Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama

216 Pages·2009·1.28 MB·English

by  Lloyd Edward Kermode

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,andpoliticalissuesthatarosefrominter-
British contact and Continental immigration into England are
reinventedandrehearsedonthepublicstage.Kermodeuncoverstwo
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
EnglishnessreadsabodyofplaysthatrepresentsEnglishnessasastate
of ideological, invented superiority – paradoxically stable in its
constantchangeability,andbroughtintobeingbyincorporatingand
eventually even celebrating, rather than rejecting, the alien.
lloyd edward kermodeis Associate Professor in the
Department of English, California State University, Long Beach.
HeistheeditorofThreeRenaissanceUsuryPlays,andco-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
CaliforniaStateUniversity,
LongBeach
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 page ix
Acknowledgements xi
1 Introduction – aliens and the English in London 1
2 Discovering the alien in Elizabethan moral drama 23
3 Accommodating the alien in mid-Elizabethan London plays 59
4 Incorporating the alien in Shakespeare’s second tetralogy 85
5 Being the alien in late-Elizabethan London plays 119
Postscript: Early modern and post-modern alien excursions 150
Notes 155
Bibliography 184
Index 198
vii