Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvii

   PDF

2. Introduction: Fostering Discussion — From the Irish Question to the British Problem by Way of the English Renaissance

   • Willy Maley

   Pages 1-6

3. ‘This Sceptred Isle’: Shakespeare and the British Problem

   • Willy Maley

   Pages 7-29

4. Postcolonial Cymbeline: Sovereignty and Succession from Roman to Renaissance Britain

   • Willy Maley

   Pages 31-44

5. Shakespeare, Holinshed and Ireland: Resources and Con-texts

   • Willy Maley

   Pages 45-61

6. Forms of Discrimination in Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland (1596; 1633): From Dialogue to Silence

   • Willy Maley

   Pages 63-91

7. ‘Another Britain’? Bacon’s Certain Considerations Touching the Plantation in Ireland (1606; 1657)

   • Willy Maley

   Pages 93-112

8. Fording the Nation: Abridging History in Perkin Warbeck (1633)

   • Willy Maley

   Pages 113-133

9. Milton’s Observations (1649) and ‘the Complication of Interests’ in Early Modern Ireland

   • Willy Maley

   Pages 135-148

10. Back Matter

    Pages 149-185

    PDF

This book, original in emphasis, daring in execution, maps out the shaping power of English Renaissance literature in creating and contesting national and colonial identities through the work of major canonical authors including Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton. Informed throughout by the burgeoning fields of the new British history and postcolonial criticism, this volume marks a dramatic shift in studies of the early modern period, from Irish to British concerns, thus accounting for the interplay of union, plantation, and conquest.

• English literature
• Great Britain
• John Milton
• novel
• Renaissance
• William Shakespeare
• British and Irish Literature

'Willey Maley's important book on 'the British problem' in relation to English Renaissance literature is a welcome contribution to the fields of Renaissance and colonial studies...the book brings those essays together beautifully, enabling us to hold in hand, and to teach, a series of strongly linked and very significant pieces...[his] view of Macmorris is fascinating and at odds with the conventional criticism surrounding that character.' - The Spenser Review

• Department of English Literature, University of Glasgow, UK

  Willy Maley

WILLY MALEY is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow. His many publications include two previous books with Palgrave Macmillan: A Spenser Chronology (1994), and Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (1997). He is also co-editor of Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534 - 1660 (1993), Edmund Spenser: A View of the Present State of Ireland: From the First Published Edition (1997), Postcolonial Criticism (1997), and British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (2002).

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