Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature

Shakespeare to Milton

Willy Maley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780333640777
• eBook ISBN:
  9781403990471
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book, original in emphasis, daring in execution, maps out the shaping power of English Renaissance literature in creating and contesting national and colonial identities through the work of major canonical authors including Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton. Informed throughout by the burgeoning fields of the new British history and postcolonial criticism, this volume marks a dramatic shift in studies of the early modern period, from Irish to British concerns, thus accounting for the interplay of union, plantation, and conquest.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: Fostering Discussion – From the Irish Question to the British Problem by Way of the English Renaissance
• 1 ‘This Sceptred Isle’: Shakespeare and the British Problem
• 2 Postcolonial Cymbeline: Sovereignty and Succession from Roman to Renaissance Britain
• 3 Shakespeare, Holinshed and Ireland: Resources and Con-texts
• 4 Forms of Discrimination in Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland (1596; 1633): From Dialogue to Silence
• 5 ‘Another Britain’? Bacon’s Certain Considerations Touching the Plantation in Ireland (1606; 1657)
• 6 Fording the Nation: Abridging History in Perkin Warbeck (1633)
• 7 Milton’s Observations (1649) and ‘the Complication of Interests’ in Early Modern Ireland
• Notes
• Index