Please help me welcome Michelle Mani. Thank you all very much, and thank you for the very kind introduction, Christine. If there are too many syllables, then that's definitely my fault and not yours. So my apologies for that. It's a pleasure to be here in such wonderful surroundings and a beautiful setting. I've noticed since I got the invitation to take on this lecture series that my children are taking me more seriously. I've been invited to Greshton College to give a series of three lectures. So it's a real pleasure. And thank you all very much for joining us this evening. So as Christine said, this lecture is more in the vein of language and conflict. It'll be followed by a talk on language revitalization and renewal. And hopefully, then the third lecture will be on language and reconciliation, which of course is something that's very pertinent and continues to be pertinent in the place where I work, which is Belfast, of course, where we continue to have some legacy issues which you may be aware of, of course. So without further ado, a little bit by way of introduction. Language can always be politicized. Choice of language can be political. But also what we say in the course of speaking to each other as human beings can be political and be politicized and can be bound up with conflict. And this is obviously something that interests me. So people talking about the war of words sometimes that accompanies military conflict, that you don't just have necessarily have military conflict, but you also have, of course, of propaganda that accompanies that. And this is not something that's unique to the Irish, English relationship in this period. Far from it, it's universal. It's a human thing. I can't stress that enough. And of course, we see it in Ukraine in the present day. We've seen how Ukrainian and the use of Russian have been politicized. So this is something that's universal. I can't stress that enough. And as part of this talk, then I'm going to be looking a little at negative stereotypes and their origins. I'm hoping to be able to absolve William Shakespeare from some of that. You'd be glad to hear. But there'll be other things which I hope will be of interest to you in that context in terms of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. And therefore the talk is structured as follows. I'm going to talk a little bit about the linguistic context of Irish as well as English, because I appreciate the Irish side would be less familiar, obviously. I'm going to talk about Ireland and Shakespeare. I'm going to talk about the image of the Irish as barbarians and civilised people and where that comes from, and the whole question of language conformity and language difference and language diversity. And then finish up with Queen Elizabeth I and Irish at Court, which means both the Irish at Court and also the possibility of some Irish language also in that context. So to start with the linguistic context then, and to talk a little bit about the Gaelic world and what that looked like in this period. And I'm talking about the early modern period linguistically, and my terms of reference, of course, coming from an Irish and Scottish background, is maybe different to what the early modern period might look like in English language. But for us in the Gaelic world, it's around about 1200 to 1650. It's a period this book ended by the two English conquests, because there was the initial Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland at the end of the 12th century, which went very well for a century or so but then faltered. And then the second conquest, which was more consequential, in the 17th century, which of course is the period of Cromwell as well. And linguistically, in this period, we refer to the language as Classical Gaelic or Irish, but of course, calling it Irish can offend the Scots. So I'm conscious of that. So I'm going to call it Classical Gaelic for our purposes. And this is the common written language that was utilized by learned people, particularly poets, but also other professionals and by the aristocracies in Ireland and Highland, Scotland, and in the Western Isles, of course, in this period. And it was a written form of the language. But then there were the vernaculars underneath that, the language that's spoken by the ordinary people in Ireland, Scotland, and man. And there was some mutual intelligibility, certainly through the classical form, and to some extent in the vernaculars, but there were some very, very significant differences between the various varieties of Gaelic from Ireland to Scotland, and indeed within Ireland too, and the Isle of Man. So the importance of Scotland in the Irish context in this period shouldn't be underestimated. The Gaelic-speaking Irish depended very much on Scottish Geldum in terms of manpower. So it wasn't charity work on the part of the Scots. They were paid to fight in Ireland, and they fought usually in the Irish interest, but they also fought sometimes in the English interest. And they were referred to in different periods as the Gallow Glass and the Redshanks, which I'm prepared to explain a little further in the questions if anybody would like to ask. But just to give us an indication, in the period of Queen Elizabeth I, the extent to which Scottish mercenaries were so important in the Irish context, it was estimated there were 25,000 Scottish mercenaries employed in Ulster alone, Ireland's northern province, in this period of 30 to 40 years. And in the 1590s, when we had outright conflict, known as the Nine Years' War, there were said to be 6,000 ready for war and to join conflict in Ireland at the beginning of that period. And indeed they did participate. So a little too about the linguistic complexion of Britain and Ireland as a whole in the century is worth mentioning. There was multilingualism, but that's not to say that everybody was multilingual. What it means is that we had a variety of languages spoken in the archipelago as a whole. And English and Scots, Lowland Scots, clearly belonged to the one family, Germanic languages. But then we have the Celtic families and two groups of those, Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic, the Gaelic side, and then the Welsh and the Cornish, which are the British side, because the language spoken in ancient Britain was British, for the most part, a Celtic language. Before the creation of England, hope that doesn't come as a shock to anybody. Sometimes we think our countries were always there. But before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons and the creation of England, British was the language spoken, and Welsh and Cornish had derived from it. So also it's good to remind ourselves of how, you know, how things changed, you know, from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 17th century, because around about 1500, estimates, best estimates, are that maybe as many as 50% of the inhabitants of the whole of Britain and Ireland spoke a Celtic language, one or other of those that are just listed. But by 1650 that had diminished considerably to about 10%. And of course, that's bound up with the Union of Crowns and all the other major political developments in that period. But it's good to remind us of that because William Shakespeare, for example, was living in a time where there was much more by way of other languages spoken in Britain than we might now recall. So, in the back to return to the Irish context, of course, the agenda in the 16th century and in the late 16th century, from the period of Henry VIII especially, and on into the Stuart period in the 17th century, was to make Ireland conform. And people have talked about that in terms of making Ireland English, which indeed is the title of a book by Jane Olmyer, who I cite here. And she talks about Ireland beyond doubt becoming increasingly English over the course of the 17th century. And we can see evidence for that from different perspectives from different people. So we have an anonymous pamphlet dating to 1652, The Present Posture and Condition of Ireland, taught by Jane Olmyer to have been written by a parliamentarian who speaks in terms of the fight in Ireland. We have fought in Ireland to make Ireland English, to make it conform. And this is something we also get in the Irish language side. So Farflach Ogneve is a famous poet in the late 16th and early 17th century. And in one of his poems, he compares the Irish to the lost tribes of Israel and talks in terms of Moses. Where are we going to get a Moses from to save the Irish? But this is a poem which is which is very fatalistic. And he talks about Ireland becoming a New England, which of course agrees with what the parliamentarian mentioned in his pamphlet, and which I highlighted for you a moment ago. So, in a particular verse which I've translated here, if Providence has ordained that this New England, named Ireland, should be in the hands of enemies, it would be well to bid farewell to the Ireland. So the idea of Ireland becoming a new England in both linguistic traditions. So English was clearly on the rise as English power grew, and on into the 17th century, we see evidence of this. We have another famous poet called Davio Brewither, who was alive in the 17th century. I'd read a little bit of Irish very, very briefly here. Just one verse of his, knock action no sigmoid arriving, that gono le mortus manglash, getashed roor or hot of galaklede, ni honed's glor, ach gosta god of verla. How queer this mode assumed by many men of Ireland. With haughty, upstart, ostentation lately swollen, though codes of foreign clerks they fondly strive to master, they speak little more than a shadow of coarse English. So English is becoming to be bound up with social mobility, and this poet is having a swipe at the Irish, who are becoming bilingual and eventually monolingual English, and uh acting above their station, too, because quite often it was the lower classes also who embraced English in this period. The word for English is most interesting in the Irish language. It's Birle, and it was mentioned in the poem I just quoted a moment ago. And it's not just confined to Ireland, but it's also the word for English in the other Gaelic languages, which is also interesting. But what is particularly interesting about this word is that it was originally the word for speech itself, derived from the word bale, a mouth. And it was narrowed to describe the most significant language with which the Gaelic world came into contact in the aftermath of the Anglo-Norman conquest, and that was English. So this was such an important linguistic conflict that the word for speech became the word for English. On the other hand, the word for Irish in Irish itself is a form of the word Gaelic, which we would use in English, of course. Various forms of the word Gaelic, Gaelgit would have been pronounced in the classical language of this period, and it and variants of that word continued to be used for the Irish language and for Scottish and Lanx varieties in this period. So ethnicity was clearly very important. It was the basis of nationality. And while an Irish person could both be a Gael, in other words, a speaker of Gaelic, and an Ehronoch, in other words, a resident of Ireland, that being geographical in reference, the language is never Irish in the geographical sense. In other words, we don't have a word for the Irish language which derives from the name of the island. We don't have a word Irish, which I put with an asterisk to indicate that it doesn't exist, in the same way as the Irish word for Rush is roosh, and we divide, and we uh the Irish word for Russian therefore is rousish, so the ish ending indicates the language associated with the nation or people or place, but we don't have that in Ireland. Era, the word for Ireland and which Ireland derives, Era land, never became the word for the language, which is interesting and probably suggests something about the relationship between Ireland and Scotland as well, I think. So now to turn to English and to say a little bit about English in this period and about Ireland and Shakespeare. Of course, I have no need really to provide this slide. We all know very well who this is, the great William Shakespeare. But before we get into a little bit about Shakespeare in detail, the English world and what that looked like in this same period is interesting. Because as a bilingual Irish English speaker myself, we have a view of English in the modern world which is global and universal and extremely powerful, we'd all agree. But this is John Florio, London born of Italian and English parentage, a tutor to many of the aristocracy in London in his day, lexicographer and did lots of other things of interest. But in his book called First Fruits, a perfect introduction to the Italian and English tongues, and he also wrote an Italian and English dictionary, he talked about English being unfamiliar on the continent in the 16th century. And he speaks of it in these terms. It is a language that will do you good in England, but past Dover, it is worth nothing. That comes as a bit of a shock to me as an English speaker. Now that may be the case on the continent of Europe in this period, but of course, English was spoken elsewhere in the archipelago. So a related language was spoken in the Scottish lowlands, called Scots, and in the Irish Pale, which is the area around Dublin, the eastern part of Ireland, where English power was strongest in this period, and of course there was bilingualism elsewhere in other parts of Ireland also. But that too is complicated because identity in language is interesting here. Lowlands and border identity is not quite the same as southern English identity. Indeed, the borders were compared sometimes to the Irish. What about this from Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, very important theologian in the Church of England of his day and a very major figure? He feared that the borderers would become too much Irish and savage, which clearly went together in his mind, in the absence of what? The civilizing hand of Anglican bishops. Thomas Mosgrave, who was keeper of Bucastle, wrote a description for William Cecil, a major figure in his day to an advisor to the Queen, in 1583, and I love this, where he described the borders as follows: They are Scottish when they will, and English at their pleasure. So we can, of course, manipulate our identities, and it's always something worth bearing in mind. So, to come to Shakespeare more directly and to Henry V, which is of particular interest to me, there has been some disagreement over the potential dating of this play. I have seen dates, the following dates mentioned 1583 and 1599. There may be others that I'm unaware of. I don't know if there are any Shakespearean specialists in the room. I'd love to hear. But what is clear is that these two dates have been linked to a passage in the play which mentions Ireland, and this is the passage. Where now the general of our gracious empress, as in good time he may from Ireland coming, bringing rebellion broached on his sword. How many would the peaceful city quit to welcome him? Who is the general? Two possibilities. One is Thomas Butler, an Irishman, but general of the Queen's forces in Ireland from 1582. He was much more than that, and I'll be coming back to Thomas Butler again. So he was sent to quell the Desmond Rebellion in Ireland in the 1580s. Second possibility is Robert Devereux, who may well be known to all of you. He was the Queen's favourite, indeed. There was talk of romantic liaison between Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Devereux. But he was sent to quell the rebellion led by Ian Yale, in Irish, the great Hugh O'Neill, an English, Earl of Tyrone, later in the 1590s. So there are those two possible contexts. But nonetheless, Ireland features in this play and is significant. But not just Ireland, because Henry V, of course, is famous for bringing the four nations into the foreground in the person of four individuals. Gower, the Englishman, McMorris, the Irishman, Jamie, the Scot, and Llewellyn, the Welshman. And of course, is seen as a play which imagines and aspires to political and linguistic unity in Britain, in the emerging Britain. But linguistic unity and complexity is a difficult thing. For a start, Scotland is a very complicated country linguistically in this period. It had two major languages at this point in time, Scots cognate to English in the south, and of course the Gaelic cognate to Irish in the northwest. And Jamie, who represents the Scots nation, can only represent one of those two constituent elements of Scotland linguistically, and there's no evidence to think that he spoke anything other than Scots as perceived by Shakespeare, and there's no allusion to his language being different or being Gaelic or being like Irish. As for the Irish, interestingly, this play has what seems to be a line of Irish, Colin no Costurime, which is very reminiscent and in my view is Karinhuschureme, A Young Maid from Beside the River Shore. The title of a melody noted in an Irish love poem, Malterban Le Birgonched, a woman may be seduced with the string a few strings of the harp. No further comment on that particular theory. However, to move on. The point about this melody and tune, it's not placed in the mouth of the Irishman like Morris, but in the mouth of Pistol. The soldier who appears in Henry V and indeed other plays by Shakespeare. When he encounters Monsieur Ferre, a French soldier, whom he had captured, and of course there was a problem communicating. So this line is put in the mouth of Pistol at this point in the play, interestingly, and not in McMorris. So to widen the lens a little for a moment, Henry IV, part one also is relevant to our discussion. At a point in this play, we have Edmund Mortimer, an Englishman, married to, or certainly English speaker, married to the daughter of Owen Glendour, the last Welsh person to rise up and rebel against English power and is well known for that reason. But at this point in the play, Mortimer, who's married to the daughter of Owen Glendur, praises her pretty Welsh language and promises indeed to learn the language. He says, I will never be a truant love till I have learned thy language. Indeed, he goes further and asks her to sing a Welsh song, but this does not meet with approval from Hotspur, as we shall see. Hotspur's wife asks Hotspur to lie still and hear the lady singing Welsh. Hotspur, for his part, says, I'd rather hear lady my brach howl in Irish, brach being dog. So Welsh, singing in Welsh and howling in Irish. Interesting. Elsewhere, Hotspur speaks of Welsh as being the language of the devil. Now we're perceived the devil understands Welsh. Sometimes that too is an allegation that's made in texts in relation to Irish. And back to Henry V, then, it's interesting to consider the Irish Welsh encounter in this play, which is famous, certainly on the Irish side of the Irish Sea, because of the questions it raises about nation and what nation may mean in this period, and indeed since. McMorris is touchy and sensitive. And in response to Huellen, who seems to cast some aspersions on McMorris's ability to fight and the uh his knowledge of the art of war, and mentions his nation, is stopped in full flight by McMorris, and who says angrily, Of my nation, what ish my nation? Ish a villain and a bastard and a knave and a rascal. What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation? And takes it a step further, indeed, and threatens to cut off the said Flewellan's head. Who is this MacMorris? MacMorris is also an interesting figure in his own right. Because MacMorris seems to be an Anglicization or a representation, an English spelling, of the Irish name MacMuddish, which literally means son of Muddish. But that in turn is a Gaelicization of Anglo-Norman French. Fitzmorris, Fitz, of course, been Anglo-Norman French, equivalent to Field in modern French, son, son of Morris. The Anglo-Normans, of course, when they arrived in Ireland at the end of the 12th century, didn't just bring one language with them English, but they also bought French. And French was favoured in the upper classes. There have been three suggestions as to who this Fitzmorris might be. There are some good candidates in this period. I list them here, won't dwell on them for too long. James Fitzmorris, Thomas Fitzmorris, and Thomas's son Paudigan. The latter had been in the court of Elizabeth with Sir Henry Sidney, but rebelled when he went back to Ireland later on two occasions, in the Desmond War in the 1570s and early the 80s, and again in the Nine Years' War in the 1590s, which of course points to the difficult position in which the old English, those derived, those descended from the first English settlers in Ireland, sometimes found themselves in. And we will talk about that again. Now, Henry V is very famous also for the amount of dialogue it contains in French. This, of course, is in the context of King Henry V's wooing of and eventually marriage to Catherine. It's been 20K in the play, daughter of Charles VI of France. And this is very Interesting, of course, because English and French are languages of authority in this period, languages of prestige, and as Michael Cronin puts it, they enjoy the translation symmetry of equivalent power. In other words, there's a respectful relationship between them. Let's not forget, of course, that the kings of England would have been French speaking up until the period of Henry IV, if I remember correctly. And French was the language of the court for 300 years after the Anglos, after the Normans came to England. But can we talk about Henry V being a multilingual drama because we have French and because we have a word line in Irish, not in Welsh, admittedly. Not really, in the sense that Irish and Welsh are politically subordinate languages. They're not on a par with French. And they're treated differently in the play. So we may have one line of Irish, the name of a tune, but nothing in Welsh. And the Irish and Welsh characters are translated rather than quoted. Catherine is quoted in French, of course. So there is something in this, potentially, about the illustrate about illustrating the consequences for speakers who adhere to inferior languages and the benefits of a single unifying language, which people often associate with Shakespeare's plays. But this is not just about England in this period. Interestingly, similar arguments were made in France in the period of the French Revolution by Republicans. In other words, that all these local patois and other regional languages in France had no place in the Republic, and that French was the language to be preferred, and it would be a unifying national language. So that is interesting when we think of it in that way. Indeed, it has been stated by Michael Cronin that although Shakespeare was promoted as the literary incarnation of English linguistic greatness, his plays contain within them attitudes towards linguistic difference, particularly with respect to the Celtic rim, Ireland and Scotland and Wales, that are by no means triumphalist and homogenous. I agree, there is a sensitivity to the significance of language shift and loss in Shakespeare. And I turn now to the Tempest, where we have Caliban, an indigenous inhabitant of an island, on which Prospero is washed ashore when his ship is founders, and becomes enslaved by Prospero. And at a point in the play, Prospero castigates Caliban for linguistic ingratitude. What is that about? Prospero says, I had taken pains to make thee, Caliban, speak, when thou didst not savage, and we should remember the word savage, know thine own meaning, but would scabble like a thing most brutish. To which Caliban retorts, You taught me language indeed, and my profit in it is, I know how to curse. Therefore, the red plague rid you for learning me your language. Most interesting, I think sensitive representation there of what it means to lose and shed a language here in this great play. Savage takes us to the garage barbarian and the question of language and diversity. Now, maybe plain to my audience, you might say, but we cannot blame the English for the Irish image of the savage. What we can say is that it is St. Pernard of Clairvaux and Gerald of Wales who were largely responsible for the lamentable public image of Ireland in the medieval Europe in the 12th century. Gerald of Wales, a cleric of a Norman Welsh mixed stock, therefore, wrote an account of Irel called Topographia Hibernia, which is very negative in relation to the Irish. Not at all even-handed, like the work he wrote on the Welsh, Descriptio Cambrae, but of course he was Welsh Norman. So the Ireland and the Irish are predicted as wild, strange, and savage in this 12th century work. They're in need of a strong hand, and conquest is a moral imperative. Of course, I have to admit that the only English pope we've ever had had permitted the granting of Ireland to the Norman kings prior to the conquest of Ireland, so one would have to bear that in mind. So Geraldus of Wales, then, and the image of the barbarian, it in turn also is not his own creation, but is derived from the classically inspired uh works of uh or the classically inspired image of the barbarians, the Huns and the Celts, and how they're perceived by the Romans. So for Cicero, the Silvestres Homenes are Gerald's gen silvestris, in other words, a woodland people, people who are evasive and given to indolence and not prepared to work the land and not prepared to live in towns, that sort of idea. So the concept of the evolution of a normal people, a civilised people, didn't begin with the Tudors in Ireland, or even with Geraldus and Wales, but has a longer pedigree in European terms. However, it is indeed Gerald that deserves to be credited for the legacy of this sort of discourse in the Irish context, because his work was read and reread and quoted and utilized again and again. A couple of examples of the War of Words. One from Barnaby Rich in his short survey of Ireland dating to 1569. The mere Irish are wild beasts, more barbarous and more brutish in their customs and demeanours than in any other part of the world that is known. And John Davies, Attorney General of Ireland, a man who knew Ireland extremely well, talked in terms of his work, The Discovery of the Two Causes, Why Ireland was never subdued, that the Irish are little better than cannibals who do hunt one another, and he that hath most strength and swiftness doth eat and devours all his fellows. Particularly outlandish, I think, that one. So, this war of words, Geraldus Cumbresis certainly can supply the discourse, but what was the reason for this emerging so strongly in the 16th century? And here we need to turn again to the world of politics. Henry VIII, of course, had himself made by law king of Ireland. The kings of England had been lords of Ireland prior to this point, so this was a very important development in this period. He followed that up with his 1537 Act for the English Order, Habit, and Language. Why? The purpose of which was to introduce conformity in language, tongue, manners, order, and apparel among the Irish and the English, and to cast aside the diversity that is betwixt the English and Irish in tongue, language, order, and habit. Now, Gerendus Cambrenz has never mentioned the Irish language in his work. Despite all the negative imagery of the Irish that he he employs, he never mentions language. So this is something that comes to the fore particularly in the later Middle Ages in Ireland. We have the Axe of Kilkenny, which I haven't mentioned in the 14th century, which were directed towards the Old English, and degeneracy on the part of the Old English, because they were bilingual, and that was a concern. But it's raised, the stakes are raised in the 16th century. But casting Irish aside, of course, was no small matter. Phineas Morrison, personal secretary to Charles Blunt, Baron Mountjoy, and Lord Deputy of Ireland in the period 1600 to 1603, talks also in similar terms in his itinerary that communion or difference of language is a special motive to unite or alienate. So if you speak the same language, you get on. If you speak a different language, there will be alienation and lack of agreement, lack of consensus. He further adds that if no such tongue, this being Irish, were in the world, I think it would never be missed either for pleasure or necessity. But Irish nonetheless was the language of the heart, and this was appreciated by some. Edmund Spencer, of course, with extensive landed interests in Ireland, in his view of the present state of Ireland in 1596, which was never published, spoke in the following terms, and this is very well known. The speech being Irish, the heart must needs be Irish. For out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh. And John Davies, whom I mentioned a moment ago in his work Discovery, talks in terms of the Nick generation, that they will in tongue and heart, he hopes, and everywhere else become English, so that there will be no difference or distinction but the Irish sea betwixt us. Becoming English was, as I say and said at the outset, was something that was very much on the agenda and a distinct possibility in the 17th century in a way that it wasn't so easily before. Major political developments, of course, were the defeat of the Irish in the Nine Years' War, the succession of James VI of Scotland as James I to Britain and Ireland, the flight of the Earls, although in Irish language tradition it's not a flight, it's just a departure, because the idea was they would return. An interesting illustration of how language, different languages preserve different perceptions. So in the English language it was a flight, they were defeated, in the Irish language it was just a departure, we'll be back. But they weren't back, of course. The plantation of Ulster in 1609. This is a particular relevance to us here in London, because the City of London and the London Livery Companies were granted a substantial amount of land in what is County Derry, Stroke London Derry, and under the governance of what became the Honourable Irish Society, which still exists. I happen to know this because I have a family member who deals with them all the time, because he's a headmaster in that part of the world. And apparently they're very generous. So it still exists, isn't that interesting? But the county which had been called Colrain up at this point, this particular county has Colrain and Dairy Stroke Londonderry as big as its two bigger urban settings. It was renamed Londonderry to commemorate this link with the London Companies by Charter in 1613. And of course, Derry Londonderry continues to be a point of disputation in Ireland, depending on your political perspective. This is the plotting of the lands and how they were allotted to the various companies, the Drapers and the Psalters Company and others in this plantation in this part of Ireland. Now, English attitudes to America in this period and to Ireland are worth bringing in to the reckoning. 1607, the plantation of Virginia, also had London involvement. But strikingly, in a study which was done by Nicholas Canney, and I allude to him here, of the period 1580 to 1622, and 1622 is important because 1622 is the year of the Virginian massacre, and relations soured in the New World from that point. But in the period prior to that, 1580 to 1622, when things were really negative, and at their most negative in the Irish context, there was a lot of positivity in relation to America and its indigenous inhabitants. Now, it must be admitted, of course, that America was not a threat. Ireland was a threat, Spanish Armada on the West Flank of Britain, security issues, one can understand that that was a factor. And of course, Ireland was much closer, could be brought to the attention of people in England in times of crisis very quickly, could be mobilized very quickly by way of response and so on. But interestingly, look at some of these positive attitudes. You would never get this in the Irish context. So William Strache, in his true reportery, talks about Native Americans being like the ancient Britons and speaks of them in the following terms. Can a savage, remaining a savage, be civil? Were not we ourselves made and not born civil? And weren't Caesar's Britons as brutish as Virginians? The Roman swords were the best teacher's disability to this and other countries near us. So the Americans had the possibility of reform. And this is a quote I had to share with you. Football. William Wood, who frequently drew parallels between the American situation and the Irish situation because he was familiar with Ireland, in his New England's prospect in 1634, talked about the native people speaking football and wearing masks as they did so to retain anonymity and avoid animosity when the game would have ended. So what about this? At football, there is no seeking a revenge, no quarrelling, no bloody noses, no scratched faces, black eyes, broken shins, no bruised members or crushed ribs, the lamentable effects of rage. But the goal being won, friends they are at the football, and friends they must meet at the kettle. Is anybody here from the Premier League? Sorry, I'll move on swiftly. Irish soccer can also be difficult and challenging. So, friends at the kettle, and friendship at all, because we've been speaking in terms of difference and animosities and the war of words. So I now turn to Queen Elizabeth I and the Irish at court. Friendships at the kettle. What about friendships at court? We know that there was a considerable Irish presence at the court of Elizabeth in the course of her time as Queen. Notable people include Hugh O'Neill, who was fostered in the English Pale in Ireland and was fluent in English. He was a bilingual speaker there, he learned English, this being an English-speaking part, amongst the Old English. He was presented in court by Lord Deputy Sydney in 1567 and was made an Ireland deed by the Queen herself. But O'Neill was to turn. He was largely responsible for the propagation of a faith and fatherland ideology in Ireland at the turn of the 16th century, which was a plea, of course, for the Old English in Ireland who remained Catholic to come on side with the Irish under the Faith and Fatherland banner. But there were others who remained loyal to the Queen. Donahue O'Brien, O'Brien and English, 4th Earl of Tonmond, was educated at court, he was a staunch ally of the Crown and remained so right till the end, fought against O'Neill in the Battle of Kinsale, and was described in the following terms in the Calendal State Papers in 1600, as truly English as if he'd been born in Middlesex. Indeed, Sir George Carew, President of Munster, said he was the first and last of Ireland birth that ever he found who was wholly addicted to the Queen. For her sake, he is hated of all his nation. Well, perhaps not all of his nation. The interesting thing about people like Donahue Brien, of course, was that they were also Irish and continued to be Irish in other respects. Donahue Brien, when he went to court and remained at court to be educated, brought his Irish poet with him, Tig MacBrudio, who remained there for two years. There can be little doubt that they would have spoken Irish together when the occasion demanded it, or when there was some advantage to be gained from that. There were others. Thomas Du, Black Thomas, or Thomas Butler, 10th Earl of Ormond, who was distantly related to the Queen, a fourth cousin, he too was sent to London to be educated in 1544 with the future Edward VI. He is equally praised in an Irish poem, Town Thomas Warriors Rohgra, in which allusion is made to the fact that he was made Knight of the Garter in 1588 and he was to get even higher by becoming Earl Marshal of England around 1591. I think that person of Irish background who achieved the highest status in the land in his day. This is a castle he built, indeed, said to be in tribute to Elizabeth I, his distant cousin, on Carrick and Shore. Remember the name Shore? That's the river that appears in the title of the song, which seems to have been recorded as a line in the mouth of pistol in Henry V. Now there are other women worth dying into the conversation. Grania Weal and O'Malley. Grania Weal, as she's known in English, lived in the same period and is thought to have died in the same year as Queen Elizabeth, although there's no firm evidence for that. She was notorious as a woman who commanded the west coast of Ireland and her galleys and clashed with Richard Bingham regularly from his appointment as governor of Connoct from 1584, which is Ireland's most western province, and indeed my native province for that matter. For Bingham, Grania Weal, and Weal means short cropped hair, we think, was a woman who had overstepped the part of womanhood. In other words, she didn't behave like a woman, in his view. Nonetheless, she was championed at court by Thomas Butler, the Queen's cousin. She sailed to London in person in 1593 and came up the Thames to Greenwich Castle. What must that have looked like? I'd love to have been there. And was got an audience with the Queen after a number of months. The Queen initiated an inquiry and compelled Bingham to release her son Chabowage and her brother Don Lamalia, who he had imprisoned. What on earth might have happened when Grania Weil met Elizabeth I in person? Is it possible that some words were exchanged in Irish? The Queen had a reputation linguistically, and that was that she liked to welcome foreign dignitaries in their own languages. Now, that's most interesting in the context of the fact that she had an Irish primer prepared for her at her own request and thought to be around about the 1560s around about 1564 by a man called Christopher Nugent himself, one of the old English in Ireland, Baron of Delvon, and a student in Cambridge for two years, round about 1562-3-4. She also provided the funding for the manufacture of a font of Gaelic type to facilitate the printing of texts in Irish, and indeed the first book ever printed in Irish in Ireland was subsequently published. A direct link to her funding there. As for the Irish primer itself, what about this Christopher Nugent's words to Queen Elizabeth? Among the manifold actions that bear testimony to the world of Your Majesty's great affection tending to the Reformation of Ireland, there is no one, in my opinion, that more evident showeth the same than the desire your Highness hath to understand the language of your people there. Your people, the Irish, and their language, the Irish language. And so we have a couple of examples here of the expressions that Christopher Nugent wished to teach the Queen or provide for the Queen. Connaissant Toto, how do you? Tom Gamai, I am well. And one definitely play into the audience. GLRN Saxona, God save the Queen of England. Christopher Nugent knew his audience. I love that. Interestingly, there are some also indications in the way the Irish is spelt, which suggest that he was trying to make the representation of the language a little bit more phonetic for the use of the Queen. Now, isn't this interesting? So we have two queens in manner of speaking. We have Elizabeth I and we have Gorania Weal, who was treated as a queen in later Irish edition. She is present in contemporary Irish folklore and was also personified in later Jacobite poetry in Ireland and portrayed as a defender of Ireland. So, in a manner of speaking, an Irish Queen. Interestingly, while we have no poem which survives in praise of Grania Weal, although she is mentioned in one poem of praise to her son Chabudge, we do have an Irish poem which survives in tribute to Queen Elizabeth I. And that poem is an animal victimosa in the name of the literally High Son who bestows grace, so that's Jesus Christ. And on it goes to praise Elizabeth I's imperial exploits in France and indeed further afield. It's possible that this poem emanates from the circle of Thomas Butler, the Queen's cousin, and a colleague of mine, Philip MacArell, is working on an edition of that poem at the moment and is going to make the argument for that, I believe. Would this have been a tribute most pleasing to the Queen? Whether she ever came to see or hear the Irish poem is unknown, and perhaps even unlikely, one might think. But if she had, we may well assume that it may have gratified her, on the basis that other things, uh, cognate things gratified her, like Irish tunes and Irish songs. We have this letter from Edward Somerset, Edward of Worcester, to Richard Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, dated 19 September 1602, not far not far from the end, Queen Elizabeth was to die the following year. And he talks of the Queen dancing in the privy chamber to Irish tunes which were at this time most pleasing to her. Was a Tudor period in Ireland a time most pleasing? I don't want to sugarcoat in any way at all or romanticise in any way any of this very interesting material, for example, the primer for Queen Elizabeth, while not doubting at all its authenticity. But this has been described by historians as the age of atrocity. Indeed, a book was published by Dave Edwards, a collection of essays by Dave Edwards and others, which has that very title. It was a time of terrible violence, scorched dirt policies and considerable friction and animosity. Nonetheless, what I hope to have shown is that relations and identities can exist beyond the binaries, which is continues, I think, to be a very important point. That we beyond the binaries, other things can happen. And we have seen this, I think, in the very least, in how Shakespeare has portrayed the language issue. I think when you take the totality of his plays as a whole, and when you consider texts like the Irish primer for Queen Elizabeth and the poem in her praise. It is difficult. Hugh O'Neill, the great Hugh O'Neill, who I mentioned earlier, who was educated in the English pale, who became therefore a bilingual Irish English, who went to visit the Queen and became an earl, was uh mid-earl by the Queen, but who turned and who then led the Irish Rebellion from 1593 to 1603, was a man too between two worlds. Brian Friel, a man I will be talking about again in the third lecture in this series in his play Making History, described O'Neill as a man too English for the Irish and too Irish for the English. Thank you very much.