Abstract
What did Shakespeare think of the British project? Was he in favour of a union? Opposed to one? Did he change his mind? Or did he simply produce a vision in line with popular contemporary thought? His plays show how clearly he was interested in — or at least prepared to engage with — the British question.
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Notes
Howard Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pt 1.
Willy Maley, ‘“This sceptred isle”: Shakespeare and the British Problem’, in John Joughin, ed., Shakespeare and National Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 83–108, at p. 84;
Henry V ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), Introduction, p. 7.
See also the lively discussion of these issues in Matthew A. Greenfield’s ‘Fragments of Nationalism in Troilus and Cressida’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000), pp. 181–200.
For recent analysis, see John E. Curran, Jr., Roman Invasions: the British History, Protestant Anti-Romanism, and the Historical Imagination in England, 1530–1660 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002).
For comment see Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ch. 6;
Jerry Leath Mills, ‘Spenser and the Numbers of History: a Note on the British and Elfin Chronicles in The Faerie Queene’, Philological Quarterly, 55 (1976), pp. 281–7;
Heather Dubrow, ‘The Arraignment of Paridell: Tudor Historiography in The Faerie Queene, III. ix’, Studies in Philology, 87 (1990), pp. 312–28.
See Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977);
Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: the Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 1996).
Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: the Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
See Steven G. Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447–1603: English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule (London: Longman, 1998), ch. 12;
J. J. Silke, Kinsale: the Spanish Intervention in Ireland at the End of the Elizabethan Wars (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1970);
T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne, eds, A New History of Ireland, Vol. III: Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), ch. 4.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 54. All subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text.
Nahum Tate, The history of King Lear: acted at the Queens Theatre reviv’d with alterations (1681), p. 67.
For details, see Wallace Notestein, The House of Commons, 1604–1610 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 78–85.
King Lear ed. Jay L. Halio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Introduction, pp. 1–2.
See Notestein, House of Commons, pp. 60–78; David Harris Willson, King James VI and I (London: Cape, 1956), pp. 247–9.
Allardyce Nicoll and Josephine Nicoll, eds, Holinshed’s Chronicle as Used in Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Everyman, 1927), pp. 228–9.
See Lila Geller, ‘Cymbeline and the Imagery of Covenant Theology’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 20 (1980), pp. 241–55, at p. 246.
See David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), ch. 7;
Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), ch. 6.
See, for example, Derick R. C. Marsh, The Recurring Miracle: a Study of Cymbeline and the Last Plays (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1980, rpt of 1962), Introduction.
For recent discussion, see Jennifer Richards and James Knowles, eds, Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).
See David M. Bergeron, Shakespeare’s Romances and the Royal Family (Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1985), pp. 136–57.
See Thomas G. Olsen, ‘Iachimo’s “Drug-Damn’d Italy” and the Problem of British National Character in Cymbeline’, Shakespeare Yearbook, 10 (1999), pp. 269–96.
For excellent discussions, see Terence Hawkes, ‘Aberdaugleddyf’, Shakespeare in the Present (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 46–65;
Ronald J. Boiling, ‘Anglo-Welsh Relations in Cymbeline’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000), pp. 33–66.
Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present, pp. 49–50. See also Emrys Jones, ‘Stuart Cymbeline’, Essays in Criticism, 11 (1961), pp. 84–99.
Claire Jowitt, Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, 1589–1642: Real and Imagined Worlds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), ch. 3.
See also Lisa Hopkins, ‘“It is place which lessens and sets off”: Perspective and Representation in Cymbeline’, Shakespeare Yearbook, 10 (1999), pp. 253–68.
For some comments on the cyclical nature of seventeenth-century British history, see Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 14.
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© 2004 Andrew Hadfield
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Hadfield, A. (2004). Shakespeare’s Ecumenical Britain. In: Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502703_11
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