Abstract
There was controversy in 1980 when Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain opened at the National Theatre. Set in 54 BC, during Julius Caesar’s invasion, and in AD 515, when Anglo-Saxon settlers were displacing the Romanized Britons, the play is punctuated by contemporary scenes — calculated to provoke — that show the British Army in action in Northern Ireland. Brenton does not shrink from displaying the brutality of an archaic society. His play starts with a group of ancient Britons killing an outlaw and abusing a slave. But the Romans, despite their developed social order and technology, are as brutal as those they attack. In a scene that prompted Mrs Whitehouse to take the play’s director to court, three Roman soldiers, separated from their unit, murder two British ‘wogs’ and rape a third after slashing him about the buttocks with a knife.1
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Notes
Howard Brenton, Plays: Two (London: Methuen Drama, 1989), pp. 20, 31.
On criticism of Geoffrey before Polydore, and the paradoxical reinvigoration of his influence brought about by the urge to defend the honour of Britain against the Anglica Historica during a period in which a new ideology of ‘Britishness’ was emergent, see Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), especially ch. 1.
24 Henry VIII c. 12; see for example Walter Ullmann, ‘“This Realm of England is an Empire”’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 30 (1979), 175–203.
The boldest version of this thesis is in Willy Maley, Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (London: Palgrave, 2003). For reservations, see my Foreword to that book, pp. xi–xvii (pp. xii–xv), though a range of Protestant texts, from Bible commentary to neo-Latin verse, could elide imperial with papal Rome — see for example John Napier, A Plaine Discouery of the Whole Reuelation of Saint Iohn (Edinburgh, 1593); ‘In Romam’, in
Paul J. McGinnis and Arthur H. Williamson eds, George Buchanan: The Political Poetry (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1995), pp. 250–3.
A. H. Dodd, ‘Wales and the Scottish Succession’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1938), 201–25: pp. 209–11.
Peter Roberts, ‘Tudor Wales, National Identity and the British Inheritance’, in British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 8–42, 37.
Penry Williams, ‘The Attack on the Council in the Marches, 1603–1642’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1961), pt 1, 1–22;
R. E. Ham, ‘The Four Shire Controversy’, Welsh History Review, 8 (1977), 381–400;
Peter R. Roberts, ‘Wales and England after the Tudor “Union”: Crown, Principality and Parliament, 1543–1624’, in Claire Cross, David Loades, and J. J. Scarisbrick, eds, Law and Government under the Tudors: Essays Presented to Sir Geoffrey Elton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 11–38: pp. 19–33, and, in a slightly different context, the same historian’s ‘The English Crown, the Principality of Wales and the Council in the Marches, 1534–1641’, in
Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds, The British Problem, c. 1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 118–47: pp. 137–45.
The Tragedie of Cymbeline 3.4 (TLN 1911–21), in The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile, ed. Charlton Hinman (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1968).
Ibid.; cf. for example George Owen, Cruell Lawes against Welshmen, in Cymmrodorion Records, ed. Henry Owen, ser. 1 pt 3 (London: Charles J. Clark, 1982), pp. 120–60; and Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV.
Humphrey Llwyd, The Breuiary of Britayne, tr. Thomas Twyne (London, 1573), B6r−v, E4v–5v (on the Brigantes), E8v–F2r, F6v–G7r (Cataracus, Voadicia, and much more). Boece’s sources and motives are sketched by T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950), pp. 67–8.
Llwyd, Breuiary, F6r−v, C3r. Buchanan responded to Llwyd, exposing the limits of Scoto-Cambrian humanist solidarity, in Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582); see Roberts, Tudor Wales’, p. 26; and Roger A. Mason, ‘Scotching the Brut: Politics, History and National Myth in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, in Mason, ed., Scotland and England, 1286–1815 (Edinburgh: Donald, 1987), pp. 60–84: pp. 73–4. There were even rival Merlins, ‘One of Scotland commonly titled Sylvester,... the other Ambrosius … borne of a Nunne (daughter to the K[ing] of Southwales) in Caermardhiri (John Seiden, notes to Poly-Olbion, IV).
Breandán Ó Buachalla, ‘James Our True King: The Ideology of Irish Royalism in the Seventeenth Century’, in D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall, and Vincent Geoghegan, eds, Political Thought in Ireland Since the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 7–35: p. 11.
‘And hath not the vnion of Wales to England added a greater strength thereto?’ the King asked a reluctant Parliament, ‘Which though it was a great Principalitie, was nothing comparable in greatnesse and power to the ancient and famous Kingdome of Scotland.’ Speech of 19 March 1603, in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 132–46: p. 135.
On Wales, the borders, and A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle see for example Richard Halpern, ‘Puritanism and Maenadism in A Mask’, in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, eds, Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), pp. 88–105;
Michael Wilding, ‘Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634: Theatre and Politics on the Border’, Milton Quarterly, 21:4 (1987), 35–51.
Llwyd, Breuiary, 60r. The Gaelic Irish and Scottish Highlanders shared many of these traits; but both groups were relatively distant; sharing a common border, and conspicuous in English towns and cities, the Welsh were the ‘other’ closest to home (cf. Glanmor Williams, Renewal and Reformation: Wales c.1415–1642 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987], p. 464; and Philip Jenkins, ‘Seventeenth-Century Wales: Definition and Identity’, in Bradshaw and Roberts, eds, British Consciousness and Identity, pp. 213–35: p. 216).
‘Address to the Welsh People by Bishop Richard Davies’, tr. Albert Owen Evans, in Evans, A Memorandum on the Legality of the Welsh Bible and the Welsh Version of the Book of Common Prayer (Cardiff: William Lewis, 1925), pp. 83–124: p. 85. For contexts see Glanmor Williams, ‘Bishop Richard Davies’ (?1501–1581)’ and ‘Some Protestant Views of Early British Church History’, in his Welsh Reformation Essays (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967), pp. 155–90, 207–19; and P. R. Roberts, ‘The Union with England and the Identity of “Anglican” Wales’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 22 (1972), 49–70: pp. 67–70.
‘September’, ‘Argument’, in William Oram et al., eds The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
Robin Flower, ‘William Salesbury, Richard Davies, and Archbishop Parker’, National Library of Wales Journal, 2 (1941), 7–14; and
Glanmor Williams, ‘Bishop Sulien, Bishop Richard Davies, and Archbishop Parker’, National Library of Wales Journal, 5 (1948), 215–19.
Bonduca 4.4.115–19, ed. Cyrus Hoy, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
8 July 1609, quoted by G. Dyfnallt Owen, Wales in the Reign of James I (Wood-bridge: Royal Historical Society/Boydell Press, 1988), p. 2.
Sidero-Thriambos: Or, Steele and Iron Triumphing, lines 216–20, in Pageants and Entertainments of Anthony Munday, ed. David M. Bergeron (Garland: New York, 1985); cf. Fuimus Troies: The True Troianes (London, 1633), G1r, where ancient Britons sing in Scots their survival of a Roman attack.
Hence Drummond of Hawthornden’s jesting inclusion of Albions Scotland in a short list of imaginary books: see Robert H. MacDonald, The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971).
Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 118–48.
See for example Emrys Jones, ‘Stuart Cymbeline’, Essays in Criticism, 11 (1961), 84–99; and, for salient counter-factors,
Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 135–7;
and Ronald J. Boling, ‘Anglo-Welsh Relations in Cymbeline’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000), 33–66, especially pp. 47–9.
William Herbert, the ‘Welsh Earl’ — see Michael G. Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 132 — was a local magnate as well as a power at court. Through several generations, his family had supported Welsh bards, and although the Welsh-speaking Earl wrote his own verse in English, he associated with Welsh literati. His brother (co-dedicatee of the first Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays), Philip, earl of Montgomery was also the object of attention from Anglo-Welsh poets like William Harbert, and had Welshmen in his household.
Irene Scouloudi, Returns of Strangers in the Metropolis 1593, 1627, 1635, 1639: A Study of an Active Minority, Publications of the Huguenot Society of London Quarto Series 62 (London: Huguenot Society, 1985), p. 1; I owe this reference to Emma Smith.
This episode figures in Robert Chester, Loves Martyr: Or, Rosalins Complaint (London, 1601), H2r–3r, the Welsh-sponsored poem-cum-anthology in which Shakespeare’s ‘Phoenix and Turtle’ first appeared. Cf. for example Thomas Churchyard, The Worthines of Wales (London, 1587), D3v–E3r; Thomas Hughes, Misfortunes of Arthur, ed. Brian Jay Corrigan (New York: Garland, 1992), ‘The Argument of the Tragedie’, and 2.1.
Meenakshi Ponnuswami, ‘Celts and Celticists in Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 2:2 (Spring 1998), 69–88.
See, for example, J. Gwynfor Jones, ‘The Welsh Poets and their Patrons, c.1550–1640’, Welsh History Review, 9 (1978–79), 245–77, and Concepts of Order and Gentility in Wales 1540–1640 (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1992).
See, for example, Sir Henry Spelman, ‘Of the Union’, in Bruce R., eds, The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of 1604 Galloway and Brian P. Levack (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1985), pp. 161–84: pp. 165, 167.
E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), vol. 2, p. 352.
See, for example, W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
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Kerrigan, J. (2006). The Romans in Britain, 1603–1614. In: Burgess, G., Wymer, R., Lawrence, J. (eds) The Accession of James I. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501584_8
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