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Bolingbroke and Coriolanus each set in motion a ‘war machine’ with the respective results that have been pointed out. Other characters, also victims of abusive banishment, do not take part in such a dynamic of riposte; rather, they find another way of expressing their feelings of injustice, trying to sublimate their temptation to be revenged. Sometimes violence does erupt, but it is channelled away
Bolingbroke’s and Coriolanus’ respective illegal returns are effective because they come with armed forces that are unexpected and, as such, convey the impression of having what Deleuze and Guattari, in their ‘Treatise on Nomadology’, term a ‘war machine’. In A Thousand Plateaus , they explore several oppositions, such as ‘smooth space’ versus ‘striated space’, ‘game of
This book analyses three Shakespearean plays that mainly deal with abusive forms of banishment: King Richard II, Coriolanus and King Lear. These plays present with particular clarity the mechanism of the banishment proclamation and its consequences, that is, the dynamic of exclusion and its repercussions. Those repercussions may entail breaking the ban to come back illegally and seek revenge; devising strategies of deviation, such as disguise and change of identity; or resorting to mental subterfuges as a means of refuge. They may also lead to entropy – exhaustion, letting go or heartbreak. Each in its own way, they invite us to reflect upon the complex articulation between banishment and abuse of power, upon the strategies of resistance and displacement employed to shun or endure the painful experience of ‘deterritorialisation’; they put into play the dialectics of allegiance and disobedience, of fearlessly speaking and silencing, of endurance and exhaustion; they question both the legitimacy of power and the limits of human resistance. This study draws on French scholars in Shakespearean studies, and also on contemporary French historians, theorists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, essayists and philosophers, who can help us read Shakespeare’s plays in our time. It thus takes into account some of the works of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Gaston Bachelard, Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Boris Cyrulnik and Emmanuel Housset. The hope is that their respective intellectual approaches will shed specific kinds of light on Shakespeare’s plays and initiate a fruitful dialogue with Anglo-Saxon criticism.
, because Bolingbroke’s and Coriolanus’ respective illegal returns are very swift and efficient, thanks to their armed forces (whether they are merely deterrent or fully in action), which evoke what Deleuze and Guattari term a ‘war machine’. On stage, the effect of speed, and even acceleration, is created by the spatio-temporal ellipsis of exile. None of the two plays presents us with what is expected from banishment, that is, ‘a
. Though they are officially, though unjustly, banished, some characters (Bolingbroke in King Richard II , Coriolanus) will not passively endure; once abroad, they initiate a dynamics of frontal counterattack and illegally return with a Deleuzian ‘war machine’. For this illegal return to succeed, expedient alliance must prevail over national loyalty, and the rebellious banished person appeals to mercenaries or turns mercenary himself, gives free
deterritorialising potential of the parrhesiast will materialise and turn effective with a ‘war machine’. In King Lear , Cordelia refuses to play her father’s rhetorical game of flattery; she also points to the hypocrisy of her sisters, who claim that they can ‘love’ their father ‘all’ (1.1.98). There is no such exclusiveness for Cordelia, as she fearlessly tells her father, ‘Haply when I
instrumentalised by the tribunes so as to reinforce popular legitimacy. But as soon as Coriolanus comes back with his ‘war machine’, the plebeians change their minds and show that they are as changeable as, to take up Elias Canetti’s metaphor, a field of corn subjected to the wind: ‘It [corn] is as pliant as grass and subject to the influence of every wind. The blades move together in accordance with the wind; the whole field bows down
banished man does not leave the territory, thus flouting the proclamation) – and not delayed transgression (the banished man leaves but later comes back with a vengeance). This signifies that the risk incurred is greater, since, in this case, the trespasser has no deterrent ‘war machine’; if discovered, he will be killed. Lear’s threat to Kent is absolutely clear: ‘If on the seventh day following / Thy banished trunk be
In King Richard II , nothing is said about how Bolingbroke experiences exile before striking back at England with his ‘war machine’. We do know, however, that time goes so unbearably slowly for his father that he dies without seeing his son again. Richard II has perturbed both the cyclical time of festivity and the linear time of history, and this has an impact upon the way Gaunt perceives his near environment and the
deliberation, determination and military preparations. The ‘war machine’ is so swift that it is as if it were already there, imposing itself before the adverse forces that are unprepared and unable to retaliate; the victory is on its side already. Conversely, the dynamic of deviation triggers a process of deprivation, degradation and humiliation that requires psychological and physical endurance, even though the necessity of enduring