Overview

In 1603, Queen Elizabeth I died and King James I inherited the English throne. During James’s reign, England continued to hark back to Elizabeth, comparing him with his predecessor – not always in a way that was either flattering or pleasing to James. Critics have traditionally assumed that Shakespeare avoided involving himself in this discourse. In this study of Shakespeare's Jacobean plays, however, Yuichi Tsukada demonstrates that, far from not involving himself in the phenomenon of nostalgia for Elizabeth, Shakespeare interacted closely with retrospective writings on Elizabeth and illuminated the complex politics behind the nostalgia. Based upon close readings of Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Cymbeline and Henry VIII, together with a range of plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries, including Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, George Chapman, John Marston, Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson, the book traces the ongoing cultural negotiation of the memory of Elizabeth. Yuichi Tsukada offers fresh insights into enigmatic aspects of Shakespeare’s Jacobean drama. For instance, what was the original significance of the two contentious prophecies – 'none of woman born' and the march of Birnam Wood – in Macbeth? Or that of the seemingly out-of-place triumphal procession of Volumnia near the tragic end of Coriolanus? Although her memory recurred in all forms of discourse throughout the first decade of James’s reign, the impact of this cultural undercurrent on Shakespeare’s Jacobean drama has been ignored or underestimated. Shakespeare and the Politics of Nostalgia reveals the unnoticed richness of Shakespeare’s Jacobean drama by focusing on the growing cultural and political nostalgia for England’s dead queen.

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9781350175075

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Reviews

This is an exciting re-evaluation of Shakespeare's engagement with the icon of Elizabeth I in his Jacobean plays. It examines the tropes of Elizabeth as a warlike queen, an imperilled princess and a bringer of peace as they were contested within Jacobean politics and culture. The book reveals a much more subtle and ambivalent response to Elizabeth by Jacobean Shakespeare than has previously been acknowledged. -- Jane Kingsley-Smith, University of Roehampton, London, UK

Tsukada (Doshisha Univ., Japan) offers a thoroughgoing political reading of four plays Shakespeare wrote in the period from 1606 to 1610: Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline. Tsukada views each work as reflecting aspects of the contemporaneous response to the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603. Thus the two Caesarean prophecies in the Scottish play dramatically stage the replacement of the diseased, barren mother with the fertile father in a way that recalls James's political vision of launching Jacobean England from Elizabeth's barren body politic (p. 50). Tsukada demonstrates the vigor of debate in these years over Elizabeth: some authors looked back with nostalgia on her warlike female stance, whereas others mocked her courtly poses and preferred the pacific posture assumed by her successor. Some of Tsukada's readings have been offered before, as the fine full notes duly indicate; others will be new even to specialists. Shakespeare is seen as reflecting views of the age, unlike other writers cited, all of whom seem to come down on one side or the other of the debate. This volume will prove useful to those eager to ponder the merits and limits of such thoroughgoing political interpretation. Summing Up: Recommended. * Choice * This is an exciting re-evaluation of Shakespeare's engagement with the icon of Elizabeth I in his Jacobean plays. It examines the tropes of Elizabeth as a warlike queen, an imperilled princess and a bringer of peace as they were contested within Jacobean politics and culture. The book reveals a much more subtle and ambivalent response to Elizabeth by Jacobean Shakespeare than has previously been acknowledged. -- Jane Kingsley-Smith, University of Roehampton, London, UK

Author Information

Yuichi Tsukada is Associate Professor of English at Doshisha University, Japan. He received his BA and MA from the University of Tokyo and his PhD from King’s College London. His journal articles on Shakespeare have won him fellowships and awards, including the Young Scholar Award of Special Merit from the English Literary Society of Japan.

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