Renaissance Drama on the Edge by Hopkins Lisa;

Author:Hopkins, Lisa;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

Mapping France onto England: The Histories

Henry V, in which Charlemagne is most firmly remembered and which seems to have been written in the same year as As You Like It, is of course interested in its own right in the borders of France. The prologue invites us to

Suppose within the girdle of these walls

Are now confined two mighty monarchies,

Whose high upreared and abutting fronts

The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder. (19–22)

Here the borders of both England and France are effectively reified as they are figured as straining towards each other like the overhanging projecting upper storeys typical of Elizabethan housefronts, with the Channel between them like a street to keep them apart. After Canterbury and the King then discuss the border with Scotland (1.2.140–45), Henry, himself a liminal figure in that he was, as Fluellen reminds us, born at Monmouth (4.7.11), moves from Calais, which is clearly established as a firm base for the English (3.2.45, 3.3.55–6, 3.6.139–40 and 5.0.6–7), first to Harfleur (3.3.8) and then across the Somme (3.5.1), while the French king and the Dauphin fall back on Rouen (3.5.64). In this shifting world it is no wonder that Macmorris should ask, ‘What ish my nation?’ (3.2.124) or that the disguised Henry’s account of Sir Thomas Erpingham’s view of their situation should be that they are ‘even as men wrecked upon a sand, that look to be washed off the next tide’ (4.1.98–9). Nevertheless we end as we began, with the two fixed edges of ‘the contending kingdoms / Of France and England, whose very shores look pale / With envy of each other’s happiness’ (5.2.344–6), and the closing chorus is quick to remind us that all Henry’s gains in France will disappear during the reign of his son. The borders of France may be impermanent, but those of England, it seems, are fixed.

The idea of England’s borders as fixed occurs even more strongly in King John, where attention to where the borders of France lie is clearly primarily a means for interrogating those of England, and those of Shakespeare’s own England as much as of its thirteenth-century past, for its anti-papal agenda and motif of repelling foreign invasion give the play an obvious topicality in the years following the Armada and the promulgation of the Papal Bull Regnans in Excelsis, which had denied the right of Elizabeth to rule. The main action of the play gets going when the forces of the Archduke of Austria and those of the King of France, with the young English prince Arthur in tow, meet those of King John outside Angers, the capital of Anjou, which despite its location almost at the heart of what is now firmly France thus becomes designated as effectively a frontier town (2.1.0). At the same time as this creates a sense of instability within France, though, it also works to instantiate a sense of England as fixed, for although at this stage, England still had extensive possessions in France, there are repeated reminders that this is going to change.

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