Early modern literature played a key role in the formation of the legal justification for imperialism. As the English colonial enterprise developed, the existing legal tradition of common law no longer solved the moral dilemmas of the new world order, in which England had become, instead of a victim of Catholic enemies, an aggressive force with its own overseas territories. Writers of romance fiction employed narrative strategies in order to resolve this difficulty and, in the process, provided a legal basis for English imperialism. Brian Lockey analyses works by such authors as Shakespeare, Spenser and Sidney in the light of these legal discourses, and uncovers new contexts for the genre of romance. Scholars of early modern literature, as well as those interested in the history of law as the British Empire emerged, will learn much from this insightful and ambitious study.

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Two plays were written and performed in the 1590s, based partly or fully on the life of the English Catholic exile, Captain Thomas Stukeley: The Battle of Alcazar attributed to George Peele, first performed in 1589 and published in 1594, and The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley, first performed in 1596 and anonymously published in 1605. Together, these two plays present Stukeley as participating in a network of religious and secular authorities that defied the official narrative of English national identity, which defined Englishmen as subject to the one infallible authority of the English sovereign. This alternative, decentralized political structure was not necessarily set in opposition to the incipient notion of a unique English character. Indeed, we see signs of Stukeley being celebrated as a stereotypical Englishman in these plays. As this essay shows, what is most significant about these works is the development of a “cosmopolitan” identity in which the subject could retain his English character, however fleetingly, at the same time that he served an array of secular and religious masters from the Continent that were opposed to the English crown. (B.C.L.)