ABSTRACT
Readers, critics, and scholars of Blake’s work have for the most part concurred in seeing Blake as he might have liked to be seen: as an artist deeply at odds with his culture and times, as a revolutionary profoundly committed to a sustained attack upon the imperialist, racist, and oppressively gendered constructions of English society in the Romantic period. The five essays in this section powerfully continue this traditional interpretation of Blake’s thought and art. G.A. Rosso persuasively argues that Blake’s “King Edward the Third” ironically invokes Shakespeare’s Henry V in order to satirise the imperialistic propaganda embedded not only in Shakespeare’s history plays but also in the historians of Edward Ill’s reign and in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century “empire poets” Denham, Dryden, Prior, Pope, Thomson, and especially William Whitehead, George III’s poet laureate. Rosso acutely reveals the precise ways in which Blake exposes the inhumanity of England’s “empire of the sea” at the very moment (1778–79) when England was losing its first colonial empire, in the Americas. By exposing the imperialist ideology at the heart of the very genre of historical drama, Rosso concludes, Blake opened the way to his own “anti- imperialist prophecy.”
