Colonialism And Early Modern National Identity 1590-1642

How far was colonialism crucial to the formation of national identity in English literature from 1590-1642?

`England` is an unstable concept in Early Modern literature. In the uneasy transition from colonial outpost to imperial power, writers of this period are caught between the shadow of the Roman Empire and the dawn of the British one. In this age of revolution and republic, the political convenience of demonising other peoples helped to consolidate political unity at home, behind one national identity. Although the notion of one monolithic `discourse of colonialism` is inherently flawed, the reinvention of national identity in the early 17th century is arguably heavily tied up with changing perceptions of Scotland, Ireland and the wider world. The distinction between the civilised Briton and the `savage` Other are essential to an understanding of national identity in this period. However, the limitations of this reductive picture can be analysed upon closer scrutiny.

England`s `evolving self-image, as a sovereign realm, or empire` can be traced in various ways through the works of Spenser, Bacon and Milton across late 16th and early 17th centuries. To start at the end of the period, when national identity was arguably most unstable, David Underdown argues that `the conquest of Ireland was as essential to the survival of the Republic as the conquest of Scotland, and for much the same reasons. The danger of an Irish based Stuart invasion had been present in English minds since 1642` . In other words, the subjection of Ireland served as a politically useful consolidation of power, a solidification of national identity behind Cromwell`s Republic. In the Orwellian phrase: `war is peace`. Conflict abroad means unity at home. In this context, Milton writes his response to the Republic`s request to uncover the `complication of interests` in Ireland: Observations (1642). The tone of this tract is suggestive to the modern reader of paranoid polemic. Milton writes of the `calumnies, hatred and.pretended reason` of the `abhorred Irish rebels` , suggesting that both Dublin and Belfast are conspiring against London. Milton`s task is to present Ireland as a threat to English sovereignty, and to this extent, he is typical of the period.

The political background of Milton`s Observations helps to explain his polemical fervour in describing the Irish. As is common when imperialism and culture meet, language is used to distance the civilised speaker from the savage object of representation. The most frequently quoted passage from the Observations serves to illustrate this mode of writing, in which he describes the Irish as a people who:

`rejecting the ingenuity of all other nations to improve and waxe more civill by a civilising conquest, though all these many yeares better shown and taught, preferre their own absurd and savage customes before the most convincing evidence of reason and demonstration: a testimony of their true Barbarisme and obdurate wilfulnesse to be expected no lesse in other matters of greatest moment`

The idea of this Irish `barbarisme` is reinforced by his later descri ption of them as `theevs and redshanks` . As has been noted, this demonization of the wild colonial subject is a source of cohesion in an attempt to counteract the dangerously disparate sense of national identity in the England of the 1640`s. In light of this, the language of Milton`s Observations appears to endorse the view that the colonialist distinction between civility and savage otherness is at the heart of national identity in this period. However, the question may be posed as to whether Milton`s attempt represents a contemporary sense of national identity or what the government want this identity to be. However, although Milton`s denigration of the Irish was especially convenient in the consolidation of national identity under Cromwell, it was building on a tradition which stretches back to Spenser`s A View of the State of Ireland (1596 1633). As Edward Said has argued, `since Spenser`s 1596 tract on Ireland, a whole tradition of British and European thought has considered the Irish to be a separate and inferior race, usually unregenerately barbarian, often delinquent and primitive` . Tracey Hill endorses this argument when she writes `in A View, the indigenous Irish are constructed as ethnically debased and intrinsically unruly` .

The English tradition of demonising the Irish from Spenser to Milton is founded on the basis of religious difference. Spenser is only able to refer to Ireland as a `savage nation` with `evil customs` from the start of A View because he takes issue with their three `evils`: `first land, second laws, last religion` . The utter disdain for Catholicism serves to further reinforce a sense of unity within England, under the banner of Protestantism. In an incisive essay, Lynda Boose sees Spenser`s A View as a founding document of racism. This tract sets up a discourse in which `the derogation of the Irish as `a race apart` situates racial difference within cultural and religious categories not biologically empirical ones` . This argument is both reinforced and moderated by Clare Carroll`s emphasis on the way in which `by social level, religion, and what for Spenser is a non-European ethnic identity.the Irish are constituted as one inferior category` . Don Wolfe goes further to explicitly link Spenser and Milton in their denigration of the Irish on religious grounds: they `both regarded the Irish as barbarous, savage, uncouth, but, worst of all, papatistical in religious belief` . Indeed, in Eikonoklastes (1649), Milton writes contemptuously of `the Irish, guided by so many suttle and Italian heads of the Romish party` and Willy Maley highlights his `radical Protestant exclusionism that represented the Irish as unclean` as part of a longer tradition of civil discourse on Ireland . Indeed, the association of Catholicism and savagery is not confined to political tracts, with Marlowe`s translation of Ovid associating the corrupted `Amazon` with Catholics in his choice of the word `idolatry` .

Spenser`s A View of the State of Ireland and Milton`s Observations both emphasise the `barbarism` of the Irish people on account of their religion, thereby reinforcing the distinction between `us` and `them` and strengthening the sense of English national identity in a politically unstable period. In light of this, it can be argued that nascent colonialism in Ireland from the crises of the 1590`s to the Ulster settlement of 1609 (and beyond) was essential to the formation English national identity in this period. Nevertheless, both writers have a political agenda, and could be viewed as isolated failures to mobilise a population behind unstable regimes. These are not works of `populist` literature. However, they tap into popular myths concerning who is fit to rule, arguably awakening at least some form of dormant nationalism amongst their readership. Thus, in writing about Shakespeare`s Cymbeline as a postcolonial text, Maley argues that `England was of uncertain parentage, but relied upon a myth of purity of origins` . As Francis Yates writes in his essay on `The Elizabethan Revival in the Jacobean Age`, `there was built into the basically Protestant position of the Queen as representative of a pure reformed Church which had cast off the impurities of Rome, this aura of chivalric Arthurian purity, of a British imperialism, using British in the mythic and romantic sense which it had for Elizabethans` .

The political invention of `Britain` as empire was justified by the mythical fantasy of `Britain` as pure, ordered kingdom. This reinvention of the past to purpose of strengthening English national identity is placed firmly in a colonial context. If the Irish are barbaric Catholics, incapable of ruling themselves in a `civilised` manner, then the legitimate, Arthurian ruler must step in. This mythical lineage is essential to Spenser, with Eudoxus and Irenius discussing the mythical origins of Ireland and England in A View. Furthermore, in Book III of The Faerie Queen, he refers to the myth of Britain descending from Troy `for noble Britons sprong from Trojans bold, and Troynouant was built of old Troye`s ashes cold`. In this context, the whitewashing of Lord Grey in Spenser`s A View makes sense. Grey is depicted as the perfect ruler in the imagery of Plato`s republic - guiding the ship of Ireland through the tempests of political content with the expertise of someone ideally suited to rule . In reality, Lord Grey was no Arthurian noble nor Platonic leader, but a butcher who met his end in the tower of London . The simultaneous demonization of Ireland and romanticisation of Britain in literature from Spenser to Milton provides convincing evidence for the importance of colonialism in the formation of national identity. Francis Bacon, chronologically between Spenser and Milton, provides a prime example of more hopeful attitudes towards colonisation. If, for Spenser and Milton, national identity and `civilised` status is confirmed through the denigration of colonial peoples, for Bacon and others, the opposite happens. Through romanticising the Irish, they provoke a questioning of our own national identity as `civilised`. In his essay `Of Plantations`, Bacon disapproves of destructive and exploitative `base and hasty drawing of profit` , viewing empire as an interconnected whole. This idea is manifested in the image of a body when he writes in `Of Empire` of how `a kingdom may have good limbs, but will have empty veins, and nourish little` if it has a corrupt leader . Elsewhere, in Certain Considerations Touching the Plantations in Ireland, Bacon compares the state with a tortoise who `is safe within her shell: but if she put forth any part of her body, then it endangereth not only the part that is so put forth, but all the rest`. The sense of an interconnected body politic is emphasised again in another metaphor later on: `in the natural body of man, if there be any weak or affected part, it is enough to draw rheums or malign humours unto it, to the interruption of the health of the whole body` . The colonies are not wild and dangerous outpost but `children of former kingdoms` to be welcomed into the grand familial project of empire .

Bacon`s vision of empire is a utopian one. However, this engenders an antithetical idea of national identity to that of Spenser and Milton. For Bacon, it is the colony that is pure, not mythical Britain. He describes the `pure soil` of plantations with enthusiasm in `Of Plantations` . His optimistic vision of the future is adorned with such fecundity and potential, when `the plantation grows to strength, then it is time to plant with women, as well as with men that the plantation may spread into generations, and not be ever pierced from without` . This optimism is not confined to Bacon, and has a tradition of its own, like Spenser`s darker influence on theories of Empire. Later in the 17th century and early 18th century, in a more global context, Joseph Addison writes in The Spectator that `there are not more useful members of the Commonwealth than Merchants. They knit mankind together in a mutual intercourse of good office.` . The Baconian, utopian view of empire, however, has darker implications in other texts. In Sir Walter Raleigh`s The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana (1596), the country is equally as untainted as the `pure soil` of Bacon`s Ireland, she `hath yet her maidenhead, never sackt, turned, nor wrought, the face of the earth hath not beene torn.` . However, the implicit suggestion is the vulnerability of the land to brutal exploitation, omitted by Bacon.

On one hand, Spenser and Milton draw Manichean distinctions between a romanticised, mythical Britain and a demonised, savage Ireland. On the other hand, Bacon and Addison attempt to whitewash colonialism as a utopian exchange. Both visions of Britain are rose-tinted. Neither construction of what it means to be `English` in this period is successful, as is evident from the texts. Even in Spenser`s A View, which has flagrantly racist moments, Deborah Shuger has found evidence of `a powerful attraction.to heroic barbarism` in comparing the tract with classical republican sources . In Milton, Waley highlights an implicit admiration for the literary Celts, as opposed to the arrogant Britons . Despite their ostensible demonization of the colonial Other, there is a more complex subtext, which clouds the distinctions between barbarity and civilisation. They undermine their own politically motivated conceptualisation of national identity, due to the inherent complexity of the issue. As Waley writes, `what exactly were English standards in Milton`s time, given the multiple and divided nature of Englishness?`

In contrast, Bacon is more deliberately naïve, and thus successful in conceiving of what it is to be `British` as an ideal, not an alleged reality. As Clark Hulse points out, `Bacon ultimately insists that fables were used to teach and lay open, not to hide and conceal knowledge` . Bacon`s utopianism is unrealistic, but deliberately so. His vision of what it means to be British is successfully defined within a colonial context, but not to the extent that it is dominated by political discourse. It has been argued that colonialism is essential to the formation of national identity in this period. However, the self-conscious idealism of Bacon`s essays is preferable to the false knowledge of Milton and Spenser`s political tracts.