British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (review)

Reviews 175 Parergon 21.2 (2004) Reviews Baker, David J. and Willy Maley, eds, British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2002; cloth; pp. xvi, 297; 10 halftone illustrations; RRP A$140, US$60, £42.50; ISBN 0521782007. This volume aims to provide a new multi-focal perspective of early modern literature and culture, one that actively engages with recent developments in historical research into the diverse significance and contradictions attached to ideas of Britishness in that period. It focuses not only on England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, but also beyond their frontiers, on continental Europe and the New World, wherever people hailing from these territories – with a range of competing political and religious allegiances – happened to be. Challenging and wide-ranging, the 15 essays in this volume have been organized around the primary camps of history and literature, but by further addressing a series of themes, such as ‘Contested Peripheries’, ‘Union Questions’, and ‘Britain’s Brave New Worlds’, they fulfill the editors’ aims to promote ‘disciplinary cross-pollination’ founded on a ‘flexible, trans-island paradigm’ of British history ‘that is capable of highly nuanced elaboration’ (p. 2). The project to elaborate on, or complicate, grand narratives is evident in ‘Revising criticism: Ireland and the British model’, in which Andrew Murphy challenges the ‘Atlanticist’ model of Ireland’s colonization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whereby Ireland and the Irish were shown to have been counterparts of the NewWorld and its natives.Arguing Ireland’s distinctly European identity in early modern English colonial discourse, Murphy also positions his work in contrast with both the New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, both of which he suggests ‘engage primarily with large-scale structures and systems of power within cultural history’ (p. 33). One of the most fascinating essays in the collection is Christopher Highley’s discussion of the intersections between religious and nationalist modes of collective identity as manifested in rivalries between Welsh and English Catholics in Rome. By extension, Highley addresses the predominance of nationalism – even of localism – in preventing successful collaboration between English Catholics and their counterparts, not only in Spain and France, but also in Ireland and Scotland and Wales. 176 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) The section on ‘British Shakespeare’ is a mixed bag. Matthew Greenfield presents an interesting discussion of 1Henry IV, which addresses its ambivalent, pluralist treatment of the national-imperial motif, and the range of shifting communities and alliances illustrated in the play, the essay preceded by a suggestion that ‘we will not have fully demonstrated the new British history’s value to literary critics until we can bring it to bear on Twelfth Night as well as Henry V’ (p. 71). Patricia Parker’s reading of the latter play, ‘Uncertain Unions: Welsh leeks in Henry V’fails to rise beyond the inevitable quibbling about ‘leeks’and ‘leaks’, or ‘breaches’; but, by contrast, Mary Floyd Wilson’s discussion of Cymbeline and the implications of the of the Briton acceptance of Roman rule and civilization as a ‘model of submission for Scotland to emulate in its union with England’ (p. 108), is a fine example of interdisciplinary work. There are significant points of convergence between some of the diverse essays in the collection, continuities which shed light on the merits of the mode of research proposed in this collection. Thus,Andrew Hadfield uncovers a similar use of the theme of the Roman colonization of ancient Britain in early modern justifications of the British colonization of the New World (pp. 164-9). Titled ‘Historians respond’, the closing section of the book provides some of the even-handed criticism of the limitations of this project. Thus, Derek Hirst argues the need for historians to incorporate some of the methodologies already established in literary study, by being ‘open to the permeability of generic and disciplinary distinctions among texts’ (p. 256). Jane Ohlmeyer, in turn, questions the perhaps excessive attention paid to Shakespeare in the volume in preference to non-canonical literature, while she also stresses the need to pay much more attention to polemical material in the Gaelic languages – and in Latin (pp. 2479 ). This is, of course, a bias which is...