Repeating Englands: The Transatlantic Archipelago and Early Modern Britain

Abstract

abstract: In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, English conquest narratives set in the Americas and popular entertainments increasingly represented a unified Britain through the figure of a “repeating England”: an insular refuge in an inchoate ocean of dangers that linked the work of English homemakers to colonial settlers. This article charts that development in two parts. It begins in the late sixteenth century, when conquest writers like George Peckham and John Hutchinson were exchanging the geographic insularity of earlier English self-representation for a model that viewed Englishness not as genealogical or place-based, but as archipelagic and mobile, maintained in and across English homes on both sides of the Atlantic. Englishness here is not a geographic context but a blueprint for producing and possessing an English place through the labors of English “planters.” Jacobean entertainments by Thomas Dekker and John Middleton then drew on this earlier conquest writing to stage Britishness through perspectival techniques that unified subjects in radically different viewing positions and made Britishness a matter of perspective. By following these repeating Englands from page to stage and from Ireland to the Americas, this analysis shows how English writers created a unified Britain from colonial materials and represented Britishness as an extension of settler identity.