Shakespeare and the Politics of Nostalgia

Negotiating the Memory of Elizabeth I on the Jacobean Stage

Yuichi Tsukada

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350067233
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

In 1603, Queen Elizabeth I died and King James I inherited the English throne. During James's reign, England continued to hark back to Elizabeth, comparing him with his predecessor – not always in a way that was either flattering or pleasing to James. Critics have traditionally assumed that Shakespeare avoided involving himself in this discourse. In this study of Shakespeare's Jacobean plays, however, Yuichi Tsukada demonstrates that, far from not involving himself in the phenomenon of nostalgia for Elizabeth, Shakespeare interacted closely with retrospective writings on Elizabeth and illuminated the complex politics behind the nostalgia. Based upon close readings of Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Cymbeline and Henry VIII, together with a range of plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries, including Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, George Chapman, John Marston, Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson, the book traces the ongoing cultural negotiation of the memory of Elizabeth. Yuichi Tsukada offers fresh insights into enigmatic aspects of Shakespeare's Jacobean drama. For instance, what was the original significance of the two contentious prophecies – 'none of woman born' and the march of Birnam Wood – in Macbeth? Or that of the seemingly out-of-place triumphal procession of Volumnia near the tragic end of Coriolanus? Although her memory recurred in all forms of discourse throughout the first decade of James's reign, the impact of this cultural undercurrent on Shakespeare's Jacobean drama has been ignored or underestimated. Shakespeare and the Politics of Nostalgia reveals the unnoticed richness of Shakespeare's Jacobean drama by focusing on the growing cultural and political nostalgia for England's dead queen.

1

Macbeth: Performing a Caesarean Section on the Mother Country

James I’s accession and British union

James I’s accession to the English throne in 1603 marked significant governmental and monarchical changes. His succession to Elizabeth I effectively achieved the Union of the Crowns, yet James had no intention to stop there; he proclaimed that the two kingdoms, Scotland and England, should be fully united as one nation.¹ As a symbolic step towards full union, James declared:

Wee have thought good to discontinue the divided names of England and Scotland out of our Regall Stile, and doe intend and resolve to take and assume unto Us is maner and forme hereafter expressed, The Name and Stile of KING OF GREAT BRITTAINE, including therein according to the trueth, the whole Island.²

The image of James as the king of Great Britain was publicized throughout the realm; an accession medal of 1603 portrayed James’s bust with an inscription that says, ‘James I, Emperor of the whole island of Britain and King of France and Ireland’, and the common coinage that circulated from 1604 similarly presented him with the title of ‘king of Great Britain’.³ At the end of 1604, a parliamentary commission composed a proposal for full union, and thereafter James’s vision of Great Britain was debated across the realm.

As Kevin Curran puts it, ‘one of the first steps James took in his project to unite England and Scotland was performed at the linguistic level’, and the language of union ‘played a crucial role in the early stages of James’s new British policy’.⁴ Many writers took part in creating this language of union; the political discourse of those who supported James’s project can be characterized by their use of ancient myths and prophecies. They compared James to key historical and legendary figures, such as Augustus Caesar, the Roman emperor who united different regions into one majestic empire, David, the king who governed both Israel and Judah, King Arthur, the defender of the ancient British kingdom, and Aeneas, the forefather of the Roman Empire.⁵ The association of James with such figures served to represent him as the founder of the British empire. In this light, another significant figure with whom James was often associated is Brutus, the legendary Trojan founder of ancient Britain. In A Prophesie of Cadwallader (1604), William Herbert praises James as the ‘second Brute’, who ‘with peace and ioy’ came to unite Britain, implying that the union by the second Brute would be even more promising than the short-lived union by ‘Britaines first Monarch warlike Brute’, who first united the British Isles ‘with fire and sword’.⁶ In Poly-Olbion (1612), Michael Drayton writes that ‘the Isle shall be stiled with Brutes name, and the name of strangers shall perish: as it is in Merlins prophecies’.⁷ These passages exemplify pro-unionist discourse since they establish a relationship for James not only with ancient legend but also with the political prophecies that were widely popular in the early Jacobean period.

Ancient prophecies were often used to legitimize the authority and policy of the monarch in early modern England; Henry VIII and Elizabeth I both capitalized on such prophecies during their reigns.⁸ Such prophecies were usually re-edited and interpreted according to political exigencies. Sharon L. Jansen Jaech observes that ‘although these so-called prophecies pretended to be ancient predictions made by reputed prophets, they were, in truth, potent political propaganda circulated to influence popular opinion’.⁹ In other words, ancient prophecies often functioned as an ideological device to propagate the policy of the sovereign. James and his encomiasts attempted to present his project for Great Britain as the culmination of ancient British prophecies.¹⁰ A notable example is The Whole Prophesie of Scotland, England, and Somepart of France, and Denmark (1603), which was published upon James’s accession by James’s printer Robert Waldegrave. The Whole Prophesie, a collection of so-called ancient prophecies, not only attempts to justify James’s accession to the English throne but also embellishes his notion of Great Britain; for example, a prophecy which is attributed to Thomas the Rymer, the thirteenth-century Scottish prophet, foretells the foundation of the British empire by Bruce’s descendant, James I: ‘a French wife shall beare the Son, / Shall rule all Britaine to the sea, / that of the Bruces blood shall come’.¹¹ This type of prophetic representation of James’s empire was not unusual in the pageants and court masques in the early years of James’s reign. Keith Thomas points out that ‘political prophecies tended to be invoked at a time of crisis, usually to demonstrate that some drastic change, either desired or already accomplished, had been foreseen by the sages of the past’.¹² The re-editing and reinterpretation of ancient prophecies in Jacobean discourse played a vital part in propagating and legitimizing the grand political transition from Tudor England to Stuart Great Britain.

Political prophecies equally played an essential role in theatre, particularly in Shakespeare’s plays; Shakespeare’s knowledge of the significance of prophecies is vividly demonstrated, for example, in the opening scene of Richard III (1592) where Gloucester forges and circulates a prophecy about the treason against King Edward IV in an attempt to remove his brother Clarence from the line of succession (1.1.32–61). As we will see, however, it is in his Jacobean drama that Shakespeare most fully included political prophecies. Given the surge of interest in prophecies at the time of James’s accession, it is not surprising that Macbeth (1606), a play which specifically features James’s Scottish ancestry, places prophecy at the centre of its dramaturgy.¹³ Macbeth was written soon after the grand dynastic transition from the Tudors to the Stuarts, and had specific ties with James, whose interests in witchcraft and the theory of divine kingship were well known through his publications. Many critics have attempted to link the play with this historical and political context by demonstrating, for example, how Shakespeare might have satisfied his patron’s interests by featuring witches and their witchcraft and by staging the procession of the eight Stuart kings in Act 4 Scene 1.¹⁴ It is hardly surprising that Macbeth has been singled out as a key play in many studies that examine Shakespeare’s commitment to Jacobean political issues. Especially since new historicists have established the close interactive link between theatre and politics, scholars generally agree that any studies of the play must acknowledge its historical and political context. However famous they might be, though, the play’s two enigmatic and contentious prophecies – the main focus of this chapter – have not been sufficiently examined in this Jacobean context; their relationship to contemporary political prophecies has not received sufficient attention. Yet the two prophecies are crucial to re-assessing Shakespeare’s engagement with the Jacobean contexts not least because it is through these prophecies, I wish to show, that Shakespeare began his exploration into Jacobeans’ political appropriation of the memory of Elizabeth and her England.

The prophecies about ‘none of woman born’ and Birnam Wood

Malcolm, the legitimate heir to the Scottish throne, advances his army into Scotland to avenge his father’s death and to claim back the crown from Macbeth, the increasingly deranged usurper. Yet Macbeth remains undaunted by the approaching army; the three witches have given him two prophecies which assure him that he is not to be defeated until a man who is not born from a woman confronts him and the trees of Birnam Wood march towards his castle. The first prophecy, ‘none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth’ (4.1.79–80), seems to promise Macbeth that he is virtually invincible since every man is born from a mother’s womb, including, Macbeth optimistically concludes, his revengeful opponent Macduff, whose family Macbeth has savagely slaughtered. Macbeth, however, realizes that his interpretation of the prophecy is false when Macduff, before overpowering Macbeth, declares that ‘Macduff was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped’ (5.8.15–16). For the episode of Macduff’s birth, Shakespeare follows the account in the second edition of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), a main source for Macbeth.¹⁵ In Holinshed’s account, Macduff announces that ‘I am even he that thy wizzards have told thee of, who was never borne of my mother, but ripped out of her wombe’.¹⁶ Both in Macbeth and in Holinshed’s Chronicles, the Caesarean-born Macduff is entitled to be called what the witches term ‘none of woman born’. Indeed, the prophecy plays on the ‘double sense’ (5.8.20) of the phrase ‘none of woman born’, a phrase which, along with terms such as ‘the Fortunate’ and ‘the Unborn’, signified Caesarean birth in medieval and early modern Europe.¹⁷ The ‘double sense’ of the witches’ phrase – its literal meaning of a man not born of a woman, and its idiomatic meaning of a man born by Caesarean section – tricks Macbeth into falsely believing that he would not be defeated by any man on earth.

The significance of the Caesarean birth in this prophecy was first highlighted by feminist critics, such as Janet Adelman and Coppélia Kahn, who approached the play by way of object-relations psychoanalysis.¹⁸ Adelman, for example, in her influential reading of Shakespeare’s plays, Suffocating Mothers, analyses the representation of gender in Macbeth in the light of Freudian psychoanalytical theory and illustrates the way in which a symptom of cultural anxieties about a singular masculinity and a male fantasy of autonomous patriarchal reproduction – a male dream of escaping the matrix of suffocating maternity – underlies the play, including the first prophecy. These critics highlight the significance of Caesarean birth by drawing on the findings of early modern cultural studies. A Caesarean operation was performed only when pregnant mothers were dying or already dead; in most cases, it was a post-mortem operation aimed at saving an infant from the mother’s enclosing body.¹⁹ Even when the mother was still alive at the time of the operation, she eventually lost her life due to the loss of blood or post-surgical infection.

Furthermore, while vaginal births were always overseen by women, only male physicians were allowed to perform Caesarean operations; the Caesarean operation was a male prerogative and considered as a manly way to deliver an infant since the Caesarean section violently severed the link, both physical and symbolic, between a mother and her infant.²⁰ Infants rescued by male physicians by Caesarean section were not seen as born of their mothers but rather as ripped from receptacles, and, in a symbolic sense, produced by male hands. Caesarean-born male infants were therefore seen as truly masculine since their masculine identity was not ‘contaminated’ by potentially degrading female influences.²¹ The Caesarean section thus embodies the male fantasy of nullifying female sway over the process of birth. The cultural significance of the Caesarean section is crucial to reading the play as Shakespeare develops a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Texts
• Introduction
• 1. Macbeth: Performing a Caesarean Section on the Mother Country
• 2. Antony and Cleopatra: The Competition for Representing the Queen
• 3. Coriolanus: Disarming the Memory of Elizabethan England
• 4. Cymbeline: The Politics of Remembering the Besieged Heroine
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint