The subject of Britain analyses key seventeenth-century texts by Bacon, Jonson and Shakespeare within the context of the English reign of King James VI and I, whose desire to create a united Britain prompted serious reflection on questions of nationhood. This book traces writing on Britain and Britishness in succession literature, panegyric, Union tracts and treatises, play-texts and atlases. Focusing on texts printed in London and Edinburgh, as well as manuscript material that circulated within and across Britain and Ireland, this book sheds valuable light on texts in relation to the wider geopolitical context that informed their production. Combining literary criticism with political analysis and book history, The subject of Britain offers a fresh approach to a significant moment in British history, and will appeal to postgraduates and undergraduates of early modern British literary history. -- .

Contents:
Introduction: Sites of Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture Grant Williams and Christopher Ivic
Part One: Embodiments
1. The Decay of Memory William E. Engel
2. Lethargic Corporeality on and off the Early Modern Stage Garrett A. Sullivan Jr.
3. Pleasure's Oblivion: Displacements of Generation in Spenser's Faerie Queene Elizabeth D. Harvey
Part Two: Signs
4. Textual Crudities in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica Grant Williams
5. Off the Subject: Early Modern Poets on Rhyme, Distraction, and Forgetfulness Amanda Watson
Part Three: Narratives
6. Reassuring Fratricide in 1 Henry IV Christopher Ivic
7. 'The Religion I Was Born In': Forgetting Catholicism and Remembering the King Donne's Devotions David J. Baker
8. Legends of Oblivion: Enchantment and Enslavement in Book Six of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Elizabeth Mazzola
Part Four: Localities
9. Nomadic Eros: Remapping Knowledge in A Midsummer Night's Dream Philippa Berry
10. 'Unless You Could Teach Me to Forget': Spectatorship, Self-Forgetting, and Subversion in Antitheatrical Literature and As You Like It Zackariah Long
11. Monuments and Ruins: Spenser and the Problem of the English Library Jennifer Summit

This collection of essays historicizes and theorizes forgetting in English Renaissance literary texts and their cultural contexts. Its essays open up an area of study overlooked by contemporary Renaissance scholarship, which is too often swayed by a critical paradigm devoted to the "art of memory." This volume recovers the crucial role of forgetting in producing early modernity's subjective and collective identities, desires and fantasies.

The Arden Shakespeare Dictionary on Shakespeare and National Identity makes a timely and valuable contribution to the discipline. National identity in the early modern period is a central topic of scholarly investigation; it is also a dominant topic in classroom instruction and discussion. More than any other early modern playwright, Shakespeare (especially his history plays) is at the heart of recent critical investigations into a host of relevant topics: borders, history, identity, land, memory, nation, place and space. This Dictionary works through Shakespeare's plays and the cultural moment in which they were produced to provide a rich and informative account of such topics. An ideal reference work for upper level students and scholars and an essential resource for any literary library.