Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan drama

Abstract

Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama, by Lloyd Edward Kermode. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xi + 202. $99.00. We live in a world, especially in America, where a secure sense of national identity is constantly threatened by elements perceived as alien to a superior native heritage, political, economic, linguistic, or religious. Some universalizing health care as a socialist and therefore foreign program; others resent illegal immigrants as competing unfairly with native workers, as unwelcome intruders who, at very least, should be required to learn English; still others are suspicious of persons who fall outside familiar patterns of JudeoChristian worship, perceiving them as potential terrorists. Popular anxiety about invasive foreignness emerges in bumper stickers that read Buy American or in need to rename french-fried potatoes freedom fries. Once feared imports have become sufficiently assimilated, however, Americans tend to accept them as aspects of a traditional melting-pot diversity - a diversity fundamental to, and definitional of, culture. Kermode considers such issues in Elizabethan England, proposing to analyze them as reflected in a range of plays dating from 1550s to close of century. His organization is chronological. Two early chapters discuss allegorical plays: anonymous Wealth and Health, FuI well' s Like Will to Like, Wapull's Tide Tarrieth No Man, and Wilson's Three Ladies of London with its sequel, Three Lords and Three Ladies of London. Brief consideration of Sir Thomas More, in which Shakespeare had a hand, leads to a chapter on bard's second tetralogy, which in turn is followed by a concluding analysis of three very different comedies from 1590s - Haughton's Englishmen for My Money, Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday, and Marston's Jack Drum's Entertainment. Although generically diverse, all these plays, in author's view, contribute to an ongoing debate about nature and quality of Anglo-foreign relations in period. Kermode sees English as initially vindicating their sense of superior national selfhood by contrasting it with foreignness, usually as manifested by residents or visitors from Holland or France, but also by cultures psychologically closer to home - Welsh, Scottish, and Irish. Continental residents are seen as contaminating English morals by taking advantage of Christian hospitality and by corrupting native generosity to make profit at all costs dominant imperative. Jewishness additionally enters mix since stereotypes of usurer, moneylender, and dealer in foreign trade often influence dramatic characterization. Kermode' s principal argument, however, is that sense of Englishness that progressively develops in these dramas moves quickly beyond a simple antithesis of self versus the other by incorporating and eventually even celebrating foreignness that it had begun by rejecting. As he writes, The English are a people rife [ripe?] for alien confusion, resisting alien but subject to absorbing habits of others, afraid of foreignness but needing (to understand or contain) foreign to bolster and inoculate self against what they fear (64). Thus theater can function not merely as a mirror of national identity; it actually constructs that identity performatively by absorbing and selectively reshaping elements of alien to project a heightened self-definition of Englishness. Paradoxically, process of constant mutation over time becomes only constant, a conclusion too predictable, one might think, to justify laborious superstructure of theoretical excogitation erected to support it. This is not to gainsay impressive amount of historical research on political and social background that informs Kermode' s discussion. His summary of relevant demographics is helpful, since burgeoning concentration of foreigners in urban centers (particularly London) was a significant factor. …