Spenser's Irish Experience
is the first sustained critical work to argue that Edmund Spenser's perception and fragmented representation of Ireland shadows the whole narrative of his major work,
The Faerie Queene
. The poem has often been read in specifically English contexts but, as Hadfield argues, demands to be read in terms of England's expanding colonial hegemony within the British Isles and the ensuing fear that such national ambition would actually lead to the destruction of England's post-Reformation legacy. Where
A View of the Present State of Ireland
attempts to provide a violent political solution to England's Irish problem,
exposes the apocalyptic fear that there may be no solution at all. The book contains an analysis of Spenser's life on the Munster plantation, readings of the political rhetoric and antiquarian discourse of
, and three chapters which argue the case that the apparently Anglocentric allegory of
reveals a land gradually—but clearly—transformed into its Irish "Other."