Shakespeare and Immigration

Ruben Espinosa, David Ruiter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317056614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare and Immigration critically examines the vital role of immigrants and aliens in Shakespeare's drama and culture. On the one hand, the essays in this collection interrogate how the massive influx of immigrants during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I influenced perceptions of English identity and gave rise to anxieties about homeland security in early modern England. On the other, they shed light on how our current concerns surrounding immigration shape our perception of the role of the alien in Shakespeare's work and expand the texts in new and relevant directions for a contemporary audience. The essays consider the immigrant experience; strangers and strangeness; values of hospitality in relationship to the foreigner; the idea of a host society; religious refuge and refugees; legal views of inclusion and exclusion; structures of xenophobia; and early modern homeland security. In doing so, this volume offers a variety of perspectives on the immigrant experience in Shakespearean drama and how the influential nature of the foreigner affects perceptions of community and identity; and, collection questions what is at stake in staging the anxieties and opportunities associated with foreigners. Ultimately, Shakespeare and Immigration offers the first sustained study of the significance of the immigrant and alien experience to our understanding of Shakespeare's work. By presenting a compilation of views that address Shakespeare's attention to the role of the foreigner, the volume constitutes a timely and relevant addition to studies of race, ethics, and identity in Shakespeare.

Chapter 1
Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Stranger Crisis of the Early 1590s

Eric Griffin
Millsaps College

In 1591, and then again in 1592, the Elizabethan government sponsored the publication of A Fig for the Spaniard or Spanish Spirits, a saber-rattling appeal to national unity issued at a moment during which the threat of a second Spanish Armada was mounting. Given a royal imprimatur and printed by John Wolfe, one of England’s most active stationers and well-connected propagandists, the tract presented a “true rehearsal” devoted to “lively portraih[ing] the damnable deeds, miserable murders, and monstrous massacres of the cursed Spaniard.”¹ As significantly, the polemic was authorized by an approved “counterfeit” of Elizabeth Tudor that promised a royal welcome, “for Christes sake,” to any displaced refugees who might be seeking sanctuary in her “happie Realme.”² During the final decade of the sixteenth century, Elizabeth’s “gracious” reception of strangers was becoming a trope of both state-issued propaganda and court poetry, which bade all, in the manner of Sir John Davies, “B ehold her in her virtue’s beams, / E xtending all sun-like to all realms” (1876: 136).³

Insofar as A Fig for the Spaniard represents a typical rehearsal of England’s “official” (or at least its public) orientation toward immigrant refugees and exiles, or “strangers,” the publication also brings into relief a number of the social tensions that were mirrored in the English drama of the early 1590s. This is especially true as regards three works attributed (whether wholly or in part) to William Shakespeare—The Comedy of Errors, Sir Thomas More, and Titus Andronicus—as well as several plays, most obviously, The Jew of Malta, written by the then more publically acclaimed Christopher Marlowe. By situating these dramas within the context they share with A Fig for the Spaniard, and alongside several expressions of popular resistance, this essay will draw out some of the humors that typified England’s late-century stranger crisis. For as does this often overlooked historical episode, the plays Shakespeare, Marlowe, and their associates were composing during this period lay bare a number of the attitudes, contradictions, and inconsistencies that characterized English postures respecting the stranger communities in their midst. And while revealing the hardening attitudes toward ethnicity, race, and religion that were emerging in this troubled historical moment, a consideration of the plays that were composed during this time of crisis also discovers both the degree to which England’s theatrical community became implicated in the era’s public unrest and how far the Elizabethan government was prepared to move against individual dramatists in their effort to maintain order. For Shakespeare, who apparently came through the crisis unscathed, increasing popularity, patronage, and his most highly regarded works were still to come. For Shakespeare’s playwriting contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe and his unfortunate roommate Thomas Kyd, the consequences of association with the stranger crisis of the early 1590s could not have been more dire.

This Town is Full of Cozenage

Laura Hunt Yungblutt has observed that the English government “seems to have been of two minds about the role of immigrants in matters of national security and about virtually all other aspects of their position in English society. From the earliest years of Elizabeth’s reign she and her councilors had simultaneously welcomed strangers and felt threatened” (1996: 94). If crown policy advertised public welcome, popular attitudes toward London’s growing immigrant community were characterized by profound ambivalences and anxieties. Oscillating between sympathetic identification and outright contempt, English citizens were discomfited by the presence of “strangers” in their midst, even when they understood why they ought to be offering support. As Lien Bich Luu notes, “the 1590s were a difficult decade for Londoners, with severe inflation, unemployment, plague epidemics, disruptions in overseas trade and war” (2000: 18). Poor harvests and high unemployment brought many “foreigners”—that is, native inhabitants of distant English shires—to an already crowded London in search of relief. Upon arrival, they jostled with émigrés who were busily establishing a vibrant economic sector in the city. Shopkeepers especially complained that London’s resident aliens had been “illegally trading in the retail of foreign goods” (Freeman 1973: 45). Aware of these internal trends, Elizabeth’s government struggled to maintain an uneasy equilibrium in which citizens and denizens might continue to coexist (Archer 1991: 259).⁴ It was a situation fraught with difficulty and ripe for exploitation, political and theatrical.

Shakespeare’s emergence as a London playwright coincides exactly with this uneasy cultural moment. Already alert to popular sentiment and the exigencies of state power, five of the six plays he apparently wrote during this period—the three parts of Henry VI, The Comedy of Errors, and Titus Andronicus—suggest that, much in the manner of his contemporary Marlowe, Shakespeare was learning to tap this vein of social disquietude. If later works like The Merchant of Venice and Othello more obviously capitalize on antistranger undercurrents, 1–3 Henry VI (c. 1590–91) trade upon deep-seated English anxieties regarding their storied entanglements with the French, even as The Comedy of Errors (c. 1592), a play some scholars believe to be Shakespeare’s first,⁵ places the problem of the immigrant at center stage.

As Shakespeare’s younger contemporary and sometime collaborator Thomas Heywood (1570–1641) would observe of the English tragedian’s practice, “If we represent a foreign history, the subject is so intended that in the lives of Romans, Grecians or others, either the virtues of our countrymen are extolled or their vices reproved” (1999: 494–5). The same was often true of Shakespearean comedy. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to take an obvious example, an English genius loci clearly overlays the play’s Grecian setting, as signaled by the presence of Oberon, Titania, and Peter Quince’s troupe of mechanicals in the Athens of Duke Theseus. The transposition allows the playwright to “intend” the English court, English religio-political dynamics, and English theatrical culture while ostensibly referring to the world of classical Greece. Though presumably set in Ephesus, The Comedy of Errors’ explicit reference to contemporary geopolitics reveals that Shakespeare, much in the manner Heywood suggests, represents the Anatolian hub of Hellenistic culture in order to extol or reprove aspects of Elizabethan England.

Within the larger Greek world Ephesus held a particularly important significance for English Protestants. Identified in the book of Revelation as first of the seven churches of Asia for whom it was revealed, in “a great voice, as if it had been of a trumpet,” that Christ is “the Alpha and the Omega, that first and that last” (1: 10–11), Ephesus had also been the place, as the book of Acts recalls, where Saint Paul had ministered and “kept backe nothing that was profitable” (20: 20).⁶ There the apostle had “shewed” and “taught” the Ephesians “openly and throughout every house, Witnessing both to the Jews, and to the Grecians the repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20: 20–21). Within a community of believers being taught from the pulpit that, on the authority of “Sainte Paul,” they were “the elect and chosen people,” a “holy nation,” and “a particular people of God” (Church of England 1563)—as the English heard each year in their state-authorized Christmas sermon—the applicability of the example is apparent enough. But Ephesus could also be understood as representing a community of backsliding idolaters and profiteers. For the book of Acts also recalls that among the Ephesians arose “a certaine man named Demetrius a silver smith, which made silver Temples of Diana” that “brought great gaines unto the craftesmen” (19: 24). Whereas the “workemen of like things” argued “by this craft we have our goods,” Saint Paul, “not alone at Ephesus, but almost throughout all Asia,” had “perswaded, and turned away much people” from idolatry. Preaching “[t]hat they be not gods which are made with hands,” the apostle went so far as to prophesy “also that the temple of the great goddesse Diana should bee nothing esteemed, and that it would come to passe that her magnificence, which all Asia and the world worshippeth, should be destroyed” (Acts 19: 25–7). Not surprisingly, the promoters of the Elizabethan cult typically declined to recall Paul’s Ephesian remonstrance. As we shall see, for a court culture advertizing its Protestantism on the one hand, and on the other an ever more intense identification with the cult of Diana, these twin Ephesian associations—the one open to the Word, the other dependent upon a heritage of paganism—suggested a gap between representational practice and ethical presumption.

The important point to underscore with respect to England’s identification with Ephesus, as well as Shakespeare’s deployment of an Ephesian setting, is that in addition to being national and multivocal, it is also ambivalent. Over and against the universalist associations and aspirations of Rome’s imperium, the Roman Catholic religion, and the Spanish Empire, which had taken up the mantle of both, England’s Grecian turn attempted to set the nation and its church apart from rivals trumpeting their Latin lineage. This was, of course, a rather dubious project for a culture that had its origins in Roman colonialism and owed an extensive inheritance to its Roman legacy. Indeed, the very genre in which Shakespeare chose to compose The Comedy of Errors derived from a Roman author and source. But his transposition of Plautus’s Menaechmi from Adriatic Epidamnum to Anatolian Ephesus gives the Grecian and biblical association primacy of place.⁷ In other words, in The Comedy of Errors—as in Edmund Spenser’s Shepeardes Calender (1579) and Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (c. 1579–81), as well as in the works of many English writers who followed in their wake—Latin inheritances, though obviously present, are subordinated to an earlier Greek heritage that is constructed, both in national and spiritual terms, as more pure than its universal successor.⁸

Turning from a literary context to a more openly religio-political one, this ambivalence is yet more pronounced. Whereas the Anglican preacher John Ainsworth would argue that “the church of Ephesus [had been] in Paul’s time the pillar and ground of truth” (1615: 64), affirming the identification of Ephesus with English Protestantism, his coreligionist William Barlow cautioned that the pagan devotion to “Great … Diana of Ephesus, whome all the world worshippeth,” could “serve Turkie as well as Rome, their church being as apparant in shew, as ceremonius for rites, as superstitious in devotion, as glorious in temples, and as auncient for succession as the Romish Synagogue (since that faithfull citie became an ha[r]lot)” (1601: 28). Linking Ephesus to “Turkie as well as Rome,” Barlow, associates the city not with Pauline “truth,” but with the profit-motivated harlotry of “the Romish Synagogue.” Of course, the Elizabethans’ elevation of their own Diana gave Roman Catholic apologists ample cause to counter, in the manner of William Allen, that the English had fashioned their queen “a verie national idol” (1588: 6). “Ephesus” thus signified in such as way as to evoke a number of competing nationalist and internationalist associations. This ambiguous and ambivalent multivocality provided Shakespeare with a field of dramatic possibility.⁹

If an audience had failed to note The Comedy of Errors’ Ephesus-London connection in earlier scenes, Shakespeare drives the relationship home in act 3, where Syracusan “strangers” Dromio and Antipholus discuss the physical virtues of Nell “the kitchen wench.”¹⁰ “She is spherical,” says Dromio, “like a globe. I could find out countries in her” (3.2.114–15). Their prosaic exchange is worth lingering over, as it describes fairly precisely England’s place in Europe’s geopolitical contest:

S. Ant.	In what part of her body stands Ireland?
S. Dro.	Marry, sir, in her buttocks, I found it out by the bogs.
S. Ant.	Where Scotland?
S. Dro.	I found it by the barrenness, hard in the palm of her hand.
S. Ant.	Where France?
S. Dro.	In her forehead, armed and reverted, making war against her heir.
S. Ant.	Where England?
S. Dro.	I looked for the chalky cliffs, but I could find no whiteness in them. But I guess it stood in her chin, by the salt rheum that ran between France and it.
S. Ant.	Where Spain?
S. Dro.	Faith, I saw it not; but I felt it hot in her. breath.
S. Ant.	Where America, the Indies?
S. Dro.	O, sir, upon her nose, all o’er embellish’d with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain, who sent whole armadas of carracks to be ballast at her nose.
S. Ant.	Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?
S. Dro.	O, sir, I did not look so low … (3.2.115–37)

While its masculinist sexual humors are obviously designed to engender a mix of attraction and revulsion, they also interpolate an outsider’s perspective on the contemporary...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dediction
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Stranger Crisis of the Early 1590s
• 2 “My hopes abroad”: The Global/Local Nexus in The Merchant of Venice
• 3 Hosting Language: Immigration and Translation in The Merry Wives of Windsor
• 4 Fluellen’s Foreign Influence and the Ill Neighborhood of King Henry V
• 5 “A noble troop of strangers”: Masques of Blackness in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII
• 6 “Boat People”: Wars of Religion, Women Refugees, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest
• 7 The Black Alien in Othello: Beyond the European Immigrant
• 8 Race Words in Othello
• 9 Open Doors, Secure Borders: The Paradoxical Immigration Policy of Belmont in The Merchant of Venice
• Coda: “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome”
• Index