Fusing historiography with literary criticism, Between Nations produces an array of unexpected readings of early modern texts. Starting from the premise that England has never been able to emerge or define itself in isolation from its neighbors on the British Isles, this book places Renaissance England and its literature at a meeting of English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh histories. It ranges from the late sixteenth through the late seventeenth centuries and deals with the "reigns" of three monarchs and one regicide--those of Elizabeth I, James I, Charles II, and Oliver Cromwell....

In early modern England, while moralists railed against the theater as wasteful and depraved and inflation whittled away at the value of wages, people attended the theater in droves. On Demand draws on recent economic history and theory to account for this puzzling consumer behavior. He shows that during this period demand itself, with its massed acquisitive energies, transformed the English economy. Over the long sixteenth-century consumption burgeoned, though justifications for it lagged behind. People were in a curious predicament: they practiced consumption on a mass scale but had...

Though British history and identity in the early modern period are intensively researched areas, the role of literature in the construction of "Britishness" has not been thoroughly studied. In this volume, leading Renaissance literary critics review a broad range of texts from the period, including plays of Shakespeare, in view of the new British history. This collection opens up a new kind of literary history with immediate relevance to contemporary discussions of "Britishness."