Poland in the Cultural Imaginary of Early Modern England

Abstract

This essay aims to restore an awareness of the position Poland occupied in the British cultural imaginary during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Drawing on sources like Laurentius Grimalius Goslicius’s De Optimo Senatore (1568), otherwise known in English translation as The Counsellor (1598, 1607), and the anonymous manuscript, “A Relation of the State of Polonia … Anno 1598,” the essay argues that Poland was notorious for three reasons: its elective monarchy, its policy of religious toleration, and its federated structure. This essay attempts to move discussion of Poland in Shakespearean and Renaissance literary studies beyond Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600) and Calderón de la Barca’s Life is a Dream (1635), as well as to ground current debates about sovereignty, citizenship, and political theology during early modernity in Poland’s reputation for constitutional innovation.

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