Breathing Banishment: Shakespeare's Sentences of Exile

There is nothing necessary in Shakespeare’s persistent depiction of banishment as a spoken sentence. Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II offers a striking alternative for representing the legal act of expulsion: a written edict, rather than a verbal proclamation. Furthermore, in the assessment of the tradition preceding Shakespeare, there are only a handful of extant texts that pre-empt Shakespeare’s preoccupation with having a sovereign “[b]reathe” “[t]he hopeless word” on stage (R2, 1.3.147, 146). Those that do rarely use the exact phrasing that Shakespeare prefers, and avail themselves of techniques that Shakespeare generally eschews, such as rhyme and euphemism. By tracing not only what he stages but what he avoids, this chapter poses that Shakespeare develops a distinctive dramaturgy of banishment, which often utilises a simple speech act – in the manner of J. L. Austin’s theory. This often occurs as the culmination of a larger, more complex dramatic strategy, using legalistic preambles or careful foreshadowing. Refinements in authorship attribution, particularly concerning the Henry VI plays, strengthen this position by designating the otherwise bathetic banishment of Fastolfe to an unknown fourth hand. Examining variations on Shakespeare’s style, and its relatively homogenous appearance across settings (medieval, Roman, Greek), this chapter considers the difficulties of reconstructing more legally and historically specific portrayals: noting the arbitrary prerogative of the medieval ban, the possible inaccuracies of chroniclers, as well as the semantic ambiguities of ‘exile’ in Greek and Roman contexts. This chapter considers the peculiar presentation of Alcibiades’ banishment in Timon of Athens, which follows Shakespeare’s usual model despite openly contradicting Plutarch’s account. However, the authorship of this scene has been attributed to Thomas Middleton, who had not yet himself used Plutarch at the time of composition, and instead relied on Shakespeare’s established dramatic pattern. Conceding that Shakespeare’s classicism and adherence to sources deepens as his career progresses, I consider Coriolanus’s banishment to Aufidius’s “hearth” in light of the Roman interdiction of fire and water (Cor, 4.5.74). Coriolanus’s banishment, packed with Roman flavour, is the last that he chooses to stage. But even this more detailed presentation is seemingly critiqued by Jonson’s erudite depiction of Catiline, whose banishment is induced not by speech, but by silence.