Shakespeare and the denial of territory: Banishment, abuse of power and strategies of resistance 9781526144058

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Shakespeare and the denial of territory

Shakespeare and the denial of territory Banishment, abuse of power and strategies of resistance Pascale Drouet

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Pascale Drouet 2021 The right of Pascale Drouet to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www​.man​ches​teru​nive​rsit​ypress​.co​.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 4404 1 hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

page vii

Introduction 1 Part I: The dynamic of deterritorialisation in King Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus 1 Swearing allegiance or questioning power 15 2 Abuse of power and banishment: from ‘effet de retour’ to unnaturalness 40 3 The talion effect: deterritorialisation for deterritorialisation 57 Part II: The dynamic of riposte in King Richard II and Coriolanus 4 The politics of illegal return 5 The necessity of the ‘war machine’ 6 Alternatives to the ‘war machine’

77 90 108

Part III: The experience of internal(ised) exile in King Lear 7 Dissembling and avoiding banishment 8 Assuming otherness, or the spiral of degradation 9 Home as a foreign elsewhere

127 142 156

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Contents Part IV: The dialectic of endurance and exhaustion in King Richard II and King Lear

10 Mental spaces and types of interiority 11 The limits of endurance and the signs of exhaustion 12 Maps of emotions

173 189 206

Conclusion 219 Bibliography 225 Index 236

Acknowledgements

Most of the material in this book has been translated and adapted from my French book Mise au ban et abus de pouvoir. Essai sur trois pièces tragiques de Shakespeare, published by the Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne in 2012, in the series directed by MarieMadeleine Martinet, to whom I would like to renew my warmest thanks. From the very beginning, this English translation and adaptation was encouraged by Gordon McMullan (King’s College London), whose wise professional counsel I was more than happy to benefit from. I am also much indebted to William C. Carroll, who kindly invited me to spend a month at Boston University as a visiting scholar. I would like to acknowledge the institutional and financial support of Boston University, the Boston University Center for the Humanities, the College of Arts and Sciences Associate Dean for Humanities, Karl Kirchwey, and the Department of English. I would like to extend my thanks to the Mugar Memorial Library and its Interlibrary Loan Staff, whose help in obtaining the English translations of books by French theorists and philosophers was particularly appreciated. I am also grateful to the University of Poitiers for the semester sabbatical granted for this project and the research trip to Boston University. The financial and institutional support of both my research centre in Poitiers, the Centre d’Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale (CESCM – UMR 7302), directed by Martin Aurell, and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société de Poitiers (MSHS – USR 3565), directed by Frédéric Chauvaud, was also precious and much appreciated. Thanks are also and specifically due to Richard Hillman (University of Tours – CESR), who

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Acknowledgements

gave me insightful advice when necessary and constantly encouraged me to carry on. Finally, for their patience and affectionate support, I thank Philippe Grosos, Dominique and Olivier Biot and Suzy Drouet, and I have a special thought for my late father’s daring spirit.

Introduction

To ‘put to the ban’, to ‘condemn by public edict or sentence to leave the country’, to ‘exile’, to ‘expatriate’: these are the objective definitions of the verb ‘banish’.1 Taking practice and subjective experience into account, Michel Foucault specifies that to banish is also to ‘destroy the home, erase the place of birth, confiscate goods and properties’,2 that is, radically to uproot what constitutes being and having. It is no coincidence that Foucault considered banishment as one of the four major forms of punishment – the other three being confinement, branding and demand for compensation.3 Banishment is a ‘major’ punitive tactic because the condemnation obviously has a strong performative value: if the sentence to leave the country is not obeyed in due time, the banished person, now persona non grata, incurs nothing less than the penalty of death. To banish, therefore, is to initiate a dynamic of departure, which is a process not only of de-spatialisation, but indeed of ‘deterritorialisation’ in the sense meant by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: the one banished is said to be ‘deterritorialised’ because they are forced to renounce all the marks (material, relational, emotional, imaginary) that transformed a geographically objective place into a familiar territory, their own, where their life was anchored and could safely develop. As the authors of A Thousand Plateaus have observed, ‘it is the mark that makes the territory’,4 and thus the territory has both a subjective quality and an existential value.5 The radical nature of deterritorialisation would seem to exclude any possibility of reterritorialisation. Yet the dynamic induced by banishment is not always a one-way trip: sometimes it elicits strategies of deviation or return; sometimes it takes part in a spiral of retaliation, with successive and reversible attempts at deterritorialising the other and reterritorialising oneself.

2

Shakespeare and the denial of territory

Who were the people liable to be banished in early modern England? In Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile, Jane Kingsley-Smith shows that in Elizabethan and Jacobean statutes banishment is ‘offered as a solution to a variety of crimes’.6 The list of those summoned to leave England includes ‘masterless men’ (vagrants, Gypsies, peddlers, unlicensed minstrels and players, etc.) and Catholic undesirable (Jesuits, seminary priests, recusants). KingsleySmith also points to the royal proclamations, which ‘reveal a much wider application of banishment than the statutes, suggesting that this was a punishment particularly favoured by Tudor and early Stuart monarchs’.7 She specifies, Under Elizabeth, proclamations were issued for the banishment of Anabaptists, the Irish, Negroes and even those whose swords exceeded the length set down in the sumptuary laws. James extended the application of this punishment to illegal hunters, to those who printed or circulated material promoting duelling (banished from the king’s presence), to rebels in the shire counties (transported to Virginia) and to individuals.8

Among the sovereign’s prerogatives was the power to exclude those who, in their eyes, deviated from the norm, did not comply with the socio-political rules of the kingdom, did not follow morally approved courses of action; those who were considered, to take up Richard Marienstras’ distinction in New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, as ‘beings “set apart” compared with beings who are “near” and whose “nearness’ is defined by custom, laws and allegiance to the sovereign’.9 These ‘beings “set apart”’ were a priori regarded as transgressive elements, threatening to create zones of chaos within the carefully hierarchised and organised cartography of political power – threatening, that is, to employ Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, to introduce ‘smooth’ or ‘nomadic’ spaces within spaces that are ‘striated’ or under control.10 Interestingly, in geological language, ‘transgression’ refers to the ‘spread of the sea over the land, as evidenced by the deposition of unconformable marine sediments’,11 and, according to the authors of A Thousand Plateaus, the sea ‘is perhaps principal among smooth spaces’.12 The notion of transgression thus concentrates the ideas of trespassing, boundary crossing and ebbing – the ebbing of the ‘smooth’ over the ‘striated’. In early modern England, banishing transgressive

Introduction

3

elements meant forcing them to take to the sea, and, as noted by Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization, ‘Navigation delivers man to the uncertainty of fate; on water, each of us is in the hands of his own destiny; every embarkation is, potentially, the last.’13 The non-conforming elements were thrown into the ‘smooth’ space of sea, as if the ‘smooth’ returned to the ‘smooth’. The notion of territoriality is crucial to understanding why banishment was so often resorted to. Three aspects are closely associated in early modern England: allegiance to the monarch and hence the realm, territorial expansion and colonisation of the New World and the development of cartography. The capacity to govern the country and conquer new lands abroad, as well as to exclude the undesirable from the homeland whenever deemed necessary, testifies to the monarch’s omnipotence. The practice of banishment is therefore part of a double dialectics: that of inclusion and exclusion, and that of territorialisation and deterritorialisation. As Edward W. Said has noted in his Reflections on Exile, ‘the interplay between nationalism and exile is like Hegel’s dialectics of servant and master, opposites informing and constituting each other’.14 Once banished, the undesirable is assigned the status of foreigner and denied the national territory, without further ado. Marienstras has emphasised the distrust harboured against foreigners, a feeling of distrust mainly fuelled by the Catholic threat and the thwarting of plots, real or supposed; he has summarised the English Parliament’s paradoxical attitude as follows: ‘While perfectly prepared to conquer distant peoples, open up new markets and assure external and internal peace, it was against opening up England to others.’15 This is clearly a process of territorialisation ‘from above’, or what Michel Onfray acerbically terms ‘the position of the missionary’, that is, ‘that regrettable tendency to apprehend reality through the filter of one’s culture’.16 Early modern England’s thirst for territorial control appears in Sir Edward Coke’s examination of the current statuses of foreigners in England and Ireland, and his consequent classification of them, in The Seventh Part of the Reports of Sir Edward Coke Kt., Chief Justice of the Common Pleas (1608);17 it also appears in the increasing interest in cartography, as evidenced by the 1579 publication of Christopher Saxton’s thirty-four maps. In his study of Elizabethan cartographers, David Ducros interestingly observes,

4

Shakespeare and the denial of territory Each of the Saxton maps claims the territory as the possession of the monarch; each reminds the observer that the Queen’s authority is exercised over all the parts of the kingdom, without exception. This message seems to be as much intended for the other European nations, on which they seek to impose the image of a powerful, unified and sovereign England, as for the subjects of Elizabeth, who are thus reminded that the attachment to the homeland is inseparable from the duty of allegiance.18

It is as if the sovereign formed a perfect equation with the land over which she reigned. Thus, attempting to undermine royal power, breaching the duty of allegiance, amounted to endangering the national territory and quite logically led to geographical exclusion. Shakespeare’s drama holds a mirror up to the practice of banishment in portraying both banishers and those banished. In tragedies, comedies and tragicomedies, as well as in history plays, a number of characters are put to the ban: Romeo in Romeo and Juliet; Cordelia, Kent and Edgar in King Lear; Coriolanus and Timon in their respective eponymous plays; the Duke Senior in As You Like It; the outlaws in The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Posthumus in Cymbeline; Perdita in The Winter’s Tale; Prospero in The Tempest; Bolingbroke and Mowbray in King Richard  II; Falstaff in King Henry IV, Part 2; Eleanor and Suffolk in King Henry VI, Part 2; and Old Queen Margaret in King Richard III. Three tragedies stand out for closely associating banishment with abuse of power: King Richard II (1595), King Lear (1605) and Coriolanus (1606).19 These plays present with particular clarity the mechanism of the proclamation and its consequences, that is, the dynamic of exclusion and its repercussions. Those repercussions may entail breaking the ban to come back illegally and seek revenge (according to an implacable rhythm of retaliation), devising strategies of deviation (such as disguise and change of identity) or resorting to mental subterfuges as a means of refuge (utopian projections, fantasies or madness); they may also lead to entropy (exhaustion and letting go, climaxing in heartbreak). These three plays, each in their own way, invite us to reflect upon the complex articulation between banishment and abuse of power, upon the strategies of resistance and displacement employed to shun or endure the painful experience of deterritorialisation; they put into play the dialectics of allegiance and disobedience, of fearlessly speaking and silencing, of endurance

Introduction

5

and exhaustion; they question both the legitimacy of power and the limits of human resistance. It seems that Shakespeare’s drama, like Racine’s, according to the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes in his foreword to Sur Racine, has managed to ‘make all the new languages of the century converge on him’, thus ‘being associated with all major critical endeavours’.20 At this point, Barthes was turning to ‘an anthropological and psychoanalytical reading of canonical texts’,21 a first step towards the methodological approach called ‘critique plurielle’ (plural criticism), which rejects the compartmentalisation of literary critical trends and seeks to see how these different trends can enrich one another through their very differences. In keeping with this approach, this study seeks to foster a critical dialogue between ‘Language Criticism’, as inherited from Structuralism (including ‘Practical Criticism and Stylistics’, with a specific focus on ‘the particular arrangement of words, sounds and phrases which were central to Renaissance humanist thought’),22 and ‘New Historicism’ and ‘Cultural Materialism’. The latter has close connections with ‘New Historicism’ in ‘its intellectual origins, and its explicit concern with power and its cultural representations’, but has, according to Hebron, ‘a more explicit and self-conscious political engagement, mixing French theoretical language with British polemical traditions of non-conformity and class-struggle’.23 ‘New Historicism’, derived from ‘Post-Structuralism’, is ‘much concerned with the issue of power’ and ‘frequently explicitly committed to challenging established authority and rescuing marginalized and suppressed voices’.24 Its key French representative was Michel Foucault. This study also seeks to foster a dialogue between Foucault’s method known as the ‘archaeology of knowledge’ – that is, the reconstitution of a historical field thanks to ‘the intertwining of its different dimensions (philosophical, economic, scientific, political, etc.), so as to obtain the conditions of emergence of knowledgeable discourses in general, at a given period’25 – and two indispensable figures of ‘French Theory’: the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. Many articles and books have been (and are still being) written by Anglo-Saxon scholars on Shakespeare’s plays, privileging one critical school or another, or trying new combinations of emerging critical trends. From a complementary perspective, this

6

Shakespeare and the denial of territory

study focuses mainly (but not exclusively) on French scholars in Shakespearean studies, and also on contemporary French historians, theorists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, essayists and philosophers, who can help us read Shakespeare’s plays in our time. This study thus takes into account some of the works of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; of the philosopher and epistemologist Gaston Bachelard, the Hellenist and anthropologist Marcel Detienne and the historian and anthropologist Jean-Pierre Vernant; and also of the lesser known (because less translated into English) analyses of the neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik, the psychoanalyst Daniel Sibony and the philosophers Michel Onfray and Emmanuel Housset. The hope is that their respective intellectual approaches will shed specific kinds of light on Shakespeare’s plays and initiate a fruitful dialogue with AngloSaxon criticism.26 Essentially focusing on Shakespeare’s King Richard  II, King Lear and Coriolanus, not as separate dramatic entities but as interwoven variations on the connections between banishment and abuse of power, this study attempts to understand the reasons for abusive exclusions and the several reactions that they generate, which range from the aggressively transgressive and patiently cunning to the self-destructive. The overall objective is to apprehend, in its own logic and continuity, the dynamic of deterritorialisation. The first part, entitled, ‘The dynamic of deterritorialisation in King Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus’, contrasts the duty of allegiance (whether absolute or contractual) with the affirmation of an individual code of ethics that goes against it. It thus examines the dialectics of loyalty and disloyalty as subjective notions: on one side, the subordinate figure who refuses to support political excesses (justified by the doctrine of divine right, absolutism or ‘theatrocracy’27) and turns into a ‘fearless speaker’28 or parrhesiast, in favour of the truth; on the other side, the king or another authority in power (like the tribunes in Coriolanus) who abuses his power and misinterprets parrhesia or ‘fearless speech’ as a sign of hubris and treachery, and consequently banishes the bold subject, now deemed a traitor, who has dared to speak the unpleasant truth. The parrhesiastes are civically and geographically excluded (Cordelia and Kent in King Lear; Coriolanus) because they have, linguistically and ethically, a threatening, deterritorialising potential. The abusive denial

Introduction

7

of territory they suffer generates three types of reactions in King Lear, Coriolanus and King Richard II: counterattack and illegal return, ruse and change of identity, and endurance through mental escape. As its title suggests, the second part, ‘The dynamic of riposte in King Richard II and Coriolanus’, is devoted to the first type of reaction. Though they are officially, though unjustly, banished, some characters (Bolingbroke in King Richard  II, Coriolanus) will not passively endure; once abroad, they initiate a dynamics of frontal counterattack and illegally return with a Deleuzian ‘war machine’. For this illegal return to succeed, expedient alliance must prevail over national loyalty, and the rebellious banished person appeals to mercenaries or turns mercenary himself, gives free rein to his ‘becoming-animal’ and his ‘becoming-machine’, and alters a civilised ‘striated’ space into a ‘smooth’ one, where landmarks are blown up. Yet this counterattack cannot succeed without, on the one hand, a weakened ‘State apparatus’ and, on the other, a ‘war machine’, whether merely deterrent or fully operational.29 This part finally shows how the plays present alternatives to the ‘war machine’, when one wants to force one’s return to one’s homeland. Two ways are envisaged: to serve another ‘State apparatus’ or to become God’s soldier (Mowbray’s choice in King Richard II); to engage in single combat with ‘nomadic’ advantages, that is, following the codes of chivalry but in a ‘smooth’ space (Edgar’s decision in King Lear). Turning to The Tempest may offer a complementary third alternative: opting for Deleuzian ‘magical capture’ when one has Prospero’s power. The third part, ‘The experience of internal(ised) exile in King Lear’, concentrates on an indirect strategy of resistance that is the product of ruse, that is, ‘cunning intelligence’, or metis in Greek.30 The dynamics of frontal riposte thus gives way to the dynamics of deviation (the choice of Kent and Edgar in King Lear). This part studies strategies of dissembling and examines how the sentence of banishment is suspended by a shift in identity, the invention of a temporary persona, so that someone can go unnoticed and ‘become imperceptible’ in the very country from which he is officially banished. This raises the question of how one experiences otherness (a displacement of social identity) in one’s own country (inner exile), facing a fall in status and humiliation (eating what is not edible,

8

Shakespeare and the denial of territory

suffering from infamy and lack of charity) and, at times, facing uncanny situations, as one finds oneself, as the poet Louis Aragon puts it, ‘en étrange pays dans [son] pays lui-même’31 (feeling in a foreign country while in one’s homeland). The here and now is thus apprehended as an elsewhere, a place off the map, a ‘haptic’ space with no horizon line, whether geographical or existential, where inner exile is patiently endured. The book’s final part, ‘The dialectic of endurance and exhaustion in King Richard II and King Lear’, focuses on a strategy of resistance departing from riposte and ruse, and requiring the capacity to endure mentally (and physically). It examines the dialectics of endurance and exhaustion, and the risk of collapsing totally (going mad, committing suicide or dying from heart failure). When persons who suffer from abuse of power feel unable to cope with a reality devoid of any sense of justice, they turn to a mental space of their own and try to find solace inwardly (as will be seen in John of Gaunt’s stoic reinterpretation of reality in King Richard II). Yet the creation of a mental shelter is deeply ambivalent: does it take part in a strategy of resistance, which subjectively re-thinks and re-shapes the real to make it more bearable, or does it rather betray a withdrawal within oneself and what Roland Barthes terms the ‘non-willto-possess’,32 which leads to a lethal letting go or the ‘borderline mode of madness’?33 This part thus questions the notions of limits, duration and torment. How do we know that the limits of endurance have reached a point of no return? What are the physical and psychic symptoms of exhaustion? Why do ‘tutors of resilience’,34 as Boris Cyrulnik calls them (such as Cordelia and Edgar in King Lear), fail to intuit these limits? In the end, the dynamic of deterritorialisation entails a reflection upon the failure of understanding or, at least, the failure to take into account the vulnerability of the human condition. Surprisingly enough, ‘tutors of resilience’ join persons of power in their incapacity to remember, in T. S. Eliot’s words about John Webster’s tragedies, ‘the skull beneath the skin’.35 The notions of banishment, abuse of power and refusal of allegiance with which this book begins implicate issues not only of territory but also of both real and symbolic death.

Introduction

9

Notes 1 Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), ‘banish, v.’, 1.; 2. 2 Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, 1954–1988, tome II, 1970–1975 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 456; my translation of ‘détruire le foyer, effacer le lieu de naissance, confisquer les biens et les propriétés’. 3 Ibid., p. 456. 4 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London/New York: Continuum, 2008), p.  348. In the original text: ‘C’est la marque qui fait le territoire’, Mille plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980), p. 388. 5 Also see François Zourabichvili, Le Vocabulaire de Deleuze (Paris: Ellipses, 2003), pp. 27–9. 6 Jane Kingsley-Smith, Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 11. 7 Ibid., p. 11. 8 Ibid., p. 11. 9 Richard Marienstras, New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 1. In the original text: ‘des êtres “éloignés” par rapport à des êtres “proches”, dont la “proximité” est définie par la coutume, les lois, l’allégeance au souverain’, Le Proche et le lointain. Sur Shakespeare, le drame élisabéthain et l’idéologie anglaise aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1981), p. 9. 10 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 523–51. This distinction will be defined and analysed in the subsequent discussion. 11 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘transgression, n.’, 2. 12 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 426–7. In the original text: ‘La mer est peut-être le principal des espaces lisses’, Mille plateaux, p. 481. 13 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 11. In the original text: ‘la navigation livre l’homme à l’incertitude du sort; là, chacun est confié à son propre destin, tout embarquement est en puissance le dernier’, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 25–6. Unfortunately the published English translation is brutally abridged, so the translation will be mine when necessary (and so identified).

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Shakespeare and the denial of territory

14 Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile, and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 176. 15 Marienstras, New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, p.  104. In the original text: ‘on voulait bien conquérir des peuples lointains, s’ouvrir de nouveaux marchés, assurer la paix extérieure et domestique, mais on ne voulait pas s’ouvrir à autrui’, Le Proche et le lointain, p. 153. Also see the entirety of Chapter 5: ‘The Near and the Far: The Calvin Affair and the Status of Foreigners under James I of England’, pp. 99–125. 16 Michel Onfray, Théorie du voyage. Poétique de la géographie (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2007), p. 60; my translation of ‘la position du missionnaire’, ‘cette fâcheuse tendance à voir le réel avec le filtre de sa culture’. 17 See Marienstras, New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, pp. 113–17. Sir Edward Coke was a ‘British jurist and politician whose defense of the supremacy of the common law against Stuart claims of royal prerogative had a profound influence on the development of English law and the English constitution’, Gareth H. Jones, entry ‘Sir Edward Coke’, last updated 28 January 2020, Encylopaedia Britannica online (2020): www​.britannica​.com​/biography​/Edward​-Coke (accessed March 2020). 18 David Ducros, ‘“Mapping the kingdom”: les cartographes élisabéthains et l’image de la nation’, in Ronald Shusterman (ed.), Cartes, paysages, territoires (Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2000), p.  132; my translation of ‘Chacune des cartes de Saxton revendique le territoire comme la possession du monarque; chacune rappelle à l’observateur que l’autorité de la reine s’exerce sur toutes les parties du royaume, sans exception. Ce message semble être autant destiné aux autres nations européennes, auxquelles on cherche à imposer l’image d’une Angleterre puissante, unifiée et souveraine, qu’aux sujets d’Élisabeth, auxquels on rappelle que l’attachement à la patrie est indissociable du devoir d’allégeance.’ 19 These dates correspond to the first performances and are from the ‘Chronological Table’ in A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (eds), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 20 Roland Barthes, ‘Avant-propos’, Sur Racine (Paris: Seuil, 1979), p. 6; my translation of ‘à faire converger sur lui tous les langages nouveaux du siècle’, ‘été mêlée à toutes les tentatives critiques de quelque importance’. 21 David Macey, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 30.

Introduction

11

22 Malcolm Hebron, Key Concepts in Renaissance Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 241. 23 Ibid., p. 225. 24 Ibid., pp. 245, 244. 25 Judith Revel, Le Vocabulaire de Foucault (Paris: Ellipses, 2009), p. 11; my translation of ‘[faire] jouer ses différentes dimensions (philosophique, économique, scientifique, politique, etc.) afin d’obtenir les conditions d’émergence des discours de savoir en général, à une époque donnée’. 26 The intellectual trajectories of Roland Barthes, Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze are clearly and usefully presented in Macey, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. 27 Georges Balandier, Le Détour. Pouvoir et modernité (Paris: Fayard, 1985); my translation of ‘théâtrocratie’. 28 See Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001); Michel Foucault, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres. Cours au Collège de France, 1982–1983 (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2008); Michel Foucault, Le Courage de la vérité. Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres II. Cours au Collège de France. 1984 (Paris: Seuil/ Gallimard, 2009); Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France. 1983–1984, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 29 All these notions (‘war machine’, ‘State apparatus’, ‘becoming-animal’, ‘becoming-machine’, ‘becoming imperceptible’, ‘striated space’ and ‘smooth space’, ‘magical capture’, ‘nomadic space’, ‘haptic space’ and ‘optic space’) are taken from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and will be discussed in due course. 30 Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Les Ruses de l’intelligence. La mètis des Grecs (Paris: Flammarion, 1974). 31 From Louis Aragon’s title En étrange pays dans mon pays lui-même (Paris: Seghers, 1946). 32 Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), p. 232. In the original text: ‘le non-vouloir-saisir’, Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 275. 33 Emmanuel Housset, L’Intériorité d’exil. Le soi au risque de l’altérité (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2008), p. 181; my translation of ‘le mode limite de la folie’.

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34 See Boris Cyrulnik and Claude Seron (eds), La Résilience ou comment renaître de sa souffrance? (Paris: Éditions Fabert, 2003), and Boris Cyrulnik, De Chair et d’âme (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008). 35 T. S. Eliot, ‘Whispers of Immortality’, Collected Poems, 1909–35 (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), p. 53.

Part I The dynamic of deterritorialisation in King Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus

Though well we may not pass upon his life Without the form of justice, yet our power Shall do a curtsy to our wrath, which men May blame but not control. King Lear (3.7.23–6)

1 Swearing allegiance or questioning power

To better understand the dynamic of deterritorialisation, it is necessary to turn backwards and look for the origins of discord, for the source of what David Scott Kastan calls ‘the turbulence of history’, which he presents as follows: In play after play we are forced to experience the turbulence of history. We are confronted not with order but with change, with the instability of rule and relationship. Loyalties and sympathies abruptly shift in the fluctuation of fortune and the flow of time. History offers not the reassuring record of God’s purposiveness but a grim reminder of mutability and instability.1

Mutability and instability sometimes result from refusal of allegiance, abuse of power and banishment. In King Richard II and King Lear, abusive banishment is the consequence of fearless speech (Greek parrhesia): bold subjects speak their minds to the king so as to question or criticise a decision or action of his that they deem unjust or evil, although supposedly justified by doctrines of absolute or divine right. In Coriolanus, the prospective consul is banished by the people and their tribunes because he disapproves of political rites and traditions that Georges Balandier would in our time categorise as ‘theatrocracy’, that is, ‘dramatisation as spectacular ruse’.2 Abuses of power, whether institutional or individual, may be regarded as the starting point of chain reactions. But what precisely do they consist in?

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The dynamic of deterritorialisation

Abuse of power (divine right, absolutism, ‘theatrocracy’) King Richard II opens with the monarch’s address to John of Gaunt concerning his son. His speech contains an interpolated clause, a comment testifying to both his lucidity and his casualness: Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster, Hast thou according to thy oath and band Brought hither Henry Hereford, thy bold son, Here to make good the boist’rous late appeal – Which then our leisure would not let us hear – Against the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray? (1.1.1–6)3

Although quite imperceptibly, the motif of the wilfully deaf ear – which Gaunt refers to at the beginning of Act 2 (2.1.15–16) – is introduced from the start and invites us to ponder over kingly priorities. The king’s bon plaisir obviously comes before administering justice at the request of his subjects and before ethical considerations. Harry Levin observes, ‘Over-indulgent and self-indulgent, coddled into that seat of grandeur which Richard III would struggle toward so ferociously, he [Richard II] neglects his duties and obligations while enjoying his privileges and exploiting his prerogatives.’4 Even if the king’s subjects are finally listened to, justice is not administered in the expected form of a trial by combat. The justice epitomised by the king appears questionable, insofar as he decides in extremis not to administer it in the traditional way, but rather to banish both the Duke of Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke. His refusal of a trial by combat and his decision to impose sentences on both parties read as a sign that Bolingbroke’s accusation of high treason (plotting the Duke of Gloucester’s death) officially targets Mowbray, but indirectly the king himself. Whether Richard II actually had a hand in Gloucester’s execution is still uncertain,5 but his decision that Mowbray and Bolingbroke must ‘tread the stranger paths of banishment’ (1.3.143), his ‘liberal largesse’ (1.4.44), his ‘blank charters’ (48) to extort revenues, his ‘leas[ing] out’ (2.1.59) of the land and, last but not least, his appropriation of John of Gaunt’s ‘plate, coin, revenues and moveables’ (161) show his propensity to abuse his power. As the Duke of York wonders about the limits of allegiance (‘tender duty’), he recapitulates the king’s excesses:

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How long shall I be patient? Ah, how long Shall tender duty make me suffer wrong? Not Gloucester’s death, nor Hereford’s banishment, Nor Gaunt’s rebukes, nor England’s private wrongs, Nor the prevention of poor Bolingbroke About his marriage, nor my own disgrace Have ever made me sour my patient cheek, Or bend one wrinkle on my sovereign’s face. (2.1.163–70)

These excesses are to be understood in the ideological context of the time, with the predominancy of the theory of the king’s two bodies (the body natural, perishable, and the purely abstract body politic) and the doctrine of divine right (the king considered as rex imago dei): the monarch was untouchable.6 As William C. Carroll emphasises, ‘This distinction between the mortal and the political body has a certain plausibility, but also led to unexpected consequences … one can easily see the advantages to the monarchical position in such a theory, since no personal action of the monarch could be invalidated, and no matter how incompetent or diseased the monarch was, as king he was nevertheless perfect.’7 Thus the Bishop of Carlisle can reassure Richard II (or so he thinks) by telling him, ‘That Power that made you king / Hath power to keep you king in spite of all’ (3.2.27–8). Thus Gaunt can only accept the king’s impunity as ‘God’s substitute, / His deputy anointed in His sight’ (1.2.37– 8), acknowledge his powerlessness as a mere subject, and turn to higher justice in his attempt to comfort the Duchess of Gloucester: ‘But since correction lieth in those hands / Which made the fault that we cannot correct, / Put we our quarrel to the will of heaven’ (4–6). Richard II’s abuses of power are his individual responsibility, but they are also symptomatic of a doctrine that enables him to impose, with impunity, ‘his autocratic conception of royal power’.8 Something seems to be rotten in the monarchy of divine right, hence in the many homilies that promoted its monolithic ideology. King Lear, although in a different context, also questions the king’s personal drift towards absolutism, taken in its negative sense. Carroll usefully reminds us that [t]he king’s right to the throne, it was claimed, is absolute, and his powers also absolute. This term, which was initially a wholly positive concept – absolute meaning perfect, complete, unrestricted, or

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The dynamic of deterritorialisation unimprovable – eventually became a term of negative judgement, suggesting ‘too much’, and finally virtually a synonym for ‘tyranny’. Hence the term ‘absolutism’ (negatively) indicating a form of rule that was without limits, arbitrary, unchecked.9

The radical evolution from positive to negative connotation speaks for itself. In King Lear, abusive absolutism takes the form of arbitrariness and what Levin terms ‘authorised egocentricity’,10 that is, his bon plaisir, the appetite of his body natural for flattering rhetoric (showing how much the father is loved by his daughters), which is so crucial to his dividing and bequeathing his kingdom. As Leonard Tennenhouse notes, ‘when he [Lear] determines the rules of inheritance according to his will and not according to the principle of primogeniture, he appears to deny the metaphysics of the body politic and the special status of the king’s blood. By dismantling his iconic body, Lear disperses the powers in a way that pits them again one another.’11 Lear’s disregarding the law of primogeniture could have been justified by his personal wish to leave a more equitable legacy to his three daughters; but the division of the kingdom is orchestrated in an arbitrary way – not according to the intrinsic value of the person, but to their aptitude to flatter and exceed in hyperbolical rhetoric. This might have functioned as a cover for favouritism had it not backfired and ironically led to the repudiation of the favourite, Cordelia. Not unlike Lear’s daughters, who have to go through a rhetorical performance to gain their respective parts of the kingdom, Coriolanus, so as to become consul, has to comply with a political rite of passage that forces him to play a part and resort to the rhetoric of pretence. In Coriolanus’ ancient Rome, the expulsion of the Tarquins might have coincided with the end of political abuses; but the patricians who are associated with the Capitol, a place symbolic of ‘imperium sine fine’,12 do not seem to be concerned with starving plebeians. As one of the citizens in arms explains, ‘They [the patricians] ne’er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear us’ (1.1.76–83).13 But in the Roman play, no patrician in power comes to Lear’s realisation that ‘[he] ha[s] ta’en / Too

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little care of this’ (3.4.32–3).14 In 494 BCE Rome, such negligence triggers a popular rebellion that leads to the election and recognition of tribunes, that is, the beginning of a political system based on democratic representation. When Coriolanus was performed in 1608 England, it is not impossible that spectators interpreted the confrontation between the Roman patricians and plebeians as a topical allusion to the conflicts between the House of Commons and King James I, whose absolutist vision of monarchy had been clear since his 1598 treatise, The True Law of Free Monarchies.15 In Shakespeare’s Roman play, the plebeians and their tribunes fear worse treatment if Coriolanus is elected consul. Volumnia herself reproaches her son with being ‘too absolute’ (3.2.41), in the depreciative sense of ‘unmitigated’.16 But Coriolanus uses the same adjective (possibly in the sense and extended use of ‘despotic’17) to point up the tribunes’ ambition when he asks his rhetorical question: ‘Mark you / His [Sicinius’] absolute “shall”?’ (3.1.91–2). If the adjective describes the people’s speeches or actions, the superlative then becomes relative, as when Coriolanus refers to Greece and says, ‘there the people had more absolute power’ (118). In the end, the only character who uses the adjective in its meliorative sense of ‘free from imperfection or deficiency’18 is Aufidius, when he addresses Coriolanus as ‘most absolute sir’ (4.5.137); but this hyperbole says more about the Volscian’s excessive emotion and admiration than about the Roman’s perfection. Coriolanus shows a concern with the balance of political powers, although it presents us with opposite excesses that, in the play, Aufidius interprets as a cyclic dialectic: ‘One fire drives out one fire, one nail one nail; / Rights by rights falter, strengths by strengths do fail’ (4.7.54–5). But for Coriolanus, political equilibrium is structurally impossible; as he explains, ‘when two authorities are up, / Neither supreme, how soon confusion / May enter ’twixt the gap of both and take / The one by th’other’ (3.1.111–14). He hates compromises and demagogical excesses; he hates ‘theatrocracy’, which is what Volumnia so desperately tries to teach him when she advises him, ‘Go to them with this bonnet in thy hand, / And thus far having stretched it – here be with them – / Thy knee bussing the stones – for in such business / Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ignorant / More learned than the ears’ (3.2.75–9). Balandier specifies that, according to ‘spectacular ruse’,

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The dynamic of deterritorialisation power presents itself as being at the service of everybody, but it is the guardian of inequalities and their hierarchies; as being issued from reason or collective will, but it is also begotten by events; as emanating from law, but at the same time it engenders laws that ensure its own defence and have different applications depending on social classes and categories. Nowhere and never is it absolutely what it pretends to be; moreover, it is incapable of showing and expressing its entire truth, since its function is to produce effects.19

But Coriolanus refuses ‘to produce effects’; he will neither exhibit his wounds to the people, nor listen to his mother’s lesson in ‘eloquence’; he is consequently excluded from the sphere of political power. Comparing Shakespeare’s Roman and English history plays, Robert S. Miola writes, ‘both depict councils, battles, rebellions, invasions, and crises in government. Both examine the nature of sovereignty, tyranny, patriotism, imperialism and honour. Both explore the shifting relationship between the public and private selves, between rhetoric and reality, between war and peace.’20 Indeed, Coriolanus and King Richard II, but also King Lear, presented in the 1608 Quarto as The True Chronicle History of the Life and Death of King Lear, do so. In the three plays, political power is not immune from excesses. First, these plays are pervaded by the (sociopolitical and rhetorical) dialectics of abundance and scarcity: Lear speaks highly of his kingdom, using what Richard Halpern terms ‘cornucopian rhetoric’,21 while keeping silent about the lot of ‘[p]oor naked wretches’ (3.4.28); Richard II and the Roman patricians are closely associated with the notion of ‘surfeit’,22 whereas England is bled dry and plebeians starving; plebeians are denied the patricians’ ‘superfluity’ (Coriolanus, 1.1.16), while the poor of Lear’s kingdom have as yet had no ‘superflux’ (King Lear, 3.4.35) shaken to them. Secondly, these plays show a shift from integrity to hypocrisy, whether the latter is manifested through dissimulation (Gloucester’s murder in Richard II) or ostentation (Lear’s drama of flattery, ‘theatrocracy’ in Coriolanus). These excesses are made possible by political institutions and the dominant ideology, insofar as they can be committed with complete impunity thanks to the former and are actually supported by the latter. Coriolanus denounces a system that has failed to evolve: ‘Custom calls me to’t. / What custom wills, in all things should we do’t, / The

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dust on antique time would lie unswept, / And mountainous error be too highly heaped / For truth to o’erpeer’ (2.3.113–17). Richard II and Lear, each in his own way, have absolutist forms of behaviour that justify their bon vouloir and whims, and that are exacerbated either by lack of maturity (York warns Gaunt: ‘Deal mildly with his [Richard II’s] youth, / For young hot colts, being raged, do rage the more’, 2.1.69–70) or by old age (according to Goneril, ‘The best and soundest of his [Lear’s] time hath been but rash; then must we look from his age to receive not alone the imperfections of longengrafted condition, but therewithal the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them’, 1.1.290–4). Absolutist behaviours not only threaten individual existences but also imperil the homeland, whether kingdom or republic, as they unwittingly pave the way for internal discords (rival sisters, enemy cousins, plebeians versus patricians) that can spark off civil wars. This raises the delicate issue of how one should react once these absolutist behaviours have been seen through.

The varieties of allegiance in early modern England Speaking one’s mind so as to go against the grain, question dominant ideology, challenging ‘the vertical relationships based on the complementary notions of deference and protection’23 and threatening the performative power of absolute authority, entail taking risks whose consequences can be measured only when the notion of allegiance is taken into account. In Shakespeare’s King Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus, allegiance is presented according to three modes: absolute (obedience is unconditional), contractual (obedience makes sense only if contractual reciprocity is respected) and conflicting (obedience stands in a dialectical relationship with disobedience, a situation which generally breaks down in the face of some personal code of ethics). Allegiance requires the respect of what Jonas A. Barish and Marshall Waingrow call ‘the doctrine of hierarchy’, which implies that ‘[a]n individual obeys or ministers to his superior in the social scale, and that superior ministers to his superior’.24 Originally, in feudal law, allegiance referred to ‘the duty, homage, etc., owed by a vassal or liege man to the king or lord from whom he holds land’.25

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This duty of unconditional obedience – the sign of unfailing loyalty – was to be fully understood in the perspective of divine right. As Richard Marienstras explains, on the basis of Sir Edward Coke’s reports,26 ‘Allegiance is the obedience that a subject owes his sovereign. Coke declares that it is stronger than the link binding the lord and the vassal who has paid him homage. It is a form of liege homage exalted to the absolute.’27 Elizabethan homilies, as Carroll notes, served as propaganda tools for the doctrine of divine right; they hammered the idea that allegiance was unquestionable even though the king happened to behave as a tyrant: if he did, this probably meant that the subjects had deserved this ordeal, which was sent by God himself.28 In King Richard II, such absolute loyalty is embodied by Mowbray, who supposedly became the king’s henchman but is, above all, his liege man, and sacrifices himself for his sovereign. In The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, first published in 1598, King James I strongly supports unconditional allegiance and absolutism; he asserts that it is ethically impossible for subjects to rebel against the monarch, who remains, however bad his reign might prove, elected by God: ‘The wickednesse … of the King can neuer make them that are ordained to be iudged by him, to become his Iudges.’29 Yet he is careful not to endorse the bad deeds of bad kings: Not that by all this former discourse of mine, and Apologie for kings, I meane that whatsoeuer errors and intollerable abominations a souereigne prince commit, hee ought to escape all punishment, as if thereby the world were only ordained for kings, & they without controlment to turne it vpside down at their pleasure: but by the contrary, by remitting them to God (who is their onely ordinary Iudge) I remit them to the sorest and sharpest schoolmaster that can be deuised for them: for the further a king is preferred by God aboue all other ranks & degrees of men, and the higher that his seat is aboue theirs, the greater is his obligation to his maker. And therfore in case he forget himselfe (his vnthankfulnes being in the same measure of height) the sadder and sharper will his correction be[.]30

It is in the same spirit that John of Gaunt, in King Richard II, answers the Duchess of Gloucester, who calls for personal revenge: ‘God’s is the quarrel, for God’s substitute, / His deputy anointed in His sight, / Hath caused his death, the which if wrongfully, / Let heaven revenge, for I may never lift / An angry arm against

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His minister’ (1.2.37–41). But history and the history play inspired by it show that neither highly rhetorical texts (pamphlets or homilies) nor the measured speeches of those whose allegiance remains unshakable prove convincing when feelings of injustice intensify. Reconsidering Coke’s interpretation (that of an allegiance between subject and king more absolute than an allegiance between vassal and lord), Marienstras specifies, The vassalage relationship was originally a contractual one. The vassal owed his ‘faith’ rather than his obedience to the ‘suzerain’. The homage tacitly implied the right to disobey if the suzerain failed in his obligations. The alteration was made towards the middle of the thirteenth century: henceforth, any disobedience might be regarded as treason and the king now tended to consider himself as a ‘natural’ sovereign.31

Such a feudal relationship (and more particularly the reciprocity required by the notion of contract) resurfaces in King Richard II and King Lear with the recurrence of the word ‘liege’. This is the common marker of deference used by John of Gaunt, Bolingbroke, York and Kent when they address their respective king, especially when they are about to voice their reserve or disagreement – Kent’s ‘Good my liege’ (1.1.118), after Lear has repudiated Cordelia; York’s ‘O my liege’ (2.1.186), after Richard II has appropriated Gaunt’s properties. As for Bolingbroke’s ‘My gracious sovereign, my most loving liege!’ (1.1.21), it creates, as Forker notes, ‘an effective anticipatory irony, for he will cut short Richard’s reign by usurpation, an event already familiar to most of the audience’.32 The formal politeness of ‘my liege’ is part of a practice of ‘précaution oratoire’, but it also reminds us, because of the two senses of the word ‘liege’ – ‘liege-man’ and ‘liege-lord’33 – of contractual relationship. As Pierre Legouis has observed, ‘“Liege” because of this double meaning [vassal and lord] perfectly expresses the reciprocity of feudal obligations, as inseparable as the obverse and reverse of one medal.’34 Hence Barish and Waingrow’s quasi-equation, ‘Failure to serve is closely linked with failure to rule.’35 As regards the notion of contract itself, it is explicitly evoked in King Lear by Cordelia’s ‘I love your majesty / According to my bond, no more no less’ (1.1.90–1) and Kent’s ‘To plainness honour’s bound / When majesty falls to folly’ (146–7). For Kent, fearless speech is required and justified by

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loyalty. Yet the contract is broken neither by Kent nor by Cordelia, who never challenge the obligations of allegiance. In Coriolanus, the social reciprocity between patricians and plebeians exists by tacit agreement, as is expressed by the Third Citizen: ‘if he [Coriolanus] tell us his noble deeds we must also tell him our noble acceptance of them. Ingratitude is monstrous’ (2.3.7– 9); Coriolanus reluctantly recognises that ‘[c]ustom calls [him] to’t’ (113–14), although he ‘had rather be their servant in [his] way / Than sway with them in theirs’ (2.1.199–200). As Denis LagaeDevoldère notes, ‘Coriolanus, obsessed as he is with his denial of reciprocity, thought he could do without the social contract founding the whole system of Roman communal reciprocity.’36 In this regard, Shakespeare’s Roman play differs from King Richard II and King Lear: the refusal to abide by higher rules, which partly triggers banishment, is to be interpreted as a harsh rejection of contractual bonds, whereas in the other two plays, this refusal, however firm it may be, seems to remain within the frame of allegiance. Between ‘the two poles of sovereignty’ that Deleuze and Guattari distinguish, it is as if Coriolanus chooses ‘the imperium of true thinking operating by magical capture, seizure or binding, constituting the efficacy of a foundation (mythos)’, as opposed to ‘a republic of free spirits proceeding by pact or contract, constituting a legislative and juridical organisation, carrying the sanction of a ground (logos)’.37 When confronted with excesses of power, what should the liegeman do? Still maintain allegiance to his liege-lord, pretending that he has noticed nothing? Does loyalty require that service should turn into servility, that one should debase oneself into someone ‘super-serviceable’ (King Lear, 2.2.16), that is, ‘one that [would] be a bawd in way of good service’ (17)? In King Richard II, this is the dilemma experienced by York, who laments, ‘How long shall I be patient? Ah, how long / Shall tender duty make me suffer wrong?’ (2.1.163–4); and he blames the king for ‘prick[ing] [his] tender patience to those thoughts / Which honour and allegiance cannot think’ (207–8). As Forker notes, ‘tender suggests York’s moral sensitivity to the obligation of loyalty’.38 York voices the conflict that occurs when the subject’s sense of duty of allegiance no longer coincides with his ethical sense and hence generates divided loyalty. What should he do? The answer is all the more difficult because medieval diffidatio, which allowed one to renounce or shift one’s

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allegiance without penalty, is no longer in keeping with the tenor of the times.39 On the one hand, York boldly raises the question, but, on the other hand, he is careful not to answer it; the play then shows that he proves unable to get away from in-betweenness, trapped first between his duty of allegiance and personal ethics, secondly between former loyalty to Richard II and new loyalty to Bolingbroke. Conversely, Kent in King Lear succeeds in reconciling his own sense of ethics with his devotion to the king. As Barish and Waingrow explain, His [Kent’s] code can be reduced almost to two commandments: absolute loyalty to his master and absolute loyalty to the truth. His devotion to Lear far exceeds in emotional intensity any of the relationship where blood kinship plays no part, and most of those where it does. Nevertheless, this devotion presupposes an even more fundamental devotion to the truth, and it therefore serves only the truth in Lear – in ‘Royal Lear’ – and not the caprices of vanity and senility.40

Thus, Kent appears as York’s inverted double. Yet, York may be searching for a third option when he calls God to witness (‘Now, afore God – God forbid I say true –’, 2.1.200) in warning Richard II against the disastrous consequences his abuses of power might have. Calling God to witness and leaving the matter in His hands might be a way to go beyond the opposition between the duty of allegiance and a personal sense of ethics. Earlier in King Richard II, Bolingbroke refuses to comply with the king’s order that he should surrender Mowbray’s gage, exclaiming, ‘O, God defend my soul from such deep sin!’ (1.1.187). Later, the dying Gaunt tells the negligent king, ‘Now He that made me knows I see thee ill –’ (2.1.93). By suggesting a division between divine will and royal behaviour, son and father imply that the king is no longer in the image of God, as if rex and imago dei were out of joint. Like York, they evoke a higher form of allegiance, a transcendent one that might possess a federative power. However, placing God before one’s sovereign did not save one from being punished for disobedience, as Johann P. Sommerville reminds us, pointing to one of the major ideas in King James I’s political writings: He [James] held that kings possess a monopoly of political power, which they derive from God alone. Active resistance to the monarch

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The dynamic of deterritorialisation is always sinful. If our king commands us to do things which contravene the law of God, we must disobey him, for we should always obey God rather than man. But if the monarch calls us to account for our disobedience, we should meekly accept whatever punishment he inflicts upon us.41

In King Richard II, neither Bolingbroke nor Mowbray can obey the king because ‘dark dishonour’ (1.1.169) would follow. But if Mowbray later accepts Richard II’s ‘heavy sentence’ (1.3.154) of endless exile, Bolingbroke only feigns to accept temporary banishment – he will come back with a Deleuzian ‘war machine’.42 In Ancient Rome, honour was a major virtue. Coriolanus is so attached to virtù that he feels free to disdain fortuna; he will not listen to his mother when she voices Machiavelli’s principles and will not prudently adapt to circumstances. He thus comes to the disastrous end announced by Machiavelli in his conclusion to ‘Of Fortune’s power in human affairs and how she can be resisted’: ‘since Fortune varies and men remain obstinate in their ways, men prosper when the two are in harmony and fail to prosper when they are not in accord’.43 Or, to take up Max Weber’s twentieth-century terms, Coriolanus opts for an ‘ethics of conviction’ (‘Gesinnungsethik’) and not an ‘ethics of responsibility’ (‘Verantwortungsethik’).44 The ethics of responsibility would require Coriolanus’ ‘allegiance’ to the people and their tribunes, which is unthinkable to him: the Roman warrior will not be ‘[f]alse to [his] nature’ (3.2.15) but faithful to his convictions, should he have to die for them. Getting back to early modern England, one may trace the influence of the 1579 treatise entitled Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, which questioned unconditional allegiance. The Shakespearean characters that dare lay claim to their own ethics, in opposition to an orthodox position verging on tyranny, resort to free-spokenness or fearless speech.

Parrhesia and the failure of performative speech The fearless speaker is a frank person, ‘not practising concealment’,45 able temporarily to relegate to the background their status as vassal, subject or citizen to address the person in authority directly and utter some truth that may be unpleasant to him, thus testifying

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that they, the speaker, are ethically autonomous. The frank speaker fights against the flattery and hypocrisy that Shakespeare, in Sonnet 114, considers as ‘the monarch’s plague’.46 Fearless speech comes from the Greek term parrhesia to which Michel Foucault devoted a substantial cycle of conferences at the Collège de France in the early 1980s. According to Foucault, ‘Parrhesia consists in telling the truth without concealment, reserve, empty manner of speech, or rhetorical ornament which might encode or hide it. “Telling all” is then: telling the truth without hiding any part of it, without hiding it behind anything.’47 Among the four ‘modes of veridiction’ or ‘fundamental modes of truth-telling’ that Foucault analyses, it is the particularly polemical mode of parrhesia that will be given full consideration here.48 In La Rhétorique des passions, Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani comments upon the negative connotations that the term ‘rhetoric’ can be endowed with: ‘the pejorative meanings that, in common language, are associated with the word rhetoric(al), whether as substantive or adjective, are caught up in a double network of codified oppositions to truth, since “rhetorical” signifies false, untrue, deceitful, illusory, and to nature, since the word means artificial, unnatural.’49 In common language, according to the culinary metaphor, rhetoric can be associated with what is fat and greasy, hence the coining of the phrase ‘une rhétorique du gras’. Indeed, rhetoric can be used to express inflation and obsequiousness, the wrong side of copia, that is, loquacitas or ‘empty prolixity’.50 In this sense, rhetoric becomes synonymous with what Onfray calls ‘ethical fatness, the end of all moral elegance, conceptual obesity and adipose reflexion’.51 Shakespeare’s King Lear, Coriolanus and King Richard II are pervaded by the dialectics of lack and abundance, by food metaphors that run the gamut from famine to gluttony, as well as the obsessive fear of poisoning and cannibalism. The opening scene of King Lear, where Lear orchestrates a rhetorical joust for the transfer of power and division of his kingdom, may be read as metaphorically evoking a banquet scene in which words as rhetorical feats are the dishes that the king gorges himself on. Lear expects from his daughters what Michel Jeanneret terms ‘des mots-mets’, that is, ‘a feast of words’;52 he expects a ‘rhétorique du gras’. There is something ogre-like in his appetite, which anticipates his welcoming of the ‘barbarous Scythian’ (1.1.114). He

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thinks in terms of opulence, appetite and digestion, metonymically referring to Cordelia’s suitors as ‘[t]he vines of France and milk of Burgundy’ (82), and telling Cornwall and Albany to ‘digest the third [part of his kingdom]’ (126). To him, it is as if Cordelia’s ‘nothing’ (85, 87) were Timon of Athens’ dishes, uncovered to reveal nothing but ‘[s]moke and lukewarm water’ (3.6.85);53 her ‘nothing’ brings out his aversion to scantiness and meagreness, to a ‘rhétorique du maigre’. With her laconic answer, Cordelia implicitly questions such ‘rhétorique du gras’, which she later describes as ‘that glib and oily art / To speak and purpose not’ (1.1.222–3), and which requires ‘[a] still-soliciting eye, and such a tongue’ as she is ‘glad’ she lacks (229–30) – an affirmation that resonates with Coriolanus’ answer to Menenius: ‘I cannot bring / My tongue to such a pace’ (2.3.48–9). The ‘rhétorique du gras’ in Coriolanus is voiced by Menenius when he checks the plebeians’ rebellion with his extended tale of the belly. The fight between Lent and Carnival54 is re-enacted by Bruegel-like citizens in arms and displaced to the verbal sphere – opposing their ‘leanness’ (1.1.18), ‘misery’ (19) and ‘hunger’ (23) to the patricians’ ‘surfeit’ (15), ‘superfluity’ (16) and ‘abundance’ (20). Coriolanus, like the common people, distrusts rhetorical effects, especially rhetorical praises such as Cominius’ epidictic copia, which he reduces to ‘acclamations hyperbolical’ (1.10.51). He will not give his support to any kind of flattery; nor will he oil the wheels of the young Republic. In King Richard II, rhetorical excesses implicitly come from the ‘thousand flatterers [that] sit within [the king’s] crown’ (2.1.100). Taking the opposite course, the aptly named John of Gaunt fearlessly points out the profligacy of Richard II, whom York sees as the very epitome of ‘surfeit’ (2.2.84), and whom the vox populi, in the person of the Gardener, designates as ‘the wasteful King’ (3.4.55). According to Gaunt, ‘[the] waste is no whit lesser than [the king’s] land’ (2.1.103). As François Laroque notes, ‘in the context of an anthropomorphised crown, waste can be read as waist, so that the picture of the waist following the outlines of the map would form some monstrous obesity (a prefiguration of Sir John Falstaff?) showing, as though in relief, the immense wastefulness, on the scale of the whole kingdom, perpetrated by the prodigal king’.55 In King Richard II, as in Coriolanus and King Lear, those who fight against the ‘rhétorique du gras’ resort to the radical mode of truth-telling: parrhesia.

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A parrhesiast is someone who speaks the truth and, consequently, differentiates himself from a liar or a flatterer, and, as Foucault specifies, ‘by telling the truth, the whole truth, regardless of any other consideration, risks bringing his relationship to the other into question, and even risks his life’.56 In this regard, the parrhesiast is the opposite of the rhetorician. As Foucault analyses it, The good rhetorician, the good rhetor is the man who may well say, and who is perfectly capable of saying, something completely different from what he knows, believes, and thinks, but of saying it in such a way that, in the final analysis, what he says – which is not what he believes, thinks, or knows – becomes what those he has spoken to think, believe, and think they know. The connection between the person speaking and what he says is broken in rhetoric, but the effect of rhetoric is to establish a constraining bond between what is said and the person or persons to whom it is said. You can see that from this point of view rhetoric is the exact opposite of parrhesia, [which entails on the contrary a] strong, manifest, evident foundation between the person speaking and what he says, since he must openly express his thought, and you can see that in parrhesia there is no question of saying anything other than what one thinks. Parrhesia therefore establishes a strong, necessary, and constitutive bond between the person speaking and what he says, but it exposes to risk the bond between the person speaking and the person to whom he speaks.57

King Lear, King Richard II and Coriolanus present us with parrhesiastes – respectively, Cordelia and Kent, John of Gaunt and York, and Coriolanus himself. Cordelia’s ‘nothing’ sounds like the total absence of rhetoric. She will not play her father’s game even if this crosses him; she does not amend her speech and, significantly, corrects her father’s ‘So young and so untender?’ (1.1.104) to ‘So young, my lord, and true’ (105). When Kent takes over, parrhesia becomes more agonistic: the speaker turns ‘unmannerly’ (143) when ‘plainness’ (146) is not listened to. The agonistic quality of parrhesia reaches a climax in Coriolanus: Coriolanus’ fearless speech has a striking power that mirrors his military ethos. Although Menenius and Cominius successively advise Coriolanus to speak to the people ‘[i]n wholesome manner’ (2.3.58), ‘mildly’ (3.3.141), that is, diplomatically, the Roman

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warrior cannot help being ‘too rough, something too rough’ (3.2.24–5). Thus he brings to the fore the risky quality of parrhesia, especially in nascently republican Rome. As Foucault explains, parrhesia appears dangerous inasmuch as it calls for courage on the part of whoever wishes to employ it in a democracy, a courage which may not be respected. … [W]ho will be listened to, approved, followed, and loved? It will be those who please the people, say what they want to hear, and flatter them. The others, those who say or try to say what is true and good, and not what pleases the people, will not be listened to. Worse, they will provoke negative reactions, irritation, and anger. And their true discourse will expose them to vengeance or punishment.58

Coriolanus’ fearless speech exposes him to death or banishment, all the more so because, in his case, frankness goes together with anger. Menenius’ portrayal of the Roman warrior is tragically accurate: ‘His nature is too noble for the world. / He would not flatter Neptune for his trident / Or Jove for’s power to thunder. His heart’s his mouth. / What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent, / And, being angry, does forget that ever / He heard the name of death’ (3.1.257–62). The very nature of free-spokenness is then altered; in the grip of anger, the parrhesiast loses control and comes to incarnate athuroglossos, that is, ‘someone who has a tongue but not a door. Hence it implies someone who cannot shut his mouth’59 – etymologically speaking, a tongue (‘glossos’) without (‘a’) a door (‘thuro’). As he loses control, Coriolanus forgets about the reforming of his interlocutors’ ethos that parrhesia is supposed to achieve. In King Richard II, York advises Gaunt to choose his words carefully when he addresses the king, to ‘[d]eal mildly with his youth’ (2.1.69). Gaunt has the courage to speak his mind before an impulsive and menacing king because of his specific situation: he is now a dying man, which relativises the risks incurred by his free-spokenness; he has not got much to lose. Gaunt pictures himself as ‘a prophet new inspired’ (31), another figure of truth-telling, but he nonetheless speaks to Richard II in his own name, voicing his own thoughts and convictions, and, in this regard, he is more a parrhesiast than a prophet.60 Foucault’s description could apply to the weakened Gaunt: ‘in this discourse of injustice proclaimed by the weak against the powerful, there is a certain way of asserting one’s own right, a way also of challenging the all-powerful and

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forcing him to face the truth of his injustice’.61 Gaunt’s purpose is to awaken Richard II, to ‘undeaf his ear’ (16) and bring him back to himself; but the king cannot hear him, deprived as he is of the right ethos, that is, ‘the way in which he, the individual, is formed as moral subject’, ‘the bond, the point of connection between truthtelling and governing well’.62 However, the king is very sensitive to parrhesia, which he associates with irreverence; the risk taken by the parrhesiast is confirmed when the king threateningly tells him, ‘Wert thou not brother to great Edward’s son, / This tongue that runs so roundly in thy head / Should run thy head from thy unreverent shoulders!’ (121–3). As parrhesiastes speak the truth in the face of all opposition, they publicly question and interfere with the performative power of their powerful interlocutors’ speeches. Foucault opposes parrhesiastic speech, ‘an irruptive truth-telling, a truth-telling that creates a split and paves the way to potential danger’, and performative speech, ‘the enunciation of something that provokes and creates, according to the general code and the institutional field in which the performative utterance is pronounced, an absolutely determined event’.63 The strength of parrhesia is to threaten and check performative speech, although temporarily. This is illustrated in King Lear, Coriolanus and King Richard II. In spite of his recurrent injunctions – ‘Speak’ (1.1.84), ‘Speak again’ (88), ‘Mend your speech a little’ (92) – Lear obtains ‘nothing’ from Cordelia. As for Kent, he obeys neither Lear’s ‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath’ (120) nor his ‘Kent, on thy life, no more!’ (152). Worse, Kent fearlessly asserts his own ethos: ‘Revoke thy gift, / Or whilst I can vent clamour from my throat / I’ll tell thee thou dost evil’ (161–3). He and Cordelia are banished for plainly speaking their minds but also for publicly holding Lear’s performative power in check. In the Roman play, Coriolanus cannot listen to the senators’ and patricians’ appeal for calm, their ‘No more words, we beseech you’ (3.1.78); he can only follow his own ethics of conviction: ‘This was my speech, and I will speak’t again –’ (64). On the battlefield, the only performative speech that is heard is his; so must it be for him in the city. And when he asserts his position as a fearless speaker ever faithful to his ethos – ‘Let them [the tribunes and citizens] pull all about mine ears, present me / Death on the wheel or at wild horses’ heels, / Or pile ten hills on the Tarpeian rock, / That the

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precipitation might down stretch / Below the beam of sight, yet will I still / Be thus to them’ (3.2.1–6) – we understand that truth, as Foucault explains, is spoken at two levels: the first level is the one of the utterance of truth itself (at that very moment, as with performative speech, the thing is said and that’s it); then, the second level of the parrhesiastic act, the parrhesiastic enunciation, which is the affirmation that the truth that is being said is thought, estimated, considered deep down inside as authentic, as authentically true. I speak the truth, I truly think that it is true, and I truly think that I speak the truth at the very moment when I speak it.64

Coriolanus makes it clear that he will not change his mind, and this is why, in the end, he is forced to submit to Sicinius’ performative ‘in the name o’th’ people, / And in the power of us the tribunes, we / E’en from this instant banish him our city’ (3.3.100–2). King Richard II offers the best examples of performative speech reduced to what J. L. Austin terms ‘infelicities’; parrhesiastes ‘make the utterance Misfire, and the act purported to be done null and void’.65 The king’s injunction to Mowbray and Bolingbroke, ‘Forget, forgive, conclude and be agreed’ (1.1.156), is held in check, and Richard II has no choice but to acknowledge the failure of his performative utterance (‘since we cannot’) and opt for a trial by combat: We were not born to sue but to command; Which since we cannot do to make you friends, Be ready as your lives shall answer it At Coventry upon Saint Lambert’s Day. There shall your swords and lances arbitrate The swelling difference of your settled hate. Since we cannot atone you, we shall see Justice design the victor’s chivalry. (1.1.196–203)

As Forker observes, ‘Having made a sweeping assertion of royal authority … Richard immediately discloses his weakness by yielding to circumstances – an early and revealing example of the discrepancy which the play develops between the regal posturing of the King and his actual power to command allegiance.’66 According to Michael Tomlinson, ‘Shakespeare’s consolidation and development of different attitudes to monarchy leads us to the

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conclusion that there can be no model kings or adequate model conception of kingship, and no univocal doctrines of social allegiance.’67 It could be added that the notion of contract is replaced by the notion of pact: the subject, faithful to his own ethos, breaks his contractual allegiance and turns to ‘the parrhesiastic pact that the subject makes with himself, by which he binds himself to both the content of the utterance and the very act of the utterance’.68 Thus his social status is relegated to the background: what matters is the courage of the truth when faced with the excesses of governing authorities. Foucault has pointed out the violence of the reactions triggered by parrhesia. The interlocutor, he says, ‘is in presence of a truth that he cannot accept, that he cannot but reject, and that renders him subject to all forms of injustice, excessiveness, madness, blindness’.69 In the three Shakespearean plays under study, the interlocutor is mainly subject to abusive banishment.

Notes 1 David Scott Kastan, ‘“To Set a Form upon that Indigest”: Shakespeare’s Fictions of History’, in Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (eds), Shakespeare and History (New York: Garland, 1999), p. 3. 2 Balandier, Le Détour, p.  117; my translation of ‘théâtrocratie’ and ‘dramatisation en tant que ruse spectaculaire’. 3 William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2002). Italics mine. All the following quotations are taken from this edition. 4 Harry Levin, ‘Sitting upon the Ground (Richard II, IV, i)’, in John M. Mucciolo (ed.), Shakespeare’s Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions. Essays in Honour of W. R. Elton (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), p. 4. 5 See Forker’s footnote at 1.1.100, pp. 187–8, King Richard II (The Arden Shakespeare). 6 See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Johann P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1604 (London: Longman, 1986); Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); William C. Carroll, ‘Theories of Kingship in Shakespeare’s England’, in Richard Dutton and

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Jean E. Howard (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Volume II: The Histories (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 125–45. 7 Carroll, ‘Theories of Kingship’, p. 128. Carroll’s italics. 8 Stéphane Lebecq, Fabrice Bensimon, Frédérique Lachaud and François-Joseph Ruggiu, Histoire des îles Britanniques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007), p. 250 (my translation). 9 Carroll, ‘Theories of Kingship’, p. 130. 10 Levin, ‘Sitting upon the Ground (Richard II, IV, i)’, p. 4. 11 Leonard Tennenhouse, ‘The Theatre of Punishment’, in Kiernan Ryan (ed.), King Lear, New Casebooks (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave, 1993), p. 63. 12 Robert S. Miola, ‘Shakespeare’s Ancient Rome: Difference and Identity’, in Michael Hattaway (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 205. 13 William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. R. B. Parker, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). All the following quotations are taken from this edition. 14 William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Lear (1623 Folio), eds Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus, The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition, Tragedies (New York/London: Norton & Company, 2008). All the following quotations are taken from this edition. 15 On this topic, see Carroll, ‘Theories of Kingship’. For Coriolanus and the Midlands Rising of 1607, see Annabel Patterson, ‘“Speak, speak!” The Popular Voice and the Jacobean State’, in Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 120–53. 16 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘absolute, adj. (and adv.) and n.’, A. II. 8. c. 17 Ibid., ‘absolute, adj. (and adv.) and n.’, A. I. 4. b. 18 Ibid., ‘absolute, adj. (and adv.) and n.’, A. II. 8. a. 19 Balandier, Le Détour, p. 117. My translation of ‘[l]e pouvoir se donne à voir comme mis au service de tous, mais il est le gardien des inégalités et de leur ordre; comme issu de la raison ou de la volonté collective, mais il est aussi fils d’événement; comme émanant du droit, mais il est en même temps générateur d’un droit qui assure sa propre défense et se différencie dans l’application selon les catégories et les classes sociales. Il n’est jamais entièrement et nulle part ce qu’il dit être; il est d’ailleurs dans l’impossibilité de montrer et d’exprimer toute sa vérité, puisqu’il est destiné à produire des effets’ (Balandier’s italics). 20 Miola, ‘Shakespeare’s Ancient Rome: Difference and Identity’, p. 193. 21 Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (New York: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 252.

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22 First Citizen: ‘What authority surfeits on would relieve us’ (Coriolanus, 1.1.15–16). York: ‘Now comes the sick hour that his [Richard II’s] surfeit made’ (King Richard II, 2.2.84). 23 François-Joseph Ruggiu, ‘Des sociétés plurielles (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles)’, in Histoire des îles Britanniques, p. 564; my translation of ‘les relations verticales fondées sur les notions complémentaires de déférence et de protection’. 24 Jonas A. Barish and Marshall Waingrow, ‘Service in King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 9:3 (Summer 1958), 348. 25 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘allegiance, n.’, 1. a. 26 Here in the seventh part (1608) of The Reports of Sir Edward Coke in Thirteen Parts (1600–1615). See vol. 2 of the edition by J.-H. Thomas and John Farquhar Fraser, in 6 vols (London: J. Butterworth and Son, 1826). 27 Marienstras, New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, p. 106. In the original text: ‘L’allégeance est l’obéissance que le sujet doit au souverain. Elle est, dit Coke, plus forte que le lien unissant le seigneur et le vassal qui a rendu hommage. C’est une forme d’hommage lige exalté jusqu’à l’absolu’, Le Proche et le lointain, p. 156. As regards the four kinds of allegiance distinguished by the common law and analysed by Coke (natural, acquired, local and legal), see pp. 106–8. 28 Carroll, ‘Theories of Kingship’, p. 132. Carroll particularly refers to ‘An Homily Against Disobedience and Willful Rebellion’. 29 King James VI and I, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: Or The Reciprock and mutuall duetie betwixt a free King and his naturall Subiects, in Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 78. 30 Ibid., p. 83. 31 Marienstras, New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, p. 219, n. 22. In the original text: ‘La relation de vassalité était, à l’origine, contractuelle. Le vassal devait sa “foi” au suzerain plutôt que son obéissance. L’hommage impliquait tacitement le droit à la désobéissance si le suzerain manquait à ses obligations. La modification intervient vers le milieu du XIIIe siècle: toute désobéissance risque dès lors de devenir trahison et le roi tend à se considérer comme le souverain “naturel”’, Le Proche et le lointain, p. 156, n. 22. 32 Forker, footnote at 1.1.20, p. 181, King Richard II (The Arden Shakespeare). 33 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘liege, a. and n.’: ‘The superior to whom one owes feudal allegiance and service; = liege lord’, B. n. 1; ‘A vassal bound to serve his superior, a liege man. Hence in a wider sense: A loyal subject of the king’, B. n. 2.

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34 Pierre Legouis, ‘Shakespeare et la féodalité’, Études Anglaises, ‘Shakespeare, 1564–1964’, 4 (Oct.–Dec. 1964), p. 471; my translation of ‘“Lige” par ce double sens [vassal et suzerain] exprime parfaitement la réciprocité des obligations féodales, aussi inséparables que l’avers et le revers d’une même médaille.’ 35 Barish and Waingrow, ‘Service in King Lear’, p. 353. 36 Denis Lagae-Devoldère, The Tragedy of Coriolanus. William Shakespeare (Malakoff: Armand Colin–CNED, 2006), p. 98; my translation of ‘Coriolan, tout à son déni de la réciprocité, a cru pouvoir se passer du contrat social fondant tout le système de la réciprocité communale romaine.’ 37 Deleuze and Guattari,  A Thousand Plateaus, p. 413. In the original text: ‘un imperium du penser-vrai, opérant par capture magique, saisie ou lien, constituant l’efficacité d’une fondation (muthos)’, ‘une république des esprits libres, procédant par pacte ou contrat, constituant une organisation législative et juridique, apportant la sanction d’un fondement (logos)’, Mille plateaux, p. 464. 38 Forker, footnote at 2.1.164, p. 259, King Richard II (The Arden Shakespeare). Forker’s italics. 39 See Karen Cunningham, Imaginary Betrayals: Subjectivity and the Discourses of Treason in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 83: ‘In the mid-thirteenth century, renouncing allegiance, which was called diffidatio, was held by barons as excusing later treasonable conduct. Feudal rules included the idea that one’s retainer might change loyalties, and in what was called diffication, he could do so without penalty. By the end of the fourteenth century, there appeared a move to criminalize diffidatio, when Richard II made “compassing to renounce liege homage” into treason.’ 40 Barish and Waingrow, ‘Service in King Lear’, p. 349. 41 Johann P. Sommerville, ‘Introduction’, in King James VI and I, Political Writings, p. xvii. 42 This will be examined in Part II. 43 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. and trans. Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 86. 44 See Max Weber, Politik als Beruf (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1964); see Johan Verstraeten, ‘The Tension Between “Gesinnungsethik” and “Verantwortungsethik”: A Critical Interpretation of the Position of Max Weber in Politik als Beruf’, Ethical Perspective, 2:4 (1995), 180–7. 45 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘frank, adj. 2’, 3. a. 46 William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine DuncanJones, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson, 2005), ‘Sonnet 114’, p. 339.

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47 Foucault, The Courage of Truth, p. 10. In the original text: ‘La parrêsia consiste à dire, sans dissimulation ni réserve ni clause de style ni ornement rhétorique qui pourrait la chiffrer ou la masquer, la vérité. Le “tout dire” est à ce moment-là: dire la vérité sans rien en cacher, sans la cacher par quoi que ce soit’, Le Courage de la vérité, p. 11. 48 Foucault, The Courage of Truth, pp. 25, 27. In the original text: ‘modes de véridiction’, ‘modes fondamentaux du dire vrai’, Le Courage de la vérité, pp. 25, 27. ‘Prophecy, wisdom, teaching, and parrhesia are, I think, four modes of veridiction which, [first], involve different personages, second, call for different modes of speech, and, third, relate to different domains (fate, being, tekhne, ethos)’, ibid., p. 25. In the original text: ‘Prophétie, sagesse, enseignement, parrêsia, ce sont là, je crois, quatre modes de véridictions qui, [premièrement], impliquent des personnages différents, deuxièmement appellent des modes de parole différents, et troisièmement se réfèrent à des domaines différents (destin, être, tekchnê, êthos)’, Le Courage de la vérité, p. 25. 49 Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, La Rhétorique des passions (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), p. 15. Italics are Mathieu-Castellani’s. My translation of ‘Les sens péjoratifs qui s’attachent dans le langage ordinaire au mot rhétorique, substantif ou adjectif, sont pris dans un double réseau d’oppositions codifiées, avec la vérité, puisque “rhétorique” signifie faux, mensonger, trompeur, illusoire, et avec la nature, puisque le mot signifie artificiel, anti-naturel.’ 50 Laetitia Coussement-Boillot, Copia et cornucopia: la poétique shakespearienne de l’abondance (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), p. 83; my translation of ‘prolixité vide’. 51 Michel Onfray, Politique du rebelle. Traité de résistance et d’insoumission (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1997), p. 223; my translation of ‘l’embonpoint éthique, la fin de toute élégance morale, l’obésité conceptuelle et la réflexion adipeuse’. 52 Michel Jeanneret, A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance, trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991); Des mets et des mots. Banquets et propos de table à la Renaissance (Paris: José Corti, 1987). 53 William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, ed. H. J. Oliver, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson, 2006). 54 See The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, oil-on-panel (46 in. × 65 in.), 1559, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. 55 François Laroque, ‘Richard II: le corps et la carte’, in Henri Suhamy (ed.), Richard II. William Shakespeare (Paris: Ellipses, 2004), p. 77; my translation of ‘Dans le contexte d’une couronne anthropomorphisée, on peut sans doute lire waste comme waist, en sorte que l’image de la

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taille épousant les contours de la carte constituerait une forme d’obésité monstrueuse (faut-il voir là une préfiguration de Sir John Falstaff?) donnant à voir, en relief en quelque sorte, le gâchis immense, à l’échelle du royaume tout entier, perpétré par le roi prodigue.’ Laroque’s italics. 56 Foucault, The Courage of Truth, p. 12. In the original text: ‘celui qui prend le risque de mettre en question sa relation à l’autre, et même sa propre existence, en disant la vérité, toute la vérité envers et contre tout’, Le Courage de la vérité, p. 13. 57 Ibid., p. 13. In the original text: ‘Le bon rhétoricien, le bon rhéteur est l’homme qui peut parfaitement et est capable de dire tout autre chose que ce qu’il sait, tout autre chose que ce qu’il croit, tout autre chose que ce qu’il pense, mais de le dire de telle manière que, au bout du compte, ce qu’il aura dit, et qui n’est ni ce qu’il croit ni ce qu’il pense ni ce qu’il sait, sera, deviendra ce que pensent, ce que croient et ce que croient savoir ceux auxquels il l’a adressé. Dans la rhétorique, le lien est dénoué entre celui qui parle et ce qu’il dit, mais la rhétorique a pour effet d’établir un lien contraignant entre la chose dite et celui ou ceux auxquels elle est adressée. Vous voyez que, de ce point de vue-là, la rhétorique est exactement à l’opposé de la parrêsia, [qui implique au contraire une] instauration forte, manifeste, évidente entre celui qui parle et ce qu’il dit, puisqu’il doit manifester sa pensée, et qu’il n’est pas question, dans la parrêsia, que l’on dise autre chose que ce qu’on pense. La parrêsia établit donc entre celui qui parle et ce qu’il dit un lien fort, nécessaire, constitutif, mais ouvre sous la forme du risque le lien entre celui qui parle et celui auquel il s’adresse’, Le Courage de la vérité, pp. 14–15. 58 Foucault, The Courage of Truth, p. 37. In the original text: ‘la parrêsia apparaît comme dangereuse dans la mesure où elle appelle, de la part de celui qui veut en faire usage, un certain courage qui risque, dans une démocratie de n’être pas honoré. … [Q]uels sont ceux qui seront écoutés, quels sont ceux qui seront approuvés, suivis et aimés? Ceux qui plaisent, ceux qui disent ce que le peuple désire, ceux qui le flattent. Et les autres, au contraire, ceux qui disent ou essaient de dire ce qui est vrai et bien, et non ce qui leur plaît, ceux-là ne seront pas écoutés. Pire, ils susciteront des réactions négatives, ils irriteront, mettront en colère. Et leur discours les exposera à la vengeance ou à la punition’, Le Courage de la vérité, pp. 36–7. 59 Foucault, Fearless Speech, p. 62. 60 For the distinction between the parrhesiast and the prophet, see Foucault, The Courage of Truth, pp. 15–16; Le Courage de la vérité, pp. 16–17.

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61 Foucault, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, p. 124; my translation of ‘Et dans ce discours de l’injustice proclamée par le faible contre le puissant, il y a à la fois une certaine manière de faire valoir son propre droit, une manière aussi de défier le tout-puissant et de le mettre en quelque sorte en joute avec la vérité de son injustice.’ 62 Foucault, The Courage of Truth, pp. 63, 64. In the original text: ‘la manière dont il se constitue, lui individu, comme sujet moral’, ‘le point d’articulation entre le dire-vrai et le bien-gouverner’, Le Courage de la vérité, pp. 60, 61. 63 Foucault, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, p. 61; my translation of ‘un dire-vrai irruptif, un dire-vrai qui fait fracture et qui ouvre le risque’, ‘l’énonciation de quelque chose [qui] provoque et suscite, en fonction même du code général et du champ institutionnel où l’énoncé performatif est prononcé, un événement tout à fait déterminé’. 64 Foucault, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, pp. 61–2; my translation of ‘un premier niveau qui est celui de l’énoncé de la vérité ellemême (à ce moment-là comme dans le performatif, on dit la chose, un point c’est tout); et puis un second niveau de l’acte parrèsiastique, de l’énonciation parrèsiastique qui est l’affirmation que ce vrai que l’on dit, on le pense, on l’estime, et on le considère effectivement soi-même authentiquement comme authentiquement vrai. Je dis vrai, et je pense vraiment que c’est vrai, et je pense vraiment que je dis vrai au moment où je le dis.’ 65 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, eds. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 25. 66 Forker, footnote at 1.1.197, pp. 198–9, King Richard II (The Arden Shakespeare). 67 Michael Tomlinson, ‘Shakespeare and the Chronicles Reassessed’, Literature and History, 10:1 (1984), 58. 68 Foucault, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, p. 62; my translation of ‘le pacte parrèsiastique du sujet à lui-même, par lequel il se lie et au contenu de l’énoncé et à l’acte même de l’énoncé’. 69 Ibid., p. 54; my translation of ‘[l’interlocuteur] est en présence d’une vérité qu’il ne peut pas accepter, qu’il ne peut pas ne pas rejeter et qui le conduit à ce qui est l’injustice, la démesure, la folie, l’aveuglement’.

2 Abuse of power and banishment: from ‘effet de retour’ to unnaturalness

Abuses of power that take the form of banishment can be interpreted as a direct consequence of parrhesia, insofar as parrhesia has been experienced by the interlocutor as speech abuse. Abusive banishment may thus be taken as an ‘effet de retour’ of abusive speech.1 Naturally, this abuse is not presented as such, as ‘wrong or improper use’,2 but is openly justified by (mis)interpreting free-spokenness as treason (political misinterpretation) and hubris (moral misinterpretation). A third party is also called for to support or side with the abuser – pagan gods in King Lear, the council in King Richard II and the people in Coriolanus. Yet abuses of power are perceptible in the shift from institutional justice to personal revenge betrayed by the motif of the wilfully deaf ear, by arbitrary decisions, and by the ‘catapulting force’3 of affect – in this case, ‘wrath’.

Misinterpretations and questionable witnesses Among the texts that provide insight into treason and the laws that condemn it, laws which increased in number throughout the sixteenth century, the 1534 ‘treason act’ is worth taking into account. As Andrew Hadfield reminds us, ‘The treason act, 26 Hen. VIII c. 13, which became law on November 3, 1534, made it a crime even to “compass” (i.e., imagine) the bodily harm of the monarch.’4 The idea that treason should be punished, whether attested by facts or merely embryonic, as in wishes or thoughts, goes back to medieval times, in particular to the reign of Edward III.5 Karen Cunningham specifies,

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In 1352, Edward III had redefined treason (25 Edw. III st.5 c.2) from behaviour to thought, from a physical to a mental action, and from an overt into a covert violation of royal prerogative, extending his control over even the ‘imaginings’ of subjects … By extending treason to ‘imaginings’, Edward III had opened up the category of ‘constructive’ or ‘presumptive’ treason, under which such things as words and writings that commented on the king and his behaviour in what could be construed a ‘malicious’ manner became the basis for indictments.6

Clearly emphasising the process of mental territorialisation at stake during treason trials, Cunningham adds, ‘the law claimed the territory of “imaginings” as its field of investigation, claiming to penetrate the intent of the accused’.7 Thus free-spokenness was already treasonable: ‘spoken words became actual treason’.8 In the light of the legislative precedents, it is not absurd to consider the parrhesiast as a traitor. Shakespeare’s plays suggest, however, that the notion of intrinsic treason is dubious, that ‘imaginings’ are liable to be misinterpreted, wrongly extrapolated, depending on whether one looks for ‘the right view’ or ‘the wry view’, to adopt Ernest B. Gilman’s distinction.9 When Lear calls Kent a ‘[m]iscreant’ (1.1.158) and a ‘recreant’ (164) because he has resorted to fearless speech, the king’s insults convey the idea that Kent is being accused of treason: ‘miscreant’ applies to ‘a rebel, criminal, or felon’; ‘recreant’ refers to ‘a person who breaks allegiance or faith, or neglects a duty’; and ‘recreancy’ is synonymous with ‘treachery’.10 Kent is regarded as a traitor because his sense of allegiance does not correspond to that of the king. As Cunningham notes, ‘Variously cast as those who resist … royal policy, traitors trouble conventional categories of allegiance.’11 And she specifies that traitors ‘repeatedly work to undercut the ostensible monovocality of a discourse of nationhood, attacking in different ways some of the conceptual oppositions – masculine/feminine, friend/enemy, countryman/exile – from which this discourse takes its meaning’.12 Hence, in King Lear, Kent challenges the faulty, binary vision of Lear when the latter opposes the ‘friend’ to the ‘enemy’, the national subject to the foreigner, the near to the far, and when he casts his own daughter in the role of the victim of the ‘barbarous Scythian’ (114). But it is only in the third act that the term ‘traitor’ is used explicitly and recurrently (3.7.3, 21, 26, 30, 35),

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since two interpretations jar with one another. On the one hand, Cornwall considers that Gloucester now owes him allegiance and hence interprets his joining Lear and the French army as treason – from his point of view, Gloucester is indeed ‘an intelligent party to the advantages of France’ (3.5.9). On the other hand, Gloucester chooses to remain loyal to Lear and, consequently, his ‘duty cannot suffer / T’obey in all [Lear’s] daughters’ hard commands’ (3.4.131– 2). Gloucester’s ‘fault’ lies in his refusal to transfer his allegiance to Cornwall and to support Cornwall’s binary oppositions, such as ‘friend/enemy’ and ‘countryman/exile’. In Coriolanus, when Sicinius tells Coriolanus that he is ‘a traitor to the people’ (3.3.66), Coriolanus exclaims, ‘How, traitor!’ (67), because he has never had the sense of betraying anything or anybody; on the contrary, he knows that has been faithful to his ethics of conviction from the start. And yet he is characterised as a traitor insofar as he persists in disregarding the process of the election of the tribunes and the representative power of the latter. His radical request that the Senate ‘at once pluck out / The multitudinous tongue’ (3.1.157–8) immediately triggers Sicinius’ retaliatory ‘He’s spoken like a traitor, and shall answer / As traitors do’ (164–5). For Coriolanus, the term ‘traitor’ produces the same effect as an insult, or as Évelyne Larguèche puts it, it produces an ‘effet injure’.13 According to Daniel Sibony, ‘he [Coriolanus] explodes as soon as he hears himself called “traitor!” This is the absolute insult, false and truthful at the same time. Coriolanus is unable to “betray” his “truth”, unable to simulate; he has a phobia about treason and, as a direct consequence, he is extremely sensitive on the point.’14 In Rome, but also later in Antium, Coriolanus’ treason is closely associated with abusive power: Aufidius’ ‘tell the traitor in the highest degree / He hath abused your powers’ (5.6.85–6) ironically echoes Sicinius: ‘We charge you that you have contrived to take / From Rome all seasoned office, and to wind / Yourself into a power tyrannical, / For which you are a traitor to the people’ (3.3.63–6). But from Coriolanus’ point of view, they are the traitors. The traitor is always the other – as the confrontation between Mowbray and Bolingbroke suggests in the opening scene of King Richard II. According to the analysis of Edward W. Said, nationalism is always in a dialectic relationship with exile.15 The traitor to any form of nationalism is regarded as dangerous, because he can sow

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the seeds of discord within the territory and generate ‘civil wounds’ (1.3.128). In King Richard II, this is the justification that the king puts forward when banishing both Bolingbroke and Mowbray (neither of whom is a traitor to the king), but he also reprobates their hubris. Free-spokenness and the assertion of individual honour over royal allegiance are (mis)interpreted as a manifestation of overweening pride. After annulling the trial by combat, Richard II justifies the double banishment as follows: For that our kingdom’s earth should not be soiled With that dear blood which it hath fostered; And for our eyes do hate the dire aspect Of civil wounds ploughed up with neighbours’ sword; And for we think the eagle-winged pride Of sky-aspiring and ambitious thoughts, With rival-hating envy, set on you To wake our peace, which in our country’s cradle Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep, Which so roused up with boist’rous untuned drums, With harsh-resounding trumpets’ dreadful bray And grating shock of wrathful iron arms, Might from our quiet confines fright fair peace, And make us wade even in our kindred’s blood: Therefore, we banish you our territories. (1.3.125–39)

It is as if the imminence of the trial by combat has produced mental images of intestine wars and cacophony (‘boist’rous untuned’, ‘harsh-resounding’, ‘dreadful bray’, ‘grating shock’) in Richard II’s mind. This auditory violence, which might deafen the whole kingdom, can be read as the imaginary amplification by the royal ear of the harsh-sounding parrhesia that he himself pretended to authorise when he said ‘ourselves will hear / The accuser and the accused freely speak’ (1.1.16–17); it constitutes a bellicose transposition of the two combatants’ impetuous determination (which he condemns as a form of hubris). Bolingbroke paved the way to such a transposition when he declared, ‘What my tongue speaks my right-drawn sword may prove’ (46). His attitude is perceived as ‘bold’ (3) from the start, not only because of his free-spokenness, but also, as is later revealed, because of his demagogical capacity, ‘his courtship to the common people’ (1.4.24), which is well noted by Richard II:

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The dynamic of deterritorialisation How he did seem to dive into their hearts With humble and familiar courtesy, What reverence he did throw away on slaves, Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles And patient underbearing of his fortune, As ’t were to banish their affects with him. Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench. A brace of draymen bid God speed him well, And had the tribute of his supple knee With ‘Thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends’, As were our England in reversion his, And he our subjects’ next degree in hope. (1.4.25–36)

For Richard II, this is truly symptomatic of ‘the eagle-winged pride / Of sky-aspiring and ambitious thoughts’ (1.3.129–30) of Bolingbroke’s implicit challenging of the doctrine of divine right. What better punishment than banishment for this Bolingbroke, who might incite the king’s subjects ‘to banish their affects with him’ (1.4.30)? What better nemesis than geographical deterritorialisation for him who is hubristic enough to territorialise the king’s own subjects emotionally (and possibly ideologically)? There is a broadly similar process at work in Coriolanus. After Caius Martius’ triumphant return from Corioles, Brutus reports, All tongues speak of him, and the bleared sights Are spectacled to see him. Your prattling nurse Into a rapture lets her baby cry While she chats him; the kitchen malkin pins Her richest lockram ’bout her reechy neck, Clamb’ring the walls to eye him. Stalls, bulks, windows Are smothered up, leads filled and ridges horsed With variable complexions, all agreeing In earnestness to see him. (2.1.201–9)

Such emotional territorialisation threatens the newly acquired power of the tribunes; as Brutus later notes, ‘our office may / During his power go sleep’ (218–19). So as to displace him, the tribunes put the stress on Coriolanus’ hubris, ‘his soaring insolence’ (250), blaming him for ‘speak[ing] o’th’ people as if [he] were a god / To punish, not a man of their infirmity’ (3.1.84–5), singling him out as

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the monstrous embodiment of ‘over-measure’ (142), pretending that he is ‘insolent, / O’ercome with pride, ambitious past all thinking’ (4.6.32–3). In their eyes, his hubris justifies his nemesis: the banishment of the man who might have eclipsed them. In King Lear, parrhesia is mistaken for hubris. Lear’s comment on Cordelia’s answer, ‘pride, which she calls plainness’ (1.1.127), should read in reverse: ‘plainness, which he calls pride’. Accusing her of hubris is a way to justify his nemesis, her ‘dower’ reduced to ‘truth’ (106) and her repudiation. Similarly, Kent is blamed for his ‘strained pride’ (166), and his banishment is presented as ‘a retribution for wrongdoing’ but also, ironically, as ‘recompense’.16 So that it will publicly appear legitimate and unquestionable, the misconstruction of free-spokenness as pride or treason, or both, necessitates the support of a third party called as a witness. As Lear is about to repudiate his daughter, he appeals to ‘the sacred radiance of the sun, / The mysteries of Hecate and the night, / … all the operation of the orbs / From whom we do exist and cease to be’ (107–10); he cloaks his abuse of power in a cosmic invocation that only betrays his own inordinate pride. And when he banishes Kent, he swears by ‘Jupiter’ (175) to assert the irrevocable nature of his decision. By the end of the tragedy, these invocations sound absolutely out of tune: the gods are nowhere to be found.17 In Coriolanus, the tribunes rely on the support of the people. But the plebeians’ part is reduced to approving of the tribunes’ decisions by responding to pre-arranged cues. They just function as amplifiers, as Brutus has planned: ‘And when such time they have begun to cry, / Let them not cease, but with a din confused / Enforce the present execution / Of what we chance to sentence’ (3.3.19–22).18 They are instrumentalised by the tribunes so as to reinforce popular legitimacy. But as soon as Coriolanus comes back with his ‘war machine’, the plebeians change their minds and show that they are as changeable as, to take up Elias Canetti’s metaphor, a field of corn subjected to the wind: ‘It [corn] is as pliant as grass and subject to the influence of every wind. The blades move together in accordance with the wind; the whole field bows down simultaneously … The full ears are like heavy heads; they nod to one or turn away as the wind blows.’19 To cover his arbitrary and abusive decision to banish both Mowbray and Bolingbroke, Richard II turns to his council, but

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their deliberation is not voiced aloud. Forker’s stage direction reads [King Richard confers apart with Gaunt and other Nobles, then addresses Combatants] (1.3.122SD). With the exception of Gaunt, the nobles that are part of the king’s council are not named, but three elements reinforce the suspicion that this may be a sham consultation: Richard II likes the company of flatterers; in Holinshed’s Chronicles, Bushy is the King’s secretary;20 in Shakespeare’s time, ‘perhaps the worst feature of the Criminal Courts … was the subservience of the judges to the executive. They were then appointed durante bene placito – removable at the sovereign’s pleasure’.21 So, although Richard II refers to ‘what with our council we have done’ (1.3.124), his appeal to his council appears to work as a consultative cover for his abuse of power.

The deaf or poisoned ear and the ‘catapulting force’ of affect Abuse of power is closely associated with the motif of the wilfully deaf ear, the refusal to listen to the other, which can either trigger parrhesia (spoken by the fearless speaker) or be the consequence of it (the abuser protects himself from new auditory injury), and, in this case, the other is banished. The motif of deafness particularly pervades King Richard II. The king listens to his flatterers, but, as York notes, ‘all in vain comes counsel to his ear’ (2.1.4); Richard II suffers from political and ethical deafness. It is only when he is deposed and imprisoned that he realises, ‘here have I the daintiness of ear / To check time broke in a disordered string, / But for the concord of my state and time / Had not an ear to hear my true time broke’ (5.5.45–8). In King Lear, the refusal to hear goes together with the refusal to see, hence Kent’s exhortation, ‘See better, Lear, and let me still remain / The true blank of thine eye’ (1.1.156–7). But Kent is gradually relegated out of the king’s hearing sphere, out of his visual field, out of his kingdom; Lear’s abuse of power can thus go unchecked. In Coriolanus, two mutually exclusive discourses conflict with and deafen one another: that of Coriolanus and that of the tribunes. So that Coriolanus may be put out of the game, the tribunes infuriate him, put him out of himself, accentuating his deafness: Coriolanus will ‘know no further’ (3.3.88), even when spoken to by Menenius and Cominius. Negotiations are equally rejected by

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the tribunes, who turn a deaf ear to Cominius’ appeal and bluntly answer, ‘He’s sentenced. No more hearing’ (3.3.109). The motif of the wilfully deaf ear is often accompanied by the motif of the poisoned ear. In Coriolanus, poisoning is euphemistically expressed by insidious ‘suggesting’ when Brutus tells Sicinius, ‘We must suggest the people in what hatred / He [Coriolanus] still hath held them’ (2.1.241–2). And Sicinius adds, ‘This, as you say, suggested / At some time when his soaring insolence / Shall touch the people’ (249–51). In King Lear, the king’s listening is perverted by the highly rhetorical flatteries of Goneril and Regan. In King Richard II, the sovereign’s ear is ‘stopped with other, flatt’ring sounds, / As praises, of whose taste the wise are fond; / Lascivious metres, to whose venom sound / The open ear of youth doth always listen’ (2.1.17–20). The motifs of the wilfully deaf ear and the poisoned ear (here metaphorical and not literal as in Hamlet) function as opposite poles: on the one hand, there is the implacably impervious partition against which the interlocutor’s speech is dashed; on the other, the excess of non-selective permeability that ‘welcomes’ poisoning. Such dysfunctions of the ear may be related to the power of affect and its ‘catapulting force’.22 What can be deciphered as symptomatic of abuse of power is the emergence of affects (in the one about to abuse his power), which Deleuze and Guattari define as follows: ‘Affect is the active discharge of emotion, the counterattack, whereas feeling is an always displaced, retarded, resisting emotion. Affects are projectiles just like weapons; feelings are introceptive like tools.’23 In the opening scene of King Lear, Lear’s wrath reads as an abusive reaction to unexpected parrhesia. Cordelia’s ‘nothing’ triggers the radical transformation from fatherly love (feeling) to infanticidal hatred (affect). The mechanism described by Deleuze and Guattari is pertinent: ‘feelings become uprooted from the interiority of a “subject”, to be projected violently outward into a milieu of pure exteriority that lends them an incredible velocity, a catapulting force: love or hate, they are no longer feelings but affects … Affects transpierce the body like arrows, they are weapons of war.’24 Indeed, Lear’s wrath functions as a weapon of war that exceeds any form of justice. When the king repudiates Cordelia, Kent courageously steps forward and advises the king, ‘Reserve thy state, / And in thy best consideration check / This hideous rashness’ (1.1.147–9). ‘Rashness’ refers

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to the king’s ‘undue haste’ and ‘recklessness’, his ‘acting or speaking without due consideration or regard for consequences’;25 it betrays what Goneril later terms ‘poor judgement’ (286). Lear’s sentence proceeds from a thoughtless initiative and a shortcut that bypasses the law, resulting from individual vexation. There seems to be no legislative framework, a topical allusion, perhaps, to the fact that banishment was not part of English common law in Shakespeare’s time.26 But Cordelia’s and Kent’s cases may be reminiscent of the declining practice of abjuration, while Edgar’s case may evoke the old practice of outlawry. As Kingsley-Smith notes, ‘Where outlawry was usually imposed in the defendant’s absence and was thus partly an expression of the law’s inability to prosecute him, abjuration regarded exile as a punishment befitting the crime, and required the offender’s acquiescence.’27 In King Lear, at any rate, both the nature of the crime and the legitimacy of the sentence are highly questionable. France’s ‘Be it lawful, I take up what’s cast away’ (1.1.251) indirectly calls attention to the uncertainties and incongruities of what is deemed lawful and what is not in Lear’s kingdom. The excess of vexation that triggers abuse of power and nearly instantaneously ‘catapults’ the undesirable outside of the kingdom is emphasised with the recurrence of the word ‘wrath’, that is, ‘the manifestation of anger and fury, esp. by way of retributory punishment; vengeance’.28 When Kent tries to intervene in favour of Cordelia, Lear orders, ‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath’ (1.1.120), and as Kent does not listen to him, Lear banishes him, alleging that Kent has ‘sought … / To come betwixt [his] sentence and [his] power’ (165–7). These lines echo one another like a chiasmus, with ‘dragon’ and ‘power’ on the one hand, and ‘wrath’ and ‘sentence’ on the other. It is interesting that ‘wrath’ should give way to ‘sentence’, because ‘sentence’ can be understood as ‘judgement or decision of a court in any civil or criminal case’,29 thus giving a legal colour to personal vexation and a consequent abuse of power, while safely relegating ‘wrath’ to the background – a necessity, considering the tyrannical connotation attached to it. As William Dodd observes, We may guess that the dragon here is the emblem of the British kings. As such it is a figure for the righteous anger of offended monarchs, usually represented by the roaring of lions. But the wrath of rulers, for Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences, was not only the ‘natural’,

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and therefore justified, roaring of the king of beasts. As the blustering Herod of the mystery plays testifies, it could easily turn into the rage of tyrants. And when restyled as the wrath of dragons, it would for many evoke the Apocalypse, the wrathful dragon being one of the devil’s incarnations at doomsday. At this crucial moment Lear’s behavior is thus connoted as diabolically tyrannical.30

This interpretation seems to be confirmed by Kent’s fearless claim to Lear: ‘whilst I can vent clamour from my throat / I’ll tell thee thou dost evil’ (1.1.162–3). In the subplot too, ‘wrath’ reads as a symptom of abusive power. When Gloucester realises his error of judgement, he significantly uses this term: ‘O dear son Edgar, / The food of thy abusèd father’s wrath –’ (4.1.21–2). But the symptomatic quality of ‘wrath’ (as ‘catapulting force’ of affect generating abuse) is best epitomised when Cornwall says, just before putting Gloucester’s eyes out, ‘Though well we may not pass upon his life / Without the form of justice, yet our power / Shall do a curtsy to our wrath, which men / May blame but not control’ (3.7.23–6). This vehement anger, which prevents any form of pity, or what Emmanuel Housset calls ‘the attentiveness to the other’s singularity, the place where our humanity is sheltered’,31 is also what causes Coriolanus to forget a man whose life he might have saved: ‘I sometime lay here in Corioles, / At a poor man’s house. He used me kindly. / He cried to me; I saw him prisoner; / But then Aufidius was within my view, / And wrath o’erwhelmed my pity’ (1.10.82–6). But in Coriolanus, and in King Richard II, although in a minor way, affects are rather used as touchstones. Affects are not systematically symptomatic of abuse of power; they can also be read as the flaw, the Greek hamartia, of the one who will turn out to be the victim of abusive power. In this regard, affects are presented by the banisher as dangerous forms of excess, as a threat to civil peace. In King Richard II, the sovereign notes the affects that lay hold of both Mowbray and Bolingbroke: ‘High-stomached are they both and full of ire, / In rage, deaf as the sea, hasty as fire’ (1.1.18–19), and he addresses them as ‘[w]rath-kindled gentlemen’ (152). His banishing them is then justified by his amplifying fantasy, his projection of individual wrath into civil discord, that is, ‘wrathful iron arms’ (1.3.136). In Coriolanus, wrath is the lever used by the tribunes, as is made explicit when Sicinius tells the people, ‘putting him [Coriolanus] to rage, / You should have ta’en th’advantage of his

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choler / And passed him unelected’ (2.3.193–5). This is also Brutus’ ultimate advice as to how the tribunes can get the upper hand: ‘Put him [Coriolanus] to choler straight. He hath been used / Ever to conquer and to have his worth / Of contradiction. Being once chafed, he cannot / Be reined again to temperance. Then he speaks / What’s in his heart, and that is there which looks / With us to break his neck’ (3.3.25–30). The tribunes exploit to their own advantage what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘the deterritorialization velocity of affect’:32 they banish Coriolanus. Or is it Coriolanus who paves the way for his own deterritorialisation when he resorts to a fearless speech that deterritorialises the tribunes? In any case, the tribunes are cunning enough to present their abusive sentence as the legal and logical response to Coriolanus’ excess: ‘He hath resisted law, / And therefore law shall scorn him further trial / Than the severity of the public power, / Which he so sets at naught’ (3.1.269–72). Honour and hamartia can be viewed as the obverse and the reverse of one and the same coin: the strength constitutive of the virtuous individual turns into his tragic flaw; ethics of conviction and fearless speeches are overwhelmed by affects. In its uncontrolled manifestation, excessive honesty paradoxically comes close to abuse of power.

Metonymies and metaphors, dismemberment and unnaturalness The ‘catapulting force’ of affect projects the individual beyond himself so violently that the territorial uprooting caused by banishment is expressed with metaphors and metonymies of dismemberment and amputation, with images that highlight the unnatural quality of the abuse of power. The ‘effet de retour’ that fearless speech triggers results in the banishment of the undesirable but also in imaginary torture. Abusively banished characters are often addressed metonymically. As if denying them bodily integrity and full identity, banishers concentrate on one part of their bodies. Lear reduces Kent to his ‘hated back’ (1.1.172), his ‘banished trunk’ (174). Richard II refers to Mowbray’s and Bolingbroke’s ‘banished hands’ (1.3.179). When Bolingbroke illegally comes back with his ‘war machine’, York asks, ‘Why have those banished and forbidden legs / Dared once to touch

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a dust of England’s ground?’ (2.3.90–1). These metonymies are an enunciation of the polemic type and create an ‘effet injure’. To take up Marc Bonhomme’s phrases, they are a ‘focalising invective’, that is, an invective whose favourite process is ‘synecdochical focalisation’.33 Beyond their ‘effets injures’ and their effects of depersonalisation, these metonymies announce the existential rupture created by exile, which is, as Edward W. Said puts it, ‘the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home’, and, consequently, ‘fundamentally a discontinuous state of being’.34 They also suggest metaphorical dismemberment and announce, not only physical separation, but also the psychic breakdown that may lie in wait for the one banished, as if his mental experience (or trauma) were metaphorically reminiscent of the mutilation of torture victims. In Coriolanus, the tribunes had originally planned to precipitate Coriolanus from ‘th’ rock Tarpeian’ (3.1.213); as for Coriolanus, he puts banishment and torture on the same level: ‘Let them pronounce the steep Tarpeian death, / Vagabond exile, flaying, pent to linger / But with a grain a day, I would not buy / Their mercy at the price of one fair word’ (3.3.89– 92). In King Lear, as Edgar envisages taking on the appearance of a Bedlam beggar to escape the consequences of outlawry, he points to the narrow line that separates exclusion from torture: Poor Toms ‘[s]trike in their numbed and mortifièd arms / Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary’ (2.2.172–3) and imagine themselves ‘led through fire and through flame, through ford and whirlpool, o’er bog and quagmire’ (3.4.50–1). Foucault reminds us that ‘every penalty of a certain seriousness had to involve an element of torture, of supplice’.35 With banishment, torture is inward, not ostentatious, nearly invisible but endured all the same. Banishment was considered, Foucault notes, as ‘the art of maintaining life in pain’.36 This is also conveyed by images of amputation of bodily parts that are vital to the individual, to his capacity to express himself, to his reproduction and transmission. Banishment goes together with dispossession and spoliation, ideas which attract metaphors of bodily reduction or amputation. In King Lear, Cordelia, now a ‘dowerless daughter’ (1.1.254), is nothing but ‘that little seeming substance’ (195). When France wonders how she could ‘in this trice of time / Commit a thing so monstrous to dismantle / So many folds of favour’ (213–15), his

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metaphorical use of ‘dismantle’ refers to the action of ‘strip[ping] off or remov[ing]’, but also implicitly evokes the harsher sense of ‘pull down, take to pieces’.37 In King Richard II, the king’s illegal appropriation of ‘[t]he royalties and rights of banished Hereford’ (2.1.190) generates a metaphor of castration; in the eyes of Ross, Bolingbroke is ‘gelded of his patrimony’ (237). As regards Mowbray, banishment paves the way for linguistic amputation: The language I have learnt these forty years, My native English, now I must forgo, And now my tongue’s use is to me no more Than an unstringed viol or a harp, Or like a cunning instrument cased up – Or, being open, put into his hands That knows no touch to tune the harmony. (1.3.159–65)

The metaphor of ‘an unstringed viol or a harp’ is ominous; Gaunt’s death is later announced with a similar metaphor: ‘His tongue is now a stringless instrument’ (2.1.149). Mowbray knows that linguistic amputation amounts to ‘speechless death’ (1.3.172). Thus his banishment, which he refers to as ‘so deep a maim’ (156), appears as a ‘“symbolic” torture in which the forms of the execution refers to the nature of the crime’:38 he is sent to ‘speechless death’ because it is feared that he will speak too much and reveal compromising facts. To banish a person is also to erase his civil identity, to amputate not just his native tongue but also his name and the filiation and transmission it ensures. In King Lear, Edgar’s name is ‘lost, / By treason’s tooth bare-gnawn and canker-bit’ (5.3.111–12). In Coriolanus, Coriolanus tells Aufidius, now that he has been banished from Rome, ‘Only that name [Coriolanus] remains. / The cruelty and envy of the people, / Permitted by our dastard nobles, who / Have all forsook me, hath devoured the rest [Caius Martius]’ (4.5.74–7). This metaphor of devouring emphasises the unnatural quality of his banishment. A great variety of words point to the abusive nature and unnaturalness of banishment, such as, for example, ‘hideous’ (King Lear, 1.1.149), ‘unnatural’ (King Lear, 1.1.216, 3.3.1; Coriolanus, 3.1.295), ‘unkindness’ (King Richard II, 2.1.133), ‘thankless’ (Coriolanus, 4.5.71) and ‘foul’ (King Lear, 1.1.161). The adjective ‘foul’ is particularly telling, in that it

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conveys the idea of a sentence that is ‘disgustingly abusive’, of some ‘unfair or treacherous dealing, often with the additional notion of roughness or violence’.39 Banishment, apart from being abusive, is regarded as unnatural when the banished one is the banisher’s kin (Cordelia, Edgar, Bolingbroke); when he is a figure of unfailing loyalty (Kent, Mowbray); or when he is an unfailing defender of the country against foreign enemies (Coriolanus). Such banishment can thus be regarded as a metaphorical form of self-dismemberment, of self-amputation evoking the practice of cannibalism or at least testifying, as Marienstras puts it, that ‘wildness can erupt at the very heart of the civilised’.40 Lear actually is no better than the barbarous Scythian who ‘makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite’ (1.1.115–16). From Gaunt’s point of view, Richard II has ‘like the pelican, / … tapped out and drunkenly caroused’ (2.1.126–27) Gloucester’s blood. Menenius warns the tribunes: ‘Now the good gods forbid / That our renownèd Rome, whose gratitude / Towards her deservèd children is enrolled / In Jove’s own book, like an unnatural dam / Should now eat up her own!’ (3.1.292–6). ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’: the law of talion is expressed through a metonymy that metaphorically conveys the violence of bodily dismemberment. ‘A deterritorialisation for a deterritorialisation’ might be another way to put it. The expulsion from one’s homeland is to be understood literally when one is banished; yet it takes place within a spiral of ‘effets de retour’ (dynamic of retaliation) that have a deterritorialising function on more than the literal level.

Notes 1 Foucault, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, p. 64. 2 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘abuse, n’, 2. a. 3 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 392. In the original text: ‘force de catapulte’, Mille plateaux, p. 440. 4 Andrew Hadfield, ‘Treason and Rebellion’, in Donna B. Hamilton (ed.), A Concise Companion to English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 180. 5 On this topic, see John Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

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6 Cunningham, Imaginary Betrayals, pp. 7–8. 7 Ibid., p. 11. 8 Ibid., p. 9. 9 See Ernest B. Gilman, ‘Richard II: Perspectives of History’, in Joel H. Kaplan (ed.), Renaissance Drama, New Series VII, ‘Drama and the Other Arts’, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1976), pp. 112–15. 10 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘miscreant, adj. and n.’, B, n. 2 ; ‘recreant, adj. and n.’, B, n. 2. a; ‘recreancy, n.’. The words ‘miscreant’, ‘recreant’ and ‘traitor’ are closely associated in King Richard II: Bolingbroke tells Mowbray, ‘Thou art a traitor and a miscreant’ (1.1.39), and Mowbray fires back, ‘A recreant and most degenerate traitor’ (144). 11 Cunningham, Imaginary Betrayals, p. 6. 12 Ibid., p. 6. 13 See Évelyne Larguèche, L’Effet injure. De la pragmatique à la psychoanalyse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983). 14 Daniel Sibony, Avec Shakespeare. Éclats et passions en douze pièces (Paris: Seuil, 2003), p. 118; my translation of ‘il [Coriolan] éclate dès qu’il s’entend appeler “traître!” C’est l’insulte absolue, à la fois fausse et véridique. Coriolan est incapable de “trahir” sa “vérité”, incapable de semblant; c’est un phobique de la trahison; donc il y est précisément très exposé.’ 15 See Said, Reflections on Exile, pp. 173–86. 16 Ibid., ‘reward, n.’: II. 5.; II. 6. b. 17 As Arthur Kirsch has noted, King Lear is close to ‘the book of the Old Testament that is most nearly pagan in its outlook and that treats human life almost exclusively in terms of the immanence of its ending’, Arthur Kirsch, ‘The Emotional Landscape of King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 39:2 (Summer 1988), 156. For Steven Marx, ‘Shakespeare’s treatment of biblical materials, like that of many of his contemporaries, shifts the emphasis from theocentric to anthropocentric’, Steven Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 59. 18 See Pascale Drouet, ‘“Are you all resolved to give your voices?”: la voix populaire dans The Tragedy of Coriolanus’, in Richard Hillman (ed.), Coriolan de William Shakespeare. Langages, interprétations, politique(s) (Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 2007), pp. 113–29. 19 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power [Masse und Macht, 1960], trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Editions, 1984), p. 85. 20 Raphael Holinshed, The Third Volume of Chronicles (1587 edition), in Geoffrey Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of

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Shakespeare, ‘Volume Three: Earlier History Plays: Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II’ (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 393. 21 Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh, Sir Sidney Lee, Charles Talbut Onions (eds), Shakespeare’s England: An Account of the Life & Manners of his Age, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), vol. 1, p. 402. 22 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 393. In the original text: ‘une force de catapulte’, Mille plateaux, p. 440. 23 Ibid, p. 441. In the original text: ‘L’affect est la décharge rapide de l’émotion, la riposte, alors que le sentiment est une émotion toujours déplacée, retardée, résistante. Les affects sont des projectiles autant que des armes, tandis que les sentiments sont introceptifs comme les outils’, Mille plateaux, pp. 497–8. 24 Ibid., pp. 392–3. In the original text: ‘les sentiments sont arrachés à l’intériorité d’un “sujet” pour être violemment projetés dans un milieu de pure extériorité qui leur communique une vitesse invraisemblable, une force de catapulte: amour ou haine, ce ne sont plus du tout des sentiments, mais des affects. … Les affects traversent le corps comme des flèches, ce sont des armes de guerre’, Mille plateaux, p. 440. 25 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘rash, adj. and adv.’, A. adj. 1. b; a. 26 See Kingsley-Smith, Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile, p. 8. 27 Ibid., p. 10. 28 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘wrath, n.’, 4. 29 Ibid., ‘sentence, n.’, 3. b. 30 William Dodd, ‘Impossible Worlds: What Happens in King Lear, Act I, Scene 1’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 50:4 (Winter 1999), 503. Italics are Dodd’s. 31 Emmanuel Housset, L’Intelligence de la pitié. Phénoménologie de la communauté (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2003), p. 9; my translation of ‘[l’]attention à la singularité d’autrui, le lieu où s’abrite notre humanité’. 32 Deleuze and Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 393. In the original text: ‘Vitesse de déterritorialisation de l’affect’, Mille plateaux, p. 440. 33 Marc Bonhomme, Le Discours métonymique (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), p. 170; my translation of ‘invective focalisante’ and ‘la focalisation synecdotique’. 34 Said, Reflections of Exile, pp. 171, 177. 35 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 33. In the original text, ‘toute peine une peu sérieuse devait emporter avec soi quelque chose du supplice’, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 42. 36 Ibid., p. 33. In the original text: ‘un art de retenir la vie dans la souffrance’, Naissance de la prison, p. 43.

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37 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘dismantle, v.’, 3; 5. 38 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 45. In the original text, ‘supplice[s] “symbolique[s]” où la forme de l’exécution renvoie à la nature du crime’, Surveiller et punir, p. 55. 39 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘foul, a., adv. and n.’, respectively, A. adj. II. 8.; III. 14. b. 40 Marienstras, New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, p. 6. In the original text: ‘la sauvagerie peut surgir au cœur même de la civilité’, Le Proche et le lointain, p. 15.

3 The talion effect: deterritorialisation for deterritorialisation

Banishment is supposed to be a court decision; it is a decree of expulsion, on pain of death. The banished person is geographically excluded and deterritorialised. As François Zourabichvili observes, ‘the concept of territory certainly involves space, but does not consist in the objective delimitation of some geographical place. The value of territory is existential: it marks out for everyone the field of the familiar and the endearing, it establishes the distances from the other and protects from chaos.’1 Because territories are numerous and of various kinds, the notion of deterritorialisation makes it possible to extend an exclusion that is strictly geographical to a variety of fields, including mental and metaphorical ones. Banishment is central to King Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus insofar as it triggers their respective dynamics and is pivotal to a series of deterritorialisations (some the cause of banishment, others, the consequences). Although both unjust and disproportionate, banishment can be interpreted as the ‘effet de retour’ of an attitude or speech that potentially had deterritorialising power and, consequently, was felt as a threat. But this ‘effet de retour’, in turn, generates new deterritorialising ‘effets de retour’ that evoke the endless spiral of the law of talion.

The deterritorialising potential of parrhesiastes When faced with abuses, parrhesiates have to denounce them fearlessly, or else they themselves would lose their honour and sense of ethos. In speaking the truth, they importune and destabilise their interlocutors, challenging their way of thinking and acting,

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questioning their idea of justice, their system of representation, that is, their own territory, which is not immune from hypocrisy and sham appearance. Parrhesiastes have a deterritorialising potential not only because their ethics lead them to take a clear-cut position, but also because their apprehension of the territory is not closed but open – open to movements of territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. The deterritorialising effect that parrhesiastes produce upon their interlocutors, who will consequently banish them, touches the domestic, political and ethical spheres. As fearless speakers publicly reveal rival and incompatible versions of reality (Mowbray’s versus Bolingbroke’s in King Richard II), dubious exclusiveness (everything for the father and nothing left for the husband in King Lear) and incoherent cohabitations (the patricians versus the tribunes in Coriolanus), they claim (more or less clearly or forcibly) that bad fences make bad neighbours, that antagonistic elements cannot coexist, that one of them is one person too many. In King Richard II, the violence of the verbal confrontation between Mowbray and Bolingbroke, in which they accuse one another of nothing less than treason, has a deterritorialising force. Honour is at stake, and, whether the accusation is true or calumnious, reputation is endangered. Mowbray admits, ‘I am disgraced, impeached and baffled here, / Pierced to the soul with Slander’s venomed spear, / The which no balm can cure but his heart-blood / Which breathed this poison’ (1.1.170–3). Their disagreement and challenge cannot end but in a merciless (although strictly codified) combat that will leave only one survivor; as Bolingbroke puts it once the combat has been annulled by the king, ‘By this time, had the King permitted us, / One of our souls had wandered in the air, / Banished this frail sepulchre of our flesh’ (1.3.194–6). However, the confrontation between Mowbray and Bolingbroke and the aborted combat are just an introduction to the main dialectics of ‘either … or’ that will oppose Bolingbroke and Richard II: the deterritorialising potential of the parrhesiast will materialise and turn effective with a ‘war machine’. In King Lear, Cordelia refuses to play her father’s rhetorical game of flattery; she also points to the hypocrisy of her sisters, who claim that they can ‘love’ their father ‘all’ (1.1.98). There is no such exclusiveness for Cordelia, as she fearlessly tells her father, ‘Haply when I shall wed / That lord whose hand must take my plight shall

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carry / Half my love with him, half my care and duty. / Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters’ (98–101). In his quest for absolute love (Sibony would speak of ‘absolute due’),2 Lear unexpectedly comes across an emotional form of deterritorialisation: for him, it is either everything or nothing, which is why he ‘disclaim[s] all [his] paternal care’ (111). This question of family rivalry (for love or domestic authority) is raised again when Lear and his hundred knights are hosted by Goneril: domestic cohabitation is impossible, since Goneril feels deterritorialised in her own house, which now, as she bluntly tells her father, shows ‘like a riotous inn’ (1.4.205). In Coriolanus, political cohabitation and compromises with the tribunes are simply not to be envisaged by Coriolanus; his ‘soul aches / To know, when two authorities are up, / Neither supreme, how soon confusion / May enter ’twixt the gap of both and take / The one by th’other’ (3.1.110–14). Either the popular voice is to be ‘pluck[ed] out’ (157) or Coriolanus is to be banished from Rome. Coriolanus, like Cordelia and Kent, like Mowbray and Bolingbroke, is banished because he affirms his own ethics of conviction regardless of circumstances. Fearless speech is potentially deterritorialising in the sense that it presents the interlocutor with a radical choice and questions the ethical and geographical delimitations of the interlocutor’s power. Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, distinguish the principle of cartography (the map is open and constantly evolving) from the principle of decalcomania (every line is traced already). They explain, What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real … The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation … A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back ‘to the same’. The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged ‘competence’.3

The ‘map’ (1.1.35) that Lear refers to at the beginning of King Lear is not, for several reasons, an open map in the Deleuzian sense of the term. First, Lear has already planned how to divide his kingdom

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into three parts; he will only trace inner divisions according to his daughter’s rhetorical and hypocritical abilities. Secondly, what he calls his map is not ‘entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real’. In the Folio version, Lear presents what appears as a land of plenty: ‘With shadowy forests and with champaigns riched, / With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads’ (1.1.62–3) – a description which boils down to ‘With shady forests and wide-skirted meads’ (Scene 1, 58) in the version of the First Quarto.4 Then, however, his description turns more theoretical: ‘this ample third of our fair kingdom, / No less in space, validity and pleasure’ (1.1.78–9); ‘[a] third more opulent than your sisters’ (84). The reality of the hostile heath across which ‘[p]oor naked wretches’ (3.4.28) wander is never mentioned. Cordelia, with her ‘[n]othing’ (1.1.85), questions Lear’s tracing and the categories of the near and the far. She is consequently catapulted outside of Lear’s map. But she will come back with a French army to rescue her father from the no man’s land that was absent from his tracing and try to ‘rework’ the map. In King Richard II, neither Bolingbroke nor Mowbray fears what is beyond the map, the ‘smooth spaces’ that have never been mapped out. They are ready to go anywhere to prove what they have claimed and clear their names: Mowbray would ‘run afoot / Even to the frozen ridges of the Alps, / Or any other ground inhabitable / Wherever Englishman durst set his foot (1.1.63–6); Bolingbroke would battle ‘[o]r here or elsewhere to the furthest verge / That ever was surveyed by English eye’ (93–4). As Marie-Madeleine Martinet observes, ‘walking for the one, gazing for the other lead to the extremes of limits in the enveloping space that they suggest, that is, the unlimited represented by a spatial hyperbole, in challenge, then in exile, hence in movement’.5 Honour prevails over geographical and juridical boundaries, hence over the ruler who delimitates and orchestrates the territory; both Mowbray and Bolingbroke disregard the map in the sense of the ‘visual support upon which the discourse of authority is constructed’.6 They are ready to be temporarily deterritorialised and freed from their allegiance to the king, a state which foreshadows Mowbray’s decision to become a crusader and Bolingbroke’s illicit return with a ‘war machine’.7 Coriolanus follows a dynamic of boundary crossing and overstepping; he invades enemy territories so that Rome can territorialise

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them; he makes and unmakes territorial limits, keeps redefining borders, as his ‘addition’ (1.10.66), Coriolanus, testifies. He himself emblematises the Deleuzian notion of the open map ‘susceptible to constant modification’. As Lagae-Devoldère puts it, ‘he goes deeper into an unstable cartography of thresholds’.8 The deterritorialising potential of his speech is proportional to his power of deterritorialisation on the battlefield. But once in the political sphere, Coriolanus poses a threat, that of internal split. In this way he endangers the geopolitical cartography of Rome. He goes against one of the major topological functions emphasised by Denis Cosgrove: ‘in mapping, as in picturing, the frame can connect to quite distinct epistemologies in fulfilling its fundamental topological functions, not only of separating inside from outside, but also producing and organising unity and totality within the space so contained’.9 Coriolanus is more similar to a Go player than a chess player, because the battlefield is reminiscent of the game of Go, in which, according to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point’.10 Fearless speakers refuse to play a game whose rules they deem arbitrary, inappropriate or unjust. Coriolanus, Cordelia, Mowbray and Bolingbroke opt for the rules of the game of Go (‘the possibility of springing up at any point’) instead of following those of a chess game (‘arranging a closed space for oneself’).11 Coriolanus will not share the ‘closed space’ of the Capitol with the tribunes. Cordelia suddenly manifests her disagreement with her father’s methods and leaves for an ‘open space’ (France) instead of sharing a ‘closed space’ in conditions whimsically imposed. Bolingbroke and Mowbray are both ready to leave Richard II’s territory and go anywhere, provided that they can settle their scores there. To apply another game metaphor, none of these characters will play with the loaded dice they are presented with. There is a link between fearless speech and freedom of movement, between fearless speech and the free perception of territory as an open map – and not as the ruler’s possession and exclusive preserve. From the viewpoint of parrhesiastes, neither speech nor territory should be restrained by arbitrary rules dominated by selfinterest or hypocrisy. A connection may be drawn between their attitude and the evolution in Elizabethan cartography, as David

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Ducros has noted. With regard to the cartographers who succeeded Christopher Saxton, whose famous Atlas of the Counties of England and Wales was published in 1579,12 Ducros notes ‘a sincere intention to put man back at the heart of representation, to enable him, through cartography, to re-appropriate the territory’ together with ‘a progressive exclusion of politics, an exclusion that is offset by the reinforcement of the “anthropocentric nature” of the map, to take up François de Dainteville’s terms’.13 Thus, when looking at the maps by John Norden and, later, John Speed,14 the reader is no longer confronted with the representation of a rigid reality but with an image that, conversely, invites him to movement, discovery and exploration. At the same time, royal coats of arms are relegated to the margin, as if their interest suddenly appeared as secondary, as if another form of authority, that of the territory, attempted to assert itself and take the place of the authority of political power.15

It thus comes as no surprise that parrhesiastes should be banished, relegated off the map, because of their potentially deterritorialising speech. Yet their banishment might be a matter of avoidance (‘holding aloof from a person’) rather than eviction (‘expelling a person by legal process from land, property’; ‘extorting or obtaining something by force’).16 There is no alternative to banishment except death. ‘If on the seventh day following / Thy banished trunk be found in our dominions, / The moment is thy death’ (1.1.173–5), Lear warns Kent. Richard II tells Mowbray: ‘The hopeless word of “never to return” / Breathe I against thee, upon pain of life’ (1.3.152–3). Coriolanus is condemned ‘[i]n peril of precipitation / From off the rock Tarpeian, never more / To enter our Rome gates’ (3.3.103–5). If not real death, banishment entails symbolic, social and civic death, a radical form of deterritorialisation. According to Volumnia, it is ‘a wild exposure to each chance / That starts i’th’ way before [one]’ (4.1.37–8). From an English point of view, the banished person has to face ‘the breaking seas’ (King Richard II, 3.2.3), and one knows, as Foucault notes, that ‘[n]avigation delivers man to the uncertainty of fate; on water, each of us is in the hands of our own destiny; every embarkation is, potentially, the last’.17 It seems, however, that this eviction, no matter how definitive it seems to be, is primarily a form of avoidance,

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a way to bypass an obstacle, an unresolved problem that may, one day, turn even more problematic. In Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile, Jane Kingsley-Smith reminds us that Henry VIII had the practice of abjuration abolished in 1530 because he had observed that ‘many English exiles were skilled soldiers who subsequently became mercenaries and joined French armies’.18 It was more strategic to retain them on English soil. Kingsley-Smith specifies, ‘This emphasis upon keeping English traitors within English bounds rather than allowing them to make dangerous alliances abroad manifested itself in the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I in a policy of extradition, previously rare in cases of treason.’19 In his 1599 chronicle, The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII, John Hayward approved of the lesson drawn by Richard II’s successors (renouncing the practice of banishment for fear of mercenary alliances and retaliation) and concluded, ‘Therefore the later princes of this realme have with more safetie wholy abolished the use of abjuration and exile, and does either by death extinguish the power, or by pardon alter the will of great offenders from entering into desperate and daungerous attempts, which men in miserie and disgrace have more vehemencie to begin, and more obstinacie to continue.’20 The Shakespearean parrhesiastes are not necessarily potential mercenaries like Coriolanus, but they are neither killed nor forgiven. In these tragedies, something backfires; there is still a deterritorialising force at stake that invades both the political and the domestic spheres.

Deterritorialisation as retaliation King Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus present three tragic variants of the comic motif of the biter bit: the banisher banished. The dynamic of retaliation runs through the three plays, though in different ways. Most of the time, if not always, deterritorialisation is announced by an upsurge of violence, both when the king (or authority in power) expulses the fearless speaker and when the king himself (or authority in power) is rejected in turn. To take up Foucault’s terms, ‘the sentence takes the form of a counterattack’,21 and ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’ becomes ‘deterritorialisation for deterritorialisation’. There are micro- and

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macro-deterritorialisations, depending on the size of the territory from which one is excluded (one’s home or one’s homeland); there are deterritorialisations that are successful and others that are not; some are relative and others absolute. In King Lear, Lear repudiates Cordelia and banishes Kent; at the same time, Gloucester turns Edgar into an outlaw. In both the plot and subplot, those who exclude their kin from the realm later find themselves not only deprived of their homes, but also doomed to wander in extreme conditions, as if suffering from an intensified ‘effet de retour’. Territorial exclusion ironically fires back with domestic deterritorialisation. Lear deprives Cordelia of her dower, but he is later deprived of ‘[his] reservation of an hundred knights’ (1.1.131). Goneril dismisses Lear’s knights because the latter have territorialised and radically altered her place, ‘infected [it] with their manners’, making it ‘more like a tavern or a brothel / Than a graced palace’ (1.4.204, 206–7). With Regan’s complicity, Goneril answers temporary deterritorialisation with radical deterritorialisation. Without his knights, Lear is denied the only form of symbolic power he had left and finds himself physically isolated, thus actively incited to leave. He finds himself stripped of any domestic haven offering anchorage, protection and comfort – ‘human virtues’ according to Gaston Bachelard’s analysis: faced with the bestial hostility of the storm and the hurricane, the house’s virtues of protection and resistance are transposed into human virtues. The house acquires the physical and moral energy of a human body. It braces itself to receive the downpour, it girds its loins. When forced to do so, it bends with the blast, confident that it will right itself again in time, while continuing to deny any temporary defeats. Such a house as this invites mankind to heroism of cosmic proportions. It is an instrument with which to confront the cosmos.22

Lear has no such ‘instrument’ left. To take up the Fool’s metaphor, Lear is like a snail without a house, now forced to ‘leave his horns without a case’ (1.5.28). Rejected by his kin and invaded ‘to the skin’ (3.4.7), Lear lets his body be territorialised by ‘bestial hostility’, and his psyche by insanity. As regards Gloucester, he is forced to deny hospitality to Lear and loses control over his own house. This is the beginning of the process of deterritorialisation that he will suffer from. As he moves

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from host to hostage, Gloucester intuits that the worse is to come: ‘I like not this unnatural dealing. When I desired their leave that I might pity him, they took from me the use of mine own house, charged me on pain of perpetual displeasure neither to speak of him, entreat for him, or any way sustain him’ (3.3.1–5). The threat of ‘perpetual displeasure’ announces the abuse of power leading to his expulsion. A couple of scenes later, as Gloucester is about to be atrociously tortured, he confesses: ‘I am tied to th’ stake, and I must stand the course’ (3.7.52). Ironically, the bear-baiting metaphor echoes what he himself had in store for his own son when he planned to reward anyone ‘[b]ringing the murderous coward to the stake’ (2.1.61), with ‘stake’ in the sense of ‘a post upon which persons were bound for execution’.23 Ironically, once he has been blinded and thrown out of doors, Goneril’s methods and orders echo his when she tells Oswald, ‘If you do chance to hear of that blind traitor, / Preferment falls on him that cuts him off’ (4.4.37–8). Gloucester’s deterritorialisation, geographical, visual and emotional (he now knows that the traitor is Edmond), in a word, existential, is such that he will plan to put an end to his life. In King Richard II, as in King Lear, deterritorialisation pervades both the domestic and political spheres, but it is also topographical (the very relief of the land is altered) and religious (the theory of divine right is challenged), and in these terms Richard II appears as an agent of deterritorialisation. Gloucester’s murder and its political motive remain opaque in the play, but his widow’s speech clearly presents its domestic consequences. Gloucester’s disappearance speaks through what his estate at Pleshy now looks like: a deterritorialised place. The Duchess laments, using privative prefixes that enhance the impression of lifelessness, ‘Alack, and what shall good old York there [at Pleshy] see / But empty lodgings and unfurnished walls, / Unpeopled offices, untrodden stones?’ (1.2.67–9). Once Bolingbroke has been banished, John of Gaunt is sapped by his son’s absence; life withdraws from his body, as it had withdrawn from Gloucester’s lodgings, leaving him ‘gaunt as a grave’ (2.1.82). Banished forever, Mowbray anticipates his deterritorialisation to come as mainly linguistic: the loss of ‘native English’ (1.3.160). Although Bolingbroke is banished only for six years, he is deprived not only of his homeland, but also of his father and his heritage – hence his illicit return.

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Yet Richard II’s major error is his deterritorialisation of England, the consequences of which John of Gaunt fearlessly sums up: ‘This land … / Is now leased out … / Like to a tenement or pelting farm’ (2.1.57–60). Gaunt’s patriotic and epidictic description of what the land of England was before Richard II came to power sounds like a funeral oration and betrays the extent of a deterritorialisation that is both national and mythical (England is no longer ‘[t]his earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, / This other Eden, demi-paradise’, 41–2), and also geopolitical (England is no longer ‘[t]his fortress built by Nature for herself / Against infection and the hand of war’, this ‘moat defensive to a house / Against the envy of less happier lands’, 43–4, 48–9) and historical (England is no longer ‘this teeming womb of royal kings, / Feared by their breed and famous by their birth, / Renowned for their deeds as far from home, / For Christian service and true chivalry’, 51–4). With his eulogy of a homeland that now belongs to the past, Gaunt effectively anticipates the mind of John Speed who, in his maps, ‘opposes the strength, the unshakable and immutable nature of the geography of the land’ to ‘the occasional manifestations of human vanity and cruelty’, and ‘uses all the workings of discordia concors, drawing from an ensemble dominated by disorder and cacophony an impression of unity’.24 Ducros’s conclusion about Speed’s maps could apply to Gaunt’s nationalistic speech: ‘The unity of a people and the love of one’s native country have taken precedence over the duty of allegiance, of which no mention is made anyway. What the map suggests is that the destiny of the homeland is now a shared concern, and Speed seems to invite his contemporaries to this collective awareness.’25 It is no coincidence that, in the history play, rex in parliamento should win over rex imago dei. In his praise of his homeland, John of Gaunt presents the island as a ‘fortress built by Nature for herself / Against infection and the hand of war’ (2.1.43–4); he also refers to the glorious deeds of ‘royal kings’, and it is clear that, as David Norbrook observes, ‘it is because of their skill in war that Gaunt reveres the kings of the past’.26 So not only is England deterritorialised by the sovereign himself, but it also seems to have lost its territorialising power abroad; Richard II can hardly bear bloodshed, and he has no money left to contain the Irish rebellion. The kingdom is hence weakened in two ways, unable as it is either to defend its own land or conquer

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others; Bolingbroke’s illicit return with a ‘war machine’ will prove quite easy. When Richard II comes back from Ireland and lands on the Welsh coast, he ‘weep[s] for joy / To stand upon [his] kingdom once again’ (3.2.4–5) and emotionally addresses his ‘[d]ear earth’ (6). However, his invocation, fraught with pathetic fallacy, betrays his capacity to project his own fantasy onto his homeland more than his authentic attachment to it, as his conclusion shows: ‘This earth shall have a feeling, and these stones / Prove armed soldiers, ere her native king / Shall falter under foul rebellion’s arms’ (24–6). This is also shown when, after listening to Salisbury’s and Scroop’s successive bad news, Richard no longer considers his homeland as his ‘gentle earth’ (3.2.12) but as ‘the barren earth / Which serves as paste and cover to our bones’ (153–4). Significantly, he uses the utilitarian verb ‘serve’. This shift from ‘gentle earth’ to ‘barren earth’ can also be interpreted, according to Marie-Madeleine Martinet, as the ‘reversal of images of pride into images of sorrow’.27 Consequently, Richard II is deterritorialised in turn, that is, in his case, deposed and imprisoned, unable to ride his horse Barbary through his kingdom, a failure which reads as symbolic of his dethronement.28 The part that Richard II unwittingly played in his deposition had been prophesied by John of Gaunt: the king was ‘possessed’ (2.1.108) to depose himself. And Richard II does renounce his royal attributes as if he were the main agent of his deposition, until what he pictures as left to him is just ‘an earthy pit’ (4.1.219), echoing the drastic self-reduction he had previously envisaged: ‘And [I’ll give] my large kingdom for a little grave, / A little, little grave, an obscure grave’ (3.3.153–4). He is deterritorialised from his body politic but also from his private body, metonymically identified with his face. He does not recognise himself in the looking glass he is presented with: ‘No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath Sorrow struck / So many blows upon this face of mine / And made no deeper wounds? O, flatt’ring glass, / Like to my followers in prosperity, / Thou dost beguile me’ (4.1.277–81). According to Martinet’s analysis, ‘the king is surprised that the mirror as object should not reflect inner suffering as allegorical mirrors do’.29 Nor does he recognise the face of his former body politic: ‘Was this face the face / That every day under his household roof / Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face / That like the sun did make beholders wink?’ (4.1.281–4). The mirror no longer reflects any image of majesty. Richard can only see

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a face in its Levinasian ‘essential poverty’.30 His murder by Exton puts an end to the process of depersonalisation that his deposition had triggered; as he faces death, the most radical form of deterrritorialisation, Richard paradoxically reaffirms his royal link with the territory, telling Exton, ‘thy fierce hand / Hath with the King’s blood stained the King’s own land’ (5.5.109–10). In Coriolanus, the protagonist’s banishment is the result of his conflicting relationship with the people and of his fearless speech; it is also part of the larger dialectics of territorialisation and deterritorialisation that runs throughout the play. Coriolanus despises the plebeians because they lack his deterritorialising power when confronted with the enemy. On the battlefield, they turn out to be cowards, ‘run[ning] / From slaves that apes would beat!’ (1.5.6–7); worse, as Coriolanus reports: ‘Being pressed to th’ war, / Even when the navel of the state was touched, / They would not thread the gates’ (3.1.124–6). Coriolanus will not have them territorialise the Roman political sphere, since they have no courage, no political maturity, and no ethical principles. If he could, he would deterritorialise them from Rome, giving them no corn gratis, insulting them as soon as he sees them, denigrating their voices and even dehumanising them and reducing them to ‘fragments’ (1.1.220). He deterritorialises his enemies with his bloody sword on the battlefield, as he does the plebeians with his acerbic tongue in the civic sphere. And when he is recognised and celebrated as the glorious warrior who vanquished the Volsques, and hence worthy of becoming consul, he refuses to show his wounds, his ‘marks of merit’ (2.3.159), for fear that the fetishising gaze of the people should territorialise them. Banished by the tribunes ‘in the name o’th’ people’ (3.3.100), Coriolanus verbally retaliates with his ‘I banish you!’ (124). As Arthur Riss has analysed, ‘In this speech act Coriolanus reveals that he imagines himself as a private state beyond the jurisdiction of Rome. He imagines his body as a piece of land subject only to his authority. The words “I banish you” make clear that Coriolanus bases his fanatical drive for independence upon a territorial model of selfhood.’31 And when Coriolanus adds, ‘Despising / For you the city, thus I turn my back. / There is a world elsewhere’ (3.3.134–6), we expect him to reterritorialise himself in another country. He does go to the city of Antium, but there, mercenary-like, he offers his ‘revengeful services’ (4.5.90) to Aufidius from an obsession to be

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revenged on his homeland (‘I will fight / Against my cankered country with the spleen / Of all the under-fiends’, 4.5.91–3) – a case that shows that King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth  I were right in preferring their policies of extradition.32 Coriolanus’ ‘I banish you’ reads as the starting point of a retaliating process culminating with a ‘war machine’ whose object is to radically deterritorialise Rome, to make a tabula rasa out of his homeland. Had not Volumnia convinced her son to stop and reterritorialise according to her point of view (reconciliation), the law of talion (deterritorialisation for deterritorialisation) would have been carried to its full extent. But in saving Rome, Volumnia only paves the way for her son’s ultimate deterritorialisation, as Coriolanus intuits: ‘O my mother, mother, O! / You have won a happy victory to Rome; / But for your son, believe it, O believe it, / Most dangerously you have with him prevailed, / If not most mortal to him (5.3.186–90). Time has come for Aufidius to get his revenge: he undermines Coriolanus’ credibility with the Volscians and has him murdered. This is related to the fact that Coriolanus became too popular with Aufidius’ own people, as if he had deterritorialised Aufidius in his own territory, stealing the show, as the Lieutenant tells Aufidius: ‘I do not know what witchcraft’s in him, but / Your soldiers use him as the grace fore meat, / Their talk at table, and their thanks at end, / And you are darkened in this action, sir, / Even by your own’ (4.7.2–6). Defining ‘talk at table’, Mikhail Bakhtin observes, ‘The grotesque symposium does not have to respect hierarchical distinctions; it freely blends the profane and the sacred, the lower and the higher, the spiritual and the material. There are no mésalliances in its case.’33 Coriolanus has become the centre of ‘talk at table’, both sacralised and desacralised, in what evokes ‘the grotesque symposium, the carnivalesque, popular-festive or antique “table talks”’.34 This is a sign that his new territorialisation contains the seeds of his deterritorialisation to come, as Aufidius confirms in an aside: ‘When, Caius, Rome is thine, / Thou art poor’st of all; then shortly art thou mine’ (4.7.56–7). Coriolanus’ ‘There is a world elsewhere’ (3.3.136) creates the illusion that his deterritorialisation is relative, that he will be able to ‘reterritorialise himself differently’, to ‘move to another territory’35 – as when Kent answers Lear, ‘Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here’ (1.1.178); as when Bolingbroke tells Richard II, ‘That

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sun that warms you here shall shine on me, / And those his golden beams to you here lent / Shall point on me and gild my banishment’ (1.3.145–7); as when Cordelia leaves for France with her husband; and as when Edgar shifts his identity to that of a Bedlam beggar. But the only way for Coriolanus to forge a new identity for himself is to raze his homeland; his deterritorialisation is absolute (hence his retaliation in the form of sheer destruction) and ‘is tantamount to living on an abstract line or line of flight’.36 In this he is not unlike Mowbray with his tireless fight against the infidels; not unlike Lear, fallen prey to madness; not unlike Gloucester and his recurrent temptation to put an end to his life. In Coriolanus, King Richard II and King Lear, the talion effect of deterritorialisation is felt before and after abusive banishments. These participate in a retaliatory spiral that touches various levels (domestic, political, ethical and symbolic), yet they in turn create their own dynamic and raise the question of how the banished man will react. Three types of reactions will be analysed in the following sections of the discussion: strategies of resistance, whether using force (the frontal dynamic of riposte) or ruse (the slow dynamic of deviation), and the ‘non-strategy’ of letting go, or what Roland Barthes terms the ‘non-will-to-possess’37 (the feeble dynamic of entropy). The next part will examine the frontal dynamic of counterattack, that is, illicit returns with Deleuzian ‘war machines’.

Notes 1 Zourabichvili, Le Vocabulaire de Deleuze, p. 28; my translation of ‘le concept de territoire implique certes l’espace, mais ne consiste pas dans la délimitation objective d’un lieu géographique. La valeur du territoire est existentielle: il circonscrit pour chacun le champ du familier et de l’attachant, marque les distances avec autrui et protège du chaos.’ 2 See Sibony, Avec Shakespeare, p. 149; my translation of ‘un dû absolu’. 3 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 13–14. In the original text: ‘Si la carte s’oppose au calque, c’est qu’elle est tout entière tournée vers une expérimentation en prise sur le réel. … La carte est ouverte, elle est connectable dans toutes ses dimensions, démontable, renversable, susceptible de recevoir constamment des modifications. Elle peut être déchirée, renversée, s’adapter à des montages de toute nature, être mise

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en chantier par un individu, un groupe, une formation sociale. … Une carte a des entrées multiples, contrairement au calque qui revient toujours “au même”. Une carte est une affaire de performance, tandis que le calque renvoie toujours à une “compétence”’, Mille plateaux, p. 20. 4 The First Quarto quotation is from Stanley Wells’ edition (The Oxford Shakespeare). With ‘shadowy’ and ‘shady’, Lear means ‘abounding in shade’ (‘shadowy, adj.’, 2. a) and ‘affording shade’ (‘shady, adj.’, 1), but we may also hear the senses of ‘unsubstantial, impalpable’ (‘shadowy, adj.’, 1. a) or ‘shadowy, indefinite in outline, faintly perceptible’ (‘shady, adj.’, 4), Oxford English Dictionary. 5 Marie-Madeleine Martinet, ‘Optique de Richard II, du regard au virtuel’, in Pascale Drouet (ed.), Shakespeare au XXe siècle: Mises en scène, mises en perspective de King Richard II (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007), pp. 144–5; my translation of ‘[l]es pas pour l’un, le regard pour l’autre, se portent aux extrêmes des limites dans l’espace enveloppant qu’ils suggèrent, illimité représenté par une hyperbole spatiale, dans le défi puis dans l’exil, donc dans le mouvement.’ 6 Ducros, ‘“Mapping the kingdom”: les cartographes élisabéthains et l’image de la nation’, p. 133; my translation of ‘support visuel sur lequel se construit un discours d’autorité’. 7 This will be examined in Part II. 8 Lagae-Devoldère, The Tragedy of Coriolanus, p.  55; my translation of ‘approfondit une cartographie mouvante des seuils’. For LagaeDevoldère, ‘the numerous displacements that the text shows or evokes … are as many signs of a large reorganisation of limits, in which the centre and the margin metonymically switch to give birth to empty centres and essential margins of elsewhere always susceptible to intersections and redistributions. Coriolanus is a tragedy of shared boundaries’ (my translation of ‘les nombreux déplacements que montre ou évoque le texte … sont autant d’indices d’une vaste réorganisation des limites où centre et marge permutent métonymiquement pour donner naissance à des centres vides et des marges essentielles d’ailleurs toujours susceptibles de recoupements et de redistributions. Coriolan, c’est le drame de la mitoyenneté’). 9 Denis Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), p. 10. 10 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 389. In the original text: ‘il s’agit de se distribuer un espace ouvert, de tenir l’espace, de garder la possibilité de surgir en n’importe quel point’, Mille plateaux, p. 437. 11 Ibid., p. 389. In the original text: ‘se distribuer un espace fermé’, Mille plateaux, p. 437. 12 See Ifor M. Evans and Heather Lawrence, Christopher Saxton: Elizabethan Map-Maker (Wakefield/London: Wakefield Historical Publications and the Holland Press, 1979).

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13 Ducros, ‘“Mapping the kingdom”: les cartographes élisabéthains et l’image de la nation’, p. 135. François de Dainteville’s quotation is from Le Langage des géographes (Paris: A. et J. Picard Editions, 1964), p. 322. My translation of ‘une volonté sincère de replacer l’homme au cœur de la représentation, de lui permettre, par le biais de la cartographie, de se réapproprier le territoire’, ‘une mise à l’écart progressive du politique, mise à l’écart qui est compensée par un renforcement du “caractère anthropocentrique” de la carte, pour reprendre les termes de François de Dainteville’. 14 In his vast Speculum Britanniae project, John Norden had chorographical descriptions of Middlesex (1593), Essex (1594) and Hertfordshire (1598). John Speed published The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, Presenting an Exact Geography of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1611. 15 Ducros, ‘“Mapping the kingdom”: les cartographes élisabéthains et l’image de la nation’, p. 136; my translation of ‘[l]e lecteur n’est plus confronté à la représentation d’une réalité figée, mais à une image qui, au contraire, l’invite au mouvement, à la découverte, à l’exploration. Dans le même temps, les armes royales sont repoussées vers la marge, comme si leur intérêt apparaissait tout à coup secondaire, comme si une autre forme d’autorité, celle du territoire, cherchait à s’affirmer et à se substituer à celle du pouvoir politique.’ 16 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘avoidance, n.’, 7. a ; ‘eviction, n.’, 2. a. 3. 17 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 11. In the original text: ‘la navigation livre l’homme à l’incertitude du sort; là chacun est confié à son propre destin, tout embarquement est en puissance le dernier’, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, pp. 25–6. 18 Kingsley-Smith, Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile, p. 61. 19 Ibid., p. 61. 20 John J. Manning (ed.), The First and Second Parts of John Hayward’s The Life and Raigne of King Henrie  IIII (London: Royal Historical Society, 1992), p. 103. 21 Foucault, Dits et écrits, 1954–1988, Tome II, 1970–1975, p. 462; my translation of ‘la peine prend la forme d’une contre-attaque’. 22 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: The Orion Press, 1964), p. 46. In the original text: ‘en face de l’humanité, aux formes animales de la tempête et de l’ouragan, les valeurs de protection et de résistance de la maison sont transposées en valeurs humaines. La maison prend les énergies physiques et morales d’un corps humain. Elle bombe le dos sous l’averse, elle raidit les reins. Sous les rafales, elle plie quand il faut plier, sûre de se redresser à temps en niant toujours les défaites passagères. Une telle maison appelle l’homme à un héroïsme du

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cosmos. Elle est un instrument à affronter le cosmos’, La Poétique de l’espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), pp. 57–8. 23 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘stake, n. 1’, 1. b. 24 Ducros, ‘“Mapping the kingdom”: les cartographes élisabéthains et l’image de la nation’, pp. 141–2; my translation of ‘oppose la force, le caractère immuable et inaltérable de la géographie du territoire … [a]ux manifestations épisodiques de la vanité et de la cruauté humaine’, ‘utilise tous les ressorts de la discordia concors, dégageant d’un ensemble dominé par le désordre et la cacophonie une impression d’unité’. 25 Ibid., p. 142; my translation of ‘L’union d’un peuple, l’amour de la patrie, ont pris le pas sur le devoir d’allégeance, auquel il n’est d’ailleurs pas fait mention. Ce que suggère la carte, c’est que le destin de la nation est maintenant l’affaire de tous, et c’est à cette prise de conscience collective que Speed semble inviter ses contemporains.’ 26 David Norbrook, ‘“A Liberal Tongue”: Language and Rebellion in Richard II’, in John M. Mucciolo (ed.), Shakespeare’s Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions. Essays in Honour of W. R. Elton (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), p. 42. 27 Marie-Madeleine Martinet, Le Miroir de l’esprit dans le théâtre élisabéthain (Paris: Didier Érudition, 1981), p. 183; my translation of ‘retournement d’image[s] d’orgueil en image[s] de chagrin’. 28 See Levin, ‘Sitting upon the Ground (Richard II, IV, i)’, p. 16. About the horse’s symbolism and the relationship between horse and rider in time of war, see Michèle Willems, ‘“Women and Horses and Power and War”: Worship of Mars from 1 Henry IV to Coriolanus’, in Jean-Marie Maguin and Michèle Willems (eds), French Essays on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: ‘What Would France with Us?’ (London: Associated University Press, 1995), pp. 189–212. 29 Martinet, Le Miroir de l’esprit, p. 187; my translation of ‘le roi s’étonne que le miroir objet ne montre pas la souffrance intérieure comme les miroirs allégoriques’. 30 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), p. 86. In the original version: ‘pauvreté essentielle’, Éthique et infini. Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1982), p. 80. 31 Arthur Riss, ‘The Belly Politic: Coriolanus and the Revolt of Language’, English Literary History, 59:1 (Spring 1992), 55–6. 32 See Kingsley-Smith, Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile, p. 61. 33 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 285–6. 34 Ibid., p. 285.

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35 Zourabichvili, Le Vocabulaire de Deleuze, p. 27; my translation of ‘se reterritorialiser autrement’, ‘changer de territoire’. 36 Ibid., p. 27; my translation of ‘équivaut à vivre sur une ligne abstraite ou de fuite’. 37 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 232. In the original text: ‘non-vouloirsaisir’, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, p. 275.

Part II The dynamic of riposte in King Richard II and Coriolanus

Thou art a banished man, and here art come, Before the expiration of thy time, In braving arms against thy sovereign. King Richard II (2.3.110–12)

4 The politics of illegal return

Taken in its extended use, a riposte is ‘a retaliatory action, a counterstroke; a reply or response, esp. one which is sharp and quickly delivered’.1 This term has been privileged over ‘reprisal’ and ‘counterattack’ because it combines the notions of retaliation and swiftness, the combination that will be studied in this section. The dialectics of inclusion and exclusion examined in the first part will here shift to new dialectics: of passiveness and reactivity, and of speed and slowness. In both King Richard II and Coriolanus, the dynamic of riposte is a response to a denial of territory that results from (or is experienced as resulting from) injustice and abuse of power; it takes the specific form of illegal return from banishment and, whether motivated by restitution or retribution, it raises the issues of honour, name and fame. It seems that the banishers in power (King Richard II and the Roman plebeians and their tribunes) should have followed Machiavelli’s advice: ‘men must be either caressed or wiped out; because they will avenge minor injuries, but cannot do so for grave ones. Any harm done to a man must be of the kind that removes any fear of revenge.’2 But little time is left for the banishers to dread retaliation, because Bolingbroke’s and Coriolanus’ respective illegal returns are very swift and efficient, thanks to their armed forces (whether they are merely deterrent or fully in action), which evoke what Deleuze and Guattari term a ‘war machine’. On stage, the effect of speed, and even acceleration, is created by the spatiotemporal ellipsis of exile. None of the two plays presents us with what is expected from banishment, that is, ‘a wild exposure to each chance / That starts i’th’ way before [one]’ (4.1.37–8), as Volumnia puts it in Coriolanus, or ‘a long apprenticehood / To foreign

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passages’ (1.3.271–2), as Bolingbroke has it in King Richard II. What the banished men experience, in the long run, in what Edward W. Said calls ‘the perilous territory of not-belonging’,3 is not taken into account, and this is for one simple reason: the dramatic focus is on their illegal return. ‘How long a time lies in one little word!’ (1.3.213), Bolingbroke exclaims after the king has just specified the duration of his banishment, ‘[s]ix frozen winters’ (211). But the exile that could have been experienced as interminable gives way to the dynamic of riposte and the dazzling speed of the ‘war machine’.

Restoration, retaliation, eradication Although the banished man leaves his homeland, as if complying with the sentence, once away he feels justified in breaking his oath of allegiance and illegally returning before due term, provided he can muster impressive armed forces. But what is his purpose precisely? To redress some injustice and re-appropriate what he has unjustly been despoiled of, or, as York puts it, to be ‘his own carver, and cut out his way / To find out right with wrong’ (2.3.144–5)? To assuage a thirst for revenge, ‘a kind of wild justice’4 according to Francis Bacon, which is reminiscent of the law of talion? It seems that Bolingbroke has re-appropriation (of family property) and reterritorialisation (of the political kingdom) in mind, whereas Coriolanus targets the utter destruction of the ungrateful homeland that banished him. ‘The banished Bolingbroke repeals himself, / And with uplifted arms is safe arrived / At Ravenspurgh’ (2.2.49–51), Green officially announces in Act 2, scene 2. Yet such a possibility of trespass was hinted at earlier in the play by a variety of characters: when Richard II envisaged a joint retaliation from Bolingbroke and Mowbray (1.3.178–90), when Bolingbroke asserted his legitimacy as a ‘trueborn Englishman’ (309) at the very moment he left English soil, when York intuited retaliation and anticipated ‘a thousand dangers’ (2.1.205) for the king and when Northumberland indirectly denounced Bolingbroke’s unjust spoliation, regretting that ‘Justice’ did not have ‘her right’ (227). Bolingbroke’s illegal return is triggered not so much by his arbitrary banishment as by the king’s abusive spoliation of his

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inheritance, his father’s lands and property. It is as if Richard II had acted against Machiavelli’s warning in his chapter ‘Of avoiding being despised and hated’: ‘what makes him [the prince] hated above all else is being rapacious and a usurper of the property and the women of his subjects. He must refrain from this. In most cases, so long as you do not deprive them of either their honour or their property, most men live content.’5 Richard II made two mistakes that proved disastrous for him: preventing Bolingbroke from clearing his name and appropriating his inheritance. The latter prejudice provided Bolingbroke with a perfect piece of justification for his illegal return. The banished man ‘come, / Before the expiration of [his] time’ (2.3.110–11) can thus retort to York: I am denied to sue my livery here, And yet my letters patents give me leave. My father’s goods are all distrained and sold, And these, and all, are all amiss employed. What would you have me do? I am a subject, And I challenge law. Attorneys are denied me, And therefore personally I lay my claim To my inheritance of free descent. (2.3.129–36)

Since he cannot follow the legal way of justice, Bolingbroke resorts to force in keeping with Machiavelli’s precepts: ‘you must know that there are two modes of fighting: one in accordance with the laws, the other with force. The first is proper to man, the second to beasts. But because the first, in many cases, is not sufficient, it becomes necessary to have recourse to the second: therefore, a prince must know how to make good use of the natures of both the beast and the man.’6 Apparently, Bolingbroke makes good use of the nature of the beast only to reclaim his due inheritance, and not to retaliate against his banisher. This he clearly tells Richard II when they meet at Flint Castle – ‘My gracious lord, I come but for my own’ (3.3.196) – thus confirming Northumberland’s reassuring words to the king: ‘His coming hither hath no further scope / Than for his lineal royalties, and to beg / Enfranchisement immediate on his knees’ (112–14). The verb ‘swear’ recurs many times, too many times perhaps: from Northumberland’s ‘The noble Duke hath sworn his coming is / But for his own’ (2.3.148–9) to his ‘And by the worth and honour of himself, / Comprising all that may be sworn or said’

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(3.3.110–11) and his ‘This swears he’ (119). It would not be surprising to have Richard II answer, in a Gertrude-like manner, ‘The gentleman swears too much, methinks’.7 This swearing seems all the more suspect because Bolingbroke’s solemn promise is never spoken directly, but reported by Northumberland. When Bolingbroke himself voluntarily swears, it ominously announces his firm intent to eradicate the ‘caterpillars of the commonwealth’ (2.3.166) and the ‘traitors’ (5.3.140) who later resist him. It comes as no surprise that Bolingbroke’s re-appropriation should be followed by retaliation and the deterritorialisation of the king himself. Richard II’s utter absence of scruples when he ‘wrongfully seize[s] Hereford’s rights’ (2.1.201) resembles Regan’s and Goneril’s joint cruelty, when they deny their father his hundred knights and perversely drive him out of doors: like Richard, they abuse their power and despoil or deterritorialise others. In King Lear, however, Cordelia’s motivations and justifications for her illegal return stand apart: she does not mean to claim anything that is her due (although she could claim the third part of the kingdom her father first intended for her) or retaliate against her wrongdoers, but to rescue her now homeless father and reterritorialise him, both geographically and psychically; she goes about her father’s ‘business’ (4.3.24), which has to do with restoration in the two senses of the term: restitution and repair. Thus she justifies her return: ‘No blown ambition doth our arms incite, / But love, dear love, and our aged father’s right’ (4.3.27–8). Yet from Gloucester’s point of view, this is rightful retaliation: ‘These injuries the King now bears will be revenged home. There is a part of a power already footed’ (3.3.10– 11). And, as for Bolingbroke, there may be more than mere family concern: the next step may be political. When Kent is comforted by Cordelia’s letter that she, now informed of the disastrous situation, ‘shall find time / For this enormous state, seeking to give / Losses their remedies’ (2.2.153–5), ‘[f]or this enormous state’ can be interpreted as ‘on behalf of England’,8 according to Stanley Wells. But Cordelia’s army, unlike Bolingbroke’s, is no ‘war machine’ and is beaten by the enemy. Bolingbroke’s re-appropriation of his inheritance cannot be dissociated from reprisal. There are no less than three reasons for him to settle the score: Gloucester’s opaque murder, his unjust banishment and his spoliation in favour of ‘upstart unthrifts’ (2.3.122).

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He retaliates against Bushy and Green, because they have initiated a relentless process of deterritorialisation, culminating in ‘expung[ing] [his] family emblem’,9 in his absence, as he reminds them:        you have fed upon my signories, Disparked my parks and felled my forest woods, From my own windows torn my household coat, Rased out my imprese, leaving me no sign Save men’s opinions and my living blood To show the world I am a gentleman. (3.1.22–7)

It seems logical that Bolingbroke should use horticultural metaphors (‘weed and pluck away’, 2.3.167) to get rid of those who have ‘[d]isparked [his] parks and felled [his] forest woods’, thus establishing a symbolic connection between the nature of the crime and its punishment. And when Bolingbroke finally retaliates against the king himself, the motif of talion is emphasised thanks to the use of the same verb: the Gardener’s ‘Bolingbroke / Hath seized the wasteful King’ (3.4.54–5) significantly echoes Richard’s ‘we seize into our hands / His plate, his goods, his money and his lands’ (2.1.209–10). In King Lear, Cordelia illegally returns to England ‘with best meaning’ (5.3.4), so as to rescue her father (restoration). In King Richard II, Bolingbroke’s intentions remain ambiguous, since he first claims that he comes ‘but for [his] own’ (3.3.196), but then deposes the king to take his place (re-appropriation, reprisal and self-territorialisation). As for Coriolanus, his aim is to destroy Rome so that it is reduced to a tabula rasa (retaliation, deterritorialisation and eradication). Coriolanus’ intent to retaliate is already perceptible when he reverses his sentence into ‘I banish you!’ (3.3.124) and ominously reminds the people of what they owe him, protection from the enemy:            Have the power still To banish your defenders, till at length, Your ignorance – which finds not till it feels – Making but reservation of yourselves – Still your own foes – deliver you As most abated captives to some nation That won you without blows! (3.3.128–34)

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As soon as he is banished from Rome, Coriolanus turns to Aufidius and offers him his ‘revengeful services’ (4.5.90). The Volscian answers him: ‘most absolute sir, if thou wilt have / The leading of thine own revenges, take / Th’one half of my commission and set down / … thine own ways’ (137–41). From that moment on, the word ‘revenge’ recurs as a leitmotiv.10 Coriolanus clearly voices what he has in mind: ‘in mere spite / To be full quit of those my banishers’ (4.5.83–4). The intensifiers ‘mere’ and ‘full’ betray a radicalisation of retaliation. Coriolanus will apply the law of talion, or even exceed it if he takes after his mother and her lack of measure. Volumnia’s curse (‘Now the red pestilence strike all trades in Rome, / And occupations perish!’, 4.1.14–15) and raging fantasy of eradication (as when she tells Sicinius, ‘I would my son / Were in Arabia, and thy tribe before him, / His good sword in his hand / … / He’d make an end of thy posterity’, 4.2.25–8) is nearly turned into reality by her son. Interestingly, the place fantasised by Volumnia is Arabia: ‘in the desert’,11 that is, a ‘smooth space’ that works as a no man’s land where one can give free rein to one’s exterminating impulses. Coriolanus’ and his mother’s motto might as well be, to take up Kurtz’s sinister conclusion in Heart of Darkness, ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’,12 the ‘brutes’ here being the Roman plebeians. Indeed, Coriolanus’ revenge is nothing but sheer rage. As he himself puts it, ‘I will fight / Against my cankered country with the spleen / Of all the under-fiends’ (4.5.91–3). The adverbial phrase of manner, with the conjunction of ‘spleen’,13 ‘all’ and ‘under-fiends’, concentrates the intensity (both quantitative and qualitative) of his hatred. This is confirmed by the superlative of the Aedile who reports that the Volscian armies are destroying the Roman territories ‘with the deepest malice of the war’ (4.6.43). Coriolanus’ retaliation bears the hallmark of excess, as regards intensity but also extent (encompassing all generations). The Messenger (another objective voice after the Aedile’s) reports that ‘Martius, / Joined with Aufidius, leads a power ’gainst Rome, / And vows revenge as spacious as between / The young’st and oldest thing’ (67–70). This is disproportionate. Should the whole city perish for only one of its citizens who was banished? But Coriolanus is not just any citizen and, from his point of view, his inordinate thirst for revenge is legitimised by what he experienced as an inordinate sentence. So as symbolically to restore the exceptional quality of his merit and

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make this restoration successful and visible, he needs to devastate an exceptional quantity of Roman territories. Only then will he envisage how he might reterritorialise himself, that is, forge himself a new identity and a new name.

‘What’s in a name?’: nominal word-plays and associated issues Juliet’s question, ‘What’s in a name?’ (2.2.43),14 resonates beyond the context of the Veronese tragedy and its enemy families, especially when a banished person is concerned. Because of the existential bond it represents between the one exiled, his family tree and his homeland, the name too is challenged. Thus it is necessary that it should take part in the symbolic reconstruction of the self and be visible to others. King Richard II and Coriolanus provide us with interesting case studies. For Bolingbroke, it would be unnatural to grant Juliet her request, ‘Deny thy father and refuse thy name’ (2.2.33–4). As for Coriolanus, he has been brought up with the obsession of ‘making a name for himself by achieving fame’.15 What matters for them are not words (Coriolanus never trusted them and Bolingbroke keeps breaking oaths) but names, because names are the true mirrors of men’s origins, ethos and actions. Bolingbroke illegally returns to England first and foremost to claim the title that fell to him when his father died. When Berkeley addresses him as ‘My lord of Hereford’ (2.3.69), Bolingbroke corrects him at once:              ‘Lancaster’, And I am come to seek that name in England; And I must find that title in your tongue Before I make reply to aught you say. (2.3.70–3)

In ‘Lancaster’ lie family lineage and honour, social rank and personal identity, which Bolingbroke will not renounce. It is in the natural course of things that he should now be Duke of Lancaster. In a highly hierarchical society, such a title facilitates performative speeches, as it forces hearing, respect and obedience. When Richard II is about to be deposed, he painfully realises that ‘the King’s name’ has lost its former performative power. He can no

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longer summon ‘twenty thousand names’ (3.2.85). And he later comes to understand that to be nothing means to have ‘no name, no title’ (4.1.255). Titles are an issue that triggers verbal retaliation. Berkeley wrongly disentitled Bolingbroke, as if ignoring that he was the true heir of his father. Northumberland casually refers to the king as ‘Richard’ (3.3.6), justifying his omission in a dubiously pragmatic way: ‘only to be brief / Left I his title out’ (10–11). And in the end, Exton clearly erases Richard’s royal title, calling him ‘Richard of Bordeaux’ (5.6.33), as if the former king were a mere mortal, referred to by his place of birth and not by his election by God. Like his father John of Gaunt, Bolingbroke knows the value of titles and is talented in playing with names. When he faces the reproachful York, he legitimises his illegal return as follows: ‘As I was banished, I was banished Hereford; / But as I come, I come for Lancaster’ (2.3.113–14). This is his unanswerable justification for breaking his oath and challenging the king’s abusive punishment. Bolingbroke also plays on mirror effects that might create pathos, pointing out the likeness of the two brothers (York and Gaunt). So as to make the temporary regent of England (while the king is away in Ireland) sensitive to his case, Bolingbroke reminds him that he is his ‘noble uncle’ (115) and, as such, a surrogate father-figure now that Gaunt is dead, as if ‘York’ and ‘Gaunt’ were interchangeable names: ‘You are my father, for methinks in you / I see old Gaunt alive’ (117–18). And then he appeals to him as ‘my father’ (118) and extends the mirror effect, so that York is reminded of his brother but also of his son Aumerle: ‘Had you first died and he [Aumerle] been thus trod down, / He should have found his uncle Gaunt a father’ (126–7). The legal transfer of title from Hereford to Lancaster leads Bolingbroke to resort to imaginary family swapping among brothers (York/Gaunt) and cousins (Bolingbroke/Aumerle), symbolic games of substitution that are likely to arouse empathy. Bolingbroke’s elaborately justifying speech to York shows the importance of naming others and oneself explicitly, of using titles (‘Hereford’, 113; ‘Lancaster’, 114; ‘Duke of Lancaster’, 124), names (‘Gaunt’, 118, 127; ‘Aumerle’, 125) and family positions (‘uncle’, 115, 127; ‘father’, 117, 118, 127; ‘son’, 125; ‘cousin’, 125), thus intertwining social and family spheres, legal and symbolic bonds, so as to gain strength. Naming is, first, acknowledging the existence

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of the person according to his social rank and, secondly, addressing him in a privileged way, as if directly appealing to his very self. In some cases, as in Coriolanus, naming can be a way of acknowledging public fame. When Caius Martius is given the honorific name of ‘Coriolanus’ (1.10.65) for his single-handed feat in vanquishing Corioles, and is then publicly acclaimed as ‘Martius Caius Coriolanus!’ (67), it is as if he were newly baptised (this time with blood). This nominal ‘addition’ (66) becomes part and parcel of his identity and will make him famous forever. As Daniel Sibony puts it, ‘the name functions as a flag, as a banner’; it signals ‘his quest for unparalleled fame, for a name that identifies him with his actions, with his merit’.16 But banishment from Rome means that Coriolanus is bound to lose both name and fame, the very pillars of his existence. Jane KingsleySmith specifies the historical implications: ‘One form of banishment invented by Augustus in the first century AD was abolitio memoriae by which the exile was literally erased from historical record as if he had never existed … Shakespeare may have known nothing of this particular, rather recondite, form of Roman exile, but Coriolanus remains keenly sensitive to such danger.’17 Coriolanus’ sentence signals his ‘fall’ from ‘best man i’th’ field’ (2.2.95) to ‘traitor to the people’ (3.3.66), and implicitly announces the erasure of his name at the very moment when, ironically, he is banished ‘in the name o’th’ people’ (3.3.100). If Aufidius repeats his question, ‘What’s thy name?’ (4.5.55, 58, 60, 63, 65), no less than five times, it is because Coriolanus appears to him ‘in mean apparel, disguised and muffled’ (4.4.1SD), but this repetition draws our attention to the now complicated issue of Coriolanus’ name, which Coriolanus himself explains in disclosing his identity to Aufidius: My name is Caius Martius, who hath done To thee particularly, and to all the Volsces, Great hurt and mischief. Thereto witness may My surname Coriolanus. The painful service, The extreme dangers, and the drops of blood Shed for my thankless country, are requited But with that surname – a good memory And witness of the malice and displeasure Which thou shouldst bear me. Only that name remains. The cruelty and envy of the people,

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The unnatural quality of his banishment is pointed up by the metaphor of cannibalism depriving him of his Roman birth name – in King Lear, banished Edgar uses the same type of metaphor when he tells the herald that his name is ‘lost, / By treason’s tooth bare-gnawn and canker-bit’ (5.3.111–12). The only name that Coriolanus can now claim is his ‘Volscian’ name, a name whose symbolic strength radically changes in the enemy country and turns harshly ‘unmusical’ (4.5.59). How shall Aufidius call him then? How will the Roman embassies address him? Coriolanus’ wandering once he has been banished is not so much geographical as nominal. As Parker has shown, ‘his sense of identity is closely bound to the insistence on his “name”, but the significance of that name is shown to be woefully unstable’.19 Coriolanus’ avowed aim is to retaliate against his banishers, to put Rome to fire and sword. He may also aim at obtaining a new name for himself ‘[i]n sign of what’ (1.10.26) he has become. This is intuited by Cominius, after the failure of his embassy: ‘“Coriolanus” / He would not answer to, forbade all names; / He was a kind of nothing, titleless, / Till he had forged himself a name o’th’ fire / Of burning Rome’ (5.1.11–15). Before, Coriolanus was unable to remember the name of the man he would have saved (1.10.90); now, he forbids all names, his own and the names of his close friends and family. ‘The virtue of your name / Is not here passable’ (5.2.13–14), Menenius is told by the First Watchman when approaching Coriolanus’ camp. His name has lost its ‘open Sesame’ power. Volumnia and Virgilia know the value that names used to have for Coriolanus, and they both try to use this, so as to make him change his mind. Virgilia reminds her husband that she gave him a son ‘to keep [his] name / Living to time’ (5.3.127–8) – but Coriolanus, once banished, has relinquished filiation in favour of alliance. As for Volumnia, she warns her son against the type of name (and fame) he will get if he does not stop his ‘war machine’:    if thou conquer Rome, the benefit Which thou shalt thereby reap is such a name Whose repetition will be dogged with curses,

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Whose chronicle thus writ: ‘The man was noble, But with his last attempt he wiped it out, Destroyed his country, and his name remains To th’ensuing age abhorred.’ (5.3.143–9)

Volumnia cunningly anticipates an anti-name that will work as a counter-example, not to be followed, thus excluding him from ‘the eminent men’ whose ‘deeds and actions’ should be remembered and imitated, according to Machiavelli’s advice.20 In Coriolanus and King Richard II, the protagonists’ illegal return is a means to regain one’s name, claim one’s title or forge oneself a new name. It is also the result of a choice that privileges action over words, refuses the soothing quality of words, the refuge of imagination and mental spaces, the benefit of the doctrine of consolatio. When told that they are banished, both Coriolanus and Bolingbroke publicly pretend that they are not affected. ‘There is a world elsewhere’ (3.3.136), retorts Coriolanus, while turning his back. As for Bolingbroke, he tells the king, ‘This must my comfort be: / That sun that warms you here shall shine on me, / And those his golden beams to you here lent / Shall point on me and gild my banishment’ (1.3.144–7). They affect indifference and show a ‘determined soul’ in a way that is reminiscent of the stoic attitude.21 Coriolanus’ words sound like ‘the simplest statement of the change of place doctrine’,22 as John L. Tison puts it, and seem taken from the prescriptions of books on the art of consolatio on the model of the Stoics: the notion and experience of reverse of fortune are not to be taken into account; the man is a citizen of the world and, if he is a wise man, he has the inner resources to be happy wherever he finds himself; although banished, he is faithful to his own virtues; exile is just a matter of movement, since the organisation of nature remains permanent and universal.23 Coriolanus accordingly tells his friends, before he leaves, ‘While I remain above the ground you shall / Hear from me still, and never of me aught / But what is like me formerly’ (4.1.52–4). Although Coriolanus publicly presents exile as a mere ‘elsewhere’, he is full of spite and already has retaliation in mind. He was raised to be a soldier, a man of action and not of words, and he will remain true to himself, that is, ‘too absolute’ (3.2.41), unable to live anywhere except on a battlefield, unable to face opposition with

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resignation. As regards Bolingbroke, his distrust of the doctrine of consolatio is betrayed by the distinction that he makes between ‘golden’ and ‘gild’.24 The ‘comfort’ he publicly evokes is but a surface (‘gild’) and constraint (‘must’) one. It is the father, and not the son, who adheres to and advocates the doctrine of consolatio. For John of Gaunt, the only way to endure exile is to appeal to one’s mental capacities, so as to re-interpret and rename it.25 But when Gaunt advises, ‘Call it a travel that thou tak’st for pleasure’ (1.3.262), Bolingbroke answers, ‘My heart will sigh when I miscall it so, / Which finds it an enforced pilgrimage’ (263–4). In the son’s eyes, words cannot reshape reality. His rhetoric is not one of denial and illusory survival, but of action. He breaks his oath and illegally returns, opting for ‘a breakthrough of life into the world of the Logos security, where the order of everything can be depended upon, and the past guarantees the future’.26 So he needs a ‘war machine’.

Notes 1 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘reprisal, sb’, I. 1. a. 2 Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 11 (III. ‘Of mixed principalities’). 3 Said, Reflections on Exile, p. 177. 4 Francis Bacon, Essays, ed. Michael J. Hawkins (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1972), ‘Of Revenge’, p. 13. 5 Machiavelli, The Prince, pp. 62–3 (XIX. ‘Of avoiding being despised and hated’). 6 Ibid., p. 60 (XVIII. ‘How a prince should keep his word’). 7 See William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994): ‘The lady protests too much, methinks’ (3.2.216). 8 Stanley Wells, footnote at scene 7, 161–3, p. 161, in William Shakespeare, The History of King Lear, ed. Stanley Wells, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 9 Forker, footnote at 3.1.25, p. 312, King Richard II (The Arden Shakespeare). 10 See 4.6.69, 5.2.42, 5.2.82 and 5.3.86. 11 Parker, footnote at 4.2.26, p. 290, Coriolanus (The Oxford Shakespeare). 12 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul. B. Armstrong, Norton Critical Editions (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 50. 13 ‘Spleen’ is an interesting term because this ‘impetuosity, eagerness’ (Oxford English Dictionary, ‘spleen, sb’, 5. b.) will later convert to

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‘melancholy or morose feelings’ (1. b.), when Coriolanus, weeping, yields before his mother and foresees his fall (5.3.183–90). 14 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Brian Gibbons, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1994). 15 Sibony, Avec Shakespeare, p. 119; my translation of ‘créer son nom par la voie du renom’. 16 Ibid., p. 113; my translation of ‘le nom fait drapeau, oriflamme’, ‘sa quête d’un renom sans réplique, d’un nom qui l’identifie à ses actes, à son mérite’. 17 Kingsley-Smith, Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile, p. 157. 18 My emphasis. 19 Parker, ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare, Coriolanus (The Oxford Shakespeare), p. 84. 20 Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 52 (XIV. ‘A prince’s duty concerning military matters’). 21 For a definition of Stoicism, see André Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), p. 1029; my translation of ‘fermeté d’âme’. Also see Hebron, Key Concepts, pp. 110–12. 22 John L. Tison, ‘Shakespeare’s Consolatio for Exile’, Modern Language Quarterly, 21:2 (June 1960), 150. 23 Ibid., p. 150. Tison examines how Shakespeare might have been influenced by Seneca’s Ad Helviam and Cardamus’ Cardamus Comforte (a reference book on the art of consolation translated into English by Tomas Beddingfield in 1576). 24 ‘Consisting in gold’ (Oxford English Dictionary, ‘golden, adj. and n.’, A. adj., I. 1. a.) versus ‘covered with a thin coating of gold’ (‘gilt, adj.’, a.). 25 This will be examined in Part IV. 26 James Hillman, Betrayal, in Guild Lecture 28 (London: Guild of Pastoral Psychology, 1964). Available online at https​:/​/al​​anash​​ley​.w​​ ordpr​​ess​.c​​om​/20​​10​/12​​/02​/j​​ames-​​hill​m​​an​-be​​traya​​l/ (accessed 7 January 2020).

5 The necessity of the ‘war machine’

Bolingbroke’s and Coriolanus’ respective illegal returns are effective because they come with armed forces that are unexpected and, as such, convey the impression of having what Deleuze and Guattari, in their ‘Treatise on Nomadology’, term a ‘war machine’. In A Thousand Plateaus, they explore several oppositions, such as ‘smooth space’ versus ‘striated space’, ‘game of Go’ versus ‘chess’, that are related to the main opposition, that of ‘war machine’ versus ‘State apparatus’.

Deleuze and Guattari’s theories ‘The war machine is the invention of the nomads (insofar as it is exterior to the State apparatus and distinct from the military institution’,1 as Deleuze and Guattari explain it. It is an armed force that escapes the control of the State (whether monarchy or Republic) and whose rules are different; it is conjectural and unpredictable; it requires a mercenary attitude; it evokes the game of Go2 in the way it deterritorialises enemy territories; it transforms ‘striated spaces’ into ‘smooth spaces’. Deleuze and Guattari first contrast the radically different strategies of the ‘State apparatus’ and the ‘war machine’ in facing conflicts: Either the State has at its disposal a violence that is not channeled through war – either it uses police officers and jailers in place of warriors, has no arms and no need of them, operates by immediate, magical capture, ‘seizes’ and ‘binds’, preventing all combat – or, the State acquires an army, but in a way that presupposes a juridical integration of war and the organization of a military function. As

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for the machine of war in itself, it seems to be irreducible to the State apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law: it comes from elsewhere.3

They then specify that when the ‘State apparatus’ constitutes its own army, the main characteristic that it requires is discipline. Conversely, the ‘rules’ of the ‘war machine’ ‘animate a fundamental indiscipline of the warrior, a questioning of hierarchy, perpetual blackmail by abandonment or betrayal, and a very volatile sense of honor, all of which, once again, impedes the formation of the State’.4 This reminds us of the contrast in Coriolanus between the military organisation depicted throughout the first act, when Coriolanus is still part of the Roman ‘State apparatus’ and fights on a traditional battlefield divided between Titus Lartius, Cominius and himself, and the ‘war machine’ that is let loose at the end of Act 4 and beginning of Act 5, when Coriolanus is his own master and ‘set[s] down’ his ‘own ways’ (4.5.139–41) with the Volscian soldiers, who are later said to have fallen prey to some ‘witchcraft’ (4.7.2). If there is still some sort of discipline, it appears to be more akin to fanaticism. This also reminds us of King Richard II, when Bolingbroke illegally comes back to England ‘with self-borne arms’ (2.3.80), that is, with ‘eight tall ships, three thousand men of war’ (2.1.286) furnished by the Duke of Brittany – interestingly, Shakespeare followed the chronicles that provided Bolingbroke with the greatest number of ships and soldiers (Holinshed’s rather than Froissart’s), ‘thus maximizing the threat to Richard’.5 The number of ‘men of war’ keeps increasing, as Bolingbroke wins more and more countrymen over to his cause. As Scroops reports to the king (with the anaphora ‘And all’ adding a magnifying effect to the massive rallying), ‘Your uncle York is joined with Bolingbroke, / And all your northern castles yielded up, / And all your southern gentlemen in arms / Upon his party’ (3.2.200–3). Richard II now reigns over a kingdom ‘barren and bereft of friends’ (3.3.84), emotionally and ideologically territorialised by Bolingbroke, whose ‘war machine’ gains more and more strength thanks to a process of horizontal incorporation and spontaneous ramifications, as opposed to the usually vertical, pyramid-shaped, preestablished organisation of the ‘State apparatus’. The State army, like most organs of power, is ‘of the arborescent

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type’, whereas the ‘war machine’, like packs and bands, is ‘of the rhizome type’.6 The ‘war machine’ thus presents a structure that is contractual and short-lived, yet infinitely extensive, rejecting neither affect nor irrationality, and, as such, appealing to mercenaries. In 1530, King Henry VIII had the practice of abjuration abolished because, as Kingsley-Smith points out, ‘The King had observed that many English exiles were skilled soldiers who subsequently became mercenaries and joined French armies. His alterations to sanctuary law reversed the policy of allowing criminals to leave the country by confining them indefinitely to particular safeholds.’7 It comes as no surprise that men banished from their homeland, deprived of biological and sociocultural filiations, should be tempted by the mercenary experience: they had no choice but to renounce former bonds. Away from home, seizing opportunities of new alliances was easier than recreating bonds of allegiance and ties of filiation. As Henry VIII’s wise decision testifies, banishment was also a way to indirectly incite one to adopt a mercenary mentality. Shakespeare’s Richard II is keenly aware of such a threat, which is why he requires a specific oath from both Mowbray and Bolingbroke, whom he has just banished: ‘You never shall, so help you truth and God, / Embrace each other’s love in banishment; / … / Nor never by advised purpose meet / To plot, contrive or complot any ill / ’Gainst us, our state, our subjects or our land’ (1.3.183–90). The quasi-fraternal alliance of the enemies dreaded by Richard II is fulfilled in the Roman play, when Coriolanus and Aufidius become brothers-in-arms and join forces to retaliate against Rome. They can go beyond their heightened rivalry because, as Michèle Willems notes, ‘an extreme form of the sense of caste … links all these warlords together’.8 Coriolanus enters into an alliance with the Volscians because he intuits that Aufidius acknowledges and admires his qualities as a warrior. When he offers his services to Aufidius, he has a mercenary attitude: he tells him, ‘make my misery serve thy turn. So use it / That my revengeful services may prove / As benefits to thee’ (4.5.89–91), while himself is ‘motivated by selfinterest’.9 The risk is that the alliance may break as easily as it was entered into; the ‘sense of caste’ may not stand the shock of strong personalities having to be equal partners and fight together. Aufidius bitterly notices how parts have been reversed, since Coriolanus’ mercenary-like speech:

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             I took him, Made him joint-servant with me, gave him way In all his own desires; nay, let him choose Out of my files, his projects to accomplish, My best and freshest men; served his designments In mine own person, holp to reap the fame Which he did end all his, and took some pride To do myself this wrong, till at the last I seemed his follower, not partner, and He waged me with his countenance as if I had been mercenary. (5.6.30–40)

As Lear might put it, change places, and ‘handy-dandy’ (4.5.144–5), which is the master, which is the mercenary?10 As Parker explains, Aufidius feels ‘patronized’ as if he were ‘a hired soldier’ and, worse, paid only by Coriolanus’ ‘condescension’.11 But this derogatory use of ‘mercenary’ recalls Machiavelli’s unflattering description according to which mercenaries are ‘disunited, ambitious, undisciplined, and disloyal’.12 Machiavelli’s warning against mercenary captains is also worth remembering: ‘Mercenary captains are either excellent men or they are not. If they are, you cannot trust them, since they will always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their masters, or by oppressing others against your intent; but if the captain is without ability, he usually ruins you.’13 We know which category Coriolanus belongs to, and Aufidius’ statement seems to confirm Machiavelli’s analysis. The Volscian general (although the author of his own disillusion and spite) might have underestimated Coriolanus’ capacity to lead a ‘war machine’ with troops that used to be under his control; he knew about Coriolanus’ power to deterritorialise any enemy territory, but he did not expect his territorialising the hearts of his own Volscian soldiers (although a mere reflection of his own infatuation). Whether from a Roman or a Volscian point of view, Coriolanus’ ‘war machine’ thwarts expectations. The strategy of the ‘war machine’ is unpredictable, but what can be predicted is its dazzling speed. Deleuze and Guattari emphasise that ‘if the nomads formed the war machine, it was by inventing absolute speed, by being “synonymous” with speed’14 – this, as opposed to the ‘State apparatus’ that ‘never ceases to decompose, recompose, and transform movement, or to regulate speed’.15 Such

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dazzling speed favours an uncommon striking power, which cannot be found on traditional battlefields, where enemy armies face one another, one advancing, the other withdrawing, and vice versa, until the issue is decided. Traditional battlefields are propitious to reversals of situation; they lend themselves to suspense, especially when information proves erroneous by the time messengers have reached their destination, as if these messengers were ‘Rumour’s tongue’, bringing ‘smooth comforts false, worse than true wrongs’ (King Henry IV, Part 2, Induction, 39–40).16 There are instances of this in King Richard II, with the Irish rebellion and the false rumour of the king’s death (2.4.7); in Coriolanus, with the already out-of-date news that the Roman troops beat a retreat before the Volscians (1.7.13–14); and in King Lear, with the uncertain issue of the war, first the breakthrough then the defeat of Cordelia’s army (5.2.6). Conversely, the ‘war machine’ is already there, even before the enemy ‘State apparatus’ has had time to prepare their military defence, taking them by surprise. In Coriolanus, whereas Brutus is persuaded that ‘Rome / Sits safe and still without him [Coriolanus]’ (4.6.38–9), the Aedile brings the news that ‘the Volsces, with two several powers, / Are entered in the Roman territories, / And with the deepest malice of the war / Destroy what lies before ’em’ (41–4). Like Brutus, Menenius thinks that this is a false report, until the Second Messenger specifies, A fearful army, led by Caius Martius Associated with Aufidius, rages Upon our territories, and have already O’erborne their way, consumed with fire and took What lay before them. (78–82)17

This is confirmed from an internal point of view, when Aufidius says, ‘All places yields to him ere he sits down’ (4.7.28; emphasis mine). Last but not least, Menenius wonders at the ‘absolute speed’ of Coriolanus’ ’war machine’: ‘What he bids be done is finished with his bidding’ (5.4.22–3). Similarly, in King Richard II the emphasis is put on celerity. Northumberland informs his friends that Bolingbroke’s armed forces are ‘making hither with all due expedience, / And shortly mean to touch our northern shore’ (2.1.287–8; emphasis mine). As

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Forker minutely points out, Shakespeare has compressed historical time to increase dramatic intensity, which also accentuates ‘the fluidity of time and space’18 and the impression of dazzling speed. And when Scroop reveals the extent of the English lands now at the enemy’s mercy and mentions ‘the rage / Of Bolingbroke, covering [the king’s] fearful land / With hard bright steel and hearts harder than steel’ (3.2.109–11), his use of the verb ‘cover’ reads as a clear consequence of the celerity of Bolingbroke’s ‘war machine’. In their ‘Treatise on Nomadology’, Deleuze and Guattari contrast the ‘war machine’ with the ‘State apparatus’ and, to emphasise their discrepancies, they contrast game strategies: that of Go versus that of chess. On the one hand, the game of chess is used as a metaphor for the ‘State apparatus’, in that ‘[c]hess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop.’19 On the other hand, the game of Go serves as a metaphor for the ‘war machine’, as Deleuze and Guattari explain: ‘Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones.’20 Forces and mercenaries that rally the ‘war machine’ once it is on the move are similar to Go pieces and form a changeable entity – in Coriolanus, an ‘it’ that varies according to Coriolanus’ ‘becomings’.21 Go pieces and chess pieces are different, and so is the way they move through space: Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus of going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point.22

The chess player moves his pieces over a ‘striated space’. The Go enthusiasts, conversely, keep adapting themselves to a ‘smooth

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space’ as they de-striate ‘striated spaces’, so that ‘smooth spaces’ can be recreated. So do ‘war machines’. Deleuze and Guattari associate the ‘smooth space’ with the ‘nomadic’ space, that is, ‘the space in which the war machine develops’, whereas the ‘striated space’ is a sedentary space, ‘the space instituted by the State apparatus’.23 One of the main tasks of the State is ‘to striate the space over which it reigns … not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migration and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire “exterior”, over all of the flows traversing the ecumenon’; or, differently put, ‘the response of the State against all that threatens to move beyond it is to striate space’.24 Outside the ‘State apparatus’, the ‘war machine’ recreates a ‘smooth space’ or ‘a manner of being in space as though it were smooth’;25 its function is to de-striate ‘striated spaces’. Deleuze and Guattari note, ‘instead of striating space, one occupies it with a vector of deterritorialization in perpetual motion’.26 So does Coriolanus’ ‘war machine’. In the words of the Third Servingman, ‘He will mow all down before him, and leave his passage polled’ (4.5.206–7). His mowing metaphor echoes Bolingbroke’s weeding metaphor (2.3.167): mowing, like weeding, expresses a radical deterritorialising movement. In both Coriolanus and King Richard II, the deterritorialising power of the ‘war machine’ is such that people turn pale, terrorstricken at the sight. Any sign of life, any system (whether social organisation or human blood circulation, even seasonal rhythm) seems doomed to disappear. It comes as no surprise that Scroop should resort to the following comparisons: Like an unseasonable stormy day, Which makes the silver rivers drown their shores As if the world were all dissolved to tears, So high above his limits swells the rage Of Bolingbroke. (3.2.106–10)

The verbs ‘drown’ and ‘dissolve’ make us visualise how a ‘striated space’ is turned into a ‘smooth space’. Topographical landmarks (‘rivers’ and ‘shores’) vanish under a rise in water level that evokes a macrocosmic flood (‘As if the world were all dissolved to tears’) and conveys the image of a ‘smooth space’ par excellence, for there

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is no longer a ‘measured, cadenced rhythm, relating to the coursing of a river between its banks or to the form of a striated space’, but ‘a rhythm without measure, which relates to the upswell of a flow, in other words, to the manner in which a fluid occupies a smooth space’.27 Such an overwhelming flood is also reminiscent of the sea, which, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is ‘perhaps principal among smooth spaces’.28 Yet deterritorialisation does not have the same end in King Richard II and Coriolanus. Bolingbroke is not interested in ‘smooth spaces’ per se. These have only a transitional strategic function; ironically, they pave the way for the new ‘striated space’ he wants to reign over (King Henry IV’s England). As for Coriolanus, he feels at home on battlefields, not in the Capitol; he has no taste for the ‘striated space’ of the political sphere; he wants revenge, but there is no indication of what he intends to do once Roman territories are de-striated, of what lies ‘beyond’ the satisfaction of deterritorialising his homeland and forging himself a name out of it. Coriolanus and Bolingbroke have different targets and, thus, different ways to use their ‘war machines’.

The ‘war machine’ in motion Deleuze and Guattari wonder ‘if war itself is the object of the war machine’, and they answer that this is ‘not at all obvious’.29 In Coriolanus and King Richard II, respectively, the ‘war machine’, on the one hand, ‘takes war for its object and forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the universe’, but, on the other hand, ‘has as its object not war but the drawing of a creative line of flight, the composition of a smooth space and the movement of people in that space’.30 It is like a weapon of mass destruction for Coriolanus, whereas, for Bolingbroke, it is a deterrent weapon that will ultimately lead to the king’s deposition and his own coronation. Yet the starting point is the same in both plays: so as to maximise its efficiency, the ‘war machine’ must be set in motion at the right time, that is, so as to take advantage of the weakness of the ‘State apparatus’. In Coriolanus, the Roman state appears to be recurrently threatened, although in different ways: first by the mutinous starving

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citizens, secondly by the Volscian army attacking the Roman territories and thirdly by the banishment of ‘the very defender’ (5.2.40) of their gates, which amounts to giving their ‘shield’ (41) to the enemy. The military strength of the ‘State apparatus’ is weakened by Coriolanus’ departure, but also by the civil strife this is already creating, as the conversation between the spies (the Roman Nicanor and the Volscian Adrian) testifies: Nicanor: There hath been in Rome strange insurrections, the people against the senators, patricians, and nobles. Adrian: Hath been? – is it ended then? Our state thinks not so. They are in a most warlike preparation, and hope to come upon them in the heat of their division. Nicanor: The main blaze of it is past, but a small thing would make it flame again, for the nobles receive so to heart the banishment of that worthy Coriolanus that they are in a ripe aptness to take all power from the people, and to pluck from them their tribunes for ever. This lies glowing, I can tell you, and is almost mature for the violent breaking out. (4.3.11–24)

And if Coriolanus’ view is to be trusted, the Roman soldiers may show cowardice rather than courage, proving ‘hares’ rather than ‘lions’ (1.1.168) on the battlefield. The English kingdom is weakened, first, because Richard II himself has bled it dry and, secondly, because the king and his army find themselves in Ireland, so as to ‘supplant those rough rug-headed kerns’ (2.1.156). Bushy is forced to acknowledge the weakness of their position at this point: ‘For us to levy power / Proportionable to the enemy is all unpossible’ (2.2.124–5). As for York, he capitulates nearly instantaneously in the face of Bolingbroke’s ‘war machine’: ‘Well, well, I see the issue of these arms. / I cannot mend it, I must needs confess, / Because my power is weak and all illleft’ (2.3.152–4). When Richard II returns from Ireland, his ‘twelve thousand fighting men’ (3.2.70) are gone,31 and the only ‘weapons’ left for him are words and imagination, which take the form of a ‘senseless conjuration’ (23). Indeed, the only ‘State apparatus’ he can think of to counter Bolingbroke’s ‘war machine’ is composed of ‘spiders’ (14), ‘heavy-gaited toads’ (15), ‘stinging nettles’ (18) and ‘a lurking adder / Whose double tongue may with a mortal touch /

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Throw death upon [his] enemies’ (20–2). His fantasy climaxes with the pathetic fallacy of the earth having ‘a feeling’ (24) and the stones proving ‘armed soldiers’ (25), as if his ‘gentle earth’ (12) could rescue him. Later, he appeals to divine justice in place of his enfeebled ‘State apparatus’, as if to deterritorialise his too-powerful enemies psychologically: Yet know: my Master, God omnipotent, Is mustering in His clouds on our behalf Armies of pestilence, and they shall strike Your children, yet unborn and unbegot, That lift you vassal hands against my head And threat the glory of my precious crown. (3.3.85–90)

But the ‘armies of pestilence’ that he calls upon for present help and future retaliation exist only in his own evocation of them. Although he is still the king, the performative power of his speech has been reduced to nothing. His military powerlessness is such that even military terms have lost their literal sense and are doomed to be used metaphorically, as when he cries, in a burst of illusory courage, ‘Arm, arm, my name!’ (3.2.86). So there is no need for Bolingbroke to fight: he just needs to use the deterrent power of his ‘war machine’. Bolingbroke’s ‘war machine’ is so effectively deterrent because it sets up a dialectics of federation and intimidation. On the one hand, it massively federates opponents against Richard II: it rallies almost unanimously, as if magnetically, not only various armed forces, but also the people, whatever their age, gender or occupation. Scroop reports to the king: Whitebeards have armed their thin and hairless scalps Against thy majesty; boys with women’s voices Strive to speak big and clap their female joints In stiff unwieldy arms against thy crown; Thy very beadsmen learn to bend their bows Of double-fatal yew against thy state; Yea, distaff-women manage rusty bills Against thy seat. Both young and old rebel, And all goes worse than I have power to tell. (3.2.112–20)

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On the other hand, Bolingbroke’s ‘war machine’ has intimidating military force, creating persuasion through fear as soon as it is seen, whether when covering the king’s territory or gathering at strategic points. As it approaches Flint Castle, to which Richard has retreated, Bolingbroke orders his men, ‘Let’s march without the noise of threat’ning drum, / That from this castle’s tattered battlements / Our fair appointments may be well perused’ (3.3.51–3). Bolingbroke’s conspicuous numerical force and military ostentation evoke Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘concept of the nonbattle [that] seems capable of expressing the speed of a lightning attack, and the counterspeed of an immediate response’.32 The immediate deterrent effect of his ‘war machine’ is visible from the reaction it provokes as it advances: terror, betrayed by pallor. In Scroop’s words, the whole kingdom is reduced to a ‘fearful land’ (3.2.110); Richard II himself must summon the courage to overblow his ‘ague fit of fear’ (190). For York, Bolingbroke’s army is ‘[f]righting her [England’s] pale-faced villages with war’ (2.3.94); the king himself asks, ‘Have I not reason to look pale and dead?’ (3.2.79). Bolingbroke’s ‘war machine’ crystallises ‘the force with which the tyrannicides, the monarchomachs, the overthrowers of thrones, the breakers of idols and the fomenters of attacks against liberticides are produced’,33 to employ Onfray’s terms. Thanks to its deterrent force, the ‘war machine’ can be used as an instrument of negotiation, a means of persuasion, that is, a trump card that enables Bolingbroke to lay down his conditions in a way that resembles blackmail. Bolingbroke agrees to lay his ‘arms and power’ (3.3.39) at the king’s feet, provided that his ‘banishment repealed / And lands restored again be freely granted’ (40–1). But if Richard II refuses, he envisages no less than an apocalyptic bloody use of his ‘war machine’: ‘If not, I’ll use the advantage of my power / And lay the summer’s dust with showers of blood / Rained from the wounds of slaughtered Englishmen –’ (42–4). The way Bolingbroke wanted ‘negotiations’ to be announced had already pointed to the ominous imbalance between forces, especially with the contrast between ‘brazen’ and ‘ruined’: ‘Through brazen trumpet send the breath of parley / Into his ruined ears’ (33–4). The metaphor of the ‘ruined ears’, conveying the sense of ‘battered slits or loopholes of the castle’s walls’,34 also extends to Richard’s own ears (with the encouragement of the use of ‘his’ instead of ‘its’). The

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‘shrill-sounding’35 trumpet, unlike John of Gaunt’s previously failed attempt, will finally ‘undeaf his ear’ (2.1.16). In a paradoxical turn, Bolingbroke is ready literally to deafen the king, so that he will be at last undeafened politically. It is necessary to impress Richard II visually with ‘glittering arms’ (3.3.116), because he has turned a deaf ear to legitimate requests. In Coriolanus, the desperate attempts to negotiate come from those who are threatened by the ‘war machine’ (the successive embassies of Cominius, Menenius, and Volumnia with Virgilia and Coriolanus’ son). But this machine is used not as a deterrent, but as a weapon of mass destruction. As soon as Coriolanus’ ‘war machine’ is set in motion, it races to destroy all Roman territories, including the very heart of the city. Coriolanus targets nothing less than utter destruction, which is expressed by the metaphors of ‘mowing’ and ‘polling’ (4.5.206–7), but also of eviscerating and disembowelling. Aufidius, who has taken the measure of Coriolanus’ hatred, invites him to pour ‘war / Into the bowels of ungrateful Rome’ (130–1). Volumnia resorts to a similar image to describe her son’s appalling action: his ‘tearing / His country’s bowels out’ (5.3.103–4). The intensity of such violence is pointed up by both its unnatural quality and Coriolanus’ ‘becomings’. Coriolanus himself is the embodiment of the ‘war machine’. As Menenius puts it, ‘When he walks, he moves like an engine, and the ground shrinks before his treading’ (5.4.18–20). According to Deleuze and Guattari, the ‘hunting machine, the war machine, the crime machine entail all kinds of becomings-animal’.36 They specify, ‘The man of war has an entire becoming that implies multiplicity, celerity, ubiquity, metamorphosis and treason, the power of affect. Wolf-men, bear-men, wildcat-men, men of every animality, secret brotherhoods, animate the battlefields.’37 Coriolanus’ ‘becomingsanimal’ are brought out by Menenius’ metaphors: ‘This Martius is grown from man to dragon’ (5.4.12–13), ‘There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger’ (27–8). In fact, several types of ‘becomings’ animate Coriolanus: he can turn into a machine, into an animal, but also into a god. His ‘becoming-god’ is evident from the beginning, when he comes back gloriously from Corioles. As Brutus notes, it is as if ‘whatsoever god who leads him / Were slily crept into his human powers / And gave him graceful posture’ (2.1.215–17). He is deified both by the plebeians

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and the patricians ‘bended / As to Jove’s statue’ (261–2), and the same process recurs with the Volscians. Cominius reports, ‘He is their god. He leads them like a thing / Made by some other deity than nature, / That shapes man better’ (4.6.94–6). And Menenius adds later, ‘He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in’ (5.4.23–4). This god is the god of war, Mars, implicit in the very name of ‘Martius’, as Aufidius makes us hear when he calls Coriolanus ‘thou Mars’ (4.5.119). Deleuze and Guattari’s analyses of the god of war may, mutatis mutandis, throw light on Shakespeare’s Roman hero: he is like a pure and immeasurable multiplicity, the pack, an irruption of the ephemeral and the power of metamorphosis. He unties the bond just as he betrays the pact. He brings a furor to bear against sovereignty, a celerity against gravity, secrecy against the public, a power (puissance) against sovereignty, a machine against the apparatus. He bears witness to another kind of justice, one of incomprehensible cruelty at times, but at others of unequaled pity as well … He bears witness, above all, to other relations with women, with animals, because he sees all things in relations of becoming, rather than implementing binary distributions between ‘states’: a veritable becoming-animal of the warrior, a becoming-woman, which lies outside dualities of terms as well as correspondences between relations.38

The scene in which Coriolanus finally yields to his mother also reveals his ‘becoming-child’, a mutation which Aufidius will later use injuriously, telling him, ‘Name not the god [Mars], thou boy of tears’ (5.6.103). Coriolanus’ ‘becomings’ are phenomena ‘of a double capture, of non-parallel evolution, of nuptials between two reigns’.39 So we come to understand that, as Sibony observes, ‘what is at stake is not blind or abstract forces, but individuals wrestling with their epoch, their memory, their genealogy, their dreams and their limits’,40 that Coriolanus is not ‘the rock, the oak, not to be wind-shaken’ (5.2.108). If Coriolanus can be regarded as a ‘block’, it is in the Deleuzian sense of the word, as François Zourabichvili explains: ‘any becoming forms a “block”, that is, the encounter or relation between two heterogeneous terms that mutually “deterritorialise” one another. You do not relinquish what you are to become something else (imitation, identification), but another way of living and feeling haunts or wraps itself in ours and “chases it away”.’41 Coriolanus, brought up by his mother to become a god-like warrior,

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cannot escape the deterritorialising dialectics of his ‘becoming-god’ and ‘becoming-child’. The ‘war machine’ in these Shakespearean plays proves absolutely efficient: Bolingbroke gets what he wanted; were it not for his mother, Coriolanus would have reduced Rome to ashes. They are efficient, but badly thought of. From Volumnia’s point of view, Coriolanus will be ‘dogged with curses’ (5.3.145), if he does not stop his machine. As for King Richard II, it ends with the resolution of Bolingbroke (the freshly crowned Henry IV) to ‘make a voyage to the Holy Land / To wash this blood off from [his] guilty hand’ (5.6.49–50). This seems to confirm that ‘[f]rom the standpoint of the State, the originality of the man of war, his eccentricity, necessarily appears in a negative form: stupidity, deformity, madness, illegitimacy, usurpation, sin’.42 But are there possible alternatives to the ‘war machine’?

Notes 1 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 419. In the original text: ‘La machine de guerre est l’invention des nomades en tant qu’elle est extérieure à l’appareil d’État et distincte de l’institution militaire’, Mille plateaux, p. 471. 2 The game of Go is a ‘Japanese board game of territorial possession and capture, played with (usually black and white) stones as counters on a square board marked with intersecting lines’, Oxford English Dictionary, ‘go, n. 2’. 3 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 388. In the original text: ‘Ou bien l’État dispose d’une violence qui ne passe pas par la guerre: il emploie des policiers et des geôliers plutôt que des guerriers, il n’a pas d’armes et n’en a pas besoin, il agit par capture magique immédiate, il “saisit” et “lie”, empêchant tout combat. Ou bien l’État acquiert une armée, mais qui présuppose une intégration juridique de la guerre et l’organisation d’une fonction militaire. Quant à la machine de guerre en elle-même, elle semble bien irréductible à l’appareil d’État, extérieure à sa souveraineté, préalable à son droit: elle vient d’ailleurs’, Mille plateaux, p. 435. 4 Ibid., p. 395. In the original text: ‘elles animent une indiscipline fondamentale du guerrier, une remise en question de la hiérarchie, un chantage perpétuel à l’abandon et à la trahison, un sens de l’honneur très susceptible, et qui contrarie, encore une fois, la formation d’État’, Mille plateaux, p. 443.

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5 Forker, footnote at 2.1.286, pp. 272–3, King Richard II (The Arden Shakespeare). 6 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 395. In the original text: ‘type arborescent’ and ‘type rhizome’, Mille plateaux, p. 443. 7 Kingsley-Smith, Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile, p. 61. 8 Willems, ‘“Women and Horses and Power and War”’: Worship of Mars from 1 Henry IV to Coriolanus’, p. 191. 9 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘mercenary, n. and adj.’, B. adj. 1. a. 10 Lear’s original cue (to Gloucester) is ‘change places, and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?’ (4.5.144–5). 11 Parker, footnote at 5.6.39–40, p. 351, Coriolanus (The Oxford Shakespeare). 12 Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 43 (XII. ‘Of the various kinds of troops and mercenary soldiers’). 13 Ibid., p. 43. 14 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 426. In the original text: ‘Si les nomades ont formé la machine de guerre, c’est en inventant la vitesse absolue, en étant “synonyme” de vitesse’, Mille plateaux, p. 480. 15 Ibid., p. 426. In the original text: ‘l’État ne cesse de décomposer, recomposer et transformer le mouvement, ou de régler la vitesse’, Mille plateaux, p. 480. 16 William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 2, ed. A. R. Humphreys, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996). 17 Emphasis mine. 18 Forker, footnote at 2.1.289–90, p. 273, King Richard II (The Arden Shakespeare). 19 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 389. In the original text: ‘Les pièces d’échec sont codées, elles ont une nature intérieure ou des propriétés intrinsèques, d’où découlent leurs mouvements, leurs situations, leurs affrontements. Elles sont qualifiées, le cavalier reste un cavalier, le fantassin un fantassin, le voltigeur un voltigeur’, Mille plateaux, p. 436. 20 Ibid., p. 389. In the original text: ‘Les pions de go au contraire sont des grains, des pastilles, de simples unités arithmétiques, et n’ont d’autre fonction qu’anonyme, collective ou de troisième personne: “Il” avance, ce peut être un homme, une femme, une puce, un éléphant. Les pions de go sont les éléments d’un agencement machinique non subjectivé, sans propriétés intrinsèques, mais seulement de situation’, Mille plateaux, p. 436. 21 This effect will be analysed later in this chapter. 22 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 389. In the original text: ‘Les échecs sont bien une guerre, mais une guerre institutionnalisée,

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réglée, codée, avec un front, des arrières, des batailles. Mais une guerre sans ligne de combat, sans affrontement et arrières, à la limite sans bataille, c’est le propre du go: pure stratégie, tandis que les échecs sont une sémiologie. Enfin, ce n’est pas du tout le même espace: dans le cas des échecs, il s’agit de se distribuer un espace fermé, donc d’aller d’un point à un autre, d’occuper un maximum de place avec un minimum de pièces. Dans le go, il s’agit de se distribuer un espace ouvert, de tenir l’espace, de garder la possibilité de surgir en n’importe quel point’, Mille plateaux, pp. 436–7. 23 Ibid., p. 524. In the original text: ‘l’espace où se développe la machine de guerre’, ‘l’espace institué par l’appareil d’État’, Mille plateaux, p. 592. 24 Ibid., pp. 425, 426. In the original text: ‘strier l’espace sur lequel il règne … Non seulement vaincre le nomadisme, mais contrôler les migrations, et plus généralement faire valoir une zone de droits sur tout un “extérieur”, sur l’ensemble des flux qui traversent l’œcumène’, ‘la réplique de l’État, c’est de strier l’espace, contre tout ce qui risque de le déborder’, Mille plateaux, pp. 479, 480. 25 Ibid., p. 426. In the original text: ‘une manière d’être dans l’espace comme s’il était lisse’, Mille plateaux, p. 480. 26 Ibid., p. 427. In the original text: ‘au lieu de strier l’espace, on l’occupe avec un vecteur de déterritorialisation en mouvement perpétuel’, Mille plateaux, p. 481. 27 Ibid., p. 401. In the original text: ‘un rythme mesuré, cadencé qui renvoie à l’écoulement du fleuve entre ses rives ou à la forme d’un espace strié’, ‘un rythme sans mesure, qui renvoie à la fluxion d’un flux, c’està-dire à la façon dont un fluide occupe un espace lisse’, Mille plateaux, p. 450. 28 Ibid., p. 427. In the original text: ‘peut-être le principal des espaces lisses’, Mille plateaux, p. 481. 29 Ibid., p. 460. In the original text: ‘si la guerre elle-même est l’objet de la machine de guerre’, ‘pas du tout évident’, Mille plateaux, p. 519. 30 Ibid., p. 466. In the original text: ‘elle prend la guerre pour objet, et forme une ligne de destruction prolongeable jusqu’aux limites de l’univers’, ‘[elle] a pour objet, non pas la guerre, mais le tracé d’une ligne de fuite créatrice, la composition d’un espace lisse et du mouvement des hommes dans cet espace’, Mille plateaux, p. 526. 31 We have no precise idea of the composition of the king’s army – whether ‘his own troops, or mercenaries, or auxiliaries, or of mixed troops’ (Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 43) – except that it comprises Welshmen who, hearing that Richard II was dead, are ‘gone to Bolingbroke, dispersed and fled’ (3.2.74). So Richard II might have had a mixed army.

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This would confirm Machiavelli’s lesson that ‘without having one’s own soldiers, no principality is safe’ (The Prince, p. 50). 32 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 459. In the original text: ‘la non-bataille semble pouvoir exprimer la vitesse d’une attaque-éclair, ou bien la contre-vitesse d’une riposte immédiate’, Mille plateaux, p. 518. 33 Onfray, Politique du rebelle, p. 221; my translation of ‘la force avec laquelle on fait les tyrannicides, les monarchomaques, les renverseurs de trône, les briseurs d’idoles et les fomenteurs d’attentats dirigés contre les liberticides’. 34 Forker, footnote at 3.3.34, p. 340, King Richard II (The Arden Shakespeare). 35 Forker, foonote at 3.3.33, p. 340, ibid. 36 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 267. In the original text: ‘La machine de chasse, la machine de guerre, la machine de crime entraînent toutes sortes de devenir-animaux’, Mille plateaux, p. 296. 37 Ibid., p. 268. In the original text: ‘L’homme de guerre a tout un devenir qui implique multiplicité, célérité, ubiquité, métamorphose et trahison, puissance d’affect. Les hommes-loups, les hommes-ours, les hommesfauves, les hommes de toute animalité, confréries secrètes, animent le champ de bataille’, Mille plateaux, p. 297. 38 Ibid., pp. 388–9 (Deleuze and Guattari’s italics). In the original text: ‘Il serait plutôt comme la multiplicité pure et sans mesure, la meute, irruption de l’éphémère et puissance de la métamorphose. Il dénoue le lien autant qu’il trahit le pacte. Il fait valoir une furor contre la mesure, une célérité contre la gravité, un secret contre le public, une puissance contre la souveraineté, une machine contre l’appareil. Il témoigne d’une autre justice, parfois d’une cruauté incompréhensible, mais parfois d’une pitié inconnue … Il témoigne surtout d’autres rapports avec les femmes, avec les animaux, puisqu’il vit toute chose dans des rapports de devenir, au lieu d’opérer des répartitions binaires entre “états”: tout un deveniranimal, tout un devenir-femme, qui outrepasse aussi bien les dualités de termes que les correspondances de rapports’, Mille plateaux, pp. 435–6. 39 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 2. In the original text: ‘de double capture, d’évolution non parallèle, de noces entre deux règnes’, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), p. 8. 40 Sibony, Avec Shakespeare, p. 115; my translation of ‘ce ne sont pas des forces aveugles ou abstraites qui sont en scène, ce sont des êtres singuliers aux prises avec leur temps, leur mémoire, leur généalogie, leurs rêves, leurs limites’.

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41 Zourabichvili, Le Vocabulaire de Deleuze, p. 30; my translation of ‘tout devenir forme un “bloc”, autrement dit la rencontre ou la relation de deux termes hétérogènes qui se “déterritorialisent” mutuellement. On n’abandonne pas ce qu’on est pour devenir autre chose (imitation, identification), mais une autre façon de vivre et de sentir hante ou s’enveloppe dans la nôtre et la “fait fuir”.’ 42 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 390. In the original text: ‘Du point de vue de l’État, l’originalité de l’homme de guerre, son excentricité, apparaît nécessairement sous une forme négative: bêtise, difformité, folie, illégitimité, usurpation, péché’, Mille plateaux, p. 437.

6 Alternatives to the ‘war machine’

Bolingbroke and Coriolanus each set in motion a ‘war machine’ with the respective results that have been pointed out. Other characters, also victims of abusive banishment, do not take part in such a dynamic of riposte; rather, they find another way of expressing their feelings of injustice, trying to sublimate their temptation to be revenged. Sometimes violence does erupt, but it is channelled away from the banisher who did them wrong and partakes of a different structure that has its own strategies. Two alternatives will first be distinguished: on the one hand, the banished individuals who have no choice but to join either a foreign ‘State apparatus’ (as is the case with Cordelia, who returns to England with a French army) or a Christian structure (in King Richard II, Mowbray’s decision to become God’s soldier); on the other hand, those who resort to chivalric codes and accept the ritual of single combat (as does Edgar when he confronts his brother Edmond). Then a detour will be made via Prospero’s island to see how, and to what extent, Deleuzian ‘magical capture’ can be interpreted as a variant of the ‘war machine’.

Joining another ‘State apparatus’? Coriolanus appropriated the forces of the Volscian ‘State apparatus’ and turned them into his personal ‘war machine’ to assuage his thirst for revenge against Rome. Clearly, Cordelia does not use the French army in the same spirit as Coriolanus, that of revengeful mass destruction, but it seems that France, her husband, puts his soldiers at her disposal (as Aufidius does with Coriolanus). Cordelia

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declares that ‘great France / [Her] mourning and importuned tears hath pitied’ (4.3.25–6). Hers is not a dynamic of riposte, but of rescue and restoration – ‘O dear father’, she says, ‘It is thy business that I go about’ (23–4). Yet this interpretation is variable, depending on the point of view. For Cornwall, Albany, Regan, Goneril and Edmond, Cordelia is at the head of a foreign and enemy ‘State apparatus’. Commenting on the stage direction ‘Enter with drum and colours, [Queen] Cordelia, Gentlemen, and soldiers’ (4.3.SD), R. A. Foakes observes, Visually she is Queen of France, armed perhaps, and leading an invading force into England on behalf of Lear, as her ‘colours’ show, presumably those of France, and different from those of the ‘British powers’ she is opposing. It is one of the terrible consequences of Lear’s violence in the division of his kingdom and treatment of his daughters that in order to aid him Cordelia must return to England as an enemy to the state, so that some political grounds could be argued for her death when she is captured.1

However, from Kent’s and Gloucester’s viewpoints, she is giving assistance to the former English ‘State apparatus’, that of Lear, by supplying auxiliary troops, ‘those that arrive when you call a powerful prince to bring his forces to your aid and defence’.2 The ambivalence associated with Cordelia’s French forces becomes more evident in the light of the textual variations that exist between the Quarto version (1607–8) and the Folio version (1623). In his article ‘The War in King Lear’, Gary Taylor makes a distinction between war and battle. As regards battle, he observes: ‘Everything takes place offstage; the audience sees nothing; like Gloucester, it can only sit and listen. The playwright presents us, as the world presents his characters, with a fait accompli.’3 He also notes that, if there is no divergence between the Quarto and the Folio texts about the non-representation on stage of the battle, the differences bearing on the treatment of the war are significant: the Folio does put the emphasis on the war, but strangely leaves out several references to France that appeared in the Quarto. For instance, in Act 4, scene 3, the Folio opening stage direction specifies ‘Enter with drums and colours, [Queen] Cordelia, Gentlemen, and soldiers’, whereas that of the Quarto just reads, ‘Enter [Queen] Cordelia, Doctor, and others’ (Scene 18).4 In Act 5, scene 2, the

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Quarto opening stage direction indicates ‘Enter the powers of France over the stage [led by] Cordelia with her father in her hand’ (Scene 23), whereas that of the Folio is more neutral: ‘Enter with drum and colours Lear, Cordelia, and soldiers over the stage’ (5.2.SD), as if the French auxiliary troops had changed into English national forces. Taylor goes further in his analysis of the differences between the two versions: evidently Elizabethan theatres could produce recognizable foreign armies, when asked to do so. The Folio … does not ask for one. This omission, moreover, seems clearly related to a number of others. Earlier, the Folio omits Goneril’s reference to French invasion (IV, ii, 56), the scene which includes discussion of French general La Far and of the king’s absence from his army (IV, iii), and Albany’s explanation that he takes arms against Lear only because ‘France invades our land’ (V, i, 25). Consequently, in the last two acts of the Folio there remains but one (indirect) allusion to French intervention, being in fact Cordelia’s disclaimer of territorial ambition: ‘No blown ambition doth our arms incite, / But love, dear love, and our aged father’s right’ (IV, iv, 27–8).5

Reminding us of Albany’s ‘the King is come to his daughter, / With others whom the rigour of our state / Forced to cry out’ (5.1.17– 19), Taylor concludes that, in the Folio, ‘Cordelia seems to lead not an invasion but a rebellion, like Bolingbroke’s or Richmond’s.’6 So her armed forces cannot be associated with either a foreign ‘State apparatus’ or a ‘war machine’. In Richard II, however, interstices propitious to ambivalence can be found between the ‘State apparatus’ and the ‘war machine’. When Mowbray enlists in the Christian army, another type of structure, which takes after both the ‘State apparatus’ and the ‘war machine’, emerges. Gloucester’s murder is a contentious issue that runs throughout the play. The motif of trial by combat, which should have opposed Bolingbroke and Mowbray in the first act, recurs at the beginning of Act 4, now opposing Bagot and Aumerle, and their respective followers. Bolingbroke wants to know who ‘wrought it with the King, and who performed / The bloody office of his [Gloucester’s] timeless end’ (4.1.4–5). This is why he decides to recall Mowbray from banishment. But the Bishop of Carlisle steps in at this point and explains,

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That honourable day [that of Mowbray’s return] shall ne’er be seen. Many a time hath banished Norfolk fought For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field, Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross, Against black pagans, Turks and Saracens, And, toiled with works of war, retired himself To Italy, and there at Venice gave His body to that pleasant country’s earth And his pure soul unto his captain Christ, Under whose colours he had fought so long. (4.1.92–101)

Carlisle’s laudatory recapitulation of the exiled Mowbray’s trajectory as a valiant crusader places Mowbray in the line of prestigious kings such as Richard Lionheart and Edward I, and shows him to be worthier than Richard II. Kingsley-Smith observes, ‘Far from losing his identity, Mowbray has become the archetype English crusader, his loss of language compensated for by the eloquence of fighting for his religion.’7 But if he proves talented at deterritorialising the infidels, nothing is said about whether this helped him reterritorialise himself after he left the milites Christi. It seems, from Carlisle’s speech, that he retired to Italy and died there shortly after, but the notion of pleasantness (‘that pleasant country’s earth’, 4.1.99) is Carlisle’s subjective interpretation. This recapitulation is probably Shakespeare’s invention or his own combination of several sources, which are not historically accurate. Henry Newbolt notes that ‘there was no Crusade between 1396 and 1439, nor did any Crusader reach Jerusalem after the twelfth century’.8 In Holinshed’s Chronicles, no crusades are ever mentioned at all: Mowbray dies in exile ‘for thought and melancholie’.9 As for Stow, he reports that Mowbray died when he came back from Jerusalem but ‘does not specify whether he had been in the Holy Land as a soldier or as a pilgrim’.10 Only in Froissart is it said that Mowbray might have travelled to the Holy Land: ‘thoughe he have been sore traveyled in his dayes in farre countreis, as into Pruce, and to the Holy Sepulchre, to Cayre, and to saynt Katheryns mount, so he may do yet, goo some other voyages to passe the tyme if he lyste … Whan he cometh into Spaygne he maye move theym [the Queens of Spain and Portugal] to make warre upon the sarazyns.’11 It is significant that Shakespeare did not opt for Holinshed’s melancholic fading away of Mowbray (he

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had gaunt Gaunt already), but for Stow and Froissart’s speculations about crusades combining violence and the sacred. In Shakespeare’s version, Mowbray joins the milites Christi and becomes Christ’s soldier: he reterritorialises himself within a politicoreligious structure whose ideals transcend any Christian territory’s specific nationalism. In doing so, he still takes part in the dialectics of faithfulness and unfaithfulness (as the king’s loyal subject and probably henchman), but the holy war endows it with a higher significance. After experiencing treason from someone close at hand – as is implicit in his answer to the king, ‘A heavy sentence, my most sovereign liege, / And all unlooked for from your highness’ mouth’ (1.3.154–5) – he turns to combat the lack of religious faith of those who are far away. The violence that his feeling of injustice triggers is diverted from the nearby to far and absolute otherness, from personal resentment to Christian ideals. He remains loyal to Richard II insofar as he neither breaks his oath to return illegally nor turns into a mercenary and enrols to fight for enemy countries. He will fight against another type of unfaithfulness, against ‘black pagans, Turks and Saracens’ (4.1.96), the infidels whom Sir Edward Coke, in his categorisation of foreigners, considered as ‘perpetual enemies’: ‘Jews, Turks, heretics and pagans’.12 Thus he can express his loyalty to ‘his Captain Christ’ (4.1.100), a new figure, more trustworthy than God’s substitute on earth. The fallible rex imago dei is replaced by Christ himself. Mowbray may have found a way to compensate for the cruel disappointment he had received from the king. Jean Flori reminds us that a crusade was originally presented as ‘a military operation eminently sacralised, as a “holy war” led by the Christians for their Lord Jesus Christ, who could reward his loyal knights much better than the lords and princes of this world knew how to do’.13 From a symbolic point of view, it could be suggested that going on a crusade is like launching a ‘war machine’ for Mowbray, since crusades evoke ‘war machines’ rather than ‘State apparatuses’, their type of organisation being rhizomatic rather than arborescent. After pointing to the diversity of armies, the absence of unity and the rivalry that could develop during expeditions, Flori concludes, ‘it is clear that the crusade, more than a unique expedition led by the papal legate, was a coalition of warlords, each of whom had his own ambition and conception of discipline’.14 There were also stakes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation internal to the country. Thus, by means of

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crusades, the papacy attempted ‘to take control over the new forces of chivalry, to transform this secular and feudal militia into a militia of Christianity’.15 But Flori shows that the Church eventually failed in its attempt to territorialise the forces of feudal chivalry.16 It is also possible that Mowbray’s faith in Christian crusades and the ‘just war’17 is associated with his own quest for redemption. Flori points out that, ‘at the same time as they took up arms to serve him, the knights became Christ’s soldiers (milites Christi), and it was God himself who would reward them, erasing the sins of those who would go and assuring eternal life for those who would perish in this “splendid combat” for him’.18 Mowbray publicly denies having a hand in Gloucester’s murder (1.1.133), but he still has a ‘grieved soul’ (138) for the ambush that he laid for John of Gaunt – although he has confessed this. So, for him, ‘the crusade presents composite characteristics, those of a war expedition but also those of a pilgrimage’.19 Mowbray’s quest for redemption, with authentically spiritual stakes, will be contrasted with Bolingbroke’s wish, once he is crowned king, to go to the Holy Land to expiate Richard II’s murder (5.6.49–50). Mowbray’s death is announced just after the escalation of challenges, of gages thrown down by Aumerle, Bagot and their respective followers, calling for a series of personal combats to clear their honour. This episode echoes the opening of the play in burlesque fashion, but also serves as a foil to what Carlisle says about Mowbray: his capacity to go beyond personal honour and focus on universal values, that is, in his case, ‘to place himself in his [Jesus’] service so as to reconquer his [Jesus’] honour’.20 King Richard II reveals the ambivalence not only of the ‘war machine’ and the Christian ‘apparatus’, but also of trial by combat, suggesting that if single combat can be resorted to shun the lex talionis, it can also be a practice based on pride and, as such, futile. In King Lear, however, single combat proves a valid alternative to the ‘war machine’.

Trial by combat (a codified confrontation with ‘nomadic’ advantages) The trial by combat between Edgar and Edmond in King Lear, which actually takes place and ends in Edgar’s victory, appears as

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a counterpoint to the abortive combats that, in King Richard II, should have opposed Bolingbroke and Mowbray (annulled by Richard II), and then Aumerle and Bagot (postponed by Bolingbroke). Because the king is sovereign, he allows (or not) such confrontations, which are controlled by chivalric codes. The chivalric structure, although independent of the ‘State apparatus’, remains framed by it. Trials by combat, like tournaments, follow a minutely regulated ritual. In King Richard II, Bolingbroke has to face his rival while respecting ‘all the rites of knighthood’ (1.1.75); Mowbray has to answer him ‘in any fair degree / Or chivalrous design of knightly trial’ (80–1). This regulated ritual begins with the Herald sounding his trumpet, reading the act of accusation (generally of treason), and inviting the combatants to state their names, specify the grounds for their confrontation and obey the codes of chivalry. Thus, in the lists of Coventry, the lord Marshal enjoins Mowbray: ‘In God’s name and the King’s, say who thou art / And why thou com’st thus knightly clad in arms, / Against what man thou com’st, and what thy quarrel. / Speak truly, on thy knighthood and thy oath, / As so defend thee heaven and thy valour’ (1.3.11–15). What is expected from the trial by combat is the spectacle of the rightful adequation between word and sword. ‘What my tongue speaks my right-drawn sword may prove’ (1.1.46), Bolingbroke promises. The chivalric procedure introduces a system of metonymical displacements, in which the whole is thrown in with the part: the challenge with (the throwing down of) the gage (as a defiant assertion of truth); the confrontation with the sword (as evidence of one’s honour); the knight alone, only trusting to his ‘single virtue’ (King Lear, 5.3.96), for a cause (as an enactment of justice). All these displacements function as mediations that should channel hatred and prevent the endless spiral of the law of talion. Maurice Keen notes, ‘The reduction of bloodshed and restraint upon the rancours which were so easily engendered in the heat of affray were clearly among the principal objects of the rules of tournaments which were drawn up by the English kings Richard I and Edward I.’21 According to Keen, ‘[i]t could indeed be argued that the relatively subtle influence of the tournament did more, in the long run, to promote standards of civilised behaviour between belligerent forces than papal prohibitions, issued in the name of restraining undisciplined violence,

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ever looked like doing’.22 As will be seen, the Church was far from agreeing that tournaments and trials by combat were a means to channel violence. As Edgar, disguised as a peasant, hands over to Albany the letter that discloses the plot against him, he asserts, ‘Wretched though I seem, / I can produce a champion that will prove / What is avouchèd there’ (5.1.32–4). At the end of the battle, when Cordelia’s army has been defeated, Albany blows the trumpet to call the champion he was promised to confront Edmond, in the hope of proving that the latter is ‘a traitor, / False to [his] gods, [his] brother, and [his] father, / Conspirant ’gainst this high illustrious prince [Albany]’ (5.3.123–5). In conformity with the ritual, the Herald asks Edgar, ‘What are you? / Your name, your quality, and why you answer / This present summons?’ (109–11). Since only knights who could use their ancestors’ names and produce evidence of their titles of nobility were normally allowed to combat, Edgar answers, ‘Know, my name is lost, / By treason’s tooth bare-gnawn and canker-bit. / Yet am I noble as the adversary / I come to cope’ (111–14). At this point, he is reminiscent of the knight errant who would present himself at tournaments. As Keen observes, ‘Because tournaments were public tests of individual prowess in which prizes and renown could be won, they helped to gain currency and respect for the role of the knight errant, the wanderer urged forward by love, enterprise and inherent virtue to seek the opportunity to win honour.’23 Mutatis mutandis, this single combat is to Edgar what the ‘war machine’ is to Coriolanus: the opportunity to recover his lost name or to forge himself a new one. Edmond’s answer to Edgar’s accusation of treason is worth paying attention to:       In wisdom I should ask thy name, But since thy outside looks so fair and warlike, And that thy tongue some say of breeding breathes, What safe and nicely I might well demand By rule of knighthood I disdain and spurn. (5.3.131–5)

In the last two lines, depending on whether the run-on line is taken into account as such, ‘By rule of knighthood’ can be associated either with what comes before (‘What safe and nicely I might well demand / By rule of knighthood’) or what comes after (‘By rule

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of knighthood I disdain and spurn’). The ambiguity is lost in the Quarto version:       In wisdom I should ask thy name, But since thy outside looks so fair and warlike, And that thy tongue some say of breeding breathes, My right of knighthood I disdain and spurn. (Scene 24, 137–40)

The knight who recognises his equal in the appellant feels free to bypass the stipulations imposed by the chivalric codes: is he, then, to be regarded as infringing these codes, or can it be considered that he has interiorised them so well that he can directly go to the point? The second hypothesis seems to suggest that chivalric codes are considered as higher than geopolitical rules, that they can adapt to ‘smooth spaces’: Edgar is intuitively recognised as a worthy adversary and hence allowed to combat, whereas he is statutorily an outlaw. Matthew Strickland points out that the knights who present themselves at tournaments generally do so ‘irrespective of the shifting political alliances and animosities of the territorial princes’.24 As for Keen, he stresses the fact that tournaments and trials by combat brought about some change in chivalry, developing ‘an international and aristocratic ideology, whose rules, attitudes and values transcended local boundaries’.25 The trial by combat between Edgar and Edmond, inasmuch as neither of the combatants abides by the chivalric rules, shows the independence of chivalric spirit from political cartography. In King Richard II, Bolingbroke and Mowbray are ready to journey to unknown territories, even ‘to the frozen ridges of the Alps, / Or any other ground inhabitable / Wherever Englishman durst set his foot’ (1.1.64–6), that is, in non ‘striated spaces’, provided they can fight one another to clear their honour. Single combats and tournaments can take place beyond geopolitical, but also ecclesiastical control. According to the Church, they not only encourage violence and favour deadly sins,26 but they are also in unfair competition with crusades. Keen explains, ‘Tournaments were easier to get to than the Holy Land; the risks that they involved, though serious, were infinitely less than those of the Holy War; and more knights – many, many more – in consequence took part in them. Indeed the reputation gained at them was often more immediately significant

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than reputation won beyond the sea.’27 In King Lear, as Edgar wins over Edmond, he can disclose and reaffirm his identity, which is immediately acknowledged by Albany: ‘Methought thy very gait did prophesy / A royal nobleness’ (5.3.165–6). Such a reintegration was made possible by Edgar’s courage and ability to fight, but also by the fact that the chivalric codes, even though slightly infringed, relegate the geopolitical context to the background. Joining another ‘State apparatus’ or using it to acquire auxiliary forces, devoting oneself body and soul to a cause, that of Christianity, which transcends questions of political exile, resorting to single combat and turning to chivalric codes so as to assert justice and honour – such are the alternatives to the ‘war machine’, which may nonetheless retain some of its characteristics. The list of alternatives would be incomplete without taking into account Prospero’s option in The Tempest: ‘magic capture’. It is worth making a detour via Prospero’s island to see how magic may offer a different alternative to the ‘war machine’ – unless it happens to be a ‘war machine’ in disguise.

‘Magical capture’ (Prospero’s practice) Prospero, like the characters studied so far, was the victim of an abuse of power, a ‘foul deed’ (3.3.72)28 perpetrated by his brother, who, he explains, wanted to be ‘[a]bsolute Milan’ (1.2.109). Antonio seized Prospero’s dukedom with the military help of Naples and ‘extirpate[d]’ (125), that is, radically deterritorialised, both his brother and infant niece, consigning them at night to the hazards of the sea, the ‘smooth space’ par excellence. Years later, Antonio and his accomplices happen to sail by the island where Prospero and his daughter live in exile. Deleuze and Guattari note that war is not contained within the ‘State apparatus’: either the State ‘acquires an army, but in a way that presupposes a juridical integration of war and the organization of a military function’, or it ‘has at its disposal a violence that is not channeled through war – it uses police officers and jailers in place of warriors, has no arms and no need of them, operates by immediate, magical capture, “seizes” and “binds”, preventing all combat’.29 The notion of ‘magical capture’ is used metaphorically by the authors of

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A Thousand Plateaus. In The Tempest, this notion takes on a very literal significance. Prospero resorts to this type of violence, which requires neither weapons nor war: he creates a tempest, so that his enemies are washed up on to his island and put at his mercy. In fact, Prospero’s ‘magical capture’ responds to the military capture he and his daughter had to undergo. Antonio used the auxiliary forces of Naples to launch a ‘war machine’, as Prospero pictures it to Miranda: ‘A treacherous army levied – one midnight / Fated to th’ purpose did Antonio open / The gates of Milan and i’th’ dead of darkness / The ministers for th’ purpose hurried thence / Me and thy crying self’ (1.2.128–32). The verb ‘hurry’ and the way Prospero presents himself as a passive agent suggest that he was taken by surprise, with absolutely no time to react. This points to the swiftness of the ‘war machine’. Once Prospero ‘captures’ his enemies, he retains them ashore, on what Ariel calls ‘this most desolate isle’ (3.3.80), a ‘smooth space’ (there are landmarks on it, but only perceptible by those who inhabit the place: Prospero, Miranda, Ariel and Caliban) over which only he has absolute control. Then, he scatters them here and there over the island, as if on a ‘nomadic’ space in which they are bound to get lost. Gonzalo exclaims, ‘Here’s a maze trod, indeed, / Through forthrights and meanders!’ (3.3.2–3), and Alonso later confirms, ‘This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod, / And there is in this business more than nature / Was ever conduct of’ (5.1.242–4). The island on which Prospero traps those who had a hand in his exile (his own brother Antonio and Alonso the king of Naples) is like ‘his knot, his net, his way of “making his move once and for all”’.30 After deterritorialising his enemies, he distracts them: ‘My high charms work, / And these, mine enemies, are all knit up / In their distractions. They now are in my power’ (3.3.88–90), he affirms. Just before the denouement (in both the literal and metaphorical sense of the term), this complete capture is symbolised by the magic circle: a miniature representation of the island, in which Prospero holds them motionless. Prospero captured his enemies thanks to his ‘art’ (1.2.25), or ‘secret studies’ (77), which has certain similarities to ‘nomad science’ – as opposed to the ‘State science’ or ‘royal or imperial sciences’.31 It is significant in this regard that he should refer to it as ‘rough magic’ (5.1.50), with ‘rough’ taken in the sense of ‘characterized by violence or harshness’.32 The study and practice

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of magic, whether black or white, were harshly condemned in King James I’s 1597 treatise, Daemonologie, in Forme of a Dialogue: they were punishable by death, as if anticipating Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis, according to which ‘this nomad science is continually “barred”, inhibited, or banned by the demands and conditions of State science’.33 Prospero, then, could be regarded as a prototype of ‘the “savants” of nomad science … caught between a rock and a hard place, between the war machine that nourishes and inspires them and the State that imposes upon them an order of reasons’.34 It seems that Prospero’s ‘magical capture’ indeed takes after the ‘war machine’. Prospero aims at both reprisal (like Coriolanus) and restoration (like Bolingbroke). If he forgives his enemies in the end, convinced by Ariel that the ‘rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance’ (5.1.27–8), his thirst for revenge came first and motivated his ‘magical capture’, inciting him to leave aside his original purpose, ‘the bettering of [his] mind’ (1.2.90), or, to adopt Bonnefoy’s words, ‘the spiritual ascent, the release of the soul’.35 Magic turns into a weapon of retaliation like the ‘war machine’: Prospero resorts to ‘magical capture’ in order to be in a position of strength, to impose his conditions (the restoration of his dukedom and the future alliance between Milan and Naples, thanks to Miranda and Ferdinand’s marriage), as Bolingbroke does with his ‘war machine’. Unlike the ‘war machine’, whose efficiency is immediate, Prospero’s ‘magical capture’ proceeds by detours, first puzzling his enemies and withholding from them the territory that is at stake, Milan, then opening their eyes and giving them a little time to meditate, repent, remain silent or curse. The objective, however, is the same: deterritorialising the abuser and being restored to one’s status. As Coriolanus’ ‘war machine’ advances over Roman territories, it brings death and destruction. Prospero only creates an illusion of this, as he manipulates ‘the wild waters’ (1.2.2) so that the ship apparently ends ‘[d]ashed all to pieces’ (8). Yet the initial tempest and shipwreck, although only enacted, betray a violence that evokes that of ‘war machine’, even a cosmic fury reminiscent of divine powers, as Ariel’s report to his master shows: Jove’s lightning, the precursors O’th’ dreadful thunderclaps, more momentary

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And sight-outrunning were not; the fire and cracks Of sulphurous roaring, the most mighty Neptune Seem to besiege and make his bold waves tremble, Yea, his dread trident shake. (1.2.201–6)

Ariel’s references to Jove and Neptune pave the way for Prospero’s similar references in his farewell speech to his spirits (5.1.33–50) and hint at Prospero’s ‘becoming-demiurge’, or what Pierre Hadot calls his ‘Promethean attitude’, that is, ‘[seeking] to do violence to nature by artificial means’.36 Ariel’s swiftness, accentuated by his ubiquitous ability to ‘divide / And burn in many places’ (1.2.198–9), creates an effect of dazzling speed that evokes the efficient celerity of the ‘war machine’. The undeniable success of the initial ‘magical capture’ is fully heard in Gonzalo’s desperate cry: ‘We split, we split, we split!’ (1.1.62). Its striking power is such that it triggers terror. ‘Not a soul / But felt a fever of the mad and played / Some tricks of desperation’ (1.2.208–10), Ariel specifies; by the end of the play, even the utopian Gonzalo comes to see the island as a ‘fearful country’ (5.1.106). Like a ‘war machine’, the ‘magical capture’ produces an effect of instantaneousness: it is as if it were already there, ‘invulnerable’ (3.3.66), disarming those who did not even have time to become true adversaries, as when Prospero says with hypnotic force, ‘Your swords are now too massy for your strengths / And will not be uplifted’ (3.3.67–8). The island comes to evoke a game of Go: Prospero and Ariel are like Go pieces that can suddenly appear anywhere, anytime. It is interesting that the game of chess should be featured in the play: those who play at chess, Ferdinand and Miranda, are to succeed Prospero in Naples, a city that was ‘known as a centre of chess-playing’.37 As future king and queen, they are expected to be familiar with this royal pastime. In Deleuzian terms, they are the heirs of civilisation and rationality, of the ‘striated spaces’ to which they must return. Even more interesting is the idea that Ferdinand ‘play[s] [Miranda] false’ (5.1.172): this works as a reminder that things can go wrong (cheating, as a minor form of usurping) within the ‘State apparatus’, that ‘striated spaces’ are no safeguards against abuses of power and thirst for ever-increasing territorialisation, as Miranda’s bantering-yet-profound retort suggests: ‘Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle’ (5.1.174).38

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Coriolanus and Bolingbroke set a ‘war machine’ in motion to return illegally to their homelands in a context of reprisal and/or restoration. They meet with success only in the very short term (Coriolanus is murdered by Aufidius and his men) and in the medium term (the York family will rebel; the War of the Roses will break out). Apart from the specific case of Prospero, who operates through ‘magical capture’ and is able to recover his rights and his dukedom, the alternatives to the ‘war machine’ do not seem to be very conclusive. Cordelia and Mowbray die in very different ways (the one is hanged; the other apparently died a peaceful death after crusading), yet both of them can be regarded as sacrificed out of the unconditional loyalty they felt for their respective banishers: Cordelia, illegally coming back to give her father military, physical and psychological assistance; Mowbray, never breaking his oath and relentlessly fighting for Christ. As Edgar wins his trial by combat over Edmond, his identity and status are restored; he is even offered rule of the country with Kent at the end of the tragedy. But what takes place before the single combat needs to be remembered: what first enabled him to ignore his proclamation as an outlaw and ‘escape the hunt’ (2.2.160) was his cunning intelligence, his ability thoroughly to alter his identity. His first response to abusive outlawry provides a more radical alternative to the ‘war machine’, with a very different rhythm: detour, ruse, simulation, dissimulation and substitution – a strategy that does not require deterrent military force, but impersonation and patience.

Notes 1 R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 142–3. 2 Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 47 (XIII. ‘Of auxiliary, mixed, and citizen soldiers’). 3 Gary Taylor, ‘The War in King Lear’, Shakespeare Survey 33 (1980), 27. 4 The quotations from the Quarto are also taken from The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition, Tragedies, second edition, eds S. Greenblatt, W. Cohen, J. E. Howard and K. Eisaman Maus (New York/London: Norton, 2008). 5 Taylor, ‘The War in King Lear’, p. 31 (Taylor’s emphasis). 6 Ibid., p. 31.

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7 Kingsley-Smith, Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile, p. 71. 8 Henry Newbolt (ed.), King Richard II (London: Thomas Nelson, 1925), p. 122. 9 Holinshed, The Third Volume of Chronicles, p. 394. 10 Forker, long footnote at 4.1.92–101, p. 496, King Richard II (The Arden Shakespeare). 11 Ibid., p. 497. 12 Marienstras, New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, p. 9. In the original text: ‘étrangers ennemis perpétuels’, ‘les juifs, les Turcs, les hérétiques ou les païens’, Le Proche et le lointain, p. 19. Sir Edward Coke’s classification of foreigners counts four categories: ‘friendly foreigners, temporary enemies, enemies in possession of safe-conducts and perpetual enemies’ (ibid., p. 9). 13 Jean Flori, La Guerre sainte. La formation de l’idée de croisade dans l’Occident chrétien (Paris: Aubier, 2001), p. 14; my translation of ‘une opération militaire éminemment sacralisée, une “guerre sainte” menée par les chrétiens pour leur Seigneur Jésus-Christ, capable de récompenser ses chevaliers fidèles bien mieux que ne savaient le faire les seigneurs et les princes de ce monde’. 14 Jean Flori, La Première Croisade. L’Occident chrétien contre l’Islam (Aux origines des idéologies occidentales) (Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe, 1997), p. 235; my translation of ‘il est clair que la croisade, plus qu’une expédition unique menée par le légat du pape, fut une coalition de chefs de guerre ayant chacun leurs ambitions et leur conception de la discipline’. 15 Ibid., p. 231; my translation of ‘de prendre le contrôle des forces nouvelles de la chevalerie, de transformer cette militia féodale et laïque en milice de la chrétienté’. 16 The independence of the chivalric system, which combines excessive codification and ‘nomadic’ capacity, will be dealt with in the following subsection. 17 Flori, La Première Croisade, p. 117; my translation of ‘guerre juste’. 18 Ibid., p. 40 (Flori’s italics); my translation of ‘En prenant les armes pour le servir, les chevaliers devenaient du même coup les soldats du Christ (milites Christi), et c’est Dieu lui-même qui les rétribuerait, effaçant les péchés de ceux qui partiraient et assurant la vie éternelle à ceux qui périraient dans ce “bon combat” pour lui.’ 19 Ibid., p. 33; my translation of ‘la croisade présente des caractères composites, ceux d’une expédition guerrière mais aussi ceux d’un pèlerinage’. 20 Ibid., p. 40 (Flori’s italics); my translation of ‘se mettre à son service [celui de Jésus] dans la reconquête de son honneur [celui de Jésus]’. 21 Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 86.

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22 Ibid., p. 101. 23 Ibid., p. 100. 24 Matthew Strickland, War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066–1217 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 150. 25 Keen, Chivalry, p. 100. 26 See ibid., pp. 94–101. 27 Ibid., p. 100. 28 All the quotations from this play are taken from William Shakespeare, The Tempest, eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson, 2003). Prospero is not unlike Coriolanus. They have in common a nature that is asocial (they both show little interest in others), even narcissistic (what matters for them is either the glory to be got from war or the bettering of one’s mind), which leads them to ignore or neglect political considerations, so as to exclusively favour the battlefield (for Coriolanus) or the cabinet propitious to the study of occult sciences (for Prospero). 29 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 388. In the original text: ‘acquiert une armée, mais qui pré-suppose une intégration juridique de la guerre et l’organisation d’une fonction militaire’, ‘dispose d’une violence qui ne passe pas par la guerre: il emploie des policiers et des geôliers plutôt que des guerriers, il n’a pas d’armes et n’en a pas besoin, il agit par capture magique immédiate, il “saisit” et “lie”, empêchant tout combat’, Mille plateaux, p. 435. 30 Ibid, p. 469. In the original text: ‘son nœud, son filet, son “coup une fois pour toute”’, Mille plateaux, pp. 529–30. 31 Ibid., pp. 399, 400. In the original text: ‘science nomade’, ‘science d’État’, ‘sciences royales ou impériales’, Mille plateaux, p. 448. 32 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘rough, adj.’, III. 11. a. 33 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 399–400. In the original text: ‘cette science nomade ne cesse pas d’être “barrée”, inhibée ou interdite par les exigences et les conditions de la science d’État’, Mille plateaux, p. 448. 34 Ibid., p. 400. In the original text: ‘le “savant” de la science nomade … pris entre deux feux, celui de la machine de guerre qui l’alimente et l’inspire, celui de l’État qui lui impose un ordre des raisons’, Mille plateaux, p. 448. 35 Yves Bonnefoy, ‘A Day in the Life of Prospero’, in Shakespeare and the French Poet, ed. and trans. John Naughton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 56. In the original text: ‘la remontée spirituelle, le désenchaînement de l’âme’, ‘Une journée dans la vie de Prospéro’, Théâtre et poésie: Shakespeare et Yeats (Paris: Mercure de France, 1998), p. 122.

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36 Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 138. In the original text: ‘l’attitude prométhéenne’, ‘faire violence à la nature par des moyens artificiels’, Le Voile d’Isis. Essai sur l’histoire de l’idée de nature (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), p. 150. 37 V. Vaughan and A. T. Vaughan, footnote at 5.1.171, p. 274, The Tempest (The Arden Shakespeare). 38 See Bonnefoy’s interpretation: ‘Has Ferdinand cheated? Shakespeare does not allow us to know for certain. But what is certain is that Miranda, who an hour before had offered to become Ferdinand’s servant if he chose not to love her, sees herself in the future, as she already does in the present, as the wife who submits to the law, if not to the whims, of her husband; as someone who will matter less to him and to others than the ambitions of the manly power he exercices in the world of other men’ (Shakespeare and the French Poet, p. 77).

Part III The experience of internal(ised) exile in King Lear

If but as well I other accents borrow That can my speech diffuse, my good intent May carry through itself to that full issue For which I razed my likeness. King Lear (1.4.1–4)

7 Dissembling and avoiding banishment

‘Force directly compels; ruse compels by roundabout means and often gains adherence or consent.’1 The interest of Georges Balandier’s observation lies not so much in the traditional opposition between force and ruse, but rather in the idea of ‘compelling by roundabout means’. Originally, ruse was a hunting term and referred to ‘a detour or turn made by a hunted animal in order to elude capture’.2 This recurs as an extended metaphor in King Lear, in which the outlawed Edgar ‘by the happy hollow of a tree / Escaped the hunt’ (2.2.159–60). Ruse, which is synonymous with ‘trick, stratagem, or wile’,3 reads as a strategy of escape but also of resistance, as Balandier’s choice of the verb ‘compel’ underlines  – and, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us, to ‘hide, to camouflage oneself, is a warrior function’.4 In Shakespeare’s tragedy, ruse participates in a dynamic of detour or deviation, so as to indirectly resist abuse of power and bypass the proclamation of outlawry. As such, it comes very close to the Greek notion of metis, that is, ‘cunning intelligence’.5 In King Lear, the dynamic of deviation is set in motion by nearly instantaneous transgression (the banished man does not leave the territory, thus flouting the proclamation) – and not delayed transgression (the banished man leaves but later comes back with a vengeance). This signifies that the risk incurred is greater, since, in this case, the trespasser has no deterrent ‘war machine’; if discovered, he will be killed. Lear’s threat to Kent is absolutely clear: ‘If on the seventh day following / Thy banished trunk be found in our dominions, / The moment is thy death’ (1.1.173–5). When the sentence is banishment, deviation paradoxically means staying here, in the homeland, instead of going away, elsewhere.

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This entails dissembling: changing one’s physical appearance, but also one’s behaviour and one’s voice – including ‘other accents … / That can … speech diffuse’ (1.4.1–2) – creating an unexpected persona to produce an effect of trompe-l’oeil, temporarily renouncing one’s identity to assume the semblance of otherness, so that one former self can go unnoticed, as if imperceptible. Successful dissembling is a matter of becoming invisible, as if obeying the banisher’s injunction: ‘Out of my sight!’ (1.1.155), the enraged Lear shouts at Kent. The question is not so much how to impersonate and assume otherness, but rather for how long? The experience might drag on and on, until one actually becomes the persona, never recovering one’s initial identity and status. Lasting impersonation might have an impact upon the real person; the persona might transform the anima. In King Lear, dissembling otherness means experiencing a fall in status and conditions of life: the dynamic of deviation entails a spiral of degradation including humiliation, infamy, the fear of poisoning, turning wild and going mad. Paradoxically, the here is felt as a hostile elsewhere, as some disorienting ‘smooth space’, as a place propitious to the sudden emergence of the Freudian ‘uncanny’; the homeland becomes strangely similar to a no man’s land where one experiences internal exile. ‘Thus Kent, O princes, bids you all adieu; / He’ll shape his old course in a country new’ (1.1.183–4). Although Kent publicly acknowledges his banishment, he actually intends to swap the adjectives ‘old’ and ‘new’, and experience ‘a new course in a country old’. When he reappears three scenes later, he confirms that he has ‘razed [his] likeness’ (1.4.4) and, consequently, must be hardly recognisable on stage. As regards Edgar, he takes on the appearance of a Bedlam beggar, ‘the basest and most poorest shape / That ever penury in contempt of man / Brought near to beast’ (2.2.164–6), and can ultimately declare, ‘Edgar I nothing am’ (2.2.178). Both Edgar and Kent illustrate what Jean Duvignaud calls ‘the detour of masked independence’.6 They take the initiative of substituting an identity detour for territorial exclusion; they opt for a change that is not geographical (though it is spatial), but social and behavioural. To do so, they resort to ‘simulation and dissimulation’, thus echoing Francis Bacon’s definition: ‘when a man industriously and expressly feigns and pretends to be that he is not’.7 As Bacon reminds us,

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the advantages of ‘simulation and dissimulation’ are ‘to lay asleep opposition’ and ‘to reserve to man’s self a fair retreat’.8

Shifting identities and counterfeiting If the ‘war machine’ favours a ‘becoming-machine’ that must be visible to create dread, the strategy of deviation and dissembling rather entails a ‘becoming-imperceptible’: to renounce one’s singularity, ‘to be like everybody else’ so that ‘to look at him, one would notice nothing’.9 Yet, according to Deleuze and Guattari, after a real rupture, one succeeds … in being just like everybody else. To go unnoticed is by no means easy. To be a stranger, even to one’s doorman or neighbors. If it is so difficult to be ‘like’ everybody else, it is because it is an affair of becoming. Not everybody becomes everybody [and everything: tout le monde – Trans.], makes a becoming of everybody/everything. This requires much asceticism, much sobriety, much creative involution: … blend in with the walls, eliminate the too-perceived, the too-much-to-be-perceived.10

The process of ‘involution’ involves retrograding to homogeneity and uniformity, and moving from the diverse to the same, towards ‘generalisation’ and ‘universalisation’.11 Hence the necessity to eradicate ‘everything that roots each of us (everybody) in ourselves’,12 which suggests that the dynamic of deviation, with the ‘becomingimperceptible’ that it requires, is a way not of avoiding the uprooting of exile but of displacing the experience of uprooting from the elsewhere to the intimate, to one’s own inner space: to turn a stranger to others, but especially to oneself. Becoming imperceptible, ‘becoming-everybody/everything, making the world a becoming, is to world, to make a world or worlds, in other words, to find one’s proximities and zones of indiscernibility’.13 The point is not only to become a stranger to oneself, but also to be receptive to otherness, that of human beings and that of the world in general, to allow oneself to be infiltrated through and impregnated by it. Kent turns to service, Edgar to Bedlam begging. As they move to a lower social sphere and become dependent on others, they create their ‘proximities and zones of indiscernibility’, although in a paradoxical mode (ostentation for Edgar/Poor Tom,

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insolence for Kent/Caius) as will shortly be discussed. What was more banal than service in a feudal society? What was more common than visible madness before the ‘great confinement’? Foucault has emphasised ‘the freedom with which it [madness] came to light during the Renaissance’: ‘madness was present everywhere and mingled with every experience by its images or its dangers’.14 This is the sense of Edgar’s comment that the ‘country gives [him] proof and precedent / Of Bedlam beggars’ (2.2.170–1). Both Kent and Edgar thus come to illustrate the Deleuzian simile: ‘One is then like grass: one has made the world, everybody/everything, into a becoming, because one has made a necessarily communicating world, because one has suppressed in oneself everything that prevents us from slipping between things and growing in the midst of things.’15 Interestingly, the qualities required to become imperceptible – adaptability and agility, the capacity to mingle with the world and move with what is moving – are reminiscent of the Greek practice of metis. In Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant define metis as ‘a certain type of intelligence at grips with objects which must be dominated by cunning if success is to be won in the most diverse fields of action’.16 They add that metis presides over activities ‘in which man must learn to manipulate hostile forces too powerful to be controlled directly but which can be exploited despite themselves, without ever being confronted head on, to implement the plan in mind by some unexpected, devious means’.17 As Kent and Edgar dissemble to escape banishment and outlawry, they prove to be men of metis. Detienne and Vernant observe, metis is itself a power of cunning and deceit. It operates through disguise. In order to dupe its victim it assumes a form which masks, instead of revealing, its true being. In metis appearance and reality no longer correspond to one another but stand in contrast, producing an effect of illusion, apate, which beguiles the adversary into error and leaves him as bemused by his defeat as by the spells of a magician.18

When Caius (Kent in disguise) showers abuse on Oswald, in Act 2 scene 2, and when Poor Tom (Edgar in disguise) vents his nonsensical logorrhoea, in Act 3 scene 4, they do indeed leave their interlocutors bemused. Who would ever suspect that an earl and the

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son of an earl are behind the masks of the zealous servant and the delirious Bedlam beggar? The men of metis are not afraid of crossing swords with concrete realities, especially when these are hostile. As Kent and Edgar brave the proclamations that expel them from their homeland, they prepare themselves for ‘situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous, situations which do not lend themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation or rigorous logic’,19 situations which, as such, require ‘cunning intelligence’. In such circumstances, the men of metis must be able to seize the propitious moment to take action, the Greek kairos, so that they can increase their chances of succeeding. Caius/Kent definitely wins Lear’s favours when he steps in at the right time to support Lear and trips the scornful Oswald (1.4.74–5). As for Tom of Bedlam/ Edgar, he seizes the right moment several times: when he hides in the ‘happy’ hollow of a tree he comes across (2.2.159–60), when Bedlam beggars come to his memory (170–7) and when he hands Oswald’s letter over to Albany (5.1.30–6). Both Edgar and Kent temporarily appropriate qualities that are proper to metis, ‘certain qualities which are also attributed to the curve, to what is pliable and twisted, to what is oblique and ambiguous as opposed to what is straight, direct, rigid and unequivocal’,20 that is, as opposed to the laws of the polis.21 Michel Onfray’s reflection on travelling as ‘a declaration of war on the controlling and timing of existence’22 could apply to metis. With metis, intuitive qualities, polymorphous attitudes and subjective, even irrational, approaches are favoured. As epitomes of uprightness, Kent/ Caius and Edgar/Tom of Bedlam might have been above metis. Kent stands for ‘duty’ (1.1.145) and ‘honour’ (146); Edgar is depicted by Edmond as ‘a brother noble, / Whose nature is so far from doing harms / That he suspects none’ (1.2.156–8). They prove, however, good men of metis and kairos, and talented counterfeiters. ‘To counterfeit’ is defined as ‘to put a false or deceiving appearance upon; to disguise, falsify’, ‘to assume the character of (a person, etc.); to pretend to be; to pass oneself off as; to personate’.23 Terms such as ‘false’, ‘deceiving’, ‘falsify’, ‘pretend’ are in keeping with what is at stake when one resorts to ‘cunning intelligence’. In Coriolanus, Shakespeare shows that counterfeiting is far from easy, for both practical and ethical reasons. Coriolanus perfectly

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knows how he should behave, which is why he ironically tells one of the citizens, ‘I will practise the insinuating nod and be off to them most counterfeitly; that is, sir, I will counterfeit the bewitchment of some popular man, and give it bountiful to the desirers’ (2.3.95–8). In fact he will not, first because he would then be ‘[f]alse to [his] nature’ (3.2.15) and secondly because counterfeiting would force him to borrow some ‘harlot’s spirit’ (114), the ‘smiles of knaves’ (117), a ‘beggar’s tongue’ (119). As such, he stands at the opposite extreme to Falstaff, whose survival instinct (or cowardice) leads him to counterfeit death on the battlefield – as Falstaff wittily explains, ‘to die is to be a counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of a man, who hath not the life of a man: but to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed’ (5.4.114–19).24 Although counterfeiting, associated as it was with deceit, was badly thought of by Puritans in early modern England, Shakespeare’s drama shows how it could positively be associated with existential issues: the refusal to counterfeit can indirectly lead to a disaster (Coriolanus’ banishment), whereas talented counterfeiting can save lives (Falstaff’s) or enable banished or outlawed persons (Kent and Edgar) to avoid exile. But honourable men were not expected to counterfeit in real life. In King Lear, neither Kent nor Edgar can be suspected of resorting to counterfeiting because of their status. Moreover, the personae that they have respectively chosen (a ‘masterless man’ in search of service, a Bedlam beggar in search of subsistence) radically differ from who they used to be in society. And dramatic conventions have their part to play: once disguised, Kent and Edgar cannot be recognised by the other characters on stage. Yet, if Kent and Edgar are above all suspicion once they are disguised, their personae can, however, be regarded as suspicious per se; they may evoke those whom Dogberry misnames ‘aspicious persons’ (3.5.44).25 According to ‘An Acte for the Punishement of Vacabondes, and for the Releif of the Poore and Impotent’ (1572), ‘masterless men’, as ‘persones beynge whole and mightye in Body and able to labour, havinge not Land or Maister’, were considered ‘Vacaboundes and sturdy Beggers’26 in early modern England and consequently punished – whipped, put in the stocks and, in the event of a second offence, imprisoned in the house of correction of Bridewell.27 As for Bedlam beggars, they had their counterfeiters, these ‘abram men’ (sturdy beggars feigning to

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be impotent, so as to escape punishment and be allowed to beg for a living) condemned by authors of roguery pamphlets such as John Awdeley in The Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561), Thomas Harman in A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds (1566) and Thomas Dekker in O per se O (1612).28 Kent’s and Edgar’s personae belong to the category that Foucault labelled ‘la pauvreté insoumise’29 (the unsubdued poor). Yet never are Kent and Edgar suspected of being other than whom they pretend to be. They are so good at impersonating, at making their personae visible and voluble in their own right, that they produce a blinding effect – which proves the best of covers.

The dialectic of ostentation and dissimulation Becoming imperceptible in King Lear paradoxically entails showing up in the riskiest places, right before one’s banisher’s nose, for instance, or publicly undressing to exhibit a nearly naked body that can be scrutinised like a map. It is as if imposing one’s ostentatious persona (both physically and verbally) were the best way to hide one’s genuine identity. If Kent intends to ‘other accents borrow’ (1.4.1), he gives no specific information about his borrowed clothes, but Cordelia later enjoins Kent to be ‘better suited’ (4.6.6), so that his garments will properly reflect his former status. As for Edgar, he announces how he will transform his physical appearance: ‘My face I’ll grime with filth, / Blanket my loins, elf all my hairs in knots, / And with presented nakedness outface / The winds and persecutions of the sky’ (2.2.166–9). What may be deemed a detail, how one dresses, takes on its full significance in early modern England, especially in Queen Elizabeth I’s reign. The social semiotics of cloth was then strictly codified by sumptuary laws, as France Elizabeth Baldwin has shown.30 Both royal proclamations and puritan pamphlets stigmatised extravagance in clothing. In his censorious 1583 Anatomie of Abuses, Philip Stubbs blamed ‘the execrable sinne of pride and excess in apparel’.31 The 1597 proclamation justified the complex regulation about who was allowed to wear what, putting forward three arguments, as Baldwin summarises them: ‘(1) the decay of hospitality, owing to the large sums spent on dress; (2) the “confusion

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of degrees, where the meanest are as richly dressed as their betters”; (3) the increase of crime. Pride in fine clothes was supposed to have driven the poorer classes to robbery and theft.’32 The second argument was of major importance: one’s social rank should be readable by one’s clothes. As William C. Carroll puts it, ‘Tudor sumptuary laws … were designed to define and confirm, indeed to fix immutably, the exact signifying correspondences between the representation of clothing and socioeconomic status.’33 Only earls (‘and above that rank and Knights of the Garter in their purple mantle’) were allowed to wear ‘cloth of gold’, ‘sylver tissued’ and ‘silke of purple color’.34 Since the focus was on sartorial excess and the possible usurpation of higher social ranks, who would pay attention to those who wore rags, and suspect them of fraudulent identity? Hence, exhibiting rags or a half-naked body seems the best way to hide one’s status as earl, and this is what Edgar opts for. Not only does he get rid of the clothes that might have betrayed his social status, but he also distances himself from his own body, for he alters it into a ‘horrible object’ (2.2.174) as Bedlam beggars usually do, either out of madness, or out of a perverse strategy to make their appearance more pitiful and more lucrative. By creating his costume of lunatic with his own skin, probably sticking in his arms ‘[p]ins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary’ (173), he transforms his body into a readable map. Bodily criteria and legibility were of major importance in Elizabethan England: beggars were categorised according to their bodies and identified either as ‘impotent’ (necessitating help and therefore allowed to beg) or ‘sturdy’ (that is, guilty of not working and punishable). If one in the latter category stubbornly clung to idleness, he was ‘burnt through the grisle of his right ear with a hot iron of the compass of an inch about’ (in Queen Elizabeth I’s reign),35 or ‘branded in the left shoulder with a great Roman R upon the iron … that the letter R be seen and remain for a perpetual mark upon such rogue during his or her life’ (in King James I’s reign).36 As a member of the fraternity of vagabonds recaps in Thomas Dekker’s 1608 The Belman of London, ‘there be Statutes to burn us i’ th ears for rogues, to singe us i’ th hand for pilferers, to whip us at posts for being beggars, and to shackle our heels i’ th stocks for being idle vagabonds’.37 In one of his latest roguery pamphlets, Dekker minutely depicts how ‘abram men’ (sturdy beggars counterfeiting Bedlam beggars) scarified their bodies and had the letters ‘E’ and ‘R’

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branded on them as ‘the mark of Bedlam’, so as to be allowed to ask for alms.38 The ‘horrible object’ that goes either begging or cursing has a deterrent effect. Not only are Bedlam beggars repulsively ugly, but they also symbolically evoke ‘some obscure connection between madness and evil’.39 It is impossible to become invisible, but possible to make people look away and turn away from you, thanks to the semiotics of clothes and cartographied bodies that work as screens. Furthermore, these screens can be reinforced by speeches that saturate the interlocutor’s ears. Far from being discreet and silent, Caius/Kent and Poor Tom/ Edgar manifest their presence with a flood of words barely intelligible because it lacks both grammatical and semantic syntax; it is mainly paratactic or nonsensical, and it perplexes their interlocutors, who are confronted with obscure signification. Their logorrhoea, whether a stream of insults or disjointed sentences, creates an effect reminiscent of the black ink (tholós, in Greek) produced by white cuttlefish to generate ‘an impenetrable darkness all about them within which they hide – a cloud of night in which all the paths of the sea become obscured and confused’.40 Detienne and Vernant explain: ‘the cuttlefish find their own póros through the aporía they have created’.41 By the cuttlefish’s ‘own póros’, the authors mean ‘on the one hand … a way of getting out of difficulties, the stratagem employed by a creature of guile endowed with metis, and, on the other, a path, way through or crossing’.42 Not unlike cuttlefish, Caius/Kent and Poor Tom/Edgar create, each in his own way, a zone of verbal perplexity around them, which hides and protects their true identity, and paradoxically helps them go unnoticed. When Kent/Caius is summoned to explain the reason for his quarrel with Oswald, he displays his capacity to ‘go out of [his] dialect’ (2.2.102), to alter his ‘manner of speaking’.43 His stream of insults, as ‘a way of addressing the other, in which excitement, aggressiveness and brutality mingle, expressed by words, but words that are most of the time shouted, screamed, thrown, hurled or spit, thus creating an impression of violence that, though described as verbal, does not exclude violence in its physical dimension’,44 as Évelyne Larguèche explains, had already testified to such capacity. Indeed, Kent/Caius soon challenges Oswald to draw his sword and fight, still shouting abuse at him: ‘you whoreson, cullionly barber-monger, draw!’ (2.2.28–9); ‘Draw, you rogue, or I’ll so carbonado your

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shanks – draw, you rascal, come your ways!’ (33–4). As Larguèche reminds us, ‘Invective goes as far as to designate a succession of words with no connection between them (whether that of signification or that of syntax), associated with a loud voice and uncoordinated gestures when it is spoken, or with a structure that is utterly fragmented when it is written, thus endowing it with an aspect of uncontrolled outburst’.45 Invective, together with the paratactic nature of the stream of insults, produces a twofold effect: it stigmatises and it mystifies, challenging understanding. Hence Cornwall’s question to Caius/Kent: ‘What, art thou mad, old fellow?’ (2.2.79). Kent uses prose, abuse and grotesque images that create an effect of low burlesque, as when, for example, he threatens to ‘tread this unbolted villain into mortar and daub the wall of a jakes with him’ (2.2.59–60) – this unexpected register of speech and his challenge to a duel work as a (comic) counterpoint to the ritualised single combat that will later oppose Edgar (still in disguise) and Edmond. For the spectators who are in the know, Caius/Kent is a counterfeiter in Act 2, scene 2, but the impostor who is exposed to their eyes is Oswald, since although he is ‘a slave’ (2.2.66) and ‘wears no honesty’ (67), he wears ‘a sword’ (66), which, for an early modern audience, would go against sumptuary laws.46 In the end, Caius/Kent is put into the stocks and exposed to infamy, but, paradoxically, this increases his insignificance, because the one who is targeted through him (a mere servant) is Lear himself. For his persona to be credible, Edgar must counterfeit madness. Among several types of madmen, he chooses one characterised by uncontrolled speech and the idea of possession. So he starts delivering enigmas, snatches from proverbs, paradoxes, onomatopoeias and references with more-or-less obscure double entendre, such as ‘Pillicock sat on Pillicock Hill; alow, alow, loo, loo’ (3.4.71). His leitmotiv is that he is pursued and persecuted by fiends. As Stephen Greenblatt has shown, Shakespeare here draws on Samuel Harsnett’s 1603 A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, in which Harsnett reveals how Catholic priests resorted to counterfeiters for their public practices of exorcism.47 So several voices can be heard through Edgar/Tom of Bedlam’s apparently nonsensical logorrhoea: those of the impostors pretending to be possessed and in cahoots with Catholic priests, those of the fake Bedlam beggars called ‘abram men’, and those of genuinely insane people. As if

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undergoing a synaesthetic shift, his voluble ventriloquism produces an effect of invisibility: he is reduced to an anonymous body that is spoken through. Kent/Caius and Edgar/Poor Tom also divert attention from who they are when they focus on and draw our attention to a similar satirical target: vile servingmen. Edgar/Poor Tom pretends that he used to be a servingman, ‘proud in heart and mind’ (3.4.77) and uniting nearly all the vices, among which were frivolousness, lust, vanity, duplicity and corruption. The way he depicts ‘himself’, as he creates an imaginary disreputable past for his present persona, echoes Kent/Caius’s injurious picture of Oswald as one that would ‘be a bawd in way of good service’ (2.2.17). Their true characters vanish behind their personae, which in turn vanish behind their common satirical target. As they deliver a harsh criticism turning our attention to others, vent a flood of puzzling words, use a register of speech and wear clothes that are poles apart from what their initial statuses would warrant, Kent and Edgar succeed in dissimulating their true selves. Yet their successful counterfeiting also initiates a spiral of degradation that is not imaginary at all.

Notes 1 Georges Balandier, ‘Ruse et politique’, in La Ruse (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1977), p. 25; my translation of ‘La force contraint directement, la ruse contraint par un détour et souvent en emportant l’adhésion ou le consentement.’ 2 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘ruse, n.’, 1. a. (first occurrence: c. 1425). 3 Ibid., 2. a. 4 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 306. In the original text: ‘Se cacher, se camoufler est une fonction guerrière’, Mille plateaux, p. 340. 5 See Detienne and Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. 6 Jean Duvignaud, ‘Pourquoi La ruse?’, in La Ruse (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1977), p. 16; my translation of ‘le détour de l’indépendance masquée’. 7 Bacon, Essays, ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’, p. 18. 8 Ibid., p. 19.

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9 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 308. In the original text: ‘être comme tout le monde’, ‘on a beau l’observer, on ne remarque rien’, Mille plateaux, p. 342. 10 Ibid., p. 308. In the original text: ‘à l’issue d’une vraie rupture, on arrive … vraiment à être comme tout le monde. Et ce n’est pas facile du tout, ne pas se faire remarquer. Être inconnu, même de sa concierge et de ses voisins. Si c’est tellement difficile, être “comme” tout le monde, c’est qu’il y a une affaire de devenir. Ce n’est pas tout le monde qui devient comme tout le monde, qui fait de tout le monde un devenir. Il y faut beaucoup d’ascèse, de sobriété, d’involution créatrice: … se confondre avec les murs, éliminer le trop-perçu, le trop-à-voir’, Mille plateaux, p. 342. 11 Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, ‘involution’, p. 544 (my translation). 12 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 308. In the original text: ‘tout ce qui enracine chacun (tout le monde) en lui-même’, Mille plateaux, p. 342. 13 Ibid., p. 309. In the original text: ‘devenir tout le monde, faire du monde un devenir, c’est faire monde, faire un monde, des mondes, c’est-à-dire trouver ses voisinages et ses zones d’indiscernabilité’, Mille plateaux, p. 343. 14 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 70. In the original text: ‘la liberté dans laquelle elle [la folie] venait au jour pendant la Renaissance. Alors elle était présente partout et mêlée à chaque expérience par ses images et ses périls’, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, p. 195. 15 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 309. In the original text: ‘Alors on est comme l’herbe: on a fait du monde, de tout le monde un devenir, parce qu’on a fait un monde nécessairement communicant, parce qu’on a supprimé de soi tout ce qui nous empêchait de nous glisser entre les choses, de pousser au milieu des choses’, Mille plateaux, pp. 343–4. 16 Detienne and Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, p. 2. In the original text: ‘un certain type d’intelligence engagée dans la pratique, affrontée à des obstacles qu’il faut dominer en rusant pour obtenir le succès dans les domaines les plus divers de l’action’, Les Ruses de l’intelligence, p. 8. 17 Ibid., p. 47. In the original text: ‘la mètis préside à toutes les activités où l’homme doit apprendre à manœuvrer des forces hostiles, trop puissantes pour être directement contrôlées, mais qu’on peut utiliser en dépit d’elles, sans jamais les affronter de face’, Les Ruses de l’intelligence, p. 57. 18 Ibid., p. 21. In the original text: ‘La mètis est elle-même une puissance de ruse et de tromperie. Elle agit par déguisement. Pour duper sa victime

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elle emprunte une forme qui masque, au lieu de le révéler, son être véritable. En elle l’apparence et la réalité, dédoublées, s’opposent comme deux formes contraires, produisant un effet d’illusion, apátê, qui induit l’adversaire en erreur et le laisse, en face de sa défaite, aussi éberlué que devant les sortilèges d’un magicien’, Les Ruses de l’intelligence, p. 29. 19 Ibid., pp. 3–4. In the original text: ‘des réalités fugaces, mouvantes, déconcertantes et ambiguës, qui ne se prêtent ni à la mesure précise, ni au calcul exact, ni au raisonnement rigoureux’, Les Ruses de l’intelligence, p. 10. 20 Ibid., p. 46. In the original text: ‘certaines valeurs attribuées au courbe, au souple, au tortueux, à l’oblique et à l’ambigu, par opposition au droit, au direct, au rigide et à l’univoque’, Les Ruses de l’intelligence, p. 55. 21 ‘In the Laws, Plato violently condemns line fishing, the hunting of aquatic creatures, the use of wheels, the hunting of birds and all forms of hunting with nets and traps, he does so because all these techniques foster the qualitites of cunning and duplicity which are diametrically opposed to the virtues that the city of the Laws demanded from its citizens’, ibid., p. 33. 22 Onfray, Théorie du voyage, p. 15; my translation of ‘une déclaration de guerre au quadrillage et au chronométrage de l’existence’. 23 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘counterfeit, v.’, 3. 5. 24 William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1, ed. A. R. Humphreys, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992). 25 William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, ed. A. R. Humphreys, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1994). 26 ‘An Acte for the Punishement of Vacabondes, and for the Releif of the Poore and Impotente’ [14 Elizabeth, c.5], in R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power (eds), Tudor Economic Documents: Being Select Documents Illustrating the Economic and Social History of Tudor England, in 3 vols, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1924), pp. 328, 329. 27 See A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1987) and Pascale Drouet, Le Vagabond dans l’Angleterre de Shakespeare, ou l’art de contrefaire à la ville et à la scène (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003). 28 See John Awdeley’s The Fraternity of Vagabonds, Thomas Harman’s A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds, and Thomas Dekker’s O per se O, in A. V. Judges (ed.), The Elizabethan Underworld: A Collection of Tudor and Early Stuart Tracts and Ballads Telling the Lives and Misdoings of Vagabonds, Thieves, Rogues, Cozeners, and Giving Some Account of the Operation of Criminal Law (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 53, 83–4, 371–3.

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29 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 86. 30 See Frances Elizabeth Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1926). 31 Philip Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, Reprinted from the third edition of 1585, ed. William B. D. D. Turnbull (London: W. Pickering, 1836), p. 8. 32 Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation, pp. 226–7. On the second point, Baldwin is citing William Jerdan (ed.), The Rutland Papers: Documents Illustrative of the Courts and Times of Henry VII and Henry VIII, Selected from the Archives of His Grace the Duke of Rutland (London: Camden Society Publications, XXII, 1843), p. 247. 33 William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 206. 34 Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation, p. 228. 35 [14 Elizabeth, c. 5, § 2, 1572], quoted by Judges (ed.), The Elizabethan Underworld, p. 502. 36 See G. W. Prothero (ed.), Select Statutes and Other Constitutional Documents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934.), [1 JAC. I. CAP. VII], pp. 253–4. 37 Thomas Dekker, The Belman of London (1608), in Judges (ed.), The Elizabethan Underworld, pp. 310–11. 38 Dekker, O per se O, p. 372. 39 Foucault, Histoire de la folie, p. 185; my translation of ‘tout un rapport obscur entre la folie et le mal’. 40 Detienne and Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, p. 161. In the original text: ‘une obscurité impénétrable au sein de laquelle elles se dissimulent, un nuage de nuit où se brouillent et se confondent toutes les routes de la mer’, Les Ruses de l’intelligence, p. 165. 41 Ibid., p. 161. In the original text: ‘à travers l’aporía qu’elles ont créée, les seiches trouvent leur propre póros’, Les Ruses de l’intelligence, p. 165. 42 Ibid., p. 161. In the original text: ‘d’une part, moyen de sortir d’une difficulté, stratagème d’un être astucieux, doué de mètis, et, de l’autre, chemin, passage, traverse’, Les Ruses de l’intelligence, p. 165. 43 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘dialect, n.’: ‘Manner of speaking, language, speech; esp. the mode of speech peculiar to, or characteristic of, a particular person or group; phraseology, idiom; jargon; a particular variety of any of these’, 3. a. 44 Évelyne Larguèche, Espèce de … ! Les lois de l’effet injure (Chambéry: Laboratoire Langages Littératures Sociétés, 2009), p. 39; my translation

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of ‘une façon de s’adresser à l’autre où se mêlent excitation, agressivité, brutalité, exprimées par des mots mais qui sont généralement criés, hurlés, lancés, projetés, crachés, laissant une sensation de violence qui pour être qualifiée de verbale n’exclut pas la dimension de violence physique’. 45 Ibid., p. 39; my translation of ‘L’invective va jusqu’à désigner une suite de mots sans lien entre eux (que ce soit celui du sens ou celui de la syntaxe), associée à une voix forte et à des gestes désordonnés quand il s’agit de la parole, ou à une structure complètement éclatée quand il s’agit de l’expression écrite, donnant une dimension de déchaînement incontrôlé.’ 46 Wearing a sword was forbidden except for ‘Barons’ sons and all above that rank. Gentlemen attending upon the queen in house or chamber. Those who have been employed in embassies. Those with net income of 500 marks per year for life. Knights (as regards daggers, spurs, etc.); Captains’, Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation, p. 228. 47 See Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’, in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 94–128.

8 Assuming otherness, or the spiral of degradation

Counterfeiting with success is one thing; assuming and enduring the fall in status that this entails is another. The dynamic of deviation is soon transformed into a dynamic of humiliation and degradation, and one tumbles down the social ladder. Making a detour via a debasing form of otherness while staying in one’s homeland amounts to experiencing not what is elsewhere but what lies at the bottom, to hitting rock bottom at home. The horizontal dynamic of (external) exile gives way to the vertical dynamic of (internal) degradation, also raising the question of whether one can recover from it.

The humiliating consequences of a fall in status When Kent swaps his earl’s wardrobe for the ‘weeds’ (4.6.7) of a masterless man, he initiates the dynamic of a fall in status that soon overtakes him: no sooner does he truly serve Lear and defend his interests than he is put into the stocks, addressed as ‘knave’ (2.2.127) and treated as such. ‘Knave’ clearly refers to his new status as ‘a male attendant, page or other servant’ and points to his now being ‘a man of low rank or status’, but it is also meant as a term of abuse, as it here designates ‘a dishonest unprincipled man; a cunning unscrupulous rogue; a villain’.1 Moral debasement is added to his fall in status and loss of class privileges. Worse, he is called a ‘beastly knave’ (2.2.63). As he himself tells Regan, ‘Why, madam, if I were your father’s dog / You should not use me so’ (126–7). He is relegated to the lower order of creation. As regards Edgar, he too hits rock bottom, as he anticipates, knowing that he will take

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‘the basest and most poorest shape / That ever penury in contempt of man / Brought near to beast’ (164–6). He retrospectively refers to his ‘shift[ing] / Into a madman’s rags, t’assume a semblance / That very dogs disdained’ (5.3.177–9). Being treated worse than a dog or being disdained by the very animals that are usually the target of scorn – so much so that ‘dog’ became a term of abuse, and so did ‘brach’2 – reads like the climax of degradation. In early modern England, the beggar was regarded as counterpointing the king. William C. Carroll notes, ‘the monarch, the top of the social and legal hierarchy, is understood in opposition to the figure at the bottom of all hierarchy, the socially and metaphysically null – the beggar; and the beggar is understood in opposition to the figure at the top of hierarchy – the monarch’.3 But in King Lear, Tom of Bedlam is perceived as a ‘[m]adman and beggar too’ (4.1.31); he comes from the asylum, an elsewhere cut off even from the bottom of society. As Carroll recapitulates, ‘The name of loss and exile, suffering and abasement, is Poor Tom.’4 All the references to animality associated with Poor Tom suggest that the initial dialectic of inclusion and exclusion has shifted to the dialectic of the civilised man and the wild man or, as Lear puts it, ‘a poor, bare, forked animal’ (3.4.96–7). They also substantiate Foucault’s analysis, according to which ‘there was a certain image of animality that haunted the hospitals of the period. Madness borrowed its face from the mask of the beast.’5 ‘Brought near to beast’ (2.2.166) or treated worse than a dog, Kent/Caius and Edgar/Tom of Bedlam come to experience homelessness in their homeland. If Edgar calmly envisages ‘outfac[ing] / The winds and persecutions of the sky’ (168–9), Kent soon realises that against the ‘wrathful skies’ (3.2.42) ‘[m]an’s nature cannot carry / Th’affliction nor the fear’ (47–8), an affirmation which paves the way for Lear’s rhetorical question: Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? (3.4.28–32)

Lear’s awakening solicitude points to the absence of charity and hospitality that devastatingly accelerates human degradation. So

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does the entire tragedy. Cordelia’s generosity – to human beings and also animals: ‘Mine enemy’s dog, though he had bit me, should have stood / That night against my fire’ (4.6.30–1) – stands as an exception in a play where ‘courtesy’ is ‘scanted’ (3.2.66) and has to be ‘force[d]’ (65). It is significant that the first performance of King Lear at Whitehall was on Saint Stephen’s Day (26 December 1606), ‘the holiday most associated with the granting of traditional hospitality’.6 Leah S. Marcus specifies, On the Feast of St. Stephen, as in the more recent carol of King Wenceslaus, the high were to look out in pity upon the tribulations of the low. On that day, poor boxes in which cash donations had been collected all year would be broken open and the money distributed. Poor people would gather in groups and proceed from house to house asking for a charity which could be denied only at the peril of those within. Wealthy individuals who participated in the spirit of the day took pride in having an estate on St. Stephen’s filled with as many guests as the ‘howse wolld hold’.7

Contrastingly, King Lear shows the disaster generated by doors that are shut, and the peril incurred by those who are forced to remain outside. Not only are they denied hospitality, but they are also punished for the slightest misdemeanour and humiliated by degrading punitive instruments. After showering Oswald with insults and fearlessly speaking to Cornwall, Kent/Caius is put in the stocks8 and exposed to public infamy. With regard to the petty criminal condemned to the stocks or the pillory, Foucault points out that ‘in him, on him, the sentence had to be legible for all’.9 Cornwall’s sentence (approved of and increased by Regan) echoes a national practice going back to the early Tudor times. In 1495, ‘An Acte Agaynst Vacabounds and Beggers’ stipulated that all suche vagaboundes idell and suspecte persones lyvyng suspeciously, and theym so taken to sette in stokkes, ther to remayne by the space of iij daies and iij nyghtes and ther to have noon other substenaunce but brede and water; and after the seid iij daies and iij nyghtes to be had oute and set at large and then to be commaunded to avoide the Towen; And if eftsones he be taken in suche defaute in the same Town or Township then he to be sette in the like wise in Stokkis by the space of vj daies with like diete as is before reherced; and if eny persone or persones geve eny other mete or drinke to the

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seid mysdoers being in stokkes in fourme aforeseid, or the same prisoners favour in their mysdoyng, that then they forfeite for every tyme so doing xij d.10

The stocks clearly designated the transgressor as an idle vagabond, a sturdy beggar or a masterless man, in any case, a suspicious person. This is what Gloucester reminds Cornwall of, in the Quarto version of King Lear: ‘Your purposed low correction / Is such as basest and contemnèd wretches / For pilf’rings and most common trespasses / Are punished with’ (Scene 7, 132–5). The inadequacy between the transgressor’s status and the punitive instrument synonymous with ‘disreputable punishment’11 can be interpreted on two levels: Kent/ Caius should not be put into the stocks, this ‘shameful lodging’ (2.2.157), both because he is really an earl and because he is now supposedly the (former) king’s serving-man. ‘What’s he that hath so much thy place mistook / To set thee here?’ (188–9), asks Lear. For Lear’s Fool, the stocks create an animal paradigm that reinforces man’s humiliating fall down the lower order of creation: ‘Ha, ha, he wears cruel garters! Horses are tied by the heads, dogs and bears by th’ neck, monkeys by th’ loins, and men by th’ legs. When a man’s overlusty at legs, then he wears wooden nether-stocks’ (184–7). Edgar/Poor Tom too might be put in the stocks. He knows that his persona’s lot is to be ‘whipped from tithing to tithing, and stocked, punished, and imprisoned’ (3.4.119–20). In his case, three factors accelerate bodily degradation: the law and the sentences it provides (including whipping), the raging elements that must be outfaced and the insanity that triggers self-mutilation and paranoia. Persuaded that he is pursued by fiends, Poor Tom also becomes the victim of imaginary torments, which he enumerates, including classic incitements to suicide – ‘Poor Tom, whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and through flame, through ford and whirlpool, o’er bog and quagmire; that hath laid knives under his pillow and halter in his pew, set ratsbane by his porridge’ (3.4.49–52). These imaginary torments also metaphorically evoke the bad treatment, ‘as brutal as ineffective’,12 that the insane received once imprisoned in Bedlam. Commenting upon the inhuman practices of confinement, Foucault notes that madness could be mastered only ‘by discipline and brutalizing’, whose purpose was ‘not to raise the bestial to the human, but to restore man to what was purely animal within him’.13

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In the stocks, transgressors have ‘noon other substenaunce but brede and water’. In the asylum of Bedlam, the insane are not provided with enough food. Dissembling and assuming otherness entails a spiral of degradation through which one experiences hunger, like the ‘[p]oor naked wretches’ (3.4.28) who have ‘unfed sides’ (30).

Tell me what you eat, I will tell you who you are The banished nobleman who counterfeits a wretch so as to hide his identity incurs the risk of starving. The process of degradation is not only social and symbolic, but also physiological. According to what he manages to find to eat, he may progressively be dehumanised and animalised, and fall prey to psychic disorder. In King Lear, Edgar must exhibit a starving body similar to those of gaunt lunatics, or else his persona of Tom of Bedlam will lack verisimilitude. His speech, which points to his meagreness, must be visually confirmed by his lean body. If meagreness is first considered as an indispensable part of his costume, it then becomes the visual evidence of an ordeal caused by scarcity and degradation of diet. The images of abundance conveyed at the opening of the play – Lear’s kingdom’s ‘champaigns riched’ (1.1.62), ‘plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads’ (63) – are now replaced by the evocation of what Claude Fischler terms ‘biologically edible [but] not culturally comestible’.14 Indeed the ‘food’ that Edgar/Poor Tom manages to find around him is not ‘culturally comestible’: ‘Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cowdung for salads, swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog, drinks the green mantle of the standing pool’ (3.4.115–19). Dietary degradation signals his fall to the bottom of the lower order of creation. Fischler observes, ‘To incorporate a type of food is, both on real and imaginary levels, to incorporate all or a part of its properties: we become what we eat. Incorporation founds identity.’15 As regards Edgar, it conveniently founds the identity of his persona, since, as Fischler puts it, ‘it is not only that the eater incorporates the properties of food: it can symmetrically be said that the absorption of food incorporates the eater into a culinary system and, consequently, into the group that practices it, unless it irremediably excludes him’.16 As

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he enumerates what his persona is supposed to eat, Edgar appears to join with the marginal group of Bedlam beggars. Some of the disgusting food he evokes also belongs to the weird sisters’ boiling cauldron in Macbeth: ‘[t]oad’ (4.1.6), ‘[e]ye of newt’ (14), ‘toe of frog’ (14), ‘tongue of dog’ (15).17 It seems clear that, to employ Michel Cépède’s and Hugues Gounelle’s terms, the sphere of ‘appetite’ never combines with the sphere of ‘appetence’, and even less with that of ‘satiety’.18 The dietary degradation that Edgar/Poor Tom is supposed to experience also points to the failure of charity and confirms the relevance of his oxymoronic ‘[e]nforce their charity’ (2.2.177). It is not impossible that Bedlam beggars should suffer from the evolution from medieval individual charity to early modern State charity. As Foucault notes, ‘God is no longer hidden beneath the poor man’s rags’; there is no longer ‘the fear of refusing a piece of bread to starving Jesus, the fear that had been the driving force in all the Christian mythology of charity and given an absolute meaning to the great medieval ritual of hospitality’.19 The new model of State charity, which Bedlam should have exemplified, is in fact a failure.20 In the first part of his city comedy The Honest Whore, Thomas Dekker has a character (one of the inmates) clearly voicing famine within the asylum: ‘Alas! I am a poor man: a very poor man! I am starved, and have had no meat by this light, ever since the great flood; I am a poor man.’21 Malnutrition has emaciated his body, which he now shows like an exhibit: ‘for look you, here be my guts: these are my ribs – you may look through my ribs – see how my guts come out! These are my red guts, my very guts, oh, oh.’22 It seems that far from curing insanity, Bedlam in fact fuels it, since it starves its inmates. Malnutrition engenders a degradation that is both physical and psychical. In Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, Piero Camporesi reminds us of the long-term consequences of nutritional deficiency and food disorders: The ‘triumph of plenty’ … was just a literary topos: a triumphalistic hyperbole which bore little resemblance to the reality of things. The accelerated deterioration of physical and mental health during the years of stupefying starvation was for many people an irreversible process towards intellectual disorder and degradation that the return to ‘normal’ – to the low level of daily undernourishment – would not

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succeed in wiping out. As from a tormented physiological labyrinth, one exited with difficulty from this alimentary chaos; one re-emerged very slowly from the muddy darkness of the voyage through the realm of hardship and indigence. The harm caused to the sick body of this feverish society was often irreparable.23

Camporesi also notes that ‘the most effective and upsetting drug, bitterest and most ferocious, has always been hunger, creator of unfathomable disturbances of mind and imagination. Further lifelike and convincing dreams grew out of this forced hallucination, compensating for the everyday poverty.’24 Edgar/Poor Tom’s ‘disturbances of mind and imagination’ are such that they trigger some paranoid fantasy of poisoning: the foul fiend that allegedly persecutes him has ‘set ratsbane by his poridge’ (3.4.52); he also ‘mildews the white wheat, and hurts the poor creature of earth’ (105–6). This betrays the obsessive early modern fear of cereal crops contaminated by fungus or weeds, which is also reflected in Coriolanus with Coriolanus’ metaphor: ‘In soothing them we nourish ’gainst our Senate / The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition, / Which we ourselves have ploughed for, sowed, and scattered, / By mingling them with us, the honoured number’ (3.1.72–5). The patricians are the corn, the plebeians, the ‘cockle’, that is, ‘any of several harmful weeds that infest cultivated wheat’.25 The allusion to cereal contamination refers to a process that was resorted to in times of famine: the mixing of rye grass and corn to make bread, which, depending on proportioning, produced intoxication. Camporesi specifies, ‘When bread was made in this desperate way with the most impure and heterogeneous mixtures, every pernicious adventure was possible, and the “evil” darnel, “often causes people to beat their heads / against walls”.’26 It thus comes as no surprise that mad Lear’s crown should comprise ‘rank fumitor and furrow-weeds, / … burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, / Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow / In … sustaining corn’ (4.3.3–6). These are substitutes necessary to avoid starvation, yet they fuel mental unbalance and work as symbols of a world upside-down. In King Lear, wholesome bread will be accessible only when imposture and chaos give way to justice and harmony. Till then, it is doomed to remain virtual, only verbal, as when Edgar tells Edmond before their single combat: ‘There is my pledge. I’ll make it on thy heart, / Ere I taste bread, thou art in nothing less / Than I have here proclaimed thee’ (5.3.86–8).

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Fall in status, humiliating punishment, refusal of hospitality, denial of charity and dietary degradation posing a threat to sanity are generally experienced when the exile finds himself in a hostile foreign territory. Yet the internal exile suffers from the same dynamic of debasement in his homeland, and there may be certain similarities with facing the sudden appearance of the ‘uncanny’.

Experiencing the ‘uncanny’ In King Lear, the irruption of the ‘uncanny’ is favoured by the storm on the heath and impending madness. Lear directly addresses the elements as if they were living creatures, thus deploying pathetic fallacy: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow, You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head; and thou all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o’th’ world, Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once That makes ingrateful man. (3.2.1–9)

From Freud’s point of view, Lear’s attitude is reminiscent of primitive animism, that is, ‘the idea that the world was peopled with the spirits of human beings, and by the narcissistic overestimation of subjective mental processes …, as well as by those other figments of the imagination with which man … strove to withstand the inexorable laws of reality’.27 Kent echoes Lear’s animistic attitude when he says,              The wrathful skies Gallow the very wanderers of the dark And make them keep their caves. Since I was a man Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder, Such groans of roaring wind and rain I never Remember to have heard. Man’s nature cannot carry Th’affliction nor the fear. (3.2.42–8)

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Thus, while still in his homeland (which is a ‘heimlich’ place), he unexpectedly experiences the ‘uncanny’ (‘unheimlich’), ‘that in which one does not know where one is, as it were’.28 It is as if he were unable to recognise his daily, native environment. Freud defines the ‘uncanny’ as ‘that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar’,29 as what we feel when the familiar becomes frightening, when the ‘unheimlich’ (‘the uneasy, eerie, blood-curdling’30) suddenly appears within the ‘heimlich’ (‘belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, intimate, comfortable, homely’31). And, quoting the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling, he adds, ‘“Unheimlich” is the name for everything that ought to have remained … hidden and secret and has become visible.’32 In King Lear, what has become visible is disquieting otherness within one’s homeland, the dark side of a kingdom that promised nothing but an ideal of plenty to its royal heirs: the otherness of homelessness and destitution, the otherness of wildness and insanity, the otherness of instability and undecidability. The experience of the ‘uncanny’ confronts one with the unease of betweenness and generic ambiguity, with ‘intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one’.33 This confusion seems to be illustrated by Lear at the end of the tragedy, when he desperately focuses on dead Cordelia’s lips and asks, ‘Lend me looking-glass. / If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, / Why, then she lives’ (5.3.235–7), then erroneously deduces, ‘This feather stirs. She lives’ (239), and finally examines them again before breathing his last, not telling explicitly what he sees, whether life or death: ‘Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips. / Look there, look there’ (285–6). This is in keeping with Freud’s observation that ‘[m]any people experience the feeling [the uncanny] in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts’.34 The experience of the undecidable is related to the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead, the human and the fiendish. In the hovel on the darkened heath, Lear’s Fool mistakes Edgar/ Poor Tom for a spirit (3.4.38). Edgar/Poor Tom depicts his latest persona, allegedly vanished from ‘the crown o’th’ cliff’ (4.5.67), to Gloucester thus: ‘methoughts his eyes / Were two full moons. He had a thousand noses, / Horns whelked and wavèd like the enragèd sea. / It was some fiend’ (69–72). The ‘intellectual uncertainty’ created

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by those characters is reinforced by spatial indeterminacy. Thrown out of doors and doomed to exile in their homeland, Edgar/Poor Tom, Lear and later Gloucester uncannily experience betweenness, which is, according to Onfray, ‘a peculiar geography, neither here nor elsewhere, a story in itself, neither firmly rooted nor atopical, a new space, neither fixed nor elusive, a time that is other, neither measurable nor smooth, a new community, neither stable nor durable’.35 The no man’s land of Lear’s (former) kingdom illustrates this ‘peculiar geography’, in which marginalised people are neither outside nor inside, with and without a homeland, thus suffering from a betweenness that favours the irruption of the ‘uncanny’. Because Edgar/Poor Tom counterfeits lunacy and Lear actually goes mad, they contribute to create uncanny interstices. Foucault has shown how, between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, preoccupations shifted from death to madness, pointing out that ‘What is in question is still the nothingness of existence, but this nothingness is no longer considered as an external, final term, both threat and conclusion; it is experienced from within as the continuous and constant form of existence.’36 The lunatic comes to epitomise a disturbing betweenness that blurs the limits between life and death. To take up Foucault’s formulation, ‘The head that will become the skull is already empty. Madness is the déjà-là of death.’37 But Lear and Edgar/Tom of Bedlam also favour the emergence of the ‘uncanny’, insofar as they exteriorise the part of otherness that everyone conceals within himself. As Freud has observed, ‘[t]he ordinary person sees in them [epilepsy and madness] the workings of forces hitherto unsuspected of his fellow-man but which at the same time he is dimly aware of in a remote corner of his own being’.38 The other lies within oneself, as may be revealed by a mirror effect, a mimetic appeal, which would evoke the idea of the double that Freud includes among ‘those themes of uncanniness which are most prominent’.39 When Lear comes across Edgar/Poor Tom on the heath, the mimetic appeal reads like an ‘interiorisation of the outside’. This brings us back to the way Foucault defined the idea of the double, which Deleuze synthesised as follows: the double is never a projection from within, on the contrary, it is an interiorization of the outside. It is not a split of the One, but a reduplication of the Other. It is not a reproduction of the Same, but a repetition of the Different. It is not the emanation of an I, but the

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establishment of the immanence of what is always other or Not-me. It is never the other who is a double, as a reduplication, but I who feel like the double of the other: I do not discover myself outside, I find the other within myself.40

All of a sudden, Lear perceives himself as other, uncannily close to the Bedlam beggar he has just met. Like him, he wants to be ‘the thing itself’ (3.4.95), ‘a poor, bare, forked animal’ (96–7). He duplicates him and finds his otherness within himself. On the darkened heath, neither at home nor in a foreign country, ‘in the betweenness, when the landmarks of civilisation disappear, the body tends to rediscover its natural marks … the body goes towards its deep and visceral, animal truth’.41 It is as if Lear were discovering some untilthen hidden part of himself, his ‘unthinkable self’,42 as Emmanuel Housset puts it, since at that very moment, ‘it is not so much the self that questions itself as the self that accepts to be questioned, in a much more radical way, by the world, and, in doing so, it discovers the excess of what it can become compared to what it imagined it was’.43 The one who comes to experience destitution, reduction to a wild state and madness is the king, that is, the one who physically and symbolically should be protected from such ordeals and should protect his subjects from them, supposed as he is to represent wealth, civilisation and reason. As the First Gentleman comments, ‘A sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch, / Past speaking in a king’ (4.5.194–5). The awareness that the human condition is put an end to by the Great Leveller goes through a phase of uncanniness, which reminds us of the mental vertigo created by Hamlet when he re-examines the food chain after Polonius’s murder: ‘We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service – two dishes, but to one table’ (Hamlet, 4.3.22–5). What collapses is a way of thinking, of organising the social hierarchy, of structuring the microcosm and the macrocosm.

Notes 1 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘knave, n.’, 2; 3. a. 2 Ibid., ‘dog, n.’: ‘As a term of reproach or abuse: a worthless or contemptible person’, II. 5. a.; ‘brach, n’: ‘a term of abuse’, b. Lear’s fool

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testifies to this derogatory use when he says, ‘Truth’s a dog must to kennel. He must be whipped out when the Lady Brach may stand by th’ fire and stink’ (1.4.98–9). 3 Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar, p. 9. 4 Ibid., p. 190. 5 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 72. In the original text: ‘c’est une sorte d’image de l’animalité qui hante alors les hospices. La folie emprunte son visage au masque de la bête’, Histoire de la folie, p. 197. 6 Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 154. 7 Ibid., p. 154. Marcus cites the carol of King Wenceslaus, in Percy Dearmer et al., The Oxford Book of Carols (London: Humphrey Milford, 1928), p. 271. 8 ‘An obsolete instrument of punishment, consisting of two planks set edgewise one over the other (usually framed between posts), the upper plank being capable of sliding up and down. The person to be punished was placed in a sitting posture with his ankles confined between the two planks, the edges of which were furnished with holes to receive them. Sometimes there were added similar contrivances for securing the wrists’, Oxford English Dictionary, ‘stock, n. 1 and adj.’, A. I. 8. a. 9 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 43. In the original text: ‘en lui, sur lui, l’acte de justice doit devenir lisible pour tous’, Surveiller et punir, p. 53. 10 ‘An Acte Agaynst Vacaboundes and Beggers’ [11 Henry VII., c. 2], 1495, in Tawney and Power (eds), Tudor Economic Documents, pp. 298–9. 11 R. A. Foakes (ed.), William Shakespeare, King Lear, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2007), footnote at 2.2.139, p. 234. 12 Gãmini Salgado, The Elizabethan Underworld (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997), pp. 198–9. See Ken Jackson, Separate Theaters: Bethlem (“Bedlam”) Hospital and the Shakespearean Stage (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005). 13 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 75. In the original text: ‘le dressage et l’abêtissement’, ‘pas d’élever le bestial vers l’humain, mais de restituer l’homme à ce qu’il peut avoir de purement animal’, Histoire de la folie, p. 200. The italics are Foucault’s. 14 Claude Fischler, L’Homnivore. Le goût, la cuisine, le corps (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 2001), p. 31; my translation of ‘ce qui est biologiquement mangeable [mais] pas culturellement comestible’. 15 Ibid., p. 66; my translation of ‘Incorporer un aliment, c’est, sur un plan réel comme sur un plan imaginaire, incorporer tout ou une partie de ses propriétés: nous devenons ce que nous mangeons. L’incorporation fonde l’identité.’

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16 Ibid., p. 66; my translation of ‘ce n’est pas seulement que le mangeur incorpore les propriétés de la nourriture: symétriquement, on peut dire que l’absorption d’une nourriture incorpore le mangeur dans un système culinaire et donc dans le groupe qui le pratique, à moins qu’il ne l’en exclue irrémédiablement’. 17 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Nicholas Brooke, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 18 Michel Cépède and Hugues Gounelle, La Faim (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), pp. 7–8. The authors establish a useful distinction between ‘appetite’ (‘the physiological state generally connected with the food deficiency correlative to the sensation of hunger’), ‘appetence’ (‘the physiological state of a subject who … feels satisfaction or has pleasure when eating’) and ‘satiety’ (‘the physiological state at the opposite of appetite’); my translation of ‘état physiologique généralement lié au déficit alimentaire corrélatif à la sensation de faim’, ‘état physiologique d’un sujet qui … éprouve une satisfaction ou un plaisir à la consommation’, ‘état physiologique inverse de l’appétit’, ibid., pp. 7–8. 19 Foucault, Histoire de la folie, p. 88; my translation of ‘Dieu ne se cache plus sous les haillons du pauvre’, ‘la peur de refuser un morceau de pain à Jésus mourant de faim, cette crainte qui avait animé toute la mythologie chrétienne de la charité, et donné son sens absolu au grand rituel médiéval de l’hospitalité’. 20 See Edward Geoffrey O’Donoghue, The Story of Bethlehem Hospital: From Its Foundation in 1247 (1915) (New York: Dutton & Company, 1915). 21 Thomas Dekker, The Honest Whore, Part the First, ed. Ernest Rhys (London: T. Fisher Unwin, not dated), 5.2.(no lines), p. 181. 22 Ibid., p. 181. 23 Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, trans. David Gentilcore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 79. 24 Ibid., p. 125. 25 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘cockle, n. 1’, 1. a. 26 Camporesi, Bread of Dreams, p. 123. Camporesi quotes Croce, Contrasto del pane di formento, fol. 2v. 27 Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” (1919)’, trans. Alix Strachey, in Philip Rieff (ed.), Studies in Parapsychology (New York: Collier Books, 1966), p. 46. 28 Ibid., p. 21. 29 Ibid., p. 20. 30 Ibid., p. 27.

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31 Ibid., p. 23. 32 Ibid., p. 27 (editor’s italics). No precise reference is given for Friedrich Schelling. 33 Ibid., p. 37. 34 Ibid., p. 47. 35 Onfray, Théorie du voyage, p. 41; my translation of ‘une géographie particulière, ni ici, ni ailleurs, une histoire propre, ni enracinée, ni atopique, un espace nouveau, ni fixe, ni insaisissable, un temps autre, ni mesurable, ni lisse, une communauté nouvelle, ni stable, ni durable’. 36 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 16. In the original text: ‘c’est toujours du néant de l’existence qu’il est question, mais ce néant n’est plus reconnu comme terme extérieur et final, à la fois menace et conclusion; il est éprouvé de l’intérieur, comme la forme continue et constante de l’existence’, Histoire de la folie, pp. 31–2. 37 Ibid., p. 16. In the original text: ‘La tête est déjà vide, qui deviendra crâne. La folie, c’est le déjà-là de la mort’, Histoire de la folie, p. 31. 38 Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” (1919)’, p. 49. 39 Ibid., p. 39. 40 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2004), p. 105; my translation of ‘le double n’est jamais une projection de l’intérieur, c’est au contraire une intériorisation du dehors. Ce n’est pas un dédoublement de l’Un, c’est un redoublement de l’Autre. Ce n’est pas une reproduction du Même, c’est une répétition du Différent. Ce n’est pas l’émanation d’un je, c’est la mise en immanence d’un toujours autre ou d’un Non-moi. Ce n’est jamais l’autre qui est un double, dans le redoublement, c’est moi qui me vis comme le double de l’autre: je ne me rencontre pas à l’extérieur, je trouve l’autre en moi.’ 41 Onfray, Théorie du voyage, p. 41; my translation of ‘dans l’entre-deux, quand les repères de la civilisation disparaissent, le corps tend à retrouver ses marques naturelles …, le corps va vers sa vérité profonde et viscérale, animale’. 42 Housset, L’Intériorité d’exil, p. 313; my translation of ‘le moi inimaginable’. 43 Ibid., p. 313; my translation of ‘ce n’est pas tant le moi qui se pose des questions à lui-même que le moi qui se laisse mettre en question, d’une façon bien plus radicale, par le monde, et, du même coup, il découvre l’excès de ce qu’il peut devenir par rapport à ce qu’il imaginait être’.

9 Home as a foreign elsewhere

Not feeling at home any longer, having the impression that the here is nothing but elsewhere and otherness, losing one’s microcosmic and macrocosmic landmarks and wandering in a ‘smooth space’ – such an experience can depend on time as it is lived and on temporal perspective (as in King Richard II); it can follow from some disastrous scenario (as in Coriolanus); it can also be closely related to a sort of no man’s land that appears to be a ‘haptic space’, in which one can ‘feel’ but not ‘see’, as opposed to an ‘optic space’ (as in King Lear). What is intuited (home as a foreign elsewhere) in the prophetic mode by Gaunt in King Richard II or with a subjective projection by Coriolanus in the Roman play becomes reality in King Lear.

Forebodings: the debasement of the homeland In King Richard II, nothing is said about how Bolingbroke experiences exile before striking back at England with his ‘war machine’. We do know, however, that time goes so unbearably slowly for his father that he dies without seeing his son again. Richard II has perturbed both the cyclical time of festivity and the linear time of history, and this has an impact upon the way Gaunt perceives his near environment and the national territory. From the beginning of the play, Richard II is ‘associated with the destructive power of time (“tempus edax rerum”), without having, in other respects, any of the positive qualities of a time that was also conceived and recognised for its healing and revealing aspect’.1 Once Bolingbroke has been unjustly banished, Gaunt loses his appetite and shows, as

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Laroque puts it, ‘the skeletal emaciation of the observers of Lent’.2 Gaunt tells Richard II, ‘The pleasure that some fathers feed upon / Is my strict fast – I mean my children’s looks, / And therein fasting hast thou made me gaunt’ (2.1.79–81). The suffering caused by the separation does not depend on the place where this suffering is experienced; the painful intensity of the rupture of filiation is the same whether on one side or the other of the frontier; here or elsewhere is much of a muchness, since the only thing that matters is the absence of the one being that would place existence in any meaningful perspective. The here and now is experienced as an elsewhere because time is now felt differently: it boils down to a time of Lent that seems to extend endlessly. Time is no longer divided into cycles, deprived as it is of ‘the pendulum rhythm that marked the festive calendar’.3 Gaunt seems doomed to live in some sort of temporal extension and levelling that illustrate the Bergsonian notion of lived and subjective time (as opposed to measured and objective time), of heterogeneous duration (as opposed to homogeneous duration).4 For Gaunt, as for the prince of Denmark, ‘The time is out of joint’ (Hamlet, 1.5.196). But Gaunt’s major reproach to Richard II does not concern his banished son, but the king’s choice of rupture and inability to ensure the continuity of English history and prove its noble heir. Negating the diachronic tradition of England entails modifying the perception of space. Gaunt puts English geography into perspective when he takes temporality into account and restores a diachronic vision, with the main idea that historicity and memory constitute national identity. Because England has a heroic past, with glorious kings like, as Forker notes, ‘Richard Cœur de Lion and Edward I’,5 it can be presented in the eulogistic mode as this ‘blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, / This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, / Feared by their breed and famous by their birth, / Renowned for their deeds as far from home, / For Christian service and true chivalry’ (2.1.50–4). Conversely, Richard’s perception is merely synchronic, considering the present time and the short term, and concerned only with meeting the most urgent needs. The result is a land ‘now leased out … / Like a tenement or pelting farm’ (59–60), ‘now bound in with shame, / With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds’ (63–4). So, in Richard II’s reign, the problematics have changed: the aim is no longer to explore the elsewhere so as to

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extend the national territory, but to exploit the here and excessively ‘striate’ it, thus producing an effect of compartmentalisation and shrinkage – and in this regard, Gaunt’s gaunt body metonymically evokes the now shrinking map of England. Richard II’s exploitation of the land, reducing it to a commodity, relegates to oblivion its mythic dimension as ‘seat of Mars’ (2.1.41) and ‘other Eden’ (42). The here is also perceived as an elsewhere by Gaunt, owing to a rupture of heritage and filiation that is twofold: on the private level, between father and son, and on the political level, between the king and his predecessors. This twofold rupture breaks the line of transmission normally ensuring continuity and ignores any temporal structure: the past is erased, the future is jeopardised; only a present that seems everlasting remains for Gaunt. With his prophecy, Gaunt reintroduces the notion of duration and concern for the future: ‘His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last, / For violent fires soon burn out themselves; / Small showers last long but sudden storms are short; / He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes; / With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder’ (2.1.33–7). Gaunt insightfully intuits Richard’s fall but is not listened to and dies alone and forgotten, as if he were in a foreign country. Gaunt’s critical perception of his homeland as a now debased and unnatural kingdom is echoed by Coriolanus, who comes to see his city, Rome, as deprived of its Romanitas. From Coriolanus’ point of view, the plebeians represent a social and ethical otherness that threatens to distort Rome, to turn its symbolic topography upside-down with a Forum that would be more powerful than the Capitol, and to exclude the patricians from the city – an exclusion that is implicit in Sicinius’ rhetorical question: ‘What is the city but the people?’ (3.1.200). The threat of patrician deterritorialisation is heard in Coriolanus’ criticism of the tribunes’ growing power: ‘That is the way to lay the city flat, / To bring the roof to the foundation, / And bury all which yet distinctly ranges / In heaps and piles of ruin’ (3.1.204–7). The new verticality (‘heaps and piles’) that might emerge from this general levelling reads as a sign of the plebeians’ victory. From the patricians’ point of view, such a collapse would be not only hierarchical, but also ethical. Kingsley-Smith observes that ‘the patricians defend an aristocratic and conservative conception of Rome that excludes the plebeians. This Rome is defined by the codes of Romanitas, the virtues of

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constancy, honour, martial skill, courage and self-sacrifice, virtues that the plebeians are constantly declared to lack.’6 This is what Coriolanus expresses, when he harshly tells them,            He that trusts to you, Where he should find you lions finds you hares, Where foxes, geese. You are no surer, no, Than is the coal of fire upon the ice, Or hailstone in the sun. Your virtue is To make him worthy whose offence subdues him, And curse that justice did it. (1.1.167–73)

The Roman here is changed into an elsewhere, because aristocratic values are reversed – also because the political evolution is not immune from ‘palt’ring’ (3.1.60), in the sense of ‘dishonourable dealing or bargaining’,7 because the ‘eagles’ (141), ‘the emblems of Roman power (particularly the army)’,8 are now threatened by the ‘crows’ (141). Everything turns upside-down and goes wrong. In Deleuzian terms, it is as if the polis were transformed into a nomos that has ‘the consistency of a fuzzy aggregate: it is in this sense that it stands in opposition to the law or the polis, as the backcountry, a mountainside, or the vague expanse around a city’.9 Whereas the battlefield over which Coriolanus reigns gloriously is a ‘smooth space’, ‘the city is the striated space par excellence’.10 The plebeians thus appear to have a de-striating function; they are ‘the many-headed multitude’ (2.3.15) that impersonates instability, mutability and chaotic movements. The Third Citizen is not mistaken when he affirms, ‘if all our wits were to issue out of one skull, they would fly east, west, north, south, and their consent of one direct way should be at once to all the points o’th’ compass’ (19–22). It comes as no surprise that Elias Canetti, in Crowds and Power, should include the sea (typical of the ‘smooth’ space) among the many relevant metaphors for the crowd.11 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari present the dialectic of the ‘smooth’ and the ‘striated’ spaces, explaining, how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces. Even the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces: to live in the city as a nomad, or as a cave dweller. Movements, speed and

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slowness, are sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space. Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries.12

This analysis helps us picture, in a more theoretical way, the conflictual relationship between the plebeians and the patricians in Coriolanus. The people and their tribunes manage to reintroduce ‘smooth’ spaces so as to force the evolution of political rules, but in doing so (especially in banishing their defender), they open a breach for the foreign enemies, the invaders liable to territorialise the place and transform the here into an elsewhere. The plebeians’ de-striating power is thus double-edged. It is without regret that Coriolanus leaves a city whose nascent political striation he disapproves of: ‘Despising / For you the city, thus I turn my back. / There is a world elsewhere’ (3.3.134–6). Once Coriolanus has crossed the border and gone to Antium, he keeps the logic of inversion that was imposed upon him in Rome, turning the elsewhere in which he now finds himself into his here: ‘My birthplace hate I, and my love’s upon / This enemy town’ (4.4.23–4). It is possible that this reversal will be temporary and opportunistic; as Kingsley-Smith notes, he ‘may wait for his country to rediscover its need of him, insisting that Rome is in exile until his return, or he may choose to destroy the corrupt simulacrum or Rome so as to claim authenticity for himself’.13 Coriolanus, as we know, goes for the second option with a ‘war machine’. But Coriolanus’ disastrous scenario (the devastation of Rome) does not come true either in Shakespeare’s play or in history. Annabel Patterson points out, ‘the creation of the tribunate did not … lead to civil war or any destruction other than that of Coriolanus himself; rather, it issued in four and a half centuries of republican government’.14

From an Eden-like map to a no man’s land ‘Behind the toponymical arsenal of geographical maps, incredible variations on the theme of subjectivity are hidden.’15 Onfray’s observation resonates with Shakespeare’s King Lear: first, with the map exhibited as the positive showcase of the kingdom; secondly, with the test of reality, the inhospitable heath in which one realises that

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‘all the maps are abstracts that are true to neither space nor time’.16 When Lear proceeds with the division of his kingdom, he presents a territory that evokes a horn of plenty and is Eden-like. KingsleySmith observes, ‘Presiding over the map of Albion, he is reminiscent of the Genesis God presiding over his Creation and wielding division as a creative power. Just as in the beginning all was good, so in Lear’s fantasy Albion is uniformly fair.’17 Such a fantasised representation will serve as a foil to some parts of the land, such as the heath and the indistinct space that separates Gloucester’s castle from the cliffs of Dover, where the undesirable try to find refuge. Instead of carefully ‘striated’, fertile lands, some characters discover the dehumanising hostility of a no man’s land, a ‘smooth’ space that has not been mapped, what Yves Bonnefoy calls ‘those lands located off the maps’.18 Apart from the Dover cliffs, locations are not specified in King Lear. As Robert Ellrodt notes, ‘the vagueness of space contributes to tragic universality’19 – and to the emergence of the ‘smooth’ whose deterritorialising power is soon to be experienced. The heath appears as an open space deprived of shelter and hardly visible. Gloucester makes us picture it thus: ‘Alack, the night comes on, and the high winds / Do sorely ruffle. For many miles about / There’s scarce a bush’ (2.2.464–6). The raging elements add to the blurring of microcosmic and macrocosmic landmarks. When the First Gentleman depicts Lear in the tempest, he also reports Lear’s cosmic fantasy, his annihilation of any horizon: ‘Contending with the fretful elements; / Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea / Or swell the curlèd waters ’bove the main, / That things might change or cease’ (3.1.3–6). The absence of landmarks and the disruption of the cosmic architecture resurface and climax in Lear’s oxymoronic apostrophe to the elements: ‘Then let fall / Your horrible pleasure’ (3.2.17–18). This elemental confusion also reads as a metaphor for Lear’s now disturbed psyche and houseless body. Yet two places could have offered a shelter: on the one hand, the outbuilding of Gloucester’s castle ‘where both fire and food is ready’ (3.4.136) – but Gloucester’s transgressive hospitality is short-lived; on the other hand, the ‘hovel’ (3.2.60) that Kent spots and presents to Lear as such: ‘Some friendship will it lend you ’gainst the tempest’ (61). This hut, however miserable, is to the heath what the cave is to the labyrinth in Gaston Bachelard’s imagination. In Earth

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and Reveries of Repose, he observes that the ‘images of the cave belong to the imagination of repose while those of the labyrinth can be ascribed to the imagination of difficult movement, of movement that brings anguish’.20 This distinction corresponds to that between the heath and the hovel in King Lear. Lear refuses to get in in spite of Kent’s reiterated incitations. Apart from the Fool sent by Lear, they have no time to enter the hut: Tom of Bedlam comes out of it like a jack-in-the-box. Yet, according to Ken Jackson, in Separate Theaters: Bethlem (‘Bedlam’) Hospital and the Shakespearean Stage, the shed is closely associated with insanity and can be considered as a mini-Bedlam. According to him, ‘Shakespeare links Lear’s sudden and somewhat confusing resistance to the hovel to the King’s struggle to maintain his wits.’21 This suggests that the only refuge found on the heath is synonymous with psychic wandering, reduction to a wild state and imprisonment (in the asylum). It is ambivalent and, as such, partakes in the dialectic of refuge and dread analysed by Bachelard: ‘The dialectic of refuge and dread needs an opening. While we wish to be protected, we do not wish to be shut in. Human beings know at one and the same time the values of outside and inside.’22 The character that temporarily found refuge there is supposedly a Bedlam beggar, a lunatic constantly on the alert, who adds to the chaotic situation. It is paradoxically a disruptive element that emerges from what seemed to be a possible shelter. In King Lear, the heath is experienced as a ‘smooth’ space, unstable and open though without horizon (both literally and metaphorically). It is later mirrored by the blurred surroundings of Dover. So that Lear may be found, Cordelia orders her men to ‘[s]earch every acre in the high-grown field’ (4.3.7). It comes as no surprise that Lear, once cured of his madness, should confide, ‘I know not / Where I did lodge last night’ (4.6.60–1). Significantly, the only perspective evoked in the play is a vertical one, that of the cliff, from above then from below. This is an untenable perspective, first because it induces dizziness – ‘I’ll look no more, / Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight / Topple down headlong’ (4.5.22–4), pretends Edgar to his father – secondly, because it is just an illusion created by imagination and speech. The characters move as if in a ‘nomadic’ (and not sedentary) space. According to Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction, ‘sedentary space is striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures, while nomad space is smooth,

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marked only by “traits” that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory’.23 The ‘nomadic’ space logically favours ‘nomadic’ thought, that is, thought ‘deployed in a horizonless milieu that is a smooth space, steppe, desert, or sea’.24 In King Lear, this ‘nomadic’ thought, pushed to the extreme, corresponds to madness – a madness that favours social satire, the criticism of a sedentary space too ‘striated’ or wrongly ‘striated’. With neither horizon nor visibility, perception shifts from being optic to ‘haptic’, since ‘smooth space is occupied by intensities, wind and noise, forces, and sonorous and tactile qualities’.25 The duality between the ‘smooth’ and the ‘striated’ leads to the distinction between optic and ‘haptic’ spaces, between close and long-distance vision. ‘Haptic’ comes from the Greek verb haptein (to touch) and is related to ‘the sense of touch’ and ‘other tactile and kinaesthetic sensations’.26 In a ‘haptic’ space, all sensory antennae are required because the eye is no longer the main organ for finding one’s way. According to Deleuze and Guattari, this state belongs to a ‘nomadic’ aesthetics: First, ‘close-range’ vision, as distinguished from long-distance vision; second, ‘tactile’, or rather ‘haptic’ space, as distinguished from optical space. ‘Haptic’ is a better word than ‘tactile’ since it does not establish an opposition between two sense organs but rather invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfill this nonoptical function … It seems to us that the Smooth is both the object of a close vision par excellence and the element of a haptic space (which may be as much visual or auditory as tactile). The Striated, on the contrary, relates to a more distant vision, and a more optical space – although the eye in turn is not the only organ to have his capacity.27

Such a ‘nomadic’ aesthetics might be traced in King Lear, particularly in the scenes taking place on the heath or presenting Gloucester after his blinding. The dark heath in the storm epitomises one of the tragedy’s ‘haptic’ spaces: one can hear the thunder, feel the wind and the rain, but see nothing except what is very close. Deleuze and Guattari explain: ‘Where there is close vision, space is not visual, or rather the eye itself has a haptic, nonoptical function: no line separates earth from sky, which are of the same substance; there is neither horizon nor background nor perspective nor limit nor outline or form nor

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center; there is no intermediary distance, or all distance is intermediary.’28 In King Lear, the adjective ‘foul’, used by Kent (‘Who’s there, besides foul weather?’, 3.1.1) and then by Lear (‘O, ho, ’tis foul!’, 3.2.23) when on the heath, serves as a hint that they are in a ‘haptic’ space, with ‘foul’ in its original sense of ‘grossly offensive to the senses, physically loathsome’.29 ‘Blow’, ‘crack’, ‘rage’ (3.2.1), ‘spout’ (2), ‘spit’ (13): the monosyllabic verbs resorted to by Lear to challenge the raging elements make us hear the tempest. For Kent, what comes first is the sound experience: ‘Since I was man / Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder, / Such groans of roaring wind and rain I never / Remember to have heard’ (44–7). With Lear, the sensory experience turns tactile and physical, as he feels ‘cold’ (3.2.68) and invaded ‘to the skin’ (3.4.7). His apprehension of reality becomes immediate and intuitive; he is, to adopt Onfray’s terms, ‘put to the phenomenological test’.30 As regards Gloucester, he is doomed to wander in a ‘haptic’ space once deprived of his sight. The experience reported by Boris Cyrulnik helps us picture what the discovery of a ‘haptic’ environment might be like: I had the occasion to conduct an experiment in absolute darkness and I was surprised by the new way I perceived, around and within me, a sensory world that was instantly different. Of course, I did not dare to walk and I had to be helped. As soon as I was talked to, I could not but listen, and this posture of immobilisation suppressed all facial and gestural accompaniments from my conversations. I had become an ear. I had also become a nose, since it was enough that a colleague opened a bottle for me to immediately smell, very strongly, a smell of acetic acid! … And I had become a heat sensor because, when the one who opened the bottle passed behind me, I felt, as palpable evidence, the warmth of his body, its volume and its distance from me. The taste of food had changed in the dark: I palpated with my nose, I sniffed the fever of others and I acutely perceived the slightest tremor in their voices. It was enough to return the light, very slowly, for my sensory envelope to lose this power of compensation. I thought of autistic or gifted people who easily associate colours and sounds, music and smells, and believe that speech is a sensory object. Perhaps there is a mode of reprogramming, reconnecting, retracing cerebral circuits? Brain plasticity is greater than previously thought, but it is not infinite.31

In King Lear, Gloucester’s moral distress is such that the question of brain plasticity does not even arise.

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It is, significantly, in this ‘haptic space’ that Gloucester discovers an aptitude for empathy, a capacity to identify with others by feeling what they feel, to make an inner detour through otherness, because he is able to renounce, in the words of Emmanuel Housset, his ‘insular interiority’ or ‘blocked interiority’, and finally to choose an ‘open interiority … capable of welcoming what it does not expect, capable of the elsewhere of otherness and of the world’.32 Housset gives the following definition of empathy: Empathy [Einfühlung] refers to the relationship of the ego to the alter ego, that is, the mode of intuition of the alter ego. It marks both the proximity of individual subjectivities and their radical separation. Empathy is therefore the place of constitution of the meaning of the other on the basis of myself in spite of the fact that the experiences of the other I are always different from mine and no communication can overcome their exteriority.33

When in the presence of Poor Tom, Lear and Gloucester meet their alter egos and come to understand ‘the meaning of the other’. They learn the de-centring of self so as to discover the world of the other: ‘for empathy to develop’, Cyrulnik specifies, ‘it is necessary that another should attract us; otherwise it is narcissism that will protect us from an otherness impossible to face’.34 In this respect, the recurrence of the verb ‘feel’ in the respective speeches of Lear and then Gloucester is meaningful. Lear’s ‘Take physic, pomp, / Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, / That thou mayst shake the superflux to them / And show the heavens more just’ (3.4.33–6) is later echoed by Gloucester’s plea to the ‘heavens’ (4.1.60): ‘Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man / That slaves your ordinance, that will not see / Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly. / So distribution should undo excess, / And each man have enough’ (61–5). Lear gives Gloucester similar advice when Gloucester and Edgar encounter him near Dover: ‘A man may see how this world goes with no eyes; look with thine ears’ (4.5.142–3). And he goes on: ‘See how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places, and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?’ (143–5). Beyond the primary effect of synaesthesia (‘look with thine ears’), the idea is that it may be necessary to be wary of an optic space likely to create effects of trompe-l’oeil. It is possible that the close-range vision specific to the ‘haptic’ space would allow a finer

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apprehension of reality, thanks to which the misinterpretations induced by spaces too striated or wrongly striated would be foiled. The empathy that allows compassion could have been read as the sign that both Gloucester and Lear had found for ‘identity of exile’. Housset notes, ‘to this identity of exile, compassion bears ultimate witness, because in it, the immensity of what seizes us reveals at the same time our confinement in ourselves and the absolute requirement to come to the aid of others … this “being taken by others”, of which compassion is an extreme mode, is what gives us a future’.35 But King Lear is one of the darkest tragedies: compassion does not open a new horizon. The dynamic of avoidance, which should allow us to stay in the here and avoid the elsewhere, is in fact a plunge into the unknown, into the ‘smooth’, into the unsuspected space of the familiar; it is a discovery of otherness in its most humiliating aspect, a deterritorialisation that is paradoxically experienced on the spot. In the end, the conditions of deviation are no less trying than those of exile, even if they allow gaining experience and understanding of the other and the world. The question that arises is therefore that of the relevance of this dynamic, or rather of its limits. For how long can this deviation be tenable? How long can it be endured? This dynamic of deviation, which triggers the degradation of the intimate and its external landmarks, brings into play what Bachelard, in Earth and Reveries of the Will, calls ‘the psychology of gravity’, which ‘involves an obvious dialectic in accordance with which an individual either submits to or resists the laws of gravity’.36 It is not certain that Shakespearean characters resist them, that in their case ‘the human psyche is distinguished by the will to stand erect’.37

Notes 1 François Laroque, ‘Temps et contretemps dans Richard II’, in Guillaume Winter (ed.), Autour de Richard II de William Shakespeare (Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2005), p. 31; my translation of ‘associé au pouvoir destructeur du temps (“tempus edax rerum”) sans rien posséder par ailleurs des qualités positives d’un temps qui était aussi conçu et connu pour son côté réparateur et révélateur’.

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2 François Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 49. 3 Ibid., p. 103. 4 See Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen, 1913). 5 Forker, footnote at 2.1.51–6, p. 246, King Richard II (The Arden Shakespeare); Forker’s italics. 6 Kingsley-Smith, Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile, p. 138. 7 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘paltering, n.’, 1. 8 Parker, footnote at 3.1.141, p. 253, Coriolanus (The Oxford Shakespeare). 9 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 420. In the original text: ‘Le nomos est la consistance d’un ensemble flou: c’est en ce sens qu’il s’oppose à la loi, ou à la polis, comme un arrière-pays, un flanc de montagne ou l’étendue vague autour d’une cité’, Mille plateaux, p. 472. 10 Ibid., p. 531. In the original text: ‘elle [la cité] est l’espace strié par excellence’, Mille plateaux, p. 601. 11 See Canetti, Crowds and Power, pp. 80–1. 12 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 551. In the original text: ‘Comment l’espace ne cesse pas d’être strié sous la contrainte de forces qui s’exercent en lui; mais comment aussi il développe d’autres forces et dégorge de nouveaux espaces lisses à travers le striage. Même la ville la plus striée dégorge des espaces lisses: habiter la ville en nomade, ou en troglodyte. Il suffit parfois de mouvements, de vitesse ou de lenteur, pour refaire un espace lisse. Et, certes, les espaces lisses ne sont pas en eux-mêmes libératoires. Mais c’est en eux que la lutte change, se déplace, et que la vie reconstitue ses enjeux, affronte de nouveaux obstacles, invente de nouvelles allures, modifie les adversaires’, Mille plateaux, pp. 624–5. 13 Kingsley-Smith, Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile, p. 152 (italics are Kingsley-Smith’s). 14 Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, p. 126. 15 Onfray, Théorie du voyage, p. 87; my translation of ‘Derrière l’arsenal toponymique des cartes géographiques se cachent d’incroyables variations sur le thème de la subjectivité.’ 16 Ronald Shusterman, ‘Introduction: des états de lieux’, in Ronald Shusterman (ed.), Cartes, paysages, territoires, p. 14; my translation of ‘toutes les cartes sont des abrégés qui ne sont fidèles ni à l’espace ni au temps’. 17 Kingsley-Smith, Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile, p. 123.

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18 Yves Bonnefoy, ‘Roland, mais aussi bien Angélique’ (Preface), L’Arioste, Roland furieux I, trans. Francisque Reynard (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), p. 14; my translation of ‘ces contrées d’en dehors des cartes’. 19 Robert Ellrodt, ‘Notice pour Le Roi Lear’, in William Shakespeare, Tragédies II, Œuvres complètes II, eds Jean-Michel Déprats and Gisèle Venet (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), p. 1355; my translation of ‘le vague de l’espace contribue à l’universalité tragique’. 20 Gaston Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Repose: An Essay on Images of Interiority, trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Publications, 2011), p. 134. In the original text: ‘En accentuant les différences, on peut dire que les images de la grotte relèvent de l’imaginaire du repos, tandis que les images du labyrinthe relèvent de l’imagination du mouvement difficile, du mouvement angoissant’, La Terre et les rêveries du repos, essai sur les images de l’intimité (Paris: Corti, 1948), p. 207. 21 Jackson, Separate Theaters, p. 171. 22 Bachelard, Earth and the Reveries of Repose, p. 135 (Bachelard’s italics). In the original text: ‘La dialectique du refuge et de l’effroi a besoin de l’ouverture. On veut être protégé, mais on ne veut pas être enfermé. L’être humain sait à la fois les valeurs du dehors et du dedans’, La Terre et les rêveries du repos, p. 209. 23 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 420. In the original text: ‘l’espace sédentaire est strié, par des murs, des clôtures et des chemins entre les clôtures, tandis que l’espace nomade est lisse, seulement marqué par des “traits” qui s’effacent et se déplacent avec le trajet’, Mille plateaux, p. 472. 24 Ibid., p. 418. In the original text: ‘qui se déploie dans un milieu sans horizon comme espace lisse, steppe, désert ou mer’, Mille plateaux, p. 469. 25 Ibid., p. 528. In the original text: ‘ce qui occupe l’espace lisse, ce sont les intensités, les vents et les bruits, les forces et les qualités tactiles et sonores’, Mille plateaux, p. 598. 26 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘haptic, adj. (and n.)’, 1. 27 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 543–4. In the original text: ‘C’est d’abord la “vision rapprochée”, par différence avec la vision éloignée; c’est aussi bien l’“espace tactile”, ou plutôt l’“espace haptique”, par différence avec l’espace optique. Haptique est un meilleur mot que tactile, puisqu’il n’oppose pas deux organes des sens, mais laisse supposer que l’œil peut lui-même avoir cette fonction qui n’est pas optique … C’est le Lisse qui nous paraît à la fois l’objet d’une vision rapprochée par excellence et l’élément d’un espace haptique (qui peut être visuel, auditif autant que tactile). Au contraire, le Strié renverrait à

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une vision plus lointaine, et à un espace plus optique – même si l’œil à son tour n’est pas le seul organe à avoir cette capacité’, Mille plateaux, pp. 614–15. 28 Ibid., p. 545. In the original text: ‘Là où la vision est proche, l’espace n’est pas visuel, ou plutôt l’œil lui-même a une fonction haptique et non optique: aucune ligne ne sépare la terre et le ciel qui sont de même substance; il n’y a pas d’horizon, ni de fond, ni perspective, ni limite, ni contour ou forme, ni centre; il n’y a pas de distance intermédiaire, ou toute distance est intermédiaire’, Mille plateaux, p. 616. 29 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘foul, a., adv. and n.’, A. adj. I. 1. 30 Onfray, Théorie du voyage, p. 52; my translation of ‘soumis à l’épreuve phénoménologique’. 31 Cyrulnik, De Chair et d’âme, p. 118; my translation of ‘J’ai eu l’occasion de faire une expérimentation dans le noir absolu et j’ai été surpris par ma nouvelle manière de percevoir autour de moi et en moi un monde sensoriel instantanément différent. Bien sûr, je n’osais pas marcher, et il a fallu m’aider. Dès qu’on m’a adressé la parole, je n’ai pas pu faire autrement que de tendre l’oreille, et cette posture d’immobilisation a supprimé toutes les synchronies mimiques et gestuelles de mes conversations. J’étais devenu une oreille. J’étais devenu un nez aussi puisqu’il a suffi qu’un collègue débouche une bouteille pour que je sente aussitôt, très fortement, une odeur d’acide acétique! … Et j’étais devenu un capteur de chaleur car, lorsque le déboucheur est passé derrière moi, j’ai senti, comme une évidence palpable, la chaleur de son corps, son volume et sa distance par rapport à moi. Le goût des aliments avait changé dans le noir: je palpais avec mon nez, je reniflais la fièvre des autres et je percevais avec acuité le moindre tremblement de leur voix. Il a suffi de faire revenir la lumière, très lentement, pour que mon enveloppe sensorielle perde ce pouvoir de compensation. J’ai pensé aux autistes ou aux surdoués qui associent facilement les couleurs et les sons, la musique et les odeurs, et croient que la parole est un objet sensoriel. Peut-être existe-t-il un mode de reprogrammation, de refrayage, de retraçage des circuits cérébraux ? La plasticité cérébrale est plus grande que l’on croyait, mais elle n’est pas infinite.’ 32 Housset, L’Intériorité d’exil, pp. 25, 189; my translation of ‘intériorité d’île’, ‘intériorité bloquée’, ‘intériorité ouverte … capable d’accueillir ce qu’elle n’attend pas, capable de l’ailleurs d’autrui et du monde’. 33 Emmanuel Housset, Husserl et l’énigme du monde (Paris: Seuil, 2000), pp. 259–60; my translation of ‘L’empathie [Einfühlung] désigne la relation de l’ego à l’alter ego, c’est-à-dire le mode de l’intuition de l’alter ego. Elle marque à la fois la proximité des subjectivités individuelles et leur radicale séparation. L’empathie est donc le lieu de la constitution

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du sens autrui à partir de moi-même en dépit du fait que les vécus de l’autre je sont toujours différents des miens et qu’aucune communication ne peut surmonter leur extériorité.’ 34 Cyrulnik, De Chair et d’âme, p. 164; my translation of ‘il faut qu’un autre nous attire, sinon c’est le narcissisme qui nous protégera d’une altérité impossible à affronter’. 35 Housset, L’Intériorité d’exil, p. 315; my translation of ‘de cette identité d’exil, la compassion témoigne au plus haut point, car, en elle, l’immensité de ce qui nous saisit nous révèle en même temps notre enfermement en nous-mêmes et l’exigence absolue de se porter au secours d’autrui … cet “être pris par autrui”, dont la compassion est un mode extrême, est ce qui nous donne un avenir’. 36 Gaston Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Kenneth Haltman (Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications, 2002), p. 274. In the original text: ‘la psychologie de la pesanteur … comporte une évidente dialectique suivant que l’être se soumet aux lois de la pesanteur ou qu’il y résiste’, La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté, essai sur l’imagination de la matière (Paris: Corti, 2004), p. 333. 37 Ibid., p. 274. In the original text: ‘le psychisme humain se spécifie comme volonté de redressement’, La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté, p. 333.

Part IV The dialectic of endurance and exhaustion in King Richard II and King Lear

O you mighty gods, This world I do renounce, and in your sights Shake patiently my great affliction off! King Lear (4.5.34–6)

10 Mental spaces and types of interiority

Two active ways of reacting to abusive banishment have been considered so far: on the one hand, the frontal strategy of illegal return to one’s homeland with armed force (the dynamic of riposte); on the other hand, the indirect strategy of dissimulation through disguise and change of identity (the dynamic of deviation). With the dynamic of riposte, endurance is not an issue: it is replaced by deliberation, determination and military preparations. The ‘war machine’ is so swift that it is as if it were already there, imposing itself before the adverse forces that are unprepared and unable to retaliate; the victory is on its side already. Conversely, the dynamic of deviation triggers a process of deprivation, degradation and humiliation that requires psychological and physical endurance, even though the necessity of enduring results not so much from individual strength of character or personal virtue as from circumstances and ensuing strategic choices. In this section I would like to consider a third possibility, which cannot be termed ‘passive’, strictly speaking, as it does not fall within a process of renunciation, yet is barely ‘active’. It does not manifest itself externally in the visible field of action, but within the self, in the mental sphere of the individual, in the imaginary space created by and belonging to the mind, in the ability intimately to spatialise, and hence subjectively to territorialise, external realities. This third response participates in a dialectic of endurance and exhaustion that can result, when the painful reality of deterritorialisation becomes too intense and prevails over soothing mental constructs, in despondency, in letting go or, as Gloucester puts it, in ‘renounc[ing]’ the world and shaking ‘great affliction off’ (4.5.35–6), more or less patiently, more or less effectively. In King Richard II and King

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Lear, this is illustrated by the ‘non-will-to-possess’1 (Richard II), the temptation to commit suicide (Gloucester) or let go (Kent), madness (Lear) and heartbreak (Gloucester, Lear). As both tragedies come to an end, two categories emerge: on the one hand, the characters who succeed in pushing farther and farther the endurable limits of the worst; on the other hand, those who finally succumb out of exhaustion – two categories that, in our time, the French neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik would classify as the ‘long serotonin transporters’ (5-HTT Long) as opposed to the ‘short serotonin transporters’ (5-HTT Short).2 The dialectic of endurance and exhaustion thus takes over from the initial dialectic of inclusion and exclusion; political and territorial issues have shifted towards the theatre of the intimate, strength of soul and the mechanisms of interiority. The challenge is still about crossing a boundary (or not), but the nature of that boundary has changed, and so has its related issue: what are the limits of the endurable? For how long is this dialectic tenable? Where are the breaking points? Mental spaces relate to intellectual functions and bring into play all the psychic faculties: they require the resources of the intellect, the creativity of imagination, the emergence of intimate territories; they depend on the vitality of our inner world. Having to suffer the hardship of deterritorialisation, the individual escapes to and finds refuge in his mental sphere: there he has the possibility of creating a mental cartography of his own, a new territory that he can privately and safely inhabit. He becomes his own compass and maps his inner space himself; to use Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, his thought secretly effects ‘the striating of [his] mental space’3 that compensates for the distressing and disconcerting experience of ‘the smooth’ in his suddenly unfamiliar surroundings, in the unexpected reality he now has to face. Emmanuel Housset posits that ‘faced with an exteriority understood as an adversity that must be daily confronted, man would have a shelter “anti-outside-world” with his interiority’.4 Housset distinguishes two types of interiority, a closed and an open one, which he terms, respectively, ‘insular interiority’ and ‘exile interiority’, and which designate two different attitudes: ‘either bring everything to oneself in an endless task, or say what is by letting it be in its otherness’.5 When mental spaces are called to the rescue in Shakespeare’s tragedies, they often betray an ‘insular interiority’ and are ambivalent: endurance turns into a denial of

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both exteriority and otherness, which leads either to subjective interpretation and radical reconstruction (as when, in King Richard II, John of Gaunt seeks to comfort his son by presenting his banishment as travel taken for pleasure), or to escape into an inner world removed from reality and reason (as with Richard’s withdrawal into himself while imprisoned at Pomfret and Lear’s wandering through the elsewhere of his own madness).

Mental spaces as strategies of resistance When Kent and Coriolanus are banished, they turn the meaning of their sentences upside-down: they will move not to painful exile but to freedom – wherever it is. When Volumnia cannot hold back her tears at seeing him go, Coriolanus reminds her of her former forceful positive teaching, of how relentlessly she would cast him in the mould of heroism:               You were used To say extremities was the trier of spirits, That common chances common men could bear, That when the sea was calm all boats alike Showed mastership in floating; fortune’s blows When most struck home, being gentle wounded craves A noble cunning. You were used to load me With precepts that would make invincible The heart that conned them. (4.1.3–11)

Like her son, Volumnia is not afraid of radical reinterpretations. In her mouth, ‘extremity’ was synonymous with opportunity, the opportunity to rise above ordinary mortals. And her ‘precepts’ transformed mortality into immortality. As she praised the patrician values of Roman virtue and heroism, she echoed the teaching of Stoicism that advocates fortitude and firmness of soul. But now that she has to face her son’s banishment, she is not so sure of the validity of her teaching. When his son is banished by Richard II, John of Gaunt seems to echo Volumnia’s idea that ‘extremities are the triers of spirits’ with his advice: ‘Teach thy necessity to reason thus: / There is no virtue like necessity’ (1.3.277–8). However, he also tries to minimise the

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sentence: ‘What is six winters? They are quickly gone’ (260); he tries to turn his son’s ‘enforced pilgrimage’ (264) into ‘a travel’ that he would take ‘for pleasure’ (262), as if the grim principle of reality could give way to the principle of pleasure; and he tries radically to reinterpret what has happened, advising his son, ‘Think not the King did banish thee, / But thou the King’ (279–80). John of Gaunt’s advice to his son is not to apprehend reality as such, but to see it through the prism of an imaginary reconstruction, that is, to alter it by interpretative choice and inner conviction, as the imperative verbs he uses (all calling for re-creation) suggest: ‘Call it’ (1.3.262), ‘Think not’ (279), ‘say’ (282), ‘suppose’ (283), ‘imagine’ (286), ‘Suppose’ (288). Reality would give way to a world of imagination or, as Housset puts it, ‘a world of the as if, a world freed from absolute spatial and temporal situations’.6 Enduring, in this case, is not a matter of accepting subjection to harsh reality, but the capacity to affirm the power of subjective reinterpretation over it. John of Gaunt’s arguments are inspired by Stoicism, as when he says, ‘All places that the eye of heaven visits / Are to a wise man ports and happy havens’ (275–6). They are also inflected by Neostoicism, which in early modern times revived and appropriated the doctrine of Zeno of Citium. Jean-Baptiste Gourinat explains, A feature dominates in Neostoicism, which is generally intended to be a reconciliation of ancient Stoicism and Christianity, and this feature may be surprising given the importance of determinism in Stoic philosophy: the emphasis on human autonomy. But this can partly be explained by the importance of themes such as the constancy and tranquillity of the soul. … The way in which Stoicism frees man from distress has been equated with the capacity to shield him from fate, so that Stoicism appears as a philosophy of free will. … Neostoicism is therefore not limited to an ethics of constancy, because it is inseparable from reflections on determinism and freedom, which allow the restoration of the whole system even at the cost of some adjustments. But such adjustments are precisely why we are dealing with Neostoicism.7

Heir to Epictetus, John of Gaunt tries to convince his son that our thoughts depend on us, that we have control over them. The banished man can still enjoy a specific type of autonomy and free will, the power of rethinking the reality that surrounds him and endowing it with his subjective meaning. Thus he can attenuate distress

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and keep grief at bay, endeavouring to put into practice the following maxim: ‘For gnarling Sorrow hath less power to bite / The man that mocks at it and sets it light’ (1.3.292–3). In this, John of Gaunt might be seen as anticipating a principle of neurology, since in our time ‘neuro-imaging allows us to observe how a belief manages to modify the neurological circuits of pain’.8 Even before confronting Richard II and fearlessly speaking his mind, John of Gaunt proves ‘a prophet new inspired’ (2.1.31): his ‘Think not the King did banish thee, / But thou the King’ (1.3.279–80) ironically takes on a proleptic quality; as interpreted by Bolingbroke, his Neostoic teaching will leave the mental sphere and take effect on the field of action: Bolingbroke will banish the king from the throne of England. John of Gaunt’s advice to reinterpret banishment as ‘travel’ (1.3.262) implicitly reintroduces the idea of return. In our time, regarding Bolingbroke not as a banished man but as a traveller changes the perspective. As Michel Onfray observes in his Théorie du Voyage, ‘The traveller is a concentration of these millennial tropisms: the inclination for movement, the passion for change, the frantic desire for mobility, the visceral incapacity for gregarious communion, the rage for independence, the worship of freedom.’9 He goes on: ‘Far from the ideologies of his native village and land, of his nation and the blood of his race, the wanderer cultivates the paradox of strong individuality and is not unaware that what is at stake is the rebellious and radiant opposition to collective laws.’10 Insofar as this contemporary traveller seems to possess the essential qualities, including ‘strong individuality’, to envisage a ‘war machine’, he resembles the Shakespearean characters of Bolingbroke and Coriolanus. Unlike his father, Bolingbroke will not limit reconstruction to the mental sphere of inaction; free will calls for efficiency and requires its own field of action. Without ceremony, he underscores the limits of conceptual breakaway that is nothing but a paradoxical construction, a denial of reality. To him, his father’s Stoicism, calling for ‘invulnerability to external “evils”’,11 is just ‘[w]ords, words, words’ (Hamlet, 2.2.192) and can only trigger a series of rhetorical questions: O, who can hold a fire in his hand By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?

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Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite By bare imagination of a feast? Or wallow naked in December snow By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat? (1.3.294–9)

Bolingbroke is right: the radical reinterpretation of harsh reality is of no avail. For him, there are no ‘anaesthetic patiences’, which, as Philippe Grosos explains, ‘either, being insensitive, anaesthetise suffering, or, being patient for anything, accept anything, that is to say, renounce anything’.12 Grosos specifies, ‘Patience of all compromises, this patience – for the man who wants his self to last, above everything – is the one that renounces the ‘very condition of mankind’, that is, man’s sensitive finitude and dignity.’13 Bolingbroke will show no patience. He does not believe in the Stoic principles that advocate ‘supreme detachment when facing the factual events of the world’.14 Before dying of exhaustion, ‘gaunt as a grave’ (2.1.82), his father too admits the limits of ‘bare imagination’, confessing that within him ‘Grief hath kept a tedious fast’ (75). Yet John of Gaunt’s strategy of resisting and rethinking reality is all the more interesting because he is also the one who has an acute awareness of both the history and geography of England and who, as such, could have been a chorographer (describing his country) and even a topographer (graphically delineating it, drawing relief maps).15 When Gaunt praises the kingdom, he presents England as a ‘precious stone set in the silver sea’ (2.1.46). His metaphor has nothing to do with what has become of the country in the reign of Richard II, a ‘national disgrace’,16 which he also describes metaphorically: England, bound in with the triumphant sea, 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. (61–4)

Merging the literal and the metaphorical, Gaunt is like a chorographer who makes the real and the imaginary coexist in the way that sixteenth-century cartography shows. Pointing to the ambivalent status of early modern maps that ‘effectively borrow as much from mathematical sciences as from pictorial art’,17 David Ducros remarks, ‘if the location of places and the outlines of territories are generally well rendered, it can be noted, however, that hills take on

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the appearance of gigantic molehills, that the courses of the rivers are considerably accentuated, and that oceans are peopled with sea monsters of disturbing proportions. Where does reality end? Where does the imaginative world begin?’18 Thanks to his memory and imagination, John of Gaunt can apprehend the richness of the English territory over and above the question of political control, and still be sharply insightful. It is significant that he should again use the metaphor of a jewel in its setting, that his ‘precious stone set in the silver sea’ (2.1.46) should echo what he had previously told his son: ‘The sullen passage of thy weary steps / Esteem as foil wherein thou art to set / The precious jewel of thy home return’ (1.3.265–7). This echo seems to suggest the parallel to come between the kingdom and the king that Bolingbroke will be. Moreover, the setting metaphor that highlights the rich value of the land contrasts with that of Richard II’s hollow crown full of a ‘thousand flatterers’ (2.1.100), a hollow crown that encompasses only vanity. Gaunt’s advice is part of a strategy of mental escape but also proves a significant anticipation of the central position that Bolingbroke will take in the land. Thanks to his ability both to radically reinterpret his son’s banishment and to describe England literally and metaphorically, Gaunt tries to tone down and even reverse a political sentence that has immediate geographical consequences (the denial of territory). Although political authorities have the power to map their territory and exclude subversive elements, putting them off the map, John of Gaunt turns to the power of his mental construction to reinterpret geography without taking into account political boundaries. Gaunt’s attitude thus anticipates that of the cartographers who came after Christopher Saxon and can be compared with the evolution of cartography itself. In 1579, Christopher Saxon published maps that first and foremost presented a political picture of England, ‘an invasion of the pictorial by the political’,19 as Ducros puts it. His maps are ‘a visual medium on which the discourse of authority is built up’, ‘the instrument by which the kingdom can be effectively governed’.20 Maps, then, claim ‘the territory as the possession of the monarch’; they are the reminders that ‘the queen’s authority is exercised over all parts of the kingdom, without any exception’, and that ‘attachment to the motherland is indissociable from the duty of allegiance’.21 However, in the last years of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, this tendency evolved with the maps of John Norden and John Speed, which read as

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‘a sincere will to put man back at the heart of representation, to enable him, through mapping, to reclaim the territory’.22 The consequence of this evolution is that ‘[t]he reader is no longer faced with the representation of a frozen reality, but with an image that, conversely, invites him to move, to discover, to explore. Simultaneously, royal arms are pushed away to the margin, as if their interest suddenly appeared to be secondary, as if another form of authority, that of the territory, sought to assert itself and replace that of the political power.’23 When John of Gaunt praises England, he makes it clear that the land comes first, before political power, because the land is the matrix, the ‘nurse’, the ‘teeming womb of royal kings’ (2.1.51). He deplores geography’s dependence on politics; he suggests that a subject can love his land independently of his duty of allegiance, that his genuine relation to the national territory does not need the heavy mediation of politics. ‘Royal arms are pushed away to the margin’ in new ways of mapping; Gaunt shows that Richard II is not worthy of his kingdom, since he behaves as a mere ‘[l]andlord of England’ (113) – a justification, in effect, of his deposition to come. Gaunt’s advice to his son (unrealistic, though prophetic) and later his eulogy of his homeland (historically rooted, though lyrical) both affirm the strength of his individual point of view, of his mental capacity for subjective interpretations or counter-interpretations, of his encompassing cartographic ability as overriding Richard II’s rash political decisions. Although place names are mentioned, like ‘Le Port Blanc’ (2.1.277) and ‘Ravenspurgh’ (296), and also ‘Ireland’ (290) where the king has gone, Shakespeare’s play does not specify whether Bolingbroke uses maps to prepare his illegal return to England. But it does show how his strategy of resistance, unlike his father’s, takes root in action – an action whose consequences will force Richard II not only to renounce the throne and become nothing, but also to withdraw within his own mental world.

Types of interiority and ‘non-will-to-possess’ Richard II’s and Lear’s destinies invite comparison. Both of them are the victims of retaliation and deterritorialisation; both become the tragic incarnation of the banisher banished. Richard II is deposed and displaced from royal palace to prison; Lear is dispossessed of

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any home and deprived of his sanity. Richard lives his last days in a closed space (the cell at Pomfret), whereas Lear seems doomed to wander through a ‘haptic space’24 (the heath and the fields around the cliffs of Dover): both are trapped in spaces devoid of visual perspective. This lack of horizon arouses introspection and leads to belated realisation and letting go. Richard admits, ‘I wasted time, and now doth Time waste me’ (5.5.49); Lear confesses: ‘O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this’ (3.4.32–3). Richard lets his crown and his kingdom go; Lear, his reason with his kingdom. Both lose their grip on reality and are no longer what they used to be. Richard falls prey to entropy25 and retreats within himself; Lear leaves for the elsewhere of madness and becomes a virtual ventriloquist. Interestingly, they come to illustrate the two types of interiority analysed by Housset. By turning in on himself, Richard brings back otherness to himself and exhibits a ‘closed interiority’, that is, ‘an interiority that consists in turning oneself into a spectacle’.26 Conversely, Lear displays an excess of ‘open interiority’, a mental space subject to any wind, ‘a place where otherness can manifest itself’,27 otherness taking the form, in his case, of madness and the ‘uncanny’. As the motif of the wilfully deaf ear has shown, Richard II was never open to others; he merely listened to his flatterers, who echoed his own words and mirrored his own will, fawningly answering his self-centred expectations. From the very beginning of the play, he epitomises ‘interiority blocked in itself and unable to welcome the otherness of the world’.28 At the end of the play, this ‘interiority blocked within itself’ can be heard at the moment when he delivers his soliloquy in his cell, where, by force of circumstances, there is ‘not a creature’ (5.5.4) but himself. Richard’s soliloquising in Pomfret Castle is the consequence of his former attitude when confronted with Bolingbroke’s illegal return from banishment, his letting go, or what Roland Barthes called ‘the non-will-to-possess’29 – though here applying not to the intimate but to the political sphere. The legitimate king politically renounces his ‘will-to-possess’ and seeks refuge in his mental space. His inner questioning, before his encounter with Bolingbroke at Flint Castle, already seems to betray his renunciation: What must the King do now? Must he submit? The King shall do it. Must he be deposed?

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The King shall be contented. Must he lose The name of King? I’God’s name, let it go. (3.3.143–6)30

His ‘non-will-to-possess’ can be interpreted as ‘a reversed substitute for suicide’;31 he claims to be ready to exchange his ‘large kingdom for a little grave, / A little, little grave, an obscure grave’ (3.3.153– 4). In the deposition scene, his dropping and shattering the lookingglass emblematises his letting go. When he comments, ‘there it is, cracked in an hundred shivers’ (4.1.289), we understand that he speaks of himself, that he externalises and dramatises his shattered identity. Now that he has been deposed, he has lost his ‘body politic’ and only his ‘body natural’ remains, so that in the looking-glass he can just see, as Kantorowicz has noted, ‘the banal face and insignificant physís of a miserable man, a physís now devoid of metaphysís whatever’.32 As the queen Isabel later notes, he is ‘both in shape and mind / Transformed and weakened’ (5.1.26–7). Separating from Isabel as he is taken to the prison of Pomfret, Richard invites her to reinterpret reality – in a way partly reminiscent of John of Gaunt’s consolation of his son – both past and present:          Learn, good soul, To think our former state a happy dream, From which awaked, the truth of what we are Shows us but this. I am sworn brother, sweet, To grim Necessity, and he and I Will keep a league till death. (5.1.17–22) Good sometimes queen, prepare thee hence for France. Think I am dead, and that even here thou tak’st, As from my death-bed, thy last living leave. (37–9)

Like Gaunt, Richard uses the imperative of ‘think’ in the sense of imagining for the sake of relief. But his personification of ‘necessity’, which he calls ‘grim’, hence conveying the idea of ‘unalterable circumstances’ and ‘tragic destiny’,33 radically differentiates him from Gaunt’s teaching that ‘[t]here is no virtue like necessity’ (1.3.278). According to him, his wife still has the capacity that he himself no longer possesses: the mental strength to reinterpret harsh reality and survive it. Although he later tries to turn his cell into a

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miniature theatre in which he can stage his own thoughts and ‘people this little world’ (5.5.9), his thoughts, far from escapist fancies, lead him to acknowledge what he is now reduced to: Bolingbroke’s ‘jack o’the clock’ (60). Richard’s ultimate ‘strategy’ for bearing his fall is not to rethink reality, but to dramatise and metaphorise what now lucidly goes on within his own mind, his soliloquy externalising his withdrawal within himself. Quite differently, Lear’s mental space, his ‘exile interiority’, avoids self-centredness and opens up to heterogeneity, otherness and social issues. ‘No, rather I abjure all roofs, and choose / To be a comrade with the wolf and owl’ (2.2.373–4). As Lear is pushed to the limit by Regan and Goneril’s ‘ingratitude’, he violently envisages his deterritorialisation, renouncing what Jean-David Devaux would call his ‘subject-space’, that is, his ‘lived space’, the ‘space enriched and distorted by the perceptive and psychological filter’.34 Or, to employ Gaston Bachelard’s terms, Lear renounces the space that ‘concentrates being within limits that protect’.35 Lear’s perception of other spatial categories is consequently altered – as when he addresses the raging elements in an animist way, or when he imagines the trial of his daughters in the Quarto version. It is all the more so because, on the tempestuous heath, he finds himself caught in a ‘haptic space’, and his madness adds to his perceptual confusion.36 It seems therefore quite ‘logical’ that Lear should go mad, retreating to the elsewhere of his mental universe. Lear’s speech starts to alter – pervaded, shaped and directed by madness – once he has realised that his daughters’ attitudes have radically altered, turning, according to him, disrespectful and unnatural. This is the moment when he is reduced to ‘an individual exposed, with no way of escape, to an otherness in the face of which he remains without hold’.37 Confronted with otherness, here through the dark side of his daughters, Lear goes from a blocked interiority (in the opening scene, when he divides his kingdom, he does not listen to anyone except those who play the game of flattery) to an interiority that is open, but too open, ‘absolutely given over to exteriority without any possible distantiation’38 (on the heath, he identifies with Poor Tom). But unlike the blinded Gloucester, Lear is not ready to let go. When he challenges the raging elements with his ‘Pour on, I will endure’ (3.4.18), we realise that his madness is less a matter of letting go than the emergence of an ‘exile interiority’: it

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thinks and speaks through him; it articulates relevant sociopolitical criticism, questioning the ‘striated space’ of both social and moral conventions. Kiernan Ryan observes, ‘Lear’s disillusioning “madness” expels him into a licensed space outside the perceptual framework contrived by class society, a space in which he is soon joined by the blind Gloucester, once he too has learned to “see … feelingly”’.39 When Lear is ‘[a]s mad as the vexed sea’ (4.3.2) and launches into a diatribe against the social vices that remain unpunished, he paradoxically recovers the use of the pronoun ‘I’: ‘I am the King himself’ (4.5.83–4) and ‘I am not ague-proof’ (102), he tells Gloucester, deluding himself (about his body politic) but also speaking the truth (about his body natural). His ‘I’ testifies to both his madness and his memory (he used to be king), but also to a new awareness of his vulnerability, hence of his humanity. With Lear, we understand that ‘madness is a borderline mode of the power to say I, to represent and control oneself’.40 The mental spaces of John of Gaunt, Richard II and Lear – although appearing as utopian escapes, morbid ‘non-will-to-possess’41 or losses of logical reasoning – evidence a form of resistance, insofar as they favour invisible energy and imaginary movements that deny or defy real constraints and physical limits; they unexpectedly connect a variety of levels and layers that ultimately make sense together; like ‘circulating madness’ in medieval times, they represent ‘the imaginary place of passage’.42 What is at stake in these characters’ mental spaces, whether they are the product of willed imagination or pure madness, is the recreation of a free circulation, which escapes the strict dialectic of inclusion and exclusion, and may help to push further the limits of endurance.

Notes 1 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 232. In the original text: ‘le nonvouloir-saisir’, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, p. 275. 2 Cyrulnik, De Chair et d’âme, p. 31; my translation of ‘gros transporteur de sérotonine’ et ‘petit transporteur de sérotonine’. Cyrulnik explains, ‘We know that serotonin plays a major role in gay or depressive moods. In sufficient quantity, it promotes synaptic transmission and stimulates desires, motor skills, the processing of cognitive functions and liveliness

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of learning. It can modify appetite, regulate stages of slow sleep and increase neuroendoctrine secretions’ (‘On sait que la sérotonine joue un rôle majeur dans l’humeur gaie ou dépressive. En quantité suffisante, elle favorise la transmission synaptique et stimule les désirs, la motricité, le traitement des fonctions cognitives, la vivacité des apprentissages. Elle peut modifier l’appétit, régulariser les stades du sommeil lent et augmenter les sécrétions neuroendocriniennes’, ibid., p. 25–6). 3 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 418. In the original text: ‘le striage de l’espace mental’, Mille plateaux, p. 469. 4 Housset, L’Intériorité d’exil, p. 12; my translation of ‘face à une extériorité comprise comme une adversité qu’il s’agit d’affronter chaque jour, l’homme disposerait d’un abri “anti-monde extérieur” avec son intériorité’. 5 Ibid., p. 25; my translation of ‘intériorité d’île’, ‘intériorité d’exil’, ‘soit tout ramener à soi dans une tâche infinie, soit dire ce qui est en le laissant être dans son altérité’. 6 Housset, Husserl et l’énigme du monde, p. 126; my translation of ‘un monde du comme si, un monde affranchi de situations spatiales et temporelles absolues’. 7 Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, Le Stoïcisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007), pp. 114–15 (italics are his); my translation of ‘Un trait domine dans le néostoïcisme, qui se veut généralement une conciliation du stoïcisme antique et du christianisme, et ce trait peut surprendre étant donné l’importance du déterminisme dans la philosophie stoïcienne: l’insistance sur l’autonomie humaine. Mais cela s’explique en partie par l’importance des thèmes de la constance et de la tranquillité de l’âme. … La manière dont le stoïcisme libère l’homme des troubles a été assimilée à une capacité à le soustraire au destin, si bien que le stoïcisme apparaît comme une philosophie du libre arbitre. … Le néostoïcisme ne se limite donc pas à une éthique de la constance, car il est inséparable de réflexions sur le déterminisme et la liberté, qui permettent la restauration de tout le système même au prix de quelques aménagements. Mais ce sont de tels aménagements qui font précisément que l’on a affaire à un néo-stoïcisme.’ 8 Cyrulnik, De Chair et d’âme, p. 181; my translation of ‘[l]a neuroimagerie permet d’observer comment une croyance parvient à modifier les circuits neurologiques de la douleur’. 9 Onfray, Théorie du voyage, pp. 14–15; my translation of ‘Le voyageur concentre ces tropismes millénaires: le goût pour le mouvement, la passion pour le changement, le désir forcené de mobilité, l’incapacité viscérale à la communion grégaire, la rage de l’indépendance, le culte de la liberté.’

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10 Ibid., pp. 14–15. My translation of ‘Loin des idéologies du village natal et de la terre, du sol de la nation et du sang de la race, l’errant cultive le paradoxe de la forte individualité et n’ignore pas que se joue là l’opposition rebelle et radieuse aux lois collectives.’ 11 Gourinat, Le Stoïcisme, p. 98; my translation of ‘l’invulnérabilité à l’égard des “maux” extérieurs’. 12 Philippe Grosos, L’Inquiète Patience. Essai sur le temps requis (Chatou: Éditions de la Transparence, 2004), p. 19; my translation of ‘patiences anesthésiques’, ‘qui soit, étant insensibles, anesthésient la souffrance, soit, patientant pour toute chose, acceptent tout, c’est-à-dire, renoncent à tout’. The phrase ‘patience anesthésique’ is taken from Charles Péguy, in Oeuvres en prose complètes, vol. 3, Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie cartésienne, ed. Robert Burac (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 1294. 13 Ibid., p. 19; my translation of ‘Patience de toutes les compromissions, cette patience – pour l’homme qui veut soi-même et plus que tout durer – est celle qui renonce à la “condition même de l’homme”, c’est-à-dire à sa sensible finitude comme à sa dignité.’ 14 Ibid., p. 21; my translation of ‘suprême détachement face à l’événementialité du monde’. 15 In ‘“Mapping the kingdom”: les cartographes élisabéthains et l’image de la nation’, Ducros reminds us of how Ptolemaic division organised geography into three categories: cosmography (descriptive astronomy), chorography (the description of a country) and topography (graphic representation including relief maps), in Shusterman (ed.), Cartes, paysages, territoires, p.  130. For more precise definitions of cosmography, geography, chorography, topography and land surveying, see François de Dainteville, Le langage des géographes. Termes, signes, couleurs des cartes anciennes, 1500–1800 (Paris: Éditions A. et J. Picard, 2002). 16 Forker’s term, footnote at 2.1.63–4, p. 248, King Richard II (The Arden Shakespeare). 17 Ducros, ‘“Mapping the kingdom”: les cartographes élisabéthains et l’image de la nation’, p. 129; my translation of ‘emprunte en effet autant aux sciences mathématiques qu’à l’art pictural’. 18 Ibid., p. 129; my translation of ‘si l’emplacement des lieux, les contours des territoires, sont généralement bien restitués, on remarque cependant que les collines ont l’aspect de gigantesques taupinières, que le tracé des rivières est considérablement accentué, et que les océans sont peuplés de monstres marins aux proportions inquiétantes. Où s’arrête le réel? Où commence l’imaginaire?’ 19 Ibid., p. 133; my translation of ‘une invasion du pictural par le politique’.

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20 Ibid., p. 133; my translation of ‘un support visuel sur lequel se construit un discours d’autorité’, ‘l’instrument par lequel le royaume peut être efficacement gouverné’. 21 Ibid., p. 132; my translation of ‘le territoire comme la possession du monarque’, ‘l’autorité de la reine s’exerce sur toutes les parties du royaume, sans exception’, ‘l’attachement à la patrie est indissociable du devoir d’allégeance’. 22 Ibid., p. 136; my translation of ‘une volonté sincère de replacer l’homme au cœur de la représentation, de lui permettre, par le biais de la cartographie, de se réapproprier le territoire’. 23 Ibid., p.  136; my translation of ‘Le lecteur n’est plus confronté à la représentation d’une réalité figée, mais à une image qui, au contraire, l’invite au mouvement, à la découverte, à l’exploration. Dans le même temps, les armes royales sont repoussées vers la marge, comme si leur intérêt apparaissait tout à coup secondaire, comme si une autre forme d’autorité, celle du territoire, cherchait à s’affirmer et à se substituer à celle du pouvoir politique.’ 24 The phrase is from Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. 25 Here in the sense of an ‘irreversible dissipation of energy resulting in stagnation or inactivity’ (Oxford English Dictionary, ‘entropy, n.’, 2. Figurative). 26 Housset, L’Intériorité d’exil, p. 15; my translation of ‘une intériorité close’, ‘une intériorité [qui] consiste à faire de soi-même un spectacle’. 27 Ibid, p. 15; my translation of ‘une intériorité ouverte’, ‘un lieu où une altérité peut se manifester’. 28 Ibid., p. 172; my translation of ‘l’intériorité bloquée en elle-même et incapable d’être disponible à l’altérité du monde’. 29 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 232. In the original text: ‘le nonvouloir-saisir’, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, p. 275. 30 Emphasis mine. 31 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 232. In the original text: ‘un substitut retourné du suicide’, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, p. 275. 32 Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, p. 40. 33 Forker’s terms, footnote at 5.1.21, p. 417, King Richard II (The Arden Shakespeare). 34 Jean-David Devaux, Les Espaces de la folie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), p. 12; my translation of ‘espace-sujet’, ‘espace vécu’, ‘espace enrichi et déformé par le filtre perceptif et psychologique’. 35 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. xxxii. In the original text: ‘concentre de l’être à l’intérieur des limites qui protègent’, La Poétique de l’espace, p. 17. 36 See Devaux, Les Espaces de la folie, p. 9.

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37 Housset, L’Intériorité d’exil, p. 171; my translation of ‘un individu exposé sans retrait possible à une altérité face à laquelle il demeure sans prise’. 38 Ibid., p. 172; my translation of ‘totalement livrée à l’extériorité sans aucune distance possible’. 39 Kiernan Ryan, ‘King Lear: The Subversive Imagination’, in Ryan (ed.), King Lear, New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1993), p. 79. 40 Housset, L’Intériorité d’exil, p. 170; my translation of ‘la folie est un mode limite du pouvoir de dire je, de se représenter et de se maîtriser’. 41 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 232. 42 Revel, Le Vocabulaire de Foucault, ‘folie’, p. 56; my translation of ‘folie circulante’, ‘lieu imaginaire du passage’.

11 The limits of endurance and the signs of exhaustion

No, I will weep no more. – In such a night To shut me out? Pour on, I will endure. In such a night as this! O Regan, Goneril, Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all – O, that way madness lies. Let me shun that. No more of that. (3.4.17–22)

Stunned by his daughters’ ‘unnatural’ attitude, Lear tries to reason with himself. He will ‘endure’. But he will also bear the unbearable, thanks to a denial strategy – emphasised with the successive ‘Let me shun that’ and ‘No more of that’, and with the use of ‘that’, as if relegating the unbearable to the unnameable. In the long run, denial may generate neurotic or psychotic forms of behaviour; it may ‘shun’ anything but madness and prove as ambivalent as the Greek pharmakon, both remedy and poison. Lear clings to it as a mental strategy for the time being, because it is part of his will to endure and make sense of what appears to him nonsensical. The dialectic of astonishment and resistance, which is perceptible in Lear’s speech (with the alternation of ‘I will’, ‘In such a night’, ‘I will’, ‘In such a night’, ‘Let me’), will evolve into a dialectic of endurance and exhaustion – an exhaustion that will be physical and psychic, and also epistemological, for how can sense still be detected in an environment that has been turned upside-down? To ‘endure’ also means to ‘suffer without resistance’,1 and the absence of resistance can be interpreted as a sign of exhaustion. ‘The disquieting world of madness reveals the astonishing frailty of the “normal” world and the need constantly to carry the meaning of the world, as well as the superhuman requirement not to give

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up out of fatigue’:2 Housset’s analysis throws light on the world of King Lear. Lear and Gloucester, and also John of Gaunt and Richard II, though in a lesser way, do their best not to give up out of exhaustion – until they are actually, sooner or later, exhausted. This raises the following questions: when does endurance reach its limits? What are the manifestations of exhaustion?

Time, torment and the interminable To endure is closely associated with the experience of duration. When time is experienced as interminable, the one who endures comes to evoke either a dead person before their time or a victim of torture, or even a miraculous survivor, if we remember Kent’s comment once Lear is dead: ‘The wonder is he hath endured so long. / He but usurped his life’ (5.3.291–2). Reflecting upon our time, Bernard Noël said, ‘Since there is no longer any central figure, that is, any divine figure, one feels nostalgic for the centre because it is simpler with a centre: one knows where one is going. It seems to me that there is no longer any infinite. There is only some interminable. The problem of man is to assume this interminable.’3 The absence of horizon, or spiritual focus, is to be taken into account in the trying experience of temporal duration that is at stake in those Shakespearean tragedies in which symbolic dismemberment and deposition loom large. If there are pagan gods in King Lear, they are like ‘wanton boys’ (4.1.37). In King Richard II, the doctrine of divine right is so radically challenged that ‘God’s substitute’ (1.2.37) is deposed, imprisoned and murdered. These are different cases, but the absence, failure or negation of the divine has a part to play in the characters’ ability to test the temporal limits of their capacity to endure. Sometimes, it is as if transcendence had given way to degradation and torment. When Richard is imprisoned in Pomfret Castle, he seems to experience time as an implacable mechanism, as interminable. He is reduced to experiencing the movement of time extremely slowly: I wasted time, and now doth Time waste me; For now hath Time made me his numb’ring clock. My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar

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Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, Whereto my finger, like a dial’s point, Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. Now, sir, the sound that tells what hour it is Are clamorous groans which strike upon my heart, Which is the bell. So sighs, and tears, and groans Show minutes, times, and hours. But my time Runs posting on in Bolingbroke’s proud joy, While I stand fooling here, his jack o’the clock. (5.5.49–60)

The repetitive, hence maddening, circularity of the clock is evoked by the implacable mirror-effect that the chiasmus, ‘I wasted time … Time waste me’, creates. There is no escape for Richard. Quite ironically, his metaphor of the ‘jack o’the clock’, the relentless mechanism of objective time, or what Paul Ricoeur calls ‘the time of clocks, the time of monumental History, the time of figures of Authority’,4 is used to point to the subjective time of his ‘sighs, and tears, and groans’, that is, the flexible time of intimacy, Ricoeur’s ‘mortal time of the soul’.5 Richard is torn between these two forms of time, which his intellect can rhetorically reconcile but not his experience. Richard’s reflection upon time is triggered by ‘sour’ (5.5.42) music whose ‘time is broke’ (43). This faulty rhythm is so ‘sour’ that it is first experienced as if it were a torment: ‘This music mads me! Let it sound no more; / For though it have holp madmen to their wits, / In me it seems it will make wise men mad’ (61–3). The use of sour music as an instrument of torment to madden wise men will be given full scope with John Webster’s 1614 The Duchess of Malfi, precisely when the perverse Ferdinand imposes ‘the wild consort / Of madmen’ (4.2.1–2) and their ‘dismal kind of music’ (4.2.SD59) on his sister, the duchess, to torment her into madness.6 The very term ‘jack of the clock’ is also a way to emphasise Richard’s radical degradation: he who used to be ‘the figure of God’s majesty, / His captain, steward, deputy elect, / Anointed, crowned, planted many years’ (4.1.126–8), is now reduced, in a threefold way, to ‘a representative of the common ordinary people’ (caught in a process of indifferentiation), ‘a contemptible man’ (caught in a process of denigration) and ‘a mechanical figure of a man which strikes a bell on a clock’ (caught in a process of reification).7 And if we have Richard III in mind, especially the moment when Richard III

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dismisses Buckingham and scornfully compares him to a jack of the clock (4.2.114) before having him murdered,8 we know that the metaphor of the jack of the clock works as a harbinger of death. The degradation expressed by the metaphor of the jack of the clock is part of a larger process of degradation. Roland Barthes notes, ‘Richard II is not the story of a king speedily overthrown, it is the story of a slow descent into misfortune.’9 He explains, Tragic drama is always a drama of degradation; misfortune is revealed from figure to figure, for what is specifically tragic is not that man should be cast down, but that he should become progressively aware of his disgrace … This is quite precisely the case of Richard II, in which the triumphant king gradually discovers the extent of his misfortune; it is therefore important that this discovery should be discursive, that the offhand king should become imbued by the progressive numbing coldness of his death, and that at each stroke of fate a bit more of the unfortunate king should appear and lend further colour to the predatory king.10

This is precisely what occurs in Act 3, scene 2, with the chain of bad news reported by both Salisbury and Scroop, and the process is repeated in the deposition scene – which, however, does not yet deliver the final blow. Unkinged Richard’s rhetorical question, ‘What more remains?’ (4.1.222), is unexpectedly answered with ‘No more, but that you read / These accusations, and these grievous crimes / Committed by your person and your followers / Against the state and profit of this land, / That, by confessing them, the souls of men / May deem that you are worthily deposed’ (222–7). Such a public humiliation is more than Richard can endure. Northumberland’s insistence is experienced as harassment, and Richard exclaims, ‘Fiend, thou torments me ere I come to hell!’ (270). The lookingglass, which he finally manages to substitute for the offensive paper, symbolises the destruction of both his body politic and body natural. And yet more is to come: the painful farewell to his wife, his imprisonment at Pomfret, the Groom’s report of his own horse proudly mounted by Bolingbroke and the ‘rude assault’ (5.5.105) of his murderers. In King Lear as well, there is such a process of degradation, but it is as if the worst could always make a higher bid, while torment, although still metaphorically expressed, also takes a literal turn.

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‘To be worst, / The low’st and most dejected thing of fortune, / Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear. / The lamentable change is from the best; / The worst returns to laughter’ (4.1.2–6). No sooner has Edgar stood back from his situation, relativised his suffering and regained some optimism than he has to face an unexpected horror: his dejected father atrociously deprived of his eyes. Things can be far worse than the humiliation of his fall in status and the dietary degradation that he had been enduring in order not to betray his persona of Tom of Bedlam. The notion of the interminable comes close to the notion of the worst; the superlative becomes relative to make room for another superlative, which, in turn, becomes relative, or, as Edgar puts it: ‘O gods! Who is’t can say “I am at the worst”? / I am worse than e’er I was. / … / And worse I may be yet. The worst is not / So long as we can say “This is the worst”’ (4.1.25–28). Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin emphasises the paradox of endurance that fuels torment: ‘The play stages mechanisms of resistance (“endure”, “patience”) that delay the annihilation of the tortured victim. Ironically, these very mechanisms of resistance and avoidance prove “worse than murder” (2.2.213) by prolonging the ordeal.’11 An example of this is given when Edgar, telling how he ‘hid’ himself and knew ‘the miseries’ (5.3.170–1) of his father, regretfully exclaims, ‘O, our lives’ sweetness, / That we the pain of death would hourly die / Rather than die at once!’ (175–7). The torment that is supposedly the last recurs in the very next moment, in another form, as if perpetual. Those who suffer torments are the former banishers, now banished in turn, the formerly authoritative figures now turned powerless and forced to endure unnatural humiliations and mutilations. The interrogation that Gloucester undergoes in his own castle (Cornwall and Regan’s harassment echoes Northumberland’s insistent request that Richard should publicly confess his crimes after being deposed) is so violent that Gloucester feels trapped like a baited bear: ‘I am tied to th’ stake, and I must stand the course’ (3.7.52). It then climaxes with physical torment, with the inhuman putting out of his eyes, one after the other. Ironically, ‘this horrid act’ (85) simultaneously works as an eye-opener: the son he vainly calls on for help is the very one who betrayed him, as Regan tells him; he now understands that he mistook the ‘good’ son for the ‘bad’ son. This is the starting point of his moral torment.

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Lear’s trajectory runs parallel. He first undergoes the physical hardship of homelessness and the ‘tyranny of the open night’ ‘too rough / For nature to endure’ (3.4.2–3). Then, his torment takes on a moral dimension when he has to face Cordelia whom he unjustly repudiated and banished. It comes as no surprise that, having experienced what he felt as torture, he should resort to the metaphor of the wheel of fire when he addresses her: ‘You do me wrong to take me out o’th’ grave. / Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead’ (4.6.38–41). Lear’s metaphor evokes Ixion’s mythical torment: condemned to spend eternity in Tartarus, he was ‘bound to a fiery, winged, four-spoked wheel which revolved everlastingly’.12 For Kent, not only this moment but also Lear’s complete trajectory (from his daughters’ unnatural behaviour to the unbearable pain he suffers from Cordelia’s death) call forth a torment metaphor: ‘Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass. He hates him / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer’ (5.3.288–90). If, for Jaques, ‘[a]ll the world’s a stage’ (As You Like It, 2.7.139),13 for Kent, all the world is a rack. The metaphor of the rack betrays Kent’s emotion and highlights the fact that those whose torments are lesser nonetheless experience greater torment when they powerlessly witness their loved ones suffering. Such is the case for Kent but also for Edgar, who comes close to betraying his persona when he discovers his blinded father (‘I cannot daub it further’, 4.1.52), and for whom Lear’s raving madness is a ‘side-piercing sight!’ (4.5.85). Their capacity for empathy would mark them, in Boris Cyrulnik’s terms, as good ‘tutors of resilience’.14 In The Whispering of Ghosts, Cyrulnik explains, When we have lived through an extreme situation, when we have been banished from normality, there are several possible strategies. When the upheaval has been too great, we may find it oddly comforting to simply slip toward death. But when the injury hasn’t totally destroyed us and the internal resources instilled in the course of our early attachments still give us the strength to cling to others, the reintegration into normality depends on our emotional, social, and cultural environment.15

These ‘others’ are the ones he also calls ‘tutors of resilience’: people who help us to overcome a trauma, to activate our resilient

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capacities. In De chair et d’âme, Cyrulnik explains again: ‘to cancel out a past injury, one must have been hurt, wounded, traumatised, broken, torn, one must have been subjected to those words that translate the Greek verb titrôskô (trauma). One can discover in and around oneself some means to get back to life and resume one’s development, while keeping the memory of one’s wound. In such a case, we will speak of resilience.’16 It can be suggested that, in King Lear, Edgar and Cordelia, and Kent to a lesser extent, serve as ‘tutors of resilience’ for Gloucester and Lear, even if they fail in the end: Cordelia is murdered, Edgar does not realise that his father is at the limit of his strength, and, consequently, both Lear and Gloucester die of a heartbreak – or, to put it differently, out of exhaustion. ‘I am the very man’, Kent finally tells Lear, ‘[t]hat from your first of difference and decay / Have followed your sad steps’ (5.3.261, 263–4). Loyal Kent’s tragedy lies in his failure to prove a ‘tutor of resilience’ to Lear, in spite of his great devotion. At the end of the play, when he reveals his true identity and tells Lear that he was the king’s devoted servant Caius, Lear barely listens to him, obsessed and devastated as he is by Cordelia’s death and his failure to save her in extremis. Lear seems to intuit that only Cordelia could have done what Kent proved unable to do: help him into an emotional and meaningful life again, as he acknowledges, ‘This feather stirs. She lives. If it be so, / It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows / That ever I have felt’ (239–41). Had she lived, the aptly named Cordelia17 might have been his ‘tutor of resilience’. This she had started to be earlier, when she had him rescued from his erratic wandering, when she called upon the gods to ‘[c]ure this great breach in his abusèd nature’ (4.6.13), and, more significantly, when she instilled in him her restorative love: O my dear father, restoration hang Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss Repair those violent harms that my two sisters Have thy reverence made! (23–6)

‘Restoration’, ‘medicine’ and ‘repair’, together with ‘cure’ and ‘redeem’, create a strong semantic field that anticipates the notion of resilience. Interestingly, the character of the Doctor that was

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present in the Quarto version is absent from the Folio version (only the First Gentleman remains). According to Foakes, ‘the main purpose of the omission from F is probably to get rid of an unnecessary part’,18 but it has the effect of insisting on the fact that the medicine on Cordelia’s lips and her ability to be a ‘tutor of resilience’ could not be outdone. Unlike Edgar with Gloucester, Cordelia immediately took the measure of her father’s frailty once he had been rescued: ‘Alack, alack, / ’Tis wonder that thy life and wits at once / Had not concluded all!’ (4.6.33–5). As Foakes notes, ‘she appears as an embodiment of loving care in the final scene, combining aspects of a nurse, mother, daughter, and wife’.19 But her promising function as a ‘tutor of resilience’, or ‘agent of redemption’20 as Yves Bonnefoy would put it, is abruptly ended with the fatal issue of the war and Edmond’s order to have her hanged in her cell. What Cordelia could have been to Lear, Edgar could have been to Gloucester – not to save him from insanity, but symbolically to restore his sight. Gloucester himself affirms, ‘O dear son Edgar, / The food of thy abusèd father’s wrath – / Might I but live to see thee in my touch / I’d say I had eyes again’ (4.1.21–4). For Gloucester, the simple fact of touching his son’s face with his hands would be an act of reparation in itself, the redemption of the injustice he committed, a way of expressing his fatherly love, his shame and his compassion. As opposed to Edmond’s hand, which is ‘the hand that manipulates’ – as when Edmond counterfeits Edgar’s writing to produce a forged letter damning for his half-brother – Gloucester’s hand might now be ‘the hand that understands’,21 the hand that feels and ‘accepts to be for and by this otherness that touches it’.22 Edgar’s declared intention is to help his father out of his despondency; this is how he justifies his strange performance when, still in the guise of a Bedlam beggar, he guides his father to the supposed top of the cliff at Dover, seemingly to comply with his wish to commit suicide: ‘Why I do trifle thus with his despair / Is done to cure it’ (4.5.33–4). But, as Stanley Cavell has observed, ‘revealing himself would seem the surest and most immediate way to do that’.23 To Cavell, ‘Edgar’s avoidance of Gloucester’s recognition precisely deprives Gloucester of his eyes again’ and links him ‘to Cornwall and the sphere of open evil’.24 Hence his question, why does Edgar delay revealing himself to his father? His first answer is, ‘He is himself ashamed and guilty. He was as gullible as his father was to Edmund’s “invention”. He

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failed to confront his father, to trust his love, exactly as his father had failed him … He wants to make it up to his father before asking for his recognition.’25 And his second answer is, ‘He cannot bear the fact that his father is incapable, impotent, maimed. He wants his father still to be a father, powerful, so that he can remain a child.’26 Cavell’s two insightful suppositions of what Edgar’s unconscious motivation may be suggest that Edgar is not ready yet, not mature enough to act as a ‘tutor of resilience’. It seems that Edgar earlier intuited that such ‘trifling’ was not the right thing to do, as he said in his aside, ‘Bad is the trade that must play fool to sorrow, / Ang’ring itself and others’ (4.1.39–40). It is so bad that when he stops ‘playing fool to sorrow’, it is too late. So he later acknowledges, ‘[I] became his guide, / Led him, begged for him, saved him from despair; / Never – O fault! – revealed myself unto him / Until some half hour past, when I was armed’ (5.3.181–4). He was ‘armed’ all right for his combat against Edmond, but unprepared for his father’s weak heart, which was unable to stand the shock of the revelation. Edgar’s ‘fault’ lies in his overestimating his father’s capacity to endure, in his ignoring or misreading the signs of exhaustion that his father continued to show – as when the latter told him, ‘No further, sir. A man may rot even here’ (5.2.8), and Edgar answered, ‘What, in ill thoughts again?’ (9).27

Exhaustion: mental and physical manifestations When Gloucester endures the unspeakable cruelty of being blinded and then is bluntly told about the unnatural betrayal of Edmond, he ‘experiences a type of otherness that, by its very nature, cannot be appropriated by the subject’.28 Without his eyes, he is doomed to wander through a ‘haptic space’ that he immediately apprehends as being all ‘dark and comfortless’ (3.7.83), an apprehension that Kent will echo at the end of the play when he says, ‘All’s cheerless, dark, and deadly’ (5.3.265). Unsurprisingly, Kent – like Gloucester previously – envisages exhaustion: with the death of his king and master, the realm is merely a ‘smooth space’, a space in which he feels deterritorialised. This is why he rejects Albany’s offer to rule the kingdom jointly with Edgar and answers, ‘I have a journey, sir, shortly to go: / My master calls me; I must not say no’ (296–7).

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Housset’s analysis sheds light on both Gloucester and Kent when they consider putting an end to their lives: For a subject thus deprived of his transcendence, that is, of his freedom, life is no more than a dark night in which nothing happens: individual life is reduced to an inner fatality in a tragic temporality. This event that cannot be appropriated is not what transforms me into a being different from the being I imagined I could be, but it annihilates any capacity of being and, in that case, interiority is exposed to the possibility of its own disappearance.29

We understand why Gloucester, confined as he is in darkness, asks the Bedlam beggar to bring him to the very brim of the cliff ‘whose high and bending head / Looks fearfully in the confinèd deep’ (4.1.67–8). The use of pathetic fallacy30 indicates that Gloucester’s intent has nothing to do with bravery or Stoicism – as noted by Hebron, suicide used to be admired by the Stoics as ‘the supreme act of the sovereign will’31 before Christianity considered it as a sin against God’s will. When Gloucester addresses the pagan gods before letting himself fall forward, he confesses his exhaustion and incapacity to go on:        O you mighty gods, This world I do renounce, and in your sights Shake patiently my great affliction off! If I could bear it longer, and not fall To quarrel with your great opposeless wills, My snuff and loathèd part of nature should Burn itself out. (4.5.34–40)

He knows this is not an act of courage, but rather a way, as Hamlet would put it, to ‘end / The heartache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to’ (Hamlet, 3.1.62–4). Gloucester’s letting go is the consequence of a psychic exhaustion resulting from his former tragic lack of insight – he ‘stumbled’ when he ‘saw’ (4.1.19) – from the loneliness and meaninglessness he now experiences in a kingdom upside-down, in which the mad lead the blind, in which free will seems illusory and in which disillusioned man cannot but bitterly conclude, ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods; / They kill us for their sport’ (4.1.37–8). Gloucester’s vision seems to be reminiscent of that of the Stoics, who, as Gourinat notes, ‘regard

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man’s own individuality as a negligible entity or accept to submit it to a universal perspective’.32 Gourinat adds, ‘This is certainly the condition required of a Stoic: to endure the hardships of life out of the conviction that we ourselves are barely significant in comparison with the universe.’33 But Gloucester’s decision to end his life shows, as far as he is concerned, the limits of this aspect of Stoic thought. Against the Stoic idea that ‘we are barely significant’, Edgar anticipates the Christian doctrine and tells his father, ‘Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours / Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee’ (4.5.73–4). But his use of the imperative ‘think’ betrays that this is no more than a mental strategy. Listening to him, Gloucester seems morally fortified and ready to endure anew: ‘Henceforth I’ll bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself / “Enough, enough”, and die’ (75–7). But after coming across Lear raving in madness, he vacillates again and pictures a new means of escape: The King is mad. How stiff is my vile sense, That I stand up and have ingenious feeling Of my huge sorrows! Better I were distraught, So should my thoughts be severed from my griefs, And woes by wrong imaginations lose The knowledge of themselves. (271–6)

Looking (through what he hears) at the gloomy world depicted by Lear, ‘wrong imaginations’, the mental elsewhere of madness, appear to him as ‘a consummation / Devoutly to be wished’ (Hamlet, 3.1.64–5). But he has no control over the sanity of his mind, as he can have over his life. So when he is told that the battle is lost and Lear and Cordelia taken prisoner, he falls prey to his former temptation: ‘No further, sir. A man may rot even here’ (5.2.8). Edgar, however, does not take this new sign of exhaustion into account; he tries to teach his father general lessons in endurance: ‘Men must endure / Their going hence even as their coming hither. / Ripeness is all’ (9–11). Yet, ironically, the son who preaches lessons in endurance and patience is the one who concludes at the end of the tragedy, still in a generalising mode, ‘The oldest hath borne most. We that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long’ (5.3.300–1). Has he finally understood that anyone could reach his own point of no

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return? Will he, from now on, be attentive to signs of exhaustion, able to see the inadequacy of rhetorical moral fortification when faced with real manifestations of exhaustion? Not only was he unable to prove a genuine ‘tutor of resilience’ to his father, but it seems that he unwittingly gave him the coup de grâce. The exhaustion of the victims of torture manifests itself through broken syntax and images of ‘cracking’, ‘breaking’ and ‘bursting’, which betray an emotion too intense to be sustained. When Lear is faced with Cordelia’s death, his syntax becomes paratactic and his words sound like the compulsive repetition of a desperate cry or helpless stuttering: ‘Howl, howl, howl, howl!’ (5.3.231), ‘No, no, no life?’ (280), ‘Thou’lt come no more. / Never, never, never, never, never’ (282–3) – outbursts which also disrupt the iambic pentameter rhythm with clusters of syllables or successive trochaic inversions. The ruptures of the syntagmatic axis signal that meaning turns without gripping, that it is the syntax of the very world of Lear that is breaking. The unbearable intensity of his intimate pain is expressed in terms of what Bonnefoy calls a ‘cracking of the cosmos’:34 Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones. Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for ever. I know when one is dead and when one lives. She’s dead as earth. (231–5)

As if listening to Kent’s prayer, ‘Break, heart, I prithee break’ (287), Lear’s heart actually does break, thus following Gloucester’s. Whether because of irretrievable loss or unexpected reunion, emotional intensity produces the same lethal effect upon exhausted souls and bodies – stoic precepts enjoining control of emotions are, like the death of Edmond that is announced, but ‘a trifle here’ (270). Gloucester’s heartbreak is not shown on stage but reported. Edgar tells Albany, Not sure, though hoping, of this good success [his victory over Edmond], I asked his blessing, and from first to last Told him our pilgrimage; but his flawed heart – Alack, too weak the conflict to support –

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’Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, Burst smilingly. (5.3.185–9)

Because he wants to breach the narrative gap of his outlaw status and thus tells a story as complete as possible, that is, exhaustive, Edgar exhausts his father’s ultimate strength. The oxymoronic tension between joy (that of being at last reunited with his son) and grief (that of realising the great hardship he, directly or indirectly, inflicted upon him), which metaphorically evokes the torment of dismemberment, results in a reaction that is also oxymoronic: Gloucester’s heart ‘burst smilingly’. As Edgar’s narration reactivates intense emotions, it kills the father and also threatens to exhaust the storyteller: ‘List a brief tale, / And when ‘tis told, O that my heart would burst!’ (172–3). Or is it a rhetorical mimetism (echoing ‘Burst smilingly’) that betrays the son’s new feeling of guilt and wish for atonement? In the Quarto version, Edgar goes on with a similar story that reads as a variation on this one – a variation that verges on repetition and has been deemed ‘unnecessary dramatically, and something of an anti-climax following on Edgar’s account of his father’s death’,35 which may explain why it was not included in the Folio. He tells of his recognition of and reunion with Kent, a story which includes Kent’s role as Caius: Whilst I was big in clamour came there in a man Who, having seen me in my worst estate, Shunned my abhorred society; but then, finding Who ’twas that so endured, with his strong arms He fastened on my neck and bellowed out As he’d burst heaven; threw him on my father, Told the most piteous tale of Lear and him That ever ear received, which in recounting His grief grew puissant and the strings of life Began to crack. (Scene 24, 204–13)

Again, the intensity of the story (enhanced with intensifiers and superlatives like ‘so’, ‘the most’, ‘ever’, and adjectives like ‘strong’ and ‘puissant’) nearly proves lethal for the storyteller, who can barely stand the emotional shock. The two stories of disguise for survival, of hardship and endurance, and of devotion, create mirror-effects that intensify pathos. But if Kent and Edgar are here presented as

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near alter egos, their ends radically differ: Edgar survives his father and, at least in the Folio text, seems to agree to sustain ‘the gored state’ (5.3.295), whereas Kent already has his exit in mind; neither Edgar nor Albany can be envisaged as a possible ‘tutor of resilience’ for him. The sequence of deaths (Cordelia’s hanging, which triggers Lear’s heartbreak, which elicits Kent’s ‘following Lear beyond the grave’36) hastens the tragedy to its end or, as Robert Ellrodt puts it, ‘results in “entropy” on a stage strewn with corpses’.37 This seems to suggest that the anchorage needed by the characters and endowing their respective existences with meaning is not spatio-temporal but human; the deep attachment is to a person rather than a land, a person whose intense presence has the power to obliterate both spacetime and the territorial dialectic of inclusion and exclusion. When the strings of life threaten to crack, the sense of belonging shifts from political geography to the intimate cartography of emotions.

Notes 1 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘endure, vb.’, II. 4. a. 2 Housset, L’Intériorité d’exil, p. 182; my translation of ‘Le monde inquiétant de la folie révèle l’étonnante fragilité du monde “normal” et la nécessité de sans cesse porter le sens du monde, dans l’exigence surhumaine de ne pas céder à la fatigue.’ 3 Bernard Noël, L’Espace du poème, Entretiens avec Dominique Sampiero (Paris: P.O.L, 1998), p. 19; my translation of ‘Depuis qu’il n’y a plus de figure centrale, c’est-à-dire de figure divine, on garde la nostalgie du centre parce que c’est plus simple qu’il y ait du centre. Pour savoir où l’on va. Il me semble qu’il n’y a plus d’infini. Il y a de l’interminable. Le problème de l’homme est d’assumer cet interminable.’ 4 Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit. Tome II: La configuration dans le récit de fiction (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1984), p. 201; my translation of ‘[t]emps des horloges, temps de l’histoire monumentale, temps des figures d’Autorité’. 5 Ibid., p. 207; my translation of ‘temps mortel de l’âme’. 6 John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Michael Neill, Norton Critical Editions (New York: Norton, 2015). 7 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Jack, n. 2’, I. 1. a; I. 2. a.; phrases (‘Jack of the clock-house’).

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8 William Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. Anthony Hammond, The Arden Shakespeare (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1981). 9 Roland Barthes, Écrits sur le théâtre, ed. Jean-Loup Rivière (Paris: Seuil, 2002), p. 65; my translation of ‘Richard II n’est pas l’histoire d’un roi précipité, c’est celle d’une longue descente au malheur.’ 10 Ibid., p. 65 (Barthes’ italics); my translation of ‘Le théâtre tragique est toujours un théâtre de la dégradation, le malheur s’y dévoile de figure en figure, car ce qui est proprement tragique, ce n’est pas que l’homme soit abattu, c’est qu’il soit entraîné dans une connaissance de sa disgrâce … Ceci est très exactement le cas de Richard II, où le roi triomphant connaît peu à peu la ligne de son malheur; il importe donc que cette connaissance soit discursive, que le roi désinvolte se pénètre par transissement progressif du froid de sa mort, et qu’à chaque coup du sort, un peu plus du roi malheureux ressorte, et colore davantage le roi prédateur.’ 11 Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, ‘“‘tis worse than murder” (II, 2, 213): King Lear ou les derniers outrages’, in Pascale Drouet and Pierre Iselin (eds), ‘The true blank of thine eye’. Approches critiques de King Lear (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2009), p. 272; my translation of ‘La pièce met en scène des mécanismes de résistance (“endure”, “patience”) qui diffèrent l’anéantissement du supplicié. Ironiquement, ce sont ces mécanismes de résistance et d’évitement qui rendent cette entreprise “pire que le meurtre” en prolongeant le supplice.’ 12 Michael Grant and John Hazel, Who’s Who in Classical Mythology (London: Routledge, 2002), ‘Ixion’, p. 251. 13 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Alan Brissenden, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 14 Boris Cyrulnik’s term (my translation of ‘tuteurs de résilience’). See, among other writings, ‘Comment un professionnel peut-il devenir tuteur de résilience?’, in Cyrulnik and Seron (eds), La Résilience ou comment renaître de sa souffrance?, pp. 23–42. 15 Boris Cyrulnik, The Whispering of Ghosts: Trauma and Resilience, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2005), pp. 121–2. In the original text: ‘Quand on a connu une situation extrême, quand on a été chassé de la normalité, plusieurs stratégies sont possibles. Quand le fracas a été trop grand, il arrive qu’on éprouve un étrange soulagement à se laisser aller vers la mort. Mais quand la blessure ne nous a pas totalement détruits et que les ressources internes imprégnées au cours de nos attachements précoces nous donnent encore la force de nous raccrocher aux autres, la réintégration dans la normalité dépend alors de l’alentour affectif, social et culturel’, Le Murmure des fantômes (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005), p. 135.

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16 Cyrulnik, De Chair et d’âme, pp. 20–1; my translation of ‘pour résilier un malheur passé, il faut justement avoir été vulnéré, blessé, traumatisé, effracté, déchiré, avoir subi ces mots qui traduisent le verbe grec titrôskô (traumatisme). On peut aussi découvrir en soi et autour de soi quelques moyens qui permettent de revenir à la vie et de reprendre un développement, tout en gardant la blessure dans sa mémoire. Là, on parlera de résilience.’ 17 F. G. Butler notes that her very name suggests that ‘she is a cordial, or healing restorer’, ‘Lear’s Crown of Weeds’, English Studies 70:5 (October 1989), 403. 18 Foakes, footnote at 4.7.24–5, p. 352, King Lear (The Arden Shakespeare). 19 Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence, p. 144. 20 Bonnefoy, Shakespeare and the French Poet, p. 23. In the original text: ‘agent de rédemption’, Théâtre et poésie: Shakespeare et Yeats, p. 80. 21 Housset’s distinction in L’Intériorité d’exil, p. 283. My translation of ‘la main qui manipule’ and ‘la main qui comprend’. 22 Ibid., pp. 290–1; my translation of ‘accepte d’être pour et par cette altérité qui la touche’. 23 Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 54 (Cavell’s emphasis). 24 Ibid., p. 55. 25 Ibid., p. 54. 26 Ibid., p. 56 (Cavell’s emphasis). 27 Emphasis mine. 28 Housset, L’Intériorité d’exil, p. 191; my translation of ‘[fait] l’épreuve d’une altérité en soi inappropriable par le sujet’. 29 Ibid., p. 191; my translation of ‘Pour un sujet ainsi privé de sa transcendance, c’est-à-dire de sa liberté, la vie n’est plus qu’une nuit noire dans laquelle rien ne se passe: la vie individuelle se trouve réduite à une fatalité intérieure dans une temporalité tragique. Cet événement non appropriable n’est pas ici ce qui me fait devenir autre que ce que j’imaginais pouvoir être, mais il supprime tout pouvoir d’être et, ici, l’intériorité est exposée à la possibilité de sa propre disparition.’ 30 ‘The cliff becomes a person terrified by the sight of the sea far below’, Foakes notes. Foakes, footnote at 4.1.77, p. 309, King Lear (The Arden Shakespeare). 31 Hebron, Key Concepts, ‘Stoicism’, p. 110. 32 Gourinat, Le Stoïcisme, p. 116; my translation of ‘tiennent pour rien l’individualité propre de l’homme ou acceptent de la soumettre à une perspective universelle’.

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33 Ibid., pp. 116–17; my translation of ‘C’est certainement la condition nécessaire pour être stoïcien: supporter les épreuves de la vie par conviction que nous sommes nous-mêmes de peu d’importance par rapport à l’univers.’ 34 Bonnefoy, Shakespeare and the French Poet, p. 25. In the original text: ‘ce craquement du cosmos’, Théâtre et poésie, p. 83. 35 Foakes, footnote at 5.3.203–20, p. 380, King Lear (The Arden Shakespeare). 36 Foakes, footnote at 5.3.320, p. 392, ibid. 37 Ellrodt, ‘Notice pour Le Roi Lear’, p. 1364; my translation of ‘aboutit à l’“entropie” sur une scène jonchée de cadavres’. Ellrodt borrows the term ‘entropy’ from James L. Calderwood, ‘Creative Uncreation in King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986), 15.

12 Maps of emotions

The heart has its reasons that political affairs do not know – or barely know. The fear of destruction, the imminence of disappearance and the face-to-face encounter with death (all resulting from abuse of power, exclusion or retribution) reveal this polarity. One either belongs to a country or is deeply attached to a person, this because political commitment and national duty prove incompatible with personal feelings (as is the case for Coriolanus), because the future of the country or the reality of the place where one dwells becomes derisory compared with deep love (as for Kent and Lear), because, conversely, one can be denied or even crushed, and the priority given to the country out of allegiance to the king (John of Gaunt) or out of an identification with a particular idea of it (Volumnia).

When the homeland matters more than human beings Although their respective children were banished from their homelands, Volumnia and John of Gaunt are still attached, the former to Rome and her narrow idea of Romanitas, the latter to England. Their objectives, however, have nothing in common, and they can even be considered as opposed figures: both are rhetorically skilled, both are patriots, but whereas John of Gaunt has no ulterior motives (at least Shakespeare chooses to make no mention of them) and genuinely suffers from nostalgia for the kingdom that existed before Richard II was crowned king of England, Volumnia knows where her interest lies, has her own agenda and does not hesitate to sacrifice her son for the good of Rome (as she sees it).

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At the end of Act 1 of King Richard II, Bushy tells the king that John of Gaunt is ‘grievous sick’ (1.4.54), ‘[s]uddenly taken’ (55) by illness. Indeed, Gaunt dies at the very beginning of Act 2, but not before speaking plainly and fearlessly. His fierce criticism of the way Richard  II misrules England is thrown into relief by the patriotic feelings and the nostalgia for past greatness that he expressed just before the king’s arrival. Listening to Gaunt, one gets the impression that he is the exile; he feels exiled from a former England that was like a promised land and a glorious matrix. To Gaunt, England used to be this ‘land of such dear souls, this dear dear land’ (2.1.57); ‘land’ and ‘souls’ are equally ‘dear’, but the land comes first, and the ‘dear souls’, however ‘[f]eared by their breed and famous by their birth’ (52), owe their excellence to it. Gaunt emphasises the contrast between past and present: ‘That England that was wont to conquer others / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself’ (65–6). And he would be ready to sacrifice himself, could this ‘earth of majesty’ (41) be redeemed: ‘Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life, / How happy then were my ensuing death!’ (67–8). Gaunt reproaches Richard II with his devaluing of the national territory, his ‘let[ting] this land by lease’ (2.1.110), but also with resorting to murder so as to break the filiation of Edward III’s royal lineage and Gaunt’s family. Although Gaunt puts the emphasis on the land and the disastrous consequences of Richard’s mismanagement and ‘rash fierce blaze of riot’ (33), he also reminds the king of the part he played in his personal decline when he banished his son. According to Forker, the couplet that contains Gaunt’s final words, ‘Convey me to my bed, then to my grave. / Love they to live that love and honour have’ (137–8), means that ‘having lost both the love and respect (honour) of his king and nephew, he would rather die than live’,1 but it may also impersonally express a nostalgia that is twofold: for his banished son (‘love’) and for the English land (‘honour’). On the brink of death, Gaunt suffers doubly from pothos: on the one hand, he shows ‘a yearning desire for a distant object’,2 the glorious past of England; on the other hand, he also has a ‘yearning for a lost child, or a beloved’.3 So, in the end, Gaunt only expresses his ‘longing for sleep and death’.4 Before leaving England, Bolingbroke’s last words are for the English kingdom, which he also presents as his nourishing earth: ‘Then England’s ground, farewell! Sweet soil, adieu – / My mother

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and my nurse that bears me yet! / Where’er I wander, boast of this I can, / Though banished, yet a true-born Englishman’ (1.3.306–9). He shares his father’s point of view and ethos; he is attached to his homeland and owes his sense of self to it. Conversely, Coriolanus, once banished, rejects Rome forever – or so he thinks. Unlike Bolingbroke, who intends to remain ‘a true-born Englishman’ (309), Coriolanus retaliates, joining his former enemy Aufidius; he breaks off communication with his family and friends; he turns mercenary and faces his ‘becoming-machine’, his ‘becoming-animal’ and his ‘becoming-divine’.5 As noted before, the god of war is the one who ‘unties the bond just as he betrays the pact’.6 The only place he can now belong to is the ever-moving space of the battlefield; although he is unable to reterritorialise himself, he is still powerful enough to deterritorialise others. He lives on the fantasy of radical rupture: ‘out, affection! / All bond and privilege of nature break’ (5.3.24–5). He presents himself as the result of autogenesis: ‘I’ll never / Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin’ (34–7). Coriolanus is blinded by ‘this mirage of an absolute circular configuration in which essence and form, origin and goal, would become only one’, which can be glossed as ‘the fantasy of annihilating any idea of filiation and heritage, be it familial, historical, cultural or even fictional’.7 But Coriolanus is put to the test just after telling Aufidius firmly, ‘Fresh embassies and suits, / Nor from the state nor private friends, hereafter / Will I lend ear to’ (5.3.17–19). The tension that Menenius’ visit already created between private emotion (‘with a cracked heart I have sent to Rome’, 9) and political appearances (‘I showed sourly to him’, 13) seems to augur ill for the next visit. Coriolanus may prove unable to confront his supplicant mother, since his subjectivity is not ‘a subjectivity that is freed from subjection, sovereign, that needs to account only to itself’.8 Volumnia’s strategy is to reaffirm blood ties and to remind Coriolanus of how much he owes to her. ‘Thou art my warrior, / I holp to frame thee’ (5.3.62–3), she tells him; she reminds him of ‘the duty which / To a mother’s part belongs’ (168–9). She blackmails him emotionally, uttering a speech that induces feelings of guilt: ‘if you fail in our request, the blame / May hang upon your hardness’ (91–2). She suggests how unworthy, even unnatural, a son he would be if he were to deny her suit: ‘There’s no man in the world / More

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bound to’s mother, yet here he lets me prate / Like one i’th’ stocks’ (159–61). Coriolanus, she insinuates, is treating his own mother as if she were a rogue or a vagrant exposed to public infamy, suffering both from filial denial and social debasement. Her purpose here is to save not her son but Rome (and herself) from her son’s ‘war machine’. As if she could not consciously acknowledge that, in the end, her city might matter more than her son, she seems to face a dilemma: ‘Alack, or we must lose / The country, our dear nurse, or else thy person, / Our comfort in the country’ (110–12). But at the same time she challenges her son with the devastating equation: Rome is me, the homeland is my womb. She personifies the motherland: ‘thou shalt no sooner / March to assault thy country than to tread – / Trust to’t, thou shalt not – on thy mother’s womb / That brought thee to this world’ (123–6). If he assaults Rome, Coriolanus will be guilty of matricide. As opposed to Gaunt, who better dissociates the private from the public sphere (as when he tells the king, ‘You urged me as a judge, but I had rather / You would have bid me argue like a father’, 1.3.237–8), Volumnia ‘immediately subverts the opposition between psychological approach and political approach’.9 Coriolanus is trapped by his mother’s rhetoric. As Sibony notes, ‘Coriolanus’ misfortune lies in his being unable to betray his mother, in his being unreasonably faithful to his origins, indissociable from them, betrayed by them and yet dependent on their betrayal’.10 Once banished, Coriolanus is deterritorialised, but he retains within himself a hypertrophied root: his mother. According to Gaston Bachelard, the root is a ‘dynamic image’ that has ‘the most diverse of powers’: ‘It is both a power to uphold – to hold up – and a power to terebrate – to bore down’.11 When Volumnia makes her son yield to her request, she digs his grave, as Coriolanus realises,      O my mother, mother, O! You have won a happy victory to Rome; But for your son, believe it, O believe it, Most dangerously you have with him prevailed, If not most mortal to him. But let it come. – (5.3.186–90)

What Cavell calls ‘his words of agony’,12 especially his surprising ‘But let it come’, betray his exhaustion or resignation, or, according

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to Richard Hillman, the movement towards ‘self-destruction’ that underlies his ‘heroic self-assertion’.13 On the surface of it, his mother requires from him that he should let go, and he accepts this; he has realised that his mother did her utmost to recreate filial bonds only to sacrifice him to Rome. But he, in tears, has taken her hand – a strong symbolic gesture of acknowledgement and love. As Housset observes, ‘[t]he hand reveals man in its entirety as a being engaged with the world, it reveals man as a free being in the world, and this is why describing the mode of being of the hand amounts to elucidating the mode of being in the world that is specific to man’.14 At this very moment, Coriolanus’ hand reveals Coriolanus’ emotional mystery, his deepest intimacy; it reveals a man who has finally managed to resist the ‘circular temptation’. His hand ‘manifests the transitiveness of existence’.15 His transitiveness to his mother – that is, his privileged relationship with her without intermediary, or, as Parker puts it, both his ‘loving reconciliation and acceptance’ and his ‘surrender and emotional dependence’16 – returns the man who ‘moves like an engine’ (5.4.19) to a vulnerable human being, and that ultimately kills him.

‘For where thou art, there is the world itself’ As they are forced to leave their homelands, several banished characters (Queen Isabel in Richard II; Lear; and Suffolk in King Henry VI, Part 2) choose to focus on beloved beings and regard them as an emotional map that mentally creates a new territory on which they can reterritorialise no matter what their geographical situation, regardless of their exile. What appears as irreplaceable is not the homeland but these beloved beings who become the banished figures’ landmark, their home base, their entire cartography. The banished figures are thereby enabled to recreate their freedom of thought, speech and movement, and the sense and legitimacy of existence that banishment had deprived them of. They have understood that, to adopt Housset’s terms, ‘man finds his significant place in the world only by the blessing presence of the other: the other, because of the love he has for me, or simply because he even unintentionally calls for my love, outlines a place and opens a present where I can exist’.17

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The final act of King Richard II starts with the farewell scene between the deposed king, now about to be imprisoned, and his ‘[g]ood sometimes queen’ (5.1.37), now enjoined to go swiftly back to France. Queen Isabel has a dramatic function, mainly that of introducing pathos, but she also embodies devoted, absolute love. Watching for Richard to come by on his way to the prison, she speaks to herself. When she sees him, she uses a flower metaphor that expresses her genuine care for him and a compassion that she wishfully endows with redeeming qualities, as if she could be a ‘tutor of resilience’: ‘But soft, but see, or rather do not see / My fair rose wither. Yet look up, behold, / That you in pity may dissolve to dew / And wash him fresh again with true-love tears’ (7–10). This is the first of a series of metaphors revealing, at this specific moment (5.1), that the king is her support, her emotional map. Thus she addresses him, ‘Ah, thou, the model where old Troy did stand, / Thou map of honour, thou King Richard’s tomb, / And not King Richard! Thou most beauteous inn’ (11–13). The paradigmatic axis of mostly spatial metaphors that she deploys reads as a metaphor for her emotional landmarks. Whether a citadel that used to be impregnable, or a tomb that protects the bones of the dead, or an inn in which one feels at home, Richard evokes a protective dwelling. The reference to old Troy introduces the motif of the ruin, which, as Marie-Madeleine Martinet has shown, conveys ‘the contrast between the incomplete present and the past in its integrity’, and ‘supposes the relationship between fragment and totality, as the passing of time destroyed entities from which only pieces remain, and it can conversely symbolise the integrative power of imagination and memory, which can recreate a world from a fragment’.18 Isabel retains an image of Richard that is intact, and she projects herself along with it in the realm of her imagination. To her paradigmatic axis fraught with metaphors, Richard prefers the syntagmatic axis that can recount his own trajectory, the (partial) story of ‘the deposing of a rightful king’ (5.1.50). This is why, intuiting his impending death, he asks his wife to be the guardian of his memory, his benevolent biographer: ‘Tell thou the lamentable tale of me / And send the hearers weeping to their beds’ (44–5). There is no possibility of resilience in the present, but the prospect of narrative restoration can serve as mental help. For Richard, the imposed parting from his wife duplicates in the domestic sphere the unnatural deed

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of the political deposition; he considers it as sacrilegious, and so he tells Northumberland, ‘Doubly divorced! Bad men, you violate / A twofold marriage, ’twixt my crown and me / And then betwixt me and my married wife’ (71–3). But he knows that he is doomed to obey Northumberland’s order. Isabel, however, cannot bear the idea of their being parted and makes a last effort, imploring, ‘Banish us both, and send the King with me’ (83), ‘Then whither he goes, thither let me go’ (85). There is no deterritorialisation whatsoever as long as she stays with him. The same idea is to be found in King Lear: what matters to Lear, whether in prison or elsewhere, is to remain with Cordelia. Once the war is lost, Cordelia turns to her father and affirms, ‘For thee, oppressèd King, I am cast down, / Myself could else outfrown false fortune’s frown’ (5.3.5–7). But Lear barely listens, elated as he is to be with her again, to be forgiven, taken care of and loved by her. His speech, out of tune with Cordelia’s, drifts away from the reality of defeat and reconfigures the present according to his own fantasy:          Come, let’s away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i’th’ cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness; so we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too – Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out, And take upon ’s the mystery of things As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones That ebb and flow by th’ moon. (5.3.8–19)

Captivity with Cordelia is interpreted not as a punishment, but as the unhoped-for opportunity to share time together, to recreate intimacy, to fully enjoy the presence of the beloved being, as if the pure presence and the intensity of togetherness could transcend temporality. The enclosed space of the cell will favour a proximity with his daughter as Lear imagines it. At last, Lear will experience with Cordelia what Bonnefoy calls ‘an epiphany of the unbroken, of the full presence of all things together’,19 an ‘epiphany [that] resides in

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the simple’.20 Each of them will simply be the raison d’être of the other. From Sibony’s psychoanalytical point of view, Lear expresses the fantasy of a ‘pleasure in its pure state’.21 With Cordelia in it, the cell is transformed into a sort of ivory tower that has the qualities of a panopticon: in a fantasy of radical inversion, the prisoners cut off from society and under surveillance are like ‘God’s spies’, able to discuss sociopolitical fluctuations and meditate upon them. The question of ‘Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out’, which had probably been crucial until Lear divided his kingdom, is now relegated to the background; the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion, of the margin and the centre, is no more than some form of entertainment. What matters is elsewhere, in the intimate microcosm that he shares with Cordelia. According to Sibony, His reverie: we will be together, the two of us, telling one another stories … we will be … ‘God’s spies’. This is very beautiful and very ambiguous: a divine couple watching the world on the behalf of God, seeing the hidden sins that only God judges. A perfect effusiveness, the symmetrical inversion of his failed couple with the bad mother (duplicated with the two daughters, two shrews). But both these couples, the one idyllic and the other horrible, are equally lethal.22

The impossible couple that Lear would form with Cordelia is not unlike what Volumnia touches on with her weird conditional ‘[i]f my son were my husband’ (1.3.2–3). Exclusive love between mother and son, or father and daughter, could verge on the incestuous and unnatural. But if Volumnia has always instrumentalised Coriolanus, it seems that Lear has always loved Cordelia to the point of preferring her to her sisters – ‘He always loved our sister most’ (1.1.285– 6), Goneril tells Regan – and he, unlike Volumnia, will not get over his child’s death. Lear’s vain ‘reverie’ of ‘[w]e two alone’ (5.3.9) and Isabel’s ineffective plea of ‘whither he goes, thither let me go’ (Richard II, 5.1.85) are reminiscent of Suffolk’s speech in King Henry VI, Part 2. After murdering Humphrey, Suffolk is banished, but he cannot bring himself to leave the queen, who is his lover. He tells her, ’Tis not the land I care for, wert thou thence:

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A wilderness is populous enough, So Suffolk had thy heavenly company. For where thou art, there is the world itself, With every several pleasure in the world; And where thou art not, desolation. (3.2.359–64)23

‘Desolation’ is a strong concluding term, which can be understood as both ‘deprivation of companionship; the condition or sense of being forsaken; solitariness, loneliness’ (referring to the queen’s absence) and ‘the condition of a place which by hostile ravaging or by natural character is unfit for habitation; waste or ruined state; dready barrenness’ (referring to some land of exile).24 By their mere presence, the beloved one illuminates any wasteland, banishes loneliness and barrenness and endows life with brightness. But were they away, meaning would collapse and the distraught lover would find himself in a ‘world thunderstruck’.25 Suffolk’s ‘desolation’ sounds similar to what Barthes terms ‘disreality’ and defines as a ‘sentiment of absence and withdrawal of reality experienced by the amorous subject, confronting the world’.26 Barthes explains, ‘everything seems inert to me, cut off, thunderstruck – like a waste planet, a Nature uninhabited by man’.27 In a world experienced as ‘disreal’, there is no real left, ‘so that I no longer have any meaning (any paradigm) available to me’.28 This reminds us of the way the Duchess of Gloucester, in King Richard II, perceives Pleshy once the duke, ‘Thomas, [her] dear lord, [her] life, [her] Gloucester’ (1.2.16), has been murdered: ‘empty lodgings and unfurnished walls, / Unpeopled offices, untrodden stones’ (68–9) – that is, an extension of absence, a defamiliarised dwelling reduced to privative prefixes and where sorrow ‘dwells everywhere’ (72). Hence her desperate cry, ‘Desolate, desolate, will I hence and die!’ (73) – a cry of letting go. Both Suffolk’s and the Duchess of Gloucester’s experience of ‘disreality’ prefigures the ‘desolation’ (5.2.1) of Cleopatra after Antony’s death, when ‘the odds is gone / And there is nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon’ (4.15.68–70).29 In King Lear, Cordelia’s death abolishes the hierarchy of the world. Lear’s desperate questioning testifies to this: ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?’ (5.3.281– 2). Her loss is incommensurable because she is irreplaceable; everything, therefore, collapses. To adopt Barthes’s distinction, Lear

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moves from the ‘unreal’ (his fantasy of ‘[w]e two alone’) to the ‘disreal’ (the world without Cordelia): ‘In the second case, I also lose reality, but no imaginary substitution will compensate me for this loss … I am not even in the Image-repertoire any longer. Everything is frozen, petrified, immutable, i.e., unsubstitutable.’30 From Kent’s point of view, the unsubstitutable is Lear. To him, Lear is the essential ‘someone else’ described by James Hillman: ‘Wherever one is, there is always an “other” by means of whom we reflect existence and because of whom we are always “more”, “other” and “beyond” what is here-and-now.’31 Every servant has his master; every devotion, its object. Kent’s life is organised around service and loyalty; without Lear, there is no meaningful structure left for him. We come to understand that, for Kent, as Deleuze notes, ‘the Other is neither an object in the field of my perception nor a subject who perceives me: the Other is initially a structure of the perceptual field, without which the entire field could not function as it does’.32 And Deleuze specifies that ‘the Other, as structure, is the expression of a possible world’.33 Without Lear, Kent is forever deprived of ‘the expression of a possible world’. In his eyes, the kingdom that he is offered to rule together with Edgar is not only a ‘gored state’ (5.3.295), but also a ‘disreal’ world in which all is ‘cheerless, dark, and deadly’ (265), or in Deleuze’s terms, a ‘harsh and black world, without potentialities or virtualities: the category of the possible has collapsed’.34 In the end, the only character who stands the test and survives exhaustion is Edgar. It is cheerlessly, however, that he agrees to rule the kingdom: ‘The weight of this sad time we must obey, / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’ (5.3.298–9). In the Quarto version, these lines are uttered by Albany, whose proposal to rule the realm is refused by Kent and not answered by Edgar – a variant which changes the perspective and leaves interpretation open. It is not impossible that Edgar should finally collapse out of exhaustion. Thus, in both versions, the limits of endurance and the manifestations of exhaustion make a lasting impression on spectators or readers: discovering the other side of mental escape, the elsewhere of madness, the ‘non-will-to-possess’; bearing in mind metaphors of physical torment, temptations towards and attempts at suicide, the failure of the ‘tutors of resilience’, the emergence of a ‘world thunderstruck’ and the ensuing crisis of meaning. What proves lethal in

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the end is not the denial of territory, even of one’s dear homeland, but the deprivation of the other who is beloved. As Deleuze puts it, ‘the Other assures the margins and transitions in the world. He is the sweetness of contiguities and resemblances. He regulates the transformations of form and background and the variations of depth. He prevents assaults from behind. He fills the world with a benevolent murmuring. He makes things incline toward one another and find their natural complements in one another.’35 The essential cartography of meaning is emotional before being geographical. Once one has deeply suffered from deterritorialisation and come out nearly exhausted, it seems that there is no possibility of reterritorialisation without the help of the loving other.

Notes 1 Forker, footnote at 2.1.138, p. 256, King Richard II (The Arden Shakespeare). 2 James Hillman, ‘Pothos: The Nostalgia of the Puer Eternus’, in Loose Ends: Primary Papers in Archetypal Psychology (Irving, TX: Spring Publications, 1975), p. 53. 3 Ibid., p. 169. 4 Ibid., p. 169. 5 These notions are from Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 256–341. Mille plateaux, pp. 284–380. 6 Ibid., p. 388 (italics are Deleuze and Guattari’s). In the original text: ‘dénoue le lien autant qu’il trahit le pacte’, Mille plateaux, p. 435. 7 Lagae-Devoldère, The Tragedy of Coriolanus. William Shakespeare, p. 95; my translation of ‘ce mirage d’une configuration circulaire absolue où l’essence et la forme, l’origine et le but, ne feraient plus qu’un se glose comme le fantasme d’annuler toute idée de filiation, d’héritage, fût-il familial, historique, culturel et même fictionnel’. 8 Onfray, Politique du rebelle, p. 186; my translation of ‘une subjectivité désassujettie, souveraine, n’ayant de comptes à rendre qu’à elle-même’. 9 Sibony, Avec Shakespeare, p. 114; my translation of ‘subvertit d’emblée l’opposition entre approche psychologique et approche politique’. 10 Ibid., p. 131; my translation of ‘le malheur de Coriolan c’est de ne pouvoir trahir sa mère; c’est d’être d’une folle fidélité à ses origines, fondu en elles, trahi par elles mais dépendant de leur trahison’. 11 Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Repose, p. 213 (Bachelard’s italics). In the original text: ‘image dynamique’, ‘les forces les plus diverses’, ‘Elle

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est à la fois force de maintien et force térébrante’, La Terre et les rêveries du repos, p. 324. 12 Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, p. 160. 13 Richard Hillman, ‘Tragedy as a Crying Shame in Coriolanus and Alexandre Hardy’s Coriolan: The “Boys of Tears” and the Hardy Boys’, in Coriolan de Shakespeare. Langages, interprétations, politique(s), ed. Richard Hillman (Tours: Presses Universitaires François Rabelais, 2007), p. 188. 14 Housset, L’Intériorité d’exil, p. 277; my translation of ‘La main dit l’homme tout entier en tant qu’il est un être en prise sur le monde, elle dit l’homme comme liberté dans le monde, et c’est pourquoi décrire le mode d’être de la main revient à élucider le mode de l’être au monde propre à l’homme.’ 15 Ibid., p. 281; my translation of ‘manifeste la transitivité de l’existence’. 16 Parker, footnote at 5.3.183, p. 343, Coriolanus (The Oxford Shakespeare). 17 Ibid., p. 193; my translation of ‘l’homme n’a son là que par la grâce d’autrui: l’autre homme, par l’amour qu’il me porte, ou tout simplement en appelant même involontairement mon amour, dessine un lieu et ouvre un présent où je peux être’. 18 Marie-Madeleine Martinet, Le Voyage d’Italie dans les littératures européennes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), p. 7; my translation of ‘contraste du présent incomplet et du passé dans son intégrité’, ‘suppos[e] le rapport du fragment et de la totalité, l’écoulement du temps ayant détruit les ensembles dont il ne subsiste que des restes, et [il] peu[t] inversement symboliser la puissance intégratrice de l’imagination et de la mémoire, qui à partir du fragment recrée un monde’. 19 Yves Bonnefoy, Notre besoin de Rimbaud (Paris: Seuil, 2009), p. 35; my translation of ‘une épiphanie de l’indéfait, de la pleine présence de toutes choses ensemble’. 20 Yves Bonnefoy, The Arrière-pays, trans. Stephen Romer (Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2012), p. 35. In the original text: ‘son épiphanie est le simple’, L’Arrière-pays (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), p. 21. 21 Sibony, Avec Shakespeare, p. 150; my translation of ‘jouissance à l’état pur’. 22 Ibid., pp. 150–1; my translation of ‘Sa rêverie: nous serons ensemble, tous les deux, à nous raconter des histoires … nous serons … “les espions de Dieu”. C’est très beau et très équivoque: couple divin guettant le monde pour le compte de Dieu, voyant les fautes cachées que Dieu seul juge. Effusion parfaite, symétrique de son couple raté avec la mauvaise mère (redoublée en deux filles, deux mégères). Mais ces deux couples, l’un idyllique et l’autre horrible, sont également mortels.’

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23 William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2, ed. Ronald Knowles, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2001). 24 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘desolation, n.’, 3; 2. a. 25 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 87. In the original text: ‘monde sidéré’, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, p. 103. 26 Ibid., p. 87. In the original text: ‘déréalité’, ‘sentiment d’absence, retrait de la réalité éprouvé par le sujet amoureux, face au monde’, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, p. 103. 27 Ibid., p. 87. In the original text: ‘C’est alors que tout me paraît inerte, séparé, sidéré comme un astre désert, comme une Nature que l’homme n’aurait jamais habitée’, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, p. 103. 28 Ibid., p. 89. In the original text: ‘en sorte que je n’ai plus aucun sens (aucun paradigme) à ma disposition’, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, p. 106. 29 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. John Wilders, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1995). On Shakespeare’s possible source for ‘desolation’ here (Simon Goulart’s edition of Plutarch), see Richard Hillman, French Reflections in the Shakespearean Tragic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), pp. 94–149. 30 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, pp. 90–1 (italics are Barthes’). In the original text: ‘irréel’, ‘déréel’, ‘Dans le second cas, je perds aussi le réel, mais aucune substitution imaginaire ne vient compenser cette perte … ; je ne suis même plus dans l’Imaginaire. Tout est figé, pétrifié, immuable, c’està-dire insubstituable’, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, p. 107. 31 Hillman, ‘Pothos: The Nostalgia of the Puer Eternus’, p. 59. 32 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 307. In the original text: ‘autrui n’est ni un objet dans le champ de ma perception, ni un sujet qui me perçoit: c’est d’abord une structure du champ perceptif, sans laquelle ce champ dans son ensemble ne fonctionnerait pas comme il le fait’, Logique du sens (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969), pp. 356–7. 33 Ibid., p. 308 (italics are Deleuze’s). In the original text: ‘autrui comme structure, c’est l’expression d’un monde possible’, Logique du sens, p. 357. 34 Ibid., p. 306. In the original text: ‘monde cru et noir, sans potentialités ni virtualités: c’est la catégorie du possible qui s’est effondrée’, Logique du sens, p. 356. 35 Ibid., pp. 305–6. In the original text: ‘autrui assure les marges et transitions dans le monde. Il est la douceur des contiguïtés et des ressemblances. Il règle les transformations de la forme et du fond, les variations de profondeur. Il empêche les assauts par derrière. Il peuple le monde d’une rumeur bienveillante. Il fait que les choses se penchent les unes vers les autres, et de l’une à l’autre trouvent des compléments naturels’, Logique du sens, p. 355.

Conclusion

The way banishment and abuse of power are articulated participates, both upstream and downstream, in a dialectics of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, a dynamic whose driving force remains a form of transgression: going ‘through’ or ‘beyond’, crossing and counter-crossing frontiers, hence undergoing a crisis in identity. The banished person is forced to follow a trajectory entailing various types of crossing, whether domestic or political, physical or mental, and any crossing implies risk-taking and uncertainty as regards the future. Like travelling, boundary-crossing ‘inexorably leads to [our] subjectivity’,1 to take up Onfray’s words. Downstream, because abusive banishment generates either a dynamic of riposte, that is, an ‘effet de retour’ (illegally coming back with armed force), or a dynamic of deviation, in which ruse proves useful (experiencing deterritorialisation in the here instead of obediently leaving for the elsewhere), or a dialectics of endurance and exhaustion (from desperate attempts at mental reterritorialisation to radical deterritorialisation, as shown by the phenomenon of letting go). Upstream, because political mismanagement or individual abuse (experienced as deterritorialisation) triggers questioning and challenging, or, to employ Foucault’s terms, induces ‘an irruptive truth-telling, a truth-telling that creates a fracture and opens the way to risk’.2 This irruptive truth-telling is felt by the banisher as a parrhesiastic deterritorialisation, and this is why he answers with exclusion, which is perceived as abusive banishment by the fearless speaker. The dialectics of territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation highlights the danger not only of abuses of power as such, but also, due to the dynamic they initiate, of their repercussions, of their retributive effects.

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Such a dialectics, beyond abuses of power (whether excesses of territorialisation or deterritorialisation) and their repercussions, essentially addresses issues of political power and what it means to be a person of power. In his treatise on resistance and insubordination, Onfray points to ‘the eternal perversion of those who exercise power whoever they are, be they philosophers who have become kings or kings who fancy themselves adepts in philosophy’.3 According to him, exercising power ‘induces an anointing that transfigures rulers, on both the right and the left, into the members of a caste with its rules, its laws, its expected habits of association, and leads to the worship of those who, one day, have been able to practice, whether legitimately or not, domination over the greatest number of their subjects, their citizens – their victims’.4 Naturally, this reads as a cliché of the abuses that any position of power is likely to entail, but it also invites us to consider and reflect upon the challenge that exercising power represents. Shakespeare’s King Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus mirror the situation of any man of power paradoxically ostracised because of his own position of authority (patriarchal, political or military), a position which prevents him from having genuine relationships with others. He can allow himself to take arbitrary decisions (like Richard II and Lear), to indulge in irascible behaviour (like Lear and Coriolanus) or to maintain intransigent positions (like Coriolanus, Lear and Richard II) – conduct that makes him feared but also isolated. He dismisses the frankness of the parrhesiast, while developing a sensitivity to flattery and honours, so that, in the end, as Bonnefoy puts it with regard to Lear, ‘he is interested in others only to the extent that they are interested in him, and so he is blind to their own true being’,5 as he is blind to his, if Regan’s ‘he hath ever but slenderly known himself’ (1.1.288–9) is to be believed – unless, like Coriolanus, he fuels a fantasy of self-parturition, to the point where he can ‘stand / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin’ (5.3.35–7). Sibony’s analysis of Lear could extend to any man of power: ‘This man holds a grudge against “power” for having cut him off from his pleasure. He then transfers this power to others to take revenge … on himself, on this power, on this sovereignty, which here stands for any emblem of symbolic success. He is a name. One can be buried beneath one’s name, beneath one’s “success”.’6 ‘Buried’, that is, incapable of listening to others, incapable

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of communicating, intolerant to any form of questioning. It is as if power, with its penchant for performative utterances, deters salutary questioning. And this is precisely what the fearless speaker challenges. Two antithetical and antagonistic figures appear to be at the heart of the dialectics of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation: the person of power (who gives orders) and the parrhesiast (who questions them). Abusive banishment is the consequence of the outspokenness of the one who questions the political behaviour or choices that they deeply believe unjust or excessive. But from the person of power’s point of view, it is as if their abuse of political power (banishment) were responding to the abuse of discursive power (parrhesia): fearless speech cannot but lead to territorial exclusion. In addition to its ‘effet injure’7 (insulting effect), parrhesia is perceived as a deterritorialising force because it calls into play nothing less than the legitimacy of power and of the allegiance that goes with it, because it questions political decisions and actions that are void of ethical considerations, because it asserts itself as freedom of speech and sets in motion the dialectics of speaking one’s mind or remaining silent, denouncing or enduring, reacting or suffering. To banish is, therefore, essentially to silence, so as to continue to control both the political and the linguistic territory. ‘Within my mouth you have engaoled my tongue’ (1.3.166), Mowbray tells his banisher, realising that he ‘must forgo’ his ‘native English’ (160) in foreign countries. Conversely, the parrhesiast takes the risk of endangering themself when they fearlessly speak to the other, however powerful that other is. They are, as Housset puts it, ‘ready to face the peril of the world’.8 This raises the question of how to react to the perilous alteration of the political sphere, which is so altered that it seems other, or, at least, is experienced as otherness within one’s homeland. One can try to establish a dialogue to inflect it (speaking fearlessly) or be determined to fight against it (coming back illegally); one can use it for one’s own ends (making pacts) or experience it out of necessity (changing one’s identity); one can discover it in adversity (becoming aware of it) and even open up to its essential meaning (making it one’s centrepiece); one can be overwhelmed and unable to overcome it (letting go and dying of heartbreak). It seems that some intuit and others come to understand what

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Housset observes: ‘the other man and the world are not reducible to me, and, in this, by their very revelation, they open me to my own revelation. Only he who welcomes the world in the anxiety of its otherness can reveal himself.’9 One must accept the risk of boundary crossing, of going out of oneself to turn to and reach what is other; one must accept the disturbing tests of porosity, of reversibility, of the ‘uncanny’. In early modern times, there was ‘a renewed affirmation of man’,10 a new taking into account of his individuality; the early modern man was, to adopt Garin’s words, ‘a man who invented himself, who fashioned himself, and who was aware of this self-creation’.11 Significantly, in King Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus, a role of primary importance is given to parrhesiastes who define themselves by the truth-telling they defend, and whose selves assert themselves ‘at the risk of otherness’, to employ Housset’s telling subtitle.12 These parrhesiastes have ‘the courage of truth’,13 whereas those in power would like them to behave ‘as if wearing a mask, as if having a role, like a person who has his place and his rights’,14 to behave like ‘a character who plays a part, as he accomplishes what the world is supposed to expect from him’,15 and certainly not to assert themselves as individuals. This is the opposition that Housset makes between ‘the closed identity of the mask’ and ‘the open ipseity of the person, who is time, flesh and will’.16 The selves of Shakespearean parrhesiastes can then be considered as a ‘becoming’, their ‘ipseity understood as a verb, and not as a substantive’,17 with ‘verb’ in the double sense of action and discourse, speaking and risk-taking. ‘Inventing oneself’, ‘fashioning oneself’, ‘being aware of this self-creation’, that is, daring to become what one is, trusting one’s subjective perception and insisting on ethics, or, in Foucault’s terms, establishing ‘a strong, necessary, and constitutive bond between the person speaking and what he says’, and thus exposing to risk ‘the bond between the person speaking and the person to whom he speaks’.18 At the risk of being ostracised, of wandering in a ‘smooth’ space, of experiencing uncanny sensations, of touching the bottom of humanity by dint of humiliation, of feeling like a victim of torture, of having a freedom of movement only in one’s mental space, of becoming exhausted and letting go, one may want to ‘oppose an upright character and disposition to anything that

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aims at submitting the individual’,19 to prefer risky questioning to silent obedience, to be a verb rather than a substantive, to refuse to endorse the abuse of power that threatens innocence and integrity, and, even more fundamentally, one’s sense of meaning; one may want to ‘answer for oneself’ but also to ‘answer for the sense of the world’.20 In the end, the respective trajectories of the banisher and the banished person echo one another, as if testifying to some poetic justice of an ironic kind (the banisher banished), or just creating variations on deterritorialisation, the ordeal of rupture and the feeling of loss. The parrhesiast is to political power what the skull is to emblems of Vanitas: not a blunt reminder of death, but a reminder of the disturbing power of existential questioning.

Notes 1 Onfray, Théorie du voyage, p. 88; my translation of ‘mène inexorablement vers [notre] subjectivité’. 2 Foucault, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, p. 61; my translation of ‘un dire-vrai irruptif, un dire-vrai qui fait fracture et qui ouvre le risque’. 3 Onfray, Politique du rebelle, p. 205; my translation of ‘l’éternelle perversion de ceux qui exercent le pouvoir, quels qu’ils soient, fussent-ils des philosophes devenus rois ou des rois piqués de philosophie’. 4 Ibid., p. 205; my translation of ‘Son exercice induit une onction qui transfigure les gouvernants, droite et gauche confondues, en membres d’une caste avec ses règles, ses lois, son grégarisme entendu, et conduit à un culte envers ceux qui ont pu, un jour, pratiquer légitimement, ou non, la domination sur le plus grand nombre de leurs sujets, de leurs administrés – de leurs victimes.’ 5 Bonnefoy, Shakespeare and the French Poet, pp. 23–4. In the original text: ‘il ne s’intéresse à autrui que pour autant que celui-ci s’intéresse à lui, il est ainsi aveugle à l’être propre des autres’, Théâtre et poésie: Shakespeare et Yeats, p. 81. 6 Sibony, Avec Shakespeare, p. 161–2 (Sibony’s italics); my translation of ‘Cet homme en veut au “pouvoir” de l’avoir coupé de sa jouissance. Il transfère alors ce pouvoir à d’autres, pour tirer vengeance … de luimême, de ce pouvoir, de cette souveraineté, qui figure ici n’importe quel emblème de réussite symbolique. C’est un nom. On peut être enseveli sous son nom, sous sa “réussite”.’ 7 Larguèche, L’Effet injure. De la pragmatique à la psychoanalyse.

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8 Housset, L’Intériorité d’exil, p. 313; my translation of ‘se tenir au péril du monde’. 9 Ibid., p. 313; my translation of ‘l’autre homme et le monde ne sont pas réductibles à moi et en cela, par leur révélation même, ils m’ouvrent à ma propre révélation. Ne se révèle que celui qui accueille le monde dans l’inquiétude de son altérité.’ 10 Eugenio Garin (ed.), L’Homme de la Renaissance (Paris: Seuil, 2002), p. 8; my translation of ‘une affirmation renouvelée de l’homme’. 11 Ibid., p. 12; my translation of ‘un homme qui se faisait, qui se construisait, et qui était conscient de cette création’. Also see on that topic Stephen Greenblatt,  Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Richard Hillman, Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse and the Stage (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). 12 Housset, L’Intériorité d’exil. Le soi au risque de l’altérité. 13 Foucault’s definition of parrhesiastic practice in The Courage of Truth. 14 Housset, L’Intériorité d’exil, p.  332; my translation of ‘comme un masque, comme un rôle, comme un individu qui a sa place et ses droits’. 15 Ibid., p. 347; my translation of ‘un personnage qui tient la pause en accomplissant ce que le monde est censé attendre de lui’. 16 Ibid., p. 342; my translation of ‘identité fermée du masque’, ‘ipséité ouverte de la personne qui est temps, chair et volonté’. 17 Ibid., p. 333; my translation of ‘ipséité comprise comme un verbe, et non comme un substantif’. 18 Foucault, The Courage of Truth, p. 13. In the original text: ‘un lien fort, nécessaire, constitutif entre celui qui parle et ce qu’il dit’, ‘le lien entre celui qui parle et celui auquel il s’adresse’, Le Courage de la vérité, p. 15. 19 Onfray, Politique du rebelle, p. 313 (Onfray’s italics); my translation of ‘opposer un caractère et un tempérament droit à tout ce qui vise la soumission de l’individu’. 20 Housset, L’Intériorité d’exil, p. 342; my translation of ‘répondre de soi’, ‘répondre du sens du monde’.

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Index

Note: ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page. Aragon, Louis 8, 11n.31, 227 Austin, J. L. 32, 39n.65, 227 Awdeley, John 133, 139n.28 Bachelard, Gaston 6, 11n.26, 64, 72n.22, 161–2, 166, 168n.20, 168n.22, 170n.36, 183, 187n.35, 209, 216n.11, 227 Bacon, Francis 78, 88n.4, 128, 137n.7, 225 Bakhtin, Mikhail 69, 73n.33, 227 Balandier, Georges 11n.27, 15, 19, 33n.2, 34n.19, 127, 137n.1, 227 Baldwin, Frances Elizabeth 133, 140n.30, 140n.32, 140n.34, 141n.46, 227 Barish, Jonas A. and Waingrow, Marshall 21, 23, 25, 35n.24, 36n.35, 36n.40, 227 Barthes, Roland 5–6, 8, 10n.20, 11n.26, 11n.32, 70, 74n.37, 181, 184n.1, 187n.29, 187n.31, 188n.41, 192, 203n.9, 203n.10, 214, 218n.25, 218n.30, 227 Beier, A. L. 139n.27, 228 Bellamy, John 53n.5, 228 Bergson, Henri 157, 167n.4, 228 Bonhomme, Marc 51, 55n.33, 228

Bonnefoy, Yves 119, 123n.35, 124n.38, 161, 168n.18, 196, 200, 204n.20, 205n.34, 212, 217n.19, 217n.20, 220, 223n.5, 228 Braunmuller, A. R and Hattaway, Michael 10n.19, 228 Bruegel, Pieter 28, 37n.54 Burgess, Glenn 33n.6, 228 Butler, F. G. 204n.17, 228 Calderwood, James L. 205n.37, 228 Camporesi, Piero 147–8, 154n.23, 154n.26, 228 Canetti, Elias 45, 54n.19, 159, 167n.11, 228 Carroll, William C. 17, 22, 33n.6, 34n.7, 34n.9, 34n.15, 35n.28, 134, 140n.33, 143, 153n.3, 228 Cavell, Stanley 196–7, 204n.23, 204n.26, 209, 217n.12, 228 Cépède, Michel and Gounelle, Hugues 147, 154n.18, 228 Coke, Edward (Sir) 3, 10n.17, 22–3, 35n.26, 35n.27, 112, 122n.12, 225 Conrad, Joseph 88n.12, 229 Cosgrove, Denis 61, 71n.9, 229 Coussement-Boillot, Laetitia 37n.50, 229

Index Cunningham, Karen 36n.39, 40–1, 54n.6, 54n.11, 229 Cyrulnik, Boris 6, 8, 12n.34, 164–5, 169n.31, 170n.34, 174, 184n.2, 185n.8, 194–5, 203n.14, 203n.15, 204n.16, 229 De Dainteville, François 62, 72n.13, 186n.15 Dekker, Thomas 133–4, 139n.28, 140n.37, 140n.38, 147, 154n.21, 225 Deleuze, Gilles 9n.5, 11n.26, 70n.1, 74n.35, 106n.39, 107n.41, 151, 155n.40, 215, 218n.32, 218n.33, 229, 235 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix 1–2, 5–6, 9n.4, 9n.10, 9n.12, 11n.29, 24, 36n.37, 47, 50, 53n.3, 55n.22, 55n.32, 59, 61, 70n.3, 71n.10, 77, 90, 93, 95–7, 100–2, 103n.1, 103n.3, 104n.6, 104n.14, 104n.19, 104n.22, 106n.32, 106n.36, 106n.38, 107n.42, 117, 119, 123n.29, 123n.33, 127, 129, 137n.4, 138n.9, 138n.12, 138n.15, 159, 162–3, 167n.9, 167n.12, 168n.23, 168n.27, 174, 185n.3, 187n.24, 216n.5, 216n.6, 229 Detienne, Marcel and Vernant, Jean-Pierre 6, 11n.30, 130, 135, 137n.5, 138n.16, 140n.40, 229 Devaux, Jean-David 183, 187n.34, 187n.36, 229 Dodd, William 48, 55n.30, 229 Drouet, Pascale 54n.18, 71n.5, 139n.27, 203n.11, 229, 233, 235 Ducros, David 3, 10n.18, 62, 66, 71n.6, 72n.13, 72n.15,

237

73n.24, 178–9, 186n.15, 186n.17, 229 Duvignaud, Jean 128, 137n.6, 230 Edward III, King of England (1327–77) 40–1, 207 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 8, 12n.35, 230 Elizabeth I, Queen of England (1558–1603) 2, 4, 10n.18, 63, 69, 133–4, 179 Ellrodt, Robert 161, 168n.19, 202, 205n.37, 230 Epictetus 176 Evans, Ifor M. and Lawrence, Heather 71n.12, 230 Fischler, Claude 146, 153n.14, 230 Flori, Jean 112–13, 122n.13, 122n.14, 122n.17, 122n.18, 122n.20, 230 Foakes, R. A. 109, 121n.1, 153n.11, 196, 204n.18, 204n.19, 204n.30, 205n.35, 205n.36, 226, 230 Forker, Charles R. 23–4, 32, 33n.3, 33n.5, 35n.32, 36n.38, 39n.66, 46, 88n.9, 94, 104n.5, 104n.18, 106n.34, 106n.35, 122n.10, 157, 167n.5, 186n.16, 187n.33, 207, 216n.1, 226 Foucault, Michel 1, 3, 5–6, 9n.2, 9n.13, 11n.25, 11n.26, 11n.28, 27, 29–33, 37n.47, 37n.48, 38n.56, 38n.58, 38n.59, 38n.60, 39n.61, 39n.62, 39n.63, 39n.64, 39n.68, 51, 53n.1, 55n.35, 56n.38, 62–3, 72n.17, 72n.21, 130, 133, 138n.14, 140n.29, 140n.39, 143–5, 147, 151, 153n.5, 153n.9, 153n.13, 154n.19, 155n.36, 155n.40, 188n.42, 219, 222, 223n.2, 224n.13, 224n.18, 230, 234

238

Index

Freud, Sigmund 128, 149–51, 154n.27, 155n.38, 230 Froissart, John 91, 111–12 Garin, Eugenio 222, 224n.10, 230 Gilman, Ernest B. 41, 54n.9, 230 Gounelle, Hugues see Cépède, Michel and Gounelle, Hugues Gourinat, Jean-Baptiste 176, 185n.7, 186n.11, 198–9, 204n.32, 231 Grant, Michael and Hazel, John 203n.12, 231 Greenblatt, Stephen 34n.14, 121n.4, 136, 141n.47, 224n.11, 227, 231 Grosos, Philippe 178, 186n.12, 231 Guattari, Félix see Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix Hadfield, Andrew 40, 53n.4, 231 Hadot, Pierre 120, 124n.36, 231 Halpern, Richard 20, 34n.21, 231 Harman, Thomas 133, 139n.28 Harsnett, Samuel 136 Hattaway, Michael 10n.19, 34n.12, 228, 233 Hayward, John 63, 72n.20, 226 Hebron, Malcolm 5, 11n.22, 89n.21, 198, 204n.31, 231 Henry VII, King of England (1485– 1509) 140n.32, 153n.10 Henry VIII, King of England (1509–47) 63, 69, 92, 140n.32 Hillman, James 89n.26, 215, 216n.2, 218n.31, 231 Hillman, Richard 54n.18, 210, 217n.13, 218n.29, 224n.11, 229, 231 Holinshed, Raphael 46, 54n.20, 91, 111, 122n.9, 225 Housset, Emmanuel 6, 11n.3, 49, 55n.31, 152, 155n.42, 165–6, 169n.32, 169n.33, 170n.35, 174, 176, 181, 185n.4, 185n.6, 187n.26,

188n.37, 188n.40, 190, 198, 202n.2, 204n.21, 204n.28, 210, 217n.14, 221–2, 224n.8, 224n.12, 224n.14, 224n.20, 231 Jackson, Ken 153n.12, 162, 168n.21, 232 James I, King of England (1603– 25) 2, 10n.15, 19, 22, 25, 119, 134, 225 Jeanneret, Michel 27, 37n.52, 232 Judges, A. V. 139n.28, 140n.35, 140n.37, 225 Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 33n.6, 182, 187n.32, 232 Kastan, David Scott 15, 33n.1, 232, Keen, Maurice 114–16, 122n.21, 123n.25, 232 Kingsley-Smith, Jane 2, 9n.6, 48, 55n.26, 63, 72n.18, 73n.32, 85, 89n.17, 92, 104n.7, 111, 122n.7, 158, 160–1, 167n.6, 167n.13, 167n.17, 232 Kirsch, Arthur 54n.17, 232 Lagae-Devoldère, Denis 24, 36n.36, 61, 71n.8, 216n.7, 232 Lalande, André 89n.21, 138n.11, 232 Larguèche, Evelyne 42, 54n.13, 135–6, 140n.44, 223n.7, 232 Laroque, François 28, 37n.55, 38n.55, 157, 166n.1, 167n.2, 232 Legouis, Pierre 23, 36n.34, 232 Levin, Harry 16, 18, 33n.4, 34n.10, 73n.28, 232 Levinas, Emmanuel 73n.30, 233 Macey, David 10n.21, 11n.26, 233 Machiavelli, Niccolò 26, 36n.43, 77, 79, 87, 88n.2, 88n.5,

Index 89n.20, 93, 104n.12, 105n.31, 106n.31, 121n.2, 226 Manning, John J. 72n.20, 226 Marcus, Leah S. 144, 153n.6, 153n.7, 233 Marienstras, Richard 2–3, 9n.9, 10n.15, 10n.17, 22–3, 35n.27, 35n.31, 53, 56n.40, 122n.12, 233 Martinet, Marie-Madeleine 60, 67, 71n.5, 73n.27, 73n.29, 211, 217n.18, 233 Marx, Steven 54n.17, 233 Mathieu-Castellani, Gisèle 27, 37n.49, 233 Miola, Robert S. 20, 34n.12, 34n.20, 233 Newbolt, Henry 111, 122n.8, 226 Noël, Bernard 190, 202n.3, 233 Norbrook, David 66, 73n.26, 233 Norden, John 62, 72n.14, 179 O’Donoghue, Edward Geoffrey 154n.20, 233 Onfray, Michel 3, 6, 10n.16, 27, 37n.51, 100, 106n.33, 131, 139n.22, 151, 155n.35, 155n.41, 160, 164, 167n.15, 169n.30, 177, 185n.9, 216n.8, 219–20, 223n.1, 223n.3, 224n.19, 233 Parker, R. B. 34n.13, 86, 88n.11, 89n.19, 93, 104n.11, 167n.8, 210, 217n.16, 226 Parnet, Claire 106n.39, 229 Patterson, Annabel 34n.15, 160, 167n.14, 234 Péguy, Charles 186n.12 Plato 139n.21 Power, Eileen see Tawney, R. H. and Power, Eileen Prothero, G. W. 140n.36, 226 Racine, Jean 5, 10n.20, 228 Revel, Judith 11n.25, 188n.42, 234

239

Ricœur, Paul 191, 202n.4, 234 Riss, Arthur 68, 73n.31, 234 Ruggiu, François-Joseph 34n.8, 35n.23, 232, 234 Ryan, Kiernan 34n.11, 184, 188n.39, 234 Said, Edward W. 3, 10n.14, 42, 51, 54n.15, 55n.34, 78, 88n.3, 234 Salgado, Gãmini 153n.12, 234 Saxton, Christopher 3–4, 10n.18, 62, 71n.12, 230 Seneca 89n.23 Shakespeare, William Antony and Cleopatra 218n.29, 226 As You Like It 4, 203n.13, 226 Coriolanus 4, 6–7, 13, 15, 18–21, 24, 27–9, 31, 34n.13, 34n.15, 35n.22, 36n.36, 40, 42, 44–7, 49, 51–2, 54n.18, 57–9, 63, 68, 70, 71n.8, 73n.28, 73n.31, 75, 77, 83, 85, 87, 88n.11, 89n.19, 91, 94–7, 101, 104n.8, 104n.11, 131, 148, 156, 160, 167n.8, 216n.7, 217n.13, 217n.16, 220, 222, 226, 229, 231–2, 234–5 Cymbeline 4 Hamlet 47, 88n.7, 152, 157, 177, 198–9, 226 King Henry IV, Part 1 73, 139n.24, 226, 235 King Henry IV, Part 2 4, 94, 104n.16, 226 King Henry VI, Part 2 4, 55n.20, 210, 213, 217n.23, 225–6 King Lear 4, 6–8, 13, 15, 17–18, 20–1, 23–5, 27–9, 31, 34n.11, 34n.14, 35n.24, 36n.35, 36n.40, 40–1, 45–8, 51–2, 54n.17, 55n.30, 57–9, 63–5, 70, 80–1, 86, 88n.8, 94, 109, 113–14, 117, 121n.3, 121n.5, 125, 127–8, 132–4,

240

Index

143–6, 148–50, 153n.11, 156, 160–4, 166, 171, 174, 188n.39, 190, 192, 195, 203n.11, 204n.18, 204n.30, 205n.35, 205n.37, 212, 214, 220, 222, 226–9, 232, 234–5 King Richard II 4, 6–8, 13, 15– 16, 20–32, 33n.3, 33n.5, 35n.22, 35n.32, 36n.38, 39n.66, 40, 42–3, 46–7, 49, 52, 54n.10, 57–8, 60, 62–3, 65, 70, 71n.5, 75, 77–8, 81, 83, 87, 88n.9, 91, 94, 96–7, 103, 104n.5, 104n.18, 106n.34, 108, 113–14, 116, 122n.8, 122n.10, 156, 167n.5, 171, 175, 186n.16, 187n.33, 190, 203n.8, 207, 211, 214, 216n.1, 220, 222, 226, 233 King Richard III 4, 55n.20, 191, 203n.8, 225–6, Much Ado About Nothing 139n.25, 226 Romeo and Juliet 4, 89n.14, 226 Sonnets 36n.46, 226 The Tempest 4, 7, 117–18, 123n.28, 124n.37, 226 Timon of Athens 37n.53, 226 The Two Gentlemen of Verona 4 Shusterman, Ronald 10n.18, 167n.16, 186n.15, 229, 234 Sibony, Daniel 6, 42, 54n.14, 59, 70n.2, 85, 89n.15, 102,

106n.40, 209, 213, 216n.9, 217n.21, 220, 223n.6, 234 Sommerville, Johann P. 25, 33n.6, 35n.29, 36n.41, 226, 234 Speed, John 62, 66, 72n.14, 73n.25, 179 Stow, John 111–12 Strickland, Matthew 116, 123n.24, 234 Stubbes, Philip 140n.31 Suhamy, Henri 37n.55, 232 Taylor, Gary 109–10, 121n.3, 121n.5, 234 Tawney, R. H. and Power, Eileen 139n.26, 153n.10, 227 Tennenhouse, Leonard 18, 34n.11, 234 Tison, John L. 87, 89n.22, 89n.23, 234 Tomlinson, Michael 32, 39n.67, 234 Verstraeten, Johan 36n.44, 235 Vienne-Guerrin, Nathalie 193, 203n.11, 235 Weber, Max 26, 36n.44, 235 Webster, John 8, 191, 202n.6, 227 Wells, Stanley 80, 88n.8, 226 Willems, Michèle 73n.28, 92, 104n.8, 235 Zeno of Citium 176 Zourabichvili, François 9n.5, 57, 70n.1, 74n.35, 102, 107n.41, 235