Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama

Examines a variety of plays between 1550–1600 to demonstrate how they asserted ideas and ideals of 'Englishness' for audiences.

Lloyd Edward Kermode (Author)

9781107404786, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 19 July 2012

216 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.3 kg

'Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama offers an engaging journey into mid- to late-sixteenth century drama. … I recommend [it] to those who teach early modern English theatre as well as those more interested generally in issues of identity as reflected in drama.' William F. Hodapp, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching

Covering a wide variety of plays from 1550–1600, 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 inter-British 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 represent Englishness as a state of ideological, invented superiority - paradoxically stable in its constant changeability, and brought into being by incorporating and eventually accepting, and even celebrating, rather than rejecting the alien.

1. Introduction: aliens and the English in London
2. Discovering the alien in Elizabethan moral drama
3. Accommodating the alien in mid-Elizabethan London plays
4. Incorporating the alien in Shakespeare's second tetralogy
5. Being the alien in late Elizabethan London plays
Postscript.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature: history & criticism [DS]