Christopher Highley's book explores the most serious crisis the Elizabethan regime faced: its attempts to subdue and colonize the native Irish. Through a range of literary representations from Shakespeare and Spenser, and contemporaries such as John Hooker, John Derricke, George Peele and Thomas Churchyard he shows how these writers produced a complex discourse about Ireland that cannot be reduced to a simple ethnic opposition. Highley argues that the confrontation between an English imperial presence and a Gaelic "other" was a profound factor in the definition of an English poetic self.

Christopher Highley's book explores the most serious crisis the Elizabethan regime faced: its attempts to subdue and colonize the native Irish. Through a range of literary representations from Shakespeare and Spenser, and contemporaries such as John Hooker, John Derricke, George Peele and Thomas Churchyard he shows how these writers produced a complex discourse about Ireland that cannot be reduced to a simple ethnic opposition. Highley argues that the confrontation between an English imperial presence and a Gaelic "other" was a profound factor in the definition of an English poetic self.

Henry VIII remains one of the most fascinating, notorious and recognizable monarchs in English history. In the five centuries since his accession to the throne, his iconic status has been shaped by different media. From Shakespeare to The Tudors, this book reassesses treatments of Henry VIII in literature, politics, and culture during the period spanned by the king s own reign (1509 1547) and the twenty-first century. Historians and literary scholars investigate how representations of the king provoked varied responses from influential writers, artists, and political figures in the decades...

Modern scholars, fixated on the "winners" in England's sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious struggles, have too readily assumed the inevitability of Protestantism's historical triumph and have uncritically accepted the reformers' own rhetorical construction of themselves as embodiments of an authentic Englishness. Christopher Highley interrogates this narrative by examining how Catholics from the reign of Mary Tudor to the early seventeenth century contested and shaped discourses of national identity, patriotism, and Englishness. Accused by their opponents of espousing an alien...