The first two chapters of this book focus on “sectarian inclusivity,” multicultural communities founded on common religious beliefs. In his discussion of how Mary I’s reign attempted to institute its own version of English national identity, Christopher Highley argues that, contrary to what seems to be a scholarly consensus, English nationhood need not be framed as an outcome of Protestantism, that Mary and Catholic English writers can also be seen to assert their particular version of Englishness.² This chapter builds on Highley’s observation, focusing on the way an embattled Protestantism led to the forging of a community based not on...

The ascension of Elizabeth I to the throne in 1558 naturally resulted in a return of Protestant refugees who had fled to the continent, but Elizabeth’s policies were not nearly as liberal as those of her brother Edward. Leaders of the stranger churches entered negotiations on their return, amid the so-called Elizabethan Settlement of 1559, under which the stranger churches would not be granted the latitude they had previously enjoyed. Under Elizabeth stranger churches were under the purview of the Bishop of London, Edmund Grindal. Thus, Austin Friars, which had been taken from the strangers under Mary, was turned over...

Despite attempts to use narratives of Protestant persecution to keep sectarian inclusivity active in England, by the 1590s tensions between some English subjects and their immigrant neighbours had intensified, rendering religious affiliation less important to social cohesion. England’s involvement in continental affairs – for instance, Leicester’s loss of support in the Netherlands in 1586–7 and Essex’s failed expedition in support of Henri IV in 1591 – led some to feel that their immigrant neighbours were perhaps less committed than the English in the continental conflicts.² The author of the Dutch Church Libel complained,

And our pore soules, are cleane...

As an introduction to his discussion of canting inLanthorne and Candle-light(1608) Thomas Dekker retells the story of the Tower of Babel. The relationship between cant (the supposed language of London’s underworld) and the Biblical tale of linguistic diversity seems clear enough, but along the way Dekker digresses in a way that sheds light on his most well-known work,The Shoemaker’s Holiday(1599), and its relationship to promoting a version of hospitality at once both provincial and global.¹

Although Dekker follows Flavius Josephus in framing Nimrod as the hubristic sinner of the tale, Dekker’s version has a decidedly artisanal...

In the previous chapters amid the various relations between strangers and English men and women – solidarity based on provincial globalism or sectarian inclusivity – we have seen marriages or near marriages between English and strangers. The French shoemaker John Denevale and the Dutch shoemaker Haunce were entertained as credible suitors for Florence in Deloney’sGentle Craft, Part I; likewise, inGentle Craft, Part II, among several potential mates, the prosperous Richard Casteler chooses to marry a Dutch woman. Beyond fictional matches or near matches, John Marston of Coventry, father to the dramatist of the same name, married Mary Guarsi,...

Every so often the authorship of the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare is called into question by someone claiming not only that Shakespeare was not the author of said works but that the real author was not even English.¹ In April 2000The Timespublished an article arguing that Shakespeare was really Sicilian.² Sometime Oxfordian Sigmund Freud entertained the idea that Shakespeare was really French, and philosopher Kuno Fischer is said to have professed that Shakespeare must have been of German ancestry.³ Although these claims never gain much of a sympathetic audience, they point to Shakespeare’s status in...