Shakespeare on the Edge: Border-crossing in the Tragedies and the HenriadWhen Shakespeare's John of Gaunt refers to England as 'this sceptred isle', he glosses over a fact of which Shakespeare's original audience would have been acutely conscious, which was that England was not an island at all, but had land borders with Scotland and Wales. Together with the narrow channels separating the British mainland from Ireland and the continent, these were the focus of acute, if intermittent, unease during the early modern period. This book analyses works by not only Shakespeare but also his contemporaries to argue that many of the plays of Shakespeare's central period, from the second tetralogy to Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello, engage with the idea of England's borders. But borders, it claims, are not only of geopolitical significance: in Shakespeare's imagination and indeed in that of his culture, eschatological overtones also accrue to the idea of the border, not least because the countries of the Celtic fringe were often discussed in terms of the supernatural and fairy lore and, in particular, the rivers which were often used as boundary markers were invested with heavily mythologized personae. exploring the spiritual uncertainties of the period, and for speculating on what happens in 'the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns'. At the same time, the idea that a thing can only really be defined in terms of what lies beyond it provides a sharply interrogating charge for Shakespeare's use of metatheatre and for his suggestions of a world beyond the confines of his plays. |
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Page 44
... Italy and Denmark are the arms that carry the imperial globe ( in the form of Sicily ) and the sceptre respectively.30 In such understandings of the world as these , geography itself conspires to dictate confessional allegiances - and ...
... Italy and Denmark are the arms that carry the imperial globe ( in the form of Sicily ) and the sceptre respectively.30 In such understandings of the world as these , geography itself conspires to dictate confessional allegiances - and ...
Page 47
... Italy ( 1600 ) .55 It is arguable that any reference to Hercules so soon after an extended garden metaphor would activate the association , and that however much Hamlet may protest his dissimilarity to Hercules , the audience is in fact ...
... Italy ( 1600 ) .55 It is arguable that any reference to Hercules so soon after an extended garden metaphor would activate the association , and that however much Hamlet may protest his dissimilarity to Hercules , the audience is in fact ...
Page 52
... Italy and Denmark seems to be fully at work . The ways in which the play habitually imagines the experience of the emblematic garden , however , are very different from the Italian Renaissance visual and moral aesthetic principles ...
... Italy and Denmark seems to be fully at work . The ways in which the play habitually imagines the experience of the emblematic garden , however , are very different from the Italian Renaissance visual and moral aesthetic principles ...
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