Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama [Paperback]

Examines a variety of plays between 15501600 to demonstrate how they asserted ideas and ideals of 'Englishness' for audiences.Covering a variety of plays from 15501600, this book examines the ways in which this medium of popular entertainment was also a tool to assert an idea of national identity for audiences. Kermode uncovers how the alien or foreign 'other' was used to posit ideas and ideals of Englishness.Covering a variety of plays from 15501600, this book examines the ways in which this medium of popular entertainment was also a tool to assert an idea of national identity for audiences. Kermode uncovers how the alien or foreign 'other' was used to posit ideas and ideals of Englishness.Covering a wide variety of plays from 15501600, 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 Elizabetl³'