From the Romans to the Normans on the English Renaissance Stage [Hardcover]

This book examines the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century engagement with a crucial part of Britain's past, the period between the withdrawal of the Roman legions and the Norman Conquest. A number of early modern plays suggest an underlying continuity, an essential English identity linked to the land and impervious to change. This book considers the extent to which ideas about early modern English and British national, religious, and political identities were rooted in cultural constructions of the pre-Conquest past. Hopkins concludes her compelling study with the statement that there 'is a recurrent acknowledgment that a purely British identity is no longer possible (if indeed it ever was), because bloodlines have been diluted by wave after wave of invasion, but there is also a sense of a link between land and identity' (191). Hers is a book that presents a wealth of material and offers intriguing insights on questions of identity, succession, legitimacy, but also on how early modern writers viewed the distant past and gave it political significance. --Nicole Nyffenegger, University of Bern, Switzerland In the context of Brexit, as the rethinking of Europe and its borders is very much part of an enterprise bound up with memory of conquest, empire, and independence, this is a book that will get students reading, critics thinking, and people talking. Willy Maley, University of Glasgow