Shakespeare and National Identity A Dictionary

Unlike fellow contemporary playwrights Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare did not participate in the writing of the popular genre of the city comedy. Incredibly, ‘none of Shakespeare’s plays is set in modern London’. 1 Simply put, Shakespeare, born in Stratford, a member of an acting but not a livery company, was no Londoner in the manner of his fellow citizen- of-London playwrights. 2 More so than Jonson and Middleton, however, Shakespeare placed the nation – its history, its wars, its rulers, its people – rather than the city centre stage in his dramatic works, imagining a national community and a sense of national identity to rival the civic communities and identities enacted by his dramatic rivals. 3 To my knowledge, no extant signature survives that, John Milton- like, reads ‘William Shakespeare, Englishman’. 4 But Shakespeare’s long list of English history plays – two tetralogies, plus – marks a signal contribution to the writing of England