English Literature and the Ulster Crises of the Seventeenth Century

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Recent research by Highley (2008), Kerrigan (2008), Maley (2002), and Schwyzer (2004) has convincingly argued that early modern English literature was often composed in an 'archipelagic' context: that is, with a newly developing sense of the interconnectedness of the various islands and regions of 'Britain.' Nevertheless, little critical attention has been paid to the most fiercely contested region of the archipelago, the north of Ireland. A series of related crises unfold in Ulster throughout the course of the seventeenth century, including the almost total disappearance of aristocratic Gaelic culture, the Anglo-Scottish Plantation, the Rising of 1641, and the Siege of Derry. As an archipelagic context makes clear, these are not insular phenomena but are instead related to the ongoing religious and political upheavals across the island grouping. But the footprint left on English literature by the Ulster crises of the seventeenth century has not to date been investigated in a rigorous manner. This project aims to explore both the English-language texts written or circulated in seventeenth-century Ulster, and those which comment on the situation from other regions of the archipelago. In doing so, it aims both to elucidate in more detail the relationship between literary production and the various identities forged along political, religious and ethnic lines in Ulster, and to examine the political significance of literary engagements with the Ulster crises in other parts of the archipelago. The monograph will consist of seven chapters. Chapter One, 'Introduction: Archipelagic Regions / Localising Ulster,' will serve as a theoretical and methodological introduction to the monograph. Chapter Two, 'Staging the O'Neill: The Nine Years War and the Flight of the Earls,' will examine the large body of texts concerning the controversial figure of Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone. Plays and poems beyond Shakespeare's Henry V engage with O'Neill and the Nine Years War; moreover, most critics have failed to engage in detail with O'Neill's Jacobean exploits, including his flight from Ireland, and attempts to raise continental military support. Chapter Three, 'Planting Empir(e)icism: Writing the Ulster Plantation,' will pay attention to the texts composed around 1609-10 - including the work of Francis Bacon, Thomas Blenerhasset, John Speed, and the fashion for British Romance on the London stage - to argue that the Plantation of Ulster left a greater mark on metropolitan English literary culture than has hitherto been realised. Chapter Four, 'Episcopal Identities: Archipelagic Armagh,' will examine in detail seventeenth-century disputes about the cultural and ecclesiastical centrality of the city of Armagh to the province of Ulster and the island of Ireland. Chapter Five, 'Bringing Milton to a Head: The Aftermath of 1641,' will build on the growing recognition among Milton scholars that the representation of the rebellion of Lucifer in Paradise Lost is in part conditioned by Milton's reaction to the 1641 rising in Ulster. Chapter Six, 'Sieging the Initiative: London-Derry and the Anglo-Irish,' will examine literary representations of, and reactions to, the Siege of Derry. Critics have too frequently made the mistake of treating the Siege of Derry as a primal scene, as the beginning of a set of political relationships in the archipelago. This chapter aims to shift the critical emphasis by relocating the literary response to the Siege in the context of the seventeenth-century Ulster genre of 'crisis narrative'. Chapter Seven, 'Epilogue: Redefining the Ulster Canon,' will argue that critics of Ulster literature have, perhaps understandably, been distracted by the political crises of the twentieth century, particularly Partition and 'the troubles': as such, the canon of Ulster literature has been unnecessarily foreshortened. This chapter willargue that the notion of "Ulster literature" has a longer, though less traumatic, history.