An allusion to Spenser's Irish writings: Matthew Lownes and Ralph Byrchensa's A Discourse occasioned upon the late defeat, given to the Arch-rebels, Tyrone and Odonnell (1602). (Edmund Spenser)

After William Ponsonby, Matthew Lownes was the second most important printer to deal with the works of Edmund Spenser, being responsible for the entry of A View of the Present State of Ireland into the Stationers' Register in 1598 and the posthumous publication of 'Two Cantos of Mutabilitie' in 1609 in the first folio edition of The Faerie Queene.(1) So far no one, to my knowledge, has attempted to link these two acts together, or ask why it was that both texts should have fallen into Lownes' hands, rather than those of the more powerful William Ponsonby.(2)

Lownes, like many early modern printers, published a wide range of texts) However, evidence would suggest that he had a certain interest in and knowledge of Irish affairs in the late 1590s and early 1600s, an unusual and probably not very lucrative subject area for an Elizabethan or Jacobean bookseller.(4) In 1598, he was involved in the probably aborted attempt to publish Thomas Churchyard's The Welcome Home of the Earle of Essex, a work which was overtaken by other developments in Essex's final years and has disappeared in its printed form, although a fragment of the title page still survives, along with a manuscript copy, probably transcribed from the lost edition.(5) Despite the fact that the work actually refers to the return of Essex from his successful exploits at Cadiz in 1596, the timing of the entry possibly links the work to Essex's disastrous Irish expedition, as he was appointed Lord Lieutenant on 12 March 1599. As Janet Clare has noted, discussion of Irish affairs in the late 1590s was severely discouraged (although there could have been, of course, other reasons for the disappearance of copies of Churchyard's book).(6) 1598 cannot have been a good year for Lownes, as his attempt to publish Spenser's View also failed, possibly …