Both desks are modeled loosely on that of St Jerome in Albrecht Dürer’s famous print (1514). Spenser would certainly have found inspiration in the early church fathers when writing his own divinely inspired work.

Many writers, such as Michel de Montaigne, Friederich Holderlein and William Butler Yeats, were attracted to towers to work in. Perhaps the physical location on high inspired lofty thoughts, just as it removed one from distractions down below. In the castle recreation here, Spenser’s study is adjacent to his bedroom and above the chapel, both powerful places for the heart and mind.

Almost all surviving examples of Spenser’s handwriting are in the form of letters written while he was secretary to Lord Deputy of Ireland Arthur, Lord Grey or when writing on behalf of other administrators, such as John Norris, President of Munster and his planter neighbor nearby to the south (at Mallow Castle, County Cork). A few rare examples of Spenser’s annotations to poems [from the Shakespeare Folger Library] do exist, however.

On the desk lies Spenser’s magnum opus, The Faerie Queene, open to the title page of the second (1596) edition. As the page declares, it was published in London and “printed for” William Ponsonbie. It shows the emblem (or device) of the printer, Richard Field: the anchora spei or “anchor of hope” that descends from the heavens. Writing epic poetry was both inspired and weighty business, and it took hope for Spenser to make the perilous land-and-sea-journey to London, so as to oversee publication of his work (see the description of such a voyage in Spenser’s poem Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, 1595). It took more hope to return again and to keep writing at Kilcolman, as the political storm-clouds gathered in the north. The name of Spenser’s estate, “Hap-hazard,” indicated its precarious nature.

Literary Connections

In Book II of The Faerie Queene is found the House of Temperance, a castle based allegorically on the human body, wherein the kitchen is the stomach, private rooms are the heart, and so on. The castle’s turret, a “blessed bowre” (FQ II.ix.47.5) functions as the head. It has many rooms, three of which function as the principle parts of the mind and/or higher soul. “Three honorable sages” (47.8) live there, i.e., foresight, judgment and memory. The first of these sages, named “Phantastes,” has “a sharpe foresight, and a working wit/ That never idle was, ne once would rest a whit” and 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)

The other two men represent the sager and more serious aspects of the mind. The second, judgment (who is unnamed in the poem), has walls

... painted faire with memorable gestes,
Of famous Wisards, and with picturals
Of Magistrates, of courts, of tribunals,
Of commen wealthes, of states, of pollicy,
Of lawes, of iudgementes, and of decretals;
All artes, all science, all Philosophy,
And all that in the world was ay thought wittily. (53.3-9)

The third of these men, “Eumnestes,” represents memory, and

His chamber all was hangd about with rolls,
And old records from auncient times deriud,
Some made in books, some in long parchment scrolls,
That were all worm-eaten, and full of canker holes. (57.6-9)

Combined, the men could represent a well-rounded (and somewhat satirical) portrait of Spenser at Kilcolman: a man of intense poetic imagination and fancy who philosophized, administered and adjudicated on his estate, while also writing antiquarian histories or chronicles (inserted into The Faerie Queene) based on his prodigious reading and memory.

Links:

http://talus.artsci.wustl.edu/

[accessed 11/30/12] [texts and digital editing of Spenser’s work, including facsimiles. Directed by Joseph Loewenstein and hosted at Washington University in St. Louis]

Spenser was in Ireland to help administer in the aftermath of the disaster, which offered considerable spoils to the victors (see also Tower House Bedroom: Chest). This helmet, or morion, could represent a trophy and souvenir from that period or from an earlier battle, the siege of Smerwick, Co. Kerry in 1580, which involved both Spanish and Italian troops fighting under the banner of the pope. Another helmet is located in the Great Hall.

Literary Connections

The lengthy battle between Prince Arthur and the evil, tyrannical Souldan in Book V.viii of The Faerie Queene has long been read as an allegory for the English defeat of the Armada, and more recently as an allegory combining these events in Ireland, as well.

The hero of Justice, Artegall, helps mop up the Souldan’s men and drive his frightful wife, Adicia, “like an enraged cow” off into the woods (FQ V.viii.46.1). Both strength of arms and God’s grace help them to victory.

Like an ancient Roman general, Arthur takes the Souldan’s armor and shield as a trophy or “eternall token” of his victory:

Onely his shield and armour, which there lay,
Though nothing whole, but all to brusd and broken,
He vp did take, and with him brought away,
That mote remaine for an eternall token
To all, mongst whom this storie should be spoken,
How worthily, by heauens high decree,Iustice that day of wrong her selfe had wroken,
That all men which that spectacle did see, By like ensample mote for euer warned bee. (FQ V.viii.44)

Links

http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/S108200/index.html (accessed 11/8/12)
[contemporary account in Spanish by Armada survivor Francisco de Cuellar, published on the CELT website of electronic texts] 

http://www.sligoheritage.com/ArchSpanishArmada.htm (accessed 11/8/12)
[photographs of Armada wreck sites in Co. Sligo and (unattributed) translation of de Cuellar’s account]

Literary Connections

The hero of Book I of The Faerie Queene, the book of Holiness, is Red Crosse Knight, who becomes St George by fighting against the Dragon in canto xi. St George is the patron saint of England, and the Dragon bears signs that would indicate its identity as Satan (“that old dragon” of the Book of Revelation). It also has features that would indicate topical references to Pope Gregory XIII (whose emblem was a dragon), Spain, and Ireland all wrapped into one. Its black and red scales are compared to an army’s shields, for example (black and red were the colors of the Castillian, i.e., Spanish monarchy), it has “sail”-like wings (shades of the Spanish Armada, which was dispersed by the English and a storm, and which crashed in part on Irish shores) and its tail is wrapped in “boughts and knots” and pointed with a double sting: the words evoke the Irish bonnaught (Irish buanacht), a term for the predatory biletting by mercenary soldiers that squeezed the country and that New English administrators tried to reform or eliminate. When the giant Dragon is slain, it is measured “To proue how many acres he did spred of land” (FQ I.xii.11.9). Accordingly, the downfall of the noble house of Desmond led to its attainder, including the forfeiture, measurement and plantation of its land by opportunists such as Spenser.

Literary Connections

This particular item, a “quilted leather jack,” Spenser describes as an English type of protective garment used by the Irish in his View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596).

In the same passage in the View, the speaker Irenius confusingly compares it to “Checklaton,” a costly article of clothing worn by the character Sir Thopas in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In The Faerie Queene, the fierce character Disdayne appears in a quilted jacket and checklaton:

He wore no armour, ne for none did care,
As no whit dreading any liuing wight;
But in a Iacket quilted richly rare,
Vpon checklaton he was straungely dight,
And on his head a roll of linnen plight,
Like to the Mores of Malaber he wore;
With which his locks, as blacke as pitchy night,
Were bound about, and voyded from before,
And in his hand a mighty yron club he bore. (The Faerie Queene VI.vii.43)

Disdayne wears a turban, like the “Mores of Malaber,” thus making him into a middle-eastern threat as much as an Irish one. There may be yet further confusion intended by Spenser: O’More is an Irish name, and Irish women (if not men) wore turban-like linen wraps on their heads in Spenser’s day.

Links

Literary Connections

In A View of the Present State of Ireland, Spenser’s spokesman Irenius describes the weapon as deriving from the ancient Gauls, a Celtic tribe on the Continent who used them against the ancient Romans (View 62).

In The Faerie Queene, the angry, fiery villain Atin carries “in his hand two dartes exceeding flit,/ And deadly sharp he held, whose heads were dight/ In poyson and in blood, of malice and despight” (FQ II.iv.38.7-9). He attacks Guyon, the hero of Temperance, with one of them:

With that one of his thrillant darts he threw,
Headed with yre and vengeable despight;
The quiuering steele his aymed end wel knew,
And to his brest it selfe intended right:
But he [i.e., Guyon] was wary, and ere it empight
In the meant marke, aduaunst his shield atweene,
On which it seizing, no way enter might,
But backe rebownding, left the forckhead keene;
Eftsoones he fled away, and might no where be seene. (FQ II.iv.46)

Atin carries two darts and (unlike those pictured here) each has a forked head: like a snake’s forked tongue, they are emblematic of his treachery and divisiveness, his “malice and despight.” Atin may also allude to the Irish. Not only do his darts point in this direction, but so does his name: tine means “fire“ in modern Irish (Steinberg).

Literary Connections

The Faerie Queene is full of weapons used for fighting on foot and horseback. In a few cases, we learn about weapons manufacture. Book I.i.8-9 presents a Virgilian catalog of trees described according to their industrial, medicinal and folkloric uses. We read this catalog when the hero of Book I, Red Crosse Knight, and his lady Una are caught by a rainstorm and enter into a forest for shelter at the very beginning of the epic:

And foorth they passe, with pleasure forward led,
Ioying to heare the birdes sweete harmony,
Which therein shrouded from the tempest dred,
Seemd in their song to scorne the cruell sky.
Much can they praise the trees so straight and hy,
The sayling Pine, the Cedar proud and tall,
The vine-propp Elme, the Poplar neuer dry,
The builder Oake, sole king of forrests all,
The Aspine good for staues, the Cypresse funerall.

The Laurell, meed of mightie Conquerours
And Poets sage, the Firre that weepeth still,
The Willow worne of forlorne Paramours,
The Eugh obedient to the benders will,
The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill,
The Mirrhe sweete bleeding in the bitter wound,
The warlike Beech, the Ash for nothing ill,
The fruitfull Oliue, and the Platane round,
The caruer Holme, the Maple seeldom inward sound. (FQ I.i.8-9)

The trees listed here have both positive and negative uses and connotations. It is possible that the “Aspine good for staues” refers to barrel staves, but it might also refer to weapon “staves” (such as those held by Irish-looking villains in FQ II.ix.13.7).

Images of violence and warfare are clustered in the second stanza in particular: laurel for crowning “mightie Conquerors,” the yew (“Eugh”) for bows, myrrh with its “bitter wound” (an apparent allusion to myrrh’s association with the crucified Christ in the Bible, Mark 15.23), the birch for arrow “shaftes,” and the beech for “war” chariots (cf. Homer’s Iliad 5.839). Spenser opens his epic with images of trees fashioned for heroic and deadly uses.

Links: http://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Now_Thrive_the_Armorers:_Arms_and_Armor_in_Shakespeare