SUBJECT TO THE NATION: OFFICIAL NATIONALISM, THE MYTH OF THE ISLAND
NATION AND THE LITERATURE OF EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
By
Jennifer Allison Toms

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
English
2012

ABSTRACT
SUBJECT TO THE NATION: OFFICIAL NATIONALISM, THE MYTH OF THE ISLAND
NATION AND THE LITERATURE OF EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
By
Jennifer Allison Toms
This dissertation argues that the early modern English crown and state deployed an
official nationalist program during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. The purpose of this
ideological campaign was to mask the governmental weaknesses plaguing the Elizabethan and
Jacobean monarchies. Suffering under the weight of a failing imperial project to bring the
archipelago together under the English crown, a fledgling state infrastructure and a rhetoric of
absolutism that was losing its potency, the English government promoted a form of official
nationalism that imagined a homogenous English populace unified by their allegiance to the
monarch, whose imperial might was borne out by England’s genealogical record.
The official ideology demanded by the above circumstances was composed, either
implicitly or explicitly, by authors and cartographers working under the aegis of the crown.
Historians like William Camden and mapmaker John Speed produced reconstructed histories and
cartographic allegories that attempted to naturalize or lend credibility to England’s fabricated
genealogical right to the archipelago, in the process barbarizing the contemporary Scots, Welsh
and Irish and their ancient forebearers. Work of official writers and mapmakers likewise
attempted to resuscitate the mystical person of the sovereign, whose authority was absolute
across all regions of her kingdom, including the colonies and borderlands.
The guiding trope of early modern official nationalism was the “myth of the island
nation” that cast the English as a unified community bound together by a deep history of ancient
descent, shared national identity, their obedience to the crown and its policies, and most

importantly, the island territory that naturally marked out their unique geography as a nation
separate from the rest of the world. Troublesomely delineating the ancient Scots and Picts as
invaders of the genealogically English Isle, the writers of the English nation carefully
constructed a national and imperial narrative that repurposed and revised ancient and
cartographic materials in support of state and crown initiatives. Recurrent in myriad texts of the
period, the “myth of the English island nation” provided the ideological foundation for
justifications of imperial domination of the archipelago and a “natural” national character
generated and preserved in a geographically insular oceanic space.
Popular literature of the early modern period put great pressure upon this official
nationalist story telling. The works included here, Thomas More’s Utopia, William
Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s Sea Voyage, Edmund Spenser’s
Faerie Queene and Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, undid the threads of this body of
nationalist works, drawing uncomfortable attention to the flaws and aporias in this official
discourse. Directly or indirectly, these literary texts punctured the official myth-making of the
period and revealed the essentially manufactured nature of the island mythos and all that it
sustained. The chapters of my dissertation are composed of two parts. The first analyzes the
attempts of official authors to rhetorically construct the English nation and indicates the
ideological and discursive ruptures in these problematic narratives. The second demonstrates
how popular works dismantle the precepts of the crown’s official nationalist productions.

Copyright by
JENNIFER ALLISON TOMS
2012

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project would not have been possible without the guidance and support of my committee.
Thank you to Professors Jyotsna Singh, Stephen Deng, Scott Michaelsen and Zarena Aslami. I
am especially grateful to my director Professor Sandra Logan whose inspiration was the
foundation of my overall work and who will continue to inspire me far into the future. I would
also like to thank my graduate student community with whom I shared the best and most difficult
of times. Finally, thank you to Michigan State University’s Department of English for your
dedication to and support of the graduate students under your wing.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES

vii-viii

INTRODUCTION

1-37

CHAPTER 1
A WORLD DIVIDED FROM THE WORLD

38-145

CHAPTER 2
MAPS AND LEGENDS: NATIONALIST ALLEGORIES, EMPIRE AND CARTOGRAPHY
146-265
CHAPTER 3
‘IN TH’ALMIGHTIES PLACE’: STATE BUILDING AND THE DIVISION OF ABSOLUTE
AUTHORITY IN SPENSER’S FAERIE QUEENE
266-350
CHAPTER 4
STAGING THE DEBUNKED ISLAND NATION

351-440

CODA
VIRGO INTACTA

441-452

vi

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Speed, John. “Frontispiece.” The History of Great Britaine Under the Conquests of ye
Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans. EEBO. Michigan State University Lib. 17 July 2012.
Web. Images published with the permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited
without permission.
136
Figure 2: Drayton, Michael. “Frontispiece.” Poly-Olbion. EEBO. Michigan State University Lib.
17 July 2012. Web. By courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library,
University of Wisconsin Madison. Images published with the permission of ProQuest. Further
reproduction is prohibited without permission.
137
Figure 3: “Woodcut from the first edition of Utopia (Louvain 1516).” Three Early Modern
Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis, The Isle of Pines. Ed. Susan Bruce. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
130.
138
Figure 4: Figure 3: Holbein, Ambrosius. “Woodcut of Utopia, as it appeared in the 1518 Basel
edition of the text.” Three Early Modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis, The Isle of Pines. Ed.
Susan Bruce. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 131.
139
Figure 5: “Detail from Saxton’s Anglia.” Atlas of the Counties of England and Wales. EEBO.
Michigan State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published with the permission of
ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.
248
Figure 6: Saxton, Christopher. “Anglia.” Atlas of the Countries of England and Wales. EEBO.
Michigan State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published with the permission of
ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.
249
Figure 7: Speed, John. “The Kingdome of Great Britaine and Ireland.” The Theatre of the Empire
of Great Britaine. EEBO. Michigan State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published
with the permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.
250
Figure 8: Speed, John. “The Kingdome of England.” The Theatre of the Empire of Great
Britaine. EEBO. Michigan State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published with the
permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.
251
Figure 9: Speed, John. “The Kingdome of Irland.” The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine.
EEBO. Michigan State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published with the permission
of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.
252
Figure 10: Speed, John. “Dedication.” Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine. EEBO. Michigan
State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published with the permission of ProQuest.
Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.
253
vii

Figure 11: Speed, John. “The Kingdome of Scotland.” The Theatre of the Empire of Great
Britaine. EEBO. Michigan State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published with the
permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.
254
Figure 12: Hariot, Thomas. “Male Pict.” A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of
Virginia. EEBO. Michigan State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published with the
permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.
255
Figure 13: Hariot, Thomas. “Female Pict.” A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of
Virginia. EEBO. Michigan State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web.Images published with the
permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.
256
Figure 14: Speed, John. “Speed’s ‘ancient’ and ‘more civill’ Britaines.” The History of Great
Britaine under the Conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans. EEBO. Michigan
State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published with the permission of ProQuest.
Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.
257
Figure 15: Nelli, Niccolo. “Il Porto Di Malta.” Used with Permission of Paulus Swaen Old Maps
and Prints, http://www.swaen.com/index.php?.
434
Figure 16: Image 16: Lafreri, Antonio. “Nuouo disegno dell’Isola di Malta et suoi forti…” New
World: Maps from the Age of Discovery. Eds. Ashley and Miles Baynton-Williams. London:
Quercus, 2006. 27.
435

viii

INTRODUCTION
Subject to the Nation: Official Nationalism, the Myth of the Island Nation and the
Literature of Early Modern England
My dissertation examines the early modern crown’s representations of the English nation
and the ways in which popular literature of the period put pressure upon the discourse of official
or governmental nationhood. I argue that historians, chorographers and mapmakers linked to the
crown constructed a nation that imagined the English as a homogenous people commanding the
British archipelago, who were united by a deep genealogical history, uniform allegiance to the
state and monarchy, and importantly, the nation’s island geography. Official nationalist rhetoric
was thus dependent upon three related threads, that of absolutism, England’s imperial right to the
lands of the archipelago, and claims to the nation’s natural unity, which were based on the
fabricated notion of “the English island”. Popular literature of various genres and critical
perspectives challenged these official constructions of the nation by reasserting the island’s
multinational character, by casting doubt upon England’s dominance of the British Isles and by
drawing attention to the gap between the official rhetoric of absolutism and the political realities
of early modern England.
I argue in the following chapters that “the island nation” as a political abstract and
ideological paradigm was deployed to mask the territorial disputes and crises of governmental
authority that plagued the Elizabethan and Stuart regimes. The crown also employed nationalist
discourse to rhetorically bind together a heterogeneous people supposedly united by England’s
island geography. The nation, as described by the crown’s authors, was the means to graft upon
the culturally distinct regions of the island the veneer of homogeneity and to envelop into a
single political and social structure the several and sometimes competing sites of political
authority: the crown, the state, and the many local governments that were often at odds with state

1

and crown initiatives. In this sense, the nation as a political construct was intended to textually
repair the ideological aporias in English governance. Discursively collapsing absolutist rhetoric,
narratives of state authority, and the various regional and national publics of the isle under the
crown’s supposed control, “the island nation” did the ideological work of projecting a unified
body politic in submission to royal and state authority.
My dissertation examines the rhetorical formulations of the early modern nation, state,
th

th

and monarchy. The nation, as defined in 16 and 17 early modern discourse, is a territory
shaped by political borders, occupied by a people who are bound geographically and
governmentally through the person of the sovereign. The subjects of the nation share a common
culture and often an ethnic genealogy that unites them as homogenous people occupying a
sovereign state. The monarch who reigns over the national territory is the single, utmost figure of
authority, considered God’s representative on earth. Monarchical representation was central to
the mystical status of the sovereign, which ideologically buttressed the monarch’s claims to
absolute authority. The primary strains of monarchical representation consisted of a rhetorical
body of carefully composed narratives surrounding the person of the sovereign, which were
intended to command the loyalty and allegiance of the nation’s subjects. Monarchical
representation formed the ideological basis of the hierarchical social order, descending from the
crown to the lowliest subjects of the kingdom. Among the most foundational components of the
rhetoric of absolutism were the notion of the monarch’s divinity, the equation of the crown’s
physical body with the territorial body of the nation, and the assertion that the monarch was the
central source and figure of all political authority. This ideological apparatus was produced and
disseminated via several forms of media, including royal proclamations and propaganda,
chronicle histories, pageants, masques, sermons, pamphlets, paintings, coins, and political tracts.

2

The state was the governmental infrastructure of the nation, composing and administering
its laws, punishing its offenders, collecting taxes, mustering troops, and generally assuring social
order across a nation’s lands through the regulation of its subjects. In the early modern period,
the state was closely tied to the crown, who granted political authority to its representatives. In
this sense, the state as a regulatory body was itself, at least ostensibly, regulated by the sovereign
to insure that state agents acted in accordance with its commands. The state was made up of
several smaller governmental bodies, including the Parliament, Privy Council, the Courts,
justices of the peace, itinerant judges and local governments who enforced the monarch’s laws in
the localities. Though the monarch and the state were two distinct entities, each with its own
ideological rhetoric justifying its authority, the two political forces were designed to act in
tandem to govern the realm’s national and imperial territories.
Richard Helgerson’s seminal work on English nationalism, Forms of Nationhood: The
Elizabethan Writing of England, opened up the field of early modern cultural studies to
examinations of English nationalism and considered the role of authors in the production of
1

popular national sentiment. I expand upon the study of the early modern nation introduced by
Helgerson to explore an area of early modern political and literary culture left largely
unexamined in his study: official nationalism and its attempts to impose a state-sponsored and
state-approved version of nationalism upon the English public. Helgerson’s work examines a
type of nationalist sentiment born of a shared desire of a body of Elizabethan authors to create “a
2

Kingdom of their own language”, to quote Edmund Spenser. Helgerson maintains that popular
nationalism in early modern England was divorced from the crown, springing from a sense of
1

Helgerson maintains that, though “the monarch was unquestionably the single most powerful
unifying force in the English state”, authors like Harrison, Shakespeare and Spenser explored
2
Quoted from Helgerson,1.
3

national belonging attributable to factors like the land, the law, language and aristocratic
community.
Though the popular nationalist sentiment that Helgerson traces in Spenser, Shakespeare,
John Speed and others undoubtedly existed in the minds of certain members of the Elizabethan
body politic, it is essential that we recognize the other, contrary forms of nationalism that were
also circulating in the English imaginary. Official nationalism differs in intention and production
from the kinds of nationalist ideals described by Helgerson; whereas popular nationalism has its
roots in the people—a kind of shared national pride or patriotism that informs a people’s sense of
communal identity—official nationalism as manufactured by those cultural producers aligned
with the state is a top-down vision necessary to the crown’s project of state, nation and empire
building. The expansive reach of official nationalism through juridical systems, royal
propaganda, national histories, cartography and other media meant that official nationalist texts
were a means of governmental centralization that could be felt not just in the proliferating
official rhetoric of the period but also in the social lives of England’s subjects as the state entered
the homes of the populace.
It is essential when examining the early modern nation to differentiate it from modern
conceptions of nationhood. Traditional theories of the nation emphasize popular selfdetermination as the foundation of nationalism. For instance, Ernest Gellner in Nations and
Nationalism contends that “nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the
political and the national unit should be congruent”, meaning that the needs, desires and values
of a people should be represented and protected by that people’s political system. In this sense,
nationalism for Gellner is a matter of “political legitimacy” that provides the people of a nation

4

3

with the ideological grounds for creating an independent state. Likewise, Eric Hobsbawm
maintains that, after the French Revolution (the starting point for several studies of nationalism),
the nation “was the body of citizens whose collective sovereignty constituted them a state which
4

was their political expression”. Again, in Hobsbawm’s estimation, the nation is born of the
collective will of the people desiring a sovereign state in which their values and needs are
safeguarded by a representative government. Lastly, Benedict Anderson posits in Imagined
Communities that the creation of a shared national identity or national consciousness was, in part,
a popular phenomenon developed through the circulation of printed works and the engendering
of reading publics.

5

As the title of my dissertation indicates, I contend that “the English nation” as imagined
by the crown was imposed upon the majority of its subjects. Allegiance to this nation—a nation
that was inextricably tied to the state and crown—was not necessarily a matter of communal
feeling or patriotic pride, but was instead a state project requiring authors of the “official nation”
to produce this political mirage. In other words, this concept of the nation was much more reliant
upon governmentality than ‘natio’, the people whose national identification was based upon their
shared culture and commitment to their native land. The land, ideologically disconnected from
the people who occupied it, was itself made a tool of state-sponsored nationalist ideology. As my
dissertation explains, the myth of the island nation was central to this fabricated official vision;
for this reason, England is unlike the nations of the European early modern continent, for it drew
3
4

Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983) 1. Print.

Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1990) 19. Print.
5
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism Rev.
ed (London: Verso, 2006) 44. Print.
5

upon its territorial uniqueness as among the most essential characteristics binding the English
into a singular body politic. Because official nationalism is a body of historical, cartographic,
and literary works functioning on the level of rhetoric, rather than the lived experience of the
populace, this project focuses on the materials of this official discourse: most prominently, the
use of the island territory as a means of constructed national identity.
However, it would be a mistake to let the official representation speak for the early
modern nation as a historical reality. Several “forms of nationalism” coexisted during the reigns
of Elizabeth and James. Official nationalism is a political production acting at different levels of
government and for different purposes, and though we cannot know the material effects of this
ideology, the large body of official texts created during this period attests to its importance to the
crown and state. It is possible that official nationalist constructions were intended to combat the
kind of aristocratic nationalism identified by Helgerson. One might also conjecture that official
nationalism was deployed to ideologically combat internal English rebellions and the violence in
Scotland and Ireland that evidenced England’s imperial weakness, as I explore throughout.
Though we cannot know with certainty the effect of these manufactured ideologies on the people
of early modern England, it is nonetheless important that we examine this body of texts to
consider these strains of official nationalism as part of the complex historical narrative of the
nation, a trajectory that reaches into the present. As I will argue in the coda to this dissertation,
the reverberations of early modern official nationalism can be felt even today in monarchical
societies.
As Helgerson rightly asserts, one cannot conceive of the early modern nation without
placing the monarch at the center of its definition. As explained above, monarchical rhetoric held
that the body of the monarch was the body of the nation; in this respect, the sovereign was

6

“political expression” embodied. Any form of “political legitimacy” emanated from this divine
personage; therefore, the state, which derived its authority from the crown, could not be
ideologically disconnected from the throne. As my dissertation will demonstrate, these official
notions of monarchical nationhood were constructed of faulty and insubstantial materials.
However, to fully understand the formation of national bodies, we must consider the contentious
political arena in which monarchical ideology and the potential for national self-identification
collided.
Official nationalism was integral to monarchical representation, state authority, imperial
narratives and the concept of the nation as a geographically and politically defined territory. A
set of ideological precepts deeply embedded in the fabric of the early modern the body politic,
official nationalism was designed to support and maintain state and monarchical authority, and
more generally, to buttress state interests. Domestically, official nationalism posits a body politic
of homogenous subjects loyal to the sovereign and the representations of the monarch that
bestowed divine status upon the king or queen. The subjects of the official nation are a
harmonious people bound not only by a politically demarcated territory but also to the monarch’s
will and the idea of shared nationhood. Official nationalist sentiment was produced and
promulgated by historians, mapmakers and authors of literary texts either implicitly or explicitly
working under the aegis of the crown. In some instances, these cultural producers were agents of
the crown, such as the case of William Camden, the crown’s Clarenceux King of Arms or John
Speed, who displayed his maps to the queen and whose religious tracts were appended to King
James Bible. In other cases, the creators of the official nation were vying for crown patronage
and therefore constructed texts that strongly adhered to crown ideology. These official texts were
central to early modern nation-building, for they provided the textual infrastructure of the

7

sovereign’s largely manufactured body politic; deploying cartography, historiography and
celebratory poetics, these official authors created the crown’s nation, one that greatly jarred with
political reality during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. The myth of the English island was
at the heart of this imagined nation.
Hugh Seton-Watson was among the first political historians to define official nationalism
in 1977. In his discussion of the break-up of the Hapsburg Empire, he considers the ideological
conflict between dynastic devotion and a growing popular nationalist sentiment in Russia. To
counter the dissolution of the empire and the disintegration of imperial loyalties that followed,
the leaders of the most powerful nations considered it their task, and indeed their
moral duty, to impose their nationality on all their subjects—of whatever religion,
language or culture. As they saw it, by drawing these people upwards into their
own superior culture, they were conferring benefits on them; while at the same
time they were strengthening their state by creating within it a single homogenous
6

nation.

He also cites 19th century “Russification”, which was a “policy” underscored by “the claim that
all subjects of the empire should consider themselves Russians, and should owe allegiance not
only to the monarch but also to the Russian nation”. This governmental program demanded that
“[the subjects] put Russia first, and [that] they preferred Russian culture to their own original
culture”.

7

Though the historical and political conditions of Seton-Watson’s official nationalism
differ from Elizabethan and Jacobean England, one can also detect significant similarities. The
6

Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of
Nationalism (Boulder: Westview, 1977) 148. Print.
7
Ibid, 85.
8

form of nationalist feeling in this definition is inextricably linked to the state and constructed to
preserve state or monarchical power. National sentiment is not a naturally occurring feeling
rising from the populous—it was intended, in fact, to combat popular nationalism—but rather a
set of manufactured state ideals “impose[d]” upon the people. Individual linguistic, cultural and
religious allegiances were secondary to nationalist identification, though nationalism was at
times defined through these categories. Under the guise of conferring advantages upon their
subjects, the ultimate goal of proponents of official nationalism was the homogenization of the
people and their uncontested allegiance to the state.
th

th

England of the 16 and 17 centuries was likewise struggling with a multinational and
multicultural archipelagic territory rejecting a uniform national identity that was monarchical in
character. Like the dissemination of authority that accompanied the break-up of the Hapsburg
Empire, England was likewise suffering from the decentering of sovereign authority precipitated
by the consolidation of the state, a development I address in chapter three. The crown’s
nationalism attempted to envelope in a set of official precepts the myriad subjects whose
identifications were dispersed across cultural, national and religious borders and regions.
Cloaking official propaganda in the robes of patriotic duty, particularly in times of war or social
dissent, the “English island nation” was deployed as a kind of patriotic feeling born of
geographic, cultural and monarchical loyalty. This was particularly significant in the supposed
imperial territories: by surrendering up their political autonomy, Wales, Scotland and Ireland
would reap the benefits of subjugating themselves to the English crown.
Anderson takes up Seton-Watson’s definition of official nationalism in Imagined
Communities. Of the “‘naturalizations’ of Europe’s dynasties” Anderson argues that “‘official
nationalism’ can best be understood as a means for combining naturalization with retention of

9

dynastic power, in particular over the huge polyglot domains accumulated since the Middle
Ages, or, to put it another way, for stretching the short, tight, skin of the nation over the gigantic
8

body of the empire”. The “willed merger of nation and dynastic empire”, Anderson asserts,
“developed after, and in reaction to, the popular movements proliferating in Europe since the
9

1820s”. However, like Seton-Watson’s analysis of official nationalism, Anderson’s definition
can readily be cast back into early modern England. The project of official nationalism during
the Elizabethan and Jacobean period was an investment in “stretching the short, tight, skin” of
the English nation over the British archipelago, to make Britain speak as English politically,
linguistically and culturally. In other words, English official nationalism sought to subdue
Scotland, Wales and Ireland to the sovereign at Whitehall and transform these autonomous
regions into English territories. Also, as I discuss below, early modern official nationalism was
very much an attempt to quash popular nationalist identities that emerged in antagonism to
crown control. The assertions of Anderson and others, like Hobsbawm, that establish nationalism
as a phenomenon occurring only after the 18th century curtails a broader reading of nationalism’s
emergence in early periods and thus limits our understanding of nationalism’s more expansive
historical trajectory.

8
9

10

Anderson, 86.
Ibid.

10

Hobsbawm’s title Nations and Nationalism since 1780 attests to his contention that
nationalism “belongs exclusively to a particular, and historically recent, period” (9). Though he
allows that “in the case of Tudor England” there may have existed “something close to modern
patriotism”, his distinction between patriotism and official nationalism remains unclear, with the
former often producing a national sentiment, and the later, which often had the same goal,
comprising a fervent attachment to the nation and the state the government that upholds it. See
Hobsbawm, 75.
10

Anthony D. Smith contests the notion that the nation emerged only after the French
revolution. Rather than provide a specific date for the birth of the nation (and thus nullify any
communities that came before), Smith provides the following, more inclusive, definition of the
nation: “we may define the nation as a named and self-defined human community whose
members cultivate common myths, memories and symbols, possess a distinctive public culture,
occupy a historic homeland, and observe common laws and shared customs”. Though I contend
that some elements of the early modern nation were “defined” by the crown, my dissertation will
demonstrate that “common myths, memories and symbols” were collected and narrativized to
illustrate the national story along official lines. Likewise, the notion of a “historical homeland”
was of utmost importance to English nation and imperial discourse.

11

Claire McEachern also

directly confronts prevailing notions of nationalism’s historical origins, maintaining that
English nationhood is a sixteenth-century phenomenon, and not, contrary to the
claims of many political theorists and historians, a nineteenth-century one [ … ]
The Tudor-Stuart nation is not necessarily democratic in sentiment or political
institution; nor is it produced by means of any practical homogeneity of social
existence. It is a performative ideal of social unity founded in the ideological
affiliation of crown, church and land, imagined not in opposition to state power,
but rather as a projection of the state’s own ideality”.

12

Refuting the notion that nationalism must spring from a democratic system and thus from the
people, McEachern rightly identifies the elements of fantasy and artificiality that inform official
nationalist discourses, the “projection” of a “performative ideal”. The performative aspect of

11
12

Smith, The Antiquity of Nations (Malden: Polity, 2004) 17. Print.
McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) 5-7. Print.
11

official nationalism lies in the utterances of oaths asserting one’s devotion to the monarch and
his or her nation. It can also apply to the utterances of historians that seek to rewrite English
history, performing feats of rhetoric that misrepresent the archipelago to the advantage of the
English. Likewise seeing in the conjoined forces of crown, state and official discourse an
important brand of nationalism, McEachern argues that “to deny a Tudor-Stuart moment of the
English nation is to obscure the very moment of its invention [ … ] monarchy is a necessary
13

condition of the nation bequeathed to later English state formations”.

E.D. Marcu also argues for early modern English nationalism, calling it “noisy, fanciful,
14

and plainly fashionable”.

She identifies that this sentiment jarred with the violent Anglo-

Scottish relations that were plaguing the English government:
The second half-century, a time that was to become one of the country’s great
periods, naturally gave patriots enough material to demonstrate their worth [ … ]
Yet there was a foreign, hostile land, Scotland, with which England shared her
own island, a playground for blunt and effective French intervention, a constant
danger and a powerful occasion for xenophobia, if not direct and cold-blooded
15

intervention.

Marcu’s observation about territorial and governmental Anglo-Scottish conflicts deeply informs
my project, for it is the bi-nationality of the island and the possibility of foreign incursion that
most necessitates official nationalist sentiment to patch over these governmental crises. John
Breuilly takes issue with Marcu, claiming she “has achieved a great deal in the way of

13
14
15

Ibid, 7.
Marcu, Sixteenth Century Nationalism (New York: Abaris, 1976) 74. Print.
Ibid, 74.
12

identifying and describing certain sorts of national consciousness in sixteenth-century Europe but
16

this should not be confused with nationalism”.

However, Breuilly then goes on to describe

what one might identify as early modern official nationalism:
in the political rhetoric of the period the idea of the nation, if it appeared at all,
was subordinated to religious and monarchical principles. The English cause at
the time of the Spanish Armada was symbolized by the person of Elizabeth I and
the Protestant religion [ … ] National historiography of the sort promoted by the
Tudor, Valois and Bourbon dynasties, when it was not simply boosting the
monarchy, extolled the nation in terms of its landscapes and resources rather than
17

the character of its inhabitants.

As my primary texts demonstrate, the language of nationhood was very much in circulation in
Elizabeth’s England, and, as explained, it was closely tied to monarchical representation. To
determine that the nation, nationalism and the monarchy cannot coexist is to eliminate from
critical discussions of nationhood an entire body of work that might allow us to better understand
modern nationalism’s beginnings, as well as its contemporary existence within modern
monarchies. Brueilly is correct in asserting that early modern nationalist texts also took as their
focus the land and the island’s resources; these were central tenets of English nationalist
illustration. However, to say that “the character of the inhabitants” was absent from these
national narratives is inaccurate. Brueilly is right in asserting that the contemporary people of the
nation took a backseat to the nation as territory; however, early modern histories and descriptions
were deeply invested in describing not only the nation’s ancient inhabitants but also the physical

16
17

Breuilly, Nationalism and the State 2nd Ed. (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993). 4-5. Print.
Ibid, 76.
13

bodies and characteristics of the nation’s populace as a means of constructing an official
genealogy supporting English right to and rule of the island.
My project takes as a starting point the above definitions of official and early modern
nationalism and refines their focus to consider the combination of these ideological forces in the
reigns of Elizabeth and James. I contend also that this official rhetoric served the dual purpose of
buttressing national and imperial rhetoric, that they were conjoined projects requiring the support
of a single ideological platform, among other strictly imperial discourses. The “English island
nation” was the primary trope of this nationalist program, thus shifting the rhetorical emphasis to
territorial definitions of the nation and largely erasing the people from the fundamental precepts
of nationhood. This is particularly significant because the people were a disunited body in terms
of class, religion and local custom and governance. The people, when they do appear, are
ethnographic specimens included in official discourse to trace a genealogical line back to the
English and thus establish their historical right to the island. Finally, as discussed above, I
maintain that popular literature responded, either directly or indirectly, to the multimedia body of
official texts and thus dismantled the infrastructure of crown and state rhetoric.
It is important to recognize that the “official island nation” was an ideological cloak in
which the national, imperial and governmental failures of the state were masked under
palimsestic layerings of state-sanctioned discourse. England’s supposed island-ness was the
factor that produced its vulnerability; geographically isolated and cut off from the major trading
routes of emergent global trade, England sat precariously “on the edge of the world”.

18

England

as a land disconnected and bordered by the sea invited foreign invasion. The expansive and
18

I borrow this term from the title of Kathy Lavezzo’s Angels on the Edge of the World:
Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000-1534 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006). Print.

14

largely unmanned coastlines of the island further contributed to England’s insecurity. Lacking
the money and men to adequately defend the archipelago against attack, England sat in the
northern reaches of the ocean like an unprotected target. Amplifying this geographic and
militaristic vulnerability was England’s failed effort to force its imperial claims upon the other
nations of the archipelago. Hemmed in on the northern and western regions by nations that
refused to bend to imperial rule, England was engaged in continual warfare with the Scottish and
Irish. The Scottish borderlands were sites of constant violence and repeated invasions on both
sides of the volatile political boundary. Ireland presented a separate problem in which English
control over the island to the west was even less tenable due, in part, to the oceanic waterway
separating the two nations. The monetary and governmental output necessary for the
construction and maintenance of the England’s failing colonies in Ireland was a pronounced
drain on crown resources and thus further opened up the possibility that England would be
unable to defend its territories against foreign attack. Compounding this conjoined threat of
internal and external incursion was the relationships of Ireland to Spain and Scotland to France.
England’s inability to control the archipelago attracted England’s longtime enemies and
sometimes allies to come to the aid of these autonomous nations for their own political gain.
Even Wales, the oft-idealized imperial success of the English government, was only
partially and ineffectually subjugated by English rule. Though Wales was annexed to England in
the 16th century, the Welsh people maintained and preserved their autonomous culture, and
violent disputes with the English persevered, despite the ostensible union. The condition of
Wales typified England’s own internal heterogeneity, which was ethnic, cultural, legal and social
in nature, and disproved official claims to English unity. Derived of various ancient cultures that
colonized the British Isles over a long historical trajectory, “English” identity was difficult to

15

trace in a troubling genealogical narrative of foreign conquest and British subjugation to imperial
rule. The ethnic melding of the ancient Britons, Picts, Scots, Romans, Danes, Saxons, Jutes and
Normans could be traced in Britain’s discombobulated cultural institutions in the early modern
period, manifesting themselves in regionally specific systems of law, linguistic difference and
architecture. Nascent state-formation only exacerbated these fissures in English culture.
As explained above, the monarchical person—the divinely ordained sovereign robed in
the discourse of mysticism and otherworldliness—was the source and singular figure of
authority. However, not only was the nation itself disparate and disunified in its subjects’ sense
of identity, the structures of the state that were associated with it similarly existed in multiplicity
and disunity. Official nationalism in the form of absolutist monarchical representation came into
rhetorical and pragmatic conflict with the distribution of monarchical power to agents of the
state. The crown’s attempts at centralization and the dispersal of sovereign authority into the
localities and imperial territories brought out in boldface the multivalent political communities
occupying the national space. Regional differences in matters of justice and law and the
resistance to crown mandates in favor of local custom made plain the rejection of the
monarchical project of governmental uniformity. Furthermore, early modern state-formation
produced an ideological and governmental crisis for the English. The dispersal of power to the
state necessarily contradicted the notion of the indivisibility of sovereign authority so central to
absolutist ideology. The decentering of sovereign power mandatory to state building further
destabilized the Elizabethan and Jacobean governments already weakened by unsuccessful
imperial wars within the archipelago and governmental failures abroad.
The “myth of the island nation” constructed and obsessively reproduced by official
authors textually glossed over England’s enfeebled state and geographical vulnerability to

16

domestic and foreign attack. It was also a tool of genealogical restructuring, allowing historians
to revise a damning past of imperial subjugation around the notion of “natural” geographic
nationhood. The discourse of English “island-ness” recast geographic vulnerability as positive
insularity, a kind of blessed geographical uniqueness created by God for his people. England’s
“otherworldliness” was a marker of God’s divine favor; protected by the sea and adorned with
Nature’s beauty and bounty, England’s isolation set it apart as a “another world” inhabited by a
19

people united by God, nation and monarch.

The monarchical body was reflected in the Lord’s

island creation, the island’s geographical body signaling the singular-ness and divine power of
the English monarch. The singular nature of the island sovereign was also a mirror of singular
and harmonious genealogically and geographically bound English body politic, whose shared
national identity was born of their natural oceanic borders and their sequestration apart from the
contaminating continent.
The myths of English island nation, like so much political propaganda, were undermined
by the unrealities embedded within their narratives. First and foremost, England is not an island
but one nation contained within a multinational isle. The supposed union of the crown effected

19

Knapp contends that the English “loved to highlight” their isolation, turning “its littleness, its
circumscription by enemies, its female monarch” into a sign of the nation’s “abjuration of
material or worldly means to power and its extraordinary reliance on God”. See Knapp, An
Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (Berkeley: U
of California P, 1992) 4. Print. Lavezzo also examines England’s claims to otherworldliness
from the perspective of medieval geography and national identity. She maintains that “the
English were not simply self-conscious of their marginality during the Middle Ages; English
writers and cartographers actively participated in the construction of England as a global
borderland.” Lavezzo explains that in the Medieval English imaginary, “not only geographic
centers but also geographic margins had a certain social authority [ … ] the power of medieval
English marginality paradoxically resembles the might of modern English centrality”. See
Lavezzo, 7. Print. Camden in his opening pages of the Britannia quotes Caesar as calling
England “another world”. Camden, Britannia Ed. Robert Mayhew (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2003) 1.
Print.
17

by James’s ascension to the English throne did not create a unified Britain; Scotland remained
politically and culturally an autonomous nation, as evinced by the border wars that persisted after
the propagandistic “union”. Nor was Wales a willing participant in the rhetorical union of the isle
under the English crown. Marcher disputes and the Welsh preservation of their culture
denounced the supposed assimilation and incorporation of Wales into the English national body.
England attempted to claim the entirety of the main island for the English crown using a pastiche
of manipulated chronicles that were riddled with contradictions and xenophobic rhetoric
intended to picture the Scottish as savages requiring the civilizing hand of their neighbors to the
south.
The imperial aims of the English government as depicted in official narratives
consistently drew attention to the slippage between “Britain” and “England”, a persistent
rhetorical hurdle for writers of the “English island nation”. In their attempts to construct the
notion of the island nation, English historians and map-makers were forced to contend with a
history that was essentially British in nature; the genealogy of the archipelago and of England
itself was multinational and multiethnic, making impossible the expulsion of Scotland, Wales
and Ireland from what was intended as a singular national narrative. Problematically
sidestepping this stubborn historiography of “British-ness”, English authors sought not only to
vilify their neighboring nations but to delegitimize them as peoples whose right to the
archipelagic territory was undermined by their supposed status as alien occupants who had
unjustifiably taken root in English territory. However, this attempt at casting the Scots, Welsh
and Irish as archipelagic others drew uncomfortable attention to England’s own populace, whose
identity was built upon multiple imperial incursions. In other words, the people that eventually
became the “English” were as foreign to the territory as their British brethren. Complicating this

18

already messy genealogical line were the ancient Britons, who were often categorized as a
brutish tribe eventually civilized by the Romans. They too were pushed to the margins of English
history to maintain a pure nation of innately superior people in contrast to the archipelagic
communities surrounding the English nation.
Even claims to imperial superiority could not elide the ethnic differences that
characterized a patchwork archipelago of autonomous political or cultural units. To flatten out
these differences, official authors walked an impossible line between casting Scots, Irish and
Welsh as, on the one hand, inextricably other and thusly subject to English rule, and on the other,
as fundamentally English (with the exception of the Irish, whose geographic separation naturally
excluded them from the island nation). As I explore in chapter one, English writers depicted the
more civil Scottish Low-landers as derived from English stock, while characterizing the Highlanders as savage foreigners whose extermination or expulsion would restore the island to its
natural English-ness. Other nationalist discourses posited a narrative of evolution in which the
inherent English character of the island would civilize the occupiers, who would happily be
brought into the English family. As Krishan Kumar explains,
If a sense of Englishness was developing in England in the medieval and early
modern period, it was not so much the result of internal developments in the
direction of a common culture as of a common consciousness in relations to
England’s nearest neighbors [ … ] It was not in the first instance a matter of
popular feeling. Royal and dynastic ambitions led the way, as so often in the early
development of national feeling in Europe. But by the sixteenth century England’s
intentions towards its neighbors stood starkly revealed. Their fate was to be part
of Greater England. In recognition of this, English kings and their spokesmen

19

appropriated the ancient name of Britain: a cruel irony, given that the destiny of
the original British was for them to be obliterated and absorbed by the English
invaders of their land. England got its identity by asserting its primacy, first in
20

Britain, later in the world.

Kumar’s assessment points to the conjoined yet often contradictory relationship in early modern
England between nation and empire building. Though the “ancient name of Britain” was often
invoked, it was also often replaced altogether with “England” as the myth of the island nation
th

th

was recuperated and entered the nationalist discourse of the 16 and 17 century.
The borders politically and culturally marking out England as a partially landlocked
nation among nations and incapable of making good on its imperial claims were unalterable
evidence of the untruths betraying England’s official rhetoric. Likewise, the persistent anxiety
regarding the national defense of the island belied the disingenuousness of claims to positive
insularity; in truth England’s “insularity” was a kind of dangerous isolation. The monarchical
body was similarly divided due to in part to the splintered authority that attended state formation
and also the failure to incorporate the surrounding national bodies into its terrain. Therefore, the
dismembered sovereign body did truly reflect that of the island body: inharmoniously conjoined
territorially, lacking a uniform governmental structure to bind the body politic, and without
ethnic or cultural likeness across the English realm and archipelago, the isles were broken into
autonomous limbs clumsily sutured by ideological discourse.
To demonstrate the significance of official nationalist discourse in early modern England
and its reliance upon the myth of the island nation, my dissertation pulls back the layers of the

20

Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003) 62-3.
Print.
20

palimpsestic discourses of the nation composed to textually patch over England’s weaknesses.
The chronicle histories of authors like William Camden and John Speed compiled and formed
layers of national narratives composed as early as the 6

th

centuries. Woven together with

ideologically charged emendations, these historians reconstructed British history along
nationalist lines, making Britain read as England. Similarly, John Speed in his role as mapmaker
overlaid upon the cartographic works of Christopher Saxton his nationalist and imperial visual
poetics to project the English as the imperial masters of the isle. In the words of Eric Hobsbawm,
these official texts made
use of ancient materials to construct invented traditions [ … ] A large store of
such materials is accumulated in the past of any society, and an elaborate
language of symbolic practice and communication is always available. Sometimes
new traditions could be readily grafted on old ones, sometimes they could be
devised by borrowing from the well-supplied warehouses of official ritual,
symbolism and moral exhortation.

21

As Sandra Logan explains, “‘topicality’ is not exclusively aimed at specific political policies or
actions, but often involves the roles of interpretation, writing, reading, and reinterpretation”. The
rewriting and “reinterpretation[s]” of national histories “can more subtly and insidiously shape
the ideological and material conditions within such policy and action is formulated and
implemented”.

22

Undoing these textual patchworks to unveil the nationalist “policies”

undergirding their production, I analyze the linguistic and visual rhetorics to discover the actual
21

Hobsbawm, Eric. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions.” The Invention of Tradition Eds. Eric
Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008) 6. Print.
22
Logan, Text/Events in Early Modern England: Poetics of History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)
7 Print.
21

England beneath and to consider why these official nationalist narratives were so necessary to
English nation, state and empire building.
Secondly, I consider popular texts of the period that seem to be responding implicitly or
explicitly to the discourses that make up the foundation of this fabricated England. Because
works like Camden’s Britannia and Speed’s conjoined History of Great Britain and cartographic
Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain were in broad circulation, it is likely that popular authors
like Thomas More, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare came into contact with these
nationalist texts. Though it is impossible to know with certainty whether the popular texts
analyzed in my dissertation were responding directly or indirectly to official works, it appears
that these authors are taking up strands of these official rhetorics and holding them up to
criticism. By taking aim at the nationalist fantasies of the crown, popular works expose the
faultiness and intrinsic flimsiness of official discourse. In the chapter descriptions below, I
elaborate on the individual threads of official nationalist discourse in the period and their
relationship to popular literature.
My methodology in this project is to read chronicle histories, chorographies and
cartographic works though the strategies of literary analysis. “Literature”, as defined in this
project, extends beyond conventional literary genres—poems, plays, prose narrative, novels,
etc.—to include more strictly historical works, like chronicles, chorographies, official speeches,
and royal correspondence. The above historical materials are often literary in nature, employing
literary devices such as allegory, poetics, and mythological story-telling that often verges on
epic. When placed side by side, “literary” and “historical” texts often merge into one another
because of their shared poetic qualities. Consider for instance Camden’s depiction of the sea in
his Britannia:

22

BRITAINE is incompassed round about with the vast and open maine Ocean,
which ebbeth and floweth so violently with maine tides that [ … ] Saint Basile
hath tearmed it [… ] The great Sea and dreadfull to Sailers; yea and Saint
Ambrose wrote thus of it: The great Sea not adventured on by sailers, nor
attempted by mariners is that, which with a roaring and surging current environeth
Britaine, and reacheth into farre remote parts and so hidden out of sight, as that
the very fables have not yet come thither. Certes, this sea sometimes overfloweth
the fields adjoining, otherwhiles again it retireth and leaveth all bare [ … ] by
reason of this open largenesse it feeleth more effectually the force and influence
of the Moone, exercising her powre thereupon, without impeachment: And it
floweth alwaies up within the land with such violence that it doth not onely drive
backe the streames of rivers, but also either overtaketh and surpriseth beasts of
the land, or else leaveth behind it those of the sea. For there have bin seene in
every age, to the great astonishment of the beholders, so many and so huge Seamonsters left on drie land upon our shore that Horace sang this note not without
good cause:

…………………………………………………….

The Ocean, of Sea-monsters fraight with store,

Upon the Britans farre remote doth rore.

And Juvenall in the like tune:

………………………………………………
23

As much as Whales full huge, that use to breede

In British Sea, the Dolphins doe exceede.

23

Focusing on Camden’s particular language choices, tone and deployment of specific tropes
reveals the essential literary-ness of his “historical” depiction of the sea. The island is
“encompassed”, rather than surrounded or encircled. His language of the sea’s violence is
affective, illustrating how the sea ravages the land and rivers with a kind of movement produced
through language to mirror the sea’s motion; the sea “ebbeth and floweth”, it “overfloweth”, it
“drive backe the streames of rivers, but also either overtaketh and surpriseth beasts of the land”.
The sense of motion produced by these terms emphasizes the sea’s threatening and violent
movement. The female moon, which so often appears in early modern poetry, ruthlessly directs
the ocean’s destructive forces, heaving the beasts of the sea onto the shore. Here, Camden turns
to the mythological, employing tales of mysterious sea creatures, akin to those found in classical
works like The Odyssey and early modern cartography, which is itself a mythmaking venture, as
I explain later. Finally, the historian relies upon ancient poets to lend credence to his dramatic
illustration.
Consider now John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s opening lines to The Sea Voyage,
delivered by the Master of the ship that carry Albert and Aminta to the unnamed deserted island.
Lay her aloof, the sea grows dangerous:
How it spits against the clouds, how it capers,
And how the fiery element frights it back!
There be devils dancing in the air I think.
23

Camden, Vol 3, 57.
24

I saw a dolphin hang i’ th’ horns o’ th’ moon,
Shot from a wave. (I.i.1-6)

24

Again, Fletcher and Massinger’s affective language viscerally conveys the sea’s violence: the
water “spits’ in the face of its passengers, flaunting its power over the vulnerable bodies afloat in
the storm. The ocean “capers” under the “fiery element”, creating a hellish oceanic landscape
that terrifies the ship’s crew, and perhaps the audience to the play. Mythical devils of the epic
conduct the violent surges and animals are “shot” to the skies in this world turned upside down.
The literary similarities between these two seemingly opposed texts—the “factuality” of
historical works in contrast to the “imaginative” qualities of the literary text—are indicative of
historians’ deployment of the mechanisms of literature to affectively draw their audiences into
their nationalist narratives. Because official nationalism is, in its basest form, an attempt by
politicians to rhetorically coerce the nation’s subjects to pledge their allegiance to the crown,
state and its mandates, official narratives are often cloaked in the language of romance, poetry
and mythology to mask the hegemonic nature of official discourse.
Likewise, consider Geoffrey of Monmouth’s depiction of Brutus’s fated discovery of
th

England in his 12 century work The History of the Kings of Britain. Importantly, the Brutus
myth explicitly connected England’s national destiny to its island geography; according to the
legend, Diana informed Brutus that “beyond the setting of the sun, past the realms of Gaul, there
lies an island in the sea, once occupied by giants [ … ] A race of kings will be born there from

24

John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, The Sea Voyage Three Renaissance Travel Plays Ed.
Anthony Parr (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995) 137. Print.
25

25

your stock and the round circle of the whole earth will be subject to them”.

The repeatedly

recycled (and eventually refuted) Brutus myth was cited not only as a foundational narrative of
English national identity, but also as justification of England’s rule over Ireland, Scotland and
Wales; Brutus ruled the English territories while his subordinates were granted the other nations
26

under the condition of their submission to the “English” King.

The ideological message of

English superiority is decorated in the language of poetry and classical myth. Illustrated here is
the Renaissance adoration and emulation of classical texts; a prophetic tale of a mortal’s
encounter with an ancient deity forms the basis of England’s mythical founding. The English
island is placed in a mystical world “beyond the setting of the sun”, a fantastic land unlike the
continent from which Brutus must flee with the progenitors of the English nation. The giants that
once populated the island are mythic creatures often deployed in classical epics to allow the hero
to prove his bravery and strength against a barbarous enemy. The language here is not of
standard historiography but borrows heavily from classical motifs and poetic turns of phrase.
Lastly, the Britain illustrated in the introduction of Camden’s Britannia is cast as a
fantastic Eden whose very nature defies simple, unadorned prose.

25

Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain Trans. Lewis Thorpe (London:
Penguin, 1966) 65. Print.
26
According to David Armitage, “proponents of the English cause in the Anglo-Scottish wars of
1543-46 and 1547-50 located the origins of the British Empire in the early history of Britain as it
had been told by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century. That empire was ‘British’
because it had been founded by Brutus, a refugee from the Trojan wars; it was an empire because
it became a composite monarchy after Brutus’s death, when it was ruled by his three sons,
Locrine, Albanact and Camber. Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniæ (1136) enshrined a vision
of English dominance over Britain within his legendary history. Brutus’s eldest son, Locrine,
ruled England; the younger sons paid homage to him on account of his seniority, just as their
respective kingdoms of Scotland and Wales were held to owe homage to England: seniority
implied superiority within the post-Brutan feudal composite monarchy”. See Armitage, The
Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000) 37. Print.
26

Britaine, or Britannie, which also is Albion [ … ] the most famous island, without
comparison, of the whole world; severed from the continent of Europe [ … ]
Disjoined from those neighbour-countries all about by a convenient distance
every way, fitted with commodious and open havens, for traffique with the
universall world, and to the generall good, as it were, of mankind, thrusting itself
forward with great desire from all parts into the sea.

27

Linking Britain to the classical world through its several names, some reaching back into the
supposed time of Brutus’s landing, the island is not simply disconnected from the continent but
“severed” and “disjoined”, bodily terms that picture the island as a human frame willfully
existing independent of Europe. Granting this island a kind of agency, Camden writes that it
“thrust[s] itself forward with great desire from all parts into the sea”. Personifying the island and
lending to the isle its own will, Camden makes the inert landmass into a literalized body politic. I
examine this passage in more detail in chapter one to explain how this poetic discourse masks
England’s geographical susceptibility to attack and its damaging isolation from “the whole
world”.
As chapter two explores, even English cartography of the period is overwritten with
nationalist narratives, sometimes in the form of text but also visually. The images surrounding
the British territories are ideologically marked to support English notions of imperial claims and
positive isolation. Sea monsters lurk in the waterways between England and Ireland and haunt
the northern regions of Scotland, lands most often described as dangerously savage and “unEnglish”. Massive royal seals carefully placed as to endorse England’s superiority over the
unruly archipelago indicate England’s historic right to multinational space. In some instances,
27

Camden, 1.
27

damning ethnographic depictions of the “wilde” Irish contrast with illustrations of the neat and
orderly English. Because these cartographic poetics depend almost entirely upon visual media,
textual explanation for their politicized treatment of the land and its subjects is unnecessary; the
cartographic language speaks for itself.
Because of the literary content of these nationalist works, “properly” literary texts can
harmoniously be read against them. The poetics of Monmouth’s History mirror those of
Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which likewise sought to lend a classical veneer to the telling of
England. The poetic nature of Camden’s Britannia can be likened to the dialogue of
Shakespeare, whose emboldened and sometimes hyperbolic language likewise seeks to describe
the nation in glorified terms (though to radically different effect, as I argue in chapter two).
Finally, More’s literary prose borrows from the chronicle histories that circulated at court and in
literary circles of his time; his satirical treatment of these nationalist texts makes up a substantial
portion of his Utopia.
My approach in each chapter is to unpack the literary language of official texts of the
English nation to first demonstrate their centrality to the myth of the island nation and to
nationalist narratives more generally. Next, I examine the inherent historical lapses and rhetorical
manipulations that undermine these official discourses. Lastly, I consider the relationship of
popular literature to these propagandistic narratives. Arguing that popular literary works counter
the primary claims of official textual and visual poetics, I contend that popular literature
disallows the nationalist visions constructed by authors like Camden, Speed, earlier chroniclers
like Gildas and Bede and early modern political philosophers who sought to build the ideological
foundations of English governance. My primary conclusion is that official constructions of the
English island nation were built upon unsteady foundations and rhetorical misrepresentations.

28

The literature of the early modern period exposed these detrimental flaws. With the destruction
of the myth of the island nation—the foundational myth flimsily sustaining the majority of
official rhetorics—the overall infrastructure of the fabricated English nation crumbles. This
dismantling radically destabilized notions of the English body politic, its geographical identity
and governmental institutions, thus excavating from layers of inflated and compendious rhetoric
the actual England that suffered under governmental crises and an untenable geographic position
on the northern oceanic frontier.
Chapter Descriptions
My first chapter “A World Divided from the World” uses the work of Camden and Speed
to define the myth of the English island nation and to determine its significance to official
th

th

nationalist discourse in the 16 and 17 centuries. Tracing the history of this myth from the 6

th

century, I consider its importance to English self-identity, particularly in regard to AngloScottish relations. Contending that the island mythos was mandatory to England’s imperial
claims to the archipelago as a whole, I examine the attempts of Camden and Speed to
ideologically expunge the Scottish from British history. Depicting the Scots as barbarous
invaders, Camden and Speed insist upon the essential foreign-ness of the Scots that continued in
the reigns of Elizabeth and James. In the process of vilifying the vast majority of the Scottish
nation, the main island is rhetorically renamed and transformed into an English, rather than
British, territory. The rhetoric of the Scots’ illegitimate claims to the northern portion of the isle
supported the myth of the genealogically English island nation and its inherent right to the island
territory.
More’s Utopia casts doubt upon this severing gesture that attempts a purely English
characterization of the island. Emphasizing the geographic artificiality of More’s fictional island

29

and the Utopians’ dependence upon the continent, I argue against the self-sufficiency and
insularity boasted of by Camden, Speed and others in regard to England. The founder of Utopia
unnaturally disconnected his island from the surrounding lands; his idealized community was
reliant upon this false geographic severing, allowing the Utopians to produce a culture wholly
independent of the outside world. However, the Utopian claims to positive insularity and selfsufficiency are proved false by the details of More’s text. The Utopians must depend upon the
continent for essential resources, such as colonies to house their people in times of
overpopulation, mercenaries to fight their wars and the iron necessary to the production of
weaponry. The pretended insularity of the Utopians and supposed refusal to interact with
contaminating foreign cultures implies a homogenous island people entirely uniform in character
and untouched by outside influence. In this regard, Utopia represents an English fantasy built
upon falsified principles, not unlike the English feigned histories that expel the Scottish from
their self-sustaining national body. This opening chapter of the dissertation demonstrates the
ideological necessity of the myth of the English island nation and the fissures and
misrepresentations that undermine it at every turn. Official nationalist texts that proclaim
England’s self-sufficiency, positive insularity and national unity born of the island territory are
plagued by the sort of idealized—and radically manufactured—island world we experience in
More’s work.
The second chapter of my dissertation, “Maps and Legends: Nationalist Allegories,
Empire and Cartography”, considers the integral role of official cartography in the manufacture
of nationalist self-identity and the conjoined projects to subjugate Ireland, Scotland and Wales to
the English crown. The profusion of cartographic texts in the early modern period was of
particular importance to the visualization of national identity and territorial sovereignty;

30

importantly, like More’s island, the representation of the supposedly natural national space could
be artificially amended to encourage a “re-reading” of the land that conformed with and
supported official nationalist agendas. Speed’s cartographic allegories, which combined
ethnographic imagery, ideologically-charged illustrations and symbols of British might,
manipulated the science of cartography to project an image of the English as a culturally and
politically uniform people reigning over the archipelago. Taking up the work of Aristotle, Sir
Philip Sydney, Christopher Saxton and Speed’s own History of Great Britain I demonstrate how
Speed attempted to amend nature to suit his nationalist program by visually effacing the evidence
of England’s failed colonial project and internal disunity.
However, the maps of Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain are so overlayed
and overburdened with illustrations that his works unintentionally betray the ideological burdens
undermining his cartographic narratives. Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Fletcher and Massinger’s
Sea Voyage appear to probe these imperial and national anxieties. Using the same materials
deployed in Speed’s visual allegories, Shakespeare, Fletcher and Massinger critique the
genealogical rendering of Britain favored by Speed in which the Irish, Welsh and Scottish are
portrayed as naturally subservient to the English. The plays’ emphasis on geographic conditions
strengthens the connection to Speed’s cartographic texts, citing geography as an inadequate
source of national and imperial identity, particularly when this geographical foundation is
weakened by ideological mistruths.
Such mistruths resonate with the notion of a unified monarchically-grounded national
body in my third chapter, “‘In th’ Almighties Place’: State-Building and the Division of Absolute
Authority in Spenser’s Faerie Queen”. Here I examine the problematic contradictions between
crown rhetoric of indivisible monarchical power and parsing out of political authority to agents

31

of the state. Identifying an ideological rift in English political philosophers and their continental
counterparts between absolute sovereign power and the necessity of a state infrastructure, I
consider how the clashing of the rhetoric behind state and monarchical power created an
unsurpassable gulf between absolutist discourse and the carrying out of governmental regulation
across the realms. For instance, widely known political treatises like those penned by Jean Bodin
th

in his 1576 Six livres de la république, Sir Thomas Elyot’s 16 century Boke Named the
Governour, and Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum. Published around the same time,
all acknowledge (oftentimes obliquely) the ideological disparities between absolutism and the
dispersal of power to the state. Early modern state building caused a splintering of supposedly
indivisible monarchical power, thus destabilizing the notion of a singular divine figure in which
governmental authority is centered.
This radical upset of the discourse of monarchical representation produced a refraction of
sovereignty that can be traced in Spenser’s Faerie Queen. In Spenser’s fantastic through
obviously politicized landscape, sovereign power is decentered, doled out to the poem’s myriad
queens. Though most are literary representation of Elizabeth, these multiple monarchs do not
form a single sovereign body. Rather, they appear at narrative intervals and are most always in a
position of governmental or militaristic weakness. It is here that the state, in the form of
Spenser’s knights, enters the poem. Their authority to wield governmental power in the realm of
Faerie Land often is derived from an unknown source. Though loyal to the poem’s titular
monarch, their power to govern does not necessarily emanate from her divine person. The Faerie
Queene herself is an absent center “visible” in the work only as a product of chivalric rhetoric
very closely mirroring the glowing language surrounding Spenser’s queen. Without a sovereign
center, authority exists in an ethereal and fragmented form, much like the territory made

32

discontinuous by disconnected kingdoms and geographical fissures. The Elizabethan
government’s inability to build a centralized state that would enveloped the various communities
of the island—who often functioned according to their own local culture—indicated that the state
at this period was a conglomerate of dispersed and unevenly distributed modes of authority.
The ambiguous source of political authority is a primary tenet of my final chapter “The
Staging of the English Island Nation”, which focuses almost entirely on Christopher Marlowe’s
Jew of Malta and serves as the conclusion of the dissertation. In Marlowe’s play, the primary
tenets of English official nationalism are mercilessly undone. The island dystopia imagined by
Marlowe adamantly refuses the geographical, genealogical and governmental foundations so
central to the English nation as envisioned in official texts. An island space devoid of cultural or
ethnic sameness, an indigenous population, a centralized government and defense from invasion,
Marlowe’s Malta is England shorn of nationalist rhetoric.
Geographically, the island is entirely vulnerable to attack and continually under siege.
Without a monarchical center and lacking a state infrastructure, sovereign authority is radically
ambiguous and the island and its populous are defenseless. Peopled by Christians, Turks,
Italians, Jews and characters of indeterminate origin, Malta is an island territory of others with
no allegiance to community or government. Because it is a site continually overwritten by its
imperial conquerors, Malta does not achieve any form of autonomous identity or communal
history. Marlowe’s is an island without the mystifying bonds of sovereignty or nationhood. As
such, Marlowe’s Malta bespeaks the insubstantial nature of nationalist discourse. Marlowe’s play
explodes the notion of island geography as the basis of natural unity, imperial or national, and
thus speaks to the inability of English authors to impose this veneer of nationalist homogeneity
and allegiance. Even the maps of Malta project not a vision of national identity, but one of

33

repeated imperial conquest, an alarming lack of national autonomy and a people wholly
dominated by outside forces. Malta’s vulnerability lies in its island nature; isolated by the sea
and placed directly in the center of Mediterranean trade routes, Malta’s strategic importance
invited repeated imperial wars for this highly sought island. The Maltese are defenseless, leading
to their takeover by myriad imperial forces. Marlowe’s Malta—and the historical Malta the play
draws heavily upon—echoes Britain’s history, a uncomfortable reminder of Britain’s own past,
which was written by the island’s conquerors. Finally, the seeming lack of a locus of
governmental authority and an apparent indifference to sovereign authority marks Marlowe’s
play as a nightmare of English governance, in which authority is dislocated and dispersed
without rhyme or reason.
My exploration of official nationalism in the early modern period is important not just to
studies of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Bringing into critical conversation the
phenomenon of official nationalism will help us to better understand nationalism’s legacy and its
continual—and often destructive—presence in modern culture. Monarchical governments remain
part of our historical present and state-led nationalist sentiment is still a potent ideology with
repercussions in the global political arena. By examining the historical trajectory of official
nationalism and the manufactured ideologies that sustain these movements, we might more fully
comprehend nationalism’s mechanisms and its impact on those peoples who are subjected, rather
than allegiant, to the nation.

34

BIBLIOGRAPHY

35

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson. Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2006. Print.
Armitage, David. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2000. Print.
nd

Breuilly, John. Nationalism and the State. 2
Print.

Ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993.

Camden, William. Britannia. Ed. Robert Mayhew. Bristol: Thoemmes, 2003. Print.
Fletcher, John and Philip Massinger. The Sea Voyage. Three Renaissance Travel Plays
Ed. Anthony Parr. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995. Print.
Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. Print.
Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. Lewis Thorpe.
London: Penguin, 1966. Print.
Helgerson, Richard. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Print.
Hobsbawm, Eric. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions.” The Invention of Tradition. Eds.
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Print.
---. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Print.
Knapp, Jeffrey. An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to
The Tempest. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. Print.
Kumar, Krishan. The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2003. Print.
Lavezzo, Kathy. Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English
Community, 1000-1534. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006. Print.
Logan, Sandra. Text / Events in Early Modern England: Poetics of History. Aldershot: Ashgate,
2007. Print.
Marcu, E.D. Sixteenth Century Nationalism. New York: Abaris, 1976. Print.

36

McEachern, Claire. The Poetics of English Nationhood. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1996. Print.
Seton-Watson, Hugh. Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the
Politics of Nationalism. Boulder: Westview, 1977. Print.
Smith, Anthony D. The Antiquity of Nations. Malden: Polity, 2004. Print.

37

Chapter One: A World Divided from the World
Reiterated in myriad forms and for varying ideological purposes in early modern official,
literary and cartographic texts is the myth of the English “island nation”. This island stands apart
from the known world, resting peaceably in the ocean’s arms at the edge of the globe. Celebrated
by the ancients as a land of natural plentitude, Julius Caesar himself sought to gain the island for
his empire, only be repulsed by the hardy Britons, bred with a militancy born of the island soil.
The geographic insularity of the land housing these early English was a mark of the island’s
divine status; the pagan gods intended the English isle as their refuge from the debased earthly
realm, and the singular God of the Christian faith created England as a new Eden, a blessed land
in an otherwise fallen world. The singular divinity of this world beyond the world finds human
form in the singular person of the English sovereign, who reigns as God’s earthly counterpart in
this second heaven. The mythic island body, its perimeters drawn by nature and the hand of God,
finds its compliment in the monarchical body politic. As the divinely instated borders of the
island figure the wholeness and completeness of the deistic monarchical person, so to does the
body politic enclose within its skin all the blessed people of the sovereign’s England.
The strains of this mythology can be discovered in texts as disparate as William
Camden’s Britannia, John Speed’s History of Great Britain, Shakespeare’s Richard II, Michael
Drayton’s Poly Olbion and Spenser’s Faerie Queene. In the works that were used, obliquely or
otherwise, in support of the sovereign’s official nationalist project, the myth of the English island
nation was deployed for several interrelated political purposes. The contained-ness and insularity
of the island’s geography invited claims to the natural unity and coherence of the English people,
inculcating notions of social, ethnic, cultural and political concord within the oceanic boundaries.
The mystique of a nature-made nation lent itself to assertions of the island’s self-sufficiency;

38

exalted as God’s creation, the isle was cast as wholly independent of the world beyond the sea.
The ocean did not sever the English isle from the world’s resources and the political benefits of
the international community. Rather, the watery borders encircling the island shielded sovereign
and subjects from invasion and war, inoculating the isle from the inherent dangers of unprotected
or unclear political boundaries. The island geography itself invited the coming together of once
culturally, socially and politically differentiated groups; enveloped by the ocean and naturally
joined by the shared soil of a cloistered land, the people of Cornwall and Wales surrendered their
national identifications to unite the island kingdom of England.
The myth of the island nation, then, provided the ideological apparatus and geographical
trope necessary to project an image of the English body politic as largely homogenous in
character, bound together by their apart-ness from the world beyond the water, their blessed state
in a land uniquely designed by God and their allegiance to the sovereign who reigned in God’s
stead over his island paradise. These characteristics were central to England’s nationalist
identifications; a sovereign entity defined by indisputable territorial borders that marked out the
island nation as separate and distinct, the English were a people whose near-mythic existence on
the earth’s margins, its historical longevity, divinely entrenched system of government and
shared cultural and linguistic community exemplified the term ‘nation’.
The problems with such a mythology are obvious and, in most cases, insurmountable.
First, and most importantly, England is not an island. The land mass so celebrated for its
otherworldliness and divine status in official English rhetoric is also home to Scotland, an
obstinate geographical fact that cannot be dispelled with tricks of cartographic mathematics or a
poetically crafted nationalist mythos. Only slightly smaller in size than its English counterpart,
Scotland dominates the northern half of the properly termed British island. Perhaps even more

39

significant than Scotland’s pronounced territorial ownership of the island is the long-standing
history of political conflict between the two sovereign states that consistently refuted claims of
English suzerainty on the British island. Medieval land disputes and early modern border
skirmishes, the Anglo-Scottish Wars, which persisted into the early years of Tudor rule,
Scotland’s allied ties to France and the repeated failures of English overlordship evince that
Scotland was a persistent and undeniable presence both in the English political psyche and in
terms of territorial might. Though the ascension of James to the English throne ostensibly
brought the two nations into a single “British” nation, Scotland remained (and remains) an
independent nation oftentimes uncomfortably sharing the island with its neighbors to the south.
To imagine England as an island was, in the context of Anglo-Scottish relations, an imperial
fantasy that impossibly denied the political reality of Scotland as a sovereign state.
Wales was also subject to this imperial myth-making. Encompassing a substantial portion
of the island’s southwestern region, Wales occupied a liminal space in the maps, atlases and
chorographies of the period, despite its annexation by England in 1537. The chorographic
marking out of the Welsh landscape from the English attests to the cultural, legal and linguistic
preservation of Welsh identity that, like the Scottish occupation of the isle, greatly complicates
28

England’s island narrative.

Though Wales adopted English law and pledged its allegiance to

28

In Camden’s Britannia, the historian speaks of his narrative of Wales as a “digression” from
his considerably larger and more important narrative of England (615). The mapped shires of
Wales are devoted their own section within the much more compendious English history;
therefore this “digression” works to consume Wales within the English territory, for the section
devoted to Wales is embedded within the English historical and cartographic narrative.
Nevertheless, Wales is subtly but separately delineated (it is provided its own section)
complicating the notion that Wales was entirely subsumed by the English and thus supporting the
notion that it occupies a separate geographic and cultural space on the “English” island. Speed’s
Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain likewise provides Wales a separate set of maps and a
comparatively minuscule 30 pages of narrative. However, he is careful to mark out the Welsh
territory as English by beginning this section with “A Catalog of such Princes Sprong from the
40

the English sovereign, the nation was not wholly subsumed by England and thus retained a
cultural and genealogical identity that resisted imperial assimilation. The notion that the English
island housed a single nation of largely homogenous subjects is upset, if not altogether undone,
by the Welsh and Scottish populations that hemmed in the English territory. Ireland, England’s
neighbor to the west and its most glaring imperial failure, more closely resembled the image of
island unity so carefully crafted in English official rhetoric. A nation of ethnically, socially and
culturally alike people with a single system of law and an unwavering fealty to their shared
character and independence, Ireland’s island boundaries defined its nationhood and rejected any
encroachments upon this communal identity. Ireland, England’s governmental bugbear,
encapsulated the very qualities that official rhetoric sought to attach to the English, thus
especially complicating England’s colonial discourse that defined civilized Englishness against
Irish barbarity. Approximately equal in size to England and an “island nation” by definition, the
English “island” of official texts unsuccessfully emulated its supposedly savage geographical
counterpart. Surrounded by cultural and political entities that denied it island status, England
itself was markedly heterogeneous due to regional differentiations in culture, ethnicity and law.
Once one dismantles the official rhetoric sustained by the trope of the English island, one
discovers that England was not a naturally bounded island nation, but one of several entities
making up the contentious grouping of ethnicities and political bodies that was problematically
termed the “empire of Britain”.

Royal Stemme of the English Kings, as have been Entituled, Prince of Wales, since the time of
that Countries last Conquest, and first Voluntary subjection under KING EDWARD THE
FIRST” (96). Yet, like Camden, Speed’s indexical delineation of Wales indicates a Welsh
territory that culturally stands apart from England. Camden, William. Britannia Ed. Robert
Mayhew. Vol 3. (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2003) 3. Print. All future citations of Camden’s Britannia
are from this three volume set edited by Mayhew.
41

The mythological singularity of the English island nation was ideologically associated
with the singular person of the monarch; this relationship between nation and sovereign likewise
breaks down when the myth of the island nation is debunked. The multiple states and
communities making up the British archipelago functioned under multiple governments,
institutions and leaders. The partitioning of the main island into two kingdoms meant that two
sovereign rulers reigned over a divided land. Even with the ascension of James VI of Scotland to
the English throne and the supposed union of the two nations, there were clear anxieties on both
sides of the marches regarding the preservation of cultural and governmental institutions and
national identity. The union of two political bodies in a single monarchical body was, arguably, a
failure until well after the Stuart era, and only pointed up the separateness and desired autonomy
of the two populations. The attempt to subject Ireland to the English sovereign was an even
greater defeat; powerful chieftans and local magnates rejected English authority and asserted a
cultural and political independence that was geographically reinforced by the sea separating the
two nations. The English body politic was itself a dismembered entity sutured by a fledgling
state. Like Ireland and Scotland, regions of England were ruled not by the monarch but by
landowning gentry and local figures. The crown attempted to assert its absolute authority through
the creation of a centralized state, but England’s feudal heritage continued to assert itself in the
form of localized governments that challenged official claims to absolutist rule. Because political
authority was splintered and dispersed across the archipelago—like the various communities
populating Britain’s many islands—the conceit of the singular island body ruled by the singular
sovereign was the insubstantial stuff of myth, rather than political reality.
In this chapter, I will define the “myth of the English island nation” and demonstrate its
uses in official national discourse. Camden’s Britannia and Speed’s History of Great Britain

42

either directly or indirectly buttressed a vision of England that was in keeping with the crown’s
attempts to forge a commonwealth of allegiant subjects mindful of their role within a national
community that was shaped by the monarch’s hand. This nationalist project was coincident with
England’s imperial aims and the attempt to subsume under the English flag the other nations of
the archipelago. As illustrated in chapter two, the English nationalist and imperial projects were
often at ideological cross purposes. In order to construct and sustain the myth of the island
nation, the genealogy of Britain must be rewritten to assert the island’s historical Englishness.
This rhetorical project posed an insurmountable problem: first, Scotland could not be simply
erased from the historical record, nor could the autonomous nation be overwritten as English,
especially if authors of the crown were attempting to assert England’s imperial domination of the
isle. The Scottish must somehow be fundamentally other and fundamentally the same (i.e.
English). Official authors clumsily “solved” this intractable difficulty by separating the Lowland
and Highland Scots into two radically distinct groups: the first, a civilized people whose history
cast them as genealogically akin to the English. The second Highland Scots, on the other hand,
were barbarous invaders of the English island who had illegitimately planted themselves on
English soil. As foreigners, their continued presence on the island was an affront to English
national boundaries, which were naturally carved out by the ocean.
The second and equally problematic purpose of this myth was to recast England’s
geographic vulnerability as positive insularity; rewriting England’s severing from the continent,
the myth of the island nation ineffectually disguised the isolation and sequestration caused by the
disconnectedness of England from the continent. Early modern England was not a self-sufficient,
insular nation without need of the world outside its borders. Rather, the English nation was
handicapped by its inability to produce certain necessary resources, such as iron, and was

43

therefore dependent upon the continent. Likewise, in a period of nascent global trade and
exploration, England was in competition with its continental neighbors for lucrative trade routes
and New World lands and resources. Lagging behind its rival Spain, England struggled for a
place on the emerging global stage and a means to mask its outlander geographic status.
Secondly, English interventions in the Low Countries and its engagement in the political wars of
the Reformation placed England firmly in the messy arena of international politics. The threat of
continental invasion was made more palpable by England’s vulnerable geographic position and
character; set within an archipelago of nations that refused to bend to its rule, the English crown
feared both the joining of Scottish and French forces and Spanish aid to the rebellious Irish. The
sea, in this context, was mutable and threatening, potentially carrying and concealing dangers
from abroad that could steal upon the largely unguarded coasts of the islands. The ocean did not
enclose England in its protective embrace, guaranteeing national security and the clear
demarcation of territorial borders; rather it invited those invading forces that sought to redraw the
borders of England’s sovereign territory to the detriment of the crown.
In Camden and Speed’s texts, the nations of Britain are elided by the island of England
and the subjects of these very different realms collapse into a single category under the weight of
this overdetermined island mythology. However, the untenable claims in these texts that
undergird the myth of the island nation persistently lurk beneath the ideological surface, drawing
attention to the very need for a fabricated narrative to gloss over England’s political and
geographic vulnerabilities. My reading of these works will explore the narratological and
ideological failures that inevitably attend these invented geographical, historical and political
constructions. The dismantling of England’s island myth effectively undoes a major strain of its

44

nationalist and imperial narration, and strips from the nation’s history the mythos of “a world
29

divided from the world”.

In the second half of this chapter, I will consider how popular literary texts of the period
exposed the flaws and inconsistencies embedded in this island mythology. The notion of the
English island had a far-reaching historical trajectory and was therefore a recognizable trope of
the nation’s cultural milieu. Authors of popular texts, such as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson,
Michael Drayton, Edmund Spenser and Thomas More, among others, employed this island
fiction to radically different effect than official works. Intentionally or otherwise, these popular
texts punctured the island myth by overturning the very tenets of this island rhetoric that were of
ideological import to the crown. Refusing the geographical and political manipulations necessary
to the official rendering of the English island, these works force back into the cultural imaginary
England’s troubled history as a nation on the world’s margins, unable to sustain or defend itself
against invasion and its own deficiencies. The likening of the singular island body to that of the
singularly divine monarch likewise breaks down when subjected to the dramatist or poet’s pen.
With the acknowledgement of the several cultures and nationalities sharing the archipelagic
space and the recognition of the English island’s essential falsity and forced construction, the site
of political authority is splintered and the manufactured-ness of this monarchical mythology is
exposed.
The culmination of this literary and historical analysis is a reading of More’s Utopia. I
argue that More’s fabricated island explicitly demonstrates the ideological weaknesses and
mistruths of the historiographic narratives deployed to buttress the myth of the island nation. The
geopolitics of More’s pretended island nationalism resonate strongly with the ideological
29

Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques Ed Stephen Orgel (New Haven: Yale UP, 1969): 56
Print.
45

shaping of medieval and early modern England, particularly in their treatment of Scotland. The
expansive and autonomous Scottish territory and the Scots’ refusal to become part of the English
domestic empire posed serious difficulties to writers of the English “island nation”. I argue that
the imperial discourses so prevalent in More’s text extend not just to the New World but to the
nation bordering England, whose very presence demanded an ideological severing of the Scots
from the English, the supposedly “true” possessors of the island. Because the English island
mythos was in broad circulation during the period of Utopia’s composition, it is safe to say that
More—the historian, humanist and statesman—was aware of this nationalist construction; there
is even evidence that More himself had a hand in perpetuating this myth, as I will explain later.
However, More’s satirical fantasy of English insularity, imperial might and governmentally
ordered national space detrimentally punctures the very precepts upon which this fantasy is built.
Therefore, one can discover on More’s island the ideological necessity of this myth to English
self-writing and the very precariousness that threatens to undo these foundational narratives of
English nationhood.
The Island Authorized
The geographical and ideological manipulations necessary to imagine England as an
island required literary sleights of hand that made slippery use of history and cartography. As I
discuss in chapter two, elaborate ornamentation and cartographic misrepresentations allowed
historian and mapmaker John Speed to imaginatively build England’s island empire, despite his
nation’s domestic and imperial failures. By crowding the English landmass with ideologically
charged illustrations carefully positioned to lend artificial borders to the English nation, Speed
gave visual credence to the myth of the English island. In this chapter, I will examine the body of
literary constructions that removed England from the sphere of geographic factuality and

46

elevated it to a kind of mythic island status. The first authors I will examine had varying degrees
of association with the crown; I contend that their illustrations of the English “island” thusly
correspond with state interests. The literary, in this respect, functions as a means of explicating
the realm of political mythology and nation building. Serving political causes as pressing and
far-reaching as governmental centralization, allegiance to the crown, imperial claims to
England’s rule over the British archipelago, and nationalist genealogy, the myth of the island
nation was an ideological construction that unstably upheld a host of official narratives.
Among the destabilizing elements of this island mythology was the recurrent slippage
between “Britain” and “England”, between empire and nation, in which the “British myth” came
into conflict with the English national mythos. Wily Maley accounts for this ideological
disconnect:
The British myth constructs a history in which the threat from its neighbors, north and
west, is a barrier to English aspirations. The subordination of the non-English nations of
the emerging British state is posited as an essential prerequisite to Empire rather than an
act of Empire itself. The British Empire is first and foremost the British state, which
represents the political subjection of the British Isles under English supremacy [ … ]
England is substituted for the British state…

30

Here, the borders between empire and nation are unclear. The imposition of “The British
Empire” upon Scotland, Ireland and Wales is obviously a project to submit these autonomous
regions to imperial English rule. Yet the “subordination” Maley indicates is likewise a project of
making the isles English in governance, an English archipelagic body, if not in name than in
political intent.
30

Maley, Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton
(Gordonville: Palgrave, 2003) 26. Print.
47

As John Kerrigan explains in his examination of Britain’s archipelagic literatures of the
period, “Englishness was a contested resource as much for writers engaging with readers as for
leaders mustering armies [ … ] ‘England’ was a shifting entity, open to reconceptualization,
defined against and meshed with its neighbors”.

31

For this reason, England had to be rhetorically

stabilized both politically and literarily in order to sustain state and propagandistic projects.
“British history”, David J. Baker likewise asserts, “is a history of chronic instability, and it puts
‘national’ identity on the islands profoundly in question—so profoundly that it must be answered
32

with a fervent and compensatory Englishness”.

Britain and its history, placed in the hands of

English writers, was transformed into an overdetermined construction of English governmental
and territorial might. From the early modern period to the present, “the pattern of ‘British
history’ entails the steadily increasing dominance of England as a political and cultural entity,”
33

in the words of J. G. A. Pocock.

As this chapter explores, ancient British history further complicated attempts during the
early modern period to positively distinguish the English from the ambiguous British family. The
confusing ethnographic admixture of peoples populating the ancient British Isles made the search
for Englishness a deeply complicated project of English nation and empire building. Andrew
Escobedo details this perplexing historical stumbling block in Nationalism and Historical Loss in
Renaissance England:

31

Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics, 1603-1707 (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2008) 12. Print.
32
Baker, “Spenser and the Uses of British History.” Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the
Early Modern Age Eds. Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman (Lexington: UP of Kentucky,
2000), 201. Print.
33
Pocock, “British history: a plea for a new subject.” The Discovery of Islands: Essays in
British History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005) 33. Print.
48

Tudor and Stuart writers in ‘England’ commonly refer to themselves as ‘British’.
Depending on context, ‘British’ in this period could comprise England, Scotland,
and Wales; or it could designate the pre-Saxon identity persisting in England,
especially through the modern Welsh; or, more rarely, it appears simply to be
synonymous with ‘English’. This ambiguity in contemporary usage pointed to a
34

persistent historical problem: was the national past an English or British one?

Imperial discourse demanded that the English be differentiated from the isle’s others and thus
outside the “British” family of the Scottish, the Welsh and the Irish, as well as their ancient
forebearers. Though Wales as the preserve of ancient Britishness provided some reprieve from
this genealogical difficulty—particularly for the Tudors, who depended upon the mythos of
Arthurian legend and Welsh heritage to ideologically sustain their royal image—Wales was also
a separate cultural entity that continued, at least in part, to resist English rule. Various texts
preserved the notion of Wale’s backwardness in order to justify English control over the Welsh
territories. The ancient Briton likewise presented ideological difficulties; often portrayed as a
brutish, pre-evolutionary race dominated by its many imperial conquerors, English writers could
not turn to this ancient figure for a model of contemporary English civility and power.
For the English nation to exist as a legitimate historical entity, England must be provided
a historical genealogy that rooted Englishness in the land, thus marking out the whole of the isle
territories as inherently English in nature. The myth of the English island nation filled the
“historical discontinuity” and “troubling breach in history”, cited by Escobedo.

35

As the work of

Speed and Camden demonstrate, English histories were rewritten around the island trope to
34

Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser,
Milton (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004) 18. Print.
35
Ibid, 3-4.
49

inscribe the isle as historically English and to cast those troublesome non-English entities,
particularly the Scots, as foreign to the English island. Britain, because it could not be altogether
abolished from the historical record or contemporary politics of empire, was overwritten as
English. The English themselves, as John Morrill explains, absented themselves from Britain
when ideologically necessary: “the one group who most resolutely and consistently refused to
regard themselves as Britons,” he explains, “were the English in England. If they use it all it is
36

without any sense that it other than a synonym for English”.

In the work of even the earliest “British” historians, the island being celebrated for its
people, its natural plentitude and its cooperative relationship to the sea is England, not its
neighbor to the north. Scotland, though recognized, is subtly but effectively characterized as
marginal to the isle called Britain. For example, Camden’s introductory material to his Britannia
and his description of ancient Britain takes up approximately 163 pages of his 822 page first
37

volume.

Following the history are his illustrations of “The States and Degrees of England” and

his “Law Courts of England”. The entirety of the rest of the volume (approximately 700 pages) is
devoted to detailed depictions of England’s counties, including an accompanying map of each.
His record of Scotland is drastically smaller in size (despite its geographic proportion) and
strangely relegated to a separate volume with its own page numbers. Indexically bracketed off
from the main volume of British (read English) history, all of Scotland is allowed only a 54 page

36

Morrill, “The British Problem, c. 1534-1707.” The British Problem, c. 1534-1707: State
Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago Eds. Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (Houndmills:
Macmillan, 1996) 10. Print.
37
Camden’s work is not broken into volumes, per se. Rather, the numbered pages 1-822 end
with his description of his final English country. As explained above, he renumbers his work
when he begins his illustration of Scotland and Ireland. Therefore, the second “volume”, as I
describe it, is an approximately 233 pages given over to “Scotland” and “Ireland and the Smaller
Islands in the British Ocean”, according to his titles.
50

narration. The Scottish lands are likewise diminished; of this sizable territory we are provided
one map of the nation as a whole, the separate counties barely delineated and their descriptions
scant in comparison to those of England, some no more substantial than a single paragraph in
length. Cartographically, chorographically, and organizationally, Scotland is reduced to footnote
to the history of Britain proper: that is, England.
The genealogical complications of figuring the island as anciently English are prominent
in both Camden and Speed’s histories of Britain. The English were themselves non-native, in the
sense that they were a people of conglomerate cultures, including the Saxons, Angles, Normans
and Jutes, who all arrived on the island from elsewhere. However, Camden and Speed are
determined to link the ancient Britons to what was later conceived as the “English nation”. For
example, Camden in his Britannia seeks to harmoniously join together the ancient Britons and
the conquering Saxons: Following the Saxon victory over the Britons, he reports:
In a short space, [the Saxon’s] State, for number, for good customes and
ordinances, for lands and territories grew to that height, that it became most
wealthy and puissant, yea, and their conquest in some sort full and absolute. For
all the conquered, except some few, whom in the Westerne tract the roughnesse of
the country defended and kept safe, became one nation, used the same lawes,
tooke their name, and spake one and the selfsame language, with the
conquerors.

38

Camden’s narrative of a united British / English nation places the ancient Britons as the
true proprietors of the island; their continued existence on the isle and their willing subjection to
the “English-Saxons”, as Camden terms them, combines the Britons and the English into one
38

Camden, Vol. 1, 132-33.
51

family, in which England’s British roots reach back into the time of the island nation’s first
founding. The problems with Camden’s narrative melding of the Britons and the Saxons cannot
be so easily elided, however. As Camden himself betrays, there remained resistance to this
blending of cultures, presumably in the Welsh territories, where British culture remained
preserved, isolated and untainted. In truth, the Britons had little choice but to fold to Saxon rule;
the joining of the nations was not a matter of contract or agreement, but of British subjugation.
The ideological project to make the island historically English is also clumsily
“achieved” by finding in texts like Bede’s Ecclesiastic History of the English Nation indirect
connections between ancient tribes like Cimbri, whose arrival on the island preceded that of the
Britons. I discuss these historical constructions in more detail below and in the final chapter of
this dissertation. The importance of these narrative manipulations is to ideologically disconnect
Scotland from England and to claim the isle as historically English in nature. Throughout his
depiction of England’s northern neighbor, Camden consistently undercuts Scotland’s
membership in the British family. In his introduction to his description of Scotland, Camden
acknowledges the necessity of including Scotland within his celebration of Britain:
Seeing Scotland also joineth in the name of BRITAINE, let it be lawfull for mee
(reserving the due honour to the Scotish) according to my purpose, having, boldly
undertaken to illustrate BRITAN, to proceed with their good favour, leave and
license, and by withdrawing a side in some sort the curtaine of obscure antiquity,
to point out with my finger, if I shalbe able, some places of ancient note, and
39

memorie.

39

Camden, Vol. 3, 3.
52

The conventional early modern trope of the humble and unknowing historian allows Camden to
rhetorically shy away from the task of giving Scotland its due in his mammoth history. Yet
Camden’s language here, in conjunction with his narratological and cartographical minimization
of Scotland, pictures Scotland as an after-thought, and afterword to Britain. Because Scotland is
territorially a part of Britain and because Britain is his project, Camden must append to his
masterwork a glance toward Britain’s northern territories. Or, as Camden himself avers, he will
“but [ … ] lightly passe over” the whole of the Scottish nation.

40

Yet Camden’s breezy gesture toward Scotland is not without ideological weight.
Peppered throughout his description of Scotland’s lands and peoples is a series of damning
portraits that serve to differentiate the northern nation from Camden’s England. Speaking in the
earliest pages of this volume, Camden delineates Scottish “Highland-men and “Lawland-men”;
unsurprisingly, the further one travels from England, the greater the decline in civility and even
humanity. Outside the geographical sphere of English influence is a sinister land of beasts and
criminals who throw into sharp relief the geopolitical ends of Camden’s depiction of England’s
Britain. “According to the habitation of the people, Scotland is now divided into High-landmen
and Lawland-men: These being more civil use the English language and apparaill: the other
which are rude & unruly, speake Irish, & go apparailed Irishlike”.

41

Camden’s ethnographic

linking of the Northern Scottish to the Irish neatly performs a multivalent colonial gesture.
Collapsing Englishness and civility and letting Irishness signify as degenerate and barbarous,
Camden ousts Northern Scotland and Ireland from the field of British progress and archipelagic

40
41

Ibid.
Ibid, vol 3, 5.
53

unity, thus returning the readers attention to the true center and subject of his volume: England
cum Britiain.
The reader travelling north in Camden’s chorography meets with an increasingly
villainous citizenry and a sometimes hellish terrain, culminating in a highland region inhabited
by witches and deadly beasts.

42

In the section entitled “Nidisdall”, Camden describes the

“warlike kind of men” that people the western borderlands between England and Scotland at
Solway Firth. “Infamous for robberies and depredations” this criminal clan has “made many
43

times outrodes into England for to fetch in booties”.

Pictured in opposition to and violation of

his English brethren, this brand of Scotsman, living in close proximity to the Irish coast, is more
akin to the thieving Irishman than the civilized English who must repel his malicious attacks.
Moving northward into the west-central portion of Scotland, the landscape is depicted as
violently deformed and is again linked to Ireland. Of “Argathelia or Argile”, Camden translates
this place name into “Neere unto the Irish; or, as old writings have it, The Edge or border of
Ireland”. Here the land itself is cast as degenerate and malicious: “the country runneth out in
length and breadth, all mangled with fishfull pooles” writes Camden, “along the shore it is more
unpleasant in sight, what with rockes, and what with blacklish baraine mountaines.” According

42

Atholl in central Scotland “is infamous for witches and wicked women; the country,
otherwise fertile enough, hath valleies bespred with forests: namely where that WOOD
CALEDONIA dreadfull to see to for the sundry turnings and windings in and our therein, for the
hideous horror of darke shades, for the Burrowes and dennes of wilde bulles with thicke manes [
… ] extended it selfe in old time farre and wide every way in these parts” (vol 3, 40). In
“Strathnavern”, which Camden refers to as “the utmost and farthest coast of all Britaine”, “the
country it selfe is for the soile nothing fertile, and by reason of the sharpe and cold aire lesse
inhabited: and thereupon fore haunted and annoied by most cruel wolves. Which in such violent
rage not only set upon cattaile to the exceeding great dammage of the inhabitants, but also assaile
men with great danger, and not in this tract onely, but in many other parts likewise of Scotland”
(Camden, vol 3, 54).
43
Ibid, Vol 3, 17.
54

to Camden, this debased territory is the original homeland of the ancient Scot. He continues, “In
this part, as Bede writeth,
Britaine received after the Britans and Picts, a third nation of Scots in that
country where the Picts inhabited: who comming out of Ireland [ … ] either
through friendshippe or by dint of sword planted heere their seat amongst them,
which they still hold [ … ] Ireland (saith hee) is the proper Country of the Scots;
for, beeing departed out of it they added unto the Britans and Picts a third nation
in Britaine. And there is a verie great Bay or arme of the Sea: that in old time
severed the Nation of the Britans from the Picts: which from the West breaketh a
great way into the land [ … ] In the North part of which Bay, the Scots aforesaid
44

when they came, gotte themselves a place to inhabite.

The Scots, imagined here as latecomers to Britain, invaders who unnaturally planted themselves
in the British Isles, are actually Irish, further entrenching the notion of the Scots’ thieving and
criminal ways. Usurpers of the land, neither the Scots nor the Irish belong to the family line that
binds the people of the island in an ancient British unity. Camden’s repetition of Bede’s claim
that the treasonous Scots “still hold” this stolen land has damning implications for the Scots’
early modern progeny; Camden’s contemporary Scot is portrayed not as a rightful subject, but as
a recalcitrant Irish invader who remains outside Bede and Camden’s genealogical rendering of
Britain.
Bede’s geographical illustration of the Scots’ invasion enforces not only a genealogical
severing of the Scots from the British but also a geopolitical division between the English and
those inhabiting the island’s northern region. Bede’s “verie great Bay” is presumably the long
44

Ibid, Vol 3, 37.
55

stretch of the western English coast, running from Anglesey in the south to Dumfries
(approximately) in the north. The point at which the Irish Sea most severely juts into the western
coast is Solway Firth, which meets with Hadrian’s Wall, the ancient border between England and
Scotland, and marks the current political border between the two nations. According to Bede’s
explanation, this bay likewise marked the border of the Pict and British “nations”. “The nation of
the Picts came in long ships”, states Bede, “and those not many, out of Scythia, (as the report
goeth) into Ireland: and of the Scots whom they found there, requested (but in vaine) a place of
habitation: by whose perswasion they went into Britaine, and inhabited the Northerne parts
45

thereof”.

The ancient Picts are also distinguished from the Britains proper; Camden maintains,

both “Antiquitie and “the Historiographers have accounted [the Picts] second” to the British.

46

Both ancient and contemporary Scotland, then, is the land of the “other British”, geographically
and ethnically distinct from England.
Though Camden debates Bede’s claims regarding the Picts’ Scythian heritage, his
explanation of their inhabitation of northern Britain likewise enacts a complicated geographic
and ethnic separation that is perhaps more startling in its rearrangement of Britain’s geopolitical
history. Citing Tacitus, Camden considers the Picts’ refusal to bend to Roman rule.
Were it not that in this point the authoritie of venerable Beda, did over-weigh all
the conjectures of all others, I would thinke that the Picts came from no other
place at all, but were verie naturall Britans themselves, even the right progenie of
the most ancient Britains: those Britans, I meane, and none other, who before the
comming in of the Romans, were seated in the North part of the Island, and of

45
46

Ibid, Vol 1, 114.
Ibid.
56

those who afterwards, casting off the yoke of bondage (as they are a nation most
impatient of servilitie) repaired unto these in the North [ … ] Where being armed
not so much with weapons as with a sharpe aire and climate of their owne, they
grew up together with the native Inhabitants whom there they found, unto a
mightie and populous nation. For Tacitus reporteth, that the enemies of the
Romans were [ … ] driven into this part, as it were, into another Island: and no
man doubteth, but Britans they were which inhabited these remotest parts of the
Island.

47

In a slippery attempt to both cast the Picts as a separate ethnic category, distinct from the proper
“Britains” and interloping Scots, and to weave a narrative that imagines the originary
Britons/English as the ancestral possessors of the whole of the island, Camden grants the Picts an
ambiguous lineage. At first glance, it would seem that Camden considers the Picts as native to
the British Isles, considering his assertion that they were “verie naturall Britans”. But, he quickly
backs away from this claim to the Picts’ indigenous right to the island by re-casting them as
ancestors of “those Britains” who first occupied Scotland (“the North part of the Island”).
Neither the Picts nor the Scots (whose status as Irishmen is again reiterated by Bede) can rightly
be called “the most ancient Britains”, a title and territorial claim preserved for those peoples who
are not sprung from non-native ethnic groups: presumably, the English. The Picts, Camden
insists, are only “progeny” or secondary, to these indigenous British. Camden reinforces this
unstable hierarchy by distinguishing the Picts from the unnamed “native inhabitants” with whom
they grew into “a mightie and populous nation”; the Picts, by Camden’s contradictory logic, are
non-native, and more importantly, non-English. By placing these ancient British/Englishmen in
47

Ibid, 115.
57

Northern Britain, Camden makes them the claimants of not only of “these remotest part of the
island” but historically of the island proper. With the Scots pushed to the Irish margins and the
Picts contradictorily presented as both non-native and secondary to the ancient British, the “verie
naturall Britans” of the English line take command of the whole of the British Isles.
The tenuousness of Camden’s narrative attests to the historiograhical difficulties that the
Scots and Picts presented to the English. Unable to wipe them from the records of British
antiquity, Camden must instead so diminish their ancestral footprint from the island’s territorial
history that the Picts and Scots—and the contemporary Scottish and Irish—appear as either
foreigners to the archipelago or nothing other than peoples of an ancient English stock. A second
and perhaps less complicated narratological gesture also deployed by Camden is to subsume
Scotland altogether. Whereas his indexical and rhetorical separation of the Scottish from the
British accomplished Scotland’s diminishment in the first instance, Camden then uses the
language of national unity to strip Scotland of its autonomy and territorial might. “A divine and
heavenly opportunity is now fallen into our laps, which wee hardly ever hoped, and our
Ancestours so often and so earnestly wished”, Camden intones, “Namely, that Britaine [ … ]
should all throughout like one uniforme City, under one most sacred and happie Monarch, the
founder of perpetuall peace, by a blessed Union bee conjoyned in one entire bodie”.

48

The

ascension of King James that accomplished this “blessed Union” was hardly a happy accident,
and, on both sides of the border, anxieties mounted regarding this “divine and heavenly
opportunity”. Specifically, both the English and the Scottish feared the loss of national identity
that could come of this merger of distinct sovereign kingdoms. Camden’s notion that “wee all
one nation are this day” is not a celebration of two autonomous cultures and governments
48

Ibid, Vol 3, 3.
58

49

binding themselves in an equal union.

Considered as a whole, Britannia’s slender narrative

devoted to Scotland and its single cartographic representation of the Scottish nation figure
Scotland as a newly annexed English territory affixed to the island of England. Fittingly, the
nation of Scotland is quickly reduced to “The Republicke or Common-wealth of the Scots” only
a few pages later.

50

Camden’s ancient history of the Scots is likewise designed to reinforce England’s
suzerainty over the main British island. Camden tells the story of two breeds of Scot: “the old,
true, and naturall Scots [ … ] whose of-spring are those Scots speaking Irish, which inhabite all
the West part of the kingdome of Scotland, now so called, and the Islands adjoining thereto, and
who now adaies be termed High-land men” and “the rest which are of civill behaviour, and bee
seated in the East part therof, albeit they beare now the name of Scotish-men, yet are they
nothing lesse than Scots, but descended from the very same Germane originall, that we English
51

men are”.

Here, Camden conflates several strains of the above narratives; the Scots as barbaric

Irish, the inherent difference between the peoples of the Highlands and Lowlands, a politicized
renaming of Scottish territories, etc. But in this formulation, it is both the inhabitants and the
land itself that is subject Camden’s re-signification. Per Bede’s history, the “true, naturall” Scots
are foreign to the British soil, interlopers whose non-native seeds have unnaturally taken root on
the island. Their ethnic separateness from the British is signaled even in Camden’s time by their
linguistic difference and uncivil character. In contrast to the above historical reformulations,
Camden here brackets off western Scotland as a separate “kingdom” of un-English invaders.

49

50
51

Ibid.
Ibid, Vol 3, 7.
Ibid, Vol 1, 119.
59

Whereas those ancient inhabitants of the northeastern portion of the British island were in
actually not Scots at all but Englishmen, sprung from “the very same Germane originall”, the
eastern Scots are a kingdom unto themselves, unnaturally occupying a stolen [English] land. It is
significant that Camden depicts this separate and foreign nation of Highland-men not simply as
some vestige of Britain antiquity but as a current feature of Britain’s geopolitical landscape. The
region of the British island that houses this foreign contingent is, “now so called”, the Kingdom
of Scotland, and “now adaies” these unsavory peoples fall under their own distinct designation
that geographically and ethnically distinguishes them from the rest of the British. In Camden’s
geopolitical reconfiguration, the English are the ancestral proprietors of the British island; the
ancient Scots who invaded its shores maintain a rogue existence in a land that they do not rightly
occupy.
As if to lend further visual evidence to this point, Camden situates his map of England in
the Britannia such that it interrupts the telling of the ancient Scot’s narrative. In the final pages
of the “Scots” section of his ancient history, Camden again repeats the now well-worn story of
the Highland-man’s Irish heritage and the constitutional Englishness of the Lowlanders:
All they which inhabite the East part of Scotland, and be called Lowlandmen, as
one would say, of the Lower-countrey, are the very offspring of the EnglishSaxons, and doe speake English. But they that dwell in the West coast, named
Highlandmen, as it were, of the upper countrey, be meere Scots, and speake Irish,
as I have said before: and so none are deadly enemies, as they be unto the
52

Lowlandmen, which use the English tongue as we doe.

52

Ibid, Vol 1, 126-27.
60

Narratively, there is little variation to this xenophobic tale of English superiority and territorial
ownership, with the exception of “deadly” violence inflicted by the Highlanders on the “English”
lowlanders. Once again, Camden’s southeastern Scotland is actually English, and the western
portion of the island is literally “Scot-land”, a region captured by a marauding band from Ireland
who have illegally taken root in English territory. The difference here is that Camden
underscores this troublesome assertion cartographically: placed such that it visually reinforces
England’s claim to Scotland and its ancestral ownership of the island at large, Camden’s map of
England obstructs the Scots’ narrative fulfillment of their place in Britain’s history. Just prior to
the final page of Camden’s description of the ancient Scots, the chorographer inserts his map
entitled “Englalond Anglia Anglosaxonum Heptarchia”, an intricate cartographic depiction of the
English territories in which Scotland and Ireland are emptied of any geographic or political
detail. The map intrudes upon the Scots’ narrative between the above cited passages: “But they
that dwell in the West coast, named Highlandmen, as it were, of the upper country, be mere
Scots and speake Irish, as I have said before: and so none are deadly enemies, as they be…” and
53

“unto the Lowlandmen, which use the English tongue as we doe”.

The page break, like

Camden’s ideologically-charged bifurcation of Scotland, divides the highland Scots from the
54

“English” lowlander.

The map likewise enacts a kind of textual break, interrupting the written

narrative of the Scot by inserting within this textual history a map of England, as though
England’s claim to ancestral ownership and contemporary suzerainty disallows the very entrance
and position of the Scot in British (i.e. English) history.
53
54

Ibid, Vol 1, 126-27.

Though one must consider as a factor in this placement the needs of the early modern printer,
who likely needed to fit as many words as possible onto the page, it is uncanny that even
Camden’s accidental organization reinforces the persistently reiterated distinction between the
Scottish highlands and “English” lowlands”.
61

Speed, Camden’s contemporary and a fellow member of the Society of Antiquarians,
likewise contributed to the myth of the English island nation by displacing Scotland from his “Ile
55

of Great Britaine”.

Driven to compile his massive narrative companion to his Theatre of the

Empire of Great Britain by “the ardent affection and love to [his] native Countrey”, Speed’s
patriotic fervor for England infects his illustration of the bi-national island, rendering Scotland
and the native Scots historically obsolete. The absence of Scotland from Speed’s narrative is
signaled in both the work’s title and the illustrative frontispiece that ushers the reader into the
work. The title, The History of Great Britaine Under the Conquests of ye Romans, Saxons,
Danes and Normans is given visual representation by the five figures that surround the title plate
(fig 1). On the lower tiers stand the Dane and the Norman in their supposed respective dress;
above them are placed “A Romane” and “A Saxon”. The representative Saxon gazes fondly at
the title plate; in Speed’s genealogy the English are sprung from his ancient line. Hierarchically
situated in the top center position of this archway is the “Britaine”, whose prominence on the
page and exaggerated size indicate his dominance over the lesser tribes making up this
genealogical portrait. Because of the careful positioning of these ethnographic specimens on the
tiered archway, and because of the looming presence and size of the “Britaine” atop the arch,
one’s eye is drawn from the bottom of the illustration to the top, implying a kind of historical
evolution culminating in the birth of the Briton. The lesser ethnic groups peopling Britain’s
history contributed to the making of the national prototype and are thusly granted a place in
Speed’s genealogy.
55

Speed, John. History of Great Britaine Under the Conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes
and Normans; Their Originals, Manners, Warres, Coines, & Seales with ye Successions, Lives,
acts & Issues of the English Monarchs from Julius Caesar to our most gracious Soverainge King
James. EEBO. Web. Michigan State University Lib. 11 Jan 2010. 115. All future citations of
Speed’s History are from this document.
62

Conspicuously absent from this ethnographic catalog is the Scot. Like Camden, Speed
relegates the Scot to a genealogical position outside Britain proper; whereas the Dane, Norman,
Roman and Saxon all went into the making of the natio “The Britaine” and his nation “Great
Britaine”, the ancient Scot has neither a role in the genealogical make-up of the Britaine nor a
rightful territory on his island. Nor does the Scot register in Speed’s “Ancient Nations Inhabiting
this Iland of Great Britaine Before the Conquest Thereof by the Romanes” or “The Manners and
56

Customs of the Ancient Britaines”, except in very minor instances.

Whereas Camden

fleetingly glances at the “third nation of Scots”, Speed virtually expunges from ancient Britain
the forefathers of the kingdom to England’s north. Only in his “Portraitures of the Ancient
Britaines, of their Nakednesse, Painting and Figuring their Bodies […] &c.” does Speed
acknowledge the presence of the Scot on the ancient isle and only as a foreign tribe to be
differentiated from the “British Pictes”.

57

Speed repeats the hypothesis posited by Camden that

the Picts were actually “untractable Britaines” driven into the north by the Roman invasion. To
further this notion, Speed cites the “British Resemblance” demonstrated by the Picts in “their
language, their manners, their kind of Government” as evidence “that these Picts were no other
58

then that multiplied offspring of those Britaines”.

The Scots are cast by Speed as a foreign

tribe that eventually came to be aligned with the native British Picts against the Roman invaders;
later, Speed will complicate this narrative to imagine the Scots as traitors to these ancestral
56

In “The Ancient Nations”, Speed references the Scot not as a member of these ancient British
communities, but as a contemporary people who should give up their belief in “their Scotia”, as
England should surrender the myth of Brutus to unreliable storytelling (166). The Scot appears in
“Manners and Customs” first in a brief reference to the complexions of the “Caledonians in the
Northene Promontories” and a second time when Speed glances toward the Caledonians’ town
organization. Speed, 167.
57
Ibid, 181.
58

Ibid.
63

British, as discussed below. To place in boldface the Scots’ difference from the indigenous
British, Speed draws upon the historiographic narrative also deployed by Camden linking the
Scots to Ireland: it is the “Irish-Scots” who arrive on Speed’s Great Britain from elsewhere.
Speed’s unexplained and uncritical collapsing of the Irish and Scots, and his assumption of the
Picts’ British identity effectively depicts the ancient island as purely “British”, the “Irish-Scots”
making up a non-native contingent foreign to the British shores.
In a manner more direct than his contemporaries, Speed asserts England’s dominant
genealogical position within the ancient British family. Taking up the origin myth that imagines
the British as descendents of Noah and his son Japheth, Speed makes the following claim
regarding the essential Englishness of all Britons:
Gomer, then, the eldest sonne of Japeth, gave name to the Gomerians, who filled
almost this part of the world, leading (as Villichius saith) in the tenth yeere of
Nimrod, a Colonie out of Armenia into Italie, which of Gomer were called
Combri, and afterwards Cimbri: whence such as departed Italy went into the
North parts and gave name to Cimbrica Chersonesus: from whence it is certaine
59

we the English proceede, and of whom also it is likely the Britaines came.

In this biblical genealogy, the English take precedence over the Britons as descendents of the
originary northern Europeans; in Speed’s estimation, it is “certaine” that the English sprung from
the Cimbri, the original inhabitants of Britain and the northern territories, whereas the Britons’
relationship to the Cimbris is less easily determined. Speed’s calculation reverses the traditional
historiographic telling of the British peoples. In most cases, we are first told of the ancient
Britons and their probable ancestors. Only after establishing this ancestral lineage do the English
59

Ibid, 161.
64

enter the picture, usually as descendents of the Saxons. Here, the English precede the Britains;
the English independently arose from the ancient Cimbri rather than from the mixed pool of
British ethnicities that came later in the long British history. Following the logic of Speed’s
narrative, it seems probable that the British—the people of uncertain origin—sprung from the
English, whose ties to the Cimbri mark them out as originary inhabitants of the island.
In his proem to The History, Speed repeatedly enacts the severing of Scotland from the
island, making England stand for Britain. Like the frontispiece that ushers us into Great Britain’s
past, Speed’s proem removes from his portrait of the celebrated island the multi-ethnic character
of the oceanic territory. Again referencing the “naturall love and true affection to [his] native
Countrey” that compels a man to a greater knowledge of his origins, Speed writes the following
paean to England:
That this our Countrey and subject of History deserveth the love of her
inhabitants, is witnessed even by forraine writers themselves, who have termed it
the Court of Queene Ceres, the Granary of the Westerne world, the fortunate
Island, the Paradise of pleasure and Garden of God; whose Typographicall
descriptions for the whole Island, and Geographical surveyes for the severall
parts, exceed any other kingdome under the cope of Heaven; that onely excepted
which was conquered and divided by Josuah; And for fruitfulnes and temperature
may be accounted another Canaan; watered with rivers that doe cleave the earth,
as the Prophet speaketh, and make the land as rich and beautiful, as was that of
Ægypt. Our Kings for valour and Sanctity, ranked with the worthiest in the world,
and our Nations originals, conquests, and continuance, tried by the touch of best
humane testimonies, leave as faire a Lustre upon the same stone, as doeth any

65

other, and with any nation may easily contend (saith Lanquet) both for antiquity,
and continuall inhabitants, from the first time that any of them can claime their
60

originals.

According to Speed’s own language, the “subject” of The History of Great Britaine is not the
multinational archipelago, not a multilateral territory of separate kingdoms, but a singular
“countrey”, “nation”, “island” and “kingdome” seated alone in the northern seas and celebrated
by writers of antiquity. Each of his descriptors and comparisons—“granary”, “garden”,
“paradise”, Canaan—points to a single, uniform or contained land with a singular history of
“originals” reaching back to antiquity, whose “continuance” into the present day marks them out
as a blessed people. Embedded in the usual grouping of tropes and metaphorical descriptions that
imagine England as a land of plenty is Speed’s political reconfiguration of the British Isles: the
language of “court”, “nation” “country” and “kingdome” are part of a governmental register that
pointedly overlooks that geopolitical complexity of the bi-national island. Likewise, Speed’s
“nations originals” and “continuall inhabitants” are of a single hereditary line unmatched by
history and unmixed by ethnic difference. They are Speed’s countrymen: the English who are the
island’s rightful inhabitants and the true subject of Great Britain’s History.
Further divesting Scotland of its territorial and governmental autonomy is the imperial
rhetoric that runs through Speed’s narrative of the English island. Despite his dedication to his
monarch, King James, Speed inextricably links the main British Isle with the body of England’s
recently deceased queen. Speed collapses the deeply revered body of Elizabeth with the English
island body. Despite the death of her physical person, Elizabeth remains “the body [ … ] the

60

Ibid, 152.
66

61

heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too”.

In recuperating the Queen’s body

in the form of the English island, Speed diminishes the Scottish king’s monarchical presence
while calling up the imperial discourse that rhetorically placed Scotland under English
submission. In his “Site and Circuit of Great Britaines Monarchie”, Speed gives praise to the
most prominent of the British Isles:
Besides those fruitfull Islands that dispersedly are scattered about the Mayne, like
to beautifull pearls that incompasse a Diademe, the Ile of GREAT BRITAINE
doth raise it self first to our sight, as the Bodie of that most famous & mighty
Empire, whereof many other Kingdomes and Countries are parcels and members.
Being by the Almighty so set in the maine Ocean, as that shee is thereby the High
Admirall of the Seas, and in the terrestriall Globe so seated, as that she is worthily
reputed both The Garden of Pleasure, and The Storehouse of Profit, opening her
Havens every way, fit to receive all forraine trafficke, and to utter her owne into
all other parts: and therefore as the Soveraigne Lady and Empresse of the rest,
deserves our description in the first place.

62

The first image employed by Speed to glorify the largest of the British Isles draws its material
from the catalog of Elizabethan portraiture. In almost every representation of England’s queen,
pearls are attached to the royal body; William Scrots’ 1546 portrait of Princess Elizabeth and the
Darnley (1575), Pelican (1575), Phoenix (1575), Sieve (1583), Ermine (1585), Armada (1588),
Ditchley (1592), Hardwick (1599), Rainbow (1600) and Coronation (1600) portraits all drape

61

Elizabeth I, “Queen Elizabeth’s Armada Speech to the Troops at Tilbury, August 9, 1588.”
Elizabeth I: Collected Works Eds. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000): 325-26. Print.
62
Ibid, 155.
67

Elizabeth in pearls, sometimes to the point of encasing the monarchical person, and pearls
oftentimes are sewn into the monarch’s clothing. Significantly, pearls also feature prominently
on the royal diadem. In the Ermine Portrait, for instance, several stands of pearls heavily
ensconce the queen’s upper body, complimenting the many pearls overlaying her bodice,
implying a kind of virginal breastplate. Sitting above a pair of pearl earrings, the perimeter of
Elizabeth’s diadem is a row of oversized pearls, sending off an otherworldly glow from her
divine person. In Speed’s visual formulation, one that would likely resonate with a learned
Renaissance audience familiar with these official portraits, the smaller islands encircling “the
Mayne” are jewels adorning the body of the queen; the “Mayne” island is the Queen’s person
and that person is England embodied.
This Elizabethan island body, this “Soveraigne Lady and Empresse” wears the many
islands of Scotland, Ireland and “the rest” in her crown. Scotland, wholly subsumed by this
imperial body, is reduced to little more than one among the several “parcels and members” that
make up England’s sovereign territories. The person of the Scottish king all but disappears from
Speed’s formulation of the feminine English island and the monarchical body that is its human
counterpart, who during her reign fashioned herself Scotland’s sovereign ruler.
Speed’s treatment of Scotland in his cartographic Theatre achieves to an even greater
degree than his History the diminution of Scotland and the Scottish as historically relevant
members of the British family and an autonomous people of the British Isles. Apportioned only
seven to eight pages of Speed’s compendious visual and textual history, Scotland barely flits
across the stage of the Theatre, its people appearing first and foremost as enemies to England. Of
the roughly eight pages allotted to Scotland in the first edition, appearing in 1612, one page is
given to the title, one to a chart depicting Scotland’s counties, one to the British seal, and two to

68

the work’s single map of the Scottish territories. England is depicted in 45 separate maps and
63

107 total pages.

The whole of Scotland’s historical narrative and its approximate 30,400

square miles is allotted two pages of text. Speed explains his scanty representation of Scotland
by referencing “a learned Gentlemen of that Nation” who has begun a description of the Scottish
landscape and whose “industrious labours” shall contribute “another Scene [ … ] to the
64

perfecting of the Theatre of Britaine’s Glory”.

This intended expansion of Scotland’s national

story never materializes; the 1616, 1632, 1650 and 1676 editions all repeat this same promise
and include the same language and roughly the same number of pages. The 1627 edition shrinks
the Scottish narrative to a mere four pages, Speed’s map of the country disappearing
65

altogether.

That Scotland’s “scene” never makes it into production in Speed’s Theatre of Great
Britain is unsurprising, considering his seeming attempt to co-opt Scottish history for English
purposes in his “generall description”. In his introduction to “this third, though short booke”
devoted to Scotland, Speed lists the primary goals of his narrative:
Lest I should seeme too defective in my intendments, let mee without offense [ …
] give onely a generall view of that Kingdome [ … ] knowing the Iland furnished
with many worthy remembrances appertaining both unto them and us, whom God
now hath set under one Crowne: and the rather, for that their more Southern
people are from the same Original with us the English, being both alike the Saxon
63
64
65

In Speed’s Theatre, Wales is allotted 14 maps and Ireland five.
This quote appears in the 1616 edition of Speed’s Theatre, 131.

It is important to note that Speed did publish a separate volume devoted to Scotland, though I
am unable to locate it. Nonetheless, it is significant that Scotland is indexicallly delineated from
England by the separateness of this volume, which only emphasizes the essential difference
between the two nations occupying this bi-national island.
69

branches: as also, that the Picts, anciently inhabiting part of that kingdom, were
the in-borne Britaines…

66

Speed’s narrative relies upon a binary of ethnic sameness and difference. Here, Scottish history
is also English history, the land a celebratory British space “furnished” with shared monuments
to the two cultures. But Speed quickly erases the distinction between “them and us” and this
“glorious” Britain is reclaimed for England. Repeating the overdetermined history that casts the
southern Scottish as English and the Picts as originary Britons, Speed naturalizes and gives
religious weight to what was actually a maneuver of high politics: the joining of the two
kingdoms “under one Crowne”.
Speed then turns the tables to assert the essential difference of “the Highland-men (the
naturall Scot, indeed)”. These true Scottish “are supposed to descend from the Scythians who
with the Gettes infesting Ireland, left both their Issue there, and their maners, apparant in the
Wild-Irish even to this day”.

67

The Scythians, the progenitors of the Irish and the Scot, were

once inhabitants of England’s other enemy, Spain, and left their barbarous mark on “the modern
68

wild-Irish”, who are alike to the Scythians in “Manners” and “garments”.

Speed’s neat

collapsing of the island’s non-English into a historical body of people antithetical and enemy to
England imagines the Scottish as an infestation, an invading tribe that “burst into Britaine”
69

during the period of the Roman occupation.

These Scythian Scots, according to Speed, first

allied themselves with the Picts or “Northern Britaines” only to later turn on these ancient British
inhabitants, leading to Picts’ extinction. “Fortune crowning the Scots with victory, [they]
66
67
68
69

Speed, 131.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
70

advanced their Kingdome unto such fame and strength, that the same hath long continued
without any absolute conquest or surprise, against the assaults of whatsoever enemies” Speed
writes, thus aligning the modern-day Scots with their violent and treacherous forebearers who
continue to wrongfully inhabit the northern portion of the island.
The cultural geography of early modern Scotland in Speed’s narrative corresponds to the
northern/southern distinction so central to his English writing of Scotland. “The South whereof is
the more populous and more beautiful in manners, riches, and civilitie: the North more rude,
retaining the customes of the Wild Irish, the ancient Scot”, Speed maintains.

70

Like the “modern

wild-Irish” cited above, his descendent in northern Britain has stalled out in the narrative of
English evolution, due to his barbaric genealogy, which s tubbornly persists as part of his ethnic
make-up. Akin to the natives of the New World or the indigenous people encountered in
uncivilized lands, the Scots are a people beyond improvement and are thusly hedged out of the
British/English story. The lands they occupy, especially those islands that skirt the main island
like pearls in Elizabeth’s crown, are also subjected to a particular strain of colonial narration: the
discourse of improvement. Of the “Hebrides, Skie, Mula, Ila, and Arran” islands Speed writes,
“all of them [are] plentifull of corn, woods, Salmons and Herrings, as others of Conies, Deere,
71

Horses, and Sheepe, where in some they are wilde, and in others without any owners”.

Reading like an advertisement for lucrative colonial investment, this Scotland is a land bountiful
with free, untapped resources awaiting the improving hand of the English empire.
The Scot, like his Native American counterpart, is squandering this “plentifull” territory,
suspended as he is in a state of inefficiency and irreligion; “the people”, Speed explains to his

70
71

Ibid.
Ibid, 132.
71

likely English reader, “[are] uncivill, and lacking religion, they rather live rudely in state of
necessity, then as Lords of these portions which God hath allotted them [ … ] Religion not
knowne among them, these penurious vertues are rather the curses of Cham, then the followings
72

of Christ, who forbids us to be too careful for the morrow”.

Like other early modern writers of

colonial literature, Speed draws upon the Bible for his condemnation of the Scots and the
wastefulness and lack of productive work that attends their treatment of the land. Shunning
God’s generosity and unwilling to make good use of the resources provided them, the Scots
occupying these northern islands have cursed themselves through their negligence and have
thusly placed themselves in a state of servitude. The natural “Lords” of such uncultivated
territory. it would seem, are the English to the south, whose cultivation of island have
transformed it into “the Court of Queene Ceres, the Granary of the Westerne world, the fortunate
Island, the Paradise of pleasure and Garden of God”.
The islands authored by Camden and Speed came under the authorization, either directly
or indirectly, of the crown. Camden’s association with Tudor government began early in his
career at Westminster. His position first as Second master from 1575-93 and Head master from
1593-97 brought him into “an intellectual and political community closely associated with
William Cecil, Baron Burghley, who was steward of Westminster and maintained a residence
there”.

73

Burghley’s career is unmatched in early modern political culture; a statesman integral to
the reigns of three Tudor monarchs, Burghley served in Henry VIII’s Parliament, his son Edward
72
73

Ibid.

Herendeen, Wyman H. “Camden, William (1551–1623).” Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed.
Lawrence Goldman. Jan. 2008. 18 June 2012 <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4431>.
Web.
72

VI’s Privy Council (under whose reign Burghley was knighted), and acted as Elizabeth’s
principle and “private secretary”. As an invaluable member of the queen’s government, Burghley
also achieved the titles of Lord Treasurer and Master of the Court of Wards.

74

Camden’s

association with this most celebrated of Elizabethan career politicians is signaled by his
dedication of Britannia to Burghley. During the years devoted to the revision and expansion of
Britannia (1586-1607), Camden was made Clarenceux, King of Arms by Elizabeth’s
government. Among the Clarenceux’s many official duties was “representation of the monarch”
75

and “the marshalling of tournaments and royal and noble processions”.

The highly regulated

and ideologically crucial task of representing the monarch in print resulted in Camden’s 1615
Annales rerum Anglicarum, et Hibernicarum, regnante Elizabetha, or The History of Elizabeth, a
projected spurred on by Burghley, “who supplied him with private documents for the purpose”,
76

and supported by King James.

Though Britannia was originally conceived before his

appointment to this official position, one can reasonably assume that Camden’s relationship with
Burghley and his nationalist representation of the realm in the Britannia proved his potential
worth to the crown as a writer of England, thus influencing his rise in the Elizabethan and
Jacobean courts.
Speed likewise fell under the patronage of a well established Elizabethan politician, Sir
Fulke Greville, and was admitted into the privileged sphere of monarchical influence. Under
Greville’s patronage, Speed gained governmental access to the land: “he received official passes
74

Herendeen, Wyman H.. “Camden, William (1551–1623).” Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed.
Lawrence Goldman. Jan. 2008. 18 June 2012 <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4431>.
Web.
75
Ibid.
76

Ibid.
73

[ … ] to facilitate his country mapping, and [ … ] he was rewarded with land and with official
77

positions.

Speed met personally with Elizabeth in 1598 to present her with his maps of the

realm, after which Greville “found him a post in the Customs, and with Queen Elizabeth’s
78

support subsidized his map-making”.

The mapmaker and historian was also servant to

Elizabeth’s successor, for “in 1605 and 1608 he was paid for making maps for the king, and
about 1606 he was granted a coat of arms”.

79

Speed’s reach into the official world of nation-

building extended even to James’s most spectacular project as king: the production of the King
James Bible. Speed’s 1592 religious tract, Genealogies Recorded in the Sacred Scriptures
appeared “in every copy of the Authorized Version of the Bible for ten years,” beginning in
80

1610.

The English island composed by Speed and Camden—both authors who won the
approval and support of the crown for their deeply nationalist texts—was very much in keeping
with state interests. The myth of the English island nation served two conjoined political
purposes: the nationalist demand that England be perceived as a self-sufficient, self-sustaining
island nation, and the imperial necessity of an England capable of subduing and controlling its
archipelagic neighbors. Both threads of this constructed island ideology were needed to combat
glaring governmental failures and England’s inescapable geographic vulnerability. Stripped of its
77

Barber, Peter. “England II: Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps, 1550-1625.” Monarchs, Ministers
and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe
Ed. David Buisseret (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992): 82-83. Print.
78
Bendall, Sarah. “Speed, John (1551/2–1629).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed.
H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman.
Jan. 2008. 18 June 2012 <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26093>. Web and Nigel
Nicolson, “Introduction” The Counties of Britain: A Tudor Atlas by John Speed (New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1989): 10. Print.
79
Bendall, “Speed”, no pg.
80

Ibid.
74

mythological veneer, early modern England was a nation hemmed in by volatile borderlands by
land and highly susceptible to foreign incursions by sea. The violence and lawlessness that
characterized the Welsh and Scottish marches were unmistakable signs of England’s inability to
regulate its imperial territories. Distressing reports of bloody conflicts and governmental
mismanagement in Ireland provided continual and irrefutable evidence of England’s colonial
failures. The persistent threat that these unwilling inhabitants of England’s Britain might seek
independence by aligning themselves with foreign factions, such as France or Catholic Spain,
made the unprotected coastlines of both England and its imperial territories a seemingly endless
site of potential invasion. The English nation-space was itself a land of governmental and
cultural disunity. The attempt to develop and maintain a state infrastructure to bring uniform law
and order to England’s national territory threw into stark relief the regional differences and local
allegiances that disproved governmental claims to national homogeneity. Despite claims to the
contrary, the English land did not provide in abundance all that was necessary to early modern
civilization; rather, a paucity of certain necessary resources made English dependence upon the
continent an absolute necessity.
Texts fabricating the myth of the English island nation were constructed and deployed to
literally paper over England’s nationalist and imperial weaknesses. In these productions, the
English island stands as a divine model of insularity, abundance, autonomy and strength, bred of
the land itself.

81

The opening lines of Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion demonstrate this widely

circulated and oft-repeated language:
Through a Triumpant Arch, see Albion plas’t,
81

As explained in the introduction, Jeffrey Knapp also claims that England turned its
“littleness” into a sentiment of pride regarding the island’s “other-worldly”-ness (4). Knapp, An
Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (Berkeley: U
of California P, 1992): 4. Print.
75

In Happy site, in Neptunes armes embras’t,
In Power and Plenty, on hir Cleevy Throne
Circled with Natures Gharlands, being alone
82

Stil’d th’Oceans Island.

The above lines from Drayton’s “Upon the Frontispice” are intended to provide us a reading of
the detailed illustration that opens his sprawling topographic poem (fig. 2). In this representation
of Great Britain embodied, Albion sits contentedly beneath an arch decorated by her
mythological and historical suitors: Brute, Caesar, the Saxon Hengist, and William the
Conqueror. Beyond the arch is the industrious sea, scattered with boats and expanding infinitely
to the horizon. The female figure Albion is draped in a map of England or Wales, recognizable
by its similarity to Saxton’s 1574-1579 cartographic works in its signs and markers. She cradles
a cornucopia bursting with vegetables, fruits and grains in one arm and a sceptre in the other, this
sceptre bearing resemblance to the one held in the same hand by Elizabeth in The Coronation
Portrait (1600). Her neck strung with pearls, she is being crowned with a laurel wreath by a pair
83

of angels, a third angel hovering above them trumpeting her divinity.

Albion’s looming figure, in comparison to the men on the arch who sought to subdue her,
and her solitary position in the sea align her body with the main island of Great Britain. The
mythological Brute and the historical figures surrounding Albion invaded and inhabited the
82

Drayton, “Upon the Frontispice.” Poly-Oblion London: Printed by Humphrey Lownes for M
Lownes. I Browne. I Helme. I Busbie, (1612). EEBO Michigan State University Lib 19 June
2012. Web.
83
Helgerson argues that the text of Poly-Olbion disputes the vision that I read in the
frontispiece, arguing that “not king, but country dominates his vision [ … ] Through all the
dynastic changes that have occurred [ … ] the land has kept its integrity. Various streams and
woods and mountains have become partisan supporters of the different peoples that have lived
near them”. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1992): 140. Print.
76

English territories of the island; Scotland and Ireland were less impacted by their incursions. The
above details of Albion’s dress and props clearly associate this representation of Albion with
Elizabeth, Drayton’s reference to the former queen perhaps owing to his strained relationship her
successor. Combining the markers of Elizabeth’s royal person in his portraiture with the likely
map of England draping this territorial figure and the historical narrative of England’s conquest
personified around the arch, Drayton unmistakably casts Albion as England.
This England reigns “triumphant” over a land and sea that have joined with each other
harmoniously; England, divinely “plas’t” in her oceanic realm, is enclosed in the “armes” of a
loving Neptune. The sea is her “throne”, situated under the arch that, like the proscenium arch of
the early modern masque, glorifies her singular monarchical body and the nation that is equated
with it. Her ships travel this oceanic stage, exporting her copious natural resources to trade on the
global marketplace (the ships appear to be heading away from Albion, rather than toward her
ports). Her power is signified by Albion’s confident gaze at the viewer, the exaggerated sceptre,
the physical diminishment of her conquerors and her oversized figure that visually overpowers
the sea. Albion is in a pose of domination. Her island insularity is a necessary component of her
strength; her cooperative relationship with the sea, which ferries her goods to other lands and
holds her in a protective “embrace”, confers on Albion a large measure of her power. The sea
provides the fertile ground and makes her a showcase to the world “being alone” on the vast
ocean on “hir Cleevy Throne”. Drayton’s enjambment of “alone” in line 4 lends pointed
emphasis to England’s uniqueness and singularity as an island nation, “a world divided from the
world” by not just the sea but by its natural “Plenty”, its divine placement “on the edge of the
world”, and its singular monarch, the female sovereign that brought England its national and

77

84

imperial glory.

It is England “alone” that is blessed with “Natures Gharland” and it is England

that is “alone / Stil’d th’Oceans Island”, as though the Ocean herself is enamored of the small
island nation that sits apart from the known world.
Lurking beneath Drayton’s ode to English Albion is a set of nationalist and imperial
anxieties that cannot be dispelled by pretty poetics. The rhetorical tension between Albion as
Great Britain and Albion as England remains, despite Drayton’s cloaking of the island in the
cartographic language of England. The Celtic name for Scotland, after all, is Albany, which has
its linguistic roots in this supposedly English signifier. In fact, these very gestures—posing
Albion in the guise of Elizabethan portraiture, the over-emphasis on her singular monarchical
and national body, the repeated notion that England triumphantly stands alone—all point to the
tedious machinations necessary to expel Scotland and Ireland from this mythic island. As noted
above, the multinational archipelago and England in particular were not protected by the sea;
rather, the oceanic border seriously jeopardized Great Britain’s national security, as the Spanish
invasion of Ireland in 1588 bore out. The possibility of collusion between James VI of Scotland
and his French brethren during Elizabeth’s reign meant that both the northern and southern seas
invited foreign invasion of the English body politic and the dismantling of England’s already
tenuous imperial hold over the several political bodies that made up Albion. For, in spite her
personification’s dominant figure and dauntless expression, the Elizabethan and Jacobean
governments were hardly so self-assured regarding their faltering colonial and imperial projects.
The currents of English mistrust and xenophobia toward the Scottish that attended James’s
ascension promised not a harmonious joining of states but a continued cultural and political
division made worse by England’s unsuccessful attempts to quash Scotland’s autonomy. Ireland,
84

I borrow this term from Kathy Lavezzo’s Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography,
Literature, and English Community, 1000-1534 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006) Print.
78

the most obvious example of England’s colonial mismanagement and imperial infirmity,
violently and successfully refused to bend to Albion’s will. Nor was England’s position in the
global market particularly strong. Scrambling after its more successful competitors—namely,
Spain, whose colonial wealth far exceed that of the English—Elizabeth’s government resorted to
85

piracy, thusly reinforcing England’s marginal position on the global stage.

England’s marginality was the very quality that writers like Camden, Speed and Drayton
sought to mask. “A World Divided from the World” might also be read as an England cut off
from the World, an England alone, an England that suffered at God’s hands by its geographic
vulnerability and precarious position outside or other to the continent. Dubious rhetorical
reversals were needed to combat this damning portrait: England was not isolated but insular. Its
very insularity was a central tenet of England’s glorious history and future fate as a people,
nation and monarchy. The very nature of the island and its position apart from the continent
imbued the English with a natural nationhood. A people harmoniously bound together by the
85

Richard Armitage considers the “myth” surrounding the English “empire of the seas” that
sought to overcome Spanish dominance of global trade in the Elizabethan Era: “the conventional
chronology of the Empire’s origins, which located them in the reign of Elizabeth I, nourished
that belief and anchored it in a particular maritime history. The originating agents of empire were
the Elizabethan sea-dogs, Gloriana’s sailor-heroes who had circumnavigated the globe, singed
the King of Spain’s beard, swept the oceans of pirates and Catholics, and thereby opened up the
sea-routes across which English migrants would travel, and English trade would flow, until
Britannia majestically ruled the waves. The myth was persistent not least because it enshrined an
inescapable truth: the British Empire was an empire of the seas, and without the Royal Navy’s
mastery of the oceans, it could never have become the global empire upon which the sun never
set”. Yet, as Armitage explains, this mythical narrative “derives in large part from the
nineteenth-century celebration of an oceanic hegemony whose origins were traced back to the
exploits of Drake, Hawkins and Ralegh”. This myth, like so many others of the period, was
based upon England’s island status. “The geographic fact of Britain’s insularity implied that it
would naturally become a maritime power”, he contends. “Because Britain’s maritime destiny
seemed compelled by nature, it was by definition beyond historical analysis”. Under the scope of
analysis, however, this myth patches over a “complacent amnesia” regarding England’s actual
power in the world of global trade. Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006): 100-01. Print.
79

ocean’s embrace, England’s national narrative and genealogy was embedded in the island’s soil,
its geographical uniqueness that positively sequestered the English from contaminating
influences from abroad. England’s alone-ness was not a weakness, but a sign of God’s divine
blessing. It stood on the world’s edge like an attainable heaven.
Concluding the general description of Britain that opens his massive chorography,
Camden instructs his readers that they can now explore his textual island assured in the
knowledge of Britain’s inherent greatness. “For Nature tooke a pleasure in the framing thereof,”
he intones,
and seemeth to have made it a second world, sequestered from the other, to
delight mankinde withall, yea and curiously depainted it of purpose as it were a
certaine portraict, to represent a singular beautie, and for the ornament of the
universall world, with so gallant and glittering varietie, with so pleasant a shew
are the beholders eyes delighted, which way so ever they glace.

86

Awed by his description of this jewel in the sea, the reader is poised to examine Britain’s
territories through the dazzling lens of Camden’s rhetoric. Nature, Camden contends, is the
author of Britain’s “singular beautie”, abundant resources and unique geographical character.
England—for, as we have seen, Scotland barely registers as Britain in Camden’s work—is the
favorite of both God and Nature herself.
Yet, the very rhetorical machinations necessary to render England’s isolation as positive
insularity are here in Camden’s description very much on display. Not Nature but the author has
“framed” this glowing “portraict” of a vibrant and heavenly England, a fantastic “second world”
to replace the actual English realm, fraught as it was with internal conflict and external threat.
86

Camden, Vol. 1, 4.
80

The “shew” that Camden puts on in this introductory salvo is sophisticated but compromisingly
instrumental; to transform England into a land of natural autonomy, heavenly charm and the
world’s wonder, he must cloak the island’s sequestration in so many poetic devices. Camden has
“depainted it of a purpose”: to overwrite England’s dangerous isolation as a divinely appointed
strength.
The entirety of Britannia’s introduction betrays the impossibility of plastering over
England’s geographic weakness. No matter Camden’s compendious accumulation of classical
sources or his rhetorical maneuvers, the ideological scaffolding maintaining England’s Britain is
inevitably exposed as rickety and unstable. Britain, “the most famous Iland, without comparison,
of the whole world”, is imbued by Camden with a kind of independent life.

87

“Thrusting it selfe

forward with great desire from all parts intro the sea” and “so advance[ing] it selfe” onto the
world’s stage, the island makes its entrance in Camden’s text as a land destined by God and
Nature to claim the world’s attention and to win its place in history.

88

The blessedness of the

isle—its quasi-edenic landscape and climate, its fruitfulness, its openness to the sea and to all the
world—are all attributable to its island status. Its location “in Neptune’s armes” accounts for its
divine nature:
Britaine is seated, aswell for aire as soile, in a right fruitfull and most milde place,
the aire so kinde and temperate that not only the Summers be not excessive hote,
by reason of continuall gentle windes that abate their heat (which as they refresh
the fruits of the earth, so they yeeld a most holesome and pleasing contentment
both to man and beast), but the Winters also are passing milde. For, the raine

87
88

Camden, Vol.1, 1.
Ibid.
81

falling often with still showers [ … ] dissolveth the rigour of the cold so; and
withal the sea which compasseth it with moderate warmth doth comfort the land
in such wise as that the cold with us is much more remisse than in some parts of
89

France and Italie.

Here the land and sea conjoin to produce this idyllic space so unlike the continent that its
geographic separateness defines it as a divine otherworld. The “gentle windes” stirred up by the
sea protect the island from severe temperatures, making the land itself a source of “pleasing
contentment” unmatched by the rest of the world’s, particularly England’s European rivals. The
sea, here, has a kind of affection for the land it surrounds, lending it “comfort”, cradling and
providing for its inhabitants.
Yet, Camden’s very language when describing the island’s disconnected nature is
unfaithful to this rhetorical marriage of land and sea. When illustrating Britain’s geographic
position in regard to Europe, Camden cannot contain the sea’s violence and the destructive force
that was the cause of England’s isolation. “Severed from the continent [ … ] by interflowing of
the Ocean” the island suffers “the most vast and wide Hyperborean sea beating upon it” in the
north and “on the East […] enforced sore it is with the Germane sea”.

90

The island described

here is not the sea’s partner but its victim. Wrecking its violence upon the island body, the sea
relentlessly batters the land, so penetrating the coastal skin that “some thinke the land [ … ] was
pierced thorow, and received the seas into it”.

91

Attempting to sidestep the dangerous contention

that Britain is among “certein Ilands [that] have been violently broken off from the firme land”—

89
90
91

Camden, Vol. 1, 3.
Camden, Vol. 1, 1.
Ibid.
82

for to acquiesce to such a notion would deny England its inherent island-ness and all that is
attached to it, Camden withdraws himself from this historical debate. “That the providence of
God hath ordained divers things to one and the same end, who knoweth not?” he questions. “And
verily, that parcels of the earth dispersed here and there within the sea serve no lesse to adorne
the world, than lakes spred upon the earth and hilles raised aloft, aswell Divines as Philosophers
have alwaies held”. But this appeal to Heaven’s will and the now well-worn image of Britain as a
jewel in the ocean cannot dispel the image conjured up by Camden of the rent island body
subjected on all sides and at all time to the brutal sea.
The reiterated discourse of England as “another world” is, in Camden, evidence of the
island’s fame in the classical age. Reports of Britain’s discovery served not only to grant the
island a place in classical history, but also to divert attention away from Britain’s comparatively
92

small territory and geographic insecurity.

“So large, and of such exceeding greatnesse in

circuit”, Camden writes,
they in olde time tooke it to be that Caesar, he who first of all the Romans
discovered it, wrote, How he had found out another world; supposing the same so
great, as that it semmed to conteine within it the Ocean, and not to be compassed
about there with; and Julius Solinus Polyhistor hath left it in writing that for the
93

largenesse thereof it deserveth well neere the name of a second world.

A world unto itself, Britain’s autonomy is a built-in characteristic, evinced by its very
geography. The glowing illustrations of the ancients confer on the island a classical greatness;

92
93

As explain above in footnote 54, Knapp makes a similar point in Empire Nowhere.
Camden, Vol 1, 2.
83

Camden even goes so far as cite ancient authors who believed Great Britain to be the Fortunate
Islands of classical legend.

94

By the time of Camden’s writing, early modern cartographic science had disproved the
notion of Britain’s “exceeding” size, such that the author is able to provide the island’s
measurements in his description. More damaging to the above depiction of this British second
world is Camden’s choice of sources. In his attempt to lend to his nation a classical veneer,
Camden draws unwanted attention to a dark period in British history: its colonization by Rome.
Unwittingly, Camden strips Britain of the very autonomy that is conferred by the title “a second
world” by calling upon its Roman conquerors. In this context, Caesar’s “another world” has
uncomfortable resonances with “the new world”, an “undiscovered” land of savages and
untapped resources rife for colonization. Caesar’s depiction of the ancient Britons in his Gallic
Wars supports this uncomfortable comparison: surviving on “milk and flesh” and “clad with
skins”, the uncivilized Britons “wear their hair long” and share their wives.

95

Camden also

makes use of Tacitus’s description of the island’s peculiar shape, presumably to demonstrate that
Britain registers in the works of the most famous ancient writers. But, as in Caesar’s writings,
Britain’s fame in Tacitus is not on account of its autonomy but its placid subjection to Roman
rule. Tacitus writes in his Life of Cnaeus Julius Agricola that Britain at that time was
96

“thoroughly subdued”.

These British “barbarians” do not reject the Roman occupation but

“bear cheerfully the conscription, the taxes, and the other burdens imposed on them by the
94
95

Camden, Vol. 1, 4-5.

Caesar, Julius. The Gallic Wars. Trans. W.A. McDevitte and W.S. Bohn. Book 5, Chap 14.
The Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.5.5.html. Web.
96
Tacitus, Life of Cnaeus Julius Agricola. Trans Alfred John Church and William Jackson
Brodribb. Para 10. Ancient History Sourcebook. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/tacitusagricola.asp. Web.
84

97

Empire, if there be no oppression”.

Camden himself points to Britain’s past as a colonized

nation when he references Orpheus, who saw in the island “the stately halls / Of Ceres Queen”.

98

The mythical status attributed to Britain by this classical poet is quickly undone when Camden
explains that Ceres’ British palace was “the very barne, garner, and storehouse for victuals of the
West empire; from whence the Romans were wont yeerely to transport into Germanie”.

99

Through his own admission, Camden reduces Britain to a warehouse that stored plundered
resources for its Roman conquerors.
When returned to their original contexts, several of Camden’s ancient citations regarding
this island “other world” and its inhabitants are outright damning. For instance, Camden’s very
first use of an outside source to describe Britain is a quotation from Virgil’s Eclogues: “Britans
people”, according to Camden’s translation of Virgil’s renowned work, are “quite disjoin’d from
100

all the world besides”.

Set apart from the main body of Camden’s text and placed in the

middle of Britannia’s first page, this recognition of Britain by among the most revered of
classical authors is likely intended to confer a kind of fame on Camden’s island. However,
Britain in Virgil’s text is a place of hellish banishment. In “Eclogue I”, Meliboeus is forced from
his land and sorrowfully considers the site of his unjust exile: to Tityrus he moans, “But we far
hence, to burning Libya some, / Some to the Scythian steppes, or thy swift flood, / Cretan Oaxes,
101

now must wend our way, / Or Britain, from the whole world sundered far”.

97
98
99

Ibid, para 11 and 13.
Camden, Vol. 1, 3.
Camden, Vol. 1, 3.

100
101

Camden, Vol 1,1.

Virgil, The Bucolics and Eclogues. Project Gutenberg.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/230/230-h/230-h.htm. Web.
85

Britain’s fame in

Virgil’s work resides in its inhospitable nature, like the “burning” deserts of the Middle East, and
its abominable sequestration from the known world. Cicero, another of Camden’s classical
authorities, echoes Virgil in calling the island and its people “barbarous” and urging in his letters
the hasty return of his brother Quintus and the jurist Trebatius Testa from the remote island.
Cicero’s quote used by Camden to depict the temperate British seas is not, in fact, in reference to
Britain but to the nature of oceans more generally.

102

Speed in his History repeats almost verbatim the language and sources deployed by
Camden in his introductory description, therefore laying himself bare to the same critique. As in
Camden, the beleaguered geographical body and falsified discourse cannot sustain the
ideological burden of the myth of the insular and self-sustaining island nation. When returned to
the troubling realm of fact, the British archipelago was in the early modern period a
geographically, culturally and politically broken territory. Like the disjointed pieces of land
making up the scattered kingdom of Britain, the multiple states contained within the archipelago
were linked only by a tenuous discursive thread that sought to bind these contentious bodies into
singular sovereign unit under the banner of Englishness. In truth, England was a small, internally
incoherent nation without a dependable state infrastructure to regulate its peoples and lands.
Dangerously surrounded by volatile nations who repeatedly reinstated their cultural, social and
political boundaries, oftentimes through violence, England was held hostage by its own imperial
posturing. Riven by a sea that invited foreign incursion and suffering both internal and external
discord, England was a site of immeasurable vulnerability.

102

Cicero, Of the Nature of the Gods. In Three Books (Oxford: D.A. Talboys, 1829) Print. See
also The Letters of Cicero: The Whole Extant Correspondence in Chronological Order Trans.
Evelyn S. Shuckburgh (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1920) 272-89. Print.
86

A Very Pleasant Tale
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as [a] mote defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear’d by their breed, and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry
Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son;
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leas’d out—I die pronouncing it—
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,

87

Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of wat’ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds;
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

103

This most famous of Shakespearean speeches celebrating the English nation is often only
104

partially quoted, leaving off before the sudden and painful turn in meaning at line 59.

Prior to

this alarming shift in emphasis, Gaunt’s speech brings together the strains of official discourse
found in Camden and Speed to compose a kind of nationalist devotional to the English island.
His ringing chorus defines the isle as inherently monarchical: like Drayton, Gaunt pictures the
island as a throne rising from the sea that is crowned with divine glory. England’s “earth of
majesty” is itself shot through with sovereign awe, a soil that figuratively engenders kings and
queens. Taking the early modern definition of “earth”, in which earth is “the material of the
human body, considered as derived from the ground”, the land is not just a “teeming womb of
royal kings” but the body of the monarch incarnate.

105

Gaunt’s collapse of the island body and

the monarchical body seated and “sceptered” on his oceanic throne extends also to the “happy
breed of men” sprung from the sovereign person and occupying Nature’s “little world”. The
literal island people are protected by the sea “wall” from foreign invasion and “infection”. For

103

Shakespeare, Richard II. The Riverside Shakespeare 2nd Ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1997): II.i.40-68. Print.
104
As Sandra Logan asserts, Gaunt’s abrupt turn signals “the threat of the fall from paradise”
caused by that which “has been lost through Richard’s abuses, incapacities, and failings”. Logan,
Text/Events in Early Modern England: Poetics of History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007): 279. Print.
105
"Earth, n.1". OED Online. June 2012. Oxford University Press. 18 June 2012
<http://www.oed.com.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/view/Entry/59023?rskey=KlesXT&result=1>. Web.
88

England is Nature’s preserve from a sinful world, “a fortress built by Nature for herself”, a prelapsarian “paradise” altogether separate from the fallen world that encroaches and is repulsed by
the sea. The island deserves a place in classical and Christian mythology as the home of “Mars”
106

and the one true God whose hand crafted it as a second “Eden” on earth.

Gaunt’s speech tells the tale of the nation’s evolution: the island is first Nature’s inspired
creation (“this earth”), then a naturally bounded space governed by divine government (“this
realm”) and finally “this England”, a nationally demarcated territory recognized and “renowned”
on an international stage. This evolution, however, is violently halted by the actions of a corrupt
monarch. “This England” is transformed into “that England”, a nation of the past destroyed and
fallen into a state of obsolescence. With the obliteration of the idealized island—it’s
degeneration into a “leas’d” space, a space stripped of its autonomy—the literary and ideological
scaffolding buttressing Gaunt’s England crumbles. The English island so celebrated by Gaunt in
the first 59 lines is indeed a “plot”: “a map, a plan, a scheme”, a “production” poetically staged
to be torn down when the political realities of the English state are brought to bear on this
construction.

107

When this plotted-ness is exposed, so too are the dangers and weaknesses facing

Shakespeare’s England. The nation is a “pelting farm”, a site where hides are removed, and also
a “paltry, petty” territory subject to “persistent striking or beating” from both internal and

106

Subtitle quoted from Thomas More’s Utopia. Three Early Modern Utopias. Trans. Ralph
Robinson Ed. Susan Bruce (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999) 72. Print. All future citations from Utopia
refer to this edition.
107
"Plot, n.". OED Online. June 2012. Oxford University Press. 18 June 2012
<http://www.oed.com.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/view/Entry/145915?rskey=ojp2lN&result=1&isAdvan
ced=false>. Web.
89

108

external forces.

The sea which once shielded England from these blows now entraps and

“triumph[s]” over the island space. “Bound in” by the ocean and “bound in” by its in-born
shame, England is repeatedly cast by Gaunt in this second characterization as vulnerable to an
abusive and imprisoning sea. The once-embracing Neptune’s turns its “envious siege” on the
nation as a form of punishment for the country’s self-inflicted fall from God’s grace.
The “inky blots” and “rotten parchment” cited here by Gaunt obviously reference the
play’s plot, in which Richard II has sold off England to the highest bidders for his own personal
gain. But, these tattered papers can also refer to the debunked materials deployed by official
writers like Camden and Speed to decorate the “English Island” in a nationalist mythos of
positive insularity. Thomas More’s “perfect tale” of an island Utopia likewise takes up the flimsy
treaties clumsily articulated by Camden and Speed to disastrous effect. More’s island is plotted
in the most literal of senses: a nationalist fantasy acutely aware of its own impossibility.
The mythos of the English island was in broad circulation during the period of Utopia’s
composition and publication. Present in the nation’s earliest printed chronicles and reiterated
thereafter in literary, historical and cartographic productions, this fabrication’s long historical
trajectory attests to its ideological import across English history. An essential fiction, the
paradigm of the island nation formed the unsteady foundation of long-standing nationalist
narratives and intermingled claims to England’s imperial destiny.
The work of 6th century cleric Gildas, likely published in the early 16th century in
England, is perhaps a starting point for the fabrication of the textual island we encounter in
Camden, Speed and many others in the early modern period. His portrait of the island is typical
108

"Pelting, n.". OED Online. June 2012. Oxford University Press. 18 June 2012
<http://www.oed.com.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/view/Entry/139942?rskey=0tmerg&result=1&isAdvan
ced=false>. Web.
90

of later texts in which the landscape is described in edenic terms with an emphasis on the land’s
promise of bountiful production. “Adorned with her large spreading fields, pleasant seated hils,
even trained for good husbandry [ … ] and mountaines most convenient for the changeable
Pastures of cattell” this fruitful terrain also offers pleasures of sight and sound that mark the
island out as an earthly Elysian Field. “Whole flowers of sundry collours [ … ] imprint no
unseemely picture” on Gildas’s literary landscape.

109

The fields are imagined to be the rightful

“spouse” of the mountains, which are “decked with diverse jewels” like a decorated bride. The
soil is “watered with cleere Fountaines and sundry Brookes, beating on the snow white sands
together with soft sounding noise, and leaving a pledge of sweet favours on their bordering
bankes, and lakes gushing out abundantly cold running Rivers”.

110

The idealized mating of the

land’s topographical features, the resulting fecundity of the land, the vow promising sensory
pleasures to those who experience England’s landscape: all combine to produce an otherworldly
paradise.
Like the island Edens of Renaissance authors, England’s natural sublimity is attributable
to its island status. The epistle to Gilda’s history opens with the following celebration of
England’s geographical uniqueness: “the island of Britaine [is] placed in the balance of the
divine poising hand (as they call it) which weighth the whole world, almost the uttermost bound
111

of this earth towards the South and West”.

Taking into account the process of translation,

“poise” in the 16th century denoted “to weigh or balance (one thing against, by, to, with another,

109

Gildas, “The Epistle of Gildas.” Description of the State of Great Brittain 1652 EEBO
Michigan State University Lib. 17 June 2012. 4 Web.
110
Ibid.
111

Ibid, 1.
91

112

or two things against each other); to bring into or hold in mutual equilibrium”.

In this sense,

England was positioned by God as the earth’s fulcrum, ensuring the world’s geographic stability
and granting “equilibrium” to His creation. Crafted and cradled by the hand of the Christian
God, the island is not marginal to rest of the world, despite it’s location on the earth’s “uttermost
bound”; instead, it is absolutely central to the earth’s geographical organization. The island is
likewise the offspring of a protective mother: it is “embraced by the embowed bosomes of the
Ocean Sea; with whose most spacious, and on every side [ … ] unpassable enclosure (as I may
113

call it) shee is strongly defended”.

The child of God and Nature, of land and water, is a site of

divine harmony serving the world at large.
Lest one mistakenly believe that Gildas is describing the whole of Great Britain, the
author makes plain that this heavenly territory is bound by the political borderlines delineating
the English nation. Early in his history he marks out a predestined English national space by
asserting the cultural and political boundaries that delineate the Scots and Picts as fundamentally
foreign and violently destructive. Following hard upon the tyrannical rule of Britain by Magnus
Maximus in the 4th century, Britain was militarily weak and thus susceptible to threats from
abroad: “and now absolutely ignorant of all practice of warre, [the Britons were] astonished, and
lamentably groaned, as trampled many yeares under the feete of especially two very fierce
outlandish Nations, the Scots from the South, and the Pictes from the North”.

112

114

Forced to

"Poise, v.". OED Online. June 2012. Oxford University Press. 18 June 2012
<http://www.oed.com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/view/Entry/146666?rskey=BTiUry&result=3&isAdvan
ced=false>. Web.
113
Gildas, 2.
114

Ibid, 25.
92

request Rome’s aid and pledge its “everlasting subjection” to the empire, Briton was a second
time victim to these foreign armies after Rome’s departure:
their accustomed foes not unlike devouring Wolves, that ravening with extreame
hunger, and greedy jawes, leape over the fold, in the Shepheards absence, being
futhered and furnished with the wings of Oares, and the strength of Rowers, and
Sailes filled with too prosperous winds, breake downe all bounds [and] commit all
115

murthers.

Gildas’s depiction of this unthinking violence casts the Scots and Picts not as an invading people,
like the Romans, but two barbaric tribes stealing upon the island from the sea. Unprotected by
their Christ-like saviors, the Britons are imagined as helpless Christian lambs persecuted by
murderous foreign tribes.
The Romans, no longer willing to send troops and resources to defend their colony,
trained the Britons in the art of defense and fortified Hadrain’s Wall at the now border between
England and Scotland. Left at the mercy of “the reproachfull despights of forraigne Nations”, the
Britons were once again the victims of the Scots and Picts:
As the brownish bands of wormes and eamots, which in the height of
Sommer, and encreasing heate, doe swarming breake out of their most straight
and darkesome dens, the dreadfull routes of Scots and Pictes, partly dissenting in
manners, but consenting in one and the selfe same greedy thirst of shedding
blood, and shadowing rather their terrible face, with shagging glibes, then hiding
the secrets and shame of their bodies with comely garments, doe runne in throngs

115

Ibid, 28.
93

and mustering troopes, a land out of their Ships, wherein they were transported
116

over the Scithian vale.

Reduced to maggot-like creatures that multiply in the “heate” like an infestation, the Scots and
Picts burst from their cowardly “dens” below ground and overrun the Britons’ lands. Largely
collapsing their ethnic differences, the two nations become a single enemy contamination. Gildas
conceals from view their human qualities, and marks their bodies and faces as inherently savage
and ungodly. Their inhumane violence is part and parcel with their geographical departure point;
as indicated in the marginal notes, the Scythian Vale is “the Sea betweene England and Ireland”.
Taking from the tradition that imagined the Scots as ancestors of this ancient Middle Eastern
nomad culture and gesturing toward the notion that the Scots and Irish are of a single Scythian
heritage, Gildas delineates the ocean space that separates England from Ireland as dangerously
foreign. He later terms the Scots “impudent Irish wasters”.

117

To breach the outer limits of

England, is to enter a world of otherness that constantly threatens to assail English shores.
Despite Gildas’s depiction of the sea as a loving mother, it is this very sea that invites
destruction upon the beleaguered English nation. In their pleas to the Romans following these
repeated invasions of what would become the English national space, the Britons’ appealed to
their Roman conquerors that “the Barbarous beate us to the Seas, the Seas drive us back on the
118

Barbarous, between these two dreadfull kindes of death, we are either slain or drowned”.

“wings of Oares” carry death into England and the sea-locked land offers not security but is

116
117
118

Ibid, 29, 34-5.
Ibid, 41.
Ibid, 39.
94

The

instead a kind of inescapable prison.

119

The “Southerne shore of the Ocean” in particular was a

site of vulnerability, “where [the Scots and Picts’] Shippes lay in Harbour (because the landing
of the barbarous savage sort, was there most to be feared)”.

120

According to Gildas’s

contradictory discourse, the dangerous waters that trapped England in a state of persistent
vulnerability carried elements that could throw England into a state of degeneration. The foreign
tribes entering the island from the sea, “heapeth slaughters on slaughters [ … ] and as Lambs by
butchers, so our pitifull Countrymen are by their foes hewed in pieces, insomuch as their
habitation was like a wildernesse of salvage beasts”.

121

That Gildas’s “countrymen” are the English is made apparent by the geographical
designations of the island that he claims resulted from these foreign invasions. “It hath beene still
a custome with our Country (as still alas it remaineth) that she hath been weake to represss the
power of their enemies”, Gildas laments. These enemies are decidedly of Irish and Scottish
origin, both in the past and the present. The geopolitical divisions of the island that we see in
Camden and Speed are here grafted onto the British territories. “The impudent Irish wasters”—
the Scots being transformed into the Irish and both collapsed into a symbol of foreignness—
“departed home, as they who not long after determined to returne againe”, Gildas reports. “First
the Pictes seated themselves (where afterwards they continued) in the furthest part of the Iland,
122

breaking every while forth in spoyling and defacing our Country”.

The northern territories

and the island to the west denominated as alien and savage, the English lands (“our Country”)
are historiographically carved out as the site of true Britain and indigenous Englishness.
119
120
121
122

Ibid, 28.
Ibid, 34.
Ibid, 37.
Ibid, 41.
95

The slipperiness of British and English designations is elided by rhetorical maneuvers
that mark out the English national space even prior to the arrival of the Saxons, who are most
th

often considered the original English. For instance, though Bede in his 8 century Ecclesiastical
History of England cites the Saxons as the true English, his intricate mapping of the eventual
English territories implies a kind of nationalist predestination in which the British space becomes
an English one. Repeating the narrative that sees the Scots as the ancient inhabitants of Ireland,
he contends that the Scythian Picts traveled to the Irish Isle and were instructed by the Scottish to
plant themselves in the island “to the eastward”: “The Picts, accordingly, sailing over into
Britain, began to inhabit the northern parts thereof, for the Britons had possessed themselves of
123

the southern”.

Bede then reiterates, sometimes verbatim, the xenophobic tale of the Scots and
124

Picts attacks upon “the natives” of the island.

Three times the victims of these vicious

invasions and eventually abandoned by their Roman colonizers, the Picts and Scots settle in
those territories demarcated in the early modern period as hostile to the English. “The bold Irish
robbers thereupon returned home”, Bede narrates, “intending to come again before long. The
Picts then settled down in the farthest part of the island and afterwards remained there, but they
125

did not fail to plunder and harass the Britons from time to time”.

The native inhabitants of

Britain, the rightful inhabitants of the island as a whole and the people who later evolve into the
English nation, are sequestered by foreign tribes from afar.
But Bede goes a step further in his narrative cartography by assigning the topographical
features of the island nationalist import. In this introductory remarks regarding the three
123

Bede, Ecclesiastical History of England Trans. A.M. Sellar (London: G. Bell and Sons,
1912) 7-8 HathiTrust Digital Library Michigan State University Lib 16 June 2012. Web.
124
Ibid, 26.
125

Ibid, 28.
96

“nation[s] that eventually inhabited the isle, he explains that “there is a very large gulf of the sea,
which formerly divided the nation of the Britons from the Picts; it runs from the west far into the
land, where, to this day, stands a strong city of the Britons, called the Alcuith. The Scots,
126

arriving on the north side of this bay, settled themselves there”.

Bede provides more detailed

geographical detail when depicting “the two very savage nations from beyond the sea” that first
ravaged the unprepared Britons:
We call these nations from beyond the sea, not on account of their being seated
out of Britain, but because they were separated from that part of it which was
possessed by the Britons, two broad and long inlets of the sea lying between them,
one of which runs into the interior of Britain, from the Eastern Sea, and the other
from the Western, though they do not reach as far as to touch one another. The
eastern has in the midst of it the city Giudi. On the Western Sea, that is on its right
shore, stands the city of Alcluith, which in their language signifies the Rock
Cluith, for it is close by the river of that name.

127

Having first established the essential foreignness of the Scots and Picts, Bede must account for
their continued presence in the territory of the indigenous British. The “two broad inlets” cited
above serve as political boundaries corresponding to Camden and Speed’s cultural borderlines
differentiating the highland Scots from the lowlanders, who resemble the English moreso than
their savage brethren to the north. The eastern waterway described here is likely the Firth of
Forth that juts into the Scottish territories, ending at Glasgow. Alcluith is the ancient designation
for Dumbarton, which lies upon the eastern most end of the Firth of Clyde on Scotland’s

126
127

Ibid, 9.
Ibid, 23-4.
97

Western shore.

128

Therefore, these two waterways cut across central Scotland, dividing the

Southern Uplands from the barbaric regions once settled and still occupied by non-native
populations.
The nationalist narratives of Gildas and Bede embedded in the geographical landscape of
ancient Britain the territorial borders and imperial conflicts that were unresolved in medieval and
early modern England. The historiographical trajectory that projected England onto the lands of
the Britons and marked the Scottish lands as usurped territory was entrenched in the English
cultural imaginary by More’s time. The Chronicle of John Hardyng, which appeared in
manuscript form in 1436, attests not only to the continuation of this imperial myth-making but
also to the active participation of early modern authors to subject Scotland to English rule and
claim the island for England’s king. Hardyng, according to his 19th century biographer, Henry
Ellis, was integral to Henry V’s “reclaiming” of Scotland, following Mortimer’s relinquishing of
Scottish lands and fealty to Robert the Bruce. As part of the King’s “secret service” in Scotland,
Hardyng spent three years in that country attempting to regain deeds of English suzerainty.

129

For his efforts, Hardyng was handsomely rewarded by the English sovereign. His Chronicle,
which repeatedly asserts England’s title to Scotland, was presented to King Edward IV.

130

Richard Grafton took up and continued Hardyng’s work with a kind of xenophobic fervor
in the 16th century. Edward VI’s printer during a period of intensified military action against the
Scots, Grafton’s Continuation of Hardyng’s Chronicle adds to the history the reigns of Edward

128
129

This information regarding Alcluith is provided in Bede’s marginal notes, 24.

Hardyng, John. The Chronicle of John Hardyng [ … ] Together with the Continuation by
Richard Grafton Ed. Henry Ellis (London: F.C. and J Rivington, etc., 1812) iv. HathiTrust
Digital Library. Michigan State University Lib. 16 June 2012. Web.
130
Ibid, xi-xiii.
98

IV, Edward V, Richard III, Henry VII and Henry VIII’s, whose own campaign against Scotland
131

in 1542 preceded his son’s “Rough Wooing” of 1547, which left 10,000 Scots dead.

Grafton

dedicates his Continuation to Lord Thomas Duke of Norfolk, who fought at the Battle of
Flodden, where King James IV of Scotland was killed. The very first stanza of the dedication
cites “Englandes querele” with Scotland; the dedication then proceeds with a vitriolic rhetorical
attack upon the Scots and a celebration of Hardyng as “a true herted Englysheman”.

132

Hardyng,

Grafton maintains, was “not unlearned, as the time was than, / Searched out of chronicles, both
late and olde, / All that ever by the same hath bee told: / How fro the begynnyng, Scotlade
133

dooeth reigne / Under kynges of Englande, as their soverain”.

Both Grafton and Hardyng are

deeply invested in denigrating the Scots and firmly establishing the historical grounds of
Scotland’s submission to England. From Hardying’s proem: “Nowe be ye knowe”, addressing
Henry V, “of your title to Englande, / By consequens to Wales and Scotlande, / For they
134

perteyne, as ye maye understande, / Of auncient tyme, to the crowne of Englande”.

Grafton’s

marginal note slightly shifts the emphasis of Hardyng’s claim, placing this justification of
English rule in the realm of 16th century politics. Of this stanza he provides the following
summary: “The tytle of the kinges of Englade, to Scotland and Ireland”.

131

135

MacLeod, Morag. "Rough Wooing." The Oxford Companion to Scottish History. Michael
Lynch. Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University
Press. Michigan State University Library. 19 June
2012 http://www.oxfordreference.com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&
entry=t246.e255. Web.
132
Hardying, 1.
133
134
135

Ibid, 2.
Ibid, 21.
Ibid.
99

Hardyng’s “proof” of England’s suzerainty over the island and the foreign inhabitants to
the north rests upon the oft-repeated but highly dubious Brutus myth, propagated by Geoffrey of
th

Monmouth in the 12 century (discussed in detail in my introduction). Brutus, great grandson of
136

Aeneas, was sent by Diana to “This ysle, enbrased with this sea”.

Having established “peace

and law”, “Brute departed Britaine in thre partes to his thre sonnes, the two yonger to holde of
the elder; so that Wales and Scotlande shulde do homage to Englande, by hys ordynaunce, by the
137

lawe of Troye”.

The following two chapters of Hardyng’s Chronicle attempt to lend further

credence to England’s ancient claim to the island, first explaining “Howe, by lawe Troyane, the
souerayntue belongeth to the eldest brother or syster”; the oldest son of Brutus, Locrine, was
granted what became the English territories after his father’s death. The ascension of this
“British” (read English) sovereign over the archipelago is the subject of Hardyng’s next chapter.
According to Grafton, it is Hardyng’s knowledge of this suspect mythology that proves his
reliability as the narrator of “the first begynnyng of Englande”.

138

“Neyther anye Chronicler that

euer was, / Eyther dooth or can more largly declare, / Euen from Brutus, howe it came to passe /
That kynges of Englande the soueraines are, / And ouver Scotlande outghte rule to beare”,
Grafton intones. “Hymselfe is wytnes of their subjection, / And homage vnder Englandes
139

protection”, referencing Hardyng’s campaigns under Henry V in Scotland.

In no uncertain terms, Grafton ups the ante by painting the ancient and contemporary
Scots as vicious and distrustful. Scottish subjection to England is his primary theme:

136
137
138
139

Ibid, 23.
Ibid, 41-2.
Ibid, title page.
Ibid, 11.
100

And Hardynges owne self hath the partie bee,
That from Scotlande, oft tymes, hath brought
Their seales of homage and fealtee,
Vnto the kyng of Englande, as he ought :
Vnto whom the Scottes then sued and sought,
Yeldyng to liue in humble subieccion,
Of Englandes gouernaunce and proteccion.

But that people of their propre nature
Hath, euen from the first, been so uvtowarde,
So vnstedfast, inconstaunte, and vnsure,
That nothyng maie possibly bee more frowarde,
So haue thei continued from thens foorthwarde,
Neuer gladde to bee in quiet and rest,
But to defeccion aye readie and prest.
…………………………………………………………
And in deede Englad hath oft been constreigned,
The Scottes slacknesse in dooyng their homage,
To pricke forewarde, whe thei would haue refreined,
With y sharpe spurre of marciall forceage ;
And to abate their watonnesse of courage,
With the iron rodde of due correccion,
As oft as thei attempted defeccion.

101

For Scottes will aye bee bostyng & crakyng ;
Euer sekyng causes of rebellion ;
Spoyles, booties, and preades euer takyng ;
Euer sowyng quereles of dissension ;
To burne and steale is all their intencion ;
And yet, as people whom God dooeth hate & curse,
Thei always begynne, and euer haue the woorse.

Englande hitherto hath neuer lacked power,
And oft as need wer, the Scottes to compell
Their duetie to dooe ; and menne of honour
Englande hath had, as stories dooe tell,
Whiche, whensoeuer the Scottes did rebell,
Wer hable, at all tymes, theim to subdue,
And their obedience to England renue.

140

Beginning by addressing Hardyng’s first person experience of the Scottish and his hand in
bringing the Scots to their knees, Grafton illustrates the inborn characteristics of the Scottish,
who are inherently wild and not to be trusted in their supposedly willing subjection to England,
neither then nor now. Because of their sometimes refusal to pay homage to their English
overlords and their unwarranted rebellions against the same, the violence of “due correction”
must be applied against these criminal people, whose “nature” it is to “burn and steele”. Because
140

Ibid, 2-3.
102

God himself despises the people to the north, the English are divinely justified in their use of the
“iron rodde” to quell their viciousness and return them to their right subjection. With God’s
blessing, England has, across history, put down the heathen Scots and established Scottish
obedience to the English throne. “If Ihon Hardyng bee a trew man, / And in this behalf inspyred
with prophecie”, Grafton intones in the Continuation’s prefatory material, “[the Scottish] wyll
neuer bee but as thei were than, / False to England, suttle, and craftie, / Entendyng myschiefe
when thei shew contrary”. Incapable of being reformed, England must instead contain the
“spoylers and robbers that amende wyll neuer, / Tyll our kyng shall haue made theim Englyshe
for euer”.

141

Only by returning the isle of Britain to its proper state—where the island is wholly

English—will the Scottish problem be wholly eradicated, along with the Scots themselves.
Grafton’s Continuation was published in 1543; he claimed it to be “gathered out of
diuerse and soundreie autours, of moste certain knowelage and substanciall credit [ … ] have
142

writen of the affaires of Englande”.

Among these authors, it is contended, is Thomas More.

In his preface to the 1812 edition, Ellis states that the histories of Edward V and Richard III were
composed by the author of Utopia, the account of Richard III also appearing in “‘the History of
Richard the Third,’ in the great body of sir Thomas More’s works, by [John] Rastell, in 1557,
who says [ … ] that he printed from a copy in sir Thomas More’s own hand”. More’s works
printed in Latin also includes these histories of the English kings cited above. Finally, Sir John
Harrington, early modern author and godson to Elizabeth I, attested in his 1596 Metamorphosis
of Ajax that “the best, and best written part of al our Chronicles, in al men’s opinions, is that of
Richard the Thirde, written [ … ] as most suppose, by that worthy, and uncorrupt magistrate, sir

141
142

Ibid, 11.
Ibid, title page.
103

Thomas More, sometime lorde chancellor of Englande”. Though Ellis argues against More’s
possible authorship of these added histories, he does contend that Hardyng’s manuscript made it
143

“into [More’s] hands”.

More’s investment in historiography and likely participation in this collaborative
chronicle strongly indicate that he was aware of the above histories and their attempt to claim the
whole of the island for England. His monarch’s campaigns against the Scottish also make
apparent that the subjection of Scotland held prominence in the political consciousness of Henry
VIII’s government. More’s Utopia is heavily inflected with the discourse of early modern
geopolitics and the myth of the English island nation that sustained the state’s assertions of
imperial dominance. However, as I will argue in the remainder of this chapter, More destabilizes
the foundational structures of the island myth; Utopia is an artificial isle unnatural in its very
geography. With the debunking of the nation’s supposed island status comes the disintegration of
all elements of the national mythos, namely, its autonomy, positive insularity, geographic
uniqueness, cultural and ethnic homogeneity and governmental regulation of the national space.
Despite the Utopians’ isolationist politics and forcible assertions of their geographic and cultural
independence, they are inextricably bound to the continent to which it was once connected. The
island’s artificial geographic detachment from the continent is reiterated by its disingenuous
claims to its nationalist insularity. The sameness of the Utopian citizenry and their strict
adherence to the cultural and governmental politics of the state is not the result of a willed
homogeneity but the violent conquest of a foreign civilization and the forced severing of the
indigenous peoples from the rest of the world. Finally, the oppressive regulation and defense of

143

Ibid, xix-xx.
104

the island territory speaks to a deep fear of foreign-ness and contamination that is coincident
with the Utopians’ failure to isolate themselves from the world outside.
Read as a satirical fantasy—an idealized realm conscious of its own impossibility—
More’s Utopia disallows the falsified histories and geopolitical distortions necessary to the island
th

th

myth propagated by English authors from the 6 century to the 17 . More takes up the primary
threads of England’s island nationalism—the notions of a divinely created island space,
protected from foreign incursion and abounding in natural resources, of the essential Englishness of the island, of its otherworldly independence from the world at large—and stretches them
to the point of absurdity. He also embeds in the text subtle details that undo Utopia’s most
fundamental assertions of its self-sufficiency and positive isolation: the fabricated island is
lacking in certain necessary resources, which it must import from outside. As I discuss in more
detail below, Utopia cannot produce iron, a metal essential in matters of defense. Utopia’s
dependence upon the continent and its colonial interactions link it inextricably to the mainland,
thus complicating its claims to insularity and self-sustaining autonomy. By detrimentally casting
doubt upon the myths that make up Utopia’s national identity, More effectively annuls the
ideological foundations of England’s island nationalism.
Utopia and England do not, of course, share a one-to-one relationship. However, More’s
text is clearly concerned with the state of England as a commonwealth in need of reform. As
Jeffrey Knapp explains, the connection between Utopia and England is, unsurprisingly forged
through their shared island-ness: the Utopians’ constructed island identity “defines their national
144

identity as surely as [ … ] England’s geography defines the English”.

Linking the text to

both England and More’s position as a member of the state, John Freeman contends that “Utopia
144

Knapp, 31.
105

corresponds very closely to the world in which More had to find his place; in fact, Book I
represents both England and More’s historical and biographical situations, and Book II offers an
145

allegorization of those terms”.

Important for this argument, Simon Morgan-Russell sees in

More’s text a response to the topographical descriptions of England and Britain spanning from
th

Gildas to William Harrison in the 16 century: “More’s Utopia needs to be considered in
relation to the genre of the description of Britain beyond the footnoted correspondences of
Utopia and Britain. In some ways the correspondence of factual information is of secondary
importance: More’s use of the chronicle-writer’s rhetorical structure is enough to forge a link
between Utopia and other examples of the description genre”.

146

That Utopia resembles early modern descriptive histories speaks to More’s possible
intention to mimic the genre, thus lending to his work the aura credibility and placing it within
the body of nationalist texts that topographically illustrated the English body politic. However, as
Richard Helgerson and Stephen Greenblatt reveal, More’s satiric representation of England in
Utopia is deeply unsettling. Unlike the descriptions, histories and maps that sought to
rhetorically and visually concretize the crown’s island, Utopia forefronts and leaves exposed the
debilities of the island nation, thus presenting to English audiences a fragile and brittle
representation of itself. “Utopian life”, in Greenblatt’s opinion, is riddled with “half-hidden
ruptures, ruptures betrayed by subtle inconsistences and contradictions in topography, economic
exchange, the exercise of power, concepts of criminality, and the uses of violence”, all topics

145

Freeman, “More’s Place in ‘No Place’: The Self-Fashioning Transaction in Utopia.” Texas
Studies in Literature and Language 34.2 (1992): 197-217. Print.
146
Morgan-Russell, “St. Thomas More’s Utopia and the Description of Britain.” Cahiers
Elisabethains: Late Medieval and Renaissance Studies 61 (2002): 1-11. Print.
106

which gesture back to More’s England.

147

Helgerson, in “Inventing Noplace” considers how

More’s text takes on the rhetoric of negation and theories regarding the perfection of society
inspired by the discovery of the New World. Whereas other perfecting narratives of the period
imagined a “Golden Age” in which the imagined new world would replace the flaws of the old,
“Utopia denies (systematically, it would seem) all that the usual images of the Golden Age
affirm [ … ] [the Utopians] are, in short, imperfect men in an imperfect world”. In other words,
More’s Utopia is not Utopic in the modern sense of the word; it is shot through with the very
societal and governmental fissures that idealized realms seek to eliminate. In Greenblatt’s words,
More’s island is located “in a post-lapsarian world, in a world of Iron Age men”, not in the
148

elysian fields of romanticized nationalist fantasy.

In this regard, Utopia plays upon fantasies of English nationalism and imperialism while
simultaneously demonstrating their impossibility and unattainable-ness. For instance, Louis
Marin shows that More makes fictionally possible the kind of homogenous national culture that
official texts repeatedly—and untruthfully—illustrated. Marin compares More’s Utopia to “the
deep-rooted American will, fantasy, dream or utopian drive, of a completely homogenized world,
a world without differences through a generalized entropy, unbound [ … ] from any exteriority
through a natural, ‘spontaneous’ assimilation”.

149

The spontaneity and naturalness of Utopia’s

extinction of difference is, of course, neither spontaneous nor natural; at its core, it is
constructed, due to the means in which the Utopians’ disconnect from the continent is achieved.
147

Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: U of C
Press, 1980) 23. Print.
148
Helgerson, Richard. “Inventing Noplace, or the Power of Negative Thinking.” Genre: Forms
of Discourse and Culture 15.2-3. (1982): 105. Print.
149
Marin, “Frontiers of Utopia: Past and Present.” Critical Inquiry 19.3 (1993): 403. JSTOR.
Web. 20 May 2011.
107

Greenblatt also comments upon this homogenizing gesture, focusing on the “radical” nature of
“More’s vision of national uniformity”. Of More’s overdetermined organization and regulation
of the national space, Greenblatt observes, “More dreams here of sweeping away the centuriesold accumulation of local and particular culture, marked seemingly indelibly in all the varieties
of dress, speech, architecture, behavior”.

150

If one considers the markings of cultural, ethnic and

linguistic difference engraved in England’s national landscape, More’s vision amounts to an
impossible fantasia of erasure of the non-English.
As if to discredit the possibility of making real this fantasy of English homogeneity,
More persistently insists upon the artificial nature of Utopia’s island-ness; he does so, in part, by
refusing the characteristics of the fictional island that so link it to England. Most potently, Utopia
denies insistently repeated claims found in Camden, Speed and their predecessors to the island’ s
insularity and singular autonomy. First, the island itself—which is absolutely central to every
aspect of Utopia’s government and its supposedly isolationist culture—is both manufactured and
geographically impossible. As discussed above, More mirrors early descriptions of Britain. The
opening illustration of the island echoes Gildas, Bede and others in laying out its geographical
dimensions. Gildas begins his epistle with the following description: ‘The Iland of Britaine [ …
reaches ] toward the South and West; extending it selfe from the South West out towards the
North Pole, eight hundred miles in length, and containing two hundred in bredth, besides the
151

farre outreached Forelands of sundry Promontaries”.

Bede opens his Ecclesiastical History of

England by largely repeating Bede’s illustration. I include here a large portion of More’s
introductory paragraph to Book Two in order to demonstrate his replication of prior

150
151

Greenblatt, 41.
Gildas, 1-2.
108

historiographic texts and the geographical discrepancies that make More’s island a place of
impossible fantasy.
The island of Utopia containeth in breadth in the middle part of it (for there it is
broadest) 200 miles. Which breadth continueth through the most part of the land.
Saving that by little and little it cometh in and waxeth narrower towards both the
ends. Which fetching about a circuit or compass of 500 miles, do fashion the
whole island like to the new moon. Between these two corners the sea runneth in,
dividing them asunder by the distance of eleven miles or thereabouts, and there
surmounteth into a large and wide sea, which by reason that the land on every side
compasseth it about and sheltereth it from the winds, is not rough nor mounteth
not with great waves, but almost floweth quietly, not much unlike a great standing
pool, and maketh wellnigh all the space within the belly of the land in manner of a
haven, and, to the great commodity of the inhabitants, receiveth in ships towards
every part of the land (49).
If one pictures this island according to More’s dimensions, the isle cannot be shaped like a “new
moon”, for a new moon is either invisible or visible only as a very thin crescent. Therefore, the
body of the island cannot be 200 miles across and continue at this length until the land is parted
at a harbor, which is measured at approximately 11 miles across. This island would appear as a
nearly complete circle with a very small portion of its circumference removed, as the first
woodcut map of Utopia from 1516 indicates (fig. 3). As Peter Barber notes, “the measurements
[More] gave for the island of Utopia defied the rules of mathematics and thus the possibility of
accurate cartographic representation”. Barber contends that “More undoubtedly realized” the

109

geographic discrepancies of his island territory.

152

In this sense, the author of Utopia sought to

emphasize not just the impossibility of such an island space, but also the inherent artificiality of
his construction.
A second map of Utopia drawn by Ambrosius Holbein appears in the 1518 edition of
More’s text (fig. 4). The differences between these two cartographic illustrations are striking and
speak to my arguments regarding defense, colonial projects and the vexed relationship between
artifice and nature discussed in this chapter. The 1516 map includes the bay, which is visually
overwhelmed by the large tower and garrison intended to defend the islanders from uninvited
foreign visitors; this looming symbol of defense undercuts the Utopian notion of the natural
security of their island nation. The bay itself is proportionately small and thusly does not
coincide with the faulty geographic calculations offered by More. In the background of both
illustrations, the land beyond Utopia appears largely unpopulated; in the 1516 version, the lands
in the northwest corner of the map are emptied of the signs of civilization and appear poised for
Utopian colonization. Holbein’s map includes two buildings in this space, allowing for the
possibility of a small and possibly undefended territory. The northeastern portion of the 1516
depiction includes several structures, implying the presence of a nearby town; the 1518 text
minimizes these buildings. In both cases, the proximity of these cities or states discredits the
repeatedly touted claim by the Utopians that they occupy an oceanic space disconnected from the
outside world. The banner decorating Holbein’s portrait also undoes this notion of positive
insularity; the banner announcing the titles of Utopia’s cities literally ties the island to the
continent.
152

Barber, “England I: Pageantry, Defense, and Government: Maps at Court to 1550.”
Monarchs, Minsters and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in
Early Modern Europe Ed. David Buisseret (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992) 29. Print.
110

The 1516 island landscape is emptied of people, with the minor exception of a sailor
manning a large ship in the foreground, thus speaking to the strict regulation of movement and
text’s reduction of the populace to an undefined laboring force; their importance lies in their
instrumentalization, not in any individualized activity that might warrant their appearance on the
map. The absent citizenry of both maps puts into boldface the forefronted and disproportionate
figures of Hythloday, More and Giles in the Holbein map, standing on the continent’s shore,
gesturing toward the island. The impossible bay has disappeared from the illustration, and this
space is now occupied by the men who have brought the island into the known world:
Hythloday, the storyteller; Giles and Morus, who introduce the island to the cultural and literary
landscape of Tudor England and beyond; and More himself, whose idealized construction of his
fantastic island flies in the face of Tudor society and geographic truth. The fictionality of these
characters and the presence of the author in the dual guise as character and author completes the
vision of the fabricated island by placing its inventors within the portrait. Utopia is not a
chronicle history or a “description” of an island belonging to the genre of Camden, Speed and
their predecessors. What is at stake in Utopia is the revelation of the manipulations and untruths,
so obvious in More’s text, that also undermine official narratives.
Hythloday’s untrustworthy description of Utopia, coming so early in Book Two, throws
into doubt the rest of his illustration of the island commonwealth. Particularly dubious is his
assertion that the land controls the sea, a contention he later contradicts. The chronicles above
describe nature’s particular care when creating her idyllic island, an argument that posits a
cooperative relationship between land and water. More’s description of the “large wide sea [ … ]
not much unlike a great standing pool” reiterates the harmonious bond between land and sea
construed by Gildas, Bede and Hardyng and reiterated by Camden and Speed. Because the

111

separation between the two points of land is only 11 miles in length, this sea can be neither
“large” nor “wide. Even if we accept Hythloday’s improbable illustration, the notion that the sea
and land are perpetually at peace is difficult to swallow when we later encounter details
annulling this idealized relationship. For instance, we learn only a few pages later that the winds
batter the homes of the Utopians with enough force that they must fortify their dwellings and
streets. To fend off the allegedly non-existent winds,
the outsides of the walls be made either of hard flint or of plaster, or else of brick,
and the inner sides be strengthened with timber work [ … ] They keep the wind
out of their windows with glass, for it is there much used, and somewhere also
with fine linen cloth dipped in oil or amber, and that for two commodities, for by
this means more light cometh in, and the wind is better kept out (55).
The islanders, rather than feeling the loving embrace of nature must instead “withstandeth the
violence of the weather”; they are not protected by nature, but must protect themselves from her
(55). Neither is the land a sign of nature’s affection for the island. Confusingly following the
marginal title “the gifts of nature”, the body of the text explains that “their soil be not very
fruitful, nor their air very wholesome” The work required of the Utopians to remedy nature’s
mistakes requires much vigilance in order to ward off disease and a shortage of food: “against
the air they so defend them with temperate diet, and so order and husband their ground with
diligent travail” as so train their bodies into perfect condition, in spite of nature’s flawed hand
when constructing the island (85).
Like the nationalist narratives penned by official authors of the early modern period,
More’s work is both factual and pretend. In Morgan-Russell’s terms: “More’s Utopia is neither
Britain nor the fictional island described by Hythlodæus”, he contends, “it is the ‘no-place’

112

between the real and the fictive”.

153

Drawing from the actual—the geographical, the historical,

the natural—16th and 17th century historians built pretend national worlds to suit the crown’s
ideological purposes. The cruelty of More’s Utopia lies in its refusal to mask both the pretendedness of his fictional island and the official discourse that informs it. Holding out an absurdist
blueprint, More reveals to his English and European audience the faulty infrastructure that
supposedly sustains the English “island”.
“A Thing Very Beastly”
Because English nation-building during the early modern period was closely tied to its
imperial aims, the state’s inability to contain and bring under English control the other nations
housed on the island likewise informs More’s work. When Hythloday recounts his time in
England to the character More, he hits upon the social and governmental ills that severely
destabilized Henry VIII’s England: state violence, vagrant or idle subjects, enclosure and the
wool trade. Hythloday’s criticism of English policy extends beyond the domestic; as Book Two
bears out, More through his narrator is acutely attentive to imperial politics and the potential
social and governmental disasters that attend imperial ventures. Hythloday, in his first direct
reference to More’s England, recalls the Cornish Rebellion of 1497 in which tin miners of
Cornwall rejected one of England’s imposed taxes and turned on its overlords. Importantly, this
tax was intended to help fund one of England’s many offensives against Scotland, one of three
nations on the island that refused to buckle completely to English rule.

153
154

154

Morgan-Russell, 10.

"Cornwall.” The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages. Ed Robert E. Bjork. Oxford
University Press, 2010. Michigan State University Library. 19 June
2012 http://www.oxfordreference.com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&
entry=t303.e1558. Web. Subtitle quote is from page 97 of Utopia.

113

The Portuguese Hythloday is so attuned to English political culture that during
Hythloday’s pronouncements More “[thought] himself to be [ … ] at home in [his] own country”
(33). Quickly following upon this acknowledgement of Hythloday’s intimate knowledge of
England is a discussion of the tenuous Anglo-Scottish relations that so preoccupied our above
historians. Upon More’s suggestion that Hythloday enter the political sphere as a philosophical
counselor to kings, Hythloday claims that such a move would be pointless, for monarchs are
“infected and corrupt with perverse and evil opinions” (34). He cites as evidence the political
machinations that attend Anglo-French relations and the position of the Scottish in France and
England’s continual skirmish for land. Imagining a scenario in which the French king is advised
on “what to do […] with England”, Hythloday engineers a supposedly imaginary plan that would
pit the English against their Scottish neighbors as a means for France to secure the island nation.
First, France would offer a false “bond” to England “to bind that weak and feeble friendship, so
that they must be called friends, and had in suspicion of enemies”. The Scots would then be
called to duty to their French brethren and poised to attack at the least provocation by the nation
to south (a likely possibility in this volatile period of imperial ambition). During this time of war,
the French would then dig up some pretending “inheritor” to the English crown and place him on
the throne (35). As the result of these stratagems, the French would have this pretended monarch
in their pocket and thus take over the island.
Hythloday’s scenario, of course, was not the stuff of literary imagination; it had its
historical referent in the political maneuvers of various French monarchs.

155

More’s narrator is

here citing a very real threat to England from abroad, thus unmooring the notion that England’s
155

As the editor to this edition, Susan Bruce, explains in the endnotes, this discussion of early
modern France “refers to the empire-building of the French kings such as Charles VIII, Louis
XII, and Francis I, and more generally to the attempts of various European magnates to annex for
themselves the choicest possessions of their peers” (219).
114

insularity and sea-bounded-ness protected the nation from insurrection. Next, Hythloday uses the
cautionary tale of the Achorians to warn against monarchical attempts to seize lands and rule two
nations concurrently. “These Achorians once made war in their king’s quarrel for to get him
another kingdom which he laid claim unto and advanced himself right inheritor to the crown
thereof by the title of an old alliance”, Hythloday explains. “Their new conquered subjects”
understandably rejected the Achorians’ rule and threw their nation into a state of violent
insecurity, where they were plagued with “daily insurrections”. Their political and military
weakness invited the invasion of “other countries [who] were continually with divers inroads and
foragings invading them”. The financial and political strain of attempting to contain two
kingdoms overwhelmed the nation, and continual war had implanted in their people “corrupt and
wicked manners, that they had taken a delight and pleasure in robbing and stealing; that through
manslaughter they had gathered boldness to mischief; that their laws were had in contempt” (36).
Coming on the heels of Hythloday’s reference to Anglo-Scottish relations, his tale of the
Achorians’ near downfall resonates strongly with England’s failed rule of Scotland. Despite
Grafton’s claim that “whensoeuer the Scottes did rebell, / [The English] Wer hable, at all tymes,
theim to subdue, / And their obedience to England renue”, England repeatedly fell to their
Scottish “subjects” and were never able to conqueror the northern territories. Britain remains a
bi-national island to this day. The imperial angle of Utopia is oft commented upon, but rarely is
the Utopian imperial project connected to England’s quest to subdue Scotland. Only with the
conquest of Scotland can the crown and English writers lay claim to the island as a whole and
substantiate the myth of the island nation. The manufacture of Utopia’s island-ness may reflect
this attempted but unsuccessful imperial state initiative; only in the fantastic and troubling world
of More’s Utopia can England’s goal of a homogenous English island be realized. But, as

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explained above, More’s text denies even this imperial fantasy by embedding in the work the
ideological slippages that point to the impossibility of such a mythic island. The Utopians insist
upon their autonomy, yet they are in constant and mostly violent conflict with their neighbors,
not unlike England’s continual wars with their Scottish enemies.
Most often, discussion of the Utopians’ colonialism is placed in the context of the New
World. As Knapp contends, “the odd truth about More’s [ … ] meditation on America is that it
contains perhaps the first Tudor attempt to elaborate a theory of colonization”.

156

Citing Knapp,

Hui-chuan Chang argues that “one striking way to approach Utopia would be to read it as an
apology for British imperialism. The utopian practice in hiring mercenaries, waging war with
neighboring countries and colonizing them all suggests some rapport with the upsurging British
power”.

157

This “British power” is redirected to England’s domestic empire by Nina Chordas,

who examines the role of dialogue in More’s work. Comparing Utopia to Spenser’s View of the
Present State of Ireland, Chordas solidly places the colonial discourse of Utopia in the British
Isles. Like the neighboring nations of Utopia, who are depicted as savage and uncivilized,
Chordas removes this colonial characterization to More’s fictionalized territories by borrowing
More’s language and applying it to the island to the west of England:
The Ireland of A Vewe may [ … ] be read as destined to be subdued by the
civilizing forces of English law and custom, in the process bringing the ‘rude and

156
157

Knapp, 21.

Chang, Hui-chuan, “Subverting Utopia: Utopia and Utopia Reconsidered.” Studies in
Language and Literature 8 (1998): 33-43. Print.
116

uncouth’ Irish (the ones who survive the transformation) to ‘the high level of
culture and humanity represented here by England.

158

Freeman likewise considers the language of improvement that was so often deployed in English
colonial discourses in regard to Ireland. Arguing that “the ‘problem’ the text of Utopia seeks to
solve is that of enclosure”, a major topic of Book I, Freeman sees a direct link between the
severing of Utopia from the continent to the social disorder in England occasioned by the
enclosure of the island’s territories:
The myth of Utopia’s founding is not at all divorced from the problems of English
history; in fact, the king’s conquering of the Abraxians is simply the telling and
enactment of that history over again, its characters disguised in myth [ … ] The
improver, Utopus is not merely conducting a raid upon a fictional people; he is, in
essence, raiding history, for his conquering of the Abraxians allows him to
redefine and reshape English history for his own ends. This reworking of history
begins with a forcible expropriation of people from their land.

159

Though Chordas and Freeman’s arguments are convincing, one can also detect in both
their critical analyses and More’s text links to the colonial rhetoric applied to Scotland. As
explained above, the Scots posed some very thorny problems for English nationalist narratives,
particularly because the Scottish people and territories occupied an island that English writers so
vehemently wanted to claim for England. The Scots in these narratives were also “wasters” of
the land and, like the Native Americans, therefore unjustified in their occupation. The “rude and
158

Chordas, “Dialogue, Utopia, and the Agencies of Fiction.” Printed Voices: The Renaissance
Culture of Dialogue Eds. Dorothea Heitsch and Jean-François Vallée (Toronto: U of Toronto
Press, 2004) 38. Print.
159
Freeman, 202.
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uncouth” Highland Scots appear beyond moral and civil improvement; the Lowland Scots, on the
other hand, “have reached the high level culture and humanity”, mainly due to the forced
genealogical links to the English constructed by Speed and Camden. Utopus’s raid on history
cited by Freeman can also be considered More’s cynical response to English writers’ attempts to
physically carve away the Scots from the English island.
The isle itself is an affront to nature and is inextricably tied to nationalism and
imperialism. Refusing nature’s design. Utopus “caused fifteen miles space of uplandish ground,
where the sea had no passage, to be cut and digged up. And so brought the sea round the land”
(50). Presumably, the reason for this unnatural alteration of the land was to manufacture the
nation’s insularity and to cut it off from the contamination of the surrounding peoples. For, as is
repeatedly asserted, it is the island’s insularity that allowed the Utopians to inculcate their ideal
culture. According to Hythloday, Utopus also transformed the indigenous people of his newlyacquired territory: “Utopus, whose name as conqueror the island beareth [ … ] also brought the
rude and wild people to that excellent perfection in all good fashions, humanity, and civil
gentleness, wherein they now go beyond all the people of the world” (50). The description of the
island’s engineering follows upon this assessment (it appears in the same sentence), therefore
implying that the detachment of the land from the continent was concomitant with the
introduction of civility to the people. Oppositely, one must assume that had the land remained in
its natural state, the savage inhabitants would have as well. The celebrated sophistication of the
Utopians is as artificial as the isle.
Interestingly, Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene makes the same claim in respect to
the English nation. Prior to Brutus’s arrival,
The land, which warlike Britons now possesse,

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And therein have their mighty empire raysd,
In antique times was salvage wildernesse,
Unpeopled, unmannurd, unproud, unpraysd,
Ne was it Island then, ne was it paysd
Amid the Ocean waves, ne was it sought
Of merchaunts farre, for profits therein praysd,
But was all desolate, and of some thought
160

By sea to have bene from the Celticke mayn-land brought.

The English territory was then inhabited by “a salvage nation [ … ] / Of hideous Giaunts, and
halfe beastly men, / That never tasted grace, nor goodness felt” (II.x. 7.1-3). In both Spenser’s
England and More’s Utopia, the “uplandish” territory (meaning “rustic, rude, uncultivated,
boorish”, according to the OED) and native population must be brought into a state of idealized
civility by the hand of a conquering people.

161

Without the reformation of the barbarous

inhabitants and the untamed land, the nation would never have entered the historical record and
found fame for its thriving trade and unsurpassed “excellent perfection”. Without its
geographical status as an island, the territory was so lacking in grace that “ne did it then deserve
a name to have” (II.x.6.1).
It is significant in both More and Spenser’s texts that ridding the land of its “desolate”,
“savage” and “wild” character and enacting its unnatural separation is an imperial project. In
both cases, the “rude” indigenous peoples and the land itself are forcibly transformed by an
160

Spenser, Edmund The Faerie Queene Ed. A.C. Hamilton Rev. 2nd Ed. (Harlowe: Pearson
Longman, 2007) II.x.5. Print.
161
"Upˈlandish, adj. and n.". OED Online. June 2012. Oxford University Press. 19 June
2012<http://www.oed.com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/view/Entry/219987?redirectedFrom=uplandish>.
Web.
119

invading empire. “Obtaining the victory” over the Abraxan people (Abraxa was the nation’s
former name), Utopus made forced laborers of the conquered peoples and set them to work on
the trench that would separate Utopia from the mainland. He also enlisted his own soldiers for
the task, so that his new subjects “should not think it done in contumely and despite” (50). This
parenthetical note seems intended to head off claims of colonial ruthlessness and negative
isolation; like assertions of the Native Americans’ happy willingness to subject themselves to
European Christianity, the indigenous Abraxans, according to this likely disingenuous comment,
are amenable to disconnecting themselves from the rest of the world because the work is shared
with their conquerors.
The relationship of the Utopians to the “borderers” is wholly imperial in design.
“marvel[ling] at the success” of the Utopians in the construction of their now sequestered land,
the borderers are thrown into a state of unexplained “fear” (50). The borderlands are later coopted by the Utopians and the colonized space is used to house those Utopians who have
exceeded their strictly regulated population. The Utopians methods of population control and the
force with which the Utopians colonize the borderers’ territory is glossed over; the notion that
the borderers simply accept Utopian rule and civilization is, in the typical construction of
colonial rhetoric, unbelievable at best. Deploying the oft-used discourse of waste and
improvement, Hythloday describes the Utopian conquest of the borderer’s national space:
If so be that the multitude throughout the whole island pass and exceed the due
number, then they choose out of every city certain citizens, and build up a town
under their own laws in the next land where the inhabitants have much waste and
unoccupied ground, receiving also of the same country people to them, if they
will join and dwell with them. They thus joining and dwelling together do easily

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agree in one fashion of living, and that to the great wealth of both the peoples. For
they so bring the matter about by their laws, that the ground which before was
neither good nor profitable for the one nor for the other is now sufficient and
fruitful enough for them both. But if the inhabitants of that land will not dwell
with them to be ordered by their laws, then they drive them out of those bounds
which they have limited and appointed out for themselves. And if they resist and
rebel, then they make just war against them. For they count this the most just
cause of war, when any people holdeth a piece of ground void and vacant to no
good nor profitable use, keeping others from the use and possession of it which
notwithstanding by the law of nature ought thereof to be nourished and relieved
(63).
Because the borderers of this unnamed “next land” are incapable or unwilling to cultivate their
own territory, they no longer possess the right to their once-sovereign ground. Preceding the
sentiments of John Locke and his notion of rightful property, and echoing the colonial discourse
of improvement used to justify England’s theft of New World and Irish territories, More’s
Utopians unjustifiably seize the borderers’ lands. Spenser View of the State of Ireland advocates
a similar policy; because the Irish are wasting valuable territory “all the lands will [ be given ]
unto Englishmen”. The Irish may serve as the Englishmen’s tenants until they learn to make
better use of their own country.

162

Supposedly to the benefit of the borderers, the Utopians impose their law and culture
upon their less civilized neighbors and lead them by the hand into the history of progress.
However, if the borderers do not “easily agree” to their colonization, then the Utopians wage war
162

Spenser, Edmund. A View of the State of Ireland. Eds. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley
(Malden: Blackwell, 1997) 120. Print.
121

upon their now enemies. The islanders force the borderers from their own territory and redraw
the boundaries of the land, without legitimate right to rule or legal claim to the territory. Turning
the discourse of waste and improvement into a moral imperative, the Utopian government
rhetorically recasts colonial violence as a “law of nature”. Even those borderers who bend to
Utopian rule are left vulnerable when the imperial project no longer serves the Utopians’
interests; when the Utopian population begins to drop, the islanders “make up the number with
citizens fetched out of their own foreign towns; for they had rather suffer their foreign towns to
decay and perish than any city of their own island to be diminished” (63). The Utopians’
investment in the Other’s “great wealth” and their loyalty to their colonies extends only so far as
Utopian state interests.
The above account of the Utopians’ interactions with the borderers casts serious doubt
upon the supposedly altruistic relationship of the islanders to their neighbors. Hythloday, after
letting slip the Utopians’ essentially mercenary stance toward their subjugated “foreign towns”,
spins a second unbelievable tale of imperialism, this time in regard to the borderers’ desire for
Utopian governance. Discussing the Utopians’ self-regulating society of “very few laws” (94),
Utopia’s narrator describes the desire of the borderers to place themselves under Utopian rule:
These virtues of the Utopians have caused their next neighbors and borderers,
which live free and under no subjection (for the Utopians long ago have delivered
many of them from tyranny), to take magistrates of them, some for a year and
some for five years’ space. Which, when the time of their office is expired, they
bring home again with honour and praise, and take new again with them into their
country. These nations have undoubtedly very well and wholesomely provided for
their commonwealths. For seeing that both the making and marring of the weal-

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public doth depend and hang upon the manners of the rulers and magistrates, what
officers could they more wisely have chosen than those which cannot be led from
honesty by bribes [ … ] These peoples which fetch their officers and rulers from
them, the Utopians call their fellows. And others to whom they have been
beneficial, they call their friends (95).
In the manner of contemporary colonial discourse, Hythloday reinscribes the Utopians’ colonial
project as noble and humane, an imperialism to benefit the uncivilized. To dispel the notion that
the borderers are forced to abide under Utopian law, Hythloday contends that the borderers
freely give themselves over to their imperial neighbors, who in an unspecified past, “delivered [
… ] them” from their own government. Inviting the Utopian state into their territories and thus
acknowledging the islanders’ superiority, “these nations” amend their lacking commonwealths
by embracing their betters and letting themselves be ruled by a foreign power. Hythloday
commends the borderers for making themselves willing subjects of their imperial “friends”.
However, when these “fellows” to the Utopians wear out their usefulness, they become colonial
chattel to be either abandoned or forfeited.
Utopia’s many references to “the borderers” and other neighboring nations echoes,
sometimes word for word, the depictions of the Scottish in medieval and early modern
chronicles. The unnamed “borderers” of Utopia are constantly marked as inelegant and
uncivilized people of use to the Utopians but themselves wholly lacking in autonomy or value.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Utopians’ stance on war. According to Hythloday, the
Utopians avoid entering into military conflict with foreign nations and therefore practice certain
tactics that may offend the reader. Specifically, the Utopians offer monetary rewards to those in
enemy territory willing to kill off or capture their own sovereign and other leaders of state. If the

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leaders of their enemies surrender themselves to the Utopians in order to avoid slaughter by their
own people, the Utopians “proffer the same great rewards with pardon and surety of their lives”
to these members of the disbanded government. “Therefore it quickly cometh to pass that their
enemies have all other men in suspicion, and be unfaithful and mistrusting among themselves
one to another, living in great fear and in no less jeopardy” (100). Hythloday concedes that “this
custom of buying and selling adversaries among other people is disallowed as a cruel act of a
base and a cowardly mind. But they in this behalf think themselves much praiseworthy”. Nor are
the Utopians above other “base” gestures, such as seating a controversial candidate on their
enemy’s throne in order to further destabilize the foreign state. If this stratagem fails, then the
anonymous borderers are called to the front lines and manipulated into believing that they are
serving their own state, rather than being sacrificed to the Utopian cause. The pretended islanders
raise up the people that be next neighbors and borderers to their enemies, and
them they set in their necks under the colour of some old title of right, such as
kings do never lack. To them they promise their help and aid in their war. And as
for money, they give them abundance. But of their own citizens they send to them
few or none. Whom they make so much of and love so entirely, that they would
not be willing to change any of them for their adversaries’ prince (100-01).
Relying upon the borderers’ lack of political sophistication and their mindless obsession with
regaining allegedly lost territory, the Utopians protect their own commonwealth from war’s
destruction while potentially ridding themselves of future enemies to their state.
The most startling of the Utopians’ wartime policies is their use of borderer mercenaries.
The Zapoletes are their primary choice of mercenary soldiers and one of the few borderer nations
allowed a name in More’s text. The Zapolete nation is located only “500 miles from Utopia

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eastward”, but the cultural distance between the two countries is far more pronounced. The
“hideous, savage, and fierce” Zapoletes inhabit a landscape of “wild woods and high mountains”,
which contributes to their “hard nature, able to abide and sustain heat, cold, and labour” (101).
Hythloday’s account of their barbarous nature seems to excuse the Utopians’ use of this nation as
hired soldiery. So too does his account of the Zapoletes’ wasteful land practices, which we have
learned is an affront to “the law of nature”, according to the Utopians. “Occupying no husbandry
nor tillage of the ground, homely and rude both in building of their houses and in their apparel,
given unto no goodness, but only to the breeding and bringing up of cattle”, the Zapoletes are
both savage and criminal, depending primarily upon “hunting and stealing” to sustain their
culture. The other source of national income is mercenary ventures, which is part and parcel of
their barbarity: as Hythloday explains, “they be born only to war, which they diligently and
earnestly seek for”. Seemingly intended by God to serve the Utopians and, in any case,
underserving of the land they occupy and the lives they criminally sustain, the Zapoletes are not
to be trusted. For the proper pay, their greed and generally blood-thirsty nature would prompt
them to turn on even their own people, “forgetting both kindred and friendship” (102). Their
caginess is driven by monetary gain: “they enter into bonds, that the next day they will take part
with the other side for greater wages, and the next day after that they will be ready to come back
again for a little more money” (101).
The Zapoletes are literally expendable to the Utopians because they are an undeserving
people. In a passage reminiscent of colonial tracts citing the worthlessness of the conquered as a
justification for their slaughter, Hytholday elucidates the Utopians’ stance toward the death of
savage cultures.

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The Utopians, like as they seek good men to use well, so they seek these evil and
vicious men to abuse. Whom, when need requireth, with promises of great
rewards they put forth into great jeopardies. From whence the most part of them
never cometh again to ask their rewards [ … ] Nor the Utopians pass not how
many of them they bring to destruction, for they believe that they should do a very
good deed for all mankind if they could rid out of the world all that foul stinking
den of that most wicked and cursed people (102).
Such a merciless stance towards the killing of foreign peoples cripples the notion of the
Utopians’ humanist quest to save other cultures from themselves by introducing civilization to
these backwards nations. So too does it seriously problematize Hythloday’s contention that the
Utopians are welcomed into borderer cultures. The borderers, whether “good men” or “evil and
vicious”, are either fundamentally unimportant or criminal contaminants. In both cases, the
Utopians have rhetorically and geographically effected their distance from them on account of
the borderers’ inherent otherness and incivility.
More satirically mimics the rhetoric of imperial England that imagined colonists grateful
for the imposing hand of their superiors and the forced transformation of their indigenous
culture. For Grafton, the Scots ought to “[yield] to live in humble subieccion / Of Englandes
gouernaunce and protection”, much like More’s borderers adopt the culture and laws of the
colonial conquerors with a happy thankfulness true only of colonial fantasies. According to
Speed, the Scots “live rather rudely in state of necessity, then as Lords of these portions which
God hath allotted them”; the Scots’ wasteful practices and disregard for husbandry are the very
qualities that allegedly justify the Utopians’ seizure of foreign lands. The rudeness of these
border cultures is, for Camden, what links them to the Irish and makes them suited to their

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territory of “blacklish and baraine mountain”. “Rude and unruly” they are inherently a “warlike
kind of men” whose primary means of profit is “robberies and depredations”, in Camden’s
words, or “spolyes, booties and preades”, in Grafton’s. It is also significant to note that the
Gallowglass, Scottish mercenaries “imported from Argyle and the Western Isles of Scotland”
were hired by Irish kings “where they played a significant role in stiffening Irish resistance to the
extension of English settlements”. The historical span of the Gallowglass coincides with the
production of the above chronicles; they were active from the 11
and 16

th

th

and 12

th

centuries to the 15

when they served “Irish and Anglo-Irish lords in Munster and Leinster”.

163

th

That the

Scottish mercenaries joined with the Irish against English imperialism seems a likely cause of
their vilification in early modern texts.
Like their fictional counterparts in More’s text, the Scottish are essentially untrustworthy;
“so vnstedfast, inconstaunte, and unsure”, Gratfton asserts, so “suttle, and craftie”, according to
Hardyng, as to be counted criminals and degenerates, interested only in blood-shed and criminal
gain. In Gildas’s language, which replicates More’s in its description of the mercenaries’
habitation, the Scottish “devouring Wolves” and contaminating “bands of wormes and eamots”
slink out of their “darksome dens” only to wage war for profit. Because of their disease-like
nature and unthinking violence, the Zapoletes, “whom God dooeth hate and curse”, should be
eradicated, excised from the land.

163

Katharine Simms "Gallowglass." The Oxford Companion to Irish History. S. J. Connolly.
Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Michigan
State University Library. 19 June
2012 <http://www.oxfordreference.com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main
&entry=t245.e758>. Web.
127

A land in which the borderers are exterminated—or, in Grafton’s words, “made [ … ]
Englyshe for euer”, was, of course, an English imperialist and nationalist fantasy. The island
would return to its “natural” state, in which the original and rightful Britons would reclaim their
land. The term “borderers” and all the otherness it connotes would become obsolete, for the
island nation would be of a homogenous character, sharing a common culture and thusly free
from costly and violent wars waged between ethnicities. As in Speed’s illustrative arch
celebrating the genealogy of the true British, the Scots would disappear from the historical
record; an unblemished narrative of English progress, like that of the Utopians which span “the
history of 1,760 years even, from the first conquest of the island”, would celebrate the nation’s
unity and longevity (55). The English state would be immeasurably strengthened, for its people
would be united under a uniform banner of Englishness, allegiant to a common set of laws and
ruled under a single monarch. Gaunt’s “happy breed of men” would rule over their land of
plentitude and the land would be put to its proper use as a “Garden of God”. Wearing a single
“sceptre” the island would be reclaim its status as “royal throne of kings” and “another world” of
national harmony.
Because the obliteration of the “borderers” is a thing of fantasy—not even More’s
utopian fiction can eliminate difference altogether—this national unity and insularity can be
achieved only through artificial geographic separation. Sealing their nation off from
contaminating or uncooperative cultures, the Utopians make real the English dream of severing
themselves from a people that violently refuse England’s assertions of territorial right and
imperial domination. Bede’s allegedly historical “arme of the sea” that once separated Scotland
from England is realized in More’s text, allowing the Utopians to inculcate in a contained space
a nearly identical people with an unwavering fealty to the state. Their geographic breaking-away

128

from the mainland likewise grants the Utopians the mythical “otherworldly status” attached to
England in early modern national narratives. The Utopians, we learn, call the Europeans “ultraequinoctials”, a term likely intended to mark out the islanders as geographically singular.
“Equinoctial” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “pertaining to [ … ] the celestial or
terrestrial equator” or “pertaining to the regions adjacent to the terrestrial equator”.

164

Therefore, one can surmise that by referring to the European continent as “ultra-equinoctial”, the
Utopians imagine Europe to be situated near the equator, at least in comparison to the Utopians
sitting “on the edge of the world” and functioning altogether independently from other less
progressive nations.
However, like the English nation painted by Gildas, Bede, Grafton, Camden and Speed,
More’s construction is shot through with contradiction and narrative lapses. For instance, the
Utopians’ claims to autonomy and self-sufficiency are greatly undermined by their
preoccupation with defense and their reliance upon other cultures for materials necessary for the
maintenance of their culture. Hythloday contends that the Utopian coastline is protected from
attack by fences and the island landscape, such that “by nature and what by workmanship of
man’s hand, that a few defenders may drive back many armies” (50). The surveillance of
England’s extensive coasts was also a source of anxiety for English monarchs; Henry VIII,
presumably because his army could not man the vulnerable coast, called upon his subjects to
map the English coastlines and to identify those coastal areas requiring fortification.

165

As

mentioned above, invasions by Spain and France in defense of their respective Irish and Scottish
allies posed particular threats by sea. The ancient Scots themselves used the seas to invade the
164

"Equinoctial, adj. and n.". OED Online. June 2012. Oxford University Press. 19 June 2012
<http://www.oed.com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/view/Entry/63771?redirectedFrom=Equinoctial>. Web.
165
Barber, “England I”, 34. Print.
129

island from afar. The great bay of Utopia is likewise provided by nature with defensive
mechanisms harmful to foreign travelers:
The forefronts or frontiers of the two corners [of the bay], what with fords and
shelves and what with rocks, be very jeopardous and dangerous. In the middle
distance between them both standeth up above the water a great rock, which
therefore is nothing perilous because it is in sight. Upon the top of this rock is a
fair and a strong tower builded, which they hold with a garrison of men. Other
rocks there be lying hid under the water, which therefore be dangerous. The
channels be known only to themselves. And therefore it seldom chanceth that any
stranger unless be he guided by an Utopian, can come into this haven. Insomuch
that they themselves could scarcely enter without jeopardy, but that their way is
directed and ruled by certain landmarks standing on the shore. By turning,
translating, and removing these marks into other places they may destroy their
enemies’ navies, be they never so many (49-50).
According with Hythloday’s depiction of the cooperative relationship between man and nature,
the bay is equipped with those defenses necessary to the protection of Utopia’s most important
waterway. But, the description of the Utopian’s defensive measures points to an anxiety that
belies their claims to a peaceful existence secure in “Neptune’s arms”. First, the garrison
constructed atop the “great rock” is a manifest symbol of the Utopians’ attempt to defend their
oceanic borders. Rather than mark the island’s natural defenses, it signals to foreigners that they
are entering a militarized space closely guarded against attack. The rocks hiding beneath the
water’s surface also speak to nature’s hand in protecting the Utopians, yet their measures to keep
secret from all the world the “channels” around these rocks betrays a pronounced fear of

130

uninvited foreign-ness on their shores. That the Utopians themselves are often at risk when
entering their own national boundaries, a risk created in part by their own maneuvering of the
bay’s “landmarks”, evinces an overinvestment in defense verging on paranoia.
Even the inland waterways are jealously, and perhaps irrationally, defended against
foreign contamination and attack. Amaurote, “the chief city in Utopia” (53) is “compassed about
with a high and thick stone wall full of turrets and bulwarks” and “a dry ditch, but deep and
broad and overgrown with bushes, briars and thorns, [that] goeth about three sides or quarters of
the city” (54). It would seem that these structures, a second defensive perimeter built around
every city, would provide satisfactory protection for the island state. Still, the Utopians nervously
guard against the contamination of their inland water system. Describing the Anyder River,
which More compares to the Thames, Hythloday explains that
they have also another river [ … ] it riseth even out of the same hill that the city
standeth upon, and runneth down a slope through the midst of the city into
Anyder. And because it riseth a little without the city, the Amaurotians have
enclosed the head spring of it, with strong fences and bulwarks, and so have
joined it to the city. This is done to the intent that the water should not be stopped
nor turned away or poisoned if their enemies should chance to come upon them
(53).
Manipulating nature and artificially trapping the river’s spring in a kind of fortress, the Utopians
ensure against the spoiling of their water by extraordinary measures. Despite the several and
intricate lines of defense—the sea, the “perilous” bay, the “high and thick stone wall”, the
Utopians still fear for their security both on the shore and inland.

131

The Utopians’ excessive preoccupation with defense undermines the insistence on the
island’s geographic security, not unlike England’s unconvincing proclamations regarding
nature’s protection of the isle. Also, the Utopian claim of uncontested imperial rule over the
borderers is suspect when one considers their disproportionate investment in national security; it
would seem that physically removing themselves from foreign nations only intensifies the threat
of invasion, for the waterways appear their most vulnerable sites. More’s text imagines an
exclusively English island space in which the troublesome Scottish borderlands are uprooted and
removed. This impossible geographic excavation resonates with the historical works cited above,
narrative constructions in which Scotland is rhetorically excised from England’s British
chronicles. However, More’s work does not allow this fantasy; “the borderers” stubbornly persist
on the Utopian horizon and in the governmental consciousness of the state as either rebellious
colonies or potential insurgents.
Regardless of the Utopians’ assertions of their self-sufficiency, the pretended islanders
are reliant upon the very people they seek to expel from their nation, particularly in times of war.
As noted, the Utopians hire mercenary soldiers because they “detest and abhor” the bloodshed
that inevitably attends military conflict (97). Their own military is voluntary, for “they thrust no
man forth into war against his will” (102). This voluntary force enters battle only when all other
avenues are exhausted, including sending their “friends” to fight (whom we might presume to be
those nations who so willing bent to Utopian rule) (102). One might assume, then, that the
Utopians are without a standing army. Even if one does not accept this possibility, the fact
nevertheless remains that the Utopians are dependent militarily upon soldiers occupying other
lands.

132

More striking still is the Utopians’ lack of an essential wartime resource of the period:
iron. A necessary metal for the production of armor and weaponry, as well as more pedestrian
necessities like agricultural instruments, a lack of iron or the inability to process it would have
amounted to a serious national deficiency in the early modern period. Such was the case in
England in the 16th century, where iron production was very limited, despite the country’s many
iron ore deposits throughout the territory. Harry Scrivenor explains that, following the renewed
emphasis on iron production after the Anglo-Saxon invasion, manufactured iron was in so short
supply during the reign of Edward III, an act was passed stating that “no iron manufactured in
England, and also no iron imported and sold, could be carried out of the country, under penalty
166

of forfeiting double quantity to the king”.

England depended upon foreign imports; because

the nation’s iron production was underdeveloped, England was forced to rely upon countries like
Spain and Germany for manufactured iron goods. According to W. R. Childs, this “heavy
dependence on foreign iron” extended from the thirteenth century until at least the time of
Utopia’s publication.

167

The Statutes of the Realm dating from Edward IV’s reign make

apparent that England was nervously protective of the few manufactured iron goods that it was
capable of producing. Among the commodities that Edward IV prohibited from entering the
English shores, the statutes list “Aundirons, Gridirons, any manner of Locks, Hammers, Pinsons,
Fire Tongs [ … ] Harness for Girdles of Iron [ … ] Knives, Daggers, Wood-Knives [ … ] Sheers
for Taylors, Scissors, Razors [ … and ] blanch Iron Thread, commonly called White Wire”.

166

Scrivenor, History of the Iron Trade: From the Earliest Records to the Present Period.
(London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1854) 33. Print.
167
According to Childs, “the heavy dependence on foreign iron known to the sixteenth century
was present in the second half of the fifteenth century, and undoubtedly earlier. The amount
imported probably trebled in the late fifteenth century”. See “England’s Iron Trade in the
Fifteenth Century.” The Economic History Review 34.1 (1981): 46. Print.
133

These same items are repeated in Richard III’s catalog of prohibited imports, with the addition of
“nayles [with] Iron Shankes” and “Iron Candelstikk (of Iron [plate])”.

168

Conspicuously absent

from this list of everyday commodities are those most necessary for the defense of the state,
weaponry and armor. One might reasonably conclude from these state records that England was,
at least in part, reliant upon foreign nations for its own defense.
Neither Utopia nor England function as a self-contained, self-sustainable island nation,
despite its nationalist rhetoric. Economically, militarily and imperially tied to the continent, these
cultures are ideologically sustained by a flawed national narrative that posits geographic and
material autonomy and insularity as their defining traits. Utopus’s trench is an ineffaceable
symbol of this rhetorical falsity; the very attempt to remove the troublesome borderlands and to
identify with a pretended geographical space only reinforces the impossibility of such a plot.
Conclusion
Like Camden’s historiographical approach to writing England, Utopia is dependent upon
plotted-ness, both in terms of space and nationalist story-telling. Utopia itself is a text of
masterful literary framing. To lend an aura of authenticity to his fabulous account, More places
the narrative within an autobiographical framing linking him with his ambassadorial duties as
one of Henry VIII’s statesmen. This mechanism lends credibility to the tale embedded within the
historical frame. He also places his narrator in the world outside the text, as if Hythloday could
be called upon by the reader to account for More’s report. In the work’s supplemental material,
which seems intended almost entirely to give real-world validation to Hythloday’s otherworldly
narrative, More includes a letter to Peter Giles, appealing to his friend to locate Hythloday so that
More can protect his retelling against “anything [ … ] found which is untrue, neither anything be
168

Statues of the Realm. British History Online. http://www.britishhistory.ac.uk/catalogue.aspx?gid=83 . Web.
134

lacking which is true” (7). More even suggests that Hythloday serve as his editor before the
volume goes to print. More’s intricate framing mechanisms are satirical; his myriad frames are
not actually intended to lend factual credence to the chronicle of Utopia, but to further signal the
fiction’s fictionality. Utopia is a textual island, existing “no place” except, perhaps, in the
imagination of the official historians like Gildas and Bede, Hardyng and Grafton, and Camden
and Speed.
The territory of this textual island is also framed and plotted. Unnaturally bordered by the
ocean, every inch of Utopia is mapped, measured and put to productive use. Every movement by
the citizenry is likewise mapped and measured, assuring that the allegedly self-sufficient and
self-regulating population is serving the interests of the state and the supposedly self-contained
culture. But, the panoptical measures taken by the state to ensure this homogeneity logically
undermines the notion that the Utopians’ willingly give themselves up to this system. The
identical sameness of the cities, stripped of cultural and ethnic difference; the overdetermined
urban organization; the state-sanctioned travel of the citizenry within the island boundaries; the
isle; the uniformity and homogeneity is as unnatural and fantastic as the island itself. A
simulacrum of a non-existent England, Utopia expels from its falsified borders the ethnic and
cultural difference that was so vexing to medieval and early modern historians. The Scots’
violent refusal to bend to English imperial rule and their stubborn insistence upon their national
autonomy invalidated the notion of an English isle “agreeing all together in one tongue, in like
manners, institutions, and laws” (50). That Camden and Speed continued in the 16th and 17th
centuries to promulgate the myth of the England island nation attests to this “perfect tale’s”
absolute and impossibly plotted necessity.

135

Figure 1: Speed, John. “Frontispiece.” The History of Great Britaine Under the
Conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans. EEBO. Michigan State
University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published with the permission of ProQuest.
Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.
136

Figure 2: Drayton, Michael. “Frontispiece.” Poly-Olbion. EEBO. Michigan State
University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. By courtesy of the Department of Special
Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Images published
with the permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without
permission. For interpretation of the references to color in this and all other figures,
the reader is referred to the electronic version electronic of this dissertation.
137

Figure 3: “Woodcut from the first edition of Utopia (Louvain 1516).” Three Early
Modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis, The Isle of Pines. Ed. Susan Bruce. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1999.130.

138

Figure 4: Holbein, Ambrosius. “Woodcut of Utopia, as it appeared in the 1518 Basel edition
of the text.” Three Early Modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis, The Isle of Pines. Ed.
Susan Bruce. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 131.

139

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Chapter 2: Maps and Legends: Nationalist Allegories, Empire and Cartography
“Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent though long-delayed
political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns
them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures; that is a
reality, for better or worse, and in general an inescapable one. Those who are its historical
agents know not what they do, but that is another matter.”
The above quote from Ernest Gellner announces what is now a widely-accepted
acknowledgment of the constructed-ness of nations and nationhood: that nations are invented
entities, carved out of natural landscapes, ethnic and cultural identities and a rhetoric of shared
political and religious values. The unnaturalness of nations recognized by theorists like Gellner,
Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson is most explicitly asserted in maps.

169

Maps literally

illustrate the manufactured boundaries that distinguish one nation from another, laying bare the
geographic superficiality of national differentiations across continuous territories. Theorists of
cartography and international relations have long recognized that the visually uninteresting and
seemingly innocuous lines of the map carry an ideological charge that arbitrates social and
political relationships and silently underscores the violence often endemic to nation building.
169

In Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Hobsbawm expands upon Gellner’s assertion of the
artificiality of nations, concluding that “nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other
way round”. Anderson also cites Gellner’s work on the essential invented-ness of the nation but
diverges from Gellner’s implied claim that nationalism is akin to the “fabrication” of the national
political body “under false pretences”. Rather, Anderson draws attention to “the large cultural
systems”, such as the 18th century Western European turn to secularism and the development of
print culture, that undergirded the development of shared “national imaginings”. For Anderson,
nations as communities “are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style
in which they are imagined”. Finally, Imre Szeman considers the problem of the nation’s
conceptual artificiality from the perspective of postcolonial studies. He argues that, despite the
critical move toward post-national conceptions of post-imperial political bodies, the nation
continues to assert itself as an undeniable, if theoretically troubling, presence in postcolonial
literatures. See Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983) 48-9. Print.;
Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd edition
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) 10, 1-13. Print.; Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised edition (London: Verso, 2006) 6,
9, 12. Print.; and Szeman, Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Nation
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003) esp. 22-31. Print.
146

The instrumental destinies and fabricated identifications that make up the constructed nation
according to Gellner are sublimated in the modern map; absent on the surface of the represented
territory, they function silently below, undergirding the nation’s claim to historical endurance
and political autonomy. In contrast, the cartographic representations of nationhood from the early
modern period seem to wear the symbols of nationalist mythology on their sleeve; oftentimes,
the landmasses represented in these maps are flanked by symbols of royal authority, emblems of
the country’s national narrative and elaborate ethnographic illustrations. The natural, geographic
space sometimes feels like the passive template for the mapmaker’s politically determined visual
allegory. Gellner contends that “nations are not inscribed into the nature of things, they do not
constitute a political version of the doctrine of natural kinds”. This chapter supports Gellner’s
diametric opposition between the natural and the national by examining early modern
cartography and its literal and ideological inscription of the artificial nation onto representations
of “natural” geographic space.
In Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England, Richard Helgerson
contends that early modern maps made possible for the English public a sense of national
identity that sprung from the land, rather than from the person of the monarch. Though he
acknowledges that Christopher Saxton’s maps were commissioned by the Elizabethan state, he
maintains that Saxton’s atlas, the first major cartographic work to illustrate England and Wales,
“strengthened the sense of both local and national identity at the expense of an identity based on
dynastic loyalty”. By relegating the royal seal to the maps’ periphery, Saxton and John Speed’s
cartographic representations of England “showed royal authority—or at least its insignia—to be

147

170

a merely ornamental adjunct to that country”.

Helgerson argues that the placement of these

royal “ornaments” on the margins of the map produced in the body politic the recognition that
the land was itself a source of national pride, unhinged from the authority of the state and crown.
However, the land that Helgerson claims allowed for a kind of popular nationalism was
very much inscribed with the symbols of crown authority. The natural English lands were not
permitted to speak for themselves in early modern cartography; rather, the territory illustrated in
th

th

16 and 17 century maps was authorized by the state and authored by mapmakers working
under the aegis of the crown. As Richard L. Kagan and Benjamin Schmidt argue, “official
cartography” was an integral tool in nation and empire building: “royal mapmakers did more
than simply outline existing realms [ … ] They further endeavored to chart a state’s designs for
future expansion and to enunciate, in cartographic form, hopeful programs of state building”.

171

Though Kagan and Schmidt refer here to court cartographers in the state’s direct hire, one
could reasonably argue that mapmakers like Speed, who were commissioned and funded by
powerful members of the Elizabethan and Stuart government, could also be considered official
cartographers because they served the ideological needs of the state and crown by producing
their propagandistic texts. Peter Barber also argues along these lines, taking issue with one of
Helgerson’s primary claims regarding the diminishment of the royal seals on Saxton’s texts.
“Although Helgerson has argued that the relative insignificance of the royal arms on Saxton’s
maps [ … ] gave users an impression that the land was more important than the monarch”, he
contends, “there can be little doubt that at the time the imagery was intended to associate the

170

Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1992) 114. Print.
171
Ibid.
148

172

queen with all parts of her realm”.

Saxton’s maps may have had unintentional consequences,

producing a form of popular nationalism rooted in the land, as Helgerson asserts, but it’s
apparent from the maps’ production and content that the Elizabethan and Jacobean government
attempted to control the production of nationalist sentiment according to its own carefully
scripted rhetoric. The intervention of the crown in the production of Saxton’s atlas makes
apparent that the Elizabethan government sought to not only make use of Saxton’s cartography
to enforce its prerogative across the realm, but that it attempted to control the ornamental
language that gave the land its nationhood. Receiving lands in Suffolk from his royal patrons,
173

Saxton was rewarded for his contribution to the manufacture of the official nation.

As Helgerson rightly asserts, cartographic ornamentation is as meaningful in early
modern maps as the landmass being depicted; it is this marginal lexicon that gives the land its
national signification. However, the visual language of the English map was that of state
centralization and imperial fantasy. For instance, the royal insignia in Saxton’s map of England
is of such pronounced size that it looms over the island in a manner that is more authoritative—
in both senses of the word—than peripheral; one cannot “read” England without acknowledging
the crown’s overarching authority and its role in the nation’s authorship or conception. 16th and
17th century English maps were integral to the crown’s project to manufacture and promote a
state authorized vision of the nation. Imagining the English as an ethnically superior people
united under the figure of the king or queen, the maps of Speed and his predecessor Saxton
visually and ideologically supported “the myth of the island nation”. The English body politic in
172

See Barber, “Mapmaking in England, ca. 1470-1650,” The History of Cartography, 6 vols.
ed. David Woodward (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007) vol.3, part 2, 1629-30. Print.
173
See Barber 1624 and Laurence Worms, “The London Map Trade to 1640,” The History of
Cartography, 6 vols. ed. David Woodward (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007) vol.3 part 2, 16931721. Print.
149

these representations appears as an ordered and homogenous nation of people allegiant to the
royal will and poised for imperial rule over the territories of the archipelago. Some mapmakers,
such as John Speed so manipulated the natural territory of the largest of the British isles as to
make England appear as an island; the entirety of the Scotland is whited out and made visually
insignificant.
The state-endorsed and commissioned images constructed in early modern maps did not
reflect the political realities of the Elizabethan and Stuart period; efforts at centralization were
thwarted by regional differences in law and custom; the English government was unable to
control its territories in Ireland and the borderlands between England, Scotland and Wales; and
the state was facing its own internal crises of authority, as the following chapters demonstrate.
The official nationalist lexicon of emblems, insignias and cartographic embellishments is
intended to guide the map-viewers’ reading of the early modern English landscape and to
ideologically mask the obstacles to nation building faced by the Elizabethan and Stuart regimes.
By glossing over England’s regional distinctiveness, erasing evidence of the violent ethnic
clashes within the archipelago and enveloping the British Isles in the symbols of unification, the
symbolic allegories literally over-wrote the land, projecting “the island” as a stable political
space. Ironically, in the case of Speed’s maps, the landmasses—the supposedly intended object
of the map-reader’s gaze—are visually overpowered by the illustrations and symbols that make
up Speed’s nationalist allegory. Indeed, rather than supplementing nature and subtly shaping the
reader’s perceptions of England along the lines of national identity, Speed’s overanxious
ornamentation instead draws the viewer’s attention to the artificiality of Speed’s island England
and of constructed nationhood more generally.

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This chapter will examine the role of Speed’s cartographic texts in the production of
official nationalist and imperial discourse during the reign of James I. I will consider how the
anxieties of the state regarding nation and empire building register in Speed’s symbolic
narratives. Specifically, I will examine how Speed’s cartographic landscapes underscore the
rhetorical incongruities present in the state’s conjoined discourses of nation and empire. Imperial
rhetoric of the period was reliant upon the notion of a deeply historical British character that
enveloped the people of the archipelago. According to this official narrative, Britain’s
geographic uniqueness and insularity contributed to the shared ethnicity and genealogy of the
British people. English nationalist rhetoric, on the other hand, often deployed the myth of the
island nation to buttress claims to England’s political, cultural and geographic centrality and
superiority within this archipelagic unit. Such nationalist mythologies necessarily depended upon
the denigration and essential ethnic difference of England’s British neighbors, as chapter one
demonstrated. These two strands of official discourse—the imperial thread that was predicated
upon the notion of a fundamental British-ness shared by the archipelagic body politic, and the
nationalist tenor, which presupposed the essential ethnic difference between the people of the
“English island” and their British brethren—are both at work in Speed’s maps and coexist
incongruously in the pages of his Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine. Speed’s maps were
among the products of the crown’s official nationalist program; as such, his maps register the
anxieties of the state. By grafting onto the British Isles an overdetermined and sometimes
contradictory rhetoric of nationhood and empire, Speed’s maps betray both the crises of English
governance and the flimsiness and instability of the manufactured nation.
Popular literature of the early modern period often put into boldface the weaknesses and
contradictions of official discourse. In part two of this chapter, I provide an analysis of

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Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The Sea Voyage to consider
how these texts expose the incongruities of the nationalist and imperial mythologies visually
narrated in Speed’s maps. Both works are invested in matters of geography and consider how
geographic location imbues subjects of particular territories with qualities that supposedly spring
from the land itself. The topic of the land’s effect on subjects traversing or inhabiting alien
regions was a preoccupation of early modern writers, particularly when hierarchically ordering
the lands of the British archipelago. Colonial discourses, such as those illustrated in Speed’s
representation of Ireland, imagined the people of Wales and Ireland as inherently uncivil and
thus in need of the regulating hand of the English state. English travelers to Ireland were
routinely warned of the island’s contaminating influence. Such discourses supported notions of
English superiority but put great pressure on the notion of an ancient and enduring British-ness
that spanned the archipelago’s disconnected territories.
Cymbeline and The Sea Voyage appear to critique imperial rhetoric based upon
geographic distinctions by refusing the abstracted and ideologically suspect characterizations of
England, Ireland and Wales found in official texts like Speed’s Theatre. Both plays make use of
the same materials deployed by Speed to construct his problematic representations of the Isles.
For instance, one can trace in Speed’s maps Spenser’s damning portrayal of the Irish in his View
of the Present State of Ireland. Likewise, the mythological rendering of Cymbeline in Geoffrey
of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles and Speed’s
own History of Great Britaine is employed by Speed in his “Kingdome of Great Britaine and
Ireland” to lend a veneer of celebrated antiquity to his visual narration of contemporary Britain.
Taking up these same materials of nationalist and imperial rhetoric, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline
and Fletcher and Massinger’s Sea Voyage render these official narratives problematic, putting

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pressure upon claims to a celebrated British genealogy and dismantling the notion, supported by
official cartography, that geography forms the basis of ethnic and cultural superiority. In the
process, these two plays betray the rhetorical contradictions underpinning Speed’s maps and
expose the tenuousness of English nationalist and imperial discourse.
By reading cartographic and literary texts side by side, the aporias and intentional
misconstructions of the early modern map rise to the surface of the overwritten visual document.
Whereas the claims or narratives of histories and literary texts demand rhetorical or textual
justification and explanation, cartographic works produce silent stories, unsubstantiated by
evidence. J.B. Harley argues in The New Nature of Maps that the cartographic silencing of
political, cultural and imperial disputes is central to the map’s ideological rhetoric. He
th

specifically cites 17 century maps of Ireland as instances of meaningful silences: he contends
that “maps—just as much as examples of literature or the spoken word—exert a social influence
through their omissions as much as by the features they depict and emphasize [ … ] So forceful
are the political undercurrents in these silences that it is sometimes difficult to explain them
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solely by recourse to other historical or technical factors”.

As I argue in the second half of

this chapter, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Fletcher and Massinger’s Sea Voyage give voice to
the historiographical, geographical and governmental crises suppressed by the early modern
map.
Perfecting Nature: Early Modern Cartographic Allegories
The poet’s process of bringing form and correctness to nature is not unlike the
mapmaker’s project: the cartographer’s mechanisms are brought to bear upon what was once an

174

Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of
Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001) 67. Print.
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imperfectly understood natural landscape. The rewriting of historical records and the representation of the nation were often necessary tasks to produce an ideologically successful
rhetorical or visual narrative. Contemporary theories of poetics, such as those asserted by Philip
Sidney and George Puttenham, drew upon Aristotle, who advocated a kind of poetic license that
permitted revisions to history. According to Aristotle, the historical record when subject to the
poet’s pen could be manipulated for the sake of a coherent plot. Because the plot is the chief
“end” of a poetic or dramatic work, “it is the function of a poet to relate not things that have
happened, but things that may happen; i.e. that are possible in accordance with probability or
necessity”.

175

th

“Necessity” for both Aristotle and his 16 century inheritors is not simply a

matter of artistry or plot, but of social necessity as well; poetic texts are instructional and
therefore the poet may alter history’s raw material to reflect “things as they should be”. The
application of these poetic principles allowed Speed and Saxton to build into their scientific
representations of the natural landscape an allegorical language that rewrote English history and
plotted an unlikely imperial future. Their maps pictorially imagine a historically expansive
English nation with genealogical roots in Roman Britain. The unified territorial body of Saxton
and Speed’s England, in which the separate counties are barely delineated, visually suggests a
consolidated body politic joined in a single identity under the subjects’ allegiance to the crown
176

and unique “island” character.

In his creative manipulation of unshaped material, like

175

Aristotle, Poetics. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, trans. Richard Janko, ed.
Vincent B. Leitch. (New York: Norton, 2001) 95 and 97. Print.
176
My analysis takes as its focus early modern representations of the English, Scottish and Irish
nations, and the more encompassing maps of the isles as a political unit. The rationale for this
emphasis on country and archipelagic maps, rather than the many county and estate maps in
circulation during the period, is as follows: it is my contention that the primary ideological
message of these atlases and collections is one of national or imperial unity and coherence. This
message is achieved, in part, through the introductory cartographic image of the archipelago,
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unmapped land or unformed language, the mapmaker oftentimes occupied the position of poet,
altering the raw material of the archipelago’s conflictive history to present a sense of unity,
coherence and concord.
Nature is also subordinate to the poet, according to Sidney; relegating nature to the
malleable material of the poet’s craft, the poet “doth grow in effect another nature [ … ] or quite,
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anew, forms such as never were in nature”.

Nature left alone fails to delineate the nation: the

signposts of nationhood—emblems of national identity, like flags and crests, country and county
borderlines and scriptural pronouncements of possessed territories—are absent from natural
landscapes, leaving no impressions of royal or state ownership and authority. Like the monarch
who subjects his or her peoples and the lands they occupy to the royal will, the poet wrests
history and nature from the staid and problematic realm of factuality to invent new, often
politicized, worlds. The mapmaker reins in the land, enclosing within the map’s geometrically
perfect borders the rugged natural terrain. In this process, the mapmaker, most importantly, gives
ideologically charged meaning to the landscape, inventing a newly conceived natural body by
applying a carefully constructed allegorical language to the land itself. In the case of early
modern maps, the language that supplements and gives form to the land is a nationalist lexicon
of unnatural borders, symbols of history and “decorative” elements that create nature anew.
artistically projected as a harmonious and unified political unit through the use of decorative
borders, which contain the various geographical, political and ethnic bodies within a single
frame. The impression of British unity under the English crown is also formally or textually
enforced by binding in a single nationalist volume the counties, annexed territories and
oftentimes disharmonious nations of the archipelago. The ideological containment of the isles
within a nationalist or imperial frame, which is arguably the purpose of such cartographic and
historiographic texts, is reproduced in the atlases’ aesthetic and formal qualities. For a detailed
discussion of William Camden and Michael Drayton’s county maps and their contribution to a
kind of aristocratic nationalist sentiment, see Helgerson’s chapter “The Land Speaks” in Forms
of Nationhood (cited above).
177
Sidney, Philip. An Apology for Poetry and Astrophil and Stella Ed. Peter C. Herman (Glen
Allen: College Publishing, 2001) 64. Print.
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The mapmaker must impose form and meaning upon nature through cartographic
allegory, like the poet imposes his or her will upon language, history and nature, and like the
monarchy imposes its prerogative upon its subjects and lands. My use of the term “cartographic
allegory” is influenced by the work of Jess Edwards, who contends in his essay “How to Read an
Early Modern Map”, that cartographic texts of this period are distinctly literary in their modes of
representing and giving meaning to the land. He argues that the metaphors and allegories that
undergird cartographic representations are what give the mathematical or scientific content of the
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map its “meaning, value and currency”. Thus, he maintains, “geography is itself a poetic art”.

The nation is forged and maintained through the inscription of law, authority and the necessary,
if forced, allegiance of the social body to the national or monarchical will; but it is also visually

178

Edwards demonstrates that the rhetoric of “waste” and “improvement” that was applied to
common lands in England during the enclosure movements was also used to justify the seizure of
lands in the New World. According to this discourse, “defective” or misused nature was made
economically viable, in part, through cartography’s mathematical ordering of the land.
Edwards’s focus on the dependent relationship between visual representation and the politically
driven rhetorical strategies that undergird these representations is akin to my argument regarding
the mapmaker’s perfection of nature. Like the relationship between legal discourses that allowed
the English to “make use” of English and American wastelands, cartographic poetics silently
informed one’s reading of the supposedly mathematical representations of the natural landscape.
See Edwards, “‘Nature in Defect’: Yielding Landscapes in Early Modern Discourses of
Enclosure and Colonisation.” Studies in Travel Writing: Papers from the Essex Symposium on
‘Writing Travels’ 4 (2000): 1-28. Print. Jeffrey N. Peters also examines the meeting of
cartography and the poetic arts; in his research on the allegorical maps of 17th century France, he
asserts that the map’s “meaning is created through a tension between scientific and figural
language”. Peters considers the more literal forms of cartographic allegory, in which, for
instance, the emotional life of a literary character is rendered cartographically, as in the case of
Madeleine de Scudéry’s 1654 Carte de Tendre. My use of the term cartographic allegory refers
to the way ideological meanings are grafted onto scientific representations of the land through
the use of “ornaments” or “embellishments’, such as decorative borders, illustrations, seals and
other demarcations of state power. See Edwards “How to Read an Early Modern Map: Between
the Particular and the General, the Material and the Abstract, Words and Mathematics.” Early
Modern Literary Studies 9.1 (2003):1-58, Academic One File. Web. 5 Jan. 2010 and Peters,
Mapping Discord: Allegorical Cartography in Early Modern French Writing. (Cranbury:
Associated University Presses, 2004) 38. Print.
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constructed and enforced through the mapmaker’s emendations to nature. Early modern
cartographic allegories make use of poetic principles of creation and manipulation to both
rework the symbols of history in order to give nationalist purpose to England’s historical record
and to shape the natural landscape to meet the geopolitical demands of state and nation-building.
Artifice penetrates the natural realm to give it particular significations, making the natural
landscape speak as a political one.
“Industria Naturam Ornat”
Saxton, long regarded as the first cartographer of the English nation, literally built the
foundations of Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine; Speed not only carried on
Saxton’s tradition of ornamenting the British landscape, he also used Saxton’s maps as his
master narrative, embellishing Saxton’s maps to construct his visual history of English
nationhood. To understand Speed’s cartographic allegories, one must first attend to Saxton’s
method of supplementing the natural landmasses of the isles with a specifically nationalist
vocabulary. Saxton’s map of England that introduces his Atlas of the Counties of England and
Wales provides the modern reader of the early map with some sense of the relationship between
nature, artifice and nationhood. In the bottom right corner of Saxton’s representation of “Anglia”
one discovers the crest of his patron, Thomas Seckford, who served the Elizabethan government
first as master of the Requests, then as “surveyor of the Court of Wards and Liveries” (fig. 5).
Seckford’s crest bears the Latin phrase “Industria naturam ornat”, roughly translated as
“industry, nature, ornament”.

179
180

180

In the context of Saxton’s arduous task of surveying and

Helgerson, 109.

In an article on Saxton, J. B. Harley translates Seckford’s motto as “hardwork improves
things”. However, taken individually, these terms in reference to the maps upon which they
appear point to the meeting of industry, nature and ornament that is integral to the art of early
157

179

mapping the whole of England and Wales, Seckford’s motto likely refers to the advancement of
English cartographic practices. Saxton’s industry made possible a kind of cartographic
knowledge of the English nation that was much needed in matters of national defense and
English identity.
However, one can detect in the root words of Seckford’s motto and in the elaborate
decorations of Saxton’s maps another manner of improvement that does not speak directly to the
scientific precision of Saxton’s cartographic representation. The English territory in Saxton’s
map is hemmed in by illustrations and ornamental seals; busy ships man the English waters,
seemingly protecting the vulnerable coastlines; an overlarge crest announcing the territory as
“Anglia” is nearly larger in size than the regions of Ireland and Scotland that border the English
“island”; this looming crest is, of course, topped by the English royal seal, and Ireland is
obscured by an index of the English counties to be depicted in the following pages. These
instances in which the map-maker ornaments geography speaks to a kind of nationalist industry,
a careful and deliberate placement of images and symbols through which the natural territory
becomes literally imprinted with the signifiers of nationhood, effectively (and affectively)
transforming land into territory, nature into nation.
Accordingly, the visual lexicons of early modern maps—the crests, plans and decorative
features that are oftentimes considered “ornamentation”—should not be regarded as mere
marginalia to fill the empty spaces surrounding the territories. What Harley terms the “valueladen images” that give nationalist articulation to the land, are part of map-making’s long
history, a history in which cartographic representations cannot be linked to a single biography.
modern map-making. See Harley, “Christopher Saxton and the first Atlas of England and Wales,
1579-1997,” The Map Collector (1 September 1979) 11 January 2010 Note to illustration above
paragraph 6. Web.

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He claims that “deliberate distortions of map content for political purposes can be traced
throughout the history of maps, and the cartographer has never been an independent artist,
craftsman, or technician”. By identifying the “rules” or language that provides signification to
the map, one can locate the state’s imprint upon the represented territory and thus tease out from
map the “set of power relations” that undergird the map’s production.

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In the case of early

modern cartography, the crown imposes itself upon the land in such a manner that the
cartographer and the immediate patron sometimes barely register in the language of the map. The
overbearing symbols of royal authority in these maps make plain the crown’s control of both the
land itself and the cartographic language that gives this land its meaning.
Saxton’s maps were central to the crown and state project to fashion the official English
nation; Saxton’s exaggerated markers of English ownership and his visual colonization of Ireland
ideologically contributed to statist notions of English identity and superiority. As Barber
explains, the commission of Saxton’s maps by Lord Burghley was for the purposes of “national
defense” and, perhaps, for the administration of the territories. Though Saxton’s atlas was by no
means consistent in its content, “spasmodic attempts were made on some of the maps to enhance
their value as aids to government by showing internal divisions, enumerating the number of
parishes and market towns and, more consistently, by showing the parks and indicating noble
houses [ … ] All of this information would have assisted administrators in assessing taxes,

181

See Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power”, 53 and 63. In his chapter “The Land Speaks”
from Forms of Nationhood, Helgerson argues that the eventual disappearance of Seckford’s arms
marks “a momentous transfer of cultural authority from the patron and the royal system of
government of which patronage was an integral part to the individual maker” (111). One of my
contentions is that the reappearance of and strong visual emphasis on the royal seals in Speed’s
maps implies, at least in some respects, the return of the royal authorizing hand to the
cartographic representations of nation and empire in early modern cartography.
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raising musters, and elucidating local problems”.

182

Evidence also indicates that Burghley and

even Elizabeth herself had a hand in the development of the ornamental language that gave
national meaning to the representation of the land. Barber explains that Saxton’s maps likely
lacked ornamentation prior to their engraving. He suggests that the decoration so central to the
maps’ statist intentions was inserted by state itself:
The choice of arms and mottoes on the printed maps were presumably stipulated
by Seckford, in consultation with Burghley and possibly the queen herself. She is
said to have taken exception to the unflattering depiction of her robes on the first
state of the frontispiece to the atlas, leading to their more naturalistic portrayal on
183

the second state.

As explained above, the Elizabethan government needed the assistance of cultural
producers like Saxton to build and disseminate an officially authorized vision of the English
nation. Official nationalism—a state project to impose a homogenous national identity upon an
ethnically, culturally and spiritually disunited people—is a phenomenon that aptly applies to
Elizabethan and Stuart England. The British archipelago was as fragmented as its geographically
disjointed territories. The ongoing perseverance of ethnic differences and identities across the
islands loudly disclaimed the state’s rhetoric of British unification. Distinctions between local
cultures and customs within England, let alone between England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales,
were made manifest in legal suits and in the localities’ sometimes refusal to adhere to royal
policy, thus disallowing the state’s attempts at centralization. The Reformation and counterReformation exacerbated these fissures and created further tears in an already fragile social
fabric.
183

Barber, 1629.
160

The state’s deployment of the language of empire further compounded these ideological
discontinuities. Though Henry VIII’s declaration of 1533 claimed for England the status of
“empire”, the state’s measures to consolidate the British archipelago seem more akin to the
construction of a unified English state across the island territories. For instance, the enforcement
of English language, law and custom in Wales and the eventual annexation of the Welsh nation
to England produced the impression that the incorporation of this once autonomous region was
really an expansion of England into newly appropriated territory. The rhetoric of annexation that
made Wales part of the English island could not be applied to Scotland, an independent
kingdom; instead, the discourse of British-ness was deployed to politically suture Scotland to
England. Arguably, this envelopment of the Scottish and English territories under the banner of
British unification was, in political reality, another attempt over a long historical trajectory to
enforce claims of English suzerainty over Scotland. Neither the language of annexation nor of
unification could be smoothly applied to Ireland, due to the island’s geographic separation from
the English center and its fierce resistance to English rule. The colonial rhetoric used to describe
the Irish put pressure on the discourse of British-ness by casting the Irish as both genealogically
British and therefore a part the unified British archipelago and a savage people under the rule of
the English. In each case, “British-ness” was often a codeword for Englishness; thus, the English
imperial project was also a process of expanding the English state infrastructure across the
archipelagic territories.

184

184

As referenced in chapter one, John Morrill also comments upon the English’s refusal to call
themselves British. As he explains, “If they use it at all it is without any sense that it is other than
a synonym for English.” See his introduction to The British Problem, c. 1534-1707: State
Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago eds. Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill. (Houndmills:
Macmillan, 1996) 10. Print. Willy Maley has also taken up this question in his examination of
canonical early modern literature, arguing that “even as [Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and
others] forge a new British identity [they are] producing the very English culture that is
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The simultaneous and conjoined state projects to construct both the English island nation
and the British archipelagic empire resulted in certain inescapable rhetorical incongruities.
English imperial rhetoric often depended upon the notion of a shared and ancient British-ness
that bound together the people of the isles. Geographic proximity and archipelagic uniqueness
were also ideas that were frequently called upon to support British imperial ideologies; Britain’s
“otherworldly” character (to borrow Jeffrey Knapp’s term) as a set of islands disconnected from
the rest of the world implied a “naturally” ubiquitous British identity across the territories that
defined the peoples of the archipelago as essentially alike in constitution, manner and
genealogy.

185

Because the English state was the biggest investor in the manufacture of this

“British identity”, Britishness and Englishness were often elided, as described above; thus, the
production of the British character meant the promotion of English values, customs, law, etc.
over the disjointed British Isles. However, these state claims to essential British sameness
necessarily ran contrary to a second strand of English state rhetoric. The subjugation of the Irish,
Scottish and Welsh to the English center demanded that these members of British family be cast
as essentially different and inherently inferior to the English, who sought to control their
territories and institute their laws and language throughout the archipelago. Even in the very
texts that sought to evince a deep history of British unity within the archipelagic unit, there
contradictorily exists alongside these rhetoric strains the contention that the Irish, Scottish and
Welsh, in both their ancient and contemporary form, are fundamentally “other” and essentially
threatened by this enlarged polity.” See Maley, Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance
Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 3. Print. Krishan
Kumar takes a somewhat opposing view of the conflation of English-ness and British-ness,
contending that the construction of a properly English national identity was interrupted or
subsumed by the process of empire building. See Kumar, The Making of English National
Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). esp 1-17. Print.
185
Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The
Tempest. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992) 4. Print.
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inferior and therefore demand the civilizing influence of the English. Such claims to English
superiority were reinforced through English mapmaking, particularly through the visual
depiction of the “English island” as the cultural, social and governmental heart of this empire. By
manipulating geography’s raw material and intricately embellishing the British landmasses,
some English maps, especially Speed’s, relegate the Irish, Welsh and Scottish territories to an
imagined periphery, and imbue England with a pretended island-ness that visually and
ideologically endorses the idea of English centrality.
The production of the British domestic empire, which necessitated the grafting of a single
identity upon heterogeneous and often contentious social bodies, and the simultaneous and
contradictory project to differentiate England from its inferior British brethren was an impossible
yet fundamental task in the project of English nation-building during the early modern period.
The careful construction of the English (and sometimes British) national character via literary,
cartographic and historical works that spanned the regions of the disunited archipelago would
aesthetically achieve that which frustrated and eluded the English state: English control of the
British territories and the allegiance of the archipelagic subjects to the English crown and state.
By “stretching the short, tight, skin of the nation over the [ … ] body of the empire”, in Benedict
Anderson’s words, English official nationalism attempted to envelop under a single imperial
banner the Welsh, Irish and Scottish, as well as the various ethnicities that peopled the English
mainland, while concurrently securing England’s status as the sovereign nation ruling over its
imperial territories.

186

In this respect, Saxton’s ornamentation in “Anglia” encourages a specific reading of the
British Isles, one that aligned with statist interests (fig. 6). For instance, Saxton’s obfuscated
186

Anderson, 86.
163

Ireland is hardly without ideological import. That Ireland is nearly covered over with a list of the
English territories to be included in the atlas visually implies that Ireland can be counted among
these English territories. Literally overwritten, Ireland appears in Saxton’s “Anglia” as a blank
slate, poised for English rule. The effect of this dual overlay is to deemphasize Ireland as a
separate and autonomous national body, making it instead a placemarker for inscriptions of
English national identity. Engraving England (its counties, its distinct forms of cartographic
embellishment) onto the Irish Isle “perfects” Ireland by visually negating Ireland’s political
autonomy and allegorically fulfilling England’s imperial “destiny” to rule the British Isles.
Reinforcing the imperial mythology that sees Ireland rewritten as English is a pair of
intertwined figures positioned between the coasts of the two nations, just east of Dublin. The
naked female figure, aligned with Ireland because of her comparative nearness to Hibernia, is
clasped in the arms of a trident-wielding male figure. Aside from the mythological associations
that can be read into this image (the Aphrodite-like female sits in what appears to be a shell, and
the trident, of course, reminds one of Poseidon), the image also recalls the gendered myths of
empire that imagine a fertile female national body or territory, awaiting a colonizing male hand.
That this imperial hand is English is made clear by the overlarge crest dominating the top right
corner of the map. The crest announcing the land as “Anglia” is roughly a third the size of the
English territory depicted and, as mentioned above, is nearly bigger in size than both “Scotie
Pars” and Hiberniæ Pars”. This piece of ornamentation includes not just an announcement of the
represented landmass, but also the English royal crest, a celebration of Elizabeth and a greatly
ornamented border that threatens to intrude upon the English land itself, nearly touching the
coast of Robin Hood’s Bay. Below the crest sits Seckford’s coat of arms; the two cartographic
embellishments are surrounded by the presumably English ships that crowdedly circle the

164

English coast. Lastly, the scale line that sits in the Irish Sea, just west of the Bristol Channel, is
exaggerated in size. The scale line itself—the only scientific tool provided the reader in order to
correctly understand the mathematics behind this representation—is dwarfed by elaborated
decorations that appear to celebrate English cartography and the artists whose hands created the
work.
Saxton’s cartographic embellishments depict the meeting of nature and ornament in a
project of visual and allegorical nation building through map-making. The writing of “Anglia” as
an autonomous nation with an imperial destiny takes place not only within the borders of the
England cartographically represented by Saxton, but also outside the archipelago’s natural
coastlines in the symbols, seals and illustrations that “decorate” the map. These illustrations are
not innocuous marginal commentary; rather, they inflect one’s “reading” of the territory,
mystifying this landscape through the distorting and unnatural lens of official nationalist
discourse. Grafting onto the English geographic landscape a visual narrative of “what ought to be
the case” according to the state, Saxton alters nature to produce the official nation.
Speed’s Imperfect Nation
As Saxton’s successor, Speed took Saxton’s embellishments to new extremes; Speed’s
ornaments sit atop the natural environment of the Isles, calling attention to their incongruity
within the cartographic landscape. Unlike Saxton, who managed to blend his loud
pronouncements of English nationalism into the map’s overall language, Speed overwhelms his
England with illustrations, Roman coins, cherubs wielding cartographic instruments and
ethnographic catalogs of isle’s inhabitants. In so doing, Speed’s maps unwittingly demonstrate
the resounding chasm between the natural land and the nationalist inscriptions that attempt to
overwrite it. The conceptual gap between natural territory and the conscripted national and

165

political body unintentionally betrays the artificiality of the official nation and the flimsiness of
such nationalist constructions. Thus, Speed’s anxious and overwrought ornamentation belies
state and monarchical anxieties regarding the impassable evidence of British disunity that
consistently undermines and threatens to undo such official representations of English
nationalism.
Speed rose to prominence through the intervention of the Elizabethan and Stuart
statesman Fulke Greville. Greville’s celebrated career as an agent of the state is made evident by
his many titles and positions within early modern political culture; as “secretary to the
principality of Wales, treasurer of the navy, and chancellor of the exchequer”, Greville was later
187

made Baron Brooke under James I.

As the mapmaker’s patron, Greville secured the funding

of the queen for Speed’s cartographic work and provided him a state position in the Customs.
Speed’s work for the state and crown also awarded him official passes and subsidies to survey
the countryside, as well as access to state documents. He was personally rewarded by the crown
for his effort to construct the nation, receiving lands from the crown’s hands.

188

Speed also

included on the back of his maps information central to the administration of the realm, making
his collections tools of not just ideology but of governance as well. As Nigel Nicolson notes,
such detailed catalogs of the British landscape read like “prospectus[es] for an American
colony”, in which the land’s greatest features are played up to encourage British investment.

187

189

"Greville, Sir Fulke, first Baron Brooke" The Oxford Companion to English Literature ed.
Dinah Birch. Oxford U P Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Ed. Dinah Birch.
Oxford Reference Online. Web. 12 April 2010.
188
See Nigel Nicolson’s introduction to his The Counties of Britain: A Tudor Atlas by John
Speed (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988) 7-19. Print. Also, Barber 1636 and Worms 1717.
Print.
189
Nicolson, 12.
166

Such celebrations of Ireland or Scotland’s resources would serve the same purpose for the more
wealthy Londoners who were most likely to encounter Speed’s vision of the English empire in
his cartographic texts. Englishmen willing to enter the Irish colonies were, of course, of great
value to an English crown with too little manpower to effectively achieve conquest. In this
regard, Speed’s maps directly served state interests by visually supporting English hegemony
over the isles and by promoting imperial ventures.
As Nicolson explains, “Speed considered himself primarily an historian”. The maps of
his Theatre were intended as “supplements” to his History of Great Britaine Under the
Conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans, which was also published in 1611.

190

Speed’s royalist History is similar in organization and content to William Camden’s Britannia,
from which he borrowed material; seeking to provide a fluid nationalist narrative “from Julius
Caesar to our Most Gracious Sovereign King James”, as the frontispiece announces, Speed’s
History constructs a British genealogy, beginning with the pre-Roman ancient Britons and
191

concluding with the creation of James’s unified Great Britain.

The reader of the History is

ushered into the narrative through an archway in which an ancient and slightly larger “Britaine”
stands on the platform above the Saxon and Norman to his left and the “Romane” and Dane to
his right (see fig. 1). In the center of this illustration is the title “Britannia”, flanked by two
Roman coins contained within the History that bear her mythological figure; this coin reappears
in Speed’s map of “The Kingdome of Great Britaine and Ireland”. In introducing his History

190
191

Ibid, 10.

Speed, The History of Great Britaine Under the Conquests of Ye Romans, Saxons, Danes
and Normans (1611) EEBO. Web. 20 March 2010. Frontispiece. Speed was also a silent
collaborator in the creation of Holinshed’s Chronicles, which similarly attempted a cohesive and
coherent nationalist history. Unless otherwise noted, all future citations of this work refer to this
edition.
167

with this ethnographic catalog of England’s forefathers, Speed brings into a pretended historical
unity the various ethnicities of early modern England and advocates an English nationalism
192

founded in a shared ancient past.

Speed’s frontispiece speaks to the History’s larger project, to compose a testament to
Britain’s historical and political endurance, its genealogical roots in ancient Rome and his king’s
crowning achievement, the unification of Great Britain. The Roman coins that appear in both the
History and its companion piece, Speed’s cartographic Theatre, provide these complementary
narratives of the isles with a classical veneer, in keeping with the myths of British origin
propagated by historians like Geoffrey of Monmouth in his 12th century Historia Regum
Britanniae. Such originary myths are fundamental to the construction and promotion of a sense
of shared national identity and imperial purpose. As Anthony B. Smith explains, nation-building
is dependent upon these myths and their symbols in order to sustain a people’s political identity:
the “myths, symbols, memories and values of ethnic communities and nations” are, in Smith’s
view, “the main elements of collective continuity and cultural distinctiveness”.

193

Speed’s

organizational strategy in his History implies that this narrative of collective identity fittingly
concludes with James’s reign, in which the king “in this last age of the World held the Scepter of
the whole Iland in his royall hand, so to unite the two stiles under the same of one entire

192

Speed’s frontispiece to his History also appears as the title page of his Theatre. Helgerson
has argued that this representation of British genealogical history underscored for contemporary
historians like Samuel Daniels the fundamental “discontinuity” in the British narrative. An
equally viable interpretation, however, is that Speed’s hierarchical placement of these
representative figures and their regal appearance marks an attempt to bring order to the historical
record and to imagine an idealized and mythological “Britaine” destined to rule the Isles.
Helgerson, 121-22.
193
Smith, The Antiquity of Nations (Cambridge: Pearson, 2004) 19. Print.
168

Empire”.

194

To reinforce the closed nature of this historical narrative, Speed reminds his readers

that James’s title of “King of great Britaine” accords with “the ancient name of this Isle before
the Saxons Conquest, the restoring of which name againe, many fore-dooming spirits had
195

anciently presaged, as now we see effected”.

The silent hierarchical ordering of these representative figures on the History’s
frontispiece, in which the overlarge ancient Britaine pronounces the destined rule of the Britaines
over the Isles, achieved during James’s reign, exemplifies what Eric Hobsbawm terms an
“invented tradition”. Speed draws “ancient materials” from the “well-supplied warehouses of
official ritual [… and] symbolism” to reinforce an often artificial history through the repetition of
nationalist narratives. As Hobsbawm explains, recuperated symbols can be recycled into a new
context and “normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past” (emphasis
added).

196

Speed himself attests to the fragility of his historical materials; however, he

reconciles possible untruths in his narrative by turning to the type of historical license promoted
by Aristotle and Sidney. Acknowledging that “the Records of Great Britaine are eaten up with
Time’s teeth”, he appeals to the reader by citing Jean Bodin, asking the reader to
give leave to Antiquity, who sometimes mingleth falshoods with truth, to make
the beginnings of Policies seeme more honourable; And whose power is farre
served into the worlds conceit, that with Hierome we may say, Antiquity is

194
195
196

Speed, The History of Great Britaine, 916.
Ibid.

See Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s “Introduction” to The Invention of Tradition. Eds.
Hobsbawm and Ranger. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983) 6, 1. Print. It is important to note
that Hobsbawm locates this national myth-making in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
However, this argument regarding the use—and misuse—of “ancient materials to construct
invented traditions of a novel type for quite novel purposes” seems particularly relevant here.
169

allowed with such generall applause, that knowne untruths many times are
197

pleasing unto many.

Among the “knowne untruths” of Speed’s genealogical history is the notion that the contesting
ethnicities represented in the frontispiece progressively culminated in the crowning Britaine that
stands atop this hierarchy. Such a harmonious visual allegory of course erases the violent
meeting of these groups and the successive conquests of the isles that put obvious pressure on
Speed’s romanticized image of James’s autonomous and culturally homogenous British empire.
Likewise, Speed’s problematic rendering of Britain’s ancient past and his contention that “the
English Empire [was] peaceably established, both by, and unto this peaceable Monarch”
th

evacuates from the contemporary historical record the ethnic violence that characterized 16 and
th

198

17 century Britain under English rule.

As visual compliments to this royalist history, the maps of Speed’s Theatre bear the
markings of a statist agenda invested in remaking English history through cartographic allegory.
The act of historical invention that we witness in his multivolume History also underpins his
visual Theatre. The state’s yet unachieved projects of national unity and imperial conquest are
narrated on Speed’s maps as though they are a matter of national record, rather than longed-for
but elusive accomplishments. In Speed’s visual history, the Irish are conquered and relegated to
the margins of their own land, the borderlands between Wales and England have disappeared,

197
198

Speed, 153-154.

Speed (1650), 911. Speed does record the rebellions against James, including The
Gunpowder Plot; however, he ends his narrative of James’s rule lamenting “this last foule blot of
infamy” and anticipating a glorious future under the “raigne of this mighty Monarch, our learned
and wise Soveraigne”.
170

and the English “island” is an undivided canvas of national unity. In this sense, Speed alters the
English national narrative to reflect statist and crown initiatives as historical givens.
The map which opens Speed’s Theatre, “The Kingdome of Great Britaine and Ireland”
brings into an ordered and visually harmonious display what was in political reality a contentious
grouping of ethnicities. Speed rubs out the Welsh border, and there is no clear demarcation
between Scotland and England (fig. 7).

199

Despite the 1536 Act of Union that led to the

assimilation of the Welsh into English political culture, social and institutional differences
between the two regions persisted into James’s reign. For instance, the Council of the Marches,
th

the governmental and judicial body planted by the English in the late 15 century that oversaw
cases on the Welsh border, was a point of contestation during James’s rule. The controversy and
political wrangling regarding Welsh jurisdiction over the English border shires reinscribed the
200

political boundaries that Speed’s maps attempt to abolish.

As Peter Roberts notes, James

himself was invested in remarking the geographic and political boundaries between Wales and
his united British kingdom; seeking to preserve the custom of treating Wales as the training
ground for future Kings, James revived the title of principality for Wales.

201

Such debates about

the status of Wales as an incorporated yet semi-autonomous body politic cast doubt upon

199

Speed, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1612) EEBO Michigan State Univesity
Lib. 25 July 2012. Web. All future citations refer to this edition.
200
For a discussion of the debates surrounding the Council and its jurisdiction during James’s
reign, see Peter Roberts “The English Crown, the Principality of Wales and the Council in the
Marches, 1534-1641,” The British Problem, c. 1534-1707: State-Formation in the Atlantic
Archipelago Eds. Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1996) 118-147.
Print.
201
Roberts, 143.
171

Speed’s cartographically and politically undifferentiated “British” landscape.

202

Speed’s erasure

of the Anglo-Scottish border is also ideologically suspect and speaks to the state’s imperial
fantasies, rather than British political reality under Stuart rule. In spite of the official rhetoric
surrounding the 1603 Union of the Crowns and James’s 1604 declaration to the English
parliament that he was “the Head” of the joined Anglo-Scottish body politic, both the English
and Scottish governments were decidedly hostile to the reforms necessary to unite the realms.
James’s attempt to fashion himself “King of Great Britain” met with the refusal of his English
parliament due to anxieties regarding the potential loss of English identity and pretenses of
superiority in the face of James’s intended unification of the Isles. Parliament’s unwillingness to
extend English common law and rights to its northern neighbors and its squashing of James’s
attempts to free up trade relations between the two nations evinces that the British king’s rhetoric
of a united body remained part of the political ether, rather than a pragmatic or achievable
political program. According to Steven Ellis, these parliamentary refusals and both Scottish and
English desires to retain their autonomy meant that “James’s various efforts to unite his British
kingdoms had been soundly defeated: only the king himself clung to the belief that the union of
203

the crowns had effected anything other than one king ruling two independent kingdoms”.
Ellis contends that some of England’s borderlands were sites of such “endemic

insecurity” that they may rightly be termed “war zones”. The monarchy’s “limited financial
202

Garrett Sullivan also notes the persistence of cultural difference between the English and the
Welsh after the Act of Union, specifically in relation to matters of geography. In his discussion
of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and the play’s treatment of Welsh difference, he argues that Welsh
resistance to Roman road-building in ancient Britain and to English standards of measurement
during the early modern period points to Wale’s status as “unassimilable” to the cultures of
conquering forces. See Sullivan “Civilizing Wales: Cymbeline, Roads and the Landscapes of
Early Modern Britain,” Early Modern Literary Studies 4.2 (1998): n. pag. Web. 2/23/2010.
203
See Ellis, The Making of the British Isles: The State of Britain and Ireland 1450-1660
(London: Pearson, 2007) 289-306. Print.
172

resources and the sheer length of the frontiers” made monitoring these borderlands impossible;
204

thus, the great instability of the marches was a pronounced concern of the Crown.

Speed’s

map of “Great Britaine and Ireland” silences these anxieties by erasing these borderlands from
his portrait of the “kingdome”. Ireland’s geographical position is also altered in Speed’s
rendering; it appears nearly to be joined to Scotland. Note the proximity of Scotland’s Kintyre
peninsula (here spelled “Cantyr”) to Ireland’s most northeast border. Speed’s strategy of
representation in practically conjoining these separate land masses gives the viewer the
impression that Ireland and the neighboring island of “Britain” naturally make up a single
homogenous region. Because Speed’s map of the Kingdom fuses England and Scotland
geographically, the “British” island appears to wrap around and visually overpower the smaller
Irish Isle. This hierarchical positioning illustrates that even the supposedly trustworthy
mathematics or science of cartography is often manipulated to suit the mapmaker or historian’s
purposes.
To combat the geographical disconnectedness of the isles, a physical fact of the
archipelago that made possible the preservation of ethnic and cultural differences, allowed for
pockets of resistance outside the reach of English rule and invited invasion from foreign nations,
Speed deploys a number of visual techniques to compress and contain the isles into a single
ideological frame of British unity. Aside from the decorative borders that hem in the separate
landmasses into a single visual narrative, Speed also makes dual use of his illustrations and
embellishments to both thoroughly stamp the archipelagic landscape with an iconography of
British-ness and to lend the visual impression of unity, symmetry and coherence to his
representations that speaks to the larger project of enforcing notions of shared geographic,
204

Ellis, “The Tudor Borderlands 1485-1603” The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and
Stuart Britain, ed. John Morrill (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996) 56. Print.
173

cultural, social and political identity. For instance, the intricately bordered inset illustrations of
London and Edinburgh pose like sentinels on either side of main British isle. Each capital is
paired with two other illustrations. The image of London is supported by a Roman coin
representing Imperial Britannia below it while the royal crest sits above the celebrated city.
Along with the obvious association of England’s capital with royal and ancient imperial might,
the visual impact of this three-tiered illustration is one of unity and security from outside sources,
particularly when read with its mirror set of images on the eastern side of the isle. Speed’s
illustration of Edinburg is likewise joined with a Roman coin; the face of Cunobilin, or
Cymbeline, directs his gaze toward the conjoined British empire, as though the supposed uniter
of ancient Britain and Rome were approving the union of the contemporary British isles, brought
about by the Scottish king of both capital cities. Sitting above the Scottish capital is an inset of
the Orkney Islands. Positioning them in the territorially empty space to the east of the English
coast is, in one sense, pragmatic. Because Speed’s northern-most landmass is the border of the
Northwest Highlands, the Orkneys exist outside the frame and therefore must be displaced to a
marginal territory. However, the alignment of this inset with the image of the capital and the coin
of Cymbeline lends to this illustrative grouping a column-like impression. The two sets of
illustrations that flank the British coastlines function as both framing mechanisms to contain the
British territories and to imply a kind of protection from the contaminating influence of foreign
nations. As the columns pictorially block the isles from invading forces, the Scottish unicorn,
Irish griffin and English lion, each carrying their representative flags in their mouths, collectively
man the threatening and legally fluid waterways surrounding the isles, symbolically signally
British possession.

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The illustrations decorating the bottom portion of Speed’s “Kingdome of Great Britaine”
achieve a similar unifying effect. Off the southwestern coast of Ireland sits the map scale, also
elaborately framed in a style similar to the inset illustrations of the capitals. Resting upon this
frame are a pair of angels who appear to be giving their blessing to the tools of cartography used
in this representation of Britain. Similar sets of angels appear in the top corners of the map; the
royal coat of arms is graced by two angels with quills, as if they just finished penning this divine
image of Britain. Another pair sit atop the illustration of Edinburg. The ubiquity of the angels
speaks, perhaps, to the blessing of Speed’s overall project; each angel is clasping or touching
instruments necessary to map-making. However, one can also read the careful placement of these
angels in three corners of the map as both a framing technique and divine visual lexicon that
lends a kind of holiness to the union of these once politically and socially disconnected peoples.
In the bottom right-hand corner appears the portions of Holland and France necessary to place
the archipelago in the northern European sphere. Situating a fourth set of angels in these foreign
territories could muddle the overall impression of the isle’s divine union by extending these holy
images to foreign lands. Instead, Speed completes his framing of the territories with a framed
plate that provides information about the map’s production and directing viewers to the location
in London where this map can be purchased. Though this is standard and necessary information
included on any map, Speed’s placement of this information atop of France and Holland
effectively overwrites these foreign territories with a narrative map of London, guiding the
reader to the business of “I. Sudbury and George Humble in Pope’s head Alley in London” and
thus relegating these foreign spaces to empty space to be re-inscribed with the language of
British-ness. As discussed above, the “reader” of Speed’s kingdom is visually encouraged to read
the map’s representation of the land through the document’s symbolic lexicon, a language that,

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in the case of Speed’s “Kingdome of Great Britaine and Ireland” celebrates James’s divine
achievement of bringing unity to the isles.
The placement and ordering of Speed’s embellishments produce his imperial poetic of
British unity and sameness. However, this cartographic rhetoric is complicated by maps’ subtle
reinforcement of English difference and superiority. As discussed, London, the seat of the
monarchy, is situated beneath the royal arms. Rather than positioning this illustration of English
authority in close proximity to the English Isle, London sits above the unruly Irish; therefore,
England as both land mass and the seat of the monarchy presses upon Ireland from both its
western and its eastern coastline. Linked vertically with the royal arms and the inset of London is
Speed’s Roman coin illustrating Britannia’s imperial rule, which nearly touches Ireland’s eastern
seaboard. These insignias of British sovereignty over the map’s national spaces loom visually
and symbolically over the Irish island. Rather than include rebellious Ireland as part of the
“kingdome” of his title, Speed separates Ireland from the English nation not to indicate that
Ireland is capable of sustaining some sort of national autonomy, but rather to symbolically
enforce English claims to the region in part through the Roman mythology manufactured in his
History. Likewise, Speed’s “Kingdome of Great Britaine and Ireland” also visually reinforces
England’s efforts at centralization, which were essential to English control over the British
territories. Significantly, the illustrations of the two sites of British governmental authority, the
capital cities, with their accompanying seals and insets are placed on either side of the Scottish
Highlands, a region of resistance to English rule. The arrangement of these capitals that surround
and bear down upon areas of potential rebellion imply that these seats of government not only
repel foreign incursions from outside the isles, but also monitor and police internal dissent from
within.

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The effect of the map’s more indirect ideological content supporting English rule over the
isles jars in important ways with the overall visual message of British sameness and unity and
betrays the fact the Britishness is often code for Englishness in early modern official rhetoric.
The incongruities between the imperial language of shared British-ness and English national
superiority become considerably more pronounced in Speed’s maps of England, Scotland and
Ireland where ethnographic catalogs, geographic manipulations and other politically-motivated
“embellishments” construct a narrative of English might and “natural” supremacy. The success
of this nationalist narrative comes, in part, from the contrived visual impression of England’s
island-ness. Where England was formerly projected as part of the conjoined “British”
archipelagic landscape in “The Kingdome of Great Britaine and Ireland”, in Speed’s “Kingdome
of England” this land is transformed into an island-like landmass somehow separate from
Scotland and only in tangential relationship to Ireland. By recasting England as an island, Speed
reinforces the notion of English centrality and separateness from the inferior cultures supposedly
under “the island’s” control. As discussed throughout, the rhetoric of “otherworldly” island-ness
was central to English nationalist discourse; in Speed’s theater this pretended island identity is
supported visually and is troublesomely deployed as evidence of England’s geographic, political
and cultural centrality in the isles.
Speed’s “Kingdome of England” is the first of his maps in the Theatre to feature
ethnographic depictions of the isle’s inhabitants (fig. 8). Illustrations of the various classes of
Englishmen and women, all neatly dressed and hierarchically ordered on either side of their
territory, stand like columns flanking the national space. The neat placement and immaculate
appearance of Speed’s representative English populace imply an easily classified and ethnically
identifiable English race. Because this is the first in a series of illustrations featuring national

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specimens, one naturally judges the coming images of the British populace from this ordered and
elegant classification of the English body politic. In this representation, Scotland and Ireland are
distinct and separate geographical units, emptied of detail and instead appearing as vacant
landmasses with only a few villages and cities skirting their shores. These lands appear poised
for colonization by Speed’s Englishmen and women; in fact, Ireland is artistically occupied by
the English figures who are presented on the Western border of the map and who largely obscure
the Irish territory. Scotland, on the other hand, is symbolically stamped with Speed’s seal of his
English Kingdom. The table of “all the Shires, Cities, Bishoprickes, Market Townes, Castles,
Parishes, Rivers, Bridges, Chases, Forrests, and Parkes, conteyned in every particuler shire of the
Kingdome of England” reinforces the naturalness of the English colonizing mission by its
implication of a burgeoning and industrious English populace in need of more land.
In marked contrast, Speed’s “Kingdome of Irland” pushes his ethnographic catalog of the
Irish to the far left side of the map, and classifies the island’s inhabitants as either gentle, “civill”
or “wilde” (as opposed to the English designations “noble”, “gentle”, “citizen” or “countryman”
or woman). Deploying the popular colonial ideology that imagined the Irish as barbarous,
thieving and animal-like, Speed dresses all of his representative Irishmen and women in cloaks
(fig. 9). As Michael Neill explains, the cloak or “Irish mantle” was often invoked as a visual
signifier of Irish shiftiness and criminal concealment, as well as their refusal to be incorporated
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into civilized England.

Speed directs the gazes of the Irish recorded in his Theatre in a

205

Speed also provides his “Wilde Irish man” what was termed a “glib” or “shaggy forelock”.
According to Neill, “mantles and glibs were read as powerful statements of a wandering people’s
disorderly resistance to placement [ … ] This effect was enormously and sinisterly enhanced by
the way in which they seemed to grant their wearers the invisibility of an almost impenetrable
disguise” (25). Neill, “Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of
Power in Shakespeare’s Histories,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45.1 (1994): 1-32. Print.
178

manner that amplifies the implied untrustworthiness indicated by their dress. Rather than
submitting to the cataloging gaze of the reader, Speed’s Irishmen and women either look towards
each other or avert their gaze away from the reader; only the “Gentlewoman of Ireland” looks
directly at the viewer. Also, each Irish specimen, with the exception of the almost entirelycloaked “civill woman”, wears clothing fringed with a hair-like material, making them appear
animalistic. Like the Englishmen and women in his “Kingdome of England”, and the ancient line
of British inhabitants on the frontispiece to his History, these illustrations are meant to represent
the natural inhabitants of the national space. By depicting the Irish in accordance with colonial
ideology, and by visually distancing them from the very land they inhabit, Speed’s nationalist
poetics advocate for English imperium over Ireland.
Cultural distance between the English and the Irish in Speed’s “Kingome of England” is
visually suggested through Speed’s misrepresentation of England as an island geographically
separate from the contaminating Irish and Scottish. The above-mentioned chart of English
development, industry, progress and order serves a second ideological purpose: to reinforce the
several borders that hem in the English land. A series of bordering mechanisms contain the
“English island” and lend to the represented land a sense of insularity even from the neighboring
British territories. Jutting inward into the seas, the illustrations of the English inhabitants are the
second frame surrounding the English land (the first being the overall frame of the map). This
illustrative frame is extended into Holland with the grafting of Speed’s scale and the
informational plate in the lower right-hand corner, thus re-writing this space in an English
nationalist vocabulary by deemphasizing non-English territory and implying an inaccurate sense
of insularity from the continent.

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Further compressing the English national space is the “Catalogue of all the shires, Cities,
Bishoprickes” etc., which is balanced symmetrically by the segment of Ireland on the Western
coast and is largely emptied of national detail, like Scotland above it. Adding further balance and
rounding out the northern-most portion of England are the royal seal between the “catalog” and
the eastern shore and the title plate announcing “The Kingdome of England”. The overall effect
of these reiterated borders and symmetrical arrangement of symbols is to visually focus one’s
attention on the English territory as autonomous and isolated, as an island nation unto itself. By
overwriting the already emptied Scottish landscape with the title plate, the southern-most portion
of Scotland appears as a placemarker for Speed’s celebration of England. Also, the placement of
this title plate atop the Scottish lands infers that England possesses or asserts some measure of
imperial control over this region. The same effect is achieved by placing the representative
English figures atop of the whited-out Irish land, as discussed above; in fact, Ireland’s very
island-ness is unrepresented here, instead deflecting this geographic character onto England.
Even the titles of the seas surrounding England add a visual sense of roundness and territorial
completeness to the English landscape in the sense that they emphasize the distance between
England and the lands that surround it by framing the regions around Norwich, Suffolk and
Essex on the southeastern coast and the contentious Irish Sea separating England and Ireland.
The overall effect of these decorative manipulations to the British landscape is to denote
England’s geographic, cultural and political centrality and to support the myth of the English
island so central to nationalist mythologies, while deemphasizing the autonomy of England’s
British neighbors in order to buttress England’s imperial claims.
Speed’s maps of Ireland and Scotland are in keeping with the above nationalist and
imperial ideology. The other nations of the British Isles are pointedly lacking the symbols of

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autonomy, might and centrality that make up Speed’s English lexicon. For instance, Speed’s
depiction of Scotland is one of disconnectedness and a clear lack of territorially unity; the
Scottish landmasses appear dispersed across the map’s plane and thus do not give the impression
of a unified body politic (fig. 10). Though this disconnected-ness is due largely to Scotland’s
many island territories, this effect is enhanced because Speed does not employ the framing
strategies that we saw in his representation of England. The images of the royal family
(discussed in greater detail below), the title plate and the inset map of the Isles of Orkney do not
exhibit the same attention to symmetry and balance that contained in a single political unit the
lands of the English maps. Similarly, the minor illustrations—the sea monsters, ships and the
work’s compass rose—only exacerbate the map’s impression of Scottish disunity. Pictured
between the Isle of Lewis and the northwestern coast of Scotland is a pair of warring battleships;
in addition to the image’s inference of Scotland’s lawlessness and violence, this illustration, in
conjunction with the scattered sea monsters and the floating compass rose in the bottom left-hand
corner contribute to Speed’s overall impression of a sundered and detached land. Because
Speed’s cartographic language across his visual narrative of the British Isles seeks to tell a
particular story of nation and empire, his representation of Scotland’s dissevered territories
implies a nation that is socially and politically splintered as well and therefore in need of English
imperial governance.
The Theatre’s imagining of Ireland is, unsurprisingly, even more pronounced in its visual
diminishment of Celtic autonomy and authority. Whereas in Speed’s map of England, the
surrounding non-English territories either serve as decorative templates for markers of English
possession or are otherwise reduced to framing mechanisms, the portions of Scotland and
England that appear in Speed’s map of Ireland are more detailed in their geographic character.

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By including these geographic details, rather than largely emptying the land of place-names or
identifying marks as we saw in the English map, Speed lends to the English landscape in
particular a sense of a national identity independent of the rest of the isles. The portion of
Scotland that appears off the northeastern coast of Ireland is lacking in England’s appearance of
autonomy, for it is prominently stamped with the royal seal. Ireland, the supposed object of the
mapmaker’s gaze, is closely bracketed by the English and Scottish territories on the east and the
overlarge title plate and ethnographic catalog on the west. These cartographic embellishments,
unlike the map of England, do not serve to provide a containing frame to the Irish landscape
because these borders are asymmetrical; the title plate and the royal seal, for instance, are not
horizontal and are disproportionate in size. Likewise, the ethnographic images of the native Irish
are not deployed as framing mechanisms; rather, they sit only on the left-hand margin of the
map. Ireland, in Speed’s representation appears not as an independent landmass because it lacks
these borders and because the land itself is visually overwhelmed by the ideologically troubling
illustrations surrounding it. Finally, we are not encouraged to read Ireland as independent of
England because of the pronounced size of the English territories that encroach upon Ireland’s
eastern shore.
Speed’s Theatre makes use—and misuse—of cartographic practices to support England’s
official national and imperial agendas. His visual lexicon composes a narrative in which the
English “island” asserts its suzerainty over a British Isles that is culturally, socially and
genealogically linked through an ancient past of shared history and ethnicity. Nature, like
subjugated lands and peoples, is made pliant under the cartographer’s pen, thus allowing Speed
to shape the land into nation and its people into willing subjects of the crown. However, despite
his cartographic and historical maneuvering, Speed’s project ultimately underscores the artistic

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manipulations necessary to this form of visual nation and empire building. The land itself
appears secondary to the ornaments designed by Speed to force his nationalist rendering of
English history and identity; by overpowering the natural landmass with illustrations, Speed
redirects the map reader’s attention from the land to the items that make up Speed’s lexicon.
These items, however, particularly those that speak to Speed’s antiquarian and imperial
significations, tell an unintentionally contradictory story.
Speed’s Imperfect Archipelago
The Roman coins that appear in both Speed’s Theatre and his History are presumably
intended to symbolize England’s Roman genealogy and to symbolically imbue the rulers of the
archipelagic empire with the aura of the classical world. However, coins impressed with the
faces of England’s former conquerors are also uneasy reminders of the nation’s past as a
colonized territory. In this regard, Speed’s nod to British antiquity has the effect of diminishing
nationalist claims of a deep history of autonomy and sovereignty. Likewise, Speed’s choice of
Cymbeline as his representative figure of ancient Britain is problematic. As audiences of
Shakespeare’s play of the same name would have known, Cymbeline, even after defeating the
Roman army that invaded his shores, decided against English independence from its colonial
rulers, declaring in Shakespeare’s work, “Let / A Roman and a British ensign wave / Friendly
together”.

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As I discuss in part two of this chapter, the historical Cymbeline’s position in

regard to his Roman overlords was an ambiguous one; because he was said to often glory in his
past as a member of Augustus Caesar’s court and because he seems to have been favored by
Rome, Cymbeline can hardly serve as a model of British independence from its colonizers. In
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nd

Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline. The Riverside Shakespeare, 2 ed (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1997) V.v.479-481. Print. All references to the play throughout this chapter are from the
Riverside edition.
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this respect, Speed’s map of Great Britain accidently reveals that myths of English imperium and
enduring autonomy are often constructed of unreliable materials. Like the fanciful narrative of
Brutus’s mythical discovery of England according Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum
Britanne, the fantastical race of giants that once inhabited the island, or the sea monsters that
threaten English sailors off the shores of Ireland in Speed’s Irish Sea, Speed’s maps underscore
that official nationalist narratives often come to rest on insubstantial myths and chimerical
stories.
Speed’s ethnographic spectacles that sit in the margins of England and Ireland are also
ideologically problematic; rather than serving the ostensible purpose of illustrating the
superiority of English customs, dress and bodies in contrast to those of the rugged and
uncivilized Irish, these catalogs instead demonstrate the superficial nature of Speed’s colonial
representations. Aside from the very different manner of dress between the English and the Irish
in Speed’s catalog—the English are impeccably attired in quality fabrics and contemporary
fashions, whereas the Irish are cloaked in their “native” rugged garb—the bodily features of the
English and Irish national specimens are largely the same. Baring some darkening of the Irish’s
eyes, perhaps to again underscore the inherent untrustworthiness of the native Irish, the bodies
and faces of the Irish are differentiated only minimally. One possible reason for this surprising
th

sameness is the limited engravings available to the early modern mapmaker. Like 16 and 17

th

century woodcuts that were recycled and only slightly altered to suit different narratives, these
cartographic figures were likely redressed and recycled with modest, but ideologically
meaningful, emendations. Speed’s Irishmen and women are re-costumed Englishmen; one
imagines that, when stripped of Speed’s material markers of English superiority and Irish
incivility, the bodies of the colonized are not unlike those of the colonizers. Such similarities

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undermine the imperial agenda of Speed’s cartographic representation by putting pressure upon
on the theories of Irish degeneracy that undergirded English claims to suzerainty over the
neighboring island by exposing as superficial and insubstantial English justifications for colonial
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rule.

Speed’s “Kingdome of Scotland” also unintentionally subverts his royalist national
narrative by calling attention to the troubling political tensions that characterized James I’s
ascension to the throne. His dedication of the Theatre to James is a celebration of the Scottish
king as the “inlarger and uniter of the British Empire; Restorer of the British Name’ and
“Establisher of Perpetual Peace, in Church, and Commonwealth”. The illustration that
accompanies Speed’s dedication of his work to “the Most High, and Most Potent Monarch”
reflects in historical and visual detail the official rhetoric that posited James as the “Husband”
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and “head” of the now conjoined body politic (fig. 11).

From behind the curtains of a canopy-

like stage is revealed the royal crest of a united Britain, exaggerated in size. The stage from
which this symbol of royal might emerges is too small to contain the royal seal, even with the
divine intervention of the cherubs who hold back the curtains. Thus, the seal of the combined

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Speed’s illustration of the Irish unwittingly draws attention to the fundamental contradiction
underpinning colonial discourse in the early modern period. The Irish must be portrayed as
degenerate, wild or animalistic in order to support English claims to ethnic superiority and
cultural difference. Yet, at the same time, the Irish must not appear so degenerate as to imply that
they could not benefit from the civilizing hand of the English. The discourse of the colonial
civilizing mission was necessary to mask the more base motive of territorial acquisition and the
subjugation of an autonomous people; to sustain this rhetorical justification, the Irish had to
appear similar enough to the English to imply both an essentially British likeness between the
two peoples and to indicate that the Irish could, in fact, be cultivated to a degree of English
civility. The paradoxical demand that the Irish be both fundamentally barbaric and unrealized
civil Britons, that they be both profoundly non-English and constitutionally British, is made
plain in Speed’s representative Irish figures who occupy the impossible ideological position of
radical difference and essential sameness.
208
Ellis, 290.
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unicorn and lion appears to burst from these humble confines, emphasizing to the reader of
Speed’s Theatre the monarchical dynamism of the first king of Great Britain. The border
containing this dramatic presentation of the royal seal is made up of the several crests of
Britain’s ancient kings. Whereas James’s royal seal sees the harmonious joining of several ethnic
groups that people the archipelago, the individual crests of the Normans, Saxons, Angles,
Danish, Cornish, Andegavion and Roman kings sit isolated from one another on the periphery,
speaking to the inability of these ancient monarchs to produce a united Britain. The crest of the
Welsh, Irish, Scottish and French kings are also set individually in the borderlands of the royal
emblem, classifying these once sovereign states as existing in the same ancient record as
“Heathen Britaines”, “First Saxon Kings” and “East Angles”. The effect of this categorizing is to
imply that these nations—who preserved their autonomy as late as 1707—are of the same
ancient history of a heterogeneous Britain and are now subsumed as part of what Speed terms
“the Achievement of our Sovereigne King James”, namely the creation of Great Britain.
However, Speed’s “Kingdom of Scotland”, which appears near the close of his Theatre
and is the only map devoted to the Scottish territories, radically dismantles the dedication’s
glorification of Great Britain’s founder. The natural territory is flanked by the royal family; King
James, Queen Anne and their two sons stand like pillars on either side of Scotland, their various
titles pronouncing their claims to territorial sovereignty and imperial rule. Surprisingly, Britain’s
King is stripped of the markers of his monarchical and imperial “potency”. He stands in the
margins of his northern kingdom not in kingly regalia but in what appears to be hunting or
fencing garb. In fact, James most closely resembles Speed’s illustration of an English gentleman;
James and Speed’s representative English gentleman wear complementary capes and hats of
apparently similar quality materials and stand in like postures. That King James is aligned in

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appearance with a gentleman, rather than even the English nobleman (who is draped in lush and
ornamented fabrics), is startling in its evacuation from the kingly person the official rhetoric that
clothed him as the divine commander of the Isles. Perhaps more surprising is the absence of the
royal seal that dominates the dedication’s illustration and so many of the maps in Speed’s
collection; our only evidence that this figure is the king of England, Scotland, Ireland and France
is the small title that sits beneath his image. In Speed’s map, Scotland appears as a rather large
estate under the ownership of the family who stand on either side of the landmass, their bodies
benignly turned in the direction of their territory.
This strange de-ranking of the monarch can perhaps be explained by the political turmoil
and social anxiety that undermined James’s ascension to the English throne. To curtail English
fears of the loss of autonomy that could result from the melding of English territory, law and
custom with that of the Scottish, Scotland was sometimes envisioned as an annexed territory that
expands English sovereignty over the isles. Such a misrepresentation of the union of crowns
would assuage the anxieties of those Englishmen most likely to peruse Speed’s Theatre, which
was sold in London. However, that Speed’s map seems to take part in this deliberate
misrepresentation is both surprising, considering his overt royalism, and strangely telling of the
inability of official rhetoric to buttress or gloss over state failures. To support the notion of the
unified Britain illustrated in his opening map, Speed must make Scotland appear as an empty
territory poised for annexation by the English. Note that Speed does not provide us ethnographic
samples of the “Gentle” or “Wilde” Scot. To do so might draw uncomfortable parallels between
the barbarous Scot that appears in texts like Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland and England’s
new king. However, this catering to anxious English readers of his maps results in the
delegitimization of Britain’s king; James is necessarily reduced to the status of gentlemanly

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landlord. Such flimsy and contradictory narratives as Speed’s map of Scotland speak to the often
unsuccessful manipulations of the historical record that are sometimes necessary to nationalist
myth-making.
Finally, Speed is unable to overcome the discursive incongruities that inevitably arise in
English imperial discourse. The symbolic unity that Speed achieves in his map of “The
Kingdome of Great Britaine and Ireland” is undone in his individual maps of England, Ireland
and Scotland. The illustrations and embellishments that were originally woven together to denote
a body politic unified in ethnicity, culture and history in his representation of Britain are
problematically re-deployed when this Britain is broken up into individual “kingdoms”. To tell a
story of English imperial might and superiority, Speed must revise his visual lexicon to rewrite
England as an island surrounded by inferior territories and peoples that can be brought to British
civility only with the imposition of English governance and culture. Such a re-picturing of the
Isles puts great pressure upon both the notion of a culturally and political harmonious British
archipelago and Speed’s ostensible support of the Scottish king of the Isles. The rhetorical
impossibility of promoting notions of British sameness to support an imperial ideology of shared
British genealogy and culture, while simultaneously proclaiming the essential ethnic difference
of the Irish and Scottish to advance a nationalist agenda of English superiority, is baldly and
unintentionally demonstrated in Speed’s Theatre. Unable to reconcile these incongruous strains
of English official discourse, Speed’s cartographic narrative betrays the slippages and
contradictions underpinning England’s claims to centrality and imperial achievement. Thus, the
political failures of the English state manifest themselves on the fragmented and dissonant stages
of Speed’s Theatre.
Conclusion to Part One: Nationalist Theatrics

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According to Harley, Speed’s maps saw the bringing together of celebrated antiquity and
England’s political present. Speed’s “visual metaphors” were effective on two levels by first
“connect[ing] the world of historical ideas with the contemporary landscape, linking the concrete
and the abstract”, and secondly by “manifesting the Renaissance discovery of England’s past and
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conveying its sense of history, [giving] support to the geo-political doctrines of his day”.

Speed’s strange collage of materials when grafted upon the English landscape imbued his
representation of the country with a sense of “an inherent though long-delayed political destiny”,
in Gellner’s words. The Roman coins indicate that ancient Britain is the historical period in
which to excavate England’s myth of origin and to find in their Roman ancestors the models for
England’s own imperial destiny. The signposts of national identity and historical endurance sit
atop of Speed’s Britain, demanding our acknowledgement of his nationalist narrative.
However, what Speed’s maps most loudly pronounce is the constructed-ness of this
nation, unintentionally emphasizing the ideological distance between “what ought to be the case”
according to the Elizabethan and Stuart regimes and the political reality on the ground. In Speed,
nature does not yield to the mapmaker’s quest for nationalist identification; rather, the natural
landscape becomes contingent or tributary to the mapmaker’s nationalist myth-making. As a
consequence, it is the invented-ness of this nation that is most apparent in Speed; the land is
engulfed by Speed’s symbolic lexicon such that the mapmaker’s ornament is foregrounded and
the land meant to absorb or become perfected through this artistry seems only a backdrop.
Speed’s privileging of the ornamental over the natural is not just a matter of aesthetics; rather it
th

th

signals the anxious construction of English nationhood in the 16 and 17 centuries. Faced with

209

Harley, “Meaning and Ambiguity in Tudor Cartography,” English Map-Making 1500-1650,
ed. Sarah Tyacke (London: The British Library, 1983) 37. Print.
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the intractable difficulties of uniting a disunited people under the banner of Englishness and
promoting an image of the English as conquerors of the British Isles, despite strong evidence to
the contrary, Speed’s maps only point up the artificial manufacture of such nationalist and
imperial destinies. Gellner’s notion that the nation’s cultural producers “know not what they do”
is especially poignant here: unwittingly, Speed’s maps undermined the state project to construct
the official nation by calling uncomfortable attention to the flimsy and insubstantial materials
that make up the illusion of national and imperial identity.
In part two, I consider how Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Fletcher and Massinger’s Sea
Voyage take up the materials of Speed’s official lexicon only to empty theses symbols of their
ideological weight. By wresting Speed’s cartographic narrative from the pages of his Theatre and
submitting this official rhetoric to theatrical representation, these dramatic texts expose the
insubstantiality of the language of English nationalist and imperialist mythologies.
Part Two: The Nation Staged
Where cartographic texts silently project the mapmaker’s carefully visualized story—be
it one of nation or empire, or in the cases of Speed, both—the theatrical work announces itself
upon the stage textually, vocally and visually. Narratives must be plotted, characters built from
words and dress and worlds must be rendered visible through language, art and imagination.
There is nothing passive about the theatre; even its silences are loud in meaning and intent. And
in the theatre, like in the written text more generally, the audience must be convinced. The
actions of characters or historical figures must be justified or defended, their words and
intentions literally spelled out. The theatrical land also must speak; it must “state” its relationship
to the characters traversing its imaginary territory and it must give evidence of its changeableness, its ability to erect its own borders and transform itself into a new world altogether. In other

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cases, the dialogue must speak for it, explaining that we have followed Tamburlaine across his
vast imperial realms, or crossed into Lear’s cave or found ourselves alone in Juliet’s tomb.
As explored in part one, cartographic allegories are composed out of a visual lexicon of
illustrations, borders, embellishments, etc. Linguistic narratives when they appear on the map,
often in the form of celebrative tale of a national trait or a description of a landmark, are simply
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signposts intended to compliment the map’s visual elements.

Aside from these descriptive

postings, cartographic texts do not explain themselves “verbally”, nor do they justify or defend
the narrative visually fabricated by the mapmaker. In colonial maps, the indigenous, often naked
and unarmed, flee their own land and the men in national garb who have come to conquer it. Or,
the conquered people, often naked and unarmed, stand in the margins of the land that was once
theirs, happily offering up to the Europeans their natural resources and welcoming their
civilizing influence. In neither case are we offered any explanation. Who are these native people
who occupy these new worlds? What right have these men from afar to violently seize these
lands and empty them of their indigenous inhabitants? In most cases, the only justifying
“narrative” of colonial conquest offered by these maps lies in the nakedness of the colonized,
which illustratively offers evidence of their inherent savagery and animal-like nature.
The maps of John Speed examined in part one are, on the surface, more innocuous,
offering the “reader” a patriotic tale of the English nation and a celebratory history of Great
Britain. However, when the maps were made to speak their stories—when the narratives that
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th

As I discuss in my final chapter, Speed’s 17 “Invasion map” is nearly buried in marginal
commentary, detailing the domestic and foreign battles that plagued England and Ireland.
Included in his marginal narrative is a paean to Elizabeth, celebrating her divine ability to bring
peace to the archipelago. In the case of this cartographic document, written narrative is necessary
to illustrate the individual battles and their beginnings; it is also needed to rhetorically amend
this image of a vulnerable island nation besieged from within and without. See my final chapter,
“The Staged Island Nation Debunked”.
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overwrote them were put into language—Speed’s cartographic texts were revealed as
xenophobic, historically inaccurate and rhetorically messy. Using the poetic license offered to
the early modern author of history, Speed constructed a false and unsubstantiated history of the
“island nation” in which Englishness replaced British-ness. Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and
Fletcher and Massinger’s Sea Voyage give voice to the discursive incongruities discovered in
Speed’s maps, demonstrating how early modern popular literature often put pressure upon
official nationalist agendas and materials. As a result, the silent but ideologically dangerous
plotted-ness of the early modern map is exposed. Making textually and theatrically visible the
invented storylines of Speed’s genealogies, Shakespeare’s play deeply problematizes the
mythologizing of ancient Britain that was often the stuff of nationalist and imperial propaganda
in texts like Speed’s cartographic Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain and his chronology of
British monarchs, The History of Great Britain. In both Cymbeline and The Sea Voyage, the
audience is privy to the colonial narratives that sit silently on the surface of Speed’s cartographic
works. When these narratives are translated to the theatre, the audience can “read” the
problematic and unjustifiable imperial narratives that are en-scripted on the land. In the case of
both plays, the theatrical texts make the maps speak their untruths.
As we have seen, Speed’s maps betrayed particular tensions regarding the use of Roman
Britain as a celebrated site of England’s domestic imperial conquest of the isles. His embellished
cartographic representations harken back to England’s Roman roots to make manifest the
inherent imperial character of the English people, thereby reinforcing the official line of British
unification under the English crown. British-ness in Speed, as in other nationalist texts of the
period, was often a code for Englishness, and therefore Speed’s reminders of Britain’s Roman
ancestry served to depict the English as a naturally, culturally and politically superior people

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based, in part, upon this classical genealogy. However, among the unintentional effects of
deploying symbols of Roman Britain in this nationalist narrative is the inexorable reminder of
Britain’s past as a subjugated people yoked to a distant and powerful empire. Such a reminder of
this blight on the national record puts great pressure upon notions of Britain and England’s
celebrated archipelagic autonomy and of England’s “natural” propensity for imperial domestic
rule.
The nationalist thread that runs through both Speed’s cartographic and historical works is
likewise under rhetorical and ideological strain. The apparent constructed-ness and overanxious
embellishment of England, Britain, Scotland and Ireland in his maps speaks to a desire to build
from a hodge-podge of sometimes incongruous materials an “invented tradition” of English
imperial might, historical sovereignty, and “natural” autonomy, based upon the isles’ geographic
distinctiveness. The constructed-ness of Speed’s visual narrative is perhaps most apparent in his
attempt to illustratively define England as an island in and of itself. As discussed, the myth of the
English island nation is a repeated trope in official nationalist literature and was often called up
to buttress claims to English autonomy and its geographically “natural” homogenous character.
According to this myth, England is “a world divided from the world”, an “otherworldly” national
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space without dependence upon the resources and influence of the continent.

The need to

depict England as an island, in order to sustain this nationalist thread, and to visually imagine
Britain as a conjoined body of islands, in order to promote imperial notions of a shared
archipelagic character, are at obvious odds and therefore draw attention to the slippage between
British-ness and Englishness that is often prevalent in English texts that turn to geography as the
potential marker of national and imperial character.
211

Jonson, Ben. “The Queenes Masques. The First, Of Blackness.” Ben Jonson. Ed. C. H.
Herford Percy and Evelyn Simpson. Vol. VII. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941) 177. Print.
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Shakespeare’s Cymbeline articulates the tensions and ideological ruptures that are
betrayed in Speed’s visual and textual illustrations of England and Great Britain. Critiquing the
English production of British-ness, the play lays bare the manipulations of the British historical
record necessary to construct Speed’s nationalist and imperial narrative. Shakespeare’s
Cymbeline demonstrates how national mythologies like Speed’s that draw upon Britain’s Roman
heritage must be radically amended to suit the geopolitical, imperial and nationalist agendas of
their makers. In so doing, the play calls attention to the ideological fabrications demanded of
nationalist histories more generally. The work undoes the official nationalist narrative
constructed by Speed in his texts by exploding the celebrated notion that Britain is “a world by
itself”, as Cloten declares in act 3 scene 1 (III.i.11-12). This declaration of British (read English)
autonomy and sovereignty is loudly questioned throughout the play, particularly through the
character of Cymbeline himself, who ends the work by surrendering up the very sovereignty that
Speed’s maps seek to articulate. Speed conjures up the person of Cunobelinus or Cymbeline in
both his map of “Kingdome of Great Britain and Ireland” and in his prose work The History of
Great Britain, using the figure of the ancient king to celebrate the foundation of the early British
state and its peaceable relations with Rome. In Speed’s Theatre, the image of Cunobelinus links
Britain to the center of the civilized Western world and provides 17

th

century Britain with a

classical genealogy. Shakespeare’s play, on the other hand, calls attention to the historical and
ideological unease that inevitably attends such recollections of Britain’s Roman past. In
Shakespeare’s Roman Britain, the relationship between the conquering Romans and the
subjugated Britons is an ambiguous one; the Romans are political enemies who deny the Britons
their autonomy, yet the Britons also maintain cultural and political ties with Rome as the wellspring of the Britons’ government and civilization. In this sense, Britain is dependent upon their

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Roman conquerors, despite claims to the newly awakened British “national” character that seeks
to extricate itself from the Roman yoke. By significantly altering the story of Cymbeline’s rule
and by drawing attention to ancient Britain’s complex relationship to their Roman colonizers,
Shakespeare puts into boldface the ideological and textual manipulations demanded of the
historical record when filtered through an official nationalist lens.

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Shakespeare’s depiction of Roman Britain also dismantles the English imperial narrative
that sees England as the heart and destined sovereign of the British Isles. Shakespeare divides the
primary action of his play between an ambiguous “Britain”, the site of Cymbeline’s palace and
of the battles between the Romans and the British army, and Wales, the peripheral territory
inhabited by the secret princes, the banished Belarius, the disguised Cloten and Imogen, the
invading Roman army and an unspecified band of savage “mountaineers”. The play’s ahistorical
division of ancient Britain serves to problematize myths of English centrality within the isles.
th

Wales exists in Shakespeare’s play in a form more closely aligned with 16 and 17

th

century

Britain than with the period of Augustus Caesar’s invasion of the Isles in 43 AD. Though there
existed in Roman Britain specified Cambrian tribes that ruled the territory that is now Wales, the
political boundary between England and Wales was, arguably, not established until the
construction of Offa’s Dyke probably in the 8

th

century (the exact date of the Wall’s erection is

unclear). Yet Wales in Cymbeline exists as a “discrete political entity”, in the words of Ronald J.
Boling, separated from “Britain” geographically, politically and culturally. Likening Rome’s
envelopment of Britain into its “political orbit” to England’s imperial annexation and absorption
of Wales, Boling argues that the play’s treatment of the Welsh landscape must be read through

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contemporaneous Anglo-Welsh politics.

213

The effect of this anachronistic parsing of southern

Britain is multifaceted. First, it draws attention to the contemporary rifts between England and
Wales that the official English line of unification sought to mask.

214

Inserting into this play of

Roman Britain the contemporary crisis of English imperial governance problematizes the notion
213

Boling, “Anglo-Welsh Relations in Cymbeline.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.1 (2000): 33-66.
JSTOR. Web. 01 Nov. 2010. Several critics have made this observation about Shakespeare’s
ahistorical partitioning of Wales during the Roman occupation. Huw Griffiths also considers
Wales’s ambiguous presence in the work, arguing that “Britain manages both to include and to
exclude the location of ‘Wales’” in the play’s geography, thus pointing to Jacobean political
rhetoric that also took an ambiguous position in regard to England’s neighbor. Griffith’s also
examines Speed’s Theatre, recognizing how the atlas’s contending visions of the nation
correspond to England’s shifting need to define itself as either empire or nation: of Wales in
Speed’s maps he maintains, “Wales is both included and marginal in this imaginary empire. This
inclusion or exclusion seems largely dependent on perspective—whether you are looking at
Wales from within or from England. It depends on whether you want to concentrate on English
dominance or on England’s ability to enclose the several nations under its imperial wing”.
Griffiths, “The Geographies of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.” English Literary Renaissance 34.3
(2004): 343. Wiley Online Library. Web. 01 Nov. 2010.
214
Many critics contend that Shakespeare’s play comments upon James’s rule, particularly his
Union project. Leah Marcus argues for an overtly topical reading of the play in which the
characters and action of the work bear directly upon the politics of Jacobean England and
James’s attempt to “write” Great Britain. However, she contends, Cymbeline counteracts James’s
agenda, despite the influence of Stuart politics on the drama by “reproduc[ing] some of the
incongruities in the actual working of Stuart policy that undermined royal claims about the
mystical organic ‘union’ of all of James’s subjects—like members of a single animate body—
under his authority as head” (159). See Marcus, “Cymbeline and the Unease of Topicality.”
Shakespeare: The Last Plays. Ed. Kiernan Ryan (London: Longman, 1999) 134-68. Print. Penny
McCarthy, on the other hand, argues that the play was originally written prior to James’s
ascension to the throne and that the work is both “anti-Tudor in sentiment” and “opposed to
James as a prospective king” (43). She bases this claim upon the work’s generic qualities and on
what she reads as the play’s “covert” critique of the Scottish king. McCarthy, “Cymbeline: ‘The
first Essay of a new Brytish Poet’?” Critical Survey. 21.2 (2009): 56. Print. Glenn Clark
considers the play’s attention to geographical parsing in relationship to Stuart investments in
Britain’s domestic empire. He argues that Cymbeline responds to James’s unification project by
exposing the “rhetorics of hostile alterity and geopolitical artifice” behind the division of the
isles. Clark claims that Shakespeare’s work proposes a “rhetoric of geopolitical naturalism in
which social order is determined by a natural spatial order”, rather than the “strange” and
unnatural borders erected by geopolitical doctrines. Clark, “The ‘Strange’ Geographies of
Cymbeline.” Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama. Eds.
John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan. (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1998) 230-31.
Print.
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depicted in Speed of a deeply historical British-ness that unites the peoples of the archipelago.
Secondly, by carving up the British Isles into Britain and Wales, Shakespeare’s play effectively
absents England from this imperial and nationalist mythology. England is nowhere mentioned in
Shakespeare’s play, thus deflating the contemporary notions of long-standing English suzerainty
and imperial power depicted in Speed’s maps. Finally, Wales, as it is delineated in this play, is
the transformative and foundational site that makes possible the work’s most fundamental action,
despite its marginal territorial status on the outskirts of the kingdom; it is in Wales that
Cymbeline’s sons and the future kings of Britain develop their princely characteristics; it is the
site of Imogen’s recovered agency, and it is in Wales, not England, where authentic “Britishness” is discovered and refined.
A World by Itself?
The contemporary myths of Cymbeline or Cunobelinus are various and largely
inconsistent regarding the payment of tribute money to ancient Rome and the overall relationship
between the Empire and Britain. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Cymbeline was a favorite
of Augustus Caesar, who “reared” the British king and “equipped [him] with weapons”. Because
of his “friendly” relations with the Roman emperor, Cymbeline “might well have kept back” the
tribute owed to Rome “but he paid it of his own free will”.

215

Holinshed also has Cymbeline

willingly paying tribute to Britain’s Roman conquerors. His Kymbelyne or Cimbeline was
“brought up at Rome and there made Knight by Augustus Cesar, under whome hee served in the
warres, and was in suche fauour with him, that he was at libertie to pay his tribute or not”.
Holinshed disputes Roman histories that record Cymbeline’s refusal to pay the tribute, citing as

215

Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. (London:
Penguin, 1966). 119. Print.
197

evidence the British king’s abiding appreciation of and loyalty to Roman culture and
government, particularly as a means of bringing civilization to Roman Britain:
Kymbelyne being brought vp in Rome, and made Knighte in the Court of
Auguſtus, euer ſhewed himſelfe a friẽd to the Romanes, and chiefly was loth to
breake with them, bycauſe the youth of the Britayne nation ſhoulde not bee
depriued of the benefite to bee trayned and broughte vp among the Ro|maynes,
whereby they mighte learne both to be|haue themſelues lyke ciuill men, and to
atteyne to the knowledge of feates of warre. But whe|ther for this reſpect, or for
that it pleaſed the Al|mightie God ſo to diſpoſe the myndes of men at that preſent,
not only the Britaynes, but in mã|ner all other nations were contented to be
216

obe|dient to the Romayne Empire.

Speed in his History also references Cymbeline’s deep allegiance and love for ancient Rome,
emphasizing the king’s willingness to maintain peaceful relations with the Romans. In Speed’s
estimation, the several coins produced during Cymbeline’s reign are a tribute to the British
monarch’s “wealth, [ … ] fame, and his civil respect” which allowed not only for Cymbeline’s
peace with the Isles’ conquerors “without the paiment of their Tribute”, but also “peace with the
rest of the world”.

217

For Speed, Cunobelinus as he appears in both his History and in his map

“The Kingdome of Great Britain and Ireland”, provides an enduring link between 17

th

century

Britain and the classical world that lends his nation their imperial character and a nationalist
genealogy reaching back to Roman civilization. As explained in part one, the coin of

216

Holinshed, Raphael. Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577) Vol. 1. Section
5.46.The Holinshed Project. Web. 5 Jan. 2010.
217
Speed, History, 174.
198

Cunobelinus that appears in Speed’s “Kingdome of Great Britaine and Ireland” serves to
symbolically align James’s 17

th

century England with imperial Rome; like their classical

forbearers, early modern England has subjugated outlying territories and bought order and
governance to the less civilized people of the peripheries.
Shakespeare’s representation of the British king derivates from the above portraits of
Cymbeline in strategic ways, demonstrating how contemporary depictions of Roman Britain are
often at cross purposes. On the one hand, Roman Britain is called up to link early modern
England with the classical world and to use this genealogy to buttress claims to England’s own
imperial character, as illustrated in Speed’s maps. On the other, England’s resistance to Roman
rule, as depicted in Shakespeare’s play and other contemporary sources, is cited as proof of
British autonomy and archipelagic independence under the English crown. Shakespeare’s
historically inaccurate portrait of the British monarch emphasizes the way in which ancient
figures such as Cymbeline are at the service of incongruous mythologies. In order to support
official imperial narratives, Cymbeline figures as a symbol of England’s inherent imperial
potential as the heart of a British domestic empire. Problematically, this same mythic king is
called upon to illustrate Britain’s break from Rome and its refusal of colonial rule, thusly
characterizing Cymbeline as a nationalist figure who achieved British autonomy from its Roman
conquerors. Britain’s eventual independence from Rome became in the early modern period the
stuff of English nationalist sentiment, imagining this strongly felt need for autonomy as part and
parcel of the English national character. As evidenced by the above accounts of the historical
Cymbeline in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Holinshed and even Speed himself, this British monarch
was largely at odds with both the imperial and nationalist strains of early modern historical
narratives.

199

The contrary forces of Shakespeare’s invocation of Roman Britain are the source of much
critical inquiry. Willy Maley’s postcolonial reading of the play asserts that Stuart imperial
aspirations contradictorily led the English to copy their Roman conquerors: in Cymbeline he
detects the throne’s “mimetic desire, a desire to emulate a Roman achievement about which there
is deep ambivalence [ … ] Britain was made in Rome.” Maley reads in this “ambivalence”
England’s fear of “being consumed by an enlarged state”, i.e. James’s unified Great Britain.

218

Andrew Escobedo instead attends to the genealogical ruptures that inevitably occur when the
play reaches back into British history. Escobedo argues that the ‘British nation’ as imagined in
James’s reign accepts the heterogeneity that inevitably results in the search for a nation’s
genealogical roots and in the project of nation-building more generally. He maintains that this
‘British’ model allows for the linking of Britain to Rome; like the Romans whose empire
demanded a certain admixture, so must early modern Britain accept into its genealogical record a
heterogeneous joining of its populace across place and history. The English nation, on the other
hand, is based upon notions of modernity, national differentiation and internal purity. Rather than
use the ancient world as proof of national belonging and identity, the “English” national model
sometimes turned to the country’s “Saxon roots” as the genealogical site of origin for the
219

English.

Escobedo argues that the confusing nature of Cymbeline is the result of the

218

Maley, “Postcolonial Shakespeare: British Identity Formation and Cymbeline.”
Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings. Eds. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles.
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh, 1999) 74. Print.
219
Escobedo, “From Britannia to England: Cymbeline and the Beginning of Nations.”
Shakespeare Quarterly 59.1 (2008): 60-87. Project Muse. Web. 18 Oct. 2010.
200

unresolved negotiation between these two nations, the English and the British, with their
contending views of nationalism and history.

220

Mary Floyd-Wilson likewise considers the play in light of the turn toward England’s
Saxon heritage as a convenient site for excavating national identity, especially in the time of
James’s Union project, when Englishness was under the threat of being swallowed up by Britishness. In her compelling essay, she demonstrates the possibility that Cymbeline takes part in the
early modern debate surrounding “England’s Anglo-Saxon history” and the need for the English
to distance themselves from the barbarous ancient Scots.

221

Casting characters like Cloten and

Posthumus as Scots in various stages of civility, and the Princes as the “innately civil” (113)
Saxon progenitors of the English nation, Floyd-Wilson claims that
Shakespeare’s Cymbeline helps establish the exclusivity of English history. By
locating Britain’s future growth in the English people’s untainted ancestry and
native soil, Cymbeline anticipates some of the ethnographic myths that will give
222

shape to succeeding chapters in Anglocentric historiography.

The multiple genealogical “worlds” of Britain’s past (the ancient, the Roman, the Saxon, etc.)
cannot be neatly unified by a historical, cartographic or literary frame. In Cymbeline,
Shakespeare doesn’t allow history to be silently and gracefully amended along lines of imperial
or nationalist propaganda. Rather, he preserves the messiness and contradiction of British and

220
221

Ibid.

Floyd-Wilson, “Delving to the root: Cymbeline, Scotland, and the English race.” British
Identities and English Renaissance Literature. Eds. David J. Baker and Willy Maley.
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002): 102. Print.
222
Ibid, 113.
201

English history and the incongruities that arise when attempting to narratively separate the
223

two.

223

Other critical perspectives on Shakespeare’s use of Roman history include the work of
Robert S. Miola, who asserts that Cymbeline is Shakespeare’s “final critique of Rome” (61), in
which the Roman program of “self-assertion, revenge, and bloodshed” are tempered by
celebrated British “forgiveness and mercy” (59). See Miola, “Cymbeline: Shakespeare’s
Valediction to Rome.” Roman Images. Ed. Annabel Patterson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1984) 51-62. Print. Avraham Oz, takes a positive stance on the Romans’ influence on
Cymbeline’s construction of Britain, claiming that Cymbeline’s Britain achieves “a national
identity [ … ] extracted from the Romans and conferred upon his subjects” through his
reconciliation with Augustus at the play’s conclusion. See “Extending Within: Placing Self and
Nation in the Epic of Cymbeline.” JTD: Journal of Theatre and Drama 4 (1998): 81-97. Print.
Thomas Olsen argues that Rome is imagined through a dual and contradictory lens in the play.
He identifies two opposing Roman worlds in Cymbeline, the first being the celebrated ancient
seat of civility and imperial inspiration, and the second being the early modern view of Rome as
a place of vice and immorality, as described in Asham’s Schoolmaster. According to Olsen,
these contending visions of Rome are resolved in the character of Jachimo, who represents the
“residue of the anti-Roman historiographical tradition” (283). See Olsen, “Iachimo’s ‘DrugDam’d Italy’ and the Problem of British National Character in Cymbeline.” Shakespeare
Yearbook 10 (1999): 269-296. Print. D. E. Landry also contends that Shakespeare’s Cymbeline
draws attention to the historiographic manipulations necessary to compose a cohesive dramatic
and nationalist narrative. Landry takes a psychoanalytic approach to the play, arguing that an
analysis of the characters’ dream-like states reveals a latent unity that brings nation, individual
identity and dramatic aesthetics into harmony. He states that the play’s analogies “between the
logic of events of chronicle-history and the logic of dreams point up the disorder and illogic of
unreconstructed historical facts, and the essentially fictive structure the historian, like the
dramatist, must impose to give shape to his narrative. It is not that the sanctity of national history
is being deliberately undermined, but that Shakespeare makes us aware that history is
constructed, that both our personal and national myths must of necessity scaffold truth with an
artificial, purposive design” (77). See Landry, “Dreams as History: The Strange Unity of
Cymbeline.” Shakespeare Quarterly 33.1 (1982): 68-79. JSTOR. Web. 22 Nov. 2010. Clinton J.
Crumley likewise claims that Cymbeline makes apparent the “storytelling inherent to any telling
of history” (312). He bases this claim on the relationship between the play’s investment in
questions of historiography and the work’s ambiguous generic position as both a romance and a
history play. See Crumley, “Questioning History in Cymbeline.” SEL: Studies in English
Literature 1500-1900 41.2 (2001): 297-315. Project Muse. Web. 01 Nov. 2010. Like Crumley,
Andrew King explores the relationship between the play’s use of the romance’s “fictional
narratives”, which are performed sometimes unwittingly by Shakespeare’s characters, and the
fictional but culturally significant Galfridian myth of British origins (157). Arguing that
Cymbeline calls upon its audience’s awareness of this nationalist mythology, King contends that
“Shakespeare’s setting and subject matter derived from the British History in Cymbeline fuels
much of the play’s interest in the power and simultaneous decrepitude of romance narrative
structures. Performance, as something both contrived and also potentially all-encompassing, is
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According to Peter Salway, Roman Britain during Cymbeline’s reign was bound both
politically and economically to the imperial center. The Roman army, which was positioned on
The Rhine in preparation for the conquest of Germany and Holland, was dependent upon Britain
for needed supplies. During Cymbeline’s rule,
British aristocrats were enjoying the imports from the empire, while the list of
exports [received by Rome] shows that the Britons were not only paying for these
supplies important to the army: by sending gold, silver, slaves, and hunting dogs
they had also become a source of commodities of direct interest to the emperor
himself and to the rich at Rome.
The economic negotiations between the Roman center and the British periphery allowed for
224

political stability between the empire and Cymbeline’s British tribe, the Catuvellauni.

Yet,

despite the mutually beneficial trade relations that helped to preserve peace between conqueror
and conquered, Britain nevertheless remained under the yoke of Roman imperial rule and was
periodically subjected to the violence of their Roman overlords. Cymbeline’s Roman Britain,
unlike the “warlike people” (III.i.52) of the fictionalized kingdom of Shakespeare’s play, was
largely comfortable as a colonized nation and showed little desire for autonomy from their
Roman rulers until the death of Cymbeline and the takeover of Britain by Cymbeline’s sons.

the keystone of both the Jacobean response to the Galfridian tradition and the Shakespearean
reception of romance”(162). See King, “ ‘Howso’ er ‘tis strange … Yet is it true’: The British
History, Fiction and Performance in Cymbeline.” Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to
the Assembly. Eds. Willy Maley and Philip Schwyzer. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010): 157-75. Print.
Finally, Irving Ribner also comments upon Shakespeare’s deliberate alterations to history,
claiming that Shakespeare “used events of the past as Elizabethan historical theory held that they
should be used: to teach political lessons of value to the present [ … ] He did not hesitate,
moreover, to change his source material as he pleased in order to better effect his didactic
purposes” (47). See Ribner, “Shakespeare and Legendary History: Lear and Cymbeline.”
Shakespeare Quarterly 7.1 (1956): 47-52. JSTOR. Web. 22 Nov. 2010.
224
Salway, Roman Britain: A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000): 8-14. Print.
203

That the historical Cymbeline’s Britain was most certainly not “a world by itself”, as Cloten
purports, demonstrates the unreliability of constructed national myths and histories, such as those
illustrated in Speed’s Theatre.

225

Cloten’s declaration of Britain’s autonomy is repeatedly undermined and finally negated
all together when Cymbeline announces at the conclusion of the play that he and his subjects
willingly “submit to Caesar, / And to the Roman empire, promising / To pay our wonted tribute”
(V.v.460-62). Despite the Britons’ victory over their colonizers and reiterated assertions of the
nation’s improved strength and order since the time of Julius Caesar’s invasion (II.iv.20-26), the
prospect of British sovereignty is always elusive, owing to Britain’s ties to Rome and the king’s
ambiguous relationship to the empire. Significantly, the most overtly nationalist speech of the
play is uttered by Cymbeline’s “wicked queen”, whom he eventually blames for his temporary
disloyalty to his Roman overlords (V.v.463). Instructing her king to recall his ancestors who
defended the isle against the Roman’s incursions and praising the “natural bravery of the isle,
which stands / As Neptune’s park, ribb’d and pal’d in / With oaks unscalable and roaring
waters”, Cymbeline’s queen deploys two of the most powerful and common tenets of nationalist
ideologies: a historical record of heroic forefathers and a deep appreciation for the nation’s
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Paul Innes also remarks upon the play’s uneasy stance on English or British nationalism.
“Cymbeline’s treatment of national identity is messy at best,” he maintains, “inflected with
gender, it slips from notions of Englishness to alternative, perhaps competing ideas of
Britishness. It attempts to negotiate a whole range of contradictory elements even as it brings
them together with the need for some kind of formal, artistic closure”. I contend that this
movement between Englishness and British-ness in the play is a symptom of this very slippage
in early modern official discourse. See Innes, “Cymbeline and Empire.” Critical Survey 19.2
(2007): 6. WilsonWeb. Web. 01 November 2010. Valerie Wayne identifies in Cymbeline’s
attention to nationalist identification the play’s appropriateness as a vehicle of not only patriotic
sentiment, but also for postcolonial explorations and parodic send-ups of patriotic fervor. See
Wayne’s “Cymbeline: Patriotism and Performance.” A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol
IV: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays. Eds. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard.
Blackwell Reference Online. Web. 05 December 2010.
204

territorial character (II.v.18-20).

226

However, it is the dissembling queen and her hot-headed son

who declare Britain’s independence from Rome. Though Cymbeline eventually joins in the
queen’s nationalist chorus, conjuring up Mulmutius as the legitimate homegrown source of
British law and acclaiming the “warlike” nature of the British people, his proclamation of British
autonomy falls flat when he soon thereafter admits that it is the recent rebellions against Rome
and the desire of his people for freedom—not his nation’s inherent sovereign character—that has
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According to Philip Schwyzer, Cymbeline attends to British politics, specifically James’s
program for Union, but that the work adamantly refuses the tenets of British nationalism
developed during the reign of the Tudors. Speaking particularly of the Queen’s nationalist
speech, Schwyzer maintains that “the key figures of British nationalism [ … ] are made the
matter of often grotesque parody” (170). See Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in
Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004) 151-74. Print. Many
critics have attempted to explain why Shakespeare would give the villainous queen the play’s
most nationalist language. Ros King maintains that readers of the play ought to pay attention to
the language and form of the Queen’s speech, rather than the fact that this nationalist sentiment
is uttered by a “fairy-tale, wicked stepmother”. She places the Queen’s speech in conversation
with James I’s first address to Parliament, in which he points to Britain’s natural geographic
defenses, and John of Gaunt’s “scepter’d isle” speech in Richard II. “The Queen”, according to
King, “turns the coastline from defensive bastion to aggressive engine of war. She claims that the
treacherous sands that actually do surround the coast have actively colluded with the Britons’
political and military objectives and have refused to bear Caesar’s ships [ … ] Being, as it were,
the very embodiment of true British grit, they must inevitably behave that way again to give
future victory over the Romans” (77). See King, Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) 47-91. Print. Patricia Parker likens Cymbeline’s Queen to the
“narrowly nationalistic Italian queen, Amata” in the Aeneid, citing the parallels between
Shakespeare’s play and the Roman text as a means of explaining the work’s anachronism and its
emphasis on imperial “westering” (196, 205). David Bergeron instead sees in the Queen a “reallife analogue”, Augustus Caesar’s Livia. See Parker, “Romance and Empire: Anachronistic
Cymbeline.” Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance. Eds. George M. Logan and
Gordon Teskey (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989). Print and Bergeron, “Cymbeline: Shakespeare’s Last
Roman Play.” Shakespeare Quarterly 31.1 (1980): 31-41. JSTOR. Web. 21 Nov. 2010. Lastly,
G. Wilson Knight observes that the Queen in this scene “has powerfully expressed precisely the
sentiments many Elizabethan Englishmen must have felt after the failure of the Spanish Armada”
(135). To explain why the immoral queen is chosen to express this nationalist sentiment that
would likely resonate with Shakespeare’s audience, he contends that “neither [the Queen nor
Cloten] speak out of character: the Queen merely finds an occasion for the blameless exercise of
her fierce and active temperament [ … ] the national situation serving, as often in real life, to
render violent instincts respectable” (136). Knight, “Cymbeline: Themes and Persons.” The
Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays. (London: Methuen, 1965):
129-67. Print.
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impelled him to refuse to pay the tribute. Moments after denying Caius Lucius the unpaid tribute,
Cymbeline reminisces about his past in Julius Caesar’s court and his training under Britain’s first
conqueror, thus reinforcing the very bond he purportedly seeks to undo. He admits in this
moment that it is his need not to appear “cold” ( II.v.75) or unmoved by the several rebellions
launched against Rome that compels his rebellion, and later, during Caius departure from the
British court, he explains that “Our subjects [ … ] / Will not endure [Augustus’s] yoke; and for
ourself / To show less sovereignty than they, must needs / Appear unkinglike” (III.v.4-7).
Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, it seems, is neither the stalwart defender of British freedom nor a
loyal adherent to Roman culture and governance; rather, this manifestation of Cymbeline waffles
somewhere in between, occupying the ambiguous position of a leader driven by the actions of his
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unjust queen and the fear of a tarnished reputation to break ties with the empire.

227

Such a

Cymbeline himself is a figure of much critical attention. Alexander Leggatt observes that
“though the play is named for him, he has been for most of its length an unimpressive figure,
passive where he is not cantankerous” (207). See Leggatt, “The Island of Miracles: An
Approach to Cymbeline.” Shakespeare Studies: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism,
and Reviews 10 (1977) 191-209. Print. Likewise, Innes, drawing upon remarks regarding
Cymbeline’s emptiness by J. M. Nosworthy and E. M. W. Tillyard, claims that “by the logic of
identification of the king with the state, if Cymbeline is a nonentity, then so is his Britain” (5).
See Innes “Cymbeline and Empire”, cited above. John E. Alvis believes that Cymbeline sounds a
warning about absolutist rule. He considers early modern England’s conflict between a
concentration on domestic governance and the desire for imperial conquest. Of Shakespeare’s
king he argues, “Cymbeline shows himself not a particle less absolute than Shakespeare’s only
other pre-Conquest monarch, but he is considerably less intelligent than Shakespeare’s Lear [ …
] Cymbeline anticipates doubts regarding Tudor absolutism apparent in Shakespeare’s final
dramatic work, a play in which an autocratic Henry VIII, like his pre-Conquest semblant, makes
state policy serve royal personal caprice” (41). Alvis, “Cymbeline in Context: The Regime
Issue.” Shakespeare’s Last Plays: Essays in Literature and Politics. Eds. Stephen W. Smith and
Travis Curtright. (Lanham: Lexington, 2002): 35-51. Print. Emrys Jones argues that one must
read Cymbeline through the rhetoric of Stuart kingship, particularly in the royal language that
equated James with Augustus Caesar as a kingly peacemaker. He explains the work’s artistic
failure and incongruities as owing to the play’s anchoring of Cymbeline to James. Of
Cymbeline’s “unsatisfactory nature”, he claims “he is largely neutral and passive while the
Queen is alive but comes to no harm, for the author officiously protects him from the
consequences of his weak nature and ill-judged actions. The Queen and Cloten are used as
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portrait effectively displays the tensions and complications of drawing upon an ideologically
strained classical genealogy like Speed’s to support early modern English claims to imperial rule.
The Seat of British-ness
Like the queen’s intimation that Britain’s geography is a source of “national” character,
Belarius also cites the British landscape as imbuing in its subjects a strength of body and mind
closely associated with place. Instructing the disguised princes in their “mountain sport”
(III.iii.10), Belarius explains that the evils of courtly life are best understood from the distance of
Britain’s marginal territories: describing the cave in which they have made their home, Belarius
declares,
Stoop, boys, this gate
Instructs you how t’adore the heavens, and bows you
To a morning’s holy office. The gates of monarchs
Are arch’d so high that giants may jet through
And keep their impious turbans on without
Good morrow to the sun. Hail, thou fair heaven!
We house i’ th’ rock, yet use thee not so hardly
As prouder livers do (III.iii.2-9).

scapegoats: they take most of the blame and are killed off” (97). Landry makes a similar claim
about the play’s sacrifice of the Queen and her son: “[Cloten] is from our first sight of him a
marked man, and he serves, as in a quieter way his mother does, as a scapegoat for the purging of
the whole community” (72). See Landry, cited above, and Jones, “Stuart Cymbeline.” Essays in
Criticism 11 (1961): 84-99. Print. Finally, Maurice Hunt also sees Cloten’s necessary sacrifice as
“a first step in the reconstitution of the British body politic” (418). Hunt considers how
Shakespeare’s play seeks to depict a fractured political body that is ultimately rebuilt in the
image of “the Pauline body of Christ” (405). See Hunt, “Dismemberment, Corporal
Reconstitution, and the Body Politic in Cymbeline.” Studies in Philology 99.4 (2002): 404-431.
JSTOR. Web. 21 Nov. 2010.
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Like the Welsh rock that teaches its inhabitants humility and appreciation for God’s work, the
Cambrian mountains also allow for a site of contemplation of abused power and courtly
corruption from the safety of the periphery: “Consider”, Belarius instructs, “When you above
perceive me like a crow, / That it is place which lessens and sets off / And you may then revolve
what tales I have told you / Of courts, of princes, of the tricks of war” (III.ii.11-15). Belarius
implies here and elsewhere that it is the Welsh landscape—its perspectives, its mountain
ruggedness, its hidden-ness—that embeds in the princes that “nobler” sentiment that is
everywhere absent in the centers of government. Significantly, Shakespeare ahistorically situates
this training ground of princes in an annexed territory sometimes characterized by resistance to
English rule. As explained above, Wales as a politically defined national space arguably did not
exist during Cymbeline’s reign. However, Shakespeare’s Wales in Cymbeline is shot through
with early modern associations, among them the potential for violence, lawlessness and rebellion
in this peripheral land. For instance, the reputed Welsh “mountaineers” (IV.ii.71), who never
appear in the play, are variously characterized as “rustic” (IV.ii.100), villainous and criminal and
the land and its inhabitants referred to as “savage” (III.vi.18) and “beastly” (III.ii.40). In a
passage recalling early modern English anxieties regarding the security of Wales, Belarius
imagines that he and the princes have been included among the Welsh outlaws that “cave here,
hunt here [ … ] and in time / May make some stronger head” against their governors (IV.ii.13839).
Cymbeline’s incongruous depiction of Wales as both the ideal school ground for the
training of princes because of its distance from the court and a site of possible savagery and
disorder, also because of its ambiguous distance from “Britain” and Cymbeline’s stronghold
there, speaks to the early modern English tensions regarding the imperial governance of Wales,

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tensions that are symbolically erased in Speed’s “Kingdome”. As explained above, Speed rubs
out the border between England and Wales, illustratively depicting the imperial center and its
annexed marginal territory as a cohesive political unit. Shakespeare’s play denies this vision of a
conjoined body politic by re-infusing the Welsh landscape with these colonial anxieties and by
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absenting England altogether from his play about British “nationalism” and imperialism.

Speed’s texts, both cartographic and historical, allow Englishness to stand in for British-ness:
though he purports to represent Great Britain in his maps and in his History, both works place
England firmly at the center of their ideological portraits of the isles. As described above, the
elaborate ornamentation and strategic framing techniques of Speed’s maps project an image of
England as the heart and “natural” sovereign of the kingdom. Likewise, Speed’s History of Great
Britain is clearly invested in writing an English history of British-ness; Speed’s chronology of
British kings consists of England’s Roman, Saxon, Danish, Norman and English monarchs who
reigned primarily over English lands and annexed territories. His “description of the whole
Kingdome in generall” is a catalog of English counties, with a handful of Irish territories
included in a separate section. Significantly, the Welsh counties are grouped within the English
territories as if they are unproblematically sutured to England. Shakespeare’s representation of
Wales in Cymbeline refuses the notion of England’s smooth incorporation of Wales by
reinstating the Welsh-Anglo border, injecting the work with contemporary colonial anxieties and

228

Terence Hawkes also comments upon the play’s refusal of British unity. According to his
analysis, “what the play finally, helplessly hints at is the extent to which the ‘two worlds’ that
England and Wales comprise remain two, not one. [ … ] Cymbeline cannot resolve the
contradiction that the notion of a British ‘nation’ embodies: a single, unified and coherent
political entity perhaps, but one that is also simultaneously multiple”. Hawkes, Shakespeare in
the Present. (London: Routledge, 2002): 61. Print.
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absenting England from a play that gestures toward England’s own imperial intentions inspired
229

by its Roman past.

Furthermore, Shakespeare’s anachronistic Wales in Cymbeline serves as a kind of extranational space, an ambiguously defined territory that sits outside Britain and repeatedly
challenges claims to British control over the isle. Aligned with contemporary imperial
representations of Wales, the Welsh landscape in Cymbeline is a site of potential rebellion,
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Critics have reached various conclusions about Shakespeare’s use of Wales in Cymbeline. In
Laura Di Michele’s estimation, Wales is a site of “infiltrating relationships” (158), where a
hybrid Roman-British-ness is achieved through “the Roman and British characters’ going and
coming to and from Rome, and perhaps more importantly, through a full immersion of the exiled
Britons [in Wales]” (164). See Di Michele, “Shakespeare’s Writing of Rome in Cymbeline.”
Identity, Otherness and Empire in Shakespeare’s Rome Ed. Maria Del Sapio Garbero (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2009) 157-173. Print. Atsuhiko Hirota argues for the “instability” of the relationship
between center and periphery in regard to the play’s three locations. Wales, he maintains, is
neither in Cymbeline’s Britain nor without it, thus complicating contemporary perceptions of the
early modern domestic empire. He likewise maintains that Britain itself is cast as marginal while
the Roman center appears to lack its former qualities as an imperial stronghold, due to the
empire’s multinational states. He reads the “dissipated” imperial center as a warning to Jacobean
England. See Hirota, “Forms of Empires: Rome and its Peripheries in Cymbeline.” The
Shakespearean International Yearbook 4: Shakespeare Studies Today. Eds. Graham Bradshaw,
Tom Bishop and Mark Turner (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) 279-293. Print. Garrett Sullivan
instead describes Cymbeline’s Wales as a “shadow” nation that serves only to illuminate London
as the center of the court and of Englishness more generally (146). Through an examination of
early modern notions of landscape and geography, Sullivan contends that Wales occupied a
contradictory place in the English imagination. Because discourses about Wales marked the
nation as both similar to and fundamentally different from England, neither the language of
assimilation nor of annexation was entirely applicable to the Welsh nation. Envisioning a
“shadow-Wales” or an indistinctly defined territory hedged the difficulties posed by England’s
takeover of the country by making this landscape an emptied template for the formulation of
English identity. See Sullivan 146, cited above. Marisa R. Cull examines the play’s Welsh
setting through a consideration of Henry Frederick’s 1610 investiture. Putting Cymbeline in
relation to The Valiant Welshman and Prince Henry’s Barriers, Cull argues that the meaning of
Shakespeare’s play is illuminated when reconsidered as a lesson in British identity and history
meaningfully staged in the Welsh territories. Cull contends that, in both Cymbeline and The
Valiant Welshman, “a distinctive version of Welsh heroism emerges as a means for exploring the
ancient past and its usefulness as a model for the present day heir to the throne” (131). See Cull,
“Contextualizing 1610: Cymbeline, The Valiant Welshman, and The Princes of Wales.”
Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to the Assembly. Eds. Willy Maley and Philip
Schwyzer. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) 127-142. Print.
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resistance and invasion that allows those housed within its territories a political position outside
the realm of British governance. For instance, Milford-Haven is not only the entry point for the
invading Roman army; it is also a site in which escapees of Cymbeline’s rule, such as Imogen,
Posthumus and Belarius enact their destinies in direct denial of the sovereign’s will. To become
reunited with her banished husband, Pisanio instructs Imogen that “not in Britain must you
abide”, before directing her to Wales (III.iv.134). Though her final destination is Rome, where
she will at least reside in proximity to her husband, it is Wales that will allow her the opportunity
and departure point for her life outside the rule of her father. Likewise, the Welsh territory is the
site of the banished Belarius’s revenge against his unjust king, harboring Cymbeline’s secret
sons just outside the monarch’s purview.
As mentioned above, the most significant transformations and determining action of
Cymbeline take place in the Welsh territories; it is in Wales that Britain’s future monarchs are
trained, where Imogen discovers the means to recover her banished husband, and the place in
which the Roman army enters Britain. Apposite to English imperial discourse, Wales is the
landscape in which the play’s celebrated British-ness is developed; whereas Britain is a site of
social and political unease from the play’s beginning, a nation of unhappy subjects, ruled by a
monarch under the sway of his corrupt queen and step-son, Wales is the terrain where
unvarnished British-ness is formed and preserved in the person of the princes and the virtuous
action of the monarch’s daughter. As Jodi Mikalachki contends, Wales in Cymbeline is “the last
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preserve and final retreat of pure Britishness”.

Cymbeline himself, after his reunion with

230

Mikalachki analyzes the play’s treatment of gender, arguing that the work’s exorcism of the
feminine allows for “the masculine embrace of Roman Britain [ … ] producing a civil masculine
foundation for early modern nationalism” (322). See Mikalachki, “The Masculine Romance of
Roman Britain: Cymbeline and Early Modern English Nationalism.” Shakespeare Quarterly 46.3
(1995): 301-322. JSTOR. Web. 21 Nov. 2010. Lisa Hopkins also identifies Wales as the preserve
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Guiderius and Arviragus, remarks that his Welsh-bred sons and their guardian are “the liver,
heart and brain of Britain” (V.v.14).

231

Likewise, the extra-national territory allows for the

largely unquestioned murder of the unjust Cloten, whose villainy coupled with that of his
mother’s, is the source of the infection of the British court that leads to the war with Rome.
Cymbeline’s fundamental action in Wales can be attributed, in part, to the play’s refusal
to give geopolitical definition to the territory labeled as “Welsh”. Though the region is
anachronistically described as “Wales” throughout the work (by both characters like Imogen and
in the stage directions), the play consistently casts the region as socially and politically
ambiguous, particularly in its relationship to Britain.

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As indicated above, Wales is

territorially defined as “not in Britain” by Pisanio. Cymbeline also gestures toward a border
between his nation and Wales when he commands his soldiers to escort Caius “till he have
cross’d the Severn” in response to the Roman ambassador’s request for “overland” passage to
Milford-Haven (III.v.8-17). Because of the significant distance between the River Severn and the

of ancient British identity, claiming that “Wales is seen in the play as the one remaining home of
true British valour; indeed the Britons, in the shape of the Welsh, are markedly more Roman than
the Romans” (143). See Hopkins, “Cymbeline, the translatio imperii, and the matter of Britain.”
Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to the Assembly. Eds. Willy Maley and Philip
Schwyzer. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010): 143-55. Print.
231
Gavin Paul’s reads Cymbeline’s bodily metaphor in this scene as a commentary on Wales’s
“submersion” into early modern England. In his interpretation, Guiderius and Arviragus’s
metaphorical incorporation into their father’s Britain amounts to the instrumental “absorption” of
both “the distinct Welsh geography” and “the princes’ latent nationalistic fervour” into the
British political landscape (182). See Paul, “Theatrical and National Spaces in Cymbeline.”
Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 37 (2006): 169-192. Print.
232
The Welsh territory is also referred to as “Cambria” in act III scene ii. However,
Shakespeare is careful to pair this reference to Wales’s ancient designation with a very
contemporary signifier of Wales. Imogen, learning of Posthumus’s belief that she has been
unfaithful through his letter to Pisanio, quotes the following lines: “ ʻTake notice that I am in
Cambria, / at Milford Haven” (III.ii.43-4). By coupling “Cambria” with a well-circulated
referent to Tudor mythology, any audience members unaware of Wales’ former name would
immediately associate this space with contemporary Wales.
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coastal city, one may safely assume that Cymbeline’s comment serves to delineate the border
between his kingdom and Wales. Most important, however, are the moments in the play that
speak to the unclear political status of the vaguely-defined Welsh periphery. For example, the
Welsh territory is the designated site in which Pisanio is to carry out the murder of Imogen,
according to Posthumus’s instructions; it is also, as mentioned above, the place of Cloten’s
killing. In these instances, it seems that the Welsh periphery allows for a type of criminal, even
murderous, activity outlawed in Cymbeline’s state. More telling perhaps is the unclear status of
the laws of the kingdom in Wales. In response to Belarius’s anxieties regarding the murder of
Cloten by Guiderius, the disguised prince signals that Cymbeline’s British law does not reach
into marginal Wales: “The law / Protects not us,” explains the heir to the kingdom, “then why
should we be tender / To let an arrogant piece of flesh threat us / Play judge and executioner all
himself, / For we do fear the law?” (IV.ii.124-29). Such an explanation of the limit of British
law, especially in the mouth of Britain’s future king, testifies to both the impotency of British
governance in a territory within its supposed isle and to the extra-national character of this
apparently lawless region.
The question of allegiance to neighboring Britain again arises when the princes consider
their roles in the war; bound to neither Britain nor to Rome, yet drawn into the battle due to their
inherent princely identities, Guiderius makes plain their seemingly nation-less status.
Responding to Belarius’s suggestion that they take to the Welsh mountains, Guiderius asks
“what hope / Have we in hiding us? This way, the Romans / Must or for Britains slay us or
receive us / For barbarous and unnatural revolts” (V.iii.3-6). Due to their politically untenable
position in the ungoverned periphery, the princes could be taken as enemies by either army;
however, this political ambiguity also allows the princes to choose their allegiances, rather than

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be put to the service of their governmental overlords. Significantly, the sons of Cymbeline and
future leaders of Britain choose to fight for the British not in allegiance to their father or because
of some nationalist sentiment that urges them to defend Britain. The “country wars” (IV.iv.51) as
Belarius terms them are for the sons of Cymbeline less a matter of “country” or British pride, but
one of natural militaristic prowess and a desire for life experience.

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Contradictorily, Shakespeare’s Wales in Cymbeline is simultaneously the site of authentic
British-ness and not territorially or politically British. The geopolitically and ideologically
ambiguous portrait of Wales in Shakespeare’s play draws uncomfortable attention to the ability
of the Welsh peripheries to confound official notions of Englishness and British-ness. The extranational character of Shakespeare’s Wales in Cymbeline resonates with contemporary anxieties
regarding English imperial governance and control over Wales. Areas of potential lawlessness,
unclear allegiances and unmonitored spaces were pronounced concerns for the English. The
play’s treatment of Wales also forces a recognition of the sometimes crude handling of historical
materials appropriated to support official nationalist and imperial agendas. Shakespeare sets the
primary action of the play in a non-English territory that highlights the state’s weaknesses,
problematizing both England’s imperial character and official claims to a united Britain. This
same territory, however, is one of great ideological import to the crown. The Galfridian
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John E. Curran, Jr. reads the play’s treatment of the princes as evidence of shifting
historiographic trends in the early modern period. Taking its cue from “the new humanist
history” (277), Shakespeare’s work gestures toward the fallibility and weakness of a British
identity drawn from Galfridian history, with its emphasis on “title and lineage” (299). The
invalidation of Galfridian historiography meant that the early moderns were forced to discover a
kind of honor in their savage British ancestors (like those illustrated in Speed’s History), who
found legitimacy in their submission to Rome. Curran sees in the play’s representation of the
princes the historiographical turn toward humanist history and the need to discover a celebrated
identity in the wilds of ancient Britain. See Curran, “Royalty Unlearned, Honor Untaught: British
Savages and Historiographical Change in Cymbeline.” Comparative Drama 31.2 (1997): 277303. Print.
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historiography that undergirded the rule of the Tudors and the Stuarts, was, at the time of the
play’s production, losing its validity. Therefore, the play’s repeated references to Milford-Haven
would not, as it may first appear, serve to celebrate those official mythologies intended to bolster
nationalist and royalist sentiment. Rather, placing his characters in this landmark of English
royalty and British myths of origin instead points to a growing awareness of the insubstantiality
of such official legends. Locating much of the action of the play in the scene of a then out-moded
Galfridian historiography while puncturing the narrative of England’s ties to ancient Rome,
Shakespeare’s play deflates the imperial and nationalist rhetoric illustratively projected in
Speed’s “Kingdome of Great Britain and Ireland”. Thusly, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline
demonstrates the power of popular literature to question the ideologically charged mythologies
of official nationalist narratives. As if to lend further punctuation to the emptiness of constructed
nationalist mythologies, Shakespeare’s conclusion to the play empties Cymbeline of the
ideological might that he possessed in Speed’s maps: “Let / A Roman and a British ensign wave
/ Friendly together”, he declares, effectively surrendering up his nation’s claims to national
autonomy and imperial destiny (V.v.480-81).
Genealogical Mapping
Upon Imogen’s arrival in the Welsh peripheries, she is moved to condemn the colonial
discourse that imagines this territory and its inhabitants as barbarous and wild: “These are kind
creatures”, she exclaims of her unknown brothers, “Gods / what lies have I heard! / Our courtiers
say all’s savage but at court. / Experience, O thou disprov’st report! / Th’ imperious seas breeds
monsters; for the dish, / Poor tributary rivers as sweet fish” (IV.ii.31-36). Like the beastly sea
creatures that swarm around the Irish and Welsh coastlines in Speed’s maps, threatening harm to
the unwary traveler to these out-regions, the imperial discourse emanating from the English

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courts was intended to draw in monstrous hues the conquered peoples of the British margins.
One of several colonial models designed to ideologically cast the Irish, Welsh and portions of the
Scottish population as unevolved and uncivilized and therefore in need of English imperial rule,
this imperial or colonial strategy was also a matter of English state-building, as discussed above.
For instance, because the Irish isle was populated with “wilde” Irish, as we see illustrated in
Speed’s maps, the very nature of the island and its people demands the expansion of a state
infrastructure into these savage territories to bring order and law.
If one considers, however, the genealogical model of a shared and ancient British-ness set
up by Speed and others and critiqued by Shakespeare in Cymbeline, one detects a certain
ideological rupture. As we have seen, early modern English colonial rhetoric was dependent on a
discourse of British sameness that imagined the people of the archipelago sharing a common
genealogy and ethnicity. Speed’s maps reinforced this notion of shared British-ness by
containing the regions of the archipelago in a single frame and embellishing these artificially
close landmasses in a singular vision of British identity. However, English colonial discourse
during this period was simultaneously reliant upon a language of essential difference: the Welsh,
Irish and the Scots betrayed fundamental inferiorities when contrasted with their English
brethren and were therefore rightly subjected to English rule. Speed’s maps exemplify this
contradictory position. Despite his attempts to visually narrate a myth of shared British-ness
across the isles, he is nevertheless at pains to distinguish the English from the Irish along ethnic
and sociocultural lines.
As discussed in chapter one, the construction of a British genealogy centered on English
ethnicity and culture brought with it the problem of differentiating the ancient Briton from his
less civilized counterparts, the Picts and the Scots. In my analysis of Utopia, I argued that Speed

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and William Camden sought to describe the Picts and Scots as invaders to an essentially English
isle. When the Picts and Scots are considered in the light of a British genealogy that still must
separate the English as ethnically superior, the writers of the nation had to overcome a different
set of ideological ruptures. During the reign of a Scottish king, the rhetorical maneuvers required
in these illustrations of ancient Britain and the naturalness of an English isle had to be very
delicately constructed. In contemporary English discourse, the Picts and Scots are the savage
th

ancestors of the Irish and Scottish, who, even in the 16 and 17

th

centuries bear the markings

and behaviors of this ancestral barbarity. William Camden, though he contends that the Picts
were in fact Britons, nevertheless refers to this ancient group as “barbarous” and likens these
234

ancestors to the present-day “wilde Irish”.

Of the Scots, Camden very cautiously and

problematically parts the family tree, identifying the ancestors of James’s Scots as English
speakers “from the very same Germane originall, that we English men are”; the other Scots who
inhabit the highlands and outlying islands, those whose resistance to British law and order posed
significant difficulties to the British state, sprung from “those Scots speaking Irish”. More
concretely linking the wild Scots with Ireland is Camden’s contention that “certainley knowen it
is, that out of Ireland, an Ile inhabited in old times by Britans [ … ] [the Scots] passed into
Britain, and what time as they were first known unto writers by this name, seated they were in
235

Ireland”.

Edmund Spenser’s Irenæus in A View of the State of Ireland more strictly and

radically collapses the ancestors of the Irish and Scottish. While arguing that the Irish are
descended from the Scythians, whose expanse reached into both Ireland and Scotland, Eudoxus
questions whether his interlocutor’s focus hasn’t shifted away from their main topic of interest.
234
235

Camden, Britannia. Ed. Robert Mayhew. Vol. 1 (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2003): 117-18. Print.
Ibid, 119 and 120.
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“I wonder [ … ] whether you runne so farre astray; for whilest wee talke of Ireland, mee thinks
you rippe up the originall of Scotland, but what is that to this?” he asks. “Surely very much,”
Irenæus replies, “for Scotland and Ireland are all one and the same”. Though, like Camden,
Spenser is very careful in parsing the ancient Scottish population into the “Irish Scots” and the
“Albin-Scots”, Spenser’s scathing characterization of the Irish in both their ancient and
236

contemporary form here expands to segments of the Scottish population.

Camden and

Spenser’s ideological maneuvers that meld the ancient Scots and Irish into a single ethnicity are
clearly intended to succinctly differentiate the ancestors of the English from the taint of barbarity
purportedly still evident in the English’s less civilized neighbors.
However, the difficulty of ferreting out from a history of conquest and ethnic mixing the
origin of contemporary British (English) identity made inevitable the potential genealogical
linking of the Picts and the British. The need to provide England or Britain with a deeply
historical genealogy demanded that preserved British-ness be traced through the many invasions
of the archipelago and distinguished from Saxon, Norman and other foreign cultures. But, to
strip away the contaminating influence and genealogy of the many invading peoples over the
course of British history could lead to the ideologically troubling notion that no “true Britons”
could be excavated from the British historical record of conquest and intermixture.

236

237

A solution

Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland Eds. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1997) 45 Print.
237
Sam Smiles makes a similar point concerning the slipperiness of ancestral identification of
the British and the English. Speaking of the overthrow of Galfridian myths of British origin, he
considers the untenable position presented to the Englishman when imagining the ancient Briton
as his national forefather: “Once the Galfridian history of Britain was supplanted, there was
considerable uncertainty about who the ancestors of the present-day inhabitants of Britain
actually were. The reputation and identity of the Britons recorded in classical texts, for all their
hardihood and martial valour, did not offer a secure point of reference for an Elizabethan reader.
Those who had received civilization—the Britons south of the Roman wall—had also been
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to this problem lay in the notion that the Picts and the Scots, ancient peoples who survived
alongside England’s ancestors were, in fact, uncivilized Britons, who had yet to come into the
civil and ethically-minded form achieved by the English. Such a constructed history would serve
a dual purpose: to give “the British” a more expansive and traceable history, to provide an
imperial narrative of superior Englishness, and to project the idea of a deep British-ness that
enveloped even disparate ethnic groups across the archipelago.
However, the evolutionary model of British-ness that would simultaneously support
colonial discourses tracing the Picts and Scots to the modern Irish and Scottish still maintained
essential and unchangeable difference as the primary motor behind the subjection of these
“peripheral” peoples to English law and culture. For instance, Harrison’s Description of Britain
from the 1577 version of Holinshed’s Chronicles discounts the historical records of England’s
ancestors: “although their histories do carry great countenance of their antiquity and continuance
in this Island: yet (to say freely what I think) I judge them rather to have stole in hither, not much
before the Saxons”. Because, he argues, the histories of the Picts and Scots cannot be trusted,
Harrison maintains that “it shall suffice to give notice that they are but strangers, and such as by

defeated by waves of invaders and, it was presumed, had been supplanted by the Saxons. Seen
from a metropolitan point of view, those who had never succumbed to the Romans—the
inhabitants of what were now the Celtic fringes—had remained reluctant converts to civilization
even in modern times. Neither seemed to have much to do with contemporary England,
increasingly identified with the Saxon settlement, and many educated Englishmen would not
wish to claim descent from the aboriginal inhabitants of Britain”. I would add to Smiles’
assessment that this attempt to find a suitable progenitor of the British race was complicated by
the need, on the part of the English, to differentiate themselves from the present-day Scottish,
Welsh and Irish. To “locate” an originary Briton could open up more problems than ideological
solutions because this “Briton” needed to be somehow English and emphatically not of Pict or
Scot lineage. Smiles, “John White and British Antiquity: Savage Origins in the Context of Tudor
Historiography.” European Visions: American Voices. British Museum Records Publication 172.
Web 9 April 2010.
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obscure invasion have nestled in this Island”.

238

By reducing the ancient Picts and Scots to

history-less “strangers” who have lawlessly “stolen” into Britain, Harrison casts the Picts and
Scots as troublesome invaders separate from British history and British stock. His 1587 account
of the Picts and Scots is much more severe in its derogatory description of Britain’s sometimes
ancestors. The Scots are “of Scithian and Spanish blood” who “arrive [d] here out of Ireland”.
Placing the Scots in Ireland, of course, links these strangers to the contemporary Irish and creates
an important ideological distance between the early modern “Britains” or Englishmen and their
Irish and Scottish neighbors. Again, the Scots have “stolen” into Britain who, in this version,
did often adventure hither to rob and steal out of Ireland, and were finally called
in by the Meats or Picts (as the Romans named them because they painted their
bodies) to help against the Britains, after the which they so planted themselves in
these parts, that unto our time that portion of the land cannot be cleansed of
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them.

Harrison’s depiction of the Scots and the Picts here achieves several rhetorical goals: the first, to
criminalize the Scots; second, to imagine a Scottish and Pictish people as separate from and
hostile to the “Britains”; and third, to posit a modern and ambiguous “Britain” that still suffers
from the contaminating effects of their savage and essential difference. Harrison also seeks to
distinguish the “natural Britans” of antiquity from the Picts, using their differences in body
painting as evidence. The Picts figure less in Harrison’s account; he focuses rather on his
contention that the “Scots and Irish are all one people” and providing illustrations of the
barbarity of this collapsed ethnic group. Such a linking, of course, serves to indict the early
238
239

Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577) Vol. 1.Section 1.4.

Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587) Vol. 1.Section 1.4. The
Holinshed Project. Web. 10 April 2009.
220

modern Irish and Scottish population of Britain who are derived from this savage stock and who
have yet to be “cleansed” from the presumably English landscape. It is significant that when
Harrison ends his section on the Picts and Scots in British antiquity he does so by
anachronistically invoking “Roman” England and explaining that the criminal Scots were
expelled from the island to Ireland, “the out Iles, and the north part of the main”, hence instating
in his history of British antiquity the very political borders that this nationalist and imperial
narrative seeks to endorse.
Harrison’s severing of the Scots from the British family tree—a move that
problematically runs contrary to the notion of a shared British genealogy—is also a project of
Spenser’s in A View of the State of Ireland. In their conversation about the origins of the Irish in
Britain, Eudoxus explains to Irenæus that the Irish and the Scottish are one people; he makes this
assertion based upon the notion that the ancient Scots were in fact Scythians who came to inhabit
both Ireland and Scotland. Eudoxus contends that there are “but two kindes of Scots [ … ] the
one Irin, or Irish Scots, the other Albin-Scots; for those Scots are Scythians, arrived (as I said ) in
the North parts of Ireland, where some of them after passed into the next coast of Albine, now
called Scotland, which (after much trouble) they possessed, and of themselves named
Scotland”.

240

Spenser’s narrative of the ancient Irish and Scottish serves a similar purpose to

Harrison’s rhetoric about the Picts and Scots, discussed above; by drawing up this history,
Spenser manages to expunge the Scottish and the Irish from “British” history by imagining their
ancestors as an invasive tribe whose savage characteristics and foreign origins culturally and
ethnically separate them from the ancient Britons. Also, by collapsing the Scots and Irish,
Spenser subtly promotes the notion of a combined foreign otherness at cultural and social odds
240

Spenser, 45.
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with the ancient and rightful inhabitants of the archipelago, the British or, by deduction, the
English. One can register certain echoes of Harrison’s nationalist and imperial narrative that had
the combined forces of the Picts and Scots warring against the “natural” Britons.
Such politically driven myths of “British” history seek not to provide a holistic view of
the archipelago in ancient times, but to construct a seemingly historical narrative that repeatedly
excavates the contemporary Scottish and Irish from the British family. The “natural” Britons are
the English in these manufactured histories who must contend with the invasive cultures that
have “planted” or “creeped” into their territory. This writing of British history clashes, of course,
with the notion of an all-encompassing archipelagic genealogy born of an ancient and shared
British-ness. Likewise, the evolutionary model also fails in this problematic trimming of the
family tree. The contemporary Scottish and Irish, descendants of the uncivilized Scots and Picts,
possess an essential ethnic difference as invading strangers to the British lands, an unchangeable
difference that demands their “cleansing” from this land or a brand of wholesale violence, as
endorsed by Spenser, that smacks of extermination, rather than reform through the enforcement
of English law and custom.
Speed in his History of Great Britain attempts to skirt the issue of contemporary claims
to this essential difference in order to support the genealogical legacy of ancient British-ness
depicted in his cartographic and historiographic texts. Unlike the discussion of Speed’s
illustrations of the ancient Picts in chapter one, where Speed attempted to equate the Picts and
Native Americans as existing on the same evolutionary chain, here Speed draws upon Thomas
Hariot’s depictions of the Picts in his Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia
to ambiguously position the Picts as the uncivilized ancestors of the Britons while
simultaneously distancing this savage group from the ancient British line. Whereas Hariot claims

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that the Picts illustrated by Theordor de Bry in his True Report were “as savage as those
[inhabitants] of Virginia”, Speed alters both the effect of these illustrations and the narrative
surrounding these potential British ancestors (figs. 12 and 13). Though Speed uses illustrations in
the same style as de Bry—one does not immediately detect the difference between those
assembled in Speed’s chronicle and those used by Hariot—he re-titles these like images. The
first set, which depicts a Pictish man and woman naked and covered in the animal and flower
motifs described by Harrison, Speed and Hariot, is entitled “portraitures and paintings of the
ancient Britaines”. In the second grouping, the man and woman stand in similar positions and
carry similar weapons but are clothed; they bear the title “The portraitures and habits of the more
civill Britaines”. One would assume from the renaming of Hariot’s Picts that Speed is invested in
bringing these figures into the history of British identity and culture, thus lending historical
credence to the claim that British-ness has a deep genealogical lineage in the isles, reaching back
before the conquests of the Romans, Saxons and Normans and stretching forward in time in
some preserved form. However, even in the title of this section of the history, Speed is at pains to
differentiate the Picts illustrated in both his and Hariot’s texts from their British inheritors: he
entitles this chapter, “The Portraitures of the Ancient Britanes, of their Nakedness, Painting and
Figuring their Bodies, of their Personages, Habits, and Habiliments, both in Peace and War: As
also of the Picts, their Original and Habits, &c.” (fig. 14). Though Speed seems interested in
promoting the evolution model of civil British-ness, in which savage and ancient inhabitants of
the island eventually achieve the civility and order of the contemporary English (as his two sets
of illustrations imply), Speed immediately disrupts this narrative by distinguishing the ‘Ancient
Britaines” of his illustrations and the Picts who are the subject of the latter half of his chapter.

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Throughout this section on ancient Britain, Speed repeatedly and anxiously returns to this
distinction. Claiming the genealogical connection between the ancient Britons and the Picts is “a
question not yet decided”, Speed cites ancient sources that position the Picts variously as
foreigners from Germany, France and Scythia, repeating the myth that the Picts came into Britain
from Ireland. Conceding ancient accounts that the Picts were, in fact, “the remains of those
ancient Britaines” that survived the Roman invasion and acknowledging the similarity in
“language”, “manners” and “government”, Speed subtly discounts this lineage by explaining that
the Romans and even the ancient British themselves used the term “Picts” to distinguish the
241

painted people from the Britons proper.

Similarly, Speed interrupts the narrative of his

sources to draw his readers’ attention to the fundamental difference underlying the relationship
between these ancient peoples who populated the archipelago. Discussing potential reasons for
the Picts’ reported nakedness, Speed cites Solinus, but not without his own ideologically
motivated interjection: “of the Britaines, Solinus thus delivereth: The Countrey is in part (note
that he makes it not generall) inhabited by People barbarous, who by artificiall formes of
incision have from their Childhood sundry shapes of Beasts depourtrayed in their bodies”.
Speed a second time brackets off the wild Picts from the ancestors of the English, explaining that
reports of the nakedness that sometimes characterizes the ancient people of the island should not
be applied to “the Britaines in generall, but the most barbarous of them [that] used to goe
naked”. Attempting to separate the savage Picts from the ancient British stock through careful
revisions to the materials of British history, Speed wavers between a nationalist narrative
dependent upon a myth of shared ancient British-ness that has bound historically the people of

241

Speed, History (1611) 181.
224

the archipelago and a contemporary imperial narrative reliant upon Scottish and Irish
242

difference.

A Faltering Geography
The messiness of a British history that seeks to posit a nationalist narrative of British or
English sameness while simultaneously insisting upon fundamental ethnic difference as the
underpinning of imperial discourses is somewhat alleviated in the transition from textual
discourse to cartographic representation. Whereas textual reproductions of history must contend
with the multiplicity of written works that sometimes betray certain ideological pitfalls, as
evidenced in the contending and troubling accounts of ancient Britain discussed above, maps
empty the field of inscribed narratives and rework them into silent but message-laden images.
The visual narratives “spoken” by maps are not often made to enter into the arena of historical
debate, unlike the written texts of Camden, Speed, Harrison and Holinshed, where various and
conflicting sources are deployed to combat previous representations of history. Rather, the
mapmaker may concoct a visual story made up of illustrations, crests and even manipulated
landmasses without the immediate need to defend the map’s overall narrative and the materials
that went into building it. It is for these reasons that maps like Speed’s could do a similar kind of
nationalist and imperial work akin to the above histories with less attention shone on the
rhetorical contradictions and irreconcilabilities embedded in those written works that sought to
depict the “British” national character while maintaining the ethnic otherness essential to
imperial discourses. In cartographic texts, geography becomes the silent basis for national
sameness and the justification for English imperial rule over the isles.

242

Ibid, 182.
225

However, like the genealogical model that falters under the sorts of literary pressure
applied by works like Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, the geographic model of nation and empire that
seeks to posit both archipelagic sameness and ethnic difference is similarly weakened when
made the object of popular literary depictions. Fletcher and Massinger’s Sea Voyage, for
instance, draws upon the ideologically charged depictions of savage and contaminating Ireland
and ordered and naturally abundant England. Such illustrations are the stuff of English imperial
discourse in Spenser’s View and Camden’s Britannia, texts that support the official line of
English rule over Ireland. As discussed above, Speed’s map of Ireland is the visual compliment
to these imperial discourses. Because of his cartographic medium, Speed’s illustrative texts
quietly sidestep the textual difficulties encountered in English imperial rhetoric that seeks to
paint a damning portrait of Ireland while simultaneously imagining the island nation as part of
the British archipelagic family. In Spenser and Camden, these ideological incongruities are
present in the geographic depictions of the Irish land, which inconsistently depict Ireland and its
people as both savage, barren and beyond reform and as potentially civil, fruitful and capable of
achieving an Irish commonwealth akin to its English neighbor. The success of such colonial
discourses depends, in part, on this fundamental incongruity; to justify the imperial takeover of
Ireland by the English, the island and its inhabitants must be portrayed as without order and thus
in need of English governance. On the other hand, to draw English colonizers into the colonial
effort in Ireland and to sustain the geographic model of archipelagic unity and insularity, Ireland
must be described as a land of plenty and promise. Much like the genealogical model that
balances precariously on claims of ancient British sameness and contentions that the Picts, Celts
and their early modern forefathers are fundamentally ethnically different, the geographic model
walks an unsteady rhetorical line between archipelagic unity and English assertions of the

226

essential territorial and ethnic difference of its British neighbors. English nationalist sentiment
and justifications for empire seem to run contrary to one another: Ireland must be painted as
savage and inhospitable in contrast to England’s civility and fruitfulness, yet Ireland must not be
so savage as to contaminate or pose a threat to the ethnic British-ness that binds the archipelagic
empire into a single autonomous unit.
The two islands of Fletcher and Massinger’s Sea Voyage seem to mimic the colonial
portraiture of England and Ireland found in texts like Spenser’s View and Camden’s Britannia.
The “Irish” island is barren and unprofitable, save for a pile of gold acquired through imperial
conquest. Across a tempestuous sea lies the “English” island, an “Elizian field” inhabited by an
all-female commonwealth.

243

On the surface of this colonial narrative, the “Irish” island is a

place of savagery and dangerous contamination, where desperation and greed produce in the
characters the kind of barbarity often associated with Ireland in English imperial discourse. The
English island, in contrast, is a place of order and natural abundance; the female subjects and
their island queen protect their “commonwealth” and its resources by adhering to a system of law
and governance (II.ii.17). However, the play’s obviously drawn differences between island
savagery and civility do not hold up under the play’s action. The violence that erupts on the
“Irish” isle is not ultimately caused by the island’s geographic characteristics or its “native”
inhabitants. On the positively drawn English island, rebellion and resistance to rule undercut the
commonwealth’s claims to social and political order. At the play’s conclusion, both islands are
abandoned because both ultimately fail as sites of potential nationhood or archipelagic rule. The
failure of these island commonwealths is not finally owing to geography or to the “natural”
character of the islands’ inhabitants. Instead, the characters of the play point to colonial greed as
243

See footnote 71.
227

the true cause of their social and political undoing. The play’s surprising critique of colonialism
forces the audience to rethink the contemporary colonial portraiture that casts the “Irish” and the
“English” islands in their hierarchical roles. By playing upon and exaggerating the colonial
portraits of England and Ireland drawn in texts like Spenser and Harrison’s, the drama betrays
these portraits as ideological constructions of geographic entities, much like the maps that
visually manipulate landmasses for imperial purposes. The play’s overt condemnation of
imperial ventures likewise speaks to the way colonial vocabularies overwrite both geographic
and cultural depictions. Importantly, the play not only draws attention to the effects of colonial
discourse, it also exposes the essential emptiness of such rhetoric; like Imogen in Cymbeline who
denounces colonial renderings of the “savage” Welsh as “lies” conjured up over “imperious
seas”, The Sea Voyage ultimately reveals that it is colonial discourse, not the inherent traits of the
land or of a people, that forms the basis of some early modern geographic and ethnographic
depictions.
“The Very Genius of the Soil”
Much like Speed’s maps of the Irish and English kingdoms that make use of symbolically
charged illustrations and embellishments to portray the territories, Fletcher and Massinger’s play
constructs abstracted portraits of the neighboring islands using the materials of colonial ideology.
The play opens on a wild and stormy waterway that is described in terms very similar to those
applied to the Irish Sea; “Lay her aloof!” commands the Master of the ship carrying the French
to the play’s unnamed pair of islands, “the sea grows dangerous, / How it spits against the
clouds, how it capers, / And how the fiery element frights it back! / There be devils dancing in

228

244

the air” (1.1.1-4).

Camden and Speed echo this damning illustration of the waters surrounding

Ireland. Britannia characterizes the Irish Sea as “troublous and tempestuous”, first implying that
this is the sea’s constant condition and natural state then citing “ancient writers [who] have
recorded that it rageth all the yeere long with surging billowes and counter seas, and never is at
245

rest, nor navigable unlesse it be in some few Summer daies”.

The map of Ireland in

Camden’s work reinforces this notion of the inherent danger facing the travelers of the hazardous
waterways surrounding the island by strategically placing on the southern and northwestern
coasts threatening sea monsters that appear to be patrolling the coastlines. Likewise, Speed
positions directly in the center of the Irish Sea a sea monster facing the English coast, visually
indicating that the dangers posed by this sea are directed towards those attempting to cross the
Irish waterway from the east. Similarly, an oversized serpent-like sea creature mans the Irish
waters just south of the Hebrides in a sea-space particularly infamous in English histories as a
channel connecting the barbarous Irish to their Scottish counterparts in Northwestern Scotland.
The sea’s “frights”, “terrors” and “thousand several shapes death triumphs in” imagined by
Aminta during the storm are in Camden and Speed’s visual illustrations specifically tied to
Ireland through a colonial discourse that sees Ireland and its surrounding waterways as
inherently damned and perpetually dangerous to the foreign traveler (I.ii.57-8).
The island upon which the French pirates find themselves stranded is variously described
as a “desert” (I.iii.139) and a muddy bog of “rotten trunks of trees” (III.i.20). Sebastian and

244

All references to The Sea Voyage (unless otherwise noted) are taken from Anthony Parr’s
Revels edition of the text in his Three Renaissance travel plays (Manchester: Manchester UP,
1995). Print.
245
Camden, 61, Vol. 3, and 60, Vol. 3.
229

Nicusa, the Portuguese who fled their colonies for fear of the French, lament the inhospitableness
of their new island home:
Here’s nothing but rocks and barrenness,
Hunger and cold to eat. Here’s no vineyards
To cheer the heart of man, no crystal rivers
After his labour to refresh his body
If he be feeble. Nothing to restore him
But heavenly hopes. Nature that made those remedies
Dares not come here, nor look on our distresses,
For fear she turn wild like the place and barren (I.iii.24-31).
Like the negative abstractions of the Irish landscape deployed by early modern writers, this
island space is one of uncultivated wilderness and disease-ridden waters that threaten to
contaminate those who cross its coastlines. Citing Cambrensis, Camden reports that Ireland’s
territory repels cultivation because it is “uneven, full of hils softe, waterish and boggy, wilde and
overgrown with woods, lying open to the Winds, and mountains. The aire is nothing favourable
for ripening of corne”. Though Camden praises some aspects of the Irish soil and climate, he
warns that the Irish “aire [ … and] the ground is excessive moist, whence it is that very many
there be sore troubled with loosenesse and rhewmes, but strangers especially”.

246

Spenser’s

Irenæus also deplores the Irish wasteland, positing the possibility that some divine power has
damned the very soil. Though “there have bin divers good plottes devised”
They say it is the fatall destiny of that land, that no purposes whatsoever

246

Camden, 63, Vol. 3.
230

which are meant for her good, will prosper or take good effect, which whether it
proceed from the very genius of the soyle, or influence of the stares, or that
Almighty God hath not yet appointed the time of her reformation, or that hee
reserveth her in this unquiet state still for some secret scourge, which shall by her
come unto England, it is hard to be knowne, but yet much to be feared.

247

Spenser, imagining that God and Nature have themselves turned their back on England’s island
neighbor, imbues the land and, presumably, the waterway between the two islands with the
devastating power to infect England.
Fynes Moryson in his 1617 Itinerary likewise imbues the Irish land, its waters and coasts
with a kind of inherent evil and danger that pose a significant threat to travelling Englishmen.
“The land of Ireland” he maintains “is uneven, mountanous, soft, watry, woody, and open to
windes and flouds of raine, and so fenny, as it hath Bogges upon the very tops of Mountaines,
not bearing man or beast, but dangerous to passe, and such Bogs are frequent over all Ireland”. In
Moryson’s depiction, like Spenser’s, the land itself is rife with danger for the Englishman
traversing its mysterious and alien landscape. The sea passage to Ireland from the English coast
is likewise perilous and threatens unexpected disaster even once the waterway itself has been
broached:
Our Marriners observe the sayling into Ireland to be more dangerous, not only
because many tides meeting makes the sea apt to swell upon any storme, but

247

Spenser, 1.
231

especially because they ever find the coast of Ireland covered with mists, whereas
the coast of England is commonly cleare, and to be seene farre off.

248

Ireland, as it appears in Moryson’s description, seems to everywhere present the potential for
harm, especially to the Englishman unused to this violent and unknowable landscape obscured
by mists and bogs. More dangerous perhaps are the unseen effects of this abstracted Ireland on
the English constitution. As Jean Feerick has noted, Moryson is particularly invested in the
notion of colonial degeneracy stemming from English plantation on this contaminating terrain.
Likening English transports to animals raised in a foreign environment, Moryson claims that
As horses, cows, and sheep transported out of England into Ireland do each race
and breeding decline worse and worse, till in few years they nothing differ from
the races and breeds of the Irish horses and cattle, so the posterities of the English
planted in Ireland do each descent grow more and more Irish, in nature, manners
and customs…

249

Stories of Ireland’s contaminating influence are played out on the shores of Fletcher and
Massinger’s anonymous island. Upon their arrival to the first unnamed island, the French are
confronted with the animal-appearing Portuguese, who bear on their persons the effects of the
island’s barrenness and contagion. “What things are these? Are they / Human creatures?” Aminta
inquires at the sight of Sebastian and Nicusa (I.iii.93-4). As though taking cues from Speed’s
representations of the Irish on his maps, or from Spenser’s illustration of the Irish as animalistic
in nature and appearance, the French comment upon the “sunk eyes” and “horse-tails” falling
248

Moryson, An Itinerary written by Fynes Moryson Gent (1617). EEBO. Web. 8 Jan. 2011.
Part 3 Chap. 5 159.
249
Quoted from Jean Ferrick’s “ ʻDivided in Soyle’: Plantation and Degeneracy in The Tempest
and The Sea Voyage.” Renaissance Drama 35 (2006): 27-54. ProQuest Direct Complete. 30
Nov. 2010. Web.
232

from the Portuguese’s heads, which appear so barely human that Aminta is compelled to ask,
250

“are they men’s faces”? (I.iii.97-100).

Sebastian, in response to queries as to their state,

explains that it is the “miseries” of life on the island that have engendered in them this inhuman
aspect (I.iii.114). Grown “degenerate” and “out of kinde”, as Camden says of those English in
Ireland who are infected with Irish customs, Sebastian and Nicusa have unwillingly turned
251

“wild” (I.iii.121) as the result of inhabiting this “poisoned” isle (I.iii.137.).

Anthony Parr and Feerick also consider the play’s treatment of contemporary anxieties
regarding degeneration stemming from colonial venturing and plantation. According to Parr,
“The Sea Voyage leaves the impression that, at best, colonisation exports the undesirable
elements of a country to new lands where they will probably not survive; at worst, the colonists
are likely to fall into depravity and barbarism”. Feerick maintains that fears of the degeneration
and contamination of Englishmen living on foreign soil centered primarily on blood as the carrier
252

of English identity and nobility.

250

The equine appearance of Sebastian and Nicusa is strongly reminiscent of Irenæus’s
assertion that to civilize the Irish is to “break a colte” only to have it “straight runne loose at
randome”. Spenser, 15.
251
Camden,148, Vol. 3.
252

See Parr, Introduction. Three Renaissance travel plays. 28. Ferrick argues that blood infected
during the process of colonization led to the disorder of not just the individual but of complex
systems of landownership and social hierarchies. Anxieties about colonial reproduction figured
in this discourse as more women were shipped to the colonies in order to plant lasting
communities in foreign soil. Feerick argues that The Sea Voyage explicitly takes up this matter of
colonial degeneracy and advocates for a regime of temperance that would alleviate fears of both
a degenerate physical and social body: “In looking to temperance as a safeguard against
degeneration,” he contends, “the play produces a new narrative of blood. Rooted not in title,
land, or wealth, blood is measured by temperance, which serves as its own sign of nobility, its
own estate” (41). See Feerick, cited above. Claire Jowitt likewise links the female characters of
Fletcher and Massinger’s play to the women transported to the colonies. Examining The Sea
Voyage through the dual lenses of gender and colonial politics, she argues that both The Sea
Voyage and Massinger’s The City Madam comment upon the need for controlled masculine
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The French soon fall under the island’s contaminating influence. Violence breaks out
among the travelers almost immediately once they set foot on the island’s coast; accusing the
ship’s crew of “maliciously” (I.iii.28) stripping them of their ill-gotten riches, Franvile, La-mure
and Morillat turn on Tibalt and Albert, and are prevented from shedding blood only by Aminta’s
supplications and the startling appearance of Sebastian and Nicusa. This peace is fleeting, for
only moments later, the pile of gold and the greed it generates rekindles the violence and
provokes a near riot between the pirates and the artificial noblemen, allowing Sebastian and
Nicusa to flee the island in the Frenchmen’s ship. Quickly following the mutiny, the now injured
and remediless French realize the likeliness of their starvation on the “wretched island”
(I.iii.122). Desperation, hunger and, importantly, the lawlessness of the island that seems to
engender in these characters their criminal and barbarous behavior, incite Franvile, La-Mure,
appetites in New World ventures. She envisions the women of both plays as reproductive
commodities necessary to the promulgation of a lasting colonial settlement. According to
Jowitt’s argument, The Sea Voyage reinscribes patriarchal gender relations while promoting the
colonial fantasy of a native-less land to be developed by exploring colonials. Jowitt, “ ʻHer flesh
must serve you’: Gender, Commerce and the New World in Fletcher’s and Massinger’s The Sea
Voyage and Massinger’s The City Madam.” Parergon: Bulletin of the Australian and New
Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. 18.3 (2001): 93-117. Print. Patricia
Akhimie likewise considers the role of women in colonial narratives, asserting that the work of
women in the colonies is often erased from the story of plantation. The travel drama and The Sea
Voyage in particular refuses this erasure. The Sea Voyage, she maintains, “ends with wives
restored to husbands, marriageable daughters matched, and Amazons turned to pious huswives
skilled in cookery and physic. This surprising turn is in direct contrast to the common practice in
first-hand accounts of travel and plantation, which most often present a homo-social world in
which the role of women is either deemphasized or occluded altogether” (154). See Akhimie,
“Travel, drama, and domesticity: colonial huswifery in John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The
Sea Voyage”. Studies in Travel Writing 13.2 (2009) 154. Print. William W. E. Slights and
Shelley Woloshyn also analyze the intersection of gender, colonialism and merchantilism in the
text. Examining the play from the perspective of a body politic both contending with and
profiting from the ambiguity of laws regarding piracy, they contend that plays like The Sea
Voyage and Pericles imagine a “fantasy” in which “the emotional power and purity of virtuous
women” brings order to a legally unstable world of sea-faring. Slights and Woloshyn “English
Bess, English Pirates, English Drama: Feminism and Imperialism on the High Seas.”
Explorations in Renaissance Culture 33.2 (2007): 269. Print.

234

Morillat and the Surgeon to cannibalism. Finding in Aminta the source of their current miseries,
La-Mure suggests that her body provide them “restoring meats”: “We have examples,” he
explains, “Thousand examples and allowed for excellent. / Women that have eat their children,
Men their slaves; / Nay, their brothers. But these are nothing: / Husbands devoured their wives
(they are their chattels,) / And of a schoolmaster that in a time of famine / Powdered up all his
scholars” (III.i.94-100). As they descend upon Aminta, she signals their descent into irreligious
animal behavior with little effect: “Hear me, ye barbarous men [ … ] Are ye not Christians?”
(III.i.136-40) Her appeals to their former selves as religious men in name, if not in action—there
are indications of Franvile, La-Mure and Morillat’s less than ethical business practices—falls on
deaf ears in this ungoverned and state-less island space. Aminta is saved only by the arrival of
Tibalt and the ship’s Master.
Tales of cannibalism in Ireland were also the stuff of English imperial legend,
particularly in regard to ingesting a member of one’s family. Spenser’s Irenæus, in an attempt to
draw genealogical links between the contemporary Irish and the Gaules, points to the shared
practice of cannibalism as proof of ancient Irish barbarity. To lend a more damning aspect to this
supposed Irish practice, Irenæus graphically describes a reported instance of Irish blooddrinking:
At the execution of a notable traytor at Limericke, called Murrough O-Brien, I
saw an old woman, which was his foster mother, take up his head, whilst he was
quartered, and sucked up all the blood that runne thereout, saying, that the earth
was not worthy to drinke it, and therewith also steeped her face and breast, and
tore her haire, crying out and shrieking most terribly.

253

Spenser, 66.
235

253

Spenser likely cites this event as evidence of Irish resistance to English rule and proof of
Ireland’s inherently savage customs and character, rather than an instance of cannibalism spurred
by starvation as we witness in The Sea Voyage. However, as cited above, Spenser begins A View
with the possibility that it is something in the soil and geographic make-up of the Irish island that
accounts for Irish barbarous-ness and resistance to civility; though the Irish are themselves
savage in Spenser’s account and elsewhere, the land exerts a particular barbaric influence that
strikes the Irish and strangers alike, prompting scenes of blood-letting and cannibalism like the
one described here. Thus, like the unbridled violence that grips the Frenchmen upon setting foot
on this infectious island, the desire to consume one of their own arises, perhaps, as a reaction to
the island’s contaminating influence.
Like contemporary political tracts that conjure up ideas of Irish barbarity through contrast
with England’s ordered and cultivated civilization, the savagery of The Sea Voyage’s “barren”
isle is put into boldface when Albert reaches the shore of the play’s second island space. To
“achieve / That hazard” of crossing the waterway separating the two islands is a dangerous feat,
for “a river, / Deep, slow, and dangerous, fenced with high rocks” (I.iii.153-55) prevents safe
passage. Until Albert’s successful voyage, men and animals alike avoided the waterway “so
dreadful, / Birds that with their pinions cleave the air / Dare not fly over it”; just “the sight of the
black lake” (II.ii.3-10) with “torrent’s cruelly interposed” (II.i.70) between the islands repels
those seeking to cross between the territories. When Albert miraculously lands on this second
island, it is radically unlike play’s first island space and likewise unlike Irenæus’s Ireland, where
the very ground is itself somehow damned; rather, the second island of The Sea Voyage is
described as divinely blest and thus ideal for human habitation. Upon Albert’s first viewing of
the second island from across the dangerous waterway separating the two land masses, he

236

pronounces this second isle as “questionless / The seat of fortunate men” (II.i.67-8), implying
that even from a distance this space emanates a kind of blessedness. The island’s aura of divinity
is again commented upon by Albert when he arrives on the second island and is almost
immediately associated with the territory’s female population and governance. “What place is
this?”, he questions, “Sure something more than human keeps residence here, / For I have passed
the Stygian gulf and touch / Upon the blessed shore! Tis so: This is / The Elizian shade; these,
happy spirits that here / Enjoy all pleasures” (II.ii.74-78).

254

The “happy spirits” to which Albert

refers are two women of the all-female commonwealth that has built its state on the island.
Charged by their queen “on pain of death” to deny “the sight and use of men” (II.ii.22), Crocale,
Juletta and Hippolita stand at the ready to capture this rogue male entering their territory.
Likening them to “nymphs of Dian’s train”, Albert appeals to their pity and sense of female
camaraderie by drawing attention to his wounds and explaining that his dangerous voyage across
the waterway to their nation was “for a virgin [that] comes as near yourselves / In all perfection,
as what’s mortal may / Resemble things divine” (II.ii.83-93).
The inherent divinity of the island and the several references to the Dian-like rulers of
this nation closely and immediately associates this island territory with Elizabeth’s England.
Even the variation of spelling in this “Elizian”, rather than Elysian shade asks the reader to
equate this island with England under the rule of its celebrated and recently deceased female
monarch. This classical descriptor of the island reinforces the notion that we are placed in Britain
when one recalls Harrison’s Description of Britain, where he cites Plutarch’s assessment of the
Isles: “we must needs confess that the situation of our island (for benefit of the heavens) is
254

Parr revises the original spelling from the 1647 Comedies and Tragedies of Beaumont and
Fletcher, changing “Elizian” to the more conventional “Elysian”. See Beaumont and Fletcher,
Comedies and Tragedies (1647): 6 (of play in volume) EEBO. Web. 2 Jan. 2010.
237

nothing inferior to that of any country of the main [ … ] And this Plutarch knew full well, who
affirmeth a part of the Elysian Fields to be found in Britain and the isles that are situate about it
255

in the ocean”.

Like John of Gaunt’s christening of “blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this

England” (II.i.50) and Camden’s claim of “the singular love and motherly affection of Nature to
this island”, this other England radiates a kind of natural blessedness in stark contrast with its
256

“wretched” island neighbor (I.iii.122).

Abundant in resources and game, the island’s natural

plenty is matched by its careful governance and system of justice. Inherited from the race of
Amazon women who once inhabited the isle, the female subjects, under the rule of Rosellia,
practice a form of statecraft that wrests away “the sovereignty [of] / Proud and imperious men”.
This power to rule, Rosellia explains to her subjects “we conferre on our selves” and like other
commonwealths contending with unexpected challenges to constitutional matters of statecraft,
questions of justice and law confront this nation of women, particularly with the arrival of the
Frenchmen within their territory (II.ii.189-91). The stranded French are permitted to enter their
shores only after Clarissa’s impassioned appeals to her mother for mercy (echoing Elizabethan
political rhetoric) and Rosellia’s consequent “resolution”, allowing the men temporary reprieve
within their borders and the commonwealth the possibility of growth and survival through
procreation with the strangers (II.ii.230). Fleeing an “Irish” isle of savagery and contamination,
and having braved a waterway described in terms not dissimilar to those applied to the Irish Sea,
Albert has entered an “English” island of order and abundance.
Critics disagree on the location of Fletcher and Massinger’s islands. Parr in his
introduction to the play contends that the geographic ambiguity of the play’s islands is central to

255

Harrison, Description of Britain. Ed. Georges Edelen. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1968) 429. Print.

256 Camden, 3, Vol. 1.

238

the text’s project of working through contemporary anxieties regarding colonial voyaging and
plantation.
We seem to catch glimpses in The Sea Voyage of numerous places and situations
that seventeenth-century readers would find in the voyage literature: the hot
swampy coastline of Guinea with its Portuguese outcasts, the great river estuaries
of Brazil, the island chains of Cape Verde and the Canaries; and see reflected in
the motley castaways and their dialogue some of the tensions and ambitions
running through the English colonial effort in North America. But the very
abundance of analogy tends to suggest that, like The Tempest, the play refutes any
attempt to tie it exclusively to a particular place or venture”.

257

According to Feerick, the geographic position of the paired isles is intentionally unclear; of
Shakespeare’s Tempest and The Sea Voyage he argues that “both plays are set on islands distant
257

See Parr, “Introduction”. Three Renaissance Travel Plays. Ed. Anthony Parr. Manchester:
Manchester UP, 1999. 22. Print. Michael Hattaway similarly associates the unnamed islands with
the New World. In his essay “ ʻSeeing things’”, he considers the unreliability of colonial
perspectives on the people and places of newly discovered territories. Like Claire Jowitt, cited
above, Hattaway contends that the island lands should be considered “romantic space”, territory
supposedly “emptied” of natives and thus rife for colonial conquest and plantation (184). Though
he argues that this representation of colonial spaces is made possible through the romance’s
generic qualities, Hattaway repeatedly places these islands in a New World context. Hattaway “
ʻSeeing things’: Amazons and cannibals.” Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time. Eds. JeanPierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) 184. Print. Zachary
Lesser also imagines the play’s isles to be positioned in a New World theater, representing them
as “recognizably ‘Indian’ islands” that are “probably but not certainly located off the South
American coast” (883). Lesser asserts that Fletcher and Massinger are participating in early
modern debates regarding emergent globalization, the valuation of English currency, and
theories concerning the natural law of economics, which threatened to erode the monarch’s
power in determining the nation’s fiscal and monetary policy. Lesser, “Tragical-ComicalPastoral-Colonial: Economic Sovereignty, Globalization, and the Form of Tragicomedy.” ELH.
74.4 (2007): 883. Project Muse. Web. 10 Dec. 2010. Gordon McMullan firmly locates the
islands in the Americas, maintaining that “Fletcher places his island near Guyana”. He bases this
claim to geographical specificity on contemporaneous colonial reports that, McMullen contends,
are recognizable in the work itself. McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John
Fletcher. (Amherst: The U of Massachusetts P, 1994) 244. Print.
239

from Europe, and likewise both plays avoid precisely identifying the geography of their setting”.
The reason for this ambiguity is that the plays are invested broadly in the “problematic of
surviving not in any one specific place but rather in a place far from ‘home’”.

258

Though

Feerick imagines these islands as non-European, his argument about The Sea Voyage calls up the
very discourses surrounding English plantation in Ireland. “Taking up the conceptual problems
posed by the colonist project and the questions that forging a sustainable settlement newly
raised”, he writes, “Fletcher and Massinger fix our attention on what it means not merely to
259

sojourn for a time in a distant place [ … ] but what it might mean to take root in an alien soil”.
One could argue that the “foreign soil” foremost in the minds of the writers of English empire
may be that of the New World; however, the anxieties regarding degeneracy and imperial
governance in Ireland were ever-present during the Tudor and Stuart reign. Furthermore, as

discussed above, it is the very soil of Ireland in the writings of Spenser and others that threatened
the English constitution and sowed seeds of violent rebellion and lawlessness in the land’s
inhabitants. Although Ireland is, of course, in close geographic proximity and thus cannot be
described as “far from home”, the Irish isle in English imperial tracts is described as vastly
ideologically distant to England (in terms of law, custom, dress, diet, land, etc). In fact, it is
claims to Ireland’s foreign-ness that both support and greatly complicate England’s domestic
imperial designs, as I argue throughout this chapter.
Despite the appearance of a functioning governmental state, the “English” island in
Fletcher and Massinger’s play is verging on political and social disintegration. The subjects of
Rosellia’s island are secretly resistant to the laws governing their commonwealth, as evidenced

258
259

Feerick, 29.
Ibid, 31.
240

immediately in our first introduction to the island’s inhabitants. “Being alone, / Allow me
freedom but to speak my thoughts”, urges Crocale to her fellow female subjects,
The strictness of our governess that forbids us
On pain of death the sight and use of men
Is more than tyranny! For herself, she’s past
Those youthful heats, and feels not the want
Of that which young maids long for; and her daughter
The fair Clarinda, though in few years
Improved in height and large proportion,
Came here so young
That scarce remembʼ ring that she had a father
She never dreams of man. And should she see one,
In my opinion, ʼ a would appear
A strange beast to her (II.ii.19-32).
That the first utterances of the isle’s subjects are, by definition of early modern English law,
treasonous speaks to the political unease circulating within this island space. In contrast to
Crocale’s prediction, Clarinda’s response to her first sight of man is likewise rebellious;
moments after encountering Albert, Clarinda, who seems poised to become the island’s next
ruler, suddenly becomes her mother’s most vocal critic and thus her most dangerous subject.
Questioning the logic behind Crocale, Juletta and Hippolita’s attack on Albert, which, Crocale
reminds her, follows the letter of Rosellia’s royal decree, Clarinda chides the women for
following what she considers a wrongheaded law: “if [Rosellia] command unjust and cruel
things,” explains the daughter of the Queen, moved to mercy by the sight of Albert’s

241

unconscious frame, “We are not to obey it” (II.ii.130-31). Upon Rosellia’s appearance on the
scene, Clarinda moves her fellow subjects to outright rebellion, treasonously exclaiming to the
governess, “Should all women use this obstinate / Abstinence you would force upon us, in / A
few years the whole world would be peopled / Only with beasts” (II.ii.207-209). Stirred to reject
the foremost decree of the island commonwealth, Hippolita declares to her queen that “we must
and will have men!”. Crocale, also incited to sedition, threatens the overthrow of Dian’s court:
“Ay, or we’ll shake off all obedience” (II.ii.210-211).
In these scenes of political upheaval, the over-neat distinction between the disordered
“Irish” island and the lawful “English” island break down; though the self-titled
“commonwealth” has put in place a system a governance, the ruler’s most foundational of
decrees, and thus the rule of law itself, cannot withstand challenges from outside and within the
state’s realm.

260

Likewise, one soon discovers that the subjects of the “English” island

participate in a brand of violence that is little different from that witnessed in barbarous
“Ireland”. Upon discovering the relationship between Albert and Aminta, Clarissa abandons the
reasoning that persuaded her mother to amend the island’s laws and quickly descends into the
kind of violence that, until this point, disassociated the play’s “English” space from its “Irish”
counterpart. As punishment for disabusing Clarissa of the notion that Aminta and Albert are
siblings, the governess’s daughter demands that the Frenchmen be starved: “How am I fool’d! /
Away with ʼ em, Juletta, and feed ʼ em-- / But hark ye, with such food as they have given me. /
New misery! [ … ] Make ʼ em more wretched. / O I could burst! Curse and kill now, / Kill
260

Lesser also recognizes the surprising similarity between these seemingly differentiated
islands, though he comes to this conclusion through an examination of their failed economic
practices, rather than the island’s shared governmental weaknesses. He contends that “the
‘pleasant’ and the ‘barraine’ islands are [ … ] more alike than first appeared: they suffer from a
lack of natural commerce, in both the sexual and economic meanings of that word”. See Lesser,
899.
242

anything I meet” (IV.iii.134-139). Albert and Aminta are also subjected to Clarissa’s rage;
warning the strangers to now “expect [her] utmost anger”, she orders Albert’s starvation. The
corporeal punishment she designs for Aminta smacks of kind of barbarity and vengefulness
usually associated with a lawless wilderness: “Tie that false witch / Unto that tree. There let the
savage beasts / Gnaw off her sweetness, and snakes embrace her beauties. Tie her, and watch
that none relieve her” (IV.iv.15-19). Clarissa’s unbridled anger, like the violence witnessed on
the other isle, is not based upon an appeal to law or to the kind of justice she herself advocated
when she first encountered Albert, thus rendering superficial the language and appearance of
statehood that formerly characterized the island.
Further complicating and thus refusing the politicized abstractions of the British Isles that
circulated in early modern imperial rhetoric is the play’s overt condemnation of colonialism and
the greed it engenders. With the arrival of Raymond, Aminta’s brother, the play’s ideological
landscape is recast; where the play’s violence was earlier explained as owing to the characters’
desperation or desire for revenge, in the final acts of The Sea Voyage, the play’s violent action is
explicitly linked to the history of imperial ventures that led to the characters’ exile to this
archipelagic space. Following the reunion of Aminta and her brother and moved by “a soft
religious tenderness”, Raymond provides this explanation for the “long difference” between
himself and Albert:
Though we have many faults to answer for
Upon our own account, our father’s crimes
Are in us punished. O Albert, the course
They took to leave us rich was not honest,
Nor can that friendship last which virtue joins not,

243

When first they forced the industrious Portugals
From their plantations in the happy islands
………………………………………..
And did omit no tyranny which men
Inured to spoil and mischief could inflict
On the grieved sufferers. When by lawless rapine
They reaped the harvest which their labours sowed,
And not content to force ʼ em from their dwelling
But laid for ʼ em at sea, to ravish from ʼ em
The last remainder of their wealth--then, then,
After a long pursuit, each doubting other
As guilty of the Portugals’ escape,
They did begin to quarrel like ill men
(Forgive me, piety, that I call ʼ em so)
No longer love or correspondence holds
Then it is cemented with prey or profit.
Then did they turn those swords they oft had bloodied
With innocent gore upon their wretched selves,
And paid the forfeit of their cruelty
Shown to Sebastian and his colony
By being fatal enemies to each other.
Thence grew Aminta’s rape, and my desire
To be revenged (V.ii.78-109).

244

I quote this passage at length because such a detailed and damning narrative historicizes
the play’s violence and fundamentally alters the narrative undergirding The Sea Voyage, thus
recasting the play as colonial critique and forcing a rereading of the play’s action. Raymond’s
narrative of their “father’s crimes” reveals that the contaminating influence that circulates in the
play and prompts the work’s violence, particular on the “Irish” isle, is not a matter of an cursed
geographic space, but is instead the result of a reprehensible history of colonial violence that
continues to infect the play’s characters. The lawless and savage behavior of the French in the
first half of the play stems not from their forced inhabitation on the “Irish” island, but from a
deeper history of unlawful practices. It is the thrice-repeated attempt to possess the Portuguese’s
ill-gotten colonial gold—not some mysterious effect of the “wretched isle” that spurs the
characters’ irreligious and violent acts. The Portuguese wealth, which was presumably gained
through their colonial “labours” on the “plantations in the happy islands” was seized by the
French, leading to their self-slaughter as they turned on each other for possession of this colonial
fortune. The remainder of the Portugal’s colonial wealth, which they carried with them in flight
from the French to the play’s first island, leads to the violent death of Sebastian’s men once they
reached the island’s shores. “This gold was the overthrow of my happiness”, he explains. “I had
command too, when I landed here, / And led young, high and noble spirits under me. / This
cursèd gold enticing ʼ em, they set / Upon their captain” (I.iii.175-79). According to Sebastian’s
account, the greed and violence undergirding the Portugal’s unlawful mutiny then inspired his
men to turn their once “civil swords” against each other, leading to the mass slaughter of these
formerly “noble spirits”. Finally, disregarding Sebastian’s warning that his men destroyed “their
lives by heaps” to possess these colonial remnants, the supposed gentlemen traveling aboard

245

Albert’s ship demand this gold as recompense for the goods lost on their voyage, leading to the
play’s first instance of violent infighting (I.iii.182-86).
Ultimately, the gold, which in The Sea Voyage comes to symbolize colonial greed and the
violence that comes of imperial endeavors, is abandoned. The recantation of imperial violence
and the rhetoric that undergirds colonial characterizations invites social and political order back
into the play in the form of the characters’ “lawful wishes” that according to Sebastian can now
261

be granted under this new state of reconciliation and peace (V.iv.110).

With the disavowal of

colonial discourse, the islands of The Sea Voyage are thus emptied of their ideological charge,
like Speed’s Ireland and England as simple geographic entities with the embellishments,
ethnographic depictions and ideologically-laden symbols erased from the cartographic landscape.
As revealed at the play’s conclusion, it is the overwriting of geographic spaces with the empty
language of imperial discourse—like the early modern colonial abstractions of savage Ireland
261

Surprisingly, Feerick contends that Albert’s reconstitution in a “nondegenerate form” (owing
to his investment in temperance and the nurturing of Aminta) “marks him as a man worthy of his
plantation, worthy, that is, of the plantation that the play’s end celebrates as ‘[home]’
(5.4.112)”.Ferrick, 46. Though this characterization of Albert supports Feerick’s argument
regarding the work’s intervention in debates about colonial degeneracy, his reading of the play’s
conclusion strangely neglects the fact that the former planters and accidental visitors to the island
vacate the island spaces at the play’s end. As I argue above, neither island becomes “home” for
the characters; the “plantations” of The Sea Voyage are abruptly abandoned, hence pointing to
the emptiness of the types of imperial rhetoric that painted the “Irish” isle as barbaric and the
English as “civil”. See Feerick, cited above. Jowitt, on the other hand, contends that The Sea
Voyage is “deeply uncertain about colonial futures”. Pointing specifically to the play’s
ambiguous end, she argues that “the unsettled nature of the text’s conclusion is [ … ] shown by
the fact that the final lines are not concerned with the future of the islands on which these
colonists have been shipwrecked [ … ] It becomes clear that there is, in fact, no future for this
embryonic Portuguese and French colony”, Jowitt, 115. Parr points to the work’s overall
“dispiriting view of colonial enterprise”, arguing that “the play creates a vision of wandering and
displacement, and [the play’s] Europeans are seen as descendants of Cain, preying on each other
in alien lands and driven to lawlessness and cruelty by the primitive conditions imposed on
them” Parr, 25. As I maintain above, the abandonment of these islands speaks not only to the
failure of this particular colony to survive, but to the insubstantial and therefore destructive
ideological discourses undergirding all colonial geographic representations. See Jowitt, cited
above.
246

and ordered England—that gave the island landscapes their ideological charge, not the land itself
or the people who occupy it. Like Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Fletcher and Massinger’s Sea
Voyage disallows the use of colonial vocabularies as the only means to read the national and
imperial spaces of early modern Britain.
Conclusion
John Speed’s translations of nature into nation, of archipelago into empire call attention
to the very manufactured-ness of these cartographic and political constructions. Seeking to offer
his king an official portrait of a unified Great Britain united through a shared history, ethnicity
and culture, Speed instead exposed the cartographic manipulations and, importantly, the political
machinations undergirding the state’s vision of England’s Britain. In Speed’s Theatre, England is
both an island and the seat of an archipelagic empire; his Irish men and women are both
members of the British family and savage outlanders; his King both a powerful monarch and a
mere Scottish landowner. Overwhelmed by illustrations, borders and ornaments—the necessary
symbols of his nationalist lexicon—the land speaks in the discordant tongues of the English
state, whose governmental crises unintentionally interrupt Speed’s visual narrative.
Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Fletcher and Massinger’s Sea Voyage co-opt the materials of
Speed’s nationalist myth-making and in the process dismantle both the genealogical and
geographic models of empire. By submitting Speed’s materials to literary critique, Cymbeline
and The Sea Voyage expose the theatrics behind official nationalist rhetoric.

247

Figure 5: “Detail from Saxton’s Anglia.” Atlas of the Counties of England and Wales.
EEBO. Michigan State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published with the
permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

248

Figure 6: Saxton, Christopher. “Anglia.” Atlas of the Countries of England and Wales.
EEBO. Michigan State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published with the
permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

249

Figure 7: Speed, John. “The Kingdome of Great Britaine and Ireland.” The Theatre of the
Empire of Great Britaine. EEBO. Michigan State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web.
Images published with the permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited
without permission.

250

Figure 8: Speed, John. “The Kingdome of England.” The Theatre of the Empire of Great
Britaine. EEBO. Michigan State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published with
the permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

251

Figure 9: Speed, John. “The Kingdome of Irland.” The Theatre of the Empire of Great
Britaine. EEBO. Michigan State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published with
the permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

252

Figure 10: Speed, John. “Dedication.” Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine. EEBO.
Michigan State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published with the permission of
ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

253

Figure 11: Speed, John. “The Kingdome of Scotland.” The Theatre of the Empire of Great
Britaine. EEBO. Michigan State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published with the
permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

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Figure 12: “Male Pict.” A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia.
EEBO. Michigan State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published with the
permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

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Figure 13: Harriot, Thomas. “Female Pict.” A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land
of Virginia. EEBO. Michigan State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published with
the permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

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Figure 14: Speed, John. “Speed’s ‘ancient’ and ‘more civill’ Britaines.” The History of Great
Britaine under the Conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans. EEBO. Michigan
State University Lib. 17 July 2012. Web. Images published with the permission of ProQuest.
Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

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Chapter three: 'In th' Almighties place': State Building and the Division of Absolute Authority in
Spenser's Faerie Queene
“The prince is duty bound toward the estates or the people only to the extent of fulfilling his
promise in the interest of the people; he is not so bound under conditions of urgent necessity [ …
] This is what is truly impressive in his definition of sovereignty; by considering sovereignty to
be indivisible, he finally settled the question of power in the state”.

262

In his 1922 work Political Theology, Carl Schmitt turned to 16

th

century political

philosopher Jean Bodin to articulate his theory of sovereignty. Sovereignty, according to
Schmitt, is the ability of a singular leader to suspend the laws governing his or her state in order
to protect and preserve that state. The “exception” or instance in which law is subject to the will
of the sovereign leader is of utmost importance to Schmitt’s theory because for Schmitt “it is
precisely the exception that makes relevant the subject of sovereignty, that is, the whole question
263

of sovereignty”.

Bodin offered Schmitt a solution to the intractable problem of locating and

delineating the authority of a nation’s leader, whose political power is granted by the citizenry
yet is defined by the sovereign’s ability to supersede the rights and privileges of this citizenry.
By declaring sovereignty indivisible, Bodin extracts political authority from the body politic,
consolidates this authority into an abstract form and places it undivided into the hands of the
sovereign. For Schmitt, Bodin’s rhetorical maneuver allows the sovereign to act in the name of
his people while abolishing the right of the populace to contest the sovereign decision.

262

Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2005) 8. Print.
263
Ibid, 6.
266

The notion of indivisible, absolute power was of potent political currency in the early
modern period, due in part to Bodin’s well-circulated theories of monarchical governance.
However, to say that Bodin “finally settled the question of power in the state” is an untenable
assertion, for early modern theorists like Bodin were grappling with the very problems of
th

th

political authority that underwrite Schmitt’s treatise. Attempts by 16 and 17 century political
philosophers to locate supreme authority solely in the person of the monarch were thwarted by
the actual practice of Elizabethan governance, in which the monarch’s counselors and the
Parliament clearly intervened in the process of policy making, thus granting them a measure of
authority. Theories of republicanism from the continent infiltrated Elizabeth’s court, putting
great pressure upon already fragile notions of the queen’s authoritarian rule. Likewise, the
spectre of feudalism continued to assert itself in the Elizabethan localities; land-owing noblemen
ruled over their own spheres of localized governance. Yet the political ideology of the
Elizabethan court imagined a prince whose power over the nation’s subjects was
incontrovertible, absolute and undivided. The indivisible power of the monarch was made
manifest in the singular body of the prince, who functioned on earth as God’s divine
representative. The singularity of this deistic persona reflected the singular unity of the English
nation bound together under the sovereign’s otherworldly authority and protection.
The disparities between early modern politics on the ground and the ideological apparatus
that sustained the conceptualization of Tudor absolutism crystallized with the creation of the
Elizabethan state. State-formation necessitated the division and distribution of sovereign
authority to crown’s agents. Those imbued by the crown with political authority—justices of the
peace, wardens, constables, itinerant judges, etc.—were fundamental in the distribution of justice
and the mechanisms of social order in the localities. Acting in the crown’s name, state agents

267

were the representative bodies of the monarch, proclaiming the sovereign’s prerogative and
putting her policies into action. Yet, functioning at a physical and ideological distance from the
monarchical centers of power, the early modern state took on a power of its own, separate from
the monarch, the supposed fount of sovereign authority. The geographic remove of the monarch
from her subjects made ambiguous an identifiable source of political power; agents of the state
were clearly servants of the crown, but without direct experience of the monarch’s might and
control over her realm, her agents instead came to embody governmental authority. Though the
monarch’s image was consistently circulated in symbolic forms, such as coins, paintings and
literary representations, the sovereign’s spectral presence sharply contrasted with the lived
experience of the forms of political authority practiced by the state in the localities. With the
division and diffusion of sovereign authority, the propagandistic image of a unified England
reflected in the singular person the monarch was unsettled. A conglomeration of localized
governments was antithetical to the crown’s attempt at centralization; rather than serve as the
limbs of a consolidated body politic under the aegis of the crown, the creation of the state in this
period instead amplified the regionalism that undermined official claims to a homogenous
political unit bodied forth by the sovereign.
The decentering of sovereign authority that inadvertently accompanied the process of
state building in Elizabeth’s England is at the heart of Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene.
In Spenser’s work, political power is radically dispersed across a discontinuous landscape. As
one travels from forest to seashore, from island to desert, from England to Belgium to France to
Ireland and back to Faerie Land, one encounters both refracted semblances of the virgin queen
and her guardians of realm, the politically empowered members of a nascent Elizabethan state.
The Knights of Maidenhead, though ostensibly deployed as pedagogical examples “to fashion a

268

gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline”, also bear a considerable measure
of authority, correcting injustices and bringing order to heterogeneous territories at a distance
from the imperial center.

264

In this sense, the state as embodied in the knights “intervenes

everywhere” in Spenser’s political landscape, but at a cost to the divine singularity of the
sovereign.

265

The splintering of Elizabeth into Medina, Alma, Belphœbe, Britomart, Mercilla

and others and the perpetually-deferred introduction of the Faerie Queene into the poem
produces a sense of the disintegration of the sovereign. The monarch is also everywhere in
traces, but nowhere in the poem is she “but one body naturally considered, though by His
266

permission a body politic to govern”, in Elizabeth’s words.

The effect of this fragmentation

of the monarch is a severing of divine sovereign power from the person of queen and the
dispersal of this authority to a disunited body of knights who act on behalf of one or more of her
dismembered personas. I intend to examine Spenser’s work within the context of the anxieties
that inevitably arise when the ideological essence of the sovereign is instrumentalized and
apportioned to the agents of an emergent state apparatus and to consider more broadly the
problem of power in a monarchical state.
Tudor Authoritarianism
Ostensibly, the early modern state served as the crown’s tool of centralization and the
consolidation of authority across the monarch’s realms. Emanating from the monarchical center,

264

nd

Spenser, Edmund. “Letter to Raleigh.” The Faerie Queene Ed. A.C. Hamilton. 2 rev.
edition (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007) 715. Print. All citations from The Faerie Queene are
from this edition.
265
Schmitt, 36.
266

Elizabeth I, “Queen Elizabeth’s first speech, Hatfield, November 20, 1558,” Elizabeth I:
Collected Works Eds. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2000) 52. Print.
269

the royal writ would declare itself and enforce social and political order in even the furthest
reaches of the crown’s kingdoms, including England’s colonial territories. State agents would act
as instruments of the crown, carrying the monarch’s authoritative might into the localities and
thus enveloping the crown’s disparate communities into a single political body known as the
nation. For the nation was also included among the crown’s tools of centralization and
consolidation; acting in concert, the official nation and the monarchical state fixed the crown’s
subjects in a shared identity and posture of obedience. Allegiant to the monarchical will, as
expressed by the laws, proclamations, and social apparatuses introduced into the community by
state agents, and loyal to the crown’s nation made possible in part by a state infrastructure that
brought uniformity to the monarch’s disconnected territories, the subjects of the Elizabethan and
Stuart regimes were bound into an ideological and political apparatus that imagined them as
unified and singular.
However, the construction of the Elizabethan state often had the opposite effect than the
official ideology that undergirded it. Rather than acting as a political engine that broadcast and
put into action the monarch’s will, the state instead brought to center stage debates regarding the
nature of sovereign authority. Disputes over the exact character of English monarchy and
governance had been a feature of political discourse since Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the
consequent declaration of his authority as rex imperator. Despite the absolutist strains of Henry’s
proclamation—strains that resounded in the official language of his daughter Elizabeth—the
actual practice of early modern governance in the 16

th

and 17

th

centuries made apparent that

political authority was not centered in monarch alone. The Privy Council and the Parliament,
governmental constellations that circled the monarch and aided her in matters of policy were
endowed with a significant measure of political power, notwithstanding official rhetoric

270

regarding these political bodies as simply helpmeets to the king or queen whose council could
either be taken up or disregarded. The quasi-representative nature of parliament likewise put
pressure upon notions of the sovereign’s absolutist rule and the social and political might of local
land-owing magnates loudly disputed authoritarian claims by the crown. English and Continental
political theorists were meanwhile debating the most effective form of rule and the place of the
monarch within these governmental schemas; discursive contests concerning the merits of
absolutism, mixed or constitutional monarchy and republicanism played out on both sides of the
channel and infiltrated the Tudor court. These disputations about the true nature of English
government challenged the ideological belief-structures that sustained monarchical rule.
Foundational concepts like the divine right of kings and the indivisible authority of the sovereign
were put to the test as competing forms of governance, some already in practice, entered the
realm of political discourse.
Early modern state building only exacerbated the tensions between official ideology and
the praxis of Elizabethan governance. Delivering and enforcing the royal writ in the localities
necessitated the dispensation of the sovereign’s authority to agents of state, as explained above.
Like the debates regarding absolutist rule, in which the political power wielded by the Privy
Council, Parliament and local officials belied crown claims to authoritarianism, the “lending” of
crown authority to state agents amounted to a repudiation of claims to indivisible monarchical
authority. The state as an instrument of monarchical centralization contained within it the seeds
of troublesome political autonomy. By placing the crown’s sovereignty in the hands of
authorities performing their governmental duties at a distance from the crown, the monarch
inadvertently empowered these local officials with the capacity to defy the sovereign and
institute localized forms of government that ran contrary to royal writ. As a result, the crown’s

271

attempts at centralization and consolidation actually had a decentering effect; by dividing and
diffusing national sovereignty, early modern state building made unclear the fount and channels
of political power and partially disengaged political power from the throne. The state became the
object of anxious crown regulation and control, rather than an instrument trumpeting the
monarch’s prerogative and absolute reign over his or her kingdoms. The nation—the ideological
mechanism that supported this monarchical tool of social and political order—likewise took on a
refracted character. By emphasizing and lending further authority to localized sites of power, the
state acted not as a unifying force that lent credence to nationalist ideologies but as an apparatus
that pointed up the severed and disconnected character of the British territories.
Debates regarding the extent of monarchical authority uneasily intersected with the
foundation of the state. The erection of a state infrastructure to administer the realm necessarily
implied that the monarch’s mystical persona that commanded the allegiance of her subjects was,
in truth, an inadequate force to ensure the people’s subjection to the regnum and her policies of
social control. As discussed above, the monarch was never sole source of political authority; the
local magnates, Parliament, Privy Council and other political bodies were ever-present in the
government of the realm. However, the state constituted a different kind of governmental
apparatus. Functioning at a distance from the monarch and designed to execute the royal will
through its various mechanisms, state formation in the early modern period institutionalized
political authority, giving the state a kind of agency that was not always clearly tethered to the
monarch. The demand for this semi-autonomous apparatus to accomplish social order ran
contrary to official ideologies that imagined the divine office of the monarch as the only fount of
political rule.

272

John Guy neatly summarizes the official line on the person of the monarch, particularly
after Henry VIII’s Act of Appeals and Supremacy, which granted the English monarch a
monopoly of secular and spiritual authority:
The most spectacular assets of the monarchy were the person and image of the
ruler [ … ] The king was at the centre of the polity. Power was concentrated
around him [ … ] Furthermore, the king’s power was ‘whole’ and ‘entire’. (The
term ‘sovereignty’ is found by the 1530s, and was used colloquially by the
1560s). [ … ] It was universally held that monarchy was instituted by God. The
king ruled ‘by the grace of God’, but did so for the benefit of the community.
Justice, in its broadest sense, was the purpose of his government. The king
governed for the common good, providing the single will necessary for the
formulation of common policy. His duties were threefold: to keep the peace and
defend the realm; to maintain the law and administer justice impartially; and to
uphold the Church, especially against heresy [ … ] The king’s ‘absolute’
prerogative was his emergency power.

267

As God’s earthly representative, authority emanated from the royal person, staying intimately
tied in perfect, undivided form to the monarchical body. The singularity of this divine personage
ensured that peace, justice and the safety of the realm could be made possible through the
sovereign’s “single will”.
As Guy explains, the above official rhetoric regarding kingship was especially prevalent
after Henry VIII’s break with Rome. By granting himself spiritual as well as secular supremacy,
“Henry VIII had reinvented the theocratic model of kingship. His imperium was ordained by
267

Guy, “Tudor monarchy and its critiques: From the Wars of the Roses to the death of Henry
VIII,” The Tudor Monarchy Ed. John Guy (London: Arnold, 1997) 78-9. Print.
273

God and embraced both ‘temporal’ and ‘spiritual’ government. The kings of England were
invested with an imperial’ sovereignty, part of which had been ‘lent’ to the priesthood by
268

previous English monarchs”.

Deploying, in no uncertain terms, the language of absolutist

rule, Henry declared that his subjects “be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and
humble obedience; [the king] being also institute and furnished by the goodness and sufferance
of Almighty God with plenary, whole and entire power, preeminence, authority, prerogative and
269

jurisdiction”.

God’s consummate authority is transferred in inviolate form to England’s

supreme ruler.
Henry’s claim to supreme, indivisible authority had the support of English and
Continental political theorists. Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria (ca 1485-1546), for
instance, was careful to delineate sovereign power (potestas) from the authority of the
commonwealth (auctoritas) in order to locate the source of sovereignty in God alone, and by
proxy, his earthly representative.
Royal power is not from the commonwealth, but from God himself [ … ] The
power of the sovereign clearly comes immediately from God himself, even
though kings are created by the commonwealth. That is to say, the commonwealth
does not transfer to the sovereign its power (potestas), but simply its own
authority (auctoritas); there is no question of two separate powers, one belonging
to the sovereign and the other to the community.

268
269
270

270

Ibid, 83.
Ibid, 83.

Vitoria, “On Civil Power,” Political Writings Eds. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) 16. Print.
274

By evacuating sovereign authority from commonwealth, thus creating a divine monarchical
sphere separate from the populace, Vitoria ensures that political power resides only in the
separate and untouchable realm of absolute rule. French theorist Jean Bodin (1529/30-1596)
likewise maintains that “he is absolutely sovereign who recognizes nothing, after God, that is
greater than himself”.

271

Like Vitoria, Bodin is invested in disassociating political power from

the commonwealth. When crowning a “sovereign monarch”, “the people [have] here
dispossessed and stripped itself of its sovereign power in order to put him in possession of it and
to vest it in him. It has transferred all of its power, authority, prerogatives, and sovereign rights
to him and [placed them] in him”.

272

Again, sovereignty is conceived as “whole”, undivided and

personified in the deistic body of the monarch.
Across the channel, Sir Thomas Elyot in his Boke Named the Governour (1531) likens
the sovereign’s rule of the nation to that of the “heven and erthe [ … ] governed by one god, by
one perpetuall ordre, by one providence”, thus emphasizing the singularity of the monarch and
273

his inherently divine character.

Himself a servant of the crown and counselor to Henry VIII,

Elyot moved within the gambit of royal power and was therefore witness to his monarch’s ascent
from secular to supreme ruler. Elizabethan historian William Camden in his Britannia (1586)
echoes the sentiments of Bodin and Vitoria, asserting that the king “hath sovereigne power and
absolute command” over his people and that the monarch need not “acknowledgeth any

271
272
273

Bodin, On Sovereignty Ed. Julian Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge: UP, 1992) 4. Print.
Ibid, 6-7.

Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour Ed. Henry Herbert Stephen Croft. 1531. (New York:
Burt Franklin, 1967) 11-2. Print.
275

274

superiour but God alone”.

Elizabeth’s language of absolutism was, of course, tempered by the

gender politics that were so integral to her monarchical representation. As David Dean explains,
Elizabeth was both a woman and a monarch. In a society which often described
political authority through the image of the body, with the monarch as its head
and the lowest orders, peasants and artificers, as the feet, this fact was not
unproblematic. At the heart of government was the royal household and the
bedrock of Elizabethan society was the household. However, while authority in
the household was male, in the royal household between 1558-1603 it was female
and Elizabeth’s councilors certainly struggled intellectually and practically with
275

the queen’s often-exercised right to refuse their council.

Aside from ignoring the advice of her male counselors, Elizabeth’s other strategies for walking
the delicate line between femininity and authoritarianism included stacking her Privy Council
with commoners, thus pushing land-owning nobles to the outskirts of government.

276

Yet she

played to her feminine characteristics through a calculated rhetoric that repeatedly positioned the
female ruler as defender and protector of the nation’s peace, justice and security. As Dean
describes, Elizabeth drew upon a storehouse of “scriptural and classical references” to shore up
her mystical persona, in which she was variously depicted as “the English Deborah, as Astraea,
Minerva and Diana”. Through these positively-gendered monarchical representations, Elizabeth
built an image that differentiated her from the agents and counselors acting in her behalf; “The
ship of state might endure perilous seas,” Dean states of this official vision of the female
274
275

Camden, Britannia Ed. Robert Mayhew (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2003) 163. Print.

Dean, “Elizabethan Government and Politics.” A Companion to Tudor Britain Ed. Robert
Tittler (Malden: Blackwell, 2004) 57. Print.
276
Ibid, 47.
276

monarch, “but God’s faith in his Elizabeth, the leader of the English nation, was a message
repeated time and time again in music, word and image”.

277

Despite her careful construction and maneuvering of this female persona, it is important
to decipher between political theatrics and Elizabeth’s inherited authoritarian take on
monarchical sovereignty. While drawing upon the powerful rhetoric of maternity by casting
herself as mother of the nation to Parliament, perhaps to appease her male advisors, Elizabeth
took the practical step of curtailing the power of this political body by calling only 13
parliamentary sessions over her long reign, occasionally taking this meeting of her lords as an
opportunity to remind them of their severely delimited power.

278

In response to her Parliament’s

strenuous and sometimes overzealous council that the Queen find a husband and thus guarantee a
successor, the monarch admonishes her counselors: “When I call to mind how far from dutiful
care, yea, rather how nigh a traitorous trick this tumbling cast did spring, I muse how men of wit
can so hardly use that gift they hold. I marvel not much that bridleless colts do not know their
rider’s hand, whom bit of kingly rein did never snaffle yet”.

279

Reducing this political body to

the status of working animals, Elizabeth informs her Parliament of the lords’ appointed place in
the sphere of government, for “it is monstrous that the feet should direct the head” in Elizabeth’s
280

authoritarian regime.

Elizabeth introduced herself as England’s sovereign by deploying a set of rhetorical
devices that variously characterized her as divinely appointed ruler, singular and sole sovereign
and as a woman in need of her lords’ council:
277
278
279
280

Ibid, 57.
Ibid, 57 and 50.
Elizabeth I, cited above, 93.
Ibid, 98.
277

My lords, the law of nature moveth me to sorrow for my sister; the burden that is
fallen upon me maketh me amazed; and yet, considering I am God’s creature,
ordained to obey His appointment, I will thereto yield, desiring from the bottom
of my heart that I may have assistance of His grace to be the minister of His
heavenly will in this office now committed to me. And as I am but one body
naturally considered, though by His permission a body politic to govern, so I shall
desire you all, my lords (chiefly you of the nobility, everyone in his degree and
power), to be assistant to me, that I with my ruling and you with your service may
make a good account to almighty God and leave some comfort to our posterity in
281

earth. I mean to direct all my actions by good advice and counsel.

Elizabeth’s first speech and address to her lords makes plain the rhetorical maneuvering
necessary to a female ruler asserting her sovereign authority over a nation and her appointed
male governors. First drawing upon the language of obedience, Elizabeth casts herself as the
yielding female reluctant but duty-bound to bend to the will of her Lord. Such language would
signal Elizabeth’s seeming recognition of her female self as subservient to a male overlord.
However, as she repeatedly reminds her audience, her master is no earthly lord, but God himself
who has made her “the minister of His heavenly will”. In this “office”, the female queen alone
acts in the capacity of God’s representative. Interestingly, this declaration of her divine power is
an embedded clause within an appeal to her lords to lend her counsel; by inserting this allimportant utterance into a professed solicitation of her lords’ guidance, Elizabeth appeases her
anxious male governors while asserting her singular power as monarch.

281

Ibid, 51-2.
278

After appealing to the very nobles whose power she curbed by replacing them with
commoners on her Privy Council, Elizabeth then gently admonishes the lords to remember their
place in her government, reiterating that their position is one of servitude to the Queen and to
God, whose blessing they will receive, provided that they perform their prescribed duties
accordingly. Moments after ensuring the lords of her devotion to their counsel, Elizabeth subtly
reminds the lords that, because their counsel may be acted upon or disregarded, the real
requirement of their service is obedience and faithfulness to her as sovereign: emphasizing the
lords’ limited and temporary power, Elizabeth assures her servants that “my meaning is to
require of you all nothing more but faithful hearts in such service as from time to time shall be in
282

your powers towards the preservation of me and this commonwealth”.

The Queen’s “one

body naturally considered”, a female body but one divinely appointed to rule and personify the
nation, is a singular political body poised and capable of sovereign rule, with or without the
283

counsel of her servants.

The dual notions of the divine right of monarchical rule and the necessary surrender of
the people’s potestas to the sovereign culminated in a form of authoritarianism that strongly
extolled the otherworldly virtues of the monarch at the expense of her counselors. According to
Quentin Skinner, the theories of natural-law absolutism that helped to undergird authoritarian
282
283

Ibid, 52.

Louis Montrose comments upon the socially and politically established relationship between
the body politic and the body monarchical: “During the second half of the sixteenth century, the
monarchical claim to supreme authority within its territories was already securely established
both in theory and practice, while formulations of the modern conception of the state as a
corporate abstraction had only just begun. At this historical juncture, the body politic inhered in
the body of the prince” (307). The aim of this chapter is to somewhat complicate Montrose’s
formulation by considering the ideological collision between royal absolutism and state
formation. Montrose, “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” Literary Theory /
Renaissance Texts Eds. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986)
307. Print.
279

politics in the early modern period claimed that “the ends of civil or political association made it
indispensible to establish a single and supreme sovereign authority whose power remains distinct
not merely from the people who originally instituted it, but also from whatever office-holders
284

may be said to have the right to wield its power at any particular time”.

In this sense, it is the

office of the sovereign, not the person seated on the throne, that must be revered and respected. It
would seem that such a tenet of political philosophy, one that neatly intersected with the notion
of the king’s two bodies, would have served the female monarch well by calling attention to the
sovereign as political body, rather than a gendered one. Elizabeth herself followed the political
philosophies expounded by Bodin, and Vitoria, who most rigorously defended the assertion that
the sovereign was accountable to God alone. “Absolute princes ought not to be accountable for
their actions to any other than to God alone”, she declared, closely echoing the language of these
continental theorists.

285

Yet, debates regarding concilarism and Republicanism continued to circulate in
Elizabethan political culture, despite the monarch’s measured, though stalwart claims to her
absolutist authority. The ideological and practical rift that divided the monarch from her advisors
was also present in discussions of constitutional government, in which political theorists
attempted to curb the monarch’s power by calling upon England’s common law heritage. As Guy
th

th

explains, the character of English governance in the 16 and 17 centuries was always already
shot through with a measure of concilarism, regardless of the monarch’s claims to supreme,
singular and independent authority. Discussing the two forms of counsel prevalent in early

284

Skinner, Quentin. “The State.” Political Innovation and Conceptual Change Eds. Terence
Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 116. Print.
285
Quoted from Guy’s “Tudor monarchy and its critiques”, 97. Print.
280

modern political philosophy (which he terms “humanist-classical” and “feudal-baronial”) and the
myriad associations connected to the term, Guy states that “within the metaphor of ‘counsel’,
where there is imperium there is also consilium; or as Bacon put it, sovereignty is ‘married’ to
286

counsel”.

Counsel, whether proffered by the Privy Council or Parliament, whether taken up

or ignored, consistently injected a contradictory element into English claims to authoritarian rule.
Patrick Collinson succinctly defines the contradiction inherent to an Elizabethan politics
that impossibly tried to quash the republican character of political culture under a rhetoric of
absolutism: “Elizabethan England was a republic which happened also to be a monarchy: or vice
287

versa”.

Speaking of Elizabeth’s possible penchant for “a high-handed autocracy which

councillors found unacceptable and which limited their capacity to be useful”, Collinson
describes the ramifications of such a policy:
Elizabethan government was often government without counsel, or with
unorthodox or irregular counsel. But [the above scenario] also suggests that the
Privy Council, with whatever futile consequences on some occasions, was in a
position to contemplate the world and its affairs with some independent
detachment, by means of its own collective wisdom and with the Queen absent:
headless conciliar government [ … ] At times there were two governments
uneasily co-existing in Elizabethan England: the Queen and her Council, the

286

Guy, “The Rhetoric of counsel in early modern England,” Tudor Political Culture Ed. Dale
Hoak (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 294-301. Print.
287
Collinson, “The monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I,” The Tudor Monarchy Ed. John
Guy (London: Arnold, 1997) 119. Print.
281

copulative now serving to distance rather than unite two somewhat distinct poles
288

of authority.

The monstrous political entity illustrated above lends visual clarity to the contradictory nature of
the Elizabethan political machine. Rhetorically a nation personified by the singular person of its
absolute ruler, but in actuality a disjointed body politic at war with itself, sovereign authority was
a site of contestation and contradistinction.
Guy locates this moment of ideological disconnect, unsurprisingly, in the reign of Henry
VIII, asserting that this originary break between rhetoric and politics on the ground later carried
into the government of his daughter.
The effect of the reign of Henry VIII was [ … ] to create a latent ambiguity, or
binary opposition, within the theory of monarchy. On the one hand, ‘official’
pronouncements maintained that the king was endowed with secular and
ecclesiastical imperium. On the other, the ‘unofficial’ exponents of conciliarism
and common-law doctrine stressed the role of councils, counsellors, and
representative institutions if ‘limited’ or ‘constitutional’ government were to be
289

preserved. The extent of this contradiction should not be exaggerated.

The incongruity of these official and unofficial representations of English governance is not
simply ideological or rhetorical but rather signaled a potentially destructive infirmity that later
disabled the very functioning of government and ushered in the Civil War. Guy demonstrates
that the contradictory elements attending Henry’s revamping of the English political system
resonate in Elizabeth’s reign because she made use of her father’s authoritarian principles. He

288
289

Ibid, 118.
Guy, ‘Tudor monarchy’, 88-9.
282

maintains that this disjuncture most fervently came to the fore during the Elizabethan Settlement,
when anxieties regarding the nation’s spiritual welfare were at their height.
The binary opposition which was latent in the theory of monarchy since the reign
of Henry VIII [ … ] was played out [in the reign of Elizabeth]: the tension
between Elizabeth’s view of her ‘imperial’ monarchy—the idea that sovereignty
was vested in her alone—and the conviction of Cecil and the Privy Council that
sovereignty lay in the ‘queen-in-Parliament’ if the Protestant state was to be
preserved, and most especially when the ruler declined to be counselled.

290

In the case of the Settlement, ironically, Elizabeth’s counselors feared that the earthy
representative of God’s will might put the nation at risk by mismanaging the spiritual end of her
duties as God’s “minister”. That the rhetoric of divine and absolute monarchy breaks down over
matters of religion is demonstrative of the breach between official narratives of sovereign might
and the real-world concerns regarding the monarch’s ability to rightly rule the nation alone.
As Collinson indicates, there existed in Elizabeth’s court two incontrovertible
mechanisms of government. Though the ideological representations of English governance cast
these two branches as working in harmony for the peace, justice and the preservation of a nation
embodied by its monarch, the actual picture of Elizabethan politics is one of a mangled political
body with little cooperation among its limbs. The “independent detachment” of the Privy
Council implies a kind of dangerous autonomy practiced by both the sovereign and her
counselors, one that seriously jeopardized the effective governance of the realm and punctured
the official rhetoric of the crown. The early modern state posed a very similar threat to the
singular and supreme rule of the monarch and greatly exacerbated the rift between ideology and
290

Ibid, 99.
283

practical governance. Early modern state-building produced further ideological strains on the
rhetoric of monarchical sovereignty; by laying bare the need for a state infrastructure to
administer the realm and by further decentering political authority from the person of the
monarch, the creation of the early modern state necessarily dismantled notions of the monarch’s
“whole and entire power, preeminence, authority, prerogative and jurisdiction” and ruptured the
one “body politic to govern”.
A Monarchical State
Despite their insistence upon the monarch’s supreme right to rule, and despite the
reliance upon these theorists by the Tudors to shore up authoritarian claims, one can detect in the
work of Bodin, Vitoria and even the ‘official’ texts of Henry and Elizabeth’s political
philosophers the need for a state to administer the monarch’s will. In their discussions of the role
of the state, one can detect a certain anxiety about this distribution of power under the auspices
of monarchical rule. For instance, Bodin’s foundational assertion that “he is absolutely sovereign
who recognizes nothing, after God, that is greater than himself” is undermined by his depiction
of Elizabeth’s court. “[The Estates] seem to be empowered to command, resolve and decide in
the great affairs of state [ however… ] the entire sovereignty belongs undivided to the kings of
England and [ … ] the sovereignty of the monarchy is in no way altered by the presence of the
291

Estates”.

Bodin’s need to somehow reconcile Elizabeth’s authoritarian rhetoric with the

tradition and practice of conciliar government results in a slippery untruth; as we have seen, the
presence of the Parliament and Privy Council was hardly insignificant. Elizabeth’s attempt to
delimit the authority of her counselors in itself attests to the fact that these political constellations
circling her court could not simply be cast outside the sphere of legitimate governance. Though
291

Bodin, 22.
284

Bodin’s travels to Elizabeth’s court and the ubiquitous presence of Bodin’s work in English
universities attests to a intimate knowledge of Elizabethan politics, one can nonetheless detect in
Bodin’s work a kind of murkiness when it comes to aligning the ideological desire to locate in
the person of the sovereign consummate authority and the political clout attached to the court.

292

Vitoria, like Bodin, grapples with the contradictory notions of a body politic imbued with
political autonomy and a monarch whose authority both exists within and supersedes that of the
commonwealth. As explained above, Vitoria baldly asserts that “the power of the sovereign
clearly comes immediately from God himself, even though kings are created by the
commonwealth”.

293

However, to conjoin a kind of republican ethic, in which the office of the

monarchy is anchored to the body politic, to his notion of the monarch’s God-given political
might, Vitoria must delicately and somewhat problematically deny potestas and auctorias to the
king’s subjects. Though he maintains that “there is no question of two separate powers, one
belonging to the sovereign and the other to the community”, Vitoria’s recognition of the
commonwealth’s authority and power as gifted to the monarch actually underscores the fact that

292

David J. Baker illustrates the great popularity of Bodin in Elizabethan political circles: “A
man of affairs as well as a scholar, this prolific and controversial French theorist had a
considerable following in England. Harvey claimed that alongside the copies of Machiavelli’s
works that could be found on every scholar’s table at Cambridge, there lay Bodin’s Six Books of
a Commonweal (1576) [ … ] Bodin was respected in court circles and visited England at least
once, possibly in 1579 and then quite certainly in 1581. Both times he would have accompanied
Alençon, to whom he had been appointed maître des requêtes et conseiller. As his master wooed
Elizabeth I, Bodin and the queen spoke often; she ‘enjoyed his conversation concerning forms of
government and his theory of climate.’”. Bodin lost popularity with Elizabeth when Alençon’s
courting of the queen ended and he voiced his support for Mary, Queen of Scots (53-4). Baker,
“Historical contexts: Britain and Europe.” The Cambridge Companion to Spenser Ed. Andrew
Hadfield (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 37-59. Print.
293
Vitoria, 16.
285

294

the polity does indeed possess a sort of agency in the face of a divine leader.

In the process of

denying the commonwealth its political potency, Vitoria at the same time demonstrates the
existence of this very authority as a potential stumbling block of authoritarian political
philosophy.
Even after severing political authority from the commonwealth, Vitoria betrays the
practical difficulties that necessarily arise when the political agency of a nation is contained
within a solitary individual: “the commonwealth as such cannot frame laws, propose policies,
judge disputes, punish transgressors, or generally impose its laws on the individual, and so it
must necessarily entrust all this business to a single man”.

295

Unintentionally, Vitoria here lists

the very duties assigned to the early modern state because “all this business” could not be
achieved by the monarch without a system of agents imbued with a measure of sovereign
authority. With the expansion of the realm, a proliferating legal culture and a need to secure
social order among the heterogeneous cultures of the British archipelago, the “business” of the
monarch became the business of the state. Neither the office nor the person of the monarch was
efficient to guarantee the nation’s peaceful preservation without the aid of a state infrastructure,
thus demonstrating the practical failures of the ideology of divine kingship.
Across the channel, English political theorists wrestled with the same problem: how to
preserve the ideologically crucial belief in the divine and indissoluble power of the monarch
while acknowledging the need for a state system. William Camden in his Britannia echoes the
sentiments of Bodin and Vitoria, asserting that the king “hath sovereigne power and absolute
command” over his people and that the monarch need not “acknowledgeth any superiour but

294
295

Ibid.
Ibid, 14.
286

God alone”.

296

However, in his description of the “law courts of England”, he maintains that

Parliament as the legislative arm of the government “hath sovereigne and sacred authority in
making, confirming, repealing and expounding Lawes [ … ] in all causes which may concerne
either the saftie of the State, or any private person whatsoever”.

297

Though he explains that

Parliament may be summoned and dismissed at the monarch’s pleasure, Camden does not tend to
the slippery usage of terms that sanctifies the authority of Parliament in the same language
applied to the sovereign prince. Because divinity is the primary characteristic that separates the
monarch from his subjects and allows him to act in a sphere removed from the body politic and
its laws, imbuing Parliament—the mere servants of the king or queen, according to official
rhetoric—with divine status radically dismantles the ideological infrastructure supporting
absolutist governance.
Likewise, Sir Thomas Smith avers that “the most high and absolute power of the realme
of Englande, is in the Parliament” in his De Republica Anglorum, but he simultaneously states
that “the prince is the life, the head, and the authoritie of all thinges that be doone in the realme
298

of England”.

As Secretary of State to both Protector Somerset and Elizabeth, it would seem

that Smith would feel compelled to construct a vision of Elizabeth’s England that firmly and
unquestionably placed the monarch at the center of the political sphere. Instead, Smith posits
both the monarch and the Parliament as the singular engine of English governance. Smith does
not resolve this fundamental contradiction; instead, he compounds these ideological difficulties
by deploying a confusing image of the body politic. Calling Parliament “the whole head and
296
297
298

Camden, 163.
Ibid, 177.

Smith, De Republica Anglorum Ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982) 78 and
88. Print.
287

bodie of the realme of England”, Smith then refers to the sovereign as “the head, life and
299

governor of this common wealth”.

By essentially subsuming the person of the monarch into

the body of the Parliament, Smith undoes the work of Bodin, who sought to relegate the estates
to the status of mere “witnesses” to the monarch’s power.
Finally, Sir Thomas Elyot in The Boke Named the Governour recognizes the necessity of
the state, acknowledging that “one mortall man can nat have knowlege of all thynges done in a
realme or large dominion”; thusly, “it is expedient and also nedefull that under the capitall
gouernour be sondry meane authorities” to attend to matters of law and justice.

300

Yet even the

author of the early modern training manual for magistrates cannot work outside the paradigm of
the singular, divine monarch. Contending that “undoubtedly the best and most sure gouernance is
by one kygne or prince”, Elyot likens the sovereign’s rule of the nation to that of the “heven and
erthe [ … ] gouerned by one god, by one perpetuall ordre, by one providence”.

301

Though Elyot

does not force the governmental bodies of early modern England into the monstrous body politic
depicted by Smith and referenced by Collinson, Elyot nonetheless fails to attend to the
ideological difficulties of monarchical singularity and the necessity of an early modern state.
That the author of the handbook for state agents cannot resolve this troublesome contradiction
speaks to the problematic elision of this foundational weakness in Tudor political philosophy.
As Skinner explains in his discussion of how best to define the early modern state, “even
when status and stato are employed by [early modern political theorists] to denote an apparatus
of government, the power structure in question is not in fact viewed as independent of those who

299
300
301

Ibid, 88.
Elyot, 25.
Ibid, 12.
288

302

have charge of it”.

In order to anchor the state to the monarch, the writers of the early modern

state claimed that “the ruler or chief magistrate, so far from being distinguishable from the
institutions of the state, is said to possess and even embody those institutions himself”.

303

Agents of the early modern state were “lent” the power of the monarch to enforce his or her will,
according to official rhetoric. In Bodin’s estimation,
Just as those who lend someone else their goods always remain its owners and
possessors, so also those who give power and authority to judge or to command,
either for some limited and definite period of time or for as much and as long a
time as it shall please them. They still remain lawfully possessed of power and
jurisdiction, which the others exercise in the manner of a loan or grant on
sufferance.

304

Smith is also careful to differentiate the power granted to members of the state from the allencompassing sovereignty of the monarch, reminding his audience that “all writtes, executions
305

and commaundementes be done in the princes name”.

Focusing on the execution of justice in

the realm and taking pains to distinguish his nation from those on the continent, Smith claims
“we doe say in England the life and member of the kinges subjectes are the kings onely, that is to
say no man hath hault [high court] nor moyenne [justice] but the king [ … ] The supreme justice
is done in the kinges name, and by his authoritie onely”.

306

Although the mechanisms of justice,

peace and law are placed in the hands of the monarch’s servants, the authority that turns these
302
303
304
305
306

Skinner, 102-3.
Ibid, 103.
Bodin, 2.
Smith, 87.
Ibid, 87.
289

mechanisms and ensures their effectiveness is inextricably bound to the monarch. According to
this ideology, the monarch is not just the prime mover and originator of justice, peace and law,
the sovereign him or herself makes possible these qualities necessary for nationhood, containing
within the monarchical person the supreme and divine authority of God and commonwealth.
In spite of the ideologically necessary moves to keep the state affixed to the monarchical
body, the state as an autonomous entity eventually unmoored itself from the monarchical center
and developed a localized political agency that often challenged rather than supported the crown.
One of the sources of this separation of the state from Whitehall was internal and spoke to the
debates already destabilizing the Elizabethan government. The division of authority denied by
official rhetoric but clearly present in the Tudor court and the discourse on republicanism that
began in Italy and migrated to England contributed to the crown’s loss of control over its own
instrument of centralization. Similarly, the unmanageable authority afforded to local magnates
and noble land-owners that Elizabeth attempted to limit was greatly increased and reified by the
creation of the state. Placing sovereign authority in the hands of local officials did not have the
effect of bending the populace to the royal will; on the contrary, as political authority became
further localized, the sovereign’s authority became more indistinct and amorphous.
Skinner examines the political disjuncture in which “natural law absolutism” and
republicanism collided in early modern political discourse. Speaking of the desire of political
philosophers like Bodin and others to reconcile the strictures of authoritarian rule with the need
to define and protect the commonwealth, Skinner states that “a number of these theorists began
to resolve their difficulties by speaking instead of the state, while making it clear at the same
time that they were consciously using the term to express their master concept of an impersonal

290

form of political authority distinct from both rulers and ruled”.

307

The turn toward the civitas as

a defined and distinct body politic instigated a turn away from absolutist ideology. Within the
bounds of Tudor political ideology, monarchical rule was intensely personal; one need only think
of the Cult of Elizabeth that functioned in a purely personal, if sometimes disingenuous manner,
to tout the absolute and divine rule of England’s virgin queen. To disengage sovereignty from the
person of the sovereign and from the subjects whose national identity flowed from their divine
leader amounted to an upheaval in early modern political philosophy that had profound
consequences for the crown and his or her governmental and ideological command over the body
politic. Bodin, the very theorist who attended the English queen and whose notions of the
English monarch’s unlimited power were broadly circulating in Elizabethan universities, spoke
of the state as a form of authority characterized by its “indivisible and incommunicable
sovereignty”.

308

That Bodin’s language describing the state so succinctly echoes the terms

applied to the monarch underscores the ideological impasse created by the monarchical state.
Italian discourses on republicanism, which found their way into England and France in
th

the 16 century, propounded a form of governance that imagined the body politic—not the body
monarchical—as its center and fount of sovereignty. “It is within this tradition of thought”,
Skinner explains of continental republicanism, “that we encounter, for the first time, a
vindication of the idea that there is a distinct form of ‘civil’ or ‘political’ authority which is
wholly autonomous, which exists to regulate the public affairs of an independent community,
309

and which brooks no rival as a source of coercive power within its own civitas or respublica”.

307
308
309

Skinner, 119-20.
Ibid, 120.
Ibid, 107.
291

This autonomous political force is at odds with monarchical power; rather than binding a people
together through their shared awe and fear of a divinely-appointed sovereign, the republican state
as a self-regulating mechanism produces its own instruments of social order from inside the
“independent community”. Such communities in these formulations were often civic or regional,
as opposed to kingdoms that drew under their banner people of often differing ethnicities and
customs. Within the self-regulating locality, the state provided the legal, social and political
mechanisms necessary for a smoothly functioning commonwealth. Fear of corruption drew
theorists of republicanism to assert that “the only way to ensure that the laws promote the
common good must be to leave the whole body of citizens in charge of their own public affairs”,
explains Skinner. “If their government is instead controlled by an authority external to the
community itself, that authority will be sure to subordinate the good of the community to its own
purposes thereby interfering with the liberty of individual citizens to attain their chosen
310

goals”.

As Skinner explains, this spirit of “civil government” was the force undergirding

Henry VIII’s Act of Appeals and his break from Rome; it is one of the ironies of early modern
governance that the republican ideals that gave sanction to Henry to free himself from Rome and
to establish his authoritarian regime were the very same principles that allowed early modern
English communities to function autonomously without the overbearing hand of monarchical
311

authority.

For the majority of Elizabethan subjects, especially those living in communities at a
distance from the monarchical center, the crown, despite all the pageantry and ideological
maneuvering, likely seemed “an authority external to the community itself”. Available to these

310
311

Ibid, 104.
Ibid, 107.
292

subjects only in propagandistic renderings, royal proclamations, and other manifestations of
monarchical might, the crown was an absent presence in much of the Tudor kingdom. The state,
ostensibly designed to make present throughout the kingdom the word and authority of the
crown, in many ways only amplified an already existent gap between the efficacy of the royal
writ and the politics that actually governed the individual, localized communities of the body
politic. State agents, such as justices of the peace, wardens, sheriffs and other officials imbued
with a measure of the sovereign’s authority, governed the localities in the name of the absent
crown; but, without palpable links to the monarchical fount of authority or to the person of the
king or queen, the state as personified in these figures of localized authority seemingly acted as
their own self-determining governmental units. As Steve Hindle has asserted, laws and policies
disseminated to the localities from Whitehall often underwent a process of revision and
adjustment before becoming codified. Modified to align with the needs and customs of particular
communities, the royal writ when it left London was not preserved in the form drawn up by the
Elizabethan court. “Parliamentary legislation, conciliar order or royal proclamation were not the
end of the law-making process but merely its beginning,” Hindle writes:
The structures of authority were elastic, multi-lateral and had both geographical
extent and social depth, and the negotiation of authority at highly localized levels
was therefore inherent in the process of state formation [ … ] State formation is
less a matter of centralisation than of the social dynamics consequent upon the
localisation of state power. That power could be legitimated only if the injection
of public authority into the localities guaranteed social stability on the basis of a
widely accepted moral ethos. In this sense, an understanding of the state only as
an instrument of power, however deeply embedded in the social order, is

293

insufficient. State agents (magistrates and constables, churchwardens and jurors)
were able to appeal to the state itself as a symbol of their instrumental authority,
justifying and legitimating their activity in political and moral terms.

312

Citing the unwillingness of Elizabethan localities to enact the crown’s Poor Laws, policies
designed to combat vagrancy, and the trial juries’ use of discretionary measures to either lessen
the severity of criminal indictments or to thrown them out altogether, Hindle illustrates that the
monarch’s word was sometimes perceived as that of an outsider, whose declarations of its
authority must be tempered to meet the needs of the localities.
The elasticity of authority demonstrated by Hindle is, of course, at great odds with
official rhetoric regarding centralization and the state. The authoritarian command of the
sovereign was not subject to negotiation, according to this rhetoric, because the word of the
monarch was the word of God spoken through his chosen mouthpiece. Likewise, the subjects of
the crown’s kingdoms spoke in one shared voice, one that echoed the monarch and thus bound
the realms into a single social and political entity. That the local authorities used their “loaned”
power to manipulate royal policy according to regionally specific systems of ethical and social
order forcefully dismantles official claims to Tudor absolutism and demonstrates that the state
itself became the object of anxious crown surveillance and management as it became disengaged
from the sovereign. Michael J. Braddick explains that the empowerment of state officials to
execute a revised and locally specific form of monarchical law also allowed these individuals to
affect their own policies independent of the crown’s mandates. “Once an initiative had legal
form it became, to an extent, a matter of policy, sanctioned by the executive. This ‘governmental
will’ operated through local officeholders who were, in this sense ‘intermediaries’, mediating
312

Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550-1640 (Houndmills:
Palgrave, 2002) 23. Print.
294

policy in the light of local interests,” he comments. The more pronounced affront to the monarch
came when members of the state took matters of policy into their own hands. “In addition to
mediating governmental will, however, groups in the localities sought legal validity for their own
political innovations—there were local initiatives alongside central initiatives”.

313

As Braddick attests, the “face-to-face” exchanges that governed social interactions on the
ground removed “the state” from the political ether, in which it was imagined as instrumentally a
piece with absolutist power. Because the state as a localized system of order was “deeply
embedded in the social fabric”, the role of the state agent was never static: “when asked to act
qua governor, officeholders frequently chose to act as neighbours instead [ … ] The activities of
many of the agents of the early modern state were constrained by wider social expectations—
their offices were envisioned as broader social roles, in which particular patterns of behaviour
were expected, in conformity with wider cultural values”.

314

These regional investments were

often at cross-purposes with the intentions of the crown. As Dean explains, those members of the
commonwealth who were marked as a threat to the body politic by the Elizabethan government
were often freed from the monarch’s more severe measures because local officials refused the
mandates of the crown. “It seems clear that those for whom punitive laws were designed—
vagabonds, beggars, prostitutes, demobilized yet armed soldiers, Catholic recusants—had some
ability to negotiate their treatment by strategies which involved kinship and neighbourhood,
315

household and community”.

Even in the event of monarchical intervention, state agents still

protected local interests at the expense of the crown. “Justices might as easily turn a blind eye to
313

Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1550-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2000) 27. Print.
314
Ibid, 76-7.
315

Dean, 56.
295

a regular offender they knew well in the interest of community peace or in response to a notion
of fairness held by the community, no matter how often they might receive a letter from the privy
council admonishing them to enforce the laws more strictly. Local solutions were found without
reference to central authority”.

316

The physical distance of these regions from the center of

sovereign authority seems proportionate to the ideological distance between the rhetoric of
Whitehall and the business of governance in the localities; harnessing the sovereign authority
transmitted to them from distant London and disengaging that political power from the site of
“central authority”, Elizabethan state agents acted more or less autonomously, privileging the
local over the monarchical, the republican over the authoritarian.
Significantly, these state agents were not necessarily men whose social or economic
status qualified them for positions of power, according to the strict hierarchies that organized
most aspects of Elizabethan social life. The belief that all men are intended for a particular
position within the social cosmos was of particular importance in regard to the doling out of
political power. Fears of social disintegration stemming from misplaced authority pervade the
opening pages of Elyot’s Boke Named the Governour, where he spells out in no uncertain terms
the disintegration that follows when social order is disrupted. After dismissing usage of the term
“commonweal” to describe England because such a designation implies communal or shared
skills and social positions, Elyot distinguishes between the plebs or “communaltie”, “wherin be
contayned the base and vulgare inhabitantes not auanced to any honour or dignite” and the
“gentilite”, locating in the latter the only possible candidates to wield political power. To upset
the “discrepance of degrees” demonstrated in this division that undergirds all social relations is
to invite destruction, for “take away ordre from all thynges what shulde than remayne? Certes
316

Ibid, 56-7.
296

nothynge finally, except some man wolde imagine eftsones Chaos”.

317

Likening the men suited

to political office to “the angels whiche be most feruent in contemplation be highest exalted in
glorie”, Elyot describes governors as “they whiche excelle other in this influence of
understandynge, and do imploye it to the detaynyng of other within the boundes of reason, and
318

shewe them howe to prouyde for theyr necessarye lyuynge”.

Naturally imbued with a kind of

intelligence and skill born of their noble position, governors acts as guides and protectors who
“oughte to be set in a more highe place than the residue where they may se and also be sene: that
by the beames of theyr excellent witte, shewed throughe the glasse of auctorite, other of inferiour
319

understandynge may be directed to the way of vertue and commodious liuynge”.

However, as Hindle and Andy Wood attest, the state agents who were revising and
sometimes even hampering the royal will were not Elyot’s angels but men of middling social
320

status.

“The ‘middling’ male householder was much more than just another object of

governance”, Wood contends,
He played a dynamic role in the administration, expression, mediation and
extension of authority: in his capacity as a member of a village court, a
vestryman, an elector, a juryman or a constable, the early modern state came
increasingly to depend upon him. This variety of roles gave him the potential to

317
318
319
320

Elyot, 2-3.
Ibid, 6.
Ibid.

Hindle also comments upon this contradiction in Elyot’s political program. Considering the
“tradition of active political participation” that invited all classes of men into the governmental
sphere, Hindle remarks that “even in the formal tradition of political thought [as demonstrated by
Elyot’s work], the widespread participation of men of middling status was recognised as a
significant structural characteristic of the state”. Hindle, 24-5.
297

represent personal or collective grievances to those in authority, and even on
321

occasion to organise resistance to lords, magistrates and gentlemen.

Collinson echoes this view, pointing our attention to “the vitality in early modern England of
traditions of localized self-government, involving men of very humble status. This was a salient
322

feature of its political culture”.

The crown’s dependence upon ordinary subjects of the realm

to enforce its policies was an ideological pitfall; sovereign authority was no longer personified in
the otherworldly monarchical person nor in his gentle subjects who were viewed as guardians of
the commonality, but in a neighbor whose localized political investments trumped those of the
crown.
More damaging still to the sovereign and the fragile hierarchy that underpinned
monarchical rule was the divine status incidentally granted these local officials. We find
pronounced traces of this mystification of the state in Elyot’s language: because of their angelic
character, Elyot’s governors cast the divine light of their noble bearing onto the barbarous
commonality through their “glass of authority”, in which the majesty of the monarch is reflected
in her gentle servants’ command and protection over the lower orders. Elyot, however, was not
referring to the middling man so central to localized authority in the early modern period; the
middling man was the very sort, in Eliot’s estimation, who demanded the blessed intervention of
the governor to best understand his place in the Elizabethan social structure. Nevertheless, with
the distribution of royal power demanded by early modern state building, the divine aura of
political authority promoted by the crown could be attached to even the middling sorts who were
the actual practitioners of this authority. As Hindle asserts,
321

Wood, Andy. Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Houndsmills:
Palgrave, 2002) 48 Print.
322
Collinson, 112.
298

the other-worldly status of rulership was not simply confined to the ruler himself,
since charisma might be inherited by all those who wielded the sword of God’s
justice. The logic of descending authority ensured that the rhetoric of mystical
politics was transferred from the prince to his judicial subordinates.

323

The distribution and transfer of divine political authority during the period of Elizabethan state
building is significant: it reveals that the crown was unable to manage not only the state agents
that used her authority to act against royal writ, but also, importantly, that the sovereign was
likewise losing control of the ideological apparatus that was deployed to justify an authoritarian
regime. The widening gap between official rhetoric of divine and absolute kingship and the
politics on the ground in which sovereign authority became defuse and decentered is at the
disjointed heart of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
‘In this fayre mirrhour maist behold thy face’: Refracted Elizabeth
To explain his use of the term “theology” to describe the mechanisms of the modern
state, Carl Schmitt maintains that “the state intervenes everywhere. At times it does so as a deux
ex machina [ … ] at other times it does so as the graceful and merciful lord who proves by
pardons and amnesties his supremacy over his own laws”. The state that Schmitt illustrates in his
1922 work Political Theology is one in which the concept of the divine that in the early modern
period attended notions of sovereignty, justice and law is subjected to the logic of secularism,
where “the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver”.

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One finds in Schmitt’s

depiction of the modern state surprisingly strong resonances with the Elizabethan state of the
th

16 and early 17

323
324

th

centuries. Through his or her divine providence, the monarch as the head of

Hindle, 33.
Schmitt, 36-8.
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state acts as “the god from the machine” whose manipulations of the earthly realm make peace
and justice possible in a fallen world. The servants of the monarch are the limbs of this machine
of state, carrying out the practical demands of effective governance in the monarch’s name. The
monarch’s absolute sovereignty is defined by his or her permanent exception to the laws
governing the realm; by inhabiting a divine sphere apart from her subjects and the laws that bind
them to both sovereign and nation, the monarch dispenses justice and mercy from a place outside
the confines of law.
Yet, as discussed above, the demarcations separating the monarch’s indivisible and
otherworldly authority from the political power granted to the state are fuzzy at best during
Elizabeth’s reign. Despite attempts to define state agents as servants of a divine ruler trusted,
temporarily, with the capacity to govern the queen’s subjects and deal justice throughout the
realm in her name, these figures necessarily took on a kind of political authority that questioned
the monarch’s very divinity. If the monarch’s otherworldly power could be separated from her
divine person, divided and parsed out among her governmental agents, then the ideological
power of singular absolutist authority is diluted and severely thrown into question. The “god
from the machine” becomes subject to the machine itself as the monarch struggles to maintain
control over the state and harness political authority to the royal person. It is “the state [that]
intervenes everywhere”, entering regional communities and reaching into the corners of the
realm in a ubiquitous fashion, disconnected from the monarch seated on the throne in Whitehall
Palace.
The collision of absolutism and state-formation in early modern England can inform our
reading of Spenser’s poem. That Spenser was invested in Elizabethan political culture is
evidenced by his overtly political treatise, A View on the Present State of Ireland and by his

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vocation as an agent of the state serving in Elizabeth’s Ireland.

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Appointed to a location that

was both physically and ideologically distant from his queen, Spenser experienced first hand the
dangers of decentered authority. The English sovereign who proclaimed her right to rule Ireland
never set foot on the Irish isle. Her authority was that of an absent-presence; physically absent
from the territory she claimed to govern, her presence was felt only through her colonial
representatives, such as Spenser’s employer, Lord Gray. As often discussed in histories of early
modern Ireland, those agents invested with her authority were sometimes wont to use their
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David J. Baker considers Spenser’s knowledge of contemporary political theorists,
specifically the work of Bodin and his examination of absolutism. Because of Bodin’s
widespread influence in England, “we can also be certain that Spenser knew of the thought of
Jean Bodin”, he maintains (53). Though there are no direct references to Bodin in Spenser’s
writing, Baker argues that this absence is resulting from Bodin’s eventual support of Mary,
Queen of Scots. According to Baker, the “internal discrepancies” that problematize Bodin’s
theory of absolutism “may have especially caught Spenser’s attention [ … ] While Bodin was, at
least according to his own insistence, entirely committed in his support for monarchical
absolutism, he did not posit a monarchy without any restraints on it at all. He set his face against
armed resistance to kings, arguing that anyone who even thought of violating his king was
worthy of execution. But he also allowed that a tyrannical king who was a usurper could be
legitimately killed, and even that he could be forcibly deposed by a foreign prince. That he was
willing to countenance the death of a prince, Elizabeth I, was perhaps then not so surprising.
Bodin was committed to a particularly rigorous form of royal absolutism and stated it, as Skinner
says, with ‘an epoch-making lack of equivocation’, but Elizabeth was a Protestant ruler, and he
had moreover declared in the Six Books that ‘the rule and government of women is directly
against the law of nature’. And his ‘lack of equivocation’, it could be argued, was in part an
attempt to clarify out of existence a deeper contradiction between the earlier and later versions of
his own thought. The Six Books, the work of Bodin’s that was perused so widely at Cambridge,
was a piece of self-revision. It may have asserted the claims of the absolute sovereign with
analytic clarity, but it contained within itself the remnants of counter-arguments Bodin himself
had once professed and traces of the resistance theory that it was directed against. It was this
ambivalence within Bodin oeuvre, perhaps, that Spenser responded to. By taking up Bodin,
Spenser was making use of a thinker who had both dallied with his queen and urged her
assassination, an interesting tension given his own equivocal relation with her” I am less
interested in how Bodin’s work may have influenced Spenser’s personal relationship to the
queen. Rather, this chapter considers how Spenser’s poem takes up the problematic nature of
absolutist rhetoric—as evidenced in Bodin—in a period of Tudor state formation. Baker, David
J. “Historical contexts: Britain and Europe.” The Cambridge Companion to Spenser Ed. Andrew
Hadfield. 37-59. Print.

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political clout in Ireland to their own advantage, serving not the queen as the fount of this
authority, but themselves as the practitioners and enforcers of Elizabethan rule in a land
ultimately disconnected from the center of power. In Ireland, not unlike regions in England, the
site from which political authority emanated was profoundly unclear. Outside the rhetoric of
absolutism, in the queen’s territories, where practical matters of governance were played out, the
face of authority was not easily recognizable. It was multiple and shifting as the early modern
state infrastructure came into being and new positions of power allowed subjects to ascend into
the realm of political authority. In The Faerie Queene, the sovereign’s visage is spectral at best.
The faces most sharply defined are those of her servants, for it is in the knights of Faerie Land
that political authority most clearly resides.
Spenser in the proem to Book II of The Faerie Queene calls upon the notion of the
singular body of the monarch in whose visage, drawn by the hand of the poet, can be seen the
territories that make up her kingdom and the celebrated genealogy that brought her to England’s
throne:
And thou, O fairest Princesse under sky,
In this fayre mirrhour maist behold thy face
And thine owne realmes in lond of Faery,
And in this antique ymage thy great auncestry. (II. Proem.4.6-9)
Praising her earthly uniqueness, Spenser draws from three major tenets of Tudor authoritarian
ideology. First, the notion of a unified nation reflected in the physical person of the sovereign.
Enclosed within the literary boundaries of the poem, or within the frame of Spenser’s
“mirrhour”, Elizabeth’s face reflects back to the sovereign a vision of her realms incorporated
into a bounded landscape. Also contained within the borders of the queen’s face is the

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genealogical record of English kingship that buttresses Elizabeth’s claim to the throne, the
ancestral registry that reaches back into Tudor mythology to locate in Arthurian legend the root
of the queen’s mystical legacy. Finally, Spenser’s threefold vision of Elizabeth’s physical,
territorial and genealogical right to rule imparts to the sovereign a kind of divine essence; like the
triple yet singular character of the trinity, the Queen’s divine person collapses into a single
deistic persona the several traits that define sovereign power in the earthly realm.

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However, the singular-ness that Spenser attributes to the Queen is troubled by the
demands of representation. His evocation of Elizabeth abounds with representational frames and
mechanisms that fracture the queen and distance us from the monarchical body evoked by the
poet. Spenser’s “fayre mirrhour”, the first of his representational reflections draws pointed
attention to the monarch’s inaccessibility; present to the readers only in spectral duplicate, the
authentic monarchical person remains outside the confines of the poetic frame and is therefore
untouched and unreachable, much like the Faerie Queene herself (a point I shall return to later).
The territories of this insubstantial queen are likewise illusory. Spenser seeks not to reflect back
a geographical replica of Elizabeth’s territories; rather the poet constructs a fantastical landscape
that’s very literariness puts into boldface its representational quality. Spenser’s “antique image”
has two possible referents. First, Elizabeth’s face produced in the poet’s mirror may be the very
representation of antiquity in the sense that her visage holds the venerable Tudor genealogy from
which Elizabeth’s mythical qualities are derived. On the other hand, Spenser’s poem is itself an
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David Norbrook comments upon the singular-ness conferred upon the queen in royal
pageants and the possible echoes of this singular royal persona in Spenser’s epic poem. “Spenser
probably knew of the pageants which greeted Elizabeth’s entry to London in 1559, of which his
schoolmaster Mulcaster had written a description; at one point the figure of Protestant Truth had
presented the queen with a Bible. Her personal motto was ‘semper eadem’ so that it was
appropriate to praise her for her unity and singleness. Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Drant had
already praised her as Una”. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984) 121-22. Print.
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“antique image”. The poet’s archaisms and evocations of Ovid and Virgil evince Spenser’s
intention to counterfeit classical models. Lastly, The Faerie Queene, both the queenly stand-in
and the work itself as a literary rendering of her England, is the ultimate representation that
enfolds these myriad refractions into a single frame.
At several representational removes from both the reader and the poet who erected these
frames and reflections, the monarch is not only obfuscated but also riven into several disparate
forms: Elizabeth as the sovereign of Faerie Land, as the object of Spenser’s mirrored reflection,
as the face of celebrated Tudor rule, and as the medium through which Spenser creates his ode to
literary antiquity. The poem itself consistently reiterates the splintering of Elizabeth witnessed in
the proem. Cracking the reflective plane that imagines the queen as the singular “fairest Princess
under sky”, the work introduces in quick succession a series of monarchical representations:
Una, Belphoebe, Medina, Alma, Britomart, Mercilla and, of course, the Faerie Queene herself
are all synecdochial personifications of England’s sovereign queen. The effect of this refracted
monarchical representation is the radical upset of the notion of the singular divine ruler that was
so central to Tudor authoritarian political ideology. When looking into Spenser’s “glass of
auctorite”, we discover not the solitary figure of sovereign power but a severed and disjointed
queen and, importantly, the disunited “Knights of Maidenhead”.
In her discussion of Elizabeth’s deft management of gender politics and the poet’s
relationship to his queen, Linda Gregerson makes a similar point regarding the myriad and
spectral representations of England’s sovereign in the work. “The lineaments of the English
queen are rendered in shadows and light throughout The Faerie Queene”, she writes,
in the poem’s presiding monarch, who is everywhere implicit and everywhere
withheld; in Britomart, her mythic ancestor; in the virgin Belphoebe and her twin

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the married Amoret; in ‘Dread” Astraea and ‘Angel-like’ Mercilla, whose
overlapping spheres are the domains of Justice; in every patron virtue and in
virtue’s grounding anti-types, the female figures of pride and lust and nature327

deforming power”.

Where Gregerson places this fragmentation of this queen within a larger discourse regarding
female rule within a culturally patriarchal nation, I contend that the dismemberment of the
sovereign and the division of authority supposedly contained within that singular position is the
result of a very different ideological crisis: the jarring meeting of authoritarian political rhetoric
and the formation of the Elizabethan state. Hadfield includes Astrea and Irena to the list of
Elizabethan representations in the work, and comments how Spenser’s letter to Raleigh
downplays the multiplicity of queenly personas in the poem.
Irena stands as one of the many manifestations of Gloriana; the letter to Raleigh
declares that the Faerie Queene herself could be doubly shadowed as ‘glory in my
generall intention’ and as Elizabeth, who herself was represented as two bodies,
the one ‘a most royall Queene or Empresse, the other of a most vertuous and
beautifull Lady’, represented by Belphoebe and fashioned after Raleigh’s own
figuration of Elizabeth as Cynthia (Diana) (FQ, p. 757). Given that both Diana
and Cynthia appear in the poem [ … ] clear comparisons are made between
Britomart and Elizabeth. Given too, that Una, as the symbol of the English church
who marries St. George, can also be regarded as a type of the queen, it can be
seen that the representations of Elizabeth are multiple, going beyond the figures

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Gregerson, Linda. “Sexual politics.” The Cambridge Companion to Spenser Ed. Andrew
Hadfield (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 195. Print.
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signalled in the letter. After Henry VIII’s declaration, on 18 June 1541 in the Irish
Parliament, that he was king of Ireland, the English monarch claimed rights to
Ireland, so Irena must stand as a figure of Elizabeth.

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If Irena is, in fact, another refraction of the English sovereign, then the argument made here—
that the splintering of the monarch into myriad representations marks the dispersal of sovereign
authority concomitant with state building —could take on a colonial dimension. As historians
and critics like Hadfield have noted, Elizabeth’s already unsatisfactory domestic resources of
governance were especially stretched thin in colonial Ireland. Spenser’s Irena is symptomatic of
these failing powers of colonial government; a powerless sovereign whose right to rule has been
taken from her by a foreign usurper, Irena must call upon outside authority to reclaim her
sovereign title. Like Alma, Medina and Mercilla, Irena is yet another Elizabeth who cannot
maintain her territories, domestic or imperial. Finally, in her deconstructionist reading of
Spenser’s epic, Elizabeth J. Bellamy maintains that England’s queen is “unreadable” in the poem
because she remains unnamed. The multiplicity of sovereign representations signals Spenser’s
inability to directly “call forth her image”:
the drive toward Elizabeth as unmediated Pure Name stalls in the succession of
aberrant references that delay the coincidence of meaning and being, and the
unreadability of her Proper Name is narrated through a chain of merely figurative

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Hadfield, “The Spoiling of Princes” Artegall Thwarted, Calidore Confused.” Edmund
Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997) 151-52.
Print.
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substitutions indefinitely deferred from an ultimate convergence with pure
signification”.

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Louis Montrose instead sees the queen in Spenser’s epic as essentially textual. Considering the
queen’s own modes of self-production and the poet’s power to make the monarch a “textual
product”, Montrose asserts that the many Elizabeths of the poem constitute “complementary
persons [that] are equally aspects of the queen’s body politic and her body natural; she is always
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already a cultural corpus, a body of texts”.

Both Hadfield and Wofford remark upon the Faerie Queene’s spectral quality in
Spenser’s epic. Turning to Arthur’s brief glimpse of Gloriana in his dream, Hadfield contends
that
the bodies of the queen reflected in the variety of female figures scattered
throughout the narrative constitute the manifestations of Gloriana, who only
appears fleetingly to Arthur. Arthur is unsure if what he saw was real [ … ] The
queen’s presence is shown to be a ghostly one at two removes from reality, a
fiction within a fiction. Arthur’s comment, ‘So faire a creature yet saw neuer
sunny day’ (13), appears, if taken at face value, to be hyperbolic praise of the
sovereign; equally, it could be taken to mean either that such a creature does not
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really exist, or that she hides herself away in the dark.

Wofford likewise refers to the Faerie Queene as an “absent centre”, a reference I invoke when
speaking of Spenser’s queen as an “absent presence”. Wofford identifies two reasons for this
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Bellamy, “The Vocative and the Vocational: The Unreadability of Elizabeth in The Faerie
Queene.” ELH 54.1 (1987) 1-3. Print.
330
Montrose, “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text”, 151-52.
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Hadfield, 152-53.
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absent center: the ‘national prophetic destiny” of the epic, promised by the unaccomplished
union of Arthur and Gloriana and the “unrepresentable nature of the divine” as embodied in the
sovereign.

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Prompted by C. S. Lewis’s contention that the poem’s “centre, the seat of its

highest life, is missing”, Willy Maley echoes Wofford’s sentiment, calling “the vacuum at the
heart of the Faerie Queene” an “absent center”. Maley attributes this absentness to “royal
absenteeism in Ireland”. According to his analysis, Spenser’s commentary on Ireland in the work
is a response to the lack of a strong vice regent in Ireland and Elizabeth’s absence from her Irish
colony. “What haunts the pages of The Faerie Queene”, he states, “is the spectre of sovereignty
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without the presence of a sovereign”.

Rather than refer to the poem’s “absent center”, I instead deploy the term “absent
presence” in reference to the Faerie Queene because, despite her absence, she exists in the work
as a kind of spectral figure of sovereign rule to which the knights owe a tenuous form of
allegiance. I contend that this absent presence of “singular” political authority is central to the
poem’s perhaps unintended commentary on the displacement of governmental might from the
sovereign to the state. According to this argument, the sovereign must be “present” as a
somewhat depleted figure of outdated authoritarian ideology. For it is Spenser’s knights that
embody governmental authority, thusly depleting the once-singular body of the queen and the
monarch’s absolute sovereignty reiterated in official rhetoric.

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Wofford, “The Faerie Queene, Books I-III.” The Cambridge Companion to Spenser Ed.
Andrew Hadfield (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 108-09. Print.
333
Maley, “ ʻAnd nought but pressed gras where she had lyen’: Royal Absenteeism and
Viceregal Verses.” Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (Houndmills:
Macmillan, 1997) 99-122. Print.
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Spenser’s knights do the work of the state, bringing law and order to bear upon a set of
lawless territories. Though their quests are either in service to the queen or intended to gain
entrance into the monarch’s unreachable court, the knights do not necessarily receive their
political authority from her hands. For example, Arthur, the well-worn figure of Tudor
mythology that repeatedly appears in the poem as a kind of savior, is unassociated with the
Faerie Queene. In Book II Canto IX, he expresses to Guyon his fervent desire to come into her
“faithfull service, and meete amenaunce” (II.ix.5.7), but the authority and power that he wields
throughout the work is not granted him by the poem’s reigning sovereign. Likewise, Guyon,
though a servant to the Faerie Queene, received the authority of knighthood not from the faery
sovereign but from “good Sir Huons hand, / When the king Oberon he came to Fary land”
(II.1.6.7-9). Although the knights have vowed allegiance to the poem’s supreme monarch, the
well-spring and nature of their authority is uncertain. In the case of Guyon, Arthur and Artegall
(who was trained in matters of justice by his mythological foster mother, Astræa), these knight
are already imbued with the power to correct social and political wrongs prior to their stated
allegiance to the queen; their authority is not “in the manner of loan or grant on sufferance”, in
Bodin’s language. For all the poem’s evocations of the queen in her many manifestations,
sovereignty does not reside in her mystifying literary personas; rather, sovereignty is diffuse and
ubiquitous, existing outside the realm of monarchical power.

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Wofford also comments upon the knights’ seeming disassociation from a centralized figure
and fount of authority. “Instead of royal or divine or metropolitan centre” she writes, “the poem
consistently presents a periphery, with knights wandering almost as if in exile in forests and
plains, far from the civic and religious centre of the plot or its symbols”. Though I agree with her
claim that the knights appear disconnected from a singular sovereign, I do not agree that they
meander the poem’s landscape as near-exiles, particularly because they act with a significant
measure of authority in their several quests. The knight’s distance from a sovereign center,
according to my argument, actually imbues the knights with a kind of unregulated power, similar
to state agents acting in behalf of the queen but out of her governmental reach. Wofford, 107.
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The decentering and dispersal of authority in the poem allows the knights a troubling
degree of political autonomy. Imbued with the power to intercede in matters of social disorder
and to mete out justice where and when they see fit, the knights repeatedly stray from the quests
assigned to them by their queen. The Red Cross Knight, for instance, not only recurrently defers
his duty to the Faerie Queene to slay the dragon that has imprisoned Una’s parents, he even
enters the court of Lucifera, bowing and “making obeysaunce” (I.iv.13.7) to one of Spenser’s
many inverse representations of Elizabeth. Likewise, Artegall and Calidore are admonished,
sometimes by the speaker himself, for neglecting the very quests that bind them to the Faerie
Queene. In both cases, the knights’ prescribed duties are left only partially fulfilled; Artegall
departs Ireland in a state of incomplete reformation, and Calidore merely suppresses the Blatant
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Beast temporarily.

As the work draws to a close, the object of Calidore’s quest “raungeth

through the world againe, / And rageth sore in each degree and state”, and we exit Spenser’s
unfinished epic with a nod toward the lawlessness that still reigns in Faerie Land and its mirror,
Elizabeth’s England.
A sense of lawlessness and rebellion pervades Spenser’s poetic landscape from the first
book to its unsettling conclusion. Lucifera, who reigns in the territory of Book I, is a self-made
monarch, lacking “rightfull kingdome” and “heritage of natiue soueraintie, / But did vsurpe with
wrong and tyrannie” (I.iv.12.3-5). Antithetical to Spenser’s several Elizabeths in the poem,
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Tobias Gregory considers Artegall’s unfinished work in Ireland in light of Spenser’s
“interventionist Protestant perspective” (366). Including Spenser among those members of
Elizabethan political culture who desired that their monarch show more commitment to
Protestant communities abroad, Gregory sees in The Faerie Queene a critique of Elizabeth’s
reluctance to more fully involve England in international Protestant causes. Linking Artgell’s
defense of Irena with Lord Grey’s deployment and eventual “recall” from Ireland, Gregory sees
in Book five’s incomplete Ireland episode Spenser’s depiction of “the evils of a policy of half
measures” (381). Gregory, “Shadowing Intervention: On the Politics of The Faerie Queene Book
5 Cantos 10-12.” ELH 67.2 (2000): 366. Project Muse. Web. 20 Sept. 2011.
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Lucifera “ne ruld her Realme with lawes, but pollicie” (I.iv.12. 7). Figures of lawlessness akin to
Lucifera abound in The Faerie Queene; Acrasia, Radigund, Adicia, Munera and Pollente, and
Grantorto all exercise a kind of localized power that radically challenges the supposedly
omnipresent authority of the Faerie Queene and the political might of Spenser’s several
legitimate female rulers. The “lawless multitude” that surround the “mighty Gyant” of Book V
Canto II (V.ii.52.1), the “thousand villeins” that besiege the House of Temperance (II.ix.13.2)
and the cannibalistic “savage nation” of borderers in Book VI (VI.viii.35.2) signal that the
refusal of law is not just the purview of those with power, but also of significant segments of the
populace who riot against both local law and the overarching rule of the queen.
One can perhaps explain the many instances of lawless figures and territories by
considering the conventions of chivalric romance; Spenser’s use of this genre demands that
itinerant knights discover treacherous elements and villainous characters to battle and suppress
during their travels. However, Spenser’s landscape is so persistently shot through with
contemporary events that took place during Elizabeth’s reign—the assassination of Mary Queen
of Scots, the several governmental crises in Ireland, the queen’s involvement in the Low
Countries and her on-going battle with Spain, etc—that it seems likely that these rebel states in
Faerie Land have relevance beyond the strictures of generic convention. In several respects, the
presence of rogue elements in the Faerie kingdom seems to gesture toward the pockets of
governmental resistance and insubordinate localized authority that made necessary the
development of the Elizabethan state. And, like the very real need for a state to maintain her
kingdoms, Spenser’s Faerie Land likewise emphasizes the failure of monarchical ideology to
enforce upon the realm the obedience to the sovereign and subjection to the law necessary to
stave off social disorder. The splintering of the sovereign into myriad forms and personas and the

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disconnectedness of the knights themselves only exacerbates the sense of governmental disarray.
The absent-presence of the overarching figure of sovereign authority and the ubiquity of
Elizabethan representations makes exceedingly unclear the source of political might and the
relationship between the sovereign(s) and her supposed servants, who often act on their own
seemingly autonomous authority.

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The governmental disunity that is betrayed in Spenser’s work is reflected in Faery Land’s
territorial disunity; like the many sovereigns of the poem and the several figures who challenge
their claims to territorial and governmental authority, the land is likewise disjointed and
disunified. Within the Faerie Queene’s discontinuous realm, as evidenced by the sharp and
unexplained shifts in landscape mentioned above, are multiple islands, disconnected bodies of
land that are usually marked out as clandestine sites of rebellion and anarchy. Acrasia’s island
Bower of Bliss (which I will return to in more detail), Argante’s “secret Ile” (III.vii.50.6) and the
“savage island” of Ireland (VI.i.9.1) are each contained within the monarch’s realm, but like the
territories ruled by Lucifera and others, they appear as autonomous units within the kingdom
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Hadfield identifies in Spenser’s Mutability cantos a pronounced fear of political change,
arguing that the cantos “seem to represent the threat of Mutabiltie as a legitimate—though
patently undesirable—challenge to the rule of Cynthia / Elizabeth”. Whereas Hadfield locates
this threat to the monarch in the Stuart ascension to the throne, it is my contention that the
formation of the state and the consequent dispersal of political authority could likewise be
perceived as a potentially dangerous upheaval of monarchical authority. It is this fear of political
mutability that I trace out in Spenser’s work. Hadfield, “Introduction: the relevance of Edmund
Spenser.” Cambridge Companion to Spenser (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 6. Print. Of
Gloriana’s elusive presence in the work, Jeffrey P. Fruen accounts for the sovereign’s absence by
pointing to Spenser’s use of “biblical typology”, arguing that “Gloriana should be seen as focal
to the poem’s disjointed narratives in much the same sense in which Christ was seen as the
unifying focus of the Bible”. Maintaining that the semblages of Elizabeth throughout the poem
are actually abstract personification of Glory that culminate in the continually deferred person of
Gloriana, Fruen attempts to resolve the narrative disjointed-ness of Spenser’s work by likening
the many queens of the Faerie Queene to the characters of the Bible who prefigure Christ. Fruen,
“ ʻTrue Glorious Type’: The Place of Gloriana in The Faerie Queene.” Spenser Studies: A
Renaissance Poetry Annual 7 (1986): 148. Print.
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functioning under their own systems of law that contrast sharply with the laws of the kingdom.
The existence of such sites territorially within the bounds of the kingdom but acting outside the
law of the realm makes impossible the notion of a Faery Land unified under the rule of its queen.
Like Elizabeth’s England, where attempts at centralization incidentally brought into boldface the
local and cultural differences that loudly denied official claims to unification, Spenser’s Faerie
realms betrays the rent body politic that refuses to be modeled upon the singular body of the
monarch.
In the remainder of this chapter, I will explore episodes from Books II and V of The
Faerie Queene to consider how Spenser’s epic work reflects contemporary debates regarding the
nature of sovereign rule and the role of the state in the governance of a monarchical realm that
problematically fashions itself absolutist.
‘In th’ Almighties place’
Books II and V of Spenser’s epic most overtly place his readers in the realm of
Elizabethan political culture by charging Knights Guyon and Artegall with the governmental
maintenance of the poet’s fictional Britain. Faerie Land as it stands at the beginning of these two
books is a failed state. The reigning monarch cannot hold the body politic together, her spectral
quality too insubstantial to hold her subjects in an ideological bounded-ness to her rule. The
other queens of Spenser’s disconnected realm momentarily appear and then quickly recede into
the poem’s narrative backdrop, their very multiplicity throwing into question the unity of this
sovereign territory. The discontinuous kingdoms of Faerie Land are held by several autonomous
rulers, some criminal, some legitimate, yet all unsuccessful in the governance of their land and
peoples. Finally, the territory lacks a system of law yoking the subjects to the “nation” and its
sovereign. Knights Guyon, Artegall and sometimes Arthur come to the aid of the land’s faltering

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monarchs, temporarily instituting law and order and bringing to bear upon the territory the
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virtues of temperance and justice.

The representative virtues of Books II and V were of obvious significance to nascent
Elizabethan state formation. Temperance was a matter that extended beyond the physical body to
the body political. “Goodly governance” of the realm often demanded the tempering of the law
and of its agents to build a state capable of rightly and justly applying the law in accordance with
royal decree and local custom, two forces that were often at social and political odds (II.i.29.8).
Abuses of power by those entrusted to rule in the sovereign’s name made this body politic
susceptible to infection and disease; thusly, the crown had to monitor closely the limbs of state
that were animated by its divine authority. Guyon and Artegall embody the qualities of
temperance and justice not only in the allegorical realm, but also in a kind of political testingground created by the poet. Each knight, imperfectly capable of asserting political authority,
traverses the landscape of the poem righting social and political wrongs and bringing temporary
order to the Faerie Queene’s territories. In this respect, Guyon and Artegall serve the interests of
the monarch by correcting governmental failures of justice and law. But, in the process of
carrying law into the realm, the knights expose the weaknesses of monarchical ideology and
draw attention to the threats to the crown produced as a consequence of early modern state
formation. The myriad queens of the poem, including the titular sovereign, are clearly incapable
of enforcing social and political order; as discussed below, the kingdoms of Faerie Land are shot
through with lawless elements that override and make inconsequential the supposed authority of
the various monarchs. The knights are themselves dangerous to the crown, acting upon their own
authority and disregarding the mandates of the sovereign; in this scenario, the limbs of state
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Subtitle, Faerie Queene, Book V Proem.
314

propel the body politic at the expense of the monarchical head. In any case, in Spenser’s Faerie
Queene, the state—its knightly representatives, its power to govern, its power to disobey—
eclipses the monarch.
Though the quest assigned to Sir Guyon by the Faerie Queen is to capture Acrasia and
end her “grievous mischiefes” (II.ii.43.3), the ruler’s mandate is twice deferred: first, when
Guyon visits the court of Medina, and secondly when he and Arthur defend Alma’s House of
Temperance from Maleger and his “thousand villeins” (II.ix.13.2). The knights’ intervention at
Alma’s castle not only puts off the queen’s command, it also results in a protracted break in
Guyon’s narrative.

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Following the defeat of Maleger’s ghostly troops, Guyon and Arthur are

given a lengthy tour though the House’s allegorical map of the temperate body. The conclusion
of this bodily progress is the discovery of Briton moniments and the “Antiquitee of Faery lond”
housed in Eumnestes’s library (II.ix.59-60). The following canto is devoted in full to Spenser’s
fabulous nationalist history, to be discussed in more detail below. The beginning of Canto VI
sees the departure of Guyon and the Palmer to the Bower of Bliss, yet the reader is disallowed
from following our hero to his decreed site of action. “But let them pas, whiles winde and wether
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Kate Wheeler also recognizes in Guyon’s narrative a “curious narrative loop or glitch”
regarding Guyon’s quest that puts significant pressure on the notion of the knight’s allegiance to
his queen. Though we learn in Canto ii that Guyon is assigned by his sovereign to root out the
evils perpetrated by Acrasia, it is his coming upon Mordant and Amavia in canto i, “which
occurs outside the context of Gloriana’s court” that impels his quest (8). Wheeler argues that this
narrative “disjunction” is not simply a narrative slip up on Spenser’s part. Instead, she maintains,
this episode points to a tension in Book II between the knight’s “visceral sympathy” and “the
service of an ideal or of a sovereign”; Guyon’s emotions, not his allegiance to his monarch,
compels him to act. Wheeler claims that “Guyon’s response, and the narrative resolution of the
tableau, emphasize independent knightly agency” above and beyond his obedience to the queen.
This “independent knightly agency”, I would argue, is also the result of placing in the servants of
the state the sovereign authority that was once the purview only of the monarch. Wheeler, “
ʻThey heard a ruefull voice’: Guyon’s Agency and the Gloriana Framework in Book II of The
Faerie Queene.” Proceedings of the Eight Annual Northern Plains Conference on Earlier British
Literature (Sioux Center: Dordt College, 2001) 7-11. Print.

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right”, states the narrator, “Doe serve their turnes: here I a while must stay, / To see a cruell fight
doen by the prince this day” (II.xi.4.7-9). The battle that ensues between Arthur and Maleger
prevents our departure from Alma’s palace, and it is not until both Arthur and “the goodly frame
of Temperance” are “fayrely to rise” that we are returned to Guyon and the only canto devoted to
the destruction of the Bower and the apprehension of Acrasia (II.xii.1.1-2).
From a strictly allegorical standpoint, the poem’s lengthy attention to the House of
Temperance makes poetic sense; the knight embodying this celebrated Elizabethan virtue, with
the aid of England’s most eminent prince, must restore Alma’s House to its “firm foundation of
true bountyhed” before razing its antithesis to the ground (II.xii.1.5). However, the poem’s
prolonged lingering at the House of Temperance has implications beyond the demands of
allegorical reasoning. As critics have noted, the House of Temperance has deep resonances with
imaginings of the early modern body politic.

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Composed of interactive organs that are

governed by a reasoning brain, the ostensible temperate body is also a self-sufficient and singular
organic structure that mirrors the political nation with the monarch at its head. Embedded within
this representation of the body politic is Spenser’s most overt intervention into England’s
productions of nationalist myth-making; the poet’s fantastic history of England’s beginnings to
the reign of Elizabeth’s mythological forefather is not a replica of the English monarchical
genealogies of Spenser’s contemporaries. Rather, Spenser makes use of the “canker holes” and
“worm-eaten” historical aporias that characterize the scrolls of Eumnestes national library to

339

Walter R. Davis similarly likens the House to Temperance to the Elizabethan body politic in
his examination of Book II’s preoccupation with mortality. Davis, “The Houses of Mortality in
Book II of The Faerie Queene.” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 2 (1981): 12140, Print.
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rewrite Britain’s history as a unified narrative of national might and English glory (II.ix.57.9).

340

Bookending his tale with celebrations of England’s queen, Spenser literally contains the history
of Britain within an English frame. By marking the Romans as vicious invaders continually
beaten back by the Britons and by seriously diminishing the Anglo-Saxon’s presence in British
genealogical records, Spenser’s reworkings imagine an ancient Britain that seamlessly
progresses into Englishness without the contaminating influences of foreign cultures. Slipping
from British-ness to Englishness by eliding these conquering forces and narratively melding the
British history read by Arthur (Elizabeth’s forefather) and the “English” faerie history consumed
by Guyon, Spenser sidesteps “the British problem” by constructing one more or less continuous
history (though, the clunky narrative mechanics necessary to this maneuver betray the difficulties
of such a historical construction). Spenser’s body politic begins and ends with Englishness. By
placing his site of national narration within Alma’s castle, Spenser marks this body politic out as
specifically English, rather than some sort of poetic abstraction of the nation.
Significantly, Spenser’s monarchical representations – Alma and the Faerie Queene—
seem to skirt the margins of Spenser’s body politic. Alma’s court at the heart of this body, the
semi-private “Parlour”, decked with “royall arras richly dight”, is the site of queenly entertaining
and “modest” courting, a scene that for Elizabeth had as much to do with politics as romance
(II.ix.33.6-7). Yet her rule of the body politic as represented in Book II does not seem to extend
beyond the “goodly government” of the passions (II.xi.2.4); in fact, she appears as little more
340

Jennifer Summit reads this scene in Eumnestes’s library as a reflection of Post-Reformation
“bibliographical salvage” in which book collectors sought to amend or purge texts from
England’s monastic libraries. She argues that two featured books in the library, Briton
moniments and Antiquittie of Faerie lond, gesture toward the system by which book collectors
“reinvented the library itself from an ecclesiastical receptacle of written tradition to a statesponsored center of national history”. Summit, “Monuments and Ruins: Spenser and the Problem
of the English Library.” ELH 70.1 (203): 3-4. Project Muse. Print.
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than a tour guide in her castle.

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Though she is the allegorical rational soul that governs the

body’s limbs and organs, the House seems to function self-sufficiently through the combined
efforts of the many bodily departments and their various governors (Diet, Appetite, Concoction
and the like). At a distance from Alma’s court in the heart, it is the head with its three sages that
commands the interconnected mechanisms of the body. Importantly, Alma requires the aid of the
sages to reign over the house. “These three in these three rowmes did sondry dwell”, explains the
narrator of the sages, “and counselled faire Alma, how to governe well” (II.ix.48.8-9). In the
room of the unnamed sage that presides over the present, the knights discover a place
……………………………whose wals
Were painted faire with memorable gestes,
Of famous Wisards, and with picturals
Of Magistrates, of courts, of tribunals,
Of commen wealthes, of states, of policy,
Of lawes, of judgements, and of decretals (II.ix.53.2-7).
Housed in this chamber of the brain are the engines of a composite government. Advised by her
counselors who oversee the functioning of the house and supported by a state infrastructure that
heads up the judicial, legal and governmental workings of the body politic, Alma’s ostensible
role as monarch is diminished by her limited intervention in the ordering of this political body.
That the most overt depiction of Tudor political culture is not associated with the Faerie
Queene is also significant. The body politic as represented by the House of Temperance appears
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As Catherine Bates also notes, references to the “goodly government” (of the passions, of
the body, of space, etc) abound in Book II. Though self-governance is obviously linked to the
virtue of temperance, Spenser’s repeated iterations of this term and the book’s preoccupation
with matters of state point to a more compendious notion of Elizabethan governmentality. Bates,
“Images of Government in The Faerie Queene, Book II.” Notes and Queries 3 (1989): 314-15,
Print.
318

at a distance from the (absent) monarchical center of the epic. Spenser’s separation of the body
politic from the body monarchical severs his many queens from the engines of governance,
subtly casting doubt upon the notions of authoritarian power that undergirded Tudor rule.
Furthermore, situating the store-house and production of national history and myth-making in
Alma’s castle, rather than in the court of the poem’s ultimate authority carries the uneasy
implication that the construction of the textual nation is the purview of the body politic and
therefore somewhat out of the monarch’s control. Guyon and Arthur’s inventions at the House of
Temperance, Medina’s castle and the Bower of Bliss all indicate a startling lack of monarchical
power. Lawlessness enfeebles Medina’s realm, personified by Sansloy and evidenced by the
“daily warre” taking place within her castle. Though she embodies Elizabeth’s deft mediation in
matters of politics, Medina’s “treaty” to end the violence in her house is only achieved after the
arrival and somewhat clumsy intervention of Guyon. The meeting of the knight’s “wonderous
great prowesse and heroick worth” (II.ii.25.3) with Medina’s “pithy words and counsel sad”
(II.ii.28.5) makes way for Medina’s “law for ever [that] should endure; / Which to observe in
word of knights they did assure” (II.ii.32.8-9).
Likewise, Alma’s “sober government” (II.ix.1.4) of the House of Temperance is thrown
into question by the seven year “siege” (II.ix.12.7) of Maleger’s “troublous rout” (II.ix.17.1),
who perpetually wage war upon the temperate body politic and effectually imprison her subjects
within the castle walls. Denied entrance to this microcosm of the Elizabethan political body, the
“vile caitive wretches, ragged, rude, [and] deformed”, armed with the “unwieldy” and “rusty”
weapons of a disenfranchised peasant class pose as the ungovernable elements that threaten
Alma’s—and Elizabeth’s—sovereign state. Only with the aid of the itinerant Guyon and Arthur

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are Maleger and his spectral army dispersed.

342

Acting autonomously and in seeming defiance

of the Faerie Queene’s command, Guyon and Arthur bring their independent authority to bear
upon the pockets of disorder in Faerie Land that have slipped out of both the overarching
monarch and her lesser representations’ control.
Taken as mirror that reflects back to Elizabeth her own kingdom, Book II of the Faerie
Queene casts in a faltering light the monarch’s command over her territory, her people and even
those imbued with the sovereign’s divine authority to manage the realm. Though Guyon
eventually captures Acrasia and destroys the Bower, and despite the fact that Spenser is often at
pains to re-center the epic’s focus on England’s queen (the knights’ arrival at the House of
Temperance begins with a lengthy celebration of the Faerie Queene, discussed below), the poem
consistently reminds us that the Faerie Queene’s kingdom (and that of her real life referent) is
shot through with ungoverned elements that feel the hand of authority only when the knights
intervene in matters of the realm. Medina, the personification of “lovely concord” and “most
sacred peace” (II.ii.31.1) and Alma, who projects “mildnesse virginall” and a “wise and liberall”
judgment (II.ix.20. 4-5), are piecemeal representations of England’s sovereign. To reinforce the
mirrored relationship between these lesser monarchs, the Faerie Queene and Elizabeth, Spenser
pairs his illustrations of Medina and Alma with moving pronouncements of the Faerie Queene’s
greatness. Quickly following the drawing of Medina’s treaty, Spenser has her inquire into
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According to Joan Fitzpatrick, the siege on Alma’s House betrays that “the landscape of
Fairyland—its rocks and caves, as well as its woodland—harbors those who wish to attack the
virtuous” (366). Whereas Fitzpatrick attributes these threatening and eventually evacuated
elements of the poem’s setting to the work’s colonial politics, in which one can detect “an almost
neurotic desire to cleanse the landscape” of Catholicism (375), I maintain that the lawlessness
that everywhere inflects Spenser’s narrative indicates the growing need for a state infrastructure
to bring order to the realm. Fitzpatrick, “Spenser and Land: Political Conflict Resolved in
Physical Topography.” Ben Jonson Journal: Literary Contexts in the Age of Elizabeth, James
and Charles 7 (2000): 366 and 375. Print.
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Guyon’s reasons for his travels, prompting him to exclaim his monarch’s glory in terms applied
to both Medina and England’s sovereign: “Great and most glorious virgin Queene alive, / That
with her soveraine power, and scepter shene / All Faery lond does peaceably sustene” (II.ii.40.35). Likewise, our introduction to Alma is prefaced by Guyon and Arthur’s paean to the female
ruler of the kingdom. Responding to Arthur’s question regarding the face on his shield, Guyon
explains,
Shee is the mighty Queene of Faery,
Whose faire retraitt I in my shield do beare:
Shee is the flowre of grace and chastity,
Thoughout the world renowmed far and neare,
My life, my liege, my Souveraine, my dear,
Whose glory shineth as the morning starre,
And with her light the earth enlumines cleare;
Far reach her mercies, and her praises farre,
As well in state of peace, as puissaunce in warre (II.ix.4).
Resounding with keywords often attached to England’s queen, Spenser borrows from this
catalog of descriptors to construct Alma, Medina and the work’s other women rulers; in so
doing, he breaks up this composite of Elizabeth into similar but disconnected queenly
manifestations. For this reason, it is alarming to realize that neither Elizabeth’s mirror image, the
ruler of Faery Land, nor her many literarily embodied characteristics (mercy, temperance,
moderation, etc) can maintain an authoritative hold over their territories.
The falsity of Guyon’s claim that the Faerie Queene’s “soveraine power” and
omnipresent “light” can alone “peaceably sustene[s]” her kingdom is made most apparent in

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Book V. Lamenting “the world [ … ] runne quite out of square” in the proem (V.proem.1.7),
Spenser abruptly removes us from Faerie Land and places us in a contemporary Elizabethan
landscape, “present dayes, which are corrupted sore” (V.proem.3.4) in which the world is
overturned and injustice reigns. In the modern state, Spenser implies, justice is obscured, made
unreachable because of a system that values self-interest and profit over truth.

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Imagining a

“golden age” (V.proem.2.1) when “justice was not for most meed outhyred” (V.proem.3.8), the
poet allegorically presents justice as a woman who once “sate high ador’d” (V.proem.9.8) in the
world’s mythical hierarchy. Next, in language that strongly resounds with that of the Elizabethan
political theorists cited above, Spenser describes how this divine quality comes to reside in kings.
Most sacred vertue she of all the rest,
Resembling God in his imperiall might;
Whose soveraine power is herein most exprest,
That both to good and bad he dealeth right,
And all his workes with Justice hath bedight.
That power he also doth to Princes lend,
And makes them like himself in glorious sight,
To sit in his owne seate, his cause to end,
And rule his people right, as he doth recommend (V.proem.10).

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Hadfield examines this portion of the proem in the context of England’s colonial project in
Ireland and the slipperiness of the concept of justice when accusations of savagery may be
applied to both colonizer and colonized. He argues that stanza three of the proem “effectively
acknowledges that ‘ciuill uses’ of the notion of justice have become inextricably mixed with
their implied opposites, savage uses, suggesting that the savagery of Artegall and the quite
opposite savagery of Ireland may not be as far apart as they should be. The threat Ireland poses
to Englishness is that the two nations may end up being variations on the same theme”.
Hadfield, “The Spoiling of Princes”, 147-8 Print.
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By first equating justice with God, Spenser places the mythological feminine figure of justice
into a recognizably Christian context in keeping with Elizabethan political cosmology. Justice
here becomes the vehicle through which “soveraine powre” is defined and made manifest.
Entering the earthly realm, this justice and the divine power it carries is transferred to “princes”,
thus enshrining the monarch in a theistic light and empowering the king or queen to act in God’s
stead. Closing this discourse on the monarch’s God-given authority to dispense the most
important of sovereign virtues is Spenser’ direct address to his queen, his “Dread Soverayne
Goddesse, that doest highest sit / In seate of judgement, in th’ Almighties place” (V.proem.11.12). Positioning Elizabeth in Justice’s “high ador’d” throne and God’s “owne seate”, Spenser
completes his allegorical portrait of sovereign power.

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Yet, Spenser’s rendering of the passage of Justice’s supreme authority to God’s earthly
representative is surprisingly disquieting. Although the poet concludes the proem by reminding
his audience of Elizabeth’s divine power to bring correctness to the world, the radically
disordered realm, which Spenser equates with her England, is left an unfixed planet of “ruinous
decay” (V.proem.6.9). The world in which the sun is “miscarried with the other Spheres” and the
stars “range, and do at randon rove / Out of their proper places farre away” is not a depiction of
the kingdom prior to Elizabeth’s donning of the crown, but an alarming illustration of the current
state of her realm, according to the narrative chronology of the proem. Spenser breaks off the
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In Icons of Justice, Jane Aptekar makes a similar point, demonstrating how Spenser applies
the early modern language of iconography to depict “the monarch’s closeness to God”. Aptekar
contends that Spenser’s portrait of Mercilla is his “central and most formally elaborate icon of
monarchy”, particularly when “performing the same act as his Dread Soverayne Goddesse, the
act of executing justice”. As I argue, however, Mercilla does not act alone in casting her final
judgment against Duessa; the fact that she enlists the aid of Artegall and Arthur speaks to a
dispersal of the sovereign power of justice to agents of the Elizabethan state (see below).
Aptekar, Icons of Justice: Iconography & Thematic Imagery in Book V of The Faerie Queene
(New York: Columbia UP, 1969) 14-15. Print.
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proem with this fallen world frozen in narrative time with Elizabeth at the helm thus implying
that all is not aright regarding the system of Elizabethan governance and the ideology that
sustains it.
Furthermore, it is not the queens of Book V who meet out justice, but Artegall, the
“instrument” (V.proem.11.9) of the sovereign who traverses the realm like an itinerant judge,
hearing cases and handing out verdicts and punishments.

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In fact, Book V’s queens,

particularly Mercilla, are either in desperate need of Artegall’s intervention to expel rogue
elements from the realm or are dependent upon his judgment to make decisions regarding the
welfare of the state. The reliance of the sovereign upon Artegall marks him out as more than a
mere mechanism of the crown; rather, he is justice incarnate acting in “th’ Almightie’s place”.
Displacing the monarch in the political cosmos illustrated in the proem, Artegall dispenses
justice with the power supposedly preserved for kings.
Artegall’s circuit of justice begins in Canto i when he judges the case of Sanglier and the
Squire in which the honest attendant is awarded with his stolen lady and the murderous Sanglier
is condemned to carry the head of his former lover. For rightly perceiving the love of the squire
for his violated lady and enforcing just punishment upon Sanglier, “much did that Squire Sir
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In Mirror and Veil, Michael O’Connell likens Artegall to “a judge of the assizes who rides in
circuit with an iron sherriff to hear difficult cases”. Paola Baseotto instead sees in Artegall the
characteristics of the Lord Chancellor, due to his training by Astraea that blended “the letter of
the law” with the equitable application of justice. One notes that in both analyses that Artegall
betrays recognizable qualities of the Elizabethan state agent imbued with the queen’s authority.
Aptekar also acknowledges that Artegall as “princely ‘instrument’ of Elizabeth and of justice not
only performs in his own person the king’s function of judging but also has at his command the
monarch’s two executive instruments of power and law”. She does not, however, address in
detail the potential danger of this disengagement of sovereign might from the person of the king
or queen. Aptekar, 23-4, Baseotto, Fighting for God, Queen and Country: Spenser and the
Morality of Violence (Milano: Arcipelago Edizioni, 2004) 98. Print, O’Connell, Mirror and Veil:
The Historical Dimesion of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1977)
I33. Print.
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Artegall adore, / For his great justice, held in high regard” (V.i.30.1-2). The neat picture of
justice served is complicated in canto two where Spenser’s chivalric romance again veers into
the territory of Elizabethan society and politics. Informed of Pollente’s tyrannous control over
the bridge leading to “the Castle of the strond” (V.ii.4.2), Artegall defers his appointed quest in
order to confront Pollente and Munera. Pollente captures in miniature Elizabethan fears of an
overpowerful upper class; disallowing free passage across the land and taxing the citizenry for
their use of his bridge, Pollente upends customary rights and common law.

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“Having great

Lordships got and goodly farmes, / Through strong oppression of his powre exort”, Pollente and
Munera rule their rogue state as pretended sovereigns, making use of kingly prerogatives
(taxation, land-ownership, control of passage) to line their coffers and consolidate their localized
power. Munera has, in fact, accumulated such wealth that “many Princes she in wealth exceedes,
/ And purchast all the countrey lying ny” (V.ii.9.6-7). For a cash-strapped monarchy unable to
fund its ventures without financial aid, the presence of overmighty subjects of great wealth who
rivaled the territorial and social power of the queen underscored the notion that authority and
power were not strictly the purview of the crown. That Spenser chose to include in his landscape
this freely-functioning state that abides only by “the custome of their law” (V.ii.11.7) speaks to a

346

Aptekar claims Pollente “exemplifies the problem of the ‘over-mighty subject’ which,
understandably, much troubled the Tudor kings. Pollente, like the great English noblemen who
retained their own armies, has assumed for himself rights and privileges which—to the Tudor
monarch’s mind—only the king should have”. While I agree with her overall characterization of
Pollente, I believe that Artegall himself might be viewed as “a usurper of proper authority”,
particularly when he uses the power entrusted to him by the Faerie Queene to intercede in quests
that thwart or delay his sworn duty to the monarch. Aptekar, 33.
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kind of social and political disorder that slips from the poetic realm of the proem into the
347

contemporary world of Elizabethan culture.

Though Artegall succeeds in ridding the land of Pollente, Munera and their henchman
Guizor, justice is meted out in a hasty and unthinking fashion. Having removed Munera’s hands
and feet, Talus throws her from the castle wall where she drowns in the river below. The
plentiful stores of money contained within Munera’s castle walls are destroyed and the castle is
razed “that there mote be no hope of reparation” (V.ii.28.4). Desiring that no “memory [ … ] to
any nation” remain of Pollente’s tyranny, Artegall and Talus destroy the traces of Pollente and
Munera’s realm, thus evacuating from the historical and political landscape of Faerie Land any
evidence of the lawless community aside from Pollente’s piked head (and Munera’s feet and
hands). Disallowing the possibility of exemplary justice so central to Elizabethan social policy
and obliterating circulating monies of the kingdom, Artegall’s form of justice is not attentive to
the broader governmental matters of the state. Instead, his reckless justice underscores his own
348

autonomous action as a figure imbued with divine power.

347

At the moment of Pollente’s death,

Jacqueline T. Miller asserts that world of Elizabethan political reality impinges upon the
fictional realm that Spenser sought to create in The Faerie Queene. The slippage of the “fallen”
contemporary world into the idealized kingdom of Faery Land marks the failure of the fiction to
produce this “ideal”. This recognition of fiction’s shortcomings, she argues, is especially
apparent in the latter books of the poem: in these books, “the poet does not simply come to terms
with the state of the world—something he has always been aware of—but comes to terms with
the status of his own fiction, which subscribes to the actual, betrays his lack of autonomy, and
reveals his inability to fashion and authorize ideal resolutions” (41). Miller, “The Status of
Faeryland: Spenser’s ‘Vnjust Possession’.” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 15
(1985): 40, Print.
348
Judith H. Anderson also remarks upon the “perfunctory, robotistic, and inhuman element in
Artegall’s justice”, identifying in his thoughtless behavior the failure of the Elizabethan
government to live up to this unattainable “absolute ideal”. I would add to Anderson’s analysis
the possibility that the poem offers up a critique of the infrastructural process of state building
requisite for practically implementing this “ideal”. Anderson, “ ʻNor Man It Is’: The Knight of
Justice in Book V of Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’”. PMLA 85.1 (1970): 65-8. Print.
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the villain “gnashed with his teeth, as if he band / High God, whose goodnesse he despaired
quight, / Or curst the hand, which did that vengeance on him dight” (V.ii.18.7-9). Troublesomely
collapsing Artegall and God, whose “goodnesse” Artegall dispenses with his hand of justice, the
death of Pollente signals not a victory of the state or sovereign, but of God’s instrument who acts
“in th’ Almighties place”.
Artegall’s self-determining mode of justice again comes into question in the second half
of the canto. Encountering the “great assembly” of the unnamed Giant’s followers (V.ii.29.6),
Artegall engages the Giant in a debate regarding egalitarian politics. As A. C. Hamilton remarks
in his marginal notes to his edition, the Giant’s argument for fiscal and social equality runs
directly counter to Elizabethan notions of the divinely appointed hierarchies that underpinned
early modern social life.

349

As explained above, this strict adherence to the hierarchical ordering

of the universe was also called up as the infrastructure of Elizabethan governance. Elyot, for
instance, argues that the term “publike weale”, rather than commonweal, best describes the
English body politic; whereas commonweal implies communal or shared skills, “publike weale”
instead acknowledges the hierarchical order that organizes and stabilizes society.

350

Maintaining

that God has endowed man with varying “degrees and astates in his glorious warkes”, Eylot
explains
in every thyng is ordre, and without ordre may be nothing stable or permanent;
and it may nat be called ordre, excepte it do contayne in it degrees, high and base,
accordynge to the merite or estimation of the thyng that is ordred [ … ] And

349
350

See footnote 29-54 on page 520.
Elyot, 1.
327

therfore hit appereth that god gyveth nat to every man lke gyftes of grace, or of
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nature, but to some more, some lesses, as it liketh his divine majestie.

Applying this logic to the appointment of government officials, Elyot argues that he who
possesses the most understanding is “next to the similitude of his maker” and should thus be
“avanced in degree or place where understandynge may profite: whiche is also distributed in to
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sondry uses, faculties, and offices, necessary for the lyving and governance of mankynde”.

The world proposed by the Giant, in which “all the wealth of rich men to the poore will
draw” (V.ii.38.9) threatens not only the fragile social order propped up by an ideological
apparatus based upon social and financial inequality, but also the systems of governance that
have placed Artegall in his position of near-deistic power. Echoing Elyot, Artegall rebuts the
Giant’s argument by citing God’s mysteries and the objects of his world “in goodly measure, by
their Makers might, / And weighed out in ballaunces so nere, / That not a dram was missing of
their right” (V.ii.35.2-4). Of God’s creatures Artegall maintains,
They live, they die, like as he doth ordaine,
Ne ever any asketh reason why.
The hils doe not the lowly dales disdaine;
The dales doe not the lofty hils envy.
He maketh Kings to sit in soverainty;
He maketh subjects to their power obey;
He pulleth downe, he setteth up on hy;
He gives to this, from that he takes way.

351
352

Ibid, 4-5.
Ibid, 6.
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For all we have is what: ehst he list doe, he may (V.ii.41).
To question this hierarchical ordering of the world and its inhabitants, according to Artegall (and
to Elyot, presumably), is to deny God’s “soveraine power” (V.ii.42.3). Upholding the model of
social organization and governance that justifies in spiritual terms the endowment of social and
political authority to the prince and her agents—those “setteth up on hy”, seated in proximity to
the monarch according to God’s design—Artegall articulates the very political theories that
underpinned the formation of the state.
Yet, like the unresolved conclusion of Book II and the discomfiting illustration of the
Elizabethan world in the proem, Spenser’s allusion to contemporary political theory in Canto ii
does not bring resolution to the questions of egalitarianism proposed by the Giant. As Hadfield
has noted, “it is by no means obvious that Artegall has the better of the argument at every turn.
The giant’s assertion that he will curb the excesses of over-mighty subjects is not dissimilar to
Artegall’s desire to punish Pollente and Munera harshly for their abuse of the commons”

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In

his disputation with Artegall, the Giant’s condemnation of the modern world and his intention to
rid the realm of tyrants are strangely in keeping with both Artegall’s persecution of Pollente and
Spenser’s address in the proem. Appealing to the “vulgar” mass that “did about him flock”, the
Giant asserts that the inequality that separates men has caused “realmes and nations [to] run
awry” (V.ii.32.6). He again cites a disordered world when countering Artegall’s claim that “all
change is perillous, and all chaunce unsound” because the results of alterations to the system as it
stands would be unclear and therefore dangerous (V.ii.36.7). “Thou foolishe Elfe”, admonishes
the Giant, “Seest not, now badly all things present bee, / And each estate quite out of order
goth?” (V.ii.37.1-3). Loudly echoing Spenser’s claim in the proem that “the world is runne quite
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Hadfield, “The Faerie Queene, Books IV-VII”, 131.
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out of square” (V.proem.1.7) and that the constellations “so now all range, and doe at random
rove / Out of their proper places farre away” (V.proem.6.5-7), the Giant seemingly mouths the
very lament voiced in the proem for a lost Elizabethan state. The fall of a world of justice and
rightness, as implied in the proem and in the beginning of Canto ii, is the result of the greed and
self-interest that motivates Pollente and Munera and provokes Artegall to end their lives.
“Tyrants that make men subject to their law”, the Giant declares, “I will suppresse, that they no
more may raine; / And Lordings curbe, that commons over-aw” (V.ii.38.6-8). Describing in
shorthand the very designs of Pollente and Munera’s rogue state, the Giant expresses a desire to
protect the realm against tyrannical forces with scant regard for the welfare of the state and
marks them as rogue elements that must be rooted out.
The undue violence inflicted upon the Giant by Talus and presumably approved by
Artegall ostensibly ends the canto’s debate regarding egalitarian social theory; intuiting that the
Giant was not seeking to uphold “the right” during the challenge of the scales, Talus flings the
Giant from the cliff where he drowns in the sea (V.ii.49.1). Confronted then with the “lawlwsse
multitude” (V.ii.52.1) who have “gather[ed] in tumultuous rout” (V.ii.51.3) to avenge their
leader, Artegall hesitates to combat the riot directly, fearing that “the base blood of such a rascall
crew” would sully “his noble hands” (V.ii.4-5). Talus again steps in. “At them he with his flaile
gan lay” (V.ii.53.5), instilling terror in the crowd and effecting an abrupt end to their quest for
“uncontrolled freedome” under the Giant’s new order (V.ii.33.5). Without further comment,
Artegall and Talus depart, and the canto concludes. Yet, the lingering spectre of egalitarianism is
never squelched; rather, the Giant’s arguments questioning the hierarchy of sovereign power
remain in the air, particularly because the Giant’s declarations appear to align with the virtues of
Book II set out in the proem and the early cantos. The Giant’s followers are not converted to the

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ideology of power that consolidates authority in the hands of the queen and her servants; instead
they are driven into “holes and bushes” to hide themselves from his attack (V.ii.52.9). Present
but obscured from view, the Giant’s “raskall rout”—and their challenge to Elizabethan social and
political hierarchy—remain within the landscape of the poem. His claim that “Ne ever any
asketh reason why” political and social authority is allotted in a descending hierarchy from God,
to sovereign to agent is disproved by the very inclusion of this unresolved episode in a poem that
is supposedly a paean to monarchical rule. The “realmes and nations run awry” are not corrected
by the queen’s instrument in Canto ii; instead, Artegall’s own “uncontrolled freedome” to act
under the queen’s authority and his unblinking mode of justice appear a contributing factor to
this political world upended.
Closely following the Giant’s challenge to the Elizabethan dispensation of power that
sees Artegall placed in a position of God-like authority, the knight’s circuit of justice is severely
curtailed and his quest to aid Irena largely ignored. After resolving the property dispute between
Bracidas and Amidas in Canto iv, Artegall allows himself to become a captive of Radigund,
falling prey to the Amazonian queen’s beauty. Stripped of the emblems of his knightly authority,
Artegall is made to dress in “womans weedes” (V.v.20.7) and is “left to [Radigund’s] will by his
owne wilfull blame” (V.v.20.2). Significantly, the sword given to him by Astrea and authorized
by the Faerie Queene to deal justice in her realms is broken “for feare of further harmes”
(V.v.21.8) and the knight is rendered powerless and inert until the arrival of Britomart. The quick
diminution of Artegall from a figure of divine justice to helpless captive has disturbing
implications for the larger structure of governmentality that brought him to this position of power
in the first place. Charged by the sovereign to expunge from the land the injustices wrought by

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figures like Radigund, Artegall instead invites the removal of his authority and casts off his duty
to the queen in a moment of weakness and self-interest.

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According to Elyot, Artegall’s actions in Radegone would fall under one of the governor’s most
egregious errors in social policy: “vain pity” (V.iv.35.9). Speaking of the poor laws that were
sometimes ignored by state agents sympathetic to those vagrants and vagabonds who so troubled
the Elizabethan state, Elyot writes,
Howe many proclamations therof have been divulgate and nat obayed? Howe
many commissions directed and nat executed? (Marke well here, that disobedient
subjects and negligent governours do frustrate good laws) […] ye and this is nat
only done by the vulgare or commune people, but moche rather by them whiche
have authoritie to them committed concerning the eftectuell execution of lawes [
… ] this may well be called vayne pitie; wherein is contayned neither justice not
yet commendable charitie, but rather therby ensueth negligence, contempte,
disobedience, and finally all mischiefe and incurable misery.

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The willful disregard of Artegall towards Radigund’s lawless practices provokes the very
disorder that the queen’s servants are charged to remedy. The knight’s negligence is doubly
damnable not only because he is a servant of the state, but because he is countenancing the
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Brian C. Lockey contends that it is Artegall’s failure to apply the “legal principle” of equity
in the case of Radigund that leads to his imprisonment. Lockey considers this scene in the light
of contemporary debates regarding equity, the appeal to “conscience” or the “individual
understanding of natural law”, and English common law, which was viewed by some legal
theorists as too “rigid” in its application (54). Britomart’s intervention introduces a kind of
equitable justice aligning her with England’s queen, whereas Artegall’s violent rule of law
throughout Book V recalls the arguments by legal philosophers who upheld natural or common
law as the cornerstone of English governance. Lockey, “ ʻEquitie to Measure’: The Perils of
Imperial Imitation in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.” Journal for Early Modern
Cultural Studies 10.1 (2010): 54. Project Muse. Web.
355
Elyot, 85-7.
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practices of a local ruler that could rightly be labeled as treasonous in Elizabeth’s England.
Radigund, like Pollente, operates her “goodly citty and a mighty one” within Faerie Land yet
with no regard for the laws of the realm, imprisoning wandering knights and forcing them into a
life of womanly servitude (V.iv.35.9). And, of course, the “contempte, disobedience, [ …]
mischiefe and incurable misery” that the knight of justice ushers in is not the result of charitable
feeling toward the poor but by Radigund’s “signes of feature excellent” (V.v.12.7). Importantly,
it is Britomart, another refraction of both the Faerie Queen and Elizabeth, who must free the
errant knight, defeat Radigund and “[change] all that forme of common weale”, “restoring [the
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women] / To mens subjection” through “true Justice” (V.vii.42.4-7).

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Like the monarch who

Pamela Joseph Benson examines the Radigund episode in the context of Renaissance
debates regarding female rule. Whereas Anglican proponents of female sovereignty “argued that
women were intellectually, morally and physically equal to men” and therefore capable of ruling
the commonwealth, Calvinists were unwilling to grant women this social equality, maintaining
“a queen is a divinely imposed exception to the general rule of inferior status for women”.
Benson reads Spenser’s dethroning of Radigund and Britomart’s relinquishing of her authority as
“clearly Calvinist in orientation” and in keeping with Spenser’s vexed ode to England’s woman
king. Mary R. Bowman also identifies in this episode the contentious discourse of female
authority during the reign of Elizabeth. Analyzing Britomart’s surrendering of political authority
in terms of her relationship to Artegall, Bowman contends that “by reversing Radigund’s social
hierarchy Britomart asserts her difference from Radigund [ … ] Britomart employs the power
gained in her victory at arms ostentatiously in his service, the very paradox of her action
emphasizing her submission to him”. Bowman links the poem’s contrasting relationship of
Britomart to Radigund to the broader field of Elizabethan politics and the self-fashioning of
England’s virgin queen. Akin to Britomart’s need to differentiate herself from the power-hungry
queen of Radegone, Elizabeth’s “figuring herself in opposition to the sexually predatory Amazon
served in part to insulate Elizabeth from against disloyalty born of fear by diffusing the anxiety
her peculiar situation necessarily bred, suggesting that this powerful woman was somehow
different from the ones that really represented a threat to men”. Finally, Katherine Eggert
identifies the pronounced shift in Book V toward historical allegory as signaling a deep cultural
discomfort with the contemporary state of female rule. Contending that poetic closure in the
Faerie Queene seems achievable only with the reinstatement of masculine authority, Eggert
genders the two literary forms at work in Book V. With the decapitation of Radigund and the
abrupt disconstinuation of the romance structure in which this episode is narrated, “book 5
castrates the castrators, proposing a thoroughgoing revision of literary construction that ought for
good and all to sever the poem from female influence. Feminine rule and feminized politics are
repealed in favor of the most straightforward mode that The Faerie Queene will ever achieve,
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must intervene when her servants fail to carry out her commands, Britomart temporarily serves
as Radegone’s reigning “Princess” until Artegall’s missteps are corrected (V.vii.42.3).
Finally, it is Artegall’s intervention into Mercilla’s civic woes that most clearly
emphasizes both the demand for state agents to secure the realm and Artegall’s inability to weed
out the corruption that inevitably attends state building. Coming upon Samient in the territory
surrounding Mercilla’s palace, Artegall is made aware of Adicia, his antithesis, and her bribery
of the queen’s knights. Donning a “roiall pompe [ … ] purchast through lawlesse power”
(V.viii.51.5-6), Adicia has bought off the allegiance of “nigh an hundred knights of name”
(V.viii.50.6) through her criminal practices, thereby “subvert[ing] [Mercilla’s] Crowne and
dignity” (V.viii.18.4). Unable to secure peace with this rebel ruler, Mercilla and her court shut
their doors to the “guile, and malice, and despight” that reigns outside the outside the castle
walls. (V.ix.22.7), “dealing just judgements, that mote not be broken / For any brybes, or threates
of any to be wroken” (V.ix.24.9). Though Adicia and Mercilla are clearly meant to define the
other through allegorical opposition, one must also consider the contemporary significance of a
realm whose territorial and political security is threatened by a lawless magnate that traffics in
bribery and treason, thereby bringing under her localized authority the queen’s politically
empowered servants. Mercilla, perhaps the poem’s most overt refraction of Elizabeth, willfully
isolates herself and her court from the malfeasance operating in quarters dangerously close to the
center of government, thus creating a dangerously insular government that is woefully

historical allegory. At this point the poem assumes a new literary mode as a way of galvanizing
the sense of an ending, the doome that Artegall’s adventures first promised before his digression
into serving a queen” (278). Benson, “Rule, Virginia: Protestant Theories of Female Regiment in
The Faerie Queene.” English Literary Renaissance 15.3 (1985) 278-9, Print. Bowman, “ ʻshe
there as Princess rained’: Spenser’s Figure of Elizabeth.” Renaissance Quarterly 43.3 (1990) 512
and 522. Print. Eggert, “ ʻChanging all the forme of common weale’: Genre and the Repeal of
Queenship in The Faerie Queene, Book 5.” English Literary Renaissance 26.2 (1996) 278. Print.
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ineffectual at attending to the ills of the kingdom. This is not to imply that Elizabeth simply hid
her head in the sand when it came to matters of political corruption in the localities; in fact, as
Elyot and others make clear, the hazard of overmighty subjects wielding the crown’s authority
was a pronounced concern of the court. It is in this context that we might consider this particular
scenario in Spenser’s work: a moment in which the ideology of the monarch’s “Angel-like”
(V.ix.29.7) “soveraine grace” (V.viii.17.4) is not potent enough to enforce allegiance or quell
political misconduct outside the confines of a self-perpetuating discourse of authoritarianism.
Ushered into the monarch’s “stately pallace” (V.ix.21.4) the knights “were guyded by degree /
Unto the presence of that gratious Queene: / Who sate on high, that she might all men see, / And
might of all men royally be seene” (V.ix.27.1-4). This illustration of the monarch’s all-seeing,
all-knowing power is strongly disproved by this canto, in which the sovereign shuts her eyes to
the subversion of her own authority while maintaining “ioyous peace and quietnesse alway’ only
within the guarded walls of her palace (V.ix.24.7).
Unlike Elyot’s public weal in which order reigns in every corner of the kingdom,
Spenser’s personification of Order is housed exclusively within Mercilla’s court, leaving the
surrounding territory in a state of criminality and misrule; only with the entrance of Artegall and
Arthur is Mercilla’s kingdom partially recovered. Spenser’s queen is reliant upon the knights not
only for their attacks on Adicia and the Souldan, but also for counsel in regard to Duessa’s
execution. In a scene that largely recreates, with some ideological emendations, Elizabeth’s
negotiations with her Privy Council and Parliament concerning the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots,
Spenser places the final decision in the hands of the “two stranger knights” (V.ix.36.2). The
inclusion of Artegall and Arthur in this momentous adjudication concerning state security might
appear peculiar had not the knights of The Faerie Queene repeatedly served in the capacity of

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357

officers to the work’s myriad queens.

However, like Artegall’s earlier intercessions into

matters of state, the knight’s service to the kingdom is inadequate and outside the Faerie
Queene’s mandate. Rather than destroying Injustice, Spenser’s knight allows Adicia to roam free
in Mercilla and the Faerie Queene’s realms; like the Giant’s followers, Adicia in the form of a
rabid tiger, lives “mongst wyld beasts and salvage woods to dwell” (V.ix.1.5), “run[ning] at
randon” throughout the territories. Similarly, Malengin, personifying “guile”, “deceit” or
”fraud”, is physically ruined at Talus’s hands and “left a carrion outcast” (V.ix.19.8).

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However, the poet provides us no evidence of his ultimate demise and expulsion from the
kingdom. The self-appointed guardian of the canto’s several cities and kingdoms has merely

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In The Polliticke Courtier: Spenser’s The Faerie Queene as a Rhetoric of Justice, Michael F.
N. Dixon applies rhetorical analysis to Spenser’s epic work, revealing interconnected systems of
meaning that have their origin in early modern investments in rhetorical strategy. Of Duessa’s
trial Dixon asserts, “this tribunal, however egalitarian it may appear, is actually an hierarchical
triad with Mercilla at the apex, a structure distinguishing the subordinated power to judge guilt
and innocence, which she delegates, from the sovereign power to punish or pardon which she
retains absolutely”. Jonathan Goldberg considers the contradictory nature of the trial and of
Mercilla herself, who simultaneously represents both justice and mercy. Because Duessa’s trial
reveals the “sustaining contradictions by which power is represented and by which it presents
itself”, “throughout Book V it is no easy matter to decide where justice resides or to make
judgments”. I would argue that this ambiguity is heightened by the presence of the knights in
Mercilla’s “courtroom” and Artegall’s unchecked authority to deal justice as the Faerie Queene’s
“instrument”. Goldberg, “The Poet’s Authority: Spenser, Jonson, and James VI and I.” Genre:
Forms of Discourse and Culture 15.2-3 (1982): 85, Print and Dixon, The Polliticke Courtier:
Spenser’s The Faerie Queene as a Rhetoric of Justice: Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP,1996. 145.
Print.
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Elizabeth Heale likens Spenser’s depiction of Malengin to the discourse surrounding the
Roman Catholic missionary priests who covertly traveled Elizabeth’s kingdom during her reign.
Finding in the terms describing Malengin’s deceptive appearance and practices, his underground
home and the episode of his capture the language often applied to missionaries, Heale contends
that “through Malengine Spenser is alluding to what was felt to be the growing menace within
England and Ireland of secret Roman Catholic missionary priests” (171-2). Heale, “Spenser’s
Maengine, Missionary Priests, and the Means of Justice.” The Review of English Studies 41.162
(1990): 171-84, Print. See footnote 2 for stanza 5 on page 569 of Hamilton’s Faerie Queene for
the definitional derivations of Malengin.
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displaced or driven underground the social ills that trouble both the security of the realm and the
integrity of the state.
Conclusion: A Wandering Island
With political authority and the maintenance of the realm placed in the hands of a semiautonomous body of knights; and with a decided lack of structure or system of accountability
linking the knights to the supreme monarch or any of her refracted personas, Spenser’s Faerie
Queene demonstrates for an Elizabethan audience the threat posed to a body politic with a
deflated ideology of absolutist rule and a growing state infrastructure that has co-opted sovereign
authority. Furthermore, the poem gestures toward the inadequacies of this nascent Elizabethan
state, produced in part, by the ideological disconnect between the official governmental rhetoric
of the “body monarchical” and the more expansive and elusive political body created in the
process of early modern state formation. The body monarchical—the divine person whose very
being and singular authority carries the ideological weight to command and bind a nation—is
absent from the poem. Her mirrored and incomplete refractions are personifications of
Elizabeth’s most celebrated virtues, but they are also and equally betrayals of the sovereign’s
inadequacies. Mercy, Temperance, Mediation, etc alone cannot combat the dangers posed to
Elizabeth’s government during a period of both external and internal threats to national security.
Spenser’s Faerie Land is a territory largely ungoverned, despite or perhaps even because of the
myriad queens inhabiting isolated pockets of governmentality; in the several realms illustrated in
Spenser’s poem, the supposedly singular authority of the monarch or ruler fails to command a
society of law and allegiance.
The collapse of an ideology of authoritarian monarchical rule and the distribution of the
sovereign’s authority to a disunited body of knights produces a fractured political landscape.

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Taking his cue from official nationalist rhetoric, Spenser repeatedly equates the political and
territorial cohesiveness of Elizabeth’s island nation with the singular, divine body of his queen.
In his invocation of his sovereign in the proem to book one, Spenser repeats the official line of
authoritarian command that imagines Elizabeth as otherworldly, all-powerful and appointed by
God to rule England:
… O Goddesse heavenly bright,
Mirrour of grace and Majestie divine,
Great Ladie of the greatest Isle, whose light
Like Phœbus lampe throughout the world doth shine,
Shed thy faire beames into my feeble eyne,
And raise my thoughtes too humble and too vile,
To thinke of that true glorious type of thine,
The argument of mine afflicted style:
The which to heare, vouchsafe, O dearest dread a while (I.proem.4)
The poet places this same language in the mouth of Guyon as he describes to Medina, one of
Elizabeth’s refracted personas, the virtues of the Faerie Queene. Responding to Medina’s
inquires into his knightly adventures, Guyon replies
This thy demand, O Lady, doth revive
Fresh memory in me of that great Queene,
Great and most glorious virgin Queene alive,
That with her soveraine power, and sceptre shene
All Faery lond does peaceably sustene.
In widest Ocean she her throne does reare,

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That over all the earth it may be seene;
As morning Sunne her beames dispredden cleare,
And in her face faire peace, and mercy doth appear (II.ii.40).
In both evocations, we are asked to dwell upon the monarch’s divine status; Elizabeth is the
reflection of God’s might and dignity, whereas the Faerie Queene’s Christ-like quality, captured
in her very countenance, can dispel metaphorical storms and usher in peacefulness. This sense of
otherworldliness is also attached to Elizabeth, whose “beames” enter the mind of the poet and
inspire his literary reproduction of her queenly person. The sovereigns of each passage cast their
sovereign gazes beyond their isolated realms into the world at large and are likewise gazed upon
by the earth’s inhabitants as earth-bound deities. Finally, and importantly, the authority of both
sovereign rulers and the grandeur of their realms are closely associated with their island
territories. In the first passage, Spenser’s “Great Ladie” is hinged to “the greatest Isle”, as though
the glory of the monarch and the glory of the land are mutually constitutive; each makes the
other great in their bounded-ness to the other. Such language, of course, is the stuff of
Elizabethan political rhetoric. In the second, the Faerie Queene did “reare” her island kingdom
“In widest Ocean”, an image that sees the sovereign raising from the depths of the sea an
isolated, mythical and oceanic realm. In both occasions, the sovereign and the island singularity
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of her territory are indelibly linked.

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Montrose also remarks upon the relationship between the body monarchical and the island
body of the nation. In his consideration of Tudor portraiture, Montrose sees in “the queen’s
virginal self-containment” in the Armada portraits a royal promise of territorial security (314).
“The inviolability of the island realm, the secure boundary of the English nation, is thus made to
seem mystically dependent upon the inviolability of the English sovereign, upon the intact
condition of the queen’s body natural”. Montrose, “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian
Text,” 315.
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But, even in Spenser’s proem to Book I where he first celebrates his deistic queen in
whom sovereign authority is singularly vested, we can already detect the splintering and undoing
of this monarchical persona. The representational crisis that plagues his rendering of Elizabeth in
the proem to Book II (discussed above) here again prevents the poet from capturing the
monarch’s radical singularity. Gesturing toward the poem’s refraction of the sovereign into
myriad reproductions, we witness the Queen only as a mirrored reflection of God and a “glorious
type” or abstracted paragon of monarchical virtue. And, of course, Spenser’s very depiction of
the Queen necessarily reduces her to a literary facsimile conjured up by the poet’s pen. Like the
Faerie Queene, whose many invocations in the poem only remind us of her problematic absence
from the work, Spenser’s Elizabeth in the proem is an absent-presence, existent only in
unsatisfactory reflections and fragmented representations. Spenser’s illustration of England’s
queen in the second passage even more strongly refuses the notion of a singular queenly body as
the uniquely identifiable source of sovereign authority. By this stage in Spenser’s narrative, the
singular persona celebrated in the proem to Book I has been all but obliterated by the
introduction of Spenser’s Elizabethan abstractions. Spenser’s attempt to create a one-to-one
relationship between England’s monarch and the poem’s “great and most glorious virgin
Queene” is therefore vexed. This particular description of the Faerie Queene, which seeks to
equate Elizabeth and Spenser’s literary replica, is brought about by Medina’s inquiries into
Guyon’s travels. Because Medina herself is a duplicate of Elizabeth, we are confronted with a
three-fold adumbration of the monarch in which Medina, the Faerie Queene and Elizabeth
separately share the supposedly irreducible qualities of divine political might.
Spenser’s self-proclaimed purpose behind his epic poem is to celebrate England’s
sovereign; Spenser claims in his letter to Raleigh that in his Faerie Queene he “conceives the

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most excellent and glorious person of our soveraine the Queene” and that “in some places els, I
doe otherwise shadow her” (716). Yet his persistent doubling and redoubling of the queen puts
great pressure upon the claim that the solitary monarchical body “with her soveraine power, and
sceptre shene / All Faery lond does peaceably sustene”. Spread thin across Spenser’s poetic
territory, his apportioned personifications of sovereign rule are fragmented and disassociated,
effectively disassembling the monarchical body so celebrated in official rhetoric. Furthermore,
Faery Land is not one of peace under the queen’s divine grace; neither the Faerie Queene,
Elizabeth’s composite, nor her lesser representations are able to quell the lawlessness that
disorders the realm. Only with the intervention of the knights does the land achieve a kind of
untenable harmony.
With this political disunity comes a sense of geographic discontinuity. The Faerie
Queene’s territory is a broken political landscape, where each realm, governed by its separate
and disconnected ruler, appears to function autonomously, suffering the many challenges to law
and order in isolated contexts without the guidance of an overarching ruler. Not only do Medina,
Alma and Mercilla govern their own faltering realms in self-sustaining, though unsuccessful
fashion, none of these monarchical refractions appear to be aware of the Faerie Queene as the
land’s supreme monarch; in each case, it is the knights who inform them of the Faerie Queene’s
supposedly omnipresent power throughout the realm. Furthermore, the several rogue states and
territorial pockets of lawlessness discussed above imply a sovereign territory with little regard
for a centralized figure of authority, whose very person is said to bind the land into a single
national frame. The absence of this figure and the disassociated nature of the several rulers to
each other, to the Faerie Queene and to the Knights of Maidenhead who are empowered by this
absent-presence essentially demolishes the formula of the above passages, which equates the

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singularity of the monarch with the singularity of her island kingdom. Our experience of Faerie
Land is very much unlike that of Speed’s maps, for instance, which project a politically,
geographically and culturally homogenous island space of subjects allegiant to the sovereign.
Instead, we are confronted with a disjointed territory that mirrors in its fractured-ness the
dismembered monarchical body.
Spenser makes plain early on that his poetic landscape is a confounding one; Una, her
dwarf and the Red Cross Knight are beguiled by the poem’s changeable territory only moments
into the narrative. Having shielded themselves from the storm, the three attempt to resume their
journey, but “when weening to returne, whence they did stray, / They cannot finde that path,
which first was showne, / But wander too and fro in waies unknowne” (I.i.10.3-5). This
misleading land is, of course, allegorical; unsure of their footing as fledgling representations of
virtue in an unjust world, the characters (Red Cross Knight in particular), must master the
poem’s ethical training ground to completely personify their representative quality. However,
when the poem’s landscape becomes politicized—in other words, once we recognize the political
contours of the poem and its shrouded commentary on Elizabethan political commentary—the
territorial shifts from idyllic woods to coastline to “desert wildernesse” (II.vii.2.9), from
Elizabeth’s Faerie Land to Ireland, Belgium and France become indicators of a land profoundly
fragmented by the kind of governmental inconsistency feared by Elizabeth’s court. Significantly,
islands feature prominently in this distorting territory and are often the home of rogue elements
that function outside the realm of law. For instance, the giantess Argante of Book III imprisons
her captive knights in “a secret Ile, / Where in eternall bondage dye he must, / Or be the vasall of
her pleasures vile” (III.vii.50.6-8). Likewise, Spenser’s Brigants of book six, a cannibalistic
“lawlesse people” (VI.x.39.3) and “salvage nation” (VI.viii.35.2) who abduct Serena, Pastorella

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and Coridon live on an island in a dangerous border region, “covered with shrubby woods, in
which no way / Appeard for people in nor out to pas, / No any footing fynde for overgrowen
gras” (VI.x.41.7-9).

360

Literally and legally disconnected from the Faerie Queene’s kingdom,

the islands of Faerie Land are akin to extra-national spaces in which official law and custom are
361

irrelevant.

360

Benjamin P. Myers maintains that the Brigands’ “little island” is a piece of “imaginary
geography” that seeks to differentiate “Gaelic Ireland from the emerging civilization in Munster”
(476). According to Myers’s reading, the “green and golden world” of Book VI is an idealized
portrait of the Munster plantation emended by the poet’s power of pastoral imagining, whereas
the Brigands’ borderland criminality stands in for those segments of the Irish population that
rejected the English plan for “agrarian reform” founded upon the Virgilian principles of
“stewardship and [ … ] improvement” (475). Myers, “The Green and Golden World: Spenser’s
Rewriting of the Munster Plantation.” ELH 76.2 (2009): 473-490 Project Muse. Print. Richard A.
McCabe also makes this connection between ungoverned peoples and marginalized territories.
Like Myers, he casts this relationship between lawless lands and populations in the light of
Spenser’s “colonial romance” (61). Examining the complex and oftentimes unsatisfactory self /
other dichotomy that underpinned colonial discourse on Ireland, McCabe argues that in the
Faerie Queene “the need to ‘fashion’ a ‘salvage’ was no less pressing than the need to fashion a
‘gentleman’ [ … ] As both poet and politician, he needed a ‘salvage’ island—such as might be
‘salvaged’ by reformers like himself” (61-2). Citing Spenser’s Irish landscape and the Brigands
of Book VI, McCabe maintains that Spenser’s Faerie Queene “suggests an almost symbiotic
relationship between outlaws and outlands, between geographical and social marginality” (62).
McCabe, “Ireland: policy, poetics and parody.” Cambridge Companion to Spenser (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2001) 6-78. Print.
361
In his discussion of Colin Clouts Come Home Againe and Book VI of The Faerie Queene,
Swen Voekel detects in Spenser’s works “the manner in which elite sixteenth-century
Englishmen looked to the consolidation of England as a model for the incorporation of peripheral
areas of the Tudor polity”. He contends that “the most violent thrust of the English state
formation process was aimed at these peripheries; there, older forms of ‘good lordship’ arising
from the delegation of state authority to local magnates came to be viewed as inimical to the
goals of political, legal and territorial uniformity”. Though Voekel’s focus is on Ireland, one can
also apply his reading of Spenser to the Queen’s English territories, where local magnates,
invested by the queen with her authority, also made claims to governmental unity and
centralization untenable. Voekel, “From Irish Countries to English Counties: State Sovereignty
and Territorial Reorganization in Early Modern Ireland,” Archipelagic Identities: Literature and
Identity in the Atlantic Archipelago, 1550-1800 Eds. Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) 95. Print.
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The broken body monarchical is most succinctly depicted geographically by the Bower of
Bliss. A “wandering island, that doth ronne / And stray”, the isle housing the Bower is a unruly
territory that cannot be charted or governed due to its movable geography. Poised as a counter to
the Faerie Queene’s island seat where all the world can view her from a fixed point, the Bower
island refuses to be part of a regulated territory and contains no ruler. Though the Bower is the
home of Acrasia, she is depicted as a seductress who shuttles her lovers away to this secret site,
as opposed to a figure like Lucifera or Alma, who clearly preside over a delineated realm. The
isle is described as “an Island, waste and voyd”; as Greenblatt and other have noted the language
of barrenness applied here is similar to the terms deployed to describe the New World, where
“waste and voyd” signifies a land uninhabited or not put to use and thusly ripe for colonial
enterprise. In the case of the Bower, however, which is illustrated as a lush, artificial Eden, the
wasted-ness of the island territory refers not to its use-value or its distance from the civilized
world, but its resistance to law and morality. Afloat in Idle Lake’s “wide Inland sea”, the Bower
island is unhinged from the body politic; it is literally, geographically and governmentally
decentralized. The Bower island is part of a larger archipelago of “many Islandes [ … ] floting
the floodes emong” (II.xii.10.6-7), “wandering Islands” “which to and fro doe ronne / In the
wide waters” (II.xii.11.5-7). Like the disjointed realms that make up the Faerie Queene’s
patchwork kingdom, the Bower archipelago visually signifies a disparate and shifting territory
unbound by the kingdom’s claim to a sovereign and centralized state reaching across a delineated
(national) territory.
Akin to the poem’s other island spaces, the Bower archipelago is characterized by
lawlessness and danger both to the individual and the realm. The seas surrounding the isles are
perilous and the geography deathly and unknowable. Having weathered the sea’s “raging surges”

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(II.xii.2.8) and “hideous hoast” (II.xii.22.8) of monstrous sea-creatures and braved the allegorical
traps intended for his moral and physical demise, Guyon reaches the Bower and, through his
temperate will, captures Acrasia with her “chaines of lust and lewde desyres ybownd” (II.i.54.3)
and destroys her artificial paradise. Yet, similar to Artegall’s “unreformed Ireland”, another
island space of unstopped rebellion, the “floating” archipelago remains unmoored; the isles
“range, and do at randon rove / Out of their proper places”, like the stars in the disordered world
conjured up by Spenser in the proem to Book V (V.Proem.6.5-6). Spenser again returns to this
imagery of an up-ended world as Guyon and the Palmer are ferried to the Bower. Suddenly
mystified by “a grosse fog”, the world becomes such “That all things one, and one as nothing
was, / And this great Universe seemd one confused mas” (II.xii.34.5-9). This “world [ … ] runne
quite out of square” is in keeping with the allegorical narrative in which Guyon’s temperate
nature is challenge by a series of attacks on his senses and passions (Book V, proem, vii).
However, the repeated refrains of “goodly governance” in The Faerie Queene refer not only to
the soul, but to the ailing body politic as well. The dispersal of sovereign authority; the
ideological breakdown of the official rhetoric of authoritarian rule; and the resultant ambiguity
regarding the source of political power all contributed to a political world that seemed as “one
confused mas”. Spenser’s Bower archipelago depicts geographically the effect of this
governmental confusion on England’s political body. Dissipating like the official rhetoric that
could no longer uphold claims to authoritarian rule, Spenser’s “realmes and nations run awry” as
sovereign authority is unhinged from the monarchical body and becomes radically decentered.

345

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346

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Chapter 4: Staging the Debunked Island Nation
Part one: “And now I see the situation”
This dissertation has taken as its primary theme the production of official nationalist
rhetoric in England during the early modern period. It demonstrates how historians,
cartographers and authors were central to this production. Penning their works either in an
official capacity or with an eye towards crown patronage, these cultural producers created texts
that helped generate or preserve crown and state ideology. I also contend that popular authors—
playwrights, poets and authors of narrative prose—were acutely aware of these nationalist
ideologies and that their texts, either implicitly or explicitly, critiqued these manufactured
narratives. Multiple forms of nationalism coexisted in the early modern period; to fully grasp the
concept of “the nation”, both in the early modern period and in ours, it is essential that we
consider the purposes, intentions and flaws of a nationalism that was born of the government, not
of the people.

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In the case of the literary works examined in my earlier chapters—More’s Utopia,
Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Fletcher and Massinger’s Sea Voyage and Spenser’s Faerie Queene—
each piece embedded in its textual fabric vestiges of the official sentiments in broad circulation
during the period. More’s satiric work took up the threads of the English island mythos produced
by the chroniclers Gildas, Bede, Hardyng, Grafton, Camden and Speed, stretching them to their
absurdist limits, and thereby pointing to the unreliability of early modern geopolitical discourse.
The ideological reframing of cartographic Britain and the archipelago’s complex genealogy
formed the subject of the second chapter. There, the work of two early modern playwrights
responded to the imperial and nationalist discourse of the Elizabethan and Jacobean court, a
362

Subtitle from V.iii.6.
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rhetoric that found its visual representation in the maps of John Speed. Spenser, as a member of
Elizabeth’s colonial government, was witness to the breakdown of England’s nascent state
infrastructure while serving in Ireland. The ideological disconnect between the absolutist rhetoric
emanating from Whitehall and state building on the ground rendered the source of political
authority radically ambiguous. This decentering of sovereign power, I have revealed, is
evidenced in Spenser’s refracted queen and the dis-unified band of agents that traverse Faerie
Land’s discontinuous politicized landscape.
The play analyzed in my final chapter, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, seems
to address—and radically destabilize—every element of the official nationalist discourse
discussed in my previous chapters. The precepts of the English island mythos—the notions of
cultural and ethnic homogeneity, the claim to England’s genealogical right to Scotland’s
territories, the chimerical tales of the island’s mythical otherworldliness, the untenable assertion
of the island’s security, insularity and self-sufficiency—all are nullified on Marlowe’s island.
Malta’s is a population of others; among the many nationalities inhabiting the island, there is no
clear majority. Every citizen is non-native, having arrived on the island as conqueror, invader,
supposed ally, slave, criminal or merchant, taking advantage of the island’s ideal location in the
Mediterranean to ply their trades. The Maltese do not exist on Malta. For this reason, Marlowe’s
Malta is without a traceable genealogy, a tenet of historical construction so central to authors like
Gildas, Bede, Speed and Camden.
Because the island is in continual cultural and political flux and because Marlowe offers
his audience no insight into the island’s past, Malta appears history-less, at least in terms of
national record. The contrived historical narratives discussed throughout my work indicate that
an identifiable English origin is difficult to locate in the repeatedly overwritten narratives of

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imperial conquest that characterized the British Isles. Likewise, no single nation or people appear
to have a legitimate or clear-cut claim to Marlowe’s island. Territorially, Malta is of the
Mediterranean world, but this locational identity only exacerbates its lack of independent
autonomy. Positioned at the oceanic intersection of multinational trade routes, Malta experienced
firsthand emergent globalization and the confluence of differing cultures. Of undoubted strategic
importance, Malta’s identity is defined in the play not by its island sequestration and positive
insularity but by its palimpsestic nature; even within the space of Marlowe’s play, it is
continually and unevenly rewritten in the language of its conquerors. The nations and empires
surrounding Malta swallow up the isle and make inconsequential (or impossible) any claims to
autonomous status. Though England had achieved its national sovereignty, the construction of
English nationhood and its historical longevity were similarly thrown in question by its
colonized past and the contemporary internal warfare in the borderlands surrounding England
that made it a victim of its own imperial aims.
The very geographic central-ness of Marlowe’s island within the Mediterranean market
made it a site of continual siege. Marlowe’s Malta is at the mercy of the Turks, the Spanish and
the Christian knights. Historical Malta was subjected to the Turks, Spanish, Christians, Sicilians,
Italians, and the Berber and Turkish pirates, who sought the island as a place of trade or military
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advantage.

Like England, Malta’s island-ness promised not security but inalterable

vulnerability. The porousness of the island boundaries resounds in the extraordinary fluidity and
indeterminate nature of the Maltese population. Further, the play’s island is a market writ large.
Both goods and people are imported to Malta’s shores to be commodified and sold. Barabas lists
363

See Kenneth Meyer Setton’s “France, Venice and the Porte: The Turkish Siege of Malta.”
The Papacy and the Levant, 1204-1571, Vol IV:The Sixteenth Century from Julius III to Pius V
(Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1984): 829-881. Print and Charles Owen’s
“The Coveted Island.” The Maltese Islands (New York: Fredrick A Praeger, 1969): 25-42. Print.
353

an influx of commodities that enter the island for global trade, yet the island itself cannot be said
to produce anything: it is bereft of domestically produced goods. The island is wholly reliant
upon the outside world that persistently encroaches upon it. A temporary resting place for both
products and peoples, Malta is akin to More’s “no place” in terms of national identity. As More’s
text revealed, Utopia’s real-life English counterpart was also inextricably linked to the continent
in terms of political interventions and reliance upon the outside world for necessary resources,
despite protestations to the contrary in official rhetoric.
Lastly, political authority and sovereignty more generally are a matter of confounding
ambivalence in Marlowe’s play. The source of legitimate authority is unidentifiable; it exists
somewhere outside the island space and is as fluid and indeterminate as the citizenry. The island
is ostensibly governed by the Christian Knights of Malta. The Knights were “granted” this island
by Charles V when the then Knights of Rhodes were ousted from this space by the Ottoman
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Turks in 1522.

The Turks also lay claim to the island, demanding tribute of the Christians,

which prompts the action of the play. However, we later learn that Spain “hath title” to Malta,
when the son of the Spanish king offers to aid the Christians against the heathen Turks (II.iii.28).
In this radically indeterminate political landscape, sovereignty and political authority are emptied
of meaning. No one and everyone rules Malta. The discourse of legitimate authority or a system
for the distribution of power is conspicuously absent in the work, though this is undoubtedly a
play preoccupied with power and its transference. Rather, the aura of governmental authority
flits from character to character in an almost meaningless pattern, sometimes alighting on the
Christians, then the Turks or the Spanish, and most fleeting, on Malta’s titular Jew. Power, not
absolute authority, is the goal of Marlowe’s characters; government is simply a tool of self364

Bevington, David. The Jew of Malta Revels Student Ed. (Manchester: Manchester UP,
Palgrave) 1997. Note 31-3, 48. Print. All future references to the play cite this edition.
354

interest. As in Spenser’s Faerie Land, the source of political power is indefinable, reflecting back
on Spenser’s England the ideological confusion resulting from the collision of absolutist rhetoric
and the necessities of state building. With the distribution of sovereign power came the potential
misuse of governmental authority as the rhetoric of power was applied not just to the figure
embodying the nation—the monarch—but also to her servants, ostensibly appointed to carry out
her will.
In brief, Malta is nation-less in the terms of early modern political discourse. Its territory
is not shaped by political borders, for the island boundaries are continually penetrated by foreign
forces. Nor are these borders established according to claims of national sovereignty. The
political borders are made and remade according to various policies and leagues strategically
drawn up by foreign forces, only to be almost invariably violated. In this sense, “national”
boundaries are meaningless. The people housed within this space do not share a common culture
or ethnic makeup. The population is a heterogeneous conglomerate of non-native peoples
residing in a foreign place; therefore they are without a historical narrative binding them as a
people. They are without a sovereign and without a state; there is little discussion of law and no
means of establishing the centers or channels of legitimate political authority.
For English audiences likely steeped in the discourse of English nationalism, Marlowe’s
Malta could present a frightening spectacle. Here is an island shorn of nationalist ideology, an
island space where the failures and mistruths of English national sentiment are on full display.
Without this ideological veneer, Marlowe’s island exposes in exaggerated form the tears in the
national narrative that official works like Camden and Speed’s were meant to textually patch
over: a body of manipulated chronicles that imagined the largest of the British isles as
historically English; a similarly manipulated cartographic record that visibly supported this

355

narrative and drew the English as rightful imperial rulers over the archipelago; a disingenuous
rhetoric of absolutism that ideologically jarred with the construction of a state infrastructure; and
most importantly, the notion of a island destined by its geography to attain a kind of national
character unavailable to nations hinged to the rest of the world. More frightening still is the
possible implication in Marlowe’s work that these faulty and oftentimes disingenuous nationalist
narratives are of absolute necessity to ideologically sustain the English body politic.
The goal of this final chapter is to demonstrate how popular theatrical texts of the period
are capable of tearing down the pillars of nationalist mythology. Marlowe’s Jew of Malta is
unique in this regard. Whereas the above-cited literary works seem to take aim at particular
tenants of early modern political philosophy, Marlowe’s work responds to and obliterates the
body of constructions so carefully plotted in official rhetoric. The playwright’s intimate
knowledge and active participation in the mechanisms of Elizabethan real politik granted him
unique access to these nationalist ideologies and the uses to which they were put both in his
nation’s territory and on the continent. Using Marlowe’s play and drawing upon the historical
and theoretical foundations laid in the previous chapters, I will demonstrate the unique power of
Marlowe’s theatre to visually and rhetorically dismantle the nationalist narratives so crucial to
the nation’s fabricated identity. In doing so, Marlowe’s work scathingly critiques the very notion
of nationhood.
Secondly, I will consider the fragility of nationalist constructions and the detrimental
effects of exposing these fabrications as essentially illegitimate or unfounded. Once the ideology
of the early modern nation is stripped away, the subjects, the government and the territory they
occupy are emptied of geographic and political identification. Though the geography remains as
product of natural forces, it can no longer hold political signification.

356

My methodology in this concluding chapter differs from those that came before.
Beginning with an analysis of Marlowe’s play, I demonstrate how this text effectively undoes the
intricately manufactured nationalist, historiographical, governmental and geopolitical ideologies
produced and disseminated by the official authors of the English nation. In this regard, I take on
The Jew of Malta with a more strictly literary approach than my previous chapters. The second
part of the chapter more explicitly links Marlowe’s text to the nationalist ideologies considered
in chapters one through three. Finally, I consider the overall effect of Marlowe’s play on these
fabricated discourses, contending that Marlowe has imagined in this play a dystopic vision of
England stripped of its nationalist rhetoric.
“A Scattered Nation”
Barabas, celebrating his “infinite riches in a little room” (I.i.37) and the incoming fleet
that will bring him more gold, attributes the prosperity of Jewish merchants to the fact that they
are a disconnected or “scattered nation” (I.i.120). Referencing the successes of well-known Jews
in Greece, “Bairseth”, Portugal, Italy and France, Barabas casts Jewish nationless-ness as a
distinct advantage in the emergent world of growing trade (I.i.124). The expulsion of the Jews
from England in 1290 was followed by the forced removal of the Jewish communities in
Catholic Spain and Portugal in 1492 and 1497, respectively. According to Ania Loomba,
England, Spain and Portugal are only a few of the nations that demanded the flight of the Jews
from their borders. She writes,
Jews had, at different points of time, been expelled and readmitted, and
sometimes expelled again, from various other places in Europe including Naples,
Genoa, and Florence. Partly as a result, European Jews travelled to far-flung

357

places; Samuel Purchas commented that ‘dispersions of the Jewish nations’
extended far beyond Europe to Africa, and especially Asia.

365

The term “nation” used by Barabas and Purchas here likely designates the diaspora, or “a group
of people having a single ethnic, tribal, or religious affiliation, but without a separate or
politically independent territory”.

366

However, the signifier “nation”, as delineating a

geographically and politically bounded space, as well as a grouping of people along ethnic,
cultural or political lines, was essential to the potent political currency of the island nation
mythos circulating during the time of the play. Camden, whose intent in his Britannia was to
discover “the first originalls of [the] nations” making up the British Isles, was also very invested
in succinctly mapping out the space of the English nation and differentiating it from England’s
367

archipelagic neighbors.

The addition to his chorography of the maps of Christopher Saxton

and John Norton allowed, in Camden’s words, that “the light of learning [ be ] adjoined to the
speechlesse delineation” of “ [his] native Country”. One might argue as I have here that
Camden’s “geographic studies” as he terms them are as important to his nationalist work as the
written text itself; it is the island territory that at once invites the trope of the island nation as a
unifying force and expels those “invaders” who are foreign to the island shores.

368

Therefore,

nation and geography are deeply interrelated terms in much of early modern nationalist literature.
Speed was likewise compelled “historically to lay downe the originals of those Nations
and successions of those Monarchs, which either by birth or conquest have aspired to the

365
366

Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002) 144. Print.

“Nation.” The Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012) Web. 3 May
2012.
367
Camden, Britannia Vol. 1 Ed. Robert Mayhew (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2003) 4. Print.
368

Ibid, “To the Reader”, 7.
358

Imperiall Crowne”.

369

One might reasonably assume that Speed speaks here of “nation” in the

sense of “natio”, a people bound by race, blood and birth. However, Speed’s cartographic
picturing of the English nation and its domestic “empire” is the visual infrastructure to his
History, in which the clearly delineated English nation rules over the supposedly conquered and
textually marginalized countries of the archipelago. Though both authors are clearly preoccupied
with matters of genealogy, the right to the island territory is at the core of Speed and Camden’s
English nations. This dependence upon geography to define the nation may result from the
intractable difficulty of English historians to trace “English” bloodlines in a historical record
made up of heterogeneous imperial forefathers.
Marlowe’s play too is deeply invested in geographic and territorial status. It is the
island’s strategic geographic position that draws the many national and imperial communities to
Malta in the hope of securing the island and best benefiting from the Mediterranean’s lucrative
markets. Historical Malta was not a nation during the time of the play’s production. Historical
Malta suffered a long history of imperial conquest, falling under the rule of the Phoenicians,
Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Normans. As Charles Owen explains,
rule of the islands passed from the Normans to the Suabians and on to the
Angevins by inheritance and then to the Spanish by conquest. Whatever the
nationality of the ruler, he tended to regard Malta as an inanimate piece of
property to be pawned or disposed of at will [ … ] While masters, royal or
otherwise, were exercising their absentee prerogative and raiding the islands’
meagre resources, Malta was being harassed from the sea by pirates. Berbers,
Turks, even at one stage fellow Christians, brought terror to the poorly defended
369

Speed, The History of Great Britain. 1611. EEBO. Michigan State University Lib. Web. 3
May 2012.
359

islands. In one classic raid [ … ] Barbary corsairs carried off four hundred
370

inhabitants, including a complete wedding party.

As Owen points out, Malta was even “mortgaged to two noblemen in turn” when the King
Alphonso “need[ed] some ready cash”.

371

Bandied around from one colonial power to the next,
th

eventually landing in the hands of the Sicilians, and in the 18 century, the French, Malta was
wholly lacking in nationhood, in either the early modern or contemporary sense of the word:
there was no unified population, no centralized governmental infrastructure, no sovereign to cast
the mold of the body politic and no possibility of independent autonomy. This “inanimate piece
of property” became a republic only in 1974.
Though historical Malta lacked nation-status at the time of the play, I contend that
Marlowe’s Malta would nonetheless resonate with an English audience, due to the physical and
historical similarities between the islands and the public’s familiarity with the language of
nationhood emanating from both official and popular sources. Like England, Malta is part of an
archipelago; however, the second island of Goza is never directly referenced in the play, much
like English official discourses that seek to overlook England’s colonial failure to the west.
Necessary to the myth of the island nation is the marginalization of Ireland, which is often
pictured not as an autonomous isle but as England’s savage other. In both cases, the archipelagic
nature of the English and Maltese islands is elided. As discussed throughout chapters one and
two, authors of the official English nation were forced to contend with Britain’s messy
genealogical record, which was composed largely by the isle’s many imperial conquerors.
Drawing from disparate and often contending sources, historians like Camden and Speed tried to
370
371

Owen, 28-9.
Ibid.
360

answer the all-important question, “who are the English”? The patchwork nature of their
chronicles and the obvious misconstructions revealed tears in the seams of these histories and
attests to the difficult, but necessary, quest to write Britain as England. Of Marlowe’s play, one
must likewise ask the question, who are the Maltese? As I discuss in more detail below,
Marlowe’s evacuation of the Maltese from the play is one of the many strategies employed by
the playwright to dismantle official nationalist rhetoric.
Finally, as explored in chapter three, Elizabethan and Stuart England were suffering a
crisis of governmental authority, stemming from the decentering of power from the monarch and
the dispersal of this supposedly indivisible authority to members of the state administering the
monarch’s will in the localities. Also discussed in this chapter were the various political bodies
serving in closer proximity to the sovereign, such as the Privy Council and Parliament, who were
vying for their own measure of authority that sometimes competed with the monarch’s “absolute
rule”. Though Malta is not a monarchy, both Marlowe’s island and historical Malta were sites of
violent struggles for power, inhabited by independent national, imperial and religious bodies
claiming territorial rule.
Like a number of early modern texts that appear to transfer English anxieties to foreign
island spaces—Othello’s Cyprus, The Tempest’s ambiguous island, Fletcher and Massinger’s set
of isles in The Sea Voyage, More’s Utopia—Marlowe’s Malta is an island doppelganger, a site in
which sovereignty, in terms of both the nation and its leadership, is either absent or invisible,
where its island-ness poses a perpetual threat from outside, and the isle’s natural geographic
boundaries fail to signify nationhood. What Marlowe’s island seems to suggest is that
geography—the bounded oceanic space of the island—cannot be looked to as a trope of
nationhood; it cannot be imagined as the natural geographic frame for a national body. Because

361

island-ness is the foundational national mythos, Marlowe’s play sees the crumbling of England’s
official ideological structure.

372

Marlowe’s “scattered [ island ] nation” denies at every turn the precepts of official
nationalism precisely because English national mythology was so closely tied to its geographic
status. Even the dramatis persona demonstrates a geographic and ethnic scattering of characters.
Barabas, “the Jew of Malta” is only of the island in the sense that he resides there to make his
fortune at an important oceanic crossroads. The Jews of the island have no defined point of
origin. Barabas fashions himself a multinational; in his vicious autobiographical account to
Ithamore in act 2 scene 3, Barabas claims to have studied in Italy and to have served Charles V
“in the wars ’twixt France and Germany” (II.iii.190). Yet, we have no knowledge of the nation of
his birth or the other locations in which his life was spent prior to his arrival on Malta; the same
is thus true of Abigail, whose motherless status denies the audience any clues to her

372

Emily Bartels also identifies links between England and Marlowe’s Malta. In her
postcolonial analysis of the play, Bartels considers how English confrontations with the other in
the New World and elsewhere cast back on the English their anxiety regarding national identity.
“Continued encounters with the “‘other’”, she explains “ [ … ] necessitated a concomitant
confrontation with the self, provoking a re-evaluation of the known in relation to the newly
discovered unknown. Significantly, and ironically [ … ] England’s preoccupation with strangers
and strange lands intensified the culture’s re-examination of its own estranged others [ … ]
England recognized the other within itself. This recognition could only be a threat to a society
whose self-definition depended upon continued assertions of a ruling and stabilizing orthodoxy,
assertions so prevalent and persuasive that critics even in our era have held up the myth of a
singular and stable ‘Elizabethan World Picture’” (1). As I argue later in this chapter and
throughout this project, anxieties surrounding otherness were also embedded in English
genealogies, in which invading “other” cultures undeniably went into the making of
“Englishness”. Marlowe’s work forefronts this genealogical and national anxiety. Bartels,
“Malta, the Jew, and the Fictions of Difference: Colonial Discourse in Marlowe’s The Jew of
Malta.” English Literary Renaissance 20.1 (1990): 1-16. Gale Cenage Learning. Michigan State
University Lib. June 13 2012. Web.
362

373

birthplace.

Barabas’s Jewish brethren, listed as “three Jews”, are even more ambiguous in

their place of origin, given only a religious moniker and little dialogue.
The slaves transported to Malta are likewise a mixed body, stripped of national
protections and community. Upon Del Bosco’s arrival on the island, he requests that Spain’s
newly-captured slaves be sold in Malta’s marketplace: “our freight is Grecians, Turks and Afric
Moors”, he explains, listing his multinational human inventory. Among this group is Ithamore,
“slave to Barabas”, whose country of origin is comparatively indistinct; in response to Barabas’s
inquiry into his birth, Ithamore explains that he was born “in Thrace; brought up in Arabia”
(II.iii.131). Though the slave is one of the few characters who can offer up a place of origin,
Ithamore’s answer is geographically vague. A land overtaken by the Illyrians, Macedonians,
Greeks, Romans, Bulgarians and Ottomans, Thracian territory encompassed present-day
Bulgaria, Greece and part of Turkey. Ithamore appears to hail from a region more so than a
politically delineated nation. Like Barabas, Ithamore is a transient subject, even prior to his life
373

According to Bevington in From Mankind to Marlowe, Barabas’s military action in the wars
between France and Germany “does not correspond realistically with what we know of Barabas’
life”. He includes this claim by Barabas as part of the Jew’s list of self alleged crimes, which he
recites to Ithamore in act two scene three. Barabas’s collection of presumably invented identities
is characterized by Greenblatt as “a catalog of outrageous blatantly fictional misdeeds”; he
argues that Barabas is himself “a falsehood, a fiction composed of the sleaziest materials in his
culture” (52). Janet Clare concurs with these assessments, claiming that “there is nothing that we
see or hear elsewhere in the play which corroborates Barabas’ enumerated acts of vengeful
cruelty”; she characterizes Barabas’s articulation in this scene as “dramatically redundant, but
highly significant theatricality as contributing to the overarching brutality” of the work. Though I
largely agree with the above critics in their evaluation of Barabas’s theatricality in this scene, I
believe one can also consider this list of violent deeds, whose locations span from Malta to the
continent, as an indication of his multinational character; as I will argue later in this chapter, it is
Barabas’s refusal to align himself with a particular group or national body that allows for his
violent agency and thus makes him such a threatening character when placed beside the official
rhetoric of national identity. See Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in
the Popular Drama of Tudor England (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962): 218-233. Print;
Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992):
40-58. Print. And Clare, “Marlowe’s ‘theatre of cruelty.’” Constructing Christopher Marlowe
Eds J.A. Downie and J.T. Parnell (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001): 74-87. Print.
363

as a slave; it was in Turkish Arabia that he was likely captured and removed to Malta. Ithamore’s
indeterminate national status is of particular interest to Barabas; in reply to Ithamore’s answer
regarding his unclear origins, Barabas states, “so much the better; thou art for my turn”
(II.iii.132). Both lacking a nation status linking them to a specific territory, Ithamore and Barabas
are allegiant to no one, a point I shall return to later.

374

Though the rest of the characters seem on the surface to be marked regionally, their
names and titles betray significant ambiguities as to their nationalist signification. Malta’s
Christians are more or less bound together as a community, based primarily upon their hatred for
the heathen Jews and Turks. However, this joining together is not based on nationalist
identifications. Ferneze “the Governor of Malta” has no ethnic or cultural associations to the
island. He and his Knights were transplanted to the isle after their ouster from Rhodes, as
explained above. The Knights of Malta, formerly the Knights of St John, were a multinational
conglomerate of Christian soldiers, hailing from “Aragon, Auvergne, Castille (including
375

Portugal), England, France, Germany, Italy and Provence”.

Connected through a pledge to

militant Christianity, they appear to have surrendered up a national identity to a religious one.
The name Ferneze signals this national dislocated-ness. “Ferneze” can be of either French or
Spanish derivation; the same is true of the Friars Jacomo and Bernardine and the courtesan
Bellamira. Ferneze’s potential French lineage is also supported by history; when Malta was
granted to the Knights, it was placed under the leadership of Philippe de Villiers d’Isle Adam,
374

Mark Hutchings also makes this point, contending that “Barabas is drawn particularly to
Ithamore because of his identity, which his statement that he was born in ‘[i] Thrace; brought up
in Arabia’ reveals. Barabas recognizes in Ithamore a kindred (though unequal) spirit: both are
displaced and stateless, their very identity subject to confusion and (mis)fortune” (429).
Hutchings, “‘In Thrace; Brought up in Arabia: The Jew of Malta, II.iii.131. Notes and Queries
(December, 2000) 428-30. Print.
375
Owen, 29.
364

who was later replaced by Jean Parisot de la Valette, the Frenchman who put down the
Ottoman’s invasion of Malta in 1565.

376

Though Ferneze is likely French, the name of his son,

Lodowick, has English resonances. However, the prefix “Don” is decidedly Spanish. Lodowick’s
friend Don Mathias is also inexplicably granted this Spanish title, despite the fact that “Mathias”
is more reminiscent of Nordic culture than the countries of the Mediterranean. Mathias is
fatherless and his mother’s name, Katherine, is largely generic; therefore, like Abigail, we are
without clues into his place of birth. So disparate and ambiguous are the characters’ locational
identifications that the Maltese “nation” is impossible to locate, particularly because the Maltese
themselves are absent from their own indigenous territory. Instead, what we are presented with is
a palimpsest of nations and identities.
The Turks are overtly marked out in the dramatis personae to signify their damning
foreignness, though “foreigner” means little on an island of migrant others. Pilla-Borza, whose
name is an Italian translation, is similarly condemned by the name that links him to his national
origin. Likely, his Italian-ness is meant as an indicator of his criminality, considering the many
English tracts blasting the licentious Italian culture.

377

Martin Del Bosco, “Vice-Admiral of

Spain”, must be delineated nationally in order to explicate the several political maneuvers by
those in power to gain control over the island. However, the remainder of the characters listed in
the dramatis personae are wholly unidentified in terms of nationality. The “Abbess”, “two

376
377

Ibid, 31.

Roger Ascham is perhaps the most vehement of early modern authors when it comes to
English travel to Italy. Of the Englishmen contaminated by Italian culture he writes, “commonly
they come home common contemners of marriage and ready persuaders of all others to the same;
not because they love virginity, nor yet because they hate pretty young virgins, but, being free in
Italy to go whithersoever lust will carry them, they do not like that law and honesty should be
such a bar to their like liberty at home in England”.Ascham, The Schoolmaster (1570; London:
Cassell and Company, 1909) 90 Print.
365

merchants”, “three Jews”, “a Nun”, “Officers”, “Slaves”, “Messenger” and “Carpenter”, exist in
the play as nationless placeholders, minor characters necessary to further the action. I would
argue, however, that their nameless-ness is more significant than the convention of assigning
generic titles to lesser characters. In the political landscape of Marlowe’s work, this body of
anonymous men and women indicates the pointless-ness of nationalist identification on an island
that cannot rightly be called a nation. Their names signify nothing except generic roles because
the play places no value on nation, as evidenced by the ambiguity of the major players’ unknown
national status. Regional or cultural identification is important to distinguish the “good guys”
from the bad, but even this seemingly simple designation is wildly complicated. Though the
language of nation is threaded throughout the play, “the nation” as an ideology binding a group
of people into a united body politic is made all but obsolete.

378

Most perplexing is Marlowe’s moniker “Citizens of Malta”, who appear in a single scene
and are never heard of again. If one tries to imagine this body of citizens, based upon the catalog
of characters presented in the dramatis personae, one must envision an inconsistent and random
grouping of various nationalities, ethnicities and religious persuasions, a people with no uniting
characteristic, no national culture. One must assume that this disunited body must also be
linguistically scattered. Because Spanish, French, Italian, Turkish and Jewish characters
intermingle and negotiate the island’s marketplace and political landscape, one can assume a
mixed pool of languages that would seem to deeply complicate these relations. Even within the
378

Bartels also inquires into “what it means to be ‘of Malta’”. In Barabas’s case, she concludes,
to be of Malta “means [ … ] domination. Calling Barabas “a capitalizing victim of imperialism”,
Bartels sees Barabas as “exploit[ed]” by the more powerful communities occupying the island. I
disagree with this assessment. As I argue later in this chapter, Barabas rejects the possibility of
domination by drawing upon his keen sense of Malta’s political atmosphere and his ability to
make use of the Christians and Turks, as well as the rest of the islanders, to his advantage. See
Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation and Marlowe (Philadelphia: U of
Philadelphia P, 1993) 83. Print.
366

play’s specified ethnic groups, some were multilingual; Ottoman Turkish, for instance, was a
conglomerate of Turkish, Arabic and Persian. Of course, the play must be in English for the sake
of the audience, but Marlowe is careful to inject the work with linguistic difference. This point is
borne out by Barabas’s deployment of multiple languages, which, at times, seem to be uttered
only for purposes of linguistic confusion. Speaking at various times Latin, Italian, Spanish and
French, the majority of the instances of his linguistic mutability are spoken in soliloquies or
asides. Barabas curses the seizure of his wealth in the presence of Ferneze in Italian and dons the
French language as part of his disguise as a French musician. Otherwise, Barabas’s use of
foreign tongues is not plot-driven or significant to the particular scene, other than to demonstrate
his global knowledge gained in the marketplace. More importantly, the multiple languages of the
play indicate a lack of linguistic unity on multivalent Malta. The “citizens” of Malta are
altogether silent, indicating that Marlowe’s play does not recognize the only possible “national”
body on the island.
“Every One’s Price is Written on his Back”
As discussed in my introduction, early modern official nationalism is not necessarily
about the people of the nation; natio is subject to the nation as defined by the crown, whose
emphasis is on allegiance to the monarch, not the land or the popular cultures that function
sometimes independently of the sovereign. Whereas popular nationalism has its seat and source
in the people, official nationalism imposes its vision of the nation from above, supposedly
providing the crown the means of gaining and preserving power. In this respect, the sovereign
and the state are partnered in this governmental project. However, as explained in chapter three,
the state and monarchy were not always in league and crown policy was often disregarded in
devotion to local custom. In his repeated language of league and policy, Marlowe demonstrates

367

what happens when power is unhinged from government and circulates independently of a locus
of centralized authority. The notion of allegiance so central to official nationalism—allegiance to
the crown, the state and to the nation as a unified body of subjects—is altogether absent in The
Jew of Malta, thus casting into doubt those very precepts as they were applied in official rhetoric
to early modern England. Barabas, though he appears as among the play’s most socially and
politically marginalized figures because of his status as a Jew, is keenly aware of the sinister
political landscape of Marlowe’s island; always cognizant of the machinations that mask as
governance, Barabas cuts through the disingenuous rhetoric of Malta’s rulers and exposes the
often empty nature of political discourse.
The absence of a Maltese populace removes from the play’s island any trace of the
governmental protections implied by nationhood. Designating the population as citizenry seems
to indicate the governmental structure of the island, but only in the vaguest of terms. The people
are not subjects of a sovereign monarch; this much is clear. However, Marlowe offers us very
little else in the way of explanation of the island’s leadership. A plausible reason for this
ambiguity is the fact that the foreign “rulers” of Marlowe’s play are only interested in gaining
power over the territory. This power is not governmental—no foreign force entering Marlowe’s
Malta seems particularly interested in achieving sovereign authority over the isle. The power
exercised in the play has no obvious connection to the “citizens of Malta” or to the nation more
generally. Law is rarely invoked; when questions of law do surface, it is only applied to serve the
interests of those in power, not to protect Malta’s ambiguous citizenry. Power in Marlowe’s play
resides in achieving possession of the strategic isle and controlling the terms of its global
marketplace. In this sense, government, if we may call it that, is a tool that is wholly self-serving
and without relation to the people. Marlowe’s representation of government on his island undoes

368

yet another thread of English official rhetoric, revealing a world ruled not by the inadequate
precepts of early modern political philosophers (with the exception of Machiavelli), but by
backhanded policy and strategy.
This disconnection of government from the people—both conceptually and in practice—
is wholly contrary to early modern political philosophies and to notions of nationhood more
generally. In his discussion of the city as a precursor to the formation of the commonwealth,
Francisco de Vitoria maintains that a city without a government protecting its interests is likely
to self-destruct. “If assemblies and associations of men are necessary to the safety of mankind,”
he conjectures,
it is equally true that such partnerships cannot exist without some overseeing
power or governing force [ … ] If all members of society were equal and subject
to no higher power, each man would pull in his own direction as opinion or whim
directed, and the commonwealth would necessarily be torn apart. The civil
community (ciuitas) would be sundered unless there were some overseeing
providence to guard public property and look after the common good [ … ] Just as
the human body cannot remain healthy unless some ordering force (uis
ordinatrix) directs the single limbs to act in concert with the others to the greatest
good of the whole, so it is with a city in which each individual strives against the
other citizens for his own advantage to the neglect of the common good.

379

Likewise, Sir Thomas Smith defends monarchy by citing its governmental protection of the
nation’s subjects: “Where one person beareth the rule they define a king, who by succession or

379

Vitoria, Political Writings. Eds Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1991). 9-10. Print.
369

election commeth with the good will of the people to that government [ … ] and doth seeke the
profit of the people as much as his owne”.

380

The governance of Malta refutes the above

political formulas. There is no “overseeing force” or “high power” commanding the limbs of the
Maltese body politic. The “ordering force” of government is reduced to simple brute force
practiced by the invading cultures who do not regard the citizenry, let alone protect the “common
good”. The “whim[s]” of the Knights, Turks and Spanish—command of the island’s lucrative
market and the concomitant wealth that comes with such domination—subjugate the citizenry,
putting into boldface the citizen’s nation-less status.
Rather than following the circuits of authority provided by governmental structures,
power circulates on Marlowe’s Malta in a haphazard and indeterminate manner, replicating the
political atmosphere of historical Malta. The island’s many shifts in leadership and the
underlying ambiguity surrounding Malta’s ownership in Marlowe’s play make the revolving
titles of governance practically meaningless. As explained above, Del Bosco declares to Ferneze
in negotiations regarding the sale of his slaves that “My lord and king hath title to this isle, / And
he means quickly to expel [the Turks] hence; [ … ] I’ll write unto his majesty for aid, / And not
depart until I see you free” (II.iii.37-41). We are made aware of the territorial and trade disputes
between the Turks, Spanish and the Knights that envelope the island and its surrounding seas in
the earliest moments of the play. In act one scene one when Barabas inquires into the status of
his ships “loaden with spice and silks” (I.i.45), the unnamed “Second Merchant” explains that
they “were wafted by a Spanish fleet / That never left us till within a league, / That had the
galleys of the Turks in chase” (I.i.95-7). The merchants of Malta, it seems, are under the
protection of the Spanish, which implies some kind of allied relationship between the islanders
380

Smith, De Republica Anglorum. Ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982) 53.
Print.
370

and the Spanish nation. However, the collusion of the Knights and the Spanish later in the play
nullifies this relation. This retraction of politicized arrangements is relentlessly repeatedly in the
th

work, echoing the chaotic struggle for power that characterized Malta in the 16 century.
Historically, the isle was handed over to the Knights by Spanish emperor Charles V, as
explained above, but this was not simply a gesture of generosity. The former Knights of St John
had largely shed their religious character by the time of their migration: in the words of Sir T.
Zammit, “their monastic vows were usually regarded as mere form, and they were remarkable
for their haughty bearing and worldly aspirations”.

381

Charles V’s decision to “present” Malta to

the Knights was one of policy. “Charles V was not without some ulterior motive in [ … ] giving
to the Order (in return for the annual token payment of a falcon) these islands from his
kingdom”, explains Ernle Bradford, the translator of Francisco Balbi di Correggio’s 1565 Siege
of Malta; “he undoubtedly saw that the militant Order of St John would be an excellent outer
382

bastion beyond his more important dominions, Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples”.

The

Knights of Malta, then, were little more than mercenaries aiding the Spanish in their economic
project in the Mediterranean. Largely stripped of their reputation and authority, the Knights “had
no option but to accept Charles V’s gift, for they had canvassed all the other rulers of Europe and
had everywhere met with indifference, prevarication, or a blunt refusal when they came to ask
383

for a new base and home”.

Though historical Malta maintained its own governmental unit, prior and following the
invasion of the Knights, this body, the Università, is never acknowledged in Marlowe’s play.
381

As quoted in Francisco Balbi di Correggio, The Siege of Malta (1565). Trans Ernle Bradford.
(London: Butler and Tanner, 1965) 8. Print.
382
Ibid, 11.
383

Ibid.
371

According to the National Archives of Malta,
this municipal body was founded around 1350 as a corporation defending local
interests – at a time when Malta and Gozo were ruled by the Aragonese from
Sicily. It was broadly similar to many town councils throughout the
Mediterranean regions of the Latin West [ … ] Its Council dealt with numerous
items of local business: it was responsible for the fortifications, the markets, and
the hygiene of the town. It could elect its own officials, raise taxes, and petition
384

the Crown.

This indigenous political body appears to have maintained some measure of power on the island;
however, the Knights limited their authority by setting up their own Università in the mid
1600’s. Established by Grand Master Homedes and relocated to Valletta, “its purpose was to
curtail the authority of [the Maltese nobles] and to ensure that the four Harbour Jurats [Maltese
385

magistrates] would come under the direct jurisdiction of the Knights Hospitaller”.

By

removing the Università from the play’s political landscape, Marlowe further de-nationalizes his
island, putting emphasis on the point that the absent Maltese are wholly at the will of non-native
forces whose interest in the island is based on monetary gain, not governmental order.
Though we cannot know for certain, it is likely that Marlowe was aware of the untenable
political situation of the Knights in Malta, for the potential Turkish invasion of the island was
broadly feared in England and Europe more generally. Elizabeth herself is quoted as saying “if
the Turks should prevail against the Isle of Malta, it is uncertain what further peril might follow

384

National Archive of Malta.
https://secure2.gov.mt/nationalarchives/Default.aspx?page_info_id=151. Web 14 June 2012.
385
Montalo, John. The Nobles of Malta, 1530-1800 (Valletta: Midsea Books, 1980) 119. Print.
372

to the rest of Christendom”.

386

Because the Turkish threat to Malta was a topic circulating in the

European imagination, particularly after the Great Siege of 1565, we can assume with relative
certainty that Marlowe was drawing upon actual accounts of the Mediterranean conflict when
th

composing his late 16 century work. Perhaps playing upon the English fears of governmental
disorder in both England and the British archipelagic territories that refused English rule,
Marlowe constructs a Maltese “nation” that amplifies the crises of authority that preoccupied the
Elizabethan crown, where the governmental authority of the state in the localities or the Irish
colonies could not be managed by Whitehall. Imagining a world without a centralized national
government and without the ideological rhetoric that located divine power in the person of the
monarch, Marlowe’s Malta presents a frightening theatrical spectacle in which base power is
negotiated through the terms of “policy” without the protection of governmental regulation.
Despite the political arrangement that appeared to place the Knights in political authority,
Marlowe’s Knights of Malta are obviously under the thumb of the Ottomans, who likewise claim
territorial rule over the isle and its shores. Though ostensibly “in league” with the Knights
(I.i.158), that the Turks claim tribute indicates by definition the Knights’ inability to free
th

themselves from the empire’s yoke. Tribute meant into the 19 century “A tax or impost paid by
one prince or state to another in acknowledgement of submission or as the price of peace,
security, and protection; rent or homage paid in money or an equivalent by a subject to his
sovereign or a vassal to his lord”.

387

Already under the protection of their European brethren

and considering the persistent warring over territory that characterizes the play, it would seem
386
387

Owen, 33.

“Tribute.” The Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012) Web. 3 May
2012.
373

that the powerful Ottoman Empire has laid claim in some respect to the strategically valuable
isle.
The Turks’ militant command over the seas and their aggressive stance when demanding
their tribute money points to a kind of agreement between the two peoples that is underscored by
submission. “A fleet of warlike galleys, Barabas / Are come from Turkey, and lie in our road”,
laments the “First Jew” in act one, his report revealing the power of the Turks to interfere in
Maltese trade by blocking the import of goods (I.i.145-46). Barabas’s response similarly makes
apparent the military intentions of the Turks and the historical conditions of the Knights’ tribute
to this foreign force:
Long to the Turk did Malta contribute,
Which tribute—all in policy, I fear—
The Turks have let increase to such a sum
As all the wealth of Malta cannot pay,
And now by that advantage thinks, belike,
To seize upon the town: ay, that he seeks (I.i.179-84)
Barabas, of course, is correct in his prediction; in the senate house of the next scene, the Turkish
Calymath and his Bashaws demand that the tribute be paid in full. They perform this injunction
in a kind of Machiavellian theatre. Once the Turks agree to a one month reprieve to allow the
Christians to collect the necessary funds, Calymath intones that “’tis more kingly to obtain by
peace / Than to enforce conditions by constraint” (I.ii.25-6). The disingenuous nature of this
claim has already been revealed in the opening lines of the scene when the First Bashaw reminds
the Christians of the loss of their last island habitation: “Know, Knights of Malta”, he declares,
“that we came from Rhodes, / From Cyprus, Candy, and those other isles / That lie betwixt the

374

Mediterranean seas—” (I.ii.2-4). This opening to the meeting between the imperial Turks and the
subjugated Christians seems intended to rhetorically reinforce the might of the Ottomans and
their ownership or control over various Mediterranean territories. As mentioned, the Ottomans
had forced the evacuation of the Christians from Rhodes, taking possession of the island in 1522.
Cyprus was likewise an Ottoman colony, captured by the Turks in 1570. Though Ferneze
attempts to ignore the implications of this hostile greeting—he replies, “What’s Cyprus, Candy
and those other isles / To us, or Malta?”—the Bashaw’s meaning is clear: Malta, like these
conquered isles, is in danger of folding altogether to Turkish rule (I.ii.5-6).
Because Malta lacks a national governmental infrastructure or a clear source or program
for the distribution of power, governmental titles are traded and exchanged like commodities
through negotiations based on broken leagues and “policy”, an obsessively reoccurring term in
the play. At various points in the work, Ferneze, the body of Knights and Barabas are granted the
title of governor. Presumably, governor would in this context be defined as “one who governs, or
388

exercises authoritative control over, subjects or inferiors; a ruler”.

Based upon the island’s

history linking it to Spain, one can assume that the governorship was granted to Ferneze by the
emperor Charles V when he handed over the isle to the then Knights of Rhodes.
But, the play itself does not provide an explanation for this transference of power. Nor
are there any representational shows that clothe Ferneze in the robes of authority. Rather, this
figure of governance seems no more than a common politician of ambiguous power, rather than
“a ruler” in any practical sense. Importantly, the title of governor is bandied around in the play in
such a manner as to drain it of any ideological import. There is no system of assigning the title of

388

“Governor.” The Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012) Web. 3 May
2012.
375

governor or ceremony in which this great authority is conferred; rather, positions of power are
awarded through simple utterance. “Bosco”, Ferneze announces after the newly drawn up league
between the Knights and the Spanish against the Turks, “thou shalt be Malta’s general; / We and
our warlike knights will follow thee” (II.iii.44-5). Likewise, when Barabas offers his aid to the
Turks in act five, allowing them to besiege the town, Calymath hands over governorship to the
Jew based only on Barabas’s power to deceive. Barabas surrenders up this title following the
Turkish takeover of Malta, and instead deals with the imprisoned Ferneze for the opportunity to
regain his wealth. In the bargain, Ferneze will be reinstated in his governmental post: “Governor,
I enlarge thee”, Barabas pronounces to the jailed Knight, who only moments ago had lost his
kingdom and thusly any claim to political power.
The ease with which positions of power are donned and cast-off is replicated in the
characters’ persistent play-acting performed with the intention to grasp at the unmoored authority
circulating the island. Abigail acts the convert to rescue her father’s money; Barabas plays the
friend to the Christians and Turk for his own gain; Barabas feigns allegiances with Lodowick,
Mathias, and the friars, even promising to convert during his scripted dialogue; he plays the part
of the French musician to kill off those who could implicate him in the deaths of Lodowick and
Mathias, etc. The roles performed in Malta’s political theatre seem to have little more
authenticity or legitimacy. The island’s political landscape is in perpetual flux; the Turks,
Christians and Spanish all claim political authority, yet these very assertions are undone by the
constant warring between the groups for uncontested power over the isle. Because Malta’s
ownership is unclear and because there is no discernable source or center of sovereign power on
the island—making authority as scattered and disunited as its populace—political titles are as
meaningless as those dispensed in the theatre to lowly actors strutting the stage as kings.

376

In a nation-less territory where the state, if one exists at all, is vulnerable to abrupt and
unregulated transferences of power, political culture is driven by self-interest and self-promotion,
rather than an allegiance to a governmental body or to the ideology of nationhood. On Marlowe’s
Malta, “policy”, in its most pejorative sense, is at the heart of political dealings. The work’s forementioned obsession with “policy” implies that the term had a kind of cultural currency during
the period. The term “policy”, in both the play and contemporary political treatises, is
characterized by its inherent slipperiness, its ability to slide from an expression of virtue or
ingenuity to malicious and unethical trickery. In Elyot’s Boke Called the Governour, for
instance, the philosopher argues that “the education or fourme of bringing up of the childe of a
gentilman, which is to have authorities in a public weale” should be approached using “the
policie of a wyse and connynge gardener”. The virtuous policy of intricate care and moral
instruction of this young plant will produce a likewise virtuous man “made propise or apte to the
goverance of a publicke weal”.

389

The lawyer’s education, Elyot asserts, demands dedication to

“the moste noble studie of morall philosophie, whiche teacheth both vertues, maners, and civile
policie”; such an understanding of policy will allow England’s “yonge men” to “serve
390

honourably theyr prince, and the publike weale of theyr countray”.

Policy in this context likely refers to “the art, study, or practice of government or
administration; the conduct of public affairs; political science.”

391

However, Elyot is wary of

policy’s second connotation. In his chapter entitled “Of fraude and disceyte, which be agayne

389

Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (1531) Ed. Henry Herbert Stephen Croft. Vol 1 (New
York: Burt Franklin, 1967): 28. Print.
390
Ibid, 161-62.
391

“Policy.” The Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012) Web. 3 May
2012.
377

Justyce”, Elyot considers the ease with which policy may be translated into vice; he even places
“policy”, a term so revered in his earlier quotations, as a practice that may be wrongly perceived
as honorable and just. He historically locates this slippage as a present day degradation of the
virtue: “That maner of injurie, whiche is done with fraude and disceyte, is at this present tyme so
communely practised, that if it be but a litle, it is called policie, and if it be moche and with a
visage of gravitie, it is than named and accounted for wisdome”.

392

In the same period and in the

same entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, “policy” is also defined as “a device, a contrivance,
an expedient; a stratagem, a trick”.

393

Public policy, it seems, takes up either of these definitions

depending upon the needs of the contending parties and the necessary means to achieve political
outcomes.
Machiavelli, who appears in vilified abstract form to introduce the play, is one of the
most astute readers and, perhaps, proponents of early modern political policy. Hated for his
unyielding honesty regarding the most successful (and oftentimes most unforgiving) means of
capturing and sustaining political rule, policy for Machiavelli was a cornerstone of his
philosophy. In his discussion on “how a ruler should act in order to gain reputation”, Machiavelli
warns against political neutrality in regard to his relations with warring nations; “a ruler is [ … ]
highly regarded if he is either a true ally or an outright enemy [ … ] This policy is always better
than remaining neutral”, he instructs, for “since if two powerful rulers near you come to blows,
either the eventual victor will become a threat to you, or he will not. In either situation, it will

392
393

Elyot, Vol 2, 214-15.
“Policy.” Ibid.
378

394

always be wiser to intervene in favour of one side and fight strongly”.

Machiavelli’s strategy

here is largely innocuous and straightforward, the stuff of military invention and national selfpreservation.
However, the political philosopher also subtly advocates for a more sinister form of
statecraft, one that proves a leader’s worth through overtly violent means. Of King Ferdinand of
Spain, Machiavelli writes that “he has become the most famous and glorious king in
Christendom” through less than savory methods:
This man attacked Granada at the beginning of his reign, and this campaign laid
the foundations of his state. First of all, he began this campaign when things were
quiet and when he was not afraid of being opposed: he kept the minds of the
barons of Castile occupied with that war, so that they would not plan any revolts.
And he meanwhile was acquiring prestige, and increasing his hold over them
before they were even aware of the fact [ … ] In order to undertake even greater
campaigns, he continued to make use of religion, resorting to a cruel and
apparently pious policy of unexampled wretchedness: that of hunting down the
Moors and driving them out of his Kingdom. Using this same cloak, he attacked
Africa; he invaded Italy; and recently he has attacked France. Thus he has always
plotted and achieved great things…”.

395

The formation of this great king’s reputation and of his celebrated state was generated by his
policy of violence and the manipulation of his people. Collecting the money of “the Church and [
… ] his subjects” to build his newly made “powerful army”, Ferdinand instrumentalized
394

Machiavelli, The Prince. Ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2001): 77. Print.
395
Ibid, 76-7.
379

religious belief for the sake of warfare and the accumulation of territory.

396

Machiavelli

ambivalently makes plain that Ferdinand’s kingly reputation was built upon “contrivance” and
“stratagem”; under the “cloak” of righteousness, he disenfranchised his subjects for imperial
purposes and the ethnic cleansing of his nation.
Machiavelli here indicates the Janus-faced nature of policy: Ferdinand’s strategy is both
“cruel” and “apparently pious”, both the stuff of “achievement” and of base “plot[ting]”.
Marlowe is likewise aware of policy’s multivalent meaning, for each of his political players is
“cloaked” in pretended allegiances and apparently well-versed in the type of policy articulated in
The Prince. Without a body of national law or a system of governmental contracts between
nations and between rulers and their subjects, the governmental ordering of Malta is entirely—
397

and untenably—reliant upon flimsy leagues, policy and feigned alliance.

“League” was also a term of especial significance in early modern political culture in
England. The first cited instance of “league” in the OED is in reference to a letter written by Sir
th

James Douglas, a 14 century Scotsman who led several successful attacks against the English
398

during the Wars of Independence, often invading the nation to the south.

In Douglas’s epistle

of 1452 addressed to King James II of Scotland, he vows to defend the borderlands and promises
396
397

Ibid, 77.

Howard S. Babb also recognizes the play’s preoccupation with the term “policy”, placing it
within the historical context of Elizabethan England. “In both its best and earliest sense [ … ] the
word refers to a righteous ordering by the government of public affairs for the good of the people
as a whole. In its alternative sense, policy designates the servicing of one’s private ends by
cunning or deceit: the normal Elizabethan version of Machiavellianism. This conflict must have
been close to the surface of the word during the 1590’s when pseudo-Machiavellian doctrine was
making its first impact on England—so close that I would guess the word hardly needed
conscious manipulation to reverberate with ironies”. Babb, “Policy in Marlowe’s The Jew of
Malta.” ELH 24.2 (1957) 85-94. JSTOR. Michigan State University Lib. 16 June 2012. Web.
398
“Douglas, Sir James.” A Dictionary of British History. Ed. John Cannon. Oxford Reference
Online (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012). Michigan State University Lib. 28 April 2012. Web.
380

his fealty to his sovereign. In it, he also swears to abandon any leagues that might run contrary to
his king’s interests:
I bind and oblige me to our said soverayne lord to revock [ … ] all leagues and
bands, if any hes been made be me in any tyme by gane, contrare to our said
soverayne lord; and binds me and obliss me, that I shall make na band, na ligg in
tyme coming, quhilk sall be contrar til his hienes.

399

The first recorded usage of this term was in the political ether of early modern Anglo-Scottish
relations. Leagues, in the context of Douglas’s letters, are unstable entities, subject to revocation
if the political need arises. Douglas’s promise that he will make “no ligg” that goes against the
king’s interest implies that contracts outside the king’s knowledge have, in fact, been drawn up
and may prove threatening to the sovereign, such that a legal document is necessary to attempt to
preclude this possibility.
A second and more contemporary example of the shiftiness of leagues is the reference by
Marlowe in the opening lines of Machiavelli’s introduction. “Albeit the world think Machiavel is
dead”, the play begins, “Yet was his soul but flown beyond the Alps, / And, now the Guise is
dead, is come from France / To view this land and frolic with his friends” (I.i.1-4). Significantly,
Marlowe here cites “The League”, a program designed by the Catholic House of Guise to
prevent Protestant Henry IV from becoming France’s sovereign. Following Henry’s ascension to
the throne, the leader of the Huguenots converted to Catholicism, and is reported to have claimed

399

Tytler, Patrick Fraser. “Appoyntement betwixt James II and James Earle Douglas.” History
of Scotland from the Accession of Alexander III, to the Union (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo,
1864): 387. Web.
381

that “Paris is well worth a mass”.

400

“The Guise” referred to above is likely the Cardinal of

Guise, whose daughter married James V of Scotland and gave birth to Mary Queen of Scots.
James V leagued himself with France against Henry VIII, his uncle. The “land” of “his friends”
to which Machiavel refers in the prologue, the “here in Britany” where he presents Marlowe’s
play is, of course, England; thus Marlowe links nefarious or politically suspect leagues to his
own nation (prologue, 4 and 29). As discussed in part two of this chapter, Elizabeth was herself
accused of breaking leagues and acting on policies both honest and otherwise.
Therefore, in the context of early modern European political machinations, the terms
“league” and “policy” were likely shot through with suspicion and mistrust, as Marlowe’s play
repeatedly bears out. As referenced above, the action of The Jew of Malta is propelled by a
broken league between the Knights and the Turks. Following the First Jew’s wary observation
that the “warlike manner” of the Turkish ambassadors undermines the notion that they’ve come
“for confirmation of a league”, Barabas disingenuously chides his brethren, saying “Fond men,
what dream you of their multitudes? / What need they treat of peace that are in league? / The
Turks and those of Malta are in league” (I.i.153-58). Barabas’s repetition of the term is ironic,
for he clearly perceives the “policy” of the Turks to demand a sum that the Knights cannot pay
“and [ … ] by that advantage [ … ] to seize upon the town”, thus dissolving the league and
nullifying the peace agreement. To counter the Turks’ strategy, the Knights league themselves
with the Spanish Del Bosco, vowing the destruction of their former allies. “Proud-daring
Calymath,” declares Ferneze, now emboldened with Spanish promises of military aid, “instead
of gold, / We’ll send thee bullets wrapped in smoke and fire. / Claim tribute where thou wilt, we
are resolved; / Honour is bought with blood, and not with gold” (II.iii.53-6). Ferneze’s
400

“Henry IV.” World Encyclopedia. Oxford Reference Online (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012)
Michigan State University Lib. 28 April 2012. Web.
382

pronouncement of their revised policy—here couched in the language of august political
philosophy—lays bare the often fraudulent nature of leagues and the hypocrisy that attends the
characters’ self-serving shifts in political allegiance. As Machiavelli warns his readers in The
Prince, “no government should ever believe that it is always possible to follow safe policies [ …
] prudence consists in the knowing how to assess the dangers, and to choose the least bad course
401

of action as being the right one to follow”.

“Right”, of course, should not be confused with

ethical, but instead best serving the present political purpose.
By aborting the league with the Turks, Ferneze willingly invites the destruction of his
own city. When the Bashaw returns to Malta to collect the tribute, Ferneze offers him the
following address:
Bashaw, in brief, shalt have no tribute here,
Nor shall the heathens live upon our spoil.
First will we raze the city walls ourselves,
Lay waste the island, hew the temples down,
And, shipping off our goods to Sicily,
Open an entrance for the wasteful sea,
Whose billows, beating the resistless banks,
Shall overflow it with their refluence (III.v.11-7).
Threatening no less than the violent disfigurement of the island and the implied massacre of the
citizens, Ferneze, the governor “hast broke the league” not as a means of achieving political
autonomy (the Knights will now be beholden to the Spanish) but as a momentary release from
paying the Turks their promised tribute. Unflinchingly and without regard for Malta’s future,
401

Machiavelli, 79.
383

Ferneze announces at the end of the scene, “by this answer, broken is the league, / And naught is
to be looked for now but wars, / And naught to us more welcome is than wars” (III.vi. 34-6).
The language of policy so proliferates Marlowe’s work as to discredit the very notion of
allegiance and to cast all policy as insidious. Without a social or governmental infrastructure
binding the disunited citizenry into an allied body politic, the isolated communities—the
Knights, the Turks, the Jews, the criminals, the Catholics—all function as centrifugal forces,
spinning outward from a destabilized center. The characters of Marlowe’s play pretend
allegiances only to shrug them off in the service of self interest or when politically expedient. As
one of Ferneze’s officers says of the Christians’ newly purchased slaves, “every one’s price is
written on his back” (II.iii.3).
A series of betrayals follows the Knights’ broken treaty; the Knights renege on their
agreement with the Jews allowing them to trade on Malta and instead confiscate their wealth;
during the scene of the Jews’ disenfranchisement, the Knights determine to take the whole of
Barabas’s wealth based on a slippery technicality; the Friars take Abigail into the nunnery based
not on her pretended desire for Christian rebirth but in the hope of her promiscuity; the Knights
align themselves with the Spanish; Abigail feigns her affection for Lodowick at her father’s
command; Barabas makes Ithamore his “only heir” (III.iv.43) following Abigail’s second
conversion, then promptly states that he will “pay [the slave] with a vengeance” (III.v.118 );
Ithamore blackmails his master as part of a plot hatched by Bellamira and Pilia-Borza, revealing
to them Barabas’s role in the murders of Lodowick and Don Mathias; and Ithamore announces
Barabas’s criminal acts to the governor in a public forum. On an island of “strangers”, transients
and politicians with no investment in social order or the protection of the citizenry, leagues
among characters or allegiances to community are hollow and theatrical. That the play is

384

permeated with political reversals, pretended social contracts, and disloyal communities indicates
a level of social disorder attributable, in part, to the nationless-ness of the island.
Barabas, of course, is the character most attuned to and practiced in policy; for this
reason, he is also wholly without allegiance to community. Marlowe’s Jew is keenly aware of his
socially marginalized status on the island and, in contrast, his great wealth that grants him a kind
of power superseding that of his Christian governors. Like a local magnate with coffers
exceeding those of the monarch, Barabas boasts that a single jewel in his possession is enough
“to ransom great kings from captivity” (I.i.32). The knights are likewise aware of the Jew’s
monetary supremacy; lacking sufficient funds to pay off the Turkish tribute, the Christian
governors must rely upon the Jews’ confiscated wealth. The speed with which Barabas regains
his fortune casts doubt upon the Christians’ ability to strip Barabas of his monetary power.
Unlike his Jewish brethren, Barabas is immediately alert to the Christians’ policy when the Jews
are called to the senate house in act one scene one. Following the theft of his wealth, Barabas
brings to the audience’s attention the multiplicity of meanings behind the term “policy”.
Responding to the First Knight’s assertion that to “break the league” with the Turks would
“prove but simple policy”, Barabas reveals the true nature of policy as it applies in the play:
Ay, policy, that’s their profession,
And not simplicity as they suggest.
The plagues of Egypt and the curse of heaven,
Earth’s barrenness, and all men’s hatred,
Inflict upon them, thou great Primus Motor!
And here upon my knees striking the earth
I ban their souls to everlasting pains

385

And extreme tortures of the fiery deep
That thus have dealt with me in my distress (I.ii.160-69).
In both usages of the word, policy refers to “trickery, duplicity”, rather than legitimate political
dealing.

402

Barabas rightly concludes that the political atmosphere generated by the Knights is

one of treachery and misdealings, citing this particular scene of betrayal not as an isolated
instance, but a political program, a “profession” practiced by the supposed authorities of Malta,
who retain only limited power over the isle. This recognition by the play’s titular character and
the curse that follows sets in motion a series of acts so violent that they threaten the very island
itself.
In his first act of vengeful scheming, Barabas instructs Abigail to pretend conversion in
order to retrieve his cache of jewels and money from the now-nunnery. “Be ruled by me,” he
instructs his daughter following the seizure of his wealth, “for in extremity / We ought to make
bar of no policy” (I.ii.272-73). The boundless and unregulated strategizing advocated here by
Barabas is reliant upon Abigail’s willingness to “dissemble”, another term used with unusual
frequency in Marlowe’s work. A practice linked in the play with the broken leagues and
dishonest policies that characterize the political landscape, dissembling unmoors Marlowe’s
characters from the limits imposed by their politicized identities and allows them to act out in a
403

deceptive theatre the roles most suited to enacting revenge.

402
403

Bevington, act one, footnote 161.

Several critics have pointed to Barabas’s perpetual dissembling as a sign of his empty inner
self. Bevington, for instance, posits Barabas’s unsatisfactory interior motivations as owing to his
close affiliation with the Vice character of Medieval morality plays and Marlowe’s use of
homiletic drama as the structural model for The Jew of Malta. Stephen Greenblatt refers to
Barabas as “the Jewish Knight of Non-Being”, examining Barabas’s scanty interiority in light of
his electric “playfulness”. Bartels similarly remarks that Barabas “consist[s] more of what he is
not than of what he is”. She describes Barabas’s elaborate set in act five as a mirror of his
386

The act of dissembling is an essentially theatrical practice. To dissemble —“to alter or
disguise the semblance of (one's character, a feeling, design, or action) so as to conceal, or
deceive as to, its real nature; to give a false or feigned semblance to; to cloak or disguise by a
feigned appearance”—is a quality of not only Marlowe’s characters but even of the physical
environment and materials of the play.

404

The Jew’s home is altered and transformed into a

nunnery; poison is masked by porridge and posies; the protective walls of the city are turned to
channels to usher in the Turkish invaders; and, finally, Barabas’s set intended for the death of
Calymath instead proves “a deep pit past recovery” (V.v.36) and the site of Barabas’s demise. In
this respect, not only the characters but the physical environment is shifty and untrustworthy.
Because Barabas possesses a special knowledge of policy’s mechanisms and illusions, he is able
to direct the characters of Marlowe’s work in a manner that either takes advantage of these
political manipulations or the ignorance of particular characters regarding the destabilized
environment that surrounds them.

405

The majority of the cast of Barabas’s theatre fail to

character, demonstrating the way in which he builds “one self after another without the substance
underneath”. I would argue that Barabas’s shifting character speaks not to his lack of interiority,
though his interior self is certainly difficult to determine. Rather, I place his dissembling in the
realm of the play’s politics. Barabas appears to lack an inner self because he has no allegiance to
other members of the play or to any particular community. He negotiates the play as an
autonomous force, motivated only by survival and self-gain. We are not made aware of his inner
self because it is unrevealed to the other characters, with whom he shares no trust or inward
emotion. It is Barabas’s very lack of conscience and his savvy knowledge of the play’s political
landscape that gives him his unlikely power on Marlowe’s island. See Bevington, Mankind, 21833, Greenblatt, “Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism,” Learning to Curse: Essays in Early
Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992) 40-58 Print and Bartels, 82-108.
404
“Dissemble.” The Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012) Web. 3
May 2012.
405
Sara Munson Deats and Lisa S. Starks consider Barabas a “surrogate playwright”,
characterizing him as the “playwright-director-stage manager-actor” of Marlowe’s work. It is
this spectacular agency to direct the actors of Malta that makes him a threatening character in
this nation-less, state-less space; he has a kind of power over the actions of the characters that
greatly supersedes that of its ostensible governors. See Munson Deats and Stark, “‘So neatly
387

negotiate this unsettled landscape. Abigail, Don Mathias, Don Lodowick, Pilia-Borza, Bellamira,
and the Friars all meet their deaths as part of Barabas’s politicized scene-writing. Even Ithamore,
Barabas’s pupil and accessory to his master’s many murders, falls prey to Barabas’s
machinations. “Oh, my master has the bravest policy,” Ithamore exclaims after the deaths of
Mathias and Lodowick; little does the slave know that he will be the victim of this murderous
policy following his betrayal of his mentor (III.iii.13.)
Only Barabas refuses to league himself with the multiple and contentious communities
inhabiting the island. His pretended alliances take place within the realm of his theatre and are
thus performances of political dissembling. Barabas’s fundamental theatricality is signaled by his
repeated use of asides, which serve to articulate his true intentions that radically contrast with his
performed utterances. From the first report of the Turkish fleet’s arrival on Malta, Barabas feigns
a commitment to the Jewish community who appear to rely upon his leadership. “Why, let ’em
come, so they come not to war; / Or let ’em war, so we be conquerors. / [Aside] Nay, let ’em
combat, conquer and kill all, / So they spare me, my daughter, and my wealth” (I.i.149-52).
Wholly disinterested in the fellow members of his “scattered nation”—“these base slaves”, as he
refers to them, and cognizant of the impossibility of Jewish rule on Malta, Barabas cares only
about the contents of his coffers and Abigail. Barabas’s allegiance to his daughter is fleeting,
however; with her conversion, Barabas has his daughter killed (I.ii.216).
In contrast to the Christians of the play, Barabas announces to the audience the unmaking of his feigned promises at the moment of their utterance. Aware of Lodowick’s desire to
possess Abigail and the advantages this scenario may offer him to avenge himself on Ferneze,
Barabas engages in the following performed exchange with the governor’s son:
plotted, and so well perform’d’: Villain as Playwright in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta.” Theatre
Journal 44.3 (1992): 375-89. Print.
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Lodowick [To himself]:
I hear the wealthy Jew walked this way;
I’ll seek him out, and so insinuate
That I may have a sight of Abigail,
For Don Mathias tells me she is fair.
Barabas [Aside]: Now will I show myself to have more of the
serpent than the dove; that is, more knave than fool.
Lodowick: Yond walks the Jew; now for fair Abigail.
Barabas [Aside]: Ay, ay, no doubt but she’s at your command.
…………………………………………………………………
Lodowick: Well, Barabas, canst help me to a diamond?
Barabas: Oh, sir, your father had my diamonds
Yet I have one left that will serve your turn.
(Aside) I mean my daughter—but e’er he shall have her,
I’ll sacrifice her on a pile of wood.
I ha’ the poison of the city for him,
And the white leprosy (II.iii.32-55).
Echoing his earlier claim that “we Jews can fawn like spaniels when we please, / And when we
grin, we bite”, Barabas points to the changeable or “cloaked” nature of performances in sites of
political warfare; to avenge the Christians’ politicized disenfranchisement of the Jews, Barabas
levels the field by prompting the death of the governor’s son and heir (II.iii.20-1). Bent only on
self-interest, Barabas likens his daughter to the murdered Iphigenia with no compunction.
Barabas engages in this double-sided dialogue repeatedly, betraying the slipperiness of

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rhetorical gestures, particularly when deployed in the name of political maneuvering. Yet another
unstable element of Marlowe’s island setting, the mutability and manipulation of language
proves the most potent weapon of dissembling and policy. Among Barabas’s rhetorical
gymnastics is his almost schizophrenic address to Abigail, in which he simultaneously performs
the role of an enraged father while instructing his daughter in the recovery of his jewels.
Responding to Jacomo’s accusation of Abigail’s political blindness, Barabas responds:
Barabas: Blind, friar? I reck not thy persuasions.
The board is markèd thus that covers it.
[He makes a sign of the cross.]
For I had rather die than see her thus.—
Wilt thou forsake me too in my distress,
Seducèd daughter? (Aside to her) Go, forget not—
Becomes it Jews to be so credulous?
(Aside to her) Tomorrow early I’ll be at the door.
No, come not at me! If thou wilt be damned,
Forget me, see me not, and so be gone.
(Aside) Farewell, remember tomorrow morning.
Out, out, thou wretch! (I.ii.353-63).
Speaking in double tongues—prevaricating while cueing the audience into the intent that drives
his performance—Barabas enacts the dual sided nature of policy and displays its dissembling
mechanisms.

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Each manifest expression is coupled with its latent meaning (“forget me, see me

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I would add to Deats and Starks’s discussion above regarding Barabas as director of the play
an examination of Barabas’s internal scripting of the stage directions, how he uses embedded
asides to place characters in the play space and order up the play’s action according to his
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not, and so be gone” in performance, “go, forget not” in aside). Policy in the play, and in the
political arena more generally, is usual masked in carefully crafted declarations of pretended
political philosophy. Consider, for instance, Ferneze’s pronouncement at the end of the play,
following Barabas’s death, the massacre of the Turkish soldiers and the capture of Calymath: “let
due praise be given / Neither to fate nor fortune, but to heaven” (V.v.122-23). The governor’s
banal nod to the Christian god smacks of hypocrisy, for it cannot conceal the fact that treachery,
murderous deceit, and treason were the actual causes for the Knights’ return to a limited form of
power. Barabas’s repeated asides in which he speaks from both sides of his mouth denies this
“cloaking” of intent, laying bare the rhetorical manipulations that are the linguistic currency of
the play of politics.
With the title of governor bestowed upon him by the Turks, Barabas delivers the
following soliloquy:
Thus hast thou gotten, by thy policy,
No simple place, no small authority:
I now am governor of Malta. True,
But Malta hates me, and, in hating me,
My life’s in danger; and what boots it thee,
Poor Barabas, to be the governor,
designs. Because the stage directions are made self-evident in the dialogue, The Jew of Malta
assuages the ‘struggle for the text’ as articulated by Margaret Jane Kidnie. Kidnie holds suspect
both the editorial interventions of contemporary editors and a pedagogy that authenticates
through teaching these perhaps unsound additions to early modern works. Barbara Hodgdon
refers to moments in dramatic texts where the material of the play practically writes its own stage
directions as “verbal scene painting”. Kidnie, “Text, Performance, and the Editors: Staging
Shakespeare’s Drama.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.4 (2000) 456-73. JSTOR Michigan State
University Lib, 29 May 2012. Web. Hodgdon, “Anthony and Cleopatra in the theatre.” The
Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy Ed Claire McEachern (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2002) 241-63. Print.
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Whenas thy life shall be at their command?
No, Barabas, this must be looked into;
And since by wrong thou got’st authority,
Maintain it bravely by firm policy,
At least unprofitably lose it not.
For he that liveth in authority,
And neither gets him friends nor fills his bags,
Lives like the ass that Aesop speaketh of,
That labours with a load of bread and wine
And leaves it off to snap on thistle tops.
But Barabas will be more circumspect.
Begin betimes; Occasion’s bald behind;
Slip not thine opportunity, for fear too late
Thou seek’st for much but canst not compass it.— (V.ii.27-46).
Authority, as propounded upon in this passage, is not a tangible, stable entity emanating in
ceremonious fashion from a divine source. Rather, it is without guarantee and without honor.
Unapologetically attributing his garnering of authority to political and personal manipulation,
Barabas recognizes the futility of authority on the island. Possessing the robes of governorship
does not ensure the protection of his person, for authority does not cast any sort of reverence or
semblance of divinity on the wearer, particularly in the Jew’s case. Because authority is not
tethered to a single source or granted any meaningful significance on Malta, Barabas’s life “shall
be at [the] command of either the Knights, the Spanish or the Turks; “their command” is
exceptionally ambiguous here, for who rules Malta at this point? A governor at the mercy of

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those not imbued with political authority is no governor at all, as Barabas realizes. Barabas’s
“circumspect[ion]”—a knowledge of the workings of politics not demonstrated by those who
ostensibly rule Malta—reminds him that when one examines the back of Opportunity’s bald
head, one discovers that “every one’s price is written on his back” (II.iii.3).
Marlowe’s Malta is an ever shifting, center-less landscape of political plotting. Without a
sovereign and without a state, empty leagues and devious policy-making make up the
contrivances of Marlowe’s Machiavellian theatre. In this island playhouse, cultural, ethnic or
political allegiance is altogether absent, for there is no nation binding the ambiguous “citizens of
Malta”. Machiavel’s philosophy stated in the prologue to “weigh not men, and therefore not
men’s words”, is particularly relevant here: the men of Malta wield only the semblance of
legitimate authority and their words—the language that makes up the political rhetoric and
professions of policy—are mutable and without substance. The formlessness of sovereign
authority and the body politic more generally has detrimental effects on the island’s geopolitical
positioning, placing the island itself in a state of acute vulnerability.
“Within this Isle, In Malta Here”
As the prologue suggests, “this isle”, this “here” of the play is both Malta and England,
territories that are likewise vulnerable because of their geographic position. Marlowe
immediately establishes the position of the Mediterranean island as pivotal site of the global
commerce , which envelopes the isle in the potential for invasion. In act one scene one, Barabas
revels in the myriad imports that fill his already overflowing coffers:
So that of thus much that return was made,
And, of the third part of the Persian ships,
There was the venture summed and satisfied.

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As for those Samnites and the men of Uz
That brought my Spanish oils and wines of Greece,
Here have I pursed their paltry silverings (I.i.1-6).
Also cited are Barabas’s goods imported from Egypt and Cairo, thus pointing to the far-expanse
of his reach into global commerce. The Jew’s profits have so accumulated that he can barely
keep count of the monies filling his private coffers, and, as we learn after his disenfranchisement
by the Christians, these imported commodities are to him so readily available that he can almost
immediately replenish his accounts. In contrast, the Knights have so depleted their coffers “by
reason of the wars, that robbed our store” that they are dependent upon the Jews to make up the
money owed to the Turks (I.i.47). The implications here are two-fold: one, the burgeoning trade
on Malta brings immense wealth to those able to harness its forces, and two, this extraordinary
wealth does not serve the populace of the island of the whole or the Knights who purport to
govern the isle.

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The capital of individuals and isolated communities far outreaches that of the supposed
state. Based upon the influx of goods entering the island shores, the failure of Malta to produce
and export domestic products and the trade wars between the Jews, Turks and Spanish, it is safe
to assume that the island is wholly unregulated in regard to trade and commerce. Lacking a
governmental structure to design and implement restrictions to trade and the individuals profiting
in this unregulated space, capital circulates in a haphazard fashion; the vast wealth achieved by
the Jews is seized by the Christians, the league with the Turks is broken so that Del Bosco’s
slaves can be sold on Malta and the Turks allow the Knights’ debt to grow to such an extent that
it is unpayable. Like all other aspects of this culture constructed by Marlowe, trade is at the
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The subtitle quote is from (V.ii.67-8).
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mercy of policy in its most pejorative sense. The wealth of the island does not fall within the
purview of the “government”. No taxes are levied, and without some sort of “state” collection of
wealth, the island is at extreme risk of collapse. Lacking sovereign autonomy as a political body,
there is no investment, monetarily or ideologically, in the interests of the native population.
Without justifiable claims to independent autonomy and no control of the monies coming
into Malta, the island is lacking any means of defense. Exacerbating this vulnerable position is
the absence of political community; on an island populated by others serving their own interests
rather than those of a non-existent state, and several “governments” all making claims to power,
it is difficult to imagine a successful mustering of the disunited communities to defend the island.
Who, exactly, are the invaders when there is no indigenous population? Conversely, what group
can claim the status of Malta’s defenders when the rulers of the island are impossible to
determine? Because Malta is a site of constant warfare, un-national in its always fluctuating
rulers, its disembodied body politic and its lack of investment in defense, Malta is immeasurably
vulnerable as an island territory subject to the several forces invading the isle from the
surrounding seas.
The great volatility of Malta’s geopolitical status is due in part to its ideal position at the
crossroads of emergent globalization. Isolated by the sea but encircled by lucrative trade routes
reaching from Spain to Turkey, Malta is repeatedly besieged by foreign forces; its geopolitical
advantage was the very cause of its vulnerability. Niccolo Nelli’s 1565 map “Il Porto Di Malta”
bears this out, depicting the flood of Turkish ships penetrating the island’s waterways and
territory (fig. 15). Illustrating in graphic detail the Great Siege in 1565, Nelli’s map depicts the
Turkish attack on Malta, which had been fortified by the island’s conquerors. A wall of Turkish
soldiers flood the western border of the map, spilling from ships docked in the bay west of what

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is now Vallette, near the island of Manoel. At the bottom of the map, we see the violent clashing
of Turkish and soldiers of the Knighthood. Victory against the Ottomans was largely due to the
injection of troops sent to the island by Pius IV, the Vice-Roy of Sicily, Don Garcia de Toledo
and Alfonso Il d’Este, Duke of Ferrara.

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In the bottom right is pictured Jean Parisot de la

Valette, the Grand Master of the Order of Malta considered the leader of the Siege. The current
capital of Malta bears his name.
The Maltese are depicted as naked generic figures fighting under the flag of the Knights.
During the Siege, the Knights were backed by “three thousand Maltese out of the whole of the
island”, according to Bradford’s translation of Correggio.

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Most of the Ottomans are reduced

to literal stick figures with no discernable characteristics aside from their Turbans, whereas the
Knights are decked in sophisticated war gear. Like most colonial portraits, the supposedly
barbaric Maltese—the indigenous peoples underserving of their own lands—serve their
conquerors. Their only discernable quality is their nakedness, signally both their incivility and
their lack of national signification; they are unmarked nationally or culturally. The focus of the
cartographic image is the savage battle for territory fought between the Christian Knights and
Ottoman Turks on a foreign island. In the forefront of the image of the Siege is a Turk who lies
dead on the battlefield, his leg removed. To the left of this figure is another Turk held by the
neck of a European soldier who is in the process of running him through with his sword; another
Turk lies prostrate on the ground as the European’s sword hangs menacingly above him. A
decapitated Turk lies above this image of savage violence, his head and Turban lying separately
at a distance from the dismembered body. Above this scene flies the flag of the Knights carried

408
409

Setton, 858-59.
Bradford, 41.
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by an unclothed Maltese, visually underscoring the fact that the indigenous people of the island
were little more than an unimportant, undifferentiated collection of bodies sacrificed to a foreign
culture that has seized their territory.
Marlowe’s play captures the Siege in miniature. The Spanish and the Knights league
together and defeat the Ottomans on Malta’s shores. The joining together of European forces
indicates the strategic and economic value of the island. This is also a religious battle, and
therefore this economic value is coded in the language of spirituality. However, the Maltese are
nowhere to be found. The total absence of the Maltese in Marlowe’s play demonstrates that the
history and culture of the native population is wiped clean from the colonial narrative composed
by the dominant imperial cultures. By evacuating the Maltese from the Siege, Marlowe
underscores the people’s nationless-ness, for the protection of national territory is among the
most pressing demands of a nation’s government and a precept of nationalist sentiment necessary
to muster troops. As both the play and Nelli’s cartographic portrait of the Siege make plain, it is
Malta’s island-ness and its geopolitical position at the crossroads of global trade that creates its
vulnerability and the native people’s subjugation to outside forces. Malta’s isolated island
location and, in Marlowe’s play, its lack of an indigenous army funded through some sort of state
infrastructure make it rife for colonial conquest; the seas usher in foreign bodies and the
waterways that jut into the isle allow for easy access to the inner-most portions of the island
where the cities or colonial centers are often located.
Ithamore and Bellamira are among the citizens forced to reside in Malta under the rule of
foreign powers, she to ply her trade and Ithamore as a slave transported and sold on the island. In
a parody of one of Marlowe’s most famous poems, Ithamore woos Bellarmira by fantasizing the
flight of these two non-native citizens from the embattled island to an idealized Greece:

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… we will leave this paltry land
And sail from hence to Greece, to lovely Greece.
I’ll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece.
Where painted carpets o’er the meads are hurled
And Bacchus’ vineyards overspread the world,
Where woods and forests go in goodly green,
I’ll be Adonis, thou shalt be Love’s Queen.
The meads, the orchards, and the primrose lanes,
Instead of sedge and reed, bear sugar-canes.
Thou in those groves, by Dis above,
Shalt live with me and be my love (IV.ii.96-107).
Ithamore imagines the escape of he and his lover from Malta into a classical narrative, where
each would inhabit the form of mythological figures. Imaginatively leaving behind the
displeasing terrain of “sedge and reeds” born of the wet island soil, Ithamore constructs a land
brimming with luxurious resources and “overspread” with Nature’s bounty. Malta is, in contrast,
a site of shorn of these expressions of Nature’s beauty, Gaunt’s “paltry” island of disorder,
subject to “envious siege” from the oceans, a “tenement” for foreign nations “bound in with
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shame” (II.i.60-4).

If the slave’s Malta is a site of subjection—subject to the sea that transported him into

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Marlowe’s play predates Shakespeare’s Richard II, so Marlowe was clearly not drawing on
Shakespeare’s language. It would dangerous to speculate that Shakespeare was gesturing toward
Marlowe’s characterization of Malta in The Jew. I think it is significant, however, that both
playwrights deploy this term in describing early modern islands, pointing perhaps to the island’s
comparatively diminutive geographical size in contrast to the continent. Shakespeare, Richard II.
nd
The Riverside Shakespeare 2 Ed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997): 847-83. Print.
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slavery, subject to the sea that entraps him in this state of subservience—then the conqueror’s
Malta is a place valued only for its monetary and military gain. Because the Knights, Turks and
Spanish have no national identification with the island, no allegiance to the non-native territory,
it can be obliterated when policy demands it. As quoted above, Ferenze announces to the Turkish
Bashaw that before the Knights would pay the tribute they would “raze the city walls [… ] lay
waste the island” and “open an entrance for the wasteful sea / Whose billows, beating the
resistless banks [ would] overflow it with their refluence” (III.v.13-18). Ferneze’s threat to give
the island over to the destructive sea is based only on economics: having closed off trade to the
Turks, Ferneze would redirect the flow of wealth to Sicily and their European partners. By
inviting the sea into the land and breaking down all the island’s fortifications against Nature’s
violent “refluence”, the water would swallow up the geographically minute and wholly
disconnected island landmass. Calymath answers this assertion by threating to transform “proud
Malta to a wilderness” (III.vi. 25). At the mercy of its multiple colonial overlords, the physical
territory of the island is valued not as a gift of Nature, but as a body rent by non-native forces.
Outside the island’s boundaries, the sea offers little relief from the violence erupting on
the isolated territory. The first scene of the play announces the contest over oceanic territory that
underpins Malta’s colonial politics. Barabas first chides the Second Merchant for travelling the
“Malta road” with such a rich store without the protection of the Turks (I.i.86). The Merchant’s
reassurance to Barabas that his “ships are safe [ … ] and all the merchants / With all their
merchandise are safe arrived” (I.i.50-1) is belied by the Second Merchant’s illustration of the sea
as a unregulated playground of battling Spanish and Turkish ships “in chase” (I.i.97). Just the
Merchant’s seemingly anxious repetition of the merchandise’s safety betrays the fact that the
waterways surrounding Malta are oceanic sites of danger and piracy without law and without

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acknowledgment of imperial rights, if such exist. Twice are the various forces accused of
“vail[ing] not” to the opposing ships (II.ii.11).
Nelli’s cartographic narration of Malta visually evinces the hazards wrought by Malta’s
untenable sea-locked position; the entirety of the channel to the west is overrun with invading
ships. In the northwest corner of the map, foreign ships are anchored virtually on top of one
another, obscuring the sea itself off the island coast. Antonio Lafreri’s 1565 map, “Nuouo
disegno dell’Isola di Malta et suoi forti”, likewise marks out the ocean space as a warzone of
competing colonial powers (fig. 16). Surrounded on three sides by Ottoman ships, the solitary
island is defenseless against the forces entering its ocean space. The imperial ships are wildly out
of proportion, some as large as the Knights’ fort constructed in the near-center of the island at the
end of the long channels of the Marsamxett and Grand Harbors that cut into the island from the
eastern shore. These oversized ships appear to so bear down on the island that conquest seems
inevitable.
Significantly, it is Malta’s channels that allow for the Turks’ invasion of Marlowe’s
island. Upon the Turks’ landing after the broken league and declaration of war, Barabas informs
Calymath that
… here, against the sluice,
The rock is hollow, and of purpose digged
To make a passage for the running streams
And common channels of the city.
Now whilst you give assault unto the walls,
I’ll lead five hundred soldiers through the vault
And rise with them i’ the middle of the town,

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Open the gates for you to enter in,
And by this means the city is your own (V.ii.86-94).
Presumably, the city here referred to is Valetta, the site of the Ottoman attack during the Siege.
Valetta is located at the far end point of the peninsula on Malta’s eastern coast, which is
surrounded by the Marsamxett Harbor on the north and the Grand on the south. Entirely
surrounded by the sea, is it safe to assume that the city was permeated with water, thus
demanding some sort of infrastructure to protect it from the destructive ocean. Conversely, here
the very channels intended to control “the running streams” instead invites the flow of Turks into
the surprised city. Valetta’s defenses—the city walls and gates, its “passage[s]”—are useless
against the sea and that which it carries.
Having successfully entered and captured the city, Calymath delivers the following
speech celebrating the island’s geopolitical uniqueness:
Thus have we viewed the city, seen the sack,
And caused the ruins to be new repaired,
Which with our bombards’ shot and basilisks’
We rent in sunder at our entry,
Two lofty turrets that command the town.
And now I see the situation,
And how secure this conquered island stands—
Environed with the Mediterranean sea,
Strong countermured with other petty isles,
And toward Calabria backed by Sicily,
Where Syracusian Dionysius reigned—

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I wonder how it could be conquered thus (V.iv.1-12).
Calymath’s ode to Malta buckles under the weight of the following scenes; with Barabas’s aid,
the island is recaptured by the Christians. But even prior to this revelation, the Turk’s speech is
shot through with contradiction, thus undoing the very sentiments it sets out to record, including
the Turks’ supposed victory. Only after reducing the island city to “ruins”, then reconstructing
the fortifications intended to stave off such destruction can Calymath “see” the island as the
Turks’ imperial stronghold. In Calymath’s flawed vision of Malta, the island is both “secure” and
“conquered”. The “two lofty turrets”—broken symbols of the Christian’s imperial might—are
raised a second time by an imperial force that will suffer its own downfall in the very next
scenes. Calymath’s reference to Sicily is likewise strange, for Sicily, that land beyond the
protective sea, historically “backed” the Christians against the Turks to protect their monetary
interests. Weirdly, Calymath seems as unaware of the Christian leagues surrounding him as he
does of Barabas’s vicious trap. Erecting imperial fortifications on Malta’s shifting ground,
Calymath’s ironic paean to the island—“I wonder how it could be conquered thus”—seems only
to reinforce the play’s take on the untrustworthy nature of rhetoric.
The boundaries of the island, the boundaries of the sea, the boundaries of the citizen body
and the boundaries of political language are fluid, readily penetrated or altogether uncertain. As
if to give visual credence to the volatility of unstable borders, Marlowe has “the Jew’s body,
throw[n] [ … ] o’er the walls” of the city (V.i.58). Barabas’s foundational marginality and his
ability to seize upon the opportunities that this marginality allows on Malta is here illustrated by
his half dead body: unconscious but alive, his liminal person is physically cast outside the
perimeters of the play’s only city, the living center of Malta. Made a literal outlander, Barabas’s
person is here visually represented in the abstract social space that he has occupied since the

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play’s beginning: a space of both persecution and alarming power. For Barabas’s ability to
negotiate the island’s unsteady terrain and to move seamlessly across Malta’s shifting borders is
his utter lack of loyalty and complete indifference to community. His first declaration following
his revival is, “My name is Barabas; I am a Jew” (V.ii.71). Barabas’s announcement is not a
statement of allegiance to the Jewish people of Malta; in the moments following Barabas’s
disenfranchisement in act one scene two, Barabas pointedly severs himself from his Jewish
community, calling his supposed brethren “earth-mettled villains [ … ] no Hebrews born”
(I.ii.79) and “base slaves” (I.ii.216). What Barabas proclaims in this pivotal scene is his
otherness, his essential difference. It is this difference and his willingness to make use of it that
eventually earns him the governorship. For Barabas presents to writers of the English nation
perhaps the most frightening of prospects: a subject who casts off the nation, who derives his
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very power from his nationless-ness, a subject who “is always nearest to [him]self”.
Part Two: Dystopia Insulae
Introduction

“Thus trolls our fortune in by land and sea,” Barabas ruminates contentedly in act one
scene one, after the arrival of his commodities from afar. “And thus we are on every side
enriched [ … ] What more may heaven do for earthly men / Than thus to pour out plenty in their
laps, [ … ] Making the sea their servant and the winds / To drive their substance with successful
blasts?”, he asks, considering the divine blessings casts upon the people of Malta (I.i.101-10).
Being by the Almighty so set in the maine Ocean, as that shee is thereby the High
Admirall of the Seas, and in the terrestriall Globe so seated, as that she is worthily
reputed both The Garden of Pleasure, and The Storehouse of Profit, opening her
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This is Bevington’s translation of Barabas’s “Ego mihimet sum semper proximus”, which he
attributes to Terence. Bevington, footnote 188, act 1.
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Havens every way, fit to receive all forraine trafficke, and to utter her owne into
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all other parts.

Speed’s English island, the “Soveraigne Lady and Empresse of the rest”, bears a striking
rhetorical resemblance to Barabas’s Mediterranean isle described above. Both islands are gifts
from a generous God, who has made the island overflow with resources. The sea is the islands’
benefactress, allowing the ocean roads of the global market to flow around them; the seas’
naturally boundary-less waters invite the commodities to the island and make possible the easy
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transport of exports. It is the island itself that bestows this divine state upon its inhabitants.

In both cases, these idealized projections of the island are dismantled, the rhetoric of the
island’s utopic character revealed as just that, carefully crafted language undone by stubborn
geographic, governmental and cultural reality. For Barabas, the island that promises him such
wealth almost immediately strips him of both his store and his social power, at least temporarily.
The juridical ambiguity surrounding the governance of the isle, which makes possible the
disenfranchisement of the Jews’ wealth, is due in part to Malta’s geography. Disconnected from
the nations that surround it and of great economic value to nations and empires alike, Malta is at
the mercy of the most militarily powerful force seeking to plant itself in the center of the
Mediterranean global crossroads. “On every side” is a nation bent on commanding the island and
depriving the citizens of their autonomy. Governance of the island population itself, if it exists at
all, is indeterminate, for the island is constantly changing hands. The governmental organization

412

Speed, John. History of Great Britaine. EEBO. Web. Michigan State University Lib. 11 Jan
2010. 155.
413
The subtitle quote is from Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, “Upon the Frontispiece.” (London:
Printed for Iohn Marriott, Iohn Grismand, and Thomas Dewe, 1622) EEBO Michigan State
University Lib, 30 June 2012. Web.
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of the citizenry appears an afterthought in contrast to the mutable rules of trade. Likewise,
though the ocean provides the convenient means of receiving and exporting goods, it is also an
oceanic warzone, where these goods might be seized because of a lack of effective regulation.
The sea is “the servant” of trade, but not of those who impossibly seek to harness its power.
Speed’s island narrative is similarly disingenuous and meticulously constructed out of
flimsy materials. England does not “command the seas”; like Marlowe’s Malta and More’s
Utopia, the island is exposed to the seas’ force and the foreign nations that circle its shores. The
“open havens” of Speed’s description make accessible military invasion; the arms of the sea that
jut into England, like the Bristol Channel and The Wash south of Nottingham invite outside
troops inland, penetrating the largely unregulated island borders. Nature’s “storehouse” does not
provide the materials necessary to defend these oceanic boundaries; without domestic access to
iron, England was forced to depend on foreign sources to arm the soldiers of their garrisons. In
contrast to Malta, England was at a distinct geographical disadvantage in regard to access to the
global marketplace. Speed’s image of the “forraine trafficke” travelling to one of Europe’s
northernmost islands is belied by the discourse of England’s otherworldliness, which celebrates
414

its isolated position “on the edge” of the map.

Though foreign commodities reached

England’s shores, the nation was hardly a global powerhouse, nor did it enjoy Malta’s
geographic prominence in the midst of these burgeoning markets.
The visual and rhetorical narratives propagated by Speed and Camden depended almost
entirely upon the notion of England’s island-ness, as my earlier chapters demonstrated.
England’s supposed island geography provided these multimedia constructions a seemingly
ready-made delineation of the national space and an over-neat philosophy of cultural,
414

I borrow this term from the title of Kathy Lavezzo’s Angels on the Edge of the World:
Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000-1534 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006). Print.
405

governmental and territorial unity. Marlowe’s play explodes these notions. Natural nationhood is
rendered a politically absurd concept; Malta’s geography traps within the contested island space
a disharmonious grouping of ethnicities and religious communities. The shared presence of these
transient and non-native groups is based entirely upon economic opportunity, and therefore
allegiances are broken as quickly as they’re made. Impossible to easily categorize among
national lines, Malta’s citizens are radically heterogeneous, lacking a common language, a
shared historical narrative or a governmental infrastructure. Absent also is an ideological
infrastructure, an official rhetoric to bind together this un-national territory and people.
Genealogy: “The Curtaine of Obscure Antiquity”
Despite Speed’s visual lexicon on his map of the “Kingdome of England”, which so
easily homogenizes and generically catalogs the various classes of the English, Marlowe’s Malta
more fittingly pictures the island population. The playwright’s dramatis personae, which
immediately makes apparent the separate nations or groupings that populate the island, can
likewise be applied to the myriad nationalities and historical genealogies that make up the
“English” isle. Multinational and multilingual, the many languages spoke on the island (English,
Scottish, Irish, Cornish) make Spenser’s despairing notion of “kingdom of [England’s]
language” an unrealistic projection of English unity.

415

Whereas Speed and Camden attempt to

suppress Britain’s multinational character in the service of English nationalism, their rhetorical
manipulations betray this rewriting of the national theatre. Speed and Camden both used
manipulated cartography to sever Wales and Scotland from the island, and thus to eradicate
national difference from the isle they claimed as historically English. The rhetorical re-visions
required of these official authors to push Wales and Scotland to the margins of the British
415

Quoted from Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England
(Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992) 1. Print.
406

genealogical index belied the impossibility of wiping the island tableau clean of non-English
bodies. Despite Wales’ incorporation and the supposed joining of the English and Scottish
crowns, both Wales and Scotland stubbornly persisted as culturally and governmentally
416

autonomous body politics occupying the “English” island.

As discussed in chapter one, Speed’s genealogical arch that introduced both his History
and his Theatre was intended to celebrate the British as the crowning culmination of the island’s
historical narrative. However, when placed in the context of Marlowe’s play and its
dismemberment of the official nation, Speed’s arch more realistically bespeaks the vexed
genealogical family of the British Isles. A collection of national or ethnic figures—the Dane,
Roman, Norman, Saxon and the “Britaine”—stand segregated in their own compartments,
artistically contained but independently marked out and separated by their difference. The visual
implication that these several and distinct ethnicities went into the harmonious formation of “the
Britaine” (or, the Englishman, as Speed’s rhetorical manipulations try to make clear), is
challenged by Speed’s troubling attempt to erase the ancient Briton from the genealogical maps
(see fig. 1).
Chapter one established that the rhetorical maneuvers necessary to cast the island as
anciently English required a falsified link between the Britons and the contemporary English.
Deeply troubling this forced genealogical kinship were tales from ancient writers of the Britons’
barbarity and incivility. Extinguishing England’s native peoples from the historical record was a
potentially damaging gesture for the writers of the nation’s history. Without a genealogical line
tracing the ancient inhabitants of the isle to the current English population, the intricately
manipulated record that established the English as the historical possessors of the island would
416

Subtitle quote from Camden, Vol 3, 3. Print.
407

be seriously compromised. Therefore, Speed and Camden were forced into a precarious
rhetorical plane; the ancient British must retain some sort of resemblance to the early modern
English, but those similarities had to appear inherent to the English genealogical record. This
attempt largely failed. The civilized British, like the civilized Maltese and More’s pre-invasion
Utopians, are the product of foreign forces that brought progress and refinement to the island
backwater.
Evolutionally different from “the Britaine” of the arch and the intricately drawn portrait
of the English standing in the margins of Speed’s “Kingdome” map, the ancient Britons—those
who were subjugated to Britain’s many conquerors—presented an ideological stumbling block to
early modern English historiographers. Rude, wild and physically reminiscent of the savages of
Ireland, the Highlands and the New World, the ancient Britons are sometimes cast as the
progenitors of the English, and at others as the uncivilized original inhabitants of the isle whose
vestiges can barely be discovered in contemporary Englishmen and women. In Thomas Hariot’s
A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, he concludes his ethnographic tour
of the New World with “Some Picture, of The Pictes Which in the Olde tyme dyd habite one part
of the great Bretainne” in order to demonstrate “how that the Inhabitants of the great Bretannie
have bin in times past as savage as those of Virginia”.

417

The seeming intent of Hariot’s

inclusion of these descriptions and portraits of the ancient Britons is to demonstrate that the New
World barbarians can be transformed by the civilizing influence of the English, like the once
“savage” inhabitants of the British Isles progressed into their present from through invasions and
the remaking of their indigenous culture (see figs. 12 and 13).
Speed and Camden, as discussed in chapter one, are less comfortable with collapsing the
417

Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia: The Complete 1590
Theodor De Bry Edition (New York: Dover, 1972) 75.
408

Picts and the ancient British. Because both authors strive, problematically, to claim the entirety
of the British isle for England’s ancestors, Camden and Speed walk a delicate line between
casting the savage Picts as ancient Britons and assigning them to the later Scottish family, whose
barbarity delineates them from the civilized English and whose arrival on the island denotes
them as foreign invaders to the English land. First citing Bede, who calls the Picts “second” to
the British, Camden then delicately retracts this characterization, calling the Picts “verie naturall
Britans themselves, even the right progenie of the most ancient Britains: those Britans, I meane,
and none other, who before the comming in of the Romans, were seated in the North part of the
Island”.

418

Speed in his History’s “Portraitures of the Ancient Britaines” is more ambiguous

regarding the position of the Picts in England’s genealogical scrolls. First referring to the history
surrounding ancient Britain as “shadowed and enwrapped in manifold uncertainties and
contrarieties”, he then likens “those Originals of Particular Nations” as “not unlike that first
beginning of the universall prosemination of Mankind, when our first Parents innocencie and
walked in naked simplicity”.

419

The unclothed ancestors referred to here are the ancient Britons,

of whom he provides engravings. The man stands calmly on rural ground with a severed head
and spear in one hand his shield in the other; a second severed head lies at his feet. The woman
poses naked, clutching a spear. Both are covered in intricate paintings and bodily markings (see
fig. 14). Due largely to their pictured bodies, Speed cautiously genealogically connects the Picts
and Britains, though he is careful to point out that “whether those other Inhabitants of the more
Northerne parts of this Island, called also Picti or painted, had their name upon the same ground
& whether they were some branch of the British stocke, or of some transmarine Colonie, it is a

418
419

Camden, Vol 1, 114-15.
Speed, 179.
409

questions not yet decided”.

420

Significantly, the images used by Hariot to illustrate the Picts are almost identical to
those “portraitures and paintings of the ancient Britaines” in Speed’s History. Both men stand in
similar poses, carry the same props and occupy the same landscape. Both illustrations announce
the men’s savagery with the aforementioned severed heads. The women are also very alike in
appearance; the only immediately noticeable difference in both the ethnographic sketches of the
men and women is the direction of their gazes. Despite the obvious contradictions and
problematic overlap of these multiple histories, each author is careful to distinguish the English
from these savage inhabitants, though this distinction is less clear in Hariot’s text. One may infer,
however, that it was the English—the conquerors of the New World and the bringers of
civilization to this wasted territory—that evolved into a people capable of colonizing this savage
landscape.
Marlowe’s play does away with these complicated genealogical negotiations,
sidestepping the issue of an indigenous population altogether by absenting the Maltese from their
island. The nightmare scenario offered up to the English by Marlowe’s island is the notion that
the English, like the Maltese, have no genealogical legacy, that their land and history are actually
the property of conquerors from other lands and cultures. For Camden, Speed and Hariot, along
with our other historians, cannot escape the fact that civilization was imported to England by the
men depicted in Speed’s arch: the Romans, the Danes, the Saxons and the Normans. Similarly,
the Knights imagined themselves as importing their Christian civility to the Mediterranean isle.
On historical Malta, the Knights discover, “a defenseless barren waste”, a “dry, dreary island”

420

Speed, 181.
410

421

without fortifications.

The Maltese, according to Vallette, were “a people of little courage and

with little love for the faith”.

422

These colonial depictions of the Maltese islanders differ little

from illustrations of the ancient Britons. For instance, Camden apologetically describes the “first
inhabitants” of Britain thus:
Who were the most ancient and the very first Inhabitants of this Ile, as also, from
whence this word Britaine had the original derivation, sundry opinions one after
another have risen [ … ] Neither can we hope to atteine unto any certenetie
herein, more than all other nations, which [ … ] as well as wee, touching their
point, abide in great darknesse, errour and ignorance. And how, to speak truly,
can it otherwise be? considering that the trueth, after so many revolutions of ages
and times, could not chuse but be deeply hidden. For the first inhabitours of
countreys had other cares and thoughts to busie and trouble their heads, than to
deliver their beginnings unto posteritiie. And say, they had been most willing so
to do, yet possibly could they not, seeing their life was so uncivill, so rude, so full
of warres, and therefore void of all literature; which keeping companie with a
civill life, by peace and repose, is only able to preserve the memorie of things, and
423

to make over the same to the succeeding ages.

Described in purely generic terms, these “first inhabitants”, whose unruly and barbaric lives must
be accounted for, cannot but include the Britons themselves. Though Camden attempts to ascribe
this problem of an empty ancient record to all nations and turns to the easy and familiar
421
422

Setton, 854.

Crowley, Roger. Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the
Contest for the Center of the World (New York: Random House, 2009) 101. Print.
423
Camden, 4.
411

rhetorical device of a past shrouded in “darknesse, errour and ignorance”, he can imaginatively
label as “truth” the notion that all early inhabitants were “too busie” to ready their progenitors for
the civilized world.
Of the many troublesome issues raised by Camden and Speed’s history-making is the
need to both retain and abolish the ancient Britons. They must be preserved in the annals of
British history and made English in order to cast the island space as England, yet the many
characterizations of these barbaric British originals casts an ugly light on the “first inhabitours”
of the English nation. These ideological difficulties are compounded by the imperial discourse
applied to the marginalized Irish, Welsh and Scottish by the English, which is uncomfortably
cast back on the center; the forefathers of England themselves required civilizing by an outside
force, be it the Romans, Saxons, Normans, etc. What Marlowe’s play uncomfortably reminds us
is that the importation of the civilized world has the potential to entirely wipe out the indigenous
culture; the Britons are not unlike the spectral “citizens of Malta” who exist but only in
“darknesse”, in an undefined space. The Britons likewise occupy a shadowy space in history;
necessary but problematic, they are palimpsestic ghosts called up to be overwritten.
More troubling still is the implication in Marlowe’s work that without the ideological
trappings of official nationalism or the rhetorical frame of imperial conquest and its concomitant
implications of improvement and civility, national or empire-making is not a gesture of
solidifying community or of territorial expansion, but of base power. On Malta, imperial
conquest and the repeated shifts in government culminate in nothing; at the conclusion of the
play, Malta is not a nation, nor is it a stabilized governmental space. The Knights have regained
power, but the violent and unethical means in which this authority is recaptured does not imply a
promising future for “the citizens of Malta”. Monetary gain—“the other cares and thoughts to

412

busie and trouble their heads”—are the true cause of the Knights’ continued presence on the
island and the purpose of their wars with the Turks. Ferneze cloaks this final victory in the
rhetoric of religion as he intones “let due praise be [ … ] to heaven”, but this declaration of
God’s grace refers not to the preservation of the island, for in the lines proceeding he promises
Malta’s destruction were the Turks to return. After informing Calymath of his imprisonment on
Malta, Ferneze announces, “for come all the world / To rescue thee, so will we guard us now /
As sooner shall they drink the ocean dry / Than conquer Malta or endanger us” (V.v.118-32).
Willing to deprive Malta of its island status, that which provides the territory its greatest value,
Ferneze prioritizes the Knights’ power over the preservation of the Maltese “nation”.
Returning to Marlowe’s England in the context of his island play, one might assume that
the playwright saw English official nationalism as a necessary evil required to pull “the curtaine”
over England’s troublesome genealogical theatre that betrayed its colonized history and barbaric
beginnings. Official rhetoric also functioned to cloak the motivations, so obvious in his play,
behind imperial endeavors; purporting to improve the archipelago by exporting and extending
the English nation, like all colonial projects, England’s actual motivation laid in land acquisition
and the grasp for power. In the following section, I will consider the damning repercussions
resulting from the deflation of geographically based nationalism. Ancient Britain was, during the
Roman occupation, little more than a colonial outpost serving the needs of an invading culture. It
was England’s island-ness and proximity to the continent that invited the many foreign
incursions that inalterably transformed English culture. Furthermore, internal rebellion rent the
English political body and refuted the fundamental notion posited in official texts that England’s
island geography naturally bound the people to each other as a insular national culture
unattached from the continent and its contaminating influences. In truth, England mirrors

413

Marlowe’ theatrical island space: a territory overrun by imperial forces in which the absenting of
the people and geographical vulnerability denied the island the possibility of nationhood.
Geography: “Being Alone Stil’d th’Oceans Island”
In some accounts of ancient Britain, the island is “otherworldly” only in the sense of its
separation from the civilized world; its barbarity is the result of its geographic separation, which
has preserved the Britons in a backwards state of heathenism. For instance, Camden cites
“Aegisippus [ who ] saith thus of Claudius, Witnesse hereof is Britaine, which living without the
world, is by the might of Romans reduced unto the world”.

424

Reversing the claims made by

characters like Cloten in Cymbeline and Johnson in The Masque of Blackness, England is not “a
world by itself” (II.v.13-4) or “a world divided from the world”, a nation whose national pride is
425

reliant upon its segregation from the continent.

Rather, the island must be “reduced” or

absorbed into Roman culture to evolve into a state of civility, law and religion.

426

Like Valette’s

account of the Maltese, the “rude” lives of these ancient Britons extends to their heathen
religious beliefs. In Gildas’s florid illustration, “the ugly spectres of Britaine [ … ] were meere
Diabolical, exceeding well neere in number those of Aegypt: whereof some wee doe see within
or without desert wals, with deformed lineaments still, carrying sterne and grim lookes after their
427

wonted maner”.

A spiritual desert, ancient Britain was the home of ghostly, insubstantial

beings “with little love for the faith”, whose monstrous outward forms reflected their inward
emptiness. With the foreign importation of Christianity also came law. “This yoke of the
424
425

Camden, Vol. 1, 45.

Jonson, The Masque of Blackness. Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques Ed Stephen Orgel
(New Haven: Yale UP, 1969) 56. Print.
426
Camden, Vol 1, 45.
427

Ibid, Vol 1, 31.
414

Romanes although it were grievous, yet comfortable it proved and having a saving health unto
them,” Camden claims, “for that healthsome light of Jesus Christ shone withal upon the Britans,
whereof more hereafter, and the brightnesse of that most glorious Empire, chased away all
428

savage barbarisme from the Britans minds”.

Only with the coming of Christian invaders were

the ancient Britons taught to amend their “diabolical” lifestyles, cast off their ruggedness and
enter the civilized world. Quoting Rutilus, Camden explains that with religion came law to the
unregulated territory. “For Rome, as saith, Rutilius, ‘Compassed the world with triumphs
429

bringing lawes; / And all to live in common league doth cause’”.

Once a “wild world”,

according to Rutilius, “the lawless folke” of Britain “were tamed”, forced by its imperial masters
430

to join the nations of the continent who had come under Roman rule.

As discussed above, the pre-Roman, ancient Briton—savage, uncivilized and unable to
defend his territory from invading tribes—is a figure that must be rhetorically abolished through
generic description or fundamentally redesigned in Camden and Speed, lest their English
genealogies of Britain be undermined by their savage ancestors. However, without an ancestral
line reaching back to the ancient Britons, England appears a land of others whose historical
intermixing and difference in culture, law and ethnicity make impossible the identification of a
people that may be exclusively named “Britaines” or, worse yet, “English”. The cultures that
reformed the savage Britons were foreign; the narrative of their reform smacks of colonial
th

rhetoric in the New World, and, significantly, 16 century Malta. During the time of Marlowe’s
play, the stubborn persistence of Welsh, Scottish and Irish cultures in the early modern
428
429
430

Ibid, Vol 1, 63.
Ibid.
Ibid.
415

archipelago evinces that this dis-united archipelago had its basis in a heterogeneous
conglomerate of nations whose differences in cultures and background refused the notion of an
island of national or historical uniformity.
Britain was not bestowed upon God’s people as an “other Eden”, but was a colony valued
for its economic and militaristic advantages.

431

Though certainly not as geographically central

in contrast to Malta in terms of global trade, England nonetheless offered the Romans and its
many other conquerors a store of natural resources, which were often shipped from the island.
The Romans, for instance, stripped the Britons of their crops and silver to accommodate their
military efforts in Germany and Holland. Though the population was primarily British and
Roman, foreign merchants and slaves entered Rome’s Britain to trade their wares on this newly
conquered isle. Town walls and Roman architecture, including fortifications, made the landscape
432

speak a foreign tongue, and announced the island as a Roman stronghold.

A multilingual and

multi-religious territory, Britain was an outpost valued by the Romans in their wars fought
against the northern Europeans and rife with natural resources to be plundered. It was little more
than a small archipelago included within Rome’s vast imperial territories.
The overtaking of the British island and the remaking of the culture along Roman
imperial lines also created a dependence of the colonized on their foreign overlords in time of
further incursions suffered by the Britons. As explained in chapter one, following the departure
of the Romans from the island, the ancient Britons repeatedly called upon the Romans to aid
them in the defense of the isle from the Picts and Scots’ attacks upon their territories. The

431
432

Shakespeare, Richard II (II.i.42).

Salway, Roman Britain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) 11, 20, 27-8,
36. Print.

416

primary reason for these incursions, one may argue, is Britain’s geographic vulnerability,
especially after the departure of the Roman garrisons. Largely “defenseless” against the Picts and
Scots, the Britons lacked the military training and expertise to expel these foreign troops from
their shores, as illustrated by the Romans’ attempts to train the Britons in the means of defensive
warfare. Obviously, this strategy failed, and the Scots and Picts took possession of the island’s
northern territories.
Drayton’s “Triumpant Arch”, which positions Britain “in Happy site, in Neptunes armes
embras’t”, is echoed by Calymath’s quickly refuted observation of “how secure this conquered
island stands—Environed with the Mediterranean sea”. Both depictions assert their island’s
geographic strengths: isles preserved and protected by their sea-locked states. In a single
dramatic gesture, Marlowe dismantles a body of poetic and historical declarations of England’s
positive oceanic insularity; coming at the end of the play, after this claim to Malta’s security is
repeatedly denounced by invasions and conquests, The Jew of Malta ends with a disturbing
reminder of England’s own vulnerabilities and subjugations.
Whereas Malta’s threatened state is the consequence of its geographic placement in the
heart of Mediterranean trade, England’s can be accounted for by its isolation and the state’s
inability to fund its wars and muster troops. The Elizabethan and Jacobean governments were
forced to rely upon the generosity of its wealthy gentry and the ability of local governments to
call men to arms. Even the crown’s responsibility to secure England’s many miles of coastline
was placed in the hands of its subjects; as mentioned in chapter one, Henry VIII called upon
those subjects living on the water to map the coasts as a defensive measure against possible
Spanish, French and other foreign attacks. Marlowe’s island is likewise defenseless, in part
because the ships circling its territory are manned by non-native groups bent on conquering the

417

isle. By point of comparison, one might place side by side the cartographic depictions of Malta
described above with John Speed’s “Invasions of England and Ireland with All Their Civil Warrs
Since the Conquest” (for a link to this image, see
http://eebo.chadwyck.com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/search/full_rec?SOURCE=pgthumbs.cfg&ACTIO
N=ByID&ID=22575158&FILE=../session/1344199333_15992&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIO
NS&SEARCHCONFIG=var_spell.cfg&DISPLAY=AUTHOR&ECCO=default).
Commissioned by “certain Martial Gentlemen professors of Armes” and made possible “by the
good allowance of her Maiestie to whose sacred person it was commended”, Speed’s map
illustrates an England under siege, often by its own subjects.

433

Visual representations of the many incursions against the isle swamp Speed’s England,
the signs of foreign and domestic wars that overpowered England often obscuring the territory
itself. The overall map depicts the visually and politically fragmented nations, doubly disfigured
by the rebellions that imploded within the domestic space and again by the invasions from
abroad that carved the territories in such a manner as to break up the national spaces. Also, these
locational signposts indelibly mark England and Ireland as isolated lands repeated besieged.
The margins of the map literally wrap the two nations in the language of conquest.
Corresponding to the numbered locations on the territorial body that indicate the sites of civil
and foreign battles, the marginalia tells a story of internal dissension and outside incursion.
Beginning with the Norman Conquest, an enormous cultural shift that brought France onto
England’s shores and into the island’s most fundamental institutions, Speed next describes the
destruction of York at the hands of the Normans and Danes. Then, trying to recapture the
433

Speed, John. “Invasions of England and Ireland with All Their Civil Warrs Since the
Conquest.” A Description of the Civill Warres of England. EEBO Michigan State University Lib.
18 May 2012. Web.
418

nationalist line that Speed claimed as the ostensible reason for the map’s production, he
describes the vicious attack by Malcome “King of Scots” who “charg[ed] his Souldiers to spare
434

neither sexe for age of the English nation”.

Malcome was later forced to “doe homage” to

England’s King. Further vilifying the Scots and demonstrating England’s might against the
British strangers is Speed’s depiction of the Scottish King David’s invasion of Northumberland,
where he “made his spoile as far as [ … ] Yorkshire”; the English repelled the invaders and “ten
435

thousand Scots [were] slaine”.

To reinforce England’s imperial reign over the archipelago,

Speed also records England’ takeover of Wales in 1090.
But here’s where the story of England’s control over the isles ends. Scotland, one of
England’s more glaring imperial failures, is largely left blank, visually negating the many battles
England waged—and lost—against the nation to the north. The illustrations and marginalia that
surround the east coast of England tell of the Danish invasion of the isle in 1069, the French
Dauphin’s 1126 attack on King John’s England and a long narrative devoted to England’s
repelling of the Spanish fleet. Though the inserted tale tells of England’s victory against Spain,
Speed’s visual narrative works against it this nationalist portrayal. Speed’s two illustrations of
the Spanish fleet very much resemble Nelli’s engraving of the Turkish ships docked at Malta that
visually overpower portions of the ocean and speak to the immense power of these foreign
armies. In both cartographic narratives, the Christian and English ships are considerably smaller
in size. As is well known, England’s defeat of the Spanish was due not entirely to English
military might, but to the strong winds that dispersed the enemy fleet.
The following chapters in this cartographic story are even more damaging to the

434
435

Ibid.
Ibid.
419

nationalist characterization of positive insularity posited in official rhetoric for they betray the
violent domestic fragmentation that disproves official narratives of national and governmental
th

unity. Beginning in the 13 century, Speed’s historical catalog is a damning record of internal
rebellion and imperial failure. Speed lists seven Scottish rebellions between 1296 and 1346, all
on English soil and in the Berwick borderlands. This record of Anglo-Scottish relations shows
badly for the English, proving that England was both unable to subdue Scotland and to keep their
ancient enemies from invading English territory; England appears defenseless against this
northern nation. Speed’s story betraying England’s imperial weakness is followed by an
extensive tale of domestic rebellion. Beginning with the Barron’s Rebellion against Henry III in
1265, the catalog of domestic rebellions against the English state is as follows: the 1381
“insurrection of the commons under the leading of Jack Straw, Wat Tiler, and others”; a second
rebellion of the commons in 1381, involving over 50,000 men from Suffolk; a 1382 uprising of
the commons in Essex; the slaying of Englishmen in Wales at the hands of Owen Glendower in
1402, who was later aided by the French in 1405; the rebellion of the earls of March and
Warwick against Henry VI in 1459; the 1461 slaying of as many as 36,776 Englishmen during
the rebellion against Henry VI, which lead to Edward IV’s ascension; the 1470 rebellion against
Edward IV; the Cornish Rebellion in 1500, which left 1,000 Cornish killed and 1,500
imprisoned; the 1549 rebellions in Cornwall and Devonshire, where “4000 of them [ were ]
436

slain”; Wyatt’s rebellion in 1554 and the rebellion of the Northern Earls in 1572.

This long chronology of domestic warfare is alarmingly ended in the middle of
Elizabeth’s reign; there is no resolution to this jarring narrative. The English island appears as a
violently imploding political space, defenseless against not only the foreign ships that circle their
436

Ibid.
420

shores and the other British nations that invade their borders, but likewise unable to control their
own home-born insurrections against an ever-changing government. With this information in
mind, Speed’s England now appears as an isolated target in the middle of the sea, an image
visually supported by the lines used by Speed to connect his marginal explanations of the battles
to their physical locations throughout England.
Speed’s ineffectual conclusion to his cartographic narrative heaps praise upon Elizabeth
for creating a nation where her subject now enjoy a life of “calme security”; the English state has
learned from its tumultuous past and is a better nation for its challenges. Of the benefits reaped
from this long period of internal bloodshed, Speed lists “the blessing of God poured upon us, in
preserving our Countrey and Nation against the several invasions of forraine enemies,
437

notwithstanding their severall and many attempts”.

Like Ferneze in the final lines of

Marlowe’s play, the newly-appointed governor cites God as the true cause of Malta’s return to a
Christian culture: “let due praise be given”, he intones, “neither to fate nor fortune, but to
heaven” (V.v.23-4); it is heaven, not policy, violence and manipulation that brought Malta to
peace. Speed likewise elides the bloody tactics that returned England to a place of “security”,
policies that remained in place long after the production of Speed’s map. For instance, he
pointedly overlooks in this pronouncement the continual blood spilled in the borderlands, a
Scottish territory still labeled as “forraine” in tracks like Camden and Speed’s. Likewise, Speed’s
own map contradicts the notion that England is now freed of foreign threat: perhaps the most
prominent battle depicted on the map, the Spanish Invasion, took place only 12 years before the
publication of Speed’s map. The second benefit, Speed concludes is “the fall and ruine of

437

Ibid.
421

rebellious Subjects taking armes against their anointed Kings, Princes and Governors”.

438

Speed’s statement of the peaceable relationship between archipelagic subjects and the state is
pure rhetoric: aside from the border wars between Wales and England and Scotland and England,
the refusal of the Scottish to kneel to the English crown was a glaring affront to England’s
“Kings, Princes, and Governors”. Also, as my chapter on Elizabethan absolutist rhetoric
discussed, the confrontations between local governments and state officials disclosed the
misdeeds of “rebellious subjects” who chose local custom over the crown. Rather than confront
the governmental fissures that accounted for this domestic turmoil, Speed again returns to God,
calling this widespread social and cultural dissension
his heavy punishments inflicted upon us for our sinnes, in making the one party
the scourge or maule of the other, with revenging murder by murder, working the
depopulation of our fruitful Country, and ruinating of our Cities at home, with
losse and revolting of the territories in subjection unto us by just title of
439

inheritance and conquest abroad.

Recasting governmental disaster as the consequence of sinful behavior on all sides, Speed
compounds this deep history of bloodshed into an eliding discourse of God’s lessons to his
earthly subjects. Yet, Speed is careful to lay the blame for this violence on England’s imperial
territories, as opposed to “our fruitful Country” that suffered such destruction at their bloody
hands. Delineating the “revolting [ … ] territories” from “our Country” and “our Cities at
440

home”, Speed rhetorically reworks his map and narrative of rebellion.

438
439
440

Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
422

It is the “territories in

subjection”, not the internal quarrels of the English or their mismanagement and illegitimate
seizure of lands that create the blots on England’s otherwise pristine historical record.
Finally, like the Utopian government, whose idealized society is the envy of neighboring
lands who seek their counsel and intervention, the Elizabethan state is instrumental in the
amelioration of the social and political challenges faced by continental nations. In a period when
all hostility and outrage of civill warres, broiles and dissentions, have seemed by
the power of the Almighty hand of God stretched forth in our defence, to have
been transported out of this Island over the Seas into other Countryes, insomuch
as notwithstanding this calme security of our owne at home, our neighbouring
Nations of all sides abroad, either thorow the licentious tyranny of ungodly
Princes, that have laid persecution upon their Subjects, or the mutinous
dissentions of disobedient people that have raised Rebellions against their Princes
[ … ] as they have been pitifully enforced to pray and seeke adye at her Maiesties
hands, and to submit themselves under the protection of her, whom with us they
acknowledge to be the defendresse of the Christian Faith and Peace, and the most
natural Nurse of the true Church of GOD.

441

Speed is likely referring here to Elizabeth’s military interventions in the Netherlands and the
attempt to put down Catholic Spain’s bloody resistance to Dutch Protestantism. However,
Speed’s contention that the peace emanating from the English island and the Queen’s willing
protection of failing foreign nations is an ideological reworking of English support of foreign
nations. Elizabeth’s interest in the Low Countries was, in part, driven by policy. Attempting,
unsuccessfully, to avoid war with Spain, Elizabeth’s involvement in the Dutch Protestant cause
441

Ibid.
423

was reluctant, self-interested and sometimes duplicitous. In her negotiations with France,
Elizabeth dissembled, turning the joint effort to defend the Low Countries from Catholic Spain
to a battle for French territory. Refusing to call back her troops from La Havre, Elizabeth
442

demanded the French return Calais, over which she claimed ownership.

This move

complicated the Queen’s marriage negotiations to Anjou in 1574, which was intended to bind
England and France against Spain. Playing both sides, she consulted with the Spanish Duke of
Parma for a peaceful end to the conflict in the Low Countries.

443

Unwilling to intervene directly

in a war that would eventually lead to the Spanish Armada’s attack on her island, Elizabeth
would only lend money to Anjou to defend her Protestant brethren until she was forced, by
political necessity, to enter into the war. The 1585 Treaty of Nonesuch did little to further the
Netherland’s Protestant cause; after serious governmental and militaristic failures, England broke
the league with the Low Countries and departed the Netherlands in 1587.
Much like the neighbors to the Utopians, Elizabeth’s allies were often pawns in a slippery
game of political manipulations; to be held in “her Maiesties hands, and to submit themselves
under the protection of her” might also to be crushed under the weight of policy. For, as Barabas
advises us “making a profit of [ … ] policy” is oftentimes a guiding principle of early modern
governance (V.iii.112). The policy of historical narrative is likewise essential to nation building,
as Speed cartographically and narratively demonstrates. However, not even his strategy to
produce a palimpsestic cartographic work—heaping marginal text upon text to explain away
England internal instability and foreign invasions—can mask island England’s vulnerability.
Speed’s map and arch also presents an narrative challenge to the discourse of English imperial
442
443

Levin, Carol. The Reign of Elizabeth I (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2002) 43. Print.

MacCaffrey, Wallace T. Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588-1603 (Princeton: Princeton, UP,
1992) 4. Print.
424

right and genealogical history, which is intended to graft the English onto the vast territory of the
isles, even those functioning as autonomous nations. Like Marlowe’s Malta, this island of others,
children of conquerors and strangers to each other, makes impossible any notion of national or
imperial homogeneity, historical or otherwise. And, when geography, a shared history and
cultural heritage cannot bind a people, it is often the ideological work of government to produce
and cement allegiance to the sovereign and to the sovereign nation. Again, Marlowe thwarts this
possibility, particularly because the source is sovereign power is undetermined and unseen
(V.iii.112).
Governmentality: “By His permission a body politic to govern”
Marlowe’s play takes to the extreme England’s very real governmental crises;
particularly the decentering of monarchical authority resulting from early modern state formation
examined in chapter three; the incongruity between absolutist rhetoric and monarchical
representation and the distribution of sovereign authority to agents of the state; the unclear
source of authority, which was attributed to the divine hand of God and the troubling cultural and
social rifts in England and the archipelagic landscapes that made official claims to national or
imperial homogeneity politically unrealistic. Britain’s erratic geopolitical state is at the heart of
these many political impasses. Unable to bring into alignment and uniformity the many
governmental bodies functioning independently within the archipelago, the monarchy—the
supposed source and body of sovereign power—was dependent upon mystical representation
444

rather than a clear consolidation of authority located at Whitehall.

As explained above, Malta is wholly lacking a center of authority; absent from the island
444

Subtitle from Elizabeth I, “Queen Elizabeth’s first speech, Hatfield, November 20, 1558,”
Elizabeth I: Collected Works Eds. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000) 52. Print.

425

is a monarch or a centralized state. Without a single body or body of persons to which authority
is attached, political authority is ephemeral and can be illegitimately wrested from the ether
strictly through force or policy. The state, if it exists at all in Marlowe’s text, is mutable and
abstract because of the many transfers of power that subject the islanders to a lawless state
without citizens’ access to justice. Following Barabas and Ithamore’s successful plot to frame
Jacomo for Bernadine’s murder, Ithamore states that the supposed criminal must be “born to the
magistrates” to be punished for the murder (IV.ii.186). Upon Jacomo’s plea to Barabas to let him
flee, Barabas insists that “the law must have his course”, assuring him that “the law shall touch
you; we’ll but lead you, we. / ’Las, I could weep at your calamity. [ … ] Law wills that each
particular be known” (IV.ii.205-08). The law, of course, fails Bernadine due to Barabas’s
manipulations. We can assume that “the magistrates” are the Knights, but their only direct
connection to the law comes as a result of personal interest: the persecution of Barabas for the
deaths of Lodowick and Mathias. Aside from the final scenes of the play, law is nearly absent
from island’s political landscape. Questioning the validity of his accusers after Ithamore,
Bellamira and Pilia-Borza reveal the Jew’s part in their poisoning and the murders of the nuns
and Abigail, Barabas exclaims “Let me have law; / For none of this can prejudice my life”
(V.i.38-9). Ferneze’s response to Katherine’s plea for justice and her inquiries into Barabas’s
whereabouts is to explain that the Jew is “In prison, till the law be passed on him” (V.i.49). The
final solution to Barabas’s criminal acts is to cast the seemingly dead Barabas into the lawless
space outside the city walls.
Barabas—who has largely controlled the law by his political machinations, his ability to
make Calymath governor, and his reassignment of this position to Ferneze—is the victim
(admittedly deservedly) of an ambiguous system of law handed from ruler to ruler and based

426

primarily upon policy. The movement of ships on the seas of Malta, as explained above, does not
appear to be regulated by any kind of law; rather piracy and unclear sea rights make the ocean
space one of violence and criminality. Likewise, Malta contains territories in which law of any
sort does not apply. For instance, the land outside the city walls where Barabas’s body is left
“prey to vultures and wild beasts” appears a space of wilderness outside legal surveillance, for it
is here that Barabas invites the invasion of the Turks and the temporary change in government
that ousts the Christians, the ostensible “magistrates” of the isle from power (V.i.59). Akin to
Spenser’s Faerie Land, in which pockets of lawlessness deny the possibility of uniform
regulation and the omnipresent power of the supreme monarch, Malta’s shifting governance and
multiple figures of ambiguous power question the very possibility of a nation without a state.
Like Spenser’s Lucifera, the self-made ruler who reigns over the territory of Book I, the
authorities of Malta are without a “rightfull kingdome and “ne ruld [their] Realme with laws but
445

pollicie” (I.iv.12.7).

Unlike Spenser’s politicized representation of his native land, law and its

components in the Faerie Queene—justice and temperance—are without a place on Marlowe’s
island.
In Marlowe’s England, the emergent state was a means of disseminating the word of the
monarch and enacting the force of the law. As we have seen, the somewhat unsuccessful attempt
at governmental centralization resulted in an uneven application of the sovereign’s prerogative
across the realm. Local governments in England and particularly in the empire’s peripheral
territories often trumped the edicts of state officials sent into the localities by the monarch and
her governmental bodies. Therefore, the living counterparts to Spenser’s villain Lucifera were
capable of building post-feudal kingdoms within the monarch’s realm, amassing wealth, lands
445

nd

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene 2
Longman, 2007). Print.

ed. Ed. A.C. Hamilton (Harlowe: Pearson

427

and power to rival that of the crown. Like Spenser’s Munera, who “many Princes she in wealth
exceedes, / And purchast all the countrey lying ny” (V.ii.9.6-7), local magnates commanded a
kind of monetary and territorial power unavailable to the crown. Though competing systems of
law were most certainly in place in England, further complicating the juridical system that
supposedly regulated the body politic as a whole, the differences in legal code and its application
across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales exposed the notion of a centralized legal system a
political fantasy.
The head of the body politic of England, at least in terms of official rhetoric, was
undoubtedly the monarch. However, the resultant dismemberment of the political nation into the
various and sometimes disconnected arms of the state disfigured the body politic and threw into
question the singular-ness and indivisibility of sovereign authority. The teetering foundation on
which the rhetoric of absolutist authority balanced was a compendious textual body of carefully
fabricated monarchical representations, composed of political philosophies and mythical stories
culled from contemporary political theorists and the compilation of often questionable “ancient”
materials. The monarch was the supreme religious and political figure of the nation, whose
power was granted to the earthy person of the king or queen by the hand of God. The
proliferation of texts celebrating the monarchy—the masques, the pageants, the paeans to the
king or queen that prefaced historical and literary works—almost all called upon the sovereign’s
divine right to rule the nation and the archipelago. More overtly political treatises likewise
strongly supported the divine right of kings, though the need for a state infrastructure and the
“loan or grant on sufferance” of divine power to state agents seriously compromised this
rhetoric.

446

446

Bodin, On Sovereignty Ed. Julian H. Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007) 2. Print.
428

The representational aura of divinity enshrining the monarch served multiple purposes,
not least the subjects’ awe of their God appointed king or queen. Inciting fear of social and
political disorder, Sir Thomas Elyot warned of the ultimate destruction wrecked upon a country
if the monarch’s rule of the nation is not perceived as “heven and erthe [ … ] governed by one
447

god, by one perpetuall ordre, by one providence”.

Without “ordre”, Elyot warns, “what

shulde then remayne? Certes nothyng finally, except some man wolde imagine eftsones Chaos [
448

… ] where there is any lacke of ordre nedes must be perpetuall conflicte”.

The ideologically

necessary worship of the sovereign of course was translated into poetic adoration of the sacred
mistress of the realm. Spenser’s “flowre of grace and chastity, / Thoughout the world renowmed
far and neare [ … ] Whose glory shineth as the morning starre, / And with her light the earth
enlumines cleare" is a divine object of poetry, but this type of rhetoric was undoubtedly of the
political text that made up “The Virgin Queen” (II.ix.4). This poetic body reached far beyond the
page into the world of policy and political strategy, both internationally and domestically. The
physical person of the sovereign was the island itself, the singular human body that mirrored
back to the nation the singular national body. The “great and most glorious virgin Queene alive, /
That with her soveraine power, and sceptre shene [ … ] In widest Ocean she her throne does
reare, / That over all the earth it may be seene,” intones Spenser: her island nation is her
sovereignty embodied (II.ii.40). These compounded rhetorics of the divine sovereign were
designed to command allegiance in her subjects: to deny the monarch was to deny God. To deny
the sovereign was to deny the nation, which was built by God and placed in the hands of his
earthly representative.
447

Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour Ed. Henry Herbert Stephen Croft. 1531. (New York:
Burt Franklin, 1967) 11-2. Print.
448
Ibid, 3.
429

What Marlowe’s play alarmingly presents to an English audience is an island in which
law, authority and its source are so unattached to Malta that the territory can barely be called a
body politic. Without a sovereign and the body of ideological rhetoric that makes up this national
and divine figure, there can be no justification for sovereign leadership. The authority to rule is
not granted by God. In fact, God plays little role on Marlowe’s Malta, except when
hypocritically invoked by the Christians to lend a veneer of legitimacy to their illegal seizures of
wealth and power. Nor is sovereignty cloaked in a kind of well-crafted mysticism or an intricate
weaving of genealogical histories tinged with mythical elements. On Malta, there is no
ideological apparatus for understanding the attribution and circulation of sovereign power; there
is no legitimate means to attain it and no justification for it’s residing in one set of hands rather
than another. The knights who are seemingly the governing body of the island derive their
authority from an unknown source. Though granted the island by the distant Charles V, we know
that the historic Knights of Malta were an international force built of several nations without any
one country claiming control over their actions. Unassociated with an overriding political figure
or governmental body, the actions of the Knights are determined not by some kind of overseeing
regulation or even an ideological narrative shaping their behaviors and public personas. The
Knights of Malta rule a rouge state without a direct line to a legitimate source of political
sovereignty or even an ideological semblance of justifiable force.
Marlowe’s dystopia demonstrates that, without the ideological veneer attached to
sovereign authority, political power is revealed in its most base form—policy, strategy and brute
force. English audiences likely would have been at least somewhat aware of the political
machinations that undermined the Virgin Queen’s polished monarchical representation, such as
her politicized reluctance to enter into the conflict in the Netherlands, her studied considerations

430

and refusals of potential marriages, and her official approval of the pillaging of Spanish ships
returning from the New World, to name only a few of Elizabeth’s less than laudatory
governmental maneuvers. Shorn of ideology, the fabrications surrounding the artificial or
theatrical nature of power are revealed as insubstantial. This possibility, of course, was a
nightmare of English politics, which was ultimately reliant upon the fashioning of monarchs to
sustain the societal order. With the collapse of the ideological structure of monarchical
sovereignty and the revelation of the true machinery of government might come the undoing of
the entire social structure of the island, the divine order of being upon which English society was
built. This nightmare was realized only 50 years later.
Conclusion: “Leave nothing loose, all levelled to my mind”
Barabas utters this line in the final moments of Marlowe’s play. Having controlled the
straw figures of authority that sought to subjugate him, Barabas is now constructing a physical
symbol of his deceptive plotting, a killing monument to policy, stateless-ness and the kind of
self-interest that adamantly refuses community or alliance. The set he constructs for the final act
of his Machiavellian production is intended to murder the Ottoman Calymath, but this plot is
wrested from the Jew by the Christian governor, who sees in this deadly trap the means to kill off
his enemies and retain his power. For power is the only medium of exchange on Malta, the only
thing valued. “A ruler who wishes to maintain his power must be prepared to act immorally
when this becomes necessary”, advises Machiavelli in The Prince, an adage followed to the letter
449

by Marlowe’s characters, who grasp at ethereal forms of authority on this lawless island.

“Many will talk of title to a crown; / What right had Caesar to the empery?” asks Marlowe’s
Machiavel, introducing in the play’s earliest moments the notion that power, not nationhood, not
449

Machiavelli, 55.
431

an ideological system of governance or the discourse of legitimacy rule in this text. “Might first
made kings”, Machiavel asserts in his introductory salvo; might in Malta flies in the face of state
and monarchical authority, exploding the very tenets of the Elizabethan and Jacobean political
apparatus. Furthermore, might is not the monopoly of kings on Malta, for no sovereign exists to
which power is bound. The sovereignty of Malta itself is perpetually in question. Lacking
autonomy on the global stage, Malta is a geographical anomaly, a literally unruly territory whose
450

boundaries are purely physical and politically without signification.

Barabas’s plotting, his adherence to Machiavelli’s precepts of power, ends in his violent
expulsion from the play. Disappearing from the visible theatrical space as he falls into the
cauldron, but still remaining an absent presence, Barabas’s spectre represents a possibility so
alarming to the writers of the nation that he must be hidden, buried in “a deep pit past discovery”
(V.v.36). Marlowe’s Jew is nationless-ness personified; admitting no allegiances, tying himself
to no delineated group, garnering an identity not from the land but from gains from overseas and
functioning outside an already tenuous system of law, Barabas must be expelled, removed from
sight. Yet he lingers as a nightmarish possibility of subjecthood without nationhood.
The nation in early modern England is the product of meticulous plotting—“all leveled”
to the minds of its official authors. Spatially, the English nation was artificially carved into the
island space, a process of geographic and political plotting that attempted to violently suture
Wales to the English body through the abolishment of cultural, legal and governmental systems.
In an opposite gesture of the island’s disfigurement, the writers of England sought to sever the
Scottish lands from “the English Island”, ideologically separating the civilized Saxon lowlands

450

Subtitle, (V.v.3).
432

from the barbaric Highlands in order to protect the immensely fragile genealogical plot that
claimed England as the island’s true progenitors.
Assigning hierarchical designations to the nations of the archipelago, geographical
plotting made possible the nationalist and imperial projects unsuccessfully pursued during the
reigns of Elizabeth and James. Cartographic plotting and the visual poetics that so often
accompanied these visual narratives were essential to the imperial plot constructed by the crown
and its producers. Manipulated borders, ideologically charged illustrations, and ethnographic
specimens of the multinational archipelago told a story of English conquest and imperial right,
one that aligned with early modern historiography. Perhaps the most intricately plotted of
nationalist materials, England’s historical record was cobbled together from often illegitimate
materials, historical mistruths and exaggerated narratives of English superiority that patched over
historical aporias and were almost always the stuff of fantasy. Finally, the plotted-ness of
monarchical representation was itself an industry of glorified images, poetry and politics, a
theatrics built upon mystifying notions of divine right.
However, despite the minute constructions of the nation—the myriad plots that uneasily
erected the teetering foundation of official nationalism in early modern England—geography
cannot be ideologically or textually amended. The “English Island” is a mythical construction
that failed to subject the English to the crown’s official nation.

433