A View of the State of Ireland, Written Dialogue-wise, betweene Eudoxus and Irenæus. By Edmund Spenser, Esq. In the Yeare 1596

1633 Spenser, Edmund (1552?-99). A View of the State of Ireland, Written Dialogue-wise, betweene Eudoxus and Irenæus. By Edmund Spenser, Esq. In the Yeare 1596. [Ed. Sir James Ware]. Dublin, Ireland: Ptd. by the Society of Stationers as part of Ancient Irish Histories. Rpt. as "A View of the Present State of Ireland." In The Works of Edmund Spenser. A Variorum Edition. Ed. Charles Grosvenor Osgood, Frederick Morgan Padelford, and Ray Heffner. Vol. X Spenser’s Prose Works. Ed. Rudolf Gottfried (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1949), 39-231 with “Appendix III A View of the Present State of Ireland (497-532); and as A View of the Present State of Ireland. Ed. W. L. Renwick. Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon Press, 1970. Critical ed. as A View of the State of Ireland. From the first printed edition (1633). Ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley. Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997. “Ware’s Annotations” (162-69), “Passages Omitted from Ware’s Text” (170-76), “Glossary” (190-92). The manuscript circulated from 1598. PSt

Apparently intended as a serious analysis of Ireland and its people, it proposes the complete suppression of the Irish people, the expropriation of all the land, exchange of the Irish among counties where they will work for English landlords, slaughter of cattle, and taxing the Irish to pay for the military that will suppress them. Argues that the Irish are descended from the barbarian Scythians and that resisting English law indicates that the Irish are “the lowest form of savages” (Hadfield and Maley ed., xx). Treated as a utopia in Sarah Hogan, Other Englands: Utopia, Capital, and Empire in an Age of Transition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. The author was born and died in England lived in Ireland from 1580-98. He is best-known for The Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596).