The Border of History
Welcome destruction, blood, and massacre!
I see (as in a map) the end of all.
(King Richard III 2.3.53-54)
Shakespeare's audience watched the plays of the second tetralogy in theaters that retained the conventional shape of a map of the world; the theater called The Globe would make the connection explicit.20 Shakespeare himself made dramatic use of the notion of the theater as a metaphor of the oikumenê in the prologue to King Henry V: "Suppose within the girdle of these walls / Are now confín'd two mighty monarchies, / Whose high, upreared, and abutting fronts / The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder" (prologue, lines 19-22). The prologue invites the audience to suppose, in effect, a tripartite world—the third part, of course, being taken by the audience.
The center of this world is occupied by the protagonist of the drama; in the plays of the second tetralogy, that protagonist is drawn from history. The audience witnesses the struggle of that figure to maintain position as the rightful occupant of that space. This is one of the central tropes of dramatic presentation; historical drama provides the additional element of the protagonist struggling to hold a "place" in history. Only Hal/Henry V controls this place successfully within the tetralogy. And while the Elizabethan audience might savor this achievement, they would also be aware of its anomaly—that this one figure is surrounded by many others who aspire to occupy the center of the world's stage but can never quite seem to find it, and instead stand in danger of falling from the stage altogether.
The loss of a locus is equivalent to the loss of historical being; it is a loss revealed in failures of both action and language. This double loss can be sensed in Shakespeare's presentation not only of Hotspur but of Henry IV; the king's final exit to "Jerusalem" in King Henry IV, Part 2, signals both his personal demise and the end of his usefulness as an actor in either drama or history. The audience's pleasure in Henry V's triumph as a figure of history is tempered by awareness that the stage is more commonly traversed with uncertain footsteps by exhausted—and exhaustible—figures like his father, and Hotspur.
The appropriate genre for such figures is tragedy—a genre which, in Shakespeare's hands, closely resembles that of the history play, but with a crucial shift in emphasis. The protagonists of the late tragedies are those who claim the dramatic and historical center but either cannot locate or cannot occupy that fixed place except, paradoxically, in death: Othello, multiply alienated, deprived of his customary military duties, and finding too much time on his hands in Cyprus; Hamlet, never entirely at home in Denmark, delivering his boldest affirmation of identity—"This is I, / Hamlet the Dane!" (Hamlet 5.1.257-58)—literally at the edge of the grave; Macbeth, who finds the very land itself turning against him at the end of the play; and Antony, disoriented in Egypt, in a drama distinguished by its extraordinarily rapid shifts in setting. Most plangently, there is Lear, who divides his kingdom into a "tripartite world" by way of a map, but who (along with the audience) comes to see "the shape and stability of the kingdom replaced by vagaries of movement and motive, and Lear's map itself, by an unmapped wilderness of lust, ambition, and deceit."21
The causes of Shakespeare's great turn toward tragedy at the end of the sixteenth century are exceptionally complex; here I would only offer the observation that this turn appears to involve a significant shift in Shakespeare's presentation of the ability of his protagonists to orient themselves within the places they are said to inhabit. The plays of the second tetralogy revolve, however elliptically, around an essentially pastoral vision of a monarch who achieves an ideal consonance with the land of England, and thus an iconic status in history. The tragedies that emerge from Shakespeare's pen during the waning, difficult years of Elizabeth's reign and the turbulent early years of James's suggest, albeit indirectly, that this vision of "terrestrial harmony" belongs to the past and cannot be reclaimed, since the more recent protagonists of history, and especially those who rule, have proven inadequate to its pursuit.
Notes
1 G. K. Hunter, "Elizabethans and Foreigners," Shakespeare Survey 17 (1964): 38. Hunter's article remains an excellent introduction to Elizabethan ideas about the larger world.
2 My text for the plays is G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974); all references use this edition and cite the text according to act, scene, and line.
3 The relevant passage from Holinshed is in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London, 1957-75), 4:185.
4 In a speech partly drawn from the First Folio version of King Henry IV, Part 2, Lord Bardolph also aspires to "map out" the revolt in order to ensure its orderly progress; at the same time, and unlike Hotspur, he understands the necessity of laying the "model" against one's "estate," the material resources that are actually available for the enterprise (I.3.41-57). We might say, in linguistic terms, that Bardolph is aware of the perilous gaps that can open up between signs and referents. The same recognition eludes Hotspur.
5 In Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), Phyllis Rackin focuses on the occurrence of this sort of transvaluation in King Richard II, best captured in John of Gaunt's speech at act 2, scene 1, lines 57-64, where Gaunt's ironically quibbling use of the word "dear" "reduces the incommensurable value of what is loved to the commercial value of an expensive commodity. . . . The enduring, immanent value of land and sea (real estate) has been replaced by the fluctuating, mediated value of the market, represented by legal documents ('inky blots and rotten parchment bonds')" (p. 101). I would suggest, though, that Hotspur's map is not this sort of "legal" document; it represents something much more archaic and much closer to the immanent value of land and sea.
6 Spevack cites thirteen uses of "map" by Shakespeare, including two uses in comedies, three in tragedies, one in a "romance," and six in histories; see Marvin Spevack, The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), p. 788. For a gnomically presented but fascinating discussion, see Frederick T. Flahiff, "Lear's Map," Cahiers Élisabéthains 30 (1986): 17-30. Though different in its style and specific preoccupations from my own efforts here, Flahiff s article is close to mine in its general approach to the geographical dimension of Shakespeare's plays.
7 The cultural uses of topography have—perhaps not surprisingly—received a good deal more attention in the social sciences than in the humanities. Especially noteworthy is the work of the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan; see, for example, his Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974), Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis, 1977), and Landscapes of Fear (New York, 1979). For a sweeping historical survey of many of the issues that Tuan addresses theoretically, see Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, 1967). A very accessible (and lavishly illustrated) primer on the conceptual dimensions of cartography is provided by David Turnbull in Maps Are Territories: Science Is an Atlas (1989; Chicago, 1993); see also two essays by J. B. Harley, "Meaning and Ambiguity in Tudor Cartography," in English Map-Making, 1500-1650: Historical Essays, ed. Sarah Tyacke (London, 1983), pp. 22-45, and "Maps, Knowledge, and Power," in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 277-312. Among literary-critical works that make an approach to these topics, see John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, 1994), which examines Hotspur's map briefly (pp. 46-47); Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago, 1988), pp. 1-25, esp. pp. 17-18; and Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992), pp. 107-47.
8 On the shifting demographics of the late Elizabethan period, see Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (New Brunswick, N. J., 1982), pp. 121-48.
9 Rackin, pp. 77, 80. For particularly influential contemporary accounts of the "modern" Hal, see Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), pp. 40-65, and Mullaney, pp. 76-87.
10 Gillies describes this "form of geographic moralisation" as "typo-geographic"; see his short comment on Fluellen's speech (p. 48).
11 As in, for example, Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1991), pp. 97-108, and Rackin, pp. 167-76.
12 The most extended discussion of the analogy between "land" and "woman," and of male exploitation of this relation, is Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land: Metaphor and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975).
13 For a recent historicist account of the political implications of Henry V's corporeality, see Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590-1612 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 83-137, which bears particularly on the dynamics of the wooing scene.
14 Medieval pilgrims were evidently preoccupied with the notion of Christ's feet touching the ground of Palestine, probably out of a perception that the effort to retrace His steps would allow for a kind of physical sympathy with Christ's person ("I walk as He walked") which would otherwise be difficult to achieve. Mandeville accordingly invokes Christ's feet in his very first sentence (The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. and intro. C. W. R. D. Moseley [Harmondsworth, 1983], p. 43).
15 See C. Raymond Beazley, The Dawn of Modern Geography: A History of Exploration and Geographical Science from the Close of the Ninth to the Middle of the Thirteenth Century (c. A.D. 900-1260), 3 vols. (London, 1901), 2:576-79, 627-33. See also Hunter (n. 1 above), pp. 38-39, and, for the T-0's connection with Noah's division of the world among his sons, Flahiff, pp. 25-26. Stephen Greenblatt discusses the T-0 map and the tradition of Jerusalem as center in relation to Mandeville's Travels in Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, 1991), pp. 41-43.
16 Beazley, p. 578. Beazley believes the earliest example of a T-0 map with Jerusalem at the center is one belonging to St. John's College, Oxford, dated 1110; he speculates that the map was crudely copied from a Byzantine original brought to western Europe after one of the early crusades.
17 In England the T-O map survived into the sixteenth century and even later; E. G. R. Taylor cites an example in an anonymous manuscript Cosmographia, transcribed in 1530 for Henry VIII's library though probably produced by a London monk around 1510 (see her Tudor Geography 1485-1583 [London, 1930], pp. 13-14); and Hunter identifies a very late example used to illustrate John Cayworth's Enchiridion Christiados, a Christmas masque, published in 1636 (p. 246n).
18 The danger of the encroaching wilderness makes itself felt in King Henry IV, Part 1, as well, whenever the "matter of Wales" is invoked. In the English popular imagination, Wales, along with the surrounding border region, was de facto a wilderness whose human inhabitants were only a few steps removed from the wolves. Shakespeare introduces this idea in the first scene of the play (I.1.44-46). It is the Prince of Wales in the history plays who bears the responsibility for domesticating the country which is nominally his; thus when Fluellen praises the king as a "countryman" in King Henry V (4.7.111), the implication is that this domestication has occurred.
19 On Henry's desire to reach Jerusalem, as this evolves from King Richard II to King Henry IV, Part 2, see James Black, "Henry IV's Pilgrimage," Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983): 18-26.
20 For a discussion of the more recondite dimensions of this equation, see Frances A. Yates, Theatre of the World (Chicago, 1969). See also Gillies (n. 7 above), pp. 70-98.
21 Flahiff (n. 6 above), p. 19.
Source: "Losing the Map: Topographical Understanding in the Henriad" in Modern Philology, Vol. 94, No. 4, May, 1997, pp. 475-95.
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