SOURCE: Woodbridge, Linda. “Palisading the Elizabethan Body Politic.” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 33, no. 3 (fall 1991): 327-54.

[In the following essay, Woodbridge examines the subject of bodily violation as a symbol for military invasion and conquest in The Rape of Lucrece, Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline. Woodbridge asserts that all three works reflect England's fear of foreign conquest and its identification with ancient Rome.]

That island of England breeds very valiant creatures.

—Henry V

To island dwellers like the Elizabethan English, Shakespeare's description of Lucrece's death must have held a peculiar horror:

And bubbling from her breast, it [the blood] doth divide
In two slow rivers, that the crimson blood
Circles her body in on every side,
Who, like a late-sack'd island, vastly stood
Bare and unpeopled in this fearful flood.
          Some of her blood still pure and red remain'd,
          And some look'd black, and that false Tarquin
          stain'd.

(lines 1737-43)¹

The goriness of those blood rivers, the creepiness of their “slow” movement, even the chilling vision of blood turned black through pollution, might have paled, in those immediately post-Armada days, beside the specter of a sacked island. That the woman is the island provides a clue to the impact of the Lucrece story on Elizabethans. The Rape of Lucrece, Titus Andronicus, and Cymbeline offer vivid testimony to the truth of anthropological theories that treat the human body as an image of society. Viewing through an anthropological lens these texts, and also that bête noire of colonial discourse theorists, The Tempest also helps explain why England identified with Rome, why Shakespeare so favored the themes of siege warfare and threatened women, and why Renaissance cartographers put so much water around England.

First let me sketch the anthropological theory and link it with some background material on England's love affair with Rome. Implicit in Van Gennep's sweeping synthesis of territorial passage rites with rites of passagelike initiations or weddings is that most cultures are receptive to analogies between the spatial and the temporal. Noting the “interchangeability of a temporal and spatial vocabulary” in Shakespeare, Berry notes that nearly half of Shakespeare's uses of “space” refer to time.² Life's events can be plotted as on a map; a human life is like the land.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas, addressing the problem of why many societies guard the body's orifices so zealously that an unsanctioned penetration—a breach of chastity, eating forbidden food—is a pollution, argues that the body is “a symbol of society” and finds “the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body.”³ Philosophers and art historians have long recognized the body as a cosmic structuring principle: Panofsky concludes that despite “mathematical or philosophical foundations, perspective and proportional systems are still iconologies of space and of the human body.”⁴ Douglas sees bodily margins as Van Gennep and Turner see the no-man's-land between territories and the liminal phase between life-stages—as powerful, dangerous marginal states.⁵ Fear of bodily pollution expresses fear for the fabric of society:

Each culture has its own special risks and problems. To which particular bodily margins its beliefs attribute power depends on what situation the body is mirroring. It seems that our deepest fears and desires take expression with a kind of witty aptness. To understand body pollution we should try to argue back from the known dangers of society. … Symbolism of the body's boundaries is used in [a] kind of unfunny wit to express danger to community boundaries.⁶

Among Douglas's examples are the Coorgs of India, ensconced in a mountain fastness, whose culture was deeply oriented toward fear of pollution.

The early American land-as-woman metaphor (see Kolodny's provocatively entitled The Lay of the Land)⁷ was a species of the Renaissance body-state analogy. In what Stallybrass calls “the geography of the body,”⁸ Donne calls his mistress, “my America, my new found land,” and Shakespeare calls Lucrece's breasts “ivory globes circled with blue, / A pair of maiden worlds unconquered”; Lucrece's smoothness is “like a goodly champaign plain” (407-08, 1247). Barkan surveys the metaphor of cosmos and commonwealth as the body (Plato saw the cosmos as a living creature; astrologers described Aries as the head, Libra the buttocks, Pisces the feet, of a great body). The body-state analogy “was already a commonplace in Plato's time not only among political philosophers using anatomical descriptions but also among physicians describing anatomy in social or political terms,” but Renaissance England saw “the heyday of the anthropomorphic image of the commonwealth.”⁹

Anthropological notions of body and society, of pollution and dangerous margins, emerge often in Shakespeare, but with particular force in Lucrece, Titus, and Cymbeline, where women's bodies are metaphors for societies threatened. All involve Rome, which offered early modern England a potent symbol of invasion that spoke poignantly to England's sense of herself.

AS THE ROMANS DO

A binary image of Rome, almost Lévi-Straussian in its precise mirror inversion, haunted the European imagination for a thousand years: Rome the implacable invader, thrusting its masculine armies deep into the virgin territory of the Goths, its soldiers raping the queen of Britain's daughters; and Rome the invaded, the sacked city, ravaged by Goths. But history offered a potent tool for deconstructing this binary opposition: the opposed images represented successive phases of Roman history, and poised between them, as a historical “time out” like calendric intercalary days, was a third Rome, Augustus Caesar's, a Rome that had finished its invasions, acquired its colonies, and was enjoying its empire in peace, a Rome yet unsacked. This compound image, its binary oppositions mediated by a liminal zone of history, fascinated Renaissance England partly because it spun from it images of itself. The ancient world is the setting for one-third of the Shakespeare canon: “two of the comedies, both of the narrative poems, four of the five romances, and six of the eleven tragedies.”¹⁰ The many readers who have seen Elizabethan politics in Shakespeare's Roman politics (see Velz) confirm the link in Shakespeare's mind between England and ancient Rome. Besides the “ubiquitous presence of Rome in Elizabethan culture,”¹¹ a classicism shared with all Europe, England often identified more specifically with Rome, as when Roman civil wars were compared with the Wars of the Roses.¹²

Titus and Lucrece display Rome in both aspects, as invader and invaded. Each opens with the typically Roman activity of soldiers invading someone's territory: Titus returns home from “weary wars against the barbarous Goths” (I.i.28); Lucrece's husband is among Romans besieging Ardea. Yet the sense of an invaded Rome predominates. In Lucrece, Tarquin, having seized power in a bloody coup, is reigning tyrannously; Titus opens on armed men battering the “city walls”; “Open the gates and let me in,” cries Saturninus (I.i.26, 65), who soon becomes emperor and rules tyrannously; his marriage to the queen of the Goths and adoption of her unlovely sons creates a reconstituted family that brings the barbarian to the gates. Lucrece culminates in an army marching on Rome bearing Lucrece's body and ousting the tyrants; late in Titus an army of Goths surrounds Rome; the tyrant is killed. Though the Rome of these texts is a complex mixture, part thrusting, martial masculinity, part woman in danger of ravishment—now invader, now invaded—the image of Rome besieged predominates. If Douglas's theory is correct and if Shakespeare has imaginatively captured the episteme of a siege-mentality culture, we should expect, for such a society, images of the human body threatened with unsanctioned penetration and pollution. This is exactly what we find. In Titus, where Rome's margins are threatened, a woman is raped and dismembered; Lavinia's invaded orifices and mangled margins are aptly symbolized by the horrifying “marginal stuff,”¹³ blood issuing from her mouth. In Lucrece, tyrant and rapist are father and son; that coup and rape are parallel usurpations, the poem makes clear: Tarquin approaches Lucrece “like a foul usurper” who means “from this fair throne to heave the owner out” (412-13); debating whether to rape her, “now he vows a league [i.e., peace treaty] and now invasion” (287); he “march[es] on to make his stand / On her bare breast, the heart of all her land” (438-39). Military siege is the governing image of Lucrece, which opens upon “the besieged Ardea” and which imagines the rape as a siege. Tarquin fears Lucrece's husband will dream of “this siege that hath engirt his marriage” (220). When “the Roman lord marcheth to Lucrece' bed” (301), Shakespeare imagines a medieval or Renaissance city siege, with its scaling of turrets and battering rams: “her bare breast … / Whose ranks of blue veins, as his hand did scale, / Left their round turrets destitute and pale”; “His hand, that yet remains upon her breast—Rude ram, to batter such an ivory wall!—may feel her heart—poor citizen!—distress'd” (440-41, 463-65). “I come,” he announces, “to scale / Thy never-conquered fort” (481-82). An analogue of the rape is a painted siege of Troy, again a Renaissance city siege: “The laboring pioner / Begrim'd with sweat” (1380-81). And in a Chinese box of siege-rape analogies, this siege was occasioned by a rape: the Greek army has assembled “for Helen's rape the city to destroy” (1369).¹⁴

In Lucrece as elsewhere, Shakespeare envisions Rome as “the enclave of civilization ringed round with a protective wall, outside of which the dark forces of barbarism lurk”;¹⁵ Dubrow suggests that Lucrece “comes to represent the center of civilization that is threatened by barbarians.”¹⁶ “In a sense … violence is not really outside the wall,” since Tarquin is a Roman,¹⁷ but so firmly is the siege trope attached to Rome that Shakespeare's imagination configures even Roman enemies as invaders. As in Titus we first see the Roman Saturninus arriving from foreign wars and beating on Rome's doors, so Tarquin, arriving at Lucrece's house from an outlying camp, has the air of an external invader: “Throughout the poem Shakespeare depicts Tarquin as the invading barbarian who comes to raze Lucrece's city. … Although he is a ‘Roman lord,’” he is “alien and hostile.”¹⁸

Heckscher notes, “The woman who had been dishonored was easily equated with a city or fortress that had been conquered by the enemy. … From classical antiquity onward, cities and fortresses had … been considered to be of the feminine sex. The Virtues of Prudentius's fifth-century Psychomachia were … maidens inhabiting and defending their Tugendburgen. … The classical triumphator entering a city was often greeted by a group of women, or a single woman, representing the city. … The daughter of Sion appears frequently in sixth-century representations of the Entry into Jerusalem.”¹⁹ As Dubrow points out, “Given the common association of gates with the vagina, the notion of rape is latent in the image of the attacked city.”²⁰ And cities wear female attire: “outskirts” is a Renaissance coinage.

A WOMAN'S PLACE IS IN THE HOME

The invasion of defended territory may be domestic as well as national or civic—as countries may be invaded and cities besieged and sacked, a house may be burglarized. Among more specialized cases is illegal entry into a game preserve: “He is no woodman that doth bend his bow / To strike a poor unseasonable doe” (Luc 580-81); “Hast not thou full often struck a doe, / And borne her cleanly by the keeper's nose?” (Tit II.i.93-94); raped Lavinia is a poacher's deer (II.i.117, ii.26; III.i.91-92). Metaphors for Lucrece's body—house, fortress, mansion, temple, tree bark—“emphasize the protective and enclosing function of the body,” which “surrounds the soul and wards off danger.”²¹ All territorial invasions invite literary analogues of bodily violation, and rape, in Shakespeare, calls forth comparisons with all kinds of territorial invasion.

Lucrece riots in images of sex as burglary.²² In the rape scene, the analogy is explicit, as Tarquin burgles his way to Lucrece's bedchamber, forcing the locks of doors. Lock-forcing, analogue of the rape, calls forth a metaphor of rape: “Each [lock] by him enforc'd retires his ward” (302-03). Even more suggestive than this rape of the lock is the way Tarquin opens the last door: “His guilty hand pluck'd up the latch / And with his knee the door he opens wide” (358-59)—why, unless to emphasize the parallel between such breaking and entering and the rape itself, should he open the door with his knee?

Stallybrass discusses conflation of body with enguarding house:

Surveillance of women concentrated upon … the mouth, chastity, the threshold of the house. … Silence, the closed mouth, is made a sign of chastity. And silence and chastity are … homologous to woman's enclosure within the house. … This “Woman,” like Bakhtin's classical body, is rigidly “finished”: her signs are the enclosed body, the closed mouth, the locked house.²³

As Douglas reminds us, “Van Gennep … saw society as a house with rooms and corridors in which passage from one to another is dangerous. Danger lies in transitional states.”²⁴ Turner's term “liminal” for such states comes from Latin limen (threshold). The bride carried across the threshold embodies the spatial-temporal analogy: spatially, she enters new territory; temporally, she enters a new phase of life. (A common superstition reflects the danger inherent in threshold states: “Men that stumble at the threshold / Are well foretold that danger lurks within,” 3H6 [Henry VI, Part 3] IV.vii.11-12; cf. LLL [Love’s Labour's Lost] III.i.115.) Burgling his way toward Lucrece, Tarquin meets resistance in locked doors and threshold guardians reminiscent of myth's monstrous figures;²⁵ metallic threshold guardians seem animate:

The locks between her chamber and his will,
Each one by him enforc'd retires his ward;
But, as they open, they all rate [berate] his ill,
Which drives the creeping thief to some regard.
The threshold grates the door to have him heard;
Night-wand'ring weasels shriek to see him there;
They fright him, yet he still pursues his fear.

(302-08)

The paradox of the seemingly passive threshold grating against the seemingly active opening door foreshadows the paradoxical power of seemingly passive Lucrece to effect the ultimate downfall of her rapist.

Lucrece dies by creating, with a knife, a new bodily orifice leading to her heart. No orifice leads to Tarquin's heart; the orifices of his ear open on no passageways reaching that far. Though Lucrece pleads, “his ear her prayer admits, but his heart granteth / No penetrable entrance to her plaining” (558-59). But then, women have more orifices than men to start with, which may be why the female body offers the more frequent image of society endangered. If Tarquin begins, however, as an image of impenetrable body and soul, he ends invaded and sacked. He finally realizes that he has invaded himself, raped his own soul, a soul he imagines as a woman polluted:

His soul's fair temple is defaced,
To whose weak ruins muster troops of cares,
To ask the spotted princess how she fares.
She says her subjects with foul insurrection
Have batter'd down her consecrated wall. …
Ev'n in this thought through the dark night he stealeth,
A captive victor that hath lost in gain.

(719-30)

As Tarquin's invasions, first (as the usurper's heir) of the Roman political state and then of Lucrece's body, make him paradoxically a prisoner, a “captive victor,” so the violent penetrations of Lucrece, first by rape and then by knife, paradoxically free her, restoring her to the safety of defended territory. The image with which I began captures this paradox in all its complexity. Lucrece's body becomes a sacked island—the ravished female body as an image of society not merely endangered but wrecked: “The crimson blood / Circles her body in on every side, / Who, like a late-sack'd island, vastly stood / Bare and unpeopled in this fearful flood” (lines 1738-41). But symbols of encirclement mark the reintegrative agrégation phase of Van Gennep's rites of passage, and the river-ringed island suggests the liminal zone that buffers defended territory. Lucrece has saved her reputation, even her soul, and the island is at least in part an image of safety and protection. Lucrece's death frees Rome from tyranny, as Lavinia's rape ultimately frees Rome from tyranny in Titus.

TRUNKS, GIRDLES, AND EARS

The endings of the two early works, personally bleak if politically redemptive, contrast with Cymbeline's comic resolution. In the early, invasion-obsessed texts, redemption comes through killing or expelling the invader. Cymbeline suggests another way out; as I shall show, it is a distinctly Jacobean solution.²⁶ Invasion is averted partly because Cymbeline is comedy but partly because a new Jacobean ideology, as we shall see, was downplaying the threat of invasion. England throughout most of Cymbeline is still a nation under siege: the Britain that always identified with Rome here takes on Rome's identity as the besieged, while Rome wears its invader face. Rome's dual nature is thus divided between two societies, England adopting the aspect with which Elizabethans had most readily identified. By play's end a pax Augusta crystallizes, but in keeping with Shakespeare's more typical concept of England as the invaded, the stress even in this play is on danger of invasion.

Lucrece's image of a “late-sack'd island” would strike a sympathetic chord in Cymbeline, where memory of Julius Caesar's invasion of the island Britain is still fresh. This invasion, however, was almost unsuccessful, for Britain was defended actively by its very surrounding liminal zone, the sea:

                                                                      Your isle … stands
As Neptune's park, ribb'd and paled in
With rocks unscalable and roaring waters,
With sands that will not bear your enemies' boats,
But suck them up to th' topmast. A kind of conquest
Caesar made here, but made not here his brag
Of “Came and saw and overcame.” With shame—
The first that ever touch'd him—he was carried
From off our coast, twice beaten; and his shipping,
Poor ignorant baubles, on our terrible seas,
Like egg-shells mov'd upon their surges, crack'd
As easily 'gainst our rocks.

(III.i.18-29)

Britain courts Roman invasion again, as Cymbeline refuses to pay the tribute. The queen's son defies the Roman emissary, declaring that if Rome invades Britain, “you shall find us in our saltwater girdle” (III.i.79-80). Though the image is unheroic for a moment of high patriotism, and its speaker is the lumpen villain Cloten, it is perfect for the play, conjuring the seawater protecting an endangered society and comparing military invasion with getting inside a person's clothing—endangered society as a body protected by clothing against rape. My colleague James Marino suggests that Cloten's image hints at the magical virginity-protecting girdles of medieval romances like Bevis of Hampton and Emare. Clothing, like the body, can be an “image of society.” In Renaissance plague time, pores “needed permanent protection from attack,” which “rendered the shape and nature of clothing in time of plague all-important: smooth fabrics, dense weave and close fit. … Men and women alike longed to have smooth and hermetically sealed clothes enclosing their weak bodies”;²⁷ compare this with the storming-the-Bastille image of French Revolutionary times: “Our clothes are like fetters, they are the invention of the barbarian and Gothic centuries. You must break these fetters if you wish to become free and happy.”²⁸

When the Romans invade, they press into Britain at an inlet, Milford Haven, and try to penetrate through a lane whose narrowness is repeatedly emphasized. A stand being made at the cervix of this lane, British society, direly endangered, is saved. Here, the attempted invasion of a country is paralleled by the attempted invasion of a woman's body. One male character tries to seduce the heroine, another to have her murdered, a third to rape her. A fourth attempted invasion, through her mouth, is averted when the poison turns out to be a sleeping potion. She is also nearly poisoned through the ear, slanderously told that her husband has been untrue; a similar poison is poured into her husband's ear. Such ear-poisoning was a penetration like rape: the ear seemed vaginal; the Virgin Mary supposedly conceived through the ear (see below; cf. Cleopatra's “Ram thou thy fruitful tidings in mine ears, / That long time have been barren,” II.v.24-25). Cloten's plan to penetrate Imogen's ear with music is fraught with double entendre: “I am advis'd to give her music o' mornings; they say it will penetrate. Enter Musicians. Come on; tune. If you can penetrate her with your fingering, so; we'll try with tongue too” (II.iii.11-15). The series of close calls that makes Imogen's story so like The Perils of Pauline reiterate Britain's near-misses: the royal line is nearly wiped out by the kidnapping of the princess and near murder of Imogen; tyranny is averted by the queen's timely suicide; the Roman army is fended off in the act of breaching Britain's maidenhead at that narrow lane. Imogen's perils are Britain's.²⁹

Threshold crossings objectify this repeated pattern of danger averted. The seducer Iachimo is carried across the threshold of the chamber where Imogen sleeps. The would-be rapist Cloten is carried across the threshold of the cave where Imogen sleeps. (Pointing up the connection, in both chambers the unconscious Imogen is called a “lily.”)³⁰ But just as the threat of Roman invasion is headed off through the death of many soldiers at the neck of a lane, so the threat to Imogen from the sexual miscreants who keep being carried into her chamber is contained by images of death: the resemblance of Iachimo's trunk to a coffin suggests the ultimate death of his evil aspirations; and Cloten arrives in Imogen's chamber quite deceased, having recently been beheaded. Iachimo's conveyance is insistently called a “trunk”: Cloten's beheaded trunk, a visual pun, recalls the earlier incident; of his body a character cries, “Soft, ho, what trunk is here / Without his top?” (IV.ii.354-55). Perhaps this is a species of that “unfunny wit” to which Douglas alludes. The constant danger threatening this young woman who spends too much time sleeping next to trunks is symbolized by the menacing penetration of domestic thresholds—a burglary that is an analogue of attempted seduction or rape, itself an analogue of military invasion. In Douglas's terms, danger to society is expressed by danger to the body; in Van Gennep's, different kinds of “passage” have a similar structure and vocabulary of symbols; in Turner's, the indeterminacy of a liminal state expresses vulnerability.

“GOD BREATHED AND THEY WERE SCATTERED”: ARMADAS, VIRGINS, PORES

Shakespeare sees Lucrece's rape as a pollution: “‘To kill myself, … alack, what were it, / But with my body my poor soul's pollution?’”; her body is a “polluted prison” (1156-57, 1725-26). In tribal societies pollution may be removed by simple purification rites, but for Shakespeare so severe a pollution is rape that its only purifier is death: “My blood shall wash the slander of mine ill,” resolves Lucrece (1207), as Titus kills his rape-polluted daughter. Lucrece uses “stain” eighteen times, alongside “blot,” “spot,” “blur,” “blemish,” “attaint,” “scar,” and “pollution”: Kahn argues that “though Lucrece uses moral terms such as sin and guilt, she actually condemns herself according to primitive, nonmoral standards of pollution and uncleanness.”³¹ (On guilt versus shame, sin versus pollution, Donaldson, Hawkins, and Dubrow have written perceptively.)³² It is startling to find in a Christian writer the pagan force of “some of her blood still pure and red remain'd / And some look'd black, and that false Tarquin stain'd” (1742-43). Augustine, a thousand years earlier, seems more Christian, even more modern, in arguing that soiled flesh was irrelevant if Lucrece's mind was pure: Shakespeare's arresting image of blackened blood as a sign of pollution seems more at home among the Yoruba of the Ndembu.³³ Did something in his society make it hospitable to primitive pollution beliefs—even more so than the rest of European Christendom?

By Douglas's theory a society bound up in pollution beliefs and obsessed with protecting orifices should be a society endangered, besieged, vulnerable at its margins. What could more accurately describe Elizabethan England, a second-rate military power in perennial danger from such great powers as Spain, a Protestant country obsessed with the threat of papal takeover and nourishing a paranoid certainty that foreign Jesuit infiltrators were penetrating every available national orifice? Sequestered like the Coorgs in their mountain fastness, Elizabethan England had a sense of herself as an island, perpetually threatened with invasion but defended by her liminal zone, the sea.

Morgan sees the sixteenth-century boom in English mapmaking as owing partly to “the international situation throughout the greater part of the century, with the recurring threat of invasion”; many royally sponsored maps were of coasts and their fortifications.³⁴ The map on which Elizabeth stands in the Ditchley portrait emphasizes the south coast. The order of Saxton's county maps focuses early on the south coast. His map of England highlights its island nature: England occupies about half the plate; the rest is given over to seas with prominently lettered names—Oceanus Britannicus, Mare Hibernium, Oceanus Germanicus—and filled with some thirty-five ships, plus sea monsters, fish, crabs, and mermaids.³⁵

In 1991 we can still say that England was last successfully invaded in 1066, but Elizabethans were not complacent: they saw the sea as rising up to defend them against repeated near-invasions, a real and constant threat. (Today's periodic outcries against the channel tunnel suggest that England's fear of penetration has not yet wholly abated.) The historical moment when this sense was strongest, the 1588 defeat of the Armada, coincided closely with the beginning of Shakespeare's career. Although the Spanish fleet enjoyed particularly good weather during its progress through the English channel, encountering storms only during the retreat along the Irish coast, the great sea storm that scattered the Spanish fleet quickly entered the mythology of this attempt on England's virtue: England protected by her saltwater girdle.

“God breathed and they were scattered,” runs the legend on one of Queen Elizabeth's Armada medals. A Dutch medal records a similar sentiment, and the learned poets who celebrated in Latin verse the triumphant preservation of the Virgin Queen and the Protestant faith were so busy extolling the divine partisanship which drowned some thousands of Spaniards by a specially provided tempest that they scarcely had time to mention the English fleet. Of course, better ships and better guns had won the battle before the Spaniards had any trouble with the weather. … The great storm which destroyed the Spanish Armada joined the other legends.³⁶

A medal struck the year after the defeat of the Armada shows Elizabeth on one side, an island emerging from storm on the other;³⁷ several portraits foregrounding Elizabeth feature a drowning Armada in the background. Of one of them, Louis Montrose writes,

The demure iconography of Elizabeth's virgin-knot suggests a causal relationship between her sanctified chastity and the providential destruction of the Spanish Catholic invaders. … The royal body provides an instructive Elizabethan illustration of Mary Douglas's cross-cultural thesis that the body's “boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious.” … The inviolability of the island realm, the secure boundary of the English nation, is thus made to seem mystically dependent on the inviolability of the English sovereign, upon the intact condition of the queen's body natural.³⁸

Shakespeare often writes about England besieged, threatened at her watery borders, and sometimes saved by “our terrible seas.” Elizabethans knew Caesar's invasions from the Gallic Wars and from many embellishing legends and pseudohistories;³⁹ considering the many available elements of legend—from magical swords to Geoffrey of Monmouth's “admirable old Britons … ready to die for country”⁴⁰—Shakespeare's focus on the role of the sea is all the more significant. When in King John, the French try to invade England, their ships are wrecked on the Goodwin Sands, a liminal zone Shakespeare returned to—one of Antonio's ships is wrecked there in The Merchant. John of Gaunt's classic description of England offers many familiar elements—the emphasis on England as an island, the island envisioned as a natural fortress, England imagined as naturally on the defensive (even the sea here an invading enemy), the besieged nation as walled house or moated castle, the land-as-woman trope, the idea that the England once conquering others has now conquered itself through tolerating tyranny—as Rome in Titus and Lucrece is both conqueror of foreign lands and conquered itself by tyrants, as Lucrece's rapist has raped his own soul. When England turns against herself, in Shakespeare's many civil wars, the Lucrece-Titus phenomenon appears: subjects who turn against their monarch are configured as foreign invaders. To maintain the less disturbing fiction that the enemy is without, rebels are laundered by foreign travel and appear as invaders from abroad: Bolingbroke invades from France, Hotspur (hailing from the perilous north) invades from Wales.

We might link Shakespeare's passion for siege warfare with his remarkable interest in sexually besieged women—the many raped or threatened with rape, the seduction attempts, the four plays in whose main plots a woman is falsely accused of sexual misconduct (Oth [Othello], Ado [Much Ado about Nothing], Cym [Cymbeline], WT [The Winter's Tale]). The biblical story of Susanna, sexually besieged by men who accuse her of sexual misconduct, thus combining sexual siege with siege of sexual reputation, attracted Elizabethans; perhaps reflecting his age's interest in this kind of female culture hero, Shakespeare had a daughter Susanna. Siege of body and of reputation are linked when Tarquin forces Lucrece to submit by threatening to accuse her of adultery with a servant if she does not. Shakespeare's preoccupation with slander may reflect its being a poisoning through the ear, another vulnerable orifice, subject to his culture's fear of danger to the opened body. A long tradition links ear penetration with vaginal penetration. Origen said Mary “conceived Jesus the Word at the words of the angel”; in medieval lyrics Mary conceives through the ear, a way to preserve her as virgo intacta.⁴¹ Poisoning or wounding through the ear is common in Shakespeare, sometimes literal (as in Hamlet Senior), sometimes figurative, as in Iago's “I'll pour this pestilence into his ear” (Oth II.iii.362). Shakespeare's concern with sexual slander recalls the link between ear and vagina, orifices vulnerable to sexual invasion.

Douglas's thesis that societies threatened at their borders obsessively protect bodily orifices suggests a profound link between two prominent concerns—with siege warfare and England embattled, and with the threatened female body. The link was not Shakespeare's alone: it was built into his culture.

Renaissance maps often identified England with the female body. The frontispiece figure Britannia in Drayton's Poly-Olbion is clothed in a map. Elizabeth in the Ditchley portrait stands on a map of England; jewels carbuncling her dress resemble in color and distribution the map's towns and forests, and the south coast below her feet disconcertingly resembles toes. In a portrait in Hardwick Hall, Elizabeth's petticoat is adorned with fish and sea horses like the sea creatures surrounding England in Saxton's country map.⁴² Elizabeth appears as defender against papist invasion in a Dutch engraving superimposing her body on a map of Europe.⁴³

Though this society officially lionized the masculine invader Henry V, its unease about Henry is suggested by Shakespeare's ambivalent treatments of him. And in a long passage in Henry V (anticipatory of James's “back door” argument), Henry hesitates to become invader because of England's traditional vulnerability to invasion, especially via Scotland, when her kings are away: “We must not only arm t' invade the French, / But lay down our proportions to defend / Against the Scot, who will make road upon us / With all advantages.” The archbishop of Canterbury minimizes the danger: England is a house walled against thieves (“They of those marches, … / Shall be a wall sufficient to defend / Our inland from the pilfering borderers,” I.ii.137-42), but Henry sees threat of invasion as a condition of English history:

We do not mean the coursing snatchers only,
But fear the main intendment of the Scot,
Who hath been still a giddy neighbor to us.
For you shall read that my great-grandfather
Never went with his forces into France
But that the Scot on his unfurnish'd kingdom
Came pouring, like the tide into a breach,
With ample and brim fullness of his force,
Galling the gleaned land with hot assays,
Girding with grievous siege castles and towns;
That England, being empty of defense,
Hath shook and trembled.

(I.ii.137-54)

Here the great masculine invader himself describes England as a vulnerable nation always subject to sieges.

Even at its most invasive, as in its aggressive Irish policy, Elizabethan England expressed fear of invasion through an insecure border:

All over Catholic Europe, as well as in Ireland, Elizabeth was regarded as illegitimate, and unlikely to remain for long on the throne she had wrongfully ascended. Catholics were convinced that, when the time was ripe, Philip II of Spain, or some other powerful Catholic sovereign, would unseat her on the pope's behalf. With her position so weak, she saw a disobedient Ireland as a constant menace to her security. … Elizabeth could not allow Ireland to become a base for hostile fleets and armies.⁴⁴

Irish lords kept up “a continual correspondence with the queen's enemies in France, Spain, and Scotland”; Ulster assisted refugees from the Spanish Armada, and a Spanish army landed in Ireland in 1601.⁴⁵ Sir Philip Sidney warned in 1577 that the Irish “will turn to any invading force,”⁴⁶ and the enclave of English in the Irish pale had the palisaded mentality of a surrounded minority subject to constant border raids.

The tissue of cultural signifiers that I have described was not unique to the Elizabethan age. The island trope looks back beyond the Norman invasion to Julius Caesar's. Metaphors comparing siege warfare with the siege of a lady's heart permeate medieval literature in many countries, and besieged cities are compared with sexually embattled women in many cultures besides England and many ages besides the Renaissance. The siege mentality seems to have affected Europe to the point where even pores became vulnerable orifices, and people quit washing: bathing, popular in the Middle Ages, was almost completely discontinued in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Georges Vigarello attributes the new mentality largely to fear of the plague: the skin

was seen as porous, and countless openings seemed to threaten. … The plague had only to slip through. … The body had less resistance to poisons after bathing, because it was more open to them. It was as if the body was permeable; infectious air threatened to flood in from all sides. “Steam-baths and bath-houses should be forbidden, because when one emerges, the flesh and the whole disposition of the body are softened and the pores open, and … pestiferous vapour can rapidly enter the body and cause sudden death” [Houel, 1573]. … The architectural metaphor played a central role, with the body seen as a house invaded and occupied by the plague.⁴⁷

But is there not a peculiar intensity to the almost paranoid self-palisading of the English Renaissance psyche—something akin to what Canadian literati used to call a garrison mentality? And was not England, for a Protestant country, oddly obsessed with virginity? Countless literary examples spring to mind, from Spenser's Knights of Maidenhead to the virgins slaughtered during Tamburlaine's city siege, and lingering as late as virginity's magical power in Comus. Who spurred on the army to meet Armada invaders? The Virgin Queen, ideal image of Invaders of England versus Embattled Woman. The Land as Woman, society as a body threatened at its orifices—such deeply ingrained ideas help explain why Elizabethans valued virginity, why England needed a virgin queen.

All Europe was influenced by what Douglas calls “the exaggerated importance attached to virginity in the early centuries of Christianity”: “The idea that virginity had a special positive value was bound to fall on good soil in a small persecuted minority group,” such social conditions encouraging symbolism of the body as “an imperfect container which will only be perfect if it can be made impermeable.”⁴⁸ Warner documents the persecution (100,000 early Christians martyred) and virginity's growing centrality in medieval dogma, which stressed “technical, physical virginity, … the closed womb, … the ‘fountain sealed,’ an unbroken body, and not … a spiritual state of purity.”⁴⁹ Though Augustine's view of rape was more spiritual than Shakespeare's, this architect of the doctrine of original sin laid the foundations for the cult of sealed-up virginity: his belief that original sin is transmitted by male genitals during intercourse made sin a venereal disease; it linked sexual penetration with admission of evil to the human interior. St. Methodius wrote: “Anyone who intends to avoid sin … must keep all his members and senses pure and sealed—just as pilots caulk a ship's timbers—to prevent sin from getting an opening and pouring in.”⁵⁰ Medieval belief that the hymen sealed off the uterus abetted the idea of a virgin as a sealed vessel. Medieval women's passion for fasting sealed the body from food and from the passage of other substances through orifices: fasting saints like Joan the Meatless ceased to menstruate and were believed not to defecate, urinate, sweat, or emit tears; of one it was said, “neither saliva nor sputum emanated from her mouth nor any mucus or other fluid from her nostrils”; another “discharged no filth or dandruff from her hair.”⁵¹ Here was truly one of Douglas's societies to “develop taboos and pollution beliefs around anything—from feces to menstrual blood—issuing from a bodily orifice.”⁵² But in most Protestant countries, virginity as an ideal was now yielding to marriage. England joined in this movement, as many cultural documents show (marriage sermons, romantic comedies); but in England virginity persisted as a potent ideal in the virgin queen cult and in works of many Protestant writers; and where married love emerged as the ideal, writers became obsessed, like Shakespeare, with sexually besieged wives. It is tempting to conclude that Douglas's theory is right and explains a lot—the Elizabethan mentality resembled the early Christian because similar political and social conditions of the two groups fostered similar anxieties.

AUGUSTUS, BRUTUS, AND THE BACK DOOR

But the sky began to change in 1603. Forthrightly enunciating a new ideology in his first speech to Parliament in 1603, James promised to avoid wars and declared the island Britain more secure from invasion than ever before. He also announced a policy of not persecuting Catholics, whose threat to the nation he saw as diminished: rather than demonizing them as would-be rapists, potential invaders of the national body, he minimized them as the last remnants of an amoebic dysentery lingering in the national alimentary canal, a “Sect, lurking within the bowels of this Nation.” His one reference to his predecessor did not mention her virginity.⁵³

This speech put an ingenious spin on the island trope: union of England and Scotland would create a true nation-island immune to invasion. Abolishing its main landlocked border gave Britain sea on all its boundaries:

These two countries being separated neither by sea, nor great river, mountaine, … but only by little small brooks, or demolished little walles. … And now in the end and fullness of time united, the right and title of both in my person, … whereby it is now become like a little world within itself, being intrenched and fortified round about with a natural, and yet admirable strong pond or ditch, whereby all the former fears of this nation are now quite cut off: the other part of the Island being ever before now not only the place of landing to all strangers, that was to make invasion here, but likewise moved by the enemies of this State by untimely incursions, to make enforced diversion from their conquests, for defending themselves at home, and keeping sure their back-door, as then it was called, which was the greatest hindrance and let that euer my predecessors of this nation got in disturbing them from their many famous and glorious conquests abroad.⁵⁴

James thinks England's status as besieged island has long hampered its expansion into empire; the island of his beleagured predecessors he sees as a house, the Scottish border its unsecured back door. The passage even hints at invasion as unsanctioned bodily penetration, given the Renaissance slang meaning of back door. (The trope persists to this day: in the 1989 European elections, the British Conservative party campaigned on an isolationist platform; radio commercials threatened that closer alliance with Europe would bring left-wing policies to Britain “through the back door.”) But his rule, James says, has changed all that, and well he might wish to minimize the threat from the north, having himself recently penetrated the inner chambers of the English monarchy through that same Scottish back door. But what was the change? Was the new Jacobean ideology a simple shift from fear of invasion to joy in the prospect of invading others? I think not: James's pacifism, stressed in this speech, undermines talk of “famous and glorious conquests.” As the address deconstructs, by introducing pacifism, its own opposition Besieged Nation/Conquering Nation, so James's ideology deconstructed Rome's opposed images as invader/invadee, by focusing on the historical liminal zone of Augustus.

Elizabethan England conceptualized itself mainly as the “feminine” society, vulnerable to invasion. In Jacobean England, official ideology played down the threat of invasion, comparing England with Rome the possessor of empire, enjoying the golden age of Augustus. James's first speech to Parliament heightened his peacemaking efforts by painting the Wars of the Roses, then more than a century past, as but recently ended; this helped create the desired Augustan atmosphere. Remember that there were always three concepts of Rome and of England: First, the “masculine” invader concept, whose frequent signifiers were Julius Caesar and Henry V; second, the “feminine” invadee concept, whose signifiers were Lucrece and Boudicca's ravished daughters; and third, the perhaps hermaphroditic “peaceful empire” concept,⁵⁵ symbolized by Augustus Caesar and King James. James's ideology belonged to the third concept. That he identified with Augustus rather than Julius Caesar is crucial: in focusing on the Augustan moment in Roman history, James emphasized peaceful possession, rather than acquisition, of empire. As the old binary oppositions invite the language of sexual difference I have here employed sous rature, James's deconstruction of this oppositional system invites the language of, as it were, sexual indifference: James's own bisexuality is as revealing a cultural signifier as Elizabeth's virginity.⁵⁶ James's ideology favored not the “feminine” image of endangered England, but not the “masculine” invader image either: it posited the peaceful colonial power.

The ideology's colonial side preceded and shaped reality, for at this moment in history the image of empire was premature: England planted its first American colony four years after James's first speech to Parliament. Early reports from the colonies are among the sources of Cymbeline's close contemporary The Tempest, a play whose complexity and ambivalence have often been ignored in recent criticism, where it has gradually become a touchstone of the western colonial discourse, a central image of European invasion of the nonwhite world.⁵⁷ Prospero, be it remembered, finally abandons his colony, allowing it to revert to its precolonial state; if this mentality sadly did not shape reality, it remains unlikely that pacifist James would have conflated colonization and invasion; he found in colonization a peaceful alternative to invasion. His word “plantation” conjures more the fertility rites of an agrarian society than the invasion mentality's rites of war.⁵⁸

Jacobean England expanding into empire fancied itself heir to the Roman Empire. The title of Speed's 1611 atlas, The Theater of the Empire of Great Britaine,⁵⁹ alluded to Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum: “Orbis” there means both “world” and “Roman Empire,” and “the authority of the Roman Empire … attach[ed] by implication to the English Empire.”⁶⁰ James carefully fostered the identification, especially in his “favourite self-appointed role of Peacemaker. Beati pacifici was his motto, and he loved to be called, and poets duly obliged him, the second Augustus”;⁶¹ James was portrayed in Roman dress as early as 1590.⁶² As Bergeron shows, the popular mind linked the Jacobean era with Augustan Rome.⁶³

The ideology incorporated that traditional link between England and the ancient world, the Brutus-Trojan myth; significantly, Brutus was a colony founder. But this myth encoded a vulnerability more typical of the Lucrece than the Augustus paradigm: Brutus founded Britain because his own society was destroyed. Mythic common ancestor of Rome and Britain, Troy shared Rome's dual image of besieged city and empire builder: Aeneas founded Rome after fleeing sacked Troy; his grandson Brutus dubbed the Ur-London New Troy. Jacobean ideology identified James with Brutus as well as Augustus, but as he downplayed England's “feminine,” vulnerable image, James borrowed Brutus's nation-founding image without its vulnerability. Not only had Brutus come from a vulnerable society, he had created one, by dividing Britain—Lear-like—into three kingdoms. Appropriating the title “new Brutus,” James created himself as an anti-Brutus: uniting England and Scotland reversed Brutus's dangerous division. Image makers promoted the theme: Munday's Triumphs of Re-united Britania (1605) notes that “England, Wales, & Scotland, by the first Brute severed and divided, is in our second Brute reunited.”⁶⁴ But so entrenched are a culture's semiotic codes, even in times of change, that image makers could not entirely forget Brutus's vulnerable side: Heywood's Troia Britanica; or, Great Britain's Troy (1609), rejoicing that in James “three kingdoms, first by Brute divided, / United are, and by one scepter guided,”⁶⁵ also develops a parallel between Troy's sack and the rapes or near-rapes of Helen.

Throughout a poem and five plays about Rome, Shakespeare “makes continual reference to Troy, the city that gave birth to Rome.”⁶⁶ Since he most often represents Troy as a besieged, sacked city, this identification underlines the basic vulnerability of Shakespeare's Rome. The emphasis so prominent in Lucrece evokes Troy's destruction. Katharine Maus justly notes that “for Shakespeare the sack of Troy is a culturally primal event.”⁶⁷ Shakespeare's return, in works early and late, to the Rome-Troy complex of ideas suggests deep resonance between the Rome-Troy culture he imagined and the English culture he experienced. Across his career he more typically represents that culture in its vulnerable aspect, at risk of invasion, than in James's imperial aspect; but his treatment does shift during his Jacobean phase.

Elizabethan Shakespeare typically imagines a “feminine” embattled society, like Douglas's Coorgs—the Lucrece paradigm; but in Jacobean works like Cymbeline, he shifts toward the Augustus (not the Julius Caesar) paradigm. This reflected, I think, his culture's changing sense of itself. The change did not occur overnight; it was a subtle shift, a tilting rather than a revolution—jaundiced views of virginity emerge in works before 1603, jaundiced views of Augustus Caesar in works after 1603 (witness Antony and Cleopatra's Caesar). The change was not universally applauded: James's pacifism and bisexuality disturbed many; transvestism in the streets disturbed even James. The change did not flow down from the top, the sole creation of Jamesian ideology: like most social change, it welled up from many sources. The ideology was not innocent: the bad faith behind pacifist pronouncements was only too clear in Ireland's continuing agonies. But the vision held great potential; it offered much to women, to the New World, to relations between sexes and between nations, to England's sense of herself. Like Wordsworth's spots of time, the Jacobean intercalary period offers one of history's shining worlds of possibility, not without pertinence to the nuclear camps of our own time.

OF SALAMANDERS AND HERMAPHRODISM: LIFE IN THE INTERSTICES

Purity and Danger, in a neat piece of puzzle solving, decodes the Hebrew abominations of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. To two thousand years' efforts to solve the puzzle of what a pig shares with a salamander that both should be abominated, Douglas adds her solution: abominated animals are those that fail to fit one clear category. “Any class of creatures which is not equipped for the right kind of locomotion in its element is contrary to holiness. … Anything in the water which has not fins and scales is unclean.”⁶⁸ Pigs, with cloven hooves but non-cud-chewing, fail to conform to the category of cattle, “the model of the proper kind of food for a pastoralist.”⁶⁹ As Turner encapsulates this theory of Douglas's, the unclear is unclean.

Fear and avoidance of creatures that stray out of class boundaries is symptomatic of boundary obsessions that generate pollution beliefs: in a society that feels endangered, clear boundaries divide Jew from Gentile, as an invisible wall guards bodily boundaries, protecting orifices. “The discrimination of statuses obsessed the guardians of the Elizabethan social order,”⁷⁰ as sumptuary laws dictated dress for social classes. Extraordinary efforts during this period to maintain the line between man and beast recall Douglas's theory of boundary-blurring creatures: “It was bestial to work at night, for the same reason that burglary was a worse crime than daylight robbery; the night … was ‘the time wherein man is to rest, and wherein beasts run about seeking their prey.’ It was even bestial to go swimming, for … it was essentially a nonhuman method of progression. As a Cambridge divine observed in 1600: men walked; birds flew; only fish swam. … Even to pretend to be an animal for purposes of ritual or entertainment was unacceptable. … In the early seventeenth century the hobby horse seems to have largely disappeared from the morris dance. … Monstrous births caused such horror [because] they threatened the firm dividing-line between men and animals.”⁷¹ Such human self-palisading is contemporary with other instances that we have seen; it was during the early modern period that “most farmers finally moved the animals out of their houses into separate accommodation” and that bestiality became a capital offense in England in 1534. Bestiality was a “sin of confusion; it was immoral to mix the categories”; the many tales of monstrous human/animal births “show that, in popular estimation at least, man was not so distinct a species that he could not breed with beasts. It was because the separateness of the human race was thought so precarious, … that the boundary had been so tightly guarded.”⁷² Also feared was whatever blurred the “categories of ‘wild’ and ‘tame.’ … The encroachment of wild creatures into the human domain was always alarming. … In 1593 it was feared that the plague in London would get worse because a heron perched on the top of St. Peter's, Cornhill, and stayed there all afternoon. In 1604 the House of Commons rejected a bill after the speech of its Puritan sponsor had been interrupted by the flight of a jackdaw through the Chamber—an indisputably bad omen. The attitude resembled that of those African peoples among whom misfortune is expected whenever the world of the bush encroaches upon that of human settlement.”⁷³

The Israelites abominated some foods; Elizabethans abominated some women. Organizing women into clear categories—maid, widow, wife, whore—it abominated the unmarried nonvirgin partly because she confounded the distinction between maid and wife.⁷⁴ In Douglas's terms, such women would have been considered polluted, not because sex was inherently staining but because in a society that demands clear boundaries, to confound the line between categories is to become an abomination as sure as the finless salamander or the flying ant.⁷⁵ The raped wife, too, is decategorized. Because her extramarital sex is unsanctioned but unwilled, she is neither chaste wife nor adulteress. Her classlessness—or boundary-crossing double class—like rape's “stain,” leaves her polluted, potentially contaminating to others. She inhabits a liminal zone between two classes.⁷⁶ All margins are dangerous.

But, Douglas says, to be in the margins is to be “in contact with danger, to [be] at a source of power.”⁷⁷ Propp reminds us how many folk heroes disobey interdictions, transgress boundaries—dangerous but necessary for a hero to grow up and triumph.⁷⁸ The dangers that boys in tribal cultures undergo in initiation, Douglas says, “express something important about marginality. … To go out of the formal structure and to enter the margins is to be exposed to power that is enough to kill them or make their manhood. … The danger that is risked by boundary transgression is power.”⁷⁹

In Titus and Lucrece, rape and mutilation lead to the downfall of a tyrannical government and to Rome's political salvation. Like smashing an atom, smashing these women releases tremendous power. When bodily violence propels them into dangerous margins, when ceasing to be chaste wives they transgress confining boundaries, they release an uncanny power upon the world.

Releasing power through blood sacrifice is tragedy's ancient heritage from ritual. Modern female readers may prefer comedy's way of releasing power. All through Cymbeline, Imogen tiptoes along a chasm of rape and death but escapes violation and murder, and England escapes invasion. Imogen transgresses boundaries in happier ways—eloping, running off to Wales, confounding sexual distinctions by dressing as a boy, transgressing theatrical conventions in being Shakespeare's only transvestite heroine who is not a virgin. This last, a break with her comedic sisters, signals a difference not generic but historical. That this symbol of Endangered Britain is a sexually experienced woman seems a sign of change. Are the orifices not to be so desperately guarded as before? Can Britain escape invasion without a royal virgin as a rallying symbol? Britain escapes here because the Britons trounce the Romans at the lane, but also because Britain pays the tribute and makes peace. Has the invasion mentality ebbed? This is the last invasion attempt in Shakespeare.

In The Tempest, Shakespeare's last globetrotting Italians, like the classical Romans before them, make themselves at home on whichever islands they come upon. The virginity magic of Prospero's “virgin knot” threat proves temporary: Prospero does not favor perpetual virginity, but wants his daughter to marry. The menace has bleached out of the invaded island theme: the storm that wrecked the intruders' ship, as storms defended Britain (at least in imagination) from Caesar's ships and the Armada, is here controlled by the island's sovereign, and the threat of rape, by the alien Caliban, is contained. The virgin will marry; the besieged island is abandoned. Prospero returns to the mainland to rule without aid of boundary-protecting magic.

We know, as Shakespeare did not, what lay ahead for the island Britain. The besieged virgin of Renaissance imaginings would become the thrusting masculine conqueror, threatening the New World with ravishment. As Rome moved from invader stage through Augustan liminal zone to invaded stage, so Britain would move from invaded stage through Jacobean liminal zone to invader stage. Colonization would reveal its brutal face, indistinguishable from invasion: the “plantation” James saw as a peaceful alternative to invasion soon displayed invasion's panoply of signifiers—rape, pillage, genocide. The British Empire, like the Roman, would thrust deep into the world's virgin territories; many read The Tempest as a document heralding that advance. But while Jacobeans helped invent English colonialism, the play does not fully inhabit that discourse: like Jacobean ideology, it dwells in a liminal zone. No longer an ideology of feminine endangerment, not yet one of masculine rapacity, James's ideology deconstructed a world view that offered only these equally unpleasant alternatives. The Tempest belongs to a precolonial discourse: to locate it fully within the discourse of colonialism, as do Brown or Barker and Hulme,⁸⁰ is to miss the power accruing from its position in the interstices of literary history. The late comedies conjure a world poised between society as threatened virgin and as thrusting rapist, a world redeemable without rape and mutilation of women, where territorial integrity can fit comfortably—a loose-fitting salt water girdle—without being tested through invading other nations.

Cymbeline closes with peace, concluded without the need for purification rites: “Let / A Roman and a British ensign wave / Friendly together. … / Never was a war did cease, / Ere bloody hands were wash'd, with such a peace” (V.v.481-87).⁸¹ Shakespeare had always identified England with Rome, and his last Roman play unites them; this union weds the “third Rome,” which desists from invading, with the “third England,” saved from invasion—Augustan Rome meets Jacobean England. Toward the end of his career, Shakespeare, living in a charmed moment in a changing culture, envisioned a society neither invaded nor invader, neither raped nor rapist, neither polluted nor polluter, “this happy breed of men, this little world, / This precious stone set in the silver sea, / … This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England” (R2 [Richard II] II.i. 45-50).

Notes

1. Throughout this essay, I use Shakespeare's Complete Works, ed. David Bevington, 3d ed. (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1980). Line numbers in Lucrece and act/scene/line numbers in the plays will subsequently be included in the text. Earlier versions of this essay were read at the Creating Word Conference in Edmonton, Alberta, at the Pacific Northwest Renaissance Conference in Victoria, British Columbia, and at the English Department of the University of Calgary when I was an exchange lecturer: I am grateful to colleagues who offered many good suggestions on these occasions.

2. Edward Berry, Shakespeare's Comic Rites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 139.

3. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 115.

4. Giulio Argan, “Ideology and Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 2 (1975): 298.

5. Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960; first published in French, 1908); Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969).

6. Douglas, Purity, 121-22.

7. Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

8. Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 138.

9. Leonard Barkan, Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 69, 75.

10. John W. Velz, “The Ancient World in Shakespeare: Authenticity or Anachronism?” Shakespeare Survey 31 (1978): 1.

11. Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 11.

12. See J. Leeds Barroll, “Shakespeare and Roman History,” Modern Language Review 53 (1958): 328-29.

13. Douglas, Purity, 121.

14. See Nancy Vickers, “‘The Blazon of Sweet Beauty's Best’: Shakespeare's Lucrece,” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985), 106ff; Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 93-95.

15. Velz, 11.

16. Dubrow, 94.

17. Ibid., 95.

18. Miola, 27.

19. William S. Heckscher, “Shakespeare in His Relationship to the Visual Arts: A Study in Paradox,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 13-14 (1970-71): 26-27.

20. Dubrow, 94.

21. Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 70.

22. See lines 16, 33-34, 838, 1056, 1067-68; see Dubrow, 92-93. Cymbeline, too, imagines sex as burglary (see I.vi.15, II.ii.41-42).

23. Stallybrass, 126-27.

24. Douglas, Purity, 96.

25. Joel Fineman notes that doors, wind, and glove objectify the rape (“Shakespeare's Will: The Temporality of Rape,” Representations 20 [1987]: 40).

26. Leah Marcus's reading of the play as a “sustained political allegory” of Jacobean political concerns is a more topical approach than mine (Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988]).

27. Georges Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 10.

28. B. C. Faust (1792) in Vigarello, 140.

29. The Roman emissary arrives in Britain to demand tribute just before the Roman seducer arrives in Britain to attempt Imogen's virtue. Imogen represents British womanhood against the claims of a Roman, Frenchman, Dutchman, and Spaniard that their own countrywomen are superior (I.iv). Told that her husband has been consorting with Roman prostitutes, Imogen replies wanly, “My lord, I fear, / Has forgot Britain” (I.vi.112-13), meaning “he has forgotten me,” a natural identification of herself with Britain. Believing her dead, Posthumus repents of having commissioned her murder and joined the Romans invading Britain: “'Tis enough / That, Britain, I have kill'd thy mistress [Imogen as the king's daughter]; peace, / I'll give no wound to thee” (V.i.19-21).

30. Meredith Skura, “Interpreting Posthumus' Dream from above and below: Families, Psychoanalysts, and Literary Critics,” in Representing Shakespeare, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 213-14.

31. Coppélia Kahn, “The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece,” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 49.

32. Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Harriett Hawkins, The Devil's Party: Critical Counter-Interpretations of Shakespearian Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Dubrow, Captive Victors.

33. As Douglas argues elsewhere, however, it is a mistake to regard as advanced or civilized an “internalized” view of transgression as moral guilt, and as primitive or uncivilized an “external” view of transgression as taboo violation. Instead she locates the taboolike attitudes in claustrophobic societies that are obsessed with boundary protection (Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology [New York: Pantheon, 1970], 102).

34. Victor Morgan, “The Cartographic Image of ‘The Country’ in Early Modern England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 29 (1979): 136.

35. Ifor M. Evans and Heather Lawrence, Christopher Saxton: Elizabethan Map-Maker (London: Holland, 1979).

36. Garrett Mattingly, The Armada (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside, 1959), 390. In the spate of books published in 1988 for the Armada's four hundredth anniversary, this verdict has stood. The most revisionary, Felipe Fernández-Armesto's (which has not been reviewed very favorably), tries to resurrect the weather as a determining factor, but mainly cites poor weather on the voyage from Spain; even he admits that twice during the battle itself the weather helped the Spanish (The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988], 202-03, 205, 238; see also Duff Hart-Davis, Armada [London: Bantam, 1988], 198).

37. Roy C. Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 138.

38. Louis Adrian Montrose, “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 315. See also Marcus, 62.

39. See Homer Nearing, Jr., “The Legend of Julius Caesar's British Conquest,” PMLA 64 (1949): 889-929.

40. Ibid., 904.

41. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), 37.

42. Roy C. Strong and Julia Trevelyan Oman, Elizabeth R (London: Secker and Warburg, 1971), 32.

43. Strong, Portraits, 116.

44. Peter and Fiona Somerset Fry, A History of Ireland (London: Routledge, 1988), 116.

45. Ibid., 117, 127, 134.

46. James P. Myers, Jr., Elizabethan Ireland: A Selection of Writings of Elizabethan Writers on Ireland (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1983), 37.

47. Vigarello, 9.

48. Douglas, Purity, 157-58.

49. Warner, 63.

50. Ibid., 54, 73.

51. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 91, 100, 122, 211.

52. Douglas, Purity, 115.

53. James I, King, The Political Works of James I, Reprinted from the Edition of 1616, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918), 270-76.

54. Ibid., 272.

55. I have elsewhere discussed the hermaphrodite symbol's centrality in Jacobean culture, including female cross-dressing in London (see Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 [Urbana: University of Illinois Press; Brighton: Harvester, 1984], part 2). Some Elizabethan women also cross-dressed—scattered references appear from about 1570—but the fashion blossomed in Jacobean times. Elizabeth's cross-dressing at Tilbury might tell against hermaphrodism as a typically Jacobean symbol; but Susan Frye (“The Myth of Elizabeth I at Tilbury,” Sixteenth-Century Journal, forthcoming) notes a complete lack of contemporary evidence that Elizabeth did cross-dress at Tilbury: this image of Elizabeth was, tellingly, a Jacobean creation. Determined to find hermaphrodism in Elizabeth, Marcus exaggerates from small hints—Elizabeth's holding a truncheon at Tilbury Marcus inflates into the “donning of male battle gear” (63). Gabriele Bernhard Jackson notes the lack of Elizabethan illustrations showing “real—as opposed to allegorical—armed women. … It looks as though there was an unspoken taboo on such representations” (“Topical Ideology: Witches, Amazons, and Shakespeare's Joan of Arc,” English Literary Renaissance 18 [1988]: 54). Such taboos suggest that despite considerable interest in cross-dressing, Elizabethans were deeply uneasy about effacing the male-female boundary.

56. Building on Mary Douglas's theories, Kirsten Hastrup suggests that “the ambivalent feelings of most people towards transvestism, and to a lesser extent towards homosexuality, are founded on the fact that the people designated by these terms defy the normal categorisation of male and female. … If transvestism and homosexuality are concepts of danger, in the sense that they are notions relating to ambiguous areas of classification, then virginity and heterosexuality may be said to be notions of purity, in that they operate with distinct categories of men and women” (“The Semantics of Biology: Virginity,” in Defining Females: The Nature of Women in Society, ed. Shirley Ardener [New York: Wiley, 1978], 52).

57. Meredith Anne Skura's recent essay usefully gathers together (n. 1) and cogently criticizes the many “colonial discourse” treatments of the play (“Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 [1989]: 42-69). She argues that the English colonialism of later centuries has anachronistically colored readings of the play: in fact the play marked, in 1611, the very beginning of a colonial discourse that was significantly altered as early as Purchas's remarks in 1625. She questions whether “colonialism was already encoded in the anomalous situation in 1611,” when “there were in England no literary portrayals of New World inhabitants and certainly no fictional examples of colonialist discourse. … Insofar as The Tempest does in some way allude to an encounter with a New World native, … it is the very first work of literature to do so. … If the play is ‘colonialist,’ it must be seen as ‘prophetic’ rather than descriptive” (52-58). For another perceptive recent critique of the “colonial discourse” interpretation of The Tempest, see Deborah Willis, “Shakespeare's Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 29 (1989): 277-89.

58. Jim Black drew my attention to this Jamesian usage.

59. John Speed, The Theater of the Empire of Great Britain, ed. John Arlott, 4 vols. (London: Phoenix House, 1953-55).

60. J. B. Harley, “Meaning and Ambiguity in Tudor Cartography,” in English Map-Making, 1400-1650, ed. Sarah Tyacke (London: British Library, 1983), 39.

61. Emrys Jones, “Stuart Cymbeline,” Essays in Criticism 11 (1961): 90.

62. Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 46.

63. David M. Bergeron, “Cymbeline: Shakespeare's Last Roman Play,” Shakespeare Quarterly 31 (1980): 31-41.

64. Anthony Munday, Pageants and Entertainments of Anthony Munday, ed. David Bergeron (New York: Garland, 1985), 7.

65. Thomas Heywood, Troia Britanica: or, Great Britaines Troy, 1609. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1972).

66. Miola, 17. Miola details many links among our three Roman works: the wager on the wife's chastity (Luc, Cym), Tarquin's and Iachimo's similar approach to sleeping victims, the configuration wicked queen/lustful son (Tit, Cym). Other readers too have noticed close affinities among these works: “The Lucrece story and the Titus Andronicus story look like alternative versions of the same archetype” (G. K. Hunter, “Sources and Meanings in Titus Andronicus,” in Mirror up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of G. R. Hibbard, ed. J. C. Gray [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984], 184). The Rome/Troy works grew out of a discrete body of material, encoded to conflate harm to the state with harm to the body. That great Jacobean endangered heroine in endangered Britain, Cymbeline's Imogen, bears the name of the wife of Brutus of Troy (see Goldberg, 240).

67. Maus, 81.

68. Douglas, Purity, 55.

69. Ibid., 54.

70. Louis Adrian Montrose, “The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology,” Helios 7 (1980): 56.

71. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 39.

72. Ibid., 39-40, 135.

73. Ibid., 78.

74. See my Women, 84.

75. An Ashanti girl who becomes pregnant before initiation is so decategorized that she is ostracized and driven into the forest: “Women denounce her for her intrusion into their territory; girls reject her for her treachery. She is without status: no-one calls her eno (‘mother’) and so she is not a woman, and she is not a girl because girls do not become pregnant” (Peter Sarpong, Girls' Nubility Rites in Ashanti [Accra-Tema: Ghana Publishing, 1977], 76). Other boundary-blurrers: the leper is “a walking oxymoron: violating the sacrosanct boundary between life and death, he had long been a figure of anomaly hence of pollution”; leprosariums were on the outskirts of the city (Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 33); the actor “was a willful confuser of categories”—as Gosson charged, “in stage plays for a boy to put on the attire, the gesture, the passions of a woman, for a mean person to take upon him the title of a prince, … [is] to show themselves otherwise than they are” (Montrose, “Purpose,” 55).

76. As Dubrow shows, Lucrece “repeatedly describes ambiguous intermediate states, such as the sensation of being both dead and alive or the dilemma of being at once chaste and unchaste, and these examples of ‘strange harmony’ are mirrored by syneciosis,” in phrases like “lifeless life” (82). Dubrow is interested in identity loss in the rape victim, but such interstitial states can also be attributed to society's rigid categories.

77. Douglas, Purity, 97.

78. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Lawrence Scott, ed. Svatana Pirkova-Jakobson (Bloomington: Indiana Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics, 1958).

79. Douglas, Purity, 96, 161.

80. Paul Brown, “‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 48-71; Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, “‘Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish’: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), 191-205.

81. Jones thinks that “the peace-tableau with which Cymbeline ends … pays tribute to James's strenuous peace-making policy” (89), and Glynne Wickham offers, “The drift away from revenge tragedy and towards regenerative tragicomedy in the first decade of James's reign … has its true origins in the political consciousness of the British peoples saved from foreign invasion and civil war by the peaceful accession of James I in 1603” (“From Tragedy to Tragi-Comedy: King Lear as Prologue,” Shakespeare Survey 26 [1973]: 36).