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

In Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity, Ralf Hertel argues that early modern English drama helped to shape “the collective imagination” and develop “the nation as imagined community” well before England became a “factual nation-state” (23). Englishness, he asserts, “is considered as something brought forth by the spectators who participate in the theatre event by becoming eye witnesses of sorts of the events staged and who engage in the Englishness displayed theatrically” (1). While Hertel, a Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Hamburg, Germany, acknowledges that he is “no historian” (28), he also usefully summarizes the historical debate about national identity and when it emerges. This political background is essential for understanding his book’s contribution to the field. As Hertel emphasizes throughout the introduction, this study is “focused on the imagination of a national community, not on a nation which already has a fully functional political, legal or jurisdictional infrastructure” (21). Although the book fails to engage with much current scholarship, it demonstrates a reasonable connection between the historical drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and the idea of early modern English national identity.

The introduction outlines historical theories of nationalism; explores contested meanings of terms such as nation, nation-building, and national consciousness; and presents debates surrounding the concept and emergence of English national identity. The body of the book comprises five parts, each titled for what Hertel calls “widely accepted components” in the shaping of national consciousness: Territory, History, Religion, Class, and Gender (28). Each part consists of two chapters: a discussion of theoretical perspectives and early modern English historical and political contexts, and a case study that applies these perspectives and contexts to interpret a late-Elizabethan English history play. Four of the plays are Shakespearean: Henry IV Part 1, Richard III, King John, and Henry VI Part 2; the fifth is Marlowe’s Edward II. The book also includes fourteen figures, through which the author locates the plays “in the context of non-fictional texts…and cultural artefacts (such as maps or portraits)” (1). A bibliography and index follow the conclusion.

Part 1, “Territory,” analyzes England’s transformation from a territory into a homeland, or a “site of historical, and historic, events” (35). Hertel emphasizes “the rise of cartography from the late 1570s onwards” (38) and the corresponding late-sixteenth-century development of chorography, both of which, he states, facilitated England’s transformation into a homeland. He shows how Saxton, Camden, and Drayton incorporated images of people into their maps to illustrate the English people’s connection to the land (45), and how the narrative aspect of early modern chorography similarly inserted people into places (47). The author then interprets the effects of the “cartographic revolution” in Henry IV Part 1(49). Hertel demonstrates that this “centrifugal play” (58), with “scenes…[set] all over England” (64), places the territory of England on the stage in various ways, from the play’s wide range of English settings to its broad spectrum of English characters, many of whose names evoke the geography of England (66–68).

In Part 2, “History,” Hertel builds upon his claims in part 1 by arguing that “transforming space into national territory and terrain into homeland involves charging the topography with historical significance, providing the expanse of the land with a past, and adding a temporal dimension to the spatial one” (77). These two chapters focus upon the constructed nature of history and historical drama. Hertel provides an interesting and insightful explanation of Henry VII’s commissioning the Italian Polydore Vergil to write the Anglica Historia, a history of England “with a Continental readership in mind” (99), and how it subsequently motivated a patriotic “renationalization of England” (102). He traces the accounts of Richard III in sixteenth-century histories, from the Anglica Historiathrough the chronicles of Hall, Holinshed, Grafton, and Stow. The...