Never a Merry World: the Rhetoric of Nostalgia in Elizabethan England
‘We shall never have a mery world til the old king be dead’, declares Sir John Oldcastle in The famous victories of Henry the fifth (Famous victories, 1598, sig.Cv).1 Responding to Prince Henry’s own assertion that ‘if the old king my father were dead, we would be all kings’, Oldcastle’s remarks provide a useful point of departure for this essay on Elizabethan nostalgia, Reformation rhetoric, and Shakespeare’s The First Part of the Contention (Cr).2 Falstaff’s archetype suggests that the prince’s rule is predicated not on the example or idea of the past; rather, he lampoons the present by imagining it as past and envisions a future defined by its disconnection from that past. That future-oriented ‘mery world’, when read together with Katherine Eggert’s assertion that nostalgia in Shakespeare’s Henry V performs anxieties about female rule and the succession, suggests that Elizabethan playwrights (and their audiences) eagerly anticipated a Jacobean future, a future cut off from the tumultuous Tudor past (Eggert, 1994, p. 524). That reading intimates superficially what I will establish below: on the Elizabethan stage, nostalgia functioned as a potent, destabilizing political discourse.