god, preferring instead a plain crucifix), and a late-medieval mural of St Christopher brightens up the wall. It is imagined here as a visible remnant of the previous inhabitants of the same chapel, which Spenser chose not to white-wash. On the makeshift altar (a table and cloth) lies a Bible, chalice and crucifix. A cushion sits below for kneeling in prayer.

Which Bible was Spenser reading? We leave that unspecified although he likely owned a copy of the Book of Common Prayer (1559) for worship purposes.

Literary Connections

Spenser seems to hate — he ridicules, satirizes and demonizes— the institution of the Catholic church, including the papacy, which he equates in The Faerie Queene Book I (for example) with the Whore of Babylon and the Antichrist. In this he follows the Calvinist commentary in the Geneva Bible (1560). He had political worries in this regard: the armies of the Catholic empire Spain regularly interfered in Ireland and the Netherlands, and tried to in England, a drama played out repeatedly in the allegories of Book V of The Faerie Queene and in other places in his poetry, such as the Orgoglio episode in Book I.

Nonetheless, without censure or irony, Spenser includes Catholic imagery and ideas in his House of Holiness episode in Book I.x of The Faerie Queene. Here the Red Crosse Knight undergoes a scourging of the flesh. That hero, the hero of holiness, then becomes St George, a saint from the old liturgy, also the patron saint of England, who undergoes a symbolic crucifixion fighting against the Dragon in canto xi. Saints were redolent of Catholicism, and George becomes an icon or image of Christ himself as we read along. Spenser describes him in words, not images, but Spenser’s words are highly imagistic. The 1590 Faerie Queene included one woodcut, an image of St George defeating the dragon: in other words, a sort of icon (this woodcut can be found hanging on the bookshelf in his study upstairs).

Spenser also appears to be anti-Catholic in his artistic temperament. At the end of Book II, for example, published in the same volume, the hero of temperance, Guyon, violently destroys the highly artistic, if luxurious and decadent, Bower of Bliss. Spenser therefore appears to promote iconoclasm (or image-destruction) at any cost: a radical Protestant idea.

Ireland itself Spenser admires for once being a “holy-Island” that “florished in fame/ Of wealths and goodnesse, far aboue the rest” (The Faerie Queene VII.vi.37.7, 38.1-2), a compliment to its ancient status as an island famed for its saints and scholars, long before the Protestant Reformation occured. Yet in Spenser’s day Ireland had —from his point of view— degenerated to a bad condition, occupied by rebellious papists and no-good, feckless Protestant church appointees (as we hear in A View of the Present State of Ireland).

For Spenser, the best cure for Ireland’s perillous spiritual condition was reformed, state-sponsored religion that would follow a political re-conquest and reformation of the country. Spenser would, presumably, uphold this religion at Kilcolman. In his poem, “Colin Clouts Come Home Againe,“ Spenser’s alter-ego Colin Clout, having visited London (to the east) and returned to Kilcolman (in the west), enthusiastically describes to his fellow shepherds the “lookes“ of “Cynthia,“ i.e., Queen Elizabeth I, whom he saw at court. Her looks and favor inspire religious devotion in him, and he compares her to the sun shining from the “windowes of the east“:

like beames of the morning Sun,
Forth looking through the windowes of the East:
When first the fleecie cattell haue begun
Vpon the perled grasse to make their feast. Her thoughts are like the fume of Franckincence,
Which from a golden Censer forth doth rise:
And throwing forth sweet odours mounts fro thence
In rolling globes vp to the vauted skies. (lines 604-11)

Links: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/gutenberg/ [accessed 10/30/12] [Harry Ransom Center exhibit on Gutenberg and the early printed Bible]

Spenser raised at least three children at Kilcolman: from his second marriage (in 1594, to Elizabeth Boyle), a son, Peregrine; from his first marriage (in 1579, to Machabeus Chylde), a daughter, Katherine, and a son, Sylvanus. Sylvanus and his descendants would end up inheriting Kilcolman. A crib was a hopeful sign that a landed gentleman’s name and property would be passed on to his heirs. (See also Bedroom: Toy Knight)

Child mortality was a constant in the early modern period. Spenser’s contemporary, the writer Ben Jonson, reported that Spenser lost another child, a baby, in the destruction of the castle in 1598. How trustworthy this statement is is unclear. Jonson also said that Spenser died penniless, which is unlikely, and Jonson regularly focused on the death of children in his creative work. He may therefore have been embellishing an already dramatic story about the poet’s narrow escape during the uprising.

A story, told by the antiquarian James Ware in his preface to Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland (1633), relates that a different sort of child, i.e., the unpublished remainder of The Faerie Queene, was lost in transit following the desertion of his castle.

Literary Connections

Children are an occasional feature of Spenser’s poetry. Some, like the infant Ruddymane in The Faerie Queene, appear in highly traumatic circumstances: Ruddymane is found playing in the blood of his dying mother, Amavia, who has stabbed herself (FQ II.i.39ff). Ruddymane, whose name means “red hand,” has been read by one of Spenser’s early commentators, John Upton, as alluding to the heraldic Red Hand of Ulster, and hence to the threat of violence and rebellion in the north (from whence soldiers came to sack Kilcolman, for example). Amavia, likewise, could evoke the Irish queen of the fairies (cf. Shakespeare’s “Queen Mab” in Romeo and Juliet). Ruddymane’s deceased father, Mordant, might glance at the English soldier, Captain Mordant, who according to state papers was reprimanded for bad behavior in Ireland in the mid-1580s. With the Ruddymane episode, is Spenser somehow allegorizing the bloody mess that Ireland was in?

Other children, like the “thousand thousand naked babes” in the ever-fertile Garden of Adonis (FQ III.vi.32.3) or the cupids (or amoretti) in his courtship poems, Amoretti and Epithalamion, stand for erotic creativity and new life in Spenser’s work. For example, in “Epithalamion,” the “sons of Venus,” i.e., cupids, amoretti or “winged loves,” symbolize Spenser’s sonnets themselves, titled Amoretti. These cupids fly and “play” around his bedroom at Kilcolman on his wedding night, which the speaker hopes will stay silently peaceful and free from threat while the couple makes love:

But let stil Silence trew night watches keepe,
That sacred peace may in assurance rayne,
And tymely sleep, when it is tyme to sleepe,
May poure his limbs forth on your pleasant playne,
The whiles an hundred little winged loues,
Like diuers feathered doues,
Shall fly and flutter round about your bed,
And in the secret darke, that none reproues,
Their prety stealthes shal worke, and snares shal spread
To filch away sweet snatches of delight,
Conceald through couert night.
Ye sonnes of Venus, play your sports at will,
For greedy pleasure, carelesse of your toyes,
Thinks more vpon her paradise of ioyes,
Then what ye do, albe it good or ill.
All night therefore attend your merry play,
For it will soone be day:
Now none doth hinder you, that say or sing,
Ne will the woods now answer, nor your Eccho ring. (“Epithalamion” 353-71)

Seen here is a four-poster with embroidered curtains. On it lies a small book (perhaps Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion).

Literary Connections

“To sleep, perchance to dream…” says Hamlet in his famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Spenser’s own dreams must have factored somehow into his deeply visionary poetry.

In his published correspondence (1580) with his Cambridge tutor Gabriel Harvey, Spenser refers to his work, Dreams, which is now lost if not incorporated under a different name in his works. He translates (and re-translates) the fifteen dream-poems or Songe of the French poet, Joachim Du Bellay, and publishes them as his Visions of Bellay along with other Visions in the Complaints volume (1591). These poems are deeply enigmatic with both political and apocalyptic strains in them.

His poetry sometimes focuses on dreams as the spur to the imagination: in The Faerie Queene, evil spirits visit “Morpheus house” (Morpheus is the god of sleep) in search of a “fit false dreame” to torment the hero Red Crosse Knight with (FQ I.i.39 ff.) In the description of the “heauenly towre” that allegorizes the mind in the House of Temperance episode in Book II, we encounter the character Phantastes, who represents the fantastic imagination (see also Tower House Study: Desk). He has “a sharpe foresight, and working wit,/ That neuer idle was, ne once would rest a whit” (FQ II.ix.49.8-9). He imagines all sorts of

...idle thoughtes and fantasies,
Deuices, dreames, opinions vnsound,
Shewes, visions, sooth-sayes, and prophesies;
And all that fained is, as leasings, tales, and lies. (FQ II.ix.51.6-9).

In his wedding poem, “Epithalamion”, the bed is a framing device: the action begins and ends in bed, as his bride is awoken from her “bowre” with the rising of the sun (23) and returns to bed with her new husband that night. At the conclusion of his poem, Spenser invokes the “Genius” of the land (a guardian spirit) to protect the couple and send them children:

And thou glad Genius, in whose gentle hand,
The bridale bowre and geniall bed remaine,
Without blemish or staine,
And the sweet pleasures of theyr loues delight
With secret ayde doest succour and supply,
Till they bring forth the fruitfull progeny,
Send vs the timely fruit of this same night. (398-404)

He also imagines cupids fluttering around his bride’s body as she lies in her (their?) bed:

The whiles an hundred little winged loues,
Like diuers fethered doues,
Shall fly and flutter round about your bed,
And in the secret darke, that none reproues,
Their prety stealthes shal worke, and snares shal spread
To filch away sweet snatches of delight,
Conceald through couert night. (357-63)

The cupids resemble scattered leaves of his own love poetry, including the sonnet sequence he used to woo his wife. The sequence is entitled “Amoretti,” from Italian amoretti, meaning “little loves,” i.e., cupids. Cupids resemble children, who like poems are the fruit of his own invention, or “Genius,” that allow him to grab “sweet snatches of delight” at Kilcolman. Thanks to his genius and “geniall bed,” he will create children, or “fruitfull progeny” with Elizabeth Boyle. Without genius, wife or a bed, no children; without children and a strong house to put them in, no hold on the land, and no place to dream or write his poetry.

Links:

The metal chest here is of the kind with elaborate locking mechanisms.

The chest is a Spanish model; Spenser could have purchased or salvaged similar models from the flotsam and jetsam washed up on Irish shores in the sixteenth century, including after ships from the Great Armada crashed there in 1588 (see also Great Hall: helmet, Spanish). In 1587, in a brief period of piracy (or opportunism, depending on the legal interpretation), Spenser captained a seized Spanish ship, loaded with wine, and sailed it from the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry to Cork harbor.

Literary Connections

Spenser's employer Arthur, Lord Grey wrote to Queen Elizabeth during the Desmond rebellion that the Spanish besieged at Smerwick had a ”coffer” in which they stored all their ”treasure.” It was duly seized and its contents of silver (“plate“) coins distributed among his men.

The Munster Plantation offered Spenser himself significant opportunity in land, treasure and status. He, like his fellow New Englishmen, or like Guyon, the hero of Temperance who resists the snares of Mammon (in Book II of The Faerie Queene), had to be on guard against its corrupting influences. He also had to guard against thieves.

The treasure inside the chest might remind us of Spenser’s bride, described in Amoretti 15 as containing “all this worlds riches that may farre be found.” Her lips are like “Rubies,” her eyes like “Saphyres,” and so forth, but most fair of all is “her mind adornd with vertues manifold.” In the following wedding poem, “Epithalamion,” we hear that “all her body” is “like a pallace fayre,/ Ascending vppe with many a stately stayre,/ To honors seat and chastities sweet bowre” (178-80). Elizabeth Boyle was herself a prize to be won.

A chest lost at sea is fought over by two sons of “Milesio,” Amidas and Bracidas, in Book V of The Faerie Queene (the “Book of Justice”). Artegall, the hero of Justice, finds Amidas and Bracidas fighting over a

… Coffer strong,
Fast bound on euery side with iron bands,
But seeming to haue suffred mickle wrong,
Either by being wreckt vppon the sands,
Or being carried farre from forraine lands. (FQ V.iv.5.1-5)

The ensuing story involves a complicated legal matter, involving a dispute over land lost and found (land washed from one brother to the other by action of the sea), wives lost and found (the wife of one brother eloped with the other; the other wife floated back the other way), as well as treasure lost and found (the chest floated, accompanied by wife, from the one brother to the other). Artegall, acting as judge, resolves the dispute through the principle of salvage (or, put crudely, finders-keepers): to whom the land, treasure and wife goes, thanks to the action of the sea, so belongs the ownership of each:

For what the mighty Sea hath once possest,
And plucked quite from all possessors hand,
Whether by rage of waues, that neuer rest,
Or else by wracke, that wretches hath distrest,
He [i.e., the Sea] may dispose by his imperiall might,
As thing at randon left, to whom he list. (FQ V.iv.19.2-7)

The episode has clear Irish significance in that Milesio was the legendary king of Spain who colonized prehistoric Ireland, according to Irish legend. His descendants were the Irish themselves. In Spenser’s poem, however, it is possible that one brother stands allegorically for Ireland and the other for England, Scotland and/or Wales. In either case, the resolution offered here indicates that Spenser fantasized about such a judgment being applied to his Irish situation. Artegall’s decision echoes the judgment of Dame Nature in The Faerie Queene Book VII (“The Mutabilitie Cantos”), which occurs on Arlo Hill, near Kilcolman: in that episode, Jove is allowed to keep the power that he took by force and is “confirm’d in his imperiall see,” or throne (FQ VII.vii.59.7). Spenser, by “imperiall might,” design and fortune, ended up with land, wife and treasure at Kilcolman, until the seas of fate took them all away again.

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, reputedly 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 Parlor.

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,” 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 deer” 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.

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.

This toy knight is dressed for a tournament and is modeled after one made in Nuremburg, c. 1530, and now in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Germany. It shows great care in craftsmanship (with some sharp edges).

Literary Connections

Spenser’s work focuses frequently on marriage and childbirth but not often on childhood. He was no Wordsworth. We should keep in mind, however, that for all its political, ethical and moral significance, The Faerie Queene is a long Arthurian romance about knights, ladies, magicians and monsters. It was written to entertain and not only to instruct. Like its predecessors in the romance tradition, such as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (translated into English in 1591), parts of its action are fabulous, even ridiculous. Like this toy, the poem would have appealed to both children and adults on different levels.

A curious moment occurs in Book I of The Faerie Queene when a child frightens his mother by wanting to play with the talons (“talants”) of a dead dragon:

One mother, whenas her foolehardy chyld
Did come too neare, and with his talants play
Halfe dead through feare, her little babe reuyld,
And to her gossibs gan in counsell say;
How can I tell, but that his talants may
Yet scratch my sonne, or rend his tender hand. (FQ I.xii.11.1-6)

It is as if Spenser, with this word of caution, is breaking a fantastical spell that holds many a reader spellbound, like the child, throughout the dragon fight in the previous canto. The dragon is real, and the beast might still be dangerous. Likewise, Satan, or sin, might easily revive and will not be extinguished from the world until the end of time. Many threats will continue to plague the heroes in the poem.

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.

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.

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).