Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: Practising with Theory
- 2 Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture: Lacan with Augustine and Montaigne
- 3 Love as Trompe-l'oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis
- 4 Tarquin Dispossessed: Expropriation and Consent in The Rape of Lucrece
- 5 Antinomies of Desire and the Sonnets
- 6 Peter Quince's Ballad: Memory, Psychoanalysis, History and A Midsummer Night's Dream
- 7 The Illusion of Empire: Elizabethan Expansionism and Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy
- 8 Making Histories Then and Now: Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V
- 9 The Case of Hamlet's Conscience
- 10 Iago the Essayist
- Notes
- Index
7 - The Illusion of Empire: Elizabethan Expansionism and Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: Practising with Theory
- 2 Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture: Lacan with Augustine and Montaigne
- 3 Love as Trompe-l'oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis
- 4 Tarquin Dispossessed: Expropriation and Consent in The Rape of Lucrece
- 5 Antinomies of Desire and the Sonnets
- 6 Peter Quince's Ballad: Memory, Psychoanalysis, History and A Midsummer Night's Dream
- 7 The Illusion of Empire: Elizabethan Expansionism and Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy
- 8 Making Histories Then and Now: Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V
- 9 The Case of Hamlet's Conscience
- 10 Iago the Essayist
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The dying John of Gaunt celebrates England at the beginning of the second tetralogy in a poetic passage justly admired for its rhetoric by later generations, and particularly widely anthologised in the nineteenth century at the height of the British Empire. Gaunt's patriotic affirmations of English military prowess were evidently taken to indicate the play's support for the imperial venture. In their context, however, his exhortations, designed to register a contrast with Richard II's neglect of the realm, sound more like reproach for failure to conquer other countries. Moreover, in other places the histories also call into question the reality – and perhaps the values – of contemporary colonial expansion. Henry V, in particular, casts doubt on the virtues of conquest and at the same time on England's capacity to keep control of Ireland, its closest existing overseas possession. On this reading, the second tetralogy presents Gaunt's imperial vision as an illusion, no more than the wistful imaginings of a dying man, and the plays register a certain ambivalence towards empire, alongside a marked anxiety about England's command of the British Isles.
Gaunt's speech lyrically defines a nation that once was and now ought to be warlike considerably in excess of the requirements of the medieval chivalry characteristic of its fictional moment. ‘That England, that was wont to conquer others’ is not only, we are to understand a ‘seat of Mars’, but also a ‘scept'red isle’, ‘bound in with the triumphant sea’ and ‘Dear for her reputation through the world ’ (my emphasis).
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- Shakespeare in Theory and Practice , pp. 109 - 118Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2008