The Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface

Abstract

“What ish my nation?” asks the Scots officer Macmorris, speaking a foreign tongue, of his Welsh colleague Fluellen, who also serves in Henry the Fifth’s polyglot “English” army in Shakespeare’s Henry V (III.ii.121). The question focuses the spectrum of issues this journal will address as it considers the Nation and its Others. We find the query useful, as Shakespeare did when he set out in 1599 to instruct his audience about its fiction of “England” in 1415. He wrote from within a barely secure new nation about a time when English kings still viewed Normandy, Anjou, Aquitaine, and the inhabitants thereof as their land and their people, though not yet their nation(-state).