ABSTRACT
'This sceptred isle', 'this pleasant Ile': it was in these terms that at the end of the sixteenth century, William Shakespeare, then not yet the national bard, and Anne Dowriche, a poet whose work remains little known, chose to make the geopolitical metaphor of insularity central to their evocations of English nationality. Juxtaposing the 'sceptred isle' speech with Dowriche's use of the trope of insularity, this chapter focuses on the reproduction of Shakespearean fantasies of Englishness, and delineates one example of an alternative late-Elizabethan relation to national identity in the Atlantic archipelago. Dowriche's The French Historie and William Shakespeare's Richard II, texts which are at once historiographical and political in their aspirations, are both concerned with civil strife and national identity. Dowriche's little-known but richly suggestive imagining of England as an Edenic island appears in The French Historie, her ambitious account of the wars of religion that afflicted France for several decades in the later sixteenth century.
