ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses empire, through figures such as Popes Adrian IV and Alexander VI, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Michel de Montaigne, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare and John Donne, with reference to England, Ireland and the New World in the Renaissance and in subsequent times. Early modern Spain, England and France inherited and used the trope of the translation and the westward movement of empire. Among the texts examined are Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland and The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Donne’s Elegy 19 and sermons, such as the one Donne preached a sermon to the Virginia Company on 13 November 1622.
