Double Dutch: Approximate Identities in Early Modern English Culture.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the workings of resemblance, similitude, approximation, and interchangeability between the English and the Dutch in early modern English cultural performances. It argues that an analytical double vision was engendered by both real (geographic, religious, commercial, and cultural) and imagined proximities between the English and the Dutch, and traces how notions of English and Dutch ethnic and national identity were shaped by this double vision: one that held cultural similitude and difference together within its scope.

Chapter one traces how English and Dutch identities were “jumbled” in London city comedies by means of puns and wordplay that emphasize the fluidity of signifiers of ethnic difference: including language, diet, clothing, and religious belief. Anglo-Dutch ethnic approximation is thematized in plays such as, John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl, Thomas Middleton’s The Family of Love and No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s. Chapter two argues that early-seventeenth-century histories of the English language emphasized the relatedness of English and Netherlandish linguistic and racial history, while representations of English and Dutch speech on stage revealed the phonetic resemblances between English and Dutch. Exploring the period’s drama, historiography, printed playbooks, Anglo-Dutch dictionaries, and humanist tracts on the worth of Europe’s vernacular languages, this chapter demonstrates the various modes of cultural production involved in rendering the English and the Dutch close kin. Chapter three considers how, in civic pageantry, London’s Dutch community mobilized the site of The Royal Exchange (London’s commercial center and an architectural copy of Antwerp’s Burse), to position themselves as enfranchised members of the London community. Chapter four uncovers Dutch and English epistolary correspondence and English-authored travel accounts to reveal that, in the early years of Anglo-Dutch colonial endeavors, a crisis of ethnic and national identity erupted. In ceremonies of distinction performed on the East Indies’ Spice Islands and in theaters after the Restoration, English attempts to make clear their ethnic, national, and colonial difference from the Dutch resulted in exposing instead the proximity of Anglo-Dutch identity.