Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play

Performing National Identity

Ralf Hertel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317050797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Applying current political theory on nationhood as well as methods established by recent performance studies, this study sheds new light on the role the public theatre played in the rise of English national identity around 1600. It situates selected history plays by Shakespeare and Marlowe in the context of non-fictional texts (such as historiographies, chorographies, political treatises, or dictionary entries) and cultural artefacts (such as maps or portraits), and thus highlights the circulation, and mutation, of national thought in late sixteenth-century culture. At the same time, it goes beyond a New Historicist approach by foregrounding the performative surplus of the theatre event that is so essential for the shaping of collective identity. How, this study crucially asks, does the performative art of theatre contribute to the dynamics of the formation of national identity? Although theories about the nature of nationalism vary, a majority of theorists agree that notions of a shared territory and history, as well as questions of religion, class and gender play crucial roles in the shaping of national identity. These factors inform the structure of this book, and each is examined individually. In contrast to existing publications, this inquiry does not take for granted a pre-existing national identity that simply manifested itself in the literary works of the period; nor does it proceed from preconceived notions of the playwrights' political views. Instead, it understands the early modern stage as an essentially contested space in which conflicting political positions are played off against each other, and it inquires into how the imaginative work of negotiating these stances eventually contributed to a rising national self-awareness in the spectators.

PART I
Territory

Chapter 1
Plotting England: The Transformation of Territory into Homeland

Prior to the twentieth century, and in some cases well into it, the interdependence of territory and national identity largely went undisputed. It was generally held that the physical environment in any given place, as it manifests itself in climate, soil and topography, was a determining influence on the local population. Theories reaching back as far as Herodotus and Aristotle proposed an interrelation of climate and character; some argued, for instance, that the southerner, being exposed to a warm climate, was generally more hot-blooded than the brooding, ‘cool’ northerner.¹ In the course of the twentieth century, however, this environmental determinism came under heavy criticism for at least two reasons. On the one hand, it was thoroughly discredited by its association with the Blut und Boden ideology of German fascism that had tied not only national characteristics but also racial superiority closely to questions of territorial belonging. More specifically, Friedrich Rätzel’s theory of the nation as an organism with a life cycle, seeking to expand into new territories, a new Lebensraum, and his notion that cultural superiority, not ancient right or tradition, justified claims to territory rendered highly unpopular later speculations proposing an interrelatedness of soil and nation.² On the other hand, and perhaps as a reaction to such racist theories, modernist concepts of nationalism largely ignored the correlation of nation and territory. To exponents of the modernist school of thought, attaching national identity to a particular place appeared an essentialist, primordialist strategy. They preferred to ascribe the birth of nationalism to social developments that could theoretically materialize anywhere. Thus, modernists tended to regard the nation as a ‘non-place realm’, defined less by territory than by institutions, by power structures that are universal rather than specific to particular territories.³ Recently, however, this neglect of the influence of territory has, in turn, been criticized, and indeed, it seems hard to dispute that there is some kind of relation between national identity and territory.⁴ As Colin Williams and Anthony D. Smith observe, ‘[w]hatever else it may be, nationalism is always a struggle for control of land; whatever else the nation may be, it is nothing if not a mode of constructing and interpreting social space’.⁵

But how exactly do space and national identity relate? One attempt to answer this question is the so-called territorial imperative, which proposes a biological connection, arguing that ‘[l]ike animals that strive to stake out and defend territory for themselves or their kin group, human beings establish certain areas as private property, mark it, and attack those who trespass’.⁶ Nationalism, according to this theory, is ‘merely the open manifestation of this phenomenon’.⁷ One can, however, also apply a more performative approach to the interrelatedness of territory and identity that leaves behind the racist and essentialist theories of the past. As Michel Foucault reminds us, human behaviour takes place in, and is shaped by, the particular temporal and spatial setting in which it occurs; the structuring of social space in everyday routines determines our actions and identity.⁸ Thus, one must not sever the question of national identity from the questions of where it occurs, where it is negotiated, and in which space it materializes. At the same time, this space is not a simple given; rather, it is shaped, and constantly reshaped, in collective performances. Russell West observes a consensus among a variety of recent critics that

space does not pre-exist social formations; rather, it is constituted by them, so that every change within a given social formation is accompanied by a change of its spatial characteristics. Conversely, changes in spatial structures also influence the social structures of the given group. … Space is thus the context, the defining condition, the object and result of social action and interaction in history.⁹

According to this view, territory is not an empty expanse of land, a neutral container of sorts, but something constantly created and recreated by individuals and communities. It provides ‘the social contexts for human behavior – the settings in which activity is caused and takes on meaning and purpose’.¹⁰ In this model, places, ‘rather than being particular instances of general laws, are made out of human practices’.¹¹ In other words, space is only brought into existence by subjective experience. This performative concept of space allows us to see territory not merely as a spatial entity but as a place related to people, be it individuals or entire nations.

This might help us to recognize the relevance of territory for national identity not in dubious claims of ancient ownership but rather in the way in which groups of people construct and structure the space they share. Space turns into national terrain through being organized and charged with meaning in ways different to those used by other nations. National territory becomes social, inhabited terrain and a place where the specific social configurations of a specific nation materialize. It is a place where hierarchies, power structures and customs are preserved and defended against influences from the outside. At the same time, it is also a place replete with sites of national significance, with landmarks relevant to national lore, or statues and memorials that anchor national identity in space. In this process of appropriating space from a national perspective, space turns into place, and territory into homeland, a unique place in which is rooted the memory of the nation: ‘Its mountains are sacred, its rivers are full of memories, its lakes recall distant oaths and battles, all of which have been commemorated in national epics and ballads, and attracted countless legends.’¹² The homeland is the territory of the nation imbued with historical significance: it is perceived to be handed down from the forefathers, and to be the site of historical, and historic, events. It is, in other words, not a neutral space but an inhabited place, a territory filled with the stories of the nation. ‘The homeland is more than just the physical space over which the nationality exercises or wants to exercise political control. It is always also a home, a place of origin and integrity; its members are imagined as sharing this home, as being part of the same family.’¹³ If, according to Benedict Anderson, the nation is an imagined community, the homeland is territory suffused with imagination. Turning territory into homeland means a symbolic activation of the land, a process of charging the territory with national reverberations that crucially links territory to a particular people – in short, the nationalizing of territory. It is, I would argue, precisely this creation of homeland out of territory, this nationalizing of space, that we observe in late sixteenth-century England.

Early Modern England and the Awareness of Space

In early modern England, social hierarchies became visible in spatial structures. Royal power asserted itself in seating orders, the arrangement of processions, or the expansive spectacles at court. Royal progresses through the countryside visualized, and territorialized, the monarch’s claim over the country; regularly moving with her court from county to county during the summer months, Elizabeth demonstrated her power over the various regions, symbolically covering the territory of her realm with displays of royal dominance.¹⁴ Furthermore, many issues debated at the time, such as questions of enclosure, vagrancy, social and demographic mobility, and the relation between court, country and city, were closely related to matters of spatial organization since they evolved around the conflicting drives of mobility and fixity, of crossing and asserting borders.¹⁵ In particular, questions of identity were closely tied to spatial relations. One’s position in society was often quite literally a matter of which place one occupied, and it showed in the area one lived in, the place one inhabited within a building, the position one held in processions, and the seating order at church, public banquets or the theatre. Indeed, one may speak, as West does, of ‘the spatialization of social identity’ and conclude that ‘identity was a matter of place’: it showed in, and was largely defined by, spatial relations.¹⁶

Williams and Smith suggest that the perspective on a particular terrain is shaped by what they term its locality, that is, by its topography and landmarks.¹⁷ In the context of an emergent sense of national identity, certainly one of the most crucial features of the locality of England was its supposed insularity. Within the clearly demarcated and isolated realm a distinct language could develop, and since Britain’s insular position had by 1600 precluded foreign invasions for some 500 years, a comparatively homogenous people had been able to develop who for a long time had not had to suffer foreign rule. Obviously, England’s alleged insularity, propagated against all geographical accuracy by Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt, whose image of a ‘scept’red isle’ (Richard II, II, i, 40) refers to England, not Britain, fostered an emotional stance towards the nation. It served as a source of pride, turning England into ‘a land … no other land may touch’, as Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, put it.¹⁸ In the collective imagination, it provided England with clear borders and heightened the sense of the uniqueness of the country as a ‘fortress built by Nature for herself’ protected by the sea as if by a moat against ‘infection and the hand of war’ as well as ‘the envy of less happier lands’, as Gaunt phrases it (Richard II, II, i, 43–9). Hand in glove with the idea that England, or Britain, was a little world went the idea that it was set apart, ‘of it selfe another world’, as the geographer John Norden put it.¹⁹ William Camden describes it in similar terms as ‘the work of rejoicing Nature, who seems to have formed it like another world at a distance from this, for the delight of mankind, and as a picture of exquisite beauty, for the ornament of the universe’.²⁰ Its insularity marked out England as being different from the rest, a fact that contributed to a sense of national singularity. And indeed, did not England differ markedly from Continental Europe in many respects? Had it not become ‘another world’ set apart under Henry VIII after he had cut ties with the Continent by splitting from Rome and creating the Church of England?

Yet, England’s borders were not always seen as quite so clear-cut. We find evidence of this for instance in Camden’s Britannia, a cartographic and chorographic description published in 1586. It opens with a bird’s-eye view of the island that erases all regional difference and creates one British whole, stressing at the same time its insularity:

Britain … the most famous island in the world, separated by the Ocean from the rest of Europe, lies overagainst Gaul and Germany, being of a triangular figure, with three promontories: BELERIUM fronting the West, CANTIUM the East, TARVISIUM, or ORCAS, the North.²¹

Yet, Britain’s frontiers are no sooner drawn than they dissolve, and Camden goes on to say that as Britain ‘is ready to supply the wants of mankind, it spreads itself into the sea on every side’ and to speculate that once there might have existed a land bridge between Kent and Calais.²² Camden’s work thus displays an interesting dialectic of demarcating and undermining the boundaries of the national territory. He verbally measures out its circumference, travelling imaginarily all along the coast, from Caithness (Tarvisium) and the Orkneys to Land’s End (Belerium) and Kent, only to undermine the notion of clear-cut boundaries by an image of amphibian indefiniteness. This ambiguity reveals a fundamental tension within concepts of national territory in early modern England: on the one hand, it was defined by clearly marked frontiers, on the other, its borders were pushed outwards as English ambitions aimed beyond the British Isles. Indeed, it seems that as England grew more powerful at sea, the frontiers of its territory grew more diffuse. In an age in which England’s aspirations as a seafaring nation began to emerge, the shore did not simply mark the country’s end, but also functioned as a springboard for the expansionist drive into spheres of influence abroad, faraway trading posts and overseas possessions.²³

Yet, borders were contested closer to home, too. Did the national territory include all of Britain, as Camden’s opening lines suggest? Or did it exclude the territory of Scotland, and was it to be distinguished from that of Wales, as the title of the first major cartographic project of this era, Christopher Saxton’s Atlas of England and Wales (1579), implies? As we saw in the Introduction, these were questions hotly debated in the late 1590s when Shakespeare composed Henry V, a play in which he has captains of all four ethnic groups prominently negotiate their problematic union. These issues might have come to the fore in an even more pressing way after James’s ascension in 1603 which, practically overnight, redrew the borders of the national territory to include Scotland. Did this mean that national identity, too, was to change? James, who propagated a new pan-British identity shared by Englishmen, Scots and Welsh alike, hoped so, but the constant frustration of his plans shows that in reality, such a new national identity could not be implemented by royal decree. Rather than furnishing Englishmen, Welshmen and Scots with a n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Introduction: Performing National Identity on the Early Modern Stage
• PART I TERRITORY
• PART II HISTORY
• PART III RELIGION
• PART IV CLASS
• PART V GENDER
• Conclusion: Early Modern Englishness and the Transformative Power of the Performative
• Bibliography
• Index