This dissertation argues that during the reign of Charles I (1625-42), a powerful and long-lasting nationalist discourse emerged that embodied a conflicted nostalgia and located a primary source of English national identity in the Elizabethan era, rooted in the works of William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, John Lyly, and Ben Jonson. This Elizabethanism attempted to reconcile increasingly hostile conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, court and country, and elite and commoners. Remarkably, as I show by examining several Caroline texts in which Elizabethan ghosts appear, Caroline authors often resurrect long-dead Elizabethan figures to articulate not only Puritan views but also Arminian and Catholic ones. This tendency to complicate associations between the Elizabethan era and militant Protestantism also appears in Caroline plays by Thomas Heywood, Philip Massinger, and William Sampson that figure Queen Elizabeth as both ideally Protestant and dangerously ambiguous.
Furthermore, Caroline Elizabethanism included reprintings and adaptations of Elizabethan literature that reshape the ideological significance of the Elizabethan era. The 1630s quarto editions of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan comedies The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Taming of the Shrew, and Love’s Labour’s Lost represent the Elizabethan era as the source of a native English wit that bridges social divides and negotiates the roles of powerful women (a renewed concern as Queen Henrietta Maria became more conspicuous at court). Similarly, poetic and dramatic adaptations of Sidney’s Arcadia by Francis Quarles, Henry Glapthorne, and James Shirley rewrite the romance’s politics to engage with contemporary debates about foreign policy. This dissertation ultimately contributes to early modern literary studies in three ways: first, it reclaims and nuances the literary and political sophistication of Caroline literature; second, it contests the narrative that casts the Elizabethan era as perennially opposed to the decadence of the Stuarts, instead showing how Caroline Elizabethanism sanctioned a proto-royalist literary and political culture and ideology that extended well beyond the court; and third, it reveals how Caroline writers and publishers began the process of literary canon formation as a way to negotiate what it meant to be English, linking nationalism with England’s literary heritage in debates that continue to resonate today.