This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard

THIS ENGLAND, THAT SHAKESPEARE

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This England, That Shakespeare New Angles on Englishness and the Bard

Edited by WILLY MALEY University of Glasgow, Scotland MARGARET TUDEAU-CLAYTON University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland

© Willy Maley and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton and the contributors 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Willy Maley and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton have asserted their rights under the Copyright, 'HVLJQVDQG3DWHQWV$FWWREHLGHQWL¿HGDVWKHHGLWRUVRIWKLVZRUN Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Wey Court East Union Road Farnham Surrey, GU9 7PT England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington VT 05401-4405 USA

www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data This England, that Shakespeare: new angles on Englishness and the Bard. 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Histories. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Political and social views. 3. Nationalism in literature. 4. National characteristics, English, in literature. 5. National characteristics, British, in literature. I. Maley, Willy. II. Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret 822.3’3–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data This England, that Shakespeare: new angles on Englishness and the bard / edited by Willy Maley and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6602-8 (alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4094-0429-3 (ebook) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Knowledge—England. 3. National characteristics, English, in literature. I. Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret II. Maley, Willy. PR2989.T47 2010 822.3’3—dc22 2009052875 ISBN 9780754666028 (hbk) ISBN 9781409404293 (ebk) II

Contents List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Introduction: ‘To England send him’: Repatriating Shakespeare Willy Maley and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton

vii ix 1

Part 1 This England 1

Pericles and the Language of National Origins Thomas Roebuck and Laurie Maguire

2

‘And bloody England into England gone’: Empire, Monarchy, and Nation in King John Willy Maley

49

The ‘trueborn Englishman’: Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, and the Future History of (the) English Margaret Tudeau-Clayton

63

‘Eat a Leek’: Welsh Corrections, English Conditions, and British Cultural Communion Allison M. Outland

87

3

4

5

‘O, lawful let it be/ That I have room … to curse awhile’: Voicing the Nation’s Conscience in Female Complaint in Richard III, King John, and Henry VIII Alison Thorne

23

105

Part 2 That Shakespeare 6

7

Imagining England: Contemporary Encodings of ‘this sceptred isle’ Sarah Grandage

127

Shakespeare Eurostar: Calais, the Continent, and the Operatic Fortunes of Ambroise Thomas Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo

147

This England, That Shakespeare

vi

8

‘Not a man from England’: Assimilating the Exotic ‘Other’ Through Performance, from Henry IV to Henry VI Amanda Penlington

165

9

A Nation of Selves: Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare Neil Corcoran

185

10

Shakespeare-land Graham Holderness

201

Afterword: One of Those Days in England $QGUHZ+DG¿HOd

221

Works Cited Index

225 251

List of Illustrations 3.1



Woodcut portrait of an Englishman, c. 1550, from Andrew Boorde, The First Book of the Introduction of Knowledge, ed. F.J. Furnivall (London, Early English Text Society, 1870), p. 116.

84

7KH¿JXUHRIWKHPRWOH\GUHVVHG(QJOLVKPDQJHQHDORJ\ of a cultural meme. Layout: Matthias Heim.

85

6.1

Cline of allusivity. Design: Sarah Grandage.

138

7.1

Francis I and Henry VIII at Channel Tunnel mouth (Calais). By permission Archives Théâtre Impérial de Compiègne.

160

Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare gaze down the Channel Tunnel. By permission Archives Théâtre Impérial de Compiègne.

162

7.2 7.3

Programme cover to the video presentation of the Compiègne production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Covent Garden (2003). By permission Archives Théâtre Impérial de Compiègne. 164

8.1

Henry V, Royal Shakespeare Company (2000). By permission Malcolm Davies Collection. © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

176

Henry VI, Royal Shakespeare Company (2000). By permission Malcolm Davies Collection. © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

181

8.2

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Notes on Contributors Clara Calvo is Professor of English Literature at the University of Murcia (Spain). She has written on Shakespeare and language and on Shakespeare’s reception in 6SDLQ+HUUHVHDUFKLQWHUHVWVLQFOXGH6KDNHVSHDUH¶VDIWHUOLYHVLQ¿FWLRQDQGRQWKH screen, and the role of Shakespeare in a shared European transnational cultural identity. She is the author of Power Relations and Fool–Master Discourse in Shakespeare (1991) and has coauthored, with Jean Jacques Weber, The Literature Workbook (1998). She has edited, with Ton Hoenselaars, a volume on “European Shakespeares” for The Shakespearean International Yearbook (2008). She is currently working on Shakespeare and the Great War. Neil Corcoran is King Alfred Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University. His books include critical studies of David Jones and Seamus Heaney; a revised, enlarged edition of his study of Heaney, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, appeared in 1998. Other books include: English Poetry since 1940 (1993); a study of modern Irish literature entitled After Yeats and Joyce: Reading Modern Irish Literature (1997); a collection of essays, Poets of Modern Ireland: Text, Context, Intertext (1999); a critical monograph, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (2004); and an edited collection of essays on the work of Bob Dylan called Do You, Mr Jones?: Bob Dylan with the Poets and Professors (2002). His most recent books are, as editor, the Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (2007) and, as author, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet (2010). Sarah Grandage is a postgraduate teaching fellow in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham working on a literary/linguistic doctoral research project exploring Shakespearean allusion in contemporary newspaper discourse. Her main interests are in stylistics, the language/literature interface, dramatic discourse, the creativity of language in use, and cognitive linguistics. She is also interested in applied linguistics in the areas of discourse analysis and language processing. As a research associate, she was part of an interdisciplinary team from within the university working on an ESRC-funded project, ‘The acquisition of multi-word structures’. $QGUHZ+DG¿HOG is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (1994), Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (1997), Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (1999), and The English Renaissance, 1500–1620 (2000). His most recent works includes Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (2003), and Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005). He has also edited The Oxford History of the Irish

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Book: Vol. III, The Irish Book in English 1550–1800 (2005), and is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. Ton Hoenselaars teaches Renaissance literature in the English Department of Utrecht University. His books (produced independently and in collaboration) include: Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (1992), Shakespeare’s Italy (1993), The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama (1997), English Literature and the Other Languages (1999), The Author as Character (1999), 400 Years of Shakespeare in Europe (2003), Shakespeare and the Language of Translation (2004), Shakespeare’s History Plays (2004), and Challenging Humanism (2005). He is the president of the Shakespeare Society of the Low Countries (SGNV) and the European Shakespeare Research Association (ESRA). He is currently writing a study of the dramatic activity in ‘Ruhleben’, the internment camp for Britons in Berlin during the First World War. Graham Holderness is Professor of English at the University of Hertfordshire. His books include: D.H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction (1982), Shakespeare’s History (1985), The Shakespeare Myth (1988), Shakespeare: The Histories (2000), Anglo-Saxon Verse (2000), Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth (2001), Visual Shakespeare: Essays in Film and Television (2002), and Textual Shakespeare: Writing and the Word (2003). His novel The Prince of Denmark was published in 2002, and his poetry collection Craeft (2002) was awarded a Poetry Book Society recommendation. Current research projects include ‘Shakespeare in the Arab World’ (funded by AHRC), and the representation of Christ in literature. He is editor of Critical Survey, and a Fellow of the English Association. Laurie Maguire is Professor of English at Oxford University and a Fellow of Magdalen College. She is the author or editor of seven books. Her recent publications include Shakespeare’s Names (2007), How To Do Things with Shakespeare (2007), and Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood (WileyBlackwell, 2009). She is also the author of the popular best-seller, Where there’s a Will there’s a Way (2006/2007). Willy Maley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of A Spenser Chronology (1994), Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (1997), and Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton   +H LV HGLWRU ZLWK$QGUHZ +DG¿HOG of A View of the Present State of Ireland: From the First Published Edition (1997). He has also edited six collections of essays: with Brendan Bradshaw and $QGUHZ +DG¿HOG 5HSUHVHQWLQJ ,UHODQG /LWHUDWXUH DQG WKH 2ULJLQV RI &RQÀLFW 1534–1660 (1993); with Bart Moore-Gilbert and Gareth Stanton, Postcolonial Criticism (1997); with David J. Baker, British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (2002); with Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare and Scotland (2004); with

Notes on Contributors

xi

Alex Benchimol, 6SKHUHV RI ,QÀXHQFH ,QWHOOHFWXDO DQG &XOWXUDO 3XEOLFV IURP Shakespeare to Habermas (2007); and with Philip Schwyzer, Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to the Assembly (2010). Allison M. Outland completed a PhD entitled ‘“Embroideries Out of Old Mythologies”: Engendering a British Nation in the Early Modern English Theatre’, in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, under the direction of Jean E. Howard. She has served for the past three years as a Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow at Fordham University in New York City. Her essay ‘“Ridden with a Welsh Goat”: Parson Evans’ Correction of Windsor’s English Condition’ is forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance. She is currently reworking her thesis as two book-length studies which develop its concerns with the construction of gender and ethnic identities and with Jacobean politics. Amanda Penlington is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of the West of England. Amanda’s doctoral research was on the staging of Ben Jonson’s comedies by professional theatre companies in England (1977 to 2000). The focus of her current research is the representation of race in the RSC’s Complete Works season. Articles include the use of design in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (Proceedings of the British Graduate Shakespeare Conference); cross-dressing, cosmetics, and desire in Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass; and Michael Grandage’s Richard III DW 6KHI¿HOG &UXFLEOH 7KHDWUH Renaissance Journal). She is also a playwright; her plays Dictation and No Pyjamas were produced at the Alma Tavern Theatre, Bristol, in 2009. Thomas Roebuck is currently a DPhil student at Magdalen College, Oxford. His research projects broadly encompass ways of conceptualizing early modern national identity before the existence of nation-states or nationalism. His DPhil DQDO\VHVWKHUROHVRIYHUVHDQGGUDPDWLFKLVWRULHVLQEXLOGLQJDI¿QLWLHVWRUHJLRQDO centres of power (e.g., civic corporations, noble households) from 1580 to 1640. He also has active research interests in Ben Jonson and his connections to seventeenth-century communities of patrons, antiquarians, and poets across England and the British Isles; the circulation, editing, publication, and imitation of medieval writing in the early modern period (researching a project on earlymodern Gower); and continuities in scholarly methodologies to approaching medieval and early modern drama. Alison Thorne is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde. Her research interests include early modern drama, rhetoric (especially its intersections with politics and gender), English visual culture, gender studies, and women’s writing. She is the author of Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking Through Language (2000), and co-editor with Jennifer Richards of Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England

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(2007). She is currently writing a monograph on the politics of female supplication in early modern drama and culture. Margaret Tudeau-Clayton is Professor of English Literature at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, having taught at the Universities of Geneva, Lausanne, and Zürich. With a BA and PhD from Cambridge (UK), she is author of Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil (1998; republished in paperback 2006) as well as many articles on English Renaissance literature, especially on translations and on Shakespeare. She has co-edited two collections of essays: with Martin Warner, Addressing Frank Kermode (1991), and with Pippa Berry, Textures of Renaissance Knowledge (2003). She is currently working on a book on Shakespeare’s language: Shakespeare’s Englishes: Shakespeare and the Ideology of Linguistic Practices in Early Modern England.

Introduction

‘To England send him’: Repatriating Shakespeare Willy Maley and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton

Hamlet Without the Prince In his conclusion to a review of work on early modern British history at the turn of the millennium, Hugh Kearney lamented the lack of attention paid to England – ‘it is the view from the periphery which is dominant, ignoring the core’ – adding in a very telling phrase: ‘If the comment is not too Anglocentric, it is like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark’.1 Leaving aside the place of England in that play – a place of exile, madness, and murder – Kearney had a point, for when John Pocock made his famous ‘plea’ three decades ago for a new subject called British history, ‘the plural history of a group of cultures situated along an Anglo-Celtic frontier and marked by an increasing English political and cultural domination’ – DSOHDWRZKLFK.HDUQH\KLPVHOIZDVRQHRIWKH¿UVWWRUHVSRQGZLWKKLVPDJLVWHULDO ‘history of four nations’ – neither he nor Kearney could have anticipated the extent to which this dominance would be met by an almost exclusive focus on the Celtic side of the frontier.2 In literary studies collections on Shakespeare and Ireland, Shakespeare and Scotland, and Shakespeare and Wales have added weight to the non-Anglo end of the ‘British’ seesaw, while England is acknowledged more in the breach than the observance.3 Between Sir Walter Raleigh’s 1918 British Academy lecture on ‘Shakespeare and England’ and Linda Colley’s 1992 lecture on ‘Shakespeare and the Limits of National Culture’, a marked scepticism has, 1 Hugh F. Kearney, ‘“Faith and Fatherland Revisited”: Review of (among others) Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (eds), British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)’, Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 4/2 (Winter 1999/Spring 2000): 145–57 (156). 2 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, Journal of Modern History, 47 (1975): 605–6. First published in 1989, Kearney’s book has been reissued in a second, updated edition: Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 3 Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (eds), Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (London: Macmillan, 1997); Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy (eds), Shakespeare and Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Willy Maley and Philip Schwyzer (eds), Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to the Assembly (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010).

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moreover, entered discussions of Shakespeare’s England.4 Raleigh was clear as to his mission: I propose to return to the old catholic doctrine which has been illuminated by so many disciples of Shakespeare, and to speak of him as our great national SRHW +H HPERGLHV DQG H[HPSOL¿HV DOO WKH YLUWXHV DQG PRVW RI WKH IDXOWV RI England. Any one who reads and understands him understands England. This method of studying Shakespeare by reading him has perhaps gone somewhat out of vogue in favour of more roundabout ways of approach, but it is the best method for all that. Shakespeare tells us more about himself and his mind than we could learn even from those who knew him in his habit as he lived, if they were all alive and all talking. To learn what he tells we have only to listen. I think there is no national poet, of any great nation whatsoever, who is so completely representative of his own people as Shakespeare is representative of the English. There is certainly no other English poet who comes near to Shakespeare in embodying our character and our foibles.5

In a reprise of Thomas Carlyle’s claim that wherever ‘English men and women are, they will say to one another: “Yes, this Shakespeare is ours; we produced him, we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kind with him”’,6 Raleigh here ORFDWHV6KDNHVSHDUHDVDJLYHQVKDUHGFHQWUHDURXQGZKLFKWKHVSHFL¿FLW\RIWKH English character as well as the totality and unity of the English nation consolidate, DOEHLWDWRWDOLW\DQGXQLW\ZLWKLWVµIRLEOHV¶DQGHFFHQWULFLWLHV7KLVFRQ¿GHQWVHQVH RIRZQHUVKLSDQGFRPSODFHQWLGHQWL¿FDWLRQRISRHWDQGQDWLRQDUHLQWHUURJDWHG by Colley whose rigorous historicizing invites rather sceptical relativism. Yet her conclusion that ‘Shakespeare eludes appropriation’ suggests, between Raleigh’s absolute patriotism and her relative pluralism, a continuity in the ineffable, if intuitively grasped, nature of Shakespeare, and this becomes transnational proof of the national poet’s elusive genius. For Raleigh, an everyday, everyman ‘core’ RI(QJOLVKQHVVVLPLODUO\HOXGHVGH¿QLWLRQLWLVLQWXLWLYHO\DSSUHKHQGHGOLNHDQG with the writing of the national poet who, despite de rigeur scepticism in the literary academy, continues to represent this core, not only brashly for tourists ZKRÀRFNWRWKHµKHDUWRI(QJODQG¶WKDW6KDNHVSHDUH¶VQDWLYHWRZQRI6WUDWIRUG still sells itself as, but also more discreetly – and feelingly – for academics such as Kearney. Raleigh’s lecture comes of course in the wake of the elaborate tercentenary FHOHEUDWLRQVRI7KHFRPSOH[DQGFRQWUDGLFWRU\FRQ¿JXUDWLRQVRI6KDNHVSHDUH and nation produced at this moment of ideological and political, international as 4

Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘Shakespeare and England’, Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy, in England and the War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918), 120–44; Linda Colley, Shakespeare and the Limits of National Culture, Hayes Robinson Lecture Series No. 2 (Egham, Surrey: Royal Holloway, University of London, 1999), 23. 5 Raleigh, ‘Shakespeare and England’, 120–21. 6 Cited in Robert J.C. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 228. That Carlyle was a Scot adds a layer of irony to this observation.

‘To England send him’

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well as national, crisis are examined in our closing essay by Graham Holderness, RQH RI WKH ¿UVW DQG ¿HUFHVW LQWHUURJDWRUV RI µWKH 6KDNHVSHDUH P\WK¶ ZKR KHUH goes beyond sceptical interrogation, looking forward as well as back, in pursuit RI UHFRQ¿JXUDWLRQV RI WKLV UHODWLRQ WR VDOYDJH D GHVSHUDWHO\ QHHGHG VHQVH RI belonging.7 As Holderness discusses, the moment of the tercentenary celebrations was also the moment pinpointed by Terence Hawkes in the conclusion to the vaudeville act of criticism that was That Shakespeherian Rag (1986) where he locates the origin of English Studies in a reactionary resistance to the Russian Revolution, and a siege mentality that made the English nation and the subject of English converge around questions of colonialism and cultural elitism. In his suggestive closing remarks, Hawkes evokes ‘a complex relationship between the academic subject of English and the culture and identity the subject was designed to serve – “Englishness”’: The one sustains, and even helps to create the other. And yet, in the same period since 1917, a series of continuing confrontations has brought just this matter of ‘Englishness’ into question. Issues raised by events in Ireland and Ulster, the retreat from colonialism followed by immigration from former colonies, the rise of Welsh and Scottish nationalism, the special problems of Africa, membership of the European Economic Community, the Falklands campaign, have all to VRPHGHJUHHEURXJKWLQWRIRFXVWKHPDWWHURIWKHGH¿QLWLRQOLPLWVDQGVSHFL¿F character of ‘Englishness’. And latterly they have done so for millions to whom WZHQW\¿YH\HDUVRIFKHDSWUDYHODQGWHOHYLVLRQKDYHSHUKDSVDOVRVXJJHVWHGWKDW (QJOLVKFXOWXUHLQYROYHVDSHFXOLDUDQGVSHFL¿FZD\RIOLIHUDWKHUWKDQWKHRQO\ or necessarily the most desirable one. It might even be reasonable to detect in the invention of the subject itself a major diagnostic response to an early apprehension of the complexities surrounding cultural identity. Current talk of a ‘crisis’ in English neglects that history. There is no crisis in English. There was and is a crisis which created English and of which it remains a distinctive manifestation: a child of Empire’s decline, we might say, by America out of Russia.8

7

‘Bardolatry: or, the Cultural Materialist’s Guide to Stratford-upon-Avon’, in Graham Holderness (ed.), The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 2–15; and more recently, Graham Holderness and Andrew Murphy, ‘Shakespeare’s England: Britain’s Shakespeare’, in John J. Joughin (ed.), Shakespeare and National Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 19–41. 8 Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London: Methuen, 1986), ‘Conclusion: 1917 and All That’, 121–2. Others have located this origin earlier, in relation to other political concerns; see Peter Barry, Beginning Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 12–13. Balz Engler reminds us of Robert Crawford’s point that the study of English literature was born in Scotland, a child of the union of the kingdoms in 1707. Balz Engler, ‘Englishness and English Studies’, in Balz Engler and Renate Haas (eds), European English Studies: Contributions towards the History of a Discipline (Leicester: The English Association for ESSE, 2000), 335–48 (339). See Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

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At the end of Shakespeare in the Present (2002), Hawkes takes up the theme with 6KDNHVSHDUH VSHFL¿FDOO\ LQ YLHZ DQG LQ UHODWLRQ WR WKH RQH DPRQJ KLV µLVVXHV¶ here that, more than any other, has succeeded in calling into question not only theoretically, but actually and painfully, ‘this matter of Englishness’, namely, the will to separatism of the other nations of the British nation state: ‘Could it possibly be that the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish might at a certain point in the future come to regard an involvement with Shakespeare as somehow condoning or even embodying the “Englishing” by which, in some eyes, they were for too long moulded?’9 Inseparable still from an elusive core of ‘Englishness’, representing the heart not only of England but also of English Studies, Shakespeare is here the instrument of a colonizing will to dominance within the nations of the British archipelago as, for other critics, he has been within the nations of the British Empire.10 Yet today both English Studies and the Englishness it purportedly serves are in disarray, in part at least thanks to such ‘postcolonial’ interrogations, which have been instrumental in their dismantling. Murmurings at the close of the second millennium swelled into the collective wail of a full blown ‘English identity crisis’ at the turn into the third, notably in the wake of the breaches opened in the United Kingdom, in particular by Scottish devolution.11 This volume is a response to this perceived crisis of identity, which proposes Shakespeare not as an object so much as a collaborator in the project of collective self-understanding. In a telling anticipation of Kearney’s telling comment about ‘Hamlet without the Prince’, Raleigh, in his lecture on ‘Shakespeare and England’, treats the nation WKHZD\3KLOLS6LGQH\DSSURDFKHVSRHWU\GH¿QLQJLWE\QHJDWLYHVRSSRVLWHVDQG exclusions. One revealing example is his refutation of an allegorical reading by another nation of its relationship to the very play that Kearney treats explicitly as an analogy and implicitly as a metonym of the core at once of Shakespeare and of Englishness. That this other nation is Germany lends a certain frisson to Raleigh’s rallying cry (whatever you do, don’t mention the war): Seventy years before the War the German poet Freiligrath wrote a poem to prove that Germany is Hamlet, urged by the spirit of her fathers to claim her inheritance, vacillating and lost in thought, but destined, before the Fifth Act ends, to strew the stage with the corpses of her enemies. Only a German could have hit on the idea that Germany is Hamlet. The English, for whom the play 9

Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 143. 10 See Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). See also Jyotsna Singh, ‘Different Shakespeares: The Bard in Colonial/Postcolonial India’, Theatre Journal, 41/4 (1989): 445–58; and Nandi Bhatia ‘“Shakespeare” and the Codes of Empire in India’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 18 (1998): 96–126. 11 Amelia Hill, ‘The English Identity Crisis’, The Observer, 13 June 2004, Focus, 12; on the relation of this crisis to Scottish separatism, see Neil Ascherson, ‘England Goes It Alone’, Diary, London Review of Books (5 April 2007): 38–9.

‘To England send him’

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was written, know that Hamlet is Hamlet, and that Shakespeare was thinking of a young man, not of the pomposities of national ambition.12

Hamlet is Hamlet in the same way that England is England, and Shakespeare is England too, since ‘Any one who reads and understands him understands England’.13 Yet nobody knows what Shakespeare and England (let alone Hamlet) really stand for except for each other and an elusive – ineffable yet intuitively JUDVSHG ± µFRUH¶ RU HVVHQFH WKDW LI GH¿QHG DW DOO LV GH¿QHG E\ QHJDWLRQ 7KLV interchangeability may account for the tautological ring to the idea of an ‘English Shakespeare Association’, a body which has never existed, unlike the British Empire Shakespeare Society (BESS) (established in 1901) and the British Shakespeare Association (BSA) (established a century later). Yet both bodies signal, too, the vulnerability of the elusive ‘core’ of Englishness and the potential for reversal – from the instrumentalization of Shakespeare in the Englishing of the British to the Britishing of both Shakespeare and the English. Indeed, the relation between the names of Britain/the British and of England/the English has become fraught again as it was for Shakespeare and his contemporaries when those who opposed adoption of the name of Britain under James couched their opposition in terms of England as a ‘colonial territory’.14 As contributors here discuss, other 12

Raleigh, ‘Shakespeare and England’, 141. This is part of a concerted effort to separate the English and Shakespeare from the nation with which both had been associated in the nineteenth century and which had even claimed that Shakespeare should be formally made over to it in the event of victory in the First World War; see Engler, ‘Englishness and English Studies’, 342–3 (and note 14). On Hamlet as a ‘Teuton’ see the citation by Young of µDQDQRQ\PRXVOLWHUDU\FULWLFLQ(GLQEXUJK¶ZKRµSXEOLVKHGWKH¿UVWVWXG\RI6KDNHVSHDUHRQ the principle of race – with Iago as the Romano-Italic type, Hamlet as the Teuton, Macbeth as a Celt, Shylock as a Jew, and so on’. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity, 68. Note the DEVHQFHRIDW\SHRI(QJOLVKQHVVDSSDUHQWO\RXWVLGHWKH¿HOGPRUHLGHDOWKDQHWKQLFLW\ 13 Hamlet is Scotland, of course, but that’s another story. See Lilian Winstanley, ‘Hamlet’ and the Scottish Succession: Being an Examination of the Relations of the Play of “Hamlet” to the Scottish Succession and the Essex Conspiracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921). The gauntlet has been taken up since by Stuart M. Kurland, in ‘Hamlet and the Scottish Succession?’, Studies in English Literature, 34/2 (1994): 279– DQGE\$QGUHZ+DG¿HOGLQµ+DPOHW¶V&RXQWU\0DWWHUV7KH³6FRWWLVK3OD\´ZLWKLQ the Play’, in Maley and Murphy (eds), Shakespeare and Scotland, 87–103. For other views that nationalize and politicize the play in ways Raleigh would not approve see Ralph Berry, ‘Hamlet: Nationhood and Identity’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 49 (1980), 283–303; Peter Erickson, ‘Can We Talk About Race in Hamlet ?’ in Arthur F. Kinney (ed.), Hamlet: New Critical Essays (London: Routledge, 2002), 207–13; Lisa Hopkins, ‘The Coast: Hamlet’, in Shakespeare on the Edge: Border-crossing in the Tragedies and the Henriad (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 35–57; Patricia Parker, ‘Black Hamlet: Battening on the Moor’, Shakespeare Studies, 31 (2003): 127–64; and John S. Pendergast, ‘A Nation of Hamlets: Shakespeare and Cultural Politics’, Extrapolation, 36/1 (1995): 10–17. 14 Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 142. Neil Ascherson (op. cit.) comments: ‘The return

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narratives of colonial occupation rather served James’s project, whether the occupation by the Saxons of an ancient British nation (Maguire and Roebuck) or the subsequent occupation of the Saxon kingdom by the Normans, assimilated to the period of ‘foreign’ Catholic hegemony by protestant revisionary historians VWUDWHJLFDOO\HFKRHGE\-DPHVKLPVHOIZKHQLQKLV¿UVWVSHHFKWR3DUOLDPHQWKH evoked a ‘slavish yoke’ from which the two kingdoms of Scotland and England had been freed (Tudeau-Clayton).15 In Shakespeare’s England/Britain, then, various FRPSHWLQJµSRVWFRORQLDO¶QDUUDWLYHVZHUHLQFLUFXODWLRQWKDWGH¿QHG(QJODQGDQG the English differently in relation to European as well as British ‘others’. Today, it is DJDLQLQUHODWLRQWR(XURSHDVZHOODVWR%ULWDLQWKDWWKLVLGHQWLW\KDVWRGH¿QHLWVHOI This is pointed up here by our essays which examine the complex – and unstable – relations between the English and their European as well as British neighbours both as explored by Shakespeare and as fashioned in cultural afterlives, including performances of the plays. The question at bottom is whether and how – with or ZLWKRXW6KDNHVSHDUH¶VKHOS±WKH(QJOLVKPLJKWGH¿QHWKHPVHOYHVRWKHUZLVHWKDQ in a negative relation of difference – as not-German, not-French (in other words not-European), and as not-British. 6LJQL¿FDQWO\LWLVLQUHODWLRQWRWKHRWKHUQDWLRQVRIWKH%ULWLVKVWDWHWKDWWKH QHJDWLYHGH¿QLWLRQRIWKH(QJOLVKDQGDQ(QJOLVKQHVVHSLWRPL]HGE\6KDNHVSHDUH UHWXUQHG LQ WKH V7KXV LQ D SLHFH ¿UVW SXEOLVKHG LQ New Society in 1982, Angela Carter recalls ‘Empire Day’ at her South London primary school: Assembled in a playground strung with Union Jack bunting, those children who had been assigned no special roles sang patriotic songs: ‘Land of hope DQGJORU\¶DQGµ7KHUH¶OODOZD\VEHDQ(QJODQG¶7KHUHZDVDSURFHVVLRQRIÀDJV and emblems: England, Scotland, Wales, Ulster. The emblems, of cardboard carried on poles, were a Tudor rose, a thistle, a daffodil and shamrocks. Those ZKRFDUULHGWKH6FRWWLVK:HOVKDQG8OVWHUÀDJVZRUHDQDWLRQDOFRVWXPH±NLOW steeple hat, Kathleen Mavourneen headscarf; but the little girl who bore up the cross of St George wore just a regular gymslip. The lesser breeds, evidently, were picturesque; the English, not.16

Not only are the English, compared to their British neighbours, not ‘picturesque’, they are, Carter concludes, ‘an unhistoric nation’ (187), a comment that comes close to Conrad Russell’s claim that England was the least revolutionary of the

of English nationalism … is beginning to question Britishness, and the growing conviction among the English that they are somehow its victims.’ 15 This discourse anticipates the unifying discourse of the British as at once Protestant (not-Catholic) and not-French following the Union in 1707, fully documented in Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994). 16 Angela Carter, ‘So There’ll Always Be an England’, in Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings, with an introduction by Joan Smith, edited by Jenny Uglow (London: Vintage, ¿UVWSXEOLVKHG&KDWWR :LQGXV ± 

‘To England send him’

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four nations in the early modern period.17 Carter’s irony undermines the racially LQÀHFWHGLPSHULDOVXSHULRULW\RIDQ(QJOLVKLGHQWLW\GH¿QHGDVDQHJDWLYHGLIIHUHQFH IURPµOHVVHUEUHHGV¶VLJQDOOHGE\DODFN+HULURQLFGHFRQVWUXFWLRQ¿QGVDQHFKR in the earliest printed portrait of an Englishman (Fig. 3.1), who is depicted, again ironically, as almost naked, without a costume of his own, at a moment just prior to Shakespeare’s birth when, as essays here consider, the character of English and/or British identity was an emergent, contested object with high ideological and political stakes. Four hundred years later, in 1998, the ‘naked’ character of the English, now not only without a national costume but also without a national language – English having disappeared into Englishes – furnishes for the historian David Starkey an RFFDVLRQQRWVRPXFKIRUGHSUHFDWRU\DQGGHFRQVWUXFWLYHLURQ\DVIRUDI¿UPDWLRQ RIDQHZLGHQWLW\DVµWKH¿UVWWUXO\JOREDOPXOWLFXOWXUDOVRFLHW\¶18 Ten years on such a prospect is viewed with gloom by Graham Holderness here as a ‘cosmopolitan vacuum’ (echoing Tom Nairn’s view of ‘globalisation’ as an ‘abyss’), perhaps symptomatically given the very different mood that prevails today.19 7KHUHLVKRZHYHUDULVNKHUHWRRRIZLWKGUDZDOLQWRDPHUHO\QHJDWLYHGH¿QLWLRQ of the English – and of Shakespeare – in relation to the global/cosmopolitan, a risk that Clara Calvo and Ton Hoenselaars detect in Holderness’s earlier work. As Holderness himself discusses, Shakespeare has hitherto enjoyed a prominent role in this relation, having been represented from 1623 on as at once universal DQG VSHFL¿FDOO\(QJOLVK%ULWLVKD UHSUHVHQWDWLRQZKLFK KDV QRWRULRXVO\ VHUYHG the imperial project.20 Yet, as other contributors consider, this relation is itself an object in the plays – only most explicitly in Innogen’s conceit of the ‘world’s volume’ in which ‘Our Britain seems as of it but not in’t’ (Cymbeline, 3.4.137–8), a conceit that, as Richard Wilson and others have recently commented, points to the imbrication of the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ in the material environment of the print culture which produced the books of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.21 If contributors here point to the hold exercised by various more local categories, whether of city, gender, or estate, over the categories of the national as well as the global, the relation of the national, whether English or British, to the global was in addition, as they show, complicated by the historical rupture that was the 17

Conrad Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 1603–1642 (London: Hambledon Press, 1989), 251. 18 David Starkey, ‘Hooray, England doesn’t exist’, News Review, 5, The Sunday Times, April 26, 1998. 19 Tom Nairn The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism, 3rd rev. ed. (Altona Vic: Common Ground, 2003), xx. 20 7KLV LV LQ HIIHFW DQQRXQFHG E\ WKH ¿UVW DQG IRXQGLQJ LQVWDQFH LQ %HQ -RQVRQ¶V prefatory poem to the First Folio which declaims: ‘Triumph my Britaine thou hast one to showe / To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. / He was not of an age but for all time’. As Britain and England are not yet the interchangeable terms they will become (see below), ‘Britaine’ is a politically charged choice by Jonson. 21 Richard Meek, Jane Rickard, and Richard Wilson (eds), Shakespeare’s Book: Essays in Reading, Writing and Reception (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 8–9.

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UHIRUPDWLRQ6SHFL¿FDOO\WKLVZDVDUXSWXUHWKDWEURNHZLWKWKHLGHDRIDVLQJOH catholic (in the sense of universal) church. English, if not British identity in the early modern world was then arguably produced from the outset in a move of VHSDUDWLRQDVDQHJDWLYHO\GH¿QHGGLIIHUHQFH 7KHLURQLFGHFRQVWUXFWLYHWUHDWPHQWRIWKHQHJDWLYHGH¿QLWLRQH[HPSOL¿HGLQ Angela Carter’s piece continues, with Shakespeare as exemplar, in Germaine Greer’s more recent contention that Shakespeare represents an Englishness that ‘minds its RZQEXVLQHVV¶ZKLFKLVWRVD\DQ(QJOLVKQHVVLQÀHFWHGE\UHJLRQDQGFODVV As a state of mind, then, Englishness is distinct from Britishness. The man who GH¿QHVKLPVHOIDV(QJOLVKGRHVQ¶WIHHOWKHQHHGWRSURSRXQGWKHYDOXHVRI(PSLUH or Commonwealth; neither does he identify with the noisy defenders of a region like Cornwall or Kent. He is not a Geordie or a Scouser; he is not a Londoner, let alone a Cockney or a Mockney. He belongs to an altogether vaguer and more unstable category that dwells unostentatiously deep in the home counties, pays its bills and minds its own business. The mentor of this sterling type is none other than the man of the millennium, William Shakespeare.22

If the protestation of nationhood is disavowed as something vulgar and showy, this comment risks, despite the irony, being complicit with the bluff patriotism of Raleigh and his generation: nobody here but us civilized – home counties, middle FODVV±(QJOLVK6WLOOHOXVLYHDQGVWLOOSUHGRPLQDQWO\GH¿QHGDVDQHJDWLYHGLIIHUHQFH signalled by a lack, the category of Englishness here carries restrictions of class and region that bear out Tom Nairn’s point that the key to the apparent elusiveness of the English character (which he claims is only apparent) is its historically classbased character.23 As our essays underscore, the question of English identity is bound up with questions of class or ‘estate’ in Shakespeare’s plays as in subsequent cultural appropriations whether by particular authors such as Ted Hughes or by popular contemporary media. Could Shakespeare, one wonders, ever have come to occupy the centre of Englishness and English Studies if he had been born an aristocrat in Cornwall or Cumbria?24 The passages from Carter and Greer as well as numerous interventions by journalists in a range of publications – from the Sunday Times to the London Review 22 Germaine Greer, ‘The Man Who Made England: How William Shakespeare … created a coherent view of an autonomous England’, The Spectator, 297/9220 (23 April 2005): 12–13 (12). It might be germane here to remind ourselves that Greer is, of course, Australian, and has participated in debates on Australian identity and Aboriginal rights. 23 Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, 279–93 (‘The English Enigma’). A particularly WHOOLQJ FRQ¿UPDWLRQ LV IXUQLVKHG E\ WKH FDVH RI D %ULWLVK$VLDQ ZKR ZHQW IURP EXUQLQJ ERRNV\HDUVDJRWRKROLGD\VLQ6FDUERURXJKWRGD\ZKHQKHLGHQWL¿HVKLPVHOIDV(QJOLVK EHFDXVHµKHKDVEHFRPHPLGGOHFODVV¶6DUIUD]0DQ]RRUµ%UDGIRUGUHÀHFWVRQPDQ\VKDGHV of Englishness’, The Observer, July 5, 2009, ‘Features’, 4. 24 For F.D. Maurice, appointed as professor to teach English literature at King’s College London in 1840, ‘the essence of Englishness’ was represented by the ‘middle class’ and ‘literature’ was their ‘peculiar property’. Barry, Beginning Theory, 13.

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of Books – testify then to a renewed preoccupation outside the academy with English LGHQWLW\DQGRIIHUDVLGHOLJKWRQWKHFULWLFDOGHEDWHZLWKLQLW-RQDWKDQ%DWH¶VFRQ¿GHQW assertion that ‘there is no denying that Shakespeare was interested in creating a myth of England. He was the only dramatist of the age who returned repeatedly to that foundation-text of Tudor ideology, Holinshed’s Chronicles’ must give us pause.25 $QQDEHO3DWWHUVRQKDVWDXJKWXVMXVWKRZIUDXJKWDQG¿VVXUHGWKHChronicles are.26 Far from being a repository of English myth or Tudor ideology – themselves very different things – they offer, as Patterson shows, a complex multination history and WKDW DSSURSULDWHO\ LV ZKDW ZH ¿QG LQ 6KDNHVSHDUH %DWH¶V FRPPHQW LV UHYHDOLQJ rather for its suggestion of just how far the culturally constructed symbiosis between Shakespeare and England in the subject of English Studies to which he has been FHQWUDOKDVLQ¿OWUDWHGWKHDFDGHP\¶VYLHZRIWKHSOD\ZULJKWDQGWKHSOD\V27 Mapp’ry Apprehension: In An Odd Angle of the Isle In an essay entitled ‘Mapping Shakespeare’s Britain’, Peter Holland points out that Shakespeare’s angle on cartography was an odd one: ‘History is written in the drawing of national borders and borderlines are a visible manifestation of the politics of map-making, what Shakespeare contemptuously calls in Troilus and Cressida “mapp’ry” (I.2.205), a word so rare OED can offer only this example before 1840’.28 Holland goes on to remind us of ‘the two crucial examples’ of FDUWRJUDSKLFFRQÀLFWLQ6KDNHVSHDUHµWKHPDSRI(QJODQGEHLQJGLYLGHGXSDQG redivided … in Hotspur’s irritation in 1 Henry IV and the map of Britain being 25 Jonathan Bate, ‘Shakespeare Nationalised, Shakespeare Privatised’, English 42/172 (1993): 9. 26 Annabel M. Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 27 A recent series of essays reclaiming Macbeth as the ‘English Play’ suggests a shift in scholarly emphasis from seeing Shakespeare as universal or unquestionably English to mapping out the ways in which England was allegorized and reoriented in Shakespeare’s work. See for example Michael Bogdanov, ‘Macbeth: The Scottish Play – Dealing with the English’, in The Director’s Cut: Essays on Shakespeare’s Plays, Volume 1 (Edinburgh: Capercaillie Books, 2003), 103–115; Claire McEachern, ‘The Englishness of the Scottish Play: Macbeth and the Poetics of Jacobean Union’, in Allan I. Macinnes and Jane H. Ohlmeyer (eds), The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century: Awkward Neighbours (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002), 94–112; Ronald J. Boling, ‘Tanistry, Primogeniture, and the Anglicizing of Scotland in Macbeth’, Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association, 25/1 (1999): 1–14; and Grace Tiffany, ‘Macbeth, Paternity, and the Anglicization of James I’, Studies in the Humanities, 23/2 (1996): 148–62. England, having long been unexamined or under-examined in relation to Shakespeare, may be reasserting its territorial rights. This collection is part of that process of reclamation. 28 Peter Holland, ‘Mapping Shakespeare’s Britain’, in Dermot Cavanagh, Stuart Hampton-Reeves, and Stephen Longstaffe (eds), Shakespeare’s Histories and CounterHistories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 198.

This England, That Shakespeare / Maley and Tudeau-Clayton

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divided up in King Lear’.29 Between Hotspur’s map of England and Lear’s map of Britain, two maps that divide the island along different tripartite lines, where are we to locate Shakespeare? Is he English or British? European or universal? $OO RU QRQH RI WKHVH"$GGUHVVLQJ IURP YDULRXV DQJOHV WKH UHODWLRQ RI WKH ¿JXUH of the national poet to constructions of England and Englishness this collection RIHVVD\VSUREHVWKHFRPSOH[LVVXHVUDLVHGE\WKLVTXHVWLRQ¿UVW3DUW WKURXJK explorations of the plays, principally, though by no means exclusively, the history plays – Pericles, for instance, is treated by Laurie Maguire and Thomas Roebuck as a play about British nationhood – then (Part 2) through discussion of a range of VXEVHTXHQWDSSURSULDWLRQVDQGUHIDVKLRQLQJVRIWKH¿JXUHRI6KDNHVSHDUHDQGRI ‘his’ England. Striking parallels between the essays highlight what is at stake in the question and its pertinence to the current concern with English/British identities in a rapidly changing global context. Predictably enough the passage to which essays in both parts return is the much quoted, and from an early date anthologized, celebration of ‘this England’ DV µVFHSWUHG LVOH¶ E\ WKH ¿JXUH RI -RKQ RI *DXQW LQ WKH ¿UVW SOD\ RI WKH VHFRQG tetralogy, Richard II (2.1). As the essays in Part 2 by Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo, Sarah Grandage, and Graham Holderness amply illustrate, both the speech as a whole and the particular phrase as a metonymy for it have circulated in a range of discourses and cultural forms throughout the twentieth century and into WKHWZHQW\¿UVW6HUYLQJWRUHSURGXFHDQLQVXODUYLVLRQRIDWRWDODQGVRYHUHLJQ England they have been mobilized, especially in times of war, to promote SHUFHLYHGµWUDGLWLRQDO¶YDOXHVRIDP\WKLFDOUXUDO(QJODQG7RGD\WKLVYLVLRQ¿QGV expression principally in the heritage tourist industry – an industry designed to paper over rather than to provide knowledge of the past30 – and a conservative, [HQRSKRELFFODVVDQGUHJLRQLQÀHFWHGSROLWLFVWKH(QJOLVKDVVRXWKHUQZKLWH and middle class). Though the speech has also been treated more recently with the irony attendant on the current prevailing mood of self-doubt, as Hoenselaars and &DOYRDVZHOODV*UDQGDJHSRLQWRXWWKH[HQRSKRELFDQGVSHFL¿FDOO\HXURVFHSWLF insular vision still tends to be perpetuated. This is ironic given the European KLVWRULFDOFRQWH[WLGHQWL¿HGE\+RHQVHODDUVDQG&DOYRZKRDUJXHWKDWWKHVSHHFK RI*DXQWZKRVHQDPHLWVHOIVLJQDOV(XURSHDQDI¿OLDWLRQV FDUULHVUHVRQDQFHVRI'X Bartas’ creation poem and its overt allusion to the English loss of Calais in 1558. English identity is thus bound to the European continent as it is in the cultural afterlives of Shakespeare in Europe, which they illustrate with the fascinating case of the nineteenth-century French opera composer Ambroise Thomas. Far IURPUHODWLRQVRIQHJDWLYHO\GH¿QHGGLIIHUHQFHVWKHVHDUHUHODWLRQVRIPXWXDOO\ enriching exchanges through the mediation of Shakespeare, who is described here, no doubt provocatively for some, as a ‘European artist representative of a certain 29

Holland, ‘Mapping Shakespeare’s Britain’, 199. Heritage is insightfully glossed by David Lowenthal as ‘not an inquiry into the past, but a celebration of it, not an effort to know what happened, but a profession of faith in a past tailored to present day purposes’ (as quoted by Maguire and Roebuck below, 39). 30

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consensus of ideas’. It is a view, they suggest, that might usefully be mobilized to counter the insular vision of England and of Shakespeare perpetuated by uses of the ‘sceptered isle’ speech. If, however, it offers intellectual and cultural common ground, Europe does not as yet furnish the requisite sense of a ‘homeland’ for many if not most of the sceptered isle’s inhabitants.31 Margaret Tudeau-Clayton makes this point at the close of her essay which comes to a not dissimilar conclusion via another historical context for Gaunt’s speech. This, too, renders ironic subsequent uses which have VLPSO\ DVVXPHG DXWKRULDO HQGRUVHPHQW ± WKLV LV 6KDNHVSHDUH ZDYLQJ WKH ÀDJ ± that Tudeau-Clayton puts into question. For, taken together with the speech by the Duke of York which immediately precedes it, this speech, she argues, evokes two overlapping post-reformation discourses on the character and history of the English informed by what she calls a protestant bourgeois ideology that seeks to appropriate the normative centre of the ‘trueborn Englishman’ (Richard II, 1.3.272) for the pious, plain, manly citizen. This is done notably through discursive H[FOXVLRQV RI WKH FRQVWLWXWLYH µRWKHU¶ WKDW LV WKH ¿JXUH RI WKH PRWOH\ GUHVVHG µIRUHLJQ¶ HIIHPLQDWH HOLWH  (QJOLVKPDQ D UHFXUULQJ FXOWXUDO ¿JXUH RU µPHPH¶ ZLWKDJHQHDORJ\WKDWLVWUDFHGIRUWKH¿UVWWLPHKHUH(YRNHGLQWKHKLVWRU\SOD\ DVLQLWVVRXUFHVWKH¿JXUHLVUHORFDWHGJHQHULFDOO\DVZHOODVJHRJUDSKLFDOO\LQ the romantic comedy which follows the history play, The Merchant of Venice. $VLQWKHRWKHUFRPHG\LQZKLFKWKH¿JXUHIHDWXUHVMuch Ado about Nothing), WKH6KDNHVSHDUHDQWUHDWPHQWRIWKH¿JXUHVHWVLWVHOIDJDLQVWWKHHVVHQWLDOLVWLQVXODU and exclusionary protestant bourgeois ideology of (the) English that it is used to VHUYHDQGWKDWLVHYRNHGWKURXJKWKHVFHSWHUHGLVOHVSHHFK7KHREMHFWL¿FDWLRQDQG interrogation of the ideology that the play ‘shows’ thus render ironic subsequent uses of the speech which reproduce it as Shakespeare’s own voice. 8QOLNHDOORWKHULQVWDQFHVRIWKLVUHFXUULQJFXOWXUDO¿JXUHWKH6KDNHVSHDULDQ instances are named. Through the name of Falconbridge – the name it carries in Merchant ± WKH ¿JXUH LV FRQQHFWHG WR RWKHU ¿JXUHV ERWK LQVLGH DQG RXWVLGH WKH SOD\DV7XGHDX&OD\WRQGLVFXVVHV0RVWWHOOLQJLVWKHFRQQHFWLRQWRWKH¿JXUHWKDW is central to the one play that the Oxford editors insert between Richard II and The Merchant of Venice in their putative order of composition – King John. For, as Willy Maley points out in his reading of the play and its critical reception, the bastard Falconbridge upstages the monarch, occupying the centre. For some critics he is indeed the play’s trueborn Englishman, ironically but also appropriately, given the divided, contradictory, and plural state of the England(s) presented in this ‘troublesome’ riddle of a play. /LNHWKH¿JXUHRIWKHPRWOH\GUHVVHG)DOFRQEULGJHLQMerchant, the bastard Falconbridge in King John PD\ EH WDNHQ WKHQ DV D ¿JXUH RI WKH KHWHURJHQHRXV mix or gallymafrey, as Allison Outland calls it, that will be gathered around the 31 The problems of achieving a felt European unity are lucidly laid out in Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 225–51 (‘National Identity and European Unity’).

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¿JXUHRIWKH(QJOLVKNLQJLQHenry V and that will be described as ‘but bastard Normans, Norman bastards’ (Henry V E\D¿JXUHWHOOLQJO\ODEHOHGµBrit.’ in the Folio.32 It is a mix that is, moreover, represented in terms of the agricultural process of grafting, a process praised in The Winter’s Tale as art’s amelioration on nature by Polixenes who bids Perdita not to ‘call bastards’ the motley issue (The Winter’s Tale, 4.4.85–99).33 The military victory of the British ‘bastards’ in Henry V LQGHHG EHDUV RXW ZKDW WKH ¿JXUH RI WKH EDVWDUG )DOFRQEULGJH LQ King John intimates, that the strength of an England, at once in and of Britain, lies in its mixed or motley character, a character sartorially ‘blazoned’ in Merchant. The bastard Falconbridge appeals to this motley or bastard nation over the head of the monarch, as Maley comments, in ways that render ambiguous to say the least his closing representation of the monarchical centre as ‘home’ (King John, 5.7.115), a representation that, as Grandage comments, is implicit in the very phrase ‘the VFHSWUHGLVOH¶ZKLFKLGHQWL¿HVPRQDUFK\DQGWHUULWRU\ It is to promote the political project of a heterogeneous mix of peoples united round a monarchical centre – the United Kingdom of Great Britain – a project dear WR-DPHV,LQEXWUHDOL]HG¿QDOO\RQO\LQ±WKDW'DQLHO'HIRHPRELOL]HV the cultural authority of Shakespeare in ‘The True-Born Englishman’, a satiric attack on English insularity (published 1701), which, Tudeau-Clayton suggests, takes from Shakespeare’s history play not only its title, but also its ironic treatment RI WKH UDFH DQG FODVVLQÀHFWHG LQVXODU LGHRORJ\ RI WKH (QJOLVK HYRNHG WKURXJK the speeches of the uncle and father of the self-styled trueborn Englishman – the usurper and regicide, Henry Bolingbroke. Defoe, like Shakespeare, foregrounds the ‘bastard’ (in the sense of motley) character of the Englishman, who is a ‘het’rogeneous thing’, a product of the island’s chequered history of invasion, colonization, and immigration.34 Drawing on Shakespearian precedent, Defoe thus seeks to counter the xenophobia as well as the internal divisions attendant on the ideology evoked in the ‘sceptered isle’ speech, calling for the unity of the heterogeneous mix of Great Britain around a monarchical centre that is, once again, occupied by a European sovereign, here not as in Shakespeare’s history play, Richard of Bordeaux – a European connection highlighted by Calvo and Hoenselaars – but William of Orange. As Calvo and Hoenselaars note, the sceptered isle speech itself carries an ‘embryo vision’ of Britain, though this is arguably a vision not so much of a heterogeneous multination Britain but of a Britain so dominated by England, that the two become 32 The uses of the trope of the ‘gallymafrey’, notably in The Merry Wives of Windsor, are discussed in Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare’s “welsch men” and the “King’s English”’, in Maley and Schwyzer (eds), Shakespeare and Wales, 126. 33 See John Florio’s Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes (1598): ‘Bozzo … a bastard or a mungrell’, 48. 34 ‘Thus from a mixture of all kinds began / That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman’. Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman, lines 334–5, in The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings, ed. P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 35.

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interchangeable terms. Certainly, as Grandage points out, the phrase ‘this sceptered isle’ has been used in recent popular media interchangeably as a metonym for Britain and England. Indeed, Shakespeare himself has been thus used as, for instance, in Shakespeare’s England (1916), the monumentalizing tome discussed by Graham Holderness, where the national poet is represented as at once ‘English to the core’ (as he is by Raleigh in the 1918 lecture quoted above) and prophet of the ‘world-wide greatness’ of ‘Great Britain’s rule’ – a rule that Robert Bridges claims is legitimated by the writing of ‘England’s gentlest son’. If this interchangeability has come under increasing strain, following awakenings to the multination character of the British state both inside and outside the academy,35 Shakespeare continues to be used to perpetuate it, as, for instance, by the British Shakespeare Association. Founded in 2001 this association is based in Stratford-upon-Avon and actively participates in the annual celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday on St George’s Day, the day of the SDWURQVDLQWRI(QJODQGZKRVHÀDJKDVIHDWXUHGVRSURPLQHQWO\VLQFHWKHVWKH PRVWVWULNLQJV\PSWRPSHUKDSVRIWKHZLGHQLQJ¿VVXUHIHOWZLWKLQWKHVFHSWHUHGLVOH between English and British – no Union Jacks please, we’re English.36 As Sarah Grandage comments, to treat England and Britain as interchangeable referents of ‘the sceptered isle’ is to reduce the complexity of Shakespeare’s treatment(s) of the question(s) of nationhood. This complexity is fully borne out by the essays in Part 1 which, if they take different approaches to different plays, QHYHUWKHOHVV DOO LOOXVWUDWH KRZ WKHVH SOD\V µVKRZ¶ RQ WKH RQH KDQG WKH ¿VVXUHV or breaches of England/Britain at a moment when the two were not so much interchangeable as competing terms and, on the other, the (more and less) violent SUDFWLFHVDQGSURFHVVHVE\ZKLFKWKHVH¿VVXUHVDUHUH FRYHUHGLQWKHWUDQVIRUPDWLRQ as Outland puts it, of a gallymafrey of peoples into a united nation. In this the plays satisfy the last and least commonplace of the purposes of playing given by Hamlet, ‘to show … the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ (Hamlet, 3.2.21–2), which, as Tudeau-Clayton notes, is the nearest we get in Shakespeare to what we call ideology as well as to what we call internal distantiation. For Alison Thorne as well as for Tudeau-Clayton, internal distantiation expresses itself as opposition or resistance. Exploring the ‘expressive and instrumental possibilities’ of the genre of ‘complaint’, a genre with close discursive links to 35 See Colin Kidd, ‘“All four of us”: Review of Hugh Kearney, The British Isles, 2nd rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)’, TLS 26 January 2007, 24. In this review of the second edition of Kearney’s book (2006) Kidd notes how ‘[u]ntil twenty years ago, British historians had been just as confused as overseas visitors and the public at large about the distinction between “English” and “British”’. Overseas visitors, if not perhaps the public at large, remain confused, understandably given the confusing character of the representations in circulation. 36 Nick Groom, The Union Jack: The Story of the British Flag (London: Grove Atlantic, 2005). Groom’s examples of earlier poetry around the Union Jack demonstrate how England and Britain were previously used interchangeably, notably at the height of WKH%ULWLVK(PSLUH*HRUJH&URVVÀDJVYLVLEO\RXWQXPEHUHG8QLRQ-DFNVLQWKHFURZGVWKDW turned out to cheer the Queen on her eightieth birthday in 2006.

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judicial discourse and practice, Thorne shows how it is turned by female royal ¿JXUHVLQKLVWRU\SOD\VIURPRichard III to Henry VIII, to expose and denounce a corrupt judicial system which has failed them. Though not themselves free from self-interest, this community of female complainants, echoing each other across the plays, constitutes a national conscience which preserves the memory of past wrongs as well as working for correction and reconciliation. The importance of their voice is underscored by the point made by Maguire and Roebuck (following Anthony Smith) that a shared framework of judicial institutions is one of the crucial desiderata of nationhood. If not overtly contested, the discursive limits of nationhood are, for Allison 2XWODQGDVZHOODVIRU0DJXLUHDQG5RHEXFNREMHFWL¿HGDQGH[SORUHGLQWKHSOD\V they examine in their respective essays. Focusing on keywords, resonant cultural ¿JXUHVDQGQDUUDWLYHVRIRULJLQLQWKHFRQWH[WRIHDUO\PRGHUQKLVWRULFDOZULWLQJV on Britain, Maguire and Roebuck argue that, like other Shakespearian plays of the same period, Pericles is a play about nationhood, a preoccupation signalled above all in its language. Play on the recurring word ‘shore’, for instance, points up the problematic ambiguities carried by early modern discursive mediations of this crucial territorial limit. Particularly telling is the ambiguity exposed by the shore as a site of differences in legal practice between Scotland and England. For WKLVRSHQVDEUHDFKRU¿VVXUHLQWKHGHVLGHUDWDRIDVKDUHGIUDPHZRUNRIMXGLFLDO LQVWLWXWLRQVH[DFWO\ZKHUHWKHWHUULWRULDOLQWHJULW\RI%ULWDLQDVLVODQGLVGH¿QHG 7KHUHLVDPELJXLW\WRRLQWKHFXOWXUDO¿JXUHRI*RZHULQPericles, which is at once a sign of the loss brought by the historical breach of the reformation and an instance of the aspiration to nationhood through recuperation of what is lost that Maguire and Roebuck illustrate from historical and antiquarian discourses. $¿JXUHQDPHG*RZHUIHDWXUHVWRRLQHenry V, a history play that shares the ODWHU URPDQFH¶V SUHRFFXSDWLRQ ZLWK WKH GH¿QLQJ FXOWXUDO DV ZHOO DV WHUULWRULDO limits of nationhood as these are recovered through memories (including memory RIWKHORVVRI&DODLVZKLFKIRU&DOYRDQG+RHQVHODDUVLVWKHGH¿QLQJPHPRU\ behind ‘the sceptered isle’ speech in Richard II 37). Like the recurrence of the name of Falconbridge in Merchant and King John, the recurrence of the name of Gower is no accident. This is borne out by Allison Outland’s close reading of the history SOD\ ZKLFK IRFXVHV RQ WKH YHU\ VFHQH LQ ZKLFK WKH ¿JXUH RI *RZHU ± KHUH DQ English captain – is most prominent, when the Welsh captain, Fluellen, compels the English ensign, Pistol, to ‘eat a leek’, a forced ingestion moralized by the ¿JXUH RI *RZHU DV µD :HOVK FRUUHFWLRQ WR WHDFK « D JRRG (QJOLVK FRQGLWLRQ¶ $FRPPHQWDWRUOLNHWKH¿JXUHRI*RZHULQPericles, this English Gower aligns himself here with the Welsh captain Fluellen, a sign not, as in Pericles, of a historical breach so much as of a breach (or ‘leak’ as Patricia Parker calls it)38 37 Jonathan Baldo, ‘Wars of Memory in Henry V’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 47/2 (1996): 132–59. 38 7KHOHHNOHDNZRUGSOD\LVMXVWRQHRIWKHPDQ\LQVWDQFHVRI¿VVXUHGZRUGV3DUNHU points out that undercut the play’s rhetoric of unity. Patricia Parker, ‘Uncertain Unions:

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between peoples (and territories) within the unity of the island nation. Like the historical breach for which he is a sign in Pericles, this is a breach that is UHFRYHUHGWKURXJKWKH¿JXUHRI*RZHU7KLVLVSDUWLFXODUO\WHOOLQJJLYHQWKDWDV Maguire and Roebuck note, the poet Gower was (erroneously) described as WelshERUQ E\ :LOOLDP &D[WRQ ZKR ¿UVW SULQWHG KLV ZULWLQJV LQ  ZKLOH KH ZDV described by Thomas Berthelet, who printed them again in 1532 and 1554, rather as one who enriched the English language, a cultural straddling of the Welsh(QJOLVKEUHDFKWKDW6KDNHVSHDUH¶V¿JXUHRI*RZHUSHUIRUPVLQWKHKLVWRU\SOD\DV the later romance arguably recalls in its exploration of the discursive re-covering RIWKHKLVWRULFDODVZHOODVWHUULWRULDO¿VVXUHVRI%ULWLVKQDWLRQKRRG39 It is these ¿VVXUHVWKDWDUHH[SRVHGWRRLQKing John, the history play studied by Willy Maley who argues that if England is invoked here more often than in any other play, it is not so much to celebrate the nation as to expose the identity crisis attendant on its expansionist and possessive aspirations in relation to its European as well as British neighbours. It is in such aspirations that England itself implodes. For Allison Outland, Gower’s comment in Henry V points the way to an understanding of how this scene stages the ‘clumsy and painful negotiations whereby a community in formation selects and evaluates those practices that will EHFRPHGH¿QLWLYHRILW¶7KHVHQHJRWLDWLRQVDJDLQLQYROYHPHPRULHVDVWKHVHDUH carried by cultural practices, in particular English memories of the Welsh that, as 2XWODQGDUJXHVDUH¿UVWµFRUUHFWHG¶LQWKHSUHFHGLQJSOD\VLQWKHWHWUDORJ\ZKLFK identify Wales as the site of an honorable, indeed legitimizing British history for the Tudors. It was, moreover, as she points out, to ‘Welsh’ history that the state looked to establish the primacy of what another Welshman, the poet George Herbert, assertively calls ‘The British Church’40 – ‘an invaluable Welsh correction’ as Outland puts it ‘of a contentious English condition’. The play, however, shows not only correction of the English but also correction by the English and correction here segues into coercion. For, as Outland points out, the king is shown to instrumentalize Welsh Leeks in Henry V’, in David J. Baker and Willy Maley (eds), British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 81–100. 39 Compare Joan Rees on ‘the two men with whom Fluellen is closely associated, Gower and Williams. … In his edition of Confessio Amantis, a work which Shakespeare knew, Caxton describes the poet John Gower (wrongly as it happens) as “a sqyer borne in Walys in the tyme of King Richard the Second”. As for Williams, who serves in Gower’s company, he has a common Welsh surname. … Gower and Williams seem to introduce a supererogatory Welshness into the play’. Joan Rees, ‘Shakespeare’s Welshmen’, in Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson (eds), Literature and Nationalism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), 31. 40 Helen Wilcox notes the title’s suggestion of the ‘historical continuity with the church of ancient Britain’ without however linking this to Herbert’s Welsh origins. The English Poems of George Herbert, edited by Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 391. As Thomas Dekker quips: ‘Welchmen’ love ‘to be cald Brittons’. Thomas Dekker, Westward Ho, 2.2.200, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935–1961), vol. 2.

This England, That Shakespeare / Maley and Tudeau-Clayton

16

at once the Welshman Fluellen and an English commoner with the Welsh sounding name of Williams in order to reassert the sovereignty and hierarchy temporally and strategically suspended by the transformative rhetoric of his speeches which conjure the gallymafrey of regional and class differences into a national unity. The violence analyzed by Outland here is exactly comparable to the cultural violence performed through uses of the trope of the ‘King’s English’ – a trope that may originate with the reign of the historical Henry V – to turn the linguistic diversity and range of the YHUQDFXODUUHFXUUHQWO\¿JXUHGDVDJDOO\PDIUH\ LQWRDKRPRJHQHRXVWRWDOLW\$V Tudeau-Clayton argues, this was analogous as well as temporally coincident with the violence meted out to the sartorial equivalent of the linguistic gallymafrey – the ¿JXUHRIWKHPRWOH\GUHVVHG(QJOLVKPDQ±LQWKHDVSLUDWLRQWRWXUQWKHLGHRORJLFDO centre of the trueborn Englishman over to a homogenous, protestant bourgeois plainness. It is, moreover, an English plainness that Shakespeare’s Henry claims for himself in another (comm)union that Outland suggests is coerced, namely the union of the English king with the French princess Kate.41 Coerced (comm)unions, as Outland comments in her conclusion, are less enduring than (comm)unions that are rather ‘willingly embraced’ or that are ‘ceremonially reenacted’ as in the repeated performances of early modern theatre in which she suggests we ‘glimpse aspects of the ceremonial engagements and imaginatively transmuted sacraments of a culturally communicant British nation’. A ‘culturally communicant British nation’ is arguably no less at stake in performances today of Shakespeare’s plays to audiences that are (potentially at least, if rarely in fact) still more ethnically and socially diverse. This is borne RXWE\$PDQGD3HQOLQJWRQ¶VGLVFXVVLRQRIKRZ¿JXUHVRI%ULWLVKµRWKHUV¶WRWKH English – the Welsh, Scots, and Irish – as well as the doubly ‘other’ female French ¿JXUHVKDYHEHHQSHUIRUPHGLQSURGXFWLRQVRIWKHKLVWRU\WHWUDORJLHVVLQFH by the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. If predictably ‘more sensitive’ to the problem of national stereotypes, these productions, she argues, have not always been successful in their attempts at getting round them. Like so-called colour-blind casting, which, she suggests, is blind to its own XQVWDWHGSROLWLFVRIDVVLPLODWLRQQDWLRQDOLW\VSHFL¿FFDVWLQJZKLFKVHHNVWRUHVLVW stereotypes through the portrayal of characters such as Edmund Mortimer’s Welsh wife as fully realized individuals, has not always achieved the desired effect. On the other hand, casting Welsh, Irish, Scots, and non-white actors in traditionally English roles has succeeded in drawing attention to how Englishness is produced, especially through voice. Particularly successful in this respect, she argues, was Edward Hall’s 2000 RSC production of Henry V with an Irish actor in the leading role whose declaration ‘I am Welsh’ consequently carried particularly telling ironies (and the same might be said of Belfast-born Kenneth Branagh when he WRRNWKHOHDGUROHLQWKH¿OPYHUVLRQWKRXJKKLVDFFHQWGLGQRWUHYHDOKLV roots); similarly effective was the casting of a Scot as the Chorus in the 2007 RSC production of the same play. Pointing up differences, these productions at 41

Henry V, 5.2.122–5, 145–6.

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the same time summon a self-aware, ‘communicant’, multiethnic, multicultural Britain, a vision that arguably meets the aspiration expressed by Trevor Phillips, chair of New Labour’s Commission for racial equality, when in 2004 he appealed for the restoration of a ‘lost’ Shakespeare to meet a perceived need ‘to assert a core of Britishness’ to facilitate immigrant integration.42 Certainly, these productions are in sharp contrast to the BBC adaptations in the 2005 series ShakespeaRe-Told discussed by Calvo and Hoenselaars who point out how comedies were taken from their European setting to be relocated in England, a disturbing denial of continental connections which (re)asserts an insular, xenophobic vision of England and of Shakespeare as rather once again (or still), as he was for Raleigh’s generation, the sign of a ‘core of Englishness’. The perpetuation of this vision helps, moreover, to account for the oxymoronic whiff to the collocation ‘multicultural England’ that ‘multicultural Britain’ does not have.43 The decline of dominance would then appear to have been followed by a will to exclusionary separation as the alternative PRGHRIGH¿QLWLRQRIWKHUHODWLRQEHWZHHQWKH(QJOLVK(QJODQGDQGWKH%ULWLVK Britain. Indeed, when a British Prime Minister – a Scot – calls for a ‘British Day’ WRFHOHEUDWH%ULWLVKQHVVDQGIRUWKH8QLRQ-DFNWREHÀRZQIURPSXEOLFEXLOGLQJV tacitly as a counterweight to the Englishness increasingly celebrated, like and with Shakespeare’s birthday, on St George’s Day, at a time when polls suggest most English and Scots would favour separation, the aspiration to maintain the unity of England and Britain appears to be doomed.44 If, moreover, recent productions of Shakespeare by national theatre companies have worked to promote a multiethnic, multicultural, communicant Britain, the BBC productions, which after all must have reached a far wider population, have, on the contrary, served to deepen the separation of a non-communicant England from its European as well as its British neighbours. As Penlington underscores, these recent theatre performances have (re)produced regional/national particularity above all through voice. In the plays themselves VSHFL¿FFXOWXUDOIRUPVDUHJLYHQYRLFHWKDWVLPLODUO\FDUU\LPSOLFDWLRQVIRUQDWLRQDO identity. As Maguire and Roebuck comment, the rhymed tetrameters spoken by WKH¿JXUHRI*RZHULQPericles illustrate not only Shakespeare’s unusual adoption of the form as well as the content of a source, but also the political and ideological weight that rhyme – again a sign of loss – carried, notably for Samuel Daniel, who DVVRFLDWHVUK\PHZLWKµDQFLHQW¶VSHFL¿FDOO\(QJOLVKLQVWLWXWLRQVWKDWKHSHUFHLYHV

42 ‘We need to assert there is a core of Britishness. For instance, I hate the way this country has lost Shakespeare. That sort of thing is bad for immigrants’, ‘Debate Call on “Multicultural” UK’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3599925.stm, 5 April 2004. Accessed 16/02/09. 43 Multicultural England does not pose a problem for John Sentamu, Archbishop of York who advocated an inclusionary vision to be celebrated on St George’s Day. ‘Archbishop ZDYHVÀDJIRU(QJODQG¶The Observer, April 5, 2009, News, 7. 44 ‘Brown Speech Promotes Britishness’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/ 4611682.stm, 14 January 2006. Accessed 16/02/09.

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This England, That Shakespeare / Maley and Tudeau-Clayton

as threatened by the new dispensation under a Scots king. Like verse form, diction too was (as it continues to be) a site of ideological and political contestation, as Tudeau-Clayton points out, arguing that Shakespearian practice sets itself against the exclusionary violence of the (emergent) ideology of the ‘King’s English’. That verse form as well as diction has continued to carry ideological and political stakes is illustrated by Neil Corcoran’s discussion of the relation of the late poet laureate Ted Hughes to Shakespeare. Corcoran places this relation within Hughes’s understanding of the ‘English poetic tradition … as double’, an antagonism between native, alliterative, and accentual verse, on the one hand, and an imported LDPELF YHUVH RQ WKH RWKHU WKDW ¿QGV H[SUHVVLRQ LQ WKH ELRJUDSKLFDOO\ UHVRQDQW trope of a troubled marriage. This doubleness is reiterated at the level of diction in the characteristic Shakespearian ‘device’ of the hendiadys, which frequently joins Latinate with Anglo-Saxon terms as in the ‘catastrophe and heel of pastime’, the exemplary instance from All’s Well analyzed by Hughes in a critical comment that Corcoran rightly describes as among his ‘most distinguished and brilliant’. Teasing out the poetic as well as ideological and political implications of such comments, Corcoran argues that, if there is a reconciliatory and accommodating thrust to Hughes’s idea of the ‘marriage’ of Anglo-Saxon and Latinate terms in the hendiadys – as of its metrical equivalent in a combination of alliterative and iambic traditions – that looks towards an open and generous future poetics/politics, WKLVLVLQFRQWUDGLFWLRQZLWKWKHFODVVLQÀHFWHGYLHZRI6KDNHVSHDULDQSUDFWLFHDV socially subversive and oppositional that, he argues, is also espoused by Hughes.45 Corcoran intelligently suggests that we locate this divided Shakespeare in the ¿JXUHRI+XJKHVKLPVHOIGLYLGHGEHWZHHQWKHSRHWRIµLQVWLQFWLYHHQHUJLHV¶DQ RSSRVLWLRQDODQGVXEYHUVLYH¿JXUHDQGKLVMREDV3RHW/DXUHDWHDMRELQZKLFKKH was called upon to represent the nation – Britain rather than England, at least until 200446 – as Shakespeare is called upon to do. Yet this divided Shakespeare resonates too with the Shakespeares of other essays in both parts of this volume. For the Shakespearian texts explored in Part 1 are indeed divided in their uncovering/recovering of the discursive practices DQGSURFHVVHVWKDWGH¿QHQDWLRQKRRGVKRZLQJDVWKH\GRWKHµIRUPDQGSUHVVXUH¶ of ‘the body and the age of time’ – incidentally another hendiadys that joins Anglo6D[RQ µERG\¶  DQG /DWLQDWH µDJH¶  GLFWLRQ 0RUH VSHFL¿FDOO\ WKH DQWLFLSDWHG issue of the coerced, and troubled, marriage of English king and French princess in Henry V – ‘a boy half-French, half-English’ conceived in an intermediary cultural space ‘between Saint Denis and Saint George’ (Henry V, 5.2.195) – echoes the 45 7KHVWDNHVRISUDFWLFHVLQGLFWLRQFRQWLQXHWREHDVVHUWHGQRWDEO\XQGHUWKHLQÀXHQFH of George Orwell; see for a recent instance: ‘I mostly followed George Orwell’s advice not to use a Latinate word when a word with an Anglo-Saxon origin was available.’ Henry Porter, ‘The pity of a child’s dictionary that junks words of imagination’, The Observer, Comment, Sunday 14 December 2008, 35. 46 ,Q )HEUXDU\  (GZLQ 0RUJDQ ZDV DSSRLQWHG ¿UVW SRHW ODXUHDWH IRU 6FRWODQG another telling symptom of the widening rift between the two nations.

‘To England send him’

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structure of the hendiadys as it echoes the mingle-mangle of French and English produced by the French princess in her English lesson (3.4). If these mixed forms may suggest reconciliation and accommodation, the coercive character of the (comm)union observed by Outland – as of other (comm)unions in this play – renders this ambiguous to say the least. More generally, oppositional and/or objectifying effects as well as reconciliatory aspirations are detected in the Shakespearian negotiations examined in Part 1. The essays in Part 2 again show how practices and processes in the reception and reproduction of Shakespeare and his plays at once divide and unite, join and separate England from its neighbours, in and of Britain, in and of Europe, in and of the world. ,IDV0DJXLUHDQG5RHEXFNFRPPHQWWKH¿JXUHRI*RZHUZDVIRU6KDNHVSHDUH and his contemporaries an object of nostalgic longing that was tied up with a sense of nationhood, this was of course what Shakespeare would become, emphatically IRUWKHJHQHUDWLRQH[HPSOL¿HGE\5REHUW%ULGJHVDQGWKHDXWKRUVRIShakespeare’s England that Holderness discusses in the closing essay. Locating this monumental WRPHDWDPRPHQWRIWHPSRUDU\VWDELOLW\EHIRUHWKHFDWDFO\VPRIWKH¿UVWZRUOG war and the collapse of an imperial, bourgeois-liberal ideology, he examines how Shakespeare’s birthplace and Shakespeare himself are represented as the heart of England that is also the heart of civilization. Celebrated as at once the trueborn Englishman and a universal genius, Shakespeare is, too, the object as well as vehicle of a nostalgic longing for England as a dwelling place, a homeland. For, if a geographical territory, as Holderness remarks, England does not exist as a nation just as Englishness is structured by absence and lack (as we have discussed). Both then become objects of nostalgic longing like and with Shakespeare just as DYDULRXVO\GH¿QHG (QJODQGDQGWKHFXOWXUDOVLJQVDQG¿JXUHVRIDGH¿QLQJORVW past were objects of nostalgic longing for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Taking Gaunt’s sceptered isle speech as illustration, Holderness argues that the exclusionary, insular, and xenophobic patriotism it expresses had purposes then – purposes discussed in other essays – just as reproductions of, and allusions to it in WKHWZHQWLHWKDQGWZHQW\¿UVWFHQWXULHVKDYHWKHLUSROLWLFDODQGLGHRORJLFDOSXUSRVHV Unhappy with more inclusionary alternatives for England as for Shakespeare, Holderness feels tentatively towards a third way, between the fetishized local PXVHXP RI (QJOLVKQHVV ± WKH LQVXODU YLVLRQ WKDW ¿QGV H[SUHVVLRQ LQ WKH WRXULVW industry and far right politics – and the world culture of Englishes – a transmuted imperial vision that, crucially for him, fails to provide a sense of home. We might do worse, he suggests in conclusion, than take Shakespeare as our guide. Though ending necessarily on a note of interrogation, this essay, like and with the volume as a whole, anticipates what Shakespeare and England – and a Shakespeare’s England – might look like in 2016. What we offer are views of Shakespeare and his playtexts not as sops to nostalgic longings or xenophobic myths of Englishness with which, as we have argued, they are rather critically engaged, but as discursive negotiations which ‘show’ not an essential character of the English and England, but how a sense of nationhood is constructed, just as µ6KDNHVSHDUH¶LVFRQVWUXFWHGDVWKH¿JXUHRIDµFRUH¶QDWLRQDOLGHQWLW\DQGFXOWXUH

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This England, That Shakespeare / Maley and Tudeau-Clayton

± %ULWLVK DQGRU (QJOLVK ± DV ZHOO DV D ¿JXUH RI D VKDUHG (XURSHDQ DQG ZRUOG ±JOREDO±FXOWXUH$QGUHZ+DG¿HOG¶VSXFNLVK$IWHUZRUGJRHVVWUDLJKWWRWKHKHDUW of this constructedness – and this volume – with his question ‘Does Shakespeare really seem that English anyway?’ The yoking of Shakespeare and England would indeed appear to be no more (and no less) than one of history’s more enduring dreams, or jokes, from which we do not look set to wake. Second only to God on *RRJOHDV+DG¿HOGQRWHV6KDNHVSHDUHDSSHDOVWR
PART 1 This England

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Chapter 1

Pericles and the Language of National Origins Thomas Roebuck and Laurie Maguire

Pericles. Marina.

What countrywoman? Here of these shores? No, nor of any shores. (Pericles 5.1.93–4)

National Origins and Critical Context Between 1606 and 1611 Shakespeare wrote a sequence of plays which, in various ways, explore the problematics of state-formation and nationhood. Such questions were of vital political and intellectual importance at the turn of the seventeenth century: Jacobean debates over the Union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland were at their height in Parliament around 1607;1 scholars and writers courted the patronage of the Stuart dynasty by demonstrating its antique, Galfridian origins;2 the desire to legitimate or to dismantle the Elizabethan and Jacobean church politicized treatments of British history.3 Scholars have unpacked the multiple ways in which Shakespeare’s plays intersect with such debates. In 1606, King Lear 1

See, for example, Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland, 1603–1608 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986). Union debates were well-known, having widespread currency in printed treatises and in sermons: on these genres respectively see Bruce Galloway and Brian Levack, eds, The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of 1604 (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1985) and Charles W.A. Prior, 'H¿QLQJ WKH -DFREHDQ &KXUFK 7KH 3ROLWLFV RI 5HOLJLRXV Controversy, 1603–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 75–9. 2 See, for instance, George Owen Harry, Genealogy of the High and Mighty Monarch, James … king of Great Brittayne, etc., with his lineall descent from Noah, by divers direct lynes to Brutus (London, 1604). For an overview of Galfridian history on stage see John E. Curran, Jr, Roman Invasions: The British History, Protestant Anti-Romanism, and the Historical Imagination in England, 1530–1660 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002). 3 A classic statement of the centrality of Protestantism to early modern conceptions of the English nation is Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). See also Patrick Collinson, ‘The Protestant Nation’ in The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Houndmills: Palgrave, 1988), 1–27. On Catholics using Anglo-Saxon history to attack the church settlement see Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. 84–91.

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This England, That Shakespeare / Roebuck and Maguire

presents an ancient British kingdom shattered into three parts (Scotland, England, and the Celtic periphery of Wales and Cornwall), and further fragmented along ethnic lines through wars between Brythonic (Lear, Cordelia) and Anglo-Saxon (Edmund, Edgar) rulers.4 In Macbeth (1608), contested Scottish territories are WKH FHQWUH RI D FRQÀLFW ZKLFK HQJXOIV PXFK RI QRUWKHUQ (XURSH WKH NLQJV RI 1RUZD\DOOLHGWR*DHOLFµNHUQHVDQGJDOORZJODVVHV¶IURPWKH:HVWHUQ,VOHV¿JKW over Scotland at the outset; Ireland shelters exiled members of the Scottish royal family; and English troops help to prop up Malcolm’s campaign to regain power in Scotland.5 Antony and Cleopatra (1608) moves the frame of reference away from immediate problems of multiple monarchy in Britain to think about those same problems in emergent Roman imperium as an agglomerative Roman centre exerts control over alien Egyptian cultures.6 Metaphors of the body politic – central to the Union controversy – become a means of thinking about another Roman attempt both to govern themselves and to take control of an alien culture, the Volscians, in Coriolanus (1608).7 Innogen’s journey in Cymbeline (1610?) into ancient Wales – a key site of resistance to the Roman imperium presented in Antony and Cleopatra – and ultimately to Milford Haven, framed within a story about contemporary Renaissance Italy, is a means of thinking both about national origins and about the problems of Britain’s Celtic periphery.8 And The Tempest (1611?) situates European states within the wider context of their emergent colonies in the New World and the prevailing problem of Ireland.9 Throughout the latter part of 6KDNHVSHDUH¶VFDUHHUWKHUHIRUHTXHVWLRQVRIWKHH[WHQWGH¿QLWLRQRULJLQVKLVWRU\ and government of Britain were central to his works. Written at the centre of this sequence, when the Union controversy was at its height in pamphlets and in parliament, is Pericles (1607). Dana Lloyd Spradley’s topical reading of the play argues that incest is a means of exploring metaphorically

4 Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Ch. 6. 5 John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, Religion, Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Ch. 1; see also the essays in Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy, eds, Shakespeare and Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 6 Kerrigan, Archipelagic English, 18. 7 Alex Garganigo, ‘Coriolanus, the Union Controversy, and Access to the Royal Person’, SEL 42/2 (2002): 335–59. 8 A classic article remains Emrys Jones, ‘Stuart Cymbeline’, Essays in Criticism 2 (1961): 84–99. More recently see Ronald J. Boling, ‘Anglo-Welsh Relations in Cymbeline’, SQ ±+XZ*ULI¿WKVµ7KH*HRJUDSKLHVRI6KDNHVSHDUH¶VCymbeline’, ELR 34/3 (2004): 339–58; Andrew Escobedo, ‘From Britannia to England: Cymbeline and the Beginning of Nations’, SQ 59/1 (2008): 60–87. 9 David J. Baker, ‘Where is Ireland in The Tempest?’, in Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (eds), Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), 68–88.

Pericles and the Language of National Origins

25

the problems of uniting the two kingdoms of England and Scotland.10 James ¿JXUHGKLPVHOIDVERWKIDWKHUDQGKXVEDQGWRWKHUHDOPDVZHOODVELJDPRXVO\ married both to England and Scotland, and Spradley argues that Pericles’ dramatic presentations of these subjects ‘implicitly serves to parody and delegitimize not only Union but also the hereditary and absolutist premises on which James based his claim to rule England alone’.11 We do not want to argue that Pericles can EHJLYHQVXFKDSUHFLVHDQDORJLFDOWRSLFDOVLJQL¿FDQFHEXWZHGRZLVKWRVKRZ that the play is subtly caught up in these issues of nation-building. What we will attempt to show is that the language of Pericles needs to be contextualized within the emerging discourse of British nation-building, particularly the search for British historical origins. Material that is treated literally in King Lear, say, is treated metaphorically in Pericles: loss and the restoration of loss (from rusty armour to deceased wife and child); ancestors, ancient histories and families; the sea and shore as territorial boundaries, and the land as a source for national selfLGHQWL¿FDWLRQWKHPDWHULDOWUDFHVDQGUHPDLQVRIWKHSDVW The work of the social scientist Anthony Smith on the history of nationalism provides the intellectual framework for our analysis. Running counter to the prevailing modernist work on nationalism, Smith argues that it is possible to distinguish between the nineteenth-century ideology of nationalismwith-patriotism and the continuous, immemorial history of national selfLGHQWL¿FDWLRQ121DWLRQVWR6PLWKEURDGO\UHTXLUHWKUHHGH¿QLQJFRQVWLWXHQWVD territorially bounded ancestral homeland; shared cultural myths and memories; and common institutional and jurisdictional frameworks.13 In an era before mass communications, the extent to which any vertical penetration of such ideas down the social hierarchy is possible remains a moot point. And the consolidation of 10

Dana Lloyd Spradley, ‘Pericles and the Jacobean Family Romance of Union’, in Assays Volume 7: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts, ed. Peggy A. Knapp (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1992), 87–118. 11 Ibid., 88. 12 Classic modernist work on nationalism includes: Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). We are not, of course, arguing that Shakespeare would have thought directly in these terms, or even that nationalism is a perennial as opposed to a modern phenomenon: Smith’s work simply provides useful analytical categories that give purchase on a sprawling range of early modern writings. 13 See Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 104. We have grouped ‘the growth of myths and memories of common ancestry’ with ‘the formation of a shared public culture based on an indigenous resource (language, religion, etc.)’, but address issues of the penetration of that culture geographically and socially in the conclusion. Smith also points out that nations require µWKH XQL¿FDWLRQ RI ORFDO HFRQRPLF XQLWV LQWR D VLQJOH VRFLRHFRQRPLF XQLW EDVHG RQ WKH single culture and homeland’. We address this issue in passing throughout our discussion of PericlesSDUWLFXODUO\LQUHODWLRQWRWKH¿VKHUPHQ UDWKHUWKDQGLVWLQJXLVKLWDVDVHSDUDWH constituent of nationhood.

26

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the British composite monarchy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brings HDFKRIWKHDUFKLSHODJR¶VQDWLRQ¶VGHYHORSLQJVHQVHVRIQDWLRQDOLVPLQWRFRQÀLFW with one another. Both these issues we will return to in the conclusion. But in certain educated circles – particularly those of antiquarian researchers – each of these categories is a major preoccupation (even though they would not have conceptualized the issue in the same way).14 Furthermore, as Andrew Escobedo has shown, early modern nationalisms are preoccupied with dynamics of loss and recovery.15 John Dee’s lament for the loss of tombs and historical artefacts is characteristic: ‘O Glastonbury, Glastonbury, the treasurie of the carcases of so famous, and so many persons … how lamentable is thy case now! Howe hath hypocrisie and pride wrought thy desolation!’16 Investment in sites of deep and FRQWLQXLQJKLVWRULFDOVLJQL¿FDQFH±LQWKLVFDVH*ODVWRQEXU\WKHSODFHRI.LQJ Arthur’s burial – entails an awareness of the loss of such continuities through historical destruction and the extirpation of ancient cultures.17 Loss and recovery are the central dynamics of Pericles, but before we turn to detailed consideration of the play we need to sketch out how each of Smith’s constituent categories of nationalism – land, cultures, institutions – can be found in early modern historical writings, and the ways in which antiquarians are attempting to restore lost continuities between ancient and contemporary Britain.18

14 On the society of antiquaries as an important site of intellectual exchange see Linda van Norden, ‘The Elizabethan College of Antiquaries’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 1946) and the suggestive remarks in Mordechai Feingold, ‘The Origins of the Royal Society, Revisited’, in Margaret Pelling and Scott Mandelbrot (eds), The Practice of Reform in Health, Medicine and Science, 1500–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 167–183, 175–6. 15 Andrew Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). We are greatly indebted to this important work. 16 In Richard Hakluyt, 7KH3ULQFLSDO1DYLJDWLRQV9R\DJHV7UDI¿TXHV 'LVFRYHULHV of the English Nation (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1903; 12 vols), I:18. Dee is thinking here particularly about the Reformation: Arthur’s ‘tomb’ was destroyed in the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539. 17 See Christopher Hodgkins’ account of these issues and their relationship to English Protestantism in Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), Ch. 1. 18 The starting-point for the study of European antiquarianism remains Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’, Studies in Historiography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), Ch. 1. The best recent overview of British antiquarians is Graham Parry, 7KH7URSKLHVRI7LPH(QJOLVK$QWLTXDULDQVLQWKH6HYHQWHHQWK&HQWXU\ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). For an overview of the European culture of antiquarianism see Alain Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past: the Origins of Archaeology, trans. Ian Kinnes (London: British Museum Press, 1996).

Pericles and the Language of National Origins

27

Language of National Origins 7KH ¿UVW RI 6PLWK¶V NH\ GHVLGHUDWD IRU D QDWLRQDO FRPPXQLW\ LV WKH VHQVH RI D territorially bounded homeland. In early modern historical and legal writing, the British shore is always a liminal boundary: it marks the point at which Britain enters recorded history.19 Britain enters surviving recorded classical history with Caesar’s Gallic WarsZKHQ&DHVDU¿UVWVHHVWKH%ULWLVKVKRUHOLQHDQGWKHSUHKLVWRULF inhabitants of Britain: ‘he himself reached Britain about the fourth hour of the day, and there beheld the armed forces of the enemy displayed on all the cliffs. Such was the nature of the ground, so steep the heights which banked the sea, that a missile could be hurled from the higher levels on to the shore’.20 Later classical historians remained preoccupied with the British shoreline. Julius Solinus (whose history was translated by Arthur Golding) is preoccupied with ‘the troublous Sea’ around Britain, which ‘also deuideth the Iland of the Silures [the Isle of Anglesey], from the coast of Brytaine’.21 Shakespeare’s contemporaries continued this emphasis. John Clapham – whose neo-Latin poem ‘Echo and Narcissus’ Shakespeare had partly used as a source for Venus and Adonis – had recently begun his Historie of Great Britaine with this moment at which Caesar ‘beheld the Cliffs possessed with a multitude of barbarous people, rudely armed, and ready to make resistance’.22 The shore was also the point at which later invaders could enter Britain: according to Camden, it was ‘[a]bout the time of Egbert, in the yeere of Christ, 800’ when WKH 'DQHV µ¿UVW ODQGHG RQ RXU VHDFRDVWV DIWHUZDUGV ZLWK VXFK WXPXOWV DQG hurliburlies as never the like was heard of’.23 The shore is therefore not only a British boundary but a key point of British origins: the site at which Britain enters the narrative of world history and of colonization and recolonization. Antiquarian writing also evinces a new investment in cultural relics from the past, particularly ancient monuments. As Leonard Barkan and Peter Burke have observed, European early modern antiquarianism is characterized by a new preoccupation with, and sophistication in the use of, material evidence (rather than simply textual evidence), in giving accounts of past cultures.24 Relics from the past 19

Jodi Mikalachki, The Legend of Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), Ch. 2 links this insight to King Lear. 20 Julius Caesar, The Gallic War, trans. H.J. Edwards (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1917), IV:23. 21 Julius Solinus, The excellent and pleasant worke of Julius Solinus Polyhistor, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1587), Piiir. 22 See Charles Martindale and Colin Burrow, ‘Clapham’s Narcissus: A Pre-Text for Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis? (Text, Translation and Commentary)’, ELR 22/2 (1992): 147–76. John Clapham, Historie of Great Britaine (London, 1606), B3v. 23 William Camden, Britannia, trans., Philemon Holland (London, 1610), M3v. 24 Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in The Making of Renaissance Culture 1HZ+DYHQ /RQGRQ
28

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such as coins, tombs, household objects, seals and inscriptions were now employed as evidence. In England, this evidentiary preoccupation is given particular political force by the dissolution of the monasteries: antiquaries as diverse as John Leland and Sampson Erdeswicke are fascinated by the ways in which surviving monuments can establish continuities with the medieval past, crossing the rupture of the Reformation. Such monuments, as James Simpson has argued, can be a nostalgic means of recuperating the loss of medieval culture in England.25 In the longer timeframe, this dynamic of loss and recovery was not only focussed around the problems raised by the dissolution of the monasteries and attendant devastation of learned manuscripts. British history was characterized by constant processes of, and attempts to resist, radical erasure. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the destruction of the culture of the ancient British inhabitants by the Saxon invaders. Leland’s defence against Polydore Vergil’s attack on the historicity of Galfridian histories of Arthur, Assertio inclytissimi Arturii Regis Britanniae, is a good example of all these issues.26 The work was translated in 1582 by Richard Robinson as A Learned and True Assertion of the Original Life, Actes and death of the most Noble, Valiant, and Renoumed Prince Arthure, at which point it reached a wider audience of English-language readers (rather than the learned Continental audience at which Leland’s writing was aimed).27 These readers would have encountered Leland’s extraordinary description of ‘K. Arthures Tombe found’. Leland points out that the Saxons went out of their way to destroy the vanquished British culture: when the ‘Saxones power grewe to some force after Arthures death’ they began ‘openly to set at nought the remnauntes of those vanquished Brittaines’ (I2r–v). Nevertheless, Leland claims Arthur’s tomb has now been found, ‘buryed verie deeply for feare of the Saxons’, and ‘we haue seene with our eyes’ (our emphasis) this tomb and the inscription upon it (K1r). Although Dee, as we saw earlier, laments historical loss at Glastonbury, Leland claims that 25 On the loss of ‘systems of knowledge and social relationships through which such books were acquired’ at the Dissolution, see David Wallace, ‘Dante in Somerset: Ghosts, Historiography, Periodization’, New Medieval Literatures 3 (1999): 9–38 (13). On the dissolution as the central event in antiquarian imaginations, see James Simpson, ‘The Melancholy of John Leland’, in Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). See also John Bale’s interpretation of Leland’s project in his The /DERU\RXVH-RXUQH\DQG6HUFKHRI-RKDQ/H\ODQGHIRU(QJODQGHV$QWLTXLWHHV*HXHQRI Hym as a New Yeares Gyfte to Kyng Henry the VIII (London, 1546). For an edition of the recusant Erdeswicke’s manuscript history of Staffordshire see S. Erdeswicke, A Survey of Staffordshire, ed. T. Harwood (London, 1844; rev. edn). 26 John Leland, Assertio inclytissimi Arturii Regis Britanniae (London, 1544). 27 On Leland’s book and the debates over the historicity of Arthur see J.W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1990), 179–86. Robinson was a scribal copyist – he made an early copy of Sir Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia)ROJHU06+E ±DQGSUROL¿FWUDQVODWRUIURP Latin and French, producing, among many other works, A Moral Method of Civil Policy, from the original by Francesco Patrizi, and translating Melanchthon.

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loss has been recuperated. Leland’s writing emphasizes the way monuments from the past can provide autoptic evidentiary access to past cultures. Linguistic and cultural monuments remained important to antiquaries, too, of course.28 The editing and repackaging of medieval literary texts, especially Chaucer, in the sixteenth century has been well surveyed.29 6XI¿FH LW WR UHSHDW that something resembling a medieval ‘literary tradition’ (‘literary’ in the broadest sense, which allows Bale to include ‘writers’ as diverse as Chaucer and Samothes) was being edited and assembled for Renaissance readers and writers.30 But DORQJVLGH VXFK WH[WXDO WUDGLWLRQV LW KDV QRW EHHQ VXI¿FLHQWO\ HPSKDVL]HG WKDW early modern British historical writing was acutely aware of the problems of establishing contact with ancient British societies who primarily recorded their histories through oral tradition, especially oral poetry.31 As Samuel Daniel writes, ‘the Druydes, who were the ministers of Religion and Iustice, the especiall men of knowledge committed not their mysteries to writing, but deliuered them by tradition, whereby the memorie of them after their suppression … came wholly to perish with them’.32 Contemporary encounters with primitive civilizations in America had given this observation renewed currency: Amyot’s preface to his French translation of Plutarch’s LivesRQHRIWKHPRVWLPSRUWDQWDQGLQÀXHQWLDO essays in the history of historiography, is a contemporary locus classicus here. This essay, in North’s translation, cannot have escaped Shakespeare’s notice: because that men in those daies deliuered in their life times the remembraunce of things past to their successors, in songs, which they caused their children to learne by hart, from hand to hand, as is to be seene yet in our daies by the example of the barbarous people that inhabite the newfound landes in the West,

28 The key work in the European history of humanist textual criticism was Lorenzo Valla’s De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione (1439); for a recent discussion RIWKLVZRUN¶VLQÀXHQFHRQHDUO\PRGHUQKLVWRULFDOVFKRODUVKLSVHH&DUOR*LQ]EXUJHistory, Rhetoric, and Proof (Hanover, NH; London: University Press of New England, 1999), Ch. 2. 29 Recently, see for example Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and their Books, 1473–1557 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Among many other works in this area, see Theresa M. Krier, 5H¿JXULQJ&KDXFHULQWKH5HQDLVVDQFH (Gainseville: Florida University Press, 1999); Derek Pearsall, ‘Thomas Speght (ca. 1550–?)’, in Paul Ruggiers (ed.), Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition (Norman, Oklahoma: Pilgrim %RRNV   ± 6WHSKDQLH7ULJJ µ'LVFRXUVHV RI$I¿QLW\ LQ WKH 5HDGLQJ &RPPXQLWLHV of Geoffrey Chaucer’, in Thomas Prendergast and Barbara Kline (eds), Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–1602 (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 270–91. 30 See John Bale, Illustrium Maioris Britanniae Scriptorum … Summarium (Wesel: 1548), Biir–Biiv. 31 An exception is the excellent discussion in Carlo Ginzburg, No Island Is An Island: Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), Ch. 2. 32 Samuel Daniel, The Collection of the Historie of England (London, 1621), E2r.

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who without anie records of writings, haue had the knowledge of things past, welneare eight hundreth yeares afore.33

As we shall see, Pericles is concerned not only with the establishment of textual and printed traditions which stretch back into the medieval past, but also with the possibility of recuperating oral storytelling traditions.34 We want simply to point out that the establishment of national cultural history was invested in the recovery of physical monuments from the past, and in the restoration and representation of major cultural monuments too. The third desideratum for the emergence of nationhood is the establishment of political and legal institutional frameworks – frameworks which themselves have their own histories. The history of the law and of parliament were emerging as particularly fraught topics in the early Stuart period. The Society of Antiquaries in the late Elizabethan period had heard papers on the history of parliament.35 Several members presented arguments to show that the origins of Parliament stretched deep into the past, back to the Anglo-Saxon witan and the associations of the Druids. The history of the law too was becoming a subject of major research interest to early modern historians: several papers on this subject were heard in the Society of Antiquaries; John Selden edited Fortescue’s De Laudibus Legum Angliae (1616); and of course Edward Coke was publishing his massive volumes of Institutes.36 Once again, this is a history of loss and recovery of that loss at the points of key historical transition in British history: the conquest of the prehistoric British inhabitants by the Romans; the Saxon conquest of the Britains; the Norman conquest of the Saxons. But the early modern period was also characterized by relationships with far more immediate and local institutions too: membership of a parish, or a guild, for example, or the citizenship of an incorporated civic authority.37 0LFKDHO%UDGGLFN¶VZRUNRQVWDWHIRUPDWLRQIRFXVVHVRQWKHUROHRIRI¿FHKROGLQJLQ 33

Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, trans., Thomas North (London, 1574), *iijv. 34 The play repeatedly dramatizes the recuperative potential of storytelling: in crises, characters’ instincts or instructions are to narrate (Cleon gives accounts of famine, Diana instructs Pericles to tell his story at Ephesus, Marina tells her life story to Pericles). 35 See the papers by Arthur Agard, Francis Tate, William Camden, and Joseph Holland collected in Thomas Hearne, ed. A Collection of Curious Discourses, Written by Eminent $QWLTXDULHV8SRQVHYHUDO+HDGVLQRXU(QJOLVK$QWLTXLWLHV/RQGRQ: -5LFKDUGVRQ 1771; 2 vols), I:281–310. 36 See for example William Hakewill’s paper, and the anonymous paper which follows it, on ‘The Antiquity of the Laws of this Island’ (Hearne, Curious Discourses, I:1–10). Perhaps the most relevant volume of Coke’s work to the issue of nationhood is Sir Edward Coke, The Fourth Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England: Concerning the Jurisdiction of Courts (London, 1644). 37 See for instance Steve Hindle, On the Parish?: The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004); Steve Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge

Pericles and the Language of National Origins

31

FUHDWLQJPRPHQWVRIFRPSOH[LQWHUDFWLRQEHWZHHQORFDODI¿QLWLHVDQGWKHSUHVVXUHV of the national state.38 Historical and antiquarian work in the early modern period on such local institutions proliferated too: the Society of Antiquaries discussed the histories of towns; chorographic accounts of cities such as London, Newcastle, and 6WDPIRUG ZHUH SURGXFHG DQG WKH KLVWRULHV RI ORFDO RI¿FHV ZHUH EHLQJ ZULWWHQ39 Jonson’s annotations to his part of 7KH0DJQL¿FLHQW(QWHUWDLQPHQW(1604) show that civic histories participated in the same economy of lost and recovered origins: ‘Rather than the City should want a Founder, we choose to follow the received story of Brute, whether fabulous or true, and not altogether unwarranted in Poetry: VLQFHLWLVDIDYRURI$QWLTXLW\WRIHZ&LWLHVWROHWWKHPNQRZWKHLU¿UVW$XWKRUV¶40 So we need to be aware of the fact that early modern subjects were embedded within multiple and overlapping social and political structures, rather than simply imagining a direct relationship with an abstract notion such as the ‘nation’ and the ‘state’.41 As we will see Pericles is particularly preoccupied with the ‘city-state’: an amalgamation of the local with the national. These are clearly learned historical writings. However, we think it important not to separate Shakespeare from such early modern cultural debates for two reasons. First, there are clear continuities between theatrical writing and other forms of early modern intellectual culture. George Buc’s essay in the 1615 edition of Stow’s Annales characterizes London as ‘The Third Universitie of England’, and sets ‘the Art of Reuels’ within the context of other institutions of early modern OHDUQLQJWKH,QQVRI&RXUW*UHVKDP&ROOHJHWKH+HUDOG¶V2I¿FHWKHµ&ROOHJHRI Physitians’ and so on.42 Members of Shakespeare’s audience would have interacted with several of these institutions, and would have been well aware of the debates just outlined (whether or not they had read the texts we have described). Second, Shakespeare was connected to early modern historical writing through his own University Press, 1989); Phil Withington, The Politics of the Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 38 Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 39 For example, Joseph Holland, ‘Of the Antiquity of Cities in England’; Hearne, Curious Discourses, I:38; John Stow, Survay of London (London, 1598); William Gray, Chorographia or a Survey of Newcastle upon Tine (London, 1649); Richard Butcher, Survey DQG$QWLTXLWLHRIWKH7RZQHRI6WDPIRUG(London, 1646); William Lambarde, Eirenarcha: RURI7KH2I¿FHRIWKH,XVWLFHVRI3HDFH (London, 1581). 40 Ben Jonson, Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford, and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925–52), 7:92. 41 For a reading of Shakespeare in the context of devolved early modern power structures see Colin Burrow, ‘Reading Tudor Writing Politically: The Case of 2 Henry IV’, Yearbook of English Studies  ± 42 George Buc, The Third Universitie of England, or A Treatise of the Foundations of All the Colledges, Ancient Schooles of Priviledge, And of Houses of Learning, and Liberall Arts (1615) in John Stow and Edmond Howes, The Annales, or Generall Chronicle of England (London, 1618), 958–88.

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LQYROYHPHQWZLWKWKH+HUDOG¶V2I¿FH7KLVKDVEHHQZHOODQDO\]HGE\.DWKHULQH Duncan-Jones, but it is worth reiterating the extent to which Shakespeare’s own family were caught up in the deeply divisive world of the late sixteenth- and early VHYHQWHHQWKFHQWXU\KHUDOG¶VRI¿FH43 William Dethicke’s ascription of armage to Shakespeare’s family was challenged by Ralph Brooke, in a widespread attack on 'HWKLFNHZKLFKZDVDWOHDVWSDUWO\DVWUXJJOHIRUFRQWURORIWKH+HUDOG¶V2I¿FH Brooke also published a comprehensive attack on Camden’s Britannia, to which Camden himself responded: again, Brooke was probably positioning himself within a factional struggle against the Clariencieux, king of Arms.44 In dealing directly with all matters relating to the family’s armage, Shakespeare was unavoidably caught up in the problems of factionalized early modern historical scholarship. Pericles and the Language of National Origins Territories The historical writing we have outlined above, with its preoccupation with the shore as a liminal boundary, is not a source for Pericles; but the shore becomes a similarly contested and complicated concept throughout the play. Pericles is SUHRFFXSLHG DV FULWLFV KDYH QRWLFHG  ZLWK WKH VKRUH¶V PXOWLSOH VLJQL¿FDQFHV45 The word ‘shore’ sometimes indicates simply the beach: ‘a huge billow … tossed LW>7KDLVD¶VFRI¿Q@XSRQVKRUH¶ ,WGLVWLQJXLVKHVODQGIURPVHD)RUWXQH according to Gower, ‘Threw him [Pericles] ashore’ (2.0.37–8). It also, confusingly, FRQÀDWHVODQGDQGVHDµ:HKDYHGHVFULHGXSRQRXUQHLJKERXULQJVKRUH$SRUWO\ sail of ships make hitherward’ (1.4.59–60); here ‘neighbouring shore’ actually refers to the sea upon which the ships sail.46 It functions as a metonym for country: ‘driven upon this shore’ (2.3.82), ‘refresh us, sir, upon your shore’ (5.1.243).

43

Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001), Ch. 4. 44 Ralph Brooke, A discoverie of certaine errours published in print in the muchcommended Britannia, 1594, very prejudiciall to the discentes and successions of the auncient nobilitie of the realme (London, 1599). 45 Bradin Cormack, A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007). See also Constance C. Relihan, ‘Liminal Geography: Pericles and the Politics of Place’, Philological Quarterly 71 (1992): 281–301; Lisa Hopkins, ‘“The Shores of My Mortality”: Pericles’ Greece of the Mind’, in David Skeele (ed.), Pericles: Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 2000), 228–37. We would disagree with Hopkins that ‘the true borders and the true journeys are of the mind, and for all the imagery of the sea, the most important shores are those that lap at the self’ (228–9). 46 6LPLODUO\ WKH ¿VKHUPHQ ZRQGHU ZKHWKHU WKH µ¿VKHV OLYHV LQ WKH VHD¶ µDV PHQ GR DODQG¶± EHIRUHFRQÀDWLQJWKHWZR]RQHVDOWRJHWKHUµ6XFKZKDOHVKDYH,KHDUG on o’th’land, who never leave gaping till they swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells and all’ (2.1.32–4).

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It designates a point of origin: ‘How far is his [Simonides’] Court distant from this shore?’ (2.1.101–2). As the references accumulate, their meanings become less clear: when Cleon suggests ‘We’ll bring your grace to the edge o’th’ shore’ (3.3.36), ‘shore’ can designate both geography, ‘the beach’, and a national institution whose territorial boundary has been reached. The word’s semantic range encompasses the play’s thinking about nations and nationhood. Sometimes particular territories ±WKHVKRUHRFFXSLHGE\WKH¿VKHUPHQVD\±DUHGLVWLQFWWHUULWRULHVXQUHODWHGWR national entities; sometimes they are inseparable from those entities. The word reveals the bifurcated nature of polities within the play which are in process between regional locales (shore as immediate geographical designator) and larger proto-national entities (shore as synecdoche for country). If the word ‘shore’ is as linguistically troubling as was the early modern concept of nationhood, it is also physically a vulnerable boundary. Or rather, it is vulnerable in that it acts as a synecdoche for the entire kingdom: in parallel to the linguistic movement of the word ‘shore’, an entrant can move from occupying only the shore to occupying the entire country. Hence Cleon perceives (when the Lord announces ‘We have descried upon our neighbouring shore/A portly sail of ships make hitherward’) ‘some neighbouring nation/Taking advantage of our misery’ (1.4.59–60, 64–5). Cleon views the shores of one ‘nation’ as vulnerable to the ships of another. But the things that are visible offshore can be read in different ZD\VµE\WKHVHPEODQFH2IWKHLUZKLWHÀDJVGLVSOD\HG¶WKH/RUGDUJXHVµWKH\ bring us peace’ (1.4.70–71). That boundaries are open to interpretation is evident in the quotation above when one king, Cleon, offers to escort another, Pericles, to ‘the edge o’the shore’. Prima facie, ‘edge’ seems tautological; in fact, it shows that ‘shore’ is a complexly differentiated region – a boundary (‘shore’) with its own boundary (‘edge’). Thomas Digges in his ‘Arguments Proving the Queenes Majesties Propertye in the Sea Landes, Salt Shores Thereof’ (1569) theorizes the division between what later legal writers would term the ‘foreshore’, the area between low and high water-marks, and the rest of the shore.47 For Digges, the shore itself is subdividable, articulated in paradoxes (‘sea landes’ and ‘salt shores’); and these subdivisions are subject to differing jurisdictions: land-holdings on the foreshore belong to the Crown whereas holdings higher up on the shore can belong to private individuals.48 The extent to which the shore constituted a jurisdictional 47 BL MS Lansdowne 105. Printed in Stuart A. Moore, A History of the Foreshore and the Law Relating Thereteo/RQGRQ6WHYHQV +D\HV  48 The issue is complex. Here is Digges’ explanation: ‘So in the great salt riuer I meane the sea enuirroninge the whole Ilande, and in the salt shores thereof, the greate and cheefe lorde of the whole soyle the Kinge himself only muste haue interest and propertye, and no man ells nether by prescription nor eny other waye, salue only by the Kinges especiall graunte maye claime propertye in them. As concerninge the vse bothe of the fresh and salt shore whiles they remayne shores they are and must bee publyck Iure gentium, But so soone as ether by the withdrawinge of the waters from them, or enye other accident, they beecoome priuate’ (191). For more on this see David Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 114.

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boundary had been placed in dispute in early seventeenth-century Britain by the union of the crowns. English legal practice had tended to favour the complete freedom of the seas (mare liberum), whereas Scottish legal practice had extended DXWKRULW\HJRYHU¿VKLQJULJKWV RXWRYHUQHLJKERXULQJZDWHUVmare clausum). James began to enforce the Scottish policy over the whole of Britain’s shores. Thus English legal traditions – the kind of institutional framework that was part of the developing sense of national identity – was placed under pressure by the need to consolidate the British composite monarchy.49 Given that each of the categories necessary for the emergence of nationhood is characterized by loss and recovery, Marina’s own preoccupation with the recuperation of her lost (watery) origins merits attention. A conversation with Leonine over which direction the wind blows is instantly turned into a discussion of her birth: Marina. Leonine. Marina.

Is this wind Westerlie that blowes? Southwest. When I was borne the wind was North. (4.1.49–50)

Nothing in the onstage discussion has triggered this remembrance (in fact, the most logical link would have been had Leonine replied ‘North’). Marina repeats the phrase, ‘When I was borne’ seven lines later; this phrase and its variant (‘when she was borne’) become an elegiac refrain throughout the play.50 This dialogue about originary loss takes place as the characters walk along the ‘sea-margent’, the shoreline boundary which will allow pirates to rescue/kidnap Marina at the end of the scene. But although Marina inhabits these margins, she is not of these margins, as the play makes repeatedly explicit: ‘for I was borne at sea’. When Pericles asks for her national identity (‘what countrywoman? Here of these shores?’), she replies, ‘No, nor of any shores’ (5.1.93–4). This harping on watery origins shows that she GRHVQRW¿WLQWRDQ\RIWKHSROLWLHVZLWKLQWKHSOD\VKHLVEHWZHHQQDWLRQVUHJLRQV lands. And this is the restoration that the play provides for her: the last scene is very VSHFL¿FDERXWWKHORFDWLRQRIQXSWLDOVIRU/\VLPDFKXVDQG0DULQDDQGWKHSODFH of retirement for Pericles and Thaisa (Pentapolis), culminating in the bestowal of jurisdiction on the new king and queen (Tyre). Despite her name, Marina now has a land-based identity. This is not so much a matter of origins restored as new identities conferred: the paradoxical absorption of Marina into the play’s political structures at the same moment she is appointed governor of those structures. Monuments, Memories, Myths If PericlesH[SORUHVWKHFRQÀLFWHGSURFHVVE\ZKLFKODQGDQGWHUULWRULHVHVWDEOLVK their boundaries, the shore throughout is also associated with memory and the attempts to recuperate the past: Pericles discovers his father’s rusty armour on the 49 For more on the British problem and law of the sea, see Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire, 1089. 50 3.3.13, 5.1.147, 5.1.186.

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shore, Marina remembers her birth while walking on the ‘sea-margent’, and the ¿QDOUHFRYHULHVRIORVVWDNHSODFHRQDERDWPRRUHGDWVKRUHDQGDWWKHVKRUHOLQH Temple of Diana.51 One of the reasons that the shore is associated with memory is that it is a site upon which objects from the past can be deposited: Pericles’ DUPRXU 7KDLVD¶V FRI¿Q$QG ZKDW WKH VHD ZDVKHV XS LW FDQ DOVR ZDVK DZD\ D process of which Marina herself is aware when she begs Boult to give her any occupation but prostitution: she offers to ‘[e]mpty/Old receptacles or common VKRUHV RI ¿OWK¶ ± $V 6X]DQQH *RVVHWW H[SODLQV WKH µFRPPRQ VKRUH¶ ZDV µWKH QR PDQ¶V ODQG E\ WKH ZDWHUVLGH ZKHUH ¿OWK ZDV GHSRVLWHG IRU WKH WLGH to wash away’ (4.5.178n).52 Gossett’s Arden edition retains the Quarto reading, where most editors ‘emend’ (in practice modernize) to ‘sewer’: the two words were variant spellings of one another. Both shores and sewers are places in which waste products can be deposited and from where they can be recycled into the sea. 7KHORVVDQGUHFRYHU\RIVKRUHOLQHGHSRVLWVIURPDUPRXUWRFRI¿QZLIH SDUDOOHOV the process of loss and recovery of memories, lineages and origins in the play. The most obvious resurrection and recovery from the British past in Pericles is the medieval poet, John Gower. Both Gower and Chaucer are the subjects of antiquarian research and recovery in the sixteenth century in its most material form: manuscript collation and textual editing. John Stow had surveyed manuscripts of Gower, and donated his research on Chaucer to Speght for his edition.53 Gower was ¿UVW SULQWHG E\ &D[WRQ LQ  WKHQ E\ WKH NLQJ¶V SULQWHU 7KRPDV %HUWKHOHW LQ 1532 and again in 1554. Sixteenth-century editions of Chaucer are too numerous WRQHHGDQRWKHUVXUYH\EXWVXI¿FHLWWRQRWHWKDW7KRPDV6SHJKW¶VHGLWLRQLQ kept Chaucer’s writing current in the early seventeenth century.54 However, the editions of both these poets offered a quite different presentation of the relationship between author and context. Whereas Chaucer is tricked out as a proto-Protestant, with works such as the Plowman’s Tale and the Pilgrim’s Tale added to his canon,

51

Natural land reclamation means that the temple today is no longer situated at the shoreline. 52 William Shakespeare, Pericles, ed. Suzanne Gossett, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004). 53 Stow incorporates Gower’s Latin elegy for Richard II as historical evidence into his A Summarie of Englyshe chronicles (London, 1565), Qivv–Qvr. In his headnote to ‘The Plowman’s Tale’, Speght says, ‘For I haue seene it in written hand in Iohn Stowes Library in a booke of such antiquity, as seemeth to haue beene written neare to Chaucers time’ (Geoffrey Chaucer, The workes of our ancient and learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer, ed. Thomas Speght [London, 1602], Qiv). For more on Stow as manuscript collector, see the essays collected in Alexandra Gillespie and Ian Anders Gadd (eds), John Stow (1525– 1605) and the Making of the English Past: Studies in Early Modern Culture and the History of the Book (London: British Library, 2004). 54 Geoffrey Chaucer, The workes of our antient and learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed, ed. Thomas Speght (London, 1598).

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Gower remains irreducibly medieval.55 Berthelet, in the prologue to his edition, describes Gower’s death and burial: And thus whan [he] had gone [his] iourney … Iohn Gower prepared for his bones a restynge place in the monasterie of saynt Marie Oueres, where somwhat after the olde facion he lieth right sumptuousely buried, with a garlande on KLVKHDGLQWRNHQWKDWKHLQKLVOLIHGDLHVÀRXULVKHGIUHVKHO\LQOLWHUDWXUHDQG science. And the same monumente, in remembrance of hym erected, is on the North side of the fore saide churche, in the chapell of sainte Iohn, where he hath of his owne foundacion, a masse daily songe … And thereby hongeth a table, wherein appereth, that who so euer praith for the soule of Iohn Gower, he shall so oft as he so doth, haue a. M. and D. daies of pardon. And moreouer he hath an obite yerely, done for hym within the same churche, on fridaie after the feaste of the blessed pope saynte Gregorie.56

This is unmistakably pre-Reformation. And even though Gower is embedded in his fourteenth-century context, his biography is fraught: he is often seen as an ROGHU¿JXUHWKDQ&KDXFHU)R[HVD\VWKDWµ*RZHUZDVDJUHDWGHDOHKLVDXQFLHQW¶  despite the reality being the reverse; for Caxton he was a Welshman (‘squyer borne in Walys’) whereas Berthelet stresses his contribution to indigenous English word-hoards (‘plentie of English wordes and vulgars’).57 The Welsh were often seen as the surviving remnants of the original British inhabitants of the island, the descendants of Brutus who were driven into Wales by the Saxons, and who preserved ancient British Christianity against Augustine’s importation of Catholicism. Gower is ethnically fractured along the same lines as the British DUFKLSHODJR LWVHOI D:HOVK %ULWLVK  ¿JXUH IRU (QJOLVK 6D[RQ  SRHWLF WUDGLWLRQ Any return to pre-Reformation English literary history is rendered problematic, of course, by the textual rupture caused by the dissolution of the monasteries. 7KXV GHVSLWH RXU FRQ¿GHQW VWDWHPHQW µXQPLVWDNDEO\ SUH5HIRUPDWLRQ¶  WKHUH is nothing unmistakable about anything pre-Reformation. For Shakespeare and Wilkins to present Gower on stage in the early seventeenth century carries with it quite different associations from the invocation of Chaucer by Shakespeare and Fletcher in Two Noble Kinsmen. Gower embodies historical recovery and loss; he represents both antiquity and the decay of antiquity. As a chorus, Gower recuperates both oral and textual traditions. He is aware of himself as an oral storyteller (‘to sing a song that old was sung’ [1.0.1]) whose tales are themselves derived from previous tellers (‘what mine authors say’ [1.0.20]),

55

Kathleen Forni, The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Counterfeit Canon (Gainesville: Florida University Press, 2001). 56 John Gower, Io. Gower de confessione amantis (London, 1532; repr. 1554), *iiir. 57 John Foxe, Actes and Monumentes (London, 1570, 2nd edn), II:965; John Gower, This booke is intituled confessio amantis, that is to saye in englysshe the confession of the ORXHU PDDG DQG FRPSLOHG E\ ,RKDQ *RZHU VTX\HU (London, 1483), iir; John Gower, de confessione amantis (London, 1532), *iir.

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but whose story also is preserved by text (‘this ’longs the text’, ‘lords and ladies in their lives/Have read it for restoratives’ [2.0.40, 1.0.7–8]).58 Gower famously ‘stand[s] i’th gaps’ (4.4.8) of theatrical representation but is simultaneously aware of the textual decay of his choric form: ‘I carry winged time/Post on the lame feet of my rhyme’ (4.0.47–8, our emphasis).59 In the chorus’ tetrameter metre taken from Confessio Amantis, Shakespeare and Wilkins do something unusual in the Shakespeare canon: they imitate the form of the source as well as its content. As the late Richard Helgerson has argued in his seminal work on nationhood, rhyme was a highly politicized concept in the early seventeenth century. Samuel Daniel’s Defence of Rhyme argued that rhyme was a customary practice in English verse, and so shouldn’t be abandoned; he paralleled rhyme with customary traditions of English common law and parliamentary process, whose antiquity and continuity commanded respect.60 Daniel’s analogy between poetic and political custom needs to be seen in a British framework: he was responding to a fear that a Scottish king would disregard English institutions of governance and the relatively consensual relationship between monarch and nation they implied. So Daniel is referring to DVSHFL¿FDOO\English poetic tradition. Carlo Ginzburg, in a brilliant extension of Helgerson’s argument, shows that Daniel draws on Montaigne’s writing about the new world, not to question the superiority of ‘civilised’ Europeans over ‘barbarous’ native Americans, but of the modern Renaissance over its medieval forebears. Daniel observes that the post-classical, medieval ‘Gothes, Vandales and Longobards’ have ‘yet left us still their lawes and customes, as the originalls of most of the provinciall constitutions of Christendome’.61 Wilkins and Shakespeare’s formal imitation of Gower’s tetrameter is not innocent of the politics of Stuart national identity; literary and political custom cannot be easily separated. It is no coincidence that Pericles was of interest to seventeenth-century Catholics: Cholmley’s players performed the play in recusant households in Yorkshire in 1609 and it appeared on a Jesuit booklist in 1619 at the English College of St Omer.62 This is not because of any coded Catholicism in the play, but because

58 The aphesis may mean ‘belongs to’ or ‘prolongs’, ‘lengthens’. Gossett favours the former, as do we. 59 In the 2006–2007 RSC production (dir. Dominic Cooke) Joseph Mydell’s Gower directed a wry apologetic look to the audience as he tapped out the ‘lame feet’ with his staff. 60 See Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Ch. 1. 61 Ginzburg, No Island Is An Island, Ch. 2. Samuel Daniel, A Defence of Ryme (London, 1603), G1r. 62 See G.W. Boddy, ‘Players of Interludes in North Yorkshire in the Early Seventeenth Century’, 1RUWK
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Pericles is a play about the recuperation of historical loss. For the same reasons, PericlesZDVWKH¿UVW6KDNHVSHDUHSOD\SHUIRUPHGLQWKH5HVWRUDWLRQ63 As we noted above, antiquarians recovered not only words and texts but artefacts from the past. This key innovation was the awareness that history could be read from objects.64 The historical object recovered from the sea in Pericles, the centrepiece of one scene and a crucial prop in another, is the rusty armour. ,Q$FW3HULFOHVLVVKLSZUHFNHGDW3HQWDSROLVZKHUHWKUHH¿VKHUPHQHNHRXWWKHLU OLYHOLKRRGVRQWKHVKRUH7KH¿VKHUPHQDUHH[FLWHGDVWKH\GUDZXSWKHLUQHW +HUH¶VD¿VKKDQJVLQWKHQHW«¶WZLOOKDUGO\FRPHRXW+DERWVRQ¶W¶WLVFRPH at last, and ’tis turned to a rusty armour. (2.1.112–15)

However, this armour complicates any simple narrative of historical recovery; instead it embodies historical contradictions. The armour is rusty and old. It is remade in the present. It is a restorative which provides hope for the future. It comes from Pericles’ father. In short, it is ‘heritage’ – Thanks Fortune, yet, that after all thy crosses Thou givest me somewhat to repair myself. And though it was mine own, part of my heritage, Which my dead father did bequeath to me … (2.1.117–20)

7R3HULFOHVWKLVREMHFWLVODGHQZLWKSDVWDVVRFLDWLRQV%XWWKHVHFRQG¿VKHUPDQ disrupts this historical linearity with a focus on the present: Ay, but hark you, my friend, ’twas we that made up this garment through the rough seams of the waters. (2.1.144–6)

Although Pericles thanks ‘Fortune’ for restoring his ancestor’s lost object to him, WKH ¿VKHUPHQ WKLQN KH VKRXOG EH WKDQNLQJ them for making this armour out of the sea itself.65 The scene presents multiple modes of imagining how past objects relate to the present, a multiplicity already implicit in Pericles’ word ‘heritage’. 63

Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare (London: Vintage, 1989), 21. Such archaeological researches were being undertaken at regional levels around the turn of the seventeenth century. On research into Hadrian’s Wall, for instance, see )UDQFLV +DYHU¿HOG µ&RWWRQ -XOLXV ) YL 1RWHV RQ 5HJLQDOG %DLQEULJJ RI $SSOHE\ RQ William Camden and on some Roman inscriptions’, Transactions of the Cumberland and :HVWPRUODQG$QWLTXDULDQDQG$UFKDHRORJLFDO6RFLHW\, new ser., 11 (1910–1911): 343–78. For more on early modern archaeological research into Roman Britain, see the survey in Richard Hingley, The Recovery of Roman Britain 1586–1906: ‘a colony so fertile’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Ch. 1. For an exploration of some of the connections between this material and Renaissance literature see Philip Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 65 See Simon Palfrey, Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 75–6; and Richard Halpern, Shakespeare among the Moderns (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997). 64

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As David Lowenthal argues, ‘heritage is not an inquiry into the past but a celebration of it, not an effort to know what actually happened but a profession of faith in a past tailored to present-day purposes’.66 Lowenthal distinguishes heritage, which is present-centred, from history, which is directed to the study of the past. Heritage, like the rusty armour, is an anachronism: its ‘pastness’ and historicity are constructed in the present. The armour’s rust is also open to multiple interpretations. Redolent of the armour’s ‘heritage’ and antiquity, it can also suggest spurious historicity, as George Buchanan observes in his History of Scotland when criticizing Humphrey Llwyd for drawing upon ‘the Authority of a certain old Paper-fragment, which Rust, Mouldiness, and length of Time (and nothing else) have almost made Sacred with him’.67 When Pericles arrives at Simonides’ court, the lords associate the rust of Pericles’ armour not with distinguished ancestry but with social inferiority: ‘For by his rusty outside he appears/To have practised more the whipstock than the lance’ (2.2.48–9). An object which seems initially to construct an unproblematic lineage from past to present, father to son, turns out to be fraught with contradictory temporalities. Institutions: The City-State Pericles also depicts political institutions which adumbrate their own historical continuities – and discontinuities. Linda McJannet, in the foremost study of Pericles’ geography, works hard to locate the play’s cities in time and space.68 To us, the key interest is when her argument proves impossible: winds do not blow Pericles DFFXUDWHO\WRZDUGVKLVGHVWLQDWLRQV3HQWDSROLVFDQ¶WEHGH¿QLWLYHO\LGHQWL¿HG7KLV spatial and temporal imprecision, rather than rendering the play’s cities inert, opens WKHLU VLJQL¿FDQFH GLDFKURQLFDOO\$QG WKLV LPSUHFLVLRQ LV GHOLEHUDWHO\ DFKLHYHG In the opening chorus of the play, Gower describes Antiochus the Great’s founding of the city of Antioch (he ‘[b]uilt up this city for his chiefest seat/The fairest in all Syria’ (1.0.18–19). However, in describing Antioch’s origins, Shakespeare and Wilkins are simultaneously disrupting historical continuities: Antiochus III (the Great) ruled Antioch about one hundred years after it was founded. Furthermore, ZKHQ$QWLRFKXV¶GHDWKLVGHVFULEHGKHLVFRQÀDWHGZLWKKLVRZQVRQ$QWLRFK,9 ZKRVH¿HU\GHDWKLQDFKDULRWZLWKKLVERG\EXUQLQJXQWLOLWVWDQNLVWDNHQIURP Macabees 2.693URFHVVHVRIKLVWRULFDOWUDQVPLVVLRQDQGOLQHDJHDUHDJDLQFRQÀDWHG 66 David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), x. 67 George Buchanan, The History of Scotland (London, 1733; 2 vols), I:3. 68 Linda McJannet, ‘Genre and Geography: The Eastern Mediterranean in Pericles and The Comedy of Errors’, in Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama, eds John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan (Newark, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 86–106. 69 See 2.4.6–12n. This may seem a lot of weight for one dramatic character’s name to bear, but the material was well known to seventeenth-century readers.

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Cities seek to derive their own distinguished and historically profound origins: in doing so, distant origins are put to present use. Antiochus here introduces us to the city-state, which is the key institution of government in Pericles¶DQFLHQW0HGLWHUUDQHDQZRUOG7KH¿UVW¿VKHUPDQUHIHUV to ‘our country of Greece’ (2.1.63), but of course classical ‘Greece’ is only a loose association of city-states. Cathy Shrank has argued that Coriolanus depicts Roman citizens to meditate on the politics of local ‘citizenship’ – the membership of incorporated boroughs and towns in early modern England.70 Shakespeare was collaborating on Pericles around the same time he wrote Coriolanus, and so it is unsurprising to see that the central political institution in this play is also the city-state. But, as we shall see, the concern is less with the participatory politics of citizenship than it is with the city as a point of national origins. Dominant in Pericles is Tyre (the name is repeated 24 times), alongside Cleon’s Tarsus (‘Tarsus, o’er which I have the government,/A city’ (1.4.21–2), and Lysimachus’ Mytilene.71 This explains the play’s title: Pericles, not Apollonius.72 The name Pericles brings with it political associations: the most famous city-state in history, Athens; Plutarch’s Pericles’ establishment of Athenian government (‘Afterwards he established lawes, and ordained a very graue forme of gouernment, to maintaine his citizens’).73 The name invokes civic origins. But Plutarch’s Pericles is also on a journey in search of successors: just before his death he tries to ‘revoke the statute he had made for [i.e., against] base borne children, fearing least his lawfull KHLUVZRXOGID\OHDQGVRKLVKRXVH QDPHIDOOWRWKHJURXQG¶4LLLMY 6RWRRLV Shakespeare’s Pericles, who seeks in Antioch ‘a glorious beauty/From whence an issue I might propagate’ (1.2.70–71); in Pentapolis he competes for Thaisa’s hand in marriage; and in Mytilene, having regained his daughter, he marries her to the governor and appoints them both rulers of Tyre. Pericles’ name remained current in contemporary British politics. John Dee, in his plans for a British navy, fantasizes about a British naval captain equivalent to Athens’ Pericles: ‘What wold that Noble, Valiant, and Victorious Atheniensien PERICLES, say, yf, now, he were lyuing, and a Subiect of Authority, in this Brytish Kingdom?’74 Freighted with origins, ‘Pericles’ (whether as dramatic character, classical name, or contemporary SROLWLFDOVLJQL¿HU SRLQWVWKHZD\IRUZDUGIRUIXWXUHVXFFHVVLRQ

70 Cathy Shrank, ‘Civility and the City in Coriolanus’, SQ 54 (2003): 406–23. See also recently, James Kuzner, ‘Unbuilding the City: Coriolanus and the Birth of Republican Rome’, SQ 58/2 (2007): 174–99. 71 Pentapolis’ and Ephesus’ political structures are no less relevant but less clearly GH¿QHG3HQWDSROLVVHHPVWREHDORRVHDJJORPHUDWLRQRIGLIIHUHQWUHJLRQVZLWKRQHUXOHU Simonides; Ephesus is associated with its patron Diana rather than any current governor. 72 MacDonald P. Jackson, ‘North’s Plutarch and the name ‘“Escanes” in Shakespeare’s Pericles’, Notes and Queries 220 (1975): 173–4. 73 Plutarch, Lives, trans. North, Oviiir. 74 John Dee, General and Rare Memorialls pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (London, 1577), Biir.

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Critical focus on the name ‘Pericles’ frequently excludes the equally important matter of what it means to be ‘of Tyre’ in the early modern period. The resonances of this particular civic institution need to be contextualized carefully. Tyre was a point of origin. Tyre was the ancient homeland of the Phoenicians, which Renaissance audiences might have been reminded about by the 1597 translation of Achilles Tatius, a story of lost love told by Clitophon, who introduces himself as ‘a Phoenician, [whose] Countrey is Tyre’.75 The Phoenicians invented shipping, as Walter Raleigh points out: ‘the Tyrians gave themselues of old to farreoff nauigations, whence Tibullus ascribed the inuention of ships vnto them’.76 According to Lucan, the Phoenicians invented writing.77 According to Josephus, the Phoenicians also preserved one of the most ancient recorded histories (along with the Chaldeians and Egyptians): ‘these nations … haue carefully prouided, that none of those things that haue beene done by them should sleepe in obscuritie, but should be kept in memorie in the publike writings of the learnedest men’.78 Tyre was also the point of origin for peoples, especially for the Carthaginians and the ancient founders of Cadiz. This fact was widely known, but is particularly relevant to Pericles because it features prominently in George Wilkins’ translation (reproduced more or less verbatim from Arthur Golding’s) of the historian Justinus. $V*ROGLQJ:LONLQVZULWHVRQWKH¿QDOSDJHµ)RUZKHQWKHGaditans [people of ‘Gades’, Latin name for Cadiz] … had brought from Tyrus, out of the which Citty the Carthegenians had also their beginning …’79,QGHHGLWKDVQRWEHHQVXI¿FLHQWO\ emphasized80 how concomitant Pericles and its Middle Eastern locales are with Wilkins’ publishing interests in 1606–1608: the representation of Middle Eastern travel in the collaborative play The Travels of the Three English Brothers; an account of plague in the Ottoman Empire, Three Miseries of Barbary, published by Henry Gosson in 1607, who also published Pericles. And although Justinus is an obscure text to modern readers, it was one of the ‘epitomes’ of classical history most widely studied by early modern schoolboys.81 The play’s most important locale resonates with the origins of human trades, technologies and nations. 75

Achilles Tatius, The Loves of Clitophon and Leucippe (London, 1638; 2nd edn), B3v. Walter Raleigh, The Historie of the World (London, 1614), N1v. See Tibullus Elegia, 1.7.19–20: ‘Vtque maris vastum prospectet turribus aequor/Prima ratem ventis credere docta Tyros’. 77 ‘Phoenices primi, famae si creditur, ausi/Mansuram rudibus vocem signasse ¿JXULs’ (The Civil War [Pharsalia], trans. J.D. Duff [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928], 3.220–21). 78 Josephus, ‘The First Booke of Flavius Iosephus the Sonne of Matthias, Written Against Apion, As Touching the Antiquitie of the Jewes’, trans. Thomas Lodge, in The Famous and Memorable Workes of Josephus, A Man of Much Honour and Learning Among the Iewes (London, 1609), Dddd4v–Dddd5r. 79 The Historie of Justine (London, 1606), Ee2r. 80 An exception is Gossett, 59. 81 See T.W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Small Latin and Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944; 2 vols.), 2:575. 76

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Ancient Middle Eastern history was not easily separable from contemporary debates in British historiography. Although scholars have shown the importance of Galfridian history to Renaissance British stories of cultural origin, there were other competing originary histories. One argued that Tyre, and the Phoenicians who sailed from there, were the point of origin of the British people. The sixteenthFHQWXU\KLVWRU\WKDW¿UVWPDGHWKLVDUJXPHQWZDV-RKQ7Z\QH¶VDe Rebus Albionicis (pub. 1590).82 This was a major work of history, read by Verstegan, Speed, and Camden in the seventeenth century.83 It is also connected to the second source of Pericles, after Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Laurence Twyne’s The Pattern of Painful Adventures,Q/DXUHQFH7Z\QHÀ± HQWHUHGWKLVQRYHOOD LQWKH6WDWLRQHUV¶5HJLVWHU7KH¿UVWH[WDQWHGLWLRQRIWKLVZRUNGDWHVWRWKHHDUO\ 1590s. It was republished in 1607, just before Shakespeare and Wilkins wrote Pericles, although the title page of this edition attributes it to Thomas Twyne, Laurence’s brother. Thomas was an actor, author, and translator; his translations include one major historical work, Humphrey Llwyd’s Commentarioli Britannicae descriptionis fragmentum (Cologne, 1568), which Twyne rendered as The Breviary of Britayne (1573).84 Thomas Twyne completed Thomas Phaer’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, the epic of the origins of the Roman nation; this version became the most popular schoolroom translation-crib into the seventeenth century.85 His Welsh DVVRFLDWLRQVZLWK/OZ\GDQG3KDHUVKRZJHRJUDSKLFDOO\PDUJLQDO¿JXUHVPDNLQJ themselves central to historical and literary narratives of nationhood.86 In 1590 he published the De Rebus Albionicis, written by the schoolmaster and antiquary, -RKQ 7Z\QH ± KLV DQG /DXUHQFH¶V IDWKHU 7KRPDV 7Z\QH ¿QDOO\ KDG D VRQ Brian Twyne (1588–1644), who himself actively pursued antiquarian studies and supported the researches of antiquaries such as William Camden, Henry Spelman 82 John Twyne, De Rebus Albionicis (London, 1590). The best discussion of this work remains T.D. Kendrick, %ULWLVK$QWLTXLW\ (London: Methuen, 1950), 105–8; Graham Parry, Trophies of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 308–39 offers a larger overview of the Phoenicians in British history. See also Arthur B. Ferguson, 8WWHU$QWLTXLW\ (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). J.W. Binns, Intellectual Culture, 182–3, discusses Twyne as part of an overview of Latin histories of Britain. 83 Verstegan’s geological argument that Britain was once part of the continent before fracturing off to become an island (Restitution of Decayed Intelligence [Antwerp, 1605], 1U±Y ZDVLQÀXHQFHGE\7Z\QH¶VHW\PRORJLFDODUJXPHQWWKDWµ%ULWDLQ¶ZDVGHULYHGIURP ‘Brit’ meaning ‘broken off’: ‘Vox enim Brit, sicut ego accepi a veteris Britannicae linguae gnaris, non solum quod colore differt, sed etiam idem fere quod Guit, id est, locali interstitio VHSDUDWXPVLJQL¿FDQW¶%U  84 7Z\QH LQ WKLV ZRUN EHFDPH WKH ¿UVW SHUVRQ ZULWLQJ LQ (QJOLVK WR XVH WKH WHUP ‘British empire’ (Niiiir); see Bruce Ward Henry, ‘John Dee, Humphrey Llwyd, and the Name, “British Empire”’, Huntington Library Quarterly 35 (1972): 189–90. 85 We are grateful to Margaret Tudeau-Clayton for this point. 86 On this argument in the case of Virgil translations see Colin Burrow, ‘Virgil in English translation’, in Charles Martindale (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 21–37.

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and John Selden.87 The Twyne family are an interrelated network which bring together major antiquarian work, histories of British origins, work on Phoenicia and Tyre – and of course one of the two major sources of Pericles itself. The De Rebus is structured around a conversation, purported to have taken place in Canterbury just before the dissolution of the monasteries, between John Twyne himself; John Foche (Ioannes Vochius, in Twyne’s Latin) the last Abbot of St Augustine’s, who leads the discourse; Nicholas Wotton (1497–1567), who would become a diplomat and dean of Canterbury and York; and John Dygon (1482– 1566?), a monk of St Augustine’s, who studied in Paris and Louvain. Before the dialogue begins, Wotton and Dygon had escorted Juan Luis Vives from Louvain on his visit to Corpus Christi College, Oxford (‘doctissimumque virum Ioannem Lodouicum Viuem in Angliam atque Oxonium prosequuti’ (B3v–B4r)). Twyne’s history embodies a network of international northern humanist scholarly exchange convening in a monastic setting in pre-Dissolution England. The group dismiss Brutus and Britain’s Trojan origins, calling Geoffrey of Monmouth ‘ille Homerus, ac mendaciorum pater’ (B7r), but instead argue that Britain’s original, primitive inhabitants were the offspring of Neptune. They describe their primitive habitations and customs (‘dum adhuc in cauernis et foveis habitatum esset’, for instance; E8r). But the really extraordinary argument comes when Twyne introduces the idea that WKH 3KRHQLFLDQV ZHUH WKH ¿UVW FLYLOL]HG VHWWOHUV RI %ULWDLQ7Z\QH GHVFULEHV WKH westward movement of the Phoenicians out of Babylon, then into Egypt to found &DLURDQGEXLOGIRUWL¿FDWLRQVµPhoenices inde in Aegyptum profecti, Cahirum, id HVWPXQLWLRQHPDHGL¿FDXHUXQW¶ IURPKHUHWKH\VHWRXWLQWRWKH0HGLWHUUDQHDQ sea, building cities along the way. Twyne goes on to quote Vives’ commentary on De Civitate Dei to the effect that the Phoenicians came to Spain to plunder their mineral deposits (D4v–D5r). But this thirst for more natural resources drives them northwards: Phoenician merchants in search of tin; farmers, crops; exiles, new homes.88 They have travelled from Babylon to Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria, Greece,

87 For his conversations with Camden on antiquarian studies see Selden’s copy of Camden’s edition of several medieval British historians, Anglica, Normannica, Hibernica, Cambrica, A Veteribus Scripta (Frankfurt, 1603), now in the Bodleian Library, shelfmark %0HG6HOGLQVLGHWKHÀ\OHDI6HOGHQSUHVXPDEO\ KDVSDVWHGµ$FRSLHRIPU%ULDQ Twynes relation of a conference had between him and William Camden … concerning his edition of Asser Meneuensis’. Twyne lent Henry Spelman an Anglo-Saxon glossary via Spelman’s friend, Jeremy Stephens (see the letters from Stephens to Spelman in BM Add.MS 34600, fols. 38r and 46r). He also assisted Selden, this time by copying Arabic manuscripts for him: see the letters from Twyne to Selden in the second volume of Selden’s letter-book, Bodl Selden MS Supra 109, fols. 277r and 278r. 88 ‘Mercatores scilicet ad album plumbum effodiendum, agricolas vt sementem facerent, extorres vt sedes ac domicilia fundarent, aliquos suavitate aeris ac coeli bonitate DOOHFWRV QRQQXOORV YHUR IRUWDVVLV RE ÀDJLWLD GRPL SHUSHWUDWD VROXP YHUWLVVH¶ )Y 7LQ ‘album plumbum’, is immensely important to all classical accounts of ancient Britain because it was the key mineral resource the Romans derived from Britain.

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6SDLQ DQG ¿QDOO\ QRUWKZDUGV LQWR %ULWDLQ89 Phoenician presence in Britain can be read back from their cultural traces. Punic huts (‘magalia vel magaria Punica lingua appellantur’) are most similar to those to be seen in contemporary Wales;90 he draws on Pliny to show that British women painted themselves, just like the Babylonians (whose customs the Phoenicians translated westwards [G1v]); and the Phoenicians taught magical arts and other religious customs to the British Druids.91 Twyne theorizes the entire movement of a culture in search of land and mineral resources, and uses the textual and material record to trace this movement to Britain. To an audience familiar with John Twyne’s history (closely related to one of the sources of Pericles) Shakespeare and Wilkins’ prince of Tyre, swept on a journey around the Mediterranean steadily acquiring new territories, cannot but have resonated with the ancient founding of the British nation. The play’s incompatible temporalities are deliberately tessellated: classical Greece, ancient Phoenicia, Gower’s medieval England – and the world of Biblical history. Shakespeare drew on Macabees for the death of Antioch, and on Jonas 7KDLVDLQWKHELWXPHGFRI¿QLVSDUDOOHOWR-RQDVLQWKHERG\RIWKHZKDOH 92 Tyre has even more sustained associations with the Old Testament books of the Prophets.93 The books of Ezekiel (Ch. 26–8) and Isaiah (Ch. 23) prophesy the destruction of Tyre. Isaiah Chapter 23 begins, ‘The burden of Tyre. Howl, ye ships of Tarshish; for it is laid waste, so that there is no house, no entering in’ (vol. 1). Because Shakespeare and Wilkins have refused to pinpoint the time-period of Pericles’ Tyre, it remains open to the full range of associations: from origins to catastrophic ruin and rupture. $VD¿QDOQRWHLWLVZRUWKEHDULQJLQPLQG-RKQ6SHHG¶VRGGO\GRXEOHHGJHGSUDLVH of London as a second Tyre: ‘The wealth of this Citie [London] (as Isaiah once spake of Nilus) grows from the revenewes and Harvests of the south-bounding 7KDPHV ZKRVH WUDI¿F IRU PHUFKDQGL]LQJ LV OLNH WKDW RI 7\UXV ZKHUHRI (]HNLHO

89

‘Phoenices primum qui a Babylone progressi ad mare rubrum, inde ad Aegyptum, $HWKLRSLDP6\ULDP*UDHFLDP +LVSDQLDP peruenerunt: postea in Albionem quae modo Britannia dicitur (si quid ego recte conijcio) penetrarunt’ (G1r). 90 µ1XVTXDPLQRUEHWHUUDUXPUXVWLFDHLGL¿FLDTXDHODWLQHWHJXULD0DJDOLDYHURYHO magaria Punica lingua appellantur, auctore Seruio, similiora Punicis illis inueniri, quam TXDH QXQF LQ TXLEXVGDP UXULEXV  JODEUHWLV Cambriae visuntur’ (G1r). ‘Punic’, i.e., Carthaginian, evidence gives access to Phoenician culture because the Phoenicians founded Carthage. For more on primitive dwelling places in literature see J.H. Prynne, ‘Huts’, Textual Practice 22/4 (2008): 613–33. 91 See K8r-v. Twyne concludes this discussion with: ‘Haec vero omnia a Phoenicibus ad nos introducta videri possunt, qui superstitionum multarum antiquis Britannis auctores extiterunt’ (K8v). 92 See Gossett, 3.1.63–4n. 93 When writing Comedy of Errors, a play to which Pericles is a companion, Shakespeare also drew on Gower’s account of Apollonius for the play’s framing narrative, and on St Paul’s letters to the Ephesians.

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VSHDNV  VWDQGV LQ DEXQGDQFH RI 6LOYHU ,URQ7\Q DQG /HDG HWF¶94 The ancient world of Pericles implies threatening parallels with the present. In the world of PericlesQDWLRQDOLW\GHVSLWHWKH¿VKHUPDQ¶VUHIHUHQFHWRµRXU FRXQWU\RI*UHHFH¶>@ LVLQHYLWDEO\GH¿QHGE\RQH¶VFLW\VWDWH:KHUHDVLQ HDUO\PRGHUQ(QJODQGSROLWLFDOLGHQWL¿FDWLRQVDUHOD\HUHGDQGPXOWLSOHLQPericles ORFDO DQG QDWLRQDO LGHQWL¿FDWLRQV DUH FRQÀDWHG ,Q WKH DVVRFLDWLRQ EHWZHHQ7\UH DQG WKH %ULWLVK QDWLRQ WKLV UHÀHFWV WKH SURFHVVHV RI VWDWH FHQWUDOL]DWLRQ DV WKH PXOWLSOHDQGSRWHQWLDOFRQÀLFWLQJDI¿QLWLHVWRORFDOLW\DQGQDWLRQDUHUHFRQFLOHG Nevertheless, there remain locally associative polities fragmented from larger LQVWLWXWLRQDOVWUXFWXUHVWKH¿VKHUPHQRQWKHVKRUHSUDLVHWKHµJRRGNLQJ6LPRQLGHV¶ while recognizing he can do nothing to ‘purge the land of these drones that rob the bee of her honey’ (2.1.45–6). The development of the history and structure of FLYLFQDWLRQDOLQVWLWXWLRQVLQWKHSOD\UHPDLQVXQ¿QLVKHG Conclusion Although we began with Smith’s helpful framework, the play pushes against DQG TXDOL¿HV VXFK WRWDO VRFLRORJLFDO V\QWKHVLV Pericles complicates any simple dynamic of return to origins. It privileges instead the construction of origins in the present. It shows the way texts, objects, and places course with multiple WHPSRUDOLWLHV DV WKH\ DFFXPXODWH FRQÀLFWLQJ KLVWRULFDO VLJQL¿FDQFHV /DQG cultures and institutions serve differing ends for different characters and groups: Cleon’s desire to police the borders of his territories versus the supranationalism of Marina; the rusty armour serves Pericles’ pursuit of ancestral heritage whereas WKH¿VKHUPHQVHHNWRHPSKDVL]HWKHZD\VWKHLUODERXUDQGUHVRXUFHVKDYHEHHQ exploited in the construction of that heritage; and, in the case of Tyre, local, civic, histories are caught up in projects to discover national British origins. These devolved and contradictory nationalisms in Pericles are more closely UHÀHFWLYH RI WKH HPHUJHQW QDWLRQDOLVPV LQ FRQWHPSRUDU\ %ULWLVK DQG (XURSHDQ multiple and composite monarchies. The union of the crowns of England and Scotland to create the British multiple monarchy was by no means unusual in seventeenth-century Europe. Other important multiple monarchies included: the Habsburg Empire; the union of Poland and Lithuania; of France and Béarn.95 All these monarchies have certain problems in common: absentee monarchs who live only in one metropolitan centre; union threatened by foreign intervention; confessional differences rendered more acute by the support of state structures; divisive taxation raised in sometimes far-away countries.96 Related to the problem 94

John Speed, Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London, 1612), H2r. J.H. Elliott, ‘A Europe of Composite Monarchies’, Past and Present 137 (1992): 48–71; and Conrad Russell, ‘Composite Monarchies in Early Modern Europe: The British and Irish Example’, in Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History/RQGRQ 1HZ
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of multiple monarchy is the consolidation of composite monarchy: a single state characterized by differing languages, or legal and governmental frameworks. James was very keen to subdue the outlying border regions of his Britain, so the Scottish-English border, with its previously punitive and divisive administration and bloody cross-border rioting, became the ‘Middle Shires’.97 And James pursued the consolidation of outlying Highland regions of Scotland by dismantling clan structures and establishing control over the Western Isles, a process which culminated in James’ admission of defeat with the Statutes of Iona (1609).98 Wales’s status within the composite monarchy was still confused: the Council of Wales’ jurisdiction over neighbouring border shires in England led to mounting gentry opposition, known as the Four Shires controversy.99 A play taking place in unresolved and liminal borderlands ZDVUHÀHFWLYHRIWKHG\QDPLFDQGHPHUJHQWQDWLRQLQZKLFKLWZDVZULWWHQ This decentralized polity was characterized by multiple cultures, rather than by a monolithic Englishness. Many different languages were still preserved in Britain: Cornish, Welsh, several branches of Gaelic in Ireland and Scotland, Manx. $VZHKDYHVHHQORFDOLGHQWLWLHV±DI¿OLDWLRQVZLWKJXLOGVRUFRUSRUDWHFLWLHVIRU LQVWDQFH±FRQÀLFWHGZLWKDQ\VLQJOHQDWLRQDOLGHQWL¿FDWLRQ$QGP\WKVRIKLVWRULFDO origins were both more various and more locally adaptable than is often realized. The peopling of Europe by the sons of Noah was still widely accepted, and even Annius of Viterbo’s forged histories by ‘Berosus’ and ‘Manetho’ (exposed in the sixteenth century) were translated into English in 1602.100 John of Fordun attempted to provide a national origin myth for the Scots: that they were descended from the Egyptians.101 And Brutus’ arrival in Britain could be adapted for the needs of 97

This process was by no means a complete success. See Penry Williams, ‘The Northern Borderlands Under the Early Stuarts’, in H.E. Bell and R.L. Ollard (eds), Historical Essays 1600–1750 /RQGRQ $GDP  &KDUOHV %ODFN   ± 2Q %HQ Jonson’s Gypsies Metamorphosed and the Scottish border, see Mark Netzloff, England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Ch. 4. 98 See Allan I. Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996); Julian Goodare, ‘The Statutes of Iona in Context’, The Scottish Historical Review 77 (1998): 31–57; and more generally see Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ‘“Civilizinge of those Rude Partes”: Colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580s–1640s’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume 1: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 99 See, for instance, R.E. Ham, ‘The Four Shires Controversy’, Welsh History Review 8 (1977): 381–400. 100 Richard Lynche, trans. An historical treatise of the travels of Noah into Europe (London, 1602); on Annius of Viterbo see Anthony Grafton, ‘Traditions of Invention and Inventions of Tradition in Renaissance Italy: Annius of Viterbo’, in Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 76–102. 101 On this see Roger A. Mason, ‘Scotching the Brut: Politics, History and National Myth in Sixteenth Century Britain’, in Scotland and England, 1286–1815, ed. Roger A.

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regional particularism: Richard Carew argues that Corineus’ wrestling with the Britain’s indigenous giants took place not at Dover but in Cornwall.102 And the %ULWLVK SUREOHP SURSHOOHG WKHVH FXOWXUDO KLVWRULHV LQWR FRQÀLFW ZLWK RQH DQRWKHU +LVWRULFDO¿JXUHVZLWKVXEVWDQWLDOFXOWXUDOFDSLWDOZHUHDSSURSULDWHGE\GLIIHUHQW members of the archipelago: Boadicea, for instance, migrated from England (Tacitus), to Scotland (Hector Boece), and then to Wales (in R.A.’s play, The Valiant Welshman).103 Pericles’ staging of cultural reappropriation is not innocent in the context of early modern Britain’s provisional and disputatious uses of history. We began with an account of the sequence of plays Shakespeare wrote between 1606 and 1611, all of which focus on problems of nationalism. Pericles is both part RIDQGTXDOL¿HVRXUXQGHUVWDQGLQJRIWKDWJURXS0DWWKHZ*UHHQ¿HOGFRQFOXGHVKLV discussion of Troilus and Cressida and nationalism by saying that ‘Shakespeare is always skeptical about the possibility of the nation, but we need to develop better accounts of the variety of his skepticisms’.104 Pericles helps us to do so. The play is part of a shift in Shakespeare’s treatment of political structures from the 1590s history plays, characterized by complex dynastic successions within the framework of a single nation, to the dispersed and decentralized polities of Lear, Cymbeline, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra in the 1600s. As Kerrigan explains, ‘The presence of Henry VIII in the later Jacobean output shows that the shift was incomplete between plays which assume (however disruptedly) a dynastic, national order of things and the more heterogeneous, imperial state structures explored in Antony and Cleopatra and Cymbeline’.105 Pericles needs to be added to this group. But Pericles’ treatment of multiple monarchy has some crucial differences from WKHUHVWRIWKHVHSOD\V3HULFOHVLVVSHFL¿FDOO\DQDEVHQWHHPRQDUFKKHDEDQGRQV7\UH to join up a network of far-away kingdoms, leaving Helicanus to rule in his place in Tyre. This might have suggested to a Renaissance audience James’ departure from Scotland to England, which gives an intriguingly Scoto-British perspective on the union, rather than an Anglo-centric one. Perhaps this ability to reverse the centremargins hierarchy should not be surprising for a play whose performance history is not exclusively centred on London, but which found audiences in the provinces and on the continent. Pericles’ network of kingdoms formed by marriage at the end of the play, furthermore, are all non-contiguous (unlike England and Scotland, and unlike the British kingdoms of Lear and Cymbeline), and so perhaps suggests the problems of Britain’s relationship to Ireland or its colonies in Virginia, or of European multiple monarchies like the Habsburg empire. Romance conclusions offer a mode suitable for papering over political divisions on the Jacobean stage. This is the case not only in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Mason (Edinburgh, 1987), 60–84. 102 Richard Carew, The Survey of Cornwall (London, 1602), B2r. 103 See Kerrigan, Archipelagic English, 129. 104 0DWWKHZ$*UHHQ¿HOGµ)UDJPHQWVRI1DWLRQDOLVPLQTroilus and Cressida’, SQ 51 (2000): 200. 105 Kerrigan, Archipelagic English, 17–18.

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The Tempest, but also in other dramatists’ historical-romances, such as William Rowley’s A Shoomaker, A Gentleman and R.A.’s The Valiant Welshman. The dynamics of loss and recovery are characteristic of romance as a mode, not least because the genre of romance was itself antiquated in the 1600s and in need of revival. Pericles looks back generically to 1580s Queen’s Men plays such as Sir Clyomon and Clamydes. But the ending of Pericles, with its seemingly total recovery of all losses within the royal family and their reestablishment of control over the empire, conveniently forgets about things that have not been restored. Having ‘made up this JDUPHQW¶KLVUXVW\DUPRXUIRU3HULFOHVWKH¿VKHUPHQDVNWKDWLIKHµWKULYH\RX¶OO remember from whence you had’ it. In Laurence Twyne’s source text Apollonius JRHVRXWRIKLVZD\WR¿QGWKH¿VKHUPHQDQGUHZDUGWKHPEXWLQPericles they are forgotten.106 Their lost labour and materials – what they call the ‘condolements’ and ‘vails’ wasted in weaving the armour from the water (2.1.145–8) – are not restored. Pericles’ rhetoric emphasizes the organic relationship between monarch and subjects: he is ‘no more but as the tops of trees/Which fence the roots they grow by and defend them’ (1.2.30–31). But the restoration of loss at the end of the play LVHQWLUHO\VXSHUVWUXFWXUDOWKHHFRQRPLFKDUGVKLSVRIWKH¿VKHUPHQRUWKHVWDUYLQJ people of Tarsus, are ignored. This is perhaps suggestive of the extent to which ‘nations’ and ‘nationalism’ are inadequate frameworks in which to think about the early modern period, because the idea of ‘nation’ arguably only exists horizontally among an intellectual elite, rather than penetrating vertically down a social structure WRWKH¿VKHUPHQ 7KDW6KDNHVSHDUHDQG:LONLQV¶¿VKHUPHQYRLFHWKHFULWLTXHRI Pericles’ presentation of his rusty armour’s links with his ancestry suggests that the GUDPDWLVWVDUHGHOLEHUDWHO\LQYLWLQJXVWRUHÀHFWRQSHRSOHWKDWDUHH[FOXGHGDQG lost, rather than only people that are seemingly lost and then restored. Finally, Pericles’ treatment of issues of nationhood is far more metaphorical and abstract than that in a play like Lear, which explicitly treats a British historical subject.107 But we need as critics to be alive to the associations a Jacobean audience might have made when encountering a play like Pericles. Our argument provides only one intellectual and political context in which the play might be read, not a FRGHZLWKZKLFKWRXQORFNDQ\VSHFL¿FµDOOHJRU\¶Pericles will probably always therefore stand slightly to the side, or at an angle, to Shakespeare’s other treatments RI QDWLRQKRRG 7KLV EH¿WV D SOD\ ZKLFK KDV DOZD\V EHHQ SDUHQWKHWLFDO WR WKH Shakespeare canon because of its collaborative production and textually damaged state. Pericles’ text remains partially unrestored, its subjects the fragmented and XQ¿QDOL]HGSURGXFWVRIFRPSOH[KLVWRULFDODQGFXOWXUDOSUHVVXUHV 106 See Laurence Twyne, The Patterne of paineful Adventures (London, 1607), L3v–M1r. 107 See Gordon McMullan, ‘The Colonization of Early Britain on the Jacobean Stage’, in Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, eds David Matthews and Gordon McMullan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 119–40, esp. 137: ‘To list only plays with overt early British settings, it seems, is by no means to delineate the full extent of the early modern theatrical engagement with the question of British origins’.

Chapter 2

‘And bloody England into England gone’: Empire, Monarchy, and Nation in King John Willy Maley

In England: An Elegy 5RJHU6FUXWRQLGHQWL¿HVIRXUWKHPHVLQ6KDNHVSHDUH that go ‘to the heart of English culture’.1 They are ‘the theme of the common people’, ‘the theme of the individual’, ‘the theme of England’, and ‘the theme of enchantment’.2 Scruton’s account of the theme of England is worth attending to: Although Shakespeare would set his plays in any part of the world and at any time where his imagination had set foot, England was self-evidently the focus of his social and political interest. The history plays are sometimes dismissed as Tudor propaganda, a brilliant attempt by a socially ambitious upstart to gain favour with monarchs whose title was far less secure than they wished it to be. But this view involves a shallow reading of the plays. Shakespeare’s histories dramatise the English constitution and present the Crown as its core idea. For Shakespeare the Crown is not the piece of jewelled metal that perches on the heads of kings – though there are kings, like Richard II, who assume it to be so, and who therefore promptly lose it. The Crown is the mysterious corporate person which is the spirit of England. It is the ‘corporation sole’ that endures from year to year and century to century, even when there is no living monarch, and even when all is in turmoil in the world of power. Its concrete representation VLWV¿UPO\RQWKHKHDGWKDWERZVWRLW±IRURQO\VXFKDKHDGPDWFKHVSRZHUWR authority, and so rules legitimately over the land and its people.3

This passage invites scrutiny and must give us pause, especially since the playwright that Scruton appears to be describing sounds more like John Bale than William Shakespeare, not that the latter is not preoccupied with England but not in the way Scruton suggests. The word ‘England’ (40) or ‘England’s’ (7) occurs more often in King John than any other Shakespeare play, but does that necessarily make it his most ‘English’ drama? (‘English’ occurs 12 times in King John and 36 in Henry V.) Just because ‘England’ is invoked doesn’t mean it’s being extolled or even upheld. Part of the problem lies with the king. The reign of King John has long presented problems for writers and readers. Howard Erskine-Hill sets out the matter thus: 1 2 3

Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (London: Pimlico, 2001), 206. Scruton, England: An Elegy, 206–10. Ibid., 208.

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For those in the 1590s who dramatized the reign of King John there were two clearly contrasted opportunities. It was possible to construct an orthodox and unproblematic play about John as he was presented in two of the most widely disseminated of all Elizabethan publications: Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, and the 1571 “Homilie against disobedience and wilfull rebellion” … In the 1590s this orthodox play was never written. King Johan was never brought up to date; or rather was brought up to date so radically that the orthodox tradition on John was completely reassessed. This was the second opportunity for those planning a drama on his reign.4

Shakespeare took this second opportunity, and the succession crisis and royal tyranny took centre stage alongside the depiction of papal tyranny: ‘Shakespeare’s chief stroke of art in John, as all accept, is the telescoping of the reign so that the FRQÀLFWZLWK$UWKXUDQGWKHFRQÀLFWZLWKWKH3RSHFRXOGMXVWRYHUODS¶5 Carole Levin observes that: ‘Except for a certain period during the English Reformation … King John has been despised with near unanimity for centuries … Indeed it may still be the consensus that John is the worst monarch to rule England’.6 Between John %DOH¶VFHOHEUDWLRQRI(QJODQG¶VHDUO\GH¿DQFHRI5RPHDQG5REHUW'DYHQSRUW¶V portrait of a chastened tyrant, John went through several incarnations.7 According to Dermot Cavanagh: ‘As John Bale’s work demonstrates, the reputation of King John was central to the formation of protestant historiography in England during the sixteenth century’.8 There was a brief interlude when ‘the medieval villain became a hero of English liberty, a kind of anticipant Protestant, a lonely pioneer resisting the tyrannies of Rome’, but that phase was over by the time Shakespeare tackled him. The King John admired or defended by Bale, Tyndale and Foxe is a more complex creature in Shakespeare’s play. John Bale’s drama is, we are told, µWKH ¿UVW SOD\ WR SUHVHQW DQ (QJOLVK NLQJ RQ VWDJH¶9 Levin remarks that Bale’s play is ‘nationalistic’, but part of the problem with depictions of John’s reign is that the identity of the nation is in doubt, a problem that Virginia Mason Vaughan acknowledges when she asks of the Bastard’s closing speech in Shakespeare’s play: ‘What does it mean to be “true”? Should a nation be true to an untrue king? Is there a higher authority than the king’s, moral or religious? In King John the issues of sovereignty and legitimacy cloud any facile moralizing on the evils of

4

Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘The First Tetralogy and King John’, in Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 60–61. 5 Erskine-Hill, ‘The First Tetralogy and King John’, 62. 6 Carole Levin, ‘A Good Prince: King John and Early Tudor Propaganda’, Sixteenth Century Journal 11/4 (1980): 23. 7 John Bale, King Johan (London: Malone Society, 1931); Robert Davenport, King John and Matilda: A Tragedy (London, 1655). 8 Dermot Cavanagh, Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 80. 9 Levin, ‘A Good Prince’, 30.

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civil war and hence represent a deeper exploration of political realities’.10 Vaughan concludes: ‘There is patriotism in the play, but it is questioning and thoughtful’.11 Erskine-Hill sees Shakespeare’s strengths as a dramatist as lying in his capacity to capture complexity and contradiction and to see the dramatic potential in the fact ‘that rulers are rarely consistent and single-minded’.12 In fact, what used to be seen as a fault of King John – its messiness and the confusion of its message – has become a virtue now that even Henry V is seen as a play much more muted in its nationalism than traditional criticism could claim. Increasingly viewed as ‘modern’ and ‘political’, King John is moving closer to Henry V as reinterpreted by the likes of Patricia Parker.13 Earlier critics seem to have had Bale rather than Shakespeare in mind when they wrote of John. David Womersley is typical of the new readings that shift the ground from a celebratory play arising from the Reformation to a sceptical play about succession and more generally about OHJLWLPDF\DQGLQWHUORFNLQJRUFRQÀLFWLQJLGHQWLWLHV14 ,W LV RYHU IRUW\ \HDUV VLQFH -RKQ 6LEO\ ¿[HG RQ WKH LVVXH RI XVXUSDWLRQ DV D central theme of King John: ‘Why … did a Tudor playwright in 1595 go to such lengths to emphasise this “usurpation” in a play notoriously written to rally the country behind Elizabeth against a foreign threat backed by Papal authority?’15 For Sibly the elephant in the room is not the Bastard but John himself, as serious doubt is cast over the king’s legitimacy. King John is a play about sovereignty, succession and legitimacy. Who rules England? Rome? The King? The people (Bastards and all)? Sibly’s contention and conclusion is that Shakespeare deliberately presented John as a usurper in order to undermine the papal claim and the nature of his submission to Rome. This is ingenious, but there is another possibility and that is that King John is part of a larger questioning of royal authority that appeals to another incarnation of Rome, a republican one. According to Sigurd Burckhardt: ‘Even bardolators have little good to say about the last two acts of King John. And I strongly suspect that Shakespeare himself knew that he was not bringing the thing off. Not because he was bored with a WKHDWULFDOFKRUHDQGZDQWHGWR¿QLVKLWTXLFNO\DQGDQ\KRZEXWEHFDXVHKHVDZ

10

Virginia Mason Vaughan, ‘Between Tetralogies: King John as Transition’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 35/4 (1984): 412. 11 Vaughan, ‘Between Tetralogies’, 419. 12 Erskine-Hill, ‘The First Tetralogy and King John’, 67. 13 Patricia Parker, ‘Uncertain Unions: Welsh leeks in Henry V’, in David Baker and Willy Maley (eds), British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 81–100. 14 David Womersley, ‘The Politics of Shakespeare’s King John’, The Review of English Studies, 40/160 (1989): 497–515. See also Robert Lane, ‘“The sequence of posterity”: Shakespeare’s King John and the Succession Controversy’, Studies in Philology, 92/4 (1985): 460–81. 15 John Sibly, ‘The Anomalous Case of King John’, English Literary History, 33/4 (1966): 415.

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no way to put Humpty-Dumpty together again’.16 Burckhardt sees Shakespeare grinning and gritting his way through the histories before he can complicate matters in the tragedies: ‘Meanwhile there was the immediate need: the national cause to be served. Without illusions Shakespeare met the need; his histories, from King John on, are a kind of holding operation, with the work of discovery going on beneath the surface. They are resolute and stirring – in a “damn the torpedoes” way and often in a “once again” style’.17 Burckhardt sees Shakespeare’s ‘continuing need’ DVDGUDPDWLVWDVEHLQJWRJHWµEH\RQGWKHFRQ¿QHVRI«³7KLV(QJODQG´¶EXWJLYHV too little credence to the possibility that the torpedoes might be being launched by Shakespeare as part of ‘the work of discovery going on beneath the surface’. Critics have been so busy untangling the relationship between The Troublesome Raigne and King John that they have tended, with few exceptions, to overlook any possible connection with Bale’s play.18 Bale’s King Johan is written with the clear aim of establishing the king as a prototype of Henry VIII. Yet because of Bale’s rehabilitation of John, his reputation in the later sixteenth century was one characterized by dramatic tension and ideological division. Thus Cavanagh informs us: ‘One obvious source for Shakespeare’s interest in the reliability of historical interpretation in King John derives from the unresolved debate surrounding the king’s reputation … Godly admirers of the monarch … saw him as a victim of catholic slander’, while others such as John Foxe ‘remained outraged at John’s eventual submission to the papacy and the king’s reputation for cruelty and despotism remained inexpugnable’.19 A tug-of-war over King John was a feature of drama and history in the period: Who held the monopoly of truth in relation to King John? Those Reformation polemicists who stigmatized all evidence of his wrongdoing as papist slander, or those popular libels, still recorded in Foxe and Holinshed that documented the king’s cruelty and self-interest?20

For Cavanagh, ‘King John asserts most fully that moral stature attributed to him by -RKQ%DOHLQKLVGH¿DQFHRIWKHSDSDOOHJDWH3DQGXOSK¶21 Cavanagh cites the closing speech of the Bastard as evidence of a ‘new spirit of obedience, accompanied by a new decorum of speech’, but the speech can be read in a way that seems far from obedient or decorous.22

16 Sigurd Burckhardt, ‘King John: The Ordering of this Present Time’, English Literary History, 33/2 (1966): 146. 17 Burckhardt, ‘King John: The Ordering of this Present Time’, 153. 18 James H. Morey, ‘The Death of King John in Shakespeare and Bale’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Notes, 45/3 (1994): 327–31. 19 Cavanagh, Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play, 82, 83. 20 Ibid., 90. 21 Ibid., 96. 22 Ibid., 101.

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In his Observations on the Articles of Peace made with the Irish Rebels (1649), one aim of which was to justify the recent execution of Charles I, John Milton reminded his readers of the precedents of bringing monarchs to justice: And in our own Nation, King John, for resigning though unwillingly his Crown to the Popes Legate, with little more hazard to his Kingdome then the payment of 1000 Marks, and the unsightlinesse of such a Ceremony, was depos’d by his Barons, and Lewis the French Kings Sonne elected in his roome. And to have carried onely the Jewells, Plate, and Treasure into Ireland without consent of the Nobility, was one of those impeachments that condemn’d Richard the second to lose his Crown.23

Milton’s nutshell accounts of two reigns dramatized by Shakespeare pinpoint the ways in which empire, either through submission to imperial Rome or bankruptcy through a failed colonial expedition in Ireland, prompts the downfall of royal seats. In the case of King John, the external threat of Rome is compounded further by the fact that not only France but also Ireland, Scotland, and Wales were contemporary battlegrounds.24 Indeed, the repeated references in Shakespeare’s play to ‘Ireland’ as one of John’s dominions, generally ignored by critics, point up one of the key ¿HOGVRIFRQÀLFWLQWKHPHGLHYDODQGHDUO\PRGHUQSHULRGV$V6HiQ'XII\UHPLQGV us: ‘No Irish historian who contemplates the rendering or reduction of Ireland into an English colony places John far from the top of his list of dramatis personae’.25 John’s impact on Scotland was more subdued but nonetheless notable, and entailed a threat to the integrity of England, as Archie Duncan explains: Despite the English xenophobia towards Scots … Scottish kings were regarded as neighbours, masters in their own house, and generally a lot less troublesome than the descendants of Hugh Capet … the tension of Anglo-Scottish relations arose from a demand, not Scottish but by the Scottish king, for Northumbria, and from a reluctance of the English king to address the demand. But crisis occurred only when Philip II of France cranked up the tension by offering alliance to the Scottish king in pursuit of his own agenda: the recovery of Normandy. Whatever King John’s IDLOLQJVDVµ6RIWVZRUG¶ZKRVHZRUGQRPDQPLJKWWUXVWLWLVGLI¿FXOWWRIDXOWKLV treatment of Scotland for more than procrastination punctuated by impatience.26 23

John Milton, Articles of peace made and concluded with the Irish rebels and papists by James Earle of Ormond … also, a letter sent by Ormond to Col. Jones, Governour of Dublin, with his answer thereunto: and a representation of the Scotch Presbytery at Belfast in Ireland: upon all which are added observations (London: Printed by Matthew Simmons, 1649), 48. 24 2Q.LQJ-RKQ¶VUHODWLRQVZLWK,UHODQG6FRWODQGDQG:DOHVVHH6HiQ'XII\µ-RKQ and Ireland: The Origins of England’s Irish Problem’, in S.D. Church (ed.), King John: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1999), 221–45; A.A.M. Duncan, ‘John King of England and the Kings of Scots’, in Church (ed.), King John, 247–71; and Ifor W. Rowlands, ‘King John and Wales’, in Church (ed.), King John, 273–87. 25 Duffy, ‘John and Ireland: The Origins of England’s Irish Problem’, 222. 26 Duncan, ‘John King of England and the Kings of Scots’, 269.

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Wales too was a pressing concern. As Ifor Rowlands remarks, ‘King John came to the throne with more experience of Wales than any of his predecessors’, and a Wales more closely tied to England was part of his legacy: ‘If Henry II had given John the lordship of Ireland, John in a sense bequeathed to Henry III the overlordship of Wales’.27 Warren Hollister sees England’s success in this period in John’s containment and control of his nearest national neighbours: ‘John’s failure WRKROGWKHFRQWLQHQWDO¿HIVKDVQRWEOLQGHGUHFHQWKLVWRULDQVWRWKHIDFWWKDWKLV military success in Ireland and along the English frontiers was unprecedented’.28 ,W LV ¿WWLQJ WKDW LQ D WH[W ZKLFK FRQIURQWV$QJOR,ULVK &DWKROLFV LQ WKH 6RXWK RI Ireland and Scottish Presbyterians in the North – a ‘complication of interests’ – -RKQ0LOWRQVKRXOGUHIHUEDFNWRUHLJQVZKLFKÀDJXSWKHZD\VLQZKLFK(QJODQG¶V integrity is compromised by its investments in empire and colony. Coincidentally, given the context of Milton’s remarks, Richard Wilson has pointed to the way in which the second Folio was doctored in 1649 by Father William Sankey for the English College at Valladolid, and the offending passage in King John on the excommunication of the king (3.1.98–104) removed, vital at a time when the execution of Charles I was opposed by Catholics.29 Wilson reminds readers that the injunction placed on English subjects by the Bull of Pope Pius V in 1570 excommunicating Elizabeth to seek to depose their monarch was muted in 1580. It was thus Shakespeare in King John who brought the threat to the monarch’s life back starkly into play and prominence.30 Wilson maintains that ‘in King JohnWKH&DWKROLFWKHRU\RISRSXODUVRYHUHLJQW\GRHV«¿QGLWVVSRNHVPDQLQ the Bastard’.31 Wilson takes to task Jeffrey Knapp for assuming that Shakespeare’s plays’ ‘“general ambivalence regarding England” secularizes the play out of religion altogether’.32 The question of whose side Shakespeare is on, or even whose side the play is on, misses the point that Catholics and Protestants alike could answer in good faith God’s side and England’s side. In Bale’s King Johan ‘Englande’ is a character, a widow, who appears onstage alongside the king, but this separation of king and country, a dangerous precedent picked up on by Shakespeare, is also used by Bale to berate John’s submission to Rome: ‘Ultimately, it is King John who succumbs to the lure of political compromise and earns the hostile rebuke of

27

Rowlands, ‘King John and Wales’, 273, 287. C. Warren Hollister, ‘King John and the Historians’, The Journal of British Studies, 1/1 (1961): 1–19. 29 Richard Wilson, ‘A Sea of Troubles: The Thought of the Outside in Shakespeare’s Histories’, in Dermot Cavanagh, Stuart Hampton-Reeves; and Stephen Longstaffe (eds), Shakespeare’s Histories and Counter-Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 118. 30 Wilson, ‘A Sea of Troubles’, 118. 31 Ibid., 119. 32 Ibid., 117, citing Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 100–112. 28

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Widow England that itself borders on sedition’.33 If she is a widow in Bale’s play, England is a mother in Shakespeare’s King John, but the gender politics of the play are complex, as Alison Thorne’s essay in this collection indicates. According to Carol Banks: ‘In King John, in addition to the stage presence of the warlike Queen Eleanor, warrior women are vividly recalled within the language itself, verbally brought to the surface as a powerful reminder that, whilst the men are failing to protect their country and save “mother England” from foreign occupation, brave English women are taking matters into their own hands’.34 King John is not a problem play, but it is a problematic one, arguably the most awkward of Shakespeare’s English histories. It has one of the least convincing royal protagonists; a monarch upstaged by Faulconbridge the Bastard. Viewed as an in-between exercise, caught between one tetralogy and another, book-ended by Henrys and Richards, King John stages the key issues of legitimacy and succession, tyranny and triumph, to be found in the other histories, but in a manner that has not attracted the kind of close consideration warranted by the likes of Richard III or Henry V. Moreover, the vexed relationship between Shakespeare’s play and the anonymous The Troublesome Raigne of King John has fuelled a debate that is a minisuccession crisis of its own, and which mirrors the mess of the play. Most critics see The Troublesome Raigne as a source-text rather than a successor to Shakespeare’s text, but the anonymous work continues to haunt Shakespeare’s play, together with Bale’s King Johan, not a source-text but an instance of the Protestant appropriation of John as an early English exemplar of resistance to Rome. But for Milton, writing a century after Bale, the redeeming features of John have faded. Religion and republicanism have only recently become major preoccupations of Shakespeare criticism and King John offers interesting insights into both.35 The Bastard, the product of Shakespeare’s imagination, has been seen as the true Englishman and thus the true king in a play short on positive role models. E.M.W. Tillyard is among early subscribers to this view.36 The argument is that the Bastard is the prototype for Henry V, a perspective that makes King John much more important as a bridging play than other critics will allow. More recent scholarship has taken Tillyard to task in different ways. Sigurd Burckhardt saw in King JohnDGH¿QLWHDGYDQFHLQ 6KDNHVSHDUH¶V FDUHHU DV D PRUH PRGHUQ DQG PRUH SROLWLFDO GUDPD WKDQ WKH ¿UVW tetralogy.37 Virginia Mason Vaughan insisted that the play be read on its own terms 33

Cavanagh, Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play, 34. Carol Banks, ‘Warlike Women: “reproofe to these degenerate effeminate dayes”?’, in Dermot Cavanagh, Stuart Hampton-Reeves, and Stephen Longstaffe (eds), Shakespeare’s Histories and Counter-Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 175. 35 See Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance 0DQFKHVWHU0DQFKHVWHU8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DQG$QGUHZ+DG¿HOGShakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 36 E.M.W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1944), 215–33. 37 Burckhardt, ‘King John: The Ordering of this Present Time’. 34

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rather than as the ungainly interlude between two groups of histories.38 Edward *LHVNHVUH¿QHGWKHDUJXPHQWVDURXQGWKH%DVWDUG¶V(QJOLVKQHVVDQGHOLJLELOLW\IRU RI¿FHE\LQFRUSRUDWLQJTXHVWLRQVRIFODVVLQWRGLVFXVVLRQVRIQDWLRQDOLGHQWLW\39 Amanda Piesse has pointed to the paradox of a play that is neglected dramatically but which is eliciting increasing interest from critics at a time when confusion is seen as more critically rewarding than clarity: 7KLVLVDSOD\WKDWFXUUHQWO\LQVSLUHV¿HUFHGHEDWHDERXWZKLFKFULWLFVOLWHUDU\ historians, and directors have yet to agree in even the most minimal of ways. Outside of the academy it is probably one of the least well-known plays in the canon. It is also a play that, at the end of the twentieth century, has enjoyed a ÀXUU\RIFULWLFDOZULWLQJRQLWVEHKDOI:K\"40

The answer lies in a newfound interest in and recognition of the richness of the text, the realization ‘that this is a play of ambivalences and contradictions’. King John is a staging post for versions of Englishness that are also forms of national identity. Anomalous, transitional, and troublesome, it is a play preoccupied with England’s divided state, and with the ways in which sovereignty, statehood and empire interact. From its ‘strange beginning’ in the French invocation of ‘The borrowed majesty – of England here’ (1.1.4, 5), through an attempt to restore the ‘banished majesty’ (3.1.247) of ‘Arthur of Brittaine’ (2.1.156), ‘Duke of Britain’ (2.1.301) – too readily glossed as ‘Brittany’ by editors, as though the matter of Britain and the matter of Brittany were entirely distinct – to its familiar ending, with the Bastard’s powerful speech beginning ‘This England’, and ending ‘Nought shall make us rue,/If England to itself do rest but true’ (5.7.112–18), King John rehearses claim and counter-claim to authentic Englishness.41 That closing speech, often singled out as particularly if problematically patriotic, is worth looking at again: This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror. %XWZKHQLW¿UVWGLGKHOSWRZRXQGLWVHOI Now these her princes are come home again, Come the three corners of the world in arms And we shall shock them. Naught shall make us rue If England to itself do rest but true. (5.7.112–18)

&ULWLFDOFRPPHQWDU\RIWHQRPLWVWKH¿UVWWZROLQHV 38

Vaughan, ‘Between Tetralogies: King John as Transition’. Edward Gieskes, ‘“He is but a Bastard to the time”: Status and Service in The Troublesome Raigne of John and Shakespeare’s King John’, English Literary History, 65/4 (1998): 779–98. 40 A.J. Piesse, ‘King John: Changing Perspectives’, in Michael Hattaway (ed.), Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 128. 41 All references to Shakespeare’s texts are taken from Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare (New York and London: Norton, 1997). 39

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O, let us pay the time but needful woe, Since it hath been beforehand with our griefs. (5.7.110–11)

These lines show that what we have is a pattern established. In Shakespeare’s time the Reformation and the loss of Calais in 1558 had brought together issues of anti-imperial polemic and imperial design. The loss of Normandy, long seen by historians as the catastrophic experience of John’s reign, is now being replaced by a more measured understanding of England’s relations with empire, both Rome and its own possessions.42 In Shakespeare’s play, pressed by France – ‘To enter conquerors, and to proclaim/Arthur of Brittaine England’s king’ (2.1.310–11) – the challenge to the kingship of ‘English John’ (2.1.10) comes from inside and outside England’s borders, borders that are in any case contested, a moving frontier that impinges on France, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, and Rome, too, in terms of its challenge to that empire’s authority. While the French, in Shakespeare’s pun, seek ‘Th’enfranchisement of Arthur’ (4.2.52), the external threat takes two other forms, British and Roman. Lackland rules over ‘that England hedged in ZLWKWKHPDLQ7KDWZDWHUZDOOHGEXOZDUNVWLOOVHFXUH$QGFRQ¿GHQWIURPIRUHLJQ purposes’ (2.1.26–8), yet with a claim to France and Ireland that threatens to undo his state, and imperial pretensions that affront papal authority. Extra-territorial ambition sparks internal combustion. Like Gaunt’s ‘sceptred isle’ in Richard II (2.1.40) or the Queen’s ‘Neptune’s Park’ and Cloten’s ‘salt-water girdle’ in Cymbeline (3.1.19, 3.1.77), the England of King John is at once well defended and overbearing, insular and overreaching. ‘This England,’ entrenched and expansive, is self-divided and subject to implosion, literally in the king’s case, as he becomes ‘confounded royalty’ (5.7.58). The scene before Angiers crystallizes the contradictions. The prompt, ‘Speak, citizens, for England; who’s your king?’ elicits the response, ‘The King of England, when we know the King’ (2.1.362–3). The king is ‘England,’ for whom his Frenchbased subjects speak. Philip of France upholds Arthur’s right, while John is his ‘own great deputy’ (2.1.365). Philip is representative – ‘Tis France for England’ – John identical – ‘England for itself’ (2.1.202). When Philip says, ‘And bloody England into England gone’ (3.4.8), he distinguishes king from country. What or who is England? To France, but for Rome’s untimely intervention, it is ‘Brother … England’ (3.1.87), to the Bastard ‘mother England’ (5.2.153). Hubert announces that he is ‘Of the part of England’ (5.6.3), but with England split into so many parts, each played by a different character, it is an ambiguous declaration of allegiance at EHVW,WLVWKH%DVWDUGDSDWULRWLF¿JXUHRIXQFHUWDLQELUWKZKRDFWVDVDEULGJLQJ character between England and those outside forces that threaten it. This is the double bind of an England that loses itself in overreaching itself, a dilemma that provided Shakespeare with such rich and dark material. Gaunt’s lament in Richard II – ‘That England, that was wont to conquer others/Hath made a shameful conquest

42

Natalie Fryde, ‘King John and the Empire’, in Church (ed.), King John, 335–46.

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of itself’ (2.1.65–6) – captures this sense of an England caught between empire and colony. Is there no way for England to be but conqueror or conquered? (QJODQGLQWKHWZHQW\¿UVWFHQWXU\IDFHVWKHSURVSHFWRIORVLQJLWVJULSRQ,UHODQG Scotland, and Wales at a time when its own North-South divide and London-centred politics make the possibility of a federal solution through English regional assemblies unlikely in the short term. Shakespeare understood and appreciated the pros and cons of an incorporating Union – echoing both Roman and Arthurian Britain – coming so close on the heels of secession from another empire. Relations between England and Rome remain vexed. The 1701 Act of Settlement that forbids the British monarch from marrying a Catholic is under review.43 Some critics see Shakespeare as in thrall to an older, Catholic Englishness than the Protestantism that prevails in his own day and ours. Elizabeth’s excommunication in 1570 and the current legislation preventing the monarch marrying a Catholic are signs of the religious exclusivity of PRGHUQ(QJOLVKQHVV0HDQZKLOHWKHUHFHQWUHDSSHDUDQFHRIWKHÀDJRI6W*HRUJH on the streets of England – as opposed to the British Union Jack – and calls for St *HRUJH¶VGD\WREHPRUHSURPLQHQWO\FHOHEUDWHGUHÀHFWDUHQHZHGVHQVHRI(QJOLVK national identity that is displacing the previous preoccupation with union and empire. Henry V’s cry of ‘”God for Harry! England and Saint George!’ (Henry V, 3.1.34) is a rallying call undercut by the four captains of the scene that follows, in which Britishness is roundly deconstructed. Henry later confesses to being Welsh. That sequence amply illustrates the ambivalence of the English condition, being at once nationalist, unionist, and imperialist, of two minds and four nations. In King John, little wonder the Bastard cries: ‘Mad world, mad kings, mad composition!’ (2.1.562). He has grasped the play’s bewildering identity crises. When John ‘spake darkly what I purposed’ (4.2.233) he anticipates Lear’s ‘darker purposes’ (1.1.34), for both intended to break up ‘Britain’, the one by blinding and burying, the other by banishment. The claim of France (Brittany and Britain) is to enfranchise an exiled English/British monarch, ‘for that England’s sake’ (2.1.91). The claim of Rome, refuted by John – ‘no Italian priest/Shall tithe or toll in our dominions’ (3.1.79–80) – and by the Dauphin – ‘Am I Rome’s slave? What penny hath Rome borne,/What men provided, what munition sent/To underprop this DFWLRQ"¶± ±ÀDJVWKHGLOHPPDGUDPDWL]HGLQCymbeline. Rome is history, Britain the new Rome.44 England’s independence is threatened by invasion and occupation, but also by its own self-aggrandizement. The breach with Rome means England and France cannot be brothers. For France, this is stated bluntly by Lewis: ‘for the difference/Is purchase of a heavy curse from Rome,/Or the light loss of England for a friend./Forgo the easier’ (3.1.130–33). The Papal legate’s ultimatum is starker still: ‘All form is formless, order orderless,/Save what is opposite to 43

‘Palace and PM “discussed reform”’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7967142.stm. Accessed 11 April 2009. 44 See Willy Maley, ‘Cymbeline, The Font of History, and the Matter of Britain: From Times New Roman to Italic Type’, in Diana E. Henderson (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares 3 (London: Routledge, 2007), 119–37.

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England’s love’ (3.1.179–80). The claims of France and Rome induce the claim of home. John exclaims: ‘O, let me have no subject enemies/When adverse foreigners affright my towns/With dreadful pomp of stout invasion!’ (4.2.171–3). These competing claims of kingship, kinship, and conquest, are compounded by divided selves. Pandulph urges Philip to conquer his earlier vows to England (3.1.214–18). Philip relents: ‘England, I will fall from thee’ (3.1.246). The ‘bloody England’ of my title is King John, who shares his name with the country of which he is king. When Philip says, ‘And bloody England into England JRQH¶ KHH[SUHVVHVWKHFRQÀDWLRQRINLQJDQGFRXQWU\,QSUHVVLQJ$UWKXURI Britain’s claim from without he is acknowledging that there can be two Englands, but not three. Arthur, on the point of being blinded, had asked Hubert, ‘Will you put out mine eyes,/These eyes that never did, nor never shall,/So much as frown on you?’ (4.1.56–8), anticipating the Bastard’s closing speech, ‘This England never did, nor never shall,/Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror’ (5.7.112–13), which is precisely where Arthur lay. Upon his return from France, John crowns himself again, D µGRXEOH FRURQDWLRQ¶   WKDW YH[HV KLV QREOHV FRQ¿UPLQJ /HZLV¶V ODPHQW that ‘Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale’ (3.3.108), and anticipating Pembroke’s comment on John’s second crowning, ‘This act is as an ancient tale new-told/And in the last repeating troublesome’ (4.2.18–19), which also alludes to The Troublesome Raigne. Melun, a French Lord, makes a dying speech in support of England to woo the English Lords from the French side, ‘For that my grandsire was an Englishman’ (5.4.42). Hubert can express his allegiance ambiguously as ‘Of the part of England’ (5.6.3) precisely because England is in parts, played by different characters. John’s identity as England is rewritten in the face of a more telling depiction of the nation, compelling him to acknowledge that his right is not worth the paper it is written on, and he was merely inscribing the time: ‘I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen/ 8SRQDSDUFKPHQWDQGDJDLQVWWKLV¿UH'R,VKULQNXS¶±  If a king can be a bastard then a bastard can be a king. Critics have over the years cautioned against taking the Bastard in King John at face value in his closing speech, but rather remembering that he is an advocate of commodity over majesty, and of action over identity.45 ‘Fractured and fragmented’, for Virginia Mason Vaughan ‘King John is Shakespeare’s most postmodern history play’, and for Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘Shakespeare’s most explicitly political play in that it comes FORVHVWWRVHWWLQJXSDFRQVLVWHQWVHULHVRIVSHFL¿FFRQWHPSRUDU\DOOXVLRQVDQGWR being, in this direct way, what Lily Campbell has called “a political mirror”’.46 $EURNHQPLUURUSHUKDSVRUDKDOORIPLUURUVWKDWGLVWRUWVWKHJUHDW¿JXUHVRIVWDWH 45 See Julia C. Van de Water, ‘The Bastard in King John’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 11/2 (1960): 137–46; and Edward Gieskes, ‘“He is but a Bastard to the time”: Status and Service in The Troublesome Raigne of John and Shakespeare’s King John’, English Literary History, 65/4 (1998): 779–98. 46 Virginia Mason Vaughan, ‘King John’, in Richard Dutton and Jean Howard (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Volume II: The Histories (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 379; Erskine-Hill, ‘The First Tetralogy and King John’, 68.

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ZKLOHUHÀHFWLQJZHOOXSRQPRUHSHULSKHUDOVXEMHFWV(UVNLQH+LOOVHHVKing John as both ‘a problem play’ and ‘a drama which seems to take sides’, and the side it takes is that of neither empire nor monarchy but of the state of bastardy.47 King John is all about England, or rather all about Englands, competing images of a nation torn between Europe and Britain, divided by religion and monarchy. Virginia Mason Vaughan argues that: ‘Shakespeare’s King John presents two Englands: a medieval world which takes its identity from its hereditary rulers, and a community whose authority is ultimately derived from the people’.48 Vaughan sees in the Bastard’s closing speech an appeal to the people, but this arguably overlooks the Bastard’s own scepticism and recognition that repetition is likelier WKDQUHÀHFWLRQ&RPPHQWLQJRQ3ULQFH$UWKXU¶VIDWH$PDQGD3LHVVHVXJJHVWVWKDW WKHLGHQWL¿FDWLRQRI(QJODQGZLWKLWVUR\DOLQFXPEHQWUXQVLQWRWURXEOHZKHQWKH ruler is a tyrant: ‘The king is England; instead of the nurturing, nourishing, fertile land so frequently invoked in the history plays, England is death-dealing stones’.49 But England is also ‘Arthur of Britain’, he whom Spenser was writing of at this time, and, in Shakespeare’s play, he of whom the Bastard says: ‘How easy dost thou take all England up!’ (4.3.143). Beatrice Groves notes the extent to which Shakespeare’s play shifts the focus IURP-RKQ¶VGH¿DQFHRI5RPHWRWKHFODLPRI$UWKXUDQGWKHUROHRIWKH%DVWDUG ‘In Shakespeare’s play King John is not the undisputed hero (as he had been in The Troublesome Raigne) and the bastard’s importance rises to compensate for the relative demotion of the king’.50 If it isn’t as royal as other plays on John, then nor is Shakespeare’s play English enough, if English is thought of as being patriotic. As Eugene Waith argues, ‘when we compare Shakespeare’s play with the two other King John plays, that of Bale in the mid-sixteenth century, and The Troublesome Reign of King John, published in 1591, we see that a political design is far more HYLGHQWLQWKHP«-RKQLVPXFKPRUHREYLRXVO\WKHUHVLVWHURISDSDOLQÀXHQFH who foreshadows Henry VIII or Elizabeth or both’.51 The Shakespeare celebrated by Roger Scruton is John Bale, or the anonymous author of The Troublesome Raigne. Waith, in keeping with a certain strand of criticism, sees Shakespeare’s strength in his subtlety and sophistication, not his jingoism: Oddly enough, what distinguishes Shakespeare’s play from its predecessors as well as from later alterations is not only literary superiority but the obscuring of the Protestant and patriotic message or its relegation to second place.52

47

Ibid., 68–9. Vaughan, ‘King John’, 393. 49 Piesse, ‘King John: Changing Perspectives’, 137. 50 Beatrice Groves, ‘Memory, Composition, and the Relationship of King John to The Troublesome Raigne of King John’, Comparative Drama   51 Eugene M. Waith, ‘King John and the Drama of History’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 29/2 (1978): 193. 52 Ibid. 48

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Waith takes to task earlier critics like John Dover Wilson and John Middleton Murray who saw in the Bastard the spirit of England. What such claims for an (QJOLVKHVVHQFHRYHUORRNLVWKHDUWL¿FLDOQDWXUHRIWKHQDWLRQWKH\VHHNWRLGHQWLI\ ‘We know … that much of King John is untrue to history – that the Bastard is largely a poetic invention, and that the confrontations of Constance and Arthur with their enemies and tormentors are heightened by contrivances of plot as well as by the speeches that Shakespeare (in this respect like some of the most famous historians) puts in their mouths. What makes their appeal to us most immediate is also what is least authentic’.53 Folded into the story of King John as precursor of +HQU\9,,,LQKLVGH¿DQFHRISDSDOW\UDQQ\ZDVDQRWKHUWDOHRIDNLQJZLWKDORRVH grip on his own crown. If King John is a play engaged in inventing England then the England it invents is arguably as mutable and multiple as the one that exists at the present time, an England surrounded by European bureacrats and pilfering borderers. When in Henry V Bourbon decries the English as ‘Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!’ (3.5.10), he is both reminding us of the genealogy of the English, and the history of conquest that shaped the nation, and echoing the Bastard’s sense of history as repetition. Normandy and bastardy go with the territory, and Faulconbridge is not the exception but the rule of an England that owes its legitimacy not to purity but to possession. Indeed, if we take the last words of the Bastard in King John with Gaunt’s lament in Richard II – ‘That England, that was wont to conquer others/ Hath made a shameful conquest of itself’ (2.1.65–6) – we see a strong link being made between conquest, subjection and self-determination. That line ‘If England to itself do rest but true’ (5.7.112–18) may advise against conquest by the nation as well as of the nation. If so, it anticipates the nineteenth-century political commentator who, warning of England’s undermining of its own liberty by its subjection of Ireland, wrote: ‘Finally, England today is seeing a repetition of what happened on a gigantic scale in ancient Rome. A nation that enslaves another forges its own chains’.54

53

Ibid., 209. .DUO 0DU[ µ&RQ¿GHQWLDO &RPPXQLFDWLRQ RQ %DNXQLQ¶ 7KH ,QWHUQDWLRQDO Workingmen’s Association (1870), http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/03/ 28.htm. Accessed 13 April 2009. 54

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Chapter 3

The ‘trueborn Englishman’: Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, and the Future History of (the) English Margaret Tudeau-Clayton

What we call ideology is … the confusion of linguistic with natural reality … literature [is] the place where this negative knowledge about the reliability of linguistic utterance is made available.1

Hamlet’s manifesto on the ‘purpose of playing’ concludes with what is perhaps the least commonplace and certainly the least commented ‘end’: ‘to show … the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ (Hamlet 3.2.21–2).2 The only place where Shakespeare uses the word ‘pressure’, this is cited by the OED together with the earlier use in the same play of the plural ‘pressures’, again in collocation ZLWK µIRUP¶ µDOO IRUPV DOO SUHVVXUHV SDVW¶ >@  DV WKH ¿UVW LQVWDQFH RI D transferred sense of ‘pressure’ as ‘[t]he mark, form or character impressed’. As the GH¿QLWLRQLQGLFDWHVµIRUPDQGSUHVVXUH¶LVDQH[DPSOHRIKHQGLDG\VDUHFXUUHQW Shakespearian trope which Frank Kermode has explored as well as George T. Wright, who mentions this instance, and which, as Neil Corcoran discusses elsewhere in this volume, was for the poet Ted Hughes a characteristic authorial device that typically carried ideologically charged antagonisms between ‘foreign’ Latinate and ‘native’ Old English forms – antagonisms that bear directly on what follows.3 Coupled with another hendiadys, ‘the very age and body of the time’, which precisely combines abstract Latinate (‘age’) with concrete Old English µERG\¶ µIRUPDQGSUHVVXUH¶FRQÀDWHVDEVWUDFWDQGFRQFUHWHWRSUREHWRZDUGVD FRPSOH[LILQGLVWLQFWLGHDRIGH¿QLQJKLVWRULFDOO\VSHFL¿FVWUXFWXULQJIRUFHVWKDW

1

Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1986), 11, 10. 2 Unless otherwise stated, references to Shakespearian texts, henceforth given in parentheses in the text, are from Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997). 3 George T. Wright, ‘Hendiadys and Hamlet’, PMLA 96/2 (1981): 182; Frank Kermode, Forms of Attention (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 49–51.

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inform particular material practices and representations.4 It is, in short, the nearest Shakespeare gets to what we call ‘ideology’. ,QZKDWIROORZV,ZDQWWRH[SORUHKRZWKLVSXUSRVHRISOD\LQJLVH[HPSOL¿HG in Richard II, a play that critics from Elizabeth I on have recognized as topical – bearing on the play’s present even as it represents the past – though not as I propose. What I want to suggest is that John of Gaunt’s prophesy of the downfall of Richard followed by his much-cited vision of ‘this England’ in 2.1, taken together with the immediately preceding description of Richard and his court by his brother, the Duke of York, evoke contemporary overlapping discourses on the character and history of the English, informed by an emergent, protestant, and bourgeois ideological structure – precisely the form and pressure of the age – that, crucially, relocates the normative ideological centre of the ‘trueborn Englishman’ (1.3.272). The only instance of the phrase in the Shakespearian corpus, this is how Henry Bolingbroke, agent of the opposition that brings about the prophesied GRZQIDOORIWKHNLQJLQFLGHQWDOO\WRRWKHRQO\¿JXUHLQWKLVSOD\WRLQYRNH6W George [1.2.84]) styles himself, ironically but also appropriately, just prior to the telling pair of speeches. The play thus economically ‘shows’ the oppositional thrust of the relocation of this centre in the discourses evoked by the speeches and its implications for a future history of the English. It is a future history that is summoned again by the Bishop of Carlisle in a second prophetic vision towards the end of the play that sets itself against, even as it comments ironically RQ WKH ¿UVW 6XJJHVWLYHO\ LPSUHFLVH OLNH -RKQ RI *DXQW¶V YLVLRQ DV , FRQVLGHU later, Carlisle’s vision of the internecine strife of ‘kin with kin … kind with kind’ (4.1.132), ‘house against … house’ (136), attendant on what he calls the ‘foul act’ (129) of the king’s deposition by the self-styled trueborn Englishman who, for Carlisle, is rather a ‘foul traitor’ (126), evokes not only the violence attendant on WKHG\QDVWLFGLYLVLRQVRI¿IWHHQWKFHQWXU\(QJODQGEXWDOVRWKHYLROHQFHDWWHQGDQW on the ‘woefullest division’ (137) of post-reformation, pre-revolutionary England. This is, I want to argue, precisely the division(s) fostered by the emergent, protestant bourgeois ideological structure that informs the discourses on the character and history of the English evoked in the speeches by the father and uncle RIWKHµWUXHERUQ(QJOLVKPDQ¶6SHFL¿FDOO\WKLVVWUXFWXUHDUWLFXODWHVDGRXEOHPRYH whereby the normative ideological centre – for Carlisle still synonymous with truth or loyalty to ‘England’s true-anointed lawful King’5– is relocated. On the one hand, it is dissociated from the centre of political power through an ‘othering’, as foreign and effeminate, of a male elite excluded as ‘untrue’, hence thinkable as traitors; on the other, it is associated with a citizen class entitled to this normative ideological centre by virtue of their ‘ancient’ native ‘manly’ character as well as by their commitment to a ‘true’ English commonwealth synonymous with the WUXHLHSURWHVWDQW &KULVWLDQFKXUFK5DFLDOO\LQÀHFWHG±VHWWLQJµNLQG¶DJDLQVW 4 As Wright points out, it is the entire phrase ‘body of the time’ that needs to be taken LQSDUDOOHOZLWKµDJH¶DVDUHGH¿QLWLRQVLQFHµDJHRIWKHWLPH¶PDNHVQRVHQVH 5 Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI), 3.3.29.

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‘kind’6 – it is a division destined to split families – kin against kin – as well as the institution of parliament – house against house.7 This move is articulated with particular explicitness around what I call the ¿JXUHRIWKHPRWOH\GUHVVHG(QJOLVKPDQDUHFXUULQJFXOWXUDO¿JXUHRUµPHPH¶WKDW IHDWXUHVWKUHHWLPHVLQWKH6KDNHVSHDULDQFRUSXV¿UVWPRUHLPSOLFLWO\KHUHLQWKH Duke of York’s description of a king and court addicted to ‘fashions’ from ‘proud ,WDO\¶ ZKLFKLVWHOOLQJO\MX[WDSRVHGZLWK-RKQRI*DXQW¶VUDFLDOO\LQÀHFWHG description of an ancient, superior (and now implicitly betrayed) homogeneous ‘happy breed of men’ (45) inhabiting a bounded totality – ‘this England’ (50). 7KH¿JXUHWKHQUHDSSHDUVH[SOLFLWO\DVµ)DOFRQEULGJHWKH\RXQJEDURQRI(QJODQG¶ (1.2.55–6), as he is described by the heroine Portia in The Merchant of Venice, the romantic comedy which immediately follows the history play in the widely accepted putative order of composition and which is located precisely in ‘proud Italy’: ‘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.’ (1.2.61–4). 7KH¿JXUHIHDWXUHVIRUDWKLUGWLPHLQDQRWKHUURPDQWLFFRPHG\OLNHZLVHVHWLQ,WDO\ – Much Ado about Nothing (1598?) – though here as an Italian, ‘Signor Benedick of Padua’ (1.1.30), as he is described by Don Pedro: ‘There is no appearance of fancy in him, unless it be a fancy 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.’ (3.2.26–30) Separately glossed by editors, correctly if dismissively, as instances of DUHFXUULQJFXOWXUDO¿JXUHWKHWKUHHKDYHQHYHUEHHQFRQVLGHUHGWRJHWKHUQRUKDYH their relations to other instances been traced.8
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WRWKHXVHVPDGHRIWKH¿JXUHLQYDULRXVIRUPVRISURWHVWDQWERXUJHRLVSROLWLFR religious discourse – homily, sermon, satire (verse and prose), pamphlet. This is WKHSULQFLSDOJHQHULFURXWHWKH¿JXUHWDNHVIURPWKHPRPHQWRILWVHPHUJHQFHLQWKH mid-sixteenth century (see Figs 3.1 and 3.2). In its journey down this route, which branches into a secondary route after a key instance from 1577 (discussed below), WKH ¿JXUH DFTXLUHV JHQGHU FODVV DQG UDFH LQÀHFWLRQV HYHQ DV LW LV ZRYHQ LQWR D historical narrative charged with the future project of a true (because protestant) Christian commonwealth of true – pious, temperate and plain – Englishmen which is to be produced through its exclusion. It is the exclusionary violence of this ideology, which fosters xenophobia as well as internal divisions, together with the future history attendant on it, that, I want to argue, the Shakespearian instances, taken together as well as separately, oppose. The aspiration to a normative ideological centre of the trueborn Englishman through exclusion of what he is not is analogous as well as temporally coincident with the aspiration to a normative linguistic centre of ‘the King’s English’, a centre of linguistic ‘plainness’ to be produced, as I have argued elsewhere, through performative exclusions of what it is not, notably Latinate and romance forms practiced by ‘far journeyed gentlemen’ as they are described by the protestant LGHRORJXH7KRPDV:LOVRQLQWKH¿UVWUHFRUGHGLQVWDQFHRIWKHWURSHZKHUHWKH analogy between sartorial and linguistic practices (a commonplace of the period) is explicitly drawn: ‘like as they love to go in forrein apparell, so they wil powder their talke with oversea language’, especially ‘Frenche English’ and ‘Angleso Italiano’.97KH¿JXUHRIWKHPRWOH\GUHVVHG(QJOLVKPDQKDVPRUHRYHUDQH[DFW linguistic equivalent in ‘the gallimaufrey’, a culinary trope recurrently used, likewise from the mid-sixteenth century, to represent (usually again to exclude) the linguistic mix produced by the practice of such forms.10 As I have argued, the trope of ‘the gallimaufrey’ is set against ‘the Kings English’ in The Merry Wives of Windsor, the one play in the Shakespearian corpus to invoke this normative linguistic centre and the one set in the universe of the English citizen class that seeks to produce this centre through exclusion of what it is not, an exclusion that is here dramatized through the humiliation of John Falstaff, a nomadic (effeminate and ‘foreign’) courtier who is explicitly associated with the ‘gallimaufrey’, as his bourgeois antagonist, the tellingly named George Page, is associated, if more implicitly, with ‘the Kings English’. Countering this exclusion through a romance subplot which closes with a ‘mixed’ marriage of courtier and citizen’s daughter, WKHSOD\,DUJXHDI¿UPVWKHFHQWULIXJDOPRWOH\FKDUDFWHURIWKH (QJOLVK±WKH 9 Thomas Wilson, 7KH$UWHRI5KHWRULTXH (1553) repr. (Amsterdam and New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), fols 86r–86v (contracted forms, i/j u/v spellings normalized). See my ‘Shakespeare’s “welsch men” and the “King’s English”’ in Willy Maley and Philip Schwyzer (eds), Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to the Assembly (Aldershot: Ashgate 2010), 121–49. 10 A ‘gallemaufrey’ of latinate neologisms is explicitly compared to a ‘Fantasticall Gulls’ motley of foreign fashions in Tomas Tomkins’ play Lingua (1607); see Fig. 3.2.

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gallimaufrey – even as it interrogates and undermines the centripetal, protestant bourgeois ideology of ‘the King’s English’.11 ,QOLNHPDQQHULQWKHWZRURPDQWLFFRPHGLHVLQZKLFKLWIHDWXUHVWKH¿JXUH of the motley dressed Englishman is set against the ideology of the ‘trueborn (QJOLVKPDQ¶HYRNHGLQWKHKLVWRU\SOD\ZKLFKLPPHGLDWHO\SUHFHGHVWKH¿UVWRI WKHFRPHGLHVDQGZKLFKLWVHOIIHDWXUHVWKH¿JXUHLIPRUHLPSOLFLWO\7KH¿JXUH is thus removed not only geographically (to ‘proud Italy’), but also generically, DPRYHZKLFKDVZHVKDOOVHHIROORZVWKHVHFRQGDU\URXWHWDNHQE\WKH¿JXUH after 1577 through texts (notably by John Lyly and Robert Greene) which are WKHPVHOYHV EDVHG RQ ,WDOLDQ PRGHOV DQG LQ ZKLFK WKH ¿JXUH LV YLHZHG WKURXJK WKH H\HV RI µ,WDOLDQV¶ LQ FRPSDULVRQV VSHFL¿FDOO\ RI WKH (QJOLVK DQG WKH ,WDOLDQ These comparisons are taken to their logical, ironic, and deconstructive end in the Shakespearian romantic comedies which undo differences, whether, as in Much Ado, between the English and the Italian or, as in Merchant, between the English and other ‘strangers’ to the Italians (crucially the Scots and the French). Differences are thus shown to be a function of culture – constructed, relative, and PRELOHUDWKHUWKDQQDWXUDOHVVHQWLDODQG¿[HG7KLVLVLQLWVHOIWRXQGHUPLQHWKH LGHRORJ\RIDµWUXH¶(QJOLVKPDQ±SUHFLVHO\DQLGHRORJ\RIHVVHQFH±WKDWWKH¿JXUH is used to serve in the principal generic route it takes. In addition the linguistic analogy is mobilized to set against this ideology the linguistic equivalent to the motley dressed Englishman – the changing mix without a normative centre that is the gallimaufrey of ‘Englishes’.126SHFWDWRUVDUHWKXVFDOOHGXSRQWRYLHZWKH¿JXUH otherwise than they are called upon by protestant politico-religious discourses in circulation. Of particular importance amongst these is a homily against ‘excesse RI$SSDUHOO¶RQHRIDVHFRQGFROOHFWLRQRIRI¿FLDOKRPLOLHV SURGXFHGOLNH DQGZLWKWKH¿UVW DVWKHGLVFXUVLYHLQVWUXPHQWRIDQHPHUJHQWFKXUFKVWDWH apparatus to regulate not only doctrine, but also individual and collective ‘habits’ – what Pierre Bourdieu usefully termed the ‘habitus’ – of a true (because protestant) English commonwealth.13 This instance is important not only because of the 11

As Neil Corcoran points out in his essay in this volume, Ted Hughes in his championing of ‘native’ old English forms uses ‘the King’s’ and ‘the Queen’s English’ contemptuously of imported Latinate and romance forms practiced by an effete aristocracy especially at the Restoration. This is highly ironic given that the trope was introduced rather against such elite forms by Thomas Wilson whose ideal of native plainness is in effect echoed by Hughes. 12 The plural form is used of the range and variety of English words by John Florio in 1598, which predates the earliest instances cited in the OED, as I discuss in Shakespeare’s Englishes: Shakespeare and the Ideology of Linguistic Practices in Early Modern England (in preparation). 13 ‘An Homyly against excesse of Apparell’, in The seconde Tome of homelyes … set out by the aucthoritie of the Quenes Maiestie: And to be read in every paryshe churche (London: Richard Jugge and John Cawood, 1563), fols 113–21. See Caroline M. Stacey, µ-XVWL¿FDWLRQE\)DLWKLQWKH7ZR%RRNVRI+RPLOLHV¶Anglican Theological Review, 83/2 (2001): 255–79.

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LPSOLHGJHQHUDOGLVVHPLQDWLRQRIWKH¿JXUHRIWKHPRWOH\GUHVVHG(QJOLVKPDQDV an object of a violently exclusionary rhetoric, but also because with it this rhetoric – and the ideology it carries – acquires the coercive force of institutionalized DXWKRULW\7RLQYLWHDGLIIHUHQWYLHZRIWKLV¿JXUHDVWKH6KDNHVSHDULDQLQVWDQFHV do is to invite resistance to coercion by the centripetal ideology of a church-state apparatus in process of establishing itself which, as we shall see, carries the seeds of its own destruction. The critical object(ive) of the Shakespearian instances is signalled by particular OLNHQHVVHVWRRWKHUNH\LQVWDQFHVRIWKH¿JXUHQRWDEO\IURPVRXUFHVRIWKHKLVWRU\ play:14ZKLOHWKH¿JXUHLQMuch Ado recalls a (key) instance in William Harrison’s chapter on ‘apparel’ (which itself draws on the homily) in the description of England that from 1577 prefaces Raphael Holinshed’s ChroniclesWKH¿JXUHLQMerchant recalls the instance in the anonymous play known as Thomas of Woodstock, or King Richard the Second Part One, prequel to as well as source of Richard II, most evidently, as others have pointed out, in 2.1, where John of Gaunt’s description of WKHVWDWHRI(QJODQGXQGHU5LFKDUGOLIWVDVSHFL¿FSKUDVH±µSHOWLQJIDUP¶±IURPWKH prequel even as it echoes the general contrast between former greatness and present corruption.15 While Harrison’s chapter marks a crucial stage in the genealogy of the ¿JXUH±LWLVKHUHWKDWDFODVVLQÀHFWLRQLVH[SOLFLWO\LQWURGXFHGDVZHOODVDFKDUJHG historical narrative of contrast between idealized past and corrupt present – the anonymous play, which has been described as the ‘most subversive of Elizabethan history plays,’16 LV SDUWLFXODUO\ H[SOLFLW LQ WKH XVH RI WKH ¿JXUH WR UHORFDWH WKH QRUPDWLYHLGHRORJLFDOFHQWUHRIWKHWUXHERUQ(QJOLVKPDQ7KLVFHQWUHLVLGHQWL¿HG unambiguously and insistently here with ‘plain Thomas’ (1.1.91), the eponymous ¿JXUHRIRSSRVLWLRQWRDFRUUXSWFRXUWWKDW6KDNHVSHDUH¶V-RKQRI*DXQWUHFDOOVDV ‘[m]y brother Gloucester, plain, well-meaning soul’ (2.1.129). If not necessarily modelled on plain Thomas, as Corbin and Sedge suggest, Shakespeare’s Gaunt 14 ,QWKHLUGHWDLOVWKHLQVWDQFHVRIWKLV¿JXUHDUHKLJKO\YDULHGDQGQRWZRWKDW,KDYH VHHQDUHLGHQWLFDO6SHFL¿FOLNHQHVVHVWKXVVWDQGRXWDVLQGLFDWLYHRIPRWLYDWHGUHODWLRQV In the current tendency to privilege referential reading critics who discuss instances have tended to look for correspondences with actual sartorial practices rather than for relations amongst various instances and their ideological implications. 15 The phrase comes in a speech by Richard who himself draws the contrast. See Thomas of Woodstock or King Richard the Second, Part One, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 4.1.48. (All references will be to this edition.) The argument which follows will strengthen the case against Shakespeare’s authorship; the case for it has most recently been made in The Tragedy of Richard II, Part One, ed. Michael Egan (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2006). Though undoubtedly exhibiting likenesses in form – notably the mastery of blank verse – the prequel is crucially different in its ideological and political thrust; indeed, as I shall suggest, the very explicitness of the echoes indicates that the Shakespearian sequel may have been meant to carry a critical revisionary thrust. 16 Margot Heinemann, as quoted to illustrate a widely shared critical opinion by Corbin and Sedge, ‘Introduction’, 37.

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bears obvious likenesses to him not least as the vehicle of a discourse on the character of the English that carries an oppositional thrust.17 Treated unhistorically, like Shakespeare’s Gaunt, ‘plain Thomas’ is entirely reworked from the sources to carry not so much ‘traditional values’ as Corbin and Sedge suggest, but values that a protestant bourgeois ideology seeks to establish as traditional and that, as Shakespeare points up, are epitomized in the epithet ‘plain’.18 It is as the excluded RWKHUWRDGH¿QLQJ±RULJLQDODQGWUXH±(QJOLVKSODLQQHVVHPERGLHGLQ7KRPDVRI :RRGVWRFNWKDWWKH¿JXUHRIWKHPRWOH\GUHVVHG(QJOLVKPDQLVPRELOL]HG¿UVWLQ an emblematic, collective description of king and courtiers ‘suit[ed]’ in a variety of ‘strange’ (i.e., foreign) ‘fashions’ – ‘French hose, Italian cloaks … Spanish hats,/ Polonian shoes …’ (2.3.88–95); then, in a staged confrontation between Woodstock and one of the courtiers in which the ‘othering’ done by this description is thrust home through an ironic, rhetorical question from Woodstock that calls upon spectators to perceive and reject the motley dressed courtier as no true Englishman: ‘Is’t possible that this fellow that’s all made of fashions should be an Englishman?’ (3.2.156–7).19 The rejection is extended to the place of the court when at the close of the scene Woodstock refuses the king’s summons with the wry comment: ‘My English plainness will not suit that place’ (line 234). The position of the phrase at the end of the line draws out the ‘othering’ force of the demonstrative to thrust the court – centre of political power – out of the normative ideological centre of true English plainness that Woodstock occupies.20 This is exactly comparable with the ideological work done by another plain Thomas when he introduces ‘the Kings 17

See Corbin and Sedge, ‘Introduction’, 9. Comparisons have been made too with Humphrey Duke of Gloucester in 2 Henry VI, likewise a good man brutally murdered that critics have suggested may be a model for plain Thomas (ibid., 4–6). But, if committed to ‘studying good for England’ (3.1.111), and a ‘map of honour, truth and loyalty’ (line 203), 6KDNHVSHDUH¶V*ORXFHVWHULVQRZKHUHLGHQWL¿HGZLWKWKHGH¿QLQJFKDUDFWHURIWKH(QJOLVK DV7KRPDVLV,WLVLQWKLVFKDUDFWHUWKDWWKHRSSRVLWLRQDOVLJQL¿FDQFHRIWKH¿JXUHOLHVKLV H[SOLFLWSRVLWLRQLVOR\DOW\WRWKHNLQJ,WLVWKH¿JXUHVRI
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English’ to claim for plainness the normative linguistic centre in a passage glossed µSODLQQHVV ZKDW LW LV¶ ZKLFK GH¿QHV WKLV LGHDO QRUP OLNH DQG ZLWK µWKH .LQJV English’ with which it is equated, through exclusion as ‘outlandish’ of what it is not. Amongst those exiled to this outland are, as I have mentioned, far-journeyed gentlemen whose penchant for ‘Frenche English’ and ‘Angleso Italiano’, like and with their penchant for foreign dress, is treated, as the courtier is treated here, with the irony that is this ideology’s preferred weapon of other-exclusion. Indeed, WKH DQDORJ\ LV DGYHUWLVHG WKURXJK WKH ¿JXUH RI WKH FRXUWLHU ZKR LQYHQWV ZRUGV – ‘toeify’ and ‘kneeify’ (3.2.224)21 – to describe his ‘Polonian shoes’ (2.3.92), an LWHPRIWKH¿JXUH¶VPRWOH\IRUHLJQGUHVVWKDWDFTXLUHVSDUWLFXODUSURPLQHQFHKHUH as later instances will recall (see Fig. 3.2). ,IWKHFXOWXUDO¿JXUHPRELOL]HGE\WKHSUHTXHOWRWKLVLGHRORJLFDOHQGLVLPSOLFLW to the Duke of York’s description of court and king in Shakespeare’s history play, WKHSDUWLFXODULQVWDQFHLVHYRNHGUDWKHUE\WKHPRUHGHWDLOHGGHVFULSWLRQRIWKH¿JXUH of the baron Falconbridge in the romantic comedy that follows.22 For this features µ)UHQFK KRVH¶ WKH ¿UVW WHOOLQJO\ VSHFL¿F LWHP LQ WKH HPEOHPDWLF GHVFULSWLRQ RI the French-born king and his courtiers that features again only in one other later LQVWDQFHRIWKH¿JXUH WKDWLWVHOIUHFDOOVWKHVFHQHLQWoodstock.23 If, unlike the instance in WoodstockWKH¿JXUHRI)DOFRQEULGJHGRHVQRWDSSHDURQVWDJH KLVSODFHDVD¿JXUHRIPRWOH\LVWDNHQE\WKHVHUYDQWFORZQ/DXQFHORW*REER 'UHVVHGLQWKHµJXDUGHG¶ PRWOH\RIWKHIRRO±ZLWKZKLFKWKH¿JXUHRIWKH motley dressed Englishman is associated in Woodstock as in other later instances24 ± /DXQFHORW LV D K\EULG ¿JXUH KDOI(QJOLVK /DXQFHORW  KDOI,WDOLDQ *REER  occupying a space at once inside and outside the (Italian) play world and the (English) theatre world, an in-between space of neither/nor as well as both/and that is the theatrical equivalent of the linguistic ‘mistakes’/neologisms that he practices such as ‘frutify’ (2.3.119), which is comparable with, if more disruptively creative 21

OED records only ‘kneeify’, citing this one instance, as a ‘nonce word’. 2IDOOWKHLQVWDQFHVRIWKH¿JXUH,KDYHVHHQLWLVRQO\WKH6KDNHVSHDULDQLQVWDQFHV that have particular, if particularly telling names, a particularity that itself suggests resistance WRWKHLGHRORJ\RIHVVHQFHWKDWWKH¿JXUHLVXVHGWRVHUYH 23 ‘… who ist would gess or skann/Fantasmus to be borne an Englishman?/He’s hatted Spanyard-like … His hose … Frenche …’. William Goddard, A neaste of Waspes … (London, 1615), fol. F1v (see Fig. 3.2). In Woodstock it is precisely the item of ‘hose’ that is a focus of the reciprocal struggle for the ideological centre: when Richard mockingly refers to ‘your t’other hose’, Woodhouse returns the mockery with the ironic comment: ‘There’s honest plain dealing in my t’other hose’ (1.3.102). The importance of the sartorial code to the play’s articulation of meanings has of course been pointed out by other critics who do not, however, place it in the context I outline here. 24 To Woodstock’s enquiry as to the identity of the courtier his servant replies ‘Some ¿QHIRRO+H¶VDWWLUHGYHU\IDQWDVWLFDOO\DQGWDONVDVIRROLVKO\¶± -RVHSK+DOO  FRQGHPQVWKH¿JXUHDVµDQ(QJOLVKPDQLQQRQHDIRROHLQDOO¶ZKLFKLVHFKRHGE\*RGGDUG¶V description of ‘Fantasmus’: ‘A compleate Foole: no compleate Englishe man’. See, too, the instance in Thomas Dekker’s The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London (discussed below). 22

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(fruitful) than, ‘toeify’ and ‘kneeify’, all three being neologisms that activate the )UHQFKGHULYHGVXI¿[µI\¶DOLQJXLVWLFHTXLYDOHQWWRWKHVDUWRULDOLWHPRIµ)UHQFK hose’ sported by Falconbridge and by king and courtier in Woodstock.25 Launcelot DQG)DOFRQEULGJHDUHPRUHRYHUFRQQHFWHGWKURXJKWKHLUQDPHV)RULIWKH¿UVW meaning of the Italian ‘gobbo’ is ‘crook-backt’, as others have noted, John Florio’s dictionary of 1598 adds, ‘[a]lso a kind of faulkon’.26 In the emblem of the falcon WKHUHLVWRRDEULGJHWRWKHDXWKRULDO¿JXUHZKRVHIDPLO\FRDWRIDUPVDFTXLUHGLQ 1596 – the year of the production of Merchant – features ‘for his crest … a falcon’, a feature that may too be linked to wider resonances of the name (discussed below).27 Shake-speare and Launce-lot are, in addition, connected through the semantic proximity of ‘spear’ – the other prominent feature of the coat of arms – to ‘launce’, a proximity signalled by dictionary entries such as Florio’s to ‘Asta’: ‘a staffe, a launce, a speare, a pike, a long poule’.28 Launcelot himself provides a gloss that glances at these ‘synonymous’ names in a comment on his father’s description of his son as ‘the very staff of my age, my very prop’ (2.2.57–8) (itself surely a glance at the implications for the father of the son’s acquisition of a coat of arms): ‘Do I look like a cudgel or a hovel-post, a staff or a prop?’ (lines 59–60). Like ‘plain Thomas’ Launcelot directs an ironic, rhetorical question at spectators that calls for recognition and rejection of an other, but the excluded other here is precisely the linguistic ideology of ‘plain terms’. This is signalled by the immediately preceding 25 Glossed anachronistically as a malapropism or as a ‘mistake’ by editors, this is another example of the editorial bias noted by Norman Blake who has commented that µPDODSURSLVP¶PD\¿QDOO\PDUNRQO\DFODVVGLVWLQFWLRQ6\OYLD$GDPVRQKDVDOVRGUDZQ DWWHQWLRQWRWKHGLI¿FXOW\RIGLVWLQJXLVKLQJEHWZHHQPLVWDNHVDQGQHRORJLVPVLQWKHHDUO\ modern period. See my discussion of this point in Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare’s Extravagancy’, Shakespeare, 1/2 (2005): 143–4. 26 John Florio, A Worlde of Worde, or Most copious, and exact Dictionarie in Italian and English (London: Edward Blount, 1598). 27 On the coat of arms I quote from Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: 2[IRUG8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV 7KHVLJQL¿FDQFHRIWKHHPEOHPLVGLVFXVVHGLQDEULHI exchange in Notes and Queries May–June 1916, where attention is drawn to the family QDPHRI)DOFRQEULGJHDVZHOODVWRWKHVLJQL¿FDQFHRIWKHIDOFRQµWKHQREOHVWRIELUGV¶LQ the heraldic system, as ‘a symbol of true gentility’. Notes and Queries, 12th series, vol. 1 (January–June 1916), 429, 493. In the context of its use in the plays – a context which KDV QRW EHHQ FRQVLGHUHG ± WKH IDOFRQ HPHUJHV UDWKHU DV D UHVRQDQW ¿JXUH RI WKH VRFLDOO\ contradictory position(s) of Shakespeare as at once in the (gendered female) position of the to-be-mastered (like Kate in The Taming of the Shrew compared to the falcon in 4.1.171) – his position as ‘servant’ actor-poet – and the position of one who aspires to be master (‘fain of climbing high’ [as the falcon and the ambitious nobleman are described in 2 Henry VI, 2.1.5–12]). The position as master is formally achieved with the coat of arms, as the Stationers Register’s entry in August 1600 of the Q texts of Much Ado and 2 Henry 4 ‘Wrytten by mr [i.e., master] Shakespere’ acknowledges. 28 The semantic proximity of launce/spear is mobilized by Ben Jonson in his poem in SUDLVHRI6KDNHVSHDUHDV,GLVFXVVEULHÀ\LQ0DUJDUHW7XGHDX&OD\WRQJonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 244.

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lines when Launcelot tells his father that his son is ‘deceased or, as you would say in plain terms, gone to heaven.’ (lines 55–6). ‘Plain terms’ here are ironized as not µWUXH¶DWRQFHWRWKHFKDUDFWHURIODQJXDJH±DOZD\V¿JXUDWLYHQRQWUDQVSDUHQW µRWKHU¶WRUHIHUHQWDVZHOODVWRVLJQL¿HG±DQGWRWKHFKDUDFWHURI(QJOLVK±KHUH displayed as the variety of (nearly) synonymous forms that Florio calls ‘Englishes’. Indeed, what Launcelot practices here is called ‘synonymizing’, or ‘varying’, a practice he shares with John FalstaffDQRWKHU¿JXUHOLQNHGµV\QRQ\PRXVO\¶WRWKH DXWKRULDOQDPHZKRVHUHODWLRQWRWKHVH¿JXUHVXQGHUZULWHVSURSV WKHRSSRVLWLRQ carried by their linguistic practices (of neologism and ‘play upon the word’ as well as synonymy) to the centripetal, reformation project of a ‘true’ English linguistic as well as sartorial centre of plainness. The analogy is advertised here through a verbal echo: when Launcelot describes as ‘odd sayings’ (line 54) the imported Latinate forms he self-consciously employs in order to legitimate (prop) his claim to the title of master (again an authorial joke [see n27]), he echoes Portia’s description of Falconbridge as ‘oddly.. suited’. If English sartorial and linguistic forms are thus denaturalized, marked as ‘odd’, the aspiration to a normative centre of plainness through the exclusion of such forms is itself ironized as other to the inherently ‘odd’ character of language and to the mobile, changing and heterogeneous ‘odd’ motley that is the gallimaufrey of Englishes. The analogy is similarly mobilized through verbal echo in Much Ado. For the description of Benedick dressed in ‘strange disguises’ recalls his own earlier description of the linguistic ‘strange dishes’ produced by his friend Claudio ZKRZDVµZRQWWRVSHDNSODLQ¶EXWZKRXQGHUWKHLQÀXHQFHRIORYHLVµWXUQHG orthography. His words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes’ (2.3.17–19). Turning the Latinate word ‘orthography’ here, as Dogberry might have done, though it would then have been glossed by editors as a ‘mistake’ (see n25), Benedick himself contributes to the fantastical banquet of strange linguistic dishes that is the play.29 But it is the mistaking ‘exchange’ of high Latinate forms SHUIRUPHGE\'RJEHUU\DQGFRPSDQ\WKDWVSHFL¿FDOO\SDUDOOHOVWKHµH[FKDQJH¶RI the highborn Hero’s dress performed by her servant Margaret which results in the ‘strange misprision’ (4.1.184) of one for the other.30 As others have remarked, this UHÀHFWVVHOIFRQVFLRXVO\RQWKHFRQGLWLRQRISOD\LQJLQDWKHDWUHLQZKLFKDORZ ERUQSOD\HURI¿FLDOO\DVHUYDQWWDNHVRQWKHVWUDQJHLQWKHVHQVHRIIRUHLJQDV 29 The word is spelt (!) ‘ortography’ in Q, ‘orthography’ in F, which is the form usually adopted by editors who have sometimes also emended to ‘orthographer’. The willful blindness of editors to its ‘strange’ character here is presumably due to reluctance to recognize DOLQJXLVWLFDI¿QLW\WR'RJEHUU\LQYDULDEO\XVHGRIFRUUHFWZULWLQJ±DQGVRDQWRQ\PLFWR ‘strange’ – Benedick’s idiosyncratic turning of orthography is at least recognized by the OED where it is described as ‘a nonce-use’ the category used for ‘kneeify’ (see above) and Launcelot’s ‘frutify’, though this is also glossed as ‘a comic blunder’, which ‘kneeify’ and ‘orthography’ are not. 30 On the mistaking ‘exchange’, which George Puttenham calls the ‘changeling’, see Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Scenes of Translation in Jonson and Shakespeare: Poetaster, Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Translation and Literature, 2/1 (Spring 2002): 13–15.

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ZHOODVXQIDPLOLDU VDUWRULDODQGOLQJXLVWLFIRUPVRIDKLJKERUQ¿JXUHIRUZKRP KHLVPLV WDNHQ6SHFL¿FDOO\WKHDFWRUZKRSOD\V%HQHGLFNµSURYHVDMotley’ in the mistaking ‘exchange’ he performs as he traverses at once national differences and the differences of estate with which national differences are bound up, elite English males being distinguished by ‘foreign’, especially Italianate and French cultural forms.31 Differences are thus again denaturalized, shown to be not given so much as performed, a function of mobile cultural, linguistic, and sartorial forms. As the name of Benedick signals, this is to take to its ironic deconstructive FRQFOXVLRQWKHFRPSDULVRQEHWZHHQWKH,WDOLDQDQGWKH(QJOLVKWKDWWKH¿JXUHRI the motley dressed Englishman is used to serve in English texts which themselves follow Italian models, notably Robert Greene’s Farewell to Folly (1591). Modelled on the much admired form of the Italian colloquy – a model too for the dialogues of Much Ado32 – and set in Italy – like the play – Greene’s text introduces the ¿JXUHRIWKHµ(QJOLVKJHQWOHPDQ¶GUHVVHGLQDPRWOH\RIIRUHLJQIDVKLRQV&DVWLOLDQ doublet, Venetian hose, French hat, German cloak) through the principal speaker DQGDXWKRULW\¿JXUHWKHµ,WDOLDQ¶-HURQLPR)DUQHVHZKRKROGVKLPXSDVDZDUQLQJ to Florentines of what they might become if they continue in the addiction to the ‘folly’ of gaudy apparel.33$GGUHVVHGHVSHFLDOO\WR%HQHGHWWRDµ¿QHFRXUWLHU¶DQG student at Padua the warning is (re)directed (‘sent’) by the title page to English ‘Courtiers and Schollers’ (see n33), who are thus called upon to see themselves in WKH¿JXUHRI%HQHGHWWRDFRQIXVLRQRI(QJOLVKDQG,WDOLDQWKDWLVFRPSRXQGHGLQ the theatre where spectators are called upon to (mis)take an English actor for the ,WDOLDQµ%HQHGLFNRI3DGXD¶ZKRWKHQFRPHVWRUHVHPEOHWKH¿JXUHRIWKHPRWOH\ dressed Englishman held up as a negative model to Benedetto of Padua. If there is pleasure in this dissolving of differences – between texts as between nations and estates – there is also a critical purpose. This is indicated by the sartorial GHWDLOVRIWKHSRUWUDLWRI%HQHGLFNZKLFKHYRNHRWKHULQVWDQFHVRIWKH¿JXUHVHH )LJ   ¿UVW DV , KDYH PHQWLRQHG WKH NH\ LQVWDQFH IURP :LOOLDP +DUULVRQ¶V chapter on apparel in his description of England (1577), which is the only other HDUO\LQVWDQFHWRGHVFULEHWKH(QJOLVKPDQ¶VFKDQJHRIIRUHLJQGUHVVLQWKHVSHFL¿F temporal sequence ‘today … tomorrow’ with ‘French toys’ as tomorrow’s choice (Benedick is ‘a Dutchman today, a Frenchman tomorrow’); second, an instance in one of Joseph Hall’s satires contemporary with the play (1598), which is the only other instance to combine German lower half with Spanish upper half, ‘thighs from Germanie, and brest fro Spaine’ (Benedick is ‘German from the waist downward

31

The phrase ‘proves a Motley’ is taken from the description of the Actor in John Stephens, Satyrical Essayes characters and others (London, 1615), 245. 32 A debt noted in both second and third Arden editions. 33 Greenes farewell to Folly: Sent to Courtiers and Schollers … to warn them from the vain delights that drawes youth on to repentance, in The Life and Complete Works of Robert Greene, ed. A.B. Grosart (15 vols, New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), vol. 9, 253.

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… and a Spaniard from the hip upward’).34 The portrait then is itself a textual hybrid in which the ironic deconstructive implications of the second cultural route WKDWWKH¿JXUHWDNHVDUHSOD\HGDJDLQVWWKHH[FOXVLRQDU\YLROHQFHRIWKHSULQFLSDO route it takes. Undoing differences the portrait subverts the centripetal ideology RIHVVHQFH±RIJHQGHUDVRIQDWLRQDQGHVWDWH±WKDWWKH¿JXUHVHUYHVDORQJWKLV route even as the play in which it features, itself an Italian-English cultural hybrid, mobilizes the linguistic analogy to promote an expanding, inclusionary JDOOLPDXIUH\RI(QJOLVKHVOLNHWKHHDUOLHUFRPHG\LQZKLFKWKH¿JXUHIHDWXUHV Likewise placed in the context of Italy and viewed through ‘Italian’ eyes, the ¿JXUHRI)DOFRQEULGJHVSRUWVQRWRQO\µ)UHQFKKRVH¶EXWDOVRDGRXEOHWµERXJKW« in Italy’, a sartorial blurring of the difference between Italian and English that is reinforced through his association, discussed above, with the servant clown whose hybrid English-Italian character epitomizes the double character of the play’s location, at once Christian bourgeois Venice and Christian bourgeois London. :LWKLQWKH¿FWLRQDOZRUOGRIWKHSOD\KRZHYHUWKHVHGLIIHUHQFHVDUHRQWKHFRQWUDU\ pointed up by the treatment Falconbridge receives. For he is an absolute stranger to the heroine Portia, notably, as she comments, because, despite his pluricultural VDUWRULDOFKDUDFWHUKHLVPRQROLQJXDODSHUVLVWHQWGH¿QLQJIHDWXUH ZKLOHVKHKDV a ‘poor pennyworth in the English’ (1.2.58–60). An illusion-breaking moment of estrangement this calls upon English spectators to imagine themselves alongside Falconbridge as ‘in the stranger’s case’.35 It is a ‘case’ Falconbridge shares with Portia’s other European suitors who, at the close of the scene, are all dismissively classed together as ‘the strangers’ (line 103). The dissolving of differences – these various suitors are all one to Portia – serves then to foreground what is the only VLJQL¿FDQWGLIIHUHQFHKHUH±EHWZHHQLQVLGHUVDQGRXWVLGHUVWRWKHFRPPXQLW\RI Venice/Belmont.36 English spectators are thus invited not only to identify with WKH¿JXUHRIWKHPRWOH\GUHVVHG(QJOLVKPDQEXWPRUHJHQHUDOO\WRUHFRJQL]HWKH VKLIWLQJUHODWLYHFKDUDFWHURIGLIIHUHQFHVKRZWKH\DUHDFXOWXUDOO\VSHFL¿FIXQFWLRQ RIZKHUHYLHZHUDQGYLHZHGFRPHIURP¿JXUDWLYHO\DVZHOODVOLWHUDOO\ The stakes of the dissolving of differences in the category of the ‘stranger’ are raised by Portia’s joke about the Englishman, the ‘Scottish lord’, and the ‘Frenchman’. Commenting ironically on his ‘neighbourly charity’, she tells how 34 William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen (New York: Dover Publications, 1968), 145–6 (precisely echoed again only in a later instance, a sermon from 1611, cited in Roze Hentschell, ‘Treasonous textiles: Foreign Cloth and the Construction of Englishness’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32/3 (Fall 2002): 554; Joseph Hall, The Poems, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969), 35. 35 The phrase is from Hand D’s (probably Shakespeare’s) contribution to The book of Sir Thomas More; like The Merchant with which it is connected by several verbal echoes the scene sets itself against the workings of xenophobic ideologies of difference as I will consider in Shakespeare’s Englishes, Ch. 5. 36 7KHSRLQWLV¿QHO\DUJXHGLQ)UDQN:KLJKDPµ,GHRORJ\DQG&ODVV&RQGXFWLQThe Merchant of Venice’, in Gary Waller (ed.), Shakespeare’s Comedies (London and New York: Longman, 1991), 108–28.

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the Scot ‘borrowed a box of the ear of the Englishman and swore he would pay him again … the Frenchman became his surety, and sealed for another’ (1.2.66– 8 emphasis added). Suggestive of a scene at a European football tournament (when the stakes of international competition are represented by a silver trophy instead of a rich heiress) this vignette illustrates the violence that is a function of the differences it serves to reproduce. Cast as it is in the language of economic relations, it offers itself as a comic prelude to the deadly drama of differences which follows. English spectators are thus invited to see a parallel between this drama and the ongoing, mutual hostility between the English and their local old enemies, the Scots and the Scots’ ‘old allies’, the French. Indeed, under James I the issue became too sensitive to allow the joke to stand – ‘Scottish’ is replaced by ‘other’ in the Folio. The joke was also dropped from the recent RSC production of the play, perhaps because Anglo-Scots relations have again become strained beyond a joke in a fragilized United Kingdom.37 An ironic frame to these relations is furnished by the evocation of ‘neighbourly charity’, an alternative economy of mutual generosity between those who see each other as like rather than different – in accordance with the new testament injunctions to love your neighbour as yourself and to do as you would be done by – that is as strikingly absent from Christian bourgeois Venice as it is from Christian bourgeois London.38 Differences are dissolved in this economy too, not, however, from a relative perspective, but from the absolute ‘other’ perspective of a kingdom or city of god in which all are at once strangers, citizens, and neighbours. Ultimately it is this inclusionary, pre-reformation (Pauline and Augustinian) vision of Christian FRPPXQLW\WKDWLVVHWLPSOLFLWO\LIQRWH[SOLFLWO\DJDLQVWDQLGHRORJ\WKDWLGHQWL¿HV the true church with a protestant English commonwealth to be produced through H[FOXVLRQRIFRQVWLWXWLYHRWKHUV±WKHHOLWHPDOHGH¿QHGE\IRUHLJQIRUPVOLNHDQGZLWK the Latinate (and Catholic) French and Italian cultures with which he is ‘confused’. As we have seen, the ‘confusion’ of the English and the French is signalled sartorially by the ‘French hose’ that Falconbridge sports, like the French-born king and his courtiers in Woodstock where the French/Catholic connection serves precisely as a legitimizing pretext for the dissociation of the political centre from the ideological centre of the plain, true Englishman.39 In Merchant the ‘confusion’ is furthered by the resonances of the name of Falconbridge, a name which recurs in Shakespearian plays of the 1590s, as E.A.J. Honigmann has pointed out,

37 The strain has indeed been expressed in terms of economics and the ‘old alliance’: ‘let the Scots join the euro, kowtow to the French for subsidies … .’ The Daily Telegraph Website as cited by Neil Ascherson, London Review of Books, 5 April 2007, 38. 38 Cf. one of the conditions for the taking of communion in the Book of Common Prayer: to be in ‘love and charity with your neighbours’. Whigham points out the absence of ‘real Christian transcendent options’; Whigham, ‘Ideology and Class Conduct’, 122–3. 39 The religious character of the opposition is signalled by the association of Richard’s corrupt entourage with Catholic doctrines and vestments (1.2.9, 26), again an anachronistic feature of the play.

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suggesting it may indicate an authorial, or at least a topical connection, perhaps with a family from the North.40 He does not, however, comment that the name LV XVHG RI ERWK )UHQFK DQG (QJOLVK ¿JXUHV41 a bridge between the nations that PRUHVSHFL¿FDOO\UHJLVWHUVWKHDUULYDORIWKH)UHQFKLQZKHQDVKHQRWHVWKH ‘Faulconbridge title’ came to England (xxiv, n2). Most tellingly, Falconbridge is WKHQDPHRIWKH)UHQFK(QJOLVK¿JXUH±EDVWDUGLQWKHVHQVHRIK\EULGRUPRQJUHO as well as illegitimate – at the centre of the one play that the Oxford editors have placed between Richard II and Merchant in their putative order of composition: King John. Here authorial associations (discussed above) are strengthened by the bastard Falconbridge’s function as commentator in which he resembles another K\EULG ¿JXUH ZLWK DXWKRULDO DVVRFLDWLRQV /DXQFHORW *REER ZKR DV ZH KDYH VHHQWDNHVWKHSODFHRIWKHGXPEDQGLQYLVLEOH PRWOH\¿JXUHRI)DOFRQEULGJH in Merchant. This function of commentator is nowhere more prominent than in the exhortation with which the Bastard Falconbridge closes the play: ‘[N]aught shall make us rue/If England to itself remain but true’ (5.7.117–18). This condition is glossed by the preceding lines in which he asserts that ‘[t]his England’ will RQO\\LHOGWRDFRQTXHURULILW¿UVWµZRXQGVLWVHOI¶DQLPDJHRIVHOIKDUPLQJWKDW represents opposition by members of the nobility to the political centre described LQ D IRUFHIXO ¿JXUH RI FROOHFWLYH EHORQJLQJ DV µKRPH¶ OLQH   7R EH WUXH WR the collective identity evoked in ‘England’ and ‘us’ undoubtedly then entails, as David Womersley has argued, truth or loyalty to the monarchical political centre.42 This is, as we have seen, the position taken in Richard II by the bishop of Carlisle whose prophetic vision of a self-wounded England ironically comments on John of Gaunt’s earlier lament at the self-harm done not against, but at the political FHQWUHE\DNLQJDQGFRXUWLGHQWL¿HGE\WKH'XNHRI
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ÀDJRI6W*HRUJHLVGHVFULEHGLQHenry V E\D¿JXUHWHOOLQJO\ODEHOHGµBrit.’ in the Folio.43 Following as it does images of agricultural grafting – in The Winter’s Tale an illustration of art’s amelioration of nature – this suggests that the English enjoy superior military strength as conquerors not despite, but because of their mixed or ‘bastard’ character just as the vernacular enjoys cultural vigour for the same reason – an analogy foregrounded in the previous scene when the French SULQFHVV.DWHSURGXFHVK\EULG(QJOLVK)UHQFKIRUPVWKDWSUH¿JXUHWKHPRQJUHO offspring of her marriage with Henry, ‘a boy half French half English’ (5.2.195). The Bastard Falconbridge’s call for England to be true to itself is then a call to be true at once to the heterogeneous, mixed character of (the) English that is a function of history and to the monarchical centre that this very heterogeneity requires to provide a collective sense of ‘home’. That in its journey from Richard II to The MerchantWKH¿JXUHRIWKHPRWOH\GUHVVHG(QJOLVKPDQDFTXLUHVWKHQDPHRIWKLV FHQWUDO¿JXUHIURPDQRWKHUSRVVLEO\LQWHUYHQLQJ KLVWRU\SOD\VXJJHVWVWKHQDQ (authorially underwritten) alliance of the genres of history and comedy against WKHSURWHVWDQWERXUJHRLVLGHRORJ\WKDWWKH¿JXUHLVXVHGWRVHUYHDQLGHRORJ\WKDW seeks, moreover, to pass itself off as history in revisionist narratives of the past. For it is precisely the moment of ‘the Conquest by Bastard William that the French came in’ (along with titles such as Falconbridge) that is treated as a rupture or fall into corruption from a prior state of perfection in protestant revisionist narratives of the history of the English – their language and cultural habits as well as their institutions of church and state. ‘[B]efore’, complains John Green in this particularly resonant instance, ‘our English tongue’ was ‘most perfect’ but ‘corrupted’ at the conquest it lost a ‘common Dialect’ since when it has been rendered still ‘more obscure’, so that ‘a plaine man can scarce utter his mind’, notably on account of ‘play-poets’ – the particular object of his attack – who, through their practice of latinate neologisms, have made the ‘gallimaufrey’ of English a ‘mingle mangle’.44 Similarly, sartorial corruption – likewise exacerbated by theatrical practice – is a function of French hegemony for William Harrison who, in his chapter on apparel, contrasts the ‘garish colors’ preferred ‘these days’ DQGµQHYHUEURXJKWLQEXWE\WKHFRQVHQWRIWKH)UHQFK¶ZLWKWKHµ¿QHNHUVH\KRVHQ and … mean slop’ worn ‘at home’ by the Englishman of a ‘merrier’ time past who was ‘known abroad by his own cloth’.45,QWKLVP\WKLF¿JXUHZHKDYHWKHHPEU\R 43

This has been expanded to ‘Britain’ in the Third Arden edition, as Lisa Hopkins notes, commenting on the reminder that it carries of the ‘historical reasons’ for the prestige of the French language in England: Lisa Hopkins, ‘Neighbourhood in Henry V ’, in Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (eds), Shakespeare and Ireland. History, Culture, Politics (London: MacMillan, 1997), 13. The label, which might have been expanded to Brittany, or Briton, also carries the memories of the mutual ‘contamination’ of French and English blood that this history entailed. 44 I. (John) G. (Green), A Refutation of the Apology for Actors (1615), fols F2r–F2v. 45 Harrison, Description, 148. There were of course sound economic reasons for this promotion of home-produced cloth; see Hentschell, ‘Treasonous Textiles’ passim. See, too, Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials

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RIµSODLQ7KRPDV¶WKH¿JXUHLQWoodstock dressed in ‘a coat of English frieze’ (1.1.102), set in exclusionary opposition to a king and court dressed in a motley of foreign fashions. This opposition is insidiously charged in the play with what we might call (borrowing from Stefan Collini) the ‘structural nostalgia’ that Harrison LVWKH¿UVWH[SOLFLWO\WRLQWURGXFHLQUHODWLRQWRWKH¿JXUHRIWKHPRWOH\GUHVVHG Englishman through his evocation of an imprecisely located, idealized moment prior to, or at least free from French hegemony, when an Englishman was known by his own plain cloth. This structural nostalgia adds rhetorical and emotional fuel WRWKHH[FOXVLRQDU\YLROHQFHZLWKZKLFKWKH¿JXUHLVWUHDWHGHYHQDVLWIXUQLVKHV legitimizing grounds at once for the violence and for the future-oriented project it serves – of a ‘true’ reformed English church-state – reformation being, as the protestant John Florio’s gloss puts it, ‘a renuing of anie thing to his old state again’. 6SHFL¿FDOO\ WKH DVSLUDWLRQ WR LQVWDOO D QRUPDWLYH LGHRORJLFDO FHQWUH RI VDUWRULDO and linguistic plainness through exclusion of the motley dressed Englishman/the gallimaufrey of Englishes is thus legitimized as a return to a prior, more authentic state, a return, in short, to ‘traditional values’ (see n18). The nostalgia for the pre-conquest era manifests itself in various ways: in the privileging, for instance, of monosyllabic Old English words over polysyllabic romance words as the language of the true Englishman: ‘the more monasyllables (sic) that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seeme’;46 in the printing of Old (QJOLVKWH[WVQRWDEO\WKHWUDQVODWLRQVRIWKH*RVSHOVGRQHIRUWKH¿UVWWLPHLQ XQGHUWKHQDPHRI-RKQ)R[HE\0DWWKHZ3DUNHU(OL]DEHWK¶V¿UVW$UFKELVKRSRI &DQWHUEXU\ZKRZDVWKH¿UVWVHULRXVO\WRFROOHFWDQGVWXG\2OG(QJOLVKWH[WV47 As Cain and Fulk comment Parker was motivated by the politico-religious aim RI ¿QGLQJ LQ WKH µUHWXUQ WR D PRUH RULJLQDO VWDWH¶ D OHJLWLPL]LQJ JURXQG IRU WKH apparatus he was appointed to build, a motive shared by John Foxe whose Acts and Monuments (1563) was, as Hugh MacDougall notes, crucial to the wide propagation of protestant revisionary narratives.48 Yet, as these scholars also note, it is to this same ground that parliamentarians would shortly have recourse to claim ‘ancient’ liberties in the struggle against the encroachment of monarchical

of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Though the analogy with linguistic practices is illustrated by examples throughout this important book it is not discussed as it might have been to support the authors’ argument about the ideological stakes of anti-court rhetoric around sartorial practices. My own argument supplements and supports theirs. 46 George Gascoigne, Certayne notes of Instruction (1575), as cited in J.L. Moore, Tudor Stuart Views on the Growth, Status and Destiny of the English Language (Tübingen: Dr. Martin Sändig, 1973), 99. 47 R.D. Fulk and C.M. Cain, A History of Old English Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 226–7; see, too, Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1982), 38–40. 48 MacDougall, Racial Myth, 36–8.

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power.49 The return to the pre-conquest era would thus work to foster divisions, notably between court and parliament, within the apparatus of an English statechurch that the revisionist narratives were initially designed to underpin. Internal divisions are still more obviously fostered by representations of the post-conquest era of French/Catholic hegemony. For this is represented not only in terms of a fall into cultural and institutional corruption, but also in terms of the subjection, humiliation, and oppression of one people – the English – by another ‘foreign’ people – the French/Norman – the terms, in short, of colonization.50 It was, as John Foxe characteristically comments, ‘half a shame at that time to be called an Englishman’51, a comment echoed by William Harrison who, in his chapter on ODQJXDJHZKHUHKHLVPRUHVSHFL¿FWKDQLQWKHFKDSWHURQDSSDUHO GHVFULEHVWKH ‘dishonour’ it was ‘to speak English’ not only at court but throughout England when ‘to speak French’ was a ‘token of gentility’, adding, ‘no marvel, for every French rascal when he came once hither was taken for a gentleman only because he was proud and could use his own language’.52 In what might be described as a belated instance of the colonized writing back Harrison uses irony – as we have seen protestant bourgeois ideology’s preferred weapon of other exclusion – to dissociate, as a mistake, (the) French from the character of the English gentleman. He thus operates a reversal of what he describes as the ‘exile’ of (the) English, a reversal that he then turns as a historical narrative of the recovery and eventual triumph RIWKH (QJOLVKXQGHU(OL]DEHWK6LJQL¿FDQWO\HQRXJKKHJLYHVDVDQH[DPSOHRI this triumph the sober prose of protestant fellow traveller John Foxe, while those ‘other’ who assume, again mistakenly, that polysyllabic foreign words are the ‘best English’ are excluded for their ‘affectation of foreign and strange words’ – as they are excluded from the ‘King’s English’ by Thomas Wilson – an exclusion that is the linguistic equivalent to the exclusion of those who dress in a motley of foreign IDVKLRQVLQWKHFKDSWHURQDSSDUHOZKHUHDOHVVVSHFL¿FKLVWRULFDOQDUUDWLYHORFDWHVD normative sartorial centre in an indeterminate past free from French hegemony. It is a centre that at the close of the chapter on apparel Harrison associates with a particular estate – the estate of ‘our merchants’. It is, of course, the rise of this estate that historians of the language have long recognized as crucial to the triumph of English over French.53 For Harrison the consistently sober dress of 49

As Maguire and Roebuck point out in their essay in this volume, antiquarian scholars traced the antiquity of parliament to a still more distant past. 50 It is the distinction ‘between the aristocratic colonizers and the indigenous colonized’ rather than national divisions that recent historians have considered the crucial distinction during the post-conquest period of Norman expansion. See Colin Kidd, ‘“All four of us”: Review of Hugh Kearney, The British Isles, 2nd rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)’, TLS, January 26, 2007: 24. 51 As quoted by MacDougall, Racial Myth, 37. 52 Harrison, Description, 415. 53 Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, 5th ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 142–3; Jeremy J. Smith, ‘The Use of English: Language Contact, Dialect Variation, and Written Standardisation during the Middle English Period’,

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the merchant class – the sartorial equivalent of John Foxe’s prose – corresponds to ‘the ancient gravity appertaining to citizens and burgesses’.54 Excepted from WKHµIDQWDVWLFDOIROO\¶UHSUHVHQWHGE\WKH¿JXUHRIWKHPRWOH\GUHVVHG(QJOLVKPDQ that is initially presented as nationwide this estate carries authority by virtue of its ancient character as well as its moral seriousness. It is thus the ancient estate of the English citizen that is entitled to the ideological centre of the trueborn Englishman IURPZKLFKWKH¿JXUHRIWKHHOLWH (QJOLVKPDQFRQWDPLQDWHGE\IRUHLJQVDUWRULDO and linguistic practices – remnants of the corruption as well as oppression under French hegemony – is excluded. It is the ‘auncient Cittizen’ as well as ‘[t]he Magistrate’ and ‘the wealthy commoner’ that Thomas Dekker too will except – and still more emphatically ± IURP WKH JHQHUDO IROO\ RI µ$SLVKQHVVH¶ WKDW WKH ¿JXUH RI WKH PRWOH\ GUHVVHG Englishman represents in his satirical pamphlet The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London (1606).553RLQWLQJXSWKHJHQGHULQÀHFWLRQWKDWLVEHVWRZHGRQWKLV¿JXUH from the earliest instances along this generic route – ‘none but women and fooles kepe him companie’ – Dekker renders explicit the logic of the exclusionary YLROHQFHZLWKZKLFKWKH¿JXUHLVWUHDWHGE\DVVLPLODWLQJWKH(QJOLVKPDQ¶VµVXLWH¶ of motley foreign fashions to ‘a traitors bodie’ deserving the same punishment.56 Aspiring to produce a normative centre of (the) true and original (ancient) English through performative exclusions of constitutive ‘others’, an aspiration fuelled by a historically charged narrative of emancipation from the foreign yoke of a French elite, this logic is neatly captured and in turn undercut in 2 Henry VI ZKHQWKH¿JXUH of the commoner Jack Cade, the clothier who ‘means to dress the commonwealth and turn it’ (4.2.4–5), and who, anachronistically, ‘vows reformation’ (lines 57–8), asserts that a man who ‘can speak French’ – a member of the nobility – is ‘therefore … a traitor’ (lines 150–51, emphasis added). 7KH JHQHDORJ\ RI WKH ¿JXUH RI WKH PRWOH\ GUHVVHG (QJOLVKPDQ WKXV EHDUV out the argument made some years ago by Christopher Hill, namely that, as an ‘intellectual origin’, or, as I would rather put it, an ideological pre-text, the ‘myth of the Norman yoke’ nourished the internal divisions leading to the civil war, a war WKDW0LFKHO)RXFDXOWIROORZLQJ+LOOFDOOHGWKH¿UVWµJXHUUHGHVUDFHV¶LQWKH:HVW WKH¿UVWZDUWKDWLVLQIRUPHGDQGSURSDJDWHGE\DGLVFRXUVHRIUDFLDOGLIIHUHQFH57 in Tim William Machan and Charles T. Scott (eds), English in its Social Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 53. 54 Harrison, Description, 148. 55 Thomas Dekker, The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London, ed. H.F.B. Brett-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1922), 44. 56 Hentschell, ‘Treasonous Textiles’, 551–3, 57 Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 361–5 (expanding on earlier arguments); Michel Foucault, ‘Il faut défendre la sociéte’. Cours au Collège de France (1975–1976), ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (Gallimard: Seuil, 1997), especially 86–96. Foucault’s dependence on Hill is critiqued by Franck Lessay, a conservative French critic who claims that Hill’s Marxist linear history has been invalidated by recent historians who have furnished a more

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Interestingly enough, despite or perhaps because of its charge of future history, the phrase ‘slavish Yoke’ is used of the period of French/Catholic hegemony by QRQHRWKHUWKDQ-DPHV,LQKLV¿UVWVSHHFKWRSDUOLDPHQWRQKLVDFFHVVLRQWRWKH English throne.58 This was no doubt a pre-emptive tactical move, ‘talking the talk’ WRUHDVVXUHSDUOLDPHQWDULDQVZKRZHUHMXVWL¿DEO\ QHUYRXVDERXWKLVGRPHVWLFDV ZHOODVIRUHLJQUHOLJLRXVSROLWLFV(TXDOO\VLJQL¿FDQWO\WKHSKUDVHLVXVHGE\WKH ¿JXUHRIWKH(DUORI1RUWKXPEHUODQGLQRichard II to rally opposition around the self-styled ‘trueborn Englishman’ at the end of the scene which opens with the telling pair of speeches by his father and uncle: ‘If then we shall shake off our slavish yoke,/ … /Away with me in post to Ravenspurgh’ (2.1.293, 298). Evidently a recurring trope for the period of French/Catholic hegemony the phrase draws out WKHFRQWHPSRUDU\UHVRQDQFHVRIWKHRSHQLQJSDLURIVSHHFKHVZKLFKGHVFULEH¿UVW a ‘tardy-apish nation’ (line 23; cf. Dekker’s ‘Apishness’), and more particularly (in an implicit estate restriction) a court and king addicted to ‘new’, foreign, especially Italian, ‘fashions’; then, an ancient, homogeneous ‘happy breed of PHQ¶LQKDELWLQJDVLQJOHXQL¿HGLVODQGµ>W@KLV(QJODQG¶RQFHµERXQGLQE\WKH triumphant sea’ ‘now bound in with shame’. Expressed through a turn in the sense of the word ‘bound’ the historical turn or fall into a condition of enslavement is associated in the next line, through a phrase which almost echoes it, with ‘rotten parchment bonds’ and ‘inky blots’, metonyms for the corruption of the institutions of government administration. The narrative of a fall into a condition of slavery together with the structural nostalgia of an imprecisely located mythic past fuels the oppositional thrust of the description of a king and court addicted to new foreign fashions, ‘other’ to the ancient ‘breed’ of ‘this England’ that they have implicitly betrayed, the outsiders inside. As the phrase ‘slavish yoke’ points complex view. But, as Lessay himself admits, what has been gained in complexity has been lost in explanatory power; as he also admits, Hill’s line of argument, if currently unfashionable, still has its adherents. Franck Lessay, ‘Joug normand et guerre des races: de l’effet de vérité au trompe-l’oeil’, in Yves Charles Zarka (ed.), Michel Foucault: de la guerre des races au biopouvoir, Cités 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 53–69. A full account of the emergence of this racial discourse is in MacDougall, Racial Myth. It is illustrated with particular explicitness two years before the execution of Charles I by a tract cited by Richard Jones as well as MacDougall and Hill in which John Hare calls on readers to ‘contemplate the heraldry and titles of our Nobility’ (remember Falconbridge) and to recognize that ‘there’s scarce any other matter then inventories of forraine villages, that speak them to be not of English blood … if we but heere the royal title rehearsed, we hear it likewise attended with a post Conquestum so that we cannot move with our senses but we heare the chaines of our captivity’. For Hare, as for others (such as John Green), these chains are audible too in ‘our Language’ in which ‘we … meet with so much tincture of Normanism, that some have esteemed it a dialect of the Gallick’. As quoted in Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 229; emphasis mine. 58 House of Commons Journal, vol. 1, 22 March 1604, in British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk. Accessed 24 October 2008.

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up, the speeches together thus evoke contemporary discourses on the history and character of the English informed by a protestant bourgeois ideology that is HODERUDWHG VSHFL¿FDOO\ DURXQG WKH ¿JXUH RI WKH PRWOH\ GUHVVHG (QJOLVKPDQ DV we have seen. This is done most prominently in two sources of the history play ZKHUHWKH¿JXUHLVWKHFRQVWLWXWLYHRWKHURIWKHLPSOLHGRUH[SOLFLW¿JXUHRIWKHWUXH (QJOLVKPDQFKDUDFWHUL]HGE\DOLQJXLVWLFDVZHOODVVDUWRULDOSODLQQHVVWKDW¿QGV its contemporary embodiment in the ancient, manly estate of the plain speaking, plainly dressed citizen. If, however, this emergent ideology is ‘shown’, it is not endorsed. Deeply ambivalent, as critics have long recognized, in its treatment of the self-styled trueborn Englishman as of the king that he opposes, the play tends, as it moves WR LWV FORVH UDWKHU WRZDUGV RSSRVLWLRQ WR WKH RSSRVLWLRQ ZKLFK ¿QGV H[SOLFLW expression in the prophetic speech by the Bishop of Carlisle that I have discussed. This (re)turns the ideological tables by identifying the self-styled ‘trueborn Englishman’ as a ‘foul traitor’ even as it predicts the future history attendant RQ WKH UHORFDWLRQ RI WKLV FHQWUH $GGUHVVHG SHUKDSV VSHFL¿FDOO\ WR WKH SUHTXHO Woodstock, a particularly explicit instance with which it may be engaged in a corrective re-vision, the history play’s opposition to the opposition is then taken up in the romantic comedy which follows it and which summons a different view RIWKH¿JXUHRIWKHPRWOH\GUHVVHG(QJOLVKPDQ/LNHWKHODWHUFRPHG\LQZKLFK WKH¿JXUHIHDWXUHVWKLVµVKRZV¶KRZGLIIHUHQFHVDUHFXOWXUDOO\SURGXFHGHYHQDVLW DI¿UPVWKHPRWOH\FKDUDFWHURIWKH (QJOLVK7KHHVVHQWLDOLVPRIWKHLGHRORJ\RI the trueborn Englishman is thus undone by these comedies which, like and with the history play, set themselves against the xenophobia as well as the internal divisions it fosters and their attendant future history. ***** Shakespearian opposition to the opposition is taken up by Daniel Defoe in a verse satire published in 1701 which takes Bolingbroke’s self-description as its ironic WLWOH'LUHFWHGDJDLQVW[HQRSKRELDDQGPRUHVSHFL¿FDOO\DJDLQVWWKHRSSRVLWLRQWR William III on the grounds of his ‘foreign’ origins (here Dutch not French), this aspires to promote the formation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, legally and politically established in 1707. If for the social historian Linda Colley Defoe’s poem marks an inaugural moment in the formation of this union, it has more generally been considered as decidedly forward looking, ‘the most famous of all attacks on the myth of racial superiority’ as one critic puts it, ‘as valid today … as it was in Defoe’s time’.59 Forward looking it undoubtedly is, but its title invites us to look back to the moment of Shakespeare’s history play as the originary moment of the myth which Defoe ironizes as, he suggests, Shakespeare does. For the ‘True-Born Englishman’ is, 59 John Robert Moore, Daniel Defoe. Citizen of the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 233; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 15–17.

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KHFODLPVµDFRQWUDGLFWLRQ¶µ>L@QVSHHFKDQLURQ\LQIDFWD¿FWLRQ¶VLQFHKHLVUDWKHU a ‘het’rogeneous thing’, a hybrid mix of the peoples, languages, and cultures of England’s chequered history of invasion and immigration.60 Like Shakespeare setting history (and its ironies) against myth/ideology, Defoe too foregrounds the motley character of the English as a function of their history to promote a heterogeneous unity around the centre of the king – precisely a united king-dom – the centre that Shakespeare’s bastard Falconbridge describes as ‘home’. More recently the motley character of the English has again been mobilized against xenophobia as well as to promote a unity of heterogeneous multiplicity. This is no longer the United Kingdom, which is rather perceived today as falling apart, but a multicultural global unity. In 1998, for instance, in a provocatively titled piece, ‘Hooray, England doesn’t exist’, the historian David Starkey argued WKDWJLYHQWKHDEVHQFHRIDGH¿QLQJQDWLRQDOFKDUDFWHU±DQDEVHQFHV\PEROL]HGE\ the lack of a national dress and of a national language (English having disappeared into Englishes) – it was the moment for England to ‘decide that nationhood is D EXVWHG ÀXVK DQG EHFRPH WKH ¿UVW WUXO\ JOREDO PXOWLFXOWXUDO VRFLHW\¶ DGGLQJ (a reassuring sop to readers of The Sunday Times) that this was the right choice for ‘a patriotic Englishman’.616LQFHRIFRXUVHWKHPRRGKDVFKDQJHGVSHFL¿FDOO\ we are on this side of another perceived rupture, known as 9/11, with its attendant uncertainties about cohesion in a multicultural, global society. Indeed, structural nostalgia is again evident and the exclusionary ideology it fuels has reared its head in the shape of a new (if marginal) political formation, ‘The English Democrats’, ZLWK WKH WHOOLQJ PRWWR µSXWWLQJ (QJODQG ¿UVW¶ ,I WKH ¿JXUH RI 6KDNHVSHDUH OLNH Gaunt’s speech, readily lends itself to instrumentalization by such an ideology and the nostalgia that fuels it, the history plays and comedies, I have been arguing, invite rather resistance to an exclusionary ideology of the English and its attendant violence. What is proposed is rather a reconciliatory politics, a reconciliation of ‘kind with kind’ that is epitomized in the twinning of Latinate and Germanic forms in the characteristic authorial device of the hendiadys (mentioned at the outset). $V LQ WKLV GHYLFH 6KDNHVSHDULDQ OLQJXLVWLF SUDFWLFH WHQGV WR WKH DI¿UPDWLRQ RI WKHJDOOLPDXIUH\RI(QJOLVKHVWKHOLQJXLVWLFHTXLYDOHQWRIWKHVDUWRULDO¿JXUHRI the motley dressed Englishman which, in Merchant and Much Ado, is mobilized against the violence with which it is treated in the normative centripetal discourses RI SURWHVWDQW ERXUJHRLV LGHRORJ\ &DOOHG XSRQ WR YLHZ WKLV ¿JXUH GLIIHUHQWO\ spectators are asked, in Merchant at least, to recognize themselves as members of the unity of multiple differences which is the Christendom of pre-reformation (XURSH,WLVSHUKDSVWRZDUGVDVHFXODUSRVW&KULVWLDQHTXLYDOHQWWKDWWKH¿JXUH invites us to look today, though what is cruelly lacking for many if not most is, of course, a shared sense of such a heterogeneous unity as ‘home’. 60 Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings, ed. P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 23–58, lines 372–3, 335. 61 David Starkey, ‘Hooray, England doesn’t exist’, The Sunday Times, April 26, 1998, News Review, 5.

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This England, That Shakespeare / Tudeau-Clayton

Woodcut portrait of an Englishman, c. 1550, from Andrew Boorde, The First Book of the Introduction of Knowledge, ed. F.J. Furnivall (London, Early English Text Society, 1870), p. 116.

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7KH¿JXUHRIWKHPRWOH\GUHVVHG(QJOLVKPDQJHQHDORJ\RIDFXOWXUDO meme. Layout: Matthias Heim.

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Chapter 4

‘Eat a Leek’: Welsh Corrections, English Conditions, and British Cultural Communion Allison M. Outland

Wedged between Hal’s military victory over the French at Agincourt with his hastily cobbled-together – and just as speedily disengaged – band of British brothers and the subsequent arrangements for the monarch’s domestic triumph in wedding the French princess is a scene critics of Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599) have for centuries found troubling. Samuel Johnson put the entirety of Act 5 down to padding, dismissing it as a ‘vain endeavor’ to ‘cultivate barrenness, or to paint upon vacuity.’1 While I agree that the scene in which the predatory English ensign, Pistol, is compelled by the Welsh captain, Fluellen, to ‘eat a leek’ is arguably about nothing, I want to entertain the possibility that this is precisely the point. Indeed, perhaps the most fascinating dynamic fuelling Henry V is the dramatic alchemy that converts – even if only ephemerally – nothing into something invaluable, a crude wooden box into a world, a common player into a king, a disjointed troop of weary soldiers into military glory, or a plot of soil into a nation. In this particular case, Fluellen forcibly administers an odd sort of cultural communion, in retribution for Pistol’s lampooning of the Welsh tradition that calls for wearing a leek in one’s cap on St David’s Day as a gage or emblem honoring fallen kinsmen. Gower, the English captain, explains Pistol’s offense and subsequent punishment: you mock at an ancient tradition, begun upon an honorable respect and worn as a memorable trophy of predeceased valor … You thought because he could not speak English in the native garb he could not therefore handle an English cudgel.
Viewed from one perspective this scene is simply the slapstick culmination of the escalating antagonism that has come to characterize Fluellen and Pistol’s relationship. But in the following pages I will trace the process whereby this

1 J.H. Walter provides numerous instances of critical ‘disappointment’ in his introduction to the Arden edition of the play (London, 1988), xxviii–xxix.

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proffered Welsh correction to a solipsistic English condition illuminates the cultural mystery of British national transubstantiation. Two thematic threads that mark the action of this alchemy have their roots in Richard II 7KH¿UVWLVWKHUHSHDWHGDQGRIWHQGLVFXVVHGUHIHUHQFHWR counterfeits, mockeries, disguises, or perspectives. This latter term makes an early appearance in R2 when, responding to the Queen’s anxieties regarding anticipated sorrows, Bushy suggests that sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears, Divides one thing entire to many objects, Like perspectives, which rightly gaz’d upon, Show nothing but confusion; ey’d awry, Distinguish form. (2.2.17–21)

It is often assumed that Bushy refers here to an anamorphic painting, such as the portrait of Edward VI, which has a grotesquely elongated nose unless viewed ‘correctly.’2 There is, however, another type of perspective wherein the viewer ¿UVW HQFRXQWHUV D SLFWXUH WKDW FRQWDLQV VHYHUDO GLVSDUDWH ¿JXUHV LQ QR DSSDUHQW relation to one another; ‘ey’d awry’ through what is now called a ‘polyoptic WHOHVFRSH¶WKHSLHFHVRIWKRVHYDULHG¿JXUHVUHIUDFWDQGUHDVVHPEOHLQWRDVLQJOH coherent image. This type of perspective not only offers a useful gloss on this passage, but also provides a template for the way in which Shakespeare imagines the composite British nation invented in H5KHWDNHVZKDWDSSHDUVDW¿UVWJODQFH to be ‘confusion’ and refracts this gallimaufry of elements through a very special glass into a magically cohesive community that resolves, if only for a moment, OLNH D WUHPEOLQJ PLUDJH LQWR D ÀHGJOLQJ QDWLRQ , ZDQW WR LQWURGXFH WZR WHUPV that accompany these anamorphic variants through these plays: ‘condition’ and ‘correction.’ The former wavers in its passage, referring both to situations conceived as either inherent (one’s inborn social status) or apparent (one’s current state), as well as to the contractual agreement that promises to collapse the two terms into one. The latter term speaks to a necessary adjustment, often in perspective, that allows one to perceive something more accurately in light of new evidence, or most frequently, in light of conventional rules (such as grammar or decorum). Even a cursory glance through these plays reveals the prevalence of these terms DQGLPDJHVDQG,¶OOFRQVLGHUVSHFL¿FLQVWDQFHVDVWKH\IXQFWLRQLQNH\VFHQHV The second thematic thread is marked by the words ‘gage,’ ‘wage,’ and ‘wed,’ which are etymologically intertwined according to the OED and virtually 2 My discussion of perspectives is indebted to Allan Shickman’s two articles on them: ‘The “Perspective Glass” in Shakespeare’s Richard II’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 18/2, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Spring 1978): 217–28; and ‘“Turning Pictures” in Shakespeare’s England’, The Art Bulletin, 59/1 (March 1977): 67–70. Shickman believes, however, that the R2 passage refers to a pleated type of perspective where I, tracing this theme through to H5, have come to believe it refers to another type that reassembled parts of a number of disparate images into one coherent whole.

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interchangeable well into the early modern period.3 That linkage provides an intriguing thematic map for traversing these plays. R2 opens with two nobles FKDOOHQJLQJ HDFK RWKHU EHIRUH WKH NLQJ E\ ÀLQJLQJ WKHLU JDJHV RQ WKH JURXQG DV each accuses the other of treachery and offers to do battle to defend his position. Their gages or gloves, which Shakespeare has substituted for the hoods Holinshed describes, function as crude contracts (engagements): they are promises of future DFWLRQXQGHUFHUWDLQVSHFL¿HGFRQGLWLRQVXQGHUZULWWHQE\WKHFKDOOHQJHU¶VUHSXWDWLRQ and honor. Richard famously trumps these well-established contractual negotiations by asserting his sovereignty, usurping the combatants’ right to trial, and skipping directly to what seems an almost arbitrary sentencing, all in order to keep the details RIWKHFRQÀLFWIURPEHLQJIXOO\DUWLFXODWHG±DQHYHQWWKDWZRXOGXQGHUPLQHKLV own credibility and honor (and thus ultimately his authority). Echoes of this earlier sequence ring through 4.1 when, faced with an even heavier shower of gages that threatens further internal fragmentation during his coup, Bolingbroke repeatedly GHIHUV WKH IXO¿OPHQW RI WKRVH FRQWUDFWV XQWLO WKH\ DUH SXVKHG RXW WKH HQG RI WKH SOD\$QGODVWO\LQWKH¿IWKDFWZHKHDUIRUWKH¿UVWWLPHRIWKHµ\RXQJZDQWRQDQG effeminate boy,’ Bolingbroke’s son, Hal, who, hearing of his father’s successful usurpation of the throne and proposed celebration, offers his own unique salute: he would unto the stews, And from the common’st creature pluck a glove, And wear it as a favour; and with that He would unhorse the lustiest challenger. (5.3.14–19)

7KXV+DO¶V¿UVWGUDPDWLFDFWLVWRSOHGJHKLPVHOIE\WKHJDJHRIDZKRUHWRWULXPSK in the jousts staged to honor his father’s usurpation and imperious assertion of authority. Marilyn L. Williamson connected this opening bracket to the Williams glove incident in H5 years ago, but as her focus is on the play’s construction of Hal, she doesn’t follow it through to the argument between Pistol and Fluellen FRQFHUQLQJWKHPRUHHWKQLFDOO\VLJQL¿FDQWJDJHZRUQLQWKH:HOVKPDQ¶VKDW%HIRUH I turn to the corrective communion Fluellen attempts to visit on Pistol, I want to attend to Shakespeare’s earlier introduction of another remarkable Welshman and FRQVLGHUWKHZD\VLQZKLFKKLVGHSLFWLRQLGHQWL¿HVDQGGHVFULEHVWKLVVHTXHQFHRI plays’ larger problems with both perspectives and engagements. 7KH¿UVWZHKHDURI:DOHVLQHenry IV, Part 1 LVDUHSRUWRID¿HUFH battle on the Welsh border when ‘the irregular and wild Glendower’ with ‘rude

3 The OED HQWULHVIRUWKHVHWHUPVUHZDUGFORVHDWWHQWLRQEXWJHQHUDOO\WKH\GH¿QH µZDJH¶DVDSOHGJHRUVHFXULW\VRPHZKDWODWHUDVDFKDOOHQJHRUHQJDJHPHQWWR¿JKWDQG lastly as payment for service so rendered. ‘Gage’ refers to something of value deposited WR HQVXUH WKH SHUIRUPDQFH RI VRPH DFWLRQ DQG OLDEOH WR IRUIHLWXUH )LQDOO\ µZHG¶ LV ¿UVW µDSOHGJHVRPHWKLQJGHSRVLWHGDVVHFXULW\IRUDSD\PHQWRUWKHIXO¿OPHQWRIDQREOLJDWLRQ¶ and secondly a nuptial promise.

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hands’ seized the ‘noble Mortimer.’4:KHQZH¿QDOO\HQFRXQWHUKLPKRZHYHULQ a meeting placed centrally within the play and wholly of Shakespeare’s making, he is not at all as he has been described: he’s a courtly and generous host who graciously corrects Hotspur’s lack of preparation and short temper; his condition is far more ‘regular’ and civilized than his uncouth guest’s, and he is given what are arguably the most lyrical passages in the play. The ‘noble Mortimer,’ far from being seized by rude hands, basks in marital bliss resting his head in his lovely wife’s lap while she sings him to sleep with charming songs (in Welsh). The revelation that Glendower is radically different from earlier English descriptions of him both points up cultural astigmatism and invites us to reconsider our sources of information and the uses to which the English, in their own political negotiations, put the Welsh. While English reports early on in the play would have us associate the Welsh with brutality and witchcraft, modern critics, in a more subtle vein, have persuasively demonstrated that Wales and the Welsh in these plays can be seen as feminizing, history-disrupting, marginalized snares and that the beguiled Mortimer, nestled in his singing lady’s lap and effectively removed from the warring political realm in England, can be likened to the seductively dangerous and evocatively Celtic realm enacted in Spenser’s Bower of Bliss.5 This episode is also, however, highly reminiscent of another story accessible to an early modern audience that gives us a sense of the ways in which elements of Welsh heritage could be seen to contribute to a good English condition. $PRQJVWWKHKLVWRULFDO2ZDLQ*O\QGǒU¶VVWDXQFKHVWVXSSRUWHUVZHUHKLV7XGXU (sic) cousins of Anglesey, whose family united the royal blood of North and South Wales and claimed descent from Cadwaladr, the last British king. Following *O\QGǒU¶VUHEHOOLRQ0DUHG\GGDS7XGXUZDVIRUFHGLQWRH[LOHDQGKLVVRQ2ZDLQ (named for their rebellious kinsman) was taken into Henry V’s service. Owain later anglicized his name, became known as Owen Tudor, and eventually married Hal’s widow, Catherine de Valois. A number of contemporary poems recount the romance of ‘England’s Dowager’ and this ‘Courtly and active Gentleman’ who was once commanded to dance before Catherine and while ‘in a Turne (not being able to recover himselfe) fell into her Lap, as she sat upon a little Stoole, with many of her Ladies about her.’ Far from chagrined, he had the panache to respond, ‘Who would not judge it Fortunes greatest grace,/Sith he must fall, to 4 I’m indebted to Christopher Highley’s reading of these events in ‘Wales, Ireland, and 1Henry 4’, Renaissance Drama, n.s. 21 (1990): 91–114, but while his intriguing project remains more focused on reading these patterns against contemporary Anglo-Irish tensions, I have chosen to follow the Welsh connections. 5 Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London, 1997), 163–75. J.L. Simmons also argues that Shakespeare’s history plays ‘represent history as a masculine discourse that is subject to female interference or generic mutilation’ in ‘Masculine Negotiations in Shakespeare’s History Plays: Hal, Hotspur, and “the Foolish Mortimer”’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 44/4 (1993): 445. Stephen Greenblatt reads Spenser’s Bower as itself another Celtic mire in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), 179, 184–8.

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fall in such a place?’6 This extraordinary meeting is echoed in a sentimental but quite moving account of Tudor’s death: the chronicler William Gregory recorded WKDWZKHQ2ZHQ¿JKWLQJLQVXSSRUWRIKLVVWHSVRQ+HQU\9,GXULQJWKH:DUVRI the Roses, was caught and condemned to death in 1461, he remarked sadly as he laid his head on the block that it had been ‘“wont to lie in Queen Catherine’s lap,” and put his heart and mind wholly unto God and full meekly took his death’.7 That lap is further and repeatedly linked to the Tudors on the English throne: for example, William Harbert of Glamorgan’s ‘A prophecie of Cadwallader’ waxes lyrical about Katherine’s ‘Thrice blessed Wombe …/Which didst enclose that glorious Theodore [a not uncommon but false etymology that glosses “Tudor” as “god’s gift”]/Whose sonne did Britaines regalty restore’ (537–9). Finally, even if audiences had not been exposed to any of these texts, they might very well have seen the (now lost) play Owen Tudor (1599). Associating Glendower’s realm and KLV GDXJKWHU¶V$QJOR:HOVK PDUULDJH ZLWK WKDW KXJHO\ VLJQL¿FDQW 7XGRU PDWFK constructs Wales in somewhat different terms: Mortimer remains enchanted and removed from the fray, but rather than a trap, Wales functions as a repository for the honorable British heritage that the Tudor dynasty came to invoke.8 The thematic core of this scene (and Glendower’s function in it) for me is as a display and analysis of potential solutions to the problems of internal fragmentation that haunt this entire sequence of plays. Throughout, they are concerned with the WUDQVODWLRQRIERUGHUVZLWKGH¿QLQJDQGGLVWLQJXLVKLQJZKDWLVIRUHLJQDQGZLWK integrating what may have been alienated (aristocratic factions, other monarchical candidates, and the ‘rebellious’ Welsh) into a secure English polity. In this central scene, set in Wales, we encounter the key representatives of all three of these factions in Hotspur, Mortimer, and Glendower. But the solution they propose is counterproductive, harkening back to Brutus’ ‘original’ division of Britain amongst his sons. At the same time, Wales functions for Hal as a testing ground: although we don’t see his military forays over the border, we are repeatedly reminded that both he 6

These passages are from Michael Drayton’s enormously popular (six editions over eight years) England’s Heroical Epistles (London, 1597) – this between ‘Queen Katherine and Owen Tudor’ – but there are other similar popular accounts including Hugh Holland’s ‘Pancharis’ (London, 1603) and Richard Johnson’s ‘A new Song of the wooing of Queene Katherine, by a gallant yong Gentleman of Wales named Owen Tudor’ which purports to be a new (London, 1620) English translation of a Welsh verse, as well as the numerous chronicle accounts. 7 Quoted in Glanmor Williams, Renewal and Reformation: Wales, c. 1415–1642, (Oxford, 2002), 188–9. There were also apparently (now lost) plays about Henry Tudor and about Owain Glyndǒr (E.J. Miller, ‘Wales and the Tudor Drama’, Transactions of the Honorable Society of Cymmrodorion, [1948]: 177). 8 A similar action occurs in Locrine (London, 1595) when, amidst the dividing of the realm, Innogen, Brutus’ wife, prophecies that Camber, her youngest son, will produce ‘a royal race,/That shall maintaine the honor of this land,/And sway the regall scepter with their hands’ (1.1.201–3), thus constructing him as a repository for British honor whilst England suffers serial conquest and rape.

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DQGKLVIDWKHUDUHHQJDJHGLQGLI¿FXOWEDWWOHVWKHUH3HUKDSVHYHQPRUHLPSRUWDQWO\ Hal emerges from his raids into Wales a seasoned military commander marked with a new streak of brutality: it is after Hal’s return that his darker side appears (in the banishment of Falstaff and later in the execution of Bardolph and the murder of the French prisoners) – the implication being that he has cut his warrior’s teeth on Wales. *OHQGRZHU0RUWLPHUDQG+RWVSXUIXQFWLRQDVUHÀHFWLRQVRIWKHLUUHVSHFWLYHIDFWLRQV but none is able to resolve the fragmentation that threatens the commonweal; they represent individual elements that could potentially be united into a cohesive whole, but there is, as yet, no perspective glass through which to project a reconstructed Britain. Furthermore, the contract these men seek to produce generates more divisiveness than unity. Fragmented viewpoints and violated contracts continue to ¿JXUHLQ 2H4DOWKRXJK:DOHVDQGWKH:HOVKUHPDLQDQRIIVWDJHLILQÀXHQWLDOIRUFH It isn’t until Henry V that all three elements come to the forefront again. We’ve yet to see what sort of coherent image Hal can construct with his recently mastered multitude of tongues, but early on in H5 we begin to get a sense of the VFRSHRIVXFKDXQLI\LQJSURMHFWLQWKH¿UVWDSSHDUDQFHRIWKHFDSWDLQVZKRUHSUHVHQW each of the most visible ethnicities within Britain. Between them they display great diversity and scope of experience, but left to their own devices they, like the tripartite group in 1H4, are unproductively competitive. A more effective rallying of disparate segments of the English army occurs in Act 4, when Hal musters and attempts to tune what begins as a cacophony of far from harmonious voices. From the beginning, Hal knows that his situation is dire, but he desperately needs to believe that good can be teased out of a bad situation ‘would men observingly distil it out’ (4.1.5) or, borrowing the phrase from R2, would they learn to eye it awry, to view it from a different perspective. Accordingly, he sets out to ‘gather honey from the weed’ and ¿QGDVROXWLRQ$VDPHDQVRIDFKLHYLQJWKHFDQGLGDFFHVVGHQLHGKLPDVNLQJ+DO disguises himself as a Welsh gentleman volunteer, and while he gains a glimpse of the divisiveness often lodged in class and ethnic differences from his encounter with Pistol and a sense of the healing effects of mutuality and fellowship in the companionable meeting he witnesses between Fluellen and Gower, it is in his conversation with Williams, Bates, and Court that Hal realizes where his army’s greatest vulnerability lies – in the fragmenting effect of the privileges afforded the king and other men of elevated status contrasted with the vulnerability of the common soldiers. Hal tries to make a much needed case for brotherhood, but gradually realizes that the conviction that status and privilege are utterly, inherently ineluctable, which assures his sovereignty, also negates his argument. Furthermore, as P.K. Ayers so aptly demonstrates, ‘without the power of his kingship to bridge the gulf he himself has created, he falls into it’.9 Williams is right: no aristocrat, let alone a king, would respect a commoner’s opinion because they operate in separate spheres of symbolic value. An exchange of gages can only make sense between fellows. Thus Hal emerges from the argument uncomfortably aware of his army’s Achilles’ 9 3.$\HUVµ³)HOORZVRI,Q¿QLWH7RQJXH´+HQU\9DQGWKH.LQJ¶V(QJOLVK¶Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 34/2 (1994): 260.

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heel and of the fact that if, as he states in his soliloquy, ceremony, symbolism, and performance are the keys to his sovereignty and privileged condition, they are also the keys to ‘correcting’ them and establishing in their place the image of a more unifying political entity that might heal the breach in his army. In his St Crispin’s Day address, Hal effectively secularizes a religious holiday, repeatedly invoking the names of the noble, ultimately martyred, brothers renowned for embracing a plebeian life and for conferring gentility on commoners. At the same time, he ceremoniously enacts the erasure of privilege and constructs D UKHWRULFDO WHOHVFRSH RI VHOHFWLYHO\ UHÀHFWLYH PLUURUV WKDW ZLOO SURGXFH WKH DQDPRUSKLFDOO\DOWHUHGUHVXOWKHGHVLUHV±DIRFXVHGXQL¿HGDQGXQTXHVWLRQLQJO\ OR\DO¿JKWLQJIRUFH7KLVWUDQVLWRU\PRPHQWRIQDWLRQDOLVWXQLW\LQVFULELQJWKHVH men together in a shared and all but hagiographic history and glorious future, achieves its triumphant magic by translating aristocratic titles into ‘household words,’ gentling the ‘condition’ of the rudest soldier, and substituting for elitist chronicles a simple ‘story’ that ‘the good man [shall] teach his son’ in years to come. But Hal, not unlike Henry Tudor who invoked resurgent Welsh glory with a similar sense of self-interest, has no intention of living in that egalitarian world and, in order to resurrect his sovereignty and authority after the battle, he must SHUIRUPDQRWKHUV\PEROLFDOO\VLJQL¿FDQWFHUHPRQ\UHDVVHUWLQJKLVSULYLOHJH Although Fluellen serves several important functions in the play, I wish to focus on the way in which he both aids in performing this resurrection of English hierarchy that locates its epitome in the monarch’s sovereignty and concomitantly articulates a newer and potentially destabilizing mode of cultural communion. It has been suggested that Fluellen may have been modeled on Sir Roger Williams, D ÀDPER\DQW DQG GDULQJ SURIHVVLRQDO VROGLHU ZKRVH H[SORLWV RQ WKH FRQWLQHQW IUHTXHQWO\LQIXULDWHG(OL]DEHWKHYHQWKRXJKWKHLUUHVXOWVDOPRVWLQYDULDEO\EHQH¿WHG her.10 Williams, whose exhibitionistic bravado found expression in the enormous bunch of plumes he sported on his helmet, served under Leicester, who knighted him for his valor, and with the second Earl of Essex, who was with him at his death in December 1595 and saw to it that he was buried at St Paul’s with full military honors. While I don’t think that any sort of direct correlation is intended, I do feel that Shakespeare had Williams in mind as he developed Fluellen and that the ways in which they differ are as telling as their similarities. It is often noted that while Roger Williams was greatly respected for writing on military decorum, he comes down on the opposite side from Fluellen on the ancients versus moderns debate.11

10 We might also note further acknowledgments of a Welsh presence at Agincourt in the PHQWLRQRI'DY\*DPDQDFWXDOKLVWRULFDO¿JXUH LQWKHOLVWRIWKHFDVXDOWLHVDVZHOODVWKH use of two common Welsh surnames for the captain Gower and the soldier Williams (Patricia Parker, ‘Uncertain Unions: Welsh Leeks in Henry V’, in David J. Baker and Willy Maley [eds], British Identities and English Renaissance Literature [Cambridge, 2002], 92). 11 See J.H. Walter’s introduction to H5 (xxx), as well as Donald A. Neill, ‘Ancestral 9RLFHV7KH,QÀXHQFHRIWKH$QFLHQWVRQWKH0LOLWDU\7KRXJKWRIWKH6HYHQWHHQWKDQG(LJKWHHQWK Centuries’, The Journal of Military History, 62/3 (July 1998): 487–520, on these debates.

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But a more suggestive difference, that brings us back to Agincourt, appears in comparing an episode of Williams’ life to Fluellen’s. William Camden recounts in his Annals … of Elizabeth that, during the war in the Netherlands, one captaine Thomas an Albanois challenged at this time Generall Norris to a single combat, and Sir Roger Williams his Lieutenant accepted the challenge (for that he [Norris] being Generall might not doe it by the law of Armes), I know not whether it be worth the mentioning, considering that after they had bickered together a little while in the view of both Armies, and neither of them hurt, they dranke a carowse, and so parted friends. (231v2)

It is worth noting that Essex was also under the command of John Norris and like him went on to serve in Ireland. Furthermore, aside from serving with Williams, Essex was himself known for a treatise on the ‘law of arms’ and is famously alluded to in the chorus to Act 5, in a passage that uncomfortably associates him with the triumphant Hal.12 For my purposes, however, Camden’s account is most suggestive in that it clearly depicts Williams graciously volunteering to do precisely the service that Hal, as Shakespeare constructs him, manipulates an unknowing Fluellen into performing. This difference, I want to argue, can be seen as part of Hal’s reassertion of an imperial monarchical authority that began with his order to kill the French prisoners. As audience members, we are privy to information that Hal doesn’t have: we see that the English king’s leveling of his soldiers’ ranks seems to have spread, LQIHFWLQJ DQG ZUHDNLQJ KDYRF RQ WKH )UHQFK LQ WKH EDWWOH¿HOG 7KHLU QREOHV declare that their ‘ranks are broke’ and ‘disorder … hath spoiled us’ (4.5.6 and 17) as later Montjoy will despair that ‘our princes …/Lie drowne’d and soak’d in mercenary blood’ while ‘our vulgar drench their peasant limbs/In blood of princes’ (4.7.78–80). Although aware that his forces are doing well generally, when FRQIURQWHG ZLWK WKH EURDGHU UDPL¿FDWLRQV RI OHYHOLQJ WKH DUP\ LQ WKH JUDSKLF report of Suffolk’s and York’s romanticized deaths in battle (4.6), and panicking at the sight of French reinforcements, Hal, in violation of respected rules of combat, orders the murder of his French prisoners. Immediately following this order, a distraught Fluellen enters exclaiming, ‘Kill the poys and the luggage! ‘tis expressly against the law of arms.’ The concussion of a violation of orthography and a violation of military protocol produces a grotesquely bathetic note. The slaughter of the pages, who were in service to knights but did not participate directly in battle, is unnecessary and vicious. But so was Hal’s order to murder the French prisoners. Both sides have violated prescribed rules of war that are underwritten, just as individual challenges would be, by their reputations and honor. But while

12 My thanks to Willy Maley for drawing my attention to the Norris family’s activities in Ireland. The multitude of connections amongst Williams, Norris, and Essex and their relevance to this play are tantalizing but beyond the scope of the current essay.

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the French have acted in desperation, Hal’s order seems more peremptory and marks the start of his reassertion of imperious royal prerogative. )URP KLV ¿UVW DSSHDUDQFH &DSWDLQ )OXHOOHQ KDV IXQFWLRQHG DV D PRFN RU LPLWDWLRQRI+DODVFRPPDQGHUKLV¿UVWZRUGVDPRXQWWRDFRPLFDOO\FRPSUHVVHG version of Hal’s famous oration, reducing the king’s eloquent 34-line exhortation WRRQHFUXGHFKDUJHµ8SWRWKHSUHDFK\RXGRJV¶)OXHOOHQIXUWKHUGHÀDWHV+DO¶V elevated terms: purebred greyhounds become common curs and even the salutary send-off ‘God for Harry, England and Saint George’ comes back as ‘Avaunt, you FXOOLRQV¶6LPLODUO\ZKHUH+DOLQYRNHV$OH[DQGHULQKLV+DUÀHXUVSHHFKWRLQVSLUH his ‘English’ soldiers, Fluellen famously compares the English king at Agincourt to ‘Alexander the Pig.’ Indeed, as Patricia Parker has wittily demonstrated, Fluellen’s grammar repeatedly points up the ‘leaks’ in the union that the play elsewhere labors to invoke. In a text that Andrew Gurr introduces as an ‘assembly of mockeries,’ and following the Chorus’ advice that we should be ‘minding true things by what their mock’ries be,’ I want to examine the series of mockeries, counterfeits, and VNHZHGSHUVSHFWLYHVWKDWFRPSULVHWKH¿QDOVFHQHVZLWKDSDUWLFXODUH\HWRWKH IXQFWLRQRI)OXHOOHQDQGWKHÀHGJOLQJ%ULWLVKFXOWXUDOFRPPXQLW\HYRNHGLQWKH Welsh correction he proffers to Pistol’s woeful English condition. The mocking note sounded in the captains’ discussion of Alexander the Pig – which invokes both the heroism and the brutality of the conqueror – is echoed in Hal’s rather disingenuous appeal to Fluellen’s ethnic pride as a fellow ‘countryman,’ an appeal that sounds friendly but that, as Gurr notes, implies ‘a slightly more removed relationship than the brotherhood’ Hal conjured prior to WKHEDWWOH7KXVZKDWVHHPVDW¿UVWJODQFHWREHDPRPHQWRIFRPUDGHO\ERQKRPLH can also be seen as a small step in the direction of reestablishing the king’s rank and privilege. Hal’s status as a Welshman is further compromised by his bloody history in that country and by the taint that attaches to his ancestor’s appropriation of the title ‘Prince of Wales,’ just as his sovereignty is tarnished by his father’s spurious acquisition of the English crown. One can also trace shadows here of other, perhaps more genuine, Welsh princes encountered in this history, such as *OHQGRZHU DQG 0RUWLPHU DV ZHOO DV WKH PRVW VLJQL¿FDQW RQH KRYHULQJ LQ WKH wings at the play’s forward-looking close, Owen Tudor, or even his grandson, another Henry, whose dedication to his ‘Welsh plood’ came and went as needed. But Fluellen’s enthusiastic embrace of Hal’s claim demonstrates a critical aspect of his own subjection: his willingness both to forget chapters of the past that jar ZLWK±DQGWRUHVXUUHFWHSLVRGHVWKDWFRQWULEXWHWR±WKHQDUUDWLYHWKDWMXVWL¿HVKLV status as Welsh subject and Hal’s as English monarch.13 It is an uncomfortable 13 In ‘Wars of Memory in Henry V’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 47/2 (Summer 1996): ±-RQDWKDQ%DOGR¿QGVWKHHQWLUHSOD\LOOXVWUDWLYHRIµWKHXVHVRIIRUJHWWLQJIRUWKH consolidation of national memory.’ He sees MacMorris as ‘assenting to the erasure of his nation’s memory, whereas Fluellen repeatedly echoes Henry’s language of remembrance’  EXW,¿QGHYLGHQFHRIERWKµFRPPXQDODPQHVLD¶ DQGFRPPHPRUDWLRQLQ Fluellen’s status as a loyal (to the English state) Welshman.

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moment that illustrates Ernest Renan’s insistence on the importance of forgetting the violent past of groups that are later united in the conjuring of a nation (11). As if to underscore that very point, a further slathering of irony is added when Fluellen recalls the brave service done by the Welsh at Crecy, at the very moment that the Welsh archers who were instrumental in the victory at Agincourt are forgotten, and when he alludes to the wearing of a leek, an act that commemorates WKH ODVW VXFFHVVIXO :HOVK EDWWOH DJDLQVW WKH YHU\ SHRSOH )OXHOOHQ QRZ ¿HUFHO\ defends. This rapid sequence of mocks (none of which occurs in Shakespeare’s sources) alerts the audience to the duplicity that marks subsequent scenes and to the paradoxical position that Fluellen occupies as both the English king’s champion and a patriotic Welshman. Thus it neatly introduces ‘the game’ Hal plays with Williams and Fluellen over honor, wage(r)s, and a pair of gages.14 Having brought to mind the ‘memorable honour’ represented by a Welshman wearing a leek in his cap and the unity that it infers, Shakespeare brings on Williams with Hal’s glove in his cap, and has Hal set up Fluellen in his favorite role – as the arbiter of military decorum. Fluellen insists that a soldier must follow through with his engagement regardless of social differences at the risk of his reputation as an honorable man and contrary to the ‘law of Armes’ that Roger Williams cited as the reason his superior could not engage in the duel (4.7.135–47). I’ve argued earlier that gages work as feudal contracts, as bonds reliant on the challengers’ reputations and honor; here Hal’s actions harken back to Richard’s arrogant absolutist sense of sovereignty, reasserting a paternal rather than fraternal sense of kinship, both in his handling of his ‘kinsman’ Fluellen and in his interruption DQGUHFXSHUDWLRQRIWKH¿JKWKHKDVDUUDQJHG)OXHOOHQDSSHDUVWREHWKHHSLWRPH of an anglicized Welshman: he has retained elements of the symbolic capital of his Welsh heritage, but embraces a radical English revision of its context that renders it justly subservient to English interests and authority. In Fluellen’s crucial role in the Williams’ glove episode can be seen the rudiments for later constructions of Welsh characters. He functions as a buffer, a defender, a cat’s paw, as well as a sheepdog, just as later characters will intercede on behalf of troubled English lovers, further English enterprise, and defend English hegemony. But, as I hope to VKRZKHUHDQGLQKLVODWHUHQFRXQWHUZLWK3LVWROKHDOVRKHOSVWRGH¿QHDQ(QJOLVK nature and place – a good English condition. Clever puppeteering allows Hal to stage the reassertion of his privilege without actually participating in the labor and risk of performance. Not only does he send WKHXQZLWWLQJ)OXHOOHQWR¿JKWRQKLVEHKDOIZKHQKHFRQWUDYHQHVLQWKLVWHVWRI honor, he avoids paying his soldier’s wages himself; rather he orders Exeter to do it, thereby resurrecting a median grade in his previously leveled society. This VWDJHGFKDOOHQJHSXWV:LOOLDPV¿UPO\EDFNLQKLVVXERUGLQDWHSODFH±QRORQJHU engaged in a brotherly challenge on his honor as a fellow Englishman, Williams is 14 In his introduction to the Cambridge edition of H5 (Cambridge, 1992), Andrew Gurr refers to this scene as ‘a game’ and notes that with the exception of that scene, ‘the play follows Holinshed closely for the aftermath of the battle’ (233).

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demoted to a hireling, paid his wages and dismissed. His honor, integrity, reputation, and the supposedly shared cultural past and future so eloquently conjured in the St Crispin’s Day speech, are reduced to a handful (literally) of crowns – the emblems of Hal’s privilege. Furthermore, lest he forget his place in future, Williams is ordered to continue wearing Hal’s gage in his hat, itself now a mockery crown, but unlike Fluellen’s leek, which represents shared cultural and soldierly solidarity, :LOOLDPV¶µKRQRXU¶LVDUHPLQGHUWKDWKLVÀHHWLQJO\JHQWOHGIUDWHUQDOFRQGLWLRQFDQ be bought and sold at the whim of his paternalistic betters. Marilyn L. Williamson has noted that while Hal doesn’t end up ransoming his life from the French, he does ransom ‘his oath to Williams’,15 but I want to suggest that what his payment ransoms is, more particularly, his privileged status as king. Though Hal is saved the ignominy of having to buy himself back from the French, the price of the victory at Agincourt is the (temporary) relinquishing of the YHU\SULYLOHJHWKDWUDQVRPLQJFRPPRGL¿HV+LVSD\PHQWWR:LOOLDPVLPSOLHVWKDW a different sort of economic deal has transpired: Hal had effectively mortgaged his sovereignty to the commons of England in order to triumph in France. It has a maddeningly short life, this level community of supportive brothers, but the spell that conjures it, the terms in which the mortgage is contracted are the basis of a unifying British nationalist narrative, and as is the case with any story, once it is in circulation, it is no longer subject to authorial control, as we see shortly when Fluellen unsuccessfully but evocatively recasts it. At the same time, having cashiered his band of brothers in order to resurrect his sovereignty, Hal can no longer rely on the unity that bond entailed to control and direct them. What he can (and does) build on after Agincourt is an assertion of absolute imperial sovereignty, ironically reminiscent of Richard’s. The opening chorus of the last act highlights Hal’s adoption of the imperial mode with references to ‘antique Rome,’ ‘plebians,’ DQGPRVWVLJQL¿FDQWO\µFRQTXHULQJ&DHVDU¶16 Both scenes in this act depict forced attempts at social cohesion, one cultural and fraternal, the other matrimonial and imperial, and they present both as doomed but resonant. Despite the Chorus’ request that we ‘admit th’ excuse/Of time, of numbers, and due course of things’ and ‘brook abridgement’ (5.0.3–4, 44), critics are often annoyed by 5.1 which feels temporally displaced and seems a diversion from what they SHUFHLYHDVWKHSOD\¶VSULPDU\JRDOWKH¿QDOPDULWDOJORU\RIWKH(QJOLVKPRQDUFK I’m not convinced that the marriage is the play’s culmination, and this scene about the common soldiers after the battle provides an ironic contrast to the triumphal reentry into London that we have just been directed to envision: it emphasizes that this is a different kind of history from the monarchical chronicle or heroic epic, one that considers a much larger community encompassing multiple ethnic, regional, 15

Marilyn L. Williamson, ‘The Episode with Williams in Henry V’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 9/2 (1969): 280. 16 Again, the allusion in this passage to Essex, along with his relationship to Roger Williams and both men’s troubled relations with the English state and the ‘Celtic fringe,’ hint at interesting lines of enquiry that rest beyond the scope of this essay.

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linguistic, professional, and class cohorts. Finally, the scene enacts the closing measure in the repeated pattern of gages and wages, perspectives and mockeries that have echoed throughout this sequence of plays, and in so doing draws together a number of thematic concerns that would otherwise be left unresolved. The key issues of the previous scene are swiftly resurrected in Fluellen’s proud display of his ‘honourable badge,’ which points both to his ethnic pride and to the gages worn in Hal’s and Williams’ hats, and in his reduction of Pistol from ‘as valiant a man as Mark Antony’ (3.7.11–12) to a ‘rascally, scald, beggarly, lousy, pragging knave … no better than a fellow’ (5.1.5–7). The diminution relates both to Pistol individually and to the larger, recently disbanded, fellowship whose now VXSHUÀXRXVPHPEHUVDUHDSSDUHQWO\OHIWWR¿QGWKHLURZQZD\VKRPH7KHGHIHUUHG resolution to the contention between the king and his soldier is further echoed structurally in Fluellen’s delayed response to Pistol’s insults, which actually began over Bardolph’s death sentence for stealing the ‘pax of little price’ and the Welshman’s refusal to intercede on his behalf (3.7). The quarrel was exacerbated by the ensign’s subsequent dismissal of Fluellen’s fellowship as worthless and reignited when the one-time victualer Pistol scornfully reduced Fluellen’s ‘honourable badge’ to its literal, vegetable worth by offering him ‘pread and salt’ ZLWKZKLFKWRURXQGRXWKLVPHDO+DYLQJ¿QDOO\IRXQGWKHDSSURSULDWHRSSRUWXQLW\ to respond, Fluellen seeks satisfaction by reenacting his role as the surrogate king in the confrontation with Williams, but this time he casts Pistol in the latter role. Earlier I referred to this scene as the forcible administration of a cultural form of communion, employing Fluellen’s gage, the redolent leek, a sacrament of Welsh heritage. Without trespassing too deeply into a related but complex fray, I want to note that the act of taking communion and the status of the eucharist itself are ULFKO\LIDPELJXRXVO\VLJQL¿FDQWLQWKLVSHULRG$UQROG+XQWKDVDUJXHGWKDWWKLV ¿HOGLVEHVWYLHZHGDVDQDUHQDLQZKLFKDYDULHW\RIVRFLDOUHODWLRQVDUHVXEWO\ renegotiated. Tracing a gradual reduction of the rules enforcing the practice of receiving communion, Hunt chronicles the social importance of the act both as ‘an instrument of reconciliation’ and as a means ‘to reinforce social distinctions’ and ‘parochial identity’ (47, 49–50). Thus, despite widespread variations in practice (both regionally and temporally), taking communion remains a site of social cohesion even as the emphasis wavers between integration and differentiation. $WWKHVDPHWLPHWKHVLJQL¿FDQFHDQGYDOXHRIWKHHXFKDULVWLWVHOIZDVZLGHO\GHEDWHG DWWKHVLPSOHVWOHYHOLQZD\VWKDWDUHUHÀHFWHGLQWKLVVFHQH7UDQVXEVWDQWLDWLRQ ‘widely regarded as the key doctrinal error of the Church of Rome … [and therefore] crucial in establishing the Church of England’s Protestant identity,’ relies on a passionate leap of faith that literally converts a wafer of bread into the body of Christ, whereas English Protestants saw the eucharist as a metaphor, µDYLVLEOHVLJQRILQYLVLEOHJUDFHDPHPRULDORIDVDFUL¿FHZKRVHVSLULWXDOHIIHFWV communion made more accessible.’17 The distinction is between seeing in the 17 Arnold Hunt, ‘The Lord’s Supper in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 161/1 (1998): 40. The last quotation is taken from Jeffrey Knapp, ‘Preachers and Players in

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same object a realistically worthless but symbolically rich crust of bread or the most sacred body in the history of the Christian world. ,QFXOWXUDODQGHWKQLFWHUPVWKHVLJQL¿FDQFHRIZHDULQJDOHHNLQRQH¶VFDSRQ 6W'DYLG¶V'D\LVVLPLODUO\FRQWUDGLFWRU\3LVWRO¶VFXUVRU\GHÀDWLRQRI)OXHOOHQ¶V UDWKHU XQZLHOG\ EDGJH RI KRQRU LV PRUH ZLGHO\ UHÀHFWHG LQ WKH FRPPRQ contemporary expression ‘not worth a leek,’ a dismissal reminiscent of Pistol’s favorite expletive, a ¿FRRUD¿J)RU)OXHOOHQRIFRXUVHLWLVWKHV\PERORIKLV invaluable cultural heritage. Traditionally, the leek is a symbol of a Welsh victory over the Saxons, but the particulars vary: in some stories it serves as an emblem of Welsh patron St David’s renowned asceticism or of the willingness of the Welsh soil to sustain the embattled warrior; in others, it serves more prosaically as a badge distinguishing his compatriots from the Saxon enemy. A further parallel to Fluellen’s attempt at cultural communion is recounted in Humfrey Lluyd’s Breviary: in response to the Augustinian slaughter of British clerics, kings of Cornwall, North and South Wales united against the Saxons and hartned forward by the Oration of their most learned Abbot Dunetus, who commended, as our Chronacles reporte, that every one [of the soldiers] should kisse the grounde, in remembrance of the comunion of the Body of our Lord, VKRXOGWDNHXSZDWHULQWKHLUKDQGHVIRRUWKRIWKH5LYHU'HHDQGGULQNHLW in commemoration of the moste sacred Bloud of CHRIST, which was shed for them. Who, havynge so Communicated, they overcame the Saxons in a famous battayle, and slew of them, as Huntygnton writeth: a thousande threescore, and ¿YH)ROVY±U

,Q /OX\G¶V QDUUDWLYH VROGLHUV ZKR ZHUH SUHYLRXVO\ DW RGGV UHGH¿QH WKHPVHOYHV uniting in their shared language, religion, and opposition to a common enemy, and are enjoined to consecrate their enterprise by imaginatively imparting to the soil and water of Wales the blessedness of their communion with Christ, thus sanctifying their union in their country. But even while describing the invention of a hallowed corporation, the account emphasizes the consecrating power of each willing individual. The episode also highlights one of the English state’s principle appropriations of ‘Welsh’ history in establishing the primacy of the early ‘British’ church over Rome – an invaluable Welsh correction of a contentious English condition. Each of the REMHFWVRIYHQHUDWLRQ±KRVWOHHNDQGFRXQWU\±LVVDQFWL¿HGE\IDLWKDQGGHYRWLRQ their values change with the voluntary engagements of their communicants. )OXHOOHQLQKLVGHYRWLRQWRWKLVLPDJLQHGKLVWRULFDOO\VDQFWL¿HGDQGSHUHQQLDOO\ memorialized communion, engages in the contract symbolized by the leek worn in his cap: converting symbol into act, word into deed, he defends the honor of the Shakespeare’s England’, Representations, 44 (1993): 29–59, which reads H5 as evidence that the early modern theatre provided ‘a spiritually valuable institution’ (33) in which theatrical practices encouraged a more egalitarian engagement with religious doctrine. While I agree with his assertion that the theatre was capable of generating a ‘reformed communion’ (50), I’m more concerned to examine its secular manifestations.

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PHQZKRVHVDFUL¿FHLVFRPPHPRUDWHGLQKLVEDGJH%HDWLQJDQGKXPLOLDWLQJ3LVWRO IXO¿OOVWKHLPSOLHGSURPLVHWRGHIHQGWKHKRQRURIWKHKLVWRULFDOVDFUL¿FHV\PEROL]HG LQWKHOHHNWDNLQJRQWKDWWDVNIXO¿OOV)OXHOOHQ¶VHQJDJHPHQWZLWKKLVKHULWDJHDQG commemorates his inclusion in that community. Feeding the leek to Pistol, however, opens up the possibility that he too could become part of the community by ingesting, embodying its symbolic representation.18 Given Pistol’s earlier assertion that ‘oaths are straws, men’s faiths are wafer-cakes,’ and that his purpose in going to the war in France is ‘like horseleeches, my boys,/To suck, to suck, the very blood to suck’ (2.3.51–7), it is hardly surprising that a forced communion leaves him unmoved. As the end of the scene makes painfully clear, secular communion like spiritual FRPPXQLRQLVRQO\DFKLHYHGE\DZLOOLQJQHVVWRVDFUL¿FHHYHU\WKLQJIRUZKDWLQWKH eyes of a non-communicant, amounts to nothing. Thus volition becomes the key to determining value and to membership in these communities. Pistol’s refusal to respect Fluellen’s heritage stands in sharp FRQWUDVW WR:LOOLDPV¶ ZLOOLQJQHVV WR VDFUL¿FH KLV KRQRU LQ UHVSHFW RI WKH NLQJ¶V As Williams explains when Fluellen charges him before the king, he had promised WRVWULNHWKHPDQZKRZRUHKLVJORYHLQKLVFDSDQGKHKDVNHSWKLVZRUGIXO¿OOLQJ his oath by exchanging a concrete action for its contracted symbol. So far he is in conformity with the code Fluellen has articulated. But then Hal points out that Williams struck Fluellen, whereas his quarrel and his oath actually concerned the (disguised) king; this mistake, according to ‘any martial law in the world’ is a KDQJLQJ RIIHQVH 6LJQL¿FDQWO\ +DO WRVVHV WKH SUREOHP EDFN WR:LOOLDPV IRU KLV assessment, thereby compelling the soldier to ‘voluntarily’ confess to and rationalize his (understandable, but nevertheless punishable) mistake and to appeal to Hal’s privilege, the communally conferred right to supersede the laws that otherwise

18 While the comparable scene in Sir John Oldcastle (2.1.1–127) likewise entails the satisfyingly literal depiction of making one’s opponent eat his own words (Pistol did urge Fluellen to eat his leek), it doesn’t take on this sacramental quality. Other critics have IRXQGLQWULJXLQJO\UHODWHGVLJQL¿FDQFHLQWKLVDFW-DPHV/&DOGHUZRRGIRUH[DPSOHLQ Shakespeare and the Denial of Death (Amherst, 1987) focuses on the anthropological cannibalistic angle (that is also present in communion) of symbolically consuming your enemies’ strength and spirit. Parker, ‘Uncertain Unions: Welsh Leeks in Henry V’, considers the erotic implications which would, I think, make this act a type of rape and thus a suitable parallel to Hal’s (inescapable) proposal to Kate in the following scene. Parker also reads ‘leek’ homonymically as an allusion to the unstoppable ‘leaks’ within the body politic. And ¿QDOO\LQKLVVWXG\RIWKHFLUFXODWLRQWKURXJK(QJOLVKDQG:HOVK OLWHUDWXUHRI-XYHQDO¶V satiric attack on the Egyptians’ veneration of onions and leeks, and various cultures’ duelling V\VWHPVRIVLJQL¿FDWLRQµ(QJOLVK3RHWV(J\SWLDQ2QLRQVDQGWKH3URWHVWDQW9LHZRIWKH Eucharist’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 30/4 (1969): 563–578, Tom T. Tashiro includes DYHUVHRI:DOWHU5DOHLJK¶VµWKH¿UVWFOHDUXVHRI-XYHQDO¶LQ(QJODQGWKDW,EHOLHYHPD\ provide a clue to Shakespeare’s associating the Welsh leek in Fluellen’s remembrance with a garden: ‘The Egyptians think it sin to root up or to bite/Their leeks or onions, which they serve with holy rite. O happy nations, which of their own sowing/Have stores of gods in every garden growing’ (568).

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JRYHUQDQGGH¿QHWKHFRPPXQLW\%\VWDJHPDQDJLQJHYHQWVLQWKLVIDVKLRQ+DOQRW only achieves the resurrection of his sovereignty, but he arranges for his subjects to re-interpellate themselves in the supporting hierarchy. It is a brilliant, if supremely cynical, move – one that he will attempt to replay in his ‘courtship’ of Katherine. For the moment though, it demonstrates the necessity for willing participation in the respect of authority and the coherence of a community surrounding it. As we see when Fluellen tries to reenact the earlier challenge, without Hal’s ‘ceremony’ – his communally endowed authority – physical violence is required to impose his will, and the result is far from a satisfactory communion. Nationalism can be seen as a secular, political manifestation of faith, and the sacraments of a nation are its shared cultural practices and, importantly, the symbolic value that is invested in those practices and in their artifacts. As the (QJOLVKVWDWHFDPHWRLGHQWLI\VSHFL¿FQHHGVWKDWDURVHLQODUJHSDUWIURPLWVGHVLUH to establish its independence from Europe, it repeatedly found the answers to those needs in Welsh culture and its British history, gradually assimilating elements of ERWK LQWR (QJOLVK FXOWXUH ¿UVW XQGHU +HQU\9,, DV D PHDQV RI JDWKHULQJ:HOVK support in his bid for the English throne, then under Henry VIII as a way of legitimizing the Church of England, and later under Elizabeth I in an attempt to maintain Welsh allegiance and to advance the bounds of the nascent, Englishstate-sponsored British Empire. This awkward little scene offers a unique record of the clumsy and painful negotiations whereby a community in formation selects DQG HYDOXDWHV WKRVH SUDFWLFHV WKDW ZLOO EHFRPH GH¿QLWLYH RI LW 3LVWRO¶V EUXVTXH dismissal of this particular custom points up the voluntary nature of this form of social cohesion; the kind of allegiance that Fluellen demonstrates, and that hovers in some transitional stage between religious or monarchical devotion and nationalism, cannot be force-fed in the way that subjection to absolute authority is violently enforced on Bardolph or coerced in Williams. At the same time, this rather confused sequence of treatments of Welsh heritage reveals in Fluellen the complicated process of forgetting and imaginative revisioning that is required of the national communicant, of the secular faithful.19 7KDWYROLWLRQDOGHYRWLRQDQGVDFUL¿FHLVDOVRWKHNH\WRWKHSOD\¶V¿QDOVFHQH between Hal and Kate, the last in this long series of engagements. In keeping with the imperial tone of his triumphal entry into London, Hal has abandoned his legal claims to the French crown and is content to claim it as a conqueror. As in his clever stage-management of the episode with Williams, here Hal contrives to make Kate a willing partner in what is effectively rape, forcing, as P.K. Ayers notes, ‘a romantic-comedy resolution’ and providing ‘a kind of polite cover for the naked reality of his demands’ (253–4). It is instructive to compare the like scene 19

See Richard Levin, ‘On Fluellen’s Figures, Christ Figures, and James Figures’, PMLA,    ± IRU FODUL¿FDWLRQ RI WKH UHOHQWOHVVO\ DQG µQHFHVVDULO\ VHOIFRQ¿UPLQJ¶ method of ‘the Fluellenian mode of comparison.’ Although Levin is most concerned to trace the presence of ‘Fluellenism’ in Shakespearian criticism, his discussion helpfully delineates the highly selective, deterministic labor in which Fluellen so eagerly engages.

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in 7KH IDPRXV YLFWRULHV RI +HQU\ WKH ¿IWK (1586): there while Hal’s part remains less developed but much the same in tenor, Kate’s is quite different. Not only is the earlier Kate at ease with the English language, she is also adept at playing the courtly coquette, and gives as good as she gets in spirited exchanges with Hal. There is nothing here of the later Kate’s careful and, at times, politely resistant maneuvering. In fact, the earlier Kate is given an aside to the audience in which she confesses: ‘I may thinke my selfe the happiest in the world,/That is beloved of the mightie King RI(QJODQG¶6LJ)U 1RWRQO\GRHVWKLV.DWH¿QGWKHFRQTXHURUDSSHDOLQJVKH obligingly overcomes any maidenly hesitation on her own, warning herself ‘I had best [agree to the marriage] whilst he is willing,/Least when I would, he will not’ (Sig. G2r). Neither the French crown nor Kate actually has any choice in the matter, but the contrast between the earlier play’s brisk, reciprocal, and admiring exchange and Shakespeare’s laborious and domineering scene appears to describe quite differently contracted unions. Ultimately, Hal’s complicated maneuvering here is of a piece with his manipulation of Fluellen and Williams: each attempts to construct a bond in other than feudal terms, to elicit a voluntary and willing submission. As the defeated French king notes, it’s very much a matter of seeing things ‘perspectively.’ )XUWKHUPRUH LI ZH VXEPLW WR WKH &KRUXV¶ ¿QDO GLUHFWLRQ DQG ORRN SDVW WKLV ‘small time’ to the future when Hal is dead, hovering in the wings is another Prince RI:DOHV2ZHQ*O\QGǒU¶VQDPHVDNHZKRZLOORIIHUURPDQWLFDQGFRQWUDFWXDO rather than imperiously forced, marriage to this same woman, and from that union produce not the doomed baby that Hal leaves behind, but the scion of the Tudor monarchs. Where Hal’s legacy is the loss of France and a bleeding England, Owen Tudor’s story, told repeatedly in poems, songs, and at least one lost play, left ‘such seasoned sweetnesse in the Eare,/That the Voyce past, yet still the Sound is there’ (Drayton 123–4). Throughout this discussion, I have attempted to obey the Chorus’ enjoinder that we read these complex relationships through the various mockeries of them, and that we watch for problematic conditions and the most fruitful corrections of them. The Henriad considers a number of perspectives from which to effect a British communion; the most successful one is the ‘band of EURWKHUV¶WKDWRIIHUVDÀHHWLQJLPDJHRIDPRUHHJDOLWDULDQVRFLHW\ZLWKDVKDUHG history and future in which all are deeply and volitionally invested. While it is from +DO¶VSHUVSHFWLYHWKDWWKLVXQLRQLV¿UVWDVVHPEOHGIURPKLVSHUVSHFWLYHLWPXVW also be dismantled if he is to retain his privileged position within it. However, the play in performance and the audience’s participation in that act also function like a perspective glass to wrest control of the display and differently rejoin the fractured segments – of which Hal is only one – into a unitary image.20 20 Amongst the most insightful of studies exploring the community-building function of the theatre are Peter Womack’s ‘Imagining Communities: Theatres and the English Nation in the Sixteenth Century’, in David Aers (ed.), Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing (Detroit, 1992), 91–145; as well as Jean E. Howard’s The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London, 1994); and, more recently, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia, 2007).

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)LQDOO\ZKLOHHWKQLFLW\OLNHFODVVUHJLRQDORUJHQGHULGHQWL¿FDWLRQLVODUJHO\ divisive in these plays, our attention is repeatedly drawn to the dangers of faction and the need for communion. It is for later British history plays to demonstrate the ways in which Welsh history and traditions could provide a wealth of material conducive to the English state formation of a regenerate Britain. As we’ve seen, however, communions are not successfully subject to state (or individual) imposition – forced, like Hal’s reinterpellation of Williams, or his acquisition of Kate and France, these unions remain tainted, vulnerable, and impermanent. Such alliances are far more durable when they come to seem willingly embraced, as in Fluellen’s simultaneous HQJDJHPHQWLQWKHODZVRIZDUDQGKLV:HOVKKHULWDJHDORQJVLGHKLV¿HUFHGHIHQVH of the (often antipathetic) English state, and when they are reenacted regularly and ceremonially – in wearing a leek on St David’s Day, in remembering battle scars on St Crispin’s, in rallying for St George, or in repeated dramatic presentations. In the early modern theatres’ ongoing performances before heterogeneous audiences we can glimpse aspects of the ceremonial engagements and imaginatively transmuted sacraments of a culturally communicant British nation.

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Chapter 5

‘O, lawful let it be/ That I have room … to curse awhile’: Voicing the Nation’s Conscience in Female Complaint in Richard III, King John, and Henry VIII Alison Thorne

God’s wrong is most of all. If thou didst fear to break an oath with him, The unity the king my husband made Thou hadst not broken, nor my brothers died. If thou hadst feared to break an oath by him, Th’imperial metal circling now thy head Had graced the tender temples of my child, And both the princes had been breathing here, Which now – two tender bedfellows for dust – Thy broken faith hath made the prey for worms. (Richard III, 4.4.308–17)1

In the speech quoted above Queen Elizabeth unmasks Richard’s pledge to atone for the murder of her two young sons by marrying her daughter for the travesty of reparation it is by reciting the crimes he has committed against his own family and the body politic. This incident, one of many such moments in the three plays examined here, bears witness to the oppositional role assumed by aggrieved royal women in some of the earliest and the last of Shakespeare’s chronicle plays: Richard III, King John, and Henry VIII (the latter co-authored with John Fletcher). In particular, it serves to highlight the interrelated functions of these characters as custodians of England’s troubled history whose memory is continually at risk of being erased or overwritten, as defenders of the national interest in the face of lawlessness and tyranny, and above all as tireless agitators for justice. Although we might expect WKHVHJRRGRI¿FHVWREHUHFRJQL]HGDVVXFKE\PRGHUQSOD\JRHUVDQGUHDGHUVLQD post-feminist age, this has rarely been the case. More often, the formidable matrons of Shakespeare’s Lancastrian cycle and King John, in particular, have met with a 1 All references to Shakespeare’s texts are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York and London, 1997).

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hostile critical reception that tends, ironically, to concur with the views of the male characters in regarding their activities as thoroughly detrimental to the nation’s welfare. As Nina Levine notes, the military and political activism of viragos such as Margaret of Anjou and Eleanor of Aquitaine, like the supposedly overweening ambition of Constance, has been widely perceived to constitute a ‘threat to order and stability’ that ‘must be brought under control for the good of the nation’.2 :LWKRXWZLVKLQJWRGHQ\WKHREYLRXVDI¿QLWLHVEHWZHHQWKHVHGLVDIIHFWHGIHPDOH characters and the early modern stereotype of the unruly woman – as evidenced by their typically vociferous, self-willed, and disruptive manner of communicating their views, their general propensity to excess and intolerance of patriarchal regulation3 – it is, I think, regrettable that these traits have too often been allowed to obscure the salutary effects of such wayward behaviour. Focusing on Margaret and the other wailing queens of Richard III, Constance in King John, and Katherine in Henry VIII, this essay will argue the need for a more nuanced assessment of the motives behind their interventions in public life and of their contribution to the moral and political welfare of the nation. This requires that we make a conscious effort to redirect our attention to the more positive aspects of the women’s role in the management of the commonweal without overlooking their involvement in the abuse of dynastic, political, and judicial systems that is endemic to the play-worlds they inhabit. In particular, it means attending to the therapeutic effect of their intercessions in ministering to the healing of a nation at odds with itself: a process primarily enacted, I submit, in their commitment to perpetuating the memory of past crimes that still FU\RXWIRUUHGUHVVLQGH¿DQFHRIDJRYHUQLQJHOLWHLQWHQWRQVXSSUHVVLQJµWKHVDG remembrance of those wrongs’ (Richard III, 4.4.238), and their tenacity in working to expose institutional corruption in the higher echelons of state by calling to account those whose power and status seemingly place them beyond reach of the law. To understand what drives this female-led quest for justice we must situate this as a response to the traumas of the recent past which still convulse the respective play-worlds, whether the legacy of internecine strife from the War of the Roses that imprints itself upon the fractured court of Richard III, the unresolved struggle over the succession in King John, or the upheavals of the English Reformation in Henry VIII. Each of these plays evokes a profoundly dysfunctional society where the normal patrilineal structures of authority and legitimate succession have broken down, where oaths are routinely violated, theology is manipulated for political gain, and the law perverted to serve the will of individuals, instead of the bono publico. What is undeniably catastrophic for the body politic, though, proves oddly enabling for the plays’ female protagonists. Along with the Bastard in King John and Richmond in Richard III WKH\ EHFRPH XQOLNHO\ EHQH¿FLDULHV 2

Nina Levine, Women’s Matters: Politics, Gender, and Nation in Shakespeare’s Early History Plays (Newark, 1998), 16. See also Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering A Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London, 1997), esp. Ch. 5–6. 3 On this topic see Nathalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), Ch. 5 (‘Women on Top’).

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of the turbulent times dramatized in our three plays and the opportunities they JHQHUDWH IRU WKRVH QRUPDOO\ GLVTXDOL¿HG IURP WKH H[HUFLVH RI SRZHU WR EHFRPH political players in their own right. Of course it may well strike us as thoroughly implausible that these female characters, who despite their royal status are multiply marked as outsiders by virtue of their sex, their discontent, their tenuous position and, in many cases, foreign origins, should come to play such a prominent role in state affairs. Nevertheless several factors conspire to propel them, both literally and metaphorically, to the centre of the public stage. For a start, England is represented in each play as experiencing something of an identity crisis. Evidence of this self-estrangement abounds on both an individual and national level. Consider the defection of Richard’s subjects, both living and dead, to the cause of Richmond, a Welshman who returns to his native soil as a foreign exile at the head of a Breton-backed invasion. In King John the French King’s claims to have the true interests of England more at heart than its titular monarch, and the subsequent decision of the English nobility, disillusioned by John’s surrender of the kingdom’s sovereignty to Rome, to ally themselves with the Dauphin’s invading army can also be seen as symptomatic of an erosion of national identity. These ironies are ratcheted up still further when Henry VIII, the monarch famed alongside King John for asserting England’s independence from external, that is to say papal, domination elects to disguise himself at the masque, both linguistically and sartorially, as a Frenchman, thus participating in the affectation of foreign manners roundly deplored by Henry’s own courtiers, while his Spanishborn wife insists on addressing the cardinals in the English tongue rather than Latin as an act of fealty to her adoptive country (3.1.41–9). Given this perplexing, evershifting alignment of national loyalties, it is perhaps not so odd, after all, that the task of articulating England’s malaise should fall upon the female characters, not only natives but strangers too such as Margaret of Anjou and Katherine of Aragon. The women’s colonization of the stage of history is also facilitated by the absence of agreed political codes or a properly functional judicial apparatus. While the concept of justice is repeatedly brandished in these plays, its presence proves elusive. Indeed the frequency with which this idea is evoked – whether through the mimetic recreation of judicial processes in the elaborately staged trial scenes of Henry VIII, the constant disputation of legal issues or the characters’ habit of slipping into lawyerly discourse – is in inverse proportion to its realization on stage. For, in each of these plays, the due process of law is curtailed, perverted by bias, false testimony or interference, or simply overridden.4 It is this situation, I shall argue, that incites Shakespeare’s royal women to occupy the discursive space vacated by the collapse of these institutional structures and leads them to 4

This is shown most clearly in the peremptory justice Richard meets out to his victims, none of whom are granted so much as a formal indictment (or only posthumously in Hasting’s case), let alone a trial. But Henry VIII also curtails due process of the law, e.g., by prejudging Buckingham’s guilt on the basis of his surveyor’s tainted testimony and by intervening in Cranmer’s arraignment for heresy to forestall further examination by his peers.

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enlist the rhetorical resources of complaint in order to supplement and correct a judicial system that has failed them. Armed only with this linguistic weapon, WKH\WDNHWKHKLJKO\XQRUWKRGR[VWHSRIXVXUSLQJWKHODZ¶VRI¿FHE\SHUVRQDOO\ confronting known or suspected malefactors with evidence of their misdeeds. In so doing they unwittingly act in consort with the female complainants of the other plays who similarly assume the informal roles of prosecutor, judge and jury.5 Thus the plaintive accents of the plays’ female protagonists emerge as if by no means the sole, certainly the most insistent voice calling for a greater degree of moral and political accountability. The following discussion will examine how this dramatic community of GLVDIIHFWHG ZRPHQ QDYLJDWHV WKH FRQÀLFWVFDUUHG SROLWLFDO ODQGVFDSHV RI WKHVH plays in the pursuit of justice. Attending to the ambiguous relationship between the plaintive female voice and the act of truth-telling, it will argue that their unstable alliance operates as a crucial index of the health of the body politic as well as providing a necessary, albeit far from infallible, moral compass for theatre audiences and readers adrift in the plays’ murky and unpredictable waters. From WKHUH LW JRHV RQ WR DVVHVV WKH HI¿FDF\ RI IHPDOH FRPSODLQW DQG LWV ODFKU\PRVH twin, lamentation, as a remedy for various forms of ethical, political, and legal malpractice. Addressing this key issue gives rise to others. To what extent can the vocalization of discontent, however eloquent, compensate for the damage wrought by corrupt and discredited institutions? What is the relation between complaint and the law? Can justice only emerge from within the private recesses of the individual soul? Or does it require a communal event, an enactment of the collective will to preserve the memory of history’s victims and arraign the living culprits, of the sort staged in the great scenes of choric female lament in Richard III? And in what ways might we think of the plays’ female lamenters as a symbolic embodiment of the ‘conscience of the nation’?6 These are the principal issues that will inform our analysis of the plays’ female-driven crusade to cure England of its ills. The Politics of Truth-Telling It is well documented that Shakespeare went out of his way to amplify the political dimensions of the female roles in all three plays by expanding on existing details LQWKHFKURQLFOHVRUE\LQYHQWLQJDSXEOLFSUR¿OHIRUWKHPWRRIIVHWWKHDEVHQFHRI such material in his sources.7 One of the key functions the playwright(s) assigns 5 In reality, of course, women were legally debarred from taking up any of these roles. For a summary of the manifold legal disabilities women endured in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, see Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1998), 21–5. 6 This phrase is used apropos of Constance by A.R. Braunmuller in the Oxford edition of King John (Oxford, 1989), 63. 7 See, e.g., Harold Brooks, ‘Richard III8QKLVWRULFDO$PSOL¿FDWLRQV7KH:RPHQ¶V Scenes and Seneca’, Modern Language Review, 75 (1980), 721–37; Juliet Dusinberre, ‘King

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to these ‘tell-tale women’ is that of speaking truth, as they understand it, to those LQ SRVLWLRQV RI SRZHU (DFK RI WKHP PDNHV OLEHUDO XVH RI WKH UKHWRULFDO ¿JXUH of ‘frank speech’ or outspokenness (known as parrhesia in Greek, licentia in Latin) where the speaker feels compelled by a sense of duty to the truth to set aside considerations of the ‘reverence’ or ‘fear’ owed to authority and exercise KLV µULJKW WR VSHDN RXW EHFDXVH >KH@ VHHP>V@ MXVWL¿HG LQ UHSUHKHQGLQJ WKHP « for some fault’.8 Peacham’s gloss on parrhesia in the 1593 edition of The Garden RI (ORTXHQFH comes nearest to adumbrating the uses to which this ‘aggressive frankness’ is put by Shakespeare’s female protagonists: 7KLV¿JXUHVHUYHWKWRLQVLQXDWHDGPRQLVKDQGUHSUHKHQG«ZKLFKLVWKHRQHO\ forme that boldly delivereth to great dignitaries and most high degrees of men, the message of justice and equitie, sparing neither magistrates that pervert lawes, nor Princes that do abuse their kingdomes.9

As this passage reveals, the rhetorical handbooks generally assume parrhesia to be a feature of male political dialogue. That such bold and forthright speech issues here from the mouths of aristocratic women is peculiarly shocking in its refusal to conform to the convoluted protocols of civil discourse deemed appropriate to their rank and sex.10 David Colclough notes that early modern discussions of the use of WKLV¿JXUHIUHTXHQWO\HPSKDVL]HLWVFDSDFLW\IRUµGLVVLPXODWLRQ¶ZKHUHWKHVSHDNHU seeks to ingratiate themselves under the guise of plain-speaking.11 However, there is not the slightest hint of compromise or palliative intent in the curse-laden invective Margaret reserves for her enemies, or the accusations publicly levelled by Constance at the rulers who have betrayed her. Even Katherine, usually more circumspect of VSHHFKDVEH¿WVDUR\DOFRQVRUWLVSURYRNHGE\:ROVH\¶VGLVLQJHQXRXVGHQLDOVRI wrong-doing into abandoning her customary composure and verbal restraint. If, as James Scott has argued, the familiar maxim of speaking truth to power is more often honoured in the breach than the observance, subordinate groups being accustomed to dissembling their grievances by expressing them, if at all, in oblique or encoded forms to avoid incurring their masters’ displeasure, then these characters may be said to constitute a rare deviation from this rule.12 For examples of such decorous John and Embarrassing Women’, Shakespeare Survey, 42 (1990): 39; Gordon McMullan’s Arden 3 edition of Henry VIII, 321 (headnote). 8 Rhetorica Ad Herennium, IV.37.49. Quoted in David Colclough, ‘Parrhesia: The Rhetoric of Free Speech in Early Modern England’, Rhetorica, 17/2 (1999): 184–5. 9 Henry Peacham, 7KH*DUGHQRI(ORTXHQFH (1593), quoted in Colclough, ibid., 206. 10 Cf. George Puttenham’s criticism of the French Princess who vented her frustration at being debarred from inheriting the throne with blunt vulgarity as ill-becoming ‘the greatness of her person, and much lesse her sex’, in The Arte of English Poesie (Menston, [1598] 1968), 223–4. 11 Colclough, ‘Parrhesia’, 194–5. 12 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven and London, 1990), Ch. 6.

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encryption of dissent are remarkably thin on the ground in these plays. In fact, the women’s astonishingly direct denunciations of wrong-doing spare neither corrupt ‘magistrates’ nor ‘Princes that do abuse their Kingdomes’. It is predictable, then, that the women’s stand against injustice should take the form of an assault on the deviousness of male political rhetoric. A familiar scenario unfolds where discursive exchanges between members of the governing class are disrupted by the interjections of female complainants who interrogate their handling of the business of governance, justice, or warfare and challenge WKH RI¿FLDO UDWLRQDOH IRU WKH SROLFLHV EHLQJ SXUVXHG ,Q WKH SURFHVV WKH\ UDLVH awkward questions about the validity of the principles – of legitimacy, succession, justice, truth, and conscience – on which the characters stake their reputations. Their self-appointed mission to expose corruption in high places translates into an attempt to dissect and demystify the pieties, empty moralizing, and righteous selfexculpation in which power wraps itself. Instead of submitting to state-sanctioned accounts of past or unfolding events, their energies are channelled into countering the distortions, evasions, and omissions proffered by the political establishment in lieu of truth. Setting the record straight is their prime objective, while their main tactic is to cut through this obfuscatory language by rewording what has taken SODFHLQDSRLQWHGO\GLIIHUHQWVHWRIWHUPVWKDWUHÀHFWDFRPEDWLYHLUUHYHUHQWDQG SURIRXQGO\VXVSLFLRXVDWWLWXGHWRZDUGVRI¿FLDOKLVWRULRJUDSK\DQGWKHJRYHUQLQJ elite in whose interests it is shaped. Their plain-speaking obviously serves them ZHOO DV D PHFKDQLVP IRU ÀXVKLQJ RXW XQSDODWDEOH WUXWKV +RZHYHU WKLV LV RQO\ the most sensational tactic in what is, by any standards, an impressive arsenal of rhetorical devices at their disposal that includes ‘exclamation’ (i.e., accusation, voluble complaint), the use of lamentation, ironic asides, savage mockery, and the wresting of another’s meaning to reveal a sombre side of England’s heritage that seeps through the censorship imposed on it. The daring ingenuity with which this rhetorical form of guerrilla warfare is conducted merits closer analysis. In Richard III Margaret is, unhistorically, brought back from the dead as a ghostly revenant and living witness to the crimes committed in the civil wars. In 1.3 she eavesdrops on the wrangling between Richard and the Woodville clan, punctuating their exchanges with sarcastic interjections that echo and, in so doing, subvert the self-righteous posturing of the disputants by commenting bitterly on the illegitimacy of their claims to the moral high ground. Impatient of their weasel words, she reminds both parties how they stole their honours from the Lancastrian line by no less barbarous means than they condemn in her. She rounds this off with a comprehensive and savagely worded curse that prophesies their collective downfall to the evident perturbation of all present. In 4.4 Margaret’s inquisitorial function is taken over by the Duchess of York and Queen Elizabeth, as they join forces to waylay Richard and ‘charge’ him with a catalogue of crimes. Throughout this scene Elizabeth is shown not only to possess greater political guile than the ‘Poor painted Queen’ (3.1.239) of Margaret’s description but to have absorbed the lesson of her rhetorical tactics. In the ensuing stichomythic skirmish between herself and Richard, she succeeds

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in upstaging him by turning the intended sense of his words back on him until her opponent, wrong-footed and disconcerted, begs her to ‘[b]e not so hasty to confound my meaning’ (4.4.248). The interrogation of ‘usurped authority’ is revived in the central scenes (2.1 and 3.1) of King John where the question of who has the stronger claim to the (QJOLVKWKURQH-RKQRU$UWKXULV¿HUFHO\GLVSXWHGZLWKZRUGVDQGDUPVE\WKH English and French Kings and their allies. But, once again, it is the women who ensure that the matter is not allowed to rest there. In the so-called ‘Billingsgate scene’, Constance and Eleanor launch into a slanging match over the symbolicallyloaded question of legitimacy, each accusing the other of ill-founded ambition and WKHLUFKLOGUHQRIEDVWDUG\$W¿UVWWKHUHVHHPVOLWWOHSRLQWWRWKLVFDW¿JKWEH\RQG pandering to clichés of female rivalry. However, the very aspects of this scene WKDW WKH SOD\¶V FULWLFV DQG RQVWDJH DXGLHQFH ¿QG PRVW HPEDUUDVVLQJ13 can be taken as an ironic, albeit inadvertent, commentary on the main political action. By referring back to the semi-farcical accommodation reached by the Bastard and his brother over their inheritance rights in 1.1, and forward to the equally absurd claims and counter-claims to be England’s lawful representative asserted by the opposing monarchs before the walls of Angers, this scene strips the central plot of its pretensions to dignity, principles, and moral seriousness. When Constance falls victim to these same political manoeuvrings – King Philip and ‘Austria’ having been suborned by the enticements of ‘tickling Commodity’ to desert her cause – she resumes the offensive, accusing her former champions of reneging on their YRZVDQG3KLOLSVSHFL¿FDOO\RIKDYLQJµEHJXLOHG¶WKHZRUOGµZLWKDFRXQWHUIHLW Resembling majesty, which being touched and tried/ Proves valueless’ (3.1.25–7). She then proceeds to sabotage Philip’s attempts to whitewash what the Bastard calls ‘a most base and vile-concluded peace’ (2.1.587); when the French King proclaims the occasion of his defection to be a day of celebration, she pounces on the phrase ‘holy day’: A wicked day, and not a holy day! What hath this day deserved? What hath it done, That it in golden letters should be set Among the high tides in the calendar? Nay, rather turn this day out of the week, This day of shame, oppression, perjury. (3.1.9–14)

In Constance’s anatomizing of his speech, the collusion between a false nomenclature and political subterfuge is laid bare. &RQVWDQFH¶V LQWUHSLG µRXWLQJ¶ RI VKDPHIXO WUXWKV ¿QGV LWV PLUURU LPDJH LQ Katherine. At the pre-trial hearing of the evidence against Buckingham in 1.2, the Queen hijacks proceedings from the very outset by forcing onto the agenda the question of Wolsey’s unauthorized taxation of the commoners (hitherto concealed from the King) and by speaking out in defence of their interests. The cardinal’s 13

See Dusinberre, ‘King John’, 40–41.

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efforts to evade blame for these extortionate measures are robustly dismissed by Katherine who interrupts the hearing to cast further aspersions on the probity of Wolsey’s proceedings against his known enemy. At the tribunal for Henry’s divorce suit she again breaks with judicial protocols in ways that recall, while going beyond, Holinshed’s more subdued account in the 1587 edition of the Chronicles.14 First, she insists on pleading her own ‘cause’ directly to the King, instead of letting her clerical counsel represent her as custom demanded; then she quits the court in GH¿DQFHRILWVRUGHUVUHVROYLQJQHYHUWRVXEPLWWRLQWHUURJDWLRQWKHUHDIWHU,QVKRUW 6KDNHVSHDUH¶V.DWKHULQHLVGLVWLQFWO\OHVVWUDFWDEOHWKDQ+ROLQVKHG¶VUHÀHFWLQJKHU more pronounced scepticism regarding the quality of justice she stands to receive, ‘having here/No judge indifferent, nor no more assurance/Of equal friendship and proceeding’ (2.4.14–16). Moreover, this queen persists in querying the cardinals’ motives, where Holinshed’s rapidly yielded under pressure. The accused turns accuser with a blistering speech, invented for her, in which she impugns Wolsey’s impartiality and asserts her right to refer her case to papal arbitration. In denying his competency to pass judgment on her, Katherine refuses in effect to recognize the court’s jurisdiction. A bolder challenge to the judicial system, contesting as it does both royal and ecclesiastical authority over legal matters, is hard to imagine. Our admiration for the audacity with which these tactics are deployed in the service of equity and truth should not deter us, though, from observing that the women’s conduct is no less vulnerable to critical scrutiny than those they indict. Indeed their active involvement in political life ought to caution us against overstating their exteriority to the systems against which they rail, for, like the Bastard and a host of other well-intentioned but complicit courtiers, all of them are to varying degrees implicated in the unsavoury operations of power they are intent RQ FKDOOHQJLQJ *LYHQ WKH GLI¿FXOW\ RI GHFLSKHULQJ WKH FKDUDFWHUV¶ ÀXFWXDWLQJ motives and intentions, it is all the more necessary to resist the temptation to postulate a simplistic antithesis that segregates women, imagined as pristine repositories of truth, from the venal practices of the court. The complex tangle of personal and public objectives, of self-interest and civic-mindedness, that impels them to speak out frustrates such categorical neatness. We need only consider Elizabeth’s obscurely motivated rapprochement with her children’s murderer, or Constance’s eagerness to align herself with whichever side happens to be opposing .LQJ-RKQWRDSSUHFLDWHWKDWWKHVH¿JXUHVDUHLQQRZD\H[HPSWIURPWKHFOLPDWH of moral and epistemological ambiguity that envelops these plays. To presume that the speech acts of these royal women are intrinsically more trustworthy than their opponents’ would therefore be rash. In fact we may conclude that the equivocal nature of their position – at once detached from and deeply embedded in a national malaise for which they are partly accountable – further compromises their status as truth-tellers. Against this it might be objected that their ability to view events from ERWKZLWKLQDQGRXWVLGHWKHKHJHPRQLFRUGHU±OLNHWKH%DVWDUGZKRVLJQL¿FDQWO\ 14 Cf. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (London, 1808 [1587]), vol. 3, 736–40.

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aligns himself with Constance in this respect – gives them an unrivalled advantage in terms of understanding the corrosive effects of ‘commodity’ on political life. Using the evidence furnished by our three plays, the following sections will assess the effectiveness of female complaint not just as a tool for exposing the abuses of the time, but as a means of putting them right. This will require an analysis of the conditions that might enable a productive synthesis to be forged between different IDFHWVRIWKLVJHQUH±SUR¿FLHQF\LQWKHDUWRIODPHQWDWLRQDQDELOLW\WRPDQLSXODWH its legal associations, and its use as a vehicle for collective political protest. Complaint and the Law Much has been made in recent years of the correspondences between literature and law. That their interconnectedness was taken for granted as an axiomatic feature of early modern culture is corroborated by a rapidly expanding body RI VFKRODUVKLS GHYRWHG WR LQYHVWLJDWLQJ WKLV ¿HOG 7KHVH DI¿QLWLHV PDQLIHVWHG themselves in various ways, but at the most basic level they were inscribed in the use of a common vocabulary. As John Kerrigan notes, ‘complaint’ originated as a technical term referring to ‘the kind of bill submitted by a “plaintiff”’ prior to court proceedings, though its meaning would be extended to cover ‘many sorts of articulate dissatisfaction’.15 2WKHU DI¿OLDWHG ZRUGV ± LQFOXGLQJ WR µDUUDLJQ¶ µLQGLFW¶RUµDFFXVH¶VRPHRQH±VXVWDLQHGWKLVGXDOYDOHQF\SRVVHVVLQJDVSHFL¿F legal sense whilst also yielding a broader ‘lay’ meaning. These ambiguous terms of reference helped stake out a shared discursive terrain that could be mined by SUDFWLWLRQHUVRIHLWKHUGLVFLSOLQH,PSRUWDQWO\WKHWUDI¿FRILQÀXHQFHÀRZHGLQERWK directions. Legal historians have shown how deeply indebted canon (and civil) law were to the ‘topics’ of Roman forensic oratory which enabled the construction and evaluation of evidentiary proof.16 By the end of the sixteenth century these rhetorically derived categories had been assimilated into English common law where they became the grounds for determining a defendant’s guilt or innocence in the absence of irrefutable evidence. Conversely, Lorna Hutson maintains that the same techniques of probable reasoning used by prosecutors and juries were enlisted by early modern dramatists and poets as a handy device for inventing cohesive plots, plausible arguments, and lifelike characters.17 These analogies are certainly seductive, but how robust are they when put to the test? Is there any literary evidence to suggest that the pseudo-legal idioms of complaint can ever serve as an adequate substitute for the rigors of the law? 15

John Kerrigan, Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’ (Oxford, 1991), 7. 16 See Barbara Shapiro, ‘Classical Rhetoric and the English Law of Evidence’, in Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson (eds), Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe (New Haven and London, 2001), 54–72. 17 Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford, 2008), Ch. 3.

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Of all the popular literary genres of this period none exploited their connections with forensic rhetoric more vigorously than complaint in its many and various guises. Female-voiced examples of erotic versions of narrative and poetic complaint, in particular, offer an exceptionally rich source of penitential narratives in which fallen women lament their sexual transgressions while simultaneously seeking to exculpate themselves.18 However, it is to early editions of the Mirror for Magistrates – whose de casibus format supplied a template for Richard III and perhaps Henry VIII 19 – WKDWZHPXVWORRNIRUDWLJKWHU¿WZLWKWKHSROLWLFDOO\DQG legalistically oriented concerns of our Shakespearian complainants. Of particular relevance here are the monologues ventriloquized by the ghosts of ‘Shore’s wife’ and ‘Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester’ (printed in the 1563 and 1578 editions respectively) who beg ‘leave to plead [their] case at large’ in language awash with legal terminology as they seek to repair their shattered reputations from beyond the grave. Like their dramatic counterparts, they are adept at exploiting their ‘piteous case’ by presenting this in the most affecting light possible in the hope of eliciting a more magnanimous judgment from their readers than that handed down by their earthly judges.20 But, as with Shakespeare’s royal women, these self-serving manoeuvres coexist with a broader concern for the parlous state of the judicial system. Towards the end of her monologue Jane Shore admonishes ‘Ye Princes all, and Rulers everychone’ not to ‘forget to joyne your justice right’: You should not judge til thinges be wel deserned, Your charge is styll to mainteyne upryght lawes, In conscience rules ye should be throughly learned, Where clemencie byds wrath and rashenes pawes, And further sayeth, stryke not wythout a cause, And when ye smite do it for Justice sake, Then in good part eche man your skourge wil take. (ll. 344–50)

But while the sentiments expressed may be similar, there are obvious differences not only of character (Shakespeare’s complainants are impenitent and pugnacious) but, more importantly, of genre. Encased within the homiletic framework of narrative complaint and subject to its monovocal conventions, these female voices elicit no response except from their editors. Consequently their brave words remain OLWWOHPRUHWKDQUKHWRULFDOÀRXULVKHV By contrast, Constance, Katherine and the other aggrieved complainants of these plays inhabit a more dialogic, spacious, and fully realized imaginative realm ZKHUHWKHLUKRSHVZRUGVDQGDFWLRQVDUHOLDEOHWREHHLWKHUWKZDUWHGRUFRQ¿UPHG Not only does the dereliction of justice within their respective play-words oblige 18 See, e.g., Samuel Daniel’s ‘The Complaint of Rosalind’ (1592); and Michael Drayton’s ‘The Epistle of Rosamond to King Henry the Second’ in Englands Heroicall Epistles (1597). 19 As argued by Paul Budra in ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ and the de casibus Tradition (Toronto, 2000), 79. 20 Lily B. Campbell (ed.), The Mirror for Magistrates (Cambridge, 1938), 385.

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them to take matters into their own hands, but they use the law’s failure to offer them either protection or remedy against the injuries sustained by themselves and others to justify their encroachment on male prerogatives. This is precisely the point Constance makes when she claims ‘no less law and warrant’ than the papal legate to curse her adversaries on the paradoxical (and morally dubious grounds) that ‘when the law can do no right,/Let it be lawful that law bar no wrong’ (3.1.112–13). The search for alternative forms of redress propels these dramatic complainants beyond the mere elaboration of judicial analogies, of the type found in the Mirror, LQWR DWWHPSWLQJ WR WUDQVODWH WKHVH ¿JXUHV RI VSHHFK LQWR SUDFWLFDO DFWLRQ +HQFH their recourse to the rhetoric of complaint which they deploy as though it were D UHPHGLDO VXSSOHPHQW RU SUR[\ IRU WKH ODZ WR WKH SRLQW RI PLPLFNLQJ VSHFL¿F procedures employed in early modern courts of law. Let us reconsider, for example, Constance’s attempts to legitimize her cursing by equating this with Pandolf’s delegated authority to pronounce the act of excommunication against King John. This tacitly invites us to view the imprecations uttered by Margaret, the Duchess of York, and Constance herself as divinely authorized speech acts that exclude the offender from participating in communion with the Catholic Church and, by extension, from divine grace.216LJQL¿FDQWO\WKRXJK3DQGROSKGHQLHVWKHYDOLGLW\ of this comparison (3.1.10). Similarly, Constance’s litany of complaint against the turncoats, King Philip and ‘Austria’ bears more than a casual resemblance to a bill RILQGLFWPHQWRIWKHW\SHEURXJKWE\LQGLYLGXDOFLWL]HQV7KHIRUPHULVVSHFL¿FDOO\ accused of perjury, a criminal offence that normally fell within the jurisdiction of the FRXUWRI6WDU&KDPEHUDQGZDVSXQLVKDEOHE\D¿QHRULPSULVRQPHQW22 Yet though Constance succeeds in exposing Philip’s breach of faith, she possesses neither the LQÀXHQFHQRUWKHPDWHULDOSRZHUUHTXLUHGWRVHFXUHPRUHWDQJLEOHIRUPVRIUHSDUDWLRQ The problem lies in the disconnection of this speech genre from any formal legal process which deprives the judgments enunciated by these female ‘plaintiffs’ of real executive force. These examples call upon us to recognize the intrinsic limitations of complaint, but without necessarily invalidating the persuasive, ethical, and diagnostic qualities that otherwise make this discursive mode so compelling. Indeed, as we shall see, our plays bear witness to its capacity to bring intense pressure to bear on the accused and even alter the trajectory of history. Reassessing Female Complaint One remarkable feature of these plays is the unusually high proportion of female characters who are also mourners, variously engaged in bewailing the loss of their husbands, kinsmen, or offspring or the privileges attendant on power. From preclassical antiquity through to the late medieval cult of the mater dolorosa, the 21 Cf. the Duchess’ curse at 4.4.181–96 which both consigns Richard to damnation ‘by God’s just ordinance’ and disowns him as her son. 22 See J.H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 4th edition (Oxford, 2007), 117–19.

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business of grieving for the dead and dying, preparing the corpse for burial, and playing a leading role in funerary rituals was acknowledged to be women’s rightful and peculiar province. But, as a consequence of the seismic upheavals of the Reformation, that time-honoured tradition was ruptured and the histrionic display of female sorrow – invoking a corporeal lexicon of weeping, wailing, vociferous lamentation, and dishevelled hair – came to be viewed in a far more ambivalent light.23 Patricia Phillippy has shown how epistemic shifts in attitudes to female mourning in the post-Reformation era led to a cultural devaluation of, and attempts to restrict, older and more extravagant forms of female grieving in favour of an ethic of inward and measured mourning. This distinction was formulated along sharply GUDZQ JHQGHU OLQHV WKH VHOIFRQWDLQHG PDOH 3URWHVWDQW VXEMHFW EHLQJ GH¿QHG LQ part ‘through his opposition to stigmatized female lamentational practices’ now deemed to be ‘excessive, violent, and immoderate’.24 Mournful women, especially bereaved mothers such as a Queen Elizabeth in Richard III and Constance in King JohnDUHRIWHQUHSUHVHQWHGLQWKLVSHULRGDVGLVWXUELQJHYHQWUDQVJUHVVLYH¿JXUHV whose extreme sorrow threatens to overspill the parameters of acceptable feminine behaviour. Their culturally scripted performance of grief was also deplored as proof of their sex’s natural incapacity to govern their emotions. Ideological concerns about IHPDOHPRXUQLQJZHUHFRPSRXQGHGE\LWVLGHQWL¿FDWLRQLQWKHSRSXODULPDJLQDWLRQ with a retrogressive reprisal of pagan and Catholic rituals for honouring the dead. These intersecting factors combined to validate the introduction of more stringent patriarchal control over a domain once regarded as the preserve of women. The same cultural prejudices regarding women’s atavistic propensity to indulge in wild displays of grief are echoed within our three plays. Aligning themselves with the dominant reformist stance, the male characters are mostly contemptuous of such practices. For example, Richard emphasizes the futility of Elizabeth’s lament for her recently deceased husband, brusquely admonishing her that ‘none can help our harms by wailing them’ (2.2.91). Katherine is also advised by the cardinals to set aside her ‘griefs’ for the loss of her former ‘dignities’ and submit herself to the royal will. Likewise, King Philip and Pandolf react with a mixture of pity and distaste to Constance’s enactment of her unbounded anguish at the loss of Arthur; she is rebuked for ‘hold[ing] too heinous a respect of grief’ (3.4.90) in making her sorrow a proxy for her abducted child. Of course it is not hard to ¿QGFRUURERUDWLYHHYLGHQFHRIWKHH[FHVVHVLPSXWHGWRWKHVHIHPDOHFKDUDFWHUV None of them could be accused of being ‘barren to bring forth complaints’, each being intent on nurturing their woe by ‘pamper[ing] it with lamentation’ (2.2.67, 88). Nor do they heed the men’s repeated exhortations to exercise selfrestraint. But that is not to say that what seem to us absurdly over-the-top displays 23

Katharine Goodland explores the sources of ‘England’s profound ambivalence towards mourning women’ in Female Mourning in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama (Aldershot, 2005), 121–3, 136–40. 24 Patricia Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge, 2002), 7–9.

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RIJULHIDUHSRLQWOHVVRUIXWLOH7UXHXQÀDWWHULQJGHSLFWLRQVRIIHPDOHODPHQWDWLRQ and complaint in general, as self-indulgent, intemperate, tediously verbose and, above all, ineffectual are widely endorsed in the literature of the period. And, with few exceptions, modern critics have followed suit, embracing such dismissive attitudes to this genre without bothering to investigate its expressive and instrumental potentialities.25 Nevertheless, we may plausibly hazard the view that the popular anxiety and distrust surrounding female mourners was driven less by doctrinal issues or worries about women’s lack of rational self-control than by an implicit recognition of the enormous affective potency of female grief and the potentially subversive uses to which it could be put. ,PPRGHUDWH JULHI LV WKXV OHJLEOH DV DQ HQFRGHG DI¿UPDWLRQ RI WKH ZRPHQ¶V oppositional stance and, as such, is instrumental in shaping their contrary evaluation of complaint. For the female mourners of these plays, far from viewing such affective display as fatuous, are keenly aware of the possibility of harnessing their own sorrow, along with other neighbouring emotions such as anger, resentment, indignation, and a sense of loss, for more productive ends. Without the bitterness of personal grief to spur them into action, we are led to surmise, it is debatable whether they would have ventured such a comprehensive critique of England’s methods of governance. It is Margaret’s ‘sorrow’s rage’ (1.2.276) for the murder of husband and son that continues to fuel her vendetta against the Yorkist faction more than a decade after the atrocities perpetrated at Tewkesbury. And just as Constance’s despondency over Philip’s treachery swiftly converts to fury, so at the divorce tribunal Katherine rejects the standard script of tearful lamentation DQGZKDWLWEHWRNHQV±ZRPHQ¶VVRIWZDWHU\GLVSRVLWLRQ±IRUWKH¿HU\FKROHULF qualities thought to typify the male: I am about to weep, but thinking that We are a queen, or long have dreamed so, certain The daughter of a king, my drops of tears ,¶OOWXUQWRVSDUNVRI¿UH±

This combustible mixture of grief and ire imbues the women’s speech with an impassioned vehemence, steering it away from the plangent accents of lament WRZDUGV PRUH FRPEDWLYH ¿JXUDWLYH GHYLFHV VXFK DV DFFXVDWLRQ H[FODPDWLRQ DQG imprecation. As Phillippy remarks, ‘the same characteristic that opens women’s mourning to censure [i.e., excessive grief] enables its use as a means of authorizing and empowering women’s speech’; here it not only licenses the airing of social discontent, EXWJUHDWO\LQWHQVL¿HVWKHSHUVXDVLYHIRUFHZLWKZKLFKWKLVLVFRPPXQLFDWHG26 25

See, e.g., Heather Dubrow, ‘A Mirror for Complaints: Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Generic Tradition’, in Barbara Lewalski (ed.), Renaissance Genres: Essays on History, Theory and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 399–417. 26 Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature, 3. Cf. Goodland’s comment on the ambiguities of complaint as ‘excessive yet inadequate, shunned and feared, yet necessary DQGHI¿FDFLRXV¶*RRGODQGFemale Mourning, 1).

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In short, Shakespeare’s royal women, unlike their male counterparts, generally place their trust in the forensic capacities of complaint, presuming that its ethically and emotionally charged discourse possesses considerable illocutionary force. Faced with Buckingham’s scornful dismissal of the utility of imprecation, 0DUJDUHWFOLQJVWHQDFLRXVO\WRWKHEHOLHIWKDWKHUZRUGVKDYHSRZHUWRLQÀXHQFH divine agency itself (1.3.285–8) – a conviction her adversaries will come to share as they succumb one by one to the fates prophesied for them. In 4.4 the Duchess of York and Elizabeth debate the question of ‘[w]hy should calamity be full of words?’ Elizabeth subscribes to the commonplace belief that plaintive speeches are ineffectual, merely ‘[w]indy attorneys to their client woes,/… Poor breathing orators of miseries’; the best they can do is ‘ease the heart’. However, the Duchess persuades her daughter-in-law to reject this pessimistic view of complaint, urging her to ‘[b]e copious in exclaims’ when confronting Richard; if he tries to ‘drown’ their voices with ‘martial music’, they will retaliate by ‘smother[ing]’ him ‘in the breath of bitter words’ (4.4.126–54). The properties ascribed here to female complaint – a power to overwhelm the party accused with a battery of exclamation, to ‘envenom’ them with vitriolic reproof and to ‘pierce’ WKHLUFRQVFLHQFH±DUHFRQ¿UPHGE\QXPHURXVGUDPDWLFH[DPSOHVDWWHVWLQJWRLWV capacity to induce disquiet in the recipient. Hastings begs Margaret to ‘end [her] frantic curse’, confessing that his ‘hair doth stand on end’ to hear them (1.3.245,  (YHQ5LFKDUGVWUXJJOHVWRPDLQWDLQKLVWUDGHPDUNVDUGRQLFÀLSSDQF\ZKHQ exposed to his mother and sister-in-law’s concerted indictment in 4.4. Clearly unnerved by the ferocity of his mother’s denunciation and her parting curse, he complains that her speech is ‘too bitter’ and makes desperate attempts to placate her. Kings Philip and John are equally apprehensive about Constance’s reaction WR QHZV RI WKH $QJOR)UHQFK DOOLDQFH KRSLQJ WR GHÀHFW KHU IXU\ E\ RIIHULQJ concessions in the form of land and titles. But John’s anxious wish that they might ‘in some measure satisfy her [will] so /That we shall stop her exclamation’ (2.1.556–9) implicitly concedes that her protests are too cogent and forceful to EHVWLÀHG Despite such heroic acts of resistance, however, these women appear a spent force well before the end of their respective plays. Overtaken by events and relegated to the margins of the political arena, they are increasingly ground down by the onslaught of old and fresh woes. In their latter appearances on stage, their sorrow is ¿JXUHGDVDFUXVKLQJµEXUGHQ¶XQGHUZKLFKWKHRZQHUµVLQNV¶±DQLGHDPDWHULDOL]HG via the conventional theatrical gesture for indicating overwhelming grief: sitting or lying down on the stage (cf. Richard III, 4.4.21–8; Henry VIII, 4.2.1–3). But while WKHLUGHWHULRUDWLQJIRUWXQHVDSSHDUWRFRQ¿UPWKHHTXDWLRQEHWZHHQIHPDOHFRPSODLQW and impotence, they vehemently repudiate this notion. Instead it is insinuated that their accumulated misery confers on those who have suffered so much a restorative dignity and authority that commands respect. This is certainly the view taken by Constance when she refuses to attend on the English and French kings, bidding them rather pay their obeisance to ‘the state of [her] great grief’:

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I will instruct my sorrows to be proud, For grief is proud and makes his owner stoop. [She sits upon the ground] To me and to the state of my great grief Let kings assemble, for my grief’s so great 7KDWQRVXSSRUWHUEXWWKHKXJH¿UPHDUWK Can hold it up. Here I and sorrows sit. Here is my throne; bid kings come bow to it. (2.2.68–74)

The women of Richard’s household also demand that due homage be paid to their wretched state, implicitly presenting themselves as an exemplary pattern of maternal grief after Hecuba. Margaret, who vies with the Duchess of York for the title of Queen of Woes, urges that ‘[i]f ancient sorrow be most reverend,/ *LYH PLQH WKH EHQH¿W RI VHQLRU\$QG OHW P\ JULHIV IURZQ RQ WKH XSSHU KDQG¶ (4.4.35–7). Katherine, too, clings to the prerogatives of grief, chastising the messenger of 4.2 for failing to show the ‘reverence’ owed to her ‘state’.27 Ironically, LWZRXOGVHHPWKDWWKHZHLJKWRIWKHLUDIÀLFWLRQVPHUHO\HQKDQFHVWKHSURWDJRQLVWV¶ moral stature. Moreover, the toll it takes on them is less debilitating than we PLJKWDQWLFLSDWH(YHQDVWKH\HQWHUWKHµODVW¿WRI>WKHLU@JUHDWQHVV¶Henry VIII, 3.1.77), they continue to publicize their grievances with undiminished vigour DQGWRUHMHFWWKHIDOVHFRQVRODWLRQRIIHUHGWKHP5LJKWXSWRKHU¿QDOPRPHQWVRQ stage Constance spurns her male comforters’ belittlement of her grief (‘Lady, you utter madness, and not sorrow’ [3.4.43]) by refuting the early modern elision of female distress with insanity, insisting that her distracted behaviour has a rational foundation (cf. Richard III, 1.3.252; Henry VIII, 3.1.112). This simple refusal to let themselves be silenced is arguably the complainants’ strongest card in their struggle against injustice. Embodying the Nation $OWKRXJKJHQHUDWHGLQWKH¿UVWLQVWDQFHE\SHUVRQDOJULHILWLVLPSRUWDQWWRQRWH that complaint lends itself to being read within a broader literary context as an extended metaphor for the sufferings of the nation at large. I would venture to suggest that Shakespeare’s sorrowful mothers are the progeny of, and participate LQDYHQHUDEOHWUDGLWLRQRIXVLQJHPEOHPDWLFIHPDOH¿JXUHVWRHPERG\DQGJLYH voice to the grievances of the common subject.28 Many of the complaints and petitions printed in pamphlet form that poured off the presses in the sixteenth and VHYHQWHHQWKFHQWXULHVDUHYHQWULORTXL]HGE\IHPDOHSHUVRQL¿FDWLRQVRI(QJODQG or of its various regions and cities, particularly London. Parallel instances of 27

In each of these contexts we may assume that ‘state’ is being usually polysemically, to refer to the character’s psychological condition (OED, I.2), their high rank (2.1), and a throne (2.2). 28 For a general discussion of this allegorical tradition, see Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens (London, 1985), esp. on representations of Britannia, Anglia’s successor (45–55).

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this gendered use of prosopopeia as a medium for lamenting the nation’s ills are to be found across a variety of other literary genres.29 Just as ‘England is LQVLVWHQWO\ SHUVRQL¿HG DV D ZRPDQ DQG PRWKHU¶ LQ 6KDNHVSHDUH¶V King John,30 so these female speakers conventionally style themselves as ‘nursing mothers’ to the nation’s citizenry. They typically bewail the harms that have befallen their µFKLOGUHQ¶VXFKDVWKHLUDIÀLFWLRQE\SRYHUW\RUGLVHDVHRUDOWHUQDWLYHO\EHUDWH their misguided offspring for straying from the path of righteousness. Thus in Englands Threnodie, or a briefe and homely discoverie of some jealousies and grievances under which the kingdom at present groaneth, Lady Anglia laments the GDPDJHLQÀLFWHGE\WKH&LYLO:DUDQGUHSURYHVKHUµGHDUFKLOGUHQ¶IRUDOORZLQJWKH country to descend into ‘open wickedness’, sectarianism, and political disunity, while the maternal speaker of Vox Civitatis, or LONDONS complaint against her children in the COUNTRIE deplores the fact that her faithless progeny KDYHIRUVDNHQWKHFLW\DWWKH¿UVWVLJQRISHVWLOHQFHRUKDYHEHFRPHHPEURLOHG in dissolute behaviour.31 More directly pertinent to the situation of the plays’ grieving women are complaints relating to the sporadic outbreaks of the plague during this period that milk the pathos of maternal anguish not simply for the purpose of arousing sympathy but to make a political point. Like Constance or the bereaved mothers of Richard III, the speaker of Londons Mourning Garment, ¿JXUHG DV D FKLOGOHVV ZLGRZ UHFDOOV KHU DIIHFWLRQDWH VROLFLWXGH IRU KHU GHDG children and husband, victims of the disease, in intimate and touching detail as she laments her plight.32 Addressing the ‘Dames of London Cittie’, she exhorts them to ‘remember well’ what they have lost: And now my harts, olde Widdowes and yong wives, And you that in silence, sit so sad and mute: You that wring hands, as weary of your lives, Heare London speake, she will expresse your suite. I know your sighes, is for your tender fruite. Fruite in the budde, in blossome ripe and growne, All deare to you, now death hath made his owne.

29

Cf. Widow Ynglond, in John Bale’s polemical anti-Catholic play, King Johan ¿UVW SHUIRUPHG LQ   ZKR µFRPSODLQHWK « JULHYLRXVO\¶ RI WKH LPSRYHULVKPHQW DQG RSSUHVVLRQ LQÀLFWHG RQ KHU FKLOGUHQ E\ FOHULFDO DEXVHV DQG JULHYLQJ ZLGRZ %HOJH ZKR laments the loss of her sons [provinces] in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, V.10.6–14. For French parallels, see Kate Van Orden, ‘Female Complaintes: Laments of Venus, Queens and City Women in Late Sixteenth-Century France’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54/3 (2001): 818–35. 30 Braunmuller, King John, 71. 31 See Alexander Ross, Englands Threnodie (1648), 1–8; and Benjamin Spenser, Vox Civitatis (1636). 32 William Muggins, Londons Mourning Garment (1603), STC 18248. This text is discussed by Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature, Ch. 4.

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By drawing the reader(s) into her retrospectively imagined life as a mother, the speaker seeks to create an empathetic community of mourners: ‘Is there no wife nor widdow that will hye,/And reach a hand that hath some sorrowes felt,/My griefes are more then I my selfe can welde’. Within this enlarged context the theme of the untimely death of children expands beyond the speaker’s personal experience to encompass new meanings, and as it does so this master-trope begins to resonate with other, more overtly politicized, kinds of loss. In Londons Mourning Garment the insistently repeated injunction to recollect the dead acquires a similar function to the commemorative acts performed in our plays, serving as a point of departure for the expression of a range of socio-economic grievances by drawing attention to the economic hardship and callous wastage of human life endured by the labouring poor. Such complaints often incorporate an impassioned plea to the state or civic authorities calling on them to alleviate this history of social injustice and ‘have respect/To poor mens livelihoods’33 which, whether heeded by its intended recipients or not, is likely to have struck a powerful chord with their popular readership. In the plays themselves the socio-political reverberations of plaintive speech DUH VLPLODUO\ DPSOL¿HG DQG VXSSRUWHG E\ WKH FRQVWUXFWLRQ RI D FRPPXQLW\ RI ill-assorted women bound together by their mutual losses in a manner characteristic of the collectivist ethos of this genre. The parallel activities of these female complainants, once bitterly at loggerheads with one another, begin to converge not only within but across their play-worlds. An important indicator of this nascent co-operation is the willingness of former adversaries to offer each other emotional support as well as instruction in the art of grieving, as when Margaret teaches the woman who supplanted her how to make her curses more ‘sharp and pierc[ing]’ by meditating on the loss of her ‘tender babes’ (4.4.116–25). Growing evidence of such collaborative endeavour inaugurates a new phase where the female rivalry and antagonism that has dominated the plot for so long yields to a groundswell RIHPSDWKHWLFVROLGDULW\7KLVLVUHÀHFWHGPRVWFOHDUO\LQWKHVKLIWLQJHPSKDVLVRI the two great scenes of antiphonal lament in Richard III (2.2 and 4.4). Initially used to underscore the women’s competitive striving for precedence, the repetitive syntactical patterns and echoic rhetorical structures of these ensemble set-pieces come to express a united sense of purpose that is predicated on the speakers’ shared status as Richard’s victims. Take, for example: DAUGHTER [Clarence’s to Queen Elizabeth] Our fatherless distress was left unmoaned; Your widow-dolour likewise be unwept. (2.2.64–5) DUCHESS OF YORK Was never mother had so dear a loss! Alas, I am the mother of these griefs, Their woes are parcelled; mine is general. (2.2.79–82) 33

Ross, Englands Threnodie, 4

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Compare this with: QUEEN ELIZABETH Poor heart, adieu. I pity thy complaining. ANNE, DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER No more than with my soul I mourn for yours. (4.1.87–8) QUEEN ELIZABETH [to Richard] Tell me, thou villain-slave, where are my children? DUCHESS OF YORK Thou toad, thou toad, where is thy brother Clarence? And little Ned Plantagenet his son? QUEEN ELIZABETH Where is the gentle Rivers, Vaughan, Gray? DUCHESS OF YORK Where is kind Hastings? (4.4.144–8)

A more subdued version of the rituals of collective female grieving occurs in Katherine’s penultimate scene where Henry’s cast-off queen asks her loyal servants to GLVSHOKHUVRUURZE\UHÀHFWLQJWKLVEDFNDWKHULQWKHLUPXVLFPDNLQJ(YHQ0DUJDUHW¶V implacable vindictiveness abates as she begins to entertain the notion that ‘sorrow can admit society’ (4.4.38). The choric complaints engendered by the rapprochement between Richard’s female relations and his enemies are enhanced by their rhetorical unison to a point where they acquire an irresistible power and intensity. These dramatic demonstrations of the companionable nature of female grief raise the question of the women’s capacity to transcend their partisan interests and private woes in order to assume the role of commentator on the nation’s ills. In actuality, the degree to which this ideal is realized varies markedly from one play to the next. Margaret’s reluctance to look beyond her own grudges is mirrored in the other women of the Ricardian court who suffer from similar, albeit PLOGHUIRUPVRIPRUDOP\RSLD/HVVVROLSVLVWLF&RQVWDQFHÀXFWXDWHVEHWZHHQDQ aggressively self-serving outlook and a more detached perspective that allows her to occupy a position comparable to the Bastard’s as a shrewd analyst of the ethical and political degeneracy infecting both sides in the Anglo-French wars. Only Katherine, I would argue, emerges with her credibility fully intact as a worthy spokesperson for the public weal. This is not because her views are untainted by personal animosity or self-interest – they clearly are – but because she aspires to a standard of impartiality by counterpoising unsparing judgment with charity in DFFRUGDQFH ZLWK WKH OHJDO FRQFHSW RI HTXLW\ DV LV H[HPSOL¿HG E\ KHU EDODQFHG assessment of her old adversary Wolsey’s career in 4.2. Moreover, she is the only female character in these plays to show any awareness of, and compassion for, the commoners’ plight in her advocacy of their interests.

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Katherine’s authority to represent the nation’s conscience does not rest solely on her own acute moral sensibility, however. Her empathy for the plight of her downtrodden subjects and wish to ease their condition is underwritten not only by DQ DOOHJRULFDO WUDGLWLRQ RI XVLQJ IHPDOH SHUVRQDH WR UHÀHFW XSRQ WKH WULEXODWLRQV RI the body politic, but by the politicized idioms of collective female lament. Another instructive comparison was proposed some time ago by Geoffrey Bullough when he suggested that the ‘wailing queens’ of Richard IIIIXO¿OODVLPLODUIXQFWLRQWRWKHFKRUXV in classical drama.34 Bullough had Senecan models in mind, but Greek tragedy, which often features choruses of subjugated barbarian women who yet dare to query the policies of their masters, are, I would argue, more germane to our plays. The classicist, Helen Foley, has commented on the tendency in tragedy for female lament to become a site for the articulation and mobilization of ‘political or social resistance’ to civic authority, or a catalyst for avenging past injuries. ‘A mourning woman’, she states, ‘is not simply a producer of pity, but dangerous’ inasmuch as ‘the message her lament carries is never fully suppressed’.35 In Richard III the women’s collective bewailing of their dead kin likewise supplies a crucial focal point for the orchestration of resistance to a tyrannical and corrupt regime. As a form of ‘memorial consciousness’, ritual lamentation also facilitates an unbroken communion with the deceased whereby the dead are made present.36 It should therefore come as no surprise that a pivotal scene of communal mourning (4.4) triggers the chain of events leading directly to the Duchess and Queen Elizabeth’s decision to confront Richard with his crimes and culminating in his death. This encounter derives its power not only from the vocalization of powerful feelings, but from their propensity to bring to the surface – that is, into public view – things that have long been suppressed in the nation’s political unconscious. ,WLVQRWRQO\5LFKDUG¶VVWLÀHGHPRWLRQDOLQVHFXULWLHVRUKLVODWHQWVHQVHRIJXLOWWKDW are aroused by his mother’s denunciation. The sequence of events strongly implies a causal connection between the women’s recitation of the roll-call of his victims and the incantatory power of summoning the dead. For in the following act England’s past is uncannily resurrected as the spectres of murdered men, women, and children reappear on stage to add their vengeful curses and accusations to the women’s and confer their blessings on Richmond.37 In effect, these two groups – male and female, Yorkist and Lancastrian, the living and the dead – merge to form a new, expanded community founded upon their shared hopes and fears for the commonweal. Between them, the interventions of the women and ghosts overwhelm Richard, precipitating a crisis of conscience from which he never recovers. His tormented psyche turns against itself, envisioning the arena of the soul as a courtroom where he is arraigned by his own sins which ‘[t]hrong to the bar, crying all “Guilty! guilty!”’ 34

Geoffrey Bullough, cited in Brooks, ‘Richard III’, 721. Helen Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton, 2001), 55. 36 Cf. Goodland, Female Mourning, 13–14, 16. The term ‘memorial consciousness’ was coined by Pierre Nora. 37 Indeed the varying of set phrases and constructions in the ghosts’ speeches encourages us to view these as a continuation of the women’s lamentation. 35

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(5.5.147–54).38 6LJQL¿FDQWO\ WKLV SURFHVV LV UHSOLFDWHG DFURVV DOO WKUHH SOD\V LQ HDFKFDVHWKHHQFRXQWHUZLWKDIHPDOH¿JXUHZKRVHGHPDQGIRUMXVWLFHFDUULHVKXJH symbolic weight appears to provoke a chain reaction that persists beyond her demise, as one dormant conscience after another is reawakened. Following Constance’s disappearance from the stage, Hubert, John, and Melun are successively galvanized by their twinges of conscience into trying to set matters right. In Henry VIII, too, the King’s restive and ambivalent conscience respecting the legality of his marriage is contrasted with the Queen’s secure faith in her own as the true infallible source of judgment, and with Wolsey’s rediscovery of his long-neglected conscience. The dramatic prominence given to the emergence of a revitalized private FRQVFLHQFHLVKLJKO\VLJQL¿FDQW:KDWWKLVGRHVLQHIIHFWLVUHORFDWHWKHRSHUDWLRQ of justice by detaching this from its external manifestations in the corrupted administration of the law to lodge it within the soul’s interior, self-regulatory dialogue with itself.39 Moreover, this faculty, described by William Ames in 1639 as an internalized ‘law’ or ‘practicall judgement’ that directs our mental deliberations with regard to ‘morall action’, had by the mid-sixteenth century become barely distinguishable from the principle of equity in the eyes of the common law.40 Its resurfacing in the latter half of these plays, then, would seem to augur well for the body politic’s capacity to heal or mend itself. Female investment in the ULWXDO UHPHPEUDQFH RI WKH GHDG OLNHZLVH WDNHV RQ D VDOYL¿F IXQFWLRQ IRU RQO\ E\ FRQMXULQJ XS WKH JKRVWV RI KLVWRU\¶V YLFWLPV OLWHUDOO\ DQG ¿JXUDWLYHO\ FDQ WKHVLQVRIWKHSDVW¿QGUHPHG\DQGDIUDFWXUHGQDWLRQEHUHFRQFLOHGZLWKLWVHOI In promoting such commemorative acts together with their forthright defence of equity, Shakespeare’s royal women may be said to play a crucial role in enabling this process of national self-recovery and thereby laying the groundwork for Richmond, the Bastard, and Cranmer’s assertive visions of a resurgent national VHOIFRQ¿GHQFH

38

This is a traditional metaphor: William Perkins likens the conscience to a ‘judge that KROGHWKDQDVVLVH WDNHVQRWLFHRILQGLWHPHQWVDQGFDXVHWKWKHPRVWQRWRULRXVPDOHIDFWRU that is, to hold up his hand at the barre of his judgement’ (The Workes of … Mr. William Perkins, vol. 1 [London, 1612–1613], 519). 39 .DWKHULQHDI¿UPVWKHVXSHULRULW\RIFRQVFLHQFHDVDIRUPRIVHOIMXGJPHQWRYHU trial by public opinion at 3.1.29–37. On the independence of private conscience from external authority, see Camille Wells Slights, ‘The Politics of Conscience in All is True (or Henry VIII)’, Shakespeare Survey, 43 (1991): 60–64. 40 William Ames, Conscience with the Power and Cases Thereof (1639): 2–4. On the assimilation of conscience to the principle of equity, see John Guy, ‘Law, Equity and Conscience in Henrician Juristic Thought’, in Alistair Fox and John Guy (eds), Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform, 1500–1550 (Oxford, 1986), 179–98. For its importance in jury trials, see Thomas Andrew Green, Verdict According to Conscience (Chicago and London, 1985), Ch. 4 and 5.

PART 2 That Shakespeare

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Chapter 6

Imagining England: Contemporary Encodings of ‘this sceptred isle’ Sarah Grandage

Few speeches are more iconic or more frequently employed in the service of patriotic rhetoric than John of Gaunt’s deathbed eulogy for a lost England (Richard II, ± 7KLV(QJODQGGH¿QHGYDULRXVO\E\LWVVXSSRVHGLVODQGJHRJUDSK\ its monarchy, an Edenic heaven on earth, the envy of the less fortunate, is of course an idealized conceit. Yet despite – or perhaps because of – its unreality, the speech’s imagined version of England captured a part of the collective cultural imagination from the outset and continues, in various forms, to be appropriated in settings both large and small, national and personal.1 7KHGHHSFXOWXUDOLQÀXHQFHRI*DXQW¶VVSHHFKDQGLWVSXWDWLYHVHQVHRIQDWLRQDO identity are encapsulated in repeated contemporary intertextual redeployments of one particular phrase from the speech, ‘this sceptred isle’. Even when divorced from its original context the phrase acts as a ‘cultural depth charge’.2 This chapter considers the use of this phrasal ‘depth charge’ in contemporary British newspaper discourse, where, notwithstanding its attendant notions of ‘Englishness’, it is appropriated for use as a metonym for both England and Britain. The chapter therefore assesses both the elements of ‘Englishness’ that appear to have been carried over from Gaunt’s speech into the newspaper discourse and those that have been occluded or changed through continual redeployment, thereby revealing FRQWHPSRUDU\YHUVLRQV RI (QJODQG%ULWDLQDQG (QJOLVKQHVV%ULWLVKQHVV UHÀHFWHG in the institutional discourse of the press. 1 ,W ZDV ¿UVW H[FHUSWHG LQ  IURP OO ± E\ 5REHUW$OORWW IRU LQFOXVLRQ LQ Englands Parnassus, an anthology which consisted of over 2000 extracts by authors including Spenser, Drayton, Daniel, Sidney, Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare, although Allott wrongly attributed the speech to Drayton. 2 ‘… the cultural depth charges latent in certain words and rhythms, that binding secret between words in poetry that delights not just the ear but the whole backward and abysm of mind and body; thinking of the energies beating in and between words that the poet brings into half-deliberate play; thinking of the relationship between the word as pure vocable, as articulate noise, and the word as etymological occurrence, as symptom of human history, memory and attachments.’ Seamus Heaney, ‘Englands of the Mind’ in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 77.

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In order to examine the way in which newspaper discourse mobilizes the sceptred isle phrase and its concomitant notions of ‘Englishness’, the phrase is considered in three main stages: 7KH¿UVWFRQVLGHUVWKHSKUDVHLQWKHFRQWH[WRI*DXQW¶VVSHHFKWKURXJKFORVH stylistic analysis, focusing on the foregrounding effects of the lexico-grammatical patterns in order to assess the salience of particular images and undercurrents of the speech that inform and sustain the phrase in contemporary redeployments. This analysis also provides a basis for comparison with the meaning potential of the phrase in later intertextual allusions, thus allowing an assessment of the distance that the appropriated phrase has travelled from its original context. The second stage acknowledges some of the principal routes of transmission the WH[WKDVPRYHGDORQJLQWKHWZHQWLHWKDQGHDUO\WZHQW\¿UVWFHQWXULHVUHÀHFWLQJRQ the changes and accretions to the perceived meaning(s) of the sceptred isle phrase DQGWKHHIIHFWRIWKHVHPRGL¿FDWLRQVRQWKHUHFRJQLWLRQDQGLQWHUSUHWDWLRQRIWKH phrase in the newspaper discourse. The third stage considers some of the issues of phrasal appropriations in contemporary newspaper discourse by focusing on three case studies to exemplify the phrasal allusion at work. In order to examine how readers recognize and interpret elements of ‘England’ in appropriations of the sceptred isle phrase, this section focuses on the linguistic devices which signal the presence of allusion and the apparent evaluative stance of the various voices at work in the journalistic texts. ‘This Sceptred Isle’: The Phrase in Context The complex imagery of the speech has been widely discussed in other research in relation to the context of the play, its historical setting, and its period of production.3 The analysis here provides a detailed linguistic exploration of the most commonly excerpted section of the speech, ‘This royal throne of kings …/… this realm, this England’ (ll. 40–50), in order to focus on the creation of the key images of the speech through overlexicalization and the complex lexico-grammatical interlacing of multiple noun phrases.4 For although each of the accumulated noun phrases of the 3 See for example Richard D. Altick, ‘Symphonic Imagery in Richard II ’, PMLA, 62 (1947): 339–65; W.C. McAvoy, ‘Form in Richard II, II.i. 40–66’, JEGP, 104 (1955): 55–61; M.M. Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay (London: Methuen, 1957); Donald Friedman, ‘John of Gaunt and the Rhetoric of Frustration’, ELH, 43 (1976): 279–99; and Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo, ‘Shakespeare Eurostar: Calais, the Continent, and the Operatic Fortunes of Ambroise Thomas’ (this volume). 4 Halliday argues that what he terms ‘overlexicalisation’ – the proliferation of apparent synonyms – plays an important part in conveying the interpersonal aspect of language through the distinguishable ‘attitudinal components’ of the apparent synonyms. This evaluative aspect is a key element of the reception of Gaunt’s various images of England. M.A.K. Halliday, Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning (London: Arnold, 1978), 165–6.

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VSHHFKUHSUHVHQWVDVLJQL¿FDQWDVSHFWRI*DXQW¶VYLVLRQRI(QJODQGWKHOLQJXLVWLF construction of the text reveals that they are more richly textured when seen in relation to each other.5 Bearing in mind the accumulation of multiple noun phrases referring to ‘this England’ in the speech, the analysis also considers the sceptred isle phrase’s particular ability to represent Gaunt’s conceptual repertoire of England and Englishness when appropriated in isolation from the rest of the speech. Two of the key images of the speech – monarchy and land – are linked together most notably in the sceptred isle phrase itself, through the head noun, isleSUHPRGL¿HGE\WKHPHWRQ\PLFSDUWLFLSLDODGMHFWLYHsceptred, which carries WKHVHQVHRIWKHODQGEHLQJµUDWL¿HG¶E\WKHJRYHUQDQFHRIWKHNLQJ6 The ensuing phrase, this earth of majesty O   DOVR UHÀHFWV WKLV FRXSOLQJ ZLWK WKH SRVW PRGL¿FDWLRQRIWKHKHDGQRXQearth by the prepositional phrase of majesty. The grammatical structuring of these two phrases foregrounds the role of the monarchy LQGH¿QLQJWKHQDWLRQUHYHDOLQJWKDWWKHPRQDUFK\LVQRWVLPSO\DQLQGLFDWRURI (QJODQG¶VJUHDWQHVVEXWDQLQKHUHQWSDUWRIZKDWGH¿QHVLW,QGHHGWKHOLQJXLVWLF VWUXFWXUHRI*DXQW¶VVSHHFKUHÀHFWVLQPLQLDWXUHDQLURQLFHOHPHQWRI6KDNHVSHDUH¶V exploration of kingship in the cycle of the history plays, that whatever the quality RI DQ LQGLYLGXDO¶V OHDGHUVKLS HDFK NLQJ¶V LQÀXHQFH LV VHHQ WR EH XVXUSHG RU dissipated, and it is the institution of monarchy which survives. Shakespeare achieves this emphasis on the institution rather than the individual WKURXJKDQDFFXPXODWLRQRIOH[LFDOLWHPVIURPWKHVHPDQWLF¿HOGRINLQJO\UXOH (royal throne, kings, sceptred [l. 40], majesty [l. 41], and realm [l. 50]) which foregrounds the intrinsic nature of the monarchy in this imagining of England and English national identity. However, it is the metonymic nature of these images that points to the importance of the institution itself. This is revealed in two intertwining lexical sets clustering around the material and symbolic trappings of kingship (the throne, the sceptre, and the realm), and the intrinsic ‘essence’ RIPRQDUFK\ZKDWLWPHDQVWREHUR\DOWRH[HPSOLI\PDMHVW\ 7KXVLQWKH¿UVW of the images in the speech to link land and monarchy, the singular noun throne 5 7KLVZRUNVDJDLQVW/HJJDWW¶VVXJJHVWLRQWKDW*DXQWLVµWU\LQJRXWHSLWKHWV¿QGLQJ none of them quite right’. The structure of the speech indicates that they are all ‘right’, linked to each other to form a multifaceted whole. See Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (London: Routledge, 1988), 55. 6 7KLVVHQVHLVDEVHQWIURPWKH2('GH¿QLWLRQIRUµVFHSWUHG¶DVµEHDULQJDVFHSWUH LQYHVWHG ZLWK UHJDO DXWKRULW\¶ 7KH 2(' QRWHV WKH ¿UVW H[DPSOH RI WKLV XVH LQ *DYLQ Douglas’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (1513) (‘Thys ancient kyng dyd set hym dovn DP\G7KHFHSWXU\WPHQDV¿UVWDQGSULQFLSDOO¶Aeneis XI.vi.). The next entry given is that of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (‘But mercy is above this sceptred sway …’ 4.1.193), with this use dated from 1596, three years after the OED presumes Richard II to have been written. Both these examples have the sense of ‘holding a sceptre’, which follows the OED GH¿QLWLRQ7KHXVHLQ*DXQW¶VVSHHFKLVQRWJLYHQXQGHUWKHHQWU\IRUµVFHSWUHG¶GHVSLWHWKH ‘sceptred isle’ phrase being contained in exemplifying quotations for the headwords ‘royal’ and ‘Eden’. See ‘sceptred, ppl. a.’ The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50215193.

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juxtaposed against the generic plural of kings brings into focus the importance of the institution as opposed to the individual sovereigns, metaphorically linking the permanence of the geographical and political entity of England to the ceremonial seat of state power.7 The sceptre, like the throne, forms part of the symbolic, ceremonial paraphernalia. The integral importance of institutional symbols such as the sceptre and the crown to Richard’s own understanding of monarchy is seen in both his words and actions: the sceptre is the symbol that Richard is said to \LHOG¿UVWLQUHOLQTXLVKLQJWKHPRQDUFK\WR%XOOLQJEURRN± WKHFURZQ LVZKDWKH¿QGVKDUGHVWWRSDUWZLWK± ,QDGGLWLRQWRWKHVHPDWHULDO symbols of rule, the adjective royalZKLFKUHIHUVKHUHVSHFL¿FDOO\WRWKHWKURQH DQGWKHUHIRUHWKHRI¿FHRIWKHNLQJWKURXJKWKHµLQVLJQLDRUHPEOHPVRIUR\DOW\¶  and the abstract noun majesty (which encodes the notions of ‘greatness’, power, DQGWKHGLJQL¿HGVWDWHO\EHDULQJRIµH[DOWHGSHUVRQDJHV¶ LQGLFDWHWKH ineffable nature of the monarchy creating what Scruton refers to as the ‘corporation sole that endures from year to year and century to century, even when there is no living monarch, and even when all is in turmoil in the world of power’.8 Notions of monarchy are also linked to the land in the phrase ‘this earth of majesty’. However, here it is the ‘earth’ or soil of England that nurtures and maintains the essence and presence of the monarchy, a gesture towards a more prosaic but equally important understanding of England in relation to its rural, agricultural heritage. This meaning is underlined in the coupling of images RI ODQG DV NLQJGRP DQG ODQG DV IHUWLOH UHVRXUFH LQ WKH ¿QDO OLQH RI WKH H[WUDFW (l. 50), where the juxtaposition of the four nominal groups, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, linked together by the grammatical parallelism of the repeated demonstrative determiner this, creates a semantic equivalence. Thus, this … plot, amongst its multiple meanings, refers to land for the cultivation of crops, underlined by the proximity to the subsequent noun earth. These two ‘land’ images lead directly to the third image, this realm. The use of realm, adopted from the Old French ‘reaume’, itself a derivation of the Latin ‘regimen’ and thus related to the act of government or rule, creates a similar pairing to that of land DQGPRQDUFK\IRXQGLQOLQHV±XQGHUOLQLQJWKHLGHDWKDWWKHODQGLVGH¿QHG DQG UDWL¿HG E\ WKH PRQDUFK\9 All three images in this line build towards ‘this England’ at the end of the noun phrase cluster, amalgamating and condensing all WKHSUHFHGLQJLPDJHU\LQWKH¿QDOYRFDWLYH(DFKRIWKHVHYDULRXVUHSUHVHQWDWLRQV 7

&RPSDUHWKHJHQHULFSOXUDORIµNLQJV¶ZLWKWKHXVHRIWKHGH¿QLWHDUWLFOHLHµWKH NLQJ¶ ± UHIHUHQFH WR D VSHFL¿F NLQJ  RU WKH XVH RI WKH LQGH¿QLWH DUWLFOH LH µD NLQJ¶ ± reference to a generic example). 8 ‘royal, a.’ The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., OED Online, http://dictionary. oed.com/cgi/entry/50209819. Meaning 2b cites the example ‘1593 SHAKES. Rich. II, II.i. 40 This royall Throne of Kings, this sceptred Isle, this England; “majesty, n”’. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., OED Online, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/00299999. Roger Scruton, England An Elegy (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000), 208. 9 ‘realm, n.’ The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., OED Online, http://dictionary. oed.com/cgi/entry/50198452.

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RI D ODQG GH¿QHG E\ LWV SHUPDQHQW LQVWLWXWLRQ RI PRQDUFK\ DUH LQWULQVLF WR WKH conceptualization of England in the speech and in onward mobilizations. The sceptred isle phrase itself centres on the much-discussed geopolitical inaccuracy of the island image that fails to distinguish between Britain and England, subsuming all parts of Great Britain under the boundaries of ‘Greater England’.10 The use of England/English to stand metonymically for Britain/British is not isolated to Shakespeare, despite his work having long been employed as a major tool in ‘Englishing the British state’.11 This same ‘mistake’ is repeated in ‘a morass of mix-ups’ across time and genres, including the journalistic discourse under consideration in the later part of this chapter.12 Notwithstanding its geopolitical inaccuracy, the island image has a key role to play in the various conceptualizations of England in Gaunt’s speech and in appropriative mobilizations, both in terms of the island fortress imagery and also the mythical, ‘world apart’ status that the use of the term ‘isle’ confers. The image of England/Britain as a fabled land beyond the edge of the world was a familiar one in the Middle Ages, taking further KROGLQWKH¿IWHHQWKDQGVL[WHHQWKFHQWXULHVDVLWDSSHDOHGWRWKHLPDJLQDWLRQVRI poets, dramatists, and chroniclers.13 Yet it is also found in the interpretations of the sceptred isle phrase in many of the contemporary journalistic sceptred isle allusions, underlining the fascination with the unreality of the imagined England/ Britain alluded to. In addition to the intertwining notions of land and monarchy, the speech encapsulates the religious connotations and the understanding of the ‘fortunate few’ that provide two further intrinsic aspects of the conceptualization of Gaunt’s England. Both of these are realized in the connotative layers of the evaluative premodifying adjective blessedO 2QRQHOHYHORIPHDQLQJ±KRO\RUVDQFWL¿HG – it forms part of the lexical set related to Christianity, particularly when read in relation to other items which encode the notion of a heaven on earth: ‘Eden’ and ‘paradise’. This meaning is blended seamlessly with the alternative meaning of blessed as ‘fortunate’ when read in relation to the affectively evaluative epithet ‘happy’ (l. 45) and the value engagement inherent in the noun ‘envy’ (l. 49). +RZHYHUZKLOH*DXQW¶VLPDJHU\UHÀHFWVWKHLGHDRI(QJODQGDVD*RGJLYHQ safe, bountiful haven and home for its lucky inhabitants, it also carries an implicit undertone of insularity, of inward-looking and suspicion of the outsider, in the

10 Willy Maley, ‘“This sceptred isle”: Shakespeare and the British problem’, in John J. Joughin (ed.) Shakespeare and National Culture (Manchester: Manchester University. Press 1997), 104. 11 Ibid., 86. 12 Norman Davies provides ample evidence, from the academic to the day-to-day, of what he refers to as ‘this morass of mix-ups’, which he argues is a result of ‘the inability of prominent authorities to present the history of our Isles in accurate and unambiguous terms’. Norman Davies, The Isles: A History (London: Macmillan, 2000), xxv–xlii. 13 See J. Waters Bennett, ‘Britain among the Fortunate Isles’, Studies in Philology, 53/2 (1956), 114–40.

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need for defence against the envy of the less fortunate. The sense of ‘envy’ is a highly negative one of ‘enmity and malice’, particularly when read in combination with the need for defence borne out in the nested images of the island fortress surrounded by the natural barrier of the sea, and the home surrounded by the manmade moat – the island fortress in miniature (ll. 43–9).14 7KHQHHGIRUSURWHFWLRQIURPHQYLRXVRXWVLGHUVLVLQWHQVL¿HGE\WKHSDUDOOHO syntactic structures of the two phrases ‘this fortress built by nature for herself/ Against infection and the hand of war’ (ll. 43–4) and ‘this precious stone set LQ D VLOYHU VHD:KLFK VHUYHV LW LQ WKH RI¿FH RI D ZDOO2U DV D PRDW GHIHQVLYH to a house,/Against the envy of less happier lands’ (ll. 46–9). The grammatical parallelism creates a co-relation between the head nouns ‘fortress’ and ‘stone’, mapping the beauty of the jewel in its precious mounting onto the island image, and the strength of the elemental stone onto the physical attributes of the fortress LPDJH7KHUHSHDWHGRSSRVLWLRQDOSUHSRVLWLRQµDJDLQVW¶LQWKH¿QDOVHFWLRQRIHDFK SKUDVH¶VSRVWPRGLI\LQJQRQ¿QLWHSDUWLFLSOHFODXVHVHWVXSDVHQVHRILQVXODULW\ %HQHDWKWKHVXSHU¿FLDOSDWULRWLFSULGHRIWKHVSHHFKODWHVL[WHHQWKFHQWXU\DQ[LHWLHV about foreign invasion, civil strife, and the succession are revealed through the attitudinal stance encoded grammatically in the preposition ‘against’ and lexically in the semantic grouping of ‘infection’, ‘war’ (l. 44), and ‘envy’ (l. 49).15 So, while the surface level of Gaunt’s England suggests a beautiful, blessed, IHUWLOH LVODQG UDWL¿HG E\ WKH µFRUSRUDWLRQ¶ RI PRQDUFK\ SRSXODWHG E\ PHQ ZKR recognize their fortunate position, utilizing the natural defences to help repel invasion by the envious people of more physically and spiritually impoverished lands, several of the images in Shakespeare’s text have an ambivalent counterpoint WRWKHQRVWDOJLFORQJLQJDQGSDWULRWLVP3HUKDSVPRVWVLJQL¿FDQWRIWKHVHLV*DXQW¶V ‘geopolitical metaphor of insularity’ and its related fortress mentality, which result from and help create the underlying sense of insecurity revealed in the speech.16 The sceptred isle phrase itself encapsulates many of the notions discussed above within its modifying adjective/head noun structure: the importance of the monarchy, the various encodings of the ‘island’ – the mythical, beautiful little world apart and the natural fortress capable of defending its inhabitants from envious outsiders. What the phrase does not overtly reveal from the speech’s imagery is the Christian trope of paradise on earth – unless of course the notions of monarchy are read in relation to the idea of the king as ‘God’s substitute,/His

14 This highly negative gloss of ‘envy’ is used by Charles Forker (ed.) Richard II (The Arden Shapespeare, 3rd series), (London: Arden, 2002), 246. 15 The image of ‘infection’ (l. 44) has been seen by several editors as echoing Daniel’s sense of ‘contagion’ through civil strife in his Civil War, book IV, verses 43 and 90. Samuel Daniel, The poeticall essayes of Sam. Danyel (London, 1599), 75, 83. 16 Kate Chedgzoy, ‘This Pleasant and Sceptred Isle: Insular Fantasies of National Identity in Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie and William Shakespeare’s Richard II’, in Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor (eds) Archipelagic Identities: Literature and Identity in the Atlantic Archipelago, 1550–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 25.

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deputy anointed in His sight/… His minister’ (Richard II, 1.2.37–8, 39). However, WKLV LV DGPLWWHGO\ GLI¿FXOW WR UHFRYHU IURP WKH sceptred isle phrase alone for a contemporary newspaper reader unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s text or notions of the divine right of kings. Before considering the newspaper articles and the versions of England visible in the phrasal appropriations of ‘this sceptred isle’, it is necessary to consider the principal mobilizations of the speech and phrase in twentieth- and early twenty¿UVWFHQWXU\SRSXODUFXOWXUH7KLVDOORZVIRUDUHÀHFWLRQRQWKHLPDJHVRIµ(QJODQG¶ that have been mapped over to contemporary settings and those which have been lost or obscured; or indeed whether meanings have been accreted or adapted WKURXJKWKHDSSURSULDWLYHFRQWH[WDOORIZKLFKPD\LQÀXHQFHWKHLQWHUSUHWDWLRQRI the phrase in the newspaper discourse. 7ZHQWLHWK&HQWXU\0RELOL]DWLRQV,QÀXHQFLQJ2QZDUG7UDQVPLVVLRQRIµWKLV sceptred isle’ Although Shakespearian appropriations have taken various forms, in a wide range of sites of ‘collaboration across time’, their function falls into two principal categories: laudatory or challenging.177KH¿UVWRIWKHVHLQYROYHVDUHLI\LQJDSSURDFK WRWKHDSSURSULDWHGWH[WZKLFKµFRQVHUYDWLYHO\DI¿UPVIDPLOLDULQWHUSUHWDWLRQVRU opinions’, the writer apparently wishing to adopt Shakespeare’s ‘voice’ for its supposed traditional values, and/or to validate their own writing by association with Shakespeare’s cultural capital.18 The more challenging or radical approaches have the apparent intention of using appropriation to critique the perceived conservative, imperial, and patriarchal values in Shakespeare’s writing.19 Whilst both the laudatory and challenging approaches to the sceptred isle phrase are IRXQGLQWKHNH\WZHQWLHWKDQGWZHQW\¿UVWFHQWXU\PRELOL]DWLRQVWKHPDMRULW\ are of the laudatory kind, apparently wishing to mobilize the traditional values of rural England and/or the conservative politics of national identity. This repeated laudatory mobilization of the phrase accretively compounds the associated ‘essence’ of Englishness in the onward transmissions of the phrase. Twentieth-century laudatory appropriations of ‘Shakespeare’ to access ideas of nation and patriotism were at their most overt during World War II. Shakespearian verse was a popular resource for those in both the British government and popular cultural spheres involved in morale-boosting and generating patriotic fervour, and few pieces were more popular than Gaunt’s portrait of England. For example, 17

Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge 2006), 47. Richard Finkelstein, ‘Disney Cites Shakespeare’ in Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (eds), Shakespeare and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 1999), 194. 19 For a discussion of these issues, see, for example, Jean Marsden, The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), and Julie Sanders, Novel Shakespeares (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 18

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in the summer of 1941, when invasion was a very real concern, the excerpted speech formed part of a London stage revue entitled This Sceptred Isle, which was intended to be a ‘dramatisation of Shakespeare’s call to Great Britain in time of war’, mobilizing the indomitable island fortress imagery, whilst reminding the DXGLHQFHRIWKHµHVVHQFH¶RIWKH(QJOLVKUXUDOLG\OOWKH\ZHUH¿JKWLQJIRU20 6LPLODUO\WKHSURSDJDQGLVWLFXVHRIWKHµKHULWDJH¶¿OPLQWKHFLQHPDRIWKHSHULRG ZDVH[HPSOL¿HGE\This England (1941), which links land and national identity, through four historical episodes – from the Norman invasion to the First World War – to focus on the idea of a rural farming community’s survival under threat of invasion.21*HRUJH2UZHOO¶VUHYLHZRIWKH¿OPVXJJHVWHGWKDWµWKHLPSOLFDWLRQDOO along is that England is an agricultural country, and that its inhabitants, millions of whom would not know the difference between a turnip and broccoli if they VDZWKHPJURZLQJLQD¿HOGGHULYHWKHLUSDWULRWLVPIURPDSDVVLRQDWHORYHRIWKH English soil’, a point echoed by Forker’s argument that in Richard II ‘Shakespeare roots the motif of patriotism in the pervasive imagery of earth, land, and ground’.22 Perhaps recognizing – and compounding – the problems of ‘Englishing the British VWDWH¶WKH¿OPZDVUHWLWOHGOur Heritage for its Scottish release. 7KHVHVWDJHDQG¿OPH[DPSOHVSURGXFHGDWDWLPHRIH[WUHPHQDWLRQDOWKUHDW unashamedly mobilize the patriotic aspects of the speech, drawing attention to the VHQVHRISULGHDQGSDVVLRQLQUHODWLRQWRDXQL¿HGQDWLRQDOLGHQWLW\DQGVHHNLQJWR legitimize this ‘call to arms’ by association with Shakespeare, the ‘national poet’. 7KH$QJORFHQWULFPDSSLQJRI(QJODQGRYHU%ULWDLQLQERWKWKHVHFDVHVH[HPSOL¿HV the confounding of Shakespeare’s explorations of the complex issues of nation and national identity, especially in times of national threat, in the service of patriotic morale boosting and national unity. It is something that is repeated in the many onward transmissions of the speech and phrase, resulting in a fossilization of this inaccuracy. Similarly, the nostalgia for a rural past has become a prevalent feature of appropriations of the phrase in many later afterlives, including newspaper discourse. The major late-twentieth-century laudatory site of ‘cultural rejuvenation’ for the sceptred isle phrase, SRWHQWLDOO\LQÀXHQFLQJMRXUQDOLVWLFDSSURSULDWLRQDQGUHDGHU UHFRJQLWLRQLVWKHKLJKSUR¿OH%%&5DGLR%ULWLVKKLVWRU\VHULHVThis Sceptred Isle: 55BC–1901, which began in 1995. This Anglo-centric version of history concentrated on the monarchy and responses to the threat of invasion throughout the 20

Maley, ‘“This sceptred isle”: Shakespeare and the British problem’, 83–4. 7KH KHULWDJH ¿OP W\SLFDOO\ PRELOL]HV DQ DHVWKHWLF LPDJH RI FKDUDFWHULVWLFDOO\ southern English pastoral, rural landscapes, with a perpetuation of tradition and associated perceptions of ‘morality’ and ‘culture’ to promote an image of a stable, middle-class, conservative community. See Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); and James Chapman, The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda 1939–1945 (London: I.B. Tauris and Co., 1998). 22 George Orwell, Time and Tide (31 May 1941), quoted in J. Richards ‘Mobilizing the Past: The Young Mr. Pitt’, in A. Aldgate and J. Richards (eds), Britain Can Take It: British Cinema in the Second World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 140; Forker, Richard II, 69. 21

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centuries, and thus traced a direct line to many of the ‘patriotic’ notions in Gaunt’s speech. The series was expanded between 1999 and 2005 to cover the twentieth century, maintaining the phrase in the popular ‘eye’, with publications and audio recordings that have become the BBC’s best-selling cassette of a single programme, DOOUDLVLQJWKHSUR¿OHRIWKHSURJUDPPHDQGWKHsceptred isle phrase.23 The use of the Shakespearian phrase as the title results in the same geopolitical subsuming of Great Britain under the England banner that occurs in Gaunt’s speech. The apparent wish to draw on an association with Shakespeare’s work, which is ‘often enlisted in the service of a conservative English nationalism’, adds to the accretive process of the phrase being widely understood conservatively in relation to issues of monarchy, legitimizing history, and an underlying sense of geopolitical insularity.24 Many of the more recent appropriations also appear to wish to access the long, therefore legitimizing ‘history’ of England/Britain, alongside the heritage tourist industry’s association of Shakespeare with a nostalgic image of rural ‘English’ village life. Thus, the laudatory appropriations found in the Website name of an online history tour and quiz of the towns, villages, and countryside of Great Britain, or volumes of British Transport Films: This Sceptred Isle – Yorkshire and This Sceptred Isle – Scotland, exemplify a ‘theme-park’ view of Britain that acknowledges a nostalgic evocation of a romanticized historical period, as they attempt to overlay the imagery of ‘England’ onto Britain.25 6RPH XVHV RI WKH SKUDVH RIIHU VXFK ÀHHWLQJ DOOXVLRQV WR WKH VSHHFK WKDW WKH\ IXQFWLRQ VLPSO\ DV DQ HPEHOOLVKPHQW RU µÀRXULVK¶ UHVXOWLQJ LQ D SHUFHSWLRQ of ‘trivialisation [or] personal indulgence by the creators.’26 For example, the ÀHHWLQJDOOXVLRQLQ The Sceptred Isle Food Company, the name of a delicatessen in the English market town of Saffron Walden, garners a sense of legitimacy and ‘Englishness’ more by association with a ‘heritage’ tourist notion of England than any deliberate association with the Shakespearian imagery of England’s agricultural fecundity.27 In many of the popular forms, the phrase is often used in less ‘exalted’ or more parodic ways than those discussed at the beginning of this section. These examples FDQDOVRH[SRVHWKH(QJODQG%ULWDLQGLOHPPDUHYROYLQJDURXQGWKHVSHFL¿FUHIHUHQW of ‘this sceptred isle’. For example, a 1994 Typhoo Tea television commercial used the excerpted speech voiced over stereotypically ‘English’ scenes of rolling 23 Christopher Lee, This Sceptred Isle 55BC–1901: From the Roman Invasion to the Death of Queen Victoria (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997). BBC Radio 4 This Sceptred Isle, http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/sceptred_isle/dynasties.shtml. Accessed 28 July 2008. 24 Maley, ‘“This sceptred isle”: Shakespeare and the British problem’, 85. 25 http://www.thissceptredisle.net. Accessed 30 July 2008. British Film Institute, The British Transport Films Collection: Volume Three, This Sceptred Isle – Yorkshire and Volume Five, This Sceptred Isle – Scotland, KWWSIWYGEE¿RUJXNVLIWWLWOH 26 Finkelstein, ‘Disney Cites Shakespeare’, 194. 27 The Sceptred Isle Food Company (Saffron Walden), http://www.travelpublishing. co.uk/CountryLivingEastAnglia/Essex/CLE31555.htm. Accessed 19 July 2008.

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green countryside, village cricket, tea and scones, and accompanied by the popular hymn Jerusalem. To allow the word play of the brand’s slogan – ‘putting the “tea/t” back into Britain’ – as well as reducing the advertisement’s Anglo-centricity, the ¿QDOSKUDVHRIWKHH[FHUSWµWKLV(QJODQG¶ZDVFKDQJHGWRµWKLV%ULWDLQ¶:KLOVWWKH change might suggest an awareness of the English/British ‘problem’, the visual images remain typically ‘English’. More recently, the cultivated eccentricity of the layered intertextuality and looser, more knowing allusion to ‘this Crunchy Nut isle, this other Eden, this honey and nut paradise …’ in a 2007 television commercial IRU.HOORJJ¶V&UXQFK\1XW&RUQÀDNHVODPSRRQHGWKHSDWULRWLFUKHWRULFRIPDQ\ nationalistic appropriations of the speech. There are also more subversive, ironic uses of the phrase where the borrowing is a creatively aggressive form of ‘quotation-theft’, deliberately playing with widely accepted associations of the appropriative text to make a political or social point.28 Thus, a 2005 BBC4 television documentary, This Sceptic Isle, tracing the Euro-sceptic movement in Britain and arguing for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, deliberately utilized the sense of insularity, distrust, and fear of being overrun so clearly articulated in Gaunt’s island fortress image. And a t-shirt slogan devised by the environmental campaign group Surfers Against Sewage, showing a map of the British Isles and the legend ‘this septic isle’, knowingly plays directly across the image of the sea as a protective barrier around the land, as well as subverting the images of the aesthetic value placed on the precious stone in its silver setting. However, although these forms of appropriation display ingenuity in their wordplay and critical engagement with the imagery traditionally associated with the phrase, they seem to have little impact on the accretive process of the widely understood meaning of the sceptred isle phrase in popular culture. Many of the issues that have been considered in the section above are at play LQWKHMRXUQDOLVWLFSKUDVDODOOXVLRQV7KH¿QDOVHFWLRQRIWKLVFKDSWHUIRFXVHVRQ three case studies of articles which exemplify many of the issues relating to the form and function of the appropriative allusions in British newspaper discourse, paying particular attention to the elements of England/Britain and Englishness/ Britishness that are being alluded to through these intertextual references. Journalistic Appropriations of ‘this sceptred isle’ There are many hundreds of examples of the sceptred isle phrase as an intertextual allusion or quotation in a range of British tabloid and broadsheet newspaper articles, including in political commentary, editorials, regular contributors’ columns, ¿QDQFLDO UHSRUWLQJ VSRUWV SDJHV HQYLURQPHQWDO LVVXHV WUDYHO DQG UHVWDXUDQW reviews. However, when considering the appropriative use of the sceptred isle phrase in these journalistic settings, two factors have to be taken into consideration

28 David Metzer, Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 163.

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in terms of the recognition of the phrase itself and any perception of journalistic stance in relation to allusions to Shakespeare or England/Englishness. )LUVWO\ZKHUHPDQ\OLWHUDU\¿OPDQGVWDJHDSSURSULDWLRQVRIIHUDVXVWDLQHG allusion to the source or ‘hypotext’, in journalistic settings (as in several of the popular culture examples discussed earlier) the phrase often constitutes the sole reference to the hypotext.297KLVÀHHWLQJUHIHUHQFHFDQFRPSOLFDWHWKHUHFRJQLWLRQ and interpretation process for the reader, an inherent paradox of appropriations of this kind that Desmet acknowledges, suggesting that quotation (or citation) is one of ‘the simplest, and yet most enigmatic, forms of appropriation’.30 Secondly, both the ephemeral and the non-‘literary’ nature of newspaper discourse means that the redeployment/recognition of Shakespearian phrases in this context raises questions about expected discourse communities, especially in comparison with more long-term, literary afterlives. Moreover, the expectations of the reader (in terms of both form and content, and the time invested in reading) when approaching GLIIHUHQW JHQUHV DUH LQÀXHQWLDO IDFWRUV LQ WKH UHFRJQLWLRQ DQG GHFRGLQJ RI WKHVH literary intertexts in a journalistic setting. Although Shakespeare’s position in the canon and the curriculum would suggest that readers might be able to recognize many citations/allusions and ‘a writer’s critical movement beyond the mere act of quotation or recitation’ relatively easily, journalists can also take advantage of a variety of linguistic devices to signal not only the phrasal intertextuality but also a critical stance towards the source text to which they are alluding.31 For example, quotation and citation often perform distinct functions, so that while quotation can be deployed in both laudatory and subversively critical ways, citation is almost always deferential in its relationship to its source text.32 I suggest that these linguistic devices form a ‘cline of allusivity’, from the overt quotation to fainter, allusive echoes (see Fig. 6.133 on following page). The further the linguistic form of the quotation/allusion is from the top of the cline, the harder the reader has to work to recognize the presence of Shakespeare and the allusion’s

29 Gerard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa 1HZPDQDQG&ODXGH'RXELQVN\/LQFROQ1( /RQGRQ8QLYHUVLW\RI1HEUDVND3UHVV 1997a [1982]), 5. 30 Christy Desmet, ‘Introduction’ in C. Desmet and R. Sawyer (eds), Shakespeare and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 1999), 8. 31 Sanders, Novel Shakespeares, 4. 32 Sanders, Appropriation and Adaptation, 4. 33 This cline of allusivity combines elements of Stockwell’s ‘cline of metaphoric forms’, which considers the opacity/clarity of stylistic realizations of metaphor, and the resulting readerly effort required to successfully decode the metaphor and Tannen’s continuum of ¿[LW\ RI VSRNHQ GLVFRXUVH IRUPV RI UHSHWLWLRQ IURP H[DFW UHLWHUDWLRQ WR SDUDSKUDVH 6HH Peter Stockwell ‘The metaphorics of literary reading’, Liverpool Papers in Language and Discourse, 4 (1992), 52–80; Deborah Tannen, Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 54.

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Fig. 6.1

Cline of allusivity. Design: Sarah Grandage.

original form and function. Nevertheless, the more variable forms allow greater leeway for journalistic attitudinal stance to be projected. In addition to the devices in Fig. 6.1 that can signal the presence of an allusion, the three case studies below consider a variety of lexico-grammatical devices used to indicate an attitudinal stance in contemporary encodings of this sceptred isle. In order to assess the version(s) of ‘England’, and any attendant attitudinal stance encoded in the journalistic allusions, the case studies consider the excerpted articles in relation to basic tenets of appraisal theory, which addresses the heteroglossic nature of discourse.34 This is particularly pertinent when considering the layers of ‘voice’ at work in such intertextuality: the putative voice of Shakespeare, or the character of Gaunt, the voice of the journalist in relation to the appropriated text and the co-text of the newspaper article, and other appropriated or supposed voices within the article. To this end, appraisal theory focuses on the linguistic means by which ‘emotions, tastes and normative assessments’ can be shared, thereby FUHDWLQJµFRPPXQLWLHVRIVKDUHGIHHOLQJVDQGYDOXHV¶ZKLFKLVDVLJQL¿FDQWDVSHFW of the appropriative uses of Shakespeare under discussion here.35 The appraisal resources applicable to this exploration of the appropriation of the sceptred isle 34

See J.R. Martin, ‘Beyond Exchange: APPRAISAL Systems in English’, in Susan Hunston and Geoff Thompson (eds), Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and J.R. Martin and P.R.R. White, The Language of Evaluation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 35 Martin and White, The Language of Evaluation, 1.

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phrase and its related notions of England/Englishness are those related to attitude. This concerns the linguistic means by which the writer takes up an evaluative stance towards participants and processes in the discourse, oriented to affect (emotional engagement), judgement (ethical or moral evaluations of behaviour) and appreciation (aesthetic evaluations). Three Case Studies The three case studies exemplify the differing forms and functions of the sceptred isle phrasal allusions found in recent British newspaper discourse. The phrasal appropriation in each case study occupies a different position on the cline of allusivity, represents different notions of England/Britain and Englishness/ Britishness associated with the sceptred isleVSHHFKDQGH[HPSOL¿HVWKHYDU\LQJ attitudes towards the appropriated phrase and its referents. 7KH¿UVWH[DPSOHLVDFLWDWLRQFOHDUO\VLJQDOOLQJLWV6KDNHVSHDULDQSURYHQDQFH and is the closest of the three examples to the idealizing, patriotic rhetoric so often DWWULEXWHGWR D VXSHU¿FLDORU WUXQFDWHGUHDGLQJRI *DXQW¶V VSHHFK DFFHVVLQJWKH ‘heritage’ industry perspective of Shakespeare’s England, in addition to gesturing toward the Christian imagery. The second case study is a looser variation of the phrase with additional wider allusion to more negative, insular aspects apparent in Gaunt’s speech, mobilizing the phrase satirically to ridicule insular notions of QDWLRQDOSULGHDQGLGHQWLW\E\PDQLSXODWLQJDEOHQGRIµYRLFHV¶7KH¿QDOVWXG\LV an example of the creative blending of intertextual reference, bringing together two phrasal allusions in the service of wryly parodying traditional, patriotic, conservative, political rhetoric. So, the case studies consider what expectations these phrasal intertexts carry with them in terms of reader recognition and assumed commonality of viewpoint, both in relation to the Shakespearian hypotext and the stance being expressed in the newspaper hypertext. Case Study 1 Listen, you’ll hear a miracle; IN SEARCH OF ENGLAND. The Daily Mail; March 8th 2005; Roy Hattersley ENGLAND is a small country when measured in miles and yards. But judged by its history, achievements and diversity of life within its shores, it is immense. We rarely express the pride we feel in being part of Shakespeare’s ‘sceptred isle’ so many of the joys of being English are never recorded. 7RGD\LQWKH¿UVWRIDQHZZHHNO\FROXPQ,DPVWDUWLQJWKHVHDUFKIRU(QJODQG« $7 7(1 PLQXWHV WR ¿YH LQ WKH HYHQLQJ WKH OLJKW LOOXPLQDWLQJ
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This extract is taken from The Daily Mail, a popular British tabloid typically VHHQ DV UHÀHFWLQJ WKH FRQVHUYDWLYH WUDGLWLRQDO YDOXHV RI PLGGOH (QJODQG ,W LV WKH ¿UVW LQ D VHULHV RI DUWLFOHV E\ IRUPHU 'HSXW\ /HDGHU RI WKH /DERXU 3DUW\ Roy Hattersley, in which he comments on aspects of England and Englishness. It quickly becomes clear that Hattersley’s concept of ‘England’ is closely related to the idealized England visible in the noun phrases of Gaunt’s elegy, nostalgically oriented to a putative glorious past. The title of the column ‘In Search of England’ is itself an intertextual reference to the title of two popular publications: Herbert Morton’s nostalgic, inter-war travel book about a disappearing rural way of life, with its sense of the inextricable link between land and nation, and the title of Michael Wood’s 2000 exploration of the link between landscape and history.36 The title, in all three cases, orients the reader through evoked affective evaluation to the suggestion WKDW (QJODQG LV µYDOXDEOH¶ DV KDYLQJ EHHQ µORVW¶ LW LV ZRUWK DWWHPSWLQJ WR µ¿QG¶ or regain, a sentiment mirroring Gaunt’s elegiac description.37 The source of this value is made clear in the attitudinal attributes of the second sentence: the positive appreciative and affective judgment of the legitimizing value of history, followed by HYRNHGDIIHFWLYHMXGJPHQWRIWKHXQVSHFL¿HGµDFKLHYHPHQWV¶DQG¿QDOL]HGZLWKWKH affective evaluation in the acknowledgement of the ‘diversity of life’. In the third sentence, Hattersley’s use of the proximal deictic properties of WKHLQFOXVLYH¿UVWSHUVRQSURQRXQµZH¶UHYHDOVKLVDVVXPHGGLVFRXUVHFRPPXQLW\ English like him, as well as sharing his notion of England and the English. Within this sentence, the placing of positively inscribed affective evaluations ‘pride’ and ‘joys’ in relation to ‘Shakespeare’s “sceptred isle”’ and ‘being English’ express Hattersley’s critical stance: being English – with its associations with the traditional and patriotic elements repeatedly witnessed in the appropriations above – is something to take pride in. By citing ‘Shakespeare’ before the borrowed phrase, Hattersley makes use of the framing ability of what Genette terms ‘peritexts’: signposting features which are present on the ‘threshold’ of the text proper and channel the reader’s reception of it.38 The phrasal intertext itself is signalled as a quotation with the use of quotation marks. Hattersley’s belt-and-braces approach to making sure his readers understand his reference seems to have less to do with indicating the origin of the quotation to the readership and more to do with ensuring they understand his critical stance: it is the commonly-held understanding of Shakespeare’s evocation of England that he appears to want to be linked to. Deploying it as ‘Shakespeare’s “sceptred isle”’ also serves the laudatory aspect of the citation, in addition to 36

H.V. Morton, In Search of England (London: Methuen, 2000 [1927]); Michael Wood, In Search of England: Journeys into the English Past (London: Penguin Books, 2000). 37 Evoked evaluation is ‘projected by reference to states or events which are conventionally prized or frowned on’, unlike inscribed evaluation, which is explicitly revealed in the text. Martin, ‘Beyond Exchange: APPRAISAL Systems in English’, 142. 38 Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997).

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marking a degree of distance and invoking a sense of incontrovertible authority: authorially distal through the invoking of the words and cultural capital of a great writer, and temporally distal as the England evoked is long past. Case Study 2 Foreign Legion are no threat to England’s long-term prospects. Coventry Evening Telegraph; February 19th 2005; Alan Poole

I DON’T KNOW who is acting as Michael Howard’s strategy spinmeister for the imminent election, but he or she squandered a golden opportunity this week. A key plank of Conservative policy, after all, is the assertion that our sceptred isle is inexorably sinking into the North Sea under the weight of unwanted immigrants who are not only leeching off our welfare state, spilling our pints and looking at our birds but also, it seems, unleashing fresh plagues of Aids, TB, the Black Death … Yet although Howard (in keeping with practically every other career politician of whatever hue) likes to emphasise his common touch with regular reminders of his passion for football, he somehow neglected to make any capital from the fact that Arsenal, once the quintessential English club, turned out on Monday with a squad consisting entirely of foreign mercenaries. Surely the Tories have got somebody with the wit to spot a xenophobic bandwagon when it hoves into view and the time to knock up a quick poster along the lines of “Vote for Blair and we’ll never win the World Cup again …” The Fourth Estate, of course, has no such inhibitions, and by Wednesday morning Fleet Street was awash with mournful obituaries for our national game … This excerpted article, from an English regional daily tabloid newspaper with a populist, politically neutral slant, takes one particular foundation of the Shakespearian text – the sense of distrust of foreign invasion and the inscribed negative evaluation of the ‘contagion’ it brings – and satirically exploits the intertextual exchange available through allusion to the socio-political insularity of Gaunt’s speech in order to link the arenas of sport and politics. This example, lying nearer the middle of the cline of allusivity, requires much more readerly effort to recognize the layering of allusion: the writer is voicing, in a parodic form, the appropriation of the phrase by the Conservative Party. This requires intricate work to recognize the allusion, separate the authorial voices – the voice of Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt, the journalist’s voice and the projected Conservative voice – and decode the parody. 7KHFOXVWHULQJRIOH[LFDOLWHPVIURPWKH¿HOGRISROLWLFVLQWKHRSHQLQJOLQHV activates readerly expectations of genre and discourse texture, what Genette refers to as the ‘architextuality’ of the text, both its form (political commentary)

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and the content (Conservative Party policies and actions).39 The deployment of the sceptred isle phrase is done without any peritextual indication of author or overt clue of appropriated voice in the form of quotation marks. In fact, there is a deliberate wresting of the phrase away from Shakespeare, in the grammatical deviation from the use of the demonstrative determiner ‘this sceptred isle’ to the use of the possessive determiner ‘our sceptred isle’. This is appropriation in the hostile sense: taking over control and authorship of the phrase, using a presumed sense of the original to add weight to the argument and to claim the idealized, insular England for the putative Conservative political voice. As the article progresses, with an accumulation of negatively evaluative lexis related to the feared invasion of ‘infection’, it becomes apparent that this is another example of a version of England in danger of being lost. This time, KRZHYHUWKHORVVLVGXHWRµXQZDQWHGLPPLJUDQWV¶7KHVHQVHRI¿QDQFLDOVRFLDO and sexual transgression by these immigrants is clear in the inscribed affective evaluation of phrases such as ‘leeching off our welfare state, spilling our pints and looking at our birds’, which leads to an evoked moral judgement of the ‘rights and wrongs’ of such behaviour. It is here that the journalist’s voice begins to surface as being different from the projected Conservative voice. The reader’s architextual knowledge of discourse registers recognizes that the discussion of these topics in such an informal fashion does not conform to genre expectations of serious political journalism: the juxtaposition of the ‘leeching off the welfare state’ with the trivializing of alcohol abuse and sexism, focused through spilling beer and ogling ‘birds’, parodies pub conversation. Moreover, the parody continues, pointing at an even greater fear of infection or contagion. Stylistically, this ‘contagion’ develops via an invoking of a biblical HFKR ¿UVW LQ WKH QHJDWLYHO\ HYDOXDWLYH YHUE µXQOHDVKLQJ¶ DQG WKHQ LQ WKH QRXQ ‘plagues’. The ‘AIDS plague’ is followed by reference to the reemerging threat of tuberculosis.40 However, this accumulation of threats and infections is then GHÀDWHGE\WKHPHQWLRQRIµWKH%ODFN'HDWK¶ORQJVLQFHYDQLVKHGIURP%ULWDLQ¶V shores but suitably ‘epic’ for the building of the discourse here. The ellipsis at the end of the list suggests that in fact ‘the Black Death’ is not the end of the contagion or the worst of it; such overstatement attempts to draw the reader’s ridicule. It is only after the setting up of this parodic picture of tabloid-reading, male xenophobia that it becomes clear that the subject of the article is in fact English football: the lack of native-born players and the prevalence of ‘foreign mercenaries’. As an example, Poole cites Arsenal, ‘once the quintessential English club’ (despite WKHFOXE¶VKLVWRU\RIIDPRXV,ULVKDQG6FRWWLVKSOD\HUV ZKRKDG¿HOGHGDQHQWLUHO\ non-English team, providing a satirical parallel here between the lost ‘England’ of the sceptred isle and the loss of national sporting identity and ideals through the 39

Gerard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. The reemergence of tuberculosis in Europe, partially as a result of migrant worker movement, has been repeatedly reported in the news in recent years. World Health Organization, http://www.euro.who.int/tuberculosis/tbday/20080312_1. Accessed 20 July 2008. 40

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growing number of foreign players and managers in the English game. In doing VRWKHMRXUQDOLVWVXEYHUVLYHO\EOHQGVVSRUWDQG&RQVHUYDWLYHSROLWLFVUHÀHFWLQJ socio-political insecurities and a distrustful insularity relating to immigrant SRSXODWLRQVWKURXJKKLVLURQLFVHQGXSRILQVXODUDWWLWXGHVWRWKHLQÀX[RIIRUHLJQ SOD\HUV7KLVLQZDUGORRNLQJVWDQFHLVUHÀHFWHGLQWKHQHJDWLYHHYDOXDWLRQE\WKH British media, seemingly based on ‘an aversion to theory or fancy ways [and] … a sustained belief that foreigners have little or nothing to teach us’, as opposed to the ‘supposedly typical English sporting virtues of commitment, power and, above DOO¿JKWLQJVSLULW¶41 Case Study 3 Come on you people at the back, put some effort in. Western Mail (Cardiff, Wales); October 10th 2003 THE man at the back was not clapping enough. He was clapping, but not enough. A steward rushed over, hands raised in supplication, and pleaded with him to put a bit more effort in. To say that Iain Duncan Smith’s speech was stage-managed would be an under-statement. Not even the best orator in the world can genuinely command 17 standing ovations in an 80-minute speech and Mr Duncan Smith is far from the best orator in the world. However, this was not about Mr Duncan Smith’s gift of the gab. It was about the party membership telling the parliamentary plotters to shut up, JHWEHKLQGWKHLUOHDGHUKRZHYHUÀDZHGDQGSURPRWH&RQVHUYDWLYHSROLFLHV>«@ And they roared as he risked an impression of Tony Blair and as he took belowthe-belt pot shots at Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy and promised to µ¿JKW¿JKWDQG¿JKWDJDLQWRVDYHWKHFRXQWU\WKDW,ORYH¶ $QGWKH\ZHUHEDFNXSDJDLQZKHQKHYRZHGWR¿JKWIRUDUHIHUHQGXPRQWKH European Constitution and again as he explained how he ‘stayed tough’ for the ‘remarkable, determined, compassionate and tolerant’ people of our green and sceptred isle.

This extract from an article in a Welsh daily tabloid with a populist, pro-Welsh focus, concerning the stage managing of the then-Conservative party leader’s address to the party faithful at the 2003 party conference in Wales, provides the PRVWGLI¿FXOWH[DPSOHRILQWHUWH[WXDODSSURSULDWLRQLQWHUPVRIUHDGHUUHFRJQLWLRQ and interpretation. The ‘green and sceptred isle’ echoes and blends allusions to two canonical hypotexts: Shakespeare’s ‘sceptred isle’ and Blake’s ‘green and pleasant

41

C. Critcher, ‘England and the World Cup: World Cup Willies, English Football and the Myth of 1966’, in J. Sugden and A. Tomlinson (eds), Hosts and Champions: Soccer Cultures, National Identities and the USA World Cup, (Aldershot: Arena, 1994), 90; Liz Crolley and David Hand, Football, Europe and the Press: Imagined Identities (London: Frank Cass, 2002), 20.

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land’ from the ‘Jerusalem’ text that prefaces his work, Milton. While Blake and his writing have not been appropriated in quite the same way as Shakespeare by the heritage tourist industry, the ‘green and pleasant land’ phrase has undergone similar afterlife appropriations to its Shakespearian counterpart in terms of being frequently conscripted to stand for a beautiful, pastoral vision of pre-industrial England. It is particularly well known as a result of Hubert Parry’s 1916 hymn setting for ‘Jerusalem’, beloved of traditional, conservative institutions such as the Anglican church and the Women’s Institute. The relationship between these two allusions results in a rich image, open to interpretation, with an accretion of meaning for both, with the popular understanding of the Blake allusion underlining the aesthetically pleasing image of green countryside and fertile agricultural land of Gaunt’s elegy so often seen in sceptred isle appropriations.42 However, neither of the hypotexts is signalled and the deviation from and blending together of the original forms places this example at the bottom of WKHFOLQHRIDOOXVLYLW\UHTXLULQJPXFKPRUHZRUNE\UHDGHUVWKDQWKH¿UVWFDVH study example. As with case study 2, there is a layering of voices in the article, each requiring interpretations of the different stances adopted. Certain phrases from Iain Duncan Smith’s speech are excerpted in quotation marks, making their provenance clear and prompting interpretation of a traditional Conservative stance to be extrapolated from the brief excerpts. However, it is the grafted sceptred isle allusion, in such close proximity to this rhetoric, representing an ironic layering of attitude through the use of the literary intertexts that acknowledges the Eurosceptic stance in the rhetoric. Here the journalist’s ‘voice’ offers a wry parody of stilted political rhetoric that accesses the laudatory, conventional sense of the sceptred isle phrase and its accreted insular, patriotic rhetoric. The effect is a retrospective deposit of meaning to the earlier reported elements of Iain Duncan 6PLWK¶VVSHHFKVXFKDVWKHSURPLVHµWR¿JKW¿JKW¿JKWIRUWKLVFRXQWU\WKDW, love’, which now takes on a layer of meaning that echoes elements of Gaunt’s beleaguered England so envied by foreign invaders. The reader is subtly invited to acknowledge the stilted nature of the political rhetoric and the journalist’s sardonic recognition of it through the ‘shorthand’ blend of literary allusions and their accreted popular ‘meanings’. Conclusion A close linguistic analysis of the lexico-grammatical features of John of Gaunt’s speech, taken from a play that has a resonant place in Shakespeare’s canon, particularly in relation to emergent ideas of national identity in the late sixteenth century, reveals the foregrounding of a cluster of images that draw a picture 42

Whilst the ‘rural’ imagery of both allusions chimes in popular appropriations of the phrases, there is a certain irony at play, albeit typically unrecognized, in the juxtaposition of the sceptred isle’s focus on the issues of monarchy with the use of a phrase by Blake who maintained an anti-monarchical stance throughout his career.

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of an England so idealized as to become the envy of invaders keen to enjoy its ERXQW\7KHLPDJHU\RIWKHVSHHFKGH¿QHVDQLPDJLQHGLVODQGQDWLRQµWUDQV¿JXUHG by nature and history, and personalized and moralized by the Crown’, a land coveted by those not fortunate enough to live here.43 The island geography, with its surrounding seas, sets this little world apart whilst providing the protection needed from envious invasion. However, this geographical inaccuracy also reveals a political one, subsuming Britain under the auspices of ‘Greater England’. The journalistic appropriations reveal that the lack of distinction between the two referents of England and Britain in many of the appropriative texts is as SUREOHPDWLF LQ WKH ODWH WZHQWLHWK DQG HDUO\ WZHQW\¿UVW FHQWXULHV DV LW ZDV  years ago. They also demonstrate that the images which spoke so powerfully to the original sixteenth-century audience, fearing the political aftermath of the death of their monarch, as well as invasion and civil strife, are repeatedly mobilized 400 years later in appropriations of the sceptred isle phrase, speaking to a contemporary audience with its own fears of invasion and attack, in the form of immigration, bird ÀXRUWHUURULVPDVZHOODVWKHSROLWLFDOFRQFHUQVRYHUGHYROXWLRQDQGWKHSRWHQWLDO fracturing of Great Britain. The nostalgic fascination with the putative past of Gaunt’s ‘England’ and a desire to ‘revisit’ it are clear in the many appropriations of both the excerpted speech and the sceptred isle phrase in isolation. The newspaper evidence suggests there is some truth in Lowenthal’s claim that ‘[i]f the past is a foreign country, nostalgia has made it “the foreign country” with the healthiest tourist trade of all.’44 However, this nostalgia is for an imagined, romanticized England/Britain, encapsulated and fossilized in the ‘sceptred isle’ phrase by the accretive process that the phrase has undergone in its many afterlives. In fact, many contemporary DSSURSULDWLRQV VXJJHVW D VRPHZKDW VXSHU¿FLDO HQJDJHPHQW ZLWK WKH SRVLWLYHO\ evaluated, patriotic images of nation, pastoral land, and island fortress. The majority of such appropriations lack an awareness of, or desire to engage with, the negative or more contentious points of Gaunt’s elegy. Similarly, in many of WKH PRUH ÀHHWLQJ LPDJHV WKH DVVRFLDWLRQ LV ZLWK D KHULWDJH LQGXVWU\ YHUVLRQ RI ‘Shakespeare’s England’ rather than with the complexity of Shakespeare’s England or the England of Gaunt’s speech. Few of the more ambivalent elements of Gaunt’s imagery seem to be used, except in the more parodic or subversive appropriations of the phrase that seek to challenge the popularly accepted understanding of England and Englishness, with its conservative, patriotic, even imperialistic overtones, relying on romanticized images of a rural, village society, ignoring the multiplicity of English voices, let alone the voices of the other parts of the United Kingdom so often subsumed under the ‘England’ of Gaunt’s ‘sceptred isle’.

43

Scruton, England: An Elegy, 211. David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 4. 44

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So, although the sceptred isle phrase has travelled a long way temporally, with popular cultural appropriations showing little recognition of, or impetus to access, its original context, it still has a relevance for a contemporary audience, encoding DFFUHWHG FXOWXUDO DVVXPSWLRQV RI QDWLRQDO LGHQWLW\ LQ LWV VHPL¿[HG SDWWHUQ WKDW are an important element of socialization.45 What remains to be seen is how Shakespeare’s ‘sceptred isle’ continues to be imagined, appropriated, accretively encoded, and interpreted in relation to popular cultural understandings of national identity, devolution in Scotland and Wales, and an increasingly multicultural %ULWLVKSRSXODWLRQDVWKHWZHQW\¿UVWFHQWXU\SURJUHVVHV

45 Michael Stubbs, Text and Corpus Analysis: Computer-assisted Studies of Language and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 169.

Chapter 7

Shakespeare Eurostar: Calais, the Continent, and the Operatic Fortunes of Ambroise Thomas1 Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo

In recent years, England has suffered a severe national identity crisis. Part of this crisis was directly related to the process of a devolving Britain – with Wales, Scotland, and Ireland seeking and obtaining varying degrees of political independence from London – most conspicuously so in the course of the 1980s and 1990s. The complexity of this process cannot be analyzed in detail here, but the quest for Englishness that follows in its wake offers an opportunity to reassess the role in all this of England’s most celebrated playwright, Shakespeare, both as a popular cultural phenomenon DQGDVDQREMHFWRIDFDGHPLFVWXG\DQGWRVHHLIDQGKRZKHPD\KHOSUHGH¿QHDQHZ sense of national identity. In 1987 Derek Jarman prophesied the demise not only of England (much like John of Gaunt in Richard II) but also of Shakespeare. As he put it in The Last of England (1987), itself the wry product of the Thatcherite 1980s which contributed to the crisis: ‘Outside in the leaden hail, the Swan of Avon dies a syncopated death.’2 Jarman was perhaps unnecessarily pessimistic. Shakespeare never died in the manner that Jarman foresaw, as a cultural icon. Nor did England end. Both survived, though in a different shape, still in a state of near chaos, lacking GH¿QLWLRQDQGKHQFHGHVHUYLQJDWWHQWLRQ In political terms, as Scotland, Wales, and Ireland gained new parliamentary rights, England never really did, and Parliament in London continues to address matters British. Just as the newly evolving England has become ‘the most “undiscovered country” of the British state,’ so the notion of ‘English’ Shakespeare has suffered neglect; although there is a veritable plethora of studies devoted to Shakespeare in Scottish, Irish, and Welsh culture, the notion of ‘Englishness’ has remained largely unexplored.3 In this paper, we seek to redress the balance. However, 1 This paper could not have been written without the hospitality of the Théâtre Impérial de Compiègne and the generous support of production assistant Jérôme Sonigo, whose tour of the archives yielded many of the results presented here. 2 Derek Jarman (dir.), The Last of England (1987), Second Sight Films 2NDVD 3055. 3 :LOO\0DOH\DQG$QGUHZ0XUSK\µ,QWURGXFWLRQ7KHQZLWK6FRWODQG¿UVW%HJLQ¶ in Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy (eds), Shakespeare and Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 15. See also Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (eds), Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (London: Macmillan, 1997).

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UDWKHUWKDQDWWHPSWWRUHGH¿QH6KDNHVSHDUHDQGµ(QJOLVKQHVV¶ZLWKUDWKHUREYLRXV reference to the other British territories and cultures – a task that shall hopefully be taken on by others now and in the years to come – we seek to explore the less OLNHO\RSWLRQRIGH¿QLQJ6KDNHVSHDUH(QJODQGDQG(QJOLVKQHVVDORQJFRQWLQHQWDO European lines. Recognizing the fact that the work of Shakespeare represents a link in the history of European culture on either side of the Channel, a culture which it absorbed during the early modern period and which it continued to mould almost instantaneously as it appeared on stage and in print, we seek to base this attempt DWDQHZGH¿QLWLRQRQWKHFRPSOH[PRGHRILQWHUUHODWLRQEHWZHHQ(QJODQGDQGWKH European continent, with Shakespeare as our commuting cultural ambassador. Much of the discussion about England and Englishness has taken its cue from John of Gaunt’s famous monologue in Richard II. Over the years this has furthered a remarkable rigidity of perception in a besieged and beleaguered and insular England, at odds, yet arguably complicit with British imperial history, but it has also given rise to revised new readings. These new readings of the speech have concentrated on at least two of its main features. One of these is its ideologically biased, self-defensive, and centripetal vision of England as an island. In Gaunt’s perception, England is a precious stone set in the silver sea, :KLFKVHUYHVLWLQWKHRI¿FHRIDZDOO Or as a moat defensive to a house Against the envy of less happier lands.4

By representing England as an island, Gaunt automatically and, in an indisputably Anglocentric fashion, subsumed such territories as Scotland and Wales under it, thus conveying an embryonic vision of Britain ruled from London. It was not entirely original to deconstruct the ideology of Gaunt’s speech in this way as the phantom of devolution emerged with full force during the 1980s (echoing the phantom of union that had emerged in the 1580s), nor was it only the English who had tended to get the topography of Britain and England wrong. At the beginning of his wartime ‘Conférences sur la Grande-Bretagne’ at the Centre d’études européennes of the University of Strasbourg, Marc Bloch, referring to the speech from Richard II, recalled how even the renowned nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet would start his classes on England with the observation, ‘Messieurs, l’Angleterre est une île.’5 However, given the increasing scepticism over the ideologically-biased topography of Gaunt, it does come as a surprise to ¿QGWKDWDWWKHWXUQRIWKHPLOOHQQLXPDOPRVWVL[GHFDGHVVLQFH0DUF%ORFKJDYH

4

King Richard II, ed. Charles Forker, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd Series (London: Thomson Learning, 2002), 2.1.46–9. All references will be to this edition. 5 Marc Bloch, ‘Conférences sur la Grande-Bretagne’ (1942), in L’Histoire, la Guerre, La Résistance, ed. Annette Becker and Etienne Block (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2006), 713.

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his lecture course for the European Studies centre, a writer like Roger Scruton should still treat the speech as a straightforward statement of fact.6 The second feature of Gaunt’s famous speech has been scrutinized much less frequently, namely its allegedly patriotic tenor. In the course of time, countless critics and historians have tended to wrest the lines from their medieval and their Elizabethan contexts, and have selectively read them to praise the nation and the inhabitants’ sense of glorious nationhood. This tendency has been particularly strong in times of war. During World War II, the Shakespearian critic G. Wilson Knight toured the country with his Shakespeare recital entitled This Sceptred Isle, although when Laurence Olivier made Demi-Paradise in 1943, the pre-war VHTXHQFHVRIWKHPRYLHÀDWWHUHGWKH(QJOLVKPDQ¶VVHOILPDJHOHVVWKDQLWH[SRVHG his xenophobic sentiments.7 In recent years, more critical representations of the speech have also begun to emerge. One case in point is ‘The Pardoner’s Tale,’ one of the episodes of the BBC’s updated Canterbury Tales (2003). ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ – an obvious precursor to Shane Meadows’ This is England (2007) – tells the story of three local bums from Rochester – Arty, Baz, and Colin – who earn a living by cheating tourists. Interestingly, Baz and Colin operate as pickpockets while Arty distracts the listeners by reciting the famous John of Gaunt monologue. 1RWDEO\WRRWKHSLFNSRFNHWVDFKLHYHWKHLU¿UVWSXUVHDV$UW\UHFLWLQJWKHVSHHFK speaks the key words: ‘This England.’ By having the climax of the deceit coincide with the national focus of the speech, scriptwriter Tony Grounds and director Andy de Emmony detract from the literary and historical idealization of the nation by drawing attention to the country’s contemporary social problems in the twenty¿UVWFHQWXU\:KDWRVWHQVLEO\VHUYHVWRSUDLVH(QJODQGLQWKH%%&¶VUHSUHVHQWDWLRQ of England, and, with it, its playwright from Stratford, is really a decoy, a means to FDPRXÀDJHWKHSHWW\FULPHWKDWH[LVWVRQWKHQDWLRQ¶VVWUHHWV8 A comparison between the tale’s original setting and that of the BBC adaptation makes a similarly depressing point about the image of England. The setting of the original Chaucerian tale was Flanders, thus in a mildly xenophobic manner suggesting that the evil represented by the three roisterers was of foreign origin. In the BBC version, the three idlers are of English origin, and besides, it is they who display their xenophobia vis-à-vis foreign tourists. Pointing at Rochester Cathedral, Arty wonders if it is right that ‘these temples [should be] full of Japs and Yanks.’ To Arty, tourists are foreigners committing sacrilege in holy sites, and therefore

6

Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000), 212. G. Wilson Knight, Shakespearian Production, with especial reference to the Tragedies/RQGRQ5RXWOHGJH .HJDQ3DXO ± 8 In the BBC’s Canterbury Tales, the literary debunking of Shakespeare is mirrored and supported by an example from popular culture: the pickpocket episode begins with a blind old man singing Louis Armstrong’s ‘What a wonderful world’. His words, as they are repeated at the end of the episode, ironically suggest that it is misleading to claim that things are wonderful; it might be a form of blindness in itself. 7

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must be punished. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that the present-day pilgrim robbed of his purse at Rochester is an American wearing chequered slacks.9 Interestingly, in ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ the decline of the English self-image coincides with what is perhaps best described as a withdrawal or move away from WKH(XURSHDQFRQWLQHQW,WHYHQVHHPVDVLIWKH%%&¶VVHOIUHÀHFWLRQLWVHOILVSDUW of a despondent strategy of entrenchment in things native rather than continental, a new form of isolationism. Preoccupied with a problematic English self-image, WKHUHLVQRWLPHDOVRWRUHÀHFWRQWKHFRQWLQHQWRI(XURSHDVWKRXJKWKHWZRZHUH mutually exclusive. This same phenomenon becomes apparent from the way in which the new millennium BBC represents Shakespeare – whose work was both URRWHGLQHDUO\PRGHUQ(XURSHDQFXOWXUHDQGZKLFKKDVVLJQL¿FDQWO\FRQWULEXWHGWR shape this culture in turn since then – in their immensely successful series entitled ShakespeaRe-Told (2005). What is remarkable about all four screen adaptations included in the series is that they have been rewritten removing both the European continent and content of Shakespeare’s plays, selecting London rather than Padua as the prime site of The Taming of the Shrew, a Midlands theme park instead of the forest outside Athens for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Thomas Hardy’s literary Dorset for the Sicilian setting of Much Ado about Nothing, and Ireland and Scotland for a version of Macbeth where the temptation to evil is of foreign origin, manifesting itself in the culinary chef’s desire for a distinctive French Michelin star or a German Mercedes-Benz with its own starry logo.10 In Shakespeare criticism, too, the patriotic appropriation of John of Gaunt’s monologue has been questioned for some time. Interestingly, in 1991 it was Graham Holderness who argued that Gaunt’s lines were ‘originally the expression of an inconsolable nostalgia for another time.’11 Inspired by and contributing to the very crisis of English identity that is central to this paper, Holderness read the speech not as a ‘panegyric of royal absolutism but a lament for the passing of the feudal kingdom’ (60). Holderness coupled Gaunt’s nostalgia to the myth of Dover, the cultural resonance of the port positioned at a strategic point in the nation’s natural boundary, and a source of national identity activating anxiety about the sequence of invasion, conquest, colonization, and fragmentation (65). Such national anxiety, we gather from Holderness’ account, would have been activated in particular by the construction of the Channel Tunnel, still in progress at the time he was writing during the early 1990s. 9

The BBC have not failed to capitalize on the cultural resonance of a phenomenon like the street robbery near Rochester: the episode contains numerous explicit references that help us to interpret the three Chaucerian roisterers turned modern-day bums as a variation also on Shakespeare’s Hal and his accomplices. 10 For a detailed analysis of the de-Europeanization of Shakespeare in ShakespeaReTold, see Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo, ‘Shakespeare Uprooted: The BBC and ShakespeaReTold (2005),’ in Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo (eds), European Shakespeares, special theme issue of Shakespearean International Yearbook (London: Ashgate, 2008), 82–96. 11 Graham Holderness, ‘National Culture’ (1991), in his Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth+DW¿HOG8QLYHUVLW\RI+HUWIRUGVKLUH3UHVV 

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With his combined focus on the nation’s internal fragmentation and the Chunnel threat, Holderness’ reading was unmistakably island-oriented and hence, like the BBC ventures discussed earlier, also patently centripetal in orientation. Ironically, his deft display of proto-presentism, introducing a revised new interpretation of Gaunt’s monologue as a feudal lament for another time, bypassed some of the historical urgency of the original speech as an Elizabethan text involving England’s ties with another place, the continental European site of contestation, Calais. In his ‘Wars of Memory in Henry V,’ Jonathan Baldo has illustrated how England’s loss of Calais on 8 January 1558 – shortly before Elizabeth’s accession to the throne – was a traumatic experience, heralding ‘the only period in English history since 1066 when the country had no overseas possessions (except Ireland).’12 Baldo has also noted how the issue remained current as Elizabeth was ‘preoccupied with retrieving England’s last Continental possession’ throughout her reign, ‘fuelling dreams of repossession’ (137). Although Baldo sought to illustrate how Henry V may be read as play on that subtext, it is many times more likely that the Calais theme informs the monologue by John of Gaunt in Richard II. If, as Holderness argues, the Gaunt speech is nostalgic in a post-feudal sense, it is no less so in terms of its loss of the nation’s continental European territories, as it deplores the passing of a militantly centrifugal, expansionist identity. Englishmen were 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. (2.1.53–6)

Hence England was ‘Dear for her reputation through the world’ (2.1.58) as it was a nation ‘wont to conquer others’ (2.1.65). 7KH MXVWL¿FDWLRQ IRU FRQÀDWLQJ WKH ODWH PHGLHYDO HYHQWV DQG WKH SHUVLVWHQW Tudor trauma of Calais comes from the main source that Shakespeare drew on for -RKQRI*DXQW¶VSURSKHWLFVSHHFKDQGLWVUHGH¿QLWLRQRI(QJODQGDVDQDWLRQZLWK natural borders, La Seconde Sepmaine (1584), being the second part of Guillaume GH 6DOOXVWH GX %DUWDV¶ FUHDWLRQ SRHP 7KH ¿UVW (QJOLVK WUDQVODWLRQ RI WKH WH[W appeared in John Eliot’s French language manual entitled Ortho-Epia Gallica (1593), which spoke of a three times blessed and ‘fruitful’ France which is an ‘earthly Paradise’ and the mother of a martial and conquering nation.13 Joshua Sylvester, too, translated Du Bartas, but instead of France the 1605 text made ‘Albion’ the addressee of this panegyric of the world’s rich garden, the mother of knights known across the world, by sea and by land.14

12 Jonathan Baldo, ‘Wars of Memory in Henry V,’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 47/2 (1996): 137. 13 John Eliot, Ortho-Epia Gallica (1593), quoted in William Shakespeare, Richard II, ed. Peter Ure, Arden Shakespeare, 2nd Series (London: Methuen, 1961), 206. 14 Devine Weeks and Works (1605), quoted in Richard II, ed. Ure, 207.

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,W LV VLJQL¿FDQW WKDW WKH FUHDWLRQ SRHP E\ 'X %DUWDV LQ ZKLFK *DXQW¶V monologue, like each of the translations, had its roots, was written on the occasion of France’s repossession of Calais in 1558. The English dispossession of Calais, described by analogy to God’s expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, further explains Gaunt’s pre-lapsarian longings: Sortez, dit le Seigneur, sortez race maudite, Leave, says the Lord, leave, you cursed race, Du jardin toujours-verd: vuidez, mais viste, viste, The garden ever green: be off, but hurry, hurry up, Vuidez-moy ce verger, gloire de l’Univers, Leave my orchard, the glory of the universe, Comme indigne maison de maistres si pervers, It is a house unworthy of masters as perverted as you. &HOX\TXLIXWWHVPRLQGHVVRXSLUVHWGHVODUPHV He who witnessed the sighs and the tears 'HV$QJORLVTXLYHLQFXVSDUOHVIUDQoRLVHVDUPHV, Of the English who, beaten by French arms, Quittoient leur cher Calais […] Left their dear Calais […] &HOX\OjSHXWMXJHUTXHOOHVFUXHOOHVSHLQHV He will know what cruel pains Bourreloient nos parens … Tormented our parents [= Adam and Eve] …15

The Elizabethan source for Gaunt’s nostalgia, then, was of a continental European nature, just like the English playwright’s source text.16 Interestingly, along similarly European lines, the name of the Lancastrian Gaunt itself – which the old man manages to play on so dexterously – also signals England’s continental past, as it recalls the Flemish city of Ghent where the knight was born, in the same way that similar territorial-cum-birth reasons explain why England’s king in the play is referred to as Richard of Bordeaux.17

15 Quoted in Richard Hillman, Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), 22. The translation is our own. 16 For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see Ton Hoenselaars, ‘Richard the Second in the European Mirror,’ in Guillaume Winter (ed.), Autour de Richard II de William Shakespeare (Arras: Artois Presses Universitaire, 2005), 87–100. As Gaunt is speaking on the eve of Richard II’s disastrous campaign in Ireland in 1399, he would have the Irish pale on his mind as much as the French one. On the Janus-faced quality of the text here – simultaneously involving France and Ireland – see Willy Maley, ‘“This sceptred isle”: Shakespeare and the British problem,’ in John J. Joughin (ed), Shakespeare and National Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 83–108. 17 Exton presents the corpse of Richard to Bolingbroke with the following words: ‘Herein all breathless lies/The mightiest of thy greatest enemies,/Richard of Bordeaux, by me hither brought’ (5.6.31–3).

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On one level, the case of John of Gaunt undermines the Anglocentric reading of Shakespeare’s histories as a development or celebration of ‘Englishness.’ On another level, it signals the limitations also of the alternative Anglocentric approach, since national awareness and the construction of national identity in Shakespeare are also inevitably a continental European affair, as they have always been.18 One way of countering the apparent tendency towards isolationism in Shakespearian terms – which is distinctly different from the traditional $QJORFHQWULVP WKDW ZDV IHG E\ QDWLRQDO VHOIFRQ¿GHQFH ± LV E\ FRQVLGHULQJ D more integrated European approach for Shakespeare, with an eye both to various national traditions and the multiple processes of transnational cultural exchange, not just during the early modern period, but also during the centuries of reception and interaction that followed. When Dennis Kennedy’s Foreign Shakespeare emancipated Shakespeare ‘without his language’ – arguing for the genuine creativity of appropriations in a tongue other than Shakespeare’s, appropriations ZKLFK OLNH -DQ .RWW¶V DQG %HUWROW %UHFKW¶V DOVR VLJQL¿FDQWO\ DIIHFWHG WKH native English tradition – one early response, protective in kind, it would seem, was Peter Holland’s survey of theatre productions of the 1990s, titled English Shakespeares.19 With our argument in favour of a well-conceived ‘European’ Shakespeare, we emphatically seek to end the very polarization of interests that we witness here. Recognizing both the cosmopolitanism that preceded the rise of the nation as the humanist Republic of Letters, and the brand of economic as well as cultural federalism that materialized in the form of the European Union over a decade ago, we think that the current Anglocentric reading focus is unnecessarily protective, naively limiting, and bound to remain unsatisfying, just as the ‘foreign 6KDNHVSHDUH¶DFRO\WHVDUHOLNHO\WR¿QGGLPLQLVKLQJDFDGHPLFUHWXUQVLIWKH\IDLO to acknowledge and address also the ‘Englishness’ of Shakespeare as part of their allegedly cross-cultural interest. The history of Europe (including England) is full of instances to support this YLHZ ,W LV IRU H[DPSOH ERWK H[HPSOL¿HG DQG VXSSRUWHG E\ WKH OLIH WKH ZRUN and the afterlives of the nineteenth-century French opera composer Ambroise Thomas (1811–1896). They provide an illustration not only of the erratic fortunes of Shakespeare in Europe, but also of the interaction between England and the &RQWLQHQWZLWKWKHODWWHUFXOWXUDOO\GH¿QLQJWKHIRUPHULQWXUQHYHQUHDFKLQJD symbolic stage where, as we hope to illustrate, the perennial theme of Calais Lost, covertly deplored by Shakespeare in the dying speech of Gaunt, may be replaced by another, which is perhaps best called Calais Regained. 18 For a concise argument about the national and international focus of the histories and the critical heritage of the plays, see Paulina Kewes, ‘The Elizabethan History Plays: A True Genre?’ in Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Volume II: The Histories. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 170–93. 19 See Dennis Kennedy (ed.), Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Peter Holland, English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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Ambroise Thomas devoted three operatic ventures to Shakespeare.20 Each of these, when studied in their cultural historical contexts, sheds light on the essentially European dimension of the English Shakespeare industry, and reveals how its ties with the continent have become inseparable, due to the spread of Shakespeare. Ambroise Thomas’s most famous Shakespearian opera is Hamlet, which premiered at the Paris Opéra on 9 March 1868. From the outset, it was controversial, mostly because of the many drastic changes to the Shakespearian text, including the adjustment of the main focus to the love interest between Hamlet and Ophélie, DQGWKHHQGLQJ,QWKH¿QDOVFHQHRIWKHRSHUDDWWKHIXQHUDORI2SKpOLHWKH*KRVW (Spectre) of Hamlet’s father returns to urge his son to complete the work that he KDV EHJXQ µ7RL PRQ ¿OV DFFRPSOLV WRQ °XYUH FRPPHQFpH¶ ± µ
20

Towards the end of his life, Ambroise Thomas also composed ballet music to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. We do not include this in our discussion. See Elizabeth Rogeboz-Malfroy, $PEURLVH7KRPDVRXODWHQWDWLRQGX/\ULTXH(Besançon: Éditions Cêtre, 1994), 193–9. 21 See the libretto of Thomas’s Hamlet at http://www.karadar.com/Librettos/thomas_ hamlet.html. 22 Guy de Pourtalès, Louis II de Bavière, ou Hamlet-roi (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1928). De Pourtalès continues the analogy between Hamlet and the Bavarian king in his biography of Richard Wagner. See Ton Hoenselaars, ‘Richard Wagner and the Great Lost Shakespeare Play,’ Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, 137 [2001]: 45–7).

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to correspond more closely to the iconic ending of the English play.23 The main LVVXHZDVWKHRSHUD¶VKDSS\HQGLQJVLQFHLQWKH¿QDOVFHQHRIWKH&RYHQW*DUGHQ SURGXFWLRQ+DPOHW¿UVWNLOOHG&ODXGLXVWKHQKLPVHOI24 It is worth noting that in the debate over Thomas’s Hamlet, during the 1860s and 70s, but also in the critical debate since then, most of the attention has tended to focus on the deference due to Shakespeare and his text. As a consequence, the more traditional political contexts within which Thomas’s Hamlet was composed and performed have been ignored. A quick look at the political map of France, however, tells us that in 1868 France was a monarchy again (though contested, still) under Napoleon III (ruling from 2 December 1852 until 4 September 1870). Given this political frame, Thomas’s Hamlet – with its ending, including the ‘Vive Hamlet! Vive Hamlet! Vive notre Roi!’ – was just the opera to vindicate the monarch and the divine right of kings – ‘Vis pour ton peuple, Hamlet! C’est Dieu qui te fait Roi!’. Certainly Emperor Napoleon III, whose Compiègne palace the composer had frequented as a guest for years, seems to have appreciated the gesture, as on 3 August 1868, he made Thomas Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur. If an honorary title of this kind seemed appropriate for the celebrated FRPSRVHULWLVZRUWKQRWLQJWKDW7KRPDVZDVWKH¿UVWFRPSRVHULQ)UDQFHHYHU to be awarded this. But Thomas had more to his credit. During the Revolution of 1848, he had also distinguished himself as an active member of the National Guard, spectacularly taking one of the insurgents’ barricades in the streets of Paris. Clearly, when Thomas’s Hamlet took the stage at the Paris Opéra in 1868, it was Emperor Napoleon III who set the political tone. When the opera was presented at Covent Garden on 19 June 1869, it was the sacrosanct, native English ‘King Shakespeare’ (to borrow Thomas Carlyle’s phrase) who ruled the conservative roost.25 Interestingly, the fate of Thomas’s Hamlet in nineteenth-century Paris and London neatly supports Dennis Kennedy’s 1993 thesis in Foreign Shakespeare, namely that the native English acquaintance with Shakespeare tended to limit the freedom of experiment on his own side of the Channel, whereas abroad, where Shakespeare spoke without his language, he provided nations and cultures with a liberating voice inspiring new departures.

23 On the connection between Shakespeare’s tragedy and the opera by Ambroise Thomas, see Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and Opera (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). It is perhaps worth recalling that the happy ending of Thomas’s Mignon – with the marriage of Wilhelm to the eponymous heroine – was also rewritten to satisfy German taste. See Francis Guinle, ‘Ambroise Thomas et Shakespeare,’ Revue d’histoire du théâtre, 49 (1997): 91. 24 Conductor Richard Bonnynge devised a compromise solution between these two YHUVLRQVE\HOLPLQDWLQJWKHVXLFLGH+HKDG+DPOHWJHWPRUWDOO\ZRXQGHGLQD¿JKWZLWK Laertes, and had the hero kill Claudius before dying himself. See Joe K. Law, ‘Three Hamlets: Ambroise Thomas,’ The Opera Quarterly, 19 (2003): 587–91. 25 Thomas Carlyle, ‘The Hero as Poet,’ in D. Nichol Smith (ed.), Shakespeare Criticism: A Selection, 1623–1840 (1916; London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 370.

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The English respect for Shakespeare and the appropriating zeal of the foreigner is not the only paradigm in European Shakespeare. This is illustrated by a small Shakespearian example from Thomas’s Mignon, the opera loosely based on Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s novel, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. In the opera’s second act, situated at the Baron von Rosemberg’s castle, the poetically-inclined Wilhelm and his strolling players put on a Shakespeare play. As Laërte puts it, by way of an introduction: A Midsummer Night’s Dream should pay for this party! It is by someone named … Shakespeare, a fairly good poet, And you’ll be enchanted by Titania. (53)

Titania’s actual aria is decidedly un-Shakespearian in terms of its lyrics, although it abounds with references to Puck and Ariel: I am Titania, the blonde, I am Titania, daughter of the air! I travel the world over, laughing, Quicker than the bird, swifter than the lightning bolt! I am Titania, daughter of the air! The wild band of elves follows 0\FKDULRWWKDWÀLHVDQGÀHHVLQWRWKHQLJKW Round about me my whole court runs, Singing the praises of pleasure and love! (Mignon, 71)

Curiously, in the Goethean novel itself, the strolling players perform not A Midsummer Night’s Dream but Hamlet. It is not clear why Thomas (with Jules Barbier and Michel Carré as his librettists) swerved from the Hamlet theme in the Goethe novel, which by itself was canonical enough in nineteenth-century German Shakespeare reception history to deserve the full opening section of Simon Williams’ Shakespeare on the German Stage.26 It seems safe with Dominique Hayer and Francis Guinle to assume that the extravagant and extroverted Philine FKDUDFWHU ZKR SOD\V WKH UROH RI7LWDQLD WR D PDUNHGO\ DUWL¿FLDO VFRUH VHUYHG WR contrast more sharply with the modest, dreamlike and mystifying child of nature, Mignon, between whose temperaments Wilhelm has to choose.27 However, given the fact that Thomas produced his famous Hamlet opera only several months after the première of Mignon (Opéra-Comique, Paris, 17 November 1866), it is no less likely that a more or less opportunistic decision was taken with the librettists Barbier and Carré to remove any Hamletian elements from the Goethe opera, and to replace 26 Simon Williams, Shakespeare on the German Stage, 1586–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1–7. 27 Dominique Hayer, Mignon: Programme (Opéra du Rhin, 1989), 9–15; Francis Guinle, ‘Ambroise Thomas et Shakespeare,’ 91–2.

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them with familiar Shakespearian texts of another kind. In this curious instance of a French adaptation of a German appropriation of Shakespeare, what is relevant for the discussion of European Shakespeare is the afterlife of Mignon. The opera was immensely popular during the entire second half of the nineteenth century, and it continues to be staged to the present day. Its reputation in present-day English culture, however, is founded mainly on the use of the Titania aria as the main musical Leitmotif in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s epic Life and Death of Colonel Blimp 7KURXJKRXWWKH¿OP±FRYHULQJWKHSHULRGIURP the Boer War to the end of World War II – the catchy and memorable Ambroise Thomas tune marks the close friendship (with its ups and downs, naturally) between the traditional English Colonel Clive Wynne-Candy (‘Blimp’) and the DULVWRFUDWLF *HUPDQ RI¿FHU 7KHR .UHWVFKPDU6FKXOGRUII 'HVSLWH WKH SROLWLFDO GLYLVLRQ PDUNHG E\ WZR ZRUOG ZDUV WKH ¿OP PDNHUV ± DUJXDEO\ UHYLYLQJ WKH ‘Everlasting Peace’ ideal that is part of the Kantian myth of Europe28 – suggest that it is the supranational cultural bond between England and Germany that enables friendly relations, and that bond, we may see, is symbolized by Shakespeare, and German Shakespeare, and French Shakespeare – in short, by a European Shakespeare. The conciliatory gesture in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp EHFDPHDOOWKHPRUHFRQVSLFXRXVZKHQWKH¿OPFULWLFV(:DQG005REVRQ argued that Powell and Pressburger endangered English political and territorial LQWHJULW\LQWKHIDFHRIWKH*HUPDQWKUHDW±XVLQJWKHPRWWRWDNHQIURPWKH¿OP itself: ‘In times like these one enemy in our midst can do more harm than ten across the Channel.’29 If the performance history of the Hamlet opera brought to the fore the division of taste and attitude to Shakespeare in England and France, the reception of Mignon shows how Shakespeare could also bond across borders, suggesting that Shakespeare was neither an English, nor a German, nor a French writer, but a European artist representative of a certain consensus of ideas. This is further borne out by the cultural history of Thomas’s third Shakespearian opera – La Songe d’une nuit d’été (Opéra-Comique, Paris, 20 April 1850), which contains a unique moment at which the rift between England and the European FRQWLQHQWEULHÀ\FHDVHGWRH[LVW Le Songe d’une nuit d’été is not a musical version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but an opera which, like Giacomo Rossini’s Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra (1814) or Gaitano Donizetti’s Elisabetta al castello di Kenilworth (1829), represents the sixteenth-century history of England, with 28

For a discussion of this myth and other forms of confusion involving the idea of (XURSH VHH 0DQIUHG 3¿VWHU µ(XURSD(XURSH 0\WKV DQG 0XGGOHV¶ LQ 5LFKDUG /LWWOHMRKQV and Sara Soncini (eds), Myths of Europe (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 21–33. However, the myth is persistent: ‘That old ideal of a peaceful cosmopolitan Europe, where free spirits could commune with open eyes and open borders, was – for all its shortcomings and blind spots, for all the evil it harbored in its heart – not totally bad.’ See Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘Introduction: The Idea of Europe,’ Comparative Literature, 58:4 (Fall 2006): 269–70. 29 E.W. and M.M. Robson, The Disgrace of Colonel Blimp: The True Story of the Film (London: The Sidneyan Society, 1943).

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D VWURQJ SUHGLOHFWLRQ IRU SVHXGR¿FWLRQDO HQFRXQWHUV RI DQ DPRURXV NLQG30 The added interest of Le Songe d’une nuit d’été (with a libretto written by Joseph Rosier and Adolphe de Leuven) is that Queen Elizabeth gets to meet Shakespeare, and that one of the two love plots involves them directly. Both E\ SUHVHQWLQJ 6KDNHVSHDUH DV D ¿FWLRQDO FKDUDFWHU RQ VWDJH DQG DV D ZULWHU LQ love, the Thomas opera follows directly in the footsteps of Alexandre Duval’s Shakespeare amoureux (1804), whose worldwide popularity in the nineteenth century anticipates that of Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998), and which, as Julie Sanders has put it, seems to ‘prove the point about Shakespeare’s SRVLWLRQDVDFXOWXUDODQGFRPPRGL¿DEOHSUHVHQFHLQWKHRSHUDKRXVH¶31 In the opera, Elizabeth, as Michael Dobson and Nicola Watson succinctly put it, ‘sets out to rescue Shakespeare from his corrupting association with the drunken )DOVWDII>«@E\DSSHDULQJWRKLPLQGLVJXLVHDVWKHSHUVRQL¿FDWLRQRIKLV0XVH […] In response to the yearning amorous raptures that she thus inspires, she laments in musical asides that her crown rules out any less creatively sublimated love affair.’32 ,Q WKH ¿QDO VFHQH RI WKH RSHUD (OL]DEHWK DGPLWV WR 6KDNHVSHDUH that it was she who appeared to him as Muse and inspired his feelings of love (‘le génie de cette nuit … il est ici … devant vous!’), but she also makes it perfectly clear that there can never be anything more of the kind between them: ‘Mais vous devez le comprendre, William, l’entrevue de cette nuit à Richmond ne pouvait être pour vous que l’audience d’une protectrice, d’une amie […] Oui, une amie, mais qui est aussi une reine.’33 True to our contemporary image of her DVWKH9LUJLQ4XHHQ(OL]DEHWKVXSSUHVVHVKHUIHHOLQJVRIORYHLQRUGHUWRIXO¿O her mission as a monarch, and Shakespeare must do likewise, since he has a patriotic duty as a poet – to the people, to the nation, and to its monarch:

30 For an in-depth analysis of the connections between Shakespeare’s comedy and Thomas’s opera, as well as Henry Purcell’s The Fairy-Queen and Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, see Francis Guinle, The Concord of this Discord: La Structure musicale du “Songe d’une nuit d’été” (Saint-Étienne: Université de Saint-Étienne, 2003). 31 Julie Sanders, Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings (Oxford: Polity Press, 2007), 100. For the reception of Duval’s play in Spain, see Keith Gregor, ‘Shakespeare as a Character on the Spanish Stage: A Metaphysics of Bardic Presence,’ in Angel Luis Pujante and Ton Hoenselaars (eds), Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 43–54; and Clara Calvo, ‘Shakespeare, Napoleon and Juan de Grimaldi: Cultural Politics and French Troops in Spain,’ in Dirk Delabastita, Jozef de Vos, and Paul Franssen (eds), Shakespeare and European Politics (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 109–23. 32 Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson, England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 129. 33 Ambroise Thomas, Le Songe d’une nuit d’été. Opéra en trois actes. Poème de MM. Rosier et De Leuven. […] Partition réduite au piano par M. Vauthrot. Nouvelle édition entièrement regravée avec les nouveau morceaux composés par l’Auteur (Paris: Henri Heugel, n.d.), 383.

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A vous, mylords, à vous, Seigneurs, A vous tous qui de la patrie Voulez la gloire et les splendeurs, Je presente un noble genie!

7XUQLQJWR6KDNHVSHDUHVKHGH¿QHVKLVPLVVLRQRQKHUEHKDOI Dieu le veut, Dieu l’ordonne! Que ton éclat rayonne Sur ton pays, sur ton pays natal! Et ta gloire, poète, Est aussi ma conquête, &DUHOOHVHUHÀqWH Sur mon bandeau royal! (Le Songe, 387–9).

Elizabeth and Shakespeare both serve the nation, but in different capacities, as the monarch and as the supporting artist. It is a view that Ambroise Thomas shared, and no doubt wanted King William III of the Netherlands to share, to whom he dedicated the opera. Le Songe d’une nuit d’étéLVLPSRUWDQWDVWKHSURGXFWRIWKDWUDSLGGHL¿FDWLRQRI Shakespeare in France during the early decades of the nineteenth century. However, the opera is not only a testimony to the Romantic absorption of the English poet on the European continent. In a way that neither Elizabeth, Shakespeare, or Thomas could have foreseen, the opera was to become exemplary of the emphatically European status of English Shakespeare. As in the case of John of Gaunt, the key town in the sequence of events leading up to this was Calais. 2Q0D\WKH&KDQQHO7XQQHOFRQQHFWLQJ&DODLVDQG'RYHUZDVRI¿FLDOO\ opened. Given the proximity of the French terminal to the Field of the Cloth of Gold – where Henry VIII had held his unsuccessful negotiations with Francis I LQ±WKHRFFDVLRQZDVQRWGHYRLGRI5HQDLVVDQFHPHPRULHVDQGDWWKH¿QDO drilling phase of the tunnel, for example, both the English and the French monarch ZHUHLPDJLQHGDVHI¿JLHVDWWKHWXQQHOPRXWK The actual inauguration of the tunnel, however, was a considerably more elaborate and professional affair. To mark the occasion, it was decided to stage Ambroise Thomas’s Songe d’une nuit d’été. As André Bénard, president of Eurotunnel put it: Eurotunnel, premier Groupe franco-brittannique intégré, a voulu célébrer O¶LQDXJXUDWLRQ RI¿FLHOOH GX 7XQQHO VRXV OD 0DQFKH HQ SDUWLFLSDQW GH IDoRQ décisive à la production d’une oeuvre à l’image da sa double culture.34

The opera was produced on the stage of the Théâtre Impérial de Compiègne, the playhouse originally constructed for Napoleon III, though never completed or used 34 Programme for Ambroise Thomas’s Songe d’une nuit d’été (Théâtre Impérial de Compiègne, 1994).

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Fig. 7.1

Francis I and Henry VIII at Channel Tunnel mouth (Calais). (By permission Archives Théâtre Impérial de Compiègne.)

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by him. The theatre, though, was reopened in 1991, thanks to the untiring efforts of Artistic Director Pierre Jourdan, as well as the Eurotunnel consortium which spent one percent of the total Tunnel costs on supporting cultural developments in northern France.35 The production of the Songe d’une nuit d’été, which effectively made Shakespeare and Elizabeth I ‘the god-parents’ of the Channel tunnel (as Jourdan put it), was faithful to the plot, the text, and the score of the opera, and the overall effect was no doubt heightened by the elaborate costumes appropriately provided by the Royal Shakespeare Company.36 As the DVD recording of the Compiègne event makes clear, it is particularly scenes like the Act I cast party – with the players of Shakespeare’s company still dressed like characters from his plays (Hamlet, Ophelia, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Othello and Desdemona) after WKH GD\¶V ZRUN ± WKDW SUR¿W IURP WKHVH FRVWXPHV DV 6KDNHVSHDUH PL[LQJ IDFW DQG¿FWLRQOLNH7KRPDVWHOOVWKHPWKDWDOOWKHLUSUREOHPVFRXOGEHVROYHGZLWKD VXI¿FLHQWTXDQWLW\RIDOFRKRO37 However, the most drastic directorial intervention occurs at the end of the opera production. Here, the chorus praising the Queen and KHU3RHWLVIROORZHGE\DEULHIEODFNRXWDIWHUZKLFKWRWKH¿QDOEDUVSOD\HGE\ the orchestra, we see Elizabeth and Shakespeare walk, hand in hand, towards the entrance of the Channel Tunnel. 7KH ¿QDO LPDJH LQ WKLV SURGXFWLRQ RI D QLQHWHHQWKFHQWXU\ )UHQFK RSHUD RQ the late-twentieth-century Compiègne stage, is stark but also complex. It may be described as anachronistic for its juxtaposition of two personages from the early modern history of England, and a potent image of present-day technology. But the time warp curiously coincides with and boosts our awareness of an equally mystifying space warp. Where are we as we look over the shoulders of these characters? Are we seeing these characters on the Compiègne stage from the perspective of Ambroise Thomas, looking towards Dover? Or are we seeing these characters in their native setting, gazing – like Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt – on Calais? These questions were certainly not easier to answer when on 22 1RYHPEHUWKH¿OPYHUVLRQRIWKH&RPSLqJQHSURGXFWLRQRILe Songe d’une nuit d’été was shown at London’s Covent Garden (Lindbury Studio Theatre), to commemorate the quatercentenary of Elizabeth’s death (without adaptations this 35 In the years that followed, Pierre Jourdan continued to build up the theatre’s reputation of reviving forgotten nineteenth-century opera. The inauguration of the Compiègne opera house in 1991 took place with a production of Camille Saint Saens’ Henry VIII (based jointly on Shakespeare’s last history play and Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Schism in England). 36 The programme acknowledges the assistance of Adrian Noble, David Brierley, Graham Sawyer, and Karen Keen. Compiègne’s contacts with the RSC ran via Elisabeth and Jacques Pillet-Will, benefactors of Théâtre Impérial de Compiègne, and acquainted with members of the Stratford company. 37 ‘Allons, allons, mon cher Macbeth,/En savourant le malvoisie/Tu vas trinquer avec Hamlet./Et vous, ma sensible Ophélie,/Emplissez leur verre à plains bords!/Grace à vous que Macbeth oublie/Et son épouse, et ses remords’ (111–13).

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Fig. 7.2

Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare gaze down the Channel Tunnel. (By permission Archives Théâtre Impérial de Compiègne.)

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time, unlike Thomas’s Hamlet in 1869). Clearly, these questions may dazzle us because they reject any single, clear-cut answer. The point made by the Compiègne ending and the screening of Le Songe d’une nuit d’été at Covent Garden is that what may initially strike us as spatio-temporal confusion proves to be one of the most transparent instances of European Shakespeare – an inter- or intraregional, transnational, and cross-historical manifestation of Shakespearian culture, all in a European context. Once we recognize that English Shakespeare is European history and has European afterlives, in Britain and abroad, will we be able to DSSUHFLDWHKRZDQLQHWHHQWKFHQWXU\)UHQFKRSHUDFRQVWUXFWHGDURXQGKLV¿FWLRQDO character could also be the ideal choice to commemorate the quatercentenary of the historical English queen’s death – at which point, perhaps, the anecdote becomes irrelevant that Elizabeth’s parents conceived her in Calais, the city that was lost to England in the year when she herself came to power. The revival of Le Songe d’une nuit d’été took place on an occasion that had already led many an Englishman, including even Graham Holderness, to experience a degree of nostalgic despondency about the English nation: the inauguration of WKH&KDQQHO7XQQHO,WLVGLI¿FXOWWRWKLQNRIDZRUNRIDUWWKDWPLJKWKDYHEHWWHU suited the occasion, if only to illustrate that such despondency was both out of place and an anachronism; to illustrate that England and the European Continent have entertained cultural links since the earliest times, and that preferring to ignore these – as in the case of the traditional reading of Gaunt’s speech, where the Calais malaise tends to be neatly relegated to oblivion – is to impoverish Shakespearian practice at home, to reduce cosmopolitan Shakespeare, whose own reliance on Continental European culture was immense, to the status of a mere local yokel. Too narrow a focus on England and Englishness in our modern world is a form of provincialism that Shakespeare – though proto-nationalist, as in the Histories – transcended through his afterlives long ago. If the English nation, certainly following its devolution in political terms, is in need of a frame to focus its selfidentity, a continental European frame, as both the work and the cultural history of Shakespeare suggest, might yield a promising perspective.

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Fig. 7.3

This England, That Shakespeare / Hoenselaars and Calvo

Programme cover to the video presentation of the Compiègne production of A Midsummer Night´s Dream at Covent Garden (2003). (By permission Archives Théâtre Impérial de Compiègne.)

Chapter 8

‘Not a man from England’: Assimilating the Exotic ‘Other’ Through Performance, from Henry IV to Henry VI Amanda Penlington

Recent scholarship on Shakespeare’s Henry plays has critiqued England by association, giving attention to the surrounding nations: Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and France. The national identities, use of language, and political allegiances of FKDUDFWHUVVXFKDV)OXHOOHQ-DP\0DFPRUULVDQG*O\QGǒUKDYHEHHQWKHIRFXVRI this criticism, which acts to discourage readings of these characters as simple comic VWHUHRW\SHV DV W\SL¿HG LQ 2OLYLHU¶V  ¿OP RI Henry V ).1 Such criticism has drawn attention to the English empire-building within these plays that intends to VXEMXJDWH:DOHV6FRWODQGDQG,UHODQGDORQJVLGHODQGVIXUWKHUD¿HOG$V:LOO\0DOH\ has suggested: ‘The use of “empire” to mean extra-British activity overlooks the imperialism implicit in Britishness itself’.2 At the start of 1 Henry IV audiences are informed that it is the need to eliminate the threat posed by such Britons that prevents the King (‘a trueborn Englishman’, Richard II, 1.3.272) from pursuing ‘business’ in the Holy Land (1 Henry IV, 1.1.48).3 Henry’s need to defeat the ‘English rebels’ (as they are called at 3.2.165) before undertaking his planned crusades irretrievably links the two plans of attack as one Empire-bolstering enterprise. Feminist critics have situated the creation of England’s national identity as a gendered enterprise, and the female characters who do not speak English, namely Princess Catherine and Mortimer’s nameless wife, have received critical attention.4 Scholarship has, WKHUHIRUHLGHQWL¿HGDQDUUDWLYHUXQQLQJWKURXJKWKHHenriesDQµRWKHU¶LVLGHQWL¿HG and exoticized by differences in language and behaviour, and the containment of that ‘other’ is then attempted through conquest and/or enforced compliance with the dominant English culture. For men like Macmorris this assimilation of the 1 See John Joughin (ed.), Shakespeare and National Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). 2 Willy Maley, ‘“This sceptred isle”: Shakespeare and the British problem’, in Joughin (ed.), Shakespeare and National Culture, 103. 3 All references to the text are taken from Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (eds), The Norton Shakespeare (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997). 4 See Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).

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H[RWLFµRWKHU¶PHDQV¿JKWLQJIRUµ+DUU\(QJODQGDQG6W*HRUJH¶Henry V, 3.1.34); for Princess Catherine it means learning English and, despite her misgivings, being kissed by King Henry. Nevertheless, their ‘other’ness remains in their accents and language after their subjugation to pose resistance to the dominant discourse: Macmorris repeatedly asks ‘What ish my nation?’ (3.3.61–3), and Catherine alerts Henry to the fact that she ‘cannot speak your/England’ (5.2.102–3). I’m interested in how performances at the National Theatre (NT) and the Royal 6KDNHVSHDUH&RPSDQ\56& VLQFHUHÀHFWFULWLFDOFRQFHUQVDERXWQDWLRQDO stereotyping by casting actors whose nationalities are a match for the characters they play, e.g., casting a Welsh actor as Fluellen. In addition I want to investigate the effects of casting actors from ethnic minorities in the roles of Henry V and Henry VI. I’m interested in the politics of assimilation evident in productions that use so-called ‘colour-blind’ casting alongside what I am calling ‘nationalityVSHFL¿F¶FDVWLQJ5 Despite inclusive casting policies, which apparently de-stabilize the presentation of Englishness within the Henries, the productions that are considered here are produced by subsidized English theatres (putatively ‘national’ institutions). I’m as interested in what these characters sound like on the English stage as what they look like, so I will also be drawing the reader’s attention to the use of accents within these productions. Following Foucault’s theory that ‘the manifest discourse … is really no more than the repressive presence of what it does not say; and this “not said” is a hollow that undermines from within all that is said’, I aim to tease out the undermining ‘not-said’s of the casting decisions taken during the NT’s and RSC’s recent stagings of Shakespeare’s Henry plays.6 Calling the casting of performers from ethnic minorities ‘colour-blind’ suggests to me a ‘not-said’ founded on a politics of assimilation. That is, theatre producers aim to portray the Histories as a narrative of national unity regardless of ‘colour’ but I VXJJHVWWKDWWKLVQDUUDWLYHRIQDWLRQDOXQLW\LVSUREOHPDWLFDQGSDUWLDO6SHFL¿FDOO\ I would suggest that it is Anglo-centric. But before I move on to discuss the Henries in performance I want to provide a chronological and programming context for each production. The productions at the RSC in 2000 were part of a season called This England: the Histories. There was little visual interplay between the productions, with different auditoria and creative teams involved across the two tetralogies.7 At the NT the two parts of Henry IV 5

See Ayanna Thompson (ed.), Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); and Celia R. Daileader, ‘Casting black actors: beyond Othellophilia’ in Catherine M.S. Alexander and Stanley Wells (eds), Shakespeare and Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 177–202. 6 Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Random House, 1972), 25. 7 Richard II was presented at The Other Place, directed by Steven Pimlott and designed by Sue Wilmington. The two parts of Henry IV (in the Swan theatre) had one director (Michael Attenborough) and a design team (sets by Es Devlin, costumes by Kandis Cook) and utilized one cast across the two plays. Some actors playing recurring characters, like Northumberland and Bolingbroke, continued their roles across productions, regardless of the conceptual differences offered by the individual director’s/designer’s visions. Henry V

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(2005) were programmed into the repertoire simultaneously, with the same cast presenting both parts. Although Henry IV was separated from the NT’s Henry V (2003) by two years, they were both directed by the company’s Artistic Director, Nicholas Hytner, and presented in the Olivier Theatre. Mark Thompson designed Henry IV, whilst Tim Hatley designed Henry V. At the RSC in 2006 the Henries were presented by one ensemble of actors in the Courtyard Theatre as part of The Complete Works season. The productions were directed by Michael Boyd and designed by Tom Piper.8 The three parts of Henry VI and Richard III were billed as a revival of the productions from 2000 alongside new productions of Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V.9 I conclude the chapter with a consideration of the RSC’s decision to recreate the 2000 production of Henry VI. But I begin with a consideration of the presentation of the Welsh characters in productions of Henry IV. In 1 Henry IV*O\QGǒULVNHHQWRSRLQWRXWWR+RWVSXUKLVDELOLW\WRµVSHDN English, lord, as well as you’ (3.1.118), but his daughter, Mortimer’s wife, remains resolutely ‘other’ through her lack of English. Within the play she has no name of her own, nor does she have any designated lines: her conversation and song is instead described in stage directions as speaking or singing ‘in Welsh’ (3.1.187 and 241).10 Originally impersonated by the boy player, she is an exotic spectacle for English audiences to look at and listen to (but, like her English husband, not understand). She is passive in relation to her father (who speaks for her) and sexualized by her husband’s kisses and Hotspur’s desire to have access to ‘the Welsh lady’s bed’ (3.1.238). At the RSC (2000) and the NT (2005), Welsh actors were cast as Lady Mortimer 0DOL+DUULHV(YH0\OHV DQG*O\QGǒU5RZODQG'DYLHV5REHUW%O\WKH 7KLV casting avoided the problem of having non-Welsh speakers learn the dialogue phonetically. An approach of mimetic realism was used to create apparently realistic individualized characters, drawing their presentation away from national (presented in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre) was directed by Edward Hall and designed by Michael Pavelka. The three parts of Henry VI (directed by Michael Boyd, designed by Tom Piper) utilized another ensemble of actors (who also went on to present Richard III designed and directed by the same team) in the Swan, situating the second tetralogy as a FRPSOHWHEXWHQWLUHO\VHSDUDWHXQLWIURPWKH¿UVW 8 The only exception to this was that 2 Henry IV was directed by Boyd’s associate director, Richard Twyman. 9 The revival productions utilized some actors in their original roles from 2000, some actors remained but were playing different roles and some actors were new to the ensemble. The actors playing Henry VI (Chuk Iwuji) and Richard III (Jonathan Slinger) had taken no part in the original productions in 2000. Whilst the production concept for Henry VI was the same in 2006 as it had been in 2000, Richard III was substantially reconceived to locate it within a contemporary aesthetic. This was the only play in The Histories to be presented in contemporary dress. 10 Her historical name of Catrin is not used within the play. I am grateful to Willy Maley for suggesting the following reference, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/mid/3077859.stm. Accessed 5 August 2008.

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stereotypes. Blythe had played Fluellen in Hytner’s Henry V (2003) and now as *O\QGǒULQ1 Henry IV the same decision to create the impression of a realistic individual was evident in his portrayal. Similarly, Myles’s presentation of Lady Mortimer was a detailed reading of the character that encouraged the audience’s sympathy for the challenges of her situation by highlighting her frustration. Whilst a realistic acting approach to the characters was evident in the NT production, at the RSC in 2000 the Welsh characters were presented in a more uneven manner, with one reviewer noting that Davies’s overblown responses to +RWVSXUDQGKLVYLVXDODSSHDUDQFHLQVLOYHU\ZLJDQGÀRZLQJJUH\JUHHQUREHV  made him ‘a marvellous cross between Jabba the Hut and Dave Gilmour’.11 'DYLHV¶V*O\QGǒUPRYHGIURPDFWLQJDFFRUGLQJWRDFRDUVHO\GH¿QHGLPDJHRI the Welsh magician (playing up to the English’s perceptions of him) to a more measured, believable individual, keen to negotiate with the English rebels. The effect of the shift in his presentation seemed distinctly odd when viewed in relation to the portrayal of his daughter, played with verisimilitude by Harries, who (like Myles in the NT production) encouraged audience sympathy for the character. The audience was invited to understand Lady Mortimer’s situation even further in 2000 when, at the end of the scene Lady Mortimer and Lady Percy (Nancy Carroll) were left alone after their husbands’ exits. This silent moment, where they exchanged eye contact before exiting together, seemed to me to provide the scene with a coda of shared female experience. It enabled the audience to view both women collectively realizing the potential tragic consequences of their husbands’ actions but unable to do anything about it. I want to draw attention to the effect achieved by the very contrast between Harries’s conventionally realistic depiction and Davies’s uneven performance. Davies’s portrayal jarred in an otherwise understated production but his decision to initially wrong-foot the audience (by playing-up, to the point of excess, the image of the Welsh magician who can ‘command spirits from the vasty deep’,   QHDWO\ UHÀHFWHG *O\QGǒU¶V LGHQWLW\ VKLIWV ZLWKLQ WKH WH[W ,I HYHU\ DFWRU employs a style that presents characters as though they are real individuals then the processes of creation and reception involved in writing, staging, and watching a play are obscured. Realistic acting works to deny the production processes involved: as an audience member it is possible to get momentarily lost in the apparently ‘truthful’ world of the characters. But for me, by its very contrast to WKHSUHYDLOLQJVW\OH'DYLHV¶VDSSURDFKWR*O\QGǒUKLJKOLJKWHGWKHDUWL¿FHRIWKH realistic approach. Whilst illuminating this ‘not-said’ of the pursuit of realism, 'DYLHV¶VSHUIRUPDQFHDOVRUHYHDOHGWKDWXVLQJµQDWLRQDOLW\VSHFL¿F¶FDVWLQJDVD 11 -DEEDWKH+XWLVD¿FWLRQDOFKDUDFWHUIURP*HRUJH/XFDV¶Star Wars¿OPVDJD¿UVW appearing in Return of the Jedi (1983). He is a slug-like alien who runs a variety of criminal operations and is characterized by his size, his antagonistic nature, and his deep laugh. Dave Gilmour is a guitarist and vocalist with the progressive/psychedelic rock group Pink Floyd. Nina Raine, ‘Battle with truth’, New Statesman, 5 June 2000, http://www.newstatesman. com/200006050039. Accessed 5 August 2008.

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device to ‘avoid the nationalist stereotypes’ is a somewhat simplistic vision of the production process.12'DYLHV¶V*O\QGǒUZDVXQVHWWOLQJDQGLWHQFRXUDJHGPHDV an audience member to be actively aware of the process of witnessing the creation RI D GUDPDWLF FKDUDFWHU DOEHLW RQH EDVHG RQ D VLJQL¿FDQW KLVWRULFDO ¿JXUH 13 Whilst I was watching Davies’s uneven portrayal I considered the strangeness of *O\QGǒUDVD¿FWLRQDOFUHDWLRQE\DQ(QJOLVKSOD\ZULJKWZULWLQJIRUDQ(QJOLVK audience long after the events portrayed, and then re-created by the RSC through the director’s, designer’s and actor’s collaboration. In 2007 the RSC produced the play again and this time cast an English actor, 5RJHU:DWNLQVDV*O\QGǒU:DWNLQVXVHGDUHDOLVWLFDFWLQJDSSURDFKEXWVWUXJJOHG to maintain a convincing Welsh accent. Seeing his problems with creating a credible character emphasized to me the limitations of mimetic realism as an approach to characters whose origins differ from the actors who play them. This casting was an unfortunate consequence of the RSC’s use of a resident ensemble that contained no Welsh actors. This made the casting of Lady Mortimer an interesting exercise DVFRQWUDU\WRWKHSUHFHGHQWRIFDVWLQJWKH(QJOLVK:DWNLQVDV*O\QGǒUQRQHRI the women in the acting ensemble were given the role of his daughter, instead Sianed Jones was cast in the part. Jones did not play any other dramatic roles but was employed in The Histories as a musician. What interests me about casting Jones was that the creative team clearly saw Lady Mortimer as a singer’s, rather than an actor’s, role. Despite the advances made at the NT (in 2005) and the RSC EDFNLQ LQYLHZLQJ/DG\0RUWLPHUDVDVLJQL¿FDQWFKDUDFWHUZKRVHDQJHU DQGVRUURZDFWVDVD¿OWHUIRUWKHDXGLHQFHWKURXJKZKLFKWRYLHZKHUKXVEDQG¶V political activities, in 2007 Lady Mortimer seemed to return to being an exotic ‘other’, an adjunct of the men’s centralized experience. No interaction between Lady Percy and Lady Mortimer occurred this time. Hotspur’s desire for the ‘Welsh Lady’s bed’ (3.1.238) was spoken from an upstage position (and not met with an indignant reaction, as shown by Lady Percy in 2000); this gave comic prominence to his remark about the woman situated downstage. In 2007 Lady Mortimer tearfully hugged and kissed her husband, without showing any signs of anger at the possible outcome of his plans. Her only potentially subversive action was to WDNHXSWKHPDSWKDWKDGEHHQUROOHGRXWRQWRWKHÀRRUE\KHUIDWKHU+RZHYHU 12 Nicholas Hytner, the director of 1 Henry IV (2005) and Henry V (2003), on the effect of casting actors whose nationalities accord with those of the characters, quoted in Peter Reynolds and Lee White, A Rehearsal Diary of Henry V at the National (London: NT Publications, 2003), 3. 13 , DP JUDWHIXO WR :LOO\ 0DOH\ IRU VXJJHVWLQJ WKH IROORZLQJ VWXGLHV RQ *O\QGǒU Camille Adkins, ‘Glendower and Fluellen; Or, Where Are the Leeks of Yesterday?’, CCTE Studies (Conference of College Teachers of English Texas), 48 (1983): 101–8; Rees Davies, ‘Shakespeare’s Glendower and Owain Glyn Dwr’, Historian (London), 66 (2000): 22–5; Herbert V. Fackler, ‘Shakespeare’s “Irregular and Wild” Glendower: The Dramatic Use of Source Materials’, Discourse, 13 (1970): 306–14; J.T. Jones, ‘Shakespeare’s Pronunciation of Glendower’, English Studies, 43 (1962): 248–52; John Edward Lloyd, Owen Glendower/ Owain Glyn Dwr (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931).

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instead of reacting against the map in a more confrontational way, she gathered it up and placed it across her lap before singing, the map then providing a comfortable cushion on which Mortimer (Keith Dunphy) could lay his head and listen to her song. The creation of such a maternal image (and one which was created before our eyes by Lady Mortimer herself and mirrored by Lady Percy and Hotspur upstage) seemed to me to signal the character’s contentment within the domestic sphere. Lady Mortimer appeared before the scene commenced, signalling the start of the second half of the production, singing a wordless lament whilst spot-lit high on the set tower. Here, sadness (and, therefore, unquestioning acceptance) seemed Lady Mortimer’s dominant emotion. Her lack of will to question her husband’s actions was different from the earlier productions, where Myles and Harries had demonstrated anger at Mortimer as well as frustration at being unable to express it directly to him in words. In Henry V a variety of characters originate from across England’s borders but, as Maley has suggested, King Henry repeatedly uses ‘England’ and ‘English’ as if they are stable entities and synonymous for ‘the British state’: he wishes ‘not a man from England’ (4.3.30) to enlarge his army.14 So Macmorris’s repeated question, ‘What ish my nation?’ (3.3.61–3) is a pertinent concern that never gets answered either for or by those Britons whose origins lie beyond England. Whilst Macmorris’s question throws the assimilation of the non-English Britons into doubt, the English Captain Gower takes control of the argument between Macmorris and Fluellen, warning, ‘Gentlemen both, you will mistake each other’ (3.3.72).15 In this moment Shakespeare presents in microcosm the ideological basis of the ‘exotic’ discourse: WKDW WKH ZLOG DQG GLVUXSWLYH QDWLRQV DUH WDPHG E\ WKH FLYLOL]LQJ LQÀXHQFH RI WKH English, who, in subjugating them, are merely asserting their natural authority. Macmorris’s keenness to kill Fluellen could be read as a simple comic stereotype of the Irish but, read another way, his uncertainty about not ‘know’ing (3.3.70) Fluellen is a consequence of England’s empire building – at home and abroad. In conquering other lands and enforcing English rule, ‘England’s’ identity is in SHUSHWXDO ÀX[ 0DFPRUULV¶V SRVLWLRQ LV EHZLOGHULQJ ± KH LV ERWK FRQTXHUHG DQG FRQTXHURUDµEDVWDUG¶ ZKR¿JKWVRQEHKDOIRIDIDWKHUODQGWRH[WHQGKLV terminology) that rules him through conquest, rather than legitimate inheritance. Whilst the comic stereotypes of the brawling Irish and the argumentative Scots and Welsh may be discerned in the play, recent productions have drawn DWWHQWLRQWRWKHODFNRIXQLW\DPRQJVWWKRVH¿JKWLQJIRUµ(QJODQG¶7KHSXWDWLYHO\ natural dominance of the English is lessened in performance when directors have 14 Maley, ‘“This sceptred isle”: Shakespeare and the British problem’, in Joughin (ed.), Shakespeare and National Culture, 103. 15 Despite my suggestion that Gower and Williams are English characters and are usually played by English actors, Joan Rees has suggested that these surnames ‘seem to introduce a supererogatory Welshness into the play’. Joan Rees, ‘Shakespeare’s Welshmen’, in Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson (eds), Literature and Nationalism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), 31. My thanks to Willy Maley for this reference.

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repeatedly drawn audiences’ attentions to the distance between Henry’s rhetoric and the physically exhausting conditions of war. When a repeated motif of rapidly initiated physical disputes between the ‘English’ forces occurs in performance (at the RSC in both 2000 and 2007 and at the NT in 2003, physical blows were exchanged in scenes with the Boy, Pistol, Nim, and Bardolph and between Williams and the disguised King) then the national stereotypes at work in the presentation of Macmorris, Jamy, and Fluellen are somewhat reduced by being seen within a broader context of social divisions within the ‘English’ camp. The performance history of Henry V has seen many negotiations of meaning pertinent to British socio-political contingencies, for example Terry Hands’s 1975 RSC production was concerned with ‘the overcoming of domestic disharmony’.16 7KHGLUHFWRUDLPHGDWµVSHFL¿FXQLW\«DUHDOEURWKHUKRRG¶EXW-DPHV1/RHKOLQ¶V comment that Macmorris was played ‘with IRA fervour’ suggests that either the production or his reading of it was informed by a sense of national stereotyping renewed by current events.17 The historical topicality of the Irish stereotype is informed by Essex’s Irish campaign of 1599, as mentioned by the Chorus at 5.0.29–32, with the Irish opposition being imagined dead on Essex’s ‘sword’ at 5.0.32. In recent years a greater sensitivity to national stereotypes has been perceptible in directorial and casting decisions. Taking place at the beginning of the second Iraq War, the NT production in 2003 was presented in contemporary dress. It drew the audience’s attention to WKHSROLWLFVRIWZHQW\¿UVWFHQWXU\ZDUIDUHFRQFHQWUDWLQJRQWKHPDQLSXODWLRQRI opinion through propaganda. Television screens were placed on either side of the Olivier stage and signalled the differences between media rhetoric and the effects of warfare on individuals. As was the case at the RSC in 2000, at the NT in 2003 a military adviser was employed to assist with the handling of weaponry and to answer the production team’s queries about military procedures. $FFRUGLQJWR5H\QROGVDQG:KLWH+\WQHUµPDGHLWFOHDURQWKDW¿UVWGD\>RI rehearsals] that he sought to avoid the nationalist stereotypes’, so ‘nationalityVSHFL¿F¶FDVWLQJZDVXVHGIRU)OXHOOHQ5REHUW%O\WKH DQG0DFPRUULV7RQ\'HYOLQ  whilst Jamy was completely excised from the 2003 production.18 The excision of Jamy was one tactic in avoiding national stereotyping but his removal from the play lessens the text’s historical relevance.19 Editing the text (and especially editing out key moments) was at the heart of Hytner’s approach to revising the character of Fluellen away from the comic tradition, so the leek scene (Act 5 scene 1) was cut. 16

James N. Loehlin, Shakespeare in Performance: Henry V (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 53. 17 Terry Hands, quoted in Loehlin, Shakespeare in Performance: Henry V, 53; Loehlin, 71. 18 Reynolds and White, A Rehearsal Diary of Henry V at the National, 3. 19 See Andrew Gurr, ‘Why Captain Jamy in Henry V?’, Archiv für das Studium der neuren Sprachen und Literaturen, 226/141 (1989): 365–73. Thanks to Willy Maley for this suggestion.

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Fluellen’s concern with the rules of combat was seized upon by Hytner, not as a comic idiosyncrasy but as a moment of psychological breakdown after the death of the Boy, as Reynolds and White explain: ‘Far from being comic, the direction results in a poignant image of an old soldier brought to the edge of a nervous breakdown by the stark reality of war’.20 Despite this touching moment that acquired audience sympathy, Fluellen was also shown in a particularly unsympathetic light when it was he alone who followed the King’s orders to kill the prisoners (after all the other soldiers refused). Fluellen’s apparent lack of empathy with the enemy was shown when he executed the (hooded) prisoners using a machine gun, and then HI¿FLHQWO\NLOOHGZLWKDVLQJOHVKRW RQHSULVRQHUZKRDWWHPSWHGWRFUDZORIIDIWHU KLV LQLWLDO URXQG RI DXWRPDWLF JXQ¿UH ,URQLFDOO\ LQ VHHNLQJ WR UHYHDO µWKH VWDUN reality of war’, the production fabricated such spectacular moments for its own HQGV -XVW DV )OXHOOHQ FRPPLWWHG D WZHQW\¿UVWFHQWXU\ ZDU FULPH LQ NLOOLQJ WKH hooded prisoners, so King Henry was shown to kill Bardolph (with a single shot to the head). The verisimilitude of this moment obscured the fact that it was a faked vision of war’s ‘stark reality’: the production’s military adviser had insisted that current wartime protocol would prevent a Commander-in-chief from executing one RIKLVRZQVROGLHUVEHFDXVHKHZRXOGQRWEHLQWKH¿HOGRIPLOLWDU\RSHUDWLRQV21 In this context the production’s presentation of Fluellen is particularly interesting as he was resolutely not ‘other’ but fully assimilated into ‘English’ army life, to the point of being crucial in enacting Henry’s orders (and emulating the actions of his King). England’s ‘other’ was situated elsewhere in this production, which presented a cause and effect narrative of England’s aggression against France. Princess Catherine’s scenes in Henry V DUH FRQFHUQHG ZLWK KHU VLJQL¿FDQFH as a potential wife for Henry and her inability to speak English. In learning the English names for body parts she provides the audience with an exotic spectacle RQKHU¿UVWDSSHDUDQFHLQWKHSOD\6KHUHSHDWVLQEURNHQ(QJOLVK WKHZRUGVWKDW she learns and, as has become habitual in performance, the performer gestures towards the parts referred to. This presents an audience with a teasing display of the foreign Princess’s body, which she itemizes for their view. The risqué comedy at the end of the scene (3.4.46–53) exposes not just the problems of language that she and Henry will encounter in Act 5 scene 2, but it also highlights Catherine’s awareness that she is engaging in sexual discourse. For an Early Modern audience WKHFRPSOH[LQWHUSOD\EHWZHHQWKHVXJJHVWHGERG\RIWKH¿FWLRQDO3ULQFHVVDQG the actual body of the boy actor underneath (and with the scene ending in her utterance of the very part that differentiates those two bodies) serves to increase the scene’s exotic and erotic appeal. The French actor Felicité du Jeu played Catherine at the NT in 2003 and the production signalled that her decision to learn the English names for body parts was not sexually playful but was, instead, an apparently spontaneous reaction to her watching a televised broadcast (with French subtitles) of Henry, who 20 21

Reynolds and White, A Rehearsal Diary of Henry V at the National, 30. Ibid., 28.

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WKUHDWHQHG WR ZUHDN SK\VLFDO EUXWDOLW\ RQ WKH FLWL]HQV RI +DUÀHXU ±  Watching her witness threats of physical (and, particularly, sexual) violence via the media emphasized Catherine’s isolation, and audience sympathy for her plight was encouraged. Reynolds and White explain that the broadcast was intended to JLYH D VSHFL¿F PRWLYDWLRQ IRU &DWKHULQH¶V GHFLVLRQ WR OHDUQ (QJOLVK VXJJHVWLQJ that an approach based on psychological realism was used for the character: ‘she does it not out of playfulness, but because she has no choice – she has witnessed the power and potential for cruelty of her country’s oppressors’.22 Reynolds’ and White’s account, which is the NT’s published Rehearsal Diary for the production, goes further in demonstrating how Hytner’s commitment to verisimilitude encouraged those present in rehearsal to speculate on what Catherine’s thoughts might be in response to the broadcast: English is the language of the occupying power and she has to learn it. It is, to her, a hateful language; the fact that she has to listen to it with the knowledge that her fate is already inexorably linked to that of Henry, transforms the scene from a comic interlude to a central moment in this production.23

Catherine’s need to learn English in the context of this production echoed governmental drives for immigrant spouses to acquire English (and pass citizenship tests) to supposedly enable swifter integration within the UK.24 Henry’s wooing of Catherine also resisted the performance history of playing the scene as a comic climax because du Jeu’s Princess remained at a polite distance throughout and did not smile at Henry’s ‘faux French’ (5.2.204). Once again a VSHFL¿FPRWLYDWLRQZDVVKRZQIRUKHUDFWLRQVWKHSURGXFWLRQVWDJHGWKH'DXSKLQ¶V GHDWKDW$JLQFRXUWVRWKH)UHQFKFRXUWZDVLQDSHULRGRIRI¿FLDOPRXUQLQJDWWKH time of the marriage-making. In such a sombre context the marriage certainly seemed to be a political alliance and no love match. 'HVSLWH+\WQHU¶VGULYHWRXVHµQDWLRQDOLW\VSHFL¿F¶FDVWLQJDWWKH17DQGWKH same policy occurring in the RSC’s 2000 production of 1 Henry IV ), the casting of Henry V at the RSC in 2000 and 2007 revealed little convergence between the nationalities of the actors and the characters in the roles of Fluellen, Macmorris, Jamy, and Princess Catherine. Whilst Macmorris and Jamy were played by Irish and Scottish actors in 2000 (Keith Dunphy and Kenneth Bryans), in 2007 the Australian actor Rob Carroll played Macmorris and the English actor Geoffrey Freshwater played Jamy. Princess Catherine was played by the Irish actor Catherine Walker in 2000 and the English actor Alexia Healy in 2007. In both productions Fluellen was played by Englishmen who assumed Welsh accents (Adrian Schiller in 2000; Jonathan Slinger in 2007). 22

Reynolds and White, A Rehearsal Diary of Henry V at the National, 8. Ibid., 8. 24 My thanks to Willy Maley for suggesting the following link: http://www. workpermit.com/news/2007_02_22/uk/english_language_test_immigrant_spouses.htm. Accessed 5 August 2008. 23

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However, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish actors were cast in traditionally English roles in these productions. Although for some roles they used the supposedly neutral delivery of Received Pronunciation (RP), they did use their natural accents at other times. This extension of the range of voices represented broadened the context in which I read the hitherto marginalized characters. In 2000 the Welsh actor Joshua Richards played Williams using his own accent and the Earl of Cambridge using RP, and William Houston did not fully eliminate the cadences of his Belfast accent in the role of King Henry. In 2007 Keith Dunphy (who, in 2000, had played Macmorris with his own accent and Scrope with RP) played Nim with an Irish accent and Forbes Masson played the Chorus with his own Scottish accent. The meaning of ‘England’ and ‘Englishness’ are created in performance through a negotiation between the actor, the text, and the audience. The use of Welsh/ Scottish/Irish accents in traditionally RP (‘English’) roles draws the audience’s attention to that very process of negotiation. Edward Hall’s RSC production (2000) seemed to me to invite the audience to actively engage with the idea of how national identities and stereotypes are created by highlighting the differences between the performer and the role. When examining the evidence of the RSC productions, Hytner’s attempts (at the NT) to redeem characters from being ‘nationalist’ stereotypes seem wellintentioned but perhaps somewhat simplistic. He did, after all, have to substantially cut the role of Fluellen and provide Catherine with a series of psychological motivations to achieve the apparently realistic characters that he sought. Despite WKHDSSDUHQWO\µQDWLRQDOLW\VSHFL¿F¶FDVWLQJRI'XQSK\DQG%U\DQVDV0DFPRUULV and Jamy at the RSC in 2000, the presentation of these characters remained comic, with the Irishman appearing from a trapdoor surrounded by the fog of stage smoke (a device repeated in 2007). Hall’s production employed a Brechtian approach to make the familiar strange by drawing the audience’s attention to the creation of juxtaposed stage images (often bringing up the house-lights to make the audience self-aware). It utilized an eclectic design with contemporary battledress worn by the actors, who were already on stage as soldiers when the audience entered. They scattered poppies RQWR D 6W *HRUJH ÀDJ WKDW FRYHUHG WKH VWDJH 2QH DFWRUVROGLHU DQVZHUHG D mobile phone and then reminded the audience to switch off their phones for the performance. I use the term actor/soldier to indicate my own increased awareness of having ‘double-vision’ in this production. The production resisted any attempts by the audience to engage with a psychologically real narrative, encouraging them instead to read those on stage as the characters and as the actors who stand for the characters. The Chorus speeches were divided up between the actors/soldiers, drawing attention to the production as a piece of collaborative storytelling. The 6W*HRUJHÀDJZDVGUDZQRIIWRUHYHDODZDUPHPRULDOPDNLQJWKHSHWDOVVFDWWHU whilst two actors/soldiers donned Bishops’ regalia (seemingly improvised from old sheets) over their battle gear and began a jokily played exchange between Canterbury and Ely.

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The set was designed to signal the shifts in its use: a moving platform that resembled scaffolding remained at the back of the stage for much of the action but was visibly pushed/pulled by the actors/soldiers towards the audience during the siege (to the accompaniment of disorientating backlighting). Catherine’s dress for the wooing scene – a farthingale – was an acknowledged anachronism LQWKHFRQWH[WRIWKHPRGHUQEDWWOH¿HOGZLWK:DONHU&DWKHULQHDQGWKHDXGLHQFH ZDWFKLQJLWVGHVFHQWIURPWKHÀ\WRZHURQZLUHVEHIRUHVKHSXWLWRQ7KH¿QDO scene is depicted in the photograph (Fig. 8.1), where Catherine’s period dress is juxtaposed with the modern military uniforms. King Henry V (kneeling) holds the crown used by King Henry VI in the same RSC This England: the Histories season. In the background a torn, grey parachute is evidence of the production’s self-consciously anachronistic design choices. The second half of the production began with the English army singing ‘Thank Heaven for little girls’, whilst surrounding Catherine at the front edge of the stage and looking at the audience. Catherine held a French/English Dictionary and launched into a rendition of ‘La vie en rose’ before her scene with Alice was played. In drawing on anachronistic details and clichéd French paratexts – and playing them out front, literally with a nod and a wink – Hall’s production framed itself as highly self-aware. Canterbury’s Salic Law defence was rushed through (with the help of a family tree scroll being unravelled by an actor/soldier on a ladder) and the line ‘as clear as is the summer sun’ (1.2.86) was played directly to the audience with a droll delivery. So by the time of Henry’s proud declaration of his nationality, the audience was familiar with the tactic of the performance dislocating the meaning of the text. William Houston drew on his own Belfast accent to play the King, so when he said ‘For I am Welsh you know’ (4.7.96) the disparity between Henry’s claim and the actor’s identity was accentuated. This disparity was pursued further by having the actors/soldiers laugh at the assertion. The audience were made to confront the lack of stable national unities within this one line, seeing simultaneously the King of England, Harry of Monmouth, and the Irish actor. Houston playing the King offers an interesting contrast to Graham Holderness’s reading of Kenneth Branagh’s portrayal of Henry. Holderness suggests that Branagh’s audience ‘catch a momentary glimpse of an Irishman weeping over the historical devastations of British imperialism’.25 In a reversal of Branagh’s situation Houston was born in England but grew up in Belfast. Houston’s King did not weep for the English dead; his reaction to the death of Bardolph was to observe the on-stage hanging without pity as the army marched through the stalls of the auditorium. Everything about +RXVWRQ¶V.LQJZDVFRRODQGGHOLYHUHGZLWKRXWDQ\DSSDUHQWVHQVHRIFRQÀLFWLQJ emotions. Henry’s actions were offered to audience members to read according to their own judgments and not clouded by emotional manipulation. The conclusion of the performance provided a coherent end to this eclectic production and highlighted the play’s lack of closure regarding questions of 25 Graham Holderness, Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth +DW¿HOG8QLYHUVLW\RI+HUWIRUGVKLUH3UHVV 

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Fig. 8.1

Henry V, Royal Shakespeare Company (2000). Left to right: Catherine (Catherine Walker), King Henry V (William Houston), Westmoreland (David Lyon), Exeter (Michael Thomas), King Charles VI (David Acton), Burgundy (Sam Cox), Dauphin (Alexis Daniel). By permission Malcolm Davies Collection. © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

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national identity. The wooing was conducted in a perfunctory manner: Henry hung his crown on the back of a chair, retrieving it at ‘here comes/your father’ (5.2.59–  $VWKHPDUULDJHZDVFRQ¿UPHG&DWKHULQHDQG+HQU\IDFHGHDFKRWKHUDQGWKH grey, torn parachute that had dressed the back of the set dropped to reveal a Union -DFNÀDJ7KH¿QDO&KRUXVVSHHFKZDVEHJXQE\'DYLG$FWRQZKRVWHSSHGRXW of the wheelchair that he had used for the King of France, signalling a shift in his VWDJH SHUVRQD :DONHU&DWKHULQH DQG +RXVWRQ+HQU\ EULHÀ\ MRLQHG KDQGV WKHQ she removed the crown from his head at the mention of Henry’s death (Epilogue, 8–10). The actors/characters silently watched Houston/Henry walk downstage DQGGLVDSSHDUWKURXJKWKHDXGLWRULXP7KH%ULWLVKÀDJWKHQIHOOWRWKHJURXQGQR Henry VI emerged and Walker/Catherine was left holding the crown. In 2007 the framing device of the Chorus again encouraged the audience to view the play critically. Because Forbes Masson used his own Scottish accent, the Chorus’ speeches about ‘England’ and ‘the English’ gained extra resonance and invited an increased scrutiny than if the actor had used the supposedly neutral accent of RP to deliver them. The text of the Prologue was altered to encourage the audience to view this production with an increased awareness of their own spectatorship: ‘This wooden O’ (Prologue, 13) was replaced with a reference to the appearance of the RSC’s Courtyard auditorium: ‘This rusty shed’. The third Chorus speech drew the audience’s attention to their own partisan allegiances when Masson asked the audience to ‘leave your England’ (3.0.19). Having a Scottish Chorus acknowledged the dramatized events as a biased English history, and DFWLYHO\VXEYHUWHGWKHLGHDRIDXQL¿HGµ(QJODQG¶WKURXJKDYDULHW\RISURGXFWLRQ decisions. On two occasions lines written for other characters were given to Masson’s Chorus. Rambures’ line, ‘That island of England breeds very valiant creatures./Their mastiffs are of unmatchable courage’ (3.7.127–8), was delivered by the Chorus with a slight pause between the two sentences to accentuate its bathetic effect. In Act IV scene 1 the Chorus took Alexander Court’s line: ‘Brother John Bates, is not that the morning which breaks yonder?’ (4.1.84–5). On both occasions these interjections had the Chorus siding with those who oppose the dominant English discourse. His association with the ‘other’ was indicated by his delivery of these lines from a position suspended above the stage, seated at a piano, which partially descended from the gods on wires. He played a melancholy melody on the piano to underscore the names of the French dead (4.8.70–94) but did not provide any musical accompaniment for the few English names reported (4.8.97–8). Having the Chorus then verbally echo Exeter’s reaction, ‘Tis wonderful’, (4.8.107) whilst close to tears suggested the gap between the words uttered and the lives lost. On Henry’s order that the soldiers acknowledge ‘That God fought for us’ (4.8.114), Masson’s Chorus signalled his resentment by shaking his head. At the end of the scene the Chorus began the singing of Non nobis and Te Deum whilst crying, an ironic counterpoint to Henry’s claim that ‘ne’er from )UDQFHDUULYHGPRUHKDSS\PHQ¶ 7KH)UHQFKWKHQEURXJKWRQFRI¿QV whilst the Chorus sang, and the English followed, building a trestle stage on top RIWKH)UHQFKFRI¿QV

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Henry’s triumphant return to London after the French War is invoked by the Chorus as a premonition of Essex’s return (5.0.29–34). In using ‘rebellion’ here the Chorus differentiates between the Irish who fought on the English side (like Macmorris) and those untamed Irish who need to be quelled ‘on [Essex’s] sword’ (5.0.32). In this production the lines about Essex’s activities in Ireland were cut (5.0.29–32) and, instead, events relating to the contemporary world of the audience were suggested, as the Chorus said, ‘As from our wars’, continuing with the text at 5.0.33: ‘How many would the peaceful city quit/To welcome him!’ The use of the Chorus to deliver an alternative viewpoint on the action alerted the audience to regard the presentations of characters within the narrative as partial. The Captains scene (Act 3 scene 3) and the leek scene (Act 5 scene 1) were retained and played as knockabout comedy. Whilst actors assuming Welsh/Scottish/Irish accents and wearing stereotypical costumes (a tam-o-shanter for Jamy; a coat lined with sticks of dynamite for Macmorris) might be seen to be pandering to national stereotypes, the analytical framework of the Chorus’ interactions with the drama and the level of exaggeration at work in the costuming and acting encouraged the audience to recognize the English bias of these presentations. What highlights the complexity of Shakespeare’s presentation of national identity in Henry V further is the nationality of the King of England. Disguised as an ordinary soldier and asked for his name by Pistol he puns ‘Harry le roi’ (4.1.50); asked whether this is a Cornish name the King responds, ‘No, I am a Welshman’ (4.1.52). The problematic assimilation of the British males that runs through Henry IV and Henry V reaches its apotheosis in the person of the King: the Welsh, PDUJLQDOL]HG E\ WKH (QJOLVK GLVFRXUVH RI WKH H[RWLF LQ WKH SHUVRQ RI *O\QGǒU become legitimized by the dual nationality of Harry of Monmouth, ‘countryman’ of Fluellen (4.7.96), and Henry V, King of England. Henry’s refashioning of himself as a Welsh soldier and his reinvention of the various forces under his command as a ‘band of brothers’ (4.3.60), which both occur before the ‘wonderful’ victory at Agincourt, work to assimilate the non-English males into ‘English’ culture. :KLOVW +\WQHU¶V  SURGXFWLRQ XVHG µQDWLRQDOLW\VSHFL¿F¶ FDVWLQJ WR EULQJ the experiences of the marginalized characters to the attention of the audience, his casting for the English and French courts revealed a narrative of ethnic inclusion at ZRUNLQWKH17¶VSROLFLHV5H\QROGVDQG:KLWHSRLQWWRWKHVLJQL¿FDQFHRIFDVWLQJ Peter Blythe (Exeter) and William Gaunt (Canterbury), who had spent most of their careers using RP to play ‘quintessentially middle-class privileged white Englishmen’, alongside the ‘black British actor’ Adrian Lester as Henry. Whilst they do not explicitly suggest that Lester’s casting is ‘colour-blind’, they do use the term when noticing that the casting ‘pairs a black actor (Cecilia Noble) as [the] Queen of France with a white actor (Ian Hogg) as [the] King’. Whilst Noble and Lester utilized RP, Jude Akuwudike, who played Pistol, ‘was encouraged to play WKHSDUWZLWKDVWURQJ-DPDLFDQDFFHQWDQGLQÀHFWKLVGHOLYHU\ZLWKWKHVSHHFK rhythms and cadences of patois’.26 John O’Connor recalls the effect of this on 26

Reynolds and White, A Rehearsal Diary of Henry V at the National, 3.

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the moment when the disguised Henry is asked for his name by Pistol and the King responds ‘Harry le roi’ (4.1.50) (pronounced here, as has become usual in production, as ‘le roy’): ‘“LEROY?!” exclaims Pistol delightedly. The audience roar with laughter at this: both actors are black’.27 The inclusion of the black stereotype of ‘Leroy’ drew my attention to the supposed ‘colour-blind’ness of Lester’s casting. The contrast between Henry’s voice, which used the same RP accent as his white uncle Exeter, and Pistol’s Jamaican voice pointed to the production’s interest in signalling the differences of class rather than ethnic origin. Nevertheless, the use of a ‘home video’ showing the young Henry, Falstaff, and his associates and watched by those characters present in Act 2 scene 3 problematized this approach. At the reported death of Falstaff (2.3.5), the video was paused and the image of Henry with dreadlocks momentarily became the focus of the audience’s gaze as Pistol, Bardolph, Nim, and the Boy observed the screen in silence. The cutting of Henry’s dreadlocks FRXOGEHUHDGZLWKLQWKH¿FWLRQRIWKHSURGXFWLRQDVDFDOFXODWHGGHFLVLRQPDGH E\WKHFKDUDFWHU WRDSSHDUPRUHIRUPDORQDVVXPLQJKLVRI¿FLDOLGHQWLW\DV.LQJ (if one was to read the production in a ‘colour-blind’ way). In another way (which acknowledges Henry’s blackness), the removal of the dreadlocks could be read DV D FKDUDFWHU GHFLVLRQ WR UHQRXQFH D VLJQL¿HU RI EODFN VSHFL¿FDOO\ -DPDLFDQ  culture in order for him to succeed as King in a predominantly white England. ,QDGGLWLRQUHDGLQJWKHPRPHQWRXWVLGHRIWKH¿FWLRQDOHYHQWVSRUWUD\HGVHHLQJ two Lesters/Henries, one with dreadlocks, one without, served to emphasize to me what occurs in so-called ‘colour-blind’ Shakespearian productions: despite casting actors of different ethnic origins, references to other cultures (both in appearance and voice) are reduced and ‘neutralized’ in the service of the dominant English discourse (whose accent is located as middle-class home counties). ,Q WKLQNLQJ DERXW VRFDOOHG µFRORXUEOLQG¶ FDVWLQJ , ZDQW WR WXUQ ¿QDOO\ WR Michael Boyd’s revival of Henry VI for the Complete Works in 2006 (originally produced in 2000). In a press release Boyd, the RSC’s Artistic Director, called the Complete Works: ‘a national knees-up for the RSC’s house playwright’, which would ‘celebrate the truly global reach of the greatest writer in the English language’.28 Boyd’s emphasis was on moving from an English artistic, cultural, and political centre out. Boyd frequently resurrects the ghosts of dead characters when not indicated by the script, e.g., in 2 Henry VI the ghosts of the Talbots made many reappearances after their disappearance in the text (as the vision of Margery Jordan in Act 1 scene 4, as shipmates at the murder of Suffolk in Act 4 scene 1 and as part of Jack Cade’s rebellion in Act 4 scene 2). Watching the revival of Henry VI six years after viewing WKHSURGXFWLRQ¿UVWWLPHURXQGZDVP\RZQHQFRXQWHUZLWKWKHDWULFDOJKRVWVQRW 27 John O’Connor, Shakespearean Afterlives: Ten Characters with a Life of Their Own (Cambridge: Icon Books 2003), 53. 28 56&3UHVV2I¿FHµ56&KRVWV¿UVWHYHUIHVWLYDORI6KDNHVSHDUH¶VFRPSOHWHZRUNV¶ 11 July 2005, http://www.rsc.org.uk/press/420_2145.aspx. Accessed 5 August 2008.

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just in the sense of Boyd adding extra appearances for some characters, but because this production seemed to me to be a palimpsest. Whilst relocated to a different auditorium in 2006, the set, the (vaguely Medieval) sombre costumes, music, and blocking were familiar from 2000. The actor playing the lead role had changed, yet I felt that I was watching pretty much the same performance that I had seen in 2000. I did not notice how closely the 2006 revival echoed the original until I witnessed the same company’s so-called revival of Richard III. In 2000 Richard III had been a conceptual continuation of Henry VI. But in 2007 the part of Richard had been recast and radical changes had been made to the concept of the production (which ORFDWHGLWLQWKHWZHQW\¿UVWFHQWXU\ZRUOGRIPXOWLPHGLDDQGDXWRPDWLFZHDSRQV  the set, costumes, and blocking were all affected by this change. This Richard III was less of a revival and more of a newly-conceived production. I wondered why the RSC chose to preserve the production of Henry VI so closely and yet radically restyle Richard III±ERWKKDGEHHQFULWLFDOO\DQG¿QDQFLDOO\VXFFHVVIXOLQ,W seemed to me that whilst the new concept allowed Jonathan Slinger the freedom to individually interpret the part of Richard without having to replicate Aidan McArdle’s earlier interpretation, Chuk Iwuji who played Henry was encouraged to emulate the acclaimed performance of his predecessor, David Oyelowo (partly because the other elements were reproduced in such detail). In 2000 Oyelowo received a high level of press attention, generated by the RSC’s announcement of his casting. One article proclaimed, ‘RSC casts black actor DV(QJOLVKNLQJIRU¿UVWWLPH¶DQGIHDWXUHGDTXRWDWLRQIURP%R\GGHFODULQJWKDW ‘It is colour blind casting, his son will be white and there is no hint of illegitimacy’.29 The reaction to this casting forms part of the ‘Shakespeare and Race’ section on the RSC’s own Website.30 Whilst the black British actor Geff Francis played Warwick (depicted in the centre of the photograph [Fig. 8.2]), it was only Oyelowo’s presence as King Henry (on the right of the photograph) that prompted comments about ‘colour-blind’ casting. For the Complete Works revival of Henry VI Boyd sought to replace Oyelowo – a black African actor, educated in a predominantly white environment (England) and a committed Christian – with Iwuji – a black African actor, educated in a predominantly white environment (the USA) and a committed Christian. Despite the uncanny similarity in the backgrounds of the two Henries, the percentage of ethnic minority actors within the ensemble was lower than in any of the other RSC productions produced for The Complete Works.31 The production employed a so-called ‘colour-blind’ 29 Michael Boyd, quoted in Fiachra Gibbons, ‘RSC Casts Black Actor as English King for First Time’, Guardian, 19 September 2000, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2000/ VHS¿DFKUDJLEERQs. Accessed 5 August 2008. 30 RSC Learning, ‘Shakespeare and Race’, http://www.rsc.org.uk/picturesand H[KLELWLRQVDFWLRQYLHZ([KLELWLRQ"H[KLELWLRQLG  VHFWLRQLG 7. Accessed 5 August 2008. 31 In the RSC’s Complete Works production of Pericles actors from ethnic minorities made up 45 percent of the cast. The percentage of ethnic minority actors was only 18 percent in the Henry VI plays, despite a black actor being cast in the title role.

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Fig. 8.2

Henry VI, Royal Shakespeare Company (2000). Left to right: York (Clive Wood), Warwick (Geff Francis), King Henry VI (David Oyelowo). By permission Malcolm Davies Collection. © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

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strategy by using actors of different ethnicities to represent members of the same families, e.g., the white English actor Roger Watkins played Salisbury, whilst his son Warwick was played in the 2006 revival by Patrice Naiambana, a black actor who originates from Sierra Leone. In a magazine interview Iwuji has cited Oyelowo’s casting as an inspiration for his decision to work with the RSC.32 The casting of a black actor as Henry for WKHVHFRQGWLPHVHHPHGPRUHVLJQL¿FDQWWKDQEHLQJDµFRORXUEOLQG¶FRLQFLGHQFH It seemed to me that for The Complete Works (called the ‘Essential Year’ in the RSC’s marketing brochures), the RSC wanted to recapture both the media reaction that had greeted the casting of Oyelowo and the success of his performance – he won the Ian Charleson award for young actors in classical roles. Oyelowo and Iwuji do not look alike but their similar backgrounds and the production’s deliberate repetition of costumes, lighting, blocking, and the selection of moments chosen for production photographs typify them as interchangeable black English Kings, rather than as individual performances of the same role. In contrast it is hard to read photographs of the two leads in Richard III as coming from the same production. In addition, I found it hard to see Naiambana’s casting as Warwick as ‘colourblind’ because, just as Boyd had substituted one black actor for another in the role of Henry, so the same pattern had occurred in the casting of Warwick (Francis in 2000, Naiambana in 2006). Naiambana’s concern that he needed to sound less African and more English as Warwick (articulated at a Shakespeare conference) exposed ‘colour-blind’ness and the use of RP as far from neutral.33 In deliberately attempting to recreate a successful production (to the extent of casting actors from ethnic minorities in the same roles as their acclaimed predecessors), the RSC reveals anxieties about its own predominantly white English performance history and in doing so, despite its claims to be ‘colour-blind’, the company actually limits the range of roles available to actors from ethnic minorities. I should add that I cannot read the casting of white English actors as ‘colour-blind’ either; for me their dominant presence serves to expose the limited use of ethnically diverse performers within Shakespearian production. :KLOVWµQDWLRQDOLW\VSHFL¿F¶DQGµFRORXUEOLQG¶FDVWLQJDUHDSSDUHQWO\OLEHUDO DWWHPSWVWRJLYHYHULVLPLOLWXGHWRWKHGLYHUVLW\RIQDWLRQVUHSUHVHQWHGDQGUHÀHFW an integrated, ethnically diverse society, for me their positive intentions are tempered by certain consequences. In seeking to represent nations ‘truthfully’, µQDWLRQDOLW\VSHFL¿F¶ FDVWLQJ HOLGHV WKH RIWHQ SUREOHPDWLF UHSUHVHQWDWLRQV RI ‘others’ in Anglo-centric texts. Directors attempt to ‘solve’ these representations through extensive cutting and/or providing extra-textual motivations to justify 32

Ann McFerran, ‘Best of Times, Worst of Times: Chuk Iwuji’, Sunday Times Magazine, 13 August 2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article700714. ece. Accessed 5 August 2008. 33 Patrice Naiambana, with Ben Crystal and Janet Dale, ‘Speaking Shakespeare’, convened by Paul Allen, British Shakespeare Association Conference, University of Warwick, 31 August 2007.

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characters’ actions. By using ‘colour-blind’ casting productions present the GRPLQDQWGLVFRXUVHRIPLGGOHFODVVZKLWH(QJOLVKH[SHULHQFHDVW\SL¿HGLQWKH predominance of RP accents) as universal. Although it seems a long way off, I look forward to the RSC and NT increasing the diversity of its ensembles for Shakespeare. I suggest that if these national institutions cast actors of different ethnicities and nationalities in the leading (English) roles more frequently, then the dislocations between the national and/or ethnic identity of the actor and the role that s/he plays will increase audiences’ awareness of the English bias of both the texts and their performance history.

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Chapter 9

A Nation of Selves: Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare Neil Corcoran

The controlling presence is not a discernible ego but an entire consciousness and life, a nation of selves. Ted Hughes, A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1991 edn)

1 In his brilliantly idiosyncratic essay ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’ (1993), Ted Hughes GHVFULEHVDUHYLHZRIKLV¿UVWYROXPHThe Hawk in the Rain (1957) by the poet Roy Fuller. Fuller, who would become Oxford Professor of Poetry between 1968 and 1973, and a governor of the BBC, was a poet of urbane sophistication and wry irony of a kind Hughes would almost certainly have associated with the poetry against which he was, in his earliest work, implicitly reacting; a reaction he was willing, even keen, to make explicit in early interviews. Citing in this essay the ¿QDOOLQHRIKLVRZQSRHPµ7KH+RUVHV¶±µ+HDULQJWKHKRUL]RQVHQGXUH¶±+XJKHV observes that ‘When Roy Fuller reviewed the book, which he did in a serious, FRQVLGHUDWHVRUWRIZD\KHVHL]HGRQWKDWODVWOLQHDQGSRLQWHGRXWFRQ¿GHQWO\ that it was “unsayable”’.1 And that word subsequently echoes caustically and reproachfully throughout this essay. For all the serious consideration, the gentlemanly good behaviour, of Fuller’s treatment of the book, Hughes clearly IRXQGKLVFRQ¿GHQFHDIRUPRIFRQGHVFHQVLRQDQGµ0\WKV0HWUHV5K\WKPV¶LVD VXSHUEO\UHOHQWOHVVUHEXNHWRWKHZRUGµXQVD\DEOH¶LQZKLFK+XJKHVLGHQWL¿HVWKH English poetic tradition of his own allegiance – the English line behind his own line from ‘The Horses’, as it were – to which Fuller’s eminently educated English ear is almost entirely deaf. In fact, our sense of Hughes’s reaction is complicated by the knowledge that Fuller’s review, although arguably both considerate and condescending, nowhere actually makes this claim about Hughes’s line, although it does quote it as one of the book’s ‘very bad patches’.2 What must be Hughes’s misattribution, however, only reinforces my feeling that rarely can resentment at a

1 Ted Hughes, Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, ed. William Scammell (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 320. Hereafter cited WP within my text. 2 Roy Fuller, untitled review, London Magazine, vol. 5 no. 1 (January 1958), 61.

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UHYLHZKDYHSURYRNHGVXFKDPDJQL¿FHQWO\PDWXUHGUHVSRQVHDQG+XJKHV¶VHVVD\ LVHGJLO\SHUVRQDOL]HGZLWKVHOIMXVWL¿FDWRU\DQLPXV3 ,WLVLPSRUWDQWWREHFOHDUDERXWWKHFRQWRXUVRI+XJKHV¶VUHEXNHDQGWKHGH¿QLWLRQ RIKLVDWWDFKPHQW+LVWUDGLWLRQRIDOOHJLDQFHZKLFKKHLGHQWL¿HVDVWKHµXQRUWKRGR[¶ one, has Gerard Manley Hopkins’s notion of ‘sprung rhythm’ at its conceptual origin and historical core, and Hughes locates it elsewhere in Christopher Smart, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott, W.B. Yeats, and even, residually, -RKQ.HDWV+XJKHV¿JXUHVWKHWUDGLWLRQDVDOZD\VH[SHULPHQWDODSSUR[LPDWHDQG DGDSWLYHDVLWµH[SORUHVLWVZD\WKURXJKD¿HOGRIÀH[LQJFRQWUDSXQWDOWHQVLRQV between two simultaneous but opposed laws – that is to say, between a law of “natural TXDQWLWLHV´VHWLQRSSRVLWLRQWRWKHODZRID¿[HGEDVLFPHWULFSDWWHUQ¶WP, 336). Being considered unorthodox, it is met everywhere and always with suspicion and KRVWLOLW\E\WKHRSSRVLQJRUWKRGR[\&ROHULGJHIRULQVWDQFHDWWHPSWLQJWRGH¿QHDQG GHIHQGWKHPHWULFVRIµ&KULVWDEHO¶¿QGVKLPVHOIFRQIURQWLQJµWKHFRQWHPSWXRXVO\ dismissive arrogance of a cultural ascendancy that was simply deaf to what he was talking about, as well as opposed to it on principle’ (WP, 334); so he becomes a precursor of Hughes in also having to defend himself against ‘unsayability’. Crucial to Hughes’s argument is a lengthy consideration of Thomas Wyatt, and of Richard Tottel’s metrical tidying-up of his work in 1557. Hughes uncovers in Wyatt the persistence of the English alliterative tradition operative in such medieval poems as Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Tottel’s rewritings indicate how, for him, ‘the metrically correct mode is the socially correct or as we might say now the politically correct mode’ (WP, 347).4 Tottel revises according to a notion of standard deriving not from the alliterative µSRHWU\RIWKHSHRSOH¶EXWIURPWKHFRQFHSWRIDFRXUWO\SRHWU\¿UVWYLEUDQWO\VHOI aware in Geoffrey Chaucer. There the ascendancy of a new, Anglo-Norman court is given literary expression in a ‘King’s English’ which ‘did not derive from any corner of Englishness’ (WP, 367), and Hughes is abrasive, if also partly admiring, about the politico-cultural strategy which this embodies: If there is a Civil War within English poetry, perhaps it opened here, where Chaucer’s marvellous oeuvre laid down the front line of battle along which the metrical, disciplined squares of the ‘King’s English’ would ever after – sometimes successfully, sometimes not – defend it against the resurgent ‘sprung rhythms’ of the tribes. (WP, 368) 3

He is still bristling about the review in letters of the 1980s, to a student and to Craig Raine. See Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and edited by Christopher Reid (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 432, 454. In the latter letter, to Raine, Hughes’s bristling is explicitly a matter RIFODVVµ5R\)XOOHUUHIXVHVWRVXUUHQGHUKLVRI¿FHU¶VPRXVWDFKHHYHQSURYLVLRQDOO\¶ 4 Hughes published his own translation of a passage from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes (eds), The School Bag (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), but he actually translated more than this; and Daniel Weissbort publishes further passages from Hughes’s manuscripts in his edition of Hughes’s Selected Translations (London: Faber and Faber, 2006).

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Sketching the concept of such a self-divided literary and linguistic history as a reaction to something Roy Fuller is wrongly said to have written about a single line RI+XJKHV¶VLQDUHYLHZRID¿UVWYROXPHPD\VHHPH[FHVVLYHDVLISHUVRQDOSLTXH is self-dramatizingly appropriating public culture. But ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’ strongly gives the impression of issuing from an entire subterrene of sensitized UHVSRQVLYHQHVVDVDFRQVHTXHQFHRI¿QGLQJLWVRSSRUWXQLW\$QGLQGHHGWKH¿QDO ÀRXULVK LQ +XJKHV¶V YLHZ RI (QJOLVK OLWHUDU\ KLVWRU\ DV SHUPDQHQW FRQWHVWDWLRQ is an almost Derridean refusal to locate a single originary impulse: since he understands the old English alliterative metres to have themselves uprooted and displaced ‘the verse forms of the indigenous Celtic peoples’, forms that he regards as those of ‘the enveloping, nurturing Celtic matrix’ (WP, 369). Over time that displacement is succeeded by an alliance, as the alliterative and Celtic traditions come into increasing interdependence; and in the breathtakingly extended prose poem which ends his essay Hughes reads the two traditions as forming, together, the bride in a marriage to the male ‘orthodox’ tradition. It is a marriage initially loving, then increasingly troubled, and eventually disastrous: but the prose poem culminates in Hopkins, and in ‘Celtic’ Wales and Ireland, with the wistful SRVVLELOLW\RIUHFRQFLOLDWLRQDQGWKHSDVVDJH¿QGVRQH¿QDOYDOHGLFWRU\EXWVWLOO wounded space for the word ‘unsayable’: The orthodoxy resumed control of the highways so completely that when Hopkins heard: She is not dead: There lives the dearest freshness deep down things and made a new attempt and even followed her, as he thought, through Wales into Ireland (as if his Catholicism itself were a lonely, forlorn, backtracking effort to locate the divorced, unheard-of or thought-to-be-defunct woman of the well-spring), his letters to her were as if written in invisible ink – or, if spelled out even to such a meticulous ear as Bridges’s, unsayable. She could only get WRKLPE\FDQGOHOLJKWDVDPLGQLJKW1RUWK1RUWK:HVWPDGQXQKHU¿QJHUWR her lips. (WP, 371–2)

This lyrical evocation genders the just persistent and just audible unorthodox tradition as female, and religiously denominates it as convert-Catholic, in a way that has manifest congruence with the myths and metaphors of Hughes’s vast study, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being.5$QG WKH ¿JXUH RI WKH QXQ WDFLWO\ DOOXGLQJ WR WKH VLOHQW ¿JXUH RI +RSNLQV¶V µ+HDYHQ+DYHQ¶ ZLWK LWV subtitle, ‘A nun takes the veil’, renders the tradition as, in the end, Gothic as well as &DWKROLFDQGD*RWKLFDOPRVWUHÀH[O\DOOXVLYHWR6KDNHVSHDUHWRWKH+DPOHWZKR says that he is only mad ‘nor’-nor’-west’. Shakespeare, of course, takes his place in Hughes’s allegorical prose-poem, and at more than one stage of the disintegration RILWV¿JXUDWLYHPDUULDJHµKH¶LQWKLVSDVVDJHLVWKHRUWKRGR[WUDGLWLRQ  5 London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Hereafter referred to within my text as ‘the Goddess’ and, in parentheses, as GIRUWKHLGHQWL¿FDWLRQRIWKHSDJHQXPEHUVRITXRWDWLRQV

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This England, That Shakespeare / Corcoran Then she erupts, love-mad, imperious, dazzling, tempestuous, alarming, while he ¿JKWVWRVXEGXHKHULQ0DUORZHDQGHDUO\6KDNHVSHDUH7KHPDUULDJHEHFRPHV uncontrollable: his more and more desperate attempts to regain control are simply shattered by her astonished rage, or her vengeful fury, as she overwhelms him, drags him by the hair, storms through the house smashing things at every LQWHUUXSWLRQUHPHPEHULQJHYHU\WLQLHVWVOLJKWDPLOOLRQWLPHVPDJQL¿HG±WLOOKH fears for his sanity: middle Shakespeare. While he dozes in second childhood fondness on their daughter, she becomes a Sycorax, joins a coven, sleeps in her FRI¿QWRWHUULI\KLPHWFODWH6KDNHVSHDUHWP, 369–70)

The metaphor here is itself, we might think, imperious, dazzling, tempestuous, and alarming: but behind it, and inhering in Hughes’s linguistic and cultural views in this essay, it is possible to sense something a little more conventional. Despite his overt anti-academicism and the often-recounted story of the dream-fox who told him to abandon the writing of literary-critical essays, Hughes’s linguistic views are profoundly in tune with those of the Cambridge English school in which he began his own post-secondary education.6 What Lucy McDiarmid, in her book Saving Civilisation, calls ‘the myth of the seventeenth century’, that myth to ZKLFK(OLRWJDYHVHPLQDOH[SUHVVLRQZKHQKHGH¿QHGDµGLVVRFLDWLRQRIVHQVLELOLW\ … from which we have never recovered’, and which was extensively purveyed by F.R. Leavis, seems powerfully active behind Hughes’s thinking in this central essay.7 3DWULFN &UXWWZHOO¶V QRZ PRUH RU OHVV IRUJRWWHQ EXW RQFH LQÀXHQWLDO DQG still excellently readable book The Shakespearean Moment (1954), a work of both literary criticism and literary history which focuses on the 1590s and the immediately succeeding decades, and on the work of Shakespeare and Donne, extensively argues for just such a dissociation, although without explicitly referring to either Eliot or Leavis.8 When we discover the phrase ‘the Shakespearean PRPHQW¶EHLQJXVHGGH¿QLWLYHO\DOWKRXJKZLWKGLIIHUHQWLQÀHFWLRQVE\+XJKHVLQ the Goddess, it is hard to believe that he is unaware of Cruttwell, despite his never actually naming him. And it is notable that, in a letter to the Observer responding WR D QHJDWLYH FULWLTXH E\ &KULVWRSKHU 5LFNV RI WKH ¿UVW HGLWLRQ RI A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, Hughes adverts to a meeting with Eliot in which he asks him about the phrase ‘dissociation of sensibility’, saying that he wishes he understood

6 For the story of the dream-fox see, for instance, Letters of Ted Hughes, 422–3 (letter to Keith Sagar of 16 July 1979). Hughes refers there to ‘the effect of the Cambridge blend RISVHXGRFULWLFDOWHUPLQRORJ\ VRFLDOUDQFRXURQFUHDWLYHVSLULW¶ 7 Lucy McDiarmid, Saving Civilisation; Yeats, Eliot, and Auden Between the Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Chapter 2 is entitled ‘The Myth of the Seventeenth Century’ and suggests that, in different ways, the three poets of her subtitle all subscribed to it. 8 Patrick Cruttwell, The Shakespearean Moment and Its Place in the Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954).

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it better, and Eliot replies, ‘I’m afraid it was something of an understatement’.9 It is almost as if Hughes is here projecting a kind of poetic laying-on of hands; and his implicit approval of the concept is one reason for his enormously high regard IRU(OLRWZKLFKZHPD\LQLWLDOO\¿QGVXUSULVLQJ Even if for Hughes the dissociation begins long before it does for Eliot, and the VHYHQWHHQWKFHQWXU\LV¿QDOFRQ¿UPDWLRQUDWKHUWKDQRULJLQVRPHRIWKHSUHMXGLFHV LQKHUHQWLQWKHLGHDRIGLVVRFLDWLRQPD\DOVREHUHDGRXWRI+XJKHVVSHFL¿FDOO\ something very like xenophobia in the suspicion of iambic pentameter and of poetry FRQWDLQLQJQRQ(QJOLVKVSHFL¿FDOO\1RUPDQ)UHQFK HOHPHQWV,QDGLVFXVVLRQRI Hughes’s poem ‘The Hawk in the Rain’, Neil Roberts shows, representatively, how the poem in fact values something quite different from the ‘heavily accented Anglo-Saxon diction’ that it would appear to value if it were read only according to the prescriptions of Hughes’s own criticism; and the point is well taken, and may even argue for the kind of Hughesian self-division I shall myself be proposing later in this essay.10 Nevertheless, in his desire to propagandize on behalf of a trochaic or beat-prosodic tradition (Anglo Saxon poetry; medieval alliterative verse; the Coleridge of the accentual – as opposed to the accentual-syllabic – poems; Hopkins) in opposition to the corrupt foreign importation of the iambic tradition, Hughes can conscript Shakespeare to the former only by a highly selective consideration of actual Shakespearian practice. Similarly, his views of both Tottel’s editorial interventions in Wyatt’s text and of Johnsonian neo-classicism are indebted to Cambridge English assumptions long since outmoded. 2 If a certain set of acquired literary and cultural-political assumptions can be uncovered from Hughes’s prose, however, what sustains readerly interest is the verve and brio of his personal reinvention or reimagining of them. Reading English poetic tradition, in his marital metaphor, as double from the start, he understands this as the cause not only of cultural and political stress but of an almost apocalyptic antagonism. Within this doubling Shakespeare is accommodated at points of, even so, particular intensity: where there is a battle for control; where desperation and subjugation reach the point of mental instability; and where dotage is distressed by the wiles of witchcraft. It is hard to say this with much tact – Hughes is himself KDUGO\WDFWIXOLQKLV¿JXUDWLRQKHUH±EXWWKHWURSHRIDGLVLQWHJUDWLQJPDUULDJH can hardly fail to derive a particular intensity from the fact that it is being written across English literary history by a poet whose own disintegrating marriage is a FRQWLQXLQJO\FRQWURYHUVLDOHOHPHQWRIWKH¿JXUDWLRQRIRQHRIWKHVHPLQDOYROXPHV of poetry in twentieth-century English and American literary history, Sylvia Plath’s Shakespearianly entitled Ariel, as it is also the coded subtext of numerous 9 Letters of Ted Hughes, 327–8 (letter dated 17 January 1972). Ricks’s review had appeared the previous day. 10 Neil Roberts, Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 27.

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poems by Ted Hughes himself, and, ultimately, the more explicit material of his ¿QDO YROXPH Birthday Letters, where it becomes the object, in my view, of an attempted but failed literary exorcism, and where some of the appurtenances of witchcraft are both the material of speculation and the source of imagery. :KDWHYHU HOVH +XJKHV¶V WDFWOHVVQHVV ZLWK WKH ¿JXUH LQ µ0\WKV 0HWUHV Rhythms’ suggests, though, it also proposes that what is at stake here is allconsuming for him. This is in large part because the alliterative tradition that is WKHEULGHLQWKLVVWUHVVIXODQGGLVWUHVVLQJ¿JXUDWLRQLVLQWLPDWHO\FRQQHFWHGZLWK Hughes’s deep, and deeply politicized, feelings about English dialect. The ‘innate music of its “sprung rhythm”’, he says, ‘survived and multiplied, underground, like a nationalist army of guerillas, in the regional dialects of common speech’ (WP, 368). This is a view given strong autobiographical emphasis in one of the most often cited passages of an interview in which Hughes talks about growing up with the ‘very distinctive dialect’ of West Yorkshire: Whatever other speech you grow into, presumably your dialect stays alive in a sort of inner freedom, … it’s your childhood self there inside the dialect and that is possibly your real self or the core of it … Without it, I doubt if I would ever have written verse. And in the case of the West Yorkshire dialect, of course, it connects you directly and in your most intimate self to Middle English poetry.11

It is hardly surprising then that, when Hughes turns his attention directly to Shakespeare’s language, dialect is prominently there at the very beginning of his speculations. Hughes’s fullest discussion of Shakespearian language comes in the lengthy introduction to the second, revised edition of A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse  DQGKHUHSURGXFHVVRPHRIWKLVLQPRGL¿HGIRUPDQGDGGVDOLWWOHWRLW in the Goddess, where he also more intimately relates Shakespearian linguistic development to the development of what he calls the Tragic Equation, what he regards as his discovery of Shakespeare’s all-consuming single preoccupation. %XWLWLVLQKLVEULHILQWURGXFWLRQWRWKH¿UVWHGLWLRQRIA Choice that he states the case which he will then lengthily pursue: In spite of its Elizabethan ruff, Shakespeare’s language is somehow nearer to the vital life of English, still, than anything written down since. One reason for this is that it is a virtuoso development of the poetic instincts of English dialect. Even the famous pincer movement, where he embraces an idea with a latinate ZRUGRQRQHZLQJDQGDQ$QJOR6D[RQRQWKHRWKHULVDQLQQDWHWULFNRIÀXHQW dialect. The air of wild, home-made poetry which he manages to diffuse through a phenomenally complicated and intellectualized language, and which makes WKH ZRUN RI DOPRVW DQ\ RWKHU SRHW VHHP DUWL¿FLDO GHULYHV DOVR IURP DQRWKHU

11

Ekbert Faas, ‘Ted Hughes and Crow’, London Magazine, January 1971, 5–20.

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dialect instinct, which is the instinct to misuse latinisms, but in an inspired way. This is really a primitive, unconscious but highly accurate punning.12

+XJKHV¶VYDORUL]LQJRIGLDOHFWKHUHSODFHV6KDNHVSHDUH¿UPO\ZLWKLQWKHUDGLXVRI the unorthodox tradition with which he aligns himself in ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’, and in a way appearing to give more prominence to the bride than to the groom in the marriage that is Shakespeare. ‘The poetic instincts of English dialect’are those of the almost lost alliterative tradition; and Hughes’s combative sense of that tradition reserves particular opprobrium for the tidy editorializing of Shakespeare at the Restoration, an activity comparable to the operations which he believes were performed on Wyatt by Tottel: the orthodoxies of the Restoration could not comprehend what Hughes wonderfully calls, in the 1991 Choice, Shakespeare’s ‘prodigiously virtuoso pidgin’.13 When he tells us that ‘Shakespeare’s hybridization and cross-breeding, for all its superior vigour, multiple genetic resource, and incidental, exotic half-caste beauty, became [after the Restoration] a barbarous offence against gentility’, Hughes is clearly registering the degree of self-interest DQG VHOIGH¿QLWLRQ LQYROYHG LQ KLV OLIHORQJ HQJDJHPHQW ZLWK 6KDNHVSHDUH WP, 184). For the word ‘gentility’ maps the literary and cultural battles of the midtwentieth century onto those of the Restoration, since it was used so prominently E\$$OYDUH]LQWKHWLWOHRIWKHFRQWURYHUVLDOO\LQÀXHQWLDOHVVD\ZKLFKLQWURGXFHG his Penguin anthology The New Poetry in 1962 (and a revised edition in 1966): ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. Famously, that essay advertises the stirrings of a ‘new seriousness’ in English poetry more responsive to contemporary actuality – ‘the forces of disintegration which destroy the old standards of civilization’ – than the poetry of the Movement with its ‘negative feedback’ against Modernism. It prominently associates Hughes with this seriousness and contrasts his poem ‘A Dream of Horses’ with Philip Larkin’s ‘At Grass’, applauding Hughes as more ‘urgent’ if less ‘skilful’. This is not a completely secure or convincing opposition of aesthetic categories but it allows Alvarez to make Hughes’s poem his major example of a poetry which combats ‘the disease so often found in English culture: gentility’.14 And, as Paul Muldoon shrewdly, if perhaps a little too insistently, 12 A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, selected with an introduction by Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 11. 13 Ibid., 192. That there is the brunt of personal feeling behind this too is attested by a letter to Nick Gammage, dated 7 April 1995, in which Hughes offers his initial reaction to Cambridge as ‘a personal sort of torment’: ‘undergraduate life seemed to me modelled, in its exhibitionist manners and styles, and especially in its speech, the exaggeration of its vocal displays, on the Restoration fop.’ Letters of Ted Hughes, 680. Subsequently, in a letter to Andrew Motion, of 7 December 1997, about his biography of Keats, Hughes compares his own treatment, at 18, as a non-standard speaker of English, to reactions to Keats’s ‘Cockney’ speech. Letters, 702. 14 ‘The New Poetry or Beyond the Gentility Principle’, in The New Poetry, selected and introduced by A. Alvarez (revised and enlarged edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), ±%RWK+XJKHVDQG$OYDUH]PD\LQIDFWKDYHEHHQLQÀXHQFHGE\3DWULFN&UXWWZHOO¶V

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reminds us in his lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry, Hughes would ‘have seen himself as being in serious contention’ with Larkin as early as 1957, the date of SXEOLFDWLRQRIKLV¿UVWERRNThe Hawk in the Rain.15 Hughes conceives of Shakespeare’s language, drawing on and developing its dialectal resources, as imperiously appropriative, experimental, and improvisatory. ,QWKLVKHJLYHVDQHZLQÀHFWLRQWRWKHQRWRWKHUZLVHHQWLUHO\RULJLQDOFRQFHSWLRQ of Shakespeare’s ‘double language’; and he is resolutely materialist and historicist about the exigencies of its origins. The word ‘pidgin’ is, after all, itself a Chinese corruption of the word ‘business’, and pidgin was evolved as a mode of communication between Chinese and Europeans for mercantile purposes. Business is also the occasion of the ‘famous pincer movement’ for Hughes. He believes that Shakespeare developed this mode of bringing Latin and Anglo-Saxon into the same linguistic construction as a response to the requirements of two theatre audiences, on both of which he was dependent. On the one hand, he needed the aristocratic Court, ‘an élite as formidably educated and as exactingly cultured as Englishmen KDYHHYHUEHHQ¶DQGRQWKHRWKHUKHZDV¿QDQFLDOO\GHSHQGHQWRQWKHµFRPPRQ populace’, many of whom would have been illiterate.16 In Hughes’s striking, KLVWRULFDOO\LQIRUPHG FRQFHSWLRQ WKHQ WKH SROLWLFDOO\ DQG ¿QDQFLDOO\ GHSHQGHQW Shakespeare has to make it his business – literally – to address both audiences at once; and the double dependency provokes the invention of the linguistic form. In all of this Hughes displays a more than usually intense and empathetic understanding of a Shakespeare actually responding with urgency to the peculiar, and novel, demands of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre – ‘that tropical forcing house of optimal conditions and maximum demand’ – which may well owe something to his use of the word in The Shakespearean Moment, particularly since Alvarez had published in 1961 a book entitled The School of Donne. Cruttwell (New York: Random House edn, 1960), 27, says that ‘in his raid on the world of politeness and “gentility”’ Shakespeare ‘took over with him … the complex ironies of the professional dramatist’. His book is also consistently derogatory about the poetry being written in his own contemporary decade, the 1950s. 15 Paul Muldoon, The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 36. That the crime of the Restoration and its ‘venomous elegance’, imported from France, is on Hughes’s mind almost as soon as he begins publishing is apparent from WKHXQFROOHFWHGVHTXHQFHRIµ'ROO\*XPSWLRQ¶V&ROOHJH&RXUVHV¶ZKRVH¿UVWSRHP ‘Semantics’ writes deliberately brutal, catechetical couplets on the topic: ‘Please sir, what did the Restoration restore?/Clip-lipped fear of that great bull at the door’ – of, that is, the µVWXGEXOO¶RIWKHUHSUHVVHG&URPZHOOLDQHQHUJLHVXQWLO¿QDOO\µ7KXVFDPHODQJXDJHDQG manners to the ruling class:/Charles’s stuffed head oracular under grass. […] Now the bull OHDUQVWKDWGHDGKHDG¶VVSHHFKDQGJODQFH$QGVR(QJODQGIDOOV¿QDOO\WR)UDQFH¶7KH sequence includes one poem, ‘Theology’, which Hughes did collect, in Wodwo (1967). It has always seemed to me the prototype poem for Crow; and its original publication as part of this anti-Restoration lesson perhaps emphasizes the extent to which Hughes intends Crow as a ferocious onslaught on gentility and decorum. Hughes’s and Larkin’s feelings for each other and for each other’s work – not always simply hostile, in Hughes’s case – are on display in the edited Letters of both poets. 16 A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1991 edn), 173.

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own experience of working with Peter Brook, that great, intense, and empathetic Shakespearian director.17 It also chimes harmoniously with everything we have learned about Ted Hughes as, himself, no mean businessman and entrepreneur. Hughes calls the pincer movement ‘famous’, but I am not sure that it is. He is referring in fact to one form of what rhetoric calls ‘hendiadys’, and it is odd, in some ways, that Hughes does not use the word, since he shows himself adept in, and ready to employ, many technical vocabularies in the Goddess, and this is by no means the most recherché term in the rhetoric manuals. Literally meaning ‘one WKURXJKWZR¶LWLVGH¿QHGE\3XWWHQKDPLQThe Arte of English Poesie (1589) as ‘Endiadys, or the Figure of Twynnes’ – ‘when you will seem to make two of one not thereunto constrained’; and Chris Baldick in his Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary TermsGH¿QHVLWDVD¿JXUHRIVSHHFKLQZKLFKDVLQJOHLGHDLVH[SUHVVHG µE\PHDQVRIWZRQRXQVMRLQHGE\WKHFRQMXQFWLRQ³DQG´¶FLWLQJµ7KHÀDVKDQG RXWEUHDNRID¿HU\PLQG¶LQHamlet.18 Neil Rhodes sophisticates this when, in a discussion involving Hughes, he writes that ‘it involves the doubling of nouns in a phrase where one of them has an adjectival function’: his examples include, from Hamlet, ‘the expectancy and rose of the fair state’, for ‘rosy expectation’, and ‘the morn and liquid dew of youth’, for ‘liquid dewy morn’.19 And indeed it is in relation to Hamlet that this rhetorical ‘ornament’ has been most thoroughly investigated, since that is the play of Shakespeare’s which employs it most; and it has been considered a trope especially appropriate to a play so preoccupied with doublings and divisions of many kinds.20 (Sylvia Plath, undoubtedly aware of Shakespearian precedent, has a beautiful example, bent across a line-break, in ‘The Applicant’ – ‘at the end/And dissolve of sorrow’.) But, despite calling it ‘famous’, Hughes is in fact exceptional as a critic of 6KDNHVSHDUH¶V ODQJXDJHLQSD\LQJSDUWLFXODUDWWHQWLRQWRLW,Q KLV GH¿QLWLRQWKH ¿JXUHLVDORFXWLRQLQZKLFK6KDNHVSHDUHµEDODQFHVWZRQRXQVRUWZRDGMHFWLYHV on either side of an “and” and directs their combined and contrasted meanings to qualify a third word – always a noun’; since, strictly speaking, adjectives would not make for hendiadys, Hughes’s ‘pincer movement’ in fact comprehends rather PRUHWKDQWKHFODVVLFDO¿JXUH21 In practice, however, his examples are all of nouns, and they are also all of one particular kind: they are those in which the ‘doubling of nouns’ always includes one Latinate and one Anglo-Saxon example. Moving 17 Ibid., 178. For Hughes’s account of working with Brook in 1971, see ‘Orghast: Talking without Words’ in WP, 122–7. 18 Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990; 2nd edn, 2001), 111. 19 Neil Rhodes, Shakespeare and the Origins of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 64. 20 See especially George T. Wright’s classic essay ‘Hendiadys and Hamlet’, PMLA 96 (1981), 168–93; and Frank Kermode on the play in Shakespeare’s Language (London: Allen Lane: The Penguin Press, 2000). 21 A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1991 edn), 180.

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DZD\IURPWKH¿JXUHRIWKHSLQFHUDQGKLPVHOIQRZDWWHPSWLQJVRPHWKLQJFORVHU to a technical term, Hughes calls this Shakespeare’s ‘device’. The word has relevant connotations of stratagem or expediency as well as of mechanical or artistic contrivance, although at one point in the Goddess Hughes also plays an elaborate scherzo on the device as a coat of arms, and the word does in fact have etymological connections with heraldry. Hughes’s exploration of it is initiated by his citation of T.S. Eliot’s observation that linguistically Shakespeare LVDOZD\VGRLQJWKHZRUNRIDWOHDVWWZRSRHWV¿UVWVLPSOLI\LQJWKHQ¿QHVVLQJD ODQJXDJHDOWKRXJK+XJKHV¿QGVWKHLVVXHPRUHFRPSOLFDWHGWKDQ(OLRWLPSOLHV The high trust Hughes places in Eliot as a critic of Shakespearian language is underwritten by his appreciative centenary tribute, ‘The Poetic Self’, written in 1988 DQG¿UVWSXEOLVKHGLQZKLFKFHOHEUDWHV(OLRWLQDZD\VXUSULVLQJWRUHDGHUV who ally Hughes more with the Protestant-individualist line of English poetry associated primarily with D.H. Lawrence, to whom Eliot is usually considered antithetical.22 Indeed, that long essay, in a way perhaps equally surprising even to passionate admirers of Eliot, culminates in an association of its discovery of an elaborated single myth in Eliot with Shakespeare himself: Shakespeare is ‘the only one other poet in the canon of English poetry comparable to him in this respect’, and ‘the same “god”’ provides ‘the hidden psychic drama’ in each.23 For Hughes, therefore, Eliot is Shakespearian through and through, and Eliot is there at the very origin of Hughes’s thinking about Shakespearian language. Hughes writes extensively about the device, sometimes with a kind of entranced attentiveness to close verbal detail, and his readings are occasionally brilliantly intricate in a virtually Empsonian manner; which makes it odd that he nowhere makes reference to Empson. Suggesting that it advances self-complicatingly along with the development of the Tragic Equation itself, Hughes proposes that the device makes its major move forward with All’s Well That Ends Well in c. 1602–1603. In this play it is galvanized into an explosive hyperactivity which now, Hughes says, ‘transforms [Shakespeare’s] vocabulary, yoking disparate worlds of reference and opposed metaphysical realms violently together, within the new “language of the common bond”’.24 Here Hughes’s metaphor draws on Samuel Johnson’s well-known critique of metaphysical poetry, with its ideas ‘yoked by violence together’; which we may regard as a little act of revenge: Hughes admires what Johnson would censure, since his Shakespeare is so resolutely anti-Johnsonian. The ‘language of the common bond’, yoking together by violence what, Hughes 22 See, however, Sandra M. Gilbert’s penetrating collocation of the two in ‘D.H. Lawrence’s Place in Modern Poetry’, in Neil Corcoran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 74–86. 23 7KHHVVD\ZDV¿UVWSXEOLVKHGLQA Dancer to God: Tributes to T.S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1992) and is reprinted in Winter Pollen, 268–92. Quotations here are from the latter, 292. 24 A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1991 edn), 185.

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believes, Johnsonian neo-classicism would separate, simplify and classify, is a Shakespearian invention virtually designed to thwart decorum. The crucial moment in Hughes’s discussion of the whole issue is his lengthy consideration of 10 lines of the King’s astonishing elegiac speech on Bertram’s father, who had been his close friend, in All’s Well (1.2.53–63), which is one of those sudden, unpredictable explosions of linguistic and emotional excess in Shakespeare and a passage which also fascinated John Berryman, who calls it ‘this protracted marvel of ungovernable re-creation and mourning, richer I think than Dante’s of Brunetto’; which is rich indeed, and Berryman is not being hyperbolic here.25 The passage includes the line containing the device, ‘On the catastrophe and heel of pastime’, and Hughes’s long, densely ramifying reading discovers in its pincering of the Latin ‘catastrophe’ and the Anglo-Saxon ‘heel’ ‘a fractal of the whole play’.26+LVSDJHVRQWKHVHOLQHVDVKHXQUDYHOVDQGH[HPSOL¿HVWKH ‘magnesium, pulsing glow of a constant metaphorical enthralment, a continuous play of riddle, a constant simultaneity of at least two worlds’ in Shakespeare, are among the most distinguished and brilliant in his critical output, breathtakingly alive in their ingenious transitions and their devoted attentiveness to the ways in which Shakespeare’s language achieves the most intense kinds of self-referentiality; achieves, indeed, almost a form of self-consciousness, since Hughes says that in WKHVHOLQHVµ>W@KHSOD\LWVHOILVWKLQNLQJ«GH¿QLQJLWVHOIWXUQLQJLWVHOIWKLVZD\ and that, searching among all possible images for new images of itself, and trying them on.’27 Hughes wins a recognition of the radical nature of Shakespeare’s experimentalism, of his permanent campaign of linguistic eventfulness, which can be at once exhilarating and unnerving, from a close reading which at times gives WKHLPSUHVVLRQRIDQDOPRVWVFLHQWL¿FDOO\FRFUHDWLYHHQGHDYRXU In the 1991 essay Hughes instances, with regard to this capacity in Shakespeare, the Renaissance Neo-platonist Giordano Bruno’s mnemonic system, and in the Goddess this brief reference is pursued much further, until Hughes discovers in the lines from All’s Well D 6KDNHVSHDUH IRU WKH ¿UVW WLPH PDNLQJ DFFHVVLEOH WR himself ‘his whole inner world of feeling … in the form of the Mythic Equation, which … was simultaneously the double myth of the Reformation and of his own deepest subjectivity’ (G, 154). Hence it is in this play that the ‘language of the common bond’, that ‘makeshift’, becomes ‘the sacred language of his hierophany’. (G, 155). Invented for business purposes, the device has become religious ceremony and mystery; and Hughes’s massively synoptic and eclectic reading ultimately uncovers it, in the Goddess, as both a development of Brunonian Neoplatonic 25

In fact Hughes wrongly ascribes the lines to the following scene; his references to the Shakespearian text are not always completely accurate. For Berryman, see ‘Shakespeare’s Reality’, in Berryman’s Shakespeare: Essays, Letters and Other Writings by John Berryman, edited and introduced by John Haffenden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 343–51. 26 A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1991 edn), 192. 27 Ibid., 191.

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KHUPHWLFLVPDQGDUHÀHFWLRQRIWKHGLVFRYHULHVRIFRQWHPSRUDU\EUDLQWKHRU\6XFK heady doublings are the very substance of the Goddess. For Hughes, therefore, the doubling which is the Shakespearian device of hendiadys is the linguistic register – the most visible sign in print and the most audible sign in the theatre – of the double myth that sustains the entire oeuvre; and his reading of these lines from All’s Well is at the very heart of his vision of Shakespeare, and crucial to it. What he says about Shakespeare’s language is extremely vivid, alert, engaging, and acute of itself as close literary criticism, and a reader unimpressed or dismayed by the language of sacred hierophany can still gain a great deal from it: but for Hughes the language and the myth cannot be separated out. They coincide and are identical in a species of mutually productive intimacy; they are, as it were, watermarked into each other. So much is this the case, indeed, that, in a piece of virtually Joycean verbal fantastication, Hughes UHDGV 6KDNHVSHDUH¶V YHU\ QDPH DV D ¿JXUH RI KHQGLDG\V µ6KDNHVSHDUH¶ LV µWKH Shake and spear of will’ (and in the Goddess Hughes displays an admiration for Joyce’s, or at least Stephen Dedalus’s, theories of Shakespeare in the Circe episode of Ulysses). Double in the very inscription of his signature, therefore, Shakespeare SRVVHVVHVDQWLWKHWLFDOVHOYHVDQGLVKLPVHOIDGUDPDWLFFRQÀLFW In the absence of its mythical dimension, Hughes thinks, Shakespeare’s language would have become a version of Neruda’s or St John Perse’s; by ZKLFK KH PHDQV SUHVXPDEO\ DOWKRXJK KH GRHV QRW VSHOO LW RXW D IUHHÀRDWLQJ rhapsody, captivating or compelling, but unanchored in anything other than the poet’s subjectivity. Or, alternatively, Shakespearian language might have been like the Joyceanism of Finnegans Wake, which Hughes characterizes as the ‘whiteout’ of radio interference. Hughes is not exactly negative about Perse, Neruda, or late Joyce, but his aim in these discriminations is, as everywhere, to account for the exceptionalism of Shakespeare: and setting him among these avatars of international Modernism, Hughes is surely offering us Shakespeare as a more resourceful Modernist, one whose literary experimentalism enables the writing of WKHPRVWSURIRXQGVSLULWXDOFRQÀLFWRIKLVRZQWLPHLQWKHVDPHOLQJXLVWLFPRPHQW in which he writes the spiritual (and sexual) history of himself. The device is also a mode of translation. The pincer movement clutches both the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon so that Shakespeare’s double language speaks both ‘the full foreign text and the full translation – simultaneously’.28 I think we should see in this sense of the Shakespearian device as an en face doubling Hughes’s varied interests as a translator and an encourager of translations of modern Eastern European poetry from the 1960s on; and his view of the urgency with which Shakespeare manages his simultaneous translations is consistent with the urgencies of his own writing about the necessity for translations into English of work by poets such as the Serbian Vasko Popa and the Hungarian Janos Pilinszky,

28

Ibid., 183.

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and his support for the journal Modern European Poetry in Translation.29 This activity, too, is one way of combating what the 1971 essay damns, with a kind RIFXPXODWLYHDGMHFWLYDOYHQRPDVWKHGLUHFWLQKHULWDQFHRI5HVWRUDWLRQDUWL¿FH µWKH VKUXQNHQ DWURSKLHG VXSSUHVVLYHRIHYHU\WKLQJXQGHU EOXI¿QJ GHERQDLU frivolous system of vocal team-calls which we inherit as Queen’s English’.30 Or, what he called even more brutally, and hilariously, in an essay on Keith Douglas, ‘the terrible, suffocating, maternal octopus of English poetic tradition’ (WP, 213) – where ‘maternal’ certainly signals the Goddess in her malign, demonic form too, a paralyzing imp of language. Shakespeare as a constant translator, inventively joining new Latinisms and old Englishes, offering, as it were, a version of what Cymbeline envisages as ‘A Roman and a British ensign wav[ing]/Friendly together’ (5.5.480–81), is therefore implicitly the model for another kind of informed and politically alert Modernism too: international, open-minded, welcoming, and XQSUHMXGLFHG$QGLQWKLVRIFRXUVHLWFRQWUDVWVZLWKZKDW,KDYHGH¿QHGDVDQ element of xenophobia in Hughes’s opposing of a native to an iambic English tradition. For Hughes, it appears, the energies of the ‘native’ mode are actually much closer to those of the often subversive work of European poets living under oppressive political regimes. It may even help to take the full measure of Hughes’s RSSRVLWLRQDOOLQJXLVWLFWKHRULHVWRWKLQNRIKLPDWVRPHEDVLFOHYHO¿QGLQJWKH native English model ‘foreign’ to the received one. But Hughes also understands the device as a form of democratizing accommodation. In his acts of ‘translation’ Shakespeare is healing, linguistically, the wounds of English social and political history by forging a ‘language of the common bond’ which will unite, even if only in the invented or imagined space of the theatrical event, Court and commoner; and along with that opposition we may well choose to read such others as Catholic and Protestant, royalist and republican, Roman and Briton. The phrase ‘the common bond’ accretes a powerfully FRYHQDQWDOTXDVLOHJDOLVWLFRUHYHQTXDVLUHOLJLRXVVLJQL¿FDQFHDV+XJKHVUHSHDWV LW WKURXJKRXW KLV ZULWLQJV RQ 6KDNHVSHDUH ,Q WKLV ¿JXUDWLRQ WKHUHIRUH KH LV LQ fact, dissolving the aggressiveness towards orthodox English which he discovers in Shakespeare’s dialectal resourcefulness into something more open-heartedly generous and inviting; and this may be one of several reasons why he maintains, in the 1971 essay, that ‘Shakespeare’s language is not obsolete so much as futuristic: it enjoys a condition of total and yet immediate expressiveness that we hope sooner or later to get back to, or forward to.’31 This is itself a richly resourceful way of suggesting what the modern poet may derive from Shakespeare, of proposing how the past may become contemporary, or may be collapsed into the contemporary, as a means of creating that future which is the next, the new poem. Getting back to the future is the actual intertextual time travel of literary history. But it is also a way for 29 Hughes’s introductions to the poetry of both Popa and Pilinszky, originally published in 1969 and 1976, are reprinted in WP. 30 A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1971 edn), 198. 31 Ibid., 12.

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the modern poet Ted Hughes to be unafraid of Shakespeare by looking forward to encountering him in the future – the future of the poem, that is, which you make for yourself – rather than being dumbfounded by his formidable presence in the past, which must include his presence in the work of other poets who succeeded him in that past, those poets who are what you have inherited, who are what you know. However, Hughes’s reconciliatory, communal view of the device, although richly complex, is also problematical, since it is not self-evident that hendiadys OHQGV LWVHOI UHDGLO\ WR D KDUPRQL]LQJ RU XQL¿FDWRU\ UHDGLQJ ,QGHHG *HRUJH 7 :ULJKWVHHVLWRQWKHFRQWUDU\DVD¿JXUHRIXQFHUWDLQW\PRFNHU\DQGGLVMXQFWLRQ ‘nothing is compact, normal unions are disassembled.’32 Hughes’s instinctive refusal to countenance the undermining or deconstructive instability which others have IRXQGLQWKH¿JXUHLVV\PSWRPDWLFRIDVWUDLQLQKLVRZQGRXEOLQJRI6KDNHVSHDUH )RUWRUHDG6KDNHVSHDUHDVUHFRQFLOLDWRU\LQWKLVZD\LVLQWUXWKWREHLQFRQÀLFW with reading his dialectal energies as subversive, energies which Hughes earlier envisages in terms of ‘a nationalist army of guerillas’. The doubling of ‘guerilla’ and political healer is one doubling too far in Hughes’s conception of Shakespeare, a willed doubling that remains obdurately plural: there simply is no ‘one through two’ possible between these terms. Nor does Hughes’s view of Shakespeare’s drama as the means for the expression of the explosive energies of his own, and his time’s, antitheses and antagonisms very easily consort, in fact, with his sense, towards the conclusion of the 1991 essay, of Shakespeare’s giving expression, in an ego-dissolving oeuvre which constitutes ‘a single work’, to ‘a nation of selves’, arresting as that formulation is in its crossing of the political and the subjective. For the very conception of a nation proposes commonalty and community, whereas Hughes’s Shakespeare in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, from the smallest detail to the largest mythological motions of mind and art, is a seething cauldron of LQGLYLGXDOLVWLF WHQVLRQ VWUXJJOH DQG GHPDQG :H FDQ ¿QG LQ +XJKHV¶V GRXEOH Shakespeare, therefore, a correlative in the poet Ted Hughes too: the poet of instinctive energies and untamed territories, the inheritor of the unorthodoxies of dialectal and alliterative resource, the perpetrator, in his translations, of the ‘barbarian’ rather than the sophisticated Ovid doubled with the Poet Laureate, ZKRLVLQHYLWDEO\DOVRWKHSRHWµRIWKH&RXUW¶DQRI¿FHURIWKH5R\DO+RXVHKROG responsible to the idea of ‘a nation’, the producer of odes on royal occasions, and the servant of the person who, more than all others, might be expected to speak ‘Queen’s English’. Inscribed in Hughes’s very conception of Shakespeare, therefore, is an element of self-contradiction which is the inevitable product of attachments to varieties of Englishness which cannot be comprehended under an ideal of national unity. Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare is fractured at his very core.

32

Wright, ‘Hendiadys and Hamlet’, 175.

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3 Hughes’s writing about Shakespeare’s language itself constantly gives the impression of a certain uncontainability, an energetic surplus. Intensely voluble, Hughes is also sometimes strikingly eloquent. Yet – paradoxically, it may be – at the very heart and end of this effort there is not writing or speech at all, but VLOHQFHDQGQRWHORTXHQFHEXWHWKLFV$QGVSHFL¿FDOO\WKHUHDUHWKH6RQQHWVDQG the silence of Cordelia. When he discusses the work he did in 1971 with Peter Brook on the play Orghast, which used a partly invented form of language, Hughes strikingly tells us that he once abandoned work on a long poem about Gallipoli, saying that, ‘A strange quality of truth is that it is reluctant to use words. Like Cordelia, in King Lear. Perhaps the more sure of itself a truth is, the more doubtful it is of the adequacy of words’ (WP, 122). Nevertheless, in the 1991 essay and in the Goddess he returns to Cordelia and decides that drama ‘gave [Shakespeare] the language of this silence’; he tells us that he once actually considered calling the Goddess The Silence of Cordelia. Arguably, Hughes is underestimating Cordelia here since, of course, she is not literally silent: she does not say nothing, she says ‘Nothing’, twice, and carefully explains what she means; and, in the context in which she says it, this may be thought very eloquently loud indeed. Nevertheless, Hughes imagines Shakespeare listening to Lancelot Andrewes’s the ‘word within a word unable to hear a word’ – the Andrewes to whom T.S. Eliot was also ascetically but fruitfully attentive – and he relates Shakespeare’s linguistic sensitivity in this regard to Wittgenstein (who was, appropriately enough, although Hughes does not say so, one of the Shakespearian doubters or heretics, like Tolstoy). Hughes decides that Shakespeare’s consciousness of the ‘dissembling function of language’ is ‘proportionate to the awe that he felt for the ineffability of the truth’ (G, 277). Ineffability is another form of unsayability: and in the Sonnets, quite differently from the plays, the problem for Shakespeare is that he has only words to prove the truth of what he says, to prove his love. It is worth saying how unfazed Hughes is here by what he just assumes to be Shakespeare’s homosexuality, even taking W.H. Auden to task for what Hughes reads as his embarrassment at the ‘abject self-prostration’ of the Sonnets (G :KHQ+XJKHV¿QGVLQWKHP6KDNHVSHDUH¶V µQDNHG VHOIVXUUHQGHU¶ ± µERWK D SHUIHFW IHDUOHVVQHVV DQG DQ XQÀLQFKLQJ WRWDO vulnerability’ – he comes to one of his most impressive, and searing, generalizations DERXWSRHWLFODQJXDJHµ3RHWU\KDVDZDUUDQWIRUWKHRI¿FHRIWUXWKWHOOHURQO\LQ so far as its music becomes a form of action.’33 That is to say, since action cannot prove anything in a lyric poem, as it can in a play, the poem must persuade by the authority of cadence and tone; but even so, Shakespeare’s suspicion of his own virtuosity means that he includes forms of ‘dumbness’ as well as volubility in the 6RQQHWV WKHPVHOYHV 7KLV KDSSHQV +XJKHV WKLQNV ZKHQ ZH ¿QG KLP UHDFKLQJ for ‘the other language of drama’, for instance, and when he tells us (‘half-joke, 33

A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1991 edn), 200.

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whole serious’) what he cannot say (‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’).34 After the immense subtleizing of language that Hughes spends so long GH¿QLQJ DQG GLIIHUHQWLDWLQJ LQ 6KDNHVSHDUH WKHQ KH IHWFKHV XS XOWLPDWHO\ ZLWK DZHDWKLVVLPSOLFLW\WKHYLUWXHGH¿QHGE\(OLRWDWWKHRULJLQRI+XJKHV¶VSURMHFW RUPRUHVSHFL¿FDOO\KHIHWFKHVXSZLWKDZHQRWDW6KDNHVSHDUH¶VVLPSOLFLW\EXWDW the ‘simple truth miscalled simplicity’ of the Sonnets. When Hughes quotes this famous phrase he does not say that it comes from Sonnet 66. This is the ‘suicidal’ sonnet – ‘Tired with all these, for restful death I cry’ – which has sometimes been read as congruent with the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy in Hamlet and therefore testimony to the way that play embodies the actual emotions of its author. But Hughes is, nevertheless, clearly discovering a biographical Shakespeare here too; and, calling his suspicion of language ‘the insoluble, Wittgenstein-like dilemma’, he is also discovering modernity in him.35 After expending so much energy and ingenuity in making Shakespeare WKH HORTXHQW DYDWDU RI (OL]DEHWKDQ DQG -DFREHDQ SROLWLFDO DQG VH[XDO FRQÀLFW +XJKHV E\ GLVVROYLQJ KLP ¿QDOO\ LQWR D PRGHUQ :LWWJHQVWHLQLDQ UHIXVDO WR speak, by making him newly naked in the reduced means of the contemporary moment, is also making him manageable to the modern poet. Freighted with so much formative English history and psychology, Shakespeare is also ultimately weightless and unaccommodated. While this may well be read as a version of the UKHWRULFDOUXVHE\ZKLFKGLVFRXUVHLVGLVFODLPHGE\GLVFRXUVH+XJKHVLQÀHFWVLW in an urgently modern manner. It is in the abjection of a very twentieth-century tone of voice, the tone of Eastern European witness poetry and a tone which would DFFRPPRGDWH 6DPXHO %HFNHWW WRR WKDW KH SUHVXPHV WR PDNH D ¿QDO VWDWHPHQW about Shakespeare, language, and truth: ‘His truth to his own nature is like a helplessness to be otherwise.’36 The hero of linguistic resourcefulness is observed here in a form of destitution. Inventing a Cordelia, he is inventing a self with nothing to say, a self that knows that saying anything at all would be saying too much and speaking an untruth. Pledging allegiance to the authority of this silence after so much linguistic energy and fury of his own, after such plenitude of saying, Hughes too – movingly, to my mind – allies himself, and the effort of his work, with an unsayability quite at variance with the kind of which he believed himself to stand accused by Roy Fuller.

34 35 36

Ibid., 201. Ibid. Ibid., 202.

Chapter 10

Shakespeare-land Graham Holderness

1 The title Shakespeare-land derives from a pictorial guide-book to Stratford-upon Avon, published around 1912, in a series called Beautiful England. The familiar iconic images of Stratford – ‘the Birthplace’, Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, Holy Trinity Church – are presented here not as photographic illustrations, but in the form of pictorial watercolours by E.W. Haslehurst. Bright colours and lush textures invoke traditions of English landscape painting, Constable and Turner, while the ¿JXUHVLQWKHSODWHVZHDUWKHUXVWLFFRVWXPHVRIDQHDUOLHUDJH$YLHZRI6WUDWIRUG High Street shows a motor-car and a rural wagon, both stationary, the street’s RQO\WUDI¿FEHLQJDÀRFNRIVKHHSGULYHQE\DEHVPRFNHGVKHSKHUG3KRWRJUDSKV of the same period show people in contemporary urban dress, cars, horse-drawn carriages; but shepherd and sheep are noticeably absent.1 At a time, just before the Great War, when plenty of traditional rural culture survived in such English market-towns, Shakespeare-land nonetheless took pains to idealize its representation of Stratford, to push it further back into the past, to efface from its tranquil surface the encroachments of modernity.2 Thus the book disengages from the real Edwardian Stratford to represent its essence as an untroubled English pastoral. Never did Shakespeare’s Birthplace appear so VHUHQHWKH$YRQVRWUDQTXLO$QQH+DWKDZD\¶V&RWWDJHVRÀRULEXQGDQWDVLQWKHVH conventional English landscapes. This will go onward the same, though dynasties pass. Stratford, writes author Walter Jerrold, is ‘the heart of England’. Though just a picturesque small town, the book suggests, Stratford was the stage set for the performance of a universal greatness.

1 Walter Jerrold, Shakespeare-land (London and Glasgow: Blackie and Son, n.d. [1912]). 2 Compare my earlier analysis of Stratford in ‘Bardolotry: Or the Cultural Materialist’s Guide to Stratford-upon-Avon’ in Graham Holderness (ed.), The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), especially 5–7. Reprinted in Graham Holderness, Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth+DW¿HOG8QLYHUVLW\ of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), 130–31. See also Terry Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays in a Critical Process (London: Routledge, 1986), 1–26.

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This England, That Shakespeare / Holderness Citizens of the place may be able to think of it as a kind of town entity, but for others it is a background to one of the world’s greatest men, to the supreme poet and dramatist whose genius commands the homage of the whole civilized world. (6)

6KDNHVSHDUH¶VµJHQLXV¶LVERWKXQ¿[HGDQGURRWHGLQSODFHERWKORFDODQGXQLYHUVDO English, of the heart of England, yet commensurate with ‘the whole civilized world’. For an age, and for all time. Of a place, yet placeless and unplaceable. Just as Rupert Brooke’s ‘Soldier’ becomes in death a ‘pulse in the eternal mind’, which yet retains its national identity, ‘Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given’, so in Shakespeare Englishness survives intact to eternity.3 The combination of locality and universality celebrated in Shakespeare-land lies at the root of the imperial and patriotic Shakespeare studied in this chapter, as it lies at the root of English nationalism. Both of these cultural formations, English 6KDNHVSHDUH DQG 6KDNHVSHDUH¶V (QJODQG WKRXJK E\ GH¿QLWLRQ DYDLODEOH IRU jingoistic and xenophobic applications, ground themselves in myths and fantasies also capable of reproducing the nation as an effective ‘imagined community’.4 7KLV FDQ RQO\ EH DFKLHYHG E\ DUWL¿FH DQG LPLWDWLRQ UHSURGXFWLRQ DQG UHSOLFD5 But this is not because the quest for national identity is hopelessly engaged in the search for a world irrevocably lost; but because that world never existed in the ¿UVWSODFHH[FHSWDVLPLWDWLRQDQGDUWL¿FHUHSOLFDDQGUHSURGXFWLRQ,WLVSUHFLVHO\ because, although there is a place, England, there never has been an English nation that our longing for it is so strong and so deep.6 In Anthony Easthope’s words, µ(QJOLVKQHVVLVDSRLQWRILGHQWL¿FDWLRQGHVLUHGSUHFLVHO\EHFDXVHLWLVVWUXFWXUHG by absence and lack’.7 But equally, because it has never existed except as myth and fantasy, there is no obstacle, other than the mind-forged manacles of ideology, to its revival as the positive ideal of a national community. 3 Rupert Brooke, ‘The Soldier’, ‘1914’ and Other Poems (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1915). 4 ‘Imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’. Benedict Anderson, ,PDJLQHG&RPPXQLWLHV5HÀHFWLRQVRQWKH Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983, revised 1991), 6. 5 See Cultural Shakespeare, 82–103. 6 $QWKRQ\6PLWKGH¿QHVWKHTXDOLI\LQJFRQGLWLRQVRIQDWLRQKRRGDVµa named human population sharing a historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members’. Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991), 14. For England most of these features are shared with the other nations of the United Kingdom. Unlike Scotland and Wales, England does not have its own parliament or national anthem. Even England’s portion of the Union Jack is shared with Wales. See Nick Groom, The Union Jack: The Story of the British Flag (London: Grove Atlantic, 2005). 7 Anthony Easthope, ‘Writing and English National Identity’, in Tracey Hill and William Hughes (eds), Contemporary Writing and National Identity (Bath: Sulis Press, 1995), 149. As Roger Scruton observes, ‘there has never been a British nation’ either. England: An Elegy (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000), 3.

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2 In the same year as Shakespeare-land was published, 1912, ‘Shakespeare’s England’ was thoroughly recreated as a replica in a major exhibition, with that title, at London’s (DUO¶V&RXUW&HQWUHGDURXQGUHSURGXFWLRQVRIWKH¿UVW*OREH7KHDWUHDQG'UDNH¶V ship Revenge, the exhibition aimed for contextual authenticity by reproducing a whole Tudor village (consisting of houses and shops that were rented to retailers). Described LQRI¿FLDOSXEOLFLW\DVµQRWDQH[KLELWLRQLQWKHRUGLQDU\VHQVHRIWKHZRUG«EXW … an accurate representation of the life of England three hundred years ago’,8 this municipal reconstruction was designed by prominent architect Edwin Lutyens. The designs were sourced from ‘old typical buildings’9RIWKHSHULRGLQFOXGLQJHGL¿FHV from Sussex, Northamptonshire, Coventry, Berkshire, and Herefordshire as well as Warwickshire. ‘Londoners are now able to walk straight into the sixteenth century and visualise the environment and atmosphere of Shakespeare’s day’.10 Thus the exhibition offered the visitor a kind of portal with direct access to Tudor England, an example of what Patrick Wright called ‘the publicly instituted transformation between prosaic reality and the imagination of a deep past’.11 As Marion O’Connor observes, ‘these space-erasing and time-cancelling conjunctions made nonsense, or but very restricted sense, of the claim that “Shakespeare’s England” was “an accurate representation of the life of England 300 years ago”’.12 The need to erase space and cancel time in the interests of ‘visitor throughput’ is precisely the motivation behind the construction in Julian Barnes’s novel England, England of a concentrated collation of English tourist attractions on the Isle of Wight.13 Here Stratford adjoins Stonehenge, Haworth,

8 Quoted by Marion F. O’Connor, ‘Theatre of the Empire: “Shakespeare’s England” at Earls Court, 1912’ in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (eds), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 79. The book and O’Connor’s essay are further discussed in Cultural Shakespeare, 25–6. See also Marion O’Connor, ‘“Useful in the Year 1999”: William Poel and Shakespeare’s “Build of Stage”’, Shakespeare Survey, 52 (1999): 17–33; and Marion O’Connor, ‘Reconstructive Shakespeare: Reproducing Elizabethan and Jacobean Stages’, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 76–97. 9 Quoted O’Connor, ‘Theatre of the Empire’, 79–80. 10 Ibid., 79. 11 Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985), 76; and see Cultural Shakespeare, 89–90. 12 O’Connor, ‘Theatre of the Empire’, 80. Compare Roland Barthes, writing of the Blue Guides: ‘To select only monuments suppresses at one stroke the reality of the land and that of its people, it accounts for nothing of the present, that is, nothing historical, and as a consequence, the monuments themselves become undecipherable, therefore senseless’. Mythologies (1957), trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1973), 76. 13 ‘What we want’, says the entrepreneur who recreates ‘England’, ‘is magic … We want our visitors to feel that they have passed through a mirror, that they have left their own worlds and entered a new one, different yet strangely familiar, where things are

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Sherwood Forest, Buckingham Palace, and everything else one would wish to see of England in a day (but with the space erased, and the time cancelled). 2¶&RQQRUFDOOHGKHU¿QHGLVFXVVLRQRIWKHµ6KDNHVSHDUH¶V(QJODQG¶H[KLELWLRQ ‘Theatre of the Empire’, though with a Tudor village, and a replica Globe staging pageants that linked Shakespeare with Edwardian music-hall, the exhibition seems more redolent of a (very) Little England than of a global empire. The extrovert, imperial emphasis was focused on the reproduction of Drake’s Revenge, which both recalled the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and heralded the expansion of British sea power in the years leading up to 1914. On 20 July 1912 First Sea Lord Winston Churchill gave a speech on board the replica Revenge, celebrating it as a ‘historic vessel’ exemplifying ‘the glories of the British Navy’.14 Here the cultural memory of British naval greatness was channelled into future military strategy. ‘The exhibition FRXSOHG WKH SRHW ZLWK WKH HPSLUHEXLOGHU DQG FRQÀDWHG (OL]DEHWKDQ H[SORUDWLRQ with Victorian imperialism’.15 Britannia rules the waves; England expects. I have dwelt on these examples from 1912 – Shakespeare-land in ‘Beautiful England’, ‘Shakespeare’s England’ in the Earl’s Court Road – because they seem to represent a critical moment of temporary stability before the collapse of this ideology in the early years of the Great War. In these images and representations there is no perception of contradiction between Little England and the British Empire, rural tranquillity and global domination, English pastoral and colonial power. Stratford, the heart of England, sits picturesquely at the centre of Empire, apparently unaffected by it. Here England seems poised on the brink of transformation, frozen in a fantasy of timeless endurance. ‘Never such innocence’, as Philip Larkin wrote of the same period, ‘Never before or since,/As changed itself to past/Without a word’.16 This sudden transformation occurred in politics, ideology, and culture as a direct consequence of the 1914–1918 War, in itself ‘a force of radical change in society’,17 but indirectly as a consequence of the crisis of imperialism. I will now examine symptoms of ‘national’ and ‘imperial’ Shakespeare from 1916, focusing on two books produced to celebrate the Tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death (1616), A Homage to Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s England. In these texts we can see the bourgeois-liberal imperial Shakespeare surviving alongside a new kind of Shakespeare whose advent heralded the demise of empire. not done as in other parts of the inhabited planet, but as if in a rare dream’. Julian Barnes, England, England (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), 120. 14 Quoted O’Connor, ‘Theatre of the Empire’, 83. 15 Coppelia Kahn, ‘Remembering Shakespeare Imperially: The 1916 Tercentenary’, Shakespeare Quarterly 52/4 (Winter, 2001): 464. 16 Philip Larkin, ‘MCMXIV’, Collected Poems, ed. Antony Thwaite (London: Marvell Press/Faber and Faber, 1988), 127. 17 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (New York: Athenaeum, 1991), xi. I discussed this ideological transformation, marked by the fall of the Asquith government and its replacement by a new coalition under Lloyd George in December 1916, as ‘the collapse of bourgeois liberalism’, in D.H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1982), 190–99.

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3 In 1912 Shakespeare-land called for the offering of ‘homage’ to the greatness of one whose universal genius was nonetheless rooted in a particular spot of ‘Beautiful England’. In 1916, for the Tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, a group of leading British scholars produced A Book of Homage to ShakespeareDVDµ¿WWLQJPHPRULDO to symbolize the intellectual fraternity of mankind in the universal homage accorded to the genius of the greatest Englishman’.187KHERRNH[HPSOL¿HVWKHJOREDOUHDFK of that ‘intellectual fraternity’, containing 166 tributes by scholars and writers from all over the world, and in other languages than English, including Chinese, Japanese, Armenian, Hebrew, Sanskrit, and, Arabic. The volume expands outwards from England to Britain and Europe, thence to the Empire and then the world. Its constituency was to some extent restricted, by the circumstances of the war, to Britain and its ‘Allied and neutral states’. There was no contribution from Germany (though the book contains a chapter on German Shakespeare by C.H. Herford).19 At the same time the dominant emphasis, shared by British, colonial, excolonial and even some foreign contributors, is on Shakespeare’s Englishness. ‘No man was more thoroughly English than Shakespeare’,20 ‘the true type of Englishman’.21 To Frank Benson Shakespeare was, like Stratford, ‘the heart of England’. He remains both the ‘representative genius of our race’, and ‘master-poet of the world’.22 According to American G.C. Moore Smith, although Shakespeare was ‘Shakespeare of England’, England does not own him. ‘Not only England’s

18 Israel Gollancz (ed.), A Book of Homage to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916), vii. 19 C.H. Herford, ‘The German Contribution to Shakespeare Criticism’, in Homage, 231–5. Doubtless one of the reasons why the war between the competing empires of Britain and Germany produced such a crisis in English national identity was that English QDWLRQDOLVP KDG EHHQ IRU FHQWXULHV GH¿QHG DV RI *HUPDQLF RULJLQV 6HH %DO] (QJOHU ‘Englishness and English Studies’, in Balz Engler and Renate Haas (eds), European English Studies: Contributions Towards the History of a Discipline (Leicester: The English Association for ESSE, 2000), 335–48; and Werner Habicht, ‘Shakespeare Celebrations in Times of War’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 52/4 (Winter 2001): 441–55. In the early seventeenth century Richard Verstegan, in Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605), argued that the Germanic warrior tribes admired by Tacitus were common ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans. In 1837 Thomas Carlyle was claiming that ‘the glories of English or Anglo-Saxon culture were basically Teutonic’ (quoted in Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle: A Biography [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983], 242–3). The war made this ethnic LGHQWL¿FDWLRQ LQFUHDVLQJO\ LPSODXVLEOH DQG µ$QJOR6D[RQ¶ FDPH WR UHIHU WR WKH FRPPRQ culture of Great Britain and the United States rather than to Britain’s Germanic roots. The family name of the British monarchy was of course changed from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor in 1917. 20 Lionel Cust, ‘Shakespeare’, in Homage, 101 21 5HJLQDOG%ORP¿HOGµ:LOOLDP6KDNHVSHDUH¶LQHomage, 461. 22 Frank Benson, ‘A Stratfordian Homage’, in Homage, 39.

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Art thou’.23 Shakespeare represents the ‘rich heritage of our English ancestry’, but also ‘belongs to the world’.24 Alongside the rhetoric of Englishness, imperial discourse is also much in evidence. But it is precisely in the unstable language of imperial Shakespeare that we can glimpse something of the historical processes at work to undo both imperial Shakespeare and the empire itself. In ‘The Dream Imperial’, New Zealander W.P. Reeves places Shakespeare in a legacy of patriotic imperialism, the poet of ‘a little island of great men’ whose ‘warring’ and ‘trading’ ‘Moved surely outward to imperial space’.25 The movement is typical of this discourse: the new energy and power of the English nation-state recovered by Henry VIII accelerated the process of imperial expansion, so the story of Englishness became the narrative of empire.26 But the poem’s colonial position reverses this perspective, and looks back towards England as a remote and distant homeland. ‘England’ is not only distant both in time and space, but a nation extrapolated into fantasy: a ‘grey ancestral isle beheld in dreams’ (312). England functions here as what Michael Neill called a ‘beacon of ORFDWLRQ¶GH¿QLQJIRUWKHGLDVSRULFpPLJUpZKDWDQGZKHUHKRPHLV27 But though the colonial poet claims attachment to the nation on the basis of common language, breeding, and the spirit of adventure that put the ‘sundering wave’ (312) between home and destination, the reality of England is invested entirely in a dream-world of poetry and imagination. ‘This is the England that we have and hold’ (313), the poem DI¿UPV%XWLWLVDVSHFWUDO(QJODQGSRVVHVVHGLQGUHDPVDQLQVXEVWDQWLDOSDJHDQW that can just as easily, fading, ‘leave not a rack behind’. By the time we come across Owen Wister,28 author of that foundational text of the modern myth of the American West, The Virginian, claiming ‘Nothing that history records can banish England from us, or us, I hope, from England’, it seems legitimate to question what DWWHQXDWHGDI¿OLDWLRQLVLQWHQGHGE\WKHWHUP  As Coppelia Kahn puts it in her comprehensive study of A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, here ‘a change of perspective occurs wherein colonials re-envision Shakespeare, dismantling his links to England and to empire’ (462). Using terms derived from Joseph Roach,29 Kahn shows that Homage contains two contradictory 23

G.C. Moore Smith, ‘1916’, in Homage, 237. John Grier Hibben, ‘Shakespeare’, in Homage, 350. 25 W.P. Reeves, ‘The Dream Imperial’, in Homage, 312. 26 See Liah Greenfeld, Nationalisms: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 27–88. 27 Michael Neill, ‘Postcolonial Shakespeare? Writing Away from the Centre’, in Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (eds), Post-colonial Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 1998), 172. 28 Wister was actually the grandson of Fanny Kemble, and very active in the Shakespeare Association of America. His contribution to Homage is partly a memorial tribute to H.H. Furness. The idea of Englishness as an indestructible itinerant loyalty receives satirical treatment in James Hawes’s Speak for England (London: Vintage, 2006) where a sturdy 1950s English patriotism is found surviving intact in the jungles of Papua, New Guinea. 29 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 3. 24

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types of cultural identity, the ‘autochthonous’ and the ‘diasporic’. Its aspiration, partly achieved, was to unify a global community of empire and commonwealth under the sign of an ‘English’ Shakespeare. But by incorporating colonial subjects, the volume also facilitated the process of empire ‘writing back’. Some of those who were on the margins rather than at the centre of this global community ‘make Shakespeare their own, or make their own Shakespeare, employing him in a rearguard action on behalf of their own cultures in contradistinction to the 6KDNHVSHDUH ZKR VLJQL¿HV (QJODQG HPSLUH DQG $QJOR6D[RQ VXSHULRULW\ IRU the British academy’ (478). I would argue, however, that by 1916 this diasporic notion of empire and Englishness, this sense that home is elsewhere, has already penetrated into the dominant discourses of Shakespeare-land. The idea of the unity of ‘England’ as a small island nation, and the British Empire as a global community and commonwealth, depends on an ideological strategy of elision whereby the manifest contradictions of that conjuncture, what Kahn calls the ‘paradox of locality and universality’,30 are suppressed. The ideological container that GLGHIIHFWLYHO\KROGWKHHPSLUHWRJHWKHUZDVRIFRXUVHQRWµ(QJODQG¶EXWµWKH¿UVW “British” empire’,31 in itself the product of territorial expansion and subjugation of national resistance from Scotland and Wales.32%\LPDJLQDWLYHDUWLVWVUHÀHFWLQJ RQ6KDNHVSHDUHDQG(QJODQGWHQGHGWRRFFXS\WKHZLGHQLQJ¿VVXUHVEHWZHHQLQVXODU Englishness and global empire. We can see this clearly in the prefatory poem contributed by Thomas Hardy to A Book of Homage to Shakespeare.33 Hardy emphasizes the disparities and discrepancies between Shakespeare’s ‘commonplace’ small-town origins and the magnitude of his artistic achievement, the ‘high design’ of his ‘penned dreams’. The coincidence of Englishness and universality presents itself not as the H[WURYHUVLRQRIDPDQLIHVWGHVWLQ\EXWUDWKHUDVDSHFXOLDUDQGEDIÀLQJDQRPDO\,Q addition, the net effect of this disjunction between origin and achievement is that Shakespearian meaning cannot be contained, its artistic power operates unpredictably, ‘not fore-desired’, running in ‘tracks unchosen and unchecked’. Since Shakespeare of Stratford remained inscrutable, unknown, barely even recognized, his presence in that ‘homely domicile’ is inexplicable: Into man’s poesy, we weet not whence, Flew thy strange mind, Lodged there a radiant guest, and sped for ever thence. 30

Kahn, ‘Remembering Shakespeare Imperially’, 461. Willy Maley, ‘“This sceptred isle”: Shakespeare and the British problem’, in John Joughin (ed.), Shakespeare and National Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 95. 32 ‘The idea of Britain was invented to give credibility to the union’. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 3. The instability of the national concept is indicated by George Orwell’s observation that it EHDUVDWOHDVW¿YHGLIIHUHQWQDPHV(QJODQG%ULWDLQ*UHDW%ULWDLQWKH%ULWLVK,VOHVDQGWKH United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. 33 Thomas Hardy, ‘Shakespeare After 300 Years’, in Homage, 1–2. 31

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‘Shakespeare’s genius was an English genius’, asserts James (Viscount) Bryce in a prominent contribution to Homage.34 Yet at the same time, Shakespeare was peculiarly ‘detached from any age or country’ (22). Like Hardy, Bryce depicts Shakespeare as almost reclusive: the individuality of his work ‘seems somehow distinct from the man, as others saw him moving about in the daily life of London or :DUZLFNVKLUH¶+HUHDJDLQWKHUHLVQRQHDWLGHQWL¿FDWLRQEHWZHHQQDWLRQDORULJLQV character and identity; and the Shakespearian genius is ‘impartial’ and ‘detached’, rather than exclusively ‘English’. Bryce was President of the British Academy from 1913–1917, and as Coppelia Kahn observes (456) chair of the committee that produced the infamous Bryce Report (1915) on German atrocities in Belgium which was designed to bring the United States into the war.35 But Bryce was also a prominent Liberal politician, who publicly condemned British internment and GHVWUXFWLRQ RI IDUPV LQ 6RXWK$IULFD DQG ZDV WKH ¿UVW WR VSHDN RXW DJDLQVW WKH 1915 Turkish genocide in Armenia which has recently re-acquired contemporary VLJQL¿FDQFH36 Bryce was not English, but an Ulsterman, who became MP for the predominantly working-class London borough of Tower Hamlets, and later a Scottish peer. 4 Shakespeare’s England 37 was published in a two-volume set by the Clarendon Press in 1916. Initially planned by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1905, it was taken on by Sidney Lee, who assembled most of its contents, but then in 1914 abandoned the project. Other editors were distracted by war-work, and the book was not published XQWLO  HGLWHG ¿QDOO\ E\ &7 2QLRQV FRHGLWRU RI WKH 2[IRUG (QJOLVK Dictionary. It appeared, happily, ‘in the tercentenary year of Shakespeare’s death’, but unhappily ‘in the midst of the Great War’ (II, vii). Shakespeare’s England set out to document and illustrate what we now call the material history of Elizabethan times, with substantial chapters on history (‘The Age of Elizabeth’, ‘Religion’, ‘The Court’), culture (‘Education’, ‘Scholarship’, ‘Folklore’), the professions (‘Law’, ‘Medicine’), intellectual history (‘The Sciences’), etc. The second volume focuses on the arts, from painting to the theatre, ‘Sports and Pastimes’ (‘Hunting, ‘Falconry’, etc.), popular culture, and language. Authors include leading scholars such as E.K. Chambers, but also ‘specialist’ authors with DPDWHXUH[SHUWLVHLQVSHFL¿FWRSLFVVXFKDVKXQWLQJ7KHERRNZDVPXFKLQGHPDQG

34

Viscount Bryce, ‘Some Stray Thoughts’, in Homage, 22. Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages (1915). Available at: http:// www.gwpda.org/wwi-www/BryceReport/bryce_r.html. Accessed 3 July 2008. 36 While other states involved in the First World War have made some acknowledgements, the Turkish government refuses to accept the evidence of massacres and genocide. 37 C.T. Onions, Walter Raleigh, and Sidney Lee (eds), Shakespeare’s England: An Account of the Life and Manners of His Age (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 1916). 35

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and was reprinted in 1917, 1926, 1932, and 1950. Most of the many copies I have handled had seen stalwart service in public libraries up and down the country. Shakespeare’s England was clearly intended as ‘background’ study. The attempt is said to have been worth making ‘even if Shakespeare had never lived’; but in practice it was ‘made in the belief that an understanding of the world he lived in is a step to the understanding of Shakespeare’ (I, ‘Preface’, v). The context GHULYHVLWVVLJQL¿FDQFHIURPWKHtext of Shakespeare’s works. Throughout the work history is used to illuminate Shakespeare’s work, and Shakespeare’s work is used to illustrate history. 6KDNHVSHDUH LV DI¿UPHG WKURXJKRXW DV DQ (GZDUGLDQ JHQWOHPDQ µJHQWOH Shakespeare’ (I, 46). In terms of national politics he was clearly a patriot, ‘English to the core’ (I, 45). In terms of religion he was a liberal, ‘not a Puritan, any more than he was a Papist’ (I, 58), who ‘stood outside all parties of the day’. His faith was characterized by ‘tolerance’, ‘deep humanity’, ‘universality’ (I, 76). Throughout the book evidence can be found endorsing the ideology of Shakespearian Englishness as seamlessly local, universal, and imperial. Writing on ‘Commerce and Coinage’, George Unwin explicates the connections: ,WZDVDPHGLDHYDOWUDGLWLRQRIWUDGHDQGLQGXVWU\WKDW¿UVWLPSUHVVHGLWVHOIRQ the boyish imagination of Shakespeare in the quiet life of market towns like Stratford and Warwick, or in the wider activities of a manufacturing centre like Coventry. Later on as an adventurous youth he may have gazed upon the glowing forges of Birmingham, or peeped down the colliery shafts of Bedworth, or stolen an admiring glimpse at the new Flemish looms at Barcheston, where an enterprising fellow-countryman was designing on tapestry the map of his native county. Lastly, in his mature years he came into prolonged and intimate contact with the life of the capital, which was not only the centre of national industry and commerce, but was already before Shakespeare’s death showing promise of that cosmopolitan pre-eminence which it has since attained. (I, 311)

Here the young Shakespeare peeps out from the rural idyll of Stratford to view the germs of the Industrial Revolution; while in later years he reaches London, focal point of England’s ‘cosmopolitan pre-eminence’ or imperial greatness. Henry B. Wheatley, writing on ‘London and the Life of the Town’, depicts Shakespeare walking from Stratford to London in 1586, and at the end of his journey discovering the capital, ‘London in her greatness’ (II, 154). Throughout the book the British Empire is viewed with rapt enthusiasm, and Shakespeare is presented as the prophet of ‘world-wide greatness’ (I, 196). W.J. Courthorpe celebrates A free-born Empire’s patriot consciousness, Tuned to the music of our Shakespeare’s tongue.38

38

146–7.

W.J. Courthorpe, ‘The Tercentenary of Shakespeare’s Death – 1916’, in Homage,

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For Laurence Binyon, Shakespeare was at the centre of the national imperial enterprise, ‘Heart-vein/Of England’s old adventure’.39 Nowhere is this view SUHVHQWHGPRUHXQFULWLFDOO\WKDQLQWKHRSHQLQJHVVD\E\6LU:DOWHU5DOHLJK¿UVW Professor of English Literature at Oxford: We have spread ourselves over the surface of the habitable globe, and have established our methods of government in new countries. But the poets are still DKHDGRIXVSRLQWLQJWKHZD\,WZDVWKH\DQGQRRWKHUVZKR¿UVWFRQFHLYHGWKH greatness of England’s destinies, and delivered the doctrine that was to inspire her. They were adventurers, to a man, and they enjoyed a freedom unknown to their successors. The language was as free to them as the seas of the world, and, like the seas, it was uncharted, with no lighthouses, and few pilots.40

Here the expansion of literature and intellectual culture in the Renaissance heralds the outward expansion of the new nation towards the global domination of empire. By opening up language and consciousness, imagining into the unknown, poets made it possible for the English to dream of worlds elsewhere, waiting to be conquered and exploited. In this discourse Shakespeare and Drake were ‘adventurers’ in the same dimension, just as the Globe and the Revenge were contingent in the 1912 ‘Shakespeare’s England’ exhibition at Earl’s Court. Above them all, Shakespeare speaks for the English race. His works are not eccentricities of a solitary genius; they are the creed of England. (44)

Raleigh thus challenges directly the ‘solitary genius’ depiction of Shakespeare evident in Hardy’s and Bryce’s contributions to Homage. English Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s England are one: Shakespeare speaks for ‘the race’. Foreigners may try to understand him, but that’s their problem. In these things, as in how many others, Shakespeare is English to the core … He has many disciples and admirers in foreign lands, some of whom partly understand him … His appeal to his countrymen is deeper than this, and closer. He speaks to them in a language rich in associations with their daily life and their daily habits of thought. His characters – the soldiers, the ladies, the fools, the rogues – are English characters, studied from the life. His poetry, which RYHUÀRZVDQGVRPHWLPHVFRQIXVHVKLVGUDPDLVWKHKLJKHVWUHDFKRIWKHRQO\ art in which England has attained to supreme excellence. (45)

‘That Shakespeare is English’, observes Terry Hawkes in his well-known discussion of Sir Walter Raleigh’s work, ‘is held to be readily demonstrable’:

39 Laurence Binyon, ‘England’s Poet’, in Homage, 21. Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’ (‘Age shall not weary them …’) remains a liturgical refrain in English commemorations of Armistice Day. 40 Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘The Age of Elizabeth’, in Shakespeare’s England, vol. I, 44.

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«EXWVLJQL¿FDQWO\RQO\LQWHUPVRIDUHGXFHGJHRJUDSKLFDODQGUDFLDOPRGHO which of course sidesteps the thorny, and over the years thornier, question of in what precisely the genuine ‘Englishness’ of an imperial power (at this time ruling roughly a quarter of the world’s population) consists.41

Raleigh should have known better, Hawkes argues, having some experience of empire, but nonetheless takes the ‘simpler, narrower and more consoling view’ of Shakespeare’s pure English ancestry, avoiding the ‘cultural complications’ of imperial crisis. Like Bryce, Raleigh was a hybrid Briton, Anglo-Hibernian, but as Hawkes demonstrates, he successfully ‘made’ himself English, and used that acquired cultural identity to hurl absurdly crude racial abuse at the Germans.42 But elsewhere in Shakespeare’s England, as in A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, other writers do show awareness of those ‘cultural complications’, and the apparent solidity and robustness of this Edwardian Shakespeare proves on closer inspection curiously unstable. J.D. Rogers, writing of ‘Voyages and Explorations’, invokes ‘Shakespeare’s prophecy of new nations, world-wide greatness and vast spreading branches’, only to admit that these ‘may have been random metaphors, and nothing more’ (I, 196). The link between Renaissance poetic vision and the Age of Empire seems tenuous. Shakespeare’s England was prefaced with a poem by Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, ‘Ode on the Tercentenary Commemoration of Shakespeare’, which manages to combine an elegiac lament for the past, a jingoistic view of the SUHVHQWDQGDXWRSLDQORQJLQJIRUDQXQGH¿QHGIXWXUH,WEHJLQVZLWKDQLQYRFDWLRQ of ‘Dove-wing’d Peace’, but immediately laments her absence: +RZVXGGHQO\DUWWKRXÀHG Leaving our cities astir with war … (xxi)

Like Raleigh, Bridges celebrates the ‘world-conquering speech’ of Empire, and LGHQWL¿HV6KDNHVSHDUHDV(PSLUH¶VSRHW In thy book Great Britain’s rule readeth her right. (xxii)

But this noisy jingoism – ‘the trumpet blareth’ – is undermined by a sadder music: I hear his voice in the music of lamentation In echoing chant and cadenced litany … (xxiii)

The martial music of English patriotism is subdued by echoes of the prophet Jeremiah, lamenting the fall of Jerusalem in the sixth century BC. The trumpetblast of patriotism ‘calleth the true to be stern’ (xxi); but Bridges’s poem is also hailed by the ‘soft reposeful music’ of Peace. It is this lyric melody, not the clarioncall of war, that facilitates access to Shakespeare, ‘England’s gentlest son’ (xxi). Here ‘gentle’ is closer to Bridges’s frail aestheticism than to Shakespeare’s own 41 42

That Shakespeherian Rag, 58. Ibid., 60–66.

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pragmatic persistence in gaining the rank of ‘gentleman’ (xxiv). In this time of FRQÀLFWµWKHORWRIWKHJHQWOHKHDUWLVKDUG¶DQGWKURXJKRXWWKHSRHPRQH can feel an aesthete’s resistance to the dominant contemporary values of military toughness and aggression. Shakespeare is not here invoked as a weapon of militant patriotism, but rather celebrated as a fragile dream of lost but recoverable virtue. Human destiny is visionary: ‘Man knoweth but as in a dream of his own desire’ (xxiv), and engagement with the harsh present is imagined as an unwelcome expulsion from that dream: ‘The lot of the gentle heart is hard’ (xxiv). Even when the young men of 1916 don with their military uniforms traces of Elizabethan martial splendour – ‘put on England’s glory as a common coat’ (xxiv) – their prospective fate represents a ‘tearful shame’ to the shadowy spirit of ‘Peace’. The whole of Shakespeare’s England is suffused with this mixture of nostalgia and utopian longing. Identity, belonging, rootedness – all the basic terms of nationalism – are invested in a poetry of the past that remains fundamentally absent from the contemporary scene. Shakespeare is not simply conscripted into patriotic service, but rather used as a vessel of nationalist longing that is more utopian than political. To place the nationalist imperative in literature is to place it in an inherently unstable domain. In his ‘Ode’ Bridges uses the metaphor of a river to expound Shakespeare’s global role, seen as coterminous with the dissemination of English and the expansion of Empire. The river draws other sources into itself, ‘gaining tributaries in many lands’ (xxii); encompasses in its course the pageant of history; DQG ¿QDOO\ UHDFKHV WKH VHD ZKHUH LW KHOSV WR ÀRDW PHUFKDQW VKLSV RQ WUDGLQJ expeditions around the world. But the poet’s metaphor is itself unstable, since there would be no means of distinguishing in the seas water from an original or secondary VRXUFHQRZD\RIGLIIHUHQWLDWLQJ(QJOLVK6KDNHVSHDUHIURPWULEXWDU\LQÀXHQFH In a brilliant essay on cultural identity, Francis Barker perfectly captured this synthesis of possession and loss that seems endemic to Englishness. It was ‘Shakespeare’ who «DWWKHEHJLQQLQJRI(XURSHDQPRGHUQLW\SOD\HGVXFKDQLPSRUWDQWSDUWDW¿UVW in the English tradition, and subsequently throughout a wider English-speaking world as well as in a number of European countries), in the foundation of an empowered discourse of nation, nationalism and of national belonging.

But it is also in a return to Shakespeare that we can encounter the end of that modernity: 7KH WDXW WUDQVDFWLRQ « EHWZHHQ WKH XQGHUO\LQJ GHVLUH RI PDVWHU\ DQG ¿[LW\ DQGGLVVHPLQDWLRQRIIRUPVERWKRI¿[DWLRQDQGRIVOLSSDJHLQWKHVLJQL¿HUVRI national identity and territorial possession (actual and symbolic) … turn out WR DGPLW VRPHWKLQJ PLVLGHQWL¿HG DOLHQ DQG QRPDGLF LQVWHDG RI ZKDW VKRXOG otherwise have been the very epitome of embodied and emplaced identity … nationalism has always already turned into its opposite.43 43 Francis Barker, ‘Nationalism, Nomadism and Belonging in Europe’, in John Joughin (ed.), Shakespeare and National Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 256.

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,WLVRQO\¿WWLQJWKDWVLQFH6KDNHVSHDUHDVVLVWHGWKHELUWKRI(QJOLVKQDWLRQDOLVP he should also preside over the moment of its necessary reconstruction. Or as John Joughin puts it in the same volume: Paradoxically, the symbology of the nation’s idealized construction and its imagined community is often secured by its very intangibility.44

‘Englishness’ as the alien and nomadic, structured by loss and absence, is precisely the kind of nationality we seek today. And if it is to be found anywhere, it will be found in Shakespeare. 5 ‘This England’, then, is still pretty much where Shakespeare, through John of Gaunt, placed it: in the past, in a space of irrecoverable loss, in a nostalgic anxiety of DEVHQFH)RUWKH(QJOLVKµ%ULWDLQ¶KDVEHHQDQGJRQHIRUFHQWXULHVRYHUÀRZLQJLWV territories and aggrandizing its power, beginning with the Atlantic archipelago, and expanding to cover a quarter of the globe, its tide receded after the Second World War in little more than a decade. Imperial Britain was outward-looking, not insular. During these developments England extended the empire and provided nations DURXQGWKHJOREHZLWKFOHDUDQGVWURQJSROLWLFDODQGFXOWXUDOVHOIGH¿QLWLRQVZLWKRXW HYHUSDXVLQJWRGH¿QHLWVHOIH[FHSWDVUDFLDOO\VXSHULRUGHVWLQHGWRJOREDOUXOHDQG XQLTXHO\ TXDOL¿HG IRU WKH PLVVLRQ RI µH[WHQGLQJ FLYLOL]DWLRQ¶ µ%ULWLVK¶ FXOWXUDO identity, derived from the framework of empire, is now available as a positive membership role mainly to people from former colonies.45 The Scots, Welsh, and Irish have their own identities, shaped in earlier resistance to England, and built on infrastructures provided by the former colonial power, so no longer think of themselves as British. But the English do not see themselves as British either.46 John of Gaunt’s two narratives of England, as ‘little world’ and as empire, are both in crisis. The exclusive view of England as sceptered isle, insular and sovereign, is unthinkable in the world of European Union, transnational capital, mobility of labour and the global economy. But the other narrative, the outward44

John Joughin, ‘Introduction’, in Joughin (ed.), Shakespeare and National Culture, 2. Scruton, England, 8. 46 Social scientists have shown that from the late 1980s ethnic minorities in Britain shifted from oppositional identities to hybridity, hyphenated (‘e.g., British-Muslim’) and PXOWLSOHLGHQWLWLHVGH¿QLQJRQHVHOIGLIIHUHQWLDOO\DFFRUGLQJWRFRQWH[W ,QWKHFHQVXV SHUFHQWRIZKLWH%ULWRQVLGHQWL¿HGWKHPVHOYHVDV(QJOLVK6FRWV,ULVKRU:HOVKZKLOH almost 90 percent of Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Caribbeans declared themselves British. ,QDQGVXUYH\VSHUFHQWRI0XVOLPVVWDWHGWKDWWKH\LGHQWL¿HGZLWK%ULWDLQ Muslims in London are more likely to think of themselves as British (57 percent) than nonMuslims (48 percent). Source: Tariq Modood, ‘Multicultural Britishness’, presented at the conference on Britishness, Identity and Citizenship: The View from Abroad (University of +XGGHUV¿HOG-XQH DQGMulticulturalism (London: Polity Press, 2007). 45

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looking and non-exclusive story of Britain as interconnected with other nations DQGFXOWXUHVLVVR¿UPO\DWWDFKHGWRWKHOHJDF\RIHPSLUHWKDWLWWRRKDVEHFRPH YLUWXDOO\XQWHQDEOH7KH¿UVWQDUUDWLYHKDVUHWUHDWHGWR¿QGGXELRXVVKHOWHULQWKH heritage industry, or a dangerous home in far-right politics. In Shane Meadows’s TV play This is England (2008), a National Front leader quotes Shakespeare’s Henry V on ‘the few’, provides British fascists with a myth of origin in Agincourt (‘join the band of brothers!’), and laments the loss of England: ‘There is a forgotten word; an almost forbidden word; a word that means more to me than anything else. That word is England’. The second has attempted to mutate from imperialism to cosmopolitanism, the ideal of a world citizenship free of any local loyalties, any attachment to a particular place or people. Cosmopolitan Britain posits ethnic pluralism and a multiracial national community as the best models for success and security in the global economy. Cosmopolitan Britain embraces diversity and multiculturalism, and welcomes difference.47 For everyone, that is, except the English, whose hybrid ethnic identity is systematically erased and denigrated by turns. As Arthur Aughey has stated, ‘Englishness is no longer anything’: ‘The people of England have become the citizens of nowhere’.48 In order to assume an effective position within a larger totality such as Europe or the global economy, a nation has to know what, where and who it is. But England has, in Roger Scruton’s phrase, been ‘forbidden’; forgotten; neglected; lost. At the end of This is EnglandWKHFKLOGKHURDQJULO\WKURZVLQWRWKHVHDKLVSUHFLRXV6W*HRUJH¶VÀDJ irreversibly contaminated, it seems, by racist hatred and violence. As he watches the banner wash out to sea, his dark, brooding eyes are empty. 6 Anthony Smith’s list of the ingredients of ‘nation’ does not prescribe linguistic uniformity, except where the ‘ethnic’ conception of nation, ‘a community of common descent’ comes into play.49 When Mowbray in Richard II is banished, he complains that the king is robbing him not only of freedom, but of language: The language I have learn’d these forty years, My native English, now I must forego …

47

See Liam Byrne, A More United Kingdom (London: Demos, 2008). Arthur Aughey, ‘Englishness versus Britishness: Three Perspectives of National Identity’, presented at the conference on Britishness, Identity and Citizenship: The View from Abroad 8QLYHUVLW\ RI +XGGHUV¿HOG -XQH   DQG The Politics of Englishness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). ‘The English are really living nowhere’. Roger Scruton, England, 246. 49 Smith, National Identity, 11. ‘Vernacular culture, usually languages and customs’ are constitutive of ethnic nationality (12). 48

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The self-alienation of banishment is compounded by this linguistic restriction on use of one’s native tongue. Today Mowbray would have a different problem, since KHZRXOG¿QGµKLV¶ODQJXDJHVSRNHQHYHU\ZKHUH English, in a variety of forms, is spoken all over the world. Where it has become peoples’ mother tongue, this is usually due to their country once having been conquered by the English or having been a British colony, a part of the Empire. Even more people speak English as a second language: largely in its American variety it has become the lingua franca of the globe. English, in other words, is no longer an English language.50

7KHUH DUH WKUHH VWDJHV LGHQWL¿HG LQ WKLV DFXWH DQDO\VLV 7KH (QJOLVK WRRN WKHLU language to the New World, and retained it when seceding as colonists from English authority. The English also gave their language, usually as an imposition, to the peoples they colonized.51 The legacy of the latter is a vast Anglophone culture mapped by empire and commonwealth. This is of course a condition shared by France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands; but none of these European nations encounters its own language returning in the masterful accents of a global superpower. The universality of American English has great potential for common intercourse and mutual understanding: but for the English, an ‘imperial people’52 possessing only the vestiges of empire, the loss of the native language can produce anxieties equivalent to Mowbray’s linguistic deprivation. This is Engler’s third VWDJHZKHUH(QJOLVKSHRSOHFDVWDURXQGIRUPDUNHUVRIQDWLRQDOLGHQWLW\DQG¿QG that they possess nothing of their own – not a territory, not institutions, not an economy, not a culture; and that English is no longer an English language. That moment of epochal discontinuity explored earlier – MCMXIV, the moment of ‘Shakespeare’s England’ – stands also as the originating moment of ‘English’ as an academic discipline. It is the moment pinpointed by Terence Hawkes, when John Dover Wilson read W.W. Greg’s article ‘Hamlet’s Hallucination’ on the train to Sunderland, and in response experienced a ‘sort of insanity’.53 Wilson’s disturbance was fundamentally caused, Hawkes argues, by Bolshevism and trade-union unrest in Britain, rather than by the dumb-show in Hamlet, and was projected (‘displaced’, 111) from its proper sphere into a debate on Shakespeare. A founding moment of Englishness is explained in terms of a reactionary resistance to the Russian

50

Engler, ‘Englishness’, 336. ‘The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine’. Stephen Daedalus in James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, quoted from Harry Levin (ed.), The Essential James Joyce (St Albans: Granada, 1977), 316. 52 Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), xi. 53 We might think of this mental invasion as the irruption of strife-torn ‘Sunder-land’ into peaceful ‘Shakespeare-land’. 51

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Revolution.54 English studies, born ‘a child of Empire’s decline’, and Englishness are mutually reinforcing: ‘The one sustains, and even helps to create the other’. In Terry Hawkes’s cultural map, ‘English’ as language, discipline and nationality constitutes a homogenous axis of racist and repressive imperialism, and underpins a supremacist and xenophobic nationalism. This position reprises a theoretical narrative constructed in the 1970s and 1980s, taking its direction from 3HUU\$QGHUVRQ¶V LQÀXHQWLDO  New Left Review essay ‘Components of the National Culture’. Anderson argued that in the nineteenth century, Britain alone among the European nations failed to produce a classical sociology as a counter to Marxism and the international socialist movement. ‘English Literature’ was drawn LQWR WKH FXOWXUDO JDS FUHDWHG E\ WKDW DEVHQFH DQG HPSOR\HG WR ERWK GH¿QH DQG maintain a national culture. According to Anderson, wrote Brian Doyle,55 It is the capacity of English studies to articulate systematically a symbolic rather than theoretical totality that has enabled the discipline to occupy a central role in sustaining the ‘national culture’.

Hawkes and Doyle both list some of the monumental projects that mark the establishing of this educational English at the close of the nineteenth and the opening of the twentieth centuries: the OED (completed 1928), the DNB (completed 1900), the Cambridge History of English Literature (completed 1916). The English Association was founded in 1907, and many of its leaders (Sidney Lee, Walter Raleigh) were involved in the Shakespeare commemorations discussed above. In his Presidential Address of 1918, Sidney Lee enlisted the discipline of English in mobilizing a response to the ‘call of national enlightenment’.56 In 1917 the English Association persuaded the Board of Education to establish a departmental committee on English teaching. A majority of English Association members sat on this committee, which produced the famous ‘Newbolt Report’ in 1921.57 Dover Wilson was also a member of the committee, and Terry Hawkes equates his contribution to the Newbolt project with his resistance to Bolshevism and trades-union activism: ‘The same battle was taken up on a broader front by the same combatant’.58 The Newbolt Report set out to create a common culture capable of uniting the nation: ‘The common right to a liberal education would form a new element of national unity, linking together the mental life of all classes’.59 In other words it was, for 54

The argument of Greg’s essay on Hamlet was, in fact, initially set out in a contribution to A Book of Homage to Shakespeare. W.W. Greg, ‘A Critical Mousetrap’, in Homage, 179–80. 55 Brian Doyle, English and Englishness (London: Methuen, 1989), 7. 56 Sidney Lee, quoted Doyle, English, 30. 57 The Teaching of English in England: The Report of the Departmental Committee DSSRLQWHG E\ WKH %RDUG RI (GXFDWLRQ WR (QTXLUH LQWR WKH 3RVLWLRQ RI (QJOLVK LQ WKH Educational System of England (London: HMSO, 1921). 58 Hawkes, Shakespeherian Rag, 111. 59 Teaching of English in England, 14–15.

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Hawkes, a tool of the ruling class aimed at persuading British workers to trade in their rights for literacy, or in Brian Doyle’s phrase a ‘class-based mobilization’ of FXOWXUDOUHVRXUFHVWRFRPEDWQDWLRQDOGLVLQWHJUDWLRQDQGVRFLDOFRQÀLFW But the choice of literature for this exercise rather than politics, or philosophy, or ethics, clearly introduced internal instabilities into the project from its very inception. The Newbolt Report urged the teaching profession to incorporate the population into a universal national culture not via a political constitution, or a social contract, or even a set of ‘shared values’, but through a language and a body of writing. Hence the very ground of the proposed national culture was what Doyle calls the ‘imponderable base’ of English.60 Although literature may be administered and policed as what +DZNHVFDOOVDµSURSK\OD[LVRIQDWLRQDOFXOWXUH¶LWUHPDLQVE\GH¿QLWLRQDYDLODEOH WRLQWHUSUHWDWLRQLWHUDEOHVHOIFRQWUDGLFWRU\DQGLQFRQWLQXDOÀX[,QWKH1HZEROW 5HSRUWZH¿QG(QJOLVKOLWHUDWXUH¿JXUHGLQWKHVDPHPHWDSKRUGHSOR\HGE\5REHUW Bridges, that of the river fed by tributary streams. Every English-speaking (and reading) child has access to ‘one of the great literatures of the world’. Moreover, if we explore the course of English literature, if we consider from what source its stream has sprung, by what tributaries it has been fed, and with how rich and full a current it has come down to us, we shall see that it has other advantages not to be found elsewhere. There are mingled in it, as only in the JUHDWHVWRIULYHUVFRXOGEHPLQJOHGWKHIHUWLOL]LQJLQÀXHQFHVÀRZLQJGRZQIURP many countries and from many ages of history. Yet all these have been subdued WRIRUPDVWUHDPQDWLYHWRRXURZQVRLO7KHÀRRGRIGLYHUVHKXPDQH[SHULHQFH which it brings down to our own life and time is in no sense or degree foreign to us, but has become the native experience of men of our own race and culture.61

The emphasis here is not, as it was in Bridges’ poem, on the purity of the native VWUHDPEXWRQWKHGLYHUVLW\RILQÀXHQFHVFRQWULEXWLQJWRLW8QGHUO\LQJWKLVYLHZ of English literature as polymorphous and miscegenated, is the conception of English nationality as hybrid from an early stage, of Englishness as a uniquely overdetermined synthesis of Germanic, Scandinavian, and Norman French LQÀXHQFHV7KLVK\EULGLW\LVFHOHEUDWHGUDWKHUWKDQGLVRZQHGLQ9LFWRULDQGLVFRXUVHV of race, where the notion of an ethnically pure community of common descent was never really feasible, since as Defoe quipped, ‘the trueborn Englishman’s a contradiction’. Here diversity and mingling are welcomed, provided that they contribute to a coherent ‘native experience’. Brian Doyle concluded his discussion of English and Englishness by envisaging the future directions of English studies as a stark choice. It seems to me that two contradictory tendencies are currently evident. The ¿UVWLQYROYHVDUHWUHDWLQWRDPXVHXPOLNHRUµPRQXPHQWDO¶UROHZLWKWHDFKHUV of English as professional curators of a residual ‘national cultural heritage’.

60 61

Doyle, English, 39. Teaching of English in England, 8, 13–14.

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The second is characterised by attempts to include the conditions underlying the discipline’s crisis within its own subject matter … .With respect to this second tendency, it is interesting to note that the goal of much feminist, political and critical theory might be summed up as a vision of the end of ‘literature’ in the sense of a privileged cultural domain. Thus, ‘the end of literature’ means the GLVPDQWOLQJRIOLWHUDU\¿FWLRQVDVDQLVRODWHGGRPDLQRIV\PEROLFH[SHULHQFH DQGWKHUHLQWHJUDWLRQRI¿FWLRQPDNLQJZLWKLQRWKHUVRFLDOSUDFWLFHV

What Brian Doyle was calling for has very largely happened, though it has not meant the ‘end of literature’. English studies is now cosmopolitan, international, multicultural. Fiction-making has been integrated into other social practices, and the literary canon thoroughly exploded. ‘Feminist, political and critical theory’ (together with psychoanalysis, linguistics, and post-colonial criticism) have revolutionized the discipline. ‘Such criticism has now become the mainstream’, and has ‘changed the relations between theory and practice in what people actually do when they study “English”’.62 Just as English is no longer an English language, so English studies is no longer only the study of English. Doyle’s choice of two options for Englishness – the local museum and the globe, English heritage or world culture – replicates the two nationalist narratives of England as island and empire, and takes us back to our starting-point, Shakespeare-land, that marginal country that lies between the heart of England and England’s global identity. But having opted for the latter scenario, in which English becomes an undifferentiated element in a cosmopolitan global culture, the heart of the nation can only become a desiccated relic, ‘embalmed’ in Hawkes’s words, ‘enshrined’, reproduced, and placed on show as a heritage theme-park, a more-or-less convincing replica of an England that is no longer here. At the end of Julian Barnes’s England, England the massive success of England as offshore theme-park heralds the demise of the actual England (‘Old England’), ZKLFK¿QGVLWVHOIVOLSSLQJLQWRDWHUPLQDOGHFOLQHEHWZHHQLWVVWURQJHU%ULWLVKDQG European neighbours. The country turns its back on the world and reverts to rural stagnation, reintroducing the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy and changing its name to ‘Anglia’. But in the process something is recovered, or perhaps reconstructed: ‘Could you reinvent innocence? Or was it always constructed, grafted on to the old disbelief?’ (264). Here in ‘Anglia’ life is lived between the polarities of here and there: ‘This … was how the human spirit should divide itself, between the entirely local and the nearly eternal’ (260–61). Earlier, the heroine Martha rediscovers a capacity for ‘seriousness’ via the cultural memory of an event that probably never happened. Taking the local legend of a woman who fell from a cliff and, borne up by her umbrella, landed unhurt with her basket of eggs largely unbroken (121–3), the managers of ‘England, England’ attempt to reproduce the event, with great technical ingenuity and several injuries. /DWHU0DUWKDUHÀHFWVRQWKLVPRGHUQVLPXODWLRQRIDQXQFHUWDLQSDVW

62

Holderness, Cultural Shakespeare, ix–x.

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A short, eternal moment that was absurd, improbable, unbelievable, true … later the moment had been appropriated, reinvented, copied, coarsened; she herself had helped. But such coarsening always happened. The seriousness lay in celebrating the original image: getting back there, seeing it, feeling it … . Part of you might suspect that the magical event had never occurred, or at least not as it was now supposed to have done. But you must also celebrate the image and the moment even if it had never happened. That was where the little seriousness of life lay. (238)

And so it is with Shakespeare, who has also been ‘reinvented’, ‘appropriated’, and no doubt copied and coarsened too: but who still remains central to any project for reviving or reproducing an English national culture. An England that is both inward-looking, conscious of its own identity, but also outward-looking towards the wider world; an England that is neither rooted in racism and xenophobia, nor merely a cosmopolitan vacuum; an England that can command respect without IHDUDQGORYHZLWKRXWKDWUHG,IWKHUHLVDQ\KRSHRI¿QGLQJVXFKDFRXQWU\VXFKD nation, one could do worse than start hunting around in Shakespeare-land, heart of an England that can still (or again) be apprehended as ‘beautiful’. There is no return to the Stratford of Shakespeare-land: it was never there in WKH¿UVWSODFH63 Those watercolour images function not as realistic portraits of a place, but as pictorial sets for the staging of an English greatness. Yet somewhere between those images and the visitor’s actual experience of Edwardian Stratford lay a land of enchantment, an imaginative engagement with place and culture, which it is reasonable to call Shakespeare-land. In doing so I invite the joint invocation of patria and theme-park, ‘Fatherland’ and ‘Disneyland’.64 But these are not the contraries they seem. A patriaLVQRWQHFHVVDULO\D¿[HGERUGHUHGVSDFHEXWDQ experience of rootedness and belonging. There are no citizens of Disneyland, but there are no citizens of England either. There’ll always be an England, but only as a geographical territory, not as the political entity of a nation. There’ll be blue ELUGVRYHUWKHZKLWHFOLIIVRI'RYHUEXWWKDWZLOOGH¿QLWHO\EHWRPRUURZVLQFH blue birds are native to North America, and not to be found in the skies over Kent. But can nostalgia and hope be dispelled by mere ornithological inaccuracy? Just you wait and see.65

63

‘There is no authentic moment of beginning, of purity … What we are looking at is almost always a replica … of something earlier. There is no prime moment’. Barnes, England, England, 132. 64 See Philip Edwards, ‘Shakespeare, Ireland, Dreamland’, Irish University Review, 28 (1998): 227–39; and Terry Eagleton, ‘Afterword’, in The Shakespeare Myth, 204–5. 65 For the White Cliffs of Dover see Cultural Shakespeare, 63–6.

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Afterword: One of Those Days in England $QGUHZ+DG¿HOG

Shakespeare is well known as the most English of English writers, having divided his time between the very heart of the nation and the capital, and expressed its inner soul in his work. After his death his plays served to galvanize Englishmen (and women) during the country’s darkest days, as well as to sell the country’s essential products (beer, military hardware, cigars, breakfast cereal) to the natives, and attract tourists from abroad. The Google hit list has Shakespeare second only to God, although God’s triumph, it has to be admitted, is emphatic: 140 to 17 million, but then God is not English. The bald pate of Shakespeare’s funeral monument represents a classic image of Englishness, the character of the greatest Englishman appearing thoughtful (think Tempest), sceptical (Hamlet), stolid (King John), conservative in instinct (Julius Caesar), perhaps dull at times (Timon of Athens), his salad days (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet) behind him. However, as this list of plays indicates, Shakespeare hardly ever represents contemporary England. Of course, he writes about the nation’s past in a long sequence of plays, mostly written in the 1590s when English history seemed an urgent issue for audiences WHUUL¿HGDERXWZKRZRXOGUXOHWKHPRQFHWKHYLUJLQTXHHQLQYDULDEO\VHHQDVRQH RIWKHEDUG¶VFKLHIVXSSRUWHUVKDGVKXIÀHGRIIKHUPRUWDOFRLO$QGDJDLQLQWKH British plays of the 1600s, now that a Scot had taken her place. Nevertheless, Shakespeare only writes about what could even be conceived of as contemporary England in two plays: The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597) and As You Like It (1599). The former concerns the life of citizens in the London suburbs; the latter transforms rural France to the Forest of Arden. This pair might seem like a neat balancing act, representing the two halves of Shakespeare’s life, London and Warwickshire, but the effect is more illusory than substantial. As You Like It was adapted from a source set in France, Thomas Lodge’s prose romance, Rosalynde. Shakespeare transplanted the Ardennes Forest to the Forest of Arden. The characters in the play have a mixture of names: the aristocrats at court and in exile are largely French (Charles, Amiens, Jacques, and Le Beau, a courtier); and *UHHN SDVWRUDO 6LOYLXV &RULQ 3KRHEH  EXW WKH SHDVDQWV DUH GH¿QLWHO\ (QJOLVK (William and Audrey); as is the clown, Touchstone. As You Like It can be read in many ways but not, I would suggest, as a straightforward play about life in the heart of England according to Shakespeare. The Merry Wives is a little more straightforward, with the intricate plot involving the Fords, the Pages, and their neighbours. But even here, they are intermingled with the crew at the Garter Inn who audiences would have last seen hanging around with Henry V who died in

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1422. This is rather like a contemporary playwright having Keats appear in a play about Seamus Heaney, or Lord Liverpool in one about John Major, quite a long way beyond the serendipity of Stoppard’s Travesties. The irony is obvious enough, albeit rarely noted. The playwright who is assumed to represent the national character actually writes very little about his own country. Of course, in an important way, very few writers ever represent their nation as it exists at the time, and if they do, it is with satirical or critical intention. They represent the past to comment on the nation’s history, and, invariably if obliquely, on its present, as in, for example, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. In rare cases, they represent the nation’s future, usually in utopian or dystopian ways that have a bearing on wider human issues, as William Morris’s News From Nowhere and E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops indicate. Or, they represent the nation as a bad thing that needs to be changed. Dickens, invariably represented as a London writer, would never be chosen to represent England as Shakespeare is, yet he writes far more about his own nation as it then was. If we leave the histories aside, we might note that Shakespeare sets most plays in European locations: Italy, Denmark, Austria, France, Greece, an XQVSHFL¿HG0HGLWHUUDQHDQLVODQGDQGDFRQIXVHG,VWULDQORFDWLRQ$QXPEHURIKLV contemporaries followed suit, notably Christopher Marlowe, who was probably the most geographically diverse writer of the time and John Webster, whose three extant plays have plots which take place in Italy. But many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries did choose to set their works in contemporary England. Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass and The Alchemist are simply three obvious examples, as is the less well-known A Looking Glass for London and England (1594), by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge. Unlike Jonson and Middleton, Shakespeare did not generally write city comedies, partly, no doubt, a result of the wars of the theatres which encouraged rival companies to produce GLVWLQFWDQGUHDGLO\LGHQWL¿DEOHW\SHVRISOD\V:KLOH-RQVRQDQG0LGGOHWRQZURWH sharp, topical satires of city life, Shakespeare wrote romantic comedies of love for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. In the one play that made use of the generic markers of city comedy, the Merry Wives, Shakespeare adapted the form so that it looked relatively unusual, setting it in a suburban area, and mixing contemporary marriage intrigue with characters from a successful history play, and so giving rise to the retrospectively constructed legend that the queen enjoyed Falstaff so much that she demanded that her favourite playwright bring him back in a benign comedy. Given this apparent lack of interest in contemporary England, it is perhaps somewhat perverse that Shakespeare has acquired the reputation as the quintessentially English writer. Of course, every nation needs a writer to express its soul and represent the people as they wish to see themselves as well as how others see them from outside. Scotland has Scott (as well as Burns); Wales, Dylan Thomas; and Ireland, Yeats. It might, therefore, seem appropriate that the nation that assumed its modern form at WKHH[SHQVHRILWVQHLJKERXUVVKRXOGEHUHSUHVHQWHGE\D¿JXUHIURPWKHSHULRGLQ which this was achieved (Wales and Ireland were formally acquired by the English crown in the 1530s; the Scottish and English monarchs became one in 1603, even

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though formal union was resisted). After all, England’s neighbours within the British ,VOHV KDYH DGRSWHG ¿JXUHV ZKR URXJKO\ VSHDNLQJ HPHUJHG DW SHULRGV RI QDWLRQDO VHOIGH¿QLWLRQZKDWHYHUSROLWLFDOUROHWKH\SOD\HG6FRWWFRQVHUYDWLYHLQSROLWLFVZDV a Jacobite sympathizer; Yeats, ambivalent about Irish union, expressed the hopes, doubts, and fears of 1916 in public consciousness; Thomas, largely indifferent to the Welsh language himself, was seen to express its cadences, words, and rhythms in what become the country’s principal language, English. Perhaps this might explain why Chaucer, Shakespeare’s predecessor as national laureate, who writes more obviously about contemporary England in The Canterbury Tales than Shakespeare does in his plays and poetry, has not been seen in quite the same way since the late seventeenth century, certainly not now. The reign of Richard II does not feature in the English psyche in the ways that the reign of Elizabeth I has done, with the defeat of the Armada preserving English sovereignty just as empire was established overseas. Shakespeare, even though he was a half-Jacobean writer, and may well have thought that James was a better monarch than Elizabeth, has been forever established as the Elizabethan favourite of Shakespeare in Love. It is intriguing, even if it is not surprising, that Shakespeare’s apparently GH¿QLWLYH SURQRXQFHPHQWV RQ (QJOLVKQHVV DUH QRW DOZD\V ZKDW WKH\ VHHP RU what they are taken to be. John of Gaunt’s famous description of England as ‘this sceptered isle’, used with either commendable chutzpah or quite mind-boggling stupidity by Christopher Lee for his BBC Radio 4 series and book of the same title, is shrouded in ironies. Of course, England is not an island and the speech should be read as a potent reminder that its boundaries are exceptionally porous and liable to be penetrated, a lesson the ‘skipping king’ has failed to learn. He jokes that his visit to Ireland has been one to the ‘Antipodes’ and that his status as monarch is secure because ‘Not all the water in the rough rude sea/Can wash the balm off from an anointed king’, whereas it is his inability to understand the vulnerable position and nature of England that prevents him from governing it effectively enough to remain in power. It is his sea voyage that helps to wash his sacred balm off, allowing his enemies to gather support and momentum. Furthermore, it is clear that Gaunt’s vision of England as ‘the other Eden, demi-paradise’, is one that never existed, a rhetorical ploy to persuade those in the present to defend their land by believing that it could have a future based on a past it never had. We are all used now to the idea that the nation is an ‘imagined community’, one that is summoned to construct a vision as a reality that will not appear. The nation will always be ‘once and future’, like the legend of the British King Arthur, never present, just as, in fact, Britain has never really existed. It is instructive to compare Gaunt’s version of England with that of Henry V, in Shakespeare’s other most famous speech on Englishness. Gaunt imagines an England with secure borders, an Eden that somehow successfully resists the fall, providing another obvious level of irony to the speech. But, while we can all agree that this exclusive vision of England is impossible, do we also agree that it is desirable? Henry V has a very different version of Englishness, a more obviously inclusive one. While the arrogant French leaders try to galvanize their troops by

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appealing to their superiority over the rag-tag English army, made up, as standing DUPLHVIURP(QJODQGKDYHDOZD\VEHHQZLWKDVLJQL¿FDQWSURSRUWLRQRI:HOVK Scots, and Irish troops, Henry addresses his men as equals, a ‘happy few’, a ‘band of brothers’. England at war is imagined as classless, a collective enterprise which VHHNVWRGHIHQGDWHUULWRU\VRWKDWWKHWUXHVSLULWRIWKHQDWLRQDSSHDUVRQWKLV¿HOG RQWKLVGD\DQGVLJQL¿FDQWO\HQRXJKµJHQWOHPHQLQ(QJODQGQRZDEHG6KDOOWKLQN themselves accursed they were not here’. The king alludes to the divisions that always open up after even the most successful wars, with the imagined contrast between the sleeping gents who owe their safety to the endangered brothers. England may be united now, but it won’t be when the heroes return to receive less than their fair reward and the king forgets who they are. For subsequent readers this sounds, of course, rather like Rupert Brooke’s lament IRUWKHGHDGVROGLHURFFXS\LQJD¿HOGWKDWSUHVHUYHVKLVLGHQWLW\DVDVPDOOSDUWRI England. But is it? This is not about individuals who are thinking about themselves DORQH EXW D QDWLRQ GH¿QLQJ LWVHOI DW NH\ PRPHQWV JORULRXVO\ XQVWDEOH SHULRGV RI unity that will disappear as soon as time passes. We have seen Fluellen, Jamy, and MacMorris, and know that they will be defenders of English territory only for a short space, just as Bates, Williams, and Court will not be able to speak to their disguised king on equal terms for much longer. On this day anyone can be English; whereas for Gaunt, there are no true Englishmen left, their time has come and gone. 1HLWKHUYLVLRQRI(QJODQGDQG(QJOLVKQHVVLVGH¿QLWLYHQRULVLWPHDQWWREH (QJOLVKQHVVORRNVYHU\GLIIHUHQWDWGLIIHUHQWWLPHVDQGWRGH¿QHSHRSOHVLQWHUPVRID series of images and objects reveals only enough truth to distort reality and inevitably excludes vast numbers of people who think of themselves as English. In fact, this sort of thinking is parodied in Othello, as a drinking game orchestrated by Iago, a man with a Spanish name working for cosmopolitan Venice, who has no identity. Here, the English emerge as the world’s best drinkers, easily able to defeat their serious rivals, the Danes, Germans, and ‘swag-bellied Hollander[s]’. There may well have been some truth in these four nations’ reputations for excessive drinking, but how much does this actually tell us about them, especially in a play set in Venice and Cyprus? The scene may have no meaning at all, beyond furthering the plot by exposing the weakness of Cassio. Or, in a play acutely concerned with the question of identity, it might be read as a subtle critique of dangerously lazy thought. After all, Othello is not only seen in terms of stereotypes, but conceives himself in similar terms. Shakespeare is an acute thinker about national identity, although many who see him in these terms cannot read his subtle distinctions and his clear understanding that such identities are always provisional. The problem is that the more one thinks DERXW (QJOLVK QDWLRQDO LGHQWLW\ WKH KDUGHU LW LV WR GH¿QH LW LQ WHUPV RI D VHULHV of characteristics, traits, issues, and habits. Does Shakespeare really seem that (QJOLVKDQ\ZD\"+HDSSHDUVWRKDYHWKRXJKWDORWDERXWÀRZHUVVH[DQGEHHU and had an interest in Italy. He also liked buying houses and married an older woman. And, he wrote sonnets to a young man and a lot of plays about crossdressing, although in French eyes at least, this would have characterized him as a man addicted to ‘le vice anglais’.

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Index

Acton, David, 176, 177 Adamson, Sylvia, 71n25 Adkins, Camille, 169n13 Aers, David, 102n20 Agard, Arthur, 30n35 Akuwudike, Jude, 178 Aldgate, A., 134n22 Alexander, Catherine M.S., 166n5 Allen, Paul, 182n33 Allott, Robert, 127n1 Altick, Richard D., 128n3 Alvarez, A., 191, 191n14 Ames, William, 124n40 Amyot, Jacques, 29 Anderson, Benedict, 25n12, 202n4 Anderson, Perry, 216 Andrewes, Lancelot, 199 Annius of Viterbo, 46, 46n100 Antioch IV, 39, 44 Antiochus III, 39, 40, Armin, Robert, 47, 48 Armitage, David, 33n48, 34n49 Armstrong, Louis, 149n8 The Arte of English Poesie, 109n10, 193 Arthur, King, 26, 26n16, 28, 28n27, 223 Ascherson, Neal, 4n11, 5n14, 75n37 Attenborough, Michael, 166n7 Auden, W.H., 188n7, 199 Aughey, Arthur, 69n18, 214, 214n48 Ayers, P.K., 92, 92n9, 101 Bainbrigg, Reginald, 38n64 Baker, David J., 15n38, 24n9, 51n13, 93n10 Baker, J.H., 115n22 Baldick, Chris, 193, 193n18 Baldo, Jonathan, 14n37, 95n13, 151, 151n12 Baldwin, T.W., 41n81 Bale, John, 28n25, 29, 29n30, 49, 50, 50n7, 51, 52, 52n18, 54, 55, 60, 120n29 Banks, Carol, 55, 55n34

Barbier, Jules, 156 Barkan, Leonard, 27, 27n24 Barker, Francis, 212, 212n43 Barnes, Julian, 203, 204n13, 218, 219n63 Barry, Peter, 3n8 Barthes, Roland, 203n12 Bate, Jonathan, 9, 9n25 Baugh, Albert C., 79n53 Becker, Annette, 148n5 Beckett, Samuel, 200 Bell, H.E., 46n97 Bénard, André, 159 Bennett, Josephine Waters, 131n13 Benson, Frank, 205, 205n22 Berry, Ralph, 5n13 Berryman, John, 195, 195n25 Bertani, Mauro, 80n57 Berthelet, Thomas, 15, 35, 36 Bhatia, Nandi, 4n10 Binns, J.W., 28n27, 42n82 Binyon, Laurence, 210, 210n39 Blair, Tony, 141, 143 Blake, Norman, 71n25 Blake, William, 143, 144, 144n42, 186 Bloch, Marc, 148, 148n5 Block, Etienne, 148n5 %ORP¿HOG5HJLQDOG205n21 Blythe, Peter, 178 Blythe, Robert, 167, 168, 171 Boddy, G.W., 37n62 Boece, Hector, 47 Bogdanov, Michael, 9n27 Boling, Ronald, 9n27, 24n8 Bolingbroke, Henry (Henry IV), 12, 64, 82, 89, 130, 152n17, 166n7 Bonnynge, Richard, 155n24 Boorde, Andrew, 84 Bourdieu, Pierre, 67 Bowers, Fredson, 15n40 Boyd, Michael, 167, 167n7, 167n8, 179, 180, 180n29, 180, 182

252

This England, That Shakespeare

Braddick, Michael, 30, 31n38 Bradshaw, Brendan, 1n1 Branagh, Kenneth, 16, 175 Braunmuller, A.R., 108n6, 120n30 Brett-Smith, H.F.B., 80n55 Bridges, Robert, 13, 19, 187, 211, 212, 217 Brierley, David, 161n36 Britten, Benjamin, 158n30 Brooke, Ralph, 32, 32n44 Brooke, Rupert, 202, 202n3, 224 Brooks, Harold, 108n7, 123n34 Brown, Gordon, 17n44 Bruno, Giordano, 195 Brutus, 23n2, 36, 43, 46, 91, 91n8 Bryans, Kenneth, 173, 174 Bryce, James (Viscount), 208, 208n34, 210, 211 Buc, George, 31, 31n42 Buchanan, George, 39, 39n67 Budra, Paul, 114n19 Bullough, Geoffrey, 123, 123n34 Burckhardt, Sigurd, 51, 52, 52n16, 52n17, 55, 55n37 Burke, Peter, 27, 27n24 Burnett, Mark Thornton, 1n3, 24n9, 77n43, 147n3 Burrow, Colin, 27n22, 31n41, 42n86 Butcher, Richard, 31n39 Byrne, Liam, 214n47 Cable, Thomas, 79n53 Cadwallader, 91 Caesar, Julius, 27, 27n20, 97 Cain, C.M., 78, 78n47 Calderwood, James L., 100n18 Calvo, Clara, 7, 10, 12, 14, 17, 128n3, 150n10, 158n31 Camden, William, 27, 27n23, 30n35, 32, 38n64, 42, 43n87, 94 Campbell, Lily, 59, 114n20 Canny, Nicholas, 46n98 Canterbury Tales, 149, 149n8, 223 Carew, Richard, 47, 47n102 Carlyle, Thomas, 2, 2n6, 155, 155n25, 205n19 Carré, Michel, 156 Carroll, Nancy, 168 Carroll, Rob, 173 Carter, Angela, 6, 6n16, 8

Catherine de Valois, 90 Cavanagh, Dermot, 9n28, 50, 50n8, 52, 52n19, 54n29, 55n33 Caxton, William, 15, 15n39, 35, 36 Chambers, E.K., 208 Chapman, James, 134n21 Charleson, Ian, 182 A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, 222 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 29, 29n29, 35, 35n53, 35n54, 36, 186, 223 Chedgzoy, Kate, 132n16 Cholmley, John, 37 Churchill, Winston, 204 Clapham, John, 27, 27n22 Cohen, Walter, 165n3 Coke, Edward, 30, 30n36 Colclough, David, 109, 109n8, 109n9, 109n11 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 186 Colley, Linda, 1, 2, 2n4, 6n15, 82, 82n59, 207n32 Collini, Stefan, 78 Collinson, Patrick, 23n3 Constable, John, 201 Cook, Kandis, 166n7 Cooke, Dominic, 37n59 Corbin, Peter, 68, 68n15, 68n16, 69, 69n17 Corcoran, Neil, 18, 63, 67n11, 194n22 Cormack, Bradin, 32n45 Courthorpe, W.J., 209, 209n38 Cox, Sam, 176 Crawford, Robert, 3n8 Critcher, C., 143n41 Crolley, Liz, 143n41 Cruttwell, Patrick, 188, 188n8, 191n14 Crystal, Ben, 182n33 Curran, John E., 23n2 Cust, Lionel, 205n20 Daileader, Celia R., 166n5 Dale, Janet, 182n33 Daniel, Alexis, 176 Daniel, Samuel, 17, 29, 29n32, 37, 37n61, 114n18, 130n14, 132n15 Davenport, Arnold, 74n34 Davenport, Robert, 50, 50n7 Davies, Norman, 131n12 Davies, Rees, 169n13 Davies, Rowland, 167, 168, 169

Index Davis, Natalie Zemon, 106n3 De Leuven, Adolphe, 158 De Man, Paul, 63n1 De Pourtalès, Guy, 154, 154n22 De Vos, Jozef, 158n31 Dee, John, 26, 26n16, 40, 40n74, 42n84 Defoe, Daniel, 12, 12n34, 82, 82n59, 83, 83n60, 217 Dekker, Thomas, 15n40, 65n8, 70n24, 80, 80n55, 81 Delabastita, Dirk, 158n31 Desmet, Christy, 133n18, 137, 137n30 Dethicke, William, 32 Devlin, Es, 166n7 Devlin, Tony, 171 Dickens, Charles, 222 Digges, Thomas, 33, 33n48 Disney, Walt, 133n18, 135n26 Dobson, Michael, 158, 158n32 Donizetti, Gaitano, 157 Donne, John, 188, 192n14 Douglas, Keith, 197 Dowriche, Anne, 132n16 Doyle, Brian, 216, 216n55, 217, 217n60, 218 Drake, Francis, 203, 204, 210 Drayton, Michael, 91n6, 102, 114n18, 127n1 Du Bartas, Guillaume, 10, 151, 152 Dubrow, Heather, 117n25 Duff, J.D., 41n77 'XII\6HiQ53, 53n24, 53n25 Du Jeu, Felicité, 172, 173 Duncan, A.A.M., 53, 53n24 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 32, 32n43 Dunphy, Keith, 170, 173, 174 Dusinberre, Juliet, 108n7, 111n13 Dutton, Richard, 59n46, 153n18 Duval, Alexandre, 158, 158n31 Dygon, John, 43 Eagleton, Terry, 219n64 Easthope, Anthony, 202, 202n7 Edelen, George, 74n34 Edward VI, 88 Edwards, H.J., 27n20 Edwards, Philip, 219n64 Egan, Michael, 68n15 Egbert, 27 Eliot, John, 151, 151n13

253

Eliot, T.S., 188, 188n7, 189, 194, 194n23, 199, 200 Elizabeth I, 51, 54, 58, 60, 64, 79, 93, 101, 105, 110, 112, 151, 158, 159, 161, 223 Elliott, J.H., 45n95 Empson, William, 194 Engler, Balz, 3n8, 5n12, 205n19, 215, 215n50 Erdeswicke, Sampson, 28, 28n25 Erickson, Peter, 5n13 Erskine-Hill, Howard, 49, 50n4, 50n5, 51, 51n12, 59, 59n46, 60 Escobedo, Andrew, 24n8, 26, 26n15 Essex, Robert Devereux, Second Earl of, 5n13, 93, 94, 94n12, 97n16, 171, 178 Faas, Ekbert, 190n11 Fackler, Herbert V., 169n13 Falstaff, 66, 72, 92, 158, 179, 222 Feingold, Mordechai, 26n14 Ferguson, Arthur B., 42n82 Finkelstein, Richard, 133n18, 135n26 Finnegans Wake, 196 Fletcher, John, 36, 105 Florio, John, 12n33, 67n12, 71, 71n26, 72, 78 Fluellen, 14, 15n39, 16, 87, 89, 92, 93, 94, 95, 95n13, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 100n18, 101, 101n19, 102, 103, 165, 166, 168, 169n13, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 178, 224 Foche, John, 43 Foley, Helen, 123, 123n35 Forker, Charles, 132n14, 134, 134n22, 148n4 Forni, Kathleen, 36n55 Forster, E.M., 222 Fortescue, John, 30 Foucault, Michel, 80, 80n57, 166, 166n6 Fox, Alistair, 124n40 Foxe, John, 26n15, 36, 36n57, 50, 52, 78, 79, 80 Francis I, 160 Francis, Geff, 180, 181 Franssen, Paul, 158n31 Freshwater, Geoffrey, 173 Friedman, Donald M., 128n3 Fryde, Natalie, 57n42

254

This England, That Shakespeare

Fulk, R.D., 78, 78n47 Fuller, Roy, 185, 185n2, 186n3, 187, 200 Furbank, P.N., 12n34, 83n60 Furness, H.H., 206n28 Gadd, Ian Anders, 35n53 Galloway, Bruce, 23n1 Gam, Davy, 93n10 Gammage, Nick, 191n13 Garganigo, Alex, 24n7 Gascoigne, George, 78n46 Gaunt, William, 178 Gellner, Ernest, 25n12 General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation, 40n74 Genette, Gerard, 137n29, 140, 140n38, 141, 142n39, 169n13 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 43 George, Lloyd, 204n17 Gibbons, Fiachra, 180n29 Gieskes, Edward, 56, 56n39, 59n45 Gilbert, Sandra M., 194n22 Gillespie, Alexandra, 29n29, 35n53 Gilmour, Dave, 168, 168n11 Ginzburg, Carlo, 29n28, 29n31, 37, 37n61 Glendower, Owen, 89, 90, 91, 92, 95, 165, 167, 168, 169, 178 Glyn Dwr, Owen, 90, 91n7, 102 Goddard, William, 70n23, 70n24 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 156 Golding, Arthur, 27, 27n21, 41 Goodland, Katharine, 116n23, 117n26, 123n36 Gossett, Suzanne, 35, 35n52, 37n58, 41n80, 44n92 Gosson, Henry, 41 Gower (character in Henry V), 14, 15n39, 87, 92, 93n10, 170, 170n15 Gower (character in Pericles), 14, 15, 17, 32, 37, 37n59, 39 Gower, John, 19, 35, 35n53, 36, 36n56, 36n57, 42, 44, 44n93 Grafton, Anthony, 46n100 Grandage, Sarah, 10, 12, 13 Grant, Alexander, 45n95 Gray, William, 31n39 Green, John, 77n44 Green, Thomas Andrew, 124n40

Greenblatt, Stephen, 56n41, 63n2, 90n5, 105n1, 165n3 Greene, Robert, 67, 73, 73n33, 222 Greenfeld, Liah, 23n3, 206n26 *UHHQ¿HOG0DWWKHZ47, 47n104 Greer, Germaine, 8, 8n22 Greg, W.W., 215, 216n54 Gregor, Keith, 158n31 Gregory, William, 91 *ULI¿WKV+XZ24n8 Groom, Nick, 13n36, 202n6 Grosart, A.B., 73n33 Groves, Beatrice, 60, 60n50 Guinle, Francis, 155n23, 156, 156n27, 158n30 Gurr, Andrew, 65n7, 95, 96n14, 171n19 Guy, John, 124n40 The Gypsies Metamorphosed, 46n97 Haas, Renate, 3n8, 205n19 +DG¿HOG$QGUHZ5n13, 20, 55n35 Haffenden, John, 195n25 Hakewill, William, 30n36 Hakluyt, Richard, 26n16 Hall, Edward, 16, 167n7, 174 Hall, Joseph, 70n24, 73, 74n34 Halliday, M.A.K., 128n4 Halpern, Richard, 38n65 Ham, R.E., 46n99 Hampton-Reeves, Stuart, 9n28, 54n29, 55n34 Hand, David, 143n41 Hands, Terry, 171, 171n17 Harbert, William of Glamorgan, 91 Hardy, Thomas, 150, 207, 207n33, 208, 210 Harries, Mali, 167, 168, 170 Harrison, William, 68, 74n34, 77, 77n45, 78, 79, 79n52, 80n54 Harry, George Owen, 23n2 Harwood, T., 28n25 Haslehurst, E.W., 201 Hattaway, Michael, 56n40 Hattersley, Roy, 139, 140 +DYHU¿HOG)UDQFLV38n64 Hawes, James, 206n28 Hawkes, Terence, 3, 3n8, 4, 4n9, 201n2, 210, 211, 215, 216, 216n58, 217, 218 Hayer, Dominique, 156, 156n27 Healy, Alexia, 173

Index Heaney, Seamus, 127n2, 186n4, 222 Hearne, Thomas, 30n35, 30n36, 31n39 Heinemann, Margot, 68n16 Helgerson, Richard, 37, 37n60 Henderson, Diana E., 58n44 Henry V, 16, 55, 90, 221, 223 Henry VI, 91 Henry VII, 101 Henry VIII, 52, 60, 61, 101, 107, 159, 160, 206 Henry, Bruce Ward, 42n84 Hentschell, Roze, 74n34, 77n45, 80n56 Herbert, George, 15, 15n40 Herford, C.H., 31n40, 205, 205n19 Hibben, John Grier, 206n24 Highley, Christopher, 23n3, 90n4 Higson, Andrew, 134n21 Hill, Amelia, 4n11 Hill, Christopher, 80, 80n57 Hill, Tracey, 202n7 Hillman, Richard, 152n15 Hindle, Steve, 30n37 Hingley, Richard, 38n64 Hodgkins, Christopher, 26n17 Hoenselaars, Ton, 7, 10, 12, 14, 17, 128n3, 150n10, 152n16, 154n22, 158n31 Hogg, Ian, 178 Holderness, Graham, 3, 3n7, 7, 10, 13, 19, 150, 150n11, 151, 163, 175, 175n25, 201n2, 218n62 Holinshed, Raphael, 9, 9n26, 52, 68, 89, 96n14, 112, 112n14 Holland, Hugh, 91n6 Holland, Joseph, 30n34, 31n39 Holland, Peter, 9, 9n28, 153, 153n19 Hollinghurst, Alan, 222 Hollister, C. Warren, 54, 54n28 Honan, Park, 71n27 Honigmann, E.A.J., 75, 76n40 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 186, 187, 189 Hopkins, Lisa, 5n13, 32n45, 77n43 Hotspur, Harry (Sir Henry Percy), 9, 10, 90, 90n5, 91, 92, 167, 168, 169, 170 Houston, William, 174, 175, 176, 177 Howard, Jean E., 59n46, 102n20, 106n2 Howard, Michael, 141 Howes, Edmond, 31n42 Hughes, Ted, 8, 18, 63, 67n11, 185–200 Hughes, William, 202n7

255

Hunston, Susan, 138n34 Hunt, Arnold, 98, 98n17 Hutson, Lorna, 113, 113n16, 113n17 Hynes, Samuel, 204n17 Hytner, Nicholas, 167, 168, 169n12, 171, 172, 173, 174, 178 Iago, 5, 224 Iwuji, Chuk, 167n9, 180, 182, 182n32 Jackson, MacDonald P., 40n72 James VI/I, 5, 6, 9n27, 12, 23n2, 25, 34, 46, 47, 75, 81, 101n19, 223 Jamy, Captain, 165, 171, 171n19, 173, 174, 178, 228 Jarman, Derek, 147, 147n2 Jeremiah, 211 Jerrold, Walter, 201, 201n1 John, King of England, 53, 57n42 John of Fordun, 46 John of Gaunt, 10, 11, 19, 57, 61, 64, 65, 68, 69, 76, 83, 127, 128, 128n3, 129, 129n5, 129n6, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 152n16, 153, 159, 161, 163, 213, 223, 224 Johnson, Richard, 91n6 Johnson, Samuel, 87, 194 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 77, 77n45 Jones, Emrys, 24n8 Jones, J.T., 169n13 Jones, Richard Foster, 81n57 Jones, Sianed, 169 Jonson, Ben, 7n20, 31, 31n40, 46n97, 71n28, 72n30, 127n1, 222 Josephus, Flavius, 41, 41n78 Joughin, John, 3n7, 131n10, 152n16, 165n1, 165n2, 170n14, 207n31, 212n43, 213, 213n44 Jourdan, Pierre, 161, 161n35, 164 Joyce, James, 196, 215n51 Kahn, Coppélia, 204n15, 206, 207, 207n30, 208 Kahn, Victoria, 113n16 Kearney, Hugh, 1, 1n1, 1n2, 2, 4, 13n35, 79n50 Keats, John, 186, 191n13, 222

256

This England, That Shakespeare

Keen, Karen, 161n36 Kemble, Fanny, 206n28 Kendrick, T.D., 42n82 Kennedy, Charles, 143 Kennedy, Dennis, 153, 153n19, 155 Kermode, Frank, 63, 63n3, 193n20 Kerrigan, John, 24n5, 24n6, 47, 47n103, 113, 113n15 Kewes, Paulina, 153n18 Kidd, Colin, 13n35, 79n50 King Johan, 50, 50n7, 52, 54, 55, 120n29 Kinnes, Ian, 26n18 Kinney, Arthur, 5n13 Kline, Barbara, 29n29 Knapp, Jeffrey, 54, 54n32, 98n17 Knapp, Peggy A., 25n10 Knight, G. Wilson, 149, 149n7 Kott, Jan, 153 Krier, Theresa M., 29n29 Kumar, Krishan, 215n52 Kurland, Stuart M., 5n13 Kuzner, James, 40n70 Kyd, Thomas, 65n8 Lambarde, William, 31n39 Lane, Robert, 51n14 Langford, Paul, 69n18 Larkin, Philip, 191, 192, 192n15, 204n16, 294 Lavers, Annette, 203n12 Law, Joe K., 155n24 Lawrence, D.H., 194, 194n22, 204n17 Leavis, F.R., 188 Lee, Christopher, 135n23, 223 Lee, Sidney, 208, 208n37, 216, 216n56 Leggatt, Alexander, 129n5 Leland, John, 28, 28n25, 28n26, 28n27, 29 Lessay, Franck, 80n57 Lester, Adrian, 178, 179 Levack, Brian, 23n1 Levin, Carole, 50, 50n6, 50n9 Levin, Harry, 215n51 Levin, Richard, 101n19 Levine, Nina, 106, 106n2 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, 117n25 Lewin, Jane E., 140n38 Littlejohns, Richard, 157n28 Lloyd, John Edward, 169n13

Llwyd/Lhuyd, Humphrey, 39, 42, 42n84, 99 Lodge, Thomas, 41n78, 221, 222 Loehlin, James N., 171, 171n16, 171n17 Longstaffe, Stephen, 9n28, 54n29, 55n34 Loomba, Ania, 4n10, 206n27 Lowenthal, David, 10n30, 39, 39n66, 145, 145n44 Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus), 41 Lucas, George, 168, 168n11 Ludwig II, 154 Lyly, John, 67 Lynche, Richard, 46n100 Lyon, David, 176 McAvoy, W.C., 128n3 McDiarmid, Lucy, 188, 188n7 MacDougall, Hugh, 78, 78n47, 78n48, 79n51, 81n57 McEachern, Claire, 5n14, 9n27, 65n8 McFerran, Ann, 182n32 Machan, Tim William, 80n53 Macinnes, Allan I., 9n27, 46n98 McJannet, Linda, 39, 39n68 Macmorris, Captain, 95n13, 165, 166, 170, 171, 173, 174, 178, 224 McMullan, Gordon, 48n107, 109n7 Maguire, Laurie, 6, 10, 10n30, 14, 15, 17, 19, 79n49 Mahood, M.M., 128n3 Major, John, 222 Maley, Willy, 1n3, 5n13, 11, 12, 12n32, 15, 15n38, 24n5, 51n13, 58n44, 66n9, 93n10, 94n12, 131n10, 134n20, 135n24, 147n3, 152n16, 165, 165n2, 167n10, 169n13, 170, 170n14, 170n15, 171n19, 173n24, 207n31 Mandelbrot, Scott, 26n14 Manzoor, Sarfraz, 8n23, 8n24 Marlowe, Christopher, 127n1, 152n15, 188, 222 Marsden, Jean, 133n19 Martin, J.R., 138n34 Martindale, Charles, 27n22, 42n86 Marx, Karl, 61n54 Mason, Roger A., 46n101 Masson, Forbes, 174, 177 Matthews, David, 48n107 Maurice, F.D., 8n24

Index Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 165n3 Mazzio, Carla, 65n8 Meadows, Shane, 149, 214 Mealor, Simon, 132n16 Meek, Richard, 7n21 Metzer, David, 136n28 Michelet, Jules, 148 Middleton, Thomas, 222 Mikalachki, Jodi, 27n19 Miller, E.J., 91n7 Milton, John, 26n15, 53, 53n23, 54, 55, 144 Mirror for Magistrates, 114, 114n19, 114n20, 115 Modood, Tariq, 213n46 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 26n18 Montaigne, Michel de, 37 Moore, J.L., 78n46 Moore, John Robert, 82n59 Moore, Stuart A., 33n47 Morey, James H., 52n18 Morgan, Edwin, 18n46 Morris, William, 222 Mortimer, Edmund, 16, 90, 90n5, 91, 92, 95, 165, 167, 170 Mortimer, Lady, 167, 168, 169, 170 Morton, Herbert, 140, 140n36 Motion, Andrew, 191n13 Muggins, William, 120n32 Muldoon, Paul, 191, 192n15 Murphy, Andrew, 1n3, 3n7, 5n13, 24n5, 147n3 Murray, John Middleton, 61 Mydell, Joseph, 37n59 Myles, Eve, 167, 168, 170 Naiambana, Patrice, 182, 182n33 Nairn, Tom, 7, 7n19, 8, 8n23 Napoleon III, 155, 158n31, 159 Neill, Donald A., 93n11 Neill, Michael, 206, 206n27 Neruda, Pablo, 196 Newey, Vincent, 15n39, 170n15 Noah, 23n2, 46, 46n100 Noble, Adrian, 161n36 Noble, Cecilia, 178 Nora, Pierre, 123n36 Norris, John, 94 North, Thomas, 29, 30n33, 40n72, 40n73

257

O’Connor, John, 178, 179n27 O’Connor, Marion, 203, 203n8, 203n9, 203n12, 204, 204n14 Ohlmeyer, Jane H., 9n27, 46n98 Olivier, Lawrence, 149, 165 Ollard, R.L., 46n97 Onions, C.T., 208, 208n37 Orkin, Martin, 206n27 Orwell, George, 18n45, 134, 134n22, 207n32 Outland, Allison M., 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19 Owen Tudor, 90 Owens, W.R., 12n34, 83n60 Oyelowo, David, 180, 181, 182 Page, George, 66 Palfrey, Simon, 38n65 Parker, Matthew, 78 Parker, Patricia, 5n13, 14, 14n38, 51, 51n13, 93n10, 95, 100n18 Parry, Graham, 26n18, 42n82 Parry, Hubert, 144 Patrizi, Francesco, 28n27 Patterson, Annabel, 9, 9n26 Pavelka, Michael, 167n7 Peacham, Henry, 109, 109n9 Pearsall, Derek, 29n29 Pelling, Margaret, 26n14 Pendergast, John S., 5n13 Penlington, Amanda, 16, 17 Percy, Lady, 168, 169, 170 Perkins, William, 124n38 3¿VWHU0DQIUHG157n28 Phaer, Thomas, 42 Philip II, 53 Phillips, Trevor, 17 Philippy, Patricia, 116, 116n24, 117, 117n26, 120n32 Piesse, Amanda J., 56, 56n40, 60, 60n49 Pilinszky, Janos, 196, 197n29 Pillet-Will, Jacques, 161n36 Pimlott, Steven, 166n7 Piper, Tom, 167, 167n7 Pistol, 14, 87, 89, 92, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 171, 178, 179 Plath, Sylvia, 189, 193 Plutarch, 29, 30n33, 40, 40n72, 40n73 Pocock, John, 1, 1n2, 69n18 Poole, Alan, 141, 142

258

This England, That Shakespeare

Popa, Vasko, 196, 197n29 Powell, Michael, 157 Prendergast, Thomas, 29n29 Pressburger, Emeric, 157 Prior, Charles W.A., 23n1 Prynne, J.H., 44n90 Pujante, Angel Luis, 158n31 Purcell, Henry, 158n30 Puttenham, George, 72n30, 109n10, 193 Rackin, Phyllis, 90n5, 106n2, 165n4 Raine, Craig, 186n3 Raine, Nina, 168n11 Raleigh, Walter, 41, 41n76, 100n18 Raleigh, Sir Walter (scholar), 1, 2, 2n4, 2n5, 4, 5n13, 8, 13, 17, 208, 208n37, 210, 210n40, 211, 216 Rappaport, Steve, 30n37 Rees, Joan, 15n39, 170n15 Reeves, W.P., 206, 206n25 Reid, Christopher, 186n3 Relihan, Constance C., 32n45 Renan, Ernest, 96 Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, 42n83, 205n19 Reynolds, Peter, 169n12, 171, 171n18, 172, 172n20, 173, 173n22, 178, 178n26 Rhodes, Neil, 193, 193n19 Richard II, 35n53, 49, 53, 223 Richards, Jeffrey, 134n22 Richards, Joshua, 174 Rickard, Jane, 7n21 Ricks, Christopher, 188, 189n9 Roach, Joseph, 206, 206n29 Roberts, Neil, 189, 189n10 Roberts, Peter, 1n1 Robinson, Richard, 28, 28n27 Robson, E.W., 157n29 Robson, M.M., 157, 157n29 Roebuck, Thomas, 6, 10, 10n30, 14, 15, 17, 19, 79n49 Rogeboz-Malfroy, Elizabeth, 154n20 Rogers, J.D., 211 Rosier, Joseph, 158 Ross, Alexander, 120n31, 121n33 Rossini, Giacomo, 157 Rowlands, Ifor W., 53n24, 54, 54n27 Rowley, William, 48

Ruggiers, Paul, 29n29 Russell, Conrad, 6, 7n17, 45n95 Sagar, Keith, 188n6 Saint David, 87, 99, 103 Saint George, 6, 13, 17, 17n43, 18, 58, 64, 77, 95, 103, 166, 174, 214 Saint-John Perse (Alexis Saint-Léger Léger), 196 Sanders, Julie, 133n17, 133n19, 137n31, 137n32, 158, 158n31 Sankey, William, 54 Sawyer, Graham, 161n36 Sawyer, Robert, 133n18, 137n30 Scammell, William, 185n1 Schiller, Adrian, 173 Schmidgall, Gary, 155n23 Schnapp, Alain, 26n18 Schrickx, Willem, 37n62 Schwyzer, Philip, 1n3, 12n32, 24n4, 38n64, 66n9, 132n16 Scott, Charles T., 80n53 Scott, James C., 109, 109n12 Scott, Walter, 186, 222, 223 Scruton, Roger, 49, 49n1, 49n2, 60, 130, 130n8, 145n43, 149, 149n6, 202n7, 213n45, 214, 214n48 Sedge, Douglas, 68, 68n15, 68n16, 69, 69n17 Selden, John, 30, 43, 43n87 Sentamu, John, Archbishop of York, 17n43 Shakespeare, William, All’s Well That Ends Well, 18, 194, 195, 196 Antony and Cleopatra, 24, 47 As You Like It, 221 Comedy of Errors, 39n68, 44n93 Coriolanus, 24, 24n7, 40, 40n70, 47 Cymbeline, 7, 24, 24n8, 47, 57, 58, 58n44, 197 Hamlet, 1, 4, 5, 5n13, 13, 63, 63n3, 72n30, 154, 154n21, 154n22, 155, 155n24, 156, 157, 163, 193, 193n20, 198n32, 200, 215, 216n54, 221 1 Henry IV, 9, 89, 90n4, 165, 167, 168, 169n12, 173 2 Henry IV, 31n41, 167n8 Henry V, 12, 14, 14n37, 15, 15n38, 16, 16n41, 18, 49, 51, 51n13, 55,

Index 58, 61, 77, 77n43, 87, 88, 88n2, 89, 90, 92, 93n10, 93n11, 95n13, 96n14, 97n15, 99n17, 100n18, 151, 151n12, 166, 167, 168, 169n12, 170, 171, 171n16, 171n17, 171n18, 171n19, 172, 172n20, 173, 173n22, 178, 178n26 2 Henry VI, 69n17, 71, 80, 179 Julius Caesar, 221 King John, 11, 12, 14, 15, 49–61, 76, 76n40, 76n42, 105, 106, 107, 108n6, 111, 111n13, 116, 120, 120n30, 221 King Lear, 10, 23–4, 25, 27n19, 199 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 76n41 Macbeth, 9n27, 24, 150 The Merchant of Venice, 11, 65, 74n36, 129n6 The Merry Wives of Windsor, 12n32, 66, 221, 222 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 72n30, 150, 156, 157, 158n30, 164, 221 Much Ado About Nothing, 11, 65, 65n8, 67, 68, 71n27, 72, 73, 83, 150 Othello, 224 Pericles, 10, 14, 15, 17, 23–48, 180n31 Richard II, 10, 11, 14, 57, 61, 64, 65n7, 68, 68n15, 76, 77, 81, 88, 88n2, 89, 92, 127, 128n3, 129n6, 132n14, 132n16, 133, 134, 134n22, 147, 148, 148n4, 151, 151n13, 151n14, 152n16, 165, 166n7, 167, 214 Richard III, 14, 55, 105, 106, 108, 108n7, 110, 114, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 123n34, 167, 167n7, 167n9, 180 Romeo and Juliet, 221 The Taming of the Shrew, 71n27, 150 The Tempest, 24, 24n9, 154n20 Timon of Athens, 221 Troilus and Cressida, 9, 47, 47n104 Two Noble Kinsmen, 36 The Winter’s Tale, 12, 77 Shapiro, Barbara, 113n16 Shickman, Allan, 88n2 Shrank, Cathy, 40, 40n70 Sibly, John, 51, 51n15 Sidney, Philip, 4, 28n27

259

Simmons, J.L., 90n5 Simpson, Evelyn, 31n40 Simpson, James, 28, 28n25 Simpson, Percy, 31n40 Singh, Jyotsna, 4n10 Sir John Oldcastle, 100n18 Skeele, David, 32n45 Slights, Camille Wells, 124n39 Slinger, Jonathan, 167n9, 173, 180 Smart, Christopher, 186 Smith, Anthony D., 11n31, 14, 25, 25n13, 45, 202n6, 214 Smith, D. Nichol, 155n25 Smith, G.C. Moore, 205, 206n23 Smith, Iain Duncan, 143, 144 Smith, Jeremy J., 79n53 Smith, Joan, 6n16 Solinus, Julius, 27, 27n21 Soncini, Sara, 157n28 Sonigo, Jérôme, 147n1 Speed, John, 44, 45n94 Speght, Thomas, 29n29, 35, 35n53, 35n54 Spelman, Henry, 42, 43n87 Spenser, Benjamin, 120n31 Spenser, Edmund, 26n15, 60, 90, 90n5, 120n29, 127n1 Spradley, Dana Lloyd, 24, 25n10 Stacey, Caroline M., 67n13 Stallybrass, Peter, 77n45 Starkey, David, 7, 7n18, 83, 83n61 Stephens, Jeremy, 43n87 Stephens, John, 73n31 Stoppard, Tom, 222 Stow, John, 31, 31n39, 31n42, 35, 35n53 Stretton, Tim, 108n5 Stringer, Keith, 45n95 Stubbs, Michael, 146n45 Sugden, J., 143n41 Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 157n28 Sylvester, Joshua, 151 Tannen, Deborah, 137n33 Tashiro, Tom T., 100n18 Tate, Francis, 30n35 Tatius, Achilles, 41, 41n75 Taylor, Gary, 38n63 Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, 45n94

260

This England, That Shakespeare

Thomas, Ambroise, 10, 128n3, 153, 154, 154n20, 155n23, 155n24, 156n27, 157, 158n33, 159, 159n34, 161 Thomas, Dylan, 222, 223 Thomas, Michael, 176 Thompson, Ann, 15n39, 170n15 Thompson, Ayanna, 166n5 Thompson, Geoff, 138n34 Thompson, Mark, 167 Thorne, Alison, 13, 14, 55 Tiffany, Grace, 9n27 Tillyard, E.M.W., 55, 55n36 Tomkins, Tomas, 66n10 Tomlinson, A., 143n41 Tottel, Richard, 186, 189, 191 Trigg, Stephanie, 29n29 Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret, 6, 11, 12, 12n32, 13, 16, 18, 42n85, 71n25, 71n28, 72n30 Tudor, Henry, 91n7, 93 Tudor, Owen, 90, 91n6, 95, 102 Turner, J.M.W., 201 Twyman, Richard, 167n8 Twyne, Brian, 42 Twyne, John, 42, 42n82, 42n83, 43, 43n87, 43n88, 44 Twyne, Laurence, 42, 42n84, 48, 48n106 Twyne, Thomas, 42 Tyndale, John, 50 Uglow, Jenny, 6n16 Unwin, George, 209 Ure, Peter, 151n13 The Valiant Welshman, 47, 48 Valla, Lorenzo, 29n28 Van de Water, Julia C., 59n45 Van Orden, Kate, 120n29 Vaughan, Virginia Mason, 39n68, 50, 51, 51n10, 51n11, 55, 56n38, 59, 59n46, 60, 60n48 Vergil, Polydore, 28 Verstegan, Richard, 42, 42n83, 205n19 Virgil, 42, 42n86, 71n28, 129n6 Vives, Juan Luis, 43 Waith, Eugene, 60, 60n51, 61 Wagner, Richard, 154n22 Walker, Catherine, 173, 175, 176, 177

Wallace, David, 28n25 Waller, Gary, 74n36 Walter, J.H., 87n1, 93n11 Warner, Marina, 119n28 Watkins, Roger, 169, 182 Watson, Nicola J., 158, 158n32 Webster, John, 222 Weissbort, Daniel, 186n4 Wells, Stanley, 166n5 Westward Ho, 15n40 Wheatley, Henry B., 209 Whigham, Frank, 74n36, 75n38 White, Lee, 169n12, 171, 171n18, 172, 172n20, 173, 173n22, 178, 178n26 :KLWH3DXO:KLW¿HOG37n62 White, Peter R.R., 138n34, 138n35 Wilcox, Helen, 15n40 Wilkins, George, 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 44, 48 William III (of Orange), 12, 82 Williams, Glanmor, 91n7 Williams, Penry, 46n97 Williams, Roger, 93, 94, 96, 97n16 Williams, Simon, 156, 156n26 Williamson, Marilyn L., 89, 97, 97n15 Wilmington, Sue, 166n7 Wilson, John Dover, 61, 215, 216 Wilson, Richard, 7, 7n21, 54, 54n29, 55n35 Wilson, Thomas, 66, 66n9, 67n11, 79 Winstanley, Lilian, 5n13 Winter, Guillame, 152n16 Wister, Owen, 206, 206n28 Withington, Phil, 31n37 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 199, 200 Womack, Peter, 102n20 Womersley, David, 51, 51n14, 76, 76n42 Wood, Clive, 181 Wood, Michael, 140, 140n36 Wotton, Nicholas, 43 Wray, Ramona, 1n3, 24n9, 77n43, 147n3 Wright, George T., 63, 63n3, 64n4, 193n20, 198, 198n32 Wright, Patrick, 203, 203n11 Wyatt, Thomas, 186, 189, 191 Yeats, W.B., 186, 188n7, 222, 223 Young, Robert J.C., 2n6, 5n12 Zarka, Yves Charles, 81n57