Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age

by Carole Levin, John Watkins

Overview

In Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds, Carole Levin and John Watkins focus on the relationship between the London—based professional theater preeminently associated with William Shakespeare and an unprecedented European experience of geographic, social, and intellectual mobility. Shakespeare's plays bear the marks of exile and exploration, rural depopulation, urban expansion, and shifting mercantile and diplomatic configurations. He fills his plays with characters testing the limits of personal identity: foreigners, usurpers, outcasts, outlaws, scolds, shrews, witches, mercenaries, and cross—dressers.

Through parallel discussions of Henry VI, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice, Levin and Watkins argue that Shakespeare's centrality to English national consciousness is inseparable from his creation of the foreign as a category asserting dangerous affinities between England's internal minorities and its competitors within an increasingly fraught European mercantile system. As a women's historian, Levin is particularly interested in Shakespeare's responses to marginalized sectors of English society. As a scholar of English, Italian Studies, and Medieval Studies, Watkins situates Shakespeare in the context of broadly European historical movements.

Together Levin and Watkins narrate the emergence of the foreign as portable category that might be applied both to "strangers" from other countries and to native—born English men and women, such as religious dissidents, who resisted conformity to an increasingly narrow sense of English identity. Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds will appeal to historians, literary scholars, theater specialists, and anyone interested in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801477980
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2012
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Carole Levin is Willa Cather Professor of History at the University of Nebraska. She is the author of several books, including Dreaming the English Renaissance: Politics and Desire in Court and Culture. John Watkins is Professor of English, Italian Studies, and Medieval Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is the author most recently of Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Part I Gender, Punishment, and Peace-Making in 1 Henry VI

1 "Murder not then the fruit within my womb": Shakespeare's Joan, Foxes Guernsey Martyr, and Women Pleading Pregnancy in English History and Culture 25

2 Shakespeare's 1 Henry VI and the Tragedy of Renaissance Diplomacy 51

Part II Aliens in Our Midst: Jews, Italians, and Wary Englishmen in The Merchant of Venice

3 Converting the Daughter: Gender, Power, and Jewish Identity in the English Renaissance 85

4 Shakespeare and the Decline of the Venetian Republic 111

Part III Dangerous Reading in The Taming of the Shrew

5 Many Different Kates: Taming Shrews and Queens 145

6 Shakespeare and the Women Writers of the Veneto 177

Afterword 207

Index 211