Not feeling at home any longer, having the impression that the here is nothing but elsewhere and otherness, losing one’s microcosmic and macrocosmic landmarks and wandering in a Deleuzian ‘smooth space’: such an experience depends on time as it is lived and on temporal perspective (as in King Richard II); it can follow from some disastrous scenario (as in Coriolanus); it can also be closely related to a sort of no man’s land that appears to be a ‘haptic space’, in which one can ‘feel’ but not ‘see’, as opposed to an ‘optic space’ (as in King Lear). What is intuited (home as a foreign elsewhere) in the prophetic mode by Gaunt in King Richard II or with a subjective projection by Coriolanus in the Roman play becomes reality in King Lear. This chapter examines how Gaunt’s critical perception of his homeland as a now debased and unnatural kingdom is echoed by Coriolanus, who comes to see his city, Rome, as deprived of its Romanitas. It shows how, in King Lear, the heath is experienced as a ‘smooth’ space and a ‘haptic’ space in which an aptitude for empathy can be discovered.

Thomas Kyd is traditionally accepted as the author of The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, and Cornelia. HeKyd may also have written a lost Hamlet play that preceded Shakespeare’s version. Among his contemporaries, Kyd enjoyed a far higher reputation than he does today. Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson’s respective epithets, ‘‘industrious’’ and ‘‘sporting’’, suggest that Kyd’s canon was considerably larger than the three plays now acknowledged as his, and that he may have written comedies. This introduction argues that Kyd’s canon should be expanded from three surviving sole-authored plays to six, including King Leir, Arden of Faversham, and Fair Em. Furthermore, the introduction engages with arguments that the play, The First Part of Hieronimo, represents a reconstruction of a lost Kyd play called The Comedy of Don Horatio, and that Shakespeare, rather than Kyd, was responsible for a lost Hamlet play (the so-called Ur-Hamlet) of the late 1580s. The introduction therefore engages with the attribution and textual histories of each of these plays, and explores the dramaturgical similarities amongbetween the six plays that have been attributed solely to Kyd.

Chapter 2 examines the connection between abuse of power and banishment in King Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus. Abuses of power that take the form of banishment can be interpreted as a direct consequence of parrhesia, insofar as parrhesia has been experienced by the interlocutor as speech abuse. Abusive banishment may thus be taken as an ‘effet de retour’ of abusive speech. Naturally, this abuse is not presented as such, as ‘wrong or improper use’, but is openly justified by (mis)interpreting free-spokenness as treason (political misinterpretation) and hubris (moral misinterpretation). A third party is also called for to support or side with the abuser – pagan gods in King Lear, the council in King Richard II and the people in Coriolanus. Yet abuses of power are perceptible in the shift from institutional justice to personal revenge betrayed by the motif of the wilfully deaf ear, by arbitrary decisions, and by the ‘catapulting force’ of affect (here ‘wrath’).

Pervez Rizvi has developed an electronic corpus of 527 plays dated between 1552 and 1657, titled Collocations and N-Grams. Users can download summary spreadsheets for play pairs sharing n-grams (contiguous word sequences). The spreadsheets rank plays in the electronic corpus according to all n-gram matches, as well as unique n-gram matches (i.e. occurring only in two plays in the corpus), and takes account of composite word counts. Rizvi’s results are fully automated and enable scholars to check for every phrasal repetition (including lemmas), as well as all collocations (discontinuous word sequences), shared between texts. Searches of these lemmatised texts – drawn from Mueller’s corpus and the Folger Shakespeare Editions website – allow a wider range of matches to be discovered than by searches using the unlemmatised forms of words. Utilising Rizvi’s corpus, this chapter further explores Shakespeare’s early verbal indebtedness to plays that have been attributed to Kyd. The study utilises quantitative measures to demonstrate the influence of Kyd’s phraseology on plays such as Henry VI Part Three, The Taming of the Shrew, and Richard III beyond reasonable doubt. The chapter proceeds to examine the influence of Kyd’s dramaturgy on Shakespeare’s early plays, including such elements identified by Brian Vickers as vengeful women and foreboding dreams, as well as dramatic structure and staging. The chapter then demonstrates that Shakespeare elaborated on Kyd’s dramatic devices, and that close study of the plays themselves reveals that, in doing so, he recycled aspects of Kyd’s idiom.

Chapter 1 contrasts the duty of allegiance with the affirmation of an individual code of ethics that goes against it. It thus examines, in King Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus, the dialectics of loyalty and disloyalty as subjective notions. Allegiance is presented according to three modes: absolute (obedience is unconditional), contractual (obedience makes sense only if contractual reciprocity is respected) and conflicting (obedience stands in a dialectical relationship with disobedience, a situation which generally breaks down in the face of some personal code of ethics). This chapter focuses on the subordinate figure who refuses to support political excesses (justified by the doctrine of divine right, absolutism or ‘theatrocracy’) and turns into a ‘fearless speaker’, or parrhesiast, that has the courage to speak the truth, thus endangering himself, but also threatening the power of performative speech, as Michel Foucault has shown in his Lectures at the Collège de France.

While Spenser is firmly rooted in the virtue ethics premise that the telos of moral life is action oriented towards the production of flourishing, Chapter 5 offers an account of the often radically un-Aristotelian shape this vision of flourishing assumes in Spenser’s ethics. This chapter considers the disciplinary agendas of Spenser’s ethical imagination as a projection of the Garden of Adonis’s metaphysical concerns into the realm of political agency. Through readings of Neostoic thought in the ‘Mutability Cantos’, of Guyon’s destruction of the Bower of Bliss, and of the image of the colonial market town near the close of Spenser’s prose dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland, it examines the relationship of this central marker of Spenserian political virtue to broader questions of moral subjectivity, of virtuous action, and of the possibility of a flourishing life in the mutable world. Spenser’s program of ‘vertuous and gentle discipline’ describes how structures of normative behavior and personal comportment are ultimately concerned with marshalling the mutable body, its needs, and its desires towards generating a social order within a disordered, and potentially disordering, world.

The complicated category of the imperfectible human navigating the mutable world is the pivotal object of speculation in Spenserian ethics, examining how Spenser sets out to discover the moral possibilities of his agents’ boundedness in temporality, worldly change, and transformation. Here we see accounts of the mutable body itself as site of procreant expansion, and thus as a microcosm and animating engine of empire building. Linking Spenser’s romance narrative structures to the formal patterns of colonialist expansion mapped out in Sir Thomas Smith’s 1572 pamphlet written in promotion of the Ulster plantation, Chapter 2 argues that Spenser renders a wholesale reorientation of received Aristotelian ways of thinking about meaning-making aims and of the orienting purpose of a human life away from self-perfecting character-making and towards the articulation of collective, and expansive, political agendas.

Chapter 7 concentrates on an indirect strategy of resistance that is the product of ruse, of ‘cunning intelligence’, or metis in Greek. The dynamic of frontal riposte gives way to the dynamic of deviation (the choice of Kent and Edgar in King Lear). This chapter examines how deviation paradoxically means staying here, in the homeland, instead of going away, elsewhere, and how this entails dissembling: changing one’s physical appearance, one’s behaviour and one’s voice, creating an unexpected persona to produce an effect of trompe l’oeil, temporarily renouncing one’s identity to assume the semblance of otherness, so that one’s former self can go unnoticed, as if imperceptible. In King Lear, Kent turns to service, and Edgar to Bedlam begging. Their becoming imperceptible paradoxically entails showing up in the most risky places, right before one’s banisher’s nose, for instance, or publicly undressing to exhibit a nearly naked body that can be scrutinised like a map. It is as if imposing one’s ostentatious persona were the best way to hide one’s genuine identity, and this is why this chapter also focuses on the dialectics of ostentation and dissimulation.

Spenser centers his moral project around the virtue ‘magnificence’, positing the expansive and transformative project of empire building as the privileged form of moral agency in a mutable world. Chapter 3 first traces a brief history of the ways in which Elizabethan vernacular and popular moral discourses align magnificence with specifically secular and political imperatives, while privileging the temporal and mutable body as the origin and end of magnificent activity. Such a shift constitutes a basic rift with received Aristotelian accounts of human excellence’s self-transcending orientation, a rift modeled in the narratives of Redcrosse and Arthur. Both of their quests are organized by a recognition that the ultimate scope and teleological orientation of virtue is fundamentally concerned with establishing a politically viable mode of embodied life in historical time, one whose ultimate goal and material instantiation is the imperial commonwealth.

Having explored dramaturgical correspondences among plays attributed solely to Kyd, Chapter 1 provides an overview of methods used by attribution scholars to distinguish dramatists’ styles, such as analyses of an author’s verse habits, phraseology, linguistic habits, and vocabulary. The chapter then provides evidence for the stylistic homogeneity of the six plays that have been attributed solely to Kyd, engaging with the work of Philip Timberlake, Ants Oras, and Marina Tarlinskaja on Kyd’s verse habits; Charles Crawford, H. D. Sykes, Paul V. Rubow, and Brian Vickers on Kyd’s habitual turns of phrase; MacDonald P. Jackson on Kyd’s distinct stage direction formulae; Thomas Merriam on Kyd’s linguistic markers; and Albert Yang on Kyd’s vocabulary. The chapter demonstrates that these six plays are stylistically of a whole and reveal Kyd’s distinctive authorial fingerprints.

This chapter presents Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theories (from A Thousand Plateaus) and explores several oppositions, such as ‘smooth space’ versus ‘striated space’, ‘game of Go’ versus ‘chess’, which are related to the main opposition, ‘war machine’ versus ‘State apparatus’, before turning to Coriolanus and King Richard II to see how relevant they can be to analyse Coriolanus’ and Bolingbroke’s respective illegal returns. This chapter focuses on the strength of the ‘war machine’: unpredictability and dazzling speed. Such dazzling speed favours an uncommon striking power, which cannot be found on traditional battlefields where enemy armies face one another, one advancing, the other withdrawing, and vice versa, until the issue is decided. The ‘war machine’ is like a weapon of mass destruction for Coriolanus, whereas, for Bolingbroke, it is a deterrent weapon that will ultimately lead to the king’s deposition and his own coronation. Yet the starting point is the same in both plays: so as to maximise its efficiency, the ‘war machine’ must be set in motion at the right time, so as to take advantage of the weakness of the ‘State apparatus’.