ABSTRACT
‘Mapping Mutability’ first appeared in an interdisciplinary collection of essays dealing with early modern Anglo-Irish relations, which sought to juxtapose and combine the insights of historians and literary critics. Julia Lupton’s essay considers a variety of interrelated significant problems; she traces the different meanings of the word ‘plot’ – a map or survey and a plan or project – in the Irish State Papers in order to reconstruct an interpretative framework for Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland; she attempts to connect Spenser’s disagreement with the Irish magnate Lord Roche concerning the title to the Kilcolman estate with Mutability’s ‘trial to … Titles and best Rights’ in The Faerie Queene, Book VII; she suggests that Ovid’s poetry – both his metamorphic verse and his writings from exile – might provide a way of conceptualising Spenser’s Irish career in literary as well as political terms. Acteon, the figure whom Ovid cites in the Tristia as the model of his own error, implicates the extreme localisation of the exiled autobiographical voice in the scattered world of mythopoesis, and thus offers a model for Spenser’s Irish reflections in the Cantos of Mutability.
