Abstract
Like its better known literary forebear Macbeth (1606), The Valiant Scot dramatizes seventeenth-century anxieties about Anglo-Scottish relations in its depiction of English ruling elites as they take on an exceptional and brazen Scot. Whereas Macbeth contrasts its ‘devilish’ soldier-cum-tyrant with England’s northern earls and its saintly Edward the Confessor, The Valiant Scot pits a spirited Scottish rebel, William Wallace, against a much less idealized Edward I (1272–1307) and his corrupt commissioners. Set at the end of the thirteenth century in Scotland in the aftermath of English conquest, the play fashions Wallace much like the 1995 film Braveheart that made him (newly or perhaps once again) a household name for modern audiences in and beyond the United Kingdom. Instead of the violent clashes on the bat-tlefield between the English and the Scots glorified in the film, however, The Valiant Scot figures Wallace’s rebellion primarily through single and symbolic acts of violence committed by and against members of the English gentry.
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Notes
Julie Sanders, The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 16.
Lisa Hopkins, Shakespeare on the Edge: Border-Crossing in the Tragedies and the Henriad (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005); Hopkins briefly discusses The Valiant Scot on p. 62.
Robb Lawson attributes the absence of the institution to the strong cultural discouragement of secular performance initiated and ensured by a powerful Scottish church. See Robb Lawson, The Story of the Scots Stage (1917; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971).
As David J. Baker writes of the border under James I and VI, ‘its line was clearly marked and was, at least officially, “mutually accepted”. But this was really a matter of degree.’ See David J. Baker, ‘“Stands Scotland where it did?”: Shakespeare on the March’, in Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy (eds), Shakespeare and Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) 20–36 (20).
Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (New York: Routledge, 2000) 219.
The title page names ‘J. W., Gent.’ as the author; no scholar has convincingly demonstrated J. W.’s identity or background, beyond ruling out John Webster. See Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956) 1234–5.
See also George Byers (ed.), The Valiant Scot by J. W.: A Critical Edition (New York: Garland, 1980) 32–55. All citations derive from this edition, and line numbers will be given in parenthesis.
James I, ‘A Speech to both the houses of parliament, March 1607’, The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918) 294.
According to Brian Levack, ‘What James was doing in his speech of 1607 was not simply appeasing the anger of his English parliament but describing accurately the position he planned for Scotland within a unitary British state.’ Brian Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union, 1603–1707 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) 27.
As Roger A. Mason notes, the Protestant Reformation made the 1540s ‘a crucial decade in unionist ideology.’ See Roger A. Mason, ‘Scotching the Brut: Politics, History and National Myth in Sixteenth-Century Britain’, in Roger A. Mason (ed.), Scotland and England 1286–1815 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1987) 6–84 (75).
Quoted in Allan Macinnes, Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement, 1625–1641 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1991) 53.
On this subject, see Maurice Lee, The Road to Revolution: Scotland under Charles I, 1625–1637 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985) 20–78.
Peter Donald, An Uncounselled King: Charles I and the Scottish troubles, 1637–1641 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 15–29; and Macinnes, Charles I, 49–101.
Macinnes, Charles I, 144; See also Edward J. Cowan, ‘The Making of the National Covenant’, in John Morrill (ed.), The Scottish National Covenant in Its British Context 1638–51 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990) 68–89.
James Francis Larkin (ed.), Royal Proclamations of King Charles I, 1625–1646 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) 703.
F. M. Cowe, Berwick-on-Tweed: A Short Historical Guide (Berwick-on-Tweed: Bell’s Bookshop, 1975) 5–6.
George MacDonald Fraser, The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers (New York: Knopf, 1972) 35.
On Overton’s other anti-Prelacy pamphlets, see Susan Wiseman’s Drama and Politics in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 40–90.
Joad Raymond also mentions the text briefly in Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 204.
Dale B. J. Randall in his text Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642–1660 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1995) 22–23.
On the precise geographical origins of the press that published these pamphlets, see David R., Como, ‘Secret Marketplace of Print: Printing, the Crisis of 1640, and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism’, Past & Present 196 (2007): 37–82.
See Edward Arber, An Introductory Sketch to the Martin Marprelate Controversy, 1588–1590 (New York: B. Franklin, 1967).
Tiffany Stern, ‘Re-Patching the Play’, in Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (eds), From Script to Stage in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 151–77 (151).
Mike Pearson describes this concept as a map that ‘attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of a location — juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary the political and the poetic, the factual, and the fictional the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might ever want to say about a space’. See Pearson, In Comes I: Performance, Memory and Landscape (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006) 15.
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© 2014 Vimala C. Pasupathi
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Pasupathi, V.C. (2014). Locating The Valiant Scot . In: Performing Environments. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137320179_13
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