The subject of Britain, 1603–25 by Christopher Ivic

Author:Christopher Ivic [Ivic, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Modern, 17th Century, Renaissance
ISBN: 9781526152695
Google: ThAFEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2020-11-03T01:01:16+00:00

4

‘Our downfall Birthdome’: reimagining nationhood in Macbeth

‘Like to his Iland, gyrt in with the Ocean’ (3H6, TLN 2619)

Why would an English playwright whose plays not only depict intra-island warfare and border transgressions between the geographically contiguous nations that constitute Great Britain’s political landscape but also include as stage props maps of all or parts of Britain delineate his native land an island?1 Writing in 1604, Bacon informs King James of the ‘points wherein the nations [England and Scotland] stand already united’; included among these points is ‘[i]n continent’. ‘For the Continent’, he adds, ‘there are no natural boundaries of mountains, or seas, or navigable rivers’.2 Shakespeare’s plays often present not Britain but England in a continent-like manner, detached from neighbouring Scotland and Wales. By no means was Shakespeare alone among his contemporaries in giving voice to such imagined geographies.3 Edmund Spenser addresses Queen Elizabeth in the Proem to book one of The Faerie Queene as ‘Great Ladie of the greatest Isle’.4 Does ‘Isle’ here signify England, or does ‘the greatest Isle’ refer to Great Britain? If the latter, then Spenser has amplified the dominion of a monarch whose rule did not encompass an entire ‘Isle’.

Labelling Shakespeare’s inscriptions of England as an island-nation or island-realm Anglocentric, as many critics have, offers a partial understanding of the cultural and historical significance of what Kate Chedgzoy terms ‘the geopolitical metaphor of insularity’.5 Shakespeare’s use of this metaphor obscures England’s, Scotland’s and Wales’s cohabitation of a land-mass that contemporaries struggled to assign a single name, describing it variously as Albion, Britain, Britannia, Great Britain, etc. Imagining England as an isle, as numerous characters in Shakespeare’s plays do, seems even more incongruous given the historical context in which these plays were written. Although Wales had been politically incorporated into the English state under King Henry VIII, Scotland was a separate, sovereign, unconquered kingdom, notwithstanding a long history of English claims to suzerainty. The plays’ geopolitical elisions are, of course, complicated by the powerful presence of characters representative of England’s island neighbours and by the voices of a few of the playwright’s non-English characters. Consider, for example, Nerissa’s question to Portia concerning ‘Fauconbridge, the yong Baron of England’: ‘[w]hat thinke you of the Scottish Lorde his neighbour?’6 And there is Glendour/Glendoure/Glendower’s revision of the Gauntean islanding of England: ‘the Sea,/That chides the Bankes of England, Scotland, and Wales’ (1H4, TLN 1569–70), spoken in a scene set in Wales and in the presence of an onstage map. The words ‘Wales’, ‘Welsh’, ‘Welshman’ and ‘Welshwoman’, and ‘Scotland’, ‘Scot(s)’, ‘Scotch’ and ‘Scottish’, surface again and again in Shakespeare’s plays as do references to non-English geographical place names within Britain, including Berwick (3H6), Brecknock (R3), Caernarvonshire (H8), Haverfordwest (R3), Milford Haven (R3, Cym), Monmouth (1H6, H5 – geographically English, culturally and historically Welsh),7 Pembroke (R3, H8), the rivers Wye and Severn (1H4, Cym), not to mention the various Scottish place names that surface in The Tragedie of Macbeth. Clearly Shakespeare had a better geographical knowledge of the three-nation island of Great Britain than he did of Bohemia.

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