Early Modern European Nations and Empire

The trauma of empire in Shakespeare and early modern culture.(Book review)


Publication: College Literature

Publication Date: 01-JAN-08

Author: DiMatteo, Anthony
When she did ill what empires could have pleased? (Sir Walter Ralegh, "The Ocean to Cynthia" (qtd. by Montrose 2006, 91) I press'd me none but good householders, yeoman's sons ... Such a commodity of warm slaves. (Falstaff, Henry IV, Part One, 4.2.14- 17) King and commander of our commonweal, The wide world's emperor, do I consecrate My sword, my chariot and my prisoners. (Titus, Titus Andronicus 1.1.247- 49)

Anderson, Thomas P. 2006. Performing Early

Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton. Aldershot: Ashgate. $94.95 hc. viii + 225 pp.

Doring, Tobias. 2006. Performances of Mourning in Shakespearean Theater and Early Modern Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. $74.95 hc. viii + 223 pp.

Elliott, J. H. 2006. Empires of the Atlantic Worlds: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830. New Haven: Yale University Press. $50.00 hc. $22.00 sc. xxi + 546 pp.

Jordan, Constance, and Karen Cunningham, eds. 2007. The Law in Shakespeare. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. $74.95 hc. x + 286 pp.

Montrose, Louis. 2006. The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $64.00 hc. $25.00 sc. xii + 341 pp.

Shuger, Debora. 2006. Censorship and Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. $59.95 hc. 346 pp.

These six books present a breath-taking, largely revisionist view of the early modern period. (1) Before identifying the contribution to scholarship each of these fine books makes amidst an on-going flood of studies of the early-modern period, I'd first like to offer a brief overview of the perhaps familiar major turn of events that brought early modernity into being.

In the sixteenth century, the loss of at least the theoretical legal and religious unity of Church and State that had formally characterized Medieval culture was exploited and reviled, celebrated and mourned by Reformationists and Counter-Reformationists. Violence and trauma spread across Europe and wherever Europeans brought their divisive and self-serving claims to sovereignty across the globe. Rampant sectarianism and division led to wars of religion and conquest at home and abroad that inflicted suffering often under the Machiavellian guise of sacrifice to some allegedly higher or spiritual good. The Pope's loss of power to nationalist and reformationist forces as well as the post-Columbus scramble for newly discovered lands helped enable the rise of monarchical empires and various forms of absolutism in Portugal, Spain, France and England. This rise threatened the traditional, allegedly ancient constitutions of European government that functioned as a composite monarchy or even a monarchical republic where the sovereign only in parliament makes law (Elliott 1992; Collinson 1987). This is what the fifteenth-century English Chief Justice Sir John Fortescue referred to when he described England as "dominium politicum et regale," that is, a composite sovereign power to make law, thus a dominion or state shared by king and those people who also are constitutionally part of the legislative and political process (Fortescue 1997, 83). There was thus significant judicial and tradition-based resistance to the rise of absolutism though it was largely ineffectual in the sixteenth century, having to hide in the shadows, as it were. Resistance paled before the opportunistic, monopoly-seeking support for the imperial schemes of the nations' sovereigns. Besides, the legal balance was already strongly tilted in the monarch's favor. Even in traditional composite monarchies, monarchs legally considered themselves emperors within their own realms, and with Pope AlexanderVI's bulls of 1493-94 donating the New World to Portugal and Spain, these realms became increasingly global in terms of the subsequent struggle for European dominion over non-European soil.

It would be hard to overstress the relevance of this early-modern imperialism to all phases of life and culture both on native and non-native soil. Shakespeare too explored its roots and consequences across all the dramatic and literary genres in which he wrote. Many of his works can be considered not mirrors of human nature but of what sovereignty is and how it functions or performs, activating the ages-old realization that the way a ruler gains and/or performs office effects people of all degrees. Traditionally, the acts of a king must accord with natural and divine law, but what recourse does a nation have if they do not? This question is the dramatic focus in many a work by Shakespeare.

No wonder, given the political crisis of his time. What Louis Montrose identifies in his study of Elizabeth as "the manifest collective process of cultural imperialism" (2006, 95)--and what Virgil as, "a monstrous lust of empire" (dira cupido regnandi, Georgics 1.37) in reference to Augustus whose power early modern monarchs typically emulated--resulted in horrific suffering and change for virtually the world at large during early modernity.

A chief factor driving the perilous passage of the early-modern towards the modern as we have come to know it in the Americas was the whole complex European legal and cultural heritage that centered upon the Christian and classical Roman concept of dominion and how it differed from royal claims to imperial rule. (2) There were endless questions and assumptions about what God's granting Adam and Eve dominion over the earth meant, about what this divine gift allowed a Christian nation in terms of assigning the relative rights and duties of rulers and subjects within an individual European nation and how it entitled or did not entitle a European nation to treat non-European, non-Christian people and their lands. Claiming the divine right to civilize, conquer or drive out uncooperative indigenous people of newly discovered lands in order to take possession of them, the monarch as "dominus mundi" or "imperator mundi" (the Latin title used by or ascribed to Henry VIII and Elizabeth I of England, Francis I of France, and Charles V and his son Philip II of Spain) sent out sailor-soldiers or sea-dogs in the sixteenth-century basically to "discover," claim, conquer, plunder, trade and/or settle in his (or her) name and to the honor and glory of the competing Catholic or Protestant God. (3)

In terms of the vast consequences of these legal and religious assumptions and voyages of discovery and conquest, Elliott's great book will, I hope, immensely forward a necessary project that is not just another project, just as this Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History at Oxford University reminds us, quoting Adam Smith, that there is no empire, only the process of empire (2006, 407). His efforts will help to put not just the politics back into history, as the early-modern historian Patrick Collinson has called for, but the suffering inflicted upon mankind by, in Elliott's own words, "the trauma of European conquest and occupation" in the pursuit of national empire (410). In helping to stitch together the fragmented histories of the Americas, Elliott has not only shown how to do comparative history on a large scale. He also has exposed the disparate processes by which the modern world has been brought into existence kicking and screaming along the way as so much human blood was shed--and mingled--on a global scale partly under the stimulus of a European quest for empire and world rule. Human progress and annihilation glare out at us from an aporia-inducing space they share in Elliott's book that shows human nature at its best and worst on nearly every page.

Shakespeare too, as Tobias Doring, Thomas Anderson and many contributors to the Jordan and Cunningham collective argue, helped to bring recognition to the horrors and dignities of human suffering, repeatedly having performed on stage the injustices often caused by those in authority over the government. To those at the top, alas, as Shakespeare has Falstaff observe with technical precision, common men are often nothing more than a "commodity of warm slaves." Very often the legal and cultural focus of Shakespeare's works is upon the effects such institutionalized hubris and indifference of those in power has not only on deeds done (res gesta) but on what is said, felt and thought throughout the society represented. The plays perform and expose power and violence, Doring and Anderson argue, rendering them in terms of human causes and effects. In this way, Shakespeare directs attention towards the historical and the real and at the same implies--for what else could he do?--an incommensurable experience of suffering and loss beyond historization that disfigures representation, marking it with traces of occlusion and denial. Doring and Anderson persuasively contend that in many of his works, Shakespeare explores a collective trauma and mourning haunting and motivating diverse national and religious agendas in the early modern period.

Indeed, these six studies forward awareness of a general trauma caused in Old World Europe by the collective efforts and imaginings directed towards the founding of empire and dominion both in the metropolitan center and on the colonial periphery, be it Ireland and North America with respect to London or the Netherlands and the Americas to Madrid. (4) To extend Doring's inquiry into the performative powers of mourning in early-modern culture, one may ask, how does one do things with suffering, as in playing the martyr for a lost cause or legally inflicting pain upon others to "civilize" them? This disturbing question partly implies what in...