Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama

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Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama, by Lloyd Edward Kermode. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xi + 202. $99.00.

We live in a world, especially in America, where a secure sense of national identity is constantly threatened by elements perceived as alien to a superior native heritage, political, economic, linguistic, or religious. Some fear universalizing health care as a socialist and therefore foreign program; others resent illegal immigrants as competing unfairly with native workers, as unwelcome intruders who, at the very least, should be required to learn English; still others are suspicious of persons who fall outside familiar patterns of …