Wilds and Wastes: How Wilderness Shaped Narratives of English National Identity in Spenser and Shakespeare

Abstract

This dissertation explores the nature of metaphoric wilderness to comment on the nature of national identity in sixteenth-century England as it manifests in the works of Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare. By extending the definition of wilderness to include not only forested areas but also oceans and ethnicities, this work comments on the nature of how groups build and maintain boundaries that then come to impact the ways in which groups characterize the “self” as opposed to the “other.” Each section examines how a metaphorical wilderness, defined as uncultivable space that is hostile to human presence, works to establish boundaries between undesirable and desirable characteristics in England’s burgeoning notions of national self.

This examination begins with a look at hybridity as a form of wilderness in Spenser’s Book One of The Faerie Queene and how the use of hybridity informs the religious divide of early modern England. Chapter 2 moves beyond the forests of Chapter 1 to examine how oceans were viewed as wilderness spaces. Specifically, it examines how Spenser’s reliance on waterscapes in Book Two of The Faerie Queene communicates anxieties felt toward the lack of objective oceanic data which threatened England’s militaristic and mercantile endeavors. Stepping beyond physical space, Chapter 3 examines how the Irish were perceived as simultaneously imbued with wilderness while posing as a diluting force on Englishness in Spenser’s Book Six. Finally, this work concludes with a chapter that explores how barren women, as manifestations of wilderness, pose a significant threat to masculine dominated nationalistic endeavors by being a hindrance to securing a lineage.