Where People Kill With Their Looks: Illyria in Shakespeare's England and in Modern Literary Criticism

This project argues that the northwestern Balkan region known to Renaissance England as "Illyria" played a significant but under-appreciated role in the writings and political thought of the English. I examine the encounters of the English with the Illyrians and "Illyrian" Slavs through the Graeco-Roman heritage; early modern geographies, histories, and travelogues; and international politics and commerce. I give particular attention to the ways in which Illyria's geopolitical position between the Ottoman Empire, Habsburg Empire and Venice, as well as its cultural heterogeneity, figured in English political and economic interests in the eastern Mediterranean, and also helped to shape English ideas about ethnicity, nationhood, and religion. In addition to non-fiction, I examine English prose romances and plays that feature Illyria or its peoples, including five plays by Shakespeare centered on Twelfth Night. I also consider modern-day critical interpretations of Twelfth Night, showing that the twentieth-century politics and negative conceptions of "the Balkans" affect critics' analyses of the play's Illyrian setting. By examining the origins and principal features of past and present discourses on the region, this dissertation invites scholars of the English Renaissance to differentiate between them with greater precision, and expands our knowledge of the relevance of the eastern Adriatic region for the ways in which England negotiated its position in the early modern world.