Though most scholars agree that fully fledged nationalism is a modern phenomenon, it is often seen to have important roots in sixteenth-century England.1 Liah Greenfeld, in her well-known comparative study of the emergence of modern nationalist sentiment, finds its first intimation in the England of Henry VIII, and several influential recent studies have discussed the role played by literature in a distinctively early modern cultural program that Richard Helgerson has named ‘the Elizabethan writing of England’.2 There have been a number of interesting recent discussions of nationalisms in medieval England, too, and these have vigorously challenged the idea that the nation is an exclusively modern phenomenon.3 But even if one can find striking examples of nation-conjuring in medieval documents, surely the extent of the early modern fascination with the ‘imagined community’ of England, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s ubiquitous phrase, is unprecedented.4
This incipient or enhanced sense of nationhood is one of the ways in which critics are likely to think of the modernity of the early modern period, as part of a larger narrative about the centralization and consolidation of England under the Tudors. And yet the texts that construct early modern ideas of nation inevitably locate them in relation to the authority of a reconstructed medieval past, and do so by means of a conservative disposition toward history that ensures the complete saturation of early modern culture with medievalism. In order to understand early modern England’s national self-fashioning, we need to rethink the relationship between emergent forms of nationalism and the nature of the Elizabethan and early Stuart medievalism upon which they are always grounded. For, as Anderson has suggested, what we think of as nationalism necessarily involves a distinctively modern attitude toward history and time, one in which the imagined community of the nation is held together by a sense of the simultaneity of all its constituent individuals so that (like an individual) it can be conceptualized as a single entity existing in the present and explained by a narrative biography of its past.5
Obsession with the medieval past is part and parcel of early modern England’s proto-nationalist impulse toward self-definition, but it is important to remember how extraordinarily varied and heterogeneous early modern England’s historical culture was.6 National history, for an early modern English subject, was transmitted in innumerable, inconsistent, and often surprising ways in chronicles, narrative histories, antiquarian reconstructions, oral traditions, communal rituals, plays, ballads, broadsides, polemics, and literary fictions with varying pretensions to accuracy. There were also multiple ways of understanding the relevance of the past to the present. Part of what makes an Elizabethan tome like Holinshed’s Chronicles seem undisciplined to modern historians is its inclusive, accumulative attitude toward historical data. F. J. Levy, some time ago, remarked that the Tudor chronicler ‘did not remake the past in his own image or in any other but instead reported the events of the past in the order in which they occurred.’7 There is of course no such thing as unmediated historical narration, and Annabel Patterson has shown that the Holinshed authors had their own agendas.8 But Levy’s exasperation underscores the difference between a modern sense of historical narrative and the comparatively loose organization of the Tudor chronicle. This difference is important because any truly nationalist history needs to be remade in the image of the nation as a coherent entity in the present. A history lacking a consistent sense of anachronism, in which any episode in the undifferentiated past can relate to the present as an exemplar or precedent, lacks the unifying principles of selection and biographical narrative required by the nationalist sense of history Anderson describes.
In this light, it is easy to see why Shakespeare’s two tetralogies have been so central to attempts to trace the foundations of nationalism in early modern England. For though these plays stage certain kinds of cultural heterogeneity (in terms of gender and class, in terms of the archipelagic diversity of Britain, and in terms of England’s relationship with France), Helgerson is clearly correct to argue that they are ultimately plays about the consolidation of royal power conceived of as central to a brand of national identity.9 Each tetralogy drives toward closure conceived of in terms of royal achievement—the triumph of Henry V and the so-called Tudor myth—even if the plays themselves may sometimes seem to undercut or critique happily settled endings. And since literary critics tend habitually to see Shakespeare’s histories as the culmination and epitome of early modern historical representation, they underpin a compelling narrative of national self-fashioning as the imposition of order upon history. Thus, for Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Shakespeare’s histories are key proof-texts for a ‘process of national consolidation and national self-definition’ in which ‘the vogue for national history and the national history play … appears as an important component of the cultural project of imagining an English nation.’10
Since narratives concerning the early modern invention of nationalism are deeply entangled with the story of Tudor centralization, they require a brand of Englishness, like Shakespeare’s, organized around the monarchy. And yet one of Helgerson’s most important arguments is that Shakespeare’s histories achieve this consolidated, royalist sense of the nation only by systematically excluding alternative perspectives contained in other history plays.11 This means that we do a disservice to the complexity and multiplicity of early modern constructions of England if we allow Shakespeare’s histories to stand for late Elizabethan and early Stuart historical culture in general. ‘What interests’, Helgerson asks, ‘are we preferring when we prefer Shakespeare’ to other, alternative dramatizations of medieval history? Part of the answer, I think, is that we are attracted to what is familiar in Shakespeare, to a vision of consolidated monarchical nationhood that resonates with our own modern ideas of nation and state. And yet it is certainly more accurate to think of Shakespeare’s histories as one construction of the national past articulated from within a historical culture that contains multiple, conflicting resources for national self-description and which lacks any overriding systematic approach with which to organize its unprecedented abundance of historical information.
This essay attempts to decenter our sense of the nationalist project of the history play by recovering an alternative version of what England meant from a set of less-familiar plays dealing with the Danish and Norman conquests of England in the eleventh century. Within a modern idea of national biography, in which temporal proximity correlates to cultural relevance, such ancient stories would appear to be less immediately important to early modern England than the more recent dynastic history depicted in Shakespeare’s two tetralogies. And yet, as D. R. Woolf has suggested, ancient conflicts with the Normans, Romans, and Danes may actually have had a ‘higher profile in popular consciousness’ than the Wars of the Roses, and it is the Danish invasions that ‘recur most often as a topic in popular discourse’.12 This suggests an accumulative relation to the past that is at once unsystematic and unruly, an attitude toward history more conducive to the production of endless alternative narratives than to the consolidation of any nationalized version of the past.13 Woolf’s account makes it clear, moreover, that these ancient stories of invasion and resistance could have considerable importance as sources of local identification and pride in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, providing narratives concerning the native us and the foreign them that were also a resource for proto-nationalist sentiment.
Cultural memories of the Danish and Norman conquests do not feature prominently in recent studies of early modern nationalism. It is easy to see why: they emphasize the vulnerability of England, its susceptibility to conquest, its complicated relations with other nearby peoples—everything seemingly denied by Gaunt’s famous speech about England’s insularity in Shakespeare’s Richard II. Indeed, it is a central tenant of Philip Schwyzer’s interesting study of British national memory that the style of Tudor nationalism exemplified by Gaunt’s eulogy is forged by excluding Anglo-Saxon history, with its Danish and Norman conquests, and thus by creating a link with imagined British origins.14 This erasure, he argues, enables an essentially Protestant, royalist brand of Tudor nationalism. My argument here is simply that, within the multiplicity of Tudor and early Stuart historical culture, there are alternative national memories with alternative histories and politics that coexist with the forms of national memory Schwyzer describes.
In early modern plays depicting eleventh-century invaders—Fair Em (c.1590), which depicts William the Conqueror, and Edmond Ironside (c.1595) and the The Love-sick King (c.1617), which both feature the Danish conqueror King Canute—these popular stories are organized into a form of nationalism that is in many ways the antithesis of that given expression in a play like Richard II or Henry V: one that locates the essence of Englishness not in its insularity, conquering might, or heroic monarchy, but rather in the hardiness of its ancient liberties, the vitality of it localities, and its ability to resist conquest by absorbing external threats. These plays, in other words, give us access to an early modern brand of national identity forged out of a sense of the medieval past that—unlike Shakespeare’s—is not fundamentally royalist in nature. In fact, with their emphasis upon Saxon liberty, these plays might be thought of as precursors for the seventeenth-century oppositional discourse associating monarchical tyranny with the Norman yoke. For though these plays lack the oppositional charge later associated with this term, they do help forge the discourse of Saxon liberty that underwrites antimonarchical polemic during the revolutionary era. Moreover, though these stories encapsulate an identifiable and coherent set of ideas about Englishness, their implicit idea of national identity is antithetical to the exclusionary logic of modern nationalism, which depends upon ‘the drawing and politicization of us–them boundaries, the exclusion of visible others, the foundation of membership on not being something else.’15
We can see how this alternative national idea works by thinking about the sentimental plotting of (to give it its full title) A Pleasant Commodie of Faire Em, the Miller’s Daughter of Manchester; With the Love of William the Conqueror, a pseudo-historical comedy produced by Lord Strange’s Men and printed in 1593 and again in 1631. The play has two comic love plots, and it is in their juxtaposition that we see its author’s imaginative reconstruction of an English national identity. One concerns Em, the daughter of a Saxon gentleman named Sir Thomas Goddard, who has been forced to become a humble miller after the Norman Conquest of England:
MILLER Thus must we mask to save our wretched lives,
Threat’ned by conquest of this hapless isle,
Whose sad invasions by the Conqueror
Have made a number such as we subject
Their gentle necks unto their stubborn yoke
Of drudging labor and base peasantry.16
Em is betrothed to Manville, but courted by two Norman lords, Mountney and Valingford, who pursue her for her beauty despite her apparently low birth. Em puts these suitors off by pretending to be deaf and dumb, but Manville, jealous of the attention Em has received and put off by news of her suddenonset disabilities, pursues a match with a wealthy citizen’s daughter instead. The other plot concerns the amorous adventures of William, ‘Britain’s mighty conqueror’ (1.1). He goes in disguise to woo the Danish princess Blanch, whose picture he has seen and been smitten by. Blanch falls in love with William, but he is unimpressed when he sees her in the flesh and falls in love instead with a Swedish princess Mariana, who is being held captive by the Danish king. Mariana, though, is the beloved of the Danish marquis Lubeck, William’s confidante and escort, and though Lubeck is willing to give his beloved to his royal friend, Mariana is unwilling to be given. She agrees to fly with William, but arranges to have Blanch, in a mask, take her place.
The comic plotting of the ending brings these two storylines together and clarifies their ideological significance. William, upon discovering his error, renounces women and love altogether, despite the Danish king’s willingness to countenance the union of the Danish and English thrones. But when William is called upon to adjudicate the competing claims of the subplot he recognizes Em’s virtue and has a change of heart. ‘I see that women are not general evils,’ he declares, and agrees to marry Blanch (17.223). William’s willingness to marry is celebrated as an act of newfound maturity, since making a sound diplomatic marriage demonstrates the ability to reconcile personal passions and desires to the greater good of the realm. And the incorporation of Denmark into William’s kingdom signals the union of England’s two eleventh-century conquerors. At the same time, William’s recognition of Em’s virtue triggers a reconciliation between Saxons and Normans, for when William opines that Em seems nobler than her station, the truth about her parentage comes out. The upshot of this is nothing less than the harmonious union of Anglo-Norman England, with William exclaiming, ‘Sir Thomas Goddard, welcome to thy prince’ and the erstwhile miller responding, ‘longer let not Goddard live a day | Than he in honor loves his sovereign’ (17.261, 266–7). This political reconciliation is sealed by the marriage of Em and Valingford, who is ‘no mean man in King William’s favor’ (16.39–40).
Goddard originally had to adopt his disguise because the conquering Normans, in their ‘tyranny’, sought to eradicate all of Saxon ‘Britain’s gentry’ (2.19–20). By the end of the play, this conflict has been solved in two complementary ways. William himself has been purged of the erratic and headstrong passions conventionally characteristic of the stage tyrant, and the enmity between Normans and Saxons has been replaced by the reciprocal loyalties avowed by Goddard and the Conqueror. But this is not depicted as the acceptance, by the Saxon gentry, of Norman conquest so much as in terms of the triumph of Saxon exemplarity. For the reconciliations that constitute the play’s happy ending are all made possible by the force of the fair Em’s Saxon virtue. Even William, who is referred to early on as a ‘Norman duke’ (3.3) is repeatedly referred to as a ‘Saxon duke’ (12.28; see also 17.9, 24) as the play reaches its comic finale. What begins as a play about the aftermath of the conquest of the Saxons by the Norman William ends as a play about the absorption of William into a tradition of national virtue represented primarily by the Saxon gentry.
Fair Em’ s emphasis upon Saxon virtue as an antidote to tyranny resonates with early modern English concerns about the relationship between native traditions of law and the Norman Conquest.17 For within the orthodoxy that J. G. A Pocock has famously called ‘the common-law mind’, the authority of native laws and institutions was derived from their status as unbroken custom, and was thus dependent upon the existence of some kind of continuity between the present and the Saxon past.18 The pivotal historical dilemma here is the Norman Conquest. If William ruled by conquest and abrogated preexisting laws and customs, then it could in theory be argued that the will of kings could over-rule the customary authority of common law. Though nobody seems to have been too eager to make this particular case, there were plenty of people eager to defend against it by asserting an essential continuity of laws and institutions despite the Conquest. In practice, this continuity could be construed in multiple ways: some suggested that William really ruled by inheritance from Edward the Confessor, some that he conquered but then ratified Saxon laws.19
Sir John Hayward (often cited as a proponent of the Conquest and its absolutist implications on the strength of earlier writings) wrote in his Lives of the III Normans that William’s victory ‘bringeth no disparagement in honour’ to England because ‘it worketh no essentiall change. The State still remained the same, the solid bodie of the State remained still English: the coming in of many Normans, was but as Rivers falling into the Ocean; which change not the Ocean, but are confounded with the waters thereof.’20 Though this kind of argument had specific ramifications for scholars like Hayward (who was trained in civil law), sentiment about conquest and the Saxon past also formed part of a more nebulous and un-theorized structure of feeling with broader popular appeal. The late, great Christopher Hill described the idea of Saxon liberty as a kind of generalized nostalgic mythos readily available to a wide range of English subjects, and the appeal of a play like Fair Em is best understood in terms of structures of feeling (concerning native liberties and the Norman yoke) like those that Hill describes.21
The comic plot of Fair Em, in which the Norman conqueror is absorbed into the tradition of Saxon virtue, correlates at the level of narrative with Hayward’s asser tion that ‘the coming in of many Normans, was but as Rivers falling into the Ocean; which change not the Ocean, but are confounded with the waters thereof.’ This presumably appealed to an audience who felt, at least intuitively, that Saxon liberties could be preserved so long as the personal initiatives of kings did not overstep customary boundaries. Though the play ends on a note of political harmony between King and people, its vision of England is in many ways the opposite of the essentially royalist brand of nationalism so frequently associated with the Shakespearean history play and the consolidation of the Tudor monarchy. Everything about Fair Em resists the impulse toward centralization, from the way the play privileges the Saxon gentry over the heroic monarch to its emphasis on its Manchester locale. Suggestively, the play is also a product of the hybridity of sixteenth-century historical culture, since its author, who had Holinshed in mind at times, concocted his basic plot by fusing material from a ballad about Em with a story about William from the novella tradition.22 The play, with its anti-royalist version of the imagined community of England, is also a product of a historical culture too unruly to be harnessed to any consolidated narrative of the past.
If it is not just another name for Fair Em, it would be interesting to see the William the Conqueror play listed in Henslowe’s diary.23 These are apparently the only plays written on the subject of William the Conqueror. Indeed, since Fair Em could accurately be described as an anti-Conquest play—it imagines the undoing of the social violence done by conquest—there is really no extant play dealing centrally with the story of the Norman Conquest. This is odd, since playwrights and audiences were evidently interested in Saxon material and since early modern playwrights seem to have been eager to stage the stories that stood as precedents for edgy constitutional inquiry. My hypothesis about the absence of any ‘Chronicle History of William the Conqueror’ is that (Hayward notwithstanding) the story of the Norman Conquest was in fact felt to bring too much disparagement to the national honor to be a popular tale. Hence, too, Shakespeare’s apparent unwillingness to stage a successful French invasion at the end of King Lear, or the way he has the French refer to their English opponents as ‘Norman bastards’ (3.5.10) in Henry V: undoing the shame of William’s conquest is part of the project of Shakespeare’s most jingoistic play.24
But concerns associated with William’s conquest—concerns, that is, about the continuity of native liberties and their constitutive relationship to national identity—are handled quite explicitly in Edmond Ironside and The Love-sick King, two plays featuring the conquering Danish king Canute (who ascended to the English throne 50 years before William). In each of these plays the conquest of Canute threatens a tradition of native liberty imagined in each case as specifically Saxon in nature. Each play, moreover, is animated by tension between the idea of conquest as a rupture that threatens to undo native character and the idea of incorporation as articulated by Hayward and staged in Fair Em. Edmond Ironside—which is based primarily on Holinshed—manipulates its source in order to emphasize the absorption of Canute into the English institution of monarchy; and this plot structure is replicated in The Love-sick King, a later play that may or may not owe the conceit to its Elizabethan predecessor.
Though the association between Normans and Danes may seem odd to modern readers—the Danish yoke?—it is common enough within the popular historical imagination of Elizabethan England. We can see this in the comic plotting of Fair Em, where William absorbs the Danes and is himself absorbed by the Saxons. Here is what Holinshed’s Chronicles have to say about the death of Edmond Ironside and the subsequent reign of Canute:
With this Edmund, surnamed Ironside, fell the glorious majestie of the English kingdome, the which afterward as it had beene an aged bodie being fore decaied and weakened by the Danes, that now got possession of the whole, yet somewhat recovered after the space of 26 yeers under king Edward, surnamed the Confessor: and shortlie thereupon as it had beene falne into a resiluation [relapse], came to extreame ruine by the invasion and conquest of the Normans.25
This association is bolstered in Holinshed by the story of the Danish origins of Normandy. The chronicle recounts the story of Rollo, a Dane who after being thwarted in his attempt to invade England sailed to France and founded Normandy.26 As a result, the Danes and the Normans are actually one people, ‘which the English people called by one generall name Danes, and the Frenchmen Normans’.27 The Anglo-Saxonist Richard Verstegan, in his Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities (1605), argues not only that the Normans were ‘all one with the Danes’ but also that, since Saxons, Danes, and Normans are all Germanic people, the intermixing of these peoples doesn’t even make England ‘a mixed nation’.28
The anonymous late Elizabethan chronicle play Edmond Ironside hinges upon a conflict between the native hero Ironside and Canute over the throne of England. The former has a claim based on native royal blood while the latter has a claim based upon the conquest of England by his father, Swein. There are numerous late Elizabethan plays featuring competing claims to power (in addition to history plays, we might think of the opening scene of Titus Andronicus), and heightened interest in this scenario clearly has to do with concerns about Elizabeth’s uncertain successor. The succession crisis, because it provoked thought about competing kinds of claims to political authority, generated interest in larger constitutional questions about the nature of the commonwealth and the relationship between monarch and people. And Edmond Ironside, though it is the story of a king, is primarily concerned with monarchy as it pertains to constitutional questions related to right by conquest and the countervailing rhetoric of native liberty.
The play’s patriotic core, its key idea about what constitutes the imagined community of England, is signaled in the opening scene when a virtuous Danish advisor named Uskataulf advises Canute to rule moderately:
USKATAULF For they are Englishmen, easye to rule
With lynitie, soe they bee used like men,
Patient of right, impatient of wrong,
Brookeinge noe tyrannie in anie sorte,
But hateinge and revengeinge yt with death.29
This advice advances the idea that the balanced English constitution, in which common law and the liberties of subjects coexist with personal monarchy, is a product of the characterological makeup of English subjects: a national character. And insofar as this speech is designed to make a patriotic appeal to the play’s sixteenth-century audience, its effect depends upon the assumption that this essential native character forms the link between the present and the Saxon past. Though this is a play that features a heroic native ruler, in other words, it imagines Englishness residing in a self-regulating populace that will not accept royal over-reaching. At the same time, the fact that the authors of this play felt the need to reconcile a narrative of heroic monarchy with a notion of Englishness that is in some ways opposed to a more crown-centered sense of national identity is an index to the uneasy intersection of competing forms of nationalism in late Elizabethan England.
The carefully drawn contrast between Ironside (the good native ruler) and Canute (the conquering tyrant) is central to the play’s dramatic action and political imagination. Ironside’s virtues are always realized in opposition to the excesses of Canute the conqueror. We can see this, for instance, in the way Ironside deals with Turkillus and Leofricke, two ‘borne Englishmen’ (1.3.27) who have been following Canute but rejoin their rightful king at the end of Act 1. Ironside welcomes them back with the following rousing speech:
This is Edmond Ironside in a nutshell: a figure of clemency rather than conquest and a figurehead for a brand of nationalism organized by the idea that ‘strangers cannot conquer us.’ Since Canute later makes much of the idea that London is ‘New Troy’ (3.2.2) and compares his army to Agamemnon’s (3.2.6–8), the allusion to the Greek general in Edmond’s speech is instructive as well. For one thing, we can see that the play’s conception of Edmond’s excellence is inextricably bound up with the idea that he is the opposite of Agamemnon or Canute. He is a figure primarily characterized here by his difference from these conquering rulers. For another, this is an unusual use of the commonplace idea of London as New Troy. This trope always invokes a genealogy of empire in which England is heir to Roman greatness, of course, but here that link is forged via a shared experience of conquest and survival. Just as Rome is the result of Troy’s unconquerable spirit—despite conquest—so the persistence of native institutions into the Elizabethan present is the result of England’s indomitable spirit despite the best efforts of Canute or William.
The play’s depiction of Canute is a great deal more ambiguous than is its treatment of the heroic native claimant. He contains more than a dash of tyrannical passion. When Turkillus and Leofricke defect, he has their children’s hands and noses cut off, prompting one of them to exclaim, ‘Oh England never trust a forraine kinge’ (2.3.158). But he is not all bad, and at the end of the play Canute and Ironside reconcile. Hence the play’s subtitle: ‘warr hath made all freinds.’ Since this is represented as a good thing, we are evidently supposed to find something in the Danish conqueror worth redeeming. Actually, the end of the play is interestingly dissonant in terms of the way it manipulates our sympathies, for it juxtaposes the triumphant reconciliation of the two kings with a reminder of Canute’s tyrannical treatment of Turkillus’ and Leofricke’s children (5.2.271–5).
To some degree these conflicting images of Canute are rendered compatible by the way the play deploys the wicked Edricus, an Englishman who is a Machiavellian schemer and who tries to play each of the kings against the other for his own benefit. He makes a convenient scapegoat, and insofar as he is responsible for misadvising Canute it is possible to imagine the latter being reformed at the end of the play. At least that is how the play tries to use him. But Edricus is an imperfect scapegoat; he is not really shown to be responsible for all of Canute’s wickedness. And though the play suggests that Edricus’ treachery paved the way for the conquest of England in the story’s prehistory, Canute’s brand of tyranny is associated so persistently with the problem of conquest and with foreignness (‘Oh England never trust a forraine kinge’) that it cannot really be fobbed off entirely on the treacherous native counselor.
In the play’s first act, Canute receives a visit from a group of commoners who enter shouting, ‘where is the kinge that hee may right our wronge?’ (1.1.98). At first this looks like a scene of regal care, a demonstration of the king’s gracious love of his subjects, for Canute responds, ‘The kinge is heere, whoe is yt Calls the kinge? | I am your kinge, speake, gentle Cuntrymen, | What laules hand hath done you injurye’ (1.1.99–101). But—and this is supposed to come as a small surprise to the audience—the commoners are in fact Danes and their complaint is that the English are insufficiently servile:
Canute promises to return them to their former eminence, a promise unlikely to win any sympathy with the play’s original audience. This is quite literally the language of the Norman yoke transposed onto Canute and the Danes, and the excessiveness of the conquerors’ tyranny toward their English slaves is not excused by noting Edricus’ perfidiousness.
Finally, the play’s Canute is incoherent at the level of character. He is at once a loathsome, tyrannical conqueror and a high-spirited but noble ruler misled by wicked counsel. But rather than chalk this ambiguity up to authorial incompetence, say, or to the absence of a missing part two, I think we can see that what is incoherent at the level of character actually makes a great deal of sense in terms of the play’s larger socio-political brief, which in this case has to do quite clearly with the Elizabethan succession crisis.30 This is implicit in the play’s warning against foreign princes, but it is possible to be a great deal more precise than that about how the play interacts with contemporary concerns if we attend to the rather odd way in which conquest theory is deployed in the play’s opening speeches.
The play opens with a long speech by Canute, who invokes ‘the due my fathers Conquest Claymes’ (1.1.8) but also speaks as if the ‘free Consent’ of English peers conferred authority (1.1.5). Even in the context of a longer speech this feels mildly oxymoronic, since rule by conquest is the antithesis of rule by consent. Things become curiouser and curiouser when Canute’s claim is backed up by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who angrily accuses Ironside of disregarding the English clergy and peerage who have ‘for publique proffitt of the Realme, | For peace, for quiet and utilitie, | Elected prince Canutus for our kinge’ (1.1.24–6). Why all the talk of consent and election in support of a monarch who claims to rule by conquest?
The answer, I think, lies in late Elizabethan arguments in which conquest was adduced to show a break with Saxon tradition and thus to disable the argument that blood inheritance was the sine qua non of succession. If inheritance as the exclusive basis for succession is not authorized by immemorial custom, then it follows that England might be free to elect a successor to Elizabeth. This is one argument put forward, for example, in Robert Parsons’ notorious tract A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland, where in fact the same basic point is also made in terms of the turbulent history of the English monarchy during the period of Danish occupation:
He that wil consider the passing of the crowne of Ingland, from the death of Edmonde Ironside, elder sonne of king Eltheldred, until the possession therof gotten by William Duke of Normandie, to wit for the space of 50 yeares, shal easely see what authority the common wealth hath in such affaires, to alter titles of succession, according as publique necessity or utility shal require.31
For Parsons, this is part of a complex argument against the claim of James VI—the strongest claim by blood—and in favor of the Spanish Infanta. Because the history of monarchy is fraught with conquest and upheaval, the tract argues, there is no clear precedent that needs to be followed. The fact that this kind of argument was in the air c. 1595 helps make sense of what looks at first like an untenable link between election and conquest at the beginning of Edmond Ironside: for Parsons and his constituents the two went together because the fact of ancient conquest actually underwrites calls for elective succession in the present.
One could in fact read Edmond Ironside as a response to the arguments put forward in Parsons’ controversial tract. To be clear: I am not here concerned to show that this is literally the case, since among other things we do not know for sure when exactly the play was written and performed. But if we take Parsons’ Conference as indicative of the kinds of arguments available to Catholic polemicists during the succession crisis, then noting how Edmond Ironside seems to respond to them can help illuminate the political brief of the play. Where Parsons argues (on the basis of conquest, among other things) for the election of a foreign prince instead of James VI, the play warns against foreign princes and celebrates the native monarchy of a figure—Ironside—from whom James VI actually traced his lineage.32 This basic reading is bolstered by a short scene in which Canterbury argues over royal legitimacy with the Archbishop of York. The former urges his colleague to ‘cleave unto Canutus, and more submit thie self | To mee thie head and to our mother Church’ (3.1.34–5). But York, sounding anachronistically Protestant and claiming that his allegiance is to god and country rather than to the Catholic church, declares, ‘Oh lett mee dye whenas I leave my kinge, | A trew borne prince, for anie forriner’ (3.1.40–1). I think it would have been hard to watch this scene, in the 1590s, without being reminded of the succession controversy and in particular of competing claims for the Protestant James VI and the Catholic Infanta.
This helps explain what is at stake for contemporary audiences in the contest between Ironside and Canute, but it does not explain the oddly dissonant reconciliation with which the play ends. To understand that I think we need to remember the associative logic linking Canute to William and the general importance of the latter in thinking about the ancient constitution and the continuity of English institutions. It is worth pointing out here that Parsons, on a number of occasions in A Conference, treats Canute and William as parallel figures from England’s past.33 At any rate, I think the parallel is invoked, powerfully if implicitly, by the play’s obsessive invocation of the idea of right by conquest.
With that said, it is not a coincidence that this play features the same basic narrative of incorporation characteristic of writings about William the Conqueror like Hayward’s Lives of the III Normans or Fair Em. The reconciliation between Ironside and Canute is very carefully scripted: Ironside meets Canute in single combat, drubs him soundly, and then they all become friends. There can be no question, therefore, about the English king’s essential victory. This ratifies the native claim, making it clear that the resulting friendship is offered by the English from a position of physical and moral superiority. As a result, the reconciliation at the end of the play makes sense primarily as a fantasy expression of the persistence of native liberty, an encoded rebuttal of the threat posed to this by the idea of conquest. In the chronicles, Canute did rule England by himself after the death of Ironside as a precursor to William the Conqueror. But the conclusion to Edmond Ironside implies that (in Hayward’s phrase) ‘the solid bodie of the State remained still English’ and that the coming in of many Danes was likewise ‘but as Rivers falling into the Ocean; which change not the Ocean, but are confounded with the waters thereof.’
This also helps explain the dramatic purpose of the otherwise tangential scene (4.2) in which Queen Emma, the stepmother of Edmund Ironside, sends her two children off to her brother Richard, duke of Normandy for safekeeping. Richard is the grandfather of William the Conqueror, and one of the children is Edward the Confessor.34 This scene, of course, has everything to do with the play’s subtextual interest in William, and by invoking the close connections between England and Normandy it hints at a larger narrative of incorporation in which William too, like Canute, becomes part of England.
Because conquest has implications for the legitimacy of native institutions, the play’s emphasis on incorporation is part of its larger response to the Elizabethan succession crisis. That is, the play insists upon England’s ocean-like ability to absorb Canute (and by extension, William) and this in turn serves as an implicit defense of a nationalistic idea—that England’s monarchy and balanced constitution are essentially native institutions—of urgent concern during the 1590s. The play’s response to the succession crisis is at once direct and theoretical. It stages a conflict between a native king and foreign tyrant designed directly to invoke controversy surrounding contemporary claimants. And its narrative of incorporation amounts to a theoretical defense of an idea of English monarchy as part of a balanced constitution protective of native liberties. For these subjects, recall, ‘are Englishmen’ and are therefore ‘Patient of right, impatient of wrong | Brookeinge noe tyrannie in anie sorte.’ In the process, Canute is pressed into double duty. Insofar as he is the wicked foreign claimant he is to be shunned and hated, but insofar as he represents the problematic of conquest he must be absorbed into the native tradition. This is why the character is by turns a tyrant to the English and their friend. Dissonance at the level of plot and character, in other words, is symptomatic of strains and incompatibilities within the larger ideological project that the play undertakes. This project, ultimately, is to support an idea of limited native monarchy compatible with a brand of Saxon nostalgia which in turn locates the essence of the nation not in the achievements of its king but the character of its subjects.
Though it is a very different kind of play written in very different circumstances, Brewer’s The Love-sick King features a (by now) familiar narrative of conquest and absorption. It begins with the utter defeat of the English by Canute—‘this day the kingdom’s wholly conquered’ (1.1.21)—and ends with the defeated Danish king welcomed into a brotherhood of amity with the English after being re-conquered by them. This reconciliation is made possible, dramatically speaking, because the English king who defeats Canute—Alured, anachronistically, instead of Ironside—has had a love affair with a virtuous Danish princess named Elgina, who is then accidentally killed in the body of the play. Elgina lays the affective groundwork for reconciliation early on when she announces, in Act 1, that she is as much English as Danish by virtue of having been brought up on English soil (1.3.242–50). When Alured has Canute at his mercy in Act 5, he pardons his erstwhile enemy out of respect for Elgina’s memory.
As in Edmond Ironside, the reconciliation at the end of the play comes as something of a surprise. Brewer’s Canute is even less sympathetic than the figure from the earlier play, and the main source for Brewer’s Canute is the legend of the Grand Turk Mohomet, who fell in love during the sack of Constantinople.35 Noting the source gives some insight into Brewer’s characterization of Canute: he is a tyrant of the sort associated in England with eastern despotism. After conquering the English he orders his followers to ‘whip out this English Race’ by killing every man, woman, and child they come upon. As Canute himself is busily murdering the helpless, he falls for an English nun named Cartesmunda, whom he woos for much of the play, finally wins, and then accidentally kills in another fit of passion. Much is made in the play of the idea that wooing Cartesmunda is an alternative kind of conquest, and we see that the unruly passion of love takes the place of the ambition and bloodlust that have driven Canute to become a conqueror.
Though Brewer plays fast and loose with history, conflating Danish and English figures from different centuries and drawing liberally from romance plots, it is clear that he is drawn to the figure of Canute by an interest in the idea of conquest. The word appears with near-comic frequency whenever Canute is onstage. Brewer’s Canute is both an over-passionate tyrant and Saxon-era conqueror, and we are by now in a position to recognize a deeper cultural logic underpinning this association: if Saxon England was ‘wholly conquered’, then the King’s will thereafter supersedes law and custom. The fact of conquest in the past could therefore underwrite tyrannical rule in the present. This is also the cultural logic by which the otherwise-weird reconciliation scene at the end of the play could have felt appropriate to a celebration of native customs and liberties: if the conqueror is absorbed into the celebration of British monarchy, then in a sense the continuity of native institutions is preserved. Accordingly, Brewer’s play ends with the defeat of Canute by the united forces of Scotland and England. The Scottish king takes the crown from the Danish invader and offers it to Alured, declaring, ‘we take the English Crown and plant it here, | To whom in right it legally belongs’ (5.2.50–1). Like Edmond Ironside, the play gives us a triumphant English king while also arranging a rapprochement between the native king and erstwhile conqueror that is itself an important historical pretext for an idea of balanced monarchy that the play espouses.
As with Ironside, this play’s understanding of British monarchy as a Saxon institution is designed as a gesture of national self-fashioning offered in response to a problem of national self-definition. In this case, as the military union celebrated between England and Scotland suggests, the play’s nationalism is designed to appeal to King James and to respond to the need for a specifically British history compatible with the idea of Saxon liberties.36 Here is the English king Alured, speaking to the Scottish king at the end of the play:
I am persuaded by the suggestion that the play was written for the occasion of James’ visit to Newcastle in 1617, for the play is also preoccupied with the glories of Newcastle and larded with local lore.37 We might, then, see the play as a kind of mirror image of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which Edward the Confessor helps the Scots expunge Macbeth’s tyranny. Since King Edward (as Janelle Greenberg has recently argued) is the Saxon king most powerfully associated with the sanctity of common law and the ancient constitution, it is possible to read Shakespeare’s play in Jacobean terms as a dramatic argument for the ancient legal union between the two nations: if Edward was so closely allied with Malcolm, then maybe it makes historical sense to include the Scots under the umbrella of English common law.38 Brewer’s play likewise casts the English/Scottish alliance as a matter of ancient history, and treats it as a bulwark against conquest and tyranny. James, as king in both realms, becomes the perfect embodiment of a specifically native British monarchy, strengthened by union, that is given as the opposite of Canute’s over-passionate tyranny.
The Love-sick King also features a comic subplot, based loosely upon a Newcastle legend, in which a peddler named Thornton comes into fantastic wealth and is transformed almost overnight from the poorest of traveling salesmen into the richest subject in England. The play’s modern editor is undoubtedly correct to argue that this plot is added in the spirit of civic rivalry, in order to create a Newcastle alternative to the London-based tale of Dick Whittington.39 But as in Fair Em, the sentimental jointure between national politics and local color is underwritten by a Saxon sense of Englishness which resists centralization. Here, the two plots come together on the eve of the climactic battle between Alured and Canute, when the former finds respite and support in Newcastle and Thornton bankrolls Alured’s army. This is particularly appropriate for the occasion of a state visit to Newcastle, for the whole scene provides an opportunity to celebrate that city’s traditional importance to the national cause. Alured even casts the heroic fortitude of Newcastle as counterweight to the shame of conquest, declaring:
Beyond this rather transparent expression of civic pride, however, what is interesting about the Thornton plot is the way its values dovetail with those at stake in the conflict between Canute and Alured. We are supposed to intuit that the mercantile values embodied by Thornton—he is acquisitive without being a conqueror, wealthy without being a hoarder—are the antithesis of Canute’s brand of tyranny. There is something quintessentially greedy and miserly about the way Canute dotes upon Cartesmunda. He lavishes the wealth of a realm upon her but keeps her hidden from all other men. In general—and in this he resembles other besotted stage tyrants, from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine to Massinger’s Domitian—Canute treats the singular richness of Cartesmunda’s beauty as a sign of his own unique status: having sole possession of such beauty reinforces the tyrant’s sense of his own unparalleled magnificence. By contrast, when Thornton considers marrying a wealthy widow, he worries that ‘the marriage of so much wealth as ours compounded, would choak all content, and with the superflux change all to cares’ (3.3.80–1). To prevent this, he becomes a figure of aggressive charity, giving money for public works as well as for Alured’s army. He embodies a kind of civic-minded generosity that is the lifeblood of a commonwealth. This is of course readily compatible with the contrast between Alured and Canute, or between constitutional monarchy and absolutism, for it celebrates reciprocal generosity as the key public virtue.
The play, then, contrasts conquest and tyranny with both native monarchy and the values of mercantilism. The result—as embodied by the reciprocal admiration and support between Alured and Thornton—is a cocktail of patriotic assertions linking the British union to native liberty and thence to localism and the triumph of English merchants. Mercantile expansion is an alternative form of imperialism, one conceptualized here—in contrast to the rapaciousness of Canute the conqueror—as a rising tide that lifts all boats. This, then, is how I see the ceremonial brief of Brewer’s play. First, in staging the defeat and absorption of the conqueror it invokes the compelling idea of Saxon liberty and uses it as the affective platform upon which to mount a celebration of the Jacobean rule of Britain. Second, by linking mercantilism to an ancient tradition of political liberty, it labors to create a historical or mythic framework for the celebration of Newcastle commerce as the lynchpin of the commonwealth.
The Elizabethan and Jacobean plays that I have discussed here hinge on an idea of Englishness that runs parallel to thinking about the continuity of common law and the ancient constitution, but that also sees Saxon virtue as the key to something like a national character. This figuration of the national character survives, of course, and is later transformed into a powerfully unifying nationalist mythos—what Balibar calls a ‘fictive ethnicity’—from the strong oppositional rhetoric of the Norman yoke in the mid-seventeenth century to the racialized notion of England’s Teutonic origins prevalent in the nineteenth.40 But what is striking about the way these earlier plays deploy the idea of Saxon virtue is how their emphases run counter to the centralizing tendencies typically associated with the ideology of early modern monarchy as an affective focus for proto-nationalist sentiment. This is not to say that they are in any concrete sense opposed to kings, but rather that they privilege a version of Englishness emphasizing the local (Em’s Manchester locale, the merchant of Newcastle), traditional limits on royal authority, and the perspectives of commoners and gentry.
Ernest Gellner, in his influential 1983 study of Nations and Nationalism argues that pre-industrial societies are too segmented (by locality and by caste) to generate what he calls the ‘cultural imperialisms’ inherent in modern nationalist culture: ‘the efforts of one culture or another to dominate and expand to fill out a political unit’.41 Certainly there were such efforts in early modern England, from Shakespeare’s imaginary vision of England as a band of brothers united under a heroic king, to the real Tudor project of expanding the language of direct obligation to the Crown outward to subjects beyond those so implicated by traditional structures of obligation.42 But the plays I have discussed here both dramatize a resistance to centralizing cultural imperialism (in that the native cannot be overcome by the force of monarchal conquest) and are themselves products of a historical culture so varied and heterogeneous as to resist streamlining or centralization (in that eleventh-century stories coexist with late medieval ones as competing resources for sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury ideas of national identity).
This case study in the figuration of Englishness has implications, I think, for the narrative of emergent nationalism we tend to use to emphasize the modernity of the early modern. In particular, we need to remember that there are multiple ways of imagining the nation, that they do not necessarily dovetail with one another, and that this situation is enabled by a historical culture that can seem, to us, impossibly undifferentiated. What is distinctive about the period’s discourse of national identity, we might say, has more to do with a deep, self-conscious interest in the multiple and conflicting implications of medieval history for the imagined community of England than with the invention or consolidation of any single nationalist idea. The story of early modern England’s emergent nationalism, in other words, is really a story about the narrative plenitude of its medieval past.