Historians have long investigated the importance of the Low Countries to European politics, and art historians have concentrated much of their work on this period on seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Yet until relatively recently, the early modern Low Countries received far less attention from literary scholars internationally. For scholars of early modern English drama, much has changed in recent years. Increasingly, literary critics have been exploring Dutch characters in early modern drama, though this presence has been mostly featured in single chapters in book studies on strangers in England and on the English stage. In Doppelgänger Dilemmas, Marjorie Rubright devotes herself entirely to the subject of English perceptions of the Dutch and at the same time expands her focus to include not just drama but other cultural and political expressions as well. In doing so, she makes a compelling case for the importance of the Dutch and “Dutchness” to English national identity in the making. Her concentration on the Dutch as doppelgängers to the English shows that it was not just through perceptions of difference and otherness that the English came to formulate their sense of self but also through their relations with “the proximate.” The closeness of the Dutch to the English, Rubright reminds us, was a matter of geographical proximity as well as ethnicity, religion, political ties, linguistic kinship, and the real presence of Dutch immigrants in early modern London and beyond. Yet, in spite of these ties, the English were also keen to distinguish themselves from the Dutch. Similitude, it turns out, is a double-edged sword; it can lead to dissembling, substitutability, and a loss of identity. To get at how the proximate was used in the formation of ethnicity, Rubright highlights what she calls a “double vision” when it comes to the English representations of the Dutch, a complex relationship in which sameness and difference were in “chiastic interplay” (5) with each other.

Rubright's book begins with a chapter on London city comedy, concentrating on John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan (1605). National origin and ethnic difference are, Rubright argues, fluid and unstable for Marston and other contemporary playwrights. Far from just making comic light of Dutch characters, the plays respond to the large number of Dutch immigrants in London with what she calls “a palimpsestic perception: one that sees Dutchness within, beneath, and overlayed onto Englishness” (55). The second chapter considers the emphasis on Anglo-Dutch kinship in language debates, and especially in works by William Camden and Richard Verstegan. Supporters of the so-called Teutonic thesis, which emphasized the Germanic origins of English, Camden and Verstegan advanced more specifically the notion of Dutch as a purer version of English. Such arguments for the closeness of the Dutch to the English can also be seen, she points out, in contemporary maps that overemphasized the spatial proximity between the two countries. Unlike the drama, then, these maps and language debates offered a more stable version of the relationship between Dutch and English, in their presentation of it as a matter of “propinquity,” or kinship.

Rubright's third chapter combines the interests of the preceding two by returning to the stage, now from a linguistic perspective, to look at dramatic representations of the Dutch language. Here, too, Rubright highlights the elasticity of ethnicity in drama and argues that plays like Thomas Dekker's No Wit, No Help like a Woman's (1611) posit that the more important distinction between characters is a matter of authenticity and inauthenticity, not national origin. Chapter 4 combines her research into drama and language theory by considering both from the perspective of print conventions and the mise-en-page of each text. Choices in letter type, she discovers, offer complex representations of Dutch as either alien or kin to English, making for fascinating “typographic experiments” (111). In chapter 5, Rubright turns from print to architectural proximity by exploring the Royal Exchange, Thomas Gresham's copy of the Antwerp Beurs, and its complex treatment in royal visits and mayoral processions. Finally, in her last chapter, Rubright moves beyond England to consider the dangerous implications of proximity of the English and Dutch in the East Indies. Letters and other documents show concerns on both sides that each was posing as the other, and the relations of kinship, friendship, and similarity were destroyed even more by commercial rivalry and the painful history of the 1623 Amboyna massacre. By the time Dryden writes his play Amboyna, fifty years after the event and during the third Anglo-Dutch war, little is left of the friendly relations of times past, and proximity has come to equal competition, violence, and death. Although Rubright does not explicitly chart a particular chronological development over the course of the century, when we get to Dryden, we seem far removed from early-seventeenth-century city comedy and its playful sense of the instability of ethnic identity.

Doppelgänger Dilemmas is long by current monograph standards, and at times it does strike me as a bit repetitive. At the same time, Rubright provides her readers with an unusual breadth of material that comes together convincingly around a set of important themes. Not only does she offer sophisticated, compelling, and interesting readings of an incredibly complex relationship, but she also suggests new and interesting avenues for the exploration of the formation of ethnicity and national identity more generally. The work is certain to remain central to the study of English representations of the Dutch for a long time and should be of interest to literary critics and historians alike.