Shakespeare and the denial of territory

This book examines three Shakespeare plays in which abusive banishment participates in a dialectics of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation (King Richard IIKing Lear andCoriolanus). It draws on analyses by French philosophers (notably Deleuze and Foucault), so as to understand strategies of resistance when one is denied one’s territory.

This book analyses three Shakespearean plays that particularly deal with abusive forms of banishment:King Richard II, Coriolanus, andKing Lear. In these plays, the abuses of power are triggered by fearless speeches that question the legitimacy of power and are misinterpreted as breaches of allegiance; in these plays, both the bold speech of the fearless speaker and the performative sentence of the banisher trigger the relentless dynamics of what Deleuze and Guattari termed ‘deterritorialisation’. This book approaches the central question of the abusive denial of territory from various angles: linguistic, legal and ethical, physical and psychological. Various strategies of resistance are explored: illegal return, which takes the form of a frontal counterattack employing a ‘war machine’; ruse and the experience of internal(ised) exile; and mental escape, which nonetheless may lead to madness, exhaustion or heartbreak.