Divided Kingdoms and the Local Epic: Mercian Hymns to The King of Britain's Daughter

When James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne in 1603, he grandly styled himself "King of Great Brittaine, France and Ireland." This did more than antagonize certain of the Irish followers of Hugh O'Neill, the third Earl of Tyrone, whose nine-year rebellion and flight in 1607 made way for the Ulster plantation. By merging England and Scotland into the entity called Britannia by the Romans, James stirred debate among his subjects from Kent to the Western Isles, including many of those Welshmen whose anciently Britonnic land had been subsumed into the English state by the Acts of Union (1536-43). James's desire to forge a single British people under one law ran into stiff opposition. A bill to unite the kingdoms was thrown out by the House of Commons. But poetry and the arts in general were stimulated by his attempts to unify the island. Much of the work motivated by his constitutional initiative--such as Ben Jonson's iconography for the king's first entry into London--was frankly propagandist. Some of it explored, however, in ways that are once again topical, the geopolitical complexity of what Shakespeare's first play about British, as against English, history, King Lear, calls "the division of the kingdom." ¹

As scholars now routinely point out, the singularity of that "kingdom" derives from a Folio reading. ² The Quarto of 1608 has Gloucester speak of "the diuision of the kingdomes" (B1^r)--attributing a plurality which makes Lear seem less obtuse when he decides to divide his realm into the traditional domains of the North (or Albany), the Celtic West (governed by the Duke of Cornwall), and England (Cordelia's intended portion). There are no doubt various reasons why eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors preferred the Folio's "Kingdome" (qq2^r), and why the ambivalence about British unity registered in the Quarto should only have come into clearer view over the last couple of decades. It can hardly be accidental, though, that the editors who opted for "Kingdome" belonged to an expansionist state which, by means of the 1707 and 1801 Acts of Union, drew Scotland and, less securely, Ireland into "the United Kingdom," and that the Quarto's "diuision of the kingdomes" was looked at with fresh understanding during a period of devolutionary politics. Since the electoral breakthrough of Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party in the mid-1960s, and since the renewal, in 1968, of the Troubles in Ulster, the grip of the crown on "Great Brittaine . . . and Ireland" has again become a matter of dispute.

These geopolitical changes have been as animating for recent poetry as the Jacobean controversy was for writers of Shakespeare's generation--though they have also tempted some poets to produce factitious verse rather than miss the opportunity to engage with public issues. It is of course the case that, since the early nineteenth century, when nationalism developed its revolutionary potential, much poetry written across the archipelago has agitated for a division of the kingdoms. Young Ireland in the 1840s and the poets who fought in the Easter Rising of 1916 contributed to the secession of the Irish Free State. A vein of separatist sentiment is equally apparent in Welsh and Anglo-Welsh poetry from Saunders Lewis to R. S. Thomas, while Scottish verse from Hugh MacDiarmid onwards often strikes a nationalist note. To find work which is recognizably contemporary, however, in its grasp of cultural geography, one must look to later poets, and particularly to the local epics produced by several writers born between 1929 and 1937. In Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns (1971), John Montague's The Rough Field (1972), Ted Hughes's The Remains of Elmet (1979), and Gillian Clarke's The King of Britain's Daughter (1993), long poems, or broken sequences, respond to devolutionary and internationalizing pressures...