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This volume of essays was written to mark
the 400th anniversary of the accession of King James VI of
Scotland to the English throne in 1603. It includes essays
by historians (including a legal historian) and literary historians
that critically reflect on the immediate as well as the long-term
consequences of James's accession. While the Jacobean union
of the crowns emerges as a central issue in this volume, a
number of other subjects-literature, Catholicism, diplomacy,
favouritism, the Essex myth, the Ancient Constitution-also
receive critical attention.
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In the Introduction to this volume, the editors
pose a number of questions relating to the transition from
Elizabeth's rule to James's -- concerning political ideas, court
behaviour, patronage, collective identity, gender -- and, severally
and together, these essays provide thoughtful, informative
responses. If there is a central question that occupies this
volume it is that of the union of the crowns: "Union of some
sort had happened," the editors note; they go on to ask "How
was it to be understood? What opportunities did it create?"
(xiv). No less than five essays provide direct responses to
these questions, and the strength of this collection is that
the at times complementary, at times conflicting, responses
reveal an open, vibrant, contested field of study.
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A wonderful lead into both this volume and
the topic of union is provided by the late Conrad Russell,
whose opening essay contemplates the "unevolved state" of
Britain in 1603, which, Russell reminds us, consisted of "two
crowns, two coronations, two Privy Councils, two Parliaments,
two laws, two churches and a border" (4). Why, Russell asks,
did James "pretend otherwise" (4)? The answer, according to
Russell, lies in the fact that only union would secure for
James a single succession. And this, in turn, explains why
James's plans for union lacked certainty and purpose: that
is, the goal was not union itself but union to secure a single
succession. This is an unsatisfactory answer. Fortunately,
Russell's essay covers more ground, and the result is an essay
that, rather than forcing a thesis, majestically surveys the
multiple voices and ideas that surfaced in early seventeenth-century
union debate. Tracing both English (read Parliamentarians
and common law lawyers) resistance to union as well as Scottish
favour toward union (Sir Thomas Craig), Russell does a superb
job of teasing out the threats and possibilities spawned by
the occasion of the union of the crowns, addressed by the
1604 Anglo-Scottish Union Commission, and debated in subsequent
English parliamentary sessions. At once revisiting and revising
the union debate, Russell refuses to hail the likes of Sir
Edwin Sandys and Sir Edward Coke (who is the centrepiece of
the volume's final essay by Daniel Hulsebosch) as champions
of liberty: their xenophobia and insularity is well exposed.
The Scottish civil lawyer Sir Thomas Craig, on the other hand,
emerges as the "Jean Monnet of the British Union" (6), a thoughtful,
open-minded commissioner well versed in not simply English
but also continental law.
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Another Scottish voice receives ample attention
in Arthur Williamson's essay: David Hume of Godscroft. Williamson
convincingly portrays Hume, author of De Unione Insulae
Britannicae, as a disciple of George Buchanan and Andrew
Melville; therefore, Hume's pro-union tracts should not be
mistaken for mere prince-pleasing (had Hume's second tract
been a prince-pleaser, then it would have made it into print;
Hume attempted unsuccessfully to have it published anonymously
in Bordeaux in 1610). Hume, we are told, viewed the union
of the crowns as a "unique opportunity for immediate, far-reaching
political innovation and creativity . . . Hume's writings
passionately urged a civic and reformed British commonwealth"
(56). One of Hume's central themes is the formation of a collective
British identity, an identity to be forged, for instance,
through Anglo-Scottish marriages. Williamson is to be lauded
for his in-depth examination of Hume and his cultural moment.
In the course of his fine discussion of Hume's "radical" writings,
however, Williamson makes some grand claims, a few of which
are questionable. His representation of Hume as "anti-racist"
(61), for instance, downplays the rhetoric of civility that
underpins Hume's writings; moreover, his take on Edmund Spenser's
"civic," "anti-imperial" "view of the settlements in Ireland"
suggests either unfamiliarity with or a naïve reading of Spenser's
less than civil, rather racist (if we can use this word in
this period) View of the Present State of Ireland. By no means
do these claims diminish Williamson's attention to the forward-looking,
innovative nature of Hume's writings.
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In many ways, this volume's work on the subject
of union is to be welcomed as some of the best scholarship
produced on union matters. For one, it contributes to the
rethinking of long-held views that Jacobean discourse on Anglo-Scottish
union was monopolized by James and his supposed sycophants.
However, there are moments in this volume when the subject
of union is imagined as James's pet project, moments when
those in favour of union are represented in a rather dismissive
manner. In their Introduction, the editors, writing on James
and his desire to cement the union, state: "His approach,
and that of his propagandists, was both to talk up the areas
of convergence that already existed between England and Scotland
and to find ways of nudging both countries along a path of
further convergence" (xiv). One page later they write: "James's
plans [for union] were supported by a chorus of politicians,
clergyman, and civil lawyers; but the chorus did not seem
to produce sympathetic echoes elsewhere in the political nation"
(xv). Why are those who wrote in support of union imagined
as a "chorus" and as "propagandists" and not, say, "authors"?
To use words such as "chorus" and "propagandists" forecloses
the possibility that some of James's subjects-such as Sir
Thomas Craig-were really thinking through questions of national,
cultural, legal union. While the editors grant Hume the status
of possessing a "'British' vision" (xxi), one wonders why
authors of pro-union tracts such as Sir Francis Bacon, Sir
John Hayward, and John Thornborough are not afforded the same
"vision"? Again, Russell's essay is invaluable because it
not only reveals the limits of earlier representations of
the union but also opens up new ways of examining and understanding
union ideas and debate.
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The problem of how we represent writers and
how that may predetermine our approach to them is nicely illustrated
in the essays by Philip Schwyzer and Tracey Hill. Schwyzer's
piece focuses on King Lear and the Jacobean union controversy;
in short, he reads Shakespeare's tragedy within the context
of debate on the union-in particular, the "propaganda" produced
in favour of union: "The years 1603-1606," he writes, "saw
the production of numerous tracts, poems, genealogies, pageants,
plays, and miscellaneous pieces in support of the king's British
policy" (35). Schwyzer then distinguishes Shakespeare's play
from the "propaganda" by providing a close and intelligent
reading of the play's "cagey and ambiguous" (39) take on the
hot topics of union and Britain. He does so, in part, by contrasting
Shakespeare's profound reflections on the union and Britain
with texts that he represents as less sophisticated and more
ideologically coherent and suspect, such as Anthony Munday's
The Triumphes of Re-united Britania. For Tracey Hill,
however, Munday's Jacobean Lord Mayor's Show is anything but
a piece of simple propaganda. Drawing upon James Knowles's
theory of "a double reading of civic ritual," Hill attends
to the ways in which Munday celebrates not only a national
identity but also, and more emphatically, a civic identity.
Crucial to Hill's reading is "ideological slippage": that
is, those moments in Munday's text when, for instance, the
word "England" appears in place of the expected "Britain"
or when his use of "we" and "us" clearly signals (and favours)
an English rather than British community. Hill does well to
reveal Munday's commitment to a burgeoning civic community
in early modern London; in fact, she paints a much more complex
picture of Munday's text than Schwyzer does. Still, I wonder
why Hill is surprised by such "ideological slippage." Does
she expect all writers to simply share James's vision? While
such slippage can be read as resistance, might it not also
bear witness to an inability at this precise moment in time
to articulate clearly and coherently a British nationalist
discourse or a sense of Britishness?
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Although not an essay on the union per
se, John Kerrigan's piece on the Romans in Britain is
a tour de force. Author of the longest essay in the
volume, Kerrigan has the space to cover a number of Jacobean
plays (William Rowley's A Shoo-maker a Gentleman, Shakespeare's
Cymbeline, John Fletcher's Bonduca, and Robert
Armin's The Valiant Welshman) produced over an eleven-year
span, beginning in the year of James's accession. Arguing
that a "play about ancient Britain could not exist for post-1603
audiences . . . in a purely English perspective" (123), Kerrigan
highlights the complex and often contradictory ideologies
embedded in these plays, especially their representation of
Wales, with which the "positive qualities of ancient Briton
were associated" (114). For Kerrigan, these plays, in particular
Rowley's, reveal "popular theatre reaching an accommodation
with the politics of 1603" (121). What makes Kerrigan's essay
so valuable is his ability to move beyond a limited and limiting
pro-/anti-union paradigm to capture the dynamics of post-1603
"archipelagic politics."
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The remaining essays in this volume take
us beyond union matters. Literature, in particular Scottish
poetry, is the subject of Roderick Lyall's piece, which compares
and contrasts the lives and works of two prominent Scottish
poets: William Drummond of Hawthornden, who chose to remain
at his estate near Edinburgh, and Sir Robert Ayton, who joined
the Scottish cultural "exodus" to London. Ironically, it is
the less travelled, though more widely read, Drummond who,
for Lyall, gives voice to an oeuvre fully informed, indeed
imitative, of sixteenth-century continental poets. Uncovering
"a murmur of real sympathy for the recusant position" (111)
in Shakespeare's Macbeth, Matthew Baynham's brief but
forceful essay on equivocation in Macbeth supplies
us with more solid material to rethink Shakespeare's Catholic
influences and connections. More reflection on James, his
rule, or 1603, would have made this an even stronger essay.
Curtis Perry supplies an excellent essay on the discourse
of favoritism, historicizing and contextualizing the discourse
of favoritism in and around 1603. Perry provides a perceptive
account of James's court and what he terms "eroticized accounts
of Jacobean favouritism" (158). But when Perry discusses the
decay of positive discourses of favouritism in the wake of
James's accession (pointing out that James's Bedchamber was
staffed principally by Scottish men), he misses the opportunity
to examine the crucial role that English nationalism played
in post-1603 discourses of favouritism. More could have been
said of the foreignness of the king's body and the foreignness
of bodies at court.
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Three essays in this volume do a fine job
of detailing the topic of transition from Elizabeth's to James's
reign. Whereas Jenny Wormald expertly shows how a country,
Scotland, kept going without a king, Pauline Croft sheds valuable
light on how a statesman fashioned under Elizabeth's rule,
Sir Robert Cecil, maintained his Elizabethan diplomacy in
order to effect the rather un-Jacobean 1604 peace with Spain.
Maureen King provides a brief yet comprehensive account of
the Essex myth in Jacobean England, focusing on how and why
Essex's reputation was rehabilitated in the years following
Elizabeth's death. Reading these three essays, one realizes
just how fluid and, paradoxically, just how entrenched certain
ideas, images, and behaviours were in the early modern period.
Indeed, the volume as a whole sheds valuable light on the
continuities and discontinuities in a signal moment in English/British
history and literary history.
