Description: 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.
Review Quotes:
'Over the past fifteen years, the work of Andrew Hadfield has been at the forefront of examining Ireland's importance for the Elizabethan imagination. His new collection of essays...usefully assembles a number of pieces that have appeared over the past decade, with two previously unpublished papers.' - Times Literary Supplement
'Hadfield's argument is exciting and stimulating...surely deserves gratitude of Shakespeareans and Spenserians for preventing both misopolitical reading and naive politicization of the early modern texts' - Mari Mizuno, Studies in English Literature, English No.47, (Mar., 2006)