Shakespeare and the denial of territory: Banishment, abuse of power and strategies of resistance

By Pascale Drouet

This book analyses three Shakespearean plays that particularly deal with abusive forms of banishment: King Richard II, Coriolanus, and King 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526144065

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Shakespeare and the denial of territory

Shakespeare and the denial of territory

Banishment, abuse of power and strategies of resistance

Pascale Drouet

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Pascale Drouet 2021

The right of Pascale Drouet to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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First published 2021

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I: The dynamic of deterritorialisation in King Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus

1 Swearing allegiance or questioning power

2 Abuse of power and banishment: from ‘effet de retour’ to unnaturalness

3 The talion effect: deterritorialisation for deterritorialisation

Part II: The dynamic of riposte in King Richard II and Coriolanus

4 The politics of illegal return

5 The necessity of the ‘war machine’

6 Alternatives to the ‘war machine’

Part III: The experience of internal(ised) exile in King Lear

7 Dissembling and avoiding banishment

8 Assuming otherness, or the spiral of degradation

9 Home as a foreign elsewhere

Part IV: The dialectic of endurance and exhaustion in King Richard II and King Lear

10 Mental spaces and types of interiority

11 The limits of endurance and the signs of exhaustion

12 Maps of emotions

 Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Most of the material in this book has been translated and adapted from my French book Mise au ban et abus de pouvoir. Essai sur trois pièces tragiques de Shakespeare, published by the Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne in 2012, in the series directed by Marie-Madeleine Martinet, to whom I would like to renew my warmest thanks. From the very beginning, this English translation and adaptation was encouraged by Gordon McMullan (King’s College London), whose wise professional counsel I was more than happy to benefit from.

I am also much indebted to William C. Carroll, who kindly invited me to spend a month at Boston University as a visiting scholar. I would like to acknowledge the institutional and financial support of Boston University, the Boston University Center for the Humanities, the College of Arts and Sciences Associate Dean for Humanities, Karl Kirchwey, and the Department of English. I would like to extend my thanks to the Mugar Memorial Library and its Interlibrary Loan Staff, whose help in obtaining the English translations of books by French theorists and philosophers was particularly appreciated.

I am also grateful to the University of Poitiers for the semester sabbatical granted for this project and the research trip to Boston University. The financial and institutional support of both my research centre in Poitiers, the Centre d’Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale (CESCM – UMR 7302), directed by Martin Aurell, and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société de Poitiers (MSHS – USR 3565), directed by Frédéric Chauvaud, was also precious and much appreciated. Thanks are also and specifically due to Richard Hillman (University of Tours – CESR), who gave me insightful advice when necessary and constantly encouraged me to carry on.

Finally, for their patience and affectionate support, I thank Philippe Grosos, Dominique and Olivier Biot and Suzy Drouet, and I have a special thought for my late father’s daring spirit.

Introduction

To ‘put to the ban’, to ‘condemn by public edict or sentence to leave the country’, to ‘exile’, to ‘expatriate’: these are the objective definitions of the verb ‘banish’.¹ Taking practice and subjective experience into account, Michel Foucault specifies that to banish is also to ‘destroy the home, erase the place of birth, confiscate goods and properties’,² that is, radically to uproot what constitutes being and having. It is no coincidence that Foucault considered banishment as one of the four major forms of punishment – the other three being confinement, branding and demand for compensation.³ Banishment is a ‘major’ punitive tactic because the condemnation obviously has a strong performative value: if the sentence to leave the country is not obeyed in due time, the banished person, now persona non grata, incurs nothing less than the penalty of death. To banish, therefore, is to initiate a dynamic of departure, which is a process not only of de-spatialisation, but indeed of ‘deterritorialisation’ in the sense meant by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: the one banished is said to be ‘deterritorialised’ because they are forced to renounce all the marks (material, relational, emotional, imaginary) that transformed a geographically objective place into a familiar territory, their own, where their life was anchored and could safely develop. As the authors of A Thousand Plateaus have observed, ‘it is the mark that makes the territory’,⁴ and thus the territory has both a subjective quality and an existential value.⁵ The radical nature of deterritorialisation would seem to exclude any possibility of reterritorialisation. Yet the dynamic induced by banishment is not always a one-way trip: sometimes it elicits strategies of deviation or return; sometimes it takes part in a spiral of retaliation, with successive and reversible attempts at deterritorialising the other and reterritorialising oneself.

Who were the people liable to be banished in early modern England? In Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile, Jane Kingsley-Smith shows that in Elizabethan and Jacobean statutes banishment is ‘offered as a solution to a variety of crimes’.⁶ The list of those summoned to leave England includes ‘masterless men’ (vagrants, Gypsies, peddlers, unlicensed minstrels and players, etc.) and Catholic undesirable (Jesuits, seminary priests, recusants). Kingsley-Smith also points to the royal proclamations, which ‘reveal a much wider application of banishment than the statutes, suggesting that this was a punishment particularly favoured by Tudor and early Stuart monarchs’.⁷ She specifies,

Under Elizabeth, proclamations were issued for the banishment of Anabaptists, the Irish, Negroes and even those whose swords exceeded the length set down in the sumptuary laws. James extended the application of this punishment to illegal hunters, to those who printed or circulated material promoting duelling (banished from the king’s presence), to rebels in the shire counties (transported to Virginia) and to individuals.⁸

Among the sovereign’s prerogatives was the power to exclude those who, in their eyes, deviated from the norm, did not comply with the socio-political rules of the kingdom, did not follow morally approved courses of action; those who were considered, to take up Richard Marienstras’ distinction in New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, as ‘beings set apart compared with beings who are near and whose "nearness’ is defined by custom, laws and allegiance to the sovereign’.⁹ These ‘beings set apart’ were a priori regarded as transgressive elements, threatening to create zones of chaos within the carefully hierarchised and organised cartography of political power – threatening, that is, to employ Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, to introduce ‘smooth’ or ‘nomadic’ spaces within spaces that are ‘striated’ or under control.¹⁰ Interestingly, in geological language, ‘transgression’ refers to the ‘spread of the sea over the land, as evidenced by the deposition of unconformable marine sediments’,¹¹ and, according to the authors of A Thousand Plateaus, the sea ‘is perhaps principal among smooth spaces’.¹² The notion of transgression thus concentrates the ideas of trespassing, boundary crossing and ebbing – the ebbing of the ‘smooth’ over the ‘striated’. In early modern England, banishing transgressive elements meant forcing them to take to the sea, and, as noted by Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization, ‘Navigation delivers man to the uncertainty of fate; on water, each of us is in the hands of his own destiny; every embarkation is, potentially, the last.’¹³ The non-conforming elements were thrown into the ‘smooth’ space of sea, as if the ‘smooth’ returned to the ‘smooth’.

The notion of territoriality is crucial to understanding why banishment was so often resorted to. Three aspects are closely associated in early modern England: allegiance to the monarch and hence the realm, territorial expansion and colonisation of the New World and the development of cartography. The capacity to govern the country and conquer new lands abroad, as well as to exclude the undesirable from the homeland whenever deemed necessary, testifies to the monarch’s omnipotence. The practice of banishment is therefore part of a double dialectics: that of inclusion and exclusion, and that of territorialisation and deterritorialisation. As Edward W. Said has noted in his Reflections on Exile, ‘the interplay between nationalism and exile is like Hegel’s dialectics of servant and master, opposites informing and constituting each other’.¹⁴ Once banished, the undesirable is assigned the status of foreigner and denied the national territory, without further ado. Marienstras has emphasised the distrust harboured against foreigners, a feeling of distrust mainly fuelled by the Catholic threat and the thwarting of plots, real or supposed; he has summarised the English Parliament’s paradoxical attitude as follows: ‘While perfectly prepared to conquer distant peoples, open up new markets and assure external and internal peace, it was against opening up England to others.’¹⁵ This is clearly a process of territorialisation ‘from above’, or what Michel Onfray acerbically terms ‘the position of the missionary’, that is, ‘that regrettable tendency to apprehend reality through the filter of one’s culture’.¹⁶ Early modern England’s thirst for territorial control appears in Sir Edward Coke’s examination of the current statuses of foreigners in England and Ireland, and his consequent classification of them, in The Seventh Part of the Reports of Sir Edward Coke Kt., Chief Justice of the Common Pleas (1608);¹⁷ it also appears in the increasing interest in cartography, as evidenced by the 1579 publication of Christopher Saxton’s thirty-four maps. In his study of Elizabethan cartographers, David Ducros interestingly observes,

Each of the Saxton maps claims the territory as the possession of the monarch; each reminds the observer that the Queen’s authority is exercised over all the parts of the kingdom, without exception. This message seems to be as much intended for the other European nations, on which they seek to impose the image of a powerful, unified and sovereign England, as for the subjects of Elizabeth, who are thus reminded that the attachment to the homeland is inseparable from the duty of allegiance.¹⁸

It is as if the sovereign formed a perfect equation with the land over which she reigned. Thus, attempting to undermine royal power, breaching the duty of allegiance, amounted to endangering the national territory and quite logically led to geographical exclusion.

Shakespeare’s drama holds a mirror up to the practice of banishment in portraying both banishers and those banished. In tragedies, comedies and tragicomedies, as well as in history plays, a number of characters are put to the ban: Romeo in Romeo and Juliet; Cordelia, Kent and Edgar in King Lear; Coriolanus and Timon in their respective eponymous plays; the Duke Senior in As You Like It; the outlaws in The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Posthumus in Cymbeline; Perdita in The Winter’s Tale; Prospero in The Tempest; Bolingbroke and Mowbray in King Richard II; Falstaff in King Henry IV, Part 2; Eleanor and Suffolk in King Henry VI, Part 2; and Old Queen Margaret in King Richard III. Three tragedies stand out for closely associating banishment with abuse of power: King Richard II (1595), King Lear (1605) and Coriolanus (1606).¹⁹ These plays present with particular clarity the mechanism of the 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 (according to an implacable rhythm of retaliation), devising strategies of deviation (such as disguise and change of identity) or resorting to mental subterfuges as a means of refuge (utopian projections, fantasies or madness); they may also lead to entropy (exhaustion and letting go, climaxing in heartbreak). These three plays, each in their own way, 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.

It seems that Shakespeare’s drama, like Racine’s, according to the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes in his foreword to Sur Racine, has managed to ‘make all the new languages of the century converge on him’, thus ‘being associated with all major critical endeavours’.²⁰ At this point, Barthes was turning to ‘an anthropological and psychoanalytical reading of canonical texts’,²¹ a first step towards the methodological approach called ‘critique plurielle’ (plural criticism), which rejects the compartmentalisation of literary critical trends and seeks to see how these different trends can enrich one another through their very differences. In keeping with this approach, this study seeks to foster a critical dialogue between ‘Language Criticism’, as inherited from Structuralism (including ‘Practical Criticism and Stylistics’, with a specific focus on ‘the particular arrangement of words, sounds and phrases which were central to Renaissance humanist thought’),²² and ‘New Historicism’ and ‘Cultural Materialism’. The latter has close connections with ‘New Historicism’ in ‘its intellectual origins, and its explicit concern with power and its cultural representations’, but has, according to Hebron, ‘a more explicit and self-conscious political engagement, mixing French theoretical language with British polemical traditions of non-conformity and class-struggle’.²³ ‘New Historicism’, derived from ‘Post-Structuralism’, is ‘much concerned with the issue of power’ and ‘frequently explicitly committed to challenging established authority and rescuing marginalized and suppressed voices’.²⁴ Its key French representative was Michel Foucault. This study also seeks to foster a dialogue between Foucault’s method known as the ‘archaeology of knowledge’ – that is, the reconstitution of a historical field thanks to ‘the intertwining of its different dimensions (philosophical, economic, scientific, political, etc.), so as to obtain the conditions of emergence of knowledgeable discourses in general, at a given period’²⁵ – and two indispensable figures of ‘French Theory’: the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari.

Many articles and books have been (and are still being) written by Anglo-Saxon scholars on Shakespeare’s plays, privileging one critical school or another, or trying new combinations of emerging critical trends. From a complementary perspective, this study focuses mainly (but not exclusively) 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. This study thus takes into account some of the works of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; of the philosopher and epistemologist Gaston Bachelard, the Hellenist and anthropologist Marcel Detienne and the historian and anthropologist Jean-Pierre Vernant; and also of the lesser known (because less translated into English) analyses of the neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik, the psychoanalyst Daniel Sibony and the philosophers Michel Onfray 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.²⁶ Essentially focusing on Shakespeare’s King Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus, not as separate dramatic entities but as interwoven variations on the connections between banishment and abuse of power, this study attempts to understand the reasons for abusive exclusions and the several reactions that they generate, which range from the aggressively transgressive and patiently cunning to the self-destructive. The overall objective is to apprehend, in its own logic and continuity, the dynamic of deterritorialisation.

The first part, entitled, ‘The dynamic of deterritorialisation in King Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus’, contrasts the duty of allegiance (whether absolute or contractual) with the affirmation of an individual code of ethics that goes against it. It thus examines the dialectics of loyalty and disloyalty as subjective notions: on one side, the subordinate figure who refuses to support political excesses (justified by the doctrine of divine right, absolutism or ‘theatrocracy’²⁷) and turns into a ‘fearless speaker’²⁸ or parrhesiast, in favour of the truth; on the other side, the king or another authority in power (like the tribunes in Coriolanus) who abuses his power and misinterprets parrhesia or ‘fearless speech’ as a sign of hubris and treachery, and consequently banishes the bold subject, now deemed a traitor, who has dared to speak the unpleasant truth. The parrhesiastes are civically and geographically excluded (Cordelia and Kent in King Lear; Coriolanus) because they have, linguistically and ethically, a threatening, deterritorialising potential. The abusive denial of territory they suffer generates three types of reactions in King Lear, Coriolanus and King Richard II: counterattack and illegal return, ruse and change of identity, and endurance through mental escape.

As its title suggests, the second part, ‘The dynamic of riposte in King Richard II and Coriolanus’, is devoted to the first type of reaction. 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 rein to his ‘becoming-animal’ and his ‘becoming-machine’, and alters a civilised ‘striated’ space into a ‘smooth’ one, where landmarks are blown up. Yet this counterattack cannot succeed without, on the one hand, a weakened ‘State apparatus’ and, on the other, a ‘war machine’, whether merely deterrent or fully operational.²⁹ This part finally shows how the plays present alternatives to the ‘war machine’, when one wants to force one’s return to one’s homeland. Two ways are envisaged: to serve another ‘State apparatus’ or to become God’s soldier (Mowbray’s choice in King Richard II); to engage in single combat with ‘nomadic’ advantages, that is, following the codes of chivalry but in a ‘smooth’ space (Edgar’s decision in King Lear). Turning to The Tempest may offer a complementary third alternative: opting for Deleuzian ‘magical capture’ when one has Prospero’s power.

The third part, ‘The experience of internal(ised) exile in King Lear’, concentrates on an indirect strategy of resistance that is the product of ruse, that is, ‘cunning intelligence’, or metis in Greek.³⁰ The dynamics of frontal riposte thus gives way to the dynamics of deviation (the choice of Kent and Edgar in King Lear). This part studies strategies of dissembling and examines how the sentence of banishment is suspended by a shift in identity, the invention of a temporary persona, so that someone can go unnoticed and ‘become imperceptible’ in the very country from which he is officially banished. This raises the question of how one experiences otherness (a displacement of social identity) in one’s own country (inner exile), facing a fall in status and humiliation (eating what is not edible, suffering from infamy and lack of charity) and, at times, facing uncanny situations, as one finds oneself, as the poet Louis Aragon puts it, ‘en étrange pays dans [son] pays lui-même’³¹ (feeling in a foreign country while in one’s homeland). The here and now is thus apprehended as an elsewhere, a place off the map, a ‘haptic’ space with no horizon line, whether geographical or existential, where inner exile is patiently endured.

The book’s final part, ‘The dialectic of endurance and exhaustion in King Richard II and King Lear’, focuses on a strategy of resistance departing from riposte and ruse, and requiring the capacity to endure mentally (and physically). It examines the dialectics of endurance and exhaustion, and the risk of collapsing totally (going mad, committing suicide or dying from heart failure). When persons who suffer from abuse of power feel unable to cope with a reality devoid of any sense of justice, they turn to a mental space of their own and try to find solace inwardly (as will be seen in John of Gaunt’s stoic reinterpretation of reality in King Richard II). Yet the creation of a mental shelter is deeply ambivalent: does it take part in a strategy of resistance, which subjectively re-thinks and re-shapes the real to make it more bearable, or does it rather betray a withdrawal within oneself and what Roland Barthes terms the ‘non-will-to-possess’,³² which leads to a lethal letting go or the ‘borderline mode of madness’?³³ This part thus questions the notions of limits, duration and torment. How do we know that the limits of endurance have reached a point of no return? What are the physical and psychic symptoms of exhaustion? Why do ‘tutors of resilience’,³⁴ as Boris Cyrulnik calls them (such as Cordelia and Edgar in King Lear), fail to intuit these limits?

In the end, the dynamic of deterritorialisation entails a reflection upon the failure of understanding or, at least, the failure to take into account the vulnerability of the human condition. Surprisingly enough, ‘tutors of resilience’ join persons of power in their incapacity to remember, in T. S. Eliot’s words about John Webster’s tragedies, ‘the skull beneath the skin’.³⁵ The notions of banishment, abuse of power and refusal of allegiance with which this book begins implicate issues not only of territory but also of both real and symbolic death.

Notes

1 Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), ‘banish, v.’, 1.; 2.

2 Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, 1954–1988, tome II, 1970–1975 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 456; my translation of ‘détruire le foyer, effacer le lieu de naissance, confisquer les biens et les propriétés’.

3 Ibid., p. 456.

4 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London/New York: Continuum, 2008), p. 348. In the original text: ‘C’est la marque qui fait le territoire’, Mille plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980), p. 388.

5 Also see François Zourabichvili, Le Vocabulaire de Deleuze (Paris: Ellipses, 2003), pp. 27–9.

6 Jane Kingsley-Smith, Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 11.

7 Ibid., p. 11.

8 Ibid., p. 11.

9 Richard Marienstras, New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 1. In the original text: ‘des êtres éloignés par rapport à des êtres proches, dont la proximité est définie par la coutume, les lois, l’allégeance au souverain’, Le Proche et le lointain. Sur Shakespeare, le drame élisabéthain et l’idéologie anglaise aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1981), p. 9.

10 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 523–51. This distinction will be defined and analysed in the subsequent discussion.

11 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘transgression, n.’, 2.

12 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 426–7. In the original text: ‘La mer est peut-être le principal des espaces lisses’, Mille plateaux, p. 481.

13 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 11. In the original text: ‘la navigation livre l’homme à l’incertitude du sort; là, chacun est confié à son propre destin, tout embarquement est en puissance le dernier’, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 25–6. Unfortunately the published English translation is brutally abridged, so the translation will be mine when necessary (and so identified).

14 Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile, and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 176.

15 Marienstras, New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, p. 104. In the original text: ‘on voulait bien conquérir des peuples lointains, s’ouvrir de nouveaux marchés, assurer la paix extérieure et domestique, mais on ne voulait pas s’ouvrir à autrui’, Le Proche et le lointain, p. 153. Also see the entirety of Chapter 5: ‘The Near and the Far: The Calvin Affair and the Status of Foreigners under James I of England’, pp. 99–125.

16 Michel Onfray, Théorie du voyage. Poétique de la géographie (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2007), p. 60; my translation of ‘la position du missionnaire’, ‘cette fâcheuse tendance à voir le réel avec le filtre de sa culture’.

17 See Marienstras, New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, pp. 113–17. Sir Edward Coke was a ‘British jurist and politician whose defense of the supremacy of the common law against Stuart claims of royal prerogative had a profound influence on the development of English law and the English constitution’, Gareth H. Jones, entry ‘Sir Edward Coke’, last updated 28 January 2020, Encylopaedia Britannica online (2020): www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Coke (accessed March 2020).

18 David Ducros, ‘Mapping the kingdom: les cartographes élisabéthains et l’image de la nation’, in Ronald Shusterman (ed.), Cartes, paysages, territoires (Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2000), p. 132; my translation of ‘Chacune des cartes de Saxton revendique le territoire comme la possession du monarque; chacune rappelle à l’observateur que l’autorité de la reine s’exerce sur toutes les parties du royaume, sans exception. Ce message semble être autant destiné aux autres nations européennes, auxquelles on cherche à imposer l’image d’une Angleterre puissante, unifiée et souveraine, qu’aux sujets d’Élisabeth, auxquels on rappelle que l’attachement à la patrie est indissociable du devoir d’allégeance.’

19 These dates correspond to the first performances and are from the ‘Chronological Table’ in A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (eds), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

20 Roland Barthes, ‘Avant-propos’, Sur Racine (Paris: Seuil, 1979), p. 6; my translation of ‘à faire converger sur lui tous les langages nouveaux du siècle’, ‘été mêlée à toutes les tentatives critiques de quelque importance’.

21 David Macey, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 30.

22 Malcolm Hebron, Key Concepts in Renaissance Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 241.

23 Ibid., p. 225.

24 Ibid., pp. 245, 244.

25 Judith Revel, Le Vocabulaire de Foucault (Paris: Ellipses, 2009), p. 11; my translation of ‘[faire] jouer ses différentes dimensions (philosophique, économique, scientifique, politique, etc.) afin d’obtenir les conditions d’émergence des discours de savoir en général, à une époque donnée’.

26 The intellectual trajectories of Roland Barthes, Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze are clearly and usefully presented in Macey,