Nugent’s Cynthia is firmly depicted as a native of Ireland, and described as a secret concealed safely in the Irish landscape, and protected by the surrounding seas. It seems clear that Nugent’s Cynthia is not to be read as coterminous with the English Queen in her role as virgin huntress. Instead, some of the anomalies of the sequence suggest other possible readings. Nugent was well-versed in the traditions of the sonnet sequence, so it seems unlikely that the love story outlined in Cynthia is straightforwardly autobiographical: despite the speaker’s claim to have loved an Irish maiden for four painful years, before going into exile for her sake, the account is too typical of the genre to be read as confessional.
In this essay, I explore how the sequence is affected by the political, geographical and religious complexities of early-modern Irish identity. However, Nugent’s collection is aligned to an alternative centre, that of his Westmeath home, and his Cynthia cannot be readily reconciled with courtly depictions of Elizabeth I. The title of Richard Nugent’s sonnet sequence, Cynthia (1604), would seem to suggest that it formed part of the tradition of celebratory verse which compared Elizabeth I to the virgin huntress and moon goddess who was variously called Diana, or Phoebe, or, as here, Cynthia.
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