It is almost certain that Kilcolman also had some form of kitchen garden for growing fruit, vegetables and herbs (see Bawn area: garden and Tower House Parlor: apples).

Literary Connections

Spenser’s House of Temperance, an allegory for the human body (see also Tower House Study: desk and Tower House Privy), has a huge kitchen, symbolizing the stomach:

It was a vaut ybuilt for great dispence,
With many raunges reard along the wall;
And one great chimney, whose long tonnell thence,
The smoke forth threw. And in the midst of all
There placed was a caudron wide and tall,
Vpon a mightie fornace, burning whott,
More whott, then Aetn’, or flaming Mongiball:
For day and night it brent, ne ceased not,
So long as any thing it in the caudron got.

But to delay the heat, least by mischaunce
It might breake out, and set the whole on fyre,
There added was by goodly ordinaunce,
An huge great payre of bellowes, which did styre
Continually, and cooling breath inspyre.
About the Caudron many Cookes accoyld,
With hookes and ladles, as need did requyre;
The whyles the viaundes in the vessel boyld
They did about their businesse sweat, and sorely toyld. (FQ II.ix.29-30)

Links

Our sheela-na-gig at Kilcolman is modeled on a sandstone carving found buried in a dungeon (in the seventeenth century or before) at Glanworth Castle, Co. Cork. Glanworth was the second-most-important center of the Roche family, after Castletownroche, Co. Cork.

The date and ultimate provenance of the Glanworth specimen is unknown. Another sheela-na-gig figure is known from Castletownroche, and one has been found in the wall of the tower house at Fantstown, near Kilmallock, Co. Limerick. The Fantstown specimen is located in the north-eastern corner of the tower house and is evident as one approaches the main doorway.

This sheela-na-gig greets a visitor entering the main gate of the bawn, or outer-wall enclosure of the castle complex. We imagine that Spenser or the previous occupants of the castle, such as Sir John of Desmond, intended the sculpture to ward off evil, including enemies. Spenser’s second wife, Elizabeth, had a son with the poet and could also have appreciated any association of the sculpture with the pains of childbirth.

Literary Connections

When night falls over the newlywed couple in Spenser’s wedding poem, “Epithalamion”, the speaker calls out on various demons of the night (including the Irish “Pouke”) not to disturb them in the comfort of their castle, as they make love (“Epithalamion” 334-52). According to Hugh MacLean and Anne Lake Prescott, “Spenser’s strategy” at this “liminal moment of sexuality,” a time of “transition and initiation,” is “to evoke and then shoo away grotesque fantasy figures” (641). For similar reasons, the poet earlier compares his bride to Medusa (“Epithalamion” 190) who “astonisht” onlookers at her wedding (with a pun in astonisht on turning to “stone”). Read one way, their alarm at her charm is a means of dispelling any potential ill will that the townspeople might bear towards the bride, for they clearly admire her beauty, as well. Read another way, Spenser is himself frightened by specters of female sexuality; it is something that must be overcome if he is to prosper and flourish in Ireland.

The most famous hag in Spenser’s oeuvre is surely the witch Duessa (her name, implying duplicity, is also an Irish name, meaning “little black one”), who is stripped and whose shame is exposed in Book I.viii of The Faerie Queene:

Such as she was, their eies might her behold,
That her misshaped parts did them appall,
A loathly, wrinckled hag, ill fauoured, old,
Whose secret filth good manners biddeth not be told.

Her crafty head was altogether bald,
And as in hate of honorable eld,
Was ouergrowne with scurfe and filthy scald;
Her teeth out of her rotten gummes were feld,
And her sowre breath abhominably smeld;
Her dried dugs, lyke bladders lacking wind,
Hong downe, and filthy matter from them weld;
Her wrizled skin as rough, as maple rind,
So scabby was, that would haue loathd all womankind. (FQ I.viii.46.6-47)

She is monstrous, with animal-like feet and other “filthy feature” that is “open showne”(stanzas 48-49). The imagery comes from the Bible (cf. Isaiah 3.17, 24) and other places and again presents to the reader a haunting specter of female sexuality gone bad, since Duessa had earlier appeared as a beautiful seductress. Her scabbiness here indicates age and disease, including syphilis or perhaps leprosy, a disease that afflicted the unfaithful Cressida in medieval legend. She is allowed to wander off into the wilderness by the heroes of holiness Arthur and Red Crosse Knight, from whence she will later return to cause more confusion. Duessa is not a sheela-na-gig, but like the one we’ve posted next to Spenser’s bawn gate, she represents a grotesque portrayal of female sexuality. She must be grappled with, comprehended and evaded if the Englishman is to prosper in Ireland.

Links

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 Tower House Study.

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]

In the Long Gallery at Carrick-on-Suir, the wainscoting running around the room shows the allegorized figures of Justice (holding a sword) and Equity (holding a scale) alternating with busts of Queen Elizabeth I and King Edward VI.

In the parlor at Myrtle Grove, a (West-)English-style oak mantelpiece shows the allegorical figures of Faith, Hope and Charity amid other detail-work.

The recreated mantelpiece at Kilcolman shows the paired figures of Faith (holding an anchor, an emblem of hope) and Justice (holding a sword). Both are modeled closely on the plaster figures at Carrick-on-Suir. In between them is the rose, a symbol of the English monarch. The rose connotes the Tudor family lineage as well as Queen Elizabeth herself, whose portrait is in the parlor next door.

The Great Hall was used mainly for important gatherings and ceremonial occasions. Spenser, a Protestant and lord of the manor (both owner and administrator), would conceivably have administered justice in this room, including arbitration over minor disputes between his tenants and other business on the plantation, all administered in the name of the English crown. Business conducted in front of the mantelpiece would have reminded supplicants of English law, religion and power in Munster.

Literary Connections

The rose was the Tudor family badge and an apt symbol for the queen’s beauty. In The Faerie Queene, Elizabeth is described in allegorical guise as Gloriana, the Fairy Queen, “that glorious flowre,” from whence her name: “Therefore they Glorian call that glorious flowre,/ Long mayst thou Glorian liue, in glory and great powre” (FQ II.x.76.8-9); she is “that goodly glorious flowre… sprung of the auncient stocke of Princes straine” (FQ IV.viii.33.6-7).

Elizabeth was closely associated with other flowers as well, such as the lily, a symbol of virginal purity (Elizabeth never married and carried the sobriquet “The Virgin Queen”), and the fleur-de-lis, either the lily or the iris. The fleur-de-lis in royal English heraldry connoted imperial power. It is figured on the queen’s scepter in portraits, for example, and was a stock symbol of the French monarchy. Elizabeth, like her forbearers, claimed monarchy over England, Wales, France and Ireland. It is interesting in this regard that the Irish word for “iris“ is gloiriam, also spelled gloriam in the early modern period (according the Dictionary of the Irish Language): a word close to glorian.

The sword is a symbol of Justice. Artegall, the principal hero of Book V of The Faerie Queene, the Book of Justice, is introduced along with his sword, “Chrysaor, that all other swords excelled” (FQ V.i.9.8). With it, Artegall dispenses a rough justice to villains who oppose him. Queen Elizabeth is allegorically figured in the book as Mercilla, who must not let her sword (i.e., the sword of state) grow rusty out of disuse and excessive mercy.

The 1596 edition of The Faerie Queene shows an anchor on its title page, an emblem of hope (anchora spei). The anchor was also the emblem of printer Richard Field. (The title page of the 1596 edition can be seen open on the desk in the Tower House Study.) The character of Speranza (her name meaning “hope”) offers her “siluer anchor” to the sinful hero Red Crosse Knight in Book I.x.22.2-3 of The Faerie Queene. Visitors to the Great Hall recreated here, who were loyal to Queen Elizabeth, would find symbols of faith, hope and justice to comfort them amid the turmoil surrounding Kilcolman.

Links:

An example from the 16th century with the provenance “Kilcolman, Co. Cork” is currently in the Limerick Museum.

Other objects on the table here, in the Parlor and in the Tower House Parlor, are modeled after Tudor-era facsimiles in wood and pewter found at Barrycourt Castle, Co. Cork.

Links: http://museum.limerick.ie/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/213 (accessed 12/5/2013) [The mether in the Limerick Museum]

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, 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 cheeks 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 “bellows.” Spenser imagines these “bellows” 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 A View of the Present State of Ireland, Spenser’s spokesman 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 “North 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 holds and fortresses of the English… he clean wiped out many great Towns” (View 15-16).

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.

Eric Klingelhofer argues that this room, the Parlor between the Great Hall and Tower House, was built during Spenser’s time, so such a stone as the one pictured here may have been included in the building’s original construction as testament to the arrival and permanent presence of the newly married couple. Every time Spenser or Elizabeth Boyle would cross the threshold from the more private Parlor to the more public Great Hall, they could keep their mutual faith in mind.

Literary Connections

What’s in a name? Spenser was subject to three Elizabeths: his mother, his second wife, and the queen. In his sonnet sequence, Amoretti (1595), he writes two adjacent sonnets (numbers 74-75) that celebrate the name of Elizabeth. In the first, he describes his wife’s “Most happy letters fram’d by skilfull trade” (74.1), and he advertises the coincidence between her name and that of the other two Elizabeths by comparing them to the famous three graces of classical mythology: “Ye three Elizabeths for euer liue,/ that three such graces did vnto me giue” (74.13-14). These graces inspire him to write gracefully about graceful things (see also the vision of four graces given to Spenser’s alter-ego, the character Colin Clout, on Mount Acidale in FQ VI.x).

The second sonnet, #75, is one of Spenser’s best-known poems. It describes how he wrote his love’s “name vpon the strand,/ but came the waues and washed it away” (75.1-2). In order to defeat the ravages of time, he decides to “eternize” her name in his verse instead:

my verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
and in the heuens wryte your glorious name.
Where whenas death shall all the world subdew, our loue shall liue, and later life renew. (75.11-14)

Spenser’s verse places her name above his head, “in the heavens,” where their love will “renew” itself at the end of time.

Almost all surviving examples of Spenser’s handwriting are in the form of letters copied while secretary to Grey or writing on behalf of other administrators, such as John Norris, President of Munster, one of his planter neighbors nearby to the south (at Mallow Castle, County Cork). Few letters survive from Spenser’s time in Munster, however.

Spenser wrote and received both administrative and personal letters; some of the latter, exchanged with the scholar Gabriel Harvey while Spenser lived in England in the 1570s, were published in 1579. They focus on newsworthy events in England and abroad as well as current debates about poetic aesthetics.

In the study in the Tower House portion of this castle recreation is another desk. That room functions as Spenser’s private “office” for other, more creative writing.

Both desks are modeled loosely on that of St Jerome in Albrecht Dürer’s famous print (1514).

Literary Connections

Irenius in A View of the Present State of Ireland describes the Irish as always asking for news, which is carried across the country by “common carriers,” men who are akin to rogues and “loose fellows” (View 76). These supposed low-life criminals are “partakers not only of many stealths by setting forth other men’s goods to be stolen,” but they are “also privy to many traitorous practices” (76). Eudoxus answers that the Irishman’s desire for news “argueth sure in them a greate desire of innovation” (76). Eudoxus’ comment, following so closely upon Irenius’ warning, hints at his fear of dangerous political innovation, including treason, which can spread so swiftly along with the news in Ireland. Spenser is concerned about the unchecked spread of information across the country in troubled times.

The news also helped those in need. In the “Mutabilitie Cantos” portion of The Faerie Queene, people of “the lower World” are confused when the light of Cynthia, or the moon, is momentarily extinguished by the attempted overthrow of her power: her throne in the heavens has been shaken by the rebellious titaness, Mutability. “Fearing least Chaos broken had his chaine,/ And brought againe on them eternall night,” the messenger-God Mercury takes action and speeds to the “faire Palace” of the king of the Gods, Jove, to tell him what has happened. Mercury, “The Heauens Herald” then acts as go-between for Jove and Mutability (FQ VII.vi.14 -19).

Spenser himself is compared to Mercury in a commendatory sonnet written by Sir Walter Raleigh in praise of The Faerie Queene. In this poem, published alongside the epic in the 1590 edition, Raleigh compares Spenser to a “celestiall thiefe” of the glory of previous poets (Raleigh, “A Vision vpon this conceipt of the Faery Queene” 14). The “thiefe” is Mercury, who is also the god of thieves; in Greek myth, Mercury steals the cattle of Apollo. Mercury’s dual role as thief and messenger may help explain the connection in Irenius’s mind (above) between thieving activity in the countryside and running news. Indeed, Spenser was himself accused in a letter (October 12, 1589) to Queen Elizabeth by his antagonistic neighbor, Lord Roche, of stealing his neighbor’s cattle and beating Roche’s men.

Spenser would have retaliated to Lord Roche's abuses in his own letters. As Andrew Zurcher and Christopher Burlinson suggest in their edition of letters associated with Spenser (pp. lxii-lxiv), the poet would have had an anxious relationship with letter-writing, given the bloody politics that inspired some of them. A fear of victimization-by-correspondence can be found in the epistolary vocabulary found in the Despaire episode in Book I of The Faerie Queene. When Red Crosse Knight contemplates suicide with a knife in his hand, ...his hand did quake, And tremble like a leafe of Aspin greene, And troubled bloud through his pale face was seene To come, and goe with tydings from the hart, As it a running messenger had beene. (FQ I.ix.51) In a second commendatory sonnet to The Faerie Queene, Raleigh declares that “Of me no lines are lou’d, nor letters are of price,/ Of all which speak our English tongue, but those of thy deuice” (Raleigh, “Another of the same” 13-4). The immediate reference here is to “lines” and “letters” of verse, i.e., to the poems written by Spenser that Raleigh admires. The “deuice” has to do with Spenser’s powers of invention while writing them (his devising of them). A secondary meaning occurs, however, in that a device, or personal emblem, was used to mark wax seals on letters as a further method of identifying them (no such “device” of Spenser’s exists today, although he would have been entitled to one, according to his rank as a landed “gentleman” at Kilcolman). Raleigh may therefore be hinting at the method by which he received poetry from Spenser, i.e., in letters of Spenser’s devising and with Spenser’s device on them. Simultaneously, such letters in the “English tongue” coming out of Ireland, especially, would attest to their shared nationality.

Links:

Spenser lived at Kilcolman under constant threat. Full-scale rebellion against him and the New English was always a possibility, as were sporadic raids by thieving, ambitious and/or disgruntled neighbors who would have borne a grudge or simply wanted his property. Some would have resented the creation of the plantation by the (mostly Protestant) New English settlers. Others, like his powerful Old English neighbor Lord Roche, engaged Spenser in regular lawsuits over property, and this led to violence on both sides. Spenser was eventually burned out when the Nine Years’ War, led by Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, began in Ulster and spread south, reaching the plantation in August, 1599. Appropriately, the name of Spenser’s estate was “Hap-Hazard.”

Guns were an early modern innovation in Europe. They are recorded as being in use in Ireland as early as the Battle of Knockdoe in 1504. Even the most mighty and feared Irish lords put gun-loops outside their front doors, as did the 10th earl of Ormond at his Tudor mansion at Carrick-on-Suir. The plantation home of Mallow Castle, occupied by the Norris family of soldiers and administrators, had gun-loops, as did Kanturk Castle, built in the early seventeenth century by the native Irish MacCarthys. Spenser’s fellow planter William Herbert lists cannon and hand-guns among his household inventory at Castleisland, Co. Kerry. Gun-loops are also found at Enniscorthy Castle, Co. Wicklow. Spenser briefly owned property in Enniscorthy in the early 1580s, before he sold it on to Sir Henry Wallop. Spenser’s friend and co-author Lodowick Bryskett lived and wrote in the town of Enniscorthy.

Literary Connections

Spenser makes extensive use of guns in his poetry. It has been argued that the highly destructive flail of Talus, Artegall’s iron-man enforcer in Book V of The Faerie Queene, could allegorize raking gunfire. Elsewhere in the epic, the character Timias (an allegorical stand-in for Sir Walter Raleigh) blasts open the castle of the giant Orgoglio with his “horne,” and Orgoglio’s forceful response is compared to cannon-fire (FQ I.viii.3-9). Book II contains “hideous Ordinaunce” (or cannon) used by villains who besiege a castle, the House of Temperance (II.xi.14.3). These same villains are earlier compared to “a swarme of Gnats at euentide” that rise “Out of the fennes of Allan” (II.ix.16.1-2), i.e., the Bog of Allen in the Irish midlands.

Eric Klingelhofer’s excavations of Kilcolman in the mid-1990s uncovered a tuning peg for a lute or similar stringed instrument. The find was located in a stratification level that could be contemporary with Spenser’s occupation of the site. Although its dating is uncertain, it may have been in use in Spenser’s household there in the 1590s.

Featured here is “Mr. Dowland’s Midnight” by the Elizabethan lutenist John Dowland (played by Christopher Morrongiello; reproduced with permissions).

Literary Connections

A poem attributed to Spenser and published posthumously by James Ware in 1633, “Verses upon the said Earles Lute,” is reported to have been carved upon the lute of Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork. Boyle was a cousin of Spenser’s second wife, Elizabeth Boyle, who lived with Spenser at Kilcolman. Richard Boyle was involved in the English administration in Munster from the 1580s on, and he eventually purchased (in 1602) the Munster holdings of Sir Walter Raleigh, which helped him (Boyle) to become fabulously wealthy and to buy his earldom from the British monarch, James I.

Spenser’s poem reads as follows:

Whilst vitall sapp did make me spring,
And leafe and bough did flourish brave,0.231.2013
I then was dumbe and could not sing,
Ne had the voice which now I have:
But when the axe my life did end,
The Muses nine this voice did send. (“Verses upon the said Earles Lute”)

What does this tell us about Spenser’s life as a poet and a planter? It indicates that the felling of trees is a necessary sacrifice that leads to the making of instruments, such as the lute, which create (or accompany) the “voice” of the “Muses nine.” The nine Muses in classical tradition are the goddesses who inspire learning and the arts, including poetry and history. Spenser refers to the Muses often in his poetry and wrote a set of poems entitled Tears of the Muses, published in his Complaints volume (1591). But the poem does more than praise instruments; it identifies industrial activity on the land as the source of art. Boyle’s lands were famous for their timber, and so Spenser connects tree-cutting, which made things like lutes, with the inspiration of poets who earned their livelihood from the land (and who were, presumably, patronized by wealthy men such as Boyle).

The most famous of mythological poets was Orpheus, whose song in nature calmed the beasts and made the trees bend to hear him. Spenser’s famous refrain to his wedding poem, “Epithalamion,” celebrates how the “woods” around him in Munster “eccho” and “ring” to his song. In such a moment the bridegroom-poet, Spenser, is like Orpheus, who is able to charm the landscape and make it harmonize with, or echo, his song. By analogy, whoever played the earl of Cork’s lute would be in the position of Orpheus, making the woods (including the instrument which is made out of wood) echo and harmonize with poetic song. Orpheus was himself torn apart by savage forces (by orgiastic maenads, or female celebrants of Bacchus) and his head and harp floated down a river. But the ideal concept of the power of his song lives on [see the reference to Orpheus’ harp on a river in Spenser’s Ruines of Time 604-9, published in Complaints (1591), wherein the Orphic harp is that of Sir Philip Sidney. See also Rivers].

Not all music was pleasant to Spenser’s ears. Music could also be a luxurious distraction from more virtuous deeds. For example, in The Faerie Queene, in the vainglorious House of Pride, a place ruled by the queen Lucifera, we witness a royal feast “in commune hall.” Here we find

… many Minstrales maken melody,
To driue away the dull melancholy,
And many Bardes, that to the trembling chord
Can tune their timely voices cunningly,
And many Chroniclers, that can record
Old loues, and warres for Ladies doen by many a Lord. (FQ I.v.3.4-9)

One can imagine Spenser spending many a long day and evening at Kilcolman playing and listening to songs accompanied by lute, and/or listening to Irish “bards” (as Spenser’s spokesman, Irenius, says he has done in the View, pp. 72-5), and/or writing his own chronicle of “Fierce warres and faithfull loues,” as he calls his historical epic, The Faerie Queene (FQ I.Proem.i.9). Such art was only worthwhile, however, if it led to virtuous action, including work on the land.

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