Shakespeare, Spencer and the Matter of Britain examines the work of two of the most important English Renaissance authors in terms of the cultural, social and political contexts of early modern Britain. Andrew Hadfield demonstrates that the poetry of Edmund Spenser and the plays of William Shakespeare demand to be read in terms of an expanding Elizabethan and Jacobean culture in which a dominant English identity had to come to terms with the Irish, Scots and Welsh who were now also subjects of the crown.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: English Literature and Anglicised Britain Crossing the Borders: Ireland and the Irish Between England and America English Colonialism and National Identity in Early Modern Ireland Malcolm in the Middle: James VI and I, George Buchanan and the Divine Right of Kings 'Bruited Abroad': John White and Thomas Harriot's Colonial Representations of Ancient and Britain Translating the Reformation: John Bale's Irish Vocacyon Cicero, Tacitus and the Reform of Ireland in the 1590s From English to British Literature: John Lyly's Euphues and the 1590 The Faerie Queene Spenser and the Stuart Succession Spenser, Drayton and the Question of Britain Shakespeare's Ecumenical Britain Index

ANDREW HADFIELD is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Shakespeare and Renaissance Political Culture (2003) and Edmund Spenser's Irish Experience (1997), as well as numerous other studies of Renaissance literature and culture. He is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Spenser (2001), and has taught at universities in Ireland, Wales, England and the USA.