According to Thomas Churchyard, Humphrey Gilbert justified his notoriously brutal treatment of the Irish by opining “that no conquered nacion will ever yelde willinglie their obedience for love but rather for feare.” If Gilbert's feeling was shared by many of his contemporaries – and a good number of the accounts from the Elizabethan period suggest that it was – then England's management of its Irish colony, would seem to have been governed by principles that ran counter to Thomas Harriot's optimistic suggestion that the English might expect to elicit obedience from the native inhabitants of America through fear and love. Ironically, England's prolonged attempt to rein in its Irish colony and establish its rule over a resistant Irish population proved considerably less successful than its analogous efforts in the New World. Although it would be too simplistic to suggest that England's lack of success in Ireland resulted from its heavy-handed and unrelentingly brutal treatment of the native Irish, such an assertion would not be entirely inaccurate. The failure I wish to examine in this chapter, however, is not simply the English failure to “love” the Irish or to convince the Irish to “love” them. More specifically, I wish to explore Edmund Spenser's refusal to imagine a positive role for the native Irish in the English colonization of Ireland. In other words, in his A View of the Present State of Ireland Spenser rejects the allegorical structure of colonialism and, lacking an allegorical structure, A View also fails to deliver a compelling logic for colonial adventure.