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'The Shepheards Nation': Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture

Michelle O'Callaghan, 'The Shepheards Nation': Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2000, pp. vii + 272, hb. £40, ISBN 019818638XBe they literary or historical. Jacobean studies have a tendency to congregate around either the beginning of James Stuart's reign in England or the end of it. It's a moot point whether the sound and fury at these junctions deserves this attention to the detriment of the rest of the reign, but the tumultuous 1620s with the drift towards war certainly are important years.Taking attention away from that period in British (and not just English) political history takes a significant degree of resolve, if only because any title that looks at the mid-Jacobean period runs the risk of an audience reception along the lines of yes, but what are the long-term implications? Which is to say that traditionally - pace the Overbury murder case and the death of Shakespeare - not much is perceived to have really happened from 1613 to 1619.In large part this is due to the fact that literary scholars like the early Jacobean period because there's plenty of good drama happening from 1603 to 1613 and Donne wrote some great poetry. Historians like it because the success or failure of the Union of the Crowns is controversial. However, it is not desirable to tie Jacobean studies too closely to Elizabethan studies - what some call 'Jacobethanism' - because so much of the political and cultural life of Britain and Ireland underwent a fundamental change as a result of the accession of James VI to the English crown.By writing a book about a group of poets who identified themselves as an intellectual community independent from the dominant political order in the mid-Jacobean period, Michelle O'Callaghan has admirably faced up to the challenge of enlightening a little-studied period of both history and literature. It is a kind of study that emanates more from English faculties than from history departments. While books on exclusively political history relating to the Jacobean period take up a healthy amount of shelf space in bookshops with recent works from, for example, Tom Cogswell, Julia Merritt, Theodore Rabb and Victor Treadwell, cultural studies of this period are scarce, especially since Kevin Sharpe's work tends to favour the Caroline period.Early Stuart cultural studies have a strong tendency to centre on the court masques which, while enlightening, cannot paint a true picture of Jacobean culture as the vast majority were written for the monarch and they were performed in front of a select group only. …