Abstract
[Excerpt] Before she died in 1603, England’s Elizabeth I requested that no political messages be left on her tomb. Her request for a tomb that gave little access to her personal and political stances likely contributed to an unintended consequence: those who lived in her wake were free to interpret and reinterpret her intentions. She became a symbol of whatever was needed of her, whether she would have agreed with that use or not. Many scholars have written about nostalgia in the Jacobean era (1603–1625) for Elizabeth I, yet Yuichi Tsukada’s first book, Shakespeare and the Politics of Nostalgia,insightfully adds to the conversation by examining the nostalgia for Elizabeth I in the first decade of her successor James I’s reign through the lens of Shakespeare’s plays.