Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity by Ralf Hertel

Abstract

Ralf Hertel. Staging Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity. Studies Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. ix + 271. $149.95. In Staging Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity, Ralf Hertel argues that early modern English drama helped to shape the collective and develop the nation as imagined community well before became a factual nation-state (23). Englishness, he asserts, considered as something brought forth by spectators who participate theatre event by becoming eye witnesses of sorts of staged and who engage Englishness displayed theatrically (1). While Hertel, a Professor of English Literature and Culture at University of Hamburg, Germany, acknowledges that he is no historian (28), he also usefully summarizes historical debate about national identity and when it emerges. This political background is essential for understanding his book's contribution to field. As Hertel emphasizes throughout introduction, this study is focused on imagination of a national community, not on a nation which already has a fully functional political, legal or jurisdictional infrastructure (21). Although book fails to engage with much current scholarship, it demonstrates a reasonable connection between historical drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and idea of early modern English national identity. The introduction outlines historical theories of nationalism; explores contested meanings of terms such as nation, nation-building, and national consciousness; and presents debates surrounding concept and emergence of English national identity. The body of book comprises five parts, each titled for what Hertel calls widely accepted components shaping of national consciousness: Religion, Class, and Gender (28). Each part consists of two chapters: a discussion of theoretical perspectives and early modern English historical and political contexts, and a case study that applies these perspectives and contexts to interpret a late-Elizabethan English history play. Four of plays are Shakespearean: Henry IV Part 1, Richard III, King John, and Henry VI Part 2; fifth is Marlowe's Edward 11. The book also includes fourteen figures, through which author locates plays in context of non-fictional texts ... and cultural artefacts (such as maps or portraits) (1). A bibliography and index follow conclusion. Part 1, Territory, analyzes England's transformation from a territory into a homeland, or a site of historical, and historic, events (35). Hertel emphasizes the rise of cartography from late 1570s onwards (38) and corresponding late-sixteenth-century development of chorography, both of which, he states, facilitated England's transformation into a homeland. He shows how Saxton, Camden, and Drayton incorporated images of people into their maps to illustrate English people's connection to land (45), and how narrative aspect of early modern chorography similarly inserted people into places (47). The author then interprets effects of cartographic revolution Henry IV Part 1 (49). Hertel demonstrates that this centrifugal play (58), with scenes ... [set] all over England (64), places territory of on stage various ways, from play's wide range of English settings to its broad spectrum of English characters, many of whose names evoke geography of (66-68). In Part 2, History, Hertel builds upon his claims part 1 by arguing that transforming space into national territory and terrain into homeland involves charging topography with historical significance, providing expanse of land with a past, and adding a temporal dimension to spatial one (77). These two chapters focus upon constructed nature of history and historical drama. …