Life
1561-1612 [err. Harrington]; son of illegitimate dg. of Henry VIII, who was an attendent of Queen Elizabeth, his god-mother; knighted in Ireland by Essex; he said, ‘I think my very genius doth in a sort lead me to that country’; celebrated as inventor of flush lavatory (“Ajax”); d. Kelston, Somerset. ODNB
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Works
[with others,] Nugae Antiquae, being a miscellaneous collection of original papers in prose and verse, ed. H. Harington, re-ed. Thomas Park, 2 vols. (London 1804) [account of Hugh O’Neill’s noble sons from this text quoted in part in Andrew Murphy, ‘Gold Lace and a Frozen Snake, Donne, Wotton and the Nine Years War’, in Irish Studies Review, No. 8, Autumn 1994, p.10.)
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References
Joseph Th. Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fior-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior To The Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. Co. 1986): Harington (Orlando Furioso, in English heroical verse, ed. R. McNulty, Oxford: Clarendon 1972) ameliorated a short but negative reference to Ireland in his translation of Orlando Furioso; Ariosto had called Ireland an ‘Isola del pianto’ etc. (X,93, p.286); Harington translates, ‘For Isle of wo it may be justly called,/Where peerless peeces [?princes] are abused so;/By monster vile to be devoured and thralled/Where pyrats still by land and sea do go/Assalting forts that are but weakly walled.’ ([Leerssen, p.55.)
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Quotations
Orlando Furioso: ‘Then came the Irish of valiant hearts, / And active limbs, in personages tall, / They naked used to go in many parts / But with a mantle yet they cover all’ (Quoted in G. C. Duggan, The Stage Irishman: A History of the Irish Play and Stage Characters from the Earliest Times, reiss. 1969) [q.p.].
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Notes
Rudolf Gottfried, Prose Works of Spenser, Variorum Ed., Vol. 10 (1949), cites remarks from Sir John Harington on Bishop Still, held to be the author of Gammer Gurton’s Needle (in Briefe View of the State of the Church of England in Queen Elizabeth’s Time, 1653).
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