Spenser’s Irish Hubbub

Abstract

This article argues that texts by Edmund Spenser imagine an idealized English voice in opposition both to Irish noise and, surprisingly, to Spenser’s own poetry. I begin with a close reading of a scene from The Faerie Queene in which a woman is about to be sacrificed by a group of noisy cannibals, the portrayal of whom recalls many contemporary English accounts of alleged Irish barbarity. I continue by examining the Irish war-cry (known as the “Hubbub”) as Spenser discusses it in A Vewe of the Present State of Irelande and as it appears in the epic. I conclude by exploring some of the anxieties that attend the echoing voices in “Epithalamion.”

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