Download or read book Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland written by Christopher Highley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher Highley's book explores the most serious crisis the Elizabethan regime faced: its attempts to subdue and colonize the native Irish. Through a range of literary representations from Shakespeare and Spenser, and contemporaries such as John Hooker, John Derricke, George Peele and Thomas Churchyard he shows how these writers produced a complex discourse about Ireland that cannot be reduced to a simple ethnic opposition. Highley argues that the confrontation between an English imperial presence and a Gaelic "other" was a profound factor in the definition of an English poetic self.