Empire, Exile, and England's 'British Problem': Recent Approaches to Spenser's Shepheardes Calender as a Colonial and Postcolonial Text

Abstract

The 'British Problem', or new British history, began in the 1970s as a reaction to a sort of cultural myopia that reduced all British to purely English history. To identify a 'British Problem', then, was to encourage historians of England to view England in relation to its British neighbours, and to explore how far England's British relations have affected English political and cultural history. Recent years have seen the application of this new British history to the study of English literature, with early modernists approaching texts from a British perspective, arguing that England's colonial interests in Wales, Scotland and Ireland affected writing by Spenser and Shakespeare in particular. This article surveys recent critical interest in England's 'British Problem' as it applies to Tudor English literature, but it also asks that we do not forget England amid all this talk of England's burgeoning 'British' empire. Colonial interests apart, England also saw itself in the sixteenth century as 'postcolonial', as independent from Catholic Europe and the influence of Rome. The word 'empire' was used to describe England's postcolonial independence, even as it was used to encode England's colonial ambitions over Britain. The article, then, goes on to survey England's self-image in the sixteenth century as an 'empire', or independent nation-state, exploring how England came to be written at this time in relation to concepts of empire and exile associated with the Roman poet Virgil. It ends by focusing on recent critical interest in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender as both a colonial and postcolonial text, a text about England's relations to Britain as well as about England's relations to Rome.