Medieval Shakespeare by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

In the following scene we have the oft-extracted exchange between Fluellen and the Irish sapper, Macmorris, whose commitment to the war is second to none, and Fluellen hits a wrong note:

FLU. Captain Macmorris, I think, look you, under your correction, there is not many of your nation—

MAC. Of my nation! What ish my nation? Ish a villain, and a basterd, and a knave, and a rascal. What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?

(3.2.120–4)

Macmorris's question is not ill-placed, given that he himself is disappointed to be prevented from blowing the town to smithereens, using underground explosives like some burrowing Trojan horse. In either the early fifteenth or the late sixteenth centuries the answer to Macmorris's pained question ‘What ish my nation?’ could have been Ireland or Scotia or ‘Harry's subject’, or England, but it could not be ‘Britain’, and ‘Britain’ does not appear in the play.25

Close attention to Shakespeare's vocabulary of ‘nation’ is helpful here. When, in Richard III, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, comes from ‘Britain’ to save England, ‘Little Brittany’ distinguishes continental from Insular Britain, smaller and bigger. That archaic geographical tag indeed put the ‘great’ in ‘Great Britain’, which Shakespeare doesn't appear to use. In the Harvard concordance I found forty-seven lexical items for ‘Brit*’ in Cymbeline. Outside Cymbeline, ‘Britain’ itself is a rare occurence.26 ‘British’ appears three times in Q1 King Lear. Between the history and the tragedy someone changed his mind and substituted ‘English’; in the course of Shakespeare's career, lexical ‘England’ requires four columns.27 By contrast, Shakespeare reserves ‘Albion’ as a marker for archaizing a speaker or a prophecy. Geographical politics offer us sixty-seven occurrences of Wales/Welsh/Welshman, mostly to do with a Prince of Wales, and almost all from the English history plays. There is one in Cymbeline; the two in Merry Wives are accounted for by Dr Caius, who is Welsh. Scotland appears mainly in the English histories, not usually as a positive evaluative location; in The Comedy of Errors, regarding Dromio's anachronistic map of his mistress, the question ‘Where Scotland?’ elicits barrenness as a reply. Macbeth is a different story, as it must be (see also Butterfield 2009).

I have referred to Edward IV's distribution of legitimacy-illustrating rolls. In the 1460s Edward IV (his head uneasily lying, wearing the crown to which his title was, to say the least, uncertain) commissioned a series of these pictorial rolls to be circulated and displayed throughout England, as European kings had done for many years. They are remarkably pretty, with genealogy-style heads painted down the middle and extracts from the historians on either side. Several of these rolls survive, including, among others, HM 264, the Winchester roll mentioned above and one at Trinity College Cambridge. The rolls appeal to the idea of unbroken continuity from Adam to Edward IV and, as time passed, to his children. But they do no such thing. First, although the rolls look like a genealogy, with parallel historical events, they are parallel illustrations, little royal heads, successions through Judeo-Christian history and secular events beginning with Troy/Rome, attempting a kind of chronological concordance.

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