Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age

While offering a sound overview of the developments motivating Elizabethans to rethink "their place in an increasingly mobile world" (13), the introduction floats arrestingly large claims for literature - "Literature was the primary force in establishing and policing the boundaries between English and foreign identities" (13)-and for Shakespeare, who, adapting classical and Italian sources, "ultimately transformed the very notion of what it means to be English" (14). Throughout history?) A coherent, distinctive nation, this England is epitomized in its Virgin Queen, who spurns foreign suitors; Englishness becomes, "the only truly stable, non-vendible commodity" (17) in a mercantile world; and Shakespeare becomes its pivotal promulgator, the major voice of an emergent xenophobic consensus. In part 1, insightfully combining tessellated cases and legal analysis, Levin documents the feminine counterpart of the "neck-verse," the plea of pregnancy, and reads Joan of Arc's unsuccessful bid to escape the fire thus as a register of the "disturbing inconsistency" (15) of the law's application in England, where "the labeling of women as illicitly sexual could also be used to destroy them" (49).