None a Stranger There: England and/in Europe on the Early Modern Stage, edited by Scott Oldenburg and Matteo Pangallo, contains nine essays on formations of English identity in early modern drama. The awkwardness of the subtitle's “England and/in Europe” reflects the productive tension of Oldenburg and Pangallo's larger framing question: “Is England's relationship to Europe the prepositional ‘in,’ which highlights common ground with other European national identities, or is it the conjunctive ‘and,’ emphasizing England's sense of difference from a continental identity?” (20). Building on work by scholars such as Gerald Delanty, Oldenburg, and Pangallo's introduction provides a useful historical overview of Europe as a culturally constructed and contested category of geography and identity in the early modern period, supplemented by a close reading of Britain's withheld (then restored) tribute to the Roman Empire in William Shakespeare's Cymbeline.
Studying works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the chapters vary in focus from England's relationship to its neighbors in the British Isles, to individual European countries, to larger ideas of “non-Englishness” that extend beyond the European continent. In a nod to its origins during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the collection begins with Margaret Tudeau-Clayton's essay on early modern imaginings of a “shared condition of precarious contingency” (46) in Shakespeare, tracking ironic reversals in social positioning and health in conceptions of the political and biological body. Focusing on non-Shakespeare plays, the next two chapters deal with intersections of faith and national identity. Kevin Chovanec in chapter 2 examines archival records of English traveling theater on the European continent, considering these players as migrants who culturally translated their performances of Biblical plays such as Esther for international Protestant audiences. In a reading of Thomas Middleton and Anthony Munday's The Triumphs of Truth, Jamie Paris in chapter 3 details the emotional labor performed by the King of the Moors's attempt to belong to white Christianity, revealing the “trap of respectability politics” (102) both in the early modern period and today.
The next four chapters investigate both imperial and isolationist stagings of Englishness through engagements with the past and future. Drawing on affect theory in chapter 4, John S. Garrison and Kyle Pivetti explore how “a nation creates itself in the shameful yet celebratory exposure of its long history of failures and crimes” (109), as exemplified in the cultural discourses of both the Henriad and Brexit. In chapter 5, Todd Andrew Borlik historicizes the imagined wall in the waters around England in Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay in the wake of the Spanish Armada's retreat. Describing how the play “offers an uncanny parable for the predicament of post-Brexit Britain,” Borlik analyzes the desire “to reap the fruits of international cooperation and trade while maintaining a staunchly independent nationalist identity” (148). Also identifying transhistorical connections, Vimala C. Pasupathi in chapter 6 probes the enduring appeal of the medieval king Robert the Bruce at moments of potential Scottish independence through the seventeenth-century play The Valiant Scot and two recent films. Focusing on other neighbors in the British Isles, Matt Carter's chapter 7 on fighting in Mucedorus argues that the play roots its justifications for English imperialism in class and ethnicity through Welsh and Irish stereotypes that endeavor “to reassert royal authority by characterizing commonfolk as Others” (181).
The final two chapters of the collection, as Oldenburg and Pangallo describe, “demonstrate [how] early modern England's project of defining itself in relation to its place in the European community informed also how communities within the nation—such as the village and the city—were understood to reflect upon, and help shape, that process of national definition” (27). Heather Bailey historicizes medical and political discourse in The Merry Wives of Windsor in an analysis of Falstaff's excessive consumption of imported sack. Bailey shows how attitudes toward Falstaff—a character both representative of the English body politic yet also a stranger to the village of Windsor—parallel how “immigrants were supposedly threatening to the formation of a uniquely English identity even as they were essential to the country's stability and economic growth” (200). In chapter 9 on The Merchant of Venice, William Casey Caldwell examines the mutually constitutive concepts of citizen and stranger at work in Shakespeare's play. Opening with the city of Manchester's 2014 vote to consolidate municipal powers previously under national control, Caldwell argues that the play's exploration of urban citizenship, rather than national citizenship, allows us to think about the potential “diverse local, civic responses to the xenophobia underlying a national referendum like Brexit” (239).
Other potential through-lines or alternative groupings can be found across the essays, both geographically and thematically. For example, Tudeau-Clayton and Bailey address the medical health of the body in their analyses of the body politic. Many of the essays demonstrate Oldenburg and Pangallo's claim in the introduction, that “[i]n most senses, Brexit's neonationalism appears as an intensification of the factors that fueled early modern English nationhood” (2–3). The collection opens with an anecdote about a reference to Brexit in a contemporary Shakespeare performance, and six of the subsequent chapters similarly establish their subject's modern relevance by beginning with recent moments in history and culture. Taken as a whole, the collection provides a rich variety of case studies that differ methodologically and geographically as they explore how England constructs itself through and against “Europe” on the stage, both in the early modern period and in current events.
