In 1603, Queen Elizabeth I died and King James I inherited the English
throne. During James's reign, England continued to hark back to
Elizabeth, comparing him with his predecessor - not always in a way that
was either flattering or pleasing to James. Critics have traditionally
assumed that Shakespeare avoided involving himself in this discourse. In
this study of Shakespeare's Jacobean plays, however, Yuichi Tsukada
demonstrates that, far from not involving himself in the phenomenon of
nostalgia for Elizabeth, Shakespeare interacted closely with
retrospective writings on Elizabeth and illuminated the complex politics
behind the nostalgia. Based upon close readings of Macbeth, Antony
and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Cymbeline and Henry VIII, together
with a range of plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries, including Thomas
Heywood, Thomas Dekker, George Chapman, John Marston, Thomas Middleton
and Ben Jonson, the book traces the ongoing cultural negotiation of the
memory of Elizabeth.
Yuichi Tsukada offers fresh insights into enigmatic aspects of
Shakespeare's Jacobean drama. For instance, what was the original
significance of the two contentious prophecies - 'none of woman born'
and the march of Birnam Wood - in Macbeth? Or that of the seemingly
out-of-place triumphal procession of Volumnia near the tragic end of
Coriolanus? Although her memory recurred in all forms of discourse
throughout the first decade of James's reign, the impact of this
cultural undercurrent on Shakespeare's Jacobean drama has been ignored
or underestimated. Shakespeare and the Politics of Nostalgia reveals
the unnoticed richness of Shakespeare's Jacobean drama by focusing on
the growing cultural and political nostalgia for England's dead queen.
