In their introduction to this illuminating but lopsided book, historian Carole Levin and literary scholar John Watkins frame their exploration of notions of identity and foreignness within European society as a push toward a “fully integrated investigation of the past” (5). While the book's proclaimed interdisciplinarity is unsurprising and its chapters never really add up to the promised “metacommentary on the current dialogue between the two fields” (6), it contains valuable and innovative discussions of Shakespeare's complex uses of foreign matter and of exchanges between Englishness and various European identities in the period that preceded England's colonial expansion beyond the British Isles.

Levin is recycling already published material; her chapters are here paired with new pieces by Watkins to form three sections, each concerned with a sixteenth-century play by Shakespeare. In the first, Levin reads the penultimate scene of Henry VI, Part I, where Joan of Arc is taken to be burned at the stake, as an example of a woman unsuccessfully pleading pregnancy to avoid execution (this was the closest women had to claiming benefit of clergy) and shows that accusations of heresy tended to close off this avenue to deferring the sentence. Here as elsewhere in the book, Levin uses Shakespeare as another source of case histories, reading Shakespeare's account of Joan's desperate plea as immediately comparable to similar stories told in Foxe's Acts and Monuments. Indeed, she finds the historical narratives “more heartrending and tragic” (50) than the drama, which thus seems to serve as a canonical excuse to talk about the lives of real people—in this case, about the marginalization and physical suffering of sixteenth-century women. Watkins's chapter complements this approach by a nuanced analysis of the purposes and contexts of the representation of such lives. He argues that the play's misogynistic focus on Joan and on King Henry's French consort, Margaret, has less to do with an ambivalence toward female sovereignty per se (a claim often made in the scholarship of the past couple of decades) than with a conflicted shift from international dynastic politics to politics centered on national interests. Written in the early 1590s, the play is committed to the popular nationalism of the post-Armada years, and, as Watkins shows, its militancy combines with a deep suspicion of any diplomatic activity: on the one hand, it revises the historical material to repudiate the Treaty of Arras by making it a result of Joan's seductive rhetoric, while, on the other, it builds on the defamation of Margaret in Yorkist historiography to discredit dynastic marital diplomacy. Throughout the book, Watkins reads the plays against their sources to identify how Shakespeare adjusted the foreign materials (foreign texts and texts about foreigners) to the concerns of his moment, using a “literary” methodology to contribute to early modern cultural history and the history of political culture.

In the section about the Merchant of Venice, Levin rehearses the familiar argument about the essentializing view of Jewishness as a persistent trait that cannot be washed away by baptism and suggests that Jessica's inability to enjoy music is part of this larger complex—a sign of her permanent exclusion from a community that sees belonging as a birthright, not obtainable by conversion. But the sweeping claims about a cultural imaginary of tone-deaf “others” and more musical Christians are undermined by the scarcity of evidence that is used to support them. Watkins's bold, multifaceted reading of the play starts with documenting a widespread sense that London's economic growth came at the expense of Venice's decline. The English were anxiously observing the Republic and what its example suggested about the dangers of a dependence on foreign trading partners—a concern that Watkins recognizes in each strand of the play, in the suspicions about Jessica's conversion as well as in Shakespeare's revision of Il pecorone to turn Portia into a lady from the Venetian terra firma.

Writing about The Taming of the Shrew, Levin turns to accounts of Catherine Parr's submission to her husband's direction in matters of religion and suggests that the “shadow” of Henry VIII's learned and disputatious queen stands behind Kate as she makes her famous final speech. Starting from the observation that in the sixteenth century, female authorship was much more common in Italy than in England, Watkins suggests that as an adaptation of Ariosto's I suppositi, Shakespeare's play compares the socioeconomic structures that shaped gender relations in the two countries. In Watkins's reading, the play valorizes Kate's English “education” over humanist training and articulates a conservative critique of the relative independence experienced by Italian women who had access to the latter.

Throughout the book, Watkins argues against the reflexive assumption that, as G. K. Hunter put it, “Italy [and other foreign settings] became important to the English dramatist only when ‘Italy’ was revealed as an aspect of England”—an assumption Levin also seems to share. In the strongest parts of Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds, Watkins deals with the transnational institutions, cultures, and networks (of diplomacy, trade, and literary education) through which England encountered other European countries and provides perceptive accounts of the plays' distinctly late sixteenth-century English perspective on them. His is a compelling contribution to recent scholarship (books by Alison Games and Timothy Hampton come to mind) that treats early modern international encounters without a reductive focus on identity. Levin's chapters seek to link national identity to other forms of “foreignness,” but this connection as well as the connections between the two scholars' markedly different approaches remain untheorized. This “collaborative monograph” promises to stage an important dialogue—its Shakespearean focus, however, is no substitute for a clear framework for the exchange.