The Subject of Britain, 1603–25

The subject of Britain reads key early-seventeenth-century texts by Bacon, Daniel, Drayton, Hume, Jonson, Shakespeare and Speed within the context of the English reign of King James VI and I, whose desire to create a united Britain prompted serious reflection on questions of nationhood and national sovereignty. This book traces writing on Britain and Britishness in a variety of discursive forms: succession literature, panegyric, Union tracts and treatises, play-texts and atlases and histories. Attending to the emergence of new ideologies and new ways of thinking about collective identities, The subject of Britain seeks to advance knowledge by foregrounding instances of fruitful cultural production in this period. Bacon's and Hume's pronouncements on the common ancestry, the cultural proximity of Britain's inhabitants, for instance, bear witness to Jacobean imaginings of peoples and nations joining together, however tenuously. Focusing on texts printed not only in London but also in Edinburgh, as well as manuscript material that circulated within and across Britain and Ireland, this book sheds valuable light on literary and extra-literary texts in relation to the wider British and Irish context that informed, indeed enabled, their production. By combining the historical study of literary and non-literary texts with the history of political thought and the history of the book broadly defined, this book offers a fresh approach to a signal moment in British history. Given this interdisciplinary nature, it will appeal to early modern British literary historians and undergraduates and postgraduates.