The Oxford English Dictionary's first definition of “orientation” reads “the relative position or direction of something” (OED). This definition is clear and reflective of current usage. However, the second definition of “orientation” reads, “the placing or arranging of something so as to face the east” (OED). What does it mean, then, to “face the east?” What is, who stands for, and where exactly is the east? To where does it lead? What happens when we redirect our lines of reading along new lines, borders, and orientations—those that fail to fit neatly into the cardinal directions of North, South, East, and West? In asking these questions, I seek a change in perspective—one that recovers our understanding of cultural appellations like the East and its historical counterpart, the “Orient.” These words constitute fundamental parts of an ambiguous and persistent taxonomy of racial, ethnic, and gendered subjects and objects. This book, at its root, interrogates the creation of the “Orient” and its “Oriental” subjects during the Romantic period.

From Immanuel Kant's question, “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thought?” (1786) to the question of the exact locale of the “Orient” or “East” in Romantic literature, the interconnected logic of orientation and “Orient” has not been excavated in Romantic literary and cultural studies. How do geographical, continental, and hemispheric divisions buttress aesthetic investments in poetic forms and subjects? If hemispheric divisions make location, position, and subject possible, what happens when continental and hemispheric divisions mark certain subjects as perpetually other and distant? Sara Ahmed writes in Queer Phenomenology, “We might not be able to imagine the world without dividing the world into hemispheres, which are themselves created by the intersection of lines (the equator and the prime meridian), even when we know that there are other ways of inhabiting the world” (13).

In 1902, Macmillan relaunched its celebrated English Men of Letters series under the general editorship of John Morley. With the release of Leslie Stephen's George Eliot, the publisher inaugurated its second series – which, following convention, retained the male noun as universal – with a study of a woman writer. Remarking on Eliot's turn to fiction after a number of years as an essayist, Stephen notes that her decision to write the village tales that make up Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) had a precedent in, among other works, Mary Russell Mitford's Our Village and Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1853). For Stephen, however, this is where the comparison with her near contemporaries ended. While all three authors, he contends, wrote about the people and places they knew well, Eliot possessed ‘a profoundly reflective intellect, which contemplates the little dramas performed by commonplace people as part of the wider tragi-comedy of human life; and the village communities, their thoughts and customs, as subordinate elements in the great “social organism”’ (1902: 62).

Although her library included a single volume of Our Village at the time an inventory was taken and George Eliot surely thought of Mitford as one of the authors for whom she felt ‘vague gratitude’ for having ‘charmed’ her in the past, she records no specific impressions of her predecessor. Nevertheless, Eliot's attention to the topographical details of St Ogg’s, the fictional village in The Mill on the Floss, bears Mitford's traces. In ‘The Queen of the Meadow’, which appeared in the 1827 annual the Literary Souvenir and was published in the third volume of Our Village the following year, Mitford's narrator recalls traversing a ‘winding unfrequented road’ that leads to ‘a low, two-arched bridge, thrown across a stream of more beauty than consequence’. Just across it stands ‘a small irregular dwelling, and the picturesque buildings of Hatherford Mill’. ‘It was a pretty scene on a summer afternoon, was that old mill’, the narrator continues, ‘with its strong lights and shadows, its low-browed cottage covered with the clustering Pyracantha, and the clear brook which after dashing, and foaming, and brawling, and playing off all the airs of a mountain river, while pent up in the mill-stream, was no sooner let loose, than it subsided into its natural peaceful character, and crept quietly along the valley, meandering through the green woody meadows.’

1 The Spiritual Automaton and the Practical Subject

‘Every idea that in us is absolute, or adequate and perfect, is true’, says Ethics II, 34. The adequate idea as absolute idea affirms absolutely (or perfectly) what it is as an idea (as a mode of the attribute of thought): infinity in act. In and through it, the unity of substance intensively expresses itself in its complete actuality. Insofar as it has adequate ideas, the mind can be understood as a ‘spiritual automaton’, following the expression from the TdlE, 85. This formulation must be reserved to describe the spontaneity of the mind, its productive activity rather than its passivity. When the mind is forced into action by the automatism of Habit, memory and imagination, it loses its status as an automaton, that is, its autonomy. This spontaneity is not that of a freely willing subject. It is a ‘free necessity’ by which the mind, insofar as God is its essence, produces ideas according to its own intensity. The adequate idea expresses a power (puissance) of thought, identical in us and in God. It expresses a way of thinking (a mode of production of ideas) that is identical with that of God. The standpoint of adequation and identifica-tion, in us and in God, of the productive force and the mode of production it involves, clarifies the relationship between truth and essence in the third kind of knowledge (according to Ethics II, 40 Schol. 2). Yet Spinoza thinks of an idea of the second kind of knowledge (a ‘common notion’ is an idea of the bodies’ properties and therefore not of its essence) as an absolute and perfectly adequate idea. In which sense, then, does a common notion also constitute a spiritual automaton?

The ‘spiritual automaton’, in the TdlE, is intrinsically linked to the specific laws of production of the true idea as it is conceived through the fourth type of perception. It is possible to keep the formulation of the spiritual automaton for the Ethics (which does not use it again), not only in relationship to ‘intuitive Science’ but also to reason, knowledge of the ‘second kind’. In fact, although the common notions do not express the singular essence of a thing, they express properties that are truly common to two, several or all bodies.

Paradoxically, Spinozist eternity has a history: a mere extrinsic denomination in the Short Treatise, it becomes a real property in the Ethics and should be counted among the ranks of common notions. In this way, it stops belonging exclusively to substance to be extended to infinite and finite modes. The Ethics therefore marks a decisive turning point in relation to Metaphysical Thoughts, since Spinoza breaks the divine monopoly on eternity and replaces, once and for all, the doctrine of the immortality of the soul with that of the eternity of the intellect. At the same time, the status of modes finds itself shaken up: particular natura naturata is no longer content to enjoy a finite duration, or even an endless duration. It now sees itself endowed with an actual present existence and an actual eternal existence. The discovery of the exact ontological nature of eternity once again highlights the fecundity and originality of Spinoza's theory of common notions, for the existence of these infamous notions is the condition of possibility for the extension of a property characteristic of substance to infinite and finite modes. The theory of common notions thus picks up where the scholastic doctrine of communicable attributes had left off and turns out to be the key to reading the final propositions of the Ethics which establish the eternity of the human intellect. Without this theory, the communication of this property would appear to be a sleight of hand – more of a nominal than real communication. We can therefore understand why in Metaphysical Thoughts, where this doctrine is not yet elaborated, or at least does not explicitly appear, Spinoza indeed refrains from attributing eternity to created things and carefully reserves it for the creator, thereby avoiding the metaphysical conundrum of a ‘substantialisation’ of modes or a ‘modalisation’ of substance, as well as the accusation of creating a lesser divinity. Recourse to common notions allows us to evade these inextricable difficulties, for those properties which ground our reasoning express that through which two or more beings agree. They reveal the existence of a certain similarity between beings without implying an identity of nature. Substance and modes can therefore share eternity without for all that being of the same nature.

I

Genre is both one of the oldest and the most slippery of literary historical concepts: the names of kinds are at once self-evident, even self-defining, at the same time that their specific content is always shifting as new works appear and as old works move from one category to another. Polonius’ description of the players’ repertory and qualifications trades on both of these characteristics in his invocation of historical genres and a series of increasingly large hybrids. Even his use of Seneca and Plautus points to a theory of genre as defined by major practitioners. In the contemporary book shop, library, or theatre, genre presents itself as given, a set of categories that have clear if, paradoxically, not always well-defined boundaries demar-cating real, substantial distinctions between kinds of books. It is a critical commonplace that early modern drama is free with generic mixing and innovation, while at the same time critics deploy traditional terms to mark kind off from kind. This book is concerned with developing an historical account of generic mixing and innovation that does not proceed from category to expression, but places what genres do before what they are.

Noting that genre is one of the oldest fields of inquiry in literary studies is hardly an astonishing claim; indeed, it is almost obligatory in any work that deals with questions of genre. In fact, if there exists a genre of “genre criticism,” such statements are a central marker of participation in it. We can look to Aristotle's Poetics as one of the originary texts in a long series of arguments about form. Writers from Horace through the Renaissance and beyond have taken up the question of how to understand the “kinds” of literature from positions ranging from the rigidly prescriptive to the merely descriptive to the wholly dismissive. It could be asked, given this long history, what the purpose of another investigation of generic change might be. The bulk of my answer to that question lies in the chapters that follow but this introduction offers some initial justifications for this project.

How can the act of reading Othello or Macbeth become virtuous? I ask this question as a Shakespearean at a liberal arts institution whose mission is to prepare students to lead an ethical life (not because my university's namesake is the island where Macbeth is buried). When it comes to Shakespeare in higher education, though, Iona University is not an outlier. Students might read one Shakespeare play, many English majors and some Education majors must take one Shakespeare course, and some elect to take two. Because most students encounter Shakespeare for small spans as undergraduates, my pedagogical goals are less informed by long-standing historical, archival or theoretical queries than they are by the very real possibility that many students are offered what might prove ‘the be-all and end-all’ of their Shakespeare experience, their last chance to dwell among a community of burgeoning Shakespeare readers who must struggle with the distinctiveness of Shakespeare's art – the poetics, the contexts, the performances and the implications.

Among my goals is to encourage students to experience Shakespeare's major works as ‘proper stuff’ for honing their emotional and mental faculties against any ‘perilous stuff / that weighs upon the heart’ in their future (Macbeth 3.4.61, 5.3.44–5). I hope that some students will absorb, resonate with and even internalise the discoveries that close reading Shakespeare affords them. Perhaps some will then peruse Shakespeare after graduation, when they will sadly but most likely encounter much of what Shakespeare makes profound through poesis and eventual performance, if they have not already – the often isolating human struggles and travails, the accompanying ambivalence, doubt, guilt, shame, anger, frustration, desperation and grief that may remain afterwards, perhaps during sleepless nights when thoughts haunt and sting like scorpions, in a world beset with social ills and ecological turmoil.

My standard scholarly approaches to Shakespeare seem ill suited for the task. Reading Shakespeare's Macbeth through a combination of textual analysis and contextualisation – that is, within its early Jacobean milieu – might not counter attempts to nudge students towards a more virtuous life, but it typically does not support those efforts either. Overviews of the Gunpowder Plot, fears over casuistry and the history of English Jesuits from Edmund Campion to Robert Southwell to Henry Garnet have never rattled readers to rethink who they are and how they ought to be in relation to others.

Conventionally speaking, a photo opportunity is an arranged event that assembles notable figures to have their picture taken. Arrangement, as a formal precondition of ekphrastic writing, empowers an author to correlate visual and linguistic forms in order to represent the effects of a non-discursive medium such as photography. Across his body of work, Don DeLillo uses narrative to investigate the ‘power of the image’ in contemporary culture, and specifically, the pervasive and complex influence of photography on ‘the way we feel about ourselves’. This chapter examines how and why DeLillo turns to photography to pose questions about subjective freedom, perceptual and affective experience, as well as collective trauma. Using language to mediate the prerogative of the image, DeLillo effectively controls its reception. His ekphrastic writing presents, describes and frames multiple features of photography, including the photographer and her subject, the site of photography, the image and its circulation, and finally, the viewer’s, and thus reader’s, experience of the picture. With this comprehensive scope, DeLillo's novels at once introduce and govern photography using the medium of language. This tension, in turn, reflects the author's deep ambivalence about the power of photography, an ambivalence that I argue is inherent to the medium itself.

The history of photography theory is anchored in the question of whether and what makes photography art. Both the indexicality and the unintentionality of the effects inherent to photography have led some critics to argue that it falls outside the traditional realm of art because it is neither an entirely made-up object independent of the world, nor an image completely controlled by its maker. Alternatively, photography theorists suggest that it is precisely these differences that define the mediumspecificity, and therefore legitimate the singular aesthetic category of photography as an art form. Added to these formal arguments is the fact that, while there have been many influential artists who work in photography, the photograph and picturetaking as such remain largely co-opted by the contemporary visual regime, which circulates images for the purposes of commodification, media communications, and individual and corporate self-promotion.

It is instructive to view one's historical moment as archaeology's raw material. What artefacts of the present will enchant the future? Which will occasion pity and contempt for an era's spiritual and aesthetic poverty? These questions loom over one of DeLillo's most oft-invoked essays, ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, which, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, offers archaeologically inflected observations on America's weight in the scales of history. Like the earlier essays ‘American Blood’ and ‘The Power of History’, ‘In the Ruins of the Future’ showcases DeLillo's eloquent ability to place the present in its larger temporal context – as have literati from Shelley to Yeats and Eliot. ‘Time present and time past’, says the last, ‘Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past’ (Eliot 189). The lines invite parody as ersatz sententiousness or ponderous tautology, but they capture something that occurs to anyone who thinks about the course of civilisation – especially to anyone who reflects that every great empire must one day collapse, whether from cultural entropy, tangled-bank geopolitics or simply imperial hubris. Moralists discern lessons in the ruins of such empires, historians and archaeologists perpend the mechanics of decline, and poets affect romantic melancholy: ‘I sometimes think that never blows so red / The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled’ (FitzGerald 4).

Those who think ruins romantic or charming would do well to imagine the actual process of societal collapse, especially the event or events that prove catalytic – failure of the water supply, breakdown in crucial technology, sacking of the imperial city. Emily Dickinson observes that ruin should proceed ‘[c]onsecutive and slow’ (904), but at a certain point it speeds up vertiginously. Like bankruptcy, according to that classic line in Hemingway, ruin happens in two ways: gradually and then suddenly.

Drawing on Julia Kristeva's theorisation of abjection as the subjective experience of the porosity between self and other, and of what is cast out of the symbolic order, this chapter examines Don DeLillo's engagement with abject art in his later fiction, focusing primarily on his 2007 novel Falling Man. Although the novel has assumed canonical status as an exemplary ‘9/11 novel’, it is a novel of crisis and continuity, not a novel of exception. Engaging with broader questions of ontological existence, the limits of human consciousness, and enduring themes in DeLillo's pre- and post-9/11 work, Falling Man is a timeless counternarrative to tired trauma narratives of 9/11. Following a brief exploration of the recurring ruin and rubble in DeLillo's oeuvre, this chapter critiques the abject body art of the Falling Man's predecessor: The Body Artist's Lauren Hartke. It then turns to its primary concern, the ‘marginal story’ of Lianne's grief and experiential encounter with abject art in Falling Man. Following DeLillo in ‘thinking along the margins’ of abject bodies, the chapter also thinks along the margins of Zero K, drawing some points of connection and continuity between the novels. Despite stylistic differences, abject aesthetics form connective tissue across DeLillo's literary corpus, revealing the miracles of the marginal and the ‘awful openness’ of grieving bodies.

The Abject

In her seminal text Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), Kristeva defines the abject as ‘the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ that ‘does not respect borders, positions, rules’ and ‘draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’ (4, 2). The abject confronts the individual with the insistent materiality of death rather than the knowledge and meaning of death, both of which can emerge from the symbolic order. She writes:

The Death of the Author in DeLillo's Early Works

In Mao II (1991), acclaimed writer Bill Gray laments that ‘[w]hat terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought’ (157). That novel also chronicles a profound anxiety about the loss of writers’ powers in the face of the increased influence of visual culture. It is significant, then, that Mao II is also the last DeLillo novel in which novelists play a central role. During DeLillo's early career, much of his work chronicled a tension between words and images. After ‘spen[ding] twenty-eight years in the movies’, David Bell, the ‘[child] of Godard and Coca-Cola’, as Mark Osteen felicitously described the protagonist of DeLillo's first novel, Americana (1971), takes up his pen after failing as a filmmaker (Americana 283; Osteen 8). As if to counteract the odious effects of pervasive visual media that ensure that our daily lives ‘[exist] only on videotape’, the novel offers ‘schizograms’ and bedtime stories whose elusiveness is their charm (Americana 23). Running Dog (1978) chronicles the collision of investigative journalism and the world of erotic art, and the very title of The Names (1982), a novel that announces the importance of film in the twentieth century, establishes the primacy of language. By Underworld (1997), however, writers in the conventional sense have all but disappeared from DeLillo's novels. Words are still important, of course, but primarily embodied by the controversial improvisations of Lenny Bruce or the stylised graffiti of Moonman 157. Subsequent novels yield an even bleaker terrain for the writer who doesn't even bother to show up, save for a brief appearance by The Body Artist's (2001) Rey Robles, a filmmaker who kills himself while trying to complete his memoir. Even the spareness of DeLillo's prose in the past twenty years suggests that the written word is disappearing. Depictions of art and artists are certainly pervasive in DeLillo's later work, with art increasingly limited to visual and performance art, a sleight of hand that seems to have gone unnoticed. It is as if Bill Gray's prognostication has proven true: writers have ceded their place to terrorists – or to visual artists.

In an interview for the Paris Review, Don DeLillo responded as follows when asked whether he read as a child: ‘No, not at all. Comic books. This is probably why I don't have a storytelling drive’ (Begley). In addition to its impact on DeLillo's well-established renunciation of conventional plot structures, the comic book genre may have had a formative influence on a less widely recognised aspect of his writing. Colour was one of, if not the defining, characteristics of American comics during its Golden Age in the 1940s. A garish gallery of superheroes in harlequin hues – Superman and Captain Marvel, Batman and Robin, the Flash and the Green Lantern – captured the roving eyes and imagination of an impressionable audience. DeLillo, of course, did not go on to become a graphic novelist, but it is important to acknowledge the extent of his literary engagement with colour. To date, the DeLillo oeuvre includes approximately three and a half thousand colour terms. Around a quarter of these references are to the colour that combines all wavelengths from the visible light spectrum. White is the most conspicuous (over 900 references) and complex presence on the DeLillo colour wheel. The second most prominent colour is another achromatic hue: black (almost 600 references). After white and black, DeLillo's ‘primary’ colours we might say, a second tier includes the following (listed in order of frequency with each between 200 and 350 references): blue, red, green, grey (not counting the two ‘Mr Grays’ who appear in White Noise and Mao II) and brown. A tertiary tier of colour (appearing between 50 and 100 times and again listed in order of prevalence) comprises those associated with the precious metals silver, gold and bronze alongside pink, yellow and orange. Finally, DeLillo's fiction is flecked with intermittent references to a range of minor colours (fewer than twenty appearances) such as copper, lime, magenta, ochre, purple and scarlet.

DeLillo's colours are often nuanced by modifiers. Two characters in the film Game 6 discussing their favourite colours plump for ‘burnt sienna’ and ‘cobalt blue’. The yellows of Underworld include shades of ‘Mikado’ and ‘Rust-Oleum’ while the greens are ‘mustard’, ‘patina’ and ‘sage’. An assiduous precision of tone is accompanied by a painterly attentiveness to the quality of light.

There's a zone I aspire to’, Don DeLillo admitted in a 1993 interview. ‘It's a state of automatic writing, and it represents the paradox that's at the center of a writer's consciousness – this writer's anyway’:

DeLillo describes the push–pull of this writerly paradox again in 1997, associating it once more with a poetic sensibility: ‘I think that poets must know this feeling, the feeling of being willing to sacrifice meaning to pure language, let language press meaning upon you, and it's an odd thing’ (‘City Arts’). A change came in DeLillo's writing practice, he attests, while he was living in Greece and writing The Names (1982). Taking regular walks around Athens, DeLillo saw among the ruins of an ancient civilisation a new way to shape his writing practice. The ‘inscribed words and sentences on stone and marble’ (‘City Arts’) at the Parthenon began to translate to the pages of his workin-progress: DeLillo switched to typing each new paragraph on a fresh sheet of paper; small blocks of text surrounded by paginal space that resembled more the pages from a book of poems than the draft of a novel.

DeLillo has employed the same creative practice ever since, with the same, secondhand typewriter, whose solid letter-hammers he says give his writing a ‘sculptural quality’ that echoes the abstract, visual art of those ancient carved stones (‘The Art of Fiction’).

In Shakespeare's As You Like It Orlando violently invades the Duke's camp in Act 2 to steal food for himself and his servant Adam. Calmed by the Duke's gracious generosity, Orlando climbs down from his rage-fuelled threats, and asks only that the party wait a little before sharing their bounty with him: ‘Then but forbear your food a little while, / Whiles like a doe I go to find my fawn, / And give it food’ (2.7.128–30). Orlando's ‘fawn’ is, of course, old Adam, his servant, left fainting from hunger under a bush. Like the foraging doe, Orlando has ventured afield while hiding his vulnerable infant from predators. Topsell mentions this practice in his History of Four-footed Beasts, noting that does ‘lodge [their young] in a stable fit for them of their own making, either in some rock, or other bushy inaccessible place; covering them’. Deer hide their young in this way especially during the two weeks after birth, when the fawn cannot run from predators, and they may continue to hide fawns for several months during summer. Anyone who has hiked or ridden in forests or fields has quite likely passed a resting fawn without seeing it – their camouflage is so effective and they are so preternaturally still unless accidentally flushed from the spot. Indeed, recent public service announcements from animal rescue groups and other organisations have repeatedly tried to inform Americans that they should never remove a fawn discovered in this fashion, since the doe will return to it; moving it will often guarantee it dies without its mother to nurse it.

Orlando's characterisation of Adam as his fawn and himself as a nurturing doe reflects his turn away from violence and towards virtue, which is here imagined as moral action leading to mutual support, or what in Shakespeare's world might be called friendship. That word could have a more capacious meaning for early moderns than perhaps it has in our own time: friendship establishes a kind of generalised kinship, a disposition of amity towards others, the embrace of accord or alliance.

In a discussion of the persistence of ‘heroic culture’ at the cusp of the European Middle Ages, Alasdair MacIntyre affirms the continuing importance of what he terms ‘the heroic table of the virtues’ in the medieval Aristotelian-infused virtue ethics tradition whose rise and fall he tracks in After Virtue:

Hamlet looks back to the historical moment MacIntyre evokes, as the play is built from source material and a worldview drawn from pre-modern sagas (not least in its concern with ‘the code of revenge’) but also marks the transformation of this source material and worldview into the ethical universe of medieval Aristotelianism adverted to in the play by engagement with schools and schooling, including the kind of schooling that is accomplished at the University of Wittenberg, and by engagement with a discourse of the virtues and vices. And yet at the same time the play also looks back on all this from much later, during the seventeenth century when the neo-Aristotelian ethical project that MacIntyre celebrates is already marked as everywhere in full disintegration. Hamlet therefore occupies a unique ethical space – analogous to the position MacIntyre himself occupies – at the intersection of three ethical world-systems: the heroic age, the scholastic Middle Ages and the world of humanism.

In the midst of this ethical intersection, MacIntyre singles out the importance of ‘[l]oyalty to family and to friends, the courage required to sustain the household or a military expedition’ as a holdover from the heroic age and yet also as a cornerstone of the whole edifice of virtue ethics he describes in After Virtue. The kind of courage to which MacIntyre points here is not the courage of the classical Stoics – ‘valor’ or ‘fortitude’, the individual's ability to face danger or even defeat.

Consider the conclusion of the 2019 HBO miniseries Watchmen. Damon Lindelof – previously the showrunner of ABC's Lost (2004–10) and HBO's The Leftovers (2014–17) – created Watchmen as a contemporary sequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1986–87 graphic novel of the same name, which was set in 1985 on an alternative earth on which superheroes existed and where Richard Nixon was in his fourth term as president of the United States. Lindelof's version stars Regina King as Angela Abar, a detective on the Tulsa police force who adopts the costumed identity Sister Night after surviving a coordinated 2016 attack on police officers’ homes by the members of a white supremacist group named the Seventh Kavalry. Over the course of the series, Abar discovers that her murdered boss and mentor Judd Crawford was secretly a member of the Seventh Kavalry, and that he was killed by her own grandfather, Will Reeves, who survived the 1921 Greenwood Massacre as a child, joined the New York Police Force in the 1940s, and became the world's first costumed vigilante after discovering that the force had been infiltrated by a racist group. In the seventh episode of the series, viewers learn that Abar's husband, Cal, is in fact the formerly godlike being named Dr Manhattan, who relinquished his power and memories to marry Abar after the two met in Vietnam. The final episode of the series culminates with Manhattan and other characters foiling two plots to steal his powers, although he dies in the process.

The final two scenes offer an epilogue of sorts focused on Abar, who – to the accompaniment of minor key piano music – contemplates an egg that remained unbroken when she smashed a carton on the floor during a final confrontation with Cal. She recalls a conversation in Vietnam, after he had first revealed himself as Dr Manhattan, when he produced an egg and told her that someone could acquire his powers by consuming organic material into which he had transferred his ‘atomic components’. We then see her taking off her shoes and walking outside to her home's swimming pool. The piano music ends, replaced by the sound of birds. Abar breaks the egg and swallows its insides, then places a hand on her chest. She places the shell on the ledge of the pool and hitches up her trousers.

Shakespeare's plays have long been aligned with a widespread movement in Elizabethan and Stuart literature to define, delimit and justify the sovereign English nation that, over the course of the sixteenth century, was fast replacing the older concept of a kingdom or realm. Accompanying this change was an acute anxiety over England's cultural identity, in response to which a generation of writers crafted literary signs of Englishness in order to fashion for their new state a national sense of self. Thus, as scholars such as Richard Helgerson have argued, Shakespeare's plays are invested in writing an emerging nation-state and rethinking the question of its identity – that is, of what constitutes ‘This England’ in the first place, of the source and authenticity of its supposed roots and origins, of the foundations and legitimacy of its governmental structures, and, indeed, of its very geographical and territorial demarcations. Perhaps the most famous Shakespearean and larger Elizabethan characterisation of England is that of an ‘island nation’ – an early conception of national identity so potent that it can still be observed in the Brexit saga of today. Though based on a blatant misrepresentation of geographic reality that appropriated both the contiguous Scotland and Wales and the island of Ireland, this discourse of ‘England’ as an elect island state, coherent unto itself, was shaped by Protestant isolationism and physical separation from Catholic Europe; catalysed by Henry VIII's break with Rome; and concretised by the miraculous salvation from the Spanish Armada. Noting that nationalism tends to be ‘rooted in claims about land’, island studies scholar Alex Law identifies early England's version as ‘maritime island nationalism’, an idea that ‘derives its force from an island mentality that conceives Britain or, more usually, England, as an “island race”’, a chosen people placed in a paradisal garden ‘bounded by clearly defined watery borders’. It is precisely this idea of nation that one finds in such history plays as King John (1594–6), where ‘that England’ is praised as a ‘water-wallèd bulwark, still secure / And confident from foreign purposes’ (2.1.26–8).

Where the preceding chapter looked at the “history play” at its putative moment of emergence, this chapter examines “late” examples of historical drama – from after the “genre” had supposedly met its end and transformed into romance in Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII. From at least the publication of Ribner's English History Play, the “English History Play” has been closely – almost exclusively – associated with Shakespeare and especially with his plays of the 1590s. Ribner writes that “Following the accession of James I the history play passes into a period of rapid decline, with only a momentary rise at the very end of the great age of the English drama in the Perkin Warbeck of John Ford” (266). Ribner offers a series of reasons for this decline – the rise of romance, that all the history had been staged, that the “history play” lost its didactic purpose somehow around 1600 and so on – but the existence of a whole range of historical plays contradicts the decline narrative; only reference to a restrictive notion of what counts as a “history play” sustains it.2 Because of the dominance of the decline narrative, scholars typically describe the historical drama of the early seventeenth century as out of place, unusual, untypical, or not historical at all. In taking a range of “late” plays seriously as historical, this chapter is questioning traditional ideas about what constitutes a “history play.”