Paul Franssen

Fleeing from the Burning City: Michael K, Vagrancy and Empire

Vagrancy is usually associated with marginalisation and lack of power. Yet there is also a myth in Western European tradition in which the negative sides of an unsettled existence, though not altogether disregarded, are outweighed by future potential. Vagrancy may constitute the necessary preparatory stage for the establishment of empire. It is this myth that can be found in the story of the Israelites crossing the desert and the river Jordan, to establish their race in the land of Palestine; in the history of the Pilgrim Fathers, who self-consciously repeated the wanderings of the Israelites; and again, in their descendants, the trappers and settlers who pushed the American frontier westward. Another variant is that of the Afrikaner voortrekkers, on the move to carve out their Boer republics of Natal, the Orange Free State, and Transvaal; like the Pilgrim Fathers, they saw themselves as antitypes of the Israelites. In such myths, which come in various shades of messianic or secular flavour, it is through hardships encountered while roaming a desert, a wilderness, the seas, or even the depths of space, that a new race is forged that will finally reach a promised land, settle there, and become a leading power. Prosperity in the new land is seen as divine compensation for the years of vagrancy. One can only speculate about the ultimate origins of this myth: for instance, it might well derive from the constructions that once nomadic peoples apply in hindsight to their conquest of territories of settlement, which involved displacing or subjugating the original inhabitants. In its final form, however, the myth is teleological, that is, it emphasizes the historical importance of the settlement as well as the peregrinations that led up to it. In many cases, it will also connect this historical destiny to a divine will that gave meaning as well as moral justification to the travels and the conquest of the promised land. It is, in fact, a powerful myth even in our postmodern age, and far from politically innocent: the Apartheid regime was built on it, and it may be seen as fuelling the fanatics on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The incarnations of this myth of empire through vagrancy that I will be most concerned with here are Virgil’s Aeneid and J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of

Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance: appropriation, transformation, opposition

“the present action of the play” (151) might function as the primary response, while its relation to the harrowing of Hell constitutes a lesser and more secondary echo. One might raise similar doubts about one of Schreyer’s favorite phrases, “synchronic diachrony” (the term is, unfortunately, a little mind-numbing for me). Likewise, the arguments for this effect can become complicated, as in the chapter on the Porter. Still, these reservations speak to the stimulating and provocative power of Schreyer’s study. It addresses itself directly, ambitiously, and imaginatively to one of our most pressing current debates. The book is also written with succinctness, clarity, and wit, is a pleasure to read, and displays masterful scholarship. Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft deserves wide readership and serious attention and constitutes a timely and significant contribution in the fields both of early English drama and of periodization.

The Myth of Shakespeare's Sonnets

Until recently, Shakespeare’s sonnets were read as the autobiographical record of a love triangle between the author, a fair-haired youth and a Dark Lady. Shakespeare’s relationship with the man was either seen as an idealizing friendship, or as homoerotic. In my article, I treat this reading of the sonnets as a flexible myth, which allows us to construct a Shakespeare according to our needs. I investigate two aspects of this myth: the addressees’ gender and the speaker’s sexual orientation. With British, American, Dutch and German examples, I argue that analogous responses to these issues have emerged in various cultures.

War and Shakespearean dramaturgy

Thus the Earl of Westmoreland, envoy of Prince John, to the rebel leader, the Archbishop of York. Rebellion, he says, should be dressed in wretches’ rags not the church’s white vestments of ‘innocence’. The Archbishop reposts that he has ‘justly weighed/What wrongs our arms may do, what wrongs we suffer,/And find our griefs heavier than our offences’ (4.1.67–69). His is the classic Christian argument for just war derived from St Augustine: ‘For it is the injustice of the opposing side that lays on the wise man the duty of waging wars’ (City of God, XIX. 7).1