Shakespeare and National Identity: A Dictionary 9781472534347, 9781474296113, 9781472525833

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgements
Series Editor’s Preface
Abbreviations
List of Headwords
Introduction: Imagining Community
Editorial note
Notes
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Bibliography
Index of Shakespeare’s Works
Index

Citation preview

Shakespeare and National Identity

i

ARDEN SHAKESPEARE DICTIONARY SERIES SERIES EDITOR Sandra Clark (Birkbeck College, University of London) Class and Society in Shakespeare Paul Innes Military Language in Shakespeare Charles Edelman Shakespeare’s Books Stuart Gillespie Shakespeare’s Demonology Marion Gibson Shakespeare’s Insults Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin Shakespeare and the Language of Food Joan Fitzpatrick Shakespeare’s Legal Language B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol Shakespeare’s Medical Language Sujata Iyengar Shakespeare’s Musical Language Christopher R. Wilson Shakespeare and National Identity Christopher Ivic Shakespeare’s Non-Standard English N. F. Blake Shakespeare’s Political and Economic Language Vivian Thomas Shakespeare’s Theatre Hugh Macrae Richmond Shakespeare and Visual Culture Armelle Sabatier Women in Shakespeare Alison Findlay FORTHCOMING : Shakespeare and Animals Karen Raber Shakespeare and Domestic Life Sandra Clark Shakespeare and London Sarah Dustagheer

ii

Shakespeare and National Identity A Dictionary

CHRISTOPHER IVIC

Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

iii

Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as Arden Shakespeare 50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Christopher Ivic, 2017 Christopher Ivic has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN :

HB : ePDF : ePub:

978-1-4725-3434-7 978-1-4725-2583-3 978-1-4725-3463-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Arden Shakespeare Dictionaries Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

iv

To my children, Alexander, Anna, Marika and Sophia, transnationals

v

vi

Contents

List of Figures

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Series Editor’s Preface

x

Abbreviations

xi

List of Headwords Introduction: Imagining Community A–Z

xiii 1 11

Bibliography

255

Index of Shakespeare’s Works

267

Index

271

vii

Figures

1 John Speed, ‘The Kingdome of Great Britaine and Ireland’, from The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London 1611–12). By permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Map Res 74, betw. pp. 1–2. 2 John Speed, Title Page, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London 1611–12). By permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Map Res 74, title page. 3 John Speed, ‘The Invasions of England and Ireland with all their Civill Warrs Since the Conqvest’ (London c. 1601). By permission of Cambridge University Library. 4 John Speed, ‘The Kingdome of England’, from The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London 1611–12). By permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Map Res 74, betw. pp. 6–7. 5 John Speed, ‘The Kingdome of Irland’, from The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London 1611–12). By permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Map Res 74, betw. pp. 137–8. 6 John Speed, ‘The Kingdome of Scotland’, from The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London 1611–12). By permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Map Res 74, betw. pp. 131–2. 7 John Speed, ‘Wales’, from The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London 1611–12). By permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Map Res 74, betw. pp. 99–100.

viii

37

40

59

88

118

199

236

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my home university, Bath Spa University, for supporting this project in various ways. Two of my colleagues, Tracey Hill and Ian Gadd, have shared their knowledge of all things early modern with me. It has been a pleasure co-teaching and discussing Shakespeare with Ian. Grant Williams kindly read and commented on select entries. Special thanks are due to Sandra Clark, series editor, who provided encouragement and a wealth of information. Extra special thanks are due to my wife, Amanda, for invaluable support throughout this project.

ix

Series Editor’s Preface

The Arden Shakespeare Dictionaries aim to provide the student of Shakespeare with a series of authoritative guides to the principal subject areas covered by the plays and poems. They are produced by scholars who are experts both on Shakespeare and on the topic of the individual dictionary, based on the most recent scholarship, succinctly written and accessibly presented. They offer readers a self-contained body of information on the topic under discussion, its occurrence and significance in Shakespeare’s works, and its contemporary meanings. The topics are all vital ones for understanding the plays and poems; they have been selected for their importance in illuminating aspects of Shakespeare’s writings where an informed understanding of the range of Shakespeare’s usage, and of the contemporary literary, historical and cultural issues involved, will add to the reader’s appreciation of his work. Because of the diversity of the topics covered in the series, individual dictionaries may vary in emphasis and approach, but the aim and basic format of the entries remain the same from volume to volume. Sandra Clark Birkbeck College University of London

x

Abbreviations

Works by and partly by Shakespeare AC AW AYL CE Cor Cym Ham 1H4 2H4 H5 1H6 2H6 3H6 H8 JC KJ KL LC LLL Luc MA Mac MM MND MV MW Oth Per PP PT R2 R3 RJ Son STM

Antony and Cleopatra All’s Well That Ends Well As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Coriolanus Cymbeline Hamlet King Henry IV, Part 1 King Henry IV, Part 2 King Henry V King Henry VI, Part 1 King Henry VI, Part 2 King Henry VI, Part 3 King Henry VIII Julius Caesar King John King Lear A Lover’s Complaint Love’s Labour’s Lost Lucrece Much Ado About Nothing Macbeth Measure for Measure A Midsummer Night’s Dream The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor Othello Pericles The Passionate Pilgrim The Phoenix and Turtle King Richard II King Richard III Romeo and Juliet Sonnets Sir Thomas More xi

Abbreviations

TC Tem TGV Tim Tit TN TNK TS VA WT

Troilus and Cressida The Tempest The Two Gentlemen of Verona Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Twelfth Night The Two Noble Kinsmen The Taming of the Shrew Venus and Adonis The Winter’s Tale

Others Chor. ed. Epil. F OED Pro. Q sig. TLN vol.

xii

Chorus editor(s) Epilogue Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies, The First Folio (1623) Oxford English Dictionary Online (www.oed.com) Prologue Quarto signature through line numbering in The First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. Charlton Hinman, Norton Facsimile (1968) volume

List of Headwords

Aeneas Afric, Africa, African Agincourt Albion Aleppo alien Amazon America see Indies Anthropophagi see cannibalism Antipodes Arabia Arthur Athens banish, banishment barbarian, barbarous Barbary Barnet bastard Belgia see Low Countries black blackamoor see Moor blood borders see also marches, pale Bosworth Bretagne Britain see also Britons, island Britons brother, brothers, brotherhood brutish Cambria see Wales cannibalism chronicles Cimmerian citizen see also people

civil, civility civil war see also Wars of the Roses clime common, commons, commoner, commoners, commonalty commonwealth, commonweal, weal complexion conquest country see also countryman, countrymen countryman, countrymen crown Cyprus degeneration see also Ireland Denmark descent dominion Dover Dutch see Low Countries Egypt empire England English see England Ethiop exile see banish, banishment fair filicide, fratricide, patricide Flanders see Low Countries foreign forgetting see also lethargy, Lethe, oblivion France fratricide see filicide French see France xiii

List of Headwords

Gallia see France galloglass see also kern Germany Goth Greece Greek see Greece Gypsy

maps marches see also borders Mauritania memory Milford Haven monarchy Moor

Harfleur Holland see Low Countries hue

nation native negro neighbour Netherlands see Low Countries New World Nine Years’ War Normans

impregnable incivil, incivility, uncivil India, Indian, Indies infection inland Ireland Irish see Ireland island, isle islander Italy see also Rome Jew Jewry kern see also galloglass kind kingdom kingmaker Lacedaemon see Sparta land league lethargy see also forgetting, Lethe, oblivion Lethe see also forgetting, lethargy, oblivion London Lord Mayor Low Countries xiv

oblivion see also forgetting, lethargy, Lethe Ottomite pagan pale see also borders Parliament patricide see filicide people see also citizen plebeian see citizen pressed see Towton Protector public race realm Reformation Regent see Protector republicanism Rome see also Italy Romans see Rome royal sacrifice Saint George

List of Headwords

Saracens see Pagan savage, savagery scar see wound sceptre see crown Scotland Scottish see Scotland Scythia, Scythian Shrewsbury soil Spain Sparta state stock stranger subject succession Tartars see also Gypsy, Scythia tawny territory Tewkesbury throne see crown Towton tribe

Troy Turk uncrown unnatural unpeople Venice Volsce, Volscian Wakefield Wales war see also civil war, Nine Years’ War, Wars of the Roses Wars of the Roses see also civil war welfare Welsh see Wales white wild wilderness wound yoke

xv

xvi

Introduction: Imagining Community

‘An Englishman?’ (H5 4.7.121) Unlike fellow contemporary playwrights Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare did not participate in the writing of the popular genre of the city comedy. Incredibly, ‘none of Shakespeare’s plays is set in modern London’.1 Simply put, Shakespeare, born in Stratford, a member of an acting but not a livery company, was no Londoner in the manner of his fellow citizen-of-London playwrights.2 More so than Jonson and Middleton, however, Shakespeare placed the nation – its history, its wars, its rulers, its people – rather than the city centre stage in his dramatic works, imagining a national community and a sense of national identity to rival the civic communities and identities enacted by his dramatic rivals.3 To my knowledge, no extant signature survives that, John Milton-like, reads ‘William Shakespeare, Englishman’.4 But Shakespeare’s long list of English history plays – two tetralogies, plus – marks a signal contribution to the writing of England, indeed of a British–Irish geopolitical entity, in the early modern period. Although Shakespeare did not invent the genre of the history play, he left his mark on that genre and on the nation(s) that his histories bring to the stage more so than any other Elizabethan or Jacobean playwright. Who precisely do Shakespeare’s English histories bring to the stage? That is, who is representative of and who speaks for the nation? The traditional and conservative response, which dominated Shakespeare criticism for much of the mid twentieth century, read the histories as ideologically in line with a political agenda: namely, the Tudor myth that King Henry VII fostered after his defeat of King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 and which print culture disseminated in the form of sixteenth-century chronicle histories.5 Plays such as King Richard III, the story goes, breathed dramatic life into the Tudor propaganda found in the voluminous chronicles written in support of the fledgling Tudor dynasty. In recent years, literary historians have come to view Shakespeare’s histories as less monologic, more dialogic, resulting in a fuller understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare’s staging of not only royalty and nobility but also common men and women: that is, a national community.6 More than any other recent critical work on national identity in early modern England, Richard Helgerson’s Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England performed significant spadework for a field of study that continues to be explored. Amongst the texts covered so astutely by Helgerson are Shakespeare’s history plays. Ironically, Helgerson uncovered little in the way of ‘the Elizabethan writing of England’ in Shakespeare’s histories. ‘In Shakespeare’s English history plays’, Helgerson writes, ‘England seems often to be identified exclusively with its kings and nobles.’ According to 1

Shakespeare and National Identity

Helgerson, ‘Shakespeare’s history plays are concerned above all with the consolidation and maintenance of royal power.’ Helgerson arrives at this conclusion, on the one hand, by a close and (new) historicized reading of Shakespeare’s history plays. He also carefully compares and contrast Shakespeare’s histories with other contemporary ‘[n]ational history plays from the Henslowe companies’, which, he argues, write the nation in a much more inclusive fashion: ‘Kings and aristocratic rivals are what the audiences at Shakespeare’s history plays see most. In the work of Munday, Chettle, Heywood, Dekker, and their collaborators, common people and their upperclass champions occupy the central place.’7 Helgerson’s monumental work has had a profound and lasting impact on a generation of scholars, but not everyone is convinced that Shakespeare was as committed to staging exclusion as Helgerson suggests. The general consensus is that Helgerson’s reading of Shakespeare’s history plays is too limited and too limiting.8 Helgerson’s examination of Shakespeare’s English histories could be labelled Foliocentric in the sense that his focus on history plays conforms to F’s tripartite generic division: comedies, histories, tragedies. In other words, Helgerson restricts his analysis of ‘Shakespeare’s English histories’ to King Henry VI, Part 2, with brief glances at King Henry IV, Part 1, King Henry IV, Part 2 and King Henry V. What about other plays that reflect on the national past? King Lear and Cymbeline come to mind (why not Macbeth?). These Jacobean plays, some may argue, are tragedies, not histories: that is, different kinds of plays – in the process conveniently obscuring the two King Richard plays. Moreover, they are British, ancient British at that (and Scottish). Foliocentricism and Anglocentrism go hand in hand. Perhaps the central exclusion in Helgerson’s work is its neglect of the wider archipelagic context reflected in Shakespeare’s Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, a context upon which the plays reflect deeply. Helgerson’s version of Shakespeare’s histories affords little or no attention to the place of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, odd given not only the political context – the political incorporation of Wales into the Kingdom of England, the presence of the Kingdom of Ireland in the royal title (Queen Elizabeth I’s and King James I’s) as well as James VI and I’s composite monarchy – but also the dramatic context – references to Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the staging of Irish, Scottish and Welsh characters (and the Welsh language), not to mention scenes, indeed an entire play, staged within neighbouring non-English sites. The formation of England’s national identity in the early modern period, it cannot be underestimated, owed much to the ways in which England defined itself against its Celtic neighbours just as it sought to incorporate, at times violently, those neighbouring nations into an English polity. Moreover, if Shakespeare participated in the Elizabethan writing of England, then he also played a crucial role in the Jacobean writing of Britain. The accession of the Scottish King James VI to the throne of England in 1603 resulted in English subjects reimaging their place within a dual monarchy that accommodated three kingdoms and four nations.9 John Kerrigan has described the seventeenth century as ‘one of the most important periods of literary production and, connectedly, nation and state formation’.10 If we limit Shakespeare’s contribution to discourse on the nation to his Elizabethan history plays, then we risk painting a partial picture of the signal 2

Introduction

contribution that all of his plays – including his romances or late plays – in their own way made to the production of national identities, the definition of national space, the dissemination of cultural memory and, crucially, the construction of a sense of belonging and connectedness. ‘this great land’ (Cym 2.1.64) John of Gaunt’s famous ‘this scept’red isle’ speech, delivered in Act 2, Scene 1 of King Richard II, is synonymous with Shakespeare and with England; indeed, it has become a centrepiece of the business of Shakespeare’s England.11 What makes Gaunt’s speech so remarkable is the way in which it imagines England as a community: Gaunt figures England as a cultural artefact and thereby constructs, invents the nation. My language here is, of course, indebted to Benedict Anderson’s brilliant reflections on nationalism. For Anderson, the rise of nationalism emerged at ‘the end of the eighteenth century’, when religious modes of thought began to wane. Early modernists have at once drawn upon and challenged Anderson’s ideas; the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are now regarded as pivotal to the construction and invention of English national identity. Anderson’s interest in ‘why these particular cultural artefacts have aroused such deep attachments’ could easily bring us back to Gaunt’s ‘scept’red isle’ speech, especially its affective and emotive power.12 Of course, Gaunt’s famous speech does not use the word ‘nation’; instead, this diectically loaded passage points to this throne, this isle, this fortress, this realm, this England, this land. Still, an emergent sense of nationhood, ‘this England’ (2.1.50), can be detected within Gaunt’s residually monarchical mapping of ‘That England’ (2.1.65). Compare Gaunt’s deeply nostalgic yet powerfully evocative speech with a significantly less genuine speech, keeping in mind Anderson’s plea that ‘[c]ommunities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’.13 The passage comes from King Richard III, and the context is a scene staged for the Lord Mayor and London’s citizens in which the Duke of Buckingham is trying to ‘convince’ Richard to accept the crown: Know then, it is your fault that you resign The supreme seat, the throne majestical, The sceptred office of your ancestors, Your state of fortune, and your due of birth, The lineal glory of your royal House, To the corruption of a blemish’d stock; Whiles in the mildness of your sleepy thoughts – Which here we waken to our country’s good – The noble isle doth want her proper limbs; Her face defac’d with scars of infamy, Her royal stock graft with ignoble plants, And almost shoulder’d in the swallowing gulf 3

Shakespeare and National Identity

Of dark forgetfulness and deep oblivion; Which to recure, we heartily solicit Your gracious self to take on you the charge And kingly government of this your land, Not as Protector, steward, substitute, Or lowly factor for another’s gain, But as successively from blood to blood, Your right of birth, your empery, your own. For this, consorted with the citizens – Your very worshipful and loving friends, And by their vehement instigation – In this just cause come I to move your grace. (R3 3.7.116–39) This passage foregrounds some of the key words and ideas examined in this dictionary, and a brief examination of it affords insight into the complexities and contradictions of national identity in Shakespeare’s plays. Buckingham’s reference to or invention of ‘a blemish’d stock’ reveals a peculiarly early modern and aristocratic notion of descent – ‘royal stock’ – grounded in an exclusionary rhetoric of purity. ‘The lineal glory’ of Richard’s ‘royal House’ is limited and exclusive. As these lines were being delivered on an Elizabethan stage, however, theories about national descent were being debated and invented (consider the rise of Saxonism in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries). Moreover, the concept of race took on additional meanings as the English came into greater contact with nonEnglish, non-Christian, non-white men and women. The fashioning of national genealogies surfaces later in the play when King Richard others his rival, the Earl of Richmond, by proclaiming Richmond’s foreign roots and, therefore, ignoble descent, although he does so less in terms of Richmond’s ‘House’ than his ethnicity or national identity (Welsh, British). The historical King Henry VII and subsequent Tudors would exploit their Welshness/Britishness, as does King Henry V in Shakespeare’s play of that name: a supranational King Henry is mistaken for Cornish – ‘art thou of Cornish crew?’ (4.1.51) – proclaims his Welshness – ‘No, I am a Welshman’ (52) – and, in F, is welcomed by the French queen as ‘brother Ireland’.14 Rather than Gaunt’s ‘scept’red isle’, Buckingham offers the more monarchic ‘sceptred office’, apt given Richard’s bloodthirsty desire for the crown. The ‘noble isle’ to which Buckingham refers included (both at the historical moment covered in the play and at the time the play was performed) the separate kingdom of Scotland and (at the time the play was performed) a Wales politically incorporated into the Kingdom of England. The ‘scars of infamy’ that have ‘defac’d’ the ‘isle’ refers to the uncivil wars in which King Richard himself has played a major part, and which Tudor subjects returned to again and again (see Figure 3) in order to reimagine the past and to effect national reconciliation: a rewriting of the past that was an act of ‘dark forgetfulness and deep oblivion’, or what Anderson terms ‘the 4

Introduction

amnesias of nationalism’.15 Buckingham’s ‘your land’ assigns the nation to Richard just as his reference to ‘Protector’ calls attention to the fact that the bloody Richard is anything but; it was, of course, precisely the lack of care for the land that led to England’s overthrow of the monarch in favour of a Protector in the mid seventeenth century. Finally, ‘consorted with the citizens’ – ‘Your very worshipful and loving friends’, not subjects – gestures toward a national community, especially if we recall Patrick Collinson’s suggestion that ‘citizens were concealed within subjects’.16 In Act 2, Scene 3 of King Richard III, three of London’s citizens step forward into London’s public sphere, however briefly, to comment critically and emotionally on the ‘land’ (11, 19, 30), ‘government’ (12) and ‘the state’ (16, 18), and however much this later passage marks a distinct break from the earlier scene with the three Citizens, it also glances back to it. Buckingham’s arrogant and awesome ‘your empery’ means not only ‘supreme or absolute power’ but also ‘legitimate government’ (OED). Buckingham’s ‘kingly government’ has, paradoxically, a republican ring to it, especially if the adjective is read as subjected to rather than subjecting the noun. Far from a product of and productive of the Tudor myth, the final play of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy supplies a sustained examination of the role between monarchs, governments, citizens and subjects in carving out the national space, a space that in this play encompasses Haverfordwest, Milford Haven, Ludlow, Exeter, London and Bosworth (not to mention memory of Ireland and Scotland), as well as the culturally and socially heterogeneous people who inhabit this space. ‘we band of brothers’ (H5 4.3.60) One of the principles underpinning this dictionary is that the variety of terms included here were not invented in this period but instead, like the concept of national identity itself, were conditioned by older ideas and meanings and infused with new ones: in short, these terms bear witness to contestation, debate, redefinition and reimagining. The aim, therefore, is to attend to dominant ideas as well as residual and emergent ones, especially in relation to political language, for ‘nation-ness is virtually inseparable from political consciousness’.17 Meanings are rarely predictable and stable; this is particularly true of early modern denotations associated with the ideologically charged concept of national identity. It is not easy, for example, to explain why Shakespeare uses kingdom or country or nation or realm or state or land when referring to any or all of these entities. Nor should we be surprised by this terminological instability given, to quote Carole Levin and John Watkins, ‘the plasticity and permeability of the English nation’.18 In order to reach a better intellectual appreciation and historical understanding of such terms, however, context is crucial – not just the larger socio-historical context but also the context of the speech act: who speaks, to whom do they speak, about whom, when, where, why, etc. Shakespeare’s language, as Patricia Parker observes, ‘involves a network whose linkages expose (even as the plays themselves may appear simply to iterate or rehearse) the orthodoxies and ideologies of the texts they evoke’.19 Such linkages are to be found throughout this dictionary. 5

Shakespeare and National Identity

Consider, for instance, the following passage spoken by the Earl of Salisbury at the opening of King Henry VI, Part 2, a play that includes a Protector, a young and weak king, a Parliament scene, a reference to Julius Caesar, civil war, rebellion, men and women, exile, references to England, Ireland, Britain and Albion – a play moreover whose title differs significantly between its Q and F versions:20 Pride went before; Ambition follows him. While these do labour for their own preferment, Behoves it us to labour for the realm. I never saw but Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, Did bear him like a noble gentleman. Oft have I seen the haughty Cardinal, More like a soldier than a man o’th’ church, As stout and proud as he were lord of all, Swear like a ruffian, and demean himself Unlike the ruler of a commonweal. – Warwick, my son, the comfort of my age, Thy deeds, thy plainness and thy housekeeping Hath won thee greatest favour of the commons, Excepting none but good Duke Humphrey. – And, brother York, thy acts in Ireland In bringing them to civil discipline; Thy late exploits done in the heart of France When thou wert regent for our sovereign, Have made thee feared and honoured of the people. – Join we together for the public good, In what we can to bridle and suppress The pride of Suffolk and the Cardinal, With Somerset’s and Buckingham’s ambition; And, as we may, cherish Duke Humphrey’s deeds, While they do tend the profit of the land. (1.1.178–202) The ‘realm’, nobility, social status, rule, the ‘commonweal’, ‘the commons’, fraternity, Ireland, civility, France, regency, sovereignty, togetherness, ‘the people’, ‘the public good’, ‘the land’ – these terms are open not only to scholarly investigation but also to scholarly debate. Shakespeare revisits and rewrites these terms throughout his lengthy career as a dramatist and a poet, employing them in a variety of genres and a variety of contexts: ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient Egypt, ancient Britain, medieval England, medieval France, medieval Scotland and, even, to cite F’s account of The Tempest’s setting, ‘an vn-inhabited Island’ (TLN 2320). And he did so as a subject to two monarchs, one who claimed Welsh descent, the other (who could also claim Welsh descent) born and bred in Scotland to a mother who was temporarily Queen of France. 6

Introduction

Editorial note The following entries, excluding brief ones, are organized into three main sections, signalled by the letters A, B and C. Section A supplies a definition of the headword. Entries from the invaluable Oxford English Dictionary often appear in this section, for they serve to historicize the headword as well as to highlight varieties of meaning. References to other works in section A are minimal, although there are occasions when a quotation is incorporated to shed valuable light on the headword. Section B forms the bulk of the entry, for it works through select citations from Shakespeare’s works in which the headword appears. Section B aims to be full and comprehensive but not exhaustive. The quotations from Shakespeare’s plays and poems have been selected on the principle that they best represent the playwright’s use and understanding of the headword, including special nuances of meaning. Quotations from the play are accompanied by commentary that aims to provide critical reflection on the headword. This commentary combines close reading of material cited with relevant early modern primary sources, some of which Shakespeare may have read and drawn upon, some of which provides a sense of how the headword was being used by other contemporary writers. Section C functions as a bibliography, inviting further exploration of the headword as covered in journal articles, book chapters and monographs. The reader may be referred to sections of these publications or to entire works. Cross-referencing is facilitated by printing of a headword that appears in another entry in bold: this applies to the headword’s first appearance in that entry but not to quotations. Except where noted, quotations from Shakespeare are taken from The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, edited by Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan (reissued in 2011). There are instances when I draw upon material from the quarto versions of Shakespeare’s plays as well as material from the 1623 First Folio. When citing early modern works, I have not modernized spellings. Shakespeare’s contribution to Sir Thomas More appears in a few entries; there is one passing reference to King Edward III.

Notes 1

2

Ian Munro, ‘City’ in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, ed. by Bruce R. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 34–40, (p. 38). Shakespeare’s contribution to Sir Thomas More, however, constitutes an exception. Lawrence Manley’s superb Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) contains limited references to Shakespeare, probably because Shakespeare, unlike other early modern playwrights such as Jonson, Middleton and Munday, offers contemporary readers little by way of sustained insight into late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London. For a reappraisal of Shakespeare and London, see Hannah Crawforth, Sarah Dustagheer and Jennifer Young, eds, Shakespeare in London (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). For an exploration of such concepts as alien, citizen and foreign within the context of London, see John Michael Archer, Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Carole Levin and John

7

Shakespeare and National Identity

3

4 5

6

7 8

9

10 11

12 13 14

8

Watkins, Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). To be fair to ‘the Londoner Ben Jonson’, it should be added that his Elizabethan plays are less concerned with nationhood than his Jacobean works (especially his masques) and extratextual activities. As one critic notes, ‘when James VI became king of England, Jonson, already connected to Welsh literary circles, got interested in his own Scottish-borders ancestry, moved into Scottish households in London, went on a walking tour to Edinburgh, and wrote masques about Anglo-Scottish union and the place of Ireland and Wales in the Jacobean system’: John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 11. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens, eds, Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), p. 3. ‘The reversed sequence of Shakespeare’s histories’, writes Patricia Parker, ‘works against the very model and rhetoric of a definitive decline and fall – from unity to division, concord to discord – that characterizes Hall’s chronicle in particular, with its narrative of discordant decline from an original English unity after the conveyance of Richard’s throne and its apocalyptic regaining of harmony and union through the Tudor defeat of Richard III ’: Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 154. For a critique of traditional criticism on the English histories (E. M. W. Tillyard, Lily B. Campbell) and an insightful investigation of the polyphonic nature of Shakespeare’s staging of the past, see Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 195, 6, 234. See, for example, David J. Baker, Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 15–16; see also Christopher Ivic, ‘ “How to vse your Brothers Brotherly”: Civility, Incivility and Civil War in 3 Henry VI’, in Staged Transgression in Shakespeare’s England, ed. by Rory Loughnane and Edel Semple (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 239–51. Citing The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare, Christopher Wortham finds ‘a total of 460 references to England and related words such as English and Englishman; of these 435 occur in works written before 1603, and 25 afterwards. There are 64 references to Britain and related words such as Briton, 49 of which are after 1603’: Christopher Wortham, ‘Shakespeare, James I and the Matter of Britain’, English, 45 (1996), pp. 97–122, (p. 120). Kerrigan, p. 2. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan, eds, The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, rev. ed. (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011), 2.1.40. All further references to this edition are given parenthetically. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), p. 4. Anderson, p. 6. Charlton Hinman, ed., The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), TLN 2999. ‘For the English’, writes John Morrill, ‘the Welsh were as English as the Cornish were’: Morrill, ‘The British Problem, c. 1534–1707’, in The British Problem, c. 1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago, ed. by Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), pp. 1–38 (p. 6). Of course, the historical Henry V ‘had no Welsh ancestry whatsoever’: Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 127.

Introduction

15 Anderson, p. xv. 16 Patrick Collinson, De Republica Anglorum, or History with the Politics Put Back (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 24. 17 Anderson, p. 135. 18 Levin and Watkins, p. 7. 19 Parker, p. 13. 20 Q: The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: And the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the Tragicall end of the proud Cardinall of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of Iacke Cade: And the Duke of Yorkes first claime vnto the Crowne; F: The second Part of Henry the Sixt, with the death of the Good Duke HVMFREY..

9

10

A Aeneas (A) Son of Anchises and Aphrodite, Trojan prince, leader of the Dardanian army who fled the ashes of Troy. His eventual arrival in Italy led to the founding of Lavinium (Rome). Aeneas is the hero of Virgil’s epic Aeneid. (B) There are numerous allusions to Aeneas in Shakespeare (not to mention the character Aeneas in Troilus and Cressida). One of the most remarkable allusions occurs in Julius Caesar. In his attempt to persuade Brutus to join the conspirators against Julius Caesar, Cassius tells of a time when Caesar and he jumped into the River Tiber only for Cassius to come to the drowning Caesar’s rescue: But ere we could arrive the point proposed Caesar cried, ‘Help me, Cassius, or I sink!’ I, as Aeneas, our great ancestor, Did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder The old Anchises bear, so from the waves of Tiber Did I the tired Caesar. (1.2.110–15) Cassius’s account of his rescue of Caesar offers more than a simple retelling of a past event; Cassius’s simile-allusion is ideologically charged precisely because it draws upon Roman myths of nationhood not only to present Caesar as weak but also to legitimate the conspirators’ cause. Cassius’s tale is a prime example of how the past (real and imagined events) can serve cultural, political and ideological agendas. (C) See Chernaik (2011), James (1997) and Kahn (1997). Hadfield (2004b) describes Troilus and Cressida’s Aeneas as ‘a relatively colourless and insignificant figure’ (155), and, given the connections between Aeneas and his great-grandson and first king of Britain, Brutus, Hadfield reads the treatment of Aeneas as a sign of Shakespeare’s cynicism toward the ‘projected union of Britain’ (156). Afric, Africa, African (A) The African continent. Also of or relating to Africa. The rise of colonial and mercantile ventures (the slave trade) as well as the burgeoning of print material and maps on the subject of Africa led to an advancement of knowledge of the African continent in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In many ways, however, Africa remained ‘a wilderness of Plinian monstrosities’ (Neill 2000: 270), especially because the print material consisted of dubious travel narratives and fabulous 11

Afric, Africa, African

tales: ‘of the cannibals that each other eat, / The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders’ (Oth 1.3.144–6). (B) Of the three terms, ‘Afric’ occurs most in Shakespeare. Troilus and Cressida, for instance, contains a reference to the ‘Afric sun’ as ‘parch[ing]’ (1.3.371). Imogen, speaking of Cloten and her recently exiled husband, Leonatus Posthumus, invokes ‘Afric’ to mean a generic deserted place or region (not unlike Volumnia’s use of ‘Arabia’ in Coriolanus, see Arabia): Your son’s my father’s friend, he takes his part To draw upon an exile. O brave sir! I would they were in Afric both together, Myself by with a needle, that I might prick The goer-back. (Cym 1.2.96–100) There is a sense here that Africa is a blank, unmapped continent, devoid of civilization. In The Tempest – which, according to F, is set on ‘vn-inhabited Island’ (TLN 2320) in the Mediterranean Sea – Africa figures in the plot, for the play’s Italian nobles are returning from the wedding of Alonso’s daughter in Tunis: ‘Methinks our garments are now as fresh as when we put them on first in Africa, at the marriage of the King’s fair daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis’ (2.1.70–2). A few lines later in the play, we learn that Alonso has lost or loosed his daughter ‘to an African’ – somewhat reminiscent of Brabantio’s reaction to the news that his ‘fair’ daughter has married Othello the Moor: Sir, you may thank yourself for this great loss, That would not bless our Europe with your daughter But rather loose her to an African, Where she at least is banished from your eye, Who hath cause to wet the grief on’t. (2.1.124–8) Of interest here is the representation of Claribel as ‘fair’, which could mean white, as well as the reference to her unnamed husband as ‘an African’. Moreover, these lines put in place an ethnocentric opposition between ‘our Europe’ (these are, after all, Italian nobles) and a rather marginal and marginalized Africa, especially given the assumption that Claribel’s marriage to the ‘King of Tunis’ is figured as a form of banishment. Pistol’s ‘I speak of Africa and golden joys’ (2H4 5.3.100) draws upon a Renaissance commonplace that associates Africa with gold. (C) On African cultures/people and African trade, see Hall (1995). Bartels’s (2008) study of the Moor in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods includes chapters on Hakluyt’s Principle Nauigations (1599–1600) and John Pory’s English translation of Leo Africanus’s A geographical historie of Africa (1600). Hall notes that Pory’s translation of Africanus provided ‘an assessment of Africa’s potential for colonization’; 12

Albion

moreover, ‘it contributed to the developing sense of the unruly and diverse sexuality of Africans’ (29). Vaughan and Vaughan’s Arden edition of The Tempest includes an informative section on ‘Africa and Ireland’ (2011: 47–54). Agincourt Town in northern France (Azincourt) that was home to the famous victory of English forces over the French during the Hundred Years’ War. The battle, fought on 25 October 1415, is represented and remembered in King Henry V as both a miraculous and a memorable victory, one etched in English cultural memory, as evidenced in the play’s memorable re-enactment. In the wake of the English victory over the French forces, King Henry asks the French herald Montjoy what the name of the nearby castle is: ‘They call it Agincourt’ (4.7.88) he informs Henry, to which Henry responds ‘Then call we this the field of Agincourt, / Fought on the day of Crispin Crispian’ (89–90). The Catholic feast day of 25 October, then, is transformed into a day of national memory. Baldo (2012: 102–30) offers a fascinating reading of the fractured politics of cultural and national memory in H5. Albion (A) This term could refer to the island of Britain or to a specific nation within the island, usually Britain or England. Moreover, it could refer to an ancient Albion or a near contemporary one. The term is used infrequently in Shakespeare’s plays, but not insignificantly. (B) Kendrick includes some useful information on the name Albion: The British History had reported giants in this country before the arrival of Brutus; to account for their existence and also to explain the island’s alternative name Albion, chroniclers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries related that the daughters of Danaus, after being exiled for murdering their husbands, headed by the eldest, Albina, had arrived in this island, which was in consequence named Albion. (1950: 24) In his Albions England (1586), William Warner states that ‘our whole Iland [was] aunchiantly called Brutaine, but more anchiantly Albion’ (sig. a.iiir). George Abbot, in his A briefe description of the whole worlde (1599), uses Albion to refer to the island of Britain: ‘The most renowned Iland in the worlde is Albion, or Britannia; which hath heretofore contained in it many seuerall kingdomes; but especially in the time of the Saxons. It hath now in it the two kingdoms of England and Scotland’ (sig. H4r). Writing in 1603 on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth’s death (and King James’s accession), Anthony Nixon, on the other hand, uses Albion to signify England only: ‘This VirginQueene did rule faire Albion / Twise two & twentie yeares’ (sig. C1r). It would appear that Nixon uses Albion again to refer to England when he hails James’s arrival from Scotland: ‘Thrice welcome then vnto our English shore, / Thrice worthy Monarch of faire Albion’ (sig. C4v). In other words, Nixon cites James’s title as King of Albion/ England in contradistinction to his title of King of Scotland. Shakespeare’s use of ‘Albion’ is no less complicated. 13

Albion

The term is used on more than one occasion by a French character. In King Henry V, the French character Britain (whose name means Brittany), on the eve of the battle of Agincourt, exclaims Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards! Mort de ma vie, if they march along Unfought withal, but I will sell my dukedom To buy a slobbery and a dirty farm In that nook-shotten isle of Albion. (3.5.10–14) Given Britain’s use of ‘isle’, Albion here appears to refer to the island of Britain. When the Fool (in F) concludes his prophecy with ‘Then shall the realm of Albion / Come to great confusion’ (KL 3.2.90–1), we can assume, given that King Lear is (or was) King of Britain, ‘the realm of Albion’ signifies the land covered by Lear’s (recently relinquished) power. The Arden editor of KL supplies the following gloss on ‘Albion’: ‘ancient name for Britain, thought by the Romans to be derived from albus meaning white, and to refer to the white cliffs of Dover. According to Harrison (Holinshed, 1.6), Albion was a son of Neptune who conquered Britain and changed its name to his own’ (Foakes 1997: 269). In King Henry VI, Part 2, Queen Margaret’s use of this term is less precise, more flexible: Is this the fashions in the court of England? Is this the government of Britain’s isle? And this the royalty of Albion’s king? (1.3.44–6) It is difficult to account for Margaret’s terminological imprecision, although it could be argued that she uses Albion in reference to (and, in the process, highlighting the decline of) the sacred antiquity of monarchic rule in England/Britain’s isle. Addressing the French King in King Henry VI, Part 3, Warwick says From worthy Edward, King of Albion, My lord and sovereign, and thy vowed friend, I come, in kindness and unfeigned love, First, to do greetings to thy royal person, And then to crave a league of amity, And lastly to confirm that amity With a nuptial knot, if thou vouchsafe to grant That virtuous Lady Bona, thy fair sister, To England’s King in lawful marriage. (3.3.49–57) Warwick slips from describing Edward as ‘King of Albion’ to ‘England’s king’, not ‘Albion’s’. It would appear that in this passage ‘Albion’ signifies England as opposed to 14

alien

Britain. Commenting on ‘the England Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented’, Helgerson notes that ‘[n]ot even its name remained fixed’ (1992: 8). Aleppo A city in Syria, renowned for its strategic position as a centre of trade, especially trade between Europe and the East (something of a Middle Eastern Venice). Aleppo was under Ottoman control at the time that Shakespeare was writing plays. Two references to Aleppo appear in Shakespeare’s plays. In Macbeth, one of the witches refers elliptically to ‘Aleppo’ (1.3.7). Othello invokes Aleppo in his final speech: Set you down this, And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbanned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog And smote him – thus! (5.2.351–6) Aleppo’s status as a trading city that brings together Western and Eastern merchants makes it an apt setting for Othello’s narrative, for in these lines Othello as narrator and as actor is the loyal servant of the Venetian city-state and slayer of Turks, but as the recipient of his own violence he also performs the part of the Turk in this re-enactment of the past. ‘It seems almost impossible’, writes Thompson in her introduction, ‘to experience the end of Othello without hearing the pang of nostalgia for a world in which Christians and Turks are clearly and easily distinguished’ (Honigmann 2016: 35). alien (A) As an adjective, alien carries the following meanings: different, foreign, strange, unfamiliar, not native, and, more specifically, ‘Born in, or owing allegiance to, a foreign country; esp. designating a foreigner who is not a naturalized citizen of the country where he or she is living’ (OED). As a noun it means foreigner, stranger, outsider, and more specifically ‘A foreigner who is not a naturalized citizen of the country where he or she is living; a foreign national’ (OED). On strangers and foreigners, Archer states ‘the terms were sometimes used interchangeably, but for the most part strangers or “aliens” were born outside the British Isles’ (2005: 7). (B) Shakespeare uses alien once as an adjective: So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse, And found such fair assistance in my verse, As every alien pen hath got my use, And under thee their poesy disperse. (Son 78) Here the meaning is very much along the lines of ‘other’ or ‘different’ pen. He uses the word twice as a noun, each time with a different meaning. The first instance comes from King Henry IV, Part 1, with King Henry chastising his wayward son, Prince Hal: 15

alien

God pardon thee! Yet let me wonder, Harry, At thy affections, which do hold a wing Quite from the flight of all thy ancestors. Thy place in Council thou hast rudely lost, Which by thy younger brother is supply’d, And art almost an alien to the hearts Of all the court and princes of my blood. (3.2.29–35) The OED cites this instance under the following definition: ‘A person who or thing which is opposed, repugnant, or unaccustomed to a specified person or thing; a stranger to’. Here, alien is underpinned by a rhetoric of civility, for it is precisely Hal’s ‘wildness’ (H5 1.1.26) that renders him repugnant (or ‘almost’ repugnant) to the elite culture of the court. According to Shakespeare’s chronicle sources, Hal was dismissed from the council for performing the uncivil act of striking the lord chief justice; hence the king’s use of ‘rudely’. Another character who is ‘an alien’ is Shylock. Portia, disguised as a doctor of laws, makes the following pronouncement in the trial scene: Tarry Jew, The law hath yet another hold on you. It is enacted in the laws of Venice, If it be proved against an alien, That by direct, or indirect attempts He seek the life of any citizen, The party ‘gainst the which he doth contrive, Shall seize one half his goods, the other half Comes to the privy coffer of the state, And the offender’s life lies in the mercy Of the Duke only, ‘gainst all other voice. In which predicament I say thou stand’st: For it appears by manifest proceeding, That indirectly, and directly too, Thou hast contrived against the very life Of the defendant: and thou hast incurr’d The danger formerly by me rehears’d. Down therefore, and beg mercy of the duke. (MV 4.1.344–61) Although an inhabitant of Venice, and although he conducts business in the Rialto, Shylock, as a Jew, would not have held citizenship in the early modern city-state of Venice. Shylock is, therefore, technically an alien; his religion and his ethnicity, moreover, render him doubly foreign, an outsider in relation to Christian Venice, although, crucially, not commercial Venice. 16

Amazon

(C) On aliens as strangers in England, see Archer (2005). On the incorporating of aliens in the second tetralogy, see Kermode (2012: 85–118), who argues that the Elizabethan stage reveals ‘English characters rejecting, abusing, and finally incorporating the aliens in their midst in a process of moulding and coming to comprehend an indefinable, multiple, dynamic “Englishness” ’ (13). For Schwyzer, ‘there is no question that Tudor England was a thoroughly and unapologetically xenophobic society’ (2004: 1). Oldenburg (2015), on the other hand, argues that Shakespeare’s England was less xenophobic than critics traditionally suggest. Amazon (A) A reference to a tribe of ancient female warriors, but also, especially in the early modern period, used to refer to female warriors in general. Amazons supposedly lived in Scythia, and supposedly cut off their right breasts so that they could be more efficient with a bow and arrow. (B) References to Amazons in early modern literature are plentiful (Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene comes to mind). Not surprisingly, references to Amazons in Shakespeare’s plays are not scarce, ranging from early plays (3H6) to late plays (TNK). In his Wits theater of the little world (1599), Robert Albott writes: ‘The women of Scythia, called Amazons, lyued as conquerours ouer men, and were neuer conquered by men, vntill Alexander destroyed both them and theyr country’ (sig. F4v). Amazons could be invoked to signal an anxiety about female power in early modern England. However, in a society that was ruled by a woman, Queen Elizabeth, it is not surprising to find the term Amazon invested with positive meaning. Female characters in Shakespeare’s plays with Amazonian links include Hippolyta (MND and TNK), Joan Puzel (1H6), Queen Margaret (3H6) and Tamora (Tit). Hippolyta has obvious roots in Greek mythology; Joan, Margaret and Tamora have early modern attitudes to Amazons mapped on to their characters. After Tamora’s sons have slain Bassianus following Tamora’s instructions, Lavinia says, ‘Ay, come, Semiramis, nay, barbarous Tamora’ (2.2.118). The sense here seems to be that Tamora is even more barbarous than Semiramis, the ancient Assyrian queen. Belligerence and cruelty, then, are ascribed to Amazons, as is evident when Richard, Duke of York addresses Queen Margaret at the battle of Wakefield: She-wolf of France, but worse than wolves of France, Whose tongue more poisons than the adder’s tooth! How ill-beseeming is it in thy sex To triumph like an Amazonian trull, Upon their woes whom Fortune captivates! (3H6 1.4.111–15) As a woman, as a foreigner (French), and as an ‘Amazon’, Margaret’s presence in this play could be read as an instance of anxiety about female rule in early modern England. But not all references to Amazons are negative. Overcome by Joan in physical combat, Charles declares, ‘Stay, stay thy hands. Thou art an Amazon / And fightest with the 17

Amazon

sword of Deborah’ (1H6 1.2.104–05). If Charles’s ‘Thou art an Amazon’ is accusatory, then it is tempered by the connection to the valorized Old Testament figure of Deborah. When, in Coriolanus, Cominius speaks glowingly of Coriolanus’s valorous actions as a sixteen-year-old warrior, he cites Coriolanus’s ‘Amazonian chin’ (2.2.91): a reference to the sixteen-year-old boy’s lack of facial hair. Given that Cominius is praising Coriolanus, this reference could be read as another instance in which the term Amazon is invested with positive significance. (C) For full coverage of the concept of the Amazon in the early modern period see Schwartz (2000). Howard and Rackin argue that Shakespeare’s Margaret stages ‘the cultural fantasy of the monstrous Amazonian woman’ (1997: 94). For an alternative perspective on Margaret’s transgressiveness, see Ivic (2013a) and Levine (1998: 68–96). See also Findlay (2010) and Hadfield (2001). America see Indies Anthropophagi see cannibalism Antipodes (A) Used to denote people living on the opposite side of the globe or places on earth directly opposite to one another. The word can be used to signify a vast distance; it can also signify alterity or otherness. (B) Voicing a desire to be as far from Beatrice as possible, Benedick pleads, ‘Will your Grace command me any service to the world’s end? I will go on the slightest errand now to the Antipodes that you can devise to send me on’ (MA 2.1.247–9). Richard, Duke of York, on the other hand, invokes this term to signify Queen Margaret’s cruel and transgressive Amazonian behaviour, whilst calling attention to her foreignness as well as the penury of her family: ‘Thou art as opposite to every good / As the Antipodes are unto us’ (3H6 1.4.134–5). King Richard II ’s use of ‘Antipodes’ is remarkable because he uses the term not to refer to a place on the opposite side of the globe but rather on the other side of the Irish Sea: So when this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke, Who all this while hath revell’d in the night, Whilst we were wand’ring with the Antipodes, Shall see us rising in our throne the east, His treasons will sit blushing in his face, Not able to endure the sight of day, But self-affrighted tremble at his sin. (3.2.47–53) The geographical reference here is to Richard’s Irish wars. Richard’s representation of Ireland, however, has less to do with a geographical opposition than a cultural opposition between a civil England and wild Ireland (see Figure 5). (C) On English–Irish difference/proximity, see Murphy (1999), especially 97–123. 18

Arthur

Arabia (A) Lies to the east of Egypt – approximate to current-day Saudi Arabia. Whilst Arabia is used to refer to this specific Middle Eastern geographical region, it is also used in a more allusive manner. (B) Specific references to Arabia include Octavius Caesar’s reference to ‘King Manchus of Arabia’ (AC 3.6.74) when naming the ‘kings o’th’ earth’ (69) whom Mark Antony and Cleopatra are levying against him. Similarly, Lady Macbeth’s ‘Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand’ (Mac 5.1.50–2) refers to the region of Arabia because it supplied Europe with perfumes. And Sebastian’s A living drollery! Now I will believe That there are unicorns; that in Arabia There is one tree, the phoenix’ throne, one phoenix At this hour reigning there. (Tem 3.3.21–4) is a reference to a classical mythological bird from Arabia, but it also reveals the exotic, mysterious and paradisal associations with Arabia. Speaking about Portia, the Prince of Morocco says all the world desires her. From the four corners of the earth they come To kiss this shrine, this mortal breathing saint. The Hyrcanian deserts, and the vasty wilds Of wide Arabia are as throughfares now For princes to come view fair Portia. (MV 2.7.38–43) In this instance, Arabia is less a specific reference than a figurative pronouncement (as is ‘Hyrcanian deserts’): for example, a wilderness. In other words, Morocco is waxing eloquent on the lengths that these desirous men will go to in order to ‘view fair Portia’. Volumnia’s citing of ‘Arabia’ uses this word to signify desert or wilderness: I would my son Were in Arabia, and thy tribe before him, His good sword in his hand. (Cor 4.2.23–5) There is no reason why Coriolanus and his rivals should be in the actual Arabia. Instead, Volumnia has in mind an empty, deserted space, perhaps implying that Coriolanus’s foes would have no place to hide. (C) See Hunter on ‘providing [a] physical name for an abstract idea’ (2000: 50). Arthur Legendary fifth-century warrior-king of ancient Britain, who successfully led the Britons against the invading Saxons. The myth of King Arthur was given a 19

Arthur

substantial boost when a twelfth-century Welsh monk, Geoffrey of Monmouth, claimed to have uncovered a manuscript written in the British language dedicated to Arthur, which he translated as Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136) – according to the Dictionary of Welsh Biography, around 200 manuscripts are extant. The staying power of Arthurian legend is evident in the name given to King Henry VII ’s first-born son, Prince Arthur, who did not live long enough to inherit the throne. The rise of rigorous historical consciousness in the early modern period, if not well earlier, put paid to serious reflection on the Galfridian stories; however, the legends of Arthur remained popular among writers, the obvious example being Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Based on the evidence of his plays and poems, Shakespeare did not share Spenser’s enthusiasm for all things Arthurian. An Arthur is a central figure in King John: he is the child of King John’s eldest brother and his wife, Constance, who wishes to see her son on the throne. In the play Arthur holds the title of Duke of Brittany. King Henry VIII includes a reference to Henry’s deceased elder brother, Arthur, when it is announced that Katherine of Aragon has been demoted from ‘Queen of England’ (2.4.10) to ‘ “Princess Dowager”, / And “widow to Prince Arthur”’. Two references to King Arthur surface in Shakespeare. In King Henry IV, Part 2, Falstaff sings, ‘ “When Arthur first in court” […] “And was a worthy king” ’ (2.4.32–3). Editors point out that Falstaff is echoing the opening lines of a popular ballad titled Sir Lancelot du Lake. Another Falstaff-related reference to Arthur appears in King Henry V when the Hostess mistakenly refers to ‘Arthur’s bosom’ (2.3.9–10) rather than ‘Abraham’s bosom’ – a reference to Luke: ‘And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom’ (16.22). Schwyzer (2004) comments at length on Mistress Quickly’s reference to ‘Arthur’s bosom’, treating her ‘malapropism’ as a sign that the ‘theme of British Empire had come to fill the space evacuated by Purgatory’ (134). Athens The most renowned city-state of ancient Greece, and its capital. Three of Shakespeare’s plays are set in and around Athens: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Timon of Athens and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Pericles’s Pericles owes his name to the famous fifth-century BCE Athenian statesman. One dominant association with Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is ‘the law of Athens’ (1.1.119). For a critique of the longheld critical opinion that Shakespeare’s Athens is generic and lacking knowledge of ancient Athens, see Miola (1980).

20

B banish, banishment (A) Removal from one’s native land (whether kingdom, country or city or city-state), sometimes voluntarily but usually by force – for example, royal edict – resulting in residence in a foreign land. This term is used synonymously with exile. Banishment does not always entail removal from one’s native land: one could, for instance, be banished from court or from coming within ten miles of the monarch or twenty miles of the court. (B) The list of characters who find themselves banished or exiled or have received decrees of banishment in Shakespeare’s poems and plays is lengthy: it includes Alcibiades (Tim), Belarius (Cym), Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford (R2), Coriolanus (Cor), Duke Senior (AYL), Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester (2H6), Sir John Falstaff (2H4), Kent (KL), Lucius (Tit), Queen Margaret (R3), Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk (R2), Posthumus Leonatus (Cym), Romeo (RJ), Rosalind (AYL), Suffolk (2H6), Sycorax (Tem), the Tarquins (Luc) and Valentine (TGV). For some characters banishment or exile is self-imposed. The exiled Duke Senior, for example, is accompanied by ‘three or four loving lords [who] have put themselves into voluntary exile with him’ (AYL 1.1.98–9). In banishment, these figures form a fraternal community: Duke Senior speaks of ‘my co-mates and brothers in exile’ (2.1.1). Banishment can function as a form of comfort, an escape from a hostile and inhospitable place. When Lucius informs his father of his ‘everlasting doom of banishment’ (Tit 3.1.51), Titus’s reply is underpinned by a sense of relief: O happy man, they have befriended thee! Why, foolish Lucius, dost thou not perceive That Rome is but a wilderness of tigers? Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey But me and mine. How happy art thou then From these devourers to be banished. (3.1.52–7) For Titus, his son’s banishment from Rome amounts to a form of protection, an escape from the incivility of Rome. Not unlike Lucius, who returns with an invading army of Goths, Coriolanus wreaks havoc on the place from which he was banished. Banished by Cymbeline, Posthumus joins Roman forces against his native Britain. Posthumus is not Cymbeline’s only ‘exile’ (1.2.97); Belarius speaks of his ‘banishment’ (3.3.69) as well as his ‘exile’ (4.4.26). Whereas Posthumus quits Britain for an Italianate rather than 21

banish, banishment

classical Rome, Belarius’s banishment at the hands of Cymbeline results in his remaining within the island of Britain: the play relocates Belarius as well as the king’s two sons, Arviragus and Guiderius, in Cambria or Wales. Perhaps the dominant sentiment accompanying banishment in Shakespeare’s plays is that of loss, in particular loss of one’s homeland. This sentiment is evident in a number of plays, especially (and not surprisingly) the history plays. Addressing the French King, Margaret represents her husband as lost, inhabiting a country not his own: Now, therefore, be it known to noble Lewis That Henry, sole possessor of my love, Is, of a king, become a banish’d man, And forc’d to live in Scotland a forlorn; While proud ambitious Edward, Duke of York, Usurps the regal title and the seat Of England’s true-anointed lawful King. (3H6 3.3.23–9) Margaret, however, is unaware that at this point in the play Henry is no longer in Scotland. Prior to Act 3, Scene 3 Henry informs the audience ‘From Scotland am I stol’n, even of pure love, / To greet mine own land with my wishful sight’ (3.1.13–14). This is a fine instance of the way in which banishment can lead to expressions of patriotism. ‘Self-estrangement’, Helgerson argues, ‘was already the fundamental condition of national self-representation in Elizabeth’s England’ (1992: 16–17). Henry’s relocation to Scotland and return to England puts in place a rhetoric of longing and belonging, one heightened by his use of ‘land’ as opposed to kingdom or realm. Perhaps the most eloquent expression of national longing and belonging voiced in response to banishment occurs in King Richard II. To Bolingbroke and Mowbray, Richard proclaims ‘we banish you our territories’ (1.3.139): Bolingbroke receives ten (reduced to six) years of ‘banishment (1.3.143); Mowbray’s ‘heavier doom’ (1.3.149) is permanent ‘exile’ (1.3.151). Mowbray’s response is couched in a form of linguistic nationalism: The language I have learnt these forty years, My native English, now I must forgo, And now my tongue’s use is to me no more Than an unstringed viol or a harp. (1.3.159–62) Lines such as these – spoken, of course, in the actor’s ‘native English’ – wherein a character reflects on his or her banishment, provide a wonderful opportunity to gauge the public theatre’s role in disseminating national self-consciousness during the Elizabethan period. 22

barbarian, barbarous

(C) See Kingsley-Smith (2003) for a comprehensive account of exile and banishment in Shakespeare’s plays, especially Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus. barbarian, barbarous (A) A derogatory term that could refer to language or to people, individuals as well as groups. In the early modern period the primary meaning, in reference to the customs and manners of a person or, more often, a people, was rude, savage, uncivilized, wild. (B) The word ‘barbarous’ has its roots in ancient Greek and Latin. For the Greeks, the term referred to speech, and it signalled a foreign speaker. The term would take on other meanings in the classical period, including ones that applied to people as rude or unpolished. For the Romans barbarous could signify a non-Latin speaker, but it also denoted uncivilized, uncultured people, especially non-Romans. Another mark of the barbarous in the early modern period was superstition; Edmund Spenser mentions this again and again in his A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596): ‘all barbarous nations are commonly great observers of ceremonies and superstitious rites’; ‘it is the manner of all barbarous nations to be very superstitious and diligent observers of old customs and antiquities’ (1970: 7, 60). Shakespeare’s use of ‘barbarous’ is in keeping with the move from a linguistic designation to an ethnographic one. So, for example, Titus Andronicus includes references to Tamora and her sons as ‘the barbarous Goths’ (1.1.28) and to Aaron as a ‘barbarous Moor’ (2.2.78, 5.3.4). Goths and Moors are ‘barbarous’ precisely because they are not Roman. Coriolanus uses a similar opposition between ‘barbarians’ and ‘Romans’ (Cor 3.1.238–9). This binary opposition is best exemplified in Marcus’s appeal to Titus to rethink his refusal to bury his son Mutius, whom Titus had recently slain, in the family tomb: ‘Thou art a Roman, be not barbarous’ (1.1.383). The OED lists this line in support of ‘barbarous’ as meaning ‘Savage in infliction of cruelty, cruelly harsh’ – a use of barbarous that Shakespeare employs in other plays. However, given that Titus at this moment is refusing to allow for Mutius’s burial in the family tomb, it is likely that another OED definition is at play in these lines: ‘Uncultured, uncivilized, unpolished; rude, rough, wild, savage. (Said of men, their manners, customs, products.) The usual opposite of civilized.’ Marcus sees Titus’s refusal to bury his son in the Andronici family tomb not simply as cruel or harsh but also, and more importantly, as a sign of Titus’s incivility. Marcus’s ‘Thou art Roman, be not barbarous’ is followed by an appeal to Greek exemplarity: The Greeks upon advice did bury Ajax That slew himself, and wise Laertes’ son Did graciously plead for his funerals: Let not young Mutius then, that was thy joy, Be barred his entrance here. (384–8)

23

barbarian, barbarous

It is precisely Marcus’s powerful invocation of a rhetoric of civility that interpellates Titus and leads him to pronounce Mutius’s burial in the family tomb. In King Henry V, the Constable of France’s use of the word signifies cultural superiority: on the topic of the advancement of the English king’s troops, the Constable says An if he be not fought withal, my lord, Let us not live in France; let us quit all And give our vineyards to a barbarous people. (3.5.2–4) As this passage attests, constructions of nationhood in early modern England were often underpinned by an opposition between one’s own collective sense of self and an othered ‘barbarous people’. The pejorative associations of ‘barbarous’ can be found not only in ethnic divisions but also in social distinctions. The Prince of Arragon, for instance, rejects the golden casket before him because he refuses to rank himself with ‘the barbarous multitudes’ (MV 2.9.33); similarly, Thersites likens Ajax to a ‘barbarian slave’ (TC 2.1.47). (C) Neill notes that ‘categories like “civil” and “barbarous”, “naked” and “clothed” were often of far more significance in establishing the boundaries of otherness than the markers of mere biological diversity’ (2000: 274). See the chapter ‘Barbarism and Its Contexts’ in Hart (2009). See also Giddens (2010–11), who astutely argues that Titus Andronicus ‘label[s] all represented groups – Romans and Moors as well as Goths – “barbarous” ’. Barbary (A) Could be used to designate a geographical location: the Muslim countries situated along Africa’s north coast: that is, present-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya. Barbary can also be used to designate barbarous origins and/or speech or barbarousness in general. Thus, Robert Allbot writes: ‘Plato dying, thanked nature for three causes; the first, that he was borne a man, & not beast; the second, that hee was borne in Greece, and not in Barbary; the third, that hee was borne in Socrates time, who taught him to die well’ (1599: 238). Greece, here, signifies civility and civilization, whereas Barbary signifies the opposite. (B) In The Merchant of Venice, Barbary is included among the list of Antonio’s ventures as cited by Bassanio: ‘From Tripolis, from Mexico and England, / From Lisbon, Barbary and India’ (3.2.267–8). There are references to Barbary hens and Barbary horses in Shakespeare’s plays. A reference to a Barbary horse occurs in Iago’s fearmongering pronouncement to Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, on the newlywed Othello and Desdemona: ‘you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse; you’ll have your nephews neigh to you, you’ll have coursers for cousins and jennets for germans!’ (1.1.109–12). Iago’s discourse on Othello and Desdemona is motivated by a fear (Brabantio’s and his) of non-Venetians, and also of non-white and non-Christian Venetians. Given that Barbary is a region of Africa, and given what we learn of Othello’s 24

bastard

origins, Iago could be using the term in relation to Othello’s homeland. But Iago’s lines, which are underpinned by images of bestiality and miscegenation, also use ‘Barbary’ to insist on Othello’s barbarousness. Desdemona informs Emilia that her ‘mother had a maid called Barbary’ (4.3.24), perhaps a reference to a woman, maybe a slave, from Barbary. Shylock says to the Venetian court: You have among you many a purchas’d slave, Which (like your asses, and your dogs and mules) You use in abject and in slavish parts, Because you bought them. (MV 4.1.90–3) The combination of Shylock’s citation of Venice’s slave population and the name of Desdemona’s mother’s ‘maid’ opens up the possibility that Bassanio’s reference to ‘Barbary’ amongst Antonio’s business ventures implicates Antonio in the slave trade carried out by Italian city-states in the early modern period. (C) On the slave trade and Venice, see Hall (1995) and Thomas (1997). Hall notes that the ‘African trade became a way for … merchants to rise in class and was early on a marker of wealth and identity’ (19). Barnet A small town in Hertfordshire and site of one of the battle scenes of the Wars of the Roses from which the Yorkists, led by King Edward, emerge victorious, defeating and killing Warwick. The battle, fought on 14 April 1471, is depicted in Act 5, Scene 2 of King Henry VI, Part 3. The scene is dominated by Warwick’s dying speech. The historical Warwick was given the epithet kingmaker, and Shakespeare’s Warwick reflects on that nomenclature: ‘For who liv’d King but I could dig his grave?’ (5.2.21). Warwick’s ‘what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust?’ (5.2.27) marks the final contribution to the demystifying discourse on sacred monarchy spoken by him throughout the play. bastard (A) A child born out of wedlock, an illegitimate child. Also mongrel, hybrid, spurious, debased. Although the term is primarily used in reference to illegitimate children, especially sons, it also holds a significant place in discourse on the nation, drawing upon its early modern denotations of hybrid and mongrel. (B) Numerous bastards populate Shakespeare’s plays, King Lear’s Edmund being the best known, followed by King John’s Philip the Bastard. Joan Puzel, of King Henry VI, Part 1, is Shakespeare’s best-known female bastard. The term ‘bastard’ can be used to defend the purity of one’s own country, as when the Frenchman Lafew says of the French courtiers who shun Helena, ‘Sure, they are bastards to [i.e. of] the English; the French ne’er got ’em’ (AW 2.3.95–6). In other words, true Frenchmen would not behave this way. In King Henry VI, Part 1, John Talbot, son 25

bastard

of Sir John Talbot, who is also labelled ‘English Talbot’ (4.2.30), asserts his Englishness by following in his father’s footsteps: Is my name Talbot? And am I your son? And shall I fly? O, if you love my mother, Dishonour not her honourable name To make a bastard and a slave of me. The world will say, ‘He is not Talbot’s blood, That basely fled when noble Talbot stood’. (4.4.12–17) John Talbot’s rejection of bastardy is all the more pronounced given that two French characters in this play – Joan Puzel and the Bastard of Orleans – are bastards. Bastard is a term that can also be hurled at another group or individual as a term of abuse, especially when highlighting uncertain or multiple origins. In his A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596), Edmund Spenser denies the existence of a ‘pure drop of Spanish blood’: ‘of all nations’, he adds, ‘the Spaniard is the most mingled, most uncertain and most bastardly’ (1970: 44). King Richard III , in his oration to his troops before the Battle of Bosworth, labels his enemies ‘bastard Bretons’ (R3 5.3.34), and in The Tempest Prospero says of Caliban ‘he’s a bastard one’ (5.1.274). Bastardy can also signal anxiety about descent, genealogy and hybridity. King Henry V contains numerous references to this word: for example, the Irish Captain Macmorris’s ‘Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain, and a bastard, and a knave, and a rascal? What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?’ (3.2.124–6). Although the French camp label their English enemies ‘Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!’ (3.5.10), they give anxious voice to a process of bastardization closer to home: By faith and honour, Our madams mock at us and plainly say Our mettle is bred out, and they will give Their bodies to the lust of English youth, To new-store France with bastard warriors. (3.5.27–31) The sense of shame here is twofold: the French are too weak for the English; moreover, the victorious English will populate France with ‘bastard warriors’. (C) Chapters 5 and 6 in Neill (2000: 127–65) explore early modern notions of bastardy, including in relation to ‘racial difference and “purity” ’ (134). Belgia see Low Countries black A term used not only in aesthetic and moral discourse (dark and light) but also in a self–other opposition that underpins proto-racial discourse in early modern England. 26

blood

Prospero’s ‘this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine’ (Tem 5.1.276–7) could be a comment on Caliban’s moral depravity or his skin colour (or both). The reference to ‘black pagans, Turks, and Saracens’ (4.1.95) in King Richard II may be using the adjective in relation to all three proper nouns; alternatively, it could be distinguishing ‘black’ Muslims from brown, tawny or white ones. Moors in the early modern period can be black. The term ‘black pagans’ reminds us that ‘theology is not juxtaposed with racial thinking; in fact it helps produce and define it’ (Shapiro 1997: 84). Iago refers to ‘black Othello’ (2.3.29), and Othello says ‘I am black’ (3.3.267) and makes reference to his ‘face’ as ‘begrimed and black’ (3.3.391, 90). Othello’s blackness feeds Iago’s racialist discourse in the play; indeed, Iago plays a massive part in causing Othello to see himself as black. As Neill puts it, Iago ‘successfully essentializes or “racializes” Othello’s difference’ (2000: 270). At no moment in the play, however, does Othello’s blackness detract from Desdemona’s love for her husband. Shakespeare praises the blackness of his so-called ‘dark lady’: ‘Then I will swear beauty herself is black, / And all they foul that thy complexion lack’ (Son 132). A verbally abused yet much-desired Egyptian Cleopatra describes herself as ‘with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black’ (AC 1.5.29), a blackness that has not deterred a host of Roman lovers. Extended commentary on blackness (in terms of otherness, beauty, slavery) in early modern England is provided by Hall (1995), who suggests that ‘the binarism of black and white might be called the originary language of racial difference in English culture’ (2). Hall, moreover, links the discourse of racial difference to English interest in colonial travel and the trade in slaves as well as anxiety about national identity as England was in the process of shedding its insularity. blackamoor see Moor blood (A) Blood can signify community in terms of descent, social status, or nation, whether inclusively or exclusively: ‘royal blood’ effects exclusion, while ‘our countrymen’s blood’ effects inclusion. The variety of bloods in relation to national identity are many: blood can be English; it can be foreign; it can be noble; it can be common; it can be tainted; it can be pure; it can be mixed; it can be spirited; it can be dull, and so on. Blood, bloody and related terms are often invoked to signify bloodshed: sometimes lamented (as in the instance of civil war), sometimes celebrated (as in the instance of victory over another country). (B) Common blood brings individuals together in groups as families, as countrymen/ women. Common blood can even unite separate kingdoms: writing just two days after the death of Queen Elizabeth I, Robert Cotton wrote, in relation to England and Scotland, of ‘both kingdoms being of one descent in blood’ (Sharpe 2000: 319). But common blood does not guarantee such bonds; indeed, when such bonds are rent, the term blood often surfaces. King Lear, for example, dismisses kinship with his daughter Cordelia with ‘Here I disclaim all my paternal care, / Propinquity and property of blood’ 27

blood

(1.1.114–15). Shylock, naturally, insists on the consanguineous relation between himself and his daughter Jessica: ‘I say, my daughter is my flesh and blood’ (MV 3.1.34). But Jessica, forsaking her father, claims ‘though I am a daughter to his blood, / I am not to his manners’ (2.3.18–19). Determining Jessica’s status in this play is, therefore, not an easy task, for she is devoid of ‘One drop of Christian blood’ (4.1.308). In his Roman plays, Shakespeare often invokes blood in relation to duty, valour and sacrifice. Menenius Agrippa says of Coriolanus: ‘the blood he hath lost … he dropp’d it for his country’ (3.1.298–300). Marcus praises his brother Titus Andronicus in similar terms: ‘five times he hath returned / Bleeding to Rome’ (1.1.33–4). Titus’s shedding of his own blood (not to mention the shedding of the blood of his enemies) bears witness to the Romanness of the eponymous hero: that is, his complete and utter commitment to Rome. The first tetralogy, especially King Richard III – ‘O bloody Richard’ (3.4.103); ‘the bloody king’ (4.3.22); ‘Bloody thou art; bloody will be thy end’ (4.4.195); ‘A bloody tyrant and a homicide’ (5.3.247); ‘the bloody dog is dead’ (5.5.2) – is saturated with references to blood. Macbeth’s ‘blood will have blood’ (3.4.121) provides a fine gloss on these four plays. Because these plays again and again stage ‘The brother blindly shed[ding] the brother’s blood’ (R3 5.5.24), the attitude to bloodshed is one of shame and loathing. When a unified English army turns its force against foreign forces – French, Irish, Scottish, Welsh – the attitude to bloodshed is different. In reference to the dead Earl of Suffolk at the battle of Agincourt, Exeter speaks of ‘the gashes / That bloodily did yawn upon his face’ (H5 4.6.13–14), valorizing Suffolk’s sacrificial wounds. The Duke of York, who died alongside Suffolk, is described, indeed praised, by King Henry: ‘all blood he was’ (4.6.6). Here, blood signifies not shame but honour, and in many ways, the loss of not just one’s own but the blood of a collective occupies a signal place in the formation of a social or national community. In King Henry VI, Part 2, Richard, Duke of York others Queen Margaret by terming her ‘blood-besotted Neapolitan, / Outcast of Naples, England’s bloody scourge!’ (5.1.117–18). For a play in which no character has a monopoly on blood-besottedness, York’s lines are interesting because they centre upon not only a foreigner (Margaret is not English) but also a woman. This play may participate in the ‘demonizing of Margaret’ (Howard and Rackin 1997: 82); however, it is not solely Margaret and ‘uncivil kerns of Ireland’ who ‘temper clay with blood of Englishmen’ (3.1.309–10). The tension between a national identity imagined as ‘a deep, horizontal comradeship’ (Anderson 1991: 7) and a society that was structured hierarchically reveals itself in discourse on blood. Consider, for instance, the exchange between Bertram, Count of Rossillion and the King of France in All’s Well That Ends Well. In response to Bertram’s dismissal of Helena as a ‘poor physician’s daughter’ (2.3.116), the King declares Strange is it that our bloods, Of colour, weight, and heat, pour’d all together,

28

borders

Would quite confound distinction, yet stands off In differences so mighty. (119–22) On the one hand, the King posits common blood as a social leveller; on the other hand – ‘yet’ – he reinscribes blood as a marker of difference. The King’s lines bear witness to the complex social and historical conditions within which a sense of national identity emerged in early modern England/Britain. In King Henry V, the French reveal an aversion to the intermingling of blood. After English victory at Agincourt, the French herald Montjoy appears, stating I come to thee for charitable licence That we may wander o’er this bloody field To look our dead and then to bury them; To sort our nobles from our common men. For many of our princes – woe the while! – Lie drowned and soaked in mercenary blood; So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs In blood of princes. (4.7.70–7) The ‘blood of princes’ is to be distinguished from ‘mercenary blood’, ‘noble’ from ‘common’, ‘vulgar’ from ‘princes’. Montjoy’s use of ‘mercenary’ helps to elevate the sacrifice of France’s nobles whilst simultaneously cheapening the contribution of common soldiers. In As You Like It, Orlando invokes blood to insist on his gentle status: I know you are my eldest brother, and in the gentle condition of blood you should so know me. The courtesy of nations allows you my better, in that you are the first-born, but the same tradition takes not away my blood, were there twenty brothers betwixt us. I have as much of my father in me as you, albeit I confess your coming before me is nearer to his reverence. (1.1.42–50) Just as Orlando proclaims his social equality with his brother, Oliver, based on shared blood (actual blood as well as lineage), he foregrounds the place of custom in such supposedly natural distinctions. (C) Adelman (2007: 66–98) considers the complexities of blood in relation issues of inclusion and exclusion in The Merchant of Venice. borders see also marches, pale (A) Real and imagined borders distinguish one nation, country or kingdom from another. Although numerous characters in Shakespeare’s plays anglocentrically imagine England as an island (that is, as Britain), the sense of a bordered nation renders England distinct from its island neighbours, even if Wales was

29

borders

politically incorporated into the Kingdom of England under King Henry VIII – although it is presented as a distinct country in Cymbeline, where the River Severn serves as a border. The accession of King James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603 did not do away with England’s border with Scotland, for James remained King of Scotland whilst becoming King James I of England (rampant Anglo-Scottish border hostilities did eventually cease in the wake of James’s accession). (B) Anderson’s discussion of the prenational ‘dynastic realm’ calls attention to borders: ‘in the older imaginings, where states where defined by centres, borders were porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another.’ ‘In the modern conception’, he adds, ‘state sovereignty is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimetre of a legally demarcated territory’ (1991: 19). Shakespeare’s English histories may return to a time of ‘older imaginings’; however, they very much stage (early) modern conceptions of the bordered nation, delimited and demarcated. Take, for example, King Henry V. On the one hand, this is Shakespeare’s most dynastic of histories, ending as it does in Henry’s marriage to the French Princess Katherine, not to mention his poor attempts at speaking French. In this sense, there is something non-national about this play. On the other hand, England’s borders – ‘nebulous and permeable’ (Baker 1997: 19) – are foregrounded in the play. Described by the Bishop of Canterbury as ‘Our inland’, England, as imagined in H5, is precariously circumscribed by ‘the pilfering borderers’, ‘th’ill neighborhood’ (1.2.142, 154) that shares with England the island of Britain as homeland. Oddly, the play, at least the F version, also incorporates an Irish, Scottish and Welsh captain into the English army – porous borders indeed. (C) For a thorough examination of real and imagined borders in Shakespeare, see Hopkins (2005), especially the first chapter, which focuses on the marches as represented in the two King Henry IV plays and in H5. Murphy (1999: 113–16) includes some rich reflections on borders and national self-definition in the second tetralogy. Highley (1997: 67–85) considers the representation of England’s borderlands in relation to Wales and Ireland. See, too, Parker (1996: 164–74) on ‘the vulnerability of national boundaries’ (168) as well as Maley and Loughnane (2013). ‘A border can polarize identities’, notes Kerrigan, ‘yet it can also simultaneously create zones, levels, and modes of negotiation and mutual interest’ (2008: 34). Bosworth (A) Fought on 22 August 1485, the Battle of Bosworth, or Bosworth Field, saw the Lancastrian Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond defeat the Yorkist King Richard III , thereby becoming King Henry VII , founder of the Tudor dynasty. The battle at Bosworth is represented in the final act of King Richard III. In the play, Richmond describes Bosworth as ‘Near to the town of Leicester’ (5.2.12). (B) Given the historical and cultural significance of the Battle of Bosworth, especially to the Tudors, one would expect an intense focus on this climacteric encounter; however, the play offers very little in terms of combat (stage directions inform us of Richard and 30

Bosworth

Richmond’s fight and Richard’s death). What instead dominates Shakespeare’s version of Bosworth is Richmond’s closing speech in the wake of Richard’s death. Earlier in Act 5, Richmond represents Bosworth as geographically central when he describes it as ‘the centre of this isle’ (5.2.11). Bosworth also occupies a central place in English cultural memory. Crucial to Richmond’s speech is the way in which he remembers/ forgets the Battle of Bosworth: Inter their bodies as becomes their births. Proclaim a pardon to the soldiers fled That in submission will return to us; And then, as we have ta’en the sacrament, We will unite the white rose and the red. Smile, heaven, upon this fair conjunction, That long have frown’d upon their enmity. What traitor hears me and says not Amen? England hath long been mad, and scarr’d herself: The brother blindly shed the brother’s blood; The father rashly slaughter’d his own son; The son, compell’d, been butcher to the sire. All this divided York and Lancaster – Divided, in their dire division. O now let Richmond and Elizabeth, The true succeeders of each royal House, By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together, And let their heirs, God, if Thy will be so, Enrich the time to come with smooth-fac’d peace, With smiling plenty, and fair prosperous days. Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord, That would reduce these bloody days again, And make poor England weep in streams of blood. Let them not live to taste this land’s increase, That would with treason wound this fair land’s peace. Now civil wounds are stopp’d; peace lives again. That she may long live here, God say Amen. (5.5.15–41) If these lines herald the victory of Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather at Bosworth Field and the close of the Wars of the Roses (signified by the union of the ‘white rose and the red’) they are significant on another level. This passage is remarkable for its ability to at once evoke the trauma of past civil wars whilst using these images to incite reconciliation and a form of national remembering/forgetting. Perhaps more than any other of Shakespeare’s history plays, King Richard III turns nasty fifteenth-century dynastic warfare into reassuring fratricidal war, an historical reimagining that played a crucial 31

Bosworth

role in forging a sense of a unified national identity under the Tudors. Richmond’s ‘Amen’, no doubt echoed on stage and echoed by the audience, bears witness to the profound sense of closure that this play effects. (C) See Schwyzer (2013b) and Targoff (2002). Bretagne (A) A region in the north-west of France; Brittany in English. The inhabitants of this region are referred to as Bretons. The term Great Britain was used to distinguish the island of Britain from Brittany, which was often referred to as lesser or little Britain. (B) The terms Brittany and Bretagne appear in Shakespeare’s plays, usually in reference to a title – ‘The Dukes of Orleans, Calaber, Bretagne and Alencon’ (2H6 1.1.7) – or to the region – ‘he shall to Brittany’ (3H6 4.6.101). The most remarkable use of Bretons occurs in King Richard III. King Henry VI, Part 3 hails ‘young Henry, Earl of Richmond’ as ‘England’s hope’ (4.6.67, 68), but in the same scene the Lancastrians learn of the future King Edward IV ’s escape from imprisonment and therefore decide to safeguard Richmond: ‘Forthwith we’ll send [Richmond] hence to Brittany, / Till storms be past of civil enmity’ (97–8). Speaking of the ancient Britons, MacDougall notes that after Cadwallader’s death, ‘pestilence and famine forced them to leave the island altogether and take refuge in Brittany’ (1982: 11), which may add a national dimension to Richmond’s relocation to Britanny. Fast forward to King Richard III and ‘civil enmity’ is rife as Richard prepares to face Richmond at the Battle of Bosworth. Richard refers to Richmond as ‘the Breton Richmond’ (4.3.40) – ‘the Britaine Richmond’ (TLN 2748) in F – and this reference is followed by a messenger’s report: The Breton navy is dispers’d by tempest. Richmond, in Dorsetshire, sent out a boat Unto the shore, to ask those on the banks If they were his assistants, yea or no? – Who answer’d him they came from Buckingham Upon his party. He, mistrusting them, Hois’d sail, and made his course again for Bretagne. (4.4.521–7) In short, at various moments in the play England’s future King Henry VII , as well as his army, is consciously associated with Brittany – F reads ‘The Brittaine Nauie’ and ‘againe for Brittaine’ (TLN 3328, 3334). Indeed, Richard insists on Richmond’s Breton identity, as is evident in his oration before the battle at Bosworth (note the reading from F within square brackets): What shall I say, more than I have inferr’d? Remember whom you are to cope withal: A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways; A scum of Bretons [Brittaines] and base lackey peasants,

32

Britain

Whom their o’er-cloyed country vomits forth To desperate ventures and assur’d destruction. You sleeping safe, they bring to you unrest; You having lands, and bless’d with beauteous wives, They would restrain the one, distain the other. And who doth lead them but a paltry fellow, Long kept in Bretagne [Britaine] at our brother’s cost? A milksop! One that never in his life Felt so much cold as over-shoes in snow. Let’s whip these stragglers o’er the seas again, Lash hence these overweening rags of France, These famish’d beggars, weary of their lives – Who, but for dreaming on this fond exploit, For want of means, poor rats, had hang’d themselves. If we be conquer’d, let men conquer us! And not these bastard Bretons; whom our fathers Have in their own land beaten, bobb’d, and thump’d, And in record left them the heirs of shame. Shall these enjoy our lands? Lie with our wives? Ravish our daughters? (5.3.315–38) Richard’s oration is a wonderful example of the ways in which nationalist sentiment not only intersects with propaganda but also plays a seminal role in motivating the troops. Just as Richard renders Richmond and his army foreign, non-English, he insists upon the purity of his and his army’s identity; in fact, it is precisely Richard’s othering of Richmond and his crew that bolsters his Englishness as well as his dubious claim to the English throne. The historical King Henry VII , of course, played upon his Welshness to secure his royal title. (C) For a reading of King Richard’s representation of Richmond, who had Welsh descent, in relation to not only a Breton identity but also a British (that is, Welsh) and Briton (that is, British) identity, see Schwyzer (2013a: 29–34). Britain see also Britons, island (A) The island home to three nations: England, Scotland and Wales (see figures 4, 6 and 7). As an island Britain exists as a geographical entity. Britain exists, too, as a historical reality: witness Camden’s Britannia (1586), an antiquarian study of Roman Britain. However, Britain also exists as a cultural and political entity, particularly following the accession of King James VI of Scotland to the English throne. (B) If it was not for the presence of Cymbeline, ‘Britain’ (and ‘Britain’s’) would exist as a single and obscure reference in just three of Shakespeare’s plays. ‘British’ appears only in Cymbeline and King Lear – F initially terms Cornwall, Edmund, Goneril and 33

Britain

Regan’s camp ‘the Brittish Powers’ (TLN 2374) but then ‘the English party’ (TLN 2703); Q uses ‘Brittish powers’ (sig. I1v) and ‘Brittish partie’ (sig. K1r) – the latter play, according to Kerrigan, ‘is merely the most conspicuous example of [Shakespeare’s] turn to British and archipelagic subject matter after 1603’ (2008: 14). Why is this the case? The obvious answer is that these two plays are set in ancient Britain. Another obvious answer is that, not unlike Kent, Shakespeare and his fellow English subjects found themselves in the wake of James’s accession to the English throne ‘in a country new’ (KL 1.1.188). ‘Britain was a zone where nations were written between and across them’ (Baker 1997: 9). When James was proclaimed King of England in March of 1603, he united for the first time the Crowns of England and Scotland, becoming the first composite monarch of two islands, three kingdoms, and four nations. As a self-proclaimed British king (the English Parliament blocked James’s plans for political union), James fostered discourse on Britain and Britishness in his speeches to Parliament and in royal proclamations. ‘Wee have thought good to discontinue the divided names of England and Scotland out of our Regall Stile,’ a proclamation dated 20 October 1604 reads, ‘and doe intend and resolve to take and assume unto Us in maner and forme hereafter expressed, The Name and Stile of KING OF GREAT BRITTAINE , FRANCE , AND IRELAND ’ (Hughes and Larkin 1973 vol. 1: 96). Poems and political tracts as well as masques performed at court sought to foster a British identity. As Francis Bacon put it, James desired to ‘imprint and inculcate into the hearts and heads of the people, that they are one people and one nation’ (1890: 227). Some of James’s subjects, therefore, found themselves rethinking their sense of belonging and connectedness within an emergent multi-national British polity, contributing ‘to the cultural fabrication of Britishness’ (Kerrigan 2008: 44). The impact of James’s composite kingship on English imaginings of the dynastically united kingdoms and their heterogeneous subjects is particularly evident in John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1611–12) – the earliest comprehensive atlas of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland – the title of which echoes the king’s preferred name for the island. Speed’s map of ‘The Kingdome of Great Britaine and Ireland’ (see Figure 1) is the sole map in the Theatre to display in one image James’s British and Irish kingdoms, and it reveals the role maps played in representing the land and the iconography of James’s triple monarchy (including a coin depicting the ancient British king ‘Cvnobilin’: that is, Cunobelinus or Cymbeline). Perhaps more so than any of Shakespeare’s history plays, King Henry V invites exploration of inscriptions of English identity in relation to an expanding nation-state that included an incorporated Wales, an intractable Ireland, and an encroaching Scotland. Before the walls of Harfleur, King Henry represents his army as distinctly English: ‘our English’, ‘you noble English’, ‘good yeoman, / Whose limbs were made in England’ (3.2.2, 17, 25–6). ‘For many Englishmen, “England” – or whatever they called it – included Wales. Did it also include Ireland and Scotland? For some it did; for others it didn’t’ (Helgerson 1992: 8). Looking at King Henry V, we could say for F it did, for Q it did not. Absent from Q but included in F is a scene that is often termed the four captains scene 34

Britain

(3.2). F presents an ‘English’ army that incorporates members of ‘th’ill neighbourhood’ (1.2.154): namely, Irish, Scottish and Welsh captains. For some critics, the culmination of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan history plays (and arguably the most patriotic) anticipates the transition to the ‘British’ plays that he would produce after James’s accession and, crucially, the change in theatrical patronage to the King’s Men. Shakespeare ‘wrote his English plays in Elizabeth’s reign and his British plays after 1603, though King Henry V, first performed in 1599, might be regarded as a proto-British play’ (Rhodes 2004: 37). Cymbeline, set in ancient Britain, could be said to contain traces of British nationalism. Marcus distances the nationalism present in Shakespeare’s Elizabethan histories from the inscription of nationhood in Cymbeline: The political plot of Cymbeline, in marked contrast to the prevailing spirit of nationalism in Shakespeare’s earlier history plays, culminates in a vision of harmonious internationalism and accommodation that mirror’s James’s own policy. The British and Roman ensigns wave ‘Friendly together’, the fragmented kingdom of Britain is reunited, and the nation embarks on a new and fertile era of peace. (1988: 122) It would not be inaccurate to say, pace Marcus, that the rhetoric of nationhood that surfaces throughout Shakespeare’s Elizabethan English history plays resurfaces in this romance or late play, except that the play’s subjects are Britons and not English. Consider, for example, the following speech delivered by Posthumus Leonatus, a Briton in Rome: I do believe, (Statist though I am none, nor like to be) That this will prove a war; and you shall hear The legion now in Gallia sooner landed In our not-fearing Britain than have tidings Of any penny tribute paid. Our countrymen Are men more order’d than when Julius Caesar Smil’d at their lack of skill, but found their courage Worthy his frowning at. Their discipline, (Now wing-led with their courages) will make known To their approvers they are people such That mend upon the world. (Cym 2.4.15–26) Underpinning these lines is a sense of national resistance to mighty Rome, not unlike, say, English resistance to Rome in King John. A sense of a collective Britishness is captured in ‘our not-fearing Britain’ and ‘Our countrymen’, a communal identity to which Posthumus attaches himself, perhaps precisely because he is in exile in Rome. In many ways, Posthumus’s speech is reminiscent of King Henry V’s ‘We are glad the 35

Britain

Dauphin is so pleasant with us’ (H5 1.2.260) speech, for both return to a former self that lacks in order to celebrate a reformed self. Cloten’s ‘Britain’s a world by itself’ (3.1.13) can, on the one hand, be read as a proclamation of the island’s separateness and unique status; however, it can also be read as naive and isolationist. In fact, the play itself provides a critique of Cloten’s British nationalism in the form of Imogen’s rather sobering Hath Britain all the sun that shines? Day? Night? Are they not but in Britain? I’ th’ world’s volume Our Britain seems as of it, but not in’t: In a great pool, a swan’s nest: prithee think There’s livers out of Britain. (3.4.136–40) Given that part of this play is set in Rome and that Imogen’s husband has been banished from Britain, it is safe to say that there are ‘livers’, that is living creatures, outside of Britain. Cymbeline, it could be argued, gives voice to British nationalism whilst simultaneously tempering it. We tend to remember Shakespeare as the Bard of Avon. Contemporaries remembered him otherwise. ‘Triumph, my Britaine, thou hast one to showe, / To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe’ is how Ben Jonson’s elegy on Shakespeare in F celebrates his fellow author (Shakespeare 1623: sig. A4v). (C) Informed by the new British history, Maley (2003: 7–44) explores Shakespeare within the context of ‘a time when England was moving from postcolonial nation to empire state’ (31). Ivic’s (2013b) exploration of national identities in Shakespeare’s Elizabethan and Jacobean plays attends to continuities and discontinuities in representations of various national subjects. On Cymbeline, see, for example, Sullivan (1998), Boling (2000), Escobedo (2008), Mikalachki (1995) and Jones (1961) as well as Hopkins’s and King’s contributions to Maley and Schwyzer (2010). Maley (2006) surveys recent work on Shakespeare and British, English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh identities. Kerrigan (2008: 91–140) situates Macbeth and Cymbeline within a wider British framework, saying of the latter play, ‘A play about ancient Britain could not exist for post-1603 audiences … in a purely English perspective’ (128). Schwyzer (2004: 151–74) explores King Lear within the context of the Jacobean Union debate. On KL, Wortham states ‘the play warns that not to recognize Britain as a de facto union may be as dangerous as to take a hatchet to a united kingdom’ (1996: 111). Greenblatt argues that ‘[b]y yoking together diverse people – represented in the play by the Welshman Fluellen, the Irishman Macmorris, and the Scotsman Jamy, who fight at Agincourt alongside the loyal Englishman – Hal symbolically tames the last wild areas in the British Isles’ (1988: 56). Dutton cites ‘Captain MacMorris fighting for Henry’ as ‘a fine expression of proto-British nationalism’ (2005: 303). Netzloff (2003) explores The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest within the context of internal colonization.

36

Britons

Figure 1 John Speed, ‘The Kingdome of Great Britaine and Ireland’, from The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London 1611–12). By permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Map Res 74, betw. pp. 1–2.

Britons (A) Used to describe the early inhabitants of the island of Britain. The only Shakespearean play to use the words Briton and Britons is Cymbeline. John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1611–12) includes ‘A Britaine’ along with a Roman, Saxon, Dane and Norman on its title page (see Figure 2). The prominence of place – central, elevated – that Speed affords the Briton suggests, perhaps, that the ancient islander is the originary source of the English/British people. According to Kendrick, ‘Speed was directly responsible for the inclusion of the famous ancient Briton in the place of honour on the title-page of his Theatre’ (1950: 125). But when hailing Anglo-(Lowland)Scottish proximity, Speed posits other origins: the ‘southern people’ of Scotland, he says, ‘are from the same Original as vs the English, being both alike the Saxon branches’ (1611–12: 130). (B) The fabulous twelfth-century history of Britain, covering the landing of Aeneas’s great-grandson Brutus to seventh-century Cadwallader, composed by the Welsh monk Geoffrey of Monmouth, celebrated Wales as the home to Britain’s native Briton 37

Britons

population – the ‘positive qualities of ancient Britain were associated with Wales’ (Kerrigan 2008: 117). Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae remained a popular text, especially as a source for romance, but in the sixteenth century (if not well earlier) serious antiquarian and historiographical work put paid to the highly romanticized Galfridian tradition. Writing in 1607, Edward Ayscu had nothing but scorn for Geoffrey’s stories: ‘the Fables of Dioclesian his Daughters, and of their successors the Troyans, under the conduct of (I know not what) Brute, coyned in some Munkish mint about foure hundred yeares agone’ (1607: 1). Ayscu does, however, agree with Geoffrey about the Britishness of the Welsh, for he describes the Welsh as ‘the remnant of the Brittish blood’ (1607: 5). Informed by Roman histories as well as ethnography, William Camden’s Britannia (1586) posited a very different Briton from Geoffrey: savage, barbarous and desperately in need of (Roman) civility. King James VI and I’s plans for a united Britain, especially for a change in name, met much resistance, in particular from members of the House of Commons. In his unpublished ‘Of the Union’, Henry Spelman, a Parliamentarian and a founding member of the Society of Antiquaries, warns: ‘if the honorable name of England be buried in the resurrection of Albion or Britannia, we shall change the goulden beames of the sonne for a cloudy day, and drownde the glory of a nation triumphant through all the worlde to restore the memory of an obscure and barberous people’ (Spelman 1985: 170). Shakespeare’s Britons are imagined otherwise. For one thing, Britons are recognized in Rome: upon Posthumus’s entry to Rome, Philarion says, ‘Here comes the Briton’ (1.5.28). Cymbeline presents Britons as ‘a valiant race’ (5.4.83) and as ‘a warlike people’: You must know, Till the injurious Romans did extort This tribute from us, we were free. Caesar’s ambition, Which swell’d so much that it did almost stretch The sides o’th’ world, against all colour here Did put the yoke upon‘s: which to shake off Becomes a warlike people, whom we reckon Ourselves to be. (3.1.47–54) One could go so far as to say that British nationalism is evident in the play: That opportunity, Which then they had to take from’s, to resume We have again. Remember, sir, my liege, The kings your ancestors, together with The natural bravery of your isle, which stands As Neptune’s park, ribb’d and pal’d in 38

brother, brothers, brotherhood

With rocks unscaleable and roaring waters, With sands that will not bear your enemies’ boats, But suck them up to th’ topmast. A kind of conquest Caesar made here, but made not here his brag Of ‘Came, and saw, and overcame:’ with shame (That first that ever touch’d him) he was carried From off our coast, twice beaten: and his shipping (Poor ignorant baubles!) on our terrible seas, Like egg-shells mov’d upon their surges, crack’d As easily ‘gainst our rocks. For joy whereof The fam’d Cassibelan, who was once at point (O giglot fortune!) to master Caesar’s sword, Made Lud’s town with rejoicing-fires bright And Britons strut with courage. (3.1.15–34) Given that these lines are spoken by the play’s odious Queen, however, one could just as easily say the play inserts a critique of British nationalism. In fact, Imogen’s Hath Britain all the sun that shines? Day? Night? Are they not but in Britain? I’th’ world’s volume Our Britain seems as of it, but not in’t: In a great pool, a swan’s nest: prithee think There’s livers out of Britain. (3.4.136–40) has long been read as critical of English/British insularity. To cite Coriolanus, ‘There is a world elsewhere!’ (Cor 3.3.135). (C) On Cymbeline see Boling (2000), Crumley (2001), Maley (2003: 31–44) and Kerrigan (2008: 115–40). On the ancient Britons, see Parry (2000), who notes that as ‘stalwart primitives, [the ancient Britons] had an honoured role in the history of the nation for they were the first recognisable ancestors who could be credibly imagined and represented in literature and art’ (155). brother, brothers, brotherhood (A) Terms that could be used to refer to one’s fellow citizen or countryman. A rhetoric of fraternity occupies a central place in discourse on the nation. One theorist of nationalism notes that ‘regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail … the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship … it is this fraternity that makes [an imagined political community] possible’ (Anderson 1991: 7). Alternatively, a lack of fraternity can signify a critique of an actual political community, especially one that does not afford ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’. (B) Perhaps no other moment in Shakespeare gestures to ‘a deep horizontal comradeship’ as does King Henry V’s oration before the battle at Agincourt. Henry’s

39

brother, brothers, brotherhood

Figure 2 John Speed, Title Page, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London 1611–12). By permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Map Res 74, title page. 40

brother, brothers, brotherhood

famous speech is provoked by Westmorland’s desire that the English army be bolstered by just ‘ten thousand of those men in England / That do no work today’ (4.3.17–18). To this Henry replies What’s he that wishes so? My cousin Westmorland? No, my fair cousin: If we are marked to die, we are enough To do our country loss, and if to live, The fewer men, the greater share of honour. God’s will, I pray thee wish not one man more. By Jove, I am not covetous for gold, Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost; It earns me not if men my garments wear: Such outward things dwell not in my desires. But if it be a sin to covet honour I am the most offending soul alive. No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England. God’s peace, I would not lose so great an honour As one man more, methinks, would share from me, For the best hope I have. O do not wish one more! Rather proclaim it, Westmorland, through my host, That he which hath no stomach to this fight, Let him depart; his passport shall be made And crowns for convoy put into his purse. We would not die in that man’s company That fears his fellowship to die with us. This day is called the feast of Crispian. He that outlives this day and comes safe home Will stand a-tiptoe when the day is named And rouse him at the name of Crispian. He that shall see this day and live old age Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say ‘Tomorrow is Saint Crispian.’ Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’ Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot But he’ll remember, with advantages, What feats he did that day. Then shall our names, Familiar in his mouth as household words, Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester, Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered.

41

brother, brothers, brotherhood

This story shall the good man teach his son, And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by From this day to the ending of the world But we in it shall be remembered, We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he today that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition. And gentlemen in England now abed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day. (4.3.18–67) Henry’s rousing speech has all the hallmarks of nationalist rhetoric: battle scars, bloodshed, fellowship, fraternity, honour, manliness, memory, nationhood, ritual and sacrifice. The speech serves to rouse the English forces in advance of the impending battle against the French army, and it does so by forging a sense of community, a band of English brothers. At least this is how this speech has often been received (not to mention performed – on stage and in film). Howard and Rackin, for instance, label Henry’s speech a ‘male fantasy of cross-class brotherhood’ (1997: 4). But to whom is this speech addressed? Who precisely does Henry’s ‘we’ include (and who does it exclude)? This scene is often depicted, especially on film, as if Henry is addressing his entire army (or, given the limited space on stage, a group representative of the entire army). The stage directions, however, inform us that Gloucester, Bedford, Exeter, Westmorland and ‘Erpingham with all his host’ are present: in other words, two of Henry’s brothers, his uncle, his cousin and an English officer and his ‘host’ or soldiers. Given the references to ‘cousin Westmorland’, ‘fair cousin’ and ‘my coz’, it appears that this speech, or certain parts of it, is directed to Henry’s cousin rather than to his entire army. Henry’s ‘Rather proclaim it, Westmorland, through my host’ reinforces the idea that his cousin is his prime auditor; moreover, this directive implies that Henry’s message is to be relayed to the absent English soldiers. Henry’s ‘our names’, moreover, is far from an inclusive gesture, for it refers to Henry’s present and absent kin and nobles. The common men present, Sir Thomas Erpingham and his soldiers, are given no mention. Perhaps ‘We few’ refers not to the few English present in France but to the select few who make up the army’s nobles – those who were remembered in English chronicles. Henry’s famous speech marks a fine instance of early modern England’s ‘never quite complete passage from dynasty to nation’ (Helgerson 1992: 10). The rhetoric of brotherhood in King Henry V takes on more complexity when seen within the context of the play as a whole. The Chorus, for example, represents Henry on the eve of battle fostering ‘a deep, horizontal comradeship’:

42

brother, brothers, brotherhood

O now, who will behold The royal captain of this ruined band Walking from watch to watch, from tent to tent, Let him cry ‘Praise and glory on his head!’ For forth he goes and visits all his host, Bids them good morrow with a modest smile, And calls them brothers, friends and countrymen. (4.Chor.28–34) But in the ensuing scene, the king enters a fierce debate with Williams, a common English soldier, about the legitimacy of this war. Helgerson describes this debate as ‘a bristling exchange between a defensive king and his acutely critical soldiers’ (1992: 231); Dawson argues that Shakespeare’s plays ‘treat social conflicts in various and often contradictory ways, rather than foreclose them’ (1999: 56–7). The divisive debate that unfolds frustrates any kind of fellowship or fraternity. A competing fraternity in the play is offered by the mercenary Bardolph, Nym and Pistol, ‘sworn brothers’ (2.1.11, 3.2.45) who enter the war for profit rather than patria. This ‘brotherhood’ (2.1.108), however, serves to undermine the Chorus’s attempt to enlist the rhetoric of fraternity for nationalist purposes in the play, for the ‘sworn brothers’ cheapen or expose the king’s motives for going to war. As noted in the OED, ‘brother’ is ‘Used by sovereigns and princes to each other’. Examples of such usage abound in Shakespeare’s plays, including King Henry V wherein Henry terms the French King ‘brother France’ and the French King terms Henry ‘brother England’ (5.2.2, 10). In Act 5, Scene 2 of F, the Queen of France greets Henry not as ‘brother England’ but as ‘brother Ireland’ (TLN 2999). According to Gary Taylor, ‘brother Ireland’ is a ‘revealing textual error’, ‘Shakespeare’s own “Freudian slip” – a slip natural enough in 1599’ (1982: 7, 18). Reading ‘brother Ireland’ as a textual error conveniently forecloses critical reflection, however. The Queen’s ‘brother Ireland’ foregrounds King Henry’s trans- or non-national kingship, and, in keeping with the play’s exposure of a self-serving rhetoric of fraternity, points up the costs of dynastic warfare to the nation (in fifteenth-century France and in 1590’s Ireland – see Nine Years’ War). So long read as a celebration of all things English, H5 could be (as has been) read as ‘a skeptical counter-discourse about English expansionism within the British Isles’ (Highley 1997: 135–6). Whilst the concept of brotherhood serves to form an inclusive community, a couple of examples from Shakespeare’s plays reveal how the term could be used to exclude. Brabantio’s ‘my brothers of the state’ (Oth 1.2.96) works to set Othello apart from Brabantio’s fellow Venetians. And when Richard, Duke of Gloucester proclaims ‘I have no brother, I am like no brother’ (3H6 5.6.80), he is cutting himself off from any kind of community and anticipating his fratricidal actions. (C) ‘In war’, Howard and Rackin argue, ‘Henry’s men – whether Irish or English, Scottish or Welsh, yeoman or earl – temporarily become a band of brothers’ (1997: 4).

43

brother, brothers, brotherhood

For McEachern, ‘Henry offers the most powerful fantasy of collectivity in the play, which is also the most hierarchical denial of common will’ (1996: 107). For an extended analysis of King Henry V’s Saint Crispin Day’s speech and the concept of ‘brotherhood’, see Dowd (2010). brutish The OED lists a few definitions for ‘brutish’; the most significant for Shakespeare being ‘Of or pertaining to the brutes, or lower animals, as opposed to man’, ‘in want of intelligence or in failure to use reason: dull, irrational, uncultured, stupid’, ‘in want of control over the appetites and passions: passionate, sensual, furious’ and ‘Rough, rude; savage, brutal’. In many ways, there is much overlap in these different meanings; indeed, the following examples from Shakespeare reveal the variety of meanings at play when ‘brutish’ is used. In his famous ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech, Mark Antony’s use of ‘brutish’ obviously refers to ‘beasts’: I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke, But here I am to speak what I do know. You all did love him once, not without cause: What cause withholds you then to mourn for him? O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts And men have lost their reason. (JC 3.2.101–6) But the play on Brutus/brutish can be read as an attempt on Antony’s part to render the death of Julius Caesar a ‘rude, savage, brutal’ act, especially as Brutus in the previous scene denies that the slaying of Caesar by the conspirators was ‘a savage spectacle’ (3.1.223). In The Tempest, Miranda terms Caliban a ‘slave’, ‘savage’ and ‘A thing most brutish’ (1.2.352, 356, 358). Perhaps nowhere else in Shakespeare’s plays does ‘brutish’ take on such a multiplicity of meanings. Maley (2007) considers Shakespeare’s multi-nation state as ‘a thing most brutish’.

44

C Cambria see Wales cannibalism (A) Refers to the eating of the flesh of fellow humans. (B) The word enters the English language in the sixteenth century as a name for a supposed human-flesh-eating tribe in the Caribbean. Richard Eden’s translation of Sebastian Munster’s A treatyse of the newe India with other new founde landes and islandes (1553) contains a chapter titled ‘Of the people called Canibales or Anthropophagi, which are accustomed to eate mans fleshe’. Telling the story of his life, Othello describes the ‘Anthropophagi’ as ‘the cannibals that each other eat’ (1.3.144). Othello’s next line – ‘and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders’ (145–6) – associates cannibalism with wonder, difference, fascination, if not the imagination. Another association circulates in the period and in Shakespeare’s plays: namely, the figurative use of cannibal to signify a bloodthirsty, barbarous act. In King Henry VI, Part 3, for example, cannibal is used twice, first by Richard, Duke of York, who chastises Queen Margaret for slaying Richard’s son: ‘That face of his the hungry cannibals / Would not have touch’d, would not have stain’d with blood’ (1.4.152–3). Later in the play, Queen Margaret accuses those Yorkists who killed her son, Edward, of being ‘Butchers and villains! bloody cannibals!’ (5.5.59). Although not named, cannibalism is evoked in King Lear when Lear estranges his daughter Cordelia: The barbarous Scythian, Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom Be as well neighboured, pitied and relieved, As thou my sometime daughter. (1.1.117–21) King Lear evokes cannibalism as the ne plus ultra of barbarity, overgoing even the barbarous Scythian. Arguably the most extreme instance of cannibalism in Shakespeare’s plays occurs in Titus Andronicus. Addressing Chiron and Demetrius, Titus states Hark, villains, I will grind your bones to dust, And with your blood and it I’ll make a paste, And of the paste a coffin I will rear, 45

cannibalism

And make two pasties of your shameful heads, And bid that strumpet, your unhallowed dam, Like to the earth swallow her own increase. This is the feast that I have bid her to, And this the banquet she shall surfeit on. (5.2.186–93) As with many passages in this play, any attempt to bracket the Romans off from the play’s barbarous acts is undermined. John Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s Essays into English includes an essay titled ‘Of the Caniballes’. Here Montaigne mounts a rational defence of the muchmaligned natives of the New World: ‘I finde (as farre as I have beene informed) there is nothing in that nation, that is either barbarous or savage, vnlesse men call that barbarisme, which is not common to them’ (sig. K3r). Montaigne’s anti-Eurocentric reflections on ‘cannibals’ has been cited as a source for what some critics view as Shakespeare’s sympathetic portrayal of Caliban (often viewed as an anagram of Canibal) in The Tempest. (C) See Neill (2002: 346, 402, 410) and Noble (2003). chronicles (A) The name given to the voluminous histories that were popular in Tudor England. Although chronicles were generally ordered by the reign of monarchs and focused on the lives of monarchs, they were not exclusively dynastic histories; indeed, they, especially later Tudor texts, were very much a product and productive of a burgeoning English national consciousness. Chronicles served as a crucial source for many of Shakespeare’s plays, especially his history plays – which in their own time were called chronicle histories: for example, The Cronicle History of Henry the fift, With his battell fought at Agin Court in France. Togither with Auntient Pistoll. As it hath bene sundry times playd by the Right honorable the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants (1600) and M. William Shak-speare: HIS True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King LEAR and his three Daughters With the vnfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of TOM of Bedlam: as it was played before the Kings Maiestie at Whitehall vpon S. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes. By his Maiesties seruants playing vsually at the Gloabe on the Bancke-side (1608). (B) In King Henry V, Fluellen, after learning of England’s victory over the French at Agincourt, says to the King, ‘Your grandfather of famous memory, an’t please your majesty, and your great-uncle Edward the Plack Prince of Wales, as I have read in the chronicles, fought a most prave pattle here in France’ (4.7.91–4). The two main chronicle sources upon which Shakespeare drew were Hall’s The vnion of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (1548) and Holinshed’s The firste volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (1577) and The first and second volumes of Chronicles comprising 1 The description and historie of England, 2 The description and historie of Ireland, 3 The description and historie of Scotland (1587). Richard 46

chronicles

Helgerson has described chronicle as the ‘Ur-genre of national self-representation’. ‘More than any other discursive form’, he adds, ‘chronicle gave Tudor Englishmen a sense of their national identity’ (1992: 11). Certainly chronicle supplied the material from which early modern dramatists drew to stage their versions of national history. Consider, for example, the following entries from Thomas Nashe: the pollicie of Playes is very necessary, howsoeuer some shallow-braind censures (not the deepest serchers into the secrets of gouernment) mightily oppugne them. For whereas the after-noone beeing idlest time of the day; wherein men that are their owne masters, (as Gentlemen of the Court, the Innes of the Courte, and the number of Captaines and Souldiers about London) do wholy bestow themselues vpon pleasure, and that pleasure they deuide (howe vertuously it skils not) either into gameing, following of harlots, drinking, or seeing a Playe: is it not then better (since of foure extreames all the world cannot keepe them but they will choose one) that they should betake them to the least, which is Playes? Nay, what if I prooue Playes to be no extreame: but a rare exercise of vertue? First, for the subiect of them (for the most part) it is borrowed out of our English Chronicles, wherein our forefathers valiant acts (that haue line long buried in rustie brasse, and worme-eaten bookes) are reuiued, and they themselues raised from the Graue of Obliuion, and brought to pleade their aged Honours in open presence: than which, what can be a sharper reproofe to these degenerate effeminate dayes of ours. How would it haue ioyed braue Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and haue his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least, (at seuerall times) who in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding. (1592: sig. F3r) Whilst, on the one hand, Nashe recognizes the cultural value of ‘our English Chronicles’, for they exist as a repository of national memory, on the other hand he laments that the recording of the past in book form will lead to cultural amnesia. The public staging of national history, for Nashe, brings about a national reawakening, for the psychosocial dynamics of the stage promise to bring the past to life. The reference to ‘braue Talbot’ may be a reference to Shakespeare’s King Henry VI, Part 1, wherein the figure of Sir John Talbot is presented in a patriotic light: he is referred to as ‘the terror of the French’ (1.4.41) and as ‘English John Talbot’ (4.2.2) and ‘English Talbot’ (4.2.30). It is possible, therefore, that Nashe’s comments on the power of theatre to transform English chronicles into patriotic performances has one of Shakespeare’s history plays (of which he may have been co-author) in mind. There are numerous references to chronicles in Shakespeare’s plays; many of them revealing an awareness of the cultural and ideological work that chronicles perform. Although citing a French chronicle, Alencon’s following lines serve to represent the English as powerful warriors: 47

chronicles

Froissart, a countryman of ours, records England all Olivers and Rowlands bred During the time Edward the Third did reign. More truly now may this be verified, For none but Samsons and Goliases It sendeth forth to skirmish. One to ten? Lean, raw-boned rascals – who would e’er suppose They had such courage and audacity? (1H6 1.2.29–36) Consider, furthermore, the following passage: She hath been then more feared than harmed, my liege. For hear her but exampled by herself: When all her chivalry hath been in France And she a mourning widow of her nobles, She hath herself not only well defended But taken and impounded as a stray The King of Scots, whom she did send to France, To fill King Edward’s fame with prisoner kings And make her chronicle as rich with praise As is the ooze and bottom of the sea With sunken wrack and sumless treasuries. (H5 1.2.155–65) Here the Archbishop of Canterbury at once records a glorious moment in English history whilst invoking the national past to rouse King Henry into military action – in effect to re-enact an English victory in France. Similarly, in praise of Prince Hal, Vernon’s reference to chronicle exposes the ideological purpose of Tudor historiography: No, by my soul, I never in my life Did hear a challenge urg’d more modestly, Unless a brother should a brother dare To gentle exercise and proof of arms. He gave you all the duties of a man, Trimm’d up your praises with a princely tongue, Spoke your deservings like a chronicle, Making you ever better than his praise By still dispraising praise valu’d with you. (1H4 5.2.51–9) As a host of critics point out, there is a crucial difference between chronicle history, organized as it is by reigning monarchs, and the history play, which is less a record of the past than a staging, a re-enactment of the past. Phyllis Rackin has argued, perhaps unfairly, that chronicle is monologic: that is, given over to a single official voice. 48

chronicles

Shakespeare’s histories, for Rackin, are dialogic: they capture a host of voices ranging from royalty to nobility to the voices of the common people. King Richard III has long been read as a play informed, indeed influenced, by Tudor propaganda. But one scene, which includes three citizens, bears witness to an instance of dialogism, especially as the citizens express a concern for a nation scarred by its ruling elite: O, full of danger is the Duke of Gloucester, And the Queen’s sons and brothers, haught and proud; And were they to be rul’d, and not to rule, This sickly land might solace as before. (2.3.27–30) It is precisely the attention to ‘this sickly land’, according to Rackin, that is absent or less forcefully registered in chronicle accounts of the past but highlighted in the history play. The power of chronicle (as well as the stage) as a site of national memory is evident in the following lines, spoken by Hotspur to his father and uncle, whom he convinces to turn against King Henry: Nay, then I cannot blame his cousin King, That wish’d him on the barren mountains starve. But shall it be that you that set the crown Upon the head of this forgetful man, And for his sake wear the detested blot Of murderous subornation – shall it be That you a world of curses undergo, Being the agents, or base second means, The cords, the ladder, or the hangman rather? – O, pardon me, that I descend so low, To show the line and the predicament Wherein you range under this subtle King! Shall it for shame be spoken in these days, Or fill up chronicles in time to come, That men of your nobility and power Did gage them both in an unjust behalf (As both of you, God pardon it, have done) To put down Richard, that sweet lovely rose, And plant this thorn, this canker Bolingbroke? And shall it in more shame be further spoken, That you are fool’d, discarded, and shook off By him for whom these shames ye underwent? No, yet time serves wherein you may redeem Your banish’d honours, and restore yourselves Into the good thoughts of the world again: 49

chronicles

Revenge the jeering and disdain’d contempt Of this proud King, who studies day and night To answer all the debt he owes to you, Even with the bloody payment of your deaths. (1H4 1.3.156–85) What is remarkable about these lines is their invocation of history as a shaming device. In asking his father and uncle how they wish to be remembered in English ‘chronicles’, Hotspur is highlighting the crucial role that chronicle played in shaping the past, especially the nation’s past. (C) For a thorough examination of Shakespeare and his chronicle sources see Rackin (1990). See Hertel (2014) for an exploration of territory, history, religion, class and gender in Shakespeare’s staging of national history. See also relevant essays in Kewes, Archer, and Heal (2012). Cimmerian In Titus Andronicus the Roman Bassianus describes Aaron, a Moor, as Tamora’s ‘swart Cimmerian’ (2.2.72). The OED lists this passage in support of the following definition: ‘A member of a nomadic people of antiquity, the earliest known inhabitants of the Crimea, who overran Asia Minor in the 7th century B.C.’. Given their status as nomads, it is not surprising that Aaron, who is twice labelled a ‘barbarous Moor’ (2.2.78, 5.3.4), is associated with Cimmerians. The Cimmerians were also believed to have lived in perpetual darkness: hence, numerous references in the early modern period to ‘Cimmerian darkness’, both literally (night) and figuratively (ignorance). Since Bassianus labels Aaron ‘swart’ (i.e. swarthy), this secondary meaning is also relevant. citizen see also people (A) A range of meanings apply: the term could be used to distinguish a city dweller from a country dweller; it could refer simply to a member of a particular city, town or urban space (a citizen of Rome or London, for instance), often, as in the case of the City of London, designating one who holds certain privileges as a result of being free of one of the City’s livery companies; it could designate a member of a larger polity, such as a nation, commonwealth or kingdom, also holding certain privileges; it could also designate someone above common labourers but below the landed gentry – a social rather than a geographical or political designation – often labelled by literary historians as ‘the middling sort’. The representatives of England on John Speed’s map of ‘The Kingdome of England’ (see Figure 4) includes ‘A Citizen’ below ‘A Gentle Woman’ and above ‘A Country Woman’. It appears, then, that Speed’s citizen fits all of these definitions, even though he (and his wife) are not named as citizens of a particular city or town. In other words, Speed’s citizen is not a country dweller, so therefore is a member of a town or city, is an English subject, and is given a specific social status. If one denotation of ‘citizen’ is a member of a nation, commonwealth or kingdom, then, of course, all of the figures on Speed’s map are citizens. Thomas Smith foregrounds the civic nature and duties of citizens: ‘NE xt to gentlemen, be appointed citizens and burgesses, such as not onely be free and receiued as officers 50

citizen

within the cities, but also be of some substance to beare the charges. But these citizens and burgesses, be to serve the common wealth, in their cities & burrowes, or incorporate townes where they dwell’ (1583: 29). (B) All sorts of citizens can be found in Shakespeare’s plays: Roman citizens, London citizens (Shakespeare was never made free of the City of London), citizens of Ephesus, of Corioles, of Angiers, of Vienna, Venice and Verona. Citizens abound in the Roman plays, and there are numerous moments when the terms ‘citizen’ and ‘plebeian’ are used interchangeably. Coriolanus, for example, collapses the difference between citizens and plebeians, for stage directions that read ‘Enter the Plebeians’ are followed by ‘1 Citizen’, ‘2 Citizen’, ‘3 Citizen’ speech prefixes. No clear and coherent attitude to citizens, however, emerges. Coriolanus, who is described as ‘[f]ast foe to th’ plebeii, (2.3.182) – in an earlier play the Bishop of Winchester terms the Duke of Gloucester ‘a foe to citizens’ (1H6 1.3.62) – may think of citizens as ‘the many-headed multitude’ (2.3.15–16), but that sentiment is far from consistent in a play that lends citizens ample political voice (if less power). Similarly, in Julius Caesar, when Mark Antony says Here is the will, and under Caesar’s seal. To every Roman citizen he gives, To every several man, seventy-five drachmas. (3.2.233–5) the assumption is that Caesar has bequeathed this to a non-aristocratic, non-patrician civic collective. Antony terms them ‘citizens’, whom he addresses as ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ (3.2.74); however, the speech prefixes given to the ‘citizens’ in this scene include ‘First’, ‘Second’, ‘Third’ and ‘Fourth Plebeian’. In King Henry V, the Chorus’s narration of Henry’s victorious return from France posits a host of London’s ‘citizens’ welcoming the monarch, and the Chorus compares this imagined scene to something similar in ancient Rome: But now behold, In the quick forge and working-house of thought, How London doth pour out her citizens. The Mayor and all his brethren in best sort, Like to the senators of th’antique Rome With the plebeians swarming at their heels, Go forth and fetch their conquering Caesar in. (5.Chor.22–8) Who exactly constitute ‘citizens’ in this imagined scenario? Does ‘citizens’ refer inclusively to the ‘Mayor’, ‘his brethren’ and ‘the plebeians’? Or is it the case that the ‘mayor and all his brethren’, who are likened to ‘the senators of the antique Rome’ are distinguished from ‘swarming’ ‘plebeians’. Given that the word ‘brethren’ could, as the OED points out, mean ‘fellow citizen’, and given that ‘plebeian’ could mean ‘common’, 51

citizen

‘ignoble’, ‘vulgar’, it is not impossible that these lines exclude ‘plebeians’ from the status of ‘citizens’. In King Henry VI, Part 2, a distinction appears to be drawn between ‘citizens’ and the ‘people’, where the people are represented as a mob made up of those of a socially inferior standing: Jack Cade hath almost gotten London bridge; The citizens fly and forsake their houses; The rascal people, thirsting after prey, Join with the traitor; and they jointly swear To spoil the city and your royal court. (4.4.48–52) The phrase ‘The rascal people’ reverberates throughout Shakespeare, especially given the numerous references to ‘the rabble’, most prominently in Coriolanus. Prince Escalus, quelling a civil brawl that involves servingmen, citizens and nobles, refers to his entire audience as ‘subjects’ and as ‘citizens’: Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace, Profaners of this neighbour-stained steel – Will they not hear? What ho! You men, you beasts! That quench the fire of your pernicious rage With purple fountains issuing from your veins, On pain of torture from those bloody hands Throw your mistemper’d weapons to the ground And hear the sentence of your moved prince. Three civil brawls bred of an airy word By thee, old Capulet, and Montague, Have thrice disturb’d the quiet of our streets And made Verona’s ancient citizens Cast by their grave-beseeming ornaments To wield old partisans, in hands as old, Canker’d with peace, to part your canker’d hate. (RJ 1.1.81–95) If the reference to ‘Verona’s ancient citizens’ is unclear, it could be argued that the Prince expects a certain kind of behaviour from his citizens, certainly not this unruly brawl. Octavius Caesar’s vision of a world turned upside down in the wake of Antony’s death invokes a civility–savagery opposition in which ‘citizens’ occupy the space of civility, even if ‘civil’ here is taken to mean ‘city’: The breaking of so great a thing should make A greater crack. The round world Should have shook lions into civil streets

52

citizen

And citizens to their dens. The death of Antony Is not a single doom; in the name lay A moiety of the world. (AC 5.1.14–19) Similarly, Canterbury’s conservative imagining or ordering of society includes ‘civil citizens’: Therefore doth heaven divide The state of man in diverse functions, Setting endeavour in continual motion, To which is fixed, as an aim or butt, Obedience. For so work the honey-bees, Creatures that by a rule in nature teach The act of order to a peopled kingdom. They have a king and officers of sorts, Where some like magistrates correct at home, Others like merchants venture trade abroad, Others like soldiers, armed in their stings, Make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds, Which pillage they with merry march bring home To the tent-royal of their emperor, Who busied in his majesty surveys The singing masons building roofs of gold, The civil citizens kneading up the honey, The poor mechanic porters crowding in Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate, The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum, Delivering o’er to executors pale The lazy yawning drone. (H5 1.2.183–204) ‘Civil’ here could mean orderly, but the fact that ‘civil citizens’ are bracketed by masons and ‘mechanic porters’ suggests that the citizens are ‘civil’ in terms of social graces as much as social position. King Richard III, which includes the most references to ‘citizens’ in an English setting, supplies some fascinating material on London’s citizens. In Act 2, Scene 3, for instance, the three citizens constitute an early modern public sphere wherein ‘the news’ (3) of King Edward’s death is circulated and reflected upon. Despite its brevity, this scene does and does not present London’s citizens as ‘anxious and inconsequential’ (Archer 2005: 1). In a play that dramatizes an aristocratic struggle for the crown, the three citizens offer a voice distinct from that of the play’s nobles. Their concern is with ‘the state’ (16, 18) and the ‘land’ (19, 30). Their political acumen in this scene is

53

citizen

proleptic, for when King Richard and the Duke of Buckingham plot to manipulate London’s citizens into receiving Richard as monarch things do not go according to plan. Richard instructs Buckingham to inform the Lord Mayor that his brother Edward was illegitimate in order to secure his claim to the throne; interestingly, Richard’s character assassination of Edward includes his execution of a ‘citizen’: Go after, after, cousin Buckingham: The Mayor towards Guildhall hies him in all post. There, at your meet’st advantage of the time, Infer the bastardy of Edward’s children; Tell them how Edward put to death a citizen Only for saying he would make his son Heir to the Crown – meaning indeed his house, Which by the sign thereof was termed so. (3.5.71–8) Once Buckingham has carried out Richard’s orders, Richard asks Buckingham how this message was received by the citizens: ‘Now, by the holy Mother of our Lord’ he responds, ‘The citizens are mum, say not a word’ (3.7.2–3). Whilst Richard calls the unresponsive citizens ‘tongueless blocks’ (42), critics have read the London citizens’ silence in response to Buckingham’s nomination of Richard less as a failure to respond than as a symbolic exercise of power, as resistance to Richard. Interestingly, this is the only moment in the play to include a reference to ‘the people’ (3.7.29). In Act 2, Scene 1 of King John, the citizens of Angiers are given a significant political voice. To King John’s ‘Whose party do the townsmen yet admit?’ and King Philip’s ‘Speak, citizens, for England; who’s your king?’ a citizen responds: ‘The king of England, when we know the king’ (2.1.361–3). Although the citizens of Angiers ‘are the king of England’s subjects’ (267), they mark a major contribution to a play that reflects deeply on ‘borrow’d majesty’ (1.1.4). If the examples above use ‘citizen’ to refer to an inhabitant of an urban space, the example below, spoken by the Countess of Auvergne to Talbot, presents ‘citizens’ as members of a national space: Long time thy shadow hath been thrall to me; For in my gallery thy picture hangs. But now the substance shall endure the like, And I will chain these legs and arms of thine, That hast by tyranny these many years Wasted our country, slain our citizens And sent our sons and husbands captivate. (1H6 2.3.35–41) Speaking as a Frenchwoman, the Countess’s ‘our country’, ‘our citizens’ includes all French ‘citizens’.

54

civil, civility

(C) For a sustained exploration on the concept of citizen, see Archer (2005), who notes that Shakespeare was ‘a civic outsider and an urban insider’ (1). See also Kermode (2012: 85–118), who examines the incorporation of aliens in the second tetralogy. On ‘the middling sort’, see Leinwand (1993). Lupton (2005: 75–101) examines the concept of citizenship in relation to Shylock and early modern Venice. Holland’s Arden edition of Coriolanus includes an informative section on ‘Voting and citizenship’ (2013: 77–97). civil, civility (A) Terms used to describe a person or a collective body of individuals or an advanced social or political state. The organization of people into a civil society brings about but does not guarantee civility. Both terms are synonymous with civilized, and both are opposed to uncivil and incivility. (B) The use of civil to designate fellow members of a body politic is evident in the second use of the word in the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet: ‘Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean’ (Pro.4). If ‘civil blood’ refers to the blood of Verona’s citizens (Weis 2012: 123), ‘hands’ here functions as a synecdoche for the Veronese body politic, and the uncleanliness signifies the lack of civility within feuding Verona. The invocation of civil and civility in Shakespeare’s plays often denotes a failure of these concepts. Helena’s line ‘If you were civil, and knew courtesy’ (MND 3.2.147) designates civil and civility as synonymous with courtesy, manners, education and good breeding: what Orlando terms ‘smooth civility’ (AYL 2.7.97); however, her use of ‘If’ points out the perceived lack of civility amongst her fellow Athenians. Civil and civility perform crucial cultural and ideological work, especially in the construction of national identities. The Earl of Salisbury’s praise of Richard, Duke of York is underpinned by an opposition between a civilizing English army and an uncivilized, wild Irish nation: ‘And, brother York, thy acts in Ireland, / In bringing them to civil discipline’ (2H6 1.1.192–3). Such an opposition is given graphic presence on John Speed’s 1612 map of Ireland (see Figure 5), with its hierarchical ordering of gentle, civil and wild subjects. Perhaps more than any other Shakespeare play, Othello calls attention to the complexity of these terms. The following passage, spoken by Roderigo to Brabantio, is underpinned by a variety of oppositions and hierarchies – geographical, national regional, religious, social: Sir, I will answer any thing. But I beseech you, If’t be your pleasure and most wise consent, As partly I find it is, that your fair daughter At this odd-even and dull watch o’th’ night, Transported with no worse nor better guard But with a knave of common hire, a gondolier, To the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor – If this be known to you, and your allowance, We then have done you bold and saucy wrongs.

55

civil, civility

But if you know not this, my manners tell me We have your wrong rebuke. Do not believe That from the sense of all civility I thus would play and trifle with your reverence. Your daughter, if you have not given her leave, I say again, hath made a gross revolt, Tying her duty, beauty, wit and fortunes In an extravagant and wheeling stranger Of here and everywhere. (1.1.118–35) The ‘sense of civility’ works on a couple of levels here. On the one hand, Roderigo couches his actions as a civil duty performed by a Venetian for a fellow and socially superior Venetian. On the other hand, Desdemona’s ‘gross revolt’ is represented as beyond the bounds of civility: in choosing a ‘lascivious Moor’ for a husband, Desdemona acts, in the eyes of Iago, Roderigo and Brabantio, in an unVenetian, uncivilized manner. But when Othello breaks up the brawl in Act 2, Scene 3, he does so voicing a rhetoric of civility. Othello says to Montano: ‘Worthy Montano, you were wont to be civil’ (2.3.182). However Iago and Roderigo present Othello, the Moor of Venice at the play’s opening, the Othello who occupies the stage in the play’s initial scenes is very much a representative of not only a civil state but also of civility. In The Merchant of Venice, Gratiano’s request to accompany Bassanio to Belmont launches a discussion of civility and incivility. Bassanio lectures Gratiano for being ‘too wild, too rude, and bold of voice’ and chastises him for his ‘wild behaviour’ (2.2.172, 178). Gratiano’s response is revealing: Signior Bassanio, hear me,– If I do not put on a sober habit, Talk with respect, and swear but now and then, Wear prayer-books in my pocket, look demurely, Nay more, while grace is saying hood mine eyes Thus with my hat, and sigh and say ‘amen:’ Use all the observance of civility Like one well studied in a sad ostent To please his grandam, never trust me more. (180–8) What is remarkable about Gratiano’s response is its acknowledgement of the performance of civility, rendering civility a social construct rather than a natural condition. (C) For a historical investigation of civility in relation to state formation in Western Europe, see Elias (1994). ‘[E]arly modern national self-representation’, Helgerson points out, ‘based its claim to cultural legitimacy … on aligning itself with standards of order and civility that transcended national boundaries but enforced boundaries of class’ 56

civil war

(1992: 11). Neill notes that ‘categories like “civil” and “barbarous,” “naked” and “clothed” were often of far more significance in establishing the boundaries of otherness than the markers of mere biological diversity’ (2000: 274). See Shrank on civility in Coriolanus (2003). Highley attends to civility and incivility in King Henry IV, Part 1 (1997: 86–109). Edmund Spenser’s cultural nationalism leads him to posit in his A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596) a refashioned England as a result of undergoing a civilizing process: ‘the English were at first as stout and warlike a people as ever were the Irish, and yet you see are now brought to that civility, that no nation in the world excelleth them in all goodly conversation, and all the studies of knowledge and humanity’ (1970: 12). civil war see also Wars of the Roses (A) War between the citizens, inhabitants or subjects of a single community, nation or kingdom. (B) Civil war occupies a number of Shakespeare’s plays, including his history plays, his Roman plays and many tragedies. The attitude to civil war is captured nicely in some of the synonymous terms used in those plays: ‘civil butchery’ (1H4 1.1.13); ‘civil broils’, ‘Civil dissension’ (1H6 1.1.53, 3.1.72); ‘civil enmity’ (3H6 4.6.98); ‘civil strife’ (JC 1.3.11, 3.1.203); ‘civil tumult’ (KJ 4.2.247); ‘civil and uncivil arms’ (R2 3.3.102); ‘civil wounds’ (R2 1.3.128; R3 5.5.40); ‘civil brawls’ (RJ 1.1.89); ‘Domestic fury’ (JC 3.1.263) and ‘domestic broils’ (R3 2.4.60). The topic of civil war fascinated Elizabethans, especially in the latter years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, when uncertainty over the succession spawned fears of a power struggle. In King Richard II, as power is slipping away from King Richard, Carlisle prophesies civil war as a result of the Lancastrian Henry Bolingbroke’s rise to power: My Lord of Herford here, whom you call king, Is a foul traitor to proud Herford’s king. And if you crown him, let me prophesy – The blood of English shall manure the ground, And future ages groan for this foul act, Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels, And, in this seat of peace, tumultuous wars Shall kin with kin, and kind with kind, confound. Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny, Shall here inhabit, and this land be call’d The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls – O, if you raise this house against this house, It will the woefullest division prove That ever fell upon this cursed earth. Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so, Lest child, child’s children, cry against you woe. (4.1.134–49)

57

civil war

Given that these lines refer to events already depicted by Shakespeare in his first tetralogy, they could have been received by an Elizabethan audience as a reference to the potential power struggles likely to surface upon the heirless Queen’s death. Many of the period’s chronicle histories documented and reflected on the nation’s traumatic civil wars. One of the most remarkable civil war texts from the Elizabethan period is John Speed’s A Description of the Ciuill Warres of England, a text that encompasses Speed’s broadside map of 1600, titled ‘The Invasions of England and Ireland with all their Civill Warrs Since the Conqvest’ (see Figure 3). Speed’s civil war text documents ‘the seueral battels fought by Sea and Land, at seuerall times and in seuerall places of England and Ireland, and the parts adioyning, within these fiue hundred yeeres last past’. Permeating Speed’s prose is a deep sense of shame: ‘Englands ciuill wars’, he writes, are ‘the markes of our owne infamies and staines to be washed away rather with repentance, then againe to be renewed by remembrance.’ The text concludes with a call to ‘Cease ciuill broyels, O Englands subjects cease, / With streames of blood staine this faire soyle no more’. Shakespeare’s various representations of civil war, especially in his English histories, convey a similar sense of collective shame, figuring the wars as national catastrophes. ‘Civil dissension is a viperous worm’, states King Henry VI , ‘That gnaws the bowels of the commonwealth’ (1H6 3.1.72–3). The use of commonwealth here rather than kingdom may be significant, highlighting the ill effects of civil war on the common people. Like Shakespeare’s histories, Speed’s broadside civil war text, both the map and the prose material, is alert to the British and Irish dimension of these historical battles. But even as Speed highlights Irish, Scottish and Welsh dimensions of ‘Englands ciuill wars’, he represents those wars as battles between fellow Englishmen: These being for the most part Ciuill Battels betweene meere English-men of one Nation, wherein the parties victorers, besides the losse of their owne side, procured on the other, the fall and ruine of them that were all of his owne Countrey, many of them of his owne acquaintance and alliance, and most of them perhaps his owne friends in any other cause, then that in which hee contended for. In many ways, Shakespeare, too, highlights the larger geographical framework of ‘English’ civil wars. Take, for example, King Henry IV, Part 1, which, in the play’s opening scene, references Anglo-Welsh and Anglo-Scottish conflict. But the play is bracketed by wars between ‘meere’ (that is, pure) Englishmen. King Henry’s opening speech proclaims an end to England’s civil wars: ‘No more the thirsty entrance of this soil / Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood’, the King exclaims (1.1.5–6). What the king imagines in this speech is a reunification of England and a forging of Englishness. ‘[T]hose opposed eyes’, he continues, Which, like the meteors of a troubled heaven, All of one nature, of one substance bred, Did lately meet in the intestine shock And furious close of civil butchery, 58

clime

Shall now, in mutual well-beseeming ranks, March all one way, and be no more oppos’d Against acquaintance, kindred, and allies. The edge of war, like an ill-sheathed knife, No more shall cut his master. (1.1.9–18) Speaking a language reminiscent of Speed (‘many of them of his owne acquaintance and alliance’), King Henry attempts to recuperate the trauma of civil war for nationalistic purposes. War that spilled beyond England’s borders is represented as a war between feuding brothers: ‘All of one nature, of one substance bred, / Did lately meet in the intestine shock / And furious close of civil butchery’. In the wake of civil war, the English nation emerges unified: ‘in mutual well-beseeming ranks’. And at the play’s conclusion, two Englishman – Prince Hal and Hotspur – enact a reassuringly fratricidal battle for ‘one England’ (5.4.65). (C) See Ivic (2004) for an account of how civil war is represented and recuperated in King Henry IV, Part 1. On the trauma of civil war in King Henry VI, Part 3, see Ivic (2013a). clime (A) A term used to designate a place or region especially in relation to climate.

Figure 3 John Speed, ‘The Invasions of England and Ireland with all their Civill Warrs Since the Conqvest’ (London c. 1601). By permission of Cambridge University Library. 59

clime

(B) In Othello Iago could easily be referring to ‘clime’ when he speaks of Venice’s ‘fertile climate’ (1.1.69). Queen Margaret’s Was I for this nigh wrecked upon the sea And twice by awkward wind from England’s bank Drove back again unto my native clime? (2H6 3.2.82–4) uses clime to mean region, in this instance France. If the Prince of Morocco’s ‘of our clime’ (MV 2.1.10) is a reference to a region, then the region could be specific (Morocco) or more general (northern Africa or even Africa). This line in its full context bears witness to the presence of climate in meanings of clime: Mislike me not for my complexion, The shadowed livery of the burnish’d sun, To whom I am a neighbour, and near bred. Bring me the fairest creature northward born, Where Phoebus’ fire scarce thaws the icicles, And let us make incision for your love, To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine. I tell thee lady this aspect of mine Hath fear’d the valiant, – by my love I swear, The best-regarded virgins of our clime Have lov’d it too: I would not change this hue, Except to steal your thoughts my gentle queen. (2.1.1–12) Morocco’s ‘clime’, therefore, is determined by his proximity to the equator (Drakakis 2010: 222) and, moreover, opposed to those ‘northward born’. It is precisely Morocco’s clime that accounts for ‘this aspect’ of his: that is, his dark complexion or hue. Iago’s ‘Of her own clime, complexion and degree’ (3.3.234), said in reference to Desdemona, could also be read in a number of ways: within the context of this line, clime could refer to Desdemona’s fellow Venetians or her fellow Italians or even her fellow Europeans, especially since Iago is opposing ‘her own’ to black Othello. In Titus Andronicus, the Nurse describes Aaron and Tamora’s child as A joyless, dismal, black and sorrowful issue. Here is the babe, as loathsome as a toad Amongst the fair-faced breeders of our clime. (4.2.67–9) Clime here intersects with discourses of blackness, whiteness and race. (C) Floyd-Wilson (2003) focuses on climate and geography in relation to ethnicity and race in Cymbeline and Othello. 60

common, commons, commoner, commoners, commonalty

common, commons, commoner, commoners, commonalty (A) To be common in early modern England was to be one of the common people: that is, someone below the peerage. ‘Undistinguished by rank or position; belonging to the commonalty; of low degree’, according to the OED. A more specific distinction is offered by Thomas Smith: ‘when we in England do say the Lordes and the commons, the knights, esquires & other gentlemen, with citizens, burgeses & yeomen be accompted to make the commons’ (1583: 23). Common is frequently used as an adjective in such phrases as the common people, the common sort and the common voice, and, depending on the speaker and/or context, the term, and associated terms, could be used in a neutral or disparaging manner. (B) Shakespeare frequently uses ‘common’ as an adjective, and there are numerous references to ‘the commons’. Shakespeare uses the word ‘commoner’ just twice; in both instances (Oth 4.2.74, AW 5.3.194) it refers to ‘a common harlot, prostitute’ (OED). ‘Commoners’ is not used much more. Sicinius, a tribune of the people, uses the word without disdain: ‘The commoners, for whom we stand’ (Cor 2.1.227). ‘Commoners’ is used again in this play in a stage direction, as it is twice in the opening scene of Julius Caesar. In Act 1, Scene 1 of the latter play, Flavius, also a tribune of the people, terms the commoners of Rome ‘my countrymen’ (57) but, once they have exited the stage, he labels them ‘the vulgar’ (71). Shakespeare twice uses the word commonalty: ‘the love o’ the commonalty’ (H8 1.2.170); ‘he’s a very dog to the commonalty’ (Cor 1.1.27–8). In both instances, ‘commonalty’ refers to the common people. The representation of commoners in Shakespeare’s plays is anything but straightforward. Commoners are viewed, especially by those ranked above them, as ‘the common herd’ (JC 1.1.71, 1.2.263) and ‘the common leg of people’ (Tim 3.6.79). It could be argued that in such instances we learn more about the attitudes of the speaker than those to whom the words refer. By no means do nobles have a monopoly on the rhetoric of commonalty. The common soldier Pistol addresses a fellow ‘common man’ (H5 4.8.51) – actually King Henry V in disguise – as follows: ‘Discuss unto me, art thou officer? Or art thou base, common and popular?’ (4.1.37–8). For a play that is often heralded for its rhetoric of brotherhood, King Henry V bears witness to deep class divisions, especially in the wake of England’s victory at Agincourt. The French messenger Montjoy’s concession of defeat clearly demarcates nobility and commoners: I come to thee for charitable licence That we may wander o’er this bloody field To look our dead and then to bury them; To sort our nobles from our common men. For many of our princes – woe the while! – Lie drowned and soaked in mercenary blood; So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs In blood of princes; and their wounded steeds Fret fetlock-deep in gore and with wild rage Yerk out their armed heels at their dead masters, 61

common, commons, commoner, commoners, commonalty

Killing them twice. O give us leave, great King, To view the field in safety and dispose Of their dead bodies! (4.7.70–82) The attitude expressed here towards common men is not restricted to the French, however. When Henry asks Exeter to name the French prisoners, his response is: Charles, Duke of Orleans, nephew to the King; John, Duke of Bourbon, and Lord Boucicault. Of other lords and barons, knights and squires, Full fifteen hundred, besides common men. (4.8.75–8) And when Henry lists the English dead, common men are erased from the historical record: Edward the Duke of York; the Earl of Suffolk; Sir Richard Keighley; Davy Gam, esquire; None else of name, and of all other men But five-and-twenty. (102–5) ‘None else of name’ is, of course, a reference to commoners – although Smith would include ‘Sir Richard Keighley’ and ‘Davy Gam, esquire’ among ‘the commons’. Owen Glendower’s claim to be ‘extraordinary’ is followed by ‘I am not in the roll of common men’ (1H4 3.1.38, 40). (C) Patterson (1989: 32–51) focuses on popular protest in King Henry VI, Part 2. Archer (2005: 131–44) focuses on Roman citizens/plebeians. commonwealth, commonweal, weal (A) The three terms are generally synonymous, and all refer to forms of government, whether a kingdom, realm or state as well as (but less frequently) to delimited territories, whether a country or a nation. The term can be highly politicized in the sense that it often surfaces in dialogue about the common good or the welfare of the national community. In his De republica Anglorum (1583), Thomas Smith divides commonwealths into ‘rulinges by one [Monarchia], by the fewer part [Aristocratia], & by the multitude or greater number [Democratia]’. Of the third form, democracy, Smith writes: ‘where the multitude doth gouerne, the one they call a common wealth by the generall name … or the rule of the people’ (3), which invests commonwealth with less monarchical, more popular rule. But in a chapter titled ‘That common wealthes or gouernements are not most commonly simple but mixt’, Smith, reflecting, no doubt, on contemporary England as well as historical commonwealths, adds: NO w although the gouernements of common wealthes be thus diuided into three, and cutting ech into two … yet you must not take that ye shall finde any common wealth or gouernement simple, pure and absolute in his sort and kinde. (5) 62

commonwealth, commonweal, weal

In short, the term commonwealth signified variously in the early modern period; close and careful attention to the context in which the word appears is crucial. (B) Weal, commonweal and commonwealth are terms that surface frequently in Shakespeare’s early plays, especially Titus Andronicus and the King Henry VI plays. That the terms are interchangeable manifests itself in Tit: Titus Andronicus refers to Rome as ‘this commonweal’ (1.1.231) and to Saturninus as ‘King and commander of our commonweal’ (1.1.251). Saturninus then speaks of ‘the commonwealth of Rome’ (1.1.318); Aaron refers to Saturninus’s ‘commonweal’ (2.1.24). What makes the use of commonweal and commonwealth so remarkable in this play is the fact that it opens with a power struggle between two sons (Saturninus and Bassianus) whose father (who was Emperor of Rome) has died and left them, it seems, to sort out who will inherit his title. Enter Titus, a general who has returned victoriously to Rome, and to whom the title of emperor is offered: as his brother Marcus notes, Titus has been ‘[c]hosen’ by ‘the people of Rome’ (1.1.23, 20). It could be argued that the word commonwealth, given its flexibility, is an apt term for a political body that is unstable and in limbo. Another Roman play that supplies serious reflection on the ‘weal o’th’ common’ (1.1.150) is Coriolanus, which is not surprising given its attention to the relationship between the people and the political body under which they find themselves. The King Henry VI plays are concerned with not only war, especially civil war, but also the impact such war has on the nation and its people. Commonwealth emerges in these plays within this context. In King Henry VI, Part 1, Humphrey, the Duke of Gloucester occupies the position of Protector of the realm during King Henry’s minority, and, for some characters, a protector of the country’s welfare is precisely how Gloucester is received: one character, a servingman, describes Gloucester as ‘So kind a father of the commonweal’ (1H6 3.1.98). In response to Gloucester’s proposal of marriage for the young king, Henry states Marriage, uncle? Alas, my years are young, And fitter is my study and my books Than wanton dalliance with a paramour. Yet call th’ambassadors and, as you please, So let them have their answers every one. I shall be well content with any choice Tends to God’s glory and my country’s weal. (5.1.21–7) The implication here is that Henry, however naively, reveals a care for his country. Richard, Duke of York’s reference to ‘The King and commonweal’ (2H6 1.4.42) seems to draw a distinction between the seat of monarch and that of government or nation. This is not the only appearance: later we find ‘king and commonweal’ and ‘my king and commonweal’ (2.1.22, 182). The use of commonweal in this play suggests a fissure between a duty owed to the monarchy and love for one’s country. Henry Bolingbroke’s description of ‘Bushy, Bagot and their complices’ as ‘The caterpillars of 63

commonwealth, commonweal, weal

the commonwealth, / Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away’ (R2 2.3.164–6) marks another instance of the use of commonwealth that foregrounds the common good. In Macbeth, the Scottish nobles’ opposition to Macbeth is marked by a language of nationhood grounded in a commitment to the country’s welfare and a connectedness with the country: Well; march we on, To give obedience where ’tis truly ow’d: Meet we the med’cine of the sickly weal; And with him pour we, in our country’s purge, Each drop of us. (5.2.25–9) The reference to ‘obedience’ may have monarchical overtones; however, the Pelicanlike imagery connects the Scottish nobles with an individual or group sacrifice for the sake of the Scottish nation. Gonzalo’s ‘utopian’ vision begins ‘I’th’ commonwealth’ (Tem 2.1.148), which may suggest that commonwealth, as a political concept, affords theoretical reimagining precisely because its meaning is flexible. Pocock notes that ‘the most powerful minds using [political speech] are exploring the tension between established linguistic usages and the need to understand words in new ways’ (1985: 13); Gonzalo’s use of commonwealth, informed by Shakespeare’s reading of Montaigne, is a prime example of such linguistic and intellectual innovation. Apemantus’s ‘the commonwealth of Athens is become a forest of beasts’ (Tim 4.3.349–50) draws upon a rhetoric of civility to oppose the order and civility of a commonwealth with its political other. (C) Hadfield’s (2005) examination of republican ideas in Shakespeare attends to the playwright’s use of the word commonwealth. See also Parker (1996: 83–115), who reflects on commoners and the commonwealth. Howard and Rackin explore Bolingbroke’s and Richard’s competing conceptualizations of England (1997: 137–59). Hertel (2014: 153–89) ponders just how common the commonwealth is; he also explores nation and class in King Henry VI, Part 2. complexion (A) Could signify disposition and temperament but also refers to skin colour. One’s or a people’s complexion could be determined by the humours (as well as heat, cold, moisture, dryness), by geographical position or clime, not to mention a whole host of other sources. In short, one’s complexion is often overdetermined. (B) In reference to Nell ‘the kitchen wench’ (CE 3.2.95), Antipholus of Syracuse asks Dromio of Syracuse, ‘What complexion is she of?’, to which Dromio replies, ‘Swart like my shoe’ (101–2). King Ferdinand speaks of the ‘sweet complexion’ of ‘Ethiops’ (LLL 4.3.264). Iago’s reference to Desdemona not choosing a suitor ‘Of her own clime, complexion and degree’ (3.3.234) appears to employ ‘complexion’ to signify skin colour, especially given the fact that she has chosen ‘black Othello’ (2.3.29). When Portia says of the Prince of Morocco ‘if he have the condition of a saint, and the 64

conquest

complexion of a devil’ (MV 1.2.127–8) it is possible to ascribe a variety of meanings to ‘complexion’, but given that the devil is imagined as black – ‘The black prince, sir, alias the prince of darkness, alias the devil’ (AW 4.5.41–2) – complexion as skin colour is a definite possibility. Morocco’s Mislike me not for my complexion, The shadowed livery of the burnish’d sun, To whom I am a neighbour, and near bred. (MV 2.1.1–3) is a clear reference to his skin colour, and Portia’s words upon Morocco’s dismissal – ‘Let all of his complexion choose me so’ (2.7.79) – may also refer to skin colour. Neill argues that ‘the pressure of encounter with so many unfamiliar peoples begins to shift definitions of alterity away from the dominant paradigm of culture, and … it is possible to see color emerging as the most important criterion for defining otherness, even as “nation” becomes the key term of self-definition’ (2000: 275). Given the national stereotypes in relation to Portia’s white European suitors that surface in Act 1, Scene 2 of The Merchant of Venice (the monolingual Englishman, the drunk German) the emphasis on Morocco’s ‘complexion’ bears witness to skin colour as a marker of otherness. (C) See Floyd-Wilson (2003) and Iyengar (2005). conquest (A) Subjugation of another country or people by means of force. The act of conquest is attended by language that defines the conqueror and the conquered in ideologically charged terms, drawing upon discourses of gender, race, nation, class and civility: English conquest in Ireland or Wales can be presented as a civilizing conquest; Roman conquest can be hailed as a masculine triumph over a feminized land and people. Resistance to foreign conquest plays a central role in defining the nation as impregnable. Civil war is often represented as a shameful act of selfconquest. (B) King Henry V, with its depiction of the miraculous English victory over the French at the Battle of Agincourt, may be Shakespeare’s most exemplary conquest play, constructing England as a powerful conquering nation and the French as arrogant losers, although the romantically comic conclusion to the play (Henry’s betrothal to the French Princess Katherine) complicates matters. A triumphant Henry is compared to Rome’s ‘conquering Caesar’ (5.Chor.28) – an ambivalent reference if read in relation to the two Caesars that Shakespeare placed on the stage. The play’s epilogue, however, sounds a sour note: Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen, Our bending author hath pursued the story, In little room confining mighty men, Mangling by starts the full course of their glory. Small time, but in that small most greatly lived This star of England. Fortune made his sword 65

conquest

By which the world’s best garden he achieved, And of it left his son imperial lord. Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned King Of France and England, did this king succeed, Whose state so many had the managing That they lost France and made his England bleed, Which oft our stage hath shown; and for their sake, In your fair minds let this acceptance take. As noted in this epilogue, King Henry V’s conquest echoes in chronologically later but compositionally earlier plays: ‘as sure as English Henry [VI ] lives / And as his father here was conqueror’ (1H6 3.2.78–9); ‘Henry [VI ], son unto a conqueror, / Is likely to beget more conquerors’ (1H6 5.5.73–4); ‘Henry’s conquest’ (2H6 1.1.94). But as also noted in the epilogue, Henry V’s conquests were achieved in vain, for his son’s reign is marked by the loss of conquered France. In fact, Henry’s funeral procession, which opens King Henry VI, Part 1, is interrupted by news that France has reclaimed land captured by the dead king: ‘Guyenne, Champagne, Reims, Rouen, Orleans, / Paris, Gisors, Poitiers are all quite lost’ (1.1.60–1). The first tetralogy traces a potential (re)conquest of France, but the action gives way to noble in-fighting and civil warfare: Thus, while the vulture of sedition Feeds in the bosom of such great commanders, Sleeping neglection doth betray to loss The conquest of our scarce-cold conqueror, That ever-living man of memory, Henry the Fifth. Whiles they each other cross, Lives, honours, lands and all hurry to loss. (1H6 4.3.47–53) As the pilfering of Bardolph, Pistol and Nym, and as the treasonous plot laid by Cambridge, Scroop and Grey attests, ‘sedition’ was never very far from the surface of King Henry V. Internal conquest, conquest within the country, dominates so many of Shakespeare’s plays, including his Roman plays, all four of which examine some form of internal conquest: that is, Roman versus Roman violence. Brutus’s reference to Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar’s ‘vile conquest’ (JC 5.5.36) provides a fine gloss on how internal conquest is imagined, as does Volumnia’s speech to Coriolanus: Thou know’st, great son, The end of war’s uncertain, but this certain, That if thou conquer Rome, the benefit Which thou shalt thereby reap is such a name Whose repetition will be dogg’d with curses, Whose chronicle thus writ: ‘The man was noble, 66

conquest

But with his last attempt he wip’d it out, Destroy’d his country, and his name remains To the ensuing age abhorr’d’. (Cor 5.3.142–50) Conquering Romans are to be memorialized in Roman history – imagined in this play in the form of ‘chronicle’ and ‘annals’ (5.6.115) – but Coriolanus’s place in Roman cultural memory will be marked by everlasting scorn and shame. Shakespeare’s English history plays, precisely because of English history, dramatize internal conquest. In disputation with Richard, Duke of York over his title to the throne, King Henry VI states that ‘Henry the Fourth by conquest got the crown’ (3H6 1.1.136). Henry Bolingbroke’s ‘conquest’ unleashes a nasty struggle for the crown, a conquest that takes its toll on the nation. John of Gaunt’s ‘That England, that was wont to conquer others, / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself’ (R2 2.1.65–6) finds its echo in the Bastard’s closing lines in King John: This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself. (5.7.112–14) The Bastard’s lines at once point to the shame of self-conquest and herald England’s resistance to conquest in a manner reminiscent of Cleopatra’s valorization of her lover: ‘none but Antony / Should conquer Antony’ (AC 4.15.17–18). And in resistance collective identities are forged: If we be conquer’d, let men conquer us! And not these bastard Bretons, whom our fathers Have in their own land beaten, bobb’d, and thump’d, And in record left them the heirs of shame. (R3 5.3.333–6) King Richard III ’s call to arms is underpinned by an othering of Richmond’s ‘foreign’ forces. Encouraging Cymbeline not to pay the tribute that Britain owes to Rome, the Queen reminds her husband that Britain never was fully conquered by the Romans: A kind of conquest Caesar made here, but made not here his brag Of ‘Came and saw, and overcame’. (Cym 3.1.23–5) Although the Queen acknowledges Caesar’s conquest, the phrase ‘A kind of conquest’ conditions it, rendering his conquest minor and incomplete. In their resistance to another attempted Roman conquest of Britain, the play’s Britons exert a fierce resistance that provides a legacy for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. 67

conquest

(C) See Figure 3 for a graphic illustration of internal and external conquests. Bartels (2008: 65–99) considers the ways in which conquered peoples in Titus Andronicus are incorporated into Rome. country see also countryman, countrymen Carries a variety of meanings, from citystate to region to nation (and even the people of the nation) to homeland to state. Invocations of country are often accompanied by a sense of connectedness and belonging, a love for one’s homeland. Pisano puts it most simply: ‘I love my country’ (Cym 4.3.43), that country being ancient Britain. Rome, for Titus Andronicus, is ‘his country’ (1.1.78), and Brutus is willing to die for his country: ‘I have the same dagger for myself, when it shall please my country to need my death’ (JC 3.2.45–7). That Julius Caesar’s republican conspirators refer to ‘their country’ (3.1.118) is not insignificant. King Henry V’s famous St Crispin’s Day speech contains a reference to ‘our country’ (H5 4.3.21), although exactly to whom ‘our’ refers is the question (Henry is, after all, speaking to a fellow noble). The Welsh Captain’s reference to ‘our country’ (R2 2.4.8) is a reference to Wales, even though he and his ‘countrymen’ regard Richard as ‘their king’ (15, 16). As Shakespeare’s depiction of the Wars of the Roses attests, a wounded, bleeding country elicits sympathy and love. Witnessing a scene of patricide and filicide, King Henry VI ’s choice of words for the national polity is significant: ‘How will the country for these woeful chances / Misthink the King and not be satisfied’ (3H6 2.5.107–8). Country is often invoked when the issue at hand is the care of the people, the nation. Three times characters in Macbeth, in the wake of King Duncan’s murder and Macbeth’s tyrannous rule, lament the state of their ‘poor country’ (4.3.31, 46, 164). No Shakespeare play includes as many uses of the word country as does Coriolanus; King Henry VI, Part 2 comes second. Coriolanus’s duty toward his country is etched on his body: ‘wound receiv’d for’s country’ (2.3.162), wounds, however, which he refuses to display to his fellow countrymen, whom he scorns, leading to his being ‘banish’d, / As enemy to the people and his country’ (3.3.117–18). Coriolanus turns against his ‘thankless’, ‘canker’d country’ (4.5.73, 94) and joins Aufidius’s Volscian forces. Volumnia’s constant invocations of ‘country’ in Act 5, Scene 3 convince Coriolanus to abandon his attack on Rome, revealing the affective power the word country possesses. Joan Puzel’s invocation of ‘country’ (1H6 3.3.44–52) does similar work, drawing the Duke of Burgundy back to his native French side. Numerous instances of characters who combine national dress or traits arise in Shakespeare, and the tendency is to mock such characters. Don Pedro, for instance, says of Benedick: ‘There is no appearance of fancy in him, unless it be a fancy that he hath to strange disguises – as to be a Dutchman today, a Frenchman tomorrow, or in the shape of two countries at once, as a German from the waist downward, all slops, and a Spaniard from the hip upward, no doublet’ (MA 3.2.29–34). And Portia says of ‘Falconbridge, the young baron of England’: ‘How oddly he is suited! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behaviour everywhere’ (MV 1.2.714). 68

countryman, countrymen

countryman, countrymen (A) Used to refer to someone from a particular region or country – a native or inhabitant of Rome or England, for example. But also and more emotively the term is used to describe a person from one’s own country. (B) There are numerous uses of countryman and, even more so, countrymen in Shakespeare’s plays; there are only two references to countrywoman (TC 4.1.69, Per 5.1.103). Women in early modern England were generally but not exclusively excluded from the public sphere. As Thomas Smith notes: we do reiect women, as those whom nature hath made to keepe home and to nourish their familie and children, and not to medle with matters abroade, nor to beare office in a citie or common wealth no more than children and infantes: except it be in such cases as the authoritie is annexed to the blood and progenie, as the crowne, a dutchie, or an erledome, for there the blood is respected, not the age nor ye sexe. Whereby an absolute Quéene, an absolute Dutches or Countesse, those I call absolute, which haue the name, not by being maried to a king, duke, or erle, but by being the true, right & next successors in the dignitie, and vpon whom by right of the blood that title is descended: These I say haue the same authoritie although they be women or children in that kingdome, dutchie or earledome, as they shoulde haue had if they had bin men of full age. (1583: 19) This rejection of women from the commonwealth perhaps accounts for the dearth of references to countrywomen in Shakespeare’s plays. This historical fact, however, should not lead us to underestimate the political agency of female characters in Shakespeare’s plays, characters such as Queen Margaret, whose curses and prophecies – repeated and sanctioned by male characters as they come true – mark a signal contribution to the political discourse of King Richard III. Many of the references are straightforward: for example, a Roman speaking to fellow Romans or an Englishman speaking to fellow Englishmen. Menenius Agrippa refers to the rebellious citizens at the opening of the play as ‘my countrymen’ (Cor 1.1.53). Saturninus’s opening speech is a plea to his ‘countrymen’ (Tit 1.1.3). Brutus, who uses the phrase more than any other of Shakespeare’s characters, addresses his fellow conspirators as ‘countrymen’ (JC 2.1.121) as well as the people of Rome; Mark Antony famously addresses the citizens of Rome as ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ (3.2.74). A host of English kings – King Richard II , King Henry V, King Henry VI – as well as a British one – Cymbeline – also use the term. Since the Welsh Captain’s pronouncement of ‘our countrymen’ (2.4.2, 16) to the English Earl of Salisbury in King Richard II is made in reference to his Welsh troops, the term in this instance is inclusive of the Welsh only. Fellow Venetians of the city-state of Venice see themselves as countrymen, for Bassanio greets Lorenzo and Salerio as ‘my very friends and countrymen’ (3.2.222). But the stage directions make clear that Lorenzo, Salerio and Jessica have made an entrance. Jessica may be excluded because she is a woman and therefore no countryman; however, she is also an ‘infidel’ (217), as Gratiano terms her upon her entrance; a few 69

countryman, countrymen

lines later he terms her a ‘stranger’, a reminder that Jews were not native to Venice. Jessica makes use of the word countrymen in reference to her father, Shylock: When I was with him, I have heard him swear To Tubal and to Chus, his countrymen, That he would rather have Antonio’s flesh Than twenty times the value of the sum That he did owe him. (MV 3.2.283–7) In what way are Tubal and Chus Shylock’s countrymen? It does not appear that Shylock, Tubal and Chus are ‘countrymen’ in the same way that Bassanio, Lorenzo and Salerio are: that is, fellow Venetians. The OED might have us believe that they are countrymen in the sense that Tubal and Chus are men from Shylock’s ‘own country’. Whilst Jessica could have a geographical space in mind, she may also be using the term in relation to religion or ethnicity: that is, Tubal and Chus are fellow Jews. A similar instance occurs in Titus Andronicus when Aaron says, ‘Not far one Muly lives, my countryman’ (4.2.154). Aaron is a Moor, and, given the name, the assumption is that Muly, too, is a Moor. The OED definitions do not afford skin colour, ethnicity and/or religion a place in their definitions of ‘countryman’; Shakespeare’s use of this word suggests a wider range of meanings. Before the Battle of Bosworth, the Earl of Richmond’s oration to his troops includes a reference to his ‘loving countrymen’ (R3 5.3.238). If Richmond is ‘backed with the hardy Welshman’ (4.3.47), and if his army consists of a ‘scum of Bretons’ (5.3.318), then his ‘countrymen’ are drawn from a variety of nations. The affective power of the word ‘countryman’ is evident at various points in Shakespeare’s plays. In King Henry VI, Part 1, Joan Puzel chastises the Duke of Burgundy for fighting alongside Talbot and the English forces against his native France: ‘thou fight’st against thy countrymen’ (3.3.74). Ashamed and repentant, Burgundy responds, ‘Forgive me, country, and sweet countrymen’ (3.3.81). In King Henry V, in the wake of the English victory at Agincourt, the Welsh Captain Fluellen recalls an earlier English victory wherein the Welsh fought valiantly: If your majesty is remembered of it, the Welshmen did good service in a garden where leeks did grow, wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps, which your majesty know to this hour is an honorable badge of the service, and I do believe your majesty takes no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Tavy’s day. To which Henry replies, ‘I wear it for a memorable honor, / For I am Welsh, you know, good countryman.’ Following Fluellen’s ‘All the water in Wye cannot wash your majesty’s Welsh plood out of your pody, I can tell you that. God pless it and preserve it, as long as it pleases his grace, and his majesty too!’ the King says, ‘Thanks, good my countryman.’ ‘I am your majesty’s countryman, I care not who know it’ is Fluellen’s response (4.7.96–111). What is remarkable about this exchange is the way in which

70

crown

‘countryman’ works to collapse class and national boundaries: the dynamic of king speaking to subject and Englishman speaking to Welshman is overridden by a dynamic of countryman speaking to fellow countryman, even with the presence of the distancing ‘your majesty’. The Earls of Shrewsbury and Surrey attempt to quell the boisterous Londoners by appealing to them as ‘countrymen’: ‘Friends, masters, countrymen –’; ‘My masters, countrymen –’ (STM 6.32, 34). (C) On the dearth of references to countrywomen, see Howard and Rackin (1997: 20–30). According to Helgerson, ‘the Elizabethan writing of England was “men’s work” ’; however, he acknowledges that ‘such men’s work was in this generation both shaped and enabled by the presence of a female monarch’ (1992: 303). crown Crown signifies on a literal and a figurative level: it can refer to the actual object worn by a monarch, and it can signify sovereignty or rule or power. Whilst crown, sceptre and throne refer to different objects, when used figuratively they are often interchangeable; however, Shakespeare uses crown significantly more than he does sceptre and throne. So, for example, in Act 4, Scene 1 of King Richard II, Edmund of Langley, Duke of York informs Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford that King Richard ‘Adopts thee heir’; ‘Ascend his throne’, he adds, to which Bolingbroke replies, ‘In God’s name, I’ll ascend the regal throne’ (109, 111, 113), which is to say that Bolingbroke accepts the crown. Upon Richard’s entrance, York instructs Richard To do that office of thine own good will Which tired majesty did make thee offer: The resignation of thy state and crown To Henry Bolingbroke. (177–80) Throughout this scene, the material properties of the monarch – his sceptre, his throne, his crown – are at once material objects that accompany the actor playing the part of Richard and symbolic properties. If Richard’s ‘Here, cousin, seize the crown’ (181) registers an unwillingness to resign, it also serves to memorialize Bolingbroke as a usurper who has ‘unking’d Richard’ (220). References to the crown (or the use of the verb to crown) abound in Shakespeare’s English history plays, with King Henry VI, Part 3 by far leading the way. One of the most memorable scenes in 3H6 occurs at the battle of Wakefield, where a victorious Queen Margaret places a paper crown on the defeated Richard, Duke of York: York cannot speak unless he wear a crown. A crown for York! and, lords, bow low to him: Hold you his hands whilst I do set it on. [Putting a paper crown on his head] Ay, marry, sir, now looks he like a king! Ay, this is he that took King Henry’s chair,

71

crown

And this is he was his adopted heir. But how is it that great Plantagenet Is crown’d so soon and broke his solemn oath? As I bethink me, you should not be king Till our King Henry had shook hands with Death. And will you pale your head in Henry’s glory, And rob his temples of the diadem, Now in his life, against your holy oath? O, ’tis a fault too too unpardonable! Off with the crown, and, with the crown, his head; And, whilst we breathe, take time to do him dead. (1.4.93–108) The ‘paper crown’ that Margaret places upon York’s head serves to mock and shame the would-be king. But this scene, indeed this play, bears witness to what King Richard II terms ‘the hollow crown’ (R2 3.2.160): that is, the transitory nature of power. In other words, the materiality of York’s ‘paper crown’ is invested with social significance. The struggle for the crown is a dominant theme in all of the Elizabethan histories, especially as de jure legitimacy gives way to de facto. Shakespeare’s historically earliest play, King John, gives voice to the idea that whoever possesses the crown is monarch, no matter whom the previous monarch named as successor: ‘Doth not the crown of England prove the king?’ (2.1.273) asks John rhetorically. Hotspur is another character who voices a belief that possession of the crown is governed by might rather than right when he refers to those that set up Henry Bolingbroke as ‘you, that set the crown / Upon the head of this forgetful man’ (1H4 1.3.158–9). In Julius Caesar the titular character’s ‘tyranny’ – Thomas Smith includes Caesar among Rome’s ‘tyrantes’ (1583: 3) – is imaged by the conspirators throughout the play by their references to Caesar’s desire for the crown: He would be crowned: How that might change his nature, there’s the question. It is the bright day that brings forth the adder, And that craves wary walking. Crown him that, And then I grant we put a sting in him That at his will he may do danger with. (2.1.12–17) In an earlier scene, the crown functions as a theatrical prop in an offstage event that is then narrated to Cassius and Brutus (and the audience) by Caska, who says ‘Why, there was a crown offered him; and being offered him, he put it by with the back of his hand, thus, and then the people fell a-shouting’ (1.2.220–2). Caska notes that Caesar thrice rejects the crown offered him by Mark Antony, adding, however, ‘he would fain have had it’ and ‘he was very loth to lay his fingers off it’ (239, 240–1). Although

72

Cyprus

this event is narrated rather than enacted, Caska’s version of it is alert to the theatricality of power. (C) Raffield considers various meanings of crown in King Richard II (2010: 82–116). Cyprus Mediterranean island that was part of the Venetian empire in the early modern period until it fell under Ottoman control in 1573, never to return to the Venetians. Two of Shakespeare plays (Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter’s Tale) each include one reference to Cyprus. In Othello, of course, the play’s setting shifts from Venice to Cyprus in Act 2. At the time of Othello’s performance, Cyprus was in the hands of the Ottomans, but the play seems to imagine an island in Venetian control, although clearly threatened by Turkish forces: ‘The Turk with a most mighty preparation makes for Cyprus’ (1.3.222–3). The same scene also calls attention to the ‘importancy of Cyprus to the Turk’ (21), highlighting the island’s geopolitical significance. The Turkish threat leads to the relocation of Othello (a general serving the Venetian state), Desdemona, Iago, Cassio and other Venetians to Cyprus. Vitkus (2003: 77–106) explores connections between Othello’s fictional and the historical Cyprus and England.

73

74

D degeneration see also Ireland (A) The noun degeneration was used in the early modern period to signify a process whereby an individual or a collective falls from a privileged, valorized position to a lower one. The OED offers ‘the falling off from ancestral or earlier excellence; declining to a lower or worse stage of being’; to this should be added the fact that such a process is often imagined in terms of a loss of or decline in civility, social status, and/or national identity. (B) In his Geography Delineated Forth in Two Bookes (1625), Nathanael Carpenter writes that ‘people suffer an alteration in respect to their seuerall transplantations … [c]olonies transplanted from one region into another, farre remote, retaine a long time their first disposition, though by litle and litle they decline and suffer alteration’ (sig Mm*3). A number of figures in Shakespeare’s plays undergo degeneration and are therefore labelled ‘degenerate’. One context in which this word surfaces is the political arena. Thomas Mowbray labels his enemy Henry Bolingbroke a ‘recreant and most degenerate traitor’ (R2 1.1.144); later in the same play, Northumberland terms King Richard ‘most degenerate King!’ (2.1.262), a sentiment anticipated by John of Gaunt’s ‘Landlord of England art thou now, not king’ (2.1.113). When, in King Henry VI, Part 3, Westmoreland labels King Henry VI a ‘degenerate king’ (1.1.189) it is in response to Henry having resigned the crown upon his death to Richard, Duke of York, thereby disinheriting his son, Prince Edward. Northumberland describes Henry’s capitulation as an ‘unmanly deed’ (193); it appears, therefore, that Henry’s degeneracy involves a gender-specific fall from masculinity to femininity – the word ‘degender’ was a synonym for degenerate in the early modern period. Philip the Bastard’s address to rebellious Englishmen draws upon a language of degeneracy: And you degenerate, you ingrate revolts, You bloody Neroes, ripping up the womb Of your dear mother England, blush for shame. (KJ 5.2.151–3) ‘Degenerate’ is an apt term here, for the English nobles to whom the Bastard speaks have joined French forces against the English King John. In King Henry IV, Part 1, King Henry’s diatribe against his own son, Prince Hal, culminates in a proclamation of degeneracy, a proclamation invited no doubt by Hal’s promise to forthwith ‘Be more myself’ (3.2.93): 75

degeneration

For all the world As thou art to this hour was Richard then When I from France set foot at Ravenspurgh, And even as I was then is Percy now. Now by my sceptre, and my soul to boot, He hath more worthy interest to the state Than thou the shadow of succession. For of no right, nor colour like to right, He doth fill fields with harness in the realm, Turns head against the lion’s armed jaws, And being no more in debt to years than thou Leads ancient lords and reverend bishops on To bloody battles, and to bruising arms. What never-dying honour hath he got Against renowned Douglas! whose high deeds, Whose hot incursions and great name in arms Holds from all soldiers chief majority And military title capital Through all the kingdoms that acknowledge Christ. Thrice hath this Hotspur, Mars in swathling clothes, This infant warrior, in his enterprises Discomfited great Douglas, ta’en him once, Enlarged him, and made a friend of him, To fill the mouth of deep defiance up And shake the peace and safety of our throne. And what say you to this? Percy, Northumberland, The Archbishop’s Grace of York, Douglas, Mortimer, Capitulate against us and are up. But wherefore do I tell these news to thee? Why, Harry, do I tell thee of my foes, Which art my nearest and dearest enemy? Thou that art like enough, through vassal fear, Base inclination, and the start of spleen, To fight against me under Percy’s pay, To dog his heels, and curtsy at his frowns, To show how much thou art degenerate. (1H4 3.2.93–128) King Henry’s lengthy rant posits Hal’s unnaturalness in relation to his king/father as the basis of his degeneracy. However, the play’s previous actions – Hal’s tavern exploits in Eastcheap – provide a further context for the King’s speech, for Hal is ‘degenerate’ precisely because he has fallen from the status of loyal and soldierly heir apparent to a

76

degeneration

tinker-like existence. In fact, the Bishop of Canterbury’s commentary on Prince Hal/ King Henry supplies a fine account of his reversal of the process of degeneration: The courses of his youth promised it not. The breath no sooner left his father’s body But that his wildness, mortified in him, Seemed to die too; yea, at that very moment, Consideration like an angel came And whipped th’offending Adam out of him, Leaving his body as a paradise T’envelop and contain celestial spirits. Never was such a sudden scholar made, Never came reformation in a flood With such a heady currence scouring faults, Nor never Hydra-headed wilfulness So soon did lose his seat, and all at once, As in this king. (H5 1.1.24–37) The reversal of the process of degeneration is signified in the shift from ‘wildness’ to ‘paradise’. King Lear’s dismissal of Goneril as ‘Degenerate bastard’ (1.4.245) echoes King Henry’s comments on Hal. Goneril’s unnaturalness in refusing her daughterly duties to her father (and monarch) motivates Lear’s language. Similarly, the Duke of Albany’s later description of Goneril as ‘Most barbarous, most degenerate’ (4.2.44) provides a fine example of how pronouncements of degeneracy draw upon a rhetoric of civility. Although the term ‘degeneration’ is not used in Antony and Cleopatra, the majority of the play’s Romans view Mark Antony as having degenerated from Roman to Egyptian and from masculine to feminine (at times, Antony, too, shares this view). In one of the few instances in the play when Octavius Caesar praises Antony, he, ironically, praises him for what in any other context would be seen as an instance of degeneracy: Antony, Leave thy lascivious wassails! When thou once Wast beaten from Modena, where thou slew’st Hirtius and Pansa, consuls, at thy heel Did famine follow, whom thou fought’st against, Though daintily brought up, with patience more Than savages could suffer. Thou didst drink The stale of horses and the gilded puddle Which beasts would cough at. Thy palate then did deign The roughest berry on the rudest hedge. Yea, like the stag when snow the pasture sheets,

77

Degeneration

The barks of trees thou browsed. On the Alps, It is reported, thou didst eat strange flesh Which some did die to look on. And all this – It wounds thine honour that I speak it now – Was borne so like a soldier that thy cheek So much as lanked not. (1.4.56–72) Urine-drinking, flesh-eating, beast-like Antony, in Octavius Caesar’s eyes, is an embodiment not of a degenerate savage but rather a hard Roman. Antony’s degeneracy manifests itself, rather, in his fondness for Cleopatra. (C) See Archer (1997) on the anxiety of degeneration in Antony and Cleopatra. On degeneration in relation to English colonists in Ireland see Neill (2000), especially 339–72. Denmark References to ‘Denmark’ are limited to Hamlet; other plays include very limited references to ‘Dane’. In Othello, for instance, the ‘Dane’ appears alongside a host of other northern European drinking nations. Iago describes the English as ‘most potent in potting’. ‘Your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander’, he continues, ‘are nothing to your English’ (2.3.71–4). In response to Cassio’s amazement at the drinking abilities of Englishmen, Iago responds, ‘Why, he drinks you, with facility, your Dane dead drunk’ (76–7). In response to an offstage noise, Horatio asks Hamlet what it signifies, and Hamlet responds by informing Horatio that King Claudius is deep into his cups, to which a rather sober Hamlet adds the following lament on Danish drinking culture: though I am native here And to the manner born, it is a custom More honour’d in the breach than the observance. This heavy-headed revel east and west Makes us traduc’d and tax’d of other nations – They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase Soil our addition; and indeed it takes From our achievements, though perform’d at height, The pith and marrow of our attribute. (1.4.14–22) The wife of King James VI of Scotland and I of England, Queen Anna, was Danish. Queen Anna’s brother, King Christian IV, ruled Denmark and Norway from 1588 to 1648. Christian’s visit to England in 1606 was infamous for its revelry, as reported by Sir John Harrington. The belief that the representation of Danes as drinkers in Hamlet has its origins in King Christian’s visit to England is problematic, for the play was written and performed (at least versions of it were) well before 1606. Iachimo, however,

78

descent

may have James in mind when he terms Posthumus Leonatus the ‘Briton reveller’ (Cym 1.7.61). John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1611–12) includes ‘A Dane’ along with a Briton, Roman, Saxon and Norman on its title page (see Figure 2). descent (A) Ancestry, lineage, ancestral stock. Descent can be low, base or high, noble; moreover, it can be individual, familial or national. (B) As a socially hierarchical society, early modern England put a premium on descent. Speed’s map of the Kingdom of England, which organizes a selection of English subjects based on social status ranging from nobility to commoners, attests to the centrality of descent (see Figure 4). Nowhere is descent more prominent than at the top of society. When John of Gaunt speaks of England’s ‘royal kings, / Fear’d by their breed, and famous by their birth’ (R2 2.1.51–2), his invocation of ‘breed’ and ‘birth’ highlights words and ideas that were central to the social and political constitution of the kingdom – a kingdom which at the time of this play’s production was under the rule of a female monarch. Gaunt’s use of ‘breed’ signifies ‘a line of descendants from a particular parentage, and distinguished by particular hereditary qualities’ (OED ). Breed and birth legitimate monarchy, at least in theory (the dramatic action of King Richard II reveals that in practice things were otherwise). Gaunt’s earlier use of ‘breed’ – ‘This happy breed of men’ (45) – seems to be an inclusive gesture (Englishmen); however, he may have a select few in mind: that is ‘This royal throne of kings’ (40). Queen Margaret mocks a captured Richard, Duke of York for having ‘made a preachment of [his] high descent’ (3H6 1.4.72), which bears witness to lineage’s place in the various contestations for the crown that Shakespeare’s plays present. Kings and queens are not the only characters to invoke descent. If Othello’s exact homeland is uncertain, his descent is not: ‘I’, he says, ‘fetch my life and being / From men of royal siege’ (1.2.21–2). Although imprecise in the sense that we learn nothing of these men, this reference does posit origins of social significance. The notion of ‘high descent’ (3H6 1.4.72) circulates throughout Shakespeare; indeed, numerous characters can be found contesting their non-noble birth, as Queen Elizabeth’s wonderful use of litotes attests: ‘I was not ignoble of descent’ (3H6 4.1.69). Antony and Cleopatra’s Mark Antony is associated with Hercules, from whom the historical Antony’s family claimed descent; this may be the boldest claim of descent in Shakespeare’s plays. Given their staging of the struggle for the crown, the English history plays are very much concerned with descent. Witness, for example, the Earl of Oxford’s response to the kingmaker Warwick, who questions the Lancastrian claim to the throne: Then Warwick disannuls great John of Gaunt, Which did subdue the greatest part of Spain; And after John of Gaunt, Henry the Fourth, Whose wisdom was a mirror to the wisest; And after that wise prince, Henry the Fifth,

79

descent

Who by his prowess conquered all France: From these our Henry lineally descends. (3H6 3.3.81–7) In many ways, Oxford’s genealogy is grounded less in royalty or legitimacy than in military consanguinity: in other words, King Henry VI ’s claim to the throne resides in his forefather’s valiant acts. (C) Roebuck and Maguire (2010) explore Pericles’s attempts to construct nationhood through the myth that Phoenicians first settled Britain. Escobedo (2008) traces competing national genealogies in Cymbeline: heterogeneous ancient British origins and purer Anglo-Saxon origins. dominion Incorporates two dominant meanings: one having to do with authority, rule, sovereignty; the other with land: ‘The territory owned by or subject to a king or ruler, or under a particular government or control’ (OED ). Of course, these two meanings are intertwined. Shakespeare uses dominion once and dominions six times. When used in Cymbeline, dominion signifies the territory under Cymbeline’s sway: that is, Britain (but not Wales). Posthumus Leonatus, in a letter to Imogen, comments on the fact of his banishment from Britain by imagining being caught within Cymbeline’s ‘dominion’: ‘Justice, and your father’s wrath (should he take me in his dominion)’ (3.2.41–2). Posthumus advises Imogen to meet him in Milford Haven precisely because it stands outside of Cymbeline’s British dominion. King Richard II pronounces to Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford and Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, ‘we banish you our territories’ (R2 1.3.139); England’s monarch then informs Bolingbroke: You, cousin Herford, upon pain of life, Till twice five summers have enrich’d our fields, Shall not regreet our fair dominions, But tread the stranger paths of banishment. (140–3) Bolingbroke’s banishment, like Posthumus’s, places him outside the king’s ‘dominions’, rendering him a stranger to his native land. In both of these instances, dominion(s) is associated with harsh rule, figured here in the pronouncement of banishment. Not even the rhetorically gifted Richard can mask the harshness of ‘dominions’ with the soothing adjective ‘fair’. Richard can nonchalantly speak this harsh sentence simply because he regards the realm less as a commonwealth and more as his possession: ‘our territories’, ‘our … dominions’. Fortinbras, as reported by Voltemand, makes the following request of King Claudius: ‘That it might please you to give quiet pass / Through your dominions for this enterprise’ (Ham 2.2.77–8) – ‘this enterprise’ being Fortinbras’s war ‘against the Polack’ (75). Speaking to King Henry VIII , and kneeling before him, Queen Katherine (of Aragon, of England)

80

dominion

describes herself as ‘a most poor woman, and a stranger, / Born out of your dominions’ (H8 2.4.13–14) – a fine example, according to many critics, of Shakespeare’s sympathetic portrayal of the Catholic, Spanish Queen. Sounding more like a product of the sixteenthcentury Reformation than twelfth-century Christendom, King John tells Cardinal Pandulph, ‘no Italian priest / Shall tithe or toll in our dominions’ (KJ 3.1.79–80). If John is asserting his sovereign authority, he appears to be doing so with not just England in mind: his reference to the plural ‘dominions’ reminds us that in this historical period England’s monarch’s dominion stretched beyond England’s borders to include significant Continental possessions. As the OED notes, continuing the second definition cited above, ‘Esp. a country outside England or Great Britain under the sovereignty of or owing allegiance to the English or British crown’. Thus, John’s ‘dominions’ is most likely a reference to all of his territorial holdings, including those across the English Channel and the Irish Sea. That ‘dominions’ is often associated with or used by oppressive, even tyrannical, monarchs is evidenced in some of the passages above, Claudius in particular. Two other examples bear further witness to the use of this specific term in circumstances involving the exercise of power and a call for harsh subjection. The first is spoken by an enraged King Lear to a loyal but too vocal Earl of Kent: Hear me, recreant, on thine allegiance, hear me: That thou hast sought to make us break our vows, Which we durst never yet, and with strained pride To come betwixt our sentence and our power, Which nor our nature, nor our place can bear, Our potency made good, take thy reward. Five days we do allot thee for provision, To shield thee from disasters of the world, And on the sixth to turn thy hated back Upon our kingdom. If on the next day following Thy banished trunk be found in our dominions, The moment is thy death. Away! By Jupiter, This shall not be revoked. (1.1.168–80) Lear’s proclamation of Kent’s banishment is an act of (arbitrary) power, and the use of ‘our kingdom’ and ‘our dominions’ represents Lear, not unlike King Richard II , as sole possessor of the land. Significantly, Lear’s monarchic pride and folly plays a crucial part in the transformation or division of the kingdom into ‘the gored state’ (KL 5.3.319). The second example comes from The Winter’s Tale, spoken by a no less enraged Leontes, King of Sicilia in reference to his wife and queen, Hermione and their daughter, Perdita, whom Leontes, wrongly, believes to be the child of another man: Mark and perform it: see’st thou? for the fail Of any point in’t shall not only be

81

dominion

Death to thyself, but to thy lewd-tongu’d wife, (Whom for this time we pardon). We enjoin thee, As thou art liege-man to us, that thou carry This female bastard hence, and that thou bear it To some remote and desert place, quite out Of our dominions; and that there thou leave it (Without more mercy) to it own protection And favour of the climate. As by strange fortune It came to us, I do in justice charge thee, On thy soul’s peril and thy body’s torture, That thou commend it strangely to some place Where chance may nurse or end it. Take it up. (2.3.169–82) The language that attends Shakespeare’s use of ‘dominions’ speaks volumes – not just the use of the imperative but also specific words such as ‘enjoin’ and ‘charge’. The tyranny of ‘dominions’ is also reflected in Leontes’s use of ‘it’ to refer to the innocent child. Dover A coastal town in the county of Kent. Dover marks the English Channel’s narrowest point between England and France (Calais). Dover is home to Dover Castle, which sits above the steep white cliffs that are often imagined as a bulwark against foreign invasion. Reporting the success of the French army, Philip the Bastard proclaims, ‘All Kent hath yielded: nothing there holds out / But Dover castle’ (KJ 5.1.30–1), which reinforces the idea of Dover as impregnable. King Henry VI, Part 1 includes a reference to an English ship leaving Dover for France for the collection of King Henry’s future wife, Queen Margaret. But the most references to Dover occur in King Lear, with the word ringing in the audience’s ears throughout acts 3 and 4 – eleven occurrences in total. Wherefore Dover? Part of the answer lies in the fact that Goneril and Regan anticipate that Cordelia’s arrival in Britain from France, with French forces, will be in Dover; Dover, therefore, emerges as the central battle site. But Dover takes on more significance in this play, especially as a fortified coastal town. In other words, Dover is a boundary point, demarcating England from France, land from sea and the known from the unknown. Dutch see Low Countries

82

E Egypt References to Egypt and Egyptians appear in a few of Shakespeare’s plays. Famously, Othello’s mother received the handkerchief from an ‘Egyptian’ who ‘was a charmer’ (3.4.58, 59). Continuing the representation of Egyptians as ‘charmers’, Cerimon speaks ‘of an Egyptian / That had nine hours lien dead, / Who was by good appliance recovered’ (Per 3.2.86–8). But the dominant representation of Egypt and Egyptians occurs in Antony and Cleopatra. Not only is the bulk of the play set in Egypt, but also one of the play’s eponymous heroes is Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt. Perhaps no passage better captures the play’s complex attitude to a real and an imagined Egypt than Mark Antony’s ‘These strong Egyptian fetters I must break, / Or lose myself in dotage’ (AC 1.2.120–1). Shakespeare could have drawn on a variety of contemporary sources for his depiction of Egypt and Egyptians: Herodotus (1584), Plutarch (1579), Andrew Boorde (1555) and Leo Africanus (1600). The ancient Greek historian Herodotus paints a picture of a female-dominated Egypt, and this notion of gender reversal survives in early modern texts, including Shakespeare’s Roman play. In his The fyrst boke of the introduction of knowledge (1555), Boorde describes Egyptians as swarthy and as pickpockets. On the one hand, Egypt in Antony and Cleopatra is contrasted with imperial Rome: Rome is associated with masculinity, reason, industry, the self; Egypt is associated with femininity, passion, pleasure, otherness. On the other hand, Egypt is invested with a certain appeal in the play, and, for many critics, Egypt functions not only in positive contrast to imperial Rome but also as a critique of Rome and Romanness, especially as embodied in the cold and calculating Octavius Caesar. When asked by Antony if he ‘wish[es] [him]self in Egypt’, the Soothsayer replies, ‘Would I had never come from thence’ (2.3.10–11). This sentiment is echoed (and rejected) numerous times by Antony, who states ‘I will to Egypt … I’th’ East my pleasure lies’ (2.3.37–9). Thus, as much as Shakespeare’s representation of Egypt draws upon national and cultural stereotypes and imperial constructions of the east, it simultaneously and subversively contests those stereotypes and constructions. When Antony, as he so often does, turns against Cleopatra he tends to view her in not only gendered (‘enchanting queen’, ‘whore’) but also in national terms: ‘This foul Egyptian hath betrayed me’ (4.12.10). For an examination of attitudes toward Egypt in the early modern period and in Antony and Cleopatra, see Archer (1997). On issues of empire and race, see Loomba (2002: 112–34). 83

empire

empire A word used infrequently by Shakespeare, but when used it often refers to the Roman Empire: for example, Mark Antony’s ‘Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the ranged empire fall’ (AC 1.1.34–5); and Cymbeline’s ‘we submit to Caesar, /And to the Roman empire’ (Cym 5.5.461–2). In 1533, the Act of Restraint of Appeals famously declared, ‘This realme of England is an Impire’, which, according to the OED , uses empire to signify ‘A country that is not subject to any foreign authority; an independent nation’. Numerous plays, especially, and paradoxically, King John, represent (or voice a desire for) England as an independent nation. One clear instance of this particular meaning of empire surfaces in King Richard III , when Richard, upon learning that ‘Richmond is on the seas’ and ‘makes for England … to claim the throne’ (4.4.462, 468), says: Is the chair empty? Is the sword unsway’d? Is the King dead? The empire unpossess’d? What heir of York is there alive but we? And who is England’s King but great York’s heir? Then tell me, what makes he upon the seas! (469–73) Given Richard’s representation of Richmond as ‘the Welshman’ (475) long ‘kept in Bretagne’ (5.3.325), his reference to ‘empire’ plays upon his identification of Richmond with foreignness. At the time in which Shakespeare was writing plays, ‘the British overseas empire remained a nascent phenomenon’ (Kerrigan 2008: 50), although The Tempest has attracted a plethora of criticism exploring the play, especially its representation of Caliban, in relation to the New World. See McEachern (1996: 1–4). For Highley, King Henry V gives voice to ‘Shakespeare’s disillusioned ambivalence about the reasons behind and the consequences of English empire-building’; moreover, the play supplies ‘a skeptical counter-discourse about English expansionism within the British Isles’ (1997: 136). See also James (1997), Maley (2003), Mottram (2008) and Del Sapio Garbero (2009). England (A) The Kingdom of England was in many ways a hierarchical society that privileged royalty and nobility above the common people, as Speed’s map of ‘The Kingdome of England’ (see Figure 4) attests. Upon first glance, such a society would not appear to be conducive to the production and dissemination of a discourse on national identity. How, then, did the period in which Shakespeare wrote his plays give rise to such powerful outpourings of expressions of nationhood, including those of a son of a Stratford glover? No simple answer exists; however, key cultural and historical events played a signal role in raising English national consciousness: the Reformation, the accession of Queen Elizabeth I to the English throne in 1558, the defeat in 1588 of the Spanish Armada, voyages to the New World, the reconquest and recolonization of Ireland, the rise of map and print culture, the emergence of the history play, the accession of King James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603, the ensuing 84

England

dialogue and debate over the Union of the Crowns, the Gunpowder Plot – the list goes on and on. It has been suggested that ‘Elizabethan England was a republic which happened to be a monarchy: or vice versa’ (Collinson 1997: 119). England was what its writers imagined it, and Shakespeare imagined England variously. (B) Shakespeare’s English history plays contain the playwright’s greatest expressions of Englishness and his richest imaginings of England. But such imaginings are also fraught with complexities and contradictions. The serious focus on civil war and the Wars of the Roses is not exactly the stuff of nationhood. The rewriting of warfare internal to a nation, however, as ‘reassuringly fratricidal wars’ (Anderson 1991: 200) has always been at the heart of national reconciliation. England in the history plays appears geographically isolated; however, this is by no means a disabling position, for insularity lends itself to constructions of the nation. ‘Britain is a world by itself’ (Cym 3.1.13) exemplifies this idea, except for the obvious fact that Cymbeline does not use the word England. Perhaps a better example is Gaunt’s ‘scept’red isle’ speech, which gives voice to an idealized vision of England as an island unto itself, while simultaneously drawing attention to the threat of hostile neighbouring nations: This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands; This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. (R2 2.1.46–50) Critics have pointed out that Gaunt’s vision of an England ‘bound in with the triumphant sea’ (61) is oblivious to Scotland and Wales, with whom England shares the island of Britain. Gaunt imagines the envious ‘less happier lands’ as external to the ‘isle’, but Shakespeare’s history plays, including King Richard II , bring Scotland and Wales centre stage. Gaunt’s now-famous lines offer much more than a lament for a golden age now lost; they evince an anxiety about England’s place within an island home to two kingdoms and three nations. Consider, for example, the following references to England’s neighbours. First, the ‘English John Talbot’ (1H6 4.2.2) on the French: How are we parked and bounded in a pale – A little herd of England’s timorous deer Mazed with a yelping kennel of French curs. If we be English deer, be then in blood: Not rascal-like to fall down with a pinch, But rather, moody-mad and desperate stags, Turn on the bloody hounds with heads of steel And make the cowards stand aloof at bay. (1H6 4.2.45–52)

85

England

Second, the Irish: Great lords, from Ireland am I come amain To signify that rebels there are up And put the Englishmen unto the sword. Send succours, lords, and stop the rage betime, Before the wound do grow uncurable; For, being green, there is great hope of help. (2H6 3.1.281–6) Third, the Scottish: We do not mean the coursing snatchers only, But fear the main intendment of the Scot, Who hath been still a giddy neighbour to us. For you shall read that my great-grandfather Never went with his forces into France But that the Scot on his unfurnished kingdom Came pouring like the tide into a breach, With ample and brim fullness of his force, Galling the gleaned land with hot assays, Girding with grievous siege castles and towns, That England, being empty of defence, Hath shook and trembled at th’ill neighbourhood. (H5 1.2.143–54) Finally, the Welsh: My liege, this haste was hot in question, And many limits of the charge set down But yesternight, when all athwart there came A post from Wales, loaden with heavy news, Whose worst was that the noble Mortimer, Leading the men of Herefordshire to fight Against the irregular and wild Glendower, Was by the rude hands of that Welshman taken, A thousand of his people butchered, Upon whose dead corpse there was such misuse, Such beastly shameless transformation, By those Welshwomen done, as may not be Without much shame retold or spoken of. (1H4 1.1.34–46) What is remarkable about these passages is the process of othering at work in them: England and Englishness emerge in opposition to not only hostile but also ‘rude’ and 86

England

‘wild’ neighbours, not unlike the demarcation of subjects on Speed’s map of Ireland (see Figure 5). The history plays bear witness to a national identity fashioned in opposition to encroaching, threatening, neighbouring entities, whether France/the French, Ireland/ the Irish, Scotland/the Scottish and/or Wales/the Welsh. Of course, the English history plays do much more than simply other England’s neighbours. They bear witness to the incorporation of and intermingling with nonEnglish lands and subjects. Fluellen in King Henry V is a prime example. Note the presence of Wales on Speed’s map of ‘The Kingdome of England’ (see Figure 4) and the absence of Welsh subjects on Speed’s map of Wales (see Figure 7). Anderson notes that ‘there has not been an “English” dynasty ruling in London since the eleventh century (if then)’ (1991: 21). Shakespeare’s history plays call attention to the nonEnglish origins of England’s monarchs (King Henry VI and King Henry VII ) and wives of monarchs (King Henry V and King Henry VI ). In short, the plays inscribe an awkward cultural and political neighbourhood, imagined, for instance, when Owen Glendower’s daughter sings on stage in Welsh and in King Henry’s bilingual wooing of the French Princess Katherine. And then there is 1603, which witnessed the death of Queen Elizabeth and the accession of King James VI to the English throne. If Shakespeare did not stop writing history plays after Elizabeth’s death, then he certainly wrote very different kinds of history plays. ‘King Lear (1606) is merely the most conspicuous example of his turn to British and archipelagic subject matter after 1603’ (Kerrigan 2008: 14). In King Henry VI, Part 1, Sir William Lucy voices a sentiment that echoes throughout the history plays: ‘Submission, Dauphin? ’Tis a mere French word: / We English warriors wot not what it means’ (4.4.166–7). Shakespeare’s plays are not restricted to such aggressive inscriptions of collective identity however much they surface. The plays also point up, often in a self-mocking manner, various cultural stereotypes of the English. Iago represents the English as ‘most potent in potting’ (Oth 2.3.72): that is, drinking beer. The English were not only thirsty: Lincoln’s ‘Our country is a great eating country’ (STM 6.7) points up English eating habits, beef being a favourite. When asked by Nerissa how she finds ‘Falconbridge, the young baron of England’, Portia responds: You know I say nothing to him, for he understands not me, nor I him: he hath neither Latin, French, nor Italian, and you will come into the court and swear that I have a poor pennyworth in the English: he is a proper man’s picture, but alas! who can converse with a dumb-show? How oddly he is suited! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behaviour everywhere. (MV 1.2.64–74) Portia is, paradoxically, poking fun at the insularity of the Englishman just as she is mocking his mongrel Continental fashion.

87

England

Howard and Rackin point out that ‘none of Shakespeare’s history plays has a female protagonist’ (1997: 20). Queen Margaret’s presence in a number of plays, especially King Henry VI, Part 3, should not be dismissed. Ironically, the only female character in all of Shakespeare’s plays to be labelled an ‘Englishwoman’ (H5 5.2.121) is the French Princess Katherine. (C) See Helgerson (1992: 195–245), McEachern (1996), Howard and Rackin (1997), Maley and Tudeau-Clayton (2010) and Schwyzer (2004: 126–50). Commenting on King Henry VI, Part 1, King Henry V and King John, Womack argues so long as the plays show the Crown of England as mixed up with the matter of France, the depicted polity remains … a feudal and pre-nationalist one, defined in terms of personal lordship and allegiance, and effectively devoid of the idea of national sovereignty. It is only when royal power is thrown back within its ‘natural’ boundaries of language and geography that a national identity starts to define itself in the drama, an England which can meaningfully be urged to be true, not just to a dynastic ruler, but to itself. (1992: 127)

Figure 4 John Speed, ‘The Kingdome of England’, from The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London 1611–12). By permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Map Res 74, betw. pp. 6–7. 88

banish,

English see England Ethiop (A) As an adjective Ethiop or Ethiope refers to an Ethiopian; as a noun it refers to a black or dark-skinned person, especially a black African. Drawing upon Elizabethan associations of fairness with beauty, Proteus compares Silvia, whom heaven made fair, and Julia, whom he describes as ‘a swarthy Ethiope’ (TGV 2.6.26). Lysander says to Hermia, ‘Away, you Ethiope!’ (MND 3.2.258). Although Hermia is not a dark-skinned African, she is being othered by Lysander, who also cries, ‘Out, tawny Tartar, out!’ (263). For Hall, ‘the evocation of blackness serves to racialize whiteness and make it visible’ (1995: 22), and in both instances above the other woman (Silvia, Helena) is celebrated for her fairness. Examining Othello in relation to gender, sexuality and race, Newman (1991: 74–91) traces the ways in which the play’s central characters reinforce and challenge dominant cultural stereotypes. exile see banish, banishment

89

90

F fair Amongst the plethora of meanings of fair in the early modern period is ‘Of hair or complexion: light as opposed to dark in colour. Of a person: having such colouring’ (OED ). Hall describes fair as ‘more than an aesthetic or physically descriptive term’ (1995: 70), for fair takes on an ideologically charged meaning when used in reference to non-white and even non-Christian characters in Shakespeare’s plays. The word fair surfaces numerous times in Titus Andronicus, often in relation to skin colour. When Titus hands over the Goth queen Tamora to Saturninus, the emperor receives her with the following words: A goodly lady, trust me, of the hue That I would choose were I to choose anew. Clear up, fair queen, that cloudy countenance. (1.1.265–7) Saturninus could be using ‘fair’ to mean beautiful; however, given Saturninus’s use of ‘hue’, ‘fair’ here is most likely a reference to her pale skin. The baby that Tamora gives birth to is described as ‘black’ by the Nurse, who hands the baby to the father, Aaron the Moor, and says, ‘Here is the babe, as loathsome as a toad / Amongst the fair-faced breeders of our clime’ (4.2. 68, 69–70). Aaron’s plan for saving the child involves exchanging it with the baby of a ‘countryman’ whose (white-skinned?) wife has given birth to a baby ‘like to her, [and] fair as’ Tamora’s sons (4.2.154, 156). Desdemona, Portia and Jessica are repeatedly described as fair. Desdemona’s fairness is often juxtaposed to Othello’s blackness, as in Roderigo’s racially motivated words to Brabantio: your fair daughter At this odd-even and dull watch o’th’ night, Transported with no worse nor better guard But with a knave of common hire, a gondolier, To the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor. (1.1.120–4) Not all the play’s characters share Roderigo’s disdain for the Moor, but even the Duke, who champions Othello as Venice’s general, offers a backhanded compliment when he says to Brabantio of Othello, ‘Your son-in-law is far more fair than black’ (1.3.292). The Prince of Morocco’s references to ‘fair Portia’ (MV 2.7.43, 47) highlight his ‘complexion’ (2.1.1) as 91

fair

much as hers, a complexion that Portia appears to dislike: upon Morocco’s exit, Portia states ‘A gentle riddance, – draw the curtains, go, – / Let all of his complexion choose me so’ (2.7.78–9). Lorenzo’s comments on Jessica, daughter of the Jewish moneylender Shylock, invoke fairness to integrate her into the Christian community of Venice: I know the hand, in faith ’tis a fair hand, And whiter than the paper it writ on Is the fair hand that writ. (2.4.12–14) Lorenzo’s lines play with multiple meanings of fair: Jessica’s hand is ‘fair’ in terms of a neat, perhaps italic, handwriting, but also in terms of colour: ‘whiter than the paper it writ on’. Jessica’s whiteness plays a crucial role in erasing her Jewish identity – ‘she is issue to a faithless Jew’ (2.4.37) – and rendering her like ‘fair Portia’. filicide, fratricide, patricide (A) Killing of one’s son or daughter; killing of one’s brother; killing of one’s father. (B) Such acts occur in Shakespeare’s plays from early works to late ones – including attempted fratricide in The Tempest. In Titus Andronicus, for example, the eponymous hero slays, at the beginning of the play, his son Mutius; at the end of the play, he kills his daughter Lavinia. Bassianus is murdered by his brother Saturninus’s confederates, albeit unbeknownst to Saturninus. Claudius, we learn, has murdered his brother, Hamlet’s father. In King Lear, Edgar slays his brother Edmund in a trial by combat. Macbeth covers up his slaying of Duncan by speaking of Donalbain and Malcolm’s ‘cruel parricide’ (3.1.31). The history plays, especially the first tetralogy, include instances of filicide, fratricide and patricide, and many of these instances can be read in relation to discourse on the nation. Early in King Henry VI, Part 1, the Bishop of Winchester accosts the Duke of Gloucester (to whom he is kin but not brother) as a fratricide: ‘This be Damascus, be thou cursed Cain / To slay thy brother Abel, if thou wilt’ (1.3.39–40). In King Henry VI, Part 3, a scene of patricide and filicide foregrounds the sufferings of England’s common people. In F, the stage direction reads ‘Enter a Sonne that hath kill’d his Father, at one doore: and a Father that hath kill’d his Sonne at ano-ther doore’ (TLN 1189–91). Discovering that he has slain his father, the patricidal son says Who’s this? O God! it is my father’s face, Whom in this conflict I unawares have kill’d. O heavy times, begetting such events! From London by the King was I press’d forth; My father, being the Earl of Warwick’s man, Came on the part of York, press’d by his master; And I, who at his hands receiv’d my life, Have by my hands of life bereaved him. (2.5.61–8)

92

foreign

This powerful scene draws attention to the suffering of commoners in the midst of aristocratic feuding. Upon discovering that he has killed his son, the filicidal father proclaims: What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly, Erroneous, mutinous, and unnatural, This deadly quarrel daily doth beget! (89–91) One of the meanings of ‘erroneous’ offered in the OED is ‘Straying from the path of right or virtue, morally faulty, criminal’; the OED cites this precise line from the play as an instance of this usage. This play’s quarrels are motivated by the interests of England’s nobles, and the character who most recognizes this is King Henry, who, in a chorus-like manner, responds with ‘Woe above woe! grief more than common grief!’ (94). Given the scenario – unnamed son, unnamed father – Henry’s ‘more than common grief!’ works to highlight the plight of the common soldier in the service of England’s feuding nobles. Shakespeare’s most fratricidal character is King Richard III . Not surprisingly, the play that bears his name reflects deeply on the ills of fratricidal warfare. Consider, for example, the Duchess of York’s lament: Accursed and unquiet wrangling days, How many of you have mine eyes beheld! My husband lost his life to get the crown, And often up and down my sons were toss’d For me to joy and weep their gain and loss; And being seated, and domestic broils Clean over-blown, themselves, the conquerors, Make war upon themselves, brother to brother, Blood to blood, self against self. O preposterous And frantic outrage, end thy damned spleen, Or let me die, to look on death no more. (2.4.55–65) This sentiment is reiterated at the play’s close: ‘England hath long been mad, and scarr’d herself: / The brother blindly shed the brother’s blood’ (R3 5.5.23–4). Fratricide, then, emerges as a dominant image in Shakespeare’s representation of the Wars of the Roses. (C) Berman (1962) explores the father–son dynamic (including filicide and patricide) in relation to subjects and monarch in the King Henry VI plays. Ivic (2013a) reads the scene of filicide and patricide in King Henry VI, Part 3 as a critique of the play’s feuding elites. Flanders see Low Countries foreign (A) From another country, nation, region, even city; not native. Archer lists strangers and foreigners as ‘noncitizen groups’, adding ‘the terms were sometimes used 93

foreign

interchangeably’ (2005: 7). Kermode notes that ‘Elizabethan documents widely employed the terms “alien” and “strange” to refer to persons from a foreign country … The term “foreigner” referred to persons from outside the city or region being discussed or those who were not “freemen” of the city … Continental aliens were usually “foreigners” too, then, in so far as they rarely gained the freedom of the city and became “citizens” ’ (2009: 2). Wales was ‘the closest foreign country to Shakespeare’s Warwickshire birthplace’ (Maley and Schwyzer 2010: 1). (B) When the Prince of Morocco speaks of the ‘foreign spirits’ who come in search of ‘fair Portia’ (MV 2.7.46, 47), he means ‘strangers’ – the term used earlier in the play to refer to Portia’s non-Venetian suitors (1.2.121). In this sense, ‘foreign’ simply means from another country or nation. But Shakespeare often uses ‘foreign’ within the context of betraying one’s own country, and in doing so highlights the unnaturalness of such a betrayal. When Joan Puzel accosts her fellow Frenchman Burgundy for supporting the English forces – ‘One drop of blood drawn from thy country’s bosom / Should grieve thee more than streams of foreign gore’ (1H6 3.3.54–5) – the implication is that the ‘foreign’ should have no hold on Burgundy; he should be fiercely tied to his own country and fiercely protective of it. When King John laments the revolt of his subjects from English to French forces, he uses ‘stranger’ to mean ‘foreign’: Our discontented counties do revolt; Our people quarrel with obedience, Swearing allegiance and the love of soul To stranger blood, to foreign royalty. (KJ 5.1.8–11) Swearing allegiance to ‘stranger blood’ and ‘foreign royalty’ is not just unpatriotic but unnatural. Nowhere does this sentiment receive fuller voice than in Coriolanus, when Volumnia berates her son, who has joined the Volscian forces, for turning his military might against his native Rome: Should we be silent and not speak, our raiment And state of bodies would bewray what life We have led since thy exile. Think with thyself How more unfortunate than all living women Are we come hither; since that thy sight, which should Make our eyes flow with joy, hearts dance with comforts, Constrains them weep, and shake with fear and sorrow, Making the mother, wife and child to see The son, the husband and the father, tearing His country’s bowels out. And to poor we Thine enmity’s most capital. Thou barr’st us

94

foreign

Our prayers to the gods, which is a comfort That all but we enjoy; for how can we, Alas! how can we for our country pray, Whereto we are bound, together with thy victory, Whereto we are bound? Alack, or we must lose The country, our dear nurse, or else thy person, Our comfort in the country. We must find An evident calamity, though we had Our wish, which side should win: for either thou Must as a foreign recreant be led With manacles thorough our streets, or else Triumphantly tread on thy country’s ruin, And bear the palm for having bravely shed Thy wife and children’s blood. (5.3.94–118) As a ‘foreign recreant’ who tears out his own country’s bowels, Coriolanus appears to have forfeited his status as a Roman, a loss of status reinforced by this passage’s numerous references to country, which place the ‘foreign’, threatening Coriolanus outside of the Roman polis. All’s Well That Ends Well provides an instance of incorporation rather than rejection of the ‘foreign’. The Countess of Rossillion, speaking to Helena, says: Nay, a mother. Why not a mother? When I said ‘a mother’, Methought you saw a serpent. What’s in ‘mother’ That you start at it? I say I am your mother, And put you in the catalogue of those That were enwombed mine. ’Tis often seen Adoption strives with nature, and choice breeds A native slip to us from foreign seeds. You ne’er oppress’d me with a mother’s groan, Yet I express to you a mother’s care. God’s mercy, maiden! does it curd thy blood To say I am thy mother? what’s the matter, That this distempered messenger of wet, The many-colour’d Iris, rounds thine eye? – Why, that you are my daughter? (1.3.136–49) Here, through the process of adoption (couched in the language of grafting), ‘foreign’ becomes ‘native’, perhaps eased by the significant fact that both women are French.

95

foreign

In 1603 King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England, a Scottish king of England ‘who was regarded by his English subjects as a foreign prince’ (Clark and Mason 2015: 25). (C) See Levin and Watkins (2009) for a thorough exploration of Shakespeare’s foreigners, not only foreigners from abroad but also those within England deemed foreign: ‘Relatively few of Shakespeare’s characters’, Levin and Watkins note, ‘are English’ (8). Schulting (2013) considers the conflicts between London citizens and immigrants in Sir Thomas More. See also Oldenburg (2015: 138–72) for a reading of an inclusive, multicultural early modern stage. Hoenselaars (1992) focuses on foreigners in Shakespeare and his contemporary writers. Hunter (2000) is very useful. See also select essays in Espinosa and Ruiter (2014). forgetting see also lethargy, Lethe, oblivion (A) Generally regarded in the early modern period as the opposite of memory and remembering, but also often depicted as a threat to memory. Most often forgetting signifies the inability to recollect. But the act of forgetting also takes on social and cultural force, as the following OED definition makes clear: ‘To lose remembrance of one’s own station, position, or character; to lose sight of the requirements of dignity, propriety, or decorum; to behave unbecomingly’. In this sense, forgetting has much in common with contemporary understandings of degeneration. (B) The accusation of forgetting as a transgressive act is rampant in Shakespeare’s plays. The division that arises between Cassius and Brutus, for instance, prompts Cassius to charge Brutus with forgetfulness: Brutus, bait not me. I’ll not endure it. You forget yourself To hedge me in. I am a soldier, I, Older in practise, abler than yourself To make conditions. (JC 4.3.28–32) In Cassius’s eyes, Brutus’s placing himself above his fellow conspirator is registered as an act of forgetting one’s place. The rhetoric of forgetting surfaces in Othello when Othello enters and breaks up the brawl between Cassio, Roderigo and Montano. First Iago says: Hold, ho! Lieutenant! – sir – Montano – gentlemen – Have you forgot all sense of place and duty? Hold, the general speaks to you: hold, for shame! (2.3.158–60) This is followed by Othello’s ‘How comes it, Michael, you are thus forgot?’ (180). This moment in the play connects forgetting with incivility, for the act of forgetting one’s place or behaving unbecomingly is accompanied by Othello’s ‘Are we turned Turks?’ 96

forgetting

and ‘put by this barbarous brawl’ (163, 164). References to civility and incivility often intersect with invocations of memory and forgetting. When Iachimo appears before Imogen and feeds her a host of lies about ‘the jolly Briton’ (Cym 1.7.67) Leonatus Posthumus, Imogen responds with ‘My lord, I fear, / Has forgot Britain’ (112–13). Given Iachimo’s response – ‘And himself’ (113) – ‘Britain’ here refers to a collective identity. Imogen could be implying that Posthumus has renounced or lost his British identity, and all that that entails, and has become a Roman/Italian, which in this play would be viewed as a decline in national status. Coriolanus, too, invokes forgetting when cutting his ties with Rome: Wife, mother, child, I know not. My affairs Are servanted to others. Though I owe My revenge properly, my remission lies In Volscian breasts. That we have been familiar, Ingrate forgetfulness shall poison rather Than pity note how much. (Cor 5.2.81–6) Although forgetfulness is figured as ‘ingrate’, it is welcomed by Coriolanus, who at this point in the play has joined the Volscians against his native Rome. Memory and forgetting are key words in The Tempest; indeed, Prospero’s power owes much to his self-representation as the play’s mnemonic centre. Throughout the play, Prospero accuses other characters of forgetfulness: Thou liest, malignant thing; hast thou forgot The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy Was grown into a hoop? Hast thou forgot her? (1.2.257–9) Moreover, throughout the play, Prospero brings light to ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’ (1.2.50); however, his remembrances are anything but disinterested. Sullivan notes that ‘from the point of view of memory, forgetting connotes erasure and erosion; its perceived destructive capacity makes it a threat to memory’s idealizations’ (2005: 14). Counter-memory in The Tempest – for example, Caliban’s ‘This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother’ (1.2.332) – unsettles Prospero’s mastery. The politics of forgetting take centre stage in the history plays. Consider, for instance, King Richard II ’s chastisement of the kingmaker-figure Northumberland: We are amaz’d, and thus long have we stood To watch the fearful bending of thy knee, Because we thought ourself thy lawful king; And if we be, how dare thy joints forget To pay their awful duty to our presence? (R2 3.3.72–6)

97

forgetting

Sullivan speaks of forgetting as ‘a fully somatic, rather than a narrowly cognitive, activity’ (2005: 1–2). For Richard, Northumberland’s support for Henry Bolingbroke and his unlawful actions toward his king manifests itself not in a mental slip but rather in a physical body (‘joints’) that is marked as rebellious. When the Earl of Worcester confronts King Henry IV on the eve of the battle of Shrewsbury, he does so by couching his side’s grievances in the form of a reminder: It pleas’d your Majesty to turn your looks Of favour from myself, and all our house, And yet I must remember you, my lord, We were the first and dearest of your friends; For you my staff of office did I break In Richard’s time, and posted day and night To meet you on the way, and kiss your hand, When yet you were in place and in account Nothing so strong and fortunate as I. It was myself, my brother, and his son, That brought you home, and boldly did outdare The dangers of the time. You swore to us, And you did swear that oath at Doncaster, That you did nothing purpose ’gainst the state, Nor claim no further than your new-fall’n right, The seat of Gaunt, dukedom of Lancaster. To this we swore our aid: but in short space It rain’d down fortune show’ring on your head, And such a flood of greatness fell on you, What with our help, what with the absent King, What with the injuries of a wanton time, The seeming sufferances that you had borne, And the contrarious winds that held the King So long in his unlucky Irish wars That all in England did repute him dead: And from this swarm of fair advantages You took occasion to be quickly woo’d To gripe the general sway into your hand, Forgot your oath to us at Doncaster, And being fed by us, you us’d us so As that ungentle gull the cuckoo’s bird Useth the sparrow. (1H4 5.1.30–61) King Henry’s forgetfulness – ‘this forgetful man’ (1.3.159) Hotspur labels him – is once again less a cognitive than a social act: here linked to a breaking of one’s oath. 98

France

In King Richard III , the Duke of Buckingham and Richard stage a scene in which Richard feigns an unwillingness to be England’s king. Buckingham’s appeal to Richard is remarkable precisely because it summons forgetfulness and oblivion as a threat to the kingdom: Know then, it is your fault that you resign The supreme seat, the throne majestical, The sceptred office of your ancestors, Your state of fortune, and your due of birth, The lineal glory of your royal House, To the corruption of a blemish’d stock; Whiles in the mildness of your sleepy thoughts – Which here we waken to our country’s good – This noble isle doth want her proper limbs; Her face defac’d with scars of infamy, Her royal stock graft with ignoble plants, And almost shoulder’d in the swallowing gulf Of dark forgetfulness and deep oblivion. (3.7.116–28) Ironically, Buckingham’s speech is underpinned by the false memories that Richard and he have put into circulation in order to secure Richard’s dubious legitimacy. In other words, the spectre of forgetfulness and oblivion that haunts this speech owes everything to a rhetoric of forgetting that enables Richard’s candidacy. Forgetting, especially a collective forgetting, can also be productive and liberatory. Nowhere is this more evident than in the close of King Richard III . The Earl of Richmond’s final speech marks closure through a profound act of forgetting: namely, a call to forget the ‘civil wounds’ (5.5.40) and national self-scarring that permeates the uncivil Wars of the Roses. Of course, in King Henry VI, Part 1, the division of England’s nobles into feuding Lancastrians and Yorkists begins with the hardening of memory in the form of Richard Plantagenet’s ‘I’ll note you in my book of memory, / To scourge you for this apprehension’ (2.4.101–02). (C) Although its focus is on ‘the individual, and not the collective, subject’ (2005: 6), Sullivan’s work is invaluable for tracing Renaissance representations of forgetting as are the essays collected in Ivic and Williams (2004). Baldo (2012) supplies a rich and sustained examination of forgetting in Shakespeare’s history plays. Ivic (2004) draws upon the work of Ernest Renan and Benedict Anderson in order to explore how King Henry IV, Part 1 at once remembers and forgets past Anglo-Scottish–Welsh warfare as reassuringly fratricidal English wars. Tribble (2006) explores memory and forgetting in The Tempest. France (A) Also referred to in some plays as Gallia, from the Latin Gaul. France is neighbour to England, although separated by the English Channel, by language and, 99

France

after the Reformation in England, by religion, somewhat. French Protestants (Huguenots) and Catholics clashed throughout the latter half of the sixteenth century, and 24 August 1572 witnessed the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, which saw tens of thousands of Huguenots murdered by Catholics first in Paris and then across France, which led to a large population of French Huguenots emigrating to England, London in particular. At one point the French outnumbered non-native inhabitants in London excepting the Dutch. England’s intimate history with France stretches back to the Normans, through a host of dynastic marriages (King Richard II – who was born in Bordeaux; King Henry V – married to the French Katherine of Valois; King Henry VI – who was crowned King of England at Westminster in 1429 and King of France in Paris in 1431). In terms of elite culture, England and France had many ties, although a French–Scottish alliance dominated sixteenth-century politics. In terms of popular culture, France was very much other to an English self. King Henry V’s wooing of the French Princess Katherine is not matched, for instance, by Pistol’s dealings with the French soldier. Officially, Queen Elizabeth I’s title was Queen of England, France and Ireland, but the inclusion of France was all but nominal, and 1558 marked the loss of England’s last French territorial possession. (B) Many of Shakespeare’s plays are set in France, from comedies to histories, including, maybe, As You Like It. Plays not set in France include characters coming to Britain via France: King Lear, King Richard III . The English histories present England and France as awkward neighbours. ‘No king of England, if not king of France!’ (H5 2.2.194) are King Henry V’s famous last words upon leaving England to do battle in France. In many ways, Henry is roused into battle by the invocation of past English victories over the French, victories etched in English cultural memory: Go, my dread lord, to your great-grandsire’s tomb, From whom you claim; invoke his warlike spirit, And your great-uncle’s, Edward the Black Prince, Who on the French ground played a tragedy, Making defeat on the full power of France, Whiles his most mighty father on a hill Stood smiling to behold his lion’s whelp Forage in blood of French nobility. (H5 1.2.103–10) Throughout the play the French are haunted by the memory of the battle of Crécy (1346) – ‘Witness our too much memorable shame’, says the French King, ‘When Cressy battle fatally was struck’ (2.4.53–4) – as much as the English are spurred on by memories of the eldest son of King Edward III , ‘Edward the Black Prince’ (1.2.105). ‘English John Talbot’ (1H6 4.2.3) plays an Edward- and Henry-like role in King Henry VI, Part 1. If English national identity is forged in opposition to the French in a number of plays, it is

100

France

also punctured by the loss of France, a subject upon which Shakespeare’s characters discourse again and again: Sad tidings bring I to you out of France, Of loss, of slaughter and discomfiture. Guyenne, Champagne, Reims, Rouen, Orleans, Paris, Gisors, Poitiers are all quite lost. (1H6 1.1.58–61) The loss of France loomed large in the Elizabethan cultural imaginary. Not surprisingly, numerous characters, including a rather naive Prince Edward – ‘I’ll win our ancient right in France again’ (R3 3.1.92) – promise a reconquest. ‘Francophobia has long proved useful in arousing domestic Anglophilia’ (Baker 1997: 20). One of the cultural stereotypes of the French that surfaces in King Henry V is their arrogance: ‘Proud of their numbers and secure in soul, / The confident and overlusty French …’ (4.Chor.17–18). Throughout this play the French mock the English, as does Lafew in All’s Well That Ends Well: ‘Sure, they are bastards to [i.e. of] the English; the French ne’er got ’em’ (2.3.95–6). In the wake of the English victory at Agincourt, a humble King Henry marks a stark contrast to the French, ascribing the triumph to ‘God’ (4.7.105). Jack Cade’s rebellion reveals a popular mistrust of the French: ‘I tell you that that Lord Say hath gelded the commonwealth and made it an eunuch; and more than that, he can speak French, and therefore he is a traitor’ (2H6 4.2.156–9). Another association with France is venereal disease: hence, Pistol’s ‘News have I that my Nell is dead i’th’ spital / Of malady of France’ (H5 5.1.80–1). To Antipholus of Syracuse’s question of where he found France on the ‘spherical’ kitchen wench Nell, Dromio of Syracuse responds: ‘In her forehead, armed and reverted, making war against her heir’ (CE 3.2.23–4). Two possible readings of this line are a description of the effects of venereal disease (the ‘French disease’) as well as an allusion to French civil wars involving Henri of Navarre. Perhaps the lengthiest national stereotype of the Frenchman appears in The Merchant of Venice when Portia responds to Nerissa’s question about the French suitor, Monsieur Le Bon: God made him, and therefore let him pass for a man, – in truth I know it is a sin to be a mocker, but, he! why he hath a horse better than the Neapolitan’s, a better bad habit of frowning than the Count Palatine, he is every man in no man, if a throstle sing, he falls straight a-cap’ring, he will fence with his own shadow. If I should marry him, I should marry twenty husbands: if he would despise me I would forgive him, for if he love me to madness, I shall never requite him. (1.2.54–63) In overgoing all the other suitors in faults and whimsicality, the French suitor is the quintessential fop.

101

France

(C) Book-length studies on Shakespeare and France include Hillman (2002) and Williams (2004). Cormack (2007) explores representations of France in the history plays in relation to English anxiety about national identity. See also Mayer (2008) as well as Saenger (2013), who addresses ‘Shakespeare’s plays as they relate to the violent, fruitful and often dislocated experience of England’s complex relationship with France’ (xiii). fratricide see filicide French see France

102

G Gallia see France galloglass see also kern (A) A kind of soldier in the service of Irish chiefs, although their origins are Scottish. Galloglasses were heavily armed and powerful soldiers. (B) In his contribution to the Irish volume of Holinshed’s Chronicles titled A Treatise contayning a playne and perfect Description of Irelande, Richard Stanihurst, listing the five followers of an Irish chief, has this to say about a galloglass: The fourth degre is a galloglasse, vsing a kind of pollax for his weapon. These men are commonly wayward rather by profession then by nature, grim of countenance, tall of stature, big of limme, burly of body, wel and strongly timberd, chiefly feeding on beefe, porke and butter. (1577: 28) The two references to galloglasses in Shakespeare’s plays couple galloglass and kern: one character speaks of ‘a puissant and a mighty power / Of gallowglasses and stout kerns’ (2H6 4.9.25–6) and another references ‘Kernes and Gallowglasses’ from ‘the western isles’ (Mac 1.1.12–13). This passing reference from Macbeth to ‘the western isles’ has drawn the following comment from Kerrigan: In Holinshed, as in the play, Macdonwald is called a rebel, but Shakespeare firmly associates him with islands which had long been unassimilated to the British-Irish state system, even after the independent Lordship of the Isles was fortified to the Scottish crown in 1493. It is no accident that James, who was especially hostile to the Gaels of the Western Isles, was in the process in 1605 of using his newly extended authority to suppress the insubordination of their leader Angus Macdonald by sending troops to Kintyre. (2008: 99) (C) See Edelman (2000) and Highley (1997: 51). See also Albrecht Dürer’s 1521 illustration of Irish soldiers. Germany References to Germany are infrequent in Shakespeare’s plays. The Catholic Gardiner’s ‘as of late days our neighbours, / The upper Germany, can dearly witness’ (H8 5.2.63–4) is a clear allusion to the Reformation. One of the cultural stereotypes of Germans is their love of drink. Iago speaks of having learned a drinking song ‘in England, where indeed they are most potent in potting. Your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander – drink, ho! – are nothing to your English’ (Oth 2.3.70–3). 103

Germany

Two German characters are referenced in The Merchant of Venice: ‘the County Palatine’ and ‘the young German, the Duke of Saxony’s nephew’ (1.2.44, 82–3). The former is too melancholic – ‘He doth nothing but frown’ (45) – and the latter too thirsty – ‘set a deep glass of Rhenish wine on the contrary casket’ (93–4). Warwick’s reference to ‘hasty Germans’ (4.8.2) in King Henry VI, Part 3 draws upon stereotypes of the irritable German. Goth (A) A member of the Germanic tribe that contributed to the sacking and fall of the Roman Empire. (B) Shakespeare makes reference to Goths in just two plays: once in As You Like It and numerous times in Titus Andronicus, which, fictionally rather than historically, presents the Goths as defeated by Rome (Titus) but also as supportive of Rome (or Lucius’s Roman–Goth army). The dominant image of the Goths in early modern England was that of a powerful, barbarous tribe. In his Wits theater of the little world, Robert Albott includes an entry on ‘the Gothes’ that defines them as ‘barbarous’ (1599: 155). In many ways, a similar imagining of Goths surfaces in Tit, as the following lines reveal: ‘the barbarous Goths’ (1.1.28); ‘lascivious Goth’ (2.2.110); ‘warlike Goths’ (4.4.110, 5.2.113); ‘lusty Goth’ (5.1.19). At the beginning of the play, Marcus refers to the Goths as ‘a nation strong’ (1.1.30). Despite these mainly derogatory references, there is little to suggest that Shakespeare uncritically incorporated Roman historiography and ethnography, for his representation of Romans and Goths in Titus Andronicus refuses to endorse a simple and straightforward civil Roman, barbarous Goth opposition. (C) For a sustained commentary on Romans and Goths in Titus Andronicus, see Broude (1970). Greece (A) Alongside ancient Rome, Greece was valorized in the early modern period as the cradle of European civilization. Shakespeare and his contemporaries owed much to Greek culture, as many of Shakespeare’s plays based on Greek myths and literature attest, from two early comedies to a very late play or romance. George Chapman’s Seauen bookes of the Iliades of Homere (1598), a source for Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, recirculated a key ancient Greek text. (B) It is difficult to say that Greece and Greeks are represented in a particular manner in Shakespeare’s plays, even though a few of his plays are set in ancient Athens and depict ancient Greeks. Unlike Julius Caesar or Coriolanus, Troilus and Cressida, although it brings Greeks to the stage, is not really a reflection of Greek people or Greek identity. Indeed, the Greeks who inhabit that play are very much social elites: the Prologue speaks of ‘their high blood’ (Pro.3). Ulysses’s ‘Take but degree away’ (1.3.109) speech is one of the most conservative and orthodox pronouncements on a hierarchically ordered society in all of Shakespeare. However, the play does afford reflection on national identity, especially in the form of the Greek commander Ajax, whose origins, as the Trojan Aeneas explains, are Greek and Trojan: 104

Greece

This Ajax is half made of Hector’s blood, In love whereof half Hector stays at home; Half heart, half hand, half Hector comes to seek This blended knight, half Trojan and half Greek. (4.5.84–7) Hector continues the theme of Ajax’s mixed descent: Thou art, great lord, my father’s sister’s son, A cousin-german to great Priam’s seed. The obligation of our blood forbids A gory emulation ’twixt us twain. Were thy commixtion Greek and Trojan so That thou couldst say, ‘This hand is Grecian all, And this is Trojan; the sinews of this leg All Greek, and this all Troy; my mother’s blood Runs on the dexter cheek, and this sinister Bounds in my father’s’, by Jove multipotent, Thou shouldst not bear from me a Greekish member Wherein my sword had not impressure made Of our rank feud. But the just gods gainsay That any drop thou borrow’dst from thy mother, My sacred aunt, should by my mortal sword Be drained. Let me embrace thee, Ajax. (4.5.121–36) What is remarkable about these two passages is their presentation of Ajax as both Greek and Trojan – ‘half made’, ‘blended’, ‘commixtion’ – whilst simultaneously halving him – ‘half Trojan and half Greek’, ‘This hand is Grecian all … this is Trojan’ – which undoes any sense of blending and commixture. In other words, these passages begin to formulate some kind of mixed national identity for Ajax; however, the two distinct identities never meet. Politically, Greece was long associated with a variety of forms of government, as Thomas Smith notes in the opening of his De republica Anglorum (1583): TH ey that haue written heretofore of Common wealthes, haue brought them into thrée most simple and speciall kindes or fashions of gouernement. The first where one alone doth gouerne, is called of the Gréekes [Monarchia], the second, where the smaller number, commonly called of them [Aristocratia], and the thirde where the multitude doth rule [Democratia]. (1) Smith reiterates this division as ‘rulinges by one, by the fewer part, & by the multitude or greater number’ (3). Of these three forms of government, Greece was best known in 105

Greece

the early modern period as the home of democracy. Not surprisingly, the commonsloathing Coriolanus’s two references to Greece are dismissive (3.1.107, 114): Holland speaks of Coriolanus’s ‘disapproval of Grecian democracy’ (2013: 277). More than any other Greek play, Timon of Athens offers a sustained reflection on the polis, although Timon’s abandonment of Athens is represented as an escape not from a civil public sphere but rather a wild civic space: ‘Timon will to the woods, where he shall find / Th’unkindest beast more kinder than mankind’ (4.1.35–6). When Timon adopts the moniker ‘Misanthropos’, claiming he ‘hate[s] mankind’ (4.3.54), it is hard, however, to see this as a hatred directed to Greeks or Athenians in particular, as his frequent use of ‘mankind’ suggests. A fine instance of attitudes to the Greeks by way of Romans is found in Titus Andronicus. After having slain his son Mutius and refused his burial in the Andronici family tomb, Titus is persuaded by his brother Marcus to bury Mutius in the family tomb; here is Marcus’s appeal to Titus: Thou art a Roman, be not barbarous: The Greeks upon advice did bury Ajax That slew himself, and wise Laertes’ son Did graciously plead for his funerals. (1.1.383–6) Marcus first reminds Titus that he is Roman and therefore not barbarous; moreover, he appeals to the example of the Greeks, to whom Roman culture and society owed much. (C) Hadfield (2004b) considers Troilus and Cressida in relation to the turn-ofthe-century politics, describing the play as ‘the most savage attack on the legend of the Trojan War written in Elizabeth’s reign’. ‘The play’, he adds, ‘serves as an oblique commentary on the failures and vacillations of the Elizabethan regime, suggesting that the excess of violence caused by Helen, who has armies of great and insignificant men fight and die for her honour, can be read as a mirror of Elizabeth’s England’ (154). Greek see Greece Gypsy (A) In the early modern period the term gypsy/gipsy could be used synonymously with Egyptian, given that gypsies were believed to have come from Egypt. Gypsies first appeared in England in the early sixteenth century. They were known to be tawny, to be nomadic, and they were associated with charms and sorcery, especially fortune telling. (B) Shakespeare’s most famous ‘gypsy’ is Cleopatra. ‘Cleopatra’, Mercutio informs us, was ‘a gipsy’ (RJ 2.4.42). When Philo labels Cleopatra a ‘gipsy’ (AC 1.1.10), he could mean that she is Egyptian (he also describes her as ‘tawny’), and/or he could be labelling her a cunning and deceitful woman. When Mark Antony terms Cleopatra ‘a 106

Gypsy

right gipsy’ (4.12.28), the emphasis seems to be on deceit and fickleness. When Lysander says to Hermia, ‘Out, tawny Tartar, out!’ (MND 3.2.264), his use of Tartar is often glossed as ‘gypsy’. (C) For an examination of attitudes toward Egypt and Egyptians in Shakespeare’s England, see Archer (1997). See also Loomba (2002: 112–34).

107

108

H Harfleur A town in Normandy and the site of a decisive English victory in the Hundred Years’ War. It is one of two battle scenes depicted in King Henry V, the other being Agincourt. The play’s version of the siege of Harfleur, which began on 18 August and ended on 22 September 1415, appears in Act 3, Scenes 1–3, opening with King Henry’s famous ‘Once more unto the breach’ speech (3.1.1). The Harfleur action is bracketed by Henry’s lengthy speeches, with the rousing ‘Once more unto the breach’ followed by the English monarch’s ultimatum to Harfleur’s Governor: Take pity of your town and of your people Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command, Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace O’erblows the filthy and contagious clouds Of heady murder, spoil and villainy. If not, why, in a moment look to see The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters, Your fathers taken by the silver beards, And their most reverend heads dashed to the walls, Your naked infants spitted upon pikes, Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry At Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen. What say you? Will you yield and this avoid? Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy’d? (3.3.28–43) King Henry V has traditionally been regarded as Shakespeare’s most patriotic history play. Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film version, for example, is dedicated to the ‘Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain the spirit of whose ancestors it has been humbly attempted to recapture’. However, the allusion to Herod, as many critics have pointed out, unsettles the Chorus’s construction of Henry as ‘the mirror of all Christian kings’ (2.Chor.6). Although Henry’s speech makes reference to ‘our English dead’ (3.1.2) as well as ‘you noble English’ (3.1.17) and describes his common soldiers as ‘made in England’ (3.1.26), the ensuing scene (3.2) introduces four captains, only one of whom, Gower, is 109

Harfleur

English; the other three, Fluellen, Jamy and Macmorris, are, respectively, Welsh, Scottish and Irish. It is important to point out that Act 3, Scene 2, often referred to as the four captains scene, exists only in F; moreover, F gives three of the non-English captains ethnically specific speech prefixes: the English captain, Gower, is designated by his name, whereas Fluellen’s speech tag is ‘Welch’, and Macmorris (‘Makmorrice’ and ‘Mackmorrice’ in F) and Jamy (‘Iamy’ and ‘Iames’ in F) are given the speech prefix ‘Irish’ and ‘Scot’. Holland see Low Countries hue Synonymous with complexion meaning skin colour. The Prince of Morocco’s anxious ‘Mislike me not for my complexion’ is followed by a proud assertion of his ‘complexion’ when he declares that he ‘would not change this hue’ (MV 2.1.1, 11). Titus Andronicus uses hue more than any other of Shakespeare’s plays. Saturninus is attracted to Tamora, Queen of the Goths, because of her ‘hue’ (1.1.265), but the play never speaks explicitly of Tamora’s skin colour, although Saturninus’s reference to Tamora as ‘fair queen’ (1.1.267) suggests a white hue. A later reference in this play, however, clearly invokes Aaron’s skin colour: Believe me, queen, your swart Cimmerian Doth make your honour of his body’s hue, Spotted, detested and abominable. (2.2.72–4) Aaron’s rhetorical question ‘is black so base a hue?’ (4.2.73) could be read as a challenge to early modern attitudes toward blackness.

110

I impregnable One of the recurrent imaginings of England in Shakespeare’s plays. In the following passage, Hastings, a Yorkist supporter, rejects an alliance with France in favour of an alliance with providence and nature: Let us be back’d with God and with the seas Which he hath given for fence impregnable, And with their helps only defend ourselves: In them and in ourselves our safety lies. (3H6 4.1.42–5) Underpinning Hastings’s rhetoric is a belief in England as an elect nation, indeed as an inviolable elect island-nation. England, of course, is bordered by Wales to the west and Scotland to the north; however, in Hastings’s patriotic geographical refiguring England is ‘impregnable’ precisely because of the sea that he imagines serves as a defence or bulwark. Under King James VI and I, such inscriptions of an impregnable England give way to alternative imaginings of national place and space. As the following passage from Marcus attests, Cymbeline is sensitive to James’s vision of British concord and union: ‘Through the wicked queen, Shakespeare marginalizes the image of Elizabeth and its association with the valorization of England’s “virginal” isolate intactness, in favor of the Stuart vision of internationalism and political accommodation’ (1988: 128). incivil, incivility, uncivil Uncivilized, unrefined, lacking good manners, rude. Opposed to civil and civility. Often synonymous with savage and barbarous. Of the three words, uncivil appears most frequently. Incivil and incivility are each used only once in Shakespeare. Adriana interprets Antipholus of Ephesus’s beating of Dromio of Ephesus as evidence of Antipholus’s ‘incivility’ (CE 4.4.48). Guiderius, in response to Cymbeline’s pronouncement that Cloten ‘was a prince’, says, ‘A most incivil one’ (5.5.91–2) – the OED sites this line from the play in support of the following definition: ‘Unmannerly, rude, clownish; impolite or uncourteous to others; uncivil’. Winchester registers a peculiarly early modern English perspective on the Irish when he says, ‘Th’uncivil kerns of Ireland are in arms’ (2H6 3.1.309), and in doing so reinforces a civil English – uncivil Irish opposition. For an account of incivility in the process of self-definition in relation to The Two Gentlemen of Verona, see Fudge (2008). Ivic (2013a) examines incivility in King Henry VI, Part 3. 111

India, Indian, Indies

India, Indian, Indies (A) All these terms carry a variety of meanings and can be used interchangeably to refer to India, to the East Indies, to the West Indies, to the East and West Indies, to India and the West Indies, to India and the East Indies and to all three regions. Similarly, an Indian can be a native of any or all regions. (B) Shakespeare uses these terms (and related ones) frequently in his plays; however, the exact reference is not always clear. In The Comedy of Errors, Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse compare the body parts of Nell ‘the kitchen wench’ (3.2.95) to various countries. ‘Where America, the Indies?’, demands Antipholus, to which Dromio responds, ‘O, sir, upon her nose, all o’er-embellished with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires’ (3.2.132–4). ‘America, the Indies’ (Shakespeare’s only reference to America) refers to the New World generally and associates this part of the world with riches, especially jewels. When Sir Toby greets Maria with ‘How now, my metal of India!’ (TN 2.5.13– 14), the allusion is likely to the West Indies rather than India, for the West Indies (or America), in the early modern period, was a prime source of gold. Mortimer’s description of Glendower as ‘as bountiful / As mines of India’ (1H4 3.1.162–3), therefore, uses ‘India’ to signify the Indies. As does the Duke of Norfolk: Today the French, All clinquant, all in gold like heathen gods, Shone down the English; and, tomorrow, they Made Britain India. Every man that stood Showed like a mine. (H8 1.1.18–22) The West Indies, however, is not the sole source of precious jewels. Rosalind’s ‘ “From the east to western Inde, / No jewel is like Rosalind” ’ (AYL 3.2.85–6) appears to posit two ’Inde’s (or ’Ind’s): one located in the east (India, the East Indies, both?) and the West Indies. Falstaff says of Mistress Page and Mistress Ford, ‘she is a region in Guiana, all gold and bounty. I will be cheaters to them both, and they shall be exchequers to me. They shall be my East and West Indies, and I will trade to them both’ (MW 1.3.66–9). The OED cites this passage – and another from King Henry VIII : ‘Our King has all the Indies in his arms’ (4.1.45) – in support of the following definition: ‘Used allusively for a region or place yielding great wealth or to which profitable voyages may be made’. Troilus’s description of Cressida’s bed as ‘India; there she lies, a pearl’ (TC 1.1.99) suggests that, like ‘Indies’, ‘India’, too, could be used allusively, as does King Henry VI ’s reference to his crown, ‘Not deck’d with diamonds and Indian stones’ (3H6 3.1.43). The precious gems to which Henry alludes could have their origins in any or all of the world’s Indies. Another instance of the conflation of ‘India’ and ‘Indies’ occurs in The Merchant of Venice. India is included among the list of Antonio’s ventures given by Bassanio – ‘From Tripolis, from Mexico and England, / From Lisbon, Barbary and India’ (3.2.267– 8). An earlier passage in the play spoken by Shylock, however, uses ‘Indies’ in reference to Antonio’s ventures: ‘he hath an argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the Indies, I 112

infection

understand moreover upon the Rialto, he hath a third at Mexico, a fourth for England, and other ventures he hath, squand’red abroad’ (1.3.17–21). Bassanio’s puzzling reference to ‘the beauteous scarf / Veiling an Indian beauty’ (MV 3.2.98–9) appears to offer ‘Indian beauty’ as an oxymoron, suggesting that ‘Indian’ is the opposite of ‘beauty’, although exactly from where this ‘Indian beauty’ derives is unclear – given the play’s emphasis on ‘fair’, ‘Indian’ could simply signify dark skin. There are instances in Shakespeare’s plays wherein the use of India, Indian and Indies is specific. The numerous references to ‘India’ and ‘Indian’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – including ‘the spiced Indian air’ (2.1.124) – are to India. Maria says of Malvolio, ‘he does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies’ (TN 3.2.76–8). This may be a reference to a map published in England in 1599, one of the first to use Mercator projection and which advanced cartographical knowledge of the New World. Berowne’s Who sees the heavenly Rosaline, That, like a rude and savage man of Ind, At the first opening of the gorgeous east, Bows not his vassal head and, strucken blind, Kisses the base ground with obedient breast? (LLL 4.3.217–21) is generally read as a reference to India. One would assume, therefore, that Stephano’s ‘What’s the matter? Have we devils here? Do you put tricks upon’s with savages and men of Ind’ (Tem 2.2.65–6) also refers to India. But another passage in The Tempest (in the same scene) uses ‘Indian’ in reference to inhabitants of the New World who have been brought to England and put on display: Were I in England now (as once I was) and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian. (2.2.27–33) Moreover, terms such as rude and savage were used by Shakespeare and his contemporaries to refer to ‘Indians’ from India as well as from the East and West Indies. Finally, unpacking Othello’s ‘base Indian’ (5.2.347) is further complicated by the presence of ‘base Judean’ (TLN 3658) in F (see tribe). (C) For some general reflections on Shakespeare’s representations of India, especially in relation to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, see Hendricks (1996). infection In terms of political rhetoric, infection implies a number of meanings: contamination, corruption, degeneration, fatal mixture, impurity – in short, a threat to an ideal state or a fall from a privileged, uncorrupted, valorized state. Gardiner’s ‘a 113

infection

pestilence / That does infect the land’ (H8 5.1.45–6) is a prime instance of such political rhetoric. John of Gaunt’s imagining of England as ‘This fortress built by Nature for herself / Against infection’ (R2 2.1.43–4) is another fine example. Gaunt is not, of course, suggesting that England is disease-free; rather, the underlying sentiment, captured in the phrase ‘for herself’, is, if not xenophobic, Anglocentric, monarchically Anglocentric. In other words, ‘infection’ refers to all things foreign, be it people or ideas. The rhetoric of infection also surfaces in early modern English discourse on Africans, as this example on Ethiopians attests: this blackenesse proceedeth of some naturall infection of the first inhabitants of that Countrey, and so all the whole progenie of them descended, are still polluted with the same blot of infection. Therefore it shall not bee farre from our purpose, to examine the first originall of these blacke men, and howe by a lineall discent they haue hitherto continued thus blacke. (Hakluyt 1599–1600 vol. 3: 52) Shakespeare’s contribution to Sir Thomas More presents the riotous and xenophobic Londoners as fearing ‘infection’ (6.18) from foreign sources. inland (A) As both a noun and an adjective, ‘inland’ functions primarily as a geographical term, denoting the interior of a country, distant from both sea and/or border. Its meaning, however, is not restricted solely to geography. (B) In his A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596), Edmund Spenser speaks of an occasion ‘by which all those countries which, lying near unto any mountains or Irish deserts, had been planted with English, were shortly displanted and lost’ (1970: 14); he adds that these displanted English settlers then ‘spread themselves into the inland’ (15). Although it is not clear where these English settlers went, Spenser’s use of ‘inland’ suggests a relocation from remote and rebellious parts of Ireland to a space under tighter English colonial control: a shift from wild to civil territory. Another use of inland, this time as an adjective, by Spenser complicates this attitude, ‘the trade and inter-deal of seacoast nations one with another worketh more civility and good fashions in them, than amongst the inland dwellers which are seldom seen of foreigners’ (60). When Shakespeare uses ‘inland’, the word can signify geographical position only: hence Portia’s reference to ‘an inland brook’ (MV 5.1.96). But it can also serve, as demonstrated by Spenser, to demarcate boundaries grounded in notions of civility and incivility. For instance, in King Henry V, the Bishop of Canterbury, responding to King Henry’s fear of a Scottish assault on England in the wake of England’s invasion of France, says: They of those marches, gracious sovereign, Shall be a wall sufficient to defend Our inland from the pilfering borderers. (1.2.140–2)

114

Ireland

Citing these lines from the play, the OED defines ‘inland’ as the ‘interior part of a country, the parts remote from the sea or the border’. Given that Canterbury distinguishes England (‘Our inland’) from Scotland (‘the pilfering borderers’), we can comprehend how ‘inland’ functions as more than a geographical term. The full OED definition is helpful here: ‘the inlying districts near the capital and centres of population, as opposed to remote or outlying wild parts’. It is precisely this opposition between centre and periphery, inland and extremity that Canterbury’s lines evoke. The use of ‘inland’ to denote superior civility is more pronounced in As You Like It: the thorny point Of base distress hath ta’en from me the show Of smooth civility. Yet I am inland bred, And know some nurture. (2.7.95–8) In these lines, Orlando invokes his ‘inland’ breeding in order to register his ‘civility’. (C) See Ivic (1999a) for an account of ‘inland’ within the context of Shakespeare’s representation of the Celtic Fringe as well as Murphy (1996), who contrasts Canterbury’s use of ‘Our inland’ with John of Gaunt’s imagining of England in King Richard II . Ireland (A) Island lying west of Britain, separated from Britain by the Irish Sea; second largest island of the British Isles or Atlantic Archipelago. In the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, Ireland was at once a kingdom and a colony very much subject to English control. Queen Elizabeth I and King James VI and I both included ‘Ireland’ among their regal titles; however, neither monarch set foot in Ireland (in fact, the last English monarch to have set foot in Ireland was Richard II ) and the native Irish were much more colonial than political subjects. England’s relation with Ireland in Shakespeare’s time was marked by a division between an aggressive colonizing Protestant state and a defensive colonized Catholic population. The English, or Anglo-Norman, conquest of Ireland began in the twelfth century under King Henry II , resulting in a partial conquest of Ireland and the establishment of pockets of colonial communities scattered around the island. In the wake of the Reformation, it was paramount that English power extended beyond Dublin. King Henry VIII changed his title from Lord to King of Ireland, and Tudor Ireland witnessed the appointment of an English-born Lord Deputy as well as the arrival of a new wave of Protestant settlers from England, the ‘New English’. The arrival of the New English amounted to a reconquest and recolonization of Ireland. The political incorporation of Ireland into an English polity meant the loss of political authority for the ‘Old English’, the descendants of the twelfth-century invaders who primarily, although not exclusively, inhabited the English-dominated area surrounding Dublin, called the English Pale. In spite of their mutual mistrust, the Old and New English collectively constructed an identity-forming (colonial) discourse in which Englishness was defined against the island’s Gaelic inhabitants, as well as those settlers of English or Anglo-Norman descent 115

Ireland

who planted themselves in the remoter parts of Ireland and suffered what contemporaries termed degeneration: that is, adopting Gaelic customs, language and family names. In this sense, Ireland and images of the Irish played a crucial role in early modern English identity formation. Two of the most monumental historical events to have occurred during Shakespeare’s career as a playwright were the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603) and the Jacobean plantation of Ulster, which began in earnest in 1609. (B) Shakespeare may have acquired knowledge of Ireland and the Irish from the Irish volume of Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577 and 1587). The 1577 volume was compiled mainly by Richard Stanihurst, a Catholic Old Englishman resident in Dublin; Richard Hooker, a Protestant Englishman, who lived briefly in Ireland and whose contributions to the Irish Chronicles give voice to New English aspirations, compiled and contributed to the 1587 volume. Whilst Stanihurst’s A Treatise contayning a playne and perfect Description of Irelande praises Ireland for its commodious properties, its comments on the English Pale reveal the dominant English attitude toward the Irish: There is also an other diuision of Irelande, into the English pale and Irishry. For when Ireland was subdued by the English, diuers of the conquerors planted themselues neere to Dublyn and the confines thereto adioyning, and so as it were enclosing and empalyng themselues within certayne listes and territories, they feazed away the Irish, in so much as that countrey became meere English. And thereof it was termed, the English pale: which in auncient tyme stretched from Doondalke to Catherlagh or Kilkennie. But now, what for the slacknesse of marchoures, and the encroachyng of the Irish enemy, the scope of the English pale is greatly empayred. (Holinshed 1577: 3) An absolute division of English and Irish is voiced here, particularly evident in Stanihurst’s use of the word ‘meere’. In its early modern denotation ‘mere’ meant pure or unmixed. In Edmund Spenser’s prose dialogue A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596), the liminal position of the Gaelicized Old English – that is, the descendants of the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman invaders of Ireland – resists simple ethnic classification: ‘most of them’, one of the interlocutors claims, ‘are degenerated and grown almost mere Irish’ (1970: 48); in a later passage the same speaker labels the Old English ‘the English Irish’ (151). Stanihurst was well aware that the concept of ‘meere’ English and ‘meere’ Irish was complicated by the fact that many of the descendants of the twelfth-century invaders had married into Irish families and adopted Irish names and customs. Commenting on the ‘present ruine and decaie’ of Ulster’s English families, Stanihurst writes: They were enuironned & compassed with euill neighbours. Neighbourhoode bredde acquaintance, acquaintance wafted in ye Irish tongue, the Irishe hooked with it attyre, attyre haled rudenes, rudenesse engendred ignorance, ignoraunce

116

Ireland

brought contempt of lawes, the contempt of lawes bred rebellion, rebellion raked thereto warres, and so consequently the vtter decay and desolation of that worthy countrey. (Holinshed 1577: 5) In this passage, Stanihurst voices a common English conception of Ireland as a land of ire that threatens one’s civil identity as well as a common English perception of the Irish as barbarous, savage and wild (see Figure 5). Spenser’s prose dialogue immediately refers to Ireland as ‘that savage nation’ (1970: 1). Numerous references to Ireland and the Irish appear in Shakespeare’s plays, especially the history plays, and many of these references continue early modern English stereotypes of Ireland and the Irish. There are references to ‘an Irish rat’ (AYL 3.2.174) and a bitch-hound howling in Irish (1H4 3.1.230). The cartographic anatomization of the ‘kitchen wench’ Nell in The Comedy of Errors leads Antipholus of Syracuse to ask Dromio of Syracuse, ‘In what part of her body stands Ireland?’; Dromio’s answer is ‘Marry, sir, in her buttocks, I found it out by the bogs’ (3.2.116–18). Ireland is often the butt of Shakespearean jokes. As mentioned, most references to Ireland and the Irish surface in the history plays. Some of these references are historically accurate: for instance, references to King Richard II ’s ill-fated ‘Irish expedition’ (1H4 1.3.149). Other references bear witness to a civil–savage opposition at work in English imaginings of Ireland. Salisbury praises the Duke of York for the civilizing mission that he carried out in Ireland: And, brother York, thy acts in Ireland In bringing them to civil discipline; … Have made thee feared and honoured of the people. (2H6 1.1.192–6) Shakespeare’s only ‘Irish’ character is King Henry V’s Captain Macmorris, who along with Gower, Jamy and Fluellen make up what are often termed the play’s four ‘British’ captains. Macmorris’s famous ‘What ish my nation?’ (3.2.124) speech, addressed to the Welsh Captain Fluellen, has drawn a host of critical responses ranging from historicized (Macmorris as Old English) to postcolonial (Macmorris as hybrid) readings. In F (this scene is absent from Q), Macmorris is given an ethnically specific speech prefix, ‘Irish’ (Shakespeare 1623: sig. h6v). Less critical attention has been given to this play’s (actually F’s) reference to King Henry as ‘brother Ireland’ (TLN 2999). Editors have viewed ‘brother Ireland’ as an error for ‘brother England’; however, given that ‘Lord of Ireland’ was often included in King Henry’s title, ‘brother Ireland’ is not necessarily an error. ‘Henry V was clearly written in the short time when England was excited at the prospect that the young hero [Robert Devereux, earl of Essex] would soon have the Irish licked’ (Edwards 1983: 78). Edwards is right to describe the line ‘Bringing rebellion broached on his sword’ as ‘powerful’; however, he underestimates the uneasiness accompanying the preceding

117

Ireland

line: ‘As in good time he may’ (5.Chor.32, 31). Ireland offered little excitement during Elizabeth’s reign. (C) A plethora of scholarship on Shakespeare and Ireland has appeared in recent years. Burnett and Wray (1997) offer a collection of fine essays. Valuable studies include chapters found in Baker (1997), Highley (1997), Murphy (1999), Neill (2000) and Shapiro (2005: 98–118). Brown (1985) explores the relations between the setting of The Tempest and English colonialism in early modern Ireland. Fuchs (1997) extends Brown’s reading by focusing on both ‘the violent English colonial adventures in Ireland’ and ‘the very real presence of the Ottoman threat in the Mediterranean’ (46). Baker’s contribution to Maley and Murphy (1997) also places Tem within an Irish context. For a reading of F’s ‘brother Ireland’ within the context of English expansion across the British Isles, see Ivic (1999a). For historical accounts of early modern Ireland see Canny (2001) and Morgan (1993). Vaughan and Vaughan’s Arden edition of Tem includes an informative section on ‘Africa and Ireland’ (2011: 47–54).

Figure 5 John Speed, ‘The Kingdome of Irland’, from The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London 1611–12). By permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Map Res 74, betw. pp. 137–8. 118

island, isle

Irish see Ireland island, isle (A) England as isle or island was one of the dominant tropes of English nationhood in the early modern period. The island of Britain contained two kingdoms (England and Scotland – see Figures 4 and 6) and three nations (England, Scotland, Wales – see Figure 7), but England’s contiguous neighbours were erased from Anglocentric imaginings of England as an island-nation which were pervasive in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (B) Again and again in Shakespeare’s plays England is described as an island; the following examples are not exhaustive: ‘this island’ (2H6 3.1.148); ‘this fair island’ (KJ 1.1.10); ‘Our isle’ (1H6 1.1.50); ‘this isle’ (KJ 4.2.99, 5.2.25; 2H6 4.7.56; R3 5.2.11; H8 2.3.79); ‘this famous isle’ (R3 3.1.164); ‘This noble isle’ (R3 3.1.124); ‘this warlike isle’ (2H6 1.1.123). Even (ventriloquized) French characters can be Anglocentric: ‘That island of England’ (H5 3.7.142); although, interestingly, French characters also employ a different name for the island: ‘that nook-shotten isle of Albion’ (H5 3.5.14); ‘Britain’s isle’ (2H6 1.3.45). ‘Like to his island girt in with the ocean’ (3H6 4.8.20) is how the Earl of Warwick presents his king (who, earlier in the play, had been in Scotland) protected by his ‘loving citizens’ (19). In promising Arthur both the English and French crown, Limoges, the Duke of Austria, presents England as an island from a French perspective, for the initial reference is to the chalk cliffs of Dover: Upon thy cheek lay I this zealous kiss, As seal to this indenture of my love: That to my home I will no more return, Till Angiers and the right thou hast in France, Together with that pale, that white-fac’d shore, Whose foot spurns back the ocean’s roaring tides And coops from other lands her islanders, Even till that England, hedg’d in with the main, That water-walled bulwark, still secure And confident from foreign purposes, Even till that utmost corner of the west Salute thee for her king. (KJ 2.1.19–30) The emphasis here is on the inviolability of the island-nation of England, figured as a natural fortress for its inhabitants. Austria’s sense of geography is impoverished, for England is not completely ‘hedg’d in with the main’. Other plays – King Henry IV, Part 1, King Henry V – are alert to the ‘foreign purposes’ of Scotland and Wales. The ‘utmost corner of the west’ is an ancient and medieval conception of England on the edge of a flat world.

119

island, isle

A similar imagining of the island of Britain occurs in Cymbeline, when the Queen rouses Cymbeline in the face of Rome’s demand for a tribute from Britain: Remember, sir, my liege, The kings your ancestors, together with The natural bravery of your isle, which stands As Neptune’s park, ribb’d and pal’d in With rocks unscaleable and roaring waters, With sands that will not bear your enemies’ boats, But suck them up to th’ topmast. (3.1.17–23) The Queen, too, presents, anachronistically, an Anglocentric imagining of Cymbeline’s ‘isle’. Although Cymbeline is King of Britain rather than England, by no means did the historical Cymbeline’s (Cunobeline, Cunobelinus – see Figure 1) rule spread across the entire island of Britain. Indeed, in the play Wales, or Cambria, is marked as a foreign country. The most famous invocation of England as isle occurs in King Richard II . John of Gaunt’s speech is underpinned by ‘classical and Christian registers’ as well as ‘natural and political destinies’ (McEachern 1996: 6); it is also underpinned by an awkward combination of nationalist and royalist sentiment: This royal throne of kings, this scept’red isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands; This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth, Renowned for their deeds as far from home, For Christian service and true chivalry, As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s son; This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land, Dear for her reputation through the world, Is now leas’d out – I die pronouncing it – Like to a tenement or pelting farm.

120

islander

England, bound in with the triumphant sea, Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege Of wat’ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame, With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds; That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself. (R2 2.1.40–66) As much as Gaunt celebrates the island-nation in a manner not unlike the previously cited passages, he foregrounds an England whose impregnability is undermined by internal strife. Although the word island is not used, King Henry V does imagine England as an island: ‘O England, model to thy inward greatness, / Like little body with a mighty heart’ (2.Chor.16–17). Here the Chorus is restating Gaunt’s sense of impregnability if not a siege mentality. Despite the passages cited above, Shakespeare was by no means oblivious to the fact that the island of Britain was made up of three nations, as evidenced by Owen Glendower’s question to Hotspur Where is he living, clipp’d in with the sea That chides the banks of England, Scotland, Wales, Which calls me pupil or hath read to me? (1H4 3.1.41–3) Perhaps it is significant that these lines are delivered by a Welsh character rather than an English one, and perhaps it is even more significant that they are delivered in the presence of an onstage map of Britain. (C) On imaginings of Britain in ancient and early modern texts, see Bennett (1956). For McEachern, ‘the England whose passing Gaunt laments is, in 1592, just beginning to be glimpsed’ (1996: 6). For a comparison of ‘the geopolitical metaphor of insularity’ in John of Gaunt’s and Anne Dowriche’s ‘evocations of English nationality’ (25), see Chedgzoy (2004). islander An inhabitant of an island; one native to an island. The term is used (but not exclusively) in reference to small islands, such as the island that forms the setting of The Tempest. When Trinculo stumbles across Caliban, he wonders what he has found: What have we here, a man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish: he smells like a fish, a very ancient and fish-like smell, a kind of – not of the newest – poor-John. A strange fish!. . . Legged like a man and his fins like arms! Warm, o’ my troth! I do now let loose my opinion, hold it no longer: this is no fish, but an islander. (2.2.24–36) Whatever Caliban is, he is native to the island. In F, Caliban is labelled a ‘saluage and deformed slaue’ (TLN 2329); in King Henry VI, Part 2 the Marquess of Suffolk

121

islander

suggests, incorrectly, that ‘savage islanders [killed] Pompey the Great’ (2H6 4.1.139– 40). A connection between islanders and savagery seems to be in place. But this connection should not be overemphasized. Desdemona speaks of ‘the generous islanders’ (Oth 3.3.284) of Cyprus – ‘generous’ here meaning noble. And in King John, two of the play’s French characters speak of England’s inhabitants as ‘islanders’ (2.1.25, 5.2.103). Italy see also Rome (A) Italy was home to the Renaissance, a cultural rebirth that witnessed a recovery of ancient Greece and Rome, especially in the form of classical Greek and Roman texts, that spawned a revolution in art and ideas in Italy’s rich citystates. Italy was also home to Roman Catholicism. Elizabethan and Jacobean English attitudes towards Italy and Italians, therefore, were complex and contradictory. (B) Many of Shakespeare’s plays, especially comedies, are set in Italy and depict Italian characters if not characteristics. Settings include Florence, Mantua, Messina, Milan, Padua, Pisa, Sicilia, Venice and Verona. The comedies do not bear witness to any serious misgivings about Italy and Italians. With their emphasis on English nationhood, the histories, however, register a more critical perspective. Edmund of Langley’s reference to ‘proud Italy, / Whose manners still our tardy-apish nation / Limps after in base imitation’ (R2 2.1.21–3) could be read as a commentary on England’s belated cultural Renaissance. Because these lines immediately precede John of Gaunt’s lengthy lament on ‘this England’ (50), it could be argued that they reflect an oft-voiced critique of Italianate Englishmen. King John’s proclamation to Cardinal Pandulph smacks of a post-Reformation attitude toward Catholic Rome: Tell him this tale; and from the mouth of England Add thus much more, that no Italian priest Shall tithe or toll in our dominions; But as we, under God, are supreme head, So under Him that great supremacy, Where we do reign, we will alone uphold Without th’ assistance of a mortal hand: So tell the pope, all reverence set apart To him and his usurp’d authority. (3.1.78–86) The emphasis here is on England as an empire more so than a nation, as the reference to ‘our dominions’ and the use of the royal ‘we’ suggest. Nevertheless, how England defined itself in opposition and in defiance to other countries, including Italy, manifests itself in these lines. In John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, the Spanish Vasques says to the Italian Soranzo, ‘Now you begin to turne Italian’ (1633: sig I3v), which is a nod to vengefulness as an Italian national characteristic. In The Tempest, Shakespeare at once appropriates 122

Italy

this stereotype and dismantles it, as Prospero, former Duke of Milan, seeks revenge on his usurpers only to forgive and forget. Oddly, the play that includes the most uses of ‘Italian’ is Cymbeline. Posthumus Leonatus speaks of returning to ancient or Roman Britain with ‘th’Italian gentry’, and he refers to his clothing as ‘Italian weeds’ (5.1.18, 23). Iachimo exists in Cymbeline as an anachronistic Italian. Imogen describes Iachimo as a ‘saucy stranger’ (1.7.151), and, although he is technically a Roman, he is referred to in the play as an ‘Italian’ (2.1.37); he makes reference to his ‘Italian brain’ (5.5.196). Pisano, upon receiving Posthumus’s letter accusing Imogen of adultery asks the rhetorical question, ‘What false Italian / (As poisonous tongu’d as handed) hath prevail’d / On thy too ready hearing?’ (3.2.4–6). In short, Iachimo is imagined less as a Roman and more as a stock character: the scheming Italian. (C) Maley (2003: 31–44) attends to contemporary Italy, especially Roman Catholicism, in Cymbeline’s distinctly post-Reformation and post-Elizabethan construction of Britain. On Shakespeare’s Italian language-learning habits, see Lawrence (2005: 118–76).

123

124

J Jew (A) A term used to denominate a person of Hebrew descent and of the Judaic religion. Synonyms include Hebrew and Israelite. Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and were not formally allowed entry until 1656 under Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate. The execution of Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jew accused of plotting Queen Elizabeth’s murder, in 1594 fed long-held anti-Jewish sentiment in Elizabethan England. As Shakespeare’s Shylock attests, Jews were associated with moneylending or usury, a profession to which Jews were drawn because they were barred from other offices in medieval and early modern Europe. There may have been a Jewish presence in Elizabethan and Jacobean London; however, Jews were forbidden from practising their religion openly. (B) ‘The Jew’ rings throughout The Merchant of Venice perhaps more than any other tag for a character in a Shakespeare play. References to Othello as ‘the Moor’ are comparable. However, ‘the valiant Moor’ and ‘the noble Moor’ (1.3.48, 2.3.131) find no equivalent in MV . Instead, we find ‘the dog Jew’ (2.8.14). It has been suggested that the cultural stereotypes of the Jew in MV are not tested in the manner that prejudice against Moors is in Othello and, less so, Titus Andronicus. That it was proverbial that Jews did not keep their word is evidenced by Falstaff’s ‘or I am a Jew else: an Ebrew Jew’ (1H4 2.4.177) and Benedick’s ‘if I do not love her, I am a Jew’ (MA 2.3.252–3). Launce’s ‘a Jew would have wept to have seen our parting’ (TGV 2.3.11–12) plays upon the proverb ‘It would make a Jew rue’, which is also conveyed by Antonio’s reference to Shylock’s hardened ‘Jewish heart’ (4.1.80). In Launcelot Gobbo’s ‘I am a Jew, if I serve the Jew any longer’ (2.2.107–08) the latter reference is to Shylock as a religious and ethnic Jew, whilst the former reference uses ‘Jew’ as a term of contempt. Launce’s ‘thou art an Hebrew, a Jew, and not worth the name of a Christian’ (TGV 2.5.47–8) uses ‘Hebrew’ and ‘Jew’ synonymously; moreover, it demarcates Christians and Jews on religious lines. Antonio’s ‘The Hebrew will turn Christian, he grows kind’ (1.3.177) posits religious difference just as it ironically and proleptically gestures to a (forced) conversion. Antonio uses ‘kind’ to mean generous, and, of course, it connects generosity and benevolence with Christianity. But kind as race is not far off; indeed, the play is very much a reflection on Antonio’s and Shylock’s kind, with Shylock’s daughter Jessica a liminal figure: daughter to a Jew but married to a Christian. Because Jews, like Muslims, did not hold Christ in the same regard as did Christians, both Jew and Muslim could be lumped together as religiously other, as they are in Macbeth: 125

Jew

Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Silver’d in the moon’s eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips. (4.1.26–9) Throughout The Merchant of Venice Shylock is associated with the devil: upon Shylock’s entrance in Act 3, Scene 1, for instance, Solanio claims here ‘comes [the devil] in the likeness of a Jew’ (3.1.20). In the same scene, Tubal’s entrance leads Solanio to state, ‘Here comes another of the tribe, – a third / cannot be match’d, unless the devil himself turn Jew’ (3.1.71–2). Shakespeare’s depiction of Jewish Shylock has led many critics to believe that Elizabethan society was not a tolerant one, especially on religious grounds. A cursory glance at sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English history suggests that Catholics were not very tolerant of Protestants and that Protestants were not very tolerant of Catholics. Indeed, some Protestants could not tolerate other Protestants. Is it any surprise that Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1592) and Shakespeare’s play treat Jewish characters in the manner they do? Yet many critics have read Shakespeare’s treatment of Shylock as more than merely anti-Semitic. Portia’s ‘Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?’ (4.1.172) has drawn ample critical attention, especially as it troubles notions of identity and difference. If in this scene Shylock is wearing his ‘Jewish gaberdine’ (1.3.110) – ‘a garment worn by Jews’ is included among the OED ’s ‘gaberdine’ entries – then he would be easily distinguished from the Christian Antonio. Might, therefore, this play be interrogating supposed cultural differences? Interestingly, the only other Shakespearean character to sport gaberdine is The Tempest’s Caliban, who is described in F’s list of the ‘Names of the Actors’ as ‘a saluage and deformed slaue’ (TLN 2321, 2329). Critics also point to the fact that the play was entered into the Stationers’ Register in July 1598 as ‘the Marchaunt of Venyce or otherwise called the Jewe of Venyce’ (Arber 1876: 3.39v) to foreground Shylock’s critical centrality. (C) Book-length studies include Shapiro (1997), who offers a historical approach to Jews in early modern England, attending particularly to ‘the extent to which The Merchant of Venice had come to embody English conceptions of Jewish racial and national difference’ (2). Focusing on MV , Adelman (2007) explores such topics as blood and conversion. Cohen (1988: 104–18) acknowledges that Shylock is both villain and victim, but he reads the play as anti-Semitic and posits a playwright content to exploit cultural stereotypes. Acknowledging that ‘Shylock’s status remains undecidable’, Archer (2005: 41–6) suggests that his ‘separateness demands, even if it finally exceeds, historicist efforts to place him in early modern London’ (41). Drakakis’s Arden edition of MV includes an informative section on ‘Marlowe, Shakespeare and the Jews’ (2010: 17–31). Jewry Judea, or the land of the Jews. Antony and Cleopatra includes four references to Jewry (including three uses of ‘Herod of Jewry’) and it appears once in King Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor and King Richard II . 126

K kern see also galloglass (A) A light-armed Irish foot-soldier, usually sporting sword, target (a light round wooden shield) and maybe bow and arrows. (B) In his contribution to the Irish volume of Holinshed’s Chronicles titled A Treatise contayning a playne and perfect Description of Irelande, Richard Stanihurst, listing the five followers of an Irish chief, has this to say about kerns: Of the third degre is the kerne, who is an ordinary souldior, vsing for weapon his sword & target, and sometimes hys peece, beyng commonly so good markemen as they will come within a score of a great castle. Kerne signifieth, as noble men of deepe iudgement informed me, a shower of hell, because they are taken for no better then for rakehels, or the deuils blacke garde, by reason of the stinkyng sturre they keepe, where so euer they be. (1577: 28) There are numerous references to kerns in Shakespeare’s plays, and his familiarity with kerns probably owes much to his reading of chronicles. That Shakespeare was familiar with kerns is evident in the specificity that accompanies the references. King Richard, for example, makes a claim about historical kerns that may well refer to the actual English–Irish warfare that was occurring at the time of the composition of this play (that is, the Nine Years’ War, 1594–1603): Now for our Irish wars: We must supplant those rough rug-headed kerns, Which live like venom where no venom else, But only they, have privilege to live. (R2 2.1.155–8) Like Richard, Queen Elizabeth (and, to a certain extent, King James) had her ‘Irish wars’. Shakespeare’s description of kerns as ‘rough rug-headed’ is probably a reference to the thick mass of matted hair covering the forehead and eyes worn by some of Ireland’s native subjects. The Dauphin, too, refers to kerns, displaying a knowledge of Irish soldiery, in particular the practice of riding bareback: ‘O then belike she was old and gentle, and you rode like a kern of Ireland, your French hose off, and in your straight strossers’ (H5 3.7.52–4). When Winchester says, ‘Th’uncivil kerns of Ireland are in arms’ (2H6 3.1.309), he gives voice to a dominant English view of not only kerns but also the Irish in general. And this view is shared by other characters in the play, including 127

kern

Richard, Duke of York. Consider, for example, York’s account of his seduction of John Cade: I have seduced a headstrong Kentishman, John Cade of Ashford, To make commotion, as full well he can, Under the title of John Mortimer. In Ireland have I seen this stubborn Cade Oppose himself against a troop of kerns, And fought so long till that his thighs with darts Were almost like a sharp-quilled porpentine; And in the end, being rescued, I have seen Him caper upright like a wild Morisco, Shaking the bloody darts as he his bells. Full often, like a shag-haired crafty kern, Hath he conversed with the enemy And, undiscovered, come to me again And given me notice of their villainies. This devil here shall be my substitute. (2H6 3.1.355–70) What is remarkable about this passage is the way in which Cade, on the one hand, is opposed to kerns yet, on the other, is ‘like a shag-haired crafty kern’. If this reveals Cade’s duplicity, it also reflects the mercenary nature of kerns, who fought in service of Irish and English and other forces. In the same play, we witness an alternative perspective on the wild, rude Irish soldier, as a messenger announces: Please it your grace to be advertised The Duke of York is newly come from Ireland, And with a puissant and a mighty power Of gallowglasses and stout kerns Is marching hitherward in proud array. (4.9.23–7) The messenger pronounces a begrudging respect for York’s Irish soldiers, a sentiment echoed in much of the English discourse on Ireland in the period, especially during the Nine Years’ War. References to kerns are not restricted to an Irish context. In Macbeth we are informed that Macdonwald ‘is supplied’ of ‘Kernes and Gallowglasses’ from ‘the western isles’ (1.1.12–13), the same ‘wretched Kernes’ (5.7.17) who, according to Macduff, are later in Macbeth’s service. These references remind us that kerns were often employed as mercenary soldiers and that kerns were by no means restricted to Ireland. 128

kingdom

(C) See Edelman (2000). See also Albrecht Dürer’s 1521 illustration of Irish soldiers. Highley (1997: 52–8) examines Shakespeare’s fashioning of Cade as a ‘quasiIrishmen’ (53). kind Amongst the many meanings that this word carries are birth, descent, origin, natural condition or disposition, race, stock. Lysimachus’s ‘She’s such a one that, were I well assur’d / Came of a gentle kind and noble stock’ (Per 5.1.68–9), spoken in reference to Marina, uses ‘kind’ to mean birth. Prospero distinguishes himself from Ariel when he speaks of himself, in relation to his fellow Italians, as ‘One of their kind’ (Tem 5.2.23). Ariel, ’an ayrie spirit’ (F), is not of Prospero’s kind, nor, it appears, is Caliban. Iago’s ‘But I for mere suspicion in that kind’ (Oth 1.3.387) is more difficult to decipher: the primary reference is most likely to his wife Emilia and therefore womankind. However, because Iago begins this line of thought with ‘I hate the Moor’ (384), ‘kind’ can be read as a reference to Moors in general, and therefore his use of the word has racial overtones. kingdom (A) A monarchical state or government, ruled by a king or queen (possibly and temporarily by a Protector). Opposed, say, to a republic. (B) Shakespeare lived in a kingdom and he did so under two monarchs, Queen Elizabeth I and King James I (also and simultaneously King James VI of Scotland). Earlier scholarship read Shakespeare’s plays, especially his Elizabethan history plays, as a reflection on life in a well-ordered kingdom, the product of a dramatist who, like his fellow subjects, was loyally and obediently subject to a monarch. And two passages in particular were often cited as evidence of Shakespeare’s conservatism. One comes from King Henry V, delivered by the Bishop of Canterbury: Therefore doth heaven divide The state of man in divers functions, Setting endeavour in continual motion, To which is fixed, as an aim or butt, Obedience. For so work the honey-bees, Creatures that by a rule in nature teach The act of order to a peopled kingdom. They have a king and officers of sorts, Where some like magistrates correct at home, Others like merchants venture trade abroad, Others like soldiers, armed in their stings, Make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds, Which pillage they with merry march bring home To the tent-royal of their emperor, Who busied in his majesty surveys The singing masons building roofs of gold, The civil citizens kneading up the honey,

129

kingdom

The poor mechanic porters crowding in Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate, The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum, Delivering o’er to executors pale The lazy yawning drone. (1.2.183–204) The other passage, spoken by Ulysses, is from Troilus and Cressida: O, when degree is shaked, Which is the ladder to all high designs, Then enterprise is sick. How could communities, Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities, Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, The primogeneity and due of birth, Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, But by degree, stand in authentic place? Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark what discord follows. (1.3.101–10) Whilst these passages manifest the idea of the Great Chain of Being, they do not evince a playwright’s belief in such a world view. More recent criticism has drawn attention to Shakespeare’s contribution less to Tudor royalist propaganda and more to the production of English national identity, although one of the foundational works on nationhood in the Elizabethan period argues that Shakespeare’s ‘representations of England are … the most exclusively monarchic that his generation has passed on to us’ (Helgerson 1992: 245). This may be an overstatement. Which characters use the word kingdom and how they use it is revealing. Hamlet’s most power-hungry characters, Claudius and Fortinbras, are the only characters in the play to use the word kingdom. King Richard II often speaks of ‘my kingdom’, which leads Howard and Rackin to claim that Richard views England as ‘his personal property, to be used as he desires for his own benefit’ (1997: 150). King Henry V is often read as Shakespeare’s most patriotic play, with its numerous references to England, English and Englishman – more than any other play. Interestingly, the Chorus opens the play voicing a desire not for a national space but rather for ‘A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, / And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!’ (Pro.3–4). Kent’s reference to an ancient Britain rent by war as ‘this scattered kingdome’ (Q: sig. F3v) is suggestive, for the notion of a scattered kingdom – especially if we take scattered to mean disunited – posits the need for reconstruction and reconciliation, inviting, perhaps, alternative political and social formations of the national community. (C) See Helgerson (1992: 195–245). Like Helgerson, Howard and Rackin argue that ‘Shakespeare’s history plays are primarily monarchical in orientation’ (1997: 160). 130

kingmaker

Schwyzer suggests that King Lear ‘takes issue with nationalism itself, at least in its dominant sixteenth-century form’ (2004: 169). kingmaker (A) A term used to describe one who place monarchs on the throne. Historically, kingmaker was an epithet given to Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, who played a crucial kingmaking role during the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV. Critics have come to see characters who perform a similar function in Shakespeare’s plays as kingmakers. (B) Although Shakespeare does not use the term in relation to Warwick in his plays, he would have been familiar with Warwick’s epithet. Contemporaries, such as Samuel Daniel, employed the term. In his The ciuile wars betweene the howses of Lancaster and Yorke, Daniel ostensibly invests Warwick with significant political power: But greatest in renowne doth Warwicke sit; That braue King-maker Warwicke; so farre growne, In grace with Fortune, that he gouerns it, And Monarchs makes; and, made, againe puts downe. (1609: 146) Whilst a demystification of sacralized monarchy could be identified in these lines, the reference to ‘Fortune’ could also be read as conditioning Warwick’s political agency. What makes Warwick such a fascinating historical figure, especially for Elizabethans, is the fact that he plays a part in the crowning and uncrowning of kings, rendering sacralized monarchy rather conditional. Warwick appears in all of Shakespeare’s King Henry VI plays: crucially, in the second play he is a supporter of the Yorkists; in the third and final play he switches allegiance to the Lancastrian side. Warwick’s kingmaker status is evident when he addresses King Edward as ‘Duke’ rather than ‘King’. Justifying his choice of words, Warwick proclaims: When you disgrac’d me in my embassade, Then I degraded you from being King, And come now to create you Duke of York. Alas, how should you govern any kingdom That know not how to use ambassadors, Nor how to be contented with one wife, Nor how to use your brothers brotherly, Nor how to study for the people’s welfare, Nor how to shroud yourself from enemies? (3H6 4.3.32–40) Of particular significance in this passage is not only the degrading of Edward from king to duke but also the shift from ‘kingdom’ to a sense of fraternity and commonwealth: ‘brothers’, ‘the people’s welfare’. Perhaps more so than any other history play, King Henry VI, Part 3 foregrounds the costs of civil war on the common people. Perhaps the 131

kingmaker

one line that best sums up Warwick’s kingmaker status is ‘’Twas I that gave the kingdom to thy brother’ (3H6 5.1.34). (C) Sinfield (1992: 97, 102) discusses King Richard II ’s Northumberland and Macbeth’s Macduff as kingmakers. Ivic considers Warwick’s kingmaker position in relation to republican political thought (2013a).

132

L Lacedaemon see Sparta land A sense of ‘territorial and social space’ (Anderson 1991: 2) is central to imaginings of nationhood. The presence of ‘land’ in England and Scotland speaks volumes. Not surprisingly, references to land are abundant in Shakespeare’s English histories (with King John and King Richard II leading the way); in the Roman plays the references are minimal; instead Rome occupies the discursive space of land. Although land can be used synonymously with country, nation, state, kingdom or realm – consider the Duke of Austria’s ‘other lands’ (KJ 2.1.25) as well as John of Gaunt’s ‘less happier lands’ (R2 2.1.49) – it can carry with it a sense of belonging, care, place and welfare that terms such as kingdom or realm do not as readily possess. The Duke of Gloucester’s ‘the common grief of all the land’ (2H6 1.1.75) could easily substitute kingdom or realm for ‘land’, but to do so would detract from Gloucester’s heightened ‘common grief’. Similarly, the Earl of Salisbury’s ‘the profit of the land’ (2H6 1.1.202) is an invocation of the general or public good, as is, in the same scene, the Earl of Warwick’s ‘So God help Warwick, as he loves the land, / And common profit of his country!’ (203–4). King Henry VI offers his ‘government’ to Warwick, and he does so in the name of ‘the people of this blessed land’ (3H6 4.6.21). The citizens in King Richard III speak with political acumen of ‘this sickly land’ (2.3.30). There is also the signal question: whose land? Falstaff’s reference to ‘our land’ (1H4 2.4.408) has a communal ring to it that is absent from King Richard II ’s possessive ‘our state, our subjects, or our land’ (R2 1.3.190), especially given the presence of the majestic plural. Later in the play, Richard instructs Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland to inform Henry Bolingbroke ‘[t]hat every stride he makes upon my land / Is dangerous treason’ (3.3.92–3): the more threatening Bolingbroke becomes, the tighter Richard’s grip on his land becomes, at least linguistically. Upon returning from Scotland, King Henry VI speaks of ‘mine own land’ (3H6 3.1.14), which is at once possessive and patriotic, for it conveys a sense of homecoming. King Richard III ’s oration to his troops before the Battle of Bosworth is grounded in a rhetoric of protecting ‘our lands’ from an invading ‘scum of Bretons’ (R3 5.3.337, 318); Richard’s use of the plural ‘lands’, however, is less suggestive of the nation than individual land ownership, apt given the murderous and usurping Richard’s care for the self. Twice French characters in King Henry V refer to ‘our land’ (3.5.22, 48) defensively in the face of King Henry’s military advances. 133

land

The Second Lord’s reference to ‘this great land’ (Cym 2.1.64) is a patriotic pronouncement, but which piece of land the deictic points to is difficult to discern: the obvious answer is ancient Britain; other possibilities include contemporary England and, given that this is a Jacobean play, contemporary Great Britain (prompted by the ‘great’). Perhaps more than any other reference to land, John of Gaunt’s ‘dear dear land’ (R2 2.1.57) captures the association between land and belonging that emerged so powerfully in early modern England. ‘Precious in one’s regard, of which one is fond, to which one is greatly attached’ is one meaning of dear supplied by the OED , and the OED cites Gaunt’s line. If, like Thomas Browne’s prose, Gaunt’s famous speech ‘brings gooseflesh to the napes only of English-readers’ (Anderson 1991: 147), then it has been doing so for more than four hundred years. Although Shakespeare is not the focus, Helgerson provides a brilliant account of the land’s role (writings on the land, the mapping of the land) in the formation of English national identity (1992: 107–47). league (A) A covenant or compact, usually military or political, struck between individuals, groups or countries in order to secure mutual help and protection often but not always in relation to a common enemy. (B) There are numerous examples of leagues in Shakespeare’s plays: leagues attempted; leagues consolidated; and leagues broken. In King Henry VI, Part 3 Warwick approaches the French King Lewis with ‘a league of amity’ (3.3.53) – a proposal to marry King Edward and the French Lady Bona – which fails to materialize because King Edward marries Lady Grey. In King Henry VIII , Norfolk speaks of a league betrayed: ‘For France hath flawed the league, and hath attached / Our merchants’ goods at Bordeaux’ (1.1.95–6). In another play, the exchange between Charles, the Dolphin and Richard, Duke of York represents a proposed league between England and France as heralding a time of peace: Since, lords of England, it is thus agreed That peaceful truce shall be proclaimed in France, We come to be informed, by yourselves, What the conditions of that league must be. (1H6 5.3.117–20) York’s response to Charles reveals the complications of such ‘conditions’: Insulting Charles, hast thou by secret means Used intercession to obtain a league And, now the matter grows to compromise, Stand’st thou aloof upon comparison? Either accept the title thou usurp’st – Of benefit proceeding from our king,

134

lethargy

And not of any challenge of desert – Or we will plague thee with incessant wars. (147–54) If the formation of a league is a political act, then Shakespeare’s plays, especially his history plays, reveal the complex politics underpinning such leagues. One seeming exception appears at the close of King Henry V, when the French Queen Isabel heralds the marriage of King Henry and Princess Katherine as symbolic of the league or ‘paction’ put in place between formerly warring England and France: God, the best maker of all marriages, Combine your hearts in one, your realms in one! As man and wife, being two, are one in love, So be there ‘twixt your kingdoms such a spousal That never may ill office or fell jealousy, Which troubles oft the bed of blessed marriage, Thrust in between the paction of these kingdoms To make divorce of their incorporate league; That English may as French, French Englishmen, Receive each other. God speak this amen. (5.2.351–60) The Queen’s upbeat pronouncement is, however, betrayed not only by history (the resumption of Anglo-French warfare) but also by the play’s epilogue, which reminds its readers that King Henry VI ‘lost France and made England bleed’ (Epil.12). Furthermore, if some leagues are to be welcomed – ‘peace and fair-fac’d league’ (KJ 2.1.) – other leagues are to be scorned – ‘O peers of England, shameful is this league’ (2H6 1.1.96). (C) For a discussion of King Henry V ’s ‘incorporate league’ that includes not just England and France but also the Celtic Fringe, see Ivic (1999a) lethargy see also forgetting, Lethe, oblivion (A) Drowsiness, inactivity, laziness, torpor. Lethargy derives from Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in the underworld. The forgetful self is often imaged as a lethargic self. (B) A passage from Coriolanus provides a remarkable instance of early modern attitudes to and understandings of lethargy: ‘Let me have war, say I. It exceeds peace as far as day does night: it’s sprightly walking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men’ (4.5.228–33). The vigour of war is opposite to the dullness of peace: to be lethargic, then, can signify a failure to perform one’s moral and public duties. Ironically, Falstaff, evader of military duties, provides the following insight on a melancholic and phlegmatic King Henry IV ’s illness: ‘This apoplexy, as I take it, is a kind of lethargy, and’t please your lordship, a kind of sleeping in the blood, a whoreson tingling’ (2H4 1.2.111–13).

135

lethargy

Early modern English discourse on colonial Ireland is a prime site for references to lethargy, especially in relation to degeneration. Alluding to the Catholic Old English, Edmund Spenser in his A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596) laments that they have ‘quite forg[o]t their country and their own names’. ‘That is a most dangerous lethargy’, he adds (1970: 64). The lethargic subject is very much one to be chastised, reformed, for such a subject fails to serve the nation. In a poem written by John Donne to Henry Wotton, who was serving in Ireland during the Nine Years’ War, Donne worries that Wotton’s ‘mind’ may ‘bee a pray / To lethargies’, and Donne warns his friend ‘Lett not your soule … unto the Irish negligence submit’ (1967: 7). For Spenser, for Donne, Ireland induces lethargy and lethargic subjects. Iago’s commentary on Othello’s ‘epilepsy’ (4.1.50) or ‘fit’ (51) is interesting: The lethargy must have his quiet course, If not, he foams at mouth, and by and by Breaks out to savage madness. (54–6) The connection between ‘lethargy’ and ‘savage madness’ may owe much to English discourse on Ireland. (C) Sullivan connects forgetfulness and lethargy, and he argues that as modes of being these terms are ‘routinely understood as erosive of one’s identity’ (2005: 13). Maley wonders if there might be an Irish context for Othello (2013b). Lethe see also forgetting, lethargy, oblivion In Greek mythology, a river in Hades that induced forgetfulness or oblivion in anyone who drank from it, but commonly used in the early modern period to denote forgetting as well as lethargy. ‘The Poets faine’, writes Robert Albott, ‘that there is a riuer in hell called Lethe, of the which who soeuer drinketh, forgetteth all what hee remembred before’ (1599: sig. I3r). Lethe is often used by Shakespeare to signal forgetfulness on the part of an individual character: for example, ‘May this be wash’d in Lethe and forgotten?’ (2H4 5.2.72). It can also be employed in relation to a desired forgetting, especially in the form of drunkenness: for example, Mark Antony’s Come, let’s all take hands Till that the conquering wine hath steeped our sense In soft and delicate Lethe. (AC 2.7.105–07) The invocation of Lethe is also associated with moral failure and a loss of a sense of self, especially in connection to a group identity. Pompey’s use of the term is a prime example of Lethe’s association with torpor: But all the charms of love, Salt Cleopatra, soften thy waned lip!

136

London

Let witchcraft join with beauty, lust with both; Tie up the libertine in a field of feasts; Keep his brain fuming. Epicurean cooks Sharpen with cloyless sauce his appetite That sleep and feeding may prorogue his honour Even till a Lethe’d dullness – (AC 2.1.20–7) Pompey’s vision of Antony overcome by a ‘Lethe’d dullness’ imagines not just a moral failure on Antony’s part but a loss of a peculiarly Roman sense of self. London (A) England’s burgeoning capital – the population quadrupled during Shakespeare’s lifetime – and home to its numerous Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses. The separate city of Westminster was home to the court, but London often emerges in Shakespeare’s history plays as a centre of royal as well as civic power. The City of London formed the heart of England’s civic and mercantile community, glimpses of which Shakespeare offers. (B) Unlike his fellow contemporary dramatists, Shakespeare did not participate in the genre of city comedy, a genre that produced plays set in and around the City of London. Excluding his contribution to Sir Thomas More, ‘none of Shakespeare’s plays is set in modern London’ (Munro 2016: 38). Coriolanus, set in and around ancient Rome, may be the period’s greatest city tragedy. Shakespeare’s English history plays include numerous references to and scenes set in and around London. The tavern scenes set in Eastcheap in the two King Henry IV plays come to mind, as does Jack Cade’s rebellion – ‘All the realm shall be in common, and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass’ (2H6 4.2.64–5) – and King Henry V’s triumphant return from France to ‘London’ (H5 5.Chor.24). At times London is under threat, especially when civil war rages: consider, for example, the Mayor’s ‘Pity the city of London’ (1H6 3.1.77). Warwick’s representation of London as a protective enclave draws upon Anglocentric imaginings of England as an island: My sovereign, with the loving citizens, Like to his island girt in with the ocean, Or modest Dian circled with her nymphs, Shall rest in London till we come to him. (3H6 4.8.19–22) Ian Munro describes the city in the Renaissance imagination as representing ‘a stabilizing social force, linking individuals and groups in a legible, rational network of reciprocal ties’ (2016: 34); in this sense the city – the City of London in the passage cited above – is like a microcosm for the kingdom-nation-state, a civic model for a larger national polity. Within the same scene in King Henry VI, Part 3 King Henry, who is at the Bishop’s Palace in London, is captured by King Edward, and in Act 5, Scene 6 Henry is killed in

137

London

the Tower. Indeed, the Tower of London, present in all four plays of the first tetralogy, serves as a symbol of power, legitimate or illegitimate. The relation between royal and civic power is captured nicely in King Henry VI, Part 2, especially in the presentation of the transgressive Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, who, as a ‘punished duchess’, is made to walk ‘the flinty streets’ of London under the gaze of the ‘abject people’, ‘the giddy multitude’ (2.4.7, 11, 21). There is a sense here that the state-sanctioned and very public punishment of the duchess – who, as noted in the stage directions, is ‘accompanied with the Sheriff of London, and Sir John STANLEY and officers with bills and halberds and commoners’ – is reinforced on the civic level by the presence of the gazing Londoners. If we read this scene in such a manner, we could make a connection with the treatment of Londoners in King Henry VIII : regal coronations and christenings are attended by dutiful, loyal Londoners. Alternatively, a sense of pathos marks the scene of Eleanor’s public shaming, a pathos subtly detected in the silence of the onstage ‘commoners’. The reference to ‘Lud’s town’ (3.1.33) in Cymbeline is appropriate given that the play is set in ancient Britain. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London was home to not only a native population but also a host of non-English inhabitants: Dutch, French, Scottish, etc. Sir Thomas More provides a deep reflection on the place of London’s non-English population. ‘London’, Howard has suggested, ‘was becoming an increasingly miscegenated space’ (2007: 11). (C) See the various essays on London, including ones on class and politics, in Crawforth, Dustagheer and Young (2015). Hill (2005) explores the treatment of London’s citizens in Sir Thomas More. Manley’s (1995) account of literature and culture in early modern London is encyclopedic; the limited references to Shakespeare reflect less a neglect of Shakespeare on Manley’s part than a neglect of London on Shakespeare’s. Marcus includes a chapter on London that foregrounds Coriolanus (1988: 160–211). Lord Mayor Generally regarded as the most significant commoner in the country, the Lord Mayor occupied the head position of the City of London’s civic government. There are numerous references to the Lord Mayor (often called ‘mayor’) in Shakespeare’s history plays. Both King Henry VI, Part 1 and King Henry VIII refer to the Lord Mayor, and in the former play the Lord Mayor is critical of the feuding nobles. In King Henry V, the Chorus describes a very public ‘mayor and all his brethren’ welcoming ‘their conquering Caesar’ back to London (5.Chor.25, 28) – a reference that seems to blend civic and national duties. But the most significant inclusion of the Lord Mayor appears in King Richard III , Act 3, Scene 7. Richard and the Duke of Buckingham are plotting Richard’s ascent to the throne; a crucial element in their plan involves securing the assent of the Lord Mayor and London’s citizens. But civic assent proves hard to come by. In response to Richard’s queries about Buckingham’s attempts to solicit the Lord Mayor’s and the citizens’ support for Richard, Buckingham describes how the Londoners responded, or, more accurately, failed to respond: 138

Low Countries

No, so God help me: they spake not a word, But like dumb statues or breathing stones Star’d each on other, and look’d deadly pale. Which when I saw, I reprehended them, And ask’d the Mayor what meant this wilful silence. His answer was, the people were not us’d To be spoke to but by the Recorder. Then he was urg’d to tell my tale again: ‘Thus saith the Duke; thus hath the Duke inferr’d’ – But nothing spake in warrant from himself. When he had done, some followers of mine own At lower end of the hall, hurl’d up their caps, And some ten voices cried ‘God save King Richard!’ And thus I took the vantage of those few: ‘Thanks, gentle citizens and friends,’ quoth I; ‘This general applause and cheerful shout Argues your wisdoms and your love to Richard.’ And even here brake off, and came away. (3.7.24–41) This civic resistance to Richard, which, of course, is not sustained in this scene, bears witness to a civic-cum-national consciousness at odds with dynastic ideology. In other words, ‘love to Richard’ fails to overcome love for city and nation. Low Countries (A) Refers to present-day (Flemish-speaking) Belgium and The Netherlands. Archer estimates that about ‘75 percent of the alien population of London at mid-century [1550] was “Dutch” ’ (2005: 8). (B) Numerous stereotypes of the Low Countries surface in Shakespeare’s plays. Anatomizing the body parts of the kitchen wench Nell in relation to countries, Antipholus of Syracuse asks Dromio of Syracuse, ‘Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands? (CE 3.2.137), to which Dromio replies, ‘O, sir, I did not look so low’ (138). Dromio’s ‘low’ means below the waist, but it also supplies a bawdy pun on Low Countries. Parolles’ reference to the ‘Low Dutch’ (AW 4.1.71) is a reference to the Dutch language. The only other reference to ‘Belgia’ in Shakespeare occurs in King Henry VI, Part 3: ‘Edward from Belgia, / With hasty Germans and blunt Hollanders’ (4.8.1–2). Other references to this region and its inhabitants include ‘Holland’, ‘Hollander’, ‘Dutch’ and ‘Dutchman’. Iago makes reference to the ‘swag-bellied Hollander’ (Oth 2.3.73), and in doing so bears witness to an early modern stereotype of the Hollander as a heavy drinker, a stereotype shared by numerous northern European nations, including England – hence Mistress Page’s reference to Falstaff as ‘this Flemish drunkard’ (MW 2.1.19). Ford rehearses a number of national stereotypes in the following passage: ‘I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter, Parson Hugh the Welshman with my cheese, an Irishman with

139

Low Countries

my aqua-vitae bottle, or a thief to walk my ambling gelding, than my wife with herself’ (MW 2.2.285–9). (C) For a thorough exploration of Shakespeare and the Low Countries, see Hoenselaars and Klein (2015). Archer points out that many goldsmiths in London were Dutch or Flemish (2005: 53).

140

M maps (A) Sixteenth-century England saw serious advancements in cartography, and the result was the production of numerous maps and atlases that allowed subjects to see their land (and others’) in ways that they never had before. Monumental texts include Christopher Saxton’s Atlas of England and Wales (1579) and John Speed’s cartographic as well as chorographic Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1611–12) (see Figures 1, 4–7), which is significant for being ‘the earliest published atlas of the British Isles’ (Skelton 1960: 31). (B) References to maps are scattered across Shakespeare’s plays, and they range from historical to mercantile to, of course, geographical interests. Maps can be functional or figurative, such as ‘the map of honour’ (2H6 3.1.203) that King Henry VI sees in the Duke of Gloucester’s face. Fluellen’s exchange with Gower about Alexander the Great’s birthplace leads the Welsh Captain to say ‘if you look in the maps of the world’ (H5 4.7.23–4). Solanio tells Antonio that were he in his venturous shoes, he would be ‘Plucking the grass to know where sits the wind, / Piring in maps for ports, and piers and roads’ (MV 1.1.18–19). Pisano provides Cloten with a map directing him to Milford Haven (Cym 3.5). Maria says of Malvolio ‘he does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies’ (TN 3.2.76–8), which may be a reference to a map published in England in 1599, one of the first to use Mercator projection and thereby advance cartographical knowledge of the New World. Maps appear on stage as props in King Henry IV, Part 1 and King Lear, and in both plays they serve as a visual aid for the division of the kingdom. In Act 3, Scene 1 of 1H4, Hotspur, Worcester, Lord Mortimer and Owen Glendower appear on stage with a map, using it to illustrate how the kingdom will be divided once they have taken the crown from King Henry IV: ‘Come, here is the map: shall we divide our right / According to our threefold order ta’en?’ (3.1.66–7): England, from Trent and Severn hitherto, By south and east is to my part assign’d: All westward, Wales beyond the Severn shore, And all the fertile land within that bound, To Owen Glendower: and, dear coz, to you The remnant northward lying off from Trent. (70–5) In a not-too-dissimilar manner, King Lear calls for a ‘map’ to reveal how he has ‘divided / In three our kingdom (1.1.35–6). 141

maps

In a play given over to bloodshed and butchery, it is not surprising to hear Queen Elizabeth’s cartographically informed apocalyptic declaration Ay me! I see the ruin of my House: The tiger now hath seiz’d the gentle hind; Insulting tyranny begins to jut Upon the innocent and aweless throne. Welcome destruction, blood, and massacre; I see, as in a map, the end of all. (R3 2.4.49–54) Perhaps no other map from this period captures Elizabeth’s vision as does John Speed’s ‘The Invasions of England and Ireland with all their Civill Warrs Since the Conqvest’ (see Figure 3), which includes prose material on the historical period covered in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy. (C) Helgerson (1992: 107–47) considers the ways in which Elizabethans ‘took effective visual and conceptual possession of the physical kingdom in which they lived’ (107), and he highlights cartography’s role in the rise of national self-consciousness. Book-length studies on early modern maps and literature include Gillies (1994) and Klein (2001): the former is more philosophical and foregrounds Shakespeare; the latter more political although less attentive to Shakespeare. Sullivan (1998: 92–123) considers John of Gaunt’s ‘map-inspired description of England [in R2] in relation to the play’s insistent questioning of the nature and (largely geographic) limits of Richard’s authority’ (24). Focusing on a host of Shakespearean plays, as well as Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, Neill (2000: 373– 97) surveys the plotting of national history, arguing that a ‘newly spatialized sense of the past … helped to make history the powerful ideological weapon it was to become’ (379). A similar approach is on offer in Hertel (2014: 33–73) although with special attention to King Henry IV, Part 1. See Cohen (2006) for an account of the ways in which the manufacturing of globes impacted Shakespeare’s works. On the mapping of early modern Wales, see Schwyzer (1998). Ivic (2013b) compares two maps by John Speed, one from the final years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign (see Figure 3), the other from the early years of King James’s, to tease out representations of national identities in Shakespeare’s Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. marches see also borders Generally a border or boundary but more specifically the part of England that borders Wales; also that part of England that borders Scotland, known in the period as the middle marches. In King Henry V, the discussion of England’s invasion of France turns to the threat of inter-island warfare should Henry’s army go to France: We must not only arm t’invade the French, But lay down our proportions to defend

142

memory

Against the Scot, who will make road upon us With all advantages. (1.2.136–39) In response to Henry’s concerns, the Archbishop of Canterbury states: They of those marches, gracious sovereign, Shall be a wall sufficient to defend Our inland from the pilfering borderers. (140–2) As this passage attests, the marches can be imagined as a site wherein national security can be breached or as a site protective of the nation. On the highly symbolic situation of Prince Hal and Hotspur’s battle (‘Shrewsbury, a town situated on the margins of English territory in the Marches of Wales’), see Highley (1997: 106). Mauritania In ancient times, Mauretania was a region in North Africa, occupying the space equivalent to present-day Morocco. In the early modern period, Mauritania referred to a region on the west coast of Africa: in other words, south west of ancient Mauretania (roughly equivalent to present-day Mauritania). Etymologically, Mauritania could also be used generally to refer to the land of the Moors. Iago – perhaps lying, for no other character confirms this – tells Roderigo that Othello ‘goes into Mauretania and taketh away with him the fair Desdemona’ (Oth 4.2.226–7). Exactly why Iago chooses ‘Mauretania’ is unclear. It could be a reference to Othello’s homeland. Alternatively, it could be an ethnic or racial slur, such as Iago’s earlier reference to the socially superior Othello as ‘his Moorship’ (1.1.32). memory (A) Memory played a crucial role in the construction of early modern English nationhood. Chronicles performed not only ideological but also cultural work, for they provided a public repository of national memory. As re-enactments of historical events, history plays brought memories of the nation’s past onto the stage. Crucially, national memory was very much contested not only in chronicle sources but also, and especially, in London’s public theatres. (B) Not unlike the public stage, national memory served to interpellate national subjects and to incite nationalist feelings. ‘Theatrical performance’, Dawson notes, ‘is a conduit for what historians call “social memory”, and one of the purposes of social memory is to configure a national past’ (1999: 55). In King Henry V, a lengthy, tedious and uninspiring interpretation of French Salic law in support of Henry’s claim to the French crown by the Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by a much more affective, persuasive rhetoric grounded in memory. ‘Look back into your mighty ancestors’ (1.2.102) says Canterbury, to which the Bishop of Ely adds:

143

memory

Awake remembrance of these valiant dead, And with your puissant arm renew their feats. You are their heir, you sit upon their throne, The blood and courage that renowned them Runs in your veins. (115–19) Much more than Canterbury’s dull oration on Salic law, these invocations of national memory ‘rouse’ (123) Henry into action. And Henry co-opts national memory at key moments in the play. On the eve of the battle of Agincourt, the king proclaims: He that outlives this day and comes safe home Will stand a-tiptoe when the day is named And rouse him at the name of Crispian. He that shall see this day and live old age Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say ‘Tomorrow is Saint Crispian.’ Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’ Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot But he’ll remember, with advantages, What feats he did that day. Then shall our names, Familiar in his mouth as household words, Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester, Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered. This story shall the good man teach his son, And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by From this day to the ending of the world But we in it shall be remembered. (4.3.41–60) Henry’s rousing speech puts in place an unforgettable mnemonic ritual. Sullivan points out that ‘the affect with which a specific memory is imbued influences its memorability’ (2005: 9). One element of affective power in these lines is the reference to wounds, which serve as a physical embodiment of national memory. Another instance of memory work occurs after the battle of Agincourt. In response to Fluellen’s ‘I do believe your majesty takes no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Tavy’s day’, Henry responds, ‘I wear it for a memorable honour; / For I am Welsh, you know, good countryman’, to which Fluellen replies, ‘All the water in the Wye cannot wash your majesty’s Welsh plood out of your pody’ (4.7.100–6). The leek, symbolic of Welshness, becomes yet another mnemonic prop for Henry. Hotspur draws upon future memory (embodied in chronicle history) at once to shame into action the Percy clan and to redeem their familial honour:

144

memory

Shall it for shame be spoken in these days, Or fill up chronicles in time to come, That men of your nobility and power Did gage them both in an unjust behalf (As both of you, God pardon it, have done) To put down Richard, that sweet lovely rose, And plant this thorn, this canker Bolingbroke? (1H4 1.3.168–74) If Hotspur’s reference to ‘chronicles’ reveals a care for how his allies will be remembered, it also supplies Northumberland and Worcester with the opportunity to memorialize themselves. In many ways, Shakespeare’s dialogical history plays bear witness to a rewriting of national memory or, perhaps, an awareness of competing and conflicting inscriptions of the past. Consider King Henry IV ’s advice to Prince Hal: Therefore, my Harry, Be it thy course to busy giddy minds With foreign quarrels, that action hence borne out May waste the memory of the former days. (2H4 4.5.212–15) This passage offers one of the boldest and most frank acknowledgements of what one theorist of nationalism terms ‘the icy calculations of state functionaries’ (Anderson 1991: 201). Shakespeare’s history plays register an awareness of who precisely participates in the construction of collective memory. To the victors go the spoils: Now are we well resolved; and by God’s help And yours, the noble sinews of our power, France being ours, we’ll bend it to our awe Or break it all to pieces. Or there we’ll sit, Ruling in large and ample empery O’er France and all her almost kingly dukedoms, Or lay these bones in an unworthy urn, Tombless, with no remembrance over them. Either our history shall with full mouth Speak freely of our acts, or else our grave Like Turkish mute shall have a tongueless mouth, Not worshipped with a waxen epitaph. (H5 1.2.223–34) Losers are erased from the past, forgotten. If King Henry V often celebrates the work of memory in forging a national identity, many of Shakespeare’s other history plays, especially the first tetralogy, give voice to a

145

memory

deep anxiety about the failure to be remembered. In an earlier play (later chronologically) it is King Henry himself who is heralded as a man of ever-living memory: Thus, while the vulture of sedition Feeds in the bosom of such great commanders, Sleeping neglection doth betray to loss The conquest of our scarce-cold conqueror, That ever-living man of memory, Henry the Fifth. Whiles they each other cross, Lives, honours, lands and all hurry to loss. (1H6 4.3.47–53) Sullivan argues that ‘memory is integral to various valorized models of selfhood’ (2005: 4); conquering Henry, then, should serve as an exemplary figure for the English forces in France. But civil strife threatens to undo all that Henry has done. Indeed, this sentiment becomes more and more prominent, as is evident in Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester’s speech: Brave peers of England, pillars of the state, To you Duke Humphrey must unload his grief, Your grief, the common grief of all the land. What! Did my brother Henry spend his youth, His valour, coin and people, in the wars? Did he so often lodge in open field, In winter’s cold and summer’s parching heat, To conquer France, his true inheritance? And did my brother Bedford toil his wits To keep by policy what Henry got? Have you yourselves, Somerset, Buckingham, Brave York, Salisbury, and victorious Warwick, Received deep scars in France and Normandy? Or hath mine uncle Beaufort and myself, With all the learned council of the realm, Studied so long, sat in the council house Early and late, debating to and fro How France and Frenchmen might be kept in awe, And had his highness in his infancy Crowned in Paris in despite of foes? And shall these labours and these honours die? Shall Henry’s conquest, Bedford’s vigilance, Your deeds of war and all our counsel die? O peers of England, shameful is this league; Fatal this marriage, cancelling your fame,

146

memory

Blotting your names from books of memory, Razing the characters of your renown, Defacing monuments of conquered France, Undoing all, as all had never been! (2H6 1.1.73–101) ‘Blotting’, ‘Razing’, ‘Defacing’, ‘Undoing’: national memory in the 3H6 plays comes under constant threat, especially as the English nobles vent their fury on each other. Coriolanus provides another vexed representation of memory, for the eponymous hero, who has done much violence to Rome’s Volscian enemies, abandons Rome for the enemy camp. Upon meeting the Volscian leader Aufidius, Coriolanus says: My name is Caius Martius, who hath done To thee particularly, and to all the Volsces, Great hurt and mischief: thereto witness may My surname, Coriolanus. The painful service, The extreme dangers, and the drops of blood Shed for my thankless country, are requited But with that surname: a good memory And witness of the malice and displeasure Which thou should’st bear me. Only that name remains. (Cor 4.5.68–76) ‘Memory’ here probably means memorial, but because of the thanklessness of Rome the moniker Coriolanus has been stripped of the memorial properties invested in it by Rome. At the play’s close Coriolanus is killed by the Volscians, and Aufidius, who a few lines earlier terms Coriolanus an ‘insolent villain’ (5.6.129), offers these final words: Take him up. Help, three o’th’ chiefest soldiers. I’ll be one. Beat thou the drum that it speak mournfully; Trail your steel pikes. Though in this city he Hath widow’d and unchilded many a one, Which to this hour bewail the injury, Yet he shall have a noble memory. (147–53) In many ways, Coriolanus is a doubly tragic figure: ostracized by his fellow/enemy Romans and murdered by enemy/fellow Volscians. Yet Aufidius insists on his ‘noble memory’, which could mean a memorial befitting a nobleman, or everlasting fame. King Lear, mistakenly, presents his daughter Regan as an ideal subject precisely because she remembers her place as dutiful daughter and as subject: Thou better knowst The offices of nature, bond of childhood, 147

memory

Effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude. Thy half o’ the kingdom hast thou not forgot, Wherein I thee endowed. (KL 2.2.369–73) Lear’s praise of Regan is grounded in his mistaken belief that this daughter (unlike Cordelia and Goneril) exercises memory in the service of her father and king. (C) Although focused on individual subjectivity, Sullivan’s work (2005) provides a full account of early modern attitudes and imaginings of memory. Tribble’s (2006) focus on contested, troubled memory (or memories) in The Tempest leads her to view Caliban as an uncooperative ‘mnemonic other’ (160). Ivic (2004) explores remembering/ forgetting in relation to the Wars of the Roses. Dawson (1999) explores Shakespeare’s theatre in relation to ‘social remembering’, focusing on King Henry V, Hamlet and Julius Caesar. Milford Haven Located on the south-west coast of Wales, Milford Haven is famous for its deep natural harbour. Two of Shakespeare’s plays include references to Milford Haven: King Richard III and Cymbeline. In R3, Catesby brings Richard good and bad news: My liege, the Duke of Buckingham is taken: That is the best news. That the Earl of Richmond Is with a mighty power landed at Milford Is colder tidings, yet they must be told. (4.4.531–4) Given Richmond’s Welsh descent, his landing in Wales is a sort of homecoming. Of course, it is also a strategic move: Milford Haven’s distance from the centre of power renders it a safe haven from which to launch a land attack. Not unlike King Lear’s invocations of Dover, Milford Haven and Milford are repeatedly invoked in Cymbeline. In part, this is because Milford Haven, as a port town, is where one travelling from Rome (Leonatus Posthumus) would land in Cambria. But given that the future King Henry VII landed in Milford Haven in 1485 on his way to victory at the Battle of Bosworth, this particular town takes on significance in relation to British history, which, of course, Cym explores, especially in relation to contemporary ideas on Britain and Britishness. monarchy (A) A state whose government is vested in a single person, usually a king or queen. In early modern England, the workings of Parliament, especially in the form of the House of Commons and House of Lords, meant that England’s monarch worked hand in hand with other supreme civil institutions. ‘The development of the Privy Council and more frequent meetings of parliaments made England a “mixed polity”’ (Sharpe 2000: 201). In other words, claims about absolutism, what Thomas Smith terms

148

monarchy

‘the absolute power of a king’ (1583: 7), in Elizabethan and Jacobean England have been greatly exaggerated. Still, the Reformation meant that England’s monarch was not only the realm’s secular but also its spiritual head. (B) According to Smith, monarchy is the only form of government that England has ever known: ‘By olde and auncient histories that I haue red, I do not vnderstand that our nation hath vsed any other generall authoritie in this realme neither Aristocraticall, nor Democraticall, but onely the royall and kingly maiestie’ (1583: 9). Interestingly, Smith locates ‘our nation’ within the larger political framework of ‘this realme’. Collinson has suggested that in Elizabethan England ‘citizens were concealed within subjects’ (1990: 24); Shakespeare’s plays reveal that nations were concealed within realms. ‘The monarch was unquestionably the single most powerful unifying force in the English state’ (Helgerson 1992: 9). Arguably, King Henry V exemplifies Helgerson’s claim. Consider, for example, the Earl of Cambridge’s ‘praise’ for Henry: Never was monarch better feared and loved Than is your majesty; there’s not, I think, a subject That sits in heart-grief and uneasiness Under the sweet shade of your government. (2.2.25–8) Ironically, Cambridge is about to be exposed for plotting against the English king: Machiavellian political ideology, in other words, is disseminated by a Machiavel. If the Chorus’s ‘Suppose within the girdle of these walls / Are now confined two mighty monarchies’ (Pro.19–20) serves to rouse the audience, much of the play calls attention to Henry’s very personal dynastic wars. King Richard II supplies the most profound reflections on monarchy, including the ideology and legitimacy of monarchic rule. The following lines, spoken by King Richard, give voice to the notion of the divine right of monarchs, a notion that was tested in sixteenth-century England and challenged in the seventeenth century: Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm off from an anointed king; The breath of worldly men cannot depose The deputy elected by the Lord. (3.2.54–7) Of course, this play’s dramatic action suggests otherwise, as Henry Bolingbroke seizes the crown from Richard to emerge as King Henry IV. Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex attempted a similar coup against Queen Elizabeth I; it failed and resulted in his execution in 1601. Famously, King Richard II was performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men the day before Essex’s failed rebellion. Not only does the play’s dramatic action undermine sacralized monarchy, the play’s language supplies a serious demystification of kingship. In fact, King Richard himself is the play’s most eloquent spokesperson for such demystification: 149

monarchy

Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood With solemn reverence; throw away respect, Tradition, form and ceremonious duty; For you have but mistook me all this while. I live with bread like you, feel want, Taste grief, need friends – subjected thus, How can you say to me, I am a king? (3.2.171–77) This is just one of many passages in which Richard dismantles the ideology of sacralized monarchy, rendering ‘Proud majesty a subject’ (4.1.252). Sharpe suggests that both King Henry VIII and even more so Queen Elizabeth appropriated sacralized monarchy to elevate the Tudors to the lofty heights of ‘divine-right rule’. ‘This fragile awe of majesty’, he adds, ‘was punctured by the succession of James VI ’ (2000: 21). Shakespeare’s English history plays, especially King Richard II, do much to puncture the ‘awe of majesty’, and in doing so create a discursive space for imagining the nation. The Duke of Clarence’s ominous and proleptic dream makes reference to Hell as ‘this dark monarchy’ (R3 1.4.51); however, it could be argued that Clarence’s line is also an anticipatory nod to Richard III ’s bloody rule. (C) Collinson has famously argued that ‘Elizabethan England was a republic which happened to be a monarchy: or vice versa’ (1997: 119). Norbrook (1996) offers a reading of R2 that treats the play as critical of monarchy; instead, and republican-like, a strong aristocracy is favoured. Kastan (1991) considers the theatrics and role-playing associated with kingship in the Henry IV plays. Howard (2003) considers the ways in which monarchy is desacrilized in Macbeth. King James VI and I has often been accused of absolutist tendencies, although Sommerville speaks of James’s ideas as ‘a nuanced, moderated absolutism’ (1995: xv). For a reading of Shakespeare’s romances in relation to Jacobean attitudes toward monarchy, see Jordan (1997). Moor (A) A native or inhabitant of North Africa, usually Muslim. The term could also be used in reference to a Muslim regardless of their homeland. In the early modern period, the word Moor could refer to any African, not to mention individuals and groups from outside Africa, including the Irish. (B) Neill comments on ‘the notorious indeterminacy of the term “moor” itself’: Insofar as it was a term of ‘racial’ description, it could refer quite specifically to the Berber-Arab people of the parts of North Africa then rather vaguely denominated as ‘Morocco,’ ‘Mauritania,’ or ‘Barbary,’ or it could be used to embrace the inhabitants of the whole North African littoral, or it might be extended to refer to Africans generally (whether ‘white,’ ‘black,’ or ‘tawny’ Moors), or by an even more promiscuous extension, it might be applied (like ‘Indian’) to almost any darker-skinned peoples – even on occasion, those of the New World. (2000: 273) 150

Moor

Shakespeare uses the word Moor in three plays: The Merchant of Venice, Othello and Titus Andronicus, with the latter two plays including a Moor. Aaron is described as a ‘barbarous Moor’ (Tit 2.2.78, 5.3.4) and as a ‘coal-black Moor’ (3.2.79). The description of Aaron’s skin colour is confirmed by his defence of his newborn son: ‘Coal-black is better than another hue’ (4.2.101). What Aaron is doing amongst the captured Goths is never made clear. Aaron’s scimitar could mean that his origins are Middle Eastern or Turkish rather than African. Some critics have taken his reference to his ‘countryman … Muly’ (4.2.154) as evidence that his country is somewhere in north-west Africa. Marcus labels Aaron an ‘irreligious Moor’ (5.3.120), a line which the OED cites in support of irreligious as ‘Believing in, practising, or pertaining to a false religion’. This is seconded just a few lines later in the play when Marcus terms Aaron a ‘misbelieving Moor’ (5.3.142). Aaron’s status as Moor, therefore, is underpinned by religion, skin colour and barbarousness. In F there is a stage direction ‘Enter Nurse with a blacke a Moore childe’ (TLN 1732); the child is the offspring of Aaron and Tamora, queen of the Goths. A marginal gloss in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations that reads ‘A black Moore sonne borne in England’ intersects with the representation of Aaron and Tamora’s baby: I my selfe haue seene an Ethiopian as blacke as a cole brought into England, who taking a faire English woman to wife, begat a sonne in all respects as blacke as the father was, although England were his natiue countrey, and an English woman his mother: whereby it seemeth this blacknes procceedeth rather of some natural infection of that man, which was so strong, that neither the nature of the Clime, neither the good complexion of the mother concurring, coulde any thing alter, and therefore wee cannot impute it to the nature of the Clime. (Hakluyt 1599–1600: vol. 3, 51–2) However, the play also contradicts this ‘natural infection’ theory, for Aaron’s countryman Muly has a child who is ‘like to’ the mother, that is, ‘fair’ (4.2.156). The depiction of Othello is quite different from that of Aaron. Whereas Aaron is very much the play’s Machiavel figure (although by no means does Aaron have a monopoly on evil in the play), Othello is the tragedy’s eponymous hero. Moreover, Othello the Moor of Venice (to cite the F title) is the general of the Venetian force that prepares to defend Christian Venice against the Ottomans. Iago, Roderigo and Brabantio (and, eventually, Emilia), however, supply a racialist chorus in the play, seeing ‘black Othello’ (2.3.29) through Eurocentric eyes. Iago’s ‘his Moorship’ (1.1.32) can be and has been read as an ethnic slur. Roderigo highlights physical difference when he terms Othello ‘the thicklips’ (1.1.65). He also refers to Othello as ‘a lascivious Moor’ (1.1.124) and ‘an old black ram’ (1.1.87), which means not only an adult male sheep but also ‘A lecherous or sexually voracious man’ (OED ). Brabantio’s reference to Othello’s ‘sooty bosom’ (1.2.70) uses ‘sooty’ to mean not only foul or dirty but also dusky or brownish black. Shakespeare’s sources for knowledge of Moors includes John Pory’s 1600 translation of Leo Africanus’ A geographical historie of Africa, Philemon Holland’s 1601 151

Moor

translation of Pliny’s History of the World, and Lewis Lewkenor’s 1599 The Commonwealth and Government of Venice. Shakespeare may (or may not) have seen the King of Barbary’s ambassador, who visited London in 1600. (C) Bartels (1990) examines early modern English representations of Moors in relation to Aaron and Othello. In another essay, Bartels argues that Othello is handed ‘a dual rather than divided identity’: as ‘the Moor of Venice’, Othello is ‘[n]either an alienated nor an assimilated subject, but a figure defined by two worlds’ (1997: 61). Neill (2000: 269–84) provides some solid contextual material as well as an intelligent reading of Othello. Honigmann’s revised Arden edition of Oth includes an informative section titled ‘Where is Othello? Early Modern Contexts’, which considers the ‘elastic term’ Moor (2016: 13–41).

152

N nation (A) People are joined together into a nation by way of shared origins, language, culture, history (indeed memory), and, crucially, dwelling within a demarcated land or territory. In the early modern period nations were conceived of in relation to blood, race and common descent. But as states began to define and delimit themselves by mapping and enforcing borders the residual idea of a nation intersected with an emergent idea of nation as political entity, what some would term a state. Critical analysis of Shakespeare and nationhood tends to reflect on the nation as both a reality and an imagined construct. McEachern supplies a fine definition of nation, one that captures its various denotations and connotations: In the Tudor period, nation more often means race, or kind – the kith and kin of a common nativity, or birth, natio. Yet it also hovers near the meaning we have given it, and … in the course of the sixteenth century it comes to denote that principle of political self-determination belonging to a people linked (if in nothing else) by a common government. (1996: 1) (B) Marcus in Titus Andronicus refers to ‘the barbarous Goths’ (1.1.28) as ‘a nation strong’ (1.1.30). The primary meaning here is probably people. Hamlet laments the fact that other ‘nations’ traduce and tax Danes for being ‘drunkards’ (1.4.18, 19), which calls attention to the numerous national stereotypes that circulated in the period. Brabantio speaks of Venice as ‘our nation’ (1.2.68), and given the context (the improbability, in Brabantio’s eyes, that Desdemona would shun her fellow white Venetians for black Othello) he means a specific social group within Venice – wealthy merchants and/or nobles. When Antonio says ‘the trade and profit of the city / Consisteth of all nations’ (MV 3.3.30–1), he uses ‘nations’ to mean other countries, including, it is safe to assume, citystates and colonies. When Shylock uses nation, the meaning is otherwise: ‘A group of people having a single ethnic, tribal, or religious affiliation, but without a separate or politically independent territory’ – ‘used of the Jewish people in the Diaspora’ (OED ). All three of Shylock’s references to nation – ‘our sacred nation’ (1.3.46), ‘my nation’ (3.1.52) and ‘our nation’ (3.1.79) – carry this ethnically, religiously inflected meaning. Shylock’s numerous references to tribe overlap with nation. King Henry V provides a remarkable opportunity to explore the concept of nation. ‘The place of Henry V’, writes Baker, ‘is both a royal demesne, stretched loosely across the British Isles, and the spatially distinct and regulated domain that we have now come 153

nation

to think of as a nation’ (1997: 63). Attempting to persuade King Henry to invade France, the Archbishop of Canterbury draws upon a rhetoric of nationhood: Therefore to France, my liege. Divide your happy England into four, Whereof take you one quarter into France And you withal shall make all Gallia shake. If we, with thrice such powers left at home Cannot defend our own doors from the dog, Let us be worried and our nation lose The name of hardiness and policy. (1.2.214–21) For Canterbury, ‘England’ is ‘our nation’, but considered within the context of the play as a whole the concept of nation is far from straightforward. Consider, for example, what has come to be known as the four captains scene (3.2). This scene is absent from Q; it appears first in F. The four captains are the Englishman Gower, the Irishman Macmorris, the Scot Jamy and Fluellen, a Welshman – at least this is how these characters are presented to readers in modern editions of the play. In F, the character whose speech prefix was ‘Flu.’ is rechristened, for this moment in the play, with a new speech prefix: ‘Welch.’ (TLN 1186). The English captain, Gower, remains ‘Gower.’ throughout this scene; the Irish captain’s speech prefix is ‘Irish.’ and the Scottish captain’s is ‘Scot.’. The ‘Irish man’ (TLN 1184–5) is given the name ‘Makmorrice’ (TLN 1186) – later ‘Mackmorrice’ (TLN 1204) – and the Scottish captain ‘Captaine Iamy’ (TLN 1184–5, 86, 93–4) also ‘Captaine Iames’ (TLN 1202–3). ‘The three Celtic figures’, Murphy argues, ‘though individualized in being assigned names within the text, are simultaneously produced as ethnic ciphers and, as such, they are distinguished from their English counterpart, who consistently appears as a unified, individuated character’ (1997: 224). Fluellen, who is staged as a stereotypically voluble Welshman, raises the Irish captain’s ire when he says: ‘Captaine Mackmorrice, I think, look you, vnder your correction, there is not many of your Nation’ (TLN 1237–9). Macmorris responds with ‘Of my Nation? What ish my Nation? Ish a Villaine, and a Basterd, and a Knaue, and a Rascall. What ish my Nation? Who talkes of my Nation?’ (TLN 1240–2). Like editors, critics have tried to smooth out Macmorris’s outburst. Philip Edwards, for example, supplies the following interpretation: ‘The paraphrase [of Macmorris’s ‘What ish my nation’ speech] should run something like this. “What is this separate race you’re implying by using the phrase ‘your nation’? Who are you, a Welshman, to talk of the Irish as though they were a separate nation from you. I belong in this family as much as you do” ’ (1983: 75–6). Recent critics have taken Macmorris’s question seriously: what precisely is his nation? That hyphenated nomenclatures such as Anglo-Irish, Old English and New English exist to describe early modern Ireland’s heterogeneous ‘English’ community renders a stable English identity in Ireland problematic. On the topic of Ireland’s ‘degenerate’ Old English settlers, Edmund 154

native

Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596) laments a reversal of the civilizing process: ‘some of them have quite shaken off their English names and put on Irish, that they might altogether be Irish’ (1970: 64). Sir John Davies’s Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued (1612), in a section titled ‘How the English Colonies Became Degenerate’, chastises English colonials who ‘grew to be ashamed of their very English names … and took Irish surnames and nicknames’ (1988: 172). Davies gives the example of ‘the great families of the Geraldines’ in Munster, in particular one family that ‘was called “MacMorris” ’ (172). Macmorris makes one brief appearance in F; however, his unsettling interrogative marks a crucial contribution to the play’s discourse on the nation. The English recognized an Irish nation – or, at least, pockets of Irishness – as is evident in Spenser, who speaks of the natives of Ireland ‘dwelling as they do whole nations and septs of the Irish together without any Englishmen amongst them’ (1970: 5). The OED defines sept as a ‘division of a nation or tribe; a clan’, a definition which at once allows for the conception of nationhood (‘a nation’) but also fragments it (a ‘division’). Spenser also describes Ireland as ‘full of her own nation’ (153); however, at the heart of this colonial text is a commitment to forcing the Irishman ‘quite to forget his Irish nation’ (156). What is Macmorris’s nation, indeed. Archbishop Cranmer’s prophetic paean to ‘the high and mighty Princess of England, Elizabeth’ (H8 5.4.2–3) includes a passage on the future King James VI of Scotland and I of England: Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine, His honour and the greatness of his name Shall be, and make new nations. (5.5.50–2) The reference to ‘new nations’ is likely a reference to James’s desire for a unified Britain. (C) For book-length studies as well as material within books, see Baker (1997: 17– 65), Cohen (1985), Hadfield (2004b: 151–68), Helgerson (1992: 195–245), Highley (1997: 40–66, 86–109, 134–63), Howard and Rackin (1997), Kerrigan (2008: 91–140), Maley (2003: 17–65), McEachern (1996: 83–137), Murphy (1999: 97–123) and Schwyzer (2004: 126–74), who argues that what ‘we discern in some early modern texts is not the nation per se so much as the nation in potentia’ (9). native (A) As a noun native refers to a person born in a particular place, region or country. As an adjective native carries a variety of meanings, including inherent in relation to one’s place of birth or national identity, signifying a connection with other people by birth or race, of a place, region or country, produced in a specific place, region or country. (B) After learning that Rosalind (disguised as Ganymede) dwells in the forest, Orlando asks her ‘Are you native of this place?’ (AYL 3.2.331), meaning ‘were you born here?’ Solinus, Duke of Ephesus’ use of ‘native’ 155

native

Well, Syracusian, say in brief the cause Why thou departedst from thy native home And for what cause thou cam’st to Ephesus. (CE 1.1.28–30) makes clear that Syracuse is Egeon’s ‘native home’ and that he is a foreigner in Ephesus. Antium is Aufidius’s ‘native town’ (Cor 5.6.50). Hamlet is ‘native’ to Denmark (1.4.14). Queen Margaret’s Was I for this nigh wrecked upon the sea And twice by awkward wind from England’s bank Drove back again unto my native clime? (2H6 3.2.82–4) refers to her crossing of the English Channel; her ‘native clime’, therefore, being France – clime meaning region. When, before the battle of Agincourt, King Henry V says, ‘many of our bodies shall no doubt / Find native graves’ (H5 4.3.95–6) he means graves in England, for a few lines later he speaks of ‘our English’ (104). The F version of the play includes an Irish, Scottish and Welsh captain; however, Henry seems less concerned with the graves of these non-English subjects. In the wake of Agincourt, Gower chastises the English Pistol for insulting the Welsh Fluellen: I have seen you gleeking and galling at this gentleman twice or thrice. You thought because he could not speak English in the native garb he could not therefore handle an English cudgel. You find it otherwise, and henceforth let a Welsh correction teach you a good English condition. (5.1.72–77) What makes Gower’s ‘Welsh correction’ interesting is the way in which it represents the Welsh Fluellen as less than fluent in the English language whilst simultaneously incorporating Fluellen within an English community in a much more accommodating manner than the rogue Pistol. Upon learning of his banishment, Mowbray states: The language I have learnt these forty years, My native English, now I must forgo, And now my tongue’s use is to me no more Than an unstringed viol or a harp, Or like a cunning instrument cas’d up – Or being open, put into his hands That knows no touch to tune the harmony. Within my mouth you have engaol’d my tongue, Doubly portcullis’d with my teeth and lips, And dull unfeeling barren ignorance Is made my gaoler to attend on me. 156

negro

I am too old to fawn upon a nurse, Too far in years to be a pupil now: What is thy sentence then but speechless death, Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath? (R2 1.3.159–73) In this passage, ‘native’ takes on an affective power, especially as Mowbray’s praise of the English language is, of course, spoken by an actor in his ‘native English’. Old Clifford’s appeal to the rebellious Jack Cade’s followers is couched in a rhetoric of nationhood: Is Cade the son of Henry the Fifth That thus you do exclaim you’ll go with him? Will he conduct you through the heart of France And make the meanest of you earls and dukes? Alas, he hath no home, no place to fly to, Nor knows he how to live but by the spoil, Unless by robbing of your friends and us. Were’t not a shame that whilst you live at jar The fearful French, whom you late vanquished, Should make a start o’er seas and vanquish you? Methinks already in this civil broil I see them lording it in London streets, Crying ‘Villiago!’ unto all they meet. Better ten thousand base-born Cades miscarry Than you should stoop unto a Frenchman’s mercy. To France! To France! And get what you have lost! Spare England, for it is your native coast. Henry hath money, you are strong and manly; God on our side, doubt not of victory. (2H6 4.8.34–52) Old Clifford’s speech interpellates his English audience precisely because his appeal to their ‘native coast’ is underpinned by an invocation of a foreign enemy, France, and a representation of the rebel leader Cade as homeless, without a homeland. negro The only reference to negro in Shakespeare appears in The Merchant of Venice when Lorenzo informs Launcelot that he has impregnated a Moor: ‘the getting up of the negro’s belly: the Moor is with child by you Launcelot’ (3.5.36–7). The following passage seems to demarcate Saharan and sub-Saharan Africans: all the people in generall to the South, lying within the Zona torrida, are not onely blackish like the Moores; but are exceedingly blacke. And therefore as in olde

157

negro

time, by an excellencie, some of them were called Nigrita; so that to this day they are named Negros, as then whome no men are blacker. (Abbot 1599: sig F2r) Lorenzo, on the other hand, conflates ‘negro’ and ‘Moor’. neighbour (A) Used as a noun to mean someone who lives in a nearby or bordering region, country; used as an adjective to denote people or regions or countries situated next to or close to one another. England’s most immediate neighbours, therefore, were Wales and Scotland. The concept of ‘neighbour’ could be invoked positively, neutrally or negatively. (B) Neighbour in terms of proximate countries appears in a number of plays, including Pericles: ‘our neighbouring shore’ (1.4.60), ‘some neighbouring nation’ (1.4.65). Gardiner speaks of ‘our neighbours, / The upper Germany’ (H8 5.2.63–4). When Nerissa asks Portia, ‘What think you of the Scottish lord his neighbour? (MV 1.2.75–6), ‘his neighbour’ is a reference to ‘Falconbridge, the young baron of England’ (64–5). As a Venetian, Nerissa assumes Anglo-Scottish neighbourliness. In King Henry V, however, Anglo-Scottish relations are far from neighbourly. In response to the Bishop of Canterbury’s reassurances that England will not be vulnerable to invasion from ‘pilfering borderers’ (1.2.142), Henry states: We do not mean the coursing snatchers only, But fear the main intendment of the Scot, Who hath been still a giddy neighbour to us. For you shall read that my great-grandfather Never went with his forces into France But that the Scot on his unfurnished kingdom Came pouring like the tide into a breach, With ample and brim fullness of his force, Galling the gleaned land with hot assays, Girding with grievous siege castles and towns, That England, being empty of defence, Hath shook and trembled at th’ill neighbourhood. (1.2.143–54) Given the fact that English civil war as depicted in the history plays is not confined to England but spills across Britain and into Ireland (see Figure 3), ‘th’ill neighbourhood’ is an apt description of England’s relations with its Celtic neighbours. However, F includes an Irish and Scottish captain in Henry’s army. The play concludes on a positive note, with the King of France offering Henry his daughter, Princess Katherine: Take her, fair son, and from her blood raise up Issue to me, that the contending kingdoms Of France and England, whose very shores look pale With envy of each other’s happiness, 158

New World

May cease their hatred, and this dear conjunction Plant neighbourhood and Christian-like accord In their sweet bosoms, that never war advance His bleeding sword ’twixt England and fair France. (5.2.340–7) ‘Neighbourhood’ here is imagined along the lines of geographical and religious proximity. Although written earlier than King Henry V, King Henry VI, Part 1 is not given over to neighbourly relations between England and France. The same is true of King John, wherein the Earl of Salisbury laments England and France’s ‘unneighbourly’ relations (5.2.39). Netherlands see Low Countries New World (A) A term that emerged in the early modern period in the wake of Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of America: therefore used in opposition to the Old World. English voyages to and settlements in the New World marked a signal contribution to English national identity and state formation, especially in terms of staking a claim to a nascent imperial identity. (B) Hakluyt’s extremely popular The principal nauigations (1599–1600) is perhaps the prime example of what Helgerson terms ‘the voyages of a nation’, revealing ‘England in action’ (1992: 152). As Helgerson notes, ‘in 1580 England did not control a square inch of territory outside the British Isles’ (164). That was to change in the following years. In terms of national identity, the critical consensus is that ‘the colonial project became one of the primary ways that the English used to articulate and define their own emerging sense of nationhood’ (Scanlan 1999: 3). Protestant English colonists, for example, imagined themselves in opposition to Catholic Spanish colonists, and the ‘civilized’ English subjects redefined themselves in opposition to what they regarded as barbarous, savage natives of the New World. For writers such as Montaigne, the hideous European treatment of New World natives prompted a critical reassessment of civility and incivility. That Montaigne’s writings (translated into English in 1603) influenced Shakespeare’s dramatic ideas is upon record. In reference to options for young men to ‘seek preferment out’, Pantino includes ‘to discover islands far away’ (TGV 1.3.9). But ‘an vn-inhabited Island’ (TLN 2320) not that far away, in the Mediterranean Sea, has attracted the most critical attention on Shakespeare and the New World. The Tempest draws upon numerous contemporary sources on New World voyages; it includes oblique references to the New World; moreover, the character Caliban, whom F labels ‘a saluage and deformed slaue’ (TLN 2329), has often been viewed in relation to New World natives. Two examples from the play will suffice. Upon spying Caliban for the first time, Trinculo states: Were I in England now (as once I was) and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man; 159

New World

any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian. Legged like a man and his fins like arms! Warm, o’my troth! I do now let loose my opinion, hold it no longer: this is no fish, but an islander that hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt. (2.2.27–36) The references to ‘painted’ and ‘Indian’ most likely allude to the practice in early modern England of publically exhibiting American Indians who were brought back over the Atlantic. It could and has been argued that this passage is critical of such practices. Antonio’s later pronouncement in reference to Caliban – ‘One of them / Is a plain fish and no doubt marketable’ (5.1.276–7) – continues this idea of exploiting New World natives as cultural curiosities. (C) Criticism on The Tempest in relation to the New World exists aplenty. A selection of material includes Greenblatt (1991: 16–39), Vaughan and Vaughan (1991) and Gillies (1994: 140–55). Vaughan and Vaughan’s Arden edition of Tem includes an informative section on the ‘Brave new world’ (2011: 39–47). Nine Years’ War (A) The name given to the brutal war fought in Ireland between England and Ireland from 1594 to 1603. The Irish forces were led primarily by Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, who also held the Gaelic title of ‘The O’Neill’, and who instigated the overthrow of the Munster plantation, which resulted in the expulsion of many English settlers, including the poet Edmund Spenser and his family. O’Neill’s power in Ireland was at its peak in 1598 when Irish forces defeated the English at the battle of Yellow Ford. It was in March of 1603, a few days after the death of Queen Elizabeth I, that O’Neill surrendered to the leader of the English forces, Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy. (B) Contemporary Ireland was a very sensitive topic during the Nine Years’ War; Elizabethan censors worked hard to control and limit discourse on Ireland in this period. As Highley notes, ‘a growing fascination with England’s troubles in Ireland was satisfied less by printed materials than by the public stage’ (1997: 5). It may not be surprising, then, that Shakespeare’s King Henry V makes an explicit reference to contemporary Ireland. The Act 5 Chorus imagines Henry’s triumphant return from France to London along the lines of, on the one hand, the return of a Roman emperor and, on the other, the potential triumphant return of an English general from Ireland: But now behold, In the quick forge and working-house of thought, How London doth pour out her citizens. The Mayor and all his brethren in best sort, Like to the senators of th’antique Rome With the plebeians swarming at their heels, Go forth and fetch their conquering Caesar in; As, by a lower but loving likelihood, 160

Nine Years’ War

Were now the General of our gracious Empress, As in good time he may, from Ireland coming, Bringing rebellion broached on his sword. (5.Chor.22–32) Evelyn May Albright describes the Chorus’s allusion to ‘the General … from Ireland coming’ as ‘the clearest and most unmistakable personal and topical reference in all [of Shakespeare’s] plays’ (1928: 727). ‘The allusion to the Irish expedition’, Gary Taylor notes in his edition of the play, ‘is the only explicit, extra-dramatic, incontestable reference to a contemporary event anywhere in the canon’ (1982: 7). To whom, however, does the Chorus refer? This play is often dated between 29 March 1599 (when Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex departed for Ireland as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland) and 28 September 1599 (when he returned), and for this reason the critical consensus is that the reference to ‘the General of our gracious Empress’ is aimed at Essex. It is not difficult to locate indirect praise of Essex around this time: Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596) voices a desire for Ireland to ‘be ruled by a lord deputy or justice’, adding, ‘I wish that over him there were placed a lord lieutenant of some of the greatest personages of England (such an one I could name, upon whom the eye of all England is fixed and our last hopes now rest)’ (1970: 168), which is often read as a reference to Essex. William Camden narrates Essex’s departure for Ireland as follows: ‘The Earle … depart[ed] out of London accompanied with a gallant traine of the flower of the Nobilitie, and saluted by the people with ioyfull acclamations’ (1630: 4: 139). Included amongst this ‘gallant traine’ was Shakespeare’s patron Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. It could be argued, therefore, that the Chorus’s cheering of ‘the General’ is not only patriotic but also personal. The conditional ‘As in good time he may’ should not be overlooked, for it foregrounds the heightened anxiety of the times. Warren D. Smith (1954) posits that ‘the General’ may refer to Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, who succeeded Essex as commander-in-chief of the forces in Ireland in early 1600. Smith, then, dates the play between 1600 and the time when Mountjoy returned to London shortly after the death of the Queen in March of 1603. Whether the reference is to Essex or to Mountjoy, it is clear that Shakespeare’s play is concerned with the Anglo-Irish war raging in Ireland at the time of its performance. Indeed, although it depicts a fifteenthcentury battle between England and France, Shakespeare’s play, written and performed around the time of the end of one monarch’s reign and the beginning of another’s, is remarkably sensitive to England’s relations with its Celtic neighbours. (C) See Chapter 4 in Murphy (1999), which includes a lengthy examination of the figure of Hugh O’Neill in relation to King Henry V. Highley (1997) examines the conflict between English and Welsh forces in King Henry IV, Part 1 as a thin veil for the crisis in 1590’s Ireland, with Owen Glendower functioning as a ‘displaced representation’ (87) of Tyrone. Shapiro (2005: 97–118) treats H5 not as ‘a pro-war play or an anti-war play but a going-to-war play’ (104). See also Dutton (2005), who argues for a 1602 dating of the F version of the play.

161

Nine Years’ War

Normans (A) Designates the inhabitants of Normandy. William the Conqueror, who defeated the Anglo-Saxon King Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, hailed from Normandy. The Plantagenets’ roots are Norman. (B) There are numerous fleeting references to Normandy and Normans in Shakespeare’s plays, especially the history plays, but also Hamlet and Love’s Labour’s Lost. In King Henry V, the French character Britain (whose name means Brittany) proclaims on the eve of the battle of Agincourt Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards! Mort de ma vie, if they march along Unfought withal, but I will sell my dukedom To buy a slobbery and a dirty farm In that nook-shotten isle of Albion. (3.5.10–14) Britain’s ‘Normans’ refers, of course, to the English army of King Henry V. The English are represented as Normans because of their descent from William the Conqueror, who, before he was known as ‘the Conqueror’, was called William the Bastard. ‘Bastard’ here also intersects with notions of Norman degeneration: that is, the mingling of Normans and natives of ‘Albion’ produces a less hardy race, or, to cite the Constable of France, ‘barbarous people’ (3.5.4). The Dauphin employs gardening imagery to represent the intermingling of Norman and Anglo-Saxon: O Dieu vivant! Shall a few sprays of us, The emptying of our fathers’ luxury, Our scions, put in wild and savage stock, Spirt up so suddenly into the clouds, And overlook their grafters? (3.5.5–9) If this passage serves to mock the arrogance of the French, it also bears witness to a process of national self-definition in the period wherein one nation constructs neighbouring nations as ‘wild and savage’ in order to assert its superiority and civility. John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1611–12) includes ‘A Norman’ along with a Briton, Roman, Saxon and Dane on its title page (see Figure 2). (C) Ivic (2010) considers King Henry V ’s ‘bastard Normans, Norman bastards’ within the context of anxiety about English expansion across Britain and Ireland.

162

O oblivion see also forgetting, lethargy, Lethe (A) Forgetfulness, especially a releasing and relaxing form of forgetfulness. (B) In Sonnet 55, Shakespeare opposes ‘The living record of your memory’ and ‘alloblivious enmity’. If Hamlet is charged with the task of remembering – ‘Remember me’ (1.5.91) – then he does so in opposition to ‘Bestial oblivion’ (4.4.40). As the adjective ‘sweet’ suggests, Macbeth invokes oblivion as a cure, a restorative: Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart? (5.3.40–5) If Lady Macbeth’s mind is both diseased and dis-eased, a ‘sweet oblivious antidote’ would ease it. In Antony and Cleopatra oblivion is a property to be coveted rather than scorned, for it releases the play’s eponymous heroes from the rigours of Rome and Romanness: in Mark Antony’s case, a rigid, conquering masculinity; in Cleopatra’s case, the abject position of colonial subject. Cleopatra’s ‘Oh, my oblivion is a very Antony, / And I am all forgotten!’ (1.3.92–3) has long troubled editors, for it affords a variety of meanings, but it can be read in relation to her and Antony’s desire to ‘Let Rome in Tiber melt’ (1.1.34): that is, to forget Rome. (C) Sullivan (2005: 88–108) explores the intersection of erotic self-forgetting and national self-forgetting in Antony and Cleopatra. Antony’s self-forgetting, variously celebrated and lamented throughout the play, is a forgetting of his country, his masculine Roman identity. Sullivan highlights the Circean narrative of Cleopatra as female temptress and source of oblivion and threat to cultural identity; however, he also foregrounds how self- and national forgetting culminate in a heroic, masculine identity. According to Sullivan, Cleopatra ‘transforms the discontinuities generative of selfforgetting into a prerequisite for heroic masculinity, and thus into an alternative to Rome’s (or Caesar’s) conception of fame’ (107).

163

Ottomite

Ottomite a synonym for Turk. Used in Othello on three occasions, twice by Othello: 1.3.34, 235, and 2.3.162–3 – ‘Are we turned Turks? and to ourselves do that / Which heaven hath forbid the Ottomites?’ Along with ‘Ottomites’, the word ‘Ottoman’ is also used: ‘the general enemy Ottoman’ (1.3.50), which posits the Ottomans as the enemy of Christianity. Vitkus (2003: 77–106) explores the idea of an Othello turned Turk.

164

P pagan A heathen, a non-Christian, often associated with barbarousness, incivility and savagery. Thus, Brabantio’s ‘if such actions may have passage free / Bond-slaves and pagans shall our statesmen be’ (Oth 1.2.98–9) is invoked to imagine a Christian and socially stratified world turned upside down. In The Merchant of Venice, Launcelot bids adieu to Shylock’s daughter Jessica with the rather oxymoronic ‘Most beautiful pagan, most sweet Jew’ (2.3.10–11), which is yet another instance of the liminal status of Jessica – daughter of a Jew, beloved of a Christian – in this play. Launcelot’s line also manifests the range of meanings associated with the word pagan. Often references to pagans in Shakespeare’s plays occur amidst discourse on war, as the following passage reveals: Many a time hath banish’d Norfolk fought For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field, Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross Against black pagans, Turks, and Saracens. (R2 4.1.92–5) This passage also tells us something about terms that are synonymous with pagan as well as something about the skin colour of pagans. The Earl of Salisbury’s pronouncement on warring England and France, including a French force bolstered by English nobles, establishes a Christian–pagan opposition: O nation, that thou couldst remove! That Neptune’s arms, who clippeth thee about, Would bear thee from the knowledge of thyself – And cripple thee – unto a pagan shore, Where these two Christian armies might combine The blood of malice in a vein of league, And not to spend it so unneighbourly! (KJ 5.2.33–9) The fantasy envisioned here is one wherein English and French forces would combine as Christians in arms against some non-Christian nation.

165

pagan

Similarly, in King Henry IV, Part 1, the king proposes war against non-Christians in the Holy Land as a means of resurrecting a sense of Englishness in the wake of ‘civil butchery’ (1.1.13): Therefore, friends, As far as to the sepulchre of Christ – Whose soldier now, under whose blessed cross We are impressed and engag’d to fight – Forthwith a power of English shall we levy, Whose arms were moulded in their mothers’ womb To chase these pagans in those holy fields Over whose acres walk’d those blessed feet Which fourteen hundred years ago were nail’d For our advantage on the bitter cross. (18–27) War against a religious other consolidates not only a confessional but also a national identity. pale see also borders A stake, fence or boundary, derived from the Latin palus for a pointed piece of wood placed in the ground. Pale also refers to an area enclosed by a fence as well as any enclosed space. The term is used to mark not only physical, geographical boundaries, but also cultural and political ones. Shakespeare uses ‘pale’ to signify fence or enclosure a few times. Titania’s Fairy speaks of flying over a fenced-in area: Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough briar, Over park, over pale, Thorough flood, thorough fire. (MND 2.1.2–5) A more figurative use of ‘pale’ surfaces in Venus and Adonis when Venus’s address to the ‘captured’ Adonis plays with the idea that her arms are a ‘pale’ encircling her love: ‘Fondling,’ she saith, ‘since I have hemm’d thee here Within the circuit of this ivory pale, I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer. (230) Pale certainly had political connotations, especially when used in an analogous manner, as in King Richard II : Why should we, in the compass of a pale, Keep law and form and due proportion, 166

pale

Showing, as in a model, our firm estate, When our sea-walled garden, the whole land, Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers chok’d up, Her fruit-trees all unprun’d, her hedges ruin’d, Her knots disordered and her wholesome herbs Swarming with caterpillars? (3.4.40–7) In these lines the Gardener’s Man compares a fenced-in garden – a garden that is proper precisely because it is enclosed, protected – to a vulnerable and rank England. As a ‘sea-walled garden’, England should be a ‘firm estate’ like the garden, but political corruption has tainted the ‘land’. Shakespeare would have been familiar with the English Pale in Ireland. The English Pale constituted that part of Ireland over which English jurisdiction, in the wake of the twelfth-century English conquest of Ireland, was established. As evidenced in Richard Stanihurst’s A Treatise contayning a playne and perfect Description of Irelande, which appeared in the first volume of Holinshed’s Chronicles, the English Pale served as a physical barrier segregating the English and the Irish: There is also an other diuision of Irelande, into the English pale and Irishry. For when Ireland was subdued by the English, diuers of the conquerors planted themselues neere to Dublyn and the confines thereto adioyning, and so as it were enclosing and empalyng themselues within certayne listes and territories, they feazed away the Irish, in so much as that countrey became meere English. And thereof it was termed, the English pale. (1577: 3) For Stanihurst, the Irish are not only physically and geographically beyond the Pale but also culturally. Moreover, an enclosed and impaled Dublin is represented as an isolated and besieged pocket of Englishness. In his A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596), Spenser speaks of ‘the English Pale’ as ‘a border’, ‘a pale and defence to the inner lands’ (1970: 30). And he notes that ‘the English Pale hath preserved itself through nearness of their state in reasonable civility’ (64). A not-too-dissimilar imagining of Englishness occurs in King Henry VI, Part 1. Talbot invokes the image of being ‘bounded in a pale’ upon learning that he and his army are surrounded by French forces: He fables not. I hear the enemy. Out, some light horsemen, and peruse their wings. O negligent and heedless discipline – How are we parked and bounded in a pale – A little herd of England’s timorous deer Mazed with a yelping kennel of French curs. If we be English deer, be then in blood: 167

pale

Not rascal-like to fall down with a pinch, But rather, moody-mad and desperate stags, Turn on the bloody hounds with heads of steel And make the cowards stand aloof at bay. Sell every man his life as dear as mine And they shall find dear deer of us, my friends. God and Saint George, Talbot and England’s right, Prosper our colours in this dangerous fight! (4.2.42–56) What is remarkable about this passage is the way in which Talbot exploits the occasion, using the sense of enclosure to imagine his forces as a little England. Moreover, the pale functions as a border to demarcate those outside from those within, in this case on national lines. The Duke of Austria’s use of ‘pale’ refers to Dover’s chalk cliffs: Together with that pale, that white-fac’d shore, Whose foot spurns back the ocean’s roaring tides And coops from other lands her islanders. (KJ 2.1.23–5) As an adjective, ‘pale’ means white; as a noun, it means fence, barrier or, to cite Austria, a ‘bulwark’ (27). Parliament (A) England’s executive legislature, comprised of the Sovereign, the House of Lords – home to peers and bishops – and the House of Commons – home to elected members (although limited, in Shakespeare’s time, by gender and status). Also, the place where Parliament meets: that is, Parliament House. ‘TH e most high and absolute power of the realme of Englande’, Thomas Smith notes in De republica Anglorum (1583), ‘consisteth in the Parliament’, ‘which is the whole vniuersall and generall consent and authoritie aswell of the prince as of the nobilitie and commons, that is to say, of the whole head and bodie of the realme of England’ (34, 47). (B) There are numerous references to Parliament in Shakespeare’s plays, notably his history plays. The opening scene alone of King Henry VI, Part 3, for example, uses the word four times. The play opens with a power struggle, with the Yorkist forces attempting to seize the throne from the Lancastrian King. In response to Richard, Duke of York’s ‘The Queen this day here holds her Parliament’, Warwick states, ‘The bloody parliament shall this be call’d, / Unless Plantagenet, Duke of York, be king’ (1.1.35, 39–40). Under pressure from the Yorkist forces, Henry resolves to allow York to inherit the crown after Henry’s death. Upon learning of Henry’s action, Queen Margaret divorces herself from Henry ‘Until that act of parliament be repeal’d / Whereby my son is disinherited’ (1.1.256–7). This scene, however, provides no evidence of an ‘act of parliament’, unless Margaret’s lines refer to Henry’s actions. In other words, in this play, 168

Parliament

an ‘act of parliament’ is portrayed as an act carried out by feuding royal and noble families. Perhaps the most significant scene that takes place in Parliament is the deposition scene of King Richard II (4.1). The scene opens with the stage direction Enter as to the Parliament, BOLINGBROKE , AUMERLE , NORTHUMBERLAND , PERCY, FITZWATER , SURREY, the Bishop of CARLISLE , the Abbot Of Westminster and another Lord, herald, officers and BAGOT During a stichomythic debate in King Henry VI, Part 3, King Henry and York offer alternative accounts of the transfer of power from King Richard II to King Henry IV: ‘Henry the Fourth by conquest got the crown’, states Henry, to which York replies, ‘Twas by rebellion against his king’ (1.1.135–6). Act 4, Scene 1 of King Richard II supplies yet another account, one that differs from the chronicle sources. In the following lines, directed first to Carlisle, then to the Lord of Westminster and finally to his fellow lords, the Duke of York implies that Richard’s deposition has been ordered by Parliament: Well have you argued, sir, and, for your pains, Of capital treason we arrest you here. My Lord of Westminster, be it your charge To keep him safely till his day of trial. May it please you, lords, to grant the commons’ suit? (150–4) The Lancastrian Bolingbroke’s reply to the Duke of York is significant: Fetch hither Richard, that in common view He may surrender, so we shall proceed Without suspicion. (155–7) The use of ‘common’ here probably means public, and, of course, it could function metatheatrically to signal the fact that this scene is being re-enacted in a public theatre. Later in the play, just before the Duke and Duchess of York learn of their son Aumerle’s treasonous conspiracy, the Duke has this to say upon his son’s entrance: Aumerle that was, But that is lost for being Richard’s friend, And, madam, you must call him Rutland now. I am in parliament pledge for his truth And lasting fealty to the new-made king. (5.2.41–5) These lines invest Parliament with significant power, for they suggest that ‘parliament’ has made Bolingbroke king. 169

Parliament

(C) See Mayer (2004a) for a discussion of the deposition of King Richard II by Parliament (4.1), a scene that was not included in editions of the play printed during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign. See also Dutton (1998). For a historical account of Parliament as well as an informative reading of Coriolanus, see Kishlansky (1986). patricide see filicide people see also citizen (A) When used with a definite article this word could designate members of society lacking a privileged social status, in particular those below the nobility; the word could be used generally and objectively but also dismissively and derogatorily. ‘People’ can also be used less exclusively to refer to all the individuals of a nation irrespective of one’s social status. (B) In his De republica Anglorum (1583), Thomas Smith divides commonwealths into ‘rulinges by one, by the fewer part, & by the multitude or greater number’; he makes a further division of these forms of government into ‘good and iust’ and ‘evill and uniust’. Of the third form, democracy, he writes: ‘where the multitude doth gouerne, the one they call a common wealth by the generall name … or the rule of the people’: this being good and just. Evil and unjust manifests itself in ‘the rule or the vsurping of the popular or rascall and viler sort, because they be moe in number’ (3). Smith’s work bears witness to the fact that Elizabethan and Jacobean political culture was fully aware of historical instances of popular rule, not to mention positive and negative examples of and attitudes to popular rule. Smith’s division of ‘the parts and persons of the commonwealth’ (18) includes a chapter on ‘laborers’ or ‘men which doe not rule’, of whom he records: TH e fourth sort or classe amongest vs, is of those which the olde Romans called capite censij proletarij or operae, day labourers, poore husbandmen, yea marcantes or retailers which haue no frée lande, copiholders, and all artificers, as Taylers, Shoomakers, Carpenters, Brickemakers, Bricklayers, Masons, &c. These haue no voice nor authoritie in our common wealth, and no account is made of them but onelie to be ruled, not to rule other. (33) Labourers in Shakespeare’s plays may have little or no authority; however, it would be inaccurate to say that they have no voice. No plays include more references to ‘people’, especially ‘the people’, than Shakespeare’s Roman plays, with Coriolanus by far leading the way, followed by Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. In his earliest Roman play, Titus Andronicus, the people appear to be invested with significant political power. At the play’s opening, Marcus, a tribune, interrupts the power struggle between the sons of the late Emperor of Rome, Saturninus and Bassianus, informing them that the people of Rome have elected Marcus’s brother, Titus, to the vacant position of Emperor: 170

people

Princes, that strive by factions and by friends Ambitiously for rule and empery, Know that the people of Rome, for whom we stand A special party, have by common voice In election for the Roman empery Chosen Andronicus, surnamed Pius For many good and great deserts to Rome. (1.1.18–24) In response to Marcus’s pronouncement, Bassianus renounces his claim to power, acknowledging ‘the people’s favour’ (1.1.57); interestingly, Saturninus withdraws his claim for ‘the love and favour of my country’ (1.1.61). Upon Titus’s victorious return to Rome, Marcus reiterates the fact that the people have offered Titus the imperial diadem: Titus Andronicus, the people of Rome, Whose friend in justice thou hast ever been, Send thee by me, their tribune and their trust, This palliament of white and spotless hue: And name thee in election for the empire With these our late-deceased emperor’s sons: Be candidatus then and put it on, And help to set a head on headless Rome. (1.1.182–9) The power of the people in this play is reinforced when Saturninus, now Emperor, says of his political rival, Lucius, ‘’Tis he the common people love so much’ (4.4.73). Ironically, ‘the people’ of Rome have no presence and no voice in Titus Andronicus. Plebeians or citizens are nowhere to be found in this play; instead, as illustrated, the people’s voices are ventriloquized by other noble characters. The same cannot be said of Coriolanus and, to a lesser extent, Julius Caesar. The latter play affords the people of Rome a greater presence, for the people do speak, and much is made of the Roman people. In fact, JC is dominated by political camps that act, they say, for the good of the people of Rome. However, Caska’s early reference to the ‘tag-rag people’ (1.2.257), which could be a reference to their dress but could also mean riff-raff, rabblement, evinces the attitude of the play’s elite figures toward their social inferiors. At times, the attitude toward the people of Rome is utterly dismissive, as when Caska narrates the scene of Julius Caesar’s political grandstanding: and still as he refused it the rabblement hooted, and clapped their chopped hands, and threw up their sweaty nightcaps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown that it had almost choked Caesar. (1.2.243–7)

171

people

This attitude is not shared by all of the play’s nobility, but there is a sense that the people of Rome are manipulated by the likes of Caesar, Mark Antony, Brutus and Cassius for their own political aggrandizement. To read this play as a straightforward critique of the aristocracy, however, is problematic, for, given the play’s representation of the people as fickle and easily swayed, there is little to suggest that the play mounts a defence of the Roman people. No Shakespeare play affords the people greater prominence than Coriolanus. The plural noun ‘the people’ reverberates throughout Cor. Despite the play’s title, the people play a signal role in what is arguably Shakespeare’s most political play. When Coriolanus joins forces with his bitter Volscian enemy, Aufidius, in an attack on Rome, the struggle between Coriolanus and the people of Rome is reinforced. But who are ‘the people’ in Coriolanus? The following quotation marks ‘the people’ of Rome off from their social superiors, revealing the exclusive work this term can and at times does perform in this play: ‘There hath been in Rome strange insurrections: the people against the senators, patricians and nobles’ (4.3.13–15). Here, ‘the people’ are defined by what they are not: senators, patricians, nobles. Much of the play is given over to an antagonistic relation between the play’s eponymous tragic hero and ‘the people’. Coriolanus, for example, is labelled by a citizen of Rome as ‘the chief enemy of the people’ (1.1.8–9); in short, Coriolanus ‘loves not the common people’ (2.2.6). Menenius Agrippa, on the other hand, is hailed by another citizen as ‘one that hath always loved the people’ (1.1.50–1). Coriolanus, then, could be read as reflecting deeply on the relationship between not only a society’s upper and lower classes but also on the constitution of a collective political body. To Sicinius’s rhetorical question, ‘What is the city but the people?’, the people (or ‘All Plebeians’) reply, ‘True, the people are the city’ (3.1.199–200). If these lines work to associate a collective social body within a delimited geopolitical space, other passages in the play do otherwise. Of Coriolanus, Junius Brutus states: ‘There’s no more to be said, but he is banish’d, / As enemy to the people and his country:’ (3.3.117–18). These lines appear to distinguish and demarcate ‘the people’ and ‘his country’. If the people are the country, then Junius Brutus need not speak both nouns. Does ‘his country’ exclude ‘the people’ and, therefore, refer to ‘senators, patricians and nobles’? Another text that invests the people with significant political power is Lucrece. The poem’s ‘Argument’ concludes with the following vendetta involving Lucrece’s father, her husband, Junius Brutus and Publius Valerius: with one consent they all vowed to root out the whole hated family of the Tarquins and … Brutus acquainted the people with the doer and manner of the vile deed, with a bitter invective against the tyranny of the King. Wherewith the people were so moved, that with one consent and a general acclamation the Tarquins were all exiled, and the state government changed from kings to consuls. Whilst Junius Brutus plays a crucial role in swaying ‘the people’, their place in this narrative and in effecting political change is key. 172

people

Shakespeare’s history plays offer further reflection on ‘the people’. ‘People’ is used four times in King Henry V, three times in reference to another nation: Henry’s ‘your people’ (3.3.28) is directed to the Governor and men of Harfleur; the French camp describe the English as ‘barbarous people’ and ‘a more frosty people’ (3.5.4, 24). The only reference to one’s own people occurs when Henry is speaking of his soldiers rather than all of his subjects: My people are with sickness much enfeebled, My numbers lessened, and those few I have Almost no better than so many French. (H5 3.6.146–8) For a play that is often read as a product of emergent early modern English national consciousness and as participating in the production of English national identity formation, there is, surprisingly, little sense of ‘the people’ as a cohesive national unit. In King Henry VI, Part 2, Cardinal Beaufort’s attack on Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester is grounded in an aversion to Gloucester’s popularity with the people: So, there goes our Protector in a rage. ’Tis known to you he is mine enemy, Nay more, an enemy unto you all, And no great friend, I fear me, to the King. Consider, lords, he is the next of blood And heir apparent to the English crown. Had Henry got an empire by his marriage And all the wealthy kingdoms of the west, There’s reason he should be displeased at it. Look to it, lords, let not his smoothing words Bewitch your hearts; be wise and circumspect. What though the common people favour him, Calling him ‘Humphrey, the good Duke of Gloucester’, Clapping their hands and crying with loud voice, ‘Jesu maintain your royal excellence!’ With ‘God preserve the good Duke Humphrey!’, I fear me, lords; for all this flattering gloss, He will be found a dangerous Protector. (2H6 1.1.145–62) Although the Cardinal’s use of ‘the common people’ is specific and exclusive, it does not express the loathing of the people found in Caska’s and Coriolanus’s lines. Not unlike Julius Caesar, King Richard II acknowledges the role that the people play in securing power; moreover, the disdain that the patrician Caska has for the people is shared by King Richard. Consider the following passage spoken by Richard regarding the moment that the banished Bolingbroke takes leave of England: 173

people

Ourself and Bushy Observ’d his courtship to the common people, How he did seem to dive into their hearts With humble and familiar courtesy; What reverence he did throw away on slaves, Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles And patient underbearing of his fortune, As ’twere to banish their affects with him. Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench; A brace of draymen bid God speed him well, And had the tribute of his supple knee, With ‘Thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends’ – As were our England in reversion his, And he our subjects’ next degree in hope. (1.4.23–36) Given Richard’s condescending view of ‘the common people’, whom he terms ‘slaves’ and, significantly, ‘subjects’, it is not surprising that the political space over which he rules is ‘our England’: that is, a kingdom rather than a nation. However much this passage reveals Richard’s arrogance, it also bears witness to an anxiety about the place of the people in securing the throne. Another history play that has much in common in terms of attitudes to the people with Julius Caesar is King Henry VI, Part 3. The dying Clifford’s final speech is prophetic but also predictable in its representation of the people: Here burns my candle out; ay, here it dies, Which, whiles it lasted, gave King Henry light. Oh, Lancaster, I fear thy overthrow More than my body’s parting with my soul. My love and fear glu’d many friends to thee; And, now I fall, thy tough commixture melts, Impairing Henry, strengthening misproud York. The common people swarm like summer flies; And whither fly the gnats but to the sun? And who shines now but Henry’s enemies? (2.6.1–10) Here, as in Julius Caesar, the people are presented as fickle; in fact, when we next learn of the swarming common people it is to the forces of the red rose that they swarm, as Warwick (who at this point of the play has joined the Lancastrians) pronounces: ‘The common people by numbers swarm to us’ (4.2.2). Warwick’s last word on the people, however, relates a shift in the people’s allegiance to the white rose:

174

Protector

What counsel, lords? Edward from Belgia, With hasty Germans and blunt Hollanders, Is pass’d in safety through the Narrow Seas, And with his troops doth march amain to London; And many giddy people flock to him. (4.8.1–5) The play’s, if not the plays’, dominant attitude to the ‘giddy’ people is conveyed in the verbs used to describe them: in these instances ‘swarm’ and ‘flock’. Unlike King Richard II , however, this play’s titular king reveals a care for the people rarely found in other plays. Acknowledging his bad luck, Henry says to Warwick: But, Warwick, after God, thou set’st me free, And chiefly therefore I thank God and thee; He was the author, thou the instrument. Therefore, that I may conquer Fortune’s spite By living low where fortune cannot hurt me, And that the people of this blessed land May not be punish’d with my thwarting stars, Warwick, although my head still wear the crown, I here resign my government to thee, For thou art fortunate in all thy deeds. (4.6.16–25) In a political rhetoric very different to King Richard’s, Henry represents the people less as subject to his rule but rather as an imagined national community grounded in a national space. (C) For a thorough examination of the people’s ‘voice’ in Coriolanus, see Patterson (1989: 120–53). plebeian see citizen pressed see Towton Protector ‘A person having charge of the kingdom during the minority, absence, or incapacity of the sovereign; a regent’ (OED ). In Act 1, Scene 3 of King Richard III , the issue of King Edward IV ’s ill health leads to a discussion of Edward and Queen Elizabeth’s ‘goodly son’ (9), namely Prince Edward, Prince of Wales. Queen Elizabeth informs her son, Lord Grey, that they cannot look to Prince Edward for protection in the case of her husband’s death: Ah, he is young, and his minority Is put unto the trust of Richard Gloucester, A man that loves not me, nor none of you. (11–13) 175

Protector

To which Grey responds, ‘Is it concluded he shall be Protector?’ (14). These lines put in place a discourse on Richard as Protector that sustains much of the play, at least until Richard is crowned King of England. Indeed, when Richard and the Duke of Buckingham stage a scene of Richard’s unwillingness to accept the crown, it is precisely Richard’s current position as Protector that Buckingham dismissively invokes: we heartily solicit Your gracious self to take on you the charge And kingly government of this your land, Not as Protector, steward, substitute, Or lowly factor for another’s gain. (3.7.129–33) Of course, the use of Protector in King Richard III is deeply ironic, for Richard’s sense of protection does not extend beyond the self. The most conspicuous Protector in Shakespeare’s plays is Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who serves in this office during the minority of King Henry VI , as represented in King Henry VI, Parts 1 and 2. Not surprisingly, these two plays contain by far the most uses of Protector. In many ways, the two plays, not unlike King Richard III, interrogate the notion of the Protector, or Lord Protector, especially as the Bishop of Winchester contests Gloucester’s position: ‘thou most usurping proditor – / And not Protector – of the King, or realm’ (1H6 1.3.31–2). Whilst neither of the plays necessarily represents Gloucester in a negative light, the notion of an individual in charge of the realm and protecting its subjects comes under scrutiny as civil war is unleashed by feuding nobles on the nation’s inhabitants. The OED ’s definition of ‘Protector’ cites ‘a regent’, and that dictionary’s definition of regent is similar to the one for Protector: ‘A person invested with royal authority by, or on behalf of, another; esp. a person appointed to administer the affairs of a country or state during the minority, absence, or incapacity of the monarch.’ A prime example of this meaning surfaces in King Richard II when Richard is away in Ireland and Lord Berkeley terms Edmund of Langley, Duke of York ‘the most gracious regent of this land’ (2.3.77). Richard’s absence from England results in York being made regent. However, Shakespeare also uses regent to signify the said person outside the country or nation. There are, for instance, numerous references to regent in King Henry VI, Parts 1 and 2, including the Duke of Bedford, whom 1H6’s opening stage directions label ‘Regent of France’, a title taken up by Richard, Duke of York, whom Winchester addresses as ‘Lord Regent’ (1H6 5.3.94). public Can be synonymous with common, especially in terms of the commonweal or commonwealth, as evidenced in Sicinius Velutus’s ‘th’ public weal’ (Cor 3.1.176) and the Bishop of Winchester’s ‘public weal’ (1H6 1.1.177). The OED supplies the following definitions for public as adjective and as noun: ‘Of or relating to the people as 176

public

a whole; that belongs to, affects, or concerns the community or the nation’; ‘The community or people as an organized body, the body politic; the nation, the state; the interest or well-being of the community, the common good’. The latter definition applies to Claudio’s use of ‘the body public’ (MM 1.2.156). Menenius Agrippa’s fable of the belly, delivered to Rome’s citizens, provides a fine instance of the use of public to mean the larger community and communal well-being: The senators of Rome are this good belly, And you the mutinous members: for examine Their counsels and their cares, digest things rightly Touching the weal o’th’ common, you shall find No public benefit which you receive But it proceeds or comes from them to you, And no way from yourselves. (Cor 1.1.147–53) Menenius speaks a language of ‘the public good’ (2H6 1.1.197), grounded in such terms as ‘counsels’, ‘cares’ and ‘weal o’th’ common’.

177

178

R race (A) Not to be confused with later nineteenth-century formulations of race based on biological, genetic or scientific ideas. In the early modern period, race signifies a grouping of people; however, the grouping is based on descent rather than phenotypical or physical difference. Thus, synonyms include nation, people and tribe. Still, how Shakespeare and his contemporaries participated in the construction of proto-racial identities (whether Irish or African) is not to be underestimated. (B) When Timon speaks of ‘the whole race of mankind’ (Tim 4.1.40), he is gesturing to all of humankind. In this sense, race is an inclusive term, as it is in Cymbeline where Britons are described as ‘a valiant race’ (5.4.83) – perhaps in opposition to or perhaps similar to the play’s Romans. Race can also work to demarcate and distinguish, especially in terms of social status. Shakespeare often uses race to designate family, particularly of noble origins, as when the Earl of Suffolk says to the Earl of Warwick: If ever lady wronged her lord so much, Thy mother took into her blameful bed Some stern untutored churl, and noble stock Was graft with crab-tree slip, whose fruit thou art, And never of the Nevilles’ noble race. (2H6 3.2.211–15) When the ghosts of Prince Edward and York visit a sleeping Richmond, they cry ‘Live, and beget a happy race of kings! (R3 5.3.8). Here race means ‘offspring or posterity of a person; a set of children or descendants’ (OED). According to the OED, Mark Antony’s ‘Have I my pillow left unpressed in Rome, / Forborne the getting of a lawful race’ (AC 3.13.111–12) exemplifies the use of race to mean offspring. Race, then, overlaps with issue, as evidenced in Octavius Caesar’s Contemning Rome, he has done all this, and more In Alexandria. Here’s the manner of ’t: I’th’ market-place, on a tribunal silvered, Cleopatra and himself in chairs of gold Were publicly enthroned. At the feet sat Caesarion, whom they call my father’s son, And all the unlawful issue that their lust Since then hath made between them. Unto her 179

race

He gave the stablishment of Egypt; made her Of lower Syria, Cyprus, Lydia, Absolute queen. (3.6.1–11) What renders Antony’s ‘issue’ with Cleopatra ‘unlawful’, and why would his children with Octavia constitute ‘a lawful race’? Marriage may be crucial here. But these concepts may owe something to Octavia’s Romanness and whiteness and Cleopatra’s status as a ‘tawny’ Egyptian. The play does not supply easy answers; however, it does invite reflection on race as a complex and contradictory term in the early modern period. In his A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596), Edmund Spenser condemns ‘the old English’ – the descendants of the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman invaders of Ireland – for ‘marrying with the Irish’; moreover, thought of their issue troubles him: ‘how can such matching but bring forth an evil race’, he asks (1970: 66, 68). Here ‘race’ likely means offspring, the product of such marriages; however, as ‘an evil race’, the issue of the Old English and the Irish are figured in a manner not unlike Iago’s racially motivated discourse directed to Brabantio concerning Desdemona and Othello’s imagined offspring: ‘you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse; you’ll have your nephews neigh to you, you’ll have coursers for cousins and jennets for germans’ (Oth 1.1.109–12). ‘Racialism in the familiar nineteenth- and twentieth-century sense of the term’, according to Margaret Hodgen, ‘was all but nonexistent’ at the time Shakespeare was writing (1964: 213). Miranda’s reference to Caliban’s ‘vile race’ (Tem 1.2.359), for instance, is glossed by editors, following the OED, as ‘natural or inherited disposition’. The word race appears just once in The Tempest, and it has been suggested that ‘an unprepared modern reader risks misunderstanding it’ (Appiah 1990: 279), for Miranda’s lines are spoken to an individual, Caliban, and not in reference to an entire race. Given, however, that F’s list of characters figures Caliban as ‘a saluage and deformed slaue’ it would not be irresponsible to view Caliban as an individual who is representative of a larger group identity, whether Africans or New World natives. If Miranda’s reference to Caliban’s ‘vile race’ marks his ‘individual moral incorrigibility’ (Appiah 1990: 279), it is difficult not to find in the play’s (including paratextual material) treatment of Caliban a glimpse of an emergent proto-racial discourse in the early modern period: ‘if we think of Caliban as African, [‘thy vile race’] resonates strongly with modern audiences who then see Miranda’s contempt for a dark-hued slave as predictive of modern racism’ (Vaughan and Vaughan 2011: 197). Indeed, as Neill argues, the English ‘brought some important cultural baggage to their encounters with foreign peoples: ideas about genealogy, about the biblical separation of humankind, and about the moral symbolism of color, all of which pushed them toward an essentialist reading of phenotypic difference’ (2000: 274). (C) Book-length studies on race in Shakespeare include Hall (1995), Alexander and Wells (2000), Loomba (2002), Floyd-Wilson (2003) and Iyengar (2005). See also Neill, who notes that to

180

Reformation

talk about ‘race’ in Othello is to fall into anachronism; yet not to talk about it is to ignore something fundamental about a play that has rightly come to be identified as a foundational text in the emergence of modern European ‘racial’ consciousness – a play that trades in constructions of human difference at once misleadingly like and confusingly unlike those twentieth-century notions to which they are nevertheless recognizably ancestral. (2000: 267) realm (A) A kingdom; also a region or territory. (B) Given the reference to the nobility, Hotspur’s ‘the lords and barons of the realm’ (1H4 4.3.66) posits a hierarchical polity, realm as kingdom, as, obviously, does King Richard’s ‘our royal realm’ (R2 1.4.45) – the OED lists Richard’s line under ‘Owned, occupied, owing to, or used by a monarch or a royal family; forming part of the possessions or property of a sovereign’. And given the context, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s references to ‘the realm of France’ (H5 1.2.41, 55) when discussing French laws of dynastic inheritance is clearly using realm as a synonym for kingdom. Jack Cade’s ‘Away, burn all the records of the realm, my mouth shall be the parliament of England’ (2H6 4.7.11–13) appears to use ‘realm’ as an exclusive and exclusionary term in opposition to his popular protest. The Earl of Salisbury’s ‘While these do labour for their own preferment, / Behoves it us to labour for the realm’ (2H6 1.1.179–80), on the other hand, gestures toward realm as commonwealth, especially since it pits self-advancement (‘preferment’) against common good (‘labour for the realm’). King Henry VI ’s initial refusal to hand the throne over to Richard, Duke of York – ‘No: first shall war unpeople this my realm’ (3H6 1.1.130) – bears witness to the violence that dynastic struggles have unleashed on the people of England. The Duke of Albany’s ‘Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain’ (KL 5.3.319) associates the realm with rule and monarchy and the state with the polity or political nation. The use of realm in Shakespeare bears witness to Mottram’s argument that Shakespeare’s stage is ‘a representational minefield, where characters and communities vie with each other, not only for control over the realm of England, but over the very word “England” itself – over the ability, that is, to speak on England’s behalf’ (2008: 221). Reformation (A) The early sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation of the Roman Catholic Church was led on the European continent by Martin Luther and John Calvin. The Protestant Reformation had a monumental impact on English culture and society, including national identity. ‘If one event more than any other determined the extraordinary sixteenth-century outpouring of writing about England’, Helgerson writes, ‘it was the separation of the English church from the church of Rome’ (1992: 251). King Henry VIII ’s and the English Parliament’s break from the Church of Rome resulted in the establishment of England’s monarch as the head of church and state, which, in turn, put in place a process of national self-determination and self-fashioning.

181

Reformation

Although Protestantism never simply and immediately displaced Catholicism – especially under Queen Mary – eventually, especially under Queen Elizabeth I, the construction of English nationhood was underpinned by a peculiarly Protestant belief that England was an elect nation in the eyes of God. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 bolstered that belief. At the heart of English self-definition, particularly during Elizabeth’s reign, was the construction of a Protestant national community in opposition to a predominantly Catholic Europe. (B) There has been much debate in recent years about Shakespeare’s confessional identity. Shakespeare’s Protestantism is no longer taken as a given. But in some ways Shakespeare’s plays, especially his history plays, encode the dominant tropes of Protestant English nationhood. A prime example occurs in King John, Shakespeare’s chronologically earliest English history play. Although the warring French and English forces are, of course, both of the Catholic faith, the play presents, in the figure of Cardinal Pandulph, Rome as an external force meddling in England’s dynastic-cumnational affairs. King Henry VIII -like, King John proclaims no Italian priest Shall tithe or toll in our dominions; But as we, under God, are supreme head, So under Him that great supremacy, Where we do reign, we will alone uphold Without th’ assistance of a mortal hand: So tell the pope, all reverence set apart To him and his usurp’d authority. (3.1.79–86) Even though the language is not sharply focused on the nation – ‘our dominions’, ‘Where we do reign’ – this passage reveals a Shakespeare, whether Catholic or Protestant, indebted to an imagining of English national identity informed by the Reformation if not John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563), which presents King John as a martyred hero. King John’s proto-Reformation rhetoric also bears witness to what Anderson labels ‘the amnesias of nationalism’ (1991: xv). The closest that Shakespeare comes to dramatizing the Reformation is, not surprisingly, in King Henry VIII. Although the play refuses to foreground Henry’s break with Rome, the struggle between Catholics and Protestants within England is evident. The Catholic Cardinal Wolsey’s ‘the elect o’th’ land’ (2.4.58) could be read as an ironic reference to the Protestant notion of the elect. Wolsey’s description of Anne Boleyn as a ‘spleeny Lutheran’ (3.2.99) speaks volumes. Cranmer’s Protestantism is despised by the Catholic Lord Chancellor and Gardiner. When the Lord Chancellor states ‘new opinions, / Diverse and dangerous, which are heresies / And, not reformed, may prove pernicious’ (5.2.51–3), it is hard not to interpret his lines as referring to the Reformation. Indeed, Gardiner’s reply refers explicitly, as numerous editors of this play have pointed out, to Protestant groups in Germany: 182

republicanism

Which reformation must be sudden too, My noble lords, for those that tame wild horses Pace ’em not in their hands to make ’em gentle, But stop their mouths with stubborn bits and spur ’em Till they obey the manage. If we suffer, Out of our easiness and childish pity To one man’s honour, this contagious sickness, Farewell, all physic. And what follows then? Commotions, uproars, with a general taint Of the whole state, as of late days our neighbours, The upper Germany, can dearly witness, Yet freshly pitied in our memories. (54–65) While this play returns to a period of bitter religious struggles it does so from a critical distance that shows little interest in stirring up national antagonisms. The impact of the Reformation manifests itself in other plays, including King Henry V. The play’s opening scene involves two Catholic bishops: Canterbury and Ely. Given the play’s historical setting these two cannot be anything but Catholic; however, they at times sound like sixteenth-century Protestants rather than fifteenth-century Catholics. Canterbury’s ‘miracles are ceased’ (1.1.67) is a prime example. (C) McEachern makes the strongest claim for English nationhood as ‘founded in and by the religious culture and ideology of Elizabethan England’ (1996: 5). On Shakespeare and Catholicism, see Dutton, Findlay and Wilson (2004). Hertel (2014: 119–49) considers religion in relation to national identity as well as the ‘new faith’ in King John. Regent see Protector republicanism (A) Adherence to, support of republican ideas and ideals: that is, a state ruled not by a monarch but rather governed by representatives of the people or those appointed to office. The following passage from Thomas Smith’s De republica Anglorum (1583) reveals less about England’s absolutism and more about Venice’s status as a republic: ‘the kingdome of Englande is farre more absolute than either the dukedome of Uenice is, or the kingdome of the Lacedemonians was’ (1583: 44). (B) According to Sharpe, ‘all educated Englishmen learned from the Greek and Roman past the achievements and virtues of the classical republics and studied their contemporary and later humanist historians and apologists. Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign’, he adds, ‘republican ideas became fashionable in the intellectual circles of Sidney and Essex and bequeathed a language and a vision of politics that remained to critique and contest the official discourse of monarchy and state’ (2000: 223). Such political contestation, it should be noted, was accompanied by alternative imaginings of the state as civic nation. 183

republicanism

Unlike some contemporary poets – Samuel Daniel, for example – Shakespeare does not use the word ‘republic’ in his plays. But this has not stopped critics from exploring Shakespeare’s attitude to Roman and early modern English republicanism, even though the word never surfaces in his works. The OED notes that the word state can mean ‘A republic, a non-monarchical commonwealth. Chiefly with reference to ancient Rome’, so attending to how Shakespeare’s use of this word at times intersects with republican ideology is fruitful. Following King Henry VIII, Coriolanus uses state more than any other Shakespeare play, for example ‘the Roman state’ (1.1.68). The first tetralogy provides fertile ground for the exploration of republican ideas, not only because monarchy is unsettled in those plays but also because words key to a republican vocabulary circulate throughout the plays. The Earl of Warwick, as a kingmaker, occupies a significant yet ambiguous political and ideological position, for he has the power to place individuals on the throne, but, as a kingmaker, he is not ideologically opposed to monarchy. Still, the very notion of a kingmaker disturbs royalist ideology grounded in notions of inheritance. In King Henry VI, Part 2, Warwick’s father says of his son, ‘Thy deeds, thy plainness and thy housekeeping / Hath won thee greatest favour of the commons’ (1.1.190–1). The emphasis here on merit intersects with republican ideas, as does the Earl of Salisbury’s praise of Richard, Duke of York: And, brother York, thy acts in Ireland In bringing them to civil discipline; Thy late exploits done in the heart of France When thou wert regent for our sovereign, Have made thee feared and honoured of the people. (192–6) Salisbury’s praise of York is grounded in ‘acts’ and in the honour of ‘the people’, not in divine right. Moreover, York’s status as regent opens up the possibility of standing in for, maybe even displacing, the monarch. A prime site for exploring republican ideas is Shakespeare’s Roman plays, not to mention his Roman poem Lucrece. Hadfield says of Lucrece that Shakespeare ‘produced a poem on the most obviously republican subject. Whether this expressed his own political views, or whether a needy writer produced a poem designed to engage the interest of a patron [Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton], is obviously a harder matter to determine’ (2002: 80). Cassius alludes to Lucius Junius Brutus, who, according to Roman legend, drove out the last of the Roman kings, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus – whom Thomas Smith lists among Roman ‘tyrantes’ (1583: 3) – and went on to found the Roman Republic: There was a Brutus once that would have brooked Th’eternal devil to keep his state in Rome As easily as a kin. (JC 1.2.158–60)

184

Rome

And Brutus reiterates this republican sentiment: ‘My ancestors did from the streets of Rome / The Tarquin drive, when he was called a king’ (2.1.53–4). Throughout Julius Caesar, Brutus speaks of a commitment to ‘the general good’ (1.2.85) as a republican ideal. Coriolanus, of course, participated in the early Republic’s driving out of the Tarquins. In Antony and Cleopatra, Pompey nostalgically describes Brutus and his coconspirators as ‘courtiers of beauteous freedom’ (2.6.16). Pompey’s use of the word ‘courtiers’ is intriguing, given its early modern denotations. The OED cites this line from the play and assigns the definition ‘One who courts; a wooer’, but such a strict definition forecloses the line’s anti-monarchical possibilities. (C) Hadfield suggests that Shakespeare ‘dabbled with republican ideas’ (2002: 77). In a later work (2005), Hadfield supplies a sustained exploration of Shakespeare and republicanism, including an investigation of the republican ideas circulating in England when Shakespeare was writing. Norbrook (1987) considers the paradox that as Shakespeare draws upon King James I and VI ’s (absolutist) views on monarchy he explores the legitimacy of regicide in Macbeth. Rome see also Italy (A) The leading city of the ancient Roman Empire. References to Rome could signify not only the city of Rome itself but also ancient Roman civilization generally. Moreover, we must distinguish ancient Rome from contemporary Rome, which in the early modern period was regarded as the heart of Christendom and the seat of the Roman Catholic Church. (B) A real as well as an imagined Rome was valorized by antiquarians and humanists throughout the Renaissance. Shakespeare’s grammar-school education would have supplied him with a thorough knowledge of Rome and Romans, not to mention Roman texts: Catullus, Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Lucan, Ovid, Plautus, Quintilian, Seneca, Terence and Virgil. Ancient Rome and Romans appear in a number of Shakespeare’s plays, specifically his four Roman plays as well as, although rather differently, Cymbeline. Cultural attitudes toward Rome and Romans, however, are voiced in a plethora of plays. In many ways, early modern England looked back to ancient Rome as the cradle of European civilization, and in many ways England modelled itself upon the Roman Empire. For Helgerson, Elizabethan England based its national identity ‘on a project of imitative self-transformation’ (1992: 14), imitating ancient Greece and especially Rome. King James VI and I, for example, drew heavily upon Augustan iconography to reinforce his kingly, indeed imperial, status. The sense of a burgeoning English or British Empire has it roots in ancient Rome. Political ideas, especially republicanism, emerged in the Elizabethan period in relation to the translation and study of Roman texts. Like any collective identity, a sense of Romanness emerges in Shakespeare’s plays as Romans pit themselves in opposition to other nations: Britons, Egyptians, Goths and Volscians. Antony and Cleopatra, with its depiction of a masculine Rome and a feminized Egypt, is a prime example, as is Titus Andronicus with its 185

Rome

precarious civil Rome – barbarous Goths/Moors opposition. When Bassanio describes Antonio as one in whom The ancient Roman honour more appears Than any that draws breath in Italy (MV 3.2.293–5) he is alluding to the notion of civility. Just as the Romans inherited a rhetoric of civility from the Greeks, early modern England inherited key culture-defining concepts from the Romans. Just how much Shakespeare drew upon ancient Roman concepts of the self and the other cannot be overemphasized. In King Henry VI, Part 2, for example, Lord Saye attempts to settle Jack Cade and the Kentish rebels through an appeal to civility: Hear me but speak, and bear me where you will. Kent, in the Commentaries Caesar writ, Is termed the civil’st place of all this isle. (4.7.54–6) Although Lord Saye’s appeal to Caesar falls on deaf ears, his lines bear witness to Shakespeare’s inheritance of Roman notions of civility and incivility. What we, although not Shakespeare, term romanitas is at once valorized and scrutinized in Shakespeare’s plays. Commenting on the varieties of Rome in Shakespeare, Munro writes, ‘[a]s imagined civic ideal in Henry V, Rome is the epitome of urban meaning, the great classical example; as staged city in Julius Caesar, Rome is an urban dystopia’ (2016: 37). Rome’s history of civil discord, its decadence and its primitive and pagan rituals were not overlooked. The Christian, indeed Protestant, reception of ancient Rome was not uncritical. Nowhere is the cultural gap between Protestant England and ancient Rome more prominent than in Titus Andronicus, which examines a Rome in decline and on the verge of collapse. In the play’s lengthy opening scene, an extremely Roman Titus returns victorious to Rome with Goth and Moor prisoners in tow. Within one hundred lines into the play the eldest son of the Queen of the Goths, Tamora, is offered for a ‘sacrifice’ (1.1.101). Tamora offers the following plea to Titus to spare her eldest son: Stay, Roman brethren, gracious conqueror, Victorious Titus, rue the tears I shed, A mother’s tears in passion for her son! And if thy sons were ever dear to thee, O, think my son to be as dear to me. Sufficeth not that we are brought to Rome To beautify thy triumphs, and return Captive to thee and to thy Roman yoke? But must my sons be slaughtered in the streets For valiant doings in their country’s cause?

186

Rome

O, if to fight for king and commonweal Were piety in thine, it is in these. Andronicus, stain not thy tomb with blood. Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods? Draw near them then in being merciful. Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge: Thrice noble Titus, spare my first-born son. (1.1.107–23) At the heart of this speech, with its stinging interrogatives, is a powerful critique of Romanness. Rome is associated with slaughter, bloodshed and, crucially, being merciless. The words ‘merciful’ and ‘mercy’ would have had held a certain significance for Shakespeare’s Christian audience, but ‘mercy’ has no hold on Titus; and why should it, for he is after all a Roman – that is, not Christian but also hard and merciless. Titus dismisses Tamora’s plea with a quintessentially Roman response underpinned by a sense of duty: since Titus’s sons ‘Religiously … ask a sacrifice’, Tamora’s eldest son ‘must’ die (127, 128). A dutiful Lucius, one of Titus’s sons, reports: See, lord and father, how we have performed Our Roman rites: Alarbus’ limbs are lopped And entrails feed the sacrificing fire, Whose smoke, like incense, doth perfume the sky. (1.1.145–8) The response delivered by Tamora’s other sons, Chiron and Demetrius, speak volumes: ‘Was never Scythia half so barbarous?’ asks Chiron, to which Demetrius responds, ‘Oppose not Scythia to ambitious Rome’ (1.1.134–5). English writers certainly drew upon Roman ideas about self and other; however, they did so, as Titus Andronicus attests, from a profound cultural and historical distance. In different ways Cymbeline and King John dramatize England’s/Britain’s vexed ties with ancient and contemporary Rome. King John, Shakespeare’s historically earliest English history play, presents a Rome that meddles in England’s national affairs. Although historically set in a Catholic Europe, moments in the play imagine a protoProtestant England, such as when King John proclaims no Italian priest Shall tithe or toll in our dominions; But as we, under God, are supreme head, So under Him that great supremacy, Where we do reign, we will alone uphold Without th’ assistance of a mortal hand: So tell the pope, all reverence set apart To him and his usurp’d authority. (3.1.79–86) 187

Rome

Shakespeare’s King John could easily be confused with King Henry VIII , who established himself as the Head of the Church of England. John is not, of course, insisting on a separate national church, but his speech is informed by Tudor history and Tudor rhetoric on national identity. Similarly, although in a different historical setting, Cymbeline posits an opposition between ancient Britain (or Roman Britain) and Rome that anachronistically smacks of a division between early modern England and Rome. British resistance to Rome is again and again a source for national self-definition: You must know, Till the injurious Romans did extort This tribute from us, we were free. Caesar’s ambition, Which swell’d so much that it did almost stretch The sides o’th’ world, against all colour here Did put the yoke upon’s: which to shake off Becomes a warlike people, whom we reckon Ourselves to be. (3.1.47–54) The play concludes, however, with a Pax Romana that seems to collapse the difference between the two groups: Laud we the gods, And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils From our blest altars. Publish we this peace To all our subjects. Set we forward: let A Roman, and a British ensign wave Friendly together: so through Lud’s town march, And in the temple of great Jupiter Our peace we’ll ratify: seal it with feasts. Set on there! Never was a war did cease (Ere bloody hands were wash’d) with such a peace. (5.5.477–86) Many critics read Cymbeline as a play set within the context of the Roman Empire precisely because it reflects on England’s/Britain’s nascent imperial status: ‘England, former Roman colony, is’, writes Maley, ‘part of an emerging British empire, its own colonies consisting of the very Celtic nations that comprised ancient Britain’ (2008: 120). There was a strong consensus in the early modern period that ancient Rome played a crucial role in civilizing ancient Britain. This idea comes across in William Camden’s Britannia (1586) and many other antiquarian and historiographical texts, including Edward Ayscu’s A Historie Contayning the Warres, Treatises, Marriages, betweene England and Scotland (1607). On the distinction between Britons and Picts, Ayscu writes: 188

royal

these Picts [were] natural Britaines, who refusing to become subject to the Romaines, abandonded themselves into the furthest parts of the land Northwards, where living unto them-selves, they retained their ancient and barbarous customes, from which the other Britianes were reclaimed by the civill behaviour of the Romaines, who there-upon for distinction sake, gave to those Northerne Britaines (then become enimies to the other) the name of Picts. (7) Whilst Cymbeline’s Britons resist the invading Roman force, they by no means regard the Romans in the matter that, say, Titus Andronicus’s Romans view Goths or Moors. In fact, underpinning the play is a certain respect for the Romans. Nationalism is generally regarded as a modern phenomenon, so it makes little sense to say that Shakespeare would have inherited nationalist discourse from the ancients. A love for one’s homeland or patria is, however, one thing that Romans did bestow to subsequent generations. Brutus’s justification of the conspirators’ murder of Julius Caesar owes everything to a love of his native Rome: ‘not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more’ (3.2.21–2). Such love for one’s homeland is echoed throughout sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English texts, witness Richard Mulcaster: ’I loue Rome, but London better, I fauor Italie, but England more, I honor the Latin, but I worship the English’ (1582: 254). Mulcaster’s and Shakespeare’s expressions of love for their nation and language are deeply indebted to the Romans. John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1611–12) includes ‘A Romane’ along with a Briton, Dane, Saxon and Norman on its title page (see Figure 2). (C) For a thorough investigation of ancient Rome in Shakespeare, see Miola (1983). On Roman citizenship, see Archer (2005: 129–34). See also the essays collected in Del Sapio Garbero (2009). Romans see Rome royal (A) Of or pertaining to monarchy or royalty, whether in terms of authority, blood, character, descent, office, physical attributes, possession or property, power, etc. (B) No play includes more uses of royal than King Richard III. Because the play traces the fortunes of a royal usurper, Richard, and a rather unroyal claimant to the throne, the Earl of Richmond (later King Henry VII ), it could be argued that the play offers a sustained and critical examination of the concept of royalty. The usual references to royal blood and royal person arise throughout the play. Moreover, the word ‘royal’ serves to demarcate social hierarchies. When Clarence asks his murderer, ‘what art thou?’, the answer is ‘A man, as you are’, to which Clarence responds, ‘But not as I am, royal’ (1.4.162–3). The Duke of Buckingham’s ‘Then I salute you with this kingly title: / Long live Richard, England’s worthy King’ (3.7.238–9) comes not without much ideological work: his earlier cry of ‘God save Richard, England’s royal King!’ (3.7.22) fell upon deaf ears. Richmond’s ‘O now let Richmond and Elizabeth, / The true 189

royal

succeeders of each royal House’ (5.5.29–30) serves to legitimate England’s first Tudor monarch. But this play is far from mere propaganda. When Richard says to Queen Elizabeth, ‘To royalize his blood, I spent mine own’ (1.3.125), ‘royalize’ points to the part Richard played in Edward’s rise to the throne, but, like the term kingmaker, ‘royalize’ also exposes the constructedness of royalty and thereby demystifies the concept of sacred royalty.

190

S sacrifice In many of Shakespeare’s plays, sacrifice is represented as a crude pagan ritual: nowhere is this more evident than in the merciless sacrifice of Tamora’s eldest son, Alarbus, in Titus Andronicus, where the word ‘sacrifice’ appears three times within the space of a few lines of Act 1, Scene 1. Brutus attempts to invest the slaying of Julius Caesar with nobility and dignity as he says to his fellow conspirators, ‘Let’s be sacrificers but not butchers’ (JC 2.1.165). But Mark Antony refuses to see the conspirators as anything but ‘butchers’ (3.1.255), and he manages to convince the people of Rome to see them so. Volumnia valorizes sacrifice as the ultimate patriotic act: ‘had I a dozen sons, each in my love alike, and none less dear than thine and my good Martius, I had rather had eleven die nobly for their country, than one voluptuously surfeit out of action’ (1.3.23–6). Shifting from an ancient context, sacrifice often surfaces in the English history plays in relation to war, in particular the loss of life. Often the emphasis is on needless loss of life, as in King John: Hear us, great kings: vouchsafe awhile to stay, And I shall show you peace and fair-fac’d league; Win you this city without stroke or wound; Rescue those breathing lives to die in beds, That here come sacrifices for the field: Persever not, but hear me, mighty kings! (2.1.416–21) The Chorus’s description of the English army on the eve of the battle at Agincourt is ominous, especially its chilling simile: The poor condemned English, Like sacrifices, by their watchful fires Sit patiently and inly ruminate The morning’s danger; and their gesture sad Investing lank-lean cheeks and war-torn coats, Presenteth them unto the gazing moon So many horrid ghosts. (H5 4.Chor.22–8)

191

sacrifice

The militant Hotspur eagerly anticipates battle against Prince Hal and King Henry IV ’s forces, who present themselves as a blood sacrifice: ‘Let them come! / They come like sacrifices in their trim’ (1H4 4.1.112–13). There are, of course, moments in Shakespeare’s plays when sacrificing one’s life for one’s country is represented as heroic and honourable. Although the word sacrifice is not used, the Duke of Exeter’s moving account of the death of the Duke of York and the Earl of Suffolk, with its focus on blood and wounds, presents two noble subjects offering themselves up for their sovereign: In which array, brave soldier, doth he lie, Larding the plain; and by his bloody side, Yoke-fellow to his honour-owing wounds, The noble Earl of Suffolk also lies. Suffolk first died, and York, all haggled over, Comes to him, where in gore he lay insteeped, And takes him by the beard, kisses the gashes That bloodily did yawn upon his face. He cries aloud ‘Tarry, my cousin Suffolk! My soul shall thine keep company to heaven. Tarry, sweet soul, for mine, then fly abreast, As in this glorious and well-foughten field We kept together in our chivalry.’ Upon these words I came and cheered him up; He smiled me in the face, raught me his hand, And with a feeble gripe says ‘Dear my lord, Commend my service to my sovereign.’ So did he turn, and over Suffolk’s neck He threw his wounded arm and kissed his lips, And so, espoused to death, with blood he sealed A testament of noble-ending love. The pretty and sweet manner of it forced Those waters from me which I would have stopped, But I had not so much of man in me, And all my mother came into mine eyes And gave me up to tears. (H5 4.6.7–32) What is remarkable about this sacrifice is its affective power, registered not only in the vivid description but also in the emphasis on Exeter’s tears; in fact, Exeter’s speech moves King Henry to order the death of all French prisoners, another sacrifice. A perverse version of Suffolk and York’s self-sacrifice for their country occurs in King Henry VI, Part 1 when Joan Puzel conjures up fiends and offers them a sacrifice 192

savage, savagery

in return for their assistance against the English. Joan offers to ‘lop a member off’ (5.2.36) and present it to the fiends; however, they refuse. ‘Cannot my body nor blood sacrifice / Entreat you to your wonted furtherance?’ (41–2), asks Joan in desperation. Howard and Rackin suggest that ‘Joan embodies a demonized and feminine modernity threatening to the traditional patriarchal order’ (1997: 54). The play’s othering of Joan is also achieved by associating her with pagan rituals and contemporary witchcraft. However much she transgresses gender boundaries, Joan’s gender allows a construction of her as other in a manner quite different than Shakespeare’s Frenchmen. Saint George Patron saint of England, famous for his mythical slaying of a dragon and therefore often depicted defeating a dragon. In England, 23 April is Saint George’s Day. Numerous history plays contain the battle cry ‘God and Saint George’. Philip the Bastard invokes the patron saint in a semi-comedic manner: Saint George, that swindg’d the dragon, and e’er since Sits on’s horse-back at mine hostess’ door, Teach us some fence! (KJ 2.1.288–90) King Henry V contains two references to Saint George. The first reference occurs before the walls of Harfleur when Henry concludes his ‘Once more unto the breech’ speech with ‘ “God for Harry! England and Saint George!” ’ (3.1.34), a rallying cry that combines person, nation and religion. Henry’s rallying cry is a fine example of his ability to represent a war that is very much his personal war – ‘May I with right and conscience make this claim?’ (1.2.96) – as a national and religious struggle. That the play stages Henry’s war is evident when the king invokes the patron saints of England and France in addressing his future wife, Princess Katherine, at the play’s close: ‘Shall not thou and I, between Saint Denis and Saint George, compound a boy, half French, half English, that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard?’ (5.2.204– 6). In many ways, King Henry V bears witness to Anderson’s musings on the dynastic realm. Henry and Katherine’s imagined ‘half French, half English’ warrior-boy reminds us that ‘antique monarchical states expanded not only by warfare but by sexual politics’ (Anderson 1991: 20). Saracens see Pagan savage, savagery (A) A range of meanings is associated with this word, including uncultivated or wild land, a person or people considered to be primitive, uncivilized. The word is often synonymous with wild. (B) George Puttenham’s account of Orpheus as a civilizing figure was a Renaissance commonplace: ‘he brought the rude and sauage people to a more ciuill and orderly life’ 193

savage, savagery

(1589: 4). Notions of civility and savagery underpin early modern imaginings of individual and collective senses of self and other. One way, then, to understand Shakespeare’s use of savage is as in opposition to civil, as demonstrated by Imogen’s lines upon discovering the cave, or ‘savage hold’ (Cym 3.6.18), inhabited by Belarius and Cymbeline’s two sons. Wondering who or what is within the cave, Imogen asks Ho! who’s here? If any thing that’s civil, speak: if savage, Take, or lend. (3.6.22–4) Telling here is the association of civil with speech, reminding us that the word barbarous, which, too, is often used synonymously with savage, has its roots in ancient Greece, designating non-Greek speakers. Hence Miranda’s commentary on Caliban’s brutish gabbling: I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish. (1.2.354–8) In F, Caliban is described amongst the ‘Names of the Actors’ as ‘a saluage and deformed slaue’ (TLN 2321, 2329). Stephano, stumbling upon Caliban and Trinculo under a gaberdine, says, ‘Do you put tricks upon’s with savages and men of Ind?’ (2.2.57–8). Savages are to be found in a variety of places. As Suffolk’s ‘savage islanders’ (2H6 4.1.139) suggests, remote islands are a prime site. The Tempest is, of course, set on ‘an vn-inhabited Island’ (TLN 2320). Berowne’s simile ‘like a rude and savage man of Inde’ (LLL 4.3.218) could refer to India and/or the Indies (East and/or West). Berowne’s ‘Vouchsafe to show the sunshine of your face, / That we like savages may worship it’ (LLL 5.2.201–2) is an example of savage as primitive, especially in terms of religious worship, even superstition. When Iago advises Cassio not to disturb Othello, whose epilepsy has rendered him prostrate, his use of savage likely means uncontrolled: No, forbear: The lethargy must have his quiet course, If not, he foams at mouth, and by and by Breaks out to savage madness. (4.1.52–5) Given Othello’s status as Moor of Venice, the use of savage invites other meanings, including wild and primitive. Examples of the overlap of ‘wild’ and ‘savage’ include 194

scar

Salisbury’s mutually intensifying ‘wildest savagery’ (KJ 4.3.48) as well as the Dauphin’s ‘wild and savage stock’ (H5 3.5.7). Although savagery is predominantly used in opposition to civil and therefore as a derogatory term, it could be invoked to praise an individual, especially when used to critique refinement. Octavius Caesar, for example, heralds Mark Antony’s former self for his ability to be ultra-savage: Antony, Leave thy lascivious wassails! When thou once Wast beaten from Modena, where thou slew’st Hirtius and Pansa, consuls, at thy heel Did famine follow, whom thou fought’st against, Though daintily brought up, with patience more Than savages could suffer. Thou didst drink The stale of horses and the gilded puddle Which beasts would cough at. Thy palate then did deign The roughest berry on the rudest hedge. Yea, like the stag when snow the pasture sheets, The barks of trees thou browsed. On the Alps, It is reported, thou didst eat strange flesh Which some did die to look on. And all this – It wounds thine honour that I speak it now – Was borne so like a soldier that thy cheek So much as lanked not. (1.4.56–72) In this instance, savagery reinforces Roman notions of hardness and masculinity. Imogen, it appears, expects to find savages in mountainous Wales, but instead she finds ‘kind creatures’: Gods, what lies I have heard! Our courtiers say all’s savage but at court; Experience, O, thou disprov’st report! (Cym 4.2.32–4) These lines could be read, Montaigne-like, as a critique of a sense of cultural superiority that sees all things beyond one’s own borders as savage. However, because these ‘kind creatures’ are in fact products of Cymbeline’s court (unbeknownst to Imogen), these lines could also be read as reinforcing a civil–savage opposition. (C) See Hadfield (2001). Vaughan and Vaughan’s Arden edition of The Tempest includes an informative section on ‘The “salvage man” ’ (2011: 59–62). scar see wound 195

sceptre

sceptre see crown Scotland (A) England’s northern neighbour existed at the time of Shakespeare’s career as a separate kingdom ruled by a Protestant monarch, King James VI . By the time of Queen Elizabeth I’s death, James had an heir and a spare (see Figure 6), and for this reason he was very much welcomed by his English subjects on his long journey from Edinburgh to his English capital. In March of 1603 James became King James I of England; however, he retained the title of King James VI of Scotland, although he returned to Edinburgh just once before his death in 1625. In this sense James was a composite monarch and the King of Great Britain only nominally (pronounced by Royal Proclamation, not, crucially, by English Parliament). Shakespeare’s acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, came under the patronage of England’s Scottish monarch in the form of the King’s Men. (B) Shakespeare’s representation of Scotland and Scottishness is most pronounced in his English history plays (including Edward III, if he had a hand in that play), with the obvious exception of Macbeth. In fact, the majority of references to Scot, Scots, Scotch, Scottish and Scotland appear in plays written during Elizabeth’s reign. If it was not for Macbeth, it would be safe to say that Shakespeare went silent on Scotland under James. This is not to say, however, that plays such as King Lear, Coriolanus, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, for example, cannot be read in relation to James’s rule or in relation to the question of Anglo-Scottish union, which became a hot topic for discussion inside and outside of Parliament in the wake of James’s accession to the English throne. A passage from one pro-union tract sheds valuable light on English attitudes toward Scotland as well as Anglo-Scottish relations. In his A Treatise of Vnion of the two Realmes of England and Scotland (1604), John Hayward writes But this vnion of mindes betweene the English and the Scots is not to bee esteemed a matter which may easily be effected; by reason of the great differences which haue been betweene them. For in old enmities it is hard to establish both a present and perfect reconciliation; because either suspicion, or contempt, or desire of reuenge are proper and assured meanes, either alwaies to continue, or readily to renue the ancient hate. And yet this will prooue most easie and plaine, if industrie be applied to the opportunitie present. And the rather, for that it hath pleased God to open the way to this Vnion in such a time as there is almost no memorie of any warre betweene the two nations: insomuch as the long peace which hath now continued more than fiftie yeeres, and the mutuall offices which in the meane time haue been shewed, haue now either worne out, or at least much weakened the hate, which in former times, by reason of continuall warre, was almost growne to be naturall. (18) Hayward at once highlights obstacles to union whilst optimistically expressing the possibility to overcome those obstacles. But as the references to war and hate attest, 196

Scotland

vexed relations between England and Scotland have a long history. Shakespeare’s representations of Scotland and Scottish characters bear witness to these ‘old enmities’. The Elizabethan plays do not supply a single vision of Scotland and Scots. The historical figure of Archibald, Earl of Douglas, although of the rebel camp, is at times valorized in the King Henry IV plays. The Earl of Westmoreland’s report from the north begins: On Holy-rood day, the gallant Hotspur there, Young Harry Percy, and brave Archibald, That ever valiant and approved Scot, At Holmedon met. (1H4 1.1.52–5) King Henry then makes reference to ‘bold Scots’ (1.1.68), and he speaks of ‘renowned Douglas’ (3.2.107). At the battle of Shrewsbury, Hotspur praises Douglas’s puissance: ‘O Douglas, hadst thou fought at Holmedon thus / I never had triumph’d upon a Scot’ (5.3.14–15). The final reference to Douglas in the play is Prince Hal’s ‘The noble Scot’ (5.5.17), an echo of Hotspur’s ‘my noble Scot’ (4.1.1). King Henry V includes the Scottish Captain Jamy (3.2), although he is overshadowed by Captains Fluellen and Macmorris. Most critics read Jamy’s (and Macmorris’s) inclusion in F (they are nowhere to be found in Q) as a later addition, perhaps in anticipation of or response to King James’s desire for Anglo-Scottish union. Whatever the reason for Jamy’s inclusion in F, it jars with earlier negative representations of Scotland in the play. The debate to invade France turns to the topic of England’s vulnerability once its military forces are abroad: We must not only arm t’invade the French, But lay down our proportions to defend Against the Scot, who will make road upon us With all advantages. (1.2.136–9) We do not mean the coursing snatchers only, But fear the main intendment of the Scot, Who hath been still a giddy neighbour to us. For you shall read that my great-grandfather Never went with his forces into France But that the Scot on his unfurnished kingdom Came pouring like the tide into a breach, With ample and brim fullness of his force, Galling the gleaned land with hot assays, Girding with grievous siege castles and towns. (1.2.143–52)

197

Scotland

But there’s a saying very old and true, If that you will France win, Then with Scotland first begin. For once the eagle England being in prey, To her unguarded nest the weasel Scot Comes sneaking and so sucks her princely eggs. (1.2.166–71) When the subject of Scotland surfaces in the comedies, the attitude is more relaxed, but the national stereotype of Scotland as agriculturally and fiscally impoverished exists. In The Comedy of Errors, a dialogue ensues between Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse about Nell the kitchen wench, who is compared to a globe and, therefore, has ‘countries in her’ (3.2.115). To Antipholus’s question, ‘Where [would one find] Scotland?’, Dromio replies, ‘I found it by the barrenness; hard in the palm of the hand’ (119–21), an explicit reference to, according to English popular belief, Scotland’s unproductive soil. When Nerissa asks Portia about her various suitors, ‘the Scottish lord’ (MV 1.2.75) comes up for discussion within the context of being ‘neighbour’ (76) to the English suitor: ‘That he hath a neighbourly charity in him, for he borrowed a box of the ear of the Englishman, and swore he would pay him again when he was able: I think the Frenchman became his surety, and seal’d under for another’ (76–81). The joke here may have something to do with the penury of Scots; it could also refer to a long history of Anglo-Scottish violence on the Borders. Proclamations published against Borders hostility continued up until James’s accession. Moreover, the poverty of the Scots was a dominant theme in anti-union discourse in the early years of James’s English reign. It has long been believed that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth to please his Scottish monarch. The ways in which the play may have pleased James include appealing to James’s obvious interest in witchcraft, referencing James’s apparent genealogical ties to Banquo, celebrating Anglo-Scottish union and James’s title as King of Great Britain, France and Ireland – ‘some I see / That two-fold balls and treble sceptres carry’ (4.1.120– 1) – and dramatizing the absolutist belief that the monarch is untouchable. It could just as easily be argued that the representation of Scotland and its nobles in Macbeth only consolidated anti-union sentiment south of the border. (C) See the essays collected in Maley and Murphy (2005). Kerrigan (2008) situates Macbeth within an archipelagic framework. See also Kinney (1993) and Alker and Nelson (2007) for an approach to Macbeth within the context of the Jacobean Union. Hamilton (1993) reads The Winter’s Tale within the context of the Jacobean Union debate, attending to ‘the speeches of King James, the Union pamphlets, the parliamentary debates, and various diaries and letters, including the papers of Francis Bacon’ (229). Garganigo (2002) examines Coriolanus in relation to Jacobean Union debate. Clark and Mason’s Arden edition of Macbeth includes an informative section on ‘The realization of Scotland in Macbeth’ (2015: 28–35).

198

Scythia, Scythian

Figure 6 John Speed, ‘The Kingdome of Scotland’, from The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London 1611–12). By permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Map Res 74, betw. pp. 131–2. Scottish see Scotland Scythia, Scythian (A) Refers to an area in what is now European and Asiatic Russia as well as to nomadic people inhabiting that area, generally north of the Black Sea. (B) Representations of Scythians have a long history, from the ancient Greeks through the Romans to the early modern period, including Marlowe’s eponymous hero Tamburlaine. For the ancient Greeks, Scythians were barbaros: that is, non-Greek, foreign. Moreover, the Scythians spoke a harsh language and, unlike the agrarian Greeks, lived a nomadic life. There is little evidence that the Greeks as well as the Romans viewed the Scythians as savages. In the early modern period, however, Scythians came to be represented otherwise. The Scythians, Robert Albott writes in his Wits theater of the little world (1599), ‘were so giuen to all kinde of pleasure, that in beastlines they exceeded brute beasts’ (sig. N3r). As for Scythia itself, ‘Although Scythia was barren yet was shee stoute, though rude and barbarous, yet was shee very valiant, and hard to bee subdued’ (sig. F2r). For many early modern writers, including Edmund 199

Scythia, Scythian

Spenser, the Irish were descended from Scythians: ‘the Irish’, Spenser writes in his A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596), ‘are aunciently deduced from the Scythians’ (1970: 59). This view of the Scythian as the ne plus ultra of barbarity is inherited by Shakespeare. When, in response to the Roman’s sacrifice of his brother Alarbus, the Goth Chiron says, ‘Was never Scythia half so barbarous’ (1.1.134), the compliment to Scythia is negated by the fact that it is rendered synonymous with barbarity. Of course, Demetrius’s response – ‘Oppose not Scythia to ambitious Rome’(135) – reverses the play’s ostensible civility–incivility opposition. King Lear’s rejection of his daughter Cordelia provides a fine example of how Scythians figured in the early modern cultural imaginary: The barbarous Scythian, Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom Be as well neighboured, pitied and relieved, As thou my sometime daughter. (1.1.117–21) In rejecting what is closest to him – his (favourite) daughter – Lear rhetorically embraces what is most opposed to his civilized, regal self. Whilst Lear appears to offer cannibals (‘he’) as overgoing Scythians in barbarity, many writers in the period connect Scythians with cannibalism: for example, Thomas Dekker in The wonderfull yeare (1603) writes: ‘Anthropophagi are Scithia[n]s, that feed on mens flesh’ (sig. C3r). (C) For an account of ancient representations of the Scythians, see Hartog (1988). Accounts of representations of Scythians in early modern English culture can be found in Hadfield (1993) and Ivic (1999b: 156–9). Shrewsbury (A) Town in Shropshire and the central battle scene as depicted in King Henry IV, Part 1 (Act 5, Scenes 3–4). One of the most famous battle scenes in all of Shakespeare, the battle culminates in the individual conflict between Prince Hal and Hotspur. The historical battle occurred on 21 July 1403. (B) King Henry IV, Part 1 dramatizes fifteenth-century civil wars that would have been very familiar to Elizabethan theatregoers, especially as they were recorded in Tudor chronicles. Shakespeare’s version of the Battle of Shrewsbury differs significantly from the historical sources, however. The historical Henry Percy was a couple of years older than King Henry and Hal’s elder by twenty-three years; Shakespeare’s Hotspur is roughly the same age as Hal. In short, Shakespeare’s version of Shrewsbury differs from the official histories upon which he drew in that it refigures Hal and Hotspur as English brothers engaged in reassuring fratricidal warfare. The play’s representation of civil war participates in a refiguring, indeed anglicizing, of fifteenth-century pan-British warfare as ‘civil butchery’ (1.1.13): that is, as conflict between English brothers – namely Hal and Hotspur. By shifting the focus from intra-island warfare to a fratricidal 200

Shrewsbury

fight between English brothers, 1H4 bears witness to the ways in which Shakespeare’s history plays mapped an emergent English national identity onto less stable, less fixed historical identities. Much of the play anticipates the concluding scene at Shrewsbury. For instance, in refuting his father’s accusation of degeneracy, Hal anticipates and rehearses the play’s concluding fratricidal battle. ‘I will redeem all this on Percy’s head’, Hal tells his father, And in the closing of some glorious day Be bold to tell you that I am your son, When I will wear a garment all of blood, And stain my favours in a bloody mask, Which, wash’d away, shall scour my shame with it; And that shall be the day, when’er it lights, That this same child of honour and renown, This gallant Hotspur, this all-praised knight, And your unthought-of Harry chance to meet. For every honour sitting on his helm, Would they were multitudes, and on my head My shames redoubled! For the time will come That I shall make this northern youth exchange His glorious deeds for my indignities. (3.2.133–46) What makes this homecoming scene so significant is that from this moment on the play’s focus will be on Hal and Hotspur’s encounter at Shrewsbury. Hotspur, too, in his next appearance on stage, envisions a one-to-one encounter: ‘Harry to Harry shall, hot horse to horse, / Meet and ne’er part till one drop down a corse’ (4.1.122–3). Again departing from his chronicle sources, Shakespeare’s Hal challenges Hotspur to a single battle, a challenge Vernon represents as a fratricidal fight: No, by my soul. I never in my life Did hear a challenge urg’d more modestly, Unless a brother should a brother dare To gentle exercise and proof of arms. (5.2.51–4) When they finally encounter each other in Act 5, Hal and Hotspur are presented as engaged in a symbolic battle for ‘one England’ (5.4.65). Hal, of course, emerges victorious, and he offers the following eulogy in response to Hotspur’s last words, ‘And food for’ (5.4.85): For worms, brave Percy. Fare thee well, great heart! Ill-weaved ambition, how much art thou shrunk! 201

Shrewsbury

When that this body did contain a spirit, A kingdom for it was too small a bound; But now two paces of the vilest earth Is room enough. This earth that bears thee dead Bears not alive so stout a gentleman. If thou wert sensible of courtesy I should not make so dear a show of zeal; But let my favours hide thy mangled face, And even in thy behalf I’ll thank myself For doing these fair rites of tenderness. Adieu, and take thy praise with thee to heaven! Thy ignominy sleep with thee in the grave, But not remember’d in thy epitaph! (5.4.86–100) What amounts to a monumentalizing eulogy is, simultaneously, a remarkable instance of remembering/forgetting. Hal’s placing of his ‘favours’ upon Hotspur’s ‘mangled face’ can be read as an attempt to bring about a sense of closure to a country scarred by civil war. The line ‘Thy ignominy sleep with thee in the grave, / But not remember’d in thy epitaph!’ invites a collective remembering/forgetting of Hotspur’s role in England’s civil wars. (C) Greenfield argues that King Henry IV, Part 1 was written ‘at a moment when it was still possible to imagine a history that did not move teleologically toward the development of the modern nation state’ (2002: 72). Ivic (2004) and Karremann (2010) focus on memory and forgetting in the same play. soil used as a synonym for land, country and often personified: for example, ‘foreign soil’ (R3 4.4.312), ‘Renounce your soil’ (1H6 1.5.29), ‘fertile England’s soil’ (2H6 1.1.236), ‘a warlike soil’ (KJ 5.1.71), ‘England’s ground, farewell; sweet soil,’ (R2 1.3.306) and ‘the firm soil’ (Son 64). Spain (A) Catholic Spain was arch-enemy to Protestant England. King Henry VIII ’s divorce from Queen Catherine of Aragon in 1533 was preceded by a monumental event in the history of the English nation: Henry passed the Act of Supremacy, making him the Head of the Church of England. English–Spanish relations were soured for a lengthy period of time. The two kingdoms fought each other in the Low Countries throughout the latter half of the sixteenth century in what could be described as geopolitical religious wars (Shakespeare’s fellow playwright Ben Jonson saw active duty there). The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 was hailed at the time as a providential victory over the Catholic enemy and a sign that England was an elect nation in the eyes of God. England’s hold on Ireland, including the Protestant Elizabethan reconquest and recolonization, owed much to a fear that Spain would use the neighbouring kingdom as a back door to invade England.

202

state

(B) A fiery temperament is one of the stereotypes of the Spaniard enacted in Shakespeare’s plays. Anatomizing the body parts of the kitchen wench Nell in relation to countries, Antipholus of Syracuse asks Dromio of Syracuse, ‘Where [found you] Spain?’; the response is, ‘Faith, I saw it not; but felt it hot in her breath’ (CE 3.2.129– 31). In response to Antipholus’s ‘Where America, the Indies?’, Dromio says, ‘O, sir, upon her nose, all o’er-embellished with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain, who sent whole armadoes of carracks to be ballast at her nose’ (132–6), an obvious reference to the Spanish Armada. Act 2, Scene 9 of The Merchant of Venice brings the Prince of Arragon to the stage. Aragon is a region in north-east Spain (Much Ado About Nothing includes two references to Aragon), and it could be said that Arragon is representative of Spain in general and that his name hints at a Spanish trait: arrogance. Indeed, Arragon’s unwillingness to choose the golden casket is motivated by a desire to be distinct from ‘the fool multitude’, ‘common spirits’ and ‘the barbarous multitude’ (2.9.26, 32, 33). Love’s Labour’s Lost is set in Navarre, which was an independent kingdom although annexed to Spain in 1512. Shakespeare’s most significant Spanish character must be King Henry VIII’s Queen Katherine of Aragon and England, whom Henry divorces to marry Anne Boleyn. The portrayal of the Spanish queen in the play is surprisingly sympathetic. (C) Noling (1988) attends to King Henry VIII’s Queen Katherine. Sparta Capital of Laconia in the Peloponnese, one of the most renowned city-states of ancient Greece. In the early modern period, Sparta was especially associated with austerity as well as the military prowess of its soldiers. References to Sparta do not abound in Shakespeare, but references to Spartan hounds or dogs surface in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (4.1.113, 118) and Othello (5.2.361), the latter – ‘O Spartan dog’ – using ‘Spartan’ to mean cruel or savage. state (A) As a political term state refers to a commonwealth, a polity, a defined and sovereign territory, a nation. With less emphasis on commonwealth or the people, state also refers to a country’s government and governing bureaucracies as well as its supreme civil power. State is often used in a hyphenated or conditioning sense: for instance city-state or state royal, which suggests the variety of political forms a state can take. (B) State can be an exclusive and limited term: ‘The lords, nobles, or high-ranking persons of a realm considered collectively; a ruling body consisting of such persons, a government, grand council, or court’ (OED). The OED gives the following line from Othello, spoken by Brabantio, as textual support: ‘my brothers of the state’ (1.2.96). Brabantio’s line – not only his use of ‘state’ but also and especially ‘my brothers’ – works to exclude Othello in particular. As general of the Venetian military forces, however, Othello is by no means excluded by the Venetian state; in fact, Othello himself invokes ‘the state’ (90) in reference to having been summoned by the Venetian duke. 203

state

Interestingly, these two references to the state are preceded by Brabantio’s use just a few lines earlier to ‘our nation’ (68), which seems to exclude Othello, to whom Brabantio denies any kind of political status in terming him ‘a thing’ (71). The OED also records state as meaning ‘A republic, a non-monarchical commonwealth. Chiefly with reference to ancient Rome’. Perhaps it is not surprising that Shakespeare’s most political play, Coriolanus, uses the word more than any other play with the exception of King Henry VIII: for instance, ‘the Roman state’ (1.1.68), ‘the Volscian state’ (4.3.10–11). Given the politics of nationhood in King John, that play’s use of ‘sovereign state’ (5.2.82) is apt. The ‘Argument’ to Lucrece records a shift in the political organization of Rome in the wake of the exile of the Tarquins: ‘and the state government changed from kings to consuls’. Hamlet includes numerous references to state, including Marcellus’s ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ (1.4.90). The references to ‘our state’ in the play mirrors the political struggle enacted in the play, for Claudius’s use of ‘our state’ (1.2.20), employing the majestic plural, implies possession and connects the word with meanings associated with royalty; it also divests the term of any intimacy and sentiment. Horatio’s use of ‘our state’ (1.1.72, 104) is more communal, less monarchical. The deposition scene in Richard II includes the use of state. Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland orders Richard to read These accusations, and these grievous crimes Committed by your person and your followers Against the state and profit of this land. (4.1.222–5) Here, state, used rather impersonally, most likely means government, but the use of the deictic in ‘this land’ serves to invest state with more national sentiment. (C) See Wells (1986), Alexander (2004) and Hadfield (2004a). stock (A) Synonymous with the word race in the early modern period, designating common ancestry, family. One’s stock would be one’s origins, especially genealogically. (B) Stock could refer to a family, including an extended family. When Bassianus seizes Lavinia from Saturninus and is defended by Titus’s brother Marcus as well as Titus’s four sons, Saturninus dismisses the entire Andronici clan, stating, ‘No, Titus, no, the emperor needs her not, / Nor her, nor thee, nor any of thy stock’ (Tit 1.1.304–5). One’s stock can be high or low. As daughter to an ancient British king, Imogen is of ‘great stock’ (Cym 1.7.128). King Henry V’s noble and arrogant French characters, on the other hand, view the (Anglo-Saxon) progenitors of their English enemies as of ‘wild and savage stock’ (3.5.7). Griffith describes Cardinal Wolsey, apparently the son of a butcher, as ‘from an humble stock’ (4.2.49). 204

stock

Shylock’s desire to restrict Jessica within a specific religious and ethnic group is evident when he says of his daughter, ‘Would any of the stock of Barrabas / Had been her husband, rather than a Christian.’ (MV 4.1.294–5.) Stock often signifies continuity: that is, one’s descendants inherit the qualities of their progenitors. The French King, for instance, presents King Henry V as ‘a stem / Of that victorious stock’, alluding to Henry’s descent from ‘Edward, Black Prince of Wales’ (H5 2.4.62–3, 56). Of Henry the French King adds, ‘he is bred out of that bloody strain / That haunted us in our familiar paths’ (51–2). The language of grafting often accompanies references to stock. So, for example, in Lucrece we have Well well, dear Collatine, thou shalt not know The stained taste of violated troth; I will not wrong thy true affection so, To flatter thee with an infringed oath. This bastard graff shall never come to growth: He shall not boast who did thy stock pollute, That thou art doting father of his fruit. (1058–64) The notion of a polluted or corrupted stock occurs in other texts. The Earl of Suffolk insults Warwick’s honour by implying that he is the offspring of some low-born figure: If ever lady wronged her lord so much, Thy mother took into her blameful bed Some stern untutored churl, and noble stock Was graft with crab-tree slip. (2H6 3.2.211–14) The Duke of Buckingham’s propagandistic rhetoric in support of Richard’s claim to the throne also invokes stock in relation to the language of grafting: Then know, it is your fault that you resign The supreme seat, the throne majestical, The sceptred office of your ancestors, Your state of fortune, and your due of birth, The lineal glory of your royal House, To the corruption of a blemish’d stock; Whiles in the mildness of your sleepy thoughts – Which here we waken to our country’s good – The noble isle doth want her proper limbs; Her face defac’d with scars of infamy, Her royal stock graft with ignoble plants. (R3 3.7.116–26) 205

stock

Grafting can work in the other direction, too, as manifested in Polixenes’s words to Perdita: You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race. (WT 4.4.92–5) In this instance rather than the base functioning as an agent of contamination, the ‘nobler’ works to elevate the base. stranger (A) Someone from another country or place, especially someone who now occupies a country or place that is not their native land: alien, foreigner, newcomer, outsider, visitor. Archer lists strangers and foreigners as ‘noncitizen groups’, adding ‘the terms were sometimes used interchangeably, but for the most part strangers or “aliens” were born outside the British Isles’ (2005: 7). (B) Strangers abound in Shakespeare’s plays, especially because so many plays include characters visiting or inhabiting a foreign land. When Aaron, a Moor, says to Chiron and Demetrius, Goths, ‘was’t not a happy star / Led us to Rome, strangers’ (Tit 4.2.32–3), the implication is that all three characters are strangers precisely because they are non-Roman. However, by the end of Act 1, Tamora, Queen of the Goths, is ‘incorporate in Rome’ (1.1.467) as Emperor Saturninus’s Empress. Luciana relays to Adriana Antipholus of Syracuse’s claim that he, as a Syracusan, is ‘a stranger’ (CE 4.2.9) in Ephesus. Posthumus Leonatus, ‘the Briton’, is ‘a stranger’ in Rome; and the Roman Iachimo is ‘a saucy stranger’ in Britain (Cym 1.5.28, 30; 1.7.151). Queen Katherine of Aragon describes herself to King Henry VIII as ‘a stranger, / Born out of your dominions’ (H8 2.4.13–14). Shakespeare’s contribution to Sir Thomas More opens with a reference to ‘strangers’ (6.6), and this word reverberates throughout the scene. Tranio, disguised as Lucentio, describes himself as ‘a stranger in this city here’ (TS 2.1.90). In this instance, an Italian is speaking to a fellow Italian, countryman to countryman; however, Tranio is speaking as an inhabitant of Pisa who now finds himself in Padua. Shakespeare’s two plays set in Venice offer a fascinating reflection on his use of ‘stranger’. Roderigo labels Othello ‘an extravagant and wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere’ (1.1.134). Othello is not a ‘stranger’ in the sense that Tranio is: that is, a newcomer, unaccustomed to a specific place. Iago’s reference to Othello as an ‘erring Barbarian’ (1.3.357) provides, perhaps, a gloss on Roderigo’s use of ‘stranger,’ for ‘erring’ here means wandering (as does ‘wheeling’), and ‘Barbarian’ is defined by the OED, citing Iago’s line, as ‘With the Italians of the Renaissance: a member of a nation outside of Italy’. The F title describes Othello as ‘the Moore of Venice’ (TLN 2); in Iago and Roderigo’s eyes, Othello may be of Venice but he is not Venetian. 206

stranger

There are numerous strangers in The Merchant of Venice. Bassanio, Gratiano and Salerio, however, are not strangers, for they are all hailed as ‘Venetians’. When Portia’s servant says, ‘The four strangers seek for you madam to take their leave: and there is a forerunner come from a fifth, the Prince of Morocco, who brings word the prince his master will be here to-night’ (1.2.121–4), the strangers to whom he refers (actually six) are non-native to Venice, although one is Italian: a Neapolitan, a Frenchman, an Englishman, a Scotsman and two Germans. But there are strangers in this play who are inhabitants of Venice but not Venetians: for example, the Jewish Shylock and his daughter Jessica. When Salerio, Lorenzo and Jessica arrive in Belmont, Gratiano says, ‘Nerissa, cheer yond stranger, bid her welcome’ (3.2.236). Jessica’s ambiguous status is captured nicely here, for whilst she is made ‘welcome’ she is also a ‘stranger’. Shylock’s reference to Antonio kicking him – ‘You that did … foot me as you spurn a stranger cur’ (1.3.115–16) – foregrounds the hostility and violence faced by ‘strangers’, especially those of a different ethnicity and, crucially, faith. Still, Venice welcomes strangers, as Antonio notes: The duke cannot deny the course of law: For the commodity that strangers have With us in Venice, if it be denied, Will much impeach the justice of the state, Since that the trade and profit of the city Consisteth of all nations. (3.3.26–31) Venice is very much a commercial contact zone but less so in terms of religious and ethnic intermingling. Sir Thomas More’s address to the riotous and xenophobic Londoners provides a remarkable instance of pity for London’s strangers: Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage, Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation. (STM 6.85–7) The text not only invites its readers to imagine and sympathize with ‘wretched strangers’; it also chastises the inhumane Londoners. More posits a scenario of banishment, and asks fellow Londoners ‘whither would you go?’ (6.141). The response is a scathing critique of the Londoners’ response to their non-English neighbours: What country, by the nature of your error, Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders, To any German province, Spain or Portugal, Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England: Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased To find a nation of such barbarous temper

207

stranger

That, breaking out in hideous violence, Would not afford you an abode on earth, Whet their detested knives against your throats, Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements Were not all appropriate to your comforts But chartered unto them? What would you think To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case, And this your mountainish inhumanity. (6.142–56) More’s stinging interrogatives at once critique the London crowd and invite the play’s audience and readers to reflect deeply and humanely on ‘the strangers’ case’. (C) For a thorough examination of the concept of stranger in Shakespeare, see Fiedler (1972). Bartels (2008: 155–90) challenges Othello’s stranger status by examining Othello the Moor as not only in but also, as F terms him, of Venice. subject One who owes allegiance to a monarch: hence, subject of the realm or subject of the crown. Shakespeare rarely uses the word subject with an adjective of nationality – for example, ‘English subjects’. But in King John one character states ‘we are the king of England’s subjects’ (2.1.267); however, undermining this declaration is the fact that the speaker is a citizen of Angiers and, moreover, he is unsure, in the face of King Philip’s (acting on the behalf of Arthur, Duke of Brittany) and King John’s calls for subjection, precisely who is the king of England. Anderson’s reflections on the origins of nationalism posit ‘the dynastic realm’ as prenational: ‘Kingship organizes everything around a high centre. Its legitimacy derives from divinity, not from populations, who, after all, are subjects, not citizens’ (1991: 19). The political conditions of early modern England mean that subjects abound in Shakespeare’s plays, from nameless and offstage subjects to unruly subjects such as Macbeth: ‘I am his kinsman and his subject’ (Mac 1.7.13). As the latter example illustrates, not all subjects are as subordinate to the crown as Anderson implies. Henry Bolingbroke’s ‘I am a subject’, for instance, is followed by: And I challenge the law; attorneys are denied me, And therefore personally I lay my claim To my inheritance of free descent. (R2 2.3.133–5) Nobles gather around Bolingbroke and, eventually, set him up in place of Richard as England’s king, which suggests that the static and top-down ‘dynastic realm’ posited by Anderson offers little insight into Shakespeare’s imaginings of the realm. Characters in King Richard II shift allegiance: ‘To Bolingbroke are we sworn subjects now’ (R2 5.2.39). And the Bishop of Carlisle waxes eloquent on subjection:

208

succession

What subject can give sentence on his king? And who sits here that is not Richard’s subject? Thieves are not judg’d but they are by to hear, Although apparent guilt be seen in them, And shall the figure of God’s majesty, His captain, steward, deputy elect, Anointed, crowned, planted many years, Be judg’d by subject and inferior breath, And he himself not present? O forfend it, God, That in Christian climate souls refin’d Should show so heinous, black, obscene a deed! I speak to subjects, and a subject speaks, Stirr’d up by God thus boldly for his king. My Lord of Herford here, whom you call king, Is a foul traitor to proud Herford’s king. (4.1.121–35) But Carlisle himself is subject to the facts of history and to the fact that this play, perhaps more than any other of Shakespeare’s, demystifies the ‘sacred state’ (4.1.209) of majesty, rendering Richard ‘subjected thus’ (3.2.176). Recent work (Hadfield 2005) on republican ideas that circulated in the early modern period offers a productive approach to Shakespeare’s national subjects. According to Patrick Collinson, ‘when it came to a crunch, the realm took precedence overt the ruler. So citizens were concealed within subjects’ (1990: 24). Citizens within subjects, especially citizens who saw themselves as English, played a crucial role in imagining the national community. Marcellus’s ‘the subject of the land’ (Ham 1.1.75) evinces other entities to which one could be subject. succession (A) England was a hereditary monarchy, despite the unhereditary transfers of monarchical power depicted in Shakespeare’s history plays. Thomas Smith records that Parliament ‘giueth formes of succession to the crowne’ (1583: 35). As an Elizabethan/ Jacobean dramatist, Shakespeare lived through one act of royal succession: the unprecedented accession of the Scottish King James VI to the English throne following Queen Elizabeth I’s death on 24 March 1603. James Stewart (or Stuart), who remained King of Scotland (returning to his homeland just once) until his death in 1625, became the composite monarch King James VI and I. Just as Elizabeth’s death elicited an outpouring of grief, James’s accession was greeted with a plethora of encomiastic texts by poets, including Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson. William Shakespeare, to our knowledge, produced no poem in praise of England’s new king, a king under whose protection Shakespeare’s acting company was placed (The King’s Men). This does not, of course, preclude the possibility that Shakespeare wrote or rewrote a play or plays in anticipation of or after the fact of James’s accession to the English throne.

209

succession

(B) One way to address the issue of succession in Shakespeare’s plays would be to consider, on the one hand, the linguistic and theatrical representation of succession and, on the other, the consequences of a real succession on the cultural context in which Shakespeare was writing. There are numerous instances of succession in the plays, some smooth, others less so. In King Henry IV, Part 2, the king’s death results in a rather eager Prince Hal’s accession as King Henry V. However, Henry Bolingbroke’s seizing of the crown by force is no example of ‘fair sequence and succession’ (R2 2.1.199). Furthermore, King Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2 foreground rebellion and an intra-island struggle for the crown. King Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth and The Winter’s Tale supply further complications when considering the issue of succession, although the last play of the first tetralogy does conclude with the triumphant accession of the first Tudor monarch. King Henry VII ’s concluding speech is a fine example of the cultural, political and ideological work sustaining discourse on succession. But where would one place Julius Caesar and The Tempest (Gonzalo’s imagined commonwealth would ban succession) in a discussion of succession? There’s also the question of who succeeds to the throne at the close of King Lear. Consider, for instance, Titus Andronicus, which opens with a power vacuum and struggle in the wake of the death of the previous (fictional) Emperor of Rome. Immediately, the dead Emperor’s two sons stake a claim to rule. The eldest son, Saturninus, proclaims: And countrymen, my loving followers, Plead my successive title with your swords. I am his first-born son that was the last That wore the imperial diadem of Rome. (1.1.3–6) Saturninus’s claim to power is grounded in the idea of primogeniture. The response of Saturninus’s younger brother, Bassianus, draws upon a more republican idea of the transfer of power: Romans, friends, followers, favourers of my right, If ever Bassianus, Caesar’s son, Were gracious in the eyes of royal Rome, Keep then this passage to the Capitol, And suffer not dishonour to approach The imperial seat, to virtue consecrate, To justice, continence and nobility; But let desert in pure election shine, And, Romans, fight for freedom in your choice. (1.1.9–17) The republican theme is continued in the play upon the victorious return to Rome of the titular character, whom the people of Rome have chosen as their ruler. Titus, however, 210

succession

refuses the offer, and, instead, paves the way for Saturninus to rule, with disastrous consequences. One of Shakespeare’s last plays (1613), likely co-authored by John Fletcher, addresses the issue of King James’s succession explicitly, although it does so at the time of performance ten years after the fact. At the close of King Henry VIII, Archbishop Cranmer supplies the following prophecy regarding England’s future monarchs, Elizabeth (mostly) and James: Let me speak, sir, For heaven now bids me; and the words I utter Let none think flattery, for they’ll find ’em truth. This royal infant – heaven still move about her – Though in her cradle, yet now promises Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings, Which time shall bring to ripeness. She shall be – But few now living can behold that goodness – A pattern to all princes living with her And all that shall succeed. Saba was never More covetous of wisdom and fair virtue Than this pure soul shall be. All princely graces That mould up such a mighty piece as this is, With all the virtues that attend the good, Shall still be doubled on her. Truth shall nurse her; Holy and heavenly thoughts still counsel her. She shall be loved and feared. Her own shall bless her; Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn, And hang their heads with sorrow. Good grows with her. In her days, every man shall eat in safety Under his own vine what he plants, and sing The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours. God shall be truly known, and those about her From her shall read the perfect ways of honour And by those claim their greatness, not by blood. Nor shall this peace sleep with her, but as when The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, Her ashes new create another heir As great in admiration as herself, So shall she leave her blessedness to one, When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness, Who from the sacred ashes of her honour Shall star-like rise as great in fame as she was And so stand fixed. Peace, plenty, love, truth, terror, That were the servants to this chosen infant,

211

succession

Shall then be his, and like a vine grow to him. Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine, His honour and the greatness of his name Shall be, and make new nations. He shall flourish, And, like a mountain cedar, reach his branches To all the plains about him. Our children’s children Shall see this, and bless heaven. (5.5.14–55) It is difficult not to hear in ‘the greatness of his name’ and ‘make new nations’ a reference to James’s desire for a united Britain. Although he remained King of England and King of Scotland, James assumed the title ‘King of Great Brittaine, France, and Ireland’ by proclamation on 20 October 1604. Many critics accept that the shift from Shakespeare’s Elizabethan to Jacobean plays is marked by a turn away from matters English to matters British: ‘There is little celebration of England and Englishness in Shakespeare’s plays written after the accession of James VI of Scotland to his English throne as James I in 1603. There is some reference to Britain and Britishness in the later plays, but mention of England is muted and infrequent’ (Wortham 1996: 97). Whilst a concordance to Shakespeare’s works can be cited to support this point, a concordance will not shed light on how England and Englishness and Britain and Britishness are represented in Shakespeare’s Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. ‘Shakespeare’s primary response to the new regime’ manifests itself in ‘a decision to address his plays to James’s own background and interests in a more direct way than he had ever done with Elizabeth. One obvious feature of this reorientation is the move away from the medieval English history which he had dramatized in the 1590s towards an exploration of the remoter British and Scottish past’ (Burgess, Wymer and Lawrence 2006: xvii). For Kerrigan, ‘a late-Elizabethan taste for English chronicle history gave way to such Stuart-British works as King Lear’ (2008: 14). Indeed, under England’s Scottish monarch, Shakespeare’s plays, in particular those drawn from chronicle material (King Lear, Macbeth, Cymbeline), are more sensitive to the archipelagic geopolitics of a composite monarchy that included the Principality of Wales and the Kingdom/colony of Ireland. When a character in a play set in ancient Britain makes reference to ‘this great land’ (Cym 2.1.64), it is a definite possibility that this line owes much to the impact of an emergent greater British consciousness in the Jacobean period. (C) See the relevant sections on Shakespeare in Hopkins (2011) and Mayer (2004b). See Kurland (1994) for a reading of Hamlet in relation to the accession of King James VI to the English throne, Schwyzer on King Lear (2004: 151–74) and Hadfield (2003) on Hamlet and King Lear. There is a plethora of material on Macbeth and the Jacobean Union: see, for example, Alker and Nelson (2007) and Smuts (2008). On the broader historical and cultural consequences of James’s accession, see the fine collection of essays in Burgess, Wymer, and Lawrence (2006). Ivic (2013a) attends to continuity and discontinuity in Shakespeare’s Elizabeth/Jacobean imaginings of England/Britain.

212

T Tartars see also Gypsy, Scythia (A) A Mongolian tribe inhabiting central Asia, from the Caspian Sea eastward. Sometimes the word ‘Tartar’ or ‘Tatar’ was used synonymously for Turk. The Tartars laid waste to much of Europe in the thirteenth century. Tartars are not to be confused with Tartarus, a name used by the ancient Greeks and Romans to signify infernal regions. (B) In the early modern period, Tartars, like Turks, were viewed as infidels and associated with cruelty and savagery. Helena makes reference to the ‘flinty Tartar’s bosom’ (AW 4.4.7), a sentiment reiterated in The Merchant of Venice, where Tartars are described as having ‘brassy bosoms and rough hearts of flint’ and, like ‘stubborn Turks’, were ‘never train’d / To offices of tender courtesy’ (4.1.31–3) – Antonio makes reference to Shylock’s hardened ‘Jewish heart’ (MV 4.1.80). Macbeth also couples Turks and Tartars: ‘Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips’ (4.1.29). (C) In a chapter of The principal nauigations (1599–1600), titled ‘Of the Tartars’, Hakluyt writes: TH ey haue in no place any setled citie to abide in, neither knowe they of the celestiall citie to come. They haue diuided all Scythia among themselues, which stretcheth from the riuer Danubius euen vnto the rising of the sunne. And euery of their captaines, according to the great or small number of his people, knoweth the bounds of his pastures, and where he ought to feed his cattel winter and summer, Spring and autumne. For in the winter they descend vnto the warme regions southward. And in the summer they ascend vnto the colde regions northward. (1599–1600: vol. 1, 95) What Hakluyt is describing here is the belief that Tartars are principally nomadic, which, in the eyes of the agrarian culture of early modern England, was considered a sign of an uncivilized people. In his A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596), Edmund Spenser’s construction of Irish incivility draws upon their nomadic existence. There is one custom, Spenser writes, amongst [the Irish] to keep their cattle and to live themselves the most part of the year in Bollies, pasturing upon the mountain and waste wild places, and removing still to fresh land as they have depastured the former days; the which appeareth plain to be the manner of the Scythians as ye may read in Olaus Magnus et Johannes Boemus. (1970: 49)

213

Tartars

The Irish practice of ‘booleying’ or transhumance – the seasonal transfer of grazing animals to different pastures – sufficed to render the Irish nomadic: ‘look you’, says Irenius, ‘into all countries that live in such sort by keeping of cattle, and you shall find that they are both very barbarous and uncivil’ (Spenser 1970: 158). tawny a composite colour consisting of brown and either yellow or orange. Used by Shakespeare to designate a person with brown skin. Shakespeare’s plays include a number of characters labelled tawny. Cleopatra refers to herself as ‘with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black’ (AC 1.5.29), but at the opening of the play Philo speaks of Cleopatra’s ‘tawny front’ (1.1.6). ‘Although this Countrey of Aegypt doth stand in the selfe same Climate that Mauritania doth’, writes George Abbot in his A briefe description of the whole world (1636), ‘yet the inhabitants there are not black, but rather dunne, or tawny. Of which colour Cleopatra was observed to be; who by inticement, so wonne the love of Julius Caesar, and Antony’ (162–3). The Nurse describes Aaron and Tamora’s ‘issue’ as ‘black’ (Tit 4.2.67); however, Aaron is quoted by a Goth soldier as addressing his and Tamora’s child as ‘tawny slave, half me and half thy dame’ (5.1.27). Lysander labels Hermia a ‘tawny Tartar’ (MND 3.2.263). The F stage direction describes The Merchant of Venice’s Prince of Morocco as ‘a tawnie Moore all in white’ (TLN 514). On F’s stage direction, Spiller says, Shakespeare’s depiction (both in the play text and perhaps on stage) of the Prince of Morocco is likely to have emerged out of his reading of texts such as Richard Eden’s translation of Peter Martyr’s Decades of the New Worlde or West India (1555), which included an influential essay, ‘Of the colour of Indians’, the first published use of the term ‘tawny’ to refer to human complexion in the way in which Shakespeare uses it in this play. (2011: 8) In a rare reference to an entire nation rather than an individual, King Ferdinand speaks of ‘tawny Spain’ (LLL 1.1.171). territory Of the various possible meanings of territory, two are of relevance to Shakespeare’s plays: the broader meaning encompassing an unbounded tract of land, or a region; and the more specific denotation, the one most employed by Shakespeare, signalling land in the possession of some form of political authority – for example, a monarch or a state. This word is used infrequently by Shakespeare, but when used its significance is pronounced. Shakespeare uses the plural form much more than the singular. The singular territory surfaces in King Lear as the play’s eponymous hero discloses his intention of divesting himself of ‘Interest of territory’ (1.1.50): in other words, relinquishing his political authority. In As You Like It, Duke Frederick charges Oliver to produce his absent brother, Orlando, or face having his lands seized by the Duke: 214

territory

Find out thy brother whereso’er he is; Seek him with candle: bring him dead or living Within this twelvmonth, or turn thou no more To seek a living in our territory. Thy lands and all things that thou dost call thine, Worth seizure, do we seize into our hands, Till thou canst quit thee by thy brother’s mouth Of what we think against thee. (3.1.5–12) The presence of ‘our territory’ and ‘our hands’ marks the territorial space inhabited by the two speakers as the property of the Duke. Similarly, King Richard II ’s pronouncement to Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford and Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk concerning their banishment makes reference to ‘territories’: ‘Therefore, we banish you our territories’ (R2 1.3.139); as with the previously cited passage, the presence of the majestic plural amplifies the hold that the speaker has on them, or their, land. In Coriolanus, territories surfaces three times, and in all three instances the adjective suggests a less monarchical, more republican imagining of space in that the territory invoked belongs to a socio-political entity rather than a sole ruler. The Volscian Tullus Aufidius’s ‘your territories’ (4.5.137) refers to land in the possession of the banished Coriolanus’s native Rome. A few moments later in the play, one Roman speaks of ‘the Volsces with two several powers / Are enter’d in the Roman territories’ (4.6.39–40). Reiterating this threat, a messenger announces that ‘A fearful army, led by Caius Martius, / Associated with Aufidius, rages / Upon our territories’ (4.6.76–8). The use of ‘our’ here designates territory as a communal space rather than the possession of the crown. In the English history plays territories refers to ‘The extent of the land belonging to or under the jurisdiction of a ruler, state, or group of people’ (OED) – the OED adds ‘Often applied contextually to the land or country itself of a state, as French territory, etc.’. In support of this definition, the OED cites the following line from King Henry VI, Part 1 spoken by a Frenchman to an Englishman, which is indeed a reference to (contested) French territory: ‘Welcome, brave earl, into our territories: / Command in Anjou what your honour pleases’ (5.2.167–8). Rejecting the Bishop of Winchester’s offer of a league that would see him reduced to the English King Henry VI ’s ‘liegeman’ (5.4.128), Charles, the Dolphin of France states: ’Tis known already that I am possessed With more than half the Gallian territories, And therein reverenced for their lawful king. Shall I, for lucre of the rest unvanquished, Detract so much from that prerogative As to be called but viceroy of the whole? (5.4.138–43) 215

territory

Given the invocation of possession, parts of ‘the Gallian territories’ are very much the property of France’s monarch. Come King Henry VI, Part 2, England’s claim to France has shifted from contested to lost; hence the Earl of Somerset’s lines delivered to King Henry VI : ‘That all your interest in those territories / Is utterly bereft you; all is lost’ (3.1.84–5). In the following scene, the Earl of Salisbury informs King Henry of the commons’ discontent with and sentence upon the Earl of Suffolk: Dread lord, the commons send you word by me, Unless Lord Suffolk straight be done to death, Or banished fair England’s territories, They will by violence tear him from your palace And torture him with grievous lingering death. (3.2.243–7) Although ‘all [France] is lost’, the plural ‘territories’ is still used; however, ‘England’s territories’ in the context of the play’s historical setting could include land outside of England’s national borders: Ireland, for example. Indeed, in King John, a historically much earlier play than the King Henry VI plays, a sense of England’s territories, or the territories of England’s monarch, is gauged as Chatillon, the French ambassador to King John, relays a message of defiance from the French King: Philip of France, in right and true behalf Of thy deceased brother Geoffrey’s son, Arthur Plantagenet, lays most lawful claim To this fair island and the territories: To Ireland, Poictiers, Anjou, Touraine, Maine, Desiring thee to lay aside the sword Which sways usurpingly these several titles, And put these same into young Arthur’s hand, Thy nephew and right royal sovereign. (1.1.7–15) ‘[T]his fair island’ is, of course, England rather than Britain. If Chatillon’s use of ‘territories’ reminds us that King John depicts a historical moment in which England’s monarch was also in possession of vast Continental holdings, it also calls to mind Anderson’s account of the prenational ‘dynastic realm’: ‘in the older imaginings, where states where defined by centres, borders were porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another.’ ‘In the modern conception’, Anderson continues, ‘state sovereignty is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimetre of a legally demarcated territory’ (1991: 19). If King John bears witness to an older imagining of the dynastic realm, it also adumbrates (early) modern conceptions of demarcated territory, as evidenced in this proto-nationalist passage spoken by Philip the Bastard: 216

Towton

By all the blood that ever fury breath’d, The youth says well. Now hear our English king, For thus his royalty doth speak in me: He is prepar’d, and reason too he should – This apish and unmannerly approach, This harness’d masque and unadvised revel, This unhair’d sauciness and boyish troops, The king doth smile at; and is well prepar’d To whip this dwarfish war, this pigmy arms, From out the circle of his territories. (5.2.127–36) Significantly, the Bastard’s speech concludes with references to ‘your nation’, ‘Englishmen’ and ‘dear mother England’ (144, 145, 153). This speech, therefore, marks a fine instance of an Elizabethan playwright returning to a prenational historical context fully informed and influenced by emergent early modern concepts of nationhood. Tewkesbury One of the battle scenes of the Wars of the Roses from which the Yorkists, led by King Edward, emerge victorious, defeating and killing Prince Edward. The battle, fought on 4 May 1471, is depicted in Act 5, Scenes 4 and 5 of King Henry VI, Part 3. The scene culminates in Queen Margaret’s response to her son’s death at the hands of the Yorkists, a repetition of Richard, Duke of York’s speech on his slain son Rutland at the battle of Wakefield. Margaret’s ‘They that stabb’d Caesar shed no blood at all’ (5.5.51) at once highlights civil war whilst commenting on its butchery. throne see crown Towton One of the battle scenes of the Wars of the Roses from which the Yorkists emerge victorious. The battle, fought on 29 March 1461, is depicted in Act 2 of King Henry VI, Part 3, and, perhaps more than any other battle scene in the play, it registers the sufferings of the common people. The centrepiece of this battle scene is an instance of patricide and filicide, observed by the seated and contemplative King Henry VI , who forms a royal audience for this affective tableau. Following the stage direction ‘Enter a Son that hath kill’d his father, with the body in his arms’, the patricidal son states: Who’s this? O God! it is my father’s face, Whom in this conflict I unwares have kill’d. O heavy times, begetting such events! From London by the King was I press’d forth; My father, being the Earl of Warwick’s man, Came on the part of York, press’d by his master; 217

Towton

And I, who at his hands receiv’d my life, Have by my hands of life bereaved him. (2.5.61–8) In his chronicle history, Edward Hall (1548) offers a description of Towton that is a much more official and orthodox historical account, one in line with Tudor historiography: This conflict was in maner vnnaturall, for in it the sonne fought against the father, the brother against the brother, the nephew against the vncle, and the tenau[n]t against his lord, which slaughter did not onely sore debilitate and much weke[n] the puyssance of this realme, considering that these dedde men, whe[n] thei were liuyng had force ynough to resist the greatest princes power of al Europe. (fol. Clxxxvijr) What makes Shakespeare’s rewriting of his sources significant is the social critique that pervades his version, as evident by the use of ‘press’d’. According to the OED, ‘pressed’ means ‘Forced to enlist in, or seized for use in, military, royal, or public service’; many Elizabethan men, particularly during the Nine Years’ War, would have been pressed into service. The repetition of ‘press’d’ – ‘by the King was I press’d forth’; ‘press’d by his master’ – places extra emphasis on this key word. tribe (A) Carries a variety of meanings. One obvious meaning is biblical in origin, and it refers to the division of the Israelites into twelve tribes, each claiming descent from Jacob’s twelve sons; less specifically, but still biblically, a ‘tribe’ refers to people who can trace a common descent. In the early modern period ‘tribe’ could overlap with words such as nation and people, especially as these words denote a group that defines itself in terms of common stock or ancestry. (B) Edmund’s ‘Why bastard? Wherefore base?’ (KL 1.2.6) speech uses ‘nation’ and ‘tribe’ somewhat interchangeably when he refers to the ‘curiosity of nations’ (4) and ‘a whole tribe of fops’ (14). Both terms as used by Edmund are rather abstract in that he does not have a specific ethnic or religious group in mind. ‘Tribe’ is used twice in Coriolanus, and in both instances there is an ethnic or geographical specificity. An enraged Volumina, speaking to the Roman tribunes Sicinius and Brutus, refers to the people of Rome as ‘thy tribe’ (4.2.24) – a tribe, of course, to which she, as a Roman, belongs. Coriolanus, speaking from within the space of Volscian territory, appears to be referring to all Volscians when he defiantly proclaims just before his death O that I had him, With six Aufidiuses, or more, his tribe, To use my lawful sword. (5.6.127–9) 218

Troy

Here ‘tribe’ could mean Aufidius’s family, but, given Coriolanus’s propensity for grandstanding, these lines probably voice a desire to take on all Volscians – or to take on yet again all Volscians, for a few lines earlier Coriolanus imagines that he defeated the ‘Volscians in Corioles / Alone’ (115–16). Othello’s use of ‘tribe’ is more complicated, certainly textually. In his final speech before he stabs himself, Othello wishes to be remembered as a valuable servant to Venice: Soft you, a word or two before you go. I have done the state some service, and they know’t: No more of that. I pray you, in your letters, When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely, but too well; Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought, Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand, Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe. (5.2.338–48) The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works text of Othello (cited here) is based on F, but it adopts readings from Q (1622), as is the case here, for ‘base Indian’ is taken from Q; F reads ‘base Iudean’ (TLN 2558). Whilst ‘Judean’ associates ‘tribe’ with biblical denotations, both ‘Indian’ and ‘Judean’ can be used in relation to ‘tribe’, for in both instances the reference is to a group identity based on common descent. The Merchant of Venice uses ‘tribe’ more than any other Shakespeare play: four times. The word is used once by a Venetian; the other three instances involve Shylock’s speech. Solanio, on stage with Salarino and Shylock, says, following Tubal’s entrance, ‘Here comes another of the tribe’ (3.1.70), meaning ‘here comes another Jew’. When Shylock uses the word – ‘my tribe’ (1.3.49; 1.3.55), ‘our tribe’ (1.3.108) – it appears to be synonymous with ‘nation’ and ‘people’; in fact, Shylock’s first use of ‘tribe’ is preceded by his reference to ‘our sacred nation’ (1.3.46). The use of ‘sacred’ suggests that Shylock’s use of ‘tribe’ (and perhaps Othello’s in F) defines his community not only in terms of common ancestry and ethnicity but also, and perhaps most importantly, in terms of religion. (C) Further examination of the concept of tribe, especially in relation to nationhood, can be found in Adelman (2003) and Kitch (2008). Troy (A) An ancient city in Asia Minor, famous for being besieged and overrun by a Greek army led by the likes of Achilles, Agamemnon and Ulysses. Homer’s epic poem The Iliad offers the most famous account of the Greek victory over the Trojans. Another 219

Troy

epic poem, Virgil’s Aeneid, tells the story of Aeneas fleeing the ashes of Troy and, eventually, founding Lavinium (Rome). (B) References to Troy abound in Shakespeare’s plays, with Shakespeare’s very own contribution to the ‘matter of Troy’, Troilus and Cressida, leading the way; Lucrece includes a lengthy account of a painting of the fall of Troy. Queen Margaret and Lucrece both refer to ‘burning Troy’ (2H6 3.2.118; Luc 1476) and Titus Andronicus to ‘bright-burning Troy’ (Tit 3.1.70). As these references attest, Troy is synonymous with the fall of a nation and the scattering of a people. Not surprisingly, Shakespeare’s only fictional Roman play, Titus Andronicus, which takes place on the verge of the collapse of the mighty Roman Empire, includes more references to Troy than any other play bar Troilus and Cressida. At the close of the play a Roman Lord says to Lucius: Speak, Rome’s dear friend, as erst our ancestor When with his solemn tongue he did discourse To lovesick Dido’s sad-attending ear The story of that baleful burning night When subtle Greeks surprised King Priam’s Troy. Tell us what Sinon hath bewitched our ears, Or who hath brought the fatal engine in That gives our Troy, our Rome, the civil wound. (5.3.79–86) If these lines look back to Rome’s fictional ancestor, Aeneas, they also anticipate a repetition of the past: ‘our Troy, our Rome’ ominously captures Rome’s imminent fall. Similarly, references to the fallen Trojan hero Hector, the son of Priam who leads the Trojans against the invading Greek army, are paradoxically heroic and fatal. Consider, for instance, the account of the death of Richard, Duke of York: Environed he was with many foes, And stood against them, as the hope of Troy Against the Greeks that would have enter’d Troy. (3H6 2.1.50–2) Later in the same play King Henry’s ‘Farewell, my Hector and my Troy’s true hope’ (4.8.25), spoken of Warwick, is proleptic, for Warwick loses his life at Barnet. When Richard, Duke of Gloucester claims that ‘like a Sinon’ he will ‘take another Troy’ (3H6 3.2.190), he is revealing his treachery; it was the deceitful Sinon who convinced the Trojans to bring the wooden horse full of Greek soldiers within the walls of Troy. Allusions to Troy are not solely negative. As Virgil’s epic poem reveals, out of Troy’s fall emerged another empire, and the idea of translatio imperii resulted in later nations appropriating the myth of Troy for their own purposes. In fact, Troy takes on added 220

Turk

significance in an English context given that histories traced Britain’s roots to the Trojan line of Aeneas in the figure of Brutus, Aeneas’s great-grandson: hence, contemporary references to London and New Troy and Troynovant, as in the following: This way the king will come; this is the way To Julius Caesar’s ill-erected tower, To whose flint bosom my condemned lord Is doom’d a prisoner by proud Bolingbroke. Here let us rest, if this rebellious earth Have any resting for her true king’s queen. Enter RICHARD and guard. But soft, but see, or rather do not see, My fair rose wither – yet look up, behold, That you in pity may dissolve to dew, And wash him fresh again with true-love tears. Ah, thou, the model where old Troy did stand! Thou map of honour, thou King Richard’s tomb, And not King Richard! Thou most beauteous inn, Why should hard-favour’d grief be lodg’d in thee, When triumph is become an alehouse guest? (R2 5.1.1–15) The Queen’s ‘old Troy’ may function as a contrast to London as ‘New Troy’. Nevertheless, the dominant idea here is one of Richard’s fall. (C) James (1997: 85–118) considers the myth of England’s Trojan descent in relation to Troilus and Cressida. Writing on the same play, Greenfield (2000) traces in connections between Troy and London anxious articulations of English national identity, especially in relation to dubious national genealogies. Turk (A) Used loosely to refer to people within the Ottoman Empire as well as Muslims. Used synonymously with Ottomite, pagan, saracen. As the examples below attest, Turks were associated with cruelty, barbarity, militancy, savagery and tyranny. (B) When a newly crowned King Henry V appeases his anxious nobles with ‘This is the English, not the Turkish court’ (2H4 5.2.47) he is giving voice to a Renaissance commonplace: a merciful English court is unlike a cruel and tyrannical Turkish one. Often in Shakespeare’s plays a strong opposition between Christian and Turk surfaces. Examples range from Rosalind’s playful ‘Why, she defies me, / Like Turk to Christian’ (AYL 4.3.32–3), to King Henry V’s semi-playful plans for his unborn son to ‘go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard’ (5.2.205–6) to the less-than-playful remarks of the Bishop of Carlisle: 221

Turk

Many a time hath banish’d Norfolk fought For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field, Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross Against black pagans, Turks, and Saracens. (R2 4.1.92–5) Another stereotype of the Turk is as fiercely militant, hence Carlisle’s prophesy of England’s civil wars as Turk-like: My Lord of Herford here, whom you call king, Is a foul traitor to proud Herford’s king, And if you crown him, let me prophesy – The blood of English shall manure the ground, And future ages groan for this foul act, Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels. (R2 4.1.134–9) Along with cruel and militant, the Turk, as an infidel, was viewed as unfaithful in more than one meaning of that word. After Buckingham reveals the false claim that Lord Hastings planned to murder Richard and Buckingham, the Lord Mayor asks, ‘Had he done so’ (3.5.39), to which Richard replies, ‘What, think you we are Turks or infidels?’ (R3 3.5.40). Iago’s ‘Nay, it is true, or else I am a Turk’ (Oth 2.1.114) plays upon notions of the Turk as untrustworthy; however, it could also be read as playing upon early modern English stereotypes of the untrustworthy Italians given that ‘honest Iago’ is anything but. Crucially, Turks were seen as barbarous and savage not only in terms of cruelty and lack of mercy but also in terms of incivility. When Othello appears to break up the brawling Venetians, he addresses them as follows: Are we turned Turks? And to ourselves do that Which heaven hath forbid the Ottomites? For Christian shame, put by this barbarous brawl. (2.3.362–4) To engage in barbarous acts is to engage in acts Turkish. At this moment in the play, Othello sees himself as a civilized Christian servant of the Venetian republic, hence his voicing of a rhetoric of civility in the lines cited above. Come the end of the play, Othello views himself otherwise: in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog, And smote him – thus! [He stabs himself.] (5.2.352–6) 222

Turk

Re-enacting a past event and playing both parts, Othello now occupies the subject position of both civilized Venetian and barbarous Turk. (C) Knolles’s The generall historie of the Turkes (1603) was likely a source for Shakespeare, especially for Othello. Vitkus (2003: 77–106) explores the idea of a Turkish Othello.

223

224

U uncrown This word occurs (twice) in only one play, King Henry VI, Part 3 (albeit the original line spoken by Warwick is reiterated verbatim by a messenger). Warwick, who is represented as a kingmaker in this play, has this to say (via messenger) to King Edward upon learning at the French court that Edward has humiliated Warwick by marrying Lady Grey rather than, as proposed, the French Lady Bona: ‘Tell him from me that he hath done me wrong, / And therefore I’ll uncrown him ere’t be long’ (3.3.231–2). Given Warwick’s role as kingmaker, it could be argued that this play stages a politics of uncrowning. Ivic (2013a) considers the centrality of uncrowning in relation to the politics of 3H6. unnatural (A) The term is most often used to describe a breakdown in natural relations: for example, between father and daughter, between monarch and subject, between citizen and nation. (B) King Lear contains the most uses of unnatural, not surprising given the numerous familial bonds that are broken in the play: conjugal, filial, fraternal, paternal, sororal. The bond between Lear and his daughter Cordelia is, of course, not only a bond between father and child but also between monarch and subject. Shakespeare’s use of unnatural is often invoked in familial situations – unruly children; fratricidal brothers – but he also employs the term in political contexts: unnaturalness, for example, in relation to one’s monarch or one’s country. Titus’s slaying of his daughter Lavinia leads Saturninus to exclaim, ‘What hast thou done, unnatural and unkind?’ (Tit 5.3.47) – an echo of Titus’s use of ‘unkind’ (1.1.89), meaning unnatural, earlier in the play. For Saturninus, Titus’s slaying of his own kind registers as a brutal and inhuman act. Speaking as a father, King Henry VI is alert to the fact that his disinheritance of his son is a preternatural act: Not for myself, Lord Warwick, but my son, Whom I unnaturally shall disinherit. But be it as it may: [to York] I here entail The crown to thee and to thine heirs for ever; Conditionally that here thou take an oath To cease this civil war and, whilst I live, To honour me as thy king and sovereign; And neither by treason nor hostility To seek to put me down and reign thyself. (3H6 1.1.198–206) 225

unnatural

Because Henry’s son is also the heir to the throne, his action, although not brutal or inhuman, is doubly unnatural: familially as well as politically. Upon learning of King Henry’s disinheritance of Prince Edward, Queen Margaret states, ‘thou hast proved so unnatural a father’ (1.1.225). Claudius’s ‘most unnatural murder’ (Ham 1.5.25) of his brother Hamlet is similarly doubly unnatural, for the brother Claudius has poisoned was also his king; in other words, Claudius is a fratricide and a regicide. Perhaps it is not surprising that, after King Lear, ‘unnatural’ occurs most frequently in Coriolanus, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Henry VI, Part 3 and King Richard III. That ‘unnatural’ is a politically loaded term is evident in the numerous contexts in which the term surfaces. In defence of his friend Coriolanus, Menenius Agrippa warns the people of Rome not to do violence to a man who has fought valiantly for Rome: Now the good gods forbid That our renowned Rome, whose gratitude Towards her deserved children is enroll’d In Jove’s own book, like an unnatural dam Should now eat up her own! (3.1.289–93) For Menenius, to ‘dispatch’ (285) Coriolanus, after all the blood he has ‘dropp’d … for his country’ (300), would go against the laws of nature. In the face of war between their native Britain and an invading Roman army, Guiderius represents their assumed ‘revolt’ against their homeland as not only ‘unnatural’ but also as ‘barbarous’: Nay, what hope Have we in hiding us? This way, the Romans Must or for Britons slay us, or receive us For barbarous and unnatural revolts During their use, and slay us after. (Cym 4.4.3–7) A similar sentiment is expressed in King Henry VI, Part 1 by Joan Puzel, who is able to entice the Duke of Burgundy, who is fighting for the English against his native France, by invoking a rhetoric of unnaturalness: Look on thy country, look on fertile France, And see the cities and the towns defaced By wasting ruin of the cruel foe, As looks the mother on her lowly babe When death doth close his tender-dying eyes. See, see the pining malady of France, Behold the wounds, the most unnatural wounds, Which thou thyself hast given her woeful breast. O turn thy edged sword another way,

226

unnatural

Strike those that hurt, and hurt not those that help: One drop of blood drawn from thy country’s bosom Should grieve thee more than streams of foreign gore. Return thee therefore with a flood of tears And wash away thy country’s stained spots. (3.3.44–57) In response to Joan, Burgundy asks for forgiveness – ‘Forgive me, country, and sweet countrymen’ (81) – which highlights the hold the rhetoric of unnaturalness has on national subjects. One of the dominant images of civil war is its unnaturalness, captured in the lines below in which a warring father realizes that he has slain his warring son: What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly, Erroneous, mutinous and unnatural, This deadly quarrel daily doth beget! (3H6 2.5.89–91) King Henry VI, Part 1 extends the idea of civil war as unnatural by insisting on the unnaturalness of the ‘effusion of our Christians blood’ (5.1.9). Here, ‘our’ refers not to England’s but rather English and French blood, as is evident in the young king’s response to his uncle, Gloucester: Ay marry, uncle, for I always thought It was both impious and unnatural That such immanity and bloody strife Should reign among professors of one faith. (5.1.11–14) As much as unnaturalness can be invoked to forge national alliances it can also be invoked to forge international alliances. If the spectre of unnaturalness has the affective power to interpellate subjects, it is also a concept that can be abused. A prime example occurs when George, Duke of Clarence quits the Lancastrian forces and returns to his Yorkist roots. After plucking the symbolic red rose from his hat and tossing it at the Lancastrian Warwick, George says: Father of Warwick, know you what this means? Look, here I throw my infamy at thee: I will not ruinate my father’s house, Who gave his blood to lime the stones together, And set up Lancaster. Why, trowest thou, Warwick, That Clarence is so harsh, so blunt, unnatural, To bend the fatal instruments of war Against his brother and his lawful King? (3H6 5.1.84–91) 227

unnatural

Clarence’s bold pronouncement that he has switched camps because to do otherwise would be ‘unnatural’ lacks rhetorical force given that he has been fighting on the Lancastrian side: in other words, engaging in unnatural war. Although he does not use the word unnatural, the Earl of Salisbury’s comments on the rebellious English nobles, including himself, who support the French against the English King John are underpinned by a sense of unnaturalness: And is’t not pity, O my grieved friends, That we, the sons and children of this isle, Was born to see so sad an hour as this; Wherein we step after a stranger, march Upon her gentle bosom, and fill up Her enemies’ ranks – I must withdraw and weep Upon the spot of this enforced cause – To grace the gentry of a land remote, And follow unacquainted colours here? (KJ 5.2.24–32) ‘Strange’ and ‘unacquainted’ take the place of unnaturalness in Salisbury’s speech. Earlier in King John Lewis, the Dauphin speaks to Arthur, Duke of Brittany and nephew to the king of ‘rebuk[ing] the usurpation / Of thy unnatural uncle, English John’ (2.1.9–10). Brabantio draws upon a rhetoric of unnaturalness when accounting for Desdemona’s relations with Othello: A maiden never bold, Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion Blushed at herself; and she, in spite of nature, Of years, of country, credit, everything, To fall in love with what she feared to look on? It is a judgment maimed and most imperfect That will confess perfection so could err Against all rules of nature, and must be driven To find out practises of cunning hell Why this should be. I therefore vouch again That with some mixtures powerful o’er the blood, Or with some dram conjured to this effect He wrought upon her. (Oth 1.3.95–107) Unlike the majority of other characters in the play, Brabantio’s racialist attitudes lead him to view the pairing of Othello and his daughter as unnatural and therefore brought about under dubious circumstances. Iago shares Brabantio’s views, hence his thoughts on Desdemona’s ‘unnatural’ choice of Othello for husband – thoughts sparked by Othello’s ‘And yet how nature, erring from itself’ (3.3.231): 228

unpeople

Not to affect many proposed matches Of her own clime, complexion, and degree, Whereto we see, in all things, nature tends – Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank, Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural. (333–7) Iago’s references to miscegenation in reference to Desdemona and Othello earlier in the play also draw upon a sense of their pairing as unnatural. unpeople To empty of people, to depopulate, whether literally or figuratively. This verb can have political significance, for its use registers the violence of the act of unpeopling, often ascribing that violence to a monarch. When Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, uses the word, however frivolously, there is an association with tyranny: ‘[Antony] shall have every day a several greeting / Or I’ll unpeople Egypt!’ (AC 1.5.80–1). The threat is not real, but the potential is. ‘Unpeople’ is also used in King Henry VI, Part 3 by King Henry in response to Richard, Duke of York’s having seized the throne: Suppose by right and equity thou be king, Think’st thou that I will leave my kingly throne, Wherein my grandsire and my father sat? No: first shall war unpeople this my realm; Ay, and their colours, often borne in France, And now in England to our heart’s great sorrow, Shall be my winding-sheet. (1.1.127–33) This passage seems to ascribe bravery and courage to King Henry; however, it calls attention to the consequences of royal conflicts on the realm and its citizens. Henry claims that he will hold onto the crown even at the cost of unpeopling of the realm.

229

230

V Venice (A) Emerged as a maritime power in the fifteenth century, possessing such valuable land as Cyprus, the setting for much of Othello. In the early modern period Venice was famous for being a republic, a contact zone, and, crucially, wealthy if not materialistic; indeed, Venice was the wealthiest city-state in Europe. Venice was also home to a substantial Jewish ghetto. (B) Whether in Shakespeare’s or Ben Jonson’s plays, the early modern stage presented its theatregoers with a real and an imagined Venice. Shakespeare probably had no actual contact with Venice; however, he would have drawn upon a variety of published material on Venice, literary and non-literary. Two of Shakespeare’s plays are set in Venice: The Merchant of Venice and Othello, and there are references to Venice in other plays, including Holofernes’s ‘Venetia, Venetia, / Chi non ti vede, non ti pretia’ (LLL 4.2.97–8) – Venice, Venice, he who does not see thee does not praise thee. In response to Solanio’s belief that the Duke of Venice will excuse Antonio from the hold that Shylock’s bond has on him, Antonio says: The duke cannot deny the course of law: For the commodity that strangers have With us in Venice, if it be denied, Will much impeach the justice of his state, Since that the trade and profit of the city Consisteth of all nations. (MV 3.3.26–31) In these lines, Venice is represented as a contact zone wherein ‘strangers’ and ‘all nations’ meet and do business. That Venice consists of ‘all nations’ perhaps accounts for its role as the setting for two of Shakespeare’s plays in which Christian Venetians are neighbour to figures of other religions, ethnicities and races. In both Othello and The Merchant of Venice, non-Venetian characters – Othello and Shylock – are frequently referred to not by their proper names but rather by a marker of difference: hence ‘the Moor’ and ‘the Jew’. If Shakespeare chose to set these plays in Venice because of its status as a contact zone, he may also have considered Venice as an appropriate site for the interrogation of tolerance, intolerance and varieties of otherness. (C) Lewis Lewkenor’s translation of Gasparo Contarini’s The commonwealth and gouernment of Venice (1599) was a prime source for early modern English men and women interested in Venice. According to Contarini, Venice consists ‘of strange and 231

Venice

forraine people, yea of the farthest and the remotest nations, as though the City of Venice onely were a common and generall market to the whole world’ (1). Hadfield (2005) has a lot to say about Venice and Contarini in relation to republican ideas. Levin and Watkins (2009: 111–40) treat Shakespeare’s Venice as both Venice and London. Volsce, Volscian An ancient and warlike tribe who inhabited a region to the east of Latium. The Volsces or Volscians were defeated by the Romans in the fourth century BCE . The only play in which the Volsces/Volscians are represented is Coriolanus, which portrays the warfare between Romans and Volscians in a manner not unlike the representation of English and French warfare in King Henry VI, Part 1 and King Henry V. That is, two warring nations are pitted against each other, and the Roman victory comes to occupy a significant place in Roman history, as is evident in the following lines: Good news, good news! The ladies have prevail’d, The Volscians are dislodg’d, and Martius gone. A merrier day did never yet greet Rome, No, not th’expulsion of the Tarquins. (Cor 5.4.41–4) But because the eponymous hero Coriolanus leads initially the Roman but then the Volscian army, the play struggles to maintain a clear and coherent distinction between Romans and Volscians, just as in Titus Andronicus the distinction between civilized Roman and barbarous Goth/Moor collapses.

232

W Wakefield One of the battle scenes of the Wars of the Roses from which the Lancastrians, led by Queen Margaret, emerge victorious, defeating and killing Richard, Duke of York. The battle, fought on 30 December 1460, is depicted in Act 1, Scene 4 of King Henry VI, Part 3. The scene is most remarkable as one of cruelty, with the captured York being given a cloth stained with his son Rutland’s blood to dry his tears. Images of and references to blood and tears pervade this scene. Wales (A) Formally incorporated into England by the Act of Union (1536), Wales occupied an awkward place within the Kingdom of England. Politically, Wales was within the Kingdom (unlike, say, the Kingdom of Ireland); culturally, Wales was without the Kingdom, with a language and a history of its own, although that history was inextricably linked to England’s. The absence of national figures on Speed’s map of Wales (see Figure 7) unlike his maps of England, Ireland and Scotland (see Figures 4, 5 and 6) as well as the omission of Wales from the title page of Speed’s The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine: Presenting an Exact Geography of the Kingdomes of England, Scotland, Ireland, and the Iles adioyning (see Figure 2) suggests that Speed, like many of his fellow Englishmen, viewed the Welsh as having been ‘Englished’, just as Welsh counties had been politically assimilated. England’s first Tudor monarch, King Henry VII , was the son of a Welshman, Owen Tudor (of the Tudurs of Anglesey), and he and subsequent Tudor monarchs made much of their Welsh/British ancestry in an attempt to legitimize their power. (B) ‘Welsh characters and locales feature even more frequently in [Shakespeare’s] plays than does contemporary Italy’ (Maley and Schwyzer 2010: 2). Exactly how this figure was arrived at is not explained, but this comment does well to foreground the presence of Wales and Welsh characters in Shakespeare’s plays, including Cymbeline, King Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, King Henry V, King Henry VIII, King Richard II, King Richard III and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Before the Act of Union, the status of the Welsh in the kingdom of England had been anomalous … Thereafter, in the eyes of the law, the Welsh were English. Yet it would be equally valid to argue – as there was no longer any advantage in boasting of the condition of being English – that henceforth everyone living in Wales was Welsh, a principle which would be built upon over succeeding generations. (Davies 1993: 233)

233

Wales

For many Englishmen in the early modern period there were (at least) two ways of looking at Welshmen, and Shakespeare’s plays bear witness to this double perspective. Let us begin with positive representations of Wales and the Welsh, and we can use the Jacobean Union debate as a case study. ‘In the early seventeenth-century literature on Anglo-Scottish union,’ Levack writes, ‘the Welsh were frequently referred to as having become one people with the English’ (1987: 22). In his Ioiefvll and Blessed Revniting the two mighty & famous kingdomes, England & Scotland into their ancient name of great Brittaine, John Thornborough speaks of ‘Our Countrie men, & neighbors of Wales’ (1605: 43). The Welsh, according to Thornborough, are not only England’s ‘Countrie men’ but also their ‘neighbors’. Like ‘Othello the Moor of Venice’, this is an awkward phrase, for it implies that, on the one hand, the Welsh are of England and, on the other, outside England. Another pro-union pamphlet describes Wales’s incorporation as follows: Wales is Englished, a country whose riches did not woe vs, nor her power, nor the fertility of the soyle; but the discommodities that we might receiue by them whilest they were held as Aliens, beeing matter to feed discontented or ambitious plottes, this was the furthest and onely aduantage we expected, which since it lay within the power of our incorporating to cure, and that nature had performed halfe the worke, with the alliance of countries so neerly knit together vpon one continent, wee performed. (Cornwallis 1604: sig. D4v-E1r) For Cornwallis, England’s incorporation of Wales was mutually beneficial. Praise for the Welsh is not difficult to locate in Shakespeare’s plays. The Earl of Salisbury addresses the Welsh Captain as ‘thou trusty Welshman’ (R2 2.4.5). The Earl of Warwick speaks of Edward, Earl of March’s followers as ‘the loving Welshmen’ (3H6 2.1.180). In King Richard III, the Welsh are no longer on the king’s side; still, Sir Richard Ratcliffe speaks of ‘the hardy Welshmen’ (R3 4.3.47). And then there is King Henry V’s ‘countryman’ (4.7.96), Fluellen, who some critics represent as the ideal subservient colonial subject: ‘Fluellen figures the colonial subject who has internalized English values and subordinated his own provincial loyalties to service to [sic] the English nation-state’ (Highley 1997: 147). King Henry IV, Part 1’s representation of the Welsh Owen Glendower combines cultural stereotypes – Glendower is described as ‘irregular’ and ‘wild’ (1.1.40) – and contemporary reality in the form of Anglicized Welsh subjects: chiding Hotspur, Glendower states, ‘I can speak English, lord, as well as you, / For I was train’d up in the English court’ (3.1.116–17). Glendower, of course, can also speak Welsh, as the stage directions in Act 3, Scene 1 reveal: ‘Glendower speaks to her in Welsh, and she answers him in the same’. This is not the play’s only Welsh language moment, for this is followed by ‘The lady speaks in Welsh’; ‘The lady speaks again in Welsh’; and ‘Here the lady sings a Welsh song’. ‘The lady’ would most likely have been a boy actor, likely a boy who was fluent in Welsh. 234

Wales

Another way of looking at the Welsh from an English perspective in this period was to view them historically, keeping in mind the many years of Anglo-Welsh warfare. When King Richard III terms the Earl of Richmond ‘the Welshman’ (R3 4.4.476), he is using the term as an ethnic slur, not unlike Iago’s use of ‘the Moor’. King Henry IV, Part 1 represents a reversal of the ‘civilizing process’ as an effeminate Edmund Mortimer, the Earl of March, gives not only his love to a Welsh woman but also his tongue: ‘But I will never be a truant, love, / Till I have learned thy language’ (3.1.200–01). Earlier in the play King Henry IV receives the news of how Mortimer was captured and what happened to his English men: the noble Mortimer, Leading the men of Herefordshire to fight Against the irregular and wild Glendower, Was by the rude hands of that Welshman taken, A thousand of his people butchered, Upon whose dead corpse there was such misuse, Such beastly shameless transformation, By those Welshwomen done as may not be Without much shame retold or spoken of. (1H4 1.1.38–46) This passage probably comes closest to representing the Welsh in a manner not unlike early modern English depictions of the ‘wild Irish’. But by no means is this passage representative of the various inscriptions of Wales and Welsh men and women in Shakespeare’s plays. King Henry V’s depiction of the Welsh Captain Fluellen is positive if complex: an ostensibly dutiful subject whose malapropisms imbue the play with a critical perspective on the Monmouth-born King of England. ‘In the Britain of Cymbeline’, writes Marcus, ‘unlike the Britain of James I, Wales, or Cambria, is a separate country’ (1988: 134). Wales, or Cambria, is also presented as a safe haven from the incivility of Cymbeline’s court. (C) For an invaluable collection of essays on Shakespeare and Wales see Maley and Schwyzer (2010). For a survey of ‘Shakespeare’s Welshmen’, see Rees (1991). Highley’s (1997: 67–109) work on Wales attends to the representation of Glendower in King Henry IV, Part 1. Ivic (2010) considers the treatment of Wales in King Henry V, especially in relation to Speed’s map of Wales. Kerrigan’s (2008: 115–40) chapter on Wales and Jacobean drama includes discussion of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline within the context of the complex and often contradictory representation of Wales, with which the ‘positive qualities of ancient Britain were associated’ (117). Kerrigan eschews a simple and simplistic pro-/anti-Welsh/British binary in favour of a much more complex archipelagic model of literature, history, and politics. ‘The comic dialect Shakespeare invented for Fluellen and Parson Evans [MW] would be parroted by dozens of subsequent “stage Welshmen”, but none of Shakespeare’s own Welsh characters’, Maley and Schwyzer argue, ‘can be reduced to a mere ethnic stereotype’ (2010: 4). 235

Wales

Figure 7 John Speed, ‘Wales’, from The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London 1611–12). By permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Map Res 74, betw. pp. 99–100.

war see also civil war, Nine Years’ War, Wars of the Roses (A) Shakespeare’s plays, his history plays especially, but also his tragedies, incorporate a multitude of battle scenes. It is difficult to speak of a dominant attitude toward war, for the representation of war in the plays is complex and contradictory. (B) Shakespeare’s plays stage or report a plethora of wars from a variety of locations: across ancient and medieval Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), in Ireland, on the European continent, and, of course, in the ancient world (including such famous battles as Actium, Corioles, Philippi and Troy). Amongst the epithets to describe war in the plays are ‘cruel’ (Cor 1.3.14; TC Pro.5), ‘trenching’ (1H4 1.1.7), ‘impious’ (H5 3.3.15), ‘dreadful’ (3H6 1.1.193, 3.3.259), ‘fell’ (3H6 2.5.13), ‘dogged’ (KJ 4.3.149), ‘wild’ (KJ 5.2.74), ‘bleeding’ (R2 3.3.94) and, in more than one play, ‘bloody’. Many characters who engage in warfare are represented as heroic, noble and brave. In short, they are recipients of the highest praise; moreover, they are rewarded for their heroic actions. Titus Andronicus opens with a celebration of the titular character, who is about to return to Rome from his victorious battle against the Goths: ‘A nobler man, a 236

war

braver warrior,’ declares Titus’s brother Marcus, ‘Lives not this day within the city walls’ (1.1.25–6). ‘He was a thing of blood’ (2.2.109) becomes something of an epithet for Coriolanus, who is covered in blood ‘from face to foot’ (108). Brave and bloody Macbeth is praised by the Captain and by his king at the play’s opening: Doubtful it stood; As two spent swimmers, that do cling together And choke their art. The merciless Macdonwald (Worthy to be a rebel, for to that The multiplying villainies of nature Do swarm upon him) from the western isles Of Kernes and Gallowglasses is supplied; And Fortune, on his damned quarrel smiling, Show’d like a rebel’s whore: but all’s too weak; For brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name), Disdaining Fortune, with his brandish’d steel, Which smok’d with bloody execution, Like Valour’s minion, carv’d out his passage, Till he fac’d the slave; Which ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him, Till he unseam’d him from the nave to th’ chops, And fix’d his head upon our battlements. (1.2.7–23) Duncan’s pithy response speaks volumes: ‘O valiant cousin! worthy gentleman!’ (24). Duncan responds to the Captain’s account of Macbeth’s success in battle by awarding ‘noble Macbeth’ (1.1.68) the title of Thane of Cawdor. However much characters such as Titus, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and even Octavius Caesar are valorized for their military prowess, Shakespeare’s plays (as the fate of these characters suggests) often provide a deep and critical interrogation of war and a warrior ethos, attending to the war’s effect on individuals and society. Consider, for example, a play that is often regarded as Shakespeare’s most patriotic, King Henry V. This play is very much a war play, for it has been read as enthusiastically staging England’s fifteenth-century victory, led by ‘the warlike Harry’ (Pro.5), over the French. In many ways, the French war is the crucible from which a sense of Englishness emerges in this play, a play in which the words ‘England’, ‘English’ and ‘Englishman’ appear more often than in any other of Shakespeare’s plays. It has been suggested that King Henry V ‘is premised on the consolidation of national identity through violence against foreign enemies’ (Howard and Rackin 1997: 4). When, in another play, Richard, Duke of York speaks of ‘this warlike isle’ (2H6 1.1.123), he is constructing a sense of Englishness based not only on geography but also on military aggression. English national identity owed much to a long war with Catholic Spain, culminating in English victory in 1588 over the Spanish Armada. Just as the English victory over the Spanish 237

war

Armada was represented as miraculous and providential, so is the English victory over the French: O God, thy arm was here; And not to us but to thy arm alone Ascribe we all. (4.8.105–7) However, numerous scenes in the play undercut the celebration of England’s and Henry’s military exploits. The Chorus’s ‘Now all the youth of England are on fire’ (2.Chor.1) is belied by the ensuing scene, which presents the mercenary Bardolph, Nym and Pistol as solely interested in ‘profits’ (2.1.111). Similarly, Henry’s rousing ‘Once more unto the breach’ (3.1.1) finds its parodic echo in the static Bardolph’s ‘On, on, on, on, on, to the breach, to the breach!’ (3.2.1–2). Arguably the play’s most critical moment occurs when a disguised King Henry, who is attempting to motivate his soldiers, finds himself instead arguing with one. Again, the Chorus presents Henry in a favourable light: For forth he goes and visits all his host, Bids them good morrow with a modest smile, And calls them brothers, friends and countrymen. (4.Chor.32–4) But the ensuing scene attends more to the grim reality of war, especially from the perspective of a common soldier. Indeed, Williams’s account of war is very much at odds with Henry’s and the Chorus’s mystifying rhetoric: But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in battle shall join together at the latter day and cry all ‘We died at such a place,’ some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now if these men do not die well it will be a black matter for the King, that led them to it, who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection. (4.1.132–44) As this powerful counterstatement on war attests, Shakespeare’s plays by no means uncritically incorporate national history and myths. The sense that England’s elite view common soldiers as pawns in their political struggles is broached in King Richard II. Consider, for example, the following lines: Henry Bolingbroke On both his knees doth kiss King Richard’s hand, And sends allegiance and true faith of heart

238

Wars of the Roses

To his most royal person; hither come Even at his feet to lay my arms and power, Provided that my banishment repeal’d And lands restor’d again be freely granted; If not, I’ll use the advantage of my power And lay the summer’s dust with showers of blood Rain’d from the wounds of slaughtered Englishmen – The which, how far off from the mind of Bolingbroke It is such crimson tempest should bedrench The fresh green lap of fair King Richard’s land, My stooping duty tenderly shall show. (3.3.35–48) Although Bolingbroke’s words are spoken as a threat to prompt Richard to restore the banished noble to his proper status, his casual reference to ‘slaughtered Englishmen’ reveals little concern for the ‘land’. (C) For general accounts of war in Shakespeare see Meron (2000), Foakes (2002), especially pp. 83–106, and Barker (2007). For an astute reading of war, violence and ideology in Macbeth see Sinfield (1992: 95–108). On King Henry V and the concept of the just war tradition see Pugliatti (2010: 197–228). For Greenblatt, King Henry V is ‘the charismatic leader who purges the commonwealth of its incorrigibles and forges the martial national state’ (1988: 56). For Shapiro (2005: 97–118), H5 ‘wasn’t a pro-war play or an anti-war play but a going-to-war play’ (104). Wars of the Roses see also civil war (A) A term used to designate the fifteenth-century dynastic struggles fought between the houses of Lancaster (red rose) and York (white rose): in King Richard III Clarence speaks of ‘the wars of York and Lancaster’ (1.4.15). Whilst the fifteenth century witnessed much conflict between royal families, the designation Wars of the Roses applies to the period of the Lancastrian Henry VI ’s rule to the defeat of the Yorkist Richard III (in terms of Shakespeare’s plays, from King Henry VI, Part 1 through to King Richard III, so four plays in total, often referred to as the first tetralogy). The reign of King Henry VII , the first Tudor monarch, therefore, marks the end of the Wars of the Roses. (B) According to Rackin, the ‘wars of the Roses, which had occupied much of the preceding century, destroying families, devastating the land, and disrupting ancient allegiances, made the study of recent English history a pressing concern for a nation that wished to preserve the peace and political stability of the present and to avoid the mistakes that had led to the insecurity of the past’ (1990: 3). If the Wars of the Roses existed in collective memory as a history lesson, they, paradoxically, served as an instance for forging a unified sense of Englishness. Shakespeare’s King Henry VI, Part 1 inaugurates the dramatic focus of the Wars of the Roses. ‘Prosper this realm’, declares Bedford at the play’s opening, ‘keep it from

239

Wars of the Roses

civil broils’ (1.1.53), but what for the Elizabethan playwright were historic wars between the Lancastrians and Yorkists are about to take centre stage. In Act 2, Scene 4 an argument over a case at law leads to a division amongst the English forces in France, with Richard Plantagenet forcing the issue by declaring, ‘If he suppose that I have pleaded truth, / From off this briar pluck a white rose with me’ (29–30). Somerset, Plantagenet’s antagonist, responds: Let him that is no coward nor no flatterer, But dare maintain the party of the truth, Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me. (31–3) Whilst other characters assert their allegiance to the opposing camps (later in the play, King Henry VI pledges his allegiance to the Lancastrians), the scene concludes with Warwick’s ominous prophesy: And here I prophesy: this brawl today, Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden, Shall send between the red rose and the white A thousand souls to death and deadly night. (124–7) What follows in the ensuing three plays – King Henry VI, Part 3 and King Richard III in particular – can be summed up by the numerous references to ‘blood’ and ‘bloody’: both plays contain just under forty uses of ‘blood’ (second only to King John). ‘Butcher’ and related words – ‘butchers’, ‘butcher’d’, ‘butcheries’ – also dominate these two plays. A dominant imagining of the Wars of the Roses in the first tetralogy is as fratricidal warfare, as is evident in the Duchess of York’s powerful lines: Accursed and unquiet wrangling days, How many of you have mine eyes beheld! My husband lost his life to get the crown, And often up and down my sons were toss’d For me to joy and weep their gain and loss; And being seated, and domestic broils Clean over-blown, themselves, the conquerors, Make war upon themselves, brother to brother, Blood to blood, self against self. O, preposterous And frantic outrage, end thy damned spleen, Or let me die, to look on death no more. (R3 2.4.55–65) As much as these plays lament the brutal civil wars fought between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists, the final lines of King Richard III perform crucial cultural and ideological work; indeed, Richmond’s closing speech supplies a fine instance of closure: 240

welfare

Inter their bodies as becomes their births. Proclaim a pardon to the soldiers fled That in submission will return to us; And then, as we have ta’en the sacrament, We will unite the white rose and the red. Smile, heaven, upon this fair conjunction, That long have frown’d upon their enmity. What traitor hears me and says not Amen? England hath long been mad, and scarr’d herself: The brother blindly shed the brother’s blood; The father rashly slaughter’d his own son; The son, compell’d, been butcher to the sire. All this divided York and Lancaster – Divided, in their dire division. O now let Richmond and Elizabeth, The true succeeders of each royal House, By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together, And let their heirs, God, if Thy will be so, Enrich the time to come with smooth-fac’d peace, With smiling plenty, and fair prosperous days. Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord, That would reduce these bloody days again, And make poor England weep in streams of blood. Let them not live to taste this land’s increase, That would with treason wound this fair land’s peace. Now civil wounds are stopp’d; peace lives again. That she may long live here, God say Amen. (5.8.15–41) What is so remarkable about this passage is not its proclamation of concord, peace and unity, but the way in which it excludes those who are unwilling to subscribe to Richmond’s national covenant. For those willing to subscribe, pardons are on offer; those who resist are labelled traitors. Inclusion in the nation is conditional. (C) On the trauma of the Wars of the Roses, see Ivic (2013a). welfare The OED defines welfare as ‘[t]he state or condition of doing or being well; well-being, prosperity, success; the health, happiness, and fortunes of a person or group’. When, at the end of Titus Andronicus, Lucius, one of the few characters left standing, proclaims that he has ‘preserved [Rome’s] welfare in [his] blood’ (5.3.109), his use of ‘welfare’ signifies the well-being of Rome, in particular its citizens. Similarly, Warwick’s ‘Alas, how should you govern any kingdom / That know not how to … study for the people’s welfare’ (3H6 4.3.35–9), which is directed at King Edward IV, is offered

241

welfare

as a critique of the monarch’s self-interest and disregard for his subjects. When, in reference to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, Queen Margaret says to King Henry, ‘Take heed, my lord; the welfare of us all / Hangs on the cutting short that fraudful man’ (2H6 3.1.81–2), the suggestion, especially because of ‘us all’, is that Margaret has the wellbeing of a large group – the nation, say – in mind, a suggestion reinforced by the fact that these words are pronounced in Parliament. However, Margaret’s ‘all’ is less inclusive, for it refers to those select few who are plotting Gloucester’s death. Thus, ‘welfare’ is used here ironically but significantly. Welsh see Wales white Female beauty in Elizabethan England was idealized in the form of fair skin, blonde hair and blue eyes, as so many Elizabethan sonnet sequences bear witness. Attending to blackness and economics, Hall traces ‘a poetics of color in which whiteness is established as a valued goal’ (1995: 66). In describing his ‘mistress’, Shakespeare says, ‘If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun’ (Son 130), which can be read as a challenge to, a critique or parody of dominant discourses on female beauty. Both black and white, or blackness and whiteness, are highly significant in Othello. Iago’s ‘an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe’ (1.1.87–8) bears witness to the ways in which a white–black opposition is bound up with race and gender in this play. Hall’s point that ‘ “white” is attached to values – purity, virginity, and innocence – represented by (or notably absent in) women’ (1995: 9) is particularly apt for Othello. According to Neill, the ‘idea of Europeanness as a form of group identity delimited by color’ (2000: 277) begins to emerge in the early modern period, especially as voyagers and merchants come into contact with distant lands, cultures and peoples. Royster (2000) explores racial categories in Titus Andronicus, focusing specifically on whiteness. Hall (1995) offers incisive commentary on whiteness, calling attention to ‘a racial hierarchy in which blackness and black men serve to heighten the whiteness of Europeans’ (6). wild (A) Referring to a place, this word includes the following meanings: uncultivated or uninhabited; referring to a person it includes such meanings as primitive, uncivilized, savage, devoid of manners and also rebellious. (B) In terms of place, most references are to woods and forests: ‘wild wood’ (AYL 5.4.157), ‘forests wild’ (MND 2.1.25). The use of ‘wild’ in reference to people, whether a specific person or a collective, is not infrequent in Shakespeare’s plays. When Banquo and Macbeth first come across the three witches, Banquo hails them as ‘wild’: What are these, So wither’d and so wild in their attire,

242

wild

That look not like th’inhabitants o’th’earth, And yet are on’t? Live you? or are you aught That man may question? You seem to understand me, By each at once her choppy finger laying Upon her skinny lips: you should be women, And yet your beards forbid me to interpret That you are so. (Mac 1.3.39–47) ‘Of strange aspect; fantastic in appearance’ is the definition that the OED gives this line (citing it as the first instance of this particular meaning). What, for Banquo, renders the witches ‘wild’ or strange is their otherness, an otherness marked by dress, appearance and, crucially, their indecipherable gender. The sense here is more of wonder on Banquo’s part rather than contempt. Westmoreland speaks of ‘the irregular and wild Glendower’ (1H4 1.1.40). The OED cites this line in support of the following definition of irregular: ‘Of persons: Not conforming or obedient to rule, law, or moral principle; lawless, disorderly’. Given that one meaning for wild is ‘not accepting, or resisting, the constituted government; rebellious’, ‘wild’ and ‘irregular’ may function as synonyms here. If so, Westmoreland’s ‘irregular and wild’ amplifies the non-English Glendower’s lawlessness. Also, precisely because Glendower is Welsh, ‘wild’ could reflect an English attitude to Wales as a site of incivility, as the larger context of this passage suggests: But yesternight, when all athwart there came A post from Wales, loaden with heavy news, Whose worst was that the noble Mortimer, Leading the men of Herefordshire to fight Against the irregular and wild Glendower, Was by the rude hands of that Welshman taken, A thousand of his people butchered, Upon whose dead corpse there was such misuse, Such beastly shameless transformation, By those Welshwomen done, as may not be Without much shame retold or spoken of. (1.1.36–46) As the words ‘rude’, ‘butchered’ and ‘beastly’ reveal, ‘wild’ has as much to do with barbarousness and savagery as it does with lawlessness. The source for this passage is Holinshed’s The first and second volumes of Chronicles (1587): For the dead bodies of the Englishmen, being aboue a thousand lieng vpon the ground imbrued in their owne bloud, was a sight (a man would thinke) greeuous to looke vpon, and so farre from exciting and stirring vp affections of crueltie; that it should rather haue mooued the beholders to commiserartion and mercie: yet did 243

wild

the women of Wales cut off their priuities, and put one part thereof into the mouthes of euerie dead man, in such sort that the cullions hoong downe to their chins; and not so contented, they did cut off their noses and thrust them into their tailes as they laie on the ground mangled and defaced. (528) Compared to the historiographical source, Shakespeare’s version of this event is remarkable less for the information that it withholds and more for how it privileges a rhetoric of civility over the relaying of information. In his The boke named the Gouernour (1537), Thomas Elyot considers contemporary ‘Irysshe men or Scottes’ as ‘of the same rudenes and wilde disposition, that the Suises and Britons were in the tyme of Cesar’ (38). Another wild character in King Henry IV, Part 1 is Prince Hal, at least from the perspective of King Henry V: in the latter play King Henry, referring to his Eastcheap exploits, speaks of ‘our wilder days’ when he gave himself over to ‘barbarous licence’ (1.2.268, 272). In King Henry V the Dauphin uses ‘wild’ to refer to the English or Anglo-Saxons at the time of the Norman Invasion, and in doing so posits a civil–savage opposition between the French and the English: O Dieu vivant! Shall a few sprays of us, The emptying of our fathers’ luxury, Our scions, put in wild and savage stock, Spirt up so suddenly into the clouds And overlook their grafters? (3.5.5–9) Again, ‘wild’ and ‘savage’ are being used as synonyms, which works to reinforce the cultural superiority expressed by the Dauphin. The concept of wild in relation to both a people and a place is particularly evident in the many references in the early modern period to the ‘wild Irish’. Edmund Spenser’s prose dialogue A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596) uses ‘the very wild Irish’ and ‘the wild Irish’ (1970: 63, 30, 64, 151) in the manner of an epithet. John Speed’s 1612 map of Ireland (see Figure 5) situates images of a ‘wilde’ Irish man and a ‘wilde’ Irish woman at the base of a cultural and social ordering of Ireland’s inhabitants. The following passage, in which Richard, Duke of York speaks of having seduced the Kentishman Jack Cade to make a commotion, is revealing: In Ireland have I seen this stubborn Cade Oppose himself against a troop of kerns, And fought so long till that his thighs with darts Were almost like a sharp-quilled porpentine; And in the end, being rescued, I have seen Him caper upright like a wild Morisco. (2H6 3.1.359–64)

244

wilderness

The simile ‘like a wild Morisco’ likely alludes to Morris dancing, so the adjective comments on the style of the dance. However, Morisco’s association with Moors and the fact that this dance occurred in Ireland invests the adjective with specific cultural significance (and it may also anticipate Cade’s rebelliousness). (C) See Baker (1992), Highley (1997) and Roberts (1991). wilderness (A) This word has a variety of meanings in the early modern period, but the term predominantly refers to wild or uncultivated land, in particular land that is without human inhabitants. (B) Shakespeare’s use of wilderness is generally negative, whether signifying a desolate place or a place lacking civility or opposed to civil society. Wilderness as designating an unpopulated space is evident in Suffolk’s lament to his lover, Queen Margaret: Thus is poor Suffolk ten times banished, Once by the King, and three times thrice by thee. ’Tis not the land I care for, wert thou thence: A wilderness is populous enough, So Suffolk had thy heavenly company. For where thou art, there is the world itself, With every several pleasure in the world; And where thou art not, desolation. (2H6 3.2.357–64) For Suffolk, the loneliness and isolation of the wilderness would be cancelled out by the presence of his lover. As Suffolk’s use of the word attests, references to wilderness in Shakespeare’s plays are often, but not always, abstract. Titus, for instance, states: ‘For now I stand as one upon a rock / Environed with a wilderness of sea’ (Tit 3.1.94–5), a line which the OED lists under ‘A waste or desolate region of any kind, e.g. of open sea, of air’. In the same scene Titus uses this word with much more specificity when he speaks of Rome as ‘a wilderness of tigers’ (3.1.54). The OED cites this line from the play in support of wilderness as a ‘mingled, confused, or vast assemblage or collection of persons or things’. But Rome is a wilderness in another sense: for at this point in the play it is becoming clear to Titus that Rome is far from a site of civility; rather, it is given over to incivility and savagery. Similarly, in Lucrece we learn of the heroine’s vain resistance to the tyrant Sextus Tarquinius: While she, the picture of pure piety, Like a white hind under the gripe’s sharp claws, Pleads in a wilderness where are no laws, To the rough beast that knows no gentle right, Nor aught obeys but his foul appetite. (542–6)

245

wilderness

Here the literal meaning of ‘wilderness’ is ‘wild or uncultivated region or tract of land, uninhabited, or inhabited only by wild animals’ (OED 1.b); however, the figurative meaning touches on wilderness as a lawless place. Chiding his wayward son, King Henry IV invokes ‘wilderness’ as the end result of a socio-political degeneration: a slide from a ‘kingdom’ (albeit one at ‘civil blows’) to a ‘wilderness’, meaning a return to a state of incivility and lawlessness: O my poor kingdom, sick with civil blows! When that my care could not withhold thy riots, What wilt thou do when riot is thy care? O, thou wilt be a wilderness again. Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants! (2H4 4.5.133–7) In Shakespeare’s plays a real or imagined ‘wilderness’ is often invoked as the antithesis of civilization. (C) See Rooks (1993), Loomba (2002: 75–90) Roberts (1991) and Giddens (2010–11). wound (A) Wounds and scars (received and inflicted) abound in Shakespeare’s plays, actual wounds as well as expected, imagined and symbolic ones. Wounds have a variety of significations depending on context: a wound could be a sign of honour or shame; wounds can play a crucial role in forging individual and group identities; moreover, wounds can be a sign that something is rotten in the state of the nation. Wounds certainly occupy an invaluable place in discourse on nationhood. (B) Coriolanus, in which the words ‘wounded’ and ‘wounds’ appear more than any other of Shakespeare’s play, provides a sustained reflection on what, in another play, are termed ‘honour-owing wounds’ (H5 4.6.9) – in the eponymous hero’s case, wounds inflicted and received both for and against his country and foes. To Menenius Agrippa’s ‘Is he not wounded? He was wont to come home wounded’, Coriolanus’s anxious and caring wife, Virgilia, naturally replies, ‘Oh no, no, no’. Coriolanus’s honour-loving mother, Volumnia, on the other hand, replies, ‘Oh, he is wounded; I thank the gods for’t’. To which Menenius adds, ‘So do I too, if it be not too much. Brings a victory in his pocket? The wounds become him’ (2.1.117–22). For Volumnia and Menenius, wounds received in victorious battle for one’s country are to be praised; they signal one out as heroic and as a dutiful servant of the state. Wounds, as one Roman citizen terms them, are ‘marks of merit,’ (2.3.162). Volumnia’s ‘He had, before this last expedition, twenty-five wounds upon him’ (2.1.153–4) is offered not as a lament or critique but rather in celebration of her son. Given Coriolanus’s unwillingness to reveal his wounds before the people of Rome, wounds are, however, anything but simple and straightforward in this play. In many ways, Coriolanus takes pride in his wounds, but he regards them as ‘marks of merit’ for himself, his family, and, perhaps, his social equals, as the following passage attests (‘them’ referring to the people of Rome): 246

wound

To brag unto them, thus I did, and thus, Show them th’unaching scars which I should hide, As if I had receiv’d them for the hire Of their breath only! (2.2.146–9) In his refusal to show his scars to the people of Rome, Coriolanus gives voice to a serious disdain for ‘them’, as is evident in his substitution of ‘breath’ for ‘voice’. Whatever his attitude to Rome, Coriolanus is no nationalist. Put another way, unlike King Henry V, Coriolanus is unwilling and unable to appropriate the rhetoric of nationhood to his political advantage. A much more politically and ideologically astute figure is Julius Caesar’s Mark Antony, who uses the lifeless body of Caesar as a powerful prop to turn the people of Rome against Brutus and his fellow conspirators: I tell you that which you yourselves do know, Show you sweet Caesar’s wounds, poor poor dumb mouths, And bid them speak for me. But were I Brutus, And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony Would ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue In every wound of Caesar that should move The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny. (3.2.217–23) Despite Antony’s claims, these ‘dumb mouths’ certainly have ‘the power of speech, / To stir men’s blood’ (215–16). In fact, Antony makes brilliant use of Caesar’s clothing as a prop, just as he does of Caesar’s about-to-be unveiled body: Kind souls, what weep you when you but behold Our Caesar’s vesture wounded? Look you here, Here is himself, marred as you see with traitors. (193–5) Even in Act 5, just before the battle at Philippi, Octavius Caesar is still harping on ‘Caesar’s three and thirty wounds’ (5.1.50). The wounded body of Caesar, then, serves to render, at least after Antony’s oration to his fellow countrymen, Brutus and his fellow conspirators ‘butchers’ rather than ‘sacrificers’ (2.1.165). At the opening of Macbeth, the titular character and Banquo are lauded for their ability to inflict and receive wounds, as is the wounded Captain who reports of the battle: If I say sooth, I must report they were As cannons overcharg’d with double cracks; So they Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe: Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds, 247

wound

Or memorize another Golgotha, I cannot tell – But I am faint, my gashes cry for help. (1.2.36–43) To which Duncan replies, ‘So well thy words become thee, as thy wounds: / They smack of honour both’ (44–5). To quote Sinfield, Macbeth and Banquo perform ‘violence the state considers legitimate’ (1992: 95). Not unlike Antony, King Henry V enlists the affective power of scars and wounds in his public orations. Henry’s speech before the battle of Agincourt invokes ‘wounds’ in relation to a community forging memory ritual: This day is called the feast of Crispian. He that outlives this day and comes safe home Will stand a-tiptoe when the day is named And rouse him at the name of Crispian. He that shall live this day and see old age Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say ‘Tomorrow is Saint Crispian.’ Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’ (4.3.40–8) But what of those without wounds? Henry’s speech is prompted by Westmorland’s wish that more troops were in France to support the war, and Henry’s reply to Westmorland – ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’ (60) – imagines a small, exclusive community. Those without scars will be excluded. In King Henry VI, Part 2, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester offers another instance in which scars function as political capital: Brave peers of England, pillars of the state, To you Duke Humphrey must unload his grief, Your grief, the common grief of all the land. What! Did my brother Henry spend his youth, His valour, coin and people, in the wars? Did he so often lodge in open field, In winter’s cold and summer’s parching heat, To conquer France, his true inheritance? And did my brother Bedford toil his wits To keep by policy what Henry got? Have you yourselves, Somerset, Buckingham, Brave York, Salisbury, and victorious Warwick, Received deep scars in France and Normandy? (1.1.73–85) 248

wound

The attempt here is to interpellate his fellow English nobles, although, ultimately, Gloucester is unsuccessful. Because they depict aristocratic feuding and civil war, Shakespeare’s English history plays often reflect on wounds inflicted upon the nation, what the Earl of Richmond calls ‘civil wounds’ (R3 5.5.60). ‘Henry’s wounds’ (R3 1.2.55) – that is the corpse of King Henry VI – symbolize a nation scarred by civil war. Not surprisingly, King Richard III concludes with a warning against civil war, with Richmond proclaiming, ‘Let them not live to taste this land’s increase / That would with treason wound this fair land’s peace’ (5.5.58–9). As much as the histories represent self-inflicted communal wounds, an accompanying rhetoric of English assertiveness serves to forge a sense of national identity. Philip the Bastard offers one of the finest examples of such rhetoric: This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself. (KJ 5.7.112–14) A similar sentiment is pronounced by Posthumus Leonatus, who, upon returning to his native Britain amongst the invading Romans, says: I am brought hither Among th’Italian gentry, and to fight Against my lady’s kingdom: ’tis enough That, Britain, I have kill’d thy mistress: peace, I’ll give no wound to thee. (Cym 5.1.17–21) The sense of wounding one’s own homeland is repeatedly represented as unnatural. Indeed, Joan Puzel’s appeal to the Duke of Burgundy, who has been fighting for the English against his native France, makes explicit the unnaturalness of Burgundy’s actions: Look on thy country, look on fertile France, And see the cities and the towns defaced By wasting ruin of the cruel foe, As looks the mother on her lowly babe When death doth close his tender-dying eyes. See, see the pining malady of France, Behold the wounds, the most unnatural wounds, Which thou thyself hast given her woeful breast. (1H6 3.3.44–51) Burgundy’s unnatural wounding of his native land is reinforced by Joan’s figuring of her and Burgundy’s ‘country’ as a mother to her children–subjects. 249

wound

In King Henry VI, Part 2, we witness the intersection of political and medical discourse: Great lords, from Ireland am I come amain To signify that rebels there are up And put the Englishmen unto the sword. Send succours, lords, and stop the rage betime, Before the wound do grow uncurable; For, being green, there is great hope of help. (2H6 3.1.281–6) A counter-discourse to the warrior’s valorized rhetoric of scars and wounds can also be traced in Shakespeare’s plays. A prime example is Falstaff’s response to Prince Hal’s claim that he killed Hotspur himself: Didst thou? Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying! I grant you I was down, and out of breath, and so was he, but we rose both at an instant, and fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock. If I may be believed, so: if not, let them that should reward valour bear the sin upon their own heads. I’ll take it upon my death, I gave him this wound in the thigh; if the man were alive, and would deny it, ‘zounds, I would make him eat a piece of my sword. (1H4 5.4.143–51) This is, of course, a lie, or at least a partial truth: Falstaff did wound a dead Hotspur. It is hard not to read Falstaff’s lines as a parody of the warrior ethos that pervades the history plays. A similarly parodic scene occurs in King Henry V when Fluellen offers Pistol a ‘Welsh correction’ (5.1.76–7): ‘I say I will make him eat some part of my leek, or I will peat his pate four days. – Bite, I pray you; it is good for your green wound and your ploody coxcomb’ (5.1.39–42). In the wake of Henry’s ‘Crispin’s day’ speech, with its references to scars and wounds, Pistol’s ‘green wound’ unsettles the play’s nationalist rhetoric by staging such unbrotherly action. In reference to King Henry’s ‘Crispin’s day’ speech, Howard and Rackin ask ‘where are the woman [sic] in this male fantasy of cross-class brotherhood?’ (1997: 4). We might also ask where are the scarred, wounded women in Shakespeare? Two examples provide a partial answer to this question. After having been raped by Tarquin, Lucrece speaks of her ‘unseen shame’, her ‘crest-wounding private scar!’ (Luc 827–8). In Lucrece’s eyes, rape has scarred her, and, it seems, more importantly, her rape has wounded the honour of her husband, Collatine. Julius Caesar’s Portia provides another instance of exclusion of women from the public realm of a male community. Attempting to persuade her husband Brutus to confide to her, Portia states: If this were true, then should I know this secret. I grant I am a woman: but withal A woman that Lord Brutus took to wife.

250

wound

I grant I am a woman: but withal A woman well reputed, Cato’s daughter. Think you I am no stronger than my sex Being so fathered and so husbanded? Tell me your counsels. I will not disclose ‘em. I have made strong proof of my constancy, Giving myself a voluntary wound, Here in the thigh. Can I bear that with patience And not my husband’s secrets? (JC 2.1.290–301) Because Portia cannot receive wounds in the manner that male warriors did in ancient Rome, she must resort to a self-inflicted wound to stake her claim to the androcentric concept of Romanness. But as the limited presence Portia (and Caesar’s wife Calphurnia) have in this male-dominated play, not even ‘a voluntary wound’ leads to Portia’s inclusion in Rome’s all-male affairs. (C) Kahn (1997) offers a rich account of wounds in Shakespeare’s Roman plays. Marshall attends to wounds in Julius Caesar (1994) and Coriolanus (1996).

251

252

Y yoke (A) Used figuratively to signify servitude, subjection and oppression often at the hands of a tyrant. (B) Shakespeare’s use of yoke conveys both positive and negative senses of the word. When used positively, it is spoken by those in power or those newly victorious, as is evident in Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596) by an English speaker in reference to the unruly Irish: ‘being a people altogether stubborn and untamed, and if [the Irish] were tamed, yet now lately having quite shaken off their yoke and broken the bands of their obedience’ (1970: 4). The opening scene of Titus Andronicus presents a more fortunate conqueror in the figure of Titus: Romans, make way: the good Andronicus, Patron of virtue, Rome’s best champion, Successful in the battles that he fights, With honour and with fortune is returned From where he circumscribed with his sword And brought to yoke the enemies of Rome. (1.1.67–72) In these lines, the Roman Captain hails the conquering Titus’s defeat of Rome’s enemies, the Goths. When King Henry IV speaks of reducing ‘rebels’ to ‘the yoke of government’ (2H4 4.4.9–10) the noun is synonymous with legitimate control. But ‘yoke’ is also a term used by those who are subject to power, and often its use serves to expose illegitimate or tyrannous rule. Describing Scotland under the regicide Macbeth’s rule, Malcolm says, ‘I think our country sinks beneath the yoke’ (Mac 4.3.39). Brutus laments the fact that Romans find themselves under the ‘yoke’ of a monarchical Julius Caesar: Let it be who it is: for Romans now Have thews and limbs like to their ancestors: But woe the while, our fathers’ minds are dead, And we are governed with our mothers’ spirits: Our yoke and sufferance show us womanish. (JC 1.3.80–4) In instances such as this passage, the invocation of ‘yoke’ serves to incite political resistance. Compounding Brutus’s lament is his representation of an effeminate Rome 253

yoke

under Caesar, which bears witness to the crucial role that gender ideology plays in the formation of collective identities and political movements. Northumberland figures resistance to King Richard as ‘shak[ing] off our slavish yoke’ (R2 2.1.291). And in reference to King Richard III ’s rule, Richmond’s invocation of ‘yoke’ frames Richard’s rule as tyrannous whilst simultaneously forging a bond amongst those who resist Richard: ‘Fellows in arms, and my most loving friends, / Bruised underneath the yoke of tyranny’ (R3 5.2.1–2). In reference to Julius Caesar’s ‘ambition’ and Roman calls for Britain to pay Rome a tribute, Cymbeline says: You must know, Till the injurious Romans did extort This tribute from us, we were free. Caesar’s ambition, Which swell’d so much that it did almost stretch The sides o’th’ world, against all colours here Did put the yoke upon’s: which to shake off Becomes a warlike people, whom we reckon Ourselves to be. (3.1.47–54) These lines, too, evince the formation of a collective identity: the act of shaking off the Roman yoke forges a group identity among the ancient Britains, who come to define themselves as ‘a warlike people’.

254

Bibliography

Editions of Shakespeare Clark, Sandra and Pamela Mason, eds, Macbeth (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2015). Drakakis, John, ed., The Merchant of Venice (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010). Foakes, R. A., ed., King Lear (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997). Hinman, Charlton, ed., The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968). Holland, Peter, ed., Coriolanus (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2013). Honigmann, E. A. J., ed., Othello, rev. ed. (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2016). Jowett, John, ed., Sir Thomas More (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011). Proudfoot, Richard, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan, eds, The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, rev. ed. (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011). Taylor, Gary, ed., Henry V (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Vaughan, Virginia Mason and Alden T. Vaughan, eds, The Tempest (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011). Weis, René, ed., Romeo and Juliet (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2012).

Primary sources Abbot, George, A briefe description of the whole worlde wherein are particularly described all the monarchies, empires, and kingdomes of the same, with their seuerall titles and situations thereunto adioyning (London, 1599). Abbot, George, A briefe description of the whole world Wherein is particularly described all the monarchies, empires and kingdomes of the same, with their academies. As also their severall titles and situations thereunto adioyning (London, 1636). Africanus, Leo, A geographical historie of Africa (London, 1600). Albott, Robert, Wits theater of the little world (London, 1599). Ayscu, Edward, A Historie Contayning the Warres, Treatises, Marriages, betweene England and Scotland (London, 1607). Bacon, Francis, The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon, ed. by James Spedding, vol. 3 (London, 1890). Boemus, Joannes, The fardle of facions conteining the aunciente maners, customes, and lawes, of the peoples enhabiting the two partes of the earth, called Affrike and Asia (London, 1555). Boorde, Andrew, The fyrst boke of the introduction of knowledge (London, 1555). Camden, William, Britannia siue Florentissimorum regnorum, Angliae, Scotiae, Hiberniae, et insularum adiacentium ex intima antiquitate chorographica descriptio (London, 1586). Camden, William, The historie of the most renowned and victorious princesse Elizabeth, trans. by Robert Norton, 4 vols (London, 1630). Carpenter, Nathanael, Geography Delineated Forth in Two Bookes (Oxford, 1625). Contarini, Gasparo, The commonwealth and gouernment of Venice (London, 1599). Cornwallis, William, The Miracvlovs and Happie Union of England and Scotland; by how admirable meanes it is effected; how profitable to both Nations, and how free of any inconuenience either past, present, or to be discerned (London, 1604). 255

Bibliography

Daniel, Samuel, The ciuile wars betweene the howses of Lancaster and Yorke corrected and continued (London, 1609). Davies, John, A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued [and] Brought Under Obedience of the Crown of England Until the Beginning of His Majesty’s Happy Reign, ed. by James P. Myers, Jr. (Washington DC : The Catholic University of America Press, 1988). Dekker, Thomas, The wonderfull yeare (London, 1603). Donne, John, The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. by John T. Shawcross (New York: Anchor, 1967). Elyot, Thomas, The boke named the Gouernour (London, 1537). Ford, John, ’Tis pitty shee’s a whore (London, 1633). Hakluyt, Richard, The principal nauigations, voyages, traffiques and discoueries of the English nation made by sea or ouer-land, to the remote and farthest distant quarters of the earth, at any time within the compasse of these 1600. Yeres (London, 1599–1600). Hall, Edward, The Vnion of the two noble and illustre families of Lancastre & Yorke, beyng long in continuall discension for the croune of this noble realme, with al the actes done in both the tymes of the Princes, bothe of the one linage & of the other, beginnyng at the tyme of kyng Henry the fowerth, the first aucthor of this devision, and so successiuely proceadyng to the reigne of the high and prudent Prince kyng Henry the eyght, the indubitate flower and very heire of both the saied linages (London, 1548). Hayward, John, A Treatise of Vnion of the two Realmes of England and Scotland (London, 1604). Holinshed, Raphael, The firste volume of the chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande conteyning the description and chronicles of England, from the first inhabiting vnto the conquest: the description and chronicles of Scotland, from the first original of the Scottes nation till the yeare of our Lorde 1571: the description and chronicles of Yrelande, likewise from the first originall of that nation untill the yeare 1571 (London, 1577). Holinshed, Raphael, The first and second volumes of Chronicles comprising 1 The description and historie of England, 2 The description and historie of Ireland, 3 The description and historie of Scotland (London, 1587). Hughes, Paul L. and James F. Larkin, eds, Stuart Royal Proclamations, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). Knolles, Richard, The generall historie of the Turkes from the first beginning of that nation to the rising of the Othoman familie: with all the notable expeditions of the Christian princes against them. Together with the liues and conquests of the Othoman kings and emperours faithfullie collected out of the best histories, both auntient and moderne, and digested into one continuat historie vntill this present yeare 1603 (London, 1603). Montaigne, Michel de, The essayes or morall, politike and millitarie discourses (London, 1603). Mulcaster, Richard, The first part of the elementarie which entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English tung (London, 1582). Munster, Sebastian, A treatyse of the newe India with other new founde landes and islandes, aswell eastwarde as westwarde, as they are knowen and found in these oure dayes, after the description of Sebastian Munster in his boke of universall cosmographie: wherin the diligent reader may see the good successe and rewarde of noble and honeste enterpryses, by the which not only worldly ryches are obtayned, but also God is glorified, [and] the Christian faythe enlarged. Translated out of Latin into Englishe. By Rycharde Eden (London, 1553). Nashe, Thomas, Pierce Penilesse his supplication to the diuell (London, 1592). Nixon, Anthony, Elizaes memoriall. King Iames his arriuall. And Romes downefall (London, 1603). Puttenham, George, The arte of English poesie (London, 1589). 256

Bibliography

Shakespeare, William, M. William Shak-speare: his true chronicle historie of the life and death of King Lear and his three daughters With the vnfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlam: as it was played before the Kings Maiestie at Whitehall vpon S. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes. By his Maiesties seruants playing vsually at the Gloabe on the Bancke-side (London, 1608). Shakespeare, William, Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies Published according to the true originall copies (London, 1623). Smith, Thomas, De republica Anglorum. The maner of gouernement or policie of the realme of England (London, 1583). Speed, John, A description of the ciuill warres of England (London, 1600). Speed, John, The theatre of the empire of Great Britaine presenting an exact geography of the kingdomes of England, Scotland, Ireland, and the iles adioyning: with the shires, hundreds, cities and shire-townes, within ye kingdome of England, divided and described by Iohn Speed (London, 1612). Spelman, Henry, ‘Of the Union’, in The Jacobean Union: Six tracts of 1604, ed. by Bruce R. Galloway and Brian P. Levack (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1985), pp. 161–84. Spenser, Edmund, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. by W. L. Renwick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). Thornborough, John, Ioiefvll and Blessed Revniting the two mighty & famous kingdomes, England & Scotland into their ancient name of great Brittaine (London, 1605). Warner, William, Albions England Or historicall map of the same island (London, 1586).

Secondary sources Adelman, Janet, Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Albright, Evelyn May, ‘The Folio Version of Henry V in Relation to Shakespeare’s Times’, PMLA, 43 (1928), 722–56. Alexander, Catherine M. S., Shakespeare and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Alexander, Catherine M. S. and Stanley Wells, eds, Shakespeare and Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Alker, Sharon and Holly Faith Nelson, ‘Macbeth, the Jacobean Scot, and the Politics of the Union’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 47 (2007), 379–401. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). Appiah, Kwame Anthony, ‘Race’, in Critical Terms for the Study of Literature, ed. by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 274–87. Arber, Edward, ed. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640. Vol. 3. London: 1876. Archer, John Michael, ‘Antiquity and Degeneration in Antony and Cleopatra’, in Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance, ed. by Joyce Green MacDonald (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), pp. 145–64. Archer, John Michael, Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Baker, David J., ‘ “Wildehirissheman”: Colonialist Representation in Shakespeare’s Henry V’, English Literary Renaissance, 22 (1992), 37–61.

257

Bibliography

Baker, David J., Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Baldo, Jonathan, Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2012). Barker, Simon, War and Nation in the Theatre of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Bartels, Emily, ‘Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 41 (1990), 433–54. Bartels, Emily, ‘Othello and Africa: Postcolonialism Reconsidered’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 54 (1997), 45–64. Bartels, Emily, Speaking of the Moor from Alcazar to Othello (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Bennett, Josephine Waters, ‘Britain Among the Fortunate Isles’, Studies in Philology, 53 (1956), 114–40. Berman, Ronald S., ‘Fathers and Sons in the Henry VI Plays’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 13 (1962), 487–97. Boling, Ronald J., ‘Anglo-welsh Relations in Cymbeline’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000), 33–66. Broude, Ronald, ‘Roman and Goth in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Studies, 6 (1970), 27–34. Brown, Paul, ‘ “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 48–71. Burgess, Glenn, Rowland Wymer and Jason Lawrence, eds, The Accession of James I: Historical and Cultural Consequences (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006). Burnett, Mark Thornton and Ramona Wray, eds, Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). Canny, Nicholas, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Chedgzoy, Kate, ‘This Pleasant and Sceptred Isle: Insular Fantasies of National Identity in Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie and William Shakespeare’s Richard II’, in Archipelagic Identities: Literature and Identity in the Atlantic Archipelago, 1550–1800, ed. by Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 25–42. Chernaik, Warren, The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Cohen, Adam Max, ‘Englishing the Globe: Molyneux’s Globes and Shakespeare’s Theatrical Career ’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 37 (2006), 963–84. Cohen, Derek, Shakespearean Motives (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988). Cohen, Walter, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Collinson, Patrick, De Republica Anglorum, or History with the Politics Put Back (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Collinson, Patrick, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in The Tudor Monarchy, ed. by John Guy (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 110–34. Cormack, Bradin, A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Crawforth, Hannah, Sarah Dustagheer and Jennifer Young, eds, Shakespeare in London (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Crumley, J. Clinton, ‘Questioning History in Cymbeline’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 41 (2001), 297–315. Davies, John, A History of Wales (London: Penguin, 1993). 258

Bibliography

Dawson, Anthony B., ‘The Arithmetic of Memory: Shakespeare’s Theatre and the National Past’, Shakespeare Survey, 52 (1999), 54–67. Del Sapio Garbero, Maria, ed., Identity, Otherness and Empire in Shakespeare’s Rome (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). Dowd, Christopher, ‘Polysemic Brotherhoods in Henry V’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 50 (2010), 337–53. Dutton, Richard, ‘Shakespeare and Lancaster ’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 49 (1998), 1–21. Dutton, Richard, ‘ “Methinks the truth should live from age to age”: The Dating and Contexts of Henry V’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68 (2005), 173–203. Dutton, Richard, Alison Findlay and Richard Wilson, eds, Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). Edelman, Charles, Shakespeare’s Military Language: A Dictionary (London: Continuum, 2000). Edwards, Philip, Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Escobedo, Andrew, ‘From Britannia to England: Cymbeline and the Beginning of Nations’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 59 (2008), 60–87. Espinosa, Ruben and David Ruiter, eds, Shakespeare and Immigration (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). Fiedler, Leslie A., The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Field and Day, 1972). Findlay, Alison, Women in Shakespeare: A Dictionary (London: Continuum, 2010). Foakes, R. A., Shakespeare and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Floyd-Wilson, Mary, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Fuchs, Barbara, ‘Conquering Islands: Contextualizing The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 48 (1997), 45–62. Fudge, Erica, ‘The Dog is Himself: Humans, Animals, and Self-Control in The Two Gentlemen of Verona’, in How to do Things with Shakespeare: New Approaches, New Essays, ed. by Laurie Maguire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 185–209. Garganigo, Alex, ‘Coriolanus, the Union Controversy, and Access to the Royal Person’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 42 (2002), 335–59. Giddens, Eugene, ‘Masculinity and Barbarism in Titus Andronicus’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 15.2 (2010–11) (accessed 3 May 2016). Gillies, John, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Greenblatt, Stephen, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Greenblatt, Stephen, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1991). Greenfield, Matthew, ‘Fragments of Nationalism in Troilus and Cressida’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000), 181–200. Greenfield, Matthew, ‘1 Henry IV: Metatheatrical Britain’ in British Identities in English Renaissance Literature, ed. by David J. Baker and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 71–80. Hadfield, Andrew, ‘Briton and Scythian: Tudor Representation of Irish Origins’, Irish Historical Studies, 28 (1993), 390–408. Hadfield, Andrew, Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels: Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550–1630: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 259

Bibliography

Hadfield, Andrew, ‘Tarquin’s Everlasting Banishment: Republicanism and Constitutionalism in the Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus’, Parergon, 19 (2002), 77–104. Hadfield, Andrew, ‘The Power and Rights of the Crown in Hamlet and King Lear: ‘The King– the King’s to Blame” ’, Review of English Studies, 54 (2003), 566–86. Hadfield, Andrew, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (London: Bloomsbury, 2004a). Hadfield, Andrew, Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004b). Hadfield, Andrew, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Hall, Kim F., Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Hamilton, Donna B., ‘The Winter’s Tale and the Language of Union, 1604–1610’, Shakespeare Studies, 21 (1993), 228–50. Hart, Jonathan, Shakespeare: Poetry, History, and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Hartog, Francois, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, trans. by Janet Lloyd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Helgerson, Richard, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Hendricks, Margo, ‘ “Obscured by Dreams”: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 47 (1996), 37–60. Hertel, Ralf, Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). Highley, Christopher, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Hill, Tracey, ‘ “The Cittie is in an uproar”: Staging London in The Booke of Sir Thomas More’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 11.1 (May 2005), 2.1–19 (accessed 3 May 2016). Hillman, Richard, Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Hodgen, Margaret T., Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964). Hoenselaars, A. J., Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: A Study of Stage Characters and National Identity in English Renaissance Drama, 1558–1642 (Rutherford, NJ : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992). Hoenselaars, Ton and Holger Klein, eds, Shakespeare and the Low Countries, Shakespeare Yearbook, 15 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005). Hopkins. Lisa, Shakespeare on the Edge: Border-crossing in the Tragedies and the Henriad (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005). Howard, Jean, ‘Shakespeare, Geography, and the Work of Genre on the Early Modern Stage’, Modern Language Quarterly, 64 (2003), 299–322. Howard, Jean, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2007). Howard, Jean and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997). Hunter, G. K., ‘Elizabethans and Foreigners,’ in Shakespeare and Race, ed. by Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 37–63. Ivic, Christopher, ‘ “Our inland”: Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Celtic Fringe’, ARIEL, 30 (1999a), 85–103. 260

Bibliography

Ivic, Christopher, ‘Spenser and the Bounds of Race’, Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, 32 (1999b), 1–33. Ivic, Christopher, ‘Reassuring Fratricide in 1 Henry IV’, in Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture: Lethe’s Legacies, ed. by Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 99–109. Ivic, Christopher, ‘ “bastard Normans, Norman bastards”: Anomalous Identities in The Life of Henry the Fift’, in Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to the Assembly, ed. by Willy Maley and Philip Schwyzer (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 75–90. Ivic, Christopher, ‘ “How to vse your Brothers Brotherly”: Civility, Incivility and Civil War in 3 Henry VI’, in Staged Transgression in Shakespeare’s England, ed. by Rory Loughnane and Edel Semple (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013a), pp. 239–51. Ivic, Christopher, ‘Shakespeare’s Elizabethan England/Jacobean Britain’, in Celtic Shakespeare: The Bard and the Borderers, ed. by Willy Maley and Rory Loughnane (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013b), pp. 103–18. Ivic, Christopher, and Grant Williams, eds, Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture: Lethe’s Legacies (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). Iyengar, Sujata, Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color and Race in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). James, Heather, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Jones, Emrys, ‘Stuart Cymbeline’, Essays in Criticism, 11 (1961), 84–99. Jordan, Constance, Shakespeare’s Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances (Ithaca: Cornell Univesity Press, 1997). Kahn, Coppelia, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London: Routledge, 1997). Karremann, Isabel, ‘Rites of Oblivion in Shakesperian History Plays’, Shakespeare Survey, 63 (2010), 24–36. Kastan, David Scott, ‘ “The king hath many marching in his coats”, or, what did you do during the war, daddy?’, in Shakespeare Left and Right, ed. by Ivo Kamps (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 241–58. Kendrick, T. D., British Antiquity (London: Methuen: 1950). Kermode, Lloyd Edward, Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Kerrigan, John, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Kewes, Paulina, Ian W. Archer and Felicity Heal, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Kingsley-Smith, Jane, Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Kinney, Arthur, ‘Scottish history, the union of the crowns and the issue of right rule’ in Renaissance Culture in Context, ed. by Jean R. Brink and William J. Gentrup (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993). Kishlansky, Mark, Parliamentary Selection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Kitch, Aaron, ‘Shylock’s Sacred Nation’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 59 (2008), 131–55. Klein, Bernhard, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Kurland, Stuart M., ‘Hamlet and the Scottish Succession?’ Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 34 (1994), 279–300. Lawrence, Jason, ‘Who the Devil taught thee so much Italian?’ Italian language learning and literary imitation in early modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 261

Bibliography

Leinwand, Theodore B., ‘Shakespeare and the Middling Sort’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 44 (1993), 284–303. Levack, Brian P. The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union 1603–1707 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Levin, Carole, and John Watkins, Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). Levine, Nina S., Women’s Matters: Politics, Gender, and Nation in Shakespeare’s Early History Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998). Loewenstein, David and Paul Stevens, eds, Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). Loomba, Ania, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Lupton, Julia Reinhard, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). MacDougall, Hugh A., Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Montreal: Harvest House, 1982). Maley, Willy, Nation, State, and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Maley, Willy, ‘British Ill done: recent work on Shakespeare and British, English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh identities’, Literature Compass, 3 (2006), 487–512. Maley, Willy, ‘A thing most Brutish: depicting Shakespeare’s multi-nation state’, Shakespeare, 3 (2007), 79–101. Maley, Willy, ‘Cymbeline, the font of history, and the matter of Britain: from Times New Roman to italic type’, in Alternative Shakespeares 3, ed. by Diane E. Henderson (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 119–37. Maley, Willy, ‘Othello and the Irish Question’, in Celtic Shakespeare: The Bard and the Borderers, ed. by Willy Maley and Rory Loughnane (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013b), pp. 121–38. Maley, Willy and Rory Loughnane, eds, Celtic Shakespeare: The Bard and the Borderers (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). Maley, Willy and Andrew Murphy, eds, Shakespeare and Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). Maley, Willy and Philip Schwyzer, eds, Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to the Assembly (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). Maley, Willy and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, eds, This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). Manley, Lawrence, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1995). Marcus, Leah, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Marshall, Cynthia, ‘Portia’s Wound, Calphurnia’s Dream: Reading Character in Julius Caesar’, English Literary Renaissance, 24 (1994), 471–88. Marshall, Cynthia, ‘Wound-Man: Coriolanus, Gender, and the Theatrical Construction of Interiority’, in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. by Valerie Traub (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 93–118. Mayer, Jean-Christophe, ‘The “Parliament Sceane” in Shakespeare’s King Richard II’, Bulletin de la société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 59 (2004a), 27–42. Mayer, Jean-Christophe, ed., The Struggle for the Succession in Late Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations (Montpellier: Astraea Collection, 2004b). Mayer, Jean-Christophe, ed., Representing France and the French in Early Modern English Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008). 262

Bibliography

McEachern, Claire, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Meron, Theodor, Bloody Constraint: War and Chivalry in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Miola, Robert S., ‘Timon in Shakespeare’s Athens’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 3, (1980), 21–30. Miola, Robert S., Shakespeare’s Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Mikalachki, Jodi, ‘The Masculine Romance of Roman Britain: Cymbeline and Early Modern English Nationalism’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 46 (1995), 301–22. Morgan, Hiram, Tyrone’s Rebellion: The Outbreak of the Nine Years War in Tudor Ireland (London: The Royal Historical Society, 1993). Morrill, John, ‘The British Problem, c. 1534–1707’, in The British Problem, c. 1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago, ed. by Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), pp. 1–38. Mottram, Stewart, Empire and Nation in Early English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008). Munro, Ian, ‘City’ in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, ed. by Bruce R. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 34–40. Murphy, Andrew, ‘Shakespeare’s Irish History’, Literature & History, 3rd Ser. 5 (1996), 38–59. Murphy, Andrew, ‘ “Tish ill done”: Henry the Fifth and the Politics of Editing’ in Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture, ed. by Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), pp. 213–34. Murphy, Andrew, But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Literature (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1999). Neill, Michael, Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics and Society in Renaissance Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Netzloff, Mark, England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Newman, Karen, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Noble, Louise, ‘ “And make two pasties of your shameful heads”: Medicinal Cannibalism and Healing the Body Politic in Titus Andronicus’, English Literary History, 70 (2003), 677–708. Noling, Kim H., ‘Grubbing up the Stock: Dramatizing Queens in Henry VIII’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 39 (1988), 291–306. Norbrook, David, ‘Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography’, in Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. by Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 78–116. Norbrook, David, ‘ “A Liberal Tongue”: Language and Rebellion in Richard II’, in Shakespeare’s Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions, ed. by John M. Mucciolo (Aldershot, Hampshire: Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 37–51. Oldenburg, Scott, Alien Albion: Literature and Immigration in Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). Parker, Patricia, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Parry, Graham, ‘Ancient Britons and Early Stuarts’, in Neo-Historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics, ed. by Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess and Rowland Wymer (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 155–78. Patterson, Annabel, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge, MA : Basil Blackwell, 1989). Pocock, J. G. A., Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 263

Bibliography

Pugliatti, Paola, Shakespeare and the Just War Tradition (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). Rackin, Phyllis, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Raffield, Paul, Shakespeare’s Imaginary Constitution: Late Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law (Oxford: Hart, 2010). Rees, Joan, ‘Shakespeare’s Welshmen’, in Literature and Nationalism, ed. by Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), pp. 22–40. Rhodes, Neil, ‘Wrapped in the Strong Arms of the Union: Shakespeare and King James’, in Shakespeare and Scotland, ed. by Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 37–52. Roberts, Jeanne Addison, The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus and Gender (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991). Roebuck, Thomas and Laurie Maguire, ‘Pericles and the Language of National Origins’, in This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard, ed. by Willy Maley and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 23–48. Rooks, John, ‘Mental and Moral Wilderness in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare and Renaissance Association of West Virginia: Selected Papers, 16 (1993), 33–42. Royster, Francesca T., ‘White-limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (2000), 432–55. Saenger, Michael, Shakespeare and the French Borders of English (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). Scanlan, Thomas, Colonial Writing and the New World, 1583–1671: Allegories of Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Schulting, Sabine, ‘ “What country, friends, is this?”: The Performance of Conflict in Shakespeare’s Drama of Migration’ in Shakespeare and Conflict: A European Perspective, ed. by Carla Dente, Sara Sancini and Ton Hoenselaars (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 24–39. Schwartz, Kathryn, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000). Schwyzer, Philip, ‘A Map of Greater Cambria’, Early Modern Literary Studies 4.2 (September, 1998), 4.1–13 (accessed 3 May 2016). Schwyzer, Philip, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Schwyzer, Philip, ‘A Scum of Britons?: Richard III and the Celtic Reconquest’, in Celtic Shakespeare: The Bard and the Borderers, ed. by Willy Maley and Rory Loughnane (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013a), pp. 25–34. Schwyzer, Philip, Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013b). Shapiro, James, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Shapiro, James, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber and Faber, 2005). Sharpe, Kevin, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Shrank, Cathy, ‘Civility and the City in Coriolanus’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 54 (2003), 406–23. Sinfield, Alan, Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Skelton, R. A., County Atlases of the British Isles, 1579–1850 (London, Carta Press, 1960). Smith, Warren D., ‘The Henry V Choruses in the First Folio’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 53 (1954), 38–57. 264

Bibliography

Smuts, Malcolm, ‘Banquo’s Progeny: Hereditary Monarchy, the Stuart Lineage and Macbeth’, in Renaissance Historicisms: Essays in Honour of Arthur F. Kinney, ed. by James M. Dutcher and Anne Lake Prescott (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 225–46. Sommerville, Johann P., King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Spiller, Elizabeth, Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Sullivan, Garrett A. Jr., The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Sullivan, Garrett A. Jr., Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Targoff, Ramie, ‘ “Dirty” Amens: Devotion, Applause, and Consent in Richard III’, Renaissance Drama, 31 (2002), 61–84. Thomas, Hugh, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (1450–1870) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). Tribble, Evelyn, ‘ “The dark backward and abysm of time”: The Tempest and Memory’, College Literature, 33 (2006), 151–68. Vaughan, Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Vitkus, Daniel, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Wells, Robin Headlam, Shakespeare, Politics and the State (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986). Williams, Deanne, The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Womack, Peter, ‘Imagining Communities: Theatres and the English Nation in the Sixteenth Century’, in Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. by Davis Aers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), pp. 91–145. Wortham, Christopher, ‘Shakespeare, James I and the Matter of Britain’, English, 45 (1996), 97–122.

265

266

Index of Shakespeare’s Works

AC (Antony and Cleopatra) Arabia, black, citizen, conquest, Cyprus, degeneration, descent, Egypt, empire, Gypsy, Jewry, Lethe, oblivion, people, race, republicanism, Rome, tawny, unpeople AW (All’s Well That Ends Well) bastard, blood, common, commons, commoner, commoners, commonalty, complexion, foreign, France, Low Countries, Tartars AYL (As You Like It) banish, banishment, blood, civil, civility, France, Goth, India, Indian, Indies, inland, Ireland, native, territory, Turk, wild CE (The Comedy of Errors) complexion, France, incivil, incivility, uncivil, India, Indian, Indies, Ireland, Low Countries, native, Scotland, Spain, stranger, Volsce, Volscian Cor (Coriolanus) Afric, Africa, African, Amazon, Arabia, banish, banishment, barbarian, barbarous, blood, Britons, citizen, civil, civility, common, commons, commoner, commoners, commonalty, commonwealth, commonweal, weal, conquest, country, countryman, countrymen, foreign, forgetting, Greece, lethargy, London, memory, native, Parliament, people, public, republicanism, Rome, Scotland, state, territory, tribe, unnatural, Volsce, Volscian, war, wound Cym (Cymbeline) Afric, Africa, African, banish, banishment, borders, Britain, Britons, clime, conquest, country, Denmark, descent, dominion, empire, England, forgetting, impregnable, incivil, incivility, uncivil, island, isle, Italy, land, London, maps, Milford Haven, race, Rome, savage, savagery, Scotland, stock, stranger, succession, unnatural, Wales, wound, yoke Ham (Hamlet) Denmark, dominion, filicide, fratricide, patricide, kingdom, memory, nation,

native, Normans, oblivion, state, subject, succession, unnatural 1H4 (King Henry IV, Part 1) alien, chronicles, civil, civility, civil war, common, commons, commoner, commoners, commonalty, crown, degeneration, England, forgetting, India, Indian, Indies, Ireland, island, isle, Jew, land, maps, memory, Nine Years’ War, pagan, realm, sacrifice, Scotland, Shrewsbury, Wales, war, wild, wound 2H4 (King Henry IV, Part 2) Afric, Africa, African, Arthur, banish, banishment, lethargy, Lethe, memory, succession, Turk, wilderness, yoke H5 (King Henry V) Agincourt, Albion, alien, Arthur, barbarian, barbarous, bastard, blood, borders, Britain, brother, brothers, brotherhood, chronicles, citizen, common, commons, commoner, commoners, commonalty, conquest, country, countryman, countrymen, degeneration, empire, England, France, Harfleur, inland, Ireland, island, isle, Jewry, kern, kingdom, land, league, London, Lord Mayor, maps, marches, memory, monarchy, nation, native, neighbour, Nine Years’ War, Normans, people, realm, Reformation, sacrifice, Saint George, savage, savagery, Scotland, stock, succession, Turk, Volsce, Volscian, Wales, war, wild, wound 1H6 (King Henry VI, Part 1) Amazon, bastard, chronicles, citizen, civil war, commonwealth, commonweal, weal, conquest, country, countryman, countrymen, Dover, England, filicide, fratricide, patricide, foreign, forgetting, France, island, isle, league, London, Lord Mayor, memory, neighbour, pale, Parliament, Protector, public, sacrifice, soil, territory, unnatural, Volsce, Volscian, Wars of the Roses, wound

267

Index of Shakespeare’s Works

2H6 (King Henry VI, Part 2) Albion, banish, banishment, blood, Bretagne, citizen, civil, civility, clime, common, commons, commoner, commoners, commonalty, commonwealth, commonweal, weal, conquest, country, England, France, galloglass, incivil, incivility, uncivil, Ireland, island, isle, islander, kern, land, league, London, maps, memory, native, people, public, race, realm, republicanism, Rome, savage, savagery, soil, stock, territory, Troy, war, welfare, wild, wilderness, wound 3H6 (King Henry VI, Part 3) Albion, Amazon, Antipodes, banish, banishment, Barnet, Bretagne, brother, brothers, brotherhood, cannibalism, civil war, conquest, country, crown, degeneration, descent, England, filicide, fratricide, patricide, Germany, impregnable, incivil, incivility, uncivil, India, Indian, Indies, island, isle, kingmaker, land, league, London, Low Countries, memory, Parliament, people, realm, Tewkesbury, Towton, Troy, uncrown, unnatural, unpeople, Wakefield, Wales, war, Wars of the Roses, welfare H8 (King Henry VIII) Arthur, common, commons, commoner, commoners, commonalty, dominion, Germany, India, Indian, Indies, infection, island, isle, league, London, Lord Mayor, nation, neighbour, Reformation, republicanism, Spain, state, stranger, succession, Wales JC (Julius Caesar) Aeneas, brutish, citizen, civil war, common, commons, commoner, commoners, commonalty, conquest, country, countryman, countrymen, crown, forgetting, Greece, memory, people, republicanism, Rome, sacrifice, succession, Troy, wound KJ (King John) Arthur, bastard, citizen, civil war, degeneration, dominion, Dover, England, foreign, island, isle, Italy, land, league, pagan, pale, Reformation, Saint George, savage, savagery, soil, territory, unnatural, war, wound KL (King Lear) Albion, banish, banishment, blood, Britain, bastard, cannibalism, degeneration, dominion, Dover, England, filicide, fratricide, patricide, France, kingdom, maps, memory, 268

Milford Haven, realm, Scotland, Scythia, Scythian, succession, territory, tribe, unnatural LLL (Love’s Labour’s Lost) complexion, India, Indian, Indies, Normans, savage, savagery, Spain, tawny, Venice Luc (Lucrece) banish, banishment, people, republicanism, state, stock, Troy, wilderness, wound MA (Much Ado About Nothing) Antipodes, country, Jew, Spain Mac (Macbeth) Aleppo, Arabia, blood, Britain, commonwealth, commonweal, weal, country, filicide, fratricide, patricide, galloglass, Jew, kern, kingmaker, monarchy, oblivion, republicanism, Scotland, subject, succession, Tartars, unnatural, war, wild, wound, yoke MM (Measure for Measure) public MND (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) Amazon, Athens, civil, civility, Ethiop, Gypsy, India, Indian, Indies, pale, Sparta, tawny, wild MV (The Merchant of Venice) alien, Arabia, barbarian, barbarous, Barbary, blood, Britain, civil, civility, clime, complexion, country, countryman, countrymen, England, foreign, France, Germany, hue, India, Indian, Indies, inland, Jew, maps, Moor, nation, negro, neighbour, pagan, Rome, Scotland, Spain, stranger, stock, Tartars, tawny, tribe, Venice MW (The Merry Wives of Windsor) India, Indian, Indies, Jewry, Low Countries, Wales Oth (Othello) Afric, Africa, African, Aleppo, Barbary, black, brother, brothers, brotherhood, cannibalism, civil, civility, clime, common, commons, commoner, commoners, commonalty, complexion, Cyprus, Denmark, descent, Egypt, England, Ethiop, fair, forgetting, Germany, India, Indian, Indies, islander, lethargy, Jew, kind, Low Countires, Mauritania, Moor, nation, Ottomite, pagan, race, savage, savagery, Sparta, state, stranger, tribe, Turk, unnatural, Venice, Wales, white

Index of Shakespeare’s Works

Per (Pericles) Athens, countryman, countrymen, descent, Egypt, kind, neighbour R2 (King Richard II) Antipodes, banish, banishment, black, civil war, commonwealth, commonweal, weal, conquest, country, countryman, countrymen, crown, degeneration, descent, dominion, England, forgetting, infection, inland, Ireland, island, isle, Italy, Jewry, kern, kingdom, kingmaker, land, maps, monarchy, native, pagan, pale, Parliament, people, Protector, realm, soil, subject, succession, territory, Troy, Turk, Wales, war, yoke R3 (King Richard III) banish, banishment, bastard, blood, Bosworth, Bretagne, chronicles, citizen, civil war, conquest, countryman, countrymen, empire, filicide, fratricide, patricide, forgetting, France, island, isle, land, Lord Mayor, maps, Milford Haven, monarchy, Protector, race, royal, soil, stock, succession, Turk, unnatural, Wales, Wars of the Roses, wound, yoke RJ (Romeo and Juliet) banish, banishment, citizen, civil, civility, civil war, Gypsy

Tem (The Tempest) Afric, Africa, African, Arabia, banish, banishment, bastard, black, Britain, brutish, cannibalism, commonwealth, commonweal, weal, empire, filicide, fratricide, patricide, forgetting, India, Indian, Indies, Ireland, islander, Italy, Jew, memory, New World, race, savage, savagery, succession TGV (The Two Gentlemen of Verona) banish, banishment, Ethiop, Jew, New World Tim (Timon of Athens) Athens, banish, banishment, common, commons, commoner, commoners, commonalty, commonwealth, commonweal, weal, Greece, race Tit (Titus Andronicus) Amazon, banish, banishment, barbarian, barbarous, blood, cannibalism, Cimmerian, clime, commonwealth, commonweal, weal, conquest, country, countryman, countrymen, fair, filicide, fratricide, patricide, Goth, Greece, hue, Jew, Moor, nation, people, Rome, sacrifice, stock, stranger, succession, tawny, Troy, unnatural, Volsce, Volscian, war, welfare, white, wilderness, yoke TN (Twelfth Night) India, Indian, Indies, maps

Son (Sonnets) alien, black, oblivion, soil, white STM (Sir Thomas More) countryman, countrymen, England, foreign, infection, London, stranger TC (Troilus and Cressida) Aeneas, Afric, Africa, African, barbarian, barbarous, countryman, countrymen, Greece, India, Indian, Indies, kingdom, Troy, war

TNK (The Two Noble Kinsmen) Amazon, Athens TS (The Taming of the Shrew) stranger VA (Venus and Adonis) pale WT (The Winter’s Tale) Cyprus, dominion, Scotland, stock, succession

269

270

Index

This index references the titles of plays, authors of primary and secondary sources, historical events and figures as well as place names. For entries in this Arden Shakespeare Dictionary the reader is directed to the List of Headwords (p. xiii). Although this index does not reference the dictionary’s headword entries, it does reference the presence of select headwords based on the criteria above as they appear in other entries. References within quotations from plays as well as primary and secondary sources have not been incorporated nor have the names of Shakespeare’s characters. 1H4 (King Henry IV, Part 1) 2, 15–16, 48–50, 51, 57–9, 62, 72, 75–7, 86, 98–9, 112, 117, 119, 121, 125, 133, 137, 141–2, 144–5, 161, 166, 181, 192, 197, 200–2, 233–5, 236, 243–4, 250 1H6 (King Henry VI, Part 1) 18, 25–6, 47–8, 54, 57–8, 63, 66, 68, 70, 82, 85, 87–8, 92, 94, 99, 100–1, 119, 134–5, 137, 138, 146, 159, 167–9, 176, 192–3, 202, 215–16, 226–7, 232, 239–40, 249 2H4 (King Henry IV, Part 2) 2, 12, 20, 21, 135, 136, 137, 145, 210, 221, 233, 246, 253 2H6 (King Henry VI, Part 2) 2, 6, 14, 21, 28, 32, 52, 55, 60, 62, 63–4, 66, 68, 86, 101, 103, 111, 117, 119, 121–2, 127–9, 133, 135, 137–8, 141, 146–7, 156–7, 173, 177, 179, 181, 184, 186, 194, 202, 205, 216, 220, 237, 242, 244–5, 248–50 3H6 (King Henry VI, Part 3) 14–15, 17–18, 22, 25, 32, 43, 45, 57, 59, 67, 68, 71–2, 75, 79–80, 88, 92–3, 104, 111, 112, 119, 131–2, 133, 134, 137–8, 139, 147, 168–9, 174–5, 181, 217–18, 220, 225–6, 227–8, 229, 233, 234, 236, 240, 241–2 Abbot, George 13, 158, 214 AC (Antony and Cleopatra) 19, 27, 53, 67, 73, 77–8, 79, 83, 84, 106–7, 108, 126, 136–7, 163, 170, 179–80, 185, 214, 229 Actium 236 Adelman, Janet 29, 126, 219 Africa 24, 60, 143, 150–1 Africanus, Leo 12, 83, 151 Agincourt 14, 28–9, 36, 39, 46, 61, 65, 70, 101, 109, 144, 156, 162, 191, 248

Albion 6 Albott, Robert 17, 104, 136, 199 Albright, Evelyn May 161 Alexander, Catherine M. S. 180, 204 Algeria 24 Alker, Sharon 198, 212 America 112, 159–60 Anderson, Benedict 3–4, 8 n.12, 8 n.13, 9 n.15, 9 n.17, 28, 30, 39, 85, 87, 99, 133–4, 145, 182, 193, 208, 216 Angiers 51, 54, 208 Anna of Denmark 78 Antium 156 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 180 Arabia 12 Aragon 203 Archer, Ian W. 50 Archer, John Michael 7 n.2, 15, 17, 53, 55, 62, 78, 83, 93, 107, 126, 139–40, 189, 206 Athens 104, 106 AW (All’s Well That Ends Well) 25, 28–9, 61, 65, 95, 101, 139, 213 AYL (As You Like It) 21, 29, 55, 100, 104, 112, 115, 117, 155, 214–5, 221, 242 Ayscu, Edward 38, 188–9 Bacon, Francis 34 Baker, David J. 8 n.8, 30, 34, 101, 118, 153, 155, 245 Baldo, Jonathan 13, 99 Barbary 152 Barker, Simon 239 Barnet 220 Bartels, Emily 12, 68, 152, 208

271

Index

Battle of Bosworth 1, 5, 8 n.20, 26, 32, 70, 133, 148 Bennett, Josephine Waters 121 Berman, Ronald S. 93 Blount, Charles, Lord Mountjoy 160–1 Boling, Ronald J. 36, 39 Boorde, Andrew 83 Britain 2, 6, 8 n.9, 11, 13–15, 19, 21–2, 29–30, 32, 37–8, 67, 68, 80, 82, 85, 100, 109, 115, 119–21, 123, 130, 134, 138, 148, 155, 158, 162, 187–8, 196, 198, 206, 212, 216, 221, 226, 236, 249, 254 Britons 19, 32, 35, 67, 179, 185, 188–9 Broude, Ronald 104 Brown, Paul 118 Browne, Thomas 134 Brutus 11, 37, 221 Burgess, Glenn 212 Burnett, Mark Thornton and Ramona Wray 118 Cadwallader 32, 37 Caesar, Julius 6, 72 Calais 82 Calvin, John 181 Cambria 22, 120, 148 Camden, William 33, 38, 161, 188 Canny, Nicholas 118 Carpenter, Nathanael 75 Catherine of Aragon 20, 80, 203, 206 Catullus 185 CE (The Comedy of Errors) 64, 101, 111, 112, 117, 139, 155–6, 198, 203, 206 Chapman, George 104 Chedgzoy, Kate 121 Chernaik, Warren 11 Chettle, Henry 2 Christian IV 78 Cicero 185 Clark, Sandra 96, 198 Cohen, Adam Max 142 Cohen, Derek 126 Cohen, Walter 155 Collinson, Patrick 5, 9 n.16, 85, 149, 150, 209 Columbus, Christopher 159 Contarini, Gasparo 231–2 Cor (Coriolanus) 12, 18, 19, 21, 23, 28, 39, 51–2, 55, 57, 61, 63, 66–7, 68, 69, 94–5, 97, 104, 106, 135, 137–8, 147, 156, 170–5, 272

176–7, 184, 196, 198, 204, 215, 218–19, 226, 232, 236–7, 246–7, 251 Corioles 51, 236 Cormack, Bradin 102 Cornwallis, William 234 Cotton, Robert 27 Crawforth, Hannah 7 n.2, 138 Crécy 100 Cromwell, Oliver 125 Crumley, J. Clinton 39 Cym (Cymbeline) 2, 3, 12, 21–2, 30, 33–6, 37–9, 60, 67, 68, 69, 78–9, 80, 84–5, 97, 111, 120, 123, 134, 138, 141, 148, 179, 185, 187–9, 194–5, 196, 204, 206, 212, 226, 233, 235, 249, 254 Cyprus 122, 231 Danes 37, 78, 162 Daniel, Samuel 131, 184, 209 Davies, John 233 Davies, Sir John 155 Dawson, Anthony B. 43, 143, 148 Dekker, Thomas 2, 200 Del Sapio Garbero, Maria 84, 189 Denmark 156 Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex 149, 161 Donne, John 136 Dover 119, 148, 168 Dowd, Christopher 44 Drakakis, John 60, 126 Drayton, Michael 209 Dürer, Albrecht 103 Dustagheer, Sarah 7 n.2, 138 Dutton, Richard 36, 161, 170, 183 Edelman, Charles 103, 129 Eden, Richard 45 Edward III 100 Edward IV 131 Edwards, Philip 117, 154 Egypt 6, 19, 106–7, 185, 229 Elias, Norbert 56 Elizabeth I 2, 13, 17, 27, 31, 57, 84, 87, 100, 115, 125, 127, 129, 142, 149, 150, 160, 170, 182, 196, 209, 211–12 Elyot, Thomas 244 England 1–6, 11, 13–15, 17–18, 22, 24, 26–7, 29–30, 32–6, 42, 46–7, 50, 57, 58–9, 61–2, 65, 67, 69, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84, 92–3, 96, 99–100, 104, 106–7, 109–11, 113, 114–16,

Index

119–21, 122, 125–6, 130, 133–5, 137, 139, 141, 142, 148–50, 152, 154–5, 158–62, 167–8, 176, 181–2, 185–8, 190, 193, 196–8, 202, 208–9, 211–12, 213, 216–17, 221, 233–8, 242 Englishness 26, 33, 58, 85–6, 115, 166–7, 212, 237, 239 Ephesus 51, 156, 206 Escobedo, Andrew 36, 80 Espinosa, Ruben 96 Exeter 5 Faith Nelson, Holly 198, 212 Fiedler, Leslie A. 208 Findlay, Alison 18, 183 Florence 122 Florio, John 46 Floyd-Wilson, Mary 60, 65, 180 Foakes, R. A. 14, 239 Ford, John 122 Foxe, John 182 France 6, 13, 17, 26, 29, 32, 42–3, 46, 48, 51, 54, 60, 65–6, 68, 70, 82, 86–7, 111, 114, 134–5, 137, 142, 146, 154, 156–7, 159, 160–1, 165, 167, 182, 193, 197, 215–16, 226, 232, 237, 240, 248–9 Fuchs, Barbary 118 Fudge, Erica 111 Garganigo, Alex 198 Geoffrey of Monmouth 20, 37–8 Germany 182 Giddens, Eugene 24, 246 Gillies, John 142, 160 Goths 21, 23, 91, 110, 151, 185–6, 189, 200, 206, 214, 232, 236, 253 Greece 6, 20, 24, 122, 184, 194, 203 Greenblatt, Stephen 36, 160, 239 Greenfield, Matthew 202, 221 Gunpowder Plot 85 H5 (King Henry V) 1, 2, 4, 5, 13, 14, 16, 20, 24, 26, 28, 29, 30, 34–6, 39, 40–4, 46, 48, 51–3, 61–2, 65–6, 68, 69–71, 77, 84, 86–8, 100–1, 109–10, 114–15, 117–18, 119, 121, 126, 127, 129–30, 133, 135, 137, 138, 141, 142–3, 143–6, 148, 149, 153–4, 156, 158–9, 160–1, 162, 172–3, 181, 183, 191–2, 193, 195, 197–8, 204–5, 210, 221, 232, 233–5, 236–9, 244, 246, 247, 248, 250

H8 (King Henry VIII) 20, 61, 80–1, 103, 112, 114, 119, 134, 138, 155, 158, 182–3, 184, 203, 204, 206, 211–12, 233 Hadfield, Andrew 11, 18, 64, 106, 155, 184–5, 195, 200, 204, 209, 212, 232 Hakluyt, Richard 12, 114, 151, 159, 213 Hall, Edward 46, 218 Hall, Kim F. 12–13, 25, 27, 89, 91, 180, 242 Ham (Hamlet) 78, 80, 130, 148, 153, 156, 162, 163, 204, 209, 210, 212, 226 Hamilton Donna B. 198 Harfleur 34, 172, 193 Harrington, John 78 Hart, Jonathan 24 Hartog, Francois 200 Haverfordwest 5 Hayward, John 196 Heal, Felicity 50 Helgerson, Richard 1–2, 8 n.7, 15, 22, 34, 42, 43, 47, 56, 71, 88, 130, 134, 142, 149, 155, 159, 181, 185 Hendricks, Margo 113 Henry II 115 Henry V 87, 100 Henry VI 87, 100, 131 Henry VII 1, 20, 30, 32, 33, 87, 148, 189, 210, 233, 239 Henry VIII 30, 115, 150, 181–2, 188, 202 Herodotus 83 Hertel, Ralf 50, 64, 142, 183 Heywood, Thomas 2 Highley, Christopher 30, 43, 57, 84, 103, 118, 129, 143, 155, 160–1, 234–5, 245 Hill, Tracey 138 Hillman, Richard 102 Hodgen, Margaret 180 Hoenselaars, A. J. 96 Hoenselaars, Ton 140 Holinshed, Raphael 46, 103, 116–17, 127, 243–4 Holland, Peter 55, 106 Holland, Philemon 151 Homer 219 Honigman, E. A. J. 15, 152 Hooker, Richard 116 Hopkins, Lisa 30, 36, 212 Horace 185 Howard, Jean 18, 28, 42–3, 64, 71, 88, 130, 138, 150, 155, 193, 237, 250 273

Index

Huguenots 100 Hundred Years’ War 13, 109 Hunter, G. K. 19, 96 Ireland 2, 5, 6, 13, 18, 26, 30, 34–6, 37, 43, 55, 58, 65, 78, 84, 86–7, 100, 103, 110, 111, 114, 127–9, 136, 150, 154–5, 158, 160–1, 162, 167, 176, 180, 198, 200, 202, 212, 213, 214, 216, 233, 236, 244–5, 253 Italy 11, 12, 21, 25, 97, 129, 206–7, 222 Ivic, Christopher 8 n.8, 18, 36, 59, 93, 99, 111, 115, 118, 132, 135, 142, 148, 162, 200, 202, 212, 225, 235, 241 Iyengar, Sujata 65, 180 James VI and I 2, 13, 87, 115, 118, 127, 129, 142, 155, 196, 209, 211–12 James, Heather 11, 84, 221 JC (Julius Caesar) 11, 44, 51, 57, 61, 66, 68, 69, 72–3, 96, 104, 148, 170–2, 173–4, 184–5, 186, 189, 191, 210, 247, 250–1, 253–4 Jews 16, 70, 92, 126, 165, 207, 231 Jones, Emrys 36 Jonson, Ben 1, 7 n.2, 7 n.3, 36, 202, 209, 231 Jordan, Constance 150 Juvenal 185 Kahn, Coppelia 11, 251 Karreman, Isabel 202 Kastan, David Scott 150 Kendrick, T. D. 13, 37 Kermode, Lloyd Edward 17, 55, 94 Kerrigan, John 2, 8 n.3, 8. n.10, 30, 34, 36, 38, 39, 84, 87, 103, 155, 198, 212, 235 Kewes, Paulina 50 King, Andrew 36 King Edward III 196 Kingsley-Smith, Jane 23 Kinney, Arthur 198 Kishlansky, Mark 170 Kitch, Aaron 219 KJ (King John) 20, 25, 35, 54, 57, 62, 67, 72, 75, 81, 82, 84, 88, 94, 119, 122, 133, 135, 159, 165, 168, 182–3, 187–8, 191, 193, 195, 202, 204, 208, 216–17, 228, 236, 240, 249 KL (King Lear) 2, 14, 21, 23, 25, 27–8, 33–4, 36, 45, 77, 81, 82, 87, 92, 100, 131, 141, 147–8, 181, 196, 200, 210, 212, 214, 218, 225–6 274

Klein, Bernhard 142 Klein, Holger 140 Knolles, Richard 223 Kurland, Stuart M. 212 Lavinium 11, 220 Lawrence, Jason 123, 212 Leinwand, Theodore B. 55 Levack, Brian P. 234 Levin, Carole 5, 7 n.2, 9 n.18, 96, 232 Levine, Nina S. 18 Lewkenor, Lewis 152, 231 Libya 24 LLL (Love’s Labour’s Lost) 64, 113, 162, 194, 203, 214, 231 Loewenstein, Davis 8 n.4 London 1, 3, 5, 7 n.2, 8 n.3, 50–1, 53–4, 87, 96, 100, 114, 125, 138, 139–40, 143, 152, 160–1, 207–8, 221, 232 Loomba, Ania 83, 107, 180, 246 Lopez, Roderigo 125 Lord Mayor 3, 54, 222 Loughnane, Ray 30 Low Countries 202 Luc (Lucrece) 21, 172, 184, 204, 205, 220, 245–6, 250 Lucan 185 Ludlow 5 Lupton, Julia Reinhard 55 Luther, Martin 181 MA (Much Ado About Nothing) 18, 68, 125, 203 Mac (Macbeth) 2, 15, 19, 28, 36, 64, 68, 103, 125–6, 128, 132, 150, 163, 185, 196, 198, 208, 210, 212, 213, 226, 237, 239, 242–3, 247–8, 253 MacDougall, Hugh A. 32 Maguire, Laurie 80 Maley, Willy 30, 36, 39, 44, 88, 94, 118, 123, 136, 155, 188, 198, 233, 235 Manley, Lawrence 7 n.2, 138 Mantua 122 Marcus, Leah 35, 111, 235 Marlowe, Christopher 126, 199 Marshall, Cynthia 251 Mason, Pamela 96, 198 Mayer, Jean-Christophe 102, 170, 212 McEachern, Claire 44, 84, 88, 120–1, 153, 155, 183 Mercator, Gerardus 113, 141

Index

Meron, Theodor 239 Messina 122 Middleton, Thomas 1 Mikalachki, Jodi 36 Milan 122 Milford Haven 5, 80, 141 Milton, John, 1, 8 n.4 Miola, Robert S. 20, 189 MM (Measure for Measure) 177 MND (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) 17, 20, 55, 89, 107, 113, 166, 203, 214, 242 Montaigne, Michel de 46, 64, 159, 195 Moors 23–4, 27, 50, 56, 70, 91, 125, 129, 143, 157, 186, 189, 194, 206, 208, 232, 245 Morgan, Hiram 118 Morocco 24, 60, 143 Morrill, John 8 n.14 Mottram, Stewart 84, 181 Mulcaster, Richard 189 Munday, Anthony 2, 7 n.2 Munro, Ian 7 n.1, 137, 186 Munster, Sebastian 45 Murphy, Andrew 18, 30, 115, 118, 154–5, 161, 198 Muslims 24, 27, 125, 150, 221 MV (The Merchant of Venice) 16, 19, 24, 25, 28–9, 36, 56, 60, 64–5, 68, 69–70, 87, 91–2, 94, 101, 104, 110, 112–13, 114, 125–6, 141, 151, 153, 157–8, 165, 186, 198, 203, 205, 207, 213, 214, 219, 231 MW (The Merry Wives of Windsor) 112, 126, 139–40, 233, 235 Nashe, Thomas 47 Neill, Michael 11, 24, 26, 27, 46, 57, 65, 78, 118, 142, 150, 152, 180–1, 242 Netzloff, Mark 36 Neville, Richard 131 Newman, Karen 89 New World 46, 84, 112–13, 141, 180 Nine Years’ War 116, 127–8, 136, 218 Nixon, Anthony 13 Noble, Louise 46 Noling, Kim H. 203 Norbrook, David 150, 185 Normans 37, 79, 100, 115–16, 180, 189, 244 Norway 78 Oldenburg, Scott 17, 96 Olivier, Laurence 109

O’Neill, Hugh, Earl of Tyrone 160–1 Oth (Othello) 12, 15, 24–5, 27, 43, 45, 55–6, 60, 61, 64, 73, 78, 79, 83, 87, 89, 91, 96–7, 103–4, 113, 122, 125, 136, 139, 143, 151–2, 153, 164, 165, 180–1, 194, 203–4, 206, 208, 219, 222–3, 226, 228–9, 231, 242 Ovid 185 Padua 122, 206 Parker, Patricia 5, 8 n.5, 9 n.19, 30, 64 Parry, Graham 39 Patterson, Annabel 62, 175 Per (Pericles) 20, 69, 80, 83, 129, 158 Philippi 236, 247 Pisa 122, 206 Plautus 185 Pliny 152 Plutarch 83 Pocock, J. G. A. 64 Pory, John 12, 151 Pugliatti, Paola 239 Puttenham, George 193–4 Quintilian 185 R2 (King Richard II) 3, 18, 21–2, 27, 57–8, 63–4, 67, 68, 69, 71–3, 75, 79, 80–1, 85, 97–8, 113–14, 115, 117, 120–1, 122, 126, 127, 130, 132, 133–4, 142, 149–50, 156–7, 165, 166–7, 169–70, 173–5, 176, 181, 202, 208–9, 210, 215, 221–2, 233–4, 236, 238–9, 254 R3 (King Richard III) 1, 3–4, 5, 21, 26, 28, 30–3, 49, 53–4, 57, 67, 69–70, 84, 93, 99, 100–1, 119, 133, 138–9, 142, 148, 150, 175–6, 179, 189–90, 202, 205, 210, 222, 226, 233–5, 239–41, 249, 254 Rackin, Phyllis 8 n.6, 18, 28, 42–3, 48–50, 64, 71, 88, 130, 155, 193, 237, 239, 250 Raffield, Paul 73 Rees, Joan 235 Reformation 81, 84, 100, 103, 115, 122, 123, 149 Renan, Ernest 99 Richard II 100, 115 Richard III 1 RJ (Romeo and Juliet) 21, 23, 52, 55, 57, 106 Roberts, Jeanne Addison 245, 246 Roebuck, Thomas 80 275

Index

Romans 11, 14, 21, 23–4, 27, 28, 33, 37, 38, 46, 50, 51, 57, 62, 63, 65–7, 69, 77, 78, 79, 84, 95, 97, 104, 106, 122–3, 137, 147, 160, 162–3, 171–2, 179, 181, 183–4, 195, 199, 200, 206, 213, 215, 218, 220, 226, 232, 246, 249, 253–4 Rome 6, 11, 21–2, 28, 35–6, 38, 50–1, 61, 63, 65, 67–8, 69, 72, 83, 94, 97, 104, 120, 122, 133, 137, 147–8, 163, 170–2, 177, 181–2, 191, 204, 206, 210, 215, 218, 220, 226, 236, 241, 245, 246–7, 251, 253, 254 Rooks, John 246 Ruiter, David 96 Saenger, Michael 102 Saxons 19, 37, 79, 80, 162, 162, 189, 204, 244 Saxton, Christopher 141 Scanlan, Thomas 159 Schulting, Sabine 96 Schwartz, Kathryn 18 Schwyzer, Philip 8 n.14, 17, 20, 32, 33, 36, 88, 94, 131, 142, 155, 212, 233, 235 Scotland 2, 4, 5,6 13, 22, 27, 30, 33–4, 37, 58, 64, 78, 84–5, 86–7, 96, 100, 103, 110, 111, 114–15, 129, 133, 142, 155, 158, 199, 209, 212, 233–4, 236, 253 Scythia 17 Seneca 185 Shapiro, James 27, 118, 126, 161, 239 Sharpe, Kevin 27, 148, 150, 183 Shrank, Cathy 57 Sicilia 122 Sinfield, Alan 132, 239, 248 Skelton, R. A. 141 Smith, Thomas 50, 61, 62, 69, 72, 105, 148–9, 168, 170, 183–4, 209 Smith, Warren D. 161 Smuts, Malcolm 212 Sommerville, Johann P. 150 Son (Sonnets) 15, 27, 163, 202, 242 Spain 26, 84, 159, 182, 237 Speed, John 34, 37, 40, 50, 55, 58–9, 79, 84, 87–8, 118, 141–2, 162, 189, 199, 233, 235–6, 244 Spelman, Henry 38 Spenser, Edmund 17, 20, 23, 26, 57, 114, 116–17, 136, 142, 154–5, 160–1, 167, 180, 200, 213–14, 244, 253 Spiller, Elizabeth 214 276

Stanihurst, Richard 103, 116–17, 127, 167 Stevens, Paul 8 n.4 STM (Sir Thomas More) 7, 7 n.1, 71, 87, 96, 114, 137, 138, 206–8 Sullivan, Garret A. Jr., 36, 97–9, 136, 142, 144, 146, 148, 163 Targoff, Ramie 32 Tarquins 172, 184–5, 204, 245, 250 Taylor, Gary 43, 161 TC (Troilus and Cressida) 11, 12, 24, 69, 104–6, 106, 112, 130, 220–1, 236 Tem (The Tempest) 6, 12–3, 19, 21, 26, 27, 36, 44, 46, 64, 84, 92, 97, 99, 113, 118, 121, 122–3, 126, 148, 159–60, 180, 194–5, 210 Terence 185 TGV (The Two Gentlemen of Verona) 21, 89, 111, 125, 159 Thornborough, John 234 Tim (Timon of Athens) 20, 21, 61, 64, 106, 179 Tit (Titus Andronicus) 17, 21, 23–4, 28, 45–6, 50, 60, 63, 68, 69–70, 91, 92, 104, 106, 110, 125, 151, 153, 170–1, 185–7, 189, 191, 204, 206, 210–11, 214, 220, 225, 232, 236–7, 241, 242, 245, 253 TN (Twelfth Night) 112, 113, 141 TNK (The Two Noble Kinsmen) 17, 20 Tribble, Evelyn 99, 148 Troy 11, 236 TS (The Taming of the Shrew) 206 Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret 88 Tunis 12 Tunisia 24 Turk 15, 73, 151 Union of the Crowns 8 n.3, 34, 36, 85, 111, 196–8, 212, 234 VA (Venus and Adonis) 166 Vaughan, Alden T. 13, 118, 160, 180, 195 Vaughan Mason, Virginia 13, 118, 160, 180, 195 Venice 15, 16, 25, 51, 55–6, 60, 69–70, 73, 91–2, 122, 151, 153, 183, 194, 206–8, 219 Verona 51, 55, 122 Vienna 51 Virgil 11, 185, 220 Vitkus, Daniel 73, 164, 223 Volsce, Volscian 68, 94, 97, 147, 172, 185, 215, 218–19

Index

Wakefield 17, 71, 217 Wales 2, 4, 6, 22, 29–30, 33–6, 37–8, 58, 65, 68–9, 70–1, 80, 85–7, 94, 110, 111, 119–21, 141–2, 143, 144, 148, 154, 156, 158, 161, 195, 212, 236, 243–4 Warner, William 13 Wars of the Roses 25, 31, 68, 85, 93, 99, 148, 217, 233 Watkins, John 5, 7 n.2, 9 n.18, 96, 232 Weis, René 55 Wells, Robin Headlam 204 Wells, Stanley 180 William the Conqueror 162

Williams, Deanne 102 Williams, Grant 99 Wilson, Richard 193 Womack, Peter 88 Wortham, Christopher 8 n.9, 36, 212 Wotton, Henry 136 Wriothesley, Henry, Earl of Southampton 161, 184 WT (The Winter’s Tale) 73, 81–2, 146, 196, 198, 206, 210 Wyner, Rowland 212 Young, Jennifer 7 n.2, 138

277

278

279

280