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Representing Ireland: literature and the origins of conflict, 1534–1660. Edited by Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley. Pp xxiv, 235, illus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1993. £35.

THE passage into common parlance of the term 'beyond the Pale' as a general metaphor for all that is morally or socially unacceptable bears strong testimony to the force of polemical 'representation'. Yet the sense of a boundary implies not merely a spatial division but also a point of contact, an area of ambiguity which is neither beyond nor within but between. In cultural terms, it suggests all that is hybrid and ambivalent, a sense of otherness all the more disturbing for being uncannily familiar. Not suprisingly, therefore, the issue of 'representation' lies at the heart of the volume under review, but the results are uneven and occasionally indicate a surprising lack of self-reflective awareness on the part of those who undertake to represent the representers. By way of preface, it is well to remember that in the period from 1534 to 1660 ambivalent representations of Ireland were not confined to polemic pamphlets, official chronicles or ministerial memoranda, but pervaded the popular image of an island regarded as the frontier of civilisation. For example, in A warning for fair women (1599), a 'domestic tragedy' based on actual events and appealing to the tastes of the citizen classes, the Dublin-born Captain George Browne entertains his English acquaintances with 'a good discourse of Ireland', maintaining that the inhabitants are 'As civil in the English Pale as here, /And laws obeyed and order duly kept; /And all the rest may one day be reduced'. This occurs in the opening scene, and the matter appears irrelevant until a disturbing cultural subtext begins to reveal itself. Breaking all law and order, Browne turns to adultery and murder and is duly convicted and executed. On his way to the gallows he meets his brother, convicted for a similar offence and destined for the same punishment. The denizens of the Pale, it would seem, are less 'civil' that they appear, and the discrepancy is dangerous. Browne's victim is the very man to whom he supplies his assurance of civility. The matter is highly complex, since, as the introduction to Representing Ireland aptly indicates, Trishness' could be used to supply 'negative images of Englishness' (p. 7). Browne's crimes are quite typical of the general run of domestic tragedy, yet the anonymous dramatist settles upon his antecedents as if they supplied some form of explanation; in fact the historical Browne appears to have had no association with Ireland. It is as though a lapse from virtue might render anyone 'Irish'—an implication which blurs, if not negates, the ethnic distinction laboured in the text. Two years later the earl of Essex and his supporter, Tom Lee, both much concerned with the 'reduction' of 'all the rest' of the Irish to civility, were themselves executed for treason. Whatever its intended purpose, Gheeraedts the Younger's famous portrait of Lee as a bare-legged Irish knight ironically evokes the crux of colonialism, the alarming tendency of polar opposites to converge. In this respect, Hiram Morgan's illuminating account of Lee's Irish career supplies a salutary insight into the internecine ethos of colonial adventurism (pp 132-65), but renders incongruous the volume's repeated ascription of the soubriquet 'arch-traitor' to Hugh O'Neill, an Irishman forced into English dress but loyal to other codes (pp 133,158).