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, The Legacy of Boadicea:

• 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.