Lands,realms,women and texts

Induction: Land grabs

I suppose many of us have had occasion, in the United States, to join in the chorus of Woody Guthrie’s song of the 1940s: ‘This land is your land, this land is my land, / From California to the New York island…’. Originally a protest song, it became a patriotic anthem celebrating comradeship and plenitude. It did take potshots at private property but ignored any scars left by social hierarchy, slavery or discrimination, let alone land grabs by the ‘undertakers’, as colonizers were once called. Nor was there any mention of post-expropriation territorial claims from members of North America’s first nations. It now features inappositely in campfire sing-alongs. Seventy years ago, as now, ‘land’ could be made to mean both terrain and national territory.

‘Land’ also had a sacral and mythical connotation: Remember ‘the promised land’, the land ‘covenanted’ to Abraham and his descendants that we read about in Genesis, 5.18–21. Implicit sacralization infused collective memories, helped nation states sustain agreed and recognized borders and validated the claims of great powers over virtual spaces – so-called ‘spheres of influence’.

But now, in the post-cold war confusion, borders are again porous – in Europe by design, but also, appallingly, because of invasion in the Ukraine. Further afield new political confederations and unions abound, and new ‘nationalities’, created by ethnicities, languages and religions, jostle to occupy and restructure colonialist political and cultural spaces. The Berlin Wall came down, but a ‘barrier’ between Palestine and Israel went up, as did the fences around the Calais entrance to the Channel Tunnel, and a migrant-proof barrier between Hungary and Serbia. A wall between the United States and Mexico might yet go up.

Around 1594, Sir Henry Wotton wrote a long essay, The State of Christendom, ‘giving a perfect and exact discovery’, according to the title page of the second edition of 1667, ‘of many political intrigues and secret mysteries of state, practised in most of the courts of Europe, with an account of their several claims, interests, and pretensions’. (It was not printed until 1657.) Wotton’s title, The State of Christendom, typically for its age, rests upon a pun on the word ‘state’. This invokes a virtual space, ‘Christendom’, and a territorial entity, the landmass of Europe, but also a condition, current political circumstances. Remember Marcellus to Hamlet: ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ (Hamlet, 1.4.90 [emphasis added]). ¹ Wotton’s text might figure in the debate started by Quentin Skinner over whether we can or should talk of ‘states’ as enduring political institutions in the age of Shakespeare: Significantly, like Shakespeare, Wotton focuses on ‘courts’, very different from modern ‘countries’.

Unusually for his time, Wotton condemns the Spaniards for their occupation of the Netherlands but also praises them as empire builders. ² Moreover, he implies that Christendom and Europe are coterminous. Will Turkey, where Christians make up a very small segment of the population, ever be admitted to the European Union?

Semantics count for so very much: the so-called Islamic State is not a state – it doesn’t ‘execute’, it murders and it is scarcely likely to win a seat at the United Nations (UN). ‘Refugees’ have become ‘migrants’. As well as redesignation, unthinking reification appears in much popular discourse. The word ‘country’, for example, is particularly tricky: Nigel Farage, one-time leader of the UK Independent Party, said, ‘I want my country back’, and negotiations for Brexit have followed. In the United States, followers of Donald Trump claimed that they had taken their country back, while the women who marched on the day after his inauguration felt that they had lost theirs. Yet although a ‘country’ is not a thing, not like a ball kicked over the neighbour’s fence, reified ‘countries’ figure in elections and referenda – perhaps even more starkly in an age of globalization and supranational federations. Likewise, ‘sovereignty’ is not a thing but an infinitely complicated series of processes, defined in treaties that the Brexit negotiators are currently trying to undo. In 2014, the Scots almost voted to take control if not possession of ‘their country’. Appropriation, making a territory one’s own (the word’s etymological meaning), is intensely problematic, as Grotius recognized in his De Iure Belli ac Pacis, published in Paris in 1625. ³

So too the notion of ‘nation’ may be more troublesome than we imagine. We all remember the cry from Macmorris in Henry V, ‘What ish my nation?’ (Henry V, 3.3.64). Macmorris’s cultural identity had been destroyed by the English conquest of Ireland. Nations in the age of Shakespeare were more associated with tribes than with denizens of a delimited area: They inhabited figurative rather than actual geography. Macmorris is certainly a ‘displaced person’, but also a victim of the religious reformation that fired Irish colonization. In The Merchant of Venice, the words ‘nation’ and ‘tribe’ are interchangeable (Merchant of Venice, 1.3.40–3). Furthermore David Scott Kastan acutely observed that, in The Merchant of Venice, ‘Jewishness’, within the play’s ‘symbolic economy’, ‘becomes no more than a metaphor…a condensation of a set of dramatic contrasts with Christian norms' [emphasis added]. ⁴

In fact, at this time, ‘nations’, which we are so used to calling ‘imagined communities’, ⁵ may be, more subtly, ‘atavisms’, the word Joseph Schumpeter, way back in 1919, used to describe empires, hangovers from a lost world. ⁶ In the age of Shakespeare Eden is an archetype, and nations are much associated with ‘land’, again symbolic, specifically figured by lost gardens, once pruned (Richard II), once tilled (Henry V), once weeded (Hamlet), or that land of Cockaigne, Merry England (2 Henry VI). In English, the word ‘country’ designates both a nation state and also William Blake’s ‘green and pleasant land’. It remains an emblem of Englishness: remember John Major in 1993:

Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs…and – as George Orwell said – ‘old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’, and if we get our way – Shakespeare still read even in school. Britain will survive unamendable in all essentials. ⁷

Shakespeare reduced to an atavism

When we are exploring the word ‘occupy’ and its derivatives in an early modern context, we talk law, we talk politics, we talk self-fashioning, we talk a buzzword of today (the ‘Occupy London’ Movement of 2011–12 was the manifestation of an alternative and global moral economy), we talk our own obsessions, we talk sex – a familiar cocktail when discussing Shakespeare – hence my title.

Now, in Anglo-Norman, Old and Middle French, ‘occupy’ meant ‘to take possession of’, ‘to seize’. Later it came to mean, almost but not entirely, ‘own’: The word tactfully reminds us that owning encompasses seizing.

Two recent new plays have explored notions of occupation in contemporary Europe. At the end of 2014, Tena Štivičić’s Three Winters opened in Britain’s National Theatre. It is set in the Kos family house in Zagreb in 1945, 1990 and 2011. Like The Cherry Orchard, it chronicles social and political transformation, in this case in Croatia, as an old order is subjected to material change. Štivičić’s house is like Chekhov’s orchard. As do so many texts of Shakespeare, this play anatomizes entitlement. Occupation is a cognate notion: In 1945, a family home had been seized by the state. So, in this case, the ex-partisan who occupies the house owns it – having been given it by the state – but previous owners and occupiers haunt what was their home. In 2017, another National Theatre play, D. C. Moore’s Common, was a quasi-allegorical meditation on the appropriation of Ireland and the enclosure or occupation of common land and ‘common’ women in late eighteenth-century Britain.

And this is my topic: The meanings Shakespeare and his contemporaries apply to the appropriation of non-portable property, corporeal and non-corporeal: land, women and identity. We can add literary texts to this list.

Plantation and profession

Shakespeare, like any early modern European, grew up familiar with the impulses and rhetoric of conquest. Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror were the avatars, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine was the fantasy turned icon, and, in the distance, the Spanish conquistadors were turning rapacious imaginings into realities. The human costs of conquests in the New World may not have resonated loudly in Europe, which is perhaps why Shakespeare, as it were, towed Bermuda into the Mediterranean. In The Tempest, his new world play, Caliban, the native of the isle, has a proud sense of territorial entitlement: ‘This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother’ (Tempest, 1.2.332) – she had herself possessed it, after being deported from Algiers. But Prospero has seized it.

Prospero’s Neapolitan courtier Gonzalo proves to be just as disingenuously wily with words as Nigel Farage. His Utopian vision artfully ducks the question of whether the dispossession of Caliban by Prospero means that the Duke of Milan now owns the island. Gonzalo implies, rather, that it had been ‘planted’, a weasel word suggesting stewardship and ‘improvement’ rather than possession, associated, as we have seen, with that atavistic Garden of Eden.

The word ‘plantation’, of course, is salient in early modern colonialist discourse: I am thinking of the ‘plantation’ of Ulster by the Scots and the English that was occurring at the time of the play – like ‘cultivation’, it is a dangerous euphemism for conquest, military or religious. ⁸ Embedded in Gonzalo’s plantation-riff, which, of course, is based very closely on Montaigne’s ‘Of the Cannibals’, is the word ‘occupation’:

Here, ‘occupation’ is associated with ‘use’ or ‘employment’. The repetition of ‘use’ is intriguingly specific. ‘Use of service’, I take it, means simply, ‘employment of servants’. ‘No use of metal’ and so on seems to mean ‘No benefit from’. ⁹ This is ‘usufruct’, much written about by Roman jurists, ¹⁰ although the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) does not record any form until Ralegh used ‘usufructuary’ in 1618. I do not think that in The Tempest Gonzalo is preaching ‘communism’: rather, that Nature’s abundance generates ‘usufructs’, provides for adequacy without ownership.

More significant, perhaps, is the way Shakespeare, closely following Florio, artfully morphs the meaning of ‘occupation’ from the appropriation of land to the fashioning of identity: ‘Occupation’ means not just ‘busyness’ but has to do with one’s time being taken up by work or a by particular activity. Profession is derived from ‘possession’: One’s self is fashioned by one’s calling – as one might be possessed by a devil. ¹¹ We all remember the cry, ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone’ (Othello, 3.3.358) – a line to which I shall return. Interestingly, in the early modern period, the word designates occupation of the subject rather than occupation by the subject.

In fact, Shakespeare, it could be argued, lived at the cusp of two ages – the newer when, increasingly, careers were open to talents or desires, the older when, according to certain preachers, men should labour in their ‘calling’ or vocation. ¹² Remember Falstaff: ‘Tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation’ (1 Henry IV, 1.2.84–5). This often meant that men were oppressed simply by following in their fathers’ footsteps or by having their labour taken for granted. In Coriolanus, Menenius upbraids the Tribunes when news is brought of Coriolanus returning to attack Rome:

In the second book of his Utopia, Sir Thomas More takes up the possible injustice: He has an important chapter entitled, in Roper’s translation, ‘Of Sciences, Crafts, and Occupations’. There he argues that everyone must not only be engaged in husbandry but also learn a craft:

For the most part, every man is brought up in his father’s craft, for most commonly they be naturally thereto bent and inclined. But if a man’s mind stand to any other, he is by adoption put into a family of that occupation [opificium] ¹³ which he doth most fantasy [fancy, choose]…Yea, and if any person, when he hath learned one craft, be desirous to learn also another, he is likewise suffered and permitted. When he hath learned both, he occupieth whether [whichever] he will, unless the city have more need of the one than of the other. [Emphasis added] ¹⁴

Gonzalo’s phrase ‘No occupation’ is echoed two lines later by ‘No sovereignty’. This would seem to mean ‘regal title’, ‘lordship’ or ‘dominion’ – a species of ‘ownership’. Gonzalo concentrates on the abolition of legal titles, implying that appropriation might be misappropriation, a species of legalized theft and also on a hope of life without labour. We remember the contribution of Dick the Butcher to Jack Cade’s insurrection in 2 Henry VI: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’ (4.2.63).

However, as has been evinced in countless clashes between colonizers and colonized, concepts of the legal ownership of land, derived by early modern colonizers, as we shall see, from Roman law, ¹⁵ would have been unrecognizable to peoples whose affinities with their land would have rested on their occupation of it. Caliban is not only a figure of a Native American Indian or African slave – as he is so often portrayed in modern productions – but is also an Irish wood-kern, ¹⁶ the sort that dwelt, as Thomas Blenerhasset opined in 1610, in ‘caves, holes, and lurking places’. ¹⁷

Now, Roman law always distinguished between ownership (dominium) and possession. This was made explicit in an edict, ‘Ownership has nothing in common with possession’, promulgated by the influential Roman jurist Domitius Ulpianus. ¹⁸ He died in 223 AD, having served, in 207, in the forum of York that tried insurgent Scottish Highlanders. Ulpian’s distinction between possession and ownership, presumably brushed aside by Vladimir Putin in his Ukraine adventure, was as inconvenient in the early modern period as it is now. But it had been encoded in Emperor Justinian’s Digests. ¹⁹ At the time of the plantations in Wexford, not only the ‘mere Irish’ but land-owning (and Catholic) families lacked title to their lands, their ancestral warlords having seized these by force over the previous centuries. The cost of converting occupancy or possession to ownership, converting warlords into landlords, was the forfeiture of a quarter of their estates. ²⁰ No wonder Gonzalo wished to eschew contracts and the like.

The binary of ownership by possession and ownership by entitlement is, as Roman jurists in fact registered, deconstructed by the notion of rights. Occupation in the form of colonization encountered what the Canadians call ‘First Nations’ whose relationship with land did not match legal structures imported from Europe. In New Zealand, Maori families and tribes did not conceive of the ownership of land: Different tribes might have different rights – fishing and crop-raising, for example – over the same area. In medieval and early modern England, the suppression of feudal rights by means of enclosure exposed the vulnerability of a moral economy of rights, of ‘communal property’ held without title. In As You Like It, Corin is probably the victim of enclosure: ‘[I] do not shear the fleeces that I graze’ (As You Like It, 2.4.72), and enclosure may have been the chief cause of the Revolt of 1607.

In another context, it has been argued that the Renaissance rediscovery of the Roman law of private property was crucial to the development of sovereignty and then of the nation state. ²¹ As Ben Holland wrote, ‘By conceiving of sovereignty as analogous to property in Roman private law, it was decided that ultimate authority would be exercised in mutually exclusive areas’. ²² Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus of 1578 glosses ‘dominium’ as ‘Lordship: rule over other: dominion: empire: principality’. One of Cooper’s glosses for ‘dominus’ is ‘owner’: Dominion over a principality might thereby be validated by ownership.

Gonzalo’s distrust of titles and leases had been foreshadowed in Richard II where Gaunt inveighs against his king for leasing out his land:

It was convenient for kings to claim that they were above the law, that they ruled by inherent right. Again Justinian quotes Ulpian: ‘The Emperor is free from the operation of the law’ (Digests, 1.3.31). Converting the lands of his own feudal demesne to leasehold capitalist property dismembers Richard’s mystical body politic and enmeshes him within parts of the common law concerning property and possession. ²³ But Richard is nothing daunted:

To this haul, he later adds ‘His plate, his goods, his money and his lands’ (Richard II, 2.1.210). Accordingly, Gaunt’s son Bullingbrook, upon his return, can claim to be acting legally, as a victim of material expropriation. ²⁴

The land, as bonded adjunct to the crown, is also evoked when, in the Flint Castle scene, Bullingbrook threatens invasion in the figure of a rape upon a feminized body of England:

Paradoxically, when legal ownership supplanted the mystical bond between crown and land, authority was lost and rapine might thrive.

This distinction between possession and ownership was inscribed in Janice Honeyman’s superb production of The Tempest in Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre Centre, which came to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC’s) Courtyard Theatre in 2009. ²⁶ Antony Sher’s Prospero was, to use a splendid word from Dekker and Middleton, a ‘tatterdemalion’ who wore the layered and ragged remnants of courtly cloaks and was gloriously upstaged by a tribe of massive puppet-spirits, manifestations of a vibrant autochthonous culture and of an anti-colonialist ideology. Jon Kani as Caliban had a nobility and authority that eluded that of his ‘master’. The island might be occupied but its culture could not be appropriated.

But it is even more complicated: Gonzalo realizes that the ‘occupation’ of a woman designated, as we shall see, either sexual possession or prostitution, which is why he compulsively asserts that in his new regime women would be innocent and pure. It is almost as if Shakespeare, in his metaphoric strings, foregrounded the phenomenon of rape as a means of political and cultural appropriation that surfaced not just in Early Modern Europe but all too recently in Modern Europe. Of course, Shakespeare, being Shakespeare, turned the tables: It was Caliban, colonized and not colonizer, who attempted to rape Miranda.

Shakespeare’s King John and Roman law

Laying claim to a geographical space with obvious boundaries – Malta in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, ‘Bermuda’ in The Tempest or England in Richard II – was not a difficult concept. An island is easily conceived of as a thing, or can be depicted symbolically – perhaps as a castle – as when, in Richard III, Richard of Gloucester and Buckingham dupe the Lord Mayor by pretending to defend an imaginary and invisible structure. A child may dream of being its king: ‘I’m the king of the castle, / And you’re the dirty rascal’. A crown can be formally bestowed as in King John or Richard II, or seized as it is by Hal from his father’s pillow, or by Stanley from the corpse of Richard III. But laying claim to a kingdom is something more complex: The myth of an ‘island nation’ does not match the geography or cultural mix of the ‘United Kingdom’ as claims for political autonomy in Northern Ireland, Wales and, most recently, Scotland cogently remind us.

King John is a play where, in its first half, the rhetoric of occupation and rule is put to the test. Shakespeare exposes the difficulties of conceptualizing possession of a kingdom as opposed to ownership of a territory in the opening sequence of the play:

When Shakespeare wants to defamiliarize a word, he repeats it. When he repeats words, you can tell he is thinking about them – or thinking with them. The word ‘majesty’ is another reification and is ambivalent: It vacillates between designating the sovereign power over land, the ‘greatness’ inherent in the state and regal impedimenta, the king’s crown and vestments. ‘Majesty’ is both corporeal and incorporeal. Pace Dr Johnson quibbles did not ‘engulf [Shakespeare] in the mire’, ²⁷ but signalled indeterminacy and complexity.

The dualism re-emerges in a spat between Queen Eleanor, mother to King John, and the Lady Constance, mother to Arthur and wife to John’s older brother Geoffrey. The women are struggling for the allegiance of Prince Arthur whose title to the throne of England and adjacent territories is supported by the French:

Constance is mocking the facile concept of a kingdom as a property, the metonym of which is the ‘title’ that King John would divide up in order to prevent Arthur’s claim to the whole (see King John, 2.1.562–3).

The theme is sophisticated when rights of ownership over an estate by law are set against rights of ownership by possession: This thread is firmly spun at the play’s opening. These are anatomized when, again, key words are repeated:

A few lines later, there is an interlude, a play for the ownership of an estate, between Robert Falconbridge and the unhistorical Philip, bastard son of Richard Coeur de Lion. King Richard had occupied Lady Falconbridge’s marital space, as she unwillingly admits:

This scene also juxtaposes two categories: The worth of honour that derives from descent and from what may be owned: material wealth derived from land.

In the third act, the doughty Lady Constance demolishes the distinction. Rights can be asserted, especially if they have existed since ‘time immemorial’, ²⁸ and thereby have a quasi-material existence as part of the fabric of the state. This means that, like lands, laws might themselves be possessed and are of no higher validity than rights derived from other kinds of possession. This is what Constance claims when she chops logic with Pandulph, emissary from the Pope:

‘He that holds his kingdom holds his law’: Constance’s precept was contentious, and, in fact, King Philip’s handover of his vassal, Arthur of Brittany, to King John of England, was a key quaestio that enabled King John’s contemporary, Azo of Bologna (1150–230), to argue that the universal law, appropriated from the Roman kingdom by the Roman emperors, the lex regia, did not necessarily take precedence over local laws, and that a king was indeed emperor in his own kingdom. The implications for the emergence of the early modern state are obvious. ²⁹ (Sir Henry Wotton has a cogent section in The State of Christendom on the devious means popes use to ‘grow up to authority’. ³⁰ )

Three hundred years after the reign of John, in Thomas Cromwell’s Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533, Henry VIII was to proclaim ‘This realm of England is an empire’. ³¹ Shakespeare alludes to this implicitly when the King, to Pandulph, claims divine right, ‘under God [as] supreme head’ (3.1.155), to choose his own archbishop. As Robert Smallwood writes, ‘The phrase is almost the only direct allusion to the idea of John as he forerunner of Henry VIII and the Reformation that Shakespeare allows to survive from The Troublesome Reign’. ³²

This ‘knitting together of high theology and politics’, enacted by Henry VIII and embellished by Richard Hooker during Shakespeare’s life, is the basis of the constitutional settlement, with its established Church of England, under which we in the United Kingdom still live. ³³ But, in King John, appeasement prevails and Pandulph is allowed to reassert his authority by re-crowning the monarch at the beginning of Act 5: The emblematic dimension of the moment is captured in this woodcut from the 1583 edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (Figure 1). ³⁴

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Figure 1.

‘King John offering his Crowne to Pandulphus, Legate’. From John Foxe, Actes and monuments of these latter and perillous dayes (London, 1583), 787. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online or TAMO (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011). http://www.johnfoxe.org.

John had ‘possessed’ the crown; the Pope implicitly ‘owned’ it. In another image, one in a conspicuous series of fine woodcuts at the end of the volume, the Pope is designated, in certain copies, as ‘Anti-Christ’ (Figure 2). ³⁵

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Figure 2.

‘K. J. Supplication to the Pope. Emperours kissing the popes feete. The Image of Antichrist’. From John Foxe, Actes and monuments of these latter and perillous dayes (London, 1583), 783. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online or TAMO (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011). http://www.johnfoxe.org.

However, there are dangers in taking images like these as defining moments in a battle between religious imperialism and English nationalism. In Shakespeare’s narrative, I consider that the sequence represents an opportunistic gambit by John to bolster his authority, even if this derived from the Pope.

In a production at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2015, this became John’s third onstage coronation: the director, James Dacre, had included a first coronation in an induction, taken largely from 1 Troublesome Reign, which began the performance. Taking a hint from a stage direction in the same play (8.84SD) and the line that begins 4.2, ‘Here once again we sit, once again crowned’, a second coronation (one described in Holinshed) ³⁶ was enacted. However, the acclamation, ‘May the king live for ever’, heard three times, and a new sung version of ‘Zadok the priest’ sounded to me like an anachronistic touch of Handel on that night.

That year was the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta – not, in fact, mentioned by Shakespeare, although at Shakespeare’s Globe they hammered a reference in. Perhaps those three coronations could mark a recognition that the increasing possession of power by unseen barons had to be countered by repeated demonstrations of right, even if these were generated by the papacy. Overall, however, we have to conclude that Shakespeare’s play is far more about Tudor than Angevin politics.

It happens that, when I was first preparing this article, David Cameron’s project to allow the repatriation of laws for Britain from another supranational entity, the EU – an atavistic evil empire in the minds of the Tory Right – was announced. The conflicts have not yet been resolved.

A third-language game occurs in the second act when King Philip of France berates King John of England:

John has shamelessly stared down his child adversary, the incarnation of the state, and by seizing the crown has raped it. State politics are sexual politics. It’s all summed up of course in the Bastard’s great soliloquy on ‘commodity’ (2.1.561 ff.). The word’s meaning swings between the designation of things material, commodities and an abstraction – that which is ‘commodious’, those possessions or conventions that become all men. Ethics derive from possessions: It’s all about self-interest, self-interest in both the individual and the state.

Now, of course, King John occupies not a kingdom but a grave. The old mole lies under his effigy and a funeral chest in the chancel of Worcester Cathedral, some yards from where I delivered a first version of this paper. Doubtless, as in Shakespeare’s ‘Denmark’, the cathedral gravedigger considered that he owned the grave.

Identity and consciousness

As in the macrocosm, so in the microcosm. People thought with concepts of invasion and territoriality to create metaphors for mental states. The words ‘preoccupy’ and its cognates were rare, but here is an interesting example. In 1572, John Leslie wrote of two conspirators against the Queen, Fleck and an associate, who were plotting against Mary Tudor:

The chief of these two Machiavellians…intruded himself by preoccupation into her presence and service…and suggested unto her certain…colourless suspicions against the chief of her sister’s council. ³⁷

In Coriolanus, Sicinius, one of the tribunes is trying persuade the citizens to retract their vote for Coriolanus’ bid for the consulship:

Hamlet’s consciousness is invaded, preoccupied, by the Ghost and the latter’s antagonist Pyrrhus – as Macbeth’s is by the Witches.

Thomas Drant, in his translation of Horace’s Art of Poetry, described the effects of pornography: ‘a scull [basket] of amorous pamphlets have…preoccupied the eyes and ears of men’. ³⁹ In Othello, as Lynda Boose demonstrated, Iago doubles the role of Machiavellian politician with that of Aretinian pornographer, preoccupying the mind of Othello with graphic images of Desdemona copulating with Cassio. ⁴⁰ Pietro Aretino’s Sonnetti Lussuriosi, published with engravings derived from Giulio Romano, the only Renaissance artist named by Shakespeare, was the most famous pornographic work of its age.

Iago’s images act ‘upon [Othello’s] blood’ to make him ‘Burn like the mines of sulphur’. Othello is so consumed that, for him, all sexual acts become sins. ⁴¹

Marital lovemaking is associated in his mind with what is unclean: Of Iago Othello says, ‘An honest man he is, and hates the slime / That sticks on filthy deeds’ (5.2.146–7). Othello’s cry, ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone’, is, first, a lament for his military career, perhaps a recognition that conversion from the religion of the Turk may have been a mistake; second, an admission that he had possessed but not ‘owned’ Desdemona as her father had done; and third – because he seems to feel that all lovemaking involves ‘adulteration’ – an exclamation of relief at his liberation from obsessive sexual desire for his own wife.

Sexuality

Shakespeare usefully defamiliarized the word for us: You will remember Doll Tearsheet tearing strips off ‘Captain’ Pistol in 2.4 of 2 Henry IV:

Captain? Thou abominable damned cheater, art thou not ashamed to be called captain?…. You a captain! You slave, for what? For a poor whore’s ruff in a bawdy-house?…God’s light, these villains will make the word as odious as the word ‘occupy’, which was an excellent good word before it was ill-sorted…. (2 Henry IV, 2.1.109–16 [emphasis added])

The word became such a common designation for carnal relationships that, according to the OED, throughout the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries, there was a general tendency to avoid the word. ⁴² A graph generated by Google Books Ngram Viewer exemplifies this (Figure 3). ⁴³

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Figure 3.

Incidences of the words ‘occupy’ and ‘occupation’, 1500–900. Google Books NGram Viewer.

Not surprising perhaps: In The Taming of the Shrew, Tranio reports that Hortensio had attended a ‘taming-school’ where Petruchio was the master’, a school ‘that teacheth tricks eleven and twenty long / To tame a shrew and charm her chattering tongue’ (4.2.57–8 [emphasis added]). This euphemism is a reference to Italianate vice, a game of occupation, in fact: In 1598, John Florio glossed ‘Trentuno’ as ‘a punishment inflicted by ruffianly fellows upon rascally whores in Italy, who…cause them to be occupied one-and-thirty times by one-and-thirty several base rascally companions’, ⁴⁴ and OED offers another gloss from Florio, ‘A good wench, one that occupies [works] freely’. ⁴⁵ So, for a woman, ‘occupying’ designated both passivity and activity. She takes and is taken. About 1637, Ben Jonson remembered the word: ‘Many, out of their own obscene apprehensions, refuse proper and fit words – as occupy, nature, and the like’. ⁴⁶

The notion circled back from sexual to territorial possession: Ralegh wrote in The Discovery of Guiana (1596):

we now consider of the actions both of Charles the first, who had the maidenhead of Peru and the abundant treasures or Atabalipa…To conclude, Guiana is a Country that hath yet her maidenhead, newer sacked, turned, nor wrought…It hath never been entered by any army of strength, and never conquered or possessed by any Christian Prince. ⁴⁷ (Emphases added)

Texts: Seizing the day, occupying the moment

Many of Shakespeare’s comedies rest on shifting political tectonic plates. They involve conflict and negotiations between states, nations and factions as well as between individuals. Perhaps Shakespeare from his isle, at last comparatively peaceful after the Wars of the Roses, was casting a complacent eye on the unstable realms or dominions across the channel.

Modern productions can occupy historical moments as well as political spaces. In 2014, the centenary of the outbreak of the Great European War, the RSC seized the moment by mounting a brilliant diptych production. Director Christopher Luscombe occupied Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing, the latter of which became his by virtue of a fresh title: It was credibly marketed as Love’s Labour’s Won. The merry wars between Berowne and Rosaline and Benedick and Beatrice were profiled against that devastatingly real war, which almost destroyed the fabric of Europe. Gregory Doran, the RSC’s Artistic Director, was intrigued by a notion of the two plays in conversation. The verbal sparring, which was followed by separation in the one, was consummated by marital union in the other – in Elizabethan English, these were both designated by ‘conversation’.

‘Occupying’ yet again seems to be a useful metaphor. It reminds us of the fact that texts are not things to be ‘possessed’. When our German colleagues speak of ‘unser Shakespeare’, we know they are not claiming ownership – or we think we know! Or perhaps it is an acknowledgement that Shakespeare has occupied areas of the cultural map all over Europe and beyond. The title of a recent essay by Kim Moran, ‘The Stages “Occupied by Shakespeare”: Intercultural Performances and the Search for Korean-ness in Postcolonial Korea’, suggests a relationship between political and cultural occupations. ⁴⁸

However, stage productions have long been marketed on the basis of their employment of ‘original staging conditions’ (OSC) – for example, those by the American Shakespeare Center at the Staunton Virginia Blackfriars playhouse. ⁴⁹ The danger is that an OSC production might be claimed to be ‘authentic’.

The equation of the original with the authentic is deeply flawed: An autographed work – a Picasso, for example – is authentic and, as a thing, can be possessed. Plays, as Nelson Goodman pointed out, belong in a category different from works of art: They are allographic, which means they must be re-created in performance. ⁵⁰

In the re-creation of Love’s Labour’s Lost, a synecdoche represented England, here not a castle but a country house. A fine replica of Charlecote Park, the pastiche Elizabethan manor built in the 1820s on the site of the original house of the Lucy family, stood at the rear of the stage. A large truck could thrust out downstage a furnished drawing room, and other sets could be thrust up through a sizeable stage trap. Just the ticket for a recreation of an Edwardian house party. It looked terrific, and, as someone who tells his students ‘you don’t build walls, let alone rooms, for Shakespearian productions’, I had to eat my words.

At the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost, instead of departing to serve in a hermitage or hospital, the quartet of young men had enlisted and passed across the stage to the ramp that would take them from ‘Navarre’ to the front in France. They were now spick subalterns, their Sam Browne belts with shoulder straps vibrantly polished. Nigel Hess’s romantic settings of ‘When daisies pied’ and ‘When icicles hang by the wall’ morphed first into a romantic lyric, ‘If love make me forsworn, how shall I swear to love’ (the first line of Sonnet 5 in The Passionate Pilgrim), then into a patriotic Elgarian march tune with snare drums and trumpet obbligato. The words of Mercury were indeed harsh after the songs of Apollo – the last sound we heard was the tune played from afar on a mouth organ.

Love’s Labour’s Won was set just after the Armistice of 1918, in Christmas of that year. Holst’s setting of ‘In the Deep Midwinter’ was the second-half opener. The house had been occupied by a hospital: Metal beds filled the drawing room, the subalterns returned with three pips on their epaulettes, now captains.

Division between officers and gentlemen and others supplanted political tensions caused by the imperial occupation of Sicily by Spaniards. (We remember that in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Navarre has occupied Aquitaine, which the King of France, father to the Princess, would like to buy back. ⁵¹ The Duchy of Aquitaine has become a commodity.)

In Love’s Labour’s Won, in 4.2, the social fault line gaped open between the self-proclaimed gentleman Conrad and Borachio, a devious footman or valet out of Downton Abbey. Don John was multiply damaged, and sported a crutch, his machinations a symptom of shellshock. Dogberry was also a veteran, with service ribbons on his policeman’s uniform, and obviously a man who worshipped in the Methodist chapel rather than the parish church, a working-class Tory, as devoted to his Prince as to his God. ‘Allegiance’ was a sanctified word for him: ‘Nay, that were a punishment too good for them, if they should have any allegiance in them, being chosen for the prince’s watch’ (3.3.5–6 [emphasis added]). ⁵² However, like Don John, Dogberry, his occupation gone, had been crazed by the war. The Friar was not a man of piety but of passion and anger, a doughty military chaplain.

Hess’s music marked the change from the age of Ivor Novello, active 1914–51, to the age of Noel Coward, who came into his own in the interwar years. Once they were out of their nurses’ uniforms, the women had worn the long skirts familiar to us from photos of the suffragettes. Towards the end of the play, Beatrice, when she was not on social parade, slipped around the great house in trousers. The final musical number included a Charleston with the two feisty brides to be to the fore.

Just as Conrad and Borachio were separated by rank, Margaret and Ursula were separated by their origins. Ursula sported an Irish accent and was not scared to appropriate and send up the high style of the English ascendancy:

Margaret was unhappy with her situation:

The production made more sense of the rebirth of Hero than any I have seen. As in The Comedy of Errors, it played with ideas of a double identity, social – created by the way we are perceived – and subjective, created by our sense of our own experience. Leonato proclaimed, ‘She died, my lord, but whiles her slander lived’. Hero’s identity, if not her body, had been occupied by the men in the play and she was reborn, her hair cut fashionably short, as a new woman of the twentieth century.

In conclusion

I hope that I have established that the word ‘occupy’ and its derivatives might stand as a keyword – any word that was too hot to handle for more than a 100 years must be a keyword. I began with Woody Guthrie: His protest song has been occupied by patriots. I wanted to imitate – although I knew I would not match – the method of the great historian of European culture, Erich Auerbach, who, some 70 years ago, wrote, at the conclusion of his essay ‘Figura’, that his ‘purpose was to show how, on the basis of its semantic development, a word may grow into a historical situation and give rise to structures that will be effective for many centuries (emphasis added)’. ⁵³ For some theorists, that organic metaphor may be tendentious, but I think it defines a particular semantic space, which, for the moment, I am happy to occupy.