Despite various waves of studies of national identity warning readers of its complexities and diversities, discontinuous history, conflicting nature, and the need to read between the lines when confronted with apparently patriotic outpourings, there is still often an assumption that versions of Englishness and Britishness can be taken at face value. In his thoughtful and carefully analytical new study, Freedom of Speech, 1500–1850, Christopher Ivic explores the “complex and often contradictory ways in which the heterogeneous writing of Britain put in place new ideologies and new ways of thinking about collective and individual identities within the context of the island's increasingly intersecting and intermingling peoples and cultures” (3). Ivic points out that the expanding bulk of Anglophone writing contained numerous criticisms of an Anglocentric British project but was not generally radical enough to include the Gaelic speaking communities of Scotland and Ireland (4). Accordingly, this is a study of the varieties of British identity represented in texts written in English, one that reveals a series of diverse and divergent perspectives teased out through the author's patient readings.
There are four lengthy chapters. Chapter 1 explores English responses to the accession of James VI and I. These tend to combine praise for the incoming monarch with an understandable anxiety about what his reign might bring with it and how a Scottish king could change England and English culture. The literature tends to support the union, but it imagines a union on England's terms rather than a genuine merging of the two countries’ cultures (it is easy to see why James had to scale down his hopes for Britain). In a treatise by Robert Fletcher, James is imagined as an honorary Englishman, even if his speech betrays his Scottish origins; it is a notion of Britishness “that served English interests” (36). Imagery based on the end of the Wars of the Roses might seem like it points to a new unity, rather like the dawn of the Tudors, but it also suggests a genuine fear of civil war: anxiety was as prevalent as celebration.
Chapter 2 explores the ways in which Jacobean panegyric imagined the union. The myth of Brutus, the supposed eponymous founder of Britain, was employed in a number of works. Often, however, the story was treated with considerable skepticism, as poems by Michael Drayton and Henry Chettle demonstrate. Samuel Daniel welcomes the king and celebrates his peaceful accession (a sign that not everyone thought that it would be), but makes it clear that he wants nothing to change and the journey south of the Scottish king should probably herald the Anglicization of Scotland rather than the Hibernicization of England (James would probably have agreed). Scotland would be like Wales, and the poem can be read as a warning that James needs to preserve the status quo. Later, Daniel, like the Catholic historian Richard Verstegan, seems to have used “Albion” as a counterpoint to the idea of Britain coming from the court.
Chapter 3 looks at the work of two major writers on the union, the Scot, David Hume of Godscroft, and the Englishman, Francis Bacon. Hume writes enthusiastically about the union but has a particular version of Scottishness that privileges the Lowlanders and excludes the Highland Gaels. Although some critics and historians have tried to emphasize the radical character of his thought, Ivic is not convinced. Bacon is interesting because he saw Ulster as a laboratory in which the new ideas of Britishness could be tested, as settlers were encouraged over from England and Scotland, a sign of things to come. Accordingly, it is no surprise that Bacon articulates more than any other writer of the period “how the people of Britain may coalesce into a single collective identity” (131).
Chapter 4 explores how Macbeth reimagines nationhood. To my mind, this is the least successful of the chapters, perhaps because there has been so much good work on the national politics of the play, in particular by John Kerrigan and Willy Maley. Ivic amasses a lot of useful and interesting material but perhaps does not change a perception of the play as one forged out of debates and discourses about Britishness. Ivic sees the play caught between a chauvinistic nationalism expressed by Macbeth and a more union-looking outlook represented by Macduff and Malcolm, speaking to the nation but offering “no easy resolution to the complex issues with which it engages” (189). The play shows that nationalism, when left unchecked “produces a tyrannical mindset” (189).
In the epilogue, Ivic analyzes John Speed's Theatre of Great Britain, arguing that it, too, expresses an unease that has not been identified very often. Speed represents himself as an Englishman, a relic from a previous age marooned in a brave new British world. The Subject of Britain is a lively, intelligent work that demonstrates how much more work needs to be done on ideas of Britain and Britishness. One hopes that Ivic can be persuaded to carry on driving the subject forward.
