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1. Halbjahresband 2015
This earth, this land, this island…
By RUTH MORSE (Cambridge) and DAVID SCHALKWYK (London)
Abstract: The essay conjoins two things that may be considered to be unusual bedfellows: first, a rigorous etymological analysis of the word ‘earth’ (and its difference from the apparent cognate, ‘land’) as it is used in Shakespeare’s plays, especially Richard II, and, second, an investigation of the role of the concept in the context of South Africa as a place in which settlers and the indigenous population struggled variously over land and earth as the fundamental materials of sustenance, place and identity. Our analysis is conceptual and literary, not historical or political. The connection that we trace between the concepts is allusive and suggestive rather than causal, stemming from the contingency of a mediating text, the “Robben Island Shakespeare” that was signed by some 34 prisoners on Robben Island who were Mandela’s companions in the mid to late 1970s. The essay tests some of the broad assumptions of the battle lines that South African Shakespeareans drew in the late 1980s between political commitment to local conditions and responsibilities, an apparently apolitical philological reading of Shakespeare, and the different, and unexpected, ways in which a historical reading of the language Shakespeare uses may reflect on seemingly remote contexts. We argue that a careful etymological reading of the concepts may complicate the oversimplifications of immediate political commitment and reveal the political nuances available to a properly sensitive attention to the historical sedimentation of key words in Shakespeare. Keywords: Shakespeare, land, ownership, stewardship, South Africa, Robben Island Shakespeare, Mandela, language
In 1987, when those responsible for maintaining the Apartheid system in South Africa seemed most belligerently intransigent in the face of massive opposition, both internally and internationally, Martin Orkin published Shakespeare Against Apartheid, radically confronting Shakespeareans within the country and changing the terms by which Shakespeare could be read, taught, and performed in the country.1 Inspired by the new wave of political readings of Shakespeare in Europe and North America, Orkin worked on two fronts. 1 Martin Orkin, Shakespeare against Apartheid (Craighall, South Africa: Ad. Donker, 1987). Orkin’s chapter on King Lear was subsequently republished as “Cruelty, King Lear and the South African Land Act 1913”, Shakespeare Survey, 40 (1988), 135–44; http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/shakespeare/chapter.jsf?bid= CBO9781139053174&cid=CBO9781139053174A016 (access: 7 October 2014).
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He castigated South African Shakespeareans for pursuing a Leavisite path in their teaching and research that irresponsibly ignored politics in favour of an aesthetic philology by which “the abstract qualities of a supposedly universal and timeless ‘human nature’, lose touch with the concrete material situations and social processes pictured in the plays, and thus effectively depoliticises and almost anaesthetises Shakespeare”;2 and he offered his own Marxist reading of King Lear. He focused on its concern with land as the basis of power and property, looking at the Jacobean play in relation to the South African Land Act of 1913, by which black South Africans were dispossessed of all but thirteen percent of the land in the country of their birth by the white descendants of the Dutch seventeenth-century settlers and subsequent immigrants from England.3 This essay revisits this debate a quarter of a century later, when South Africa has just celebrated twenty years of democratic rule, and Shakespeareans consider the Materialist movement from which Orkin derived his ideas arcane enough to have warranted a special commemorative panel at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in 2014. If Orkin’s issue was land – as something possessed and therefore capable of being dispossessed, alienated, struggled over, envied, bought and sold – our focus is earth. The essay conjoins two things that may be considered to be unusual bedfellows: a rigorous etymological analysis of the word ‘earth’ (and its difference from the apparent cognate, ‘land’) as it is used in Shakespeare’s plays, especially Richard II, and an investigation of the role of the concept in the context of South Africa, where settlers and the indigenous population struggled over land and earth as the fundamental materials of sustenance, place and identity. Our analysis is conceptual and literary, not historical or political. The connection that we trace between the concepts is allusive and suggestive rather than causal. It stems from the contingency of a mediating text: the “Robben Island Shakespeare” that was signed by some 34 prisoners on Robben Island who were Mandela’s companions in the mid to late 1970s. The essay tests some of the broad assumptions of the battle lines Orkin and his critics drew in the late 1980s between political commitment to local conditions and responsibilities, an apparently apolitical philological reading of Shakespeare’s language, and the different, and unexpected, ways in which a historical reading of the language Shakespeare uses may reflect on seemingly remote contexts.
2 Colin Gardner, “Teaching Shakespeare in Southern African Universities: A Response to Martin Orkin’s Shakespeare Against Apartheid”, Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 2 (1988), 78–82, p. 78. 3 The Dutch settled at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. It became a British possession after the Battle of Muizenberg in 1795 and was finally ratified as a British colony with the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814.
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In the first part we discuss the etymology of ‘earth’ as it comes into English from the twin sources of Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon, jolting modern memories by tracing the different meanings of ‘earth’ in Shakespeare and its difference from ‘land’. In the second we trace a similar differentiation between ‘earth’ and ‘land’ in modern South Africa, especially in the attitudes towards the concepts that provided an ideological underpinning to white, and especially Afrikaner, justification for their large-scale theft of land from the indigenous population. We contrast the distinctively Afrikaner application of a German Romantic Blut und Boden philosophy of oneness with the earth to their own relation to the farm in Africa with key African representations of land. In contrast to the appropriating Blut und Boden ideology, we argue that attitudes towards earth and land in the South African activists Sol T. Plaatje and Nelson Mandela are much closer to Shakespeare’s uses of the terms, and that a careful etymological reading of the concepts may complicate the oversimplifications of immediate political commitment and reveal the political nuances available to a properly sensitive attention to the historical sedimentation of key words in Shakespeare. ‘Earth’ vs ‘land’ in Shakespeare The most well-known instances of the phrase “this earth” in Shakespeare occur in Shakespeare’s Richard II, where it appears at least twice, in the mouths of the antagonists, John of Gaunt and Richard.4 There are six further instances of the phrase in the canon, none of them with the precise and very unusual sense in which it is employed in Shakespeare’s play of usurpation and regicide. Indeed, the word ‘earth’, without the demonstrative pronoun, also occurs most frequently in Richard II. It is used some thirty times; in Hamlet it occurs on 24 occasions, followed by Romeo and Juliet with 20, and Titus Andronicus with 16. In The Tempest it is used eleven times; in King Lear there are only six occurrences. One of the problems with such counting of words is that the signifier has a range of different but related signifieds or uses, so that closer scrutiny will show that we are often comparing apple and oranges. In Romeo and Juliet, for example, the word ‘earth’ is used most often by Juliet, who invokes it repeatedly in her fearful apprehension of death and entombment. This sense of the earth as the ultimate destiny of the body as corpse is a predominant sense
4 Our word counts are generated by the computer programme Wordhoard, available at http://wordhoard.northwestern.edu/userman/getting-started.html. Wordhoard is an extremely powerful programme that can generate usage across the Shakespeare corpus (and of the early Greek epic, Chaucer and Spenser) by genre or date. Available tags are ‘lemma’, ‘parts of speech’, ‘spellings’, ‘word classes’, ‘speaker’, ‘speaker gender’, ‘speaker mortality’, ‘verse or prose’ and ‘metrical shapes’.
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across the Shakespearean canon. This is especially true of plays like Hamlet and Titus Andronicus, where specific scenes involving burial concentrate the word ‘earth’ to the term commonly used to refer to the medium of interment. But as we shall show, Romeo and Juliet offers a different but related sense of “my earth”, when Juliet’s father uses it to speak of his progeny. This sense is related to the biblical sense of the body as mere earth, but it also conveys a sense of living on through one’s progeny. Much more striking is the absence of the word ‘earth’ from plays like King Lear, where one might expect the ideological struggle over the land to induce more frequent invocations of the material site and substance of political struggle. When we turn our search to the word ‘land’, a subtle change occurs. King Lear registers a more frequent reference to land not only as something inhabited but also as something possessed, and therefore prone to be lost, especially through its coupling to the possessive pronouns ‘my’ or ‘our’, or the intimately demonstrative ‘this’. Along with its use of the term ‘earth’, and especially ‘this earth’, Richard II again leads the pack in its use of ‘land’. If we combine its reference to earth with its obsession with ‘land’, our word count suggests that this is the Shakespeare play most concerned with human interactions in a broadly human, political, emotional and sovereign sense to the material and symbolic place and substance of human existence and relationships. But again, it strikes us intuitively that if any of Shakespeare’s plays plumbs these issues to their uttermost depths, it is King Lear, which is at the very bottom of the lists of plays in which either ‘earth’ or ‘land’ appear. We will return to this in the second part of the essay. Songs of Erð The commonly quoted phrase “this earth, this England” (Richard II, 1.1.46), in John of Gaunt’s famous dying speech is so familiar, so resonant, and so worn out by the twentieth century’s wars, so used-up by nationalism, that there seems no more to say about it. And yet a close examination of the semantic field of ‘earth’ in the OED and a concordance of Shakespeare’s work offers a nuanced variety of connotations and implications that invite us to rethink its appearances in a variety of contexts. This essay explores this earth rather than that earth; as this living human body, or that dead one; base elemental, as followed by water, fire and air; or grossly bound upon the wheel of desire. It also reminds us of the layers of the English language which, like its soil (from Latin via French, its terre charnelle), reveal forgotten layers of feeling and expression, among them that ‘earth’ was once as feminine a noun as la terre. Our first excavation, which is not the same as ‘dig’, is to remind us forgetful of the history of the language that Tolkien, whose work was predicated upon a now-dying philology, would have explained that we have two words, ‘Erd’ and ‘Earth’, so close that they have intertwined until their separate
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existence has faded into a long-forgotten past, not least because when they were written down as homophones, they were confused. One might add ‘dearth’ and ‘death’, where the former started life – as Hamlet knows – as a positive evaluative descriptive word. “His infusion of such dearth and rareness” means high value, high price and excellence – but it also means that Hamlet treats Osric like a fool, humiliating him with aureation in an archaic register. Infusions of Old Norse into Anglo-Saxon make such manipulations possible, contributing to and distributing the unusual rich potential of vocabulary and redundancy of the English language now. Let us observe the etymological commentary at the head of the entry for “Earth substantive 1” (in the original edition of the OED): Men’s notions of the shape and position of the earth have so greatly changed since Old Teutonic times, while the language of the older notions has long outlived them, that it is very difficult to arrange the senses and applications of the word in any historical order. The following arrangement does not pretend to follow the development of ideas.
“The development of ideas” owed much to the ‘Comparative Method’, which encouraged historians of languages to deduce genealogies and thus the descents of languages and peoples, implying as well the vocabulary of social bonds in a framework of developing ‘civilisation’. If it is a cliché that metaphors deliver presuppositions to which we are often blind, it is nevertheless true. One etymological example that sheds light on ‘earth’ can be seen by using the test of ‘substitution’. Let us suppose John of Gaunt to have said, “This land, this England”, which would have offered a rhyme. ‘This land’ doesn’t, however, convey the same thing at all, though it is not immediately easy to explain why not. Crudely, perhaps, ‘earth’ is the substance itself, indeed, the element; ‘land’, while overlapping that sense, is an area of earth that is measured, or assigned to a particular use. While ‘earth’ and ‘land’ are Germanic in origin, they are also French, where ‘lande’ refers to heath or moor. A rich land has good soil. Land is, thus, made of earth, but not vice versa. The song of the earth might be the soil singing; the song of the land would be something about the countryside, one’s own country, or someone else’s, the land of Egypt, say. In King John ‘land’ is definitely the property over which the Falconbridge brothers are at odds. “My land” is repeated, as Shakespeare hammers away at possession; later it becomes “our land”, and in rebuke “thy land”, sixty times in all, more than half of which are the last word of a line – that key rhetorical position. King John has ‘land’ more than twice as many times as Richard II. In both plays there are rhapsodies of repetition. This must be purposeful. Compare Orsino’s stress on value to the Duke of Bourbon’s disdain for his English foe: Once more, Cesario, Get thee to yond same sovereign cruelty.
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Tell her, my love, more noble than the world, Prizes not quantity of dirty lands; (Twelfth Night, 2.4.79–82)5 Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards! Mort de ma vie, if they march along Unfought withal, but I will sell my dukedom To buy a slobbery and a dirty farm In that nook-shotten isle of Albion. (Henry V, 3.5.10–14)
Dirt plays with unclean and impure, where dirt is, as it were, is the bottom of earth. In its raw state, dirt always has something else, something we tend not to name, mixed into it. Soil is what is soiled: blood, and, if we push it, former men, earth. ‘Earth’ meant home, native land, one’s country; in Old English it also meant that which composed us, and therefore our disposition, temperament; earth was the bottom element; colloquially, when man is unmade, he is a corpse. It was also a verb, ‘erðing’, inhabiting. This mix comprehended ‘living’, both as a place and a condition. The lost letters distinguished erd from earth, but one could not have heard the distinction. Groundedness grows similarly from another root, ‘ground’, which is Old Norse rather than Germanic – it begins as the bottom of something, expanding to mean firmly settled in. The OED gives ‘earth’ seventeen columns, many more than lexical ‘land’. If we reach toward the inflections of such words as earth and ground, we might remark that they feel Anglo-Saxon, so old that they still don’t always take a plural form: ‘earth’ (as in ‘earth to earth’) doesn’t take plural ‘s’ or ‘es’ as does ‘ash’ in ‘ashes to ashes’ in the burial liturgy. What these uninflected words share with words like ‘blood’ and ‘bread’ are those Germanic origins. ‘Kind’ is – or was – another such noun. Where we would say ‘on earth’ or ‘in the earth’, Shakespeare’s characters say ‘in earth’; but they also say ‘on earth’, meaning anywhere in the world. We retain ‘What on earth?’ which is an intensive on ‘what’. As we scroll through some illustrative examples we shall assume that they illustrate a variety of ways in which Shakespeare’s characters speak differently from each other: their word choices, like their syntax, distinguish them. ‘Earth’ is part of the elemental ground of a native speaker’s feeling for words. Earth is also what our blood and bone finally are: there is an elemental connection. We ‘are’ in some way, our own earth, made from it, living on it, off it. These connections became a central tenet in what we might now call ‘Germanic’ thought, especially after the Romantic movement and its versions 5 All Shakespeare references are to The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Updated Fourth edition, ed. David Bevington (New York: Longman, 1997).
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of nationalism (Murray wrote ‘Teutonic’ throughout his New English Dictionary): we cannot own ‘the land’ any more than we can own ourselves as earth, but we are all prone to ignore that knowledge. Shakespeare does not forget this misplaced avarice, and repeats our duty as stewards of the land, returning our brief tenure of it when we become it once more. Characters who curse the earth are ipso facto, making a moral error. Bodies At least as far as the Geneva Bible is concerned (Genesis 27–8), God made man in his image (assuming that when God says ‘our’ it’s a royal ‘we’), “male and female created he them”. 1 Corinthians picks this up with a contrast between earthly and heavenly man: The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven. As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy: and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. (1 Corinthians, 47–49)
We are familiar with the way that, in Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is the bride of death. Capulet says of his daughter, his sole surviving child, The earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she; She is the hopeful lady of my earth. (Romeo and Juliet, 1.2.14–15)
The repetition may seem simple; it is not. Of course he means that Juliet is his only heir, as he has buried, returned to earth, all his other progeny. ‘Earth’ is evidently his dwelling, his land, but it is less evidently his body, his clay which survives in her. An actor’s stress on ‘my’ could choose that reading. Shakespeare’s characters tend to use ‘earth’ to limit life to the body, not what it carries within it. In Titus (1.1.99) Lucius’ call for sacrifice refers to “this earthy prison of their bones” – their bodies are already dead men walking. Similarly, later, the glowing ring reveals the corpse of Bassanius, “the dead man’s earthy cheeks”. This is Marcus speaking within a comparison to Pyramus. Marcus, always one for exercising his rhetorical muscles, gives us an instance in 4.1 of what he doesn’t call a dead woman walking, in his oath on Lavinia’s still living corpse: “There is enough written upon this earth / To stir a mutiny in the mildest thoughts”. This time Marcus compares Lavinia to the subject of Brutus’ revenge for the rape of Lucrece. Before Tarquin rapes Lucrece, he blames his victim, gloating over the same gross physicality. We call attention to ‘earth’s’ here because this earth belongs to that man of earth, earthy in Corinthians, and we shall meet it again below:
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Thy beauty hath ensnared thee to this night, Where thou with patience must my will abide – My will that marks thee for my earth’s delight, Which I to conquer sought with all my might. But as reproof and reason beat it dead, By thy bright beauty was it newly bred. (Rape of Lucrece, 2.485–90)
Hamlet, joking with the grave-diggers about Alexander’s mortal remains, uses ‘earth’ as it devolves into ‘dust’, reaching slightly hysterically towards a claggy bung in a barrel. O, that that earth which kept the world in awe Should patch a wall t’ expel the winter’s flaw! (Hamlet, 5.1.215–16)
Or here is Hotspur addressing Harry Percy: But thoughts, the slave of life, and life, time’s fool, And time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop. O, I could prophesy, But that the earthy and cold hand of death Lies on my tongue. No, Percy, thou art dust And food for – [....] (1 Henry IV, 5.4.81–6)
And here is Harry Plantagenet on Harry Percy: When that this body did contain a spirit, A kingdom for it was too small a bound; But now two paces of the vilest earth Is room enough. This earth that bears thee dead Bears not alive so stout a gentleman. (1 Henry IV, 5.4.89–93)
This living man of earth becomes only earth, though poor Percy’s earth has a short journey yet to go on Falstaff’s mighty shoulders. So far we’ve concentrated on the variety of what ‘earth’ could mean; my earth, the earth, base and vile earth, the “vile bodies” of Philippians 3.6 Etymology and variety are the substratum of feeling and value, and we turn now to this kind of mood construction at its most complex, in Richard II – written within months of Romeo and Juliet. In this most versified of Shakespeare’s plays, lexical ‘earth’ appears 32 times; ‘earth’ alone 30 times. That’s more than both Hamlet (discounting for Hamlet’s speech tic and his repeating himself in the Caesar’s dust passage), and Romeo and Juliet. The reasons are not far to 6 This is a passage translated in many different ways: “vile bodies” is in Tyndale and KJV, but not in the Douai Reims version, which has the less dungy “low”.
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seek, but the performance of ‘earth’ in the play is a symphony of evocation, and a reason to return to John of Gaunt, old gaunt, old and gaunt. Richard II is, as everyone knows, the most versified of Shakespeare’s plays, and it follows that the word-plays are continuous as well as various. As so often in Shakespeare, there’s no warning that he is going to ring changes on the very word, ‘earth’. In scene 2, John makes explicit the leitmotif, speaking to his brother’s wife, the Duchess of Gloucester, implicitly emphasizing the physicality of blood kinship, shared earth. Alas, the part I had in Woodstock’s blood Doth more solicit me than your exclaims To stir against the butchers of his life! But since correction lieth in those hands Which made the fault that we cannot correct, Put we our quarrel to the will of heaven, Who, when they see the hours ripe on earth, Will rain hot vengeance on offenders’ heads. (Richard II, 2.2.1–8)
The expressive image of the genealogical tree is as old as the Bible’s dream of the tree of Jesse. John of Gaunt recognizes the way kinship’s obligation to revenge is stymied, displaced from his earth to heaven. His lamentations rise to God, skipping God’s vicar on earth, since Richard is implicated in the murder. More important is the implicit condemnation of Richard’s attitude to his land as a personal possession rather than part of his duty of Stewardship, as we will see below in the king’s extravagant ground kissing on his lonely return from Ireland. This is image rather than ecology, but grounded in ideas of kinship and kinship responsibility. It is not the rootedness in blood and soil more familiar in post-Romantic Teutonic/Germanic literature and thought, the subject of the second half of this essay.7 Stewardship The separation of image and ecology is clear when we turn to the middle, Act 3, scene 4, in a garden, or perhaps an orchard, with a rich-textured speech by a minor character winding herself up to curse an even-more minor character than she. Why is death’s hand ‘earthy’? And why does Queen Isabelle in Richard II call the Gardener
7 The considerably less historically informed essay by Jean E. Feerick, “Groveling with Earth in Kyd and Shakespeare’s Historical Tragedies” sees this quite differently, without regard to the economy of the image texture of the individual plays. See, Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (St Martin’s: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 231–52. Ruth Morse thanks Coppélia Kahn for this reference, which filled us with gloom about the future of our discipline.
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Thou, old Adam’s likeness, Set to dress this garden, how dares Thy harsh rude tongue sound this unpleasing news? What Eve, what serpent, hath suggested thee To make a second fall of cursèd man? Why dost thou say King Richard is deposed? Dar’st thou, thou little better thing than earth, Divine his downfall? Say, where, when, and how, Cam’st thou by this ill tidings? Speak, thou wretch. (3.4.72–80)
We often see ‘base earth’ used paradoxically as an insult, and here the poor gardener is one step off that. The Queen is anti-earth, which she calls “rebellious” – as if it were animate – as she lurks in wait for her passing husband, then charges him to wound the earth, like a stricken lion. Her attitude towards the earth as a treacherous servant unites the Queen and her husband. This is a completely a-historical scene, given that giving Richard a public stage was the last thing Bolingbroke wanted. The Queen’s speeches are often cut, as happens frequently to women’s orations. This sudden appearance of Isabelle is, however, one of the balanced scenes which contribute to the question of Stewardship – the ethics of governance – in which the governor is the servant of the land and the people. In Shakespeare’s plays, powerful men who curse the earth are making a big mistake, as are powerful kings who confiscate the goods and lands, the earth, say, of the uncle who has preached better conduct. This animated earth, like Eden, invites a serving sovereignty. Let us return to the chastising John of Gaunt, one of the two surviving sons of the great Plantagenet conqueror, Edward III. John of Gaunt makes a balancing speech; King Richard makes another. Richard is responsible for his own negative, possessive commands to the earth, like the Queen. And like his Queen, they are both ethically wrong. If we take these speeches in isolation, we miss the thematic ringing of changes. From the beginning, ‘earth’ is a key term, like the moon in Midsummmer Night’s Dream, but without the jokes. Dream begins with anodyne references to the moon; Richard II with numerous references to earth, this little patch of ground of the trial by battle, the grounds of the accusation, this England. We are watching the pomp of a deeply medieval thrash. Here are the exchanges between Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray: BOLINGBROKE Now, Thomas Mowbray, do I turn to thee; And mark my greeting well, for what I speak My body shall make good upon this earth Or my divine soul answer it in heaven. (1.1.35–38)
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Yet, from the outset, we hear Thomas Mowbray saluting the king with an archaizing formality that tells us how the almost ritual lines are to be understood: MOWBRAY Each day still better others’ happiness, Until the heavens, envying earth’s good hap, Add an immortal title to your crown! (1.1.22–24)
It is impossible to offer the kind of substitution used above (‘land’ for ‘earth’), because everything is in the repetitions, but also the omissions. Not a word about dying here, just successive days of prosperity, felicity, and the king’s own eventual salvation. Bolingbroke’s challenge picks this up, emphasising this place, this particular ground, these lists. And Bolingbroke, too, repeats his message: Further I say, and further will maintain Upon his bad life to make all this good, That he did plot the Duke of Gloucester’s death, Suggest his soon-believing adversaries, And consequently, like a traitor coward, Sluiced out his innocent soul through streams of blood – Which blood, like sacrificing Abel’s, cries Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth To me for justice and rough chastisement. And, by the glorious worth of my descent, This arm shall do it or this life be spent. (1.1.98–108; emphasis added)
As he greets and parts from his witnesses, he addresses his father last. Here we bring another change of reading. In many texts Henry says, “O thou, the earthly author of my blood” (1.3.69). This is, however, the easy reading of the Quartos; F1 corrects to “earthy author of my blood”. Like Capulet, whose body is “my earth” in his making of his child, so, too, Bolingbroke links his body to his father’s body, as he is the hopeful heir of his father’s earth. These appeals must be important, because Shakespeare repeats them in the later scene in which even more gages are thrown by Aumerle and his accusers, in act 4.1. As the gardener was the balance to the lever of the kingdom, so there is balance in another scene often cut altogether. It is above all the Welsh captain who, in 3.2, sees the king’s body implicated in what we might call the biosphere: ’Tis thought the King is dead. We will not stay. The bay trees in our country are all withered, And meteors fright the fixèd stars of heaven; The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth, And lean-looked prophets whisper fearful change;
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Rich men look sad and ruffians dance and leap, The one in fear to lose what they enjoy, The other to enjoy by rage and war. These signs forerun the death or fall of kings. Farewell. Our countrymen are gone and fled, As well assured Richard their king is dead. (2.4.7–17)
And Salisbury replies with the shooting star landing on “base earth” (2.4.20). When Shakespeare thinks something is important he uses it more than once, ringing changes which we might not notice in the theatre, but must not ignore in the study. In the historical moment of the play’s events, there is audible archaizing in order to emphasize the world of fourteenth-century beliefs about the stability of the kingdom that will become less stable in the subsequent reigns. Richard II is rich in speeches about, to, cursing, blessing ‘the earth’. The two most important are separated by many lines, John of Gaunt’s celebration of the climate, fertility, healthiness, and gift of the island fortress, which contrast so markedly with the egotism and instrumentality of the island’s king, Richard II. Here is Richard’s badly mistaken rant to the earth: No matter where. Of comfort no man speak! Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth. Let’s choose executors and talk of wills. And yet not so, for what can we bequeath Save our deposèd bodies to the ground? Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke’s, And nothing can we call our own but death And that small model of the barren earth Which serves as paste and cover to our bones. (3.2.144–54)
Gaunt’s image of his earth as “this nurse” (l. 56) is inverted when Richard addresses the earth as a child that has been bereft of its loving mother: I weep for joy To stand upon my kingdom once again. Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand, [He bends and touches the ground.] Though rebels wound thee with their horses’ hoofs. As a long-parted mother with her child Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting, So, weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth, And do thee favors with my royal hands. (3.2.4–11)
Richard appropriates what Gaunt keeps at a communal distance with the demonstrative pronoun through the possessive: “this earth” becomes “my
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earth” in Richard’s appropriating mouth, and the initial metaphor is reversed as the earth itself becomes both a gentle nurse with the capacity for betrayal – “Feed not thy sovereign’s foe, my gentle earth” – and then a dark, venomous creature of vengeful violence – “rebellious” in the earlier words of his Queen: Nor with thy sweets comfort his ravenous sense, But let thy spiders, that suck up thy venom, And heavy-gaited toads lie in their way, Doing annoyance to the treacherous feet Which with usurping steps do trample thee. (3.2.13–17)
From now on until the end of the play ‘earth’ takes on overtones usual elsewhere in Shakespeare: as the base opposite of spirit (cf. Prospero to Caliban: “What ho, slave, Caliban! / Thou earth, thou, speak!”); the material of the grave and sign of mortality; or, in Carlisle’s prophecy, it is transformed from gentle nurse into “this curséd earth” (4.2.153). Many years ago Ruth Morse engaged with the question of Shakespeare’s ideas of landscape, and found in characters’ attitudes to the land judgments of their worthiness to possess it, at least for a time.8 She missed the function of ‘earth’ in the economy of land metaphor, in this play and in others. But already in Richard II we can see the ethically defining character of an individual’s duty to the land – not for nothing is Carlisle one of the cursers. What she also missed was the difference between the common-law social world of England compared, say, to continental views of the sacredness of a land susceptible to invasion and requiring sacrifice to protect its integrity. It took, perhaps, the context of Shakespeare’s 450th birthday within the memory of the Great War to be reminded of attitudes such as are expressed in the opening of Charles Péguy’s “Eve” (1913), written before he left his own earth in that of the trenches: Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour la terre charnelle, Mais pourvu que ce fût dans une juste guerre. Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour quatre coins de terre. Heureux ceux qui sont morts d’une mort solennelle.9
Perhaps civil war is different if only because all the participants belong to the same land. Shakespeare’s English history plays concern competing baronial
8 “‘A Dim Farre-of Launce-skippe’: The Ethics of Shakespeare’s Landscapes”, in Shakespeare’s World / World Shakespeares. The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Brisbane, 2006, ed. Richard Fotheringham, Christa Jansohn, and R. S. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 58– 72. 9 Quoted from: http://www.lettresvolees.fr/degaulle/peguy.html (access: 7 November 2014).
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interests, as did much medieval politics. The century of civil war – in fact feuds among magnates intertwined by kinship and affinity – treated by the two tetralogies was both preceded and followed by disruptions that could without much exaggeration be said to have recurred right up to the Hanoverian settlement. In reign after reign the same story of balancing royal power against the claims of the northern landholders is played out again and again. Some monarchs had a gift for dividing and ruling or the decided advantage of character and charisma; personal wealth from acquisition, conquest, or marriage; loyal brothers or royal wards. Foreign wars were sometimes useful. Above all it was important to have desirable, indeed, danglable, goods and service positions with which to bribe or reward those who served them. Their moments mattered, too, not just peace in their own realms, but some degree of quiet among the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh. The less lucky were saddled with marked disadvantages, more or less the reverse of wealth in family, friends, and neighbours. When we meet Edward III in the eponymous play, he has already overcome youthful difficulties (such as the assassination of his father, a more customary event north of the border) and is well endowed with marriageable children. It has taken many years, and much schooling in manipulating the ever-changing balance of powers among his loyal barons, before he could feel the throne was his without threat. ‘His’, in this context, as in so many medieval tenures, was never ‘ownership’, but a lease from a deity whose fickleness of favour fitted a providential narrative of offence and punishment that was rewritten to suit the current winner. Earth and land: the South African case We opened with a story in which ‘earth’ and ‘land’ in their complex differences and affinities are exemplified, especially around the figure of the medieval king, Richard II. The hero of this part of our story comes from a very different time and place in which the embroilment of land and earth were just as intense. He is Sol[omon] Tshekisho Plaatje (1876–1932), a black South African of extraordinary abilities. Born to a rural Tswana family, with a third-grade education, Sol Plaatje became a founding member of what became the present-day African National Congress (ANC). He was a far-ranging political activist whose books and pamphlets were published in the USA, a translator of Shakespeare, a speaker of seven languages, and the first black South African to have published a novel in English. His most significant and moving work was Native Life in South Africa (1914). Exiled temporarily in Britain owing to the First World War, Plaatje sought support from the British populace and their political classes against the iniquitous theft of land from the indigenous population in the newly formed Union of South Africa, from which its black citizens had been excluded from political power. In his landmark work on King Lear, Orkin draws attention to that theft in the form of the South African 1913 Land Act,
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whereby black South Africans were dispossessed of all right to own and work land in all but thirteen per cent of the country. Coming into effect on a freezing night in mid-winter, the new law prohibited black peasants who had previously worked land in a tenant system from doing so. It prevented them from sustaining their livestock on any land not their own, and forced vast numbers of families off the land into cities, where they would sell their labour cheaply to white capitalist mine and factory owners. Or else they were forced to live a dismal hand-to-mouth existence on the barren lands reserved for them in areas discarded by their white rulers, who had only recently formed a new political entity, the Union of South Africa, out of the ruins of the Boer War. Prescient of the devastation that this law would wreak upon his people, Plaatje engaged in a kind of ‘rural rides’ after Cobbett, recording his experiences of the suffering of black people in the wake of their massive dispossession and displacement, in the vain hope that his witness would move the colonial government that still wielded power over its colony. On one bitterly cold night he came across a black family, recently evicted from their land and home. In the course of their desperate trek their baby had died, and when Plaatje came across them, he recorded the following scene: … the stricken parents … had no right or title to the farmlands through which they trekked: they must keep to the public roads – the only places in the country open to the outcasts if they are possessed of a travelling permit. The deceased child had to be buried, but where, when and how? This young wandering family decided to dig a grave under the cover of darkness of that night, when no one was looking, and in that crude manner the dead child was interred – and interred amid fear and trembling, as well as throbs of a torturing anguish, in a stolen grave, lest the proprietor of the spot, or any of his servants, should surprise them in the act.10
Although Plaatje doesn’t use the words ‘earth’ and ‘land’, he brings together the multivalent senses of land as a place of belonging or alienation with earth as a deeper, indeed darker, need and destiny: the ownership or at least closeness of ‘our’ or ‘my’ land is brought into conflicted relation with ‘this earth’ as a pure deictic: a momentary place of oblivion that will presumably be forever alienated as ‘that land’ – the furtively stolen space to which the body is consigned, never to be recovered except through the distance of memory. When Plaatje lost his own three-month-old son, he was reminded at the funeral (he had a proper plot of ground in which to bury him, with a daylight ceremony) of “that poor wandering family of fugitives from the Natives’ Land 10 Sol T. Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa [1914] (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1982), pp. 89–90. The novel is available online under: http://www.thuto.org/ubh/etext/ nlisa/nl-np.htm.
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Act”. He recalls: “A sharp pang went through us, and caused our hearts to bleed as we recalled the scene of their night funeral” (p. 146). As he recollects the family rendered landless, even from the dubious comforts of the earth, Plaatje remembers King Lear and invokes, as if in his own voice, the king’s own anguished, landless cry: “Oh! For something to – Strike flat the thick rotundity o’the world! / Crack Nature’s moulds all germans spills at once! / That make ungrateful man!”11 ‘Earth’, ‘land’, “the thick rotundity o’the world”. What distinguishes these concepts when we bring Shakespeare’s uses of land and earth into contact with the struggle over South Africa itself? The Robben Island Shakespeare We turn from the expropriating act of 1913 to the culmination of resistance that Plaatje initiated in his writings and his political activism as a founding member of the African Native National Congress, the forerunner of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC): the Robben Island Prison, where black African opponents of everything that the 1913 Land Act set in motion were incarcerated. There we find Shakespeare once more: this time, in the form of the collected works signed by the thirty-four prisoners who shared the singlecell section with Nelson Mandela. What is now known as the ‘Robben Island Shakespeare’ (or sometimes the ‘Robben Island Bible’)12 was taken into the prison by Solly Venkathratnam, as the one book he was allowed to have. Transferred to the single-cell section with Mandela and others, Venkathratnam asked each of his fellows to sign their names against their favourite passage in the Complete Works. Striking about the choice of passages by these political prisoners is that only one involves a reference to land or earth. It is Billy Nair’s appropriation of Caliban’s accusation of Prospero: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me” (The Tempest, 1.2.334–35). This island, this land, this earth. The demonstrative adjective clearly establishes an intimate connection between the speaker and the referent. But it does so in different ways. There is a clear claim of true possession of a spatial entity in both Caliban’s and Nair’s reference to their respective islands through the rights of lineage – but not necessarily any deep emotional connection with that entity. This contrasts with the unusual use of ‘this earth’ in Richard II, 11
Ibid., p. 147. See Matthew Hahn’s interviews with some of the signatories of this book and his play based on their signatures and experiences on the island: http://myshakespeare. rsc.org.uk/the-inspiration-of-the-robben-island-bible-by-matthew-hahn/ and http:// robbenislandbible.blogspot.co.uk/. For other accounts, see David Schalkwyk, Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), and Ashwin Desai, Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2012). 12
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where the antagonists, Gaunt and Richard, both appropriate the earth as a more transcendental, limitless space of deep spiritual and emotional investment rather than as land to be owned or alienated. Indeed, Gaunt accuses Richard of betraying the very essence of “this earth” when he forgets his duty of stewardship – when he treats it as mere ‘land’, “leased out … / Like to a tenement or pelting farm” (2.1.59–60). That Richard II is so preoccupied with ‘this earth’ as something different from the land alerts us to the relative absence of the sense of the earth as something inalienable and heavily invested with human emotion and identity in Shakespeare as a whole. The failure of the Robben Island prisoners to isolate passages in Shakespeare in which earth or land are objects of nostalgia, intense desire, or personal and cultural identity may be a function of their relative absence from the plays that would have been familiar to the prisoners. Surprising, however, is the lack of such a notion of ‘this earth’ in Mandela’s account of his struggle to win his land back from the colonial usurpers. This stands in stark contrast to the attitudes to land, and especially the earth in this metaphysical sense derived from post-romantic German thought, by the usurpers themselves. For a long time Afrikaners supported their right to South Africa as a gift from God that could not be alienated. Especially during their trek into the interior in the early nineteenth century they conceived of themselves as a second chosen people, led by God himself to the Promised Land. In his masterful writing on attitudes to land in South African white writing, J. M. Coetzee focuses on a genre of Afrikaans writing especially prevalent in the 1930s, called the plaasroman or ‘farm novel’, in which the distinction we are tracing between ‘land’ and ‘earth’ is central: “To turn the transfer of land from one farmer to another into a tragedy, [the novelist] must … establish a bond of natural right between a farm and the man who inherits it and its mere purchaser”.13 Quoting the novelist Van den Heever’s essay, “The Form of Afrikaner Civilization and Culture”, Coetzee underwrites the special sense of earth rather than land that constituted a farm for the Afrikaner: “the slumbering might of the culture … has its basis in ‘the bondedness of man to the earth.’ Man is ‘mystically united … by a dark love’ to the earth, which is the ‘soil of generation’ of national culture” (p. 87). It is no surprise that this ideology of the ‘dark call of the earth’, which has its roots in the reactionary, anti-capitalist and racist Blut und Boden ideology of the German Bauernroman of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, should find only an isolated, tangential expression in Shakespeare. More interesting is the absence of any such Romantic conception of the relation to 13 J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 84.
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the soil in the context of Robben Island, despite Nair’s choice of Caliban’s claim to “this island”. In his autobiography Mandela tends to speak of the land rather than the earth: as a space of sustenance that has been alienated from his people, and which needs to be restored to them as a form of communal property to be worked by people of all colours and cultures – as its stewards – rather than as an inalienable nurse or gift of God to any single nation. If there is any image that epitomises Mandela’s relation to the earth it is a pragmatic one: the garden. Once regulations were relaxed in the prison, Mandela became an obsessive gardener. His attitude towards gardening is mostly pragmatic and moral, occasionally metaphorical. It is also cannily political, since he decides to share some of his best tomatoes and onions not only with his fellow prisoners but also with the white wardens. In a book of almost 800 pages, Mandela uses the word ‘earth’ only twelve times, twice in relation to his prison garden. Here is an extract from his autobiography: A garden was one of the few things in prison that one could control. To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend it and then harvest it, offered a simple but enduring satisfaction. The sense of being custodian of this small patch of earth offered a small taste of freedom.14
Gardening offers the prisoner reduced to the object of regulation and command a degree of agency. Such freedom follows the demands of nature in her cycle of generation, growth and ripening, so that Mandela sees himself in the service of “this small patch of earth”: as its “custodian”, reminiscent of the stewardship that Richard so disastrously refuses or perverts. The demonstrative is still there, but its grand metaphysical pretentions are reduced not only in size but also ambition. In such a reduction of ambition and the selfconsciousness of the possibilities of agency within imposed limitations, the future president of South Africa and world icon paradoxically finds liberty. But he also puts the prison in its place, by replacing its draconian notion of custodianship with his own nurturing role. Although Mandela’s garden is primarily presented in pragmatic terms, in its distraction from the strictures and boredom of prison life, its fecundity, the opportunity it offers to turn the custodians of the prison by providing them with gifts of its fertile labour – especially significant in the context of Robben Island as barren desert, like Lear’s wind-swept heath – inevitably it would impress a metaphorical sense upon him. “In many ways”, Mandela writes, I saw the garden as a metaphor for certain aspects of my life. A leader must also tend his garden; he, too, plants seeds, and then watches, cultivates, and harvests the result. Like the gardener, a leader must take responsibility for what he cultivates; 14
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (London: Abacus, 1995), p. 582.
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We don’t know whether Mandela had read Richard II. But the rough echoes with the famous garden scene should be clear: in the common view of the responsibility of a leader not only to nurture and preserve, but also to prune and “eliminate”. Mandela also draws a further, more personal lesson from his inability to save a “particularly beautiful tomato plant” that “either through some mistake or lack of care … began to wither and decline” (p. 583). “I felt”, the ANC leader continues, “that I had been unable to nourish many of the most important relationships in my life. Sometimes there is nothing one can do to save something that must die” (ibid.). In the farm novel of Romantic Afrikaner nationalism and the prison memoirs of the leader of the African nationalist movement, ‘this earth’ is pitted against ‘the land’. The first is an inalienable, metaphysical entity that cannot be reduced to space or measure, but in which the blood and very identity of those who toil it are deeply invested; the second is a more neutral space that can be worked for mutual sustenance, but which can also be alienated and fought over. We encounter similar but not identical concepts in Shakespeare. It can be no coincidence that the word ‘land’ has its most frequent use in Shakespeare’s history plays, with the curious exception of Henry IV Part 1 (where it appears only once). ‘Earth’, on the other hand, is largely confined to the history play upon which we have focussed, where, amongst other, more usual uses, it takes on the metaphysical qualities we have noted in the mouths of both Gaunt and Richard. In conclusion, let us return to our two South African examples. Billy Nair’s claim in the words of Caliban to ‘this island’ as an analogue for South Africa as a whole reflects both Mandela’s conception of the land as something to be subject of mutual sharing and the general absence in The Tempest of an investment in ‘this earth’ as a grounding in which individual and collective identity is so invested that it is unthinkable to leave or alienate it. Caliban’s aesthetic appreciation of the island is not of the Germanic Blut und Boden variety. As we have seen, ‘earth’ is used in this play as a curse, and Prospero is happy to abandon both Caliban’s earthy baseness and the earth of the island that its original inhabitant has come to represent as a “thing of darkness”, as a merely temporary means to a greater end, the ‘Dukedom’ of Milan and the ‘Kingdom’ of Naples: lands, not earth. He might have declared that he is happy to leave both to Miranda as the “hopeful lady of my earth”. But he doesn’t. Sol Plaatje’s turning to King Lear in his rage at the burial of his child in consecrated ground – in contrast to the family who are forced to inter their child in fear and trembling in a stolen plot of earth – is very different. As we have noted, neither ‘earth’ nor ‘land’ appears with any frequency, especially relative to the histories, in King Lear (which contains only eight instances
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of each). In that play, ‘earth’ is either a general synonym for the world or the quintessence of lifelessness (as in Lear’s despairing “She is dead as earth” [5.3.312]), while ‘land’ conforms to the established sense of something to be divided, given away, invaded or fought over. And yet, as Plaatje intuited, the play is deeply concerned with not only the possession or dispossession of land, but also with what it means for the sustenance of a landed community to be violently withdrawn from this earth, as Orkin noted half a century ago, but without quite expressing it in these terms. King Lear therefore indicates the limitations of the kind of word counting with which we introduced this essay. It may be that, seen in the light of King Lear’s deeper, less histrionic or rhetorical and more dramatic engagement with what it means to have one’s claim to both land and earth violently removed – epitomised by the coming together of their multiple senses in Plaatje’s burial scene in the dead of night on the icy veld – the prisoner on Robben Island who signed the whole of the first act of Lear moved beyond the pragmatic utility of Mandela’s garden and the bare political contest of Nair’s choice. He recognized the absolute necessity of ‘this earth’ for human existence, especially between its sense of the human as mere clay and the merely materialist notion of earth as land.
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Évanghélia Stead: La Chair du livre. Matérialité, imaginaire et poétique du livre ¿n-desiècle (N. RISSLER-PIPKA) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 Jörn Steigerwald/Valeska von Rosen (Hg.): Amor sacro e profano. Modelle und Modellierungen der Liebe in Literatur und Malerei der italienischen Renaissance (CHR. OTT) . . . . . . 225 Leonarda Trapassi (a cura di): Leonardo Sciascia. Un testimone del XX secolo (G. DI STEFANO) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
Kurzbesprechungen Englisch und Amerikanisch Ulrich Suerbaum: Das elisabethanische Zeitalter (J. ALBER). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 Sonja Fielitz: William Shakespeare. Eine Einführung in Werk und Wirkung (I. BERENSMEYER) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 Katrin Fischer: Reclams Lexikon der Shakespeare-Zitate (TH. KULLMANN) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
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