Why should people interested in territory read Shakespeare?

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that territory is more than a simple concept, and that William Shakespeare is a valuable guide to understanding its complexities. Shakespeare’s plays explore many aspects of geography, politics and territory. They include ideas about the division of kingdoms in King Lear, the struggle over its control in Macbeth and many of the English history plays, to the vulnerability of small territories with powerful neighbours in Hamlet. However, the plays also help us to understand the legal and economic issues around territory, of the importance of technical innovations around surveying and cartography, and the importance of landscapes and bodies. Shakespeare is especially interesting because debates in political theory at this time concerned a recognizably modern understanding, and European states were consolidating their own rule, marking boundaries and seizing colonial possessions. Shakespeare dramatizes many of these themes, from The Tempest to plays set in the Eastern Mediterranean such as Othello. Territory is a word, concept and practice, and their interrelation is explored with Shakespeare as a guide. This builds on the author’s previous work on territory, but also develops the understanding further, especially around the colonial, corporeal and geophysical. Historical work on our contemporary concepts can also be revealing of our present.

KEYWORDS:

• territory
• history
• William Shakespeare
• geopolitics

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Stuart Elden http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7885-2444

Notes

1 I discuss Marlowe briefly in Elden (2018, pp. 9–10). For another example, see John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi (c.1613) (Webster, 2009) where the duchess’s body and her territory are seen as equivalent and subject to male domination (II.v.9–11, 18–21).

2 For an important study that appeared after the book’s final submission, see Barton (2017).

3 I generally used the excellent Arden Third Series editions of the plays, but also consulted the Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Penguin and Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) editions. I often returned to facsimile editions of the original Quarto and First Folio to check details, and made use of modern editions of those texts. Note, too, that the references to the secondary literature given here are merely indicative of each point and a much more substantial set of references appear in the book itself.