Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France (review)

Drawing on a range of theatrical, political, and polemical texts, Richard Hillman tackles the imaginative relations between England and France and aims to fill a gap in close studies of the literary exchanges between these countries in the late-sixteenth century. Hillman's concerns are the ways English and French discourses, read intertextually, produce political meanings, which work to "define [a] collective subjectivity" (5). The author is drawn to Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller and to Shakespeare's plays on English nationhood, particularly King John, 1 Henry VI, and Henry V. With a nod to England's struggles for national security and stability in the 1590s, he argues that similar struggles characterized France, and he aims to remedy an English "cultural one-sidedness" by seeing France as England's "'other'" and by theorizing French "'difference'" (10). Behind the apparent hatred of the English for the French and vice versa "lurks ambivalence: for the English of the period, France was always, in some measure, their own alienated heritage, a nostalgic reminder of shamefully forfeited but theoretically recoverable glory" (13).

Because (as Hillman writes of representations of Jeanne d'Arc), the "'real' drama is arguably epistemological, rather than historical" (19), several fascinating reciprocal relationships among myths, characters, and genres emerge. These include the resonances between the genres of "oratory" (or the "literary") and "history"; among French pamphlets evoking Henri VI, Nashe's play, and Shakespeare's Henriad (30-46); and among King Arthur and Richard Coeur de Lion as mythological figures in King John and HenryV and Henri III's similarly mystified role (47-71). The last chapter offers a brilliant turn on the meanings of Rouen as the city is reimagined in English and French texts.

The richest chapter is "Marlovian Monarchs and Various Guises." Situating Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris among different versions of the story of the Guise, Hillman's discussion culminates in the verse drama La Guisiade, published in the year following the Guise's murder (1589). Hillman compares representations of the Guise in French works, where he is given a relatively balanced treatment, with Marlowe's play, which depicts the Guise as instigator of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (83). These texts illuminate the viewpoints available to Marlowe's audiences and serve Hillman's contention that ideologically opposed dramas in French and English "could represent villainy and virtue by similar discursive conventions" (92). The major strength of this study is the wealth of French materials it brings to light in every chapter, but there are some difficulties along the way. Hillman announces a Lacanian approach to the materials, but the book makes little serious use of Lacan, relying instead on a discursive, dialogical method. There is also a question about the uniqueness of the French materials: on soldiership, for example, the French citations appear to derive as much from biblical texts and well-known courtly discourses such as The Courtier as from the specifically French sources Hillman cites. Moreover, often only a summary reference, single word, or brief phrase of the French texts is provided, making it difficult for a reader to "hear" the resonances being asserted. (English scholars be forewarned: though the book is dense with citations of French materials, ranging from single words to substantial passages, it includes no translations.)

Especially in his close readings, Hillman makes the most of his French texts, forging meaningful associations from these less-familiar works. In the process, he contributes to discussions of the London theater audience, which he finds "immersed . . . in the discourses of French affairs" (2), and he presents a convincing vision of the symbolic exchange effected in late-sixteenth-century English representations of France.