The Legacy of Boadicea
explores the construction of personal and national identities in early modern England. It highlights the problems and anxieties of national identity in a nation with no native classical past.
Written in an accessible style,
:
* offers powerful new readings of the ancient British past in Shakespeare's
King Lear
and
Cymbeline
* persuasively illuminates a 'Boadicean' heritage in royal iconography, drama, and the social symptoms of religious dissent
* articulates parallels between the eventual domestication of Britain's warrior queen in Restoration drama, and the social, political and legal decline in the status of women.