Whose English is 'true' English? What is its relation to the national character? These were urgent questions in Shakespeare's England just as questions of language and identity are today. Through close readings of early comedies and history plays, this study demonstrates how Shakespeare resists the shaping of ideas of the English language and national character by Protestant Reformation ideology. Tudeau-Clayton argues this ideology promoted the notional temperate and honest citizen, plainly spoken and plainly dressed, as the normative centre of (the) 'true' English. Compelling studies of two symmetrical pairs of cultural memes: 'the King's English' versus 'the gallimaufry' and 'the true-born Englishman' versus the 'Fantastical Gull', demonstrate how 'the traitor' came to be defined as much by non-conformity to cultural 'habits' as by allegiance to the monarch. Tudeau-Clayton cogently argues Shakespeare subverted this narrow, class-inflected concept of English identity, proposing instead an inclusive, mixed and unlimited community of 'our English'.

In this wide-ranging and original study, Margaret Tudeau-Clayton examines how Virgil--the poet as well as his texts--was mediated in early modern England. She analyzes what was at stake in the reproduction and circulation of these mediations of Virgil, focusing specifically on the works of Ben Jonson and on one of Shakespeare's most resonantly Virgilian plays, The Tempest. She argues that the play offers a complex model of cultural and socio-political resistance by engaging critically not only with contemporary mediations of Virgil, but with the ways they were used, especially by Jonson, to reproduce structures of authority (in relation to nature and language as well as to the socio-political order). She also shows how instructive comparisons may be drawn between the ways Virgil was constructed and used in early modern England and the ways Shakespeare has been constructed and used, especially as national poet, from the early modern period until our own time.

Is Shakespeare English, British, neither or both? Addressing from various angles the relation of the figure of the national poet/dramatist to constructions of England and Englishness this collection of essays probes the complex issues raised by this question, first through explorations of his plays, principally though not exclusively the histories (Part One), then through discussion of a range of subsequent appropriations and reorientations of Shakespeare and 'his' England (Part Two). If Shakespeare has been taken to stand for Britain as well as England, as if the two were interchangeable, this double identity has come under increasing strain with the break-up - or shake-up - of Britain through devolution and the end of Empire. Essays in Part One examine how the fissure between English and British identities is probed in Shakespeare's own work, which straddles a vital juncture when an England newly independent from Rome was negotiating its place as part of an emerging British state and empire. Essays in Part Two then explore the vexed relations of 'Shakespeare' to constructions of authorial identity as well as national, class, gender and ethnic identities. At this crucial historical moment, between the restless interrogations of the tercentenary celebrations of the Union of Scotland and England in 2007 and the quatercentenary celebrations of the death of the bard in 2016, amid an increasing clamour for a separate English parliament, when the end of Britain is being foretold and when flags and feelings are running high, this collection has a topicality that makes it of interest not only to students and scholars of Shakespeare studies and Renaissance literature, but to readers inside and outside the academy interested in the drama of national identities in a time of transition.

Is Shakespeare English, British, neither or both? Addressing from various angles the relation of the figure of the national poet/dramatist to constructions of England and Englishness this collection of essays probes the complex issues raised by this question, first through explorations of his plays, principally though not exclusively the histories (Part One), then through discussion of a range of subsequent appropriations and reorientations of Shakespeare and 'his' England (Part Two). If Shakespeare has been taken to stand for Britain as well as England, as if the two were interchangeable, this double identity has come under increasing strain with the break-up - or shake-up - of Britain through devolution and the end of Empire. Essays in Part One examine how the fissure between English and British identities is probed in Shakespeare's own work, which straddles a vital juncture when an England newly independent from Rome was negotiating its place as part of an emerging British state and empire. Essays in Part Two then explore the vexed relations of 'Shakespeare' to constructions of authorial identity as well as national, class, gender and ethnic identities. At this crucial historical moment, between the restless interrogations of the tercentenary celebrations of the Union of Scotland and England in 2007 and the quatercentenary celebrations of the death of the bard in 2016, amid an increasing clamour for a separate English parliament, when the end of Britain is being foretold and when flags and feelings are running high, this collection has a topicality that makes it of interest not only to students and scholars of Shakespeare studies and Renaissance literature, but to readers inside and outside the academy interested in the drama of national identities in a time of transition.

Whose English is 'true' English? What is its relation to the national character? These were urgent questions in Shakespeare's England just as questions of language and identity are today. Through close readings of early comedies and history plays, this study demonstrates how Shakespeare resists the shaping of ideas of the English language and national character by Protestant Reformation ideology. Tudeau-Clayton argues this ideology promoted the notional temperate and honest citizen, plainly spoken and plainly dressed, as the normative centre of (the) 'true' English. Compelling studies of two symmetrical pairs of cultural memes: 'the King's English' versus 'the gallimaufry' and 'the true-born Englishman' versus the 'Fantastical Gull', demonstrate how 'the traitor' came to be defined as much by non-conformity to cultural 'habits' as by allegiance to the monarch. Tudeau-Clayton cogently argues Shakespeare subverted this narrow, class-inflected concept of English identity, proposing instead an inclusive, mixed and unlimited community of 'our English'.

In this wide-ranging and original study, Margaret Tudeau-Clayton examines how Virgil--the poet as well as his texts--was mediated in early modern England. She analyzes what was at stake in the reproduction and circulation of these mediations of Virgil, focusing specifically on the works of Ben Jonson and on one of Shakespeare's most resonantly Virgilian plays, The Tempest. She argues that the play offers a complex model of cultural and socio-political resistance by engaging critically not only with contemporary mediations of Virgil, but with the ways they were used, especially by Jonson, to reproduce structures of authority (in relation to nature and language as well as to the socio-political order). She also shows how instructive comparisons may be drawn between the ways Virgil was constructed and used in early modern England and the ways Shakespeare has been constructed and used, especially as national poet, from the early modern period until our own time.

This volume addresses the multiple, complex and overlapping, sometimes contradictory and frequently strange forms of knowledge in circulation during a period which has always been recognized as a turning point in the intellectual history of Western Europe, and which is described alternatively as "early modern" or "Renaissance". The problems of the label "early modern" are discussed, including the implied rupture with earlier periods, and the consequent denial of the difference or "otherness" of the complex material particularities - the textures - of these forms of knowledge. It is to a variety of such textures - to textualized spaces and material artifacts as well as to "literay" and "non-literary" texts - that the distinguished contributors to this volume attend. Drawing on a range of critical discourses they engage with these textures in the more nuanced styles of interpretative practice which are emerging in the wake of new historicism and cultural materialism, and which represent a significant shift in critical approach and focus. Individual essays as well as the volume as a whole should be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students as well as to scholars of the period.