Earth, realm, England: national identity and the land in the English history plays of William Shakespeare
Keywords: Shakespeare
National identity
Henry VI
Ecofeminism
Ecocriticism
History play
Richard II
Henry IV
Henry V

When John of Gaunt speaks of ‘this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’, his words elide local plots of earth with the realm as a whole, suggesting the ‘earth’ (ie. soil) of the ‘blessed plot’ is a necessary component of the ‘realm’ of ‘England’. The order is intriguing: Gaunt begins on a granular level, the physical soil. From there he moves to a plot, a term commonly designating a small area of land. Next is the realm. Commonly understood as a kingdom, the term can also be defined as ‘a region, a territory; the sphere which something affects or controls’, and both definitions were in use at the time of Richard II’s composition and performance. In the ‘Table of Engliſh words’ appended to Timothy Bright’s Charactery: An Art of Short, Swift, and Secret Writing by Character (1588), for example, ‘realme’ is glossed as ‘region’ (although one early reader of the Bodleian’s copy has added ‘nation’ next to it), and Claude Hollyband’s A Dictionary French and English (1593) defines ‘légion’ as ‘a region, a realme, a countrey’. Each consecutive noun builds upon the previous until they culminate in ‘England’, which is framed as summative of both plots of earth and realms. Both regional and national identity are dependent upon the physical soil. With this in mind, my thesis reassesses Shakespeare’s treatment of national identity in light of recent developments in ecocritical and spatial thinking. My analysis focuses on Shakespeare’s English history plays of the 1590s. Scholarship on national identity in these plays has focused largely on the rhetorical aspects of nation building. I consider instead the role of the physical land itself, bringing an ecocritical perspective to bear upon early modern English understandings of self and nationhood. I ask how the relationship between earth, plot, and realm – that is, between England’s varied and often conflicted identities and the physical land of which the nation was composed – was understood by its inhabitants.
In recent years Shakespeare criticism has become increasingly local and regional in focus, as demonstrated by the work of Julie Sanders, Philip Schwyzer, Andrew McRae, and Sarah Dustagheer. However, in many ways scholarship continues to view Shakespeare’s engagement with questions of national identity in the histories in distinctly binary terms – to see them, as Jean Feerick writes of Henry V, ‘as orchestrating a relation between opposed terms, between a core and its periphery, or English and non-English’. Matthew Greenfield has rightly observed the problematic depiction of ‘English culture as a homogenous entity with clear boundaries, uncomplicated by the British question’, as it appears to be in the quotation from John of Gaunt cited in my title. The scholarship mentioned above has done much to counteract this depiction, redirecting our attention to England’s elision and oppression of its archipelagic neighbours as well as to the uncertainties this produced. My thesis applies this thinking more locally, demonstrating that in addition to being complicated by ‘the British Question’ the nation is complicated by what might be termed ‘the English Question’, and that if we persist in the assumption that England as a whole is a privileged normative space, we miss vital aspects of the cultural moment in which Shakespeare’s histories were written. It is not my contention that some degree of division or uncertainty is incompatible with nationhood. Instead, my thesis argues that in attending to such tensions, we must attend to those which are internal alongside those between England and its archipelagic or continental neighbours.
Reassessing such moments of intranational tension through a more ecocritical lens allows us not only to challenge the idea that England as a whole was a homogenous entity, but to consider to what extent its heterogeneity affects the concept of national identity. My thesis encourages a more open critical understanding of early modern English national identity in which the ‘nation’ shares a common – if contested – territory, and can contain multiple, and often conflicting, identities and narratives of identity. In this it is informed by the conditions of nationhood identified by Benedict Anderson alongside challenges to modernist orthodoxy by Adrian Hastings, John M. Adrian, and Andrew Hadfield, as well as the more recent work of Richard Ned Lebow. By redirecting critical attention to the crucial role the land plays in thinking about this ‘English question’, my thesis demonstrates how such internal tensions can coexist with a broader concept of national identity, creating the ‘national vision composed of local particulars’ Elizabeth Yale speaks of. ‘Earth, Realm, England: National Identity and the Land in the English History Plays of William Shakespeare’ reconsiders the parameters of national identity in early modern England, demonstrating how an ecocritical approach enables a better understanding of the problematic boundaries of the emerging nation state.