None a Stranger There
None a Stranger There
England and/in Europe on the Early Modern Stage
None a Stranger There offers a collection of wide-ranging essays that explore the creation and understanding of English identity through the lens of early modern drama. Drawing together a rich array of disciplines—literary criticism, theater history, linguistics, book history, and performance studies—the scholars in this collection illuminate how diverse or competing notions of “Englishness” can be seen and studied in early modern English plays. They are an especially fertile site of study because they enabled collective performances in a variety of settings, such as public theaters, royal courts, and streets. They engaged with live audiences from a cross section of society.
The contributors also draw parallels in plays of the period between past and present. They identify vivid struggles over controversies—especially Brexit and neonationalism—that still bedevil Britain and much of the western world: attitudes about and experiences of immigrants; xenophobia and tolerance; multiculturalism, assimilation, and hybridity; patriotism and jingoism; racial and ethnic identity; border-making and border-crossing; transnational itinerancy; and other topics.
None a Stranger There provides a nuanced understanding of how early modern dramatists shaped and responded to questions about English identity and its relationship with Europe and beyond. It emphasizes the fluidity and complexities of national identity, reminding us that these debates remain deeply relevant in an interconnected world.
CONTRIBUTORS
Heather Bailey / Todd Andrew Borlik / William Casey Caldwell / Matt Carter / Kevin Chovanec / John S. Garrison / Scott Oldenburg / Matteo Pangallo / Jamie Paris / Vimala C. Pasupathi / Kyle Pivetti / Margaret Tudeau-Clayton
A timely collection that explores continuities and differences across anti-immigrant ideologies of the early modern period and the politics of Brexit's neo-nationalism. Mobilizing historicist and presentist approaches, this collection mines the fraught tensions entailed in forging ethnic and national identities at moments when the imagined value of 'European' collective identity is hotly contested.' —Marjorie Rubright, associate professor of English and director of the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
Scott Oldenburg is professor of English at Tulane University. He is author of A Weaver-Poet and the Plague: Labor, Poverty, and the Household in Shakespeare’s London.
Matteo Pangallo is associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is author of Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reading Early Modern Drama after Brexit by Scott Oldenburg and Matteo Pangallo
Chapter 1. “The Uncertainty of This World”: Shakespeare in “Unprecedented” Times by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton
Chapter 2. Profiting in Babylon: Transnationalism and Typology in the Biblical Drama of the English Traveling Theater by Kevin Chovanec
Chapter 3. Astonished and Amazed: Early Modern English Black Christianity and Respectability Politics in Middleton and Munday’s The Triumphs of Truth by Jamie Paris
Chapter 4. The Nation Embarrassed: Shameful Memories in the Henriad by John S. Garrison and Kyle Pivetti
Chapter 5. Building a Wall around Tudor England: Coastal Forts and Fantasies of Border Control in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay by Todd Andrew Borlik
Chapter 6. The Brut, the Bruce, and Brexit: Scottish Independence in The Valiant Scot (1637), The Outlaw King (2018), and Robert the Bruce (2019) by Vimala C. Pasupathi
Chapter 7. English Imperialism and Staff Fighting in Mucedorus by Matt Carter
Chapter 8. “Let Burnt Sack Be the Issue:” Immigrants as Threat and Remedy in William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor by Heather Bailey
Chapter 9. “Thou Hast Incurred the Danger”: Shylock, Brexit, and Urban Citizenship by William Casey Caldwell
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
