Staging England In the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity by Ralf Hertel (review)

Ralf Hertel’s latest publication offers a “novel approach” to the way we consider the “political drama of the late Elizabethan period” and its display of English national identity (1). It enters a crowded stage. Scholarship concerning the performance of English nationhood and history in the early modern period has a long and distinguished heritage. In particular, some of Shakespeare’s most sensitive readers have been drawn to consider not only the playwright’s articulations of Englishness, but also how the body politic functions in his oeuvre, from E. M. W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture(1943) and Shakespeare’s History Plays(1944) to Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations(1988) and John Kerrigan’s Archipelagic English(2007).

In broadening his scope beyond Shakespeare to Elizabethan writers, Hertel is able to incorporate the works of the Bard’s immediate forebear as the language’s greatest playwright, Christopher Marlowe. Analyzing the role of English identity in the work of sixteenth-century writers, thinkers, and dramatists, Hertel examines popular representations of perhaps the key foundation stone of what was to later emerge as a putatively singular British state. Furthermore, his study presents a valuable addition to the body of work asking how Englishness functions in the early modern, and in particular Shakespearean, theatre.

The most striking aspect of the book is its engagement with a broad range of critical themes. “Applying current political theory as well as methods established by recent performance studies,” Staging England in the Elizabethan History Playattempts to “shed . . . new light on the role the public theatre played in the negotiation of English national identity around 1600” (1). As such, Hertel’s study explores four distinct spheres of social relations: history, religion, class, and gender, each corresponding to established scholarly approaches, such as Marxist, historicist, queer, and feminist readings. However, in drawing on a diversity of methodologies, Hertel offers a wide-ranging examination of his subject matter. In an introduction commencing with a perspicacious reading of John of Gaunt’s peroration on “the scept’red isle” from Richard IIand how it articulates a “concept of a perishing England,” the author proceeds to provide a helpful summary of prevailing theories of nationhood (3). Sketching out the three principal paradigms—modernist, ethnosymbolist, and primordialist—of nationalism and their main tenets, Hertel establishes the scene of his ensuing discussion (12–23).

Such theoretical backgrounding, undergirded by reference to recent studies of nationalism by the likes of Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner, and Benedict Anderson, is augmented by an extensive summary of contemporary accounts of ideas regarding the prevailing nationalist concept of the sixteenth century: the commonwealth. Hertel argues that in replacing the older designation of realm, commonwealthshifted the emphasis of nationhood from the monarchy to the populace: “a commonwealth, in contrast [to a realm], aims by definition at common wealth, and is grounded in the people as a source of legitimacy” (11). Yet, this proto-democratic impulse, of egalitarianism, was modulated by the perceived imperviousness of class stratification. As the author details, influential writers like Thomas Elyot evidence an attempt to reconcile the notion of a mutually held stake in the land with the inherently tiered Great Chain of Being (155–58). Other interests beyond the aristocracy would also express similar sentiments: for example, for the sixteenth-century Church, Hertel observes, “the commonwealth is not a pre-Communist society but a strictly hierarchical society which maintains order for the benefit of all” (157).

One admirable trait of Staging England in the Elizabethan History Playis its map-mindedness. As historians of cartography like Richard Helgerson, John Harley, and Bernhard Klein have shown, the practice of recording the land played a fundamental role in the development of a cohesive national consciousness during the period. Serving in much the same manner as history plays as a medium for the performance of national identity, maps gave identity and shape to the emerging “imagined community” of...