ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Michael Neill's inquiry to a slightly earlier period in England's construction of a disordered Ireland when the Queen for a third time delegated a mission of pacification to Sir Henry Sidney, and Sidney, in turn, delegated that mission's representation to an artist-comrade-in-arms, John Derricke. Although it is always Sidney's strategy to contrast the instability of the Irish frontier with a fixed vision of English harmony and civility, the attempted domestication of a chronically intractable Ireland troubles the very boundary between the foreign and domestic, turning what is constitutionally beyond the pale into a more permanent version of what too often manifests itself inside it. John Derricke's The Image of Irelande., for example, is usually treated complacently as a storehouse of anti-Irish prejudices and stereotypes. Derricke's Image, particularly his Discovery, schematizes and illustrates Sidney's logic in graphically generalizable form.
