Edmund Spenser - Misjudged

At my local library I opened James Shapiro's 1599 A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, and in one of those odd coincidences, the opened page that I chanced upon yielded the following extract related to Edmund Spenser, which suggests that from my thus far limited reading of Nicholas Canny's Making Ireland British 1580-1650 I may have done the fair poet a disservice, but only in the sense that he was far more homicidally inclined, and systematically so, than I imagined. Spenser, wrote Canny, "in View of the Present State of Ireland proceeded to detail how an existing socio-political order might be destroyed, and another erected in its place." 

And Shapiro details a little, as I'm sure Canny does later in his far more involved work, of Spenser's envisaged means towards this fine end: "Subsequent to writing the View Spenser reiterated the main point in 'A Brief Note of Ireland': "Great force must be the instrument but famine must be the mean(s), for til Ireland is famished it cannot be subdued." Spenser (who lived on an estate of 3,000 acres of confiscated land in County Cork) knew the consequences of the starvation he advocated. The most powerful paragraph in his View renders in graphic detail the effects of a starved and cannibalistic Irish population who 'consume themselves and devour each other': "Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them, they looked like anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves, they did eat their carions, happy where they could find them. Yea, and one another soon after, inasmuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves." Having seen its effects first-hand, Spenser vigorously advocated mass starvation as proven policy."(Shapiro)