Martin Mueller has created a database called Shakespeare His Contemporaries, which consists of over 500 plays dated between 1552 and 1662. Shakespeare His Contemporaries lists play pairs that share large numbers of dislegomena (phrases that occur within only two plays in Mueller’s corpus) consisting of four words or more, and therefore provides empirical data that can help researchers to explore the intertextual relationships among early modern texts. This chapter investigates the number and nature of these parallels, drawing upon the idea of Shakespeare’s aural, or ‘actor’s’, memory, explored by scholars such as Geoffrey Bullough, John Tobin, Charles R. Forker, and Ian Lancashire. The chapter also elaborates on the theory that Shakespeare had acted in plays attributable to Kyd for Pembroke’s Men, as presented by J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, Arthur Freeman, and Terence Schoone-Jongen. Having explored phrasal repetitions according to the dramatic contexts in which they appear, the chapter concludes that in order to distinguish between authorship and influence in contested texts such as Arden of Faversham, more work needs to be done to ascertain the patterns of influence in Shakespeare’s plays. The chapter also deals with claims that Shakespeare had a hand in that play, and establishes that, on the basis of phraseology, prosody, and versification habits, there is no evidence for Arden of Faversham being a co-authored play or for Shakespeare’s hand in the verbal fabric of the text. The stylistic unity of Arden of Faversham points to a single author, and that author is Kyd.

This chapter demonstrates the ways in which Shakespeare engaged with Kyd’s drama throughout his career, with specific focus on Much Ado about Nothing, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. For instance, the chapter extends Thomas H. McNeal’s observations on Shakespeare’s characterisation of female figures in relation to the strong-willed women found in Kyd’s works; Jacqueline Pearson’s exploration of comic devices shared between Shakespeare and Kyd plays; and Lukas Erne’s arguments that many scenes in Kyd’s plays prefigure moments found in Shakespeare works. The chapter demonstrates that Kyd’s influence on King Lear is far more apparent than is the case with Much Ado about Nothing and Othello, and takes the form of not only plot points and dramatic devices, but also a large number of distinct verbal echoes. The chapter also reveals the ways in which Shakespeare adapts Kyd’s heroic narration in Macbeth, and how, in order to create Lady Macbeth, he fuses Kyd’s characterisation of violent females with the archetype of the grieving woman who succumbs to madness. This chapter establishes that Shakespeare continued to pick up the older dramatist’s cues when he was an established playwright, in terms of rhetoric, staging, characterisation, and plot devices.

Chapter 4 turns to the Shakespearean characters who, being unjustly banished, will not passively endure (Bolingbroke in King Richard II, Coriolanus). Once abroad, they initiate a dynamic of frontal counterattack and illegally return with a Deleuzian ‘war machine’. In King Richard II, Bolingbroke’s intentions remain ambiguous, since he first claims that he comes but for his own, but he then deposes the king to take his place (re-appropriation, reprisal and self-territorialisation). As for Coriolanus, his aim is to destroy Rome so that it is reduced to a tabula rasa (retaliation, deterritorialisation and eradication). This chapter examines how, in Coriolanus and King Richard II, the protagonists’ illegal return is a means to regain one’s name, claim one’s title or forge oneself a new name. It is also the result of a choice that privileges action over words, refuses the soothing quality of words, the refuge of imagination and mental spaces, the benefit of the doctrine of consolatio.

Chapter 3 examines how King Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus present three tragic variants of the comic motif of the biter bit: the banisher banished. The dynamic of retaliation runs through the three plays, though in different ways. Most of the time, if not always, deterritorialisation is announced by an upsurge of violence, both when the king (or authority in power) expulses the fearless speaker and when the king himself (or authority in power) is rejected, in turn. To take up Foucault’s terms, ‘the sentence takes the form of a counter-attack’, and ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’ becomes ‘deterritorialisation for deterritorialisation’. This chapter focuses on the characters who speak fearlessly in the three Shakespearean plays and shows how those parrhesiastes are banished because they have, linguistically and ethically, a threatening, deterritorialising potential.

This chapter surveys arguments for Kyd’s hand in Edward III and argues against the idea that Shakespeare revised a play written by another dramatist/s, for internal evidence suggests that Shakespeare planned and composed the play with Kyd. The Reign of King Edward III was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 1 December 1595 by Cuthbert Burby. It was published the following year with no allusion to the play’s authors or by which acting company it had been ‘sundry times played about the City of London’. On the basis of internal evidence, Shakespeare’s hand in Edward III is now universally accepted in modern authorship studies. This chapter reveals that the ‘non-Shakespearian’ scenes are commensurate with Kyd’s authorship and that this attribution has been anticipated by numerous scholars. The chapter expands upon previous scholarly observations through analysis of rhyme, prosody, and language in Edward III and in comparison to plays assigned to Kyd. The chapter proceeds to examine the ways in which this collaboration influenced the development of Shakespeare’s style and dramaturgy, using Henry V as a case study.

This chapter addresses 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’, as Boris Cyrulnik calls them (such as Cordelia and Edgar in King Lear), fail to intuit these limits? This chapter shows how endurance is closely associated with the experience of duration. When time is experienced as interminable, the one who endures comes to evoke either a dead man before his time or a victim of torture, or even a miraculous survivor. This chapter suggests that, in King Lear, Edgar and Cordelia, and Kent to a lesser extent, serve as ‘tutors of resilience’ for Gloucester and Lear, even if they fail in the end. It suggests that 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.

Central to Spenser’s ethics is the question of the political and metaphysical insufficiency of the ancient virtues to the task of establishing colonial rule in Ireland. Chapter 6 focuses on Spenser’s engagements with the Florentine political theorist, Machiavelli, claiming that if Spenser’s Irish experience exposes the political limitations of an Aristotelian understanding of virtuous action, then the View’s Machiavelli-inflected account of Arthur, Lord Grey as an icon of virtue notably clarifies the scope, aims, and ambitions of what we might describe as a specifically Spenserian account of virtue. Spenser’s account of Grey’s violent tenure in Ireland, in which he upholds the massacre of Spanish troops at Smerwick as an exemplary action, defines virtue not as fulfillment of normative principles of excellence, but as the ability to respond in politically efficacious ways to various bad choices compelled by fortune and necessity.

Spenser’s ethics are organized among concerns that would become pivotal to the transforming discipline of moral philosophy in early modernity: making the status of humanity itself a central speculative problem of moral inquiry, and centering social obligations as both the normative guide to, and ultimate telos of, virtuous agency. Spenser is thus important to the history of moral philosophy because he also illuminates the ways these questions find a crucial aspect of their historical origin in early modern England’s political emergence as a colonial empire, helping to shape central representational and critical problems of British intellectual culture well into the modern era: the challenge of understanding colonialism, and the coercive violence on which it depends, as a moral activity. Reading Spenser as a moral theorist, and one whose moral theory is significantly shaped by his experiences in Elizabethan Ireland, thus illuminates at a crucial moment of historical inception that philosophical tradition’s pivotal turn as it evolved alongside early modern England’s wider political and economic transformation into a global nation-state built on the foundations of colonial expansion.

Chapter 4’s analysis pivots towards the metaphysical questions such an account of virtue entails. It argues that Spenser’s central image of worldly flourishing, the Gardens of Adonis, describes the metaphysical crux of moral life as Spenser understands it – rendering the good within the material facts of time, death, and decay. The Garden’s iconic exemplar of virtue is Adonis, who represents the instrumentalization of the organic body’s substance by embodying death’s conversion into the infinite potentiality of a form-making life. The image of Adonis in the Garden describes how deathly and temporal bodies become procreant, generative, and expansive forms of life. I argue that such a body stands as the ethical core of this poem and its account of human flourishing. To extend the image beyond the poetic bounds of the Gardens of Adonis and into the critical agendas of the poem writ large, the scene’s images of mortality offer a crucial metaphor for understanding the ways we productively inhabit the mutable world by figuring the point where our poetic, moral, and political lives shape and sustain one another in the task of carving out niches of civilization against the incursions of time and loss.

Chapter 8 studies 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. This chapter shows how the dynamic of deviation is soon transformed into a dynamic of humiliation and degradation, and how one tumbles down the social ladder. Making a detour via a debasing form of otherness while staying in one’s homeland amounts to experiencing not what is elsewhere but what lies at the bottom, to hitting rock bottom at home. The horizontal dynamic of (external) exile gives way to the vertical dynamic of (internal) degradation, also raising the question of whether one can recover from it. Fall in status, humiliating punishment, refusal of hospitality, denial of charity and dietary degradation posing a threat to sanity are generally experienced when the exile finds himself in a hostile foreign territory. Yet the internal exile suffers from the same dynamic of debasement in his homeland, and there may be certain similarities with facing the sudden appearance of the ‘uncanny’.

Chapter 10 focuses on mental spaces that require the resources of the intellect, the creativity of imagination, the emergence of intimate territories, and that depend on the vitality of our inner world. It shows how, having to suffer the hardship of ‘deterritorialisation’, the individual escapes to and finds refuge in their mental sphere: there they have the possibility of creating a mental cartography of their own, a new territory that they can privately and safely inhabit. They become their own compass and map their inner space. Resorting to Emmanuel Housset’s distinction between two types of interiority, a closed one and an open one, which he terms, respectively, ‘insular interiority’ and ‘exile interiority’, this chapter analyses the types of interiority that can be associated with Shakespeare’s Richard II and Lear. In King Richard II and King Lear, mental spaces often betray an ‘insular interiority’ and are ambivalent: endurance turns into a denial of both exteriority and otherness, which leads either to subjective interpretation and radical reconstruction, or to escape into an inner world removed from reality and reason.