A new book is on the way from Prof Stuart Elden considering how our ideas of “territory” were shaped by the works of William Shakespeare.
There’s a little interview with him on the Warwick University website:
“While he only uses the words ‘territory’ and ‘territories’ rarely in his plays, the concept and practice is not at all marginal to his work. A number of his plays are structured around questions of exile, banishment, land politics, spatial division, contestation, conquest and succession.
Shakespeare exhibits a profound geographical imagination and his plays and poems raise a whole host of geographical questions. We can use them to shed light on the concept of territory as we understand it now.”
This will be something to return to I think, once the book is out. Interested in what readings of regional geopolitics in Macbeth can be attached to this blog’s sense of Gothic Patchwork and the fragmentations of state and self which follow the witches’ flight…