At Home in Shakespeare's Tragedies

Geraldo U. de Sousa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754668862
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317177661
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Bringing together methods, assumptions and approaches from a variety of disciplines, Geraldo U. de Sousa's innovative study explores the representation, perception, and function of the house, home, household, and family life in Shakespeare's great tragedies. Concentrating on King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, de Sousa's examination of the home provides a fresh look at material that has been the topic of fierce debate. Through a combination of textual readings and a study of early modern housing conditions, accompanied by analyses that draw on anthropology, architecture, art history, the study of material culture, social history, theater history, phenomenology, and gender studies, this book demonstrates how Shakespeare explores the materiality of the early modern house and evokes domestic space to convey interiority, reflect on the habits of the mind, interrogate everyday life, and register elements of the tragic journey. Specific topics include the function of the disappearance of the castle in King Lear, the juxtaposition of home-centered life in Venice and nomadic, 'unhoused' wandering in Othello, and the use of special lighting effects to reflect this relationship, Hamlet's psyche in response to physical space, and the redistribution of domestic space in Macbeth. Images of the house, home, and household become visually and emotionally vibrant, and thus reflect, define, and support a powerful tragic narrative.

Chapter 1
The Vanishing Castle in King Lear

An empty space makes it possible for a new phenomenon to come to life

—Peter Brook, The Open Door (4).1

The small worlds of direct experience are fringed with much broader fields known indirectly through symbolic means

—Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place (88).2

In Forest Fire (c. 1505), a painting at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Florentine Piero di Cosimo (1462–1521) depicts a forest fire, which scatters domestic and wild animals. The flames consume trees and bushes, and smoke reaches up to the clouds. Flocks of birds fly overhead or seek safe trees to perch upon. Animals flee in different directions; whereas others stand as in a daze or seem unaware of danger. A shepherd guides farm animals back to a cottage, where excited human figures gesticulate. In his analysis, Richard Turner writes: “A freak of nature, a forest fire, governs activity in this world.”3 He suggests that a copse of trees blocks the view and directs one’s eyes to the central area, where the fire “rages,” and “From here, the line of vision is forced to shoot off towards the horizon on two different tangents.”4 Turner writes of a “paradox that permeates much of Piero’s work,” combining the sinister threat posed by the fire, and the “disarmingly naïve” presence of a man moving “about the landscape as King of the animals but little better than an animal himself. This world of flame, soot, and death is presented in clear and forceful imagery, so that the least thought of the nostalgic or delicate is throttled within us.”5 The great visual impact of the painting depends on creating both a sense of order, represented by the cottage, and images of turmoil, represented by the fire, the scattering of the animals, and the admixture of both docile livestock and wild fauna.

Indeed, fire, tornado, hurricane, earthquake, flood, military action, and other man-made or natural disasters may damage or destroy human habitations and cause much suffering and upheaval. In usage dating to 1509, such dreadful calamities and disasters have become synonymous with tragedy.6 In everyday life, mortgages are foreclosed, and creditors repossess houses. In actual life, houses and castles also get damaged or destroyed, but they do not simply vanish into thin air. In folklore and literary creations, they do, as Andrew Marvell reminds us, “ … when th’ enchantment ends / The castle vanishes or rends.”7 In the story of the Grail, the Fisher King’s deserted castle vanishes when Perceval on horseback jumps over the rising drawbridge and gallops away toward the forest, having failed to seek an explanation for the mysterious sights and events of the night before.8 In Buchedd Collen Sant (c. 1536), Saint Collen is invited to visit the rich and marvelous castle of Gwyn, a mighty sovereign on a golden throne. All sorts of well-appointed courtiers, servitors, minstrels, musicians, and handsome youths riding priceless steeds give the saint a hearty welcome.9 Suspecting that the king and courtiers are evil spirits, Saint Collen refuses a tempting invitation to an elegant banquet. Collen “sprinkles holy water” all around, and “the castle vanishes, leaving nothing but the green tussocks.”10 According to Roger Loomis, Annwn, the palace of the deities of the ancient Welsh, was believed to appear and then disappear in a familiar landscape; and the dwellers of Annwn were always “noted for their hospitality; the place abounded in treasure, particularly in costly vessels for the service of the table.”11 In Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Britomart binds Busirane and frees Amoret. As she exits the house of Busirane, the rooms and the rich furnishings of the house vanish behind her: “those goodly roomes, which erst / She saw so rich and royally arayd, / Now vanisht vtterly, and cleane subuerst / She found, and all their glory quite decayd.”12

Likewise, in Shakespeare’s King Lear, I submit, Lear’s castle too vanishes, mysteriously and puzzlingly, to great dramatic and emotional consequences. I accept Linda Woodbridge’s statement that “Lear’s vanishing castle is more than a textual crux,” but not her explanation: “that [Lear] never considers, when his daughters close up their houses, simply going back to the castle where the opening scenes took place suggests the text’s commitment to homelessness as a theme.”13 I argue that Lear’s castle vanishes in a way similar to the disappearance of the abodes of the Fisher King, Gwyn, Annwn, or Busirane, without any association with homelessness. Therefore, I propose that the disappearance or erasure of Lear’s castle, home, and domestic sphere constitutes the central phenomenon around which the experience of dwelling revolves. I want to link the disappearing castle, a literary tour-de-force and the equivalent of a theatrical special effect, to a change in housing conditions, a crisis of patriarchal authority, and the disintegration of a way of life.

I am particularly interested in Lear’s domestic space and the extent to which Shakespeare connects perception to tragedy’s radical dislocation of habits of mind. When Lear divides his kingdom and casts out Cordelia, he also dismantles all the certainties that anchor his daily life. Lear presumably disposes of his abode, along with his throne, but in actuality the text remains silent on this issue. All that we know for certain is that Lear’s castle fades from the characters’ consciousness, seemingly vanishing into thin air. Christian Norberg Schuz writes that home, being a primary site of “meaningful events of our existence,” provides “points of departure from which we orient ourselves and take possession of the environment.”14 The disappearance of Lear’s castle from the characters’ consciousness signals a drastic disorienting effect that goes to the core of this tragedy: Shakespeare takes us to the shifting, unstable, idiosyncratic realm of perceptual space. Nothing can ever again be as it was.

In this play, a tragic nexus hinges on voids that the disappearance of Lear’s domestic space and the fragmentation of Lear’s affective domain create. To fill the voids, other places—the houses of Goneril, Gloucester, and Regan, and the hovel—become the focus of attention, revealing the sharp divide between inside and outside, indoors and outdoors. Awakened female sexual desire threatens to disrupt the household and subvert the integrity of the family. To a large extent, King Lear conforms to Jean Howard’s characterization of Jacobean tragedy in general: “By contrast, tragedies, particularly those of the first Jacobean decades, narrativize the decline and fall of once dominant groups rather than the emergence of new ones.”15 In this play, the shift from Lear’s castle to his daughters’ houses embodies and symbolizes a reshuffling of the social order.

Historical Contexts

Home can be a castle, a sumptuous palace or country house, an urban townhouse, a cabin in the Flint Hills of Kansas, a black tent in the Maghreb, a mud hut in the Congo, or a shack in a Rio de Janeiro favela. These architectural structures provide shelter and protection from the elements; serve as center of family life; and, according to a Kirgiz proverb, become a sanctuary: “A man’s tent is like a god’s temple.”16 At times, it might be instructive to strip all human abodes down to elemental functions, as it might also to historicize major changes in housing conditions and availability in the early modern period. My discussion of King Lear emphasizes both.

As Arthur Fairchild, Lena Cowen Orlin, and others have argued, the dissolution of the monasteries and other policies introduced under Henry VIII precipitated a major redistribution of lands and spurred a construction boom in England.17 According to Fairchild, the erection of new churches had practically ceased and of public buildings had barely begun, with the exception of the Royal Exchange.18 Architectural innovation, made possible by new wealth, reflected fundamental changes under way:

The feudal castle or castellated mansion, with its moat, its fortified entrance, its high walls, and its narrow windows, all designed for protection against an enemy, was no longer felt to be necessary; and it rapidly gave way to the Elizabethan manor house or hall, an E or H open type of structure, which was designed to be a home. The castle, frigid, formidable, and forbidding in its external features, was replaced by a house which was hospitable, inviting, and attractive—a fit setting for a gentleman and an implied compliment to its occupant and its invited guest.19

The Tudor period witnessed “the decay of the old architectural form of the feudal lord’s fortress,”20 so much so that “castle” would become a proverbial metaphor for the early modern house, which was no longer a military fortress but rather a human habitation: “A man’s house is his castle.”21 Social and economic changes, developments in warfare technology, and more effective defense strategies were making such medieval fortifications obsolete. “The new architecture was domestic. Mansions and great houses sprang up all over England.”22 Architectural innovations simultaneously derived from as well as ushered in new expectations and new degrees of comfort, privacy, individualism, and subjectivity.23 This “architectural revolution,” as Lena Orlin puts it, reflects “a higher standard of living, increased physical comfort, more individual privacy, and the segregation of laboring and domestic life, and more household spaces, each with specialized functions.”24 According to Mary Thomas Crane, the changes created “unstable boundaries,” and also elicited considerable “anxiety” about the potential of women as “producers”—“of income, goods, children”—and their roles as “caretakers” and “preservers of money, goods, and offspring produced by the husband.”25 The word “housewife,” adds Crane, epitomizes those unstable, contested boundaries, signifying simultaneously a woman “who manages her household with skill and thrift” and “a light, worthless, or pert woman or girl.”26

Two definitions of home help contextualize the changes. In The Elements of Architecture (1624), a compilation of European architectural writings, such as those of Leon Batista Alberti, Sir Henry Wotton describes what the house represents in a person’s life:

Every Mans proper Mansion House and Home, being the Theater of his Hospitality, the Seate of Selfe-fruition, the Comfortablest part of his own Life, the Noblest of his Sonnes Inheritance, a kinde of priuate Princedome; Nay, to the Possessors thereof, an Epitomie of the whole World: may well deserue by these Attributes, according to the degree of the Master, to be decently and delightfully adorned.27

In Wotton’s formulation, the house embodies family life and household, hospitality, self-realization and security, comfort, a financial investment and legacy, a “private princedom,” and a microcosm. Reflecting deeply-ingrained contemporary notions of privacy and domesticity, which had been evolving since the Renaissance, Gaston Bachelard, however, writes: “our house is our corner of the world,” and the house is “our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.”28 The early modern house embodies both the death of the medieval castle and the birth of the modern home. In the Tudor and early Stuart periods, “England began to house itself.”29 In this context, Lear fails to negotiate the shift from the medieval castle to the early modern house, being unprepared to make the transition from an unflinchingly patriarchal household to an emerging wider diversity of households, which, though still functioning within patriarchal systems, might be headed by women, and new domestic arrangements in which husband and wife might—increasingly—share domestic responsibilities.

Lear’s Castle and Household

In Act I, Lear refers to his “court,” where both France and Burgundy have made their long amorous sojourn, although the seventeenth-century editions of the play do not specify the location of the scene. Modern editions locate the first scene in the throne or audience room in Lear’s palace. Kenneth Muir in his 1952 Arden edition of the play gives the location of the scene in a stage direction: “A State Room in King Lear’s Palace.”30 R.A. Foakes, in his 1997 new Arden Shakespeare edition, does not give ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Vanishing Castle in King Lear
• 2 Unhoused in Othello:Roots, Routes and the Edge of Darkness
• 3 At Home in Hamlet
• 4 Boundaries of Home in Macbeth
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index