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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

The view from the window would be of the marsh adjacent to the castle. The window is dubbed “Raleigh’s window” today because, as legend has it, Spenser and Raleigh sat here and smoked pipes and conversed when Raleigh visited Kilcolman in 1589 (see Spenser and Raleigh).

Literary Connections

Raleigh’s visit to Kilcolman is immortalized in Spenser’s pastoral poem, Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595). Spenser’s alter-ego Colin Clout describes this encounter as beginning outside, under an alder tree:

One day (quoth he) I sat, (as was my trade)
Vnder the foote of Mole that mountaine hore,
Keeping my sheepe amongst the cooly shade,
Of the greene alders by the Mullaes shore:
There a straunge shepheard chaunst to find me out,
Whether allured with my pipes delight,
Whose pleasing sound yshrilled far about,
Or thither led by chaunce, I know not right:
Whom when I asked from what place he came,
And how he hight, himselfe he did ycleepe,
The shepheard of the Ocean by name,
And said he came far from the main-sea deepe.
He sitting me beside in that same shade,
Prouoked me to plaie some pleasant fit,
And when he heard the musicke which I made,
He found himselfe full greatly pleasd at it:
Yet aemuling my pipe, he tooke in hond
My pipe before that aemuled of many,
And plaid theron; (for well that skill he cond)
Himselfe as skilfull in that art as any.
He pip’d, I sung; and when he sung, I piped,
By chaunge of turnes, each making other mery,
Neither enuying other, nor enuied,
So piped we, vntill we both were weary.
(Colin Clouts Come Home Againe 56-79).

The “shepheard of the Ocean” is Raleigh. Spenser’s description of a “piping” contest is a pastoral conceit, indicating that they shared poetry with one another (whether or not they actually played pipes as well). In the distance is “Mole,” Spenser’s name for Galtymore, the highest mountain in the nearby Ballyhoura Hills to the north of Kilcolman.

Moss could have served for wiping. Waste would have fallen down a two-story chute, exiting out the south side (or back) of the castle, where it would have been shoveled away and/or disinfected with a covering of lime.

Two-seater privies were not uncommon. An example is found today in Barryscourt Castle, Co. Cork. Newman Johnson refers to modern-day Kilcolman’s missing “stone” privy seat although a wooden seat (as here) could also have been in place in Spenser’s time.

Placed on the seat for reading is a treatise on the flush toilet, A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596) by the inventor of the device, the courtier poet and epic translator Sir John Harington.

Another privy lies on the east end of the Great Hall.

Literary Connections

In The Faerie Queene (1590), Spenser describes a castle, the House of Temperance, in figurative terms as like a human body. There is a privy attached by “conduit pipe” to the kitchen, which represents the stomach in Spenser’s allegory:

But all the liquour, which was fowle and waste,
Not good nor seruiceable elles for ought,
They in another great rownd vessell plaste,
Till by a conduit pipe it thence were brought: 
And all the rest, that noyous was, and nought,
By secret wayes, that none might it espy,
Was close conuaid, and to the backgate brought,
That cleped was Port Esquiline, whereby
It was auoided quite, and throwne out priuily. (FQ II.ix.32)

Andrew Hadfield estimates that Spenser had 200-300 volumes in his working library (by comparison, an inventory of Munster planter Sir William Herbert’s seignory at Castleisland, Co. Kerry mentions “of sundry sortes great and little one hundred“ books). These would have been in various languages and of all kinds and genres, ranging from religious to legal tracts to popular and refined works of literature.

The space for the conjectured study in our recreation is relatively small, so vertically stacked bookshelves (a design known in the late-sixteenth century) are used instead of shelves angled outwards from the wall (as one might find in a periodicals reading-room today, for example). The latter type were better for displaying the covers of books but the former could hold more. Contrary to modern-day practice, the majority of the books are arranged with their spines facing the wall. The reason for this is that many books were bound haphazardly by the owners, and titles of books were often written in ink on the page-ends of books, as opposed to being stamped onto the leather or vellum of the spines.

There was a book trade in early modern Ireland, but how far it reached into the countryside is uncertain. Spenser travelled enough, including to London, and spent enough time in major Irish towns, such as Dublin, and earned enough money, to have amassed a good collection of books for a person of his social status. Many of these books would presumably have been burnt when the castle went up in flames in 1598. Losses may have included unpublished parts of The Faerie Queene.

On the top shelf of one of the bookshelves are two objects with threatening significance. One, a skull, is the standard medieval momento mori or reminder of our final end. The other is a Spanish helmet (see Tower House Study: Helmet), the sort of trophy that Spenser could have bought or have picked up as a souvenir after one or another expedition by Spain landed on Irish shores (disastrously so).

Spenser was a poet acutely conscious of worldly ruin and of his own mortality, while simultaneously hopeful that a decisive English Protestant victory over Spain (and other foreign Catholic forces) might finally be achieved. Spenser anticipates such a battle in The Faerie Queene, between “that great faery Queene and Paynim king,” which he promises to one day write about (FQ I.xi.7). Spenser’s epic has a godly, anti-Spanish, anti-papal, pro-English militaristic purpose. Ironically, that battle came to Kilcolman too soon, and his book was never finished.