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  • Shakespeare and the Politics of Nostalgia: Negotiating the Memory of Elizabeth I on the Jacobean Stage by Yuichi Tsukada
  • Kavita Mudan Finn
SHAKESPEARE AND THE POLITICS OF NOSTALGIA: NEGOTIATING THE MEMORY OF ELIZABETH I ON THE JACOBEAN STAGE. By Yuichi Tsukada. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2019; pp. 232.

It is generally acknowledged that King James I of England was not as charismatic as his predecessor Queen Elizabeth I, and one suspects he knew it too. Problematic as her policies often were, Elizabeth’s death in 1603 nonetheless ushered in a period of nostalgia for the chivalric glamour associated with the long-reigning Virgin Queen. Shakespeare is no exception here, as many scholars have noted, often evoking the memory of Elizabeth in his plays that postdate her death—although she only appears onstage once in his oeuvre, as a speechless infant in Henry VIII or All Is True (1613). It is the more indirect evocations that Yuichi Tsukada explores in Shakespeare and the Politics of Nostalgia, not just as isolated representations of Elizabeth but as reflections of how James’s policies and propaganda grappled with rhetorical and actual nostalgia for Elizabeth.

The greatest strength of this study is Tsukada’s rich, nuanced rereadings of scenes from (and indeed critical interpretations of) Macbeth, Antony & Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline that would on the surface seem to be done to death. This book proves the contrary—that it is possible to find more complexity in Shakespeare’s engagement with both the monarch on the throne (James) and the looming shadow of his predecessor (Elizabeth) than has been previously assumed. In addition to discussing Shakespeare, Tsukada engages with other contemporary dramatists, poets, and essayists; James’s own official statements and policies; and the copious modern critical tradition. The result is a study that builds upon, rather than tearing down, those with whom it disagrees. Furthermore, the book’s conciseness, its careful engagement with critical conversations, and its clarity of style and argument make it especially useful for undergraduates approaching these thornier late plays, and for graduate students seeking models for how to productively engage with the enormous volume of Shakespeare criticism already available.

Several major themes emerge. The two plays with Roman settings use pageantry and triumphal imagery to both remember and question Elizabethan militarism. In the final actions of both Cleopatra and Volumnia, Tsukada finds carefully choreographed spectacles—Cleopatra’s suicide, Volumnia’s triumphal return to Rome after having engineered Coriolanus’s betrayal of the Volscians—that at least appear to give the powerful woman the final word. However, in both cases, the woman is silenced, much as Elizabeth was by death, losing “control over how her iconic power was to be used or how her image was to be posthumously interpreted” (144). By dramatizing not just the spectacle but also its reinscription under masculine influence, Shakespeare is able to acknowledge the power of nostalgia as well as how it can be controlled. These chapters are particularly compelling, especially the reading of Volumnia, which focuses on the largely wordless “triumphal march” to which critics have previously paid little attention.

The remaining two chapters explore plays set in Britain, although one of them, Cymbeline, does concern Rome. Macbeth, while the outlier, is well-positioned as the first chapter, since it is the play most explicitly engaged with the topics of Scotland and disputed succession. Tsukada uses the double prophecy of Birnam Wood and “no man of woman born” to read Malcolm’s invasion as “an attempt to rescue the people who are entrapped in the decaying body politic in much the same way as male physicians free trapped infants from their dying mothers” (40). This rhetorical choice echoes language used to describe the transition from Elizabeth’s reign to James’s, and James himself compares statecraft to medicine in texts such as Basilikon Doron. The choice to reveal the prophecies (and the accompanying silent [End Page 253] spectacle of the eight kings) via the witches, and for their success to be rooted in Macbeth’s misinterpretations, cements the witches as the true power players in the conflict, even when they disappear from the stage itself. The links among the matter of Britain, the...

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