Edmund Spenser's 'A View of the Present State of Ireland': Sovereignty, surveillance, and colonialism

Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland is firmly situated within the Elizabethan culture of surveillance. Secrecy and surveillance are key aspects of this colonial text. By contextualizing Spenser's tract in the culture of surveillance, we are able to examine the link between sovereignty and surveillance not only within a courtly economy of secrecy, but also on the colonial periphery. In addition, we see how surveillance and sovereignty are intertwined, a conjunction that is often ignored in new historicist readings of early modern literature which have relied on Michel Foucault's dichotomous periodization of display and surveillance.;I argue that Spenser utilizes a deployment of secrecy in order to draw the attention of a potential patron. This, in turn, draws colonial Ireland into the competitive, political quest for empowering secrets. But, in doing so, Spenser's enquiry into Irish affairs reveals a critical attitude towards the sovereign. His location on the periphery of power allows Spenser to imagine the colony's relationship to the court in a challenging way. A View's representation of Ireland is, ostensibly, a representation of England, a space in which the interlocutors of the dialogue negotiate sovereign power through subtle cultural exchange: the imposition of an English mode of surveillance on Ireland and the appropriation of bureaucratic and cartographic discourse, for example. Spenser's tract points to the failures of the colonial project of plantation that are, in fact, traced to the sovereign: Elizabeth I, queen of England and Ireland. Elizabeth I, I suggest, is both the gendered and the Irish other of Spenser's text, and the desire to establish a male patronage bond is an attempt by Spenser to influence a process which will put an end to the Irish "troubles" as well as fashion himself against the sovereign other.