Shakespeare, Geography, and the Work of Genre on the Early Modern Stage

Shakespeare set most of his tragedies somewhere other than England. Consider the list. Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar take place in Rome; Romeo and Julietis set in the strife-riven city of Verona, Hamletin the Danish court at Elsinore; Othello begins in the great maritime city of Venice, though after act 1 the action moves to the island of Cyprus; Antony and Cleopatra ranges over the eastern Mediterranean, oscillating primarily between Rome and Egypt; Coriolanus takes place mainly in Rome, Corioli, and Actium; Timon of Athens, obviously, is set in Athens. Macbeth does unfold in Scotland, with a brief detour to the England of Edward the Confessor, but, as I will discuss later, Scotland to the English was very much a foreign country. Only King Lear, of all the plays we today identify as part of Shakespeare's tragic canon, is set in the territory we now call England, though the action takes place in the distant past, in the days of the ancient Britons, before England was England. ¹ Temporal distance in Lear replaces the spatial distance from England that characterizes the other tragedies.

Is the pattern of locating tragedy outside England unique to Shakespeare? Is it of critical significance, or just a random curiosity? In attempting to answer these questions, I meditate in what follows on the links among genre, geography, and the class and gender investments of particular kinds of plays on the early modern stage. ² I begin by focusing on one of my key terms, genre. It is a word frequently employed by early modern writers, for whom, as for us, it indicated the differences, in a relational field, separating one type of writing from another. ³ Often, comprehending the terms of a generic system can be as much a matter of tacit as of explicit or formal knowledge. For instance, if one asks any twelve-year-old what different kinds (i.e., genres) of TV shows there are, he or she will instantly produce a taxonomy: there are sitcoms, soap operas, quiz shows, cop shows, ten-o'clock-in-the-evening dramas, talk shows, and so on, each with its own narrative conventions, its familiar cast of characters, even its typical time slot. Lacking TV, Renaissance writers nonetheless recognized and worked within generic systems. They distinguished tragedies from comedies, pastorals from georgics, odes from sonnets. In the modern as in the early modern instance, however, the purpose of generic classification remains the same. It allows different kinds of similar things to be distinguished from one another. Comedies and tragedies are both plays, but they differ in many ways: effect on an audience, narrative structure, assumptions about time. As a pragmatic matter, genre aids both producers and consumers of texts. For example, familiarity with generic conventions enables readers or consumers to have specific expectations about a given text and so helps organize the viewing or reading experience. ⁴ Genre is useful to writers or producers of texts because it provides them with forms and matter for imitation, with starting points for their own innovations and transformations of received material.

However, generic systems do not, as some structuralists have implied, map essential and immutable kinds of writing. Rather, generic differences are established relationally, and a given genre system is constantly in flux in response to a wide variety of historical and social pressures. New genres emerge; old ones mutate; some disappear. Often, one labels a genre as a distinctive entity only retrospectively, and there is always considerable instability around the edges of any generic classification. ⁵ For example, in the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, Richard IIIon its title page is called The Tragedy of Richard the Third, but it is listed among the histories in the catalog that serves as a preface to the volume. ⁶ Tragedy was a venerable genre in the early...