PROSPECTUS

In Shakespeare's age political and cultural perceptions of what constituted nationality tended to diverge: this circumstance will underlie the twofold structure of this chapter.

On both sides of this divide, nationality in the Renaissance was often a shifting or emerging concept, and certainly this was the case in Elizabethan England. In terms of cultural mythologies, scholars and artists forged and/or questioned British origin myths. In the realm of political constructions, English lawmakers refashioned the limits of citizenship and alien status.

Moreover, mythic–historical and mythic–jurisprudential thinking joined in novel, highly influential theories that an essential ancient Englishness was the basis of the immutable English common law: scholars have argued that these theories had a great deal of fictional content. So in several ways English nationality was both a prominent and yet an evidently constructed entity.

Because of the dual nature of the constructions of nationality in accord with either legal specification or else with perceptions of cultural difference, this chapter will be divided into two portions, one of which could be labelled ‘Alien Statutes’ and the other ‘Exotic Foreigners’.