On November 4, 1576, Spanish troops violently attacked the city of Antwerp in an event that quickly became known, at least for propagandists of the Dutch Revolt, as the “Spanish Fury”. Stationed in the Low Countries to stem the spread of Protestantism and stamp out revolt against Spanish rule, the soldiers’ pay was delayed by bankruptcy in Spain, and they were determined to recoup their losses from the riches of the city and its citizens. In three days, thousands were killed, and hundreds of homes were burnt to the ground. Because of these events and the Spanish (re)conquest of the city in 1585, the population of Antwerp, a bustling city that in the middle of the 16^th-century had contained 100,000 people, declined in 1590 to slightly less than 50,000 people.

Marjorie Rubright’s wonderful new book Doppelgänger Dilemmas: Anglo-Dutch Relations in Early Modern English Literature and Culture picks up this narrative in England with the settlement of a small subset of these refugees in London. The influx of people from the southern Netherlands, who were simultaneously foreign and familiar, prompted contemporaries to think more about what constituted Englishness in the later 16^th-century. The “Dutch” of the title, then, is a capacious term, meant to include people from the seventeen provinces that made up the Low Countries under Habsburg rule before the onset of the Dutch Revolt in 1568, an event which ultimately divided these provinces from one another. When Rubright’s narrative moves from the later 16^th-century into the first decades of the 17^th-century, and finally to the 1670s, her focus shifts from these refugees of the southern Netherlands to the people of the northern Netherlands in the nascent Dutch Republic.

If recent historiography has focused on the ways that the English constructed their identity through declaring their dissimilarity from the distant people of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, Rubright offers the original suggestion that we must be equally sensitive to the ways that English identity was constituted through an encounter with the much more geographically and culturally proximate people of the Low Countries. She also compellingly shows that the construction of identity occurred not only in discourses about differences but also in discourses about similarity and especially in the anxiety that emerged from the perception that the English and Dutch might be so similar as to be interchangeable. As Rubright explains, “imagining and representing London involved imagining and representing the Low Countries” (3). English people—and the culture they produced—were constantly negotiating their understandings of themselves as like the Dutch and their need to ensure that their identities remained distinct and independent from the Dutch.

Casting a wide net in her search for sources, Rubright looks at plays, linguistic debates, dictionaries, typescript, architecture, and descriptions of triumphal processions and argues that these sources show a great deal of conflation of English and Dutch culture, territory, and language, as well as many efforts to create or represent differences, not all of which were successful. In chapter one, Rubright intervenes in debates about London comedies. Rather than seeing the portrayals of English characters and their foreign counterparts as a way to work out London’s diversity in the period by creating safe stereotypes that served to reassure viewers that English people and foreigners could be easily identified, Rubright suggests that Dutch characters instead are meant to demonstrate that it was, in fact, difficult to distinguish foreigners from Englishmen and women. It is minor differences, then, such as the preference for ordinary butter or salt butter, that constitute Englishness and Dutchness respectively and that guarantee English distinctiveness from the Dutch.

Chapters two and three focus on the “Teutonic Thesis” in scholarly debate and the wider culture. In the early 17^th-century, scholars began to argue that English was not a distinct language, but rather was part of a larger family of Germanic languages. This narrative positioned the Dutch language as ideal and the English language as gaining some reflected glory from its association with Dutch. In the usage of the Dutch language in English plays, which is the focus of chapter three, Rubright argues that we see English playwrights putting words into the mouths of the Dutch characters that English audiences would understand. These word choices served to promote the “Teutonic Thesis” among ordinary people and suggested, again, the kinship of English people and Dutch people.

In chapter four, the focus shifts to printers and the typescripts used in plays and dictionaries for English and Dutch. These scripts suggest an effort to distinguish the two languages through italics or black letter, but also a conflation of the two languages as dictionaries consistently demonstrated the proximity of English and Dutch by placing the two languages next to one another and by emphasizing their joint distance from Romance languages. Chapters five and six turn to Anglo-Dutch competition, but again, the English are defined by their relationship to the Dutch. Chapter five investigates the reactions to the construction of London’s Royal Exchange in 1568. Built by the Englishmen Thomas Gresham as an exact replica of Antwerp’s exchange, the building expressed London’s aspiration to be a financial centre like Antwerp, while simultaneously suggesting that London would differentiate itself from Antwerp by outstripping it. Finally, in chapter six, the narrative moves to the East Indies, where the English simultaneously expressed their connection to the Dutch through alliance and friendship, while also trying to differentiate themselves from the Dutch by teaching local populations that the English and Dutch were two different groups and by demarcating their own interest in the commerce of the East Indies as reasonable, while Dutch activities are presented as rapacious.

Doppelgänger Dilemmas offers a complicated, rich exploration of English attitudes to the Dutch, and it suggests that if we want to understand Anglo-Dutch interactions on the ground, then we ought to look at “relations”—perceived proximity and distance—between the two groups. This book, however, begs questions about the period between 1630 and 1670 as well as about the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. Rubright’s sources do not cover the period of the first Anglo-Dutch War (1652-54) or the second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-67), nor do they cover the arrival in England of a Dutch prince, William III of Orange, with a Dutch army at his back in 1688. In these moments of heightened actual Anglo-Dutch proximity, one wonders how English representations of the Dutch changed, or if they did. These questions become even more pressing if we consider cultural anthropology, which suggests that the outbreak of violence between two similar groups often occurs because of the perception that their differences have collapsed. If so, could the outbreak of war be interpreted as a signal that England and the Dutch Republic had become uncomfortably similar? Such an interpretation might help to upset a historiography which has long supposed that England was a colonizing power, while the Dutch Republic was a commercial one.

This book will be of interest to anyone who studies Anglo-Dutch interactions in the 16^th-and 17^th-centuries, but its larger argument about ethnicity creation being tied to similarity and the elaboration of small differences that arose out of a fear of interchangeability should be of interest to all who study intercultural encounters and ethnicity formation, fields which, as Rubright points out, have been dominated by concepts of othering and difference.