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. DNB
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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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Notes
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.)
G. C. Duggan, The Stage Irishman: A History of the Irish Play and Stage Characters from the Earliest Times, reiss. 1969) [q.p.].
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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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)