Abstract
In 1548, the Dutch-born London bookmaker Reyner Wolfe devised a plan to create a chronicle of the world that incorporated every national history into a grand narrative.1 Although he was a foreigner, he prospered in his adoptive home to the point that he became the favored printer of the three English monarchs Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. He hired native Englishman Raphael Holinshed to assist him in his ambitious endeavor—ambitious not least because Wolfe lived during a period shocked with the discoveries of new lands at a rapid rate, even as England and its neighboring European nations were all rocked repeatedly by political and religious strife as they too expanded to accommodate waves of immigrants. At a time when the shifting world was growing at a dizzying pace, the printer decided to concentrate it into the pages of a single magisterial work. Wolfe died before realizing the fruits of his labors, but Holinshed (who subsequently hired his own assistants) published a portion of their efforts in 1577 as The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland.2 This text was so popular that multiple editions were printed that same year, while three more editions emerged within the decade. Its influence reverberated throughout the canon of early modern English literature, as is reflected in the works of Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and John Milton, to name but a few.3
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Notes
Andrew Pettegree, “Wolfe, Reyner (d. in or before 1574),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004). http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/101029835/Reyner-Wolfe; accessed March 1, 2014.
For two recent influential studies of this text, see Paulina Kewes, Ian Archer, and Felicity Heal, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013);
and Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994).
Holinshed’s influence on Shakespeare is by now a critical commonplace, but he never mentions Boudicca by name. Nevertheless, Boudicca appears in Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queenes, Edmund Spenser’s Ruines of Time, John Fletcher’s Bonduca, and Milton’s Historie of Britain. For a recent essay encapsulating Holinshed’s influence on Spenser, see Richard McCabe, “Spenser and Holinshed” in The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012).
For Fletcher’s use of Holinshed’s Boudicca, see Claire Jowitt, Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, 1589–1642: Real and Imagined Worlds (New York: Manchester UP, 2003), 104–140.
For Milton’s famous defamation of the queen, see Willy Maley, “The Fatal Boadicia: Depicting Women in Milton’s History of Britain, 1670” in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008), 305–30.
For an extended list of English authors who mention Boudicca (as well as their variant spellings of her name), see Aleks Matza, Boudica: Historical Commentaries, Poetry, and Plays (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2010), 14–15.
Carolyn Williams, Boudicca and Her Stories: Narrative Transformations of a Warrior Queen (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2009), also lists her various names on 44–55.
For an insightful reading connecting individual biography with the writing of national history, see Stephanie Lawson, “Nationalism and Biographical Transformation: The Case of Boudicca,” Humanities Research 19.1 (January 2013): 101–19.
Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994). Patterson also notes that Holinshed greatly augments his sources in his narration of Voadicia’s speech (104–5).
For another study that recognizes Boudicca’s instrumental role in the formation of British identity in the Chronicles, see Jennifer Feather, Writing Combat and the Self in Early Modern English Literature: The Pen and the Sword (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 82–92. Feather emphasizes how “Voadicia envisions the Britons as a coherent people in her speech” (91). She adds, “the process whereby Voadicia creates British identity reveals the power of violence to establish and naturalize a communal identity” (92). She concludes that Holinshed celebrates savagery as the means by which to form British coherence; my reading diverges in that I see femininity and not savagery as the defining factor of British identity as it emerges in the Boudicca episode.
There is a vast amount of recent work on the fundamental multiplicity of early modern Britishness. See, for instance, the excellent collection edited by Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003);
Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989);
John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008);
Claire McEachern, “Literature and National Identity,” in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 313–42;
and Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004).
Kat Lecky, “Naturalization in the Mirror and A Mask,” Studies in English Literature 54.1 (Winter 2014): 125–42.
John E. Curran, Roman Invasions: The British History, Protestant Anti-Romanism, and the Historical Imagination in England, 1530–1660 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, 2002).
For instance, one of the most influential recent works on Shakespeare’s response to republicanism, Oliver Arnold’s The Third Citizen: Shakespeare’s Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2007), consistently uses the term “subject” rather than “citizen” to describe the Elizabethan commons. Furthermore, Arnold reads the republican version of representative government during this period as a form of “patriarchal tyranny ” that mirrors the “political tyranny” of monarchy (130). Similarly, Andrew Hadfield’s otherwise comprehensive analysis of republicanism in Shakespeare’s plays deals with this political system’s relations to the powers-that-be rather than with the important place of citizens within this economy: see Hadfields’ Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.) John Michael Archer at once constricts and effaces the concept of the citizen in Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.) He reduces the definition of Elizabethan citizenship in Shakespeare’s plays to a function of economic privilege in the city of London by arguing, “citizenship in Shakespeare cannot be understood apart from the city and the language of its material culture,” while asserting that ultimately “citizenship expanded [during the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries], but it dissolved into subjecthood as it did so” (165–66). One notable exception is Julia Reinhard Lupton’s excellent study Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005), which expands the parameters of citizenship to include the commonwealth as a whole, and includes a provocative chapter on Milton’s Samson Agonistes. For shorter essays that advocate a more inclusive definition of early modern citizenship,
see Markku Peltonen, “Rhetoric and Citizenship in the Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I,” in The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: E ssays in Response to Patrick Collinson, ed. John F. McDiarmid (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 109–28. In this essay, Peltonen reveals the tension between inclusive and exclusive models of active citizenship by analyzing “the centrality of eloquence in the Elizabethan notion of citizenship”: a notion that ultimately privileges those who had access to rhetorical education (110). Patrick Collinson also focuses on the elites of sixteenth-century Elizabethan republicanism, but nevertheless asserts that principles of engaged citizenship cut across class boundaries. See “The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I” in Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), 19–58.
Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009), 118.
Joy Connolly, The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007), 10. For another exploration of republican citizenship, which “conceives the citizen as someone who plays an active role in shaping the future direction of his or her society through political debate and decision-making,”
see David Miller, Citizenship and National Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 53–60, citation on 53.
Neil Hertz, “Medusa’s Head: Male Hysteria under Politica l Pressure,” in The End of the Line (New York: Columbia UP, 1985), 199–230; citation on 205. Page numbers follow in the text.
Jodi Mikalachki reads Boudicca as the embodiment of the foreclosed “maternal” medieval past with which post-Reformation masculine writers had to struggle in The Legacy of Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1998), 118. She argues as well that “the figure of Boadicea registers masculine concern with female authority” until at least the rule of Margaret Thatcher in the twentieth century (117), and points out that sixteenth-century writers from Polydore Virgil onward kept butting up against the figure of the Iceni queen as they attempted to construct a British history of Roman origins (119). In this view, Boudicca is the abject center of humanist historiographies that desired to define nationalism in classical terms by aligning it with the venerable topos of republican Rome. Mikalachki posits Holinshed among the historians unanimously aligned in condemnation of the ancient British queen, and asserts that Holinshed, like Camden in the Britannia, initially sympathizes with Boudicca but ultimately places his allegiance with the Romans (121). For a counter-reading, see Judith Mossman, “Holinshed and the Classics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles, ed. Paulina Kewes, Ian Archer, and Felicity Heal (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 303–17, especially 311–17. In her account, Holinshed condemns the Roman conquest of Britain (311). She also notes that Holinshed revises his source texts to showcase Boudicca’s rebellion (and savagery) as driven by personal revenge against the men who raped her daughters, and argues “In Holinshed, then, Voadicia is the one really vocal champion of British liberty against the Romans” (316).
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© 2015 Carole Levin and Christine Stewart-Nuñez
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Lecky, K. (2015). How the Iceni Became British: Holinshed’s Boudicca and the Rhetoric of Naturalization. In: Levin, C., Stewart-Nuñez, C. (eds) Scholars and Poets Talk about Queens. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137534903_7
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