Ralf Hertel. Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity.

Deiter, Kristen

Ralf Hertel. Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. ix + 271. $149.95.

In Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity, Ralf Hertel argues that early modern English drama helped to shape "the collective imagination" and develop "the nation as imagined community" well before England became a "factual nation-state" (23). Englishness, he asserts, "is considered as something brought forth by the spectators who participate in the theatre event by becoming eye witnesses of sorts of the events staged and who engage in the Englishness displayed theatrically" (1). While Hertel, a Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Hamburg, Germany, acknowledges that he is "no historian" (28), he also usefully summarizes the historical debate about national identity and when it emerges. This political background is essential for understanding his book's contribution to the field. As Hertel emphasizes throughout the introduction, this study is "focused on the imagination of a national community, not on a nation which already has a fully functional political, legal or jurisdictional infrastructure" (21). Although the book fails to engage with much current scholarship, it demonstrates a reasonable connection between the historical drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and the idea of early modern English national identity.

The introduction outlines historical theories of nationalism; explores contested meanings of terms such as nation, nation-building, and national consciousness; and presents debates surrounding the concept and emergence of English national identity. The body of the book comprises five parts, each titled for what Hertel calls "widely accepted components" in the shaping of national consciousness: Territory, History, Religion, Class, and Gender (28). Each part consists of two chapters: a discussion of theoretical perspectives and early modern English historical and political contexts, and a case study that applies these perspectives and contexts to interpret a late-Elizabethan English history play. Four of the plays are Shakespearean: Henry IV Part 1, Richard III, King John, and Henry VI Part 2; the fifth is Marlowe's Edward 11. The book also includes fourteen figures, through which the author locates the plays "in the context of non-fictional texts ... and cultural artefacts (such as maps or portraits)" (1). A bibliography and index follow the conclusion.

Part 1, "Territory," analyzes England's transformation from a territory into a homeland, or a "site of historical, and historic, events" (35). Hertel emphasizes "the rise of cartography from the late 1570s onwards" (38) and the corresponding late-sixteenth-century development of chorography, both of which, he states, facilitated England's transformation into a homeland. He shows how Saxton, Camden, and Drayton incorporated images of people into their maps to illustrate the English people's connection to the land (45), and how the narrative aspect of early modern chorography similarly inserted people into places (47). The author then interprets the effects of the "cartographic revolution" in Henry IV Part 1 (49). Hertel demonstrates that this "centrifugal play" (58), with "scenes ... [set] all over England" (64), places the territory of England on the stage in various ways, from the play's wide range of English settings to its broad spectrum of English characters, many of whose names evoke the geography of England (66-68).

In Part 2, "History," Hertel builds upon his claims in part 1 by arguing that "transforming space into national territory and terrain into homeland involves charging the topography with historical significance, providing the expanse of the land with a past, and adding a temporal dimension to the spatial one" (77).

These two chapters focus upon the constructed nature of history and historical drama. Hertel provides an interesting and insightful explanation of Henry VII's commissioning the Italian Polydore Vergil to write the Anglica Historia, a history of England "with a Continental readership in mind" (99), and how it subsequently motivated a patriotic "renationalization of England" (102). He traces the accounts of Richard III in sixteenth-century histories, from the Anglica Historia through the chronicles of Hall, Holinshed, Grafton, and Stow. The author then analyzes Shakespeare's Richard III, which he calls a "centripetal" play because its "geographical setting is extremely restricted" and "obsessively London-centered" (105). Hertel argues that the play, especially its final act, "abounds with allusions to Elizabethan realities" that Shakespeare contributed to the Richard III story, and he draws parallels between the England of 1485 and Elizabethan England (112).

Parts 3, 4, and 5 similarly build upon parts 1 and 2, though mostly independently of one another. Part 3, "Religion," treats "the nation-building effect of Protestantism in sixteenth-century England" and applies this context to a reading of King John (123). This play, Hertel claims, "argues for the necessity of a new faith" in England (134), this "new faith" being both Anglicanism (149) and "the belief in the national community" (146). The author asserts that "Shakespeare's theatre tends to support, intentionally or not, the Anglican via medial' and that it does so in King John by showing "religious differences to be rather insignificant" (149). He concludes this part by comparing John's England to Elizabeth's, both "at the point of being torn by religious controversy" (149). Part 4, "Class," discusses well-known social changes that characterized sixteenth-century England and how the public theatre "both subverted and reiterated class distinctions" (167). It then argues, drawing upon Thomas Cartelli's and Chris Fitter's work, that Shakespeare lowered the historical Jack Cade's social status in Henry VI Part 2 in order to make Cade the spokesperson of the masses (175).

Hertel asserts, in part 5, "Gender," that Elizabethan historical drama contributed to the development of "language, images and metaphors for female rule" (194). He discusses how "motherland tropes and images of a virgin England" represented the country as female and associated it with Elizabeth, while "nationalist discourse masculinized the nation" (198). According to the author, "history plays such as Marlowe's Edward II or Shakespeare's Richard II are preoccupied with men who plunge their country into trouble precisely because their lack of heterosexual virility signals a lack of national awareness. In particular, the lack of desire they display towards their queens parallels their lack of desire towards an England that is gendered feminine" (206). He then interprets Edward II as "a highly political play reverberating with allusions to Marlowe's contemporary England" (213). In the conclusion, the author astutely treats early modern historical drama as a precursor to "modern-day historical reenactments," allowing Elizabethan audiences to experience "living history" (233).

In the book's first paragraph, Hertel asks a question: "How, this study crucially asks, does the performative art of theatre reflect, contribute to and question the dynamics of the formation of early modern Englishness?" (1). Indeed, numerous questions characterize his style throughout: sometimes he asks several on a page, or as many as six at a time (238). Although excessive, the questions reinforce Hertel's emphasis upon the contested nature of historical drama and of early modern history itself. He consistently remains open to multiple interpretations of history and drama, noting, "We should, of course, be wary of not pinning down the political message of a play too readily; more often than not we are confronted with conflicting views, even within a single drama" (26). The author stresses the "multiperspective nature of drama" which can allow for various performances of a play, and affirms that multiple historical interpretations "coexist," even within a single dramatic character (88). While this outlook is not new, I appreciated Hertel's highlighting its continued importance, as well as his suggestion that "one might read the histories as metahistories that demythologize history by showing that it is fiction after all" (90).

The book draws heavily upon important and well-known historicist studies of early modern English literature, such as Helgerson's Forms of Nationhood (2001), Howard and Rackin's Engendering a Nation (1997), Holderness's Shakespeare's History Plays (1992), and Rackin's Stages of History (1990). However, I wish it also engaged with more current scholarship--or even one journal article--from the five years that preceded its publication. The twenty-three-page bibliography includes only nine entries that date from 2009 to 2013: the reprint of Chambers's 1923 The Elizabethan Stage (2009); an anthology of Ben Jonson's plays (2009); one book chapter (2009) and one monograph (2009) by other scholars; a chapter by the author in a collection he coedited (2012); another collection the author coedited (2012); and three websites accessed in 2013. The absence of current research was conspicuous.

On the first page, Hertel claims that this monograph "applies] current political theory as well as methods established by recent performance studies," and that "it decidedly goes beyond a New Historicist approach by foregrounding the performative surplus of the theatre event" (1). For this reader, the book falls short of these promises, though its argument both reveals and fills a gap in the knowledge about early modern English dramas role in the formation of English national identity.

KRISTEN DEITER

Tennessee Tech University