![]() Looking back on 1599, I can now say that the best writing in it, and what animated the entire narrative, was this long and undervalued, if not suppressed, Irish story. I think it fair to claim that in all this I was representative of most Shakespeare scholars, raised in the era of New Criticism, which tried to create a firewall between literary works and their historical contexts. I didn’t even know that Edmund Spenser, so admired for his Elizabethan epic The Faerie Queene, had also written a tract arguing for the brutal suppression of the Irish, if necessary by starvation. I had no idea that England had been caught up in a bitter nine-year war to crush an Irish revolt, knew nothing of the difference between the “New” and “Old” English then living in Ireland, and didn’t know that Queen Elizabeth’s popular courtier the earl of Essex had marched out of London leading an army 16,000 strong to resolve England’s Irish problem once and for all. ![]() In the late 1980s, when I began research on what turned into my book 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, I had never heard of the Irish leader Hugh O’Neill. ![]()
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