Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds

National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age

Carole Levin, John Watkins

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780801457715
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria de Shakespeare

In Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds, Carole Levin and John Watkins focus on the relationship between the London-based professional theater preeminently associated with William Shakespeare and an unprecedented European experience of geographic, social, and intellectual mobility. Shakespeare's plays bear the marks of exile and exploration, rural depopulation, urban expansion, and shifting mercantile and diplomatic configurations. He fills his plays with characters testing the limits of personal identity: foreigners, usurpers, outcasts, outlaws, scolds, shrews, witches, mercenaries, and cross-dressers.

Through parallel discussions of Henry VI, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice, Levin and Watkins argue that Shakespeare's centrality to English national consciousness is inseparable from his creation of the foreign as a category asserting dangerous affinities between England's internal minorities and its competitors within an increasingly fraught European mercantile system.

As a women's historian, Levin is particularly interested in Shakespeare's responses to marginalized sectors of English society. As a scholar of English, Italian Studies, and Medieval Studies, Watkins situates Shakespeare in the context of broadly European historical movements. Together Levin and Watkins narrate the emergence of the foreign as portable category that might be applied both to "strangers" from other countries and to native-born English men and women, such as religious dissidents, who resisted conformity to an increasingly narrow sense of English identity. Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds will appeal to historians, literary scholars, theater specialists, and anyone interested in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age.

PART I

Gender, Punishment, and Peace-Making in 1 Henry VI

From at least as far back as the Norman Conquest of 1066, the story of England’s foreign relations was primarily about France. Recent scholarship suggests that as early as the sixth century, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were essentially client states of Merovingian Frankia. From 1066 until King John’s retreat from France in 1202, the kings of England ruled large areas of French territory in their capacity as dukes of Normandy and spent more time in France than in England itself. Edward II’s 1308 marriage to Philip IV’s daughter Isabella gave their son, Edward III, a claim to the French throne that he and his successors pursued for over a century in the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453). That war provided the context for most of the history plays that Shakespeare wrote during the reign of Elizabeth I, including the play that we examine in our first two chapters: 1 Henry VI.

Elizabeth styled herself Queen of France even though England had lost its last continental territory, the city of Calais, just before her 1558 accession. But during her reign, changes in England’s relationship to France altered England’s understanding of itself as a nation within a wider European community. Throughout the Middle Ages, dynastic interests determined foreign affairs. English kings went to war to assert their claims to French lands and made peace through interdynastic marriages that were supposed to settle disputed territories on an heir descended from both families. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, however, dynastic interests were yielding to a complex of issues that seventeenth-century writers would call “reasons” or “interests of state”: trade, national security, and the defense of a Protestant national church.1 These issues mattered not just to the ruling dynasty and its aristocratic supporters but to every sector of English society as well.

Elizabeth’s decision to remain a virgin was symptomatic of the new diplomacy. During her reign, for example, Spain’s rise as a major Atlantic power encouraged her to abandon England’s centuries-old enmity against France and to pursue instead a tentative alliance with France against Spain. In the Middle Ages, such an alliance would have been sealed with a marriage linking the French and English ruling dynasties. Elizabeth entered into negotiations for such a marriage between herself and the Duke of Alençon during the 1570s, but they failed in the face of popular resistance. A new factor had entered the diplomatic calculus that made the medieval peacemaking apparatus of interdynastic marriage less tenable: religious divergence. Preserving England’s Protestant integrity outweighed the advantages to be won through a marriage linking England and France.

Ever since Henry VIII’s break with Rome, and especially since Elizabeth’s accession, propagandists like John Foxe had worked hard to make Protestantism essentially English. Since Protestantism was a foreign import, this was not easy. As scholars like Liah Greenfeld have argued, Elizabeth’s sister and predecessor Mary I, by embracing the nascent Counter-Reformation, inadvertently helped writers like Foxe to make Protestantism a lasting aspect of English national consciousness.2 The faith that Mary promoted was not the old, indigenous Catholicism that her father and brother had worked to extirpate. She and her advisors insisted on greater diocesan authority, parochial discipline, and a concerted teaching ministry not only to root out Protestantism but also to establish what Eamon Duffy has called “a more scripturally ‘correct’ emphasis on Christ and his passion” at the expense of regional saints’ cults that had been the focus of medieval piety.3 In this, Mary’s practice was conspicuously aligned with that of her unpopular Spanish husband, Philip II. By the end of her reign, her adoption of the Spanish practice of burning large numbers of heretics helped to make Catholicism itself seem foreign.

When Elizabeth came to the throne, she not only reestablished Protestantism as the religion of England but also fashioned herself as its chief defender and promoter. Like many of her subjects, Shakespeare seems to have come from a family that was reluctant to adopt the new religion. But in presenting himself as a national playwright, Shakespeare wrote plays that contributed to the national fantasy of England as a Protestant space.4 The Catholicism of France, Italy, and Spain established their foreignness within the English imagination, a foreignness so pronounced that many English men and women saw a marriage between their Protestant Queen and a French Duke as an abomination.

The two chapters in this section examine Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI as his earliest and most complex response to the Reformation’s impact on English constructions of the foreign. Since English Protestantism took the form of a state religion under the monarch’s direct authority, the chapters coincide in their complementary concern with legal developments ascending from the administration of the local courts to what we now think of as international law and the regulation of relationships between states. Reading Joan of Arc’s burning at the end of the play against an analogous passage from Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, Levin suggests how the perception of heresy as a threat to the nation’s spiritual, legal, and political integrity closed off avenues of defense once accorded to anyone accused under English common law. Focusing on Joan’s orchestration of a rapprochement between France and Burgundy that leads to England’s loss of the Hundred Years’ War, Watkins explores a complementary limitation on avenues of early modern peace-making.

As our common focus on Joan of Arc suggests, we share an interest in gender as a particularly charged site in the emergence of the foreign as a category of opprobrium defining the English nation. Tainted with sorcery, heresy, and sexual promiscuity, the transgender body of Joan of Arc opposes the virginal body of the Protestant English Queen. Joan is everything that Elizabeth, at least in her iconic role as the epitome of English national glory, is not: French, Catholic, duplicitous, and double-talking. As the recurrent bawdy puns on pucelle suggest, her virginity is the mirror opposite of Elizabeth’s, a cover for rhetorical, spiritual, and erotic excesses that define the foreign for Shakespeare and his audience. At the end of the play, Joan has to die not so much because she is French but because she defies the boundaries between male and female, sacred and profane, solemn and ludic, that had begun to define national identity itself in sixteenth-century Europe.

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1. Maurizio Viroli, Dalla politica alla Ragion di stato: La scienza del governo tra XIII e XVII secolo (Rome: Donzelli, 1994); Maurizio Bazzoli, “Ragion di Stato e interesse degli stati: La trattatistica sull’ambasciatore dal XV al XVIII secolo,” in Stagioni e teorie della società internazionale (Milan: Edizioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia Diritto, 2005).

2. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 51–59.

3. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 564. See also William Wizeman, S.J., The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2006).

4. See Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

CHAPTER 1

“Murder not then the fruit within my womb”

Shakespeare’s Joan, Foxe’s Guernsey Martyr, and Women Pleading Pregnancy in English History and Culture

Joan Pleads Pregnancy in 1 Henry VI

In Shakespeare’s play 1 Henry VI Joan La Pucelle is the driving force of the French victories for much of the action. Her English enemies find her frightening and horrifying. While fighting Joan, Lord Talbot says to her, “Thou art a witch” (1.6.6) and later refers her to as “Pucelle, that witch, that damned sorceress” (3.2.37). He also questions her morality, describing her as “puzzel” (1.5.85), which in the Elizabethan period meant slut. When Joan, having been captured, is brought before the Earl of Warwick and the Duke of York to be condemned at the end of the play, she at first denies her shepherd father and proclaims both her noble birth and her virginity. She claims that she is issue “from the progeny of kings;/virtuous and holy” and adds proudly, “Joan of Arc hath been a virgin from her tender infancy/Chaste and immaculate in very thought” (5.4.38–39, 50–51).1 These assertions do not, however, impress York and Warwick, who order her to be taken away to her execution. At this point, Joan, panicked at the thought of her imminent death, completely changes her demeanor and makes a very different claim. Arguing that it is “warrente[d] by law . . . [as a] privilege” Joan claims, “I am with child, ye bloody homicides:/Murder not then the fruit within my womb” (63–65). But York and Warwick refuse to listen, damning the child for each of its potential fathers as the desperate Joan names one man after another—the Dauphin, Alençon, Reignier. Joan is sent away to be burned, and her last words on stage are her curse to the English. It is important to be explicit: this is Shakespeare’s character Joan, not the historical fifteenthcentury person, and Shakespeare has this character Joan place saving her life, an attempt that proves futile, above honor and historic glory.

The thought of a pregnant woman being executed is an unsettling one. But though York and Warwick mock Joan once she asserts that she is pregnant, stating “Strumpet, thy words condemn thy brat and thee” (5.4.84), what she demands would actually be hers by right of law in the sixteenth-century Britain in which Shakespeare composed his history play. Many women convicted of capital crimes pleaded pregnancy, and this was one method that kept a number of sixteenth-century women who had been found guilty from being executed.

In this chapter I examine the character Joan’s plea within the context of actual women pleading pregnancy to avoid execution in Elizabethan England and Scotland. Pleading pregnancy was a familiar part of the justice system in England in the medieval and early modern period.2 Many women convicted of felony in Elizabethan and Jacobean England pleaded that they were pregnant, and a number of them successfully maintained that claim, even if in some cases there is real doubt that the women were actually pregnant. Yet we also have several cases of pregnant women being burned as heretics in sixteenth-century England, the most notorious being the Guernsey martyr Perotine Massey. The accusations of harlotry, like those cast at Joan, appear in Massey’s case as well. As Watkins argues in the following chapter, the boundary of English nationhood is particularly porous when we examine the Channel Islands, as John Foxe makes evident in the especially barbarous treatment of Perotine Massey and her infant son.

In these cases, the boundaries between law and compassion get confused and moved back and forth because of the sixteenth-century crises of nationbuilding as portrayed both in drama and religio-political actualities. While in the 1590s Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI looks back at the remembered crisis of the Hundred Years’ War and paints Joan as a woman who uses sorcery to aid the national enemy, in the 1550s Perotine Massey was actually, and illegally, burned as a heretic as Mary I attempted through religious restoration to reclaim the English nation as Catholic. While we might believe that the law ought to apply to everyone, in sixteenth-century England, class played an extensive role in both convictions and type of executions. Men, theoretically only clerics but often any man who was literate, could also plead benefit of clergy; if a woman sentenced to die could show that she was pregnant, she might just escape her fate. Examining the actual cases lends insight into how Shakespeare’s audience might have responded to the character Joan, and how women—fictional and actual—related to oppressive state regimes.

Though we in the early twenty-first century may be appalled by the idea of the violent death of a pregnant woman, in early modern England such a death might be perceived as a just punishment for a woman who so visibly stepped beyond the boundary of appropriate behavior. For Elizabethans, Joan, a French woman dressed in masculine attire who consorted with demons, was clearly an uncomfortable, transgressive character. By the sixteenth century, Joan was known as “La Pucelle,” almost as a surname. That very title could mean either “virgin” or “slut,” the latter meaning first arising in the 1570s. In the same century the word quean, which originally meant simply “woman” or “female,” came to mean “a bold or impudent woman; a hussy; spec. a prostitute.” That the word sounds the same as queen, a woman who rules, only adds to the complexity.3

As Leah Marcus argues, “Joan’s crossing of the gender boundaries marking men off from women threatens a whole set of cultural polarities by which the categories were kept distinct.” Marcus sees Joan as a fractured image of Elizabeth, a point also made by Barbara Hodgdon: “Figured remarkably like Elizabeth in many attributes, Joan represents a subversive challenge to gender. . . . Joan, like the Queen whose ghostly image she echoes, functions as a spectacular, and intensely troubling, site of gender display.”4 And around Elizabeth, as with the character Joan, there were rumors of sexual misconduct and pregnancy; in Elizabeth’s case, stories were even told of babies being burned alive. In the 1580s, both Dionisia Deryck and Robert Gardner were placed in the pillory for claiming that Elizabeth had illegitimate children who were burned to death as newborn infants. These stories spread further as the reign neared its end.5 Richard Hardin also sees Joan as echoing a queen, but he posits the parallel with Mary Stuart: both were French, Catholic, violent, and sexually promiscuous. Mary was executed only five years before the first production of 1 Henry VI.6

Pope Joan

Another figure who stands behind Joan la Pucelle is the other Joan, Pope Joan. In the twenty-first century, most scholars recognize her to be a legendary character, but many in the sixteenth century believed that she had actually existed centuries earlier. This medieval legend also contained religious overtones that used cross-dressing and suggested demonic relations. For sixteenth-century English Protestants such as John Foxe, Pope Joan was another example not only of the waywardness of women but also of the contemptible nature of Catholics, since they “to the perpetual shame of them . . . instead of a man pope elected a whore indeed to minister sacraments, to saye masses, to geve orders.”7 According to the story, which is alleged to have occurred around the year 850, Joan—in some versions an English woman; in others, Dutch—disguises herself as a young man so that she can travel with her tutor, a young monk who is also her lover. Unfortunately, Joan’s lover dies in Athens. In an effort to forget her grief, Joan, whose knowledge of the various sciences is masterful, begins to give public lectures. Her fame as a scholar grows, and eventually she is invited to lectur...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Gender, Punishment, and Peace-Making in 1 Henry VI
• Part II. Aliens in Our Midst: Jews, Italians, and Wary Englishmen in The Merchant of Venice
• Part III. Dangerous Reading in The Taming of the Shrew
• Afterword