John Derricke's The Image of Irelande: with a Discoverie of Woodkarne: Essays on text and context

By Manchester University Press

John Derricke’s Image of Irelande, with a Discoverie of Woodkarne is a key work of English print-making, Irish and English history and cultural misunderstanding. The work attests to the complexity of English and Irish relations, colonisation, military history, imperial propaganda, poetry, art, printing and the forging of identity in the early modern British Isles. The original work comprises of a lengthy poetic narrative and twelve famous woodcuts of the highest quality produced in sixteenth-century England. They also represent some of the only contemporary views of early modern Ireland on record. The sixteen interdisciplinary essays in this collection focus on the text’s political and historical meaning, print history, iconographic elements, paratexts, literary and artistic influences, and cultural archaeology. The collection will appeal to scholars of many disciplines.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526147585

Book preview

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Introduction

Thomas Herron, Denna J. Iammarino, and Maryclaire Moroney

The Image of Irelande: with a Discoverie of Woodkarne (1581), by John Derricke,¹ merits more sustained critical attention than it has received so far. It is a fascinating, multivalent text published in London by John Day and dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, the most prominent figure of a famous English family whose mid-Tudor patriarch, Sir Henry Sidney, was three times governor of Ireland and the protagonist of Derricke’s book. The Image brazenly advertises military atrocity in the name of religious zealotry, although its politics and modes of representation are far from understood. It has more to tell us than we suspect.

This collection, the first dedicated to Derricke’s work, offers new readings of and new sources behind the Image, all to better explicate many facets of a difficult and complex book. The collection delves into historical, art-historical, archaeological and literary scholarship to explore the many meanings of this complex text. Though on the face of it, the Image is blatantly pro-Sidney and anti-Irish propaganda, we suggest that Derricke’s work is in fact culturally and politically daring, a highly sophisticated textual and visual presentation. What is ‘Irish’ about it or its intended audience is subject to dispute. Parts of it are crude and other parts refined, in a seemingly deliberate contrast. Both the subject matter and the manner in which the book represents its subjects, as well as the responses it has garnered from academics, are similarly conflicted.

Although the Image is mainly a poem in varied parts, the work is known, above all, for its woodcuts. They are among the best published in Tudor England² and include some of the only contemporary images of the early modern Irish and the city of Dublin we have today. Nonetheless, the woodcuts have been uncritically received. The third woodcut (of twelve), for example, is frequently reproduced [Plate III]. It shows an Irish feast with a lord, his lady, his dog and his retinue, including a harpist and ‘bard’ (as the caption tells us). As the harp is the national symbol of Ireland (since the time of King Henry VIII), and since friars join the feast, the woodcut pulls strongly on a modern viewer’s Irish-nationalist heartstrings: the plate shows a scene of hospitality, music and feasting outdoors, amid frugal circumstances, all of which resonates with stereotypical notions of the Irish as a Catholic, poetical, musical, boisterous, extremely sociable, down-to-earth people who prefer to live in the countryside.

Looked at more closely, however, vulgar details spoil the quaint façade. Something is clearly awry. The feast is highly primitive, even violent. Intestines spill from the butchered cow. The dog is not friendly. The lord’s dagger (or skeen) is enormous and threatening. The two men warming their backsides by the fire are mooning the company; their lord stares, smiling, at the younger one. There is no space under the table for anybody’s legs. Even the harp is strung in the wrong direction. Is this image intended to be a joke? Is it a comedic, though not unexpected, depiction of these ‘savage[s]’?

Or, taken further, is the image meant to alarm us? Is it a fearful satire of dangerous, devouring rebels preparing an assault on English rule? As Derricke writes in the caption, the friars who counsel the lord are inciting acts of treason against ‘true men’ who abide by the law.³ The native Irish shown here are therefore as savage and depraved as the dog. From this perspective, they are rebels who deserve killing.

Are we to read the text and images in this sequence as ethnography or satire? Funny, alarmist or apocalyptic? Or simply mistaken? Derricke’s book is mired in contradiction both in itself and in our time. Transparent in its colonial aspirations and ideology, it is often confusing and ambiguous in execution. Produced by the premier printer in mid-Elizabethan London, John Day, its fine woodcuts have garnered surprisingly little attention from scholars examining Tudor book illustration.⁴ Although the accompanying poem is substantial, it is rarely read, much less analysed. Until very recently, scholarship on the Sidneys has had little to say about this text.⁵ Despite its value as a precursor to policy tracts such as Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (c.1596), it is seldom explored in relation to those works or to Spenser’s poetry.⁶ This collection, which is edited by three Spenserians and derives partly from an interdisciplinary conference on Derricke held in Cleveland, Ohio in 2016, throws Derricke’s Image into the sharp relief it deserves among literary scholars, historians, art historians and archaeologists.⁷

Derricke’s images have illustrated the pages of social, political and military histories of early modern Ireland for more than a century, but – as noted – the book itself is virtually unstudied. Ironically, for a work promoting itself as a source of discovery and revelation, it remains nearly invisible academically. Historian Hiram Morgan claims that the content of the woodcuts is consistently ‘ignored, sublimated, or misunderstood’,⁸ and reception of the work overall reflects the tenacity of unspoken assumptions about Irish backwardness and British superiority. How else to explain the uncritical use of the scatological third woodcut in Irish schools to teach children about the customs of their forebears? Or the way in which the library of the University of Edinburgh captions its digitized edition, which identifies Rory Og O’More, a Gaelic Irish leader connected to the Earl of Ormond, as ‘a wild kerne’?⁹ The library is ventriloquizing Derricke’s own message. These and a host of similar examples might be explained, or explained away, by the paucity of other visual materials from sixteenth-century Ireland, but we suggest that the reception of Derricke’s work and its relative omission from close scholarly scrutiny is itself part of a colonial legacy. The twin assumptions, that Derricke’s visual representations of the Irish are accurate and do not need to be interrogated, and the complementary assumption that his verbal invectives against the Irish are so polemical that they do not need to be interrogated, have persistently obscured what is most in need of explanation (and, in some cases, is most offensive). To ‘discover’ as well as to defamiliarize the Image of Irelande is at the heart of the project undertaken here.

Historical background

John Derricke, virtually unknown to us apart from this single foray into authorship, produced his work on Ireland during a period of intensified English efforts to bring the island securely under Crown control. Claiming kingship over Ireland in 1541, the Tudors spent the rest of the sixteenth century engaged in administrative reform and periodic military campaigns to extend royal authority well beyond the boundaries of the Pale around Dublin. At the time Derricke’s work was written, political and economic power in Ireland was wielded by three culturally distinct but overlapping groups: Gaelic Irish elites like the O’Neills of Tyrone in the north, who largely maintained their cultural and political autonomy; ‘Old English’ elites like the Earls of Ormond, Desmond and Kildare in the midlands and south, consisting of powerful families established in Ireland since the time of the twelfth-century Norman conquest; and the ‘New English’, including recently arrived governmental appointees from England, whose job it was to assert the Crown’s authority and secure cooperation – by force, if necessary – from the two entrenched communities. The Gaelic Irish and the Old English were predominantly Catholic, while the New English were largely Protestant. Derricke, writing on behalf of one such Crown appointee, the New English Protestant Lord Deputy Sir Henry Sidney (terms in office 1565–71, 1575–78), impugns the motives, integrity and civility of Sidney’s opponents while celebrating Sidney’s effective governance and suppression of armed rebellion.

Two historical Irish figures play significant roles in Derricke’s account, as they did in Henry Sidney’s own representations of his time in Ireland: Rory Og O’More (c.1544–78) and Turlough Luineach O’Neill (c.1530–95).¹⁰ Derricke distorts the image of each to advance his views of Sidney’s political and military achievements during his second term as Lord Deputy. O’More, from Co. Laois, was displaced from his inheritance by the experimental midlands plantation of Laois-Offaly established during the reign of Queen Mary (1553–58). O’More had made a name for himself as a local warlord as well as a swordsman in English service in the early 1570s, but he found himself increasingly at odds with Ireland’s English rulers, none of whom granted the compensation in land to which he felt entitled. Worse still, from Sidney’s point of view, O’More was a kinsman to one of the most powerful of Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers, Thomas Butler, 10th Earl of Ormond (d. 1614), and as such, attracted the particular enmity of Sidney, who was the target of Ormond’s attacks at court.¹¹ In 1577, a number of O’More’s extended family were killed by Sidney’s forces at Mullaghmast, where the O’Mores had been granted safe passage for a parley.¹² In the wake of this violation, O’More re-engaged in a year-long war with the Lord Deputy, a struggle O’More paid for with his life in June 1578.

If O’More’s story illustrates the explosive collision of competing claims to power in the midlands, Turlough Luineach O’Neill exemplifies the dangers to English rule posed by over-mighty powers in the north. Married to the formidable Agnes Campbell, daughter of the 3rd Earl of Argyle, O’Neill promoted himself as the leader best able to exert control in the north, in part, by subordinating the Scots whose interests there went back centuries. He also antagonized English authorities while steadily growing in power. Anticipating acknowledgement of his strategic importance to the Crown, O’Neill submitted to Sidney in 1575. Sidney, in turn, endorsed O’Neill’s request for the English titles Earl of Clanoconnell and Baron of Clogher for O’Neill and his sons.¹³ In the end, however, O’Neill’s inflated sense of his own abilities, coupled with the Privy Council’s ‘continuing suspicion of [O’Neill’s] long-term intention’ led to an indefinite postponement of the patents of nobilitation.¹⁴ The triumphant final woodcut in Derricke’s Image shows a remarkable detente between the two figures, with Sidney (representing the Crown) taking O’Neill’s submission and that of his retinue. The woodcut thus strategically obscures the distrust the Crown had of O’Neill¹⁵ and the reality that neither Sidney nor O’Neill were sufficiently powerful to achieve either their political or military ends.

Textual history

Derricke’s Image bears a publication date of 1581 on its title page and was entered in the Stationer’s Register on 8 July 1582.¹⁶ This sole edition has not survived in large numbers: of the eight copies known to be extant, only one has all twelve woodcuts (Edinburgh University Library) and another has eight (National Library of Scotland).¹⁷ No other copies have preserved the woodcuts. The textual state and layout of these copies differs, which can possibly be attributed to preservation attempts. For example, in the Edinburgh University Library (EUL) edition, the prints have a separate title page and are located at the end of the poem, while the National Library of Scotland (NLS) edition has the woodcuts interspersed throughout the text. In each edition the prints are mostly in the same order except for Plates VI and VII, which are switched in the NLS edition. Moreover, the prints in the NLS edition have been reinforced on thicker paper, suggesting that the text has been supported for preservation.

The extremely limited number of surviving copies raises questions about how the book was used and received during the years surrounding its initial publication. The woodcuts are in a separately named sequence, entitled ‘The Discoverie of Woodkarne’, and are notably oversized by comparison with the rest of the work. The fact that they must be unfolded to view may account for their poor rate of survival. The loss of the woodcuts may also be attributed to the common early modern practice of using book illustrations for domestic display.¹⁸ It is also possible that the woodcuts were published and circulated independently of the poem, though we have no evidence that either part was marketed as a free-standing work.¹⁹

The provenance history of the EUL edition is a precarious one. Between 1620 and 1636 the Scottish poet and historian William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649) donated over seven hundred books from his private library to his alma mater, Tounis College (later Edinburgh University).²⁰ The reason for this substantial donation – a gift to the ‘College of King James’ – is often attributed to a wish from King James I after the college was renamed in 1617.²¹ Drummond, a student of Scottish history and English poetry, was an avid book collector, with more than 2,000 works in his private library. His collection (about a third of which went to the college) contained a variety of subjects, including philosophy, rhetoric, classical history and literature, and was ‘balanced but satisfyingly complete’.²² While he ‘followed the fashions … he did not forget the academic authorities in each field of learning’.²³ Of particular interest are the literary texts in his gift; they included the works of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Drayton, Ben Jonson and Philip Sidney. Drummond was especially interested in Sidney, as is revealed in the abundance of handwritten marginal comments on both a manuscript of Astrophel and Stella and the published Arcadia, also part of the collection. This interest may explain why he owned a copy of Derricke’s Image, which is dedicated to Sir Philip.²⁴

Importantly, Drummond’s collection is the library of a working writer: many of his books are relatively cheap academic editions or second-hand copies for use rather than for display.²⁵ The Image is one of these second-hand texts (it was published before Drummond was born), as the front page reflects. The name ‘Johann Jaksonne’ is inked on the back of the front page of the EUL edition, suggesting that he was the first (and possibly only) owner of the text before Drummond.

At the time of Drummond’s donations, it was unusual for a research library to house vernacular literary texts, since vernacular literatures were not part of the university curriculum until the nineteenth century. Such works were more typically found in private collections. The sheer number of texts in the collection may account for the preservation of the EUL copy in its entirety, as it had presumably been tucked away and left undisturbed. In the early nineteenth century, the library started to restore and preserve its oldest collections. The Image (and much of the Drummond collection) was included in this restoration project. The marks on the cover of Drummond’s copy were commissioned by an Edinburgh antiquarian, David Laing, as was the green-and-gold binding (revealed by the gold marks on each side). Laing also likely commissioned the gold that adorns the edges of the pages, and the two blank pages in the front are of nineteenth-century paper.

Notably, three of the extant copies of Derricke’s work have Scottish connections, as do the first two modern editions. Drummond’s family apparently owned the copy now in the British Library.²⁶ A third copy, in the National Library of Scotland, belonged to the Advocate’s Library in Edinburgh (created in 1682), and was consulted by Sir Walter Scott for his 1809 edition of the work, the first modern (albeit incomplete) edition of the Image.²⁷ In 1883, the Edinburgh University librarian, John Small, used that university’s copy to produce the first complete edition of Derricke’s Image, making all twelve woodcuts freshly available for late Victorian scrutiny. (For more on the Scottish connections, reception and responses to Derricke, see Maley and Thanisch, Chapter 9, in this volume.) Suffice it to say that in these Scottish contexts, The Image of Irelande seems to have been received from the outset as a text with archipelagic implications.

A century after Small’s edition appeared, Blackstaff Press (Belfast) produced a limited edition of the Image with notes and commentary by historian D.B. Quinn.²⁸ This edition usefully incorporated the notes from both Sir Walter Scott and from John Small in its own descriptions of the woodcuts, thus ensuring the availability of Scott’s readings, in particular, for later audiences. The Small and Quinn editions are themselves rare books, so the Scholar Press facsimile of Small, from 1998, was a welcome resource as well; its quality of reproduction is poor and limits its utility, however. Most recently, Maryclaire Moroney’s forthcoming edition, to be published like the present collection as part of The Manchester Spenser series, will offer a high-quality reproduction of the EUL copy of the book while providing an updated introduction and notes addressing the work’s literary and historical contexts, as well as a history of its reception. Denna Iammarino and Andie Silva, both contributors to this volume, are also developing a digital edition of the Image.

Summaries of the work

The Image is tripartite in structure. It begins with three dedicatory epistles in prose, introducing a long mixed-genre poem in three parts (see Chapter 14 by Iammarino in this collection). The whole collection concludes with a sequence of woodcuts in three segments (Plates I–V, Plates VI–X and XI–XII).²⁹

The poem

In Part 1, the ‘Image of Ireland’, Derricke praises the English royal lineage beginning with the fabled King Arthur, then Henry II and continuing to Elizabeth I. Ireland is shown in its corrupted beauty, including attractive nymphs; both city and countryside are praised. Part 2, the ‘Discovery of Woodkarne’, praises Sidney’s armies and features a debate among the Gods. The Plates are explained, and the Lord Deputy is described fighting in the field against Irish rebels. In Part 3, specific Irish lords recount their submission, either voluntary or involuntary. Rory Og O’More complains in the first section of his lamentable state in defeat (also illustrated in Plate XI); in the second section, Turlough Luineach O’Neill gives thanks for the mercy shown to him by Sidney (shown in Plate XII); in the third section, O’More’s disembodied head on a stake laments his sins when alive (Irish heads on stakes can be seen in Plate VI).

The woodcuts

The woodcuts measure between 313 and 320 mm wide and 180 mm high. As indicated earlier, in the EUL copy they are all grouped together and given a separate title page, with prefatory information added to the left margin of the first woodcut. The illustrations have a gradual, loosely connected narrative trajectory that corresponds in various points with the action of Parts 2 and 3 of the poem. As they are reproduced here, in Plates I–V, a rebellious Irish Lord and his men raid a house and steal goods and livestock; feast; skirmish with Crown forces; and are captured and/or beheaded. In Plates VI–X, which are drawn in a more sophisticated style, Lord Deputy Sidney leaves Dublin with his men on a new military campaign; takes the field and receives a message; marches through the landscape with his soldiers; fights against the enemy (his troops, not Sidney, are seen in Plate IX); then returns with his men to a hero’s welcome in Dublin.

The last two woodcuts, Plates XI–XII, can be grouped together although they contrast starkly: Plate XI is drawn in the same crude style of Plates I–V and shows Rory Og O’More standing alone in a forest, surrounded by wolves and lamenting his status as a refugee from justice. Plate XII is drawn in the sophisticated style of Plates VI–X and shows the peaceful submission of Turlough Luineach O’Neill and his men to Lord Deputy Sidney and his men.

Textual and authorial strategies

An expansive paratextual apparatus both surrounds and is interwoven throughout the work, including the woodcuts. The amount of paratextual matter in the Image and its recurring explanation of textual intention make it exceptionally valuable for the study of early modern printing practices, book history and poetics. As expected in a literary work from this period, the poem includes a dedication (to Sir Philip Sidney). Less expected are two letters from the author to his two named audiences, the ‘Lordes of her Maiesties realme of Irelande’ and the writer’s ‘loving countrymen of Englande’ (called his ‘good and gentle Reader’). Derricke thus begins to illustrate his awareness of the complexity of both the work’s topic and its reception. The author addresses three quite disparate audiences: his readers in London, English administrators in Dublin, and the Old English (and perhaps to a more limited extent Gaelic Irish) gentry and elites in and beyond the Pale. The competing political interests, religious affiliations and social worlds embraced in these dedicatory epistles, along with the fluidity with which Irish and English identities were constructed and expressed in Ireland, accounts for some of the troubled and defensive marginalia so liberally strewn throughout Derricke’s work.

The various prologues to Parts 2 and 3 shift considerably in style and demonstrate similar complexity concerning the writer’s intentions, self-regard and anticipated reception. For example, in the prologue to Part 2, Derricke explains in verse how

though pictures and protractors made

by painters’ cunning skill,

With gestures of the Irish kern

set out by quivering quill

I, published have, whereby the world

may know their inclination.³⁰

Here, Derricke’s claim that in word and image he exposes the manners of the ‘Irish kern’ to the ‘world’ echoes his ideas in the early paratexts, wherein he explains that, despite the risk of offending ‘ye friends of vertue, and embracers of civilitie’, he is compelled to reveal ‘their [e.g. the woodkern’s] wilde shamrocke manners’. He will not ‘blemishe any mannes renowne [in Ireland]’ but instead expose those who threaten the Crown, that is, ‘these monsters, beeying sworne enemies of the Crowne’.³¹ This rationale is peppered throughout each of the early paratextual pieces and is reinforced in the later prologues in the poem.³² In these spaces, the author directly addresses the reader, further exposes the ‘monstrous’ threat which remains undetected by unnamed elites in Ireland, and aggrandizes himself in the first person as a faithful servitor of the Crown.³³

By contrast, in the three prologues to Part 3, all in prose, characters speak directly to the reader (as opposed to using Derricke’s voice as mediator of events). Yet, the prologues also offer play-by-play textual rationales from Derricke’s narrative voice, which introduces them.³⁴ Hence the Part 3 prologues echo the framing explanations of the early paratexts while overtly presenting the author’s intentions and explanations at the same time that Irish characters (O’More and O’Neill) step on stage to speak directly to the reader. For example, in the prologue to the first narrative by Rory Og O’More, Derricke explains,

After that I had finished the first and second part of the Image of Ireland, and had there somewhat disclosed the nature and quality of the wanton Irish wild Woodkern, I thought it expedient for the volume’s augmentation, as more ampler by examples to prove the things therein contained, to put in a next sequence the picture and portraiture of the most notablest rebels in Ireland.³⁵

Here, Derricke not only explains his rationale for writing O’More’s complaint but shows his reasoning for what comes next: to add examples to ‘prove’ his points. Our picture of the writer is of an excessively controlling, even fussy, compiler of material that constantly grows under his pseudo-omniscient command.

Also extraordinary are the excessive marginalia as well as its disparate content.³⁶ While the marginal notes in the first part of the poem are relatively restrained, as the piece unfolds the marginalia become more frequent and the entries more robust, at times interrupting the main lines of the poem.³⁷ There is precedent for lengthy and numerous glosses in sixteenth-century books. Yet, these texts were usually biblical or theological, not literary. For example, Old Testament passages in the 1569 Geneva Bible were centered on the page and framed by various glosses and explications surrounding all sides of the primary passage. There are, however, two notable literary examples with glossing from the time of Derricke’s publication: Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar (1579) and another Day publication, Foxe’s martyrology, the Actes and Monuments (1563, 1570, 1576). Yet, in each of these examples, the glosses explicate or translate the content of the passage in question. They are not overtly competing with the lines of the poem (or prose narrative) for space, as Derricke’s glosses often do. In fact, Spenser’s comments, by the mysterious ‘E.K.’, are printed as endnotes, possibly to fully keep a reader’s attention on the poem or to reduce clutter in the poem’s margins.³⁸ By comparison, Derricke’s marginalia hinder a reader’s ability to navigate the many parts of the text and certainly raise questions about authorial intention and book design.

How do these intricate and abundant paratexts affect the reader’s navigation of the woodcuts? That is, if the author is hyper-present in the primary text, what do the woodcuts illustrate or achieve in related terms? Does the authorial ego vanish at that point, beyond two woodcuts signed ‘I.D.’ (and four signed ‘F.D.’)? More importantly, how are the images meant to illuminate the poem, and vice versa? Two examples from Part 2 of the poem raise this question. Both instruct the reader to consult the woodcuts.³⁹ The first tells the reader to ‘Behold the selfsame thing / set forth by carver’s art. / With pictures framed prettily / expounding every part’, while the second asks the reader to ‘Again behold the thing / in figures well requited. / Expounded briefly every point/ that was even now recited.’⁴⁰ In these moves, Derricke not only directly references the woodcuts, but also blurs the boundary between woodcut and poem: is the poem doing the ‘expounding’ here, or the woodcuts? Both are, at the same time.

As the first quotation illustrates, the woodcuts visually (‘prettily’) explain the lines of the poem. Yet, as a reader quickly realizes, there are discrepancies,⁴¹ and the woodcuts cannot directly expound the meaning of the poem. Moreover, they provide content not found at that point in the poem, such as military imagery, for example. They also have their own complicated relationship to their captions.⁴² While the lines of the poem explain the threat the woodkern pose to civil order and Crown authority, and even produce direct dialogue from the main Irish figures (Rory Og O’More and Turlough O’Neill), they do not detail the same combative images that the woodcuts present. Derricke mostly avoids the epic task of narrating warfare (on military matters, see Chapters 3 and 13 by Moroney and Woodcock in this volume). The woodcuts do animate many of Derricke’s verbal claims about the manners and appearance of the Irish, and these engage with the contents of the poem; but they also present original images and an independent, more sequential narrative than that in the poem. The woodcuts demonstrate events from Sidney’s campaign(s), as opposed to the physical backdrop, stakes and contexts of his deputyship, as presented in the poem. Such interaction between the woodcuts and the poem suggests that each was meant to enhance the other, though they were not necessarily meant to be read simultaneously alongside each other.⁴³

New and old interpretations

The details of clothing, weaponry and military tactics in the woodcuts are arguably well studied by scholars, while the poem has been more or less neglected. Historian D.B. Quinn’s superb edition of Derricke does a fine job explicating historical details in the woodcuts and includes prior commentary on the same.⁴⁴ Quinn’s analysis largely ignores the poem when not explicating elements of the plates, however; he claims that the ‘real meat of the book’ is in the ‘impressive detail, both satirical and straight, contained in the plates’.⁴⁵ This approach is also taken in his previous study of Derricke,⁴⁶ as well as by historian Cyril Falls who reproduces one of the woodcuts (Plate IX) on the cover of his monograph, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars. Falls also makes a detailed listing of military features in four of the Plates (VII–X) of Sidney on campaign. In uncanny fashion, Falls re-employs Derricke’s prints in his own narrative of the wars and dedicates his book to the Duke of Alba, descendant of the enemy of the Sidneys.⁴⁷ Musicologist Anne Buckley follows Quinn’s and Falls’s empirical lead and closely studies the musical instruments in the woodcuts.⁴⁸ Falls’s, Buckley’s and Quinn’s empiricist approaches towards the woodcuts are highly factual and informative but do not address the complexities of the book’s timing, audiences and ideological program.

In more general historical studies of early modern Ireland, the Image only surfaces occasionally and anecdotally to help explain this or that cultural curiosity. Studies by historians and literary critics that analyse the work more fully tend to ignore the poem in favor of examining the woodcuts, which are more enjoyable (and certainly easier) to comprehend on the surface. The polemical content of Derricke’s poem seems in some way to have insulated it from careful critique relative to contemporary popular literary genres (a problem remedied in part by Lucas, Chaghafi and Woodcock in Chapters 10, 11 and 13). Historian Vincent Carey’s essay published in Irish Historical Studies is exceptional for its thoroughgoing historical and textual analysis of both Derricke’s woodcuts and poem. Carey rightfully situates the Image in the context of Sidney’s campaigns in the Irish midlands in the mid–late 1570s, as Exhibit A in Sidneian propaganda (correlating with Sidney’s contemporary but unpublished Memoir of his service in Ireland) and the ongoing denigration and destruction of Irish culture by the New English. In a second important essay Carey stresses the brutal nature of the wars and atrocities celebrated in Derricke’s work. To Carey, Derricke sanctions an unusual policy of ‘retributive justice’ enforced by the Lord Deputy operating under Crown authority.⁴⁹

Carey in his revisionist approach rightly stresses the demonization of the ‘Gaelic Irish’ in Derricke’s pro-Sidney propaganda; Carey also writes, accurately, that ‘Derricke’s Image provides us with sufficient evidence to suggest that indiscriminate slaughter was an accepted tool in the effort to subdue Gaelic Ireland.’⁵⁰ Nonetheless, his focus on the massacres and anti-Gaelic vitriol in the work arguably sidesteps the way Lord Deputy Sidney takes the reins in civic life as well, including protecting (and cowing) the Dublin Pale (see McGrath, Chapter 5, in this collection) and making peace with native Irishman Turlough O’Neill, which is of course the triumphant note on which the woodcuts of the Image – and hence the entire book – conclude (the main text concludes with Rory Og O’More’s head lamenting his fate).

Carey is not alone in his focus on the Gaelic Irish. Quinn in The Elizabethans and the Irish concentrates almost exclusively on how they are portrayed, in a chapter appropriately titled ‘The Irish Brought to Life’.⁵¹ Andrew Carpenter, in his groundbreaking anthology Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland, mainly excerpts and glosses ‘venomous’ passages from the ‘rather lumbering’ poem and captions to the images. These describe the attractive landscape and MacSweeney’s feast in the third woodcut, a detail of which is placed on the book jacket.⁵² Joep Leerssen in his influential Field Day survey of historic attitudes towards the Irish also selectively quotes anti-native and anti-Catholic vitriol from Derricke, while writing that the Image portrays the ‘utter destruction’ of ‘Irish soldiers (kerns) … at the hands of English authorities’.⁵³

This raises the question: who are the ‘Irish’ in Derricke, and did Derricke, who published his book in London, envision an ‘Irish’ and/or ‘English’ audience? Not all the Irish soldiers in the book are ‘kern’, as Leerssen suggests; some are in Sidney’s retinue, dressed in English uniform, and others are lined up and living behind the supplicating O’Neill in the twelfth woodcut. As Quinn notes, citing Derricke’s own apology for his third woodcut, the first half of the Image focuses mainly on raiding and the feasting ‘MacSwines’ who come from the ‘North’: ‘Derricke’s admission must reinforce the point, made elsewhere, that the applicability of many of the most primitive cultural traits is more often to Ulster than to the rest of Gaelic Ireland.’⁵⁴ Moreover, Derricke’s anti-Ulster bias is tempered by the fact that ‘the greate ONeale of Irelande’ (as he is called on the title page) is also from that region, and O’Neill has the good sense to capitulate at ‘the Newrie’ (i.e., Newry, in Ulster), according to the introduction to the second part of the third section of the poem.⁵⁵ O’Neill’s retinue appear dignified and still formidable in the twelfth woodcut, which is understandable: O’Neill was actively seeking confirmation of titles and properties and hoping to further consolidate his power under Sidney’s successors as lord deputy when Derricke published his work. Are Derricke and Sidney helping his cause?

Certainly Derricke’s work is highly localized, even scattered: he plays Ulster politics while ringing alarm bells along the Pale; simultaneously, his work glances at ongoing skirmishes in the midlands, involving Rory Og O’More, and also (obliquely) at the Desmond rebellion (1579–83) in Munster, which was still raging when the poem was published (see Moroney Chapter 3, in this collection). Derricke’s sanction of martial law and brutal force, as employed by Sidney and so many others against so many Irish septs, is undisputed; simultaneously, the political and hence the cultural message told by Derricke is complicated by local particulars and by the Image itself.

Literary critics, on their side of the academic deck, revel in the ideological and cultural complexity found in Derricke’s woodcuts and try to complicate the assumed binary of ‘civilized’ English versus ‘barbaric’ Irish. They do so in large part by placing Derricke in his immediate context of fellow readers and writers, both ‘Irish’ and other. John Barry, a classicist, makes a rare study of Derricke’s interaction with his literary contemporaries and speculates how the Image influenced the work of Old English Palesman Richard Stanihurst, and vice versa; Barry notes how both authors mercilessly chastise native Irish customs while Stanihurst also defends, in Latin, his Catholic brethren from Derricke’s aspersions.⁵⁶ Richard McCabe muddies the interpretive waters by finding correspondences between Derricke’s Image and Spenser’s ‘colonial’ project in The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596, 1609) that are not clear-cut examples of anti-Irish propaganda.⁵⁷ According to McCabe, who places a detail from the sixth woodcut (severed heads on Dublin Castle) on the dust jacket of his book, Derricke’s third woodcut, in particular, creates a parodic or mimicking relation between native Irish bardic and English poetic culture; the image of the ‘bard’ entertaining his lord in Derricke is an apt if crooked mirror for Spenser’s poetry and career ambitions at court while still in Ireland.⁵⁸ Patricia Palmer dances between polar opposites by studying the severed heads in Derricke’s work within both Irish and English contexts: the appearance of so many heads is part Irish literary trope, part ghoulish colonial spectacle responding and corresponding to the savagery of English-led military campaigns, reflexive Irish ‘barbarity’ and traditional warfare. Palmer notes the collapse of English civility into supposed Irish ‘savagery’ as the English actively engage in the atrocities attributed to the Irish.⁵⁹ Cultural confusion abounds. To take an oft-cited example, most prominent among the many native Irish heads gaping atop Dublin Castle is Rory Og O’More’s, which (in the conclusion to Derricke’s poem) speaks ‘in plaine Irish’, which is actually plain English, in order to confess his rebel crimes.⁶⁰ In a sense, Rory Og, an Irishman, is declaring his own past deeds as a model to his fellow countrymen and not to Londoners. But who is (or was) this demonstrated ‘monstrous Deuill’ O’More and where should his language and his loyalties lie? His father Ruarí held a native Irish O’More (Ó Mórdha) lordship and his stepmother, Margaret, was a Butler, granddaughter of the 8th Earl of Ormond and member of one of the most distinguished Anglo-Norman lineages in the country.⁶¹ As a traitor, O’More’s corporeal division mirrors his mixed ethnic and political identities.

Other critics, notably Willy Maley and Christopher Highley, bring our attention back from native Irish and English culture to the power games of Crown and chief governor. These critics play cards from the New Historicist deck and complicate the discovery of a pro-English, anti-Irish triumphalist narrative by highlighting tensions and anxieties in Derricke regarding the lines of authority invested in the lord deputy by the English government. In their reading, the power dynamics of the work are not clear-cut; instead, Lord Deputy Sidney is a rival figure to the Queen through his own outsized magnificence, emphasized by Derricke.⁶²

Derricke’s religious messaging has also been explored at length. Like Carey, literary critics Maryclaire Moroney and Brandie Siegfried stress the work’s apocalyptic rhetoric as part and parcel of New English, ‘Foxeian’ ideology (see also Chapter 12 by Herron in this collection).⁶³ Indeed, the fierce dichotomies of religious accusation reinforce sectarian divisions in the text, which in turn reinforce cultural stereotypes to the detriment of the Irish. No matter how confused and culturally bifurcated Rory Og may appear, he is on display as a rebel and native Irish woodkern and so of the devil’s party.

As Thomas Cartelli writes elsewhere, Derricke makes ‘all parties to the conflict instantly recognisable: they are either Gaelicised or English, savage or civil, destined whether to languish or thrive’. In this regard Derricke’s Image provides the triumphant closure that Sir Henry Sidney’s unpublished Memoir cannot achieve.⁶⁴ It is true that the victims of the raid in Derricke’s second woodcut are indistinguishable in dress from their kernish attackers, but this visual confusion is a prelude to a thoroughly anglicized re-establishment of civic order. As denizens of the ‘Pale’ and (apparently) innocent, the victims will languish like their livestock, open to theft and plunder (see Chapter 4 by Soderberg in this collection), until Sidney takes command of the situation. Whatever defenses they have before the arrival of Sidney – including, perhaps, the bare ditch of the Pale itself, slashing across the lower half of the woodcut – these are no more helpful than the canvas of a covered wagon in the Old West. As Moroney has written, Derricke sends a strategic message to London that maliciously affirms the barbarity of the native Irish, glosses over the troublesome loyalties of the Catholic Old English community of the Pale, and advertises Sidney’s firm control of gleaming Dublin and surrounding countryside in the wake of border raids, rebellion and the cess controversy that he helped to create.⁶⁵ To send a clear message of obfuscation on Sidney’s behalf, Derricke cements ethnic divisions for the sake of Sidney’s rule. ‘In place of this complex political reality, Derricke offers reassuringly clear distinctions through readily deployable iconography, thus managing with his pen forces otherwise quite beyond Crown control.’⁶⁶

As noted at the beginning of this Introduction, Derricke’s patronizing, at times belligerent, attitude towards native Irish culture is not well understood outside academic circles. However, Derricke’s work (especially his poetry) is not well known inside academic circles, either, especially those outside Irish studies. Yet, his feasting image, at least, is ubiquitous and the work’s darker, stranger and peculiarly native elements easily capture the imagination. As James Knapp argues, the Image marks a move ‘from a program of reform to one of repression’, and does so, ‘by a concomitant shift in representational strategy from a visual and explanatory mode to one grounded in the verbal concept’.⁶⁷ In our visual media- and atrocity-saturated age, this harsh work with Sidney as savior deserves renewed attention.

Poetic reception: Spenser and Derricke

Derricke’s art strikes a surprisingly sympathetic chord among poets. As we have seen, his more vitriolic and reductive side resonates with New English anti-Irish, ‘colonial’ discourse of the kind generated by fellow polemicists like Spenser. It would be hard to argue that Derricke had a more benign or complex creative effect on the ‘Prince of Poets’. Nonetheless, Derricke’s parliament of the gods in an Irish landscape, including Jove himself, could well have influenced the trial between Mutabilitie and Jove on Arlo Hill (in Munster, not far from Spenser’s castle at Kilcolman) in Book VII of The Faerie Queene (published 1609), clearly among Spenser’s best work. Derricke tries to write a legal-philosophical epic-allegorical discourse that explains the ongoing presence of dangerous woodkern in the country, while justifying their harsh treatment by government authorities and advertising the country’s fertility. Spenser in a far more elegant and comprehensible poem explains how conquering and flawed Jove is allowed to rule over bountiful Arlo Hill, also blessed by the gods but plagued by wolves and thieves.⁶⁸

Might Derricke also have read Spenser? Spenser’s first major work, The Shepheardes Calender, was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney and published anonymously in London in 1579, two years before the Image came out. Derricke’s dedicatory epistle to Philip Sidney is dated ‘1578’, but he could have written and/or edited the rest of his work afterwards. Conversely, Spenser is thought to have visited Ireland in 1577, and he may have had access to Derricke’s MS there or in London before he published The Shepheardes Calender.

One episode in The Shepheardes Calender stands out as a possible influence on Derricke if only because it, too, focuses on kern and corrupt churchmen. In the month of ‘Julye’, the shepherd Thomalin criticizes prelates (‘shepheards’) who make their way to Rome and live the high life while neglecting their ‘fasting flocks’ at home. They do so in part by hiring ‘fatte kernes and leany knaves’ to guard their flocks. The kern and knaves fail at their task, letting the flock ‘famish’ as a result.⁶⁹

Critics have noticed Spenser’s curious use of the term ‘kerns’, which he anglicizes with an ‘s’ in the plural.⁷⁰ Spenser may or may not have understood it properly. ‘E.K.’, the mysterious commentator on the poem who might have been Gabriel Harvey or Spenser himself, glosses the word ‘Kern’ as ‘a Churle or farmer’, which is obviously a mistake. But why employ ‘kern’ in the first place? Use of the term ‘kern’ could be random, but it potentially signals an Irish context or meaning behind the allegory.

The use of ‘kern’ next to ‘knaves’ in The Shepheardes Calendar reminds the reader of Derricke’s criticism of the friars in the caption to the third woodcut:

Now when into their fenced holds, the knaves are entered in,

To smite and knock the cattle downe, the hangmen do begin …

fryer smelfeast sneaking in, doth preace amongst the best.

Who play’th in Romish toyes the Ape, by counterfeiting Paul;

For which they do award him then, the highest room of all.

In the woodcut, the friar is shown feasting with the lord MacSweeney, and by virtue of his ‘Romish’ teaching he occupies the ‘highest room’ or social standing (‘Rome’ is echoed in ‘highest room’). This includes, presumably, sitting at the ersatz table with the lord. This mirrors Thomalin’s complaint. He criticizes prelates who live high on the hog because of their travel to Rome, which implies pernicious Catholic influence; this influence and the prelates’ absence leads them to use ‘kerns and leany knaves’ to their advantage. The kerns devour the flocks and otherwise abuse them, as do Derricke’s kerns and friars. Moreover, in another echo of Spenser’s passage, Derricke’s caption calls the feasting kern ‘knaves’. They are called that elsewhere in the Image, including the part of the main poem that refers directly to the third woodcut.⁷¹

These lines in Derricke’s caption to the third woodcut have been suggested as a source, in turn, for the criticism of abusive Irish prelates who peregrinate to Rome in Richard Stanihurst’s Latin text, De Rebus in Hibernia (1584).⁷² Just as Derricke’s passage could have influenced Stanihurst, so Spenser’s satire of prelates and their kerns may have motivated Derricke to use the terms he does.

Finally, given this context and Spenser’s situation in Ireland from as early as 1577, might E.K.’s gloss therefore point at an Irish person as the target of Thomalin’s satire in The Shepheardes Calender?⁷³ Spenser is highly particular in the same eclogue when he focuses on the English prelate Edmund Grindal, who is transparently figured as the character ‘Algrind’. Might Spenser also be attacking abuses among absentee prelates in Ireland who employ ‘kerns’ and ‘knaves’ to keep their flocks, and who may be corrupt in other regards? It is hard to know. Derricke’s satire of clerical venality in kernish circumstances could add corroboration to any Ireland-focused reading of this episode, however.

Poetic reception: Montague and Heaney

More recently, despite Derricke’s best and worst intentions, two modern Irish poets have claimed the Image as their own. John Montague and Seamus Heaney, Ulstermen writing during the politically charged 1970s, turn the proverbial swine’s ear into a purse and dignify what Derricke denigrates. The pair find in Derricke a useful voice that runs counter to modern British (and Sidneian) propaganda: a voice of the native who speaks back against the colonial oppressor – Sweeney revivified, brought down from the branches and made to speak.⁷⁴

Daringly, each of these authors draws sympathetic comparison between himself and the native woodkern. Like Carpenter after him, Montague puts a detail of the harpist and bard from Derricke’s third woodcut on the cover of his work, the collection The Rough Field (1972; the image also appears on the cover of James Carney’s academic study, The Irish Bardic Poet [1967]).⁷⁵ Like Falls, he intersperses images from the woodcuts throughout his volume. The purpose is to ‘emphasize the dual purpose of The Rough Field – not only to protest against British colonialism past and present, and thus draw attention to the root causes of unrest in Northern Ireland, but to elegize the Gaelic culture in Ulster that the English had nearly erased’.⁷⁶

Heaney, in his poem ‘Exposure’ (in North, 1975), enacts a similar strategy of problematic sympathies. He sees himself as an ‘inner émigré’, alone in a forest

… grown long-haired

And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

Escaped from the massacre,

Taking protective colouring

From bole and bark, feeling

Every wind that blows.

Being a northerner in self-imposed artistic and political exile in County Wicklow (i.e., in the Republic of Ireland) and writing in English, not Irish, Heaney imagines himself as a ‘wood-kerne’ like Rory Og O’More wrapped in his mantle in Derricke’s eleventh woodcut, alone and traumatized yet surrounded by trees that camouflage and protect him. The ‘wood-kerne’ for Heaney becomes a kernel of endangered Irish humanity in a nurturing rough wood, and the image has deep English roots as well: like Duke Senior bitten by the ‘churlish chiding of the winter’s wind, / Which … blows upon my body’ in As You Like It (Act 2.1), Heaney’s cold situation reminds him of who he is. Derricke, like the rain in the alders in Heaney’s poem, speaks to the culturally conflicted modern poet in ways that provoke his creativity and that draw out his ‘long-haired’ sympathies with the native Irish, the English literary tradition, and the natural world.

Heaney and Montague therefore return us to the opening thread of this Introduction: perhaps we should join the Sweeney lord, lady and friars at their feast after all, to eat what we can, while we can. ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity’, to quote Duke Senior in the same speech. Heaney’s adaptation of this principle is an apt touchstone for this collection. While it may not contain ‘every wind that blows’ from every critical and historical perspective, we the editors hope that it will find a suitable home with every ‘thoughtful’ reader. The collection aims to reinterpret Derricke’s poem and woodcuts more fully in the light of recent scholarship on early modern Ireland, England and Scotland, while also filling in gaps concerning the work’s sources, textual apparatus and publishing history.

Summary of chapters

Derricke outdoes the leprechauns for his disappearing act. Elizabeth Evenden’s recent monograph on Derricke’s publisher, John Day, does not mention Derricke.⁷⁷ Carpenter states that, ‘Nothing is known of John Derricke except that he was an Englishman and a follower of Sir Henry Sidney.’⁷⁸ But was Derricke even English? As Stuart Kinsella (Chapter 7) notes in this collection, various documents could place the author-artist(s) or some other Derricke in the retinue of Sidney and/or Leicester in Ireland, England and/or the Netherlands during military campaigns there. What then would Derricke’s education have been? What was he doing in London, the Netherlands or Ireland? Did his sphere of patronage and influence extend far beyond the Sidneys? Kinsella, a careful student of Sidney’s Irish monuments, places Derricke in a Dutch as well as English and Irish biographical and art historical context. Kinsella is also the first art historian to study Derricke’s illustrations at length, noting connections with both Dutch artists and other productions from John Day’s workshop.

Thomas Herron (Chapter 12) adds to the question of sources analysing the influence of Albrecht Dürer’s work on Derricke’s woodcuts. Herron sees Derricke both parodying and copying Dürer’s religious art for the purpose of ‘amplifying’ his apocalyptic evangelical message, which finds its inspiration also in the polemical structural divisions of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Thomas Cartelli (Chapter 16) reminds us that the woodcuts have slippery and ambiguous meanings, and use ‘strategic acts of misrepresentation’ to stage exaggerated claims about English civility and Irish barbarity, an appropriately admonitory message given the history of uncritical illustrative uses for these woodcuts.

Other parts of this collection concentrate on Derricke’s complicated