Elizabethan Views of the “Other”

The abundant use of foreign settings and characters throughout Shakespeare’s canon provides us with a basis for conjecture about his own perspective on various nationalities, and perhaps that of Elizabethans in general. Admittedly, it may not always be possible to distinguish between the dramatist’s personal biases and his appropriation of popular prejudices for dramatic effect. While he was not above caricaturing foreigners (for example, the Welsh Sir Hugh Evans and the French Dr. Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor), ¹ Shakespeare often demonstrates a more sophisticated international outlook than what we know to have been the popular Elizabethan sense of the differences between the English and other peoples. ² Love’s Labour’s Lost serves as an excellent text for examining his depiction of foreigners, because it brings together French lords and ladies, a Spaniard, noblemen masquerading as Russians, and some comic lowlife figures who seem to have wandered into the French royal preserve from an English village. ³ At the same time, an understanding of England’s relations with France, Spain, and Russia from the 1570s to the 1590s can illuminate some of the oddities in this charming but perplexing play.