셰익스피어가 창조한 영국: 헨리 삼부작에 나타난 민족과 제국의 담론

Abstract

Kyung-Won LeeMaking a nation or empire always depends upon the binary epistemological frame of self and other, 'us' and 'them', or center and periphery. As critics of nationalism have repeatedly shown, the fictive unity of a nation is often created by insisting on the utter differences between those who are designed as belonging to the 'imagined community' and those who are seen as alien on the basis of complexion, ethnicity, religion, or customs. The nation-building project in Shakespeare's histories is not an exception. While Shakespeare's history plays deals with the anxieties and contradictions inherent in the dominant discourses of nation and empire, they also express the emergent desires of national consolidation and imperial expansion. And Shakespeare's textual strategy of making England a strong and glorious nation is, not surprisingly, subtle and ambivalent.In Shakespeare's histories and the Henriad plays in particular, the combined notions of Englishness, nobility, and masculinity serves a key ideological measure to define the imagined boundaries of England and its peripheries. Drawing on the distinctions between London court and Eastcheap tavern or between Anglo-Saxon center and Celtic fringe, Shakespeare maps out England by simultaneously incorporating and excluding a variety of sexual, class, racial, and ethnic outsiders. These centrifugal modes of nation-building finally converge on the invasion and conquest of France by Henry V, the most heroic Christian monarch in Shakespeare's histories. Here again the 'invented' distinction between English masculinity and French femininity makes the double conquest possible, namely, Henry's miraculous victory at Agincourt and his successful wooing of the French princess. For all its local disturbances and temporary ruptures, Shakespeare's national epic is thus an enunciation of expansionist desire and a celebration of imperial patriarchy as well.