Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama

by Lloyd Edward Kermode

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 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.

214 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Lloyd Edward Kermode is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. He edited Three Renaissance Usury Plays for the Revels Companion series (2009) and coedited Tudor Drama before Shakespeare (2004) and the collection “Space and Place in Early Modern Drama” for the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2013). He is the author of Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama (2009), and of a number of essays on cultural identity in literature and on the theory and experience of space in early modern England.