Abstract
Constructing a particular nation, that of early modern England, is seen here as a series of theatrical performances. Shakespeare’s work is taken as a series of thought experiments. Some, like The Merchant of Venice, are reassuring that threatening circumstances and innovatory social practices are capable of being overcome or assimilated from the unknown to the known. Some, like King Lear and Hamlet, ponder the consequences of a failure to discover a resolution. Some writers have argued that England was historically quite early in beginning to conceive of itself as a nation, rather than as a population of possibly heterogeneous regions subject to a dynasty, a state of affairs summarized in the by now clichéd remark attributed to the Sun King, “L’Etat, c’est moi”. For Shakespeare, if not for all of his contemporaries, the Englishman is a bit slow-witted, owing to his fondness for beef and red wine, but he is distinguishable from others and provides material for the second pieces of theater I look at. If there could be an Englishman, his experience with the absolutist pretensions of the Stuart monarchy allowed there to be a free-born Englishman (and, actually, Englishwoman). The two crucial battles of the English civil war, Marston Moor and Naseby, followed by the Army Debates of 1647–1649 form the stage for an at least aspiring egalitarianism we now know as the rights of man, or the rights of the civic person.
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Notes
See Macintyre and Clark [1, p. 29].
See Purkiss [2, Q and A Section, 4]. The battle of Bosworth Field, near Leicester, established the Tudor dynasty in 1485, an event, I shall suggest, with perhaps wider ramifications than Purkiss grants it. Nevertheless, Naseby, as we shall see, gradually enabled people to understand their world (in the west) in a new way.
The frequent colloquial conflation of England and Great Britain is a cause of confusion. The United Kingdom is a political contrivance. An Allied Army confronted the Germans in the Great War, but it was as Scottish, French and German men that they played football at Christmas 1914: see Christian Carion’s 1995 film, Joyeux Noel. The scene in the film portraying the singing of Stilliche Nacht comports precisely with my late grandfather’s story. German soldiers approached “enemy” trenches with flags of truce on Christmas Eve 1914, saying “Englische soldaten” to be told “we’re no’ English, we’re Sco’ish, but ye’re welcome onyways”.
See [3, p. 133].
See [4].
See [5, p. 19].
Ibid.
See [6].
See [7].
Quoted in Roy [8, p. 54].
Rupert Brooke, The Soldier. His body would lie, he promised his reader, “under an English heaven”.
See [9, p. 86].
See [10].
See [11, p. 87]. Ironically, of course, he was writing less than a decade before the Insurrection of 1857.
See [12, p. 8]. The nuances of class and ethnicity in the constructions of Kipling’s work are often startling.
See [15].
See Noth on De Saussure and Beneviste [16, p. 244].
See [16].
See [15, p. 118]. He might have added “legal” to political, since, in relation to monetary currency, we speak of “legal tender”.
See [24, p. 37].
One thinks, here, of course of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, in particular see [25], on the cultural dimension of law’s political recognition of important, apparently individual accomplishments of social status by virtue of possession or cultural achievement.
See [29]. The chart was, it proclaims, discovered in the Kaiser’s Alcove at Osborne House, one of Queen Victoria’s favorite retreats.
See [30].
See [31].
See [32].
See [33].
Leanda de Lisle argues that the failure of Elizabeth’s successor to use theater “as a symbol of national aspirations” contributed much to the alienation and disintegration that was to characterize seventeenth century England. “… the nation that shaped and worshipped Gloriana never forgave him for it”. See [36, p. 289].
“wain” was a term much favored by Morris, Rossetti and others, whose preferred nomenclature for the ubiquitous urban tram or omnibus, was “folk wain”.
See Baldwin [37].
See [38].
See Thompson’s Conclusion [39].
See [40].
See Andrews [41] for the importance of the Hakluyts in the areas of discussion on the issues.
See [42, Act I Sc i].
See [42, Act IV Sc i].
See [43, p. 69]. The Aboriginal character in Alex Miller’s Landscapes of Farewell, describing his father’s violence toward him to a retired professor from Hamburg says, “It is as if he had searched for an answer that had cursed him from the day of his birth. What is it I am supposed to do? And he received no answer” [See 44, p. 161].
See [45, pp. 188–189].
See [46, pp. 14–15].
See [47, Act II Sc vii].
See [48, Act II Sc ii].
See [49, Act V Sc vii].
See [50, pp. 210–212].
See [51].
See [52].
It is worth noting that the House of that name was understood to represent, or stand for a greater commons, that of the free Englishman. For many historians, the army was far more representative of this subject, more literate and politically engaged in the seventeenth century until the mid-nineteenth.
The (First) Agreement of the People, in GE Aylmer see [55, p. 89].
See [56, p. 62, Introduction].
See [56, p. 53].
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Duncanson, I.W. Reading for Law and the State: Theaters of Problematization and Authority. Int J Semiot Law 22, 321–342 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-009-9111-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-009-9111-y