Renaissance Drama on the Edge

Lisa Hopkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317066576
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Recurring to the governing idea of her 2005 study Shakespeare on the Edge, Lisa Hopkins expands the parameters of her investigation beyond England to include the Continent, and beyond Shakespeare to include a number of dramatists ranging from Christopher Marlowe to John Ford. Hopkins also expands her notion of liminality to explore not only geographical borders, but also the intersection of the material and the spiritual more generally, tracing the contours of the edge which each inhabits. Making a journey of its own by starting from the most literally liminal of physical structures, walls, and ending with the wholly invisible and intangible, the idea of the divine, this book plots the many and various ways in which, for the Renaissance imagination, metaphysical overtones accrued to the physically liminal.

PART I
What is an Edge?

Chapter 1

Walls:
The Edge of Territory

Walls are quintessentially liminal, both literally, in that they mark the boundary between one sort of territory or property and another, and metaphorically, in that they are themselves inherently susceptible to uncertainty about whether they are keeping things in or keeping things out. Militarily, they had of course always been significant, and also symbolic. The walls of the castle built by Edward I at Caernarfon were designed by his architect Master James of St George to evoke those of Constantinople and thus to speak of imperial power and the transmission of cultural heritage from classical Rome; the wall of Flint Castle from which Richard II descends in the play named after him becomes an emblem of both the rank which he is about to forfeit and the power which is about to be taken from him. Domestically, the garden wall was becoming an increasingly important feature of grander houses, not least because of what Roy Strong calls Inigo Jones’s ‘most enduring and delightful innovation, the garden gate’.¹ Walls of castles might seem to be built primarily for defence and walls of gardens primarily for reasons of status, but elements of the function of their opposites here bleed into each of them, in ways which serve to make the wall as a category seem oddly permeable. In this chapter, I want to show this first by examining the strangely and subversively domesticated walls of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and then by turning to Marlowe’s more openly militarised and yet also ultimately psychologised use of the idea of the wall, particularly in two plays which are not Roman but are nevertheless conditioned by and responding to ideas of Romanitas, the two parts of Tamburlaine the Great.

The pairing of these two ostensibly very different treatments of walls may seem an odd one, not least because the Tamburlaine plays, as I have already noted, are not Roman plays. However, I have argued elsewhere that there are a number of intersections between the figure of Tamburlaine and the figure of Julius Caesar,² and Tamburlaine and Coriolanus also have much in common: both are dedicated and ruthless killers and both valorise their personal identities at the expense of any national or territorial loyalties, but both also prove surprisingly susceptible to the wishes of a woman, even if it is his mother who influences Coriolanus and his wife who influences Tamburlaine. Most notably, both are associated with the destabilising and undoing of edges and boundaries. This may seem counter-intuitive, because Coriolanus is a hero whose life is defined and structured by two opposing cities and the walls which demarcate them as separate, while Tamburlaine acquires if anything something of an association with the idea of protecting and marking boundaries.³ Nevertheless, Coriolanus proves to be insistently associated both intradiegetically and, I argue, extradiegetically with systematic inversion of the boundaries marked by walls, and situating the Tamburlaine plays within the context of Marlowe’s treatment of the topic across his oeuvre reveals the associations of fragility and permeability which habitually accrue to his representations of walls. Collectively, these two heroes mount a two-pronged attack on the concept of the wall, with Coriolanus riddling the distinction between domestic and military and the Tamburlaine plays troubling that between the boundary of the city and the boundary of the self, and by implication that between the physical and the psychological more generally. Coriolanus and Tamburlaine are two heroes who metaphorically erect walls in front of their own psyches in that both strive (with considerable success) to appear invulnerable, but to read them in terms of the ways their respective plays interact with the idea of actual walls paradoxically offers us a way to glimpse behind these psychic walls at the same time as it affords a perspective on the more general dynamics of the demarcation between the relationships of individual to household and of household to state.

Coriolanus: The Walls of Rome and the Walls of Home

The walls of Rome, the building of which had led its founder Romulus to kill his twin brother Remus, were particularly iconic; thus Warren Chernaik notes that ‘In Livy and in Plutarch, the story of Coriolanus includes at the beginning an incident omitted by Shakespeare: the physical withdrawal of a large number of plebeians to the Sacred Mount, outside Rome, complaining “that the rich men had driven them out of the cittie”’.⁴ The walls divided the living from the dead and what was Roman from what was not Roman; however Romanitas was always inherently double, as the myth of the city’s foundation by twins attests and as Coriolanus itself powerfully registers, and there are, I think, strong reasons why Shakespeare would not want to evoke so clear a demarcation as existed in his sources between Roman and non-Roman space. The walls of Rome are certainly important in Coriolanus, but perhaps not in ways we would expect, for Coriolanus is an oddity. It is a Roman play, but has no obvious political agenda: as James Kuzner observes, ‘Advancing a prorepublican reading of Coriolanus ... is quite difficult to do’,⁵ but one that supports the opposite position is equally hard to sustain. Coriolanus himself is a Roman, but also a refuser of Rome: the character of Volumnia means that he personally embodies the myth of mothering by the she-wolf, but his image of the gosling refuses that of the geese who saved the city. The play is a tragedy, but it has no soliloquy. Moreover, some of the speeches its hero does make strike a distinctly odd note. Take for instance his apparently defiant declaration,

Let them pull all about mine ears, present me

Death on the wheel or at wild horses’ heels,

Or pile ten hills on the Tarpeian rock,

That the precipitation might down stretch

Below the beam of sight, yet will I still

Be thus to them.⁶

Coriolanus here echoes Hamlet in the reference to piling hills upon each other and the Dover cliff scene of King Lear in the idea of something stretching beyond sight, but he prefaces the whole with the ludicrous and transparently petulant ‘Let them pull all about mine ears’. Even more striking is his wish that ‘All the contagion of the south light on you, / You shames of Rome! You herd of – Boils and plagues / Plaster you o’er’ (1.4.30–33), for here he closely anticipates Caliban:

As wicked dew as ere my mother brushed

With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen

Drop on you both. A southwest blow on ye

And blister you all o’er.⁷

‘Plaster you o’er’, ‘blister you all o’er’ – there is nothing to choose here between the Roman military machine and the island-bred savage. Later in the same speech, Coriolanus hopes that the Roman soldiers will ‘infect one another’ (34) and says that they have ‘run / From slaves that apes would beat’ (36–7); Caliban wishes that ‘All the infections that the sun sucks up’ (2.2.1) may fall on Prospero and complains that his master’s spirits chase him ‘Sometime like apes that mow and chatter at me’ (2.2.9), so that he is in his own person a slave whom apes beat. Given the extent to which Coriolanus thus anticipates Caliban, it would certainly seem difficult to read this sulky curser as a tragic hero.

A paradigm into which Coriolanus may well seem to fit more comfortably is that of the soldier with no war to fight. This is a figure which cuts across generic demarcations: Shakespeare is interested in the disruption caused by men in this category in plays as diverse as Much Ado About Nothing, Othello and Titus Andronicus. Here too though Coriolanus is an oddity. In Much Ado, Othello and Titus, the temporary absence of an external threat allows soldiers to remain at home, where their actions cruelly expose and ultimately destroy the fragility of the domestic balance which their military efforts have been dedicated to defending. The situation in Coriolanus is different in two crucial respects.

In the first place, it is unclear that Rome at the stage at which Shakespeare depicts it actually faces any consistent or meaningful external threat any more. Certainly there are skirmishes with the Volsces, but all the indications are that they are easily beaten off before Coriolanus joins and strengthens them. Moreover, although the Ralph Fiennes film refers to the tensions between the Romans and the Volsces as an ‘ancient border dispute’, there is no clear indication of what demarcates or differentiates one territory from the other, and it is in fact abundantly clear that the Volsces are in any case already on the verge of being subsumed into the Roman Empire. This is a play of inversion and destabilisation: Coriolanus may regard himself as being in his own person an edge, but the language in which he expresses this belief undoes itself as he threatens, ‘He that retires, I’ll take him for a Volsce, / And he shall feel mine edge’ (1.4.28–9), suggesting the radical instability of the very distinction between Romans and non-Romans which is crucial to his cause and indeed at this stage to his raison d’être. Aufidius may call him ‘most absolute sir’ (4.3.159), but the more appropriate term for him would in fact be ‘relative’; it is only the consuls of the people who may deploy an ‘absolute “shall”’ (3.1.90) and draw absolute borderlines, as when Brutus says ‘It will be dangerous to go on. No further’ (3.1.26). Coriolanus himself inhabits a world of dizzying inversion in which nothing is what it seems:

I would they were barbarians, as they are,

Though in Rome littered; not Romans, as they are not,

Though calved i’th’porch o’th’Capitol.

(3.1.237–9)

Here boundaries of both nation and species are called into question as words more normally associated with animals – ‘littered’, ‘calved’ – are applied to humans and as location proves to provide no secure guarantee of identity. At the end of his time in Rome, Coriolanus finds indeed that inversion is all he has to fall back on as he seeks to turn the tables on his opponents by declaring, ‘I banish you’ (3.3.123).

Nor are these the only signs of dislocation and of lack of demarcation and of secure boundaries. Throughout the play, images of reversal and of the monstrous abound. The Third Citizen fears that ‘for the multitude to be ingrateful were to make a monster of the multitude’ (2.3.9–11), and Coriolanus himself expostulates to the citizens that ‘He that trusts to you, / Where he should find you lions, finds you hares; / Where foxes, geese’ (1.1.168–70), presumably with reference to the board game Fox and Geese, popular since mediaeval times, in which one player is given only one piece, known as the fox, while the other has seventeen which are the geese, and which would be reduced to an absurdity if the player with the fox tried to make it function as one of the geese. The image of geese recurs when he castigates his soldiers:

You souls of geese

That bear the shapes of men, how have you run

From slaves that apes would beat! Pluto and hell!

All hurt behind!

(1.4.34–8)

Here what should be before is behind, but Coriolanus’ remedy for this situation also produces inversion as the gate closes behind him and he is shut alone into the city, while Menenius says to Sicinius and Brutus ‘You talk of pride. O that you could turn your eyes toward the napes of your necks, and make but an interior survey of your good selves!’ (2.1.36–8). This time, what should be inside is outside, but on other occasions, wh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I What is an Edge?
• Part II The Edge of the Nation
• Part III Invisible Edges
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index