Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama

Some fear universalizing health care as a socialist and therefore foreign program; others resent illegal immigrants as competing unfairly with native workers, as unwelcome intruders who, at the very least, should be required to learn English; still others are suspicious of persons who fall outside familiar patterns of JudeoChristian worship, perceiving them as potential terrorists. [...]the theater can function not merely as a mirror of national identity; it actually constructs that identity performatively by absorbing and selectively reshaping elements of the alien to project a heightened self-definition of Englishness. Turbulence in the Netherlands under the tyrannous Duke of Alva and events such as the Saint Bartholomew massacre in France produced a flood of Protestant refugees who clustered in particular neighborhoods, formed their own non-liturgical congregations in competition with the Anglican establishment, and, as "denizens," often shared the halfway status of legal residents uncertainly located between the full rights of "true born" native citizenship and the limbo of stateless transients.