ABSTRACT
Revisionist historians have recently disputed the assumption that a radical break separated Tudor and Stuart England, producing an overwhelming nostalgia for Elizabethan England upon the old queen’s death. Challenging entrenched notions of an “idyllic national consensus” in the waning years of Elizabeth’s reign and of the “Stuarts’ universal unpopularity,” John Watkins begins his study of Stuart representations of Elizabeth by questioning the widely held assumption “that the Stuarts departed so dramatically from Elizabeth’s example that the differences were apparent to everyone” (Watkins 4-5). Still, the accession of James arguably produced at least one sudden and startling change: the inheritance by the more prosperous of the two nations of what many Elizabethans regarded as a troubling and violent past. If a nation is defined as a people who share a common history, invented or imagined through extensive, tacit agreements about what to remember and what to suppress, then what happens when a nation-already having substantially shaped and been shaped by an invented past-suddenly inherits a new one? That strikes me as the larger question posed by Macbeth to its first English audiences, who, armored with xenophobia and longstanding stereotypes about Scotland,2 were likely to have interpreted the play very differently from Shakespeare’s patron, King James.
