This dissertation argues that the early modern English crown and state deployed an official nationalist program during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. The purpose of this ideological campaign was to mask the governmental weaknesses plaguing the Elizabethan and Jacobean monarchies. Suffering under the weight of a failing imperial project to bring the archipelago together under the English crown, a fledgling state infrastructure and a rhetoric of absolutism that was losing its potency, the English government promoted a form of official nationalism that imagined a homogenous English populace unified by their allegiance to the monarch, whose imperial might was borne out by England's genealogical record. The official ideology demanded by the above circumstances was composed, either implicitly or explicitly, by authors and cartographers working under the aegis of the crown. Historians like William Camden and mapmaker John Speed produced reconstructed histories and cartographic allegories that attempted to naturalize or lend credibility to England's fabricated genealogical right to the archipelago, in the process barbarizing the contemporary Scots, Welsh and Irish and their ancient forebearers. Work of official writers and mapmakers likewise attempted to resuscitate the mystical person of the sovereign, whose authority was absolute across all regions of her kingdom, including the colonies and borderlands.The guiding trope of early modern official nationalism was the "myth of the island nation" that cast the English as a unified community bound together by a deep history of ancient descent, shared national identity, their obedience to the crown and its policies, and most importantly, the island territory that naturally marked out their unique geography as a nation separate from the rest of the world. Troublesomely delineating the ancient Scots and Picts as invaders of the genealogically English Isle, the writers of the English nation carefully constructed a national and imperial narrative that repurposed and revised ancient and cartographic materials in support of state and crown initiatives. Recurrent in myriad texts of the period, the "myth of the English island nation" provided the ideological foundation for justifications of imperial domination of the archipelago and a "natural" national character generated and preserved in a geographically insular oceanic space. Popular literature of the early modern period put great pressure upon this official nationalist story telling. The works included here, Thomas More's Utopia, William Shakespeare's Cymbeline, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's Sea Voyage, Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene and Christopher Marlowe's Jew of Malta, undid the threads of this body of nationalist works, drawing uncomfortable attention to the flaws and aporias in this official discourse. Directly or indirectly, these literary texts punctured the official myth-making of the period and revealed the essentially manufactured nature of the island mythos and all that it sustained. The chapters of my dissertation are composed of two parts. The first analyzes the attempts of official authors to rhetorically construct the English nation and indicates the ideological and discursive ruptures in these problematic narratives. The second demonstrates how popular works dismantle the precepts of the crown's official nationalist productions.
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