Aliens And Englishness In Elizabethan Drama

This page intentionally left blank ALIENS AND ENGLISHNESS IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA Covering a wide variety of dramatic texts and performances from 1550 to 1600, including Shakespeare’s second tetralogy, this book explores moral, historical, and comic plays as contributions to Elizabethan debates on Anglo-foreign relations in England. The economic, social, religious, and political issues that arose from interBritish contact and Continental immigration into England are reinvented and rehearsed on the public stage. Kermode uncovers two broad ‘alien stages’ in the drama: distinctive but overlapping processes by which the alien was used to posit ideas and ideals of Englishness. Many studies of English national identity pit Englishness against the alien ‘other’ so that the native self and the alien settle into antithetical positions. In contrast, Aliens and Englishness reads a body of plays that represents Englishness as a state of ideological, invented superiority – paradoxically stable in its constant changeability, and brought into being by incorporating and eventually even celebrating, rather than rejecting, the alien. ll oy d e dw ar d k erm od e is Associate Professor in the Department of English, California State University, Long Beach. He is the editor of Three Renaissance Usury Plays, and co-editor, with Jason Scott-Warren and Martine van Elk, of Tudor Drama before Shakespeare, 1485–1590: New Directions for Research, Criticism, and Pedagogy. ALIENS AND ENGLISHNESS IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA LLOYD EDWARD KERMODE California State University, Long Beach CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521899536 © Lloyd Edward Kermode 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2009 ISBN-13 978-0-511-51788-4 eBook (NetLibrary) ISBN-13 978-0-521-89953-6 hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. For aliaunts and butterboxes Contents Preface Acknowledgements page ix xi 1 Introduction – aliens and the English in London 1 2