| The present study explores the budding recognition of heterogeneity, in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, as a fundamental trait of English language, culture, and history. While earlier authors such as Roger Ascham and John Stubbs had reacted with horror to the prospect of cultural intermingling---Stubbs's Discovery of a Gaping Gulf (1579) had likened Queen Elizabeth's proposed French marriage to "the uneven yoking of the clean ox to the unclean ass"---England moved, for a variety of reasons, from Stubbsian isolationism to a more cosmopolitan acceptance of cultural, sociopolitical, and literary mixture. Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene and Vewe of the Present State of Ireland, for instance, work through a possible synthesis of Briton, Anglo-Saxon, and Irish cultural identities in thematizing the mixed status of the nation. Generic hybridity, meanwhile, manifested in such works as Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida; the satires of Nashe, Hall, and Weever; and the tragicomedies of playwrights such as Marston, Beaumont, and Fletcher. Though Sidney's Defence of Poesie had criticized "mungrell" genres that "match Horn-pypes and Funeralls," such formal experiments often provided the cognitive frames needed to manage social dissent and mediate between competing forms of political organization. Finally, this study employs such instances of 'hybridity'---a charged term in current postcolonial criticism---as a lens to focus critical attention on some of the larger social transformations of Tudor and Stuart England: the absorption of classical mores and discursive forms into the humanist educational program; nascent imperial aspirations, complicated by shifting relationships with Spain, Ireland, and Scotland; the emergence of anti-authoritarian, "Puritan" challenges to the established order; and finally, the great compromise between "absolutist" and "parliamentary" forms of government in the reign of James I. |
