by Eric Franklin

William Shakespeare’s drama reflects a sense of early modern national selfhood, one that demonstrated not only a clear pride in Englishness but also a delineation between English and Other, an indication that membership in the national affiliation sets a person apart from outsiders, but also an idea that there was something intangible yet salient about the national community—an English quality that came from the land itself. Yet while the dramatist’s texts reveal an apparent celebration of English superiority, that ideal often lacks conviction, a national absence that suggests a national insecurity. This uncertainty emerges in Shakespeare’s Richard II and Henry V with the implicit expectation that Welsh characters find acceptance when they most closely approximate the English cultural norm, often delineated by one’s command of English but also through behaviour that demonstrates loyalty and civility. Additionally, Cymbeline, with its setting in ancient Britain, evokes a sense of pre-modern English desire to find a link to the land’s past, implying a desire for a national identity born of historic stability.

Evidence of Early Modern English National Consciousness

The identification with the land exemplifies a primordial notion of national origins. For example, in Richard II, when the king banishes Bolingbroke from England, the latter departs the country with the following lamentation: “Then, England’s ground, farewell; sweet soil, adieu, / My mother and my nurse that bears me yet. / Where’er I wander, boast of this I can, / Though banished, yet a trueborn Englishman.” [i] Bolingbroke’s connection to England proves personal, a link that determines his own identity, yet the emotive response to his country suggests a profound attachment but also significant frustration, anger, and insecurity. In this excerpt, the character’s speech is hagiographic — the love of a son for an absent mother. Significantly, Bolingbroke does not identify as a Catholic as he certainly would have been in fourteenth-century England. Rather, Shakespeare sidesteps this detail so problematic in sixteenth-century England and instead connects his character’s identity to his country, one defined by its link to the land.

This visceral response emerges again when the dying John of Gaunt awaits the arrival of his nephew, Richard II, and addressing his brother, the Duke of York, creates a hagiographic vision of England. Yet, the mythic basis of hagiography often lacks a realistic vision of its object. In this case, Gaunt juxtaposes the thoughtless whimsy of Richard and the solid stability of England, but it is the trying circumstance—essentially fear—which appears to trigger his speech. As one of Shakespeare’s histories, Richard II takes place centuries before the playwright’s life, but the rhetorical sentiment reflects the cultural currents of sixteenth-century England. In his “History and the Nation in Richard II and Henry IV,” Derek Cohen argues that pre-modern English men and women looked to the past as a simpler world lacking the divisions that rent their own era: “Gaunt and Richard, too, are possessed by a nostalgia for lost plenitude, a world in which an imaginary unity, simplicity, and certainty once prevailed.”[ii] As he lies on his deathbed, Gaunt paints a picture of an England that proves separate from other lands and cloaked in mythical and religious grandeur that hearken back to images of the lost greatness of earlier civilizations: “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.”[iii] The lofty language hints at imperial greatness, ironic for the impending arrival of a corrupt king preparing to rob the speaker of his material goods, but all the more useful in illustrating the difference between the land that is England and the ruler who presently governs it. Equally significant is the notion of England as the seat of the great Roman god of war within nature’s fortress, a territory that proves paradisical. That which makes England great pre-dates its monarch and inhabitants. It is a nation born of ancient earth—of primordial strength and stability, a greatness unique unto itself. However, the mythic notion of England as a “sceptred isle” suggests an island that is entirely English. Gaunt’s speech reveals a national disposition of placing England at the cultural and political centre of Britain, reflecting the early modern English desire to appropriate the ancient British past.[iv]

The thematic focus of Gaunt’s soliloquy continues, reflecting a desire for a nation of mythical greatness. In this passage, Shakespeare marries the idea of war-like tenacity and biblical ideals of paradise and uses them to produce a vision of a country like no other. Yet the mention of the people who inhabit this mythic land remains fleeting: “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] moat defensive to a house, / Against the envy of less happier lands.”[v] In Gaunt’s speech, the pre-eminence of the nation comes from the land itself. England is not great because of the English people; it is worthy because of the inherent qualities of the land that constitutes the country’s territory—a realm that remains on a constant defensive footing, a land with its own moat to protect a “breed of men,” an intriguing appellation that suggests national difference. The inherent condition of Englishness makes one great, a sentiment evocative of national consciousness. Yet the focus remains on the intangible qualities of the actual land itself. So unique, its definition seems hardly certain, necessitating disparate nouns to assemble an approximate image of Gaunt’s vision; it is a “blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, / this nurse 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, … 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.”[vi] It is a remarkable tribute to a land that proves unlike all other, a country defined by the Christian blessing it enjoys and the mythic qualities it preserves, and yet it remains susceptible to the faults of one individual, the king whose aspirations dull the shine of the country’s lustre. Gaunt again suggests that the land itself gives the country its significance. Without geographical place, there could be no England with the implication of the primordial nature of nation.

As Gaunt continues, he outlines a country whose honour needs defence, whose reputation remains but mythical and therefore ethereal. It is a land prone to internal conquest, requiring defence against an unnamed threat. Oddly, a land of mythic gods, presumably protected by their might, proves prone to the base schemes of mere mortals. The dying Gaunt hints at the darker machinations of the king, and in doing so, he points to an inherently fragile England, for the country “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.”[vii] As much elegy as poetic commemoration, the vision of a “rocky” country would have found purchase in Shakespeare’s audience and the early modern perception of itself as a nation under siege, evoking a national sense of insecurity. The fact that Parliament pressured the Tudor Queen to sign the death warrant for her Scottish cousin reveals an ongoing insecurity within the realm, strong enough to unnerve the ruling elite. This national insecurity manifests itself in Shakespeare’s Welsh characters and their location within English national consciousness.

Welsh Proximity to the English Centre Literally and Conceptually

In considering the place of the Welsh within Shakespeare’s cultural constellation, Edward Said’s theory of the Other provides a useful metric by which to understand the English-Welsh relationship. In his Orientalism, Said argues that cultural confrontation reveals national differences that a particular people impose on another population in an effort to define itself. Although Said does not examine Shakespeare’s work in his monograph, Said’s research provides a theoretical framework with which to understand the cultural interactions of the English and ethnically-distinct characters in Shakespeare’s literary canon—and by extension the possible hegemonic underpinnings of the English in forming their national identity vis-à-vis the Welsh. Said argues that Orientalism reflects a value system that implicitly distinguishes “between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident.’” [viii] In Henry V, for example, displays of ethnic markers establish oppositional relationships between Celtic and English characters, illustrating the theoretical east-west fault lines with the Celts representing the Orient of Said’s paradigm. Said contends that without realizing it, western writers “have accepted the basic distinction between East and West,” with the Orient and its indigenous inhabitants understood as manifestly different.[ix] According to Said, the concept of Europe consists of “a collective notion identifying ‘us’ Europeans as against all ‘those’ non-Europeans.”[x] This relationship begins to outline the concept of Other, a vision of cultures and peoples that rests upon the assumption that European identity proves inherently superior “to all non-European peoples and cultures,” the latter usually representing “Oriental backwardness.”[xi] These notions of cultural superiority have their roots in the Renaissance when Shakespeare wrote his dramas and created his Celtic characters,[xii] representatives of England’s earliest efforts at imperialism.

Yet, while Shakespeare’s work reveals a sense of Other imposed on non-English figures in apparent conjunction with a distinct national consciousness, Welsh characters inhabit a unique space in the English national outlook, one that acknowledges cultural differences but without marginalizing them to the point of making them alien—or the Other of Said’s theoretical paradigm. Within the context of Shakespeare’s canon, evidence suggests an attempt to bring the Welsh closer to the English cultural centre. Such national centrism presupposes the English nation as superior to the inferior Welsh, Said’s Other. However, Shakespeare’s Welsh characters prove manifestly likeable, respected, and sympathetic. The differences that separate the two nationalities are inconsequential, essentially connected to accented English. That said, there are English figures who ridicule the Welsh manner of speaking English or belief systems—notably Hotspur in 1 Henry IV—but he comes across as a crass dullard whose treatment of the Welsh make the latter more sympathetic. If anything, Shakespeare seems to want to criticize these English characters, resorting to a form of poetic justice to condemn such unwarranted behaviour. Arguably, they become representative of the cultural backwardness of Said’s theoretical paradigm, an intriguing reversal of the colonizer-colonized dichotomy. While the Welsh are certainly not English, Shakespeare arguably brings them into the English mainstream to the point that they become part of the national whole. They remain different; however, they are not foreign. Indeed, the Welsh become the known-unknown.

The Welsh figures in Richard II aptly exemplify the playwright’s positive vision of them, their brief appearance notwithstanding. After the venal Richard departs England to lead a military campaign against Ireland, Welshmen await the king’s return to Britain, ready to support him. While Richard follows a trajectory of corruption and dishonour, Shakespeare portrays the Welsh as loyal and independent. When the Welsh Captain informs Salisbury that he and his men will leave for home after waiting ten days for the king, Salisbury attempts to convince him to delay their departure: “Stay yet another day, thou trusty Welshman / The King reposeth all his confidence in thee.”[xiii] Though the Welshman rebuffs Salisbury’s request, the language he employs to do so resembles that of both Bolingbroke and Gaunt in terms of poetic quality. After declaring his belief that the king is dead and that they will therefore leave, he says,

The bay trees in our country are all withered, / And meteors fright the fixèd stars of heaven; / The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth, / And lean-looked prophets whisper fearful change; / Rich men look sad, and ruffians dance and leap, / The one in fear to lose what they enjoy, / The other to enjoy by rage and war. / These signs forerun the death or fall of kings. / Farewell. Our countrymen are gone and fled, / As well assured Richard their king is dead.[xiv]

Significantly, the reference to “countrymen” apparently references the English as the Welsh have yet to depart, revealing at least from the English perspective, a strong identification with their Celtic neighbours. The juxtaposition with Salisbury’s speech emphasizes a Welsh character whose powers of language allow him to convey an eloquent rendition of the current difficult situation in England, and in doing so, his elegiac tone reveals the same sort of fear and insecurity that the noble figures of Bolingbroke and Gaunt do in their own soliloquies. That the Welsh Captain’s language brims with rich imagery formed in part by a plethora of alliteration, parallel sentence structure, assonance, consonance, and paradox suggests a sophisticated, thoughtful character—hardly an inferior mind or insulting representative of a backward culture. The Welshman’s use of the first person possessive pronoun “our country” and “our countrymen” underscores an ambiguity that blurs the line between Wales and England in his speech. On the face of it, the Captain appears to reference Wales and the Welsh; however, Salisbury’s request that the Welsh warriors stay put suggests that “our countrymen” points to English troops who have already departed presumably because of the forces gathering behind the advancing Bolingbroke. When the Captain explains that these men have “fled” out of a conviction that “their king is dead,” he confirms the close connection between the Welsh and English, for the possessive pronoun either refers to the Welsh who have fled (if the case) or to the English (who might have joined forces with Bolingbroke). If the former, the Welsh have accepted the English king as their own and presumably the close link between the English and Welsh nations. If the latter, the Captain has made it thus clear that “our countrymen” refers to the English and that he considers himself part of their country or nation. At any rate, this scene suggests an attempt by Shakespeare to bring the Welsh closer to the English cultural centre. That the quality of the Captain’s English proves equal to that of Bolingbroke and Gaunt underscores the notion that Benedict Anderson, Liah Greenfeld, and Richard Helgerson put forth: language determined in large measure one’s membership in the English national family. [xv]

Shakespeare’s Henry V dramatically illustrates the concurrent conceptions of English national consciousness and, at times, the implicit significance of the Welsh to that national consciousness. The English campaign leading up to the Battle of Agincourt exemplifies the sense of worth that comes with English nationality. As Henry’s forces besiege Harfleur, just when it appears some of the English fighters begin to falter, the king rallies his troops:

“Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more, / Or close the wall up with our English dead!”[xvi] He continues, “On, on, you noblest English…whose limbs were made in England, show us here / The mettle of your pasture. Let us swear / That you are worth your breeding, which I doubt not…Follow your spirit, and upon this charge / Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’”[xvii]

This last line offers spectacular support for McEachern’s notion of nationhood in Renaissance literature, that combination of appreciation for king, connection to land, and common religion. As Henry inspires his men, he draws on their sense of national identity, reminding his soldiers that their greatness lies with their Englishness. Henry’s sentiment is not entirely dissimilar from Gaunt’s emphasis on the greatness of the land as separate from those who inhabit it. By suggesting that their strength and valour originate with their birthright, the king reveals a value system that depends on national origins, and though the action of the play makes clear that many of these characters belong to the dregs of society, in this scene, Henry speaks to no one in particular, for they are English, and on that count, they may see themselves as equals fighting for the glory of king, country, and patron saint.

Yet that celebration of Englishness belies the monarch’s desire to broaden his heritage, for the Bard’s King Henry V, the heroic English warrior king, claims Welsh nationality on two different occasions. On the night before the Battle of Agincourt, the king moves disguised through the English camps to gain a sense of the mood of his fighting men. At one point, an Englishman, Pistol, a former companion from the monarch’s younger wild days, calls out to the roving king and asks Henry to identify himself. In response, the monarch introduces himself as Harry Le Roy and says, “I am a Welshman.”[xviii] This curious response would seem improbable if for no other reason than his lack of Welsh accent would surely indicate to his English interrogator that he is no Welshman. While suggesting a fluidity of nationality detached from the superficial marker of accent, the English soldier takes no notice of the king’s incongruous speech. Rather, he asks Henry if he knows Fluellen, and when the king answers in the affirmative, the English soldier, a thief upset with the captain’s refusal to prevent the execution of another thief, threatens to harm Fluellen on Saint Davy’s Day, a Welsh holiday. Henry not only puts Pistol on guard that Fluellen would likely hit back, the monarch also claims both friendship and kinship with the Welshman, the latter effectively ennobling him.[xix] While Pistol’s choice of Saint Davy’s Day implies anti-Welsh xenophobia, his threat not only underscores his crass demeanour but also sets into stark relief the common baseness that links Shakespeare’s characters who demean Welsh figures. In this case, the juxtaposition of Fluellen and Pistol emphasizes the latter’s crude nature with the implication that early modern people saw themselves defined in part by national origin, but Pistol’s apparent bigotry finds no reward in Shakespeare’s narrative.

Appropriation of the Welsh Past

While Shakespeare’s characters provide insight into early modern English national consciousness, his Cymbeline represents the profundity of English anxiety regarding the national desire for a claim to the ancient past of Britain. For late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English men and women, national legitimacy appears to have depended on establishing a connection to pre-Germanic Britain, long before their forebears arrived on the island. Set in the ancient Celtic past of Britain, Cymbeline represents the appropriation of Welsh cultural history by the English in the early seventeenth century. Nonetheless, the relationship proved highly complex. While Briton was for the early modern English a moniker for the Welsh,[xx] the king of the Britons, Cymbeline, rules from Lud’s Town, the assumed antecedent to London.[xxi] Wales itself is located beyond the River Severn and is wild and lawless,[xxii] far from the English cultural centre. In her article, Jodi Mikalachki examines the apparent dependence of pre-modern English national identity on an ancient British past. Using Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Mikalachki argues that the era’s social tensions prompted the pursuit of a clearly defined national identity. She maintains that the search for the national origins of England was a “project of recovery.” Intrinsic to this process remained the tension between the push to establish historical precedent and continuity and the desire to excise primitive savagery from the national character.[xxiii] However, the pattern of benign, sympathetic Welsh characters vis-à-vis English ruffians and the combative MacMorris act as the manifestations of her argument that the English sought to excise primitive savagery from the national character. Together, Cymbeline’s ancient Celtic setting and Henry V’s claim to Welsh ancestry offer not only an implied yearning for the supposed stability of a time gone by, but they also reinforce the Tudor myth that linked the monarch to the “fabled British—that is, pre-Saxon, and thus Welsh—past.”[xxiv] That Shakespeare used his drama, with its fictionalized representations of history, to employ the past to shape contemporary notions of an English national consciousness that included the Welsh seems particularly apt. Like Humanists of the era, Shakespeare’s work reflects the practice of finding truth in the historic past that gives definition to the present, both to English nationalism and to the Tudor desire for finding affirmation in the ancient British history of their island.

Cymbeline exemplifies that various national monikers define setting as constituent to the English national consciousness. If the greatness of England derives from the “dear, dear land” to which Gaunt refers in his elegy for the “sceptred isle,” or if the “sweet soil” that is Bolingbroke’s “mother and nurse” makes England what it is, the country’s greatness rests with its primordial origins. As Bolingbroke mournfully departs for life in exile, he talks of “England’s ground” with the implication that the nation’s land gives it shape and value. Yet if the English nation’s exceptional quality is powerfully bound to the land—territory that has its own history with a different people predating the contemporary world of the conflict-ridden early modern period, there can only be one solution: erase the national differences between Welsh and English and set the story in the ancient past where the setting makes everyone a Briton. In this way, Shakespeare gave his contemporary English an ancient heritage by appropriating Welsh ancestral claims to the island’s primordial past. Rather than hail from England or Wales, the characters in Cymbeline come from “Britain,” as Iachimo tells Philario upon the arrival of Posthumus in Rome. [xxv] While there is “a Frenchman, a Dutchman, and a Spaniard,”[xxvi] and there is an “Italian,”[xxvii] Posthumus is known as “the Briton” during his stay in Rome. [xxviii] Unlike the other European nationalities, Briton is an appellation that designates a tie to the ancient island of Britain, not membership in a common cultural community. The land itself unites both peoples into one British population, both with common ties to the island and its past. When Imogen speaks of Posthumus’ absence from (the island of) “Britain,” she turns the island and its land into a surrogate nation. Unlike the characters in the play from Italy, France, Spain, and Holland whose nationalities derive from their cultural communities, British and Briton derive from Britain, a geographic place, thereby emphasizing the region’s land, the factor that connects all who inhabit it. Thus, the term British gives the English of Shakespeare’s era a national pathway to the island’s past, and Cymbeline’s British theme allows the Tudor monarchs with their Welsh bloodline to celebrate themselves as truly British, and thus leaders of a British nation.

William Shakespeare’s depiction of Welsh characters is not necessarily negative. In fact, the dramatist has arguably created sympathetic Welshmen whose favourability increases for the disdain surrounding characters heap on them. Yet that sympathy comes at the cost of assimilation into the English normative sense of national self. Degree of assimilation appears key to the level of acceptance, and distinctive Welsh cultural traits are less pronounced the closer the Welsh individual to the English cultural centre. Ultimately, the depiction of the Welsh demonstrates little genuine respect for Welsh cultural uniqueness. Pointing to an underlying current of national insecurity, Shakespeare’s plays reveal a casual disregard for the so-called Other, the foreign subaltern of Edward Said’s Orientalism. However, in the case of the early modern Welsh, otherness was not their destiny so long as they assimilated to the English normative self. While this sort of xenophobic national consciousness manifests itself in the plays investigated for this project, the fact that a preponderance of national sentiment takes shape as sentimental primordialism signifies a need for an ancient past absent from English history. Taken together, both forms of national consciousness indicate an underlying insecurity within the English sense of self.

References

i. William Shakespeare, Richard II, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1996), I.iii.313-316.

ii. Derek Cohen, “History and the Nation in Richard II and Henry IV,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 42, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 295.

iii. Shakespeare, Richard II, II.i.44-48.

iv. Alan MacColl, “The Meaning of ‘Britain’ in Medieval and Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 2 (April 2006): 249-50.

v. Shakespeare, Richard II, II.i.49-54.

vi. Ibid., II.i.55-64.

vii. Ibid., II.i.65-72.

viii. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 2.

ix. Ibid.

x. Ibid., 7.

xi. Ibid.

xii. Ibid., 7, 60.

xiii. Shakespeare, Richard II, II.iv.5-6.

xiv. Ibid., II.iv.7-17.

xv. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006), 18, 37-38, 40-42; Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992), 30; Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 9.

xvi. William Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1995), III.i.1-3.

xvii. Ibid., III.i.18-37.

xviii. Ibid., IV.i.53.

xix. Ibid., IV.i.55-61.

xx. Stewart Mottram, “Warriors and Ruins: Cymbeline, Heroism and the Union of the Crowns” in Celtic Shakespeare: The Bard and the Borderers, ed. Willy Maley and Rory Loughnane (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 169-183.

xxi. Marisa Cull, Shakespeare’s Princes of Wales: English Identity and the Welsh Connection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 140.

xxii. Ibid., 141.

xxiii. Jodi Mikalachki, “The Masculine Romance of Roman Britain: Cymbeline and Early Modern English Nationalism,” Shakespeare Quarterly 46, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 302.

xxiv. Babcock, “For I am Welsh, You Know,” 194.

xxv. William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2003), I.iv.1.

xxvi. Ibid., I.iv.0.

xxvii. Ibid., II.i.49.

xxviii. Ibid., I.iv.29.

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