Shakespearean Territories

Stuart Elden

• Editorial: University of Chicago Press
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226559223
• Categoría: Literatur
• Categoría: Literaturkritik

Shakespeare was an astute observer of contemporary life, culture, and politics. The emerging practice of territory as a political concept and technology did not elude his attention. In Shakespearean Territories, Stuart Elden reveals just how much Shakespeare's unique historical position and political understanding can teach us about territory. Shakespeare dramatized a world of technological advances in measuring, navigation, cartography, and surveying, and his plays open up important ways of thinking about strategy, economy, the law, and colonialism, providing critical insight into a significant juncture in history. Shakespeare's plays explore many territorial themes: from the division of the kingdom in King Lear, to the relations among Denmark, Norway, and Poland in Hamlet, to questions of disputed land and the politics of banishment in Richard II. Elden traces how Shakespeare developed a nuanced understanding of the complicated concept and practice of territory and, more broadly, the political-geographical relations between people, power, and place. A meticulously researched study of over a dozen classic plays, Shakespearean Territories will provide new insights for geographers, politicaltheorists, and Shakespearean scholars alike.

CHAPTER ONE

Divided Territory:

The Geo-politics of King Lear

“Divided in their dire division”

As subsequent chapters will show in more detail, many of Shakespeare’s fairly rare uses of the word “territories” have a sense close to “lands.” People are banished from territories, welcomed into them, or ownership is asserted or disputed. Some of the instances come in the early Henry VI plays. Together with Richard III these plays are now known as Shakespeare’s first tetralogy, though they are unlikely to have been conceived as that while being written. Division of territories is a key theme through these four texts. The plays are episodic, covering a large part of the reign and overthrow of the king, but some key themes can be identified. In particular, the division of territories becomes ever more tightly focused throughout their dramatic action. Part 1—possibly written after the other two parts—concerns the wars with France, and part 2 the wars internal to England, while part 3 focuses even more tightly on the splits between the rival families of York and Lancaster. In Richard III the eponymous character murders many of his own family members to claim and maintain the throne, before being overthrown by Henry Tudor, who becomes King Henry VII and unites the families of York and Lancaster through marriage.

In Henry VI, Part 1, the gains made by Henry V are shown to be very fragile, and the Earl of Suffolk promises the territories of Anjou and Maine to France in order to secure Margaret of Anjou’s wedding to the young king. He is greeted by the Reignier, the Duke of Anjou, with “Welcome, brave earl, into our territories,”1 and concedes, “That is her ransom. I deliver her, / And those two counties I will undertake / Your grace shall well and quietly enjoy.”2 Richard, Duke of York, bemoans the loss of these lands, gained by bloodshed and now given away in “effeminate peace,” and anticipates “the utter loss of all the realm of France.”3 Charles the Dauphin anticipates this weakness, arguing that he is already “possessed / With more than half the Gallian territories,” and intends to become “viceroy of the whole.”4 In other words, he already holds more than half as “lawful king,” and is unwilling to exchange the reverence he gets for this status with the control of the whole in a less senior role.5

This story continues into Henry VI, Part 2, where the “articles of contracted peace” are read in the opening scene. Among them is the clause that says, “the duchy of Anjou and the county of Maine shall be released and delivered to the King her father.”6 The Duke of Gloucester admits he cannot bear to see the territories gained by his brother’s wars given away so easily. He fears the loss of all France, something that comes to pass later in the play when the Duke of Somerset says, “That all your interest in those territories / Is utterly bereft you; all is lost.”7 Gloucester is accused of treason, and blamed for the loss, and later murdered. But the King eventually agrees that the Duke of Suffolk is “banished fair England’s territories.”8 Salisbury says that this needs to be done to appease the people.

In Henry VI, Part 3, the struggle is over who should be king of England. Henry declares:

I am the son of Henry the Fifth,

Who made the Dauphin and the French to stoop

And seized upon their towns and provinces.9

Warwick replies that he should “Talk not of France, sith thou has lost it all,”10 which Henry blames on others in his childhood: “The Lord Protector lost it and not I. / When I was crowned I was but nine months old.”11 While most of the focus in these plays is on elite struggles, Henry VI, Part 2 also has a class struggle, led by Jack Cade. Cade leads a revolt of working men to London, though he is defeated by the aristocracy. Cade flees to the country, and through hunger seeks food in a private garden. There he is confronted by the owner and killed. As Stephen Greenblatt has noted, in this scene, “status relations . . . are being transformed before our eyes into property relations.”12

At the very end of Richard III, Henry Tudor surveys the battlefield, and seeks to create a new state of affairs in England. He remarks:

We will unite the white rose and the red. . . .

England hath long been mad, and scarred herself:

The brother blindly shed the brother’s blood;

The father rashly slaughtered his own son;

The son, compelled, been butcher to the sire.

All this divided York and Lancaster,

Divided in their dire division. . . .

Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord,

That would reduce these bloody days again

And make poor England weep in streams of blood.

Let them not live to taste this land’s increase

That would with treason wound this fair land’s peace

Now civil wounds are stopped; peace lives again.

That she may long live here, God say amen.13

This is an interesting and powerful passage, seeking to mend the broken land of which he has become king. The two roses of York and Lancaster symbolized the division of the Plantagenet family. One couplet has caused editors and commentators some pause, because it seems like the Folio’s “Divided, in their dire division” may be corrupted. York and Lancaster are “united” in their division, the one thing that they share; and indeed some editions of the text emend in this way (Norton and Oxford). The Norton edition glosses the emended line as “joined by hatred, having nothing in common but mutual antagonism.”14 Jacques Lezra has provided a particularly interesting reading of these lines.15 This speech is, for Lezra, “perhaps the least equivocal assertion of the so-called Tudor myth of history to be found in Shakespeare’s work and surely his most obscure treatment of political ‘division.’”16

It is important to recognize that the earlier Quarto text is not quite the same, reading “Deuided in their dire deuision,”17 which Lezra suggests provides “a nice play on device.18 How important this technology might be is unclear. The division is not just between York and Lancaster, but within them, as Richard III has especially shown. For Lezra, “surely this would suggest, not that ‘dire division’ divided the two camps, but rather that York and Lancaster shared at least this: that both camps were divided, each within each, each against the other.”19 In joining together the two roses, the two families, through his marriage to Elizabeth, Richmond is clearly trying to unite something that has been divided. Lezra argues that “the ‘dire’ political division between York and Lancaster and within each camp has now been replaced by ‘union’ between two distinct orders of submission: the ‘submission’ of the subjects to the sovereign, and the ‘submission’ of his (or her) speech to the ‘fair ordinance’ and the ‘will’ of God.”20 In addition, Richard’s brief reign was a division between legitimate kings, “the division that Richard provoked in the fabric of British history, which Richmond now heals,”21 a lineage that Richmond seeks to rejoin in his accession to the throne. “We who listen to Richmond are in consequence divided from Richard’s division and from the divisions shared by York and Lancaster, apart from them and united as a result of this division from ‘division.’”22 But all this is division within the kingdom, not division of the kingdom.

In contrast, King Lear is divided within, and divided between. It is a remarkable play about space and in particular the politics of space. The focus of this chapter is what might be called the “geo-politics” of King Lear, its politics of earth, of land, of the geo. This focus has three parts: the opening scene with its division of territory, the wider politics of land in the play, and the more figurative use of the term “earth.”

“Interest of territory, cares of state”

The most intriguing of the passages from the Henry VI plays concerning “territories” is the report from Lord Somerset: “That all your interest in those territories / Is utterly bereft you; all is lost.”23 “Interest” here clearly shows that there is a political issue beyond a more economic one, control over and legal title to, rather than simple possession.24 It also has a sense of the terrain over which, and for which, a struggle of competing forces may take place. This passage is strikingly similar to the way the word “territory” is used in King Lear. In the play’s opening scene, Lear is conducting a ceremonial division of his kingdom between his three daughters and their husbands. Along with As You Like It, this is one of only two plays in which the singular “territory” is used by Shakespeare, though here notably only in the Folio text. The first thing that Lear says is that Gloucester should “attend the Lords of France and Burgundy,”25 suitors for his youngest daughter’s hand. He then begins:

Meantime, we shall express our darker purpose.

Give me the map there. Know that we have divided

In three our kingdom; and ’tis our fast intent

To shake all cares and business from our age,

Conferring them on younger strengths, while we

Unburdened crawl toward death. Our son of Cornwall,

And you, our no less loving son of Albany,

We have this hour a constant will to publish

Our daughters’ several dowers, that future strife

May be prevented now.

The two great princes, France and Burgundy,

Great rivals in our youngest daughter’s love,

Long in our court have made their amorous sojourn,

And here are to be answered. Tell me, my daughters—...