By Lloyd Edward Kermode
Protecting a wide selection of performs from 1550-1600, together with Shakespeare's moment tetralogy, this publication explores ethical, ancient, and comedian performs as contributions to Elizabethan debates on Anglo-foreign kinfolk in England. the industrial, social, non secular, and political concerns that arose from inter-British touch and Continental immigration into England are reinvented and rehearsed at the public level. Kermode uncovers wide 'alien stages' within the drama: distinct yet overlapping strategies during which the alien used to be used to posit rules and beliefs of Englishness. Many experiences of English nationwide id pit Englishness opposed to the alien 'other' in order that the local self and the alien settle into antithetical positions. against this, extraterrestrial beings and Englishness reads a physique of performs that characterize Englishness as a nation of ideological, invented superiority - satirically good in its consistent changeability, and taken into being by means of incorporating and finally accepting, or even celebrating, instead of rejecting the alien.
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Extra resources for Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama
Sample text
George Wapull’s The Tide Tarrieth No Man, the last play discussed in this chapter, takes on another trope with its vice ‘Courage Contagious’. The metaphor of blood circulation and the context of ‘plague’ were used by the playwright and other authors to create the environment within which Wealth and Health was performed, and in this later play notions of infection are revived to show how proper English reformed behaviour is corrupted from within by alien bodies. ), and Courage the vice is also ‘Courage Contrarious’, emphasizing his ability to mutate as necessary to do his corrupting.
Englishness’, of course, in this reading, is always ‘in action’, always in a position of relativity because it is always playing itself out, performing, proving its existence. Because it does not have a definitive pre-existence, Englishness alters itself and rejects or incorporates aspects of the encountered alien as the occasion requires. This sixteenth-century history of improvisational experience serves England well as it expands its imperial influence through Britain and the known world in the seventeenth century.
In the period, that outer complexion or ugliness would also lead to the suspicion of inner corruption, which Wealth expresses in his dismissive ‘Dryve him away quickly’ (B2v). When Will is questioned about exactly whose will he is, he claims to be everyone’s and anyone’s: ‘I am your evyll wyll / your wil, & your will, & your will’ (B2v). Liberty resorts to that word ‘straunge’ again and declares that ‘this cannot be / For in our wyles is great diversitie / For one is not lyke another’ (B2v). English Liberty finds the concept of a single, mutable ‘will’ ‘strange’ and alien, and indeed he is right, because he is talking to the vice who will corrupt Englishness.