"Barely English"? Richard Stanihurst, Edmund Spenser, and the Remaking of the "Aeneid" in Early Modern Ireland

The phrase “barely English” was a criticism levelled by C. S. Lewis at Richard Stanihurst’s 1582 translation of the first four books of the Aeneid. Yet the text itself, when examined alongside other works by Stanihurst, also invites us to consider what it means to criticise a text for a lack of “English-ness”. The paratextual poetry and dedications situate his Aeneid translation very clearly within the Old English community in Ireland. My thesis is a comparison of this volume with Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, which similarly is an interpretation of Virgil’s Aeneid whose paratexts reflect an investment in the English Protestant ruling classes. My work will analyse these two epic poems, alongside the polemical works of both men, using an interdisciplinary methodology which considers both historical and literary perspectives. Through this comparison, I reveal the way in which both men used the Virgilian epic narrative of imperial conquest to explore their own relationship to the colonisation of Ireland and the English forces who enacted this process. I then use this as the basis for further examination of the poetics of these two texts, and demonstrate that in both works form and meaning and historical context are inseparable elements that build upon each other. Furthermore, I demonstrate that both texts, in their formal and semantic elements, are highly invested in the concept of community: they reflect the ways in which their authors identified as belonging to a variety of social and political communities, whether that be Stanihurst’s Old English, the poets who come together to write commendatory verses for The Faerie Queene, or the nation that each epic seeks to immortalise and define.