Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama
Author: Lloyd Edward Kermode
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Edition: 1st edition
Publication Date: 2009-03-23
Language: English
Paperback: 214 pages
ISBN-10: 0521899532
ISBN-13: 9780521899536
Book Description
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.
Review
Mary Floyd-Wilson, University of North Carolina
“… Aliens and Englishness is valuable and necessary for any attempt to understand the figure of the stranger or Other in early modern English drama. I have learned much from it.”
Shakespeare Quarterly
“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
Book Description
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