The Trauma of Empire in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture

When she did well, what did ther elce amiss?
When she did ill what empires could have pleased?

(Sir Walter Ralegh, "The Ocean to Cynthia" (qtd. by Montrose 2006, 91)

I press'd me none but good householders, yeoman's sons…
Such a commodity of warm slaves.

(Falstaff, Henry IV, Part One, 4.2.14-17)

King and commander of our commonweal,
The wide world's emperor, do I consecrate
My sword, my chariot and my prisoners.

(Titus, Titus Andronicus 1.1.247-49)

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

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

It would be hard to overstress the relevance of this early-modern imperialism to all phases of life and culture both on native and non-native soil. Shakespeare too explored its roots and consequences across all the dramatic and literary genres in which he wrote. Many of his works can be considered not mirrors of human nature but of what sovereignty...