The Coda asks whether Scotland’s undeniable imaginative presence in Macbeth disproves the book’s thesis of erasure. It argues that editors read into Shakespeare’s sources the contrast between England’s political civility and Scotland’s dysfunctional barbarism that is one effect of this brilliant tragedy. Holinshed’s account of Edward the Confessor does not present a society less barbarous than that of Holinshed’s Macbeth, which derives Hector Boece’s elegant Livyan history. Shakespeare evacuates the political-theoretical content of his Scottish sources, substituting the figure of Scotland as a mother unable to nurture her children. Macbeth thus pathologises the Scottish double plight of jurisdictional subordination and alien status with respect to England. The Scottish failure of nationhood becomes a rooted sorrow that even English sovereignty cannot cure.

Chapter 5 challenges accounts of the ‘Union’ debate of 1603–1608 as a story of English constitutionalist resistance to James’s absolutist Union. Edmund Plowden’s Treatise (1567) used the ‘King’s Two Bodies’ to locate sovereignty in the ‘body politic’ of the English common law. He transformed the old Galfridian notion of English overlordship into an allegory of Scotland’s jurisdictional sub-nationality, Scotland’s body politic kneeling before England’s. The problem created by James’s accession was how, after Plowden, to deny Scots the rights of English naturalisation. How to justify excluding Scots from free trade with England and from the common law liberties of Englishmen? Sir Henry Savile and Sir Henry Spelman drew ingeniously on myths of King Edgar’s (943–975) thalassocratic rule over the British islands to argue simultaneously that Scots were aliens and (lest that suggest that a Scottish accession had brought England geopolitical advantages to be recompensed) that this alien nation’s coastlines had nevertheless always been under English sea-sovereignty. England’s trade expanded while Scots, though subject to English foreign policy, were excluded as aliens from participation.

The introduction sets out the book’s thesis that the conspicuous absence of Scotland as a named nation from the great poetry and political writing of Elizabeth’s reign is not an indication of that kingdom’s actual insignificance in sixteenth-century English consciousness, but the effect of myriad acts of imagination that signal quite the opposite. The conscious project of English insular imagining was to make Scotland-as-nation inconceivable; to produce, by various means, the image of an England stretching from shore to shore, a trompe l’oeil vision of England and Wales as Britain, with Scotland intermittently forcing itself on English consciousness as a foreign supplement, an ever-erupting ‘border region’ threatening England’s peace.

Historians and critics assume that the topic of ‘Britain’ and Camden’s Britannia only became political in 1603. But Camden’s Britannia (1586) was political in its very conception. Camden deliberately set out to undermine George Buchanan’s innovative 1582 account of Britain’s three ancient, Gaulish-speaking indigenous races (Britons, Picts and Scots). Camden wants only one indigenous race: Britons. So he conflates Picts and Britons as ‘painted people’, excluding Scots. Ben Jonson, Camden’s pupil, transformed this identification of British indigeneity with painted skin in the The Masque of Blackness, where Britannia becomes an island ‘discovered’ by the daughters of Niger as they seek to become ‘fair’. Inverting the poetry of Claudian, for whom sunburnt Africans and painted Britons mark the extremes of a vast Roman empire, Jonson sets Britannia at the centre of a new sea-empire, integrating the races of Britain by producing them as unpainted and therefore ‘white’. As unpainted indigenous whiteness replaces Camden’s painted indigeneity, what is left is ‘blackness’, the unwashable hue of the peoples beyond the British seas.

Shakespeare’s Henry V shapes popular consciousness of England/Britain at war, yet resists accusations of jingoism. Its national imagining involves conscientious doubts about the justice of war itself. Chapter 5 shows that this appealingly inward, conscientious dimension of English national identity on stage is predicated on Scotland’s occlusion. Scotland was a major player in the Hundred Years’ War. Henry IV kidnapped the child heir to the Scots throne, James I. Henry V then forced James to fight his subjects, the Scots, in France. Yet Shakespeare carefully avoids acknowledging Scotland as a kingdom. He develops, from earlier history plays, a metaphorical plot that produces the idea of England’s island integrity as an effect of its king’s chaste reformation. In this plot, England is threatened by the wild incontinence of its royal heir until his reformation effectively secures England’s insularity, enabling English advancement ‘beyond sea’ to France. The analogy between royal self-chastening and English insular sea-power is traced through Greene’s Bacon and Bungay, Marlowe’s Edward II, the anonymous Edward III to Henry IV 1 & 2 and Henry V.

To read Lear as connected to Union debates is not reductively topical: the story of Leir belongs to the Galfridian history on which England’s British claims were founded. Moreover, as a Senecan Oedipal tragedy, Shakespeare’s Lear responds to the ‘Oedipal Britain’ found in Elizabethan tragedies such as Gorboduc, Jocasta and The Misfortunes of Arthur. These are national tragedies that lament the natio/nation as lost place of origin, a mother destroyed by her children. Shakespeare’s Lear resists this identification. In Shakespeare’s Lear, the ostentatiously childless deaths of Goneril and Regan destroy the Galfridian prophetic future, while the doubling of Oedipus and Antigone in Lear/Cordelia and Gloucester/Edgar thoroughly ironises and makes impossible any tragic identification of nation and maternal birthplace. In consigning the futureless ‘state’ to Albany and Edgar, icons, respectively, of Scottish enmity and English sea-sovereignty, Shakespeare compounds the tragedy’s ironic relation to contemporary naturalisation debates.

Why are the nine years of destructive invasion and attempted conquest of Scotland unknown to English literary criticism? This chapter shows why we have forgotten this unusually brutal invasive war of 1542–1550 and why it matters to remember it. It introduces the ‘British history’ of Geoffrey of Monmouth, through which English kings claimed feudal overlordship of Scotland. It shows how Henry VIII deployed Geoffrey’s history in his Declaration of 1542 to justify invasion, but also how Henry’s rhetoric and strategy disavowed any desire to conquer in the pretence that he was reluctantly forced into reminding the Scots of English overlordship. Such rhetoric, subsequently repeated and reprinted, helped both justify English claims and trivialise the war to the point of oblivion in modern English historiography. The chapter reads a neglected Scottish text by William Lamb which, opposing Henry’s claims by appealing to the law of nations, exposes the precarious fictionality of English claims to overlordship and its lack of credibility in a broader European context.

Chapter 3 engages with literary criticism’s argument that English national imagining became increasingly spatialised under Elizabeth Tudor. Critics argue that cartography and chorography introduced a new spatial awareness into English national consciousness. This criticism, which ignores Scotland, misrecognises as merely ‘national’ the imperial connotations of ‘British’ in the sixteenth century. The chapter shows that sixteenth-century chorographic British antiquarianism is shot through with both nostalgia and imperial ambition: ancient place-names and local legends fill the idea of England with the immanent presence of the British past and the promise of a pan-insular, imperial future. John Dee’s claims for English sea sovereignty over the Arctic and the Americas depended on claims to Scotland. Chapter 2 shows how Spenser’s The Faerie Queene conjures the vision of an Anglo-British imperial island in which Scotland becomes inconceivable. Spenser fuses river poetry, chorography and classical poetry with these texts on naval power, maritime law and English sea-sovereignty to shape the love of Florimell and Marinell as an allegory of Chastity as key to English insular empire.

Chapter 2 considers the war led by Edward Seymour, Protector Somerset. Somerset saw the Scots as culpably resistant to God’s providential plan for an imperial ‘Great Britain’ with Edward VI as emperor. Metalepsis, a reversal of cause and effect, governs Somerset’s rhetoric and military strategy. His 15,000-strong amphibious army entered Scotland in 1547, heralded by a proclamation declaring that Scots who did not recognize the peaceful aim of this invasion would be the cause of violence against themselves. This preposterous logic is perpetuated by modern reference to the wars as ‘Rough Wooings’. The chapter analyses Somerset’s innovative amphibious strategy (fortifying the Forth and the Tay) in terms of the incoherence and hidden violence of his favoured metaphor of Britain as an island fortress walled by the sea, garrisoned by Anglo-Scots love. It interprets Hans Eworth’s arresting painting of Sir John Luttrell rising, naked, from the Firth of Forth. The chapter lays the ground for understanding what is wrong with the modern critical assumption that ‘Great Britain’ was James VI and I’s project and what is at stake in the occlusions that such a misreading of history permits.

English critics know Mary Queen of Scots as a foreign, Catholic threat to England. Yet Mary’s deposition in 1567 was a Scottish constitutional crisis. It resulted in a war from 1567 to 1573 managed by William Cecil, who appealed to the Galfridian overlordship arguments of the 1540s invasion to justify England’s right to decide the Scottish succession. Chapter 4 traces English government involvement in Mary’s deposition and English military support for the King’s Men versus the Queen’s Men. It contrasts Scottish nationhood as portrayed in George Buchanan’s anti-Marian writings with the poetic collections and compositions of the Maitland family of Lethington. Buchanan’s justification of Mary’s deposition and forensic proof of Mary’s tyranny implicitly ceded an English jurisdictional right to decide Mary’s fate and Scotland’s succession. By contrast, the poetry of the Maitlands – both Thomas Maitland’s neo-Latin poems and Scots vernacular poems in The Maitland Quarto – articulated a commitment to Scotland’s sovereign autonomy and gave voice to the suffering of the Scottish commonweal and people through the wars of 1567-1573.

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture may, as a series title, provoke some surprise. On the one hand, the choice of the word ‘culture’ (rather than, say, ‘literature’) suggests that writers in this series subscribe to the now widespread assumption that the ‘literary’ is not isolable, as a mode of signifying, from other signifying practices that make up what we call ‘culture’. On the other hand, most of the critical work in English literary studies of the period 1500–1700 which endorses this idea has rejected the older identification of the period as ‘the Renaissance’, with its implicit homage to the myth of essential and universal Man coming to stand (in all his sovereign individuality) at the centre of a new world picture. In other words, the term ‘culture’ in the place of ‘literature’ leads us to expect the words ‘early modern’ in the place of ‘Renaissance’. Why, then, ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture’?

The answer to that question lies at the heart of what distinguishes this critical series and defines its parameters. As Terence Cave has argued, the term ‘early modern’, though admirably egalitarian in conception, has had the unfortunate effect of essentialising the modern, that is, of positing ‘the advent of a once-and-for-all modernity’ which is the deictic ‘here and now’ from which we look back. The phrase ‘early modern’, that is to say, forecloses the possibility of other modernities, other futures that might have arisen, narrowing the scope of what we may learn from the past by construing it as a narrative leading inevitably to Western modernity, to ‘us’. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture aims rather to shift the emphasis from a story of progress – early modern to modern – to a series of critical encounters and conversations with the past, which may reveal to us some surprising alternatives buried within texts familiarly construed as episodes on the way to certain identifying features of our endlessly fascinating modernity.