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This chapter breaks new ground in John Derricke scholarship by excavating the hitherto neglected Scottish context and afterlife of The Image of Irelande through a series of encounters – historical, political, and editorial – in order to suggest that Derricke’s text also offers, crucially, an image of Scotland. The Scottish connection is especially significant because three surviving copies have Scottish provenance, two nineteenth-century editions had Scottish editors, and two copies remain in Edinburgh
This book explores, from a variety of critical perspectives, the playwright's place in Scotland and the place of Scotland in his work. The influence of Scotland on William Shakespeare's writing, and later on his reception, is set alongside the dramatic effects that Shakespeare's work had on the development of Scottish literature. The Shakespeare's work of Scottish literature stretches from the Globe to globalisation, and from Captain Jamy and King James to radical productions at the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow. Shakespeare have strong Scottish connections by virtue of his theatre company's being brought under the sponsorship of the Scottish king James VI immediately after his accession to the English throne in 1603. Jonathan Goldberg and Alvin Kernan have traced the impact of royal patronage on Shakespeare's work after the Union, finding Scottish themes at play not just in Macbeth, but also in Cymbeline, King Lear, Hamlet, and in other plays. Then, the book outlines some of the issues and problems raised by Scotland and Scottish history for English readers in the last decade of Elizabeth's reign. Shakespeare wrote his English plays in Elizabeth's reign and his British plays after 1603, though Henry V, first performed in 1599, might be regarded as a proto-British play. Unlike Henry V, Shakespeare's most English play, where national identity is of the essence, in Macbeth, Scotland is a blot on the landscape. Shakespeare's political drama moves from a sense of England and Scotland as independent kingdoms into an alignment with the views of Unionist King James.
One of the best-known features of Macbeth is its alias. Such is the notoriety of the misadventure apparently visited upon those foolhardy enough to utter ‘Macbeth’ within a theatre, that it is frequently referred to as ‘the Scottish play’, even by those without a superstitious bent. 1 The adoption of this moniker, like the avoidance of walking under
Scotland was something of a power-house of British publishing in the nineteenth century. In 1873, Henry Curwen estimated that some 10,000 people were employed in the printing trade north of the border. ‘The eight or nine leading houses’, he observed, ‘with one exception, print themselves the books they sell; a practice which is almost indigenous to Edinburgh, or, at all
When James VI of Scotland came south in 1603 on his way to London, where he would be hailed as James I of Britain, he crossed a border that, to his mind, was no longer a border. Until then, Scotland and England had been divided by the ‘march’, a continuous strip of territory, fortified by castles and towers, which lay alongside their mutual border. England’s marches could
especially during the 1970s when all these examples were staged, was a theatre of distinctive aesthetic innovation and theatrical daring, and underline the company’s reputation as a unique and remarkable element of late twentieth-century Scottish theatre culture. This chapter will describe and debate the innovative and controversial productions of Shakespeare’s plays by the Citizens
in a speech to the English parliament, James I declared (not for the first or last time), that God had united the kingdoms of England and Scotland ‘in Language, Religion, and similitude of manners’. 2 The idea that England and Scotland shared one language had long been asserted by those on both sides of the Tweed who supported closer ties between the two countries. Once Anglo-Scottish integration
‘Like to his Iland, gyrt in with the Ocean’ ( 3H6 , TLN 2619) Why would an English playwright whose plays not only depict intra-island warfare and border transgressions between the geographically contiguous nations that constitute Great Britain’s political landscape but also include as stage props maps of all or parts of Britain delineate his native land an island? 1 Writing in 1604, Bacon informs King James of the ‘points wherein the nations [England and Scotland] stand already united’; included among these points is ‘[i]n continent’. ‘For the Continent
Why might Shakespeare have been interested in Scotland? The answer to the question is all too obvious. No one who paid any attention to Elizabethan affairs could fail to take careful note of events north of the border. Elizabethan England was in fact neatly framed by its relationship with Scotland: most specifically, through the Stuart claim to the English throne, but also because
The Edinburgh publication of Basilikon Doron in 1599 made public, via the medium of print, James Stewart’s desire that his son, Henry, would inherit not only Scotland’s crown but England’s, too. The father’s advice to his eldest son reveals a Scottish monarch thinking through the rule of multiple kingdoms well in advance of his English accession. ‘And incase it please God’, a judicious James writes, ‘to prouide you to all thir three Kingdomes, make your eldest son Isaac , leauing him all your kingdomes, and prouide the rest with priuate possessions