This book, original in emphasis, daring in execution, maps out the shaping power of English Renaissance literature in creating and contesting national and colonial identities through the work of major canonical authors including Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton. Informed throughout by the burgeoning fields of the new British history and postcolonial criticism, this volume marks a dramatic shift in studies of the early modern period, from Irish to British concerns, thus accounting for the interplay of union, plantation, and conquest.

Foreword by John Kerrigan Introduction 'The Sceptred Isle': Shakespeare and the British Problem Postcolonial Cymbeline : Sovereignty and Succession from Roman to Renaissance Britain Shakespeare, Holinshed, and Ireland: Resources and Contexts Forms of Discrimination in Spenser's A View of the State of Ireland (1596, 1633): Form Dialogue to Silence 'Another Britain?': Bacon's Certain Considerations Touching the Plantation in Ireland (1606, 1657) Fording the Nation: A Bridging History in Perkin Warbeck (1633) Milton's Observations (1649) and 'the complication of interests' in Early Modern Ireland Index

WILLY MALEY is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow. His many publications include two previous books with Palgrave Macmillan: A Spenser Chronology (1994), and Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (1997). He is also co-editor of Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534 - 1660 (1993), Edmund Spenser: A View of the Present State of Ireland: From the First Published Edition (1997), Postcolonial Criticism (1997), and British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (2002).