Description: Applying current political theory on nationhood and methods established by recent performance studies, this study sheds new light on the role the public theatre played in the rise of English national identity around 1600. It situates selected history plays in the context of non-fictional texts - historiographies, chorographies and political treatises - and cultural artefacts such as maps or portraits to highlight the circulation, and mutation, of national thought in late 16th-century culture.
Review Quotes: 'Hertel has valuably shown that the English history plays of the 1590s addressed the issue of national identity with caution, dialogically, open-endedly, and, like Macmorris, in the interrogative mode.' Seventeenth Century News 'Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play is much more than a book of literary criticism: it investigates many different cultural domains ... it provides many penetrating insights into a plethora of crucial socio-political issues and it possesses the rare quality of being equally enjoyable for both specialists and non-specialists. ... We can be grateful to Ralf Hertel for helping us look at very familiar plays in a new and refreshing light.' Notes and Queries 'Hertel shows how nationalism on the Elizabethan stage represented variously a present ideal, a stabilizing bulwark against destabilizing forces, and the promise of a homogenous and conflict-free future. In addition, his study represents a thoughtful consideration of how dramatists used the stage as medium to express, interrogate, and critique prevailing nationalist paradigms.' Theatre Journal