ABSTRACT
Probing into the interaction of late sixteenth-century drama and the emergence of national identity, this book has focused on three aspects and their interrelation. First, it looked at specific concepts and discourses of the nation. Second, it focused on the cross-fertilization of these concepts and forms of collective identity, on how ideas of community were shaped by notions of the nation, and on how these ideas themselves gave shape to the concept of the nation. Finally, it asked what role drama and theatre played in both the negotiation of the nation and in the formation of collective identity. Its underlying assumption is that through drama, and in the theatre, collective identity and concepts of the nation could come to react in a way that contributed to the emergence of national identity. This study regards early modern public theatre as a social laboratory of sorts, as a locus in which diverse attitudes towards the nation materialized and in which a number of alternative role models were quite literally played out against each other. Drama is an art form that presents potentialities, offering the audience glimpses of a variety of mindsets: What would the world look like if we shared Henry V’s patriotism or if we saw it through the eyes of a Machiavellian schemer like Richard III? What happens when various political attitudes clash – what will be the arguments, which will prove most powerful? Like a chemical reaction in a laboratory, the theatre event causes a variety of stances – embodied by the characters of the play – to interact and provides the opportunity to study the outcome of this interaction.
