British Identities and English Renaissance Literature.

British Identities and English Renaissance Literature Edited by David J. Baker and Willy Maley Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002

The editors of this volume, David J. Baker and Willy Maley, are much impressed by the vitality of various forms of "British history" practiced by early modern historians and make the case that literary scholars can profitably incorporate this "British perspective" into their own work--and, in turn, offer fresh insights to historians--to advance a joint enterprise of reinterpreting early modern Britain. In this volume, they and their contributors therefore "attempt to locate a certain shared ground with British historians and to learn what useful work can be done on that ground" (4). This is an admirable agenda and offers the prospect of a welcome relief from the excessively simplistic literary scholarship that equates "British" history primarily with Ireland and builds its arguments upon the proposition that Ireland and the New World can be lumped together unproblematically into a common English colonialist enterprise. However, as the editors and several of contributors to this volume point out, "British history" is itself a difficult thing to define and embraces a range of different, even divergent, intellectual impulses. As Andrew Murphy notes in his essay, "the injunction that literary analysts should 'get back to history,' is an altogether more complex imperative than has often been recognized" (26-27).

Various forms of "British history" (also sometimes termed "the British perspective") have been a central feature of the historiography of early modern Britain since the 1980s, and became decidedly mainstream in the 1990s. This impulse has perhaps been driven most powerfully by a desire to understand the crisis of the British monarchy in the 1630s and 1640s, when Charles I's rule over the separate kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland collapsed into rebellion and civil war. In this view, the "English Civil War" was actually a series of linked "British wars" and the crisis at the center of the Stuart monarchy was fueled by failed attempts to manage its peripheries. "British history" has also been advanced to offer a more complex understanding of the vexed question of Anglo-Irish history, often seeking to contrast English policies in Ireland with those towards Wales or Scotland or, more fruitfully, to recognize the interconnectedness of "the Irish problem" with a larger "British problem." The military resilience of Irish lords in Ulster, for example, was powerfully assisted by a regular flow of mercenaries from the Western Isles of Scotland, while many of the "English" adventurers in Ireland were actually Welsh or from peripheral English counties like Devon and Cornwall. A still-larger view of the ructions and accommodations of "the British (or Atlantic) Archipelago" leads to an "Atlantic perspective," which embraces English/British settlement in the New World and opens up comparisons with other European colonial enterprises and composite monarchies. Many of these ideas were sketched out in a seminal article by J. G. A. Pocock in 1975, who made the case for "a new subject" that might escape the Anglocentrism of "English history" and the narrow partisanship of "Irish history"--and, indeed, be more sensitive to culture and ideas than was the norm for political history in the mid-1970s. However, inevitably, the various forms of "British history" have brought their own ideological freight. Some Irish historians, for example, have been hostile to "British history" because they see its agenda as a kind of Anglocentric wolf in sheep's clothing, in which what matters about "Britain" is only what affects events and perceptions in England. There is also room for confusion between the broader Atlantic perspective on "British history" and an earlier Atlanticist model that has been widely adopted by literary scholars, in which Ireland is seen as the testing ground for "English" imperialism in the New World and the early modern Irish are consequently equated to native Americans.

How, then, does British Identities and English Renaissance Literature approach this rich and roiling field of "British" studies? In its structure, the volume effectively mirrors its origins at a conference in 1997, with seven sections, each of two or three chapters, functioning like a series of different panels. The seventh of these sections, entitled "Historians Respond," evokes notions of a conference respondent. Sensibly enough, the first section "opens the field" with two essays about the nature of "British history." Andrew Murphy offers a short and straightforward survey of the scholarly terrain, focusing primarily on Ireland, while Philip Schwyzer draws a parallel between English writers of the sixteenth century, who attributed ideas and stories to Welsh writers that served English ideological purposes, and modern scholars, whose interest in early modern Wales is normally limited to its usefulness as an antitype for Ireland. Subsequent essays by Christopher Highley and Richard McCabe explore the writing of "British history" in Renaissance England. Highley correctly observes that the concept of "Britain" in Tudor times was an explicitly Protestant construct, which made it deeply problematic for Catholic writers. Catholic priests from England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland who lived in exile on the continent--some of whom were prolific writers--tended to be fiercely nationalistic and were often antagonistic to each other. However, this divisiveness was not simply because the unifying concept of "Britain" was unavailable to them, as Highley suggests, but also a reflection of the profoundly nationalised nature of the "universal" church of Rome extending back into the medieval period. McCabe contrasts the political connotations of the 1577 and 1587 editions of Holinshed's Irish Chronicles, arguing that the addition of new material marked a shift from an Old English sensibility to a New English perspective that largely stigmatized Irish culture. One of the interesting oddities of the "Holinshed enterprise" (as it might be called) was that the 1587 edition of the Chronicles still lauded the scholarship and character of Edmund Campion in its Irish section, while the pages on England vilified him as a papist priest who deserved his traitor's death in 1581. If the Chronicles in some sense reflects "English" colonialism, as McCabe suggests, this striking example would suggest that the enterprise was more haphazard and awkwardly cumulative than programmatic.

The following two sections of the volume entail various attempts to deploy insights from "British history" for the analysis of literary texts. Three chapters--by Matthew Greenfield, Patricia Parker, and Mary Floyd-Wilson--discuss Shakespearean plays, while Jayne Elizabeth Archer and Philippa Berry explore representations of James VI & I's "Union" of the crowns of England and Scotland in masques and Christopher Ivic considers John Speed's maps. Although not entirely convincing in its detail and marked by a number of minor factual errors (such as misdating the Ulster expeditions of Sir Thomas Smith and the first Earl of Essex in the 1570s), Ivic's chapter shows how ideas associated with James VI & I's failed campaign of 1604-7 to refashion England and Scotland as "Great Britain" could be appropriated by proponents of the Ulster plantation to seek political and commercial support for their colonizing venture in Ireland. Ivic's chapter (like Andrew Had field's later) suffers somewhat from the curious design decision by the editors or publishers to use both endnotes and parenthetical references. There seems to be no obvious reason why some references are endnoted and others given in parentheses, and the result is an unnecessarily cluttered text. In the chapter preceding Ivic's, Archer and Berry make great play upon the way that masques of the "Union" period literally excavated the British past and landscape in search of unifying devices. This is an elegant piece, but the sheer ingenuity of the dramatists' efforts to unearth natural forms of political legitimation for a new "Great Britain" also highlights the novelty and difficulty of James's project.

Opening the run of three chapters that offer readings of Shakespearean plays, Greenfield's essay undoubtedly wins the prize for the most dreadful start to any piece in this whole collection: "My reading of the first part of Shakespeare's Henry IV is situated in a region on the periphery of literary criticism, near the border of the movement known as the new British history" (71). One can only wonder how the editors allowed such a monstrous piece of writing to escape the blue pencil. Happily, the essay improves and Greenfield has the courage to question the usefulness of "British history" for scholars who do not work on themes that can easily be classified as "colonial." In his case, he responds by applying a "British perspective" to the metadramatic features of 1 Henry IV, arguing that the comings and goings of characters enact the diverse and fissiparous nature of Shakespeare's "British" world. Parker offers a characteristically playful reading of "leeks" and "leaks" to explore Welshness in Henry V, while Floyd-Wilson emulates McCabe and utilizes the contrasting accounts of the same events in the English and Scottish sections of Holinshed's Chronicles to situate Cymbeline within the contemporary debate about the racial homogeneity or separateness of English and Scots.

A similar insistence on the racial and cultural gulf between English and Scots is a theme of Andrew Hadfield's essay on representations of "ancient Picts" by John White and Thomas Harriot. Although nicely illustrated with a large number of black-and-white reproductions of these engravings, this chapter is a mix of rich and suggestive ideas and curious tunnel vision. The assertion that "it is more than likely" that Sir Walter Ralegh's association with Edmund Spenser "was enough to damn him" when James succeeded to the English throne (174), for instance, can only be described as a heroic piece of wishful thinking about the significance of The Faerie Queene for the politics of 1603. However much the trial of Duessa in book 5 might have enraged James in 1596, this is surely a case of pushing claims about the political influence of literary texts too far: Ralegh's fall can be more convincingly explained by political events and personal animosities in the years leading up to 1603. By contrast, Linda Gregerson's chapter on efforts to convert the native Americans of New England in the mid-seventeenth century--and some of the embarrassingly shrewd responses that missionaries received--shows considerably more circumspection about the limits of literary analysis in making meaningful claims about state formation and the "nation." Almost uniquely in this volume, Gregerson also rightly pays explicit attention to the commercial or mercenary element in cultural interactions.

In the penultimate section of the book, the chronological scope broadens still further. Murray Pittock's very useful survey of Jacobite literature--not something that will be familiar to many scholars of the Renaissance era--sweeps into the nineteenth century. John Kerrigan's essay on Roger Boyle, first Earl of Orrery, only extends as far as 1679, but in many ways it is the most impressive and ambitious essay in the volume. Fluidly written and alert to the shifting and peculiarly personal nature of Orrery's "British" identities, this chapter works so well that it makes the reader wonder how earlier studies could have failed to grasp the significance of his Irish experiences for understanding his life and oeuvre. This piece is a model of what "British history" can achieve when used sensitively by a literary scholar and would repay careful reading by historians interested in the period.

Historians finally have their opportunity to "respond" to the book in its final two chapters. Significantly, both historians--Jane Ohlmeyer and Derek Hirst--are specialists in seventeenth-century British history. Ohlmeyer's inclusion brings up one particularly curious feature about the contributors to this book. Although the authors range from relatively junior scholars to senior members of the academy and hail from universities in the United States, Scotland, England, and Wales, Ohlmeyer is the only contributor to be based in an Irish university--and she only relocated to Ireland after this book was actually published (and hence is still listed here as being based in Scotland). Both historians are largely complimentary about this collection of essays and the editorial injunction animating them--and rightly so--but Hirst is more willing to wade into the waters of literary interpretation, arguing that Prospero's island (actually Caliban's) in The Tempest can be identified with Ireland. This is by no means as novel an idea as he seems to imply and, despite offering a fascinating allusion to Shane O'Neill in the 1560s, will perhaps raise the hackles of some literary scholars as being excessively reductive. Nevertheless, Hirst's effort is a reminder that historians have as much to learn from a richer understanding of important literary texts as literary scholars have to gain from becoming more aware of the historiographical context of their endeavors.

In singling out John Kerrigan's essay for special praise, Hirst contrasts his approach with that of some of the other chapters in this volume, which "merely invok[e] the authority of J. G. A. Pocock to demonstrate the existence of a historical and conceptual problem that then forms a passive context for an exercise in textual unfolding" (260). Another way of putting this is that a number of the essays here could probably have been written in very similar form without any specific reference to "British history." This is probably inevitable when authors are asked to operate within a paradigm that they have not yet had time to assimilate. However, it does revive the question that Matthew Greenfield raised: how can issues such as "metatheatricality, genre, the double plot, redemption, inheritance, counterfeiting or [1 Henry IV's] meditation on corruptions of language" be addressed by "British history"? (72) Greenfield offers one answer, but other scholars will perhaps need to think imaginatively to tap into this discourse.

Another equally fundamental question about "British history" (which Ohlmeyer raises in passing) is how legitimately the concept can be applied to the period before 1603. One of the problems with a specifically "British" emphasis on events before James's accession to the English throne is that it risks obscuring the distinct cultural and political ties that Ireland, Scotland, and Wales each enjoyed with various parts of continental Europe, thereby restricting our understanding of these cultures to an Anglocentric viewpoint. Tudor England was usually interested in a notion of "Britishness" only when the European ties of Scotland or Ireland threatened England's security. Before 1603 at least (and perhaps also afterwards), the "British perspective" therefore needs to be seen as functioning within a broader "continental context." This, in turn, might suggest an agenda for future research which would investigate the "negotiation" between internationalism and national (or even local) identities by recognizing that many writers could choose from among a spectrum of languages, including Latin (the European lingua franca), English (the "British" common language), and Irish, Welsh, or Scots (or even Cornish, for that matter). As Murray Pittock observes in his chapter on Jacobite literature, Latin had a powerful significance for Scotland's intellectual life, partly because it was not English and partly because it underscored Scotland's own direct involvement in European life. How do choices about language function elsewhere--or, indeed, among different groups, or at different times, in Scotland itself? As the title suggests, British Identities and English Renaissance Literature is focused on an Anglophone and Anglocentric "Britain." Nevertheless, more non-English literature is now becoming available in translation and moving beyond an essentially Anglocentric "Britain" logically requires some consideration of this non-English "British" world. This is a task for which historians are poorly equipped. On the other hand, by exploring what kind of cultural act of writing in English--or not--might entail, literary scholars could open up a new and fertile field of "British history." If we are take up the challenge from Baker and Maley to pursue inter-disciplinary cooperation and to "redraw the map on which English studies has usually been situated," this might be a promising path toward genuinely figuring "a new critical cartography"(7-8).