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

Abstract

Propelled by a renewed interest in histories of globalization, Shakespeare and Renaissance studies have undergone major transformations in recent years, both in scope and their theoretical foundation. Several new books put pressure on the boundaries and connections between English drama and European texts, particularly those of Italy, Spain and France. Examples include Richard Wilson's Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (2009), Eric J. Griffin's English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire (2009), Barbara Fuchs' Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (2009), and Identity, Otherness, and Empire in Shakespeare's Rome, edited by Maria Del Sapio Garbero (2009). Adding a whole new dimension to this body of scholarly work is Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds. A persuasive, interdisciplinary study of the presence of Italy in the conception of English nationhood at the end of the sixteenth century, it interrogates the foreign as a portable category in case studies of marginalized individuals of English society, both historical and fictional, through the broader context of “European historical moments” (8). It provides a much-needed account of the connections between early modern English drama and European contexts and establishes the centrality of the figure of the foreign in Shakespeare's imagination.Coauthored by Carole Levin, a historian, and John Watkins, a literary critic, Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds is a successful model of collaborative research that opens a new vista on the formation of English identity in the decades preceding “England's expansion into the Atlantic” (10). It says something about the state of the humanistic fields that Levin and Watkins have to spend so much time on the issue of interdisciplinarity in the introduction and to return to the question in the afterword (e.g., they observe that “the more closely early modern literary and historical studies converge,” the more scholars in each field insist on the distinctness of the two disciplines [5]). The book came about through the coauthors' many conversations that led them to approach Shakespeare's world simply as early modernists rather than as a literary critic or historian. The fruit of their collaboration demonstrates the profound impact of a new mode of scholarly inquiry that is “no longer answerable to the canons of institutional and disciplinary affiliation” (3). Though each of them is responsible for different chapters, the book as a whole tells a compelling story about how Shakespeare responds to religious dissidents, women, and the marginalized sectors of his society within the broader context of European history.Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds opens with one of the most famous moments in Shakespeare, Portia's puzzling question in the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice (“Which is the merchant here? And which the Jew?”), to bring to the fore the historical experience of being an outcast and to hint at the merging of the coauthors' new, indistinguishable scholarly identities. Parsing historical texts and this tense moment in Shakespeare's plays, Levin and Watkins suggest that “Shakespeare's England comes about by reducing an almost infinite number of [heterogeneous] groups and individuals [Italians, religious dissenters, Jews, old women, and more] to the general category of the foreign,” which is seen as both “an object of wonder and opprobrium,” threatening and reinforcing the unified identity of Englishness (9). The court scene is treated at length in chapter 4, especially pages 135–37. As later chapters make clear, literature was an important force in “policing the boundaries between English and foreign identities” (13), which in turn establishes the fiction of national coherence that lies at the core of English identity. Subsequent chapters examine how Shakespeare transformed the notion of Englishness by revealing of its coherence and distinctiveness.The book is divided into three parts (two chapters each), with each part focusing on one Shakespearean play: 1 Henry VI, The Merchant of Venice, and The Taming of the Shrew. Each part also offers a brief, overarching preface that highlights the key issues bringing the two chapters together. The parallel studies by Levin and Watkins in each section complement each other. Chapter 1, by Levin, canvasses the legal and historical contexts of accusations of witchcraft and Joan of Arc's function as Elizabeth I's opposite. Joan is killed not because she is French but because her presence troubles the boundaries between sacred and profane (23). Watkins follows up on this paranoia in 1 Henry VI in chapter 2 with the ambitious goal of “de-nationaliz[ing] the history that dominates our understanding of the English sixteenth century” (53). Shakespeare's hostility to such figures as Margaret of Anjou informs the historical resistance to interdynastic marriages.The next chapters turn to the foreigner's place in the dominant, local culture. Part 2, “Aliens in Our Midst,” examines the exclusion of Jews and The Merchant of Venice, a dramatic text and historical record of assimilation, conversion, and mercantile culture. This is one of the best parts of the book. The parallel chapters' primary contributions lie in their in-depth study of key historical contexts that further our understanding of the play and its period. Levin brings rich medieval and Renaissance materials about Jewish women, including Abigail in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, to create a complex and more comprehensive picture of Jessica, Shylock's daughter, than is common in Shakespeare criticism. Jessica has commonly been read as either a disobedient daughter or a praiseworthy Christian wife, but Levin points out that what is most striking about her is “her isolation as a Jewish woman” (85–86). The question of conversion that has vexed Shakespeare criticism for decades thus becomes a question of assimilation and one of female conversion: can a non-Christian woman ever truly become a Christian one in early modern England? (86). Levin's and Watkins's chapters demonstrate that while characters such as Jessica and Abigail are “the fictional creations of male non-Jewish playwrights,” they are the keys to understanding “the dominant cultural anxiety over gender and difference” (87). Adding usefully broad historical contexts is Watkins's chapter on conversion of a different kind, namely the conversion of English society into the Venice of the North Atlantic (113–15) with its attendant anxieties. These two chapters can be read productively along with Janet Adelman's Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in “The Merchant of Venice” (2008) which argues that the relationship between Christianity and Judaism is framed in uneasy, familial terms.The title of Part 3, “Dangerous Reading in The Taming of the Shrew,” points to Renaissance humanism and Reformation as two major foreign intellectual movements lurking behind the creation of the play. Following the pattern of the previous sections, the chapters are designed to be read both along and against each other. Once again, at stake is an Italian threat—in this instance a domestic one as well as the humanist belief in the freedom of the will. Levin reads John Foxe's story of Katherine Parr's struggles with Henry VIII in Acts and Monuments and Queen Kate in Samuel Rowley's lesser-known play When You See Me, You Know Me as analogues for Katherine's struggles with Petruchio in Shakespeare's play. These instances suggest the rise of English women who were “empowered by Reformation teaching” to help evangelize the country (143). Watkins, on the other hand, offers a darker interpretation of the play by reading it against its Italian source, I suppositi by Ludovico Ariosto, and the experience of women in Italy and England. As much as a humanist education can be liberating, it is also dangerous to the establishment. Petruchio's insistence on taming Kate is an English counter to humanism (202–6).In the afterword, Levin and Watkins return to Portia's question of which is the merchant and which the Jew. In their passionate plea for integrated, interdisciplinary scholarship, they urge readers to shed the defensiveness that often accompanies the meeting of different disciplines: “If the merchant and the Jew's modern analogues, the literary scholar and the historian, can bring together a confluence of approach and method as well as a respect for the differences inherent in their approaches as well as the similarities, the foreign worlds will be home to us” (209). The book lives up to its coauthors' vision of a “common academic discourse, one more compromised than abetted by formal disciplinary affiliations,” analogous to the “litigation that exposed a common identity between Shylock and Antonio” (2). There is much to recommend in this accessible, exciting book.