ABSTRACT
Most critics ignore the Dutch characters that appear in early modern English drama, or dismiss them as comic touches incorporated for their ethnic colour and humorous but unwitting corruptions of the English language.1 When they are dealt with, the difference between theatrical representations of true Dutchmen and of Englishmen who assume fake Dutch identities for their own benefit is seldom considered.2 Those scholars who do acknowledge in more complex ways the existence of the Dutch in English play-texts frequently speak of cultural tensions, setting the two nations in opposition and regarding the Dutch as yet another category of Otherness amid the various sites of antagonism that helped, supposedly, to construct English national identity.3
