This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard (review)

[Erratum]

Spurred by the approaching quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, as well as by a desire to expand studies of Shakespeare and the British question beyond the Celtic margins to encompass an English “core,” the essays in this capacious collection explore Shakespeare’s relationship to nation and empire across a wide swath of textual and historical contexts. The ten essays that comprise the volume, excluding a detailed introduction and a brief afterword, reveal how the elusiveness of Shakespeare’s corpus both propels and undermines nationalist and imperialist projects, then and now. If Shakespeare has been credited with embodying the essence of Englishness, these essays unravel the very notion of nationalist identity, building on Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities” to expose it as the trace of a presence that never was. Instead of a Shakespeare fully embodying Englishness, these essays offer a more seasoned view of a dramatist who, as Andrew Hadfield argues in his concluding piece, evidenced a good degree of cynicism about the motives and mechanisms underpinning nation formation. Far from reclaiming and fixing an English core, then, the volume’s contributors deconstruct that very enterprise.

The editors have organized the contributions into two broad chronological sections. Part 1 provides coverage of the early modern moment, with a particular emphasis on Shakespeare’s history plays, supplemented by an opening focus on the romance Pericles. Essays in this section explore how early modern England’s self-definition emerged in contradistinction to Britain and expose the fissures and obstacles to English nation formation. The second part surveys contemporary appropriations of the Bard and his milieu, assessing the ideological implications of a range of textual and cultural artifacts, including newspaper articles, French opera, contemporary English poetry, and historical recreations of sixteenth-century Stratford-upon-Avon. Precisely because this section analyzes such a rich set of texts and media, it sometimes feels sprawling and dispersed in focus, but this effect is countered by a tendency among the contributors to animate their inquiries with reference to defining moments in the plays, whether Gaunt’s “sceptered isle” speech or the assimilative gesture of Henry V’s “band of brothers” speech. The defining terms and tropes of such moments ripple across the essays, providing continuities and links amid the otherwise diverse objects of analysis.

Launching the volume is a provocative essay by Thomas Roebuck and Laurie Maguire that explores dramatic romance, particularly Pericles, as a mode successful at “papering over political divisions on the Jacobean stage” (47) and at advancing a more heterogeneous and imperial state structure as compared with the strictly dynastic emphasis of the history play. The authors read Pericles as performing a more metaphorical version of King Lear’s “search for British historical origins” (25), evidenced in its focus on liminal shorelines, a trope commonly associated with Britain’s entry into world history. The next set of essays by Willy Maley and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton destabilize readings of the history plays—especially King John—as engines of nation formation. Maley’s essay, “‘And bloody England into England gone’: Empire, Monarchy, and Nation in King John,” challenges the claim that the play locates corporate essence in the monarch, proposing that it fixates instead on “England’s divided state” and betrays a “messiness” that reveals a more “‘modern’ and ‘political’” stance toward “sovereignty, statehood and empire” (56, 51) than has hitherto been granted. Tudeau-Clayton unearths a similarly subversive quality to the drama in exploring the figure of the motley dressed Englishman in history plays and romantic comedies, detecting an ideological “alliance” between the two genres (77). In her analysis of this sartorial hybrid, she discovers the drama’s resistance to an emerging normative ideological center, which defines itself in relation to an “‘ancient’ native ‘manly’ character” (64) and against an elite body construed as foreign and effeminate. Plays like The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado about Nothing interrogate...