How influential was Spenser’s View as a representation of Ireland following on from its publication in 1633? What part did it play in the atrocity literature of the 1640s and beyond? Little has been written on this topic, and I am very much aware of treading on unsurveyed territory. Indeed, not only is there a drastic shortage of secondary criticism on the subject of the later seventeenth-century interpretation of the View, but many critics, in discussing the document, appear to be unaware that its most decisive impact must surely have been in this period, and not in the thirty-seven years during which it circulated in manuscript form, however plentiful those manuscripts were. Judging by the twenty-odd surviving copies, the View must have been one of the most popular and widely known of such contemporary treatises. An exception to the general rule that sees Spenser’s View as an Elizabethan document is Pat Coughlan, who has argued: