Shakespeare, Spencer and the Matter of Britain examines the work of two of the most important English Renaissance authors in terms of the cultural, social and political contexts of early modern Britain. Andrew Hadfield demonstrates that the poetry of Edmund Spenser and the plays of William Shakespeare demand to be read in terms of an expanding Elizabethan and Jacobean culture in which a dominant English identity had to come to terms with the Irish, Scots and Welsh who were now also subjects of the crown.
Keywords
culture England English literature Great Britain identity national identity poetry reformation Renaissance William Shakespeare
Bibliographic information
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502703
Copyright InformationPalgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2004