But the Irish Sea betwixt us: Proximity and Anglo-Irish discourse

Literary scholars examining Renaissance English texts about Ireland have typically tended to view these texts within the framework of a strictly colonialist reading of the Anglo-Irish situation, often aligning Ireland's experience in this period with that of the colonial New World. This dissertation seeks, by contrast, to foreground the particular nature of the relationship between England and Ireland, stressing the geographical, cultural, ethnic and historical proximity of the two islands. The dissertation provides an analysis of the effects of such proximity on Anglo-Irish discourse, both in its founding moment in the work of Gerald of Wales in the twelfth century, and in the work of such writers as Edmund Spenser, John Donne, John Harington, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Davies in the early modern period.;In Gerald's accounts of the Norman incursion into Ireland we find the first attempt to distinguish the native Irish from a relationship of proximity with their neighbours in Britain--an attempt rendered all the more difficult by the division of Europe in the period into a Christian West and heathen East. In the early modern period, three distinct phases are posited in English writing about Ireland. In the first phase (exemplified by Spenser) the focus is on the descendants of the Norman invaders (the Old English) and their relationship to a new generation of colonists (the New English). In the second phase, under the pressure of the Nine Years War and the ascendancy of Hugh O'Neill, the focus shifts to the Gaelic Irish, as is evidenced by, for example, Shakespeare's engagement in Henry V with Irish matters and with the question of the relationship between Irish and English national identities. Finally, in the wake of the defeat of O'Neill and the accession of James I in 1603, writers such Jonson (in his Irish Masque) and Davies (in his Discovery of the True Causes) imagine the union of the peoples of the two islands such that Irish difference is erased and the Irish become English, thus negating proximity by eliminating Irish difference.