Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales

Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales By Philip Schwyzer Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004

Philip Schwyzer's Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales joins a growing body of scholarship by such critics as David Baker, Andrew Hadfield, Christopher Highley, and Willy Maley interested in the literary manifestations of what historians have termed the "British problem." Taking their cue from the New British History, these scholars attend carefully to the conflicts and intersections between English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh histories and the complexities of identity in the early modern Atlantic Archipelago. Schwyzer's distinctive contribution to the discussion is twofold: he challenges the assumption that English national consciousness could exist apart from ideas of Britishness, and he explores how Tudor national sentiments were formed and experienced in a period that predates nationhood. Recognizing that few Tudor writers traced their English identity to the "racial stock of the Anglo-Saxons, who were held in remarkably low esteem in the Elizabethan era" (5), Schwyzer cleverly points out that since British nationalism derived its identity from Welsh sources, the "nationalism of the English" was almost indistinguishable from Welsh national consciousness. Schwyzer aims to delineate a protonational sentiment, but he is prudent to explain that this "consciousness" is not yet a nationalism of "mass participation" (8) but aesthetic, literary, and most germane to the ruling classes. Much of the book is devoted to exploring the "modes-genealogical, nostalgic, spectral-by which English readers and playgoers were induced" to appropriate Welsh mythology as their own and "experience a sense of communion with the ancient Britons" (7).

Chapter 1 traces the emblematic images of fire and blood in Welsh bardic poetry and British national literature (including several pages on Spenser's Faerie Queene) in their varying approaches to the Tudor claims of origin and destiny. Chapter 2 considers the role of the Reformation in producing conflicting nostalgic and nationalist sentiments. On one side, Schwyzer positions Robert Aske, leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace, who possesses a nationalist vision of an "idyllic feudal realm" (57) and laments the loss of England's abbeys on aesthetic grounds; on the other side, he locates the Protestant polemicist John Bale, whose "notion of...