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.