McCabe, Professor Richard

Job Title: Professor of English Language and Literature, CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow
College: Merton
Period/ Subject: Early Modern

Email address: richard.mccabe@ell.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

Prof McCabe is currently on a Major Leverhulme Fellowship (2011-14) to write a monograph on literary patronage in the Early Modern period. His research interests include Edmund Spenser, Tudor and Stuart colonialism, Early Modern Celtic Literature, and the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.  He has recently edited the Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser (2010).

Teaching Areas:

I currently give lectures, classes or seminars on Spenser, Utopian Literature, and Renaissance Drama for both graduates and undergraduates, and supervise masters and doctors dissertations in the same areas.

Recent Publications:

Monographs and editions

Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation ( Oxford : Clarendon Press, l982), xi + 399pp.
The Pillars of Eternity: Time and Providence in 'The Faerie Queene' ( Dublin : Irish Academic Press, l989), 244pp.
Incest, Drama, and Nature's Law 1550-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), viii + 361pp.
Presenting Poetry: Composition, Publication, Reception: Essays in Honour of Ian Jack, edited and introduced by Howard Erskine-Hill and Richard A. McCabe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), viii + 272pp.
Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, edited by Richard A. McCabe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999), xxi + 780pp.
Spenser's Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference, 1580-1650 (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2002), xiii +306pp.

Literary Milieux: Essays in Text and Context. edited by David Womersley and Richard McCabe (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 371pp.

Articles

'Elizabethan Censorship and the Bishops' Ban of 1599', The Yearbook of English Studies, 11 (1981), 188-93.
'The Form and Methods of Milton 's Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence Against Smectymnuus', English Language Notes, 18 (1981), 266-72.
'Wit, Eloquence, and Wisdom in Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit', Studies in Philology, 81 (1984), 299-324. 
'Conflicts of Platonic Love and Sensual Desire in Astrophil and Stella', in Literature and Learning in Medieval and Renaissance England, edited by John Scattergood (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1984), 103-26.
'Meditation, Pilgrimage, and Paradise : The Literary Career of Henry Hare, second Baron Coleraine', The Library, 6th series, 8 (1986), 59-67.
'Richard Hooker's Polemic Rhetoric', Long Room, 31 (1986), 7-17.
'The Masks of Duessa: Spenser, Mary Queen of Scots, and James VI', English Literary Renaissance, 17 (1987), 224-42.
'"Ut Publica est Opinio": An Utopian Irony', Neophilologus, 72 (1988), 633-9.
'Ben Jonson, Theophrastus, and the Comedy of Humours', Hermathena, 146 (1989), 25-37.
'The Fate of Irena: Spenser and Political Violence', in Spenser and Ireland : An Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Patricia Coughlan (Cork: Cork University Press, 1989), 109-125.
'Edmund Spenser: Poet of Exile', British Academy Chatterton Lecture on Poetry, in '1991 Lectures and Memoirs', Proceedings of the British Academy, 80 (1993), 73-103.
'Prince Arthur's "Vertuous and Gentle Discipline"' in Noble and Joyous Histories: English Romances, 1375-1650, edited by Eilean Ní Chuilleanáin and J. D. Pheifer (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1993), 221-43.
‘”Little booke: thy selfe present”: the Politics of Presentation in The Shepheardes Calender' in Presenting Poetry, edited by Howard Erskine-Hill and Richard A. McCabe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 15-40.
‘Refining Theophrastus: Ethical Concerns and Moral Paragons in the English Character Book', Hermathena, 152 (1995), 33-50.
'Translated States: Spenser and Linguistic Colonialism', in Edmund Spenser: Essays on Culture and Allegory, edited by Jennifer Klein Morrison and Matthew Greenfield ( Aldershot : Ashgate, 2000), pp. 67-88.
‘Annotating Anonymity, or putting a gloss on The Shepheardes Calender', in Ma[r]king the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page, edited by Joe Bray, Mirian Handley and Anne C. Henry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 35-54.
‘Ireland : Policy, Poetics, and Parody' in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Spenser, edited by Andrew Hadfield (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 60-78.
‘Making History: Holinshed's Irish Chronicles, 1577 and 1587', in British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, edited by David J. Baker and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 51-67.
‘”Right Puisante and Terrible Priests”: The Role of the Anglican Church in Elizabethan State Censorship', in Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England, edited by Andrew Hatfield (Basingstoke and New York : Palgrave, 2001), pp. 75-94.
‘Parody, Sympathy and Self: A Response to Donald Cheney, Connotations, 13, nos 1-2 (2003-04), 5-22
‘Spenser: Shorter Verse Published 1590-95', in A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies, edited by Bart van Es (Basingstoke and New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 166-87.
'Tis Pity She's a Whore and Incest', in Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, edited by Garrett A. Sullivan, Patrick Cheney and Andrew Hadfield ( New York : Oxford University Press, 2006), 309-320.
‘Fighting Words: Writing the Nine Years' War', in Ireland in the Renaissance, c. 1540-1660, edited by Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), pp.105-21.

Other Information:

Professor of English Literature and Fellow of Merton College Oxford. Fellow of the British Academy. Formerly Lecturer at Brasenose College Oxford, Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, Lecturer at University College Dublin, and Drapers' Research Fellow at Pembroke College Cambridge.

Spenser and Ireland

My interest in Spenser began with an examination of the intellectual background to his epic verse published as The Pillars of Eternity: Time and Providence in The Faerie Queene (1987). That monograph also contained my first examination of Spenser and colonialism (pp. 39-47), a subject to which I returned in 'The Fate of Irena: Spenser and Political Violence', published in Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective , edited by Patricia Coughlan (1989), 109-125. This essay concentrates on Spenser's relationship with Lord Grey, but it was evident to me that more attention needed to be directed towards his attitudes towards Gaelic Society. In ‘Edmund Spenser: Poet of Exile', the British Academy Chatterton Lecture on Poetry for 1991, I therefore attempted to re-orientate Spenser Studies in this direction by making  a new case for seeing the whole of The Faerie Queene , not just Book V, as informed by Spenser's Irish experience. I also sought to establish the importance of Spenser's complex relationship to the Irish bards, explored the importance of Spenser's linguistic views to his concept of nationality and colonialism, illustrated his attitude to Irish surnames and topography, demonstrated the polemic uses to which he put etymology and (emergent) ethnography, and discussed some Gaelic responses to his work (see Proceedings of the British Academy, 80 (1993), 73-103).  I developed these ideas further with particular attention to linguistic issues at papers delivered at the International Spenser Conference at Yale in 1996 (published as ‘Translated States: Spenser and Linguistic Colonialism' in Edmund Spenser: Essays on Culture and Allegory , edited by Jennifer Klein Morrison and Matthew Greenfield (2000), pp. 67-88), and the MLA at San Francisco in 1998 (largely published as ‘Ireland: Policy, Poetics, and Parody' in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Spenser, edited by Andrew Hadfield (2001), pp. 60-78). The award of a British Academy Readership (1999-2001) enabled me to consolidate and expand these studies into the monograph Spenser's Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (2002) which also incorporates the plenary lecture, '"Not one Parnassus": Spenser and the Rival Poets' delivered at the International Spenser Conference in Cambridge in 2001.

While working on Spenser and Ireland I also wrote a series of articles on other literary aspects of the canon and edited Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems (Penguin, 1999). I am currently editing The Oxford Spenser Handbook (for publication in 2010).

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