Septic isle?
Britain’s
A world by itself, and we will nothing pay
For wearing our own noses.
Cue laughter, and/or cynical nodding of heads. It’s a line that Boris Johnson might come up with while (misleadingly) claiming that the UK ‘sends to Brussels’ 350 million quid every week. But it’s not Boris. It’s Cloten, the boorish son of the wicked queen in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, jeering at the general who has come to claim Britain’s unpaid tribute money to the Roman Empire.
His mother the Queen then chips in with a ludicrous vision of sovereignty, in which Britain ‘stands as Neptune’s park’ with an impregnable perimeter fence made up of good old British oak trees, and ‘roaring waters’. Shades here not just of Boris, but of Trump.
Most absurdly, she claims that the treacherous shifting sands in the Channel will attack ‘enemies’ boats’ and ‘suck them up to the topmast’ – and seemingly, only the enemies’ boats! These are impressive border controls; sands and seas, she says, have twice combined to smash Julius Caesar’s shipping (‘poor ignorant baubles’) against ‘our’ rocks. As a result, London town has been lit up with ‘rejoicing fires’ and ‘Britons strut with courage’—like so many drunken football hooligans.
This is clearly not the idea of Shakespeare’s England on which most people have been brought up. Indeed few critics have known what to do with Cymbeline , and the current production at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford which seeks to draw extended parallels between the play and the Brexit campaign has had mixed, and uncomfortable, reviews.
Normally, when people want to press Shakespeare into service for quotes about ideas of Britain, they look to other plays. In Richard II , for example, we can find almost exactly the same speech, but this time given to the dying John of Gaunt:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle…
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This precious stone set in the silver sea
Which serves it in the office of a wall …
That fence idea again.
So often taken out of context, and intoned in an unthinking warm beer and old-maids-on-bicycles kind of a way, ‘this sceptered isle’ has leant itself to a multitude of other uses, including the title for a 90 part BBC Radio 4 series on the history of the British Empire. But we should remember who it is that speaks these lines in the play, and why. John of Gaunt is in fact complaining that Richard’s excesses as king are destroying the country from the inside—in despite its defences. And it will be John of Gaunt’s own son, Henry Bolingbroke, who returns from exile abroad to usurp Richard, throwing the country into what will turn out to be 75 years of intermittent civil war.
Over the course of his career, Shakespeare devotes eight plays to this period of domestic strife, encapsulating it, in the 3rd part of Henry VI , in a devastating pair of stage directions ‘ Enter a son that has killed his father ’ and a few lines later ‘ Enter a father that has killed his son ’. Written out of sequence at about the time of the rise of the nation state, this collection of plays is a series of indictments of the perils of so-called sovereignty. And yet, as a chronological sequence, as they are so often presented, they can acquire a kind of historical inexorability.
Where that unjustly neglected play Cymbeline has value in the present moment is in its fanciful mix of periods – seemingly both ancient Britain and contemporary renaissance Rome – and of styles. It is often gruesome, often violent, often immensely touching, but always on the verge of humour.
Highly experimental, the play consistently looks two ways at once. By the end, the boorish little Englander and his wicked mother are dead. King Cymbeline, though the victor in a bloody battle, submits to Caesar and pays the tribute money. But Shakespeare keeps up the ambivalence: the peace is celebrated in the ‘crooked smokes’ of sacrifices that climb to the ‘nostrils’ of the gods and the final resounding couplet retains a slightly queasy tone:
Never was a war did cease,
Ere bloody hands were washed, with such a peace.
In this play, as possibly in this coming week, Britain as part of Europe has a future— albeit one that it will need to negotiate and to work for—but Britain out of Europe, most assuredly, does not.
Professor Ros King
Professor Ros King is a Professor of English at the University of Southampton.
